Today's Topics

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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World War II veteran, 88, 'who was randomly beaten to death by two teens died because he tried to defend himself' By James Nye

·        Delbert Belton was set upon in the parking lot of the Eagles Lodge in Spokane, Washington on Wednesday night

·        He died on Thursday morning in hospital after being admitted with serious head injuries

·        Kenan Adams Kinard, 16, was arrested on Monday morning for the murder after a day's long manhunt

·        Demetrius Glenn, 16, was charged with first degree murder with bail set at $2 million

Senseless: Delbert Belton an 88-year-old veteran of World War II was beaten to death outside the Eagles Lodge in Spokane, and police have arrested two teens in connection with the murder

The 88-year-old World War II veteran who was randomly beaten to death Wednesday likely died because he tried to fend off his attackers. Two teenage boys are charged in the bloody beating of Delbert Belton outside a Spokane, Washington ice skating rink and investigators are now suggesting the soldier—who took a bullet in the Battle of Okinawa—tried to stop the apparent robbery.

Police say that enraged the teens and turned their petty theft into full-blown murder as they continued to beat him into submission with ‘big, heavy flashlights.’ ‘Our information is that the individual fought back and that may have made this, you know, a worse situation,’ said Spokane Police Chief Frank Straub in a Monday press conference.  Straub was quick to maintain Belton’s innocence in the matter. ‘I'm not being critical of Mr. Belton,’ he clarified. ‘We certainly encourage individuals to fight back, and he should have. But it shouldn't have happened to begin with.’ The second fugitive teenager wanted in connection with the brutal murder was arrested morning after a four-day man-hunt. Kenan Adams-Kinard, 16, was the second teen to be arrested for the murder of Belton. The teen was arrested on a 1st degree robbery and 1st degree murder warrant and was brought into custody by Spokane police to join fellow suspect, 16-year-old Demetrius Glenn, who was arrested on Thursday.

Glenn's bail was set at an eyebrow-raising $2 million.  District Judge Richard Leland, presiding over a packed courtroom, said the brutality of the attack and vulnerability of the victim make the high bail proper.

Several other people found with Adams-Kinard have been arrested for rendering criminal assistance to the teen during his time in hiding.

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MLK: ‘Whatever We Do, We Must Keep God in the Forefront’ by Terry Jeffery

Americans today are celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech," which he delivered on Aug. 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. That speech echoed themes King, a Baptist clergyman, had been sounding since he had emerged as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement eight years before. On Dec. 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person, King spoke in Montgomery’s Holt Baptist Church at the end of the first day of a boycott he had been elected to lead against Montgomery’s bus system.

King stressed that the boycott movement’s foundation was the Christian religion. “Whatever we do, we must keep God in the forefront,” he said. “I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people,” he said. “We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. That’s all.”  He also expressed his conviction that God would judge nations by whether they obeyed Him or not. “He’s also the God that stands up before the nations and said: ‘Be still and know that I’m God, that if you don’t obey me I will break the backbone of your power and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships,” said King.

Additionally, he stressed the movement’s reverence for the Constitution and the free system of government that made peaceful protest possible. “There will be nobody amid, among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation,” said King.

“Certainly, certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults,” said King. “This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation we couldn’t do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” King said that if the Montgomery police were going to unjustly arrest anyone for merely sitting on a bus, he was happy that the person they arrested was Rosa Parks. This, he said, was because of Parks’s integrity, her character and her Christian faith.  “Mrs. Rosa Parks is a fine person. And, since it had to happen, I’m happy that it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity,” said King. “Nobody can doubt the height of her character nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus. And I’m happy since it had to happen, it happened to a person that nobody can call a disturbing factor in the community. Mrs. Parks is a fine Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there. And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.”

Finally, King expressed his conviction that God would judge nations by whether they obeyed Him or not. “The Almighty God himself is not the only, not the, not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, ‘I love you, Israel,’” said King. “He’s also the God that stands up before the nations and said: ‘Be still and know that I’m God, that if you don’t obey me I will break the backbone of your power and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships.’ King called for those joining the movement to boycott Montgomery’s busses to “be Christian in all our actions.”

“May I say to you my friends, as I come to a close, and just giving some idea of why we are assembled here, that we must keep—and I want to stress this, in all of our doings, in all of our deliberations here this evening and all of the week and while—whatever we do, we must keep God in the forefront,” said King. “Let us be Christian in all of our actions.”

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Leading From Behind in Syria

Turning another page in his Lead-From-Behind World Tour, President Seven-Iron dithered enough that he perfected U.S. security strategy regarding Syria: Wait so long that no matter what side we help, we're on the wrong side. Case in point: Intervening on Bashar al-Assad's behalf seats us next to a chemical-weapon-using mass murder and madman; on the opposite side, we're with a coalition of people who hate and want to destroy the U.S.  The good news is that Mr. Nobel-Peace-Prize-Laureate will no doubt reach deep into his usual bag of tricks -- ignoring the Constitution, abusing his executive authority and failing to run any of his plan by Congress even for tacit approval -- to drag America into yet another war.

Expect a predictable, Clinton-esque fusillade of cruise missiles, but no actual boots on the ground to ensure no more chemical weapons are used -- it's too close to mid-term elections for that. Preparation for such attacks is already underway, notwithstanding the fact that despite the ill-advised artificial "red lines" drawn in the sand by our Dear Leader, no vital U.S. interests -- even with confirmed chemical attacks -- are at stake. Yes, Syria is a hotbed; yes, it could potentially become a But none of that yet justifies one boot on the ground, one missile in the air, or one U.S. service member in harm's way.threat to vital U.S. security interests; and yes, we want it to end.  A few more nagging questions: What, exactly, would be the objective if we did use military force, how would we know when we had achieved it, and how would we get out once we got into such a mess?  Finally, a parting thought from Joe Biden: "[T]he president has no constitutional authority ... to take this nation to war ... unless we're attacked or unless there is proof we are about to be attacked. And if he does, I would move to impeach him." Of course, that was 2007...

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Newly Discovered ‘Orphan Genes’ Defy Evolution  by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.

An important category of “rogue” genetic data that utterly defies evolutionary predictions is the common occurrence of taxonomically restricted genes, otherwise known as “orphan genes.” These are now being discovered in the sequencing of all genomes.  Many multi-cellular animals share similar sets of genes that produce proteins that perform related biochemical functions. This is a common feature of purposefully engineered systems. In addition to these standard genes, all organisms thus far tested also have unique sets of genes specific to that type of creature.  The authors of a recent review paper, published in Trends in Genetics, on the subject of orphan genes stated, “Comparative genome analyses indicate that every taxonomic group so far studied contains 10–20% of genes that lack recognizable homologs [similar counterparts] in other species." These orphan genes are also being found to be particularly important for specific biological adaptations that correspond with ecological niches in relation to the creature’s interaction with its environment. The problem for the evolutionary model of animal origins is the fact that these DNA sequences appear suddenly and fully functional without any trace of evolutionary ancestry (DNA sequence precursors in other seemingly related organisms). And several new studies in both fish and insect genomes are now highlighting this important fact…..

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The audacity of lawbreaking Obama by George Will
Barack Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and redlines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act, he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.” He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law ... it looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”

Journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: Brevity. Because there is no such authority.

Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy: He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.”

When was it “normal”? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine years. Even if he understood “normal” political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the “environment” is abnormal.

Neither does the Constitution confer on presidents the power to rewrite laws if they decide the change is a “tweak” not involving the law’s “essence.” Anyway, the employer mandate is essential to the ACA.

Twenty-three days before his news conference, the House voted 264-161, with 35 Democrats in the majority, for the rule of law – for, that is, the Authority for Mandate Delay Act. It would have done lawfully what Obama did by ukase. He threatened to veto this use of legislation to alter a law. The White House called it “unnecessary,” presumably because he has an uncircumscribed “executive authority” to alter laws.

In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: “So, what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations ... where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation ... and do something illegal?”

Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Frost: “By definition.”  Nixon: “Exactly, exactly.”

Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.

Obama should be embarrassed that, by ignoring the legal requirement concerning the employer mandate, he has validated critics who say the ACA cannot be implemented as written. What does not embarrass him is his complicity in effectively rewriting the ACA for the financial advantage of self-dealing members of Congress and their staffs.

The ACA says members of Congress (annual salaries: $174,000) and their staffs (thousands making more than $100,000) must participate in the law’s insurance exchanges. It does not say that when this change goes into effect, the current federal subsidy for this affluent cohort – up to 75 percent of the premium’s cost, perhaps $10,000 for families – should be unchanged.

When Congress awakened to what it enacted, it panicked: This could cause a flight of talent, making Congress less wonderful. So Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management, which has no power to do this, to authorize for the political class special subsidies unavailable for less privileged and less affluent citizens.   If the president does it, it’s legal? “Exactly, exactly.”

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"It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country." --Noah Webster, On Education of Youth in America, 1790

"The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets."

–James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787

"Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice." –Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation, 1792

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." –Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, 1766

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