The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Four More Years, Indeed
Mike Ramirez, two-time Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist scores again:
Only I believe Obama is, if anything worse than Carter. Carter was a (relatively mild) Christian Socialist. I think Obama is the real Marxist type, but perhaps without the atheism.
Either way, the next four years ain’t gonna be fun.
Quote of the Day
Five years ago, when I told people that my eventual goal was to build a house out in the middle of nowhere that was totally off the grid, powered by solar panels, a wind turbine, with my own well and gravity fed water tower, I was a psycho right-wing militia type. Now, apparently I’m “environmentally aware” and “Green.” – Larry Correia, I’m not feeling warm fuzzies about this election…
RTWT. Most especially the opening paragraph that was almost the QotD.
I had an interesting lunch with a coworker today, an Obama enthusiast. We’ve traded barbs and had some extended discussions over our differences in political outlook in the past, and he acknowledges that some of my positions are, even to his worldview, not wrong.
He’s an open-minded kinda guy.
So he asked me, “How do we fix it?”
I’ve been thinking about it ever since. And tonight when I got home and checked the blog and the comments, I ran across this:
Kevin, if there is an honest history written of these times, it will agree with your premise that the gubmint school system was the essential mechanism by which the American people were tamed, neutered, and fitted with their slave collars.
Each of us has a sacred obligation not only to resist the coming Night, but to teach the ones behind us the difference between Night and Day.
See this quote from Fjordman here:
I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the system cannot be fixed, and perhaps shouldn’t be fixed. Not only does it have too many enemies, it also has too many internal contradictions. If we define the “system” as mass immigration from alien cultures, globalism, Multiculturalism and suppression of free speech in the name of “tolerance,” then this is going to collapse.
It’s inevitable.
The goal of Western survivalists — and that’s what we are — should not be to “fix the system,” but to be mentally and physically prepared for its collapse, and to develop coherent answers to what went wrong and prepare to implement the necessary remedies when the time comes. We need to seize the window of opportunity, and in order to do so, we need to define clearly what we want to achieve.
Let’s roll. – Cabinboy
So, what’s the answer? What went wrong? Assuming we get the chance, how do we correct the problems for Constitutional Republic of the U.S. V2.0?
I told my colleague the same thing that Fijordman said, the system cannot be fixed. Two hundred-plus years of entropy have eroded the mechanism past the point of repair. The basic design was outstanding, but nothing is ever perfect.
Unfortunately it started off with an inherent flaw, the acceptance of chattel slavery. Granted, the whole thing was a no-go without that compromise, but we’re still suffering the after-effects 219 years later. And, as pragmatic as the Founders were about human nature, I still think they underestimated human corruptibility and the human will to power. Back when I first saw Joss Whedon’s film Serenity, these lines struck me perhaps the hardest:
Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They will swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that.
It faintly echos Robert A. Heinlein from my favorite novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:
Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws – always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.
In fact, I just had an argument discussion with a commenter on that very topic a couple of days ago. And I admit that to some extent I’m on the “stop people from doing as they please” side when I think they’re bats*!t crazy. Sorry. Guilty as charged. But at least I don’t think we can make people better.
But we have to design around entropy.
Back when I wrote Game Over, Man, I quoted Mike from the now-defunct Feces Flinging Monkey on the topic of our legal system:
Personally, I think that the (unfortunate) bottom line is that the future of our freedom ultimately rests with the court’s willingness to periodically reexamine the law. Lawmakers, and law enforcers, will always push the limits, and they will always win occasional gains. If the court is unwilling to revisit these issues over time and correct the damage done, then it’s “game over” no matter what we do. This makes it a little easier for me to accept changes in the law where the cost is low and the benefits are significant. If I can’t count on an occasional review, then the game is already lost.
I then went on to point out to him that no such review really exists. Judges who wish to (in Alex Kozinski’s words) “Constitutionalize their personal preferences” go ahead and do so, leaving honest and honorable judges below or on the same judicial level stuck with bad precedent. And if higher courts refuse to review (and they can), or worse, refuse to overturn (and they have), then cancer sets in, and cutting out that cancer later is painful and difficult, as we may be about to learn once again.
Second, as I noted in When Your Only Tool is a Hammer, and again Saturday in Pressing the “Reset” Button, Part II, the job description of legislator is “lawmaker“. It’s what they do. Rev. Donald Sensing put it quite graphically a while back:
A long time ago Steven Den Beste observed in an essay, “The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to themselves, they will regulate everything they can.” Celebrated author Robert Heinlein wrote, “In any advanced society, ‘civil servant’ is a euphemism for ‘civil master.'” Both quotes are not exact, but they’re pretty close. And they’re both exactly right. Big government is itself apolitical. It cares not whose party is in power. It simply continues to grow. Its nourishment is that the people’s money. Its excrement is more and more regulations and laws. Like the Terminator, “that’s what it does, that’s all it does.”
So for me, Priority Number One is limiting the number of laws, decrees, edicts, ordinances, precepts, proscriptions, regulations, and rules. Priority Number Two is periodic review of all existing laws, decrees, edicts, ordinances, precepts, proscriptions, regulations, and rules. ALL of ’em. That ought to keep the legislatures and courts busy enough to at least help with Priority Number One.
Honestly, that’s as far as I’ve gotten. So what are YOUR ideas?
Hope and Chénge
Since Ché seems to be a theme among Obamessiah supporters, I thought I’d do some posters for them:
No Thanks,
Keep the Chénge
Think that’ll sell?
Heller Observations
Concurring Opinions has an interesting post up, What to Watch For in D.C. v. Heller, a compendium of ten items the author Rick Mike O’Shea thinks we should pay close attention to when the decision is finally handed down. (I concur with his belief that it will be one of if not the last decisions released by the Court this term, on or after June 23.)
To me, the most interesting points raised are, of course, the questions of how the court will address U.S. v. Miller (and I expect both concurring and dissenting opinions to split on this, creating a nightmare of dicta for future courts to wade through), whether the Court will address the level of scrutiny at all (I’m voting for “no”), and – one I hadn’t really considered, the question of standing. As Concurring Opinions notes:
The Supreme Court litigation in D.C. v. Heller has been so rich and important that one forgets about the accompanying cross-petition for certiorari, Parker v. D.C. The Heller litigation originally involved six different plaintiffs, each raising slightly different challenges to D.C.’s gun laws. However, the D.C. Circuit panel dismissed five of the six plaintiffs (all but Dick Heller) under an unusual standing doctrine that the circuit had adopted in an earlier Second Amendment case. This is why the case was recaptioned from Parker to Heller when it reached the Supreme Court.
When the District of Columbia petitioned the Supreme Court for review of the D.C. Circuit’s opinion granting judgment in Mr. Heller’s favor, plaintiffs’ counsel cross-petitioned for review of the denial of standing to the other five plaintiffs. The cert petition on the standing issue, still captioned Parker, has been waiting in limbo on the Justices’ desks for seven months, while the Court has granted cert in Heller and held briefing and argument on the Second Amendment merits issue.
I predict that if the Court holds for Mr. Heller on the Second Amendment issue, it will consider this to be quite enough work for one day without also wading into the tangled complexities of standing doctrine. It will “GVR” (summarily Grant, Vacate, and Remand) the Parker part of the litigation back to the D.C. Circuit, which will have to reconsider the question of Second Amendment standing for the other plaintiffs, in light of what the Court says about the nature of the Second Amendment right in Heller.
One thing about cases like this that has always irritated me is the standing argument – that unless you can show that the law has directly adversely affected you, you have no standing to sue. That was the grounds on which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided Hickman v. Block – they said the Second Amendment didn’t have anything to do with an individual right to arms, therefore the plaintiff had no standing to sue. In his dissent to the denial to re-hear Silveira v. Lockyer en banc, judge Kleinfeld wrote:
The panel opinion holds that the Second Amendment “imposes no limitation on California’s [or any other state’s] ability to enact legislation regulating or prohibiting the possession or use of firearms” and “does not confer an individual right to own or possess arms.” The panel opinion erases the Second Amendment from our Constitution as effectively as it can, by holding that no individual even has standing to challenge any law restricting firearm possession or use. This means that an individual cannot even get a case into court to raise the question.
H. Wayne Fincher decided that the only way he could challenge the Federal machinegun ban was to get arrested for violating it. There’s something wrong with a system that essentially demands that you break a law before you can challenge its Constitutionality.
But Mr. O’Shea is right – I don’t expect SCOTUS to touch that ball of worms.
George Bush Hates White People
Ravenwood makes a very valid observation.
Apparently the news coverage of the Tucson Unified School District’s “Ethnic Studies” program has resulted in some action. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne released this letter this morning:
I. The TUSD Ethnic Studies Program Should be Terminated.
The citizens of Tucson, of all mainstream political ideologies, would call for the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District’s ethnic studies program if they knew what was happening there. I believe this is true of citizens of all mainstream political ideologies. The purpose of this letter is to bring these facts out into the open. The decision of whether or not to eliminate this program will rest with the citizens of Tucson through their elected school board.
II. Philosophy.
First, let’s spend a minute on underlying philosophy. I believe people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups. What is important about people is what they know, what they can do, their ability to appreciate beauty, their character, and not what race into which they are born. They are entitled to be treated that way. It is fundamentally wrong to divide students up according to their racial group, and teach them separately.
In the summer of 1963, having recently graduated from high school, I participated in the civil rights march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King stated that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That has been a fundamental principal for me my entire life, and Ethnic Studies teaches the opposite.
III. Personal Observations.
I personally observed this at the Tucson Magnet School. My Deputy, Margaret Garcia Dugan, who is Latina and Republican, came to refute the allegation made earlier to the student body, that “Republicans hate Latinos”. Her speech was non-partisan and professional, urging students to think for themselves, and avoid stereotypes. Yet, a small group of La Raza Studies students treated her rudely, and when the principal asked them to sit down and listen, they defiantly walked out. By contrast, teenage Republicans listened politely when Delores Huerta told the entire student body that “Republicans hate Latinos.”
In hundreds of visits to schools, I’ve never seen students act rudely and in defiance of authority, except in this one unhappy case. I believe the students did not learn this rudeness at home, but from their Raza teachers. The students are being ill served. Success as adults requires the ability to deal with disagreements in a civil manner. Also, they are creating a hostile atmosphere in the school for the other students, who were not born into their “race”.
Hector Ayala was born in Mexico, and is an excellent English teacher at Cholla High School in TUSD. He reports that the Director of Raza Studies accused him of being the “white man’s agent,” and that when this director was a teacher, he taught a separatist political agenda, and his students told Hector that they were taught in Raza Studies to “not fall for the white man’s traps.”
IV. Textbooks.
As I will describe, the evidence is overwhelming that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism that the citizens of Tucson should no longer tolerate.
The very name “Raza” is translated as “the race.” On the TUSD website, it says the basic text for this program is “the pedagogy of oppression.” Most of these students’ parents and grandparents came to this country, legally, because this is the land of opportunity. They trust the public schools with their children. Those students should be taught that this is the land of opportunity, and that if they work hard they can achieve their goals. They should not be taught that they are oppressed.
One of the textbooks is Occupied America (5th ed.). One of the leaders it talks about is described as follows: “José Angel Gutiérrez was one of the leaders, and he expressed the frustrations of the MAYO generation. His contribution was indispensable; it influenced Chicanos throughout the country.”
One of Gutiérrez’s speeches is described as follows:
We are fed up. We are going to move to do away with the injustices to the Chicano and if the ‘gringo’ doesn’t get out of our way, we will stampede over him.” Gutiérrez attacked the gringo establishment angrily at a press conference and called upon Chicanos to ‘kill the gringo,’ which meant to end white control over Mexicans.
The textbook’s translation of what Gutiérrez meant contradicts his clear language. In describing the atmosphere in Texas where Gutiérrez spoke, the textbook states: “Texans had never come to grips with the fact that Mexicans had won at the Alamo.” (P. 323.) It is certainly strange to find a textbook in an American public school taking the Mexican side of the battle at the Alamo.
Another textbook is The Mexican American Heritage (2nd ed.). One of the chapters is “The Loss of Aztlan.” Aztlan refers to the states taken from Mexico in 1848: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Colorado. This chapter states: “Apparently the U.S. is having as little success in keeping the Mexicans out of Aztlan as Mexico had when they tried to keep the North Americans out of Texas in 1830.” (P. 107.) In other words, books paid for by American taxpayers used in American public schools are gloating over the difficulty we are having in controlling the border. This page goes on to state: “…the Latinos are now realizing that the power to control Aztlan may once again be in their hands.”
V. M.E.Ch.A.
The extracurricular activity at TUSD related to ethnic studies is called M.E.Ch.A. When I was at Tucson high school, the librarian was wearing a M.E.Ch.A. tee shirt. If you Google M.E.Ch.A., you will find its goals and constitution. In the introductory paragraph, M.E.Ch.A. states:
We are Chicanos and Chicanas of Aztlán reclaiming the land of out [sic] birth (Chicano and Chicana Nation); 2) Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture…
In section 2 of the M.E.Ch.A. Constitution it states:
Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.
VI. Teaching the Wrong Things About Literature.
When I began speaking out publicly against ethnic studies, one of the ethnic studies teachers had his students write me letters. One of these letters states: “All that the English classes teach is mainly about some dead white people.” I believe schools should teach the students to judge literature by its content and not by the race or gender of the author.
VII. MacEachern Investigative Reports.
After my confrontation with TUSD over ethnic studies had begun, Doug MacEachern, a columnist for the Arizona Republic, ran a series of investigative reports on ethnic studies. This is the kind of thing that the Star and the Citizen should do, but thus far only the Republic has done. One of his sources was a former TUSD teacher named John Ward, who despite his name, is Hispanic. Ward reports:
But the whole inference and tone was anger. (They taught students) that the United States was and still is a fundamentally racist country to those of Mexican-American kids.
Individuals in this (Ethnic Studies) department are vehemently anti-Western culture. They are vehemently opposed to the United States and its power. They are telling students they are victims and that they should be angry and rise up.
. . .By the time I left that class, I saw a change (in the students), he said. An angry tone. They taught them not to trust their teachers, not to trust the system. They taught them the system wasn’t worth trusting.
Because Ward no longer worked at TUSD, he was willing to be quoted. Many current TUSD employees have talked to me about the horrors of what they have witnessed in the Ethnic Studies Program, and the almost totalitarian climate of fear at TUSD which keeps them from being quoted. Here is what MacEachern found:
In the past several weeks, messages have filtered out from teachers and other TUSD employees (some directed to Horne; others who have contacted me, following two previous columns on this subject) about what an officially recognized resentment-based program does to a high school.
In a word, it creates fear.
Teachers and counselors are being called before their school principals and even the district school board and accused of being racists. And with a cadre of self-acknowledged ‘progressive’ political activists in the ethnic-studies department on the hunt, the race transgressors are multiplying.
The director of the TUSD Ethnic Studies Department, who keeps a portrait of Ché Guevara on the wall of his classroom, spoke to MacEachern: “Our teachers are left-leaning. They are progressives. They’re going to have things (in their courses) that conservatives are not going to like, he told me.”
VII. TUSD’s Intimidation of Its Employees.
Ward eventually wrote his own column. He describes how the TUSD administration intimidated him by removing him from his class, and calling him a “racist,” even though he himself is Hispanic. This tactic, he writes:
…is fundamentally anti-intellectual because it immediately stops debate by threatening to destroy the reputation of those who would provide counter arguments.
Unfortunately, I am not the only one to have been intimidated by the Raza studies department in this way.
VIII. The Time for Action Is Now.
TUSD can intimidate its employees. But it cannot intimidate you, the citizens. You are in a comfortable position. You can speak out. If the TUSD board eliminates ethnic studies, it will save $2 million a year of your money, the cost of ethnic studies administrators and consultants alone. That is your money. The school board represents you. I can use my pulpit to bring out the facts, but only you can bring about change.
Sincerely,
Tom Horne
Yup. “Progressives” who like Ché teaching that the white man victimizes everyone else, that Western Civilization is just the history of “dead white people”.
And tax dollars pay for it all.
Marvelous.
And how long has this been going on?
Which Judge Would YOU Prefer to Sit Before?
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals:
Or Lourain County, Ohio, Court of Common Pleas Judge James Burge:
Well?
(h/t: Rachel Lucas for the second one. Read her post, “Hope and Che.” Snort!)
“Judicial Activism” Defined
Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.
The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. – Antonin Scalia, Boumediene v. Bush, (dissenting)
What in the world is a ‘moderate interpretation’ of the text? Halfway between what it really says and what you want it to say?
It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution.
What ‘we the people’ want most of all is someone who will agree with us as to what the evolving constitution says.
We are free at last, free at last. There is no respect in which we are chained or bound by the text of the Constitution. All it takes is five hands. – Antonin Scalia, excerpts from a speech quoted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 3/10/04
Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. – Clarence Thomas (dissenting) Kelo v New London (2005)
I keep saying that “Claire Wolfe Time” passed us by a long time ago.
Our beloved country, freedom’s last redoubt, civilization’s only power capable of resisting the advancing tide of barbarism, keep of Castle Earth, is seriously contemplating elevating to the presidency Barack Obama, an effete academic weakling, a messianic soothsayer, perfervid followers in tow, who believes America’s collective soul is broken and that He has been called to mend it, a caricature Euro Statist whose voting record and public utterances reflect passionate belief in all the discredited far leftist critiques of America (and their attendant fixes), a dreamy naïf with a permanently adolescent world view born of lifelong refusal to work in the real world, a thinly disguised leftist revolutionary who for decades eagerly immersed himself in a vile crowd of crypto-Marxists, quislings, racists, domestic terrorists, and antisemites, and who now simply says, calm as you please, he never really shared their views, a twenty-eight carat tyro whose resume of accomplishments would fit neatly on the back of a Visa card, a man whose scary wife (whom the candidate himself seems to fear) dislikes the country that has showered her with great good fortune. – James Edmund Pennington at American Thinker from “Obama and his Next Goal”
Touché, sir. Touché! If there were any justice in this world, that would leave a livid mark.
Via Van der Leun