Sunday, June 20, 2010


Once again Glenn Beck gives Americans the education that their schools no longer teach

In Glenn Beck’s excellent continuing series of “Founders Friday’s,” yesterday he examined “Father of the Constitution” James Madison.

Discussing this great founder with him was Colleen Sheehan, author of “James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government,” and James D. Best, author of “Tempest at Dawn.” (Mr. Best graciously sent me a copy of his book a few months ago as a gift; I regret that my busy schedule and huge reading list has kept me from diving into this interesting novel to date–but I eagerly look forward to it)

Sheehan said Madison was responsible for the introduction of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, at the instigation of Thomas Jefferson. Madison did have a concern that these rights might someday be interpreted as the only rights we have; the Ninth Amendment should have taken care of this.

Beck pointed out that modern liberals view the Constitution and our freedoms exactly the reverse of how they were designed; they view the Constitution as a frustrating obstacle to all that they want to do, while our founders saw it as an obstacle to all that an over-powerful government might want to do TO us. How right they were!

Beck points out that Best’s book is a novel about the Constitution Convention; based on facts, but in novel form. He then asks Best about the priorities of the founders.

Best said they were dead-set against any form of concentrated power, having just escaped from an oppressive concentration of power. One of these “checks and balances” set up by the founders to prevent too much concentration of power and to protect freedom was the original system where senators were appointed by the state legislatures (this was prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913). The states were intended to have a high degree of sovereignty (see the Tenth Amendment) and held considerable influence in what the federal government did.

Another point brought out on the show was that the founders deliberately chose not to form a democracy as our form of government, and chose a republic. Madison’s research did reveal, however, that republics have their flaws, too. Madison called them “factions” and today we call them “special interests.” Madison went to great lengths in the design of our government to nullify the power of factions.

In order to slow things down, facilitate communication between the people and their representatives, and prevent factions or mobs from forcing hasty change on the nation, Madison worked to build in these “speed bumps” that checked impulsiveness by a single individual or groups; these also served to protect the basic rights of the minority from assault by the majority. Major changes had to go through the amendment process in Article V (not allow an activist judge to legislate from the bench as we have been doing since FDR).

Sheehan pointed out how important the original intent of the Constitution is, and that, as prescribed in Article V, it can only be changed by the amendment process. To allow unelected judges–or even elected legislators–to change it outside of the amendment process is to throw away our state and personal sovereignty and allow an oligarchy. “Interpretations” and reaching extrapolations not in line with the intent of the law/constitution when it was written are improper and undermine the rule of law, respect for the law, and freedom itself. Our founders and early statesmen clearly recognized this:
We must confine ourselves to the powers described in the Constitution, and the moment we pass it, we take an arbitrary stride towards a despotic Government. – James Jackson, First Congress

[The purpose of a written constitution is] to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights. – Thomas Jefferson

Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. – Thomas Jefferson

On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. – Thomas Jefferson

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that is not the guide in expounding it, there may be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful exercise of its powers. If the meaning of the text be sought in the changeable meaning of the words composing it, it is evident that the shape and attributes of the Government must partake of the changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject. What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense. – James Madison

The Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution. – Alexander Hamilton

The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and purposes, for which those powers were conferred. By a reasonable interpretation, we mean, that in case the words are susceptible of two different senses, the one strict, the other more enlarged, that should be adopted, which is most consonant with the apparent objects and intent of the Constitution. – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 1833

There was also considerable discussion of the Federalist Papers, which are a collection of writings by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay to explain the Constitution to the people. These are a fantastic resource for deeper understanding of the Constitution, what it means, why it does what it does, why it requires what it requires, etc. It goes deeper into the philosophy of the why behind the Constitution. It also helps clear up some of the mud that liberals have deliberately thrown into the waters today in an attempt to hide their unconstitutional agenda and slip things past the American people.

As the segment began to come to a close, the role of faith and religion in the lives of the founders and how they crafted our government was examined. Best pointed out that Madison’s teachers when he was young were clergymen (Rev. Thomas Martin and Rev. John Witherspoon), and he also worked closely with and sought the advice of Rev. Witherspoon (one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) in formulating the Virginia Plan. Also, the original intent of “separation of church and state,” i.e. preventing government from meddling in religious freedom–rather than the total divorce of religious values from the public square as liberals want today–is examined.

More HERE (See the original for video)





Ouch! Environmental News Site Calls Democrats "Notorious Terrorist Group"

It's all in the context, baby, all in the context, as Mother Nature Network lays it out (and, if they happen to see this post, will go "oh, shat")
There’s really nothing positive about the Gulf Oil spill, which has spilled over 102 million gallons and counting into the Gulf of Mexico. But a recent story out of the Gulf shows that even the darkest tales can shine a light on a more positive one. The Biloxi Sun Herald reports that reformed Ku Klux Klan member George Malvaney has taken a key role in the Gulf cleanup. Once a convicted white supremacist mercenary, Malvaney now supervises cleanup as the chief operating officer of the BP subcontractor U.S. Environmental Services.

George Malvaney was convicted as a KKK mercenary over thirty years ago. The Ku Klux Klan was initially founded in the 1860s by disgruntled Confederate army veterans but more or less died out by the 1870s. It found a second life in the 20th Century, serving as a notorious terrorist organization against minorities. The modern Klan is thought to be composed of several independent chapters across the United States, and it was one of these chapters which recruited George Malvaney.

And who were the primary members of the KKK? That's right, Democrats! Heck, the Democrats have a former member sitting in the Senate. And, really, other than the violence, is there all that much difference between today's Democrat Party and the KKK? Both put groups in boxes based on race and religion. Neither particularly cares for people of the Jewish faith. Both make horrible remarks about people based on their ethnicity and religion. Both have tried to restrict legal immigration (mostly from Asia, in particular, China). Both had/have policies that keep minorities in segregated communities. Both were against the Civil Rights Act. Both were against anti-lynching laws.

The difference is, the Democrat Party changed itself up so that now, instead of being directly abusive to minorities and religious groups (well, I suppose they are still abusive to Christian religious groups), they pander to minority groups as somehow not being capable enough to get it done themselves, and keep their lives under the banner of the federal government. Indirectly abusive, and their policies make themselves look beneficent.

SOURCE





In an English Suburb, Teaching the Kids Jihad and Jew Hatred

Carol Gould attends a school seminar on terrorism, and finds they have the kids hating Jews and the West early and often these days

Recently I spoke at a British school conference on world terrorism in the suburb of Bushey. In the current climate of worldwide Israel-hatred and America-bashing, it registered as a rather frightening experience.

At the evening opening of the conference, I was in the audience. Outspoken Muslim activist Inayat Bunglawala, who once wrote to the Jewish Chronicle that the creation of Israel was one of the great mistakes of the past century, was one of the speakers. On this occasion he railed against the Jewish state and the U.S., as did pockets of audience members sitting near me. He made it appear that America had been attacking Muslim cities, hence the 9/11 al-Qaeda attack.

I was jumping out of my skin. He spoke a stream of inaccuracies in front of this large, mostly young audience; many of them were toddlers when 9/11 took place and have no historical perspective about the decades of radical Islamic terror that culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001. I wagered that if I had said “Klinghoffer” to the crowd, they would have laughed.

There were several Israelis and Jewish students in the front row who got into a shouting match with the jihadists sitting near them, and the front rows engaged in a kind of verbal mini-pogrom. Every manner of invective was promulgated, including from one audience member the mantra that “a bunch of Ukrainian and Russian Jews converged on Palestine after the war who stole the land.” Two parents — with their progeny present — constantly chanted phrases about the “barbaric Israelis” and “American murderers.” I glared at them, but they just carried on.

At the end, three young Muslim men came over to me, one of whom I had challenged about a comment he had made from the floor about America and its “25% of oil consumption.” They shouted at me that Jews ran the U.S., were responsible for the lack of climate change legislation, manipulate the commodity market, and everything else.

The woman sitting next to me took me back to my hotel. She, a Hindu, and I agreed this was an eye-opener, as the 250 member audience — mostly children as young as 12 — was obviously filled with a near physical rage against Israel and the United States.

The next day, I gave my speech to a large audience of students from five local schools. From the platform I could see there were many youngsters wishing to express their identity with headscarves and keffiyeh-style neck scarves. I made the point that I was horrified that youngsters with sponge-like brains had been fed so many untruths the night before. As soon as the question-and-answer session got underway, a woman in a burka shouted at me from the back of the room: the world is in a perilous state because of the “stupidity, arrogance, and pigheadedness of the United States.”

The audience erupted. I thought they might storm the platform.

The atmosphere hitting me up there, looking down at this crowd of angry children, was of palpable hostility. One of the panelists, journalist Paul Eedle, interrupted the woman — evidently a teacher — to remind her of the thousands of Americans who had given their lives in WWII to defeat fascism, but the school just erupted again. One wee boy in the third row was holding up a fist. I reminded them of the plaque at Dunxford Airbase commemorating 33,000 dead U.S. pilots but it — literally — landed like a lead balloon. At this point the headmaster stood up and said: “You need to remember that there are only a handful of countries in the world that would allow a discourse like this amongst young students!” I am sure I could hear from a great distance the angry woman grinding her teeth.

My speech had concentrated on IRA terror — but a man asked me why I was blaming “only Muslims.” Yes, in the course of the panel discussion I had mentioned the small matters of the PLO hijackings, the murder of 241 American troops in Beirut, the Khobar Towers, the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan London Embassy, and of course 9/11 and 7/7 — panelist Dr. Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain even mentioned the 1972 Munich slaughter of the Israeli Olympic athletes — but this guy seemed to feel Muslims were being victimized. In my speech I had also noted that some historians feel Menachem Begin was a terrorist, but now I was accused of singling out Muslim terror.

It troubles me that children are also being made by the media to hate the U.S. because of the — admittedly poor — American management of Manchester United and Liverpool football clubs and the takeover by Kraft of Cadbury. The British trade authorities could have stopped those misguided Americans from taking over those institutions in the first place.

Panelist Dr. Abdullah decried America for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was not given a chance to reply, but wanted to remind him, and the large contingent of impressionable children, that if the U.S. had not dropped the bombs, millions of American, British, Australian, Filipino, and New Zealand troops would have perished because the Japanese leadership was fully intending to conduct a forty-year land war — with even the tiniest of its children trained to fight until every last baby was dead. Needless to say, Dr. Abdullah and the America-hating faculty member would not have been born, as people of color would have been next on Hitler’s annihilation list. Had the allies been annihilated by Germany and Japan in World War II, we would be living in the dark ages.

But they don’t seem to teach real history these days. Suffer the little children …

SOURCE






A Good Father's Day Gift

A good Father's Day gift would be to reform the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), make it gender-neutral, and assure men that family courts will accord them constitutional rights equivalent to those enjoyed by murderers and robbers. VAWA will be coming up for its five-year reauthorization later this year, and that will be the time to hold balanced hearings and eliminate VAWA's discrimination against men.

VAWA illustrates the hypocrisy of noisy feminist demands that we kowtow to their ideology of gender neutrality, to their claim that there is no difference between male and female, and to their opposition to stereotyping and gender profiling. VAWA is based on the proposition that there are, indeed, innate gender differences: Men are naturally batterers, and women are naturally victims.

Feminist supporters of VAWA obviously share Jessica Valenti's recent assertion in The Washington Post that American women are oppressed by the "patriarchy" and that "it needs to end." One way they hope to end it is by using the extravagantly expensive and discriminatory VAWA, which was passed in 1994 as a payoff to the feminists for helping to elect Bill Clinton president in 1992.

VAWA is not designed to eliminate or punish violence, but to punish only alleged violence against women. Most of the shelters financed by VAWA do not accept men as victims.

VAWA has been known from the get-go as "feminist pork" because it puts nearly $1 billion a year of U.S. taxpayers' money into the hands of the radical feminists without any accountability for how the money is spent. Feminists have set up shop in shelters where they promote divorce, marriage breakup, hatred of men and false accusations, while rejecting marriage counseling, reconciliation, drug-abuse treatment and evidence of mutual-partner abuse.

Feminists have changed state laws to include a loosey-goosey definition of family violence. It doesn't have to be violent -- it can simply be what a man says or how he looks at a woman.

Domestic violence can even be what a woman thinks a man might do or say. Definitions of violence include calling your partner a naughty word, raising your voice, causing "annoyance" or "emotional distress," or just not doing what your partner wants.

VAWA makes taxpayers' money available to the feminists to lobby state legislators to pass feminist laws, to train law enforcement personnel and judges in using those laws, and to fund their enforcement. VAWA provides women with free legal counsel to pursue their allegations while men are left on their own to find and pay a lawyer, or struggle without one.

Feminists have lobbied most states to adopt mandatory-arrest laws, which means that when the police arrive at a disturbance and lack good information on who is to blame, they are nevertheless legally bound to arrest somebody. Three guesses who is usually arrested.

Feminists have lobbied most states to pass no-drop prosecution laws, which require proceeding with prosecution even if the woman recants her charges or wants to drop them. Studies show that women do recant or ask to drop the charges in 60 percent of criminal allegations, but the law requires the man to be prosecuted anyway, which means he loses his constitutional right to confront his accuser.

Charging domestic violence practically guarantees that a woman will get custody of the children and sever forever the father's relationship with his children even though the alleged violence had nothing whatever to do with any abuse of the children. Judges are required to consider allegations of domestic violence in awarding child custody, even though no evidence of abuse was ever presented or proven.

It seems elementary that husbands and fathers who are accused by their wives or girlfriends should have the constitutional rights accorded to any criminal, but they are routinely denied equal treatment under law, the right to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty and the right to own a gun. The accusation also destroys his employability, which diminishes her income as well as his.

Based on a woman's unsubstantiated allegations of trivial offenses, family courts deprive thousands of men of their fundamental right to parent their own children. VAWA has a built-in incentive for the woman to make false charges of domestic violence because she knows she will never be prosecuted for perjury.

Domestic violence should be redefined to mean violence. We must eliminate the incentive for false accusations, which includes getting a restraining order as the "gamesmanship" for divorce, child custody, money, and ownership of and access to the family home.

Reforming VAWA is today's basic civil rights issue. All persons accused of domestic violence, men and women, are entitled to have fundamental constitutional rights in court, including due process and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty by clear and convincing evidence.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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