This Depressing Economy
The government’s August jobs report from its Bureau of Labor Statistics was all too typically lackluster.It's far closer to the dreadful 1930s than you might think.
It is true that 164,000 seasonally adjusted payroll jobs were added during the month, per the Establishment Survey of employers, but June and July were revised down by a combined 75,000. The Household Survey used to determine the unemployment rate had even grimmer news, as it showed that 115,000 fewer Americans were working in August than in July. The only reason that the official (“U-3″) unemployment rate fell to 7.3 percent is because the civilian workforce shrunk by over 300,000, taking the labor force participation down to 63.2 percent, that figure’s lowest level in since 1978.
Looking back further, since President Obama was first inaugurated in January 2009, seasonally adjusted employment per the Household Survey has increased by just over 2 million, while the number of adults not in the labor force has skyrocketed by almost 10 million.
On Wednesday, the Obama administration indicated that it wants to take the focus off of Syria and for the umpteenth time shift the president’s energies back to the economy. Haven’t you guys done enough damage already?
It may be hard to get used to the idea, but the onslaught of statistics such as these in the areas of employment and output indicates that we’re in an economy which, in certain statistical respects, more resembles what the nation experienced during the 1930s than during the other far more legitimate recoveries seen since World War II.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the level of human suffering currently occurring — though it has been virtually ignored and vastly understated by an establishment press which has seemingly excised the terms “homelessness” and “tent cities” from its dictionaries while losing its directions to the low-priced weekly motels where so many downtrodden families now live — is anywhere near what it was during the Great Depression.
That said, data at the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that the economy under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took barely longer to recover from the steep 26 percent nosedive in real gross domestic product (GDP) which took place from 1929 to 1933 than the economy under Barack Obama has since the most recent recession’s 4.3 percent real GDP decline officially ended in the second quarter of 2009. It may be that the only thing keeping the Obama “recovery” from looking worse on the GDP front is that quarterly stats didn’t become available until shortly after World War II.
The economy under Roosevelt recovered what had been lost in 1936, three years after the Depression’s trough, and grew at a compound annual rate of almost 11 percent to get there. That pace of growth, accompanied by the decade’s high unemployment, explains the popular saying about that period, namely that “the Great Depression wasn’t so bad, if you had a job.”
Given that FDR didn’t take office until March 4, 1933 — the Constitution’s 20th Amendment, passed earlier that year, established our current January 20th Inauguration Day, beginning in 1937 — it’s reasonable to believe that the Depression’s bottom occurred in the third or fourth quarter of that year. This would mean that full recovery, if real GDP had been computed on a quarterly basis, may have been achieved just nine or ten quarters later, though it’s conceivable that it could have taken as long as 15 quarters.
The economy under Obama didn’t see real GDP return to its pre-recession peak until the second quarter of 2011, the eighth quarter after the recession’s end, and did so with paltry compound annual growth of only 2.3 percent; it was nine quarters before BEA issued multi-year revisions in July. In every other recovery from a downturn since World War II, real GDP returned to it pre-recession peak in one, two, or three quarters.
Now let’s compare FDR and BHO using “Buffett’s Benchmark,” so named because it’s the standard by which Warren Buffett, the Obama-worshipper of Omaha, defines a recession’s end. In his view, that doesn’t occur “until real per capita GDP gets back to where it was before,” i.e., its previous peak.
The 1930s economy got to within 0.3 percent of reaching Buffett’s benchmark in 1937, four years after the bottom, before falling back in 1938 and finally getting over the hurdle in 1939. The latest GDP report for the second quarter of 2013, the sixteenth quarter after the most recent recession’s end, revised an original estimate of 1.7 percent annualized growth up to 2.5 percent, and finally pushed per capita GDP above its fourth quarter 2007 peak. It will stay that way as long as the final second-quarter revision in late September comes in at an annualized 2.0 percent or higher and growth continues in subsequent quarters — neither of which is a certainty.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the 22 quarters it took for the economy to return to its previous GDP per capita peak is “more than twice as long as the 10 quarters it took after the recession of the early 1980s, the next-longest recovery since World War II.”
Finally let’s look at unemployment. Surely the Depression was horribly and exponentially worse than our current very unacceptable predicament.
Not so fast.
Estimates of the unemployment rate during the 1930s vary. A 1973 paper by Robert Coen shows that it was between roughly 14 percent and 22 percent from 1933 to 1940. EyewitnessToHistory.com claims that “in 1933, the unemployment rate hovered close to twenty-five percent … (and) never fell below 14.3% until 1941.” The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics tells us that the lowest unemployment rate seen during the 1930s was 12 percent.
The most directly comparable current unemployment statistic today — with one very big exception — is probably the “U-5″ figure, which includes “total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force,” but excludes those who are working part-time for economic reasons (i.e., they can’t find full-time work). The U-5 figure reached a high of 11.4 percent in October 2009 and has since fallen to 8.7 percent.
But BLS’s current methodology excludes from the workforce anyone who has stopped looking for a job. With labor force participation at a 35-year low, that’s a huge omission when comparing today’s data to other eras when there was little alternative to continuing to look for a job — at least if eating was on your and your family’s agenda.
Most analyses attempting to adjust for a “normal” level of labor force participation are currently adding between three and four percentage points to the “official” U-3 unemployment rate. Those points should arguably be added to the current U-5 rate for true Depression-era comparability. Doing so would take the U-5 rate to between 11.7 percent and 12.7 percent, figures which are about as close to the unemployment rates seen during much of the 1930s as they are to the official U-5 rates beginning when BLS first began tracking them in 1994 until 2008, i.e., until Barack Obama came along.
Thus, the current post-recession economy’s performance as measured in GDP, per capita GDP, and even unemployment has been far closer to what was seen during the 1930s than anything experienced following any post-World War II downturn. Another couple of years of this kind of continued misery, made even more possible by Obamacare’s impending havoc, may lead even progressive historians to start calling the Obama era the 21st century’s depression.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/this-depressing-economy/?singlepage=true
Florida official tells Christian charity to choose between Jesus and cheese
A Florida ministry that feeds the poor said a state agriculture department official told them they would not be allowed to receive USDA food unless they removed portraits of Christ, the Ten Commandments, a banner that read “Jesus is Lord” and stopping giving Bibles to the needy.“They told us they could no longer allow us to have any religious information where the USDA food is going to be,” said Kay Daly, executive director of the Christian Service Center.
So why did the government have an issue with the religious group’s religious decorations?
A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Agriculture told me they were following the guidelines written by the USDA.
“This program is a USDA-funded program and the requirements were outlined by the USDA,” spokesperson Amanda Bevis said. “This agency administers the program on the state level. Our staff did provide a briefing to CSC following turnover in leadership at CSC and did review the USDA requirements.”
Daly said they were told it was a matter of separation of church and state.
A USDA spokesperson told me that “under current law, organizations that receive USDA nutrition assistance can still engage in religious activities so long as the activity is not used to create a barrier to eligible individuals receiving food.”
The USDA referred to an Executive Order providing equal protection for faith-based organizations. That order guarantees those groups the right to provide assistance without “removing or altering religious art, icons, scriptures or other symbols from these facilities.”
For the past 31 years, the Christian ministry has been providing food to the hungry in Lake City, Fla. without any problems. But all that changed when they said a state government worker showed up to negotiate a new contract.
“The (person) told us there was a slight change in the contract,” Daly told me. “They said we could no longer have religious information where the USDA food is being distributed. They told us we had to take that stuff down.”
Daly said it’s no secret that the Christian Service Center is a Christian ministry.
“We’ve got pictures of Christ on more than one wall,” she said. “It’s very clear we are not social services. We are a Christian ministry.”
Daly and her staff sat in stunned disbelief as the government agents also informed them that the Christian Service Center could no longer pray or provide Bibles to those in need. The government contract also forbade any references to the ministry’s chapel.
“We asked if we had to change the name of the organization but that said we could leave that,” Daly said. “But we had to take our religious stuff down.”
Daly said they were told they could continue distributing USDA food so long as it was somewhere else on the property – away from anything that could be considered religious.
In other words – the Christian Service Center had a choice: choose God or the government cheese.
So in a spirit of Christian love and fellowship, Daly politely told the government what they could do with their cheese.
“We decided to eliminate the USDA food and we’re going to trust God to provide,” she told me. “If God can multiply fish and loaves for 10,000 people, he can certainly bring in food for our food pantry so we can continue to feed the hungry.”
In a nutshell, Daly said the Christian Service Center would not be compromising.
“We are a Christian ministry,” she said. “Our purpose is to help people in need and to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are going to pray with them. We are going to offer them a Bible. We are going to counsel them in Christian help. We are going to use our chapel.”
Churches across Lake City have stepped up to the challenge – filling the void left when the government took away their cheese.
“I’m called to do what the Lord tells me to do,” Daly said. “I’m not called to worry about it. I pray about it. The Lord answers our prayers and we move forward one day at a time, one person at a time.”
Raleigh police make arrest in alleged food stamps for tattoos fraud
Police say a Raleigh, North Carolina tattoo parlor accepted food stamps as payment for tattoo work, according to the Carolina’s WNCN.Raleigh police arrested Clifford Craig Tittle, the owner of Ink Addiction Tattooz, this week and charged him with buying and distribution of food stamps and conspiracy to obtain property under false pretenses.
Raleigh police discovered early in 2013 that Ink Addiction Tattooz was accepting Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, the vehicle for food stamps, as payment for tattoos, according to WNCN’s review of the warrants.
The Agriculture Department revealed four instances of EBT cards being used for payment at Ink Addiction Tattooz.
According to WNCN’s report, on Sept. 4 two people charged $421 and $417.61 to EBT cards (in addition to cash) for work at Ink Addiction Tattooz. On Sept. 6 another person charged $413 to their EBT card plus $175 in cash for tattoo work from Tittle. Also on Sept. 6, another person sold Tittle an EBT card worth $570 to Tittle for $215.
In charging Tittle, police had an assist from a confidential informant who, from Sept. 4-11, met with Tittle five times and sold him food stamps twice. The informant during two of the meetings exchanged EBT benefits for $600 worth of tattoos.
The Agriculture Department has stepped up efforts in recent years to combat food stamp fraud. According to the agency the rate of trafficking has decreased in the last 15 years from four percent to approximately one percent of benefits.
Eric Holder, IRS officials coached tax-exempt black ministers on how to engage in political activity
Attorney
General Eric Holder and IRS officials advised black ministers on how to
engage in political activity during the 2012 election without violating
their tax-exempt status.
Holder, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, and Peter Lorenzetti, a senior official in the scandal-plagued agency’s exempt organizations division, participated in a May 2012 training session for black ministers from the Conference of National Black Churches at the U.S. Capitol hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Holder spoke at the event.
“We’re going to, first of all, equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they cannot say in the church that would violate their 501(c)(3) status with the IRS,” said then-CBC chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri. “In fact, we’re going to have the IRS administrator there. We’re going to have Attorney General Eric Holder there…the ACLU.”
Cleaver’s session advised black ministers on “draconian laws” including voter ID laws. Cleaver was a sharp critic during the 2012 campaign of Republican Mitt Romney’s policies.
As The Daily Caller has extensively reported, the IRS harassed conservative and tea party groups during the 2012 election cycle with improper reviews of their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt applications.
“[The CBC] had the IRS members there specifically to advise them on how far to go campaigning without violating their tax-exempt status,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told The Daily Caller.
“I viewed the meeting as highly problematic. Eric Holder
heads the agency that prosecutes organizations who give false
information to the government. The Justice Department coordinates with
the IRS on actions taken against not-for-profits. These ministries are
given not-for-profit status on the basis that they are not engaging in
any political activities. Here, the Obama administration was clearly
encouraging them to maximize their efforts by showing them where the
lines were drawn in federal case law,” Turley said.
“It is a fundamental precept that cabinet members should not engage in political activities. The most important of those cabinet members would be the attorney general of the United States. To have the attorney general actively advising political allies of the president showed remarkably poor judgment on his part,” Turley told TheDC.
“I believe this session undermined the integrity of the justice department, signaled to other Justice Department officials that the attorney general wants to support these black ministries as much as possible,” Turley said.
Obama won 93 percent of the black vote in 2012, according to exit polling.
“This event was open to all faiths, denominations, colors, creeds, and political affiliations,” Rep. Cleaver told TheDC in a statement. “We were pleased to have leaders from our government provide information on compliance with the law and participation in our electoral system.”
The IRS and DOJ did not return requests for comment.
General Eric Holder and IRS officials advised black ministers on how to
engage in political activity during the 2012 election without violating
their tax-exempt status.Holder, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, and Peter Lorenzetti, a senior official in the scandal-plagued agency’s exempt organizations division, participated in a May 2012 training session for black ministers from the Conference of National
Black Churches at the U.S. Capitol hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Holder spoke at the event.“We’re going to, first of all, equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they cannot say in the church that would violate their 501(c)(3) status with the IRS,” said then-CBC chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri. “In fact, we’re going to have the IRS administrator there. We’re going to have Attorney General Eric Holder there…the ACLU.”
Cleaver’s session advised black ministers on “draconian laws” including voter ID laws. Cleaver was a sharp critic during the 2012 campaign of Republican Mitt Romney’s policies.
As The Daily Caller has extensively reported, the IRS harassed conservative and tea party groups during the 2012 election cycle with improper reviews of their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt applications
.“[The CBC] had the IRS members there specifically to advise them on how far to go campaigning without violating their tax-exempt status,” George Washington University law professor
Jonathan Turley told The Daily Caller.“I viewed the meeting
as highly problematic. Eric Holder
heads the agency that prosecutes organizations who give false
information to the government. The Justice Department coordinates with
the IRS on actions taken against not-for-profits. These ministries are
given not-for-profit status on the basis that they are not engaging in
any political activities. Here, the Obama administration was clearly
encouraging them to maximize their efforts by showing them where the
lines were drawn in federal case law,” Turley said.“It is a fundamental precept that cabinet members should not engage in political activities. The most important of those cabinet members would be the attorney general of the United States. To have the attorney general actively advising political allies of the president
showed remarkably poor judgment on his part,” Turley told TheDC.“I believe this session undermined the integrity of the justice department, signaled to other Justice Department officials that the attorney general wants to support
these black ministries as much as possible,” Turley said.Obama won 93 percent of the black vote in 2012, according to exit polling.
“This event was open to all faiths, denominations, colors, creeds, and political affiliations,” Rep. Cleaver told TheDC in a statement. “We were pleased to have leaders
from our government provide information on compliance with the law and participation in our electoral system.”The IRS and DOJ did not return requests for comment.
Obamacare exchange leaks data of 2,400 unsuspecting customers
An employee
of Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, MNsure, sent an unencrypted file to
the wrong person and left 2,400 people’s private information at the
mercy of a nearby insurance agent.
One exchange staffer’s simple mistake gave insurance broker Jim Koester access to an Excel document of Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal data
for whole a list of insurance agents. Luckily for the 2,400, Koester was cooperative — and unnerved.
“The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Koester told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”
While MNsure officials called Koester and ensured the data was deleted from the insurance company’s hard drives, such an easy breach of confidentiality before the Obamacare exchanges have even gone live heighten the security concerns many have already raised about the law.
Obamacare’s Federal Services Data Hub has received heavy criticism for insufficient security and delayed testing. The data hub will centralize and route private information of every Obamacare participant through an endless list of federal and state agencies and related businesses, but lawmakers are worried about privacy as the deadline approaches.
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Pat Meehan, who has been leading the charge to delay the data hub, criticized the security breach. “Obamacare’s data hub hasn’t even gone live yet, and already there are massive data breaches,” Meehan said in statement. “What more has to happen to convince this administration that the data hub is not ready for prime time?”
Obamacare exchange officials aren’t the only agents that will have access to private consumer data in the data hub. Along with any federal or state officials working with Obamacare, program “navigators” will have access to consumer information in order to help them make decisions about what insurance plan is the right choice.
Navigators will only receive 20 hours of training before having access to consumer data, a policy which turned heads at a tense congressional hearing. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry pointed out, “It takes 1,250 hours to become a barber in Pennsylvania, but to navigate insurance, these folks are going to be advising us with 20 hours?”
The data sent in the Minnesota email
did not have any increased cybersecurity efforts attached to it. “The
gorilla in the room is that they sent me something that’s not even
encrypted. It’s unsecured, on an Excel spreadsheet,” Koester told
reporters. “They’ve got to realize they have a huge problem.”
The completion date for cybersecurity testing on the data hub has been delayed until September 30, the day before Obamacare exchanges open for business.
MNsure issued a statement maintaining that “MNsure has a data privacy policy in place, and this employee’s action was a violation of this policy.”
But Meehan was not convinced. “It’s time to delay the data hub, now,” the congressman concluded.
A new GAO report says the federal government may have paid $1.29 billion in social security disability benefits to 36,000 people who don’t even qualify for the program. They make too much income to qualify!!! According to the report, at least one recipient alone collected a potential overpayment of $90,000 without getting caught by the Social Security Administration. But that’s not the only case of outrageous numbers; others also reported over-collecting $57,000 and $74,000.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/heatherginsberg/2013/09/14/social-security-overpays-13-billion-in-benefits-n1699691
A piece in the gay culture magazine The Advocate by Aaron Hicklin lays out the facts about the Shepherd mythology, but it also contains a line that is the Rosetta Stone to understanding how leftist narrative mythology is so pervasive in both the arts in journalism. Despite the clear evidence that the story that Shepard was done in by deadly homophobia was inaccurate and that Shepard was instead killled in a meth-fueled bender by another man who was bisexual, Hicklin states:
This philosophy explains why in so many cases you get a story that is heavily hyped in the culture at one point and then later the real story comes out. While trying to drive a gay rights agenda, the myth of Matthew Shepard was useful, so that's what ended up getting reported. If it's useful to say that Shepard was killed by homophobic good ol' boys in Wyoming, the news media and the arts go all in on that story.
Because the means of cultural production--the mainstream press, the entertainment industry, and academia--are all held by progressives, fables like the one told about the tragic death of Matthew Shepard are told, retold, and regurgitated in a thousand different form and formats, from new stories that get the facts wrong to protests based on those false facts, stage plays, movies, and HBO specials all ultimately ending up in a legislative or activist ground fundraising effort.
There are myriad examples. Why did the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman story become a wall-to-wall media event? Why has the left done countless stories and even two movies--including "Informant," which is in theaters and on iTunes now--about Breitbart News writer Brandon Darby? Why did the mainstream media and hactivist group Anonymous focus so much attention on a rape case in the small town of Steubenville Ohio earlier this year?
Why promote a lie? Because the lie is more effective. That's all that matters in a culture that's dominated by the leftist views of Saul Alinsky, the Frankfurt School, and the media machines of the mainstream media, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue.
Saul Alinsky realized the first goal of a community organizer is to agitate. By creating resentment and hostility, you can build a mob that can be easily controlled. Sometimes you need a lie to do that. The truth seldom fits the left's narrative.
One of the big revelations of the protest movement of the late 1960s proved that radical leftism was something that could be actually be marketed and sold. Events like Woodstock, consumer products like the Volkswagen Beetle, Broadway musicals like Hair, TV shows like The Mod Squad, and countless albums, movies, books, and more proved to Hollywood and Madison Avenue that youth resentment and anger could mean big bucks. America would later see the same strategy applied to punk rock, grunge rock, and hip-hop.
And so the media – entertainment/journalism industrial complex delivers us well packaged fables with great production values, where the facts have been twisted to fit the moral of the story.
The Matthew Shepard case proved that America was so homophobic that gay men could be crucified by straight men just for being gay. Except the story we were sold wasn't true.
The Trayvon Martin myth proved that America was so racist that young black men can't walk the streets without fear of being racially profiled and murdered. Except it wasn't true.
The Steubenville myth proved that America is so sexist and sports-obsessed that a small town covers up a brutal rape. Except it wasn't true.
The Brandon Darby myth proves that America uses entrapment to make up stories about a terrorism threat that doesn't really exist. Except it wasn't true.
In all of these cases and so many more, the facts about the actual people at the center of them hardly matter. Don't make the mistake of blaming Trayvon Martin or Matthew Shepard. Neither of those young men had anything to do with how their stories became entwined in the myth machine. Attacking either Martin or Shepard only serves to distract from the people who use their deaths to promote an agenda. Those activists are the ones who rightly deserve to be criticized.
The antidote to the progressive media command-and-control structure is to follow the Andrew Breitbart legacy of truth telling; harness the power of technology and new media to research the facts and use social media to share the truth with the world.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/09/14/Matthew-Shepard-Trayvon-Martin-Brandon-Darby-And-The-Power-Of-Leftist-Mythmaking
It is a claim that Obama has made repeatedly throughout his presidency. In 2011, he cited the same reasons for high unemployment in an interview with NBC News' Ann Curry: "If you see it when you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don't go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you use a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate," he said. He apparently believes there is a trade-off between innovation and employment.
That is an odd conviction for a president who purports to believe in the importance of innovation to the U.S. economy. The White House even has a "Strategy for American Innovation" that aims "to ensure economic growth that is rapid, broad-based, and sustained." In his recent economic speech at Knox College, Obama pledged to push for innovation in manufacturing and education, going around Congress if necessary.
Yet by the president's own faulty logic, these initiatives would cost American jobs (just ask those tellers and travel agents). Indeed, his push for alternative energy technologies, such wind and solar power and electric cars, would destroy thousands of fossil fuel jobs. (He is also aiming to do that, independently, through regulation that makes new coal plants cost-prohibitive and new oil leases impossible on public land.)
New technology does have a short-term effect on jobs in certain industries. But a growing economy creates new industries, as well. Over time, technology creates many more jobs, as well as greater welfare, which is the point of economic activity to begin with. On one level, the president--or his advisers--know this. But his big-government outlook on the world and his desire to avoid blame prevent him from admitting it.
Some of the interests most directly threatened by new technology--and by competition in general--also have the loudest voices in Washington, and have been Obama's sponsors throughout his political life. Big unions have always warped Obama's thinking on economic issues, a fact evident from his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, in which he admits the logic of free trade but cannot bring himself to support it.
He opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, he says, out of protest "against what I considered to be the [Bush] White House’s inattention to the losers from free trade" (209). That reveals a key aspect of Obama's political character: a keen sense of the potential of opposition politics, but no ability to grasp the interest of American society as a whole, no vision beyond a narrow, radical, utopian ideological sentiment.
That is why Obama excels at campaigning but fails at governing. The president who owes his own election to the most advanced technology ever deployed in a campaign, and who relies on support from members of a technologically-savvy generation, blames that same technology for his economic failures. It is not new invention, but old statism, that hampers Obama--but that is something he will not or cannot, understand.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/15/President-Obama-Blames-Technology-for-Job-Failure-Again
of Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, MNsure, sent an unencrypted file to
the wrong person and left 2,400 people’s private information at the
mercy of a nearby insurance agent.One exchange staffer’s simple mistake gave insurance broker Jim Koester access to an Excel document of Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal data
for whole a list of insurance agents. Luckily for the 2,400, Koester was cooperative — and unnerved.“The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Koester told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”
While MNsure officials called Koester and ensured the data was deleted from the insurance company’s hard drives, such an easy breach of confidentiality before the Obamacare exchanges have even gone live heighten the security
concerns many have already raised about the law.Obamacare’s Federal Services Data Hub has received heavy criticism for insufficient security and delayed testing. The data hub will centralize and route private information of every Obamacare participant through an endless list of federal and state agencies and related businesses
, but lawmakers are worried about privacy as the deadline approaches.Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Pat Meehan, who has been leading the charge to delay the data hub, criticized the security breach. “Obamacare’s data hub hasn’t even gone live yet, and already there are massive data breaches,” Meehan said in statement. “What more has to happen to convince this administration that the data hub is not ready for prime time?”
Obamacare exchange officials aren’t the only agents that will have access to private consumer data in the data hub. Along with any federal or state officials working with Obamacare, program “navigators” will have access to consumer information in order to help them make decisions about what insurance plan is the right choice.
Navigators will only receive 20 hours of training before having access to consumer data, a policy which turned heads at a tense congressional hearing. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry pointed out, “It takes 1,250 hours to become a barber in Pennsylvania, but to navigate insurance, these folks are going to be advising us with 20 hours?”
The data sent in the Minnesota email
did not have any increased cybersecurity efforts attached to it. “The
gorilla in the room is that they sent me something that’s not even
encrypted. It’s unsecured, on an Excel spreadsheet,” Koester told
reporters. “They’ve got to realize they have a huge problem.”The completion date for cybersecurity testing on the data hub has been delayed until September 30, the day before Obamacare exchanges open for business
.MNsure issued a statement maintaining that “MNsure has a data privacy
policy in place, and this employee’s action was a violation of this policy.”But Meehan was not convinced. “It’s time to delay the data hub, now,” the congressman concluded.
Social Security Overpays $1.3 Billion in Benefits
Here’s just another example of how our government is wasting our tax payer dollars and why our social security system needs some serious reforming. Will this finally be the straw that broke the camel’s back? Probably not.A new GAO report says the federal government may have paid $1.29 billion in social security disability benefits to 36,000 people who don’t even qualify for the program. They make too much income to qualify!!! According to the report, at least one recipient alone collected a potential overpayment of $90,000 without getting caught by the Social Security Administration. But that’s not the only case of outrageous numbers; others also reported over-collecting $57,000 and $74,000.
To qualify for disability, recipients must show that they have a physical or mental impairment that prevents gainful employment and is either terminal or expected to last more than a year. Once approved, the average monthly payment to a recipient is just under $1,000.
There is a five-month waiting period during which monthly income cannot exceed $1,000 before an applicant can qualify for disability, as well as a nine-month trial period during which someone who is already receiving benefits can return to work without terminating his or her disability payments.
The GAO said that its analysis showed that about 36,000 individuals either earned too much during the waiting period or kept collecting too long after their nine-month trial period had expired. The report recommended that "to the extent that it is cost-effective and feasible," the Social Security Administration's enforcement operation should step up efforts to detect earnings during the waiting period.
In fiscal 2011, more than 10 million Americans received disability benefits totaling more than $128 billion. The GAO's report estimates that less than half of one percent of recipients might be receiving improper payments.
A spokesperson for the Social Security Administration said the agency had a "more than 99 percent accuracy rate" for paying disability benefits. "While our paymen taccuracy rates are very high, we recognize that even small payment errors cost taxpayers. We are planning to do an investigation and we will recoup any improper payments from beneficiaries."
"It is too soon to tell what caused these overpayments," said the spokesperson, "but if we determine that fraud is involved, we will refer these cases to our Office of the Inspector General for investigation."Well isn’t that handy? Over a billion dollars of over-spending by the Social Security Administration is completely inexcusable. It’s time for reform to take hold and get rid of the abundance of fraud in this organization.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/heatherginsberg/2013/09/14/social-security-overpays-13-billion-in-benefits-n1699691
Matthew Shepard, Trayvon Martin, Brandon Darby and the Power of Leftist Mythmaking
The blockbuster story that the facts in the Matthew Shepard murder case have been distorted in order to promote a political agenda is another example of the power of the left's narrative mythmaking. Gay journalist Stephen Jimenez presents a new argument as to the details of Shepard's murder in The Book of Matt, but he's up against 15 years of storytelling and inverted reality.A piece in the gay culture magazine The Advocate by Aaron Hicklin lays out the facts about the Shepherd mythology, but it also contains a line that is the Rosetta Stone to understanding how leftist narrative mythology is so pervasive in both the arts in journalism. Despite the clear evidence that the story that Shepard was done in by deadly homophobia was inaccurate and that Shepard was instead killled in a meth-fueled bender by another man who was bisexual, Hicklin states:
There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.Take a moment and read that quote again, because it's one of the clearest statements ever written on how the left sees "the narrative." It's moral relativism applied to epistemology and metaphysics. There is no such thing as truth to the left. There are "certain stories" that can be told "a certain way." The story tellers, whether they are artist or journalist, simply pick and choose which story they will tell which way depending upon whether it's a "pivotal time."
This philosophy explains why in so many cases you get a story that is heavily hyped in the culture at one point and then later the real story comes out. While trying to drive a gay rights agenda, the myth of Matthew Shepard was useful, so that's what ended up getting reported. If it's useful to say that Shepard was killed by homophobic good ol' boys in Wyoming, the news media and the arts go all in on that story.
Because the means of cultural production--the mainstream press, the entertainment industry, and academia--are all held by progressives, fables like the one told about the tragic death of Matthew Shepard are told, retold, and regurgitated in a thousand different form and formats, from new stories that get the facts wrong to protests based on those false facts, stage plays, movies, and HBO specials all ultimately ending up in a legislative or activist ground fundraising effort.
There are myriad examples. Why did the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman story become a wall-to-wall media event? Why has the left done countless stories and even two movies--including "Informant," which is in theaters and on iTunes now--about Breitbart News writer Brandon Darby? Why did the mainstream media and hactivist group Anonymous focus so much attention on a rape case in the small town of Steubenville Ohio earlier this year?
Why promote a lie? Because the lie is more effective. That's all that matters in a culture that's dominated by the leftist views of Saul Alinsky, the Frankfurt School, and the media machines of the mainstream media, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue.
Saul Alinsky realized the first goal of a community organizer is to agitate. By creating resentment and hostility, you can build a mob that can be easily controlled. Sometimes you need a lie to do that. The truth seldom fits the left's narrative.
One of the big revelations of the protest movement of the late 1960s proved that radical leftism was something that could be actually be marketed and sold. Events like Woodstock, consumer products like the Volkswagen Beetle, Broadway musicals like Hair, TV shows like The Mod Squad, and countless albums, movies, books, and more proved to Hollywood and Madison Avenue that youth resentment and anger could mean big bucks. America would later see the same strategy applied to punk rock, grunge rock, and hip-hop.
And so the media – entertainment/journalism industrial complex delivers us well packaged fables with great production values, where the facts have been twisted to fit the moral of the story.
The Matthew Shepard case proved that America was so homophobic that gay men could be crucified by straight men just for being gay. Except the story we were sold wasn't true.
The Trayvon Martin myth proved that America was so racist that young black men can't walk the streets without fear of being racially profiled and murdered. Except it wasn't true.
The Steubenville myth proved that America is so sexist and sports-obsessed that a small town covers up a brutal rape. Except it wasn't true.
The Brandon Darby myth proves that America uses entrapment to make up stories about a terrorism threat that doesn't really exist. Except it wasn't true.
In all of these cases and so many more, the facts about the actual people at the center of them hardly matter. Don't make the mistake of blaming Trayvon Martin or Matthew Shepard. Neither of those young men had anything to do with how their stories became entwined in the myth machine. Attacking either Martin or Shepard only serves to distract from the people who use their deaths to promote an agenda. Those activists are the ones who rightly deserve to be criticized.
The antidote to the progressive media command-and-control structure is to follow the Andrew Breitbart legacy of truth telling; harness the power of technology and new media to research the facts and use social media to share the truth with the world.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/09/14/Matthew-Shepard-Trayvon-Martin-Brandon-Darby-And-The-Power-Of-Leftist-Mythmaking
President Obama Blames Technology for Job Failure--Again
On Sunday's edition of This Week, ABC News aired an interview conducted with President Barack Obama on Friday. Among other familiar Obama tropes--such as the threat not to negotiate with congressional leaders over the debt ceiling, which is odd considering he's perfectly willing to negotiate with Vladimir Putin--was the claim that slow job growth during his administration has been caused by technological advancement.It is a claim that Obama has made repeatedly throughout his presidency. In 2011, he cited the same reasons for high unemployment in an interview with NBC News' Ann Curry: "If you see it when you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don't go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you use a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate," he said. He apparently believes there is a trade-off between innovation and employment.
That is an odd conviction for a president who purports to believe in the importance of innovation to the U.S. economy. The White House even has a "Strategy for American Innovation" that aims "to ensure economic growth that is rapid, broad-based, and sustained." In his recent economic speech at Knox College, Obama pledged to push for innovation in manufacturing and education, going around Congress if necessary.
Yet by the president's own faulty logic, these initiatives would cost American jobs (just ask those tellers and travel agents). Indeed, his push for alternative energy technologies, such wind and solar power and electric cars, would destroy thousands of fossil fuel jobs. (He is also aiming to do that, independently, through regulation that makes new coal plants cost-prohibitive and new oil leases impossible on public land.)
New technology does have a short-term effect on jobs in certain industries. But a growing economy creates new industries, as well. Over time, technology creates many more jobs, as well as greater welfare, which is the point of economic activity to begin with. On one level, the president--or his advisers--know this. But his big-government outlook on the world and his desire to avoid blame prevent him from admitting it.
Some of the interests most directly threatened by new technology--and by competition in general--also have the loudest voices in Washington, and have been Obama's sponsors throughout his political life. Big unions have always warped Obama's thinking on economic issues, a fact evident from his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, in which he admits the logic of free trade but cannot bring himself to support it.
He opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, he says, out of protest "against what I considered to be the [Bush] White House’s inattention to the losers from free trade" (209). That reveals a key aspect of Obama's political character: a keen sense of the potential of opposition politics, but no ability to grasp the interest of American society as a whole, no vision beyond a narrow, radical, utopian ideological sentiment.
That is why Obama excels at campaigning but fails at governing. The president who owes his own election to the most advanced technology ever deployed in a campaign, and who relies on support from members of a technologically-savvy generation, blames that same technology for his economic failures. It is not new invention, but old statism, that hampers Obama--but that is something he will not or cannot, understand.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/15/President-Obama-Blames-Technology-for-Job-Failure-Again
American Ineffectualism
Every American ally is cringing with embarrassment at the amateurishness of the last month.
By Mark Steyn
For generations, eminent New York Times
wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s
Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s
more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was
inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure
it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened
strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed
page this week.
It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.
All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekend.”
As Iowahawk ingeniously summed it up, Putin is “now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.” It’s not just that he can stitch him up at the G-8, G-20, Gee-don’t-tell-me-you’re-coming-back-for-more, and turn the leader of the free world into the planet’s designated decline-and-fall-guy, but he can slough off crappy third-rate telepromptered mush better than you community-organizer schmucks, too. Let’s take it as read that Putin didn’t write this himself any more than Obama wrote that bilge he was drowning in on Tuesday night, when he took to the airwaves to argue in favor of the fierce urgency of doing something about gassed Syrian moppets but not just yet. Both guys are using writers, but Putin’s are way better than Obama’s — and English isn’t even their first language. With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you haven’t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt all over town on, too.
This is what happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z. Putin is cool mainly in the sense that Yakutsk in February is. In American pop-culture terms, he is a faintly ridiculous figure, with his penchant for homoerotic shirtlessness, his nipples entering the room like an advance security team; the celebrities he attracts are like some rerun channel way up the end of the dial: Goldie Hawn was in the crowd when Putin, for no apparent reason, sang “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” which Goldie seemed to enjoy. In reality, Putin finds his thrill by grabbing Obama’s blueberries and squeezing hard. Cold beats cool.
Charles Crawford, Britain’s former ambassador in Serbia and Poland, called last Monday “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began.” Obama set it in motion at a press conference last year by drawing his famous “red line.” Unlike, say, the undignified scrums around the Canadian and Australian prime ministers, Obama doesn’t interact enough with the press for it to become normal or real. So at this rare press conference he was, as usual, playing a leader who’s giving a press conference. The “red line” line sounds like the sort of thing a guy playing a president in a movie would say — maybe Harrison Ford in Air Force One or Michael Douglas in The American President. It never occurred to him that out there in the world beyond the Republic of Cool he’d set an actual red line and some dime-store dictator would cross it with impunity. So, for most of the last month, the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment has assured us that, regardless of whether it will accomplish anything, we now have to fire missiles at a sovereign nation because “America’s credibility is at stake.”
This is diplomacy for post-moderns: The more you tell the world that you have to bomb Syria to preserve your credibility, the less credible any bombing raid on Syria is going to be — especially when your leaders are reduced to negotiating the precise degree of military ineffectiveness necessary to maintain that credibility. In London this week, John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, capped his own impressive four-decade accumulation of magnificently tin-eared sound bites by assuring his audience that the military devastation the superpower would wreak on Assad would be “unbelievably small.” Actually, the problem is that it will be all too believably small. The late Milton Berle, when challenged on his rumored spectacular endowment, was wont to respond that he would only take out just enough to win. In London, Kerry took out just enough to lose.
In the Obama era, to modify Teddy Roosevelt, America chatters unceasingly and carries an unbelievably small stick. In this, the wily Putin saw an opening, and offered a “plan” so absurd that even Obama’s court eunuchs in the media had difficulty swallowing it. A month ago, Assad was a reviled war criminal and Putin his arms dealer. Now, Putin is the honest broker and Obama’s partner for peace, and the war criminal is at the negotiating table with his chances of survival better than they’ve looked in a year. On the same day the U.S. announced it would supply the Syrian rebels with light arms and advanced medical kits, Russia announced it would give Assad’s buddies in Iran the S-300 ground-to-air weapons system and another nuclear reactor.
Putin has pulled off something incredible: He’s gotten Washington to anoint him as the international community’s official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going nuclear and keeping their blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential palace. Already, under the “peace process,” Putin and Assad are running rings around the dull-witted Kerry, whose Botoxicated visage embodies all too well the expensively embalmed state of the superpower.
As for Putin’s American-exceptionalism crack, he was attacking less the concept than Obama’s opportunist invocation of it as justification for military action in Syria. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans alike took the bait. Eager to mend bridges with the base after his amnesty bill, Marco Rubio insisted at National Review Online that America was still, like, totally exceptional.
Sorry, this doesn’t pass muster even as leaden, staffer-written codswallop. It’s not the time — not when you’re a global joke, not when every American ally is cringing with embarrassment at the amateurishness of the last month. Nobody, friend or foe, wants to hear about American exceptionalism when the issue is American ineffectualism. On CBS, Bashar Assad called the U.S. government “a social-media administration.” He’s got a better writer than Obama, too. America is in danger of being the first great power to be laughed off the world stage. When the president’s an irrelevant narcissist and his secretary of state’s a vainglorious buffoon, Marco Rubio shouldn’t be telling the world don’t worry, the other party’s a joke, too.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/358480/american-ineffectualism-mark-steyn
Goldberg believes it is a mistake to assume that just because Obama is hesitant on Syria, he will be similarly hesitant on Iran. Why the difference? Because, he says, the president has defined Iran's nuclear program as a core threat to U.S. national security. He maintains that Obama has made it clear that only two Middle East issues rise to the level of core American national interests: destroying al-Qaeda and stopping Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.
Goldberg sums up with this formulation: "Not all red lines are created equal. Not all national security challenges are equally dire. It is not analytically sound to assume that Obama's hesitancy in one area equals hesitancy in another. It would be a mistake on the part of the Iranian regime to believe that the president won't strike their nuclear facilities if he judges them to be near the nuclear threshold."
Perhaps. But assuming Goldberg once again has his finger on the pulse of this administration, American allies should be alarmed. The implication is that there are "core threats" to American national security against which Obama can be counted on to act; and then there is some lesser category where enforcement of clearly stated American commitments is unpredictable, at best. Which commitments are which? The ostentatiously public declaration of a "red line" by the President of the United States is apparently no longer sufficient to know America's actual intentions. There is evidently no actual commitment to some commitments.
It is anybody's guess which American commitments Obama considers to be "core," and therefore worthy of protection by American action, and which are not. Is there any "Obama doctrine" which indicates which American commitments will be carried out at all costs? Into which category falls protection of Taiwan? Or of South Korea? Or Israel's defense?
The Czechs and Poles learned the hard way that Obama is selective in which American commitments he keeps when he unilaterally abrogated their missile-defense treaties with the U.S. Apparently, as can be seen from Obama's backing away from his own Syrian red line, that was no fluke. Obama has no problem making commitments; it's keeping those commitments where he's wobbly.
If the seriousness of American red lines and commitments are legitimately open to question, then just how much do they deter the world's forces of aggression? Obama's indecisiveness regarding whether to follow through on his own Syria commitment will only inflame those world hot spots where American commitments keep the peace. His reticence undoubtedly has our allies sleeping less soundly in Taipei and Seoul.
And in Jerusalem. There are obvious implications the Syrian episode has for undermining American deterrence of Iranian nuclear development. But Obama's devaluation of American commitment is also likely to crush whatever slim chances there are for any substantial agreement to emerge from the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. In all likelihood, the only hope of bridging the parties' irreconcilable respective positions is some combination of American guarantees, especially regarding Israeli security and defense capabilities.
Israel already experienced Obama reneging on commitments made by the Bush administration regarding U.S. support for Israeli retention of major settlement blocs in "road map" peace process negotiations, as well as for scrapping the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. But as bad as not honoring the commitments of one's presidential predecessors may be for maintaining trust between countries, Obama's waffling over the red line he himself painted cuts to the core of whether he can relied upon to keep even his own commitments anywhere else. Would you buy a used peace plan from this man?
The president who cancelled America's manned space program has found a new vehicle for achieving weightlessness: American foreign policy commitments now based on airy pronouncements and evanescent promises.
At this point, in terms of U.S. credibility, it doesn't matter much whether Congress ultimately passes a resolution authorizing American force in Syria. And it doesn't matter much anymore whether Obama finally orders the firing of a handful of Tomahawk missiles at Syrian military targets, or whether Russia assumes control of Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles. Obama's zigzagging response to a direct challenge to his very own red line undermines the reliability of every other challenging commitment America has made. It is the dithering itself that causes the damage; and that damage has already been done.
Federal Court Rules ‘In God We Trust’ Will Remain on Coins and Currency
Lost in a busy news week dominated by Syria, Putin, Obama’s bungling, and the 9/11 anniversary was an important federal court ruling on September 10, resulting in a victory so that the motto “In God We Trust” can remain on all U.S. currency.
The Associated Press reported:
But the atheists will persist in ignoring God’s role in our national creation and as the source of our freedoms. Also, as stated above, they will likely appeal the judges ruling.
Desiring more insight on this ruling, I turned to a friend of mine. Colby M. May is the senior counsel and director of the Washington office for the ACLJ. (This group has also taken the lead role in defending numerous Tea Party groups in the IRS abuse scandal. They are doing terrific work and always appreciate additional financial support.)
Here are two questions I posed to Colby along with his answers:
Furthermore, if you are interested in knowing when and why the motto ”In God We Trust” first appeared on our coins, it was due to increased religious sentiment during the Civil War. However, the motto has only been printed on our paper money since 1957. Read more about this fascinating history at Treasury.gov.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/09/13/federal-court-rules-in-god-we-trust-will-remain-on-coins-and-currency/?singlepage=true
Then the day takes a turn. As part of newly mandated diversity training, Suzie’s teacher brings out Heather Has Two Mommies for some light mid-morning reading. A typically precocious kindergartener, Suzie pipes up during the story to correct the teacher’s telling. “God gave us a mommy and a daddy,” she exclaims.
Though no student takes exception to Suzie’s remark, the teacher cringes and becomes keenly aware of her state-mandated role to report any incident which could be construed as bullying. So Suzie gets pulled out of class and taken to the principal’s office, where she’s met by a counselor.
There begins a process of formative intervention and remedial discipline. More than correction for objectively inappropriate behavior, this intervention focuses on changing who Suzie is, on correcting her values to ensure that she accepts each of her classmates and values their diverse backgrounds.
Confused, disturbed, and teary-eyed, Suzie comes away from the experience convinced she has done something wrong. Worse, she feels the very sense of rejection which her accusers claim to deplore. She learns her lesson, that the values taught at home are not welcome in school. A bit of her innocence dies. She grows more guarded, less expressive, and unfairly subdued.
Such a tale may be among the tamest of experiences awaiting children in Minnesota, if a task force of social engineers commissioned by Governor Mark Dayton succeeds in lobbying for legislation which has already been approved by the state House. House File 826, misleadingly titled the Safe and Supportive Schools Act, serves as a trial balloon modeling what its supporters would like to implement nationally – a radical transformation of schools from institutions of academic achievement into political reeducation camps which correct Orwellian Wrong Think.
Sold colloquially as an “anti-bullying bill,” the proposed legislation actually institutionalizes bullying, targeting political minorities with suppressive badgering. The bill would repeal existing anti-bullying statutes which have proven effective. It would create an invasive, overbearing, and unfunded new state bureaucracy to impose politically correct values upon students, teachers, parents, staff, and anyone serving in or around the educational system. It would affect both public and private schools. In a state which already has one of the worst achievement gaps between white and black students in the nation, the bill would burden struggling districts with new mandates diverting precious resources away from academics. Teachers and staff will become thought police and value mediators, shifting their disciplinary focus from correcting inappropriate behavior to remediating students’ belief systems. As with any state bureaucracy, reams of new data will be generated and follow students throughout their academic career, if not the rest of their lives.
Understanding the proposed legislation requires more than simply
reading the bill. We must consider the political and historical context,
as well as the expressed agenda of its supporters. One of the bill’s
authors sat on a task force commissioned by Governor Dayton to address
alleged bullying. A report came out of that task force, and much of its language has been transplanted word-for-word into the subsequent bill.
When considering whether new legislation is required to prevent bullying in schools, one may be inclined to ask: what kind of bullying is currently acceptable? Assault remains a crime. Schools enforce rules against inappropriate conduct. So what else needs to be done?
Page 18 of the task force report lets us know:
To accept is to choose. To value is to judge. These acts occur inside an individual’s heart and mind. As warm and fuzzy as unconditional acceptance may seem, such a goal ignores objective reality. The mind cannot be compelled to consent, only badgered into acquiescence. What Governor Dayton thus proposes is the police of thought, the subjugation of judgment, and an imposition of official state attitudes. By definition, the promotion of certain values and attitudes occurs at the expense of others.
What does a state-defined “nature of human sexuality” look like? Does it match what you teach at home? Does it match what is taught in your house of worship? Whose job is it to teach children the nature of human sexuality anyway? Certainly, teachers may have a role. But shouldn’t parents determine what that role is?
While the task force report and the bill informed by it pay lip service to protecting all children, a review of the actors involved in crafting these documents (p. 31), along with a close examination of the text, reveals that the effort focuses specifically upon “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression.”
This raises vital questions. Does a transgender student have a greater right of expression than his or her sexually unambiguous peer? What of religious orientation? What of Christian identity or expression? Are they to be protected with as much vigor under this new law, or targeted for remediation?
From page 20 of the report detailing “Formative Interventions and Discipline”:
Expanding bullying beyond an objective definition of physical harm or
other violations of individual rights, the bill targets any action
deemed detrimental to the “emotional health of one or more student(s).”
What is emotional health? How is it measured? What evidence indicates
its compromise? And will the emotional health of all students be equally
valued in the implementation of this law?
The definition of harassment expands to include any act judged “unwelcome if the student or employee did not request or invite it and considered the conduct to be undesirable or offensive.” So simply offending someone is harassment now. What if the “harasser” becomes offended by the charge of harassment? Does the universe implode?
All of this proceeds from Governor Dayton’s ludicrous notion that people have a “right” to be “accepted” and “valued.” That idea ignores the objective definition of each word. We all have the same rights as our neighbors, to proceed unharmed and exercise our freedom of conscience without fear of tyrannical reprisal. Respecting those rights means tolerating the unique value judgments of each individual, including whether they choose to accept you, condemn you, or ignore you. To mandate unconditional acceptance is to oppress individual judgment, to police thought, and to remove consent from relationships. The serious proposal of such a course by those wielding political power ought to garner our rapt attention.
A real solution to bullying requires identification of the real problem. While Governor Dayton’s task force seeks to conflate bullying with offending someone’s delicate sensibilities, actual bullying involves the initiation of force to coerce, intimidate, steal, or otherwise harm. Real bullying cannot be genuinely addressed by a brazen new bureaucracy imposing state-mandated values through its own coercion and intimidation. Instead, we must act to protect individual rights by removing force from human relationships.
In a very direct way, the nature of public education fosters bullying. Consider that, at its core, public education is coercion. Taxpayers fund it under the force of law. Students attend it under the force of law. Teachers adhere to its mandates under the force of law. No one in the entire system has the ability to act upon their own judgment in pursuit of their own values. Forcing people of differing beliefs, priorities, and objectives into close proximity with a mandated agenda will inevitably foster conflict.
Imagine a different world. Imagine choice. Imagine the freedom to
select where you send your student, to choose what they will learn, and
to consent to their associations. Under such liberty, were a bully to
arise at school, he could be quickly and effectively neutralized with
the threat of expulsion. In the event the school did not adequately
respond to the bully, you would be free to take your student (and your
money) somewhere else. A school which routinely allowed the abuse of its
students would garner an appropriately horrendous reputation, and
endure less business as a result. All this would be done through market
incentives, the natural human desire for profit, and the individual
values of parents and their children. What’s the downside?
For those supporting Governor Dayton’s heavy-handed approach, the downside would be tolerating people with whom they disagree. The idea of free association, of choosing with whom you consent to enter into relationship, fundamentally offends them.
Consider the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the variety of approaches taken by its different activists. In his famous “Dream” speech fifty years past, Martin Luther King outlined an inspiring vision of a world where individuals would be judged by the content of their character. Were modern pretenders to his legacy honest in their discourse, they would admit to deploring that vision. After all, to judge someone by the content of their character requires an application of chosen values toward an exclusionary and discriminating conclusion. I accept you and not him. I value her and not you. I judge this to be appropriate and not that. Such differentiation, such choice, defies the “progressive” goal of unconditional value.
Since equal value of all people, things, and ideas defies objective reality, the closest to it that social engineers can get is employing force to grant advantage to the “disadvantaged” and disadvantage to the “advantaged.” So the white male suburbanite who never asked anyone to take a back seat must yield his place in line to a black lesbian woman who has never been truly oppressed. Rather than equality under the law, the dominant trend in civil rights became affirmative action.
So it is with this fresh prescription for “bullying.” Governor Dayton
and his task force harbor no desire for equal treatment. On the
contrary, they seek to promote a certain set of values at the exclusion
of others. But unlike free actors making individual choices in liberty,
they want to impose their values upon everybody else under the force of
law. It’s not enough for them to choose a progressive school where they
can send their progressive student to learn progressive values. So long
as a single school exists where such values are not taught, their
gut-wrenching intolerance drives them to legislate. Rather than live and
let live, they demand you live as they say.
Citizens concerned with liberty and the protection of individual rights must rise in nationwide opposition to this effort by Governor Dayton and his task force of bullies. Over the years, many encroachments upon freedom of conscience have gone without effective challenge. Obamacare became the law of the land, upheld by the Supreme Court, and bolstered by last year’s election results. A myriad of scandals, from the IRS targeting of groups on the Right to NSA spying on American citizens, has amounted to little more than a pesky annoyance for the administration. In Minnesota, the Democrats own state government and throttle production and choice without check. It can be easy under such circumstances to become cynical and complacent. However, inaction at this moment will invite the nationwide transformation of schools into politically correct remediation centers. As bad as things have become, they can and will get worse unless you act.
If you live in Minnesota, resistance begins with a signature. Sign the petition at the Minnesota Child Protection League demanding legislators vote no on this rights-violating bill. For everyone else, dig into the task force report and support choice through whatever channels are available to you.
Hopefully, among opposition to this bill will emerge a credible effort to implement school choice as a solution to both real bullying and Minnesota’s shameful achievement gap. While Governor Dayton and his task force wring hands over “emotional health,” class after non-graduating class enters adulthood without the skills or job opportunities to succeed. Whatever emotional health is, surely it improves when exposed to genuine hope. Empowering parents to send their students to the institution which best serves them will help turn their American dream into reality.
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/09/09/rise-of-the-thought-police-bullying-your-children-into-forsaking-their-values/?singlepage=true
It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.
All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekend.”
As Iowahawk ingeniously summed it up, Putin is “now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.” It’s not just that he can stitch him up at the G-8, G-20, Gee-don’t-tell-me-you’re-coming-back-for-more, and turn the leader of the free world into the planet’s designated decline-and-fall-guy, but he can slough off crappy third-rate telepromptered mush better than you community-organizer schmucks, too. Let’s take it as read that Putin didn’t write this himself any more than Obama wrote that bilge he was drowning in on Tuesday night, when he took to the airwaves to argue in favor of the fierce urgency of doing something about gassed Syrian moppets but not just yet. Both guys are using writers, but Putin’s are way better than Obama’s — and English isn’t even their first language. With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you haven’t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt all over town on, too.
This is what happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z. Putin is cool mainly in the sense that Yakutsk in February is. In American pop-culture terms, he is a faintly ridiculous figure, with his penchant for homoerotic shirtlessness, his nipples entering the room like an advance security team; the celebrities he attracts are like some rerun channel way up the end of the dial: Goldie Hawn was in the crowd when Putin, for no apparent reason, sang “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” which Goldie seemed to enjoy. In reality, Putin finds his thrill by grabbing Obama’s blueberries and squeezing hard. Cold beats cool.
Charles Crawford, Britain’s former ambassador in Serbia and Poland, called last Monday “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began.” Obama set it in motion at a press conference last year by drawing his famous “red line.” Unlike, say, the undignified scrums around the Canadian and Australian prime ministers, Obama doesn’t interact enough with the press for it to become normal or real. So at this rare press conference he was, as usual, playing a leader who’s giving a press conference. The “red line” line sounds like the sort of thing a guy playing a president in a movie would say — maybe Harrison Ford in Air Force One or Michael Douglas in The American President. It never occurred to him that out there in the world beyond the Republic of Cool he’d set an actual red line and some dime-store dictator would cross it with impunity. So, for most of the last month, the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment has assured us that, regardless of whether it will accomplish anything, we now have to fire missiles at a sovereign nation because “America’s credibility is at stake.”
This is diplomacy for post-moderns: The more you tell the world that you have to bomb Syria to preserve your credibility, the less credible any bombing raid on Syria is going to be — especially when your leaders are reduced to negotiating the precise degree of military ineffectiveness necessary to maintain that credibility. In London this week, John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, capped his own impressive four-decade accumulation of magnificently tin-eared sound bites by assuring his audience that the military devastation the superpower would wreak on Assad would be “unbelievably small.” Actually, the problem is that it will be all too believably small. The late Milton Berle, when challenged on his rumored spectacular endowment, was wont to respond that he would only take out just enough to win. In London, Kerry took out just enough to lose.
In the Obama era, to modify Teddy Roosevelt, America chatters unceasingly and carries an unbelievably small stick. In this, the wily Putin saw an opening, and offered a “plan” so absurd that even Obama’s court eunuchs in the media had difficulty swallowing it. A month ago, Assad was a reviled war criminal and Putin his arms dealer. Now, Putin is the honest broker and Obama’s partner for peace, and the war criminal is at the negotiating table with his chances of survival better than they’ve looked in a year. On the same day the U.S. announced it would supply the Syrian rebels with light arms and advanced medical kits, Russia announced it would give Assad’s buddies in Iran the S-300 ground-to-air weapons system and another nuclear reactor.
Putin has pulled off something incredible: He’s gotten Washington to anoint him as the international community’s official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going nuclear and keeping their blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential palace. Already, under the “peace process,” Putin and Assad are running rings around the dull-witted Kerry, whose Botoxicated visage embodies all too well the expensively embalmed state of the superpower.
As for Putin’s American-exceptionalism crack, he was attacking less the concept than Obama’s opportunist invocation of it as justification for military action in Syria. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans alike took the bait. Eager to mend bridges with the base after his amnesty bill, Marco Rubio insisted at National Review Online that America was still, like, totally exceptional.
Sorry, this doesn’t pass muster even as leaden, staffer-written codswallop. It’s not the time — not when you’re a global joke, not when every American ally is cringing with embarrassment at the amateurishness of the last month. Nobody, friend or foe, wants to hear about American exceptionalism when the issue is American ineffectualism. On CBS, Bashar Assad called the U.S. government “a social-media administration.” He’s got a better writer than Obama, too. America is in danger of being the first great power to be laughed off the world stage. When the president’s an irrelevant narcissist and his secretary of state’s a vainglorious buffoon, Marco Rubio shouldn’t be telling the world don’t worry, the other party’s a joke, too.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/358480/american-ineffectualism-mark-steyn
Barack Obama's Commitment Problem
Jeffrey Goldberg is as attuned as anyone to the thought processes of the Obama White House. So it is worth paying attention when he writes in Bloomberg View that President Obama's lack of enforcement of his Syrian chemical "red line" does not imply that there would be a similar lack of enforcement of his Iranian nuclear red line. But his explanation carries serious implications for America's international commitments and diplomacy, nowhere more so than regarding Israel and the peace process.Goldberg believes it is a mistake to assume that just because Obama is hesitant on Syria, he will be similarly hesitant on Iran. Why the difference? Because, he says, the president has defined Iran's nuclear program as a core threat to U.S. national security. He maintains that Obama has made it clear that only two Middle East issues rise to the level of core American national interests: destroying al-Qaeda and stopping Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.
Goldberg sums up with this formulation: "Not all red lines are created equal. Not all national security challenges are equally dire. It is not analytically sound to assume that Obama's hesitancy in one area equals hesitancy in another. It would be a mistake on the part of the Iranian regime to believe that the president won't strike their nuclear facilities if he judges them to be near the nuclear threshold."
Perhaps. But assuming Goldberg once again has his finger on the pulse of this administration, American allies should be alarmed. The implication is that there are "core threats" to American national security against which Obama can be counted on to act; and then there is some lesser category where enforcement of clearly stated American commitments is unpredictable, at best. Which commitments are which? The ostentatiously public declaration of a "red line" by the President of the United States is apparently no longer sufficient to know America's actual intentions. There is evidently no actual commitment to some commitments.
It is anybody's guess which American commitments Obama considers to be "core," and therefore worthy of protection by American action, and which are not. Is there any "Obama doctrine" which indicates which American commitments will be carried out at all costs? Into which category falls protection of Taiwan? Or of South Korea? Or Israel's defense?
The Czechs and Poles learned the hard way that Obama is selective in which American commitments he keeps when he unilaterally abrogated their missile-defense treaties with the U.S. Apparently, as can be seen from Obama's backing away from his own Syrian red line, that was no fluke. Obama has no problem making commitments; it's keeping those commitments where he's wobbly.
If the seriousness of American red lines and commitments are legitimately open to question, then just how much do they deter the world's forces of aggression? Obama's indecisiveness regarding whether to follow through on his own Syria commitment will only inflame those world hot spots where American commitments keep the peace. His reticence undoubtedly has our allies sleeping less soundly in Taipei and Seoul.
And in Jerusalem. There are obvious implications the Syrian episode has for undermining American deterrence of Iranian nuclear development. But Obama's devaluation of American commitment is also likely to crush whatever slim chances there are for any substantial agreement to emerge from the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. In all likelihood, the only hope of bridging the parties' irreconcilable respective positions is some combination of American guarantees, especially regarding Israeli security and defense capabilities.
Israel already experienced Obama reneging on commitments made by the Bush administration regarding U.S. support for Israeli retention of major settlement blocs in "road map" peace process negotiations, as well as for scrapping the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. But as bad as not honoring the commitments of one's presidential predecessors may be for maintaining trust between countries, Obama's waffling over the red line he himself painted cuts to the core of whether he can relied upon to keep even his own commitments anywhere else. Would you buy a used peace plan from this man?
The president who cancelled America's manned space program has found a new vehicle for achieving weightlessness: American foreign policy commitments now based on airy pronouncements and evanescent promises.
At this point, in terms of U.S. credibility, it doesn't matter much whether Congress ultimately passes a resolution authorizing American force in Syria. And it doesn't matter much anymore whether Obama finally orders the firing of a handful of Tomahawk missiles at Syrian military targets, or whether Russia assumes control of Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles. Obama's zigzagging response to a direct challenge to his very own red line undermines the reliability of every other challenging commitment America has made. It is the dithering itself that causes the damage; and that damage has already been done.
Federal Court Rules ‘In God We Trust’ Will Remain on Coins and Currency
Lost in a busy news week dominated by Syria, Putin, Obama’s bungling, and the 9/11 anniversary was an important federal court ruling on September 10, resulting in a victory so that the motto “In God We Trust” can remain on all U.S. currency.
The Associated Press reported:
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking removal of the words “In God We Trust” from U.S. coins and currency. Atheist groups and individuals argued that the national motto conveys a religious message that violates separation of church and state and puts them in a position of spreading a religious message when they engage in commerce.
In dismissing the suit, U.S. District Judge Harold Baer, Jr., wrote that “the Supreme Court has repeatedly assumed the motto’s secular purpose and effect” and that federal appeals courts “have found no constitutional violation in the motto’s inclusion on currency.” He added that while the plaintiffs might feel offended, they suffered no “substantial burden.” One of the plaintiffs said they’ll appeal the judges ruling.The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) in response to the judge’s ruling released a statement titled “Victory: In God We Still Trust.” Within the statement was a quote from the amicus brief the ACLJ filed in support of the United States’ motion to have the case dismissed:
Moreover, the inscription of the national motto . . . on the nation’s currency does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The national motto simply echoes the principle found in the Declaration of Independence that our freedoms come from God and not the state.It is a wonderful moment when one is reminded that the unique concept upon which our nation was founded was, in fact, truly exceptional. (Especially since, thanks to Mr. Putin, the question over whether our nation is still exceptional has been up for discussion all week.)
But the atheists will persist in ignoring God’s role in our national creation and as the source of our freedoms. Also, as stated above, they will likely appeal the judges ruling.
Desiring more insight on this ruling, I turned to a friend of mine. Colby M. May is the senior counsel and director of the Washington office for the ACLJ. (This group has also taken the lead role in defending numerous Tea Party groups in the IRS abuse scandal. They are doing terrific work and always appreciate additional financial support.)
Here are two questions I posed to Colby along with his answers:
1. Do you believe that this ruling by Judge Baer will be the end of such attempts to strip the national motto from our currency?
The Supreme Court has repeatedly assumed the national motto was appropriate and its placement on the currency presented no Establishment Clause concern. Likewise, every U.S. court of appeals that has ruled on the issue, namely the Ninth, Fifth, Tenth, and D.C., has found no constitutional violation in the motto’s inclusion on currency. One would like to think that is the end of the matter, but when you are dealing with rabid atheists it appears likely that they will just keep on trying and wasting everyone’s time and resources.
2. Could the plaintiffs try to find another judge or different district that may rule in their favor?On behalf of PJ Media, I would like to thank Colby May for his expertise on this matter.
Yes. There are eleven appeals court circuits in the U.S. court system, and each circuit has several districts. As I mentioned, every circuit that has ruled on the national motto, a total of four, has upheld it against Establishment Clause claims. The Rosslyn Newdow, et al., case was in the Southern District of New York, which could be appealed to the Second Circuit. If that happens, the overwhelming odds are that it would agree with its four sister circuits and deny the challenge. That would then leave six more circuits, so I suspect this will keep kicking around for a few more years.
Furthermore, if you are interested in knowing when and why the motto ”In God We Trust” first appeared on our coins, it was due to increased religious sentiment during the Civil War. However, the motto has only been printed on our paper money since 1957. Read more about this fascinating history at Treasury.gov.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/09/13/federal-court-rules-in-god-we-trust-will-remain-on-coins-and-currency/?singlepage=true
Thinking about Rights and Claims
Most
of my social acquaintance are hard left-wingers. It is my lot to listen
to them expound about rights. "We have the right to tax the rich... to
reproductive rights... the Jews have no right to Israel." If I were to
dispute these assertions on a political or historical basis I would be
treated to withering condescension. But most of my friends fancy
themselves thinkers, and they will listen to philosophical notions. So I
challenge their political beliefs obliquely, through a model about the
difference between rights of human identity, which are directly given by
God, and claims to tangible possessions, which are manmade
contrivances.
Unalienable human rights are based on ineffable experience that our Creator values our life and therefore we need to value it too. The rights associated with being human are eternal and imperishable, truth beyond imagination. People try to capture these rights with words like the right to life, to liberty, freedom, to find meaning, to pursue happiness, to express individuality. And all are true. I prefer the term "self-realization," the process of uncovering and living in the truth within. The "pursuit of happiness" sounds a bit like chasing something. (Psychologists favor the term self-actualization, but "actualization" suggests the need for activity, and human activity is subject to inequality.) But whatever words one prefers, God-given rights are the only manifestation of perfect equality in a world of perfectly unequal forms. They can't be recorded in a ledger or held to any measure. Accepting our rights is an aspect of faith in God.
The unique quality of God-given rights is, "I can only use mine and you can only use yours." I can't use your right to life and you can't do anything with mine. Anyone who tries to diminish immutable rights dehumanizes themselves in an effort to obtain something they cannot use.
On the other hand, no one has an unalienable right to anything in the world. All possessions of this world -- money, land, marriage rights, even the means of subsistence -- are based upon claims. Hungry people have no right to steal food, or sick people to steal medicine, though a righteous society is lenient towards them. And no group has a right to any territory.
People believe they have a right to things they can only claim because the concept "rights" is overused in the same way the concept "love" is overused. Just as the predator "loves" its prey, people feel a right to the things they intensely want, have worked for, paid for, been given, or even stolen. But no such unalienable right exists. One way to distinguish between rights and claims is the psychological dimension of internality vs. externality. Rights are internal identification with God; claims are staked and maintained for control of the external conditions of life. Insight, inspiration, and illumination accompany the expression of God-given rights. The wordless rights inherent in human identity are a standing challenge to the nattering claims of "me" and "mine."
Claims are based on beliefs about ownership, arising from agreements and contracts, prior possession, tradition, custom, religion, or law. But there is a little spot on every claimed possession. People don't look for it because it complicates the "mineness" of the possession. All claims need a spot where a mental string is attached. And if you follow along that string -- it may be short or long -- the string always ends in a man with a weapon. Without enforcement, a claim to possessions is worthless and creates chaos. This is the part that my left-wing friends will not accept. They want to believe that claims are secured by law itself, or upheld by the relationship between the parties to the claim, anything but the reality, which is that somewhere, someone must be prepared to enforce the claim, or it is worthless. (I suspect the reason they refuse to face this plight of the human condition is because they would never want to be that person and take those risks, but I keep that to myself.) In fact, there is no possession so small, so full-price paid, so hard-fought, that it doesn't need enforcement of ownership.
Claims can be strong or weak, stable or unstable. Strong claims have long held, widely accepted bases. And brave men with powerful weapons make for stable claims. Nobody challenges my claim to the land I "own" in South Carolina (and not just because of the mosquitoes). It is a strong claim because of the sacrifices of the guardians of American land. The descendants of the Pee Dee and Waccamaw Indians could also make a claim. But according to the local historical society, by 1755 they were being killed off by the Cherokee and Natchez Indians. As a direct descendant of Joseph Loomis and Mary White, who claimed land in Connecticut in 1639, I could make a claim to the house they built. It is the oldest standing homestead in the United States. But it is a very weak claim and I have no army.
Conflicts tend to rise from the imbalances of a strong claim with weak enforcement, or a weak claim with strong enforcement. Two examples are the claims of Americans to keep the money they earn for themselves, and the claim of the Jews to live in Israel. The former is a strongly-based claim because money earned through work is subject to powerful, ancient beliefs about ownership. Work feels like a God-given right because it is the dynamic of self-actualization, but keeping one's wages is still only a dearly held claim. And an unstable one because an armed government can raise taxes whenever it wants. The case of the Jews and Israel is extraordinary. The Jews have the strongest continuously asserted religious territorial claim in history, but through the millennia their countless supplications to God were not backed up with military force. Now that they are finally willing to stabilize their claim, it is proving difficult.
Getting back to my left-wing friends, they are following in an atheist tradition founded by Karl Marx and fulfilled in the presidency of Barack Obama. In this tradition, God-given rights are at worst a hoax and at best, irrelevant, and politics are only about competing materialist claims. One final notion. The reason our friends on the left act as if they are above the law is that for them, claim-based politics are above everything. With God-given rights off the table, and especially having claimed the "right" to take innocent human life, the dogma of socially engineered equality are the new religious fanaticism and constitute, for them, the highest power on earth.
Unalienable human rights are based on ineffable experience that our Creator values our life and therefore we need to value it too. The rights associated with being human are eternal and imperishable, truth beyond imagination. People try to capture these rights with words like the right to life, to liberty, freedom, to find meaning, to pursue happiness, to express individuality. And all are true. I prefer the term "self-realization," the process of uncovering and living in the truth within. The "pursuit of happiness" sounds a bit like chasing something. (Psychologists favor the term self-actualization, but "actualization" suggests the need for activity, and human activity is subject to inequality.) But whatever words one prefers, God-given rights are the only manifestation of perfect equality in a world of perfectly unequal forms. They can't be recorded in a ledger or held to any measure. Accepting our rights is an aspect of faith in God.
The unique quality of God-given rights is, "I can only use mine and you can only use yours." I can't use your right to life and you can't do anything with mine. Anyone who tries to diminish immutable rights dehumanizes themselves in an effort to obtain something they cannot use.
On the other hand, no one has an unalienable right to anything in the world. All possessions of this world -- money, land, marriage rights, even the means of subsistence -- are based upon claims. Hungry people have no right to steal food, or sick people to steal medicine, though a righteous society is lenient towards them. And no group has a right to any territory.
People believe they have a right to things they can only claim because the concept "rights" is overused in the same way the concept "love" is overused. Just as the predator "loves" its prey, people feel a right to the things they intensely want, have worked for, paid for, been given, or even stolen. But no such unalienable right exists. One way to distinguish between rights and claims is the psychological dimension of internality vs. externality. Rights are internal identification with God; claims are staked and maintained for control of the external conditions of life. Insight, inspiration, and illumination accompany the expression of God-given rights. The wordless rights inherent in human identity are a standing challenge to the nattering claims of "me" and "mine."
Claims are based on beliefs about ownership, arising from agreements and contracts, prior possession, tradition, custom, religion, or law. But there is a little spot on every claimed possession. People don't look for it because it complicates the "mineness" of the possession. All claims need a spot where a mental string is attached. And if you follow along that string -- it may be short or long -- the string always ends in a man with a weapon. Without enforcement, a claim to possessions is worthless and creates chaos. This is the part that my left-wing friends will not accept. They want to believe that claims are secured by law itself, or upheld by the relationship between the parties to the claim, anything but the reality, which is that somewhere, someone must be prepared to enforce the claim, or it is worthless. (I suspect the reason they refuse to face this plight of the human condition is because they would never want to be that person and take those risks, but I keep that to myself.) In fact, there is no possession so small, so full-price paid, so hard-fought, that it doesn't need enforcement of ownership.
Claims can be strong or weak, stable or unstable. Strong claims have long held, widely accepted bases. And brave men with powerful weapons make for stable claims. Nobody challenges my claim to the land I "own" in South Carolina (and not just because of the mosquitoes). It is a strong claim because of the sacrifices of the guardians of American land. The descendants of the Pee Dee and Waccamaw Indians could also make a claim. But according to the local historical society, by 1755 they were being killed off by the Cherokee and Natchez Indians. As a direct descendant of Joseph Loomis and Mary White, who claimed land in Connecticut in 1639, I could make a claim to the house they built. It is the oldest standing homestead in the United States. But it is a very weak claim and I have no army.
Conflicts tend to rise from the imbalances of a strong claim with weak enforcement, or a weak claim with strong enforcement. Two examples are the claims of Americans to keep the money they earn for themselves, and the claim of the Jews to live in Israel. The former is a strongly-based claim because money earned through work is subject to powerful, ancient beliefs about ownership. Work feels like a God-given right because it is the dynamic of self-actualization, but keeping one's wages is still only a dearly held claim. And an unstable one because an armed government can raise taxes whenever it wants. The case of the Jews and Israel is extraordinary. The Jews have the strongest continuously asserted religious territorial claim in history, but through the millennia their countless supplications to God were not backed up with military force. Now that they are finally willing to stabilize their claim, it is proving difficult.
Getting back to my left-wing friends, they are following in an atheist tradition founded by Karl Marx and fulfilled in the presidency of Barack Obama. In this tradition, God-given rights are at worst a hoax and at best, irrelevant, and politics are only about competing materialist claims. One final notion. The reason our friends on the left act as if they are above the law is that for them, claim-based politics are above everything. With God-given rights off the table, and especially having claimed the "right" to take innocent human life, the dogma of socially engineered equality are the new religious fanaticism and constitute, for them, the highest power on earth.
Hillary! Because What Difference Does it Make?
Watching
Hillary get a Liberty Medal on September 10, the day before the
anniversary of the attack on the United States soil and the more recent
murder of our ambassador and others in Benghazi, I think it's time to
review the record of a woman whose life is marked by deceit and
professional failure and ask about the sanity and judgment of her ardent
supporters.
Hillary came to public attention with her graduation speech at Wellesley College.
She was chosen for this honor not because of grades or character or service to that community but because her influential roommate threatened a strike if she were not allowed to speak. Once the school caved to this demand, Hillary -- who just two years earlier supported Senator Edward Brooke, the first black American to be elected to the Senate -- hurled a vicious attack on him.. The charges were hurtful to him and without substance. As Christopher Andersen recounts:
From Wellesley she went to Yale law school after which she moved to Washington, D.C. to take a job with the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate. She was fired from her job and from that point on distinguished herself as a public master of mendacity.
Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of the 27-year-old, fired her, and has explained why:
At about the same time, Hillary failed the District of Columbia bar exam, hardly one of the more difficult bar exams in the country. What difference does it make? I realize that many voters have uncritically adopted Bill Clinton's description of her as "the smartest woman in the world", but except at deceit, self-promotion, and self-enrichment she is a repeat, proven failure whenever tested.
In 1978 she turned a $1,000 cattle commodity trading account into $6,300 overnight and within 10 months into a $100,000 profit. While she first lied and claimed she learned how to make this incredible investment profit in the riskiest of endeavors by educating herself on commodity futures, in fact she was the beneficiary of preferred treatment by an Arkansan when her husband was Arkansas attorney general and slated to become that state's governor, when in other words Bill was a person in a position to provide favors in return.
The odds of this happening except by design (and preferential treatment ) were calculated at one in 31 trillion. The IRS was somewhat less impressed by the failure to account for income and pay taxes on it, and she was forced to pony up. There was no investigation that time.
What difference does it make? If you think it's important to have in positions in power someone who can lie without missing a beat, no matter how implausibly, she proved then and a number of times afterward she can do it.
Not all her lies were for herself alone. She regularly covered up her husband's misogynistic attacks on women, apparently accepted without protest his nuts and sluts defenses, and no one did a better job than she when pretty in pastel green and with a nice girlish headband she stood by her man while incongruously insisting she was no Tammy Wynette.
What difference does it make? She made a mockery of the feminist and Democratic claims that they were going to bat for women, working to make sure they had equal and fair treatment. The feminist movement sacrificed its moral sway on these two who would have pulled off the years-long deceit but for a providently saved little blue dress.
Hillary's corruption and preposterous lies continued into the White House. Special prosecutors investigating an apparently corrupt loan and land development deal had conducted subpoena searches for Hillary's law billing records which she claimed had gone missing.
At the time David Maraniss and Susan Schmidt wrote a detailed account of the controversy and had this to say about the missing/late found records and Hillary's treatment of them
At the same time she barreled through that loser her husband drafted her to head a Task Force to draft new health legislation, Her clumsy handling of the Task Force certainly added to the opposition to this wonk wet dream and by 1994 it was dead. What difference does it make? Yet again we see that she trusts few people, listens to fewer, has a blinkered , highly-exaggerated view of her abilities to formulate or execute legislation.
The day after she was awarded the Liberty Medal, the Washington Post broke yet another Hillary-linked scandal.
A D.C. businessman under investigation for having financed the campaign of the mayor and others, was found to have contributed over $600,000 to Hillary Clinton's get-out-the-vote campaign in 2008. His contribution was not disclosed by Hillary's campaign or by Thompson in violation of the Federal campaign laws. The person paid by Thompson to do this work also failed to file corporate income tax which would have revealed the payments. That man (Mr. White) has admitted that he coordinated his efforts with the Clinton campaign. His contact there seems to have been former Rainbow PUSH coalition organizer Minyon Moore, Clinton's director of political affairs in the White House and a senior adviser to Hillary's 2008 campaign.
What difference does it make?
As Secretary of State, Hillary proved even a bigger disaster to the country.
She, who had failed to provide the begged-for security to our ambassador and officials in Benghazi and who seems to have done nothing but participate in the bald-faced lies about the murderers and their motive was, in fact, the author of the Red Line dare that has plunged Obama into a Syrian disaster.
Hillary came to public attention with her graduation speech at Wellesley College.
She was chosen for this honor not because of grades or character or service to that community but because her influential roommate threatened a strike if she were not allowed to speak. Once the school caved to this demand, Hillary -- who just two years earlier supported Senator Edward Brooke, the first black American to be elected to the Senate -- hurled a vicious attack on him.. The charges were hurtful to him and without substance. As Christopher Andersen recounts:
Hillary offered nothing more than the muddled, sophomoric peace-and-love dogma that was so prevalent on campuses at the time. And, predictably, when it was over, Hillary's mesmerized classmates leaped up to their feet and cheered.What difference does it make? Doesn't this reflect on the inconstancy of her political views and loyalties, her willingness to demagogue and slander and to use muscle to promote herself? What does it say about her empathy for Black community whom she professes to support?
From Wellesley she went to Yale law school after which she moved to Washington, D.C. to take a job with the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate. She was fired from her job and from that point on distinguished herself as a public master of mendacity.
Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of the 27-year-old, fired her, and has explained why:
"Because she was a liar," Zeifman said in an interview last week. "She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality."What difference does it make? It should seem obvious that she does not feel constrained to follow ethical or legal constraints, and therefore presents a danger whenever she finds herself in a position to exercise power.
At about the same time, Hillary failed the District of Columbia bar exam, hardly one of the more difficult bar exams in the country. What difference does it make? I realize that many voters have uncritically adopted Bill Clinton's description of her as "the smartest woman in the world", but except at deceit, self-promotion, and self-enrichment she is a repeat, proven failure whenever tested.
In 1978 she turned a $1,000 cattle commodity trading account into $6,300 overnight and within 10 months into a $100,000 profit. While she first lied and claimed she learned how to make this incredible investment profit in the riskiest of endeavors by educating herself on commodity futures, in fact she was the beneficiary of preferred treatment by an Arkansan when her husband was Arkansas attorney general and slated to become that state's governor, when in other words Bill was a person in a position to provide favors in return.
The odds of this happening except by design (and preferential treatment ) were calculated at one in 31 trillion. The IRS was somewhat less impressed by the failure to account for income and pay taxes on it, and she was forced to pony up. There was no investigation that time.
What difference does it make? If you think it's important to have in positions in power someone who can lie without missing a beat, no matter how implausibly, she proved then and a number of times afterward she can do it.
Not all her lies were for herself alone. She regularly covered up her husband's misogynistic attacks on women, apparently accepted without protest his nuts and sluts defenses, and no one did a better job than she when pretty in pastel green and with a nice girlish headband she stood by her man while incongruously insisting she was no Tammy Wynette.
What difference does it make? She made a mockery of the feminist and Democratic claims that they were going to bat for women, working to make sure they had equal and fair treatment. The feminist movement sacrificed its moral sway on these two who would have pulled off the years-long deceit but for a providently saved little blue dress.
Hillary's corruption and preposterous lies continued into the White House. Special prosecutors investigating an apparently corrupt loan and land development deal had conducted subpoena searches for Hillary's law billing records which she claimed had gone missing.
...they were suddenly turned over to the prosecutors by a White House aide, Carolyn Huber. Mrs. Huber said she had found them on a table in a room in the White House living quarters last August and put them in a box, then had realized this month that they were the records that had been subpoenaed.Hillary became the first First Lady to have to testify to a federal grand jury. In the end she wasn't indicted in the Whitewater scandal, in part quite obviously because of the unlikelihood that an overwhelmingly Democratic jury in the District of Columbia would ever convict her. What difference does it make? Someone who so obviously lied to escape criminal jeopardy would drive confidence in the fairness and honesty even lower than Obama has and a society in which the leaders are held in such disregard is a vastly weaker one in every respect.
At the time David Maraniss and Susan Schmidt wrote a detailed account of the controversy and had this to say about the missing/late found records and Hillary's treatment of them
How a public figure reacts to a controversy can be as important as what happened in the first place.In 1993 she made serious but untrue allegations about pharmaceutical companies gouging providers on children's' vaccines.
[snip]
From the beginning of the Whitewater controversy, Hillary Clinton has maintained a public posture seemingly at odds with her actions. She was reluctant to release records during the 1992 campaign. She fought David Gergen's recommendation to turn over all the records in 1993. She led White House opposition to the appointment of a special counsel in early 1994.
There appears to be a four-year pattern of Hillary Clinton avoiding full disclosure, occasionally forgetting places and events that might embarrass her, and revising her story as documents emerge and the knowledge of her questioners deepens. This article examined only one of several areas where her answers could be analyzed. Similar studies could be done in other areas, including the original Whitewater investment itself and the extent to which the Clintons were equal yet passive partners with the McDougals, as they have maintained.
Based on Hillary Clinton's proclamation of a nonexistent crisis, Congress had been stampeded into passing unnecessary legislation. And even though the worst features of the administration plan had been dropped, the country was still stuck with a program that was more costly, cumbersome and wasteful than the one it replaced. What's more, the alarming statistics Hillary had cited on the rise in prices of prescription drugs were another myth. It turned out that the Labor Department statisticians had gotten the numbers wrong.What difference does it make? Odd that a program that made vaccinations for children more costly and difficult to obtain benefitted Hillary (and Bill) who had demagogued through this bill using false statistics.
This news came too late for investors. The threat of price controls had caused the blue chip pharmaceutical stocks to decline as much as 40 percent, wiping out over $1 billion worth of market capitalization. Some smaller biotech companies were put out of business permanently.
Only short sellers profited, among them a private hedge fund called ValuePartners I, run by Smith Capital Management of Little Rock, Arkansas. Hillary Clinton held an $87,000 stake in Value Partners I, which also owned a block of stock in United Healthcare, an HMO that stood to benefit under the Clinton reform plan. Lois Quam, a United Healthcare vice president, was a member of the task force.
Unlike the Carters, Bushes and Reagans, the Clintons failed to put their assets into a blind trust when they moved into the White House. Hillary resisted the notion that her financial affairs were anybody's business but her own, and she reasoned that since she was not a government employee and the money was in her name, she didn't have to resort to a trust.
At the same time she barreled through that loser her husband drafted her to head a Task Force to draft new health legislation, Her clumsy handling of the Task Force certainly added to the opposition to this wonk wet dream and by 1994 it was dead. What difference does it make? Yet again we see that she trusts few people, listens to fewer, has a blinkered , highly-exaggerated view of her abilities to formulate or execute legislation.
The day after she was awarded the Liberty Medal, the Washington Post broke yet another Hillary-linked scandal.
A D.C. businessman under investigation for having financed the campaign of the mayor and others, was found to have contributed over $600,000 to Hillary Clinton's get-out-the-vote campaign in 2008. His contribution was not disclosed by Hillary's campaign or by Thompson in violation of the Federal campaign laws. The person paid by Thompson to do this work also failed to file corporate income tax which would have revealed the payments. That man (Mr. White) has admitted that he coordinated his efforts with the Clinton campaign. His contact there seems to have been former Rainbow PUSH coalition organizer Minyon Moore, Clinton's director of political affairs in the White House and a senior adviser to Hillary's 2008 campaign.
What difference does it make?
Mrs.
Moore, for her part, provided Mr. White with "confidential internal
information" about the campaign's itinerary, and arranged for a Clinton
campaign office to give campaign materials to his workers to hand out,
according to the documents. Mr. White is now cooperating with what the
U.S. attorney says is a "continuing investigation." That's an ugly
prospect for Hillary 2016.
The
shady money funneling is bad enough, but it takes on an extra dimension
because Mr. Thompson's accounting firm was a significant government
contractor, providing services inter alia to a number of
federal agencies, departments, and the Congressional Black Caucus and
many big-name Democrats are the recipients of even his above-board
contributions.As Secretary of State, Hillary proved even a bigger disaster to the country.
She, who had failed to provide the begged-for security to our ambassador and officials in Benghazi and who seems to have done nothing but participate in the bald-faced lies about the murderers and their motive was, in fact, the author of the Red Line dare that has plunged Obama into a Syrian disaster.
The red line was not a gaffe it was the considered policy of the United States. This, if anything, makes the whole incident more egregious as the nation was consciously committed to acting militarily (see Clinton's statement about "contingencies" and "response") in case of chemical weapons use in Syria and yet it is obvious no planning was ever accomplished in anticipation of such an event. Yet another blunder by the administration comes home to roost.Rick Ballard sums up her foreign policy and how it proved an utter catastrophe:
The NYT is drawing attention away from [Hillary] by focusing on [Obama]. Arab Spring belongs to [her]. It was supposed to be a demonstration of her mastery of foreign policy and her "team" of Abedin, Powers and Rice were supposed to demonstrate how marvelous women were in applying "soft" power to effect "change". It began to go just a little off track when [Gaddafi's] intransigence in resisting the Franco/US/Brit coup led to the delivery of a few thousand tons of kinetic humanitarian aid to alter the hearts and minds of Libyans who had not yet demonstrated sufficient affection for the bright future designed for them in DC. It continued to drift further from Clinton's objective when the Egyptian generals determined [Hillary/Obama] had no intention of fulfilling the promises which had induced the generals to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to play FaceBook revolutionaries, so the generals took the KSA/Gazprom hard cash offer and squashed Huma's buddies like bugs.What difference does it make? Do we really want to follow the community organizer who failed to get the asbestos out of Altgeld Gardens with the woman who has lied, cheated, instigated wrongheaded legislation, botched our foreign policy and seriously diminished our role on the international stage? It's fine with the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, who saw Hillary get the Liberty Medal and is as agog at the possibility as the jejune Wellesley grads were delighted when Hillary shocked the staid graduation ceremony by leveling her unwarranted attack on Senator Brook:
Syria is just the last gasp of the Clinton Arab Spring idiocy and [Obama's] promise of a gentle tap with just a few hardly noticeable Tomahawks was just a continuation of the soft power idiocy promulgated by Clinton and her shrews. The same crew are wholly responsible for the Benghazi fiasco where Clinton's denial of funding for adequate security led to [Gaddafi's] arms stockpiles drifting into unkind and uncaring hands.
The men who gathered here 226 years ago to draft a new national charter never imagined a woman as president. Indeed, as Clinton noted, it took a constitutional amendment more than a century later to extend to women the right to vote, and "we are still on our way to that more perfect union."
On a steamy September night, it was not hard to imagine what progress she had in mind.
Rise of the Thought Police: Bullying Your Children into Forsaking Their Values
Five-year-old Suzie heads off to kindergarten in rural Minnesota. She
settles into her class routine full of activity, discovery, and
friendship.Proposed “anti-bullying” legislation creates a powerful new bureaucracy to police students' values and remediate politically incorrect beliefs.
Then the day takes a turn. As part of newly mandated diversity training, Suzie’s teacher brings out Heather Has Two Mommies for some light mid-morning reading. A typically precocious kindergartener, Suzie pipes up during the story to correct the teacher’s telling. “God gave us a mommy and a daddy,” she exclaims.
Though no student takes exception to Suzie’s remark, the teacher cringes and becomes keenly aware of her state-mandated role to report any incident which could be construed as bullying. So Suzie gets pulled out of class and taken to the principal’s office, where she’s met by a counselor.
There begins a process of formative intervention and remedial discipline. More than correction for objectively inappropriate behavior, this intervention focuses on changing who Suzie is, on correcting her values to ensure that she accepts each of her classmates and values their diverse backgrounds.
Confused, disturbed, and teary-eyed, Suzie comes away from the experience convinced she has done something wrong. Worse, she feels the very sense of rejection which her accusers claim to deplore. She learns her lesson, that the values taught at home are not welcome in school. A bit of her innocence dies. She grows more guarded, less expressive, and unfairly subdued.
Such a tale may be among the tamest of experiences awaiting children in Minnesota, if a task force of social engineers commissioned by Governor Mark Dayton succeeds in lobbying for legislation which has already been approved by the state House. House File 826, misleadingly titled the Safe and Supportive Schools Act, serves as a trial balloon modeling what its supporters would like to implement nationally – a radical transformation of schools from institutions of academic achievement into political reeducation camps which correct Orwellian Wrong Think.
Sold colloquially as an “anti-bullying bill,” the proposed legislation actually institutionalizes bullying, targeting political minorities with suppressive badgering. The bill would repeal existing anti-bullying statutes which have proven effective. It would create an invasive, overbearing, and unfunded new state bureaucracy to impose politically correct values upon students, teachers, parents, staff, and anyone serving in or around the educational system. It would affect both public and private schools. In a state which already has one of the worst achievement gaps between white and black students in the nation, the bill would burden struggling districts with new mandates diverting precious resources away from academics. Teachers and staff will become thought police and value mediators, shifting their disciplinary focus from correcting inappropriate behavior to remediating students’ belief systems. As with any state bureaucracy, reams of new data will be generated and follow students throughout their academic career, if not the rest of their lives.
When considering whether new legislation is required to prevent bullying in schools, one may be inclined to ask: what kind of bullying is currently acceptable? Assault remains a crime. Schools enforce rules against inappropriate conduct. So what else needs to be done?
Page 18 of the task force report lets us know:
Effective strategies will promote values, attitudes, and behaviors that acknowledge the cultural diversity of students; optimize relevance to students from multiple cultures in the school community; understand the nature of human sexuality; strengthen students’ skills necessary to engage in healthy interactions; and build on the varied cultural resources of families and communities.The articulated purpose of the executive order instituting the Prevention of School Bullying Task Force was to “ensure that all students in Minnesota schools are provided with a safe and welcoming environment wherein each student is accepted and valued in order to maximize each student’s learning potential.” From this we learn all we need to know.
To accept is to choose. To value is to judge. These acts occur inside an individual’s heart and mind. As warm and fuzzy as unconditional acceptance may seem, such a goal ignores objective reality. The mind cannot be compelled to consent, only badgered into acquiescence. What Governor Dayton thus proposes is the police of thought, the subjugation of judgment, and an imposition of official state attitudes. By definition, the promotion of certain values and attitudes occurs at the expense of others.
What does a state-defined “nature of human sexuality” look like? Does it match what you teach at home? Does it match what is taught in your house of worship? Whose job is it to teach children the nature of human sexuality anyway? Certainly, teachers may have a role. But shouldn’t parents determine what that role is?
While the task force report and the bill informed by it pay lip service to protecting all children, a review of the actors involved in crafting these documents (p. 31), along with a close examination of the text, reveals that the effort focuses specifically upon “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression.”
This raises vital questions. Does a transgender student have a greater right of expression than his or her sexually unambiguous peer? What of religious orientation? What of Christian identity or expression? Are they to be protected with as much vigor under this new law, or targeted for remediation?
From page 20 of the report detailing “Formative Interventions and Discipline”:
The goals of responding to bullying behavior are to stop the aggressive behavior, support the students who have been harmed, and teach that bullying is harmful and not allowed, in order to help all involved young people learn—and change—from the experience. [Emphasis added.]
The best way to prevent bullying behaviors is through the implementation of a whole school climate program. Because bullying is a relationship problem that requires relationship solutions (Pepler & Craig, 2006), responses to bullying should promote healthy relationships.
Formative discipline is defined as activities that not only provide a clear message that bullying is unacceptable, but also develops respect and empathy for others, helps students make amends and associates power with kindness and pro-social activities (PREVNet, 2011).
When the school climate is founded on restorative principles rather than solely punitive policies, misbehavior is understood as a violation of relationships, not rules; thus repair of relationships and support (rather than isolation through suspension or expulsion) of the wrongdoer is likely to reduce bullying (Smith, 2008).Is repairing relationships really what we need teachers and administrative staff focused on? What if your student does not desire a relationship with his classmate? What’s wrong with limiting interaction to academics? What’s wrong with letting student’s retain their own judgments regarding the value of particular relationships? Are we forcing everyone to be friends now?
Victim.
The definition of harassment expands to include any act judged “unwelcome if the student or employee did not request or invite it and considered the conduct to be undesirable or offensive.” So simply offending someone is harassment now. What if the “harasser” becomes offended by the charge of harassment? Does the universe implode?
All of this proceeds from Governor Dayton’s ludicrous notion that people have a “right” to be “accepted” and “valued.” That idea ignores the objective definition of each word. We all have the same rights as our neighbors, to proceed unharmed and exercise our freedom of conscience without fear of tyrannical reprisal. Respecting those rights means tolerating the unique value judgments of each individual, including whether they choose to accept you, condemn you, or ignore you. To mandate unconditional acceptance is to oppress individual judgment, to police thought, and to remove consent from relationships. The serious proposal of such a course by those wielding political power ought to garner our rapt attention.
A real solution to bullying requires identification of the real problem. While Governor Dayton’s task force seeks to conflate bullying with offending someone’s delicate sensibilities, actual bullying involves the initiation of force to coerce, intimidate, steal, or otherwise harm. Real bullying cannot be genuinely addressed by a brazen new bureaucracy imposing state-mandated values through its own coercion and intimidation. Instead, we must act to protect individual rights by removing force from human relationships.
In a very direct way, the nature of public education fosters bullying. Consider that, at its core, public education is coercion. Taxpayers fund it under the force of law. Students attend it under the force of law. Teachers adhere to its mandates under the force of law. No one in the entire system has the ability to act upon their own judgment in pursuit of their own values. Forcing people of differing beliefs, priorities, and objectives into close proximity with a mandated agenda will inevitably foster conflict.
For those supporting Governor Dayton’s heavy-handed approach, the downside would be tolerating people with whom they disagree. The idea of free association, of choosing with whom you consent to enter into relationship, fundamentally offends them.
Consider the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the variety of approaches taken by its different activists. In his famous “Dream” speech fifty years past, Martin Luther King outlined an inspiring vision of a world where individuals would be judged by the content of their character. Were modern pretenders to his legacy honest in their discourse, they would admit to deploring that vision. After all, to judge someone by the content of their character requires an application of chosen values toward an exclusionary and discriminating conclusion. I accept you and not him. I value her and not you. I judge this to be appropriate and not that. Such differentiation, such choice, defies the “progressive” goal of unconditional value.
Since equal value of all people, things, and ideas defies objective reality, the closest to it that social engineers can get is employing force to grant advantage to the “disadvantaged” and disadvantage to the “advantaged.” So the white male suburbanite who never asked anyone to take a back seat must yield his place in line to a black lesbian woman who has never been truly oppressed. Rather than equality under the law, the dominant trend in civil rights became affirmative action.
Citizens concerned with liberty and the protection of individual rights must rise in nationwide opposition to this effort by Governor Dayton and his task force of bullies. Over the years, many encroachments upon freedom of conscience have gone without effective challenge. Obamacare became the law of the land, upheld by the Supreme Court, and bolstered by last year’s election results. A myriad of scandals, from the IRS targeting of groups on the Right to NSA spying on American citizens, has amounted to little more than a pesky annoyance for the administration. In Minnesota, the Democrats own state government and throttle production and choice without check. It can be easy under such circumstances to become cynical and complacent. However, inaction at this moment will invite the nationwide transformation of schools into politically correct remediation centers. As bad as things have become, they can and will get worse unless you act.
If you live in Minnesota, resistance begins with a signature. Sign the petition at the Minnesota Child Protection League demanding legislators vote no on this rights-violating bill. For everyone else, dig into the task force report and support choice through whatever channels are available to you.
Hopefully, among opposition to this bill will emerge a credible effort to implement school choice as a solution to both real bullying and Minnesota’s shameful achievement gap. While Governor Dayton and his task force wring hands over “emotional health,” class after non-graduating class enters adulthood without the skills or job opportunities to succeed. Whatever emotional health is, surely it improves when exposed to genuine hope. Empowering parents to send their students to the institution which best serves them will help turn their American dream into reality.
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/09/09/rise-of-the-thought-police-bullying-your-children-into-forsaking-their-values/?singlepage=true
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