President Obama, Scandal, Socialism, and American Culture

Learning, Definition, and Critical Thinking

Culture of liberalism and socialism

Definition of sycophant: servile, self-seeking flatterer.

Application today: President Obama is a cult figure for socialists and liberals; they follow him slavishly, defending criminal behavior with blind adoration, totally oblivious to right and wrong

from the Rush Limbaugh Radio Show

Sycophants

Rush: We have an update here from Jay Carney, another one, on the IRS scandal.

There are now, I figure, eight or nine different versions of what happened. The White House has had four or five shifting versions of why it happened, who did it, who knew about it, who knew about it and didn’t tell the president about it, who knew about it and didn’t tell anybody else about it. Every day it’s a new thing, and here’s the latest from the spokeskid, Jay Carney. At the daily press briefing, a reporter said, “Okay, Jay, who did Treasury talk to here at the White House? Who is it? Who did the Treasury department tell here what was going on in Cincinnati about targeting the Tea Party groups?”

CARNEY: It was Mark Childress, uh, deputy chief of staff.

REPORTER: And the president was not made aware of this notification?

CARNEY: Absolutely. He — he — he was not, and I think we made that clear. Some people have suggested that was, uh, unwise. I think people in the know and people who understand, uh, why it’s important to maintain distance from these kinds of things for a White House understand that that was the right call, in our view.

RUSH: Okay! So the White House didn’t tell Obama about the IRS because it was a wise thing to do to keep him in the dark, and so now we have a name. Mark Childress, deputy White House chief of staff, was the person who interacted with their Treasury department learning what the IRS was doing. So the net is drawing closer. See, every day we get a new update on who knew and who was involved. So now we find out that the deputy White House chief of staff was cahooting with the Treasury department about how best to put this story out.

After the elections, by the way. After the elections.

Ladies and gentlemen, again, there are a bunch of sycophants and groupies and just true believers. Maybe they’re not even groupie or sycophants. They’re just literally believers. I mean, these are dyed-in-the-wool true believers. Obama was The Messiah. Obama is The Messiah. Obama, he’s it! He’s infallible. “If conservatives and Republicans are the worst thing to him, then I’m gonna protect him! I’m gonna make sure that conservatives don’t get to him.

“I’m gonna make sure that conservatives don’t harm my guy! I’m gonna make sure these Republicans do not inflict damage on my guy ’cause my guy is god! My guy is infallible; my guy is the answer to everybody’s problems. I’m gonna protect my guy, and if that means taking out Republicans with the IRS, so be it.” Those are the kinds of people who get hired, folks. I’m telling you, he doesn’t have to know. He doesn’t have to issue orders. He doesn’t have to have an operator’s manual for this.

The sycophant supporters of Obama are gonna accept this right off the bat. These are people who don’t want to think ill of Obama, and were not gonna make that happen. We’re not gonna reverse that. You take these low-information people who idolize Obama, and that’s it. Look, in their minds, when Obama goes out and says he’s mad about this and gonna get to the bottom of it, they believe that. They believe he didn’t know!

Obama is so important, he is so vital to the country and to the world, he must be kept out of the loop in order to save him from his failed presidency.  The only way to keep Obama safe from his failed presidency is to keep him in the dark.  Do not accuse me of making a racist statement with that.  That’s a common phrase that people use.  So in order to save Obama from his own failed regime, he must be kept out of the loop.  He’s too big to fail. He’s too big to know.  If he knew, he would be aware of how he’s failing.  Can’t have that.

 

Stress Management, Classical Music, and Richard Wagner

Dinner Topics for Friday

Classical Music and Richard Wagner

 

Sometimes we need to ignore the life and philosophy of the composer, and just enjoy the music.

 

Wilhelm Richard Wagner; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, “music dramas”). His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music; his Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.

Wagner inspired great devotion. For a long period, many composers were inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner’s music. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf were greatly indebted to him, as were César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet, Richard Strauss, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and numerous others.^[194] Gustav Mahler was devoted to Wagner and his music; aged 24, he sought him out on his 1875 visit to Vienna,^[195] became a renowned Wagner conductor,^[196] and his compositions are seen by Richard Taruskin as extending Wagner’s “maximalization” of “the temporal and the sonorous” in music to the world of the symphony.^[197] The harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (both of whose oeuvres contain examples of tonal and atonal modernism) have often been traced back to Tristan and Parsifal.^[198] The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owed much to the Wagnerian concept of musical form.^[199]

Wagner made a major contribution to the principles and practice of conducting. His essay “About Conducting” (1869)^[200] advanced Hector Berlioz‘s technique of conducting and claimed that conducting was a means by which a musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism for achieving orchestral unison. He exemplified this approach in his own conducting, which was significantly more flexible than the disciplined approach of Mendelssohn; in his view this also justified practices that would today be frowned upon, such as the rewriting of scores.^{[201][n 16]} Wilhelm Furtwängler felt that Wagner and Bülow, through their interpretative approach, inspired a whole new generation of conductors (including Furtwängler himself).^[203]

Wagner’s concept of the use of leitmotifs and the integrated musical expression which they can enable has influenced many 20th and 21st century film scores. The critic Theodor Adorno has noted that the Wagnerian leitmotif “leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotif is to announce heroes or situations so as to allow the audience to orient itself more easily”.^[204] Amongst film scores citing Wagnerian themes are Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now, which features a version of the Ride of the Valkyries, Trevor Jones‘s soundtrack to John Boorman‘s film Excalibur,^[205] and the 2011 films A Dangerous Method (dir. David Cronenberg) and Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier).^[206]

Amongst those claiming inspiration from Wagner’s music are the German rock band Rammstein,^[207] and the electronic composer Klaus Schulze, whose 1975 album Timewind consists of two 30-minute tracks, Bayreuth Return and Wahnfried 1883. The Slovenian group Laibach created the 2009 suite VolksWagner, using material from Wagner’s operas.^[208] Phil Spector‘s wall of sound recording technique was, it has been claimed, heavily influenced by Wagner.^[209]

 

Comments from You Tube

Wagner was dead 6 six years before Hitler was even born and 37 years before the formation of the Nazi Party.

I lately saw a BBC-documentary search on “Stephen Fry on Wagner” it’s also on youtube, Stephen a Jew himself is one of the biggest fans of Wagner’s music since he was child, some of his family died in the camps, is he allowed to like Wagner’s music? The conclusion is, many dictators (Mao, Stalin etc.) misused great artists like Wagner and Wagner never knew Hitler.

 

More about Wagner from Wikipedia

More music on You tube

 

 

Jesus Christ: Christian Art

Dinner Topics for Thursday

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carl Heinrich Bloch (May 23, 1834 – February 22, 1890) was a Danish painter.

He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark and studied with Wilhelm Marstrand at the Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi) there. Bloch’s parents wanted their son to enter a respectable profession – an officer in the Navy. This, however, was not what Carl wanted. His only interest was drawing and painting, and he was consumed by the idea of becoming an artist. He went to Italy to study art, passing through the Netherlands, where he became acquainted with the work of Rembrandt, which became a major influence on him.^[1] Carl Bloch met his wife, Alma Trepka, in Rome, where he married her on May 31, 1868. They were happily married until her early death in 1886.

His early work featured rural scenes from everyday life. From 1859 to 1866, Bloch lived in Italy, and this period was important for the development of his historical style.

His first great success was the exhibition of his “Prometheus Unbound” in Copenhagen in 1865. After the death of Marstrand, he finished the decoration of the ceremonial hall at the University of Copenhagen. The sorrow over losing his wife weighed heavily on Bloch, and being left alone with their eight children after her death was very difficult for him.

In a New Year’s letter from 1866 to Bloch, H. C. Andersen wrote the following: “What God has arched on solid rock will not be swept away!” Another letter from Andersen declared “Through your art you add a new step to your Jacob-ladder into immortality.”

Temptation of Christ by Carl Bloch

In a final ode, from a famous author to a famous artist, H.C. Andersen said “Write on the canvas; write your seal on immortality. Then you will become noble here on earth.”

He was then commissioned to produce 23 paintings for the Chapel at Frederiksborg Palace. These were all scenes from the life of Christ which have become very popular as illustrations. The originals, painted between 1865 and 1879, are still at Frederiksborg Palace. The altarpieces can be found at Holbaek, Odense, Ugerloese and Copenhagen in Denmark, as well as Loederup, Hoerup, and Landskrona in Sweden.

Through the assistance of Danish-born artist Soren Edsberg, the acquisition of “Christ healing at the pool of Bethesda,” [formerly owned by Indre Mission, Copenhagen, Denmark], was recently made possible for The Museum of Art, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA.^[1]

Carl Bloch died of cancer on February 22, 1890. His death came as “an abrupt blow for Nordic art” according to an article by Sophus Michaelis. Michaelis stated that “Denmark has lost the artist that indisputably was the greatest among the living.” Kyhn stated in his eulogy at Carl Bloch’s funeral that “Bloch stays and lives.”

A prominent Danish art critic, Karl Madsen, stated that Carl Bloch reached higher toward the great heaven of art than all other Danish art up to that date. Madsen also said “If there is an Elysium, where the giant, rich, warm and noble artist souls meet, there Carl Bloch will sit among the noblest of them all!” (From Carl Bloch Site).

Bloch’s influence

For over 40 years The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made heavy use of Carl Bloch’s paintings, mostly from the Frederiksborg Palace collection, in its church buildings and printed media. The LDS church has produced films depicting scriptural accounts of Christ’s mortal ministry, using Bloch’s paintings as models for the colour, light and overall set design as well as the movement of the actors in many of the films’ scenes. The most notable example of this is the movie The Testaments of One Fold and One Shepherd.

You can see a scrolling set of his pictures and schedule a visit to the Museum of Fine Art, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.[1]

Bible Study: Abortion, Symbol, and Definitions

The Oath, a Serpent, and a Staff

American Right To Life’s The Bible and Abortion article documents that 3,500 years ago the Mosaic Law in the Hebrew Scriptures recognized the unborn child as a person. More than a thousand years later Hippocrates, considered the father of medicine, also acknowledged the immorality of killing an unborn child. The single serpent on a staff is the most popular medical symbol in the world. Many claim this symbol originated not in Scripture but with Greek mythology and as associated with Hippocrates. However, biblical influence on the Greek culture greatly predates Hippocrates, as Robert Johnson wrote, “Ancient Greek religion, what we call mythology, tells the same story as the Book of Genesis, except that the serpent is the enlightener of mankind…” And during the Exodus:

“Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.’ So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.” -Moses, Numbers 21:8-9

A millennium after Moses, and 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates held to a Greek religious belief which recognized the serpent on a staff as a symbol of medicine. If the time frames were reversed, and Hippocrates predated Moses, no one could doubt that secular archaeologists would insist that the Bible copied the pre-existing symbol for medicine from the Greeks. But since the actual time frames give precedence for this symbol by more than a thousand years to the scriptures, secular historians deny the evident source of the snake and staff symbol for the restoration of physical health.

The Bible records that the Fall and the curse of death occurred after mankind was tempted by a serpent at a tree (Gen. 3:1-4). Then in the fullness of time Jesus Christ “Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), “having become a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). The symbolism pointed to the actual historic crucifixion and explains the Apostle Paul’s words to the Galatians that, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree).” Also, the Hebrew terms for sin and for sin offering in the Bible are the identical word, for Jesus is the sin offering (Heb. 10:10) who became “sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21). That is the ultimate meaning of the serpent being lifted up. For all who looked to it, that is, to Jesus who became sin for us, could be saved. As Jesus said, “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself” (John 12:32). For the Lord said:

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” -Jesus Christ, John 3:14-16

And back to Hippocrates who wrote in the Hippocratic Oath, “never do harm,” and “I will not… cause an abortion.” Medical schools still commonly administer the pledge but sadly, in pro-abortion cultures, they have removed the promise to not kill an unborn child. For as mentioned at Abort73.com, the original oath has been “replaced by vague generalities… and fails to list any of the prohibitions against euthanasia, abortion, and sexual relations with patients (which was prohibited in the original).” So as the American Medical News reports, most doctors who take a modern oath, “the taking of the oath is not… meaningful… but just something that happens” whereas, “Physicians who said religion is important were more likely to say that their medical school oath was influential than were less-religious doctors.” And the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network comments, “of course! When the oath you take doesn’t really say much of anything, it can’t be of much use as an ethical guide.”

Read more

Definition changes and Timeline

Shiphrah, the rescuer, by Elspeth Young

Semantic Gymnastics
History has shown that changing people’s attitudes is much easier if verbal engineering precedes social engineering. When scientists want to do something the public abhors, they simply change the terminology. They either use a euphemism or use technical jargon that nobody really understands.

The practice of changing the meanings of words and phrases, in an effort to change the way the public views the issue of abortion, has added to the confusion.

Abortion rights advocates refer to themselves as ‘pro-choice’ but have been labelled as ‘pro-abortion’ by their opponents. Those opposed to abortion call themselves ‘pro-life’ while their opponents call them ‘anti-choice,’ ‘anti-abortion,’ and even ‘terrorists.’

The foetus (the Latin word for ‘young one’) has been variously termed: ‘unwanted pregnancy,’ ‘product of conception,’ ‘sub-human,’ ‘non-person,’ ‘parasite,’ ‘sexually transmitted disease,’ feto-placental unit,’ ‘blob,’ ‘unborn baby,’ ‘pre-born baby’ and even just ‘baby.’

Euphemisms for abortion include: ‘women’s health care,’ ‘termination of pregnancy,’ ‘women’s reproductive rights,’ ‘the right to choose,’ and ‘procedure.’

Then and now: 1871 to 1970
Dr Wilkie then contrasted the AMA’s attitude on abortion from the 1870′s to 1970:

What is abortion?
1859 – “The slaughter of countless children; such unwarranted destruction of human life.”

1871 – “The work of destruction; the wholesale destruction of unborn infants.”

1967 – “The interruption of pregnancy; the induced termination of pregnancy.”

1970 – “A medical procedure.”

What should the ethics of abortion be?
1871 – “Thou shalt not kill. This commandment is given to all without exception. It matters not at what stage of development his victim may have arrived.”

1967 “This is a personal and moral consideration, which in all cases must be faced according to the dictates of the conscience of the patients and her physician.”

Who should perform abortions?
1871 – “It will be unlawful and unprofessional for any physician to induce abortion.”

1970 – “Abortion should be performed only by a duly licensed physician.”

Who are doctor abortionists?
1871 – “Men who cling to a noble profession only to dishonour it, false brethren, educated assassins, modern Herods, the executioners.”

1967 – “Conscientious practitioners, conscientious physicians.”

What should be done to physician abortionists?
1871 – “These men should be marked as Cain was marked; they should be made the outcasts of society.”

1970 – They should be permitted to perform as long as they take place in an accredited hospital.”

How did the AMA deal with doctor abortionists back in the 19th century, when it was first formed?
According to W.Brennan, in 1871 the AMA recommended dealing with medical abortionists in the following manner:

“These men should be marked as Cain was marked; they should be made the outcasts of society. Respectable men should cease to consult with them; should cease to speak to them, should cease to notice them except with contempt. Resolved, that we repudiate and denounce the conduct of abortionists, and that we will hold no intercourse with them professionally or otherwise, and that we will, whenever an opportunity presents, guard and protect the public against the machinations of these characters, by pointing out the physical and moral ruin which follows in their wake.”

The gradual change in Germany from the 1920s into World War II
Dr Leon Alexander, a psychiatrist at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, interviewed the Nazi doctors involved in euthanasia and medical experiments on prisoners. In 1949, he wrote on the lessons to be learned.

The acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as “a life not worthy to be lived” is what led to the Nazi doctors acceptance of euthanasia and medical experiments on prisioners.

“The beginnings were at first a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived.”

“This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude towards the non-rehabilitable sick.”

(L. Alexander, “Medical Science Under Dictatorship”, New England Journal of Medicine, Vol 241, July 14th, 1949)

More about Life

Quotations: Holy Spirit, Virtue, and Vice

Dinner Topics for Tuesday

Quotes by Alexander Pope

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

 

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”

“What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.”

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

“Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,
Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.”

 

Defining Moment

There is a Line of Demarcation, well defined, between the Lord’s territory and the devil’s. If you stay on the Lord’s side of the line, you will have no desire to do wrong, but if you cross to the devil’s side of the line one inch, you are in the tempter’s power, and if he is successful, you will not be able to think or even reason properly, because you will have lost the Spirit of the Lord. ~George Albert Smith

Praying Hands: Story of Inspiration

Dinner Topics for Monday

Praying Hands: A Story of Inspiration 

Late in the fifteenth century, two young and zealous wood-carving apprentices in France confided in each other their craving to study painting. Such study would take money and both Hans and Albrecht had none. Their joint solution was to have one work and earn money while the other one studied. When the lucky one became rich and famous, he would work and aid the other one. They tossed a coin and Albrecht won. Albrecht quickly went to Venice to study painting while Hans worked as a blacksmith.

After many hard years, at last Albrecht returned home as an independent master. Now it was his turn to help Hans. However, when Albrecht looked at his friend, tears welled in his eyes. Only then did he discover the extent of his friend’s sacrifice. The years of heavy labor in the blacksmith shop had calloused and enlarged Hans’ sensitive hands. Hans could never be a painter. In humble gratitude to Hans for his years of sacrifice, the great artist, Albrecht Durer, painted a portrait of the work-worn hands that sacrificed so much so that he might develop his talent. He presented this painting of praying hands to his devoted friend. Today, this master piece is a symbol of love and sacrifice and is familiar to millions of people throughout the world.

President Obama, Scandal, and Big Government Abuse

Unfortunately, there is no way the Senate will impeach a sitting black president. But we must keep fighting for our liberty, because they want us to give up and quit.

Obama classmate audited 2 years ago now ‘vindicated’

Critic charges IRS abuse part of plan to destroy opposition

 

Art Moore

As Attorney General Eric Holder orders an investigation of the Internal Revenue Service after a top official admitted targeting conservative groups with extra scrutiny, an outspoken critic of Obama who claimed more than half a year ago that the administration was using the IRS to punish him is feeling vindicated.

“I feel like a million bucks. I feel absolutely vindicated. I knew this was going on,” Wayne Allyn Root told WND.

Root, the Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate in 2008 who has claimed Obama was strangely unknown to him and his fellow Columbia University classmates, recounted his story to WND last October of becoming the target of unusual audits, beginning in January 2011, despite a “spotless” 30-year tax record.

He charged in October that the order to audit him came from Obama himself, and he is even more convinced now.

“I believe this is not rogue agents, who would be risking their pension and careers,” he said.

In October, Root said the order to audit him “must have come from the highest levels of government.”

“Obama is using the power of the IRS and other government agencies to punish his political opposition and intimidate and silence his critics,” Root charged at the time.

At that time he was calling for congressional hearings “to determine if the Obama administration is misusing its power to damage or ruin the lives, drain the finances, or just distract Obama’s critics and political opposition.”

Now, the House Ways and Means Committee has scheduled a formal hearing for Friday to probe the IRS scandal.

In March 2012 hearings before the Financial Services and the Ways and Means Oversight subcommittees, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman twice denied that the IRS had targeted conservative groups.

On Monday, Root contacted the office of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., offering to testify before Congress.

Root said that until this week, he would not have expected scrutiny of the Obama administration to get much traction, but with the news Monday that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, he thinks the media “woke up overnight and realized this is a tyrant that we’ve got in charge.”

Root has been a relentless critic of Obama in thousands of appearances on political talk shows on TV and radio over the past four and a half years, focusing on what he calls the president’s anti-capitalist policies. He also writes columns and commentaries for many popular conservative websites.

He is the author of “The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide: How to Survive, Thrive, and Prosper During Obamageddon,” which was published last month.

A pre-law and political science major in the class of 1983, like the president, Root told WND that he received an “unsettling” telephone call from an IRS agent in January 2011 who called himself a fan of his and considered it “an honor” to audit him.

Root won a complete victory last summer in tax court, which found no taxes owed in his 2007 and 2008 filings. But then, he said, he and his tax attorney were shocked when he was hit with a new audit just five days later, for 2009 and 2010.

Root told WND in October he knew of many cases like his that pointed to a pattern of abuse by the Obama administration, including audits of high-profile friends who contribute to the Republican Party and GOP bundlers.

Last year, billionaire Frank VanderSloot became the target of investigations by both the IRS and the Labor Department after he gave $1 million to a super PAC that supported Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The GOP’s biggest donor, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said a federal criminal investigation into his company’s business practices was politically motivated. Another casino giant, Steve Wynn, also has been investigated.

This week, Root has received many emails from people who identify as conservative and believe the IRS has been harassing them for political reasons.

He said he was contacted by a Mormon man who said everyone he knew in his small Mormon community was being audited for the first time in their lives.

The man told Root the Mormons are easy to identify because their tax forms show they give 10 percent of their income to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Root said the Mormon man told him, “Everywhere I go, I run into people who are being audited, and they have never been audited before.”

Root sees the alleged targeting of Mormons as consistent with the report Tuesday that the IRS was targeting Jewish groups that are pro-Israel.

“Who in America would be more conservative Republican and donate more to Romney than Mormons?” he asked.

Cloward and Piven

Root has charged that Obama is borrowing from the radical, collectivist strategy of former Columbia professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

The aim is to overwhelm the welfare system for the purpose of collapsing it and replacing it with a system of guaranteed annual income.

“I’ve been saying it since he was elected in 2008,” Root said of Obama, “his goal is the Cloward and Piven plan we learned at Columbia University – you’ve got to bankrupt your opposition and you’ve got to bankrupt the United States of America. You’ve got to bankrupt it with debts, entitlements and spending. And it’s all happening in front of our very eyes.”

The new admission by the IRS, he said, supports his contention that Obama aims to attack business owners who fund conservative candidates and causes until they have no money left.

“If you raise people’s taxes and regulate them to death, and assess IRS liens and audit them to death, eventually the people who write all the big checks to conservative causes will go bankrupt,” he said.

Root acknowledges his assessment of Obama opens himself to charges that he is extreme, but he insists anyone who has met him “would describe him as a family man or a man of faith” who does not exaggerate or “wear a tin foil hat.”

“And yet,” he said. “I believe with every bone in my body that Barack Obama is a Marxist out to destroy capitalism and the United States of America.”

Now, he said, as Obama is hit with a perfect storm of scandals, “you tell me if anything I’ve said now appears to be extreme.”

“No,” he said, “the only extremists here are the radical Marxists sitting in the White House.”

After Obama’s inaugural speech in January, House Speaker John Boehner seemed to agree that Obama was undertaking a scorched-earth political strategy, notably declaring that he believed the president wanted to “annihilate” the Republican Party.

Boehner said the broader goal of the administration was “to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

Recalling Boehner’s statement, Root commented: “That’s how you become a communist or socialist nation.”

In September, Root announced that he was stepping down from his positions in the Libertarian Party to focus on helping elect Republicans to office who share his small-government values. He reasoned that it’s not enough to have a “philosophical foundation rooted in liberty” if you can’t win as a third-party candidate.

No sign of Obama at Columbia

Root drew wide attention as the Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate in 2008 when he contended that although he and Obama were both pre-law and political science majors in Columbia’s class of 1983, he never even heard of Obama during his time at the university. None of the classmates with whom he’s spoken knew of him either, he claimed. A 2008 Wall Street Journal article cited a Fox News survey of 400 people who were Columbia students from 1981 to 1983 and found no one who remembered Obama.

Root told WND Tuesday it’s telling that still no one from his Columbia days has come forward and declared any knowledge of Obama during that time.

“Every kid I went to school with was a liberal, trending toward Marxist. They all said it. They all said they were proud Marxists,” Root said. “You would think they would defend the president, and you would have students saying, ‘I knew him, and Wayne Root is wrong.’ No one has.”

There’s “just dead silence,” he said.

“Nobody saw him there. There is something wrong with the story, I am telling you.”

 

Do you think Obama will be impeached over IRS scandal?

Unfortunately, there is no way the Senate will impeach a sitting black president. But we must keep fighting for our liberty, because they want us to give up and quit.

Learning, College Students, and “Cultural Diversity”

Dinner Topics for Friday

Warning: If you are looking at colleges, buyer beware! College tuitions these days will bankrupt you, and what follows is only one example of what is going on nationwide, in some of the most prestigious colleges. The more prestigious they are, the more liberal they are. These are sad days for those of us who remember America before the “Post-Christian” era.  ~C.A. Davidson

What Students Don’t Learn at Bowdoin College

From Rush Limbaugh Radio Show

 

RUSH: From the Wall Street Journal last Friday, April 5th. I missed it Friday. I was informed about this on Saturday afternoon. It’s a piece by David Feith. David Feith is assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal. “It sounds like the setup for a bad joke: What did the Wall Street type say to the college president on the golf course? Well, we don’t know exactly — but it has launched a saga with weighty implications for American intellectual and civic life. Here’s what we do know:

Bowdoin College

“One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein for a round of golf about an hour north of campus. College presidents spend many of their waking hours talking to potential donors. In this case, the two men spoke about college life — especially ‘diversity’ — and the conversation made such an impression on President Mills that he cited it weeks later in his convocation address to Bowdoin’s freshman class.

“That’s where the dispute begins. In his address, President Mills described the golf outing and said he had been interrupted in the middle of a swing by a fellow golfer’s announcement: ‘I would never support Bowdoin — you are a ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons,’ said the other golfer, in Mr. Mills’s telling. During Mr. Mills’s next swing, he recalled, the man blasted Bowdoin’s ‘misplaced and misguided diversity efforts.’

“At the end of the round, the college president told the students, ‘I walked off the course in despair.’” So the college president tells the guy this. He’s out playing golf and in the middle of his backswing — which is the biggest no-no in golf, is to chat during somebody’s swing. In the middle of the backswing, he says something, and this guy’s college was insulted twice by this Klingenstein guy, who was the potential donor. “Word of the speech,” this interpretation, “soon got back to Mr. Klingenstein.

“Even though he hadn’t been named in the Mills account, Mr. Klingenstein took to the pages of the Claremont Review of Books to call it nonsense: ‘[The president of this college] didn’t like my views, so he turned me into a backswing interrupting, Bowdoin-hating boor who wants to return to the segregated days of Jim Crow.’ The real story, wrote Mr. Klingenstein, was that ‘I explained my disapproval of ‘diversity’ as it generally has been implemented on college campuses: too much celebration of racial and ethnic difference,’ coupled with ‘not enough celebration of our common American identity.’”

You guys are destroying the country. We all have a “common American identity” and you’re focusing on our differences and then demanding all this “diversity” be tolerated, accepted, and treated the same. Well, after Klingenstein’s “essay appeared, President Mills stood by his version of events. A few months later, Mr. Klingenstein decided to do something surprising: He commissioned researchers to examine Bowdoin’s commitment to intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity.”

So he paid for researchers for the National Association of Scholars to study this university and its curriculum and what’s been going on there, and the upshot of it is: Bowdoin College “has ‘no curricular requirements that center on the American founding or the history of the nation.’ Even history majors aren’t required to take a single course in American history. In the History Department, no course is devoted to American political, military, diplomatic or intellectual history — the only ones available are organized around some aspect of race, class, gender or sexuality.”

So a history major at Bowdoin College is taught about the intrinsic discrimination against blacks, women, gays, lesbians, transgender, bisexuals. That’s all they are taught. A history major coming out of Bowdoin College is not taught for one minute about the American founding. There is not one moment of traditional American history taught, and this is just the history department. What’s taught is how immoral and unjust America has been since its founding and how its founding featured institutional racism, segregation, sexism, homophobia, and all that.

Klingenstein found this kind of thing in pretty much all the other departments he looked at, and he studied it for years and years and years.

Quite naturally, he decided not to donate to the school.

RUSH: Now, the students at Bowdoin College are required to take a year-long seminar as freshmen. They get to choose from 37 different offerings, such as “Affirmative Action in US Society,” or “the Fictions of Freedom,” or “Racism,” or “Queer Gardens,” or “the Sexual Life of Colonialism,” or “the Modern Western Prostitutes.” They have to take one of those courses, as a seminar, but they’re not taught anything about the American founding other than it was racist and immoral.

Economy, Taxation, and Integrity

Calvin Coolidge represents the exact opposite of President Obama. Coolidge had integrity. He deserves a lot more respect than he ever got. ~C.A. Davidson

Dinner Topics for Thursday

“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”

“We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic of undeveloped people, or of a decadent generation.” ~Calvin Coolidge

Senator Selden Spencer once took a walk with Coolidge around the White House grounds. To cheer the President up, Spencer pointed to the White House and asked playfully, “Who lives there?” “Nobody,” Coolidge replied. “They just come and go.”

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. ~Calvin Coolidge

Amity Shlaes
Author, Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge and the Moral Case for Economy

AMITY SHLAES is a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg, a director of the Four Percent Growth Project at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and a member of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. She has served as a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and as a columnist for the Financial Times, and is a recipient of the Hayek Prize and the Frederic Bastiat Prize for free-market journalism. She is the author of four books, Germany: The Empire Within, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It, and Coolidge.

The following is adapted from a talk given at Hillsdale College on January 27, 2013, during a conference on “The Federal Income Tax: A Centenary Consideration,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series.

WITH THE FEDERAL DEBT spiraling out of control, many Americans sense an urgent need to find a political leader who is able to say “no” to spending. Yet they fear that finding such a leader is impossible. Conservatives long for another Ronald Reagan. But is Reagan the right model? He was of course a tax cutter, reducing the top marginal rate from 70 to 28 percent. But his tax cuts—which vindicated supply-side economics by vastly increasing federal revenue—were bought partly through a bargain with Democrats who were eager to spend that revenue. Reagan was no budget cutter—indeed, the federal budget rose by over a third during his administration.

An alternative model for conservatives is Calvin Coolidge. President from 1923 to 1929, Coolidge sustained a budget surplus and left office with a smaller budget than the one he inherited. Over the same period, America experienced a proliferation of jobs, a dramatic increase in the standard of living, higher wages, and three to four percent annual economic growth. And the key to this was Coolidge’s penchant for saying “no.” If Reagan was the Great Communicator, Coolidge was the Great Refrainer.

Enter Coolidge
Following World War I, the federal debt stood ten times higher than before the war, and it was widely understood that the debt burden would become unbearable if interest rates rose. At the same time, the top income tax rate was over 70 percent, veterans were having trouble finding work, prices had risen while wages lagged, and workers in Seattle, New York, and Boston were talking revolution and taking to the streets. The Woodrow Wilson administration had nationalized the railroads for a time at the end of the war, and had encouraged stock exchanges to shut down for a time, and Progressives were now pushing for state or even federal control of water power and electricity. The business outlook was grim, and one of the biggest underlying problems was the lack of an orderly budgeting process: Congress brought proposals to the White House willy-nilly, and they were customarily approved.

The Republican Party’s response in the 1920 election was to campaign for smaller government and for a return to what its presidential candidate, Warren Harding, dubbed “normalcy”—a curtailing of government interference in the economy to create a predictable environment in which business could confidently operate. Calvin Coolidge, a Massachusetts governor who had gained a national reputation by facing down a Boston police strike—“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” he had declared—was chosen to be Harding’s running mate. And following their victory, Harding’s inaugural address set a different tone from that of the outgoing Wilson administration (and from that of the Obama administration today): “No altered system,” Harding said, “will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system.”

One of Harding’s first steps was to shepherd through Congress the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, under which the executive branch gained authority over and took responsibility for the budget, even to the point of being able to impound money after it was budgeted. This legislation also gave the executive branch a special budget bureau—the forerunner to today’s Office of Management and Budget—over which Harding named a flamboyant Brigadier General, Charles Dawes, as director. Together they proceeded to summon department staff and their bosses to semiannual meetings at Continental Hall, where Dawes cajoled and shamed them into making spending cuts. In addition, Harding pushed through a tax cut, lowering the top rate to 58 percent; and in a move toward privatization, he proposed to sell off naval petroleum reserves in Wyoming to private companies.

Unfortunately, some of the men Harding appointed to key jobs proved susceptible to favoritism or bribery, and his administration soon became embroiled in scandal. In one instance, the cause of privatization sustained damage when it became clear that secret deals had taken place in the leasing of oil reserves at Teapot Dome. Then in the summer of 1923, during a trip out West to get away from the scandals and prepare for a new presidential campaign, Harding died suddenly.

Enter Coolidge, whose personality was at first deemed a negative—his face, Alice Roosevelt Longworth said, “looked as though he had been weaned on a pickle.” But canny political leaders, including Supreme Court Justice and former President William Howard Taft, quickly came to respect the new president. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, after visiting the White House a few times that August, noted that whereas Harding had never been alone, Coolidge often was; that whereas Harding was partial to group decisions, Coolidge made decisions himself; and most important, that whereas Harding’s customary answer was “yes,” Coolidge’s was “no.”

The former governor of Massachusetts was in his element when it came to budgeting. Within 24 hours of arriving back in Washington after Harding’s death, he met with his own budget director, Herbert Lord, and together they went on offense, announcing deepened cuts in two politically sensitive areas: spending on veterans and District of Columbia public works. In his public statements, Coolidge made clear he would have scant patience with anyone who didn’t go along: “We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic of undeveloped people, or of a decadent generation.”

If Harding’s budget meetings had been rough, Coolidge’s were rougher. Lord first advertised a “Two Percent Club,” for executive branch staffers who managed to save two percent in their budgets. Then a “One Percent Club,” for those who had achieved two or more already. And finally a “Woodpecker Club,” for department heads who kept chipping away. Coolidge did not even find it beneath his pay grade to look at the use of pencils in the government: “I don’t know if I ever indicated to the conference that the cost of lead pencils to the government per year is about $125,000,” he instructed the press in 1926. “I am for economy, and after that I am for more economy,” he told voters.

Coolidge in Command
“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” Coolidge had once advised his father. And indeed, while Harding had vetoed only six bills, Coolidge vetoed 50—including farming subsidies, even though he came from farming country. (“Farmers never had made much money,” he told a guest, and he didn’t see there was much the government could rightly do about it.) He also vetoed veterans’ pensions and government entry into the utilities sector.

The Purpose of Tax Cuts

 

In short, Coolidge didn’t favor tax cuts as a means to increase revenue or to buy off Democrats. He favored them because they took government, the people’s servant, out of the way of the people. And this sense of government as servant extended to his own office.

Senator Selden Spencer once took a walk with Coolidge around the White House grounds. To cheer the President up, Spencer pointed to the White House and asked playfully, “Who lives there?” “Nobody,” Coolidge replied. “They just come and go.”

But as unpopular as he was in Washington, Coolidge proved enormously popular with voters. In 1924, the Progressive Party ran on a platform of government ownership of public power and a return to government ownership of railroads. Many thought the Progressive Party might split the Republican vote as it had in 1912, handing the presidency to the Democrats. As it happened, Progressive candidate Robert LaFollette indeed claimed more than 16 percent of the vote. Yet Coolidge won with an absolute majority, gaining more votes than the Progressive and the Democrat combined. And in 1928, when Coolidge decided not to run for reelection despite the urging of party leaders who looked on his reelection as a sure bet, Herbert Hoover successfully ran on a pledge to continue Coolidge’s policies.

Unfortunately, Hoover didn’t live up to his pledge. Critics often confuse Hoover’s policies with Coolidge’s and complain that the latter did not prevent the Great Depression. That is an argument I take up at length in my previous book, The Forgotten Man, and is a topic for another day. Here let me just say that the Great Depression was as great and as long in duration as it was because, as economist Benjamin Anderson put it, the government under both Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, unlike under Coolidge, chose to “play God.”

Lessons from Coolidge

Beyond the inspiration of Coolidge’s example of principle and consistency, what are the lessons of his story that are relevant to our current situation? One certainly has to do with the mechanism of budgeting: The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 provided a means for Harding and Coolidge to control the budget and the nation’s debt, and at the same time gave the people the ability to hold someone responsible. That law was gutted in the 1970s, when it became collateral damage in the anti-executive fervor following Watergate. The law that replaced it tilted budget authority back to Congress and has led to over-spending and lack of responsibility.

A second lesson concerns how we look at tax rates. When tax rates are set and judged according to how much revenue they bring in due to the Laffer Curve—which is how most of today’s tax cutters present them, thereby agreeing with tax hikers that the goal of tax policy is to increase revenue—tax policy can become a mechanism to expand government. The goals of legitimate government—American freedom and prosperity—are left by the wayside.

Thus the best case for lower taxes is the moral case—and as Coolidge well understood, a moral tax policy demands tough budgeting.

Finally, a lesson about politics. The popularity of Harding and Coolidge, and the success of their policies—especially Coolidge’s—following a long period of Progressive ascendancy, should give today’s conservatives hope. Coolidge in the 1920s, like Grover Cleveland in the previous century, distinguished government austerity from private-sector austerity, combined a policy of deficit cuts with one of tax cuts, and made a moral case for saying “no.” A political leader who does the same today is likely to find an electorate more inclined to respond “yes” than he or she expects.

Coolidge and Moral Economy, complete article

History: Israel and Palestine

Dinner Topics for Wednesday

So, journalists, activists, and foreign ministers of the world: you still have time to ask yourselves and others these questions; still have time to prevent a great wrong from being done; still have time to save untold lives; still have time to avoid a terrible precedent; still have time to prevent the creation of another terrorist state.  Will you? ~Steve Feldman

 

The Questions Never Asked About Palestine

By Steve Feldman

As the Palestinian-Arabs and their friends make their latest push for “Palestinian” statehood at the United Nations this week, once again the wrong questions are being asked, while the pertinent questions every reporter, activist, and foreign minister should be asking never arise.

Why do “Palestinians” need a state of their own?  Who are these “stateless” people?  What is their history?  Where have they been for all of these years?

In the spirit of “you don’t know what you don’t know,” here are some Hansel-and-Gretel-like bread crumbs to guide journalists and others to the questions they might ask:

Where does the name “Palestine” come from and who have been the people who’ve lived there?  Of course, it was coined by the conquering Romans to add insult to injury to a Jewish nation they sought to obliterate.  The Romans conquered the land, but there was always a remnant of Jewish people living there.

While throughout the ages the land was under control of various powers, none called themselves “Palestinian,” and there was never a nation with that name.  It was that Jewish remnant and those Jews who joined them over time who became the “Palestinians.”

In modern times, the Ottoman Turks controlled this territory and, following World War I, the British (under the auspices of the League of Nations).  In this period, there were many “Palestinian” institutions, though all of them were Jewish in character and membership.  The most famous of these was, perhaps, the Palestine Post, which lives on today as the Jerusalem Post.  There were Palestine orchestras and chess teams and the like.  But the names of the players were Jewish, not Arab.

As Jewish nationalism in the region gained strength, the Arabs and Muslims committed massacre after massacre of Jews throughout Palestine.

Meanwhile, in 1922, the British took 78% of territory that was promised for a Jewish homeland by the World War I victors and the League of Nations and gave it to the Arabs.  The outcome was the heretofore nonexistent Arab nation of Transjordan.  Transjordan later became simply Jordan.

This should be the end of the story, as the land of Palestine was divided (though quite unfairly) and an Arab state was created out of the Jewish homeland.  ”Two states for two peoples.”

Being handed 78% of a territory would satisfy most people — if their true interest were a state of their own.  Instead, over the past seven decades, what the world refuses to see is the desire by the Arabs to obliterate Jewish nationalism, and later the Jewish nation that was its culmination.

Violence and terrorism by the Arabs against Jews continued, and as the Arabs stepped up their pressure on the British and the League of Nations, in an attempt to appease the Arabs, the remaining 22% of the land left for the Jews was divided further.  The Arabs again got the bigger portion.  The Jews accepted the offer and, when the mandate expired, declared independence as the nation of Israel.

The Arabs declared war.

Though they were unable to defeat the Israelis, the Arabs did gain more territory.  The Jordanians expanded into what they renamed “the West Bank” so as to erase the Jewish connection to Judea and Samaria (as those areas were called for millennia), while Egypt grabbed the Gaza Strip.

The Arabs who lived in those areas never cried out for independence or claimed to be oppressed, nor threatened to go to the United Nations.  Why?  Because they were part of, rather than distinct from, the Arab Nation.

Instead, there were incessant terror attacks.  In 1964, the Arabs formed the “Palestine Liberation Organization” — three years before Israel would gain control over the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria (aka “the West Bank”).  So: what were the Arabs bent on liberating, and whom were they liberating it from?  Did they demand a state from Egypt and Jordan?  This is the same PLO that today controls the Palestinian Authority — and has never renounced its appetite for all of what was once dubbed “Palestine.”

It was only after Israel’s miraculous victory in 1967 that “the West Bank” and “Gaza Strip” suddenly had relevance to their Arab inhabitants, and it was then that the Arab propaganda machine revved up.  It eventually inverted much of the world’s perception of the Middle East: transforming tiny Israel from its natural role of “David” against the massive Arab population and lands, to one of “Goliath” against the “stateless,” “oppressed,” and “occupied” “Palestinians.”  It made the notion of changing straw into gold seem like child’s play.  And it worked.

That the Palestinian-Arabs have spilled much innocent blood to get their “cause” out there — murdered Olympics athletes, airline passengers, bus riders, diners — seems to have faded from memory.  But it was these headline-grabbing crimes that got them to the head of the line.

The lesson: crime pays.  Terror works.

So, journalists, activists, and foreign ministers of the world: you still have time to ask yourselves and others these questions; still have time to prevent a great wrong from being done; still have time to save untold lives; still have time to avoid a terrible precedent; still have time to prevent the creation of another terrorist state.  Will you?

Steve Feldman is executive director of the Greater Philadelphia District of the Zionist Organization of America and was a reporter for more than 20 years.