Nullification Anyone?

(Reuters) – Lawmakers moved toward a confrontation over the government’s power to detain suspected terrorists on Wednesday as the Republican-led House of Representatives began debate on a defense policy bill the White House has threatened to veto.

Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, sought to amend the law to guarantee people arrested in the United States on terrorism charges could not be detained indefinitely without trial or transferred to military custody.

Other lawmakers, concerned that Smith’s proposals went too far, sought to defuse the issue by proposing amendments that would clarify the rights of citizens to challenge their detention in court.

The amendments are being proposed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual bill that sets defense policy and authorizes spending levels for the Pentagon.

Story continues…

Related articles

• Smith amendment helps address detainee question (thehill.com)
• GOA: Neuter the NDAA (maddmedic.wordpress.com)
• Two Representatives Looking to Neuter the NDAA – Amendment would protect you from indefinite detention (fromthetrenchesworldreport.com)
• Obama Administration threatens to veto defense budget (rawstory.com)
• NDAA 2013 Headed to Full House; Smith/Amash Amendment Offered (destructionist.wordpress.com)
• NDAA 2013 Headed to Full House; Smith/Amash Amendment Offered (revolutioninmedia.com)
• Fix the NDAA! by Defending Dissent Foundation (socialactions.net)
• The Revolt Against the NDAA Hits Congress (motherjones.com)

Barack Obama’s coming out party notwithstanding, the question in this debate should never be one of rights. It should be one of definitions. If we accept that marriage is, by definition, the union between a man and woman and nothing else, the faux-marriage-rights argument is moot.

For you cannot have a right to that which doesn’t exist.

This isn’t just semantics. If social engineers insist on pushing faux marriage, we must demand that they first attempt to redefine the institution.

“Have you gone off your rocker, Duke?! This is precisely what we’re fighting!” some will now say.

Actually, no, it isn’t.

This is because there is no widely accepted and professed alternative definition to fight. For the Left has not sought to redefine marriage.

They are “undefining” it.

After all, what is the Left’s argument? They don’t focus on definitions any more than the Right does; they don’t say, consistently and boldly, “Marriage is the union between any two adults; therefore, there is no reason to exclude same-sex couples.” They won’t tread there.

There are a couple of reasons why. First, leftists are confused: They never have a clear vision of what they want to create, only what they want to destroy (i.e., the status quo). Second, redefining marriage would be a tactical disaster for them, as they’d relinquish a huge hammer they pummel the opposition with: the accusation that traditionalists are being “exclusive” and “discriminatory” and are denying people rights. For if you establish boundaries — anywhere — you’re excluding and discriminating against whoever lies beyond them.

So leftists won’t offer any alternative definition; instead, they simply imply that the right definition is wrong. And this is where they lose the debate. For if you cannot say what marriage is, how can you be so sure about what it isn’t?

This failure to redefine marriage also puts the lie to the Left’s claim that their actions won’t lead to the recognition of other conceptions of “marriage,” from polygamy to inter-species unions (yes, this does happen). This isn’t as silly as it sounds. Remember that an undefinition excludes nothing. If you refuse to establish boundaries, then the sky — or Hades — is the limit.

Thus, while the Left’s focus on rights helps them win the immediate marriage battle, it also ensures the loss of civilization. After all, once you undefine something, you have destroyed it — at least in people’s minds. For if something exists, if it is real, it is a certain thing and thus can be defined. “Bird” refers to a specific creature, but if “bird” could mean fish, insect, chair or pepperoni pizza — if it could mean anything — the term would lose meaning. Likewise, if marriage can mean anything, it will ultimately mean nothing. It will simply be a “something” and be destroyed as a meaningful institution.

To understand the implications of this, realize that marriage exists not as a “right” that brings self-fulfillment but to stabilize the family. It encourages men and women to fulfill their obligations to each other and their children. Thus, an attack upon marriage is an attack upon the family. And, since the family is the central building block of civilization, if you destroy it, you have destroyed civilization.

Except perhaps for a few Machiavellian types, the Left doesn’t understand this; like all emotion-driven people — like children — they know only what they want at the moment. But wiser heads should refuse to discuss the issue as what it isn’t: a matter of rights. Instead, be steadfast in the understanding that faux marriage simply doesn’t exist. Oh, people can still pretend to marry; heck, we did that in first grade (only boys and girls back then). But dismiss this as child’s play — and a rather twisted variety of it at that.

This is why I seek to control the language and use the term “faux marriage.” For the side that defines the vocabulary of a debate, wins the debate. Thus, using the Lexicon of the Left — in this case, the oxymoronic euphemism “gay marriage” — is disastrous; it’s likewise a mistake using “traditional marriage,” for what is the other side of that coin? Both terms either state or imply that a mythical institution called “gay marriage” exists.

What will happen once citizens accept this idea? Well, homosexuals are people, too, and if their conception of “marriage” exists, many will conclude that it’s wrong to deny recognition of it. Hey, how can you not recognize — in the sense of perceiving — something that exists? And once personal recognition becomes widespread, legal recognition is nigh.

This is why states err when proposing laws and constitutional amendments limiting marriage to a man and woman. Instead, their measures should state, “Marriage is defined as the union between a man and a woman.” Again, this isn’t just semantics. When these measures go to court and judges are left to rule on the constitutionality of limiting who may marry, they can easily rationalize that such laws violate the equal-protection clause. But if the law is framed as I suggest, this argument becomes illogical, as no one is being denied anything. After all, a homosexual certainly can — and may — marry just as anyone else may; he may form a union with a member of the opposite sex. As for heterosexuals, they cannot form a legally sanctioned union with a member of their own sex any more than anyone else can. Thus, controlling the definition would help control the courts.

Of course, our “creative” judges can spin anything, so there are no guarantees. But we ought to ask: If they would rule that same-sex couples have a right to “marriage,” with what definition are they working? After all, the only consistent definition out there is the one the West has operated by for millennia. There is nothing else except an effort that amounts to an “undefinition,” an unraveling of part of civilization’s bedrock. And you cannot have a right to what doesn’t exist.

Just when you thought there was no way possible to cover or subdue the record of five trillion in debt and the most joblessness since the depression, the master politician starts making announcements that catch the attention, not just of the country, but of the entire world.

Biblically based ministers of the gospel have resented the fact that in the daily news cycle the issue of America’s moral decline has consistently been placed on the back burner and the economy was all that was ever discussed. Along comes Barack Obama who manages to put the so called ‘hot button’ issues back on the front burner and brings them up to a boil in record time. With a dismal record of his own, the distraction is at least getting him plenty of attention, which in politics, will do fine if you haven’t much else to go on.

Oddly, Mr. Obama may have overstepped the bounds of his own devices. He pulled out the very worst subject, at the very worst time, with his recent announcement that he is up for gay marriage. Don’t look now, but Obama’s best advisors have forgotten to tell him that the issue of marriage is not just a political issue; it has its roots in our biblical foundations, traditions, the laws of nature and the very moral underpinnings of the nation.

This is the pot we don’t want anyone to boil, much less to pull it to the front of the stove, to boil over, just for a political distraction to be used to bolster a sagging campaign.

Creating a circus like element to his campaign was augmented by the now famous cover of Newsweek magazine that depicts Obama with a rainbow colored halo over his head. Although the halo or the ‘nimbus’ is not something ever mentioned in the bible; it is part of the art world and has been used for many centuries. Christian art began the use of the halo around the fourth century AD.

What brings this particular circus attraction to the very border of blasphemy is the fact that while not biblical it is commonly accepted that the halo represents the presence of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life.

God does not change his moral laws and he doesn’t care what LGBT social engineers are trying to mold into shape for the last day’s twists and turns in the social fabric of this, or any other nation. If marriage was declared to take place only between one man and one woman, it is a declaration that supersedes any from the past, present or future – it is a law from the realm of eternity. It is a law, accepted or not, that God declares we will all answer to at some time in our lives, be it now or later.

Even worse is the fact, that while all sins are forgivable – one is not. The sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is so abominable, that it cannot be forgiven. (Mt 12: 31) It is the easiest sin to identify because it is one of the most perverse. It is attributing evil to the Holy Spirit. Thus whether vying for civil rights, or any other cause, when we enact or even consider enacting laws that defy God’s laws and then say we were inspired by God to do so, that is clearly, unforgivable blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.

When Barack Obama used the teaching of the ‘Golden Rule’ (Mt 7: 12-14)  he did not need to claim he was personally inspired by the Holy Spirit because he extracted a proof text from scripture that is clearly inspired, and used it as his own. While no one is supposed to notice this, for those well-grounded in scriptural teachings, it is quite impossible to miss.

Be it blasphemy or just the influence of his teen aged daughters, as Obama has declared, the effect is still the same and the question is singular – do we change the very moral fiber of a nation based on either premise?

This makes for great campaign commotion, but it also creates a lot of contention and confusion. One example of that confusion was seen on the O’Reilly Factor May 15, 2012 when black ministers Delman Coates and Emmett Burns sat and argued that while they believe the bible called for marriage to be between only one man and one woman, they still were planning to vote for Barack Obama.

Setting aside the demand of the bible to never become a ‘respecter of persons,’ (Pr 28: 21) the bible has many examples of men and women who risked their lives to continue in God’s laws rather than to submit to a law of man that was clearly antithetical to God’s laws. The Apostle Peter openly declared that he would not ever suspend God’s laws for men, even if it meant his life. “Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, we ought to obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5: 29)

In the simplest terms possible, if we can be swayed by a man who is considering policy changes to the nation based on the pop culture influences of his teen daughters we most assuredly must pause for some serious thought. Or if we allow the foundations of our nation to be undermined by a man who is caught between vague allusions to the bible and childhood training in Muslim Madrassa schools; we probably will end up with – just what we deserve.

I may be able to influence doubters and perhaps convince a few not to take the path to their own demise. But to the believers I am forced to use a much stronger admonition. One of the very last things Christ said to the Apostle John as he sat imprisoned on the Isle of Patmos for his faith was an admonition he fully warned was for every man, woman and child on the planet earth. I will use these words as if they were my own.

“But that which ye have already - hold fast till I come.” (Revelation 2: 25)

​

The great test of 2012 will not be decided by the re-hashing and divisive use of something as meaningless as a ‘hot button issue.’ When Barack Obama declared that in crisis Americans “clung to their guns and their bibles” he essentially failed to see that constitutional rights and the foundational principles the constitution was derived from are much more than something we ‘cling to’ – but rather, they are what we ‘stand on.’

Pool reporter David Nakamura of the Washington Post reported that at a $35,800 a head fundraiser at the home of Blackstone COO Hamilton “Tony” James in New York City Monday night, the 60 attendees were asked to place their phones in plastic bags by the door. An Obama aide called the move it “standard operating procedure,” but veterans of a range of other campaigns said they’d never heard of the practice, which is common in secure White House spaces where there are concerns of espionage, but unknown in contexts in which only political secrets are discussed. The new prevalence of sophisticated audio and recording capacities in mobile devices owned by virtually anyone wealthy enough to write a check to a political campaign, however, has put a new pressure on campaigns concerned with staying on a public message. Former aides to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman all expressed surprise at the practice, and they’ve never seen an instance where a campaign asked donors to surrender their cell phones. The former Clinton aide called the Obama policy “absurd,” suggesting that the Obama policy is almost certainly a response to the infamous 2008 fundraiser where Obama described voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter.”

A medical report compiled by the family physician of accused Trayvon Martin murderer George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a “closed fracture” of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation. . . .

WFTV in Florida reports on Martin’s injuries, but again it is what injuries aren’t reported that is also important.

WFTV has learned that the medical examiner found two injuries on Martin’s body: The fatal gunshot wound and broken skin on his knuckles.
When you compare Trayvon’s non-fatal injury with Zimmerman’s bloody head wounds, the autopsy evidence is better for the defense, Sheaffer said. . . .

So despite already facing being overcharged, the Obama administration continues to go after Zimmerman:

WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said federal prosecutors would have to prove the hate crime to charge Zimmerman, though.
“What the government would have to prove is that Mr. Zimmerman acted out of hatred toward African-Americans. That’s why he came into contact with him. That’s why he shot and killed him,” Sheaffer said.
Sheaffer said a federal hate crime murder charge could bring more serious consequences than the second-degree murder charge Zimmerman faces now.
“Mr. Zimmerman could be punished by up to life in prison or even the death penalty,” said Sheaffer. . . .

Hate crime?  Against a person who donated his time to mentor black kids?  Against someone who is part black himself?  Against a guy who tried to help his neighbors, some of whom are black, by volunteering to be the community watch leader.

Enough already!  Leave the guy alone!

GOP lawmakers believe the House Democrats should apologize to the New York Police Department's commissioner, Ray Kelly, and to the officers involved in counterterrorism and intelligence gathering. Photo credit: NYPD Press Office

The formal rebuke of the NYPD, which failed to pass this week on a mostly party-line vote, would have punished the 40,000-member law enforcement department by prohibiting funding for police and security organizations engaged in alleged unconstitutional or unlawful discrimination.

GOP Rep, Peter King (R-NY) — chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee – and Rep. Bob Turner (R-PA) called the vote shameful, while several police officials told the Law Enforcement Examiner that the Democrats “stayed true to form.”

“The Democrats obtain campaign contributions from groups like CAIR and other Islamic organizations and they in turn protect them from the ‘big bad cops,’” said one anonymous police officer who works in the NYPD’s Arson & Explosion Unit.

While the amendment would apply to any jurisdiction in the nation, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) who sponsored the legislation made it clear that he was targeting the NYPD, especially those divisions and units tasked with combating terrorism.

“Holt did not even have official information on the allegations made against the New York cops. He was using stories gleaned from news organizations, such as the Associated Press, and complaints made by groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations — a group that always complains whenever cops attempt to protect Americans from radical Islamic terrorists,” said former New York police detective and military intelligence officer Mike Snopes.

“Holt practically scolded the NYPD saying they infiltrated neighborhoods because they were Muslim,” Snopes said. “That congressman sitting safely in his heavily guarded workplace should be praising the NYPD.”

In an official statement promulgated on Saturday by Reps. King and Turner, the congressmen rebuked Holt for his “politically-motivated” statements and condemned Democrat congressmen for supporting the amendment — the measure failed on a 232-193 vote, with only Democrats supporting it.

“We are utterly dumbfounded and shocked that after such a slanderous attack, the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats and the entire Democratic leadership voted for the Holt amendment and against the NYPD,” Rep. King said. “The Democrats owe New York and the NYPD an explanation for their shameful surrender to political correctness.”

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and city officials, as well as King and Turner, have defended the department’s tactics as effective and perfectly legal. Their tactics also have not been found to be unconstitutional, meaning Holt’s amendment might not have had much practical effect on the NYPD’s funding.

Holder and Democrats screaming for blood?

New York’s Police Commissioner Ray Kelly — arguably the best police commander in that city’s history — continues to defend the tactics, calling them legal and necessary. But groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are practically screaming for blood, said former NYPD police detective Sid Franes.

“What the NYPD officials did in New York and New Jersey, they’ve also done overseas in countries such as the United Kingdom, India, Indonesia, and others,” said Franes. “They are collecting intelligence not investigating and arresting suspects. And they’re not using drones to spy on American citizens the way the feds do,” he added.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder had told U.S. senators that he was disturbed by what he’s read about the New York Police Department conducting undercover and surveillance operations targeting mosques and Islamic student organizations in New Jersey.

Holder was testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee when New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, asked about the NYPD spying operation in New Jersey.

While most of the operations were conducted within New York, NYPD officials admitted some of the operations led them outside of New York State and into New Jersey, which angered politicians such as Lautenberg, and received condemnation from some FBI officials, who claimed “the surveillance damaged relations with Muslims and weakened national security.”

For a long time the government has been digging a hole we may never get out of, and Clinton is suggesting that part of the solution includes sending them more shovels? Yep:

Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s goal of hiking taxes on the rich alone is not enough to solve the country’s fiscal woes and suggested that middle class Americans must also eventually contribute more.

Clinton, who discussed a number of economic and political issues at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s third annual Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C., prefaced his comments with the warning that he was giving his personal view and was “not speaking for the White House.”

“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House — I think you could tax me at a 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” said Clinton, who has earned tens of millions of dollars since leaving office. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates [from] when I was president” – before the Bush tax cuts.

Clinton’s idea is to wait for the economy to recover a little more and then crank up taxes across the board to start chipping away at the deficit. Spending cuts instead? He’d probably sooner invite Hillary to go through his text messages.

Trying to resuscitate the economy just so the government can then harvest the money reminds me of that death row inmate who got sick and the concerned warden spent countless hours helping him get better so he was eventually healthy enough to put in the chair.

Returning to South Carolina on June 30, 2010, Mr. Kim stopped at Walter Reed for a doctor’s appointment. Afterwards, he got lost while driving his two-door Honda Civic in downtown D.C. in the evening. He was pulled over by police. The officer said that his driver’s license had been suspended. He was unaware of this. He found out the next morning that it was wrongly suspended due to a clerical error in which North Carolina incorrectly reported to South Carolina that he didn’t pay a speeding ticket. Mr. Kim called and had this cleared up the next morning. However, because of the suspended license, the D.C. police officer called for backup, and told Mr. Kim he would have to go to the police station. Then the cops asked Mr. Kim if they could search his vehicle. The lieutenant agreed because his guns were properly locked in a case in the trunk, in compliance with federal firearm transport laws. Mr. Kim was handcuffed and told to sit on the curb during the search. He recalled that the officers inspected the collection and “were upset about the fact that I had the AR-15, which D.C. considers to be an ‘assault weapon.’” The model of rifle is illegal in the District, but not in his home state. The officers then told Mr. Kim he was in violation for the carrying firearms outside the home (in his vehicle) in the District. The nation’s capital does not acknowledge the right to bear arms, so there are no carry rights. “I told them I had been under the impression that as long as the guns were locked in the back, with the ammunition separate, that I was allowed to transport them,” Mr. Kim told me in an interview. “They said, ‘That may be true, however, since you stopped at Walter Reed, that make you in violation of the registration laws.” It is illegal to possess a firearm anywhere in D.C. other than the home. Mr. Kim’s attorney, Richard Gardiner, said his client was lawfully transporting the firearms, and that would have been his defense if the matter went to trial. “The mistake he made was agreeing to a search of his vehicle,” the attorney explained in an interview. “If the police ask for consent to search, the answer is ‘no.’ If they ask, ‘why not?’ The answer is, ‘no.’” . . .

A Detroit groundskeeper, who turned in a loaded handgun he found hidden in weeds while working, was fired by the Wayne County Department of Public Services, MyFoxDetroit.com reports.
John Chevilott, who is just two years shy of retirement, found the loaded snub-nosed revolver on May 3 when he and his crew were mowing a lawn in Wayne County. Chevilott secured the gun, waiting for police to drive by so he could hand it over to them. . . .
According to a Wayne County spokeswoman and the rules, employees aren’t allowed to possess a weapon on work property.
Chevilott says he didn’t bring a weapon to work. He found it on the job. . . .

A GAO report revealed about 25,000 incidents of security breaches at U.S. airports. Photo credit: TSA/DHS

The Homeland Security Department had completed an initial study to validate the scientific basis of the Transportation Security Administration’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program; however, additional work remains to fully validate the program, according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office in July.

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Illegal Alien Bimbo Olumuyia Oyewole's case has created a firestorm and not one word from President Obama as of yet. Photo credit: PA of NY & NJ

One fact that needs to be addressed immediately is that background checks on airport workers and other employees assigned to sensitive areas are not as indepth as originally believed, according to several security experts who spoke with the Law Enforcement Examiner.

Sadly, since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Government Accountability Office has analyzed airport security deficiencies in a number of reports. The results of these studies, which are routinely distributed to the executive and legislative branches of government, were given scant attention by the Obama White House, the U.S. Congress, and the news media, said the Law Enforcement Examiner sources.

Within the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration manages several credentialing programs, which include background checking (known as Security Threat Assessments) and issuing credentials to transportation workers requiring unescorted access to the nation’s transportation facilities.

The number of TSA programs and their potential for redundancy with state and local government programs has raised questions about these credentialing programs. GAO examined TSA credentialing programs to identify the roles and responsibilities of federal and nonfederal government entities related to TSA’s transportation worker credentialing programs and how they compare; and any key challenges TSA faced in ensuring the effectiveness of its credentialing programs.

Besides the background investigation process for airport security personnel, nonfederal government entities have varying roles and responsibilities under three TSA transportation worker credentialing programs that were reviewed — the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program (TWIC) for maritime workers; the Hazardous Materials Endorsement program (HME) for truckers seeking a commercial drivers license endorsement to carry hazardous materials; and the Aviation Workers program for airport workers.

Under the Aviation Workers program, TSA and airports share responsibility for the vetting process for airport workers, with airports responsible for enrolling applicants, adjudicating criminal history results provided by the TSA, and issuing and revoking airport badges.

During its most recent analysis in December 2011, GAO analysts discovered limitations in the vetting process and criminal background checks:

First, in general, the level of access that TSA credentialing programs receive to Department of Justice (DOJ) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal history records is the level of access accorded for noncriminal justice purposes (e.g., equal to that of a private company doing an employment check on a new applicant, according to TSA) which limits TSA in accessing certain criminal history data related to charges and convictions. While TSA is seeking criminal justice type access to FBI systems, the FBI reports that it is legally unable to provide this access. The FBI and TSA are collaborating on options, but have not identified the extent to which a potential security risk may exist under the current process, and the costs and benefits of pursuing alternatives to provide additional access, according to the analysts.

Second, TSA officials reported the agency was not reviewing some state-provided criminal history for Hazmat applicants because TSA did not have a mechanism to efficiently capture the data in its case system. Identifying a solution may help TSA better identify HME applicants posing security threats.

Third, the TSA Adjudication Center relies on contractors for adjudicating applicant cases, and contractor turnover has affected the agency’s ability to meet its growing workload. Developing a workforce staffing plan that considers the costs and benefits of using contractors will help ensure that TSA meets its growing credentialing workload.

The GAO recommended that TSA and the FBI conduct a joint risk assessment of TSA’s access to criminal history records; TSA assess costs and benefits of using state-provided criminal history information; and  TSA develop a workforce staffing plan to address its growing Adjudication Center workload, said the GAO analysts.

Not everyone can get Obama to deliver their commencement address. It helps if your college is female and affiliated with the Ivy League, where downtrodden Barnard students can be counseled to “fight for your seat at the head of the table” by an unqualified man who began and ended his career by pushing out better qualified female candidates from Alice Palmer to Hillary Clinton. Barnard women are free to fight for a seat at the head of the table, so long as it’s not his seat or a seat that he wants.

These days the man whose administration pays women less than men, which has been repeatedly accused of sexist treatment of its female staff and whose chief speechwriter was photographed groping a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton, has taken to the campaign trail to warn about a “War on Women”. And where better to sell the war on women than on campuses which are becoming more female than male.

There’s something blatantly patriarchal about a powerful man arriving on a female campus promising to protect its graduates from that other man, but liberalism has long been immune from its own contradictions. Only Obama can protect women from Romney, when he isn’t protecting them from being President or saddling them with massive amounts of debt.

The 57 percent tilt of female to male enrollment on campus has also meant a disproportionate share of student loan debt being amassed by women. The students profiled in the recent New York Times article on student debt are almost all female and if anyone has been fighting a war on women, it would be the entire system of academic loan sharks who trade mostly useless degrees for five and six figure debt.

The sheepskin was once a doorway to a privileged world of achievement, but diplomas aren’t made of real sheepskin anymore, and the college degree has become as ubiquitous as tacky commencement speeches. Just about anyone who pays a limited amount of attention in school and is willing to take on a pile of debt can get a college degree from somewhere. It won’t be worth much, but it will cost a lot.

Universalizing college has not universalized education; it has not made us a better educated country, only a dumber one. Universal education has led to dumbed-down education and meaningless degrees. The only way we could keep moving more and more students up the ladder was by making the ladder as short as possible. Promotion, populist education and educators who barely knew more than the students have taken care of the rest.

A college degree was once a mark of distinction, now it’s a checkmark even for jobs that don’t have any innate reason for requiring it, and fortunes have been spent by government and students just to “stay in place” with the jobs of yesterdays high school graduates going to tomorrow’s college grads.

The primary purpose of a degree in many fields is to provide demonstrable proof to prospective employers that you aren’t an idiot. A high school degree once served that purpose. Now not even a college degree does. But with a surplus of job-seekers, it’s a useful way to winnow down the stack of applications to people who can analyze the heteronormative subtext of a detergent commercial and have few options for employment because of their massive student loan debt.

Treating college as the new high school hasn’t benefited students who waste four years of their lives and pick up staggering debts which make it harder for them to buy homes and start families, but it has benefited the liberal arts infrastructure, which, despite the liberal spin, is just as good at handing out useless degrees with no career path as any for-profit college. And it has benefited the Democratic Party, which rightly sees college campuses as recruitment grounds and liberal-voter-training seminars.

The commencement speech is supposed to point students toward the future, but where exactly is the future? A generation snickered knowingly when Dustin Hoffman was told that there’s a great future in plastics. Well plastics have been doing all-right in the 45 years since “The Graduate” was released. Much better than diplomas and angst-ridden graduates have.

Democratic presidents have told voters that manufacturing might be gone, but there would be degrees for everyone in the fields of tomorrow. Obama has tweaked that pitch to promising “Green Jobs” for all. But those degrees are being partly paid for with debt amassed with the country that has picked up our unwanted manufacturing jobs and built an empire out of them. While students amass their debt, the government amasses its debt, and the holders of that debt are the people who took up our old-fashioned non-degree jobs.

Manhattan, home to Barnard, its sibling Columbia, NYU, Pace, and dozens of others, has one leading line of work, the restaurant business. The restaurant business doesn’t require a degree, just the willingness of pretty white people with student debt to wait tables at below minimum wage, and of some of the city’s three million illegal aliens to work illegally in the back. The city used to make things, now it makes sandwiches for Chinese tourists going to see a Disney musical on Broadway. Students dissatisfied with the low wages are, according to the erratically reliable New York Post, working at strip clubs. Fidel Castro boasted, that in Cuba, even the prostitutes have university degrees. Adopting the socialist degrees for everyone approach means we can now say the same thing.

Colleges, are, unsurprisingly, the second-highest employer in Manhattan, followed by lawyers, hospitals and investment banks. This is not a unique snapshot; you can see similar things in London and Paris, and they are symptoms of countries whose centers have stopped doing anything except eating overpriced lunches, getting overpriced degrees, losing their money on bad investments, suing each other and then dying.

It’s not much of a future for a student body or a nation, which is why commencement speeches, including the one by the Debtor-in-Chief, don’t focus on such grim realities. Instead they play to the illusion that college is a gateway of opportunities, which it still occasionally is, but at a diminishing percentage. There is the usual advice about trying things, usually unexpected things, following your dreams and all the free-spirited pieties that are the antidote to “Plastics are the Future”.

For those students not privileged enough to serve as the backdrop for “War on Women 2012″, there are consolation prize speakers like Mayor Bloomberg, who traveled 500 miles to a state where no one had gotten sick of him yet, to speak at the University of North Carolina, Michelle Obama, who showed up at Virginia Tech, and Jill Biden who bored students at Borward College. Howard University had to make do with Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, the best fit for a historically black school since Richard Simmons delivered the commencement address at Tuskegee University.

None of them will tell the students that the jobs are gone, that they were shipped overseas so that colleges like this could have more degree programs in environmental studies and transgender studies in comparative literature. They won’t clue them in that these are campaign stops for the party that has bankrupted the country and whose only fallback strategy is to promise more debt for everyone. Their message will be the same predictably trite, “You can make a difference.”

That’s true enough, you can make a difference, but that’s harder and harder to do in a country where the horizons have been chained down by a massive bureaucracy and where you have to fill out forty forms in triplicate for permission to do even the smallest things, let alone make a difference. Colleges don’t exist to teach students to make a difference, they exist to turn out a generation of bureaucrats or aspiring bureaucrats who can be counted on to reliably turn out in defense of privileges and rules. If you want someone to tell you why you can’t do something, there’s a degree for that. If you want someone who makes a difference, you’re probably looking for a college dropout.

Plastics are the future, but there’s more than one kind of plastic. The manufacturing kind has mainly moved overseas, but the human kind is still around. Colleges are in the business of making plastic people, little “Julia” molds who work for the government, are dependent for the government and spend their lives paying off government debt and urging others to do their part for the socialist state that doesn’t make things anymore, except more debt slaves.

Education has long ago given way to indoctrination, to political finishing schools where it’s hard to learn anything worthwhile, but easy to learn the habits of intellectual snobbery. “I got a crazy teacher, he wears dark glasses,” went the old song. “Things are going great, and they’re only getting better.” These days all the teachers are crazy and they all wear dark glasses. Nobody studies nuclear science anymore, only the science of telling other people what to do because it’s what best for them. There’s no nuclear armageddon ticking away in labs, just a million community organizing Dr. Strangeloves who know that they have to destroy the nation to save its soul.

When the speeches are done, the obligatory jokes, the namechecks of the university president, the multitude of variations on “Reach for the stars, keep your shoulder to the wheel and go camp out near Wall Street to complain about corporate bonuses,” then the students sweating under the hot sun, will walk away feeling oddly heavy and light at the same time. On their shoulders is a bundle of debt and the hopes of a nation. The future’s so bright they gotta wear mortarboards.

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The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t — it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

Check it out for yourself on the “learn more about each president” page at WhiteHouse.gov. Here’s one example from the Calvin Coolidge page:

On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

The Twitterverse finds this extremely mock-worthy, and rightly so.

In the Truman bio, the administration’s historians forgot to mention Obama’s role in the liberation of the Philippines during World War II, but I’m sure they’ll get around to it:

Obamacare’s Patient-Dumping, Privacy-Meddling Scheme
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

The stench of Chicago cronyism over the White House just got fouler. Inhale this:

A shadowy $10 billion Obamacare agency with zero oversight just awarded first lady Michelle Obama’s pet patient-dumping scheme at the University of Chicago Medical Center a $5.9 million taxpayer-funded grant. It will enable Mrs. Obama’s cronies to build a government-sponsored electronic medical record-sharing system.

The Chicago program, known as the Urban Health Initiative, is run by one of President Obama’s closest golfing buddies, scandal magnet Eric Whitaker, who has been entangled with Illinois corruption celebrities Rod Blagojevich and Tony Rezko over the past decade.

Fun fact: Whitaker recently was named by author Edward Klein as the man who purportedly offered hate-mongering Rev. Jeremiah Wright $150,000 in hush money during the 2008 campaign. (More here.)

The nearly $6 million grant was announced last week by the “Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation” at the Department of Health and Human Services. White House watchdog journalist Keith Koffler notes that “some 3,000 applications were received for a share on the $1 billion in 3-year grants available. Only 26 programs were included in the first batch of awards doled out.” The administration grants circumvent any and all congressional deliberation as part of Team Obama’s election-year “We Can’t Wait” initiatives.

The grant recipients will help fulfill the mandated Obamacare vision of a centralized patient-record database with unprecedented federal oversight. The provision is being challenged in court by the Goldwater Institute for forcing Americans to share “with millions of strangers who are not physicians confidential private and personal medical history information they do not wish to share.”

HHS denies any favoritism, citing a “competitive, objective” process. But as I first reported in March, a Congressional Research Service analysis concluded that Obamacare’s Innovation Center is subject to no administrative or judicial review. The Innovation Center director is, in effect, a super-czar without any checks or balances on his grant-making decisions, methods or results.

I warned two months ago that the Obamacare Innovation Center and its multibillion-dollar slush fund smacked of “another pipeline for political payoffs and Chicago-style boodle that will result in less patient autonomy, fewer health-care choices, more government intrusion and lower-quality care.”

The University of Chicago Medical Center grant walks and talks like just such a political payoff. I have reported extensively on how Mrs. Obama helped engineer the Urban Health Initiative’s plan to offload low-income patients with non-urgent health needs. With consulting help from Obama senior adviser David Axelrod’s Chicago-based PR firm and the blessing of fellow Chicago pal Valerie Jarrett (who chaired the hospital’s board of trustees), Mrs. Obama sold the scheme to outsource low-income care to other facilities as a way to “dramatically improve health care for thousands of South Side residents.”

The program guaranteed “free” shuttle rides to and from the outside clinics. In truth, it was old-fashioned cost-cutting and favor-trading repackaged by a nonprofit, tax-exempt hospital as minority aid. Clearing out the poor freed up room for insured (i.e., more lucrative) patients.

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) blasted MichelleObamacare, expressing “grave concerns that the University of Chicago’s policy toward emergency patients is dangerously close to ‘patient dumping.’” The group concluded that the Urban Health Initiative “reflected an effort to ‘cherry pick’ wealthy patients over poor.” That practice was made illegal by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) signed by President Ronald Reagan.

Bipartisan complaints about impoverished South Side Chicago patients getting the shaft led GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Chicago to challenge the crony hospital’s abuse of its nonprofit status and lucrative tax breaks. But the probe went nowhere.

And now, Whitaker will have $6 million more to play with when he’s not vacationing with Obama or grappling with subpoenas over possible kickback and pay-for-play schemes while he served as a top health official under now-jailed Illinois. Gov. Blagojevich. One of the probes involves Whitaker’s oversight of medical facilities construction projects exploited by now-convicted real-estate shark Tony Rezko. Whitaker was also under federal investigation for misuse of funding for faith-based minority programs. President Obama recommended Whitaker to Rezko, who was a top Blago’s bagman.

Anyone who isn’t concerned about the privacy implications of this government-funded records-sharing network hasn’t been paying attention to how Team Obama and its surrogates are digging for dirt on private citizens who donate to GOP campaigns.

Nothing to see or smell here? Discerning eyes and nostrils beg to differ.

***

Related: The $4 Billion Obamacare Slush Fund for Progressives

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Put on your shocked faces: The first Catholic college has announced it is dropping its student health insurance plan in the wake of the White House refusal to repeal the religious liberty-sabotaging Obamacare birth control/abortion mandate.

Life News has the scoop:

Franciscan University appears to be the first casualty of the new Obama HHS mandate that requires Catholic colleges, groups and businesses to pay for drugs that may cause abortions and birth control for their employees.

Although President Barack Obama declared “If you like your health care coverage you can keep it,” when it came to passing Obamacare, a Catholic college in Ohio has determined it will no longer offer a student health insurance plan.

“The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover “women’s health services” including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),” the university says in a new post on its website. “Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”

More from the school’s website:

Due to these changes in regulation by the federal government, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the University 1) will no longer require that all full-time undergraduate students carry health insurance, 2) will no longer offer a student health insurance plan, and 3) will no longer bill those not covered under a parent/guardian plan or personal plan for student health insurance. The current student health insurance plan will expire on August 15, 2012.

Destroying private health insurance was always the goal of health care “reform“.

Always.

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Fraud? What voter fraud? While progressives continue to deny, deny, deny, investigative journalist James O’Keefe and Project Veritas continues to expose, expose, expose.

The latest target: North Carolina.

Project Veritas pulled up jury refusal forms and voter history documents to show that non-citizens and dead people there are registered to vote.

Watch as a man posing as a non-citizen with a passport is stubbornly encouraged by NC officials — who refuse to examine his ID — to vote. Listen to a conversation with election officials who joke about running over Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Listen to the election judge who only wants to uphold certain parts of the state constitution. And witness a University of North Carolina official chuckling as a “student” brags about voting in two different states to infiltrate GOP primaries.

As I wrote last week in my column on voter fraud:

Over the past five months, investigative journalist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas team have exposed systemic lapses at precincts in New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont and Washington, D.C. The ballots of famous public figures have been forked over to complete strangers; disenfranchisement of legitimate voters is routine. While Minnesota and New Hampshire legislators have passed new voter integrity/identification laws, O’Keefe now has been targeted for investigation and possible prosecution for blowing the whistle. And Attorney General Eric Holder is striking his usual see-no-evil, shoot-the-messenger, play-the-race-card pose.

The solution isn’t to sit back and bemoan a fantastical global conspiracy. The solution is to get off the couch, support election integrity activists like O’Keefe, and turn out in force on Election Day to eject Obama’s voter fraud coddlers. Like the old saying goes: If it ain’t close, they can’t cheat.

Donate to Project Veritas here and support the voter integrity investigations that the MSM won’t do.

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Nancy Genovese was arrested in New York for taking pictures. She was imprisoned and tortured over several days to send a message to “Teabaggers.”

Genovese’s ordeal began when she noticed a helicopter on display in front of the Gabreski Airport in Suffolk County and decided to take a picture to post on her personal “Support Our Troops” Web page. In doing so, she parked across the street from the airport on a public road. She crossed the street to the airport entrance, another public road.

After taking a few pictures she crossed the street again and got into her car to drive away. As she did, Southampton Town Police Lt. Robert Iberger stopped her and demanded to know why she was taking photographs.

Iberger took her camera. Genovese got a hold of the camera and removed the memory card. Iberger confiscated it. Iberger then notified the Suffolk County Sherriff’s Office and airport authorities that he had a potential terrorist detained. Before long, officers from other local departments and agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security were on the scene.

Genovese’s car was searched without her consent. Officers found an unloaded rifle in a locked case in her trunk (she had been target shooting that morning, and it is perfectly legal to keep an unloaded rifle in the trunk of a car). For the next five or six hours, Genovese was interrogated, taunted, harangued, threatened, belittled, abused, humiliated and harassed by members of the Sheriff’s Office. During this time, officers noticed she was limping from an ankle injury she had received earlier in the day. Officers made her show them the injury, which was bleeding, then threatened to charge her for not reporting a knife wound. Deputy Robert Carlock repeatedly called her a “right winger” and a “teabagger,” and he threatened to charge her with terrorism to make an example of her for other “right wingers” and “teabaggers.”

Sometime around midnight, airport officials and Federal agents determined Genovese posed no terrorist or security threat and left. But Carlock ordered Genovese handcuffed. When Genovese’s children tried to get her purse, which contained a large amount of cash, deputies threatened them with arrest.

Genovese was then taken to a holding cell at the Sheriff’s Office. On the way there, Carlock continued to taunt Genovese, telling her she would pay and admitting they had nothing to charge her with, but that he would “find something in order to teach all right wingers and teabaggers a lesson.”

In the holding cell, she was interrogated without being Mirandized. Her requests for a lawyer were ignored. She was told she was being charged with terrorism.

She was finally taken to a nearby medical center for treatment of her leg wound. She was handcuffed to a bed. The treatment required her to disrobe, and male deputies insisted on watching the procedure. She was discharged with antibiotics and treatment instructions, and was then taken back to the cell. But deputies denied her access to the antibiotics, and she developed a staph infection.

The next morning, Genovese was questioned again by FBI, but not charged. She was transported to court, where she said she was not secured by a seatbelt in the back of the patrol car, but had her hands cuffed behind her back. On the trip to the courthouse, deputies drove recklessly, making repeated violent and sudden turns that caused her to be flung about the back seat. Deputies seemed to get a kick out of it.

She was again denied access to an attorney at the courthouse and for her arraignment. She was charged with one misdemeanor count of criminal trespass in the third degree. She was finally assigned a legal aid attorney by the judge. But Carlock and another deputy told the judge her car contained surveillance equipment (a point-and-shoot camera) and that they believed she was a terrorist, so her bail was set at $50,000.

Once back at the jail, the legal aid attorney spoke to Carlock and Undersheriff Joseph Caracappa. After the conversation, the legal aid attorney told Genovese he would not represent her and he was going to request she be put on a suicide watch. She was photographed, fingerprinted, eye scanned and issued prison “greens” to wear. She was interviewed by a woman in civilian clothes. During the interview, two men wearing jackets bearing the words “Suffolk County Emergency Response Team” entered the room. One of them led Genovese from the room and held her in the hall. She said she could hear the other man arguing with the woman, and she heard the woman say, “She is not suicidal.”

The two men then moved Genovese to another room. There, a woman who claimed to be a nurse gave Genovese two injections without Genovese’s consent. One of the men held her arm still while the other kept her head turned away so she could not see what was being done. She was forced to disrobe and made to wear a “suicide gown” that was a heavy, jacket-type blanket that fastens with Velcro. She was not permitted to wear undergarments under the suicide gown, and was made to wear it for three days. Finally, a psychiatrist interviewed her, determined she wasn’t suicidal and had her removed from suicide watch. Later that day, her bail was posted and she was released. The charges against her were dropped.

The Sheriff’s Office issued a press release in response to media inquiries. It called Genovese a terrorist and a right-wing extremist and falsely stated she had been taking pictures of the airport and surrounding security and that she had 500 rounds of ammunition and “scary weapons” in her car. It also falsely stated she had previously been removed from the airport for trespassing and had been warned to stay away.

Her camera memory card was not returned to her. More than $5,000 in cash was missing from her purse. The contents of her car’s glove box were removed.

Genovese has filed a $70 million lawsuit against the Town of Southampton, Suffolk County, Iberger, Caracappa, Carlock and other members of the Sheriff’s Office. The lawsuit is ongoing.

On May 1, Iberger retired from the Sheriff’s Office. He got a $215,483 payout, a full pension and lifetime medical benefits. It pays to be a government terrorist.

This case began more than a year ago. I’ll bet you haven’t heard about this on ABC News, CNN or Fox, et al., or read about it in The New York Times or any other newspaper of record. It doesn’t jibe with their agenda.

Iberger came out smelling like a rose. Genovese is still awaiting justice. This is the police state in which we now live.

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The arrogance on Wall Street always amazes me. I have lived through three stock market crashes, one rolling recession, near hyperinflation and what was almost an economic depression. In all those cases, Wall Street was caught unaware. People who manage financial institutions were incredulous as the events transpired.

The Street’s ignorance was on full display this month when Warren Buffett’s top investment adviser Charles Munger explained that gold is a useless relic.

On May 4, the eve of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Munger, age 88, said: “Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don’t buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.”

Munger thinks people should either be facing a Nazi occupation or else be as stupid as cavemen in order to purchase gold. If this reminds you of the Geico cavemen commercials, you won’t be surprised that Munger is big on investing in that company.

Munger said he loves Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio, which includes Burlington Northern railroad, specialty chemicals firm Lubrizol and insurance giant Geico.

“We just have a wonderful portfolio in business, if you average them out,” Munger said. “By and large they’re doing productive, useful work.”

So confident are Buffett and his associates on Burlington Northern that in 2009, Berkshire Hathaway bought the company for $34 billion. This is just one example of Buffett’s showing faith in Barack Obama’s management of America’s economy.

Buffett and Munger forgot to consider that Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio is mostly traded in U.S. dollars. Perhaps Munger slept through the past decade. Only that would explain how he missed the worst bear market ever for the U.S. dollar and one of the biggest bull markets for gold.

When I began as the editor for Outstanding Investments in the autumn of 2000, I urged subscribers to load up on gold. Bullion was then trading for less than $280 per ounce. Today, it trades at about $1,600 per ounce.

During those same years, the value of the dollar has gone to hell. The evidence in the graph below shows the greenback’s dreadful decline.

Munger doesn’t seem to understand that when the dollar declines, even against other currencies, the purchasing power of the dollar declines. Even if we accept the Federal government’s cooked books on the Consumer Price Index, what cost $100 in 2000 costs $133 today.

Burlington Northern stock has gone from $25 per share in 2000 to $100 per share now (in large part because of the spike caused by the Berkshire Hathaway purchase). But you have to discount one-third of that increase because of the declining worth of the dollar.

Another Obama Term Will Send Bullion Soaring

Munger does not understand what the dollar will face if Obama is re-elected.

In the 1970s, dollar inflation decimated Big Board stocks. The Dow Jones industrial average hit 996 in 1966. That index stood at 742 in 1980, a loss of 25 percent. If you factor in the decline of the dollar’s purchasing power, the DJIA was really 321 in 1966 dollars. Over those 14 years, the DJIA lost more than two-thirds of its value.

Uncivilized people like my father got his subscribers into gold starting in 1970 at $35 per ounce; that investment climbed to $850 by January 1980. Using the same inflation calculator, the 1980 price of that gold was $428 per ounce in 1970 dollars. So even in real terms, the price of bullion, bought by cavemen, increased twelvefold.

The Wall Street establishment wouldn’t listen to a word the “gold bugs” said. In fact, my dad, Vern, was a guest on PBS’s “Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser” in the mid-1970s. Rukeyser and his panel openly laughed at my dad’s suggestions that investors should buy gold. One came right out and said such advice was un-American.

While Wall Street investors were losing their shirts, gold investors who followed people like James Dines, Harry Schultz and C.V. Myers made themselves tidy fortunes.

You would think an experienced man such as Munger would remember those times. And given the unprecedented increase in the U.S. money supply over the past three years, men like Buffett and Munger might even think it prudent to put some assets into gold.

Perhaps such men cannot think outside the box. I don’t know. What I do know is that modern money changers refuse to believe that anyone other than a caveman would even consider investing in gold.

Most people listen to the investment establishment. I have a friend who is an accountant. He knows several multimillionaires in Alberta’s oil patch. I asked him not long ago if he thought any of them owned gold. He told me he didn’t believe even one owned a single ounce. That tells me there is a lot of upside to gold prices even though bullion is undergoing a correction right now.

Unfortunately, I think Obama is going to be re-elected. After he is, he will move forward with socialist policies, which will mean even larger Federal deficits. More debt means more dollars, and that means the continued decline of the greenback. If successful people ever get a taste of stagflation (a stagnant economy and higher prices), I think investors are going to invest in precious metals. The gold market is so thin that it won’t take much buying to push the price of bullion to $2,500 per ounce.

They Thought My Mother Was Crazy

There are legions of men and women like Munger in the world. I still remember when I first met one.

It was 1970, and it was legal for Canadians to buy gold. My dad was heavily invested in gold along with his subscribers, and my mother had about $3,000 in savings. I went with her to the Bank of Nova Scotia one day.

The main branch in downtown Calgary had a trading desk. She told the man at the desk that she wanted to take the money out of her savings account and buy 1-ounce gold South African Krugerrand coins.

Gold was trading at $35 an ounce back then. Most people who worked in the financial industry believed that once the United States freed up, the price of gold would fall.

The man at the gold desk looked at my mother as if she were crazy. He tried to convince her that she was speculating with her life savings and that it would be much better if she left it in her account. When my mother insisted she wanted to buy the gold, we were escorted into the branch manager’s office. The manager urged my mother to reconsider her recklessness. When she wouldn’t, he said the bank would not accept the transaction. She then asked the manager to phone my father, who had a much more sizable account with the bank and a much more forceful personality.

I don’t know what my dad said to that bank manager that day; but after a very brief phone call, the manager was happy to help my mother purchase her gold.

I guess it is true what the kid said to me more than four decades ago on the playground: “Myers, you’re a caveman!”

Yours in good times and bad,

–John Myers

Editor, Myers’ Energy & Gold Report

American Atheists, an organization representing the civil liberties of agnostics, filed suit in 2011 to block display of the Ground Zero Cross anywhere on the grounds of the new memorial museum planned for the World Trade Center site. The artifact in question became the best known piece of debris recovered from the terrorist attacks, when workmen spotted it on Sept. 13, 2001. The huge cross beam, presumably detached from the collapse of the North Tower and hurled down with many tons of rubble onto the stricken eight-story structure to its northeast, somehow survived intact and almost immediately became an informal shrine for the tireless crews who labored to clear Ground Zero.

A Franciscan friar blessed the welded girders as a sign that “God had not abandoned Ground Zero.” Later, with the cross installed on a city-approved pedestal, millions of tourists came to pray or leave flowers, but as construction proceeded at the World Trade Center, a crane helped to move the giant welded girders to nearby St. Peter’s Church in 2006.

The lawsuit insists the relic must remain where it is, but planners for the new museum, supported by many 9/11 families, want the cross returned to Ground Zero as part of the permanent memorial. The lawsuit cites “mental pain and anguish” suffered by the plaintiffs due to “the knowledge that they are made to feel officially excluded from the ranks of citizens who were directly injured by the 9/11 attack.”

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, which often takes a dim view of religious symbols in government-owned locations, declared that it “fully supports” the inclusion of the cross in the museum.

On my radio show, Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, denounced the potential placement of the cross as unfair because there would be no comparable display of atheist or Muslim symbols. But no one happened to recover atheist symbols (whatever they might be) from the rubble. The cross deserves its unique place of honor because of its powerful historic connection to the first dark days after the terrorist attack.

Moreover, America’s leading government-funded art museums all boast collections of sacred objects, including icons, crucifixes and altar pieces exhibited for their historical and artistic significance.

Had fate shaped the steel beams into any form other than a Christian cross, American Atheists would never think to object to its museum display. The group’s visceral hostility to the cross plays a role in a number of continuing controversies:

•In Woonsocket, R.I., the Freedom From Religion Foundation seeks to remove a World War I memorial topped by a cross that has stood without controversy on city property since 1921.

•In the Mojave National Preserve in California, officials are hoping to settle an 11-year dispute over a “desert cross” first erected on Sunrise Rock in 1934, also to commemorate the sacrifices of those who served in the Great War. In a complicated agreement, private parties have pledged to donate 5 new acres to the 1.6 million-acre federal reserve in return for title to the single acre on which the cross formerly stood before vandals destroyed it. Veterans groups hope to restore the monument, but they must first enclose the area in a chain-link fence with signs explaining that the cross stands on now private property.

In each of these fights, it’s the opponents of long-standing religious displays who seek to impose their narrow views on the rest of us. It hardly amounts to an effort to impose theocracy when people of faith defend monuments that have inspired passersby for generations. In the case of the Ground Zero Cross, for religious believers, the artifact they honor played a prominent role in the haunting imagery after the terror attacks.

Meanwhile, secular extremists seek to erase such imagery from the collective consciousness and to purge public places of religious reminders. For skeptics, prominently displayed crosses convey the uncomfortable message that the great majority of Americans still honor a faith that self-proclaimed free-thinkers hold in undisguised contempt.

Beneath all the hypocrisy over constitutional restraints and traditional walls of separation, secular activists and self-styled defenders of “civil liberties” seek to transform American society in a way that our Founders and most subsequent generations would never recognize. They seem eager to defend flag-burning, obscenity and every other form of radical expression, while seeking to suppress emblems of the Christian faith that helped shape the nation since the arrival of earliest colonists.

An experiment in enforced secularism might count as a bold departure from the nation’s God-haunted past, but it’s hard to believe it would produce a better country than the beloved, multifarious and clashing religious symbols that have always characterized our faith-based pluralism.

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Don’t buy the ‘lame-at-best’ excuse that redistricting is responsible. I said that we were going on a RINO hunt after the election. There is ample evidence that this is just what has occurred. Conservative challengers have cropped up all over the nation, despite the overwhelming monetary and organizational advantages of both the DeMarxists and the Republican establishment, whose wrong-headed choices may be, in large part, responsible for the rise of the Tea Party itself.

It’s striking that we have to run against our own side while defeating the true enemy. But rise we have, with Patriot citizen candidates all over the country, from school boards to state capitols and beyond, challenging DeMarxists who, in even heavily leftist entrenched districts, are looking over their shoulders… even the thickest, most out of touch of them, sensing the darkening mood of the nation.

Look what happened in Wisconsin, for instance. The unions were so certain they’d take out Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, in the recall elections initiated by them, that they spent millions of dollars to destroy Walker… and none of it worked. Walker actually looks like he’s gained strength and momentum coming out of the Republican primary. The point is that these are Tea Party candidates who are making their presence felt at all levels of the political spectrum.

We could be witnessing the beginning of the death of liberalism as we know it. We may also be witnessing the beginning of a whole new Republican brand… The Patriot brand.

Happy retirement, Dick.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2012

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…a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reasons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”

Reminder for any skeptics: Very light pink is a color.

Nebraska state Senator Deb Fischer pulled off a surprise upset victory against Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning in the state’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday, marking the second contest in two weeks in which an establishment favorite was upended by a dark horse candidate in a Senate primary.

Fischer, a rural rancher from the state’s 43rd legislative district, eked out a 5-point victory over Bruning, winning 41 percent to the Attorney General’s 36 percent with nearly all the votes counted. State Treasurer Don Stenberg earned 19 percent.

As of just a few weeks ago, Bruning was widely considered the favorite in the race, and was expected to handily defeat Fischer and Stenberg to face off against Democratic candidate Bob Kerrey in November.

(Note from MM: Full coverage from last night at Twitchy here, here, and here.)

Sarah Palin, who had endorsed Fischer, offered congrats. In spite of that, the race is on to paint Fischer’s primary win as anything but another win for the Tea Party. So far I’ve read articles in both the WaPo and The Hill doing just that (the latter actually claims Fischer’s win “dealt a blow” to the Tea Party). RS McCain responds to that.

Fischer’s win certainly proves that the influence of Sarah Palin hasn’t waned. Sarah and Todd Palin endorsed Fischer less than a week before the primary, and that gave Fischer the momentum needed to push her over the top.

(Note from MM: An enormous amount of credit goes to ShePAC, which provided early and vocal support for Fischer.)

Big Apple Bob Kerrey won the Democrat primary, but a recent poll (PDF) shows that he faces an uphill battle.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney easily won the Nebraska and Oregon primaries.

Also, George W. Bush made an elevator pitch for Mitt Romney.

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The NBC Investigative Unit has raised questions about two grants totaling nearly $1.5 million dollars distributed to the University of California San Francisco. The money was part of the federal stimulus program and went to studies into the erectile dysfunction of overweight middle aged men and the accurate reporting of someone’s sexual history.

This is part of our ongoing series of investigations by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit into who got federal stimulus dollars, and why some projects did not break ground more than two years after receiving the grant.

The Investigative Unit looked closely at the federal government’s decision to spend nearly $1.5 million dollars of taxpayer money, money that came here to California. Grant number 1R01HD056950-01A2 was among the thousands of grants funded, receiving $1.2 million dollars. This grant studied how to improve the accuracy of how people responded to questions about their sexual history.

The government, which consists to a great degree of overweight middle aged men, just happens to throw our money at a study about erectile dysfunction in overweight middle aged men? What a coincidence.

And what’s with the “accuracy” of questions about sexual history? Haven’t these idiots ever thought to simply apply the “rule of three”?

The new medical reports on the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case tell us a lot. And it is not just for what they find, but also what they don’t find. First, the reports provide striking evidence that Zimmerman did not start the fight with Martin, and that Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense. Martin’s injuries were two-fold: broken skin on his knuckles and the fatal gunshot wound.

Zimmerman’s injuries involved: a fractured nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury.

It takes considerable force to break the skin on multiple knuckles. The large range of injuries on Zimmerman indicates that the Martin’s attack was prolonged. . . . .