The Supreme Court has declined to take up the appeal of a lower court ruling that bans crosses placed along Utah’s highways in honor of fallen state troopers. The justices ruled 8-1 on October 31 not to hear the appeal filed by Utah and a state troopers’ group that had wanted the court to overturn the decision and give more leeway on the display of religious symbols on public lands.
Reported the Associated Press: “Since 1998, the private Utah Highway Patrol Association has paid for and erected more than a dozen memorial crosses, most of them on state land. Texas-based American Atheists Inc. and three of its Utah members sued the state in 2005.” Two years later a federal court upheld the constitutionality of the crosses, but that ruling was later overturned by the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver.
In April the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) took up the case on behalf of Utah and the Highway Patrol Association, asking the Supreme Court to review the case. ADF Senior Counsel Byron Babione expressed his disappointment in the High Court’s refusal. “One atheist group’s agenda shouldn’t diminish the sacrifice made by highway patrol officers and their families,” he said. “Thirteen heroic men fell, leaving their survivors to mourn and memorialize their loved ones, and now those widows, children, parents, colleagues, and many more must suffer through losing the very memorials that honored those heroes. Justice is not well served when unhappy atheists can use the law to mow down memorial crosses and renew the suffering for the survivors.”
This brilliant book was published shortly before the Occupy Wall Street mobs began their infantile vigils against capitalism, the banks, and anything remotely conservative. Which proves that Ann Coulter understands the liberal left better than practically anyone else in America. Her latest book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, provides incredible, bone-chilling insights into the mind of the liberal. Everything she says in the book about the psychology of mobs applies one hundred percent to what we are now witnessing in cities all across America. She describes the OWS mobs to a tee when she writes:
A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.
Coulter was inspired by a book published in 1895 by Gustave Le Bon, a French physician, scientist, and social psychologist, with the intriguing title, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. In it, Le Bon analyzed the mind of the mob and its potentially lethal behavior. Coulter writes: “Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used his book to learn how to incite a mob. Our liberals could have been Le Bon’s study subjects.” It is also quite possible that George Soros also read Le Bon’s book, for it is obvious that he is the invisible hand behind all of the efforts to use the mob in the campaign to reelect Barack Obama. Coulter writes:
When word surfaced from Politico last Sunday of sexual harassment allegations against presidential contender Herman Cain dating back to the late 1990s, questions naturally arose as to the source of the leak. The fingers have pointed in a number of directions, most notably to two of Cain’s Republican rivals, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.
And in the midst of questions of who is responsible for the breaking story, another female National Restaurant Association (NRA) employee has levied allegations against Cain, as have others not employed by the association.
On Sunday, Politico broke the story that during Cain’s 1996-99 stint as president and CEO of the NRA, he had been accused of sexual harassment by two different women. According to Politico, the two women ultimately left the NRA with financial settlements and signed agreements not to disclose any details regarding their departure. Politico reported today that one of the women received $45,000 (Cain had said she received three to six months of pay), while the other woman received $35,000 — equivalent to a year's worth of pay — according to a New York Times story earlier this week.
Cain’s campaign chief of staff Mark Block flatly accused Perry’s campaign of being the source behind the leaked information. In a town-hall meeting Wednesday night, Cain stated, “We’ve been able to trace it back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up in order to discredit me, my campaign, and slow us down.”
Students at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) evidently learned the hard way that speech is no longer free, at least not on their campus. After receiving permission from the school, on September 22 four students groups — SHSU Lovers of Liberty, Bearkat Democrats, Sam Houston Democratic Socialists, and College Republicans — had erected a "free speech wall" in protest against SHSU’s new social media policy.
The four groups also garnered 130 signatures on a petition indicating that “they never want the Social Media Policy and Procedures Manual” to go into effect. According to the school's policy, the letters “SHSU” and all similar terms have been trademarked, and therefore any student organizations seeking to use those terms in their online identities must join a speech-restrictive “Official Community,” which gives the university the authority to approve any member group’s “official profile images/avatars” and to edit and/or delete its social media content. If a group refuses to adhere to this policy, it may not use the terms trademarked by SHSU.
On this wall students expressed a vast array of philosophies and dispositions — ranging from “Legalize Weed” and “My boyfriend is a liar!” to “If you make less than $200,000, Republicans don’t care about you." Only when Professor Joe Kirk discovered that “F*** Obama” had been written on the wall, did he take action against any of those posting messages.
I have noticed that there are some on the libertarian right who appear to consider themselves kindred spirits with those who have spent the last few weeks “occupying” Wall Street and other cities throughout America and beyond. This is disheartening, for what it reveals is that those who should presumably know better than all others how best to nurture and strengthen liberty are, in actuality, as ignorant of its true character as its greatest enemies.
Note, I do not suggest that the libertarian’s professions of love for liberty are insincere. Quite the contrary, for it is most likely his fanaticism for his beloved that imperils the latter. It is the libertarian’s zeal for liberty that corrupts his intellect. Like the hyper-jealous husband whose obsession with his wife renders him either forgetful of or oblivious to the real nature of marital love, so the libertarian is similarly forgetful of or oblivious to the real nature of liberty.
Bear in mind that the libertarianism that is the object of my critique is not the only school of thought so-called. “Libertarianism” is a term invariably associated today with a particular cast of mind. But there is another, older political philosophic orientation that, though of a fundamentally different kind, is no less deserving of the name.
As GOP presidential contender Herman Cain is contending with allegations of sexual harassment, some critics assert there are more pressing items for which Cain should answer, most notably, his foreign policy and his views on the engagement of war. Appearing on Fox News’ most popular program, The O’Reilly Factor, Cain indicated that he sees no issue with entering into a military confrontation with Iran.
A District Court judge in Goffstown, New Hampshire has dismissed a criminal charge against a Weare man for recording his conversation with a police officer during a traffic stop. Judge Edward Tenney followed a recent First Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Boston in Glik v. Cunniffe in ruling that William Alleman was within his constitutional rights when making an audio recording of Weare Police Officer Brandon Montplaisir during the traffic stop on July 10, 2010.
The recording was made via cellphone when Alleman called Porcupine 911, an answering service for libertarian activists, as the officer approached Alleman's car. Though the charge was not filed until the following February, Alleman's attorney, Seth Hipple, told The New American on Thursday that the officer was aware at the time he was being recorded and told Alleman that it was illegal to record him without his permission. Alleman insisted he had a right to do so, and Judge Tenney agreed, citing the First Circuit's ruling in the Glik case.
“Glik leaves no doubt that engaging in an audio recording of a police officer in the course of his official duties in a public place is protected speech under the First Amendment,” Tenney wrote. The judge also found that Alleman had in no way interfered with the officer in the performance of his duties.
“The fact that Officer Montplaisir may have been unwilling or unhappy being recorded does not make a lawful exercise of the defendant's First Amendment rights a crime,” Tenney wrote.
A Federal Communications Commission ruling on closed captioning of television programs could jeopardize the continued broadcast of shows produced by “some 300 small- to medium-sized churches,” according to Politico. At issue is whether or not these programs should be exempt from FCC requirements for closed captioning. “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 required the FCC to establish a suitable timetable by which television broadcasters and equipment manufacturers would be required to provide closed captioning,” explains the Christian Post. “The FCC required broadcasters to fulfill the closed captioning requirement by January 2006,” the report adds. However, the agency exempted certain religious broadcasters from the requirement under the so-called “Anglers Order,” named for the ministry, Anglers for Christ, that had requested the exemption.
When news broke of two women making sexual harassment allegations against GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain, the women's identities were kept confidential to protect their privacy. Days after the story broke, however, one of Cain’s accusers — frustrated because of Cain's constant denials of such inappropriate conduct — indicated that she wanted to come forward and tell her side of the story. Yesterday evening, however, the Washington Post reported, “Joel P. Bennett, a lawyer representing one of two women who made the claims against Cain, said Tuesday that his client is barred from publicly relating her side because of a non-disclosure agreement she signed upon leaving the National Restaurant Association, where Cain served as president from 1996 through 1999.”
On Sunday, Politico reported that during Cain’s tenure as president and CEO of the restaurant association, two women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them “angry and uncomfortable.” Reports indicate that the women ultimately left the restaurant association after they signed non-disclosure agreements and were given financial payouts to settle the matter.
The story almost immediately went viral, prompting often-inconsistent answers from the Cain campaign. Cain attempted to explain his inconsistencies by asserting that because a significant amount of time had passed, he could not remember the details of the charges lodged against him. “When I was initially hit with this … I didn’t recall it right away,” he told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham this morning, adding that he was “not changing the story but trying to fill as many details as I could possibly recall.”
Congress should end federal aid to education. This aid has not improved reading scores.
