Obama’s White Ancestors Owned Slaves… More Is He ‘Black Enough’

-By Warner Todd Huston

Obama’s white ancestors owned slaves. So says the research of William Addams Reitwiesner, “who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time”, and who is featured in this morning’s edition of the Baltimore Sun.

Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.

But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: it appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and Census records.

While reading this, my very first thought found me wondering how well this will sit with the Obama-isn’t-black-enough contingent?

It didn’t take long in the story to get the issue addressed.
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Manhattan Prosecutors Declare War on Families

-By David Heleniak

2006 saw a refreshing increase in the number of commentary pieces tackling the problems with state domestic violence (DV) restraining order systems. Most if not all of these articles focus on civil DV restraining orders. In the October 2006 issue of The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk exposes a disturbing development that had not been commented upon before. In her eye-opening article “Criminal Law Comes Home,” Suk examines a practice in Manhattan that has become routine in criminal cases involving DV, the imposition of de facto divorces in which the government “initiates and dictates the end of … intimate relationship[s]” by subjecting “the practical and substantive continuation of the relationship[s] to criminal sanction” (10).

The path to de facto divorce begins when a man is arrested for domestic violence. “The arrest may have come at the behest of neighbors rather than the victim herself. Or the victim may have called the police to seek specific intervention in that moment” (59). Whatever led to the arrest, with it, the alleged victim’s marriage to the defendant is very likely over, whether she likes it or not.

In Manhattan, “a leading jurisdiction … considered to be ‘in the forefront of efforts to combat domestic violence,’” domestic violence is defined by the D.A.’s Office as “‘any crime or violation committed by a defendant against … a member of his or her same family or household’” (42). A vast majority of these cases do not involve serious physical injury, and many of the cases charged do not allege any physical injury. But “[e]ven as the ‘violence’ of DV has been defined down,” to the point where harassment is considered violent, these cases “trigger application of a ‘mandatory domestic violence protocol’ different from other crimes” (44). As Suk explains, “[t]he uniform application of a mandatory protocol in every case represents the prosecutorial response to a paradigm story in which DV victims can turn into murder victims overnight. In the oral culture of a prosecutor’s office, a misdemeanor DV defendant has the potential to turn out to be an O.J. Simpson” (44). Indeed, “[r]ookie prosecutors are warned that their DV misdemeanors are the cases that could get their names in the newspaper for failure to prevent something serious” (44-45). In this culture of fear, “every case is treated as a potential prelude to murder” (44). This is despite the fact that “[p]rosecutors generally expect that DV victims will be unwilling to cooperate in prosecution” (46), a fact that speaks volumes about the level of the crimes being charged and the victims’ own take on the likelihood of serious crimes being committed in the future.
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AP Calls Convicted Cop-Killer a ‘Freedom Fighter’

-By Warner Todd Huston

The New York Post yesterday laid out the sordid tale of the AP’s lionization of a convicted cop-killer, calling this criminal a “former freedom fighter.”

The Post did a great job of detailing the AP’s disgusting hero worship of this murderer, so I’ll let them take it from here…

AP’s Ode to a Cop-Killer

February 28, 2007 — To those who remember the infamous 1981 Brinks heist in Nyack, Judith Clark is a self-indulgent ’60s radical serving a well-deserved 75-year prison term for her role in the violent deaths of three heroic law-enforcement officers.

But to the Associated Press, which supplies news to the world, Judith Clark is a “former freedom fighter.”

That’s right. A “freedom fighter.”

Now, maybe “convicted cop-killer” is too graphic for the AP, even though it’s wholly accurate.

But “freedom fighter”?

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Mexican Wives Plead for Husbands to Return to Mexico

-By Warner Todd Huston

Think of yourself as a married American man. Imagine you and your wife have decided that you will sneak in to Canada because you feel you cannot do well in America, you cannot earn your fortune.

Now imagine you have been gone years. Perhaps you send money home once in a while. Though, otherwise you don’t do much about contacting your wife and kids. Still, even if you do your wife is raising your children alone. Your children have no memory of you. To them you are only a name on a money gram or a check.

Would your wife like this arrangement? Would you feel you were being a proper Father with this arrangement?

Or is it more likely that she would want you to come home? Don’t you think she would be sick and tired of your absence, even for the money?
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NYTimes Rudy Gets ‘Softballs’… But What About Hillary?

-By Warner Todd Huston

The New York Times has published a story scolding Rudy Guiliani for arranging only friendly campaign stops, pointedly carping how he is only “Seeing Only Softballs”.

Stepping to the Plate, Giuliani Is Seeing Only Softballs

SPARTANBURG, S.C., Feb. 21 — In a swing through South Carolina this week, Rudolph W. Giuliani chose to campaign at a fire house, which is a little like Derek Jeter meeting with Yankees fans — a most unlikely forum for hostility, or even much skepticism.

It is curious to me why anyone would expect a candidate to open themselves up to any venues that would present “hostility” this many months away from the elections?

Why, exactly, would any candidate plan to give the MSM footage of the candidate getting peppered and attacked this far out from the elections?

Instead of the sometimes barbed give-and-take endured by the other candidates, Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, fielded a few questions from the firefighters and police officers who gathered to hear him…

In a day when it is all the rage to say that the campaigns are starting too early, the NYT seems to be saying the opposite if they would expect Rudy to open himself to debate styled campaign stops 11 months before the first primary and 20 months before the election itself.
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A New Deal Frame of Mind

-By Thomas E. Brewton

With our radical left-wing Congress setting forth on a mission to preserve and enlarge the welfare-state, it’s appropriate to review the arrogant destructiveness of their New Deal predecessors who created the welfare-state.

A root of New Deal failure to restore prosperity in the 1930s was its authors’ ignorance of business and finance, overlain with simplistic arrogance. The same may be said of today’s San Francisco and East Coast liberal-socialists.

The New Dealers were a brash, cock-sure bunch who came from the academic world to Washington intending to wipe out as much of our capitalistic system as possible. They viewed the business and financial communities as a cross between Neanderthal ignorance and evil perversity. They assumed that all right-thinking people were united in the view that businessmen and bankers existed to oppress “the people.”

While 1950s apologists like liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., prettied the recollections of the New Deal by describing it as “saving business from itself,” the facts show clearly that the New Dealers were rabid anti-capitalistic socialists.

Describing the literally revolutionary frame of mind of FDR and his “brains trust,” the author of The New Dealers, published in 1934, wrote:

Roosevelt had the benefit of several other great national experiments as useful points of reference for the American New Deal. He had before him the spectacle of the Soviet Union with its recent dramatization of economic reorganization through the Five-Year Plan. He had before him the example of Fascist Italy with its regimentation of business, labor and banking in the “Corporative State.” He had before him the instances of Kemal [Ataturk in Turkey], Mussolini and Hitler in restoring national pride and self-confidence to beaten or dispirited peoples.

A key word in the foregoing, which illuminates the entirety of liberalism, is experiments. Liberal-socialism-progressivism is all about ivory-tower theory aimed at constructing sand castles in mid-air, without the benefit of a foundation in real life.
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How FDR Destroyed the Dollar

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Until 1933, the U. S. dollar was the among the strongest and most stable currencies in the world. With the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Roosevelt torpedoed it. We are still plagued with the resulting inflation.

All governments lust for taxpayers’ money. The ability to direct the expenditure of large sums of money confers great power upon political leaders. But the spending requirements that President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind upon taking office in 1933 were of extraordinary dimensions. Inflating the currency, in socialist theory, was a way to create more money for that end.

In the 1920s, after the disillusionment of World War I, socialism enjoyed great vogue in the United States. Social Gospel ministers extolled it, intellectuals lauded it, and popular magazines ran many favorable articles about it. In that period, the general public had no awareness of the horrors then being effected in the name of socialism in the USSR, and Hitler’s National Socialism was still in the future.

It was against that background that Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency in 1932 with the promise to give state-planning a try. Described in that way, it seemed to be no more than a proposal to coordinate government spending more effectively.
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Society as Clay in Liberals’ Hands

-By Thomas E. Brewton

An enduring society is not a random assemblage of people drawn together, like pigs around the feed trough, waiting for welfare-state handouts.

The liberal paradigm recognizes no spiritual dimension to human nature or to human society. In the liberals’ atheistic and materialistic world, humans are merely animals a notch along the evolutionary scale from the apes and, like them, motivated only by material factors: water, food, sex, and shelter.

Societies, in that paradigm, are held together by whatever may be the currently reigning regulations governing those material wants. A political society theoretically is a lump of clay that intellectuals are capable of shaping anyway they wish.

In contrast, Cicero, the great Roman orator and admirer of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic philosophers, observed in the Republic:
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Kicking The Habit (Oil Isn’t As Slick As Bureaucrats)

By R. A. Hawkins

Of late all we seem to hear about is the need to kick the oil habit. Before I address this I want to comment to those who seem to say this so often. Do you really think that the radical Muslims will stay away from you just because we leave their benighted land? Get a grip. All cowardice ever receives as payment is more hostility by an emboldened attacker. If I injured the sensibilities of any of the liberals out there I would like to say I’m sorry. But I won’t.

What is needed now is another Republican Revolution. I mean the kind that we almost had when Gingrich and company took Congress back in the very first election held after Bill and his significant other were in office. Here are a few things that did get done. For the first time in years private business owners were actually able to write off their own medical insurance costs. Didn’t hear much about that did you?! All of those really neat herbs and supplements you can now get in the store — they weren’t available until the Republicans took Congress back from Moscow West. And eventually the Republicans also let the stupid assault weapons ban die a quiet death. They never did get to do all of the things they wanted to do. In spite of what the media said, little has changed as far as taxes except for Bush’s tax cut. The flat tax went the way of the pterodactyl but it is about to return as the Democrat albatross. I will enjoy watching them pitch their totally original and awesome idea of tax increases for everyone. Some people just don’t learn.
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Statue Of Liberty Should Be A Liberated Woman

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

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

-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.
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THE NAME “SAPS in the USA” PREVAILS

-By Vince Johnson

The previous two issues appeared as ads The Mill City Independent Press, a small weekly in Oregon. One was paid for by Students Attending Public Schools in the USA (SAPS in the USA) and the other by Future Voters of America. (FVA) There was a slight uproar over this. Some folks thought such questions were more appropriately asked by “Saps Attending Public Schools in the USA” rather than the “Future Voters of America.” Those who preferred “SAPS in the USA,” said it was easier to recall and it also made sense based on various synonyms of “sap” as listed below:

  • Saps = Exhausts: “Wasteful spending exhausts ones savings.”
  • Saps = Runs down: “Congress always runs down common sense.”
  • Saps = Fools: “Only fools allow politicians to spend their money.”

Each ad asked the President and Congress to answer one question:

Ad #1. What are the ethics of borrowing $8.5 trillion dollars without the permission of those SAPS who will be substantially burdened by this debt as long as they live?

Ad #2. Why are over 3,000 young Americans losing their lives protecting the territorial integrity of the Iraq/Iran border while we are almost totally ignoring the integrity of the border between the USA and Mexico?
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Labor Controls the Liberals

-By Thomas E. Brewton

American labor unions are pushing candidates for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination toward expansion of the welfare-state and massive inflation of the sort that the Great Society spawned.

After both World War I and World War II, the British Labour Party led England into its destructive liaison with socialism that destroyed British industry and reduced England to the “sick man of Europe.”

Harold Meyerson’s January 31, 2007, column in the Washington Post describes the behind-the-scenes power exerted by labor unions, especially the government employees unions. Their immediate goal is imposition of universal, socialized medicine, of the sort championed in 1993 by Hillary Clinton.

If labor unions succeed, two results are inevitable.
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Successes and Setbacks in the “Long War”

-By David Huntwork

A year ago the Pentagon released its Quadrennial Defense Review. It was essentially a strategy for a 20-year “long war” and a generational battle plan designed to prepare the military for a Cold War type struggle against the forces of militant Islam. According to the official unveiling:
“Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our nation has fought a global war against violent extremists who use terrorism as their weapon of choice, and who seek to destroy our free way of life. Our enemies seek weapons of mass destruction and, if they are successful, will likely attempt to use them in their conflict with free people everywhere. Currently, the struggle is centered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we will need to be prepared and arranged to successfully defend our nation and its interests around the globe for years to come.”
It is apparent that the United States and its assorted allies are still seeking to adequately define its enemy, reach a consensus on tactics, and achieve some sort of victory in (or graceful exit from) Iraq. In this age of round the clock news and information it is easy to get caught up in the crisis of the moment. But it is also important that we examine the big picture in the War on Terror and take the time to look back at some of the successes and setbacks experienced since 9-11.
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Palestinian Family ‘Locked Up’ For Immigration Violations

-By Warner Todd Huston

WFAA TV in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas market has been touting a story that they obviously think is some sort of tragedy. So bad, in fact, that the first words of their story are, “‘Inhumanity’ and ‘atrocity’ are just two words being used to describe news…”

One would think that the world was ending, wouldn’t one?

The TV station is wracked up in high dudgeon over a family of Palestinians who are in the country illegally and were scooped up by Immigration officials and remanded to a rather posh housing center to await the outcome of the machinations of government officials trying to determine their fate.
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The Importance of Families

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Why is preservation of traditional marriage, between a man and a woman, vital to preservation of a good political society?

Malachi, a prophet who probably ministered in the 60 years after the first groups of Israelites returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, gives us God’s Word on the subject.

Having endured the Babylonian captivity for 70 sears, few of the returning Israelites had ever experienced the proper religious life of the pre-captivity period. Moreover, the Jerusalem to which they returned was a desolate ruin that had been destroyed and plundered by Judah’s enemies.
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The Barker and the Shill – The Fraud of the Fairness Doctrine

By Selwyn Duke

If you’re old enough to remember the days when freak shows were in carnivals and not daytime television, you may know about the barker and the shill. These were carnival employees who both worked to entice customers into entering the mysterious realm of the sideshow, only, their methods were very different. The barker – the correct terminology is the “talker” – was a P.T. Barnum-like character, a bold salesman who sang the praises of the exhibits. Although he was given to the hyperbole of marketing, he made no bones about his agenda: He wanted your business.

The shill was a very different animal. His job was to stand amidst the crowd and pose as one of their number; he would then feign awe as he claimed to have seen the show and that it was truly a jaw-dropping experience. He was trading on his illusion of impartiality, knowing it lent him a capacity to convince that eluded the talker with his obvious agenda.

This occurs to me when I ponder the attempt to resurrect the “Fairness Doctrine” by politicians such as Congressman Dennis Kucinich and avowedly socialist senator Bernie Sanders. For those of you not acquainted with this proposal, it harks back to a federal regulation in place from 1949 to 1987. Ostensibly it was designed to ensure “fairness” in broadcasting, mandating that if radio and TV stations air controversial viewpoints, they must provide equal time for the “other side.”
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NYTimes Reveals Distrust of ‘Law Abiding’ Citizens

-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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English Need Not Board

-By Frederick Meekins

Rosa Parks earned her place in American iconography for refusing to go to the back of the bus. But at least she would have been permitted to remain on the bus, which would have been more than is being allowed for three Saint Paul school children who were kicked off a bus, they were initially told, because they were no longer good enough to ride the bus because they spoke English.

According to a KSTP.com titled ‘Kids kicked off a bus for speaking English”, bus service along the route in question was now reserved for students other than those speaking English because of the importance of keeping the non-English speaking pupils together.

Illegals are often of the mind now that since they supposedly pay into the tax system, that should somehow earn them a slot at the government trough. But what about boring, run of the mill citizens born here and who don’t get special holidays and entire months set aside celebrating what they happened to be upon emerging from their mother’s birth canal, aren’t they just as deserving of the services they are having increasingly high taxes taken from and assessments levied against them to pay for?
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Public Opinion: Experts vs Vox Populi

-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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Congress Pushes Anti-Gun Brady Law Expansion Bill

-Larry Pratt – Gun Owners of America

The first major anti-gun bill of the new Pelosi-led Congress has already been introduced, and it could prove to be the most serious threat yet to Second Amendment Rights.

On the first full day of the new Congress, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy introduced H.R. 297, the most massive expansion of the Brady law since it passed in 1993. This is a bill that was quashed last year but under the new Pelosi House leadership, the Bill has a higher likelihood of getting passed this time.
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Stopping the Republican Senators Who Support Anti-Iraq Resolution

-By Warner Todd Huston

As I post this, it is apparent that several Republican Senators are supporting a non-binding resolution that will express no support of president Bush’s new direction in Iraq and will directly denounce the raising of troop levels in Baghdad.

The non-binding resolution sponsored by Senators Chuck Hagel (R, Neb), Joe Biden (D, Del.) and Carl Levin (D, Mich) passed the Senate Foreign Relations committee 12-9. The whole of the Senate will now get a chance to weigh in.

Worse news is the trio of Republican Senators who offered their own anti-Iraq resolution in the committee.

Republican Senators John Warner of Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine and Norm Coleman of Minnesota as well as Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska offered a resolution of their own concurrently with the initial attempt to attack Bush’s policy offered by Hagel.
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Soft People, Hard People

By Selwyn Duke

If the 1976 western The Last Hard Men has it right, we Occidentals metamorphosed into jellyfish sometime around the early twentieth century. Although this title is more movie marketing than historical statement, there may be something to it. After all, Robert Baden-Powell, a lieutenant general in the British Army, was motivated by the belief that western boys were becoming too soft when he originated the Boy Scouts in 1907.

Regardless of the origin and rapidity of our transition from he-men to she-men, one thing is for certain: We have become a very soft people.

When pondering this, I think about how it is now common to see men cry publicly. Just recently George Bush Sr. broke down while rendering a speech, something unthinkable a generation ago. Why, presidential aspirant Edmund Muskie saw his campaign scuttled by a few inopportune tears in 1972. And before you score me for not embracing the metrosexual model, remember the impression this gives the rest of the world. Feminization may be fashionable, but it doesn’t engender respect among the more patriarchal peoples.
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Congress Resurgent?

-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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Statistical Virtue

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal social justice is based on statistical averages relating to an abstraction called “humanity.” Individual morality is not an element in that liberal cosmology.

One of the first legislative acts of the newly ensconced Congressional liberals was increasing the minimum wage. Countless studies have demonstrated that the legal minimum wage is counter-productive. But it sounds good and it can be applied at one shot without the tedious process of arriving at fair wages in individual cases.

The minimum wage is an example of the sound-good, feel-good statistical virtues of liberal-socialist-progressivism. Another is Al Gore’s championing the Kyoto Protocols that would eliminate millions of workers’ jobs in the Western world to reduce greenhouse gases, a statistical virtue that state-planners hypothesize will prevent the current high-point cycle of sun spot activity from warming the earth.
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A Review Of Moral Choices: An Introduction To Ethics

-By Frederick Meekins

It has been said that we have come as far as we have only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. One of the strengths of ethics when studied as part of a survey of Western civilization has been the discipline’s emphasis on consulting the accumulated wisdom of the past. However, in doing so one must not fail to apply these principles to the situations arising in our own time.

‘Talbot School of Theology Professor Scott Rae in “Moral Choices: An Introduction To Ethics” maintains this balance by not only analyzing the foundations of this field as set forth in Biblical and historical sources as well as more contemporary systems but also by examining a number of issues arising from advances in technology.
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Paper: Conservatives Have ‘No Qualms About Torturing’ Prisoners

-By Warner Todd Huston

Are you a Conservative who likes the TV show “24”? If so, then Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writer Eugene Kane has divined why you like it so much. It’s because you have “no qualms about torturing” prisoners.

In a gratuitous insult to all intelligent Conservatives everywhere, Mr Kane has declared you all to be slobbering Neanderthals who would rather beat your enemy to death with a club than use diplomacy and that the law obviously means nothing to you.

Some speculate one reason “24” is such a favorite of the Bush crowd is that Bauer is presented as a guy with no qualms about torturing his prisoners in order to get information as quickly as possible. In light of criticism the Bush administration gets for its torture policies, it doesn’t take a think-tank expert to see why some hail the show as a breath of clean air.

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Anti-war Conservatives vs. Foreign Policy Realists

-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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Cultural Momentum

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Will enough traditions and customs of civility and decency survive long enough to keep the United States from internal disintegration and conquest by Islamic Jihad?

Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., often referred to his father’s theory that political standards follow a thirty-year cycle, first conservative, then liberal, and back to conservative, and so on. There is some truth to that observation, but the problem is that meanwhile the underlying social standards trend downward as a nation becomes more prosperous and life becomes easier. People vaunt their own intellects and come to believe that they no longer need God, that they are sufficient unto themselves for all matters.

After the United States emerged from the fiery furnace of the Civil War, on the road to becoming the most powerful economy in the world, liberal secularists in the 1880s believed that, having shed religion, they were directing us along the path of progress toward social perfection.
Continue reading “Cultural Momentum”