Issues
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (i.e., the totalitarian Marxist monarchy on the northern half of the Korean peninsula) has demanded, in a statement issued on the 58th year anniversary of the armistice in the Korean War, that the United States sign a peace treaty. Kim Kye Gwan, Vice Foreign Minister of the slave state, said that a treaty could go a long way toward ending the deadlock in six-power talks, which include our nation, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia.
The military intervention against communist aggression in the Korean War was not the action of the United States. The United Nations Security Council determined that this was a self-defense action by the Republic of Korean, and so authorized military force to resist that aggression. This was only possible because the Soviet Union at the time was boycotting the United Nations in protest against the UN's insistence on recognizing government of the Republic of China, instead of the People’s Republic of China (Communist China, which murdered over 70 million people and which, at the time, was beginning its horrific genocide of the Tibetan people, a crime known to anyone who followed world events, but protested only by “crazy” anti-communists like Dr Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.)
“I taught the Constitution for 10 years. I believe in the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.”
— Barack Obama, May 18, 2008, at a campaign stop in Billings, Montana
President Obama began his presidency with great promise, publicly pledging to end many of the Bush administration attacks against the U.S. Constitution. Obama had pledged during his initial election campaign to end signing statements as a back-door method of legislating (usurping the legislative branch’s powers under Article I of the Constitution), warrantless surveillance (violating the Fourth Amendment), detention without habeas corpus (Fifth Amendment) or trial (Sixth Amendment), torture (Eighth Amendment), and excessive executive branch secrecy under the “executive privilege” and “state secrets” claims, and pledged that he would not engage in offensive wars without the approval of Congress (Congress’ power under Article I, Section 8).
In his July 27th column, Clarence Page mentioned The John Birch Society right alongside the Ku Klux Klan. This is a very unjust type of smear. By merely mentioning the KKK with the Society, many readers will conclude that the two organizations are similar. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The New American has published its first “Freedom Index” for the new (112th) Congress. The index, published four times each two-year congressional term, rates all members of the House and Senate based on their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.
Here's what President Barack Obama said about our high rate of unemployment in an interview with NBC's Ann Curry: "The other thing that happened, though — and this goes to the point you were just making — is there are some structural issues with our economy, where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers," adding that "you see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM; you don't go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate." The president's statements suggest that he sees labor-saving technological innovation as a contributor to today's high rate of unemployment. That's unmitigated nonsense. Let's see whether technological innovation causes unemployment.
In 1790, farmers were 90 percent, out of a population of nearly 3 million, of the U.S. labor force. By 1900, only about 41 percent of our labor force was employed in agriculture. By 2008, fewer than 3 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. Through labor-saving technological advances and machinery, our farmers are the world's most productive. As a result, Americans are better off.
As the symbolic World Trade Center Cross was moved to its permanent display site at New York’s 9/11 Memorial Museum on July 23, an atheist group filed a lawsuit to have the inspirational symbol banned from the museum. Discovered by construction worker Frank Silecchia in the rubble of the Trade Center two days after the attack, “the 17-foot-tall cross became an icon of hope and comfort throughout the recovery effort in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” noted a museum press release. Joe Daniels, 9/11 Memorial president, told CNN News that the cross is “an important part of our commitment to bring back the authentic physical reminders that tell the history of 9/11 in a way nothing else could.”
In a service prior to the installation of the massive cross in the museum, Father Brian Jordan, a Franciscan monk who ministered to workers and blessed human remains at the site of the attack, blessed the symbolic relic, noting that after 10 years of shuffling to different sites, “the World Trade Center Cross has finally found its home.” Added Father Jordan, “I am grateful to the leadership of the Memorial Museum for their sensitivity, compassion, and professionalism. I urge all those who believe in the consolation and power of the Cross to visit it in its future home in the Memorial Museum.”
The official body count from the Norway terror attack was still changing even early this week. Some of the victims had not even been located yet — let alone buried.
But across the world, “experts,” journalists, politicians — just about everybody with an opinion, really — was already either on offense or defense. The media-driven witch-hunt began almost instantly.
Israel haters and Palestinian activists are trying to pin the killer on Israel. Anti-Christian zealots are screeching about the “dangers” of Christianity. Leftist political opportunists are working fiendishly to link the terror to right-of-center parties and activists across Europe. And critics of Freemasonry are hyping his membership in Oslo’s Masonic lodge.
In her essay "For the New Intellectual," Ayn Rand warned that the United States would go bankrupt — financially and morally — if we allowed intellectuals and political leaders to define commercial pursuits as inferior to noncommercial pursuits, if we permitted the productive and the creators of wealth to be defined as looters, and if we refused to see the unrestricted growth of government power as a threat to freedom. To avoid national bankruptcy, Rand called for an intellectual defense of business and capitalism, a defense of productivity, success, individualism and wealth. She said we are fed instead a steady diet of "the whining injunctions that we must love everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except greatness."
Said Austrian economist and social philosopher Ludwig von Mises, "Under capitalism, the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people."
In what critics say is political correctness run amok, the Houston National Cemetery has banned Christian prayer at the funerals of military veterans. U.S. Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) is now demanding a congressional investigation of the cemetery after he went undercover and discovered the ban is still enforced at funerals there. On July 8 Culberson attended undercover a burial at the cemetery, where he witnessed members of the honor guard from the Veterans of Foreign Wars being prohibited from making any references to God. Culberson explained,
The Obama administration had told the nation and me they were not interfering with the prayer said over the graves of veterans. And I went undercover to personally verify that claim.
Culberson contends the effort is part of a larger agenda:
Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park has made some unwanted headlines after a lesbian visiting the park with her partner was asked to turn her T-shirt, which included the message “Marriage Is So Gay,” inside out to avoid offending other park patrons. In early July, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, same-sex partners Olivier Odom and Jennifer Tipton visited the park with some friends, including the friends’ eight- and five-year-old daughters. Odom wore a shirt with a message that was “intended to be a statement supporting same-sex marriage,” reported the paper. As the group entered the park, an employee taking tickets told Odom that she would have to turn her shirt inside out. “I questioned why,” she recalled to the Sentinel, “and he told me because it was a family park.”
While Odom complied, she and Tipton later contacted “the recently formed Campaign for Southern Equality, a support group for gay, lesbian and transgender people who are the subject of discrimination, harassment or violence,” the Sentinel reported. “The campaign’s Jasmine Beach-Ferrera suggested the couple write a letter to [Dollywood] as a first step.”
