Margaret MacDonald is nearly 83 years old and suffers from lung damage (as do I). Standing outside in the cold at night could have killed her. Though she could not muster enough lung power to activate a breathalyzer, her blood alcohol level proved to be zero.

Unless we all want to capitulate to shari’a law, it’s time to put a stop to the moral panic about alcohol in Canada and the US.

Ezra Levant on Canada neo-Prohibitionist fascists

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Jan 12, 2012

To bully and berate an innocent senior then punish her without a trial for a crime she clearly didn’t commit.

This, apparently, is what Alberta has to look forward to under draconian drunk-driving laws inspired by our neighbouring province, where suspected motorists are guilty until they prove themselves innocent.

Fortunately for 82-year-old Margaret MacDonald, tears brought on by allegedly obnoxious B.C. RCMP officers didn’t blind her to protecting herself.

“I came into the house and burst into tears — then I stood here at three o’clock in the morning and thought ‘my word means nothing,’” said MacDonald.

“Three officers don’t believe me, so I phoned the hospital and took a taxi over to have a blood test.

“I’m not going to let the Mounties get away with saying I was drunk.”

At the Cranbrook Hospital, she obtained a laboratory document proving what she’d desperately been trying to tell police a few minutes before.

There was no alcohol in her system — not a drop — and yet MacDonald’s failure to provide a proper breath sample meant her car was taken away for a month and her licence suspended for 90 days.

Now, $6,000 out-of-pocket and in fear of losing her home, the Cranbrook senior will wait another six months for a ruling on her case, as the B.C. government tweaks legislation to comply with a court order.

It was May 21 when MacDonald was approached by an off-duty RCMP officer, just outside her home.

MacDonald, a near-teetotaler, was returning from an engagement party at a friend’s house when she mistakenly turned into the wrong lane. She assumed that’s why the police officer was there.

Even when the off-duty cop told MacDonald a breathalyzer was coming to test her for drinking and driving, she didn’t worry — her last serious drink was 60 years ago: “I really don’t drink,” she said.

What she didn’t count on was the lung power needed to properly blow into a police breathalyzer. Having suffered from serious pneumonia a few years ago, she couldn’t manage.

That didn’t stop RCMP from making her try — over the next two hours, MacDonald says she was forced to stand in the chill and told to blow 15 times by increasingly snotty RCMP officers.

“He pounded on the hood of his car and shouted at me to blow. He shoved this thing in my mouth and it fell on the ground, and he picked it up and put in back in again,” said MacDonald.

“I said ‘I don’t drink, I haven’t been drinking,’ and he said, ‘you’re sticking your tongue in there because you don’t want do this — you’re slurring, you’re drunk and you stink of alcohol.’”

RCMP officials are now reviewing the conduct of officers that night, but try as they might, the Mounties couldn’t get a sample from the shivering, teary-eyed senior, who was wearing only sandals and a thin dress.

Thus, MacDonald was cited for failing to provide a breath sample, given a Notice of Driving Prohibition for three months, fined $500 and told her car was to be towed.

MacDonald wept, but she was sharp enough to obtain proof of her innocence, because in Canada that used to be enough to make those in power see sense.

Not anymore. Under a system about to be adopted in Alberta, drivers suspected of driving drunk, even under .05%, can lose their licences and cars without a trial.

Even after MacDonald took her blood test to the RCMP station, she was told nothing could be done.

A helpful corporal on duty provided her with a letter, stating: “I believe it is only fair that this Driving Prohibition and Vehicle Impound be terminated and removed from your driving record as soon as possible.”

But it didn’t end there.

Despite proof of alcohol-free blood, B.C.’s superintendent of motor vehicles adjudicator still found her guilty — a decision now under review by direct order of B.C. Solicitor General Shirley Bond.

“Obviously, I am concerned with this circumstance but it is important that we get all the facts of the case,” Bond said in a statement to QMI Agency.

“As soon as I became aware of this, I directed the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles to review the case and that work is currently underway.”

The ordeal took a massive toll on MacDonald — a few days later, she suffered what doctors in Calgary told her was a mild, stress-related heart attack, leaving her bed-ridden in hospital.

Back in Cranbrook, all she can do is wait.

“I’m nearly 83 and you have to cope with life, but through my years I’ve never been this traumatized over anything,” she said.

“Especially when I’m totally innocent.”

- Calgary Sun

Piss off, MADD, you pathetic prohibitionists

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Jan 18, 2012

In Ontario the legal BAC limit is 0.08 per cent, but the blithering idiots at MADD have seen to it that your car can be impounded if you blow at the * legal * limit of 0.05. The cop has been made judge and jury. Your papers, please.

And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart. – Psalm 104:15, KJV

Washington Examiner: Conservative silence and the leftist agenda

By Stella Morabito

Occupy Wall Street aims to sway public opinion by projecting the false illusion of a “collective belief” against free markets. Likewise, most leftwing agendas depend on building a fake sense of public opinion support, especially when the agenda cannot withstand prolonged scrutiny or debate.

But the success of leftist activism depends to a great degree on the everyday silence of millions of conservative individuals. The matrix of political correctness built by leftist elites is probably most effective in applying widespread social pressure on conservatives as individuals.

It thereby isolates and discourages many conservatives from exposing their views to co-workers, neighbors, clients, classmates, and anyone else who might be effectively engaged in day-to-day life.

Consider this scenario: The phone rings while Rush Limbaugh is audible in the background. The covert conservative turns off the radio out of dread of being exposed as a listener.

Or this scene: A conservative nods politely while a neighbor pontificates leftist views. He does not correct his neighbor’s mistaken assumption that he shares such views.

Or this: A co-worker expresses disgust for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Without even questioning the premise, the conservative simply changes the subject.

Such reticence to engage contributes to a dangerous reverse bandwagon effect. To understand the mechanics, we might look up the theory of “preference falsification,” a term coined by the scholar Timur Kuran in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies. He defines it as “the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures.” [emphasis added]

Public opinion is actually “a determinant of people’s willingness to reveal their innermost selves,” observes Kuran.

When we falsify our core beliefs in our daily lives the effect is “the regulation of others’ perceptions.”

This happens in many ways, but when you avoid speaking up truthfully or at all, as the occasion presents itself, you deprive others of your knowledge and lose the opportunity to influence how others think.

The opposing view then takes root more deeply because you’ve also made it harder for those who might agree with you to speak up. [emphasis added]

According to Kuran, individuals’ preference falsification has an extremely powerful ripple effect that influences both the shape of public opinion and the political process.

An interesting sidelight is that President Obama’s current regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has studied this phenomenon in some depth. Sunstein and Kuran co-authored a 1999 Stanford Law Review article on a related theory, the “availability cascade” which they define as “a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation whereby an expressed perception triggers reactions that make that perception seem increasingly plausible through its rising availability in public discourse.”

It involves two mechanisms: “information cascades” in which uninformed people “base their own beliefs on the apparent beliefs of others;” and “reputational cascades,” in which earning social approval or avoiding social disapproval affect how personal opinions are expressed or withheld. Sound familiar?

The process can be very fragile, according to the authors. But it can trigger huge and unpredicted shifts in public opinion. What this means is that no conservative can afford to sit back and expect talk radio or conservative think tanks to save the day.

A more positive shift in public opinion will gain enduring traction only when thousands more conservatives — and, following their lead, millions more — refuse to falsify their preferences to those they meet in day to day life. [emphasis added]

By being friendly, engaging first with those who like and trust them, many conservatives who take the risk of defying political correctness report the pleasant surprise of discovering like thinkers waiting to be emboldened.

Even if this doesn’t happen, breaking out of isolation is essential to discrediting the leftist caricature of conservatives and presenting more and more people with the human face of conservatism.
[...]
Read more at the Washington Examiner.

What’s this all about in plain English? Simple. There are a lot of “closet conservatives” out there. They have been misled by leftist propaganda into believing that “normal people” don’t agree with them, so they’d better keep their opinions to themselves or face social ostracism, job loss, and maybe outright violence. They WILL come out of the closet if, and only if, they see YOU being truthful about your opinions. That’s why it’s time for all of us to step up to the plate and go to bat for the truth, not only in the blogosphere and in letters to elected officials, but also in our real-life, face-to-face encounters.

PJM: In Defense of Starting an Argument in Public for Humanity’s Greater Good

By Megan Fox
A few days ago, I took my kids to one of those places with giant inflatable slides that sane people avoid. My best friend was in town for her once-a-year visit home and in order to show the kids a “good time” took them to inflatable kid heaven, otherwise known as The Jump Zone.
[...]
There were many other mothers there that day but oddly enough, they weren’t doing any of the things we were. In fact, they were happily parked on benches yapping with each other like they were at Starbucks with a nanny at home. In the meantime, their children were terrorizing ours in ways that would have gotten them arrested if they were a few years older. My girlfriend’s three-year-old made it all the way to the top of a very precarious perch just to have some overanxious boy shove her off. She fell about 10 feet to the inflated surface below, unharmed but scared and screaming. The boy, about 6, never even looked back, his mother an invisible mystery. No adult came forward to claim the vicious little brat or to reprimand him and demand an apology for this anti-social behavior. My 5-year-old made a beeline for him and told him off in her babyish way. “That wasn’t nice!” she said in her best Mommy voice. He shoved past her and went on with his reign of terror.

Two minutes later, my 2-year-old was happily standing on top of a plastic baby slide just watching the chaos in front of her when another little boy, old enough to know better (7?) came charging up to the slide, grabbed the whole thing and started rocking it and tipping it over. Something snapped inside my brain as I watched my baby’s face shrink in terror as this monster tried to topple her tower with her in it. I was on him in less than four seconds. I dug my fingers into his ribs and shouted at him, “NO!” in the exact same voice I reserve for the dog when he’s got my shoes.

He dropped the playset and turned to me, shocked, and I continued to scold him uncaring of who was watching. I’m not sure what I said, something about manners and ending up in jail, but I hope he’ll remember it the next time he tries to harm a baby. I looked up, expecting to face his either sheepish or angry parent and to my surprise, no one came. He disappeared into the melee and that was that.

These are only two of the episodes that occurred in that hour. Other, equally disturbing acts of torment continued for our time there and in no instance did any parent but my friend or me intervene. This parenting trend to outright ignore one’s children is puzzling but everywhere. I’m no Parent of the Year here. I mean — I ignore my kids plenty when we’re at home and they’re safe and I have stuff to do. But to take them out somewhere were they could hurt themselves or others and ignore them is an outrage. But I have a solution that I’ve decided can reverse this problem but it will require your help: We’re going to engage in verbal fisticuffs.

The current wisdom says don’t make a fuss because you never know who has a gun or a knife or who’s crazy and will cut you. It’s always a possibility. But have we become so scared by the minute possibility of a random act of violence that we will just watch society degenerate into a place where chaos reigns because parents can’t take responsibility? This is the kind of environment, the Lord-of-the-Flies syndrome, that creates more thugs. Unchecked childish violence becomes unrestrained adult carnage and all of us will pay for it one day. I say, no more! I will not be silent when I witness juveniles acting badly in public. Instead of saying something just to them, the way I did with the little bulldozer boy, I will also seek out their mom or dad, take the offender to them and make my case for that parent to do his or her job better. Sounds dangerous doesn’t it? What can I say? I like to live on the edge.

The point is, we all live here. The world is like a big house. There are rules of the house and if the sheriff isn’t doing his job, I’m appointing myself deputy. It’s time to step up if you want to save America. We have a nation full of takers out there. Takers who would trample their neighbor for a $3 waffle iron, and it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing that a mother should have to be told to watch her child. Maybe embarrassment needs to make a come-back.

…We live with a very thin veil between order and chaos. Has it ever occurred to you that it might be your responsibility to push back against the madness? Popular theory says you can save the world through recycling but what will it matter if the world falls into the hands of bullies and pigs?

We fear that the worst will happen if we say something about someone’s bad behavior — and that’s always a possibility — but probability lies on the side of the idiot backing down. When a bully faces no opposition, the bullying only gets worse. It takes a brave soul to stand up, draw the line in the sand and declare “No further!” It’s the reason the Iron Curtain tore and the Berlin Wall crumbled. It’s the medicine for the national crisis we are in both financially and morally and it starts at home in your community. Personal responsibility, a phrase conservatives have been hawking for years, along with courage is the remedy for all of it.

The American people (mostly conservatives) began standing up to their representatives at town-hall meetings a few years ago and started demanding their government stop spending money it doesn’t have. Their involvement sparked a movement that changed the face of local governments across this nation.

The fight for the moral compass of this country is on and it won’t be won without push-back. The OWS protests are the antithesis of personal responsibility. They are the ones whose parents abdicated their responsibility and allowed them to cut in line and push babies down on the playground. They are the ones who feel entitled to have the first turn, your toys, free college courses in queer studies or anything else they want simply because they weren’t properly socialized. (And yet they consider themselves “socialists” or something. )

Chances are they went to public school where, I am informed, all children go to get “socialized.” I was in a room full of publicly socialized children at the Jump Zone and if that’s as good as it gets I’ll pass and continue my home-socialization experiment. (I home-school.). After all, my kids aren’t the ones knocking over babies and cutting in line.
[...]
This kind of parenting creates non-Americans. It strips the American spirit right out of American children by denying them the chance to understand what it is we do here and who we are. We are good people, we are giving people, we care for each other and that’s why we need to stand up and refuse to allow coming generations to become looting parasites. They need someone to call them on their idiocy and that someone is you.
Read it all.

PJM: Yard Signs Tell the Tale in New Hampshire

Drive through New Hampshire in the next week, and you will see a staggering number of Republican yard signs. They’re everywhere: It seems like every third house has a sign up. They’re on front yards and in the windows of businesses. They’re in every neighborhood representing every demographic. They’re in front of homes along rural roadways, in front of suburban homes in the big southern towns, and in the conservative blue-collar neighborhoods of Manchester.

And there are even Republican yard signs all over the capital city of Concord — a largely Democratic-leaning town in this swing state.

Barack Obama is in big trouble next November.

In elections, yard signs provide the essential “social proof” to back up the television ads, debate performances, and stump speeches — especially when it comes time to close the deal with relatively apolitical or undecided voters.

But this is a Republican primary. What do January yard signs have to do with Barack Obama?

Here is a secret: If you want to predict a general election, count the number of Republican yard signs in “purple” neighborhoods.

Take a drive through an upper-middle class community in a swing state. Find the subdivision where there’s a coffee shop on the corner and an organic grocery store not too far away, ideally where the Priuses outnumber the SUV’s… but not by much. Find the block where the adults are academics, professionals, or government employees and where every household has a couple of kids in the public schools. The voter breakdown in the ideal “purple” neighborhood is about a third Republican, a third Democrat, and a third independent.

Welcome to Concord, New Hampshire. Or Fort Collins, Colorado. Or northern Virginia. Or Raleigh, North Carolina. Or the suburbs and exurbs and small cities in swing states around the country.

Now count the Republican yard signs. Signs are not polling data, and they are certainly not election returns, but a yard sign is a definitive measure of three things: Support (obviously); intensity; and – most importantly — a voter’s willingness to make his political opinions known to his neighbors. A yard sign — especially in a “hostile” environment — is a symbol of political courage, a sign of an impending shift in public opinion. [emphasis added]

The early returns from the yard sign tallies are in: Voters in New Hampshire want their neighbors to know that they are voting Republican this year.

That is a big deal. If you live in a conservative community in a Republican state, it is hard to understand the open hostility towards Republicans in “purple” neighborhoods. Put up a sign in your yard and prepare to have your neighbors approach (or accost) you at the grocery store. Prepare to have them bring your kids into the discussion. Prepare to have your business boycotted. There is no separation between the personal and the political on the left, so in a swing state a sign in your yard marks you as a target.
[...]
More here.

I was doing some surfing and found this from our good friend, Don Feder.
Don Feder is a huge defender for the Serbian cause.

The Jewish Case for “Merry Christmas”

By Don Feder
posted December 8, 2006

You may find the title confusing. After all, religious Jews don’t celebrate Christmas. So why should a Jew care if a store clerk says “Merry Christmas”? Why should the public disappearance of Christmas matter to the Jewish people?

Patience. All will be explained in due course.

In the meantime, ‘tis the season to be politically correct – a coast-to-coast harkening-free zone and the tyranny of hypersensitivity.

The increasingly successful effort to purge Christmas from our culture (correctly called the War on Christmas) proceeds apace – municipal Christmas trees are re-christened (no pun intended) “holiday trees,” schools ban Christmas decorations and the singing of Christmas carols during holiday programs. Christmas – excuse me — holiday parades are excluding Santa Claus, and, everywhere, stores (which derive 20% of their annual revenue from Christmas sales) are in Grinch overdrive.
[...]
What’s the alternative — an America dominated by the twisted theories of Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, Michael Moore and George Clooney? Instead of the red and green of Christmas, how about an America where chador black is the dominant color?

So, what do you prefer to saying “Merry Christmas”? “Workers of the world unite?” Or “Allah Akbar”?

Read it all here.

Ezra Levant & Mark Steyn: Christmas

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Dec 23, 2011
Ezra Levant & Mark Steyn discuss the war on Christmas and the Jewish gents who wrote many of the great Christmas songs.

It’s Called ‘Christmas,’ Stupid

It’s a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree. It has always been a Christmas tree, and you can call it a holiday tree, but every two-year-old knows it’s a Christmas tree. No one is being fooled. Those afraid to mouth the word “Christmas,” as if it were some sort of obscenity, just appear foolish…

Read it all.

CAIR Bears: The Movie

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by TheRudeNews on Apr 3, 2008

This is a quick vid of the CAIR Bears who reside at Therudenews.com.
Feel free to stop by there and see them…

See:

• The Rude News on Facebook
• CAIR Bears Return

Yes, the bears ARE for sale. Leave a message on the blog above or on Facebook if you are interested.

In the article Call to Arms for Free Speech in Canada, we exposed the campaign of LGBT lobbyist Michael Erickson to silence the Institute for Canadian Values for running an ad against the introduction of the Dalton McGuinty government’s graphic sex-ed curriculum.

Here’s a video exposing what Michael Erickson’s supporters are all about. Suffice it to say that they talk like orcs.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Dec 5, 2011
The tolerant Left celebrate diversity in only the way they can.

Brian Lilley: Trying to silence freedom of speech

There are people that do not like us, do not like Sun News, do not like me, do not like Byline.

This isn’t shocking, we are not everyone’s cup of tea, nor do we try to be.

We had Margie Gillis, the hand dancer, and her friends try to shut us down a little while ago.

Gillis asked for us to be put off the air until we could prove that we supported and broadcast Canadian values, of course that would mean her version of Canadian values which might included bowing before her and the million dollars plus she’s sucked from the pockets of taxpayers over the years.

Gillis complained to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council and encouraged others to do the same – some 4,000 people did complain.

The Broadcast Standards council is not a government body but it is close. It is made up of Canada’s private broadcasters and it issues rulings on codes of conduct, it hears complaints and issues rulings.

If you ignore a ruling or refuse to comply you can have your licence pulled because membership in the council is often a requirement of the licence.

Remember the Dire Straits ruling?

One woman in Newfoundland complained that the song, a song that had been played on Canadian radio for 25 years, used the word faggot. The council didn’t look at the context of the song, they didn’t look at the meaning, they just ruled that it used the word faggot and was therefore homophobic and was essentially banned on commercial radio in Canada.

They reversed themselves after a public outcry, a good dose of public ridicule and after looking at the context of the song.

Well now a lone man in Toronto has started a campaign not to shut us down but in a way to shut us up.

Michael Erickson, a high school teacher in Toronto and a candidate for the New Democrats in the last federal election has petitioned the board of directors of our parent company Quebecor, the Canadian Broadcaster Standards Council and the Advertising Standards Council over our decision to air an ad that he doesn’t like.

The ad, from the Institute for Canadian Values, is against the introduction of the McGuinty government’s graphic sex-ed curriculum.

Here’s the ad.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Erickson’s complaint and his online petition, claim that “This ad promotes intolerance against people who might stand out from traditional male or female gender roles.”

I’d disagree with that and I have several times. The ad highlights what was in McGuinty’s proposed curriculum and what has been found in existing guides for teachers at the elementary school level.

Is teaching about transgendered issues, gender identity and gender fluidity in grade three a good idea?

I don’t think so.

Neither do the people behind the ad.

But rather than fight back using his own words, asking to come on the show, buying his own ad to counter the ad that has already played he wants to go a different route.

Here is what he is demanding from Quebecor.

“AN INTERNAL INVESTIGATION to determine how this ad was approved for distribution and at what rate; we also recommend you assess the level of conflict of interest involved in this particular case. We assume that you will take the appropriate disciplinary action with the employee(s) involved.” Wow – he wants to control our internal systems that would touch on ad sales, human resources and more. He also wants to control what ads we show on our network. His letter goes on.

“A ONE YEAR MORATORIUM on publishing or circulating ads by The Canadian Christian College and its subsidiary organizations, specifically (but not limited to) the Institute for Canadian Values.”A bit of an over-reach don’t you think, telling us we cannot run any ads by this group?

The ad he’s complaining about was approved by the regulator put in place to approve ads on private stations in Canada. It’s called Telecaster. But he doesn’t like the ad so he wants to shut us up. Oh, and he wants money as well.

“PROFITS FROM THE AD TO BE GIVEN to a registered non-profit in Canada or Ontario that promotes or provides services that improve the equality, safety, awareness and/or human dignity of trans, transsexual, transgendered, two-spirited or intersex people.” Okay, so he wants to control our internal systems including human resources, ad sales and he wants the money from the ad to go to a group he approves of, one that promotes his issues.

But as they say on those late night ads, wait, there’s more!

“TWO HOURS OF FREE AD TIME for a registered non-profit in Canada or Ontario that promotes or provides services that improve the equality, safety, awareness and/or human dignity of trans, transsexual, transgendered, two-spirited or intersex people.” So he wants money, free ads, control of our human resources and a ban on a potential client buying any ads from us for any reason or on any issue. This is starting to sound like a threat, it’s starting to sound like Michael Erickson, the NDP candidate and high school teacher wants to run this company.

But he’s not done yet. Michael Erickson also want to control our minds, our thoughts, our feelings. He wants to control what we say. One of his other demands.

“SENSITIVITY TRAINING for every employee in Quebecor and its subsidiaries who earn over $90,000 a year. The sensitivity training should be no less than 3 hours and should build awareness and sensitivity of trans, transsexual, transgender, two-spirited and intersex identities and experiences with the goal of building a long term capacity for equality and respect of diversity in your corporation.” Erickson has other demands including a public statement from the company on trans issues and an audit of our portrayal of trans people to make sure it is to his liking.

Don’t do these things and he will take us to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, the group that can yank our licence, and try to get them to force us to do it.

He will also demand action from the Advertising Standards Council even though this ad has already been cleared by the body set up to screen TV ads.

This is an attempt at lawfare, an attempt to harass us into accepting his point of view and not allow any others.

This is an attempt to shred the Charter of Rights and Freedom which does not grant but guarantees free speech.

For daring to exercise our own free speech and allowing others to do the same, this man wants to take control of many aspects of this television station.

All of this comes at the same time as a boycott has been launched by gay activists in Toronto targeting the advertisers of the Toronto Sun. The reason, a print version of this very same ad.

These folks are asking people to call, bully and harass the companies that do business with the Sun until we bow and scrap before them and their point of view. The boycott appears to have the backing of the paper Xtra.

Rather sad if you ask me but that’s the way things are.

Is this what Canada stands for now?

Writing about the Shafia honour killings trial recently the blogger Closet Conservative used the phrase “From never again to never offend.”

That’s an apt description of this situation as well.

Is that what we want to become in Canada, a country that doesn’t allow anyone to offend?

Diefenbaker said, “I am Canadian, free to speak without fear.”

I say we embrace Diefenbaker’s way, not the way of Michael Erickson and his ilk.

And that’s the Byline.

 
What to do now?

Contact Information for CBSC:

Contact Information – Government of Canada

• Stephen Harper
• Canadian Ministry (Cabinet)
• Members of Parliament
• Senators

Gotta check out 2.0: The Blogmocracy!

• New Low: 17% say US Government Has Consent of the Governed By Iron Fist

  Tell me something: when a majority of the people feel the government doesn’t have the consent of the governed, how can you possibly say that it does? We are there, Guys and Dolls.

• Obama Confuses Jews with janitors By Speranza
  

  Can you imagine if George W. Bush said this?

• 93,000 Copts have left Egypt since March according to NGO report By Speranza
  

  How’s that Arab Spring working out for you now? Christianity is dying in the Middle East except in the Jewish State.

• Obama Still Has Delusions of Godhood by Iron Fist
  

  So continuing to support Obama is just like keeping faith with God. Wow. That makes the Greek columns and Lightworker BS look like self-effacing humor by comparison. Of course none of those “men of faith”, including several preachers, took Obama to task for his Luciferian-scale ego trip. Why would they? They agree with him.

• Obamacare Finally Is Going to the Supreme Court By coldwarrior
  

  The Obama administration chose not to ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to re-hear a pivotal health reform case Monday, signaling that it’s going to ask the Supreme Court to decide whether President Barack Obama’sz health reform law is constitutional.

• Separation Of Church And State Was Meant As A Means Of Practicality, Not Political Correctness Run Amok. By Flyovercountry
  

  The teachers of my elementary school you see, were attempting to inflict diversity training upon the small children. The result of the inflicted diversity training was almost always a fist fight after school, and precious little actual cultural understanding. The important thing I guess is that the teacher really felt good about herself, and that is what really counts to the political left in our country.

The molestation of children goes mainstream….and the academia couldn’t be happier nor more willing to help…

Please read the comments below this article.

Maggie’s Notebook: Academia Normalizing Pedophilia With Minor-Attracted Person: Hebephiles, Ephebophiles and Pedophiles

August 21, 2011
By Maggie

I’m struggling to believe what my eyes are reading. A conference held in Baltimore on August 17th includes exchanging ideas WITH “minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Health Disorders. The input of “minor-attracted persons” is important to this conference where several major universities are represented.
[…]
Hebephilias are those who have a sexual preference for children in the early years of puberty, ages 10-14. Ephebophilias prefer children in the later years of adolescence. Pedophiles prefer prepubescent children. At this conference, there will be an effort to establish whether or not hebephilia is a mental disorder. Put them all together and this group is known as paraphilias.

[B4U-ACT website]…it has an enormous impact on the beliefs and practices of mental health professionals, the criminal justice system, the media, and the public. It also has a profound effect on adults and teenagers who are emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents, on the availability of mental health services for them, and on relevant research.

Assuming these three differing preferences are considered a mental disorder, can we correctly assume claiming that disorder in court will send a person to a hospital rather than a prison after they have ruined the life of a child?

On the schedule is Dr. John Z. Sadler: Decriminalizing Mental Disorder Concepts – Pedophilia as an Example. Here is one way the conference will consider the problem of paraphilias (my emphasis):

(2) If Pedophilia and related categories are to be preserved as legitimate, nonmorally value-laden disorders, then they require a preponderance of nonmorally-value-laden diagnostic descriptors in their diagnostic criteria.

LifeNews offers this information about B4U-ACT (my emphasis):

B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile activists and mental health professionals, is behind the August 17 conference, which will include panelists from Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Louisville, and the University of Illinois.

On their website B4U-ACT classifies pedophilia as simply another sexual orientation and decries the “stigma” attached to pedophilia, observing: “No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood.” The group says that it does not advocate treatment to change feelings of attraction to children or adolescents…

Read it all, including the comments.

Also see:

HHS: Children Are ‘Sexual Beings’

Monday, August 22, 2011
By Penny Starr

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is offering advice to parents and teens about sex education, including assurances that teens may “experiment” with homosexuality as part of “exploring their own sexuality,” and that masturbation should be of concern only “if a child seems preoccupied with it to the exclusion of other activities.”

The information, located on a “Questions and Answers About Sex” link on the “Quick Guide to Healthy Living” portion of the HHS Web site, also describes children and infants as “sexual beings.”
[…]
Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the conservative Family Research Council, said that the HHS Web site does include some positive information, such as statements about abstinence being the best way to avoid pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases and the need for parents to teach their children sexual facts.

But some of the information has no place on a federal government Web site, he said.

“The idea that ‘children are human beings and therefore sexual beings’ is one of the most destructive myths of the sexual revolution,” Sprigg told CNSNews.com. “To a large extent, this myth may be traced to the ‘research’ conducted by Alfred Kinsey, including the infamous ‘Children of Table 34’ experiments, which involved the deliberate sexual abuse of children as young as 6 months old under ‘experimental’ conditions.”

“The fact that young children are aware that their bodies include genitalia hardly makes them ‘sexual beings,’ and it is improper (and potentially dangerous) to treat them as such before puberty,” he said.

Read the rest.

By Sparta

I stand with this brave woman. I hope others do. God bless her! There should be more like her.

They want to be called “Gay.” Unfortunately, they have taken a once beautiful word and corrupted it.

Homosexuals have won the right to corrupt our children in our schools. They have won the right to corrupt our military. I wonder what parents now say to their children when they see two “Gay” officers dancing on the floor of the officer’s club making out since they have no shame? Gov. Jerry Brown of California has just signed a bill for their public schools to give lessons about Gays and Lesbians in their social studies. See:
California Gay History Law: Jerry Brown Signs Landmark Bill

I once saw a video of a Gay Parade (Gay Pride) in San Francisco. Thoroughly sickening, and Nancy Pelosi has lead this “Gay Pride” parade. See: Gay Pride and Bare Asses

A word of warning. It may prove offensive to some – but it is factual.

Let’s not forget that Nancy Pelosi had promised to lead the most ethical Congress ever! LOL!!!!

Not only are we to accept their perverse way of achieving sexual satisfaction, we are to celebrate it.

Just as they do not want our morals imposed upon their lives, we should not have their immorality imposed upon us.

I realize that even by writing my thoughts down, by being out spoken, it could be very dangerous to me, just as it is dangerous when I write in support of my Serbian brothers and sisters.

As someone close to me once said, “The way this country is going, God is going to owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah!”

New York town clerk quits over gay marriage licenses

HUDSON, New York (Reuters) – A town clerk in western New York has resigned to avoid being forced to sign marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples, citing religious objections to same-sex marriage.

Laura Fotusky, the town clerk in Barker, New York, said in her resignation letter that she will step down on July 21, three days before New York becomes the sixth and largest state to allow gay nuptials.

Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the same sex marriage law last month after the bill narrowly passed the Republican-led state Senate. Its approval in New York is seen as a catalyst for gay marriage elsewhere as well as helping push the issue to the forefront nationally ahead of the 2012 elections.

Much of the debate in New York focused on the scope of protections for those opposed to same-sex marriage. The new law exempts religious groups from performing same-sex marriages but does not extend those protections to individuals, including government employees.

Fotusky was not immediately available for comment, but in her letter, dated July 11, she said she believes the Bible takes precedence over man-made laws.

“The Bible clearly teaches that God created marriage between male and female as a divine gift that preserves families and cultures. Since I love and follow Him, I cannot put my signature on something that is against God,” she wrote.

“I would be compromising my moral conscience if I participated in the licensing procedure,” she wrote.
[…]
Cuomo, who had made the legalization of same-sex marriage a top priority this year, told reporters on Tuesday that he agreed with Fotusky’s decision to resign because government workers have a responsibility to enforce the law.

“When you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose the laws,” Cuomo said.
[…]
More here.

I found this link about a serious violation of privacy in the State of Michigan in a worrisome Blogmocracy article about another significant threat to our electronic privacy, namely Apple iPhone secretly records owners’ every move. It followed another article, Exiting Detroit, about the endless and evidently irreversible decline and fall of the city of Detroit. It sure looks as though there are fewer and fewer reasons to visit, do business in, or live in, Michigan, and more and more reasons to avoid the entire state.

Similarly, if Apple shows so little regard for their customers’ privacy, I would suggest buying from a competitor until such time as Apple changes its ways. Vote with your wallet and vote with your feet!

Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops

(h/t: Da_Beerfreak)

ACLU seeks information on Michigan program that allows cops to download information from smart phones belonging to stopped motorists.

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.
[...]
A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

“Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags,” a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device’s capabilities. “The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps.”

The ACLU is concerned that these powerful capabilities are being quietly used to bypass Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

“With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity,” Fancher wrote. “A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched.”
[...]
Read it all.

But that’s not all, folks!

(Updated 9:33 AM EST April 22, 2011)

Jury to decide if Pastor Terry Jones can protest outside the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn. Last I checked, the First Amendment is not subject to jury disapproval.

By CzechRebel

What’s all the fuss about?

December 20, 2010 is the sesquicentennial of the adoption of the Ordinance of Secession of the State of South Carolina, featuring the display of the Ordinance of Secession and a Secession Ball in Charleston. Any attempt by those disfavored by the leftist elite—such as white Southern Americans—to celebrate their own heritage, predictably brings the self-anointed enforcers of “political correctness” [click here to view all posts on that topic] out of the woodwork in force. As always, the false accusation of “Racism!” is their weapon of choice.

Then, as now, an elaborate pretense of concern for the downtrodden soon becomes nothing more than a tool for the centralized government to use for impoverishing and enslaving everyone of all races.

South Carolina’s Original Ordinance of Secession on Display

12/20/2010

Location: The Charleston Museum
Address: 360 Meeting Street Charleston, SC 29403
Phone: 843.722.2996
Web Site: http://charlestonmuseum.org

As part of its commemoration of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, The Charleston Museum is pleased to announce it will exhibit South Carolina’s original Ordinance of Secession on Monday, December 20. This date marks the 150th anniversary of the signing of the document in Charleston. In the Ordinance, the state declared that the union existing between it and the other states was dissolved. South Carolina had seceded from the United States.

Read the rest.

“Secession Ball” in Charleston commemorates Civil War, stirs protest by civil rights group

The Confederate Heritage Trust, which scheduled the dance in Charleston near where the secession document was signed, says it wants to honor the Southern men who were willing to sacrifice their lives for their homes and their vision of states’ rights. Guests will have a chance to see the original Ordinance of Secession, which has been preserved by the state.

Leaders of the NAACP say it makes no sense to honor men who committed treason against their own nation for the sake of a system that kept black men and women in bondage as slaves.

As the Charleston event kicks off more than four years of 150th anniversary Civil War commemorations, it also frames persisting questions. Chief among them: How does a nation remember the time when 11 of its states tried unsuccessfully to break away?

The $100-a-person Secession Ball falls on one end of the spectrum. It is partly sponsored by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose central purpose is to preserve the history and legacy of the South’s “citizen-soldiers.”

Read the rest.

A most unlikely source of truth

It is an interesting development in the marketplace of truth to see Fox News and CNBC constantly at war. In a funny way, it forces out the truth. Ironically, more of the truth that I need to find seems to worm its way out through CNBC, especially from their half-witted “anchor” Keith Olbermann on his week-night show, Countdown.

No, I don’t think that Olbermann has any intention of revealing the truth to movement conservatives, libertarians, or Tea Partiers. He is merely trying to energize his old-line, hardcore Communist base. Made up to look like a talking corpse, Olbermann, on his show, dons the trappings of mid-1950s left-wing extremism. Using ancient versions of the NBC Peacock and recycling the music and news rhetoric of the time, I would not be surprised if he flashed over to old, grainy footage of an “embedded reporter” ready to interview a young Fidel Castro hidden away in the Cuban hillside with his Brigade troops.

While Fox News dances around the records of the candidates that they favor, which makes them look far too middle-of-the-road for the bulk of Americans who are trying to identify and support the opponents of big government, Olbermann inadvertently reveals some of the data that these voters are seeking. For example, when was the last time that Fox News disclosed any of their guests’ positions that support either pro-life or pro-Second Amendment views? Olbermann, on the other hand, is quick to label anyone who values human life as “anti-abortion”—which helpfully lets us know that they are pro-life and therefore deserve our support in that regard.

Take My Stand to Live and Die in Dixie

Early this December, Olbernmann graciously informed us of the December 20 sesquicentennial celebration of secession in Charleston, South Carolina. South Carolina was the first State to leave the Union and reestablish itself as in an independent sovereign entity. Of course, Olbermann’s spin amounted to over-simplified Yankee propaganda that might have sufficed for a third-grade class, but was an insult to the American public.

However, Olbermann is a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinsque (or Hitlersque, take your pick) totalitarian. His show, Countdown, is dedicated to promoting left-wing totalitarianism. In the dishonorable tradition of Pot, Meet Kettle, Olbermann disingenuously bandies about words like “treason”, “slavery”, “racism,” and the like.

What was secession really about?

In 1860, would the mainstream pillars of the community in South Carolina have openly engaged in what they considered to be an act of treason? Unlike the misfits, malcontents, and ne’er-do-wells from which the likes of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara drew upon to form the radical band of Cuban guerrillas that the Keith Olbermanns of the mid-twentieth century so openly supported, the delegates in antebellum South Carolina had every reason to believe that law and custom were on their side. On December 20, 1860, the mainstream people of South Carolina merely left the union in the same orderly manner by which they had originally joined it.

We must remember that the peculiar institution was legal in 1860. A major position of the citizenry in the newly-elected Republican regime was in favor of preserving the status quo in regards to existing State laws in that regard. Besides, the precedent for using federal law to override long-standing State law was all but nonexistent at that time. Oh, I am sure that there were a few people—with crystal balls in hands—who envisioned what we would call a “slippery slope” leading to federally-mandated abolition of chattel slavery in the next thirty to fifty years. Because so few Americans had bonded servants, chattel slavery was not a major issue to most Americans. Nor would it have occurred to very many Americans of that era to take the radical step of ending chattel slavery, or for that matter, making any other major change to the fabric of society, through federal legislation. There was simply no precedent for that degree of centralization.

Racism? From a historical viewpoint, that epithet does not even pass the straight-face test. What we call “racism” today would have been the norm throughout North America and Europe. Perhaps a few of the most radical and secular humanistic abolitionists could have passed for “non-racist” in modern society—unless, of course, someone asked them whether they would “want their daughter to marry one.”

What’s wrong with the new President from Illinois?

The winner of the last presidential election was a tall, thin, fast-taking Illinois lawyer. He had gotten national attention when he ran for the US Senate. He had been a known quantity; as a seeming shoo-in for his party’s nomination, he had shown his true radical colors to anyone willing to take notice. Just to put icing on the cake, despite the fact that that this particular nogoodnick was not someone the American people would support, the former frontrunner for the presidency—a proven tyrant—was given position of Secretary of State, the highest unelected position in the federal government.

The people of South Carolina felt totally disenfranchised. Their only opportunity seemed to be finding a way to opt out of that new administration. Hmm, is the reader doing a double take? Did the author say “1860 election” or “2008 election”? Are we talking about the Tea Party, or about the secessionists of a much earlier era?

So why did South Carolina decide to secede?

While issues were many, then as now, for most South Carolinians, the top issues were:

1. High taxes;
2. High taxes; &
3. High taxes!

In 1860, the nasty federal tax was known as a “tariff.” It was an extremely high tax imposed on goods imported to the United States. American-made manufactured goods, the vast majority of which came from the north, went untaxed; only the higher quality and more expensive goods that were imported from Europe were burdened with this extra cost.

In the North, these tariffs were viewed as a tax on the rich who could easily afford it. It was seen as a way of redistributing the wealth. Yankee factories could put out products at a more competitive price. Northern politicians used the money for the social spending of the day, which included make-work infrastructure projects, such as subsidized railroads, almost exclusively located in the North.

As always, this tax-the-rich scheme was anything but that in practice. The South was an agricultural society, but not in the way that you might envision. Yes, we hear so much about those few big plantations. We hear so much about the large cotton crops of the day. In truth, the vast majority of Southerners were yeoman farmers who lived off the land. Most yeoman farmers owned NO slaves; those who did, owned just a few. They hunted and fished and worked the land as subsistence farmers. The one thing they needed most, and could not produce for themselves, was high-quality farming equipment and other industrial products from Europe.

But that ran into the nasty tariff. While the large cotton plantation might have enough cash reserves to weather the storm of higher tariffs, this was not true of the small yeoman farmer, who had much less cash to operate with. If the price of tools and other manufactured necessities rose 50%, it could wipe out all of his liquid cash and then some. This would have had a devastating effect on small merchants who served the yeoman farming community, as well as other businesses and professions servicing the average Southerner. In addition, the high tariff on imported industrial products cut off foreign competition, allowing northern industrialists to charge far more for the products that they sold to the South.

Ironically, in the case of the larger plantations, the eventual alternative to slave labor would have been mechanization—the very thing that the high tariffs priced out of reach.

Clearly, high taxes and runaway federal government spending are nothing new. Likewise, everyday people in South Carolina who take exception to this federal tyranny also have deep roots. But then, the winners always write the history books (at least for the next century or two), and Yankee lies about the motives of those who struggle for freedom are nothing new.

Do those who hate the South have any point at all?

Ever since the Emancipation Proclamation, haters of the South, such as Keith Olbermann, have tried to argue that War Between the States was nothing more than a referendum on slavery. The fact is that, before the Emancipation Proclamation, the Yankee government consistently denied that slavery played any role in their ruthless invasion of the South.

Well, let’s see! Many of the top Confederate government and military leaders were open advocates of releasing bonded servants. Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet were three noteworthy examples. And we are not talking about idle words. Jefferson Davis adopted an African-American as his son. Robert E. Lee released all his slaves, all of which he had inherited. So, the President of the Confederacy and the two top generals in the Army would be willing to prosecute a war to undermine their own heartfelt beliefs? I think not!

Those who actually went out and fought for the Confederacy, for the most part, agreed that they were not fighting a war to preserve slavery. Only a few of them saw it as a factor, albeit a secondary factor, in their motivation to fight.

Many African-Americans (both bonded and free) served in the Confederate military, some in actual combat roles. Clearly, those who did not serve, but stayed behind to work in agriculture, commerce, transportation, and manufacturing, surely knew they were helping the Southern war effort. Those who stayed must have had some reason to prefer a Southern victory.

The list goes on and on. Nonetheless, there was one problem with secession. There was one small, but important, group of people who could have derailed secession, and who might have had the motivation to do so.

The safe bet for the delegates

In 1860, there were a number of people who did worry about the consequences of the eventual abolition of slavery. While the group was small, its members did have considerable wealth and political influence, and they were part of the upper crust of society that had the time and the means to serve in the state government at that time. While other Southern issues may have influenced them, there were a few vocal supporters of the peculiar institution who might have done most anything to have their pro-slavery position cemented into a constitutional amendment.

Presumably, they would have loved to have a President that would support such an amendment. Perhaps some of them would eventually have sided with Yankee interests—for the time being—so as to etch their precious peculiar institution in stone. But where could they have found such a pro-slavery leader? Where would they have looked?

Stumped? Sorry, but this is a trick question. The new President-elect was surprisingly very pro-slavery.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln not only had slave-owning relatives, but he even favored his own Constitutional Amendment preserving slavery in every State where it was currently being practiced. Don’t believe me? OK, but read his inauguration speech first. Either Honest Abe was a serious liar or he intended his version of the 13th Amendment to preserve, NOT to outlaw, slavery.

The price that Lincoln demanded for this devil’s bargain was for the South to agree to the high tariffs on imported goods.

Keeping secession on track

So, how could the anti-tax and limited-government secessionist movement, which actually did elevate some emancipation-minded Southerners to power, have managed to garner and retain the support of those who feared such radical changes to their society? Well, the secessionists could allay their fears by agreeing to keep the peculiar institution intact for a while. But that raises the perennial question: how much can anyone trust the promises of a few politicians?

Putting it in writing

Let us look at the way South Carolinians thought at that time, not knowing what their future would be. While I seriously doubt that, back in 1860, very many people expected America to enter the 20th Century with the peculiar institution still intact, with or without a constitutional amendment keeping it in place, emancipation was not something that these fire-eaters were prepared to deal with anytime soon. For that reason, they needed some written assurance that their point of view would be part of South Carolinian (and Southern) secession.

Thus, woven into the “declarations of causes which justify the secession of South Carolina from the federal union,” a report written by a committee of delegates, were denunciations of northern interference with the institution of chattel slavery. This report was the document that Keith Olbermann and some others have evidently confused with the Articles of Secession.

No language regarding the motives for secession appeared in the Articles themselves. Closely tracking the standards set forth in the Declaration of Independence some 84 years earlier, the actions of the convention both satisfied the principles of Thomas Jefferson and alleviated the fears of those who feared that the secessionist movement might become the new Southern radical abolitionist movement.

This was not much of a move when you consider that Lincoln was, at that time, offering them a constitutional amendment to preserve slavery in return for staying in the union and submitting to the tariffs!

When you are losing the argument, just scream “Raaaaacism!”

Last spring and summer (2010), when the Tea Party was fight the federal tyranny of Obama, Reid and Pelosi, the left-wing tyrants and their left-wing (so-called “mainstream”) media screamed “Racism!” hoping to derail the freedom-minded. Right up to the eve of the 2010 elections, our leftist opponents continued to scream “Racism!” at the entire limited-government movement, with no grounds whatsoever.

In a way, it’s hard to blame them! For over a hundred years, the American public has been rolling over and playing dead whenever the far left screamed “Raaaaacism!”

We can only hope that we have finally reached the time when playing that shopworn “race card” will no longer work.

Enacting the Articles of Secession

Charleston at War: A simple Ordinance of Secession

By Brian Hicks
bhicks@postandcourier.com
Sunday, December 19, 2010
[...]
South Carolina’s secession convention had dragged on for days.

At first, the delegates had been bogged down with trivial matters — what to do with federal employees working in the state, how to handle mail service. They even debated whether to allow reporters into the chamber. Rhett, himself a delegate, had no reason to be overly concerned with the Mercury’s access.

Although some protested, most delegates argued that barring newspapers from the room would look bad. It would appear they were ashamed of what they were doing, and they certainly were not ashamed.

They fully believed they were doing the will of the people.

For proof, they only had to look beyond South Carolina’s border. In the weeks following Lincoln’s election, several other Southern states — Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Georgia among them — had begun planning their own separate conventions.

Representatives of at least two of those states were in the audience to assure the men that, if they seceded, they would not stand alone for long. Some of South Carolina’s delegates would be appointed to coordinate with these states. Already, there was talk of forming a confederacy with them.

At the same time, Rhett had been selected to join a delegation that would travel to Washington and negotiate a settlement of all debts between the state and the U.S. government.

Among other issues, these delegates would deliver terms for the government to turn over all federal forts in Charleston; the United States no longer would be welcome to hold property in South Carolina.

Of course, first there was the actual business of seceding.

The ordinance itself, which the delegation would carry to Washington, was so simple that the men gathered in St. Andrew’s Hall had little need to debate it. It read:

AN ORDINANCE to dissolve the union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled ‘The Constitution of the United States of America.’

We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, That the ordinance adopted by us in convention on the twenty-third day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and also all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of this State ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.

Done at Charleston the twentieth day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty.

Read the rest.

The above image is from a card sent last Christmas (January 7, 2010) by the Serbian Orthodox Monastery of New Gracanica in Illinois. The Serbian Orthodox Church observes the Old Calendar for liturgical purposes. The Nativity icon is from the Church of the Mother of God, Pec, Kosovo, Serbia, year 1335 (h/t: Baba Mim).

Dear friends,

The more religious the card, the better. I know they will appreciate your thoughtfulness.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Stella

Note from blog admin 1389:

Blog admin 1389 has yet to watch Dancing With The Stars and has no opinion on the dancing ability or other performing arts talents of Bristol Palin or of anyone else on the show. The following article is reprinted in its entirety with permission from Alec Rawls’ blog, Error Theory.

As Mr. Rawls also points out, Allahpundit does good work for the counterjihad on Hot Air. 1389 Blog has nothing against Allahpundit or Hot Air and recommends that 1389 Blog readers visit the site; you’ll find the link to Hot Air on the blogroll in the sidebar at 1389 Blog.

Flight 93 Blogburst: Correcting some errors

Another Flight 93 Memorial post from Error Theory

Blogburst readers should be familiar with the periodically terrible judgment of Hot Air‘s Allahpundit. How can we forget, after he dismissed concern about the crescent memorial to Flight 93 precisely because the giant Islamic-shaped crescent points to Mecca:

A good rule of thumb is: if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you’ve probably gone too far.

Now Allah is again trying to play the role of “decider,” telling everyone else what they should be concerned about. This time he is buying the Washington Post claim that it is conservatives who are exploiting a flaw in Dancing With the Stars voting-software to advance Bristol Palin through the competition (now all the way to the finals, to the shock and dismay of the professional judges). Thinking that it is conservatives who are implicated, Allah tries to dismiss the whole business as “a moronic non-scandal.” Again, he manages to get the story wrong in every possible way.

A coordinated vote rigging effort has indeed been uncovered, with participants voting hundreds of times apiece for Bristol Palin, but the perpetrators are not conservatives, as WAPO reporter Lisa de Moraes told her readers. The actual perpetrators are an online network of FLAMING HOMOSEXUAL PRANKSTERS. Here is head prankster Kevin Dujan, exposing the WAPO fraud:

I also love that HB is now considered a leading conservative site.

Literally written by a gay dude, standing next to a gaysian, who is next to a stripper, who is chatting with a feisty Whitney-in-her-prime black woman while I keep trying to get the lame VJ Otho to play Twisted Sister or anything else kickass.

Hilarious.

Welcome to the new, more fabulous face of conservatism.

Unlike Allahpundit, de Moraes knows how seriously the Palins will be damaged if they are blamed for this travesty, which is exactly why she lied about who was doing the vote rigging.

By playing the whole thing up as a big joke, Allah is playing right into the WAPO ploy. Some of his followers are even jumping on the vote-Bristol bandwagon. Ditto for Ace of Spades HQ, which also fell for de Moraes’ disinformation and is also going vote-Bristol. Smarten up people. The Palins are being set up for a world of hurt.

Competition shows are top ratings getters

Allah admits that he has never watched Dancing With the Stars, but a lot of people do. 20 million viewers watched it last week, second only to Sunday Night Football. That’s twice the size of Obama’s historic 2008 margin of victory (the largest for a non-incumbent), and a high percentage of these viewers are likely to be swing voters: generally conservative, but more interested in entertainment than politics.

Don’t underestimate how annoyed these people already are that their competition has been gate-crashed by people who are gaming the vote in favor of an undeserving contestant, and Bristol is not just an inferior dancer, she is BAD. Nothing wrong with that, except when she gets promoted to the finals of a dance competition (kind of like Obama getting the Democratic nomination for president).

No purpose is served by a graphic description of Bristol’s ineptitude. Just note that, to cover up her galumphing gait, her professional partner covered her up in both dances last week with curtain-like black dresses that completely obscured her legs. Be assured, it wasn’t for no reason.

Other competition shows have been subject to the same kind of prank, just not this far in. Anyone remember Sanjaya Malakar of American Idol 2007, a gay-dar popping semi-talent who made it alarmingly close to the final thanks to a website called Vote for the Worst? If they had gotten him to the final it would have destroyed the honest competition.

Well this time the pranksters have gotten their golem into the final. The only question now is whether they can actually cram the final crown of thorns down onto the undeserving Bristol Palin’s head.

Anyone who is sympathetic to Bristol should vote against her (until 11AM Eastern on the 23rd). She could also save herself by rejecting a winning vote. If she had done that last week, letting the show come down to what would have been a terrific final between Jennifer Grey and the wonderfully talented Brandy (already ousted), she would be a national hero right now, but better late than never.

It IS an epic prank

Nothing against the flamers for having their fun. A little culture clash can be a good thing. Heterosexual fans of the most heterosexual of all sports can always get friendly revenge by hosting a Jennifer and Derek vs. Brandy and Maksim TV special.

Good on the flamers too for using conservatives’ partisanship against them. Undoubtedly there are substantial numbers of conservative Dance voters who are favoring Bristol because they like her mother. The same thing happened with Sanjaya Malakar, who had mountains of legitimate votes from adorably silly pre-teen girls, somehow drawn to Sanjaya’s incandescent effeminacy. (Poor Sanjaya was so effeminate he had to explain to People Magazine why everyone thought he was gay.)

The Sanjaya pranksters only needed to add enough votes to push him over the top. Undoubtedly that prank was also largely the work of our relentlessly “transgressive” homosexual subculture, with their constant war on everything “normal.” That’s okay. It’s a free country. Homosexuals can be as transgressive as they want and the rest of us can be as repulsed as we want. Just don’t let conservatives get blamed for a transgressive effort.

It shameful enough that some conservative voters have been violating conservative principles by voting for other than the best dancer. We are not pre-teen girls, and voting for a blatantly inferior talent on the basis of political affinity is not adorable. If the homosexual pranksters want their victory, make them do the work.

Allahpundit still an obstacle to stopping the Flight 93 mega-mosque

Michelle Malkin played a key role in forcing the Park Service to agree to change the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93, but they never did change it. They call it a broken circle now, but that is what architect Paul Murdoch always called it. Our peaceful circle was broken on 9/11, turning it into a giant Islamic shaped crescent that just happens to point to Mecca. A more obvious memorial to the terrorists is hard to imagine.

The only actual change was to add an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace.

A crescent that points to Mecca is a very familiar construct in the Islamic world. Every mosque is built around a Mecca-direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just as with the Crescent of Embrace.

Most mihrabs are small. A large one might be 20 or 30 feet across. The Crescent/broken-circle in the Flight 93 memorial is over half a mile across. The full memorial will be the world’s largest mosque by a factor of about a hundred, yet Allah dismisses the whole thing on some supposed principle that we shouldn’t be worried which direction things point. Tell that to the Muslims, whose only universal symbol is orientation on Mecca.

When Michelle Malkin started Hot Air, she handed the Flight 93 portfolio to Allahpundit. Because of Allah’s mishandling, most of Michelle’s readers think the Flight 93 memorial controversy must have been taken care of, even as the world’s largest mosque is right now being planted atop the graves of our murder heroes.

We are not against AP. He is perfectly well meaning and does a lot of good work. He is just incredibly careless sometimes. So here is an invitation to Allah and to Michelle: please read the full page color advertisement that Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls (the author of this post) ran in the Somerset Daily American this 9/11, when Laura Bush and Michelle Obama were both in Pennsylvania for the anniversary. Take a fresh look at what is actually being built right under our noses.

To join our blogburst against the crescent mosque, just send your blog’s url.

Acknowledging that human fallibility is inevitable

Since the collapse of the IT marketplace in the US has made it impossible for me to find work in my field, I have been working as a retail clerk. Anybody who thinks that running a cash register is an easy job has never tried it. It has been a humbling experience in that it is so easy to make mistakes – entering or scanning codes incorrectly, misreading the display, forgetting to apply a discount that the customer is entitled to have, neglecting to ask for the customer’s loyalty account number, errors in counting change, dropping something on the floor, tearing a plastic bag, or just plain hitting the wrong key.

One time I happened to mention human fallibility in that regard, and the customer replied, “If it weren’t for human fallibility, I’d be out of business.” Well, there’s certainly no chance of that happening!

Of course, it turned out that the customer was a Protestant minister. Even though human fallibility will never go away, and human individuals and organizations will always err, it is always possible to move toward good. It is the pastor’s job to lead people to do so.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson that I learned while growing up in a society rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is that we live in a fallen world. Human error, failure, and outright evil are part of the human condition, and we must deal with that. I am not suggesting that anyone has to like or condone evil in the world – only that we all must acknowledge that evil in the world is a fact. No person and no institution can ever be perfect. Expecting otherwise leads to bitterness and delusion, and eventually to disaster. Moreover, condemning and abandoning the good simply because it can never be perfect is just plain wrong.

This is the very lesson that liberals reject.

Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals “Think”

(h/t: Philip_Daniel)

By Evan Sayet

…I assume that just about everybody in this room agrees that the Democrats are wrong on just about every issue. Well, I’m here to propose to you that it’s not “just about” every issue; it’s quite literally every issue. And it’s not just wrong; it’s as wrong as wrong can be; it’s 180 degrees from right; it is diametrically opposed to that which is good, right, and successful.

What I discovered is that this is not an accident. This is part of a philosophy that now dominates the whole of Western Europe and the Democratic Party today. I, like some others, call it Modern Liberalism. The Modern Liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Give the Modern Liberal the choice between Saddam Hussein and the United States, and he will not only side with Saddam Hussein; he will slander America and Americans in order to do so. Give him the choice between the vicious mass murderer corrupt terrorist dictator Yasser Arafat and the tiny and wonderful democracy of Israel, and he will plagia­rize maps, forge documents, engage in blood libels – as did our former President Jimmy Carter – to side with the terrorist organizations and to attack the tiny democracy of Israel.

It’s not just foreign policy; it’s every policy. Given the choice between promoting teenage abstinence and teenage promiscuity–and believe me, I know this from my hometown of Hollywood–they will use their movies, their TV shows, their songs, even the schools to promote teenage promiscuity as if it’s cool: like the movie American Pie, in which you are a loser unless you’ve had sex with your best friend’s mother while you’re still a child. Conversely, NARAL, a pro-abortion group masquerading as a pro-choice group, will hold a fund-raiser called “‘F’ Abstinence.” (And it’s not just “F.” It’s the entire word, because promoting vulgarity is part of their agenda.)

So the question becomes: Why? How do they think they’re making a better world? The first thing that comes into your mind when trying to under­stand, as I’ve so desperately tried to understand, is that if they side always with evil, then they must be evil. But we have a problem with that, don’t we? We all know too many people who fit this category but who aren’t evil: many of my lifelong friends, the people I grew up with, relatives, close relatives.

If they’re not evil, then the next place your mind goes is that they must just be incredibly stupid. They don’t mean to always side with evil, the failed and wrong; they just don’t know what they’re doing. But we have a problem with this as well. You can’t say Bill Maher (my old boss) is a stupid man. You can’t say Ward Churchill is a stupid man. You can’t say all these academics are stupid people. Frankly, if it were just stupidity, they’d be right more often. What’s the expression? “Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” or “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again.”
[...]
What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with–none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government–have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they’re convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, pov­erty, crime, and injustice must be found–can only be found–in the attempt to be right.

If nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn’t disagree, surely we wouldn’t fight. If we didn’t fight, of course we wouldn’t go to war. Without war, there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It’s a utopian vision, and all that’s required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency–all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right and moving toward it.
[...]
What you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn’t right and to prove that wrong isn’t wrong. You see this in John Lennon’s song “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no countries.” Not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the Nazis, but imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there’s nothing left to kill or die for…

I always despised that song, and wondered why anybody would willingly pay to listen to such tripe. I would even go so far as to say that the mad utopian delusion that John Lennon espoused in that song led to his death. Because Lennon denied the inevitability of human evil, he saw no need to take the security precautions appropriate to a world-famous public figure.

Indoctrination against discernment

The reason people listen to tripe such as “Imagine” is that, even back in the 1960s and 1970s, America’s youth had already been exposed to a great deal of leftist indoctrination. Otherwise, they would have voted with their wallets by refraining from purchasing that recording. Sayet explains how this indoctrination works:

What happens is, they [i.e., youth] are indoctrinated into what I call a “cult of indiscriminateness.” The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought.

There’s a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they’d been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: “In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.”

I’ll give you an example. At the airports, in order not to discriminate, we have to intentionally make ourselves stupid. We have to pretend we don’t know things we do know, and we have to pretend that the next person who is likely to blow up an airplane is as much the 87-year-old Swedish great-great-grand­mother as those four 27-year-old imams newly arrived from Syria screaming “Allahu Akbar!” just before they board the plane. In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.

The problem is, of course, that the ability to discriminate, to thoughtfully choose the better of the available options–as in “she’s a discriminating shopper”–is the essence of rational thought; thus, the whole of Western Europe and today’s Democratic Party, dominated as it is by this philosophy, rejects rational thought as a hate crime.

How the “cult of indiscriminateness” promotes evil over good

Later in the article, Sayet explains how this ideological corruption translates into real life. Modern liberals, and the many institutions that they control, indoctrinate and bully the public into supporting policies that reward failure and punish success.

Indiscriminateness of thought invariably leads the Modern Liberal to side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Because in a world where you are indiscriminate, where no behavior is to be deemed better or worse than any other, your expectation is that all behavior should lead to equally good outcomes. When, in the real world, different behaviors lead to different outcomes, you and I know why–because we think. We know why communities that promote teenage promiscuity tend to fail at a greater rate than communities that promote teenage abstinence: Teenage promiscuity and teenage abstinence are not the same behaviors. Teenage abstinence is a better behavior.

…But to the Modern Liberal who cannot make that judgment–must not make that judgment–that would be discriminating. They have no explanation. Therefore, the only explanation for success has to be that somehow success has cheated. Success, simply by its existence, is proof positive to the Modern Liberal of some kind of chicanery and likely bigotry. Failure, simply by its existence–no other evidence needed, just the fact that it has failed–is enough proof to them that failure has been victimized.

So the mindless foot soldier, which is what I call the non-elite, will support the elite’s blueprint for utopia, will side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success, out of a sense of justice… [emphasis mine]

Why modern liberals mindlessly support the jihadis

Siding with evil against good inevitably leads to siding with the jihadis. Hence the tranzi-progressive/jihadi convergence:

Take an issue in the news and think like a Modern Liberal, and you will see how, once you’ve been indoctrinated into this mindset, there is no other choice. Remember, I said it was inevitable. Once you belong to this cult of indiscriminateness, there is no other conclusion you can come to than that good is evil and that evil is the victim of good.

We all know it’s official policy at the Leftist media outlets to never call Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Hezbol­lah, Hamas, Harakat ul-Mujahidin, or any of the other Islamic fascist terrorist groups around the world “terrorists,” and you know why. In fact, it’s even in official memos to reporters ordering them not to use the appropriate word. That reason is that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Who are we to employ critical, rational judgment?”

But, as a very minimum standard, can’t we at least agree that in order to be called a “freedom fighter,” you have to be fighting for freedom? We know what Osama bin Laden is fighting for; he’s told us. It’s not freedom; it’s an oppressive theocracy in which women are covered from head to toe and beaten if their ankles become exposed, and unless we all change to his religion, we are considered the offspring of pigs and monkeys to be decapitated. People like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore will call Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter because being indiscriminate quite literally leaves them unable to tell the difference between freedom and having your head hacked off. That’s how sick this mentality is.

Much more here. Read it all.

Originally published on 2.0: The Blogmocracy

In Fundamentally Transforming the United States, Phyllis Schlafly explains how the Democrat party voter base is founded upon those who get (or hope to get) their livelihood from the federal government. It goes much further than Chicago-machine patronage politics writ large; the federal government is deliberately destroying the family structure so as to make people more dependent on the federal government and the Democrat party. Unmarried mothers are a key part of Obama’s voter base. Thus, it is in his interests to discourage men and women from getting and staying married.

How do the Democrats go about attacking the family structure? The attacks go much further than promoting gay marriage and abortion on demand, or free condoms and salacious “sex education” in the public schools. Detrimental as those things are, at least they are visible. It’s the progressives’ stealth jihad against the family that I’m talking about here.

Check out this hidden zinger in Obamacare:

Marriage Penalty in Health Care

A huge marriage penalty is hidden in Obama’s Health Control Law. This law is another federal program providing financial incentives to subsidize marriage avoidance and illegitimate offspring.

Even though all evidence shows that marriage is the best remedy for poverty, lack of health care, domestic violence, child abuse, and school dropouts, federal welfare programs continue to discriminate against marriage and instead give taxpayer handouts to those who reject marriage. This isn’t any accident; it is a central part of the Democrats’ political strategy that produced 70% of unmarried women voting for Obama for President in 2008.

Here is the approximate cost in the Health Control Law for an unmarried couple who each earn $25,000 a year (total: $50,000). When they both buy health insurance (which will be mandatory), the combined premiums they pay will be capped at $3,076 a year. But if the couple gets married and has the same combined income of $50,000, they will pay annual premiums up to a cap of $5,160 a year. That means they have to fork over a marriage penalty of $2,084.

The marriage penalty is the result of the fact that government subsidies for buying health insurance are pegged to the federal poverty guidelines. Couples that remain unmarried are rewarded with a separate health care subsidy for each income.

When the Wall Street Journal reporter quizzed the Democratic authors of the health care bill, they made it clear that this differential was deliberate. The staffer justified the discriminatory treatment because “you have to decide what your goals are.” Indeed, the Democrats have decided what their goals are. They know that 70% of unmarried women voted for Obama in 2008, and the Democrats plan to reward this group with health insurance subsidies.

The House staffer told the Wall Street Journal reporter that the Democrats can’t make the subsidies neutral towards marriage because that would give a traditional one-breadwinner married couple a more generous subsidy than a single parent at the same income level. Horrors! The Democrats certainly are not going to allow traditional marriage to be preferred over couples who just shack up!

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously and accurately explained the disastrous results of welfare back in 1965. The welfare system created a matriarchy with millions of children lacking their father in the home. It’s no wonder illegitimate birthrates are soaring and unmarried mothers now give birth to 4 out of every 10 babies born in the United States.

Means-tested welfare programs already cost taxpayers close to $1 trillion a year (even more than national defense!), and Obamacare is projected to add another $2.5 trillion after all its provisions take effect. There’s no end in sight to the increasing costs of these entitlements. In one year, the Obama Administration will spend more taxpayers’ money on spreading the wealth to non-taxpayers than George W. Bush spent on the entire Iraq war.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a liberal firm that consults for clients such as Bill Clinton and John Kerry, admitted: “Unmarried women represent one of the most reliable Democratic cohorts in the electorate . . . leading the charge for fundamental change in health care.”

It used to be that a husband was responsible for the financial support of his wife and children, but the feminists’ agenda calls for replacing husbands with Big Brother Government. The feminists call their movement “women’s liberation,” and Obamacare is one more way to help them achieve their goal.

Feminists keep tightening their control over the social policies of the Democratic Party, and Obamacare will be his third payoff to the feminists. The first bill Obama signed as President, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, enables women to sue employers years many years after any alleged workplace discrimination (when no one is still alive to defend against allegations), and the second payoff was getting Obama to give the majority of taxpayer-paid Stimulus jobs to women even though men have suffered the big majority of job losses.

Read it all.

The scavenger hunt is on

I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant nor a “policy wonk” (whatever that is supposed to be). Sorting through the huge pile of paperwork that makes up the Obamacare bill, or for that matter, the recent financial regulatory bill, and piecing together the hidden “zingers” that are poised to harm each sector of our economy and society, is beyond my capabilities. This is not a one-person job. I would like to urge everyone who is able to do so, to help complete this task by researching how those bills will affect their community and their sector of the economy, and submit that information to 2.0: The Blogmocracy.

The scavenger hunt is on, and the only prize is preserving your freedom.