Friday, February 17, 2012

Do Catholics Have Too Many Babies? by Andrew P. Napolitano

Do Catholics Have Too Many Babies? by Andrew P. Napolitano

When we were colonists and fought a war against the king and Parliament so that we could secede from the British Empire and be independent of it, we also fought for the value of personal freedom. That is the idea that in matters of personal choice, the government should play no role. The king only cared about the colonists' personal choices if he could control or tax them.

One of the taxes he imposed was to support the Church of England. The Church of England that the colonists' tax dollars supported was, of course, in England; it was not here. So, among the hateful taxes that impelled the colonists to revolt was this tax to support the king's church.

When the Constitution was written, religious freedom was a principal matter for discussion and debate among the Framers. They addressed this in the first clause of the First Amendment. Before the Constitution even protects the freedom of speech, it protects the natural right to worship or not to worship, free from the government. Here is what it says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."


That is very direct and clear. It was intended to prevent any tax money from going to a church, and it was intended to keep the government from using its coercive powers to influence or to punish religious institutions. For 125 years, most governments in America left churches alone.

Then along came the progressive attitude that some ethnic groups are superior to others. This is a damnable and racist view that was foist upon the federal government by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, in direct response to the influx of southern European immigrants at the beginning of the last century, most of whom were Catholic. Roosevelt and Wilson and their progressive followers thought these immigrants had too many children, children who would grow up to be voters and vote out their Nanny State central-planning values. So they began to encourage birth control and sterilizations and even abortions.


The Catholic Church resisted this by its teachings on birth control. The Church had made its teaching on contraception a core part of its mission for 400 years, and Pope Paul VI reaffirmed these teachings in a permanent way in 1968. That the Church embraces these teachings is well known, and equally as well known is the policy of the federal government to resist them.

But that resistance reached unconstitutional proportions a few weeks ago when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, herself a Catholic, issued regulations that require all employers in America to provide health insurance that makes contraceptive materials and devices available to their employees. The "all employers" includes Catholic universities, Catholic hospitals, Catholic schools and even local Catholic churches. The failure to comply with this law will result in a fine to these institutions and the provision of contraceptive coverage to their employees by the government itself.

This is quite literally Congress making a law that interferes with the free exercise of religion. This is not about the morality of contraception. This is about the constitutionality of government coercion, coercion of religious institutions, coercion directly and profoundly prohibited by the Constitution itself. The motivation for the coercion – that Catholics have too many babies – is reprehensible, and those in government who embrace that and are willing to use the power of government to resist that should be voted out of office. But the coercion is the same as that faced by the folks who seceded from England because of the king's tax to pay for his church.

We have a king today, and he wants a tax to pay for his church. The king is the president, and his church is called Obamacare. We can't let this happen here. This is not just a Catholic issue. This is an issue about whether the Constitution means what it says. Does the Constitution let the government compel Jews to eat pork, or Protestants to genuflect, or Muslims to own dogs, or Catholics to pay for contraception? The answer is obvious.

Reprinted with the author's permission.

February 9, 2012

The New Blacklist by Patrick J. Buchanan

The New Blacklist by Patrick J. Buchanan

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it "exists to strengthen Black America's political voice," claimed that my book espouses a "white supremacist ideology." Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, "The End of White America."

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America's leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people said that Buchanan's "extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world."


Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR's Diane Rehm – that I believe homosexual acts to be "unnatural and immoral."

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.

"Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite," said Foxman. Buchanan "bemoans the destruction of white Christian America" and says America's shrinking Jewish population is due to the "collective decision of Jews themselves."


Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek's 2009 cover called "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" and editor Jon Meacham described as "The End of Christian America." After all, I am a Christian.

And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the "collective decision of Jews themselves"?

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, "so long as reason is left free to combat it." What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.

Consider what it is these people are saying.

They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin's, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity.

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism?

How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, "The End of White America?" from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America's white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050.


Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject?

That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral has been doctrine in the Catholic Church for 2,000 years.

Is it now hate speech to restate traditional Catholic beliefs?


Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture and ideology, and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century's end.

Are such subjects taboo? Are they unfit for national debate?

So it would seem. MSNBC President Phil Griffin told reporters, "I don't think the ideas that (Buchanan) put forth (in his book) are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC."

In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written, and faithfully honored our contract.

Yet my four-months' absence from MSNBC and now my departure represent an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.

The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate.

All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.

Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.

Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.

I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.

February 17, 2012

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Time To Tame the Federal Beast by Andrew P. Napolitano

Time To Tame the Federal Beast by Andrew P. Napolitano

When the federal government was created, those who risked their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honors to secede from England were animated by recent events. The government did not come into existence in a vacuum. Rather, those who led the Revolutionary War joined those who fought and financed it to create a central government that would be constitutionally incapable of doing to Americans what King George III and Parliament did to the colonists.

The king abridged many personal freedoms, but among them, religion and the right to keep income were at the top of the list, along with the freedom of speech and the right to be left alone. The reason that religious rights and property rights so animated the Founders is simple: They had been aggressively assaulted by the British government, and most of it had to do with money.


The king and Parliament imposed a tax on the colonists to support the king's church in England. And the king and Parliament imposed an obligation on the colonists to purchase the king's stamps and to affix them to all papers in their possession in America. The Stamp Act led to the invasion of the colonists' homes by British soldiers without warrants, ostensibly looking for the stamps. Both of these taxes led to the Revolution, and the bitter aftertaste they left behind, in turn, led to a firm determination on the part of those who wrote the Constitution to craft a document that would assure that the new government would be constitutionally incapable of similar behavior.

How well have the Framers' hopes and plans and constitutional craftsmanship worked out? Not very well. I have written six books about the violations of the Constitution that the government has gotten away with. The feds take your taxes and give it to folks who will vote for them. They even fine churches that fail to violate their core teachings on contraception. These are not light or fleeting issues.


Today, Americans who rely on government entitlements receive an average of $32,700 worth of benefits every year. The average American's annual income after taxes – Americans who work, not those who receive benefits – is $32,400. This is the first time in history that we have seen this inversion. I realize that this is just an average, but the numbers show, by a tiny amount, that the average recipient of entitlements has more disposable wealth than the average wage earner.

These entitlements cost the taxpayers about $2.5 trillion per year. The federal government collects only $2.5 trillion a year in revenue. So, the rest of the government – defense, justice, the goons in the TSA, national parks, even the Post Office – is paid for by borrowing. And most of the borrowing is paid for by the Federal Reserve printing cash. And that causes inflation, which decreases the purchasing power of your savings.

On top of all of this is Obamacare. That is the president's signature piece of legislation. It is the instrument by which the president is threatening to fine religious institutions – mostly Catholic – that dare not to pay for contraception health care coverage for their employees. That would be the same Obamacare that is forcing every person in America to buy health insurance. This brings us back to where we started historically: The last time the central government in America tried to force all Americans to buy something against their will, it was the king of England and his Stamp Act. And that fomented the Revolution.

You can see how far we have come from the freedom the Framers intended – and how far we need to travel to return. The federal government refuses to leave us alone. It taxes too much, borrows too much, regulates too much, gives away too much money and is in our faces over something as intimate as contraception.

We need a game changer in the White House, now more than ever.

Reprinted with the author's permission.

February 16, 2012

Saturday, February 11, 2012

What ....early polls show Ron Paul beating Mitt Romney in Maine

What... early polls show Ron Paul beating Mitt Romney in Maine.... stay tuned.....

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

What early exit polls show Newt Gingrich beating Mitt Romney in Colorado !!!

What early exit polls show Newt Gingrich beating Mitt Romney in Colorado !!!

Is the establishment GOP going to play games out west to put liberal flip flopper Mitt Romney in charge ???

BIG GOVERNMENT WAR MONGER conservative Rick Santorum leads Minnesota early polls

BIG GOVERNMENT WAR MONGER conservative Rick Santorum leads in Minnesota polls may beat weather vane Mitt. Stay tuned .....

AMERICAN OUT OF HAND SPENDING & GOVERNMENT GONE WACKY

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/finance/2012/February/Ridiculous-Govt-Spending-List-Grows-Longer-/

WASHINGTON -- The list of wasteful spending by the federal government in Washington, D.C., grows ever longer.

A recent report released by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., gives a hundred examples from just last year.

Like the $120 million for federal retirement benefits to retirees who are already dead. Patrick Knudsen, The Heritage Foundation's senior federal budget expert, pointed showed CBN News a recent example.

"After a retiree had died, his son continued cashing his checks for 37 years. And it didn't stop until 2008 when the son himself died," he said.

Other examples of wasteful spending:

More federal funding in the amount of $593,000 went to a primate research center to study where in chimpanzees' brains they get the idea to throw their feces. A Virginia university received $55,000 to study Jordanian students' water pipe smoking habits. A new grant of $176,000 joined $350,000 already spent to study how cocaine hurts or helps the sex drive of Japanese quail. While some people complain about government cuts, Leslie Paige, media director for Citizens Against Government Waste, said hardly any government program is rarely downsized.

"We never cut anything. There's hardly ever anything cut. In fact, the budget goes up by five percent and we're still spending money on junk like this," she said.

More examples:

A museum of magic received $147,000 to study the audiences of magic shows. More than $550,000 of U.S. taxes went to the production of a documentary on how rock bands contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire. "Now I might actually be interested in that. I'd like to know which groups did the most to bring down the evil empire. I just don't think the federal government needs to be spending money on this," Knudsen said.

Paige said such profligate spending, magnified by many billions, could cause America's downfall.

"We're $15.3 trillion in debt, and we're giving money to people to study the collapse of the Soviet Union. I mean I think it's so ironic," she pointed out.

A television production of a Pakistani version of PBS' "Sesame Street" has already cost tax payers $10 million and $20 million more has already been budgeted.

"For all we know, this is the CIA sending coded messages to its operatives through Bert and Ernie," Knudsen said.

IPad 2s were purchased for $96,000 for students in Maine, where 96 percent of their parents said the cost wasn't worth it.

Nevada's Western Folklife Center received $50,000 for cowboys and cowgirls to gather once a year to recite cowboy poetry.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a native of the Silver State, expressed his anger when the House of Representatives tried to cut it.

"I thought Sen. Reid might not live in Nevada. I thought he might live on Mars at that point," Paige said.

"Because I could not believe we were living in the same reality, that this is so important to him that he's willing to spend that kind of federal dollars on the poetry festival when we're facing a $15.5 trillion debt."

"There's just is a culture of spending in Congress," Knudson explained.

"They don't want to have to say, 'no.' Their vocabulary is all about 'yes,'" Paige pointed out.

"And they think there's all this free money around and if they don't grab it, somebody else will," Knudson said.

And every day, the federal government continues to add $2.5 billion more to the national debt.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Trump rips Romney as "a fund guy" who got "rid of jobs"



TRUMP YOU CRACKPOT

DONALD TRUMP ENDORSES MITT LIBERAL ROMNEY ...WHO CARES

Snake oil salesman endorses serial flip flopper. A new season of the apprentice must be around the corner. So what nobody cares Donny boy.

Ron Paul: Reactionary or Visionary by Patrick J. Buchanan

Ron Paul: Reactionary or Visionary by Patrick J. Buchanan

After his fourth-place showing in Florida, Ron Paul, by then in Nevada, told supporters he had been advised by friends that he would do better if only he dumped his foreign policy views, which have been derided as isolationism.

Not going to do it, said Dr. Paul to cheers. And why should he?

Observing developments in U.S. foreign and defense policy, Paul's views seem as far out in front of where America is heading as John McCain's seem to belong to yesterday's Bush-era bellicosity.

Consider. In December, the last U.S. troops left Iraq. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta now says that all U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan will end in 18 months.

The strategic outposts of empire are being abandoned.


The defense budget for 2013 is $525 billion, down $6 billion from 2012. The Army is to be cut by 75,000 troops; the Marine Corps by 20,000. Where Ronald Reagan sought a 600-ship Navy, the Navy will fall from 285 ships today to 250. U.S. combat aircraft are to be reduced by six fighter squadrons and 130 transport aircraft.

Republicans say this will reduce our ability to fight and win two land wars at once – say, in Iran and Korea. Undeniably true.

Why, then, is Ron Paul winning the argument?


The hawkishness of the GOP candidates aside, the United States, facing its fourth consecutive trillion-dollar deficit, can no longer afford to sustain all its alliance commitments, some of which we made 50 years ago during a Cold War that ended two decades ago, in a world that no longer exists.

As our situation is new, said Abraham Lincoln, we must think and act anew.

As Paul argues, why close bases in the U.S. when we have 700 to 1,000 bases abroad? Why not bring the troops home and let them spend their paychecks here?

Begin with South Korea. At last report, the United States had 28,000 troops on the peninsula. But why, when South Korea has twice the population of the North, an economy 40 times as large, and access to U.S. weapons, the most effective in the world, should any U.S. troops be on the DMZ? Or in South Korea?

U.S. forces there are too few to mount an invasion of the North, as Gen. MacArthur did in the 1950s. And any such invasion might be the one thing to convince Pyongyang to fire its nuclear weapons to save the hermit kingdom.


But if not needed to defend the South, and a U.S. invasion could risk nuclear reprisal, what are U.S. troops still doing there?

Answer: They are on the DMZ as a tripwire to bring us, from the first day of fighting, into a new land war in Asia that many American strategists believe we should never again fight.

Consider Central Asia. By pushing to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and building air bases in nations that were republics of the Soviet Union two decades ago, the United States generated strategic blowback.


China and Russia, though natural rivals and antagonists, joined with four Central Asian nations in a Shanghai Cooperation Organization to expel U.S. military power from a region that is their backyard, but is half a world away from the United States.

Solution: The United States should inform the SCO that when the Afghan war is over we will close all U.S. military bases in Central Asia. No U.S. interest there justifies a conflict with Russia or China.

Indeed, a Russia-China clash over influence and resources in the Far East and Central Asia seems inevitable. Let us get out of the way.

But it is in Europe that America may find the greatest savings.

During the Cold War, 300,000 U.S. troops faced hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops from northern Norway to Central Germany to Turkey. But not only are there no Russian troops on the Elbe today, or surrounding West Berlin, they are gone from Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Between Russia and Poland lie Belarus and Ukraine. Moscow no longer even has a border with Turkey.

Why, when NATO Europe has two nuclear powers and more than twice the population of a Russia whose own population has shrunk by 8 million in 20 years and is scheduled to shrink by 25 million more by 2050, does Europe still need U.S. troops to defend it?

She does not. The Europeans are freeloading, as they have been for years, preserving their welfare states, skimping on defense and letting Uncle Sam carry the hod.

In the Panetta budgets, America will still invest more in defense than the next 10 nations combined and retain sufficient power to secure, with a surplus to spare, all her vital interests.

But we cannot forever be first responder for scores of nations that have nothing to do with our vital interests. As Frederick the Great observed, "He who defends everything defends nothing."