Wednesday, April 18, 2012
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
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
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
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 ???
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 .....
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