Murder and Chaos in the Supermarket Parking Lot Endangers American Exceptionalism

The civility of democracy is seriously endangered in an environment of murder and chaos…..especially murder and chaos in the community of  open public opinion and political discourse.  

The people’s confidence in the safety of its community and nation is the most important task of our elected president

The O.K Corral environment which stretches across the southern border with Mexico is intolerable.   The invasion of foreigners is intolerable.  Their cargo of poison and mahem is intolerable.  The decision made by  our present president to assault the state of Arizona in court  for  its efforts to stop  the violence and invasion is intolerable.

The murder of these folks and the crippling of a member of the House of Representatives is intolerable.

By day after tomorrow the massacre will be forgotten and the decay of American culture will continue…….

UNLESS good people do something to repair the wounds opened by the past two generations of cultural chaos and decay.

click here for more information regarding today’s episode of chaos in Tucson, Arizona:

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/01/08/quotes-of-the-day-563/

Mark Steyn on the Collapse of the “English Speaking World” under the Weight of the Politically Correct

This may look like alot to read because it is.   Mark Steyn writes profoundly, cleverly, and usually with humor.   His title for this foray into worry is, “DEPENDENCE DAY”, and subs it with, “on the erosion of  personal liberty.”

He wrote this quite somberly…very somberly for Mark Steyn.   There is much for us to worry about.  This is a five star article.

“If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.

In the days when I used to write for Fleet Street, a lot of readers and several of my editors accused me of being anti-British. I’m not. I’m extremely pro-British and, for that very reason, the present state of the United Kingdom is bound to cause distress. So, before I get to the bad stuff, let me just lay out the good. Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?

And of course the pre-eminent power of the age derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. In his
sequel to Churchill’s great work, The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Andrew Roberts writes:

Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire–led and the American Republic–led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common—and enough that separated them from everyone else—that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.

If you step back for a moment, this seems obvious. There is a distinction between the “English-speaking peoples” and the rest of “the West,” and at key moments in human history that distinction has proved critical.

Continental Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and agreeable symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses and whatnot, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can’t help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political West—one with a sustained commitment to liberty and democracy—the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and, indeed (given that most of these liberal democracies other than America share the same head of state), uniregal. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare on this earth is peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere.

Decline starts with the money. It always does. As Jonathan Swift put it:

A baited banker thus desponds,
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
’Tis like the writing on the wall.

Today the people who have America’s bonds are not the people one would wish to have one’s soul. As Madhav Nalapat has suggested, Beijing believes a half-millennium Western interregnum is about to come to an end, and the world will return to Chinese dominance. I think they’re wrong on the latter, but right on the former. Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military.

According to the cbo’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the U.S. government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest—whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent. America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have advanced from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers.

What does that mean? In 2009, the United States spent about $665 billion on its military, the Chinese about $99 billion. If Beijing continues to buy American debt at the rate it has in recent years, then within a half-decade or so U.S. interest payments on that debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. This year, the Pentagon issued an alarming report to Congress on Beijing’s massive military build-up, including new missiles, upgraded bombers, and an aircraft-carrier R&D program intended to challenge American dominance in the Pacific. What the report didn’t mention is who’s paying for it. Answer: Mr. and Mrs. America.

Within the next five years, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers. When they take Taiwan, suburban families in Connecticut and small businesses in Idaho will have paid for it. The existential questions for America loom now, not decades hence. What we face is not merely the decline and fall of a powerful nation but the collapse of the highly specific cultural tradition that built the modern world. It starts with the money—it always does. But the money is only the symptom. We wouldn’t be this broke if we hadn’t squandered our inheritance in a more profound sense.

Britain’s decline also began with the money. The U.S. “Lend-Lease” program to the United Kingdom ended with the war in September 1946. London paid off the final installment of its debt in December 2006, and the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support during the war. They have our soul who have our bonds: Britain and the world were more fortunate in who had London’s bonds than America is seventy years later. For that reason, in terms of global order, the transition from Britannia ruling the waves to the American era, from the old lion to its transatlantic progeny, was one of the smoothest transfers of power in history—so smooth that most of us aren’t quite sure when it took place. Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans; the next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British.

The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised—although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day. To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, it’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base—just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance down under to Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed, effortlessly, by the United States, and life and global order went on.

One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the ocean: “We might have been a free and great people together.” But in the end, when it mattered, they were a free and great people together. Britain was eclipsed by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, the same legal inheritance, and the same commitment to liberty.

It’s not likely to go that way next time round. And “next time round” is already under way. We are coming to the end of a two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but which, in fact, derive from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it. To point out how English the world is is, of course, a frightfully un-English thing to do. No true Englishman would ever do such a ghastly and vulgar thing. You need some sinister rootless colonial oik like me to do it. But there’s a difference between genial self-effacement and contempt for one’s own inheritance.

Not so long ago, Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and soi-disant Islamophobe, flew into London and promptly got shipped back to the Netherlands as a threat to public order. After the British Government had reconsidered its stupidity, he was permitted to return and give his speech at the House of Lords—and, as foreigners often do, he quoted Winston Churchill, under the touchingly naive assumption that this would endear him to the natives. Whereas, of course, to almost all members of Britain’s governing elite, quoting Churchill approvingly only confirms that you’re an extremist lunatic. I had the honor a couple of years back of visiting President Bush in the White House and seeing the bust of Churchill on display in the Oval Office. When Barack Obama moved in, he ordered Churchill’s bust be removed and returned to the British. Its present whereabouts are unclear. But, given what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust was almost certainly arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order.

Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of self-deprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from The Daily Telegraph:

A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was “distasteful.” The £136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of “the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences. Students were urged to “party like it’s 1899” and organisers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.

But anti-fascist groups said the theme was “distasteful and insensitive” because of the British Empire’s historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation.

The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material.

The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”

It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.

It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. But there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for the rest of us, too: When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia. As I always try to tell my American neighbors, national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, which he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:

There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.

Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and
authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government without a similar descent, in enough of the citizenry, into chronic dependency.

What happened? Britain, in John Foster Dulles’s famous postwar assessment, had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Actually, Britain didn’t so much “lose” the Empire: it evolved peacefully into the modern Commonwealth, which is more agreeable than the way these things usually go. Nor is it clear that modern Britain wants a role, of any kind. Rather than losing an empire, it seems to have lost its point.

This has consequences. To go back to Cambridge University’s now non-imperial Empire Ball, if the cream of British education so willingly prostrates itself before ahistorical balderdash, what then of the school system’s more typical charges? In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.

When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples—not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital.

What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what lbj’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out, for ten years and counting. “Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for.

Plucked at random from The Daily Mail: A man of twenty-one with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute. Why not? His social worker says sex is a “human right” and that his client, being a virgin, is entitled to the support of the state in claiming said right. Fortunately, a £520 million program was set up by Her Majesty’s Government to “empower those with disabilities.” “He’s planning to do more than just have his end away,” explained the social worker.

“The girls in Amsterdam are far more protected than those on U.K. streets. Let him have some fun—I’d want to. Wouldn’t you prefer that we can control this, guide him, educate him, support him to understand the process and ultimately end up satisfying his needs in a secure, licensed place where his happiness and growth as a person is the most important thing? Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights.”

And so a Dutch prostitute is able to boast that among her clients is the British Government. Talk about outsourcing: given the reputation of English womanhood, you’d have thought this would be the one job that wouldn’t have to be shipped overseas. But, as Dutch hookers no doubt say, lie back and think of England—and the check they’ll be mailing you.

After Big Government, after global retreat, after the loss of liberty, there is only remorseless civic disintegration. The statistics speak for themselves. The number of indictable offences per thousand people was 2.4 in 1900, climbed gradually to 9.7 in 1954, and then rocketed to 109.4 by 1992. And that official increase understates the reality: Many crimes have been decriminalized (shoplifting, for example), and most crime goes unreported, and most reported crime goes uninvestigated, and most investigated crime goes unsolved, and almost all solved crime merits derisory punishment. Yet the law-breaking is merely a symptom of a larger rupture. At a gathering like this one, John O’Sullivan, recalling his own hometown, said that when his grandmother ran a pub in the Liverpool docklands in the years around the First World War, there was only one occasion when someone swore in her presence. And he subsequently apologized.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But viewed from 2010 England the day before yesterday is an alternative universe—or a lost civilization. Last year, the “Secretary of State for Children” (both an Orwellian and Huxleyite office) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under twenty-four-hour cctv supervision in their homes. As the Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.” Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he would have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.

For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the state as church. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. A national holiday every July 5th: They can call it Dependence Day.

Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? It’s not so hard to picture a paternalist technocrat of the Michael Bloomberg school covering New York in cctv ostensibly for terrorism but also to monitor your transfats. Permanence is the illusion of every age. But you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences. There, too, are lessons from the old country. Cecil Rhodes distilled the assumptions of generations when he said that to be born a British subject was to win first prize in the lottery of life. On the eve of the Great War, in his play Heartbreak House, Bernard Shaw turned the thought around to taunt a British ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. “Do you think,” he wrote, “the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”

In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.”

While Obama and Holder Play Games with Arizona, A Judge is Murdered and a Congresswoman Shot!

“Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head Saturday and an aide and federal judge  killed when an assailant opened fire outside a grocery store as the Democratic lawmaker met with constituents, officials said.

C.J. Karamargin, a spokesman for Giffords, said the congresswoman was in surgery as of 1 p.m. local time and that an unspecified number of Giffords staff members were injured in the shooting. Karamargin said he had no other information on the conditions of the injured or on the circumstances of the shooting.

Federal officials told NBC News that U.S. District Court Judge John M. Roll was among those shot and had died. He was the chief judge in Arizona, appointed in 1991 by the first President Bush. He became chief judge in 2006.

Congressional officials said an aide to Giffords also was killed, and unknown number of others were injured, including staffers to the lawmaker.

Gabrielle Giffords

President Barack Obama called the shooting “an unspeakable tragedy” and that such “a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society.

U.S. Capitol police say the shooter is in custody as one official said he carried out the attack with an automatic weapon. The officials who described the events did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not permitted to comment publicly.

“I am horrified by the senseless attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and members of her staff,” newly elected House Speaker John Boehner said. “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society. Our prayers are with Congresswoman Giffords, her staff, all who were injured, and their families. This is a sad day for our country.”

The above article was found at MSNBC.   It was only a matter of time massacres would begin on the American side of the Mexican border.   And during this time this president Barack Hussein Obama and his right hand Court and Law man, the joke-American, Eric Holder play games suing the state of Arizona and refusing to provide safety and welfare for a huge portion of the American population.

Click here for a Fox News video of the story:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/01/08/watch_live_fox_news_coverage_of_rep_giffords_shooting.html

Patricia Kirtley: Another Story’s Hero of Survival!”

“A viral video vaulted Ted Williams and his golden voice to fame, but the real hero of this story is the woman he left behind.

Patricia Kirtley raised four daughters alone after Williams split 23 years ago and dove down the rabbit hole of drugs.

Not only that, Kirtley took in the baby boy the radioman had with another woman and raised him as her own.

Oh, and by the way, she’s partially blind.

“We survived,” Kirtley said Thursday in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. “My children are survivors. They know if we get a little bit that God provides, we make it into a lot. I’m a soup maker. I make potato soup and throw in a lot of vegetables and a little meat. We always ate.”

Except that Williams, who seems to be a nice guy, just wasn’t strong, wasn’t around and wasn’t contributing financially.

Kirtley had to go on the dole. “I still remember my case number,” she says ruefully. She eventually went to school and got licensed as a blind vendor.

“My mother and sisters pitched in and drove me because I can’t see to drive,” said Kirtley, now 58, over a din of some of her 16 grandchildren playing.

As if that weren’t enough, Kirtley said two of her sisters and a cousin each took in a child Williams and his druggie girlfriend couldn’t, or wouldn’t, care for.

“I didn’t want to see those children in no foster home,” she said.

Exactly. It’s an all-too-familiar story to the strong members of poor communities – usually women. They are the ones who must provide the backbone, as well as the hugs, for children whose parents get hooked on drugs.

Williams called once in a while, and Kirtley would hear that baritone voice she fell in love with at first sound. They stayed friendly, and he might come for Thanksgiving dinner, but otherwise, he would remain AWOL.

Daughter Julia Pullien, 30, said she was 7 when Williams left.

“He wasn’t involved,” she said. “Our mom was our sole provider. She is a more than phenomenal person. My father is a nice guy, but he fell victim to the streets. We prayed for him and we worried about him, but we became accustomed to the fact that he just wasn’t there.”

Kirtley said the kids felt some resentment.

“They didn’t understand why he was never there for their school functions, or just to help with their homework,” she said.

“That’s when I really could have used help, because I couldn’t see their pages. My kids are really good readers, though, because I made them read everything to me out loud.”

They’re grown now, with jobs and kids of their own.

Maybe Williams can redeem himself personally as well as professionally.

Maybe he can be there for his grandchildren in ways he could not for his kids.

Still, all the credit must go to Kirtley, the woman who truly deserves the fame her ex has been getting the past few days.”

(The above article was written by Joanna Molloy of the New York Daily News.  It was sent to me by good friend and fellow conservative, Mark Waldeland, to whom I am much obliged.)

The Culture in Which We Live: Teacher Chuck Chalberg Takes a Poll

It is my prejudice we live in an America where we raise knownothings.   We raise knownothings because our parents received  the same education.   Knowledge has not been in the American interest for more than a generation.

Previous to that time, it was a fragile commodity secondary to a more noble goal……to provide enough ‘education’ to create a noble and orderly  path for citizens to seek and attain a good life with liberty in their pursuit for happiness.

Knowledge is a lifetime requirement.  One cannot become an adult without certain understandings and experiences.   This once goal of value in America was taught by adult parents within the traditional family…..a masculine Father and a feminine Mother…..now just about Gone With The Wind.

Chuck Chalberg is a teacher at  Normandale College, a local two year school here in our Twin Cities.   Normandale is the  kind of college Dennis Prager admires as the most likely post-highschool positive experience in education an American  high school graduate can attain in today’s American Educational establishment.

I, incidentally, bear the same prejudice.

What does  Chuck Chalberg have to offer us in his article printed in today’s Mpls StarTribune?

“With a new semester beginning, I’m about to learn a few things from my students.

For the past 20 years or so, I’ve begun each semester by asking students to give me three lists of three things: topics they’d like to learn more about, their most notorious historical villains, and their most noteworthy heroes.

Many responses are not surprising.

The Civil War and World War II are perennial interests, while lately there’s been an uptick for the Great Depression.

Hitler always tops the bad-guy list, while Lincoln, Washington, Martin Luther King, Christ and Rosa Parks (in no particular order) populate the heroes list.

Two years ago a fellow named Barack Obama gave the aforementioned quintet a run for their money. But by this past fall his numbers had dropped dramatically.

Apparently, he’s no longer seen as the heroic savior he once advertised himself as being.

No doubt the rise and fall of Obama reflects a general present-mindedness among students.

The same thing probably explains another president’s changing fortunes in my students’ rankings.

Between 2006 and 2008, George W. Bush came close to matching Hitler vote-for-vote. (To be fair, Hitler was generally listed first.)

Well, here we are in 2011, and Bush has pretty much disappeared from sight, getting just a vote or two on both lists. If it was surprising, even stunning, to see him right there with Hitler a few years ago, it’s not surprising to see him fade from view.

Other surprises? Two come to mind, both concerning what’s missing from most lists.

One would think that Josef Stalin would be right there with Hitler on any list of villains. But he isn’t.

My best estimate is that Stalin trails Hitler by at least 20 to 1. And Mao? How about 100 to 1?

Yet when it comes to mass murderers, Hitler was a minor-leaguer compared to Stalin and Mao.

Don’t get me wrong. Hitler was an evil monster, belonging on anyone’s villains list.

But when students have three slots to fill, one would think there would be a more equitable distribution of the three most monstrous mass murderers of the previous century.

Why isn’t that the case? Is it a carryover from our World War II alliance with the Soviet Union? Probably not.

Is it that communism is still seen as being on the right side of history? Possibly.

But the likeliest explanation is that the rankings are a function of what gets emphasized and deemphasized in schools, the mass media and popular culture.

The same thing might explain what’s missing among topics students wish to study more.

Often, they’d like to know more about slavery, about the mistreatment of native peoples, about the oppression of women and other minorities, about the plight of workers and immigrants.

Fair enough. All those topics deserve serious attention.

But in all my years of reading these questionnaires, I don’t ever recall a student wanting to learn more about American inventiveness, American creativity, the sheer dynamism of this society.

This is at once sad and, in its own way, stunning. Am I making too much of it? I don’t think so.

It speaks to a larger society awash in guilt about its past and doubt about its present, and lacking confidence in its future.

It’s curious that the very same people who make fun of religions that stress individual guilt are among the first to heap collective guilt on an entire society.

And once again, this is the default position of the mass media, the keepers and mavens of our popular culture, and, I fear, of the K-12 school system.

Of course, the mantra of “critical thinking” also helps explain why schools do what they do. What passes for “critical thinking” has come to mean “being critical of” rather than “thinking critically about.”

If “critical thinking” really did mean the latter, there would be plenty of room for exploring America’s failings and successes.

I don’t do exit polls, but if I did my hope would be that students would wind up wanting to know more about American dynamism, as well as its potential pitfalls.

I’d also hope that they’d want to know more about the plight of those at the bottom, as well as what that very dynamism has done to help rectify things.

And if any of my students ever find themselves filling out a similar questionnaire in someone else’s class, I’d hope that they would not have to think once before linking Hitler and Stalin — but would think at least twice before coupling Dubya with Adolf.”

Comment:  It may be that some of Chuck’s students are returns to college from a few years of “outdoor” life.  However, let us assume they most are fresh out of high school.

We notice from Chalberg’s surveys that his students are filled with bigotries before they enter his doors.   This is nothing new…..bigotries are always with us.   It is the word which refers to our prejudices to the extreme.   I have a bigotry against  willful murder and Marxist dictatorships……that means I have strong prejudices against these matters.   I do not plan to alter my prejudices without some new evidence….and alot of it, to prove me in error.

I hate being wrong…..(It is a guy thing, gals.)

Instructor Chalberg’s survey is priceless in my view.   We learn from what responses are listed as well as what responses are missing.   Again, and again and again….

“Great civilizations are not murdered.  They commit suicide!”    

The signs of cultural suicide begin with deep mental unawareness of reality among its people who exhibit a preference  for romance over reality…..and  withdrawal from the learned abetted by drugs of one kind or another leading to loss of the natural masculine lure  of curiosity and drive to solve problems and to defend what needs to be defended for civility to continue.

(My  warmest and most sincere thanks to Garry Espe who for decades has patiently accepted these and similar diatribes from my soul.   Thank you good sir, as always for helping me stay on course and for sending me notice of this Chalberg article.

The Rime of Peggy Noonan, “the Wise”

If I were dictator, I would require every American tall and small to read and reread today’s Wall Street Journal article by Peggy Noonan….and then engage in communal discussion about its content.  The goal of my dicta, would be to restore adulthood and therefore democracy to our beloved country raising it out of the garbage dump of  its thought and acts in which it now exists.

I was strongly angered by the feminized establishment’s assault on Owen Honors for his art work of disgust wrapped in video form which he found worthy of show to his crew on the U.S.S. Enterprise when four years ago they were at sea.  To be raunchy is to be male…..to be male is to be raunchy….UPON OCCASION.  

One of my sons loves hunting and fishing.  As with my other son, I do not.   A weekend trip here and there, or a week at the Canadian border or our outpost near Effie, MN, is always revealed to me, the Father, the day after my hunter-son  returns from such jaunts. 

He speaks to his dad about business and life in the same manner as always except one…….the raunchy  words his talk now includes.  I know immediately where and who with  he as been.  I can tell he did not spend the weekend with librarians in Boston plotting their  Marxist revolution against America….no, no, that is a totally wrong comparison…..their words are rauchier for they attack conservatives.  My son’t conversations with raunch  don’t attack anyone.   They simply signify that he has been with his buddies, hunting or fishing and drinking beer……the four or five which usually enjoy this culture…..and not always the same  four or five.

Upon listening to this familiary language or where he has been, I usually lecture my deeply loved son that I am not his hunting or fishing buddy.   “I AM YOUR DAD, SON! “  I remind him with various tones ranging from  humor  to disgust.   That doesn’t stop him from describing his ‘guy” time…..he forgets, for I am also a guy, not just a dad.  I don’t always complain, nor should I.

I am glad he has an opportunity to express the more verbally disgusting phrases with the buddies.  They tell jokes about faggots and bitches, nuns,  and Jews.   “Muslims” have not yet been added to the vocabulary, but they will be.”  

That the words have any meaning outside humor should not offend, but they will the perpetually  hysterical.

Living in a tent or hovel for a few days isn’t a public affair.   Nor, in my mind  in this year, AD 2011 or in AD 2006, the 40th year of the age of New America, “America the Befouled”…..the America of drugs, sociopathology,  foul mouth and fuck, of juvenile brain and noise from the street, university  and occasionally into the White House, might the act of showing a raunchy video to a male population months on duty on a little island called an aircraft carrier, should necessarily be considered a crime of the first order.   It didn’t seem to be at first order  in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,2010 apparently either.   Why, suddenly in 2011?

I prefer Peggy Noonan’s civility.   She writes nostalgically of that better time just a few decades ago when the American MALE  had ultimately  created a civil and democratic environment based on masculine institutions with a dose of female tenderness and gentilitiy. 

Eliminate the masculine in society and one gets romance instead of reality at best, and uncivility and female hysteria  at worst.  We live in such a society.

We live in an age of  vulgarity and hysteria caused by the feminizing of  our culture’s insitutions….led by the most feminizing religion of all, Marxism.

Peggy Noonan notices an America without adults…..she writes about this culture  in “The Captain and the King”.

Why Owen Honors had to go, and why a stammering monarch is a movie hero.

The Wall Street Journal: January 7, 2011

At a time of new beginnings in Washington, and as a new year starts, some thoughts on leadership that begin with two questions. First, why is it a good thing that the captain of the USS Enterprise was this week relieved of his duties? Second, why is the movie “The King’s Speech” so popular and admired? The questions are united by a theme. It is that no one knows how to act anymore, and people miss people who knew how to act.

Capt. Owen Honors, commanding officer of an aircraft carrier, was revealed to have made and shown to his crew videos that have been variously described in the press as “lewd,” “raunchy,” “profane” and “ribald.” They are. Adm. John Harvey, who Wednesday relieved Capt. Honors of his duties, said the captain’s action “calls into question his character and undermines his credibility.” Also true.

In a way it’s not shocking that Capt. Honors did what he did, because he came from a culture, our culture, in which, to be kind about it, anything goes. Mainstream movies, television, music—all is raunch. To say the obvious, John Paul Jones, Bull Halsey and Elmo Zumwalt likely wouldn’t have made those videos, if they could have. More to the point, some average, undistinguished naval captain in 1968 wouldn’t have made them either, because he would have had his mind and consciousness formed in the 1930s and ’40s, when our culture was more coherent and constructive. It can also be said that Capt. Honors’s videos were not extreme by the standards of our day. Even his bigotry seemed self-spoofing, as obviously nitwittish and vulgar as the character he was playing—himself—was nitwittish and vulgar.

But the videos were a shock in that this was a captain of the U.S. Navy, commanding a nuclear-powered ship, and acting in a way that was without dignity, stature or apartness. He was acting as if it was important to him to be seen as one of the guys, with regular standards, like everyone else.

But it’s a great mistake when you are in a leadership position to want to be like everyone else. Because that, actually, is not your job. Your job is to be better, and to set standards that those below you have to reach to meet. And you have to do this even when it’s hard, even when you know you yourself don’t quite meet the standards you represent.

A captain has to be a captain. He can’t make videos referencing masturbation and oral sex. He has to uphold values even though he finds them antique, he has to represent virtues he may not in fact possess, he has to be, in his person, someone sailors aspire to be.

A lot of our leaders—the only exceptions I can think of at the moment are nuns in orders that wear habits—have become confused about something, and it has to do with being an adult, with being truly mature and sober. When no one wants to be the stuffy old person, when no one wants to be “the establishment,” when no one accepts the role of authority figure, everything gets damaged, lowered. The young aren’t taught what they need to know. And they know they’re not being taught, and on some level they resent it. For the past 20 years I have heard parents brag, “I brought up my child to question authority.” Ten years ago I started thinking, “Really? Well good luck finding it, junior.”

In England this week the story continues to be Kate Middleton, who is not an aristocrat, marrying into the royal family. Meaning she’s about to become, in a way, a leader within her culture. Clever people on TV are giving her media advice. Be one of us, they say, lighten and brighten, bring in less formality and stultifying stiffness.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. If any family ever needed to be classed up it is Britain’s royals, with the exception of Queen Elizabeth, that great lady. Kate should take her polite and striving middle class upbringing and use it to add dignity and distance to the House of Windsor. They came close to losing public support for the monarchy the past 40 years, in part due to the advice of PR geniuses who told them, in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, to get with it. Stop being fusty, hipper, show your humanity. It seemed reasonable—Britain was exploding with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cool Britannia. The royals had to catch up. And so they showed their human side, and revealed over the decades that they were not better than anyone else, not more disciplined, serious, patriotic, faithful or self-denying. Intimate public confessions, raucous medieval tournaments in which they rolled in the mud, toe sucking. This is royalty? Then what are slobs for?

The only good advice would have been: Stay boring, strive to appear to be persons of rectitude and high morality, don’t be modern, stand for “the permanent against the merely prevalent,” love God and his church, don’t act out and act up. Be good.

That, looking back, is all Britain needed. But it’s what every nation needs, now more than ever, from its leaders. Which gets us to “The King’s Speech.”

It is England, the 1930s, a time of gathering crises. The duke of York, a shy man with a hopeless stammer, is forced to accept the throne when his brother abdicates. “I am not a king,” he sobs; he is, by nature and training, a naval officer. Hitler is rising, England is endangered. The new, unsure king’s first live BBC speech to the nation looms.

He will stutter. But he is England. England can’t stutter. It can’t falter, it can’t sound or seem unsure at a time like this. King George VI and his good wife set themselves, with the help of an eccentric speech therapist, to cure or at least manage his condition.

He sacrifices his desire not to be king, not to lead, not to make that damn speech. He does it with commitment, courage, effort. He does it for his country.

He and his wife aren’t attempting to be hip, they are attempting to be adequate to the situation. The king is aware of the responsibilities of his position, and demands a certain deference. When his therapist tells him they must work as equals, he stammers, “I’d be home with my wife and no one would give a damn, if we were equals.” As for personal style, the great scene is when the king, on the prompting of the therapist, screams every low curse word he knows. It’s funny because it’s obvious he doesn’t say those words. He is a person of restraint, and old-fashioned ways. He doesn’t want to be one of the guys.

And audiences love it. The Journal’s Joe Morgenstern called the movie “simply sublime,” and it is, for some simple reasons. It’s about someone being a grown-up, someone doing his job, someone assuming responsibility. It is about a time when someone was taking on the mantle of leadership, someone was sacrificing his comfort for his country.

Someone was old-school. Someone wasn’t cool.

What a relief to see it. No wonder at the almost-full 4:45 p.m. showing at an uptown Manhattan theatre on Wednesday, they burst into applause, and some, you could tell, wanted to cheer.”

Comment:   Thank you, Peggy Noonan.   In today’s world I would not have removed Captain Owen from his duties.  I would have lectured as if he were my son.   “We live in a feminzed world of  feminized political correctness.  You should have included a disclaimer prefacing your crude and repulsive to some, video warning that  those who might be offended  might be offended, a bit of kindergarten politics to be safe.   For, as Peggy Noonan describes, we live in a vulgar America.   Unmentioned by Peggy Noonan, it is a vulgar American which indulgest an anarchic, uneducated, feminized America, one based on “feeling” starting with the carnal and reaching for forced equality.

It was the rise of civilized manhood which  raised the human animal out of the animal……man the thinker….man the good.  It was a horrendously violent story.   It is and always has been an easy story  to destroy.

When a culture  is no longer  led by adults, that is, when the body blood remains in the crotch without ever nourishing the mind, it is likely the culture is already doomed.   It no longer has time  for the duty to perpetuate civility and wisdom.

“Great civilizations are not murdered.  They commit suicide.”

Ann Woolner: Queen of Ignorance or Nonsense or Feminism? You Pick

I don’t think Ann Woolner is trying to smear…..she is ignorant of the facts or is crippled by being a woman unable to distinguish  romance from reality.  She could be simply lying for some reason or simply a poor reader.

Perhaps she is crippled believing she is a victim.   Ann Woolner  writes the following  at Bloomberg under the title, “Women aren’t People under Scalia’s Constitution…..

“I tend to think of myself as a person. I’d hazard a guess that most, maybe all, American women consider themselves to be actual human beings, too.

The U.S. Supreme Court said that’s what we are, although it took the court until 1971 to say so.

Justice Antonin Scalia still doesn’t believe it. In an interview in this month’s California Lawyer magazine, he said that the 14th Amendment means only men when it says states can’t deny “any person” equal protection under the law.

And where it says states can’t “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” it actually means “any man,” according to Scalia.

As for women, the Amendment doesn’t care, he said.

“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex,” he said. “The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.”

When the Amendment was written, “Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant,” Scalia said.

Here we have a perfect example of what’s so very wrong about so-called originalism, the theory Scalia claims to follow. The idea is that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its authors’ original intent, no changes allowed.

The 14th Amendment wasn’t meant to protect women, religious minorities, ethnic groups, and certainly not homosexuals. Written after the Civil War, its single aim was legal rights for newly freed slaves.

Newly freed MALE slaves, that is.

Limited Rights

That women should have rights equal to men was a radical idea in 1868 when the Reconstruction Amendments passed. (Women didn’t get the federal right to vote for another 52 years.)

At the time, state laws prevented women from owning property, signing contracts, serving on juries. Unmarried women were freer than their married sisters due to notions dating back to English common law.

The “very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage,” explained William Blackstone, the definitive British legal commentator of the 18th century.

It is “consolidated into that of her husband under whose wing and protection she performs everything,” he wrote.

No wonder my mother got divorced.

For its first 200 years, the U.S. Supreme Court saw nothing unconstitutional about states drawing limits around what women could do.

It was just fine, for example, that Illinois refused to let them practice law, eight out of nine justices said in 1872. When the state originally set standards for lawyers, “it was with not the slightest expectation that this privilege would be extended to women,” the Illinois Supreme Court said in refusing Myra Bradwell a law license.

No Problem

“That God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth,” the state’s high court wrote before Bradwell took her case to Washington.

The U.S. Supreme Court found no problem with the state court’s ruling, although it based its decision on other grounds. But three justices specifically agreed with the concept of women’s divinely limited role when they wrote a separate, concurring opinion.

“The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life,” Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote.

He said that proper family organization, as ordained by the Creator, is “repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.”

Legal Challenge

State and federal legislatures began passing laws barring sex discrimination. The Supreme Court didn’t get around to finding that women are people, too, until 1971.

That happened when Sally Reed, who wanted to administer the estate of her dead son, challenged an Idaho law that gave automatic preference to her ex-husband.

Finally, a unanimous Supreme Court said in a ruling written by a court conservative that the 14th Amendment means that gender can’t be used to deny equal protection and due process.

“To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.”

By then there could be no doubt that the 14th Amendment bars sex discrimination. It took more than 100 years to make that clear, but clear it is, whether Scalia says so or not.

Invite to Scalia

He’ll have another chance to say so, and soon. The founder of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, has invited Scalia to speak at the first of the weekly classes on the Constitution she is offering House members.

Maybe he will explain that because he thinks the Constitution is stuck in the era when it was written, married women have no legal existence. Perhaps he will tell Bachmann that the Constitution offers no protection against laws that would keep her at home under her husband’s wing.

He might repeat what he told an audience in 2005: “When I find it, the original meaning of the Constitution, I am handcuffed.”

He could tell the women gathered that with more Scalias on the high court, they too would be handcuffed.”

Comment: To call this piece by Ann Woolner stupid would seem harsh, for only a person with some shortage of mind could be actually stupid.   The word does reek with political correctness terror, however. 

Since I am at it, women in general do have some problems with seething rather than thinking even before thinking clearly.   Emoting is their nature.

Nothing she wrote suggested something Judge Scalia could have believed in and therefore said……

The following here is a less feminized report written by Emi Kolavole:

“Justice Antonin Scalia has weighed in on the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, leaving women’s rights activists seething.

In an interview with California Lawyer, Scalia said that the Constitution itself does not protect women and gay men and lesbians from discrimination. Such protections are up to the legislative branch, he said.

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don’t think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we’ve gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. … But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don’t like the death penalty anymore, that’s fine. You want a right to abortion? There’s nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn’t mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

This is not the first time Scalia has weighed in on the 14th Amendment as it relates to the protection of women’s rights. In September, Scalia told an audience at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law that, “If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex…you have legislatures.”

In 1996, Scalia was the only justice to dissent in the Supreme Court decision that ended the 157-year tradition of state-supported, all-male education at Virginia Military Institute. In his dissent in the case United States v. Virginia, Scalia wrote:

…the tradition of having government funded military schools for men is as well rooted in the traditions of this country as the tradition of sending only men into military combat. The people may decide to change the one tradition, like the other, through democratic processes; but the assertion that either tradition has been unconstitutional  through the centuries is not law, but politics smuggled into law.”

Further comment:  There is no evidence anywhere in the above words where Justice Scalia has said or even inferred to anything resembling the scourges which she claimed sent her into her hysterics.  

If Ms. Woolen were John Woolen instead,  and had written the above Ms. Woolen comments, we would know he was spreading the bull to gain propaganda points.    Ann Woolen wrote it, however.   She believes in her hysteria.

Woe is a culture that is so feminized!

Fatigue, Surgery and Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple is another ‘writer’ whose writings are always worth reading.   This pensive offering below was found at Pajamas Media.  

“Asleep at the Scalpel”

“I had an excuse for the greatest mistake of my medical career. I misdiagnosed a woman who was bleeding internally and she died; but I had been on duty for forty-eight hours with only a couple of hours of snatched sleep. It was not I, but tiredness, that killed her.

This happened in Africa, where mistakes have no consequences — legal consequences, that is. It is otherwise in America, of course, and an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine for December 30^th draws attention, both clinical and legal, to the consequences of surgery performed by surgeons who have hardly slept the night before, or who suffer from chronic sleep deprivation.

The author quotes a figure that is alarming: serious and potentially fatal complications of elective surgery are 83 percent more frequent when the surgery is performed by a surgeon who has slept less than six hours the night before.

What is wrong with this figure as given? It is that the relative risk is quoted without the absolute risk which, in fact, is far more important to a person making a decision as whether or not to consent to surgery. An 83 percent increase in a negligible risk is likely to result in a still-negligible risk. A small increase in a serious risk will kill or maim far more people than a large increase in a slight risk. The habit of quoting relative risks with quoting absolute ones is therefore to be deplored, for it gives an air of propaganda even to the most respectable causes, and in some cases adds unjustifiably to the fears of the public.

Still, it is common sense that one would prefer one’s surgeon to be fresh as a daisy rather than have a mind befuddled by exhaustion. The author, a specialist in sleep medicine, suggests that hospitals should forbid surgeons from operating who have not slept the night before, and that that they, the surgeons, should inform their patients about the state of their sleep when asking for their consent to an elective (non-emergency) procedure. This sounds like common sense. 

As usual, such proposals, however,  there is diffuculty in knowing where to draw the line.   According to research, chronic as well as acute sleep deprivation affects performance, both intellectual and manual.

Chronic sleep deprivation is caused by things other than long hours in hospital:  for example, marital unhappiness.   Should the surgeon have to reveal the state of his marriage to his patients?  Are you sure you are happily married doctor?   (As further research is done, subjects for theses is always needed, after all), it is inevitable that more factors affecting performance will be found, bad traffic on the way to the hospital, for example, or difficulty finding a parking space.  The list is potentially endless.

Thus a request for informed consent could end up sounding a bit like the Confessions of St Augustine or, worse still, of Rousseau. And here is one interesting little snippet: when the hours that junior doctors in Britain were allowed to work were restricted by law, the sickness rate among them promptly doubled. 

Is it better to have a tired doctor, or no doctor at all?  Probably a bit of both.”

GOP Passes Symbolic Bill to Repeal Obamahealth

House Republicans cleared a hurdle Friday in their first attempt to scrap President Barack Obama‘s landmark health care overhaul, yet it was little more than a symbolic swipe at the law.

The real action is in states, where Republicans are using federal courts and governors’ offices to lead the assault against Obama’s signature domestic achievement, a law aimed at covering nearly all Americans.

In a post-election bow to tea partiers by the new GOP House majority, Republican lawmakers are undertaking an effort to repeal the health care law in full knowledge that the Democratic Senate will stop them from doing so.

Republicans prevailed Friday in a 236-181 procedural vote, largely along party lines, that sets the stage for the House to vote next week on the repeal.

Shortly before the House vote, Republican governors representing 30 states opened up a new line of attack, potentially more successful.

In a letter to Obama and congressional leaders, the governors complained that provisions of the health care law are restricting their ability to control Medicaid spending, raising the threat of devastating cuts to other critical programs, from education to law enforcement in a weak economy. It’s ammunition for critics trying to dismantle the overhaul piece by piece.

Moreover, a federal judge in Florida is expected to rule shortly in a lawsuit brought by 20 states that challenges the law’s central requirement that most Americans carry health insurance. A judge in Virginia ruled it unconstitutional last month, while in courts in two other cases have upheld it. It’s expected that the Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve the issue.

Obama made history last year when Congress finally passed the law after months of contentious debate, closing in on a goal that Democrats had pursued for generations. Republicans say they changed history by taking back the House in the midterm elections, partly on the strength of their pledge to tea party supporters and other conservatives to undo the divisive law, whose final costs and consequences remain largely unknown.”

(The above is from an article by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar at the Washington Post.)

New York Times and Jesse Jackson Jr. Claim Constitution “Offensive”

What a great idea someone in the Republican family had scheduling  Representatives to read the Constitution during the first session of the 112th Congress.  

Obama’s Marxist-Democrats have been sour about the idea  from thee moment the reading was suggested.  What would have these  Obama Democrats have to lose participating in the reading?  Symbolically, their Marxism.

 The New York Times opinion page (below) insisted Republicans “intentionally chose to deliberately drop the sections that became obsolete or offensive.”

The Times people apparently misunderstood the Republican call……To read the Constitution including the Preamble before the entire House of Representatives.

I cannot find anywhere anyone requesting that the History of the Constitution be read, can you, dear readers?

Marxist-Democrats are opposed to restrictions of written law.   They prefer dictate……as demonstrated by  the number of Marxist-Democrat Judges of the NINTH Judicial District declaring by judicial fiat that marriage must include gays and lesbians or whatever the next Judicial ukase might dictate  about whom and how many any whos with whomever and whatever can “marry” no matter of the wishes of vox populi.

Dear Marxist-Democrats:   Your Leftwing Fascism can endure  just so long.   Some day vox populi will by heard, loud and clear. 

This Ceremonial Reading of the Constitution should be repeated and repeated to humble the Obama Lefties reminding them, if that ever might be possible, that in a democracy GOVERNMENT is  the servant of the people.

Here is the text to the Times editorial.  As you will discover, the author could not understand the difference between “Reading the Constitution” and “Reading a History of the Constitution.”

“The United States Consti …tion” (sic…..a clever little tic here made intentionally  by Times people to suggest a mistake has been made.)

“Members of the House might have thought they were bringing the Constitution alive by reading it aloud on Thursday. But they made a crucial error by excising its history. When they chose to deliberately drop the sections that became obsolete or offensive, and which were later amended, they missed a chance to demonstrate that this document is not nailed to the door of the past. It remains vital precisely because it can be reimagined.

Having decided to spend their first moments in power proclaiming their devotion to the Constitution, Republican leaders might at least have read the whole thing. The part, for instance, where slaves “bound to service” are counted as three-fifths of a person. The part where fugitive slaves cannot gain their freedom by escaping to a free state. Or the part where ordinary citizens do not actually get a direct vote for their senator.

All these provisions were written by a group of men that many in the Tea Party and elsewhere seem to consider infallible and nearly divine. The Constitution’s words are a stirring proclamation of freedom across the ages. But some passages are artifacts of their time.

Incensed by this rewriting of history, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., Democrat of Illinois, arose just before the reading to remind the House of what it was redacting. African-Americans and women struggled for decades to be granted the right to vote, he said, and those struggles are clearly reflected in the text. “Many of us don’t want that to be lost upon the reading of our sacred document,” he said.

But imperfection and change were not the point. The reading was conceived so that Republicans could demonstrate their fidelity to the document and make it seem as though Democrats had abandoned it. After protests, the leadership invited Democrats to join them, and many of them did. It was a stirring moment when John Lewis of Georgia, an icon of the civil rights movement, read to great applause the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery.

That was about all that was stirring. Because so many members wanted a piece of the action, the text’s momentum was broken up by an endless parade of flat, one-sentence recitations, and many lawmakers later returned to their BlackBerrys or left the chamber.

The Constitution deserves better than this airless exercise. It was a work of political genius, largely because its authors handed its interpretation to the open minds of posterity. The effect of Thursday’s reading, in case anyone was actually paying attention, was to wrongly suggest that the document was seamless and perfect, as if carved in marble rather than stained with sweat and American blood.”

These are the opinions of the Marxists at the New York Times.

On the other hand click  below to catch up with Charles Krauthammer’s views on the Constitution:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/06/AR2011010604379.html