Rule of Reason Blog

No sooner had the Supreme Court upheld the right of corporations to exercise their freedom of speech, than the ruling was attacked, first by newspapers, pundits, and finally by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address. Various newspapers and blogsites, including the White House, carry this version of what Obama said: With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that corrects some of these problems. But, the Baltimore Sun transcript of his speech contains oddly different wording: It's time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or Congress. And it's time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office. Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong. Having watched the speech, and heard Obama speak the first version, it is curious that there are different versions of it floating around the news media. However, be that as it may…. The first part of his statement is confusing. Did he mean that the Supreme Court (finally) showed deference to (or recognition of) the separation of powers by drawing a firm line between government power and the inviolability of freedom of speech? That would seem to be a compliment to the Court, but Obama’s hostility for freedom of speech is too well known. Or was he referring to the necessary restraints placed by the Constitution on executive powers? Hardly. They didn’t stop Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt from demonizing and persecuting anyone who spoke against the wars they oversaw. His statement may be taken as a measure of power-envy. The “due deference” was his own, a venal expression of a contempt for the separation of powers. His practiced dissimulation worked to get him elected, and then to lord it over Congress to have destructive legislation passed. But his rhetoric and style have lost their “magic.” His election was bankrolled by “powerful interests,” and he knows too well that most Democratic members of Congress do not represent the American people and that, for all their blather about wanting to help Americans, do not have their best interests in mind. He knows, as most of them do, that most Americans oppose his and Congress’s mutual totalitarian agenda. While it is a badly constructed sentence, the “due deference” statement was an invitation to his allies in Congress to begin a push for some kind of retaliatory legislation that would castrate the ruling and render it impotent. And as important as the Court ruling was, it did not altogether repudiate the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. As one university blogsite remarked about Obama‘s swipe at the Court and how wrong he was about the ruling: The impropriety of such a remark shocked scholars and journalists on the left and the right. Not since FDR’s Supreme Court insults has a President challenged judicial authority so publicly. Obama crossed the line in regards to separation of powers, but the most disappointing part of this judicial challenge is that Obama’s charge was inaccurate. First of all, Citizen’s United did not touch or change the early 20th century campaign law that Citizen’s United opponents continuously cite as the basis for their claim that the decision “reversed a century of law”. Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor and rebutted Obama’s claim that the Supreme Court decision addressed foreign corporations impacting American elections. Federal law and Federal Elections Commission rules regarding foreign financing were left untouched by the Citizen’s United decision. Obama remarked that the ruling “reversed a century of law.“ He was referring to the incremental reduction of the First Amendment, beginning with the Tillman Act of 1907. Another chapter was begun in 1907 when Congress passed the Tillman Act, prohibiting national banks and corporations from making contributions in federal elections. The Corrupt Practices Act, first enacted in 1910 and replaced by another law in 1925, extended federal regulation of campaign contributions and expenditures in federal elections and other acts have similarly provided other regulations. Subsequent regulations, like a steel ball rolling inexorably down a spiral chute, from the unchecked impetus of statism, had to end up regulating when, where, how, and by whom speech could exercised before and during federal elections. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion: If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the anti-distortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form. Although the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is an outright ban on speech, backed by criminal sanctions. It is a ban notwithstanding the fact that a PAC [political action committee] created by a corporation can still speak, for a PAC is a separate association from the corporation. Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence. When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves. Progressivism leaves no right untouched, no absolute principle intact. As politically correct language and “bias-free“ vernacular atomize words and concepts so that they do not “offend” anyone, the ideology of progressivism disintegrates rights and principles into particulars and special exceptions so that no one may claim them as fundamental or universal. The exercise of those rights and the application of those principles must first be vetted and approved by panels of “experts,“ such as the Federal Election Commission. Justice Clarence Thomas, who was with the majority on the Citizens United ruling, noted the uproar liberals and leftists were raising about the ruling, claiming it will give corporations the power to influence, if not control, elections. “I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company,” Justice Thomas said. “These are corporations.” A point obviously still lost on The New York Times and The Washington Post. Thomas also noted that the part of the law struck down by the ruling exempted “news reports, commentaries and editorials.“ Newspapers and other publications were the beneficiaries of McCain-Feingold because of some groundless aura or mystique surrounding the press seen by its authors. The Times article was headlined, “Justice Defends Ruling on Finance.” But, the ruling was not about “finance.” It was about the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Still, the Times reported Thomas’s remarks without bias: Justice Thomas said the First Amendment’s protections applied regardless of how people chose to assemble to participate in the political process. “If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association,” he said. “If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association." “But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same. Asked about his attitude toward the two decisions overruled in Citizens United, he said, “If it’s wrong, the ultimate precedent is the Constitution.” This is thinking in principles. Not thinking in principles are those who wish to overrule the Supreme Court’s finding. Rallying around Obama’s tattered flag are, among others, Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Chuck Schumer of New York, and Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Or perhaps it isn’t even a matter of their choosing to not think in principles, but one of their being, well, slow, or malicious, or both. Call it the Congressional Bronx cheer in answer to a grave Court ruling. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told the committee [the Senate Rules Committee, chaired by Schumer] "we may also need to think bigger….I think we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear once and for all that corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals," Kerry said. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., said Tuesday they had introduced a constitutional amendment permitting Congress and the states to regulate the expenditure of funds by corporations engaging in political speech. Schumer himself said: "If this ruling is left unchallenged, if Congress fails to act, our country will be faced with big, moneyed interests spending, or threatening to spend, millions on ads against those who dare to stand up to them," Senate Rules Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said at a hearing of his panel. Schumer said he and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., will propose legislation soon. Two House committees also plan hearings Wednesday on the ramifications of the 5-4 Supreme Court decision. But…no one is supposed to stand up to an omnivorous Congress? The federal government is not a “big, moneyed interest” that spends, spends, spends on ads and propaganda everywhere one looks? The Tea Parties and town hall meetings of 2009 were not evidence that Americans retained their freedom of speech, and let an unresponsive Congress and the White House know in no uncertain terms that they are not interested in becoming cattle herded by a political elite to the greener pastures of serfdom, or that they are not buffalo to be run off a cliff wholesale, as Western Indians did, so that politicians and special interests (foreign or domestic) can more easily select which of their carcasses can be carved up for food and clothing? Ideas for Constitutional amendments and nullifying, fiat legislation are gushing forth like rusty water from a broken spigot. The valves and washers of deference, decorum, and caution are shot and the speech regulators can’t help themselves. In the House, Representative Donna Edwards, Democrat of Maryland, and Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, introduced legislation calling for such an amendment yesterday. Thomas Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, said he plans to file a similar bill in the Senate. Representative Niki Tsongas, Democrat of Lowell, said yesterday that she would introduce legislation restricting corporations from using government money, such as bailout funds, for political purposes. Tsongas said she would seek to attach the provision to a more sweeping bill being prepared by Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, is working on similar legislation in the Senate. The Edwards-Conyers amendment reads: “The sovereign right of the people to govern being essential to a free democracy, Congress and the States may regulate the expenditure of funds for political speech by any corporation, limited liability company, or other corporate entity,” the amendment says. “Nothing contained in this Article shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press." Translation: We don’t care what the Court says about individual rights or freedom of speech. We want to gag corporations. You should know by now that we don’t give a fig about “associations of individuals” speaking through organizations. We want to control who says what, when, and how. Of course, please don’t take this as an abridgement of your freedom of speech. Or: A can be A and non-A at the same time. A constitutional amendment is not likely to see the light of day. It would require the support of two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-fourths of the states to ratify it. This could take years, and the Democrats’ days seem to be numbered in both chambers in the months leading up to the mid-term elections. But there are no constraints on Congress’s appetite for passing fiat law and the vindictive manner in which they propose it.. Other ideas are in the offing. Others, such as Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), are making an appeal for a broader legislative fix, such as passing a public financing program for federal candidates similar to the one in place for presidential elections. The Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog organization and defender of the McCain-Feingold law, also would like the Federal Communications Commission to ensure access to airwaves by candidates. Broadcasters now must sell time to candidates at the lowest unit rate, but broadcasters can pre-empt those ads if a higher bidder is willing to pay more for the time. “Airtime sold at the lowest unit rate is generally preemptible, thus forcing candidates to buy the more expensive, non-preemptible time to ensure they reach the targeted demographic. A new statute should ensure that once again the lowest unit rates for candidates are meaningful,” the group wrote Schumer. On one hand, Durbin is seeking to force taxpayers to further perpetuate both political parties by underwriting a multitude of races of federal office. On the other, broadcasters are to be further denied their property rights by being forced to ensure cheap airtime for candidates to address the public. Not to be out-done, MoveOn (aka George Soros) has come up with its own unique proposal for a constitutional amendment: We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to: Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count. Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments. Justice Kennedy’s reasoning and proofs rolled off of Move.On’s backs like water off a duck‘s back. Corporations are not “human beings” or even “persons,” just menacing entities run by robots. No, money isn’t speech, especially if you can’t afford to buy time on someone else’s soapbox, which should be public property and free anyway, right?. And any future rational decision by the Court or even by the government must be deemed “illegitimate.” “In a democracy, the people rule,” says Move.On, and corporations should be prohibited from “buying elections.” Corporations, however, staffed by people, do not “buy elections.” People do, when they vote. And they certainly bought a lemon when they “bought” Barack Obama, whose campaign was financed and run by well-oiled non-profit corporations. And, people “rule” in a democracy only until a tyrant takes over to bring “order“ out of the chaos of mob rule, also known as democracy. MoveOn is deaf to the lessons and advice of the Founders, who were experts on democracy. That is why they created a republic. A more verbose instance of such sophistry proposing an amendment is offered by an organization called “CallaConvention.org.” Here are its first two provisions: Congress shall have the power and obligation to protect its own independence, and the independence of the Executive, by assuring, through citizen vouchers or public funding, that the financing of federal elections does not produce any actual or reasonably perceived appearance of dependence, except upon the People. Sophistry The Freedom of Speech and of the Press shall not be abridged by this Amendment, save that the First Amendment to this Constitution shall not be construed to limit the power of the People to restrict any significant and disproportionate non-party financial influence during the last 60 days before an election, where such influence would reasonably draw into doubt the integrity or independence of any elected official. “Independence” from what? From the electorate? From the Constitution? From reason and the assertion of individual rights? Going by Congress’s record over the last century, Congress is not so much “independent” as it is removed and exempt from the constraints that define its powers in the Constitution. This draft amendment accurately describes the current state of Congress and the picayune, contextless interpretations of the First Amendment. Nothing could serve as better incontrovertible evidence of an absence of “due deference” to the principle of freedom of speech than the hostility to it demonstrated by politicians and their ilk at large in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Americans’ only defense against such attacks is to emulate Justice Alito, but instead of mouthing the words silently, they should stand up and shout, “Not true!” Cross-posted from Metablog

Watching a video the other evening of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address (and later reading the transcript of it), I was struck by two things: the yawn-inducing banality of everything he said, because he has said it all before; and the blatantly collectivist nature of the speech, one barely disguised by its sugary “progressive” coating. Throughout his speech, it was “I am disappointed with the lack of progress by Congress in implementing a socialist agenda, and so we must stop bickering and get things done.” Or, as Alex Epstein encapsulated the speech in “Obama vs. the First Amendment” on the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights site: We need to rise above fear, hesitation, and partisan politics–to give the government all the power it needs to solve all our problems. That is it, in a nutshell. What are “our problems”? Obama waved the usual shopping list of them that required government action and government spending, representing powers not granted to his office or to Congress in the Constitution, and wealth extorted from productive Americans and redirected to subsidize or finance statist ends. It is only an ugly association with tyranny that his speechwriters did not attempt to paraphrase Adolf Hitler from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: "No one will live in America without working for our country. There is no other work.” And, “The Democratic Party proclaimed [or was moved by] only two principles: first, it is a Party with a world view; and second, it wanted sole power in America, without compromise.” The “world view” is that Americans should abandon their individual rights and liberty and defer to their masters in Washington. And the Democratic Party has demonstrated that it wants sole power in America. The Republican Party, on the other hand, has shown that it is willing to compromise its nonexistent principles. The petulance in Obama’s manner was marked by a quantum of annoyance with an undefined object, a querulous defensiveness in which he blamed failure on everything but his own and his predecessors’ actual policies -- which did not differ fundamentally from his own -- and the subdued menace of a gang leader warning that his minions had better shape up -- or else. One half expected him to pound a fist on the podium. Missing from his delivery was an hysterical stridency. Nowhere in his speech was his manner more apparent than in his attack on the Supreme Court for upholding the First Amendment rights of corporations to advocate or oppose candidates or political ideas. "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections," Obama said. It is tempting to dwell on the hypocrisy of his words vis-à-vis Obama’s own connections to “special interests,” such as George Soros, numerous other wealthy individuals who contributed to his campaign in 2008, and foreign parties who also contributed to his campaign, all totaling some $800 million. (Thus outspending Republican rival John McCain, who accepted matching federal funds and spent about $10 million; but the subject of the propriety of forcing taxpayers to pay for the election campaigns of candidates for federal office is a separate issue). That is aside from the issue of corporations and individuals who stand to benefit from stimulus money and “green” and “clean energy” contracts. The floodgates of inflation, trillion dollar deficits, and spendthrift government spending -- all sanctioned by the administration and Congress -- promise to drown Americans for generations to come. “Special interests”? “Lobbyists”? Obama pointed out in his speech instances of businesses that have benefited from the Recovery Act. Who decides which applicants for stimulus money will get it? Who qualifies for it, and why? Where there are bureaucrats with money to hand out, and beggars pleading their “need” for it, the scenarios do not bear close scrutiny. All one will find are ACORN-like scandals and corruption. It is the middle class that will suffer most under Obama’s economic policies, as well as under any health care bill. Someone apparently informed him of this, that it was middle class Americans who formed the bulk of the Tea Parties and defiant town hall meetings last year and made known their strenuous opposition to his socialist policies. His solution is to attempt to bribe them with fictive tax cuts that are surpassed by tax increases and private revenue consuming and destroying regulations, and the granting of pointless tax credits for education and jobs. He urged Congress to pass a health care bill regardless of Americans’ opposition to it. He will have his way -- or else. Just as he will have his way over the Supreme Court ruling on the First Amendment. "I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems." Democratic lawmakers and Obama Cabinet members, surrounding the six of nine justices who turned out for the event, stood and applauded. The justices, in the front and second rows of the House chamber, sat motionless and expressionless. Except for Alito. "Not true, not true," he appeared to say (other lip readers think he said, "That's not true") as he shook his head and furrowed his brow. It is unclear what part of Obama's statement he was objecting to, although he started shaking his head after the president said "special interests." Not true? Justice Alito’s words could be interpreted one of two ways: That Obama was wrong about the ruling, that it would unleash a horde of cash-rich ogres to sway voters and elections, and that the president was misinterpreting the thrust of the ruling, and that its conclusion was based on the founding principle of the separation of the economy from state. But the incredulous expression on the justice’s face, together with the shaking of his head, I am certain he was accusing Obama of lying. One wishes that Alito had risen in protest and left the chamber. It would have been a proper punctuation mark to the growl of naked thuggery. And, he lied in Baltimore during a “debate” between him and Republicans during a televised House conference. Replying to Indiana Representative Mike Pence’s criticisms of the performance of Obama’s economic agenda and Obama’s and Congress‘s dismissal of a Republican plan for tax relief, Obama replied, I am not an ideologue. I'm not. It doesn't make sense if somebody could tell me, “You could do this cheaper and get increased results,” that I wouldn't say, “Great.” The problem is, I couldn't find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made. Meaning: He did not search for any economists of a non-Marxist ideology who would substantiate Pence’s claims -- not that Pence’s claims had any shred of validity to them, either. Tax relief? Why not propose the abolition of those taxes? It isn’t relief from those taxes that Americans need, but freedom from them. Obama said Republican lawmakers have attacked his health care overhaul so fiercely, "you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot." His proposals are mainstream, widely supported ideas, he said, and they deserve some GOP votes in Congress. "I am not an ideologue," the president declared. Yes, he is an unrepentant, dedicated ideologue of the Marxist kind. No amount of televised “give-and-take” joshing with his enemies is ever going to disguise that he is committed to “remaking” America according to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The rudderless Republicans fall for it every time. It is symbolically significant, while he thanked the Republicans for inviting him to the “debate,” that he paraphrased a line from the movie, The Godfather: Part II:* I very much am appreciative of not only the tone of your introduction, John, but also the invitation that you extended to me. You know what they say, ”Keep your friends close, but visit the Republican Caucus every few months.” (Laughter.) It is no laughing matter. This is the “gangster-government” way. However, it is factually significant that he also made this observation, one of his few honest, truthful ones: I know many of you individually. And the irony, I think, of our political climate right now is that, compared to other countries, the differences between the two major parties on most issues is not as big as it’s represented. Beneath the excelsior of badinage with his alleged enemies, one finds a kernel of truth. That is something Americans can believe in. *Attributed to Sun-Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Petrarch, but made famous in Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster movie. Cross-posted from Metablog

Democrats, welfare statists, ambitious censors, and People for the Un-American Way were dealt a triple whammy of telling defeats in a matter of two days. Air America, the liberal, anemic, and unlistened-to talk radio station that was intended to compete with Rush Limbaugh and other forthright and outspoken conservative talk show hosts, filed for bankruptcy (for the second time; the first in 2006). It was not a total loss. Al Franken, failed comedian and its most notable host, won a Senate seat in the U.S. Congress. Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown made electoral history by winning the Senate seat held by career welfare statist Ted Kennedy for over four decades in a contest that reflected, on the part of voters, at least, not so much a desire to spurn Kennedy as it was a rejection of Obamacare. Instead of the usual patronizing and venal blandishments by the late and unlamented Prince of Chappaquiddick, another Kennedy (Anthony) wrote the majority opinion in defense of the freedoms Teddy devoted his life to destroying. The Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 decision, practically nullified the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), citing the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech, reversing itself from having upheld it years ago. No one mourned or much noticed the passing of Air America, but jubilation over the Brown upset and Supreme Court ruling lit up conservative and Tea Party blogs, while the Mainstream Media and its shills for the welfare state and “progressive” agenda stuttered surprise and dismay, and immediately began rummaging through a slag heap of excuses, regrets and explanations. It was almost as though they were trying to explain why water ran downhill, when they had convinced themselves it ran uphill; their behavior demonstrates their unfamiliarity with reality. Their conclusion was that the Brown victory was simply a matter of voter “frustration,” which must be the political understatement of the month. One could just as easily call the men who fought the British at Concord and Bunker Hill “frustrated.” Congress, however, in terms of it being a “democratic“ institution, does not believe in the “will of the people” it purportedly represents. That should be obvious given its express train action to pass the health care bill against mounting popular opposition to it, an express train at the moment stalled on the track by doubt, desertion, disaffection, internal squabbling over pork, and a dawning fear of the electorate. The only “will” Congress has believed in is its members’ own “wills.” President Barack Obama, Senator Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seek a “triumph of their wills.” The reference to Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on the Nazi Party Congress is not gratuitous. Make of it what you wish, but the fundamental roots of that time and ours, in terms of the growth of government power and its transparent totalitarian character, are the same. The people will be led, willingly, or with whips, to a socialist Nirvana. Only the language, manners, and dress codes have changed. Scott Brown’s victory is welcome merely as a delaying action -- provided he keeps his promise to oppose the health care legislation in the Senate -- but any optimism about his victory and intentions should be tempered by a healthy dose of caution. As Scott Holleran notes in his blog column, “From Brooke to Brown”: Brown, supported by independents, unhappy Democrats, and Tea Party activists, ran on one central idea and campaign promise: to kill Obama’s “health care reform”. The crowd during his victory speech roared with the cry: “Forty-one! Forty-one! Forty-one!” It means he had better deliver on his promise and lead the charge to stop socialized medicine. But there he stood with former Massachusetts Governor and 2008 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a moralizing Mormon who forced his conservative Heritage Foundation plan, a carbon copy of Obama’s plan, on the state (Brown supported RomneyCare). Brown also supports Obama’s plan to send more troops to be sacrificed in Afghanistan, seeks a ban on late term abortions, and is thoroughly mixed on favoring individual rights and capitalism. During his victory speech, he did not once mention fighting for man’s rights, free market capitalism, or liberty, and his opposition to ObamaCare is entirely based on practical objections, i.e., that it costs too much, not that it is a violation of rights. Senator-elect Brown also joked at his daughters’ expense and showed that he has the capacity to be terribly unserious. He should be dead serious about his intentions to vote against ObamaCare. If he doesn’t, he will reap the same wrath which the Democrats are likely to experience in November. As Paul Hseih notes in his Pajamas Media editorial, “Brown’s Victory: The Declaration of Independents,“ it was the force of independent voters who tipped the scales in his favor: Independents are also the driving force behind the tea party rallies. Many tea party supporters have been quite explicit in warning that their opposition to the policies of our current Democratic president and Congress should not be mistaken as automatic support for the Republicans….So what do the independents want? In a word, limited government. From the tea party protests to the polling booths, independents have been declaring that they want a limited government that protects individual rights. The Republicans have won an important victory in Massachusetts — one that will reverberate throughout the country as the 2010 election cycle heats up. But they shouldn’t get overconfident. If Republicans choose to run on a platform of limited government, economic freedom, and individual rights, then they will retain the support of the independents and win. But if they take these recent election victories as a mandate to promote a divisive “social issues” agenda, then they’ll once again drive away the independents and lose. The independents have spoken — and they want the Democrats out of their pockets and the Republicans out of their bedrooms. As for the Supreme Court ruling, it no sooner was broadcast than the White House and members of Congress revealed their “wills.” Constitutional “scholar” Obama blasted the ruling, calling it a defeat for “average Americans” and a victory for “special interests,” not really grasping the point that it is in the “special interests” of all Americans, individually or through organizations that happen to be corporations, to be able to express their advocacy of or opposition to ideas or political issues in any form or at any time they choose, without penalty or the threat of arbitrary government injunctions, such as that exercised by the Federal Election Commission. "We don't need to give any more voice to the powerful interests that already drown out the voices of everyday Americans," Obama said Saturday, devoting his weekly radio and Internet address to the topic. "And we don't intend to." The White House is working chiefly with Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y, on a bill pushing back on the court decision. The goal is to put forward legislation within two weeks, Van Hollen said Saturday, but the choices are limited by the nature of the court's First Amendment ruling. George Soros isn’t a “powerful interest” that does its best to “drown out” the voices of Americans? Are not his MoveOn.org lobby and affiliated leftist organizations, including labor unions, guilty of attempting to gag opposition to health care? Did not Obama-connected ACORN and SEIU thugs and hirelings attempt to ride roughshod over Tea Partiers and town-hall meetings? You want to ask the President: What part of “freedom of speech” do you not understand? The New York Daily News, citing a portion of the ruling, could help him. "No sufficient government interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. His decision - joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito - shredded previous court rulings barring big business and big labor from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads. Of course, gaffes galore were let loose by various sages of Congress, including one by Maryland representative Chris Van Hollen, who more or less declared the ruling “unconstitutional.” “This is a very, very sad day for American democracy and this is a very radical, radical decision that came out of the Supreme Court of the United States – a court that said they respected precedent…This throws out decades of precedent designed to protect the citizens and the integrity of our political process against big money special interests. It will open the floodgate, if left unchecked and unchallenged, to more and more special interest money, big corporation money, at a time, as my colleague Senator Schumer said, we need to be reducing the amount of influence of special interest money." Although it took Justice Kennedy and his colleagues to pen a 75-page opinion, together with supporting concurrences with other justices, the conclusion they reached was clear. Some excerpts from the majority opinion should be enlightening: If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the anti-distortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form. Although the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is an outright ban on speech, backed by criminal sanctions. It is a ban notwithstanding the fact that a PAC [political action committee] created by a corporation can still speak, for a PAC is a separate association from the corporation. Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence. When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves. The dissenting opinion against the “wholesale” refutation of the restrictions on speech as exercised by corporations, attempted to read the minds of the Founders, whom Justice Stevens claimed were largely against corporations and the power they could wield. He claimed they were “implicitly” singled out by the Founders for exclusion, and so could not claim freedom of speech rights. The majority opinion addressed the premises of the dissenting minority, and handily vaporized them. Most of the Founders’ resentment towards corporations was directed at the state-granted monopoly privileges that individually charted corporations enjoyed [e.g., the East India Company, which attempted to dump cheap tea on Americans]. Modern corporations do not have such privileges, and would probably have been favored by most of our enterprising Founders -- excluding, perhaps, Thomas Jefferson and others favoring perpetuation of an agrarian society The freedom of “the press” was widely understood to protect the publishing activities of individual editors and printers… But these individuals often acted through newspapers, which (much like corporations) had their own names, outlived the individuals who had founded them, could be bought and sold, were sometimes owned by more than one person, and were operated for profit…Their activities were not stripped of First Amendment protection simply because they were carried out under the banner of an artificial legal entity. And the notion which follows from the dissent’s view, that modern newspapers, since they are incorporated, have free-speech rights only at the sufferance of Congress, boggles the mind. The journey to first principles, at least for the Court, has been long and arduous. But this, at least, is a start. The fourth horseman of the Democratic Apocalypse, which would be the Court’s absolute and unqualified upholding of individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, remains to enter the heartening picture that Americans saw last week. When it does, we will perhaps see the resurrection of a constitutionally established republic. Cross-posted from Metablog

Two months after the John Scopes “monkey” trial of July 1925, H.L. Mencken, writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun, took to task two prominent publications, the New York World and the New Republic, for castigating Clarence Darrow, chief defense counsel of Scopes, over his conduct during the trial. The World was infuriated by Darrow’s brutal cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan, the state’s star counsel against Scopes, an experience which humiliated Bryan and is thought to have contributed to his death later that same month. The New Republic objected to Darrow having made the issue of evolution vs. the Bible a national, rather than merely a local one, even though the trial was broadcast on radio. What drew Mencken’s ire was the World’s position that one’s religious beliefs, should be respected and not subjected to criticism or satire. Once more…I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame….True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force….* Mencken, an agnostic -- “Myself completely neutral in theology, and long ago resigned to damnation” -- practiced what he preached. No religion was safe from his biting wit and unbridled contempt. He was an uncompromising enemy of blind belief in assertions, especially religious ones, that contradicted evidence and reason. When they showed their heads, he picked them off with all the skill of Alvin York picking off German soldiers during World War I. Mencken was an intellectual marksman. Two things about the Scopes trial are noteworthy. First, Mencken wrote that Scopes should have been charged with teaching evolution in defiance of Tennessee’s ban. He argued that since Scopes (actually a high school gym teacher filling in for another teacher) was an employee of the public school, he should have obeyed the ban and the school‘s directives. The second thing is that the trial was intended to be a deliberate test of the state’s constitutional authority to impose such a ban, orchestrated by a businessman, George W. Rappleyea, as a means of boosting the fortunes of Dayton, where Scopes lived and taught. Scopes agreed with Rappleyea to discuss evolution in his classroom and to persuade students to report him to the authorities, and even volunteer as witnesses against him. The state, Bryan, and other religionists took the bait. Darrow, at the trial (working on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union), changed his strategy from one of defending Scopes’ and any other teacher’s right to teach evolution as a form of freedom of speech --- the irony was that evolution was explained in the state-mandated textbook used by Scopes -- to one of casting doubt on the veracity of the Bible. Bryan, a Presbyterian Fundamentalist, insisted that the Bible should be accepted as the literal truth, recorded verbatim by its saintly scribes as the word of God himself, regardless of evidence and reason. Mencken covered the trial for the Evening Sun. Although Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution (and was fined $100, which penalty was overturned by the state’s supreme court), Mencken applauded the airing of the conflict between science and religion. If any men deserved respect, he wrote, it should be the men of science who had expanded man’s knowledge of the universe and contributed to everyone’s well-being, and not the beliefs of those who reject the evidence of their senses in favor of the unprovable. He reserved a poignant disgust with men of science who upheld any brand of religion, and wasted no politeness on them. What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessary for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields, such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil.** Mencken might have been less confounded by the appeal of religion, especially among prominent men of the mind, had he examined more closely the role of religion as a morality and not exclusively as a transparent hash of absurdities, whether in the Bible or in practice. To my knowledge, he never took that approach. So he remained an intellectual marksman, never becoming a general able to direct the battle against superstition, mysticism, and other brands of anti-intellectualism. He never solved the paradox of the power of belief to anaesthetize that part of the minds of otherwise rational men, the part which requires a morality by which to conduct one’s life, and render it reason-proof against all logic and evidence. (That task remained to be achieved by one of his admirers, Ayn Rand.) That being said, Mencken would have found the whole phenomenon of modern political correctness intolerable, inexhaustibly amusing, perhaps even perilous. He was vehemently opposed to any suggestion that he be told what to think and what to write. Doubtless he would have excoriated those who claim that Islam should be respected and that Muslims be exempted from criticism or mockery of their creed, and lambasted the politically-correct as well as Islam and its practitioners. As he was able to, in his own time, cite chapter and verse of the Bible, he would have mastered the Koran and Hadith in order to expound on their irrational and heinous character. As propinquity would have it, Muslims just the other day offered an example of what he would have burned holes his typewriter ribbon exposing as unnecessarily sacrosanct, “sacerdotal,” and a candidate for ribald and deserved offensiveness. The National Association of Muslim Police in Britain (NAMP) has lodged a complaint against the government for “stigmatizing” Islam and Muslims in its anti-terrorist program, one which, on one hand, “reaches out” to Muslim communities, but on the other uses it to ferret out real and potential terrorists. The London Daily Telegraph reported: There have been growing concerns about the radicalization of Muslims in Britain. The failed Detroit bombing on Christmas Day was carried out by an al-Quaeda-inspired extremist who had studied in London. Mencken might have asked: How can one “radicalize” a Muslim when he is already “radicalized” by his creed? The creed requires a follower to swallow the Koran and Hadith whole, or not at all, in which case he would become an apostate and subjected to some nasty thuggery, a la the Ku Klux Klan (Mencken was particularly hostile to the Klan and its religious mantra). There is no pick and choose, or mix and match, no half-doses of belief in Islam, as there is Christendom, as the numerous varieties of faiths and sects in it attest. And, what is an extremist but a Fundamentalist of the Bryan kind? It is a believer who is consistent and carries out the tenets of his faith, just as hundreds of his ilk swarmed to Dayton in hopes of seeing Scopes roasted on the spit of righteousness and served up to God with the apple of Eve stuffed in his mouth. What could be a moderate Muslim, but someone who imbibes but a quarter measure of Islam, then, like a once-a-week Christian, gets on with the practical matters of living, leaving moral approval of his conduct to mullahs, priests, imams bishops, and other prestiditators? The Daily Telegraph quoted from NAMP’s “memorandum”: “The strategies of Prevent [the program’s name] were historically focused on so-called Islamist extremism. This has subjected the biggest black and ethnic minority community, and second biggest faith group, in an unprecedented manner, stigmatizing them in the process. Never before has a community been mapped in [such] a manner…It is frustrating to see this in a country that is a real pillar and example of freedom of expression and choice.” Mencken would point out that, first, this is a hilarious instance of political ventriloquism. Having a knowledge of British-Muslim tensions, he would ask how these policemen could adhere to their creed’s diktats, proscriptions, and belligerencies against non-believers, and at the same time uphold “freedom of expression and choice.” He would connect that with how non-Muslim Britons can be charged with “hate speech” if they so much as insinuate in print any criticism of Islam, Muslim behavior and mores, and the dervish-like pirouettes of Sharia law. How, he would ask, can they reconcile freedom of expression -- which no one seems to dare take advantage of -- with the campaign by various Muslim groups to smother it and leave non-believers with no choice but to comply and say nothing lest a howl of indignation be heard from the “persecuted“ minority? He would recall seeing signs, on the occasion of the Mohammad cartoon demonstrations, that read, “To hell with freedom of speech” and other placards which brandished similarly offensive and hateful imprecations that damned what the NAMP complaint cited as commendable “British values.” How is it that this band of Muslim brothers is so sensitive to the “insensitive” remarks of non-believers, yet is insensitive to the extinction of those “British values”? He would then point out that the NAMP objection includes the implication that to “stigmatize” Islam and Muslims is to also to single out Muslims by race. This is a low tactic calculated to guarantee silence, and to leave the authorities sputtering denials and preemptive apologies. Finally, Mencken would point out the glaringly obvious oversight -- if oversight it was -- that the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks over the last twenty or so years were carried out by, well, Muslims, and that these manqués were obeying the nihilistic imperatives of the Koran, urged on with the advice and blessings of their parish sheiks and imams, and enabled by training and funds provided by sinister Middle Eastern regimes and organizations of a distinctly Islamic character. How is it, he would ask, that so many mosques, where the dullard faithful perform their degrading obeisances in the direction of a rock, also serve as dens of iniquity and crèches of crime? What means this “stigmatizing” recrudescence? Mencken might have included a disquisition on the purported purity of Islam: “Islam is a creed not so pure as is alleged, certainly not as comparatively pure as the Christian and Hebrew varieties. It is a hodgepodge of the doctrines and practices of the Christian and Jew, as well as those of pre-Meccan pagan faiths of which little is known. Its essential content and color were borrowed liberally but surreptitiously from virtually every permanent and ephemeral species of animism in the region of its origin, and knocked together into the Koran and Hadith by Mohammad and his successors by sword and terror -- somewhat in the way the Bible came down to us after centuries of casuist strife and Pecksniffian quibbling.” Let Mencken, however, end this commentary in his own words, which could have been written about politically-correct speech and the attempted diminution of freedom of speech today by secular leftists, religious rightists, and Islamists. His subject was the desire of Christian Fundamentalists of his day to suppress all criticism of religion. The common doctrine that religious ideas have a sacrosanct character and are not to be discussed freely and realistically, even when they take the form of schemes to oppress and intimidate those who reject them — in this doctrine I can see nothing save a hollow bombast. Whenever it is entertained human progress is immensely retarded. Nor is there any appreciable gain for religion itself. It becomes the common enemy of all enlightened men, and soon or late, watching their chance, they rise against it and try to destroy it utterly. History is full of examples — and there is not a single compensatory example, at least in civilization, of a theocracy that has endured….To swathe religion in immunities, either by law or by custom, is simply to prepare the way for its corruption and destruction.*** *H.L. Mencken, “Aftermath,” in H.L. Mencken on Religion (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2002), pp. 215-216. ** Ibid., “Fides ante Intellectum,” pp. 230-231. *** Ibid., “On Religion and Politics,” p. 251. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog The moral sewers that are the minds of the likes of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and Senate majority leader, were revealed this week with the report that Reid has apologized to President Barack Obama (and to other black civil rights leaders) for having said privately in 2008 that Obama was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Reid’s remark was made public in a new book, Game Change, by political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. The book chronicles the sludge and sleaze behind the Democratic contest for presidential nomination and the race against John McCain and Sarah Palin. The publisher’s website describes what can only be characterized as a chronicle of dirt: Game Change answers those questions and more, laying bare the secret history of the 2008 campaign. Heilemann and Halperin take us inside the Obama machine, where staffers referred to the candidate as "Black Jesus." They unearth the quiet conspiracy in the U.S. Senate to prod Obama into the race, driven in part by the fears of senior Democrats that Bill Clinton's personal life might cripple Hillary's presidential prospects….And they reveal how, in an emotional late-night phone call, Obama succeeded in wooing Clinton, despite her staunch resistance, to become his secretary of state. Reid has apologized for the remark but sounded more like he was campaigning for reelection. In a statement, Reid confirmed his remarks and apologized for them. “I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments,” he said today, “I was a proud and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama during the campaign and have worked as hard as I can to advance President Obama’s legislative agenda. Moreover, throughout my career, from efforts to integrate the Las Vegas strip and the gaming industry to opposing radical judges and promoting diversity in the Senate, I have worked hard to advance issues important to the African American community.” He was forgiven by Obama. Well, of course. Reid, together with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, has the principal task of getting the socialist health-care bill passed by Congress. President Barack Obama released a statement this afternoon stating that Reid called him to apologize “for an unfortunate comment.” The president said he accepted the apology. “I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart. As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.” Why would he castigate Reid over a mere slip of tongue and unguarded moment, when more important things are at stake than Obama’s own self-respect, such as vanquishing America? But, the book is not closed. Game Change goes on sale in a few days, and the guided tour by Heilemann and Halperin of the cesspools of Beltway politics should make the authors millionaires. This is all very revealing about Harry Reid. It should not be surprising that a man who “advances Obama’s legislative agenda” of nationalizing the economy and abridging American freedoms would also harbor the same knee-jerk racist premises as Vice-President Joe Biden and former Senate majority leader Trent Lott. All the minds party to this legislation are vessels of malignity. In public, these creatures appear well-groomed in pressed suits and are on good conduct. Behind the scenes, they are, as Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota suggested, manipulative, foul-mouthed gangsters. If the Republicans wished to “bring down” Harry Reid as a means of defeating the health-care legislation, they ought to be challenging his political career, premises, and political agenda. They ought to be screaming their heads off about the Marx/Alinsky/Ayers number Reid and his ilk in Congress and the White House are about to pull on the country. Instead, they are calling for his resignation over a comparatively unimportant racial remark. If Reid is guilty of anything, which is his greater offense? Saying something uncouth, or advocating and working hard to bring about the destruction of American liberty? The Republican ruse to defeat the health-care legislation is intellectually vacuous. The Republican strategy is as ludicrous and futile as if the Romans accused the Huns of being bad dressers, and so they should just go away, instead of pillaging Rome. Harry Reid may be, in the core substance of his existence, a rotten, hypocritical creature. But in the hearts of Republican leadership, there is only the hollow darkness of moral bankruptcy. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out , out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. -- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 The Republican Party has reached deep into its armory of political arguments and come up with its best shot against federally-mandated health care “reform.” Citing the Tenth Amendment, they are beginning to claim that Congress is overstepping its Constitutional authority to require individuals to purchase health insurance, thus usurping states’ “rights” to do the same thing. The power is not enumerated; ergo, it is unconstitutional. In the meantime, over two dozen states, also citing the Tenth Amendment, have drafted proposals, resolutions or amendments to their state constitutions that would nullify in situ any federal health care legislation that may pass, because the power of Congress to enact such legislation is not enumerated. This movement smacks of secessionism. In the meantime, Congress has simply ignored the tea parties and the polls that have made it resoundingly clear that the majority of Americans oppose any form of mandatory government administered and regulated health care. Aside from some specious rationalizations of Congressional power to enact the health care legislation, the original enumerated powers have garnered nothing but the Democrats’ disparaging raspberries. Congress, the White House, and the Democrats may regard all this as just paper tigers meowing from behind the iron bars of already existing federal power. Just as Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska was bribed into becoming the sixtieth vote for cloture on the Senate version of the health care bill (he was assured that federal funds would not be used to pay for abortions and that the bill -- or someone or some federal department -- would provide extra Medicaid matching funds and grants for Nebraska), Congress could just as well threaten to cut off federal funds to recalcitrant states, and nearly all states depend on federal “subsidy” money or allocations to maintain their economies. It could threaten to withdraw programs in which states are financially and/or politically ensnared, such as highway maintenance, or federal grants to universities, or a multitude of social programs. Or, the White House, in typical Chicago gangster style persuasion, can threaten to close military bases. The White House, Senator Harry Reid and his allies in the Senate suggested to Nelson that Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base would be put on the Base Realignment and Closure list as “redundant” if Nelson did not help them reach the sixty votes needed. But, what is the Tenth Amendment, the last of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791? It reads: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Intimately linked to the Tenth Amendment is the “Necessary and Proper” clause of Article One (section 8, clause 18), which grants Congress the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution….” But, the purpose of the Tenth, as well as the First through the Ninth Amendments, was to constrain Congress from making “all laws” that would violate the letter and spirit of the Amendments. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, together with Kenneth Blackwell of the Liberty University School of Law and Kenneth Klukowski of the American Civil Rights Union, listed a number of protuberant reasons in The Wall Street Journal (January 5) of why the Obama/Reid/Pelosi bill is unconstitutional. To wit: Under the power to “regulate commerce” clause, commerce by citizens may be prohibited by Congress and states alike, but Congress is constrained from mandating that citizens engage in commerce -- in this instance, buying health insurance. Clearly, unconstitutional! Why, we never heard of Congress compelling citizens to purchase “green cars” or “clean” energy! “The ‘general welfare’ [Article I, Section 8] clause identifies the purpose for which Congress may spend money. The individual mandate tells Americans how they must spend the money Congress has not taken from them and has nothing to do with congressional spending.” Clearly, unconstitutional! Debate on Congressional spending is out of bounds! The purchase of Ben Nelson’s crucial sixtieth vote was made possible by demonstrably unfair and illegal chicanery. Clearly, unconstitutional! Chicanery never has besmirched the Senate before now! The health care bill requires individual states to establish “such things as benefit exchanges, which will require state legislation and regulations,” not funded, however, by the federal government. If the states do not comply, the “Secretary of Health and Human Services will step in and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government.” Clearly, unconstitutional! And where in this opinion piece are individual rights mentioned? Nowhere. Where is the moral argument against the government’s initiation of force -- by state governments or by Washington? Nowhere. What is the crux of Hatch’s argument? The federal government may exercise only the powers granted to it or denied to the states. The states may do everything else. This is why, for example, states may have authority to require individuals to purchase health insurance but the federal government does not. It is also the reason states may require that individuals purchase car insurance before choosing to drive a car, but the federal government may not require all individuals to purchase health insurance. And who is to protect us from our protectors? Who is to object to the states invoking their “states’ rights” and imposing the same powers and regulations as Hatch objects to Congress assuming? On these points, Hatch is mute. He says nothing in what is a paramount moral issue. His argument, and others similar to his, are clearly irrelevant. The Constitution already contains amendments that obliterate the Bill of Rights and any statement of enumerated powers. He is a poor player, strutting and fretting, sounding furious, but signifying nothing. In a September 16, 2009 press release about Utah governor Gary Herbert‘s participation in a governors‘ conference on health care reform, Hatch reveals his true colors. He protests the health care legislation then being concocted by the House, claiming that “individual states…have a greater understanding of the specific needs of our citizens,” and that it was “unfair” for strong states to be forced to subsidize the costs of weaker states. Although Democrats and the administration are still trying to force a path of more government, more spending and more taxes, it is not too late start over and come up with a truly bipartisan and fiscally responsible solution that we can all be proud of. Taking a state-based approach is a great place to start. Clearly, the Hatch arguments against the health care legislation are irrelevant. Utah already has a semi-fascist “health exchange.” One can only wonder if the irrelevancy is rooted in power-envy or is simply resentment of the prospect of the federal government stealing Utah’s thunder. Compare the picayune constitutional arguments proffered by opponents of the health care and event the cap-and-trade legislation with this brief description of how the Tenth Amendment came into being: After ratification of the Constitution, the anti-Federalists continued to voice their concerns over the powers of the federal government. In the course of the states’ ratification debates over the Constitution, states had recommended over two hundred amendments, which fell into two categories: 1) amendments aimed at limiting the powers of the federal government, and 2) amendments that protected individual rights. After ratification of the Constitution, it was feared that the anti-Federalists might garner enough support to call for a second constitutional convention, so James Madison, then Virginia’s representative in Congress, undertook the drafting of a bill of rights. The Tenth Amendment Center contains a treasure trove of information on the history, significance, and role of the Tenth Amendment in American politics. James Madison, when the Constitution was being debated and was up for ratification by the states, answered the Anti-Federalist demands for provisions in the Constitution that would limit Congressional powers, by proposing some forty-two amendments, which were whittled down to twenty-seven, the first ten of which became the Bill of Rights. (The Twenty-seventh Amendment, which prohibited Congress from giving its representatives pay raises or cuts before the beginning of a new term, was ratified as recently as 1992.) He intended the Tenth Amendment to be broad and clear enough to constrain Congress from violating the first nine. But, a succession of Supreme Court decisions in the 19th and 20th centuries that sanctioned government expansion of powers so dulled the knife of the Tenth that it became extraneous verbiage -- much as the Constitution has become to a venal and avaricious Congress. Couple that with the diminished character, intellectual moribundity, and congenital dishonesty of the majority of Congress’s members, past and present, and it is easy to grasp why America is in the state it is in. There are signs that many states will revolt against any health care legislation passed by Congress. These movements are a direct consequence of the Tea Parties of 2009. One obvious question is why the advocates of this species of opposition believe that state governments are imbued with the wisdom and competency Congress clearly lacks. But these same states will need to swallow their guilt because, before now, they never stringently opposed or prohibited Congress from assuming undelegated, unenumerated, or unconstitutional powers, and were only too glad to plead for federal assistance. It may be too late to start now. The issue, nevertheless, is one of force or compulsion, regardless of the level of government. This is the fundamental issue on which any constitutional argument should be based. The Constitution was drawn up to guarantee individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. All else is merely dumb show and noise. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog As the last post for 2009, I reprise a perennial aggravation. Reading a volume of Albert J. Nock’s essays, The Disadvantages of Being Educated, I came upon a footnote in one article, “A Study in Manners” (1925), in which Nock echoed my own impatient frustration with the promiscuous -- indeed, slatternly -- usage of the term democracy. I wish to complain against the common and culpable use of the term democracy as a synonym for republicanism. Time and again one hears persons who should know better, talk about democracy in this country, for example, as if something like it really existed here. They discuss “democracy on trial,” “democracy’s weakness,” and so on, when it is perfectly clear that they refer only to the political system known properly as republicanism. The fact is that republicanism, which is a system theoretically based on the right of individual self-expression in politics, has as yet done but little for democracy, and that democracy is less developed in some republican countries, as France and the United States, than in some others, like Denmark, whose political system is nominally non-republican.* Later, in a 1926 essay, Nock makes the piquant observation: Those who speak of the United States as a democracy…are misusing language most ludicrously, for it is no such thing, never was, and was never intended to be. The Fathers of the Republic were well aware of the difference between a republic and a democracy, and it is no credit to the intelligence of their descendents that the two are now almost invariably confused.** In that same volume, Nock expanded on the fundamental differences between democracy and republicanism in “Life, Liberty, and…” (1935), and offered an explanation for why Thomas Jefferson purportedly omitted a key term, property, from the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. It was, Nock avers, because Jefferson and the drafting committee assumed that “pursuit of happiness” included the omitted term: “The pursuit of happiness” is of course an inclusive term. It covers property rights, because obviously if a person’s property is molested, his pursuit of happiness is interfered with. But there are many interferences which are not aimed at specific property rights; and in so wording the Declaration as to cover all these interferences, Mr. Jefferson immensely broadened the scope of political theory -- he broadened the idea of what government is for.*** Most of the Founders agreed on that point, that “pursuit of happiness” necessarily included the right to property. Such private property, Joseph Warren noted in 1775, is natural and necessary to an individual‘s freedom: That personal freedom is the natural right of every man, and that property, or an exclusive right to dispose of what he has honestly acquired by his own labor, necessarily arises therefrom, are truths which common sense has placed beyond the reach of contradiction. (Omission of the term property from the phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can be linked to the omission of an entire paragraph from Jefferson’s original draft, which castigates George III for condoning and encouraging the slave trade. The paragraph, and possibly even the term property from the phrase, were dropped from the final version to oblige the sensibilities of the southern delegates to the Continental Congress, many of whom were slave owners and who regarded slaves as real property. Northern delegates could not countenance the inclusion of slaves as property. Jefferson, though a slave owner, was an advocate of the abolition of slavery. But, this is entirely another issue.) It is apparent that Jefferson’s phrasing is not broad enough for modern politicians and political commentators to admit. Or perhaps it is so broad it is beyond their cognitive abilities to grasp, just as the perception of a mountain is impossible to the epistemology of an ant. It is unfortunate that the term was omitted, because its retention might have saved the nation much grief, turmoil and bloodshed. The force and sanctity of its presence in the Declaration might have carried over into the Constitution itself, and served as a check on the ambitions and usurpations of several generations of elected altruists, humanitarians, and other property thieves. But, recall all the cretinous explanations by Senators and Congressmen of the power of Congress to establish socialized medicine. I have often remarked in this column that a republic, as the Founders intended it, denotes a form of government created to defend, uphold and advance individual rights. It is a system of the rule of law, of law enacted to protect individual rights. It is what the Constitution, as originally written and sans its statist (or interfering) amendments, is all about. But the term republic is as foreign to our representatives as the term wendigo. In fact, Congress can be said to be currently populated by wendigos, and the White House occupied by an exalted vampire. They all creep stealthily and carefully by night, garbed in the protective hood and cloak of democracy, intent on drawing blood and feasting on the substance of their victims. Should the light of reason catch them off guard, they have nothing to say that means anything or that is meant to mean anything. Democracy, whether pure or directly participatory (as in ancient Greece or New England), or via national plebiscite, is simply mob rule. Politely defined: majority rule. We have what could be said to be a representative government, but what is the chief function of our representatives, as opposed to their perceived function? Their actual, intended function was to serve as guardians of individual rights. Their perceived function, at least for the last century or so, is to patronize the real or imagined wants of the majority and to deliver them through coercive and confiscatory legislation. With an Augean assist from public education, modern politicians and their allies in academia and the press have, over the course of a few generations, put over the fallacy that the term republic is synonymous with democracy, and so republic, to the ignorant and the ignorance-mongers, means majority rule, too. However, they prefer to emphasize the term democracy, because the other term has too many unsettling connotations, and the last thing our night-stalkers wish to do is cause uneasiness and curiosity among the ruled and the beguiled. As Congress has ably demonstrated over the last two months, it is not representative in the first sense. It is dedicated to delivering imagined wants or “needs” to an electorate it claims demands them but has, at the same time, ignored that electorate. Democracy, Congress has demonstrated, begets tyranny. John Adams, as have many others, warned against the temptation of democracy: [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy; such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable [abominable] cruelty of one or a very few.**** This is an apt description of the current state of affairs. Americans are beginning to wake up to the fact that they have been the object of the capricious will of a president and Congress, and are expected to pay without protest, as a matter of duty, for the cruelties, frauds, vanities, and wanton pleasures of a powerful few. Political anarchy has been inaugurated, with politicians and their beneficiaries, heedless of or indifferent to the rumblings among the electorate, are scrambling to loot or defraud Americans of the last of their rights and wealth. Numerous fine essays have been written by contemporaries such as Walter Williams on the differences between republicanism and democracy, and what those differences can mean to productive Americans. Perhaps, in 2010, we shall see the concrete differences described by Williams, Adams, Jefferson and so many others. The Tea Parties of 2009, hopefully, were but a prelude to a determined campaign to recover the republic created by the Founders. *Albert J. Nock, “A Study in Manners,” in The Disadvantages of Being Educated and Other Essays (Tampa: Hallberg Publishing Corp., 1996), p. 50. **Ibid.,” Towards a New Quality-Product,” pp. 67-68. ***Ibid., “Life, Liberty, and…” p. 29 ****John Adams, The Papers of John Adams, Robert J. Taylor, editor (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977), Vol. I, p. 83, from "An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, with the Author's Comment in 1807," written on August 29, 1763. First published by John Adams in 1807. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog No better justice to President Barack Hussein Obama’s boast in the Washington Post of his political achievements can be done than to adapt portions of the Declaration of Independence to the subject of his accomplishments. Not all of the charges against George III in 1776 listed in Jefferson’s masterpiece are applicable. This charge sheet can also be leveled at Congress. I include only those offences which can be annotated. Call it not a parody, but a serious, appropriate, and well-deserved iteration. The history of the present President of the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. With artful disingenuousness, he promised Marxist tyranny during his campaign. Few believed him. Others were dumb-founded. Many applauded him, and voted for him. And the collectivists in Congress encouraged him, at the same time counseling him to soften his rhetoric so that it would seduce the impressionable and confuse but not frighten Americans. And, with the cooperation of his allies in Congress, he is delivering Tyranny. No one should be confused now. His politics are exclusively and demonstrably Marxist in theory and practice. Marx advocated dictatorship. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. Notwithstanding his professed concern for the “public good,” Obama has not advanced it by refusing to recommend the repeal of all fiat regulatory law. Instead, he has acted to expand the scope of such law over virtually every private and public action of American citizens, injuring the “public good” while benefiting those who have a vested interest in such expansion. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. What else to call his many czars? How many committees will be created by the health care bill recently passed by the Senate, after it is merged with the House version next month? Their purpose is to harass Americans and eat out not only their wealth, but their rights, to make Americans deferential and dependent on their wishes and commands. Defenders and advocates of the health care bills assert that they have been created from the best of intentions. But any intention that relies on force, compulsion, extortion, fraud, lies, and the confiscation of wealth and property necessarily results in evil. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: What are those “standing armies” today? The Internal Revenue Service and the Department of the Treasury. The Federal Reserve system. The DEA, the SEC, the ATF, the TSA, the FCC, Homeland Security, and the rest of the alphabet soup of federal power wielders. Not one of which was created with the consent of the governed or of any state legislature. Are they not indemnified against responsibility for their destructive intrusions, powers, and actions? Are they not independent of and superior to what remains of legitimate civil power? Is not the health care legislation “pretended,” that is, beyond the clearly worded constraints on government power in the Constitution? In point of fact, is not all welfare and regulatory legislation -- whether acts of Congress or recent amendments to the Constitution -- merely “pretended” legislation, assented to by Obama and all his statist predecessors in office? He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. Has Obama not recently signed a law exempting Interpol from American law, thus subjecting Americans to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution? Was not one of the ends of the Copenhagen climate change conference this month to nullify American sovereignty in favor “global” law and to make Americans subject to alien and especially European jurisdiction? Was not Obama willing to surrender American sovereignty in the name of “global governance”? For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: This goes without saying. A “governed” people has no power or right of consent. He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. Obama has become the Government, and, as with any ambitious dictator or tyrant, any and every person who opposes his powers and policies would necessarily be outside of his protection, because he has implicitly or actively waged war against such Americans. The Constitution was created to protect individuals from arbitrary power, wielded by either the president or Congress. Obama is acting in an extra-legal and extra-constitutional capacity. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. Obama has excited class warfare amongst Americans -- the poor against the rich, the claimers of entitlements against those in the productive sector who must pay for them, the retired elderly against the working young, the incompetent and lazy against the able and the ambitious -- and has endeavored to perpetuate this warfare by stealthily conscripting members of ACORN, the Service Employees International Union, and affiliated organizations such as MoveOn, in addition to his swarm of czars, as the enforcers to harass and intimidate the middle class and the rich. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. On the “high seas” of the Internet, Obama encouraged Americans to report to him “fishy” information or rumors about health care reform expressed or repeated by other Americans, and asked them inform on their friends, brethren, and fellow citizens. In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Through the summer and fall of 2009, hundreds of thousands of concerned and outraged Americans participated in dozens of massive “tea parties”; packed the “town halls” to express their displeasure with and opposition to health care legislation and other government invasions of their rights; caused dozens to Congressmen to sputter incoherently in reply to frank questions, or even to flee the confrontation; signed countless petitions to Obama and members of Congress to stop spending, legislating, and destroying their lives, livelihoods, and children’s futures; sent hundreds of thousands of faxes and made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to their senators and representatives, and even to the White House, to express their opposition -- but their efforts were answered with indifference, insouciance and repeated injury, by Obama and by members of Congress. Obama himself has not dared to face Americans or the press without “papering the hall” with friendly cliques, courtiers, and shills, in rigged and contrived “town hall meetings” and press conferences, and allowed no questions to be asked of him that would require honest, forthright, and revealing answers. His vaunted policy of “transparency,” given the facts of his means and ends, has necessarily been one of habitual obfuscation and brazen dissemblance. A President, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Need any more be said about the character and agenda of Barack Hussein Obama? A free people does not need, nor does it seek, a ruler. Which are Americans to be in the coming years? A free people confident that their president is acting in their interests as free men? Or a people that needs a ruler? Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog If one ever wondered what it might have been like to be a well-read, rational, outspoken, and angry Roman before the barbarian hordes rode in to sack the city, perhaps living in the present would come closest to the trepidation. Few of your countrymen assemble with you in the Temple of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, to discuss how best to throw back the approaching barbarians and to persuade an oblivious and indifferent Senate to stop its costly, spendthrift and foolish policy of bread and circuses for the populace. The Senate is deaf to wisdom, divided as it is into two camps: those who conduct pray-ins and make offerings to Jupiter, king of the gods, and who claim that Rome is in peril because the people have abandoned him and lost faith in him; and those who worship at the Temple of Ceres, goddess of the earth, whom they claim has told them that bountiful harvests can be had year-round by seeding the soil with confiscated salt. They assure themselves and an anxious populace that this way everyone can be fed and the barbarians bought off with endless cartloads of consumables. America -- and by implication, Western civilization -- is the object of assault by three of its chief enemies, two of them alien to its shores, and one domestic: the Islamic jihad, European and international malice, and an administration and Congress determined to eradicate freedom. All three are bent on the conquest of this country. America is not to be hunted, caught and dismembered by anything as fierce as a lion or tiger -- or even by a barbarian. Rather, all three of its enemies resemble snarling jackals and hyenas vying for possession of the cadaver. If an animal fable does not succeed in conjuring up an image of the scenario, imagine it in terms of Vlad the Impaler’s blood-drenched contest with the butchering Ottomans over who would rule the peasants. In Copenhagen, the apparent enmity between prospective looters was such that they could not agree on how to “fairly” divide the carcass, even though the carcass’s representatives were there to surrender it. Instead of a binding “communiqué,” the conference produced a “note” or an “accord.” A Daily Telegraph article describes the degrading contest between the looters and the to-be-looted over drafts of the document: There was one called "Outline." Then there was a version called "Copenhagen Accord" with major changes. Then another, with a note saying "Take 2" on it, then another with the same title. Some were handwritten. Key demands of the environmentalists were off the table. Then they were back on again. And then finally, as the day, for some delegates, entered its 35th hour, there was what President Barack Obama's spokesman called a "meaningful deal". The deal contained almost nothing that environmentalists had hoped for and did not even meet the modest goals that world leaders set themselves at the beginning of the fortnight. Before the summit started, they had already abandoned their original hope of a legally-binding treaty at Copenhagen. In the end, the only substantial thing the looters got for their pains was a $100 billion commitment from the U.S. to help “developing” (read perpetually, never-to be-"developed" poor) nations control their greenhouse gas emissions, first announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and then by Obama, who had to leave the conference early because the winter in Copenhagen was so severe. Appropriately, he flew straight into a blizzard that ground Washington D.C. to a halt. Blame it on “global-warming” and the two-degree Celsius rise in temperatures. That is also the non-binding limit pledged by “developed” nations. Liberal columnist Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph “sort of “ gets about a Copenhagen climate treaty serving as the establishment of a world government (read United Nations) that trumps national sovereignty. She agrees that such a treaty requires the surrender of national sovereignty. But she won’t let go of the necessity to “do something” about “climate change,” so she wanders around in a fog of imponderables exuded by unexamined fallacies and premises, and wonders what’s next. She writes: Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate. Of course. But consent is not in his lexicon. President Barack Obama doesn’t believe in the “will of the people,” but in the triumph of his own “will.” He will concede the “will of the people” only if it reflects a tolerance by the people for being indentured servants of the state to serve collectivist ends. Then it would be in concurrence with his own “will.” This is also the policy adhered to by the Democrats in Congress. Never mind the will of the people, so massively demonstrated this year in Washington and in all the major cities: the people shall have government-mandated health insurance, whether or not they want it. Besides, constitutional scholars, such as Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, say that Congress can act to preserve and promote the “health” and “well-being” of Americans, because she and other delusional Congressional interpreters of the Constitution can read the invisible ink in the document. She is of the “elect,” and has that special sight not shared by the peasants. Another major contributing problem is the idea of “democracy.” Some of the brightest critics of the American political system employ this term haphazardly and loosely. Democracy means: mob or majority rule. It is not synonymous with republic, which is what the Founders created to promote liberty and restrain government power. They recognized the principle of individual rights to life and property, to freedom of speech, and the right to defend those rights against violators foreign and domestic, with arms, if necessary. The only principle recognized in mob rule is that there are no principles to uphold, defend or preserve. If the majority develops a dislike for “excessive incomes,” or smoking, or obesity or “global warming,” or whatever other bugbear some rabble-rousing fraudster or demagogue manages to work the people into a lather about, then the name of democracy is invoked and legislative action can be taken. Too often, however, the “majority” is fictive and represented by noisy, hired mobs or by big-budget lobbies on a campaign to punish the objects of their hatred in the name of humanitarianism. Central and South American and African delegates to the Copenhagen conference, speaking as poor losers for their slave-driving dictator bosses, dismissed the whole affair and its non-binding "accord” as “undemocratic.” On the anti-climatic climate conference, Daley notes that: Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational "legally binding agreements", what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous "democratic deficit" of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro-bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run. Nowhere to run -- except into the custody of the Green Gestapo. The option of simply “going Galt” is looking more and more attractive as a means of withdrawing one’s consent. Either that, or a genuine revolt or revolution -- not just against a vulpine Congress and carnivorous international looters, but against the whole notion of “democracy” in the name of reason and individual rights. It would be ironic, in contrast to the Southern states seceding from the Union in the name of a state’s right to countenance slavery, if America seceded from the United Nations and a world government in the name of freedom and in the cause of abolishing it. And saw removed from office every conniving, corrupt, oath-violating politician, and replaced them all with individuals who valued freedom and acted to defend and uphold life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. In 2010, no matter what Congress and Obama do or fail to do to subject this nation to their “will,” Americans will be thronging again inside and outside the Temple of Minerva, as they did in 2009. They will be exercising their rights to freedom of assembly and to freedom of speech. Nothing can stop them except the totalitarians in our midst and beyond our borders. Nothing can stop them except the initiation of force by our government, and the collectivists in the current administration are just itching to act. If armed goons and thugs break up these new “town halls” and arrest or punish their organizers, we can only hope that perhaps Americans will get the point better than did Janet Daley. Or Obama, or Harry Reid, or Nancy Pelosi. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Search through any of President Barack Obama‘s speeches, and buried under the glittering, worthless excelsior of opaque platitudes, silicic bromides and anemic banalities, one will find a pair or more of statements that mean something. They will mean something if one parses the statements armed with a knowledge of the man and of the power of words. Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on December 10th in Oslo, Norway was an easy rummage. Of course, any one of his speeches on America’s role and place in history and in the world has been a combination of an arrogant but rehearsed apologetic humility and a verbal flagellation of his own country for simply existing. It is these little nuggets of opalescence that win him the most applause from his friends in the audience, the ones who love to see America defeated, humbled, and knocked down to their own size -- the better to feed off of it through foreign aid and taxation. Following the formulaic speechmaking of, say, the High Exalted Mystic Ruler of the Royal Order of Raccoons Lodge, Obama, addressing the Nobel committee, softened up his audience with a self-deprecatory reference to “the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.” Which was intended as a joke about his not having done anything in international affairs to have earned him the Prize. It was awarded him because the committee was smitten by his campaign rhetoric of “hope and change” -- hoping that they were right about Obama that he was serious about dismantling the United States as a free country and changing it to one of their liking. They read him correctly. That is precisely what he is doing, although resistance and opposition to the realization of that hope and change in the American population must have the distinguished members of the committee biting their nails or wringing their hands. Here is one of Obama’s nuggets: The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty and self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud. “Billions” have been lifted from poverty? How? Only in free or semi-free countries. But, “billions” have also been kept in dependent penury through foreign aid from the West. A wall? Which wall? The Berlin Wall, which, when it fell, released millions from the kind of existence imposed on them by the kind of totalitarian, communist regime he wishes to implement here in the U.S. Note that he avoided the term “communist.“ There are several communists in his administration, along with creatures who are not communists but who have their own authoritarian agendas. As for liberty, self-determination, equality and the rule of law, these are ideals which, in reality, Obama is haltingly obstructing or nullifying. The fortitude and foresight of presumably the Founders? To Obama, these are legacies to be frittered away or abandoned wholesale in the name of “social justice.” Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Institute focuses on Obama’s remarks about war and the use of force. Obama endorses, as did George W. Bush, the policy of “just wars”: And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence. And if the civilians sanction the invasion of another country? Are they not culpable? Do they not produce the weapons and materiel that enables their armies to act? Do they not abet the violence visited on another nation? If they work in an aggressor nation’s war industries, they are just as legitimate targets as the tanks, planes, ships and munitions they help to produce. Without them, the tanks, planes and ships come to a stop and their guns cease firing. Journo, however, discusses the absolutely perilous and wasteful futility of fighting a “just war” in Iraq and Afghanistan, a policy which has hamstrung American military might and caused thousands of American deaths. I endorse the concept of “proportionate” force. If Somali pirates hijack a Western ship or yacht and hold its passengers and crew at gunpoint for ransom, then every Somali base should be reduced to rubble and every mother ship and speedboat turned into floating debris. “Collateral” casualties should not be a concern. If “home-grown” or foreign terrorists commit another murderous atrocity here or abroad that kills Americans, then Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- the fundraisers and enablers of terrorism -- should be reduced to rubble swiftly, without mercy, and without concern for “collateral“ casualties. Those are “proportionalities” that would ensure the security of this country, as well as Israel‘s. These countries have, after all, declared war on the United States. Retribution is long overdue. Another nugget, allied to Obama’s remarks on war and force, bears examination. Quoting Martin Luther King Jr. on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. King was wrong. War has resulted in a permanent peace between the U.S. and many nations that were the aggressors (e.g., Britain finally early in the 19th century, Mexico, Germany, Japan). Passive non-violence, however, in the face of the initiation of force by aggressors -- and especially when non-violence is adopted as a policy in hopes that capitulation and compromise will pacify an enemy -- is not moral. It is the abandonment of the morality and of the certainty that one has a right to exist and a right to oppose the initiation of force with retaliatory force. "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and I will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." When Obama stated that “as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King’s and Gandhi’s] examples alone,” his reluctance and regret were palpable. He is not preserving, protecting, or defending the Constitution, and by implication, this nation. He is deliberately violating the Constitution as much as any foreign aggressor. He is violating the oath of office he took on the steps of the Capitol building; he had every intention of violating it before taking that oath. It explains his every action since assuming office, and the nearly three dozen “czars” (and counting) he has empowered to rule the country as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and George W. Bush could never have imagined. The violence Obama does not dwell on is the violence of government force, which is behind every act of his administration to date. He is not a “living testimony to the moral force of non-violence.” He is living testimony to the immorality of force directed against other Americans. Virtually every president since at least Woodrow Wilson’s time has proposed or endorsed employing force against his fellow Americans. Obama, however, if he is to stay the course of his intention of “transforming” America of a kinder, gentler, “socially just” America, must surpass FDR’s incursions into the economy and lives of its citizens. So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions." A gradual evolution of human institutions. A “gradual evolution of human institutions” to ensure a “more practical, more attainable peace”? Such as the corrupt United Nations? Its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.’s front man and walking delegate for world governance? Obama has also asserted that a declaration of war by a government on its own citizens -- as he has declared since assuming office -- is necessary to reach the “attainable peace” of across the board statism in all matters. Obama’s socialist (or communist) premises are more explicitly stated in this passage: It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can't aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within. Food, water, medicine, shelter, and education provided how? By whom? By indentured servants working side by side in chain gangs for the good of all? Food prices have risen because farms once devoted to growing crops are now growing bio-fuels for the “green revolution.” Medicine Obama proposes to nationalize completely. Shelter has been subsidized by government programs since the end of WWII. Education has become the near monopoly of collectivist propagandists from kindergarten through college. That is the rot that has eaten away at the American ideals of individual rights and the separation of liberty from government force. And that's why helping farmers feed their own people -- or nations educate their children and care for the sick -- is not mere charity. It's also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement -- all of which will fuel more conflict for decades. That is why, to Obama, pouring billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money into primitive sinkholes is not “mere charity.” It is a moral imperative, not to be questioned or doubted by Americans. Otherwise, there will be “conflicts,“ in addition to droughts, famine, and mass displacement. Those who question or doubt it are less than human. And Obama has telegraphed his intentions when he attends the Copenhagen climate change conference. There is “little scientific dispute” that the global warming “science” is sound? That is a direct reference to Climategate, because believing in the discredited science -- never mind the fraudulent data and the conspiracy of scientists to suppress or destroy data which contradict the “science” -- will give Americans a chance to prostrate themselves in further selfless service to the world, as penance for existing and as a duty to those whom America has purportedly “harmed.” Of course, Obama cannot concede that it is governments that are responsible for droughts, famines and mass displacement. He rejects the idea that only those nations which are free enough do not cause these events within their own borders. Stalin believed in the soundness of the total collectivization of agriculture. He believed in it so much that he was willing to murder or starve to death millions of Russian peasants who did not believe in it. Everything else Obama has ever said about “defending my nation” is just so much dissembling rhetoric. It is glittering, worthless excelsior. Actions speak louder than words, and Obama’s actions belie every fog-bound, patriotic-sounding assertion he has ever uttered. In 1925, H.L. Mencken wrote in defense of liberty: I believe that any invasion of it is immensely dangerous to the commonweal -- especially when that invasion is alleged to have a moral purpose. No conceivable moral purpose is higher than the right of the citizen to think to think whatever he pleases to think, and to carry on his private life without interference by others. If that right is taken away, then no moral system remains; all we have is a prison system. This begins to prevail in the United States.* Obama has made it clear that he intends to take away that right, and to institute a prison system. He is merely the heir presumptive of the political trends in this country dating back at least a century and a quarter. It is time for Americans to oppose his intentions with massive civil disobedience if, for example, the health-care and cap-and-trade bills are sent from Congress to his desk for his signature -- before they are obliged to become rioting inmates. *From “Autobiographical Notes, 1925,” in Notes on Democracy, by H.L. Mencken (1926). New York: Dissident Books, 2009, p. 10. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Global warming is a religion, not a science. The prospect of governing every action of every individual on the planet in the name of staving off “catastrophic climate change,” and charging especially the U.S. a fee for impoverishing it, makes belief in global warming as tenacious and anti-reason as the literal interpretation of the Bible is to a fundamentalist or evangelical holly-roller. The fraudsters and reivers have come too close to their goal of “world governance” to concede not only error, but the lies that sustained that error, as well. They want to rule, or at least see men ruled by others. Global warming advocates are “creationists” because, in their view, man is the exclusive “creator” of the potential -- nay, they say the inevitability -- of catastrophic climate change. It would not be irrelevant, then, to preface comments on Climategate by relating another instance of a furor instigated by religious creationists over a scientific finding, in this instance, the unnecessary carping over the discovery of the Java Man. The following discussion is from the blog site Creationist Arguments: Java Man. Many creationists have claimed that Java Man, discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1893, was "bad science". Gish (1985) says that Dubois found two human skulls at nearby Wadjak at about the same level and had kept them secret; that Dubois later decided Java Man was a giant gibbon; and that the bones do not come from the same individual. Most people would find Gish's meaning of "nearby" surprising: the Wadjak skulls were found 65 miles (104 km) of mountainous countryside away from Java Man. Similarly for "at approximately the same level": the Wadjak skulls were found in cave deposits in the mountains, while Java Man was found in river deposits in a flood plain (Fezer 1993). Nor is it true, as is often claimed, that Dubois kept the existence of the Wadjak skulls secret because knowledge of them would have discredited Java Man. Dubois briefly reported the Wadjak skulls in three separate publications in 1890 and 1892. Despite being corrected on this in a debate in 1982 and in print (Brace, 1986), Gish has continued to make this claim, even stating, despite not having apparently read Dubois' reports, that they did not mention the Wadjak skulls (Fezer 1993). Lubenow does acknowledge the existence of Dubois' papers, but argues that since they were bureaucratic reports not intended for the public or the scientific community, Dubois was still guilty of concealing the existence of the Wadjak skulls. This is also incorrect; the journals in which Dubois published, although obscure, were distributed in Europe and America, and are part of the scientific literature. They are available in major libraries and have often been referred to by later researchers.. Based on his own theories about how brains had evolved and wishful thinking, Dubois did claim that Java Man was “a gigantic genus allied to the gibbons,” but this was not, as creationists imply, a retraction of his earlier claims that it was an intermediate between apes and humans. Dubois also pointed out that it was bipedal and that its brain size was "very much too large for an anthropoid ape", and he never stopped believing that he had found an ancestor of modern man (Theunissen 1989; Gould 1993; Lubenow 1992). (The creationist organization Answers in Genesis has now abandoned the claim that Dubois dismissed Java Man as a gibbon, and now lists it in their “ Arguments we think creationists should NOT use” web page.) Briefly, Eugene Dubois was as confused about his finding as the religionists were determined that it either was fabricated or that it could be explained away to conform to a literal interpretation of the Bible. And the excerpt above is as tedious a read as pouring over the CRU emails. But, it is worth the effort. One might ask oneself: Why is the author of that excerpt going to the trouble of answering the claims of anti-evidence, anti-reason creationists? Why would any scientist feel compelled to attempt to rebut the absurd claims of mystics? Briefly, because religion is still the default moral code of our time. Incidentally, the “Arguments we think creationists should NOT use” web page bears reading, if not for laughs, then for a glimpse into the art of prevarication that has been employed by Bible thumpers and climate creationists alike. Religion rears its ugly head here in today’s San Francisco Gate article in its defense of “bad science“ exposed. The article is slanted in favor of the believers of anthropogenic global warming. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., the ranking Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said "the documents show systematic suppression of dissenting opinion." True enough. But: Joseph Romm, a physicist and senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the evidence of warming is getting clearer while opponents are "redoubling their disinformation campaign." Read the email exchanges. Are or are not Phil Jones and his colleagues working to suppress data that don’t fit their a priori conclusion that the climate is warming? Does that or does not that constitute a systematic suppression of dissenting opinion, a suppression that included mocking dissenters, denigrating their findings, and even dumping all the raw data? Was it or was not the omission and/or distortion of data an instance of “cherry-picking,” something the new deniers are accusing the skeptics of in regards to the emails themselves? In the face of incontrovertible evidence of doctoring the data to fit a political agenda, are or are not Romm and his allies launching their own disinformation campaign? The scientists from two major research centers, a national think tank and NASA, claimed during a telephone news conference that the e-mail exchanges were taken out of context in an attempt to influence pending greenhouse gas emissions policies….It is, they said, a cynical, blatantly dishonest effort to cloud the fact that the world is now confronting a huge, potentially disastrous climactic shift…."There is so much information that tells us the planet has been warming," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "No independent study is going to come up with anything other than what we've already concluded." Let’s see: Phil Jones recommending that A should be made to look like B, and if anyone questions the validity of that “trick,” tell him to go fly a kite -- this is a statement “taken out of context” by his critics to prove that he is committing fraud and so it shouldn’t be held against him? Aren’t such “tricks” calculated to “influence pending greenhouse gas emission policies”? Charging Jones with manipulating data to suit his bias for “global warming” is not an instance of “cynical, blatant” dishonesty? Instead of examining the surviving, adulterated data or even the statements in the emails, the “climate creationist” establishment resorts to casting aspersions on the motives of anyone who questions that establishment. Then there is this gem: The scientists dismissed the criticisms Friday as intellectually dishonest distortions by those who seek to discredit global warming for political or business reasons. When scientists talk about "tricks," pointed out several academics, they are often using colloquial jargon that means a method of dealing with a problem. And these “2,500” scientists are not working to advance their own political agenda? They are not intellectually dishonest? They stand to have perpetuated their lucrative research grants, paid for by tax revenues, and that‘s all right? And, the term trick means what it means: a sleight of hand, a work of magic, a cunning action; the meanings are many, but they are all founded on the root concept of deception. Who has been caught distorting the data? Who has been caught deceiving others? Phil Jones and his friends in the CRU. As well as NASA and GISS. And there’s the EPA standing by to enforce the dictates of the Copenhagen Communiqué. We believe in global warming. Ergo, it must be true. Now that’s religion! If it were not for the projected astronomical costs of “combating” global warming, now “climate change” -- neither of which could be “combated” anyway, has anyone ever successfully “combated” a tsunami or a volcanic eruption? -- and the prospect of a massive government expropriation of the economy, this kind of unmitigated dishonesty on the part of politically correct “scientists” would not merit front page news. The “climate creationists” protest too much. They would do themselves a service by taking the Fifth, as their crime boss predecessors did during the Senate organized crime hearings. They should be smart enough to know that anything they say from now on can incriminate them and be used against them. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Welcome to the December 3rd, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand: My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. "About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix. So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up: Burgess Laughlin presents BkRev: Edwin Locke's Study Methods & Motivation posted at Making Progress saying "The theme of this review of Dr. Edwin Locke's book, Study Methods & Motivation, is that everyone -- not only students in formal schools -- who learns through reading or through listening to lectures can improve their results by acquiring more objective methods and stronger motivation in all phases of the learning process." Sylvia Bokor presents A Comment on Rational Egoism posted at Sylvia Bokor Comments. Avi Aharon presents Avi Aharon » Education in the objectivist state of Israel posted at Avi Aharon. Beth Haynes presents Mammograms: The Road to Rationing? posted at Wealth is not the Problem saying "With the recent uproar over one government commission's new recommendations on breast cancer screening, I decided to go to the source. Unsurprisingly, their own report offers no hard evidence which would lead to their conclusions. It all commons down to "Cui bono?"" John McVey presents Concretes and integration in industry posted at John J McVey. Edward Cline presents The IPCC’s Square Pegs and Round Holes at The Rule of Reason, saying "The mushrooming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-University of East Anglia-Climate Research Unit email scandal, dubbed “ClimateGate,” invites satire first, then serious examination." * * * That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog The mushrooming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-University of East Anglia-Climate Research Unit email scandal, dubbed “ClimateGate,” invites satire first, then serious examination. We begin with an excerpt from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. Read it and weep. There have been three other assessments, in 1990, 1995, and 2001. A fifth assessment is being prepared for 2014. What sold the IPCC on the credibility of global warming was the “hockey stick” graph of Al Gore notoriety. The fifth assessment -- if it is ever collated and written -- doubtless will feature baseball bats, the better to knock some sense into a doubting and skeptical public. “The Fourth Working Group I Summary for Policymakers (SPM) was published on February 2, 2007and revised on February 5, 2007 The key conclusions of the SPM were that: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations. Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, although the likely amount of temperature and sea level rise varies greatly depending on the fossil intensity of human activity during the next century (pages 13 and 18). The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%. World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 °C (2.0 and 11.5 °F) during the 21st century (table 3) and that: Sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59 cm (7.08 to 23.22 in) [table 3]. There is a confidence level >90% that there will be more frequent warm spells, heat waves and heavy rainfall. There is a confidence level >66% that there will be an increase in droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme high tides. Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium. Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years.” The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), both U.N. organizations. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the IPCC and former vice president Al Gore. Well, we all know what the Nobel Peace Prize is worth. Ask President Barack Obama, this year’s recipient. The 2007 IPCC report contains and incorporates data cooked up by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), headed by Phil Jones. The CRU bills itself as “widely recognized as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.” As one may see in the IPCC report above, not much global warming or climate change is attributed to natural causes. Less than five percent. The rest of it, according to the report, is all man’s doing. Our activities are warping those natural causes. The qualifier in the report, “natural climatic processes,” presumably exempts the sun from causing or contributing to those processes, provided one concedes that the processes are authentic and have happened or will happen. The only value of any past and future IPCC report, to judge by the unearthed emails, is sensational material for doom-and-gloom science fiction movie producers, who would keep employed many special-effects graphic artists. However, the best source of news about ClimateGate is Climate Depot. Not the mainstream media, which, with Congress and the White House, is doing its best to ignore the scandal. After all, billions and billions of dollars are at stake if the cap-and-trade bill is not passed and if the Copenhagen climate change treaty implodes on its authors. Al Gore and his venal ilk stand to not profit if that happens. Environmentalists, global warming advocates, and the government all have a vested interest in the “truth” of catastrophic climate change. Not to mention car manufacturers and other industries that have either retrofitted their plants or invested in “green” industries to comply with anticipated federal carbon legislation. Think of the billions spent on hybrid cars and florescent light bulbs and solar panels and wind turbines, all contrived to combat non-existent global warming. Poof! It will all have been for naught. So, the economic and political consequences of ClimateGate go far, far beyond the issue of the veracity of a handful of climate scientists. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a division of the National Weather Service, is stammering astonishment that CO2 levels are not only rising, but have nothing to do with global warming, which is not occurring. In fact, CO2 levels rise after temperature increases. The New York Times is “shocked, shocked” that fraud is taking place in climate science. The New York Post ran an article on how school children are being indoctrinated (shall we say, “brainwashed”) about the “reality” of global warming. Asked about ClimateGate, White House “climate advisor” Carol Browner pretended that she had never heard the one about fifty million Frenchmen being as wrong as one. "What am I going to do?" asked Browner. "Side with the couple of naysayers out there, or the 2,500 scientists?" -- who've drunk the Kool-Aid. "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists." For a spot of sanity, listen to Lord Monckton, one of the original “skeptics” and “deniers.” The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, has more or less said that the lies, frauds, and cover-ups will not affect his or the IPCC’s conclusions about global warming. Rajendra Pachauri defended the IPCC in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007.…The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university….Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered. What he did not mention is that the “peer review” process was as rigged as were the data. Papers, findings, and statements by global warming “skeptics” and “deniers” were excoriated and deep-sixed as a mater of covert policy, apparently encouraged by CRU director Phil Jones. Pachauri is concerned with neither the truth nor the lies. Some commentators, including the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the environmental campaigner and Guardian writer George Monbiot, have called on Jones to resign but Pachauri said he did not agree. He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light. Pachauri’s first priority is to get the guy responsible for exposing the fraud and making him look like a fool. However, that “hacker” should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize. He has done the world a service that cannot be matched by any Prize winner in the past. He has uncovered the near pathological obsession of the IPCC and its acolytes with establishing a “world governance” body that would ensure that the world’s population, and in particular that of the U.S., is reduced to the standard of living of men who lived in the Medieval Warm Period so neglected and blanked-out by the global warming harpies. That hacker properly invaded the “privacy” of men on government payrolls or who live off of looted taxes (e.g., Pachauri) who have advanced costly and elaborate junk science to attain a political agenda. (One wishes that another hacker would raid the “private” emails of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman, and their health-care bill allies to see what they think of the trillion-dollar scam they wish to foist on this country.) What is fascinating in a morbid sense is the almost hilarious evasive behavior of Phil Jones and his colleagues at the CRU as they try to fit square pegs into round holes. A Portuguese website, EcoTretas, contains many of the email exchanges between Jones and his co-conspirators as they scramble to counter the invasion of reality and truth-tellers. Many of the damning statements are highlighted by the site host. However, there are two un-highlighted statements that merit special scrutiny. Under the heading, “Fixing the data,” Jones, as long ago as 2000, complains: From: Phil Jones, Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 13:04:24+0000 As all our (Mike, Tom and CRU) all show that the first few centuries of the millennium were cooler than the 20th century, we will come in for some flak from the skeptics saying we’re wrong because everyone knows it was warmer in the Medieval period. We can show why we believe we are correct with independent data from glacial advances and even slower responding proxies, however, what are the chances of putting together a group of a very few borhole [sic] series that are deep enough to get the last 1000 years. Basically trying to head off criticisms of the IPCC chapter, but good science in that we will be rewriting people’s perceived wisdom about the course of temperature change over the past millennium. “Everyone knows it was warmer in the Medieval period.” So, let’s forget it. Omit it from the picture altogether. More important is Jones’s wish to “rewrite people’s perceived wisdom.” Which means: changing reality, or trying to. Which means: committing fraud and deceit. Under the heading, “Wrongdoing,” Jones, five years later, wishes again: From: Phil Jones, Date: Tue Jul 5 15:15:55 2005 If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish. But that damned climate just wouldn’t change for the worse. The data just wouldn’t conform to his wishes. How frustrating! It’s more important to be proved right, than to adhere to and respect the truth that all indicators pointed to global cooling. So, let’s just say that global warming is occurring anyway, that CO2 is running amok, and that we’re the cause, and it’s getting hotter and hotter. Maybe nobody will notice. Repeat it often enough, and it will become true. Lots of friends in the MSM who will chant with us. So the IPCC, Phil Jones, and his fellow Chicken Littles are all learning the hard way that square pegs have never gotten along with round holes. And that skies will not fall on command. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog This is in the way of a correction to my “Fork-Tongued in Shanghai” (November 21), and of a footnote about our fork-tongued Senators as they sanction the groundwork of totalitarianism in this country. This statement is corrected: What Obama said about Sino-American relations in Shanghai is irrelevant here. China is the largest creditor of the U.S., holding about $800 billion in U.S. government securities, perhaps only three times what a health-care bill is estimated to cost over a decade. I subsequently added a comment to the Shanghai post: Last night (November 21) the Washington Post headlined: "Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) this evening secured the 60 votes needed to move an $848 billion health-care reform bill to the Senate floor for debate, clearing the way for amendment deliberations to begin after the Thanksgiving recess." So, this criminally irresponsible and morally evil legislation actually tops the $800 billion in U.S. government securities held by the Chinese government. Of course, there's no way the $800 billion debt can be paid. Now it's going to be $1.6 trillion -- and counting. And counting, indeed. My projection of the debt doubling to $1.6 trillion was literal and quite innocent. Americans for Limited Government's Bill Wilson issued the following statement today: "On Saturday, the Senate voted 60-39 to proceed to the so-called ’public option’ legislation that will cost more than $2 trillion over ten years when fully implemented, ration health care away from seniors, raise the cost of premiums, drive the American people off of private health options, and bankrupt the Treasury.” And counting, again. But, accepting my modest projection of only $1.6 trillion -- and this is exclusive of the billions in expenditure and cost to the economy incurred by whatever other socialist/fascist legislation is incubating in Congress’s collective mind, such as cap-and-trade, and exclusive of the costs of the looting, redistributionist “climate change” treaty President Obama is expected to sign next month in Copenhagen -- the logical question to ask is: How can the U.S. honor its debt to China, and also pay for socialist health care? Where is all this money supposed to come from? Is it the diminishing private, productive sector of the U.S. economy, which would become a mere servant to government debt service? For how long? Captive, command economies and a fettered citizenry produce according to the law of diminishing returns, unless it can siphon off wealth from another economy and benefit from the blood transfusions made possible by semi-free nations. Is this, or is it not, a formula for catastrophic economic collapse? Yes. Will it be an open invitation for dictatorship to “take charge” of a crisis of the government’s making? Yes. The question assumes a frozen, static debt figure, astronomical as it may be. Total U.S. government debt to foreign holders is nearly $3.5 trillion, with China followed by Japan, the United Kingdom and OPEC, in that order. As for the scale of federal indebtedness in all categories, that figure also boggles the imagination. See these Federal Reserve calculations for 2005. These are Alan Greenspan figures and legacy. Economies and human actions are not static. Economies either atrophy or grow. Men flee from atrophying economies -- when they can, when they and their wealth can remove to friendlier economic climes without being arrested and shaken down -- or they create new wealth that allows economies to grow, provided they are not barred from action by fiat law. The Emerson Electric Co. of Chicago is a case in point, cited by The Wire: Washington Insider’s Report. The ALG title for the report is “Atlas Shrugs.” Finally, here is a breakdown of the 60-39 Senate vote on whether or not to “debate” the Senate’s version of the health care bill, also now known as the ReidCare bill, which incorporates all the expropriatory and extortionate provisions and language as the House Pelosi/ObamaCare bill. And then some. The names of the guilty are there for all to see. The “debate” will not proceed on anything as honest as a principle, not even a statist, collectivist one. As happened in the House, it will be in the nature of horse-trading, arm-twisting and sugar-coated corruption instigated by malice-driven humanitarians. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog One might be tempted to pen a dark comedy about it. Don’t bother. President Barack Obama has just added this latest act to his own peculiar satire, authored by his speechwriters and scripted by professional censors. In Shanghai, China to bolster relations between China and the U.S., he appeared in a “town hall” that was as thoroughly rigged as his press conferences and other “town hall” meetings in the U.S. He addressed a group of Chinese government-vetted students and answered eight pre-selected questions from the audience and over the Internet. “You see, freedom of speech in America is not given to the people by the president but is something that the people use to supervise their government and president, to protect themselves.” No, don’t take heart. Obama did not say it. It was said by a Chinese blogger and novelist, Yang Hengjun (on Twitter via a proxy server, because Twitter is blocked in China) in admiration for and agreement with Obama‘s assertion that Americans can criticize their political leaders without fear of reprisal. Hengjun understands what neither Obama nor his White House minions and departmental appointees do not: that a free press and free speech can oppose, criticize, and even check the depredations of government. Hengjun understood that freedom of speech is a right that originates in individuals, and is not a privilege or right bestowed by a government on a nation’s citizens. What Obama said about Sino-American relations in Shanghai is irrelevant here. China is the largest creditor of the U.S., holding about $800 billion in U.S. government securities, perhaps only three times what a health-care bill is estimated to cost over a decade. China is not going to sign any climate change treaty next month in Oslo that would oblige it to cut back on CO2 emissions, and so agree to economic suicide, no matter how much Obama “prods“ the super creditor. Nor is it going to cease censoring its press or the Internet, it is never going to cease suppressing freedom of speech. China is a totalitarian country. It hosted the visit of a nascent totalitarian, President Obama. It allowed him to visit to amuse him, and to take his measure, just as Europe and the Mideast allowed him to visit, to make his speeches, and to take his measure. While Obama and his team indulged in wishful thinking, the Chinese government called all the shots. The particulars of the town hall, including whether it could even be called one, were the subject of delicate negotiations between the White House and the Chinese up to the last minute. It remained unclear, for instance, whether - and how broadly - it would be broadcast on television and how much of a hand the central government had in choosing those allowed to question the U.S. president. Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama would call at random on several of those in the audience, to be made up of hundreds of students hand-picked by the department heads of Shanghai-area universities, and would also answer questions solicited in advance by the White House from "various sources on the Internet." What Obama said in China about freedom and speech and censorship, however, is far more relevant here, because it bodes ill for the future of freedom of speech in America. In answer to a question about the “Great Firewall of China” -- the Chinese government’s absolute control over what is said and seen on the Internet -- a question asked, incidentally, not by a Chinese student, but by the U.S. ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, he replied: "I'm a big supporter of non-censorship," Obama said. "I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged." Obama is a “big supporter of non-censorship”? What is “non-censorship”? Is it an awkward grasp of the concept of freedom of speech, or an inverted synonym? No. It cannot even have an antonym. If, to paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary definition of censor, censorship is the “inspection of all books, journals, dramatic pieces, etc., before publication, to secure that they shall contain nothing immoral, heretical, or offensive to the government,” then non-censorship is an anti-concept. It is the “not censoring” of speech in any venue or form. That is, it is the staying of the government’s hand to censor it. It is the implicit acknowledgement that a government has the power and the will to censor, but chooses not to, for the moment. It is an Orwellian anti-concept possible only to a power-seeker at home with censoring and non-censoring. Obama did not say that he is a “big supporter of freedom of speech” for two reasons: It would have been offensive to the Chinese totalitarian government -- and because he does not believe in it. Obama stated that he recognized that “different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet -- or unrestricted Internet access -- is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged. He avoided the term “freedom of speech” again, and likened it to “tradition,” or custom. Message to China’s communist/fascist rulers: You have a long tradition of censorship and suppression of speech. On the other hand, we in the United States have a long “tradition” of freedom of speech. So, it’s just a difference of tradition. I won’t make a distinction between our traditions and yours, nor judge your regime. And for how long does Obama intend our free Internet to be a “source of strength”? Not for long. Which brings us to his term “unrestricted Internet access,” a euphemism for one of Obama’s key goals, “net neutrality,” or, government control and censorship of the Internet. He promised to promote and enact such controls two years ago on MTV. Net neutrality, in a nutshell, is “the idea that broadband operators shouldn't be allowed to block or degrade Internet content and services--or charge content providers an extra fee for speedier delivery or more favorable placement.” Suppose broadband operators want to block or degrade Internet content they do not wish to carry? Suppose customers do not mind paying extra for speedier delivery and more favorable placement? Well, that is beside the point, according to Obama. Like newspapers and other venues of speech and entertainment, broadband operators are regarded as “public servants” serving the public by providing it information and entertainment, and should not be permitted to discriminate against any comers. Moreover, no one should be permitted to discriminate in their favor, that is, exercise his freedom of choice. All must be “equal.” To better concretize the issue: State-mandated smoking bans in restaurants, bars, businesses and other venues -- in some localities, even in one’s own residence or in a public park -- are enacted to favor an alleged majority of non-smokers for purported health reasons. This is the literal, partial seizure of private property for the benefit of one group. Call it the selective application of the power of eminent domain, in answer to the proclaimed “right” of non-smokers to drink or dine or work in a smoke-free, “un-degraded” environment, in defiance of the fact that they drink, dine or work in an environment that is someone else‘s property. Business owners and proprietors nominally own their property or enterprises -- but only for as long as they submit to the ban. They are not allowed to discriminate between smokers and non-smokers -- call it “patron neutrality,” with a patron forbidden to light up lest he offend someone or “endanger” someone’s health -- and all customers must be reduced to the same state of being non-smokers. Extrapolate that phenomenon to the Internet -- substitute bars, restaurants and businesses with broadband operators -- now call them providers, “neutral” bureaucratic jargon for anyone or any business that creates and offers a “service,” a term that has spread like a corrosive into virtually every realm of trade -- and it is easy to see what the consequences will be: a government policed Internet, just like the Chinese one. One will hear only what the government wishes one to hear, read, or watch. Obama may have been hoping to set a personal example for China's leaders when he said he believes that free discussion, including criticism that may be annoying to him, [that] makes him "a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear." Obama has made it eminently clear that he would rather not risk hearing opinions that conflict with his own. Recall his efforts to enlist Americans, at the height of the nationwide Tea Parties, to report “fishy” opinions about him and his administration directly to the White House. Remember that he wishes to compel radio and television stations to comply with a new “Fairness Doctrine” under the magic cloak of “diversity” and has chosen members of his Politburo to monitor and enforce that policy. He appointed Mark Lloyd chief diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission, who wishes to make private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do. Obama appointed Julius Genachowski, his former Harvard Law School classmate and a busybody social worker, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Doubtless he will do Obama’s bidding, just for old times’ sake, and formulate a new speech policy that would regulate the Internet to ensure net neutrality. Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed strengthening the agency’s current guidelines on net neutrality by formally adopting them as regulation. He also proposed two additional rules, including one aimed at preventing Internet companies from discriminating against any traffic to certain types of content or services. In other words, all traffic would have to be treated the same. Net neutrality was a cornerstone of Obama’s technology priorities during his campaign. Genachowski, his top campaign tech adviser, was a key architect behind those plans. Cass Sunstein, head of the White Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, can rule on virtually any brand of speech anywhere. Indeed, one blogger reported: The recent Obama intended appointment of Cass Sunstein…is the next nail in the coffin of the First Amendment. In this position Sunstein will have powers that are unprecedented and very far reaching; not merely mind-boggling but with explicit ability to use the courts to stifle free speech if it opposes Obama policies. In particular, Sunstein thinks that the bloggers have been “rampaging out of control” and that “new laws need to be written” to contain them. Doubtless this blogger, as well as countless others who disagree with Obama that the Constitution is “deeply flawed,” has been marked for gagging by administration snoops and FCC bloodhounds on the scent of “non-diversity.” Of course, Mao admirer Anita Dunn, White House communications director and failed Fox-hunter who was a “victim” of opinions Obama would rather not hear, is gone, “but will remain as a consultant to the White House on the communications and strategic matters.” Her husband, attorney Robert Bauer and a long-time Obama devotee, has been appointed White House counsel to fend off more “frivolous” allegations and charges against Obama and members of his “team,” a political organization whose suffocating power is intended to extend from the White House rose garden to every nock and cranny of American life. The satire is that in Shanghai, Obama was subjected to the same censorship that he wishes to impose on America. It was the professional totalitarians showing the ropes to an amateur. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Just as the Witch Doctor is impotent without Attila, so Attila is impotent without the Witch Doctor; neither can make his power last without the other.* I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.** In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.*** The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lent its endorsement to the 2,000+ page health care bill passed by the House last week (H.R. 3962), when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her arm-twisting cohorts persuaded others to okay the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. The amendment would prohibit insurance companies from including coverage for federally-subsidized abortions in their health plans, or so restrict them that it would not encourage any insurance company to include it as a covered medical procedure. The amendment, which passed by a vote of 240 to 194, would be included in the so-called “public option” of the legislation. The term “public option,” however, is a deceptive misnomer. There is nothing “public” about it. It would place a government bureaucrat in between an insurer and the insured. It should be called the “bureaucratic option.” What has not been paid much attention is the fact that an organization of Catholic clergy has prevailed upon a nominally secular government to impose its religious dogma -- that fetuses are persons from the moment of conception -- on the rest of the country, in the face of opposition by several other religious groups, including one called Catholics for Choice. Of course, few in Congress, least of all Pelosi and her mandating munchkins and trolls, care to think of the First Amendment of the Constitution or even to give it serious credence, or perhaps devote two seconds of consideration of it in their power-obsessed minds. The words in that amendment are simple, clear and brief. It states that: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The establishment clause prohibits Congress from creating a state religion, while the free exercise clause bars Congress from granting “most-favored religion” status to any religion at the expense of or over another (that is, while not literally creating a state religion). Balance that against the mammoth health-care bill with its millions of words. The question, however, is: Can the endorsement of the anti-abortion provision by the bishops, together with the concession by Pelosi (also a Catholic) and her allies in response to the peevish machinations of Stupak and his allies, be construed as the establishment of a religion? Actually, no. But it hovers close to it. In fact, the American Catholic Church is a major recipient of federal funds. Its collection basket overflows with taxpayer money. It should come as no surprise that the bishops could exert such extraordinary influence on a nominally secular Congress. Politico reports: With well over half of their revenue coming from the government, it is safe to say that Catholic hospitals survive on government funding as well as contributions from private sources….Catholic Charities, the domestic direct service arm of the bishops, also depends on state and federal dollars. Sixty-seven percent of Catholic Charities’ income comes from government funding. That represents over $2.6 billion in 2008 — an amount that is more than three times as large as the next largest charitable recipient of federal funds, the YMCA. Just as Catholic hospitals do, Catholic Charities receives enormous quantities of government dollars while abiding by existing constitutional and statutory requirements that prevent government sponsorship of religion. How the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the health-care bill came to be an issue is completely consistent with the character of the bill itself. In a move that smacks of extortion of extortionists. Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat (and Catholic) who sponsored the amendment, together with Pennsylvania Republican representative Joseph Pitts (an evangelical Christian), promised that they and other Democrats and Republicans would block passage of the bill if it permitted the federal subsidy of abortions in conjunction with the bill’s insurance coverage. Joining them in that maneuver were Democratic Representatives Ike Skelton of Missouri, John Tanner and Lincoln Davis of Tennessee, and Dan Boren of Oklahoma. They were apparently moved to initiate that maneuver by the first bishops’ letter, dated October 10, in which, among other things, the bishops demanded that the bill: Exclude mandated coverage for abortion, and incorporate longstanding policies against abortion funding and in favor of conscience rights. No one should be required to pay for or participate in abortion. It is essential that the legislation clearly apply to this new program longstanding and widely supported federal restrictions on abortion funding and mandates, and protections for rights of conscience. No current bill meets this test. Otherwise, the bishops warned: If final legislation does not meet our principles, we will have no choice but to oppose the bill. We remain committed to working with the Administration, Congressional leadership, and our allies to produce final health reform legislation that will reflect our principles. Once the amendment had passed, however, the bishops wrote the House: We are very pleased that the House leadership has agreed to allow the essential Stupak-Pitts-Kaptur-Dahlkemper-Lipinski-Smith Amendment to be considered by the House. This amendment will add to the Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962) crucial provisions that maintain the current protections against abortion funding and mandates. Specifically, it will achieve our objective of applying the provisions of the Hyde amendment to the public health plan and on the affordability credits in the exchanges called for in the legislation. Passing this amendment allows the House to meet our criteria of preserving the existing protections against abortion funding in the new legislation. It also would fulfill President Obama’s commitment in this area. Most importantly, it will ensure that no government funds will be used for abortion or health plans which include abortion. It is a major step forward. In the bishops’ first letter there is no reference to or mention of the premise that abortion is immoral, or that fetuses are “persons” with “rights.” Those are merely covered by the disingenuous phrases, “rights of conscience” and “our principles.” What “rights” and what “principles”? As Ayn Rand would retort: Blank-out. In the second, congratulatory letter, the bishops felt they no longer needed to mention “rights” or “principles.” They were only too happy to pat the Stupak syndicate on the back. Catholics and their clergy are not the only religious groups that oppose abortion on moral grounds. There are secular opponents, as well. The question, then, is not whether there are any provable grounds to such a position, but whether or not such an idea, grounded on mere emotionalist assertions, has any business influencing any legislation. In both of the bishops’ letters, the premise is not spoken, revealed, or even implied. It has been merely incorporated into the arid language of the bill concerning federal funding of abortions and insurance coverage. In an apparent digression here, it would be apropos to quote Ayn Rand from her 1964 Playboy interview. Asked about her alleged remark about the cross being a symbol of torture, she replied: To begin with, I never said that. It's not my style….What is correct is that I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. Isn't that what it does mean? Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture. What is the bishops’ premise? What is their principle? Just as environmentalists expect man to sacrifice his well-being, standard of living, longevity, and happiness in the name of “preserving” the earth or the climate or polar bears or weeds, women are specifically expected to be virtuous by sacrificing their lives and happiness for the sake of a non-ideal, that is, for the sake of a fetus, or a non-person. So it is logical that the bishops would endorse the entire, sacrifice-through-coercion health care legislation. It is doubtful that they actually believe in the nonsense that fetuses have “rights.” They know, in the dark, unexamined cores of their souls, that the bill is a prescription for slavery and sacrifice to all the “non-ideal” men and women in the country. They are the Witch Doctors working hand-in-hand with the Attilas. Virtue comes from the point of a gun. They pose as “pro-life,” when, in fact, they are anti-life. Had the bishops not intervened and played politics with the House sponsors and advocates of the health-care bill, the provisions that cover insurance-covered abortions would probably have remained untouched. This is aside from the issue that the whole bill virtually appropriates Americans’ bodies and wealth for the sake of the poor, the uninsured, illegal immigrants -- and fetuses. The bishops are indifferent to the fact that the bill lays the groundwork for totalitarianism in this country. They are oblivious to the virtual enslavement of the medical profession. Their “rights of conscience” and “principles” trump those of all other Americans. The bishops are not only anti-choice in the matter of abortion, but anti-choice in the most fundamental sense of individual rights. The Bill of Rights means as little to them as it does to most members of Congress. They are the natural allies of the totalitarians in the House and Senate. *”For the New Intellectual,” in For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Signet, 1961, p. 23. **Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 499. ***Robert G. Ingersoll, 1833-1899, Prose Poems and Selections, 1884. From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p. 190. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog I open this commentary with the introduction to my previous commentary, “The Mainstream Smearing of Ayn Rand.” The disparity in subject is not so irrelevant as one might presume, but I won’t dwell on that matter. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi looked like a deer caught in the blinding headlight of an oncoming freight train, her expression frozen in either ignorance or fear. It has always been difficult to distinguish between the two in her. But the malice in her words was palpable. CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Pelosi: “ Are you serious? Are you serious?” CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes, I am.” Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individual Americans buy health insurance was not a "serious question." “You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.” His iterating mockery of the reporter is indeed on the record. Elshami, deputy communications director and senior adviser to Pelosi, later issued a press release stating that Congress was empowered by the commerce clause in the Constitution to mandate individual health insurance. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), however, differed from that dubious specificity, instead likening the power to compel all Americans to buy health insurance to federal authority to impose speed limits on interstate highways (???), adding that “nobody questions” Congress’s authority to impose controls of any kind. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) linked the power to the general welfare clause. Since that demonstration of Congressional arrogance, the House passed its health-care legislation by a vote of 220 to 215, squeaking through only because of the browbeating of Blue Dog Democrats by the Pelosi gang. Hardly a glittering victory. The bill has been sent to the Senate, which has its own versions of health care legislation to scuffle over. The House bill, remarked Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina remarked, soon after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her determined co-conspirators posed with smiles of triumph for photo ops, was “dead on arrival.” In the meantime, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut issued his own warning: If a government plan is part of the deal, “as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent whose vote Democrats need to overcome GOP filibusters. It seems that some Senators understand the original purpose of the Senate, which is to act as a check on the populist, “democratic,” majority-rule grounded legislation concocted by the House, to better preserve and protect the life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness of Americans. Unfortunately, only Graham, Lieberman, and a handful of other Senators appreciate that intention. Others have publicly articulated it -- but with reservations. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) says he is “not aware” of the Constitution giving Congress the authority to make individuals purchase health insurance, as the health care bills in both the House and Senate require. No, he isn’t aware of the Constitution mandating Congress the power to force Americans to buy health insurance. And that unawareness won’t stop him from advocating such compulsion. When asked if there was a specific part of the Constitution that gives Congress the authority to make people buy health insurance, Akaka said: “Not in particular with health insurance. It’s not covered in that respect. But in ways to help citizens in our country to live a good life, let me say it that way, is what we’re trying to do, and in this case, we’re trying to help them with their health.” Both House and Senate health care bills mandate that people buy health insurance, facing a financial penalty if they do not. Akaka said this mandate should not be looked upon as a penalty…“It’s an idea of making it possible for people and this is what it’s all about,” he said. “I don’t look upon that as a penalty but as a way of getting help with health insurance.” If Akaka had been sharp enough, he might have echoed House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland and claimed that “helping people” at the point of a gun to buy health insurance came under the (misunderstood) general welfare clause. But, he was not sharp enough, and that neglect simply added to his ignorance quotient. Other politicians have been more specific in their opposition to any health care legislation. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah remarked that if the government can force Americans to purchase health insurance, “then there is literally nothing the federal government can’t force us to do.” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island is in a dead heat with Senator Akaka in being unaware of any Constitutional mandate to compel Americans to buy health insurance. When asked by a reporter to identify that mandate in the Constitution, Reed answered: “Let me see,” said Reed. “I would have to check the specific sections, so I’ll have to get back to you on the specific section. But it is not unusual that the Congress has required individuals to do things, like sign up for the draft and do many other things too, which I don’t think are explicitly contained [in the Constitution]. It gives Congress a right to raise an army, but it doesn’t say you can take people and draft them. But since that was something necessary for the functioning of the government over the past several years, the practice on the books, it’s been recognized, the authority to do that.” The gentleman did not “get back” to the reporter who buttonholed him with that question. He likened the element of compulsion to forcing Americans to register for the military draft. That is okay with him. It is all about duty, and sacrifice, and “giving back” to society. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska also displayed his ignorance as well as his manners: “Specifically, where in the Constitution does Congress get its authority to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance?” CNSNews.com asked Nelson. “Well, you know, I don’t know that I’m a constitutional scholar,” said Nelson. So, I, I’m not going to be able to answer that question.” The senator then turned away to answer another reporter’s question. If he doesn’t know whether or not he’s a constitutional scholar, then he isn’t one. That answer invites the observation and question: One can expect members of the House of Representatives to be foggy on matters of constitutionality, although their four-year terms ought to allow them to become experts on the subject. Should Senators come to their jobs as Solons prepared to repel any and all usurpations of the Constitution? Yes. Willing and able to uphold individual rights and the sanctity of private contract? Yes. It is in the nature of the title and the concomitant responsibility of the office. Most senators, however, do not come to the job with anything near a tenuous knowledge of their function. And many of them assume their seats in the Senate with a contempt for the Constitution that may as well be ignorance. Most Senators complement their ignorance of the Constitution with an indifference to its clearly-worded stipulations, and in this state of mind emulate President Barack Obama, former pseudo-professor of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. Obama is not so much ignorant of that document as hostile to it. It is “deeply flawed,” and a “charter of negative liberties,” which should be amended or rewritten to include the “positive“ liberties of welfare state entitlements and provisions for fiat executive powers. His demonstrated hostility for individual rights and private property is arguably more deep-seated than was FDR’s, whose grasp of the Constitutional limits placed on the executive and legislative branches of government was as blithely disjointed as is Obama’s. The key to understanding the machinations of Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their allies in Congress is to grasp this: No one can express, as they have, such vehement ignorance without knowing full well what it is they are ignorant of. It is time Americans called their bluff, as they may well do in the 2010 mid-term elections, or in manners reminiscent of the Tea Parties of 2009, or of the Minute Men of 1775. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog More famous words from one of our wannabe Platonic guardians: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi looked like a deer caught in the blinding headlight of an oncoming freight train, her expression frozen in either ignorance or fear. It has always been difficult to distinguish between the two in her. But the malice in her words was palpable. CNSNews.com : “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes, I am.” Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individual Americans buy health insurance was not a "serious question." “You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.” His iterating mockery of the reporter is indeed on the record. Elshami, deputy communications director and senior adviser to Pelosi, later issued a press release stating that Congress was empowered by the commerce clause in the Constitution to mandate individual health insurance. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), however, differed from that dubious specificity, instead likening the power to compel all Americans to buy health insurance to federal authority to impose speed limits on interstate highways (???), adding that “nobody questions” Congress’s authority to impose controls of any kind. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) linked the power to the general welfare clause. All in all, nobody in Congress, it seems, treats questioning Congressional powers as a serious matter. Pelosi, Leahy, Hoyer, not to mention President Barack Obama, dismissively deflect any suggestion that particular members of Congress are violating their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution. A handful of words that meant something entirely different to the authors of the Constitution -- in fact, the exact opposite of Congressional renditions -- is their sole sanction for expanding government powers. (And where is the Supreme Court on this issue? Absent from the bench, of course.) Recounting this episode in crass contempt and learned ignorance is an overture to the subject of the mainstream critical establishment’s reception of the two biographies of Ayn Rand, Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday), and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press). As most of our lawmakers consider raising the subject of the unlawfulness of their actions as beyond the bounds of polite or legitimate enquiry, the overwhelming consensus of contemporary critics is that Ayn Rand’s philosophy of reason and individual rights cannot -- should not -- be taken seriously and must be treated with similar contempt and ignorance. And, as with the libertarians (see my previous commentary), the mainstream press’s chief purpose in paying any attention to the Heller and Burns books is to attack Rand by cadging supporting statements from both biographies. (I shall repeat here that I have not yet read the Heller and Burns biographies, but plan to. The subject here, again, is the reviewers, not the books or their authors.) Late last year and early this year, when observers were reporting the uncanny similarities between current events and the events in Atlas Shrugged, there was nothing to do but report the phenomena. The parallels were undeniable and untouchable. But the appearance of these books now is propinquitous. Her stalwart critics cannot refute her philosophy. The best of them, such as British philosopher Anthony Clifford Grayling (discussed below), can only dazzle the gullible with mental whirligigs. Some critics are so unread and illiterate that they can never grasp the philosophy, but only sense its danger to their intellectual and moral lethargy in an animalistic, feral manner. So they all adopt the policy of ad hominem, frequently interspersing their attacks on her person with generous ad captandum monologues. As I suggested in my previous commentary, imagine if it were reported that Aristotle beat his wife (as claimed, perhaps, by Roman biographer Suetonius in a newly discovered fragment), then that would constitute sufficient refutation of his work. So it is with the mainstream media and literary treatment of Rand. In all instances, the fear, ignorance and malice in these reviews are palpable. For the present, their authors monopolize the podium of the culture. TIME’s review of both biographies, “Ayn Rand: Extremist or Visionary?” (October 12) is perhaps the shortest. It does not so much review the books as borrow indiscriminately from them. After attempting to make Rand look comical in the first paragraph, the review goes on: The bad economy has been good news for Rand's legacy. Her fierce denunciations of government regulation have sent sales of her two best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, soaring. Yet her me-first brand of capitalism has been excoriated for fomenting the recent financial crisis. And her most famous former acolyte--onetime Fed chairman Alan Greenspan--has been blamed for inflating the housing bubble by refusing to intervene in the market. Does the author of the review attempt to rebut the charges that Rand’s philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism was responsible for the financial crisis, and suggest instead that government intervention was and remains the culprit? No. If she had, she would not have insinuated that Alan Greenspan still believed in free markets, and that blame for the crisis could be pinned on them. An ounce of acuity in the author about Greenspan’s position would have led her to suspect that the former Federal Reserve chairman had abandoned laissez-faire in favor of intervention. The TIME review goes on: In the midst of the newly rekindled debate, two excellent biographies have just been published: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller…is a comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand's personal life, and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns…leans more heavily on Rand's theories and politics. TIME’s reviewer, however, does not dwell on the theories and politics, but rather on Rand herself, quoting more often from Burns’ book than from Heller’s. Among other inaccuracies, it asserts that Rand’s horrible experience in Soviet Russia was the genesis of her “hatred of communism and any sort of collectivism,” which hatred “would guide her life” and somehow lead to the formulation of a philosophy. If the review’s author had bothered to investigate further (and perhaps read the biographies a little more closely), she would have seen that Rand abhorred collectivism before the Bolshevik coup and the imposition of communist rule in Russia. The reviewer does not attempt to answer whether Rand was an “extremist” or a “visionary.” She simply concludes that Rand’s emotions trumped reason and that, consequently, she was a pathetic person. Janet Maslin in her New York Times review, “Twin Biographies of a Singular Woman, Ayn Rand” (October 22), emulating TIME’s review, opens with the same ridiculing reference to Rand’s appearance, stressing her gold dollar-sign pin, calling it a “Halloween-ready costume.” That more or less sets the tone of Maslin’s review. Repeating the error that Rand’s antipathy for any kind of collectivism was the foundation of what would become her philosophy of Objectivism, Maslin writes: Ms. Heller’s book is worth its $35 price, which is not the kind of detail that Rand herself would have been shy about trumpeting. When Russian Bolshevik soldiers commandeered and closed the St. Petersburg pharmacy run by Zinovy Rosenbaum [Rand‘s father], they made a lifelong capitalist of his 12-year-old daughter, Alissa [Rand], who would wind up fusing the subversive power of the Russian political novel with glittering Hollywood-fueled visions of the American dream. Maslin, like Andrea Sachs of TIME and other reviewers, fairly gloats over Rand’s affair with Nathaniel Branden, her “foremost acolyte and officially anointed intellectual heir,” and predictably attaches more importance to it than to the body of Rand’s work. Both books characterize Rand’s long relationship with Branden as the most important connection in her life. And both use it to illustrate how drastically Rand’s personal ties could rupture. The amphetamine-addicted, self-styled goddess in both books becomes so moody and volatile that her associates do not simply part ways with her. Some, like Branden and his wife, Barbara, wind up excommunicated. Maslin concludes that Rand had “an hypnotic effect on those in her orbit,” implying that her ideas and logic were of less importance than her need to have “acolytes” and her “acolytes” needing her brand of religion. Referring to Rand’s first days in Hollywood -- a “fishy story” which Maslin writes was investigated by Heller -- Maslin concludes that Rand’s chief asset was her “charisma”: Rand might have expressed disdain for that charisma, but it was enough to stop [Cecil B.] DeMille in his tracks. She would have been nowhere without it. Sam Anderson’s New York Magazine review, “Mrs. Logic” (October 18), is arguably worse than either Maslin’s or Sachs’. Anderson, who confesses that he was once a student of Objectivism, reviews only Heller’s book, and mooches from it with scanty attribution and imposes his own evaluation on the information he gleans from it, so that rarely can one distinguish between his and Heller‘s evaluations. Beginning his review with a snide narration of what people could expect upon first meeting Rand, he writes: …. he would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth—the whole Objectivist catechism. And once you conceded any part of that basic platform, the game was pretty much over. She’d start piecing together her rationalist Tinkertoys until the mighty Randian edifice towered over you: a rigidly logical Art Deco skyscraper, 30 or 40 feet tall, with little plastic industrialists peeking out the windows—a shining monument to the glories of individualism, the virtues of selfishness, and the deep morality of laissez-faire capitalism. Grant Ayn Rand a premise and you’d leave with a lifestyle. Among Anderson’s numerous egregious and vicious statements about Rand, two stand out: It’s easy to chuckle at Rand, smugly, from the safe distance of intervening decades or an opposed ideology, but in person—her big black eyes flashing deep into the night, fueled by nicotine, caffeine, and amphetamines—she was apparently an irresistible force, a machine of pure reason, a free-market Spock who converted doubters left, right, and center. Eyewitnesses say that she never lost an argument. Thus the subtitle of Anderson’s review: “Ayn Rand never got into an argument she couldn’t win. Except, perhaps, with herself.” Harping again on the allegedly subjective, virtually neurotic origins and nature of Objectivism, he notes: Anne Heller’s new biography…allows us to poke our heads, for the first time, into the Russian-American’s overheated philosophical subbasement. After reading the details of Rand’s early life, I find it hard to think of Objectivism as very objective at all—it looks more like a rational program retrofitted to a lifelong temperament, a fantasy world created to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood….No one, according to Heller’s portrait, struggled with the unreality of Objectivism more than Rand herself. She wept, throughout her life, at the world’s refusal to conform to her ideal vision of it. Although she claimed that “one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner,” she repeatedly withheld or distorted facts to feed her own mythology. This is the theme of Anderson’s whole review: Ayn Rand created her own “mythology”; ergo, she was as phony as her philosophy. He can’t take her seriously, nor should anyone else. An unsigned review of the Heller and Burns biographies in The Economist, "Capitalism's martyred hero" (October 22), repeats but does not dwell on the “mythology” theme: But her most important attribute was her talent for myth-making. Rand perfected her literary art as a screenwriter in Hollywood. And she dealt in Hollywood-style dichotomies between good and evil, between white-hatted capitalists and black-hatted collectivists. Greys don’t interest me, she once said. “Atlas Shrugged” conjured up a world in which all creative businessmen had gone on strike, retreating to Galt’s Gulch in Colorado, and culminated in a dramatic court scene in which Galt detailed the evils of collectivism. The reviewer obviously had not read Atlas Shrugged to the end; John Galt does not appear in any courtroom scene. (Perhaps the reviewer had read The Fountainhead, but Galt and Howard Roark are emphatically not the same.) The swipes taken against Rand in this review are less offensive than those in the Anderson and Maslin reviews. The Economist reviewer at least concedes that Atlas Shrugged especially has permanent relevance and that Rand was right. Jennifer Burns is better versed in conservative thought. Both are well worth reading, partly because Rand’s life was so extraordinary and partly because the questions that she raised about the proper power of government are just as urgent now as they ever were….Rand was the single most uncompromising critic of the collectivist tide that swept across the capitalist world in the wake of the Depression. For her, government was nothing more than licensed robbery and altruism just an excuse for power-grabbing. Intellectuals and bureaucrats might pose as champions of the people against the powerful. But in reality they were empire builders who were motivated by a noxious mixture of envy and greed. The review concludes: Yet Rand’s appeal has been undimmed by either the vituperation of her critics or the peculiarity of her admirers. Her insight in “Atlas Shrugged”—that society cannot thrive unless it is willing to give freedom to its entrepreneurs and innovators—has proved to be prescient. Nick Gillespie, former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and now editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv, in his Fall Wilson Quarterly review, “Ready for Her Close-Up,” asks: Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the “greatest books” of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all. Later on, Gillespie notes: Despite—or perhaps because of—such persistent mass appeal, critics have never been kind to Rand. And: Contempt has long been the standard literati response to Rand. Like Jack Kerouac, Rand is typically written off as a writer whose basic appeal is to maladjusted adolescents, a sort of vaguely embarrassing starter author who is quickly outgrown by those of us who develop more sophisticated aesthetic and ideological tastes. There’s more than a small degree of truth to such a characterization, but the extreme prejudice with which Rand is dismissed belies a body of work that continues to reach new audiences. Of all the reviews discussed here, Gillespie’s is the fairest, not only to Rand, but to the Burns and Heller biographies. But the writer still feels compelled to take swings at Rand’s persona; it is the fairest review in terms of there being in it the least number of sneers and snorts directed at Rand. It is almost as though Gillespie were under some editorial obligation to include them (otherwise the review might not have passed muster in the Quarterly). He quotes Burns early in the article: That Rand’s life story is in many ways more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted than one of her own plots certainly helps to keep the reader’s attention. As Burns puts it, “The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes [her life] not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts.” And, remarking on both biographies, ends it with: Together, they provide a rounded portrait of a woman who, as Burns writes, “tried to nurture herself exclusively on ideas.” As Rand’s biography underscores, she failed miserably in that, even as she helped create an ideological framework that continues to energize debate in contemporary America. By far the longest and most irrelevant review of the Heller and Burns biographies appeared September 14 in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait’s “Wealthcare.” It is a lengthy, bilious protest against the recent revolt of the “right” against an economically and politically carnivorous White House and Congress, a revolt which Chait blames almost exclusively on Rand. At the same time, it is the most honest of all the reviews, for Chait doesn’t hide behind cowardly chortles and guffaws to argue his position. However, lumping her together with conservative politicians, betrayed Obama supporters, and Tea Partiers, Chait writes of the uprising: There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand. Some, though not all, of the conservatives protesting against redistribution and conferring the highest moral prestige upon material success explicitly identify themselves as acolytes of Rand. A few more clicks to the left and The New Republic’s masthead could very well read The Daily Worker. Chait, a senior editor of the publication, has apparently read Rand’s novels -- perhaps even some of her non-fiction essays on politics -- for he contrasts free market economics with socialist economics, and almost gets John Galt’s speech right. He handily explicates Rand’s ethics of productive work. For example: It was Atlas Shrugged that Rand deemed the apogee of her life’s work and the definitive statement of her philosophy. She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships--that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of "looters and moochers" stealing from society’s productive elements. Chait quotes from Galt’s speech about the pyramid of ability -- not a pyramid of intellect, as Chait implies, for ability presupposes a mind or an intellect, while ability or competence or productive work is the observable, measurable consequence of such a mind in action, and can be measured as a value -- and calls it an “inverted Marxism.” And even though Chait demonstrates a more than superficial understanding of Rand’s ethics -- certainly more than any of the other reviewers discussed in this commentary -- he still sides with collectivism. Earlier in his review he remarked about the revolt against Obama and his socialist agenda, before discussing Rand‘s role in it: In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms--that taking from the rich harms the economy--but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways. Chait’s epistemological errors include thinking that “society” is an actual, independent, volitional entity, and that the term “rich” does not include the middle class, that part of “society” which also performs productive work. This is to be expected of a committed collectivist such as Chait, and when he coheres to Marxist criticism, his arguments begin to disintegrate. To wit: Rand’s political philosophy remained amorphous in her early years. Aside from a revulsion at communism [sic], her primary influence was Nietzsche, whose exaltation of the superior individual spoke to her personally….In essence, Rand advocated an inverted Marxism. In the Marxist analysis, workers produce all value, and capitalists merely leech off their labor. Rand posited the opposite….Rand’s hotly pro-capitalist novels oddly mirrored the Socialist Realist style, with two-dimensional characters serving as ideological props….Like her old idol Nietzsche, she denounced a transvaluation of values according to which the strong had been made weak and the weak were praised as the strong….Rand called her doctrine "Objectivism," and it eventually expanded well beyond politics and economics to psychology, culture, science (she considered the entire field of physics "corrupt"), and sundry other fields. Objectivism was premised on the absolute centrality of logic to all human endeavors. Emotion and taste had no place….Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence. Rand’s movement devolved into a corrupt and cruel parody of itself. Ultimately, Chait, while he accuses Rand (perhaps influenced by the Heller and Burns biographies) of shutting out the world in order to sustain her “world view,” is himself ideologically insulated against the observable phenomenon that Objectivism is “on a roll,” that it has hardly failed. The balance of his review is largely a disjointed and distracting critique of conservative/Republican economic policies and an endorsement of Obama’s, only tenuously connected to the biographies. Lastly, A.C. Grayling, a British professor of philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London, and a frequent book reviewer for, all of things, Barnes & Noble, of all the reviewers discussed her, fails the most miserably when confronted with the task of reviewing the Burns and Heller biographies of Ayn Rand, but chiefly in his misapprehension of Rand’s philosophy. That misapprehension is rooted in a natural hostility to objectivity and logic, and may be taken as evidence of the state of contemporary, “mainstream” philosophy. It is noteworthy that Grayling tackles only Heller’s biography, not Jennifer Burns’, for the latter apparently delves in more detail into the development of Rand’s philosophy and thinking than does Heller‘s. Other than a pair of irrelevant remarks about Rand by the late leftist/neo-conservative philosopher Sidney Hook, Grayling shies away from any philosophical rebuttal. He lets Hook do his talking. Grayling’ review is particularly insipid, for it falls back on pleas for altruism to combat the purported heartlessness of Rand and her philosophy. As the Branden affair shows, Rand's life was indeed exemplary of her thought. It was, in line with her avowed principles, an entirely selfish life, to which she sacrificed her family, her good-natured husband Frank O'Connor, her friends, and all but the last of her devoted followers, Leonard Peikoff. Whoever was not wholly with her was against her. Au contraire, Rand did value her family, still prisoners in Soviet Russia, and was faced with the conflict of maintaining contact with them at the risk of jeopardizing their lives. She loved her husband, and as Letters of Ayn Rand amply reveals, concerned herself with the well-being of friends and relatives (on her husband’s side, her own distant relatives in Russia being beyond help). She could be generous, but not to a fault. As for her philosophy, all Grayling can ascribe to it is cruelty and brutality. What is wrong with Rand's views is what is wrong with Gordon Gekko. The unregulated market coupled with unbridled individual self-interest adds up to something far from heroic in the would-be Roark/Galt mode; instead it adds up to the strong trampling the weak, to the callousness of the jungle -- and eventually to a mightily ironic paradox, which is that the weak have to rescue the strong because the latter's unrestricted rampaging has consumed their own hunting-grounds. Whatever that might mean. Again, Grayling writes, willing to forgive Rand but for her philosophy of egoism (which he never names): She had enormous talents, great charisma, courage and dedication -- all as apparent in her work as in her life, and all acknowledged by Heller -- and not all of her ideas were wrong: her secularism merits applause, as does her opposition to the use of force in world affairs, and as does her championing of liberty -- or rather, this latter might merit applause if it were not in fact a coarse and callous libertarianism merely, which means liberty only for the few strong enough to trample on the heads of the rest. And that represents Grayling’s summary view of the philosophical significance of Rand’s thinking, the hoary old collectivist chestnut, preached for decades from pulpits and in grade school “social studies” and in university classrooms, that unregulated freedom can only mean the oppression of the poor and “disadvantaged” and the average. No one but the “rich” and the “strong” could possibly profit from freedom -- a rather stultified and not very original position for a prominent philosopher to take. Critics serve the function of cultural scouts, pointing out to the public what is significant, what is worth one’s attention, and what may be of value -- and also what is significantly not a value. Ayn Rand and her oeuvre are major contributors to Western culture, certainly the most significant in the last two hundred years, yet our culture has descended to such a state that its scouts are desperately and maliciously trying to persuade people that neither she nor her work should be taken seriously, for if they did, it would mean the end of the critics’ own importance. Fortunately, few are heeding the advice of the critics, and countless individuals are discovering that there is an oasis over the horizon, and there, in Rand and her works, can be found life as it was meant and ought to be. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Two biographies of Ayn Rand have burst upon the literary scene, both written by non-Objectivists, Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday), and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press). I have not read either book, but will in time. I have read the first chapter of the Burns book on Amazon Books. It is a literate account of Rand’s early life in Russia, and contains details of her life heretofore unknown to me, but that appraisal in no way can be extended to the rest of her biography, not until I have read it. Of the two books, however, going by their reception in the press and the literary establishment, the Heller book is the least significant, because it is less intellectual and more biographical. Moreover, both books provide Rand’s detractors with a limitless salad bar of details of Rand’s life. This is not the fault of the authors, of course, regardless of the merits or demerits of their books. Burns, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, focuses on Rand’s intellectual development from her years in Russia up to her death in 1982. Heller, a magazine writer and editor for Esquire and Redbook, apparently dwells on the “story” of Rand in terms of her social and personal life and political positions. It is the latter book from which “libertarian” reviewers have filled their plates from the salad bar. They have all proclaimed their fealty to Rand’s ideas, but at the same time have tried to diminish those ideas by deeming them as strictly “libertarian” and merely part of an evolutionary process of the development of libertarianism. The most offensive instance of this kind of treatment of Rand -- praise so qualified that it ceases to be praise at all -- using Heller’s biography as a vehicle to not-so-subtly slander Rand, is Stephen Cox’s review of the book in the October issue of Liberty magazine. His review, “Ayn’s World,” can be taken as the apotheosis of all libertarian reviews, because it is long, commits the same offenses, and is as thorough a job of “debunking“ Rand short of a Whittaker Chambers/William F. Buckley Jr. effort. The first offense, and there are many offenses in his article, is that he continually refers to Rand as a “libertarian” or a “radical libertarian.” Well, she was not a libertarian. She stated this so many times it would be almost pointless to repeat them here. Nevertheless, here is what she wrote: For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with, and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs. Moreover, she added, Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (e.g.,the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. Dr. Harry Binswanger seconds Rand’s position: The “libertarians” . . . plagiarize Ayn Rand’s principle that no man may initiate the use of physical force, and treat it as a mystically revealed, out-of-context absolute . . . . In the philosophical battle for a free society, the one crucial connection to be upheld is that between capitalism and reason. The religious conservatives are seeking to tie capitalism to mysticism; the “libertarians” are tying capitalism to the whim-worshipping subjectivism and chaos of anarchy. To cooperate with either group is to betray capitalism, reason, and one’s own future. A “mystically revealed” absolute is a deserved opprobrium. To libertarians, that “absolute” is just floating out there in space, ready to be recognized and picked out of the air, and incorporated into an alleged political philosophy. How did it get there? Why is it there? What is its cause? No rational answers are forthcoming, or will be, for libertarians eschew a rational metaphysics. This is no better or defensible a means of validating the concept of political freedom than attributing freedom to God’s wishes or plan, as the religious conservatives do. From a political philosophy standpoint, it is equally appropriate that Rand links in substance libertarians with the religious conservatives. Libertarians -- “radical” or not -- do not subscribe to a philosophy of freedom, but instead to what one could call a cosmology absent an inexplicable “first cause.” But Cox will have none of that. He states early on in the review, feigning a preemptive, parenthetical tiredness with the distinction Rand made between libertarians and herself (and, implicitly, between herself and himself): (I know, she repudiated the name “libertarian,” but she did so for reasons that do her no credit for objective self-description. Instead of calling herself a libertarian, she said she was an individualist and a “radical for capitalism” — in short, a libertarian.) Translation: Well, I don’t feel like making the distinction she made. She argued for freedom, ergo, she was a libertarian. That’s how I’m going to perceive her, mainly because it will allow me to take cheap shots at her and permit me to “humanize“ her. After all, she made a lot of mistakes, was not a nice person, and didn’t consistently live her philosophy. So, there. It is difficult to decide which is the cheapest shot Cox takes against Rand. Bear in mind that while these shots are woven into his discussion of Heller’s biography, they are easy to detect. For example: Rand often denied that she wrote propaganda, or even that she intended to teach her audience anything. (I believe the first claim was true; the second, transparently false.) She said that she wrote for her own pleasure, to create the kind of characters she would want to meet, in the kind of world that such characters would inhabit and deal with in their own way. Whatever her motivation, she did create a literary world in which radical libertarian ideas were embodied and found an interesting home — an intense and serious world, a world full of ideas and characters and exciting action, a world in which libertarians, self-proclaimed or only implicit, could feel that they too were at home. It is an instance of gratuitous graciousness of Cox to concede that Rand did not write propaganda. But then he accuses her of lying, that she did indeed write to teach her audience. Again, Rand often stated that she did not write her novels to “teach” anyone anything, but for her own selfish pleasure of recreating a world in which she would want to live. (See her essay, “The Goal of My Writing” in The Romantic Manifesto.) If she had written from a motive of “service” -- to teach her audience -- her novels would have been markedly different and likely as bad as other novels written for a pedagogical purpose, such as two novels cited by Cox as literary precursors of Atlas Shrugged, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Henry Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back. (Cox could have cited novels that are better literarily, such as H.G. Wells’s 1933 Things to Come, or Jack London’s 1908 The Iron Heel. As dystopian novels, these would have better served as comparisons to Atlas Shrugged -- if one regards Rand‘s novel as a purely political/economic tract, which would be the libertarian way, and wrong.) I shall skip over other remarks Cox makes about Rand, as they are of the same insouciant tone. His praise alternates with his back-stabbing. He does get around to discussing Heller’s book, and repeats some of her own estimates of Rand, touching, for example, on how he wished she had taken Albert Jay Nock, that wistful, ineffectual individualist of the 1930’s, more seriously. In fact, Cox repeats the libertarian mantra that Rand was not a true original thinker, but that she inherited and profited from the intellectual labors of her pro-freedom predecessors and contemporaries, but refused, in some narcissistic hubris, to acknowledge it. Cox missed a chance to quote Nock, who ends his essay, “Isaiah’s Job,“ with: If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewusstsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do. No, as is evident in Journals of Ayn Rand and Letters of Ayn Rand, and in her other writings, she never forgot how she came by any idea, nor why she agreed with or dismissed another’s idea. Cox asserts in his review that Rand acknowledged only Aristotle as the sole influence in her intellectual development. Wrong. She acknowledged John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, and other pro-reason thinkers from the past. She admired such contemporaries as H.L. Mencken. She was not interested, however, in addressing and consoling a “Remnant,” an idea she would have considered futile, self-defeating, and essentially malevolent because it surrendered one’s life and the world to the mindless. After making some smarmy remarks on how long it took Rand to write and complete The Fountainhead, Cox makes this verbose crack about how and why she completed Atlas Shrugged: After “The Fountainhead,” she started planning the novel that would be known as “Atlas Shrugged.” She supposed that she would finish it posthaste. It took her 14 years. For what reason? She put out the rumor that she spent the last few of those years getting the right tone for the endless speech about philosophy that she intrudes on the final movement of the book. The true reason, as it seems to me, is that she had come to regard “Atlas” as a philosophical Bible and was anxious to ensure that everything in the Speech would represent her ultimate, unassailable statement of reality. The result was a 60-page literary disaster — a ridiculously long prose essay, its tone arrogant, inappropriate, and repellent to the last degree, in which she repeated everything she had already made obvious in the rest of the novel. Years working on the “tone”? I don’t think so. Rand’s attitude toward this manifest literary failure is a mystery of the creative process. How could she have thought she was doing the right thing? (Italics mine) So, not only does Cox imply again that Rand was a liar, but states that Galt’s speech in the novel was a “literary disaster.” That also was the consensus of most mainstream book reviewers of Atlas when it appeared. What Cox fails to appreciate is that Rand was a rule-breaker in literature, and that there was no rule anyway that governed the length of any speech, and that without that speech, there would have been no “libertarian” movement for him to abscond to after cherry-picking the philosophy explicated in that speech. Cox continues later on in his review about Rand’s alleged intellectual ingratitude: There have been important writers — Hemingway is a good example — who were not intellectuals, and who read fairly little. Rand is the only example I can identify of an important writer, and a brilliant intellectual to boot, who in her mature period retained practically no curiosity about current or classic works of literature, philosophy, or history. She had studied some kind of history at Leningrad University, but where are the accounts of her enjoying any work on the subject, outside of Paterson’s “The God of the Machine” (1943)? After that book, and some works by Ludwig von Mises, the great economic theorist, she appears to have ceased learning much from either theory or history. It was as if she were making good on her claim not to have been influenced by other people. It was as if individualism meant making everything up on one’s own. Enough said. There is much, much more that is offensive in Cox’s review, which, as I wrote earlier, served as a vehicle through which to launch his not-so-subtly buried digs at Ayn Rand. One wonders what he would have written if, by some chance, a scholar had uncovered the complete life of Aristotle and published it as Heller has published it: when and where he was born, the professions of his parents, his foibles, loves, hates and hobbies, his relationships with Alexander the Great, his friends, students and enemies, and how he went off the deep end of rationality after publishing the Nichomachean Ethics and became a cave-dwelling recluse -- and devoting minimal attention to what Aristotle bequeathed to the world. Someday, if Western civilization survives the double onslaught of statism and Islam, another book will appear with the same title, only it will describe the phoenix of reason and the world Ayn Rand helped to make possible. Libertarianism, as an ideology, will merit perhaps only a footnote. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Liberals are now awakening to the evidence that President Barack Obama and his web of cronies, pull-peddlers, appointees and assorted parasites -- that alliance of the Chicago and Beltway Gangs -- are planning to move in on freedom of speech with every intention of “modifying” it so that it means only what the government wants it to mean. And some are worried that current restrictions on the First Amendment might be “modified” or even reversed and declared unconstitutional, specifically McCain-Feingold, which governs corporate spending on election campaign ads, and other anti-freedom of speech rulings such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which a movie, “Hillary: The Movie,” made by an anti-Clinton group, fell under the strictures of McCain-Feingold. A three-judge FEC “court” ruled against an appeal by the group to challenge the Court’s decision. McCain-Feingold is “a federal enactment designed to prevent ‘big money’ from unfairly influencing federal elections-which, among other things, prohibits corporate financing of ‘electioneering communications’ and imposes mandatory disclosure and disclaimer requirements on such communications.” Robert Barnes, in a Washington Post article of September 8, “Reversal of Precedents at Issue,” complains that the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John G. Roberts, may well “defy the decisions of Congress and to set aside its own precedents.” This raises ageless questions about the role of stare decisis -- the court’s custom of standing by its previous decisions. But it also raises new ones about the boldness of a court that has moved to the right with the addition of Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. It seems that while liberals are all for trashing customs and traditions in the march to an egalitarian, collectivist society -- not to mention reason and justice -- some traditions become sacred to them if the trashing or violation jeopardizes the advances of the collectivists. Thus, Barnes’s worry that the precedent of the Supreme Court upholding McCain-Feingold in December 2003 may in turn be subjected to an unprecedented volte-face. Justices Roberts, Alito, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas could well be the majority that reverses the Citizens United v. FEC and McConnell v. FEC rulings. [For details concerning these and other McCain-Feingold and FEC-related cases, see The Campaign Finance Institute here.] “Overruling Austin or McConnell in this case would be unwarranted and unseemly,” former solicitor general Seth P. Waxman told the court on behalf of McCain and other congressional sponsors. “ Stare decisis requires respect for precedents absent a special justification for overruling tem. No such justification exists.” Unwarranted? Unseemly? What old-fashioned terms! They sound almost “Republican.“ Yes, such a justification exists -- the First Amendment -- but no Supreme Court justice will cite it without paragraphs of rationalistic legal babble, or at least understand, adhere to, and expound its absoluteness: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The language is clear; that is justification enough. The Court was wrong to uphold McCain-Feingold. It ought to have declared it unconstitutional at the first opportunity and in the strongest terms in December 2003. That was a precedent that should never have been made, and which should be corrected now-- in the strongest terms. But, we should not count on Chief Justice Roberts et al. to rule absolutely in upholding the First Amendment. Rationalizations and procedural niceties, going by their past decisions, will likely befog or obstruct their thinking. On the other side of the freedom of speech coin is the issue of an attempt by the administration to co-opt the National Endowment for the Arts as a branch of the White House and convert it into a Joseph Goebbels-style Ministry of Propaganda (or as an American style, Orwellian Ministry of Truth). This development has given liberals painful stomach flutters, especially in those who campaigned for Obama. It is a little too late for them to worry about the encroachment now. If they believed in and endorsed Obama’s campaign promises to undertake a radical “change” of the country to unadulterated socialism, they should have realized that it meant the “socialization” of everything, including art, which is protected by the First Amendment. One wonders why artists and writers believe themselves exempt from the slavery and servitude they advocate should be imposed on everyone else. On August 25, Patrick C. Courrielche, columnist for Big Hollywood, reported on an unusual but unreported teleconference that occurred on August 5. On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!” Courrielche goes on to reveal: The people running the conference call and rallying the group to get active on these issues were Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons. We were encouraged to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these “focus areas” as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues. Throughout the conversation, we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to “shape the lives” of those around us. The now famous Obama “Hope” poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election. Courrielche expresses his qualms and reservations about this event, which went mostly unreported by the MSM. In a follow-up to his column, he writes that it is doubtful that the NEA’s action has any legal basis for such recruitment, and reports further that when its role in the White House teleconference was revealed, the NEA denied any responsibility, and fobbed off that responsibility on a “third party.” Courrielche believes in the existence of the NEA. He will not question the rightness of its existence. Government, he believes, has a responsibility to support and encourage the arts. So, he wonders: The NEA is the nation’s largest annual funder of the arts. That is right, the largest funder of the arts in the nation – a fact that I’m sure was not lost on those that were on the call, including myself. One of the NEA’s major functions is providing grants to artists and arts organizations. The NEA has also historically shown the ability to attract “matching funds” for the art projects and foundations that they select. So we have the nation’s largest arts funder, which is a federal agency staffed by the administration, with those that they potentially fund together on a conference call discussing taking action on issues under vigorous national debate. Does there appear to be any potential for conflict here? Yes, there is a major conflict of interest here: taxpayers coerced into paying for the “free expression” of dependent writers and artists. They must be satisfied with being involuntary donors to sustain the country’s “culture.“ But, this is the government calling in its loans and markers. He and his subsidized colleagues in the arts benefited from the looting of other taxpayers. He protests too much: I’m not a “right-wing nut job.” It just goes against my core beliefs to sit quietly while the art community is used by the NEA and the administration to push an agenda other than the one for which it was created. It is not within the National Endowment for the Arts’ original charter to initiate, organize, and tap into the art community to help bring awareness to health care, or energy & environmental issues for that matter; and especially not at a time when it is being vehemently debated. Artists shouldn’t be used as tools of the state to help create a climate amenable to their positions, which is what appears to be happening in this instance. If the art community wants to tackle those issues on its own then fine. But tackling them shouldn’t come as an encouragement from the NEA to those they potentially fund at this coincidental time. It is hardly “coincidental” that the NEA would become a party to the current White House plan to bombard Americans with leftist propaganda. It was in the cards. It does not occur to Courrielche that taxpayers should not be used as tools of the state to promote the careers of writers and artists, whatever the degree of their competence or lack of it. And if you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare [sic] with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “ Safely? Isn’t that the first concern of a thief contemplating a crime? Of a bureaucrat “overreaching” his mandate, as Courrielche puts it? Isn’t usage of that term indicative of a mind habituated to felony? He ought to have known better. He was a former employee of the NEA and learned first-hand that since political pull governs who gets how much in taxpayer money to “support the arts,” it cannot be limited to that species of theft. When all the stops have been removed, as they have been throughout Obama’s administration, the practice will necessarily expand into other realms of political action. Including drafting writers and artists into a White House-directed propaganda blitz to persuade Americans that the administration means no harm and that its goals are benign and glorious. The White House and the NEA do not give a fig about Courrielche’s “core beliefs.” They are irrelevant to power-lusters. You ate my bread. Now, sing my song. Or you get no more donuts. That is the message of the benefactors to the beneficiaries. The Supreme Court should never have upheld McCain-Feingold. And Patrick Courrielche and his colleagues should never have taken government money to subsidize their careers, nor endorsed any government program that did. Robert Barnes is fearful that a modicum of reason might move the Court to reverse its stand on the selective censorship of McCain-Feingold. Courrielche, also allowing a quantum of reason to stir his own fears, is concerned that Obama, together with the NEA, is out to corrupt the integrity of tax-supported artists in whom integrity never existed. Neither Barnes, nor the Supreme Court, nor Courrielche has ever grasped that reason is forever -- it is the indispensable means of man for his survival and happiness -- and that it cannot be discarded or evaded, in the short term or the long term. It will ultimately overtake and dispel the illusion that it can be dispensed with. Speaking of freedom of speech, something moved Joe Wilson, Republican representative from South Carolina who has opposed the health care bill, to shout “You lie!” to Obama on September 9th as he addressed a joint session of Congress to plead for passage of the health care bill. Obama had just claimed that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for government-run health care insurance. He replied, “That’s not true.“ Well, why should anyone believe what Obama says is true or untrue? Wilson was immediately condemned by Democrats and Republicans for the “outburst.” Wilson should not be condemned, nor should he have apologized. One newspaper reported that “Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi directed a fierce frown at him…Vice President Joe Biden looked down and shook his head….” But, in the CNN video, which can be seen here, Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi glance sharply in the direction of Wilson -- like a pair of liars surprised in the act and their expressions full of malice for the person who surprised them. One may ask: Wasn’t Wilson’s outburst disrespectful, unwarranted and unseemly? Hardly. How else was he to call to the country’s attention with any drama that the whole health care bill is a lie, and that Obama and Congressional supporters of it have lied about it from the very beginning? Wilson chose to not sit quietly while the President of the United States lied, and while his fellow Congressmen sanctioned what they knew was a lie with their silence. In the face of falsehood, and in the presence of a falsifier, decorum and respect should be one's last concern. Perhaps Wilson, too, grasped for a moment that reason is forever. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Dan Edge, an Objectivist activist living in Greenville, South Carolina was arrested over the weekend by the Greenville police. Mr. Edge's crime, you ask? Nothing less than contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Edge was protesting the Greenville City Council's recent enactment of an "emergency" 10PM curfew for minors, a law that Edge says curtails the freedom of the peaceable in supposed answer to the crimes committed by the un-peaceable. According to Edge, such freedom was an important part of his development: Along with many other Greenville natives, I was greatly enriched by experiences, conversations, and new friends discovered in downtown Greenville – some even after (gasp!) 10pm on a weekend night – and I never committed a crime or created a nuisance there. These experiences enriched my life and contributed to making me into the cultured, responsible adult I am today. It would be a great shame to take that same opportunity away from responsible young men and women, especially in a time when Greenville is becoming more and more a rich source of southern culture. And thus Edge's Saturday evening protest against the curfew, which went fine until a departing minor had the audacity to say "Thank You" to Edge after the 10PM hour, a crime that led to Edge's arrest for corrupting the youth (Edge provides a detailed narrative of his arrest here.) What does Greenville have next in store for Mr. Edge? Hemlock perhaps? Socrates would be proud, but we should be appalled. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog A very brief but important article on the fundamental purpose of the health care bill is circulating and with which President Barack Obama and his cadre of communist and pinkish radicals, czars and advisors would agree with nods of approval, and which most Democrats would endorse, had they but the nerve. President Barack Obama will soon plead with Congress to stop dragging its collective feet over “non-essential“ and “distracting” aspects of the “reform” bill, such as its astronomical cost and its usurpation of the right of Americans to reject it, and just pass the damned thing. “The Real Meaning of Health Care Reform” makes this crucial but neglected point: The primary goal of health care "reform" is the enactment of the legal basis for totalitarianism. So many of the provisions of the health care bill, to a close reading, set a precedent for government control of every single basis of our lives -- health care or not. That’s it. If the government expropriates the health care realm in any style, shape or form-- no matter how watered down the bill is, if it is reduced from 1,600 pages to merely 400, if it focuses on controlling expenditures and not on choice, if it gives one a temporary but penalized option other than the “public option,” the fancy trimmings are all irrelevant -- it will automatically grant the government the legal power over one’s body and it will govern all actions one might take to sustain it. It needn’t be named after Senator Ted Kennedy to be a nullification of one’s right to live for one’s own sake. The Crown’s Stamp Act of 1765 had an unchallenged legal basis, dating back to 1650: the will and power of Parliament to legislate for the British colonies. This Act was repealed exactly a year after its passage, as a consequence of violent opposition to it in the colonies, but the repeal was accompanied by the Declaratory Act, which asserted that Parliament retained “the full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” Few colonists paid the attention to the Declaratory Act it deserved. Most were celebrating their victory over Parliament. A few regarded it as Parliament’s peevish, ill-mannered means of saving face after a humiliating defeat. But it was a loaded gun. Parliament passed it, ergo it had a legal basis. In short, the Crown said: You may have won this round, but, nevertheless, we own you, “in all cases whatsoever.” Obama’s broadcast speech to the nation’s schools complements that totalitarian purpose. The text of it, if Obama sticks to the script, is, on the surface, a yawner. Many a student will feel a desire to nod off. The speech can be faulted only for its patronizing banality. But, as one blogger noted: “It’s not the speech, it’s the subtext.” And subtext there is, very subtly woven throughout Obama’s innocuous blandishments to study hard and to mind what adults say. The subtext declares: I own you. Or, rather, we, the state, own you. This point was made last week in the “I Pledge” video as a prefatory note to America’s school children. Of course, many newspaper columnists are wondering why the speech is being attacked and called propagandistic. They don’t understand what the hue and cry are about. After all, didn’t Ronald Reagan and George Bush address school children? But, the subtext is invisible to them, or they see nothing wrong with it. Here are instances of the subtext, and one major gaffe. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team. (Paragraph 13.) I can think of numerous mayors, Senators and Supreme Court Justices -- including a few Presidents -- who didn’t know about the Constitution, or who dismissed it as being as antiquated as a Babylonian law tablet, but that never stopped them from becoming what they are. That’s the gaffe. But, on to the subtext. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future. (Paragraph 15.) Which challenges? Fill in the blanks, children. It’s a multiple choice question. But stick to the choices we give you. My friend Professor Bill Ayers has drawn up a list, in consultation with my many czars and advisors. But never forget that we are a nation, and we must all pull together to meet those challenges. We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that -- if you quit on school -- you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country. (Paragraph 17.) Which difficult problems? Again, fill in the blanks, and choose from Professor Ayers’ list. If you quit on us, it means that you see a conflict between our goals and yours. That would be a selfish thing to do. Fulfillment can be found in selfless service to your country. And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you - don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country. (Paragraph 38.) If you give up on yourself, you become useless to your country and a needless charge to society. Then we must and will determine your future as a servant of the state. If you don’t want us to tell you what to do and when and why, then do as we say. So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country? (Paragraph 41.) We expect you to make selfless contributions to the country, regardless of what careers you choose to follow. How would you be able to live with yourself, knowing that you did everything for yourself, and not for your country? You are but a cell of society, and society expects your best, and for you to give back to it. Remember what a great president once said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That is all I am asking of you, too. Contradicting the subtext is this statement: Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll wind up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. (Paragraph 24.) Come again? Or must the future I make for myself first be vetted by the state? That’s what brighter students might ask of the President. He would have no answer for them, and might ask whoever on his staff wrote that statement what the hell he meant by it. If the adults won’t listen, go after the kids. Can you think of a better way to inculcate the character of totalitarian servitude and obeisance in children than this speech? Of making seductive enlistment in the Obama Youth or Ayers’ New Pioneers? Of having children believe from the start of their lives that the government has a right to control ever single basis of their lives, and that this is a moral norm? If you wanted better proof of how Obama, his cadre in the White House, his appointees, and the Democrats in Congress want to own Americans “in all cases whatsoever,” read a transcript of Obama’s speech, and watch the video. Judge for yourself. His speech is an invitation to children to become moral monsters. For years I have kept a page from The New York Times. It features a teen-aged Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK. It is a symbol, not so much of a generational link, but of a philosophical link, of the passing on of the political torch of statism and collectivism. Now we have Barack Obama reaching out to shake hands with another generation. This has got to stop. And if Americans have any kind of duty to their country, that is what they must stop. For their own sakes, and for the sake of their children. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Speaking about the political career of Senator Edward Kennedy and Kennedy's role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, Hufffington Post columnist Melissa Lafsky offered the following: We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don't know, as always, could fill a Metrodome. Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded. Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it. What we are being asked to swallow is that the victim of negligent homicide would somehow consider their homicide "worth it" because their killer had a prolific political career--a career defined primarily by their support for the forced transfer of wealth from those who earn it to those who do not. It was a horrific injustice that Kennedy never received more than a slap on the hand for his role in Kopechne's needless and preventable death. It is all the more horrific that Kennedy would now be celebrated for it. But notice Lafsky's claim here: even the most cowardly and despicable acts can be forgiven if altruism is one's aim. If you ever doubt the wickedness--the outright willingness to justify anything in the name of the self-abnegation that is altruism--remember the life of Ted Kennedy and the moral claims of those who would attempt to lionise him. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog On August 8, I sent this letter to the Democratic National Committee. The letter from Jen O’Malley Dillon -- obviously a form letter prepared for emailing to countless Citizens X for or against ObamaCare -- is reprinted in italics in its entirety following my response to it. Dillon’s letter is as impersonally comforting and assuring as a spam notice that you have a fantastic amount of money sitting in an account with the Bank of Lagos, ready to be wire-transferred to your stateside checking account, if only you would send the undersigned your private banking details. My response does not attempt to counter or refute every assertion, charge, and lie in Dillon’s letter, just the more egregiously offensive statements. Jen O'Malley Dillon Executive Director Democratic National Committee [email protected] Dear Jen: A friend shared with me your letter to him about how evil and anti-democratic Americans are for exercising their First Amendment right to protest the lies and deceptions of the President and the Democratic Party about the health care legislation. The truth is that the protesters are truly "grassroots," not being guided, advised, or manipulated by nefarious powers behind the scenes. I took part in several Tea Parties over the last few months. No one asked me to. No one paid me to. I'm not being "funded" by anyone or by any organization. I took part because I do not want socialized medicine to destroy my liberty. I know of no one who has taken part in these protests who was acting as a tool of the Republican Party or an insurance company or some other Darth Vaderish entity, as Democratic propaganda asserts. The truth is that the protesters are not "organized mobs, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion." They have every right to shout down any politician who believes he can feed his constituents the same old pap of assurances, promises, and lies about the health care legislation and get away with it. That is what Americans have been told for decades, and they are tired of it. They are smart enough to see a snake in the grass -- dozens of snakes in the tall grass of political obfuscation and in the self-serving rhetoric of venal politicians. The truth is that there is a need for real health insurance reform -- to get the government out of the realms of medical, health care, and insurance. In fact, out of the economy entirely. Nothing in the Constitution permits the federal government to take care of anyone. The Constitution exists to protect individual rights, the lives of individuals, their happiness and their property. But several Democratic and Republican administrations have usurped those restrictions and limitations. Americans are beginning to connect those dots. Just as Americans connected the dots in 1773 when they "disrupted" the cargoes of tea and tossed them into Boston Harbor. Just as they connected the dots in 1765 against the Stamp Act, and "disrupted" collection of that tax. Frankly, I wish the Republican Party would take its name seriously enough to be more forthright in its applause of the "disruptions." This is, after all, supposed to be a republic of free individuals, not a democracy of mob rule orchestrated by petit tyrants and professional looters. More power to Americans if they can intimidate presumptuous, power-seeking, sanctimonious lawmakers. You stated in your letter that "as the President has repeatedly said, health insurance reform will create more health care choices for the American people, not reduce them. If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them, and there is no 'government takeover' in any part of any plan supported by the President or Congress." Who asked you to intrude on people's choices in the first place? Why intrude, if you do not intend to take over the whole realm of health care? Who are you to care whether or not I like my insurance or my doctor? The only job of an elected representative or senator is to uphold the Constitution and individual rights. Period. You state in your letter: "Health insurance reform is about our lives, our jobs, and our families -- we can't let distortions and intimidation get in the way." What is this our business? I don't own you, and you don't own me. There is no such thing as a collective that can legitimately employ that adjective. There is just a collection of individuals, free to associate with each other or not. My business is not your business, or anyone else's, except in voluntary association or trade. But that's something the health care legislation would end -- by chaining all Americans together in a work gang. Speaking of distortions, how many millions of dollars has the DNC committed to defeating American opposition to slavery or servitude with smears, lies and glitzy TV ads? And speaking of intimidation, just who unleashed the troglodytes of ACORN, the AFL-CIO, and SEIU (a notoriously communist organization, with international links, of course) on Tea Partiers and others who protest the health care bill? You should warn those thugs: If attacked, we will fight back. Just as we did at Lexington and Concord, and at Bunker Hill. Your party stooped to a new low when the President authorized an invitation to Americans to inform on each other if they overheard or read a breath of criticism of the health care bill. Well, that tactic certainly backfired, did it not? Yes, it's going to be a long, hot August. We, the new Sons of Liberty, will also stand strong together to expose the truth about the indentured servitude you are proposing. Sincerely, and yours in liberty, Edward Cline Dear Citizen: There's been a lot of media coverage about organized mobs intimidating lawmakers, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion about the need for real health insurance reform. The truth is, it's a sham. These "grassroots protests" are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform. They're trying to use lies and fear to break the President and his agenda for change. Health insurance reform is about our lives, our jobs, and our families -- we can't let distortions and intimidation get in the way. We need to expose these outrageous tactics, and we're counting on you to help. Can you read these "5 facts about the anti-reform mobs," then pass them along to your friends and family? Five facts about the anti-reform mobs 1. These disruptions are being funded and organized by out-of-district special-interest groups and insurance companies who fear that health insurance reform could help Americans, but hurt their bottom line. A group run by the same folks who made the "Swiftboat" ads against John Kerry is compiling a list of congressional events in August to disrupt. An insurance company coalition has stationed employees in 30 states to track where local lawmakers hold town-hall meetings. 2. People are scared because they are being fed frightening lies. These crowds are being riled up by anti-reform lies being spread by industry front groups that invent smears to tarnish the President's plan and scare voters. But as the President has repeatedly said, health insurance reform will create more health care choices for the American people, not reduce them. If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them, and there is no "government takeover" in any part of any plan supported by the President or Congress. 3. Their actions are getting more extreme. Texas protesters brought signs displaying a tombstone for Rep. Lloyd Doggett and using the "SS" symbol to compare President Obama's policies to Nazism. Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his district office. Rep. Tim Bishop of New York had to be escorted to his car by police after an angry few disrupted his town hall meeting -- and more examples like this come in every day. And they have gone beyond just trying to derail the President's health insurance reform plans, they are trying to "break" the President himself and ruin his Presidency. 4. Their goal is to disrupt and shut down legitimate conversation. Protesters have routinely shouted down representatives trying to engage in constructive dialogue with voters, and done everything they can to intimidate and silence regular people who just want more information. One attack group has even published a manual instructing protesters to "stand up and shout" and try to "rattle" lawmakers to prevent them from talking peacefully with their constituents. 5. Republican leadership is irresponsibly cheering on the thuggish crowds. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a statement applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress." It's time to expose this charade, before it gets more dangerous. Please send these facts to everyone you know. You can also post them on your website, blog, or Facebook page. Now, more than ever, we need to stand strong together and defend the truth. Thanks, Jen I have a suggestion in reference to the poor Congressmen who fled their town halls under police escort, or who were hanged in effigy, or who find Americans who “disrupt” their peaceful convocations of the clueless wholly “un-democratic” and “thuggish.“ It should be an emphatic point of discussion that any politician who does not open his town hall meeting or forum with a clear statement that he is pledged to defend individual rights and private property -- including the bodies of individuals -- and will fight tooth and nail against passage of the health care/health insurance legislation -- that unless he is willing to make such a statement with unquestionable sincerity and certitude -- he will overstep or suborn his mandate to uphold the Constitution and represent his constituents, and will earn the disruption and untoward questions put to him, regardless of the rules of order. He may advocate socialism and all the scams and schemes he wishes, as a private citizen -- but not as an elected official. This is what Americans should demand. They must grasp that it is not reason or civil discourse that the statists and collectivists want in these encounters. They want bovine agreement and unthinking obedience. If a Congressman or Senator is unwilling to make such a pledge, then he should not hold the charade of a town hall meeting or forum. He should ignore his constituents and vote according to his feelings. It is now a matter of either/or, not only for Democratic and Republican politicians, but for any American with courage and integrity enough to understand what is at stake and to question any politician’s right to plunder the lives and fortunes of those who sent him to office. Cross-posted from Metablog

By [email protected] (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog Obama’s Email Arrogance Yesterday I sent this impertinent message to President Barack Obama when his staff sent me the invitation to inform on other Americans who criticize his and Congress’s plans to impose socialized health care on the country. The White House [email protected] 5 August 2009 Dear Mr. President: What is your definition of "fishy"? That it is odiferous? Bad-smelling? Unwelcome? Stinky? Ready to bury? How dare you refer to Americans criticizing your socialist health and economic plans, and the facts they are bringing to light about your whole power-lusting, corrupt regime as fishy? How dare you threaten to abrogate their First Amendment rights? Oh, that's right. I forgot. You don't want to be president of a nation of free men. You want to lord it over a nation of dependent troglodytes, ever grateful for the crumbs you throw them after you've eaten the cakes they created through productive work. If anything can be described as fishy in this country now, it is your administration, and Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, and Barney Frank, and the whole crew of your looting parasites. So, flag this!! Regards, A real American and a genuine patriot. The key paragraph in the White House’s invitation is this: “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors travel just beneath the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected]. This was preceded by two other interesting paragraphs: “Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, ‘facts are stubborn things.’ Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to ‘uncover’ the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.” This announcement was posted by Macon Phillips (White House Director of News Media, go here for the career of this non-entity), but bets can be taken that the idea of inviting Americans to inform on each other is not flying too well at the moment, for undoubtedly the “in box” of [email protected] was almost immediately filled to overflowing with emails from outraged Americans, organized or not. This was not a good idea. Phillips and his handlers in the White House should have realized, given the genuine opposition across the country to Obama’s and Congress’s health care bill, that the reaction to it would have been overwhelmingly instant and “negative.” What were they thinking? Perhaps, given that opposition, which has chiefly taken the form of what White House denizens have characterized as “disrupters” not tolerating the bromides and platitudes of elected representatives’ raucous town hall meetings about the proposed legislation, they are feeling desperate enough to try anything. In addition to having the gall to quote John Adams, Phillips (or whoever wrote the invitation, it was probably a committee effort) also paraphrased Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” as though that reference to Gore’s discredited “scary movie” on global warming still had some currency among Americans. He also refers to First Amendment communications between bloggers and individuals as “scary chain emails” and videos as “percolating” on the Internet, chock full of “disinformation.” Facts, however, are not what the White House and its allies in Congress are conveying to the American public about the contents of the health care bill. They have launched, for the length of August up until Congress reconvenes in September, a campaign of disinformation not only about the contents of the bill, but against anyone opposed to the legislation, whether he is a Republican, a voter, or a blogger. One might wonder where Obama and Company get their arrogance. They get it from the fact that the have gotten away with lies and disinformation for so long. What is worrisome -- and that is the kindest term I can think of at the moment -- is that all the emails, friendly or not to the idea of informing on fellow Americans, can be collected and used somehow to punish or reward, whether or not the health bill legislation passes. Remember the outrage of the news media over President George W. Bush’s “lost” emails? Even the ever-loyal news media is stammering its reservations about the informant program. Senator John Cornyn raises this issue in his letter to Obama about the impropriety of asking Americans to inform on others. “Furthermore, Cornyn wrote, the collection of e-mails could amount to the White House amassing various forms of personally identifiable information.” Among other things, Cornyn posed this important question to Obama: “At the very least, I request that you detail to Congress and the public the protocols that your White House is following to purge the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and identities of citizens who are reported to have engaged in “fishy” speech.” It will be interesting if Cornyn gets an answer to any of his questions. Read the whole text of his letter here. There is some comfort in seeing that not all politicians are clueless or indifferent. But, make no mistake about it: If Obama and Company are willing to stoop to so low a tactic as inviting Americans to inform on each other, even in “casual conversation,” what else would they be willing to do? Aside from all the lies and disinformation conveyed to the public over the last six months about not only the health care bill, but about TARP, the cash for clunkers program, and even Harry Reid’s pet project, a magnet-train link between California and Las Vegas (!!!), this tactic reveals the core, evil soul of Obama and his supporters in and out of government in their quest for total power. Germans were asked by Hitler to inform on their fellow Germans, and tens of thousands of Germans wound up in work camps or concentration camps. Will Americans follow suit, or are there still enough of us alive to put a brake on our march to fascism? Cross-posted from Metablog