Take Action: Two justices should recuse themselves from ‘gay’ marriage cases
Monday, January 19, 2015
Dear Supporter,
U.S.
Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg should
recuse themselves from any cases involving the homosexual marriage issue
on the basis that they have conducted same-sex marriage ceremonies.
The
justices announced last Friday they will review an appellate ruling
that upheld bans on same-sex unions in four states. The case will be
argued in April and a decision is expected by late June.
Justice Kagan performed a September 21
same-sex marriage for her former law clerk and his partner Patrick
Pearsall in Maryland. Justice Ginsburg performed a same-sex marriage at
the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in August
2013.
Both
of these justices' personal and private actions actively endorsing gay
marriage clearly indicate how they would vote on same-sex marriage cases
before the Supreme Court.
Congress has directed that federal judicial officers must disqualify themselves from hearing cases in specified circumstances. Title 28, Section 455
of the United States Code states "any justice, judge, or magistrate
judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in
which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned."
Both
Kagan and Ginsburg have not only been partial to same-sex marriage,
they have proven themselves to be activists in favor of it!
In
order to ensure the Court's integrity and impartiality, Justices Kagan
and Ginsburg must recuse themselves from same-sex marriage cases.
TAKE ACTION
Congress
has an obligation to Americans that members of the Supreme Court are
held to the highest standard of integrity. The law demands it and the
people deserve it.
Urge
your members of Congress to privately and publicly call on Justices
Kagan and Ginsburg to properly and legally recuse themselves from cases
involving same-sex marriage.
Dear Friends,
In the wake of terror in Paris, we find that Europe is now home
to both radical secularism and radical Islam, a toxic combination. This
clash of cultures presents a real problem for modern progressives. If a
Muslim barber refuses on religious grounds to cut the hair of a lesbian,
whose side does a liberal take?
This problem stems from a double standard. Muslims, even radical
Muslims that trample on the rights of women and threaten violence
against civilization, are a protected class by Western progressives,
whereas even nominal Christians have become the object of progressive
disdain.
If progressives were to be consistent, they would need to reject
Islam as fervently as they reject Christianity, something very few
progressives seem to be willing to acknowledge. Bill Maher is a notable
exception. In my last appearance on his show, he expressed outrage that liberals are inconsistent in their
condemnation of Islam.
The irony of the whole situation, though, is that the liberal,
while he can, kowtows to the radical Muslim, but the radical Muslim, if
he could, would behead the liberal! New articles this week
indicate that Holder and Obama's justice department may seek an
indictment for General Petraeus. I'll let you decide who is the patriot
and who is the scoundrel.
Petraeus' real crime was to lead a troop surge in Iraq that
worked, frustrating Obama's plans for U.S. withdrawal and defeat. It
appears as though Patraeus and the Navy SEAL who shot bin Laden have now
joined me on Obama's target list!
On a lighter note, I want to take this opportunity to wish my daughter Danielle the very best—she turned 20 yesterday! How quickly they grow older (and how fortunate that we don't)! Happy Birthday, Danielle!
Have you shared America the movie with your friends and
family yet? Join me in the fight to restore America—let's spread the
true story of our history. Click here to watch America instantly online or order on
DVD.
And remember, for each DVD purchased this year, I will donate an
Educational Edition to a school to help the youngest Americans hear the
story of our great nation.
Sincerely,
Dinesh D'Souza
Andrew
Mark Cuomo is an American politician who is the 56th and current
Governor of New York. A member of the Democratic Party, Cuomo was
elected Governor in 2010, holding the same position his father Mario
Cuomo... wikipedia.org
NY's big '$witch'
Gov. Cuomo approved a new policy Tuesday night allowing impoverished transgender New Yorkers to bill taxpayers for sex-change surgery.
The
administration issued new rules requiring New York’s $55 billion
Medicaid program — the government health-insurance program for the needy
— to foot the bill for “gender reassignment” operations.
State
officials estimate the expanded coverage for transgender operations and
services will cost the Medicaid program $6.7 million a year. It is
already the costliest in the nation.
There are 353 men and 308 women on the state Medicaid rolls who have been diagnosed with gender-identify disorder.
The
state Department of Health estimated that a portion of these
individuals will seek either hormone therapy or reassignment surgery.
The
cost for sex-change operations — which include genital removal, breast
augmentation and mastectomy — ranges from $15,000 to $50,000. That
doesn’t include thousands of dollars in therapy and counseling services.
Medicaid
will pick up the tab for transgender New Yorkers over 18, although the
patients must be at least 21 to get surgery that results in
sterilization.
“New York state has always been a progressive
leader, and ensuring that all New Yorkers — regardless of gender
identity — are treated fairly will continue this legacy,” Cuomo said.
“This
new regulation will guarantee transgender New Yorkers access to
Medicaid-funded care, which is critical to safeguarding the principle of
equal treatment,” he said.
“I am proud that the state is taking this step and continuing to lead the fight on transgender rights.”
New
York joins Oregon, Massachusetts, Vermont, Washington, DC, and
Maryland in offering medical services to transgender residents.
Republican leaders slammed Cuomo’s move as outrageous.
“New
Yorkers pay the highest property taxes in America because our Medicaid
costs already are through the roof, ” said Westchester County Executive
Rob Astorino.
State Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn) predicted the Medicaid costs for sex-change operations will be much higher.
“The
state is saying it will cost $67 million over 10 years. It will be over
$100 million. It’s an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars,” Golden
said.
Cuomo’s measure also will make it easier for foster-care
residents in the city’s care who identify as transgender to get
sex-reassignment surgery through Medicaid. The city — as well as the
state — has been sued for discrimination after refusing to pay for such
services.
“We look forward to working with the state in the
implementation and rollout of these critical and lifesaving health-care
provisions for the transgender community,” City Council Speaker Melissa
Mark-Viverito and the council’s LGBT Caucus said in a joint statement.
Michael
Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense &
Education Fund, said, “We applaud the Cuomo administration for taking
this important step.”
For more on the New York Post and to download our apps, visit NYPost.com
JOURNALISTS, SAYS Jorge Ramos, shouldn't make a fetish of accuracy and impartiality.
Univision's star anchor, Jorge
Ramos, has "nothing against objectivity," but he argues that journalists
should use their profession "as a weapon for a higher purpose."
Speaking last month
at the International Press Freedom Awards, Univision's influential news
anchor told his audience that while he has "nothing against
objectivity," journalism is meant to be wielded as "a weapon for a
higher purpose: justice." To be sure, he said, it is important to get
the facts right — five deaths should be reported as five, not six or
seven. But "the best of journalism happens when we, purposely, stop
pretending that we are neutral and recognize that we have a moral
obligation to tell truth to power."
.
As it happens, Ramos delivered those remarks soon after the publication of Sabrina Erdely's 9,000-word story in Rolling Stone
vividly describing the alleged gang rape of a freshman named Jackie at a
University of Virginia fraternity party. Erdely had reportedly spent
months researching the story, and its explosive impact was — at first —
everything a tell-truth-to-power journalist could have wished: national
attention, public outrage, campus protests, suspension of UVA's fraternities, and a new "zero-tolerance" policy on sexual assault.
.
But Rolling Stone's blockbuster has imploded, undone by independent reporting at The Washington Post that found glaring contradictions and irregularities
with the story, and egregious failures in the way it was written and
edited. Erdely, it turns out, had taken Jackie's horrific accusations on
faith, never contacting the alleged rapists for a comment or response.
In a rueful "Note to Our Readers,"
managing editor Will Dana writes: "[W]e have come to the conclusion …
that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side
of the story."
.
To a layman, that "conclusion" might seem so excruciatingly
self-evident that Rolling Stone's debacle can only be explained as gross
negligence, or a reckless disregard for the truth. But much of the
journalistic priesthood holds to a different standard, one that elevates
the higher truth of an overarching "narrative" — in this case, that a
brutal and callous "rape culture" pervades American college campuses —
above the mundane details of fact. Erdely had set out in search of a grim sexual-assault story, and settled on Jackie's account of being savaged by five men (or was it seven?) at a fraternity bash was just the vehicle she'd been looking for. Why get tangled in conflicting particulars?
"Maybe [Erdely] was too credulous," suggests longtime media critic Howard Kurtz in a piece on Rolling Stone's journalistic train wreck. "Along with her editors."
.
Or maybe this is what happens when newsrooms and journalism schools
decide, like Jorge Ramos, that although they have "nothing against
objectivity," their real aspiration is to use journalism "as a weapon
for a higher purpose." Somehow it didn't come as a shock to learn that
when Dana was invited to lecture at Middlebury College in 2006, his
speech was titled: "A Defense of Biased Reporting."
.
Even after the UVA story began to collapse, voices were raised in defense of the narrative over mere fact.
"This is not to say that it does not matter whether or not Jackie's
story is accurate," Julia Horowitz, an assistant managing editor at the
University of Virginia's student newspaper, wrote in Politico. But "to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake."
.
Well, if the "narrative" is what matters most, checking the facts too closely can indeed be a huge mistake. Because facts, those stubborn things, have a tendency to undermine cherished narratives — particularly narratives grounded in emotionalism, memory, or ideology.
Rolling Stone's article on an
alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia — meant to illustrate
the "rape culture" that supposedly pervades college campuses — turned
out to be an egregious journalistic debacle.
It's a temptation to which journalists have always been susceptible.
In the 1930s, to mention one notorious example, Walter Duranty recycled
Soviet propaganda, assuring his New York Times readers that no mass
murders were occurring under Stalin's humane and enlightened rule. Duranty is reviled today.
But the willingness to subordinate a passion for accuracy to a
supposedly higher passion for "justice" (or "equality" or "fairness" or
"diversity" or "peace" or "the environment") persists.
.
Has the time come to give up on the ideal of objective, unbiased
journalism? Would media bias openly acknowledged be an improvement over
news media that only pretend not to take sides?
.
This much is clear: The public isn't deceived. Trust in the media has
been drifting downward for years. According to Gallup, Americans'
confidence that news is being reported "fully, accurately, and fairly" reached an all-time low this year. Would you be astonished to see that number sink even further next year? Me neither.
.
.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
-- ## --
G.K. Chesterton had a knack for anticipating future trends but when, in his 1914 novel The Flying Inn,
he anticipated the Islamization of England, it seemed so far out of the
realm of possibility that it was difficult to take it as anything but a
flight of fancy.
True enough, the book has a whimsical, Pickwickian quality. It
follows the rambling adventures of two British stalwarts, Patrick Dalroy
and Humphrey Pump, as they try to stay one step ahead of the law,
dispensing free liquor as they go in an England where alcohol has been
banned. The “Flying Inn” is their motor car which they have furnished
with a large keg of rum, a cask of cheese, and a pub sign.
Roughly one hundred years later, Chesterton’s scenario no longer
seems improbable. Many observers believe the Islamization of England is
just a matter of time. For example, in her 2006 book Londonistan,
Melanie Phillips presents a detailed description of the Islamic
“colonization” of England now underway and shows how it is made possible
by the governing class’ abandonment of cultural and spiritual values.
Chesterton was remarkably prescient not only in imagining that
Islamization might happen, but also in envisioning how it would
happen—through the instrumentality of a deracinated governing class. The
reason that alcohol is banned in Chesterton’s tale is because some
upper-class elites have become enamored of Islam and everything
Islamic—including the prohibition of drink. Chief among these is Lord
Ivywood, a Nietzschean diplomat who has enlisted the aid of a mysterious
Turk, Misyra Ammon, to spread the new gospel among the jaded upper
class who find exotic Islam to be more exciting than their own
traditions and religion.
Among other things, the establishment of the new order involves a
rewriting of history. As Ammon patiently explains to his sophisticated
audiences, England was originally an Islamic country. This is evident,
he says, in the existence of numerous pubs with Islamic names—“The
Saracen’s Head,” for example—as well as in the English fondness for the
word “crescent”—as in “Grosvenor Crescent,” “Regent’s Park Crescent,”
and “Royal Crescent.” Moreover, like today’s multicultural elite,
Chesterton’s “smart set” are all too happy to hear that this exotic
culture is superior to their own, and are quite willing to accept that
virtually all scientific and technical discoveries were first made by
Muslims. As one of the English characters puts it: “Of course, all our
things came from the East…. Everything from the East is good, of
course.”
One of the imports from the East is polygamy or, as Ammon calls it,
the “Higher Polygamy.” No one is as yet practicing polygamy, but it
eventually dawns on one of the young ladies in the story that this is
the direction in which things are trending—that Lord Ivywood’s mansion
is, in fact, designed to be a harem. Not quite as astute, the other
young ladies prefer to think, as Misyra Ammon tells them, “that women
had the highest freedom in Turkey; as they were allowed to wear
trousers.”
Chesterton was smart enough to realize that something like
Islamization could not happen without a prior undermining of the
existing culture. As Hal G.P. Colebatch observes:
Chesterton was original not only in
seeing a then apparently down-and-out Islam was still a threat to
Europe, but also in seeing that the Islamic conquest would not be
possible without a preceding culture war to destroy the social agents of
resistance, that Islam had a certain seductiveness for a type of jaded
Western mind, and that the betrayers would not be the lower classes but
the wealthy elite.
As Chesterton foresaw, and as is the case today, naïve clergymen would also help to pave the way for Islam. In The Flying Inn,
the great cathedrals replace the cross with a cross-and- crescent
emblem, and intellectuals believe that the time has come “for a full
unity between Christianity and Islam.” “Something called Chrislam
perhaps,” observes a skeptical Irishman. But others are convinced that
Christianity and Islam are “natural allies”—to use a term that is
currently in favor. In Chesterton’s Edwardian setting, progressives
believe that Christians and Muslims can work together to “deliver the
populace from the bondage of the all-destroying drug [alcohol].” Today, some conservative Catholics
believe that Christians and Muslims can work together to fight
pornography and restore sexual morality. And then, as now, many believe
that we have much to learn from Islam. As Lord Ivywood puts it:
Ours is an age when men come more and
more to see that the creeds hold treasures for each other, that each
religion has a secret for its neighbour … and church unto church showeth
knowledge.
Or, as one contemporary Catholic author
claims: “Islam has great and deep resources of morality and sanctity
that should inspire us and shame us and prod us to admiration and
imitation.”
Then, as now, part of the softening-up process is accomplished by
employing politically correct euphemisms to hide plain facts. The
reclusive Turkish warlord, Oman Pasha, who has taken the estate next to
Ivywood’s, and who, with Ivywood’s assistance, is secretly building a
Turkish army in England, is referred to by naïve neighbors as the
“Mediterranean gentleman.” “The description,” notes the author, “did not
illuminate and it probably was not intended to do so.” In our day, the
elites have invented a whole panoply of Newspeak terms designed to cover
up for Islamic aggressiveness. Thus, in England and Europe, Muslim
gangs that riot and rape on a mass scale are referred to in TV news as
“Asian youth,” or simply “youths.” And Islamic terrorists are routinely
designated by the generic, could-be-anyone label “violent extremists.”
Meanwhile, in public and private schools, children are learning that jihad
is an interior spiritual struggle to become a better person. Perhaps
the mother of all euphemisms designed to keep us off guard is the
oft-repeated assurance that Islam is a religion of peace. That phrase
doesn’t appear in Chesterton’s story, but Misyra Ammon assures his
listeners that Islam is a religion devoted to serving others.
Chesterton’s prophetic novel hits uncomfortably close to home. One
thing he didn’t anticipate, however, is that the final Islamization of
England could be accomplished without importing a foreign army. Since
modern England has already imported enough Muslim immigrants to engineer
a significant cultural shift, an occupying army won’t be needed.
Otherwise, Chesterton was right on target. He foresaw that an Islamic
takeover would be facilitated by cultural elites eager to show their
tolerance for new ideas and fashions and their corresponding disdain for
traditional culture. In Chesterton’s day, the cultural elites were
referred to as the smart set; today they are the multicultural and media
elites. And, as in Chesterton’s story, they are quite willing to
believe that Muslims discovered or invented just about everything under
the sun.
Recently, for example, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey,
claimed that Muslims were the first to discover America and this, no
doubt, will soon be taken seriously by Western educators.
Multiculturalists would love to believe that America was discovered not
by a light-skinned European Christian but by a dark-skinned Muslim. It
would fit in nicely with their decades-long campaign to undermine the
Western tradition. Thanks to his teachers, the average Western student
doesn’t know much about history, but he does know that he was born into a
rotten culture with an appalling history of racism, sexism, and
imperialism.
Much of what Chesterton foresaw has already come to pass.
Cross-crescent emblems haven’t yet appeared on the cathedrals, but
several churches in the West have been sold to Muslim groups and
subsequently turned into mosques. And just recently, in a gesture of
Chrislamism, the Washington National Cathedral opened its doors to a
weekly Muslim prayer service. Meanwhile, a senior Church of England
bishop recommended
that Prince Charles’ coronation service should be opened with a reading
from the Koran. The gesture, he said, would be “a creative act of
accommodation” to make Muslims feel “warmly embraced.”
In the England of Chesterton’s imagining, polygamy was just a gleam
in Lord Ivywood’s eye. Nowadays, for all intents and purposes, it is an
institution. Although polygamy is still against the law, it is, in fact,
a growing practice
among Muslims of Great Britain. Instead of enforcing the law,
culturally sensitive police and courts look the other way, and the
welfare agencies do their best to provide material support. A Muslim man
with four wives can expect a welfare check for each of them—and all signed over to his name.
One of the things Western citizens take comfort in when contemplating
Islamic radicalism is that we possess powerful armies and well-trained
police. Once again, Chesterton skewers our illusions. As it turns out,
the England of The Flying Inn has been disarming itself
militarily as well as culturally. It gradually dawns on the citizenry
that police are few and far between, and many of those who remain have
taken to wearing Turkish fezzes. They also discover that while Ivywood
and Pasha have been quietly bringing in a Turkish army, the “British
army is practically disbanded.”
I don’t know if the British police are declining in number, but
whatever their number, they have become one of the most politically
correct organizations on the planet. For example, the London
Metropolitan Police Authority recruitment target for 2009-10 required
that 27 percent of all new recruits must be black and minority ethnic
and 41 percent must be female. Many of them might as well be wearing
fezzes or hijabs because, if you say something critical about the
religion of peace, you will quickly find yourself in front of a
magistrate on charges of Islamophobia. When, for example, Parliamentary
candidate Paul Weston stood in a public space and read aloud Churchill’s
unflattering assessment of Islam in The River War, he was promptly arrested.
As for the British army, it hasn’t been disbanded yet, but the armed
forces of the UK are not what they used to be. The same can be said for
NATO forces in general. They can be relied on to march in the local gay
pride parade or help out with ebola patients or even launch an
occasional “overseas contingency operation,” but major wars on multiple
fronts are another matter. The United States, the largest NATO member,
has been drastically reducing the size and strength of its military. The
U.S. plans to shrink its Army to pre-World War II levels, the number of
ships in the Navy is lower than in 1917, and, according to several
reports, the Obama administration has been quietly conducting a massive purge of top military officers.
Just at the point when Islam is advancing by stealth jihad and armed
jihad all over the world, the West is letting down its guard, both
literally and metaphorically. And all the while, the Lord Ivywoods of
the world assure us that we have nothing to fear from Islam. What at one
time seemed merely a fanciful fiction is fast becoming fact. Chesterton
would not have been surprised. (Illustration credit: Washington Times)
William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the
author of several books about cultural and religious issues, including Psychological Seduction; Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong; and Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West. He is also the author of a new book entitled Insecurity. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Aleteia, Saint Austin Review, Investor’s Business Daily, and FrontPage Magazine. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation.
"Arendt presents a comparison of two of the main revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and French Revolutions. She goes against a common view of both Marxist and leftist views when she argues that France, while well studied and often emulated, was a disaster and that the largely ignored American Revolution was a success. The turning point in the French Revolution occurred when the leaders rejected their goals of freedom in order to focus on compassion for the masses. In America, the Founding Fathers never betray the goal of Constitutio Libertatis. However, Arendt believes the revolutionary spirit of those men has been lost, and advocates a “council system” as an appropriate institution to regain that spirit."
A
grand jury found no reason to charge Darren Wilson in the Ferguson,
Mo., shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown, but that won’t stop
President Obama from pretending that the white police officer did
something wrong.
On Monday,
the White House pledged $263 million in new federal funding for 50,000
body cameras, additional police training and outreach efforts designed
to build trust between police departments and minority communities.
“The
president and his administration are very focused on the underlying
issues that have been uncovered in a pretty raw way in Ferguson,” said
White House press secretary Josh Earnest. But if the president was
really focused on “underlying issues,” he’d be leading a national
conversation about the violent anti-social behavior in poor black
neighborhoods that better explains the police presence. Instead, Mr.
Obama seems much more focused on furthering an anti-cop media narrative
that aligns with a liberal political narrative and maintains that black
America’s failures are the fault of others.
The Sunday
talk shows were chock-full of commentators making excuses for black
criminality—be it Brown’s or that of “protesters”—and it usually boiled
down to a critique of either the makeup or methods of police
departments. Everyone in America now knows that Ferguson is two-thirds
black and that only three out of 53 police officers in the city matched
that description at the time of the shooting. But before we make
racially representative police forces a priority, shouldn’t we have some
evidence that this likely will result in safer communities and better
relations between law enforcement and residents.
A
Washington Post story earlier this year noted that “there is hardly any
research at all on whether racial disparities exist between officers
when they use force” and that there’s “no conclusive evidence to show
that white and black police officers treat suspects differently—if
anything, some of the studies show that black officers can be harder on
black criminal suspects.”
The
Post also cited some relevant polling data. “In Washington D.C.,
according to a 2011 Washington Post poll, the police department got a
relatively low 60% rating from black residents, despite the fact that
the force is highly integrated,” said the paper. “The New York Police
Department’s demographics are close to those of the rest of the city,
but a Quinnipiac poll from 2014 found that only 54% of black residents
approved of its performance. The Detroit police department is so
dominated by African Americans that it’s been sued for discrimination
against whites, and yet only 18% of black Wayne County residents
approved of its work in 2009.��
And
then there’s the fact that black crime was spiking in the 1970s and
1980s when black mayors and police chiefs ran some of our most violent
large cities—including Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and
Philadelphia. The available evidence suggests that the racial makeup of
law enforcement matters more to people who want to down play bad
behavior than it does to people engaging in it.
You're a sick senior citizen and the government says there is no
nursing home care available for you. So what do you do?
Our plan gives anyone 65 years, or older, a gun (G) and 4 bullets.
You are allowed to shoot four Politicians.
Of course, this means you'll be sent to prison, where you will
receive three meals a day, a roof over your head, central heating
and air conditioning and all the health care you need.
Need new teeth? No problem. Need glasses? That's great. Need
a new hip, knees, kidney, lungs or heart? They're all covered.
As an added bonus, your kids can come and visit you at least as
often as they do now.
And who will be paying for all of this? The same government
that just told you they can't afford for you to go into a home.
And, you can get rid of 4 useless politicians while you're at it.
Plus, because you are a prisoner, you don't have to pay any
income taxes anymore.
It’s easy for Thanksgiving to boil down to little more
than turkey, football and travel delays, but many Americans strive to
make it more meaningful. They try to take the focus off of our problems
and to reflect on our many blessings.
.
As well they should. Consider the example set by Abraham Lincoln. Our 16th
president was in the middle of a bloody and protracted civil war when
he issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation. “The year that is drawing
toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields
and healthful skies,” it began.
.
And frankly, we should be grateful
for our problems as well. We rise in life to the degree to which we can
solve problems. Time and again, from Valley Forge to 9/11, Americans
have faced our problems squarely -- and solved them.
.
But will we always be a nation of problem solvers? Will we always enjoy the unique satisfactions that problem solving brings?
.
Nearly
two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat visiting
America, issued a dire warning. All democracies, he declared, have a
tendency to succumb to a centralized form of government that promises to
solve every problem, but in the process saps its citizens of their
courage, and robs them of their spirit.
.
At that point, the power
of government “takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching
over their fates,” he wrote. “It seeks only to keep them fixed
irrevocably in childhood; it likes its citizens to enjoy themselves
provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. … It provides for
their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their
pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry,
regulates their estates, divides their inheritances: can it not take
away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?”
.
Americans
must never succumb to such a power, which would reduce us to “nothing
more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the
government is the shepherd.” Such a “soft despotism” would provide us
with cradle-to-grave security, but at the cost of our humanity. As
social scientist Charles Murray has written, responsibility is what
keeps our lives from being trivial.
Problem solving makes us
stronger, smarter and more confident. Without the ability and the
responsibility to solve the problems we encounter on a regular basis,
neither success nor happiness is possible.
.
Historically Americans
have risen to every challenge and have seen opportunities in every
problem we have encountered. But the ambition of the modern welfare
state is to eliminate problems entirely and provide a government
guarantee of security for all.
.
“The real threat is that the promise of American life will be
frittered away for a bag of magic beans called security,” Jonah Goldberg
writes. “Many progressive seem to think that we can transform America
into a vast college campus where food, shelter and recreation are all
provided for us, and the only crime is to be mean to somebody else,
particularly a minority.”
.
Such a problem-free state of affairs
would affect not only domestic policy. The ramifications of the
welfare-state mentality also extend to foreign policy. Under such a
mindset, Irving Kristol points out, “The most powerful nations in the
world -- economically, technologically, even militarily -- will become
citadels of resistance and nothing more.”
.
Is the United States
destined to become nothing more than a “citadel of resistance” to the
crimes and outrages of rogue states and terrorist networks? Or will a
vigorous and self-confident United States continue to set the political,
economic and intellectual agendas for the rest of mankind in the 21st
century, just as it has in the 20th century?
.
Much depends on the
strength of the American spirit -- and on the refusal of ordinary
Americans to be seduced by the false promises of the welfare state: a
secure, affluent and problem-free existence.
US
President Barack Obama speaks during a press conference in the East
Room of the White House on November 5, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama
held the press conference one day after his Democratic party was
defeated in midterm elections. President Obama congratulated his
Republican opponents Wednesday on their midterm election victory and
promised to work constructively with them in Congress for the next two
years."Obviously, Republicans had a good night and they deserve credit
for running good campaigns," he said, after Republicans took control of
the Senate and strengthened their hold on the House of Representatives.
America is a mess and the world can barely tear its eyes away from the unfolding train wreck.
.
Our friends are at a crossroads and the implications for Canada and the rest of the beleaguered free world are monumental. Like it or not, the U.S.A. is the symbol of world freedom and liberty. Without it, I shudder to think what will happen to us.
.
America must fight to survive the Obama debacle. Freedom-loving people are growing more angry, frustrated, and worried with each passing day. They send me e-mail after e-mail out of desperation.
"What do we do now?" They have zero faith in their government.
.
But for Fox, talk radio and conservative online newsites, the media,
to its eternal, traitorous disgrace, has gone full Benedict Arnold. They have been a Democratic lapdog so long, they now act as if they have no choice but to continue protecting Obama. Former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson has come as
close as anyone to exposing media complicity in covering up scandals
such as Benghazi. And what is the administration's push to regulate the Internet but a shameless attempt to silence online critics.
.
It only gets worse. Various arms of the state including the IRS,
designed to be apolitical, have been subverted and weaponized into
attack drones aimed at conservative groups.
Attempts to expose what's going on are stonewalled at the highest levels. These are nightmarish attacks on freedom-loving people around the world. Once respected institutions such as academia, the labour movement and
the entertainment industry are viewed with great suspicion -- and so
they should be.
.
But worst of all, there's the presidency.
Instead of healing the racial divide, the election of this president has only fanned the flames of grievance and hatred. The sales pitch/sham that was 'hope and change' is a smoking ruin, trampled and set ablaze in Ferguson.
.
If the world is lucky, the failure of hope and change will be his only legacy.
But executive amnesty proves this president wants to tear away at the
unifying fabric that is a great country -- its Constitution.
.
This document is being mocked and ignored by a president sworn to uphold it.
Congress has taken the "nobody here but us chickens" approach to keeping a check on executive overreach.
.
Either the Constitution survives the Obama executive action on
amnesty or the U.S. risks devolving further into just another sick,
bloated, welfare state where an all powerful, hopelessly corrupt
bureaucratic borg smothers what's left of individual liberty.
.
On the foreign front, Obama boasts an impressive and growing string of failures.
But the latest impending policy debacle may be his crowning achievement -- the nuclear power of Iran.
.
Consider this horrifying piece of irrefutable logic: why would Obama
attempt to appease and cut deals with a country like Iran, which
despises America, unless this president is in sympathy with the views of
that country? Let that sink in over your Thanksgiving turkey.
Such is the state of a great nation.
.
Americans can't rely on the newly invigorated Republican Party to do much but talk.
They think NOT opposing Obama won them their huge victory in the mid-terms.
And now, the GOP think acting like a doormat is a key to winning the presidency in 2016.
But by then, who knows what will be left of their country.
Still, Americans are in a rebellious mood.
.
Hold onto that, America. It may be all you've got left. There is still time to fight back.
Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, and 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.
A local business in Ferguson, Mo., burned by rioters, Nov. 25.
Reuters
By
Jason L. Riley
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
We now know that
Michael Brown
was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop
liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor
in the name of helping them.
The black teen in Ferguson, Mo.,
robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while
resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand
jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all
the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the
vicinity of the confrontation.
Not that any amount of evidence
would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were
determined use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor
will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black
criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for
America’s high black body count.
According to the FBI, homicide
is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times
more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while
you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks
are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all
murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are
killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are
killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that
the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.
Blacks
commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The
fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young
black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not
cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to
juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at
which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime
victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these
communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they
spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from
harming one another.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani pointed this out recently
on “Meet the Press” in a debate with sociologist
Michael Eric Dyson.
“What about the poor black child that is killed by another black
child? Why aren’t you protesting that?” Mr. Giuliani asked.
“Those people go to jail,” Mr. Dyson responded. “I do protest it. I’m a minister. They go to jail.”
Mr.
Dyson might want to try protesting a little harder. Chicago had 507
murders in 2012, only 26% of which were solved. “To put it another way:
About three-quarters of the people who killed someone in Chicago in 2012
have gotten away with murder—so far, at least,” Chicago Magazine noted.
Mr. Dyson and others on the left are not oblivious to this black
pathology, but they are at pains even to acknowledge it, let alone make
it a focus. Instead, liberals spend their time spotlighting white
racism, real or imagined, and touting it as an all-purpose explanation
for bad black outcomes.
Ferguson helps further that agenda in
ways that Chicago does not. Hence, the left posits that the Michael
Brown shooting is the norm, even though the data show that it’s the
exception. And if black criminal behavior is a response to white racism,
how is it that black crime rates were lower in the 1940s and 1950s,
when black poverty was higher, racial discrimination was rampant and
legal, and the country was more than a half-century away from twice
electing a black president?
Racial profiling and tensions between
the police and poor black communities are real problems, but these are
effects rather than causes, and they can’t be addressed without also
addressing the extraordinarily high rates of black criminal behavior—yet
such discussion remains taboo. Blacks who bring it up are sell-outs.
Whites who mention it are racists. (Mr. Dyson accused Mr. Giuliani of
“white supremacy.”) But so long as young black men are responsible for
an outsize portion of violent crime, they will be viewed suspiciously by
law enforcement and fellow citizens of all races.
Pretending
that police behavior is the root of the problem is not only a dodge but
also foolish. The riots will succeed in driving business out of town,
which means that Ferguson’s residents will be forced to pay more at
local stores or travel farther for competitive prices on basic goods and
services.
Many Ferguson residents today can’t go to work because local
businesses have been burned down.
Even worse, when you make
police targets, you make low-income communities less safe. Ferguson’s
problem isn’t white cops or white prosecutors; it’s the thug behavior
exhibited by individuals like Michael Brown, which puts a target on the
backs of other young black men. Romanticizing such behavior instead of
condemning it only makes matters worse.
Mr. Riley is a
member of the Journal’s editorial board and the author, most recently,
of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to
Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
Hannah Arendt
By
Marc Patrone, Sun News network
A local business in Ferguson, Mo., burned by rioters, Nov. 25.
Reuters
We now know that
Michael Brown
was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop
liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor
in the name of helping them.