by Thomas Sowell
If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't believe in Constitutional government. And, without Constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a "crisis"-- which, as the president's chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to "go to waste" as an opportunity to expand the government's power.
That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to the particular issues.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money.
At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people." That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people-- indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others.
If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.
The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP's money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed "czars" controlling different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.
Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power-- versus the rule of law and the preservation of freedom-- are the "useful idiots" of our time. But useful to whom?
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Elections official hits TV to affirm no Hawaii birth (for Barack Obama)
BORN IN THE USA?
Tells network affiliate hospital certificate non-existent, cites racism for controversy
By Joe Kovacs
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
In direct contradiction of the White House storyline, the former Honolulu elections official who caused a national stir this month when he told WND Barack Obama was "definitely" not born in Hawaii, and that no long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate even exists for the president in the Aloha State is now reaffirming those claims to a network television affiliate.
Tim Adams, the former senior elections clerk for the city and county of Honolulu was interviewed by Gene Birk of ABC affiliate WBKO-TV in Bowling Green, Ky.
"As of the time I was in Hawaii working in the elections office," said Adams, "we had many people who were asking about the eligibility of Senator Obama to be president. I was told at the time there is no long-form birth record, which would have been the case if President Obama was born in [a] hospital in Honolulu. There is no such form in Hawaii."
The hottest book in America is the one that exposes the real Obama! Get your autographed copy only from WND!
As WND first reported June 10, Honolulu's current elections administrator, Glen Takahashi, confirmed that Tim Adams was indeed "senior elections clerk" in 2008, in charge of verifying voters' identity, especially those involving absentee ballots.
Adams, 45, also noted he's willing to testify about his claims in a court of law.
He continued in his TV interview: "[Obama] does have a [Certification] of Live Birth, which is given to children of families who are residents of Hawaii when children are born outside the state. So, I assert that he was born outside of Hawaii. Now, we can't tell you where he was born. Some of his family members said that he had been born while his mother was on a trip overseas.
Obama does have a [Certification] of Live Birth from the state of Hawaii, that he was born a U.S. citizen. And during the initial part of the campaign, when questions about his eligibility to be president came up – including Senator McCain because he was born in Panama – that both these men were vetted by the same process as any other presidential candidate. So, while we may not agree, some people say that because of Article 2 of the Constitution, President Obama was not eligible to be president. That's not a question that we can answer.
"The people who are in charge of saying who is eligible to run for president have already vouched that he was indeed an eligible candidate. If we disagree with that, we don't need to go after the man. We need to look at the process by which candidates are vetted for public office."
The interviewer, apparently looking to reaffirm what he was just told, asked Adams again, "So let me understand what you're saying. There is no long-form birth certificate, because he was not born on U.S. soil."
"Correct," responded Adams.
"But there is a Certification of Birth, which is what this is," said Birk, as he looked at a photocopy of Obama's purported short-form, computer-generated Certification of Live Birth, a document which does not specify the hospital where Obama might have been born nor any doctor's name or signature.
"A facsimile of it has been put online," said Adams.
Birk responded, "Yes, and in your opinion, this means regardless of where he was born, he was a U.S. citizen at birth."
"Yes," said Adams, reiterating his personal opinion that Obama is eligible to hold office and that the question would have been answered when the Democratic National Committee vetted him to run for public office prior to the 2008 election.
Adams' claims are starkly different from those of the White House.
"The noble truth is that the president was born in Hawaii, a state of the United States of America," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told WND.
Linda Lingle, the Republican governor of Hawaii, has also publicly voiced the alleged exact location of Obama's birth, saying "the president was, in fact, born at Kapi'olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii."
Since WND's original report, Adams has come under fire from some critics online who suggested Adams may hold an anti-black philosophy and that his assertions were possibly racially motivated.
Adams, though, said it's people still asking Obama to prove his eligibility who tend to have race-based sentiments against the commander in chief.
Tim Adams, the former senior elections clerk for Honolulu, says President Obama was "definitely" not born in Hawaii, and a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not exist in the state.
"Some people are basically racist," Adams said. "It's a question of race. They don't like having someone who's not white, or they don't like someone who's from such a different heritage as President Obama, because his family has ties to Africa. His family also has ties to middle America, so to me it's also a non-issue. The other thing is, is he is a liberal, he's a Democrat. There's a lot of political rancor in the country in the last decade, starting with President Bush, and then we had 9/11. We've had the wars overseas. And this entire fight between the Left and the Right has become so Balkanized that anything someone finds, they say, 'Oh look, he lied about being born inside the United States. There must be something terrible there!' But they're extrapolating something that's not true."
Adams also lamented the poor state of civil discourse in America.
"I think we're getting to the point where no one can talk to anyone else," he explained. "The rhetoric has become so divisive, that there is no way for us to work out these issues that our country's facing. So I kind of dove in and tried to start a conversation and have paid for it dearly."
When asked what he had learned from this experience, Adams said, "It's very difficult for anyone to speak publicly on a controversial issue in the country, even if they do so with the best intentions."
Adams, a Hillary Clinton supporter who now teaches English at Western Kentucky University while he works on his master's degree, burst onto the national scene in a WND story in which he asserted that Obama was not born in Hawaii as the White House claims and that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not exist there.
"There is no birth certificate," he said. "It's like an open secret. There isn't one. Everyone in the government there knows this."
"I had direct access to the Social Security database, the national crime computer, state driver's license information, international passport information, basically just about anything you can imagine to get someone's identity," Adams explained. "I could look up what bank your home mortgage was in. I was informed by my boss that we did not have a birth record [for Obama]."
At the time, there were conflicting reports that Obama had been born at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, as well as the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children, also located in the capital city. So Adams says his office checked with both facilities.
"They told us, 'We don't have a birth certificate for him,'" he said. "They told my supervisor, either by phone or by e-mail, neither one has a document that a doctor signed off on saying they were present at this man's birth."
To date, no Hawaiian hospital has provided documented confirmation Obama was born at its facility.
Adams, 45, stressed, "In my professional opinion, he definitely was not born in Hawaii. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that he was not born in Hawaii because there is no legal record of him being born there. If someone called and asked about it, I could not tell them that person was born in the state."
He now expects his former co-workers still working in the elections office to say little, if anything, about the nonexistent birth certificate because they fear for their jobs.
"If you're working in the civil service and you say this, you're done," Adams said. "Don't expect to have a good career, especially since the governor is on the other side. Embarassing them is not good for your career."
Tells network affiliate hospital certificate non-existent, cites racism for controversy
By Joe Kovacs
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
In direct contradiction of the White House storyline, the former Honolulu elections official who caused a national stir this month when he told WND Barack Obama was "definitely" not born in Hawaii, and that no long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate even exists for the president in the Aloha State is now reaffirming those claims to a network television affiliate.
Tim Adams, the former senior elections clerk for the city and county of Honolulu was interviewed by Gene Birk of ABC affiliate WBKO-TV in Bowling Green, Ky.
"As of the time I was in Hawaii working in the elections office," said Adams, "we had many people who were asking about the eligibility of Senator Obama to be president. I was told at the time there is no long-form birth record, which would have been the case if President Obama was born in [a] hospital in Honolulu. There is no such form in Hawaii."
The hottest book in America is the one that exposes the real Obama! Get your autographed copy only from WND!
As WND first reported June 10, Honolulu's current elections administrator, Glen Takahashi, confirmed that Tim Adams was indeed "senior elections clerk" in 2008, in charge of verifying voters' identity, especially those involving absentee ballots.
Adams, 45, also noted he's willing to testify about his claims in a court of law.
He continued in his TV interview: "[Obama] does have a [Certification] of Live Birth, which is given to children of families who are residents of Hawaii when children are born outside the state. So, I assert that he was born outside of Hawaii. Now, we can't tell you where he was born. Some of his family members said that he had been born while his mother was on a trip overseas.
Obama does have a [Certification] of Live Birth from the state of Hawaii, that he was born a U.S. citizen. And during the initial part of the campaign, when questions about his eligibility to be president came up – including Senator McCain because he was born in Panama – that both these men were vetted by the same process as any other presidential candidate. So, while we may not agree, some people say that because of Article 2 of the Constitution, President Obama was not eligible to be president. That's not a question that we can answer.
"The people who are in charge of saying who is eligible to run for president have already vouched that he was indeed an eligible candidate. If we disagree with that, we don't need to go after the man. We need to look at the process by which candidates are vetted for public office."
The interviewer, apparently looking to reaffirm what he was just told, asked Adams again, "So let me understand what you're saying. There is no long-form birth certificate, because he was not born on U.S. soil."
"Correct," responded Adams.
"But there is a Certification of Birth, which is what this is," said Birk, as he looked at a photocopy of Obama's purported short-form, computer-generated Certification of Live Birth, a document which does not specify the hospital where Obama might have been born nor any doctor's name or signature.
"A facsimile of it has been put online," said Adams.
Birk responded, "Yes, and in your opinion, this means regardless of where he was born, he was a U.S. citizen at birth."
"Yes," said Adams, reiterating his personal opinion that Obama is eligible to hold office and that the question would have been answered when the Democratic National Committee vetted him to run for public office prior to the 2008 election.
Adams' claims are starkly different from those of the White House.
"The noble truth is that the president was born in Hawaii, a state of the United States of America," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told WND.
Linda Lingle, the Republican governor of Hawaii, has also publicly voiced the alleged exact location of Obama's birth, saying "the president was, in fact, born at Kapi'olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii."
Since WND's original report, Adams has come under fire from some critics online who suggested Adams may hold an anti-black philosophy and that his assertions were possibly racially motivated.
Adams, though, said it's people still asking Obama to prove his eligibility who tend to have race-based sentiments against the commander in chief.
Tim Adams, the former senior elections clerk for Honolulu, says President Obama was "definitely" not born in Hawaii, and a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not exist in the state.
"Some people are basically racist," Adams said. "It's a question of race. They don't like having someone who's not white, or they don't like someone who's from such a different heritage as President Obama, because his family has ties to Africa. His family also has ties to middle America, so to me it's also a non-issue. The other thing is, is he is a liberal, he's a Democrat. There's a lot of political rancor in the country in the last decade, starting with President Bush, and then we had 9/11. We've had the wars overseas. And this entire fight between the Left and the Right has become so Balkanized that anything someone finds, they say, 'Oh look, he lied about being born inside the United States. There must be something terrible there!' But they're extrapolating something that's not true."
Adams also lamented the poor state of civil discourse in America.
"I think we're getting to the point where no one can talk to anyone else," he explained. "The rhetoric has become so divisive, that there is no way for us to work out these issues that our country's facing. So I kind of dove in and tried to start a conversation and have paid for it dearly."
When asked what he had learned from this experience, Adams said, "It's very difficult for anyone to speak publicly on a controversial issue in the country, even if they do so with the best intentions."
Adams, a Hillary Clinton supporter who now teaches English at Western Kentucky University while he works on his master's degree, burst onto the national scene in a WND story in which he asserted that Obama was not born in Hawaii as the White House claims and that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not exist there.
"There is no birth certificate," he said. "It's like an open secret. There isn't one. Everyone in the government there knows this."
"I had direct access to the Social Security database, the national crime computer, state driver's license information, international passport information, basically just about anything you can imagine to get someone's identity," Adams explained. "I could look up what bank your home mortgage was in. I was informed by my boss that we did not have a birth record [for Obama]."
At the time, there were conflicting reports that Obama had been born at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, as well as the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children, also located in the capital city. So Adams says his office checked with both facilities.
"They told us, 'We don't have a birth certificate for him,'" he said. "They told my supervisor, either by phone or by e-mail, neither one has a document that a doctor signed off on saying they were present at this man's birth."
To date, no Hawaiian hospital has provided documented confirmation Obama was born at its facility.
Adams, 45, stressed, "In my professional opinion, he definitely was not born in Hawaii. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that he was not born in Hawaii because there is no legal record of him being born there. If someone called and asked about it, I could not tell them that person was born in the state."
He now expects his former co-workers still working in the elections office to say little, if anything, about the nonexistent birth certificate because they fear for their jobs.
"If you're working in the civil service and you say this, you're done," Adams said. "Don't expect to have a good career, especially since the governor is on the other side. Embarassing them is not good for your career."
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Dems' speech-limit plan hits rocky road in House
1ST AMENDMENT UNDER FIRE
Pelosi delays floor vote amidst fracas over carve-out for NRA
By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
WASHINGTON - MARCH 26: U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signs the revised Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act during an enrollment ceremony March 26, 2010 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The House passed the bill that completed heath care reform by a vote of 220 to 207. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
An effort by Democrats to close down speech critical of their actions before it can impact the November elections is running into a rocky road in the U.S. House, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed action on the proposal while the party regroups and tries to assemble support.
The DISCLOSE Act, pending as HR 5175 in the U.S House and as S. 3295 in the Senate, targets the freedom of speech of companies and groups acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court in its "Citizens United" ruling last winter.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Van Hollen in the House and Sen. Charles Schumer in the Senate, has 114 co-sponsors with Van Hollden and 49 with Schumer.
Pelosi, however, pulled the proposal from a floor vote and sent members home for the weekend because of turbulence over the plan to impose a new set of reporting and other requirements on a long list of organizations, according to a report in Human Events.
According to the Connie's Congress column, "Democrats have been scrambling to shut down conservative political speech before the November elections this year since the January U.S. Supreme Court decision in 'Citizens United v. FEC' that found freedom ofspeech applies to everyone: individuals, corporations and unions.
"Discontented with a more level playing field, Democrats threw together the DISCLOSE Act, a very lengthy and complicated piece of legislation designed solely to undo the court's decision."
While moving forward, it still needed additional support, and in recent days a "carve-out" was created that would have exempted the National Rifle Association from its demands, allegedly in exchange for the NRA dropping its opposition.
But analysts say the move backfired, since the Internet ignited with criticism of the organization's "deal with the devil" and other less-complimentary descriptions.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.com said, "Congress' attempt to repair their attack on the First Amendment, overturned in the 'Citizens United' decision earlier this year, has run off the rails thanks to the machination of its Democratic backers.
"Nancy Pelosi pulled the DISCLOSE Act from the House floor last night after the news of sleazy deals to exempt powerful organizations from the law started leaking to the media. Ironically, it was a rare partnership between the NRA and the Democrats that sealed the bill's fate."
Morrissey reported the vote scheduled today would have been to require special interest groups to disclose their top donors if they run television ads or mail out information during the run-up to an election.
"What does this say about leadership in the House? Pelosi should have already known how this would have played with her various factions. Cutting a deal with the NRA, who will spend millions fighting progressives in the midterms, is like deliberately winning a battle in order to lose a war from their perspective. It's a caucus in disarray, although unfortunately, Pelosi will probably have the DISCLOSE Act back in some form soon enough," he wrote.
He suggested Congress "should just read the First Amendment and get someone to explain the big words."
In Washington's bureaucratic language, the bill would require "corporations, labor organizations, tax-exempt charitable organizations, and political organizations other than political committees (covered organizations) to include specified additional information in reports on independent expenditures of at least $10,000, including certain actual or deemed transfers of money to other persons, but excluding amounts paid from separate segregated funds as well as amounts designated for specified campaign-related activities."
It also would create "restrictions on the use of donated funds" and "requires any electioneering communication transmitted through radio or television which is paid for by a political committee (including a political committee of a political party), other than a political committee which makes only electioneering communications or independent expenditures consisting of public communications, to include an audio statement identifying the name of the political committee responsible."
That means donors would have to be made public and leaders of such organizations identified in ads.
The National Right to Life Committee said in a letter to Congress the effort was an "attack on the First Amendment rights of your constituents and the private organizations with which they choose to associate."
It accused members of Congress of attempting "to discourage, as much as possible, disfavored groups (such as NRLC) from communicating about officeholders, by exposing citizens who support such efforts to harassment and intimidation, and by smothering organizations in layer on layer of record keeping and reporting requirements, all backed by the threat of civil and criminal sanctions."
"The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of incorporated groups of citizens to communicate with the public to express opinions about the actions of those who hold or seek federal office. The authors of the DISCLOSE Act have demonstrated that their overriding intent is to impede and deter the exercise of that constitutional right," the organization said. "The justifications offered for such legislation rest on the unspoken premise that the American people lack the capacity to properly evaluate advertising or other forms of mass communication, so the incumbent lawmakers will take it upon themselves to protect their hapless constituents from such troublesome communications, in order to prevent them from being 'unduly influenced' – and all of this is being deemed necessary to 'protect democracy.'"
The bottom line?
"We strongly urge you to oppose this pernicious, unprincipled and unconstitutional legislation," the NRLC said.
Even some whose groups would have been favored were outraged.
Cleta Mitchell, a member of the board of directors for NRA, which would have fallen into the bill's exempting language, wrote in a newspaper column the true purpose of the DISCLOSE Act is to "silence congressional critics in the 2010 elections."
"Since the court's January decision in 'Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission' that corporations cannot be constitutionally prohibited from making independent candidate-related expenditures, Democrats have been hyperventilating at the notion that corporations might spend millions of dollars criticizing them," she wrote. "To foreclose that possibility, the DISCLOSE Act would impose onerous and complicated 'disclosure' restrictions on organizations that dare to engage in constitutionally protected politicalspeech and on corporations that dare to contribute to such organizations.
"The DISCLOSE Act isn't really intended to elicit information not currently required by law. The act serves notice on certain speakers that their involvement in the political process will exact a high price of regulation, penalty and notoriety, using disclosure and reporting as a subterfuge to chill their political speech and association," she wrote.
"It is only disclosure, say the authors. And box-cutters are only handy household tools . . . until they are used by terrorists to crash airplanes," she wrote.
Pelosi delays floor vote amidst fracas over carve-out for NRA
By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
WASHINGTON - MARCH 26: U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signs the revised Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act during an enrollment ceremony March 26, 2010 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The House passed the bill that completed heath care reform by a vote of 220 to 207. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
An effort by Democrats to close down speech critical of their actions before it can impact the November elections is running into a rocky road in the U.S. House, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed action on the proposal while the party regroups and tries to assemble support.
The DISCLOSE Act, pending as HR 5175 in the U.S House and as S. 3295 in the Senate, targets the freedom of speech of companies and groups acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court in its "Citizens United" ruling last winter.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Van Hollen in the House and Sen. Charles Schumer in the Senate, has 114 co-sponsors with Van Hollden and 49 with Schumer.
Pelosi, however, pulled the proposal from a floor vote and sent members home for the weekend because of turbulence over the plan to impose a new set of reporting and other requirements on a long list of organizations, according to a report in Human Events.
According to the Connie's Congress column, "Democrats have been scrambling to shut down conservative political speech before the November elections this year since the January U.S. Supreme Court decision in 'Citizens United v. FEC' that found freedom ofspeech applies to everyone: individuals, corporations and unions.
"Discontented with a more level playing field, Democrats threw together the DISCLOSE Act, a very lengthy and complicated piece of legislation designed solely to undo the court's decision."
While moving forward, it still needed additional support, and in recent days a "carve-out" was created that would have exempted the National Rifle Association from its demands, allegedly in exchange for the NRA dropping its opposition.
But analysts say the move backfired, since the Internet ignited with criticism of the organization's "deal with the devil" and other less-complimentary descriptions.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.com said, "Congress' attempt to repair their attack on the First Amendment, overturned in the 'Citizens United' decision earlier this year, has run off the rails thanks to the machination of its Democratic backers.
"Nancy Pelosi pulled the DISCLOSE Act from the House floor last night after the news of sleazy deals to exempt powerful organizations from the law started leaking to the media. Ironically, it was a rare partnership between the NRA and the Democrats that sealed the bill's fate."
Morrissey reported the vote scheduled today would have been to require special interest groups to disclose their top donors if they run television ads or mail out information during the run-up to an election.
"What does this say about leadership in the House? Pelosi should have already known how this would have played with her various factions. Cutting a deal with the NRA, who will spend millions fighting progressives in the midterms, is like deliberately winning a battle in order to lose a war from their perspective. It's a caucus in disarray, although unfortunately, Pelosi will probably have the DISCLOSE Act back in some form soon enough," he wrote.
He suggested Congress "should just read the First Amendment and get someone to explain the big words."
In Washington's bureaucratic language, the bill would require "corporations, labor organizations, tax-exempt charitable organizations, and political organizations other than political committees (covered organizations) to include specified additional information in reports on independent expenditures of at least $10,000, including certain actual or deemed transfers of money to other persons, but excluding amounts paid from separate segregated funds as well as amounts designated for specified campaign-related activities."
It also would create "restrictions on the use of donated funds" and "requires any electioneering communication transmitted through radio or television which is paid for by a political committee (including a political committee of a political party), other than a political committee which makes only electioneering communications or independent expenditures consisting of public communications, to include an audio statement identifying the name of the political committee responsible."
That means donors would have to be made public and leaders of such organizations identified in ads.
The National Right to Life Committee said in a letter to Congress the effort was an "attack on the First Amendment rights of your constituents and the private organizations with which they choose to associate."
It accused members of Congress of attempting "to discourage, as much as possible, disfavored groups (such as NRLC) from communicating about officeholders, by exposing citizens who support such efforts to harassment and intimidation, and by smothering organizations in layer on layer of record keeping and reporting requirements, all backed by the threat of civil and criminal sanctions."
"The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of incorporated groups of citizens to communicate with the public to express opinions about the actions of those who hold or seek federal office. The authors of the DISCLOSE Act have demonstrated that their overriding intent is to impede and deter the exercise of that constitutional right," the organization said. "The justifications offered for such legislation rest on the unspoken premise that the American people lack the capacity to properly evaluate advertising or other forms of mass communication, so the incumbent lawmakers will take it upon themselves to protect their hapless constituents from such troublesome communications, in order to prevent them from being 'unduly influenced' – and all of this is being deemed necessary to 'protect democracy.'"
The bottom line?
"We strongly urge you to oppose this pernicious, unprincipled and unconstitutional legislation," the NRLC said.
Even some whose groups would have been favored were outraged.
Cleta Mitchell, a member of the board of directors for NRA, which would have fallen into the bill's exempting language, wrote in a newspaper column the true purpose of the DISCLOSE Act is to "silence congressional critics in the 2010 elections."
"Since the court's January decision in 'Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission' that corporations cannot be constitutionally prohibited from making independent candidate-related expenditures, Democrats have been hyperventilating at the notion that corporations might spend millions of dollars criticizing them," she wrote. "To foreclose that possibility, the DISCLOSE Act would impose onerous and complicated 'disclosure' restrictions on organizations that dare to engage in constitutionally protected politicalspeech and on corporations that dare to contribute to such organizations.
"The DISCLOSE Act isn't really intended to elicit information not currently required by law. The act serves notice on certain speakers that their involvement in the political process will exact a high price of regulation, penalty and notoriety, using disclosure and reporting as a subterfuge to chill their political speech and association," she wrote.
"It is only disclosure, say the authors. And box-cutters are only handy household tools . . . until they are used by terrorists to crash airplanes," she wrote.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
The Atheist-Dominated National Academy of Sciences
by Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr.
06/17/2010
It is important for us to understand the mindset of the hierarchy of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) because they are the ones whose alleged expertise on “global warming” will justify the Democrats’ cap-and-tax legislation. Over the last 50 years, the NAS hierarchy has become one of the most poisonous organizations in America, a nest of atheists who base their pseudo-scientific dogma on the arbitrary rejection of God, and not upon empirical evidence and the scientific method.
As the author of Sowing Atheism: the National Academy of Sciences’ Sinister Scheme to Teach Our Children They’re Descended from Reptiles, let me tell you what I know about the mindset of the members of the NAS hierarchy and their utter corruption of the search for truth in nature.
In 2008, NAS published Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a book sent to every public school board member and science teacher in America. The book’s message: Darwinian evolution is the only acceptable explanation for human origins. The book treats the intelligent-design hypothesis as invalid without presenting a shred of empirical evidence to contradict it.
The pseudo-scientific method of the NAS begins, not with a valid hypothesis or empirical evidence, but rather with the arbitrary rejection of a Creator/Designer and atheist materialism deduced as a fact. One of the 18 NAS book committee members, Neil deGrasse Tyson, revealed this at a friendly atheists’ conference in 2006. At 40:45 of his presentation, Tyson remarked to fellow atheist, Lawrence Krause:
“I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t. That’s really what we’ve got to address here. Otherwise, the public is secondary to this… Lawrence, if you can’t convert our colleagues, why do you have any hope that you’re going to convert the public?”
A few moments later, atheist panelist Michael Shermer suggested that the true figure of NAS scientists who reject God is 93%.
Having dismissed the valid design hypothesis as impossible in their atheist/materialist cosmos, the NAS writers feel free to assert over and over in Science, Evolution, and Creationism, that macro-evolution/Darwinian evolution is a "fact."
The beauty of the NAS’s atheist/materialist approach is that no empirical evidence is needed to “prove” that mankind evolved over hundreds of millions of years from slime and worms. Once our Creator is denied, all that is left to explain our existence is time and chance.
The NAS writers as much as admit that they lack the empirical evidence required for the two key elements of their “fact:” the alleged evolution of the sexes and speciation itself:
“There remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation.”
Out of the two million or so species on this planet, the NAS writers cannot pick a single one (a pine tree, shark, anchovy, potato, human, eagle, firefly, bumblebee, etc.) and identify, with empirical evidence, the species from which it evolved. Nor can they produce any empirical evidence for the evolution of the sexes.
The NAS writers turn the time-tested scientific method on its head. Instead of beginning with a hypothesis, they begin with Darwinian evolution acclaimed as fact. Working backwards, against the grain of true science, they attempt to develop a theory to legitimize the “fact” of evolution. But they have no empirical evidence for their theory, and so they cannot express what they claim occurs in nature in literal, operational, scientific terms.
The NAS hierarchy must thus resort to metaphor, a figure of speech, to describe what they imagine happens in nature. Darwin’s phrase, “natural selection,” a personification giving human characteristics to nature, serves their purposes well, for it obscures rather than reveals. Page 23 of the NAS book defines natural selection as “the driving force behind evolution,” without specifying what kind of force it is or how it is measured. On page 50, the NAS writers define natural selection as a “process,” without explaining how it works. On page 5, they define it as “reproductive success,” i.e., as an outcome or result.
Is natural selection a force, a process, or an outcome? In reality, it is none of the three. It is a mere figure of speech, a literary device meant to obscure the reality that no operative, literal, scientific principles relative to evolution have been uncovered since Charles Darwin published his speculative and fanciful The Origin of Species in 1859.
Continuing to work backwards, the NAS hierarchy now needs a foundational hypothesis that addresses the origin of life. Guess what? They don’t have one: “Constructing a plausible hypothesis for life's origins will require that many questions be answered.”
Competent scientists do not assert that their theory is a “fact” while at the same time admitting that they lack a plausible hypothesis for the foundation of it.
Competent scientists develop hypotheses, and then search for empirical evidence that will develop those hypotheses into valid theories, or cause them to be abandoned. NAS pseudo-scientists, begin with their contrived “fact” of evolution, and then, through sophistry, attempt to bluff their way through a theory that rationalizes their atheist beliefs.
Within the framework of their own book, the NAS writers define themselves as embracing a religious faith: “An important component of religious belief is faith, which implies acceptance of a truth regardless of the presence of empirical evidence for or against that truth.”
The NAS writers admit that they don’t have a “plausible hypothesis” for the origin of life, and yet they passionately insist that life came about by chance. That is a huge leap of irrational faith. Thus, the NAS ignores objective science, preferring to push its own gloomy atheist faith on our children, in direct violation of the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment.
The so-called science of macro-evolution, or Darwinism, is nothing more than an arbitrary atheistic materialist premise (no Creator/Designer) fueled by arrant speculation, and spread by hearsay. It is a fraudulent, closed-minded, deductive rationalization from atheist dogma. NAS pseudo-scientists are not interested in systematically uncovering the truths of nature; but rather in manufacturing a pseudo-scientific rationale for their own atheism.
The corrupt mindset that rules the field of human origins is the same corrupt mindset that rules the field of climatology. Within the atheists’ nest that rules the NAS, empirical evidence is irrelevant. In both fields, their “findings” will continue to bolster their atheist religion and their self-interest, not the interests of true science, or of the American people.
Isn’t it about time we stirred up that atheists’ nest?
------
Mr. Johnson, a West Point grad and an airborne ranger infantry veteran of Viet Nam, is the author of "The Parthenon Code: Mankind's History in Marble" and "Noah in Ancient Greek Art." His Web sites are www.welfaregame.com and www.solvinglight.com., where you can find more details on the Obama/Oprah connection.
06/17/2010
It is important for us to understand the mindset of the hierarchy of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) because they are the ones whose alleged expertise on “global warming” will justify the Democrats’ cap-and-tax legislation. Over the last 50 years, the NAS hierarchy has become one of the most poisonous organizations in America, a nest of atheists who base their pseudo-scientific dogma on the arbitrary rejection of God, and not upon empirical evidence and the scientific method.
As the author of Sowing Atheism: the National Academy of Sciences’ Sinister Scheme to Teach Our Children They’re Descended from Reptiles, let me tell you what I know about the mindset of the members of the NAS hierarchy and their utter corruption of the search for truth in nature.
In 2008, NAS published Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a book sent to every public school board member and science teacher in America. The book’s message: Darwinian evolution is the only acceptable explanation for human origins. The book treats the intelligent-design hypothesis as invalid without presenting a shred of empirical evidence to contradict it.
The pseudo-scientific method of the NAS begins, not with a valid hypothesis or empirical evidence, but rather with the arbitrary rejection of a Creator/Designer and atheist materialism deduced as a fact. One of the 18 NAS book committee members, Neil deGrasse Tyson, revealed this at a friendly atheists’ conference in 2006. At 40:45 of his presentation, Tyson remarked to fellow atheist, Lawrence Krause:
“I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t. That’s really what we’ve got to address here. Otherwise, the public is secondary to this… Lawrence, if you can’t convert our colleagues, why do you have any hope that you’re going to convert the public?”
A few moments later, atheist panelist Michael Shermer suggested that the true figure of NAS scientists who reject God is 93%.
Having dismissed the valid design hypothesis as impossible in their atheist/materialist cosmos, the NAS writers feel free to assert over and over in Science, Evolution, and Creationism, that macro-evolution/Darwinian evolution is a "fact."
The beauty of the NAS’s atheist/materialist approach is that no empirical evidence is needed to “prove” that mankind evolved over hundreds of millions of years from slime and worms. Once our Creator is denied, all that is left to explain our existence is time and chance.
The NAS writers as much as admit that they lack the empirical evidence required for the two key elements of their “fact:” the alleged evolution of the sexes and speciation itself:
“There remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation.”
Out of the two million or so species on this planet, the NAS writers cannot pick a single one (a pine tree, shark, anchovy, potato, human, eagle, firefly, bumblebee, etc.) and identify, with empirical evidence, the species from which it evolved. Nor can they produce any empirical evidence for the evolution of the sexes.
The NAS writers turn the time-tested scientific method on its head. Instead of beginning with a hypothesis, they begin with Darwinian evolution acclaimed as fact. Working backwards, against the grain of true science, they attempt to develop a theory to legitimize the “fact” of evolution. But they have no empirical evidence for their theory, and so they cannot express what they claim occurs in nature in literal, operational, scientific terms.
The NAS hierarchy must thus resort to metaphor, a figure of speech, to describe what they imagine happens in nature. Darwin’s phrase, “natural selection,” a personification giving human characteristics to nature, serves their purposes well, for it obscures rather than reveals. Page 23 of the NAS book defines natural selection as “the driving force behind evolution,” without specifying what kind of force it is or how it is measured. On page 50, the NAS writers define natural selection as a “process,” without explaining how it works. On page 5, they define it as “reproductive success,” i.e., as an outcome or result.
Is natural selection a force, a process, or an outcome? In reality, it is none of the three. It is a mere figure of speech, a literary device meant to obscure the reality that no operative, literal, scientific principles relative to evolution have been uncovered since Charles Darwin published his speculative and fanciful The Origin of Species in 1859.
Continuing to work backwards, the NAS hierarchy now needs a foundational hypothesis that addresses the origin of life. Guess what? They don’t have one: “Constructing a plausible hypothesis for life's origins will require that many questions be answered.”
Competent scientists do not assert that their theory is a “fact” while at the same time admitting that they lack a plausible hypothesis for the foundation of it.
Competent scientists develop hypotheses, and then search for empirical evidence that will develop those hypotheses into valid theories, or cause them to be abandoned. NAS pseudo-scientists, begin with their contrived “fact” of evolution, and then, through sophistry, attempt to bluff their way through a theory that rationalizes their atheist beliefs.
Within the framework of their own book, the NAS writers define themselves as embracing a religious faith: “An important component of religious belief is faith, which implies acceptance of a truth regardless of the presence of empirical evidence for or against that truth.”
The NAS writers admit that they don’t have a “plausible hypothesis” for the origin of life, and yet they passionately insist that life came about by chance. That is a huge leap of irrational faith. Thus, the NAS ignores objective science, preferring to push its own gloomy atheist faith on our children, in direct violation of the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment.
The so-called science of macro-evolution, or Darwinism, is nothing more than an arbitrary atheistic materialist premise (no Creator/Designer) fueled by arrant speculation, and spread by hearsay. It is a fraudulent, closed-minded, deductive rationalization from atheist dogma. NAS pseudo-scientists are not interested in systematically uncovering the truths of nature; but rather in manufacturing a pseudo-scientific rationale for their own atheism.
The corrupt mindset that rules the field of human origins is the same corrupt mindset that rules the field of climatology. Within the atheists’ nest that rules the NAS, empirical evidence is irrelevant. In both fields, their “findings” will continue to bolster their atheist religion and their self-interest, not the interests of true science, or of the American people.
Isn’t it about time we stirred up that atheists’ nest?
------
Mr. Johnson, a West Point grad and an airborne ranger infantry veteran of Viet Nam, is the author of "The Parthenon Code: Mankind's History in Marble" and "Noah in Ancient Greek Art." His Web sites are www.welfaregame.com and www.solvinglight.com., where you can find more details on the Obama/Oprah connection.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Obamacare's control plan? 'Behavior modification'
DOCTOR'S ORDERS
Expert opinion: 'Ultimately everything will be governed by federal authorities'
By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
The online Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders says "behavior modification," a controversial psychological treatment, can be accomplished through positive reinforcement or "punishment" – and now President Obama has signed an executive order specifying the treatment for all Americans, to be prescribed by government bureaucrats.
Obama's order appoints members to a new government committee set up by the Democrats' new health law that will evaluate, make recommendations about and establish rules for everything from how people exercise to whether they smoke to the food they eat and the medicines they use. And it specifically requires the committee list the priorities for "lifestyle behavior modification" that the government will pursue.
The encyclopedia report describes "punishment" as "the application of an aversive or unpleasant stimulus in reaction to a particular behavior." Two experts who reviewed the president's June 10 executive order establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council say the plan easily could encompass exactly that.
Herb Titus, a veteran constitutional expert and lawyer, told WND, "The council is designed to basically implement future policy that ultimately everything will be governed by federal authorities, from food to dietary supplements to vitamins."
Now it's statism on our plate! Mark Levin's manifesto – 'Liberty and Tyranny' – provides the antidote to its growing stranglehold
Deborah Stockton, executive director of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, which deals regularly with natural foods such as raw milk, agreed with the Titus analysis.
"They say, 'We're going to centralize power and control. We're going to be in control,'" she told WND. "It's [going to be] another epic confrontation between those who will and those who won't."
The council's membership, including the chiefs of the Agriculture, Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Education and Homeland Security departments as well as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Trade Commission, National Drug Control Police, Domestic Policy Council, Corporation for National and Community Service and others, also is alarming, Titus noted.
Most of those positions have no qualifications for making decisions about health care, so what would be their involvement, wondered Titus.
Could it be that non-compliance will bring down the wrath of those agencies?
"It'll be criminalized … if you don't follow federal guidelines on nutrition, exercise," he said. "That's what this is designed to do. Ultimately bring everything under the federal umbrella. The only way they can accomplish that is through force.
"Ultimately that's where it's headed," Titus said. "This is what people have been warning about. Here you have it."
The executive order requires the council to "provide coordination … with respect to prevention, wellness, and health promotion practices, the public health system, and integrative health care in the United States."
It further must develop a "health-care strategy that incorporates the most effective and achievable means of improving the health status of Americans" and also must "carry out such other activities as are determined appropriate by the president."
It will "set specific goals and objectives for improving the health of the United States" and "establish specific and measurable actions and timelines to carry out the strategy."
"Citizen, stop and show your papers and certify under oath you have properly exercised and ingested the proper amount of nutrition today!" scoffed one blogger.
The council then will have to report to the president on what it has done, what progress has been made and provide a "list of national priorities on health promotion and disease prevention to address lifestyle behavior modification (including smoking cessation, proper nutrition, appropriate exercise, mental health, behavioral health, substance-use disorder, and domestic violence screenings) and the prevention measures."
That paragraph alone raised eyebrows for those wondering what the government would do to demand "lifestyle behavior modification." It also raised concerns over its reference to "domestic violence screenings" as well as "mental health."
The order also targets most of the products that are promoted as natural supplements or remedies, demanding that all "prevention programs" be based on the "science" guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control, virtually eliminating anything that is not put through the multi-million dollar tests required of the federal agency.
Asked a blogger at Techimo.com, "Is this something we need to worry about? Is (sic) Obama and his 'advisers' attempting to modify our behavior through legislation?"
"It's a done deal," said Titus.
The White House declined a WND request to comment on the action.
But the initial blog comments were no more favorable to the details of Obamacare that are being unveiled now than they were to the overall idea of a nationalized health care with mandatory payments by taxpayers.
"If any government perverted junkie tries to tell me or my family what to do there is going to be a lot of unhealthy issues," wrote a forum participant at Conservative's Forum.
Added another on the same page, "Karl Marx would be proud."
Another forum page posted the headline "Obama creates behavior modification commission," and a writer called the council a "stepping stone to what the Soviets did to dissidents."
Added the YourWebApps site, "What do we take for prevention? Herbs and vitamins. Herbs that you grow in your backyard and vitamins that are not approved by your doctor do not fall under these 'science-based' guidelines and are not allowed. Therefore, this will effectively open the door to outlawing ALL disease prevention practices that use herbs and vitamins."
Columnist David Limbaugh put it this way: "Lifestyle behavior modification is none of the government's business, but it is even less the prerogative of a renegade, unaccountable executive acting outside the law through unconstitutional executive orders."
Stockton said she already sees people in revolt – "waking up to see what really does create health." Her group has monitored several raw milk fights of late in which farmers are selling unpasteurized milk to consumers who demand it.
The process has enraged state and other food regulators.
And she cited the reference to behavior.
"How are you going to address that? Put everyone into drills?" she said.
She said there's a huge failure to see that what the government is trying to impose has been done before – unsuccessfully.
But it will result in confrontation, she forecast.
"It's a conflict that has to be resolved."
WND previously reported when the federal government argued in a case in Iowa that individuals have no "fundamental right" to obtain what food they choose.
The brief was filed April 26 in support of a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.
"There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds," states the document signed by U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose, assistant Martha Fagg and Roger Gural, trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.
"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish," the government has argued.
WND also reported on a bill pending in the U.S. Senate that critics say would do for Americans' food supply what Obamacare is doing to the nation's supply of health-care resources.
"S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the U.S.," writes Steve Green on the Food Freedom blog. "It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money."
The plan is sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who explains the legislation "is a critical step toward equipping the FDA with the authorities and funding it needs to regulate what is now a global marketplace for food, drugs, devices and cosmetics."
His website explains, "The legislation requires foreign and domestic food facilities to have safety plans in place to prevent food hazards before they occur, increases the frequency of inspections. Additionally, it provides strong, flexible enforcement tools, including mandatory recall. Most importantly, this bill generates the resources to support FDA food-safety activities."
The proposal cleared the U.S. House last year but has been languishing in the Senate because of a full calendar of projects. It creates a long list of new requirements for food-producing entities to meet the demands of the secretary of agriculture. It is expected to be the subject of discussion in coming days.
Expert opinion: 'Ultimately everything will be governed by federal authorities'
By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
The online Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders says "behavior modification," a controversial psychological treatment, can be accomplished through positive reinforcement or "punishment" – and now President Obama has signed an executive order specifying the treatment for all Americans, to be prescribed by government bureaucrats.
Obama's order appoints members to a new government committee set up by the Democrats' new health law that will evaluate, make recommendations about and establish rules for everything from how people exercise to whether they smoke to the food they eat and the medicines they use. And it specifically requires the committee list the priorities for "lifestyle behavior modification" that the government will pursue.
The encyclopedia report describes "punishment" as "the application of an aversive or unpleasant stimulus in reaction to a particular behavior." Two experts who reviewed the president's June 10 executive order establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council say the plan easily could encompass exactly that.
Herb Titus, a veteran constitutional expert and lawyer, told WND, "The council is designed to basically implement future policy that ultimately everything will be governed by federal authorities, from food to dietary supplements to vitamins."
Now it's statism on our plate! Mark Levin's manifesto – 'Liberty and Tyranny' – provides the antidote to its growing stranglehold
Deborah Stockton, executive director of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, which deals regularly with natural foods such as raw milk, agreed with the Titus analysis.
"They say, 'We're going to centralize power and control. We're going to be in control,'" she told WND. "It's [going to be] another epic confrontation between those who will and those who won't."
The council's membership, including the chiefs of the Agriculture, Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Education and Homeland Security departments as well as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Trade Commission, National Drug Control Police, Domestic Policy Council, Corporation for National and Community Service and others, also is alarming, Titus noted.
Most of those positions have no qualifications for making decisions about health care, so what would be their involvement, wondered Titus.
Could it be that non-compliance will bring down the wrath of those agencies?
"It'll be criminalized … if you don't follow federal guidelines on nutrition, exercise," he said. "That's what this is designed to do. Ultimately bring everything under the federal umbrella. The only way they can accomplish that is through force.
"Ultimately that's where it's headed," Titus said. "This is what people have been warning about. Here you have it."
The executive order requires the council to "provide coordination … with respect to prevention, wellness, and health promotion practices, the public health system, and integrative health care in the United States."
It further must develop a "health-care strategy that incorporates the most effective and achievable means of improving the health status of Americans" and also must "carry out such other activities as are determined appropriate by the president."
It will "set specific goals and objectives for improving the health of the United States" and "establish specific and measurable actions and timelines to carry out the strategy."
"Citizen, stop and show your papers and certify under oath you have properly exercised and ingested the proper amount of nutrition today!" scoffed one blogger.
The council then will have to report to the president on what it has done, what progress has been made and provide a "list of national priorities on health promotion and disease prevention to address lifestyle behavior modification (including smoking cessation, proper nutrition, appropriate exercise, mental health, behavioral health, substance-use disorder, and domestic violence screenings) and the prevention measures."
That paragraph alone raised eyebrows for those wondering what the government would do to demand "lifestyle behavior modification." It also raised concerns over its reference to "domestic violence screenings" as well as "mental health."
The order also targets most of the products that are promoted as natural supplements or remedies, demanding that all "prevention programs" be based on the "science" guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control, virtually eliminating anything that is not put through the multi-million dollar tests required of the federal agency.
Asked a blogger at Techimo.com, "Is this something we need to worry about? Is (sic) Obama and his 'advisers' attempting to modify our behavior through legislation?"
"It's a done deal," said Titus.
The White House declined a WND request to comment on the action.
But the initial blog comments were no more favorable to the details of Obamacare that are being unveiled now than they were to the overall idea of a nationalized health care with mandatory payments by taxpayers.
"If any government perverted junkie tries to tell me or my family what to do there is going to be a lot of unhealthy issues," wrote a forum participant at Conservative's Forum.
Added another on the same page, "Karl Marx would be proud."
Another forum page posted the headline "Obama creates behavior modification commission," and a writer called the council a "stepping stone to what the Soviets did to dissidents."
Added the YourWebApps site, "What do we take for prevention? Herbs and vitamins. Herbs that you grow in your backyard and vitamins that are not approved by your doctor do not fall under these 'science-based' guidelines and are not allowed. Therefore, this will effectively open the door to outlawing ALL disease prevention practices that use herbs and vitamins."
Columnist David Limbaugh put it this way: "Lifestyle behavior modification is none of the government's business, but it is even less the prerogative of a renegade, unaccountable executive acting outside the law through unconstitutional executive orders."
Stockton said she already sees people in revolt – "waking up to see what really does create health." Her group has monitored several raw milk fights of late in which farmers are selling unpasteurized milk to consumers who demand it.
The process has enraged state and other food regulators.
And she cited the reference to behavior.
"How are you going to address that? Put everyone into drills?" she said.
She said there's a huge failure to see that what the government is trying to impose has been done before – unsuccessfully.
But it will result in confrontation, she forecast.
"It's a conflict that has to be resolved."
WND previously reported when the federal government argued in a case in Iowa that individuals have no "fundamental right" to obtain what food they choose.
The brief was filed April 26 in support of a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.
"There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds," states the document signed by U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose, assistant Martha Fagg and Roger Gural, trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.
"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish," the government has argued.
WND also reported on a bill pending in the U.S. Senate that critics say would do for Americans' food supply what Obamacare is doing to the nation's supply of health-care resources.
"S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the U.S.," writes Steve Green on the Food Freedom blog. "It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money."
The plan is sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who explains the legislation "is a critical step toward equipping the FDA with the authorities and funding it needs to regulate what is now a global marketplace for food, drugs, devices and cosmetics."
His website explains, "The legislation requires foreign and domestic food facilities to have safety plans in place to prevent food hazards before they occur, increases the frequency of inspections. Additionally, it provides strong, flexible enforcement tools, including mandatory recall. Most importantly, this bill generates the resources to support FDA food-safety activities."
The proposal cleared the U.S. House last year but has been languishing in the Senate because of a full calendar of projects. It creates a long list of new requirements for food-producing entities to meet the demands of the secretary of agriculture. It is expected to be the subject of discussion in coming days.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Alien in the White House
The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.
There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.
A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.
Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.
Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."
And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."
He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."
Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.
Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.
It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.
It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.
So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.
It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.
The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.
There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.
A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.
Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.
Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."
And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."
He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."
Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.
Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.
It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.
It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.
So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.
It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.
The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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