Archive for the ‘Liberalism’ Category
Code Pink with promoting harm to troops!
Sacramento, Calif. – The nation’s largest grassroots pro-troop organization Move America Forward is standing up for U.S. troops again, as yet-again, the virulent anti-war group CODE PINK is threatening the lives of U.S. troops around the world.
Posted in The 17th Amendment Revisited
By Thomas E. Brewton
Original provisions of the Constitution intended to prevent Congress from enacting "dumb" laws were vitiated by ratification of the 17th Amendment.
Before ratification of the 17th Amendment it's unlikely that a Senate committee would have needed to raise the sort of question posed by Senator Coburn during confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. A Wall Street Journal editorial reports editorial reports:
If Congress passed a law saying Americans were required to eat three fruits and three vegetables a day, Mr. Coburn asked, would that be legitimate under the Commerce Clause? It sounds like a "dumb law," Ms. Kagan wisecracked, which is true enough, but then she added that "courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they're senseless." In other words: Congress could do it.
The real question here is whether Ms. Kagan recognizes any limits on the Commerce Clause, which legislators have used as justification to regulate or mandate just about anything, and which the Obama Administration is eyeing as its golden ticket to defend ObamaCare. Some 20 states are challenging the law on the grounds that forcing people to buy health insurance shreds the Constitution.
… Ms. Kagan maintained that in recent years the Commerce Clause has been read broadly, to suggest "that deference should be provided to Congress with respect to matters that affect interstate commerce" and that "the principal protector against bad laws is the political branches themselves.
That one would have made James Madison howl.
I must disagree, however, with the Journal's understanding. Abundant evidence from James Madison's notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention debates, as well as from the Federalist Papers and correspondence and speeches by prominent political leaders of the founding era, make clear that the Senate's role was to prevent Congress from passing laws that infringed upon powers traditionally reserved to state governments. Read the rest of this entry »
The Battle Of The Ages — Words And Language Versus Thoughts And Ideas
Political language is designed to be deceptive. People need to do a better job of "looking past" the words and try to get to the ideas that the words represent. The words, themselves, are often designed to hide the real meaning.
Thoughts and ideas are expressed with words and language but there is too much meaning placed on the words and not enough exploration of the ideas that the words represent. If the words sound good, if they are soothing words that make people feel good about themselves then people are unlikely to explore the real meaning. Call it intellectual laziness; this conflict is the dictator's best friend.
Joseph Goebbels is known for having said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." The rest of that quote is lesser known. He continued "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Take It Back
We need to go back in history to see when and how our constitutional republic was lost. As people get serious about taking America back from the Liberals, they will need to learn when and how our constitutional republic was lost. It will be discovered that Barack Obama is not responsible for turning America in to a socialist nation. That project began centuries earlier with a vision of what America was created to be that has a long established historical lineage.
That vision has always been disputed. The division has always been between those who understand that the argument that civil government is "of the people, by the people and for the people" is a biblical position, and those who reject it as so and substitute a socialist (godless) definition, not far different from the Marxist vision of a classless society or democracy of the people. The phrase was first used by John Wyclif regarding his translation of the Bible in the mid-1600s, long before Lincoln borrowed it.
The methodology that passed the recent Healthcare Reform bill was worked out 30-50 years earlier in America's Mainline churches. If you are not familiar with it, you might read Gary North's, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, Institute for Christian Economics, 1996. The process that was perfected in the American Churches is now being applied to the American government.
The Danger Of A Government With Unlimited Power
By Thomas E. Brewton
The Obama administration continues the nation's travels, since Franklin Roosevelt's socialist New Deal in the 1930s, along what Friedrich von Hayek called The Road To Serfdom.
The fundamental thrust of liberal-progressive-socialist governments such as that of President Obama is to abrogate the rights of private property, aiming at the holy grail of their secular religion: redistribution of income and wealth to reduce everyone to an equally low state of economic equality.
But people don't readily abandon what they have labored to earn and save. As Lenin purportedly said, "Socialism emanates from the business end of a gun barrel." Hence the relentless push of liberal-progressives to expand the power of collectivized government in Washington.
The case can be made that, of all our rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment's private property rights are the most important. People who are secure in their own property can maintain their rights to free speech and other aspects of constitutional government. People in a collectivized, socialistic government lose the will and the ability to fight for their rights. They slowly sink into dependence upon the political state, just as the German Empire's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck anticipated when he enacted the world's first systematic welfare-state program.
Private property rights were formalized as early as 1215 in Magna Carta, then in England's 1628 Petition of Right and its 1689 English Bill of Rights, the most fundament elements of the British constitution.
Senator Obama and the Transformation of Human Nature
By Thomas E. Brewton
Believing apparently that specifics are not necessary, Senator Obama promises us that his election will bring us all together in one happy family via a miraculous transformation of society and its citizens.
Earthly perfection of human nature and human society, here and now, is what Senator Obama is promising us. This is his implicit message when tells us that he can, as President, bring us all together and move us beyond strife, aggression, and wars.
One thing we can state categorically in that regard is that what Senator Obama promises is emphatically, irreconcilably opposed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilization. Parenthetically, the Senator's secular and socialistic mind-set may explain in part why he saw no problem with the unchristian hatred preached by his minister, the Rev. Wright.
Senator Obama is not necessarily painting himself as the Second Messiah who will personally effect the transformation. Rather, as a good socialist-progressive-liberal, he expects that structural changes in the political state will do the necessary work.
Such structural changes will include higher taxes, especially on capital gains which fuel business innovation and more efficient production, massive increases in Federal welfare-state spending programs, and crushing inflation, along with extensive increases in regulation of personal and business conduct (including stronger affirmative-action measures).
As the German Empire's Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in the 1880s, he was instituting the world's first welfare state in order to gain total control over the German people. Those who are dependent upon the political state for their benefits, he observed, can be herded like cattle.
In contrast, in the Old Testament, King Solomon tells us:
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:1-3)
I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:12-14)
The god That Failed New Orleans
By Thomas E. Brewton
Why does much of New Orleans still look as if the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina had occurred just a few weeks ago?
Huge areas of New Orleans still are wastelands. New Orleans's liberal-progressive-socialist Senator Mary Landrieu has grabbed far more than her share of Congressional pork. Hundreds of millions of Federal dollars spent for rehabilitation have produced far too little beneficial result. People were without electric power for months; the police department contained more thieves than honest law enforcers; drug-dealing and prostitution remain major enterprises; and the city still retains its crown as the nation's murder capital.
One of the city's few "legitimate" businesses is casino gambling.
City and state administrations have yet to coordinate rebuilding plans, as politicians fight over who gets what share of the spoils.
The best that the city's Mayor Nagin can do is to demand that the Democratic-socialist Party presidential candidates pledge to send even more pork to New Orleans.
What accounts for this dismal record?
The answer is simple. New Orleans abandoned God and personal moral responsibility, turning instead to worshipping the atheistic, secular political state. That secular god has failed miserably, notoriously so in the aftermath of Katrina.
Ruining Our Youth, Our Future
By Alan Caruba
Those of us who grew up in the 1940s and 50s almost universally look back on those days with great fondness. Born into an era that saw the end of the Depression and living as children through World War II, we were nonetheless somehow shielded from it by parents who took care to ensure that these calamities in the world did not take from us the sheer joy of being young.
By 1945, America emerged from the war as one of the world’s recognized superpowers, plunging immediately into the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a totalitarian regime that, like all Communists, promised a worker’s paradise and delivered a new form of serfdom.
We grew up with school drills in the event of the “bomb” as America helped rebuild Europe, guarding it against the Russians. While the grownups tended to these matters, we kids were treated to television shows free of the salaciousness of too many of today’s programs.
One could not be a teenager in the 1950s and not be aware of the great concern regarding the infiltration of our government by Communist spies and sympathizers. Decades later, thanks to the revelations of the Venona intercepts of Soviet communications with those spies, we learned just how thorough the infiltration had been and how many sympathizers worked at the highest levels of our government. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, it turns out, was right.
In the end, by standing firm against the Soviet Union the United States and its allies would see its end. Its threat has been replaced by a resurgence of a particularly evil Islamic fanaticism and now, as there were then, those of a liberal frame of mind are telling us not to meet it on the field of battle and everywhere else it threatens Western civilization.
Will Californians Face Social Chaos Imposed by Politicians?
By Jim Kouri
"I shudder to think how millions of California children will be led astray, how marriage will be destroyed, and how immorality will step on the neck of morality if Arnold Schwarzenegger signs five anti-family bills into law. The ‘Terminator’ has less than two weeks to sign or veto very bad bills!" said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families.
Thomasson is disappointed with California’s Christian pastors and elders. In the last five days, many individuals and several businesses have responded to CCF’s action alert. However, to date, only one church has faxed in veto letters to the liberal Schwarzenegger’s office in Sacramento.
"This is not right, since the majority of pastors in California oppose sexual indoctrination of schoolchildren (SB 777 and AB 394), oppose demeaning marriage (AB 43 and AB 102), and oppose forcing the homosexual-bisexual-transsexual agenda on businesses, organizations, and churches (AB 14)," said Thomasson.
"Distracted drivers cause car accidents; distracted pastors may accidentally assist anti-family bills to be signed into law. The Governor will notice our loud voice or our relative silence. The choice is [ours]," he added.
California’s leading pro-family organizations are urging Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto five bills they believe will harm children, marriage, and religious freedom that are on his desk. And the Governor is taking notice — he’s listed the five bills as among a dozen pieces of legislation upon which telephone callers to his State Capitol office can "vote."
Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), Capitol Resource Institute, California Family Council, and Traditional Values Coalition are all urging vetoes of two school sexual indoctrination bills (SB 777 and AB 394), two marriage-demeaning bills (AB 102 and AB 43), and a bill that forces homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality upon businesses, churches, and nonprofit member organizations such as the Boy Scouts (AB 14).
Imus and Virginia Tech
by Thomas E. Brewton
The inconsistency of atheistic materialism. There's more there than Marx allowed for.
Our thoroughly secularized society explains events and behavior, human nature itself, as the product of the material conditions of living and earning a living, in accord with the Marxian thesis.
In The German Ideology Marx and his colleague Friederick Engels wrote:
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
Present-day liberals therefore deny the concept of a higher law, of timeless moral truths emanating from God the Creator of the universe. They fancy themselves capable of restructuring society, and human nature in the process. Hence the endless stream of new Federal welfare-state programs. In the liberal view, economic and social problems can be cured only by bountiful application of the most materialistic of all things: money.
School massacres, of which Virginia Tech is the latest and deadliest example, predictably are thought by liberals to result from a material factor: the availability of firearms. In liberal theory, make guns unavailable, and you change human nature.