Quote of the Day

"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it." --John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

Probably Obama Supporters

Our Worst President Ever?

The more I think about the abject cynicism of Barack Obama, the more I'm drawn to the conclusion that, despite liberal professors' views to the contrary, he might be our worst president ever.

I don't take any great glee in announcing this. I fully expected to disagree with the vast majority of his policies. But I do try to accept that his vision for America and mine might be different, but that doesn't mean he hates the country, or that he wants to do it harm. There are those who fervently believe these things, but that's just nuts. You can be completely wrong about the maintenance your car needs and still run it out of oil.

After reading this Dick Morris column, though, I'm becoming ever more disgusted with the constant campaign mode of this president and his constant Republican bashing. This isn't just disagreement. It's constant war. Is there a compromise for this president, and is it possible for him to cast those who disagree with him as other than obstructionists?

For my liberal friends, I've noted some of their pet legislation signed into law by George W. Bush: No Child Left Behind (sponsored by Ted Kennedy) and the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act (co-sponsored by Russ Feingold). What legislation sponsored by and championed by Republicans has Barack Obama signed into law? Where, precisely, has he compromised?

The answer is that he hasn't. His rhetoric is designed not to bring sides together but to blame someone, anyone for the ills of the country, and that scapegoat won't be himself. His cynical approach to illegal immigration is just the most recent example.

Like Dick Morris, I believe that heavy fines and enforcement will drive most illegal immigrants back to their countries of origin. Unlike him, I don't think all of them will go because there are reasons besides the dollar to stay in this country. But Obama's cynical and racist ploy on this issue (trying to appeal to Hispanics who are disenchanted with him) is not worthy of America. Only 18 months into his term and he's already vying for the worst president slot, IMO.

Happy Independence Day!

Quote of the Day

"Equal laws protecting equal rights; the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country." --James Madison, letter to Jacob de la Motta, 1820

Quote of the Day

"The dons, the bashaws, the grandees, the patricians, the sachems, the nabobs, call them by what names you please, sigh and groan and fret, and sometimes stamp and foam and curse, but all in vain. The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America." --John Adams, letter to Patrick Henry, 1776

Quote of the Day

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." --James Madison

Whose Been Indoctrinating the Children?

If you only read leftwing sites for coverage of the Texas Textbook controversy, you'd come away believing education was going to hell in a handbasket and that there was a sudden attempt to indoctrinate the kids in eeeevil ways. Take this from MSNBC:

Among the recommendations facing a final vote: adding language saying the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and including positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the GOP’s Contract with America.

Other amendments to the state's curriculum standards for kindergarten through 12th grade would minimize Thomas Jefferson's role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state; require that students learn about "the unintended consequences" of affirmative action; assert that "the right to keep and bear arms" is an important element of a democratic society; and rename the slave trade to the "Atlantic triangular trade.”

Oh, noes. We certainly don't want or need children to have any positive references to the Second Amendment or conservatives. That might halt the slow march to hell liberals have been leading us on forever. From (laughably titled) Teaching Tolerance:

But even if Diskey is right, what’s happening in Texas has national implications. The board’s decisions affect 4.7 million Texas school kids—4.7 million potential future voters who will be acting on biased information.

(Emphasis mine)
Biased information? As opposed to the completely unbiased propaganda information available from groups like Teaching Tolerance? If Teaching Tolerance were actually about informing as opposed to indoctrinating, the argument against the Texas educators might be stronger. But because of groups like Teaching Tolerance, the New York Collective of Radical Educators (CORE) and Rethinking Schools, normal people actually do have to take the educational reins and rench them back to something closer to the center.

The truth is that Teaching Tolerance and other liberal organizations are afraid that students won't be lapping up social justice lessons or twisted views of American history bent to show the United States as racist, sexist, homophobic, greedy and generally a terrible force in the world. If I thought this way, I'd be scared that children might learn nice things about America, too.

Quote of the Day

"They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.... Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect." --Thomas Jefferson, Opinion on National Bank, 1791

Quote of the Day

"On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, 1823

Quote of the Day

So much for that "living" Constitution:

"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." --James Wilson, Of the Study of Law in the United States, 1790

Quote of the Day

"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation." --Justice John Marshall, McCullough v. Maryland, 1819

Virginia's Confederate History Month

Virginia's Governor Robert McDonnell acted stupidly and opened unnecessary wounds when he proclaimed April Confederate History Month.

As Ed Morrissey explains,

As a history buff myself, I agree that it’s important to study history, but that doesn’t require a Confederacy Appreciation Month, which is what this sounds like. McDonnell could have broadened the perspective to a Civil War History Month, which would have allowed for all of the issues in the nation’s only armed rebellion to be studied. This approach seems needlessly provocative and almost guaranteed to create problems for Republicans in Virginia and across the country.

I'm all for everyone understanding the history leading up to and through the bloodiest war the United States has ever engaged in, but that could be done within typical history debates and classes. Confederate History Month, especially in the Age of Obama, just represents an unnecessary thumb in the eye of black citizens, reinforcing the stereotype that Republicans hate black folk.

UPDATE: McDonnell apologizes.

Unintentional Humor in the Texas Textbook Debate

Liberals are appoplectic that the Texas Board of Education has made changes to the textbooks the state will purchase. But it would probably help if their organizations hired a few copy editors.

The unintended humor came in a couple of posts on the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance site (see here and here):

Democratic board member Mary Helen Berlanga made the common sense observation that these men died at the Alamo just the same (sic) Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, yet they are almost completely ignored in Texas classrooms.

Then there was this:

The Texas State Board of Education has made nationwide headlines in recent weeks by rewriting the curriculum standards for its k-12 textbooks. Texas is the 500-pound guerilla (sic) in textbook publishing.

Maybe if the Southern Poverty Law Center was as concerned with teaching students spelling and grammar as they are about including Cesar Chavez in history books, their ideas might be met with less ridicule.

Quote of the Day

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions." --James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, 1792

Quote of the Day

"Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual -- or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country." --Samuel Adams

Thank God Howard Zinn Is Dead

If only it had happened sooner, we wouldn't have generations of Americans believing his hateful anti-American view of American history.

I wouldn't usually hope someone was rotting in hell, but if I did, Howard Zinn would be the person. His unbelievable propaganda has been spoonfed to our children for decades, and we now spend far too many hours trying to deprogram them from the crap that man unleashed. Look at this:

This melodrama depends on simplistically dividing mankind into two groups – and only two: oppressors and oppressed. This is how Zinn describes and utterly distorts the early settlement of North America. The Pequot War serves as his example, as it will ours.

The war was climaxed when the Pequot stronghold in Fort Mystic was burned in battle and all its inhabitants incinerated in May of 1637. Finding themselves severely outnumbered the attackers had set fire to the Pequot compound. This is a tragic enough story, but Zinn won’t be satisfied until it becomes a story of native American innocence and victimhood versus rapacious and evil white settlers.

Thus the Pequot violence against whites that led to the war is almost entirely absent from the text. The most Zinn can bring himself to admit is that “Massacres took place on both sides.” In fact, the author details only the atrocities committed by one side: the Puritans. While graphic descriptions of Puritan violence are highlighted, Pequot atrocities are brushed aside. Here are some examples not to be found in Zinn::“[T]hey took two men out of a boat, and murdered them with ingenious barbarity, cutting off first the hands of one of them, then his feet,” writes 19th century historian John Gorham Palfrey about the Pequots’ assaults upon settlers. “Soon after, two men sailing down the river were stopped and horribly mutilated and mangled; their bodies were cut in two, lengthwise, and the parts hung up by the river’s bank. A man who had been carried off from Wethersfield was roasted alive. All doubt as to the necessity of vigorous action was over, when a band of a hundred Pequots attacked that place, killed seven men, a woman, and a child, and carried off two girls.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why the settlers might have decided to resort to violent means to deal with the Pequots. But it does take someone more honest than Zinn.

The author mentions only briefly the atrocity the precipitated the war, which was the killing of a settler named John Oldham. Zinn morally justifies the murder by labeling the victim a “trader, Indian-kidnapper, and troublemaker.” This loaded account helps Zinn persuade his readers that it was the white man’s greed that led to the Pequot War. The settlers, writes Zinn, “wanted [the Pequots] out of the way; they wanted their land.”

Also absent from Zinn’s devious narrative are the atrocities that the Pequots committed against other Indians of the Connecticut Valley. The Pequots not only waged war on whites, but on their fellow native Americans as well. They were a belligerent people feared by weaker tribes.

Consequently, while Zinn portrays the Pequot War as a Puritan-versus-Indian conflict, the fact is that both Puritans and Indians fought against the Pequots, nothing could be further from the truth. Indian tribes—for example, the Narragansett—repeatedly urged the English newcomers to attack their enemies, namely the Pequots. Zinn writes that “Indian tribes were used against one another” by the Puritans when, in fact, the reverse was true. Indian tribes used the Puritans and their superior firepower to eradicate their fellow Indians who posed a threat to them.

In fact Indians were the majority in the attacking force at Fort Mystic, and by a vast margin. Whites comprised less than 15 percent of the 500-plus men who attacked the Pequot stronghold and burned it to the ground. After the horrific conflagration ended, it was the Mohegans who executed the Pequots’ captured chief.

Zinn’s account of the Pequot war is a microcosm of his book as a whole which is little more than an 800-page libel against his country.

What an evil man.

Quote of the Day

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802

Quote of the Day

"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." --James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

Quote of the Day

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow." --Federalist No. 62