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.
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Posted by Walt in Economics, Liberalism, Politics, Social Issues categories at 11:49 PM EDT
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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.
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Posted by Walt in Education, Environment Issues, Liberalism categories at 10:42 PM EDT
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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).
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Posted by Walt in Education, Family, Liberalism, Social Issues categories at 12:19 AM EST
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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.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Education, Liberalism, Social Issues categories at 5:54 PM EDT
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by Robert E. Meyer
When conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh gets an occasional caller from Appleton, Wisconsin, he frequently remarks that Appleton is the place where the football teams playing the Green Bay Packers stay the night before the game. Now he has a less noble reason for citing Appleton.
Appleton's freshman addition to Congress, Dr. Steve Kagen, has garnered the national spotlight for remarks allegedly made during a recent visit to the White House. Kagen apparently told a group of fawning peace activists, whom he met with in December, that he dissed Karl Rove and President Bush during a reception for new members of Congress.
The short version of the encounter was that he confronted Rove in a small White House restroom, stood in front of the exit door and "gave him a message." Then he deliberately insulted the president by referring to The First Lady as "Barbara" (or so he says) when they were introduced. Of course, Kagen could say he meant she looked as young as the president's daughter Barbara, not his mother with the same name.
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Posted by Walt in Liberalism, Politics categories at 11:48 PM EST
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by Robert E. Meyer
We had a Marriage Amendment referendum in Wisconsin this November, as they did in several other states. I have to admit that for a while I was pretty concerned that the outcome of the vote was in doubt.
Last spring, I was having breakfast with a man who has been very influential in my life over the past several years. I complained to him about the indifference and complacency that I noticed on the marriage issue. At that time, I saw Letters to the Editor every week arguing for voting "no" on the amendment referendum. I saw very few rebuttals. It would be more than generous to say the arguments against the amendment were very specious, but they were cleverly presented to appeal to the emotions, and dupe anyone who was not doing their own independent research.
In Wisconsin, as well as seven of the eight states with binding referendums on marriage, the amendments passed, taking the question of the legal composition of marriage out of the hands of judges.
After the vote, editorial sections of regional newspapers I read, were teeming with sour-grape diatribes by those who had voted against the Marriage Amendment. They spent their editorial capital either ridiculing the ethic, or trying to shame the "backward majority" who had voted for the amendment.
One such letter was composed by a man in his late twenties, who took a futuristic approach in his effort to scold "narrow-minded" readers.
He imagined that it was the year 2056, and that he was an incontinent senior citizen, who was trying to get someone to change his soiled diaper. He reminded the current generation alive then, that though the state of Wisconsin had passed an amendment legally sanctioning only traditional marriage, he was one of the "enlightened" progressives who didn't vote with the rest of the ignorant yokels.
I responded to him in my own Letter to the Editor as such…
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Posted by Walt in Family, Liberalism, Politics, Social Issues categories at 8:14 AM EST
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By Thomas E. Brewton
Diversity is another word battered beyond recognition by liberals and progressives. Orwellian NewSpeak has made the word diversity into a bangalore torpedo to undermine the defenses guarding civilized society.
Liberal-socialists, with our educational system in the vanguard, have made diversity into an end in itself, a principle of materialistic social justice.
In education, for example, the goal of diversity is elevated to a higher status than providing the best possible education for students. Diversity is, not an educational principle, but a correlate to Lenin's program to create the New Soviet Man via material factors imposed by intellectuals. Students are somehow to be made better by the corruption of a system that supposedly is devoted to academic excellence.
As economist Thomas Sowell has so articulately observed many times, poorly prepared students, of whatever race, gain nothing by being admitted to colleges with academic standards beyond their reach. Either the better students are held back, or the poorly prepared students are discouraged and eventually drop out. Nothing is gained by the mendacity of liberal-progressive educators giving every student a minimum grade of B. Victims of grade-inflation have simply been set up for failure and embittered cynicism in real-world job competition.
Less well prepared students can get a good education at colleges with less stringent academic standards. Students who earn Bs and As in those colleges can have the priceless gift of real self-respect based on their own hard work.
Diversity of the liberal-progressive stripe has disastrous consequences for the survival of the United States. Economically we see its results in the widening gap between linguistic, mathematical, and scientific competence of average American graduates and their overseas counterparts. In an increasingly technical world, the United States is suffering, not only from inflated production costs arising from the welfare state and unionism, but from falling behind in the innovation curve.
We can celebrate the diversity of our student bodies, but at the cost of fewer and fewer Nobel Prizes for science awarded to Americans in the future, along with more and more manufacturing transferred overseas.
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Posted by Walt in Education, Liberalism, Socialism categories at 9:55 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals see the natural world as flawed and presume hubristically to restructure nature to fit their artificial, intellectual blueprint for perfection. In contrast, religious Jews and Christians are instructed to take joy in God's marvelously created cosmos, to recognize that the world is complex far beyond the capacity of any human minds to comprehend its entirety.
Liberals look to Marxian economics. Religious Jews and Christians seek God's guidance.
Liberal Republicans and Democrats, along with the media that follow the lead of the New York Times, are ceaselessly intent upon criticizing everything about life in the United States. This is true not just during political campaign season, but unendingly so.
Perfection, from liberals' viewpoint, would be a theoretical world-society with equal distribution of income in a socialistically regulated economy, under a one-world government led by socialist intellectuals in the UN.
If a liberal sees anything that differs from his idea of perfection, his knee-jerk reaction is to demand a new law to regulate or correct it. The implicit assumption is that everything in society is the product of materialistic forces emanating from the political state. Hence the harping, for example, on income gaps, and the presumption that the Federal government can, and should, run the economy to eliminate income discrepancies.
David Limbaugh's new book "Bankrupt" (see Brent Bozell's review in the Washington Times) documents this fundamental posture of negativism.
Seeing the world as all wrong, while confidently believing that you can fix everything if you are put in charge, is a basic characteristic of the gnostic doctrine of liberal-socialism.
As I wrote in The Da Vinci Code: Liberal Gnosticism:
Gnosticism is the belief that intellectual elites have secret knowledge about the structure of human society and about the relationship between humans and the cosmos. These elites are thereby empowered to direct human affairs.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Liberalism, Politics, Socialism categories at 8:21 AM EDT
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