Welcome To Freedom for US Now!
"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means
of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own
Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." --James
Madison, letter to W.T. Barry, 1822
Iwo Jima
Feb. 23, 1945
67 years
Those depending upon a benevolent government will find the same benevolence a sheep may find among a pack of wolves.
Jim Mullen
| Blog and news |
5-19-13
Maureen Scott is an ardent American patriot who was born in Pittsburgh, PA, and retired to Richmond, VA, in 2000. Free from the nine-to-five grind of writing for employers and clients, she began writing political commentary to please herself and express her convictions.
The accomplishment of which she is most proud is her volunteer work at an Army base where she looked into the eyes and hearts of the service members who protect our country.
Our Pledge of Allegiance, a military band playing the National Anthem, and the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, inspire her passion and views. Her life is guided by a firm belief that truth is the most important virtue.
The Architect of Destruction
By Maureen Scott
"Obama comes from a community organizer background where it's us against them. But that's not who we are.
And that's not the position the leader of our Nation should take." - Dr. Benjamin Carson
Obama appears to be a tormented man filled with resentment, anger, and disdain for anyone of an opinion or view other than his. He acts in the most hateful, spiteful, malevolent, vindictive ways in order to manipulate and maintain power and control over others. Perhaps, because, as a child, he grew up harboring an abiding bitterness toward the U.S. that was instilled in him by his family and mentors. It seems to have never left him.
It is not the color of his skin that is a problem - for anyone in America.
Rather it is the blackness that fills his soul and the hollowness in his heart where there should be abiding pride and love for this country.
Have we ever heard Obama speak lovingly of the U.S. or its people, with deep appreciation and genuine respect for our history, our customs, our sufferings and our blessings? Has he ever revealed that, like most patriotic Americans, he gets "goose bumps" when a band plays "The Star Spangled Banner," or sheds a tear when he hears a beautiful rendition of "America the Beautiful?" Does his heart burst with pride when millions of American flags wave on a National holiday - or someone plays "taps" on a trumpet? Has he ever shared the admiration of the military, as we as lovers of those who keep us free, feel when soldiers march by? It is doubtful because Obama did not grow up sharing our experiences or our values. He did not sit at the knee of a Grandfather or Uncle who showed us his medals and told us about the bravery of his fellow troops as they tramped through foreign lands to keep us free. He didn't have grandparents who told stories of suffering and then coming to America, penniless, and the opportunities they had for building a business and life for their children.
Away from this country as a young child, Obama didn't delight in being part of America and its greatness. He wasn't singing our patriotic songs in kindergarten, or standing on the roadside for a holiday parade and eating a hot dog, or lighting sparklers around a campfire on July 4th as fireworks exploded over head, or placing flags on the gravesites of fallen and beloved American heroes.
Rather he was separated from all of these experiences and doesn't really understand us and what it means to be an American. He is void of the basic emotions that most feel regarding this country and insensitive to the instinctive pride we have in our national heritage. His opinions were formed by those who either envied us or wanted him to devalue the United States and the traditions and patriotism that unites us.
He has never given a speech that is filled with calm, reassuring, complimentary, heartfelt statements about all the people in the U.S. Or one that inspires us to be better and grateful and proud that in a short time our country became a leader, and a protector of many. Quite the contrary, his speeches always degenerate into mocking, ridiculing tirades as he faults our achievements as well as any critics or opposition for the sake of a laugh, or to bolster his ego. He uses his Office to threaten and create fear while demeaning and degrading any American who oppose his policies and actions. A secure leader, who has noble self-esteem and not false confidence, refrains from showing such dread of critics and displaying a cocky, haughty attitude.
Mostly, his time seems to be spent causing dissention, unrest, and anxiety among the people of America, rather than uniting us (even though he was presented to us as the "Great Uniter"). He creates chaos for the sake of keeping people separated, envious, aggrieved and ready to argue. Under his leadership Americans have been kept on edge, rather than in a state of comfort and security. He incites people to be aggressive toward, and disrespectful of, those of differing opinions. And through such behavior, Obama has lowered the standards for self-control and mature restraint to the level of street-fighting gangs, when he should be raising the bar for people to strive toward becoming more considerate, tolerant, self-disciplined, self-sustaining, and self-assured.
Not a day goes by that he is not attempting to defy our laws, remove our rights, over-ride established procedures, install controversial appointees, enact divisive mandates, and assert a dictatorial form of power.
Never has there been a leader of this great land who used such tactics to harm and hurt the people and this country.
Never have we had a President who spoke with a caustic, evil tongue against the citizenry rather than present himself as a soothing, calming and trustworthy force.
Never, in this country, have we experienced how much stress one man can cause a nation of people - on a daily basis!
Obama has promoted the degeneration of peace, civility, and quality of cooperation between us. He thrives on tearing us down, rather than building us up. He is the Architect of the decline of America, and the epitome of a Demagogue.
© Maureen Scott
5-18-13
Hating America
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are accused of setting the bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon, attended the University of Massachusetts. Maybe they hated our nation before college, but if you want lessons on hating America, college attendance might be a good start. Let's look at it.
"We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it." That's taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council's Palestine monitor, explained the Boston bombings by saying, "The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world." Professor Falk has also stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.
University of Southern California professor Darry Sragow preaches hate to his students in his regulation of elections and political finance class, recently telling them that Republicans are stupid, racist losers and that they are angry old white people. A few years ago, Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, "The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world." Penn State University professor Matt Jordan compared supporters of the voter ID laws to the Ku Klux Klan. Professor Sharon Sweet, an algebra teacher at Brevard Community College, told her students to sign a pledge that read, "I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket." Fortunately, the college's trustees fired her.
University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis tweeted, "I want (National Rifle Association executive vice president) Wayne LaPierre's head on a stick." He asked, "Can (we) define NRA membership as dues contributing to a terrorist organization?" Here's a sample of how Professor Loomis frequently expresses himself: "Motherf---ing f---heads f---ing f---." Then there's Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman, who explained our national problems by saying, "But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions." Professor Seidman worked for The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. When he was sworn in as an officer of the court, I wonder what constitution he swore to uphold and defend.
Parents don't have to wait for college admission for their youngsters to receive America-hating lessons. Scott Compton, an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, S.C., was put on administrative leave after he allegedly threw an American flag on the floor and stomped on it in front of his students. He has chosen to resign.
An Advanced Placement world geography teacher at Lumberton High School in Texas encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing and instructed them to refer to the 9/11 hijackers not as terrorists but as "freedom fighters." They were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as genocide. John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, told Fox News that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.
In McAllen, Texas, teachers tried to force a teenager to sing the Mexican national anthem and recite Mexico's pledge of allegiance. The teen refused, saying it was against her beliefs as an American. She was thrown out of the class and given a failing grade for that day's assignment. Her father has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his daughter against the McAllen Independent School District.
Investor's Business Daily ran a story that shows student indoctrination is official union policy: "A New Low From The California Federation Of Teachers: Urine Indoctrination" (12/5/12). The union's website has a cartoon narrated by leftist Hollywood actor Ed Asner. In tones used when reading to children, Asner says: "(Rich people) love their money more than anything in the whole world. ... Over time, rich people decided they weren't rich enough, so they came up with ways to get richer." The cartoon finishes its class warfare message by graphically depicting "the rich" urinating on the poor.
These people running our education system are destroying the minds and values of our young people, and we allow them to do it.
5-17-13
Lies About Libya
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There can be honest differences of opinion on many subjects. But there can also be dishonest differences. Last week's testimony under oath about events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 makes painfully clear that what the Obama administration told the American people about those events were lies out of whole cloth.
What we were told repeatedly last year by the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to the U.N., was that there was a protest demonstration in Benghazi against an anti-Islamic video produced by an American, and that this protest demonstration simply escalated out of control.
This "spontaneous protest" story did not originate in Libya but in Washington. Neither the Americans on duty in Libya during the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, nor officials of the Libyan government, said anything about a protest demonstration.
The highest American diplomat on the scene in Libya spoke directly with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by phone, and told her that it was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya announced that it was a terrorist attack. The C.I.A. told the Obama administration that it was a terrorist attack.
With lies, as with potato chips, it is hard to stop with just one. After the "spontaneous protest" story was discredited, the next claim was that this was the best information available at the time from intelligence sources.
But that claim cannot survive scrutiny, now that the 12 drafts of the Obama administration's talking points about Benghazi have belatedly come to light. As draft after draft of the talking points were made, e-mails from the State Department pressured the intelligence services to omit from these drafts their clear and unequivocal statement from the outset that this was a terrorist attack.
Attempts to make it seem that Ambassador Susan Rice's false story about a "spontaneous protest" was the result of her not having accurate information from the intelligence services have now been exposed as a second lie to excuse the first lie.
Despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's loudly proclaimed question "What difference, at this point, does it make?" the difference is between an honest mistake and a calculated lie to deceive the American people, in order to win an election.
Barack Obama's election campaign oratory had proclaimed the death of Osama bin Laden as an accomplishment of his administration, as part of a general defeat of Al-Qaeda and other terrorists. To admit that these terrorists were still in action, and strong enough to kill an American ambassador and three other Americans in a well-coordinated military style attack, would be a politically devastating admission during the election campaign.
Far better, politically, to come up with a story about a protest demonstration that just got out of hand. This could be presented as an isolated, one-time event, rather than part of a continuing pattern of terrorism by groups that were still active, despite President Obama's spin suggesting that they were not.
The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department's own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him.
After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars.
The Obama administration's excuse for not trying to get help to the Americans in Benghazi while they were under attack — namely, that it would take too long — is as shaky as its other statements. A small fighting unit in Tripoli was ready to get on a plane to Benghazi when they were ordered to "stand down." Other fighting units located outside of Libya are designed precisely for fast deployment — and nobody knew how many hours the attack would last.
But it will take more investigations to determine who gave the order to "stand down," and why. How many new lies that will generate is another question.
5-16-13
"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one."
--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Charles Hammond, 1821
5-15-13
"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."
--Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
5-14-13
"Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence."
--Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
5-13-13
Alexander's Column
Tyranny? What Tyranny?
By Mark Alexander · May 9, 2013
"The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered." --Thomas Jefferson (1781)
In commencement remarks to graduates sparsely convened in the Ohio State University football stadium in Columbus last weekend, Barack Hussein Obama offered the following observations and advice:
"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted. We don't think the government is the source of all our problems ... we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it's not about what America can do for us, it's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process."
Clearly, Obama's absurd and overtly partisan assertions were aimed at young constituents whom he hopes embody the future of his Socialist Democratic Party. After all, an effective speechmaker knows his audience, and Obama knows that most of these youthful citizens are indoctrinated in government institutions since they were weaned.
Indeed, the socialist protagonist, Karl Marx, wrote, "The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense." Marx's disciple, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, concurred: "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
From the days of Woodrow Wilson to those of Barack Obama, and encompassing all the "progressives" in between, taxpayer-funded academic institutions have been the breeding ground for generations of socialists. For most leftists, the crucial years that cemented their worldview were the ones they spent in our nation's colleges and universities.
Given that some substantial number of the adoring, bright-eyed beneficiaries of Obama's rhetoric have no concept of Essential Liberty and its antithesis, tyranny, let me take apart the selected excerpt of Obama's oration and provide those graduates with an introductory lesson in Liberty.
After all, most of the class of 2013 will have plenty of time to contemplate this lesson, as more than half of college and university graduates entering the "Obamanomic" job market will be either underemployed or unemployed until the primacy of free enterprise is restored.
Obama claimed, "Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner."
I'm not sure what incessant voices those might be -- certainly not those of our Founders -- because a growing number of college graduates can't name but a few if any. And they're certainly not the voices of a majority of government schoolteachers and professors, who are little more than useful idiots in the service of socialism.
Obama might be talking about the handful of courageous young American Patriots on campuses across the nation -- those who stand in the face of peer and professorial ridicule in order to speak in defense of Liberty. Or maybe he's referring to that rarest of creatures, the conservative professor whose lone voice extols the virtues of Liberty amid the academic statism desert.
Or perhaps the voices Obama alludes to are those of the current generation of grassroots Patriots, who gave rise to the Tea Party movement a couple of years back. They fortunately "gummed up the works" in the 2010 midterm elections when they sent more than 70 Democrats packing and replaced them with grassroots conservatives to retake the House of Representatives. That provided a gauntlet to Obama's socialist agenda, one that notably crushed the crown jewel of that agenda last month -- his so-called "assault weapons" ban (known in our humble shop as the defensive weapons ban.)
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Obama continued, "You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."
Well, not quite. It is Obama and his statist cadres who believe that "we, the people" can't be trusted, and thus he has perpetually campaigned since 2006 to implement his plan of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Obama's objective is to reject the voices of those who support Liberty and the Rule of Law over the rule of men, the terminus of which is always tyranny. As Lord Acton famously wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Finally, Obama said, "We don't think the government is the source of all our problems ... we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it's not about what America can do for us, it's about what can be done by us, together..."
This is just a heap of unadulterated double-speak.
First, in regard to "the source of our problems," I remind you of the inimitable words of Ronald Reagan, which are truer today than when he spoke them in 1981: "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." As his colleague Margaret Thatcher once said, "Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. ... They then start to nationalise everything and ... control everything by other means."
Sound familiar, class?
Second, we are not a "democracy," but a Constitutional Republic. Of course, a "community organizer" wouldn't know the difference, but someone who bills himself a "constitutional scholar" should!
Third, "it's not about what America can do for us"? This is clearly some kind of cheap JFK knockoff. John Kennedy, of course, said, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." But Obama has built his constituent voter blocs on the exact opposite theme, "Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you."
And, when Obama says, "it's about what can be done by us, together," he's not talking about equal partners, but about government dominion over people. This is in keeping with the socialist theme trumpeted at the grand opening of his 2012 Demo Confab: "Government is the only thing we all belong to!"
To summarize, here is the shorter catechism of Obama's message to graduates of The Ohio State University, and, of course, to college graduates everywhere: "Government is great, Government is good, you should thank us for your food. By its hands we all are fed, government provides our daily bread."
For those in the class of 2013 who really want to impact the world for good, they must arm themselves with the right intellectual perspective on Liberty and tyranny. Here is the syllabus for Liberty Lesson 101:
Read Essential Liberty, a brief but comprehensive essay on the origins of Liberty. Learn the difference between Rule of Law and rule of men.
Read A "Living Constitution" for a Dying Republic. Learn the difference between our authentic Constitution and the so-called "living constitution."
Read Our Sacred Honor ... to Support and Defend. Learn about the oaths all elected officials take to "support and defend" our Constitution. Generations of uniformed American Patriots have given their lives defending our Constitution. Honor their sacrifice.
Read On American Patriotism. Learn about your obligation to extend Liberty to the next generation.
Finally, visit The Patriot Post's outstanding Historic Documents repository for the complete texts of our nation's most significant formative documents.
I leave you with these words from President Reagan: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free."
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
5-12-13
Black Unemployment
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A couple of weeks ago, Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson, speaking at The National Press Club, said the nation "would never tolerate white unemployment at 14 and 15 percent." Black unemployment has been double that of white Americans for more than 50 years. The black youth unemployment rate is more than 40 percent nationally. In some cities, unemployment for black working-age males is more than 50 percent. Let's look at this, but first let's look at some history.
From 1900 to 1954, blacks were more active than whites in the labor market. Until about 1960, black male labor force participation in every age group was equal to or greater than that of whites. During that period, black teen unemployment was roughly equal to or less than white teen unemployment. As early as 1900, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites; today it's about 30 percent longer. To do something about today's employment picture requires abandonment of sacred cows and honesty.
The typical answer given for many black problems is racial discrimination. No one argues that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated. But the relevant question is: How much of what we see can be explained by discrimination? I doubt whether anyone would argue that the reason for lower unemployment, higher labor force participation and shorter duration of unemployment among blacks in the first half of the 20th century was that there was less racial discrimination. I also doubt whether anyone would argue that during earlier periods, blacks had higher education and greater skills attainment than whites. Answers must be sought elsewhere.
I was a teenager during the late 1940s, living in North Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing project. Youngsters in my neighborhood who sought after-school, weekend or summer jobs found them. I picked blueberries in New Jersey, caddied at Cobbs Creek Golf Club, shoveled snow for the Philadelphia Transportation Co., delivered packages for a milliner, performed janitorial work at Horn & Hardart restaurant, and huckstered fruits and vegetables. As a high-school student, Christmas employment for me included after-school and weekend work at Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s mail-order house, and one year, I delivered mail for the U.S. Post Office.
Such opportunities for early work experiences are all but gone for today's teens living in Richard Allen homes. A major reason is the minimum wage law, which makes hiring low-skilled workers a losing economic proposition. In 1950, only 50 percent of jobs were covered by the minimum wage law. That meant the minimum wage didn't have today's unemployment effect. Today nearly 100 percent are covered. Today's child labor laws prevent youngsters from working in perfectly safe environments. The minimum wage has destroyed many jobs. That's why, for example, in contrast with the past, today's gasoline stations are self-service and theater ushers are nonexistent.
Then there are super-minimum wage laws, such as the Davis-Bacon Act, which were written for the express purposes of excluding blacks from government-financed or -assisted construction projects. Labor unions have a long history of discrimination against blacks. Frederick Douglass wrote about this in "The Tyranny, Folly, and Wickedness of Labor Unions," and Booker T. Washington did so in "The Negro and the Labor Unions." To the detriment of their constituents, black politicians give support to labor laws pushed by unions and white liberal organizations.
Then there's education. Black youths are becoming virtually useless for the increasingly high-tech world of the 21st century. According to a 2001 report by Abigail Thernstrom, "The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement," many black 12th-graders dealt with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade; they wrote about as well as whites in the eighth grade. The average black high-school senior had math skills on a par with a typical white student in the middle of seventh grade. The average 17-year-old black student could only read as well as the typical white child who had not yet reached age 13. That means an employer hiring the typical black high-school graduate is in effect hiring an eighth-grader.
5-11-13
Words that replace thought
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, "diversity" should be recognized as the undisputed world champion.
You don't need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.
To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard evidence that places obsessed with diversity have worse race relations is to risk getting yourself labeled an incorrigible racist. Free thinking is not free.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the government has a "compelling interest" in promoting diversity — apparently more compelling than the 14th Amendment's requirement of "equal protection" of the law for everybody.
How does a racially homogeneous country like Japan manage to have high quality education, without the essential ingredient of diversity, for which there is supposedly a "compelling" need?
Conversely, why does India, one of the most diverse nations on Earth, have a record of intergroup intolerance and lethal violence today that is worse than that in the days of our Jim Crow South?<
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Even to ask such questions is to provoke charges of unworthy tactics, and motives too low to be dignified with an answer. Not that the true believers in diversity could answer anyway.
Among the candidates for runner-up to "diversity" as the top word for making thought obsolete is "fair."
Apparently everyone is entitled to a "fair share" of a society's prosperity, whether they worked 16-hour days to help create that prosperity or did nothing more than live off the taxpayers or depend on begging or crime to bring in a few bucks.
Apparently we owe them something just for gracing us with their presence, even if we feel that we could do without them quite well.
At the other end of the income scale, the rich are supposed to pay their "fair share" of taxes. But at neither end of the income scale is a "fair share" defined as a particular number or proportion, or in any other concrete way. It is just a political synonym for "more," dressed up in moralistic-sounding rhetoric. What "fair" really means is more arbitrary power for government.
Another word that shuts down thought is "access." People who fail to meet the standards for anything from college admission to a mortgage loan are often said to have been denied "access" or opportunity.
But equal access or equal opportunity is not the same as equal probability of success. Republicans are not denied an equal opportunity to vote in California, even though the chances of a Republican candidate actually getting elected in California are far less than the chances of a Democrat getting elected.
By the same token, if everyone is allowed to apply for college admission, or for a mortgage loan, and their applications are all judged by the same standards, then they have equal opportunity, even if the village idiot has a lower probability of getting into the Ivy League, and someone with a bad credit history is less likely to be lent money.
"Affordable" is another popular word that serves as a substitute for thought. To say that everyone is entitled to "affordable housing" is very different from saying that everyone should decide what kind of housing he or she can afford.
Government programs to promote "affordable housing" are programs to allow some people to decide what housing they want and force other people — taxpayers, landlords or whatever — to absorb a share of the cost of a decision that they had no voice in making.
More generally, making various things "affordable" in no way increases the amount of wealth in a society above what it would be when prices are "prohibitively expensive." On the contrary, price controls reduce incentives to produce.
None of this is rocket science. But if you don't stop and think, it doesn't matter whether you are a genius or a moron. Words that stop people from thinking reduce even smart people to the same level as morons.
5-10-13
Honest Examination of Race
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | One definition given for insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; it might also be a definition of stupidity. Let's look at some cities where large percentages of black Americans live under poor conditions.
Experiencing a violent crime rate of 2,137 per 100,000 of the population, Detroit is the nation's most dangerous city. Rounding out Forbes magazine's 2012 list of the 10 most dangerous cities are St Louis; Oakland, Calif.; Memphis, Tenn.; Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta; Baltimore; Stockton, Calif.; Cleveland; and Buffalo, N.Y. The most common characteristic of these predominantly black cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by Democratic and presumably liberal administrations.
Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia — haven't elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. What's more is that in most of these cities, blacks have been mayors, chiefs of police, school superintendents and principals and have dominated city councils.
You might ask, "What's the point, Williams?" Let's be clear about it. I'm not stating that there's a causal relationship between crime, poverty and squalor on the one hand and, on the other, Democratic and black political control over a city. Nor am I saying that blacks ought to vote Republican. What I am saying is that if one is strategizing on how to improve the lives of the poorest black people, he wants to leave off his to-do list election of Democrats and black politicians. Also to be left off the to-do list is a civil rights agenda. Racial discrimination has little to do with major problems confronting black people.
Today 72 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock. Being born and finding out that your mother is 17 years old, that your grandmother is 35 and that you don't know who or where your father is is not a good start on life. In fact, it's a near guarantee for school dropout, poverty and crime, but such a start in life has nothing to do with racial discrimination.
Law-abiding poor black people suffer the nation's highest rates of criminal victimization from assaults and homicide. More than 50 percent of homicide victims are black. Would anyone claim that this victimization is caused by racist groups preying on the black community?
In addition to victimization, the level of lawlessness in many black communities has the full effect of a law banning economic growth. That's because the thugs are equal-opportunity thugs who will rip off a black-owned business just as they'd rip off a white-owned business.
Black education is a disaster, but who runs the violent, disruptive big-city schools, where education is all but impossible? For the most part, it's not white people. Go to a city such as Detroit and you'll find that blacks have been superintendents, principals and most of the teachers for years. Most black high-school students, in Detroit and other cities, can't read, write and compute as well as sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade white students, but is it because of racism? What the elite teach is not only futile but counterproductive. For example, speaking standard English in an English-speaking country is critical for self-improvement.
But that's not the lesson from the nation's multiculturalists, who call for the celebration of native languages and dialects. Sloppy-minded academics and assorted hustlers have taught that poor English, gangsta rap, men wearing pigtails and thug behavior should not be criticized but become a part of the celebration of diversity.
Black people could benefit from an honest examination of the bill of goods they've been sold. Such an examination would not come from black politicians, civil rights leaders or the black and white liberal elite. Those people have benefited politically and financially from keeping black Americans in a constant state of grievance based on alleged racial discrimination. The long-term solution for the problems that many black Americans face begins with an absolute rejection of the self-serving agenda of hustlers and poverty pimps.
5-9-13
Bouncing Ball Politics
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If you are driving along and suddenly see a big red rubber ball come bouncing out into the street, you might want to put your foot on the brake pedal, because a small child may well come running out into the street after it.
We all understand that an inexperienced young child who has his mind fixed on one thing may ignore other things that are too dangerous to be ignored. Unfortunately, too much of what is said and done in politics is based on the same tunnel vision pursuit of some "good thing," in utter disregard of the repercussions.
For years, home ownership was a big "good thing" among both liberal Democrats like Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd, on the one hand, and moderate Republicans like President George W. Bush on the other hand.
Raising the rate of home ownership was the big red bouncing ball that they pursued out into the street, in utter disregard of the dangers.
A political myth has been created that no one warned of those dangers. But among the many who did warn were yours truly in 2005, Fortune and Barron's magazines in 2004 and Britain's The Economist magazine in 2003. Warnings specifically about the dangerous roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were made by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in 2005 and by Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snow in 2003.
Many, if not most, of the children who go running out into the street in pursuit of their bouncing ball may have been warned against this by their parents. But neither small children nor politicians always heed warnings.
Politicians are of course more articulate than small children, so the pols are able to not only disregard warnings but ridicule them. That was what was done by Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd, among many other politicians who made the pursuit of higher home ownership rates the holy grail.
In pursuit of those higher home ownership rates, especially among low-income people and minorities, the many vast powers of the federal government — from the Federal Reserve to bank regulatory agencies and even the Department of Justice, which issued threats of anti-discrimination lawsuits — were used to force banks and other lenders to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.
Lower lending standards of course meant higher risks of default. But these risks — and the chain reactions throughout the whole financial system — were like the traffic ignored by a small child dashing out into the street in pursuit of their bouncing ball. The whole economy got hit when the housing boom became a housing bust, and we are still trying to recover, years later.
What makes all this painfully ironic is that the latest data show that the rate of home ownership today is lower than it has been in 18 years. There was a rise of a few percentage points during the housing boom, but that was completely erased during the housing bust.
Housing has been just one area where the bouncing ball approach to political decision-making has led the country into one disaster after another.
Pursuit of the bright red bouncing ball of "universal health care" has already begun to produce collisions with reality in the form of rising insurance premiums to cover the cost of generous government-mandated benefits, to be paid for by someone else.
Here again, there have been many warnings, but the political response to those warnings was to rush ObamaCare to a vote before even the Congressmen who voted for it had a chance to read it. Now, one of the Democratic Senators who voted for it — Senator Max Baucus — has called it "a train wreck." And ObamaCare, with its thousands of regulations, has not even fully taken effect yet.
The same mindset has prevailed internationally. Trying to make Middle East countries more "democratic" is the bipartisan bouncing ball of American foreign policy. Some of these countries existed thousands of years before there was a United States — and, in all that time, they never came close to being democratic.
Maybe democracy has prerequisites that do not exist in all places at all times. And maybe pursuing it in utter disregard of the repercussions — which we have already begun to see in Libya and Egypt — is one of the most dangerous pursuits of a bouncing ball.
5-8-13
Liberal Suffering and Confusion
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The liberal world vision and reality are often at variance, for example, with equal pay for equal work. I've often watched "Lockup," a show that features California supermax prisons, including Pelican Bay and Corcoran. Often, a recalcitrant prisoner must be extracted from his cell through brute force. I've never seen female guards remove a prisoner. If they are part of the process at all, it's to videotape the extraction for legal purposes. It's my bet that female guards receive the same salaries as male guards while not having to risk injury. Along the same lines, women on aircraft carriers earn as much as their male counterparts, but I have yet to see women hefting a hernia bar to attach a 500- or 1,000-pound bomb to a fighter jet wing. All of this suggests that liberals are for equal pay for unequal work. Or could it be sex discrimination whereby equally qualified women are denied the opportunity to extract beastly inmates from their cells and load heavy bombs on fighter planes?
Here's another bit of liberal confusion. Liberals deny that raising labor cost through minimum wages reduces incentives to hire. But if you asked a liberal for advice on how to stop rich people from shirking their tax obligations, they'd say raise the penalty. Ask low-information Harvard University doctors what should be done to stem gun violence and they answer that government should institute "a new, substantial national tax on all firearms and ammunition." Ask Illinois' Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle how to reduce purchases of bullets and guns. She'd say levy a nickel tax on each bullet and a $25 tax on each gun. Liberals demonstrate they understand the law of demand — that raising the cost of something lessens the amount taken — but they deny that it applies to labor. That's as ludicrous as suggesting that the law of gravity applies to everything in the universe except cute creatures, such as pandas and puppies.
Liberals love political correctness that conceals information. For example, how does one know whether the "chair" of a board of directors or the chair of a city council is a man or woman? This issue arose during my (1995-2001) chairmanship of George Mason University's distinguished economics department. At a chairman's meeting or gathering, I was referred to as department chair. I told the speaker that I am a chairman and that I have empirical evidence as proof. Needless to say, it didn't go over well, but academics don't like the terms chairwoman or chairperson, either, but puzzlingly, God forbid that people refer to their idol as Chair Mao instead of Chairman Mao.
How liberals identify black people must be confusing to whites. Having been around for 77 years, I have been through a number of names. Among the more polite ones are colored, Negro, Afro-American, black and, more recently, African-American. Among those names, African-American is probably the most unintelligent. Let's look at it. To identify their races, suppose I told you that I had a European-American friend, a South America-American friend and a North America-American friend. You'd probably say, "Williams, that's stupid. Europe, South America and North America are continents and home to different races, ethnicities and nationalities." You might suggest that my friend is a German-American instead of European-American. My friend from Brazil is a Brazilian-American rather than a South America-American, and my friend from Canada is a Canadian-American instead of a North America-American. So wouldn't the same apply to people whose heritage lies on the African continent? For example, instead of claiming that President Barack Obama is the first African-American president, he's the first partially Kenyan-American president. Obama is lucky; he knows his national heritage. The closest thing to a national identity for most black Americans is some country along Africa's Gold Coast. Adding to the confusion, what would you call a white American of Afrikaner or Egyptian descent? Is he an African-American?
Liberals suffer confusion and cognitive dissonance because the rest of us don't help explain things to them.
5-7-13
Is Thinking Obsolete?
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | While it is not possible to answer all the e-mails and letters from readers, many are thought-provoking, whether those thoughts are positive or negative.
An e-mail from one young man simply asked for the sources of some facts about gun control that were mentioned in a recent column. It is good to check out the facts — especially if you check out the facts on both sides of an issue.
By contrast, another man simply denounced me because of what was said in that column. He did not ask for my sources but simply made contrary assertions, as if his assertions must be correct and therefore mine must be wrong.
He identified himself as a physician, and the claims that he made about guns were claims that had been made years ago in a medical journal — and thoroughly discredited since then. He might have learned that, if we had engaged in a back and forth discussion, but it was clear from his letter that his goal was not debate but denunciation. That is often the case these days.
It is always amazing how many serious issues are not discussed seriously, but instead simply generate assertions and counter-assertions. On television talk shows, people on opposite sides often just try to shout each other down.
There is a remarkable range of ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any coherent argument.
Decades of dumbed-down education no doubt have something to do with this, but there is more to it than that. Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination. Moreover, it is largely indoctrination based on the same set of underlying and unexamined assumptions among teachers and institutions.
If our educational institutions — from the schools to the universities — were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those differences.
Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the prevailing political correctness.
Moreover, the moral perspective that goes with this prevailing ideological view is all too often that of people who see themselves as being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — whether the particular issue at hand is gun control, environmentalism, race or whatever.
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas. One sign of this sense of moral monopoly among the left intelligentsia is that the institutions most under their control — the schools, colleges and universities — have far less freedom of speech than the rest of American society.
While advocacy of homosexuality, for example, is common on college campuses, and listening to this advocacy is often obligatory during freshman orientation, criticism of homosexuality is called "hate speech" that is subject to punishment.
While spokesmen for various racial or ethnic groups are free to vehemently denounce whites as a group for their past or present sins, real or otherwise, any white student who similarly denounces the sins or shortcomings of non-white groups can be virtually guaranteed to be punished, if not expelled.
Even students who do not advocate anything can have to pay a price if they do not go along with classroom brainwashing. The student at Florida Atlantic University who recently declined to stomp on a paper with the word "Jesus" on it, as ordered by the professor, was scheduled for punishment by the university until the story became public and provoked an outcry from outside academia.
This professor's action might be dismissed as an isolated extreme, but the university establishment's initial solid backing for him, and its coming down hard on the student, shows that the moral dry rot goes far deeper than one brainwashing professor.
The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach. It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they send out into the world, incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for themselves or for American society.
5-6-13
From Townhall.com
The Foundation
"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." --Thomas Paine
Inspiration
2013-04-29-brief.jpg
James Monroe
"Sunday, April 28, mark[ed] the 255th anniversary of President James Monroe's birth in 1758. ... How have we let this great patriot become a forgotten man? Monroe's military service alone made him a hero. When he was 18 and newly matriculated at William and Mary College, and the Second Continental Congress proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, he suspended his education to enlist in the Virginia infantry. ... Monroe and his fellow Virginia sharpshooters repelled a British advance, marking the first time in the War for Independence that Americans had whooped the British, forcing the redcoats to turn tail and run for their lives. Monroe played a key role in Washington's famous 1776 Christmas night sortie across the Delaware River. The teenaged Monroe was the co-leader, with one of Washington's cousins, of an advance party of 50 that had crossed the river ahead of the rest of Washington's troops, and then captured the two strategically placed cannons that defended the Hessian military camp outside of Trenton. Though seriously wounded by a musket shot, Monroe stood his ground, repelling repeated Hessian attempts to recapture the big guns, thereby saving many American lives (including, possibly, Washington's), and thereby making that indispensable, resounding victory possible. ... The amazing life story of James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, would not be complete without mentioning that he passed from this world on the Fourth of July, 1831 -- five years to the day after his fellow presidents Adams and Jefferson. What a fitting conclusion to the life of a principled patriot who gave his whole adult life to serving his country and upholding our most noble ideals." --professor Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson
Government
"[I]f [the Marketplace Fairness Act] bill becomes law, fairness goes up in smoke. Online merchants would become revenue collectors for every sales-tax jurisdiction in America -- an estimated 9,600 of them, each with its quirks and quiddities. No longer would Internet retailers based in Massachusetts be liable only for sales taxes owed to Massachusetts. They would have to calculate and remit taxes owed to Tennessee and California and Wyoming and New Jersey, charging different levies for different customers, and somehow keeping up with the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of sales-tax rates, definitions, exemptions, and deadlines. Yet the owner of the brick-and-mortar shop around the corner would go on as before, charging only a single tax rate and remitting taxes to only a single state. ... There's a crucial reason why merchants can only be required to collect taxes for states in which they are physically present: Anything else would be taxation without representation. States must not be allowed to reach beyond their borders, imposing tax obligations on retailers who had no vote or voice in creating those obligations, no political recourse, no opportunity to be heard. Against such unfairness, Americans once fought a revolution. A craving for revenue is no reason to forget that." --columnist Jeff Jacoby
5-5-13
"[T]he administration of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick stonewalled efforts by the Boston Herald to determine the extent of government benefits provided to the Tsarnaev brothers, particularly attack mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The Patrick administration's absurd stance, with its preoccupation with the 'privacy rights' of non-citizen Tamerlan -- an alien terrorist -- is a reflection of the kind of inept leadership and dogmatic thinking that led to the success of the attack in the first place. The egregious intelligence failures and uniform chorus of jihad denial following the attack have left little question that leftist political establishment, from state agencies to the Oval Office, does not recognize the true nature of the threats America faces. Nor does it take them seriously." --columnist Arnold Ahlert
"Perhaps you noticed that President Obama became the first president to speak at a Planned Parenthood gala, without ever mentioning the word abortion. This new poll suggests why: 55 percent of Americans, including 38 percent of pro-lifers, do not know that Planned Parenthood provides any abortions. Just 6 percent of all Americans know Planned Parenthood clinics perform more than 300,000 abortions each year. Alongside the refusal of television and other media to cover the sensationally disturbing Gosnell trial, this fact alone exposes the extent of the Left's cultural domination of the media-infotainment landscape." --National Review's Maggie Gallagher
"Obamacare is 'working fine,' President Obama said yesterday in his press conference. It's made health insurance 'stronger, better, more secure than it was before.' ... Right. There's nothing to worry about, which is why Members of Congress are trying to exempt themselves and their staffs from Obamacare. In reality, health insurance premiums are rising, and states -- meaning taxpayers -- are staring down some astronomical expenses. ... President Obama dismissed Obamacare opposition from the states as political. But it's a very real bottom-line issue. Heritage research shows that 40 of 50 states would see increases in costs due the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. In just three years, costs would exceed any potential savings that have been suggested." --Heritage Foundation's Amy Payne
"President Obama didn't kill American free-market health care. It began dying during World War II, when government imposed wage and price controls. At first, companies said, 'Great, stability!' But then they realized that they could not attract better workers without raises. So companies got around the rules, as companies do. They gave 'benefits,' like health insurance. Government then distorted the market further by giving employer-based health insurance better tax treatment than coverage you buy yourself. But employer-based insurance is nuts. Many workers feel locked into their jobs. Company insurance largely destroyed the health care free market, since employees rarely shop for the best service at the lowest price. Now Obamacare may kill what's left of that market." --columnist John Stossel
5-4-13
"The Boston Marathon bombers hated America, but they loved the American dole. The suspects in the scheme to murder and maim innocent men, women and children were living off the generosity of the American taxpayers they hated. The Boston Herald reports that the 'brains' of the operation, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was on the Massachusetts dole with his wife, Katherine, and their 3-year-old daughter, Zahara. The parents of the Tsarnaev brothers received welfare and the accused brother, Dzhokhar, received benefits when he was a child. Taxpayer generosity to the Tsarnaev family did not end there. The city of Cambridge awarded Dzhokhar a $2,500 scholarship toward his education at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. ... Taxpayers are even paying for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyer. Congress turns now to immigration reform, and the Tsarnaev case raises important issues about the high price of certain public policies under consideration. ... [Republican Sen. Jeff] Sessions observes that the Department of Homeland Security has been ignoring a 100-year-old law that requires that the government consider, before admitting an immigrant, the likelihood that he will become a 'public charge,' who will eventually be permanently dependent on public welfare. Less than 1 percent of visa applications were denied on these grounds in 2011, despite a growing number of undocumented residents who live on food stamps and other welfare programs. The Tsarnaev brothers were granted political asylum because they were Muslims from Chechnya. ... The immigration debate gives Congress a chance to re-evaluate the wisdom of sacrificing Americans for political correctness by sending invitations to prospective citizens in parts of the world where nearly everybody hates America and all it stands for. This phenomenon illustrates the need for vigilance, to make sure immigrants will become productive, prosperous Americans. Sadly, it seems the primary motivation of the president and his party on immigration reform is to create 11 million new Democratic voters with an amnesty, and hang the cost." --The Washington Times
5-3-13
Please read my new article,
Common Core educational Standards; federal government tyranny
5-2-13
"[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."
--John Adams, Speech on Independence Day to the House of Representatives, 1821
5-1-13
The Art of the Impossible
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Someone called politics "the art of the possible." But, in the era of the modern welfare state, politics is largely the art of the impossible.
Those people morbid enough to keep track of politicians' promises may remember how Barack Obama said that ObamaCare would lower medical costs — and lots of people bought it.
But if you stop and think, however old-fashioned that may seem these days, do you seriously believe that millions more people can be given medical care and vast new bureaucracies created to administer payment for it, with no additional costs?
Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free red tape. Bureaucrats have to eat, just like everyone else, and they need a place to live and some other amenities. How do you suppose the price of medical care can go down when the costs of new government bureaucracies are added to the costs of the medical treatment itself?
By the way, where are the extra doctors going to come from, to treat the millions of additional patients? Training more people to become doctors is not free. Politicians may ignore costs but ignoring those costs will not make them go away.
With bureaucratically controlled medical care, you are going to need more doctors, just to treat a given number of patients, because time that is spent filling out government forms is time that is not spent treating patients. And doctors have the same 24 hours in the day as everybody else.
When you add more patients to more paperwork per patient, you are talking about still more costs. How can that lower medical costs? But although that may be impossible, politics is the art of the impossible. All it takes is rhetoric and a public that does not think beyond the rhetoric they hear.
You can just call "medical care for all" a "right" and you are home free with a major part of the public. Those who are more skeptical can be dismissed as people who just are not as compassionate. That puts you on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — and that is a proven winning strategy in politics.
Back during World War II, military construction battalions had the motto, "The difficult done immediately; the impossible takes a little longer." Today, the impossible may not even take longer. Indeed, the impossible has become routine in political rhetoric.
Whether in medical issues or other issues, politicians don't even have to prove that what they advocate is possible, much less probable. For example, those who advocate tighter gun control laws are almost never asked for evidence that such laws have in fact reduced gun violence. And almost never do they even attempt to present such evidence.
But the only way that it is possible that such laws will save lives is if they do in fact reduce killings with guns. But who cares what is possible these days? If the intention is good and the means sound plausible, who wants to get bogged down in specifics? Certainly not politicians or most of the media. All you really need is rhetoric that puts you on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.
On the international stage, the ever-popular policy of "disarmament" is in essence domestic gun control writ large. Nuclear disarmament is especially popular. No doubt many people wish that scientists had never discovered how to make such devastating weapons.
But, once the principles on which nuclear bombs operate have been discovered, it is impossible to undiscover them.
Even if you destroyed every nuclear bomb in the world, the knowledge of how to make them cannot be destroyed. If you killed every scientist who has this knowledge, such a bloodbath would be futile, because new scientists can discover what the old scientists discovered.
With international disarmament agreements, as with domestic gun control, nothing is easier than disarming peaceful people — thereby leaving them more vulnerable to people who are not peaceful, who can simply ignore the restrictions that others obey.
But if verifiable, lasting and universal nuclear disarmament is impossible, who cares, so long as it sounds good? Politics is the art of the impossible.
4-30-13
Academic Cesspools
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Over the past 10 years, I have written columns variously titled "Academic Cesspools," "Academic Dishonesty," "The Shame of Higher Education," "Academic Rot" and "Indoctrination of Our Youth." Therefore, I was not surprised by David Feith's April 5th Wall Street Journal article, "The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World." In it, Feith tells of a golf course conversation between Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein. Klingenstein voiced disapproval of campus celebration of diversity and ethnic differences while there's "not enough celebration of our common American identity."
Because Klingenstein wouldn't help finance the college's diversity craze, Mills insinuated, in remarks to the student body, that Klingenstein is a racist. Mills also told students: "We must be willing to entertain diverse perspectives throughout our community. ... Diversity of ideas at all levels of the college is crucial for our credibility and for our educational mission."
Klingenstein decided to check out Mills' commitment to diverse perspectives by commissioning the National Association of Scholars to examine Bowdoin's intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity. Its report — "What Does Bowdoin Teach?" — isn't pretty. There are "no curricular requirements that center on the American founding or the history of the nation." Even history majors aren't required to take a single course in American history. In the history department, no course is devoted to American political, military, diplomatic or intellectual history; the only ones available are organized around some aspect of race, class, gender or sexuality.
Some of the 37 seminars designated for freshmen are "Affirmative Action and U.S. Society," "Fictions of Freedom," "Racism," "Queer Gardens," "Sexual Life of Colonialism" and "Modern Western Prostitutes." As for political diversity, the report estimates that "four or five out of approximately 182 full-time faculty members might be described as politically conservative." During the 2012 presidential campaign, 100 percent of faculty donations went to President Barack Obama. Despite political bias and mediocrity, in 2012, Bowdoin was ranked sixth among the nation's liberal arts colleges in U.S. News & World Report and was ranked 14th on Forbes magazine's list of America's top colleges. That ought to tell us how much faith should be put in college rankings.
I applaud Klingenstein for not making a contribution to a college agenda that is so common today. Wealthy donors are generous but tend to be lazy and uninformed in their giving. They give large sums of money that winds up supporting college agendas that are contemptuous of donors' values, such as enlightened racism, anti-capitalism and Marxism. A rough rule of thumb to discover modern-day racism is to search a college's website to see whether it has vice presidents or deans of diversity and diversity programs. If so, keep your money.
Recent evidence has emerged that some colleges have become bold enough to hire former terrorists to teach and possibly indoctrinate our young people. That's the case with Columbia University in the hiring of convicted Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, who spent 22 years in prison for the murder of two policemen and a Brink's guard. She now holds a professorship at Columbia's School of Social Work. Her Weather Underground comrade William Ayers is a professor of education on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Unrepentant, in the wake of 9/11, Ayers told us: ''I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.'' Bernardine Dohrn, his wife, is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her stated mission is to overthrow capitalism. Ayers and Dohrn, as well as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are people who hate our nation and are longtime associates of President Obama's. That might help in explaining our president's vision.
What we see on college campuses represents a dereliction of duty by boards of trustees, which bear the ultimate responsibility. Wealthy donors who care about the fraud of higher education should recognize that there's nothing like the sound of pocketbooks snapping shut to open the closed minds of college administrators.
4-29-13
From The Patriot Post
News From the Swamp: Obama's Underlying Tax Increase
Analysis by the Tax Policy Center of Barack Obama's budget proposal shows that the tax hikes he proposes will hit most taxpayers, including the middle class. The top 1 percent of taxpayers would pay 86 percent of the higher taxes called for in Obama's budget by 2015, but the tax burden for middle-class households would also steadily rise over the next decade. This, of course, breaks the oft-repeated promise by the president to shelter the middle class from higher taxes. Not that we ever believed him.
A gimmick baked into Obama's proposal would slow the increase of deductions and exemptions compared to inflation, giving them a slightly lower effective value with each passing year. Tax brackets would also be adjusted so that additional income would more rapidly move taxpayers into higher brackets. It has always been the practice of Democrats to raise taxes rather than lower spending, which is why they have yet to produce any substantive deficit or debt reduction proposals. By creating a higher baseline budget with increased spending, they can fall back on the excuse that taxes have to be raised in order to meet the government's spending "priorities."
Hope 'n' Change: GOP Infighting Over ObamaCare
The laughably named Affordable Care Act is turning out to be anything but. The Department of Health and Human Services spent the funds allotted for implementation and went to Congress looking for more money to set up the exchanges -- $5.9 billion more, to be exact. With their request rejected, HHS decided to take money from a separate ObamaCare "slush fund" dedicated to "prevention." In response, House Republican leaders devised a plan to stop HHS's attempt to raid this fund by moving $5 billion to another ObamaCare fund dedicated to insuring those with pre-existing conditions. The thinking behind the plan is that the pre-existing program expires in nine months anyway, so moving funds into it -- and away from HHS hands -- would not only hamper implementation of ObamaCare but, as The Wall Street Journal put it, also force Democrats "to choose between coverage for sick people now versus the HHS money pit."
However, Republican leadership was forced to pull the bill this week after many conservatives refused to back it, fearing it would help save ObamaCare. Several key conservative organizations also lobbied against it. "Fiscal conservatives should be squarely focused on repealing Obamacare, not strengthening it by supporting the parts that are politically attractive," Andy Roth, a vice president of Club for Growth wrote. Of course, we'd also love to see ObamaCare go the way of the dodo, but with Democrats controlling the White House and Senate, it's not going to happen any time soon. Unfortunately, the GOP missed a chance to deal the law a targeted blow.
Meanwhile, ObamaCare is proving so unpopular among Americans that the administration announced it will spend an additional $8 million (over and above the $23 million already planned) in marketing to tell Americans just how much they like it. ObamaCare, rather than a health care law, turns out to be a you-paid-for-it infomercial.
4-28-13
"It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf."
--Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, 1776
4-27-13
Immigration Gambles: Part II
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Whose interests are immigration laws supposed to serve — and whose interests do current immigration reform proposals actually serve?
In order to have any immigration policy serve any purpose, the border must first be secured. Otherwise American immigration policy exists only on paper, and is mocked by what happens on the ground, as masses of people cross the border illegally, in disregard of whatever policies are embodied in our laws.
Moreover, all the people who cross the border from Mexico are not Mexican. They can easily include Middle East terrorists. The fact that this obvious threat has been blithely ignored for years, in order to get political leverage for "comprehensive" immigration reform, suggests that importing more potential voters for the Democrats has a higher priority in some quarters than safeguarding the country.
"Comprehensive" immigration reform — as distinguished from securing the border before doing anything else — serves the interests of politicians of both parties.
A "comprehensive" immigration bill means that they can vote for something that mollifies those Americans who are concerned about the uncontrolled influx of foreigners, while winning support from those who want more foreigners admitted and made citizens. Starting the amnesty track immediately, while promising border security in the future, means that an irreversible benefit is conferred up front, while only time will tell whether the promise of border security will be kept — as it has not been thus far.
Ask yourself why people who have been living illegally in this country for years cannot wait a couple of more years until the border is secured before the question of their legal status can be studied and debated in Congress and among the public at large.
Ask yourself why the American people must continue to be played for suckers by such games as letting foreign pregnant women drop in to have their babies here, who automatically become American citizens, opening the door for other members of their families to come in later. These are called "anchor babies."
Crossing the border from Mexico is by no means the only way such women unilaterally confer American citizenship on their children. There are profitable organized programs to bring in affluent pregnant women from overseas to live in little communities set up for them before and after the birth of their anchor babies. The principle that anyone born on American soil was automatically an American citizen made sense in centuries past, when getting here across an ocean in ships was very different from booking a round trip flight from Shanghai or Manila, much less walking across the border from Tijuana.
If nothing else, putting a legal end to the "anchor baby" racket might suggest to the American public that they were regarded in Congress as something more than expendable suckers who can be mollified with rhetoric.
Waiting until the border has already been secured before an immigration policy is decided upon would also allow time to discuss the pros and cons of various ways of enforcing whatever that policy might turn out to be. But many politicians much prefer to rush complex legislation through Congress before the public knows what is in it or what is at stake. "We the people" are to be by-passed.
Time to deliberate would also be time to raise questions as to why local government officials in "sanctuary" cities who openly thwart or defy federal immigration laws should be allowed to get away with such illegal acts, while private employers are forced to become enforcers of such laws, under heavy penalties for not investigating the legal status of those they hire.
Government officials at all levels take an oath to uphold the laws, but somebody who owns a restaurant or hardware store has not applied for the job of border enforcement — and the 13th Amendment forbids involuntary servitude. Or are we already too far along on the road to serfdom for that to matter any more?
"Comprehensive" immigration reform serves the interests of politicians who like to be on both sides of a controversial issue, and it serves the interests of those foreigners who want to game the system in the United States, at the expense of the American people. But it does not serve the interests of American society.
4-26-13
"Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor."
--Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788
4-25-13
Immigration Gambles
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Britain's late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said it all when she wrote that the world has "never ceased to be dangerous," but the West has "ceased to be vigilant."
Nothing better illustrates her point than the fact that the West has imported vast numbers of people who hate our guts and would love to slit our throats. Political correctness has replaced self-preservation. The Boston Marathon killer who set a bomb down right next to an eight-year-old child is only the latest in an on-going series of such people.
Senator Patrick Leahy has warned us not to use the Boston Marathon terrorists as an argument against the immigration legislation he advocates. But if we are not to base our laws on facts about realities, what are we to base them on? Fashionable theories and pious rhetoric?
While we cannot condemn all members of any group for what other members of their group have done, that does not mean that we must ignore the fact that the costs and dangers created by some groups are much greater than those created by other groups.
Most members of most groups may be basically decent people. But if 85 percent of group A are decent and 95 percent of group B are decent, this means that there is three times as large a proportion of undesirable people in group A as in group B. Should we willfully ignore that when considering immigration laws?
It is already known that a significant percentage of the immigrants from some countries go on welfare, while practically none from some other countries do. Some children from some countries are eager students in school and, even when they come here knowing little or no English, they go on to master the language better than many native-born Americans.
But other children from other countries drag down educational standards and create many other problems in school, as well as forming gangs that ruin whole neighborhoods with their vandalism and violence, and cost many lives.
Are we to shut our eyes to such differences and just lump all immigrants together, as if we are talking about abstract people in an abstract world?
Perhaps the most important fact about the immigration bill introduced in the Senate is that its advocates are trying to rush it through to passage before there is time for serious questions to be explored and debated, so as to get serious answers.
Anyone who suggests that we should compare welfare rates, crime rates, high school dropout rates and drunk driving arrest rates among immigrants from different countries, before we set immigration quotas, is likely to be stigmatized as a bad person.
Above all, we need to look at immigration laws in terms of how they affect the American people and the American culture that gives us a prosperity that has long been among the highest in the world.
Americans, after all, are not a separate race but people from many racial and ethnic backgrounds. Yet most Americans have a higher standard of living than other people of the same racial or ethnic background in their respective ancestral home countries. That is even more true for black Americans than for white Americans.
Clearly, whatever we have in this country that makes life here better than in the countries from which most Americans originated is something worth preserving. A hundred years ago, preserving the American way of life was much easier than today, because most of the people who came here then did so to become Americans, learn our language and adopt our way of life.
Today, virtually every group has its own "leaders" promoting its separate identity and different way of life, backed up by zealots for multiculturalism and bilingualism in the general population. The magic word "diversity" is repeated endlessly and insistently to banish concerns about the Balkanization of America — and banish examples provided by the tragic history of the Balkans.
We are importing many foreigners who stay foreign, if not hostile. Blithely turning them into citizens by fiat, rather than because they have committed to the American way of life, is an irreversible decision that can easily turn out to be a dangerous gamble with the future of the whole society.
What happened in Boston shows just one of those dangers.
4-24-13
Genes and Racism
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | During decades of watching both collegiate and professional football, I have seen hundreds of touchdowns scored by black players — but not one extra point kicked by a black player.
Is this because blacks are genetically incapable of kicking a football or because racists won't let blacks kick a football?
Most of us would consider either of these explanations ridiculous. Yet genes and discrimination were the predominant explanations of black-white differences offered by intellectuals in the 20th century.
It was genes that were the preferred explanation in the early decades of that century and discrimination in the later decades, as I show in my recent book, "Intellectuals and Race."
The intelligentsia did not simply offer these as possible explanations among others. On the contrary, each was offered as the predominant, if not exclusive, explanation. Anyone who said otherwise risked being dismissed as a "sentimentalist" in the early 20th century or denounced as a "racist" in later years.
Out of such dogmatic insistence on some one-size-fits-all theory came racial quotas and "disparate impact" lawsuits in our times, based on the presumption that racial differences in outcomes show that somebody did somebody else wrong.
In earlier times, the prevailing theory was that differences in outcomes show that some races are inferior to others. This led to such things as eugenics and ultimately to the Holocaust.
In both eras, the prevailing theory flattered the egos of the intellectuals — first as saviors of their race, and later as rescuers of victims of racism.
Among the alternative explanations of group differences that were ignored were geography, demography and culture.
For example, people with the geographic handicap of living in isolated mountain valleys have seldom, if ever, produced world-class achievements that advanced science, technology or philosophy. On the contrary, people in such places have almost invariably lagged behind the progress in the rest of the world — including people of the very same race living on the plains below. Mountaineers were long noted for their poverty and backwardness in countries around the world, especially in the millennia before modern transportation and communication eased their isolation.
People geographically isolated on islands far from the nearest mainland or people isolated by deserts or other geographic features have likewise seldom kept up with the progress of others. Again, this was especially so before modern transportation and communication put them more in touch with the rest of the world.
Conversely, urbanized peoples have often been in the vanguard of progress, producing far more of the historic advances of the human race than a similar number of people scattered out in the hinterlands — even when both were of the same race.
Geography has been a factor in this as well, since not all geographic areas are equally suitable for building big cities. The overwhelming majority of cities have been built on navigable waterways, for example — and not all regions have navigable waterways available.
Isolation can be man-made, as well as created by nature. Centuries ago, when China was the most advanced nation in the world, its leaders decided to isolate the country from other peoples, all of whom they regarded as barbarians. After a few centuries of isolation, China was shocked to find itself overtaken by others, and to some extent at the mercy of those others.
Demography is yet another reason why some groups have very different outcomes than others. Age differences between groups within a nation, or between whole nations, have often been a decade or even two decades. Peoples with decades of difference in experience are almost guaranteed to have different achievements, whether they belong to the same race or to different races.
There are many differences between races that have nothing to do with either genes or discrimination, but have much to do with their educational, economic or other outcomes. However, it is a much harder job to examine these many factors, and their complex interactions, than to seize upon whatever happens to be the prevailing theory of the day that may be both easier to grasp and more self-flattering.
4-22-13
Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert.
Congress said, "Someone may steal from it at night."
So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.
Then Congress said, "How does the watchman do his job without instruction?"
So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.
Then Congress said, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?"
So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One was to do the studies and one was to write the reports.
Then Congress said, "How are these people going to get paid?"
So they created two positions: a time keeper and a payroll officer then hired two people.
Then Congress said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?"
So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.
Then Congress said, "We have had this command in operation for one year and we are $918,000 over budget, we must cut back."
So they laid-off the night watchman.
NOW slowly, let it sink in.
Quietly, we go like sheep to slaughter. Does anybody remember the reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY during the Carter administration?
Anybody?
Anything?
No?
Didn't think so!
Bottom line is, we've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency, the reason for which very few people who read this can remember!
Ready??
It was very simple... and at the time, everybody thought it very appropriate.
The Department of Energy was instituted on 8/04/1977, TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.
Hey, pretty efficient, huh???
AND NOW IT'S 2012 -- 35 YEARS LATER -- AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS "NECESSARY" DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR. IT HAS 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES; AND LOOK AT THE JOB IT HAS DONE!
(THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY, "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?")
34 years ago 30% of our oil consumption was foreign imports. Today 70% of our oil consumption is foreign imports.
Ah, yes -- good old Federal bureaucracy.
NOW, WE HAVE TURNED OVER THE BANKING SYSTEM, HEALTH CARE, AND THE AUTO INDUSTRY TO THE SAME GOVERNMENT?
Hello!! Anybody Home? Didn't think so.
Signed....
The Night Watchman
4-21-13
Price Versus Cost
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Suppose you buy a gallon of gas for $3. How much did it cost you? You say, "Williams, that's a silly question. It cost $3." That's where you're mistaken, because there's a difference between price and cost. To prove that price and cost are not the same, consider the following. Suppose you live and work in New York City and routinely pay $15 for a haircut. Imagine you were told that there's a barber in Boise, Idaho, who can give you the identical haircut for just $5. Would you start going to the Boise barber? I'm betting you'd answer no because even though the price is cheaper, the cost is greater.
We might think of price as the money that's actually given in exchange for the transfer of ownership. When you purchased the gallon of gas, you simply transferred your ownership of $3. What the gas cost you is a different matter. One way to determine the cost of a gallon of gas is to ask yourself what sacrifice you had to make in order to have $3 to buy it. Say that your annual salary is $75,000. Your total federal income tax, state income tax, local taxes and Social Security and Medicare taxes come to about 35 percent of your salary. That means that in order to purchase the $3 gallon of gas required that you earned about $4.60 in order to have $3 after taxes. That means a gallon of gas costs you $4.60 worth of sacrifice. But that's not so costly as it is to a richer person — for example, someone earning a yearly salary of $500,000. He has to earn more than $5 before taxes in order to have $3 after taxes to purchase gas.
If taxes only concealed hidden costs of what we buy, we'd be lucky, but taxes are destructive in another hidden way. Suppose I want to hire you to repair my computer. Having the work done is worth $200 to me, and performing the work is worth $200 to you. The transaction occurs because we have a meeting of the minds. Suppose Congress imposes a 30 percent income tax on you. That means that if you repaired my computer, you would receive not $200, what it was worth to you to do the job, but instead $140 after taxes. You might say the heck with repairing my computer; spending time with your family is worth more than $140.
You might then offer that you'd do the job if I paid you $283. That way, your after-tax earnings would be $200 — what doing the job is worth to you. There's a problem. The repair job was worth $200 to me, not $283. So it's my turn to say the heck with it.
This simple example demonstrates that one effect of taxes is that of destroying transactions and hence jobs. But politicians have what economists call a zero-elasticity vision of the world. In other words, they're fool enough to believe that people will behave after taxes are levied just as they behaved before and that the only effect of a tax is to bring in more revenue. Of course, a more flattering assessment is that politicians are not fools and know that their actions destroy transactions and hence jobs but they don't give a damn and only care about revenue.
Here's a question: Would you and I, as well as our nation, be better off if you repaired my computer and I gave you $200 in cash and we agreed not to report the transaction to the agents of Congress? I'd answer yes and no. Yes, because there'd be more transactions, more jobs and greater wealth. No, because we'd be criminals.
Taxes are necessary to fund the constitutionally mandated functions of the federal government. If Congress spent according to its authority under Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution, taxes wouldn't be any more than 5 percent of the gross domestic product, as it was between 1787 and 1920, as opposed to today's 20 percent.
4-20-13
The way in which the Manchin Gun-Control bill was presented is indicative of the politicalization and shameful use of the tragic shootings of innocents for personal and ideological gains by Manchin, the press, and other gun-control fanatics.
Just the name of the Bill should tell Americans the underhanded nature of radical left-wing government and Manchin. The Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act automatically reveals the fact that it has nothing to do with public safety and guarantees that it will not protect the Second Amendment.
Manchin accused the NRA of lying, while he, Obama, and the rest of his gun-bashers were doing their usual 'reasonable' gun-control argument.
We have thousands of these so-called 'reasonable' laws scattered across this land - but blazing their anti-2nd Amendment crusade in cities and states controlled by the Democratic Party. If anyone is unclear about the intent of the Democrats to not only gun-control, but gun confiscation, they should just look at Chicago and other left-wing progressive cities and states. Chicago has some of the most restrictive; actually out-right bans of guns in the country, and yet is the murder capital of the country.
Manchin to public: Read gun bill
April 19, 2013
By JESS MANCINI (jmancini@newsandsentinel.com) , Parkersburg News and Sentinel
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PARKERSBURG - A West Virginia senator who brokered a compromise on a bill requiring background checks on gun sales encouraged everyone Thursday to read the legislation.
The Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act does nothing that opponents, including the National Rifle Association claimed, such as create a registry of guns, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said on Thursday. To know that and still spread the inaccuracies "is just wrong," Manchin said.
The compromise was organized by Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. After much hope it had the best chance to pass, the bill failed Wednesday in the Senate 54-46, short of the 60 votes needed to advance.
The legislation will return, although when was not available, said Manchin, attributing that to statements from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday.
"This bill will come back," Manchin told reporters in West Virginia in a telephone press conference.
The national discussion on gun control rekindled after the Newtown, Conn., mass shootings where 20 kids at the Sandy Hook Elementary School were among the 26 people killed.
Existing law requires checks when guns are purchased from firearms dealers with a federal license. The proposal required background checks for sales at gun shows and over the internet, but excluded family transactions, to prevent criminals and those with a mental illness from buying guns.
"Most people say they thought it was already being done," Manchin said.
The legislation would have created a national commission on violence and violence from video sources and makes it illegal to create a registry of gun ownership, Manchin said.
The NRA on Wednesday issued a statement after the bill's defeat, saying it "would have criminalized certain private transfers of firearms between honest citizens, requiring lifelong friends, neighbors and some family members to get federal government permission to exercise a fundamental right or face prosecution."
None of that is in the bill, Manchin said.
The bill is 49 pages long and is available to read on his website, http://www.manchin.senate. It won't take long to read, Manchin said.
"The facts really do set you free," he said.
© Copyright 2013 Parkersburg News and Sentinel. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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The way a bill is presented is indicative of the politicalization
4-19-13
Immigration Sophistry
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Most laws are meant to stop people from doing something, and to penalize those who disregard those laws. More generally, laws are meant to protect the society from the law breakers.
But our immigration laws are different. Here the whole focus is on the "plight" of those who have broken the laws, and on what can be done to lift the stigma and ease the pressures they feel, so that they can "come out of the shadows" and "normalize" their lives.
Merely using the word "illegal" to describe their breaking the law is considered to be a sign of mean-spiritedness, if not racism. The Associated Press refuses to let their reporters refer to people who sneaked across the border into this country, in violation of American immigration laws, as "illegal immigrants."
On the other hand, if an ordinary American citizen breaks a law, no one cares if he has to live in fear for years — "in the shadows," as it were — worrying that his illegal act will be discovered and punished. No one bothers to come up with euphemisms to keep from calling what he did illegal.
No cities announce that they will provide "sanctuary," so that American shoplifters, or even jay-walkers, will be protected from the law. But, in some places, illegal immigrants are treated almost as if they were in a witness protection program.
What is even more remarkable about this special treatment is that you are not supposed to think about it as special treatment. When a new immigration law is proposed that simply overlooks violations of the old law, that is not supposed to be called "amnesty" — even though the word "amnesty" has the same root as "amnesia." It is all about forgetting.
Why is it not supposed to be called "amnesty"? Because illegal immigrants must "earn" their citizenship. But if an ordinary American citizen gets a traffic ticket, the law is not going to just forget about it, no matter what good deeds he does afterwards.
People who come here perfectly legally have to earn their citizenship. Why is earning citizenship some special reason for ignoring the illegality of others?
Impressive feats of sophistry have become the norm in discussions of illegal immigration.
For example, we are told that there is no way that the government can find all the people who are in the country illegally and deport them. Does anyone imagine that the government can find all the embezzlers, drunk drivers or bank robbers in the country? And does anyone think that this is a reason why the government should stop trying to enforce laws against embezzlement, drunk driving or bank robbery? Or let embezzlers, drunk drivers and bank robbers "come out of the shadows" and "normalize" their lives?
Even if the government does not lift a finger to find illegal immigrants, many will come to the attention of law enforcement officials because of their violations of other laws. But, even then, there is no assurance that they will be deported — and certainly not in "sanctuary" cities.
Why are there immigration laws in the first place? For the benefit of the American people — not for the benefit of people in other countries who want to come here.
But political and media elites treat the American people as if they are the problem — a problem to be circumvented with sophistry and pious promises about border security that have not been kept in all these years since the last amnesty, decades ago.
Making an irreversible decision to add millions of people — and their dissimilar cultures — permanently to the American body politic is something that should take months of careful examination and discussion, both inside and outside of Congress. But it is likely to get less time than you would take to decide whether to buy a house, or perhaps even a car.
What should American immigration policy be? It doesn't matter what any of us think that policy should be if the borders are not secure, because whoever wants to come across that border will come across anyway, in defiance of whatever the policy might be.
If legal benefits are conferred on illegal immigrants before the border is secured, we may as well give up any pretense that we have an immigration policy, because benefits conferred are never going to be taken back, no matter how porous the border remains.
4-18-13
Fact-Free Crusades
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Amid all the heated, emotional advocacy of gun control, have you ever heard even one person present convincing hard evidence that tighter gun control laws have in fact reduced murders?
Think about all the states, communities within states, as well as foreign countries, that have either tight gun control laws or loose or non-existent gun control laws. With so many variations and so many sources of evidence available, surely there would be some compelling evidence somewhere if tighter gun control laws actually reduced the murder rate.
And if tighter gun control laws don't actually reduce the murder rate, then why are we being stampeded toward such laws after every shooting that gets media attention?
Have the media outlets that you follow ever even mentioned that some studies have produced evidence that murder rates tend to be higher in places with tight gun control laws?
The dirty little secret is that gun control laws do not actually control guns. They disarm law-abiding citizens, making them more vulnerable to criminals, who remain armed in disregard of such laws.
In England, armed crimes skyrocketed as legal gun ownership almost vanished under increasingly severe gun control laws in the late 20th century. (See the book "Guns and Violence" by Joyce Lee Malcolm). But gun control has become one of those fact-free crusades, based on assumptions, emotions and rhetoric.
What almost no one talks about is that guns are used to defend lives as well as to take lives. In fact, many of the horrific killings that we see in the media were brought to an end when someone else with a gun showed up and put a stop to the slaughter.
The Cato Institute estimates upwards of 100,000 defensive uses of guns per year. Preventing law-abiding citizens from defending themselves can cost far more lives than are lost in the shooting episodes that the media publicize. The lives saved by guns are no less precious, just because the media pay no attention to them.
Many people who have never fired a gun in their lives, and never faced life-threatening dangers, nevertheless feel qualified to impose legal restrictions that can be fatal to others. And politicians eager to "do something" that gets them publicity know that the votes of the ignorant and the gullible are still votes.
Virtually nothing that is being proposed in current gun control legislation is likely to reduce murder rates.
Restricting the magazine capacity available to law-abiding citizens will not restrict the magazine capacity of people who are not law-abiding citizens. Such restrictions just mean that the law-abiding citizen is likely to run out of ammunition first.
Someone would have to be an incredible sharpshooter to fend off three home invaders with just seven shots at moving targets. But seven is the magic number of bullets allowed in a magazine under New York State's new gun control laws.
People who support such laws seem to blithely assume that they are limiting the damage that can be done by criminals or the mentally ill — as if criminals or mad men care about such laws.
Banning so-called "assault weapons" is a farce, as well as a fraud, because there is no concrete definition of an assault weapon. That is why so many guns have to be specified by name in such bans — and the ones specified to be banned are typically no more dangerous than others that are not specified.
Some people may think that "assault weapons" means automatic weapons. But automatic weapons were banned decades ago. Banning ugly-looking "assault weapons" may have aesthetic benefits, but it does not reduce the dangers to human life in the slightest. You are just as dead when killed by a very plain-looking gun.
One of the dangerous inconsistencies of many, if not most, gun control crusaders is that those who are most zealous to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens are often not nearly as concerned about keeping violent criminals behind bars.
Leniency toward criminals has long been part of the pattern of gun control zealots on both sides of the Atlantic. When the insatiable desire to crack down on law-abiding citizens with guns is combined with an attitude of leniency toward criminals, it can hardly be surprising when tighter gun control laws are accompanied by rising rates of crime, including murders.
4-17-13
Black Unemployment
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A couple of weeks ago, Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson, speaking at The National Press Club, said the nation "would never tolerate white unemployment at 14 and 15 percent." Black unemployment has been double that of white Americans for more than 50 years. The black youth unemployment rate is more than 40 percent nationally. In some cities, unemployment for black working-age males is more than 50 percent. Let's look at this, but first let's look at some history.
From 1900 to 1954, blacks were more active than whites in the labor market. Until about 1960, black male labor force participation in every age group was equal to or greater than that of whites. During that period, black teen unemployment was roughly equal to or less than white teen unemployment. As early as 1900, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites; today it's about 30 percent longer. To do something about today's employment picture requires abandonment of sacred cows and honesty.
The typical answer given for many black problems is racial discrimination. No one argues that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated. But the relevant question is: How much of what we see can be explained by discrimination? I doubt whether anyone would argue that the reason for lower unemployment, higher labor force participation and shorter duration of unemployment among blacks in the first half of the 20th century was that there was less racial discrimination. I also doubt whether anyone would argue that during earlier periods, blacks had higher education and greater skills attainment than whites. Answers must be sought elsewhere.
I was a teenager during the late 1940s, living in North Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing project. Youngsters in my neighborhood who sought after-school, weekend or summer jobs found them. I picked blueberries in New Jersey, caddied at Cobbs Creek Golf Club, shoveled snow for the Philadelphia Transportation Co., delivered packages for a milliner, performed janitorial work at Horn & Hardart restaurant, and huckstered fruits and vegetables. As a high-school student, Christmas employment for me included after-school and weekend work at Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s mail-order house, and one year, I delivered mail for the U.S. Post Office.
Such opportunities for early work experiences are all but gone for today's teens living in Richard Allen homes. A major reason is the minimum wage law, which makes hiring low-skilled workers a losing economic proposition. In 1950, only 50 percent of jobs were covered by the minimum wage law. That meant the minimum wage didn't have today's unemployment effect. Today nearly 100 percent are covered. Today's child labor laws prevent youngsters from working in perfectly safe environments. The minimum wage has destroyed many jobs. That's why, for example, in contrast with the past, today's gasoline stations are self-service and theater ushers are nonexistent.
Then there are super-minimum wage laws, such as the Davis-Bacon Act, which were written for the express purposes of excluding blacks from government-financed or -assisted construction projects. Labor unions have a long history of discrimination against blacks. Frederick Douglass wrote about this in "The Tyranny, Folly, and Wickedness of Labor Unions," and Booker T. Washington did so in "The Negro and the Labor Unions." To the detriment of their constituents, black politicians give support to labor laws pushed by unions and white liberal organizations.
Then there's education. Black youths are becoming virtually useless for the increasingly high-tech world of the 21st century. According to a 2001 report by Abigail Thernstrom, "The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement," many black 12th-graders dealt with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade; they wrote about as well as whites in the eighth grade. The average black high-school senior had math skills on a par with a typical white student in the middle of seventh grade. The average 17-year-old black student could only read as well as the typical white child who had not yet reached age 13. That means an employer hiring the typical black high-school graduate is in effect hiring an eighth-grader.
4-16-13
Tests and Tiger Moms
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | New York City's Stuyvesant High School is one of those all too rare public schools for intellectually outstanding students. Such students are often bored to death in schools where the work is geared to the lowest common denominator, and it is by no means uncommon for very bright students to become behavior problems.
Recent statistics on the students who passed the examination to get into Stuyvesant High School raise troubling questions that are unlikely to receive the kind of serious answers they deserve.
These successful applicants included 9 black students, 24 Latino students, 177 white students and 620 Asian Americans.
Since this is definitely not the ethnic makeup of the general population of New York City, we can expect to hear the usual sort of comments from those who are in the business of being indignant and offended.
The most common of these comments is that the tests are "unfair." That is of course possible, but it is also possible that the groups themselves are different. Yet only the first possibility is allowed to be mentioned, in an age when race can be discussed only with pious hypocrisy and obligatory lies.
However shocked some people may be by the ethnic breakdown among students who passed the test to get into Stuyvesant High School, similar disparities can be found among students from different ethnic backgrounds in other countries around the world. Back in the decade of the 1960s, students from the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned 20 times as many Bachelor of Science degrees as students from the Malay majority.
In Sri Lanka, children from the Tamil minority consistently outperformed members of the Sinhalese majority on university admissions tests and, in at least one year, made an absolute majority of the A's on those tests.
Back in the days of the Ottoman Empire, Armenian students did better than Turkish students when it came to writing in the Turkish language.
What does all this mean? That people are different. Would ordinary observation and ordinary common sense not tell you that? Or dare you not even think that, in the suffocating atmosphere of political correctness?
These differences are not set in stone. Back during the First World War, low mental test scores among Jewish soldiers in the U.S. Army led one mental test expert to declare that this tended to "disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent."
But many of the men taking the Army's mental tests during the First World War were the children of immigrants, and had grown up in homes where English was not the language used. Mental tests in later years showed Jews scoring above the national average.
Every study I know of that compares the amount of time that black students and Asian American students spend watching television, and how much time they spend on school work, shows disparities as great as the disparities in their academic outcomes.
When teaching at UCLA, years ago, I once went into a library on a Saturday night, noticed how many Asian students were studying — and looked around in vain for any black students. How surprised should I have been when Asian students did better in the courses I taught?
A few years ago, Professor Amy Chua of Yale caused a controversy when she wrote a book about Asian "Tiger Moms" who put heavy pressure on their children to succeed in school. But a more recent book ("Gifted Hands") by black neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson shows that his mother was as much of a Tiger Mom as the Asians.
Not only did Dr. Carson rise from the ghetto to become an internationally recognized neurosurgeon, his brother became an engineer — both of them children of a poverty-stricken mother with only three years of education. But Tiger Moms get results.
Unfortunately, we are at a stage where the interests of race hustlers is to cry "unfair" at the tests — and they have a lot more political clout than black Tiger Moms have. So long as the rest of us are silenced by political correctness, racial progress on that front is unlikely.
Put differently, whole generations of black young people can continue to go down the drain because their fate carries less weight than fashionable racial rhetoric.
4-14-13
4-13-13
"As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom." --former Reagan press secretary and political consultant Lyn Nofziger (1924-2006)
"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government." --President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908)
4-12-13
Senators talk background checks for gun sales
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia remains in the thick of the discussions for a compromise on background checks for gun sales, according to Associated Press.
Manchin, a Democrat, is working with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., on expanding federal background checks for gun buyers by requiring checks on gun show sales and firearms transactions online, but sales between close relatives and temporary transfers between hunters would be excluded, AP said.
Few details of the discussions have been released.
"Sen. Manchin continues to talk to all of his colleagues," Jonathan Kott, Manchin's communications director, told the newspaper on Monday.
Manchin and Toomey have both been received A ratings from the National Rifle Association, which has opposed background checks.
Manchin for several months was working on a background check compromise with Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Schumer proposed a bill that required records of private gun sales, which was opposed by Coburn, and the discussions stalled.
Congress returned on Monday from a two-week recess.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., on Monday called for an "honest debate" on gun safety and an agreement on background checks.
"The background checks in particular are something we need to push ourselves to reach agreement on," Rockefeller said. "We know beyond any doubt that right now in America there are too many ways for criminals and the mentally ill to buy guns, especially at gun shows, and we know how to fix it. This does not mean gun owners would be placed on a registry. What it does mean is that those who want to do people harm shouldn't be allowed to avoid background checks by going to gun shows. Period. And we all have a shared responsibility to just put an end to that."
Rockefeller cited the four-month anniversary of the Sandy hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Conn., where 20 kids were killed.
"Parents, educators, police officers, hunters and sportsmen, and elected leaders have worked hard to find common ground and come up with new solutions to solve the very real problem of gun violence in this country. And they've stuck with it even in the face of some unfair and ugly criticisms by those who would instead turn this moment into a false rallying cry over gun rights that are not threatened in any way, shape or form," Rockefeller said. "From the NRA to the halls of Congress and state capitols, we've seen some turn a blind eye to the tragedy of Newtown or, worse yet, use it as an excuse to create panic and undo longstanding public safety laws."
Rockefeller supported the 1994 ban on new purchases of a limited number of assault weapons and high capacity magazines. No one gave up the guns they owned and thousands of rifles were exempt, he said.
"That law made sense then and in my view should be re-enacted now, but we also have the opportunity today to tackle other important aspects of gun violence expanding mental health support services, studying violent media content, addressing gun trafficking, and closing the big loopholes that exist today in the background check process," he said.
© Copyright 2013 Parkersburg News and Sentinel. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
4-11-13
Obama's gun tyranny
HARTFORD, Conn. — With time running out on the chance to pass gun control legislation, President Barack Obama on Monday warned Congress not to use delaying tactics against tighter regulations and told families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims that he’s “determined as ever” to honor their children with tougher laws.
Obama’s gun control proposals have run into resistance on Capitol Hill, leaving their fate in doubt. Efforts by Senate Democrats to reach compromise with Republicans over expanding required federal background checks have yet to yield an agreement, and conservatives were promising to try blocking the Senate from even beginning debate on gun control legislation.
“The day Newtown happened was the toughest day of my presidency,” Obama said in an emotional speech from Connecticut’s capital, an hour’s drive from Newtown. “But I’ve got to tell you, if we don’t respond to this, that’ll be a tough day for me too.”
Some of the Sandy Hook families are making an attempt to push through the bill. Obama met with them privately before his speech at the University of Hartford Monday evening, then brought 12 family members back to Air Force One for the trip back to Washington. The relatives want to meet with senators who’ve yet to back the legislation to encourage their support in memory of their loved ones.
“Nothing’s going to be more important in making sure that the Congress moves forward this week than hearing from them,” Obama said. His eyes teared as he described Nicole Hockley, who lost her 6-year-old son, Dylan, saying how she asks him every night to come to her in her dreams so she can see him again.
“If there’s even one thing we can do to prevent a father from having to bury his child, isn’t that worth fighting for?” Obama asked.
The day Newtown happened was the toughest day of my presidency
Obama’s speech was interrupted repeatedly by standing ovations from the packed gymnasium. At one point, the room erupted with chants of “We want a vote!” Audience members, many wearing green ribbons in support of the victims, were stomping their feet on the bleachers and clapping their hands in unison with the chant.
“This is not about me. This is not about politics. This is about doing the right thing for all the families who are here who have been torn apart by gun violence,” Obama said, his voice rising with emotion as he shook his finger in the air.
Obama argued that lawmakers have an obligation to the children killed and other victims of gun violence to allow an up-or-down vote in the Senate. That would require 50 votes to pass, rather than a procedural maneuver some Republican senators are threatening to require 60 votes, potentially sinking the legislation.
Susan Walsh / The Associated Press
Susan Walsh / The Associated PressPresident Barack Obama hugs Newtown family member Scarlett Lewis, mother of shooting victim Jesse Lewis, after speaking at the University of Hartford in Hartford, Conn. on Monday.
“Some back in Washington are already floating the idea that they may use political stunts to prevent votes on any of these reforms. Think about that. They’re not just saying they’ll vote no on ideas that almost all Americans support. They’re saying they’ll do everything they can to even prevent any votes on these provisions. They’re saying your opinion doesn’t matter. And that’s not right.
Obama rode to the speech with Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who signed sweeping gun control legislation into law Thursday with the Sandy Hook families standing behind him. But legislation in Washington faces a tougher challenge, as the nation’s memories of the shooting fade with time and the National Rifle Association wages a formidable campaign against Obama’s proposals.
Related
Shop that sold gun to Newtown school shooter’s mother loses firearms license
Schools should train teachers to carry guns, NRA-backed task force says prior to Senate gun control debate
Newtown shooter fired 155 bullets in five minutes, investigators reveal, as Obama says ‘shame’ for flagging momentum on gun control
Majority Leader Harry Reid brought gun control legislation to the Senate floor on Monday, though actual debate did not begin. He took the step after receiving a letter from 13 conservative Republican senators including Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, saying they would use delaying tactics to try preventing lawmakers from beginning to consider the measure. Such a move takes 60 votes to overcome, a difficult hurdle in the 100-member chamber.
The conservatives said the Democratic measure would violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms, citing “history’s lesson that government cannot be in all places at all times, and history’s warning about the oppression of a government that tries.”
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Spencer Platt / Getty ImagesAudience members chant "we want a vote" as U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a speech on gun control at the University of Hartford on Monday in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Further underscoring the tough road ahead for the Obama-backed legislation, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that the Kentucky Republican would join the filibuster if Reid tries to bring the measure to the floor.
Obama said the vote shouldn’t be about his legacy, but about the families in Newtown who haven’t moved on to other matters.
“Newtown, we want you to know that we’re here with you,” Obama said. “We will not walk away from the promises we’ve made. We are as determined as ever to do what must be done. In fact, I’m here to ask you to help me show that we can get it done. We’re not forgetting.”
If there’s even one thing we can do to prevent a father from having to bury his child, isn’t that worth fighting for?
A group of Sandy Hook families originally planned to travel to Washington earlier on Monday, but the White House offered to give the families a ride so they could also attend Obama’s speech before their lobbying push. The White House lit up the steps of Air Force One with flood lights so photographers and television cameras could capture the image of Obama climbing the plane’s steps with the families at dusk.
The families’ lobbying trip was organized by Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit started by community members in the wake of the shooting. “The group is encouraging senators to come together around legislative proposals that will both save lives and respect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans,” the group said in a statement.
With time running out on negotiations, the White House is making an all-hands-on-deck push this week. Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder planned to promote their plan at the White House on Tuesday with law enforcement officials. First lady Michelle Obama planned to wade into the debate Wednesday with a speech on youth violence in her hometown of Chicago. And on Thursday, Biden was taking part in a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with people who have different views on gun control.
We will not walk away from the promises we’ve made
Organizing for Action, the grassroots group being formed out of Obama’s re-election campaign to support his agenda, said it was launching online ads Monday asking the public to urge their senators to support background checks. The ads will target 11 senators – all Republicans – through Facebook and search engines. An OFA spokesman said the group was not disclosing the cost of the ad campaign.
Gun control is divisive in Newtown, Conn., as in the rest of the country. Not all Sandy Hook families support gun control, and even those involved with the lobbying push organized by Sandy Hook Promise are not backing the assault weapons ban. But those families are asking lawmakers to expand background checks, increase penalties for gun trafficking and limit the size of magazines.
4-10-13
Minority Student Needs
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Professor Craig Frisby is on the faculty of University of Missouri's Department of Educational, School and Counseling Psychology. His most recent book is "Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students." It's a 662-page textbook covering a range of topics from multiculturalism and home and family influences to student testing and school discipline. There's no way full justice can be given to this excellent work in the space of this column, so I'll highlight a few valuable insights he makes that would help educators do a better job with minority students.
Quack multiculturalism is the name Frisby gives to the vision of multiculturalism that promotes the falsehoods and distortions that dominate today's college agenda, sold under various names such as "valuing diversity," "being sensitive to cultural differences" and "cultural competence." He identifies different brands of multiculturalism such as boutique, Kumbayah, light-and-fluffy, and bean-counting multiculturalism. Insider language used to promote multiculturalism includes terms such as "practice tolerance," "celebrate diversity," "equity with excellence" and "differences are not deficits." Escalating costs and budget crunches don't stop colleges from hiring vice presidents, deans and directors of diversity.
Multiculturalism teaches that one set of cultural values is equal to another. That means if black students talk, dress and comport themselves in a certain way, to criticize them is merely cultural imperialism. Frisby cites college textbooks that teach: "Racism is what people do, regardless of what they think or feel" and "Institutional racism is characterized by practices or policies that systematically limit opportunities for people who historically have been characterized as psychologically, intellectually, or physically deficient" and "One can view the clock as a tool of racism that the monochromic dominant society uses to regulate subordinate groups."
All of this boils down to teaching undergraduate and graduate students and professionals in the fields of psychology and education to be non-critical and feel sympathy for blacks and other minorities. I might add that such sympathy doesn't extend to Japanese, Chinese and Jews, who are even more of a minority.
Frisby gives many examples of multicultural lunacy. One particularly egregious one was the 12th annual White Privilege Conference (WPC) held in 2011 in Minneapolis, Minn., and sponsored by the University of Colorado's Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity. The WPC is "built on the premise that the U.S. was started by white people, for white people." Among the 150 workshops offered during the conference were "Making Your School or Classroom a Force for Eliminating Racism," Helping Non-White Students Survive Academia — The Pinnacle of White Dominance" and "Uprooting Christian Hegemony." This vision of the mission of education might help to explain why students, particularly minority students, emerge from high school and college with little reading, writing and thinking ability.
Frisby turns his attention to school discipline and criminal behavior. He discusses the atmosphere at one New York school, which is by no means unique among schools. Teachers experience being pushed, shoved and spit upon by students. A male teacher transferred to another school after a student threatened to rape his wife. In this kind of atmosphere, should anyone be surprised that only 3 percent of the students were at grade level in English and only 9 percent in math?
The fundamental problem crippling low-income minority students is school behavioral disorder. Its visible manifestations are graffiti, broken and vandalized furniture, fights, sexual activity, drug use in the bathrooms and rowdy behavior. Frisby says we should tell students exactly how to behave and tolerate no disorder. That's not rocket science, except for today's liberal establishment who run our schools and colleges.
You say, "Williams, what Frisby says simply reflects the insensitivity of privileged white people." But what if I told you that Professor Craig Frisby is a black professor at the University of Missouri who has a record of fine scholarship? My read of his book is that it supplies more evidence that the actions of soft-minded, guilty white liberals have done far more harm to black people than racists of the past could have ever done.
4-9-13
'Proportional' Response
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Since when has it been considered smart to tell your enemies what your plans are?
Yet there on the front page of the April 8th New York Times was a story about how unnamed "American officials" were planning a "proportional" response to any North Korean attack. This was spelled in an example: If the North Koreans "shell a South Korean island that had military installations" then the South Koreans would retaliate with "a barrage of artillery of similar intensity."
Whatever the merits or demerits of such a plan, what conceivable purpose can be served by telling the North Koreans in advance that they need fear nothing beyond a tit for tat? All that does is lower the prospective cost of aggression.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, should we have simply gone over and bombed a harbor in Japan? Does anyone think that this response would have stopped Japanese aggression? Or stop other nations from taking shots at the United States, when the price was a lot lower than facing massive retaliation?
Back before the clever new notion of "proportional" response became the vogue, our response to Pearl Harbor was ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Japan has not attacked or even threatened anybody since then. Nor has any war broken out anywhere that is at all comparable with World War II.
Which policy is better? There was a time when we followed the ancient adage "By their fruits ye shall know them." The track record of massive retaliation easily beats that of the more sophisticated-sounding proportional response.
Back in ancient times, when Carthage attacked Rome, the Romans did not respond "proportionally." They wiped Carthage off the face of the earth. That may have had something to do with the centuries of what was called the Pax Romano — the Roman peace.
When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the British simply sent troops to take the islands back — despite American efforts to dissuade Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from doing even that.
For more than a century since the British settled in the Falkland Islands, Argentina had not dared to invade them. Why?
Because, until recent times, an Argentine attack on a British settlement would be risking not only a British counterattack there, but the danger of a major British attack on Argentina itself. That could mean leaving Buenos Aires in ruins.
Today, Argentina's government is again making threatening noises about the Falkland Islands. Why not? The most the Argentines have to fear is a "proportional" response to aggression — and the Obama administration has already urged "negotiations" instead of even that. When threats are rewarded, why not make threats, when there are few dangers to fear?
Can you think of any war prior to Iraq and Afghanistan where the United States announced to the world when it planned to pull its troops out? What has this accomplished? "By their fruits ye shall know them." What have been the fruits?
First of all, this constant talk in Washington about not only pulling out, but announcing in advance what their pullout timetable was, meant that Iraqi political leaders knew that a powerful Iran was on their border permanently, while Washington was a long way away and intended to stay away.
Should we be surprised that the Iraqi government has increasingly come to pay more attention to what Iran wants than to what Washington wants? Once more, vast numbers of American lives have been sacrificed winning victories on the battlefield that the politicians in Washington then frittered away and turned into defeat politically.
What about other countries around the world who are watching what the American government is doing? Many have to decide whether they want to cooperate with the United States, and risk the wrath of our enemies, or cooperate with our enemies and risk nothing.
There is no need to respond to a North Korean artillery barrage by wiping North Korea off the map. But there is also no need to reassure the North Koreans in advance that we won't.
What announcing the doctrine of "proportional" response does is lower the price of aggression. Why would we want to do that?
4-8-13
Minority Student Needs
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Professor Craig Frisby is on the faculty of University of Missouri's Department of Educational, School and Counseling Psychology. His most recent book is "Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students." It's a 662-page textbook covering a range of topics from multiculturalism and home and family influences to student testing and school discipline. There's no way full justice can be given to this excellent work in the space of this column, so I'll highlight a few valuable insights he makes that would help educators do a better job with minority students.
Quack multiculturalism is the name Frisby gives to the vision of multiculturalism that promotes the falsehoods and distortions that dominate today's college agenda, sold under various names such as "valuing diversity," "being sensitive to cultural differences" and "cultural competence." He identifies different brands of multiculturalism such as boutique, Kumbayah, light-and-fluffy, and bean-counting multiculturalism. Insider language used to promote multiculturalism includes terms such as "practice tolerance," "celebrate diversity," "equity with excellence" and "differences are not deficits." Escalating costs and budget crunches don't stop colleges from hiring vice presidents, deans and directors of diversity.
Multiculturalism teaches that one set of cultural values is equal to another. That means if black students talk, dress and comport themselves in a certain way, to criticize them is merely cultural imperialism. Frisby cites college textbooks that teach: "Racism is what people do, regardless of what they think or feel" and "Institutional racism is characterized by practices or policies that systematically limit opportunities for people who historically have been characterized as psychologically, intellectually, or physically deficient" and "One can view the clock as a tool of racism that the monochromic dominant society uses to regulate subordinate groups."
All of this boils down to teaching undergraduate and graduate students and professionals in the fields of psychology and education to be non-critical and feel sympathy for blacks and other minorities. I might add that such sympathy doesn't extend to Japanese, Chinese and Jews, who are even more of a minority.
Frisby gives many examples of multicultural lunacy. One particularly egregious one was the 12th annual White Privilege Conference (WPC) held in 2011 in Minneapolis, Minn., and sponsored by the University of Colorado's Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity. The WPC is "built on the premise that the U.S. was started by white people, for white people." Among the 150 workshops offered during the conference were "Making Your School or Classroom a Force for Eliminating Racism," Helping Non-White Students Survive Academia — The Pinnacle of White Dominance" and "Uprooting Christian Hegemony." This vision of the mission of education might help to explain why students, particularly minority students, emerge from high school and college with little reading, writing and thinking ability.
Frisby turns his attention to school discipline and criminal behavior. He discusses the atmosphere at one New York school, which is by no means unique among schools. Teachers experience being pushed, shoved and spit upon by students. A male teacher transferred to another school after a student threatened to rape his wife. In this kind of atmosphere, should anyone be surprised that only 3 percent of the students were at grade level in English and only 9 percent in math?
The fundamental problem crippling low-income minority students is school behavioral disorder. Its visible manifestations are graffiti, broken and vandalized furniture, fights, sexual activity, drug use in the bathrooms and rowdy behavior. Frisby says we should tell students exactly how to behave and tolerate no disorder. That's not rocket science, except for today's liberal establishment who run our schools and colleges.
You say, "Williams, what Frisby says simply reflects the insensitivity of privileged white people." But what if I told you that Professor Craig Frisby is a black professor at the University of Missouri who has a record of fine scholarship? My read of his book is that it supplies more evidence that the actions of soft-minded, guilty white liberals have done far more harm to black people than racists of the past could have ever done.
4-7-13
Are We Equal?
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Are women equal to men? Are Jews equal to gentiles? Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal — or should be equal — is foolhardy and creates mischief. Let's look at it.
Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Female intelligence is packed much closer to the middle of the bell curve, whereas men's intelligence has far greater variability. That means that though there are many more male geniuses, there are also many more male idiots. The latter might partially explain why more men are in jail than women.
Watch any Saturday afternoon college basketball game and ask yourself the question fixated in the minds of liberals everywhere: "Does this look like America?" Among the 10 players on the court, at best there might be two white players. If you want to see the team's white players, you must look at the bench. A Japanese or Chinese player is close to being totally out of the picture, even on the bench. Professional basketball isn't much better, with 80 percent of the players being black, but at least there's a Chinese player. Professional football isn't much better, with blacks being 65 percent. In both sports, blacks are among the highest-paid players and have the highest number of awards for excellence. Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95 percent of the top times in sprinting.
By contrast, blacks are only 2 percent of the NHL's ice hockey players. But don't fret about black NHL underrepresentation. State underrepresentation is worse. Most U.S. professional hockey players were born in Minnesota, followed by Massachusetts. Not a single U.S. professional hockey player can boast of having been born and raised in Hawaii, Mississippi or Louisiana. Any way we cut it, there is simply no racial proportionality or diversity in professional basketball, football and hockey.
A more emotionally charged question is whether we have equal intelligence. Take Jews, for example. They are only 3 percent of the U.S. population. Half-baked theories of racial proportionality would predict that 3 percent of U.S. Nobel laureates are Jews, but that's way off the mark. Jews constitute a whopping 39 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. At the international level, the disparity is worse. Jews are not even 1 percent of the world's population, but they constitute 20 percent of the world's Nobel Prize winners.
There are many other inequalities and disproportionalities. Asian-Americans routinely score the highest on the math portion of the SAT, whereas blacks score the lowest. Men are 50 percent of the population, and so are women; yet men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. I'm personally wondering what whoever is in charge of lightning has against men. Population statistics for South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their respective populations is black. By contrast, in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented in terms of their percentages in the general population. Pima Indians of Arizona have the world's highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Cervical cancer rates are five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women.
Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we'd be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality's being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being.
4-6-13
Guns Save Lives
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives— much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved.
But that trade-off is the real issue, not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.
The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the OK Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger.
If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming, and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger. And if he is an idiot with a knife coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.
Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.
Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock.
The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
Although most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually shooting, nevertheless the total number of criminals killed by armed private citizens runs into the thousands per year. A gun can also come in handy if a pit bull or some other dangerous animal is after you or your child.
We need to recognize the painful reality that, regardless of what we do or don't do about gun control laws, there will be innocent people killed by guns. We can then look at hard facts in order to decide how we can minimize the number of needless deaths.
But that is not the way the issue is presented by many in politics or the media. Every story about an accidental shooting in the home will be repeated again and again, while a thousand stories about lives saved by defensive uses of a gun will never see the light of day in most newspapers or on most television newscasts.
More children may die in bathtub accidents than in shooting accidents, but you are not likely to read that in most newspapers or see it on television newscasts. Some in the media inflate the number of children killed by counting as children the members of criminal teenage gangs who shoot each other in their turf fights.
Many seize upon statistics which show that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates. Yet they ignore other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, but which have much higher murder rates, such as Brazil, Russia and Mexico.
Even in the case of Britain, London had a much lower murder rate than New York during the years after New York State's 1911 Sullivan Law imposed very strict gun control, while anyone could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked in the 1950s.
Today, virtually the entire law-abiding population of Britain is disarmed— and gun crimes are vastly more common. Gun control laws make crime a safer occupation when victims are unarmed.
The gun control crusade today is like the Prohibition crusade 100 years ago. It is a shared zealotry that binds the self-righteous know-it-alls in a warm fellowship of those who see themselves as fighting on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. It is a lofty role that they are not about to give up for anything so mundane as facts— or even the lives of other people.
Jewish World Review
4-5-13
Middle East 'Democracy'
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The Obama administration treated the creation of "democracy" in the Middle East as a Good Thing. Ironically, those who created the United States of America viewed democracy with fear— and created a Constitutional republic instead.
Everything depends on how you define democracy. In its most basic sense, democracy means majority rule. But there can be majority rule in a free country or in a country with an authoritarian or even a dictatorial government.
In this age of sloppy uses of words, many people include freedom in their conception of democracy. But whether democracy leads to freedom is an open question, not a foregone conclusion.
In the United States, when the Union army of occupation withdrew from the South, years after the Civil War, majority rule returned to the Southern states— and the freedom of blacks was drastically restricted from what it had been under military rule.
Those who applauded the spread of democracy in the Middle East seemed to assume that the "Arab Spring" meant greater freedom. But there was no reason to assume that beforehand— and certainly no reason to believe it after the fact. Christians in Egypt have already lost whatever security they had under Hosni Mubarak.
The idea that "all people want freedom" is one of those feel-good phrases that some people indulge in. But you do not get a free country just because everybody wants freedom— for themselves. You can have a free country only when people are willing to let other people have freedom.
Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler and Communists were free to be Communists under Stalin and Mao. But nobody else was free.
Toleration for others is a precondition for a free society— and it is hard to think of more intolerant societies than most of those in the Middle East. There have been female heads of state in some other Islamic countries, but not in the Middle East.
Democracy in the Middle East context means majority selection of which individuals get the power to oppress. Why would anyone have seriously believed that it would mean anything more than that? Certainly not from the history of the region.
Too many people tend to think of democracy as a consumer good, so that high voter turnout on election day makes them happy. But the purpose of an election is not to make people feel good about participating. Its purpose is to select the best leaders available, to whom the well-being, and ultimately the lives, of the people can be entrusted. That is serious business.
Voting is not an end in itself. Had there been universal access to the ballot in Europe centuries ago, in an age of mass illiteracy, it is very unlikely that this would have led to freedom, and far more likely that the continent would have collapsed into confusion and anarchy— and been ripe to be enslaved by conquerors with more realistic governments.
Restrictions on who can vote have been based on assessments of who can best choose the nation's leaders. Those assessments have varied from country to country, and from one era to another, and no doubt some restrictions make more sense than others. But the fundamental point here is that elections have far more serious purposes than participation.
Most Western nations had freedom long before they had democracy. Women have been voting in the United States less than a century. But, even before women could vote in England or America, they had freedoms that women in many Middle Eastern countries can only dream about today.
"Arab Spring" democracy has certainly not increased women's freedom, nor was there ever any reason to expect that it would.
Why then was Barack Obama so hyped over his "achievement" in having helped put new rulers into power in the Middle East? First of all, this is a man with a monumental ego, to whom every avenue to self-aggrandizement is welcomed, whether it is ObamaCare or realigning the Middle East.
Either or both may end in utter disaster for others, but that is hardly a deterrent to Obama. What some see as a failure of his Middle East policy is a success in carrying out his vision of a historic realignment. The lives that are lost and the increased dangers of international turmoil are to him just "bumps in the road" on the path to his place in history.
Jewish World Revies
4-4-13
Intellectuals and Race
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | After reading Dr. Thomas Sowell's latest book, "Intellectuals and Race," one cannot emerge with much respect for the reasoning powers of intellectuals, particularly academics, on matters of race. There's so much faulty logic and downright dishonesty. (Buy the book at a 41% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE editionat a 50% discount by clicking here)
Many intellectuals attribute the behavior patterns of blacks to "a legacy of slavery" or contemporary racial discrimination. But when one observes similar behavior patterns among Britain's lower-class whites, which can't be attributed to "a legacy of slavery" or discrimination, it calls into question the explanations for black behavior.
It's lamented that blacks are "the last hired" and, during an economic downturn, "the first fired," because blacks are terminated before whites. That's seen as evidence of discrimination by white employers, but white employees are terminated before Asian-American employees. Is that employer discrimination against whites? Intellectuals accept statistical data as showing discrimination when it reinforces existing preconceptions and reject or ignore it when it doesn't.
It's the same story in the housing market. Newspapers, television commentators, civil rights leaders, academics and politicians see racial discrimination as the cause for black mortgage loan applicants being rejected more frequently than white applicants. In 2000, black applicants were turned down for prime mortgage loans twice as often as whites; however, white applicants were turned down nearly twice as often as Asian-Americans.
The racial discrimination explanation requires that we believe that white bankers racially discriminate not only against blacks but against whites, as well. It also requires that we believe that black-owned banks are in cahoots with white-owned banks, because they, too, turn down black mortgage applicants more often than white applicants. The true explanation is not rocket science. Lenders prefer to lend to people who will pay them back. Average credit scores are higher among whites than blacks and higher among Asian-Americans than whites.
During the early 20th century, there were mass migrations of blacks from the South. Both the black-owned Chicago Defender and the Urban League offered published advice to their less tutored brethren, such as: "Don't use vile language in public places." "Don't throw garbage in the backyard or alley or keep dirty front yards." "Do not carry on loud conversations in street cars and public places." Jews, Germans and Irish made similar appeals to acculturate their ill-mannered cousins. These efforts produced positive results over the years.
That has changed with today's multiculturalism vision. Efforts to get minority groups to acculturate to the linguistic, dress and other norms of the larger society are seen negatively by multiculturalists as a form of cultural imperialism. Intellectuals and academics call for celebrating diversity. That means wearing one's trousers low enough to see one's butt, men wearing a head full of pigtails, and using poor language that's sometimes vulgar are part of the liberal's vision of "celebrating diversity." Then there's the "acting white" charge, when black youngsters who conduct themselves according to the norms of the larger society are criticized and often assaulted by their presumably "acting black" peers.
Sowell concludes that our nation is painting itself into a corner when it comes to thinking about racial problems. Whole cities, of which Detroit is a classic example, have been devastated physically, socially and economically by racial problems — which cannot be discussed honestly by elected officials, people in the media or academics, who do not want to become pariahs or, even worse, lose their jobs. This moral paralysis is paid in blood — mostly the blood of black people preyed upon by criminals, though in recent years, there have been violent mob attacks on white people in shopping malls, on beaches, on public transportation vehicles and in other public places. These attacks often go unreported, are minimized or are reported without detail, even though the attackers shouted their hatred for white people. The use of sufficient force to stop these attacks would be called "excessive" in the media and by politicians or "community leaders."
My own conclusion is that black people waged a successful civil rights struggle against gross discrimination. It's white and black liberals, intellectuals, academics and race hustlers who have created our greatest hurdle.
4-3-13
Educational Rot
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | American education is in a sorry state of affairs, and there's enough blame for all participants to have their fair share. They include students who are hostile and alien to the education process, uninterested parents, teachers and administrators who either are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and politicians who've become handmaidens for teachers unions. There's another education issue that's neither flattering nor comfortable to confront and talk about. That's the low academic preparation of many teachers. That's an issue that must be confronted and dealt with if we're to improve the quality of education. Let's look at it.
Schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, tend to represent the academic slums of most college campuses. They tend to be home to students who have the lowest academic achievement test scores when they enter college, such as SAT scores. They have the lowest scores when they graduate and choose to take postgraduate admissions tests — such as the GRE, the MCAT and the LSAT.
The California Basic Educational Skills Test, or CBEST, is mandatory for teacher certification in California. It's a joke. Here's a multiple-choice question on its practice math test: "Rob uses 1 box of cat food every 5 days to feed his cats. Approximately how many boxes of cat food does he use per month? A. 2 boxes, B. 4 boxes, C. 5 boxes, D. 6 boxes, E. 7 boxes." Here's another: "Which of the following is the most appropriate unit for expressing the weight of a pencil? A. pounds, B. ounces, C. quarts, D. pints, E. tons." I'd venture to predict that the average reader's sixth-grader could answer each question. Here's a question that is a bit more challenging; call your eighth-grader: "Solve for y: y - 2 + 3y = 10, A. 2, B. 3, C. 4, D. 5, E. 6."
Some years ago, the Association of Mexican American Educators, the California Association for Asian-Pacific Bilingual Education and the Oakland Alliance of Black Educators brought suit against the state of California and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, charging that the CBEST was racially discriminatory. Plaintiff "evidence" was the fact that the first-time passing rate for whites was 80 percent, about 50 percent for Mexican-Americans, Filipinos and Southeast Asians, and 46 percent for blacks. In 2000, in a stroke of rare common sense, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit found CBEST not to be racial discriminatory.
Poor teacher preparation is not a problem restricted to California. In Massachusetts, only 27 percent of new teachers could pass the math test needed to be certified as a teacher. A 2011 investigation by Atlanta's Channel 2 Action News found that more than 700 Georgia teachers repeatedly failed at least one portion of the certification test they are required to pass before receiving a teaching certificate. Nearly 60 teachers failed the test more than 10 times, and one teacher failed the test 18 times. They also found that there were 297 teachers on the Atlanta school system's payroll even though they had failed the state certification test five times or more.
Textbooks used in schools of education might explain some teacher ineptitude. A passage in Marilyn Burns' text "About Teaching Mathematics" reads, "There is no place for requiring students to practice tedious calculations that are more efficiently and accurately done by using calculators." "New Designs for Teaching and Learning," by Dennis Adams and Mary Hamm, says, "Content knowledge is not seen to be as important as possessing teaching skills and knowledge about the students being taught." Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar's text "Methods that Matter" reads, "Students can no longer be viewed as cognitive living rooms into which the furniture of knowledge is moved in and arranged by teachers, and teachers cannot invariably act as subject-matter experts." The authors explain, "The main use of standardized tests in America is to justify the distribution of certain goodies to certain people."
With but a few exceptions, schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education could benefit from slum removal, eliminating schools of education.
4-2-13
'Me Too' Republicans
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Many ideas presented as "new" are just rehashes of old ideas that have been tried before — and have failed before. So it is no surprise that the recent "Growth and Opportunity Project" report to the Republican National Committee is a classic example of what previous generations called "Me too" Republicanism.
These are Republicans who think that the key to winning elections is to do more of what the Democrats are doing. In effect, they say "me too" on issues such as immigration, in hopes of gaining more new votes than they lose by betraying their existing supporters.
In the wake of last year's presidential election debacle for the Republicans, the explanation preferred by "moderate" Republicans has been that the GOP has been too narrowly ideological, and needs to reach out to minorities, women and young people, rather than just to conservatives.
In the words of the "Growth and Opportunity Project," the problem is that conservative Republican candidates have been "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac."
But the report itself says that the Republicans' election problems have been at the national level, not at the state level, where a majority of the governors are Republicans. Are the Republican moderates suggesting that the reason Mitt Romney lost in 2012 is that he was driving around in a conservative cul-de-sac? Romney was as mushy a moderate as Senator John McCain was before him — and as many other Republican losers in presidential elections have been, going all the way back to the 1940s. The only Republican candidate who might fit the charge of being a complete conservative was Ronald Reagan, who won two landslide elections.
The report to the Republican National Committee is on firmer ground when it says that national Republican candidates have not articulated their case very well — that "we too often sound like bookkeepers." Republican candidates "need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms."
Absolutely. It doesn't matter how good your case is, if you don't bother to articulate it so that voters understand you.
The heart of the report, however, is the argument that Republicans need to reach out to minorities, women and young people. With Hispanics and blacks becoming a growing proportion of the American population — and both groups voting overwhelmingly for Democrats — the Republicans are obviously in big trouble in future elections if they don't do something.
But if they do what this report advocates, they could be in even bigger trouble. Here again, facts seem to mean nothing to those who wrote this report.
They propose going through such organizations as the NAACP to reach black voters, as if the NAACP owns blacks, in violation of the 13th Amendment. Not only is the NAACP virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, the kind of black voters that the Republicans have some hope of winning over are unlikely to be enthralled to the NAACP, and many of them may see through such race hustlers.
Or do all blacks look alike to those who wrote this report?
It is the same story with Hispanics and Asian Americans. The Republicans are supposed to go through these groups' "leaders" as well — mostly leaders tied to the Democratic Party ideologically or otherwise. You might think that a Republican Party that talks about individualism would try to appeal to individuals.
Individuals whom the Republicans have some chance of winning over may well be a small minority within these groups. However, if the GOP can reduce the Democrats' 80 percent of these groups' votes to 70 percent, that can swing elections.
But a shotgun approach to minorities won't do it.
When it comes to minority votes, the Democratic Party is much like Eastman Kodak during the long period when it sold the vast majority of the film and cameras in the country. How did its competitors manage to drive Kodak into bankruptcy?
Not by saying "me too" while trying to imitate Kodak and trying to outdo Kodak with better film and better film cameras. They went digital instead. But that approach requires a lot more thought than apparently went into this report. Polls and focus groups are not a substitute for thought.
4-1-13
Who Killed the New Majority?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Republican National Committee has produced an “autopsy” on what went wrong in 2012, when the party failed to win the White House and lost seats in Congress.
Yet, the crisis of the Grand Old Party goes back much further.
First, some history. The Frank Lloyd Wright of the New Majority was Richard Nixon, who picked up the pieces of the party after Goldwater’s defeat had left Republicans with just a third of the House and Senate.
In 1966, Nixon led the GOP back to a stunning victory, picking up 47 House seats. In 1968, he united the Rockefeller and Reagan wings and held off an October surge by Hubert Humphrey, which cut a 13-point Nixon lead to less than a point in four weeks.
In 1972, Nixon swept 49 states. The New Majority was born. How did he do it?
Nixon sliced off from FDR’s New Deal coalition Northern Catholics and ethnics — Irish, Italians, Poles, East Europeans — and Southern Christian conservatives. Where FDR and Woodrow Wilson had won all 11 Southern States six times, Nixon swept them all in ’72. And where Nixon won only 22 percent of the Catholic vote against JFK, he won 55 percent against George McGovern in 1972.
What killed the New Majority?
First, there was mass immigration, which brought in 40 to 50 million people, legal and illegal, poor and working class, and almost all from the Third World. The GOP agreed to the importation of a vast new constituency that is now kicking the GOP into an early grave.
When some implored the party in 1992 to secure the border and declare a “timeout” on legal immigration to assimilate the millions already here, the party establishment repudiated any such ideas.
“We are a nation of immigrants!” it huffed. Well, we sure are now.
And when amnesty is granted to the 12 million illegals, as GOP senators are preparing to do, that should advance the death of the GOP as a national party by turning Colorado, Nevada and Arizona blue, and putting even Texas in play.
Second came party acquiescence in dropping half the nation off the income tax rolls, while making half dependent on government for food assistance, income support, rent, health care and the education of their kids from Head Start through Pell Grants.
Why should the half of America that pays no taxes but survives on federal benefits vote for a party that will cut taxes they do not pay but roll back benefits upon which they do depend?
Third, to accommodate its K Street bundlers, the GOP embraced globalism, empowering Corporate America to shed its U.S. labor force, move its plants to Mexico, Asia and China, bring its foreign-made goods back to the USA free of charge and pocket the difference.
Profits, stocks, dividends soared. But the Reagan Democrats of industrial America — who paid the price in lost jobs and shuttered plants from the $10 trillion in trade deficits America has run since George H. W. Bush — have now gone home to the party of their fathers. And they are not coming back.
Fourth, rather than bringing the troops home after our Cold War triumph and telling our allies the free rides were over, Bush I and II went crusading for a “New World Order” to “end tyranny in our world.”
After three wars and half a dozen interventions, we are bankrupt at home and hated abroad. And Americans, sick of seeing their best and bravest brought home to Dover or being fitted at Walter Reed for prosthetic arms and legs, have twice voted for an ant-interventionist president.
Yet, one matter over which the GOP had no control is the triumph of the counterculture.
What might be called the old morality — that abortion is the killing of an unborn child, an abomination, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral — has been relegated by scores of millions, especially among the young, to the dark ages of the 20th century.
Americans who adhere to this traditional morality, rooted in Christian tradition and Biblical truth, are culturally outgunned and may now be outnumbered. They may have lost America for good.
What can the GOP do about this? Nothing.
What will the GOP do? Probably what comes naturally — declare itself “tolerant” and respectful of all views, pro-life and pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro-traditional marriage.
Reality must be faced. A generation has grown up rejecting the truths that its grandparents lived. And while population growth among our native born halted decades ago, scores of millions have come in from abroad to fill the empty spaces. And they are still coming. They like what Big Government has to offer, and seem uninterested in what the GOP has to sell.
In that case, you try harder to sell your product, change your product, or go out of business.
Yet, if the GOP changes its product, it may just lose its most loyal customers.
When the obituary of the party is written, the subhead will likely read "Dead of Self-inflicted Wounds."
3-31-13
Lance Corporal Josh Taylor was laid to rest in Marietta, Ohio.
May this hero rest in peace
In this undated photo released by the U.S. Marine Corps via the Marietta Times, Marine Lance Cpl. Josh Taylor poses for a photograph. Taylor 21, with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Lejeune, N.C., was killed with 6 other Marines after mortar shell exploded during a training exercise at the Hawthorne, Nev., Army Depot. (AP Photo/U.S. Marin Corps) via of WTAP News
3-30-13
Can It Happen Here?
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The decision of the government in Cyprus to simply take money out of people's bank accounts there sent shock waves around the world. People far removed from that small island nation had to wonder: "Can this happen here?"
The economic repercussions of having people feel that their money is not safe in banks can be catastrophic. Banks are not just warehouses where money can be stored. They are crucial institutions for gathering individually modest amounts of money from millions of people and transferring that money to strangers whom those people would not directly entrust it to.
Multi-billion dollar corporations, whose economies of scale can bring down the prices of goods and services — thereby raising our standard of living — are seldom financed by a few billionaires.
Far more often they are financed by millions of people, who have neither the specific knowledge nor the economic expertise to risk their savings by investing directly in those enterprises. Banks are crucial intermediaries, which provide the financial expertise without which these transfers of money are too risky.
There are poor nations with rich natural resources, which are not developed because they lack either the sophisticated financial institutions necessary to make these key transfers of money or because their legal or political systems are too unreliable for people to put their money into these financial intermediaries.
Whether in Cyprus or in other countries, politicians tend to think in short run terms, if only because elections are held in the short run. Therefore, there is always a temptation to do reckless and short-sighted things to get over some current problem, even if that creates far worse problems in the long run.
Seizing money that people put in the bank would be a classic example of such short-sighted policies.
After thousands of American banks failed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were people who would never put their money in a bank again, even after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created, to have the federal government guarantee individual bank accounts when the bank itself failed.
For years after the Great Depression, stories appeared in the press from time to time about some older person who died and was found to have substantial sums of money stored under a mattress or in some other hiding place, because they never trusted banks again.
After going back and forth, the government of Cyprus ultimately decided, under international pressure, to go ahead with its plan to raid people's bank accounts. But could similar policies be imposed in other countries, including the United States?
One of the big differences between the United States and Cyprus is that the U.S. government can simply print more money to get out of a financial crisis. But Cyprus cannot print more euros, which are controlled by international institutions.
Does that mean that Americans' money is safe in banks? Yes and no.
The U.S. government is very unlikely to just seize money wholesale from people's bank accounts, as is being done in Cyprus. But does that mean that your life savings are safe?
No. There are more sophisticated ways for governments to take what you have put aside for yourself and use it for whatever the politicians feel like using it for. If they do it slowly but steadily, they can take a big chunk of what you have sacrificed for years to save, before you are even aware, much less alarmed.
That is in fact already happening. When officials of the Federal Reserve System speak in vague and lofty terms about "quantitative easing," what they are talking about is creating more money out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve is authorized to do — and has been doing in recent years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a month.
When the federal government spends far beyond the tax revenues it has, it gets the extra money by selling bonds. The Federal Reserve has become the biggest buyer of these bonds, since it costs them nothing to create more money.
This new money buys just as much as the money you sacrificed to save for years. More money in circulation, without a corresponding increase in output, means rising prices. Although the numbers in your bank book may remain the same, part of the purchasing power of your money is transferred to the government. Is that really different from what Cyprus has done?
3-29-13
Connecticut is the latest state looking to tighten gun control by infringing on the rights of law abiding citizens. On March 14, frustrated resident Robert Steed gave a powerful testimony in front of state legislators. The following are a few of Steed's remarks, which demonstrate a clear understanding of the Constitution and a willingness to stand up to those looking to exploit tragedies.
"This is the third day I've taken off of work to come here to, like so many of the rest of us, plead to you for us to keep our guns because of the actions of some wing-nut in Newtown, Connecticut. If that isn't inherently wrong, I don't know what is. That these bills are even in proposed form is scary enough. That any of you could be possibly undecided is scary enough. ... I can't for the life of me understand how this state can have as many gun laws on the books as it does and have members of its legislature need to take firearms 101. And as far as the, what I felt were potshots taken at the NRA earlier today: They've done more for gun safety -- they'll do more for gun safety this weekend than this committee will do in your careers. ... Sometimes things are beyond your control. You can't control everything. Evil exists. Adam Lanza commits a crime, and I'm here to grovel and plead for my rights and explain to you that my firearms are kept safely? I keep hearing the word 'solution' -- 'we need to find a solution.' You're not going to find a solution, it doesn't exist. You can't find a broad brush solution to evil. ... The reason that your jobs are becoming so difficult is that you're coloring outside the lines of constitutional parameter[s]. That's the bottom line. You are trying to marriage up public safety with constitutional rights. The Constitution did not guarantee public safety, it guaranteed liberty. And sometimes what comes with liberty is tragedy, unfortunately." --Robert Steed
3-28-13
A Real Term Limit
Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The main thing wrong with the term limits movement is the "s" at the end of the word "limit."
What are advocates of term limits trying to accomplish? If they are trying to keep government from being run by career politicians, whose top priority is getting themselves reelected, then term limits on given jobs fail to do that.
When someone reaches the limit of how long one can spend as a county supervisor, then it is just a question of finding another political office to run for, such as a member of the state legislature. And when the limit on terms there is reached, it is time to look around for another political job — perhaps as a mayor or a member of Congress.
Instead of always making reelection in an existing political post the top priority, in the last term in a given office the top priority will be doing things that will make it easier to get elected or appointed to the next political post. But in no term is doing what is right for the people likely to be the top priority.
Those who favor term limits are right to try to stop the same old politicians from staying in the same old offices for decades. But having the same career politicians circulating around in the same set of offices, like musical chairs, is not very different.
In either case, we can expect the same short-sighted policies, looking no further than the next election, and the same cynical arts of deception and log-rolling to get reelected at all costs.
There are undoubtedly some high-minded people who go into politics to serve their community or the nation. But, in the corrupting atmosphere of politics, there are too many who "came to do good and stayed to do well" — especially if they stayed too long.
Recently, California's Senator Dianne Feinstein gave a graphic demonstration of what can happen when you have been in office too long.
During a discussion of Senator Feinstein's proposed legislation on gun control, Texas' freshman Senator Ted Cruz quietly and politely asked "the senior Senator from California" whether she would treat the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment the same way her gun control bill was treating the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms.
Senator Feinstein never addressed that question. Instead, she became testy and told Senator Cruz how long she had been in Congress and how much she knew. Watching her get up on her high horse to put him in his place, recalled the words of Cromwell to Members of Parliament: "You have sat too long for any good that you have been doing lately. ... In the name of God, go!"
Those who oppose term limits express fears of having government run by amateurs, rather than by people with long experience in politics. But this country was created by people who were not career politicians, but who put aside their own private careers to serve in office during a critical time.
When President George Washington was told by one of his advisors that an action he planned to take might prevent him from being reelected, he exploded in anger, telling his advisor that he didn't come here to get reelected.
As for the loss of experience and expertise if there were no career politicians, much — if not most — of that is experience and expertise in the arts of evasion, effrontery, deceit and chicanery. None of that serves the interest of the people.
If we want term limits to achieve their goals, we have to make the limit one term, with a long interval prescribed before the same person can hold any government office again. In short, we need to make political careers virtually impossible.
There are many patriotic Americans who would put aside their own private careers to serve in office, if the cost to them and their families were not ruinous, and if they had some realistic hope of advancing the interests of the country and its people without being obstructed by career politicians.
Is any of this likely today? No!
But neither the Reagan revolution nor the New Deal under FDR would have seemed likely three years before it happened. The whole point of presenting new ideas is to start a process that can make their realization possible in later years.
3-27-13
Gifted Hands (Dr. Benjamin Carson)
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | A remarkable book titled "Gifted Hands" tells the personal story of Benjamin Carson, a black kid from the Detroit ghetto who went on to become a renowned neurosurgeon. (Buy it for just $11.98 by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition for $5.69 by clicking here)
At one time young Ben Carson had the lowest grades in his middle school class, and was the butt of teasing by his white classmates. Worse yet, he himself believed that he was just not smart enough to do the work.
Fortunately for him, his mother, whose own education went no further than the third grade, insisted that he was smart. She cut off the television set and made him and his brother hit the books — books that she herself could scarcely read.
As young Ben's school work began to catch up with that of his classmates, and then began to surpass that of his classmates, his whole view of himself and of the wider world around him began to change. He began to think that he wanted to become a doctor.
There were a lot of obstacles to overcome along the way, including the fact that his mother had to be away from time to time for psychiatric treatment, as she tried to cope with the heavy pressures of trying to raise two boys whose father had deserted the family that she now had to support on a maid's wages.
In many ways the obstacles facing young Ben Carson were like those faced by so many other youngsters in the ghetto. What was different was that he overcame those obstacles with the help of a truly heroic mother and the values she instilled in him.
It is an inspiring personal story, told plainly and unpretentiously, including the continuing challenges he faced later as a neurosurgeon operating on the brains of people with life-threatening medical problems, often with the odds against them.
To me it was a personal story in another sense, that some of his experiences as a youngster brought back experiences that I went through growing up in Harlem many years earlier.
I could understand all too well what it was like to be the lowest performing child in a class. That was my situation in the fourth grade, after my family had moved up from the South, where I had been one of the best students in the third grade — but in a grossly inferior school system.
Now I sometimes found myself in tears because it was so hard to try to get through my homework.
But in one sense I was much more fortunate than Ben Carson and other black youngsters today. The shock of being in a school, whose standards were higher than I was able to meet at first, took place in an all-black school in Harlem, so that there was none of the additional complications that such an experience can have for a black youngster in a predominantly white school.
By the time I first entered a predominantly white school, I had already caught up, and had no trouble with the school work. Decades later, in the course of running a research project, I learned that the Harlem school, where I had so much trouble catching up, had an average IQ of 84 back when I was there.
In the predominantly white school to which I later went, I was put in a class for children with IQs of 120 and up, and had no trouble competing with them. But I would have been totally wiped out if I had gone there two years earlier — and who knows what racial hang-ups that might have led to?
Chance plays a large part in everyone's life. The home in which you are raised is often a big part of luck being on your side or against you. But you don't need parents with Ph.D.s to make sure that you make the most of your education.
The kinds of things that statisticians can measure, such as family income or parents' education, are not the crucial things. The family's attitude toward education and toward life can make all the difference.
Virtually everything was against young Ben Carson, except for his mother's attitudes and values. But, armed with her outlook, he was able to fight his way through many battles, including battles to control his own temper, as well as external obstacles.
Today, Dr. Benjamin Carson is a renowned neurosurgeon at a renowned institution, Johns Hopkins University. But what got him there was wholly different from what is being offered to many ghetto youths today, much of which is not merely futile but counterproductive.
3-26-13
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --Cesare Beccaria
3-25-13Mandated Wages and Discrimination
By Walter Williams
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Let's work through an example. Suppose 100 yards of fence could be built using one of two techniques. You could hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each, or you could hire one high-skilled worker for $40. Either way, you get the same 100 yards of fence built. If you sought maximum profits, which production technique would you employ? I'm guessing that you'd hire one high-skilled worker and pay him $40 rather than hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each. Your labor costs would be $40 rather than $45.
Suppose the high-skilled worker came into your office and demanded $55 a day. What would be your response? You'd probably tell him to go play in the traffic and hire the three low-skilled workers. After all, hiring the three low-skilled workers for $45, to get the same 100 yards of fence, would be cheaper than the $55 a day now demanded by the high-skilled worker.
The high-skilled worker is not stupid and knows that's exactly what you'd do. He will do a bit of organizing first, convincing decent, caring people that low-skilled workers are being exploited and not earning a living wage and that Congress should enact a minimum wage in the fencing industry of at least $20. After Congress enacts a minimum wage of $20, what then happens to the chances of a high-skilled worker's successfully demanding $55 a day? They go up because he's used the coercive powers of Congress to price his competition out of the market. Because of the minimum wage, it would cost you $60 to use the three low-skilled workers.
The minimum wage not only discriminates against low-skilled workers but also is one of the most effective tools of racists everywhere. Our nation's first minimum wage came in the form of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931. During the legislative debate over the Davis-Bacon Act, which sets minimum wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects, racist intents were obvious. Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., supported the bill, saying he had "received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South." Rep. Miles Allgood, D-Ala., complained: "That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country." Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., spoke of the "superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor." American Federation of Labor President William Green said, "Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates." The Davis-Bacon Act, still on the books today, virtually eliminated blacks from federally financed construction projects when it was passed.
During South Africa's apartheid era, the secretary of its avowedly racist Building Workers' Union, Gert Beetge, said, "There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans." The South African Nursing Council condemned low wages received by black nurses as unfair. Some nurses said they wouldn't accept wage increases until the wages of black nurses were raised. The South African Economic and Wage Commission of 1925 reported that "while definite exclusion of the Natives from the more remunerative fields of employment by law has not been urged upon us, the same result would follow a certain use of the powers of the Wage Board under the Wage Act of 1925, or of other wage-fixing legislation. The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed."
Whether support for minimum wages is motivated by good or by evil, its effect is to cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder for the most disadvantaged worker and lower the cost of discrimination.
3-24-13
Ipswich Middle School Principal Fabrizio Cancels ‘Honors Night’ Because It Might Upset & Be “Devastating” to Students Who Didn’t Make The Grade
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COUNTRY I GREW UP IN: EDUCATION HONOR EDITION:
What is going on in out schools? The latest head scratching incident comes from Ipswich, Massachusetts. David Fabrizio, Ipswich Middle School Principal, has canceled ‘Honors Night’ because it might make some students feel uncomfortable and upset who did not make the grade. ARE YOU SERIOUS? David Fabrizio wrote in a letter sent to parents that, “honors night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child …” INCREDIBLE. Devastating to average students, are you friggin stupid? How about devastating to those who actually made the effort to succeed? This is what passes as a principal into today’s liberal public schools. They care more about how some one feels who fails, rather than rewarding those who actually succeed. I would ask this foolish and misguided principal, why give grades? Schools are supposed to uplift students, not gum down the education to the lowest common denominator. Let’s celebrate underachieving, way to go Principal Fabrizio. Welcome to the Nanny state collective, where liberals think its only fair that all are treated the same, even though all do not put forth the same effort.
3-23-13
Intellectuals and Race: Part IV
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.
Multiculturalism is a tempting quick fix for groups that lag by simply pronouncing their cultures to be equal, or "equally valid," in some vague and lofty sense. Cultural features are just different, not better or worse, according to this dogma.
Yet the borrowing of particular features from other cultures — such as Arabic numerals that replaced Roman numerals, even in Western cultures that derived from Rome — implies that some features are not simply different but better, including numbers. Some of the most advanced cultures in history have borrowed from other cultures, because no given collection of human beings has created the best answers to all the questions of life.
Nevertheless, since multiculturalists see all cultures as equal or "equally valid," they see no justification for schools to insist that black children learn standard English, for example. Instead, each group is encouraged to cling to its own culture and to take pride in its own past glories, real or imaginary.
In other words, members of minority groups that lag educationally, economically or otherwise are to continue to behave in the future as they have in the past — and, if they do not get the same outcomes as others, it is society's fault. That is the bottom line message of multiculturalism.
George Orwell once said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them. Multiculturalism is one of those ideas. The intelligentsia burst into indignation or outrage at "gaps" or "disparities" in educational, economic or other outcomes — and denounce any cultural explanation of these group differences as "blaming the victim."
There is no question that some races or whole nations have been victimized by others, any more than there is any question that cancers can cause death. But that is very different from saying that deaths can automatically be blamed on cancer. You might think that intellectuals could make that distinction. But many do not.
Yet intellectuals see themselves as friends, allies and defenders of racial minorities, even as they paint them into a corner of cultural stagnation. This allows the intelligentsia to flatter themselves that they are on the side of the angels against the forces of evil that are conspiring to keep minorities down.
When they cannot come up with hard evidence in any particular case to support this theory today, that just proves to the intelligentsia how fiendishly clever and covert these pervasive efforts to hold down minorities are.
Why people with high levels of mental skills and rhetorical talents would tie themselves into knots with such reasoning is a mystery. Perhaps it is just that they cannot give up a social vision that is so flattering to themselves, despite how detrimental it may be to the people they claim to be helping.
Multiculturalism, like the caste system, paints people into the corner where they happened to have been born. But at least the caste system does not claim to benefit those at the bottom.
Multiculturalism not only serves the ego interests of intellectuals, it serves the political interests of elected officials, who have every incentive to promote a sense of victimhood, and even paranoia, among groups whose votes they want, in exchange for both material and psychic support.
The multicultural vision of the world also serves the interests of those in the media, who thrive on moral melodramas. So do whole departments of ethnic "studies" in academia and a whole industry of "diversity" consultants, community organizers and miscellaneous other race hustlers.
The biggest losers in all this are those members of racial minorities who allow themselves to be led into the blind alley of resentment and rage, even when there are broad avenues of opportunity available. And we all lose when society is polarized.
3-22-13
Please read my new article,
W.V. Sen. Joe Manchin and Obama don't get it - leave our guns alone!
3-21-13
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."
--James Madison, Federalist No. 58, 1788
3-20-13
"A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government."
--Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
3-19-13
"Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper power to govern us? Whoever says No, to this question, is an Independant for independency means no more than this, whether we shall make our own laws, or, whether the King, the greatest enemy this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us there shall be no laws but such as I like."
--Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
3-18-13
Intellectuals and Race: Part III
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The desire of intellectuals for some grand theory that will explain complex patterns with some solitary and simple factor has produced many ideas that do not stand up under scrutiny, but which have nevertheless had widespread acceptance — and sometimes catastrophic consequences — in countries around the world.
The theory of genetic determinism which dominated the early 20th century led to many harmful consequences, ranging from racial segregation and discrimination up to and including the Holocaust. The currently prevailing theory is that malice of one sort or another explains group differences in outcomes. Whether the lethal results of this theory would add up to as many murders as in the Holocaust is a question whose answer would require a detailed study of the history of lethal outbursts against groups hated for their success.
These would include murderous mob violence against the Jews in Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ibos in Nigeria, among others. Class-based mass slaughters of the successful would range from Stalin's extermination of the kulaks in the Soviet Union to Pol Pot's wiping out of at least a quarter of the population of Cambodia for the crime of being educated middle class people, as evidenced by even such tenuous signs as wearing glasses.
Minorities who have been more successful than the general population have been the least likely to have gotten ahead by discriminating against politically dominant majorities. Yet it is precisely such minorities who have attracted the most mass violence over the centuries and in countries around the world.
All the blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States would not add up to as many murders as those committed in one year by mobs against the Jews in Europe, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the Chinese in Southeast Asia.
What is there about group success that inflames mobs in such disparate times and places, not to mention mass-murdering governments in Nazi Germany or the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia? We can speculate about the reasons but there is no escaping the reality.
Groups that lag behind have often blamed their lags on wrong-doing by groups that are more successful. Since sainthood is not common in any branch of the human race, there is seldom a lack of sins to cite, including haughtiness by those who happen to be on top for the moment. But the real question is whether these sins — real or imagined — are actually the reason for different levels of achievement.
Intellectuals, whom we might expect to counter mass hysteria with rational analysis, have all too often been in the vanguard of those promoting envy and resentment of the successful.
This has been especially true of people with degrees but without any economically meaningful skills that would create the kinds of rewards they expected or felt entitled to.
Such people have been prominent as both leaders and followers of groups promoting anti-Semitic policies in Europe between the two World Wars, tribalism in Africa and changing Sri Lanka from a country once renowned for its intergroup harmony to a nation that descended into ethnic violence and then a decades-long civil war with unspeakable atrocities.
Such intellectuals have inflamed group against group, promoting discrimination and/or physical violence in such disparate countries as India, Hungary, Nigeria, Czechoslovakia and Canada.
Both the intellectuals' theory of genetic determinism as the reason for group differences in outcomes and their opposite theory of discrimination as the reason have created racial and ethnic polarization. So has the idea that it must be one or the other.
The false dichotomy that it must be one or the other leaves more successful groups with a choice between arrogance and guilt. It leaves less successful groups with the choice of believing that they are inherently inferior for all time or else that they are victims of the unconscionable malice of others.
When innumerable factors make equal outcomes virtually impossible, reducing those factors to genes or malice is a formula for needless and dangerous polarization, whose consequences have often been written in blood across the pages of history.
3-17-13
Intellectuals and Race: Part II
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among races, nations and civilizations have been the rule, not the exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope of rational thought — and perhaps even some constructive efforts to help everyone advance.
Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, "We owe London to Rome" — an acknowledgement that Roman conquerors created Britain's most famous city, at a time when the ancient Britons were incapable of doing so themselves.
No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of that era was likely to imagine that someday the British would create an empire vastly larger than the Roman Empire — one encompassing one fourth of the land area of the earth and one fourth of the human beings on the planet.
History has many dramatic examples of the rise and fall of peoples and nations, for a wide range of known and unknown reasons. What history does not have is what is so often assumed as a norm today, equality of group achievements at a given point in time.
Roman conquests had historic repercussions for centuries after the Roman Empire had fallen. Among the legacies of Roman civilization were Roman letters, which produced written versions of Western European languages, centuries before Eastern European languages became literate. This was one of many reasons why Western Europe became more advanced than Eastern Europe, economically, educationally and technologically.
Meanwhile, the achievements in other civilizations — whether in China or in the Middle East — surged ahead of achievements in the West, though China and the Middle East later lost their leads.
There are too many zig-zags in history to believe that some single over-riding factor explains all, or even most, of what happened, either then or now. But what seldom, if ever, happened were equal achievements by different peoples at the same time.
Yet today we have bean counters in Washington turning out statistics that are solemnly presented in courts of law to claim that, if the numbers are not more or less the same for everybody, that proves that somebody did somebody else wrong.
If blacks have different occupational patterns or different other patterns than whites, that arouses great suspicions among the bean counters — even though different groups of whites have long had different patterns from each other.
When American soldiers were given mental tests during the First World War, those men of German ancestry scored higher than those of Irish ancestry, who scored higher than those who were Jewish. Mental test pioneer Carl Brigham said that the army mental test results tended to "disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent."
An alternative explanation is that most German immigrants came to the United States decades before most Irish immigrants, who came here decades before most Jewish immigrants. Years later, Brigham admitted that many of the more recent immigrants grew up in homes where English was not the spoken language and that his earlier conclusions were, in his own words, "without foundation."
By this time, Jews were scoring above the national average on mental tests, instead of below. Disparities among groups are not set in stone, in this or in many other things. But blanket equality of outcomes is seldom seen at any given time either, whether in work skills or rates of alcoholism or other differences among the various groups lumped together as "whites."
Why then do statistical differences between blacks and whites set off such dogmatic assertions — and "disparate impact" lawsuits — when it is common for different groups to meet employment or other standards to different degrees?
One reason is that "disparate impact" lawsuits require nothing more than statistical differences to lead to verdicts, or out of court settlements, in the millions of dollars. And the reason that is so is that so many people have bought the unsubstantiated assumption that there is something strange and sinister when different peoples have different achievements.
Centuries of recorded history say otherwise. But who cares about history any more? Certainly not as much as they care about the millions of dollars available from "disparate impact" lawsuits.
3-16-13
"Hence as a private man has a right to say what wages he will give in his private affairs, so has a Community to determine what they will give and grant of their substance for the Administration of public affairs."
--Samuel Adams, A State of the Rights of the Colonists, 1772
3-15-13
"[A] rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive." --Thomas Jefferson
3-14-13
"In the first place, it is to be remembered, that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any."
--James Madison, Federalist Paper XIV, 1787
3-13-13
The Pop-Tart terrorist
By George Will
JewishWorldReview.com | Rodney Francis is insufficiently ambitious. The pastor of the Washington Tabernacle Baptist Church in St. Louis has entered the fray over guns, violence and humanity's fallen nature with a plan for a "buyback" of children's toy guns. And toy swords and other make-believe weapons. There is, however, a loophole in the pastor's panacea. He neglects the problem of ominously nibbled and menacingly brandished breakfast pastries.
Joshua Welch - a boy, wouldn't you know; no good can come of these turbulent creatures - who is 7, was suspended from second grade in Maryland's Anne Arundel County last week because of his "Pop-Tart pistol." While eating a rectangular fruit-filled sugary something - nutritionist Michelle Obama probably disapproves of it, and don't let Michael Bloomberg get started - Joshua tried biting it into the shape of a mountain but decided it looked more like a gun. So with gender-specific perversity, he did the natural thing. He said, "Bang, bang."
But is this really natural? Or is nature taking a back seat to nurture, yet again? Is Joshua's "bang, bang" a manifestation of some prompting in our defective social atmosphere, and therefore something society could and should stamp out?
While some might enjoy dog-paddling around in this deep philosophic water, Joshua's school, taking its cue from Hamlet, did not allow its resolve to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." More eager to act than to think, the school suspended Joshua and sent a letter to all the pupils' parents, urging them to discuss the "incident" - which the school includes in the category "classroom disruptions" - with their children "in a manner you deem most appropriate."
Ah, yes. The all-purpose adjective "appropriate." The letter said "one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures" and, although "no physical threats were made and no one was harmed," the code of student conduct stipulates "appropriate consequences." The letter, suffused with the therapeutic ethic, suggested that parents help their children "share their feelings" about all this. It also said the school counselor is available, presumably to cope with Post-Pastry Trauma Syndrome.
By now, Americans may be numb to such imbecilities committed by the government institutions to which they entrust their children for instruction. Nothing surprises after that 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl was labeled a "terroristic threat," suspended from school and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation because she talked about shooting herself and others with her Hello Kitty gun that shoots bubbles. But looking on the bright side, perhaps we should welcome these multiplying episodes as tutorials about the nature of the regulatory state that swaddles us ever more snuggly with its caring. If so, give thanks for the four Minnesota state legislators whose bill would ban "bullying" at school.
They define this as the use of words, images or actions that interfere with an individual's ability "to participate in a safe and supportive learning environment." Bullying may include, among many other things, conduct that has a "detrimental effect" on a student's "emotional health." Or conduct that "creates or exacerbates a real or perceived imbalance of power between students." Or violates a student's "reasonable expectation of privacy." Or conduct that "does not rise to the level of harassment" but "relates to" - yes, relates to - "the actual or perceived race, ethnicity, color, creed, religion, national origin, immigration status, sex, age, marital status, familial status, socioeconomic status, physical appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, academic status, disability, or status with regard to public assistance, age, or any additional characteristic defined" in another Minnesota statute.
If this becomes law, it will further empower the kind of relentless improvers and mindless protectors who panic over Pop-Tart pistols and discern terrorism in Hello Kitty bubble guns. Such people in Minnesota will be deciding what behavior - speech, usually - damages a "supportive learning environment." They will be sniffing out how students' speech or other behavior has real or perceived - by whom? - effects on the balance of "power" between other students. And school bureaucracies will ponder whether what Sally told Eleanor about Brad's behavior with Pam after the prom violated Brad's, or perhaps Pam's, "reasonable expectation of privacy."
Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments. Government nowadays is not just embarrassing, it is - let us not mince words - inappropriate.
3-12-13
Intellectuals and Race, Part 1
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels.
A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some races were genetically superior to others.
Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton urged "the gradual extinction of an inferior race."
It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like this. Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the leading universities and were internationally renowned.
Presidents of Stanford University and of MIT were among the many academic advocates of theories of racial inferiority — applied mostly to people from Eastern and Southern Europe, since it was just blithely assumed in passing that blacks were inferior.
This was not a left-right issue. The leading crusaders for theories of genetic superiority and inferiority were iconic figures on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Maynard Keynes helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society. Fabian socialist intellectuals H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were among many other leftist supporters of eugenics.
It was much the same story on this side of the Atlantic. President Woodrow Wilson, like many other Progressives, was solidly behind notions of racial superiority and inferiority. He showed the movie "Birth of a Nation," glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House, and invited various dignitaries to view it with him.
Such views dominated the first two decades of the 20th century. Now fast forward to the last few decades of the 20th century. The political left of this era was now on the opposite end of the spectrum on racial issues. Yet they too regarded differences in outcomes among racial and ethnic groups as something unusual, calling for some single, sweeping explanation.
Now, instead of genes being the overriding reason for differences in outcomes, racism became the one-size-fits-all explanation. But the dogmatism was the same. Those who dared to disagree, or even to question the prevailing dogma in either era were dismissed — as "sentimentalists" in the Progressive era and as "racists" in the multicultural era.
Both the Progressives at the beginning of the 20th century and the liberals at the end started from the same false premise — namely, that there is something unusual about different racial and ethnic groups having different achievements.
Yet some racial or ethnic minorities have owned or directed more than half of whole industries in many nations. These have included the Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese in West Africa, Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, Britons in Argentina, Indians in Fiji, Jews in Poland, and Spaniards in Chile — among many others.
Not only different racial and ethnic groups, but whole nations and civilizations, have had very different achievements for centuries. China in the 15th century was more advanced than any country in Europe. Eventually Europeans overtook the Chinese — and there is no evidence of changes in the genes of either of them.
Among the many reasons for different levels of achievement is something as simple as age. The median age in Germany and Japan is over 40, while the median age in Afghanistan and Yemen is under 20. Even if the people in all four of these countries had the same mental potential, the same history, the same culture — and the countries themselves had the same geographic features — the fact that people in some countries have 20 years more experience than people in other countries would still be enough to make equal economic and other outcomes virtually impossible.
Add the fact that different races evolved in different geographic settings, presenting very different opportunities and constraints on their development, and the same conclusion follows.
Yet the idea that differences in outcomes are odd, if not sinister, has been repeated mindlessly from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court.
3-11-13
"A Constitution is not the act of a Government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is a power without right."
--Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
3-10-13
The Truth About Government Ammo Purchases
"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington
The last few months have seen troubling news of massive government purchases of ammunition. Agencies from the Social Security Administration to the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Homeland Security have purchased millions of rounds. But is the whole thing more hype than substance?
Ever since Barack Obama was first elected in 2008, he has been selling guns and ammunition at a faster clip than any gun salesman could hope for. And since his re-election, citizens have been faced with severe shortages of both. This can only be exacerbated by large government purchases. The Social Security Administration (SSA), for example, purchased 174,000 rounds and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) bought 320,000 rounds. More understandable in purpose but also perhaps more staggering in scale, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) put in a request for 450 million rounds, while the FBI intends to purchase 100 million.
The headlines are ominous, but some of the hype can be put in perspective by doing a little math. National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke does just that. The SSA's request for 174,000 rounds amounts to just 590 rounds for each of its 295 inspector general agents "who investigate Social Security fraud and other crimes." Some of us might go through 590 rounds in an afternoon at the range. As for the USDA, 320,000 is enough to provide the same number of rounds for 542 agents, and, through the Forest Service, those agents have an area the size of Pakistan to cover.
When it comes to the bigger orders, Cooke writes, "The FBI and DHS's apparently vast orders are deceptively presented by the conspiracy theorists. It is true that in 2011, the FBI ordered up to 100 million bullets for its 13,913 special agents (which works out to 7,187 per agent). And, yes, the Department of Homeland Security -- a composite department that oversees USCIS, Customs and Border Protection, FEMA, ICE, the TSA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the National Protection Directorate -- placed a request for up to 450 million rounds for its 65,000 armed personnel (which works out to 6,923 per agent). But in the real world, ammunition is not divided up and handed out on such a basis. What is bought is stockpiled and then allocated on the basis of need. The DHS's order is expected to last for at least five years, and it was placed up front primarily as a cost-saving measure." Indeed, DHS is not even bound to buy that much; they merely have a tab on which to order more rounds as needed.
That certainly doesn't mean there aren't questions or that we should simply shrug and look the other way. For starters, the Department of Education recently placed an order for "27 Remington Brand Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns." This might lead any reasonable person to ask, as Cooke does, "Whether it is in possession of one bullet or 1 million bullets, should the federal Department of Education be armed in the first place? If so, why?" We would add, should there even be a Department of Education? But that's a topic for another day. The DoE has been known to botch raids when it was the wrong enforcement vehicle from the start.
The same questions could be asked of any number of bureaucracies. Does the Social Security Administration really need an armed enforcement division? We've known some unruly seniors in our day, but that seems to be overkill.
Then there's the information that's just plain false. Reports have been circulating that DHS has procured 2,717 Mine Resistant Armor Protected (MRAP) vehicles. The truth is, DHS has had retrofitted MRAPs since 2008, and now has 16 of them for serving "high-risk warrants." The figure of 2,717 comes from a delivery to the Marine Corps, not DHS. None of that, however, takes away from the problem that these are more properly military vehicles for war zones, not law enforcement tools. The militarization of law enforcement is undeniably troublesome. Furthermore, DHS is the same bureaucracy that claims right-wing extremists pose a threat, and it's run by an administration that thinks that "weapons of war" shouldn't be on our streets. Unless they're the ones driving them, apparently.
There are certainly troubling trends here and very real threats to our Liberty, but we must be careful not to exaggerate. While readers know that we never minimize the outrageous growth of government beyond its constitutional bounds, it also doesn't seem to us that the government is, as some have put it, "stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest." Questions about procurements and functions? Absolutely. Apocalypse? Not yet.
Townhall.com
3-9-13
Obama and Gun Control
Star Parker
Difficulty in getting change in our country is an ongoing source of frustration. Particularly when we have huge problems facing us as we do today.
But the founders knew what they were doing setting up the checks and balances of our constitutional republic. The delicate arrangement we call freedom should never submit with ease to a charismatic demagogue or to an emotion filled crisis.
The current push for gun control is case and point. It is at a time like this that we should be grateful that changing our laws is hard to do.
Every normal and decent American wants to live in a country where we will never again see life lost as result of a weapon held and fired by some deranged individual.
If we knew how to prevent it from ever happening again, we all would sign off in a minute.
But we don’t know. And that is the point.
Ironically, President Obama acknowledges that we don’t know what causes the irrational violent incidents we have witnessed. It is the reason one part of the proposal he has put forth is to provide funding to the Centers for Disease Control to study the problem.
Yet, despite acknowledging lack of understanding about what drives gun violence, the president and Senator Dianne Feinstein do not hesitate to offer what they claim is a solution. They propose further controls on gun ownership that are deeply problematic in their intrusion on our freedoms and right to bear arms, guaranteed under the second amendment of our constitution.
Why are the president and Senator Feinstein so ready to compromise basic American freedoms with gun control measures, that already have a dubious record of success, to solve a problem that President Obama acknowledges we don’t understand?
To the president’s credit, in his remarks introducing his gun control initiative, he acknowledges that there may be cultural reasons that contribute to this sick, violent behavior.
But he defines the cultural parameters of what he chooses to look at in such narrow terms that you have to question his seriousness or sincerity.
The president said, “Congress should fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds.”
But why limit this discussion to video games?
Has the president walked by a local movie theater complex recently to see what is playing? How about the local fare on television? Or what about the content of rap music?
Can it possibly be that the disproportionate support that the Democratic Party gets from the entertainment industry - major sources of gratuitous violent media – gets them a pass from today’s discussion?
President Obama outraised Mitt Romney five to one from the movie/TV/music industry.
This business was in the top ten sources of business funding for Senator Feinstein’s re-election in 2012, with election funding sources showing these entertainment businesses didn’t provide a dime to her Republican opponent.
What about other major themes in American culture today that contribute to a sense of meaningless and lack of respect for the sacredness of life?
Of course, I am talking about our indifference to the lives of unborn children, who are murdered in our country with impunity. Somehow those who want to intrude on gun ownership can live with the violence perpetrated on the unborn and have little interest in seeing its implications on violence in other areas of our society.
Another part of this discussion is about the mentally ill. Can President Obama or Senator Feinstein give us a good definition of mental illness and seriously tell us how this can be used to control gun ownership?
We have a serious problem on our hands, which demands serious discussion.
This discussion is not taking place and the gun control initiatives that have been put forward do not begin to justify the compromise of our basic freedoms, which they would require.
3-8-13
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"
--Samuel Adams, 1776
3-7-13
Economic Mobility
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Most people are not even surprised any more when they hear about someone who came here from Korea or Vietnam with very little money, and very little knowledge of English, who nevertheless persevered and rose in American society. Nor are we surprised when their children excel in school and go on to professional careers.
Yet, in utter disregard of such plain facts, so-called "social scientists" do studies which conclude that America is no longer a land of opportunity, and that upward mobility is a "myth." Even when these studies have lots of numbers in tables and equations that mimic the appearance of science, too often their conclusions depend on wholly arbitrary assumptions.
Even people regarded as serious academic scholars often measure social mobility by how many people from families in the lower part of the income distribution end up in higher income brackets. But social mobility — the opportunity to move up — cannot be measured solely by how much movement takes place.
Opportunity is just one factor in economic advancement. How well a given individual or group takes advantage of existing opportunities is another. Only by implicitly (and arbitrarily) assuming that a failure to rise must be due to society's barriers can we say that American society no longer has opportunity for upward social mobility.
The very same attitudes and behavior that landed a father in a lower income bracket can land the son in that same bracket. But someone with a different set of attitudes and behavior may rise dramatically in the same society. Sometimes even a member of the same family may rise while a sibling stagnates or falls by the wayside.
Ironically, many of the very people who are promoting the idea that the "unfairness" of American society is the reason why some individuals and groups are not advancing are themselves a big part of the reason for the stagnation that occurs.
The welfare state promoted by those who insist that it is society that is keeping some people down makes it unnecessary for many low-income people to exert themselves — and therefore makes it unnecessary for them to develop their own potential to the fullest.
The multiculturalist dogma that says one culture is just as good as another paints people into the cultural corner where they happened to have been born, even if other cultures around them have features that offer better prospects of rising.
Just speaking standard English in an English-speaking country can improve the odds of rising. But multiculturalists' celebration of foreign languages or ethnic dialects, and of counterproductive cultural patterns exemplified by such things as gangsta rap, can promote the very social stagnation that they blame on "society."
Meanwhile, Asian immigrants or refugees who arrive here are not handicapped or distracted by a counterproductive social vision full of envy, resentment and paranoia, and so can rise in the very same society where opportunity is said to be absent.
Those "social scientists," journalists and others who are committed to the theory that social barriers keep people down often cite statistics showing that the top income brackets receive a disproportionate and growing share of the country's income.
But the very opposite conclusion arises in studies that follow actual flesh-and-blood individuals over time, most of whom move up across the various income brackets with the passing years. Most working Americans who were initially in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners, rise out of that bottom 20 percent. More of them end up in the top 20 percent than remain in the bottom 20 percent.
People who were initially in the bottom 20 percent in income have had the highest rate of increase in their incomes, while those who were initially in the top 20 percent have had the lowest. This is the direct opposite of the pattern found when following income brackets over time, rather than following individual people.
Most of the media publicize what is happening to the statistical brackets — especially that "top one percent" — rather than what is happening to individual people.
We should be concerned with the economic fate of flesh-and-blood human beings, not waxing indignant over the fate of abstract statistical brackets. Unless, of course, we are hustling for an expansion of the welfare state.
3-6-13
Budget Politics
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency's budget were cut, what would it do?
The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.
The example was deliberately extreme as an illustration. But, in the real world, the same general pattern can be seen in local, state and national government responses to budget cuts.
At the local level, the first response to budget cuts is often to cut the police department and the fire department. There may be all sorts of wasteful boondoggles that could have been cut instead, but that would not produce the public alarm that reducing police protection and fire protection can produce. And public alarm is what can get budget cuts restored.
The Obama administration is following the same pattern. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, released thousands of illegal aliens from prisons to save money — and create alarm.
The Federal Aviation Administration says it is planning to cut back on the number of air traffic controllers, which would, at a minimum, create delays for airline passengers, in addition to fears for safety that can create more public alarm.
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Republicans in the House of Representatives have offered to pass legislation giving President Obama the authority to pick and choose what gets cut — anywhere in the trillions of dollars of federal spending — rather than being hemmed in by the arbitrary provisions of the sequester.
This would minimize the damage done by budget cuts concentrated in limited areas, such as the Defense Department. But it serves Obama's interest to maximize the damage and the public alarm, which he can direct against Republicans.
President Obama has said that he would veto legislation to let him choose what to cut. That should tell us everything we need to know about the utter cynicism of this glib man.
The sequester creates more visible damage and more public alarm than if the president were given the authority to trim a little here and a little there in the vast trillions of dollars spent by the government, in order to make a relatively small "cut" that still leaves total federal spending higher than last year.
Only in Washington is a reduction in the rate of growth of spending called a "cut." Moreover, costly boondoggles not covered by the sequester can continue and grow.
Obviously Obama wants public alarm, which he can use to help defeat the Republicans in the 2014 elections, so that Democrats can take back control of the House of Representatives.
When Obama was offered the authority to make the spending cuts wherever he chooses, anywhere in the government's multi-trillion dollar budget, it was the only power that this power-grabbing president has rejected.
Why? Because with this new power would go responsibility for the consequences of his choices. And responsibility for consequences is precisely what both the Obama administration and the Senate Democrats have been avoiding for years, by refusing to pass a federal budget, as required by the Constitution of the United States.
Democrats prefer to get the political benefits from handing out goodies, while Republicans can be blamed for not subsequently raising enough taxes to pay for the Democrats' spending spree.
If Obama succeeds in maneuvering the Republicans into positions that cause them to lose control of the House of Representatives in the 2014 elections, then as a president who never has to face the voters again, he would be in an ideal position to create a big spending liberals' heaven.
But it will be far from heaven for the economy, with Obama-appointed bureaucrats burying businesses in red tape and job-killing costs, while expanding the size and arbitrary powers of government. We could become the world's largest banana republic.
3-5-13
Mandated Wages and Discrimination
Walter E. Williams
Let's work through an example. Suppose 100 yards of fence could be built using one of two techniques. You could hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each, or you could hire one high-skilled worker for $40. Either way, you get the same 100 yards of fence built. If you sought maximum profits, which production technique would you employ? I'm guessing that you'd hire one high-skilled worker and pay him $40 rather than hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each. Your labor costs would be $40 rather than $45.
Suppose the high-skilled worker came into your office and demanded $55 a day. What would be your response? You'd probably tell him to go play in the traffic and hire the three low-skilled workers. After all, hiring the three low-skilled workers for $45, to get the same 100 yards of fence, would be cheaper than the $55 a day now demanded by the high-skilled worker.
The high-skilled worker is not stupid and knows that's exactly what you'd do. He will do a bit of organizing first, convincing decent, caring people that low-skilled workers are being exploited and not earning a living wage and that Congress should enact a minimum wage in the fencing industry of at least $20. After Congress enacts a minimum wage of $20, what then happens to the chances of a high-skilled worker's successfully demanding $55 a day? They go up because he's used the coercive powers of Congress to price his competition out of the market. Because of the minimum wage, it would cost you $60 to use the three low-skilled workers.
The minimum wage not only discriminates against low-skilled workers but also is one of the most effective tools of racists everywhere. Our nation's first minimum wage came in the form of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931. During the legislative debate over the Davis-Bacon Act, which sets minimum wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects, racist intents were obvious. Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., supported the bill, saying he had "received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South." Rep. Miles Allgood, D-Ala., complained: "That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country." Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., spoke of the "superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor." American Federation of Labor President William Green said, "Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates." The Davis-Bacon Act, still on the books today, virtually eliminated blacks from federally financed construction projects when it was passed.
During South Africa's apartheid era, the secretary of its avowedly racist Building Workers' Union, Gert Beetge, said, "There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans." The South African Nursing Council condemned low wages received by black nurses as unfair. Some nurses said they wouldn't accept wage increases until the wages of black nurses were raised. The South African Economic and Wage Commission of 1925 reported that "while definite exclusion of the Natives from the more remunerative fields of employment by law has not been urged upon us, the same result would follow a certain use of the powers of the Wage Board under the Wage Act of 1925, or of other wage-fixing legislation. The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed."
Whether support for minimum wages is motivated by good or by evil, its effect is to cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder for the most disadvantaged worker and lower the cost of discrimination.
3-4-13
"If the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, and was left to select a council for himself, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to patriotism."
--Roger Sherman, 1789
3-3-13"The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Ritchie, 1820
3-2-13
O'Reilly: The big con
By: Bill O'Reilly
Please listen up. We are all being conned by the Obama administration. This year, the American taxpayer will fork over about $571 billion to pay for educating children in the nation’s public schools. All told, the country spends close to $16,000 per student every year on primary through college education. That’s the highest per-student spending rate in the world.
However, according to President Obama, it’s not enough. He wants more tax dollars, especially for “early education.” He said so in his State of the Union address, and it drew big-time applause from his crew. Of course we need to spend more on education. And anyone who opposes that hates kids!
The centerpiece of the president’s early-education vision is the “Head Start” program, which has been in place since 1965. Over the past 48 years, the feds have spent close to $200 billion on Head Start. But there’s one big problem: The program is not working.
According to a recent study by the Department of Health and Human Services, by the end of third grade, Head Start children remain academically disadvantaged compared to their same-age peers. So why did the president not mention that? Why is he still pounding the drum for more funding for a program that is not cutting it?
The answer is social engineering.
Obama will not say this, but one of his devoted followers, Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz, will. What the left really wants is to redistribute income through the public education system.
In a recent New York Times column, Stiglitz called for the following:
–More spending on preschool education.
–More spending on before- and after-class programs.
–More entitlements to ensure that pregnant women are protected from “environmental hazards.” That means increased payments to prospective moms for better food, housing and medical care.
And the topper:
–Direct cash payments to parents of poor children who make sure their kids participate in school programs and show up for class. If that ever comes to be, America essentially will be paying parents to parent.
It is all about control. Obama believes the deck in America is stacked against the poor and wants to get lower-income citizens as much cash and as many entitlements as he can. Masking those payments under “more money for education” is a clever way to do that.
It is certainly true that poor children have a much tougher academic road than affluent kids. And smart educational policy can close that gap. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told me the reason Head Start is not delivering is that it doesn’t concentrate enough on reading. In many school districts, it is primarily a babysitting service.
As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid’s grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.
But that’s not all of what federal education spending is about, is it? It’s also about redistributing income. We are being conned big time. And it’s the kids who suffer the most because of it.
3-1-13
Teacher Tells Students to Call 9-11 Hijackers “Freedom Fighters”
Todd Starnes
Placement World Geography teacher at a Texas high school who encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing also instructed them to refer to the 9-11 hijackers not as terrorists – but as “freedom fighters,” according to students who were in the class.
Students at Lumberton High School were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as Genocide – instead they were told to use the term “ethnic cleansing.”
John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, tells me that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.
“What is more dangerous – fear and ignorance or education and understanding,” he asked. “From our standpoint, we are here to educate the kids.
Valastro said the teacher involved is a 32-year veteran who was simply following state teaching guidelines.
“I don’t think my freshman-level teacher was trying to politicize radical Islam or anything like that,” he said. “I don’t think our teacher has...to my knowledge ever converted a single student to Islam.”
The Islamic lessons in the small public high school generated national attention after a photograph of four female students wearing burqas surfaced on Facebook.
April LeBlanc’s 15-year-old daughter was one of the students in the photograph. She told me that many parents in the district feel betrayed by school officials.
“My biggest thing is not the burqa,” she said. “That was the key to opening up the rest. It’s scary how far they dove into the Islamic faith. It’s scary what they taught my daughter. Who’s in charge of this? How did our superintendent let this slip through the cracks?”
LeBlanc said the students were told that they could no longer use the terms suicide bomber or terrorist. Instead, they were instructed to use the words “freedom fighters.”
“This teacher taught her that a freedom fighter is when they give their life for the Holy War – and that they’re going to go to heaven,” she said. “They were saturating these kids in Islam and my daughter is an American Christian child.”
Madelyn LeBlanc told me that it was clear her teacher was very uncomfortable lecturing the students.
“I do have a lot of sympathy for her,” the 15-year-old said. “At the very beginning she said she didn’t want to teach it but it was in the curriculum.”
Her mother added that it was her impression that the teacher did not agree with the quote about calling the terrorists freedom fighters and laced her lecture with sarcasm.
During a lesson on Judaism, LeBlanc said the teacher told the class, “Students, I’m supposed to be politically correct and tell you that the Holocaust was not Genocide. It was an ethnic cleansing.”
LeBlanc said her daughter kept detailed notes of every classroom lecture and as she read the transcripts she became disturbed.
“Really,” she asked. “They can’t call the Holocaust Genocide? I was more upset with that than the lessons on Islam. It made me sick.”
And then came the comparison between the 9-11 hijackers and the freedom fighters.
Madelyn said a young man sitting beside her was stunned.
“He was shocked that we had to call them that,” she told Fox News. “He laughed and asked the teacher, ‘Is that a joke? Are you serious? Why do we have to call them that? That makes it sound okay (what they did) And it’s not.’”
Madelyn said the teacher didn’t know how to respond.
“She said it was something we have to learn for the end of the year testing,” she said. “I’m sure it was very difficult for her to do.”
Madelyn said the lesson about freedom fighters made her feel “terrible.”
“That made it sound like what they were doing was okay,” she said.
The superintendent also defended the lesson on freedom fighters.
“The whole idea behind this particular lesson – do you call yourself a freedom fighter or Islamic jihadist – or whatever it is you want to be called – you’ve got to put things in perspective,” the superintendent said. “We’re trying to teach the kids to discern for themselves that one thing can be called many different things.”
Valastro said it’s important for students to understand context.
“We might see it as terrorism, but from the Islamic side they might call it jihadist or freedom fighter,” he said.
The superintendent said he was not aware of the specific comments made about the 9-11 hijackers – but conceded there was only one side to the attack.
“I do agree it was a terrorist attack,” he said. “But in several classes across this country, you’re going to have a make-up of students from all over the world in your class. We teach it as an act of terrorism – whereas they are teaching it to their kids as a revolutionary event.”
LeBlanc said she was especially bothered by the lack of emphasis on other religions. She said there were hardly any lessons on Judaism and none on Christianity.
“I wondered how it was okay for them to go so in-depth into a religion from the other side of the world but it was not okay for them to be like that with Christianity,” she said.
“I try to stay open-minded,” she said. “I don’t want my daughter to be ignorant about the world. My kids watch the news with us. We make them aware. I don’t even mind the high school teaching these things.”
But, she added, there was no balance.
“They can talk about how important Mecca is – but why aren’t they talking about how important Christianity was to the founding of the nation,” she asked.
LeBlanc and other parents said they feel betrayed.
“We trusted these people,” she said of the school system. “It scares me. I feel like our school is being infiltrated. How can this not be a sign? We’re talking about Lumberton, Texas. We’re talking about a small town with Christian churches on every street corner. Right in our small school this is going on.”
2-29-13
Obama claims, "I'm not interested in spin, I'm not interested in playing a blame game." But his "Republican sequester" political strategy is nothing more than spin and blame shifting.
So, how does Obama's ploy play out, assuming Republicans don't fold in a last minute vote today?
Once these cuts are implemented, Obama and his NeoCom cadres will blame the "Republican Sequester" for any and all ills between now and the 2014 midterm election. Obama knows that the net effect of his $300 billion payroll and income taxes hikes, on top of skyrocketing ObamaCare health insurance premiums, mounting debt and deep military cuts already enacted, will send the economy back into recession.
Thus, from sequester forth, every negative economic GDP or jobs report, which in reality demonstrates the continued planned failure of Obama's socialist "recovery stimuli," will be blamed on the "Republican Sequester." Moreover, Obama will employ his classist "politics of disparity" playbook to blame sequester "cuts" for every runny nose in America, claiming the nation can't "afford" even minuscule cuts to socialist welfare programs.
And make no mistake -- in partnership with his public relations network, the Leftmedia and their MSM propaganda machinery, Obama may win the public opinion contest.
The Patriot Post
2-28-13
"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual..." --Thomas Jefferson (1785)
Addressing the National Governors Association this week, Barack Hussein Obama proclaimed, "At some point, we've got to do some governing. And certainly, what we can't do is keep careening from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis."
But Obama himself engineered his rapid political ascension -- from junior senator in 2005 to president of the United States in 2009 -- precisely by hopping "from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis." Page one of his political playbook, authored by Rahm Emanuel, states: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. ... This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not before."
This unknown "community organizer" and disciple of hate, was mentored by avowed Marxists, who paved his way into the Illinois State Senate in 1997 and the U.S. Senate in 2005.
Virtually unknown, but backed by wealthy ultra-Leftists John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy, Obama won the presidential election in 2008 on a banking crisis precipitated by a manufactured mortgage crisis. He won a narrow re-election in 2012 based upon his tried-and-true manufactured classist disparity crisis.
Now Obama is trying to set up his Republican opponents for a fall in 2014, based upon a manufactured "Republican sequester crisis."
According to Obama: "Republicans in Congress face a simple choice: Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them? Or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations? That's the choice. Are you willing to see a bunch of first responders lose their job because you want to protect some special interest tax loophole? ... If [Republicans] allow this meat-cleaver approach to take place, it will jeopardize our military readiness; it will eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research."
The litany continues: "Emergency responders -- their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings. And already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf. And as our military leaders have made clear, changes like this ... affect our ability to respond to threats in unstable parts of the world."
Despite feigning dramatic opposition to the "Republican sequester" in his national "Chicken Little" tour, both Obama and his congressional Democrat sycophants want sequestration to occur, so they can attempt to use it as a noose to hang Republicans ahead of the 2014-midterm elections. The undisputed master of deception and Demo-goguery, Obama is banking big political fortunes on the implementation of the much-debated 2.3 percent cuts to federal spending, reducing the growth of spending, not current allocations -- a plan that Obama himself hatched -- almost half of which are defense cuts.
This is precisely why Obama made Republicans an offer -- more taxes and no spending cuts -- that they can only refuse.
What's that? You say you're surprised by my analysis because Republican "leaders," House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and their Beltway pundits, haven't mentioned Obama's real sequestration agenda? Well, they've been so busy taking their rebuttal queues from Obama that they missed his strategic agenda -- at their imminent peril, and that of the nation.
The Patriot Post
2-27-13
Shepherds and Sheep
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | John Stuart Mill's classic essay "On Liberty" gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people's decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing "that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging."
Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that "people make a lot of mistakes." Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging.
What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.
Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.
Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?
Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.
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Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.
Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, in which millions of people were plunged into poverty in even the most prosperous nations, was needlessly prolonged by government policies now recognized in retrospect as foolish and irresponsible.
One of the key differences between mistakes that we make in our own lives and mistakes made by governments is that bad consequences force us to correct our own mistakes. But government officials cannot admit to making a mistake without jeopardizing their whole careers.
Can you imagine a President of the United States saying to the mothers of America, "I am sorry your sons were killed in a war I never should have gotten us into"?
What is even more relevant to Professor Sunstein's desire to have our betters tell us how to live our lives, is that so many oppressive and even catastrophic government policies were cheered on by the intelligentsia.
Back in the 1930s, for example, totalitarianism was considered to be "the wave of the future" by much of the intelligentsia, not only in the totalitarian countries themselves but in democratic nations as well.
The Soviet Union was being praised to the skies by such literary luminaries as George Bernard Shaw in Britain and Edmund Wilson in America, while literally millions of people were being systematically starved to death by Stalin and masses of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.
Even Hitler and Mussolini had their supporters or apologists among intellectuals in the Western democracies, including at one time Lincoln Steffens and W.E.B. Du Bois.
An even larger array of the intellectual elite in the 1930s opposed the efforts of Western democracies to respond to Hitler's massive military buildup with offsetting military defense buildups to deter Hitler or to defend themselves if deterrence failed.
"Disarmament" was the mantra of the day among the intelligentsia, often garnished with the suggestion that the Western democracies should "set an example" for other nations — as if Nazi Germany or imperial Japan was likely to follow their example.
Too many among today's intellectual elite see themselves as our shepherds and us as their sheep. Tragically, too many of us are apparently willing to be sheep, in exchange for being taken care of, being relieved of the burdens of adult responsibility and being supplied with "free" stuff paid for by others.
2-26-13
West Virginia: House Passes Emergency Powers Protection Legislation
On Friday, February 22, the West Virginia House of
Delegates voted
97-0 to advance important emergency powers protection legislation. House Bill 2471,
sponsored by House Speaker Rick Thompson (D-19), seeks to prohibit the
restriction of the lawful possession, use, carrying, transfer, transportation,
storage or display of a firearm or ammunition during any declared state of
emergency.
This legislation would protect law-abiding citizens in West
Virginia from a violation of their constitutional rights reminiscent of what
occurred in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where law-abiding citizens were
stripped of their lawfully owned firearms by overzealous government officials
leaving them defenseless and unable to protect their families and
property.
HB 2471 has been sent to the state Senate where it will be
assigned to a committee. Please stay tuned to www.nraila.org for
updates on the status of this, and other, important NRA-supported
legislation.
2-25-13
Texas To Block Cops From Enforcing Federal Gun Laws
texasgunlaw12New legislation in the Texas State legislature, sponsored by Steve Toth (R-Dist. 15), looks to stop Texas law enforcement officials from confiscating so-called “assault weapons” and high capacity magazines. The legislation is called the Firearm Protection Act.
Toth’s proposal would create a Class A misdemeanor for police officers enforcing any new federal gun regulations. It also would establish cause for the state attorney general to sue anyone who seeks to enforce new federal gun regulations. It is one of several states-rights measures being offered by conservative state lawmakers nationwide in response to federal gun control proposals.
“There’s a federal law, there’s a 30-round magazine right in front of you – what do I do?” Toth said in an interview.
Toth, in a press release, wrote, “The ‘Firearms Protection Act’ or HB 1076 would make any federal law banning semi-automatic firearms or limiting the size of gun magazines unenforceable within the state’s boundaries. Any municipality, county, or special district trying to enforce a federal gun ban could face monetary holdings by the state and misdemeanor charges under this proposal.”
According to Toth:
The ‘Firearm Protection Act’ would do the following:
• Supports and protects our local sheriffs and law enforcement officers working hard to protect Texan’s 2nd Amendment Rights
• Sends a clear message to Washington by supporting and protecting Texans from the Federal Administrations unconstitutional overreach
• Addresses local Texans concerns for their personal safety
“I believe this administration has now realized they have woken up a giant. All over the United States, Americans are crying out for something to be done to protect their 2nd Amendment rights. The American people understand this is not just about gun rights, but about all constitutional rights. They understand once you compromise one Constitutional right, all others can be in jeopardy”, said Representative Toth.
Sheriff Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff said, “”The federal government is not our boss. If there’s any place that that’s applicable and true, it’s the state of Texas.”
Attorney General Greg Abbot helped draft the bill. Along with Abbott, who has already filed over twenty-three suits against the Federal Government, Representative Toth will continue to stand with other Texans to encouraging the promotion of personal responsibility and liberties while actively guarding against outside parties attempting to erode the freedoms enjoyed by Texans so that the people of Texas may have more confidence in their government.
Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/02/texas-to-block-cops-from-enforcing-federal-gun-laws/#ixzz2LrxjGJ74
2-24-13
Why do Democrats hate American manufacturers?
by Michelle Malkin
Here’s the latest example of head-splitting cognitive dissonance in Washington: President Obama used his State of the Union address to crusade for a revitalized U.S. manufacturing sector. But while he pays lip service to supporting businesses that build their products on American soil, Obama and his left-wing operatives are hell-bent on driving a key sector of the U.S. manufacturing industry six feet under: the American firearms and ammunition industry.
The White House is pushing new government spending to “spur economic growth,” protect manufacturing plants and “create good-paying jobs” to help America’s middle class. Yet across the country, with aggressive lobbying by the White House itself, Democrats are working to destroy tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and the firms that created them. Assault rhetoric has lasting real-world consequences.
In New York, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed radical, ineffectual gun-grabbing measures that are backfiring in more ways than one. Nearly half a dozen gun companies have now announced that they will no longer sell their products to police in the Empire State. In protest of Cuomo’s gun-control regime banning citizens from owning semi-automatic rifles or shotguns because of cosmetic features deemed “military-style,” Washington-based Olympic Arms “will no longer be doing business with the State of New York or any governmental entity or employee of such governmental entity within the State of New York.”
According to USA Today, other companies including “LaRue Tactical, York Arms, Templar Custom and EFI, as well as sporting-goods retailer Cheaper Than Dirt” have also joined the sales boycott of New York.
Worse news for New York citizens: At least one local manufacturer, the storied Remington Arms Company founded in Ilion, N.Y., in 1816, is in dire financial danger as a result of Cuomo’s draconian regulations. The company’s innovations in weaponry and ammunition have been used in sporting, self-defense, law enforcement and warfare for two centuries.
Now, as a result of hysteria-induced government pandering, nearly 40 percent of Remington’s weapons can no longer be sold to citizens legally. Its small-town plant employs more than 1,300 people in a town of 8,000 and generates revenue of an estimated $400 million from sales in the U.S. and 55 other countries. As an Ilion local official noted, “Remington is not only a major employer, but it’s a historic employer. It’s been part of our very fiber for 200 years.”
And so it is with the rest of the industry. Despite tough economic times, firearms and ammunition companies have created nearly 27,000 well-paying jobs over the past two years alone, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Businesses in the United States that manufacture, distribute and sell firearms, ammunition and hunting equipment employ nearly 100,000 people in the U.S. and generate an additional 110,000-plus jobs in supplier and ancillary industries.
“These are good jobs, paying an average of $46,858 in wages and benefits,” the NSSF reports. In addition, “the firearms and ammunition industry was responsible for as much as $31.84 billion in total economic activity in the country … (and) the industry and its employees pay over $2.07 billion in taxes including property, income and sales based levies.”
In my adopted home state of Colorado, where unemployment hovers near 8 percent, nearly a dozen businesses are being forced to consider leaving their home state because of extremist gun-control proposals. Vice President Joe Biden himself leaned on Democratic lawmakers to support an arbitrary 15-round limit on ammunition magazines. So, what have Sheriff Joe and his gun-grabbing pals wrought? Denver-based ammo magazine manufacturer Magpul served notice that it will take its 400 full-time employees and subcontractors somewhere else. Magpul generates some $85 million in spending in the state.
As the Denver Post reported, the privately held company makes an array of consumer products in addition to sales to the military, law enforcement and gun owners. And because Magpul has made a conscientious effort to support other Colorado companies, the ripple effect could reach far beyond the gun industry — including several cutting-edge innovators in the plastics-injection-molding business. One of Magpul’s most important contractors, Denver-based Alfred Manufacturing Co., employs 150 residents. It, too, will “relocate part or all of our operations out of state” if Democrat Gov. John Hickenlooper enacts the stringent gun-control regime pushed by Biden and company. The company has already put expansion plans on hold.
Smart lawmakers from Texas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Arizona and South Carolina are now courting Remington away from New York and Magpul away from Colorado. For now, these states can offer business-friendly, Second Amendment-defending climates that support a demonized industry. But how much longer will it be until Obama and the pro-jobs hypocrites on Capitol Hill find new, more nefarious ways to obstruct this innovation-driving, wealth-producing sector of the American economy?
Make no mistake: Gun-control demagoguery is a lethal weapon.
2-23-13
'There Oughta Be a Law'
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." --Richard Henry Lee, Federal Farmer XVIII
Joe Biden, holding the only acceptable firearm
Ever since the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the Left has rabidly pursued all manner of unconstitutional gun control legislation. Federal, state and local, the NeoComs stop at nothing to deprive us of our unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator. Yet all is not lost as long as we stand firm.
The National Institute of Justice, the research branch of the Justice Department, recently leaked a memo evaluating many of the White House's preferred gun control measures. For example, the NIJ says that Dianne Feinstein's defensive weapons ban is "unlikely to have an impact on gun violence" because -- wait for it -- those firearms "are not a major contributor to gun crime." Therefore, concludes the NIJ, in order for a ban to be effective, it would have to include no exemptions and be paired with a mandatory buyback program.
Notably, Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) just introduced legislation to impose a 10 percent tax on concealable firearms, aiming to fund a federal buyback with the revenue collected.
The NIJ reaches similar conclusions about magazine capacity limits, which would be ineffective while exempting currently owned magazines, and universal background checks, which won't work without national gun registration because criminals use straw purchasers or steal weapons in order to avoid background checks.
The question is, will Obama and the NeoComs pursue NIJ's recommended "fixes" to their obviously flawed plans?
While movement has temporarily slowed at the federal level, the states are busy enacting their own draconian gun restrictions. In Colorado, House Democrats passed four anti-gun bills including outlawing concealed carry on college campuses (more on that below), requiring universal background checks and limiting magazine capacity to 15 rounds.
As we noted last week, Magpul, maker of the popular PMAG magazine for AR-15 platform weapons, plans to carry through with its threat to leave the state because of the mag cap limit. Democrats tried offering them an exemption to manufacture their magazines in-state as long as they didn't sell them there, but Magpul wisely didn't take the bait. "If we're able to stay in Colorado and manufacture a product, but law-abiding citizens of the state were unable to purchase the product, customers around the state and the nation would boycott us for remaining here," said Doug Smith, Magpul's chief operating officer. The move would take $85 million and hundreds of jobs from Colorado.
In Washington, a bill is in the works with a requirement to "safely and securely store" any legally owned "assault weapons." It would also provide sheriffs with the power to, "no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance," upon penalty of up to one year in jail.
Maryland Democrats seek to ban "possessing, selling, offering to sell, transferring, purchasing, or receiving an assault weapon." That goes beyond Feinstein's federal ban proposal in that it also bans "possessing." Furthermore, no one under the age of 21 may possess ammunition, meaning they also can't hunt. Things aren't going well in the Used-to-Be Free State.
New York, an early adopter of unconstitutional restrictions post-Newtown, isn't done. Democrats introduced a bill to require that all gun owners in New York "obtain and continuously maintain a policy of liability insurance in an amount not less than one million dollars specifically covering any damages resulting from any negligent or willful acts involving the use of such firearm while it is owned by such person." Failing this, a gun owner will face "immediate revocation of such owner's registration, license and any other privilege to own" a firearm. Privilege? Our copy of the Constitution recognizes the right to keep and bear arms.
Speaking of New York, numerous gun manufacturers and sellers are refusing to sell to law enforcement officers or government agencies anything that can't be legally bought by the average citizen. This move applies to any other state that bans weapons or magazines while making exceptions for law enforcement officers. So far, none of the big three law enforcement suppliers -- Smith & Wesson, Glock and Sig Sauer -- have joined the effort, but Barrett, LaRue Tactical, Olympic Arms, York Arms, MidwayUSA, Cheaper Than Dirt, Spike's Tactical and several others have announced the policy change.
We greatly respect and appreciate our nation's law enforcement officers, but if a seven-round mag is good enough for a civilian, it's good enough for a police officer. And if civilians can't own modern muskets, police shouldn't either. Civilians and law enforcement personnel are fellow citizens, not subjects.
State news isn't all bad, however. Ten states have proposed legislation to preempt federal gun bans and protect lawful gun owners. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Washington have all proposed legislation to protect firearms made and kept within their borders. Alaska, Arizona, Montana and Tennessee have already passed such laws.
Finally, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks state guns bans will reach the Court. We agree, and we don't doubt Scalia is itching to reiterate that the Court meant what it said in its Heller and McDonald rulings, and that the Second Amendment also means what it says.
The Patriot Post
2-22-13
LIMBAUGH: FOR FIRST TIME I’M ASHAMED OF MY COUNTRY
(Rush Limbaugh) – RUSH: Folks, I’m sorry here. I can’t help but think that we are all being played for a bunch of fools, a bunch of suckers on this sequester business. I don’t know. Are you like me? Do you really think 800,000 people are gonna lose their jobs in the Pentagon because we cut $22 billion? Do you really think air traffic control’s gonna shut down? Do you really think there aren’t gonna be any meat inspectors? Do you really think that all of these horror stories are going to happen? I don’t.
I feel like I’ve been here. This is deja vu all over again. I remember the 1995 budget battle. That involved a legitimate government shut down. That wasn’t just $22 billion we were not gonna spend. We’re still gonna spend $3.5 trillion. We’re just not gonna spend $22 billion, if it happens.
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Now, the government shutdown in 1995, yeah, we were gonna starve kids. That was the plan then. I’m just kidding. Snerdley I’m sorry, it’s all ridiculous to me. Every bit of this. I’ve been doing this — you get new perspective. I’m into my 25th year, and I think I mentioned to you last week and maybe the week before, I’ve been doing this long enough now to start seeing the repeat cycles on everything. I don’t care whether it’s the debt limit or the fiscal cliff or continuing resolution or the budget crisis of 2008 or TARP or the auto bailouts, and now the sequester, it’s the same playbook.
It is the same threats. It’s the same danger. It’s the same crisis. It’s identical. There’s nothing about it that changes, over and over. And everybody gets sucked into it. I try to escape, I try to get out of it, I try to leave it aside, I try to move on, but it just sucks me back in, too, until I realize that I have been sucked back in. And then there’s a part of me that says, “Well, wait a minute now.” You got not just Panetta, but now a uniformed military general, General Odierno, saying that he could lose 600,000 uniformed people, and the common sense of this doesn’t add up. Now we’ve got a guy comparing this to the Oklahoma City bombing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Everything gets repeated. The cycle, the claims, the threats, the crisis, Armageddon, it’s the same. And we’re talking $22 billion. It’s not as though we’re not gonna spend anything. If the sequester happens, the first year is $44 billion. Half of that’s defense. We’re still going to spend $3.5 trillion or $3.3 trillion, even if we don’t spend the $22 billion. Then there’s this guy who draws an analogy to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Plus, we have our old buddy Ron Fournier. He used to be at AP, and is now at the National Journal. This is quite instructive, actually. Let me just read a portion of this to you. “You May Be Right, Mr. President, But This Is Crazy — Your federal government is almost certain to blow past the March 1 deadline for averting $1.2 trillion in haphazard budget cuts that could cost 700,000 jobs.” But see, it’s not $1.2 trillion.
It is over ten years, but it’s not this year and it’s not next year. This year’s portion of it is $22 billion. Besides, does anybody really think that, even if the sequester happens, it’s not gonna get fixed for ten years? Anyway… “Don’t worry. We know who to blame. President Obama makes a credible case that he has reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans.” He has? Well, I guess he has, since the media says so. “President Obama makes a credible case that he has reached farther toward compromise…”
“But knowing who’s at fault,” writes Mr. Fournier, “doesn’t fix the problem. To loosely quote Billy Joel: You may be right, Mr. President, but this is crazy. Is this fiscal standoff (the fifth since Republicans took control of the House in 2011)…” Is that not an interesting perspective, by the way? It’s not “the fifth standoff since Obama was inaugurated.” No, no. It’s “the fifth standoff since Republicans took control of the House” two years ago. “Is this fiscal standoff … just about scoring political points, or is it about governing?”
Unbeknownst to Mr. Fournier, he has now swerved right into my theory: Political points versus governing, and he says it’s all about politics. “If it’s all about politics, bully for Obama. A majority of voters will likely side with the president over Republicans in a budget dispute because of his popularity and the GOP’s pathetic approval ratings.” Speaking of that, I don’t want to depress you out there, but Obama’s approval rating is as high as it’s been since 2009. It’s 55%.
The Republicans’ approval is as low as it’s been since 2009. Chris Christie goes on Letterman, eats a doughnut, and he’s at 74% approval. Christie is at 74%. Obama is at 55%, his highest approval in four years. But then Mr. Fournier writes, “If it’s all about politics, bully for Obama” but “[i]f it’s about governing, the story changes” for obama ” Yes siree bob. That’s my whole point. “You see,” as Mr. Fournier writes, totally unaware that he’s totally confirming my brilliant theorem of last week, “If it’s about governing, then the story changes for Obama.”
Because “in any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure. Sure, blame Congress — castigate all 535 lawmakers, or the roughly half you hate. But there is only one president. Even if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history. Fair or not, the president owns this mess.” Mr. Fournier, I disagree with you. He doesn’t. That is the whole point. The president does not own this mess. His approval rating wouldn’t be 55% if he owned this mess.
He is not governing, Mr. Fournier. You’ve stumbled into this and I’m here to alert you how right you are. You don’t even know it. He’s not governing. It’s all about politics. Congress is being blamed for this. The Republicans are being blamed. Obama is just the outsider trying to fix it all. He’s the guy trying to compromise. He even went out and played golf to try to compromise! He even went out and played golf with Tiger Woods to try to compromise, and still the Republicans resist.
“Fair or not, the president owns this mess.” He doesn’t own this mess. Even though it was his idea. Even though he will choose if the sequester happens where there are cuts. (He will choose it!) But as far as the low-information voter population in this country knows, he does not own this mess, Mr. Fournier, and he will not own it. The Republicans own this lock, stock, and barrel. But, Mr. Fournier writes, “What can he do about it? For starters, he could read this op-ed piece published two months ago in a Midwestern newspaper…”
Fournier highlights an op-ed written by a Republican who blames everybody on both sides for it and we all gotta get together and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s what Fournier thinks Obama needs to read. “With a few tweaks, Obama could make it a presidential address. … ‘Americans are fed up with the jousting.… There is a lot of public posturing but apparently not much genuine conversation.’” That gets to the root of what’s bothering me here. The jousting never ends. I just feel like I’m being played for the fool here to get sucked into this narrative and this template every day.
The way all this stuff plays is, I think this whole episode is a big joke on the country. I think this is an insulting joke to everybody. This is an embarrassing spectacle. After 1995, 1993, whatever, I’m getting tired of it. I’m worn out. It’s history repeating it’s over and over and over, almost verbatim, from “taking food out of the mouths of children,” to “they’re coming for our children” to “No meat inspectors!” They’re even saying have to close down the sleigh rides in Jellystone Park! That has come up again, like it did in the 1995 budget battle.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country. To be watching all of this, to be treated like this, to have our common sense and intelligence insulted the way it’s being insulted? It just makes me ashamed. Seriously, man. Here we get worked up over $44 billion. That’s the total amount of money that will not be spent that was scheduled to be spent this year. In truth, we’re gonna spend more this year than we spent last year.
We’re just not gonna spend as much as was projected. It’s all baseline budgeting. There is no real cut below a baseline of zero. There just isn’t. Yet here they come, sucking us in, roping us in. Panic here, fear there: Crisis, destruction, no meat inspection, no cops, no teachers, no firefighters, no air traffic control. I’m sorry, my days of getting roped into all this are over. We have the media playing along with all this. The ruling class of both parties play along with all this. It’s insulting. I don’t know how else to describe it.
I’m into my 25th year.
I can’t tell you the number of times this has happened. This hit me yesterday. I’ve said the same things over and over for 25 years. Whether the Clinton presidency or the Obama presidency, whether it’s a Pelosi speakership or Tom Foley (who was speaker when I started), it’s the same stuff. It’s the same threats. It’s the same arguments over and over. Nothing ever changes! We just keep spending more money. We create more dependency, we get more and more irresponsible from one crisis to the next, all of them manufactured.
Except for the real crisis, which nobody ever addresses, and that is: We can’t afford any of this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: What’s happening here, folks, is we are being played for fools and being suckered — suckered into supporting the never-ending expansion of government, the wholesale destruction of the private economy. Everybody who joins in this debate under the premise that Obama puts forth, as well as debating the politics of this nonsense, is just being used to cover up what’s actually going on. Now, what’s going on is no great conspiracy. It’s no mystery. We’re spending much more money than we have.
The government is getting inexorably larger.
It’s less and less efficient at accomplishing anything. We’re creating more and more dependents. We’re robbing people of their dignity and humanity and of their opportunity to realize their dreams as they turn their lives over to the government. It’s like a never-ending cycle. The government makes the private sector smaller. There are fewer job opportunities. There’s less money in the private sector, less opportunity to accrue wealth. Income taxes and others threaten to go higher; they do go higher.
original
It all adds up to the government growing, the private sector shrinking, freedom being lost ever so slowly, and nobody ever talks about stopping this. Everybody gets sucked into debating the crisis of the moment according to the terms of the moment, without any context and relationship to the past and a knowable future and a relevant perusal of the present. These little debates take place within their own little universe, as though they’re unaffected by things that have happened in the past.
We hear the most outrageous things. The government’s gonna shut down. Life can’t go on as we know it if we don’t spend $22 billion this year. For 15 to 20 years, I have been behind this microphone, and I’ve actually been defending the accusation that Republicans want to starve children. It comes up — predictably, regularly — and for 15 or 20 years I have been trying to tell people in this country via this radio show, “No, the Republicans are not trying to starve children.”
The allegation itself ought to disqualify the people who make it, because it’s patently absurd. There’s nobody trying to starve anybody in terms of food, but particularly Republicans trying to starve children? Republicans trying to deny people health care? The Republicans want big business to be able to pollute the air? The Republicans want their children living in an economic and environmental sewer? It’s an insult to my intelligence to have to even try to defend this to people.
The idea that there are people who believe it is bad enough. I can understand it once or twice, but for 20 years this cycle has been repeating, and it’s ridiculous. It’s a distraction. Either one of two things is happening: Either more and more people believe this idiocy, or more and more people are just saying, “You know what? I don’t want any part of this,” and they’re not paying attention to it. National Journal has a piece today by Matthew Cooper.
Just when you thought the Drive-Bys could not top themselves with “sequesteria,” we get this. Matthew Cooper is comparing the 2.2% reduction in the rate of spending increase to the Oklahoma City bombing. Now, he immediately says that he’s not making that comparison. But if he’s not, why did he bring it up in relationship to sequestration? That seems the point of his article. It seems that sequestration has a good side that it will show the American public that the government is important, that the American people will learn that we should not demonize the government.
He says the sequester cuts are gonna stop air traffic control.
original
Well, you know, that’s happened before. Ronaldus Magnus fired the air traffic controllers when they went on strike in the early eighties, and the airplanes still flew, and the airports remained opened. The schools remained open, and the military was still out there firing weapons at bad guys. But we need to live through this sequester so people will find out just how important and relevant government is to their life and how we should not demonize it.
Not only will the sequester stop air traffic control, Mr. Cooper says it’ll end meat inspections. It’ll close Yellowstone. This is exactly what I mean: The budget battle of 1995 was gonna end the sleigh rides at Jellystone National Park. CNN’s Larry King actually got the sleigh ride concessionaire on his TV show, and the sleigh ride concessionaire — who ended up being a conservative. We ended up talking to that guy. He called here, but he was playing it for all it was worth.
Yeah, he went on and he talked about how tough it was gonna be. Nobody was gonna be able to go on the sleigh rides because the government wasn’t gonna be paying him to do it. Remember all the federal employees were going to lose their Thanksgiving turkeys because of the government shutdown. Oh, folks, if you weren’t around then, it was Armageddon — and so is this. But never mind that the world didn’t end when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers.
Never mind that the states have their own meat inspectors and they pay teachers and cops and firefighters. The federal government doesn’t. Never mind that there has to be enough money remaining in the $3.7 trillion budget, after the $44 billion in “cuts” to keep the national parks open and everything else operating. Look at it this way: How much money do you earn a year, $100,000? Just pick a round number. If you earn $100,000 a year, and every now and then the government comes to you and says, “We need to raise taxes.
“You can afford to do without as much as you’re earning. You don’t really need that much. We’re gonna raise taxes because we need to invest in education here, and we need to invest in research and development, and we need to invest in jobs, and we need to invest in infrastructure. So we’re gonna raise your taxes.” You’re expected to not complain and get along with less. Now, the federal government earns a lot more than $100,000 a year. The federal government has $3.7 trillion!
But whereas you are not supposed to complain and you’re supposed to be able to get along just fine with a little tax increase if you make $100,000, the government can’t be expected to continue to operate if $22 billion is subtracted from their $3.7 trillion. This is the equivalent of the government being asked to do without a penny and a half, ladies and gentlemen — and they can’t do it. A penny and a half closes airports and shuts down air traffic control. It shuts down meat inspection.
It shuts down the military’s civilian personnel. A penny and a half out of our budget not being spent. Whereas you are expected to happily pay more and get by just as you have been on a little less next year, the government is never, ever supposed to be able to get by with a little less. Can you imagine if the government came along said, “We want to raise your taxes 10%,” and you said, “Well, no! I won’t be able to afford food. I won’t be able to afford clothes for my kids. I might not be able to afford my mortgage.”
If you used the same arguments on them that they use on you, do you know what they’d do? They’d tell you, “(Raspberry!) Deal with it.” But here we are over and over again.” The American public needs to learn that the sun will rise. That’s what we need to learn: That the sun will still rise and the sky will still be blue and the birds are still gonna chirp after this sequester if it happens. Here’s Mr. Cooper: “The last time I can think of such an educational moment was not the short-lived government shutdown on the ’90s, but the Oklahoma City bombing. …
“In 2001, looking back on the bombing, Clinton said: ‘And I had, like every politician, on occasion, gotten upset by some example of government waste or something the way we all do, and referred derisively to government bureaucrats. And I promised myself that I would never use those two words together for the rest of my life. I would treat those people who serve our country with respect, whether they’re in uniform, in law enforcement, firefighter, nurses, any other things.’”
Then Cooper says, “I’m not comparing the tragedy of Oklahoma City to sequestration.” Of course not. He just compared them! So we can’t even think about cutting federal spending by $22 billion without being accused of disrespecting law enforcement, firefighters and nurses, none of whom are paid for by the federal government. Anyway, this is the predictable course this takes every time such a crisis appears. We just lived through this with the fiscal cliff. We just went through this with the expansion of the debt limit. If it all sounds familiar to you, it’s because it is.
We haven’t had a federal budget in four years, and because of that, we have these never-ending budget crises.
“Funding crises.”
END TRANSCRIPT
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/02/21/for_the_first_time_in_my_life_i_am_ashamed_of_my_country
2-21-13
Guns and Pensions
By Thomas Sowell
A nation's choice between spending on military defense and spending on civilian goods has often been posed as "guns versus butter." But understanding the choices of many nations' political leaders might be helped by examining the contrast between their runaway spending on pensions while skimping on military defense.
Huge pensions for retired government workers can be found from small municipalities to national governments on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a reason. For elected officials, pensions are virtually the ideal thing to spend money on, politically speaking. Many kinds of spending of the taxpayers' money win votes from the recipients. But raising taxes to pay for this spending loses votes from the taxpayers. Pensions offer a way out of this dilemma for politicians.
Creating pensions that offer generous retirement benefits wins votes in the present by promising spending in the future. Promises cost nothing in the short run — and elections are held in the short run, long before the pensions are due.
By contrast, private insurance companies that sell annuities are forced by law to set aside enough assets to cover the cost of the annuities they have promised to pay. But nobody can force the government to do that — and most governments do not.
This means that it is only a matter of time before pensions are due to be paid and there is not enough money set aside to pay for them. This applies to Social Security and other government pensions here, as well as to all sorts of pensions in other countries overseas.
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Eventually, the truth will come out that there is just not enough money in the till to pay what retirees were promised. But eventually can be a long time.
A politician can win quite a few elections between now and eventually — and be living in comfortable retirement by the time it is somebody else's problem to cope with the impossibility of paying retirees the pensions they were promised.
Inflating the currency and paying pensions in dollars that won't buy as much is just one of the ways for the government to seem to be keeping its promises, while in fact welshing on the deal.
The politics of military spending are just the opposite of the politics of pensions. In the short run, politicians can always cut military spending without any immediate harm being visible, however catastrophic the consequences may turn out to be down the road.
Despite the huge increase in government spending on domestic programs during Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s, FDR cut back on military spending. On the eve of the Second World War, the United States had the 16th largest army in the world, right behind Portugal.
Even this small military force was so inadequately supplied with equipment that its training was skimped. American soldiers went on maneuvers using trucks with "tank" painted on their sides, since there were not enough real tanks to go around.
American warplanes were not updated to match the latest warplanes of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. After World War II broke out, American soldiers stationed in the Philippines were fighting for their lives using rifles left over from the Spanish-American war, decades earlier. The hand grenades they threw at the Japanese invaders were so old that they often failed to explode. At the battle of Midway, of 82 Americans who flew into combat in obsolete torpedo planes, only 12 returned alive. In Europe, our best tanks were never as good as the Germans' best tanks, which destroyed several times as many American tanks as the Germans lost in tank battles.
Fortunately, the quality of American warplanes eventually caught up with and surpassed the best that the Germans and Japanese had. But a lot of American pilots lost their lives needlessly in outdated planes before that happened.
These were among the many prices paid for skimping on military spending in the years leading up to World War II. But, politically, the path of least resistance is to cut military spending in the short run and let the long run take care of itself.
In a nuclear age, we may not have time to recover from our short-sighted policies, as we did in World War II.
2-20-13
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." --Thomas Jefferson
Editorial Exegesis
"During the summer 2011 debt ceiling battle, President Obama's White House came up with the idea of sequestration. It is a mechanism designed to trigger automatic spending cuts in the event that a congressional 'super committee' couldn't agree to at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. Congress passed the White House proposal, and Obama signed it into law. And in November 2011, Obama vowed, 'I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy offramps on this one.' How times have changed. With the automatic spending cuts scheduled to go into effect March 1, it's now Obama who is imploring Congress to undo them. As is his wont, he's resorting to demagoguery to make his case. Surrounding himself with first responders during a speech on Tuesday, Obama predicted a virtual apocalypse if the cuts he once supported now go into effect. 'Emergency responders like the ones who are here today -- their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded,' he said. 'Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.' ... Over a decade, the $1.2 trillion in scheduled cuts are barely more than a rounding error when compared with the $48 trillion the federal government would otherwise spend, according to the Congressional Budget Office. To say the sequester will not be painful for many would be untrue. But if Obama wants to preserve his credibility, he should probably stifle the Chicken Little routine. The historical and continued growth in government spending will not even stop to take a breath, because the 'cuts' in spending are actually just reductions in the projected growth of government spending. ... If Obama can't manage an ever-growing budget like this one without turning criminals loose on the population, then perhaps he's out of his league serving as president." --The Washington Examiner
2-19-13
Obama's Progressive State of Disunion
Pinocchio/Picasso Politics -- All Lies and Distortions
By Mark Alexander
"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." --Article II, Section 1, Constitution of the United States
Ad Nauseam
OK, truth be told, I didn't actually watch Barack Hussein Obama's fabulous State of the Union Address on Tuesday night. I missed all the phony fanfare, pompous posturing, thespian theatrics and teleprompted NeoCom propaganda, instead devoting that evening to something more productive -- cleaning our family's defensive weapons (what BO calls "assault weapons").
I did note ahead of the address, however, that the first choice for "hero prop" next to First Femme Michelle was missing. That seat was offered to former Army Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha, upon whom Obama conferred the Medal of Honor the day before his SOTU. Sergeant Romesha exhibited extraordinary valor at the Battle of Kamdesh in Afghanistan, but humbly declined Obama's invitation, saying he would prefer to spend the evening with family and friends.1.
Though I escaped the SOTU telecast, I did skim the transcript the next day in order to determine how Obama's first-term pledge -- "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency" -- is holding up, and to determine how his goal of "fundamentally transforming" our nation was progressing.
To that end, I was shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that his address to the nation was full of, well, audacious prevarications in direct opposition to Rule of Law as enshrined in our Constitution, and direct violation of his oath to uphold same. But I must give Obama credit where credit is due -- he certainly made progress on that fundamental transformation, and he outlined an ambitious second term agenda to complete it.
Here are a few more notable SOTU excerpts for your reading displeasure.
National Defense: "As long as I'm commander in chief, we will do whatever we must to protect those who serve their country abroad, and we will maintain the best military in the world." Reality Check: Obama has already cut defense spending to the point that DoD is no longer able to fight a two-front war. And Obama's recent mandates promoting open homosexuals and women on the frontlines are not exactly boosting military readiness or morale. Obama asserted, "By the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over." Well if he declares it's over, then it must be true!
National Security: "Today, the organization [al-Qa'ida] that attacked us on 9/11 is a shadow of its former self." Tell that to the families of those killed in Benghazi and those suffering the ongoing battles in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen and our great ally, Israel.
Debt: "Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion." This reduction is all smoke and mirrors, and it includes cuts that have not been made, interest expense savings that have not been saved, and reductions in budgetary spending increases that are called "cuts."
While Obama failed to focus on the fact that he's increased the national debt by 60 percent during his first term, he did assert, "Nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime."
First, notice the weasel word "should." Second, if that dime store rhetoric sounds familiar, it's because this is an oft-repeated whopper. Here are just a few examples from 2009: "I will not sign a bill that adds a dime to our deficits -- either now or in the future." "Health care reform will not add one dime to our deficit." "I will not sign health insurance reform ... if that reform adds even one dime to our deficit over the next decade -- and I mean what I say." And from 2010: "That's also why we're restoring pay-as-you-go: a simple rule that says Congress can't spend a dime without cutting a dime elsewhere." "This [jobs] legislation is fully paid for and will not add one single dime to our deficit." "We will not add one dime to our deficit." And from 2011: "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficit." "I want to lower the corporate rate and eliminate these loopholes to pay for it, so that it doesn't add a dime to our deficit." Ad infinitum.
Fact is, since he took office in 2009, Obama has added almost 60 TRILLION dimes to the deficit. He claims his initiatives are "for the sake of our children and our future," and yet he's saddled them with $6,000,000,000,000 in debt. And he wants to add another $5,000,000,000,000?
Mardi Gras POTUS
Given the long list of largess Obama promised, it struck me as no small irony that this SOTU coincided with Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday, for the secular crowd, is a day of excess, unmitigated libation and reckless abandon. For the Faithful, it is a day of preparation followed by a lengthy period of reflective austerity. Clearly, given the current rate of debt accumulation, days of severe taxpayer austerity are on the horizon.
2-18-13
No bluff: Ammo mag company Magpul, other firms will leave if Colorado gun-grabber bills pass; Update: CO House passes mag limit
By Michelle Malkin
On Friday, liberal lawmakers in the Colorado state House passed legislation requiring background checks on private gun sales and placing limits on ammo magazines. A final vote may come today before the bills move on to the state Senate. Dems now hold majorities in both chambers and the governor’s mansion is occupied by Democrat John Hickenlooper.
Here’s how radical the proposed measures are compared to the rest of the nation:
…Colorado would join California, New York and Rhode Island as states that require sweeping background checks on virtually all gun purchases.
Currently, only four states prohibit magazines that hold over 10 rounds, while New Jersey bans magazines with more than 15 rounds and Maryland those with more than 20, the group said.
Two other gun measures put forth by Colorado Democrats also received preliminary approval on Friday by House lawmakers. One bill would ban concealed weapons on college campuses. The other would charge gun buyers for background checks.
Hickenlooper has won praise from the Wall Street Journal in the past for showing “good sense” about gun control. But when progressive push comes to shove, what will Hickenlooper — a rumored 2016 Democratic presidential contender — do? The test is nigh. As his Democratic colleagues prepare to send him a pile of ineffectual new gun regulations, Colorado-based companies are preparing to abandon the state.
Is Hickenlooper ready to accept responsibility for the disappearance of hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions in revenue and spending? Ammo magazine manufacturer Magpul served notice late last week:
Colorado’s largest and most profitable manufacturer of high-capacity ammunition magazines has vowed to leave the state if lawmakers pass a measure banning the devices — a move officials with the company say could cost hundreds of jobs and upward of $85 million in potential spending this year.
Magpul’s threat has Democratic lawmakers scrambling to strike a balance that remains true to their goal of limiting the number of rounds a magazine can hold without frightening off businesses.
“If we’re able to stay in Colorado and manufacture a product, but law-abiding citizens of the state were unable to purchase the product, customers around the state and the nation would boycott us for remaining here,” said Doug Smith, Magpul’s chief operating officer. “Staying here would hurt our business.”
…in addition to a wide array of gun-magazine products, the privately-held Magpul makes many other products, including cases for mobile phones and tactical sights for firearms. This year, the company says it expects to spend upward of $85 million in Colorado alone on employee payroll, manufacturing subcontractors, suppliers and service providers.
Smith said much of Magpul’s business comes from out-of-state sales, contracts with the U.S. military, and with local and national law enforcement.
The ripple effect could reach a dozen other firms located in Colorado:
If Magpul Industries follows through on its threat to leave Colorado, it could harm more than a dozen Front Range firms specializing in plastic injection molding and reduce the region’s capacity in that manufacturing process.
…As much as possible, the company tries to contract with Colorado vendors, who represent about 90 percent of its supply chain, he said. Those suppliers received about $46 million last year from Magpul, with the company projecting that number to reach $85 million for 2013, Liptak said.
A large share of those dollars goes to manufacturers that mold the company’s mostly plastic components, including the controversial cases that can hold more than 15 rounds.
North Denver’s Alfred Manufacturing Co. has grown from 40 employees in 2008 to 150 largely because of the work provided by Magpul, said the company’s third-generation chief executive, Greg Alfred.
“If House Bill 1224 passes, we will relocate part or all of our operations out of state,” Alfred warned Gov. John Hickenlooper and members of the state legislature in a letter Friday.
Alfred said plans for a $1 million expansion to add another 15,000-square-foot building to the 60,000 square feet the company has at West 44th Avenue and Elati Street are on hold.
…Blaine Dacus, molding-division manager at Alfred, said Magpul contracts support more than a dozen plastic-injection- molding firms.
“They have kept molders in business,” Dacus said.
Alfred Manufacturing’s legacy metal stamping and machining business runs on four 10-hour shifts a week, while Magpul contracts have kept the plastics side going 24/7, Alfred said.
Arrogant Democrats here in Colorado have fooled themselves into thinking that companies like Magpul are bluffing. The company fired back last night on Facebook:
We’re hearing some rumors that the Gov and the Dem caucus think we are bluffing. Just to clarify for them, then…we’re not a political company. We don[']t play political games. We’ve made our position very clear, very publicly. We would not survive lying to our customer base, nor would we ever consider it. If you pass this, we will leave, and you will own it. We’ve already got plans in place to get PMAG manufacturing moved rapidly, and the rest of the company will follow. We will make sure to at least have a small remain-behind operation through the 2014 elections so that we can remind folks why we are gone.
In other news to be filed under Gun Control Hysteria Has Consequences, a number of gun makers are now refusing to sell arms to police in gun-grabbing New York state:
Olympia, Wash.-based Olympic Arms is one of the industry’s smaller players, but news that it has stopped sales to police in the Empire State has added a new twist to the protests over the law, and lit a fire in the blogosphere.
“We just didn’t feel it was right,” said Brian Schuetz, Olympic’s president and co-owner.
The new law allows continued sales of assault-style rifles to police agencies but not to civilians. “It didn’t make sense that citizens can’t have what police departments have,” Schuetz said.
Schuetz’s company posted an expansive explanation of its decision to pull out of New York on its Facebook page: ” … Legislation recently passed in the State of New York outlaws the AR-15 and many other firearms, and will make it illegal for the good and free citizens of New York to own a large selection of legal and safe firearms and magazines. We feel as though the passage of this legislation exceeds the authority granted to the government of New York by its citizens, and violates the Constitution of the United States.”
LaRue Tactical and EFI have also joined the sales boycott against New York.
Is this Colorado’s fate? What say you, Gov. Hickenlooper?
***
Update: The Colorado House just passed the magazine limit 34-31, with three Democrats voting no. On to the state Senate. Meanwhile, three more gun control measures up for recorded votes today.
2-17-13
Dems Sponsor Bill To Violate Fourth Amendment Rights Of Gun Owners
Washington State Democrats have sponsored Senate Bill 5737, which has a little provision that apparently was to go unnoticed that would have said that police have a right to search a private citizen’s home once per year if they own certain types of firearms.
According to the legislation:
In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall … safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.
Yes, that means liberal Democrats pushed forward this legislation in open and defiance of the Fourth Amendment. But that’s not all. When they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they exclaimed it wasn’t their fault and that they made mistake.
“I have to admit it shouldn’t be in there,” said Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle). “I made a mistake,” said Sen. Adam Kline (D-Seattle). “I frankly should have vetted this more closely.”
Yeah, there was no mistake. This was deliberate. Murray and Kline were sponsors of the bill. They knew exactly what was in it. This is just more BS from the Left.
Murray also told a gun-control rally in January, “We will only win if we reach out and continue to change the hearts and minds of Washingtonians. We can attack them, or start a dialogue.”
Interestingly, Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times writes about Lance Palmer, a Seattle trial lawyer and self-described liberal. “I’m a liberal Democrat — I’ve voted for only one Republican in my life,” Palmer told me. “But now I understand why my right-wing opponents worry about having to fight a government takeover.”
He added: “It’s exactly this sort of thing that drives people into the arms of the NRA.”
Now this part is actually somewhat encouraging. If a self professed liberal Democrat, a trial lawyer at that, understands why we believe a real danger of government takeover and abandonment of the law of the land is genuine, then that is at least one guy who is thinking. Hopefully, he’ll drop his liberalism and become a pro-gun attorney!
Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/02/dems-sponsor-bill-to-violate-fourth-amendment-rights-of-gun-owners/#ixzz2LHlVPt5e
2-16-13
Democrats Heart Medicare Fraudsters
By Michelle Malkin
Hey, remember when President Obama crusaded against Medicare fraud and vowed to crack down aggressively on scammers who’ve bilked the program out of an estimated $90 billion? Like Archie and Edith Bunker used to sing: Those were the daaaays.
While Democrats pretend to protect the elderly and disabled, leaders of the People’s Party have pocketed gobs of campaign contributions from fat-cat donors tied to massive Medicare rip-off schemes.
Let’s talk some more about Dr. Salomon Melgen, shall we? We now know that the jet-setting Florida eye doctor who flew beleaguered Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to several alleged sex romps in the Dominican Republic also overbilled the government by $8.9 million for care at his clinic. That’s according to Menendez’s own aides. They acknowledged last week that their boss met with federal health bureaucrats at least twice to lobby on Melgen’s behalf.
“Federal investigators and health-care auditors have had concerns about Melgen’s billing practices at various times over the past decade,” according to two former federal officials who spoke to The Washington Post. “In part, they have examined the volume of eye injections, surgeries and laser treatments performed at his West Palm Beach clinic.”
Now, brace yourselves. A Menendez aide says that while Sen. Sleaze-Bob intervened, he didn’t know nuttin’ about Melgen being under investigation. Just like he didn’t know nuttin’ about his longtime aide working for Melgen’s port security firm in the Dominican Republic, on whose behalf Sen. Sleaze-Bob also intervened.
And just like he didn’t know nuttin’ about yet another ride on Melgen’s plane in 2008 (exposed this week by the conservative Daily Caller), which he forgot to disclose to the Senate.
Senate Democratic leaders have done nuttin’ to prevent Menendez, who also sits on the Senate Finance Committee overseeing Medicare, from playing a prominent role in Medicare reform negotiations while Melgen’s Medicare fraud investigation unfolds.
It’s all par for the Democrats’ conflict-of-interest course, of course. Recently departed Obama health care czar Nancy-Ann DeParle raked in millions from her positions on a handful of corporate boards under fire for various regulatory violations, whistleblower complaints and Medicare fraud.
One of the companies for which DeParle served as a director, kidney dialysis empire DaVita, has been plagued by whistleblower fraud allegations for nearly 20 years. These include long-standing claims (many still under investigation or the subject of ongoing litigation) that the company overused the anemia drug Epogen and then billed Medicare for it; submitted fraudulent Medicare claims for dialysis drugs; and forged alleged kickback schemes between doctors and joint ventures.
Another Medicare fraud suspect, the Stryker Corporation, paid nearly $17 million to settle allegations about false claims submissions in 2007. Pat Stryker, liberal heiress to the Stryker fortune, is an Obama bundler and one of the Democratic Party’s wealthiest progressives. She was also behind the now-bankrupt Obama green energy boondoggle in Colorado, Abound Solar.
While the Obama campaign (aided and abetted by the lapdog media) viciously smeared Mitt Romney by tying him to Medicare fraud he had absolutely nothing to do with while at Bain Capital, this White House has escaped any scrutiny of its own ties to accused Medicare scammers. Instead, the administration was happy to powwow with Menendez and other Democratic leaders on policy strategy this week.
What did they have to say about Menendez’s lobbying on behalf of Medicare exploiter Melgen and the conflict-of-interest cloud stretching from Capitol Hill to 1600 Pennsylvania? Nuttin’.
2-15-13
"[Obama's] speech gave every indication that he remains a hostage to the superstition that we can spend our way to national prosperity -- or that we can pass laws that will force employers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other businesses to spend our way to prosperity for us. ... In reality, the state of our union is this: The United States is today $6 trillion deeper in debt than it was before Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. That represents an increase of 57 percent in just four years. Put another way: Out of every dollar the country owes in government debt, 36 cents was acquired under the Obama administration. The state of our union is this: Today there are more than 4 million fewer Americans working than there were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president -- not including those who have retired. ... The state of our union is this: Economic growth is weaker than it has been during any recovery in recent memory; in fact, the economy shrank in the last quarter. ... The state of our union is this: Incomes are lower today than they were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. ... The president boasted that a decade of war is coming to an end. It is, and a new decade of war is beginning. He boasted that al-Qaeda is decimated, but that news has not reached Benghazi or most of North Africa. So the state of our union also is this: North Korea sets off nuclear weapons with impunity. Iran seeks them without fear. Islamists slaughter our diplomatic personnel while the president's national-defense team keeps bankers' hours. ... The president's confrontational, hectoring, and highly ideological speech ought to be a wake-up call to the country. The Republican majority in the House is the only real check on his power. Supplementing that check with a Republican majority in the Senate is imperative. Even through all of President Obama's obfuscations, that much is clear." --National Review
2-14-13
Random Thoughts
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Random thoughts on the passing scene:
I can't get excited by the question of whether Senator Robert Menendez had sex with a prostitute in Central America. It is her word against his — and when it comes to a prostitute's word against a politician's word, that is too close to call.
If an American citizen went off to join Hitler's army during World War II, would there have been any question that this alone would make it legal to kill him? Why then is there an uproar about killing an American citizen who has joined terrorist organizations that are at war against the United States today?
Of all the things said during the gun control controversy, one of the most disquieting has been the emphasis on "mental health." If that ends up letting the guesses of shrinks put more murderers back on the street, the public can be in even greater danger after such a "reform."
However emotionally similar envy and resentment may seem, their consequences are often very different. Envy may spur some people to efforts to lift themselves up, while resentment is more likely to spur efforts to tear others down.
New York's Mayor Bloomberg wants to restrict the use of pain-killers in hospitals. Is there any subject on which this man does not consider himself an expert? There are, after all, doctors treating individual patients who currently decide how much pain-killer to use.
One of the talking points in favor of confirming Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense is that he was a wounded combat veteran. How does that qualify anyone to run the whole military establishment? Benedict Arnold was a wounded combat veteran!
In the modern welfare state, a vote becomes a license to take what others create — and these others include generations yet unborn.
Some people seem to think that glib and shallow political correctness becomes Deep Stuff when it comes from a TV commentator with a foreign accent.
Can anyone explain why, when someone dies, most of what he has saved up over a lifetime should be turned over to politicians, rather than to his heirs?
The front page of the February issue of Townhall magazine says: "It's Messaging — not principles — that's hurting the GOP with Minority Voters." Neglecting to make their message clear hurts Republicans with all voters, but especially minority voters.
Why do so many judges' views of criminals seem to be the opposite of policemen's view? It could be that judges see criminals when they are on their best behavior, while the police see them at their worst. But I believe it is because judges have usually spent more time in educational institutions than policemen, and have picked up more politically correct nonsense as a result.
With all the discussion about gun control, I have not heard anybody on any side of this issue mention how many lives are saved by guns every year — which are far more than are lost in even the mass shootings that get so much media attention. But most of the media never mention the lives saved by guns.
Does anyone think that Iran and North Korea would be as threatening as they are if Ronald Reagan were President? I don't think it was a coincidence that the Iranians freed their American hostages just hours before Reagan took the oath of office.
People who are forever ready to charge others with "greed" never apply that word to the government. But, if you think the government is never greedy, check out what the government does under the escheat laws and eminent domain.
The latest anti-trust farce is the Justice Department's lawsuit to prevent the makers of Budweiser from buying up Corona beer. Even if this sale goes through, more than half of all the beer in the country will still be made by more than 2,700 other brewers, large and small.
I don't know how many Hispanic votes the Republicans think they are going to pick up by going soft on illegal immigration. But it may not be enough to offset the votes they lose from their existing supporters, not counting the future voters added for the Democrats as a result of legalizing existing illegals and attracting more illegals in the future.
2-13-13
"The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind." --Thomas Paine
Inspiration
Dr. Benjamin Carson
Editor's Note: Neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson gave a wonderful speech at the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Here are a few excerpts:
"[W]e've reached the point where people are afraid to actually talk about what they want to say because somebody might be offended. ... We've got to get over this sensitivity. ... [Political correctness] is dangerous. Because, you see, this country -- one of the founding principles was freedom of thought and freedom of expression. And it muffles people. It puts a muzzle on them. And at the same time, it keeps people from discussing important issues while the fabric of this society is being changed. And we cannot fall for that trick. ... [I]n 1831 Alexis de Toqueville came to study America. The Europeans were fascinated. How could a fledgling nation, barely 50 years old, already be competing with them on virtually every level? This was impossible. De Toqueville was going to sort it out and he looked at our government and he was duly impressed by the three branches of government.... He said, 'Wow, this is really something,' but then he said, 'but let me look at their educational system' and he was blown away. See, anybody who had finished the second grade was completely literate. He could find a mountain man on the outskirts of society who could read the newspaper and have a political discussion, could tell him how the government worked. ... [T]he people who founded this Nation said that our system of government was designed for a well-informed and educated populace, and when they become less informed, they become vulnerable. Think about that. ... Why is it so important that we educate our people? Because we don't want to go down the same pathway as so many pinnacle nations that have preceded us. I think particularly about ancient Rome. Very powerful. Nobody could even challenge them militarily, but what happened to them? They destroyed themselves from within. Moral decay, fiscal irresponsibility. They destroyed themselves. If you don't think that can happen to America, you get out your books and you start reading, but you know, we can fix it. ... All we need to do is remember what our real responsibilities are so that we can solve the problems." --Dr. Benjamin Carson
2-12-13
If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave. --Samuel Adams
2-11-13The Gun Control Playbook: The REAL agenda forumlated in 1994
Posted by National Director dee< Tea Party COMMAND Center
Great information shared by our member by Jim Fogarty. You will see this resembles the Feinstein bill shared in another discussion.
The following is excerpted from a 1994 agenda memo from Handgun Control, Inc. (Now the Brady Campaign) The memo was mailed to me by a federal police officer I used to know, so I trust the source:
"Notes and minutes of Meeting of Friday, December 17, 1993. Rough Draft Proposal for Internal Memo and Five Year Plan"."Confidential Not For general Distribution".
"Special praise to Senator Dianne Feinstein was mentioned for her courage in standing up to the ever diminishing number of GUN CRAZY EXTREMISTS who are actually pushing to make our society a KILLING FIELD."
"What is pending now and can be law in 1994!...Ban ON ALL SEMIAUTOS WHICH CAN FIRE MORE THAN 6 BULLETS WITHOUT RELOADING." ..."Ban of all machine guns, DESTRUCTIVE DEVICES , short shotguns/rifles, assault weapons..."...."Ban on possession of a firearm within a home located within 1000 feet of schoolyard." ..."Ban on all realistic replicas/toy guns or non-firearms capable of being rendered realistic."..."The right of victims of gun violence to sue manufacturers and dealers to be affirmed and perhaps aided with money from government programs."...."Taxes on ammo, dealers licenses & guns to offset the medical costs to society."...."the eventual ban of all semi-automatics " – 1994 HCI Agenda Memo
"Five year plan: Licenses:"...."It is reasonable to require that all individuals must prove to the signers that they require a firearm."..."Reduction of the number of guns to require an arsenal license"..."due to the fact that any number of guns constitutes a grave threat to the safety of the community"..."no arsenal licensing be permitted in counties with populations of more than 200,000"..."requirement of federally approved storage safe for all guns"...
"Public Safety Regulations": "Ban on Manufacturing in counties with a population of more than 200,000". Guns are being built all the time and the number of licensed manufacturers are too great to justify the threat to public safety"..."The pending national ban on all assault weapons... can be expanded to eventually cover any firearm with a remotely military appearance."...."We hope that this point system can eventually be expanded to high powered air guns and "paint ball" weapons, which can inflict great damage, and with a little effort can be easily converted into real guns." ..."Banning the carrying of a firearm anywhere but home or range or in transit from one to the other."..."Control of ammunition belonging to certain surplus firearms: Senator Moynihan has already proposed a tax or ban on .22LR, 32 ACP, and 25 ACP , and 9 MM ammo,..."......"Eventual ban of handgun possession: This may be closer to reality than many of us think. Handguns are becoming increasingly unpopular and we think that within five years we can enact a total ban on possession at the federal level."...
"Ammunition and explosives: Banning of any quantity of smokeless powder or black powder which would constitute more than the equivalent of 100 rounds of ammunition. With the bombing of the World Trade Center, it has been made clear that WE MUST CONTROL ( yes the key phrase here is "we must control" everyone else's life and allow no freedom! ) the amount of explosive materials in public hands." ..."Ban on the possession of explosive powders of more than I kilogram at any one time. GUN NUTS ARE NOTORIOUS FOR CIRCUMVENTING THE INTENT OF THE LAW..."..."This additional language can be useful in preventing "Bomb-Maker" Hobbyists and other DANGEROUS INDIVIDUALS ."..."Banning or strict licensing of all reloading components. Ammunition regulation laws can be regularly bypassed by home loaders..."..."National registration of ammunition or ammo buyers"..."with a possible background check to eliminate the purchase of dangerous ammo by felons or MENTAL PATIENTS."
"Gun ranges: ...waiting period for rentals on pistol ranges"
"Activities which promote gun violence: Banning Gun Shows..."BANNING OF MILITARY REENACTMENTS: THE QUESTIONABLE "HISTORICAL" VALUE OF THESE EVENTS HAS ESCAPED PUBLIC SCRUTINY FOR TOO LONG. MANY OF THESE SO CALLED HISTORICAL EVENTS ARE A MERE EXCUSE FOR GUN NUTS TO BLAST THE COUNTRYSIDE WITH AUTOMATIC WEAPONS. WHAT IS TO KEEP THEM FROM LOADING LIVE BULLETS AND HAVING THOSE STRAY BULLETS KILL INNOCENT CHILDREN?"... Begin to curb hunting on all public lands. Blood sports are an anathema to a civilized society..." ..."MAKING GUN OWNERS RECORDS AND PHOTOS MATTER OF PUBLIC RECORD"...SO THAT COMMUNITIES CAN HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE OF WHO POSES A DANGER TO THEIR COMMUNITY BEFORE DISASTER STRIKES" ..."Random police checks for weapons "...
"Banning of military accouterments: Essential to the NEANDERTHAL GUN CULTURE are the typical military clothing, CAMOUFLAGE, POUCHES, and gear, BOOTS and other combat gear ....Elimination of the future sale of these items will cripple the culture of violence well into the 21st century"...
"Stricter guidelines for violence in television and the movies: We should look at the possibility of victims of violence initiated by copying an act on television and the movie or video screen, suing the makers of such shows for compensation to their suffering."...
"THE TOTAL ELIMINATION OF ARMS FROM SOCIETY: "
"CONTROL OF DANGEROUS LITERATURE ( bomb making, machine gun conversions, etc.) Too much irresponsible material is purportedly covered by the 1ST AMENDMENT, however the time will come when our nation has to agree THAT SOME LITERATURE DOES NOT BELONG IN A SAFE SOCIETY..." ... "We must realize that THERE CAN BE SUCH A THING AS TOO MUCH FREEDOM where such literature poses a serious threat to the public safety."
"1994 sounds like the death knell for the bully tactics of the NRA and the culture of violence in America!!"..."With the loss of power and clout of the NRA and their various smaller crony organizations crumbling to dust, we can eliminate a 200 YEAR OLD LICENSE TO MURDER into history and enter the 21st century a safer place for our children and our children’s children."
"THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS CONFIDENTIAL!! DO NOT DISTRIBUTE BEYOND THE OFFICES OF HCI UNLESS HAND DELIVERED TO AN APPROVED STATE OF FEDERAL LEGISLATOR OR LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL . ..Handgun license fees: year 1 to 2"..."year 3 to 4"..."year 5 to 8: ...$550-625 annual fee...suggested penalties for non-compliance...failure to turn over guns for destruction...$15,000/18 months in jail...The federal government estimates that around 65-75 million Americans own guns. These fees and licensing requirements would allow us to take guns out of the hands of an estimated 30 million unsuitable or ineligible individuals. The fees for the remaining qualifying individuals would additionally reduce the number to about 14 million gun owners"....
"OUR EVENTUAL GOAL IS TO REDUCE THE NUMBER OF LICENSEES TO ZERO . The revenue itself can be utilized to achieve this goal." ....Establish a nationwide system of toll free numbers for reporting violators of the new gun restrictions and non-licensees. " ..."Suing gun organizations under the RICO statute: It would be expected that gun groups and lobbying groups such as the NRA would encourage non compliance. Thus nationally recognized groups will be technically "organizing to break the law. Once this can be proven, these groups will be vulnerable to lawsuits based on the RICO statute and drained of their financial resources through repeated legal action."
"Suing the makers of toy/replica guns, toy weapons and violent entertainment:....The items could include: violent video games, television shows, movies, video tapes, WATER GUNS, SUPER SOAKERS, electronic noise guns, toy weapons like swords, batons, martial arts items."
"TORT LAW AS WE KNOW IT MAY NOT HAVE TO UNDER GO A CHANGE IN ORDER TO FACILITATE THESE ACTIONS. AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ACTUALLY WIN IN ORDER TO AFFECT CHANGE, SINCE THE CONSTANT THREAT OF LEGAL ACTION WILL INDUCE CHANGE IN THE WAY PEOPLE DO BUSINESS. "
" A QUICK GUIDE TO ARGUING WITH GUN ZEALOTS:....Our children are being threatened, murdered and cut down in the street...With tens of millions of people owning guns, the potential for lawlessness and gun massacres increases ten fold each year...THERE IS NO SPORTING PURPOSE FOR A SEMIAUTOMATIC FIREARM ...HANDGUNS HAVE NO PURPOSES OTHER THAN KILLING PEOPLE .....SELF DEFENSE IS NO LEGITIMATE REASON FOR OWNING A GUN ... MOST GUN DEALERS SELL THOUSANDS OF GUNS ILLEGALLY TO GANGS AND CRIMINALS EVERY DAY."
" Repeat these FACTS over and over and eventually the public will begin to see the light. They cannot casually dismiss these devastating facts any more.....REMEMBER THAT THEY ARE DEFENDING THE RIGHT TO MURDER IN OUR COUNTRY. THIS ALONE MAKES THEM LOOK BRUTISH AND NEANDERTHAL...IT IS BECOMING LESS AND LESS POLITICALLY CORRECT TO OWN A GUN. Ultimately society as a whole will look upon gun owners with dread and disdain."
"Other pressing points: Military assault weapons: The confusion by the general public between semi-automatic and automatic weapons can work in our favor. Constantly dropping the words- submachine gun, fully automatic , machine gun, military weapon, high tech killing machine are good debaters tricks to instill a sense of dread over these weapons. Ultimately people will learn to dread these weapons..."
"Remember that there is no place for any kind of semi auto weapon in a safe society regardless of how it looks, since many so called sport rifles can be easily converted to military configuration. Thus all semi automatic weapons are capable of being called "assault weapons". Never let up on this fact."
"Endangerment of children: It is difficult for Gun groups to counter arguments which call attention to the endangerment of children. Making the opposition look callous creates an image of brutality and indifference to the audience...Enough is enough: Americans are sick and tired of the violence that is infecting our society...it is time for action, to take back our streets from crime, if we don't take action now this crime wave will engulf America" ( crime's been going down, sorry to disappoint you )
"Assault weapons are the weapons of choice for gangs , mentally deficient individuals and criminals across the board. The gun lobby argues that anyone at any time should have the right to buy and own these weapons of mass destruction"
2-10-13
I regret, as much as any member, the unavoidable weight and duration of the burdens to be imposed; having never been a proselyte to the doctrine, that public debts are public benefits. I consider them, on the contrary, as evils which ought to be removed as fast as honor and justice will permit."
--James Madison, Debates in the House of Representatives on the First Report on Public Credit, 1790
2-9-1320 Reasons America Is Becoming An Increasingly Nonfunctional Society
John Hawkins
1) Starting in the sixties there was an explosion of children born out-of-wedlock and kids who don't grow up in two parent families fare more poorly percentage wise on just about any and every scale imaginable including substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, suicide rates, criminality and homelessness.
2) Many people are becoming so childlike in their dependence on the government that they can't save for their own retirement, escape from an oncoming hurricane, or even purchase their own birth control without the government handling it for them.
3) Our legal system encourages frivolous lawsuits, is punitively expensive and because of the political inclinations of the judges, can often be almost random.
4) Leeching off more productive people has become much more acceptable. To many people, taking welfare, food stamps, free lunches and anything else they can get the government to force someone else to pay for isn't shameful; it's deserved, presumably because they're doing everyone else in the country such a wonderful favor just by existing.
5) The mainstream media has become so partisan for the Democratic Party that it's not significantly different from a state-run media. Every news story and scandal is reported differently based solely on which party is involved. "Scandals" that would destroy the careers of Republicans are largely ignored and treated as irrelevant when Democrats are involved.
6) Americans have lost confidence in our institutions. Most Americans don't trust our politicians, our criminal justice system, big business, our schools, our media or our churches.
7) As choices have proliferated because of the Internet, TV, and our affluent culture, Americans have become more alien to each other and share less and less cultural experiences. Today, two Americans may live in the same small community without ever talking, watching the same TV shows, listening to the same radio programs, or getting news from the same sources.
8) Our movies, music, and TV shows are provided by people who are almost universally hostile to conservatism, Christianity, and traditional American values.
9) We have stopped breaking up monopolies in this country and that has allowed mega-corporations to have an outsized and unhealthy level of influence on our political process. That's how corporations that make more money every sixty seconds than the average person does in a lifetime can rake in hundreds of millions each year in subsidies and be given access to billions of dollars’ worth of your money when they make dumb decisions that put their companies’ futures at risk.
10) Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and yet Christianity in this country is slowly retreating from Biblical principles, the Public Square, and American life in general.
11) Women becoming educated, moving into the work force and becoming much more independent has been a positive development. However, the downside of it is that it has led to later marriages, a soaring divorce rate, more out-of-wedlock birth, and much more conflict, discontent, and fights over children between the sexes. Marriage and relationships are an order of magnitude more complicated for Americans today than they were sixty years ago.
12) Gerrymandering, increasing partisanship, and a lack of term limits have allowed politics to become a lifetime job for a majority of members of Congress. The average congressman cannot be defeated by a member of the opposing party and only has to worry about making special interest groups on his own side angry enough to back a primary challenger against him. For most members of Congress, once they're elected once, they never have to worry about the voters in their own district again.
13) The differences between the Republican and Democratic Party have become so great that there is very little common ground anymore. Not only do both parties propose very different solutions to America's problems, but both sides also see the other side's solutions as taking the country in exactly the wrong direction.
14) Over the past few decades both parties, but particularly the Democrats, have given up on the idea that the government should have any sort of limits on what it spends, should be required to afford new spending, or should even try to pay back the money it already owes.
15) Schools have moved away from teaching reading, writing, history, morality, and patriotism for the benefit of the students to pushing self-esteem and liberal indoctrination for the benefit of the teachers’ unions and salaries of professors.
16) Our entire society is based on a Constitution that is being systematically ignored, distorted, and treated as optional by the populace, our politicians, and even the judges who are sworn to enforce it.
17) Our federal government has grown so far beyond the boundaries that were originally intended for it by the Founding Fathers that it intrudes and interferes into almost every facet of American life. Since the government is always slower, stupider, and less efficient than the private sector it feeds off to grow, this leads to an inevitable decline.
18) The Democratic Party's entire electoral strategy is based around giving people money and goods that they didn't earn and ginning up hatred between different groups of Americans.
19) As the standard of living in America has increased and globalism has made having manual labor done in foreign countries more economical, highly paid, low skill level jobs have mostly either been replaced by technology or have moved offshore to nations with cheaper labor. This means that a large number of men who could have once held "good" jobs that could have provided a living for them and a family now are barely able to take care of themselves and they also have poor future prospects in an economy that now favors highly educated, heavily skilled workers.
20) Race and ideology-based tribalism is becoming the norm. Different racial and political groups often have completely different standards, moral codes, and types of behavior depending on whether the person they're dealing with is a member of their own "tribe."
2-8-13
Three-Year-Olds Chant ‘Union Power’ After Reading New Children’s Book
Kyle Olson
Is your three-year-old preschooler chanting ‘union power’ these days? She might, if author Innosanto Nagara has his way.
Nagara wrote A is for Activist, a book supposedly geared for the children of the “99 percent.” In other words, a new vehicle has been developed for leftists to begin indoctrinating children.
“It’s pretty awesome to hear a three-year-old saying ‘union power,’” Nagara said in a YES! magazine interview.
But union power and student activism aren’t the only goals. Consider these other letters and how they are applied in the book:
B is for banner, as in a protest banner hanging off a construction crane
L is for LGBTQ, as in Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered and Queer
T is for Trans, as in transgendered
Z is for Zapatistas, as in Mexican revolutionary leftists
Heady stuff for preschoolers, but the indoctrinators believe the tikes are old enough to learn the basics of revolutionary thought.
Nagara’s A is for Activist has been heralded by the likes of Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, who said, “Many a thousand young activists bloom!”
“This is an amazing book for toddlers,” wrote Oakland teachers union activist Mary Prophet.
The Radical teachers group Rethinking Schools gave the book its hearty endorsement, offering it on its resources page.
“This beautifully illustrated alphabet reader brings a whole new vocabulary to board books,” the organizations wrote about the book. “For example, ‘Kings are fine for storytime/Knights are fun to play/But when people make decisions/we will choose the people’s way.’ As a spirited and humor-filled introduction to progressive values, A is for Activist is a book to grow on, and return to again and again for many years. It could also be used as a prompt for older students to create their own alphabet books with a conscience.”
One might ask how anyone with a conscience could even think about exposing little children to this sort of political garbage, or how any parents wouldallow it.
East Bay Express – an “alternative” Oakland news outlet – said the book is for “grooming your future activist.”
“Children's entertainment comes with no shortage of messages: disobedient princesses learning to obey their parents; giant red dogs urging teamwork; purple dinosaurs imparting the wisdom of just being yourself,” the newspaper wrote. “But with a few exceptions, kids' books, movies, and music highlight only a narrow range of voices and viewpoints. Most are an implicit endorsement of stratified wealth. (After all, what are princes and princesses if not the embodiment of entitlement?) There's an acute shortage of voices from queer folks and people of color. Many have outmoded gender norms.”
Who knew Barney was endorsing the perpetuation of “stratified wealth”?
This isn’t the first leftist book with an agenda. I wrote in “Indoctrination, “How ‘Useful Idiots’ are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism” that another more subtle book, Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type, pushes the union agenda.
There is a war on for the minds of our future leaders. And judging by Nagara’s book, they’re targeting children at younger and younger ages.
The question remains: As a parent, do you know what your student is learning?
2-7-13
Prophets and Losses: Part II
By Thomas Sowell
People on both sides of tax issues often speak of such things as a "$300 billion tax increase" or a "$500 billion tax decrease." That is fine if they are looking back at something that has already happened. But it can be sheer nonsense if they are talking about a proposed increase or decrease in the tax rate.
The government can only raise or lower the tax rate. Whether the actual tax revenues that the government will collect as a result will go up or down is a matter of prophecy. And these prophecies have been far too wrong far too often to base national policies on them.
When Congress was considering raising the capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 28 percent in 1986, the Congressional Budget Office advised Congress that this would increase the revenue received from that tax. But the Congressional Budget Office was wrong, not simply about the amount of the tax revenue increase, but about the fact that the capital gains tax revenue actually fell.
There was nothing unique about this example of tax rates and tax revenues moving in opposite directions from each other — and also in opposite directions from the predictions of the Congressional Budget Office. Reductions of the capital gains tax rates in 1978, 1997 and 2003 all led to increased revenues from that tax.
The Congressional Budget Office is by no means the only government agency whose prophecies have been grossly unreliable. Anyone who looks at the history of the Federal Reserve System will find many painful examples of wrong prophecies that led to policies with bad consequences for the whole economy.
In a worldwide context, during the 20th century economic central planning by governments — prophecy at the grandest level — led to so many bad consequences, in countries around the world, that even most socialist and communist governments abandoned central planning by the end of that century.
The failures of governmental prophecies in so many different contexts cannot be blamed on stupidity. Most of the people who made these prophecies were far more educated than the average person, had far more information at their fingertips and probably had higher IQs as well.
Their intellectual superiority to others may well have given them the confidence to venture into areas where no human being has what it takes to make prophecies that lead to policies overriding the plans and actions of millions of other human beings.
As John Stuart Mill said, back in the 19th century, "even if a government were superior in intelligence and knowledge to any single individual in the nation, it must be inferior to all the individuals of the nation taken together."
People competing with each other, and being forced to make mutual accommodations with each other in the marketplace, are operating in a trial and error process.
Human beings are going to make errors in any kind of economic or political system. The question is: Which kind of system punishes errors more quickly, and more effectively, in terms of forcing errors to be corrected?
A market economy with many competitors has incentives and constraints that are the opposite of those in a government monopoly.
Anyone familiar with the economic history of businesses knows that their mistakes have been common and large. But red ink on the bottom line lets them know that they are going to have to shape up or shut down.
Government agencies face no such constraint. The Federal Reserve can keep making the same mistakes in the next hundred years that it made in its first hundred years. Or it can make new and bigger mistakes.
Nor is the Federal Reserve unique. The same thing applies to the Congressional Budget Office and to government agencies on down to the local DMV.
Elected politicians not only can keep making the same mistakes. They have every incentive to deny that they made a mistake in the first place, since such an admission can end their careers.
That is why these prophets can lead to our losses.
2-6-13
Prophets and Losses
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Now that the federal government is playing an ever larger role in the economy, a look at Washington's track record seems to be long overdue.
The recent release of the Federal Reserve Board's transcripts of its deliberations back in 2007 shows that their economic prophecies were way off. How much faith should we put in their prophecies today — or the policies based on those prophecies?
Even after the housing market began its collapse in 2006, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in 2007, "The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained."
It turned out that financial disasters in the housing market were not "contained," but spread out to affect the whole American economy and economies overseas. Then Chairman Bernanke said: "It is an interesting question why what looks like $100 billion or so of credit losses in the subprime market has been reflected in multiple trillions of dollars of losses in paper wealth."
What is an even more interesting question is why we should put such faith and such power in the hands of a man and an institution that have been so wrong before.
This is not just a question of a bad guess by Ben Bernanke. The previous chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, likewise misjudged the consequences of the housing boom and bust. Nor was the Federal Reserve's staff any more accurate in its prophecies. According to the New York Times, "The Fed's own staff still forecast that the economy would avoid a recession."
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Today, the economy has not yet fully recovered from the recession that the Federal Reserve System's staff and chairmen thought we would avoid.
We all make mistakes. But we don't all have the enormous and growing power of the Federal Reserve System — or the seemingly boundless confidence that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke still shows as he intervenes in the economy on a massive scale.
Not only does the Federal Reserve System control the money supply and regulate banks, the Fed's willingness to keep buying hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of government bonds makes it easier for the Obama administration to keep engaging in massive deficit spending that runs up a record-breaking national debt.
The reason that the Federal Reserve can afford to continue buying huge amounts of government bonds is that the Fed is authorized to create its own money out of thin air. They use the fancy term "quantitative easing," instead of saying in plain English that they are essentially just printing more money.
Being wrong is nothing new for the Federal Reserve System. Since this year is the one hundredth anniversary of the Fed's founding, it may be worth looking back at its history.
President Woodrow Wilson explained the reasons for creating the Federal Reserve System. He said that the Federal Reserve "provides a currency which expands as it is needed and contracts when it is not needed" and that "the power to direct this system of credits is put into the hands of a public board of disinterested officers of the Government itself" to avoid control by private bankers or other special interests.
The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent shocks to the economy that can come from drastic inflation or deflation, and reduce the dangers that can come from widespread bank failures. These are all good goals. But what is the Fed's track record?
In the hundred years before there was a Federal Reserve System, inflation was less than half of what it became in the hundred years after the Fed was founded. The biggest deflation in the history of the country came after the Fed was founded, and that deflation contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s. As for bank failures, they reached levels unheard of before there was a Federal Reserve System.
Like so many "progressives," then and now, Woodrow Wilson seemed to think that, if those who made government decisions had no financial interest in those decisions, then they could be trusted to wield their powers in the public interest.
But the enormous power wielded by the unelected leaders of the Fed over the economy, unchecked by the constraints of the market, has repeatedly turned out to be more than human beings can handle.
2-5-13
"Chicago's government, which is not normally known for elevated thinking, is feeling so morally upright and financially flush that it proposes to rise above the banal business of maximizing the value of its employees' and retirees' pension fund assets. Although seven funds have cumulative unfunded liabilities of $25 billion, Chicago will sacrifice the growth of those assets to the striking of a political pose so pure it is untainted by practicality. Emulating New York and California, two deep blue states with mammoth unfunded pension liabilities, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has hectored a $5 billion pension fund into divesting its holdings in companies that manufacture firearms. Now he is urging two large banks to deny financing to such companies 'that profit from gun violence.' TD Bank provides a $60 million credit line to Smith & Wesson, and Bank of America provides a $25 million line to Sturm, Ruger & Company. Chicago's current and retired public employees might wish the city had invested more in both companies. Barack Obama, for whom Emanuel was chief of staff, has become a potent gun salesman because of suspicions that he wants to make gun ownership more difficult. Since he was inaugurated four years ago, there have been 65 million requests for background checks of gun purchasers. Four years ago, the price of Smith & Wesson stock was $2.45. Last week it was $8.76, up 258 percent. Four years ago, the price of Sturm Ruger stock was $6.46. Last week it was $51.09, up 691 percent. The Wall Street Journal reports that even before 'a $1.2 billion balloon payment for pensions comes due' in 2015, 'Chicago's pension funds, which are projected to run dry by the end of the decade, are scraping the bottoms of their barrels.'"
--columnist George Will
2-4-13
10 Stories That Prove Guns Save Lives
John Hawkins
In a nation that already has more than 200 million guns, gun control does little other than make the work of rapists, robbers, murderers and nuts like Adam Lanza easier. When faced with gun control laws, the law abiding citizen has no choice other than to disarm or become an outlaw, but people with bad intentions are faced with no such moral dilemma. That's why the best friend of a rapist or a potential Adam Lanza is the gun control advocate who's working tirelessly to insure that his targets can't adequately defend themselves.
On some level, even diehard advocates of gun control know this, which is why they want people with guns defending them. Our police aren't going to disarm, the military isn't going to try to fight our enemies with non-violent protests and the White House will never become a "gun free zone." But, what happens when the bad man with the gun is right there and the military, the police, and the President's Secret Service aren't on the scene? Then having a gun may be the difference between living or dying, between being raped or being okay, between saving your children or watching them die.
The hypocrites who want men with guns to protect them when they're in trouble, but want to prevent other law abiding citizens from defending themselves love to use anecdotal evidence to make their case. Those of us who are pro-Second Amendment then usually talk about our Constitutional rights or reel off statistics to counter them, but we have our own stories. There are thousands of good and decent Americans who are alive today precisely because they had guns. Gun control advocates might think the world would be a better place if those people and the ones you're about to read about were dead and the people menacing them had gotten away with their crimes, but those of us who are serious about our Second Amendment rights disagree.
1) On February 12, 2007, a lone gunman, Sulejman Talovic, opened fire at the crowded Trolley Square shopping mall, killing five bystanders. Armed with a shotgun with a pistol grip, a 38-caliber handgun with rubber grips, and a backpack full of ammunition, he set forth on his rampage through the mall.
But he did not get as far as he had hoped. He was stopped by off-duty police officer Kenneth Hammond of the Ogden City Police Department, who was at Trolley Square having an early Valentine’s Day dinner with his pregnant wife. When they heard shots, she called 911 and he drew his weapon and confronted Talovic. He was joined by Sgt. Andrew Oblad of the Salt Lake City Police Department. They pinned down Talovic, stopping further deaths, until a SWAT team from the Salt Lake City Police Department killed him.
Hammond, a man with a weapon, was credited with saving “countless lives.”
2) That's right. There was not a mass killing spree in Atlanta on Thursday, but there could have been. We'll never know -- and thankfully so, because an armed guard stepped in.
As reported by USA Today, "A 14-year-old student was shot at an Atlanta middle school Thursday afternoon, and another student was taken into custody, police said."
An armed guard disarmed the shooter moments after the 1:50 p.m. shooting in a courtyard at the Price Middle School in southeast Atlanta.
Atlanta Public Schools public information officer Steve Alford said the teen's wound was more toward the back of the neck, WXIA-TV reported.
An armed off-duty Atlanta police officer who works at the school subdued the shooter and had him drop his weapon, Police Chief George Turner said.
3) Over the past couple days we've been hearing a whole lot about deadly rampages that have occurred throughout America, but what we haven't heard much about are the deadly rampages that have been prevented thanks to armed, trained, responsible security and citizens. Yesterday in San Antonio, an off-duty police officer prevented mass murder after taking out a gunman before he could kill anyone.
Gunfire erupted at the Mayan Palace Theatre on Southwest Military Sunday night just before 9:30 pm. This shooting comes just days after a deadly rampage at a school in Connecticut and sparks memories of the mass slaying at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.
Investigators tell News 4 WOAI the gunman is 19-year-old Jesus Manuel Garcia. They say he worked at the China Garden restaurant right next to the Mayan Palace Theater. Police say Garcia opened fire at China Garden because of relationship problems with his girlfriend who also worked at the restaurant, although she was not present at the time. Officers explain that Garcia then continued to fire his weapon across the parking lot and into the theater. Garcia even opened fire on a San Antonio Police Department patrol car explained Detective Lou Antu, spokesman for the Bexar County Sherriff's Office.
“Everybody was just coming out of the side of the theater, running out the emergency exits. And everyone was screaming and running,” explained a moviegoer named Megan.
Garcia was finally stopped by a deputy who was working an off-duty job at the theater. The deputy shot Garcia four times.
4) Nick Meli is emotionally drained. The 22-year-old was at Clackamas Town Center with a friend and her baby when a masked man opened fire.
"I heard three shots and turned and looked at Casey and said, 'are you serious?,'" he said.
The friend and baby hit the floor. Meli, who has a concealed carry permit, positioned himself behind a pillar.
"He was working on his rifle," said Meli. "He kept pulling the charging handle and hitting the side."
The break in gunfire allowed Meli to pull out his own gun, but he never took his eyes off the shooter.
….
Meli took cover inside a nearby store. He never pulled the trigger. He stands by that decision.
"I'm not beating myself up cause I didn't shoot him," said Meli. "I know after he saw me, I think the last shot he fired was the one he used on himself."
5) A Texas burglary suspect dialed 911 early Tuesday morning to report that an armed homeowner was threatening to shoot him, MyFoxDFW.com reported.
James Gerow, the homeowner, told the station that he awoke and discovered a man wearing a dark hoodie inside his Springtown, Texas home. Springtown is a small city Northwest of Fort Worth.
Gerow grabbed his gun and followed the man out to a truck in his driveway.
With gun in hand, Gerow convinced the man to drop his keys. He told his wife to call 911 and waited for deputies to arrive.
6) On January 19th, an elderly homeowner in MO was forced to defend himself when a 30 year old suspect broke into his home and assaulted him.
The homeowner fired a shot at the intruder, striking him in the arm.
The suspect then fled the scene, but was captured by police after a brief manhunt.
The homeowner was taken to the hospital for treatment of the injuries he sustained in the assault. The homeowner had to be airlifted to a second hospital for head injuries.
The suspect is charged with 1st degree assault and 1st degree burglary.
7) There were frightening moments for a Loganville family forced to fight back against a robber chasing them in their own home Friday afternoon.
CBS Atlanta News has uncovered new details regarding a home invasion in Loganville on Friday.
Walton County investigators said the homeowner involved wasn't the only target and released the chilling 911 call from the incident.
A mom and her twin 9-year-old children tried hiding near the attic - but the crook wouldn't back down.
Police say the crook was armed with a crow bar and the terrified woman inside the home opened fire on the crook, striking him five times.
8) According to The Associated Press, a 14-year-old Phoenix boy shot an armed intruder who broke into his home at approximately 4:30 p.m. Saturday, June 23. At that time, the boy was babysitting his younger siblings, ages eight, 12 and 12.
The incident started with a woman ringing the doorbell to the residence. Since the boy didn’t recognize the woman, he refused to open the door.
A short time later, the boy heard a loud bang, which he correctly assumed was someone attempting to force entry through the door. The boy gathered his siblings and hurried them upstairs as he armed himself with a handgun from his parent’s bedroom.
From the top of the stairs, the boy saw a man break open the front door. When the man pointed a gun at the boy, the boy shot the man. The man did not fire his weapon.
9) The 53-year-old woman, who is also a veteran private school counselor, was alone at the time of the Wednesday morning attack. She lives on East Mount Tabor Circle in Duluth.
The woman was getting out of the shower when she was met by a strange man with a kitchen knife, police said. They said there was a struggle in the bathroom, and she fell in the tub. Police later identified the man as Israel Perez Puentes, a Cuban national who lived in Alpharetta.
"The male was armed with a kitchen knife, a struggle ensued between the two of them. She fell in the bathtub injuring herself," Gwinnett police spokesman Edwin Ritter said.
The woman tried to fight the man off with a shower rod, and he forced her into her bedroom, police said. They said she told her attacker she had money in the room. But she grabbed a .22-caliber handgun and shot the man nine times, police said.
Police said the man ran out of a back door and collapsed in the yard. He later died at the Gwinnett Medical Center. The victim, who was injured in the scuffle, was also taken to the hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. Police have not released her name.
10) Monica Jones said Thursday she was more angry than afraid when she rushed to the aid of a screaming neighbor girl, pointed a shotgun at a man who had allegedly ripped off the youngster's clothes, and warned: ''Stay put or I'll shoot.''
''You don't think about getting hurt,'' Ms. Jones, a mother of three, said in an interview. ''If someone is getting hurt, I can't close my door.''
Police credit Ms. Jones' quick action with preventing the 12-year-old girl from being raped.
''She's a heroine,'' said police Capt. Robert Richters. ''She did an outstanding job - simply outstanding.''
But Ms. Jones, 28, said her actions under the circumstances were only normal.
''I wasn't going to stand back and let this man take this child and do awful things to her,'' she said. ''She wasn't nothing but a baby. If she were my child, I would hope somebody would be there to save her.''
2-3-13
DHS Raids Gun Collector – Confiscates Nearly 1,500 Guns – No Charges Filed
20130202-103003.jpgOn Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security, along with a SWAT team and Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies raided the home of Robert Adams in Albuquerque, New Mexico and, according to a federal search warrant affidavit the raid seized nearly 1,500 firearms from the man’s home and business. However, no charges have been filed against him, despite the fact that court documents reveal that agents had been watching Adams for years.
By Wednesday afternoon dozens of rifles were hauled out of the house, bagged as evidence and laid out on the lawn.
According to search warrants that were filed on Thursday Homeland Security Investigations confiscated nearly 900 firearms from Adams’ home, 548 handguns and 317 rifles. They also seized 599 pistols and revolvers from his office.
Neighbors say that he was a firearms collector and some indicated that he was also a licensed gun seller. No confirmation of that has been forthcoming.
While having been watched for years and no charges filed as they seized Adam’s firearms, Federal investigators are saying that they are investigating him for gun smuggling, tax evasion, violating importation laws.
KRQE reports,
Court documents reveal federal agents were watching Adams for years and that some documentation was missing “to determine to whom Adams [was] selling or exporting his firearms.”
The guns were also not properly marked possibly to make the guns more valuable and to avoid paying high import taxes, investigators alleged.
However, a bigger concern is that no markings on the guns and missing documents mean the guns are not traceable by law enforcement.
The search warrant also said Adams was investigated in Canada for keeping about 80 illegal guns in a storage unit. U.S. agents worked with Canadian police on that case.
Kurt Nimmo points out, “New Mexico does not regulate or specifically restrict the possession of firearms. Owners are not required to register or license firearms with the state.
“No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes, but nothing herein shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons. No municipality or county shall regulate, in any way, an incident of the right to keep and bear arms,” Article 2, Section 6 of the state constitution reads.
“Gun collectors are protected under the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986,” Nimmo writes. “The law states that a firearms dealer is defined as a person who is selling guns for profit or livelihood. Unlicensed individuals are allowed to sell firearms from their private collection without performing a background check on the buyer.”
Something seriously smells here. How can you be investigated for years, yet upon serving a search warrant you don’t put forth any charges against a man when you confiscate nearly 1,500 firearms? I wish they had taken this kind of approach to the Obama Justice Department’s gunwalking program that trafficked nearly 2,500 firearms across the border into Mexico that has left hundreds dead. No one is claiming that the firearms that Adams had were used in any crime!
So much for the Obama administration’s claims that they aren’t against gun collectors. Sports shooters and hunters, you’re up next.
Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/02/dhs-raids-homeowner-confiscates-nearly-1500-guns-no-charges-filed/#ixzz2JnPxeGWf
2-2-13
The GOP’s Amnesty Caucus Raises the White Flag
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On Monday, Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake and Marco Rubio emerged with an offer of a Republican surrender to Barack Obama.
We will accept amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens, said the four, but you must get serious about securing the border against yet another invasion. Only after an independent commission agrees the border has been secured will the 11 million be given green cards and put on a path to citizenship.
The next day in Las Vegas, Obama, reveling in victory, instructed the four waving their white flags that the defeated do not dictate terms.
Get cracking on comprehensive reform now, Obama instructed Marco and John, or I send my own bill to the Hill, granting amnesty to every illegal alien, with no preconditions. Putting the 11 million illegal aliens on a path to U.S. citizenship should begin not after the border is better secured, but the day the bill is signed.
In a pointed lecture to Rubio, the Great Hispanic Hope of the GOP, Obama said, “We have done more on border security in the last four years than we have done in the previous 20.”
A graduate of the Saul Alinsky school, Obama can smell the defeatism in the Republican Party. And he knows how to treat supplicants begging for a fig leaf to cover the nakedness of their capitulation.
But why are the Republicans surrendering their “no amnesty” stand, which has been party policy since America rallied to the GOP’s opposition to amnesty in 2007, when a national grass-roots uprising routed McCain, Teddy Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush himself?
McCain fears the future. We got 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and the reason is our position on illegal aliens, he argues. Until we get this behind us, we will never again get the 40 percent of the vote Bush got. Either we capitulate to Obama and La Raza, or we are doomed.
Why is McCain wrong?
He is wrong on principle. Should a majority of women tell pollsters they are against overturning Roe v. Wade, does the party abandon its pro-life stand and cease calling for Supreme Court justices who might overturn Roe?
What kind of party is that? What kind of people do that?
Who thought in 2007 we could rout the establishment of both parties?
Washington is not invincible. But you cannot rally the people if you are not prepared to lead and fight.
Republican capitulation on amnesty is not going to win Hispanic votes, but it will demoralize the party base. McCain, the amnesty champion today and in 2007, got 31 percent of the Hispanic vote against Obama.
Why is he an expert on what the party should do?
When those 11 million illegals have completed their path to citizenship and become voters, why should they, or the millions more family members they will have brought in by then, vote for the GOP? Hispanics are not small-government people. They believe in and benefit disproportionately from Big Government.
Some 53 percent of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, and 52 percent of Hispanic families are headed by single women.
Big Government provides their kids with Head Start before school, free K-through-12 schooling, Pell Grants and student loans for college, and two or three free meals a day at school for the kids.
Big Government provides food stamps, welfare for mom and earned income tax credit checks should she work. Big Government subsidizes her housing and provides free health care for the family through Medicaid.
A Pew Hispanic poll found that by 3-to-1, Hispanics would favor a big government with more services to a small government with fewer services.
Why would these folks vote for a Republican Party that promises to downsize the Big Government upon which they depend for sustenance, security and survival? Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut capital gains, income and inheritance taxes they don’t pay?
The 11 million illegals, who came with nothing, are poorer than the Hispanics who are already citizens.
When we make citizens of them and the family members they bring in, our welfare state will explode and the social safety net will sag under the weight of millions of new beneficiaries.
Republicans win between 27 and 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Add 10 million new Hispanic voters, and Democrats will realize a net gain of 2 to 4 million new voters.
There goes the Southwest, and there goes the presidency, forever.
Amnesty would be the greatest victory for mass lawbreaking in U.S. history. It would reward those who broke our laws and make fools of those who waited in line back home to come to America.
And this is about more than economics. It is about our sovereignty, our security, our national culture and our national identity.
This fight is not yet lost, and even should we lose, is it not better to go down fighting than to ask for terms from Barack Obama?
2-1-13
Whose Welfare?
By Thomas Sowell
If there is ever a contest for the law with the most grossly misleading title, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 should be a prime candidate, because the last thing this Act protects is the welfare of Indian children.
The theory behind the Indian Child Welfare Act is that an American Indian child should be raised in an American Indian culture.
Based on that theory, a newborn baby of American Indian ancestry, who was adopted immediately after birth by a white couple, was at 27 months of age taken away from the only parents she has ever known and given to her father.
Apparently the tribe has rights under the Indian Child Welfare Act. If this child were of any other race, a court would be free to decide the case on the basis of whatever was in the best interests of the child. Instead, the child is treated almost as property, contrary to the 13th Amendment that outlawed slavery.
Fortunately, the legal issues growing out of this case are now before the Supreme Court of the United States. We can only hope that the justices will use their wisdom, instead of their cleverness, to decide this case.
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The wisdom of Solomon provided a good example many centuries ago, in a case where two women each claimed to be the mother of a child and each demanded custody. Since he did not know who was the real mother, King Solomon said that he would cut the child in half and give each mother her half.
When one of the women dropped her claim, in order to spare the child's life, he knew that she was the real mother. Anyone who would ruin a helpless child's life, in order to assert their own legal prerogatives, or to protect the tribe's turf, raises very serious questions about what kind of parent they are.
The question is not which home is better, but whether the child will ever feel secure in any home again, after the shock of being forcibly taken away.
The welfare of a flesh-and-blood human being should trump theories about cultures — especially in the case of a two-year-old child, who has been torn away from the only parents she has ever known, and treated as a pawn in a legalistic game.
This little girl is just the latest in a long line of Indian children who have been ripped out of the only family they have ever known and given to someone who is a stranger to them, often living on an Indian reservation that is foreign to them. This has happened even to children who have spent a decade or more with a family to which they have become attached and is attached to them.
There have already been too many scenes of weeping and frightened children, crying out in vain for the only mother and father they have known, as they are forcibly dragged away.
Whatever the merits or demerits of various theories about culture, they are still just theories. But too many people put their pet theories ahead of flesh-and-blood human beings.
One of the rationales for the Indian Child Welfare Act is that, in the past, Indian children were wantonly wrested from their Indian parents and sent off to be raised by non-Indians. But nothing we can do today can undo the wrongs of the past — especially not by creating the same wrongs again, in reverse.
While those who are most victimized by the so-called Indian Child Welfare Act are the children ripped out of their homes to satisfy some theory, they are not the only victims.
Indian children without biological parents to take care of them can be needlessly left in institutional care, when there are not enough Indian foster parents or adoptive parents to take them into their homes.
The Alice in Wonderland legal situation can hardly encourage non-Indian families to take care of these children, when that can so easily lead to heartbreak for both the children themselves and the surrogate parents who have become attached to them.
The New York Times reports that fewer than 2 percent of the children in Minnesota are Indian, but 15 percent of the children in that state's foster care system are Indian. In Montana, 9 percent of the children are Indian, but Indian children make up 37 percent of the children in foster care.
What a price to pay for a theory!
1-31-13
Shouting Louder
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | An old-time trial lawyer once said, "When your case is weak, shout louder!"
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shouted louder when asked about the Obama administration's story last fall that the September 11th attack on the U.S. ambassador's quarters in Benghazi was due to an anti-Islamic video that someone in the United States had put on the Internet, and thereby provoked a protest that escalated into violence.
She shouted: "We had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?"
Students of propaganda may admire the skill with which she misdirected people's attention. But those of us who are still old-fashioned enough to think that the truth matters cannot applaud her success.
Let's go back to square one.
After the attack on the American ambassador's quarters in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, the Obama administration immediately blamed it on the anti-Islamic video.
Moreover, this version of what happened was not just a passing remark. It was a story that the administration kept repeating insistently. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice repeated that story on five different television talk shows on the same Sunday. President Obama himself repeated the same story at the United Nations. The man who put the anti-Islamic video on the Internet was arrested for a parole violation, creating more media coverage to keep attention on this theme.
"What difference, at this point, does it make?" Secretary Clinton now asks. What difference did it make at the time?
Obviously the Obama administration thought it made a difference, with an election coming up. Prior to the attack, the administration's political theme was that Barack Obama had killed Osama bin Laden (with an assist from the Navy SEALs), vanquished Al Qaeda and was now in the process of putting the terrorist threat behind us.
To have the attack in Benghazi be seen as a terrorist attack — and a devastating one — would have ruined this picture, with an election coming up.
The key question that remains unanswered to this day is: What speck of evidence is there that the attack in Benghazi was due to the much-discussed video or that there was ever any protest demonstration outside the ambassador's quarters?
If there is no evidence whatever, then the whole attempt to say that a protest over a video escalated into an attack was a deliberate hoax by people who knew better.
There is no point in the administration saying that they did not have all the facts about the attack immediately. All the facts may never be known. But the real question is: Did you have even a single fact that would substantiate your repeated claims that some video led to a protest in Benghazi that got out of hand and led to the attack?
Interestingly, Hillary Clinton herself was not featured in this campaign, even though as Secretary of State she was a key figure. Hillary was not about to create video footage that could come back to haunt her if she runs for President of the United States in 2016.
In a larger context, the Benghazi attack showed that you cannot unilaterally end the "war on terror" or the terrorists' war on us, by declaring victory.
For years, the Bush administration's phrase "war on terror" was avoided like the plague by the Obama administration, even if that required the Fort Hood massacre to be classified as "workplace violence." But, no matter how clever the rhetoric, reality nevertheless rears its ugly head.
Once the September 11th attack in Benghazi is seen for what it was — a highly coordinated and highly successful operation by terrorists who were said to have been vanquished — that calls into question the Obama administration's Middle East foreign policy.
That is why it still matters.
1-30-13
Bill Ayers to Deliver Keynote Address at Association of Teacher Educators Meeting
Political Outcast
Bill Ayers_Mug ShotDomestic terrorist Bill Ayers will be a keynote speaker at the annual meeting for the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) to be held February 15–19 in Atlanta, GA.
Do you know what your children are being taught about what by whom? Probably not.
Ayers was a co-founder of the radical Weather Underground. He and his equally radical wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hoped they could change America through violence.
“Ayers first found fame for his involvement in plots to set off explosives at the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a police station, two Army recruiting stations and a New York judge’s home while his family slept inside.”
Ayer’s wife helped to write a manifesto that had as its goal a revolution that would lead to “the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.”
And what about her husband, Bill Ayers?:
“Ayers participated in the Days of Rage riot in Chicago in October 1969, and in December was at the ‘War Council’ meeting in Flint, Michigan. Two major decisions came out of the ‘War Council.’ The first was to immediately begin a violent, armed struggle (e.g., bombings and armed robberies) against the state without attempting to organize or mobilize a broad swath of the public. The second was to create underground collectives in major cities throughout the country. Larry Grathwohl, a Federal Bureau of Investigation informant in the Weatherman group from the fall of 1969 to the spring of 1970, stated that ‘Ayers, along with Bernardine Dohrn, probably had the most authority within the Weatherman.’”
Ayers and Dohrn learned a big lesson during their days as second-rate violent revolutionaries: You can’t change a society through violence. Societies are changed by patiently and peacefully capturing and re-imaging our nation’s institutions, and they’ve done it. We’ve been fighting an outdated war. We fought against Communism abroad while our domestic institutions were gradually taken over.
Ayers rejected the older revolutionary model and adopted the program outlined by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). To change the culture, Gramsci argued, “would require a ‘long march through the institutions’—the arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium [of the time], radio.” ((Patrick J. Buchanan, Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books, 2001), 77.))
Gramsci supplied the road map, and liberals like Ayers, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama followed the sign posts.
“If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon,” Bill Ayers said. “We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm.”
There’s the admission: Ayers and his ideological associates already have control, and we are the ones being controlled. The rest is mopping up.
Here’s the contact information for the Association of Teacher Educators if you would like to lodge your disapproval (be cordial):
The Association of Teacher Educators
11350 Random Hills Dr., Suite 800
Fairfax, VA 22030
(703) 659-1708
(703) 595-4792 (f)
Read more: http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/01/bill-ayers-to-deliver-keynote-address-at-association-of-teacher-educators-meeting/#ixzz2Jbhy3vRB
1-29-13
"The Obama administration's announcement that it is going to put women in front-line ground combat positions is but the latest example of a deliberate and systematic wrecking operation it has conducted against the armed forces since 2009. ... Among the many, well-documented problems with assigning women to line infantry positions are three intractable ones: Most women lack the physical upper-body strength and stamina of most men. ... It is impossible as a practical matter to provide for separation of the sexes in frontline positions. That guarantees a loss of privacy and greatly increases the chances of pregnancies and harassment that: profoundly affects the personnel immediately involved; causes degrading of their units' warfighting capabilities; and traumatizes their families or, at a minimum, erodes the essential support for uniformed service that those loved ones provide. Men frequently will feel the need to protect women in dangerous situations, particularly if there is an emotional attachment between them. The effect in combat situations can be to complicate, if not to undermine entirely, the disciplined execution of orders that can prove to be the difference between victory and defeat. ... Unfortunately, thanks in part to the hollowing out of America's armed forces and other officially approved measures that are empowering and emboldening our enemies, the world is becoming a more dangerous place by the day. By replacing Ronald Reagan's historically validated philosophy of 'peace through American strength' with the unfounded hope for peace despite American weakness, President Obama is setting the stage for conflicts we will be unable to deter and, failing that, may be hard pressed to win." --Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
Essential Liberty
"Hunting, according to these wizards of odd, is what [the Left] think our founding fathers had in mind when they penned that pesky Second Amendment, and according to these control freaks we don't need a tactical weapon with a high capacity magazine to hunt with. First off, dipsticks, the Second Amendment has nada to do with hunting. The founding fathers weren't worried about their right to put the bam to Bambi (although we should be because progressives hate hunting and would love nothing more than to bring that activity to a grinding halt). If you don't believe me, just corner one of these little darlings and ask them what they think about hunting. Secondly, who are they to tell us what we 'need' or don't need when it comes to anything? Typical of the Left, they think they know what's best for we the people. If you want to talk about 'needs,' Ms. Leftist, we don't need iPhones, Porsches, crazy straws, American Idol, beer, leaf blowers, and I don't need a gorgeous Italian wife. But that's America, folks. Stay out of our business." --columnist Doug Giles
Re: The Left
"I'm getting sick and tired of the Obama administration using children selectively in order to help the president advocate his public policy positions. ... As I sat and watched Obama surrounded by little human political shields, three things struck me as being especially hypocritical: 1. Just a few years ago, the president would have supported murdering all of those children by dismemberment. 2. The president would have classified their dismemberment as 'health care' within a comprehensive reform package necessary to preserve the well-being of children, and finally 3. All the children at the press conference were protected from being murdered at that particular moment by government agents carrying concealed weapons. But it got worse as the day went on. ABC News and other outlets began circulating letters written to Obama by children wishing to weigh in on current public policy debates. That's normal, of course. Children always weigh in on public policy debates without being prodded by liberal parents who never left childhood themselves. And everyone knows it makes sense to base public policy decisions on the recommendations of children." --columnist Mike Adams
The Gipper
"Mightn't it be better in those areas of high crime to arm the homeowner and the shopkeeper, teach him how to use his weapons and put the word out to the underworld that it is no longer totally safe to rob and murder? ... Criminals are not dissuaded by soft words, soft judges or easy laws. They are dissuaded by fear and they are prevented from repeating their crimes by death or by incarceration. In my opinion, proposals to outlaw or confiscate guns are simply unrealistic panacea. We are never going to prevent murder; we are never going to eliminate crime; we are never going to end violent action by the criminals and the crazies -- with or without guns." --Ronald Reagan
The Patriot Post
1-28-13
15 Lies of Liberalism
John Hawkins
Liberalism offers up a utopian vision of the world and then invites its practitioners to feel good about themselves for embracing it. Not only does this beautiful fantasy world never come to pass, liberalism fails to address the root causes of the problems it sets out to solve while creating whole new disasters in the process. In other words, it's a never ending circle. There's a problem, liberalism is offered up as the solution, it doesn't work and creates more problems, for which liberalism is offered up as the solution, etc., etc., etc. until you're starving, bankrupt, or your society is tearing itself apart at the seams.
Liberalism says that....
1) ...it's all about choice -- unless you want to choose which gun or lightbulb to use, which school your child will attend, or you’d prefer more freedom and smaller government.
2) ...it cares about the environment, when in practice, not only do liberals like Al Gore live some of the most resource-wasting and ostentatious lifestyles on the planet, but they hurt the environment by blocking environmentally friendly energy production here in favor of energy sources from nations that care little about pollution.
3) ...you can have lots of free government services and somebody else will pay for them. The trillion dollar deficit we're running every year that will have to be paid back says otherwise.
4) ...as long as you use birth control that someone else is forced to pay for, there are no consequences whatsoever to having lots and lots of sex. Meanwhile, more than 50 million children have been killed by their own mothers via abortion and 1 out of every 4 adults in New York City has herpes.
5) .... "government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn." Do you know anyone with crabgrass on his lawn? DO YOU?
6) ...it's all about compassion and taking care of the less fortunate, unless liberals have their own money on the line, in which case they give less to charity than those stingy, greedy, heartless conservatives.
7) ...you shouldn't take your Christian faith seriously, that political correctness matters more than the Bible, and that mocking God has no consequences. Ever heard someone say, “Don't pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel?” Well, if liberals were smarter, they wouldn't be picking a fight with an omnipotent God who buys lightning bolts by the barrel and has a well earned reputation for getting fed up every once in awhile and dishing out "Old Testament style wrath" on His enemies.
8) ...how much our country spends can be dictated by our wants, as opposed to what we can afford. Of course, if the world really works this way, Greece would be fine, nobody would have ever heard of the word "bankruptcy," and the banks wouldn't even bother to write down your name when you borrow money from them.
9) ...liberals want unity and bipartisanship, which they apparently believe they can accomplish by spewing pure hatred and smearing, demonizing, threatening, and lying about anyone who disagrees with them.
10) ...it’s going to deliver equality of outcomes for everyone, which is true, if by "delivering equality of outcomes" you mean "make everyone poorer."
11) ...it cares about women -- unless they're conservative women, in which case liberals will insult them in the vilest of terms, attack their children, call them whores and laugh and hoot at the most grotesque sexist attacks against them. Every last insult ever hurled at someone like Sandra Fluke probably wouldn't amount to what women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter put up with on any given week with the full support of the same liberals who run off at the mouth about a "war on women."
12) ....it'll help the poor -- and it does. Liberalism helps poor Americans live in ghettos with just enough food and money to survive so they can stay dependent on liberals. It's the same sort of help a farmer gives a chicken while he harvests its eggs and waits for the right time to wring its neck and toss it in the frying pan.
13) ...liberals are the only people who care about black Americans and want to help, which doesn't seem to square with the fact that just about anywhere and everywhere liberals have been in charge for decades, like Detroit or New Orleans, most black Americans are in dire straits.
14) ...small business owners were able to build their businesses because they were lucky. But of course, if that's true, why do we have such a high unemployment rate? Why doesn't everyone who loses his job just set up his business and grab that easy money? Since bankers don't deserve the big salaries they make, why doesn't the Occupy movement set up its own bank and show the "banksters" how it's done?
15) ...you can fix crime by taking away guns, but by definition, the people who will voluntarily give up guns are law abiding citizens who have no intention of committing a crime in the first place. Besides, if that can work, why doesn't Barack Obama set the example by asking his Secret Service agents to disarm?
1-27-13
Rotten to the Core (Part 2): Readin’, Writin’ and Deconstructionism
By Michelle Malkin
Common Core learning: The Gettysburg Address “word cloud”
Here’s the next installment of my Rotten to the Core series. I’ll continue to post resource/background/activist links at the end of every post. See also the links below to my previous critiques of GOP-led national standards efforts and related posts on dumbed-down curriculum/Everyday Math.
There are many, many amazing grass-roots efforts in the states that have been gaining ground over the past three years and I hope to spotlight as many of them as possible. They’ve been in this fight a long time and their work is indispensable. It’s important to note that the Common Core cheerleaders’ claim that their agenda came from the bottom up is false. Flat-out false.
I’ll also be printing e-mails, feedback, critiques, and responses. Stay tuned, spread the word, get informed, and get active.
***
Rotten to the Core (Part 2): Readin’, Writin’ and Deconstructionism
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013
(This is the second part of an ongoing series on federal “Common Core” education standards and the corruption of academic excellence.)
The Washington, D.C., board of education earned widespread mockery this week when it proposed allowing high school students — in the nation’s own capital — to skip a basic U.S. government course to graduate. But this is fiddlesticks compared to what the federal government is doing to eliminate American children’s core knowledge base in English, language arts and history.
Thanks to the “Common Core” regime, funded with President Obama’s stimulus dollars and bolstered by duped Republican governors and business groups, deconstructionism is back in style. Traditional literature is under fire. Moral relativism is increasingly the norm. “Standards” is Orwell-speak for subjectivity and lowest common denominator pedagogy.
Take the Common Core literacy “standards.” Please. As literature professors, writers, humanities scholars, secondary educators and parents have warned over the past three years, the new achievement goals actually set American students back by de-emphasizing great literary works for “informational texts.” Challenging students to digest and dissect difficult poems and novels is becoming passe. Utilitarianism uber alles.
The Common Core English/language arts criteria call for students to spend only half of their class time studying literature, and only 30 percent of their class time by their junior and senior years in high school.
Under Common Core, classics such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are of no more academic value than the pages of the Federal Register or the Federal Reserve archives — or a pro-Obamacare opinion essay in The New Yorker. Audio and video transcripts, along with “alternative literacies” that are more “relevant” to today’s students (pop song lyrics, for example), are on par with Shakespeare.
English professor Mary Grabar describes Common Core training exercises that tell teachers “to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all ‘texts’ to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation.” Indeed, in my own research, I found one Common Core “exemplar” on teaching the Gettysburg Address that instructs educators to “refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset.”
Another exercise devised by Common Core promoters features the Gettysburg Address as a word cloud. Yes, a word cloud. Teachers use the jumble of letters, devoid of historical context and truths, to help students chart, decode and “deconstruct” Lincoln’s speech.
Deconstructionism, of course, is the faddish leftwing school of thought popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Writer Robert Locke described the nihilistic movement best: “It is based on the proposition that the apparently real world is in fact a vast social construct and that the way to knowledge lies in taking apart in one’s mind this thing society has built. Taken to its logical conclusion, it supposes that there is at the end of the day no actual reality, just a series of appearances stitched together by social constructs into what we all agree to call reality.”
Literature and history are all about competing ideological narratives, in other words. One story or “text” is no better than another. Common Core’s literature-lite literacy standards are aimed not at increasing “college readiness” or raising academic expectations. Just the opposite. They help pave the way for more creeping political indoctrination under the guise of increasing access to “information.”
As University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky, an unrelenting whistleblower who witnessed the Common Core sausage-making process firsthand, concluded: “An English curriculum overloaded with advocacy journalism or with ‘informational’ articles chosen for their topical and/or political nature should raise serious concerns among parents, school leaders, and policymakers. Common Core’s standards not only present a serious threat to state and local education authority, but also put academic quality at risk. Pushing fatally flawed education standards into America’s schools is not the way to improve education for America’s students.”
Bipartisan Common Core defenders claim their standards are merely “recommendations.” But the standards, “rubrics” and “exemplars” are tied to tests and textbooks. The textbooks and tests are tied to money and power. Federally funded and federally championed nationalized standards lead inexorably to de facto mandates. Any way you slice it, dice it or word-cloud it, Common Core is a mandate for mediocrity.
1-26-13
Rotten to the Core: Obama’s War on Academic Standards (Part 1)
By Michelle Malkin
This year, I’ll be using my syndicated column and blog space to expose how progressive “reformers” — mal-formers — are corrupting our schools. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to provide you in-depth coverage of this vital issue that too often gets shunted off the daily political/partisan agenda. While the GOP tries to solve its ills with better software and communications consultants, the conservative movement — and America — face much larger problems. It doesn’t start with the “low-information voter.” It starts with the no-knowledge student. This is the first in an ongoing series on “Common Core,” the stealthy federal takeover of school curriculum and standards across the country. As longtime readers know, my own experience with this ongoing sabotage of academic excellence dates back to my early reporting on the Clinton-era “Goals 2000″ and “outcome-based” education and extends to my recent parental experience with “Everyday Math”.
The good news is that grass-roots education and parental groups, brave teachers, and professors are fighting back. See the resource list/links at the bottom of this column and stay tuned for much more.
***
Rotten to the Core: Obama’s War on Academic Standards (Part 1)
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012
America’s downfall doesn’t begin with the “low-information voter.” It starts with the no-knowledge student.
For decades, collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice. “Progressive” reformers denounced Western civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers and the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as irrelevant in modern life. They deemed ability grouping of students (tracking) bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling and multicultural claptrap.
Under President Obama, these top-down mal-formers — empowered by Washington education bureaucrats and backed by misguided liberal philanthropists led by billionaire Bill Gates — are now presiding over a radical makeover of your children’s school curriculum. It’s being done in the name of federal “Common Core” standards that do anything but raise achievement standards.
Common Core was enabled by Obama’s federal stimulus law and his Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” gimmickry. The administration bribed cash-starved states into adopting unseen instructional standards as a condition of winning billions of dollars in grants. Even states that lost their bids for Race to the Top money were required to commit to a dumbed-down and amorphous curricular “alignment.”
In practice, Common Core’s dubious “college- and career”-ready standards undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s schoolchildren.
Over the next several weeks and months, I’ll use this column space to expose who’s behind this disastrous scheme in D.C. backrooms. I’ll tell you who’s fighting it in grassroots tea party and parental revolts across the country from Massachusetts to Indiana, Texas, Georgia and Utah. And most importantly, I’ll explain how this unprecedented federal meddling is corrupting our children’s classrooms and textbooks.
There’s no better illustration of Common Core’s duplicitous talk of higher standards than to start with its math “reforms.” While Common Core promoters assert their standards are “internationally benchmarked,” independent members of the expert panel in charge of validating the standards refute the claim. Panel member Dr. Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas reported, “No material was ever provided to the Validation Committee or to the public on the specific college readiness expectations of other leading nations in mathematics” or other subjects.
In fact, Stanford University professor James Milgram, the only mathematician on the validation panel, concluded that the Common Core math scheme would place American students two years behind their peers in other high-achieving countries. In protest, Milgram refused to sign off on the standards. He’s not alone.
Professor Jonathan Goodman of New York University found that the Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.”
Under Common Core, as the American Principles Project and Pioneer Institute point out, algebra I instruction is pushed to 9th grade, instead of 8th grade, as commonly taught. Division is postponed from 5th to 6th grade. Prime factorization, common denominators, conversions of fractions and decimals, and algebraic manipulation are de-emphasized or eschewed. Traditional Euclidean geometry is replaced with an experimental approach that had not been previously pilot-tested in the U.S.
Ze’ev Wurman, a prominent software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert in California and Washington, D.C., points out that Common Core delays proficiency with addition and subtraction until 4th grade and proficiency with basic multiplication until 5th grade, and skimps on logarithms, mathematical induction, parametric equations and trigonometry at the high school level.
I cannot sum up the stakes any more clearly than Wurman did in his critique of this mess and the vested interests behind it:
“I believe the Common Core marks the cessation of educational standards improvement in the United States. No state has any reason left to aspire for first-rate standards, as all states will be judged by the same mediocre national benchmark enforced by the federal government. Moreover, there are organizations that have reasons to work for lower and less-demanding standards, specifically teachers unions and professional teacher organizations. While they may not admit it, they have a vested interest in lowering the accountability bar for their members. …This will be done in the name of ‘critical thinking’ and ’21st-century’ skills, and in faraway Washington, D.C., well beyond the reach of parents and most states and employers.”
This is all in keeping with my own experience as a parent of elementary- and middle-school age kids who were exposed to “Everyday Math” nonsense. This and other fads abandon “drill and kill” memorization techniques for fuzzy “critical thinking” methods that put the cart of “why” in front of the horse of “how.” In other words: Instead of doing the grunt work of hammering times tables and basic functions into kids’ heads first, the faddists have turned to wacky, wordy non-math alternatives to encourage “conceptual” understanding — without any mastery of the fundamentals of math.
Common Core is rotten to the core. The corruption of math education is just the beginning.
1-25-13
From the Freedom Files
Guns and freedom
ByAndrew P. Napolitano
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. And yet, the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a break on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.
As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government, and as our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior -- like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy -- immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.
The essence of humanity is freedom. Government -- whether voted in peacefully or thrust upon us by force -- is essentially the negation of freedom. Throughout the history of the world, people have achieved freedom when those in power have begrudgingly given it up. From the assassination of Julius Caesar to King John’s forced signing of the Magna Carta, from the English Civil War to the triumph of the allies at the end of World War II, from the fall of Communism to the Arab Spring, governments have permitted so-called nobles and everyday folk to exercise more personal freedom as a result of their demands for it and their fighting for it. This constitutes power permitting liberty.
The American experience was the opposite. Here, each human being is sovereign, as the colonists were after the Revolution. Here, the delegation to the government of some sovereignty -- the personal dominion over self -- by each American permitted the government to have limited power in order to safeguard the liberties we retained. Stated differently, Americans gave up some limited personal freedom to the new government so it could have the authority and resources to protect the freedoms we retained. Individuals are sovereign in America, not the government. This constitutes liberty permitting power.
But we did not give up any natural rights; rather, we retained them. It is the choice of every individual whether to give them up. Neither our neighbors nor the government can make those choices for us, because we are all without the moral or legal authority to interfere with anyone else’s natural rights. Since the government derives all of its powers from the consent of the governed, and since we each lack the power to interfere with the natural rights of another, how could the government lawfully have that power? It doesn’t. Were this not so, our rights would not be natural; they would be subject to the government’s whims.
To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson’s thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from us, absent our individual waiver.
There have been practical historical reasons for the near universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of this right. The dictators and monsters of the 20th century -- from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad -- have disarmed their people, and only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won.
The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties; they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, thus, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.
Most people in government reject natural rights and personal sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the government. Most people in government believe that they can write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject to the sovereignty of individuals, not cognizant of history’s tyrants, but subject only to what they can get away with.
Did you empower the government to impair the freedom of us all because of the mania and terror of a few?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. His latest is “Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.”
1-24-13
'I, Barack Hussein Obama...'
Betraying Oath and Country
"The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, is sacredly obligatory upon all." --George Washington (1796)
In 1776, an extraordinary group of Patriots signed our Declaration of Independence, thereby affirming their unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as "endowed by our Creator," not man. A decade later, their Liberty won at great cost, our Founders enshrined that Liberty in the form of our Constitution.
As written and ratified, our Constitution stipulates in its preface that it is "ordained and established" by the people to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." To that end, it established a Republic, not a popular democracy, which is to say it affirmed the primacy of Rule of Law over the rule of men.
Accordingly, the first order of business for those elected to national office is that they be bound by oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution under which they were duly elected.
Since our founding, every president has taken a sacred and solemn oath, as prescribed in Article II, Section 1, which specifies: "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: 'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'"
Prior to delivery of his Second Inaugural Address Monday, Barack Hussein Obama was administered his oath1. by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts. It is dedication and allegiance to that oath of office which, first and foremost, defines the presidential character of all who have taken it.
In the case of Barack Obama, every day of his administration has been defined by the abject violation of that oath.
In his inaugural remarks2., Obama bookended his agenda with Declaration- and Constitution-affirming aphorisms, in fitting tribute to our Founders. But every word between those bookends reflected a lifetime of Leftist mentoring, and was, accordingly, an affront to Liberty and Obama's oath to support and defend our Constitution.
Obama began his remarks: "Each time we gather to inaugurate a president we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. ... What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
"For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The Patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. And for more than two hundred years, we have."
All well and good, but then Obama devoted the body of his inaugural agenda to the evisceration of the Liberty proclaimed in our Declaration and codified in our Constitution.
It is not that Obama's overt intent was to shred our Constitution, per se. It is that he subscribes to the errant notion of a "living constitution," one that can be twisted to mean whatever he and his Leftist cadres want it to mean in order to comport with their statist agenda. In other words, he subscribes to the rule of men over Rule of Law.
In the second of his two autobiographies, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama wrote, "[The Constitution] is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world."
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He repeated that assertion in the context of his address, saying, "[W]e have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. ... Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time."
Our Founders did not establish a Constitution in order to facilitate a "centuries-long debate about the role of government." On the contrary, our Constitution clearly enumerates the role of government, but Obama insists that he be the arbiter of that role. And, as for how we "define liberty," undoubtedly Obama also aspires to have his definition be the universal standard.
The only "debate," then, is to what extent Obama and the Left can violate Liberty and the authority of our Constitution before American Patriots rise in protest. The advent of another American Revolution to re-establish our nation's First Principles, is a perpetual check against tyranny, as discomforting as that thought might be for some.
As Thomas Jefferson noted in the year our Constitution was written, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." And on that note, make no mistake: Obama's current assault on the Second Amendment has nothing to do with "keeping children safe from harm," and everything to do with the confiscation of the type of weapons that have one primary purpose under the Second Amendment -- defending our Constitution.
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Obama and his ideological Marxists have overtaken the once-noble Democratic Party, and converted it to the Socialist Democratic Party. The consequences have been devastating for those he ostensibly serves, particularly for his most loyal constituency -- black Americans, 93 percent of whom voted for Obama.
Obama's inaugural was "celebrated" on the day set aside to remember the civil rights struggle, and its primary protagonist, Martin Luther King. MLK proclaimed famously, "I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But Obama has done nothing to advance that proclamation, instead, affirming the statist status of most blacks, who, in effect, are enslaved on urban plantations.
Obama maintains this most loyal constituency by maintaining the "victim status" of black people, thus ensuring they are judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character -- the antithesis of MLK's dream.
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Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged. It seeks a centrally planned economy directed by a dominant-party state that controls economic production by way of taxation, regulation and income redistribution.
Obama's closing bookend began with the assertion, "My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction. And we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service."
But Obama's allegiance is most assuredly to "party" and "faction," in part two of his quest for "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
He ended his inaugural remarks claiming, "You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country's course. ... With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom."
Translation: He and his legions of socialists are intent on setting the nation's course, and they will not be deterred by the Rule of Law. These are words spoken with the arrogance of a man who believes he is worshipped by all the people, rather than one who was re-elected to office by a narrow, naive and dangerously uninformed populist majority.
In his Farewell Address to the nation in 1796, George Washington affirmed, "The Constitution which at any time exists, 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, is sacredly obligatory upon all."
But Obama believes that the "explicit and authentic act of the whole People" was his marginal re-election, not the process of amendment prescribed in Article V of our Constitution.
Thus, American Patriots from all walks of life must stand ready to defend Liberty, as our Founders did, "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." We must, likewise, "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" to uphold our Constitution.
For the record, I have taken my oath to support and defend our Constitution nine times in the service of my community, my state and my country. I honor my oath every day, and stand ready with more than 60 million armed Patriots, to support and defend it! To that end, I recall the words of Thomas Paine: "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."
Thepatriotpost.com
1-23-13
Ex-SEAL Zinke: 'Nearly Certain' Women in Combat Will Cost Lives
By David A. Patten
Former Navy SEAL commander and Montana State Sen. Ryan Zinke reacted sharply Wednesday to news the Obama administration will drop the prohibition against women serving in military combat roles, warning it is “nearly certain” to cost lives.
A Republican who served in the elite SEAL Team Six, Zinke cautioned that introducing male-female dynamics on the front lines “has the potential to degrade our combat readiness.”
“I know there are some women who can do the physical training,” Zinke told Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “When I was a SEAL instructor, the Olympic training center is in San Diego, and I watched some Olympic-caliber women athletes run through the obstacle course better than certainly many of the SEAL candidates could do.
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“These were quality athletes. So physically, I think there are some women who can do it. But the issue is what are the unintended consequences? This is not a Demi Moore movie.
“In my opinion we’re not ready,” he said. “This is not a Hollywood movie. This has real consequences that are going to affect our sons and daughters whose lives are on the line. I think you need to go very, very carefully when it comes to the defense of our country.”
Sources say outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will announce his decision Thursday to allow female soldiers to participate in combat roles beginning later this year. Special units such as the SEALS, and the Army’s Delta Force, will have until 2016 to demonstrate why they should qualify for an exemption.
Zinke, who served in the SEALS from 1985 to 2008, said the administration’s order should be carefully reviewed.
During his time in the military, he said, he encountered “women operatives that were very, very good.”
The problem comes with unilaterally lifting the combat restriction across the board, he said.
“I think it’s going to have women wanting to be the first SEAL for the purpose of being the first SEAL,” he said. “The evolution of man, I think, is slower than the cultural evolution. And I think there will be unintentional consequences when it’s lifted across the board.”
Zinke also suggested that the decision does not appear to reflect a real-world understanding of combat.
“The hard truth of combat oftentimes is brutal,” he said. “It involves face-to-face, hand-to-hand, close-quarter battle. And I think we forget that. We’ve become so sensitized that warfare is wrapped up in a two-hour movie featuring stars who always live. And that’s not how it really is.”
The former Navy SEAL launched the Special Operations for America PAC during the height of last year’s presidential campaign. He said the decision to open up combat roles for women should have followed “a longer national discussion than a simple executive order.”
“I’m disappointed that it was taken lightly, and obviously it was,” he said.
Zinke also addressed concerns that mixing men and women on the front lines could impair unit morale and effectiveness.
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“Let’s face it, it’s physically demanding, and distractions result in death,” he told Newsmax. “We’re not talking about mature men such as Panetta. We’re talking about 20-year-olds away from their families, close-quarters, out in the field. Relationships are going to happen, as they happen today on our naval vessels.”
His conclusion: “I think it is hasty and will result in unintended consequences that will lead unfortunately to a loss of life.”
Zinke added: “I believe that is nearly certain.”
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1-22-13
"It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn." --George Washington, letter to the Legislature of Pennsylvania, 1789
1-21-13
Federal Court Upholds Wisconsin Law on Unions
Mike Shedlock
Those looking for excellent news in the midst of a clearly-souring global economy can find it in Wisconsin.
I am pleased to report Federal appeals court upholds Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s restrictions on public unions
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s contentious law stripping most public workers of nearly all of their collective bargaining rights in a decision hailed by Republicans but not undoing a state court ruling keeping much of the law from being in effect.
The decision marks the latest twist in a two-year battle over the law that Walker proposed in February 2011 and passed a month later despite massive protests and Senate Democrats leaving for Illinois in a failed attempt to block a vote on the measure.
The law forced public union members to pay more for health insurance and pension benefits, which Walker said was needed to address a budget shortfall. It also took away nearly all their bargaining rights.
Walker and Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who fought for passage of the bill, called the ruling a win for Wisconsin taxpayers.
“As we’ve said all along, Act 10 is constitutional,” Walker said in a statement, referring to the law’s official designation.
While Friday’s 2-1 ruling by a panel of the 7th Circuit could influence the state appeals court and others hearing the cases, it’s not binding, said Paul Secunda, a Marquette University law professor. It certainly doesn’t signal the end of the legal fights, he said, and it could be appealed to the full federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The public unions will fight until every one of their arguments are considered in full,” Secunda predicted.
The law in question prohibits most public employees from collectively bargaining on anything except wages. It also requires public unions to hold an annual election to see whether members want the organization to continue to exist, and it bars unions from automatically withdrawing dues from members’ paychecks.
Walker specifically exempted public safety unions from the law’s effects, however. He said he didn’t want to risk police and firefighters going on strike in protest of the law’s provisions.
The appeals court upheld the law in its entirety Friday. The judges said the state was free to draw a line between public safety and other unions. The state had a rational basis to protect the public safety unions and the law didn’t explicitly discriminate against other public worker unions based on their political leanings, the court said.
“Distinguishing between public safety unions and general employee unions may have been a poor choice, but it is not unconstitutional,” the opinion said.
Poor Choice Indeed
Let's review that last sentence above “Distinguishing between public safety unions and general employee unions may have been a poor choice, but it is not unconstitutional,” the opinion said.
I agree. It was a poor choice to exclude public workers.
The way to rectify that poor choice is to pass another law, including public safety workers as well.
I strongly endorse ending all collective bargaining "rights" of public unions.
No "Right" to Collective Bargaining
For starters there is no "right" to collective bargaining. I made the case at the height of the Wisconsin battle on March 21, 2011 in Collective Bargaining neither a Privilege nor a Right
The battle cry from Wisconsin is a union complaint that their "right" to collective bargaining has been taken away. Nothing could be further from the truth. You cannot take away something that does not exist and never did.
Please consider this simple sentence straight from the Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Public unions take away those "unalienable rights" via collective bargaining arrangements.
Five Ways Collective Bargaining Tramples Various Unalienable Rights
Collective bargaining agreements take away the right of individuals to pursue a career of their dreams void of union affiliation
Collective bargaining agreements force individuals into organizations against the free will of those members
Collective bargaining agreements force union dues out of members who do not even want to belong
Collective bargaining agreements dictate what members can and cannot do with their free time.
Collective bargaining agreements even dictate what non-members can and cannot do with their free time!
I list examples for those five points in my article. Collective bargaining is no bargain for anyone. It is a curse on taxpayers. FDR agrees.
Inquiring minds are reading snips from a Letter from FDR Regarding Collective Bargaining of Public Unions written August 16, 1937.
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.
The biggest socialist president in the history of the US even agrees there is no place for collective bargaining of public unions, and he states the case very well.
Anyone who reads that logical explanation by FDR and disagrees, is a member of a union, has a family member in a union, or simply has a non-functioning mind.
I call on governor Scott Walker to rectify the law as passed. Excluding public safety workers was a bad idea, and he knows it.
So why did he do it?
He barely won the first election (winning the recall by much more) and probably would not have won if he took on all the unions at once.
1-20-13
West Virginians rally for 2nd Amendment
By Jeff Jenkins in News | January 19, 2013 at 11:45AM
Kanawha County resident Terry Knorr said he “no options” but to attend a rally on the steps of the state capitol Saturday morning in support of 2nd Amendment rights.
Knorr says proposals to take away some gun rights are worth rallying against.
“What the government is talking about doing is in direct violation of that amendment,” Knorr told MetroNews. “There is nothing in the Constitution that permits them, without another amendment, to violate that amendment.”
Knorr is a 22-year veteran of the military and he joined about 300 men, women and children at the “Guns Across America” rally led by state lawmaker Josh Nelson.
Del. Nelson, R-Boone, says many West Virginians are scared that a chipping away of the 2nd Amendment will one day lead to a taking away of personal ownership of guns used for protection.
“A lot of us especially here in West Virginia live quite a ways away from any kind of civilization—so the comfort it brings to be able to protect your family means a lot to people,” the freshman delegate said.
Nelson told the crowd through a bullhorn that when he goes to work as an underground coal miner in Boone County and leaves his wife and two-year-old daughter at home she should able to have a gun with more than seven rounds to protect herself.
Knorr says he agrees with President Barack Obama that no single act is going to solve the gun violence problem but he says infringing on a constitutional right isn’t the way to go.
“When you give up one right what’s to stop them from taking another. You’ve got to draw the line before you start,” Knorr said.
Berkeley County Del. Larry Faircloth says it’s a very emotional issue for many West Virginians.
“They’ve learned generation after generation that ‘Hey we’ve got guns in the home. We can hunt with these. We can go to sporting events with these. We can use them for recreation. And now you want to take them away from us? What did we do wrong?’” Faircloth said.
Knorr admits it’s a difficult issue.
“I don’t know the answer,” he said. “But I know taking away the rights or infringing on that right is unconstitutional. It’s unconscionable!”
Del. Nelson says those who took the time on a Saturday morning in January to come out to the state capitol to voice their concern and rally for the 2nd Amendment were mostly just regular West Virginians who don’t like the way things are going.
“People are afraid. It’s just as simple as that,” Nelson said.
1-19-13
A Rational Gun Discussion?
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants." --Cesare Beccaria
Twice this week, Barack Obama graced us with his pontification on both his fealty to the Second Amendment and his desire for "common sense" gun control measures. With the Left, however, those two things are mutually exclusive. He's merely repeating the siren song of every other socialist tyrant during the last one hundred years.
On Monday, Obama goaded Republicans to go along with his schemes. "[I]f in fact ... everybody across party lines was as deeply moved and saddened as I was by what happened in Newtown," further gun control measures are the only reasonable solution, he concluded. Furthermore, "As far as people lining up and purchasing more guns," he said, "I think that we've seen for some time now that those who oppose any common sense gun control or gun safety measures have a pretty effective way of ginning up fear on the part of gun owners that somehow the federal government's about to take all your guns away. And, you know, there's probably an economic element to that. It obviously is good for business." He should know -- he's the Gun Salesman Emeritus, presiding over the sale of 67 million guns in four years.
So to recap, if you don't support gun control, you hate kids, and if you're buying or selling guns, you're a greedy loon. Now who's ready for a rational discussion?
Then on Wednesday, Obama laid down the gauntlet. Of course, there was nothing new in what he proposed -- he had it all on the shelf just waiting for the first post-election crisis to exploit. Using four children as human shields, he bravely strode to the lectern to outline 23 executive actions, adding a call for congressional action. Nothing like basing policy on the opinions of eight-year-olds who've been brainwashed in government schools.
One particularly worrisome item on Obama's list is No. 14: "Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence." Such research isn't new, however. Timothy Wheeler, MD, director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, writes, "Memories are short. It was only 15 years ago that Congress cut off federal funding for the Centers for Disease Control's gun research. Top CDC officials such as Patrick O'Carroll, M.D., had said things like, 'We're going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We're doing the most we can do, given the political realities.'" There is reason to fear that the CDC would once again politicize their research or expand exclusionary mental illness to prohibit firearm ownership for millions of Americans.
Not only that, but Obama's item No. 4 gives the attorney general the authority to "review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks." Remember Fast and Furious? And recall the DHS warning about right-wing extremists? For that matter, check out this week's report on "America's Violent Far-Right." Now raise your hand if you trust Eric Holder to determine who "dangerous people" are.
Obama also promised to nominate a permanent ATF director. We suggest one who won't supply "assault weapons" to murderous Mexican drug cartels.
Next, Obama called on Congress to pass universal background checks and to ban so-called "military-style assault weapons" and standard-capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. This defensive weapons ban faces a steep climb, however. Not withstanding Joe Biden's claims of "overwhelming consensus" on gun control, the GOP controls the House, and we don't believe even the spaghetti-spine Republicans in that chamber will consent to a ban. Then there's the Senate, where Democrats such as Max Baucus (MT), Mark Begich (AK) and even Al Franken (MN) are balking at, if not outright opposing, a ban. Mark Pryor (AR), Tim Johnson (SD), Kay Hagan (NC) and Mary Landrieu (LA) likewise face re-election in red states in 2014 and are probable "no" votes. Even Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) doesn't seem to be a fan of Dianne Feinstein's gun ban.
Then the courts. Under the Supreme Court's Heller and McDonald rulings, the Second Amendment does, in fact, mean what it says -- it preserves the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The Court added that this meant arms in common use, which would include semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15.
That said, we won't stop standing as a voice of Liberty in encouraging lawmakers to abide by their oaths. We must hold our elected officials accountable, and we must stop the Left's agenda. You can start by contacting your senators and representatives, as well as joining the 25,000 Patriots who have already signed the Second Amendment pledge.
Patriot Post.com
1-18-13
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1795
1-17-13
Are Guns the Problem?
Comment
By Walter Williams
When I attended primary and secondary school — during the 1940s and '50s — one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become routine today. Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws. My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped.
Dr. John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships. They carried their rifles to school on the subways and, upon arrival, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach and retrieved their rifles after school for target practice. Virginia's rural areas had a long tradition of high-school students going hunting in the morning before school and sometimes storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars that were parked on school grounds. Often a youngster's 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.
Today's level of civility can't match yesteryear's. Many of today's youngsters begin the school day passing through metal detectors. Guards patrol school hallways, and police cars patrol outside. Despite these measures, assaults, knifings and shootings occur. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2010 there were 828,000 nonfatal criminal incidents in schools. There were 470,000 thefts and 359,000 violent attacks, of which 91,400 were serious. In the same year, 145,100 public-school teachers were physically attacked, and 276,700 were threatened.
What explains today's behavior versus yesteryear's? For well over a half-century, the nation's liberals and progressives — along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts — have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. These people taught their vision, that there are no moral absolutes, to our young people. To them, what's moral or immoral is a matter of convenience, personal opinion or a consensus.
During the '50s and '60s, the education establishment launched its agenda to undermine lessons children learned from their parents and the church with fads such as "values clarification." So-called sex education classes are simply indoctrination that sought to undermine family and church strictures against premarital sex.
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Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed and considered passé and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions with neither parental knowledge nor consent.
Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society. These behavioral norms — transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings — represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error, and looking at what works. The importance of customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more uncivilized we become the more laws that are needed to regulate behavior.
Many customs, traditions and moral values have been discarded without an appreciation for the role they played in creating a civilized society, and now we're paying the price. What's worse is that instead of a return to what worked, people want to replace what worked with what sounds good, such as zero-tolerance policies in which bringing a water pistol, drawing a picture of a pistol, or pointing a finger and shouting "bang-bang" produces a school suspension or arrest. Seeing as we've decided that we should rely on gun laws to control behavior, what should be done to regulate clubs and hammers? After all, FBI crime statistics show that more people are murdered by clubs and hammers than rifles and shotguns.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
1-16-13
Liberalism Versus Blacks
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?
San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city's total population has grown.
Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.
Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.
Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.
The two most recent books that show this with hard facts are "Mismatch" by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and "Wounds That Will Not Heal" by Russell K. Nieli. My own book "Affirmative Action Around the World" shows the same thing with different evidence.
In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good — and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.
The current liberal crusade for more so-called "gun control" laws is more of the same. Factual studies over the years, both in the United States and in other countries, repeatedly show that "gun control" laws do not in fact reduce crimes committed with guns.
Cities with some of the tightest gun control laws in the nation have murder rates far above the national average. In the middle of the 20th century, New York had far more restrictive gun control laws than London, but London had far less gun crime. Yet gun crimes in London skyrocketed after severe gun control laws were imposed over the next several decades.
Although gun control is not usually considered a racial issue, a wholly disproportionate number of Americans killed by guns are black. But here, as elsewhere, liberals' devotion to their ideology greatly exceeds their concern about what actually happens to flesh and blood human beings as a result of their ideology.
One of the most polarizing and counterproductive liberal crusades of the 20th century has been the decades-long busing crusade to send black children to predominantly white schools. The idea behind this goes back to the pronouncement by Chief Justice Earl Warren that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
Yet within walking distance of the Supreme Court where this pronouncement was made was an all-black high school that had scored higher than two-thirds of the city's white high schools taking the same test — way back in 1899! But who cares about facts, when you are on a liberal crusade that makes you feel morally superior?
To challenge government-imposed racial segregation and discrimination is one thing. But to claim that blacks get a better education if they sit next to whites in school is something very different. And it is something that goes counter to the facts.
Many liberal ideas about race sound plausible, and it is understandable that these ideas might have been attractive 50 years ago. What is not understandable is how so many liberals can blindly ignore 50 years of evidence to the contrary since then.
1-15-13"No free government was ever founded or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defence of the state.... Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen." --Josiah Quincy, Jr., Thoughts on Standing Armies, 1774
1-14-13
Please read my new article,
"Acts of madmen must never result in loss of liberty for freemen"
1-13-13
Oakland’s Radical Occupy Teachers Finally Reveal Their Goal: ‘Abolish Capitalism’
Kyle Olson
At least the teachers of Occupy Oakland are finally being honest about their political agenda.
They’re openly calling for an all-out abolition of capitalism.
The Occupy Oakland Education Committee – comprised of public school teachers from the Oakland, California school district – has renamed its publication “ClassRoom Struggle” and its platform TEACH, which stands for “Transform Education, Abolish Capitalism and Heal.”
Finally the radical teachers have acknowledged what we’ve been saying all along: they want to end capitalism and replace it with a socialist economy, quite possibly enforced by a totalitarian form of government.
And what, precisely, is their strategy? They tell us that goal number one is to abolish “capitalist schools.”
“What we are calling to abolish is not education but rather capitalism,” the group wrote in a statement. “We see the struggle to abolish capitalist schools as one place where we can begin to chip away at capitalism’s grasp on our society. Capitalist tendencies run deep into the structure and politics of schools.
Operated the proper way, these schools have a great deal of potential for left-wing causes, according to the Oakland group.
“While public schools have served a role in developing white supremacist, capitalist and imperialist ideology and social structure (for example through segregated schools, tracked programs, mandated pledge of allegiance, etc.), they have also been key sites of struggle and served as assets for movements of working class students of color and other youth struggles,” the group wrote.
The last part is the scariest. They clearly want to encourage rebellious behavior among young student and recruit them into their anti-American movement.
The teachers have an absolute right to subscribe to any silly political theory they choose. That’s one of the great things about living in the country they hate. But many teachers in Oakland and throughout the U.S. have been using their classrooms as “assets” for their radical movements. They seek to brainwash youngsters into hating America and mistrusting the economic system that has given our nation a very high standard of living.
This proves what domestic terrorist-turned-professor Bill Ayers recently said: Radical leftist teachers have a great deal of influence in our schools, and they should use it to further the revolutionary cause.
SEE THE VIDEO HERE.
America will continue its slide toward socialism as long as radical activists like Ayers and the Oakland teachers are allowed to use our taxpayer-funded schools as bully pulpits and recruiting zones for their movement.
1-12-13
25 People, Places, And Things Liberals Love To Hate
John Hawkins
1) Guns for making all those poor innocent criminals break the law.
2) The old, dead white guys who founded America and their ridiculous, outdated Constitution that doesn't mention global warming or limits on soda size even once.
3) Nosy voters who ask questions like, "What kind of change?" and "Forward to where?"
4) Adorable little kids who want to run lemonade stands...WITHOUT A PERMIT!
5) The fact that Sarah Palin is the single best feminist role model in a generation while the Left's #1 feminist role model, Hillary Clinton, built her whole career around marrying the right guy.
6) Deciding issues based on the merits as opposed to going with whatever makes you sound "nice."
7) Informed voters.
8) Those “deceptive” “negative” campaign ads that take liberals “completely out of context” by quoting them when they take unpopular positions.
9) Minorities who actually expect Democrats to make their life better in return for their vote.
10) People who define patriotism as actually loving your country.
11) Black men who don't take orders from white liberals.
12) That no government program exists that can force Fox News to make Chris Matthews the head of its network.
13) Judging from Barack Obama's presidency so far -- jobs.
14) People who think anyone responsible enough to have sex is responsible enough to buy their own birth control.
15) All those dirty polluters who put a higher value on having electricity 24 hours a day at a reasonable cost with oil rather than using extremely expensive alternative energy sources that are only a few decades away from being almost as good.
16) Debt limits, budgets and anything else that makes it harder for liberals to spend other people’s money.
17) People who want to hear from conservatives what they believe instead of just accepting what liberals say conservatives believe.
18) Expecting liberals to live up to the same standards they want to impose on everyone else as opposed to tactfully ignoring their staggering hypocrisy because they "mean well."
19) The South.
20) People who believe they should be allowed to choose what lightbulbs they want to use in their own house.
21) Crazy radicals who believe our country should live within its means even if it means the guy who plays Big Bird won't be able to afford to have a butler.
22) The idea that everyone should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin.
23) Voters who expect liberals to keep the campaign promises they made when they were pretending to be moderates in order to get elected.
24) All these Christians who actually insist on trying to stick to the Bible instead of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi's interpretation of what God really meant to say.
25) People who live in America and actually like America, even when a Democrat isn't in charge.
1-11-13
Only You Can Prevent Gun Bans
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." --Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
On Thursday, we began a critical push for American Patriots across this great nation to pledge: "We, the People, affirm that we will support and defend Liberty as 'endowed by our Creator,' enshrined in our Constitution and empowered by its Second Amendment, against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Please take a moment and join the thousands of your countrymen who answered the call. Share it with your family, friends and colleagues via social media and email, as well. Let's stay ahead of the curve.
The Left certainly won't relent in their effort to destroy Liberty. Neither should we tire of pledging all that we have to defend it, as Mark Alexander did yesterday when he made public his intention to resist the Left's unconstitutional assault on our Second Amendment.
Threats to our God-given right "to keep and bear Arms" abound. Chief in the news has been the renewed defensive weapons ban to be introduced by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) on Jan. 22, conveniently close to the State of the Union address. We outlined last week just how atrocious this bill is. Feinstein plans to redefine "assault weapons" to apply to a wider and entirely subjective list of firearms, which will be subject to invasive registration procedures and forfeiture upon death of their owners. Of course, these firearms would better be defined as "defensive" rather than "assault weapons." But the senator's radiant incompetence about the subject of guns is eclipsed only by her utter lack of respect for the Bill of Rights.
We strongly urge you to contact your senators and representatives, as well as GOP leadership in both houses, to express your opposition to this and any other gun grab.
Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden has been leading a task force (read: tragedy exploitation team) to determine what draconian measures will be "necessary" to restrict and confiscate guns in an effort to provide the illusion of safety. He plans to announce his findings next Tuesday. "The president is going to act," Biden warned, mentioning executive orders as a possible avenue. Biden also advocated for the destruction of Liberty as a "moral issue." And since the Left operates under the presumption that the ends justify any means, Biden said that if these actions "result in only saving one life, they're worth taking." In the case of Feinstein's legislation or any executive order, however, they'd be lucky if it actually did save one life. Of course, saving lives isn't the real agenda of the Abortion Party, is it?
The feds aren't the only ones making a target of the Bill of Rights, either. Last week, we noted that Illinois and New York both are working on expansive gun bans. On Wednesday, New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed "the toughest assault weapons ban in the nation", asserting, "We respect hunters and sportsmen. This is not taking away people's guns. I own a gun. I own a Remington shotgun. I've hunted. I've shot. That's not what this is about. It's about ending the unnecessary risk of high-capacity assault rifles. No one hunts with an assault rifle! No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer!"
A word to the wise: Whenever a politician says, "I'm a supporter of the Second Amendment" or "hunting and sport shooting" and then adds a "but" or some other caveat, beware. That's how the 1994 ban passed -- hunters and sport shooters decided the bill didn't affect them, and we all lost a large measure of Liberty.
Neighboring New Jersey Democrats introduced an astonishing 18 civilian disarmament bills this week. Likewise, the New England states of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are joining the tyrannical bandwagon, as is Colorado, which expects to see 14 to 20 gun bills in the wake of its own tragic murders in Aurora last July. And Chicago, the murder capital of the nation in part because of its strict gun laws, will soon propose even more.
There is some hope, however. Wyoming is considering a bill that would specifically nullify "any federal law which attempts to ban a semi-automatic firearm or to limit the size of a magazine of a firearm or other limitation on firearms in this state." We would only suggest that they expand their definition to include any unconstitutional federal gun legislation. There are other states on the side of Liberty, too.
We often recall the words of Samuel Adams, who said, "It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." If we wish to preserve our Liberty, and that of our posterity, we must be tireless and we must remain intent on setting those brushfires of freedom. You can start by affirming the Second Amendment and getting others to do the same. We must win this battle.
http://patriotpost.us/editions/16244/
1-10-13
Dishonest educators
By Walter Williams
Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came out with the story “Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal.” It reported that “for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history.”
Atlanta‘s not alone. There have been investigations, reports and charges of teacher-assisted cheating in other cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington.
Recently, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s blog carried a story titled “A new cheating scandal: Aspiring teachers hiring ringers.” Reportedly for at least 15 years, teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee paid Clarence Mumford, who‘s now under indictment, between $1,500 and $3,000 to send someone else to take their Praxis exam, which is used for K-12 teacher certification in 40 states. Here‘s a practice Praxis I math question: Which of the following is equal to a quarter-million — 40,000, 250,000, 2,500,000, 1/4,000,000 or 4/1,000,000?
A practice writing-skills question is to identify the error in the following sentence: “The club members agreed that each would contribute 10 days of voluntary work annually each year at the local hospital.” (The test taker is supposed to point out that “annually each year” is redundant.)
CNN broke this cheating story last July, but the story hasn‘t gotten much national press since then. In an article for NewsBusters titled “Months-Old, Three-State Teacher Certification Test Cheating Scandal Gets Major AP Story — on a Slow News Weekend” (11/25/12), Tom Blumer quotes speculation by the blog “educationrealist”: “I will be extremely surprised if it does not turn out that most if not all of the teachers who bought themselves a test grade are black. (I am also betting that the actual testers are white, but am not as certain. It just seems that if black people were taking the test and guaranteeing passage, the fees would be higher.)”
There‘s some basis in fact for that speculation, and it includes former Steelers wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, who‘s been indicted for fraud for allegedly paying someone to take a teacher-certification test for him. According to the study “Differences in Passing Rates on Praxis I Tests by Race/Ethnicity Group” (March 2011), the percentages of blacks who passed the Praxis I reading, writing and mathematics tests on their first try were 41, 44 and 37, respectively. For white test takers, the respective percentages were 82, 80 and 78.
This test-taking fraud is merely the tip of a much larger iceberg. It highlights the educational fraud being perpetrated on blacks during their K-12 education. Four or five years of college — even majoring in education, an undemanding subject — cannot make up for those 13 years of rotten education. Then they‘re given a college degree that is fraudulent, seeing as some have difficulty passing a test that shouldn‘t be challenging to even a 12th-grader.
Here‘s my question: If they manage to get through the mockery of teacher certification, at what schools do you think they will teach?
Walter Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
Read more: http://triblive.com/opinion/featuredcommentary/3251902-74/test-cheating-teacher#ixzz2HWjSvRa6
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1-9-13
The Role of 'Educators'
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Many years ago, as a young man, I read a very interesting book about the rise of the Communists to power in China. In the last chapter, the author tried to explain why and how this had happened.
Among the factors he cited were the country's educators. That struck me as odd, and not very plausible, at the time. But the passing years have made that seem less and less odd, and more and more plausible. Today, I see our own educators playing a similar role in creating a mindset that undermines American society.
Schools were once thought of as places where a society's knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation. But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education — one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries overseas.
John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society's culture to the young, but as an agent of change — someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.
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A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions. The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America — and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.
If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers' attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn's book.
That book has sold millions of copies, poisoning the minds of millions of students in schools and colleges against their own country. But this book is one of many things that enable teachers to think of themselves as "agents of change," without having the slightest accountability for whether that change turns out to be for the better or for the worse — or, indeed, utterly catastrophic.
This misuse of schools to undermine one's own society is not something confined to the United States or even to our own time. It is common in Western countries for educators, the media and the intelligentsia in general, to single out Western civilization for special condemnation for sins that have been common to the human race, in all parts of the world, for thousands of years.
Meanwhile, all sorts of fictitious virtues are attributed to non-Western societies, and their worst crimes are often passed over in silence, or at least shrugged off by saying some such thing as "Who are we to judge?"
Even in the face of mortal dangers, political correctness forbids us to use words like "terrorist" when the approved euphemism is "militant." Milder terms such as "illegal alien" likewise cannot pass the political correctness test, so it must be replaced by another euphemism, "undocumented worker."
Some think that we must tiptoe around in our own country, lest some foreigners living here or visiting here be offended by the sight of an American flag or a Christmas tree in some institutions.
In France between the two World Wars, the teachers' union decided that schools should replace patriotism with internationalism and pacifism. Books that told the story of the heroic defense of French soldiers against the German invaders at Verdun in 1916, despite suffering massive casualties, were replaced by books that spoke impartially about the suffering of all soldiers — both French and German — at Verdun.
Germany invaded France again in 1940, and this time the world was shocked when the French surrendered after just 6 weeks of fighting — especially since military experts expected France to win. But two decades of undermining French patriotism and morale had done their work.
American schools today are similarly undermining American society as one unworthy of defending, either domestically or internationally. If there were nuclear attacks on American cities, how long would it take for us to surrender, even if we had nuclear superiority — but were not as willing to die as our enemies were?
1-8-13
Return of the real Obama
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes — naked of spending cuts — passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives. After which, you might expect him to pivot to his self-proclaimed “principle” of fiscal “balance” by taking the lead on reducing spending. “Why,” asked The Post on the eve of the final fiscal-cliff agreement, “is the nation’s leader not embracing and then explaining the balanced reforms the nation needs?”
Because he has no interest in them. He’s a visionary, not an accountant. Sure, he’ll pretend to care about deficits, especially while running for reelection. But now that he’s past the post, he’s free to be himself — a committed big-government social democrat.
As he showed in his two speeches this week. After perfunctory nods to debt and spending reduction, he waxed enthusiastic about continued “investments” — i.e., spending — on education, research, roads and bridges, green energy, etc.
Having promised more government, he then promised more taxes — on “millionaires” and “companies with a lot of lobbyists,” of course. It was a bold affirmation of pre-Clintonian tax-and-spend liberalism.
Why not? He had just won Round 1: raising rates. Round 2 is to raise yet more tax revenue by eliminating deductions. After all, didn’t John Boehner offer him $800 billion of such loophole-closing revenuejust a few weeks ago?
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To paraphrase Churchill on the British Empire, Barack Obama did not become president of the United States to preside over the liquidation of the welfare state. On the contrary, he is dedicated to its expansion. He’s already created the largest new entitlement in half a century (Obamacare). And he has increased federal spending to an astronomical 24.4 percent of GDP (the postwar norm is about 20 percent), a level not seen since World War II.
But this level of spending requires a significantly higher level of taxation. Hence his hardball fiscal-cliff strategy of issuing an ultimatum to Republicans to raise tax rates — or be blamed for a massive across-the-board tax increase and a subsequent recession.
I’ll get you the money by eliminating deductions, offered Boehner. No, sir, replied the president. Rates it must be.
Why the insistence?
(1) Partisan Advantage
As I wrote last month, the ultimatum was designed to exploit and exacerbate internal Republican divisions. It worked perfectly. Boehner’s attempted finesse (Plan B), which would have raised rates but only for those making more than $1 million, collapsed amid an open rebellion from a good quarter of the Republican caucus.
At which point, power passed from the House to the Senate, where a deal was brokered. By the time the Senate bill reached the House, there was no time or room for maneuver. Checkmate. Obama neutralized the one body that had stymied him during the past two years.
(2) Ideological Breakthrough
Obama’s ultimate ambition is to break the nation’s 30-year thrall of low taxes — so powerful that those who defied the Reaganite norm paid heavily for it. Walter Mondale’s acceptance speech at the 1984 Democratic convention, promising to raise taxes, ended his campaign before it began. President George H.W. Bush’s no-new-taxes reversal cost him a second term.
On this, too, Obama is succeeding. He not only got his tax increase passed. He did it with public opinion behind him.
Why are higher taxes so important to him?
First, as a means: A high-tax economy is liberalism’s only hope for sustaining and enlarging the entitlement state. It provides the funds for enlightened adventures in everything from algae to Obamacare.
Second, as an end in itself. Fundamentally, Obama is a leveler. The community organizer seeks, above all, to reverse the growing inequality that he dates and attributes to ruthless Reaganism. Now, however, clothed in the immense powers of the presidency, he can actually engage in unadorned redistributionism. As in Tuesday night’s $620 billion wealth transfer.
Upon losing the House in 2010, the leveler took cover for the next two years. He wasn’t going to advance his real agenda through the Republican House anyway, and he needed to win reelection.
Now he’s won. The old Obama is back. He must not be underestimated. He has deftly leveraged his class-war-themed election victory (a) to secure a source of funding (albeit still small) for the bloated welfare state, (b) to carry out an admirably candid bit of income redistribution and (c) to fracture the one remaining institutional obstacle to the rest of his ideological agenda.
Not bad for two months’ work.
1-7-13
Sheriff Pulls Business From Dana Safety Supply Because They Stopped Selling Semi-Automatic Rifles To Civilians
Dana Safety Supply, a major distributor of weapons and accessories to police departments and civilians across the United States, has declared that they will no longer sell semi-automatic rifles to civilians. Instead, they will only sell to law enforcement. This prompted Oconee County, Georgia Sheriff Scott Barry to write them an email in which he told them he would no longer be seeking them out to purchase products for his department based on their decision.
Sheriff Barry wrote the following email to DSS:
Sirs,
It is my understanding that you have stopped selling self loading rifles to members of the general public in favor of selling them to law enforcement officers only.
I deeply regret that decision. As such, this agency will no longer seek bids from or purchase from DSS.
Thank you for your time and attention to this email.
Sheriff Scott Berry
Oconee County Georgia Sheriffs Office
A call to the headquarters of DSS resulted in a political answer of “we appreciate your call, but are in the midst of consulting to form a proper response.” They would neither confirm nor deny the report when called on Friday. Apparently their website and postings outside their businesses are more forthcoming than their headquarters.
DSS posting on it’s website
DSS posting on it’s website
My hat is off to Sheriff Barry! In fact, Barry popped up on Fox Business for an interview.
In the interview, when asked why he would not longer be purchasing from DSS, Sheriff Barry said that since law abiding citizens couldn’t purchase a legal weapon there with money they have, then he wasn’t going to “spend their tax money” at such a business and he wasn’t going to “spend his personal money there” either. Come on! This guy is my kind of Sheriff!
When asked if it would “make his job easier” if “assault” rifles weren’t being sold and “out there,” Sheriff Barry responded by correcting the host that they were semi-automatic rifles, not assault rifles. He then went on to point out that there were millions of these weapons in America, but that “statistically an insignificant number of them are used to commit any kind of crime.”
Sheriff Barry was right on weapons and people. “Rifles of any type just don’t bother me,” he said. “Handguns of any type just don’t bother me. The truth is that in the hands of criminals they are tools of evil, but in the vast majority of hands, they are owned by law abiding citizens.”
When the host asked why take the term “assault rifle” off the table, the Sheriff responded by stating that the definition of the term is as “wide and as broad” as the building he was sitting in. The Sheriff described that an assault weapon was a military weapon that was designed for military purpose. “Semi-automatic rifles just aren’t assault rifles,” he said. “You can call them that, but that’s just not what they are.”
The host then asked Barry what his reaction to the Brady campaigns’ rating of an 8 out of 100 on Georgia’s regulations on firearms was. According to the host, who was citing the Brady campaign, the reasons for the low rating was because there was “no limits on gun purchases, no required background checks for gun show purchases, and no ban on ‘assault’ weapons,” Sheriff Barry said that he was “hoping to shoot for a lower number than that.” He did address the issue of the supposed “required background checks at gun shows” by stating that “law abiding citizens can sell guns in the parking lot or on the floor of a gun show.” He doesn’t know where they get the idea that it’s required to do a background check. He was emphatic in stating that he can sell his gun to anyone else no matter where he is at. The Sheriff rightly pointed out that one goes through the same process if they buy a gun through a dealer at a gun show that someone goes through at a standard brick and mortar store to purchase a firearm. He called the Brady statement concerning gun shows a “scare tactic.”
Barry said that Georgia believes in the Second Amendment and that means that law abiding citizens should be able to carry and buy firearms.
The rest of the interview is good too, Please watch it below.
Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/01/sheriff-pulls-business-from-dana-safety-supply-because-they-stopped-selling-semi-automatic-rifles-to-civilians/#ixzz2HFLuRdWT
In addition, should you be a law-abiding citizen who wants to show your non-support of Dana Safety Supply by not purchasing from them, here are a few more companies owned by the same people that own DSS:
Dana Safety Supply, Atlanta, GA
Southern Firearms, Greensboro, NC
Palmetto Firearms, Columbia, SC (NOTE: This is NOT Palmetto State Armory!)
Central Firearms, Tampa, FL
Dana Safety Supply, Miami, FL
Duval Honda
Duval Ford
Duval Acura
Duval Mazda at the Avenues
Mercedes-Benz of Gainesville
Subaru of Gainesville
Tampa Honda Land
Countryside Ford of Clearwater
Countryside Mazda of Clearwater
U.S. Auto Credit
Scott-McRae Advertising
Cause to Communicate
Commercial Landscape Solutions
1-6-13
Top Two Reasons to Own a Gun: Thank God and Sam Colt …
By John Kirkwood
SamuelColtMy right to own a gun, to stroke it, to use it, and to pass it on to my children is not a matter of pragmatism, so I’m not going to argue statistics or polls, even though they’d be in my favor. And this list is in no particular order because, after the top two reasons, it really doesn’t matter how you order the rest. It’s like the top musical acts of the twentieth century; there’s Elvis and the Beatles and where you rank The Stones, The Who or Led Zeppelin is just a matter of preference. In this case, the top two reasons to own a gun are to “shoot a bastard” and to “shoot a tyrant,” or at least to have the capacity.
Yes, I like poking holes in paper at 1100 feet per second and I love to take a pheasant down with my Remington 870, but “sport” and “hunting” are not the reasons that our founders were so “fanatical” about gun rights. Guns are also a great investment and in the Obama age, that’s a rare commodity, so it cracks the top ten. Want a good return on your investment, buy gold; want a good return on your freedom – buy lead. Still, not in the top two. I even like to stare at the guns in my collection and to see the “O” face of my friends when they eye-fondle my antique Winchester rifle; but our fathers didn’t risk lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for my right to display museum pieces. So let’s get to the meat of the matter, shall we?
Guns are meant to kill. Amen! They’re a tool made for killing. As a tool they can be used rightly or wrongly, and in the commission of justice or malice, but most of the time, they’re never used at all. Killing animals is good for the belly and can give you an appreciation for God’s creation, the food chain and the Noahic Covenant; hunting can even increase the bond between individuals, but it’s not imprimis.
Killing bad guys is; it is good for the soul, the neighborhood, the nation and the universe. Killing bad guys is even good for the ungrateful, pacifist, worm that kvetches at the sight of four tweens playing Risk (because of the implied “conflict”). He doesn’t know it because he’s never read Orwell beyond the stripped and bleached quotes from The Daily Kos, but it is true, “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
One reason to own a gun is because you can. We’re Americans. The right to KEEP and BEAR guns is our heritage. Dianne Feinstein and Mayor Bloomberg may want us to barter that right away for a bowl of lentils, but our “right” transcends the 2nd Amendment. The founders didn’t grant the right to us; they simply recognized that as free men, we have that right. God gave us the right to protect and defend our lives and our property. We have not ceded that right to the policeman, the soldier or the politician; we have extended that right to them.
To Kill a Bastard:
Personal defense is high on the list and because I live outside of Chicago, I know a thing or two about out-of-control violent crime in the face of draconian, stringent gun laws. Oh, I don’t mean an illegitimate child, here. By “bastard,” I mean a guy who tries to eat you on a Miami highway or tries to kick in the basement window to get jiggy with your five year old. The meth-head that would tie you up and light you on fire, just to get $25 for his next OMG, is a bastard; so is anyone who would separate you from your money, your children, or your heartbeat.
Another great reason to own a gun is because I’m not Chuck Norris or Barack Obama – ghosts don’t sit around the campfire telling “John Kirkwood” stories and I don’t have a personal Secret Service detail, so I’ll have to settle for my H&K .45. Colt gave us the great equalizer, a tool that could put Pee-Wee Herman on equal ground with Conan the Barbarian and civilization is better for it.
There’s something to say about those countries that have disarmed only to be faced with hundreds of thousands of bastards arriving on troop carriers. During World War II, the defenseless British begged the U.S. for arms and thousands of Americans sent their family shotguns and hunting rifles to aid the Limeys in their defense against Nazi bastards.
Personal defense and national defense are damn good reasons to be armed, to be armed well and to be as proficient as the average Hollywood hypocrite who makes a living playing with a gun, is protected by guys with guns and then makes PSA’s about taking our guns away.
To Kill a Tyrant:
“America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” ~ Claire Wolfe
This is the top dog! Thank God for lead and gun powder or we’d still be living as serfs under a feudal lord. Our founders developed a healthy respect for an armed populace and gleaned their wisdom from guys like Samuel Rutherford. Rutherford wrote LEX REX (Law is King), and it was the garlic necklace to the vampire doctrine of the divine right of kings. He suggests that, while we do owe the King certain things, if that King comes through the front door to rape my wife, he is no longer a king – he’s a rapist and the right thing to do is to draw your sword and to run him through.
My Bushmaster is my sword. If our “representatives” make good on their threats to confiscate guns, then it’ll be time to draw the sword. I respect ballots and so did the founders, but we don’t live in freedom today because Sam Adams and Patrick Henry cast a ballot. Our founders stuffed a musket because the English were stuffing the ballots and as a free man, I retain my right to water the Tree of Liberty if tyranny should arise on my watch.
If that time comes in our generation, then we’ll find out what we’re made of. Christians are fond of quoting Paul’s aphorism, “for me to live is Christ” but when choosing between living by that statement and dying or even discomfort, the herd thins. “From my cold dead hands” is a witticism, a quip, but one day it may be a necessity. Pasting the bumper sticker on your Facebook wall or your Ford F-150 is one thing; living and dying by it is quite another. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but an armed populace is mightier than a tyrant’s pen.
My AR-15 is freedom’s spade. It is the main tool in Liberty’s toolbox; the ultimate “just in case” if my generation would need to lay a new foundation. There are those in this country and many in this administration that would like to strip us of our guns, not to protect children, but to accumulate power. It is why they won’t listen to reason; it is why, in the face of contrary evidence, they turn their head and it is why they have a speech and a bill ready to be spewed out on command whenever the next tragedy occurs. If a room full of school children was swept away in Hurricane Sandy, Mayors Bloomberg and Emanuel would call for more gun control.
MOLON LABE!
I will not turn in my spade for a gift card; your bark doesn’t intimidate me, I am not alone and let the resolve of millions of patriots with an understanding of history and firearms, give you pause. I pray to God that it won’t come to it; but if tyranny comes to our doorstep it is most likely to come in uniform, at the dictate of rogue politicians and guarded by the propaganda of a dozen news anchors. What will you do? I can tell you how a “free man” would respond: a short prayer followed by two to the chest and one to the head; come what may!
May it never be! And it will be a lot less likely the more that Americans arm themselves. Arm yourselves in every way and make no apologies for it – ask a Holocaust Jew if he would, ask an Armenian.
Our founders felt it necessary to include not only the protections to keep the citizen armed, but the injunction to keep him free:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Image; Samuel Colt (1814 – 1862); English: Samuel Colt, founder of the firearms manufacturer Colt; date: 1857; source: 19th century engraving; author: Matthew Brady; public domain/copyright has expired
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1-5-13
Higher Taxes, More Spending: Not a Compromise
David B. McKinley (R-WV)
Member of Congress
As Congress approached the final hours before going over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the House was faced with a difficult choice. It could amend the controversial Senate plan and return it to them or the House could accept or reject it. Amending the plan was not a viable option because the Senate had refused to consider any changes. Thus it became a “take it or leave it” vote. I was elected to come to Washington to reduce the size of government and decrease spending; therefore, I voted against the flawed Senate plan.
In summary: although the legislation had certain positive attributes, the principle effect of the bill raised taxes, increased spending and only promised future spending cuts. It failed to address our long-term debt problem and looks nothing like the balanced approach promised by President Obama. America is now burdened with more than $16 trillion of debt, and Congress has failed to cut spending that it promised the public.
Let’s have a splash of reality: America is facing another $1.2 trillion dollar deficit for this year as it has for the past four years. This solution adopted by Congress not only does not reduce this year’s deficit, but it adds to it. According to the official estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate deal includes more than $330 billion in new deficit spending over the next decade.
Additionally, the bill calls for $620 billion in increased tax revenues over ten years but incredibly includes only $15 billion in spending reductions. That equates to a ratio of $1 in spending cuts to $41 in increased tax revenue, even though the President promised $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in new revenue during his campaign. The highly touted Simpson-Bowles Commission recommended a 3:1 ratio.
It should be self-evident that the $60 billion in new revenue annually is woefully insufficient to pay down the deficit. Where will we find the remaining $1.14 trillion to eliminate the deficit? We have a spending problem in Washington, not a taxing problem.
I had been willing to support a compromise that included additional, but limited, tax revenue if the plan also had included significant spending reductions and common-sense entitlement reforms. However the bill lacked that balance.
These concerns were not limited to conservatives. Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) also opposed the plan on these same grounds, saying, “We want a plan that materially reduces the deficit. This proposal does not meet that standard and does not put in place a real process to reduce the debt down the road.”
In a similar statement, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke called the current levels of spending “unsustainable,” and cautioned that “fiscal policy must be placed on a sustainable path that eventually results in a stable or declining ratio of federal debt to GDP.”
This plan does nothing to put us on that sustainable path.
Americans once again are being promised spending cuts in the future in exchange for immediate increases in taxes. We’ve seen this movie before – the spending cuts unfortunately never happen.
This has played out twice with similar results:
In 1982, Congress promised President Reagan $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax hikes but the spending cuts never happened.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush reluctantly agreed to $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases but none of those cuts occurred either.
The frustration of this process takes its toll. The final bill was presented in the Senate in the early morning hours and hastily cobbled together. Senators had only minutes to review the legislation before voting on it. According to one Senate aide, their office was emailed a copy of the legislation at 1:36 a.m. and the vote began nine minutes later at 1:45 a.m. The Senate obviously was not given sufficient time to read the bill that was over 150 pages long.
For the Senate to agree to legislation in the wee hours of the morning without a thorough review is not how the process should work. It reminds me of the quote from Nancy Pelosi during the debate over ObamaCare when she said, “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”
With more time to review the bill, we found that not only does it increase taxes with almost no spending cuts, but it also includes other questionable provisions such as:
$12.1 billion in tax breaks for wind energy;
$222 million in loopholes for Puerto Rican rum producers;
$248 million in incentives for Hollywood studios; and
$62 million in tax breaks for American Samoa businesses.
America can’t afford this.
As my record reflects, I have already voted to extend the Bush-era tax rates for all Americans and $5.5 trillion in spending cuts –both of which were opposed by the Senate. I will continue to fight to maintain the lowest tax burden for middle class families and small businesses and work to stop Washington’s addiction to spending.
The Senate sent us a bill that contained tax increases, no significant spending cuts, increased the federal debt and then refused to consider any changes from the House. Therefore I had no other recourse but to oppose the final plan.
I am hopeful in the coming months we can move past this end-of-year mess and turn our attention to stopping out-of-control spending. Congress needs to address the real problem facing our country - excessive government spending that will be paid for by our children and grandchildren.
David B. McKinley (R-WV)
Member of Congress
1-4-13
Obama’s Tax Evaders of the Year; Update: Add Al Gore to the list
By Michelle Malkin
Well, it happened last night. The U.S. Senate Democrats and bend-over Republicans delivered a massive tax-hike/puny spending-cut bill in the ratio of 41-to-1 tax hikes to spending cuts. This is the Washington idea of a “balanced approach” to our fiscal woes. The McConnell-Biden love connection screwed us over big time.
But as American families, business owners, and struggling entrepreneurs now brace for their “fair share” punishment, many of Obama’s wealthiest friends are busy evading the tax hikes their candidate spearheaded. Let’s ring in the new year exposing the hypocrites.
1/3 update: The New York Times reports that Al Gore sold his ailing Current TV network to terror-coddling al Jazeera because he had wanted to unload it by December 31 for tax reasons:
Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1, according to several people who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But the deal was not signed until Wednesday.
A spokesman for Al Jazeera said that antitrust regulators had not expressed any objections to the deal.
Awww. So poor AlGore didn’t make it in time. But as I report below, plenty of other Obama tax evaders did.
***
Obama’s Tax Evaders of the Year
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012
President Obama will kick off the new year the same way that he kicked off the old year: by demanding that the wealthy pay their “fair share” in taxes. But while millions of small business owners, struggling entrepreneurs, inventors, and investors brace for a double whammy of fiscal cliff tax hikes and new Obamacare taxes, the class warrior-in-chief’s richest pals are getting a pass.
It’s a Golden Pass for liberal millionaires and billionaires who support higher Obama taxes for everyone but themselves. Meet the Democratic tax evaders of the year.
*GOOGLE. The left-wing Internet giant provided Silicon Valley’s biggest campaign finance boost to Obama, with individual employee donations supporting the tax-hiking candidate by a ratio of more than 31-to-one. Google rank-and-file workers pitched in some $800,000 to Obama. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Chief Legal Officer and Senior Vice President David Drummond, and Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf are all vocal Obama supporters and top donors.
In December, Google’s Netherlands subsidiary disclosed in a tax filing that it had shifted nearly $10 billion in revenues to a Bermuda shell company. That’s “almost double the total from three years before,” according to Bloomberg News. In response to criticism, Google defended the scheme as a legal response to government incentives. “It’s called capitalism,” Schmidt snarked defiantly.
Wonder what all of Obama’s operatives and media lapdogs who bashed evil, selfish Republican offshore tax havens have to say about that? Cue crickets chirping.
*The Washington Post. Speaking of media lapdogs, this newspaper sanctimoniously supported Obama for president and singled out his support for “revenue [tax] increases.” Its endorsement editorial castigated Mitt Romney for embracing an America “in which an ever-greater share of the nation’s wealth resides with the nation’s wealthy, at a time when inequality already is growing.”
The privileged wealthy barons at the Washington Post, however, increased that inequality at the end of the year when they joined a growing number of companies who are paying 2013 dividends in 2012 to protect investors from paying higher Obama taxes on dividend income. It’s “proof positive,” my friend and guest-blogger Doug Powers noted, “that no matter what happens in the negotiations, the country is definitely going off the irony cliff.”
Bonus irony: The $70 million year-end dividend payment will be a windfall for other “higher taxes for thee, but not for me” Obama supporters, including donor Warren Buffet’s firm Berkshire Hathaway. According to the Associated Press, “Berkshire is its largest shareholder with an estimated 1.7 million shares, which means it could
get a roughly $17 million dividend payment.”
*Costco. The mega-retailer’s co-founder, Jim Sinegal, is a lifelong Democrat and top Obama fundraiser. He crusaded aggressively for Obamacare and sent out a campaign dispatch defending his candidate from criticism over his “you didn’t build that remarks.” But while Sinegal purported to speak for beleaguered small business owners, his company was availing itself of rarified tax avoidance strategies. Like the Washington Post, the Costco Board of Directors voted to pay special $7 per share year-end dividends to avoid higher taxes. In addition, Costco will borrow $3.5 billion to finance the payout, according to the Wall Street Journal. Higher taxes, more debt. They built that.
*Facebook. The social networking giant’s founder Mark Zuckerberg told Obama in 2011 at a town hall forum that he was “cool” with paying higher taxes. But neither Zuckerberg nor his many Facebook execs are actually down with following through. Co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship in a blindingly obvious bid to evade nearly $70 million in taxes. In addition, Zuckerberg and a half-dozen Facebook insiders are all skirting hefty estate and gift taxes on their family Facebook shares held in annuity trusts. According to the Wall Street Journal the legal maneuver is called a “grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT,” and the total Facebook tax avoidance sum adds up to at least $200 million. A “cool” $200 million, that is.
*George Lucas. The billionaire Star Wars director called Obama a “hero” and parroted his candidate’s capitalism-bashing rhetoric in a January 2012 interview with PBS dinosaur Charlie Rose. “I do not believe that the rich should be able to buy the government,” Lucas lectured. He does, however, believe in shirking higher taxes the one-percenter way. In October, Lucas sold his film company to Disney for a whopping $4 billion in cash and stock to evade anticipated capital gains tax increases and Obamacare Medicare surtaxes on investment income.
*Andre “Dr Dre” Young. Forbes magazine named this California gangsta rapper-turned-music industry mogul the highest-paid musician in the world in 2012. He raked in an estimated $100 million, mostly from sales of his Beats headphone company along with concert revenue. Dre’s music electronics company was co-founded with Jimmy Iovine, who also founded Dre’s parent record label, Interscope Records. Interscope was funded by “progressive” billionaire Ted Field, heir to the Marshall Field retail empire and one of the nation’s biggest Democratic Party donors.
Dre boosted the careers of prominent Obama hip-hop cheerleaders Eminem and 50 Cent. But overseas, he’s rolling like a Romney supporter. The rap mogul is now using a County Cork, Ireland, tax haven to protect his global headphones empire subsidiaries and avoid high U.S. corporate tax rates. The Irish Examiner newspaper explained that the elaborate structuring “allows for money to be [channeled] between the separate companies in the form of royalty payments or [license] fees to artificially but legitimately reduce profits as a means of reducing tax liabilities.”
To paraphrase Dre and his Obama-endorsing rap partner Snoop Dogg, it ain’t nuthin’ but an E thang: Elitism. Exemptions. Evasion.
1-3-13
Why the 2nd Amendment
BY WALTER WILLIAMS
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, said: "The British are not coming. ... We don't need all these guns to kill people." Lewis' vision, shared by many, represents a gross ignorance of why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants.
Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." By the way, Hamilton is referring to what institution when he says "the representatives of the people"?
James Madison: "(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
Thomas Jefferson: "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which inspired our Constitution's Bill of Rights, said, "To disarm the people — that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
Rep. John Lewis and like-minded people might dismiss these thoughts by saying the founders were racist anyway. Here's a more recent quote from a card-carrying liberal, the late Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey: "Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms. ... The right of the citizen to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible." I have many other Second Amendment references at http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes.html.
How about a couple of quotations with which Rep.
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Lewis and others might agree? "Armas para que?" (translated: "Guns, for what?") by Fidel Castro. There's a more famous one: "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing." That was Adolf Hitler.
Here's the gun grabbers' slippery-slope agenda, laid out by Nelson T. Shields, founder of Handgun Control Inc.: "We're going to have to take this one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily — given the political realities — going to be very modest. ... Right now, though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal — total control of handguns in the United States — is going to take time. ... The final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition — except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs and licensed gun collectors — totally illegal" (The New Yorker, July 1976).
There have been people who've ridiculed the protections afforded by the Second Amendment, asking what chance would citizens have against the military might of the U.S. government. Military might isn't always the deciding factor. Our 1776 War of Independence was against the mightiest nation on the face of the earth — Great Britain. In Syria, the rebels are making life uncomfortable for the much-better-equipped Syrian regime. Today's Americans are vastly better-armed than our founders, Warsaw Ghetto Jews and Syrian rebels.
There are about 300 million privately held firearms owned by Americans. That's nothing to sneeze at. And notice that the people who support gun control are the very people who want to control and dictate our lives.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
1-2-13
Happy New Year?
By Thomas Sowell
The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future.
If there are any awards to be given to anyone for what they did in 2012, one of those rewards should be for prophecy, if only because prophecies that turn out to be right are so rare.
With that in mind, my choice for the prediction of the year award goes to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal for his column of January 24, 2012 titled: "The GOP Deserves to Lose."
Despite reciting a litany of reasons why President Obama deserved to be booted out of the White House, Stephens said, "Let's just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose."
To me, the Republican establishment is the 8th wonder of the world. How they can keep repeating the same mistakes for decades on end is beyond my ability to explain.
Bret Stephens said, back at the beginning of 2012, that Mitt Romney was one of the "hollow men," and that voters "usually prefer the man who stands for something."
Yet this is not just about Mitt Romney. He is only the latest in a long series of presidential candidates backed by a Republican establishment that seems convinced that ad hoc "moderation" is where it's at — no matter how many of their ad hoc moderates get beaten by even vulnerable, unknown or discredited Democrats.
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Back in 1948, when the Democratic Party splintered into three parties, each one with its own competing presidential candidate, Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey was considered a shoo-in.
Best-selling author David Halberstam described what happened: "Dewey's chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend no one. His major speeches, wrote the Louisville Courier Journal, could be boiled down 'to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead...'"
Does this sound like a more recent Republican presidential candidate?
Meanwhile, President Harry Truman was on the attack in 1948, with speeches that had many people saying, "Give 'em hell, Harry." He won, even with the Democrats' vote split three ways.
But, to this day, the Republican establishment still goes for pragmatic moderates who feed pablum to the public, instead of treating them like adults.
It is not just Republican presidential candidates who cannot be bothered to articulate a coherent argument, instead of ad hoc talking points. Have you yet heard House Speaker John Boehner take the time to spell out why Barack Obama's argument for taxing "millionaires and billionaires" is wrong?
It is not a complicated argument. Moreover, it is an argument that has been articulated many times in plain English by conservative talk show hosts and by others in print. It has nothing to do with being worried about the fate of millionaires or billionaires, who can undoubtedly take care of themselves.
What we all should be worried about are high tax rates driving American investments overseas, when there are millions of Americans who could use the jobs that those investments would create at home.
Yet Obama has been allowed to get away with the emotional argument that the rich can easily afford to pay more, as if that is the issue. But it will be the issue if no one says otherwise.
One of the recent sad reminders of the Republicans' tendency to leave even lies and smears unanswered was a television replay of an old interview with the late Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was destroyed by character assassination.
Judge Bork said that he was advised not to answer Ted Kennedy's wild accusations because those false accusations would discredit themselves. That supposedly sophisticated advice cost the country one of the great legal minds of our time — and left us with a wavering Anthony Kennedy in his place on the Supreme Court.
Some people may take solace from the fact that there are some articulate Republicans like Marco Rubio who may come forward in 2016. But with Iran going nuclear and North Korea developing missiles that can hit California, it may be too late by then.
1-1-13
Happy New Year!!
