"Al Gore Told Me to Skin You Alive!"
Obama Declares Victory: War Continues
Judeo-Christian...Islamic Country?
As recently as the early 1990's, it was widely understood that the United States was a Christian nation, which is to say one founded primarily by Christians and imbued with a Christian value system.
The term Judeo-Christian was used in an effort to clarify the fact that the Founders did not explicitly require church membership or an official national church (as is found in England, Scotland, Sweden, etc.) merely that one subscribe to certain basic moral principles found in both the Old Testament and the New.
With the rise of homosexual activists, pagan earth worshipers, Muslims and strident atheists it became "politically incorrect" to acknowledge these historical truths.
Obama himself has made the claim that we are not a Christian nation. (He said this, no surprise, before a muslim audience.)
The fundamental key to understanding why Obama would be so respectful of non-national holidays such as "Ramadan" while he belittles Easter and Christmas is that his worldview seeks to incorporate a new paradigm -- that of a "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" nation.
Keep in mind that Islam teaches that Jews and Christians are "people of the Book" and warrant more attention than Buddhists (Tiger Woods?) and animists (who Muslims summarily slaughter in Obama's Family homeland of sub-Saharan Africa).
In keeping with the chronological appearance, people like Obama and his lackeys act from a subtext of Islamic superiority. For him, Islam supersedes Christianity. The Bible came before Mohammed, but it was "corrected" by Mohammed.
That is why Obama invites homosexuals to Easter to promote "family" easter egg hunts while denying entry to a single "gay" person at his taxpayer-funded White House Ramadan meal. Islam must be respected; Christians require "teachable moments"
Islamo-Obamism is acceptable to the Left because it bashes Christians and Orthodox Jews.
Obama's innovation is adding "Islam" to "Judeo-Christian." That is Obama's "change we can believe in." Or so he hopes.
The Mystery of Jennifer Aniston
The megaflops, costing millions of dollars, have continued unabated. She is box office poison. Love Happens, He's Just Not That Into You, The Break Up and Friends With Money all flopped at the box office. She appeared with boyfriend of the nanosecond Gerard Butler in the Bounty Hunter earlier this year, and the presence of Mr. Butler brought up the receipts from abysmal to acceptable.
Ms. Aniston has never had a starring role in any hit movie (Marley and Me starred a golden retriever with far more talent than Aniston).
She has milked her willingness to attach herself to any rising Hollywood leading man or celebrity (Pitt, John Mayer, Butler ad nauseam) who promptly drop the foul-mouthed, Streisand wannabe.
When will we enjoy an end to this waste of carbon, ink and paper?
Zinn: Communist Treason Taught at Taxpayer Expense
'A Peoples' History of the United States' portrays the history of the United States in classic Marxist terms. The book glorifies feminism and the 'class struggle', and vilifies the United States as a 'racist', 'imperialist', 'sexist' and 'oppressive' nation.
Even liberal commentators have admitted that the book is more propaganda than history. Matthew Yglesias, while saying that the book “provokes useful inquiry,” conceded that “that the People’s History is neither good history nor good politics, offering basically nothing in terms of ways to think about solutions to the problems of the world.” More worrisome, he notes that the book has been universally read and consumed by the liberal elites: “most of the best people seem to have read it at some point, and all that’s a pretty impressive achievement.” Scott Eric Kaufman, a fan of the book, reported that Zinn told him “My little book has served its purpose.”
A film called “The People Speak,” which was based on his book, was shown on the History Channel, and featured a panoply of mainstream actors and 'progressives'. Even liberal reviewers such as Tom Shales of the Washington Post found the film “heavy-handed and agitproppy” and “a shopping list of grievances through the years.”...the FBI described him in a breifing to the Secret Service as late as 1972 as “potentially dangerous” for a number of reasons including his involvement in groups “engaged in activities inimical to [the] U.S.”
Constitution Recieves another Blow in the Name of "Education" by Wes Riddle
Austin Congressman Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX District 25) recently sponsored an amendment to H.R. 1586 that is grossly unconstitutional, and his friend Rep. Chet Edwards (D-TX District 17) of Waco supported it enthusiastically. It just goes to show how any good cause these days, particularly if it is a winner politically, will trump adherence to the U.S. Constitution or the intent of the Founding Fathers. Doggett’s amendment essentially places an education spending mandate on the State of Texas alone of all the fifty states.
H.R. 1586 refers to The FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act. The bill like so many others is a veritable grab-bag of bailouts and legislation pertaining to unrelated topics such as education, Medicaid, and nutrition—not to mention a massive bailout for state governments. The total cost is $26 billion, which costs every American family approximately $126 per year. The bill also allocates $10 billion for jobs in education nation-wide, of which $831 million would go to Texas, in order to pay for 14,500 teacher jobs. The bill’s controversial amendment introduced by Rep. Doggett and voted for by Congressional Democrats including Edwards, requires Texas to maintain the same level of funding in education for the next three years.
Never mind the Governor has no such authority to guarantee or to direct the State Legislature to spend a certain amount of money, or to possibly bind future Legislatures. As U.S. Congressmen from Texas, Doggett and Edwards should know that. Beyond that, one would hope they appreciated the U.S. Constitution too and the fact that Court precedent precludes federal legislation from treating States unequally. The idea being that all States, old and new, do and should share an equality of constitutional right and power as a condition of belonging to the Union in the first place. States are equal in power, dignity and authority, each competent to exert that residuum of sovereignty not delegated to the United States by the Constitution itself. To maintain otherwise would be to say that the Union, through the power of Congress might come to be a union of States unequal in power, including States whose powers were restricted only by the Constitution and others whose powers had been further restricted by acts of Congress!
It is clear from the legislation that Texas has some Democrat congressmen, who are either unaware of constitutional limits to their authority, or else they are outright traitors to the State. Doggett’s Amendment would require the Governor to offer some sort of presumably written assurance to the feds to receive the funds earmarked for Texas. Even if that assurance amounts to a prediction and there are no claw-back or enforcement provisions in the legislation, the Governor does not work for or report to the Federal Government. Hence the language of the Amendment is an attempt to extort certain behavior quid quo pro for the funds, and it amounts at least to implicit infringement on State sovereignty.
Doggett sponsored his amendment essentially to pick a bone: he was unhappy that Governor Perry used part of the money Texas received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a. the federal stimulus package) to offset regularly scheduled spending. Hence Doggett is trying to ensure Texas uses federal money to supplement rather than supplant funds for education with money it receives. Clearly it is a continuation at federal level of partisan wrangling over Texas legislative priorities and Texas State budget. If taken on its face, the Amendment doesn’t even satisfy Federal legislative priorities or U.S. Congressional intent. The federal stimulus package was, well, for economic stimulus—not all about education. Likewise, this current polyglot bill is for stimulus too. Education spending clearly has merit, even in the area of stimulus, but there are many other things money can be spent on to foster recovery and economic growth: to put people back to work and take economic pressure off families; to keep students in school and to enable the workforce to pursue education and wellbeing.
Both Representatives Lloyd Doggett and Chet Edwards are myopic at best and, quite frankly, they lack a larger vision—conservative, progressive or otherwise. In hindsight, Doggett apparently begrudges the fact the Texas economy is doing so well, or that state government is in a far better position than virtually any other state. Now that Texas faces an $18 billion shortfall next year, he wants to limit flexibility and virtually assure that Texas follows the path of a California or New York to bankruptcy. Texans simply cannot know today whether or not they will be able to afford exactly the same percentage of the budget going towards public education. No one doubts the Governor’s commitment to education, but limiting his and the Legislature’s flexibility in bad economic times is particularly imprudent, even foolhardy. Not only that, the offset using federal dollars for “scheduled spending” actually includes things like textbooks and other costs which support education. Indeed, there really is no quantifiable harm for the offset using federal funds that Doggett complains about. Education is far more complex than that, and benefits do not accrue dollar for dollar.
Doggett’s approach would literally preclude the realization of cost savings ever (so much for improving efficiency or trying innovation to get a better return on investment, or better results in the classroom either). The Amendment is really a stunt designed to embarrass the Governor, given that economic imperatives are likely to drive him and the Legislature to make hard choices, in order to balance the budget next year. Elected in 1994, if Doggett doesn’t know this then he has been in Washington, D.C. too long, having forgotten that unlike the U.S. Congress, States are required to balance their budgets! In the bigger scheme of things, education is important but economic opportunity for high school and college graduates, as well as the solvency of state government is more important. Typically there is not a wide trade-off and certainly it isn’t zero-sum, but during the Great Recession and for the next couple of years it could be. Only Doggett and other liberal Democrats in Congress would attempt to play ostrich with the situation and put their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the reality of high unemployment, the slowness of the recovery, the uncertainty of business environment. For Chet Edwards’s part, he was first elected in 1990 and was considered for President Obama’s Vice-Presidential pick in 2008—largely for his adept record at looking and acting conservative while supporting liberal politics, such as the anti-Texan and unconstitutional Doggett Amendment to score points for supporting education while empowering the federal government even more.
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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary and is currently Chairman of the Central Texas Tea Party. Email Wes@WesRiddle.com or call (254)
Marriage:Obama Decides?
Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." (Hebrews 13:4)
Yes, but times have changed, we are told. The so-called "gay" lifestyle is now a normal option, they say, and even "same-sex" marriages are acceptable. Premarital sex, as well as adultery, are very common today, all over the world, often even impacting Christian homes and churches. Indeed, the world has changed!
The Greek word for "whoremongers," incidentally, includes anyone who practices or promotes illicit sex of any kind and the Bible says that "whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." However, God will forgive and purge away any of these sins when they are repudiated and Christ is accepted as Savior.
Public Universities: Proliferation of Leftist Dogma at Taxpayer Expense by Wes Riddle
The next sit-ins on campuses across the country really need to be staged by rightists. Of course, “right-wing” in the context of the modern public university could simply mean an individual who doesn’t entirely despise his parents or America. A “right-wing bigot” then is someone who doesn’t intuitively understand why universities should erase the names off of buildings, because those names belonged to people whose opinions and attitudesin their time do not conform to the in vogue truths of today. Rename them all Freak-side, just to be inclusive.
As one University of Texas professor and administrator informed the state legislature recently, even “The name ‘Western Civilizations and American [Traditions]’ sounds really right-wing.” So does ham and eggs; and red, white and blue. The administrator made no attempt to reconcile his assertion with the stated commitment of the university to “advance a free society” or prepare “educated, productive citizens” through academics that “enrich and expand the appreciation and preservation of our civilization.” As if we had a civilization—heck, who are you fooling? Imagine instruction that provides students with knowledge about the country in which they live! What will right-wing nutcase teabag rednecks think of next—Shakespeare?
We all know that words mean nothing anymore, not in the Constitution and certainly not in some university’s charter or propaganda to parents for “PR” purposes. Most public institutions of higher learning trace their heritage to land grant legislation in the 19th century and still rely on legislative funding to some degree. Beyond the taxpayer money, however, their link is severed between education and the health of American democracy. Their mission no longer has to be consistent with creating an informed citizenry. Just give them your money and shut up!
Regarding U.S. history, the past decade has featured aggressive schemes to “re-vision” U.S. political and diplomatic history around themes of race, class, and gender, the same pedagogy that already dominates contemporary humanities and social sciences departments. Increasingly, U.S. history is only taught through the prism of a race-class-gender trinity. Moreover, the arrogance of universities has reached such a level, that academic freedom now means freedom of the liberal majority in academe to evade all public criticism. Just leave them alone you stupid moron!
The dirty little secret on campus is that if you want to go somewhere and actually do something with that degree, particularly if you are post-graduate and aspire to a Ph.D., you had better tow the party line. Only if one does this, might one earn the coveted key to the kingdom and certain access to do damage to the other little minds out there. Students who do not agree with the liberal ideology of the Prof do not have an appropriate “disposition,” you see, to teach anyone else.
The university curriculum is thoroughly radicalized, and leftists control the academic departments of the major public universities throughout this nation. Universities no longer serve, as it were, the pursuit and transmission of knowledge but of leftist dogma. To reach into history—that poorly overlooked oblivion, today’s public universities smack of the kind of corporate corruption that Montesquieu described in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), in which those who govern renege on the fundamental principles of that system they were empowered to serve and protect.
The surest way to destroy a civilization is to erase its collective memory and reduce chronology to the present tense. After that, well, power brokers and puppeteers of the mind are free largely to mold it to any and everybody’s Progressive dream of Utopia. The process is just about complete at every level of education in these United States, including at the highest. Thanks to you and your hard-earned cash, and to a negligent inattention to where that money is going. Your mediocre representatives and outright corrupt lawmakers are bloated on the swill of debt liquidity. They have bought you public universities, anathema to learning and averse to the very future of your children and grandchildren. They shall have bankrupted their minds and pockets simultaneously, the better to lead the next docile generation to a slaughter. Taxpayers and concerned citizens, all—those who still hold the purse string and pull the lever to vote: it is time now again to sit in. It is time to listen and to tell a thing or two. The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, and a hard rain is going to fall.
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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary and is currently Chairman of the Central Texas Tea Party. Article is based loosely on a collection of remarks entitled, “The Obligations of Citizenship,” published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (6 Nov 2009). Email Wes@WesRiddle.com or call (254) 939-5597.
Why Are Illegal Aliens So Ungrateful?
"Sir, The behavior of those we call 'mexican' is tribal, and your extrapolations are correct-as they are driven by the ordinary rules of economics, where 'free' incurs no obligation from the receiver.
Most aliens from there ( mexico et al )-legal or illegal-will not freely interact or acknowledge our customary, hospitable gestures (employed even with a stranger ), unless they have been somewhat acculturated-or in the rare case where the alien is of a somewhat higher caste than ordinary. I count this as a defensive behavior, in the 'natural' state, where anyone encountered who is NOT of the tribe must be regarded as a threat. Cultural anthropology comes to mind, and simple survival."
Something to ponder as our elites continue to savage English speaking Arizonans and all Americans as "nativists" and "racists."
Is Mr. Saunders analysis correct?
