Moscow Show Trials Redux

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Obama’s shameful campaign to criminalize officials in the Bush administration is reminiscent of Stalin’s purges of his opponents in 1936-38.

Through the office of Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama actively supported a witch-hunt aimed at destroying the careers of Bush administration attorneys who provided legal advice about the limits upon interrogating captured Islamic terrorists. Hating President Bush wasn’t enough. It was necessary figuratively to spill some blood.

Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin staged public trials of of Soviet military and political leaders whom he regarded as rivals. All of the trials resulted in convictions and executions for alleged treason.

American liberal-progressives at the time applauded the show trials as necessary to stop opposition to socialistic progress toward perfection of human nature and political society. In fact, liberal-progressives continued to defend the trials until after the fall of the Soviet Union and revelation of KGB documents.
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Moscow Show Trials Redux”


Marriage Covenants

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Covenants bind us, as individuals, to God; as children of God, to our families and to our brothers and sisters in God’s church throughout the world; and, as citizens, to preservation of a moral, God-fearing society.
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In Sunday’s sermon at the Cohocton Assembly of God church, Pastor Dan Gardner used a text from the Book of Malachi:

10 Have we not all one Father; Did not one God create us? Why do we profane the covenant of our fathers by breaking faith with one another?

11 Judah has broken faith. A detestable thing has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem: Judah has desecrated the sanctuary the LORD loves, by marrying the daughter of a foreign god. 12 As for the man who does this, whoever he may be, may the LORD cut him off from the tents of Jacob —even though he brings offerings to the LORD Almighty.

13 Another thing you do: You flood the LORD’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. 14 You ask, “Why?” It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.

15 Has not the LORD made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. And why one? Because he was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth.

16 “I hate divorce,” says the LORD God of Israel, “and I hate a man’s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment,” says the LORD Almighty. 
So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith. (Malachi 2:10-16)

In the Biblical sense, marriage covenants can be viewed on three levels. First is the bond between individuals and God. Second is the covenant between Israel and God; after Jesus’s crucifixion, the new covenant in His blood, joining all Christians in the church as children of God. Finally, in the marriage bond between husband and wife and between parents and children. These, obviously, are interrelated and can be seen as aspects of keeping faith with God.
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Marriage Covenants”


Green Jobs Stupidity

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The president’s smug assertion that the “science” of global warming is settled turns out to be anther example of liberal-progressive dogmatic closed-mindedness. His continuing devotion to “green” jobs can only be described as willful stupidity.

Tom Emerson forwarded the Wall Street Journal’s European editorial opinion, which recounts the readily available information regarding the wasteful and feckless efforts of the Spanish and German governments to create green jobs.

No matter how one fudges the numbers or rationalizes about environmental benefits, green jobs require enormous government subsidies. The extra money for those subsidies is forcibly taken via taxes from businesses that would have been able to to use the money for more productive purposes. Thereby is an economy diminished. Green jobs, for example, in production of ethanol have raised food prices for the world’s poor and used more petroleum energy in production of ethanol than would have been used without ethanol.
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Green Jobs Stupidity”


Worth Reconsidering

-By Thomas E. Brewton

President Obama is reassessing his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) in New York City. A couple of related ideas also need to be reconsidered.

The colossal cost of holding a KSM trial in New York City is evidently the primary motivation for moving the trial elsewhere.

More worthy of reassessment is the liberal-progressive idea that terrorists should be dealt with as if they were ordinary criminals entitled to Miranda rights and the host of additional constitutional protections that go with ordinary criminal trials.

Worthy of reassessment, as well, is the administration’s repeated assurances that KSM will be found guilty and will be executed. This gives the appearance of a show trial in which the conviction is rigged beforehand. One wonders why Obama is willing to create this appearance, given his craven urges to kow-tow to overseas public opinion.
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Worth Reconsidering”


Make Christianity More Than A Hobby

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Too many of us just go through the motions without commitment.

Sunday’s sermon at the Cohocton Assembly of God Church was delivered by Elder Joel Martin. His principal text was from the Book of Matthew:

1Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: 2″The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. 3So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. 4They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

5″Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; 6they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; 7they love to be greeted in the marketplaces and to have men call them ‘Rabbi.’ (Matthew 23:1-7)
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Make Christianity More Than A Hobby”


Not Just In Germany

-By Thomas E. Brewton

In Germany and California the secular, socialist political state is attempting to crush parents who teach Judeo-Christian moral principles to their children.

Shades of Bismarck’s kulturkampf and Hitler’s pogrom to impose Aryan purity.

Germany has criminalized home schooling, demanding that parents place their children in state schools, where they will be suitably indoctrinated in the religion of socialism.
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Not Just In Germany”


The Obama Road to Serfdom

-By Thomas E. Brewton

During 2009 we travelled far along the downward economic spiral that Friederich von Hayek in 1944 accurately foresaw for Great Britain under the post-War socialist Labour Party government.

This Wall Street Journal editorial lays out the nauseating hypocrisy of Obama’s phony PR gesture in the direction of fiscal probity.

Only blind faith in the secular religion of socialism can explain Obama’s rush to subordinate every aspect of our lives to the control of socialistic ideologues like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, David Axelrod, Bill Ayers, and Bernadine Dohrn. Obama and his people presume to omniscience, because they have been “educated” by elite socialistic universities. They assume arrogantly that the American people are dunces who can’t find their way to the bathroom without guidance from the intellectuals. In their ideology the only just and desirable society is based upon what Franklin Roosevelt termed security, what in earlier periods of history was called serfdom.
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The Obama Road to Serfdom”


The Federal Reserve Is Inflating Another Bubble

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Stock market exuberance is symptomatic of a rapidly expanding money supply’s corrosive effect.

In the last two trading days of the week ending January 23rd, the Dow Industrial Index plummeted 430.170 points, the worst decline in a year. Major factors, according to Street gossip, were continuing weakness in corporate sales and growing fears that Helicopter Ben Bernanke might not be re-appointed Fed chairman.

As the Wall Street Journal reported:
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The Federal Reserve Is Inflating Another Bubble”


Closing the Barn Door

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Procrustean regulation of banks and other financial institutions, passed by the House and pending in the Senate, will not prevent the next credit debacle and economic recession.

The House of Representatives has just passed a bill, primarily the brain child of Congressman Barney Frank, that expands the scope and detailed depth of financial markets’ regulation.

For public consumption, Congressman Frank’s legislation aims to prevent future financial meltdowns. This it will fail to do. It will, however, continue the long standing animosity between Democrat/Socialists and Wall Street and the business community.

Accepting the Democrat/Socialist Party’s nomination for the presidency in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt railed against the “economic royalists” who were allegedly seeking a “new industrial dictatorship.” Privately, he opined that businessmen as a class were stupid, that newspapers were just as bad. During the election campaign of 1936, in an address at Madison Square Garden, he fulminated against the magnates of “organized money.” To uprorious applause, he threatened: “I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”
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Closing the Barn Door”


Bunkum-Babbling Ben Bernanke

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is a devotee of Keynesian economics, which is to say that he is incapable of learning from experience. Either he can’t comprehend that the Fed’s excessive fiat money creation always precedes bubbles of economic exuberance, or he insanely proposes to continue repeating the Fed’s cheap money policies, ever hopeful of a different result.

Establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 enabled arbitrary and excessive inflation of the monetary base supplied to banks and other financial institutions. In every recession since 1913, especially the 1930s Depression and our current housing and subprime mortgage bust, Fed action made bubbles larger and more pervasive and made subsequent buble-bursts more devastating than they would have been otherwise.

Over a short six-year period preceding the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Fed doubled the lendable deposits of the nation’s banks. Other over-expansions of the money supply also led to the unprecedented inflation and high unemployment of the 1970s stagflation, to the 1990s dot.com boom-and-bust, and to the current collapse of housing and financial markets.
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Bunkum-Babbling Ben Bernanke”


When Fanatical Agendas Obliterate Science

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Climate Emails Stoke Debate: Scientists’ Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global Warming (Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2009).

The Wall Street Journal article notes:

Representatives of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a large professional organization, expressed concern that the hacked emails would weaken global resolve to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

One would expect true scientists to be more concerned with pursuit of the truth than with foreclosing questions about an hypothesis. As it stands, the greenhouse-gas hypothesis is no more than a religious dogma proclaimed from closed chambers. Liberal-progressives treat all questions or challenges to it as heresy.
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When Fanatical Agendas Obliterate Science”


Why Place Your Bet On The Horse That Always Loses?

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Why believe that Obamacare will “bend the cost curve,” when government has repeatedly failed to cut costs of existing healthcare entitlements?

The Obama administration and fellow liberal-progressive-socialists in Congress have based much of their rationalization for Obamacare on its purported reductions in healthcare costs. But, for at least two decades, proposals by the Social Security Administration and Congress to cut Medicare costs have come to naught.

This is hardly surprising, since Congress’s modus operandi is spending money, and the more of it the better, from politicians’ viewpoint. Alexis de Tocqueville, celebrated author of Democracy in America, put his finger on the insurmountable problem in mid-19th century. The theory of socialism is “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” but, while the public’s needs may be quantifiable, its wants are unlimited.

Efficiency is a negative criterion in any government project. Remember that the Employment Act of 1946 committed the government to maintaining full employment. From the politicians’ viewpoint, it is better to employ excessive numbers of people, at higher costs, to enhance the image of helping the people. Congress’s $787 billion so-called stimulus extravaganza is a recent example.
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Why Place Your Bet On The Horse That Always Loses?”


Government As Narcotics Dealer

-By Warner Todd Huston

Since the advent of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, monetary authorities have repeatedly upped the narcotic dosage as a remedy for the pains of easy money and credit addiction.

An exceptionally clear and insightful analysis of the precipitating and sustaining causes of the twelve-year-long Great Depression is to be found in Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States. Published in 1937, this book provides a wealth of statistics and quotations from Federal Reserve officials, bankers, and economists of that era. It can be obtained from the Ludwig von Mises Institute via its website.

At the end of World War I, when the Federal Reserve System was only five years old, the Fed decided to prevent prices across the economy from falling back to the levels prevailing before the war. To do so, the Fed pumped so much money into the economy via the banks that total bank lendable deposits more than doubled in the six years from 1914 to 1920. To make the perspective clearer, the Fed pumped more lendable funds into the banking system in six years than had been created in the prior 131 years since the ratification of the Constitution.
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Government As Narcotics Dealer”


Sanctity of Criminals’ Lives

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Some groups like the ACLU, who advocate abolition of the death penalty for murder or rape, enthusiastically endorse murder by abortion.

Many Christians and religious Jews, along with secular liberal-progresssives, sincerely oppose the death penalty for convicted murderers or rapists. They are firmly persuaded that the God-given miracle of life is too precious to leave in the hands of fallible human jurors and judges.

Almost all people agree that murder, taking matters into one’s own hands without the sanction of civil justice, is forbidden. Indeed, that view is one of the oldest imbedded in society’s laws. Those same laws of society, from time immemorial, also dictated executing murderers and rapists, provided that they were brought before a lawfully constituted body and convicted by requisite evidence. Justice was fitting the penalty to the crime.
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Sanctity of Criminals’ Lives”


Iran: Can Obama play hardball?

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Robert Kagan’s Washington Post column gives us a look at the way the president appears to be playing his hand in the diplomatic game.

President Obama notoriously promised to bring change to our foreign policy relations. His presumption, shared by most liberal-progressives, was that every nation in the world truly desires to eschew war as a policy instrument.

Liberal-progressives take their cue from Auguste Comte’s writings in the 1820s. Comte was supremely confident that international socialism, under the rubric of his Religion of Humanity, would bring people from all over the world to learn from French intellectuals the means for restructuring political society. Restructured societies, with socialistic redistribution of wealth, would no longer experience crime, aggression, or war. Acting as moral judges, intellectuals would dictate appropriate rules for personal and international relations.

The way to realize those presumed universal peace desires, in the liberal-progressive scenario, is to be sensitive, even obsequious, and never to take military or diplomatic action unilaterally. To show its faith in the promise of world peace and benevolence under international socialism, the United States is to set an example for the world by disarming itself and reducing its economic and military power to rough equality with such powers in the rest of the world.

This diplomatic paradigm, faithfully followed by President Obama in his dealings with our self-declared enemies, has so far produced nothing more than promises.
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Iran: Can Obama play hardball?”


Socializing Society By Eliminating The Family

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, proposes to abolish traditional marriage as a state-sponsored institution.

As many feared, same-sex marriage may become the wedge to destroy the religious and political institutions of marriage and family.

Each new day brings to light additions to the torrent of liberal-progressive-socialist attacks upon the basic social and political institutions of Western civilization and its foundation in Judeo-Christian morality. Reducing marriage to no more than issuance of a civil certificate acknowledging the partnering of any two people is exactly what the Soviet Union did. The aim was, and is under Obama’s New New Deal socialism, to break down lingering vestiges of individual moral responsibility and to supplant them with servility under the supposedly classless socialist political state.
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Socializing Society By Eliminating The Family”


Bitten By Profligacy

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The dollar edges closer to becoming a third-world currency.

Foreign central banks, suffering from the Treasury and Fed-engineered decline in the dollar’s value, are moving new currency reserve investments from the dollar into Euros and Yen.

Long-range effects on the United States will be bad.

If foreign central banks continue to shift their currency reserves from the dollar to other currencies, the dollar will lose its international reserve currency status, damaging our nation’s future. Interest costs on the national debt will rise, reflecting a higher level of economic risk for foreign dollar holders. To pay higher interest on the national debt, taxes will have to rise, crimping business and depressing employment. Costs of our imports, upon which we came to depend for inexpensive consumer and industrial goods, will rise, because the dollar is worth less on international markets. Those higher import costs will reduce business profits, further constraining creation of new jobs.
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Bitten By Profligacy”


The Meaning of Change

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Candidate Obama charmed inexperienced, poorly educated youth and disaffected elders with promises of an undefined abstraction called change. That change, we now can see, was to be forcible imposition of Obama’s true religion, secular socialism.

Change that candidate Obama promised turns out to be restructuring society to achieve social justice, which in the socialist lexicon is egalitarian redistribution of income and wealth. That means higher taxes, tight regulation of all sectors of the economy, and further enervation of a population increasingly dependent upon the political state for its sustenance.

The president’s pattern of industry czars and heavy new regulations, along with government financing and partial government ownership of major private companies is reminiscent of Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism in the 1920s and 30s, as well as of Hitler’s tight regulation of German industry after 1933. In neither case did these dictators seize full ownership of private industry, which liberal-progressives tell us is the definition of socialism. Instead, Mussolini and Hitler followed the prescription of socialism’s early theorists: regulation alone is sufficient to impose socialist statism.
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The Meaning of Change”


Oslo Edition of Saturday Night Live

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Wolf Blitzer needs to continue his fact checking.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer recently devoted time to fact-checking a Saturday Night Live skit that cast a less than favorable light upon failure of The One to deliver on his campaign promises.

Surely Mr. Blitzer will follow up with an analysis of the lack of basis for the Nobel committee’s awarding its Peace Prize to President Obama.

He will find his rebuttal work easy.

The President has done exactly nothing in the way of concrete action to stabilize volatile foreign conditions or to restrain rogue states (Iran, Russia, North Korea) that continually work to destabilize world political and economic conditions. No effective action, just talk, talk, talk. All of that talk has been ignored by rogue states, which have contemptuously dismissed Obama’s empty words and continued unrestrained in their campaigns to dominate Asia and the Middle East.
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Oslo Edition of Saturday Night Live”


Keynesianism Loves the Total State

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Keynesian macroeconomics, the mythology favored by liberal-progressives ranging from President Obama to New York Times propagandist Paul Krugman, is a rationalization for massive expansion of deficit spending and socialization of the entire economy.

From the Mises.org website, John Maynard Keynes’s introduction to the 1936 German edition of his General Theory:

The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire.

Keynes’s bete noir was individual savings, his so-called liquidity trap, which he identified as the cause of economic depression. His ideology thus calls for displacing individualism with collectivized power of the political state, evidenced by rampant creation of Federal agencies, deficit spending programs, and punishingly higher taxes. This is what the Obama administration is pushing to do today.
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Keynesianism Loves the Total State”


Labor Day: A Tribute To Highway Robbers

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Labor Unions are a throwback to the days of travel by horseback, when highwaymen fell upon lone travelers, beating them and robbing them of their possessions. Unions still have the ambivalent status of thugs, to their victims, and Robin Hoods, to their supporters.

Crafts labor unions evolved out of the medieval system of crafts guilds, which used an apprenticeship system to restrict the number of craftsmen in every skilled trade and thereby to set prices and limit competition. After the start of the industrial revolution in the early 1800s, the crafts guilds morphed into unions of skilled workers, such as carpenters, electrical workers, metal workers, etc.

Today’s industrial unions of unskilled workers such as the United Auto Workers, longshoremen, and steelworkers have a somewhat different provenance. Their inspiration was Karl Marx’s several Socialist Internationals, which in different incarnations were headquartered in Europe and in the United States. Marx envisioned cooperation among all workers – the employed and unemployed – in labor unions as the means to destroy what he called the despotism of capitalism. It is such unions that bankrupted the automobile and big steel producers in the United States and reduced the port of New York to secondary status. (See Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops)
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Labor Day: A Tribute To Highway Robbers”


Murder’s OK, But No Torture. We’re Liberals

-By Thomas E. Brewton

To understand the grotesque hypocrisy of liberal-progressives we must view it from the perspective of their religion of socialism.

Let’s immediately dispatch the moralistic protestations of liberal-progressives that any degree of rough interrogation of terrorists, even to save thousands of lives from planned attacks, is unconscionable. Liberal-progressives grow weak-kneed contemplating the confinement and interrogation of a few hundred terrorist thugs, while aggressively murdering millions of babies.

President Obama supports the slaughter without judicial due process of babies via abortion, which is reminiscent of the an earlier pagan worship of the god Molech, requiring the sacrifice of infants. At the same time, the President’s fellow liberal-progressives hold street demonstrations and candle-light vigils to protest execution of vile murderers and rapists and to protest incarceration of criminals. These are pagan rituals oozing from the gospel of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that private property was the root of all evil and, in particular, the cause of crime and wars.
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Murder’s OK, But No Torture. We’re Liberals”


Government Stimulus Spending: Differing Perspectives

-By Thomas E. Brewton

President Franklin Roosevelt, speaking of the intractable Depression, sourly admitted that Keynesian fiscal policy, in theory, was the simplest thing in the world, but in practice, a disaster.

A thoughtful reader, who generally disagrees with me, posted the following as part of his comment responding to The Bigger the Government, the Harder the Economic Fall:

I must confess that I find your “mysticism” explanation of how business cycles occur somewhat baffling, but knowing your anti-Keynesian viewpoint, I should not be surprised that you view any governmental pump priming with suspicion.

According to the butterfly effect, any seemingly insignificant action will have a cascading effect and invariably lead to a chain of events elsewhere. How much more telling would the expenditure (whether you approve or not) of billions of dollars be to the economy than the flutter of the wing of a moth?

My response:

I can’t presume to speak for the reader’s views, but liberal-progressives on balance advocate the Keynesian macro-economic approach, a variety of chaos-theory, butterfly effect, which appears to me to be simplistic.
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Government Stimulus Spending: Differing Perspectives”


Obamacare: Quintessential Socialism

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The overriding characteristic of President Obama’s National Socialist healthcare is forced equality of consumption, a major step in the direction of egalitarian distribution of income. Emphasis is upon the word forced.

As we see with the widespread town hall protests against the President’s proposed National Socialist healthcare proposals, people do not willingly surrender the fruits of many years’ labor to the government in the name of an undefined abstraction called the common good. Particularly is this true when it is liberal-progressive bureaucrats who decide arbitrarily what constitutes the common good.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed essay, Martin Feldstein, Harvard economics professor and former chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, sums up Obamacare: it’s all about the raw power to decide who gets what treatment, while cramming everyone into identical little boxes in order to eliminate any efforts in the direction of individuality. And the bureaucratic mechanism for eliminating individuality is rationing medical care.
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Obamacare: Quintessential Socialism”


Multi-Cultural Amorality in the White House

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Washington Post reports that President Obama aims to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Doing so will offend hundreds of millions of heterosexual married couples in order to please a minority of voters. If one looks only at homosexual couples, that minority is probably less than 1% of the population, particularly if one takes into account the lesser degree of stability in homosexual relationships than in heterosexual ones.

Politically, the President’s opposition to DOMA is probably motivated by his need to throw a sop to his liberal-progressive-socialist worshippers, who have been irritated or outraged by his failure to deliver on many of his campaign promises.
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Multi-Cultural Amorality in the White House”


Henry Lewis Gates and the Debasement of American Education

-By Thomas E. Brewton

More consequential than Professor Gates’s racist rant against a Cambridge police officer is the core rot in American education introduced by his academic specialty, black studies, which is an excrescence of 1960s and 1970s student radicalism.

Harvard’s Professor Henry Lewis Gates is, of course, not solely responsible for the muddle-headed mess that is American education today. But the politically-correct, identity-politics education, of which he is a champion, has destroyed the historical purpose of education, leaving us an ignorant and divided people.

Student radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s demanded “relevant” subjects, but those subjects gave them no useful knowledge or skills, thus leaving them outside the mainstream of employment and contributing to their bitterness and feelings that they were victims of discrimination.

Black studies and the other identity-politics specialties are radicalizing preparation for work as community organizers. Their effect is to establish a separate culture that is critical of the ethos upon which the United States was founded.
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Henry Lewis Gates and the Debasement of American Education”


Destructive Social Justice

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Democrat/Socialist Party’s plan to nationalize healthcare exemplifies the essence of social justice: an invidious urge to destroy what exists and a faith that social harmony depends upon making everyone equally miserable.

Liberal-progressives estimate that 46 million people, 15% of the population, lack health insurance. In order to provide them insurance, liberal-progressives intend to force each of us to forgo any vestige of individuality and to accept a prison-like regimentation of our healthcare.

When Hillary Clinton was working in 1993 to impose socialized medicine upon us, the Washington Monthly, one of the purest strains of socialism within the liberal-progressive, mainstream media, editorialized forthrightly that a fundamental aim and benefit of Hillary Care would be forcing business leaders to sit for hours in crowded doctors’ waiting rooms to receive medical care. There is more than a bit of nastiness in this liberal-progressive urge to smash what others have built and to drag people down to their level.
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Destructive Social Justice”


Social Engineering and Price Controls

-By Thomas E. Brewton

All government intervention in the economy distorts decision making, with bad and unanticipated results.

Classical economics, on the whole, attempts to explain how individuals behave under changing economic conditions. The implicit idea is that people, acting as individuals, collectively move an economy. But classical economics recognizes that within an economy, many different economic factors impinge upon individuals who have highly variegated economic preferences. Free market prices, changing continually in response to the changing balance of supply and demand across markets for tens of thousands of different kinds of products and services, are the signals that trigger individuals’ economic decisions.

Keynesian macroeconomics, in contrast, assumes that the economy is comprised of monolithic abstractions treated as if they were independent, controllable “things.” Among others, those “things” are consumption, savings, investment, wages, and employment. The implicit assumption is that everybody can be controlled by one-size-fits-all policies. Thus divorced from the multitude of individual aspects of real life, Keynesian economists believe that their computer models can with precision predict consumption, investment, and wages, enabling them to maintain full employment at all times.
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Social Engineering and Price Controls”


The Long, Agonizing Decline of the United States

-By Thomas E. Brewton

We are following the downward path of Great Britain, one of the two greatest of Western history’s empires.

We can draw several cautionary lessons from the history of our British cousins. Of all the world’s nations we and the UK are most similar, both in our rise and in our decline.

In addition to sharing the English language, our whole constitutional ethos and legal system derive from the British constitution and from the common law. Ours are the principal nations that made the sovereign’s right to taxation subject to the will of the people expressed in Parliament and our state and national legislatures.

Most especially, ours were the only nations that arose upon the primacy of private property rights. It was this fundamental element of natural law that, more than anything else, accounted for English and American individualism. It was an ethos that the German Empire’s Iron Chancellor Bismarck contemptuously dismissed as a society of shopkeepers, as opposed to the Prussian landed aristocracy. It was, however, an ethos that twice bested the statist collectivism of Continental Europe in world wars.
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The Long, Agonizing Decline of the United States”


The Supreme Court And The Commerce Clause

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Constitution’s commerce clause has been stretched beyond recognition to justify traveling the road to tyranny by obliterating the 9th and 10th Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution’s Article I, Section. 8 says, inter alia:

“The Congress shall have Power…To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…”

In the hearing for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, she was asked to comment upon the Constitution’s commerce clause. Senator Dianne Feinstein inquired about the extent to which the Court can restrain Congress’s use of the commerce clause to regulate anything and everything it lays eyes upon. As Senator Feinstein noted, that will become particularly important as Congress and executive branch regulatory bodies embark upon procrustean regulations under President Obama’s proposed “green” legislation.
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The Supreme Court And The Commerce Clause”