A Heartbreaking Unspoken Consequence of Obama

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Decades of socialist/progressive indoctrination in our schools, media and culture, plus six years of Obama, has yielded a devastating unspoken consequence. It is the loss of who we use to be as Americans.

In his 1961 Inaugural Address, President John F. Kennedy said, “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Democrats have perverted Kennedy’s inspiring challenge. Their dispiriting goal is to have as many Americans as possible controlled by and dependent on government, even for life itself, which is at the root of Obamacare.

I mourn the loss of the independent self-reliant mindset which made our parents great; and the pride and dignity it generated within them. Welfare (government assistance) was a last resort and for the truly needy.

Today, far too many Americans see no shame in living on government assistance or scamming the system. The Left’s campaign led by the Obama Administration to instill an entitlement mindset in many has proven successful. The Administration even campaigned targeting minorities, discouraging their instinct to be self-reliant. Even worse, the Administration portrays getting on welfare as the honorable thing to do. Dear Lord, what kind of nation are we becoming?

An unprecedented 47 million Americans are on food stamps which is riddled with fraud. The Obama Administration has added over 10,000 new oppressive job-killing regulations. Consequently, 90 million are unemployed and on unemployment which is also riddled with fraud. Here’s another first for America, over 11 million are receiving disability benefits; riddled with fraud. Clearly, many believe working is for suckers when the government is handing out freebies.

In his War on Achievers, Obama used his bully pulpit to deflate business owners by saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Obama and his operatives use compassionate sounding terms such as “social justice” and “income inequality” to justify the government confiscating the earnings of achievers and redistributing it to non-achievers to win their votes. Despicable.

My heart aches for my America when character, excellence and hard work were rewarded, celebrated and respected.

At 9 or 10 years old, I worked part-time for my neighbor Mr Buddy Roy. I pulled the copper out of old motors for him to sell. I still remember the pride I felt making my own money.

In the early 1950s, blacks were allowed to take the entrance test for the Baltimore City Fire Dept. My dad applied and mom helped. My parents sought opportunity not handouts. Talk about a strong black woman, though compassionate and loving, mom could be a tough no nonsense person.

I remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table, a glass turned upside down between them with mom tapping on the glass with a spoon. She was simulating the different bell sounds which alerted the firefighters to various situations. She would yell at my dad, “No, that’s wrong, stupid! Listen and get it right!” Thanks to my drill sergeant mom, dad was among a hand full of blacks who became Baltimore City’s first black firefighters.

Being a pioneer is never easy. Dad endured humiliating work conditions and blatant racism. Still, dad relished the opportunity. Thanks to his Christian faith, dad won admiration and respect by fighting racism and hate with excellence. He won “Firefighter of the Year” two times.

That mindset of putting ones best foot forward and striving for loftier standards is what I fear we are rapidly losing as Americans. Apparently, character is no longer expected in our leaders. President Obama is caught repeatedly lying to the American people and the response is ho-hum, let’s move on.

The trend is to celebrate deadbeats, entitlement junkies, haters of achievers and assorted low life. For example. The Democrats and mainstream media loved the Occupy Wall Street mobs. People were assaulted and even raped at their angry mob gatherings. Severely infected with an entitlement mindset, Occupiers dumped feces in a public building demanding the government redistribute wealth to them.

Meanwhile, the Left continues their shameful relentless demonizing and slandering the Tea Party with unfounded allegations of racism. The Obama Administration has plotted to criminalize free speech (the Tea Party). Folks, we are talking decent hard-working Americans who are simply pushing back against Obama’s shock and awe assault on our freedoms, liberty and culture.

Tax cheat Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel compared the Tea Party to Hamas terrorists. Either Mr Rangel is a loudmouth clueless idiot or a despicable evil human being. Leftists like Rangel who throw unfounded irresponsible “hate” grenades at millions of Americans should be called on it. Inciting racial division is extremely serious.

Amidst the unbelievably long list of scandals, crimes and misdemeanors of the Obama regime, the damage that this evil man and his minions have done to the internal make-up of many Americans is extremely disturbing and heartbreaking.

Please view me performing my song, “We Are Americans” which I wrote to remind us of who we use to be and I believe a majority still are as Americans. I have faith that the liberal’s, socialist’s and progressive’s toxic disease of entitlement thinking has not reached critical mass.

My fellow Americans, we are exceptional, a chosen people. We are Americans!

James Madison: The Indispensable Founder

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“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. … If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one. …

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. … The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general.

Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. … There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

– James Madison

When people are asked to name the Founding Fathers of the nation, they usually reel off Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, the first, second and third Presidents in addition to their earlier role in guiding the Revolution to success.

Occasionally, someone who, like myself, loves history will add Madison, the fourth President, but Lynne Cheney’s new biography of Madison rightly identifies him as the man most responsible “for creating the United States of America in the form we know it today.” It was Madison who guided the process by which the Founders arrived at the Constitution, contributing the fundamental principles it incorporated and writing the Bill of Rights, amendments that ensured its ratification by the original states.

Cover - James MadisonCheney’s biography, “James Madison: A Life Considered” ($36.00, Viking) benefits not only from her scholarship, but from her facility with the written word, making it a continual pleasure to read for a book of 563 pages, including its notes, bibliography, and index. If you were to set aside the summer to read just one book, this would be the one I would recommend.

If Cheney’s name rings a bell, it is because she is the wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, but she is also a Ph.D. who has been studying Madison since 1987 when she was a member of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution. These days she is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Cheney’s reside in Wilson, Wyoming. She is making the rounds of radio and television shows to promote her book and, most notably, interviewers tend to ignore her book in order to pry an opinion out of her about current events and politics. One gets the feeling that most did not read her book.

Those short in stature and, compared to the other Founders, quite young, all who came to know him swiftly developed a profound respect for his intellect and his knowledge of how governments were structured with some succeeding while others failed. When Madison spoke, they listened. There were in those days “factions” (which today we call political parties) that opposed his and the other Founder’s views.

“Jefferson,” wrote Cheney, “would later say that it was a wonder that Madison accomplished so much as he had, given that he faced ‘the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations, and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers’” and Madison himself was often struck “by the way that ‘important bills prepared at leisure by skillful hands’ were treated to ‘crudeness and tedious discussion’, and he had seen legislative tricks of the most blatant sort.” So the politics of Madison’s time was not unlike much of today’s.

After the Constitution was written to replace the failed Articles of Confederation it needed to be vigorously defended. America benefited greatly from the fact that its population was highly literate and it was the Federalist papers, a series of essays mostly written by Madison was the way its principles and protections were explained to the public. Chaney notes that the Federalist essay that would eventually become most famous was the first one Madison wrote.

“In Federalist 10, published November 22,1787, he set forth the failures of ‘our governments’ (rather than ‘our states’ where, after all, the Constitution would be ratified), noting the instability and injustices that had caused good citizens across the country to increasingly distrust those governments and feel ‘alarm for private rights.’”

These alarms are reflected in our times by concerns that the President is bypassing Congress to govern by executive orders, is failing to enforce laws with which he disagrees, and that we have a Department of Justice and an IRS that cannot be trusted to apply laws fairly, acting against groups and individuals with whom they disagree such as the Tea Party movement and other conservative organizations. A rogue agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency is so out of control that Congress must at some point exert powerful restraints on it.

What is remarkable about Madison’s time was the fact that he, Jefferson is lifelong friend, and Adams, all lived long lives unlike the bulk of the population. Madison would devote his life to the creation of our extraordinary government and, throughout the early presidencies including his own, to ensuring the existence of the new nation, challenged as it was by Great Britain, first during the Revolution and then in the War of 1812.

On his last day as President, Madison vetoed an improvements bill, “arguing as he had since the days of The Federalist that the general government did not have general powers. It had specified powers, and recognizing its limits was essential to ‘the permanent success of the Constitution.’”

Chaney wrote that Madison understood that “if the limits the Constitution imposed on government were unrecognized, ‘the parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.”, but Madison was all about protecting the Constitution and the new nation. For that he is owed the gratitude of all the generations that have followed him.

It is now our responsibility to protect it because freedom and liberty always have domestic and foreign enemies

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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The Obama Presidency Implodes

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The first time I heard the term “military advisors” it was being used by John F. Kennedy and they were being sent to South Vietnam. A strong anti-communist, in 1961 Kennedy approved financing an increase in the size of the South Vietnamese army from 150,000 to 170,000 along with sending a thousand U.S. military advisors to help train them. We all know how the Vietnam War ended.

Earlier, the North Korean attack on the South had ended in a stalemate. Technically a state of war still exists. Since 1953, the U.S. has maintained a military force in South Korea. In the wake of World War II, we still have a military presence in Europe and Japan to aid in their defense.

Obama’s announcement that 300 military advisors are being sent to Iraq is too little, too late.

As of this writing Americans are witnessing what happened when Obama withdrew from Iraq and are anticipating the same result when we withdraw from Afghanistan. Yes, we were and are war-weary, but we do not like what we’re seeing in Iraq and the President’s foreign policy failures are compounding by the day.

We are weary, too, after six and a half years of the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. It has taken this long for all the predictions regarding his lack of experience and competence to come true.

The polls taken during the past week provide evidence of this. Gallup’s job approval poll of June 9-15 showed that 42% of “national adults” approved. Over at Rasmussen Reports, Obama’s job approval on June 21 was 48%. Asked by Rasmussen if the nation is headed in the right direction or not, 67% of likely voters said it was not. Reacting to the immigration invasion crisis a Gallup found that 69% thought he was doing a poor job.

Depending on events, polls rise and fall, but the numbers indicate a growing loss of confidence in Obama’s decisions and actions to date. I suspect that what they do not show is a growing sense of the man as utterly untrustworthy and increasingly distant from the demands of the office.

We are witnessing the implosion of the Obama presidency.

All presidencies have a scandal or two, usually relatively minor in the grand scheme of national management. Watergate was considered minor initially and took two years to materialize into the scandal that forced Nixon to resign. Obama, however, has generated directly and indirectly enough scandals for their combined weight to begin being noticed even by those who pay little attention to Washington, D.C.

The worst of the latests has been the revelation of how the Internal Revenue Service was politicized to attack organizations that were deemed to be affiliated with the Tea Party movement and patriotic objectives. The “loss” of Lois Lerner’s emails and others smells of the destruction of evidence Congress has demanded. The one element of the government that virtually all Americans interact with is the IRS.

Other scandals like Solyndra, representing the waste of billions on wind and solar companies, many of which went bankrupt after receiving all manner of grants and loans, did not registered in a similar fashion. The wiretapping of Associated Press reporters’ phone calls likewise did not evoke widespread concern. The failure of the “stimulus” that spent billions without producing an uptick in the economy was seen as just another way the government wastes our money. Even “Fast and Furious” in which thousands of weapons were purchased and transferred to Mexican drug cartels did not evoke more than a short expression of dismay.

Benghazi, however, in which a U.S. ambassador died along with three others, remains an unresolved scandal as much for the lies about a video as its cause as for the tragedy of the abandonment of those killed. The release of five leaders of the Taliban from Guantanamo without letting Congress know has piled on the previous scandals to a point where serious concerns about both Obama’s judgment have arisen.

What remains now is a combination of the President’s increasing use of Executive Orders to create as much mischief as possible along with the perception that he simply does not care what Americans in general and Congress in particular thinks about what he is doing. There is talk in the House of bringing a legal suit against the President regarding his heavy use of Executive Orders to bypass Congress while initiating policies that require congressional inclusion and oversight.

Those of us who pay close attention to what the President is doing know that the ultimate aim of his actions in office has been to harm the nation in a variety of ways from reducing our military to pre-World War Two levels to destroying a large element of the nation’s electrical energy supply by forcing coal-fired plants out of business.

Ultimately, the implosion of the Obama presidency has been the realization that he has put the nation at risk of the world’s bad actors by causing America’s global leadership position to erode. Americans have been accustomed to being a leading military and economic power since the end of World War Two and he has been undermining that in every way possible.

Voter payback is likely to see a major shift of political power in Congress away from the Democratic Party in the forthcoming midterm elections and would enable Republicans to slow or stop further damage to the nation. Failing that, the fate of the nation will be a great risk.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Deconstructing same-sex “marriage”

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The same sex marriage issue can be viewed from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint and from a secular viewpoint. If you are a Christian, then the first part of this discussion below is especially for you. If you are an Orthodox Jew or other non-Christian, or if you want to learn how to debate from the secular standpoint, the second part applies.

1. Christian response to the same-sex marriage issue:

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA has just given its blessing to “pastors” who perform same sex marriage.

Here is the part that Christians must focus on:

According to the denomination’s statement, on Thursday, June 19, “the 221st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) approved a recommendation from its Civil Union and Marriage Issues Committee allowing for pastoral discretion to perform ‘any such marriage they believe the Holy Spirit calls then to perform,’ where legal by state law.” [my highlighting]

Jesus said that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is the unpardonable sin.

“I promise you that any of the sinful things you say or do can be forgiven, no matter how terrible those things are. But if you speak against the Holy Spirit, you can never be forgiven. That sin will be held against you forever.” — Mark 3:28-29 (CEV)

Jesus was addressing a crowd containing some Pharisees, who had attributed his healing powers to Satan, when in fact the Holy Spirit had performed the miracles.

Now, if a Presbyterian “pastor” performs a “gay” wedding, then under the above-cited rule, he is tacitly averring that the Holy Spirit called him to perform it. Since the definition of marriage throughout the Bible refers only to a union between a man and a woman, this pastor is actually averring that the Holy Spirit called him to perform a “marriage” that is counter to Biblical principles. This can clearly be construed as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

I have heard pastors saying “the Holy Spirit told me…” [to do this or that] when it would appear this was highly questionable. There are famous TV preachers who make predictions and claim that these are revelations from the Holy Spirit. Some are foolish enough to name a date, so confident are they of the anticipated outcome. But that date comes and the prediction fails to materialize. Any Christian who feels he was called to so something by the Holy Spirit would best not mention this to anyone except their spouse. To attribute anything to the Holy Spirit is to step into a booby trap.

2. Secular response to the same sex marriage issue:

We constantly hear the mantra “Homosexuals must be given an equal right to marry.”

This is America, and that statement is technically correct. However, no one has the right to change the definition of words at their whims. There are over 600 languages and dialects in the world, and none of these has an equivalent for our word marriage that can apply to both same sex and heterosexual unions.

The advocates of same sex marriage always pretend that same sex marriage meets the definition of marriage. This is the sticking point (the “equal rights” point is a red herring). Obviously, this is not true. The first step anyone would have to take is to prove that the term marriage can apply to same-sex couples. However, everyone with a pulse knows what marriage really means, and instead of using legal channels to change that definition, they slyly pretend the word “marriage” always, since time immemorial, has applied both to same-sex couples and to heterosexual couples.

The only reason people bend over and grab their ankles for these activists is fear. They use raw power of intimidation to force the legal system to apply a definition that does not exist. So-called same sex “marriage” has been legally accepted in several countries and states and yet, the main requisite for this change in law was never met, namely, a legal change in the definition of marriage. And changing this definition after millennia is like saying a dog is a cat. Homosexual activists can – and do – force the hands of crooked judges and lawyers and politicians all they want to go along with this pretense that marriage has always applied to both heterosexual and homosexual unions.

However, deep down inside people resent being told that, for example, a cat is a dog. Deep down they’d be saying “if it barks it’s not a damn cat!” And they’d be mad, rightfully so! And let’s stop pretending this is only about religion. For Christians and Orthodox Jews (and also for Muslims), it may be mostly about religion. But for everyone, religious or not, it is about language: words and their definitions. The only way you could legitimately change the definition of marriage so as to include same sex unions would be to prove that human physiology changed recently to something that it never was in those thousands of years when only people of opposite sexes could marry each other. But you can’t prove that because nothing like that happened. Granted, there were crazies like Roman Emperor Elagabulus, who are said to have “married” another man, but their actions of this kind were condemned by the grassroots. In Elagabulus’ case, he was eventually assassinated. The people’s will was done.

Thus, human nature did not change to usher in the “gay” marriage craze. Something else changed, and that is, a revolution that overturned all traditions and common sense through social engineering. And this brings us to the issue of sovereignty. A sovereign country has a right to defend its traditions and be what it always has been. In this point, Russia is actually superior to the West. Westerners have let down their guard, allowing the far left, posing in civil rights garb, to sell out our culture. We pretend it is an individual rights issue but it is a sovereignty issue. By inventing a right to “marry” someone of the same sex we have allowed our culture and hence our sovereignty to be destroyed. And yet sovereignty is in many ways more important than individual rights, because nowadays, rights are faddish and redefined regularly by activists antagonistic to culture, so they can no longer be defined. Yet sovereignty is something we all sense, as in my analogy with the cat-dog confusion.

We sense it inherently but are afraid to say so. This is social Marxism and we are slaves to it in the US.

Isn’t it time to throw off the chains? It’s all up to the people. We define – and redefine – words through the way we use them. Language is power. We must stop giving away our power.

EDITORS NOTE: The below poster was added to a Facebook comment about homosexual marriage. It seems to say what the author is saying. A picture is worth a thousand words.

procreationvsrecreation

Liberty: Come Play on the Lawn by Steven Horwitz

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We all have to be good stewards of liberty’s intellectual commons.

The directions in which young libertarians are taking the movement seem to have caused a backlash among some of the libertarians of my generation, threatening to turn us into the old guys telling the kids to get off our lawn.

The problem is that it’s not our lawn. It never was.

It wasn’t our predecessors’ lawn when we overran it either. It belongs to hundreds of years of the classical liberal tradition. The libertarian movement has seen significant changes in the last few years, and I believe that those changes have broadened and diversified libertarianism in ways that are the inevitable and desirable products of our growth.

The success of organizations like Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty in bringing more young people into the movement has meant that the issues they are interested in are the ones that are getting increasing attention. Gender, race, and sexuality are part of that, but so are peace and privacy. That this generation of young libertarians wants to talk about all of those things is good, even though I might not personally think that everything they have to say about them is good. For example, I don’t want a libertarianism full of either incessant calls to check my privilege, nor little boy brutalism.

But thinking in terms of what I want, or what any other person wants, is exactly the problem: Those of us in our 40s and 50s (and beyond) simply have to realize that we don’t own the movement and that we can’t centrally plan it. The liberty movement has always been a spontaneous order that has grown and evolved in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways. We all have our views of what that direction should be, and because spontaneous orders emerge from the various intentional actions of those who constitute them, we are perfectly free to keep arguing for our own visions of where we should go. However, we must also simultaneously recognize that we are but one voice in a growing multitude and that our control is limited, despite any leadership roles we might play.

We should also think about the ways in which the growth of the liberty movement affects the production of good and bad work and our perceptions of it. By analogy, consider how the proliferation of new TV networks and falling costs of production have meant there’s just more “stuff” on TV than ever before. Thanks to HBO and Netflix and others, one result is that there’s never been more great TV than there is right now, but Orange is the New Black is competing with tons of terrible reality shows and all the rest. TV’s signal-to-noise ratio might be lower than in the past, but the absolute amount of high-quality programming has never been higher.

I would argue the same is true of libertarianism. As we’ve grown, there’s just a lot more libertarian “stuff” out there, including a lot more nonsense. Our signal-to-noise ratio is lower than when we older folks were young. But there’s also never been more good stuff. Libertarian ideas are being taken seriously in academia, public intellectual circles, and the media because we’ve done good work. And even when our ideas aren’t treated well, it remains true that a lot of smart people seem to think they have to respond to libertarian arguments. That’s a huge sign of growth and of increasing quality.

That increased public presence means that we need to be our own harshest critics. As Bastiat said, there is nothing worse than a good cause ineptly defended. For starters, we should feel no obligation to support, rather than criticize, other libertarian writers because they are libertarians (or because they are women, or gay, or anything else for that matter). We should be seeking out the best work and promoting it from the rooftops. And we should be merciless in our blunt, though civil, criticism of inferior work—including that from our friends.

Young libertarians who write for social media have to realize that they are putting their ideas into the broader public discourse on those topics, and this means they have to do real research and hone their arguments carefully because they will be held accountable for lousy work. They are not helping the cause of liberty by defending it ineptly. You cannot go from an undergraduate degree to serious libertarian pundit without actually knowing something about the history of classical liberal thought and the major contemporary work about which you’re writing. We elders who have a significant public intellectual presence got there because we did the hard work of reading lots of old books as well as plenty of new research. There’s no shortcut from the “collect underpants” of a BA to the “profits” of being taken seriously as a public intellectual.

Young libertarians also need to get used to serious criticism if they wish to compete in the arena of ideas. Whining that you’re being treated unfairly, especially because of gender, age, race, sexuality, or other trait, will simply not cut it. It’s your arguments and evidence that matter. Stop complaining. Revise your work. And try again.

That young libertarians want to talk about issues that previous generations didn’t, or make up lists of the top 20 hottest libertarian women and men, doesn’t mean that the barbarians are at the gate. Focusing on the increasing quantity of weak libertarian writing out there can easily lead us to ignore the unseen: the simultaneous increase in high-quality work. Rather than complaining about silly lists on social media and telling the kids to get off our lawn, we old folks should let the kids do what kids have always done—push the boundaries set by the previous generation. We should, however, also be holding them to the highest standards of argumentation and evidence.

Come play on the lawn, kids. Bring your new ideas and modes of expression. That lawn belongs to all of us, and it’s yours to help the rest of us landscape as you see fit. We old folks will just keep reminding you how precious an asset it is and that it takes hard work, dedication to quality, and deep knowledge of the fundamental  ideas to keep liberty’s lawn fertilized, beautiful, and productive. That’s how our elders treated us, and it’s the least we can do for the generation in whose hands the future of the liberty movement will soon rest.

ABOUT STEVEN HORWITZ

Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective, now in paperback.

Blacks Need More Racists

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A few weeks ago, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) made a stunning announcement that caused a lot of consternation in the Black community. UNCF had accepted a $25 million contribution from Koch Industries and the Charles Koch Foundation.

Under normal circumstances, David and Charles Koch – the brothers who control the two entities – would be applauded for their generosity.  But some Blacks have labeled the Koch brothers as racist simply because they are White, conservative, and libertarians who believe in smaller government, lower taxes and ballot integrity.

However, when the critics are asked to specify what has the Koch family done that is racist, they draw blanks. They equate philosophical disagreements with being a racist. Even if that were the case, why reject money that will actually benefit Black students? The gift is one of largest in the history of UNCF. The UNCF is the primary fund-raising organization for students at private, historically Black colleges. UNCF President Michael Lomax had no problem accepting the check, saying, “… We believe that our cause is a cause that all Americans can and should support regardless of their views on other matters.”

The money will be allocated as follows:

$18.5 million will be used to create the UNCF/Koch Scholars Program, which will provide funds to “exemplary students with demonstrated financial need and an interest in the study of how entrepreneurship, economics, and innovation contribute to well-being for individuals, communities, and society;” $6.5 million will provide general support to the UNCF and historically black colleges of which $4 million of those funds will be reserved to help the 37 UNCF member institutions help students who have been hurt by the denial of PLUS loans (a parent loan program).

Michael L. Lomax, president and CEO of the UNCF, is being criticized for accepting these funds from the Koch brothers  essentially because they oppose virtually everything Obama stands for – and are willing to spend billions of their own money to help their cause. It’s their money and they can do what they please with it. Everyone should be happy that they chose to support Black colleges.

Many are quick to criticize the Koch brothers but don’t have the courage to criticize  the brother in the White House. Obama’s policies have had a devastating impact on Black colleges.

Last month, I wrote a column titled, “Why Black Men Need More White Women.” I pointed out that two conservative White women were supporting policies more beneficial to African Americans than the nation’s first Black president.

Now you have two Koch entities trying to correct a different policy from the same Black president that is destroying the Black community.

In October of 2011, Obama’s Department of Education quietly and without public notice changed the underwriting standards for the very popular PLUS loan.  The changes created more stringent requirements on a parent’s ability to secure a loan for their child.  This shifts in PLUS eligibility standards has resulted in many parents of students at Black colleges having their loan applications denied and those denials have been cited as the reason many Black students have dropped out of school.

According to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org, “Based on last year’s trends [2011], nearly half of would-be PLUS borrowers this academic year [2012] might be turned away…The denials have hit particularly hard at historically black colleges and universities, presidents of those colleges, as well as higher education associations, say. They have warned that some students might not return because they can’t get the loans to pay for college.”

When the Education Department switched entirely to direct lending, the high approval rates for direct loans continued. In 2010-11, the first year when all loans were direct loans, 72 percent of PLUS applicants were approved, and just 28 percent were denied, according to department data. At the same time, the loans continued to grow, from $7.6 billion in 2008 to $10.4 billion in 2011, according to Education Department disbursement data.

“The change was made quietly — the department didn’t convene a rule-making panel or issue a letter to colleges explaining it — but the impact was dramatic,” Kantrowitz said. “Some creditors will put accounts in collections if a payment is only 30 days late. Parents who had previously been eligible for the loans found they had now been turned down.”

“Denials for PLUS loans jumped after the new requirement took effect, midway through the 2011-12 academic year. According to preliminary Education Department data, 38 percent of applicants for the loans were denied — 10 percent more than in the previous year.”  If the new criteria had been in effect all year, Kantrowitz estimated, 44 percent of applicants would have been turned down.

At least $4 million of the Koch contribution will go towards trying to remedy this Obama created disaster for these worthy college students.  It is estimated that this money will help 3,000 students stay in school.  So once again, we have a White persons coming to the rescue of the Black community when their supposed “leaders” have come down with laryngitis yet again.

Open letter to Petty Officer Matthew Hindes US Navy Submarine Fleet

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TO: Petty Officer Matthew Hindes
US Navy Submarine Force Pacific

Thank you for your brave and courageous service in the United States Navy submarine forces currently deployed in the Pacific aboard a ballistic missile submarine. When you return to port you will get this email from me to you shipmate.

Today I called Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan.  I’m friends  with many people and I get things done shipmate.

Noe

Margaret Noe, Lenawee County Circuit Court judge.

I spoke to his personal aid (517) 373-3400 regarding your problem with the dishonorable and egregious acts perpetrated against you by Judge Margaret Noe sitting in the Lenawee County Michigan District I court house. Governor Snyder and his legal team are now fully informed and up to speed on the illegal and harassing ruling by Judge Noe.  So in the words of Master Chief Billy Sunday in Men of Honor… disregard her Cookie, paraphrasing of course.

Governor Rick  Snyder is now looking into your case and so is half the retired U.S. Navy Chief’s canoe club.  We will not let you fall, we will not let you be beat down and trod on.  When you get back to Seattle (this date is classified I understand) but if you have an arrest warrant waiting for you call me at 850-313-1893. I will fly to Seattle and we will both together have a face off with the head judge.  I will have members of Governor Rick Snyder’s legal staff, Fox News and others in tow.

Do not fear shipmate you will be OK.  To Sheriff Jack Walsh of Lenawee County Michigan, if Judge Margaret Noe signs an arrest warrant for Petty Officer Matthew Hindes I ask that you to disregard it.  Judge Noe has violated the rights of Petty Officer Hindes and his daughter under the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act which is federal law. So under the color of law she has committed a felony pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 242.  Judge Noe by inflicting an illegal statute on Petty Hindes, which can be  pursued under 18 U.S.C. § 241. Judge Noe is also subject to civil liability for all damages flowing from such an act pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1985 which, at the minimum, would include attorney fees necessitated by such acts.

Since Judge Noe appears to have committed a felony, she is now subject to arrest and prosecution. When a judge violates a right made specific by statutes, rules or settled interpretations of them, the judge has violated 18 U.S.C. § 242. See U.S. v. Lanier, 520 U.S. 259, 267 (1997).

Judge Noe should be arrested and removed  from the bench for cause if she attempts to harm to Petty Officer Hindes. To quote from the movie Men of Honor released in the year 2000.

“Carl Brashear:

Forgive me sir, but to me, the Navy isn’t a business. It’s an organization of people who represent the finest aspects of our nation. We have many traditions. In my career, I have encountered most of them. Some are good, some not so good. I would, however not be here today were it not for our greatest tradition of all.

Captain Hanks:

And what would that be, Chief Brashear?”

Carl Brashear:

“Honor, sir”

Coming on your Telly — Masterpiece Porno Theatre [pun intended]

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We at Masterpiece Theatre take pride in having changed the meaning of “masterpiece” to a bit of wretched sitcom fluff steeped in legendary English history to be sold to our amply paid agents at American Public Broadcasting. And now we bring our act to an even higher level with a collection of Masterpiece Porno Shows, featuring the very masterful actors and actresses in our cunning exports.

Politely designed to be shown only after midnight to avoid the gaze of the kiddies, we feature in our very masterful masterpieces done by such masters of masterful mastering in the style of the late Anthony Trollope, a covey of well-larded British oldsters freckling in the gardens of the very posh town houses in which we set our bathetic dramas.

You will find them at least as casually masterful in their amorousness as they are in their equally masterful depictions of the glories of the English class system. Are these ancient crones mostly beyond mere puerile comeliness? Perhaps they are, what of it? Are they dead? Probably not.

Masterpiece Porno Theatre
We are engaged here not in life or death, nor rank scholastic aesthetics, but in penetrating the America Public Broadcasting System to persuade the aging armies of formally educated innocents and dupes, rife in your swinish moors, bogs, and Academic baronies, that the American Revolution had never happened.

What better place to do it, after all, than planting our Tory faithful copulating within unctuous machines for pretense, wafting their electronic ecstasies on a supposedly prestigious television channel, one paid for amply, if hardly all that happily, by cozened American taxpayers?

You can’t blame us Brits for doing what we do well: among other things, pretense. You can’t even castigate us for pretending on American television that the American revolution never happened. If the Americans take up that pretense, why shouldn’t we?

Heigh-ho!

We don’t ever give you Shakespeare or anyone who is a real English master in our most masterful masterpieces. We don’t even give you the reliably dogged Anthony Trollope. We give you cabbage-strewn fare worthy of Moe, Larry and Curly sporting obesely thick English accents.

You don’t need to be an Anglophile to enjoy our Masterpiece Porno Theatre – a scooped out empty head and the lack of appreciation for America and its freedoms will do jolly well. If you’re indeed a properly educated bloke, by George, you poor Yankee, you are usually damned happy to get it.

For the first fifty viewers with a Ph.D. to watch Masterpiece Porno Theatre we will rush you an authentic gooseberry crumpet and a frothing cup of excellent and strong Indian tea.

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Iraq and the Bloody Price of Lies

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Western civilization lied and people died.

It lied, that is, to itself.

I am referring to Iraq, but not to the hapless George W. Bush and the claim of WMDs’ existence, which wasn’t a lie at all. What is at issue here is more fundamental. It’s a lie that imbues Bushes, Clintons and Obamas, both the left and the right and most everyone in-between. It is the enlightened position of the modern man, a tenet of our times.

It’s the idea that all peoples are basically the same.

I wrote about this seven years ago in “The Folly of Deifying Democracy in Iraq,” in which I predicted that our “nation-building” would ultimately be fruitless:

While we often view democracy as the terminus of governmental evolution, the stable end of political pursuits, the truth is that civilizations have tended to transition not from tyranny to democracy, but democracy to tyranny (e.g., the ancient Romans). …Benjamin Franklin understood this gravitation toward tyranny well, for when asked what kind of government had been created when he emerged from the constitutional convention, he said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

This brings us to the crux of the matter: Even if we can successfully install democratic republics in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, what makes us think they can keep them?

…To average westerners, all groups are essentially the same, despite profound religious and cultural differences. If a civilization — be it Moslem or Christian, Occidental or Oriental — suffers under the yoke of tyranny, it is only due to a twist of fate that has bestowed the wrong system of government upon it. Change that system and “voila!” all live happily ever after.  What eludes these Pollyannas is that politics doesn’t emerge in a vacuum but is a reflection of a far deeper realm, the spiritual/moral.  Alluding to this, Ben Franklin observed,

“Only a moral and virtuous people are capable of freedom; the more corrupt and vicious a society becomes, the more it has need of masters.”

…[S]piritual [and moral] health must precede the political variety….

A good way to illustrate this point is with Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s story about a large group of young British schoolboys who are shipwrecked on an island and who, after an initial effort at democratic governance, quickly descend into brutal autocracy. Being children, they are raw pieces of humanity perfectly illustrative of the “wild man.” After all, one thing distinguishing children is that they aren’t yet morally and spiritually developed enough to govern themselves. This is why a young child must be watched and controlled, with his life micromanaged by his (usually benign) nanny state, the parents. As he grows and matures, however, the parents can gradually allow an increasing degree of self-governance until, it is hoped, a day comes when he’s capable of complete autonomy.

But as our bursting prisons prove, this process isn’t always successfully effected; more to the point, as greatly varying levels of criminality among groups evidence, not all of our nation’s sub-cultures effect this process with equal success.

If this is true of some sub-cultures in our nation, however, why would it surprise anyone that it would be true of some cultures outside our nation?

In fact, I’ve long described moral and spiritual growth as movement toward “authentic adulthood,” which, at its pinnacle, yields that ethereal combination of innocence (meaning, absence of sin) and wisdom, and the former is actually a prerequisite for the latter. Yet some cultural norms can produce just the opposite: a loss of innocence and lack of wisdom.

However you describe this growth, the fact is that peoples mature very differently. George W. Bush was famous for saying that everybody wanted freedom, but this is an imprecise statement. No nation has complete freedom (to kill, steal, etc.), so what freedoms do the people in question supposedly want? But even if a given people does want freedom in the sense of democratic self-determination, wanting isn’t enough. Virtually everyone wants money, but not everyone has the discipline and wherewithal to acquire it; everybody wants health, but some people still can’t resist smoking, eating or drinking themselves to death. Ours is a world full of people too wanting to get what they want, which is one reason why unfulfilled desire is man’s constant companion.

Ironically, the very modernists who stress how foreign Muslims are “just like us” can easily comprehend culture/system incompatibility when our own culture war is at issue. No small number of liberals have concluded that the last opposition to their agenda won’t evaporate until we traditionalists — who, ironically, liberals sometimes liken to the Taliban — die off. Oprah Winfrey said that the old “racists” were just going to have to die; Judge Judy Sheindlin said that those who oppose faux marriage were just going to have to die. What they’re really saying is that the culture on the other side of the culture war has to die (and, believe me, I consider their “culture’s” demise no less necessary). And they figure that it won’t be perpetuated because they’re forging a new culture via the media, academia and entertainment.

So why is it so hard to understand that the same principle applies to foreign intransigents?

If certain moderns can resign themselves to this with respect to Western Christian culture, why can’t they realize that it’s no different with Islamic culture? They don’t think for a moment that they can talk us traditionalists out of our deeply held principles, so why do they think they can talk Muslims out of theirs? And they have only succeeded in shaping the younger generations because they have seized control of the aforementioned culture shapers. So why would they think that Muslim civilization could be reshaped without the same Gramscian march through the madrassahs and other Islamic institutions? They act as if their own domestic political opponents are more foreign than foreigners. But I will explain the reason why.

Just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, distance makes dreams grow fanciful.

As with an irritating neighbor who, owing to continual petty annoyances, you despise more than a tyrant an ocean away, liberals are close enough to us for our behavior to have affected them viscerally so that they feel on an emotional level what they’re incapable of apprehending intellectually. But Muslims are far enough away — and I don’t just mean physically, but, more importantly, psychologically — so that it’s easy to ascribe to them whatever qualities one’s fantasies may prescribe. It’s as with the starry-eyed, naïve young lady who is smitten with an exotic but flawed man and who is just sure (as women so often are) that she’ll be able to change him: after 15 years she can be a cynical old jade who will bitterly lament, “He’ll never change!” The man, you see, made that transition from theoretical foreign naughty boy to up-close domestic nightmare.

So do you really want to know what it would truly take to transform the ‘stan du jour? Alright, but most of you either won’t like it or won’t believe it:

  1. Go in with massive force and brutality, Roman style.
  2. Execute anyone who offers resistance after dousing him in pig’s blood.
  3. Forcibly convert the population to Christianity, and thoroughly infuse their institutions with the faith.
  4. Garrison troops there for several generations, repeating steps one and two as necessary to complete the transformation.

And, by the way, there is precedent for this: It’s a version of what the Muslims did when they long ago conquered the old Christian lands of the Mideast and North Africa.

Having said this, I’m not currently recommending such a course. I’m just telling you what would be necessary to effect the kind of change in question. You see, everyone talked about Mideast nation-building when we really just engaged in government-building and what was actually needed was something far grander than both: civilization-building. The moderns thought that if they put sheep’s clothing on a wolf it wouldn’t bite, that they could put the leaves of liberty on a tree of tyranny and they wouldn’t wither and die. We thought we were remedying causes when we were just treating symptoms.

So yesterday’s moderns called WWI “the war to end all wars.” Then their grandchildren gave us the political system to end all wars — democracy — with George W. Bush once saying that democracies don’t go to war with one another. And this is true. After all, when democracy’s birthplace, ancient Athens, democratically decided to launch a disastrous imperialistic war that ultimately cost her people their whole empire, the target was autocratic Sparta; there were no other democracies to war against at the time, you see.

So all we can really say is that democracies haven’t yet gone to war with one another. Perhaps even more to the point, democracies don’t always remain democracies; they often, sometimes quickly and violently, descend into tyranny.

Then they may go to war.

So while some commentators are saying that the current crisis in Iraq vindicates the neo-cons, it only proves that they were better than the liberals at herding cats. A wiser policy was the one we pursued during Cold War days. Understanding that the island boys were going to need a firm hand, we both kept them on their island and tried to ensure a firm hand we could handle: a pro-American dictator, such as Augusto Pinochet or Hosni Mubarak. Oh, the viciously vacuous condemned this as the authoring of tyranny, but they forget that, as Thomas Sowell often points out, in life there often aren’t any solutions, only trade-offs. And accepting this can help prevent making the wrongs ones, such as trading off blood and treasure for that fruit of folderol and fantasy — nothing.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

RELATED ARTICLE: Your Government Is Sending Your Money to These Less-Than-Friendly Countries

“Lines in the Sand”

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Why is ISIS different?  Why is it different from all the other acronyms we have learnt to remember and fear over the last thirteen years?  There is one reason in particular.  Most of the last decade-and-a-half has been spent tackling terrorist groups.  There have been many manifestations of them.  But in Syria and Iraq, the civilised world now faces a different proposition: a terrorist army.

The current capabilities of ISIS are extraordinary. Not just the hundreds of millions of dollars to which they have access since they overran Mosul.  Not just the fact that they now control some of the world’s most productive oil fields.  It is not even that this is the first terrorist entity to have planes and helicopters at their disposal and more than 10,000 people to fight.  This brutal army is now uniting very disparate enemies.

The cooperation of Iran and America is just one such symptom.  But it must be approached unbelievably carefully, and in the knowledge that we wish Iran to lose.  One of the most feared and capable Iranian terrorist leaders, Qassem Suleimani, has been on America’s radar for years.  He is now in Iraq helping the attempts to push back ISIS.  He was also the orchestrator of the recent plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador in Washington.  That the Americans would find themselves having to cooperate with an Iranian who recently attempted to carry out an act of terrorism on American soil is a demonstration of the fact that we are in unchartered waters indeed.

So what should we do now?  If we are in the realm of such impossibilities where should we head next?  At The Henry Jackson Society, we have spent years studying both foreign and home-grownforms of terrorism.  Having taken a special interest in Iraq and Syria, we have also repeatedly stressed the way in which these types of terrorism are becoming effectively intermingled.  There is no longer simply an ‘over here’ and an ‘over there.’  And we cannot choose not to fight them in one place because if we do we will have to fight them in another.

There are a number of things we must now consider.  Firstly, we might have to accept that the borders of the Middle East are going to change significantly.  Perhaps we will have to give up on those borders.  Perhaps the only success story of Iraq – the Kurdish region in the North – should be allowed to embed itself as a viable, independent and sovereign state, accorded the rights to self-defence and independence that is the dream of most Iraqi Kurdish politicians.

Perhaps we will have to go further.  Earlier this week at the HJS office, we heard from someone who relayed the possibility that if the Obama White House ever had any strategy regarding Syria it was to allow the country to become Iran’s Vietnam.  But if that was the hope – and it is a stretch to see this administration seeing it through so far – then it is one that is not being actively enough pursued.

Syria has become the cauldron of the Middle East’s next major war.  And while the Western media and public have endlessly replayed the rows of 2003, the Middle East has moved on and taken us by surprise.  This week political leaders in the US and UK warned of terrorist attacks at home in the wake of these events.  We, at HJS, agree that this is an immediate possibility.  We have already warned what this terror could look like, as we saw at the Jewish museum in Brussels last month.  Indeed it is what we have studied and warned about for years.

Our politicians have become good at suggesting what it is that makes our countries ‘inclusive’.  This is a good moment for them to go further and suggest what we must exclude as well.  As ISIS show what they are made of in Iraq, this is the moment to show that there is a brutality at home and abroad which must be fought with the utmost determination and fire wherever we find it.

RELATED VIDEO: Olivier Guitta discusses threat to the West from jihadists returning from Syria

The Metropalistan Opera

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This column is a follow up to my recent article “We have MET the Enemy“.

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Scene from “The Death of Klinghoffer”.

Canceling the simulcast of ‘The Death of Klinghoffer” does not exculpate any of the personnel affiliated with the opera if the show will be presented on stage as scheduled.  Because Peter  Gelb acknowledged the “genuine concern in the international Jewish community,” he is not oblivious to the impropriety, yet he continues unimpeded.  He may well be an active partner to the insult, an accomplice to Alice Goodman’s rejection of their mutual heritage, or he lacks the capacity to see that this production should also be of enormous concern to the greater American community.  It would appear that this may well rank with the Bavarian Oberammergau that continues to inspire antisemitism – but not only antisemitism.  This perverted story is an act of jihad.

For the still uninformed, Jihad is “holy war,” or it would be a holy war if Islam were a bona fide religion. However, Islam is political ideology, a movement of conquest that is presented as a religion (a religion of peace, no less!),  a duty for all Muslims to wage war against the non-Islamic world on behalf of their prophet, Mohammed.  In the 7th century, after 13 years of futile attempts at converting Meccan and Medinan Jews, Christians and idol worshipers to his new religion, Mohammed began torturing, looting and destroying those who would not accept his “religion” or him as prophet. He beheaded (Jewish) men, enslaved women and children, and killed until both cities were inhabited by Muslims only.  Thus he acquired land and converts to Islam. To this day, his followers must obey the same Qur’anic decrees. Eighty percent of the Qur’an is devoted to dealing with the unbeliever. Mohammed converted about 10,000 to Islam every year, committing violence until the end of his life.  Islam is a detailed political system, a demonic doctrine of jihad and the implementation of Islamic laws, Sharia, everywhere.

9:29  Make war on those who have received the Scriptures (Jews and Christians) but do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day.  They do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden. The Christians and Jews do not follow the religion of truth until they submit and pay the poll tax (jizya) and they are humiliated.

Over these 1400 years, Jihad has been responsible for the death of 270 million people worldwide. Known as “The Tears of Jihad,” they include 60 million Christians, 80 million Hindus, 10 million Buddhists, 120 million Africans, the number increases with each attack throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Russia, India and China.  To assume that we Americans are not included in their vision is, at the least, foolish.  To paint the jihadists as though they might be justified or in need of compassion is reckless.  We cannot turn a blind eye and portray the terrorists with humanity, or we will not be able to defend ourselves as they change our culture and mindset in this slow, methodical onslaught. These cold-blooded killers who are meticulously trained since childhood to revel and celebrate death have been robbed of all humanity.

The opera’s purpose is to prime us to be insensitive to the death of a wheelchair-bound American, a veteran of World War II, an inventor and appliance manufacturer, a husband and father, with the smokescreen that he is Jewish and, therefore, responsible for every misfortune known to the Muslim world.  It is also preparing us to slowly lose our moral compass, take on their Qur’anic mission of hate and death, and tolerate their violence, evil, and bloodlust as “acceptable under the circumstances.” It is enhanced with the accusation of “Islamophobia,” to prevent us from naming and discussing the enemy.

Raymond Ibrahim, Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum and author, has exposed Islam’s war on Christians. There are news reports daily of Muslim killings according to Muhammad’s commands – oppressing their women, honor killings, hunting down apostates, kidnapping children into sexual slavery, and converting or killing Christians in Afghanistan, Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Krygyz, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tanzania, and into Europe.  You need  only turn on the few TV channels that are still dedicated to reporting the truth.

The opera is an insult to the memory of Leon Klinghoffer and his family and an assault on us and our humanity.  We must not be manipulated into this gradual acceptance of the Islamic viewpoint. We must understand that this is yet another jihad war strategy with the purpose of destroying us – nihilism – to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Western world.  There is no greater threat to mankind today than Islam and this opera must not be staged.

RELATED STORIES: 

The Met’s senseless ‘Klinghoffer’ cop-out
Presbyterian Church (USA) Makes Controversial Divestment Move Against Israel

The Obama Administration’s Growing Assault on Religious Liberty: Wake up Catholic Church!

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Hope all is well as we are two days away from the official start of summer…and, friends, it is getting hot as hell out here. And, if you think it’s hot now, wait until you see what the liberal Obama administration is fixing to do this up-coming week. As if the attack on our beloved Catholic Church on January 20th, 2012 with Sebelius and the H.H.S. Mandate wasn’t bad enough, wait till you see what “Mr. Executive Order” is setting up to do. And, mind you, the Holy Catholic Church did not do a damn thing back then to fight that unethical & immoral mandate that knocks the First Amendment out of the U.S. Constitution books, while crippling our religious freedoms to a complete standstill. Shame on Cardinal Dolan. Shame on the Catholic Church. Shame on the 51% of Catholics who voted for this egomaniac whose ego is almost as big as his ears.

I have written about this religious freedom fiasco way too many times and way too many times, nothing has been done. Running two “Fortnight for Freedoms” was like the captain of the Titanic asking his first mate to use a half gallon bucket to take some water out of their sinking ship. The state of our Catholic Church today does not look like the Catholic Church that I signed up for 56 years ago. The one that I did my Baptism, Holy Communion, Confirmation and Holy Matrimony at. The one that I love with my entire being and call “my home away from home”. This does not look like the Holy Church that is headquartered out of the Vatican in Rome. The one that Jesus built upon the rock of Peter. It almost feels like it is the Catholic Church that is being run up on the Hill at the liberal White House in Washington D.C. They have had a lot more input these past 5 & a half years than what is coming out of the Holy See in the Vatican…or the USCCB, which is just a few blocks away from the Obama mansion.

Come on now, let’s get serious for a minute here. As of today, only a measly “80” law suits have been filed against the Obama administration & the H.H.S. Mandate. “80” – not “8,000”!!! Like I have said from January 21st, 2012 up until yesterday – “The day that the the Vatican and the USCCB get enough guts and courage to stand up to this wanna-be dictator in our White House and order every single Catholic institution in our country to file a law suit against this administration & the H.H.S. that is making a complete mockery of the Holy Catholic Church – is the day that the Catholic Church will be the Church Triumphant”…Right now and for many decades to come, we will remain the Church Suffering…so, we better get used to it.

If the small but powerful Ave Maria University in tiny Immokalee, Florida can file a law suit – the rest of our Catholic institutions can. If the ever-Catholic Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio can do it – the rest of us can. It is beyond my comprehension that then-President of the USCCB, Cardinal Dolan, did not do anything to combat these intrinsic evils and at least, order every Catholic institution in the U.S. to file a law suit against the H.H.S. It is even more painful to see incoming President of the USCCB, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, clumsily take the baton from Cardinal Dolan…and let it hit the ground without even trying to pick it up. He fumbled it badly and now every Catholic in this country is paying a dear price for it. More than 30 pieces of silver. Beyond me, folks…Gutless. And, this is supposed to be the “Year of Boldness”.

In these first 6 months of our proclaimed “Year of Boldness”, I can count on one hand – actually, on one finger – how many times the leaders of our beloved Catholic Church have been bold. It’s more like “being told”instead of “being bold” – as in being told what to do by Sebelius, Pelosi, Obama, Biden, Reid and the rest of the cast of clowns. The Catholic Church is being told what to do every day of the year and not one of our church leaders has the guts to stand up to this unfair assault. A “live” Puppet show at the USCCB. The White House controls the strings. Beyond excruciating. And, now with this new Executive Order coming from King Kenya, the Catholic Church better brace itself and get ready to take it again on the backside one more time.

Executive Order Number what…Who can keep track? This nifty one coming from our avid golfer in the White House “bars federal contractors from discriminating against anyone on gender identity and/or sexual orientation”. Obama is moving on the issue a week after talking about the important role that administrative action can play in advancing LGBT rights. (I am not certain, but I think LGBT stands for Lesbian/Gay/ Bi-sexual & Trans-sexual) I cannot believe I even had to elaborate on this appalling type of lifestyle. I know it sounds a bit “queer”, but that is what this liberal socialist is pushing in “our” country and what the Holy Catholic Church is going to get hit once again with – like a ton of condoms.

 Yes, Obama’s team is gearing up to place unfair pressure on Catholic charitable social services to conform to its progressive & leftist agenda. Church services – like adoption agencies – will have to face a choice. Either conform to that agenda or shut their doors for the lack of federal financial support. The choices are bleak. The fault is our own. The Catholic Church should have never allowed herself to be put into this compromising position. Had we stood up “Two-Gether” as One Body in Christ back on January 20th, 2012, we would not be even talking about this issue and I would not be writing my fingers off this late at night.

We have two choices: Bow down to King Kenya and to all of his immoral and unconstitutional atrocities he has forced upon us, or stand up as One Body in Christ and fight it with all we have. Let’s see, on last count, there were about 68 million Catholics in this country. If an army this big – supposedly “Soldiers of Christ” – cannot defend our Catholic Church, our Catholic institutions and our religious freedoms – and we are not willing to take a bullet for our beloved Faith like in the movie “For Greater Glory” – then, we are not worthy to call ourselves Catholics, Christians or followers of Christ. It’s a slap in His face and a mockery to the One who died for us.

Thank GOD that Jesus is not coming down any time soon to see this debacle…then, again, He just may be coming before we even know it…and, he will be knocking over every damn tax collectors’ tables not only at the Temples but, also at the White House, Planned Parenthood, Bill & Melinda Gates’ offices and at every single place that attacks what He set out to do 2,000 years ago. He did not die in vain.

The H.H.S. Mandate, the countless Scandals, the skyrocketing Federal debt, the “Curse of Common Core”, the Promotion of  “same-sex marriage” and now yet, another powerful gutting of the First Amendment’s “Guarantee” of Religious Freedom being prepared for implementation by the fiat of Executive Order – the government is steadily crushing liberty.

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Religious Liberty? Obama’s Not Done Yet

Elise Hiltonby ELISE HILTON on WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 2014

If you thought the Obama Administration had taken its final swipe at religious liberty with the HHS mandate, think again. At Catholic Vote, John flag broken cross jewish star gavelShimek tells us that there is a new attack on American’s religious liberty, and it won’t affect just Catholics.

According to Shimek, the social media website Buzzfeed announced that the White House is drafting an executive order that will bar federal contractors from discriminating against anyone based on gender identity and/or sexual orientation.

President Obama is moving on the issue a week after talking about the important role that administrative action can play in advancing LGBT rights.

At a question-and-answer session at the White House last week, Obama spoke about how transgender students can now “assert their rights” following recent Education Department action laying out an expanded view of sex discrimination protections under Title IX.

Shimek asks, “So what? What does this have to do with religious liberty?” As it turns out, quite a bit.

Fr. Thomas Reese claims that “Depending on what exemptions [the executive order provides], the new requirement may affect Catholic Relief Services, Catholic hospitals, Catholic education, and other Catholic charities that received Federal funds.”

Bottom line: The HHS Mandate hit health care workers and institutions. This new assault? Basically, it hits all the rest of the Church’s charitable social services. In other words, the Obama White House is casting the net of its progressive agenda much further and wider this time.

What practical impact could this executive order have? Picture this. A Catholic archdiocesan or diocesan adoption service, that needs federal monies in order to function, announces plans to place children in traditional families comprised of one father and one mother. Such a plan would violate the new executive order being drafted. What happens next? A phone call from the Feds? Burdensome fines? At this juncture, we don’t know. But, perhaps history is prologue.

Of course, Catholic social service agencies have closed their doors in several states, rather than violating Church teaching and being forced to place children with homosexual couples. Shimek says.

Obama’s team is gearing up to place pressure on Catholic charitable social services to conform to its progressive agenda. Church services – like adoption agencies – will have to face a choice: Either conform to that agenda or shut their doors for lack of federal financial support. The choices are bleak.

This is another case where the Obama Administration may “win,” but children and other vulnerable groups will lose – lose much-needed services, hope, and compassionate care from organizations with (in some cases) a century or more experience in delivery of care. Yet, Tico Almeida, president of Freedom to Work says that this move by the White House “is a tremendous step forward in the campaign to give LGBT Americans a fair shot to build a successful career being judged on their talent and hard work – nothing more and nothing less.” However, it’s clear that the administration is not interested in giving religious liberty any type of fair shot.

Read HHS Mandate was just the first step. Here comes a new attack on religious liberty at CatholicVote.org.

An Open letter to the Democrat Party of Florida

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Christian Ulvert (left) with boyfriend Carlos Andrade.

Dear Democrat Party of Florida,

First let me congratulate Christian Ulvert. I understand he just married his long time boy friend Carlos Andrade. Christian is the Florida Democratic Party’s new political director. He married his partner Carlos in Washington, D.C. last week in a ceremony that they couldn’t have in their home state. It was more of a quick in and out ceremony. In honor of this marriage all liquid soap in hotel rooms in Miami has been changed to powered soap to ensure a longer wait time during the pick up process. This could encourage playful banter but none the less bring your own soap now boys and girls when you visit Miami.

I am sure Carlos has his Green Card or is at least here legally. If not its OK, as he can still get in state tuition and can become an attorney. Thank you Republican Party of Florida and the Florida Supreme Court.

Nicholas J. Pellito is the Director of Democrat Party Affairs for Florida. He must be managing Charlie Crist and Bill Clinton’s calendar. Just assuming. More of the quick in and out stuff I am sure. All hard drives will be accidentally lost and written over (perhaps) if we ever request a Freedom of Information Act request to look at all the in house party emails.

Sarah Smith, the new Finance Director, will be responsible for the redistribution of wealth from the pockets of Florida taxpayers to her purse just as soon as they can get rid of the TEA Party. Its not looking too hopeful so I reckon they will push ahead for a massive gas tax increase and destroy what’s left of the Democrat Party in the process.

allison tant

Allison Tant

Allison Tant is the Florida Democrats Chairwoman. Allison Tant has had major problems leading the Democrat Party. Tant was front and center when Allie Braswell announced he was running for state Chief Financial Officer. When Braswell pulled out of the race a few days later after revelations that he had filed for personal bankruptcy numerous times, she was left holding the bag. Looks like Florida Democrats are good at one thing – spending money they don’t have and filing bankruptcy to escape justice for their philandering’s.

The Florida Democrat Party does offer internships and are currently accepting applications. FDP internships for credit require a minimum of one semester or one summer in length. All internships are unpaid and generally require a time commitment of 10 to 20 hours a week. All student loans will be waived and passed onto the taxpayers.

Qualified interns should:

(1) Be members of the Communist Party USA;
(2) Support Gay marriage;
(3) Run up their parent’s credit card at college;
(4) Have a working understanding of Mein Kempf; and
(5) Swear a blood oath of allegiance to President Barrack H. Obama.

The Florida Democrat Party also has a long and proud history of defending civil rights and expanding opportunity for all Americans. This culminated in placing in power Barack Obama, who was half white. Before that though the Democrats pretty much created the Klu Klux Klan and voted against every single civil rights bill prior to JFK. We won’t mention that they filibustered the civil rights act of 1964. On June 10, 1964, for the first time in its history, cloture was invoked on a civil rights bill, ending a record-breaking filibuster by Democrats that had consumed fifty-seven working days. The hero of the hour was minority leader Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-IL). YES THE GOP SAVED THE DAY! The Democrats were spanked again just like they will be on November 4th, 2014.

Pack your bags, clean out your cubicles and hold your breathe intermittently for 3 minutes every 30 minutes to reduce CO2 emissions when you exhale. Al Gore will surely start to tax it.

Have a wonderful evening Florida Democrats. Start saving your pennies to pay for your soon to be expanded price of health insurance premiums, gasoline and consumer goods, like food.

I know you all want a progressive centralized single payer system like the Veterans Administration. Your days of harming this country are coming to an end and soon you will be all fired on November 4th, 2014. Or most of you any way.

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Bergdahl Did Serve with Distinction: Pity There’s No Video

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One man’s villain can be the same man’s hero five minutes later, especially if that man is a woman. Our friend and contributor Marion DS Dreyfus has somehow succeeded in knitting the above bipolar vision into a consistent argument.

Think about it a minute. We flock to the “Mission Impossible” flicks, to James Bond actioners, eagerly glug down the research-and-fact-based novels of Tom Clancy.

Yet when we come across a potential real-live potential agent, we go all dumb and credulous.

What better cover could the military have devised than a maverick loose cannon who gets tossed from the Coast Guard (who gets ejected from the Coast Guard?!), joins an FOB base in Afghanistan, one of the hottest of the flashpoints in the flaming Middle East, and just…wanders away from his platoon one day, flaking out enough to take a supply of water, a map and some stuff to tide him over before he hooks up with, oh yeah, the Taliban his guys have hitherto been hunting and shedding from their rocky tents and frantic fanaticism?

This dingbat paradigm has been studying the local tongues, no easy task, Pashto and Dari, for a year and some. That’s no accident. He cleverly set up the people back home by maligning the US, the country that has bred and reared him.

He’s on record, even on Twitter, saying obnoxious things about the States. So far, so evil.

Just to make things perfectly clear, he jettisons his military gear, after asking his commanding officer if that is the advisable tack to take if he decides to…leave for any reason. He considerately leaves a note pinned to his cot saying he’s going bye-bye.

So this paragon of deviousness and maybe clueless wanderlust gets himself “found” by the very guys he has been seeking.

Now he’s in their clutches, and to make it seem authentic, he lets these wild Afghan tribalists rough him up a while; he knows that, and is prepared for it. But time passes, and he’s part of their crowd, does target practice and soccer with the gang. He’s not really unhappy, though he knows his guys must have sent out search parties to get him back. He’s gone native, beard and all.

Everything he’s done for the past five or six years would convince the suspicious thugs in the Talib crew that here is a real deserter, a guy who hates the US, who ditched his platoon, who learned their language, who seems to have sought them out when he had the magic passport that would have clothed and fed him forever, so long as he is not IED’ed or friendly-fired to Allah somewhere.

What better way to implant, imbed a smart mole to send back intel and hang with the enemy?

Maybe his useful transmission was at an end; Susan Rice was pressing for, they tell us, two years or more to exfiltrate this guy. Certainly, the commander in chief has done less than nothing to rescue or bring back PTSD-sufferer Andrew T from his Mexican shackles for no reason other than a missed road turnoff and a few registered firearms in his vehicle. Nada, zip, zilcho.

It is also not unusual to infer that for obvious reasons, neither the intelligence community nor the unintelligence community (those in the White House at present) would be extremely reticent about sharing what this defector cum collaborator (possibly) was really doing out in the Afghan boonies with his unwashed non-platoon-mates.

Wouldn’t it be well within the realm of likelihood that this entire incident was carefully scripted by the feckless Administration or some CIA honcho to get one pair of eyes and ears up in the ranks of the Taliban?

Even his military mates, ex-, bolstered the story unwittingly by reporting that he was flaky, had abruptly left them, had not been a part of the base command in any solid way. All incidentally supporting the cover ID of this guy who has been privy to the strategy, conversations, plans and mission movement of the baddest of the Afghan bad.

What about escape attempts? Sure. He made a few token efforts to escape, to solidify his persona as mindful or regretful US military. They were half-hearted attempts, and he knew he would be recaptured and brought back to the camp of ongoing info and intel.

So the irony is: This may have been the first time Susan Rice, BObama and his flunkies—eyes front, Jay Carney!—actually told the truth. We are so used to disbelieving anything uttered by anyone in the present regime that we automatically dismiss everything they say.

And how about that lengthy debriefing/rehab they’re draping him with over in Germany? And the fact that he hasn’t yet even made contact with his evidently loopy bearded second coming of ZZZTop pops?

There’s more here than meets the eye, or the ink, of the fuddled media. And maybe the Talibs were close to blowing his cover, so they indeed might have been close to decapitating or scimitaring him?

Even, mirabile dictu, the once and future truth with reference to this other Bo-zo.

Hey. It’s not even that far-fetched.

But wait!

Maybe, then, he really did “serve with honor and distinction,” putting himself at risk every day, should they have woken up and busted his cover. There’s another way this could have gone:

Another scenario, one virtually no one has yet presented but us, is that Bo became a waiter in Taliban-land, and served lamb chops and sorghum, or whatever other feculent stuff they ate there, managing to add a dash of elegance to their yurts and berm-buried hovels and wind-tossed animal-skin shelters. Every restaurant wants serving people with a dash of the exotic, no? And here they have an expensive piece of real estate, a costly avant-guard waiter who can deliver the baaaah’d goods and cattle-hock slop soup with a touch of the snootiness and hauteur preferred by upscale customers.

A good waiter, hey, in the mountains of Afghanistan? Not ever to be sneezed at. He was worth his weight in peppercorns and turmeric.

No wonder they kept him around.

And again, Susan Asian Carbohydrate now has to be re-evaluated.

Turns out she was right. He DID serve with distinction. He never spilled a drop. Never upchucked at table with the comestibles he had to set down on the dinner rock of mealtime. Never turned his nose up and sniffily recommended the diners go elsewhere, should the bill of fare not please their poufy palates–Pakistan Palace, only 1,000 kilometers away, for the Boeuf Bourguignon.

Why wouldn’t this scenario make more sense, given our massive immersion in spycraft, spy video, Google Earth, and all the paraphernalia of derring-do by Daniel Craig et al., than the present 100% across-the-board mockery and derision of the man captive five years with the mountain men of Afghanistan?

Back in the States, he can now show ethnic cafes and fanatic food foray farms how to serve up their real-slow food fare with panache and riveting authenticity, whisking his arm-towelette with the flourish of the very best.

marion d s dreyfus – June 20©14

Obama’s Legacy Threatens America’s Future

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Americans are feeling the same fear for the future that preceded the Civil War when the incompetent James Buchanan left the mess that Abraham Lincoln had to address. I don’t think we have ever had a President with less knowledge of history than Barack Obama and less ability to solve domestic economic problems and address threatening foreign ones.

“Rarely has a U.S. President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” said former Vice President Dick Cheney, along with his daughter Liz, in a June 18 opinion published by the Wall Street Journal. Liz has been a deputy assistant secretary of state for eastern affairs.

My fear now is that the President is not, as I originally assumed, driven just by ideology, but that he keeps demonstrating the illegal use of powers that he does not have under the Constitution, coupled with a disdain for the other branch of government, the Congress.

If Obama is eminently impeachable, but Congress is so divided that this is not an option.

Despite what his Justice Department told him, Obama disobeyed a law requiring him to give Congress a 30-day notice for the exchange of terrorist detainees from Guantanamo Bay. His use of executive orders may meet some legal standard, but they are often his way of getting around legal limitations such as his wish to open America’s borders to the flood of illegal immigrants we are seeing.

There is some comfort in being someone who warned against electing him both times, but there is no comfort in reviewing the harm he has done to date. Only a major Republican victory in the November midterm elections will offer any protection against him until he leaves office.

Let’s just do a quick review:

He traded five members of the Taliban’s highest ranked detainees from Guantanamo for an alleged prisoner of war who deserted his unit in Afghanistan, negotiating with the Islamic criminal group, the Haqqani, known for extracting high ransoms but no mention of money has been made.

Having initiated negotiations with Iran in a futile attempt to get them to cease seeking their own nuclear arsenal, there is conjecture the U.S. will enlist Iran’s help in addressing the jihadist attack on Iraq, but Iran has been the declared enemy of the United States since it seized our diplomats in 1979 and held them hostage until President Reagan was sworn into office. Iran is the world’s greatest supporter of terror. It was behind the truck bomb that destroyed our embassy in Beirut in 1984 and a few months later killed U.S. Marines in an attack on their barracks there. It provided weapons to our enemies during the Iraq war.

He has driven the nation’s debt up so high that, for the first time in its history, its credit rating was reduced. That debt continues to grow and is pegged at $17 trillion. The price of food is beginning to soar.

Unemployment now affects the lives of those unable to find work—literally millions—and those who have ceased to look. Raising the minimum wage will only serve to further reduce job creation and opportunities. Millions are on food stamps while millions are receiving disability benefits. There is likely no way to know who legitimately deserves assistance and who does not. Increasing the rolls is seen as ensuring the Democrat Party gets their vote.

He reduced the funding of our military, reducing its fighting capacity to pre-World War Two levels in manpower and the arsenal of weapons it requires. He advocated the participation of homosexuals, a policy the military has long opposed for issues of unit cohesion and morale. He advocated more female participation in the military. Pastors and other chaplains serving the military were pressured to alter their message to the troops.

Obama is on record saying that “climate change” is the greatest enemy the U.S. military will face. Climate change has been occurring for billions of years and is entirely natural. It has nothing to do with waging war except for the circumstances on a specific battlefield and that is called the “weather”, not climate change.

Having done nothing to stem illegal immigration, the nation is now besieged by thousands of “refugees”, often very young, being bussed here from nations like Nicaragua and Guatemala. They in turn are being “dumped” in Arizona and other locations because the Texas immigration detention facilities are full. This situation is being attributed to Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was initiated in 2012 to allow illegal immigrants who can to the U.S. as minors to escape deportation for two years. In early June an additional two years was tacked onto the program.

By pushing Obamacare—the Affordable Patient Care Act—through Congress, Obama has effectively destroyed the finest medical health system in the world, raising the cost of health insurance, interfering with the doctor-patient relationship, and causing several million Americans who already had health insurance to lose it. He lied to achieve this and the Democrats knew it. No Republican in Congress voted for it. By 2017 an estimated seven million workers will lose employer provided coverage.

Just as Obama’s indifference to fix the management problems of the Veterans Administration has resulted in needless deaths, Obamacare’s death toll will make that seem small when even policy holders are forced to wait for care because hospitals have closed or there are fewer private practice physicians.

Obama’s declared “war on coal” has already caused more than a hundred coal-fired plants producing electricity to close, reducing the production of electricity at a time the population is growing and the economy requires it for growth. The emissions from such plants had already been reduced by 90% at a significant cost. The EPA’s new regulations have no basis whatever in scientific fact. The cost of electricity is already rising for many Americans and U.S. coal is being shipped to China and India for their plants.

The nation’s moral standards have been harmed by the implementation of same-sex marriages which the President endorsed after reversing an earlier campaign position. His view that legalizing marijuana is okay will have serious implications that are already manifesting themselves at this point.

This is just a thumbnail review of what has been happening to the nation and to all Americans. We have survived incompetent presidents in the past, but Obama is unique, not just for his ignorance and incompetence, but for his reliance on lies to achieve his goal of reducing America as the one world power that has been relied upon to resist the forces of evil that threaten mankind.

Having begun with a quote by the Cheney’s, I will conclude with their view that “President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.”

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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