I have shamelessly copied this article from the Dakota Voice after having received an email from a brother-in-law who lives in Maine. I should also add that after having "Googled" the topic, I found that Congressman J. Randy Forbes has written a similar article on his website click here.
Congressional Prayer Caucus to Obama: Issue National Motto Correction
By Guest Author on December 6th, 2010
The following press release was issued from the Congressional Prayer Caucus today:
Congressman J. Randy Forbes (VA-04), along with 42 bipartisan Members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, today sent a letter to President Barack Obama calling on him to issue a correction to a speech he gave in Jakarta, Indonesia, in which he inaccurately referred to our national motto as being “E Pluribus unum.” The official national motto is “In God We Trust.”
“For the President of the United States to incorrectly state something as foundational as our national motto in another country is unacceptable. The President is the primary representative of our nation to the world, and whether mistake or intention, his actions cast aside an integral part of American society,” said Forbes. “President Reagan once warned that ‘If we ever forget that we’re one national under God, then we will be a nation gone under.’”
In his speech on November 10, 2010 at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, President Obama said “But I believe that the history of both America and Indonesia should give us hope. It is a story written into our national mottos. In the United States, our motto is E pluribus unum – out of many one…our nations show that hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag.”
“In God We Trust” has been a foundational phrase used throughout our nation’s history, from Presidential proclamations, to engravings in both the House and Senate chambers, to the oath taken by all federal employees. In 1956, Congress passed and President Eisenhower signed into law establishing “In God We Trust” as the official national motto of the United States. The motto is referred to in the national anthem and is engraved on U.S. coins and currency.
In addition, on October 18, during a fundraiser, President Obama said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This was the third time in over a month that the President omitted the word “Creator” from the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence specifically recognizes God, the Creator, as the source of inalienable rights.
“Once may be a mistake. But twice is a pattern. These omissions and inaccuracies are a part of a larger pattern we are seeing with the President where he is inaccurately reflecting America and undercutting important parts of our nation’s history,” said Forbes. “Trust in God is embedded into the fabric of society and history in the United States. If we allow these threads to be pulled, we will begin to unravel the very freedoms that birthed America.”
In the letter, the members asked that the President issue a correction to the speech he gave in Jakarta and expressed their willingness to meet with him to discuss the issue further. A copy of the letter is available here
.
The Congressional Prayer Caucus is a bipartisan group of Members of Congress dedicated to preserving America’s religious heritage and protecting religious liberties. The Prayer Caucus successfully led efforts to ensure that “In God We Trust” was included in the newly constructed Capitol Visitor Center after it had been removed and the national motto incorrectly noted as “E Pluribus unum.” Congressman Forbes is founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
A Wisconsin Citizen's Open Letter to the New Governor and Senator
This, my fellow Americans, is a homerun.
Open Letter to Wisconsin Governor-Elect Scott Walker & Senator-Elect Ron Johnson
By Dave Brown · Friday, December 3, 2010
Congratulations on your election victories on 2 November 2010! We are blessed to have two men of good character to lead and represent Wisconsin. There are three critical issues that require your immediate attention. If these issues are not addressed first, all others are meaningless. It will take courage on your part equal to the courage demonstrated by the Founding Fathers and more recently by New Jersey Governor Chris Christy. Government spending must be drastically reduced. The survival of our country depends on it. The short term goal should be a 50% reduction. There can be only one of two results in this defining battle ... saving America, or the destruction of America. Opposition to your efforts will be intense.
The national debt is at 13.5 trillion. Even if government spending is cut 50% it will take several generations to repay this debt. With minor spending reductions, like those being recommended by the debt and deficit commission, the debt will not be re-paid, ever. The federal government spent 1.4 trillion in 2009 and 1.35 trillion in 2010 more than it took in tax revenue. This un-checked spending is destroying the United States of America.
"Men of energy of character must have enemies; because there are two sides to every question, and taking one with decision, and acting on it with effect, those who take the other will of course be hostile in proportion as they feel that effect."
--Thomas Jefferson, December 21, 1817
I believe in the country of our Founding Fathers. The principles of honoring the Almighty, personal responsibility, character, integrity, and honesty make the foundation that supports the American ideal. Without a true respect for these principles no person will ever enjoy their unalienable rights granted by the Creator among those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Fortunately for Wisconsinites both of you have demonstrated a healthy respect for these principles. I believe you are both up to the challenge.
Here are the major issues:
PUBLIC EMPLOYEES
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824
The number of federal, state, and local employees must be reduced by 50%. At the federal level this means postal workers, agency bureaucrats, FBI, CIA, and the list goes on and on. At the state level this means starting with divesting the University of Wisconsin system. Let the new private university compete in the free market. If their customers (students) don't mind paying six figure salaries to professors that work one day/week, and don't mind supplying University administrators with lavish compensation including luxury housing with servants, luxury cars, and unlimited expense accounts then great! On the other hand if struggling students don't see why they have to pay for these luxuries academia may have to adjust how they do business, or lose all of their customers. It also means cutting teachers, firefighters, non-frontline police, DNR, etc… Those public employees that remain must have compensation equivalent to similar jobs in the private sector.
Reason must be applied when making cuts, example: In most cases reductions would not be appropriate in frontline law enforcement, national security, FBI, and border patrol. This means the men and women on the street. However desk jockeys and bureaucrats in these agencies can and must be eliminated. No cuts in military personnel would be appropriate in a time of war either. However, elimination of entire agencies like the postal service, departments of education, energy, housing and urban development, agriculture, NASA, to name a few would help meet the 50% target.
Can we survive a 50% cut in government employees? Here are the current government full time employee numbers:
Federal 14.6 million
State 3.8 million
Local 11.0 million
-------------------------------
Total 29.4 million
Certainly America will survive with half of 29.4 million. 14.7 million government employees still looks extraordinarily high and inappropriate for a free country. Note these numbers do not include 1.5 million state and 3.2 million local government part time employees.
Not only will America survive it will thrive after these reductions are made. It may take some adjustment for the newly unemployed public workers to find meaningful, productive work in the private sector. Adjusting to the required work standard in the private sector may be traumatic for some but when they do the economy will expand and improve.
For remaining government employees pensions must be abolished. No public employee including elected officials should receive a pension or any other benefit (health insurance) of any type under any circumstance upon termination of employment. The only exception would be for retired military honorably discharged after 20 years of service or for any military service person injured while serving. Retired military and/or injured military should receive a pension and healthcare for the remainder of their lives.
Forcing a productive citizen to pay for the public employee's life of ease and enjoyment in retirement (that usually begins around age 50 for this very privileged class) against his will is unconstitutional.
XIII Amendment Section I, ratified December 6, 1865
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The language is clear and needs no lawyer to translate the meaning to citizens. It means if a politician enters into a contract with a pubic employee union, or passes a law that obligates me to pay pension and benefits to the idle public employee for the remainder of their natural lives so they may live in ease, leisure, and comfort in retirement is clearly unconstitutional. It is not only unconstitutional; it is illegal, immoral, and obscene. It is the definition of involuntary servitude. Why should those working in the private sector, who receive no pension, be expected to save for our own retirement and be required to pay the public employee's pension? We are all familiar with standard justifications for this...but these are noble professions, who could possibly be against police, firemen, teachers, etc…, or compensation and benefits must be high or we will lose these very special people to the private market place, or they work in difficult conditions so they deserve lavish benefits... There is no limit to the straw man arguments from public union leaders and politicians to justify this mess.
Public employee unions must be abolished and outlawed.
Public employees organized into a union feeding at the same public trough elbow to elbow with lawmakers is an obvious disaster for the tax payer. Peer pressure on lawmakers from their unionized fellow trough eaters to keep the trough full at all costs is intense and is the reason politicians give up their soul, some quicker than others, once elected to office. The politician quickly realizes his highest priority is to keep squeezing the tax payer so the trough remains full. Life at the trough looks very attractive to many working and/or idling in the private sector. It is like a giant magnet attracting more and more people. It is obvious to those working in the private sector the public employee's compensation and benefits are much better than his.
The politician/lawmaker realizes his fellow trough eaters are always a solid vote so why wouldn't he want to add more and more trough eaters? What a wonderful system he thinks to himself, a real no-brainer! He realizes he has the power to extract more money from the tax payer because he makes the laws that direct the guys with the uniforms and guns, that run the IRS, and run the prisons. The stunning part for those in the private sector is that no politician is willing to acknowledge the obvious -- the public employee orgy of compensation and benefits has sunk America into a black hole of debt.
Public employees are keenly aware they have no chance whatsoever to match their lavish government compensation and benefits in the private sector. They will fight as King George III did to force the productive class to keep the trough full, at gun point if required.
ENTITLEMENTS
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
--Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766
Entitlements are destroying our country morally and financially. Welfare, unemployment, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and housing subsidies must be abolished. No where in the constitution is the government authorized to take the treasure and earnings from one and give to another. As Ben Franklin observed 244 years ago ...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer... This was true in 1766, true in 2010, and will still be true in 2254 (if we survive). As for the cost of medical care, consumers must pay for medical care. The current system of having others pay for one's medical care removes any incentive to shop for the best provider, the best price for meds, or for many to take care to eat a proper diet and exercise. The free market will do as it always does when not interfered with by government -- it will reward care providers that provide the best service at the best price and punish those that don't. The winner is the consumer. It is no more complicated than that.
Will this be a painful adjustment? Yes. Will people suffer? Yes. Remember Freedom is not free. Freedom means you reap what you sow. Freedom gives the individual a choice of planning, working, learning, and living responsibly. Which means more often than not you will enjoy the blessings and rewards of living this way. Freedom also means the individual can choose to not plan, not work, not learn, and live irresponsibly. These choices usually lead to a miserable life, probably behind bars or dead at an early age.
"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."
--James Madison
The current system of forcing the responsible to pay for irresponsible is unconstitutional and immoral. One lucky break for the irresponsible and for good people that happen to fall on hard times, is that America is the most charitable, giving nation on the planet. There are hundreds of charitable organizations in America. There is no finer charity than The Salvation Army. The CEO makes $13,000 a year. $0.93 of every dollar donated goes directly to the needy. Compare this incredibly high ratio to that of the federal government. What percentage of a dollar given to the government goes to the needy after paying the 14.6 million federal government employees, 82,000 of which make more than $150,000/year? I do not imagine it is close to $0.93.
TAXATION
"[A] wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
--Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
Income tax, state and federal, must be abolished. The practice of confiscating a large percentage of a productive worker's wages from his pay before he ever takes possession of his justly earned compensation dulls the pain of surrendering his earnings to the government. If productive citizens had to write a check out to the state and federal government every month for their share of taxes based on their income there would be revolution tomorrow. All capital gains taxes must be abolished. The death tax must be abolished.
Taxation should be levied on purchased goods and services only. The percentage tax rate must be the same for all consumers and for all goods and services. The government cannot make punitive tax rates on businesses or products it does not favor for any reason. This includes oil, gas, tobacco, alcohol, etc... Everything is taxed at the same rate. Corporate taxes must be abolished. This is a devious way for government to tax citizens without accountability. Only people pay taxes, not corporations.
SUMMARY
These are the main issues and unless addressed first makes addressing all other issues equivalent to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Mr. Walker, when you gave back over $300,000 of your county salary it spoke volumes of the type of man you are. It reminds me of a quote I read on the church bulletin board years ago that stuck with me, that goes: What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.
You both are good men and I believe you are up for the challenge. God bless both of you. I will support you in any way needed.
Dave Brown
Franklin, WI
Open Letter to Wisconsin Governor-Elect Scott Walker & Senator-Elect Ron Johnson
By Dave Brown · Friday, December 3, 2010
Congratulations on your election victories on 2 November 2010! We are blessed to have two men of good character to lead and represent Wisconsin. There are three critical issues that require your immediate attention. If these issues are not addressed first, all others are meaningless. It will take courage on your part equal to the courage demonstrated by the Founding Fathers and more recently by New Jersey Governor Chris Christy. Government spending must be drastically reduced. The survival of our country depends on it. The short term goal should be a 50% reduction. There can be only one of two results in this defining battle ... saving America, or the destruction of America. Opposition to your efforts will be intense.
The national debt is at 13.5 trillion. Even if government spending is cut 50% it will take several generations to repay this debt. With minor spending reductions, like those being recommended by the debt and deficit commission, the debt will not be re-paid, ever. The federal government spent 1.4 trillion in 2009 and 1.35 trillion in 2010 more than it took in tax revenue. This un-checked spending is destroying the United States of America.
"Men of energy of character must have enemies; because there are two sides to every question, and taking one with decision, and acting on it with effect, those who take the other will of course be hostile in proportion as they feel that effect."
--Thomas Jefferson, December 21, 1817
I believe in the country of our Founding Fathers. The principles of honoring the Almighty, personal responsibility, character, integrity, and honesty make the foundation that supports the American ideal. Without a true respect for these principles no person will ever enjoy their unalienable rights granted by the Creator among those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Fortunately for Wisconsinites both of you have demonstrated a healthy respect for these principles. I believe you are both up to the challenge.
Here are the major issues:
PUBLIC EMPLOYEES
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824
The number of federal, state, and local employees must be reduced by 50%. At the federal level this means postal workers, agency bureaucrats, FBI, CIA, and the list goes on and on. At the state level this means starting with divesting the University of Wisconsin system. Let the new private university compete in the free market. If their customers (students) don't mind paying six figure salaries to professors that work one day/week, and don't mind supplying University administrators with lavish compensation including luxury housing with servants, luxury cars, and unlimited expense accounts then great! On the other hand if struggling students don't see why they have to pay for these luxuries academia may have to adjust how they do business, or lose all of their customers. It also means cutting teachers, firefighters, non-frontline police, DNR, etc… Those public employees that remain must have compensation equivalent to similar jobs in the private sector.
Reason must be applied when making cuts, example: In most cases reductions would not be appropriate in frontline law enforcement, national security, FBI, and border patrol. This means the men and women on the street. However desk jockeys and bureaucrats in these agencies can and must be eliminated. No cuts in military personnel would be appropriate in a time of war either. However, elimination of entire agencies like the postal service, departments of education, energy, housing and urban development, agriculture, NASA, to name a few would help meet the 50% target.
Can we survive a 50% cut in government employees? Here are the current government full time employee numbers:
Federal 14.6 million
State 3.8 million
Local 11.0 million
-------------------------------
Total 29.4 million
Certainly America will survive with half of 29.4 million. 14.7 million government employees still looks extraordinarily high and inappropriate for a free country. Note these numbers do not include 1.5 million state and 3.2 million local government part time employees.
Not only will America survive it will thrive after these reductions are made. It may take some adjustment for the newly unemployed public workers to find meaningful, productive work in the private sector. Adjusting to the required work standard in the private sector may be traumatic for some but when they do the economy will expand and improve.
For remaining government employees pensions must be abolished. No public employee including elected officials should receive a pension or any other benefit (health insurance) of any type under any circumstance upon termination of employment. The only exception would be for retired military honorably discharged after 20 years of service or for any military service person injured while serving. Retired military and/or injured military should receive a pension and healthcare for the remainder of their lives.
Forcing a productive citizen to pay for the public employee's life of ease and enjoyment in retirement (that usually begins around age 50 for this very privileged class) against his will is unconstitutional.
XIII Amendment Section I, ratified December 6, 1865
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The language is clear and needs no lawyer to translate the meaning to citizens. It means if a politician enters into a contract with a pubic employee union, or passes a law that obligates me to pay pension and benefits to the idle public employee for the remainder of their natural lives so they may live in ease, leisure, and comfort in retirement is clearly unconstitutional. It is not only unconstitutional; it is illegal, immoral, and obscene. It is the definition of involuntary servitude. Why should those working in the private sector, who receive no pension, be expected to save for our own retirement and be required to pay the public employee's pension? We are all familiar with standard justifications for this...but these are noble professions, who could possibly be against police, firemen, teachers, etc…, or compensation and benefits must be high or we will lose these very special people to the private market place, or they work in difficult conditions so they deserve lavish benefits... There is no limit to the straw man arguments from public union leaders and politicians to justify this mess.
Public employee unions must be abolished and outlawed.
Public employees organized into a union feeding at the same public trough elbow to elbow with lawmakers is an obvious disaster for the tax payer. Peer pressure on lawmakers from their unionized fellow trough eaters to keep the trough full at all costs is intense and is the reason politicians give up their soul, some quicker than others, once elected to office. The politician quickly realizes his highest priority is to keep squeezing the tax payer so the trough remains full. Life at the trough looks very attractive to many working and/or idling in the private sector. It is like a giant magnet attracting more and more people. It is obvious to those working in the private sector the public employee's compensation and benefits are much better than his.
The politician/lawmaker realizes his fellow trough eaters are always a solid vote so why wouldn't he want to add more and more trough eaters? What a wonderful system he thinks to himself, a real no-brainer! He realizes he has the power to extract more money from the tax payer because he makes the laws that direct the guys with the uniforms and guns, that run the IRS, and run the prisons. The stunning part for those in the private sector is that no politician is willing to acknowledge the obvious -- the public employee orgy of compensation and benefits has sunk America into a black hole of debt.
Public employees are keenly aware they have no chance whatsoever to match their lavish government compensation and benefits in the private sector. They will fight as King George III did to force the productive class to keep the trough full, at gun point if required.
ENTITLEMENTS
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
--Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766
Entitlements are destroying our country morally and financially. Welfare, unemployment, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and housing subsidies must be abolished. No where in the constitution is the government authorized to take the treasure and earnings from one and give to another. As Ben Franklin observed 244 years ago ...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer... This was true in 1766, true in 2010, and will still be true in 2254 (if we survive). As for the cost of medical care, consumers must pay for medical care. The current system of having others pay for one's medical care removes any incentive to shop for the best provider, the best price for meds, or for many to take care to eat a proper diet and exercise. The free market will do as it always does when not interfered with by government -- it will reward care providers that provide the best service at the best price and punish those that don't. The winner is the consumer. It is no more complicated than that.
Will this be a painful adjustment? Yes. Will people suffer? Yes. Remember Freedom is not free. Freedom means you reap what you sow. Freedom gives the individual a choice of planning, working, learning, and living responsibly. Which means more often than not you will enjoy the blessings and rewards of living this way. Freedom also means the individual can choose to not plan, not work, not learn, and live irresponsibly. These choices usually lead to a miserable life, probably behind bars or dead at an early age.
"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."
--James Madison
The current system of forcing the responsible to pay for irresponsible is unconstitutional and immoral. One lucky break for the irresponsible and for good people that happen to fall on hard times, is that America is the most charitable, giving nation on the planet. There are hundreds of charitable organizations in America. There is no finer charity than The Salvation Army. The CEO makes $13,000 a year. $0.93 of every dollar donated goes directly to the needy. Compare this incredibly high ratio to that of the federal government. What percentage of a dollar given to the government goes to the needy after paying the 14.6 million federal government employees, 82,000 of which make more than $150,000/year? I do not imagine it is close to $0.93.
TAXATION
"[A] wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
--Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
Income tax, state and federal, must be abolished. The practice of confiscating a large percentage of a productive worker's wages from his pay before he ever takes possession of his justly earned compensation dulls the pain of surrendering his earnings to the government. If productive citizens had to write a check out to the state and federal government every month for their share of taxes based on their income there would be revolution tomorrow. All capital gains taxes must be abolished. The death tax must be abolished.
Taxation should be levied on purchased goods and services only. The percentage tax rate must be the same for all consumers and for all goods and services. The government cannot make punitive tax rates on businesses or products it does not favor for any reason. This includes oil, gas, tobacco, alcohol, etc... Everything is taxed at the same rate. Corporate taxes must be abolished. This is a devious way for government to tax citizens without accountability. Only people pay taxes, not corporations.
SUMMARY
These are the main issues and unless addressed first makes addressing all other issues equivalent to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Mr. Walker, when you gave back over $300,000 of your county salary it spoke volumes of the type of man you are. It reminds me of a quote I read on the church bulletin board years ago that stuck with me, that goes: What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.
You both are good men and I believe you are up for the challenge. God bless both of you. I will support you in any way needed.
Dave Brown
Franklin, WI
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Subtle Way Hollywood Turns the Christian Theme
Does caring, working together in harmony, joyous relationships equal boring? Do we have to have conflict within our own ranks to provide excitement? And why can't we take something that someone else wrote and that has a very wide following and not change it thereby changing the underlying goodness of the story?
Mere Entertainment?
By: Anne Morse|Published: December 9, 2010 10:53 AM
Topics: Arts & Media, Books, Religion & Society
Many Christians are eagerly anticipating the third film of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, due in theaters in December. We love the fact that these deeply Christian stories are making their way to a wider audience. But one theologian wonders if the films really are a faithful representation of Lewis’s deeply Christian worldview.
In a Touchstone magazine essay titled “Narnia Invaded,” Steven Boyer says we should “think carefully about a significant element in Lewis’s vision that does not play very well in our world”: His “particular fondness for hierarchy.”
Christianity teaches that there is a hierarchal distinction between God and the world He created, with humans rightly subordinating to the God who creates and sustains us. As well, the Christian tradition teaches the goodness of hierarchy through all sorts of human relationships. “When that order is respected, real joy and freedom are the result,” Boyer says.
Writers like Dante, Spenser, Milton, and Virgil, along with Lewis, “understand the idea that just rulership and obedience are inextricable one from the other—that they are, in fact, the same virtue in different modes,” Boyer adds. Of course, throughout history people have abused hierarchy—everyone from dictators to fathers who demand unquestioning obedience from their families. And this is why, for many moderns, the very word hierarchy reeks of domination and oppression.
Unfortunately, this is the view of hierarchy the Narnia scriptwriters embrace. For instance, in Lewis’s books, the lion Aslan makes the four Pevensie children kings of Narnia, who rule harmoniously over Narnia. Peter, the oldest brother, is made the High King over the others. When the children return to Narnia and encounter Prince Caspian, the relationship between Peter and Caspian is marked by mutual respect, reliance, and open-handedness.
But the scriptwriters destroy this view of honorable cooperation. Peter and Caspian—whose dealings are marked by rancor and antagonism—battle constantly over who is really in charge in their efforts to rescue Narnia from the evil King Miraz. During a great battle, their own ignoble desires lead to the unnecessary deaths of their own soldiers.
But if you page through Prince Caspian, you’ll find that Peter and Caspian treat one another with great respect and cooperation.
The film’s depiction of hierarchy reveals a great deal about the scriptwriters, who are, Boyer notes, essentially admitting that they “understand nothing about power other than that it is meant to make other people do what you want them to do.” In effect, the scriptwriters accept the view of hierarchy embraced by the evil King Miraz, who stole the throne from Caspian: For Miraz, there is no such thing as legitimate hierarchy, only power. Kingship is not about sacrificing for one’s subjects, but about enjoying unquestioned authority—and destroying anyone who stands in the way.
Sadly, Boyer says, this means that viewers of the Narnia films are getting “mere entertainment” instead of Lewis’s “richly Christian view of the world.”
And what of the latest film in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?
I saw an advance screening of the film a couple of weeks ago. I’m pleased to say that there is more respect for appropriate hierarchy here than in the previous two films. For instance, after Edmund and Lucy Pevensie fall back into Narnia through a seascape, Edmund unthinkingly attempts to take charge in a tense situation. The ship’s captain, Drinian, respectfully tells Edmund that the only person he takes orders from is Prince Caspian. Edmund accepts this gentle rebuke. We also see, through Lucy and Edmund’s obnoxious cousin Eustace, the consequences of failing to respect appropriate hierarchy.
When the travelers arrive at an uninhabited island, they discover that anything dropped into a body of water will turn to gold. Caspian—realizing the immense wealth and power that could come to anyone who exploited this knowledge—claims the island as a Narnian possession. He sternly forbids his companions from telling anyone about the island’s secret on pain of death. Edmund immediately (and rather nastily) contests Caspian’s right to command him.
While this may seem like a revisiting of the “who’s the boss?” hostility so much in evidence in Prince Caspian between Peter and Caspian, in reality, the scene comes straight out of the book:
“The king who owned this island,” said Caspian slowly, and his face flushed as he spoke, ”would soon be the richest of all kings of the world. I claim this land for ever as a Narnian possession. . . . And I bind all of you to secrecy. No one must know of this. Not even Drinian—on pain of death, do you hear?”
“Who are you talking to?” said Edmund. “I’m no subject of yours. If anything it’s the other way round. I am one of the four ancient sovereigns of Narnia and you are under allegiance to the High King my brother.”
“So it has come to that, King Edmund, has it?” said Caspian, laying his hand on his sword-hilt.”
In the book, Aslan appears to wake the children out of the trance the island has put them under. In the film, Lucy reminds them that the magician they encountered earlier had warned them that evil would try to sway them from their path.
Parents whose children have watched the previous two Chronicles of Narnia films, and who are eagerly awaiting the third one, might consider using Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a springboard for a discussion about both biblical and non-biblical hierarchy. With this film, as with all others, children should be taught to identify the worldview of those who created it. Where and why does the film deviate from Lewis’s original? Did screenwriters add scenes and change the story in order to add more excitement? Or did they alter the story in order to tone down the Christian message?
While we should be mindful of the film’s messages, we should not focus on them so hard that we cut into our enjoyment of it. It’s a rollicking adventure story, filled with dragons and sea serpents, magicians and Dufflepuds, a delightfully bratty schoolboy who gets his comeuppance—and a Lion who takes the young adventurers to the end of the world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mere Entertainment?
By: Anne Morse|Published: December 9, 2010 10:53 AM
Topics: Arts & Media, Books, Religion & Society
Many Christians are eagerly anticipating the third film of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, due in theaters in December. We love the fact that these deeply Christian stories are making their way to a wider audience. But one theologian wonders if the films really are a faithful representation of Lewis’s deeply Christian worldview.
In a Touchstone magazine essay titled “Narnia Invaded,” Steven Boyer says we should “think carefully about a significant element in Lewis’s vision that does not play very well in our world”: His “particular fondness for hierarchy.”
Christianity teaches that there is a hierarchal distinction between God and the world He created, with humans rightly subordinating to the God who creates and sustains us. As well, the Christian tradition teaches the goodness of hierarchy through all sorts of human relationships. “When that order is respected, real joy and freedom are the result,” Boyer says.
Writers like Dante, Spenser, Milton, and Virgil, along with Lewis, “understand the idea that just rulership and obedience are inextricable one from the other—that they are, in fact, the same virtue in different modes,” Boyer adds. Of course, throughout history people have abused hierarchy—everyone from dictators to fathers who demand unquestioning obedience from their families. And this is why, for many moderns, the very word hierarchy reeks of domination and oppression.
Unfortunately, this is the view of hierarchy the Narnia scriptwriters embrace. For instance, in Lewis’s books, the lion Aslan makes the four Pevensie children kings of Narnia, who rule harmoniously over Narnia. Peter, the oldest brother, is made the High King over the others. When the children return to Narnia and encounter Prince Caspian, the relationship between Peter and Caspian is marked by mutual respect, reliance, and open-handedness.
But the scriptwriters destroy this view of honorable cooperation. Peter and Caspian—whose dealings are marked by rancor and antagonism—battle constantly over who is really in charge in their efforts to rescue Narnia from the evil King Miraz. During a great battle, their own ignoble desires lead to the unnecessary deaths of their own soldiers.
But if you page through Prince Caspian, you’ll find that Peter and Caspian treat one another with great respect and cooperation.
The film’s depiction of hierarchy reveals a great deal about the scriptwriters, who are, Boyer notes, essentially admitting that they “understand nothing about power other than that it is meant to make other people do what you want them to do.” In effect, the scriptwriters accept the view of hierarchy embraced by the evil King Miraz, who stole the throne from Caspian: For Miraz, there is no such thing as legitimate hierarchy, only power. Kingship is not about sacrificing for one’s subjects, but about enjoying unquestioned authority—and destroying anyone who stands in the way.
Sadly, Boyer says, this means that viewers of the Narnia films are getting “mere entertainment” instead of Lewis’s “richly Christian view of the world.”
And what of the latest film in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?
I saw an advance screening of the film a couple of weeks ago. I’m pleased to say that there is more respect for appropriate hierarchy here than in the previous two films. For instance, after Edmund and Lucy Pevensie fall back into Narnia through a seascape, Edmund unthinkingly attempts to take charge in a tense situation. The ship’s captain, Drinian, respectfully tells Edmund that the only person he takes orders from is Prince Caspian. Edmund accepts this gentle rebuke. We also see, through Lucy and Edmund’s obnoxious cousin Eustace, the consequences of failing to respect appropriate hierarchy.
When the travelers arrive at an uninhabited island, they discover that anything dropped into a body of water will turn to gold. Caspian—realizing the immense wealth and power that could come to anyone who exploited this knowledge—claims the island as a Narnian possession. He sternly forbids his companions from telling anyone about the island’s secret on pain of death. Edmund immediately (and rather nastily) contests Caspian’s right to command him.
While this may seem like a revisiting of the “who’s the boss?” hostility so much in evidence in Prince Caspian between Peter and Caspian, in reality, the scene comes straight out of the book:
“The king who owned this island,” said Caspian slowly, and his face flushed as he spoke, ”would soon be the richest of all kings of the world. I claim this land for ever as a Narnian possession. . . . And I bind all of you to secrecy. No one must know of this. Not even Drinian—on pain of death, do you hear?”
“Who are you talking to?” said Edmund. “I’m no subject of yours. If anything it’s the other way round. I am one of the four ancient sovereigns of Narnia and you are under allegiance to the High King my brother.”
“So it has come to that, King Edmund, has it?” said Caspian, laying his hand on his sword-hilt.”
In the book, Aslan appears to wake the children out of the trance the island has put them under. In the film, Lucy reminds them that the magician they encountered earlier had warned them that evil would try to sway them from their path.
Parents whose children have watched the previous two Chronicles of Narnia films, and who are eagerly awaiting the third one, might consider using Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a springboard for a discussion about both biblical and non-biblical hierarchy. With this film, as with all others, children should be taught to identify the worldview of those who created it. Where and why does the film deviate from Lewis’s original? Did screenwriters add scenes and change the story in order to add more excitement? Or did they alter the story in order to tone down the Christian message?
While we should be mindful of the film’s messages, we should not focus on them so hard that we cut into our enjoyment of it. It’s a rollicking adventure story, filled with dragons and sea serpents, magicians and Dufflepuds, a delightfully bratty schoolboy who gets his comeuppance—and a Lion who takes the young adventurers to the end of the world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You Think Our Religious Practice(Christianity) is Safe?
When it was happening overseas we ignored it with the reasoning, "It can never happen in the United States".
It's happening in Canada, it will soon be hear.
CULTURE NEWS
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Biblical Preaching Banned from Canadian TV
A Canadian evangelical preacher has been stricken from Christian TV broadcasting after homosexualists complained that he modeled himself after his counterparts in the United States by criticizing the state-sanctioned Gay Agenda.
-- From "Broadcaster suspends reverend's TV show" by CTV.ca News Staff 12/11/10
Christian broadcaster CTS has taken the television show of evangelical minister Charles McVety off the air, after an industry watchdog ruled that statements he had made about homosexuals violated its broadcasting codes.
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) said that it had received complaints about how McVety's program, Word TV, had portrayed issues "such as homosexuality, Islam, Haiti and euthanasia," it said in a decision issued Wednesday.
The complaints charged that the program "had included discriminatory comments on the basis of sexual orientation, religion and mental disability," the organization said.
In response, CTS decided to suspend the show, saying that such concerns "are treated seriously."
An influential Canadian evangelical, McVety models himself on the televangical stars south of the border, and has been known to express controversial views.
To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
From "Evangelical TV show pulled from the air" by Charles Lewis, National Post 12/10/10
. . . commenting on Toronto's massive gay pride parade, ". . . [it] is a criminal activity, to parade down the streets in the nude," Rev. McVety said on Word TV. "There is the Criminal Code of Canada that says you can't do that. It's an abuse of public space, it's abuse of our children."
The broadcasting council said Rev. McVety derided the city for advertising Toronto as a "sex tourism destination ... with full opportunity for sex with hot boys."
. . . strong comments about a proposed 2010 change to Ontario's sex curriculum that presented homosexuality in a more accepting light . . . "[W]e send little Johnny and little Jane to school, not to learn to be homosexuals and lesbians," Rev. McVety said on air. "We send them there to learn reading, writing and arithmetic and history and all these wonderful things, but unfortunately there is an activist group that is afoot that wants to change our curriculum. Why? Because unfortunately they have an insatiable appetite for sex, especially with young people. And there are not enough of them, so they want to proselytize your children and mine, our grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals."
To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
From "Religious Program Distorted Facts and Contained Abusive Comments about Homosexuals" posted at Broadcaster, Canada's Communications Magazine 12/9/10
The CBSC's Ontario Regional Panel examined the complaints under the Human Rights clauses of the CAB Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code, which prohibit the broadcast of abusive or unduly discriminatory comment about identifiable groups. It also examined them under the Religious Programming Clause of the CAB Code of Ethics, which prohibits attacks on identifiable groups in such programming, as well as the Negative Portrayal Clause of the CAB Equitable Portrayal Code.
With respect to the comments about homosexuality, the Panel explained that the program was entitled to air objections to that practice generally, to government funding of gay pride parades and to changes made to an Ontario school curriculum that would include discussion of homosexuality. When, however, the program suggested that homosexuals prey on children, it violated the Human Rights, Religious Programming and Negative Portrayal Clauses.
. . . [McVety] also stated that "speaking out" against homosexuality is now a "crime" in Canada, which is also an inaccurate statement regarding the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code.
To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
Posted by Gabriel Mephibosheth at 1:02 PM
Labels: anti-Christian, ban, Bible, Canada, censorship, evangelicals, gay agenda, hate crimes, hate speech, homosexuality, indoctrination, parade, pastor, pedophilia, public schools, TV
Links to this post
It's happening in Canada, it will soon be hear.
CULTURE NEWS
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Biblical Preaching Banned from Canadian TV
A Canadian evangelical preacher has been stricken from Christian TV broadcasting after homosexualists complained that he modeled himself after his counterparts in the United States by criticizing the state-sanctioned Gay Agenda.
-- From "Broadcaster suspends reverend's TV show" by CTV.ca News Staff 12/11/10
Christian broadcaster CTS has taken the television show of evangelical minister Charles McVety off the air, after an industry watchdog ruled that statements he had made about homosexuals violated its broadcasting codes.
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) said that it had received complaints about how McVety's program, Word TV, had portrayed issues "such as homosexuality, Islam, Haiti and euthanasia," it said in a decision issued Wednesday.
The complaints charged that the program "had included discriminatory comments on the basis of sexual orientation, religion and mental disability," the organization said.
In response, CTS decided to suspend the show, saying that such concerns "are treated seriously."
An influential Canadian evangelical, McVety models himself on the televangical stars south of the border, and has been known to express controversial views.
To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
From "Evangelical TV show pulled from the air" by Charles Lewis, National Post 12/10/10
. . . commenting on Toronto's massive gay pride parade, ". . . [it] is a criminal activity, to parade down the streets in the nude," Rev. McVety said on Word TV. "There is the Criminal Code of Canada that says you can't do that. It's an abuse of public space, it's abuse of our children."
The broadcasting council said Rev. McVety derided the city for advertising Toronto as a "sex tourism destination ... with full opportunity for sex with hot boys."
. . . strong comments about a proposed 2010 change to Ontario's sex curriculum that presented homosexuality in a more accepting light . . . "[W]e send little Johnny and little Jane to school, not to learn to be homosexuals and lesbians," Rev. McVety said on air. "We send them there to learn reading, writing and arithmetic and history and all these wonderful things, but unfortunately there is an activist group that is afoot that wants to change our curriculum. Why? Because unfortunately they have an insatiable appetite for sex, especially with young people. And there are not enough of them, so they want to proselytize your children and mine, our grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals."
To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
From "Religious Program Distorted Facts and Contained Abusive Comments about Homosexuals" posted at Broadcaster, Canada's Communications Magazine 12/9/10
The CBSC's Ontario Regional Panel examined the complaints under the Human Rights clauses of the CAB Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code, which prohibit the broadcast of abusive or unduly discriminatory comment about identifiable groups. It also examined them under the Religious Programming Clause of the CAB Code of Ethics, which prohibits attacks on identifiable groups in such programming, as well as the Negative Portrayal Clause of the CAB Equitable Portrayal Code.
With respect to the comments about homosexuality, the Panel explained that the program was entitled to air objections to that practice generally, to government funding of gay pride parades and to changes made to an Ontario school curriculum that would include discussion of homosexuality. When, however, the program suggested that homosexuals prey on children, it violated the Human Rights, Religious Programming and Negative Portrayal Clauses.
. . . [McVety] also stated that "speaking out" against homosexuality is now a "crime" in Canada, which is also an inaccurate statement regarding the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code.
To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
Posted by Gabriel Mephibosheth at 1:02 PM
Labels: anti-Christian, ban, Bible, Canada, censorship, evangelicals, gay agenda, hate crimes, hate speech, homosexuality, indoctrination, parade, pastor, pedophilia, public schools, TV
Links to this post
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Margarine - One of the Most Insidious Hoaxes
BUTTER! Glad I never got onto the margarine bandwagon.
By The Weston A. Price Foundation
The Weston A. Price Foundation provides accurate information about nutrition and is dedicated to putting nutrient-dense foods back on American tables.
Members receive a lively and informative quarterly journal and email updates on current issues and events.Visit their website at www.westonaprice.org .
Are you still shunning butter from your diet? You can stop today because butter can be a very healthy part of your diet.
Why Butter is Better
* Vitamins ...
Butter is a rich source of easily absorbed vitamin A, needed for a wide range of functions, from maintaining good vision to keeping the endocrine system in top shape.
Butter also contains all the other fat-soluble vitamins (D, E and K2), which are often lacking in the modern industrial diet.
* Minerals ...
Butter is rich in important trace minerals, including manganese, chromium, zinc, copper and selenium (a powerful antioxidant). Butter provides more selenium per gram than wheat germ or herring. Butter is also an excellent source of iodine.
* Fatty Acids ...
Butter provides appreciable amounts of short- and medium-chain fatty acids, which support immune function, boost metabolism and have anti-microbial properties; that is, they fight against pathogenic microorganisms in the intestinal tract.
Butter also provides the perfect balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. Arachidonic acid in butter is important for brain function, skin health and prostaglandin balance.
* Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) ...
When butter comes from cows eating green grass, it contains high levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a compound that gives excellent protection against cancer and also helps your body build muscle rather than store fat.
* Glycospingolipids ...
These are a special category of fatty acids that protect against gastrointestinal infections, especially in the very young and the elderly. Children given reduced-fat milks have higher rates of diarrhea than those who drink whole milk.
* Cholesterol ...
Despite all of the misinformation you may have heard, cholesterol is needed to maintain intestinal health and for brain and nervous system development in the young.
* Wulzen Factor ...
A hormone-like substance that prevents arthritis and joint stiffness, ensuring that calcium in your body is put into your bones rather than your joints and other tissues. The Wulzen factor is present only in raw butter and cream; it is destroyed by pasteurization.
Butter and Your Health
Is butter really healthy? Let us count the ways …
1. Heart Disease
Butter contains many nutrients that protect against heart disease including vitamins A, D, K2, and E, lecithin, iodine and selenium. A Medical Research Council survey showed that men eating butter ran half the risk of developing heart disease as those using margarine (Nutrition Week 3/22/91, 21:12).
2. Cancer
The short- and medium-chain fatty acids in butter have strong anti-tumor effects. Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in butter from grass-fed cows also gives excellent protection against cancer.
3. Arthritis
The Wulzen or "anti-stiffness" factor in raw butter and also Vitamin K2 in grasss-fed butter, protect against calcification of the joints as well as hardening of the arteries, cataracts and calcification of the pineal gland. Calves fed pasteurized milk or skim milk develop joint stiffness and do not thrive.
4. Osteoporosis
Vitamins A, D and K2 in butter are essential for the proper absorption of calcium and phosphorus and hence necessary for strong bones and teeth.
5. Thyroid Health
Butter is a good source of iodine, in a highly absorbable form. Butter consumption prevents goiter in mountainous areas where seafood is not available. In addition, vitamin A in butter is essential for proper functioning of the thyroid gland.
6. Digestion
Glycospingolipids in butterfat protect against gastrointestinal infection, especially in the very young and the elderly.
7. Growth & Development
Many factors in the butter ensure optimal growth of children, especially iodine and vitamins A, D and K2. Low-fat diets have been linked to failure to thrive in children -- yet low-fat diets are often recommended for youngsters!
8. Asthma
Saturated fats in butter are critical to lung function and protect against asthma.
9. Overweight
CLA and short- and medium-chain fatty acids in butter help control weight gain.
10. Fertility
Many nutrients contained in butter are needed for fertility and normal reproduction.
Why You Should Avoid Margarine, Shortening and Spreads
There are a myriad of unhealthy components to margarine and other butter imposters, including:
* Trans fats: These unnatural fats in margarine, shortenings and spreads are formed during the process of hydrogenation, which turns liquid vegetable oils into a solid fat
Trans fats contribute to heart disease, cancer, bone problems, hormonal imbalance and skin disease; infertility, difficulties in pregnancy and problems with lactation; and low birth weight, growth problems and learning disabilities in children.
A U.S. government panel of scientists determined that man-made trans fats are unsafe at any level. (Small amounts of natural trans fats occur in butter and other animal fats, but these are not harmful.)
* Free radicals: Free radicals and other toxic breakdown products are the result of high temperature industrial processing of vegetable oils. They contribute to numerous health problems, including cancer and heart disease.
* Synthetic vitamins: Synthetic vitamin A and other vitamins are added to margarine and spreads. These often have an opposite (and detrimental) effect compared to the natural vitamins in butter.
* Emulsifiers and preservatives: Numerous additives of questionable safety are added to margarines and spreads. Most vegetable shortening is stabilized with preservatives like BHT.
* Hexane and other solvents: Used in the extraction process, these industrial chemicals can have toxic effects.
* Bleach: The natural color of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is grey so manufacturers bleach it to make it white. Yellow coloring is then added to margarine and spreads.
* Artificial flavors: These help mask the terrible taste and odor of partially hydrogenated oils, and provide a fake butter taste.
* Mono- and di-glycerides: These contain trans fats that manufacturers do not have to list on the label. They are used in high amounts in so-called "low-trans" spreads.
* Soy protein isolate: This highly processed powder is added to "low-trans" spreads to give them body. It can contribute to thyroid dysfunction, digestive disorders and many other health problems.
* Sterols: Often added to spreads to give them cholesterol-lowering qualities, these estrogen compounds can cause endocrine problems; in animals these sterols contribute to sexual inversion.
How to Purchase Butter
The BEST butter is raw butter from grass-fed cows, preferably organic. Next is pasteurized butter from grass-fed cows, followed by regular pasteurized butter from supermarkets. Even the latter two are still a much healthier choice than margarine or spreads.
And where is the FDA? When are we going to realize that we should not shirk our own responsibilities by transferring them to a bureaucracy?
By The Weston A. Price Foundation
The Weston A. Price Foundation provides accurate information about nutrition and is dedicated to putting nutrient-dense foods back on American tables.
Members receive a lively and informative quarterly journal and email updates on current issues and events.Visit their website at www.westonaprice.org .
Are you still shunning butter from your diet? You can stop today because butter can be a very healthy part of your diet.
Why Butter is Better
* Vitamins ...
Butter is a rich source of easily absorbed vitamin A, needed for a wide range of functions, from maintaining good vision to keeping the endocrine system in top shape.
Butter also contains all the other fat-soluble vitamins (D, E and K2), which are often lacking in the modern industrial diet.
* Minerals ...
Butter is rich in important trace minerals, including manganese, chromium, zinc, copper and selenium (a powerful antioxidant). Butter provides more selenium per gram than wheat germ or herring. Butter is also an excellent source of iodine.
* Fatty Acids ...
Butter provides appreciable amounts of short- and medium-chain fatty acids, which support immune function, boost metabolism and have anti-microbial properties; that is, they fight against pathogenic microorganisms in the intestinal tract.
Butter also provides the perfect balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. Arachidonic acid in butter is important for brain function, skin health and prostaglandin balance.
* Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) ...
When butter comes from cows eating green grass, it contains high levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a compound that gives excellent protection against cancer and also helps your body build muscle rather than store fat.
* Glycospingolipids ...
These are a special category of fatty acids that protect against gastrointestinal infections, especially in the very young and the elderly. Children given reduced-fat milks have higher rates of diarrhea than those who drink whole milk.
* Cholesterol ...
Despite all of the misinformation you may have heard, cholesterol is needed to maintain intestinal health and for brain and nervous system development in the young.
* Wulzen Factor ...
A hormone-like substance that prevents arthritis and joint stiffness, ensuring that calcium in your body is put into your bones rather than your joints and other tissues. The Wulzen factor is present only in raw butter and cream; it is destroyed by pasteurization.
Butter and Your Health
Is butter really healthy? Let us count the ways …
1. Heart Disease
Butter contains many nutrients that protect against heart disease including vitamins A, D, K2, and E, lecithin, iodine and selenium. A Medical Research Council survey showed that men eating butter ran half the risk of developing heart disease as those using margarine (Nutrition Week 3/22/91, 21:12).
2. Cancer
The short- and medium-chain fatty acids in butter have strong anti-tumor effects. Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in butter from grass-fed cows also gives excellent protection against cancer.
3. Arthritis
The Wulzen or "anti-stiffness" factor in raw butter and also Vitamin K2 in grasss-fed butter, protect against calcification of the joints as well as hardening of the arteries, cataracts and calcification of the pineal gland. Calves fed pasteurized milk or skim milk develop joint stiffness and do not thrive.
4. Osteoporosis
Vitamins A, D and K2 in butter are essential for the proper absorption of calcium and phosphorus and hence necessary for strong bones and teeth.
5. Thyroid Health
Butter is a good source of iodine, in a highly absorbable form. Butter consumption prevents goiter in mountainous areas where seafood is not available. In addition, vitamin A in butter is essential for proper functioning of the thyroid gland.
6. Digestion
Glycospingolipids in butterfat protect against gastrointestinal infection, especially in the very young and the elderly.
7. Growth & Development
Many factors in the butter ensure optimal growth of children, especially iodine and vitamins A, D and K2. Low-fat diets have been linked to failure to thrive in children -- yet low-fat diets are often recommended for youngsters!
8. Asthma
Saturated fats in butter are critical to lung function and protect against asthma.
9. Overweight
CLA and short- and medium-chain fatty acids in butter help control weight gain.
10. Fertility
Many nutrients contained in butter are needed for fertility and normal reproduction.
Why You Should Avoid Margarine, Shortening and Spreads
There are a myriad of unhealthy components to margarine and other butter imposters, including:
* Trans fats: These unnatural fats in margarine, shortenings and spreads are formed during the process of hydrogenation, which turns liquid vegetable oils into a solid fat
Trans fats contribute to heart disease, cancer, bone problems, hormonal imbalance and skin disease; infertility, difficulties in pregnancy and problems with lactation; and low birth weight, growth problems and learning disabilities in children.
A U.S. government panel of scientists determined that man-made trans fats are unsafe at any level. (Small amounts of natural trans fats occur in butter and other animal fats, but these are not harmful.)
* Free radicals: Free radicals and other toxic breakdown products are the result of high temperature industrial processing of vegetable oils. They contribute to numerous health problems, including cancer and heart disease.
* Synthetic vitamins: Synthetic vitamin A and other vitamins are added to margarine and spreads. These often have an opposite (and detrimental) effect compared to the natural vitamins in butter.
* Emulsifiers and preservatives: Numerous additives of questionable safety are added to margarines and spreads. Most vegetable shortening is stabilized with preservatives like BHT.
* Hexane and other solvents: Used in the extraction process, these industrial chemicals can have toxic effects.
* Bleach: The natural color of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is grey so manufacturers bleach it to make it white. Yellow coloring is then added to margarine and spreads.
* Artificial flavors: These help mask the terrible taste and odor of partially hydrogenated oils, and provide a fake butter taste.
* Mono- and di-glycerides: These contain trans fats that manufacturers do not have to list on the label. They are used in high amounts in so-called "low-trans" spreads.
* Soy protein isolate: This highly processed powder is added to "low-trans" spreads to give them body. It can contribute to thyroid dysfunction, digestive disorders and many other health problems.
* Sterols: Often added to spreads to give them cholesterol-lowering qualities, these estrogen compounds can cause endocrine problems; in animals these sterols contribute to sexual inversion.
How to Purchase Butter
The BEST butter is raw butter from grass-fed cows, preferably organic. Next is pasteurized butter from grass-fed cows, followed by regular pasteurized butter from supermarkets. Even the latter two are still a much healthier choice than margarine or spreads.
And where is the FDA? When are we going to realize that we should not shirk our own responsibilities by transferring them to a bureaucracy?
Friday, December 03, 2010
How to Straighten This Country Out
By ED Kennedy - Wednesday, December 1, 2010
The recent election offers an incredible opportunity to take actions strong enough to actually get our country out of its current rut and on the road to prosperity.
The economic proposal offered by former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles does nothing but make matters worse. Raising taxes has never solved any economic problem. The solution to our huge and ever-rising deficits is to increase the tax base by making the economy bigger and government smaller.
How do we do it? Here's how:
First, do away with the IRS.
Replace it with the Fair Tax. Every Fair Tax proposal I've seen calls for lower-income citizens to receive advanced rebates to prevent further hardship on those folks until we can create higher-paying jobs for them. The Fair Tax would cause hundreds of companies to either open headquarters locations or move entirely to the U.S.
The result would be millions of new jobs, good jobs that would result in much higher revenues being collected from the Fair Tax. Employers would be competing for good workers, and the economy would explode with success.
Now, the broken economy is solved. The only thing that could slow it down is continued irresponsible spending by a government gone wrong. So let's fix government.
Let's start by completely doing away with the Department of Education.
This department is a $100 billion quagmire that turns every dollar into 17 cents. Since the formation of this boondoggle more than 30 years ago, education has gone backward. The only result we see from the $100 billion this national disgrace spends annually is increased and unnecessary paperwork for already overworked teachers.
The government would support state schools to the tune of $25 billion of current DOE funding. The states would decide how best to spend the dollars to improve education, and the feds would stay out of their business - thereby saving taxpayers $75 billion a year and greatly improving the education product offered to our children.
Now that we are finally moving in the right direction, let's dissolve the Department of Energy.
This is another bureaucratic nightmare that costs billions and serves no purpose. Since its inception during the Carter administration, energy prices have skyrocketed and we are more dependent than ever on foreign oil. Let individual states determine if they want to drill for oil within their states' boundaries or off their coasts.
This would allow us to take advantage of a couple of the world's richest reserves in Alaska and the Dakotas. The resulting fall in OPEC oil prices would help economies all over the world to grow. The only nations to be hurt would be those that use oil revenues to support terrorism.
In order to keep the remaining departments of government from devouring our newfound prosperity with further incompetence, we'll cut every department's budget by 50 percent. These excess government workers would easily be able to find "productive" jobs in our now-booming economy. The result would be more efficient government that supported rather than crushed good economic initiatives.
EPA and FDA would be defanged and no longer the enemy of every business with an environmental solution or health care breakthrough.
The only department that would be exempted from drastic cuts would be the Department of Defense. The DOD would be charged with protecting our borders and protecting us from terrorists. The DOD would be subjected to extensive audits to expose any wasteful or unnecessary spending. Those guilty of buying "hundred-dollar toilet seats" would be fired and severely punished.
What about health care, you ask? Simple! Scrap the worst piece of legislation in history, Obamacare, and replace it with tort reform and allow health care insurers to compete across state lines. Rates would drop and our now much more gainfully employed workers would more easily be able to afford it.
Finally, put prayer back in schools.
In the 30 years since liberals have kicked God out of our schools, our society and the values that made it great have gone into decay. Respect for authority is disappearing, and our schools are more dangerous and less productive because of these problems.
Let every state put "prayer in schools" on the ballot during the next statewide election. My guess is that such initiatives would pass overwhelmingly in most states. Atheists, radicals and others who object would have the same options that Christians now have: Put their children in private school, home school or find a state with laws they like. This fringe element could also consider moving to countries like Iran, North Korea or France.
These simple improvements might not solve everything, but they would get the ball rolling in the proper direction.
God bless America!
Businessman Ed Kennedy lives in Pinehurst. Contact him at ekennedy10@nc.rr.com.
The recent election offers an incredible opportunity to take actions strong enough to actually get our country out of its current rut and on the road to prosperity.
The economic proposal offered by former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles does nothing but make matters worse. Raising taxes has never solved any economic problem. The solution to our huge and ever-rising deficits is to increase the tax base by making the economy bigger and government smaller.
How do we do it? Here's how:
First, do away with the IRS.
Replace it with the Fair Tax. Every Fair Tax proposal I've seen calls for lower-income citizens to receive advanced rebates to prevent further hardship on those folks until we can create higher-paying jobs for them. The Fair Tax would cause hundreds of companies to either open headquarters locations or move entirely to the U.S.
The result would be millions of new jobs, good jobs that would result in much higher revenues being collected from the Fair Tax. Employers would be competing for good workers, and the economy would explode with success.
Now, the broken economy is solved. The only thing that could slow it down is continued irresponsible spending by a government gone wrong. So let's fix government.
Let's start by completely doing away with the Department of Education.
This department is a $100 billion quagmire that turns every dollar into 17 cents. Since the formation of this boondoggle more than 30 years ago, education has gone backward. The only result we see from the $100 billion this national disgrace spends annually is increased and unnecessary paperwork for already overworked teachers.
The government would support state schools to the tune of $25 billion of current DOE funding. The states would decide how best to spend the dollars to improve education, and the feds would stay out of their business - thereby saving taxpayers $75 billion a year and greatly improving the education product offered to our children.
Now that we are finally moving in the right direction, let's dissolve the Department of Energy.
This is another bureaucratic nightmare that costs billions and serves no purpose. Since its inception during the Carter administration, energy prices have skyrocketed and we are more dependent than ever on foreign oil. Let individual states determine if they want to drill for oil within their states' boundaries or off their coasts.
This would allow us to take advantage of a couple of the world's richest reserves in Alaska and the Dakotas. The resulting fall in OPEC oil prices would help economies all over the world to grow. The only nations to be hurt would be those that use oil revenues to support terrorism.
In order to keep the remaining departments of government from devouring our newfound prosperity with further incompetence, we'll cut every department's budget by 50 percent. These excess government workers would easily be able to find "productive" jobs in our now-booming economy. The result would be more efficient government that supported rather than crushed good economic initiatives.
EPA and FDA would be defanged and no longer the enemy of every business with an environmental solution or health care breakthrough.
The only department that would be exempted from drastic cuts would be the Department of Defense. The DOD would be charged with protecting our borders and protecting us from terrorists. The DOD would be subjected to extensive audits to expose any wasteful or unnecessary spending. Those guilty of buying "hundred-dollar toilet seats" would be fired and severely punished.
What about health care, you ask? Simple! Scrap the worst piece of legislation in history, Obamacare, and replace it with tort reform and allow health care insurers to compete across state lines. Rates would drop and our now much more gainfully employed workers would more easily be able to afford it.
Finally, put prayer back in schools.
In the 30 years since liberals have kicked God out of our schools, our society and the values that made it great have gone into decay. Respect for authority is disappearing, and our schools are more dangerous and less productive because of these problems.
Let every state put "prayer in schools" on the ballot during the next statewide election. My guess is that such initiatives would pass overwhelmingly in most states. Atheists, radicals and others who object would have the same options that Christians now have: Put their children in private school, home school or find a state with laws they like. This fringe element could also consider moving to countries like Iran, North Korea or France.
These simple improvements might not solve everything, but they would get the ball rolling in the proper direction.
God bless America!
Businessman Ed Kennedy lives in Pinehurst. Contact him at ekennedy10@nc.rr.com.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
PatriotPost.US Alert:: TSA Invasive Body Scanners
Friday, November 12, 2010
Breaking: An investigation by The Patriot Post has determine that the three primary manufacturers of full body scanners being purchased by TSA with Obama (taxpayer) "stimulus" funding, are located in (you guessed it) Democrat congressional districts favored for such boondoggle funding in California and Massachusetts.
L-3 Communications ($165 million contract) is in Massachusetts congressional district 7 (Demo Rep. Ed Markey). American Science and Engineering is in Massachusetts congressional district 5 (Demo Rep. Niki Tsongas). And, Rapiscan ($173 million contract) is in California's 36th congressional district (Demo Rep. Jane Harman).
If you think the TSA scanners now being deployed at airports around the nation -- thanks to $73 million in Obama (taxpayer) stimulus funding -- are not invasive, you might reconsider after viewing this virtual strip search, which is a low resolution of the much higher resolution TSA scans now being used.
Is there a privacy issue here? Want your wives and daughters scanned or searched using the "enhanced pat down procedure" if a woman refuses to subject herself to the scan? Did you know that TnA, er, uh, TSA employees have cached these images? Reuters reports and thousands of them have been posted on the Web. Further, there are also health related concerns about scanner radiation.
When it comes to airport security matters, we put some stock into what the Israelis have to say. In April of this year, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority, Rafi Sela, who has been an expert in security and defence technology for 30 years, said of the body scanners: "I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747. That's why we haven't put them in [Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport]." (Obviously Sela's security decisions are not directed by politicians with stimulus money to burn.)
Sela believes a "trusted traveller" network would be better because pre-approved low-risk passengers would be subject only to expedited screening and higher risk individuals could then be subject to much more proven technology like automatic sniffers now used to detect explosive residue on airline baggage.
As for the "random search" procedures in effect at U.S. airports, Sela says, "Random searches are like Russian roulette." He is an advocate of behavioral profiling, but that would offend the sensibilities of travelers who actually fit the profile of a terrorist.
View a list of airports with scanners.
Links to more info on the new TSA protocols:
Assume the position:
Assume the position 2:
Assume the position 3:
Pilot Association says NO:
Columnist Steve Chapman concludes, "The war on terrorism is going to get personal. Very personal. Americans have long resented the hassles that go with air travel ever since 9/11 — long security lines, limits on liquids, forced removal of footwear and so on. But if the Transportation Security Administration has its way, we will look back to 2009 as the good old days. The agency is rolling out new full-body scanners, which eventually will replace metal detectors at all checkpoints. These machines replicate the experience of taking off your clothes, but without the fun. They enable agents to get a view of your body that leaves nothing to the imagination. For the camera-shy, TSA will offer an alternative: "enhanced" pat-downs. This is not the gentle frisking you may have experienced at the airport in the past. It requires agents to probe aggressively in intimate zones — breasts, buttocks, crotches. If you enjoyed your last mammography or prostate exam, you'll love the enhanced pat-down. And you'll get a chance to have an interesting conversation with your children about being touched by strangers. Besides the indignity of having one's body exposed to an airport screener, there is a danger the images will find a wider audience. The U.S. Marshals Service recently admitted saving some 35,000 images from a machine at a federal courthouse in Florida. TSA says that will never happen. Human experience says, oh, yes, it will."
Breaking: An investigation by The Patriot Post has determine that the three primary manufacturers of full body scanners being purchased by TSA with Obama (taxpayer) "stimulus" funding, are located in (you guessed it) Democrat congressional districts favored for such boondoggle funding in California and Massachusetts.
L-3 Communications ($165 million contract) is in Massachusetts congressional district 7 (Demo Rep. Ed Markey). American Science and Engineering is in Massachusetts congressional district 5 (Demo Rep. Niki Tsongas). And, Rapiscan ($173 million contract) is in California's 36th congressional district (Demo Rep. Jane Harman).
If you think the TSA scanners now being deployed at airports around the nation -- thanks to $73 million in Obama (taxpayer) stimulus funding -- are not invasive, you might reconsider after viewing this virtual strip search, which is a low resolution of the much higher resolution TSA scans now being used.
Is there a privacy issue here? Want your wives and daughters scanned or searched using the "enhanced pat down procedure" if a woman refuses to subject herself to the scan? Did you know that TnA, er, uh, TSA employees have cached these images? Reuters reports and thousands of them have been posted on the Web. Further, there are also health related concerns about scanner radiation.
When it comes to airport security matters, we put some stock into what the Israelis have to say. In April of this year, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority, Rafi Sela, who has been an expert in security and defence technology for 30 years, said of the body scanners: "I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747. That's why we haven't put them in [Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport]." (Obviously Sela's security decisions are not directed by politicians with stimulus money to burn.)
Sela believes a "trusted traveller" network would be better because pre-approved low-risk passengers would be subject only to expedited screening and higher risk individuals could then be subject to much more proven technology like automatic sniffers now used to detect explosive residue on airline baggage.
As for the "random search" procedures in effect at U.S. airports, Sela says, "Random searches are like Russian roulette." He is an advocate of behavioral profiling, but that would offend the sensibilities of travelers who actually fit the profile of a terrorist.
View a list of airports with scanners.
Links to more info on the new TSA protocols:
Assume the position:
Assume the position 2:
Assume the position 3:
Pilot Association says NO:
Columnist Steve Chapman concludes, "The war on terrorism is going to get personal. Very personal. Americans have long resented the hassles that go with air travel ever since 9/11 — long security lines, limits on liquids, forced removal of footwear and so on. But if the Transportation Security Administration has its way, we will look back to 2009 as the good old days. The agency is rolling out new full-body scanners, which eventually will replace metal detectors at all checkpoints. These machines replicate the experience of taking off your clothes, but without the fun. They enable agents to get a view of your body that leaves nothing to the imagination. For the camera-shy, TSA will offer an alternative: "enhanced" pat-downs. This is not the gentle frisking you may have experienced at the airport in the past. It requires agents to probe aggressively in intimate zones — breasts, buttocks, crotches. If you enjoyed your last mammography or prostate exam, you'll love the enhanced pat-down. And you'll get a chance to have an interesting conversation with your children about being touched by strangers. Besides the indignity of having one's body exposed to an airport screener, there is a danger the images will find a wider audience. The U.S. Marshals Service recently admitted saving some 35,000 images from a machine at a federal courthouse in Florida. TSA says that will never happen. Human experience says, oh, yes, it will."
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
And you think we are FREE?
What follows is an email newsletter from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and if it doesn't 1) scare the heck out of you and 2) overwhelm you with outrage, I don't think anything will.
OUR GOVERNMENT IS SO OUT OF CONTROL THAT OUR VERY LIVES ARE IN DANGER. THE THREAT ISN'T IN SOME DISTANT FUTURE BUT HAS ARRIVE.
1. SEARCHES TO GET ON AN AIRPLANE THAT ARE TANTAMOUNT TO FULL BODY, STRIP SEARCHES. AND THE PROCEDURES DO NOT PROTECT US AS THE BUREAUCRATS WOULD HAVE YOU THINK.....THEY DON'T CARE BECAUSE THEY CAN EXEMPT THEMSELVES FROM THE SEARCHES.
See my blog "Have We Gone Insane?" "HOMELAND SECURITY?" (Another nasty joke on "We the People" or is it Homeland Prison?
2. POLICEMEN AND BORDER PATROL AGENTS GOING TO JAIL FOR DOING THEIR JOBS. THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (JOKE OF THE CENTURY) IS COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL AS YOU WILL UNDERSTAND FROM THIS ARTICLE.
3. DOJ JUDGES LEGISLATING FROM THE BENCH AND USURPING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE WHEN IT DOESN'T SUIT THEIR AGENDAS.
Check out what one judge has done to the will of the people of Oklahoma that do not wish to use International law or sharia law......In Defense of the Sharia Ban
Dear Defender of Freedom,
Thanksgiving is time every year when we all travel many miles to be around the ones we love. I wish I could tell you that Stephanie Mohr was going home this Thanksgiving to be with her son Adam. Stephanie is sitting hundreds of miles away from Adam in a jail cell where she was sentenced to spend 10 years of her life for a “crime” she didn’t commit!
This holiday season and all year long, LELDF has one goal and that is to defend those officers that have been wrongly accused for actions taken in line of duty. Please click here to learn more about LELDF and our mission!
Please -- let me explain.
Stephanie received more than 25 letters of commendation and two awards during her years on the police force. But all that matters to the bureaucrats at the federal Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice is that she was a white police officer whose police dog bit an illegal immigrant on the leg back in 1995.
You may have heard about her case. On the night of September 21, 1995, she was on patrol with her police dog, Valk. The area she patrolled, Takoma Park, had been suffering a rash of burglaries.
So when her partner, Sergeant Anthony Delozier, and Stephanie got a call for back-up from an officer who had spotted two men on the roof of a nearby store, they knew they might have found the criminals.
When they arrived, the situation was tense. The two suspects, Ricardo Mendez and Herrera Cruz, had been ordered down from the roof and told to face a wall. They were shouting back and forth to each other in a stream of Spanish. And then it happened.
Mendez made a move -- as if to flee the scene. Stephanie instantly released her dog, Valk, who was trained to perform the police department’s standard “bite and hold.” That’s exactly what Valk did -- he bit Mendez on the leg and held him until the other officers and she was able to handcuff him. Thankfully, a police helicopter was overhead and had monitored the arrest.
Both of the suspects were charged with 4th degree burglary. Herrera Cruz pled guilty, was sentenced to time served, and deported to Mexico. Mendez was convicted of illegally entering the U.S. and selling crack cocaine and was deported to San Salvador.
As for Stephanie Mohr, she was relieved to get two dangerous drug dealers off our streets.
So imagine her shock -- five years later -- when the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was going to indict me for “violating” Mendez’s civil rights by allowing her police dog to bite his leg!
At first, Stephanie simply could not believe it.
Ricardo Mendez was a convicted felon. An illegal immigrant. And it was her duty to release Valk and stop Mendez from fleeing the scene that night back in 1995! But the facts didn’t matter to the bureaucrats in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
They had been looking for cases of “police brutality” to investigate.
And Stephanie was exactly what they wanted:
A white police officer whose police dog had bitten a San Salvadoran immigrant. Her fellow officers testified in court that she had done her job by the book. The P.G. County police training clearly states that if a felony suspect makes a move, they are authorized to release our police dogs.
The jury agreed and voted to acquit her 11-1. And that’s when things really got ugly. Civil rights groups were furious. Everyone from Amnesty International to the NAACP declared the arrest “racist” and demanded an investigation of Stephanie and of the police department. The Justice Department insisted on a second trial because of the one lone juror who had sided with the prosecution.
The second trial was a circus.
The government flew Mendez in from San Salvador and Cruz from Mexico at taxpayer expense to testify against Stephanie. That’s right -- they wanted the jury to take the word of two convicted felons over the word of decorated police officers! To make matters worse, they stacked the jury with minorities who would be sympathetic to illegal immigrants. They drummed up minority witnesses who accused Stephanie of using racial epithets against them – without a shred of proof! And this time, their strategy worked.
Stephanie was convicted and sentenced to prison for ten years. Ten years -- for putting her life on the line every day and arresting a dangerous drug dealer! Stephanie left the courtroom in shock, without a chance to even kiss Adam or his daddy good-bye. Stephanie has been here in the Alderson, West Virginia prison now for seven years.
Stephanie thinks about Adam every constantly. Stephanie says it is an unimaginable pain. Maybe something only a mother can feel.
Stephanie missed seven of his birthdays and this Thanksgiving will be another holiday that Stephanie is separated from her son.But with your help, by donating $25, $50 , $100 or as much as you can afford to The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund we can try to make sure this is the last holiday Stephanie has to spend in a cold jail cell.
If you’ve heard of LELDF then you know we are the best friend a police officer could ever have. LELDF helps defend good officers who have been unfairly persecuted for their split-second, use-of-force decisions in the line of duty.
After I heard about her case, I told everyone on my board, including former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, about it. Since then, LELDF has been defending Stephanie Mohr. We have filed two appeals with the U.S. Court of Appeals, and paid for legal briefs, expert witnesses, and research. We have recently filed a Petition for Commutation of Sentence with the President and a Habeas Corpus Petition with the Bureau of Prisons to force them to grant Stephanie an early release to her home or a half way house so she can be employed.
I would like to tell you that Stephanie’s story is unique but the fact is, that police men and women are wrongly accused every year for actions taken in line of duty.
Will you help LELDF defend Stephanie and other officers in a similar situation by sending a tax-deductible contribution to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund?
The U.S. Department of Justice has had unlimited federal tax dollars to spend on the cases against officers like Stephanie. But she must rely on the generous hearts of people like you to help clear her innocent name and send her home to her son Adam.
So all I can do now is hope that good Americans like you will come to their defense.
Any gift you can send -- be it $25, $50, $100, or $500 -- is tax-deductible. These officers have no other choice. They must rely on good Americans like you to right the wrong that has been done.
Sincerely,
Dave Martin
Chairman, LELDF
P.S. If she can be sent to prison for doing her job, then every police officer in this nation faces the risk of being put behind bars for protecting your family and mine. Won’t you please help me clear her name and get Stephanie home to her son before she misses another Thanksgiving? Thank you for any donation that you can spare.
OUR GOVERNMENT IS SO OUT OF CONTROL THAT OUR VERY LIVES ARE IN DANGER. THE THREAT ISN'T IN SOME DISTANT FUTURE BUT HAS ARRIVE.
1. SEARCHES TO GET ON AN AIRPLANE THAT ARE TANTAMOUNT TO FULL BODY, STRIP SEARCHES. AND THE PROCEDURES DO NOT PROTECT US AS THE BUREAUCRATS WOULD HAVE YOU THINK.....THEY DON'T CARE BECAUSE THEY CAN EXEMPT THEMSELVES FROM THE SEARCHES.
See my blog "Have We Gone Insane?" "HOMELAND SECURITY?" (Another nasty joke on "We the People" or is it Homeland Prison?
2. POLICEMEN AND BORDER PATROL AGENTS GOING TO JAIL FOR DOING THEIR JOBS. THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (JOKE OF THE CENTURY) IS COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL AS YOU WILL UNDERSTAND FROM THIS ARTICLE.
3. DOJ JUDGES LEGISLATING FROM THE BENCH AND USURPING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE WHEN IT DOESN'T SUIT THEIR AGENDAS.
Check out what one judge has done to the will of the people of Oklahoma that do not wish to use International law or sharia law......In Defense of the Sharia Ban
Dear Defender of Freedom,
Help make sure this is the last Thanksgiving a mother is away from her son!  |
This holiday season and all year long, LELDF has one goal and that is to defend those officers that have been wrongly accused for actions taken in line of duty. Please click here to learn more about LELDF and our mission!
Please -- let me explain.
Stephanie received more than 25 letters of commendation and two awards during her years on the police force. But all that matters to the bureaucrats at the federal Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice is that she was a white police officer whose police dog bit an illegal immigrant on the leg back in 1995.
You may have heard about her case. On the night of September 21, 1995, she was on patrol with her police dog, Valk. The area she patrolled, Takoma Park, had been suffering a rash of burglaries.
So when her partner, Sergeant Anthony Delozier, and Stephanie got a call for back-up from an officer who had spotted two men on the roof of a nearby store, they knew they might have found the criminals.
When they arrived, the situation was tense. The two suspects, Ricardo Mendez and Herrera Cruz, had been ordered down from the roof and told to face a wall. They were shouting back and forth to each other in a stream of Spanish. And then it happened.
Mendez made a move -- as if to flee the scene. Stephanie instantly released her dog, Valk, who was trained to perform the police department’s standard “bite and hold.” That’s exactly what Valk did -- he bit Mendez on the leg and held him until the other officers and she was able to handcuff him. Thankfully, a police helicopter was overhead and had monitored the arrest.
Both of the suspects were charged with 4th degree burglary. Herrera Cruz pled guilty, was sentenced to time served, and deported to Mexico. Mendez was convicted of illegally entering the U.S. and selling crack cocaine and was deported to San Salvador.
As for Stephanie Mohr, she was relieved to get two dangerous drug dealers off our streets.
So imagine her shock -- five years later -- when the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was going to indict me for “violating” Mendez’s civil rights by allowing her police dog to bite his leg!
At first, Stephanie simply could not believe it.
Ricardo Mendez was a convicted felon. An illegal immigrant. And it was her duty to release Valk and stop Mendez from fleeing the scene that night back in 1995! But the facts didn’t matter to the bureaucrats in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
They had been looking for cases of “police brutality” to investigate.
And Stephanie was exactly what they wanted:
A white police officer whose police dog had bitten a San Salvadoran immigrant. Her fellow officers testified in court that she had done her job by the book. The P.G. County police training clearly states that if a felony suspect makes a move, they are authorized to release our police dogs.
The jury agreed and voted to acquit her 11-1. And that’s when things really got ugly. Civil rights groups were furious. Everyone from Amnesty International to the NAACP declared the arrest “racist” and demanded an investigation of Stephanie and of the police department. The Justice Department insisted on a second trial because of the one lone juror who had sided with the prosecution.
The second trial was a circus.
The government flew Mendez in from San Salvador and Cruz from Mexico at taxpayer expense to testify against Stephanie. That’s right -- they wanted the jury to take the word of two convicted felons over the word of decorated police officers! To make matters worse, they stacked the jury with minorities who would be sympathetic to illegal immigrants. They drummed up minority witnesses who accused Stephanie of using racial epithets against them – without a shred of proof! And this time, their strategy worked.
Stephanie was convicted and sentenced to prison for ten years. Ten years -- for putting her life on the line every day and arresting a dangerous drug dealer! Stephanie left the courtroom in shock, without a chance to even kiss Adam or his daddy good-bye. Stephanie has been here in the Alderson, West Virginia prison now for seven years.
Stephanie thinks about Adam every constantly. Stephanie says it is an unimaginable pain. Maybe something only a mother can feel.
Stephanie missed seven of his birthdays and this Thanksgiving will be another holiday that Stephanie is separated from her son.But with your help, by donating $25, $50 , $100 or as much as you can afford to The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund we can try to make sure this is the last holiday Stephanie has to spend in a cold jail cell.
If you’ve heard of LELDF then you know we are the best friend a police officer could ever have. LELDF helps defend good officers who have been unfairly persecuted for their split-second, use-of-force decisions in the line of duty.
After I heard about her case, I told everyone on my board, including former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, about it. Since then, LELDF has been defending Stephanie Mohr. We have filed two appeals with the U.S. Court of Appeals, and paid for legal briefs, expert witnesses, and research. We have recently filed a Petition for Commutation of Sentence with the President and a Habeas Corpus Petition with the Bureau of Prisons to force them to grant Stephanie an early release to her home or a half way house so she can be employed.
I would like to tell you that Stephanie’s story is unique but the fact is, that police men and women are wrongly accused every year for actions taken in line of duty.
Will you help LELDF defend Stephanie and other officers in a similar situation by sending a tax-deductible contribution to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund?
The U.S. Department of Justice has had unlimited federal tax dollars to spend on the cases against officers like Stephanie. But she must rely on the generous hearts of people like you to help clear her innocent name and send her home to her son Adam.
So all I can do now is hope that good Americans like you will come to their defense.
Any gift you can send -- be it $25, $50, $100, or $500 -- is tax-deductible. These officers have no other choice. They must rely on good Americans like you to right the wrong that has been done.
Sincerely,
Dave Martin
Chairman, LELDF
P.S. If she can be sent to prison for doing her job, then every police officer in this nation faces the risk of being put behind bars for protecting your family and mine. Won’t you please help me clear her name and get Stephanie home to her son before she misses another Thanksgiving? Thank you for any donation that you can spare.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Have We Gone Insane?
Have we gone insane? There was a time when sane men and women, who are our elected officials would never have even entertained the idea of body scanners our invasive body searches. The chairman of the Homeland Security(?) committee, The Honorable Mr. Rockefeller, stated in his opening statement that the proposed changes to airport security were receiving comments from all quarters. "I appreciate peoples concerns. I understand there is a frustration. I realize some of these screening procedures appear invasive." (emphasis added by me).
He goes on to characterized this unconscionable and barbaric procedure as "unavoidable". What is the matter here? Have we raised a nation of blundering idiots? This is the best that can be presented?
The pity of it all is that experts such as Charles Slepian, who was the guest of Janet Parshall on yesterday's "In the Market with Janet Parshall" will tell you that these procedures DO NOT WORK. For example, these searches will not pick up an explosive that is in powder form such as one person who was caught with powder in his underwear. Answering Janet's question about training reveals the absurdity of TSA's hiring practices. He states that the minimum training requirement of 40 hours with another 20 hours or so of on-the-job training. Policemen get 6 to 8 months in an academy and they are not being trained in bomb detection. A military person will go through a special bomb detection school which is after other schools that lead up to it. It takes many months and sometimes years before they are put in the field. "Yet we don't make an effort to hire them."
He goes on to say that we don't use the kinds of people who can profile, such as retired police officers. He also says that "we do not build a security force in the United States based on security skills, we base it on job need and that's unfortunate." "We take the people who need a job and we give them the job, we give them the minimum training, but they are not prepared to undertake the responsibilities of that job. It's as simple as that. If it were otherwise, we would take some of those many many thousands of young men and women who are coming back from military service who are dealing with bombs in the field, and dealing with IED's, they are also dealing with personalities, they also do profiling. We would be taking some of those police officers who do the 20 years and are out and have a vast, vast well of experience and we don't use them either."
"We have the wrong people doing the wrong jobs to protect America"
There is so much wrong about the direction being taken and these by the very people who we elect to do our will.
Please, do not become complacent because we made a change in this last election. That was merely the "shot fired across the bow". We need to fire all of the political establishment (class).
We need term limits for everyone, including the Supremes (all Federal judges).
We need the Fairtax bills in both House and Senate passed and signed into law
We need the Federal government out of education. The states need to "man-up"
We need the Federal banking system removed.
We need the Federal government to divest themselves of all businesses such as Freddie Mack and Fanny May.
We need to abolish unions for government workers
We need to get the government out of unions in general.
We need limits on how long a person can work for the State department, Defense department, etc.
We need legislation that is a) read by and understood by every congressman b) understandable down to the 5th grade level c) is paid for up front
We need to balance the budget and make it against the law for the government to go into debt.
We need to revoke all legislation that exempts the politician from any program or law.
We need to secure our borders and enforce laws currently on the books.
We need to have humane immigration that allows us to have a guest worker program and paths to citizenship that are not as difficult and costly as they are currently.
As to airport security.............maybe it's time to borrow from our friends...........
A great alternative to body scanners at airports
The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports.It's a booth you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you. They see this as a win-win for everyone, with none of the whining about racial profiling. It also would eliminate the costs of long and expensive trials. Justice would be swift. Case closed!
You're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system: "Attention standby passengers — we now have a seat available on flight number ____. Shalom."
Sunday, November 14, 2010
IMPRIMIS - Hillsdale College - Mike Pence Address September 2010
MIKE PENCE graduated from Hanover College in 1981 and earned his J.D. from Indiana University School of Law in 1986. After running for Congress in 1988 and 1990, he was named president of the Indiana Policy Review Commission, a state think tank based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1991. He was first elected to Congress from Indiana’s 6th District in 2000 and was most recently elected to a fifth term in 2008. That same year he was elected to serve as House Republican Conference Chairman. During the 109th Congress, he also served as chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus in the House of Representatives.
Imprimis
OVER 1,900,000 READERS MONTHLY
October 2010 • Volume 39, Number 10
The Presidency and the Constitution
Mike Pence
U.S. Representative, Indiana’s 6th Congressional District
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on the Hillsdale College campus on September 20, 2010.
The presidency is the most visible thread that runs through the tapestry of the American government. More often than not, for good or for ill, it sets the tone for the other branches and spurs the expectations of the people. Its powers are vast and consequential, its requirements impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purpose as set forth in the Constitution of the United States.
Isn’t it amazing, given the great and momentous nature of the office, that those who seek it seldom pause to consider what they are seeking? Rather, unconstrained by principle or reflection, there is a mad rush toward something that, once its powers are seized, the new president can wield as an instrument with which to transform the nation and the people according to his highest aspirations.
But, other than in a crisis of the house divided, the presidency is neither fit nor intended to be such an instrument. When it is made that, the country sustains a wound, and cries out justly and indignantly. And what the nation says is the theme of this address. What it says—informed by its long history, impelled by the laws of nature and nature’s God—is that we as a people are not to be ruled and not to be commanded. It says that the president should never forget this; that he has not risen above us, but is merely one of us, chosen by ballot, dismissed after his term, tasked not to transform and work his will upon us, but to bear the weight of decision and to carry out faithfully the design laid down in the Constitution in accordance with the Declaration of Independence.
* * *
The presidency must adhere to its definition as expressed in the Constitution, and to conduct defined over time and by tradition. While the powers of the office have enlarged, along with those of the legislature and the judiciary, the framework of the government was intended to restrict abuses common to classical empires and to the regal states of the 18th century.
Without proper adherence to the role contemplated in the Constitution for the presidency, the checks and balances in the constitutional plan become weakened. This has been most obvious in recent years when the three branches of government have been subject to the tutelage of a single party. Under either party, presidents have often forgotten that they are intended to restrain the Congress at times, and that the Congress is independent of their desires. And thus fused in unholy unity, the political class has raged forward in a drunken expansion of powers and prerogatives, mistakenly assuming that to exercise power is by default to do good.
Even the simplest among us knows that this is not so. Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh. Therefore, those who are entrusted with it must educate themselves in self-restraint. A republic is about limitation, and for good reason, because we are mortal and our actions are imperfect.
The tragedy of presidential decision is that even with the best choice, some, perhaps many, will be left behind, and some, perhaps many, may die. Because of this, a true statesman lives continuously with what Churchill called “stress of soul.” He may give to Paul, but only because he robs Peter. And that is why you must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness. For all greatness is tempered by mortality, every soul is equal, and distinctions among men cannot be owned; they are on loan from God, who takes them back and evens accounts at the end.
It is a tragedy indeed that new generations taking office attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it. In the judiciary, this has seldom been better expressed than by Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” In the Congress, it presents itself in massive legislation, acts and codes thousands of pages long and so monstrously over-complicated that no human being can read through them—much less understand them, much less apply them justly to a people that increasingly feel like they are no longer being asked, but rather told. Our nation finds itself in the position of a dog whose duty it is not to ask why—because the “why” is too elevated for his nature—but simply to obey.
Imprimis (im-pri-mis), [Latin]: in the first place
EDITOR Douglas A. Jeffrey
DEPUTY EDITOR
Timothy W. Caspar
COPY EDITORS
Emily Thiessen
Monica VanDerWeide
ART DIRECTOR
Angela Lashaway
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Fred Hadra
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Lucinda Grimm
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Patricia A. DuBois
STAFF ASSISTANTS
Kim Ellsworth
Wanda Oxenger
Mary Jo Von Ewegen
Copyright © 2010 Hillsdale College
The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used: “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”
SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST.
ISSN 0277-8432
Imprimis trademark registered in U.S. Patent and Trade Office #1563325.
OCTOBER 2010 • VOLUME 39, NUMBER 10 < hillsdale.edu
An audio version of Imprimis is available online at
hillsdale.edu/imprimis
America is not a dog, and does not require a “because-I-said-so” jurisprudence; or legislators who knit laws of such insulting complexity that they are heavier than chains; or a president who acts like, speaks like, and is received as a king.
The president is not our teacher, our tutor, our guide or ruler. He does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision. It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law, and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others. It is neither his job nor his prerogative to shift the power of decision away from them, and to him and the acolytes of his choosing.
Is my characterization of unprecedented presumption incorrect? Listen to the words of the leader of President Obama’s transition team and perhaps his next chief-of-staff: “It’s important that President-Elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.” Or, more recently, the latest presidential appointment to avoid confirmation by the Senate—the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—who wrote last Friday: “President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again.”
“Take power. . .rule. . .leveling.” Though it is the model now, this has never been and should never again be the model of the presidency or the character of the American president. No one can say this too strongly, and no one can say it enough until it is remedied. We are not subjects; we are citizens. We fought a war so that we do not have to treat even kings like kings, and—if I may remind you—we won that war. Since then, the principle of royalty has, in this country, been inoperative. Who is better suited or more required to exemplify this conviction, in word and deed, than the President of the United States?
* * *
The powers of the presidency are extraordinary and necessarily great, and great presidents treat them sparingly. For example, it is not the president’s job to manipulate the nation’s youth for the sake of his agenda or his party. They are a potent political force when massed by the social network to which they are permanently attached. But if the president has their true interests at heart he will neither flatter them nor let them adore him, for in flattery is condescension and in adoration is direction, and youth is neither seasoned nor tested enough to direct a nation. Nor should it be the president’s business to presume to direct them. It is difficult enough to do right by one’s own children. No one can be the father of a whole continent’s youth.
Is the president, therefore, expected to turn away from this and other easy advantage? Yes. Like Harry Truman, who went to bed before the result on election night, he must know when to withdraw, to hold back, and to forgo attention, publicity, or advantage.
There is no finer, more moving, or more profound understanding of the nature of the presidency and the command of humility placed upon it than that expressed by President Coolidge. He, like Lincoln, lost a child while he was president, a son of sixteen. “The day I became president,” Coolidge wrote, “he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, ‘If my father was president I would not work in a tobacco field,’ Calvin replied, ‘If my father were your father you would.’” His admiration for the boy was obvious.
Young Calvin contracted blood poisoning from an incident on the South Lawn of the White House. Coolidge wrote, “What might have happened to him under other circumstances we do not know, but if I had not been president. . . .” And then he continued,
In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him.
A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic, but life itself. It communicates that the president feels the gravity of his office and is willing to sacrifice himself; that his eye is not upon his own prospects but on the storm of history, through which he must navigate with the specific powers accorded to him and the limitations placed on those powers both by man and by God.
* * *
The modern presidency has drifted far from the great strength and illumination of its source: the Constitution as given life by the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document ever written. The Constitution—terse, sober, and specific—does not, except by implication, address the president’s demeanor. But this we can read in the best qualities of the founding generation, which we would do well to imitate. In the Capitol Rotunda are heroic paintings of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the victory at Saratoga, the victory at Yorktown, and—something seldom seen in history—a general, the leader of an armed rebellion, resigning his commission and surrendering his army to a new democracy. Upon hearing from Benjamin West that George Washington, having won the war and been urged by some to use the army to make himself king, would instead return to his farm, King George III said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” He did, and he was.
To aspire to such virtue and self-restraint would in a sense be difficult, but in another sense it should be easy—difficult because it would be demanding and ideal, and easy because it is the right thing to do and the rewards are immediately self-evident.
A president who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse: he will be thrown, and the nation along with him. The president solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does not solemnly swear to ignore, overlook, supplement, or reinterpret it. Other than in a crisis of existence, such as the Civil War, amendment should be the sole means of circumventing the Constitution. For if a president joins the powers of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.
Is the Constitution a fluctuating and inconstant document, a collection of suggestions whose purpose is to stimulate debate in a future to which the Founders were necessarily blind? Progressives tell us that even the Framers themselves could not reach agreement in its regard. But they did agree upon it. And they wrote it down. And they signed it. And they lived by it. Its words are unchanging and unchangeable except, again, by amendment. There is no allowance for a president to override it according to his supposed superior conception. Why is this good? It is good because the sun will burn out, the Ohio River will flow backwards, and the cow will jump over the moon 10,000 times before any modern president’s conception is superior to that of the Founders of this nation.
Would it be such a great surprise that a good part of the political strife of our times is because one president after another, rather than keeping faith with it, argues with the document he is supposed to live by? This discontent will only be calmed by returning the presidency to the nation’s first principles. The Constitution and the Declaration should be on a president’s mind all the time, as the prism through which the light of all question of governance passes. Though we have—sometimes gradually, sometimes radically—moved away from this, we can move back to it. And who better than the president to restore this wholesome devotion to limited government?
* * *
And as the president returns to the consistent application of the principles in the Constitution, he will also ensure fiscal responsibility and prosperity. Who is better suited, with his executive and veto powers, to carry over the duty of self-restraint and discipline to the idea of fiscal solvency? When the president restrains government spending, leaving room for the American people to enjoy the fruits of their labor, growth is inevitable. As Senator Robert Taft wrote: “Liberty has been the key to our progress in the past and is the key to our progress in the future.… If we can preserve liberty in all its essentials, there is no limit to the future of the American people.” Whereas the president must be cautious, dutiful, and deferential at home,his character must change abroad. Were he to ask for a primer on how to act in relation to other states, which no holder of the office has needed to this point, and were that primer to be written by the American people, whether of 1776 or 2010, you can be confident that it would contain the following instructions: You do not bow to kings. Outside our shores, the President of the United States of America bows to no man. When in foreign lands, you do not criticize your own country. You do not argue the case against the United States, but the case for it. You do not apologize to the enemies of the United States. Should you be confused, a country, people, or region that harbors,
shelters, supports, encourages, or cheers attacks upon our country or the slaughter of our friends and
families are enemies of the United States. And, to repeat, you do not apologize to them. Closely related to this, and perhaps the least ambiguous of the president’s complex responsibilities, is his duty as commander-in-chief of the military. In this regard there is a very simple rule, unknown to some presidents regardless of party: If, after careful determination, intense stress of soul, and the deepest prayer, you go to war, then, having gone to war, you go to war to win. You do not cast away
American lives, or those of the innocent noncombatant enemy, upon a theory, a gambit, or a notion. And if the politics of your own election or of your party intrude upon your decisions for even an
instant—there are no words for this. More commonplace, but hardly less important, are other expectations of the president in this regard. He must not stint on the equipment and provisioning
of the armed forces, and if he errs it must be not on the side of scarcity but of surplus. And he must be the guardian of his troops, taking every step to avoid the loss of even a single life. The American soldier is as precious as the closest of your kin—because he is your kin, and for his sake the president
must, in effect, say to the Congress and to the people: “I am the Commander-in-Chief. It is my sacred duty to defend the United States, and to give our soldiers what they need to complete the mission and come home safe, whatever the cost.”
If, in fulfilling this duty, the president wavers, he will have betrayed his office, for this is not a policy, it is probity. It is written on the blood-soaked ground of Saratoga, Yorktown, Antietam, Cold Harbor, the Marne, Guadalcanal, the Pointe du Hoc, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a thousand other places in our history, in lessons repeated over and over again.
* * *
The presidency, a great and complex subject upon which I have only touched, has become symbolic of overreaching. There are many truths that we have been frightened to tell or face. If we run from them, they will catch us with our backs turned and pull us down. Better that we should not flee but rather stop and look them in the eye.
What might our forebearers say to us, knowing what they knew, and having done what they did? I have no doubt that they would tell us to channel our passions, speak the truth and do what is right, slowly and with resolution; to work calmly, steadily and without animus or fear; to be like a rock in the tide, let the water tumble about us, and be firm and unashamed in our love of country.
I see us like those in Philadelphia in 1776. Danger all around, but a fresh chapter, ready to begin, uncorrupted, with great possibilities and—inexplicably, perhaps miraculously—the way is clearing ahead. I have never doubted that Providence can appear in history like the sun emerging from behind the clouds, if only as a reward for adherence to first principles. As Winston Churchill said in a speech to Congress on December 26, 1941: “He must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honor to be the faithful servants.”
As Americans, we inherit what Lincoln in his First Inaugural called “the mystic chords of memory stretching from every patriot grave.” They bind us to the great and the humble, the known and the unknown of Americans past—and if I hear them clearly, what they say is that although we may have strayed, we have not strayed too far to return, for we are their descendants. We can still astound the world with justice, reason and strength. I know this is true, but even if it was not we could not in decency stand down, if only for our debt to history. We owe a debt to those who came before, who did great things, and suffered more than we suffer, and gave more than we give, and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for us, whom they did not know. For we “drink from wells we did not dig” and are “warmed by fires we did not build,” and so we must be faithful in our time as they were in theirs.
Many great generations are gone, but by the character and memory of their existence they forbid us to despair of the republic. I see them crossing the prairies in the sun and wind. I see their faces looking out from steel mills and coal mines, and immigrant ships crawling into the harbors at dawn. I see them at war, at work and at peace. I see them, long departed, looking into the camera, with hopeful and sad eyes. And I see them embracing their children, who became us. They are our family and our blood, and we cannot desert them. In spirit, all of them come down to all of us, in a connection that, out of love, we cannot betray.
They are silent now and forever, but from the eternal silence of every patriot grave there is yet an echo that says, “It is not too late; keep faith with us, keep faith with God, and do not, do not ever despair of the republic.” ■
DID YOU KNOW?
Sam Knecht, chairman and professor of art at Hillsdale College, has produced an oil painting of the signing of the American Constitution. Measuring over 5'x9', it will hang in Hillsdale’s Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. To view the painting online, go to hillsdale.edu/kirbycenter/painting.
Imprimis
OVER 1,900,000 READERS MONTHLY
October 2010 • Volume 39, Number 10
The Presidency and the Constitution
Mike Pence
U.S. Representative, Indiana’s 6th Congressional District
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on the Hillsdale College campus on September 20, 2010.
The presidency is the most visible thread that runs through the tapestry of the American government. More often than not, for good or for ill, it sets the tone for the other branches and spurs the expectations of the people. Its powers are vast and consequential, its requirements impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purpose as set forth in the Constitution of the United States.
Isn’t it amazing, given the great and momentous nature of the office, that those who seek it seldom pause to consider what they are seeking? Rather, unconstrained by principle or reflection, there is a mad rush toward something that, once its powers are seized, the new president can wield as an instrument with which to transform the nation and the people according to his highest aspirations.
But, other than in a crisis of the house divided, the presidency is neither fit nor intended to be such an instrument. When it is made that, the country sustains a wound, and cries out justly and indignantly. And what the nation says is the theme of this address. What it says—informed by its long history, impelled by the laws of nature and nature’s God—is that we as a people are not to be ruled and not to be commanded. It says that the president should never forget this; that he has not risen above us, but is merely one of us, chosen by ballot, dismissed after his term, tasked not to transform and work his will upon us, but to bear the weight of decision and to carry out faithfully the design laid down in the Constitution in accordance with the Declaration of Independence.
* * *
The presidency must adhere to its definition as expressed in the Constitution, and to conduct defined over time and by tradition. While the powers of the office have enlarged, along with those of the legislature and the judiciary, the framework of the government was intended to restrict abuses common to classical empires and to the regal states of the 18th century.
Without proper adherence to the role contemplated in the Constitution for the presidency, the checks and balances in the constitutional plan become weakened. This has been most obvious in recent years when the three branches of government have been subject to the tutelage of a single party. Under either party, presidents have often forgotten that they are intended to restrain the Congress at times, and that the Congress is independent of their desires. And thus fused in unholy unity, the political class has raged forward in a drunken expansion of powers and prerogatives, mistakenly assuming that to exercise power is by default to do good.
Even the simplest among us knows that this is not so. Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh. Therefore, those who are entrusted with it must educate themselves in self-restraint. A republic is about limitation, and for good reason, because we are mortal and our actions are imperfect.
The tragedy of presidential decision is that even with the best choice, some, perhaps many, will be left behind, and some, perhaps many, may die. Because of this, a true statesman lives continuously with what Churchill called “stress of soul.” He may give to Paul, but only because he robs Peter. And that is why you must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness. For all greatness is tempered by mortality, every soul is equal, and distinctions among men cannot be owned; they are on loan from God, who takes them back and evens accounts at the end.
It is a tragedy indeed that new generations taking office attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it. In the judiciary, this has seldom been better expressed than by Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” In the Congress, it presents itself in massive legislation, acts and codes thousands of pages long and so monstrously over-complicated that no human being can read through them—much less understand them, much less apply them justly to a people that increasingly feel like they are no longer being asked, but rather told. Our nation finds itself in the position of a dog whose duty it is not to ask why—because the “why” is too elevated for his nature—but simply to obey.
Imprimis (im-pri-mis), [Latin]: in the first place
EDITOR Douglas A. Jeffrey
DEPUTY EDITOR
Timothy W. Caspar
COPY EDITORS
Emily Thiessen
Monica VanDerWeide
ART DIRECTOR
Angela Lashaway
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Fred Hadra
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Lucinda Grimm
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Patricia A. DuBois
STAFF ASSISTANTS
Kim Ellsworth
Wanda Oxenger
Mary Jo Von Ewegen
Copyright © 2010 Hillsdale College
The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used: “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”
SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST.
ISSN 0277-8432
Imprimis trademark registered in U.S. Patent and Trade Office #1563325.
OCTOBER 2010 • VOLUME 39, NUMBER 10 < hillsdale.edu
An audio version of Imprimis is available online at
hillsdale.edu/imprimis
America is not a dog, and does not require a “because-I-said-so” jurisprudence; or legislators who knit laws of such insulting complexity that they are heavier than chains; or a president who acts like, speaks like, and is received as a king.
The president is not our teacher, our tutor, our guide or ruler. He does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision. It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law, and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others. It is neither his job nor his prerogative to shift the power of decision away from them, and to him and the acolytes of his choosing.
Is my characterization of unprecedented presumption incorrect? Listen to the words of the leader of President Obama’s transition team and perhaps his next chief-of-staff: “It’s important that President-Elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.” Or, more recently, the latest presidential appointment to avoid confirmation by the Senate—the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—who wrote last Friday: “President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again.”
“Take power. . .rule. . .leveling.” Though it is the model now, this has never been and should never again be the model of the presidency or the character of the American president. No one can say this too strongly, and no one can say it enough until it is remedied. We are not subjects; we are citizens. We fought a war so that we do not have to treat even kings like kings, and—if I may remind you—we won that war. Since then, the principle of royalty has, in this country, been inoperative. Who is better suited or more required to exemplify this conviction, in word and deed, than the President of the United States?
* * *
The powers of the presidency are extraordinary and necessarily great, and great presidents treat them sparingly. For example, it is not the president’s job to manipulate the nation’s youth for the sake of his agenda or his party. They are a potent political force when massed by the social network to which they are permanently attached. But if the president has their true interests at heart he will neither flatter them nor let them adore him, for in flattery is condescension and in adoration is direction, and youth is neither seasoned nor tested enough to direct a nation. Nor should it be the president’s business to presume to direct them. It is difficult enough to do right by one’s own children. No one can be the father of a whole continent’s youth.
Is the president, therefore, expected to turn away from this and other easy advantage? Yes. Like Harry Truman, who went to bed before the result on election night, he must know when to withdraw, to hold back, and to forgo attention, publicity, or advantage.
There is no finer, more moving, or more profound understanding of the nature of the presidency and the command of humility placed upon it than that expressed by President Coolidge. He, like Lincoln, lost a child while he was president, a son of sixteen. “The day I became president,” Coolidge wrote, “he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, ‘If my father was president I would not work in a tobacco field,’ Calvin replied, ‘If my father were your father you would.’” His admiration for the boy was obvious.
Young Calvin contracted blood poisoning from an incident on the South Lawn of the White House. Coolidge wrote, “What might have happened to him under other circumstances we do not know, but if I had not been president. . . .” And then he continued,
In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him.
A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic, but life itself. It communicates that the president feels the gravity of his office and is willing to sacrifice himself; that his eye is not upon his own prospects but on the storm of history, through which he must navigate with the specific powers accorded to him and the limitations placed on those powers both by man and by God.
* * *
The modern presidency has drifted far from the great strength and illumination of its source: the Constitution as given life by the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document ever written. The Constitution—terse, sober, and specific—does not, except by implication, address the president’s demeanor. But this we can read in the best qualities of the founding generation, which we would do well to imitate. In the Capitol Rotunda are heroic paintings of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the victory at Saratoga, the victory at Yorktown, and—something seldom seen in history—a general, the leader of an armed rebellion, resigning his commission and surrendering his army to a new democracy. Upon hearing from Benjamin West that George Washington, having won the war and been urged by some to use the army to make himself king, would instead return to his farm, King George III said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” He did, and he was.
To aspire to such virtue and self-restraint would in a sense be difficult, but in another sense it should be easy—difficult because it would be demanding and ideal, and easy because it is the right thing to do and the rewards are immediately self-evident.
A president who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse: he will be thrown, and the nation along with him. The president solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does not solemnly swear to ignore, overlook, supplement, or reinterpret it. Other than in a crisis of existence, such as the Civil War, amendment should be the sole means of circumventing the Constitution. For if a president joins the powers of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.
Is the Constitution a fluctuating and inconstant document, a collection of suggestions whose purpose is to stimulate debate in a future to which the Founders were necessarily blind? Progressives tell us that even the Framers themselves could not reach agreement in its regard. But they did agree upon it. And they wrote it down. And they signed it. And they lived by it. Its words are unchanging and unchangeable except, again, by amendment. There is no allowance for a president to override it according to his supposed superior conception. Why is this good? It is good because the sun will burn out, the Ohio River will flow backwards, and the cow will jump over the moon 10,000 times before any modern president’s conception is superior to that of the Founders of this nation.
Would it be such a great surprise that a good part of the political strife of our times is because one president after another, rather than keeping faith with it, argues with the document he is supposed to live by? This discontent will only be calmed by returning the presidency to the nation’s first principles. The Constitution and the Declaration should be on a president’s mind all the time, as the prism through which the light of all question of governance passes. Though we have—sometimes gradually, sometimes radically—moved away from this, we can move back to it. And who better than the president to restore this wholesome devotion to limited government?
* * *
And as the president returns to the consistent application of the principles in the Constitution, he will also ensure fiscal responsibility and prosperity. Who is better suited, with his executive and veto powers, to carry over the duty of self-restraint and discipline to the idea of fiscal solvency? When the president restrains government spending, leaving room for the American people to enjoy the fruits of their labor, growth is inevitable. As Senator Robert Taft wrote: “Liberty has been the key to our progress in the past and is the key to our progress in the future.… If we can preserve liberty in all its essentials, there is no limit to the future of the American people.” Whereas the president must be cautious, dutiful, and deferential at home,his character must change abroad. Were he to ask for a primer on how to act in relation to other states, which no holder of the office has needed to this point, and were that primer to be written by the American people, whether of 1776 or 2010, you can be confident that it would contain the following instructions: You do not bow to kings. Outside our shores, the President of the United States of America bows to no man. When in foreign lands, you do not criticize your own country. You do not argue the case against the United States, but the case for it. You do not apologize to the enemies of the United States. Should you be confused, a country, people, or region that harbors,
shelters, supports, encourages, or cheers attacks upon our country or the slaughter of our friends and
families are enemies of the United States. And, to repeat, you do not apologize to them. Closely related to this, and perhaps the least ambiguous of the president’s complex responsibilities, is his duty as commander-in-chief of the military. In this regard there is a very simple rule, unknown to some presidents regardless of party: If, after careful determination, intense stress of soul, and the deepest prayer, you go to war, then, having gone to war, you go to war to win. You do not cast away
American lives, or those of the innocent noncombatant enemy, upon a theory, a gambit, or a notion. And if the politics of your own election or of your party intrude upon your decisions for even an
instant—there are no words for this. More commonplace, but hardly less important, are other expectations of the president in this regard. He must not stint on the equipment and provisioning
of the armed forces, and if he errs it must be not on the side of scarcity but of surplus. And he must be the guardian of his troops, taking every step to avoid the loss of even a single life. The American soldier is as precious as the closest of your kin—because he is your kin, and for his sake the president
must, in effect, say to the Congress and to the people: “I am the Commander-in-Chief. It is my sacred duty to defend the United States, and to give our soldiers what they need to complete the mission and come home safe, whatever the cost.”
If, in fulfilling this duty, the president wavers, he will have betrayed his office, for this is not a policy, it is probity. It is written on the blood-soaked ground of Saratoga, Yorktown, Antietam, Cold Harbor, the Marne, Guadalcanal, the Pointe du Hoc, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a thousand other places in our history, in lessons repeated over and over again.
* * *
The presidency, a great and complex subject upon which I have only touched, has become symbolic of overreaching. There are many truths that we have been frightened to tell or face. If we run from them, they will catch us with our backs turned and pull us down. Better that we should not flee but rather stop and look them in the eye.
What might our forebearers say to us, knowing what they knew, and having done what they did? I have no doubt that they would tell us to channel our passions, speak the truth and do what is right, slowly and with resolution; to work calmly, steadily and without animus or fear; to be like a rock in the tide, let the water tumble about us, and be firm and unashamed in our love of country.
I see us like those in Philadelphia in 1776. Danger all around, but a fresh chapter, ready to begin, uncorrupted, with great possibilities and—inexplicably, perhaps miraculously—the way is clearing ahead. I have never doubted that Providence can appear in history like the sun emerging from behind the clouds, if only as a reward for adherence to first principles. As Winston Churchill said in a speech to Congress on December 26, 1941: “He must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honor to be the faithful servants.”
As Americans, we inherit what Lincoln in his First Inaugural called “the mystic chords of memory stretching from every patriot grave.” They bind us to the great and the humble, the known and the unknown of Americans past—and if I hear them clearly, what they say is that although we may have strayed, we have not strayed too far to return, for we are their descendants. We can still astound the world with justice, reason and strength. I know this is true, but even if it was not we could not in decency stand down, if only for our debt to history. We owe a debt to those who came before, who did great things, and suffered more than we suffer, and gave more than we give, and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for us, whom they did not know. For we “drink from wells we did not dig” and are “warmed by fires we did not build,” and so we must be faithful in our time as they were in theirs.
Many great generations are gone, but by the character and memory of their existence they forbid us to despair of the republic. I see them crossing the prairies in the sun and wind. I see their faces looking out from steel mills and coal mines, and immigrant ships crawling into the harbors at dawn. I see them at war, at work and at peace. I see them, long departed, looking into the camera, with hopeful and sad eyes. And I see them embracing their children, who became us. They are our family and our blood, and we cannot desert them. In spirit, all of them come down to all of us, in a connection that, out of love, we cannot betray.
They are silent now and forever, but from the eternal silence of every patriot grave there is yet an echo that says, “It is not too late; keep faith with us, keep faith with God, and do not, do not ever despair of the republic.” ■
DID YOU KNOW?
Sam Knecht, chairman and professor of art at Hillsdale College, has produced an oil painting of the signing of the American Constitution. Measuring over 5'x9', it will hang in Hillsdale’s Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. To view the painting online, go to hillsdale.edu/kirbycenter/painting.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Just Plane Crazy: Obama’s Dog Flies to Vacation on Separate Jet
Just Plane Crazy: Obama’s Dog Flies to Vacation on Separate Jet
By Doug Powers • July 17, 2010 02:26 PM
**Written by Doug Powers
The Obamas arrived at their vacation spot in Maine, and the local paper, the Morning Sentinel, described the scene:
The president was the first to walk onto the tarmac, dressed casually in a pale blue Oxford shirt and khakis. A few minutes later, the first lady, dressed in black capris, a tank-top and sandals, walked onto the runway. Shortly afterward, Malia and Sasha joined their parents.
Baldacci and his wife, Karen, presented the family with gift bags full of Maine-made goodies, including baskets made by the Passamaquoddy Tribe, popcorn from Little Lad’s Bakery in East Corinth, iconic L.L. Bean bags, University of Maine ice hockey hats, and an assortment of other Maine foods and books.
Karen Baldacci said the bags for Malia and Sasha contained one loon toy and one chickadee toy that sound their natural calls.
Arriving in a small jet before the Obamas was the first dog, Bo, a Portuguese water dog given as a present by the late U.S. Sen Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.; and the president’s personal aide Reggie Love, who chatted with Baldacci.
Not enough room on Air Force One for a Portuguese water dog and Reggie Love? Obama had to have a smaller jet (G3 Gulfstream, according to the story) serve as Air Force One instead of the 747 the president usually uses because of the size of the airport, but still, it’s a dog — and we’re all supposed to sacrifice in order to get through these tough economic times, right Mr. President? … Um, Mr. President?
There was some concern because the jet carrying the First Couple’s egos was a bit late in arriving due to rough weather over Shangri-La.
Incidentally, my dog saw this story and wants his own jet now, too. Thanks Obama.
Vacation update: What do you think attracted Obama to this ice cream shop?
(h/t Warner Todd Huston)
**Written by Doug Powers
By Doug Powers • July 17, 2010 02:26 PM
**Written by Doug Powers
The Obamas arrived at their vacation spot in Maine, and the local paper, the Morning Sentinel, described the scene:
The president was the first to walk onto the tarmac, dressed casually in a pale blue Oxford shirt and khakis. A few minutes later, the first lady, dressed in black capris, a tank-top and sandals, walked onto the runway. Shortly afterward, Malia and Sasha joined their parents.
Baldacci and his wife, Karen, presented the family with gift bags full of Maine-made goodies, including baskets made by the Passamaquoddy Tribe, popcorn from Little Lad’s Bakery in East Corinth, iconic L.L. Bean bags, University of Maine ice hockey hats, and an assortment of other Maine foods and books.
Karen Baldacci said the bags for Malia and Sasha contained one loon toy and one chickadee toy that sound their natural calls.
Arriving in a small jet before the Obamas was the first dog, Bo, a Portuguese water dog given as a present by the late U.S. Sen Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.; and the president’s personal aide Reggie Love, who chatted with Baldacci.
Not enough room on Air Force One for a Portuguese water dog and Reggie Love? Obama had to have a smaller jet (G3 Gulfstream, according to the story) serve as Air Force One instead of the 747 the president usually uses because of the size of the airport, but still, it’s a dog — and we’re all supposed to sacrifice in order to get through these tough economic times, right Mr. President? … Um, Mr. President?
There was some concern because the jet carrying the First Couple’s egos was a bit late in arriving due to rough weather over Shangri-La.
Incidentally, my dog saw this story and wants his own jet now, too. Thanks Obama.
Vacation update: What do you think attracted Obama to this ice cream shop?
(h/t Warner Todd Huston)
**Written by Doug Powers
Sunday, October 03, 2010
"I Feel Like I Can Fly"
Staff Photo by Angela Lewis/Chattanooga Times Free Press Sep 30, 2010
Athlete Rachel Cannon smiles as she sits atop Axel while learning the Special Olympics competition course on a ranch in Flintstone, Ga. Thursday afternoon.
The muscles in Rachel Cannon’s legs stiffened so tightly she shook with pain, but the 17-year-old with crippling cerebral palsy and scoliosis never gave up horseback riding.
“I just realized, ‘Oh, I can do this,’” she said.
Six practice sessions later, the horse has become a way to soothe her fears, Cannon said. Stretching helped her muscles relax, and she now is training to compete in the Special Olympics.
“I have to depend on everybody for my every single need almost, but being on the horse makes me more mobile,” she said. “I feel like I can fly.”
Cannon is one of 33 special-needs children from Catoosa, Walker and Hamilton county schools who are preparing for the Equestrian Special Olympics on Oct. 30. The event, at Eagles Rest Ranch in Flintstone, Ga., is sponsored by the Catoosa and Walker County Special Olympics.
“There is value in using sports to help people learn healthy life skills,” said Wendy Bigham, spokeswoman for Special Olympics Georgia. “So many students are stuck at home and they don’t have a lot of outlets to stay healthy.”
More than 23,078 special-needs, school-age children are competing in the Special Olympics this year across Georgia, Bigham said.
Ginger Brown, owner of the licensed SpiritHorse Therapeutic Riding facility at Eagles Rest, is one of three instructors who train the students at no charge. Brown depends on donations to fund the cost of operating the ranch. She also has 33 volunteer Special Olympics state-trained riding teachers and other workers who help the students.
Some riders are autistic, others have cerebral palsy and some have Down syndrome. Many use wheelchairs, Brown said. She and her staff train students twice a week to prepare for the Olympics.
It hurts some of the riders when they start because they’re using muscles to balance on the horse that they haven’t used in wheelchairs, Brown said.
“I’ve seen kids sweat and turn beet-red in the face because they were using muscles that were just painful, but they refuse to quit and they have made great strides,” she said.
The result has been special-needs children who have increased their independence, confidence and ability to communicate, according to Brown.
No child has been seriously injured at the ranch in the two years she’s hosted the Special Olympics, Brown said. Even if they fall, they get up and try again, she said.
“They feel the freedom and independence they get from being on top of the horse, and they want to try,” Brown said.
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