Founders

00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Education - Founders - Media Bias - Nancy Salvato - News - Religion - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized

In Defense of Freedom

December 8, 2007 by

-By Nancy Salvato

According to “Devilstower”, a blogger on the DailyKos website, human rights are more important than national security. She explains, “Even if it was sure to be lost in a terrorist attack today, my life is not worth the Constitution. The life of my child is not worth the Constitution.” This same blogger believes that presidents Bush, Roosevelt, and Lincoln set aside their duty to uphold the constitution in exchange for the illusion of security.

“Devilstower” seems to have missed the whole idea behind instituting a constitution, which is that government is instituted to protect the peoples’ right to life, liberty and property, and the right to defend themselves against those who would rob, enslave, or kill them. This right, which the Constitution is designed to protect, is derived from Natural Law* not from the Constitution itself.

Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, proclaims:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow, this ground– The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us, the living, to stand here, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“Devilstower states, “The life of hundreds — thousands — is not worth setting aside the rights ensured to us by the Constitution. Because setting aside the Constitution is a defeat greater than any that can be delivered to us by any instrument of terror or war.” Isn’t it clear that those soldiers, of whom Lincoln spoke, gave their lives to preserve the union and to end the practice of slavery, a practice which had been under the protection of our Constitution?
Continue reading “In Defense of Freedom”

00Publius Contributor - 2nd Amendment - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Founders - History - Judges - Media Bias - Military - News - Patriotism - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

New York Times Hopes For SCOTUS Gun Grab

December 2, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Warner Todd Huston

The “paper of record” once again makes like a broken record with another prosaic call to take away guns from the average American. The New York Times again displays its complete disregard of the Constitution in an editorial titled, “The Court and the Second Amendment”, claiming our founding law is out of date and doesn’t “confront modern-day reality.” In another editorial filled with extreme language, untrue definitions and arrogance, and cementing its reputation against self-defense and American principles, the Times addressed the recent decision by the Supreme Court to soon take on the DC Gun banning reversal case. Hitting all its best low notes and filled with propaganda laced verbiage, the Times again made the case that you, Mr. and Mrs. America, are too stupid and filled with bloodlust to be trusted with a firearm… quite despite that musty, stupid old, out of date Constitution thingie.

It’s hard to believe such a small editorial can have so many lies, distortions and misconceptions but the Times really packed them into this rant. Nearly every paragraph has something that is either incorrect technically, or just plain propagandistic. I’ll take each paragraph one at a time here:

By agreeing yesterday to rule on whether provisions of the District of Columbia’s stringent gun control law violate the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court has inserted itself into a roiling public controversy with large ramifications for public safety. The Court’s move sowed hope and fear among supporters of reasonable gun control, and it ratcheted up the suspense surrounding the court’s current term.

The Supreme Court “inserted itself into a roiling public controversy,” New York Times? Like most cases, this one came TO them, the SCOTUS didn’t go out to actively seek this case. And, notice the soft selling of their attempts to advocate for a reversal of the Constitutional right by calling the issue a “public safety” issue? No, it is a rights issue, not a “public safety” issue, Times, and you know it. By trying to reframe this debate as a “safety” issue, you are purposefully trying to pretend it has nothing to do with your plans to eliminate a Constitutionally guaranteed right to self-protection. It is also amusing that you call your gun grabbing “reasonable.” I am sure that totalitarians everywhere, in every age termed their desires to disarm the public “reasonable” before they undertook that outrage. It was quite a smooth propaganda effort there, though, Times, so props for trying to hide behind misleading language. I am sure your attempts at subterfuge might fool some.

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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Elections - Founders - GOP - News - Religion - Society/Culture - The Law - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Land Explains Why Dobson is Wrong on Thompson

September 25, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Warner Todd Huston

This is a smart and dead-right explanation of why Dr. James Dobson is way off with his assessment on Fred Thompson.

It all comes down to the issue that I wondered a while back if Fred could make people understand? We are in a day when our national government has been hijacked by socialists with an FDR fetish who imagine that the government is the solution to all ills.

Fred wants to go back to a day when our nation had a smaller, contained Federal government as proscribed by the Founding Fathers and guided by the Constitution instead of the far, far leftist government that FDR and his ilk have forced upon us.

THIS is the reason that some of us are supporting Thompson. It is also why Dobson should. Dobson’s single issue vote is short sighted and I hope that he comes to understand why a vote for Fred Thompson is a vote for America.
——-
Southern Baptist Leader Defends Fred Thompson

CBNNews.com – David Brody

Richard Land, the President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (which is part of the influential Southern Baptist Convention), tells The Brody File that the criticism leveled at Fred Thompson by James Dobson and others is a tad bit over the top. Recently, Dr. Dobson, Founder of Focus on the Family, said he wouldn’t support Thompson for a number of reasons including Thompson’s stance against a one size fits all marriage amendment. Read more on that here. As for Dr. Land’s comments, here’s what he told me:

“I’ve received phone calls and emails from Southern Baptists about Senator Thompson. They are all furious at Doctor Dobson. They just feel that first of all there was a mischaracterizing of his positions. Do I wish that he supported the marriage protection amendment? Of course I do. To say that he is for 50 different views of marriage in 50 different states is a gross mischaracterization of his position. Secondly, do I wish that he attended church every Sunday? As a Baptist pastor, of course I do. But does that make him a person of unbelief? That’s harsh and unwarranted.”
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Founders - Frank Salvato - Society/Culture - Uncategorized

Civic Responsibility & The Blame Game

March 25, 2007 by

-By Frank Salvato

Our Founders believed in ownership of the Constitution. By that I mean they expected, almost took for granted, that each American citizen would stake a claim of ownership to the principles and tenants set forth in our Founding Documents. But as we watch our elected officials, in Washington DC and in our State Houses, habitually place the political well-being of themselves and their parties above good government for their constituents and our country, we must ask ourselves: Are we doing our part in making sure our government is the best it can be?

The Founding Documents, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights, serve as a covenant between the American people and our government, a contract, as it were.

One of the unwritten provisions of this covenant, this contract, was that each American would exercise a certain level of self-prescribed civic responsibility where the role of caretaker, or steward, to the Constitution was concerned. They intended for Americans to engage in the governmental process by continuously questing for the truth and then engaging their representatives in elected office – when need be – on the issues using fact-based knowledge, civil discourse and a patriotic ideology, even when in disagreement.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Founders - Islam - Islamofascism - Media Bias - Military - Patriotism - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Boston Globe: Iraq Insurgents Just Like Our Founding Fathers

March 16, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

I wonder if the MSM ever gets tired of trying to make evil look good? And if they aren’t trying to make evil look like good, they are trying to soft peddle evil with a they-are-really-just-like-us analysis of evil’s actions. Such is the case today in the Boston Globe wherein writer H.D.S. Greenway equates Iraqi insurgents to being just like America’s founding revolutionary generation.

In ‘Surge’ doomed to final failure, a badly garbled reading of history is foisted upon an unsuspecting reading public that culminates with H.D.S. Greenway boiling down the entire American Revolution to the claim that British soldiers were a “conquering force” in the Colonies and the Colonists were mad at them for it.

And so conquering foreign soldiers will be resisted in Iraq, as they have always been everywhere down the centuries. In early April 1775, the British governor of Boston sent John Howe out to gather intelligence in that hotbed of insurgency now called the western suburbs, but then the Anbar province of its time. Howe met an old man cleaning his rifle who looked too old to hunt game.

The old man said he expected foreign soldiers — “a flock of redcoats” — would be arriving soon, and he thought they would make good targets. Arrive they did, and with them the American revolution that in many states degenerated into civil war. The British soldiers were mostly of the same race and religion as the people they fought, but they were by then foreigners, and eight years later they were gone.

This simpleminded “gotcha” point that H.D.S.Greenway seems to imagine he has stumbled upon makes a mush of what really happened in 1776 and before to cause the American Revolution. Apparently H.D.S. Greenway is unaware that the British didn’t “conquer” the Colonists because the colonies were part of the territorial possessions of Great Britain in the fist place. Putting down an insurrection is quite different than conquering and the British were not truly “foreigners” – Revolutionary rhetoric aside– even to most American citizens. Unwanted, yes, but “foreign”? Not really. In truth, many U.S. citizens felt they were being truer Englishmen than the Brits were being.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Founders - Media Bias - Society/Culture - The Law - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Editor & Publisher to Journalists: Get over Your Big Egos

March 12, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

As I have in the past, to be a fair and honest reporter, I’ll bring the good news about the MSM to the fore right along with the bad. Today I have some good in the form of a piece in Editor & Publisher’s Shop talk section titled Who’s a Journalist These Days? This is an interesting piece that takes journalists to task who share, as E&P puts it, the “big ego disease” that seems woefully prevalent throughout the MSM.

In fact, Mark A. Phillips doesn’t at all mince words when taking to task his fellow journalists, not sparing their feelings a bit. He even identifies by name one of the journalistic comrades of whom he is scolding. That being one Debra J. Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a recent article on the Josh Wolf affair, Saunders raised the question of the legitimacy of Wolf’s claims of being a journalist. Wolf, is a blogger who has been jailed since last year for refusing to reveal to investigators a news source he used on his Blog.

Saunders described Wolf variously as “…a blogger with an agenda and a camera”, and a man who likes to “…put himself in the company of real journalists”. Saunders’ final analysis negates Wolf’s claims of being a journalist. “But a camera and a Web site do not a journalist make, any more than shooting a criminal makes a vigilante a cop”, she haughtily proclaimed.
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00Publius Contributor - Family - Founders - Society/Culture - Uncategorized

Britney versus Jefferson: No contest

February 24, 2007 by

-By Michael M. Bates

We’ll start out with a pop quiz. Don’t fret. The results won’t go on your permanent record. Probably.

Here goes. Last Monday the United States celebrated:

  • The biggest white sale of the year.
  • Paris Hilton’s most recent engagement.
  • Presidents Day.
  • Washington’s Birthday.

The correct answer, as aficionados of Section 6103(a) of Title 5 of the U.S. Code know, is Washington’s Birthday. By the way, that’s Washington as in George. Isaiah Washington most likely won’t get his national holiday until he successfully completes his homophobia rehab.
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00Publius Contributor - Education - Family - Founders - History - President - Religion - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Martin Luther King, Jr., On Trial for Being a Communist

February 10, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

What was the first thing that ran through your head when you read that headline?

Did it confuse you? Maybe you were shocked? Perhaps you were even angered? I am sure a few even said something like “At last” or “about time”?

It is well known that MLK hung around Communists, even “card carrying” ones. It is also well known that he had some as his close advisors. It is not completely ascertainable if he, himself, was a believer in Communism.

But, in reality, it doesn’t matter a whit if he did because he did not openly speak out for Communism and did not base his position on the ideology of Communism.
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00Publius Contributor - Family - Founders - Frederick Meekins - History - Patriotism - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Uncategorized

Statue Of Liberty Should Be A Liberated Woman

February 10, 2007 by

-By Frederick Meekins

One of the most comic irrationalities to come out of the Vietnam War that a village had to be destroyed in order to save it. Half a world away, the comment has become something of a joke ever since epitomizing government stupidity; however, as similar logic begins to be used here all in the name of national security, such an observation won’t seem as amusing anymore.

Most responding to my column about efforts to permanently bar the American people from the upper reaches of the Statue of Liberty agreed with my position. However, one response reflected the kind of thinking that will not only end up getting the remainder of our freedoms taken away from us but also lecture us why it is our civic duty to have a smile across our face while it is happening.

In the response, the government toady writes that, since the Statue of Liberty is a target because of its symbolic value as an artistic representation of America’s values, any and all measures should be taken to protect the landmark.

However, since Lady Liberty’s function is primarily symbolic, by closing her off aren’t we sending the message to the world that liberty is not an inalienable and immutable but rather contingent upon circumstances and the malleable whims of those holding power.
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00Publius Contributor - Book Reviews - Constitution - Family - Founders - GOP - History - Islam - Islamofascism - Media Bias - Patriotism - Religion - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Chicago Sun-Times: Warning About Christian Fascists

February 9, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times gave nearly an entire page in their “Controversy” Section to a man who feels America is under attack by a radical, religion that is inseparable from Nazi Fascism. He feels it is a hateful religion that is out to destroy America and everything it stands for and it must be stopped at all costs.

No he did not mean Islamism, amazingly enough, but Christianity.
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Constitution - Elections - Founders - Islam - Islamofascism - Military - R. A. Hawkins - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Uncategorized

We’ve Been Here Before (Grow Up Or Get Out of the Way)

February 7, 2007 by

By R. A. Hawkins

In the early part of this nations history we can find the first echoes of what we are currently attempting to grasp and deal with. There we can also find the answers to our current problems. There has been a lot of cheering about inclusiveness from the left lately. It has to do with the swearing in of a certain Islamic Congressman who is unsurprisingly from Minnesota, a state that is not only on the outskirts of the nation but also on the outskirts of reality.

The swearing in of this particular congressman was performed on the copy of the Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Many have questioned why Jefferson would have owned a copy of that book. Well, if the truth be told, he had copies of just about any book on any religion. This was one of the few books that survived the burning of his library. I for one am quite pleased that it did. I’m also quite pleased that someone who is ignorant of history, I assume, suggested that Ellison use that book.

At the very start of this nation we were dealing with the Pirates of Barbary. They were capturing our ships and impeding commerce with other nations. Once the United States was free of Britain we were also free of her protection. The British had been paying the demanded tributes. Tripoli had demanded $225,000 in cash and annual payments of $25,000. Adams was inclined to follow the model of the British but Jefferson wasn’t. Jefferson tried to form an international coalition to fight them but that failed because then, like now, everyone decided it was easier to give the bully their lunch money.
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00Publius Contributor - Crime - Family - Founders - History - Media Bias - Patriotism - Religion - Society/Culture - The Law - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Internet Tattletales — Is it Right to ‘Spy’ on a Neighbor?

February 7, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

A recent Wallstreet Journal editorial by Jennifer Saranow entitled The Snoop Next Door, highlighted some interesting websites that have been taking their slot on the World Wide Web of late… and, no, it isn’t porn.

Apparently these sites are being used to tattle on other people. One site claims to be ready to reveal bad drivers and people who don’t know how to park well, one to uncover the identity of the person who is stealing newspapers in the wee hours of the morning before the neighborhood is awake to get their morning editions, and one to highlight litterbugs. All supposedly feature video or clear photos of the perpetrators of the ill the website’s creators wish to right.

How should we, as freedom loving Americans, react to websites where people are tattled on, spied upon, or “outed” as the bad guy? The libertarian reaction might be to confront the website’s creator and ask them who the heck they think they are by publicly airing other’s dirty laundry? Still others would applaud the website because they get to jeer the “jerks” of society who cannot seem to abide by the rules.

Which is right? Which is the more “American” reaction to these snoop’s websites? Curiously enough, both are.
Continue reading “Internet Tattletales — Is it Right to ‘Spy’ on a Neighbor?”

00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Elections - Founders - Media Bias - Patriotism - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Highlighting Leftist Activism on Web… no Mention of Conservatives

February 5, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

Ain’t technology wunnerful? I mean, it saves all that wear and tear on the VW Mini-Bus, saves the trees that would otherwise be cut down for anti-war signs, the paint, the tye-dying of shirts, the buying of sandals… heck all sorts of things and time can be saved because the World Wide Web has brought technology to leftist activism!

I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

It’s also a great thing that those evil, rotten, Nazi, CONSERVATIVES have not discovered the WWW as a place to gather their forces. It’s so heart warming that the left can, at long last, use technology for good instead of evil.

Or so it seems the Washington Post imagines the world has been set to rights because today a charming article has appeared in their paper letting us know that hey have found the “perfect example of how antiwar is waged in the Internet age.” Or at least so says Jennifer Earl in “Where Have All the Protests Gone? Online”.
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00Publius Contributor - 2nd Amendment - Constitution - Founders - History - Media Bias - Patriotism - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

NYTimes Reveals Distrust of ‘Law Abiding’ Citizens

January 31, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Warner Todd Huston

The New York Times thinks you are a criminal if you own a gun. The editorial writers at the Times simply don’t believe that you could possibly be a law abiding citizen if you are interested in self defense, their most recent anti-gun piece reveals.

Their January 30th piece, incongruously titled “A Day Without Guns …” — incongruous because the piece itself does not address any such subject as a day without guns — cannot be interpreted too many other ways than contempt for both the citizenry as well as the Constitution.

Twenty years ago, the Florida Legislature cravenly decided to allow “law abiding” citizens to carry concealed weapons merely by declaring their preference for self-defense. Then last July, at the prodding of the gun lobby, the current crop of state lawmakers proved they could be even more corrupt and cowardly than their predecessors by deciding to make the list of gun-toting Floridians a secret.

The quotes around “law abiding” says it all. In such a case, the usage of quotes marks obviously denotes sarcasm as opposed to a mere quote and their position that no gun owner could be a law abiding citizen rings through loud and clear.
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Constitution - Elections - Founders - History - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Public Opinion: Experts vs Vox Populi

January 28, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Tension between government by experts (intellectuals, bureaucrats, and independent legislators) and the voice of the people (expressed in elections and opinion polls) complicates politics in our Federal republic.

Relying too heavily on opinion polls or elections is a short road to disaster when the government must determine critical policies that involve intricate financial knowledge, broad knowledge of history, economics, and foreign affairs. The general populace can be too easily misled by propaganda and ignorance of the subject.

But looking exclusively to an expert elite opens the path to tyranny, as the history of socialist collectivism demonstrates. Intellectual cadres, working through an impersonal bureaucracy, display, as a comedian once observed, all the sensitivity of the IRS and the efficiency of the Post Office.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Elections - Founders - GOP - History - Patriotism - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Royal Illinois GOP Says Who’s ALLOWED to be Republican

January 20, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last month I wrote an op ed about how this one last move by the Illinois Republican Party drove me from the state’s Party as a self-proclaimed member. (Why I left the Illinois Republican Party) I warned that their announcement that only THEY were allowed to say who is allowed to proclaim themselves to be a Republican and who was not smacked of anti-democracy and a tendency toward monarchical elitism.

Well, it didn’t take them long to prove me correct.

As the new year began the haughty, bigwigs in the Illinois State Party decided that the Republican Assembly of Lake County should not be “allowed” to use the word Republican in their organization’s name.

Imagine the gall of the state Party? Who are they to decide who is “allowed” to use the word Republican and who is not?
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Constitution - Elections - Founders - History - Patriotism - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Congress Resurgent?

January 20, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Will we have a reprise of the post Nixon-era Congressional invasion of the President’s Constitutional powers that led, among other things, to eviscerating the CIA?

Congress is reassessing the President’s Constitutional powers, as it did in the aftermath of President Johnson’s Vietnam war and President Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

The new Democratic Congressional majority are challenging the Constitutional powers of the President on the whole sweep of national security measures. They are particularly infuriated by President Bush’s intention to deploy 17,000 or more new troops in Iraq, their ire augmented by the President’s short-term ability to do so whether they approve or not.

Presidential wartime powers are succinctly delineated by the Constitution’s Article II, Section 2: The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States…..

Counterbalancing this seemingly absolute Presidential authority is the Constitutional provision that all taxes and appropriations, including those for military purposes, are the prerogative of Congress.

In principle there is nothing wrong with Congress sparring with the President. The question is whether it is for domestic political advantage at the expense of our national security.
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Constitution - Founders - History - Patriotism - Society/Culture - Uncategorized - Warner Todd Huston

Bloggers Might be Fined $200,000 by the Federal Gov’t

January 19, 2007 by

Thomas Paine wrote one of the most famous tracts of the Revolutionary era. Titled “The Rights of Man”, it was a tract that many said, should it not have existed, the Revolution could not have occurred. In fact, historians contend rightfully, that the writings of our founders and their contemporaries were incredibly important as much for their content as for their ability to spread the ideas over which we went to war with Great Britain across the hard to travel geography of early America.

Our Founders were true “grassroots” organizers. Without their words, we could not have won the Revolution.

Now the Federal government wants to destroy that same sort of process used to spur our citizens to free themselves from Monarchical despotism. The Federal government today wants to quash the ability of small citizen’s groups to disseminate information to like minded people by instituting oppressive reporting rules and by claiming they are “lobbyists” bound by Congressional oversight. And if they don’t they face oppressive fines.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Dan E. Phillips - Elections - Founders - History - Islam - Islamofascism - Military - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - The Law - Uncategorized

Anti-war Conservatives vs. Foreign Policy Realists

January 17, 2007 by

-By Dan E. Phillips

Reports indicate that Bush will advocate an increase in troop strength in Iraq when he publicly announces his new policy for Iraq. This policy has been dubbed “surging” and is also supported by Sen. McCain and other hawks. Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid have already spoken out against a surge. How this will all play out from a public relations and political standpoint remains to be seen.

Planning for a surge may well have been in the works for some time, but the timing of Bush rethinking the policy in Iraq was clearly precipitated by the unfavorable results (.pdf document) of the Iraq Study Group (ISG). Ironically, if the ISG was suggesting a de-escalation and eventual withdrawal, they may end up precipitating the opposite. In the name of “doing something” or “changing tactics” the findings of the ISG arguably give Bush some political cover for increasing troop numbers that he might not have had otherwise.

The liberal media celebrated the ISG’s findings as a severe blow to the Bush administration and its policies in Iraq. Predictably the conservative punditry reacted indignantly to the report and cried that the recommendations were tantamount to surrender. An apparent RNC talking point is that the Commission should be renamed the Iraq Surrender Group, an admittedly catchy but obviously simplistic formulation.
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Book Reviews - Constitution - Founders - History - Patriotism - Society/Culture - The Law - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Nock on Shaw’s Socialism

January 9, 2007 by

-By Thomas Brewton

Celebrated libertarian analyst Albert Jay Nock’s 1945 review of George Bernard Shaw’s Everybody’s Political What’s What exposes the fundamental flaw in socialism and its American liberal-progressive doctrine. As we begin a new Congress dominated by liberal-socialist-progressives, it is useful to have Mr. Nock’s perspective.

The Mises.org website posting titled The Socialism of Mr. Shaw is a reminder to us elderly, and a notice to the young, that however delightful Shaw was as a playwright, he was very far out in left field with regard to politics and economics. Not surprisingly, just as is true today of the media and theatre today, Shaw’s plays project pro-socialist views.

Most people today who know of Shaw at all probably acquired that acquaintance indirectly via the hugely successful Broadway musical My Fair Lady, which was an adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion. To appreciate Shaw’s role outside the literary field, it’s necessary to understand a bit more about the late Victorian period in England and its impact upon political and economic doctrine in the United States.
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Founders - History - Religion - Society/Culture - Uncategorized

Like a Thief in the Night, The Defacing of an American Chapel

January 6, 2007 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

When the extremist Taleban junta demolished the centuries old Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001, the world replied with outrage at the attacks on those ancient artifacts. It was, indeed, an outrage against art, antiquity, history, and religion as these great statues carved into a mountainside in the Bamyan Valley were brutally dynamited by the Islamist extremists then holding Afghanistan in thrall. It was right that the world community expressed their disgust at this obscene destruction.

One would think that no such outrage could happen in the United States, that no one would be uncivilized enough to propose the elimination of a long standing artifact, merely because it had a religious origin.

One would be wrong.
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Constitution - Founders - History - Uncategorized

Constitutional Federalism vs Totalitarianism

January 1, 2007 by

– By Thomas E. Brewton

As noted frequently in past postings, the unavoidable tendency of socialism is concentration of political power in the hands of a ruling elite who decide for the masses what their living and working conditions are to be. This is called state-planning.

In ways that would have been inconceivable as recently as the 1920s, our everyday lives are circumscribed by unelected bureaucrats in Washington who make regulations, enforce them, and adjudicate them, too often without our access to the normal safeguards of the common law. Those bureaucrats — think of the IRS, for example — issue rulings that most Federal courts will not contest, on the grounds that they lack the supposed expertise of the tens of thousands of Federal regulatory bureaus……………………
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