Uncommon Knowledge: Dennis Prager on Why America Is Still the Best Hope [Video]

The State at the End of the Universe

The current round of class warfare taking place in this country can hardly be called that because it is taking place within a single class. This is no great conflict between the construct of a 1 and 99 percent, this is a civil war taking place within the 1 percent. The very name of the “Buffett Rule” makes that all too obvious. When your class warfare bid relies on 1-percenters like Warren Buffett and Elizabeth Warren, then what you have isn’t a class war, it’s an internal conflict among some of the wealthiest Americans over whether the future lies with an all-encompassing state or a looser libertarian system.

Buffett’s position as the champion of the government class isn’t as irrational as it might seem. For the average taxpayer, the tax code is a vacuum cleaner, but, for Buffett, it’s an investment. The more money people pay in, the more money the government has available to salvage troubled banks that he can swoop in on at a hefty profit. The average taxpayer loses money to the government, but Buffett gets back money from the government.

Born in Crisis

The Meaning Of The Constitution

By Edwin Meese III | September 16, 2009 | Heritage Foundation

The Constitution of the United States has endured for over two centuries. It remains the object of reverence for nearly all Americans and an object of admiration by peoples around the world. William Gladstone was right in 1878 when he described the U.S. Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”

Part of the reason for the Constitution’s enduring strength is that it is the complement of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration provided the philosophical basis for a government that exercises legitimate power by “the consent of the governed,” and it defined the conditions of a free people, whose rights and liberty are derived from their Creator. The Constitution delineated the structure of government and the rules for its operation, consistent with the creed of human liberty proclaimed in the Declaration.

Justice Joseph Story, in his Familiar Exposition of the Constitution (1840), described our Founding document in these terms:

We shall treat [our Constitution], not as a mere compact, or league, or confederacy, existing at the mere will of any one or more of the States, during their good pleasure; but, (as it purports on its face to be) as a Constitution of Government, framed and adopted by the people of the United States, and obligatory upon all the States, until it is altered, amended, or abolished by the people, in the manner pointed out in the instrument itself.

By the diffusion of power—horizontally among the three separate branches of the federal government, and vertically in the allocation of power between the central government and the states—the Constitution’s Framers devised a structure of government strong enough to ensure the nation’s future strength and prosperity but without sufficient power to threaten the liberty of the people.

Harvard Law, the Commerce Clause, and the Obamacare Mandate

By Jim Byrd | May 11, 2012 | Canada  Free Press

Harvard Law School Professor Einer Elhauge published an article in The New Republic titled, “If Health Insurance Mandates Are Unconstitutional, Why Did the Founding Fathers Back Them?” The foundation of his argument is the belief that the Militia Act of 1792 was a mandate to purchase a firearm, and the 1790 and 1798 acts by Congress requiring that ship owners purchase medical insurance for seamen, was a mandate forcing the citizens of the states to make a commercial purchase under the Commerce Clause.

Professor Elhauge presents as fact that these two mandates required engagement in commerce, thus setting 200+ years of precedent by the first Congress, “which was packed with framers,” as per his depiction. He then states, “Nevermind that nothing in the text or history of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause indicates that Congress cannot mandate commercial purchases.” The professor appears to subscribe to the oft employed licentious theorem of the Left that if it is not enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, then Congress can presume it has unfettered authority to mandate, tax, legislate, control, and dictate wantonly. But, plausibly, historically, and factually, that is neither the intent nor the spirit of Article 1, Section 8, as it was not an enumeration of what the government should or could do, but rather a very narrow set of limitations constraining what the government can do. What the government cannot do is mandate commercial purchases under the Commerce Clause, as that power was not enumerated, intended, nor would it have survived ratification. Perhaps a perfunctory history lesson of why the Constitution was created, and the purpose of the Commerce Clause, may be the antidote to apocryphal balderdash.

Liberals, progressives, and a particular genus of law professors are wringing their hands in animated intoxication regarding these two particular mandates cited by Professor Elhauge. And reinforcing Professor Elhauge’s theorem of mandated purchases under the Commerce Clause, the Left are evidencing case law functioning as unsanctioned amendments to the Constitution, or as unsanctioned legislation fabricated by American jurisprudence. This benighted infatuation with stare decisis, this judicial inbreeding of the Supreme Court assigning dominion of past Supreme Court rulings as surrogates for the Constitution, has resulted in the passing of deleterious and recessive traits to each Supreme Court progenitor. As with genetics, if the Supreme Court reaches a faulty decision, or flagrant political or agenda driven decision, this trait is passed down to each successive Supreme Court that is indentured by the judicial genetics of stare decisis. Professor Elhauge appears to be erroneously attesting that the first Congress, “which was packed with framers,” mandated that the citizens of sovereign states, states that ceded very few enumerated powers to the newly created federal government, were forced to engage in commerce ad libitum.

Before brandishing adulterate case law and phantom mandates, one question must first be answered: What was the purpose of adding the Commerce Clause to the Constitution?

One must delve much deeper than the burlesque Supreme Court assembled by FDR and its league of handpicked ideologues parading around as judiciously inclined justices. These robe wearing sycophants infected American constitutional jurisprudence with the New Deal, and especially Wickard v. Filburn. Wickard v. Filburn breached the boundaries of the Constitution by affording the federal government an almost immeasurable expansion of powers via the Commerce Clause. And if this unburdened scope of power was the original intent of the Commerce Clause, what was the point of the founders penning the remainder of the Constitution if it is subordinate to the Commerce Clause? Indeed, it is necessary to delve beyond FDR’s reign, beyond Professor Elhauge’s imaginary mandates of commerce, back to the Articles of Confederation and the commercial dysfunction between the states.

Prior to the ratification of the United States Constitution, the governing document of the United States was the Articles of Confederation. Of the myriad weaknesses of this document, the focus will be commerce and the militia, as these two areas are what Professor Elhauge perhaps employed in some fashion of palmistry to arrive at his supposition.

Prior to the American Revolution, colonial commerce was regulated by Great Britain, and to a greater extent in the years just preceding the Declaration of Independence. After independence was declared, the framework of colonial commerce changed, immediately going from regulated to unregulated. Without a structured and enforceable set of regulations to ensure the equitable and uninterrupted flow of the transportation of goods between the states, counterproductive trade barriers between the states arose and jeopardized the necessary commercial alliances of the states essential for sustainability of the nation. The states having the advantage of ports charged exploitative tariffs on goods that passed through their ports en route to and from the states without ports. This started a series of trade wars pitting states with ports against states without ports, with both sides charging counterproductive tariffs.

To compound the problems created by discordant commerce, the Articles of Confederation lacked the mechanism to provide and enforce a uniform monetary policy to protect commerce as well. Under the Articles of Confederation, the states had the authority to setup their own monetary systems and print their own currency.

Article III of the Articles of Confederation addresses the states entering into a “firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense,” while Article VII addresses the appointing of officers of the land forces raised by the states, and Article VIII addresses the expenses and funding of “All charges of war, and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare.” The government did not have to power to raise an army for defense, and the government did not have to funds to honor Article VIII regarding paying expenses of defense, as the government was unable to even collect the taxes due to pay off the debt from the Revolutionary War. The states generally ignored the federal government regarding taxes, and the Articles left the government powerless to collect taxes.

Even though the states maintained their militias after the end of the war, the inability of the federal government to raise an army left the newly sovereign states vulnerable without a united military front. Even after the Treaty of Paris was signed, the forts in Northwest Territory remained under British control and occupation. The states were not enforcing nor abiding by the provisions of the Treaty of Paris, and the government lacked the power to compel them to do so.

Read the full article here.

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Demonizing Conservative Thought

By Howard Slugh | May 13, 2012 | American Thinker

The president has adopted an electoral strategy of demonizing conservative thought.  In a now-infamous speech, President Obama referred to his conservative opponents as “stuck in the past,” and as “naysayers” who “don’t believe in the future.”  He scoffed that his detractors were “founding members of the Flat Earth Society” who “just want to keep on doing things the same way that we’ve always done them.”  The president contrasted his critics with people who “refuse to stand still” and who “put their faith in the future.”  In a second speech, discussing Congressman Ryan’s proposed budget, the president implied that liberal policies create “opportunity” and “upward mobility” while conservative policies entrench inequality.  These false dichotomies mischaracterize conservative ideas.

These were not merely off-the-cuff remarks intended to smear political rivals.  This caricature of conservative ideas is popular among liberal social scientists.  In 2012 alone, two well-respected psychology journals published studies perpetuating these smears, citing more than a dozen previous studies.

“Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing ideology and Low Intergroup contact,” by Gordon Hodson and Michael Busseri, argued that conservatism is linked to low cognitive ability and that it acts as a precursor to racism.  This study described conservatism as characterized by “resistance to change” and “the promotion of inter-group inequalities.”

“Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism,” by Scott Edelman, et al., links an absence of critical thinking to conservative conclusions.  He describes conservative positions as evincing “low-effort thought” and as “initial and uncorrected responses” correctable by “overriding and adjusting initial conservative responses.”

Edelman claims that conservatives are marked by an “acceptance of hierarchy” and an “opposition to equality.”  He describes this acceptance as “proceeding in the absence of effortful information processing.”  Hodson and Buseri claim that these apparent cognitive problems are “associated with prejudice” and stem from fear and anxiety.

But this reductionist view ignores reality and the beauty contained in the conservative position.  In fact, the president and these social scientists denigrate conservative thought because its rejection of utopianism and insistence on cautious incremental change denies them the ability to unilaterally design a future that reflects their preferences.

Conservatives recognize that talents, such as the ability to write great novels, paint beautiful paintings, or hit five-hundred-foot home runs, will never be equally distributed.  Inequalities will exist even between people with similar levels of natural talent due to differences in their levels of dedication and pure luck.  Social scientists cannot wish these “hierarchies” out of existence, no matter how many papers they write.

Of course, this says nothing of political and legal equality, which conservatives embrace.  What conservatives do deny is that a society that suppresses the differences between people is attainable or even desirable.  Such an effort eliminates notions of nobility, heroism, and the aspiration for self-improvement.  We can either appreciate the novel, the painting, and the home run — or we can begrudge the “hierarchy” created by inequalities.  We cannot do both.

Only a dystopia, such as the one described in Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” could achieve perfect equality.  Vonnegut’s story takes place in a time where “everybody [i]s finally equal … every which way.”  This equality is perpetuated by a tyranny that forces intellectuals to place buzzers in their ears to prevent them “from taking unfair advantage of their brains,” hides the handsome behind masks, and encumbers the athletic with weights.

The characters live in a world devoid of joy; everyone is equally uninspired and miserable.  Vonnegut illustrates this dreariness by describing a ballet in which the ballerinas are “burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces [a]re masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.”  The imposition of equality obliterates everything that makes the ballet worthwhile.  This is allegorical hyperbole, but only because no one actually believes we should truly pursue a world without hierarchy.  The debate between conservatives and liberals is over where to draw the lines and which of our differences are worthy of esteem.

The adoption of universal equality is contrary to the natural human inclination to seek out excellence.  The attempt to deter such behavior cannot destroy that longing.  It merely perverts and distorts it.  This has led to the phenomenon of the celebrity who is “famous for being famous.”  Once people were admonished against recognizing and honoring people for their merits, they transferred that honor to entirely unremarkable people, undeserving of such esteem.  Is society better off because our children revere Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian rather than brilliant minds, moral exemplars, and great leaders?  As a conservative, I think not.

Edelman claims that conservatives have a “preference for the status quo” which requires “little time, effort, and awareness.”  He maintains that conservatives “simply assume that existing and long-standing states are good and desirable.”  Hodson and Busseri attribute this to the fact that “individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate toward … conservative ideologies …  that maintain the status quo and provide psychological stability and a sense of order.”

What these social scientists view as laziness is actually a humble understanding of our own limitations.  Conservatives value tradition because we recognize that our inheritance contains wisdom that we could not quickly or easily replicate.  Conservatives do not view tradition as perfect or final; they see it as a collection of ideas that were successfully implemented throughout the ages and should not be hastily discarded.  The trial and error of generations have delivered a product superior to the one society could design based on current theories and prejudices.

Conservatives recognize that no individual or even individual generation is wise enough to recreate society from scratch.  Society is far too complex to maintain or improve without relying on the knowledge transmitted through tradition.  This, more than anything else, irritates these social scientists because they think it is their job to free us from tradition and to teach us how to remake the world.  They trivialize conservative thought because it counsels prudence and stability, while they think it is their place to lead the revolution.

Read the full article here.

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A New Declaration of Independence

By Eileen F. Toplansky | April 28, 2012 | American Thinker

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary to ensure that a President, who has led the country to near ruin and who is working to discard the basic principles upon which this Great Country rests, be peaceably removed it is incumbent upon us that we submit the reasons to the people.

Without any in-depth research or vetting about his background, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44^th president of the United States.  There were voices of caution who early on exposed Obama’s connections to former terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-American vilifier Reverend Wright, crook Tony Rezko, and anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi, but they were laughed at as the people allowed themselves to be demagogued on hope and change.  Evidence continues to suggest that Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate is, indeed, a forgery.  This would make his presidential eligibility suspect.

Thus, the American people are at a critical watershed moment in our history.  The facts are in; Obama’s ideology and core principles are now public and exist for all to see.  We can no longer claim ignorance; we can no longer be naïve; we can no longer deny what is patently before us.  The record of this current president is a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these United States.  To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Mr. Obama has “given himself the powers to declare martial law[.]  It is a sweeping power grab that should worry every American.”  Thus, “Barack Obama is very dangerous, the apotheosis of an insidious strain of authoritarianism that destroys from within.”  In a statement published on December 31, 2011, Mr. Obama states that “[t]oday I have signed into law H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012.”  Though he claims that he has “signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” it was Mr. Obama who “demanded the removal of any and all protections for US citizens and legal residents.”

And like King George III, Obama has now established the distinct possibility of placing “[s]tanding armies without the Consent of our legislatures” — although sadly, in this case, the Senate passed this unwholesome disgrace.  King George III would be pleased.

In fact, Mr. Obama sees fit to bypass the “pesky” Constitution whenever it suits him, thus ignoring limited-government tenets which were at the core of the Founding Fathers’ belief system.  Thus, the NDAA detention mandate allows indefinite military detention not just to foreigners; now “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

In fact, should Mr. Obama be re-elected to a second term, “our rights to speech, religion and property, and to privacy in our persons and homes, will be transformed.”  Mr. Obama has already “hectored Christianity on matters of conscience.”  Through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, Mr. Obama is forcing Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraceptives.  Why, when “religious liberty was weighed against access to birth control, did freedom lose?” — a clear intrusion into the first of the five protections of the First Amendment.  Bishop Daniel Jenky has likened President Obama’s health care policies to the attacks on the Catholic church by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of yesteryear.  Dare we go down that totalitarian road again?

The onslaught against free speech has been heightened because of the “cooperation between [Mr. Obama] and the OIC or Organization of Islamic Cooperation.”  The “Obama administration stands ‘united’ with the OIC on speech issues,” thus silencing Arab reformers and anyone who makes any allegedly negative remarks about Islam.  The “repressive practices” of the OIC member-nations speak volumes about their restrictions on free speech.  Hence, “the encroachment of de facto blasphemy restrictions in the West threatens free speech and the free exchange of ideas.”  That an American president would threaten this most fundamental right is yet another resounding reason why he needs to be removed from office.

In December of 2009, Nat Hentoff, a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, asserted that “[i]f congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care ‘reform’ measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions[.]” Thus, “these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you[.]  Is this America?”  Hentoff concludes his piece with the revelation “I’m scared and I do mean to scare you.  We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be.”

Thus, we still hold “these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  And “whenever any Form of Government becomes  destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles … as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  We do not declare violent revolution but do demand the secure right to change the government through the ballot box.

But even this fundamental right is being seriously eroded as the Department of Justice openly and arrogantly dismisses genuine cases of voter intimidation with nary a word of concern by Barack Obama.  Although there is visual proof and  evidence of threats to the voting public as well as exhortations of death threats to a man on trial, Attorney General Eric Holder turns a blind eye.

By his selective indifference, Mr. Obama has created a racially divisive atmosphere in America.  He continues to promote this hateful attitude wherein the civil rights progress made in this country for all its citizens is ignored.  Surely, Mr. Obama has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us” as he engages in racial division, class warfare, and phony gender wars.  If Mr. Obama is, indeed, so interested in the rights of women, then why does he support Islamic sharia law, which demands second-class status for women?  These diversions serve to stir up resentments; unfortunately, they are successful in obfuscating the shameless actions of this 44^th president.

Mr. Obama is not content with taking the country down the path to “European socialism.”  His centralized control of the health care industry, his increases in entitlement programs, his redistribution of capital — in fact, his sweeping regulations that give the government new authority to control the entire financial sector — are reminiscent of Karl Marx’s 10-Point Agenda, and although communism was unknown in 1775, the signatories of the Declaration knew of the absolute power of the monarchy and would see through the oligarchic nature of this “ism.”

Amazingly, Mr. Obama has assured Russian leaders (who have gained their power through rigged elections) that American concessions are coming their way, but they [the Russian leaders] must wait because he is seeking re-election and he dare not tell his own people of his true intentions.  What credible reason would a loyal American president have for weakening American and allies’ defense systems?  During the open microphone conversation between Obama and Medvedev, a puppet of KGB Putin, the world learned whose interests Obama was truly serving.  Surely, this is “enough to chill friends and allies, democrats and dissidents, all over the world.”

Furthermore, Obama has “obstructed the Administration of Justice[,]” instead pitting one group against the other through “waivers.”  If ObamaCare is so laudable, why extend waivers in the first place?  In fact, it is yet another example of how manipulative Mr. Obama is when he tries to make the people “dependent on his will alone.”

Mr. Obama has ignored the laws of our country to impose an arbitrary and capricious rule of law by outside forces.  He finds it more expedient to pit the federal government against an American state which is trying only to enforce federal immigration law.  To this end, Mr. Obama has seen fit to “subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution[,]” which was so clearly enumerated in the Declaration of Independence as reason to reject King George III.   By issuing a Universal Period Review (UPR), the first of its kind, Mr. Obama has given the United Nations the right to dictate to Arizona.  Thus, the “stakes for our national sovereignty have just been raised.”  Despotic countries of the United Nations have now been empowered to dictate how Americans should conduct themselves.  Is this not reminiscent of King George III “waging war against us”?

Moreover, the Obama State Department ordered the “suspension of routine border inspection procedures in order to whisk (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamists into our country.  Thus, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party did not have to go through the normal procedures of inspection.  Recall that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission statement is “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!”  Negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood is akin to negotiating with the dictator Hitler.  It is appeasement all the way.  Why does the Obama administration cavort with such people?  Does this not make him unfit to defend the interests of America?

Read the full article here.

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How to Think About the Foundations of American Conservatism

By James Ceaser, Ph.D. | December 10, 2008 | Heritage Foundation

Contemporary American conservatism, which is notorious for its internal factionalism, is held together by a self-evident truth: conservatives’ shared antipathy to modern liberalism. Their main objections are well-known.

Almost to a man or woman, conservatives oppose using government authority to enforce a vision of greater equality labeled by its supporters, with great seduction, as “social justice.” Nearly as many conser­vatives object to the use of government authority–or, alternatively, to the denial of government authority where it is natural, legal, and appropriate–to pro­mote a worldview of individualism, expressivism, and secularism. Finally, most conservatives want nothing to do with an airy internationalism, frequently suspi­cious of the American nation, that has shown itself so inconstant in its support for the instruments of secu­rity that are necessary in the modern world.

No shame attaches, or should, to relying in politics on the adhesive property that comes from the senti­ment of common dislike. That sentiment is the heart that beats within the breast of the conservative move­ment, supplying much of its unity. This heart sustains four heads, known generally as religious conserva­tives, economic or libertarian-minded conservatives, natural-rights or neoconservatives, and traditionalists or paleoconservatives.

The four heads comprise a coalition of the willing that came together during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The remarkable diversity of this coalition has been both a source of strength and a source of weak­ness for the conservative movement. Each part came into existence at a different time and under differ­ent circumstances, and each has been guided by a different principle by which it measures what is good or right.

• For religious conservatives, that principle is biblical faith.
• For libertarians, it is the idea of “spontaneous order,” the postulate that a tendency is opera­tive in human affairs for things to work out for themselves, provided no artificial effort is made to impose an overall order.
• For neoconservatives, it is a version of “natural right,” meaning a standard of good in political affairs that is discoverable by human reason.
• Finally, for traditionalists, it is “History” or “Culture,” meaning the heritage that has come down to us and that is our own.

There are refinements and subdivisions that could be added to this schema, but it represents, I think, a fairly standard approach to discussing the different intellectual currents inside the conserva­tive coalition. Recently, however, a number of com­mentators have fallen into the practice–I use this expression advisedly–of replacing this four-part schema by a two-part division based on a distinc­tion between the concepts of “Culture” and “Creed.” The new system of categorization derives from a book published last year by Samuel Hun­tington, entitled Who Are We? in which the author offers these concepts as the two basic modes in any society for establishing national identity.[1] The cate­gories are meant to refer to the whole nation, but conservatives have applied them to discussions of their own movement.

My argument in this essay will be that introduc­ing this new categorization schema represents a huge error, especially as a way of discussing conser­vatism. The Culture-Creed distinction does not sim­plify; it distorts. Built into its categories are premises that attempt by fiat to order and arrange the different parts of the conservative coalition. Not only is this arrangement “partisan,” in the sense of favoring the Cultural category, but it also attempts, with no basis either in principle or in fact, to place faith inside of Culture, thereby suggesting a natural grouping of traditionalists and religious conservatives in opposi­tion to natural-rights or neoconservatives. Whether this attempt was undertaken consciously or not is of little matter; what counts are its effects, and these could have serious and negative implications for the conservative movement.

The Concepts of Culture and Creed

Let me now take a step back and describe the concepts of Culture and Creed. Huntington initial­ly provides a social science definition of Culture that is so broad as to be meaningless. Culture con­sists of “a people’s language, religious beliefs, social and political values, assumptions as to what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to the objective institutions and behavioral patterns that reflect these subjective elements.”

Huntington is less interested, however, in social science than in recovering a basis today for patrio­tism and for securing unity in America. It is our Culture that concerns him. He labels that culture “Anglo-Protestantism,” which refers to everything that Huntington elects to emphasize among the first New England settlers. His selection boils down to four main elements: our language (English); our religion (dissenting Protestantism); our basic polit­ical beliefs (a commitment to liberty, individualism, and self-government); and our race (white).

Since Huntington wants Culture to work as a source or standard of identity, and identity in a pos­itive sense, he allows it to evolve in order to per­form its function. In its evolved form, the Culture to which we should look refers–still–to the English language and to the same commitment to liberty and self-government; the notion of religion is broadened slightly from dissenting Protestantism to Christianity insofar as it has been Protestantized. Race as a criterion of distinction drops out.

As for Creed, Huntington initially defines it in a social science fashion as the taking of bearings from theoretical claims that are offered in principle as universal or applicable to all. Examples of Creed that he identifies are communism and classical lib­eralism. The use of these broad-based theoretical concepts is what Huntington means by Creedalism as distinguished from Culturalism. As he says at one point:

People are not likely to find in political principles [i.e., a Creed] the deep emotional content and meaning provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality. These attachments may have little or no basis in fact, but they do satisfy a deep human longing for meaningful community.

Once again, however, Huntington’s interest in Who Are We? is more in our own Creed than in Creeds in general. Our Creed consists of an idea of nature, specifically of natural rights, as articulated in documents like the Declaration of Independence.

How does the binary distinction between Cul­ture and Creed replace and subsume the four-part division of conservatism? The implication is the following. The category of Culture consists of tra­ditionalists and religious conservatives–the first for the obvious reason of their emphasis on our his­tory and culture and the second because Hunting­ton identifies dissenting Protestantism as first or original. The category of Creed consists of natural-rights or neoconservatives and libertarians–the former because they regularly reference natural rights and the Declaration of Independence and the latter because they think in terms of general princi­ples of economic reasoning.

An example will help to illustrate how this bina­ry mapping of conservatism has entered into con­temporary discussion. Lawrence Auster, an outspoken conservative, publishes an instructive blog entitled “View from the Right.” Never one to mince words, he begins a spirited entry of October 25, 2005, with an attack on President George W. Bush (one of his frequent targets) in an article iron­ically entitled “Under Bush and the American Creed, America Continues Its Bold Progress”:

At President Bush’s annual Ramadan dinner at the White House this week–did you know the President has an annual Ramadan dinner?–he announced for the first time in our nation’s history we have added a Koran to the White House Library. Yippee.[2]

Arguing that this recognition serves unwisely to legitimize Islam in America, Auster finds further evidence of this same error in a passage from a speech given the previous week by Senator John McCain at the Al Smith Dinner:

We have a nation of many races, many religious faiths, many points of origin, but our shared faith is the belief in liberty, and we believe this will prove stronger, more enduring and better than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.[3]

In Auster’s view, the McCain-Bush position rep­resents the perfect expression of creedal thinking:

According to McCain, the meaning of America is that we have no common culture and no coherent set of traditions but give equal freedom to all cultures, traditions and religions. Such a cultureless society is stronger and more enduring than any other.[4]

Auster may have taken some liberties with the strict claims of Bush and McCain, but his general point could not be more clear: The end result of the Creed is at best indifference, at worst hostility, to Culture.

The Problem with the Culture-Creed distinction

This application of the Culture-Creed distinc­tion to the conservative movement contains two assumptions. The first is that Creedalists are not true conservatives, but conservatives on their way to becoming liberals, if they are not there already. The other is that religious conservatives–meaning those concerned with biblical faith–fall inside the category of Culturalists. Here would seem to be the main gambit involved in this analysis: to define those of faith as closer to cultural traditionalists than to proponents of natural rights.

In light of this questionable mapping of the con­servative movement, it is fair to ask whether Creed and Culture make up helpful categories that assist in understanding reality, or whether they force the analyst to describe reality in a way that satisfies these categories.

Thomas Hobbes, that puckish British philoso­pher, has a chapter in Leviathan in which he reminds us that abstract categories are human con­structions, born either of men’s efforts to compre­hend the world or of the aim of some to dictate how others will think. The result very often is that these terms are imprecise, conflating different things under the same label and producing ever-growing confusions. Hobbes was a very timid man, and as is not infrequent with personalities of this kind, he was also a bit of a sadist. The trait served him well in describing how an individual, when employing a poorly circumscribed category, will soon find him­self “entangled in words as a bird in lime twigs, the more he struggles, the more belimed.”

Have we become “belimed” by adopting the Cul­ture-Creed distinction?

I bear some slight personal responsibility for popularizing this distinction. Last year I wrote a review essay on Huntington’s Who Are We? for The Weekly Standard.[5] In contrast to the avalanche of reviews from the Left attacking the book, mine was in many ways very appreciative. I followed the Golden Rule of discussing the work of a major thinker, which is to treat it initially on its own terms. Hence my lengthy discussion of the Cul­ture-Creed distinction, on which I offered two observations.

First, I pointed out that more than 20 years ago, Huntington wrote a previous book on America–a fact he all but hides in this one–in which he invoked the Culture-Creed dyad.[6] In both books he argues that forging our national identity requires relying on both Culture and Creed. But whereas in the earlier book he contends that America should emphasize the Creed, in the current one he argues that it should identify more with the Culture.

Second, I asked what reason could account for so fundamental a change. A higher ordering idea of some kind, contained either within one of the two principles or coming from a new one, ought to have been supplied to account for how to regulate the appropriate mix of Culture and Creed. I offered a couple of speculative comments of my own on this issue and suggested that it would be a nice question for others to consider.

In the past year, this theme has been taken up by two well-known political scientists. In a recent issue of The Claremont Review of Books, the editor, Charles Kesler, has a fine essay on Huntington’s work. He begins with some cogent criticisms of how Huntington allows the concept of Creed to slide from its specific and original American mean­ing (a support of natural rights) to its more general social scientific meaning (any kind of broad type of theoretical reasoning). The result is a category that encompasses everything offered in the name of rational principles, from the position of limited government and individualism of the Founders to the Big Government position of the Progressives.

Following this clarification of the concept of Creed, Kesler goes on to argue that we need both concepts, but that the standard of regulation must stem from the Creed (properly understood). He concludes his essay:

The American creed is the keystone of American national identity; but it requires a culture to sustain it. The republican task is to recognize the creed’s primacy, the culture’s indispensability and the challenge which political wisdom alone can answer, to shape a people that can live up to its principles.[7]

Another very perceptive article appeared this fall in Society, written by Peter Skerry. Skerry takes Huntington to task for much of his treatment of the status of the Hispanic community in America and for his analysis of the process of immigrant integra­tion into an American identity. On the major theo­retical distinction of Culture and Creed, however, Skerry embraces Huntington’s analysis and shares his Cultural emphasis. America needs both Creed and Culture, but the senior partner today is–and should be–Culture, which Skerry observes is “at the core of Huntington’s understanding of Ameri­can national identity.”[8]

Both of these essays, each critical in its own way of Huntington’s work, make use of the Culture- Creed distinction. In doing so, they, along now with many other writings, lend credibility to the view that these categories are adequate to define the terrain of this inquiry. It is this position that now needs to be challenged.

Before turning directly to this question, it is worthwhile to observe that for many “Culturalists,” there appears to be as much politics as social sci­ence in the Culture-Creed categorization scheme. No sooner is the distinction introduced than Cul­turalists put it to work to argue for their positions on two major issues of the day.

The first is the previously mentioned matter of immigration policy. Culturalists are deeply con­cerned with the current rate and character of immi­gration. Huntington devotes a large portion of his book to warning of the threat to national unity posed by the influx of Hispanics, largely Mexican. We are in danger of establishing two different cultures in the United States: one English-speaking and Anglo-Protestant, the other Spanish-speaking and, I sup­pose, Latin Catholic. Not only is it said that a Cultur­al approach makes us more aware of this problem, but also Creedalists are charged with being incapa­ble of taking this problem seriously. Their reasoning in universal terms about all human beings makes them “a-Cultural” or anti-Cultural, which for practi­cal purposes means, for immigration politics, multi­cultural. The Culture-Creed distinction is put to use as the proverbial stick with which to beat certain (alleged) foes of immigration restriction.

The other issue on which Culturalists insist today is foreign policy, where many of them are highly critical of the Bush Administration’s position on the war on terrorism. The Administration’s pol­icy in launching the Iraq war and in emphasizing democracy is again said to be a consequence of Creedal thinking, which in its universalistic per­spective leads to a naïve belief, often labeled “Wil­sonianism,” in the possibility of exporting Western democracy to the rest of the world. Creedalism blinds one to the factual primacy of Culture. If the Creedalists who have designed the current foreign policy appreciated the strength and soundness of Culture at home, acknowledging that every other nation or civilization has its Culture just as we have ours, the folly of their grandiose project of nation building would quickly become evident to them.

Culturalists here, incidentally, have their closest allies among those on the Left, including the mul­ticulturalists, who on this issue adopt the Cultural­ist and realist position. Again, the Culture-Creed distinction becomes the weapon of choice in attacking a policy even though a good number of natural-rights conservatives have expressed reser­vations about this policy of their own.

A Better Foundation

Huntington’s inquiry is concerned with cohe­sive­ness and justification–with what enables Americans to be a people, in the sense of possessing unity, and with what makes this people good or worthy in its own eyes. Creed and Culture are said to provide the categories that cover this terrain and allow for intelligent investigation of these ques­tions. But these categories, I have argued, are nei­ther adequate nor exhaustive. Even as defined, they are hugely asymmetrical. Creed refers to a doctrine or set of principles; Culture is presented as a com­pilation of existing sociological facts and realities. But as should be obvious by now, Culture is used to do far more than reference pure facts. It is itself a doctrine that selects facts and bids us to judge the world in a certain way.

It seems to me that a more rewarding approach to the study of unity would begin by separating the study of pure sociological facts–the analysis of what is (or has been) our language, our customs, beliefs, and the like–from all doctrines meant to supply an idea of unity and of right. It would then be possible to examine these doctrines without built-in presup­positions to see how they conceive of cohesiveness and deal with certain sociological facts.

Given my time limits here, I will restrict myself to three major doctrines that were put forth in the early period of our history and that remain impor­tant for contemporary politics and the modern conservative movement: natural rights, traditional­ism, and faith.

Read the full article here.

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Barack Obama’s Hidden Past – With Bill Whittle (Parts 1 & 2) [Video]

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The best of Fred Hutchison: The roots of the culture war – The debate over universal law

By Fred Hutchison | April 26, 2012 |  Renew America

Originally published June 26, 2004

Certain aspects of the culture war have ancient roots. One of the central points of disagreement regards the existence of a universal moral law. Political philosophers have been arguing about this for three hundred years. The ideas at stake are ancient.

First, I shall point out some of the ancient and early modern roots of the old argument. Subsequently, I shall discuss the rise of the American consensus. Then I shall consider how the debate has changed and the wells of reason have been poisoned as we moved out of the Modern era and into the Postmodern era.

Pantheism and the universal moral law

Twice in Western history, Pantheism (the belief that everything is god) became popular. The first version of Western Pantheism was the philosophy/religion of Stoicism, which arose in the Hellenistic cosmopolitan Greek world that followed the conquests of Alexander. The Stoics claimed that everything — matter, mind, and nature — was precipitated out of the divine fire. This is a distinctive version of Pantheism. Stoics rejected the old Greek city-state parochialism and regarded themselves as part of the cosmos, part of humanity, and part of the metropolitan city.

During the time of the Roman Empire, the cities became larger and more metropolitan, the Mediterranean culture became more universal, and the appeal of Stoicism spread. The Apostle Paul found the Stoics debating the Epicureans at Mars Hill. Stoicism became popular among the Roman aristocracy in the second century. The “five good emperors” (Trajan, Hadrian, the two Antonines, and Marcus Aurelius) lived during the time of the Stoic Roman aristocrats — who were always talking about virtue and about “logos” or “right reason.” The Stoic concept of logos had an influence on Roman law. Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher in his own right, and his writings are still considered Western classics.

The Stoics developed the concept of a universal moral law. They were influenced by Aristotle’s teaching about natural law (fourth century BC). They may have been indirectly influenced by Christianity. St. Augustine (5th century AD) wrote about natural law, and Gratian (11th century) equated natural law with divine law. The medieval scholastic St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century) systematized the “eternal law of divine reason,” in a complex formulation which has been heavily borrowed from since that time by natural law theologians, philosophers, and political theorists.

Notice that during the middle ages, the universal moral law was broken free from its old pantheistic associations and firmly associated with Christianity. It was a good fit.

When Pantheism rose again to favor in the eighteenth century, it contained ideas antithetical to the universal moral law. The rejection by some influential pantheists of the universal moral law resulted in a clash of world views. This marked the beginning of a hostility to Christianity by intellectuals influenced by pantheistic ideals. One of the early signs of this clash came during a debate by leading philosophers over the metaphysical implications of the 1750 Lisbon earthquake. Many of the French “encyclopedists” were also hostile to Christianity, but they were a motley crew — some atheists, some empiricists, some deists, and some pantheists.

A major stream of Western Pantheism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century involved a Romantic worship of nature. Under the influence of Rousseau, some Romantics rejected the universal moral law and replaced it with “the general will” and “democratic values.” To this day, we can hear liberals and conservatives talk past each other as the liberals speak of an ethics based upon “democratic values” and “social justice,” and conservatives speak of an ethics based upon the moral law.

During the eighteenth century, natural law philosophy was popular among some of the deists and favored by some leading philosophers like Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Kant. This stream of thought influenced the American founding Fathers. All these philosophers except Kant built their foundation upon nature in order to develop ideas of natural law. Man has a nature. Therefore, there must be a natural law and a moral law suitable to man to govern human conduct. Reason can discover this moral law. Some natural law philosophers such as Locke and Kant had ideas that were not far on some points from the universal moral law of Christian theology and of Stoicism. The similarities were especially noticeable on issues which had political and legal implications.

Natural law — a hybrid concept built upon both philosophical and theological foundations — was crucial to the American founding fathers. In contrast, Romantic ideas about the general will, democratic values, and social justice were essential to some of the factions involved in the French revolution and to some of the liberal democracies established in Europe.

We must not place all the blame on Rousseau or on Romantic Pantheism for the rejection of the moral law. Beginning with the Pauline Epistles, the church has been continually fighting against the heresy of antinomianism, which means “against law.” The antinomians thought that those who are in a state of grace could violate the moral law with impunity. All the great theologians weighed in on the subject, including those of the Reformation and those who fought the challenge of theological liberalism in the nineteenth and the twentieth century.

The Scottish Enlightenment — and America

Many key thinkers in the French Enlightenment were anticlerical and some were anti-Christian. The Scottish Enlightenment was not. Francis Hutcheson, who was both a Presbyterian pastor and a professor of philosophy, is hailed by some as the Father of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hutcheson emphasized the moral aspect of Christianity. He taught 1) natural law philosophy based upon the study of man in a state of nature, 2) the Greek Classics, and 3) Christian theology — and emphasized the areas of harmony of these three.

(To indulge the reader’s curiosity, Hutcheson probably comes from of the same Scottish clan which I do as a Hutchison, and there is a remote possibility of a distant blood relationship.)

Among the many influential voices of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ones most familiar to us are Adam Smith, David Hume, James Boswell, Thomas Reid, James Watt, and Edward Gibbon. Gibbon was an Englishman but intellectually was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The most skeptical voice of the Scottish enlightenment was philosopher David Hume. But Hume developed his own version of a moral law and he did not view Christianity as an enemy of the Enlightenment.

Both the French Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment had an influence on the American founding fathers. But even Jefferson and Franklin, the founders who were most charmed by things French, sometimes spoke in a voice that sounded more like the Scottish Enlightenment than the French. There was heavy immigration by poor but remarkably well-educated Ulster Scots and the Scots from lowland and border precincts of Scotland during the period 1745–1800. This introduced a bias for the Scottish Enlightenment in the American colonies and the early Republic. As a result, Francis Hutcheson’s vision of Christian morality in alliance with natural law theory and the classical virtues became the working mainstream reality of American politics.

Read the full article here.

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Evidence Broadens Obama Natural Born Conspiracy [Video]

By J.B. Williams | June 8, 2011 | News With Views

Evidence that we have a fraud and a usurper currently residing in the people’s White House is overwhelming, despite the overt lack of journalistic investigating on the part of the American press. But now new evidence indicates that the conspiracy to carry out that fraud was much broader than originally thought.

The story of whom and what Barack Hussein Obama II really is – is a forty-year story that requires a book, not a column, to tell. Strong evidence suggests that he was being groomed from a very young age for the moment in history that would end American supremacy in the world, and usher in a new era of Global Marxist Governance.

But there was a major hurdle that had to be overcome – the U.S. Constitution, in this case, Article II – Section I – Clause V specifically, which requires that “no person except a natural-born citizen of the United States” can hold the office of President. – Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States…and may not even be a legal citizen of the United States. So, how can he be President?

This column focuses upon the period 2003-2008 and the political maneuvers that took place in order to make way for America’s first unconstitutional resident of the White House.

Efforts to Eliminate the Natural Born Requirement (2003-2005)

Proving that the players involved knew the correct definition of natural born citizen borrowed from the Law of Nations by our founders – 1) those born in the country, of parents who are citizens; 2) those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights; 3) The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; 4) in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen. – that they knew Barack Hussein Obama II did not meet that definition as a foreign or dual citizen via his father’s British citizenship and that they worked feverishly to find a way around this constitutional requirement for office, as Obama was about to become president…

The effort to remove the natural-born citizen requirement from the U.S. Constitution actually began in 1975 – when Democrat House Rep. Jonathon B. Bingham, [NY-22] introduced a constitutional amendment under H.J.R. 33 which called for the outright removal of the natural-born requirement for president found in Article II of the U.S. Constitution –“Provides that a citizen of the United States otherwise eligible to hold the Office of President shall not be ineligible because such citizen is not a natural born citizen.”

Bingham’s first attempt failed and he resurrected H.J.R. 33 in 1977 under H.J.R. 38, again failing to gain support from members of congress. Bingham was a Yale Law grad and member of the secret society Skull and Bones, later a lecturer at Columbia Law and thick as thieves with the United Nations via his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations.

Bingham’s work lay dormant for twenty-six years when it was resurrected again in 2003 as Democrat members of Congress made no less than eight (8) attempts in twenty-two (22) months, to either eliminate the natural-born requirement, or redefine natural-born to accommodate Barack Hussein Obama II in advance of his rise to power. The evidence is right in the congressional record…

1. On June 11, 2003 Democrat House member Vic Snyder [AR-2] introduced H.J.R 59 in the 108th Congress – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes a person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 35 years and who has been a resident within the United States for at least 14 years eligible to hold the office of President or Vice President.” – Co-Sponsors: Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14]; Rep Delahunt, William D. [MA-10]; Rep Frank, Barney [MA-4]; Rep Issa, Darrell E. [CA-49]; Rep LaHood, Ray [IL-18]; Rep Shays, Christopher [CT-4].

2. On September 3, 2003, Rep. John Conyers [MI] introduced H.J.R. 67 – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes a person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 20 years eligible to hold the office of President.” – Co-Sponsor Rep Sherman, Brad [CA-27]

3. On February 25, 2004, Republican Senator Don Nickles [OK] attempted to counter the growing Democrat onslaught aimed at removing the natural-born citizen requirement for president in S.2128 – “Natural Born Citizen Act – Defines the constitutional term “natural born citizen,” to establish eligibility for the Office of President” – also getting the definition of natural born citizen wrong. – Co-sponsors Sen Inhofe, James M. [OK]; Sen Landrieu, Mary L. [LA]

4. On September 15, 2004 – as Barack Obama was about to be introduced as the new messiah of the Democrat Party at the DNC convention, Rep Dana Rohrabacher [CA-46] introduced H.J.R. 104 – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes eligible for the Office of the President non-native born persons who have held U.S. citizenship for at least 20 years and who are otherwise eligible to hold such Office.” – No co-sponsors.

5. Again on January 4, 2005, Rep John Conyers [MI] introduced H.J.R. 2 to the 109th Congress – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes a person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 20 years eligible to hold the Office of President.” – Co-Sponsor Rep Sherman, Brad [CA-27]

6. Rep Dana Rohrabacher [CA-46] tries again on February 1, 2005 in H.J.R. 15 – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes eligible for the Office of the President non-native born persons who have held U.S. citizenship for at least 20 years and who are otherwise eligible to hold such Office.” – No Co-Sponsor

7. On April 14, 2005, Rep Vic Snyder [AR-2] tries yet again with H.J.R. 42 – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes a person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 35 years and who has been a resident within the United States for at least 14 years eligible to hold the office of President or Vice President.” – Co-Sponsor Rep Shays, Christopher [CT-4]

8. All of these efforts failing in committee and the 2008 presidential election looming with an unconstitutional candidate leading the DNC ticket, Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill, [MO] tries to attach the alteration to a military bill in S.2678 on February 28, 2008 – “Children of Military Families Natural Born Citizen Act – Declares that the term “natural born Citizen” in article II, section 1, clause 5 of the Constitution, dealing with the criteria for election to President of the United States, includes any person born to any U.S. citizen while serving in the active or reserve components of the U.S. armed forces.” – Co-Sponsors DNC Presidential candidate Sen Clinton, Hillary Rodham [NY]; DNC Presidential candidate Sen Obama, Barack [IL]; Sen Menendez, Robert [NJ]; Sen Coburn, Tom [OK] – (This was the first effort to also assure that GOP Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain [AZ] would be cleared to run against the DNC primary victor.)

From June 11, 2003 to February 28, 2008, there had been eight (8) different congressional attempts to alter Article II – Section I – Clause V – natural born citizen requirements for president in the U.S. Constitution, all of them failing in committee — All of it taking placing during Barack Obama’s rise to political power and preceding the November 2008 presidential election.

In politics, there are no coincidences… not of this magnitude.

Finally on April 10, 2008, unable to alter or remove the natural born citizen requirement to clear the way for Barack Obama, the U.S. Senate acts to shift focus before the election, introducing and passing S.R.511 – declaring Sen. John McCain a “natural born citizen” eligible to run for and hold the office of president. There was never any honest doubt about McCain, the son of a U.S. Navy Commander. The Sponsor of the resolution is Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill, [MO]

S.R.511 States that John Sidney McCain, III, is a “natural born Citizen” under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States. S.R511 passed by a 99-0 unanimous consent of the Senate, with only John McCain not voting. The basis was –“Whereas John Sidney McCain, III, was born to American citizens;” – a condition not met by Barack Hussein Obama II. – Co-Sponsors DNC Presidential candidate Sen Clinton, Hillary Rodham [NY]; DNC Presidential candidate Sen Obama, Barack [IL]; Sen Leahy, Patrick J. [VT]; Sen Webb, Jim [VA]; Sen Coburn, Tom [OK] (They had made certain that John McCain would run against Barack Obama)

However, in the McCain resolution is also this language –“Whereas the Constitution of the United States requires that, to be eligible for the Office of the President, a person must be a `natural born Citizen’ of the United States; – Whereas the term `natural born Citizen’, as that term appears in Article II, Section 1, is not defined in the Constitution of the United States;”

The U.S. Constitution is not a dictionary. The definition of “is” is not in the constitution either. Yet this is the text that would later be issued in Congressional Research Service talking points memos distributed to members of congress, to protect an individual that all members of congress know and understand to be an “unconstitutional” resident of the people’s White House – Barack Hussein Obama II.

Once again, as the political left was unable to alter the U.S. Constitution by way of legitimate constitutional process, they resorted to altering the constitution via precedent setting, in short, knowingly electing and getting away with seating an unconstitutional president in order to alter Article II requirements for the office via breaking those constitutional requirements.

Read the full article here.

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Time to Indict the Political Class!

By Larry Klayman | April 21, 2012 | WND

Exclusive: Larry Klayman explains history of citizen grand juries targeting the corrupt

With government corruption and treasonous acts running rampant, particularly with regard to President Obama and his administration, many have asked what ordinary American citizens can do to legally mete out justice. Short of violent revolution, there is only one strong legal mechanism that can be invoked. That is the so-called “citizens grand jury,” by which Americans themselves can enforce the law. This is our only recourse to hold the president and his accomplices truly accountable for their actions. Over the years, impeachment has not worked, nor has any other means to address crimes at the presidential and other high levels of government.

In this regard, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes that “no person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” A proper understanding of the effect of this requirement begins with the common law, since, as Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand stated in In re Kittle, “we took the [grand jury] as we found it in our English inheritance, and he best serves the Constitution who most faithfully follows its historical significance.”

The grand jury dates back at least to 1166, under the Norman kings of England. These earliest grand juries were convened to provide answers from local representatives concerning royal property rights, but developed into a body of 12 men who presented indictments at the request of either private individuals or the king’s prosecutor. (Susan W Brenner & Gregor G. Lockhart, “Federal Grand Jury: A Guide to Law and Practice,” 4 [1996]). The Magna Carta granted individuals the right to stand before a grand jury to be charged of their crimes. (Id)

By 1681, an important characteristic of the grand jury had developed: the rule of secrecy. This characteristic set up the grand jury as a bulwark against government abuse. Grand juries were designed to exclude all outside persons, including the government’s prosecutors, ensuring that all phases of an investigation (not just deliberation) remained secret. Thus, English grand juries functioned to prevent prosecutorial abuses by blocking the king’s attempts to prosecute.

This tradition was continued and expanded by colonial grand juries. In America, the grand jury originally began as a defense against the monarchy and was arguably even more independent than the English grand jury of the 1600s. American grand juries initiated prosecutions against corrupt agents of the government, often in response to complaints from individuals. For example, a Massachusetts grand jury refused to indict the organizers of the Stamp Act rebellion. (See Roger Roots, “If It’s Not A Runaway, It’s Not A Real Grand Jury,” 33 Creighton L. Rev. 821, 832). Four years later, another Massachusetts grand jury indicted some British soldiers located within the city boundaries for alleged crimes against the colonists, but refused to treat certain colonialists who had been charged by the British authorities for inciting desertion in a like manner. Similarly, a Philadelphia grand jury condemned the use of the tea tax to compensate British officials, encouraged a rejection of all British goods and called for organization with other colonies to demand redress of grievances.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the powerful role of the grand jury had come to be established law. In 1902, a Minneapolis grand jury, acting on its own initiative, hired private detectives and collected enough evidence to indict the mayor and force the police chief to resign.

In Frisbie v. United States, Supreme Court Justice David Brewer declared that “in this country it is for the grand jury to investigate any alleged crime, no matter how or by whom suggested to them, and after determining that the evidence is sufficient to justify putting the suspected party on trial, to direct the preparation of the formal charge or indictment.” [157 U.S. 160 (1895)]

Read the full article here.

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If Voting Isn’t Fair, We’re Not Free: An Interview With Catherine Engelbrecht

By Breitbart News | April 15, 2012 | Breitbart

Breitbart.com interviewed Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of anti-fraud organization True the Vote. Engelbrecht has taken citizen journalism and activism to the next level, leading the way in making sure the 2012 elections are free, fair, and transparent, in the face of efforts by the institutional left to suppress wildly popular voter ID legislation.

On April 27 and 28, Engelbrecht and True the Vote are hosting a National Summit in Houston, Texas. The two-day event will bring together nationally recognized experts on the issue of election integrity, as well as and grassroots leaders of election integrity movements from across the country. Last year’s Summit drew leaders from 27 states (including Alaska), and Engelbrecht expect this year’s event to be even bigger.

Breitbart.com: Election fraud–how big a problem is it?

Engelbrecht: I think you have to start by asking: how much fraud is OK? The answer is none. But, there do seem to be very organized, methodical, strategies in place to exploit our system. Examples like the coordinated vote buying that goes on in parts of Texas; absentee ballot fraud in Wisconsin and New York, non-citizens voting in Florida and Colorado; the nationwide ACORN voter registration scandals–these are just a few of the problems we’ve seen recently. In fact, in the past ten years, forty-seven states have prosecuted some kind of election fraud. It’s not the rarity some pretend it to be. It’s a serious, pervasive, corrosive problem and it has to be stopped. Belief that the results of our elections reflect the will of the people is the underpinning of our entire republic.

Breitbart.com: Why does there need to be a program like True the Vote?

Engelbrecht: In recent years, we’ve seen increasingly lax standards produce increasingly unreliable results–and our problems are compounded by a severe shortage of volunteers who are desperately needed to help work in the polls, help review the registry, help support a fair and legal electoral process at every possible stage. We believe the best solution is a well-organized national volunteer program that inspires and equips citizens to actively protect the rights of legitimate voters.

Read the full article here.

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Judicial Review v. Judicial Activism

By Mark Alexander | April 12, 2012 | The Patriot Post

SCOTUS and Constitutional Authority

“No legislative act … contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.” –Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78 (1787)

Last week, seeing that his signature legislative achievement was in jeopardy, Barack Hussein Obama fired a shot across the bow of the Supreme Court as it considered the constitutionality of his so-called “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (a.k.a., ObamaCare). Obama warned the court against “judicial activism.”

“I am confident,” proclaimed Obama, “that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. I just remind conservative commentators that for years what we have heard the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example and I am pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step. … [T]hat’s not just my opinion, that’s the opinion of a whole lot of constitutional law professors and academics and judges and lawyers who have examined this law.”

Actually, as Obama knows well, the Supreme Court’s consideration of ObamaCare is not an example of judicial activism as Obama erroneously claims, unless the Court actually upheld the institution of socialized medicine as constitutionally compliant.

In fact, SCOTUS is exercising appropriate judicial review as outlined in Article III of our Constitution, and established as precedent in 1803 with the Court’s Marbury v. Madison decision under Chief Justice John Marshall. In that fundamental case, Marshall wrote, “The powers of the legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written. … [T]he framers of the constitution contemplated that instrument, as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the legislature.”

Marbury v. Madison is often derided as the beginning of the end of Liberty. However, it certainly was consistent with our Framers’ intent, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78: “[T]he courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges as, a fundamental law. It, therefore, belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.”

The unfortunate consequence of the Marbury precedent is that it rendered the Constitution vulnerable to broad extra-constitutional interpretation, should the courts ever become highly politicized — as indeed they did in the 20th century, from FDR forward.

Judicial review was and remains a foundational component of republican federalism and was instituted to preserve Liberty. However, as Thomas Jefferson feared when warning the judiciary could become the “despotic branch,” the federal court’s checks and balances have been adulterated by judicial activists who, in the words of the venerable Senator Sam Ervin, “interpret the Constitution to mean what it would have said if [they], instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.”

Thus, now, as Jefferson warned, “The Constitution [will be] a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

Read the full article here.

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How much is your country really worth to you?

By imperfectamerica (Diary) | April 9, 2012 | RedState

Over the course of the last ten years millions of brave men and women have served in the United States military. Those people, those fathers, mothers, sons and daughters deserve every ounce of respect that Americans of all stripes have.

It says a lot about both the country and these individuals that they still see something in the United States worth defending and that they were willing to sign on the dotted line to do so.

Unfortunately, that is simply not enough. Not that those brave men and women aren’t giving enough, but rather, the great sacrifice they have been and are making today is simply not sufficient to save the United States.

The United States is far more than a military power. In reality, military power is but a small part of what makes America great and a leader in the world. People around the planet have been flocking to watch Hollywood movies for decades. They’ve also been sending the best and the brightest of their progeny to study at our universities. During the Cold War it was Levis and Pepsi that Soviet citizens were clamoring for. According to Interbrand, ten of the ten most valuable consumer brands in the world are American, including names like Coke, Disney, McDonalds and Google. None of these things were accomplished with a barrel of a gun. From Star Wars to Big Macs to our private and public universities, people around the world see the United States as a place where seemingly everything is possible, where great ideas come from and where anyone can find success. Little of that is the result of American military intervention. It’s the result of accomplishments and achievements Americans have forged throughout the nation’s history… although winning two world wars certainly didn’t hurt.

The bottom line is, the United States’ military is strong because America is strong. Not the other way around. And what has made America strong is her people, the individual freedom and liberty they have enjoyed since June 21, 1788 and the economic strength that freedom has created.

Read the full article here.

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Tom Woods: Nullify Now Tour, Philadelphia, March 31, 2012

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The Vetting: Obama Channels Derrick Bell in Attack on Supreme Court

By Joel B. Pollak | April 3, 2012 | Breitbart

Much of the left seems inclined to shrug at President Barack Obama’s pre-emptive rebuke of the Supreme Court yesterday. One Democrat even urged Obama to attack the Court on the campaign trail if it overturned Obamacare.

A few liberals, however, realize that Obama’s attack is a threat to judicial independence, and ought to be condemned by all.

One such was Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, who said she would “lament a ruling striking down the individual mandate,” yet chided Obama for “channeling tired critiques from the right about activist judges,” calling his attack “unsettling.”

Marcus was right about the danger, but for the wrong reason: judicial activism is not the issue here.

The president deliberately confused judicial activism–the wholesale manufacture of rights and laws by judges in accordance with their personal or political views–with judicial review, the power courts have to overturn unconstitutional legislation, which the Supreme Court has exercised since Marbury v. Madison (1803).

Obama’s assault on judicial review might seem bizarre–particularly coming from a former president of the Harvard Law Review, and a former lecturer in constitutional law at one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools–were it not for the fact that we now know of his connection to radical Critical Race Theory professor Derrick Bell.

Apparently, Bell had little interest in judicial review, since he believed the constitution itself to be racist. The Constitution allowed slavery to continue, after all, and even the post-Civil War amendments preserved the (unequal) institution of property, Bell argued. Therefore, he believed, pursuing racial equality through the courts was likely to be ineffective, and even counter-productive.

Bell’s ideas clearly left an impression on Obama, who assigned Bell’s textbook to his students at the University of Chicago. Obama’s own views about the constitution also bear a striking similarity to Bell’s.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s second autobiography, Obama claimed that the Constitution “provided no protection to those outside the constitutional circle—the Native American whose treaties proved worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the black man Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave.” (114)

Like Bell, Obama acknowledged, but rejected, “a school of thought that sees the Founding Fathers only as hypocrites and the Constitution only as a betrayal of the grand ideals set forth by the Declaration of Independence.” As an American “with the blood of Africa coursing through my veins,” Obama declared, he believed instead that the constitution itself was flawed, and that real change came about through radical, violent action by “the absolutists that have fought for a new order.” (116)

The power of judicial review is important to liberal legal scholars worldwide, but to radicals like Bell and Obama, even the boldest Supreme Court was limited by the fact that it operated within a constitutional system that needed to be transformed.

In 2008—days before the election, too late to make a difference–conservatives seized on newly-discovered remarks that Obama had made about the Supreme Court in an interview in January 2001 with Chicago’s local NPR affiliate, WBEZ-FM.

Read the full article here.

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Data Mining You

By Tom Engelhardt | April 3, 2012 | The American Conservative

From TomDispatch: How the intelligence community is creating a new American world 

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism — about you and me, that is — for up to five years.  (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years — or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence think it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part — and it hardly made a ripple.

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read “Tread on Me” and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupéry’sThe Little Prince. That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.

Oh, and in those nine days abroad, a new word surfaced on my horizon, one just eerie and ugly enough for our new reality: yottabyte.  Thank National Security Agency (NSA) expert James Bamford for that.  He wrote a piece for Wired magazine on a super-secret, $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah. Focused on data mining and code-breaking and five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, it is expected to house information beyond compare, “including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

The NSA, adds Bamford, “has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net.”

Which brings us to yottabyte — which is, Bamford assures us, equivalant to septillion bytes, a number “so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.” The Utah center will be capable of storing a yottabyte or more of information (on your tax dollar).

Large as it is, that mega-project in Utah is just one of many sprouting like mushrooms in the sunless forest of the U.S. intelligence world. In cost, for example, it barely tops the $1.7 billion headquarters complex in Virginia that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, with an estimated annual black budget of at least $5 billion, built for its 16,000 employees.  Opened in 2011, it’s the third-largest federal building in the Washington area.  (And I’ll bet you didn’t even know that your tax dollars paid for such an agency, no less its gleaming new headquarters.)  Or what about the 33 post-9/11 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work that were under construction or had already been built when Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote their “Top Secret America” series back in 2010?

In these last years, while so many Americans were foreclosed upon or had their homes go “underwater” and the construction industry went to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just continued to grow. And there’s no sign that any of this seems abidingly strange to most Americans.

Read the full article here.

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Bill Whittle Explains the “Electoral College” Once and for All!

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On Restoring American Individualism

By Daren Jonescu | March 31, 2012 | American Thinker

Much of the political crisis facing America today stems from a disintegration of the ethical basis of the free society.  That is why the core of the 2012 election fight is not tax rates, job growth, or the national debt.  These issues, though of enormous practical importance, are merely the policy manifestations of underlying moral sentiments.  The fundamental battle to be waged concerns nothing less than the nature of man, and the moral implications of that nature.  If public disapproval of particular Obama policies is to become a lasting movement toward societal renewal, then the conservative’s primary objective must be the restoration of American individualism.

The problem is that the warm quilt of entitlement and dependency which the left has so cozily tucked around American society not only restricts freedom of movement; it also effectively reinforces the anti-individualist morality that makes the left’s advances possible.  In the doublethink names of “fairness” and “security,” soft despotism of the modern leftist sort produces a siren-song promise of carefree mother’s love forever — with its corresponding appeal to a toddler’s moral myopia, the inability to concretize and respect the wishes and wills of other people.  Thus, creeping socialism ushers in a hitherto unknown ethic, which we might dub “collectivist self-absorption.”

“We Are the World” and “We are the 99 percent” are both products of this ethic, expressed as, respectively, self-aggrandizing “brotherly love” and self-aggrandizing slothful covetousness.  In both cases, the heart of the message is, “We are one; give us what we want.”  This sensibility is the very meaning of the “entitlement mentality” with which the left seeks to charm America into moral and intellectual submission.  The constitutionalist is therefore saddled with the thankless task of serving up the repeated splashes of cold water that might prevent the cozily blanketed moral invalid from drifting into the long, nightmarish sleep of collectivist authoritarianism.

The most indispensable resource in this struggle to renew the individualist ethic is a clear understanding of the moral terms of the argument, and a refusal to allow those terms to be redefined by the authoritarians.

Read the full article here.

John Adams (HBO Mini-Series): A Case for Independence

An American President: “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.”

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” ~Woodrow Wilson

Overview of America

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]