2011 Declaration of Independence From Big Government

2011 Declaration of Independence From Big Government
by Frank Miniter
07/03/2011

The Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776, was a moral and profound list of grievances and/or charges detailing why colonial Americans found it necessary to separate themselves from the English Parliament and King George III. As we near Independence Day, it’s time for such a declaration of complaints listing what some in our government are doing to our individual freedoms as safeguarded in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Besides, it’s a lot of fun to tell the government where to go, so here’s my list of the top 10 freedoms we’ve lost or are losing and want returned. (For a more complete list, as well as the history of our rights and detailed ways we can win our rights back, check out my book Saving the Bill of Rights.)

1. The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.” Therefore, if my priest wants to say former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D.-N.Y.) behaved immorally, he should be able to do so without risking his church’s nonprofit status. Or if my priest wants to call out President Barack Obama for his stance on abortion, the First Amendment clearly protects his right to do that. The law banning tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from politics didn’t come from the founding era. It was actually engineered in 1954 by then-Senate Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973). Johnson wanted to silence two nonprofit organizations in Texas that had opposed his reelection, so he pushed the bill through. It wasn’t controversial because Johnson passed it off as a favor to churches. The legislation passed as an amendment to another bill via an up-or-down voice vote in the U.S. Senate. Most churches in America have since organized themselves as 501(c)(3) tax-exempt religious organizations—501(c)(3) churches are prohibited from addressing, in any tangible way, the vital issues of the day. If they do, the IRS might come for their tax-exempt status. This is unconstitutional. Religious leaders also have First Amendment rights. Of course, if parishioners don’t like what a priest, reverend, rabbi or other leader says, they have the right to complain, to leave the church, or to start a campaign to get a new priest. That’s the freedom Americans have always fought for.

2. If people choose to spend their own money on an ad supporting or criticizing someone who is running for political office, then they have the First Amendment right to do so. This right doesn’t cease if someone pools his or her money with others in an association, union or organization. It’s their hard-earned money, and the government can’t constitutionally stop them from condemning or praising someone with it. Nor should a union or other association be able to legally force someone to contribute to a candidate or political party he or she doesn’t support.

3. When law-abiding citizens log on to the Internet on their private computers, they don’t need the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) working behind the scenes with net neutrality regulations to decide what they should be reading, how fast their downloads should be working, or what their searches should turn up. That’s none of the government’s business. The First Amendment should prevent the FCC from interfering with the freedom of speech of not just the Internet user, but also of the provider. Americans have the right to take their business to the company or companies that provide the best services at the lowest prices—such is the free market that has given us everything.

4. If someone attacks us with lethal force in our homes or in the public square, we have the Second Amendment right to use a firearm to preserve our lives. Sure, all of the amendments within the Bill of Rights can be reasonably restricted by the government (via the will of the people) so that one person’s individual rights don’t impede another’s, but when a sane adult who has broken no laws simply wants to carry a firearm for self-protection, his or her action doesn’t impact others’ constitutional rights—though it just might impact a mass-murderer’s evil intentions.

5. It’s time to stop trial attorneys from making American citizens (as well as corporations and the government) liable for whatever some idiot decides to do. We have the right to behave as responsible adults—or as idiots, until our actions affect someone else. For example, if people choose to swim outside the ropes at a public lake, then they are taking their lives into their our own hands. If one of those people drowns, then no one should be able to sue the government or anyone else because a person got in over his or her silly head. To stop the threat of lawsuits from reducing our liberty, we need tort reform. The Seventh Amendment was not designed to be a tool for attorneys using only a “preponderance of evidence” to win large sums of money in a lawsuit. The Seventh Amendment was designed protect individuals from negligent and fraudulent actions. “Loser-pays” legislation and other tort reforms must be instituted to stop the lawsuit lottery from curtailing our freedoms by making everyone from the government to grandmothers practice extreme lawsuit avoidance.

6. My property can only be taken for a public “use,” just as the Fifth Amendment says, not for a public “purpose,” as the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Berman v. Parker (1954) and later upheld in Kelo v. New London (2005). If they come to take our homes so they can give them to someone who will pay more taxes or who is more politically connected, then they are trampling on the individual rights this great nation was founded upon.

7. Until the government gets a warrant, citizens' movements, cell phone usage, bank records, e-mails and more are their own business. The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” “Papers” include e-mails, financial records and more. Just because papers are now digital doesn’t preclude their constitutional protections. After all, no one says we lose the First Amendment’s right to free speech when we write an e-mail or speak over the telephone. The courts need to start understanding the basic premise that new technology doesn’t erase the U.S. Constitution.

8. The people's decision to purchase health insurance is their private decision. ObamaCare is an infringement on state and individual rights, as the bill mandates that, as of 2014, every American must buy a product approved by the U.S. Congress or be fined for not doing so. Failure to buy government-approved health insurance, according to ObamaCare, results in a penalty included on the taxpayer’s annual federal return. As Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, said, “There has never been a point in our history where the federal government has been given the authority to require citizens to buy goods or services.” According to the Left’s reasoning, a person’s decision not to eat fast food, not to take a job, not to join the military or not to buy a Chevy is an “activity that is commercial and economic in nature” that can be regulated and even required by Congress. The U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause (“The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States …”) does not give the federal government the power to make us buy products. The Supreme Court needs to rule this portion of ObamaCare unconstitutional.

9. “Penumbras” and “emanations” should not be used by the U.S. Supreme Court to create new “privacy” rights that don’t appear in the Constitution, but penumbras and emanations are exactly where Justice William O. Douglas found new “constitutional” privacy protections in Griswold v. Connecticut(1965). Griswold created new rights not found in the Constitution and led to Roe v. Wade (1973), a case that constitutionalized the right to have an abortion even though the Constitution never mentions abortions. (Can you picture even a minority of the Founding Fathers including a right to have an abortion in the Bill of Rights?) By creating such unenumerated privacy rights, the high court has taken the Constitution away from the people. After all, we the people can’t pressure our representative in Congress to change a ruling the Supreme Court errantly made—this is why such judicial activism is undemocratic. Judges are supposed to adjudicate the law, not write it.

10. When people find themselves on a jury sitting in judgment of an accused person, they have the right to rule according to their conscience, not how some judge says they must rule. According to the common-law doctrine of jury nullification, jurors can nullify a law—refuse to convict a defendant despite instructions from a judge—if they believe the law is unjust or that the application of the law in a specific instance is unjust. Historically, the jury’s power to sit in judgment of not only their peers, but also of the law, is what led to many of the freedoms we cherish today. For example, in 1735, John Peter Zenger, editor of the New York Weekly Journal, was tried for printing seditious criticisms of the governor of New York. Andrew Hamilton, Zenger’s attorney, convinced the jury that something isn’t libelous if it’s true. Hamilton informed the jury members that they had the common-law authority to ignore the law and to instead rule according to their consciences. The jury subsequently acquitted Zenger, setting a precedent that led to increased debate about the importance of press freedom. Jury nullification has these glorious roots in people’s struggles for freedom from tyranny, yet today liberals tell us that a jury can’t sit in judgment of the law. If juries lose the right to sit in judgment of government, we are in danger of losing all our rights.

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Frank Miniter has floated the Amazon, run with the bulls of Pamplona, hunted everything from bear in Russia to elk with the Apache to kudu in the Kalahari, and has fly-fished everywhere from Alaska’s Kenai to Scotland’s River Spey to Japan’s freestone streams. Along the way he was taught to box by Floyd Patterson, spelunked into Pompey’s Cave, climbed everywhere from New York’s Gunks to the Rockies, and is currently learning Kenkojuko Karate with Sensei Masakazu Takahashi. He graduated from the oldest private military academy in the U.S., a place that still teaches honor and old-school gentlemanly conduct, and believes men need this book because the U.S. has lost its code of honor as enumerated by its Founding Fathers. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect GuideTM to Hunting and has won numerous awards for outdoor and conservation writing. He was a Senior Editor at Outdoor Life magazine and, currently, is the Executive Editor of American Hunter magazine.

A Declaration For Independents

A Declaration For Independents
What do you imagine you are "independent" from?
by John Hayward
07/03/2011

Independent voters are supposedly the key to American politics. The Democrat and Republican bases are thoughtlessly set in their ways, so a crucial population of swing voters decides national elections. Win over those free-thinking independents, while using carefully coded appeals to your base that won’t scare the indies away, and victory is yours.

The rising number of registered independents is taken as a measure of our political health. Politics is all about persuasion, so a hearty population of persuadable voters means the big races will become spirited contests. We’re told to take comfort from knowing that a presidential candidate can’t dominate the country with nothing but appeals to his loyal base.

What do these independent voters imagine they are “independent” from, as citizens?

Barack Obama won the White House with plenty of independent support in 2008. Now your right to choose your own health insurance is gone, perhaps forever. It died in the middle of the night, with the passage of ObamaCare.

If the independent voters of 2008 were counting on the courts to rein in the worst excesses of a health-care power grab, they have been thus far disappointed. Four courts have been willing to manufacture absurd decisions that suggest the Commerce Clause gives Congress nearly limitless power to compel citizens to make purchases in certain “essential” markets, which we enter by merely living.

If independents thought their Congressional representatives would contribute to shaping a health-insurance takeover that served the best interests of all Americans, they were played for fools. Those “representatives” were bought off with backroom deals. Crucial votes were purchased from Congressmen that most Americans will never have a chance to vote for, or against.

The only way to become “independent” from ObamaCare is to secure one of those priceless waivers, awarded to favored companies and unions through a permanent bureaucracy that never faces judgment from the voters. Good luck with that.

If you voted for Obama in 2008, you threw your independence away. It doesn’t matter what you call yourself, or how liberated you pretend your intellect is. There will be no more appeals to your fine non-partisan judgment in the matter of health insurance, because the takeover is complete, and your opinion doesn’t matter very much now. It will be courted again, very briefly, when ObamaCare’s mounting failure leads to calls for single-payer socialized medicine… and then you will never be consulted again, until the entire system collapses, and you are left with the task of building something from the ruins.

If you want your independence back, you must burn Obama and the Democrats out of Congress in 2012, in the kind of historic landslide that produces entire chapters in the history books of the future.

It’s good to make the Republicans earn your vote. By all means, play hard to get. It is appropriate to approach all candidates with suspicion, and make them win your trust. In the end, however, if you leave government in the hands of Democrats, more of your “independence” will be consumed. They have promised as much. They claim it will be for your own good. They will require you to ignore years of devastating failure to trust them again, because the purity of their intentions eclipses all practical considerations.

How can you entertain the appeals of a party that promotes government control, and dependence, as a virtue… but still posture as an “independent” voter?

In a nutshell, you have one party that has often broken its promises, and diminished your freedom… versus one party that takes your freedom away when it keeps its promises. The freedom-devouring type of promise is always easier for politicians to keep. People keep forgetting that.

Transform the Republicans with your uncompromising demands for independence, and you’ll eventually transform the Democrats, too. It will be difficult, but not impossible. Liberty lives in the space between “difficult” and “impossible.”

It’s a shame things have come to this. You should have two - or more! - choices who make serious appeal to people with independent minds, as we select the leadership of a government that respects our liberty, no matter how the election turns out. But that is not the choice before you now, and pretending otherwise is foolish and destructive.

Independent voters are a fraud, unless they are also independent citizens. Such a citizen accepts the possibility of failure, because risk is impossible without it, and only children live without risk. He embraces uncertainty, provided he has the freedom to meet it, for opportunity does not exist in the presence of absolute certainty. He looks for wealth in the free market, because wealth requires choice, and true choice is a product of competition.

A free-thinking citizen accepts the State as a necessary expense, but recoils when the process of funding the state through taxation is used as an instrument to shape the population. Any politician who describes the tax code as a machine to engineer “fairness” should instantly disqualify himself from consideration by independent voters. What “independent” person is willing to accept someone else’s notion of “fairness,” imposed by force?

The independent citizen rejects the concept of “entitlement,” for entitlements are claims against the liberty of others. He does not wish to live in a maze of subsidies and penalties, because these things replace the judgment of free citizens with the agenda of government. He does not live off crumbs of freedom hidden within thousands of pages of laws, which few citizens understand.

He doesn’t tolerate an activist government which targets other citizens as enemies, not just because he knows that one day, he might become the target… but because he is not interested in becoming a conscript to ideological warfare.

An independent citizen tolerates government, but demands freedom. No one should be allowed to pretend we are poised halfway between liberty and dependence, with both courses equally open before us. It is time to either declare your independence, or stop talking about it.

Email, Hate Mail and Comments from Readers

Email, Hate Mail and Comments from Readers
By John Ransom
7/3/2011

We had a shortage of liberals this week on the message boards and emails. But we have enough to make a scrum. So here’s “have at it” for this week’s edition of Email, Hate Mail and Comments from Readers.

Hal Donahue wrote: Bush the torturer's wars were conducted OFF the books but you knew that and economists say any defense spending over 3% damages the economy severely. Also, you are not counting homeland security and VA which are defense spending but you knew that. The principal cause of our fiscal malaise is the absurd conservative belief that the private sector could self regulate - it never has and never will. - in response to my column Report: Boomer Fiscal Policies Lead World to Cliff

Dear Hal,

Here’s what Obama said about it: "That is why this budget looks ahead ten years and accounts for spending that was left out under the old rules – and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price." Of course, Obama didn’t even get that budget passed despite having a majority in both the House and the Senate.

Instead, Obama ran EVERYTHING off the books didn’t he?

Obama still hasn’t gotten a budget passed. That’s why his House budget chair John Spratt (D-SC5) who said “If you can't budget, you can't govern” lost his safe seat in Congress after serving in it since 1983.

Go ‘Bama!

And no, economists don’t say that defense spending over 3 percent damages the economy. Defense spending has rarely been near 3 percent. Most economists believe, as do I, that the economy can accommodate about 5 percent of GDP for defense spending.

Seriously: You expect us to believe that when the government was involved in half the mortgage transactions that led up to the mortgage meltdown that the problem was regulatory neglect?

Only liberals would believe that you can solve a problem with the federal government being half-involved in the mortgage business by getting them all the way involved in the mortgage business.

Geesh.

Lawrence wrote: I believe that race card has been played SO MUCH (along with the IT'S BUSH'S FAULT card) that there is nothing recognizable on the face of that card anymore. No one is even sure what they mean now when either is played. - in response to my column Rabbit Fights Back: Rabbit 1 Obama 0

Dear Lawrence,

Tell that to Hal Donahue. Although I do think you’re right in this sense: Hal doesn’t really know what he’s saying.

Russell wrote: I'm not in favor of the government setting the standard. But ... I bought four houses between 1969 and 1984 (sold three) -all with 20% down. Had that requirement for some skin in the game been maintained, we wouldn't have had so many homeowners who couldn't afford the houses they bought. And people wouldn't have been so quick to walk away. -in response to my column A Farewell to Homes: A Drama by Barney Frank

Dear Russell,

Good for you, but no matter how tempting it is to say “Hey 20 percent down is a good idea,” we have to tell the government to back off and let the people with the money to loan decide how much of a down payment they’ll accept.

If we don’t, the next thing you know they’ll be telling us that we have to buy health insurance; that we can only use certain types of light bulbs; that wind power is morally superior to coal-generated power; that we have to buy electric cars; that there is some global calamity called the Man-Bear-Pig that is threatening the world and only the collective action of a world government putting us all in collectives can avert it.

Big Jack II wrote: Timmy boy will be OK, he'll just go back to one of the big banks. If not there, back to the FED. Do you think we got our money’s worth out of him? We were told we had to have him, there was nobody else who could do the job, WHAT a SNOWJOB. - in response to my column HeadsRoll: Geithner Out, Or Maybe Never Mind

Dear Big Jack,

The One needed a Mini Me with a blow-dry hair-do to gather up the bankers into the Borg.

Now that his work has been done, he’s free to go.

Chicaree wrote: Giving tax breaks has proven to be a real deficit producer. George Bush proved that. - in response to my column Why Obama Must Raise Taxes

Dear Chicaree,

Oh, I thought Ronald Reagan proved that…or John Kennedy proved that.

I think if you asked people they’d be quite happy to go back to the golden days of Bush or Reagan, when the economy was at or on its way to full employment and the deficit, while contentious, seemed containable.

Federal revenue set a record under George Bush at $2.7trillion in 2007, with a fairly small- comparatively speaking- deficit of $170 billion. Obama’s running deficits of $1.5 trillion every year based on tax policies crafted by Democrat majorities.

As Christopher Chantrill writes at governmentspending.com:

Nobody, in 1900,speculating on the future of government, could have imagined the astonishing growth and scope of government in the 20th century. Nor would they have imagined that, for many people, this gigantic government would seem the very essence of efficiency, compassion, and modernity. But the reason that government has got so big is not, as many claim, the weight of armaments and wars. Instead the money goes for health care, education, pensions, and welfare programs. You can see how it all happened in the United States in the charts below.

Lon wrote: This is unimaginative, redundant and exceedingly poor writing. Could not finish it. - in response to my column Why Obama Must Raise Taxes

Dear Lon,

I appreciate the criticism. I also appreciate that you are one of the droves of liberals who comes back and reads me- incomplete or not- every single day. My family, my publisher and my advertisers thank you.

Thanks also to everyone else who generally makes it to the second page!

We’re growing fast and we thank you for making it happen.

As always, if you like this column, forward it to a friend.

Happy Fourth! See you there.

JR
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.

Mr Hypocrite

Oh Brother... Obama Says "Government Has to Start Living Within Its Means"
His words mean nothing.
by Jim Hoft

07/02/2011 Shameless. Barack Obama increased the national debt by over $3 trillion in just over 2 years. Obama tripled the deficit in one year with his failed stimulus plan.



The Obama deficit this year may reach $1.65 trillion. (The Captain's Comments)

Barack Obama and Democrats also added over One Trillion Dollars to the Federal Budget in the last 4 years.



That's at least a 30% increase in federal spending in just 3 years.

To top if off, Obama has consistently demonized Republicans for pushing spending cuts.

Today Obama told the American people that he really does want to reduce the deficit and that "government needs to start living within its means."

From the White House website: click here.

Right now, there are a lot of folks who are still struggling with the effects of the recession. They’re wondering how they’d deal with an unexpected expense if their car breaks down. They’re worried about layoffs. They’re not sure if they can help their kids pay for college. And for many families, these challenges were around long before the recession hit in 2007.

I ran for President because I believed in an America where ordinary folks could get ahead; where if you worked hard, you could have a better life. That’s been my focus since I came into office, and that has to be our focus now. It’s one of the reasons why we’re working to reduce our nation’s deficit. Government has to start living within its means, just like families do.

We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.
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Well, what should we expect - He Lies!

Time’s Orwellian Story on U.S. Constitution Refuted

Time’s Orwellian Story on U.S. Constitution Refuted
By Ken Blackwell
7/2/2011

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Ken Klukowski

Time magazine’s cover story shows the U.S. Constitution and asks, “Does it still matter?” Reading this story, we kept waiting for Emmanuel Goldstein to show up for the Two Minutes of Hate. It was difficult to discern whether we were reading Time, or Orwells’ 1984.

It portrays the Constitution as an outmoded document that we should ignore to whatever extent is expedient to pursue someone’s vision of a better society: “We cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to a future with a sensible health care system, a globalized economy, and evolving sense of civil and political rights.”

The story shows all sorts of poll questions that present a false choice, such as, “The 14th Amendment says that any person born in the U.S. automatically becomes a U.S. citizen… Should [it] be revised?” The Citizenship Clause says no such thing, because it adds that anyone “not subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. is not a citizen.

That’s why children of foreign ambassadors, prisoner soldiers and heads of state born here do not become citizens. The question is how broad that “jurisdiction” clause is. Could Congress exclude illegal aliens? It’s an active debate in legal circles, with no clear answer.

Instead, the questions should have included: “Are you more interested in the Constitution today that you were four years ago?” “Do you agree or disagree with candidates discussing the Constitution more in their campaign speeches this year?” “Are you now aware that the Constitution only vests the federal government with power of specific areas of life, leaving the states sovereign to decide all other issues?”

Or questions on enduring constitutional principles. “Do you agree with the Supreme Court’s 1803 pronouncement that any law contrary to the Constitution is null and void?” “Every government officer (including every judge) takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Should they apply its original meaning to current challenges?”

Does the Constitution still matter? Look at huge crowds of Americans cheering at rallies, whether it’s a spending protest or a pro-life rally. It matters to them, and they vote.

The story was so riddled with distortions that it obscured its message. For example, it says we must raise the debt ceiling because, “the idea that we can default on our debt is not only reckless; it’s probably unconstitutional.” It twists a provision from the 14th Amendment that has nothing to do with the debt ceiling.

The reality is, revenue government collects every month so vastly exceeds our debt payments that we could easily meet our monthly obligations. We would just have to cut discretionary spending on other programs. But it’s deceptive to suggest that not raising the ceiling automatically causes default, and it’s wrong to suggest it’s unconstitutional.

The most disappointing part of the article mischaracterizes the Obamacare legal fight. It says Obamacare’s individual mandate requiring you to buy health insurance is constitutional because government takes your money in taxes and requires you to buy car insurance.

The writer obliviously ignores that the Constitution expressly creates a federal government of enumerated powers. The feds can tax you because of the Taxing Clause of the Constitution (though even then only four types of taxes are legal—not the mandate). And states have authority to make you buy car insurance under state police power, but if the feds required it, such a law would be illegal because the feds have no police power.

Since there is no Healthcare Clause in the Constitution, the feds try cramming it in the Commerce Clause. That’s the whole fight: Whether Congress can control your personal decisions whenever Congress declares such decisions impact interstate commerce.

Every decision in your life has some tangential relationship to interstate commerce. Does that mean the Constitution allows the government to control your every decision? It makes a mockery of the concept of limited government.

The story concludes, “The Constitution serves the nation; the nation does not serve the Constitution.” The connotation is that we shouldn’t be too slavish in our fidelity to the Constitution.

Like the rest of this article, its conclusion misses the point. The Constitution serves the American people as an unbreakable constraint on those in power, dictating their duties and the limits on their authority. The Constitution serves We the People by requiring every government official to take an oath to obey its every word.

The picture art at the outset of Time’s story showed the Constitution cut in dozens of narrow vertical strips. Clearly it had been run through a paper shredder.

Evidently this is wishful thinking for some on the Far Left. The only problem is that it’s false. Interest in the Constitution is resurgent, and that renewed interest is the key to America’s renewal in our third century.

Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski are fellows at the American Civil Rights Union, on faculty at Liberty University, and authors of Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.

Top 10 Obama Attacks on Capitalism

Top 10 Obama Attacks on Capitalism
by Human Events
07/02/2011

President Obama occasionally cozies up to the corporate world, especially during fund-raising time, and delivers a modicum of support for business. But have no doubt about it, this is a man who honors the power of government over the marketplace. Here are the Top 10 Obama Attacks on Capitalism:

1. Spread wealth around: This famous utterance—“I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody”—to Joe the Plumber during the 2008 presidential race, remains the saying that most succinctly sums up Obama’s worldview, that of a community organizer, which is that accumulated wealth is to be reviled and rectified through redistribution. Nothing could be more antagonistic to entrepreneurship, free markets or business investment than to have the government seize the rewards of sound economic decisions in order to try and engineer social equality.

2. Capital-gains “fairness”: During a 2008 presidential debate, Obama gave us another plank in his Socialist mindset by explaining his view on tax-policy fairness. When asked by moderator Charlie Gibson whether he would favor a cut in the capital gains rate if it led to higher revenues as it did during previous administrations, Obama said: “Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” Seizing higher percentages of earnings from those who made wise investments is preferable to Obama even if it means less tax dollars for his precious government programs.

3. ObamaCare by any means: When battling for his signature health care legislation, Obama saw fit to carry out daily attacks on insurance companies. Even the liberal Washington Post called him out, with an article reporting: “The near-daily demonization of the insurance industry is an attempt by the White House to play to Americans' anxieties about the health-care system.” Typical of his attacks was a speech containing 22 castigations against the insurance industry, such as, “How much higher do premiums have to rise, before we do something about it?" We are still waiting, Mr. President.

4. Bondholders equal speculators: When negotiating the bailout of General Motors, Obama called the automaker’s bondholders “speculators” who were "refusing to sacrifice like everyone else." Apparently Obama’s definition of shared sacrifice didn’t apply to his campaign-backers at the United Auto Workers, which were handed partial ownership of the company saved from bankruptcy by taxpayer dollars.

5. Chamber of Commerce attack: Obama demonized the Chamber of Commerce during the midterm election campaign, accusing the business group, with no proof, of using foreign money to influence the elections. “Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations. So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections,” Obama said on the stump. “And they won’t tell you where the money for the ads comes from.” Going into campaign mode against corporate America with such silliness even had the New York Times complaining.

6. Class-warfare tactics: In January 2010, Obama stumped for the Massachusetts Senate campaign of Martha Coakley, asking the crowd to make a false choice: “When the vote comes on taxes, and there’s a choice between giving more tax breaks to the wealthiest few and corporations that ship American jobs overseas or giving them to the middle class and businesses that create jobs here, who’s going to be on your side?” We all know how well that campaign rhetoric worked, don’t we, Sen. Brown?

7. Student-loan penalty for private sector: Obama laid out a new student loan program in his 2010 State of the Union address where those who choose a career in public service (working for the government) get special treatment over those who enter the private sector. "Let's tell another 1 million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10% of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years, and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service.” Do we really need more incentives for government workers?

8. Stop making money: It just pains the President when someone is successful in the financial world. During his campaign to pass the Dodd-Frank financial reform monstrosity, Obama let his true feelings show: "We're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money.”

9. Boeing silence: That Obama doesn’t want to talk about the National Labor Relations Board’s Boeing action speaks volumes. The Obama-packed NLRB suit to deny Boeing’s attempt to open a new plant, creating jobs, in South Carolina because it is a right-to-work state strikes at the heart of our capitalist system. But when asked about the ruling, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “We do not get involved in particular enforcement matters of independent agencies.”

10. Leave corporate America: Michelle Obama, during the 2008 presidential race, described her and her husband’s philosophy on the superiority of public service over the business world: “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do. Don't go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse.” Because, you know, community activists are so much more valuable than corporate leaders.
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To read another Human Events 'Top Ten List', click here.

Agenda 21: Conspiracy Theory or Real Threat?

Agenda 21: Conspiracy Theory or Real Threat?
By Rachel Alexander
7/2/2011

Americans are so focused on Congress and Obama at the federal level of government right now that most are overlooking the socialism creeping in at the local level through Agenda 21. It is easy to overlook local government since people are saturated with too much information in the internet age. Compounding this is the fact that Agenda 21 is a dull topic, and it becomes understandable how it has been able to fly mostly under the radar since 1992, slowly working its way into our cities and counties.

Agenda 21, which reportedly means an agenda for the 21st century, is a United Nations program launched in 1992 for the vague purpose of achieving global "sustainable development." Congress never approved Agenda 21, although Presidents Obama, Clinton and George H.W. Bush have all signed Executive Orders implementing it. 178 other world leaders agreed to it in 1992 at the Rio Summit. Since then, the U.N. has mostly bypassed national governments, using Agenda 21’s International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (“ICLEI”) to make agreements directly with local governments. ICLEI's U.S. presence has grown to include agreements with over 600 cities, towns and counties here, which are now copying the land use plans prescribed in Agenda 21.

Some conservatives are trying to attract attention to Agenda 21 by labeling it a secret conspiracy to create a one world government. While that will wake some people up, it will turn off others. It does not matter whether it is a conspiracy or not. There are people on the left side of the political spectrum - who may even believe they have good intentions - working together to spread their vision for society worldwide. Whether they meet in dark rooms or openly in public meetings is irrelevant; they are having great success convincing local governments in the U.S. to adopt their socialist and extreme environmentalist programs under the guise of feel-good buzz words. Left wing billionaire George Soros's Open Society has provided $2,147,415 to ICLEI. Van Jones' Green for All and the Tides Foundations’ Apollo Alliance are also reportedly ICLEI contributors.

Agenda 21 ostensibly seeks to promote "sustainability" (the latest revisionist word for "environmentalism," since Americans have learned too many negative things about environmentalism). "Sustainability" is an amorphous concept that can be interpreted to an extreme degree that would regulate and restrict many parts of our lives. When will the level of carbon emissions be low enough? How much must we reduce our consumption of fossil fuels? Preserving the environment is a dubious science, and what steps are really necessary to protect the environment are anyone's guess.

Agenda 21 promotes European socialist goals that will erode our freedoms and liberties. Most of its vague, lofty sounding phrases cause the average person’s eyes to glaze over, making it easier to sneak into our communities. The environmentalist goals include atmospheric protection, combating pollution, protecting fragile environments, and conserving biological diversity. Agenda 21 goes well beyond environmentalism. Other broad goals include combating poverty, changing consumption patterns, promoting health, and reducing private property ownership, single-family homes, private car ownership, and privately owned farms. It seeks to cram people into small livable areas and institute population control. There is a plan for “social justice” that will redistribute wealth.

Once these vague, overly broad goals are adopted, they are being interpreted to allow massive amounts of new, overreaching regulations. Joyce Morrison from Eco-logic Powerhouse says Agenda 21 is so broad it will affect the way we "live, eat, learn and communicate." Berit Kjos, author of Brave New Schools, warns that Agenda 21 "regulation would severely limit water, electricity, and transportation - even deny human access to our most treasured wilderness areas, it would monitor all lands and people. No one would be free from the watchful eye of the new global tracking and information system." Even one of the authors of Agenda 21 has admitted that it "…calls for specific changes in the activities of all people…" These steps are already being enacted little by little at the local levels.

Since the U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and uses more energy than any other country, it stands to lose the most from environmental regulations. The goal of "sustainability," which comes down to using government to heavy-handedly accomplish vague goals of caring for the earth, goes contrary to our free market capitalism. Even more unfair, struggling third world countries and communist countries that cannot financially afford to comply with the onerous environmental regulations will continue their high levels of fossil fuel consumption, and the U.S. will be forced by U.N. regulators to conserve even more to make up for those countries.

Obama signed Executive Order 13575 earlier this month, establishing a "White House Rural Council" prescribed by Agenda 21. The amount of government Obama has directed to administer this is staggering. Obama committed thousands of federal employees in 25 federal agencies to promote sustainability in rural areas, completely bypassing Congressional approval. Some of these agencies are unrelated to rural areas. The agencies will entice local communities into adopting Agenda 21 programs by providing them millions of dollars in grants. Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writing for Canada Free Press analyzed the order and wrote, "it establishes unchecked federal control into rural America in education, food supply, land use, water use, recreation, property, energy, and the lives of 16% of the U.S. population."

Tea party groups, talk show host Glenn Beck, and organizations like Freedom Advocates, Catholic Investigative Agency and Sovereignty International are working hard to expose Agenda 21, but there is only so much a few can do. Some local governments have become aware of what Agenda 21 is really about and dropped out of ICLEI this year. The Carroll County Board of Commissioners, Montgomery County in Pennsylvania and the city of Edmond, Oklahoma have all withdrawn their participation.

It will be difficult to defeat Agenda 21 because it requires changing the attitudes of over 600 separate localities across the U.S. Ideally, a conservative president could roll back the executive orders implementing it, but considering Republican President H.W. Bush was a disappointment in this area that may be too much to hope for. If Republicans take over Congress they could challenge the huge power grab Obama made with Executive Order 13575 and ban Agenda 21 in the U.S. For now, local activists must champion this issue, much like Texans for Accountable Government has done, educating local boards and commissions and serving on them. Agenda 21 is a tedious and overwhelming topic, and until it can be explained in an easy-to-understand way that interests the average American, it will be tough to beat back.

What if President Obama Had Said This Instead?

What if President Obama Had Said This Instead?
By David Limbaugh
7/1/2011

What if -- instead of blaming Republicans, big oil, the "wealthy" and corporate jets -- President Obama had used his recent news conference to say the following?

"Look, I've tried my solutions, and they've had ample time to work. If they were going to work, they would have done so by now. So I'm going to ask my party to join with Republicans in focusing on the national debt instead of ginning up envy, jealousy and animosity among people who earn different amounts of money. I'm going to prove that I share the American people's fear about this debt crisis and that I recognize there will have to be structural reform to entitlements. It may involve some cuts in benefits, but if we don't do this now, eventually everyone will lose his benefits, because Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are headed for insolvency -- and much sooner than we thought.

"Endless government spending, I now see, will not stimulate economic growth. I should have accepted that before based on the historical evidence, but my professors kept insisting that Keynesian pump priming would work if we would just spend enough money. But $800 billion wasn't enough? Come on, fellas, whom do we think we're fooling here?

"Accordingly, I'm also going to get real about discretionary spending cuts because trillion-dollar deficits are hardly sustainable. Do the math; you people aren't idiots. In order to close the gap between revenues and expenditures, I also promise to quit demagoguing the tax issue. Though I couldn't see it before, we have a dynamic economy, and I won't be able to raise appreciable revenues by raising tax rates, especially on the highest-income producers and small businesses, which, incidentally, provide so many jobs for Americans.

"Continuing to malign the wealthy and big oil -- as much fun as it is -- will simply not generate any revenue. And about these cuts in discretionary spending, I'm talking about non-defense spending. While my philosophy inclines me to drastically cut defense spending, I must admit that I'm enjoying the luxury of deploying our military assets in various places around the world, even where the United States has no discernible national interest. All this takes money, as did killing bin Laden, which, as you may recall, I did -- virtually single-handedly.

"Moreover, though I promised that the Affordable Care Act would bend the health care cost curve down, I can now see, based on recent scorings by the Congressional Budget Office and other things that have occurred since we crammed the bill through Congress against the will of the American people (e.g.,1,400 waivers), that my bill will in fact increase costs. I don't deny that I'd prefer to keep this flagrantly unconstitutional bill in place because my ideology teaches that government is better-equipped to micromanage health care decisions than are millions of American consumers in a free market who have no earthly idea how to come together on reducing health care costs, let alone choose their medical treatment. But for now, I'll agree to shelve this boondoggle and forgo other recreational federal spending until we make some progress on reducing the debt.

"Speaking of recreational spending, I'll also have to temporarily back off my demand for high-speed rail, even though I enjoy dictating to the states as much as I do to the American people.

"Alas, the most difficult lark to abandon will be my various quixotic renewable energy ruses. If I'm going to be serious about changing course, I'm going to have to get my boot off the neck of domestic oil producers. With the other boot on BP, it's difficult to maintain my balance. This bold action is likely to depress the demand for mo-peds -- and perhaps even spoil Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's scheme to get us out of our gas guzzlers and onto bike paths -- but shared sacrifice means czars have to take it in the shorts, too.

"I'm sorry for blaming George W. Bush for everything. My goodness, I've been in charge of the executive branch for almost three years, so it's probably high time I acknowledged ownership of this economy. Not only that, but despite what I've been saying since I took office, I did help create this mess. My party was instrumental in pushing affordable housing on everyone, which was the biggest culprit in our financial meltdown. I was in the Senate for much of this time, and I went along with Barney Frank and others in obstructing remedial action proposed by President Bush.

"But what's done is done. There is a way out of this mess. It is to quit expanding the federal government and smothering the private sector and to implement comprehensive reforms substantially equivalent to Rep. Paul Ryan's road map to prosperity. I'm asking you to join with me in supporting Ryan's plan and getting America back on the road to economic recovery and a sound fiscal condition. Thank you."
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To read another article by David Limbaugh, click here.

Oil Shortage Obama's "Man-Caused" Disaster

Oil Shortage Obama's "Man-Caused" Disaster
By Bob Beauprez
7/2/2011

I was asked by the National Journal to weigh in on the following question for their Energy & Environment blog:

"What precedent is this administration setting by tapping into the reserves at a time of ongoing unrest in the Middle East and seemingly sustained high oil prices?"

Here is my answer:

Precedence? You ask what precedent the administration is setting by tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for only the third time in our nation's history? I'll tell you. They are setting a precedent as easily the most blatantly political administration ever in American history.

I'll offer just a few examples of the evidence:

1. This is the administration with a publicly stated objective to "boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."

2. This is the administration that cancelled existing leases on millions of acres of federal land and banned development in vast amounts of reserves both on and off-shore.

3. This is the administration that was ordered by a federal court to lift an ill-conceived moratorium on drilling in the gulf, and then was found in contempt with a "determined disregard" of the court's ruling to start issuing permits.

4. This is the administration that turned "a regulatory firehose" on US business and the energy industry in particular with 29 new major regulations and 172 major policy rules finalized or proposed in its first 22 months.

5. This is the administration who lied to congress in March, 2011 by claiming production in the gulf "remained at an all-time high, and we expect that it will continue." However the Government's own Energy Information Agency had already reported a decline of 300,000 bpd in the first year following the administration's gulf moratorium fiasco and projected a total decline in production of 35% by late summer, 2012.

6. This is the administration whose policies have caused revenues from onshore oil and gas leasing in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to plunge more than 80%, and total acreage leased to shrink to the lowest level ever.

7. This is the administration that Steve Forbes correctly labeled as having the "most anti-oil and gas record in U.S. history."

8. This is the administration that promised that energy cost would "skyrocket" under their plan of onerous regulation.

And, now having waged war on the energy industry and American consumer's wallets for more than two years; that is exactly what has happened. Despite some recent relief, prices for gasoline are almost double what they were when Obama took office, and due to new regulations being imposed by the Obama Administration, analysts are warning that electricity rates could jump 40-60% over the next few years.

The crisis that prompted Barack Obama to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve didn't come from a foreign enemy or a natural disaster, as was the case the only two other times that the SPR has been drained. This was entirely a crisis of Obama's own making. It even has a name – "Operation Re-Election."

The sorry state of the economic recovery and kitchen table issues overwhelm any other issue on the minds of voters. So, Obama and his Central Planners will pull out all the stops in trying to hoodwink the voters one more time; even if that means creating a national security vulnerability by draining the SPR in exchange for a few cents of relief at the pump. This isn't the first time this administration has been shameless, and with a year and a half until the election we're likely in for a few more examples.

The UN's Climate of Desperation

The UN's Climate of Desperation
By David Rothbard
7/2/2011

This article was co-authored by Craig Rucker

As the UN wrapped up its recent climate conference in Bonn, Germany, talks organizer Christiana Figueres proclaimed that climate change is the “the most important negotiation the world has ever faced.” Faced with real problems – financial meltdowns, unemployment, war and genuine human suffering – the world no longer agrees.

It’s a good thing human productivity doesn’t threaten the global thermostat the way the UN would have us believe. If it were, we’d be cooked. Countries rich and poor are backing away from commitments they made years ago during rosier economic times, before the public became aware of Climategate, renewable energy costs and genuine debate.

The Kyoto Protocol, the only binding international agreement signed since the global warming scare began, expires after 2012. Canada, Russia and Japan have publicly declared they will not renew; China and the United States never signed it; and the US has made it plain it is not about to. And poor countries are becoming less enamored about signing on, as they realize hard economic times mean there will be little climate “mitigation” and “restitution” money coming their way from (formerly) rich countries.

Even die-hard warmists increasingly recognize that bureaucratic solutions hatched at these conferences are rife with waste, fraud and abuse. They may enrich a few, at the expense of everyone else, especially the poor. But they are powerless to control Earth’s climate.

In March, German investigators reported that 850 million Euros disappeared, when shady companies swarmed into carbon trading, emissions and energy businesses. Criminal enterprises raked in tens of millions, fended off regulators with delaying tactics, and then announced bankruptcy or vanished. An Italian sting operation resulted in arrests of wind farm developers who billed the country for subsidies, but never produced a kilowatt of electricity.

London’s liberal Guardian newspaper was aghast to learn that the World Bank’s Biocarbon Fund had arranged to pay European “entrepreneurs” $1 million to establish a system under which 60,000 Kenyans would restrict themselves to farming under rigidly controlled, inefficient, “sustainable” techniques. For that they will receive $1.4 million over 20 years.

That’s right, the beneficent World Bank will enrich more Europeans, so that 60,000 Kenyans can receive $23.83 apiece annually for 20 years of drudgery, poverty and misery: a princely $1.19 a year!

Even the European Union finally understands how little energy deprivation and bureaucratic dictates affect the climate. “It is not enough for the EU to simply sign up for another commitment period,” EU climate representative Jurgen Lefevere admitted. “We only represent 11% of global emissions.”

Burning fossil fuels contributes only a fraction of total annual atmospheric carbon dioxide buildup, and the EU contributes just 11% of that. The EU’s commitment to slashing CO2 emissions by 20% invites corruption, has no control over Chinese or Indian emissions, and has no effect on the climate.

The biggest divide evident in Bonn was between the USA and large emerging economies. Even Obama administration officials who are thoroughly committed to manmade global warming catastrophe claims finally recognize the fraud problem. In Bonn the US insisted that all countries subject their emission reduction claims to verification.

However, China will accept only an agreement that lacks verification – and thereby guarantees the right to cheat. Meanwhile, the Chinese are happy to be “the world’s leader” in manufacturing wind turbines – 95% which they gladly sell to guilt-ridden western countries, while they build a new coal-fired power plant every week.

China and other nations support the notion that prosperous countries owe the world restitution for the “sin” of engaging in the Industrial Revolution and becoming prosperous. We can only hope some nation’s representative will have the courage to remind China and its fellow climate travelers that the West never forced them to spend fifty years mired in Communism, bureaucracy and stagnation.

While it is encouraging that the global warming camp no longer has things entirely its own way, celebration would be premature. For all the gnashing of teeth and complaining about corporate influence we hear from global warming bureaucrats and campaigners, the truth is that today the warmists are the establishment.

Billions are being redistributed to researchers, developing nations, carbon speculators, alternative energy investors and other carbon profiteers – who would like to turn billions into trillions. Pity the poor carbon traders whose markets expire with Kyoto. Not all have their villa in the sun yet.

But rest assured, they will do whatever is necessary to get their villas. Big Warming will not surrender its hold on Western taxpayers without a fight.

The warmist camp plans to retake the initiative at the December UN conference in Durban, South Africa. It intends to turn back the clock to the time when the media would attribute any weather or nature event to global warming, without question or critical examination. Al Gore’s recent Rolling Stone diatribe essentially calls on the media to censure climate disaster skeptics and adopt a one-sided manmade warming narrative.

The New York Times may go along, but the huge and growing alternative media will not. This week’s Washington, DC Heartland Institute international conference of climate alarm skeptics dramatically reinforced the lack of evidence for manmade Armageddon, and the disastrous consequences for poor and industrialized nations alike of staying the current UN course.

Many believe the last-minute appearance by dozens of world leaders crippled the Copenhagen climate conference. But with the big names absent from Cancun and now Bonn, the UN wants them back.

Ms. Figueres capped the Bonn conference with a call for “high-level political attention.” If she succeeds, just imagine the mischief a gathering of Heads of State, foreign ministers, bureaucrats, researchers, green campaigners and carbon profiteers can do at an African beach resort.

Then imagine how nearly impossible it will be to repair the harm they inflict. Action must be taken now to avert such a result.

Why the Civil Service Is No Way to Run a Business

Why the Civil Service Is No Way to Run a Business
by Michael Barone
06/30/2011

What's the fair way to run a large organization? That's a question that is squarely, and interestingly, raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, a Supreme Court case decided last week.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs, women who work or worked for Wal-Mart, were seeking to bring a class action charging pervasive discrimination against women. The 5-4 Supreme Court majority ruled that the group was too diverse to be given class-action status.

Ginsburg partially disagreed, saying that all female employees and former employees of Wal-Mart might have enough in common to form a coherent class with common interests and entitled to common remedies. (We'll leave aside the fact that much of the money in these cases ends up with the lawyers.)

"A system of delegated discretion," she wrote, can be the subject of a class-action lawsuit "when it produces discriminatory outcomes."

There was no disagreement that Wal-Mart's management practices are "a system of delegated discretion." Wal-Mart store managers, as Justice Antonin Scalia explained in his majority opinion, have considerable discretion in deciding whom to hire and whom to promote.

The company, which employs some 1.4 million people in this country, is proud that it tends to promote from within, and it evidently holds its managers responsible for results that it famously monitors extremely closely.

It is hardly necessary to add that this formula was been successful. Wal-Mart is enormously profitable. And I don't think I'm the only one who has found Wal-Mart greeters and sales people to be friendly and helpful every time I've shopped there.

But this is not a fair way to run a business, Ginsburg said, because women hold 70 percent of the company's hourly jobs but only 33 percent of its management positions. Women are paid less on average than men in every region, and the salary gap between men and women widens over the years.

All of which provides, Ginsburg concluded, an "inference of discrimination." The fact that many women these days freely choose less demanding work in return for more family and free time surely couldn't have anything to do with it.

The conclusion I draw is that Ginsburg thinks the only fair way to run a large organization is the way government runs civil service.

All jobs should be numerically classified to eliminate "arbitrary and subjective criteria." Promotions should be determined by written tests or seniority, not by managers choosing "on the basis of their own subjective interpretations."

Managers should understand that they will face harsh scrutiny if they don't hire and promote equal numbers of men and women and pay them all the same. Better just to figure out how to make your gender quotas and avoid any trouble.

Of course, anyone with experience in the real world can tell you that an organization run this way wouldn't be as efficient as Wal-Mart. It wouldn't do as good a job of satisfying consumers' wants. Its employees would probably not be as friendly and helpful.

If you doubt that, think back over the years about your experiences in your local department of motor vehicles. Only the most strenuous efforts by local officials, like former Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, gets a DMV operating with anything close to Wal-Mart efficiency.

The folks that concocted this lawsuit against Wal-Mart want, in effect, to model the private sector of the economy on the civil service. That's why they took on the largest private-sector company of them all.

Their motives are similar to those of feminists who, in the 1970s, pushed for "comparable worth" legislation, under which bureaucrats would decide what each job was really worth and what each worker should be paid.

We're better off if private firms allow managers to use "subjective criteria." Which is to say, the human judgment we all use in everyday life to judge the performance of others. Sometimes those judgments turn out to be wrong, but on balance they're more reliable than rigid civil-service criteria.

All of which is recognized by liberals who care about government performance, like education reformers who want to give principals more discretion to weed out bad teachers.

Or, as Elaine Kamarck, head of Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative, told me in the 1990s, "No rational person would choose civil service as the way to manage a large organization." Justice Ginsburg notwithstanding.
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To read another article by Michael Barone, click here.

N.Y. GOP, Supremes Join Cultural Assault

N.Y. GOP, Supremes Join Cultural Assault on Children and Common Sense
By Robert Knight
7/1/2011

The cultural sledgehammer that’s shattering basic decency in America keeps pounding away.

Our enemies must be delighted to see us disarm morally and still expect to be strong, free and prosperous. They know it doesn’t work that way.

This week, we’ve seen the Republican-controlled New York Senate grant legal recognition to “pretend marriage.” A Wall Street Journal photo makes that case: two women, one dressed as a groom, celebrate. Because marriage at its core is the union of male and female, a groomless or brideless wedding is an absurd counterfeit.

In a free country, you can pretend to be all sorts of things. But you should not be allowed to use the power of the law to force your delusions on others. The religious “exemptions” that helped sell the law will prove illusory as activists later sweep away any remaining resistance to this radical upheaval.

While New York legislators were busy sharpening legal knives to use against traditionalist schoolteachers, employers and institutions of all kinds, the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association struck down a California law that bars selling extremely violent videos to children.

In a 7 to 2 ruling on Monday, Antonin Scalia wrote that the law violates children’s First Amendment rights to buy interactive games in which they vicariously steal, and rape, torture, and decapitate people to score points. He did not put it that way, of course, in saying that the state had no compelling interest. He blew off studies showing that violent videos correlate to aggressive behavior in some children, and denied that reading about violence is different from a full-color, sound-filled, interactive depiction in which the children themselves commit the violence.

Justices Stephen Breyer and Clarence Thomas filed the only dissents, arguing that the law was intended to empower parents, not chip away at the First Amendment. The law targets adults who sell this junk to kids. It’s about curbing predators, not disempowering children.

In a concurring opinion, Sam Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, argued that the law should be struck down because of vagueness, but he also said this:

“The Court is far too quick to dismiss the possibility that the experience of playing video games (and the effects on minors of playing violent video games) may be very different from anything that we have seen before....

“In some of these games, the violence is astounding. Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement … dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy. Blood gushes, splatters, and pools. Severed body parts and gobs of human remains are graphically shown. In some games, points are awarded based, not only on the number of victims killed, but on the killing technique employed.

Hey, parents. How do you feel, knowing your daughters are growing up around boys immersed in this kind of material for hours each day? Not to worry. It’s just like reading Treasure Island.

Alito continues: “It also appears that there is no antisocial theme too base for some in the video-game industry to exploit. There are games in which a player can take on the identity and reenact the killings carried out by the perpetrators of the murders at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech.

“The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters; in another, the goal is to rape Native American women. There is a game in which players engage in ‘ethnic cleansing’ and can choose to gun down African-Americans, Latinos, or Jews. In still another game, players attempt to fire a rifle shot into the head of President Kennedy as his motorcade passes by the Texas School Book Depository.”

Scalia’s argument that children’s literature is often violent ignores the video medium’s visceral impact.

“Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore,” Scalia writes. “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed.” Yes, they are. But the kids hearing the story are not doing the killing and maiming.

As for interactivity, Scalia dismisses it this way: “The latter feature is nothing new: Since at least the publication of The Adventures of You: Sugarcane Island in 1969, young readers of choose-your-own adventure stories have been able to make decisions that determine the plot by following instructions about which page to turn to.”

So, deciding whether to take a certain path or different strategy is about the same as deciding whether to rape the woman in the video before or after decapitating her?

The Court’s opinion also dismissively notes that Congress once tried to do something about violent and suggestive comic books:

“Many in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s blamed comic books for fostering a ‘preoccupation with violence and horror’ among the young, leading to a rising juvenile crime rate. But efforts to convince Congress to restrict comic books failed.”

Yes, but the mere threat of legislation led to the industry’s Comics Code, which cleaned up comic books for years until the lid came off again in the ‘80s. That’s when ‘60s-addled adults decided they didn’t want to do the difficult work anymore of protecting children by enforcing even minimal cultural mores. As Boomers have aged, it’s no coincidence that our culture has become adult-centered with children suffering collateral damage.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, in a much-quoted 1949 dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago, famously wrote that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

Although the majority in that case rightly upheld free speech of those even with odious content, Jackson’s warning is worth repeating in light of the video ruling:

“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

The Constitution is the greatest political document in history, and the guarantor of our God-given rights. The First Amendment has proven utterly foundational to maintaining all of our freedoms. Exceptions should be few and necessary.

But in the hands of America’s elite lawmakers and jurists, the First Amendment is sometimes misapplied as a free pass for dysfunction and decadence.
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To read another article by Robert Knight, click here.

Unmasking the ‘International Community’

Unmasking the ‘International Community’
By Caroline Glick
7/1/2011

For many years, the Left in Israel and throughout the world has upheld the so-called “international community” as the arbiter of all things. From Israel’s right to exist to climate change, from American world leadership to genetically modified crops, the Left has maintained that the “international community” is the only body qualified to judge the truth, lawfulness, goodness and justice of all things.

Most of those who uphold this view see the United Nations as the embodiment of the “international community.”

US President Barack Obama has repeatedly made clear that his chief litmus test for the viability or desirability of a foreign policy is the support it garners in UN institutions.

Obama is so averse to acting against the will of the UN that he is trying to strong-arm Israel into making suicidal concessions to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority. Obama claims that if Israel agrees to accept indefensible borders, then he will be able to convince the Palestinians not to ask the UN to endorse Palestinian sovereignty in September. Since the success of the Palestinian initiative is entirely dependent on the US Security Council veto, by acting as he is, Obama is showing that he prefers sacrificing Israel’s future viability as a nation-state to standing up to the “will of the international community” as embodied by the UN.

Furthermore, in a bid to maintain faith with the UN Security Council resolution permitting the use of force in Libya to protect civilians, Obama has refused to articulate a clear goal for the US military involvement in Libya. The fact that the Security Council resolution essentially dooms NATO’s military intervention to strategic incoherence stalemate that can lead to the break-up of Libya is unimportant to the US president.

The only thing that is important is that the US abides by the limitations dictated by the UN Security Council resolution.

As to Libya, Obama’s decision to send US forces to Libya without congressional permission makes clear that from his perspective, the UN Security Council, rather than the US Congress, is the source of authority for US military action. To the extent that Congress calls for the president to act in a manner that is contrary to the UN Security Council, as far as Obama is concerned, it is the duty of the president to disregard Congress and obey the Security Council.

Given the totemic stature of the UN in the minds of the American president and the international Left, it is worth considering its nature.

A glance at UN affairs in recent days is revealing.

Last week UN members elected Qatar President of the General Assembly and Iran one of the body’s vice presidents. Both countries’ representatives will use their platform to advance their regimes’ anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western agendas.

As Prof. Anne Bayefsky noted in The Weekly Standard last week, their first order of business will be leading the Durban III conference that will take place in New York on the sidelines of September’s General Assembly meeting. The first Durban conference was of course the infamously racist and anti-Jewish UN conference in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. At Durban, Israel was singled out as the only racist, xenophobic country in the world and Jewish people were denied their right to national rights and self-determination. The conference ended three days before the jihadist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.

In addition to their anti-Jewish conference, the Qatari and Iranian leaders of the General Assembly will reliably advance a General Assembly resolution embracing Palestinian statehood and condemning Jewish statehood.

Perhaps anticipating its new leadership role in the “international community,” last weekend Iran hosted its first “World Without Terrorism Conference.” Speaking at the conference, Iran’s supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the September 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.

Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military – participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy. According to Iran’s Fars news agency, “In a written message... read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah, [Ban] Kimoon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference.”

According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had “approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years, and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions.”

When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary-General’s Office defended its position. Ban’s spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, “If we’re reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it.”

So as far as the UN’s highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran’s “counterterror” conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.

The new General Assembly vice president is not merely the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran’s UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation’s fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN’s Conference on Disarmament.

This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatened nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.

What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the “international community” is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US- and Western-funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.

Given the utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left’s kneejerk obeisance to it? From San Francisco to Chicago to Boston; from Stockholm to Paris to London, members of the international Left claim they support the victims of tyranny. They claim they stand for liberal values of freedom and tolerance and human rights. But like the UN, the truth about the international Left shows that its members are the opposite of what they claim to be.

Here, too, a few examples from the past week suffice to tell the tale of liberal intolerance and violence. On Sunday, US Congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann appeared on ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Towards the end of her interview, Stephanopoulos informed Bachmann that she can expect the media to begin attacking her family, and specifically the 23 foster children that she and her husband cared for.

As he put it, “I know you want to shield them [the foster children] but are they prepared and are you prepared for the loss of privacy that comes with the president [sic] campaign? And is that something you are concerned about for them?” Stephanopoulos’s menacing warning was notable for what it says about the nature of the leftist-dominated media. In a recent interview, first lady Michelle Obama thanked the media for protecting her family from scrutiny. Yet Stephanopoulos had no compunction about threatening Bachmann’s family with a journalistic lynch mob.

And this makes sense. As fellow leftists, the Obamas get a free ride. But as a conservative Republican, and as a non-leftist woman, Bachmann – like the Sarah Palin – has no right to expect tolerance for her family’s privacy from the enlightened, feminist, liberal media.

Then there was the mob assault on Israeli historian Benny Morris outside the London School of Economics two weeks ago. As Morris described it at The National Interest, on his way to give a lecture at the university, “a small mob...of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of “fascist,” “racist,” “England should never have allowed you in,” “you shouldn't be allowed to speak.”

He added, “To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin.”

No less appalling than the behavior of the mob was the behavior of the professor at LSE who hosted Morris’s lecture. As Morris described it, in his “brief introductory remarks,” the professor “failed completely to note the harassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware)..., or to criticize [Morris’s attackers] in any way.”

In New York last weekend, when conservative television and radio host Glenn Beck went to New York’s Bryant Park to watch a movie with his family, they were accosted by the people around them who professed hatred for “Republicans.”

The extraordinary intolerance of the Left for Israel is on full display among the participants in the so-called “flotilla.” The purpose of the flotilla is to break international law by providing aid and comfort to Hamas-controlled Gaza and to weaken with the intention of ending Israel’s lawful maritime blockade of Gaza’s Hamas-controlled coastline.

As Ehud Rosen exposed Thursday in a report for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, this year’s flotilla is organized by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood with the active participation of leftist anti-Israel groups.

In their public statements, participants in the Hamas flotilla profess bottomless tolerance for Hamas and its genocidal agenda. And they profess no tolerance whatsoever for Israel or its right to exist.

In their behavior, participants in the flotilla from the Obama-aligned Code Pink group and sister organizations ape the behavior of UN Secretary- General Ban in celebrating Iran’s provocative conference on terrorism, and overseeing North Korea’s ascension to the head of the UN’s Conference on Disarmament’ and Qatar’s and Iran’s leadership of the General Assembly.

While emptily mouthing slogans of tolerance, all these adherents to the rule of the “international community” embrace the agenda of the most violent, intolerant, totalitarian forces in the world. Not only do they embrace them, they serve them.

It doesn’t take much to tear off their flimsy mask of sweetness and light. Pity so few can be bothered to do it.
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To read another article by Caroline Glick, click here.

Marco Rubio - Obama Uses the Language Of A Third-World Leader

Marco Rubio: Obama Uses the Language Of A Third-World Leader
The senator from Florida is disappointed.
by John Hayward
07/01/2011




Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) was very disappointed in President Obama’s class-warfare press conference yesterday… describing it on the floor of the Senate as “the kind of language that you would expect from the leader of a third-world country, not the President of the United States.”

To view a video of his speech, click here.

All restraint on power abandoned, defeated legislation like the DREAM Act enforced through decree, disfavored legislation like the Defense of Marriage Act ignored, government muscle used to trash targeted companies like Boeing on behalf of labor unions, leaders with fabulously opulent lifestyles threatening the livelihood of private-sector class enemies… the Third World is, increasingly, right outside your window. Tell me where Senator Rubio is wrong.

Better yet, prove him wrong, President Obama! Get through a month without deploying a senseless class warfare argument, declaring any new enemies in the American private sector, or castigating citizens for doing the kind of thing prominent Democrats like “Air Claire” McCaskill do on a regular basis. She didn’t just enjoy a tax break for her private jet – she failed to pay over $280,000 in property taxes on it, and extracted funds from her Senate budget for fuel and maintenance.

Let’s hear you denounce McCaskill as vehemently as you tore into those greedy corporate jet owners, Mr. President, and then we’ll know you’re not just a wannabe Third World despot, whose every action satisfies his need for power, money, or blind ideology. Show us that the ruling class lives by the same standards you would impose on the private sector. That's how we roll in the First World.

Obama's Amnesty for Illegals Sidesteps the Law Again

Obama's Amnesty for Illegals Sidesteps the Law Again
by Roger Hedgecock
07/01/2011

The only announced Democrat candidate for President has repeatedly called for complete immigration reform while consistently failing to enforce the federal immigration laws on the books now.

Large majorities of Americans in repeated polls want border security first, jobs for Americans first and "path to citizenship" last. Obama wants amnesty first to get the undocumented Democrats to the polls in 2012, has bullied Republican employers with workplace raids to get their support for amnesty, and will never secure the border any more than his immediate predecessor did.

Senators Dick Durbin (D.-Ill.) and Bob Menendez (D.-N.J.) have introduced in Congress Obama's "comprehensive immigration reform," and Durbin introduces his Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act legislation every year, but the only ones dreaming are those two.

Because the public opposes these Obama priorities, Congress won't pass his amnesty agenda. In fact, Congress wants to pass mandatory E-Verify for employers to check whether job applicants are legally in the country. Obama opposes it.

Not to worry, big employers looking for cheap, exploitable, illegal labor. Not to worry, Democratic Party desperately looking for a way to win in 2012. Obama has simply dictated the amnesty. Mission accomplished. On to wiping out corporate jets. How did amnesty for illegals happen?

Failing to get support for Obama's legislative agenda in Congress, La Raza and other open-border advocate groups have long pressured Obama to issue an Executive Order to implement the DREAM Act (placing illegals ahead of citizen students in college), and the "path to citizenship" (illegals get an immediate green card while learning English and paying back taxes at their leisure). Obama publicly refused to do so, proclaiming, "That's not how democracy works."

But this is how dictatorship works. An "Executive Order is not even necessary. On June 17, 2011, Obama's Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) John Morton issued new guidelines to ICE agents, basically calling off deportation prosecutions of other than criminal aliens.

In school? Don't worry. No deportation even if caught. (DREAM Act accomplished.) Longtime illegal resident? Don't worry. No deportation. (Amnesty accomplished). Got an illegal job? Don't worry. No deportation.

Keep in mind that the Border Patrol might catch 25% to 50% of illegal aliens. ICE will detain for prosecution a small percentage of those rounded up. Most of those who are detained are let then go on their own recognizance pending a court date for a deportation hearing, never to be seen again.

So only a sliver of illegal aliens are ever prosecuted for breaking into the country. Those found guilty are almost all deported to the annoying and expensive task of sneaking right back into the U.S. about a day later.

Now that sliver of prosecutions just got reduced even more by Morton. And not for the first time.

Last August 2010, the Houston Chronicle, through a Freedom of Information Act request, caught the Houston ICE office doing the same type of "backdoor amnesty," as the Chronicle put it. Reminiscent of the later Operation Gun Walker scandal, higher-ups at first denied any such prosecutorial discretion memo had been issued, then denied (when the memo was made public) that anyone up the chain of command had seen or approved the memo, then withdrew the memo and said they would never do it again.

Well, they've done it again. This time, congressional investigators have a draft memo from Homeland Security that describes the goal as to "reduce the threat of removal" for illegals and calls it "a nonlegislative version of amnesty."

How much more clear does dictatorship have to be?

Obama's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has classified CO2 as a "pollutant" subject to regulation and taxation despite the failure of cap-and trade legislation to pass Congress. His National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has relaxed the rules governing employee elections for unionization despite the failure of card check, or majority sign-up, to pass Congress. Obama's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has pushed Net Neutrality rules despite any authorization from Congress and explicit court rulings denying FCC jurisdiction without congressional action.

Through nonenforcement of the law (Defense of Marriage Act, immigration), through regulation without authorization by Congress (EPA, NLRB, FCC), and now through "prosecutorial discretion," Obama does not govern, he rules.