Thomas+Brewton

00Publius Contributor - Anti-Americanism - Barack Obama - Crime - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Ayers and Dohrn are Liars

December 29, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Everything, from people within the Weatherman Underground, to Bill Ayers’s own words, proves his mendacity.

Doug Welsh on his Twitter site posted a link to Larry Grathwohl’s reply to Ayers.

Mr. Grathwohl, from his personal knowledge as an FBI infiltrator in the Weatherman underground in the late 1960s and early 70s, confutes the self-serving, hypocritical rationalizations that Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn are now peddling.
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00Publius Contributor - Education - News - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Whence Comes the Concept of Fairness, of Right and Wrong?

December 23, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Without acknowledgment of God-created human souls, society is reduced to a random collection of people guided only by pursuit of their individual ideas of pleasure and avoidance of what they find painful. In such a society, nothing is inherently right or wrong.

Read Ben Shapiro’s Why Atheism Is Morally Bankrupt.

John Dewey, in the first half of the 20th century, taught that there is no such thing as timeless moral principles. Humans merely respond to pleasure and pain, while pursuing actions that redound to their benefit. Dewey’s compass, in his philosophy of pragmatism, was only whether an action achieved the actor’s aim, without regard to its effect on others.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - History - Media Bias - News - President - Society/Culture - Taxes - The Law - Thomas Brewton

The New Deal Would Have Worked, If…

December 19, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressive-socialists again eagerly anticipate returning to the disastrously failed economic policies of Franklin Roosevelt. Apparently religious faith in socialism outweighs rational consideration of evidence.

The standard liberal-progressive-socialist litany is that socialism, in the New Deal and subsequent years, would have succeeded, if only the government had spent more money for a longer time.

Many liberals lament that the New Deal didn’t go far enough in socializing the economy. That was a major reason for the savage antagonism between the liberal establishment of the 1960s and the New Left student radicals like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the spiritual parents of president-elect Obama’s educational policies.
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00Publius Contributor - Communism - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Family - Media Bias - News - Religion - Socialism - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

A Preacher for the Gnostic Religion of Socialism

December 18, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Naomi Klein, a Canadian and the new rock-star evangelist of secular socialism, is representative of the New Left activists who populate the Democrat/Socialist Party.

Radical-left activist doctrine ignores the historical fact that every cohesive and enduring political society must be ordered by a commonly held understanding of human nature and human morality.

The profile in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine is a long and revealing one. Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left gives the reader a sympathetic view of the anti-everything orientation of the present-day progeny of early 20th century families who were thoroughly imbued with gnostic expectations of a socialist heaven on earth. Families who passionately believed in remaking human society and human nature to achieve blissful, benevolent social conditions by purely materialistic means.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Media Bias - News - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Generous With Other People’s Money

December 6, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressives presume that they can do no wrong, so long as they take other people’s money for the benefit of the secular and socialistic welfare state.

iticorp’s Robert Rubin is getting harsh words from investors who ask why he should receive $115 million in annual compensation, while shrugging off any suggestion of personal responsibility for the banking giant’s horrendously imprudent investment policies. Mr. Rubin says that he was merely a broad-gauge policy advisor, that problems arose from the policies he supported only because of poor execution by underlings.

In the same vein, liberal-progressives steadfastly maintain that socialist welfare-state policies always fail only because the government didn’t spend enough money, long enough.
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00Publius Contributor - Family - News - Religion - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

The Advent Season

December 5, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Advent is the time of preparing ourselves for Christmas to celebrate the coming of Christ Jesus for our salvation. It’s also a time for watchful awaiting the Second Coming.

For her sermon today at the Cohocton (New York) United Methodist Church, Rev. Karin Porch’s text was Mark 13:1-37. Her focal points were, first, a call to prayer for a new Great Awakening of spiritual awareness and a return to the principles of morality that shaped the formation of our nation, and, second, an awakened watchfulness for the spiritual arrival of Jesus this Christmas and for His return as depicted in the Book of Revelation.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Communism - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Elections - GOP - Media Bias - News - Socialism - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

The Auto Bailout

November 13, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Classic socialism in action.

Socialism is characterized by ignoring the free marketplace and empowering intellectual planners to control the economy with a cocoon of regulations and directives. In Europe (and today in China) economically moribund companies are designated national champions and kept alive at taxpayer expense, even when they can’t compete in the free market without government subsidies.

This flows from socialist governments’ belief that full employment can be maintained only by massive deficit spending. J. M. Keynes, the economics guru of the the New Deal era, opined that it would be suitable government policy to hire men to dig holes one day, fill them up the next day, then re-dig them and refill them ad infinitum.
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00Publius Contributor - Budget - Business - Congress - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - News - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Pursuing the Common Good

November 9, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

R. R. Reno explores the moral dimensions of capitalism.

History demonstrates conclusively that free-market capitalism increases everyone’s standard of living far more and far faster than any variety of liberal-progressive-socialism. The question Mr. Reno asks, however, is whether free-market capitalism must be indifferent to the broader aspects of the common good. Must it be, as liberal-progressive-socialists contend, driven by selfish greed?

My own view, frequently stated in this blog, is a supplement to Mr. Reno’s analysis. It is that a society of limited government, one with wide economic and political liberties for individuals, must be counterbalanced by a strong commitment to individual religious morality.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Education - News - Socialism - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Gnostic Education

November 7, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Why are today’s students often taught to hate the United States?

Phyllis Schlafly sketches the aims of too many teachers’ colleges who train our teachers (Teaching “Social Justice” in Schools).

Those aims are the ones notoriously espoused by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Senator Obama’s friends and co-workers in the Chicago schools project funded by the Annenberg Foundation.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Crime - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - President - Socialism - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton - Unions

Labor Unions: A Brood of Vipers

November 4, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Labor unions make us poorer and they prolong recessions.

Senator Obama’s short-sighted support for wealth-redistribution taxation and for socialist labor unions is nothing new for Democrat/Socialist politicians.

Both in England and in the United States, labor unions led the political assault to overwhelm the individualistic traditions that made those nations great and to impose socialistic planning and regulation.

Between 1933 and 1940, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal nationalized agriculture, promoted the expansion of membership and power of communist-led labor unions, and pushed businesses into the National Recovery Administration (NRA), an imitative version of Mussolini’s Fascist state corporatism.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Crowding Obama

November 3, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The mindless throngs assembled to worship their savior, Senator Obama, bring to mind José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses.

Street mobs and mass demonstrations are a product of socialism, beginning with the Parisian mobs who assaulted the Bastille on July 14, 1789, then dragged government ministers from their homes and hanged them from the lamp posts.

Everything about these mass demonstrations is anathema to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which was intended to protect individual political liberties from the power of the mob. Today, liberal-progressive Federal judges justify abrogation of individual liberties, particularly property rights, by reference to mob sentiment.
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00Publius Contributor - Anti-Americanism - Communism - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Europe - History - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Socialism - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Mandating a Perfect World

October 25, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressives’ conception of social justice always requires the political state forcibly to impose some form of equality.

Social justice, in the catechism of the socialist religion, is no more than an exertion of raw power to force people to conform to what liberal-progressives believe conditions ought to be.

Forced equality was the mode in the world’s first socialist political state, Revolutionary France. After the 1789 Revolution, France was reeling under wild swings from monarchy, to attempts at constitutional government, to the rule of street mobs. Matters came to a head with the execution of King Louis XVI in January, 1793. The Assembly’s Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety announced, “It is wholly necessary to establish briefly the despotism of freedom in order to crush the despotisms of Kings.” (quoted in André Maurois, A History of France).

What “the despotism of freedom” meant was the bloody Reign of Terror. The Revolutionary Tribunal, during fourteen months of continuous sessions, condemned thousands of people to the guillotine as purported enemies of the Revolution. Altogether, more than 70,000 French citizens – men, women, children of all ages – were murdered in the name of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood.
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00Publius Contributor - Abortion - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Family - Media Bias - News - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Murder by Abortion Leads to Societal Death

October 23, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressivism’s preoccupation with self-indulgent hedonism, evidenced glaringly in abortion advocacy, is literally death, the abnegation of social cohesion through abandonment of personal responsibility and morality.

A vote for Senator Obama is a vote for death. The spread of AIDs via rampant sexual promiscuity, facilitated by abortion, is only one small aspect of the phenomenon.

Read At Long Last: Obama, Abortion, and the Courts.

Abortion “rights” leave us only a short step away from the eugenic birth-control policies advocated by openly tyrannical socialist regimes such as Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party and Mao’s socialist China. Hitler forced sterilization of supposedly inferior races and regulated marriage to promote Aryian culture. Mao and subsequent Chinese regimes limited families to a single child and encouraged infanticide of female babies.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Communism - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Elections - GOP - Media Bias - News - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

$700 Billion Worth of Vagueness

October 17, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Despite what you read in the press, the $700 billion “Wall Street bailout” program granting the Treasury and the Fed almost unlimited and only slightly defined authority to implement the bailout bill is hardly unprecedented.

Most new regulatory programs are approved in broad principle by the public and by Congress. Legislative implementing language typically is along the lines of, “An act to create X agency for the purpose of regulating Y, with powers to write, enforce, and adjudicate all necessary regulations for the purposes of, but not limited to, Z.”

Such broad enabling legislation may call for Congressional oversight, but the real power always lies in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and the Federal judiciary, which will be called upon to interpret disputes over subsequent regulations.
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Elections - Media Bias - News - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Why You Should Not Vote For Senator Obama

October 15, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The rock-bottom issue is the destructive nature of the secular religion of socialism, which is, next to Islam’s mandate for jihad, the most vicious and degrading religious movement ever to afflict humanity.

The election of Senator Obama to the presidency will usher in a Federal government in which both the legislative and executive branches will be controlled by leaders who worship at the altar of socialism, a secular religion. Nearly half of the Supreme Court Justices and a large percentage of other Federal judges are socialists.

The questions to confront are:

First, is Senator Obama a socialist? The answer emphatically is yes.
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00Publius Contributor - Budget - Congress - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - GOP - News - President - Security/Safety - Socialism - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Taxes, Unions, and Regulations Matter

September 19, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

To picture what Senator Obama’s economic policies hold in store for the United States look at the destructive impact of those policies in individual states.

The New England States and New York once were the industrial heartland of the United States. After the Civil War, industrial growth moved westward into Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and neighboring states. Even as recently as the end of World War II, New York City was the greatest manufacturing city in the world.

No longer. What happened?

To some extent the demise of these centers, especially a crowded New York City, reflects changes in technology and transportation. Trucking on the interstate highway system surged in the 1950s and the rise of air freight shifted lots of freight traffic from railroads. More cost-effective single-story, spread-out manufacturing plants along interstate highways replaced the multi-story plants in major cities that had to be within walking or subway and bus ride distances from workers.
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00Publius Contributor - Congress - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Dead Wrong

August 29, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Relying on Senator Biden’s foreign policy judgment is risky. Both he and Senator Obama backed the wrong horses in Iraq.

When it was unpopular, Senator McCain stood up for victory in Iraq and pushed for what later became known as the successful Surge.

Senator Obama, of course, put his finger to the wind and followed public opinion down the path of least resistance. He famously campaigned on a pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq immediately. He has since failed to acknowledge the effectiveness of the Surge, a denial that demeans the superior performance and valor of our troops.
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00Publius Contributor - Communism - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - History - News - Patriotism - President - Security/Safety - Socialism - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Thomas Paine and the Values of 1776

August 26, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Paine’s ideology was the antithesis of the ethos that produced our Constitution.

Responding to A View From the Left, Kenneth T. Ellis wrote:

Mr. Brewton,

As a member of the Thomas Paine Assn. I am appalled when I see what has happened to the U.S. and its downtrodden masses.

These words by Thomas Paine should ring out loud and clear to every American that today is in want.

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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Socialism - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Can Senator Obama Talk Us Out of This One?

August 23, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Talk, they say, is cheap. And generally worth no more than it costs, when confronting international military aggression.

Senator Obama’s eagerness for face-to-face meetings with foreign dictators, without preconditions, echoes Senator John Kerry’s “sensitive” foreign policy enunciated in the 2004 presidential election campaign:

Last Thursday, Kerry told minority journalists at the Unity 2004 conference in Washington that “I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side.

That approach failed in the 1930s with the League of Nations and failed repeatedly with the UN after World War II. Why should we be surprised that it makes no impression upon the Russians today?
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00Publius Contributor - Family - News - Science - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

What is Faith?

August 20, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

It was not through law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. (Romans 4:13)

Rev. Josh Hanson preached Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut).

Using the familiar story of Noah building the ark, Rev. Hanson emphasized that Noah did everything just as God commanded him. (Genesis 6:22) This is why Genesis 6:9 states that Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Europe - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Socialism - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - UN

World Citizenship?

August 9, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

It means different things, depending upon your religious faith.

Responding to Senator Obama, Citizen of the World, a reader emailed this observation:

June 17, 1982 – Ronald Reagan speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, “I speak today both as a citizen of the United States and of the world. I come with the heartfelt wishes of my people for peace, bearing honest proposals and looking for genuine progress.”

Would you care to come to the same conclusions about President Reagan?

My response is that the difference between Senator Obama’s usage and President Reagan’s is a matter of intent.
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00Publius Contributor - Education - Family - News - Religion - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

The Babylonian Captivity of the Christian Church

August 7, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Too many Christians have sold their souls to the secular political state.

From the early days of the Roman Catholic Church, when the temporal power of the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 6th century, there has been continual tension in Christianity between the pull of political power and the essentiality of personal spirituality.

Jesus called us to follow him and reminded us that the two greatest commandments are to love the Lord God alone with all our strength and to love our fellow humans as we love ourselves. Too often the church has been tempted to ally itself with the prevailing political power to enforce secular laws that it sees as necessary for Christian life.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Congress - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Media Bias - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Outrageous Reaction to Profits

August 5, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

ExxonMobil’s quarterly report, taken out of perspective, predictably evoked screams of outrage from liberal-progressives and from the general public.

Senator Obama and other members of Congress, egged on by the liberal media, bluster about imposing so-called windfall-profits taxes on oil companies.

Because gasoline prices are at all-time high levels, the news that ExxonMobil coincidentally reported an all-time high net income of $11.97 billion was immediately bruited by liberal-progressives as evidence that ExxonMobil is gouging the public, profiteering on the backs of ordinary citizens. Exxon, liberal-progressives tell us, must have been taking advantage of the world situation to squeeze the rest of us by unreasonably forcing up the price of gasoline.

That syllogism is untenable.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Congress - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Media Bias - News - Society/Culture - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Inflation and the Burgeoning Deficit

August 4, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

How will the Fed handle it?

The Wall Street Journal reports (U.S. to Ratchet Up Borrowing, July 31, 2008):

With this fiscal year’s budget deficit expected to more than double from the previous year, the U.S. government plans to nearly quadruple its borrowing to $555 billion.

The Federal Reserve’s dilemma is that opening the money-supply spigot enough to provide funds for banks and other institutional investors to buy the $555 billion of new Treasury debt will contribute further to the inflation already under way.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson

August 3, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

There is a striking parallel between the naivete of Senator Obama and President Woodrow Wilson in their expectation of imposing a liberal-progressive model of peace upon a fractious world.

Senator Obama’s faith that his personal diplomacy with our sworn enemies will transform them into reasonable and peaceful partners is as old as American liberal-progressivism. Its most celebrated expression was in the policy of the Democratic Party’s progressive president Woodrow Wilson, pronounced in his April 2, 1917, message to a special session of Congress.

President Wilson, responding to Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking without warning of three American ships the previous month, declared:
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - President - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Senator Obama, Citizen of the World

August 2, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

European socialists and Middle Eastern Muslims are wildly enthusiastic about Senator Obama, because he styles himself a citizen of the world who, like all liberal-progressive-socialists, aims for world government.

American liberal-progressive-socialism, in the person of Senator Obama, is a carbon copy of European socialism, and Islamic jihadists recognize that socialism offers no opposition to their ruthless jihad to enslave the entire world.

For historical perspective, let’s look to one of France’s leading socialist theoreticians, the late Jean-François Revel. As I wrote at the time of M. Revel’s death in May, 2006:
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