Emote, protest, get naked for your professor, and get credit

Pity poor Emma Sulkowicz lugging a mattress around the Columbia University campus now for almost a full academic year.

This act, recalling Christ carrying his cross (that is if any on our college campuses know about this part of our Judeo-Christian heritage any more) has drawn attention to her alleged rape by fellow student and one-time lover, Paul Nungesser, who in turn has filed a Title IX suit against the university for allowing the campaign of harassment against him. Nungesser was cleared by a “campus court” (itself a disturbing extra-legal development).

Sulkowicz’s back-bending activity, however, is actually her senior thesis, “Carry That Weight,” directed by Jon Kessler, a professor in the School of Visual Arts. Kessler, who has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, in the 1980s and 1990s made “kinetic sculptures,” and used video and surveillance equipment in his work to express “political urgency” after 9/11.

Sulkowicz seems to have learned from her professor about the new academic requirements and purposes of art, as her words in an email to AP reveal:

“I think it’s ridiculous that Paul [Nungesser] would sue not only the school but one of my past professors for allowing me to make an art piece. It’s ridiculous that he would read it as a ‘bullying strategy,’…when really it’s just an artistic expression of the personal trauma I’ve experienced at Columbia. If artists are not allowed to make art that reflect on our experiences, then how are we to heal?”

Sadly, Sulkowicz’s performance art project reflects a growing trend of professors giving students assignments that have little to do with real academics. Most colleges now require (or at least allow students to get credit for) service-learning, a sort of charity for liberal causes that garners academic credit. The exercises typically require work in homeless shelters, inner-city schools, parks, and even prisons.

For example, at Boise State University students taking Advanced Spanish Conversation and Composition (SPAN 303) last month went to Idaho Correctional Center in order to translate letters by Hispanic inmates for the American Prison Writing archive page. Students also learned about the collection in the prison library and job training programs for the inmates.

Predictably, the students’ “reflection papers,” many handwritten and on posters interspersed with photos, testified to how the program succeeded in changing stereotypes they held about prisoners. No doubt, the professor, Doran Larsen, whose c.v. includes a collection of prisoners’ writings, was pleased.

In this advanced Spanish language course, discussions with inmates and casual writing (in English) pushed aside hours of study that could have been devoted to Cervantes and Marquez. Likewise, the assignments accompanying service-learning projects are a degraded form of academics. “Reflection papers” replace traditional essays and research papers. One handwritten reflection paper on a poster board display paper looks like a third-grader’s journal. In the past, it would have been their language skills and knowledge about Spanish that mattered. Today, however, students are judged by their attitudes, not their knowledge.

Even in composition classes, reflection papers and participation in preselected protests, such as “Take Back the Night,” take the place of writing formal essays. Composition teachers, as I learned at the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication, take students on protests to study the “rhetoric” of slogans and “bodies,” instead of having them read classic works.

Such ideological and emotional assignments, and “performance art,” grew out of the 1960s protest movement and the rejection of Western standards. The radicals who went into academe embraced the new standards and have passed them on.

Performance art has become a favorite of feminists, who follow theorist Helene Cixous, who insisted, “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes….”

One of the most famous purveyors of this mode is Karen Finley, who in her younger days famously smeared chocolate and honey over her body to express her feelings about the objectification of women. She then took her outrage over the revoking of funding by the National Endowment for the Arts to the Supreme Court, where she, along with her three co-litigants, lost. What is such a transgressive artist going to do without public funding?

She soon found a teaching position at New York University.

She landed there after she was denied a position at Georgia State University (where I earned my master’s degree) as a visiting professor after she refused to sign Georgia’s loyalty oath (requiring that applicants promise not to overthrow the government by violent means). At a 2009 South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting, English department co-chair Matthew Roudané introduced her and related the story about how he had offered her the position after her NEA difficulties.

In her presentation, Ms. Finley recounted going into “a subtle form of body trauma” after seeing Georgia’s loyalty oath.

“You have to start with an individual, emotional place,” she insisted, describing her principled resistance and her form of art.

She would have fit in at Georgia State. One of my professors allowed another graduate student to write her final paper in the form of a “quilt” of colored paper. A feminist, she was defying the linear, patriarchal form of writing, i.e., organized with a thesis statement and argued logically.

Students are now being asked to follow the lead of performance artists like Finley and do assignments in the nude. This is the case of a visual arts class at UC-San Diego taught by Roberto Dominguez, who famously concocted an electronic Transborder Immigrant Tool, winning awards from the Endowment for Culture Mexico-US. In 2010 he used students to conduct a virtual sit-in to protest cuts in the budget for the California state university system.

Dominguez, naturally, has given a different version to the original complaint by a parent. He told Inside Higher Ed that students have two “clothes-free” options for the class: “The students can choose to do the nude gesture version or the naked version (the naked gesture means you must perform a laying bare of your ‘traumatic’ self, and students can do this gesture under a rug or in any way they choose—but they must share their most fragile self—something most students find extremely hard to do).”

In contrast, “’The nude self gesture takes place in complete darkness, and everyone is nude, with only one candle or very small source of light for each individual performance…. A student may decide to focus on their big toe, their hair, an armpit, as being a part of their body that is ‘more them than they are.’”

Presumably, this should alleviate parental concerns. But a room with naked (in distinction from nude) students in front of their nude professor blubbering about how they feel about their armpits illustrates vividly the decay of academe.

Such assignments do not prepare students for the world of work and adult responsibilities, where their emotions do not factor in performance reviews, where they are expected to communicate in a clear and logical manner, and where they will have to know certain facts in order to build a bridge, argue a legal case, treat a heart attack victim, or teach children to read. Nor do such assignments prepare them to participate as free and literate citizens in a constitutional republic.

So where is the oversight? In the case of the Boise State prison service-learning program, we can see that the inmates are indeed running the asylum. Sadly, this is happening in most of our institutions of higher learning.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the John Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Pamela Geller and the Hijacking of America

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I couldn’t help thinking, I could have been a passenger on one of those planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Today the feeling is back, as if we are all passengers on a hijacked plane the size of America, heading towards an imminent crash. The question is, knowing what we know now, what are we going to do about it?

Shortly before American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower, an Egyptian-born jihadi, Mohammed Atta, addressed the passengers over the intercom:

“Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay.  We are returning to the airport… Nobody move.  Everything will be okay.  If you try to make any move, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane.  Just stay quiet… Nobody move, please…  Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

Twenty minutes later they died a horrible death, accompanied by hundreds of people inside the North Tower. Had the passengers known the real plan, they might have attempted to take matters into their own hands and possibly avert a bigger disaster. But they likely believed Mohammed Atta, especially since no hijacker had deliberately crashed a plane before.  Many were probably thinking, Let the government sort it out, that’s whom the terrorists always blackmail. We just need to stay quiet and make no stupid moves. Of course we’ll be okay.

Tactical deception, especially when lying to non-Muslims, is legally sanctioned under Sharia, which is a mainstream, universal Islamic law.  In Sunni Islam, such practice is referred to as mudarat, or taquiyya.

Fast-forward fourteen years to Garland, TX.  Jihadists drove a thousand miles to enforce Sharia blasphemy laws. The cop who shot them to death likely prevented a gruesome massacre. We are now being told that this would not have happened and everything would have been okay if Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer had stayed quiet and didn’t make any stupid moves, such as, organizing the exhibition of Mohammed cartoons.

This is exactly the behavior of passengers on a hijacked plane. We hope that everything will be okay as long as we remain quiet and make no stupid moves. We willingly trust the voices on TV and hope the government will sort it out. We want to believe that every act of Islamic terrorism is an isolated incident, that they only target the government, and that the 58% of Muslim-Americans in a 2012 survey who think that that critics of Islam in the U.S. should face criminal charges, with 12% of them favoring the death penalty for blasphemy, are not part of a bigger phenomenon. Just stay quiet and nothing bad will happen. After all, no terrorist has ever hijacked and crashed an entire nation before.

Alas, nations have been consistently hijacked and crashed throughout history. This has always been executed according to the same blueprint, which originated in the 7th century Islamic conquests and is known to Islamic jurists as the Pact of Umar.

While the Pact of Umar’s precise origins are a matter of legend, its conditions, based on Muhammad’s treatment of conquered people, have gained a canonical status in Islamic jurisprudence with regard to relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, otherwise known as dhimmis, and as such became a subset of Sharia law.

Given that Sharia by definition cannot be altered any more than one can alter the Koran or the Sunna, and even talking about reforming Sharia is considered blasphemous, its medieval rulings about what dhimmis are allowed or not allowed to do, are still in effect today. According to a recent Pew survey, the majority of Muslims worldwide want Sharia to be the law of the land everywhere; that includes the Conditions of Umar, even if those who practice them may not necessarily refer to them by that name.

Settling in non-Muslim countries, Muslim minorities traditionally bring with them Sharia law, which prescribes them to punish dhimmis who overstep certain boundaries regardless of what the local law says, because the “God-given” Sharia law will always be superior to the “man-made law” of the dhimmis.

Under the many Conditions of Omar, dhimmis aren’t allowed to criticize anything that has to do with Islam, including the very conditions of subjugation under which they live. Dhimmis are supposed to remain ignorant about Islamic teachings and can only refer to Islam in positive terms. Mocking, insulting, cursing, or even upsetting Muslims in any way, testifying against a Muslim in court, or raising a hand against a Muslim, even in self-defense, is forbidden.

Criticism of a Muslim person by a dhimmi — even if it’s based on undeniable facts, constitutes “slander” and is punishable by death. In contrast with the Western definition of slander — false spoken statement damaging to a person’s reputation — Sharia defines slander as any statement a Muslim would dislike, regardless if its degree of accuracy. This works in conjunction with another Sharia ruling, which gives all Muslims an open license to murder the offender wherever they find him. That doesn’t mean all Muslims will do it, but if someone volunteers to do the killing, he will not be punished under Sharia. In modern times, this means an open season of vigilante street justice on any critic of Islam anywhere on the planet.

Suddenly, the medieval choices jihadis place before their victims are all over today’s news coverage, just as they were originally set out in the Koran:  convert to Islam, submit to the Muslim rule and pay a non-Muslim religious tax called jizya, or die by the sword. Those who submit, as we’ve seen in the territories conquered by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are doomed to a life of humiliation, subjugation, discrimination, and confiscatory taxation.

Dhimmi translates as “protected person,” which is similar in meaning to protection racket: what a nice dhimmi community you have here, shame if anything were to happen to it. You are protected from violence as long as you obey the conditions and pay the protection money. But if any of the dhimmis act up or “made a stupid move,” his or her action puts the entire dhimmi community in jeopardy of jihadi retaliation, where anyone is fair game for collective punishment.

Western nations with a significant share of Muslim immigrants are now learning to live in a state of permanent vulnerability and fear that one of them might upset a Muslim and thus provoke rioting or jihad slaughter. As a result, Western dhimmis are learning to police each other and make sure no one in their community makes any “stupid moves.”

Pamela Geller just did that. Her exhibition of Mohammed cartoons has crossed the line of permissible dhimmi behavior, and for that she has become a target of criticism by the American media, including some conservative commentators. Among the many stated reasons why Pamela should have “just stayed quiet,” the main argument remains unstated: she made a stupid move and now we’re all in danger of retaliation.

The real questions the media should be asking is, if we aren’t already living under the Conditions of Umar, what would we do differently if we did?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the American Thinker. You may follow the American Thinker at: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Winning Life’s Lottery

I realize that it may be a bit un-cool to dwell too much on one’s own life experiences, but I have a point to make and I hope that I will be forgiven for doing so.

I was born in 1933, in St. Louis County, Missouri, in the midst of the Great Depression.  My parents, both of whom came from generations of farm families, had sixth grade educations.  Farming was a matter of hard dawn-to-dusk labor, so when children had learned to read, write, and “do their sums,” they were expected to leave school to carry their share of the workload.

When my parents married in 1929 they decided to purchase a small farm, but they had no money and the banks had no money to lend, so their only alternative was to become sharecroppers, giving a 1/3 share of their crops to our landlord in lieu of rent.  Sharecropping provided our family with a subsistence, but little else.  Nearly all of the food on our table was either from our vegetable garden, from farm animals… chicken, turkey, beef and pork… or the rabbits, squirrels, ducks, geese, and catfish that my father brought home from his frequent forays into our local forests and rivers.  Whatever butter and eggs we didn’t need for our own table was taken to South St. Louis every Saturday and sold to regular customers, door-to-door.  But then, when war clouds gathered over Europe and the Pacific in the late 1930s my father took a job as a pick-and-shovel ditch-digger at 67½ cents an hour, helping to build a new munitions plant under construction at Weldon Spring, Missouri.

My older sister and I attended a small one-room brick schoolhouse at Harvester, Missouri, three miles from our home, but when my father decided to give up farming for good in 1941 to work in the defense plants, we left our little red brick schoolhouse and moved to St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis, where we were enrolled at a Lutheran parochial school.  And when we completed our primary school education we attended St. Charles High School, a public high school.

I was not a good student and had little interest in high school.  However, my parents insisted that if we wanted to get a good job, we had to have a high school diploma.  It was the only thing they ever said on the subject.  Attending a college or university was never a consideration, so during my four-year high school career I successfully avoided all subject matter related to mathematics and the sciences.  I graduated in June 1951, with a GPA of just under 2.0, a C-minus average.

After graduation I took a job as a “grease monkey,” tow truck driver, and mechanics helper at a local automobile dealership, and months later I went to work as an assembly line riveter at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, a major manufacturer of jet fighter planes for the U.S. military.

Then, in July 1953, I received a letter from the president of the United States; it began with the word “Greetings.”  I was drafted into the U.S. Army on August 12, 1953, and was trained as a Field Artillery Operations and Intelligence (O&I) Specialist.  After completing my basic training and my O&I training I was sent to West Germany for seventeen months as a member of the post-World War II occupation forces.  Upon being honorably discharged in June 1955, I returned to McDonnell Aircraft where I worked as a Production Control Expediter for eighteen months.

During that time, as therapy for an injury to my left knee, the result of a “friendly fire” incident during basic training, I took a second job as a ballroom dancing instructor in St. Louis.  Those two jobs kept me fully occupied for at least fifteen hours each day, five days a week.  However, my injury prevented me from adequately performing my day job, so I took a job selling sewing machines and vacuum cleaners in the housing projects of St. Louis.  My sales territory included the infamous Prewitt-Igo housing project where it was absolutely foolhardy for a white man to enter without an armed escort… let alone attempt to repossess a sewing machine or a vacuum cleaner from a black family who’d failed to make their monthly payments.

Finally, in December 1956, I took a job as a draftsman for Laclede-Christy Corporation, a major refractory manufacturer in South St. Louis.  My job was to design open-pit strip mines on leases in Missouri and Illinois, and to assist the company surveyor in laying out prospecting plans for our drilling crews.  It was during the nearly two years that I worked for Laclede-Christy that I developed an interest in surveying, mining engineering, and geology.

In February 1957, I married my ballroom dancing partner, with whom I’d earned an all-St. Louis ballroom championship.  However, being unable to afford the rent for a house or an apartment of our own, we were forced to move in with my parents.  But then, as the economic recession of 1957-58 worsened, I learned that my job at Laclede-Christy was to be phased out.  It was then that I made the decision to “escape” into college, to enroll as a full-time student at the University of Missouri College of Engineering.  It was something that my supervisors at Laclede Christy had urged me to do, but I had little or no high school background in science and mathematics.  So, during the 1957-58 school year I took two evening courses in Intermediate Algebra at Washington University (St. Louis)… just to see if I could handle college-level mathematics.

In two semesters of Algebra I earned two Cs.  So in August 1958, armed with nothing but my two Cs and an abundance of hope and determination, I enrolled at the University of Missouri.  Since I had no money and no background for the study of engineering, I look back on that decision as the most courageous thing I’ve ever done.  After selling everything we owned, except for our clothing and our 1953 Ford, I went to the local Goodwill store and purchased three rooms of kitchen, bedroom, and living room furniture off the junk pile in the alley behind the store for a total of fifty dollars.  It was not good furniture; it was on the junk pile for good reason.

In early November, 1957, we were blessed with the birth of a beautiful baby boy who was ten months old in August 1958 when we loaded all of our belongings, including our fifty dollars worth of junk furniture, into a U-Haul trailer and moved into a dilapidated three-room tar-paper shack in Columbia, Missouri, just across the road from the Missouri Tigers football stadium.

Our only regular income was the $125 I received each month under the Korean G.I. Bill… $27 of which paid our monthly rent.  The remainder of our income, earmarked for the next semester’s tuition and books, gasoline, utilities, and insurance, left us with a food budget of only sixty cents a day.  After we’d purchased milk and other supplies for the baby we were able to afford only beans, spaghetti, and an occasional bottle of ketchup to mitigate the blandness of our starchy diet.

But the biggest shock of all was the difficulty of the course work.  I was a 25-year-old veteran with a wife and child to support, and I found myself competing for grades against seventeen and eighteen-year-olds with four years of engineering prep in their high school careers.  I attended class every day, I studied very hard, and I completed every homework assignment.  Yet, when mid-term grades were posted during my first semester, I found that I was failing every course.

With no alternative, I developed a radical new study regimen.  I was in class at 7:40 every morning and completed my lectures by noon.  By 1:00 PM I was home, hitting the books, and I refused to turn the page in a textbook until I thoroughly comprehended everything on that page.  I was up every morning at 6:00 AM and I studied for fourteen hours a day, every day of the week.  It worked.  At the end of my freshman year I found that, not only had I turned those Fs around, I was named to the Dean’s Honor Roll.

Our second child was born in January 1960, after which my wife took a night-shift job at the University Medical Center.  Each night at 10:00 PM I’d load our sleeping children into the back seat of our Ford and drive my wife to the medical center in time for her 10:30 PM shift.  After driving home, I’d return our children to their beds and resume studying until 2:30 or 3:00 AM.  After a few hours sleep I was up again at 6:00 AM, changing diapers and feeding the children.  And after dropping the boys off at our babysitter’s home, I’d pick up my wife at 7:00 AM and drive her home so that she could get eight hours sleep.  I was in class at 7:40 AM, and when I’d completed my morning lecturers I’d return home to repeat my 14-hour study regimen.

It was our daily routine, and it was brutal.  When I entered the university in August 1958 I was 6 ft. tall and weighed 153 lb., but when I graduated four years later, in June 1962, I was still 6 ft. tall but I weighed only 116 lb.  But I have no regrets.  During my junior year I was elected to Chi Epsilon, National Scholastic Honor Fraternity; in 2001 I was elected to the Civil Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni; and in 2012 I was named an Honorary Knight of St. Patrick, receiving the Missouri Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Engineering.

During my junior and senior years we had a neighbor with three small children whose husband was serving a long prison sentence.  And although she was on the public dole, her in-laws often delivered supplies of freshly-butchered beef and pork from their farm… which she promptly tossed into our neighborhood garbage pails because, as she explained, she didn’t like “that old country meat.”  When I returned to the university for my 20th class reunion in 1982, our former landlord reminded me that he and his wife had often seen me rooting through those garbage pails with a flashlight, late at night, digging out food with which to feed my family.  It was such a painful experience that I had apparently washed it from my memory.

As we drove away that day, my eldest son said, “Dad!  You fed us out of garbage cans?”  To which I replied, “Yes, Mark, I did.  I did whatever I had to do.”

Those were difficult, character-building years.  But now, after more than fifty years of unlimited opportunity and exciting challenge, Barack Obama informs me that I’ve played no role in any of that… that I’ve arrived at this stage of my life because I’ve “won life’s lottery.”  I can’t help but wonder what life would be like if I hadn’t purchased that lottery ticket.

It Is Time ­to Get Back To Basics

With everything in life, there are basic rules, instructions, directions, etc.  If one wants to participate in team sports such as rugby or football there are basic rules of engagement.  In other words, there are specific instructions on how different positions are played and how many team members can be on the field.  Also, referees are available to make sure that the games run smoothly, maintain law and order and to establish fair play and opportunity for both teams to do their best to obtain victory.

When I was in high school and played sports, our coaches were very tough, but fair.  One of the things our instructors stressed to the hilt, was knowing the fundamentals of the game.  Our head coach believed that the best teams were well versed in the fundamentals.  It was those fundamentals that kept us on the same page as a successful team.  They kept us disciplined, so that if we had to veer away from the playbook in order to outwit a more formidable opponent we would not falter.

Our teams consistently were in competition for the state championship of Ohio, thus proving our hard-nosed disciplinarian coaches to be correct in their thinking and approach.  They were not politically correct Mr. Rogers types.  We always expected to win and did win.  To this day, I have nothing but high regard and respect for our rugged coaches who taught that without the basics we could unravel as a team and individually.

Let us take a look at one of the world’s leading automakers, The Ford Motor Company.  During the days of Henry Ford, he demanded high quality automobiles at a reasonable price that most working class Americans could afford.  The Blue Oval Company has experienced a long history of many ups and a few downs as well.  During the 1970s and 1980s, Ford drifted away from the higher quality of vehicles the company had been known for.  Ford could have folded up and closed, leaving Americans with nothing more than memories of yet another manufacturer that bit the dust.

But in recent years, individuals like Bill Ford and a host of others believed that Ford could once again be on the leading edge of auto manufacturing.  They threw caution to the wind and put the company up for collateral in order to receive a substantial private sector loan.  Even the famous Blue Oval was part of the loan agreement.  It was do or die time for the company that had been known for better ideas. So, the insightful leaders at Ford spearheaded a two pronged approach to that company’s revival.

The Ford deciders pursued more innovations and more creative product designs and a much better quality of motor cars overall.  Thus the greatly improved quality and look of Ford automobiles has reestablished Ford as a global leader in auto production. One of the factors insuring Ford’s ascension has been a return to basics such as focusing on customer satisfaction and creating cars that customers enjoy looking at and driving.

Speaking of basics, let us turn our attention to the United States of America.  In the beginning, there was a struggle to disengage the colonies from the brutal iron grip of the tyrannical King George.  Thing really began to get underway soon after the Boston Massacre.  That is where Crispus Attucks a black colonist was shot and killed by the red coats. He was the first casualty of the Revolutionary War.  Soon after, more and more colonists began to catch the vision of liberty. They also came to realize that our rights come from God, not a king or government.

When the Founding Fathers and all of the liberty seekers set out to form a more perfect union, it was to be a constitutionally limited republic.  The government was to be of by and for the people.  America was founded to be a nation of sovereign individuals enjoying the blessings of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  “We the People” were to live our lives as self- governed moral individuals who didn’t need a nanny government to rule over us from cradle to grave, according to the fundamental or basics enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

The Founders repeatedly warned us about what would occur if we as a nation would drift away from the basics that were part of the framework our freedoms rested upon.  Samuel Adams said it best, in this letter to his colleagues.  “The sum of it all if we would most truly enjoy the gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.  Then shall we both deserve it and enjoy it.  Whole on the other hand, if we are universally vicious and debauched in our manners, though he form of our constitution carries the face of the most exalted freedom, we shall in reality be the most abject slaves.

So here we are today, a nation decreasing freedoms, unraveling as we drift further away from the basic principles and fundamentals once utilized to help make America the envy of the world.  So the question is, will “We the People” prevail and reignite the basic fundamental principles that set this republic on the path to greatness, or settle for the sinking ship we are experiencing today?  The choice is ours.  Let us choose Providential guidance and true liberty, not tyranny.

© 2015 Ron Edwards – All Rights Reserved

EDITORS NOTE: Please join Ron Edwards on his new talk show every Saturday @ 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM EST on Philadelphia’s AM 1360 WNJC Radio and everywhere www.wnjcradio.com Also, AM 1360 WNJC is the newest affiliate outlet of The Edwards Notebook Syndicated commentary weekday afternoons @ 4:57 PM EST.

The Slow Death of Common Core

Think about the major policy undertakings of the Obama administration over the past six and a half years. It began with a “stimulus” that wasted trillions in the quest of generating jobs, but did little to nothing in achieving that goal. That was followed by ObamaCare which most agree has been a disaster for the nation’s healthcare sector and, finally, Common Core, a one-size-fits-all testing program intended, we were told, to improve learning standards in the nation’s schools. The only thing it has achieved is the opposition of parents, teachers unions, and entire states.

Heartland  - School Reform News (1)In the April edition of The Heartland Institute’s School Reform News, one could find headlines that included “Arizona House Votes to Repeal and Replace Common Core”, “Arizona House Votes to Repeal Common Core”, ”West Virginia House Passes Common Core Repeal Bill”, and “Ohio Bill Would Protect Students Opting Out of Common Core Tests.” In March, some 19 states had introduced legislation to either halt or replace Common Core. Do you see a trend here?

One trend of significance was noted in a commentary by Jason L. Riley in the May 6 edition of The Wall Street Journal. “The Soccer Mom Revolt Against Common Core” cited a national poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University earlier this year that put “approval for the new standards at 17%, against 40% who disapproved and other 42% who were undecided. A breakdown by gender had Common Core support 22% for men and only 12% for women.”

Perhaps the greatest surprise among these numbers is that the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Educational Association, as Rob Bluey of the Heritage Foundation noted in February “is no longer a cheerleader for Common Core national education standards.” In a letter to the union’s three million members, its president, Dennis Van Roekel, took Common Core to task for its failure to even provide information for implementing it in their classrooms. The American Federation of Teachers had raised similar concerns nearly a year earlier!

Writing on September 2014, Joy Pullman, a Heartland Institute research fellow whose expertise is education held forth on the “Top Ten Things Parents Hate About Common Core.” Among them was “The senseless, infuriating math.” “If Common Core hadn’t deformed even the most elementary of our math abilities so that simple addition now takes dots, dashes, boxes, hashmarks, and foam cubes, plus an inordinate amount of time”, you are not going to get the right answer.

Parents in growing numbers have discovered, as Pullman notes, that “when they do go to their local school boards, often all they get are disgusted looks and a bored thumb-twiddling during their two-minute public comment allowance.” Pullman says, “The bottom line is, parents have no choice whether their kids will learn Common Core, no matter what school they put them in.” That, obviously, is changing as state after state pulls out of the Common Core program.

Cover - Crimes of the EducatorsIn a new book by Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman, “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children”, Blumenfeld points to “Growing levels of illiteracy, plunging international rankings, the decline of critical-thinking skills, mushrooming decadence, mass shootings, and companies that can’t find the skilled workers they need—these have become some of the atrocious hallmarks of U.S. public schools.”

“Common Core schemers are engaged in what can only be described as consumer fraud with monumental implications for education and the future of America.” The bottom line is that “the scheme was never field-tested before being foisted on America.”

There is no part of student’s education that Common Core does not impede or corrupt. In the area of science, Blumenfeld says “Instead of teaching children about science—real science—the standards will offer students a steady stream of controversial propaganda presented as unchallenged fact.” Regarding climate change “students will be required to learn that human activities are mostly to blame, even though this notion is disputed by countless scientists and a vast, growing body of actual scientific observational evidence.”

Closest to home are Common Core’s “National Sexuality Education Standards” aimed to begin the “sexualization of children in kindergarten” says Blumenfeld. “Is learning about ‘homosexual marriage’ before first grade in government schools really ‘age appropriate’ or necessary?” But it gets more radical “with graphic lessons promoting everything from masturbation and fornication to transgenderism and homosexuality.”

We shouldn’t be surprised at the backlash Common Core has received from both parents and teachers unions among others. Like the “stimulus” and ObamaCare, Common Core demonstrates a thorough lack of understanding of the values of individuality that have underwritten our nation’s free market economy, helped create a respected healthcare system, and which parents have expected the educational system to pass on to new generations.

Instead Common Core teaches collectivism—socialism—and degrades various elements of education from math to English to science.

It cannot be removed from our nation’s schools soon enough.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Shut Up, Kid! (It’s What You Really Want) by B.K. Marcus

If you’re college age, you’re a child.

Or so says Salon writer Eric Posner.

No, he’s not confused about the legal age of majority. What he means is that college students are immature and need to be treated accordingly. Paternalism, according to Posner, is entirely appropriate: you and your peers “must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.” Furthermore, he argues, it’s what you really want, whether you know it or not.

Here’s the context:

Lately, a moral panic about speech and sexual activity in universities has reached a crescendo. Universities have strengthened rules prohibiting offensive speech typically targeted at racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; taken it upon themselves to issue “trigger warnings” to students when courses offer content that might upset them; banned sexual acts that fall short of rape under criminal law but are on the borderline of coercion; and limited due process protections of students accused of violating these rules.

Libertarians, Posner observes, “are up in arms. They see these rules as an assault on free speech and individual liberty. They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right.”

But the ever-more paternalistic universities are also right, he insists: “Students today are more like children than adults and need protection.”

Posner appeals to pedagogy, history, and, believe it or not, libertarian principle. In the end, I think he’s wrong on all counts, but the pedagogical issue alone could fill a book, and the historical points he makes are accurate but misleading, and ultimately irrelevant.

Where his argument is the most interesting — and the most interestingly wrong — is in his appeal to the principles of free-market economics.

Yes, many libertarians are outraged by the increasingly authoritarian trend on (at least public) university campuses. And Posner does a surprisingly good job of addressing some typical libertarian arguments.

He appeals, for instance, to the right of exit: “Students who are unhappy with the codes and values on campus can take their views to forums outside of campus — to the town square, for example.”

Furthermore, he contends, the stifling groupthink of the modern academy is a result of consumer sovereignty:

More important — at least for libertarian partisans of the free market — the universities are simply catering to demand in the marketplace for education.

While critics sometimes give the impression that lefty professors and clueless administrators originated the speech and sex codes, the truth is that universities adopted them because that’s what most students want.

If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they?

Here is where he sounds his most libertarian: “As long as universities are free to choose whatever rules they want, students with different views can sort themselves into universities with different rules.”

But notice the sleight of hand. He goes from talking about what would happen in free markets to assuming that the current university system is free and market-driven.

He even sees state schools as part of what “libertarian partisans” mean by the free market: “Indeed, students who want the greatest speech protections can attend public universities, which (unlike private universities) are governed by the First Amendment.”

At first glance, his argument is reminiscent of the libertarian position on private gun bans.

When Walmart, for example, proscribed customers from bringing firearms into their stores, whether or not the customer had a concealed-carry permit, many gun-rights advocates cried foul. Doesn’t the Second Amendment, at least in combination with a state-issued permit, give a citizen the right to bear arms wherever he or she likes?

Not according to libertarians: Walmart banning guns on its own property is perfectly legitimate, whereas any government banning firearms on someone else’s property — or even on so-called public property — is a different story. With Walmart, at least, we are free to take our business elsewhere.

Doesn’t a principled consistency require us to support similar decisions on the part of universities?

This is the problem we face over and over again. We say “free market,” and they hear something else.

We say “freedom in health care”; they think we mean insurance before Obamacare.

We say “privatize”; they think we mean outsourcing prison security.

We say “laissez-faire”; they think we mean corporate welfare, the military-industrial complex, and central banking.

In fact, central banking is an important parallel here: storing wealth and lending money are both important services. They’re not only legitimate from a libertarian perspective; they’re critically important to a healthy economy.

But the particular way in which governments cartelize and regulate nominally private banks produces a financial system that is far from free and often dangerous.

It’s as if Posner read a libertarian critique of the housing crisis and asked, “Why are libertarians opposed to private lending?”

It is true that advocates of economic freedom often have to accept consumer choices that strike us as baffling or wrongheaded, but that doesn’t mean we support the distortions of choice and incentives created by a regulation-hampered market.

This is a basic law of economics: when you subsidize something, you get more of it.

Here’s another one: when you artificially limit the supply of a good, you raise the price.

After all but monopolizing basic education, governments then subsidize university tuition (which produces more long-term students than we’d have in a free market) and cartelizes higher education (which allows fewer options than we’d otherwise have).

Here’s perhaps the most relevant economic rule of thumb, called moral hazard: when the costs of certain decisions are externalized — that is, when someone else is picking up the tab — those decisions will be made less responsibly. Not only does moral hazard promote reckless choices; it also raises the price of those choices, because you’re less budget-conscious than you would be if you had to pay the full bill yourself.

You may be familiar with the argument that moral hazard has created much of the cost crisis in health care, but it also determines the size and shape of academic departments, choices in majors, and graduation requirements. It affects everything about schools as we know them.

Posner suggests that libertarians “reflect on the irony that the private market, in which they normally put faith, reflects a preference among students for speech restrictions.”

But modern education is far from a “private market,” and the preferences that students express have very little relationship to what economists mean by “demonstrated preferences” in the market, where you consciously give up something to acquire something else.

Only when confronted with the real trade-offs in a world of scarcity can we make informed decisions about how to balance such trade-offs. What Posner describes is more like voting than it is like consumer sovereignty.

Neither Posner nor I can say for sure what demand would look like if we had a free market in education, but it’s hard to imagine that students who had to pay the visible and invisible costs of their choices would choose to be treated like children. In what other market do customers say, in essence, “Here are gobs of money: talk down to me, limit my options, decide what’s important for me, tell me what I’m allowed to say and to hear, stunt my growth”?

In fact, in what other market do we see customers demanding more centralization and homogeneity — fewer options and an ever-narrower range of acceptable preferences?

Libertarians shouldn’t oppose private institutions setting whatever rules they want for voluntary participants, but neither should we let our philosophical opponents pretend that the current university system exemplifies freedom of choice.

We should resist the temptation to assume, a priori, that everything we don’t like about a market is the direct result of the state’s interventions in that area. It might be that some schools in a free, fully private market would become bastions of authoritarian paternalism.

But it seems likely that students would have many more options for escaping such stultifying condescenion. There’s every reason to believe that real freedom, in the economy and in education, would produce students who are smarter, more mature, and more responsible in their actions.

In the system Posner advocates, we should expect to see ever more of the opposite — and we are.

B.K. Marcus

B.K. Marcus is managing editor of the Freeman.

Avoiding Hillary Misery

While we endure the daily lies of President Obama, do we really want to have another four to eight years more of Hillary Clinton’s? It’s not like we don’t have ample evidence of her indifference to the truth and that is not what America wants in a President, now or ever.

The office has already been degraded to a point where neither our allies nor our enemies trusts anything Obama says. Do we really want to continue a process that could utterly destroy our nation?

Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she intends to run for President is predicated not on any achievements in her life beyond having married Bill Clinton. Instead, her message is that America needs a woman as President. Having already elected an abject failure because he was black, one can only hope and pray that enough voters will conclude that America needs to avoid race or gender to be the determining factor.

In 1974 the 27-year old Hillary was fired from a committee related to the Watergate investigation. Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised her and when the investigation was over, he fired her and refused to give her a letter of recommendation. When asked why, he said, “Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee, and the rules of confidentiality.”

She has not changed. Writing about her emails, Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, said her admitted destruction of more than 30,000 emails “sure looks like an obstruction of justice—a serious violation of the criminal law. The law says that no one has to us email, but it is a crime (18 U.S.C. section 1519) to destroy even one message to prevent it from being subpoenaed.” The law, said Rotunda, punishes this with up to 20 years imprisonment.

Instead, Hillary is asking voters to give her at least four years in the highest office in the land.

Even pundits like The New York TimesMaureen Dowd, writing in mid-March responded to Hillary saying “None of what you said made any sense. Keeping a single account mingling business and personal with your own server wasn’t about ‘convenience.’ It was about expedience. You became judge and jury on what’s relevant because you didn’t want to leave digital fingerprints for others to retrace.”

“You assume that if it’s good for the Clintons, it’s good for the world, you’re always tangling up government policy with your own needs, desires, deceptions, marital bargains, and gremlins.”

Around the same time as Dowd’s rebuke, I wrote that I thought that the revelations about the emails and the millions the Clinton foundation received from nations with whom she was dealing as Secretary of State would be sufficient for those in charge of the Democratic Party to convince her not to run. I was wrong. I was wrong because I profoundly underestimated Hillary’s deep well of ambition and indifference to the laws everyone else must obey. I was wrong because the Democratic Party is totally corrupt.

It is not as if anyone paying any attention would not know that she is politically to the far Left, a politician who does not believe that the powers of our government are derived from “the consent of the governed.” Throughout her life she has let us know that with quotes such as:

“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

“(We) can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”

“I certainly think the free-market has failed.” These quotes are the personification of Communism.

In March, the political pundit, Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said “We are defining political deviancy down.” Referring to the email scandal, she asked “Is it too much to imagine that Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal the record of her communications as America’s top diplomat…?” That was the reason she ignored the government’s rules regarding such communications. Rarely mentioned is the very strong likelihood that her email account had been hacked by our nation’s enemies and thus everything she was doing, officially and privately, was known to them.

“The story,” said Noonan “is that this is what she does and always has. The rules apply to others, not her.” That is, simply said, a criminal mentality. “Why doesn’t the legacy press swarm her on this?” asked Noonan. “Because she is political royalty.”

We fought a Revolution to free America from the British royalty. This was so ingrained in the thinking of the Founding Fathers that section 9 of Article One of the Constitution says “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States. And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” That’s what the foundation did.

Noonan had earlier written a book about Hillary. “As I researched I remembered why, four years into the Clinton administration, the New York Times columnist William Safire called Hillary ‘a congenital liar…compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.’”

“Do we have to go through all that again?” asked Noonan. “A generation or two ago, a person so encrusted in a reputation for scandal would not be considered a possible presidential contender. She would be ineligible. Now she is inevitable.”

Well, maybe not inevitable. We have a long time to go until the primaries arrive and then the election. We have enough time to ask ourselves if we live in a republic where merit, integrity, and honesty are still the standards by which we select our President.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

A Thousand Ways to Die

Does a day go by when we are not warned about something that might do us harm or kill us?

I recently received an email from the Surgeon General of the United States in which he said, “Yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet with President Obama, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and health care professionals to discuss climate change. We talked about the impact of climate change on public health and the importance of prevention.”

The prevention of what? Climate change?

In the five thousand years of human civilization, there has never been, nor will ever be, a way to “prevent” climate change. This is not to say that earlier cultures didn’t try to solve drought or other weather-related problems by sacrificing the occasional virgin. We look back at that and regard it as primitive in the same way we find the notion of American Indians doing “rain dances” to induce a downpour to help the crops to grow a thing of the past.

The politicization of “climate change”, a planetary phenomenon that goes back about a billion or so years ago when the Earth took on its present atmosphere and weather patterns tells you everything you need to know about the White House and those who think they can tell outrageous lies to Americans, knowing at least half of them will believe those lives.

You’re not going to die from the “climate”, but what kills Americans is well known.

The good news is that we’re living longer lives than the generations that preceded us.

We can determine what we eat and how much. Some of us thrive on exercise and others do well by ensuring they get a good night’s sleep. There are behaviors we should avoid, but their harm can be traced from a lack of moderation. People who opt for genuinely bad behavior such as drug addictions or alcoholism are simply ruining their own lives and those who care about them.

The obstacles to a long, healthy life often involve factors over which we have no control. These include family histories of illness, genetically passed on from generation to generation.

There are some fifteen most common causes of death in America and they range from diseases of the heart (28.5%) down to homicide (0.7%). That’s right. Even though our media is filled with news of homicides and popular culture features murder, the likelihood of suffering death that way is very small.

Disease of the heart (28.5%) and malignant tumors (22.8%) are responsible for more than 50% of the annual death toll. Other leading causes drop off dramatically by comparison. They include cerebrovascular diseases (6.7%), chronic lower respiratory disease (5.1%), and accidents (4.4%).

On my Facebook page I asked my friends to list some of the things they have been warned about over the years. The list included salt, bacon, processed meats, eggs, soft drinks, saccharin, sugar substitutes, margarine, and chocolate. I have no doubt you can think of other things you’ve been told to avoid. Now, not including things like gluten or peanuts that activate allergic reactions in some people, these and comparable things are not likely to kill you. My rule of thumb has always been to eat the real, the natural food product like butter and avoid the substitutes.

I have no doubt that people have died from smoking. Cigarettes have long been called “coffin nails” in acknowledgment of the way too much smoking can affect one’s lungs. That said, I have smoked for some fifty years and a good cigar is daily pleasure. My Father smoked a pipe for just as long and lived into his 90s. My Mother who taught the art of gourmet cooking, complete with every delicious sauce and method of preparation you can imagine, lived until age 98. An international authority on wine, she would remind her students that you can find it mentioned frequently in the Bible. It is a healthy addition to your diet.

While we are constantly being warned against everything as a potential cause of death, you might find it of interest to learn that the American Medical Association conducted several research studies in the last decade, concluding that approximately 225,000 Americans died from their medical treatments!

Unnecessary surgeries caused 12,000 deaths and hospital medication errors killed 7,000. The odds of dying from an infection you pick up in the hospital is impressive; some 80,000 deaths were attributed to that, but the largest number of deaths, 106,000, were attributed to “negative effects of drugs.” To put it another way, “doctor-induced deaths are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. after heart disease and cancer.”

While we live daily with warnings about everything from the air we breathe to the water we drink (both quite clean), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collects data on mortality, including suicide. In 2013, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in America. Someone committed suicide every 12.8 minutes. From 1986 to 2000, suicide rates had dropped from 12.5 to 10.4 deaths per 100,000 people. It is back up to 12.6, mostly involving people 45 to 64 years old, as well as those over 85 and older. The rate among men is four times higher than women and whites killed themselves (14.2) far more often than blacks (5.4) and Hispanics (5.7).

While the White House is adding to our stressful lives with utter nonsense about “climate change”, claiming it is affecting our health, there’s another group, those in charge of the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UFCC), whose greatest concern is the fact that there are some seven billion of us on planet Earth whom they blame for eating too much and using too much of its energy resources.

“Obviously less people would exert less pressure on the natural resources,” said Christiana Fiqueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCC. You can translate to mean that there are those at the United Nations who wouldn’t mind if a new plague came along to kill off thousands or if famine did the same thing.

You will live a lot longer if you figure out how to reduce the levels of stress in your life; if you eat well, but moderately; and if you avoid overdoing anything you know can harm you.

Don’t listen to the fear-mongers. In the words of Mr. Spock, live long and prosper.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Hillary Clinton: THE WORST OF THE WORST OPPORTUNIST

The United States of America has always been a land of opportunity. Unfortunately, that has meant both good and bad opportunity. We all know about the good opportunity because it is what the American Dream is based upon. The American Dream brings out the best in all of us. It leads us to success and it drives us through our families. It’s about being better today than we were yesterday. That is all a part of the good opportunity and right now, America has a huge opportunity and unfortunately it is the bad kind.

We are seeing the ramping up of the campaign season for the next election in 2016 and there is bad opportunity all around. We see candidate after candidate not living up to what we believe is still the American Dream. We see candidate after candidate from all levels of government telling us about their ideas to help the American people as a whole and individually. The reason this is a bad opportunity is because history has shown and taught us that big government can never help us on an individual level. I cannot even begin to fathom how someone, anyone, would argue that fact since we have overwhelming evidence which includes data and history that over shadows any small successes there might have been in this area.

What is worse is that bad opportunity always attracts bad characters. It attracts the worst our nation has to offer. These bad characters come to us in shiny cloths, shiny cars, they live in shiny homes, and work in shiny offices. But underneath it all, they are dirty, filthy, disgusting human beings. Shall I name a few? How about one? Clinton.

The facts and history are there and those facts and that history is not good. It’s not shiny. It’s not even dim. It is just filthy and disgusting. How can someone even think about running for public office and represent many, many people with a record as filthy as Hillary Clinton’s? It’s that bad opportunity calling. She cannot help herself. You see, bad opportunists are arrogant and self-important. They believe they are the best of the best when in fact they are the worst of the worst.

What difference does it make you ask? It makes all the difference in the world. If someone cannot be trusted with the little things, then how can they be trusted with the big things? Indeed, how could they ever be trusted with the HUGE things? Mrs. Clinton has a filthy history of lies, deceit, neglect, bad judgment, possible criminal activity and the list goes on and on and on. How is it that someone who is so filthy can get away with appearing so shiny? How is it that Americans allow themselves to be insulted to such a level by a bad opportunist?

Is it the promises that she and others make? These same promises they never seem to deliver upon Oh sure, they always have an excuse but then a bad opportunist always has an excuse. But that excuse never includes their own failures. Mrs. Clinton had a bad history while she was the First Lady of the State of Georgia. Then she graduated and delivered more bad history as First Lady of the United States of America and it did not stop there. She decided to shop for a senate seat and landed in a state she was known to have disparaged. It would be safe to say that Hillary Clinton hated New York State before she loved it. And she only loved it because she was able to get the citizens of that state to see only the shiny. Then she gets elected and proceeds to deliver even more bad history. Oh but she does not stop there. The one thing about a bad opportunist is that they are never satisfied with being stuck on a level that is below the level they believe in their own little minds they should be. She set her sights on the White House and being the first female President of the United States but she didn’t quite make it because an even greater bad opportunist beat her this time. But she landed on her feet as most bad opportunists often do.

The greater bad opportunist, President Obama, decided to make the lesser bad opportunist, Hillary Clinton, Senator from the Great State of New York, the Secretary of State for the United States of America and we all know what happened there. Yes more bad history was delivered. Very bad history. History so bad that even many of her supporters cannot successfully hide any of it. This history is so bad that it includes the death of four dedicated Americans under her watch and she didn’t even care.

Yet she claims she wants to be the “champion” for the American people. How can she be a champion when she has not even graduated from the Bantam leagues? Oh I know how. Because she is a bad opportunist. You and I can stop a bad opportunist. It’s really not too hard. We just have to vote for a good opportunist candidate. We have to make sure our neighbors, our family, and our co-workers fully understand how bad she is. And then make sure they see and understand there is a good opportunist who may actually deserve our vote. A good opportunist doesn’t try to make themselves all shiny. Instead, they understand they are but one light in a sea of lights that together makes a good and shiny light for all the world to see and admire.

The United States cannot be shiny if we have a dirty, filthy, bad opportunist leading. We have already seen what a dirty opportunist can do to a nation. Do we really want another dim, dirty, filthy darkness over shadowing the good light?

I sincerely hope not.

My 2015 Commencement Address

All manner of people are giving commencement speeches to students graduating from colleges and universities these days. It is doubtful that any will be remembered because the prospects of students depend in large part on the economy into which they are entering, the majors they pursued, their individual ambitions, and capacity for hard work. Then, too, there’s dumb luck which often plays a role.

For those graduating this year, my profound sympathy because the economy could not be much worse short of being declared an official Depression. Out of a total of 330 million Americans, there are currently 93,194,000 Americans who are not in the workforce because they can’t find a job or have given up looking. Even in the field of manufacturing—not something you studied for—the number of jobs have declined by 7,231,000, some 37% since manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in 1979.

U.S. economic growth rate has slowed to 0.2%. In short, it is virtually non-existent. So, with your diploma in hand, unless you majored in the sciences, math or engineering, you are not likely to join the workforce any time soon. Those of you who majored in social work, theatre arts, elementary education, and something called parks and recreation, are going to be at the bottom of the salary scale for the rest of your life.

Of the previous graduates from 2008 to the present who voted for Barack Obama, just 14% have real jobs. You have had the vast misfortune of being born just in time to live through the worst presidency in the history of the nation. If, in fact, you even know the history of the nation.

You are at a further disadvantage because the curriculums of the government schools you attended have been so distorted that you have been led to believe that the Founding Fathers were all slave-owning, white elitists when in fact, many opposed slavery, the labor source of their era, and would have abolished it. However they knew they could not get the Constitution ratified by the southern states if they did. It’s called compromising for a greater goal, the finest and currently the oldest functioning Constitution on Earth.

Depending on your race and sex, you have already been taught to blame anything that goes wrong in your life on whether you are white, black or Hispanic, male or female. If you want to know what’s wrong, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing wrong or not doing right—dressing, manners, behavior, addictions, et cetera.

If you have been raised to believe in God and have spiritual values, you are likely to be mocked, though not necessarily to your face. While still the majority faith in America, Christianity is under attack from many directions, not the least of whom are homosexuals that constitute less than 2% of the population. Their attack on traditional (and biological) male-female marriage that has been part of every civilization going back five thousand years and more will degrade society in many ways.

For many of you, graduation means years of paying off huge loans for the privilege of picking up a degree that, as noted—short of science, math and engineering—will not yield a lot of income. This will impact your lifestyle including possibly having to move back in with your parents. It may mean putting off marriage and a family of your own for a while and your loans will affect being able to secure a mortgage on a home, but everyone is having problems doing that these days.

So, if all this looks and sound bleak, it is because it is. A real commencement speech should tell you the truth but most of them do not. They are generally filled with inspiring talk about the future.

The future you are looking at along with everyone else is fraught with danger. That, however, can be said of every “future” that every American has faced since the nation was established. It took a shooting war with Great Britain just to have a nation and Americans have been engaged in wars large and small ever since.

The threat of Communism faced Americans after World War Two and generations previous to yours waited out and opposed the Soviet Union for nearly fifty years before it collapsed. Communism is still around however in China, nearby Cuba, Venezuela and other nations who suppress their people in the name of the utopian society they claim to have.

The more recent threat is the rise of Islamism, radical Islam as practiced and supported by a significant percentage of the world’s one billion-plus Muslims. It is a cult about Mohammed based on the total domination of the world. Divided between two sects, Sunnis and Shiites, when they are not killing each other, they are killing “infidels”, anyone who is not a Muslim.

It will fall to you and your fellow graduates to fix the nation’s problems and right now its biggest one is that the federal government is too large and we are collectively facing an $18 trillion debt that must be resolved because just paying interest on it makes doing anything else difficult at best.

All of the states are in debt as well as they struggle to pay the health benefits and pensions of civil service workers, active and retired. That often doesn’t leave much money for fixing potholes and other infrastructure needs.

Whatever problems you will encounter, keep in mind previous generations often encountered much worse, such as those in the 1930s during the Great Depression and in the 1940s who fought World War II, and those from the 1950s and 1970s who were called on to fight the Korean War and the war in Vietnam; more recently those who fought the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Respect their sacrifices and their courage.

If you want to see the government grow even larger along with the debt, vote for Hillary Clinton. She’s still mentally and ideologically stuck in the 1990s, plus she has engaged in behavior that would get anyone else put in jail. You have a large choice among Republican candidates and eventually it will narrow to someone capable of tackling the future.

The best I can do is to wish you good luck. You’re going to need it.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Anti-Semitism and Jewish Dissonance on the 2016 Campaign Trail

The left has to do some soul-searching and reflect why it describes anti-Semitism as political expression, but criticism of Muslims as hate speech. Liberal Jews have to do the same about Obama.

The 2016 presidential cycle is beginning to gear up, with Hillary Clinton assuming the mantle of presumptive Democratic nominee and Republican hopefuls preparing to compete with each other during the primary season.  And Jewish Democrats are already lining up to shill for Clinton and attack the Republicans.

If the litmus test for Jewish voter loyalty is Israel, however, Democrats long ago abdicated any authority to determine “who’s good for the Jews” by their continuing support for Barack Obama – despite his relationships with Israel-bashers, his appeasement of Islamist regimes, his disrespectful treatment of Binyamin Netanyahu, and his pursuit of a deal with Iran that rewards aggression, enables its nuclear ambitions and threatens the existence of the Jewish State.

Jewish Democrats attacked Republican Senator Marco Rubio for allegedly creating a political wedge issue when he spoke in support of Israel from the Senate floor in response to the White House’s personal attacks against Netanyahu before his address to Congress in March.  They criticized Rubio even as Obama refused to meet with Netanyahu and Democratic operatives were meddling in Israel’s election in an unsuccessful attempt to push a left-wing coalition to victory.  It seems that party hacks were more interested in belittling Rubio’s unwavering support for Israel than in condemning the negative message sent by the fifty-eight Congressional Democrats (some of them Jews) who boycotted Bibi’s speech, and by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s churlish conduct in turning her back to the Prime Minister as he spoke.

Similarly, the National Jewish Democratic Council was quick to criticize Kentucky Senator Rand Paul for his position on aid to Israel and to insinuate that he would be detrimental to the Jewish State.  This criticism is actually valid in light of Paul’s past statements about reducing aid to Israel and his isolationist rhetoric – as well as the dubious positions of his father, Rep. Ron Paul, regarding Israel.  But it is hypocritical for Jewish Democrats to sound the alarm regarding Paul’s candidacy considering how they portrayed Obama as a friend to Israel and champion of Jewish values while ignoring his associations with anti-Semites, his uncritical acceptance of the revisionist Palestinian narrative, and his hostility toward the Jewish State – particularly during last year’s war in Gaza.

There is clearly a strategy to push a distorted narrative that taints all conservatives with the presumption of anti-Semitism, though hatred of Jews is far more prevalent on the political left these days.  While there is a history of anti-Semitism on the right to be sure, there is just as long and pernicious a tradition of Jew-hatred on the left, where it has been a potent political force since the rise of socialism, communism and European liberalism.  It permeated the ideological fabric of these movements because it was part of the societies in which they grew.  Progressives today often project hostility for Jews and Israel onto conservatives while pretending that liberal and Muslim anti-Semitism does not exist.

Studies show that anti-Semitism today is much more pervasive on the left than the right.  As reported in the “Annual Report: Anti-Semitism in 2013, Trends and Events” by Israel’s Ministry for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, for example, “[t]he anti-Zionism prevalent mainly on the left, which has already become an integral part of the permanent worldview of individuals and groups of the left, can today be defined as a cultural code replacing anti-Semitism and enabling its disseminators to deny all connection to anti-Semitism.”

And a 2014 German study analyzing anti-Semitic trends reflected by hate mail showed that most bigoted communications during the survey period came from the political mainstream, including university professors and the well-educated (i.e., segments of the population that tend to identify as liberal).  In contrast, only three percent of the offensive communications came from right-wing nationalists.  The study, conducted by Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel, professor of linguistics at the Technical University of Berlin, and published in a book entitled, “The Language of Hostility toward Jews in the 21st Century,” indicated that hatred of Jews was often presented as criticism of Israel using traditional anti-Semitic canards and imagery.

Though progressive anti-Zionists glibly attempt to distinguish hatred of Israel from hatred of Jews, it is a distinction without a difference.  The left-wing movements in Europe traditionally considered religion and nationality societal evils and, accordingly, disparaged the Jews because they represented the most enduring elements of both.  The anti-Zionism espoused by so many progressives today makes use of the same stereotypes and conspiracy theories that have been ascribed to Jews for generations and, consequently, is no different from old-fashioned Jew-hatred.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (“BDS”) and Israel Apartheid Week (“IAW”) movements are purely creations of the progressive left in partnership with Islamist interests.  The left is obsessed with demonizing Israel and advancing anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, with progressive academics routinely defending campus anti-Semitism as political speech while simultaneously censoring any criticism of Muslims as “Islamophobic.”

Conversely, the European right today is generally more supportive of Israel, Jews and free speech.  American conservatives likewise exhibit greater affinity for Israel than do their liberal counterparts, and Congressional Republicans support pro-Israel legislation and resolutions far more frequently than do their Democratic colleagues.  These trends were reflected in a recent Gallup poll showing that 83% of Republicans sympathize with Israel compared to only 48% of Democrats.  Indeed, pejorative Congressional letters mischaracterizing Israeli policies as belligerent and reproaching Israel for defending herself are written almost exclusively by Democrats.

The left maintains a sympathetic attitude towards Islamist rejectionism as reflected by its support for BDS, IAW and the revisionist Palestinian narrative, and this cannot be obscured by the hurling of scandalous accusations of Jew-hatred against conservatives who, unlike liberals, have taken meaningful and effective steps to combat it.  Nearly a quarter century ago, the late William F. Buckley rid the National Review of those whose denunciations of Israel he believed were motivated by anti-Semitism.  He then wrote “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” which represented a watershed in political self-analysis and moral accountability.

The left has yet to engage in similar soul searching.  Instead, it excuses anti-Semitism as political expression, even as it stifles criticism of Muslims as hate-speech.  Unfortunately, warped views often attributed to the “hard left” have infected the liberal mainstream, as evidenced by the failure of its establishment to wholeheartedly condemn bigotry against Jews and Israel the way Buckley did in 1992, or to ostracize progressive extremists whose venom clearly sounds in classical anti-Semitism.

When it comes to party politics, Jewish Democrats have been deluding themselves since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when they substituted New Deal priorities for authentic Jewish values and regarded FDR as a savior.  Despite their blind devotion, FDR was accepting only of those who were assimilated and aligned with him politically.  He seemed indifferent to Jewish suffering in Europe, as reflected by the views of his special Mideast envoy, Harold Hoskins, who recommended censoring “Zionist propaganda” that consisted largely of publicizing the Nazi genocide and lobbying for rescue efforts.  Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, advised the maintenance of tight immigration restrictions that effectively condemned many to the death camps, and such recommendations guided FDR’s policy for much of the Second World War.

When reports of the genocide began to spread early in the war, the administration prevailed upon its progressive Jewish allies to downplay the news and discredit those reporting it.  Many Jewish New Dealers acquiesced in an effort to prevent distractions to the war effort and embarrassment to a president they idolized.  Some of FDR’s Jewish acolytes waged a shameful campaign to malign those who were publicizing the Holocaust, including Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), going so far as to demand that Bergson and his compatriots be investigated for tax crimes and jailed or deported, though no improprieties were ever found.

Some Jewish Democrats even attempted to undermine the 1943 “Rabbis’ March on Washington” conceived by Bergson in conjunction with the Aggudat HaRabonim.  The event involved four-hundred Orthodox rabbinical scholars, including Rabbis Eliezer Silver, Avraham Kalmanowitz and Moshe Feinstein, many of whom were immigrants and none of whom looked or dressed like FDR’s secular political cronies. Encouraged by some of his Jewish confidantes, Roosevelt left the White House to avoid meeting the rabbis.

Many assimilated New Dealers sacrificed Jewish interests and pledged themselves to an administration that devoted military resources to saving works of European art, but which refused to bomb the concentration camps or the railway lines leading to them in order to stop the carnage.  When US policy finally changed to make saving Jewish lives a priority, it proved too little, too late.  Nevertheless, the lionization of Roosevelt provided the blueprint for a political cognitive dissonance that continues today.

The endorsement of President Obama is a case in point.  He sat in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s church for more than twenty years and associated with radical academics and anti-Israel ideologues.  As a senator he had no record of support for Israel, and since becoming president he has conspicuously refused to acknowledge the Jews’ historical rights in their homeland.  He has treated Israel more like an enemy than an ally and has appeased Islamist regimes dedicated to destroying her and exterminating her people.  Nevertheless, he has been portrayed as philo-Semitic by the liberal Jewish elite.

The real story should be apparent from his words and actions, however, including his public spats with Netanyahu and lecturing to Israelis who reject his worldview – which to the attuned ear might sound similar in tone to common progressive excoriation of Israel.

It would be more honest for his Jewish supporters to admit they no longer regard Israel and traditional values as political priorities.  However, given their support for a man who has been deemed more hostile to the Jewish State than any other president, it is disingenuous for them to use faux concern for Israel as a pretext for discouraging other Jews from voting Republican.

Since the days of FDR, politically progressive Jews have sacrificed religious and ethnic loyalty for political acceptance.  That was why Roosevelt knew he could count on Jewish support in downplaying reports of the Holocaust when he so requested.  And this is why Obama recently met with American Jewish leaders in an attempt to silence criticism of an Iran policy that threatens the future of the Jewish homeland.

The partisan delusion continues with groups such as “Jewish Americans for Hillary,” whose website proclaims that “[t]hroughout her career, Hillary Clinton has fought for the issues that matter most to Jewish Americans.”  Given her complicity in Obama’s efforts to “put daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, one has to wonder what issues they believe are important to American Jews.  Her position during the Ramat Shlomo crisis in 2010 should indicate where she really stands.  When Obama referred to Ramat Shlomo – an established Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem – as a “settlement” and demanded that Israel cease all building activities there, Clinton chided Netanyahu publicly and characterized neighborhood construction as “an insult to the United States.”

During her tenure under Obama, Clinton did not disagree when he demanded that Israel pull back to the 1949 armistice lines and divide Jerusalem; and she devalued Israeli sovereignty by lambasting construction on ancestral Jewish land while ignoring illegal Arab building.  She promoted Mahmoud Abbas as moderate, whitewashed the PA’s support for terrorism, and presided over renewed American participation in the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Council.

As Mrs. Clinton attempts to rewrite her history at the State Department and posture herself as a stalwart ally within the Obama administration, Jewish voters should instead consider the decline in American national prestige and the shameful treatment of Israel that characterized her tenure as America’s top diplomat.

If Jews who supported President Obama now truly care about Israel’s future, they should acknowledge how he has compromised her national integrity, empowered her enemies and exacerbated the existential threat to her survival.  They must also recognize that he has not acted alone, and that his ill-conceived policies have been enabled by fellow Democrats – including Hillary Clinton, whose actual record on Israel is spotty and opportunistic at best.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Israel National News.

Orthodox rabbis tell it like it is on “gay marriage” issue outside Supreme Court hearing.

A contingent of Orthodox rabbis from New York and New Jersey came and “told it like it is” outside of the US Supreme Court on the day of the “gay marriage” hearing. A larger group of 850 Orthodox rabbis publicly demanded the recusal of Justices Ginsburg and Kagan from the case.

They got there early and stayed even after the crowds left that day.

Although liberal Jews are known for their unwavering allegiance to radical anti-family agendas, the Orthodox community — especially the Hasidic, etc. — is the opposite. They are fiercely pro-family, passionate and unwavering in their Biblical principles, and not afraid to say so publicly.

So when our friend Rabbi Leibish Iliovits of New York contacted us on Monday and informed us that he and a group of several other rabbis from New York and New Jersey were planning to be outside of the Supreme Court on the day of “gay marriage” hearing with signs — to make a statement — we knew they’d deliver some powerful messages.

We all saw lots of other pro-family signs that day saying “We support traditional marriage” and “Every child needs a mother and a father.” But these fellows get to the core of the problem, and aren’t afraid of what the liberal media thinks of them. They talk about the Bible and the dangers religious people face in an oppressive secular society.

And, yes, they got the media’s attention.  The rabbis were included in news stories by the Washington PostNational Public RadioYahoo News, and several other outlets.

850 Rabbis call for recusal of Ginsburg and Kagan

Late last week we also got a call from Rabbi Yehuda Levin of Brooklyn,spokesman for the 75-year-old 850-member Rabbinical Alliance of America. Rabbi Levin wanted MassResistance to know that his organization was outraged that Justices Ginsburg and Kagan had refused to recuse themselves from this case, citing their publicly known biases on the “gay marriage” issue.

The following day the organization’s statement was sent out to press across the country:

We join many other who are appalled and deeply ashamed that less than a week before the Supreme Court hearing on same gender “Marriage,” Justices Ginsberg and Kagan, both of whom have officiated at such events, have nevertheless still not had the grace, or decency to adhere to the US code which calls upon a justice to “Disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned” . . .

Read the entire statement HERE

The Almighty and society

Too many of us have allowed the intimidation of the secular left to cause us to forget or brush aside the huge religious aspects of this issue.

Yesterday our friend Rabbi Noson Leiter of New York called MassResistance to point out the eerie coincidence of the “gay marriage” hearing being held this particular week. Throughout the year, Jews read the entire Torah in their synagogues, divided into weekly portions. This week’s portion happens to include the part of Leviticus that deals with the harsh prohibition against homosexual behavior, describing it as among those things that “will cause the [Holy] Land to vomit you out” (Lev. Ch. 20).

For Orthodox Jews, at least, it is part of a bigger picture. As Rabbi Leiter emailed us this morning:

It is significant that this Supreme Court hearing fell out this week, which is the week in which Jews read the portions of the Torah (Lev. 18) which include the prohibition against sodomy, as well as — according to our Sages — a reference to the prohibition against same-gender “marriages” (see Toras Kohanim 12, Yalkut Shimoni 587; Torah Shelaimah, citing Lekach Tov).

What is perhaps even more noteworthy is the following: This same chapter – Lev. 18 — is read during one other time during the year: on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) – the holiest day of the Jewish year.

As we approach the crescendo of that awesome day, millions of Jews in synagogues worldwide hear the public Torah-reading of this very chapter, the 18th chapter of Leviticus, which enumerates the forbidden relationships.

One crucial lesson, pertaining to this issue at hand, derived from that chapter, is the abominable nature of sodomy in particular.

Although all of those enumerated forbidden relationships are all referred to in general as “abominations” (in verses 26-7; 29-30) – the only prohibited relationship specifically branded “abomination” is the homosexual act (v.22).

Thus, sodomy is an abomination even among abominations (see Maharal on Babylonian Talmud, tractate Chullin 92; She’arim Metzuyanim BaHalacha on Chullin 92; and Maharsha on Tractate Nedarim 51a).

In fact, when the Torah uses the term “abomination” elsewhere (in Dvarim (Dt.) 32:16), the Sages of the “Sifri” identify that term as referring specifically to sodomy.

One reason we read this chapter on the Day of Atonement is to encourage those who’ve stumbled in even the most serious transgressions that there is hope for change — for those who seek true repentance.  Man can – and therefore must – control his actions, and, thereby, his destiny for spiritual greatness, the destiny beckoning him most — as one  approaches the zenith of that most sacred day of Yom Kippur.

This is clearly a time for us all to step up our public opposition, not tone it down!

My Daughter Married a Woman

All of a sudden, it is pedal-to-the-metal, full-speed-ahead, no-holds-barred promotion of homosexuality everywhere you turn. It is as if someone said, okay, now is the time to launch our all out assault on traditional principles and values; while crushing all opposition.

I can not even enjoy a non-political Saturday watching do-it-yourself home improvement TV channels without almost every show aggressively promoting homosexuality. Homosexuals are only slightly over 2% of the population. And yet, their representation on TV shows is dramatically disproportionate to their numbers. Clearly, the networks have become political activists promoting the homosexual agenda.

My wife can not watch her bridal gown and pregnancy TV shows without the producers featuring same sex couples. We protest by changing the channel.

What really frosts me and is super scary is the Left’s ever-increasing strong-arm tactics, forcing us to agree with their sin. I thought, good grief, next they will be teaching our kids, “Great Lesbians in History.” Then, I thought, oh my gosh, they are already doing that celebrating Gay Pride Month beginning in elementary school.

Think about that folks. Regardless of your religious beliefs or opinion, the Left has said screw you, we’re teaching your child that homosexuality is a good thing and something they should explore. Period.

Leftists (Democrats) are passing legislation to make it illegal to assist anyone unhappy with their sexual attractions to change. Isn’t that outrageous? While portraying themselves as victims who claim to only seek tolerance, Leftists are insidiously working to have their government enforcers arrest pastors, counselors and parents who help their sexually confused kids.

Folks, we are talking Sodom and Gomorrah all over again; homosexuality aggressively forced upon us.

Before you call me crazy, consider this. For 200 years marriage was defined as between one man and one woman. Today, such thinking is considered nutty, extreme and hateful in the mainstream media, numerous political and social circles. Opposing their so-called “mainstream” consensus on this issue will cost you your livelihood and even jail-time.

My Christian minister dad called me to say that a family member gave him a heads up that my daughter’s wedding pictures are posted on Facebook. My daughter married a woman. She wanted me to attend the wedding. I explained that while I love her and am fond of her partner, my faith does not allow me to bless their union by attending their wedding.

Her mom and I divorced when she was around 7 years old. My daughter and I were estranged until five years ago. I cherish our new found relationship. So, I was happy when my daughter said she loves me and understands my reason for not attending her wedding.

At 87 with over 50 years as a pastor, Dad remains as cool and wise as ever. He adamantly advised me to shower my daughter and her partner with love. Dad said as Christians, love is our greatest weapon.

Now do not get me wrong. Far too many Christians today believe “love” means co-signing sin; passively allowing the Left’s relentless implementation of their anti-God agenda to go unchallenged. That is not what Dad meant, nor is it his definition of “loving them.” He suggests that I behave according to Romans 12:9 “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.”

I will not be manipulated by the Left’s absurd claim that loving parenting means rubber-stamping all of your child’s life choices. When I received my daughter’s wedding invitation in the mail, Dad advised me not to attend and explain why to my daughter. Dad was confident that she would understand.

christian-loveIn response to my daughter’s wedding pictures on Facebook, my millennial nephew and nieces congratulated her. Despite their Christian upbringing, liberal public school indoctrination and mainstream media have shaped their opinions.

Before ending our phone call (I’m in Florida, Dad is in Maryland), Dad instructed me to read Exodus 20: 1-6 and Deuteronomy 5: 1-10. These scriptures promise that if you are faithful and love God, He will bless your family for generations. Praise God. That was Dad’s way of comforting and assuring me that God has everything under control.

I do not pray for God to turn my daughter straight. I pray that she and her partner will come to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile, without approving their lifestyle, I will love them both to death.

RELATED ARTICLE: Gay Marriage Goal Is ‘To Wipe Out the Christian Religion’

The Un-American Divider in Chief

The president of the United States of America was once known as the commander in chief.  The old saying about a house divided against itself may certainly be applied to our republic today.  Not since the civil war has our beloved nation been so separated ideologically.  The most noted era of division historically is the time surrounding the big war between the north and the south.  There were sharp disagreements over states’ rights as well as the argument over whether individuals should be allowed to hold others in the bondage of slavery.

As horrific as the states’ rights and slavery issues were considering the toll they took on the country, at least they were situations that mattered and worth the time and effort to resolve them.  Take for example, the ongoing mission of the divider and chief, Barack Obama and his embittered wife, First Lady Michelle Obama.  Just recently, Mrs. Obama gave a commencement address at the historic Tuskegee University in Alabama.  Instead of encouraging the hopeful graduates to go seek opportunities and to be the best they can be, she chose to focus upon the wasteful topic of the limitations of racism.

Here we are in a nation facing a major crossroad in her history and Mrs. Obama complained about the “daily slights” that she and her husband have experienced.  This is from a woman who’s own husband won’t even associate with you on any level if you are not a fellow progressive.  She talked about overcoming that “heavy burden” by channeling their frustration into “organizing and banding together.”  Mrs. Obama also stated that the frustrations that are playing out in “communities like Baltimore and Ferguson.”

She took a grand opportunity to embolden younger Americans who happen to be black (technically brown) in their goals of successful achievement and allowing their God given gifts and talents to make room for them and turned it into a pedestrian pity party for having been “black in America.”

Such worthless and insane topics to be repeated over and over within the ranks of Americans who happen to be black, only serves to insure failure, bitterness and misery for those who should be looking forward to climbing the ladder of success.  The horrendous economic policies of President Obama has done much more to thwart opportunities for all Americans, than the racists Mrs. Obama refers to could dream of.  In fact, as usual under most democrat administrations especially the current one, economic opportunities are much fewer today than during the time of the previous Bush administration.

Alright so let me get this straight according to the Obama’s, racism is today’s biggest impediment preventing blacks from succeeding.  Yet there are fewer opportunities today than when the president assumed office in this so-called racist nation.  So does that make the Obamas racists?  I already know they are rabidly anti United States bigots.

The president has allowed the influx of millions of illegal immigrants who are being offered just about anything they want, including the chance to displace Americans who happen to be black at the dwindling workplace.  Again, does that make President Obama and the First Lady racist?  If Mrs. Obama is so concerned about blacks being held back, she might review her husband’s economic policies and also take a look in the mirror.  Under the Obama administration, America’s highest corporate tax rate on the planet is just one of the many factors of this regime that has the economy basically stagnating at best.  Thus the real reason for fewer opportunities, not racism.

In addition, purposely dividing the republic over racial foolishness and class envy only keeps people focused on real or imagined divisions rather than authentic solutions to the stymied economy.  So now we are putting up with a divided and less prosperous republic turned mob rule democracy.  Mrs. Obama has unfortunately has proven to be nothing more than a middle aged progressive activist using race as a means to divide and weaken our country.  She along with her husband has scoffed at every viable free market economic solution to the current malaise.

Are there racists in America?  Yes there are, many of whom are black.  But there are many more non racists who are optimistic hard working Americans who simply want to see the nation restored not only economically, but in every facet of society as well.  I believe that many of my fellow Americans who happen to be white like myself, do not like the destructive policies of the Obama regime doesn’t make them racists.  But also like myself desire to witness a resurgence of the good values and principles that made the United States of America the envy of the world.

The freedoms, rights, privileges and responsibilities enumerated in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution can only be maintained if “We the People” are united as Americans. The progressive hyphenated Americans divided by race, class envy and increasingly immoral behavior only serves the purpose of those seeking to divide and conquer America.  America’s strength is in the good morality of her people.  The founding fathers recognized that in order for America to be and remain free is for her sovereign citizens to be more dependent upon God, their own good sense and opportunities than an intrusive overbearing and oppressive government.

The choice is yours my fellow Americans.  You can either be divided and conquered or United and free to live in liberty as God intended.   God Bless America and May America Bless God.

What Would the Country Look Like If the Far Left Won?

I read this piece by Dr. Tim Daughtry titled “Calling for a true conservative strategy” from Feb 4. 2013 today, and thought: What would our country look like if we simply capitulated to the far-left and let them win?

Daughtry has a line in the piece which is tragically accurate:

“The strategy (of the far-left) was one of immersion more than conversion. It was not necessary to convert students or consumers of news to leftist thinking; it was only necessary to surround them with liberalism as if there were no other respectable way of thinking. While conservatives were focused on winning the next election, the left focused on winning the next generation. And they are succeeding.”

Their “immersion” strategy has been a tremendous success. It has changed the debate landscape by altering the playing field from one where two different ideological belief systems competed against one another (individual liberty and limited government vs. heavy-handed rule by government elites), to one where heavy-handed government intervention in our lives is accepted as “the norm,” and arguing against big government makes you an “extremist” or something far worse in the eyes of the cultural “elites.”

Consider for a moment what the country would look like if we completely gave up and let the far-left win, here’s what you would be looking at:

Taxes

You would be living a country with no limit on your tax bills. The far-left consistently argues for higher taxes but, did you notice that that never give you a tax rate number and only talk loosely about your “fair share?” They will never give you that actual number because they do not want to limit their access to your wallet. If the far-left won, and conservatives stopped fighting, the assault on your wallet would only end when they claimed all of the money in your wallet and the wallet too.

Healthcare 

You would be living in a country where access to doctors and hospitals is tightly controlled by government bureaucrats. Never forget this; there are only two ways to allocate scarce resources in this world we have been given and a doctor’s time, and a hospital bed, are scarce resources. We can either ration those resources, and let the bureaucrats pick and choose who gets to see the doctor and who gets the hospital bed, or we can price them and let a free-people make decisions about which doctor they want to see and which hospital they want to use. If the far-left won, and Conservatives stopped fighting, your health would no longer belong to you. Your health would belong to a government bureaucrat and his permission slip.

Graduation Cap With Message

The legions of children in school choice programs who finally have a future to look forward to would be yanked out of these programs and their better tomorrow would be heartlessly stolen away.

Education 

You would be living a country where your children can only attend government schools and where the curriculum is tightly controlled by bureaucrats. The far-left fights against school choice, despite the fact that your tax dollars entirely fund the public education system because, when given the choice, parents choose schools that actually educate their kids and this severely limits the power of the bureaucracy/special interests. If the far-left won and conservatives stopped fighting, the legions of children in school choice programs who finally have a future to look forward to would be yanked out of these programs and their better tomorrow would be heartlessly stolen away.

Liberty

You would be living in a country where your speech and religious expression were tightly controlled by laws and regulations which bureaucrats deem “acceptable.” The far-left only believes in “free speech” when that speech strictly aligns with leftist thinking. Any other speech or religious expression which conflicts with leftist thinking is to be declared “non-inclusive” or “hate speech”, and the person speaking must immediately be labeled as an “extremist.” If the far-left won and conservatives stopped fighting, it would only be a matter of time before this “war on language” encompassed anyone and everyone who opposed the DC power players and the cultural elites.

It is precisely for this reason that we need a Republican nominee for President and a new generation of candidates who are not beholden to this failed strategy of yesterday. A failed strategy which apologizes for fighting for effective, conservative principles first, then meekly tries to lay out a “managed-decline” plan next. We cannot and will not be any part of any “managed-decline” of the most prosperous country on earth. We must support candidates who disavow this and proudly speak about liberty, free-market prosperity, limited-government and the boundless potential of tomorrow where the American people are unrestrained by government. A better tomorrow is right around the corner and it’s up to us to stop watching the boxing match, put on the gloves and get in the ring. The future of the country is not a spectator sport.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image is by OLIVIER DOULIERY | AP Photo.