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Brass Oldies: Part III

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by Thomas Sowell

Politics is not the only place where some pretty brassy statements have been made and repeated so often that some people have accepted these brassy statements as being as good as gold.
       
One of the brassiest of the brass oldies in the law is the notion that the Constitution creates a “wall of separation” between church and state. This false notion has been so widely accepted that people who tell the truth get laughed at and mocked.
       
A recent New York Times piece said that it was “a flub of the first order” when Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for senator in Delaware, asked a law school audience “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” According to the New York Times, ?The question draw gasps and laughter” from this audience of professors and law students who are elites-in-waiting.

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Brass Oldies: Part II

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by Thomas Sowell

Songs that are “golden oldies” have much less pleasant counterparts in politics– namely, ideas and policies that have failed disastrously in the past but still keep coming back to be advocated and imposed by government. Some people may think these ideas are as good as gold, but brass has often been mistaken for gold by people who don’t look closely enough.
       
One of these brass oldies is the idea that the government can and must reduce unemployment by “creating jobs.” Some people point to the history of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment peaked at 25 percent, as proof that the government cannot simply stand by and do nothing when so many millions of people are out of work.
       
If we are going to look back at history, we need to make sure the history we look at is accurate. First of all, unemployment never hit 25 percent until after– repeat, AFTER– the federal government intervened in the economy.

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Voter Fraud: Open and In your Face

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by Michelle Malkin

Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. It’s the Democrats’ coping mechanism for midterm election voter fraud. Faced with multiple reports of early voting irregularities and election shenanigans across the country, left-wing groups are playing dumb, deaf and blind. Voter fraud? What voter fraud?

More cunningly, these organizations are seeking to marginalize complaints about election integrity by casting citizen watchdog efforts as racist “scare tactics.” Echoing President Obama’s message to the Democratic faithful on the campaign trail, they are accusing political opponents of suppressing the votes of minorities and the poor. On Tuesday, The New York Times quoted a liberal voting rights advocate, Wendy R. Weiser, wringing her hands over individual Americans taking clean elections seriously:

“Private efforts to police the polls create a real risk of vote suppression, regardless of their intent,” said Weiser, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “People need to know that any form of discrimination, intimidation or challenge to voters without adequate basis is illegal or improper.”

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Brass Oldies

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by Thomas Sowell

Classic songs from years past are sometimes referred to as “golden oldies.” There are political fallacies that have been around for a long time as well. These might be called brass oldies. It certainly takes a lot of brass to keep repeating fallacies that were refuted long ago.

One of these brass oldies is a phrase that has been a perennial favorite of the left, “tax cuts for the rich.” How long ago was this refuted? More than 80 years ago, the “tax cuts for the rich” argument was refuted, both in theory and in practice, by Andrew Mellon, who was Secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s.

When Mellon took office, there was a large national debt, the economy was stagnating, and tax rates were high, though the tax revenues were still not enough to cover government expenditures. What was Mellon’s prescription for getting out of this mess? A series of major cuts in the tax rates!

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The Left Hates Free Speech – Juan at a Time

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by Ted Nugent

National Public Radio’s firing of commentator Juan Williams is yet another example of how political correctness has poisoned free speech.

Mr. Williams didn’t say anything that the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t say or agree with regarding genuine and well-founded concerns about Muslims on airplanes. Who doesn’t know that Muslim voodoo loons have used or tried to use jets as a means to carry out mass murder and mayhem? It’s the truth, comfortable or not.

Juan Williams, a clear and present left-leaning guy, has now been exposed to the progressive’s anti-free speech grinder machine. Instead of rallying to his to defense as many on the Right and some on the Left have, I have a question for Mr. Williams: How do you like the Left now?

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Mr. Fix-It

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by Oliver North

The Obama administration has replaced an old axiom, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” with one of its own: “If it ain’t broke, fix it till it is.” That’s certainly what the O-Team is doing to the U.S. military.
       
While campaigning for the presidency, then-Sen. Barack Obama repeatedly promised to “end discrimination against gays and lesbians” by the U.S. military’s so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Last October, he told supporters at a Human Rights Campaign dinner here in Washington, “I’m working with the Pentagon, its leadership and the members of the House and Senate on ending this policy. … I will end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ That’s my commitment to you.”
       
Of course, it’s not a matter of “policy”; it’s the law — and it’s been on the books since 1993. Section 654 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code clearly states: “The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.” Notably, this language became the law of the land — not just “policy” — while American troops were engaged in Somalia.

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Multiculturalism: Political Correctness Run Amok

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by Ken Connor

“We … take our form-freedom balance in government for granted as though it were natural.  There is form in acknowledging the obligations in society, and there is freedom in acknowledging the rights of the individual….  There is a balance here which we have come to take as natural in the world.  It is not natural in the world.  We are utterly foolish if we look at the long span of history and read the daily newspapers giving today’s history and do not understand that the form-freedom balance in government which we have had in Northern Europe since the Reformation and in the countries extended from it is unique in the world, past and present.”

Francis Schaeffer, “The Abolition of Truth and Morality”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel set the tongues of pundits wagging this week when she declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” in Germany.  Multiculturalism is, of course, one of the sacraments Secularism.  It is the idea that people from dramatically different cultures can peacefully coexist as a unified society within a state or nation notwithstanding that they order themselves very differently within society and cling to radically different–and often conflicting–world views.  Multiculturalism is the fruit of “cultural relativism” which maintains that all cultures are equally valid, no one being better than another.  Cultural relativism, in turn, is the outgrowth of “relativism,” which asserts that there is no such thing as universal truth and that all ideas are equally valid and depend on the circumstances in which they are applied.

Not surprisingy, the political correctness police went into high dudgeon in the aftermath of Ms. Merkel’s speech, suggesting that her comments represented some kind of ominous foreshadowing of a German nationalist resurgence (allusions to Hitler’s Third Reich are perfectly permissible rhetorical tools for liberals, though off limits to conservatives).  Their goal was to squelch any thoughtful debate of the premise advanced by the Chancellor.  If they could demonize her position, that would have a chilling effect on the willingness of anyone else to embrace it or, perhaps, even to discuss it.  In the western world of the 21st century it is no longer fashionable to take pride in one’s national heritage, and patriotism is equated with parochialism.

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Freedom vs. Sharia Law

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by Ted Nugent

We’ve been told there are so-called moderate Muslims who deplore terrorism and that Islam has been hijacked by extremists.

If there are in fact moderate Muslims, they have been quiet as mosque mice regarding their positions. For example, Americans don’t know if moderate Muslims recognize Israel, what they think about women’s rights, or if they believe the proposed New York City mosque should be moved to another location out of concern and sensitivity for the families of the victims of 9/11.

We also don’t know if there are other freedom-loving and freedom-fighting Muslims who respect the rights of others to burn the Koran, draw cartoons of Mohammad in newspapers, hold marches to condemn Hamas and other terror organizations, write unflattering books about Islam, and vigorously support allowing people of other faiths to practice their faith in the city of Mecca where all other religions besides Islam are currently outlawed.

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The Multicultural Cult

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by Thomas Sowell | Part 1 & 2

Somebody eventually had to say it — and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has “utterly failed.”

Multiculturalism is not just a recognition that different groups have different cultures. We all knew that, long before multiculturalism became a cult that has spawned mindless rhapsodies about “diversity,” without a speck of evidence to substantiate its supposed benefits.

In Germany, as in other countries in Europe, welcoming millions of foreign workers who insist on remaining foreign has created problems so obvious that only the intelligentsia could fail to see them. It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious.

“We kidded ourselves for a while,” Chancellor Merkel said, but now it was clear that the attempt to build a society where people of very different languages and cultures could “live side-by-side” and “enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.”

Continue reading Part 1 . . .

There was a reason why employers in the middle of the 19th century had signs that said, “No Irish need apply” — and why employers in the middle of the 20th century no longer had such signs. It was not that employers had changed. The Irish had changed.

The Catholic Church for years worked to bring about such changes among the Irish immigrants and their offspring, just as various religious and secular organizations among the Jews, among blacks and among other groups worked to bring about changes within their respective groups. By and large these efforts paid off. All these groups were advancing, long before there were civil rights laws.

Yet today, attempts to get black or Hispanic youngsters to speak the language of the society around them are decried by multiculturalists. And any attempt to get them to behave according to the cultural norms of the larger society is denounced as “cultural imperialism,” if not racism.

Continue reading Part 2 . . .

Why is America Exceptional?

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by Matthew Spalding

In 1776, when America announced its independence as a nation, it was composed of thirteen colonies surrounded by hostile powers.

Today, the United States is a country of fifty states covering a vast continent. Its military forces are the most powerful in the world. Its economy produces almost a quarter of the world’s wealth. The American people are among the most hard-working, church-going, affluent, and generous in the world.

Is America exceptional?

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