The Michael Flynn Faux Scandal

The Michael Flynn Faux Scandal

By Michael Moore

I'm reading the news and listening to the radio and I am dumbfounded at how poorly the republicans are dealing with the Michael Flynn "scandal".

First, there is no scandal. Flynn allegedly violated the Logan Act of 1799. No, that's not a typo - it's a law under which no person has ever been prosecuted in 220 years. It prohibits private citizens from interfering in foreign policy - you know, like Jesse Jackson did when he went to Syria, Michael Moore did when he went to Cuba, and Bill Richardson and Jimmy Carter did when they went to North Korea. That kind of behavior is against the law. An incoming National Security Advisor would clearly not fall into that kind of category.

It's not like he sold weapons to the Mexican drug cartels or left for Americans to die on foreign soil. If he had talked about the sanctions in a speech or interview, would that also violate the Logan Act? The same information could have been imparted publicly rather than personally and somehow that is a violation of the law?

The real problem is that Flynn lied. He flat out lied and made the Vice President look like a bumbling fool. If I was Mike Pence I would have told Trump "It's him or me because I can never trust the man again."

Now the Senate republicans are piling on - calling for an investigation. Rush Limbaugh is saying "The democrats lied and got away with it, so republicans should be allowed to lie, too."

Um, no.

If republicans want to win this debate, they need to get off defense and go on offense.

Sean Spicer should be standing at the podium right now saying: "For 8 years there has been no accountability in the White House. That ended when Donald Trump took office. While the press and the democrat party have sat by for nearly a decade and ignored every lie that has been uttered in this room, this administration will be different. We will hold the members of this administration accountable for their actions and require above all else that they be honest with the American people."

And every question after that you ask the reporter "Did you ask any questions like that about Lois Lerhner when Jay Carney was standing up here? Why not?

Take your pick which scandalous liar he targets - he could go through every question all day long and never repeat a name. The point would be made.

The Human Cost of Socialism in Power

The Human Cost of Socialism in Power

By Richard Ebeling

The attempt to establish a comprehensive socialist system in many parts of the world over the last one hundred years has been one of the cruelest and most brutal episodes in human history.

Some historians have estimated that as many as 200 million people may have died as part of the dream of creating a collectivist "Paradise on Earth." Making a better "new world" was taken to mean the extermination, the liquidation, the mass murder of all those that the socialist revolutionary leaders declared to be "class enemies," including the families, the children of "enemies of the people."

The Bloody Road to Making a New Socialist Man

We will soon be marking the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (November 1917) under the Marxist revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin. In Soviet Russia, alone, it has been calculated by Russian and Western historians who had limited access to the secret archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB (the Soviet secret police) in the 1990s that around 68 million innocent, unarmed men, women and children were killed over the nearly 75 years of communist rule in the Soviet Union.

The communist revolutionaries in Russia proudly declared their goal to be destruction and death to everything that existed before the revolution, so as to have a clean slate upon which to mold the new socialist man.

The evil of the Soviet system is that it was not cruelty for cruelty's sake. Rather it was cruelty for a purpose – to make a new Soviet man and a new Soviet society. This required the destruction of everything that had gone before; and it also entailed the forced creation of a new civilization, as conjured up in the minds of those who had appointed themselves the creators of this brave new world.

In the minds of those like Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin's close associate and founder of the Soviet secret police, violence was an act of love. So much did they love the vision of a blissful communist future to come that they were willing to sacrifice all of the traditional conceptions of humanity and morality to bring the utopia to fruition.

Thus, in a publication issued in 1919 by the newly formed Soviet secret police, the Cheka (later the NKVD and then the KGB), it was proclaimed:

We reject the old systems of morality and 'humanity' invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the 'lower classes.' Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To do so, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles . . .

Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black pirate's flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever! For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves from the return of those jackals.

Death and Torture as Tools of Winning Socialism

The famous sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin was a young professor in Petrograd (later Leningrad and now St Petersburg) in 1920 as the Russian Civil War that firmly established communist rule in Russia was coming to its end. He kept an account of daily life during those years, which he published many years later under the title Leaves from a Russian Diary – and Thirty Years After (1950).

Here is one of his entries from 1920:

The machine of the Red Terror works incessantly. Every day and every night, in Petrograd, Moscow, and all over the country the mountain of the dead grows higher . . . Everywhere people are shot, mutilated, wiped out of existence . . .

Every night we hear the rattle of trucks bearing new victims. Every night we hear the rifle fire of executions, and often some of us hear from the ditches, where the bodies are flung, faint groans and cries of those who did not die at once under the guns. People living near these places begin to move away. They cannot sleep . . .

Getting up in the morning, no man or woman knows whether he will be free that night. Leaving one's home, one never knows whether he will return. Sometime a neighborhood is surrounded and everyone caught out of his house without a certificate is arrested . . . Life these days depends entirely on luck.

This murderous madness never ended. In the 1930s, during the time of the Great Purges instituted by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to wipe out all "enemies of the revolution" through mass executions, there were also sent millions to the GULAG prisons that stretched across all of the Soviet Union to be worked to death as slave labor to "build socialism."

Before being sent to their death or to the forced labor camps, tens of thousands would be interrogated and cruelly tortured to get confessions out of people about non-existent crimes, imaginary anti-Soviet conspiracies and false accusations against others.

Stalin personally sent instructions to the Soviet secret police that stated that in obtaining confessions from the accused, "the NKVD was given permission by the Central Committee [of the Communist Party] to use physical influence ... as a completely correct and expedient method" of interrogation.

When Stalin was told that this method was bringing forth the desired results, he told the NKVD interrogators, "Give them the works until they come crawling to you on their bellies with confessions in their teeth." Then, in another purge, this one after World War II, Stalin simplified the instructions even more: "Beat, beat and, once again, beat."

Thousands of the victims wrote letters to Stalin from their exile and hardships in the labor camps, all of them persuaded that it had all been a terrible mistake. If only Comrade Stalin knew, he would set it all right and they would be freed and restored as good, loyal Soviet citizens ready to once again work to "build socialism."

Stalin's Personal Hand in Building Socialism through Blood

But Stalin knew. He personally signed off on tens of thousands of death warrants and orders for tens of thousands more to be sent to their horrifying fate in the GULAG camps.

Domitri Volkogonov, a Soviet general-turned-historian, gained access to many of the closed Soviet archives in the 1980s, and wrote a biography of Stalin, entitled Triumph and Tragedy (1991), referring to Stalin's "triumph" to power and the resulting "tragedy" for the Soviet people. Volkogonov told a Western correspondent at the time:

I would come home from working in Stalin's archives, and I would be deeply shaken. I remember coming home after reading through the day of December 12, 1938. He signed thirty lists of death sentences that day, altogether about five thousand people, including many he personally knew, his friends . . .

This is not what shook me. It turned out that, having signed these documents, he went to his personal theater very late that night and watched two movies, including "Happy Guys," a popular comedy of the time. I simply could not understand how, after deciding the fate of several thousand lives, he could watch such a movie.

But I was beginning to realize that morality plays no role for dictators. That's when I understood why my father was shot, why my mother died in exile, why millions of people died.

Soviet central planning even had quotas for the number of such enemies of the people to be killed in each region of the Soviet Union as well as the required numbers to be rounded up to be sent to work in the labor camps in the frigid waste lands of Siberia and the Arctic Circle or the scorching deserts of Soviet Central Asia.

A Russian lawyer who had access to some of the formerly closed Soviet archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1990s told at the time:

Recently I read a Central Committee document from 1937 that said the Voronezh secret police, according to the "regional plan," repressed in the "first category," nine thousand people – which means these people were executed. And for no reason, of course.

Twenty-nine thousand were repressed in the "second category" – meaning they were sent to labor camps. The local first secretary [of the Communist Party], however, writes that there are still more Trotskyites and kulaks who remain "unrepressed."

He is saying that the plan was fulfilled but the plan was not enough! And so he asked that it be increased by eight thousand. Stalin writes back, "No increase to nine thousand!" The sickness of it. It's as if they were playing poker [and upping the ante in tragic human lives].

The Victims of Socialism Literally Reduced to Burnt Ash

In the last years of the Soviet Union, a Russian historian took The New York Times correspondent David Remnick to the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow, which in the 1930s was used as a burial ground for the thousands regularly killed on Stalin's orders in the capital of the Red Empire. In his book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993), Remnick told what the Russian historian explained:

See this gate? . . . Well, every night trucks stacked with bodies came back here and dumped them in a heap. They'd already been shot in the back of the head – you bleed less that way . . . They stacked the bodies in old wooden ammunition crates.

The workers stoked up the underground ovens – right in through the doors – to about twelve thousand degrees centigrade. To make things nice and official they even had professional witnesses who counter-signed the various documents.

When the bodies were burned they were reduced to ash and some chips of bone, maybe some teeth. They then buried the ashes in a pit . . . When the purges [of the 1930s] were at their peak . . . the furnaces worked all night and the domes of the churches were covered with ash. There was a fine dust of ash on the snow.

The Kalitnikovsky Cemetery in Moscow also served as dumping ground for thousands of tortured and executed bodies in the 1930s. That same Russian historian told David Remnick:

In the purges, every dog in town came to this place. That smell you smell now was three times as bad; blood was in the air. People would lean out of their windows and puke all night and the dogs howled until dawn. Sometimes they'd find a dog with an arm or a leg walking through the graveyard.

Enemies of Socialism Sent to Torture in the Mental Ward

The nightmare of the socialist experiment, however, did not end with Stalin's death in 1953. Its form merely changed in later decades. As head of the KGB in the 1970s, Yuri Andropov (who later was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982) accepted a new theory in Soviet psychiatry that said that opposition to the socialist regime was a sign of mental illness.

Why? Because only the mentally disturbed would resist the logic and the truth of Marxian dialectical determinism and its "proof" that socialism and communism were the highest and most humane stage of social development. Those who criticized the system or who wanted to reform or overthrow the Soviet socialist regime were mentally sick and required psychiatric treatment.

In his book, Russia and the Russians (1984), former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post Kevin Klose told the story of Alexei Nikitin, a coal mine worker who complained to the Soviet government about the safety and health environment in the mines of the Soviet Union. He was arrested, tried and found guilty of subversion and committed to a Soviet mental institution.

Various drugs were proscribed as treatment to bring him to his proper socialist senses. Explained Kevin Klose:

Of all the drugs administered [at the mental institution] to impose discipline, sulfazine stood at the pinnacle of pain . . . "People injected with sulfazine were groaning, sighing with pain, cursing the psychiatrists and Soviet power, cursing with everything in their hearts," Alexei told us. "The people go into horrible convulsions and get completely disoriented. The body temperature rises to 40 degrees centigrade [104 degrees Fahrenheit] almost instantly, and the pain is so intense they cannot move from their beds for three days. Sulfazine is simply a way to destroy a man completely. If they torture you and break your arms, there is a certain specific pain and you somehow can stand it. But sulfazine is like a drill boring into your body that gets worse and worse until it's more than you can stand. It's impossible to endure. It is worse than torture, because, sometimes, torture may end. But this kind of torture can continue for years."

Sulfazine normally was "prescribed" in a "course" of injections of increasing strength over a period that might last up to two months . . . The doctors had many other drugs with which to control and punish. Most of them eventually were used on Alexei . . . At the end of two months, Nikitin was taken off sulfazine but regular doses of . . . other disorienting drugs continued the entire time he was imprisoned.

The significance of these accounts is not their uniqueness but, rather, their monotonous repetition in every country in which socialism was imposed upon a society. In country after country, death, destruction and privation followed in the wake of socialism's triumph. Socialism's history is an unending story of crushing tyranny and oceans of blood.

Socialism as the Ideology of Death and Destruction

As the Soviet mathematician and dissident Igor Shafarevich, who spent many years in the GULAG slave labor camps for his opposition to the communist regime, said in his book, The Socialist Phenomenon (1980):

Most socialist doctrines and movements are literally saturated with the mood of death, catastrophe, and destruction . . . One could regard the death of mankind as the final result to which the development of socialism leads.

That twentieth century socialism would lead to nothing but this outcome was understood at the time of the Bolshevik victory in Russia. It was clearly expressed by the greatest intellectual opponent of socialism during the last one hundred years, the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises.

Near the end of his famous 1922 treatise, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Mises warned that:

Socialism is not in the least what is pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created . . . Each step leading towards Socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists.

When voices are raised today calling for socialism in America, including by those attempting to win a major party candidacy to run for the presidency of the United States, it is important – no, it is crucial – that the history and reality of socialism-in-practice in those parts of the world in which it was most thoroughly imposed and implemented be remembered and fully understood. If we do not, well, history has its own ways of repeating itself.

Dr. Richard Ebeling is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He was professor of economics at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan (2009-2014). He served as president of the Foundation for Economic Education (2003-2008) and held the Ludwig von Mises Chair in Economics at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan (1988-2003).

Obama and National Security: A Team of Bumblers?

Obama and National Security:Team of Bumblers?

Are Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel capable for today’s new national-security challenges?

When President Obama, after months of equivocation over how to respond to the takeover of parts of Iraq and Syria by radical militants, announced in September that the United States would “lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat,” the White House swung quickly into action, sending proposed legislation to train and equip Syrian rebels to Capitol Hill that same day. Unfortunately, the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon—which would be doing most of the rolling back—on the timing or details of the announcement.

According to multiple sources, behind the scenes a few things went badly awry in the launch of Obama’s new policy. First, the Pentagon was surprised by the president’s timing, according to a senior defense official. “We didn’t know it was going to be in the speech,” he said, referring to Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation. Second, the White House neglected to give Pentagon lawyers a chance to revise and approve the proposed legislative language before it went to the Hill, which is considered standard practice. Staffers working for Rep. Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said they were appalled by what they saw: language so sloppy that it failed to mention adequate protections against so-called “green-on-blue” attacks by trainees on American troops, and effectively left the Defense Department liable for funding the mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—even though the president was telling members of Congress he didn’t need money for this new mission, since the Saudis were putting it up. “What came over would have not have been a mission the DoD could have executed,” says a senior Republican committee staffer.

The Armed Services Committee later went directly to the Pentagon and worked out new language, the White House approved it, and Obama signed the legislation as part of a new Continuing Resolution on Sept. 19. But that was hardly the first instance in recent months when the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon. The Pentagon was not given a heads-up about that letter either, according to multiple sources. “We didn’t know it was going over there, and there were significant concerns about it,” said the senior defense official. “We had these authorities to go into Iraq under the 2002 AUMF, which is what she wanted repealed. We believed the authorities were still needed.”

But it’s clear the finger-pointing between the White House and Pentagon reflects no mere technicality. Both examples cited to me by well-placed sources close to the Defense Department offer new evidence of a criticism that has dogged this administration for most of its six and a half years: that Barack Obama’s White House is so insular and tightly controlled it often avoids “outside” consultation—including with its own cabinet secretaries and agencies. That’s especially true when the issue is one of this president’s least favorite things: opening up new hostilities in foreign lands.

Indeed, the Syrian-rebel incident recalled a more famous instance of White House surprise tactics a year earlier, when after a stroll on the White House lawn with chief of staff Denis McDonough, Obama embarrassed Kerry by abruptly deciding to ask for congressional approval for bombing the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad—only hours after Kerry had publicly declared that Assad was facing imminent action.

In their recent memoirs, former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta also have described the White House-centric foreign policy of the Obama administration—in Panetta’s case, a White House that he said was so “eager to rid itself of Iraq” it rejected Pentagon advice about the need for residual troops in Iraq after 2011, opening the way for ISIL. 

Gates was even more pointed, writing that “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the president and vice president—became a big problem for me.”

“I think this is the most insular White House national security team in recent history,” says Jim Thomas, vice president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former senior Pentagon official, who added that the president’s most recent big decision, picking an “Ebola czar,” was “symptomatic of the problem.”.

The Ebola crisis has underscored what many of Obama’s critics—including those in his party—have been saying with increasing urgency in recent months, that the White House’s approach to national security does not instill confidence and seems more questionable than ever in the face of the muscular new challenges on the scene.

“It’s a pathetically weak team,” says one retired general who was in a senior command position, and who faults Hagel as much as Rice for some of the problems. The general said that military professionals were buzzing over Hagel’s absence from the recent public exchange between the White House and Dempsey, who in congressional testimony on Sept. 16 appeared to undercut the president’s vow to put no boots on the ground in Iraq by suggesting that “close combat advisers” might be needed. “There’s no energy, no sense that the OSD stands for anything,” says one administration official, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “It’s all coming out of the Joint Chiefs.”

“An unlikely consensus is emerging across the ideological spectrum about the war against the Islamic State: President Obama’s strategy to ‘degrade and eventually destroy’ the terrorist entity is unworkable,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial on Sunday. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., put it Sunday on “Face the Nation,” the U.S. effort now amounts to mere “pecks at a big problem,” and allies remain baffled by the lack of a larger U.S. strategy.

While Hagel defends the status quo, Rice continues to stumble in her infrequent TV appearances and to alienate potential Hill allies – as well as the Pentagon—with what critics describe as poor outreach to Republicans and coordination of policy with the Defense Department. “Our experience has been that the DoD and Capitol Hill are often taken by surprise at same time and on same issues” by the White House, says the senior Armed Services Committee staffer.

Rice is rarely heard in public except when she very occasionally appears on the Sunday talk shows—and then more times than not, it seems, in a bumbling way. (Most recently, by saying Turkey would supply bases for strikes against ISIL, only to be undercut by Ankara’s denial hours later; that followed a much-criticized performance describing former Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl’s Army service as “honorable” despite the murky circumstances of his disappearance and capture; and her now-infamous explanation of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, after which she was blasted by Republicans for appearing to play down terrorism links.)

"There is a sense that the NSC is run a little like beehive ball soccer, where everyone storms to wherever the ball is moving around the field,” according to another recently departed senior administration official. “They are managing by crisis rather than strategy.… It’s Syria one day, Iraq the next, North Korea the next, and so on. The NSC is finding multitasking very hard these days.

According to the federal government’s 2014 personnel survey, civilian defense employees have grown increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs, with ratings dropping in 47 of 84 categories from last year. And the larger question is whether Hagel’s mostly inward focus on budget and morale issues at the Pentagon is the right focus now—instead of helping to project American power abroad amidst spiraling global crises.

But what might be missing most from the administration—at least according to its critics—is a forceful strategist who is able to push the president (who remains, for the most part, his own No. 1 strategist) to be more decisive.

Of course, no one knows Obama’s thinking on national security better than Rice, who has been with him longer than any senior official in the administration with the exception of McDonough, his chief of staff. And as we’ve discovered during six-plus years of studying Obama’s MO, that counts for a lot with this president. Keeping America out of any more disastrous wars is his mission, and it may well be that his allegedly bumbling team is doing nothing more than implementing his desires. Whether that is any longer a policy appropriate to the times, given the resilience of ISIL—and whether he’s getting the kind of advice he needs to hear, rather than the kind he wants to hear—is another question, one for the pundits to debate.

But as one former senior Pentagon official puts it, “When you select for personal loyalty, that may be all you get.”

Welfare in the U.S. and the Population of Russia

Welfare in the U.S. and the Population of Russia

The CIA World Factbook says there are 142,470,272 people in Russia. So, the 150,026,000 citizens getting federal benefits in the United States at the end of 2012 outnumbered all the people in Russia.

The question for Americans is how did the most prosperous and successful country in the world reach a point where we have more people dependent upon the government that the population of Russia; our nemesis for 50 years of the Cold War?

Could it possibly have anything to do with the Great Society authored by Democrats? The Democrats have accomplished what the Communists desired with not a bullet fired!

Is it possible that policies adopted by Democrats to buy votes have encourage and predisposition many Americans to take the easy route versus hard work?  A natural human tendency?

Now, think about the simple fact that the change any of this depends upon people that believe in the founding principles of this nation get off the couch, become politically active, engage like minded people and get out the vote.  Period – no other pathway out!

Obama's apparent Foreign policy gaffs are simply a plan that is working

Obama's apparent Foreign policy gaffs are simply a plan that is working

The talking heads are way into the weeds when it comes to Putin's aggression and Obama's foreign policy blunders.  Remember when Obama stated he would have more flexibility after the election?  Did it occur to anyone they are seeing in real time what that truly meant?

Does anyone really believe Putin would be behaving like he is with Ukraine if anyone else was in the White House?  He is behaving with impunity and not fearful at all with what the U.S. may or may not deal.  The bargain was struck with the devil a long time ago.

So, trust your own eyes and ears.  This nation cannot trust this president and he will do whatever he wishes with the same impunity.  He knows that no one in any branch of government has the courage or gall to call him out.

Tyrant to tyrant is playing out before the world and the world is pretending to not notice.

The impulse of liberals is to run things

Today's News

The impulse of liberals is to run things

By Walter E. Williams
Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you’d have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they’re waging war on their daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do they abide by the Geneva Conventions’ bans on torture, or do they engage in enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with female family members? You might say that leftists don’t mean actual war. Then why do they say it?

What would you think of a white conservative mayor’s trying to defund charter schools where blacks are succeeding? While most of New York’s black students could not pass a citywide math proficiency exam, there was a charter school where 82 percent of its students passed. New York’s left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, is trying to shut it down, and so far, I’ve heard not one peep from the Big Apple’s civil rights hustlers, including Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel. According to columnist Thomas Sowell, the attack on successful charter schools is happening in other cities, too.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently stated that we must revisit the laws that ban convicted felons from voting. Why? According to a recent study by two professors, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse of Stanford, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, three-fourths of America’s convicted murderers, rapists and thieves are Democrats. Many states restrict felons from voting; however, there’s a movement afoot to eliminate any restriction on their voting. If successful, we might see Democratic candidates campaigning in prisons, seeking the support of some of America’s worst people.

Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots’ agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans. By the way, to reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me.

Seeing as Americans are timid and compliant, why not dictate other aspects of our lives – such as the size of soda we may buy, as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried in New York? Former U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman John Webster said: “Right now, this anti-obesity campaign is in its infancy. ... We want to turn people around and give them assistance in eating nutritious foods.” The city of Calabasas, Calif., adopted an ordinance that bans smoking in virtually all outdoor areas. The stated justification is not the desire to fight against secondhand smoke but the desire to protect children from bad influences – seeing adults smoking.

The late H.L. Mencken’s description of health care professionals in his day is just as appropriate today: “A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things.”

Hobby Lobby case creates unusual allies

By Kathleen Parker

When it comes to tackling complicated legal issues, one would be hard pressed to conjure a less likely partnership than Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Baylor University President Ken Starr.
Well, okay, there was the David Boies and Ted Olson confederacy fighting for gay marriage rights after they took opposite sides during the 2000 Bush-Gore election dispute. Still, witnessing Dershowitz and Starr discuss and largely agree on religious liberty issues raised by the case popularly known as Hobby Lobby was pleasantly jarring.

The two convened at the Willard Hotel on Monday, the day before oral arguments in the case were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a delightful back-and-forth punctuated by yarns and anecdotes, the two legal luminaries affirmed at least two points of agreement: (1) separation of church and state is good for religion; (2) corporations are people and people are corporations (echo Mitt Romney?) and, therefore, Hobby Lobby should be permitted an exemption from the contraceptive mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
To back and fill a bit: Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a family-owned arts and crafts chain of more than 500 stores and 13,000 employees, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government. Hobby Lobby President Steve Green, who told a dinner crowd Monday night that he has distributed Bibles to a billion people worldwide through his personal ministry, claims that he shouldn’t be forced to participate in what he views as life-terminating contraception, including IUDs and the so-called morning-after pill.
The core of the argument is that Green’s business is protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. The RFRA basically requires that the government prove “compelling interest” when someone’s religious rights are “substantially burdened” by what the state wishes to do. Although individuals and religious groups are clearly covered by the RFRA, it isn’t clear whether the act’s protections also extend to companies.

Dershowitz and Starr kicked off an afternoon of discussions as part of a symposium co-sponsored by Baylor University and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. Starr, a former U.S. solicitor general, described the lawsuit as a “conflict of vision” – big government vs. a family that has devoted itself to Christian mission work. While Starr’s stewardship of a Baptist university might make his favorable view of the plaintiffs’ position unsurprising, Dershowitz’s sympathy for Hobby Lobby may come as a surprise to many.
Proclaiming his love both for religion and the separation of church and state, he called the government’s brief “silly and trivial.” And though he thinks birth control is good for society – and he approves of the ACA – neither of those considerations matter.

It’s the principle.
Contrary to protestations from certain entities that subvert all issues for political gain, the Hobby Lobby case is not about birth control or women’s rights or even universal health care. It is, in Dershowitz’s summation, about “whether or not the statutes in the penumbra of the Constitution require a religious exemption.”
Period.
As a final note of clarification, the Green family did not pick this battle.
The federal government did when it imposed what could be considered a secular belief system on people who happen to be business owners with strong religious convictions about abortion.
In a brief sidebar: Don’t you find it curious that the biological fact of life at conception is characterized as an article of faith (religious), while denial of that life vis-a-vis its involuntary termination is viewed as ultimately sacred? One of life’s little mysteries.

Whatever one’s views on these matters, they are of no consequence.
The fact that I personally favor birth control doesn’t alter the logic of what I’ve just written.
It merely suits me to believe as I do in order to get through life as I find most convenient.
It doesn’t make me right, except under secular law, which a great many people find less compelling than the higher laws of nature – or of God. Your choice.
In any case, the first principle of religious freedom should be treated as paramount, as often and at every stage possible, agreed both Starr and Dershowitz. And both hope that the Supreme Court will find a way to accommodate Hobby Lobby.

The court’s ruling is expected sometime in June.

Seeing Past the Obama Meme

The Daily Bell

Chickens come home to roost for Obama ... Today's quiz: What do Vladimir Putin's aggression and ObamaCare's troubles have in common? OK, that was too easy. It is impossible to dismiss as mere coincidence the Russian Bear's invasion of Ukraine and the continuing mayhem of the Affordable Care Act. In their own ways, each reflects the full flowering of the policies of Barack Obama. His chickens are coming home to roost, and what a mess they are making. – New York Post

Seldom do we see an article that incorporates so many dominant and sub-dominant social themes so seamlessly. Obama is attacked in this article for a variety of reasons and is portrayed as a weak president whose behavior is making the world a more dangerous place. He is painted as an ideologue who wants to create socialism at home and peace via palliation abroad. His inability to "move" Europe and Russia in the directions he seeks is further evidence of his lack of gravitas and his dangerous disengagement from the world as it really is.

The article compares Obama's handling of his country to Putin's regime in Russia and makes the case that Putin is a far better leader and a more competent administrator. "America's standing and influence have declined," and this is a direct result of Obama's worldview and subsequent flawed decision making.

Here's more:

Obama's sixth year in the White House is shaping up as his worst, and that's saying something. He's been in the Oval Office so long that it is obscene to blame his problems on George W. Bush, the weather or racism. Obama owns the world he made, or more accurately, the world he tried to remake.

... Ideologues love to dream, and some do it eloquently. Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" Mario Cuomo, no slouch at dreaming, nonetheless offered a caveat, saying, "You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose."

Obama hasn't figured out the difference. Even more alarming, he shows no signs of trying to learn. In the ways of the world, he remains a know-it-all rookie. The view from his faculty lounge has no space for reality. Anything that doesn't fit the grand plan is dismissed as illegitimate.

So while global hot spots multiply and the world grows dangerously unstable, the president still plans to slash the military. His trip abroad last week further secured his reputation for historic ineptitude. It wasn't that the trip was a disaster — it never rose to that level. His presence and his promises simply made no difference.

He failed to move the European Union toward a firmer stance on Russia, created bizarre headlines by differing with the Vatican over what he and the pope discussed, and got not-so-veiled threats from the Saudis about Syria and Iran. He could have stayed home and not done worse.

... ObamaCare is the domestic expression of the president's ineptitude. The law that was supposed to fix health care has become a problem for millions, and now enjoys mere 26 percent approval, a poll finds. It is proving so unworkable that the White House has given up defending it as written and instead simply changes key provisions when they prove impossible to implement or politically inconvenient.

... A Caesar at home and a Chamberlain abroad, Obama manages to simultaneously provoke fury and ridicule. He bullies critics here while shrinking from adversaries there. He divides the country and unites the world against us, ­diminishing the nation in both ways. His reign of error can't end soon enough, nor can it end well.

Damning, eh? Yet one could equally argue exactly the opposite points.

It is not Russia, apparently, that destabilized Ukraine but the US and Britain. There is plenty of evidence of this beginning with Victoria Nuland's assertion that the US funded "democracy" – and thus contributed to the Ukraine's destabilization over decades – with some US$5 billion.

To maintain as this article does that those who engineered the Ukraine's regime change did not foresee that Putin would seek immediately to annex Crimea is ludicrous. Obama is castigated as "weak" but Putin's behavior was surely part of a larger, predictable strategy that the West expected and the Pentagon, in particular, expected. Putin certainly played his part.

There is plenty of evidence as well that the US State Department helped to lay the groundwork for "color revolutions" in such disparate places as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali and Syria.

Iraq and Afghanistan were outright wars in which the US and Britain – along with NATO – made significant military commitments. It remains to be seen if Iran will suffer a similar fate. Chaos is ever the friend of globalism, after all, and there are significant globalist forces at work in the West.

And then there is Obamacare. The incompetence is extraordinary and the implementation is breathtakingly inept. But are we to conclude from this that the Obama administration has simply failed to do things properly? Or perhaps there are other reasons why the rollout has been plagued with a variety of failures.

Those behind Obamacare surely see the current system as merely a stopgap measure on the way to a single payer system – a national healthcare program that backers would have tried to implement if they could. Seen from this perspective, the incredibly flawed rollout of the new system actually creates the conditions for further reform.

It would seem that Obama's reputation is being sacrificed to achieve certain results. His apparent incompetence at home sets the stage for further health care reforms and an additional consolidation of medical services.

Abroad, Obama's perceived "weakness" lays the groundwork for further provocations by Russia and perhaps China as well. In an era where people are better informed about larger globalist manipulations, the ability to re-engineer certain Cold War tensions is surely useful.

It is "directed history" that is at work here. The catastrophe of Obamacare will lead to further nationalizations of health care. The apparent weakness of the US response to Russian provocations will lead to an even more energetic security state in the US along with a resurgent military-industrial complex.

The article castigates Obama as authoritarian at home and submissive abroad. But perhaps Obama is merely playing the role that is demanded of him.

As we peer behind the curtain, we can actually see these manipulations being played out. They remind us that in the 21st century, as in previous centuries, nothing is as it seems and both government and economic policies are subject to secret forces that operate with agendas that are never fully explained.

We are fortunate, however, in this Internet Era that we can actually see these promotions being initiated and pursued. This knowledge gives us important insights into how the world is organized and what might be coming next. And these insights can be used to anticipate a variety of sociopolitical, economic and investment trends.

Here at The Daily Bell, we try to point them out on a regular basis. We try to analyze the reality "behind the memes," along with other elements of the alternative media.