Category Archives: Actions has Consequences

Cause and Effect

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Some could label this post as, “An example of unintended consequences.” I chose the one above because it’s shorter and I really don’t believe the ‘Effect’ is unintended. What am I talking about? Baltimore…and by extension, all the large, liberal controlled cities.

There is a story out today about Baltimore. One headline laments the rising murder rate in Baltimore after the riots. The other headline for the same story reports the reluctness of the police to enter the riot areas.

Alarming Surge In Murders And Shootings In Baltimore

May 18, 2015 11:03 PM

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — City crime spike. A dramatic increase in violence in Baltimore. Dozens of shooting and murders in the last few weeks following the riots last month.

Christie Ileto reports some are concerned police are hesitant to crack down after six officers were charged in the death of Freddie Gray.

…

“People have said its because morale is down, or it’s because the officers were charged. We don’t know that,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

While city leaders are working to curb the rash of bloodshed.

A Baltimore police officer who chose to remain anonymous says the Freddie Gray case impacted policing.

“If you want them to be proactive in patrolling and trying to catch people, I could see them not being interested in doing that,” the officer said.

William Scipio heads Sandtown’s Resident Action Committee–an area once at the heart of April’s unrest.

Ileto: “When was the last time you’ve personally seen an officer in Sandtown?”

Scipio: “Since the riots.”

Is anyone really surprised? Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has tied the hands of the police. The residents know they can prevent arrest and charges by filing a complaint. Why should the street cops risk jobs and their lives when they know the city administration will not back them and will, instead, file criminal charges against them doing their jobs?

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake should not be surprised. Cause. Effect.

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Have you heard the term, “Wookie suiter.” The term started as a joke a number of years ago. It was intended to ridicule some self-serving, fringe “patriots” who saw conspiracies at every term.

It was a joke a decade ago. It isn’t today. Now, there are so-called conservative websites whose sole purpose is to promote conspiracy theories—and a growing number of people are buying their claims hook-line-and-sinker.

The current conspiracy du jour is the Army’s Jade Helm training exercise. Every year the Army conducts training in various states among the citizenry. The Army has done so for decades, at least since the 1970s.

On occasion, the Army has asked veterans and military retirees to help with the training; in some cases acting as the OpFor, or the Opposing Force. I remember one occasion when I was a member of Air Force MARS, some MARS members were asked to use their amateur radio HF mobile stations to simulate insurgent radio stations.

Idiots, like Alex Jones and his InfoWars website, has been stoking the coals since the Army announced Jade Helm. I see photos claiming to find Army vehicles hidden in the woods along with train-loads of trucks, MRAPs and Humvees on railroad sidings. Strangely, most of these photos are a decade or more old, some since the build-up for the first Gulf War. But, the conspiracy websites aren’t interested in the truth. It’s all about web hits and revenue from advertisers created by those web hits.

The conspiracy theorists overlook one thing. Jade Helm doesn’t start until August 15. the Army doesn’t have the resources to hide all those vehicles now. Their budget has been cut. Leaving the vehicles exposed for a couple of months is a guarantee they won’t start come August.

Another item these conspiracy theorists overlook is their belief the Army would obey orders to start rounding up American citizens without cause. Even today, with the politicized Army command structure, few officers would obey such orders.

Obama, Distrust, and the Armed Forces

By Russ Vaughn, May 19, 2015

I recently wrote a piece here about the Jade Helm military operations scheduled to be conducted across large areas of the U.S. this summer. A few irresponsible conservative web sites are using these routine military training activities to frighten citizens in the selected areas into believing the federal government is planning an armed takeover of their locales. I warned in that previous article that neither the training operations nor the alarmed citizenry are anything new; the U.S. Army has conducted such training for decades and there has always been some civil protest. I made jumps into civilian areas and ran ops back in the 1960’s. But this time, through the wide reach of the Internet, the fear factor among the citizenry has been driven through the roof.

I’m a conservative, registered Republican who has been a contributor of conservative themed articles here at American Thinker for a decade. I’m also a ground combat veteran of Vietnam who spent much of his post-college career marketing to the military, a job that took me to Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine installations all across the country and overseas. I have shared many meals and happy hours with enlisted personnel and officers, during which many frank, forthright discussions were held regarding politics and the political leadership of the times.

Not once in almost five decades of my association with the military have I heard any serving member or veteran agree that he would take up arms against fellow Americans to impose the political will of a sitting president. Conversely, I’ve heard many times that an order to do so would be considered unlawful and refusable. When the Jade Helm article was cross-posted at my favorite soldiers’ blog, This Ain’t Hell, I was gratified to see that the majority of comments there, almost all from still-serving service members or veterans, validated that belief.

That was in stark contrast to the reaction here at American Thinker. Comments here were almost universally negative with my denial that the operation was a federal takeover of Texas and Utah by Obama being heavily ridiculed. Even readers who normally post supportive comments on my writings, sometimes even thanking me for stating their views, called me a naïve fool and a dupe of the Obama administration. It was a bit of a downer until those military comments began coming in later at the soldier’s blog, reaffirming my faith in my fellow warriors. Clearly, distrust of Obama is very strong on both sites; the difference being the troops trust our troops. 

One of the evidentiary cudgels that was used on me here at AT was the militarization of local and state level police departments in recent years and how those forces, using military weapons would join with the military forces of Jade Helm to suppress, oppress, even imprison dissenters in Texas and Utah. I found that ironic in that I have written articles here in the past critical of this heavy arming of civilian law enforcement. On that topic, the primarily civilian readership here at AT and the military followers of TAH were in agreement that this practice needs to be curtailed. It was only some law enforcement officers at both sites who accused me of ignorance or treachery and even among that cohort, some LEO’s agreed with my premise.

Today the Obama administration, in a move no doubt attributable to the increasing level of conflict between law enforcement and the black community, announced it will cease supplying certain surplus military weaponry, such as tracked armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft and grenade launchers among numerous other items including, for suspect reasons, bayonets. Some surplus weaponry already distributed may be recalled and future use of military weaponry may be restricted by federal guidelines. Of course, the administration is hiding behind the skirts of a federal commission that recommended these changes in federal policy after a lengthy study that was initiated after the Ferguson incident.

The column continues on the American Thinker website. It thoroughly debunks the conspiracy theorists. But there will always be that segment who would rather believe in myths than realities. I call them the Tin-Foil Hat Brigade.

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It’s done, verdict announced

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The Ferguson verdict was announced last night. To no one’s great surprise, Darren Wilson was not charged. In fact, the prosecutor released all the evidence collected, much more than normal, to the media. The evidence was overwhelming. Michael Brown attacked Wilson, not once but twice. Wilson defended himself and shot Brown.

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Violence erupts in Ferguson: Fire, looting, arrests

But that doesn’t make any difference to those who are determined to riot regardless of the verdict. Before the night was over, thirty-one people had been arrested, numerous businesses were looted, a dozen buildings, along with at least two police cars, were burned, and shots were fired. None of those shots were fired by police. All were fired by members of the mob.

Missouri Govenor Jay Nixon sent members, upwards of 1,000, of the National Guard to St. Louis. However, he didn’t release them to quiet the rioting until almost midnight, well after much of the damage had been done.

I should not be but I’m continually amazed at Nixon’s incompetence and stupidity. What Nixon should have done was to deploy those Guard troops around the expected hotspots well before the announcement. With them in place, with orders to stop any looting and burning at first sight. And, if they were fired upon by the mob, to return fire.

For those of you too young to remember the LA riots of the ’60s, rioters and snipers fired upon National Guardsmen from the roofs and upper stories of buildings. The Guard returned fire with vehicle-mounted machine guns. In some cases turning the buildings into sieves. The sniping and rioting quickly stopped.

(I tried to find some links for the Guard responding to the Watts riots, but couldn’t find any that reported the events accurately. I remember those 1965 riots quite well. I was in college at the time taking a modern history class. We analyzed the riots closely. Now, some fifty years later, little can be found on the internet about the riots in Los Angles, the Watts Riots, that hasn’t been tainted with liberal viewpoints. The use of National Guardsmen has been painted as a counter-riot when it was not.

I remember watching live TV when a Guard jeep driving slowly down a street on patrol was taken under fire by several snipers on rooftops. The Guardsmen returned fire using their personal arms and the jeep-mounted machine gun. The sniping quickly ended with the snipers dead or having fled. The rioting ended soon after the arrival of the National Guard. Many of the Guardsmen were also combat veterans.

That real story can’t be found today. It’s been censored by the left.)

The bottom line is that the liberal government of St. Louis and Ferguson, abetted by Governor Jay Nixon, allowed the rioting to happen. Most of the damage was to locally-owned residents of Ferguson, minority owners. The liberal politicians of St. Louis and Jeff City, the leaders who were obligated to act and prevent violence, did nothing.

Al Sharpton and other thugs are on the way to Ferguson. They have no intention of quieting the situation. They will do anything and everything to cause the situation to get worse. The greater the disturbance the more their agenda will be enhanced. If Nixon and the St. Louis Police Chief were smart, they’d meet these thugs at the airport gate and put them on the next plane out from St. Louis to any destination.

But, they won’t. The trouble in Ferguson will continue until someone in authority gets fed up and deals with the situation. In the end, Ferguson will be a burned-out hole in St. Louis County. It will be area where no business will come, where insurance companies will not insure existing businesses and without insurance, no business can survive. Jobs will be lost, more than have already been lost, and Ferguson will turn into another blighted area, with no jobs and no hope of jobs.

In the coming months and years, residents will leave. None of them will return. Ferguson and the surrounding area will turn into another Detroit littered with abandoned buildings amid weeds, debris and crumbling infrastructure.

Why did this happen? Because there exists a culture of self-destruction that is dependent on the largess of government, governments, local, state and federal that really does not care what happens to the residents as long as they vote for democrats, a party that keeps them enslaved. Just look at the history of Detroit for the last fifty years and you will see the future of Ferguson and probably St Louis.

The Ferguson situation isn’t whites oppressing blacks. There are more blacks in Ferguson, by a large majority, than whites. No, the residents of Ferguson chose their government, did it to themselves. There is a lesson there in full display. Few in Ferguson and elsewhere, will learn from it. It isn’t politically correct.

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Monday’s Talking Points

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Headlines on various news outlets this morning: 

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Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel

Hagel Fired for Contradicting Obama over ISIS threat!

From FOX News…

OBAMA FINDS MIDTERM SCAPEGOAT IN HAGEL
In another strong sign of President Obama’s hard tack left in the wake of a midterm drubbing, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is heading for the exits. First reported by the NYT, the cashiering of the Pentagon boss comes after “the two men mutually agreed” that it was time for the only Republican in Obama’s cabinet to go. But given the fact that the White House was the one pushing out the story, it seems more likely that the president had grown tired of the ongoing pressure from Hagel and members of the top brass to take a more aggressive stance on national security threats abroad. The conflict went public back in August when Hagel openly contradicted White House talking points on the threat posed by Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria. While Obama succumbed to the pressure, Hagel’s ouster shows the president seeking to reassert control over his foundering foreign policy. — FOX Newsletter, November 24, 2014

Never let it be said that Obama lets anyone on his staff disagree with him. I wonder which hand-puppet will be chosen next for Sec’y of Defense?

***

Rand Paul has been the fair-haired boy of Libertarians and the Paulbot wing of the GOP. He has been viewed as an opponent of the GOP Washington establishment. When Ted Cruz and Mike Lee stood up in opposition to Harry Reid, and occasionally Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul stood in the background giving the impression of supporting Cruz and Lee but seldom actually doing so on the floor of the Senate.

I’ve never trusted Rand Paul. In my view, he is too much like his Dad—inconsistent, a bit unstable with a tin-foil hat firmly in place. My view, again, has been vindicated. The reports today have Rand Paul cozing up to Mitch McConnell, worming his way into the establishment and the Ruling Class.

Paul strengthens McConnell ties with fundraiser hire – National Review: “[Sen.] Rand Paul [R-Ky.] is bringing on [Sen.] Mitch McConnell’s [R-Ky.] national finance director, Laura Sequeira, to play a key fundraising role at his political-action committee ahead of an expected 2016 presidential campaign.”

[Flashback: “We’ve developed a very tight relationship, and I’m for him…I don’t think he’s made a final decision on that. But he’ll be able to count on me.” – Senate Majority Leader-elect Mitch McConnell in a post-election interview.] — FOX Newsletter, November 24, 2014.

McConnell, immediately following the election, betrayed the GOP by publicly stating the Senate would not use the only real weapons of Congress against a rogue President—impeachment and removal from office, and the power of the purse—defunding Obama’s acts of defiance to Congress and strictures of the Constitution. When asked what McConnell would do to oppose Obama, McConnell, in essence, said he’d rollover and do nothing. That allows Obama to continue his lawless edicts without opposition…and now Rand Paul will help McConnell to do…nothing.

***

I have been called, on occasion, a Grammar-Nazi. I accept that label. Why is grammar necessary, and spelling, too? Because correct grammar and spelling enhances communication and decreases confusion and misunderstanding.

It is a failing of education when schools no longer teach grammar, sentence structure and construction, spelling and writing. Not cursive hand-writing, although that should be taught, too, but writing as in Writing an Essay. Clear, concise writing, with proper sentence and paragraph structure, is fading. Others agree with me.

Descriptive versus Prescriptive: Another Left-Wing Scam

By Bruce Deitrick Price, November 24, 2014

Everywhere we look, we’ve got pompous professors telling us they don’t dare prescribe what’s right in language.  No, no, no, no.  It’s not their role.  Nor yours either, that’s for sure.  People can express themselves as they wish.  It’s America, the 21st century.  God forbid we should tell anybody how to do anything.“Weird Al” Yankovic put out a popular video called “Word Crimes.”  It’s gotten almost 20,000,000 views.  In effect, he says: “Hey, moron, do it the right way.”  He got everybody talking about correct grammar.  Boy, we needed that.  Thanks, Weird Al.

Naturally, all the primly pontificating nuisances crawled out of the woodwork to tell us: hey, stop all that prescribing!  You can only describe. 

And why?  Because when anthropologists go in the jungle to study a primitive culture, they must remember that the natives are the experts on their own language.  Great.  That’s fine and dandy.  But that has nothing to do with how we should deal with our own language. In our case, you ask the relevant experts (teachers, novelists, journalists), average the answers, and that’s probably a good guide.  But you certainly don’t listen to left-wing scam artists telling you that our experts are not allowed to speak, because anything they say would be prescriptive, and we don’t allow that when we go into the jungle on anthropological expeditions.  Doesn’t this sophistry almost make your head spin?

But look again, and it turns out there is a second sophistry on top of the first one.  These discussions about natives, experts, and ourselves casually presuppose that we are talking about adults.  But many times, without ever acknowledging it, the discussion shifts over to school and the teaching of children.  Isn’t it obvious that the freedom you might give to adults is not appropriately given to children?

In other words, when liberal sophisticates start discussing this issue, they always pose it in terms of freedom, creativity, self-expression, laissez-faire, do your own thing, and gather ye rosebuds while ye may.  Sure, if you insist, adults can wear clothes inside-out and stay drunk.  Let’s not waste time discussing it.  If you want to arrange your sentences backward and break every grammatical rule, go for it.

What we’re discussing now is what’s appropriate in the early grades at school.  Teaching is typically prescriptive, and that’s how it should be.  Schools should teach the right ways to do things.  (This approach has got to be far more efficient than what many public schools are now doing: teach no ways at all, or teach all the ways as if none is preferable.) 

Bottom line, what newspapers call Standard English should be taught first.  That seems to be what our left-wing professors are eager to stop.

So what are the pros and cons?  Do you let a child do anything the child wants?  Are you doing children a favor if you allow them to go out with dirty faces or raggedy clothes?  Isn’t it foolish to pretend that children live and learn in a vacuum?

It seems to be common sense and common decency to tell children what is typically done.  With regard to language, this might require explaining regional variations, work-related slang, and even class differences.  Most children can understand these ideas at a fairly young age.  They probably already speak a different way with their friends from how they do with their parents.

To pretend that all these nuances don’t exist is the opposite of teaching.  To pretend that everything is equally acceptable is a nasty sort of nihilism.

Question is, why are liberals so eager to drown children in permissiveness and relativism?  Who is being served?  Just recently reports came out about a Chicago school that was teaching anal sex to fifth-graders.  And this would be for whose benefit?  The children’s?  No, this is surely liberals trying to break down the last barriers.

Presumably we’re seeing that same worldview when schools refuse to teach grammar.  The point, always, is power – in this case, the power to make the rules.  That’s why the left always maneuvers to control language, semantics, and education.

The sophistry prohibiting prescriptive grammar is not about grammar at all.  It’s about the left being able to tell everybody else how to talk, and how to think.  (Note that the anti-prescriptive diktat is itself prescriptive.)

Liberals always want to play their ideological games, using kids as guinea pigs.  If you don’t tell the kids what the prevailing rules are, the kids will be left in an intellectual wasteland.  To excuse this, you have a whole Education Establishment boldly proclaiming that whatever little children say is just fine, whatever it is.  No rules, guessing, and invented spelling – that’s what elementary education is for many.

But how can they justify all this logically?  Well, some genius thought, why don’t we just bring back anthropological field work to our own society?  We’ll announce (and argue with great indignation) that professional authors, English professors, and smart citizens who have used the language expertly for a lifetime have absolutely no special standing.  They should shut up, lest they be guilty of the crime of prescription.  The left has gotten away with this fluff for 75 years.

Aren’t you tired of left-wing professors using lame sophistries to dumb down the schools and the society?  Here’s a plan: don’t accept lame sophistries.

Sophistry. That’s a word I’ve not seen for a long, long time. Truthfully, now, how many of you know what it means? Don’t know? Here’s the definition. If you and your children don’t know, it’s a good topic for teaching both of you.

soph·ist·ry
ˈsäfəstrē/
noun
noun: sophistry
  1. the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.
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The day of the Tyrants…

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…will soon begin to end…or at least, hit a speed bump. The level of tyranny changes on a daily basis. One of the most egregious acts by a tyrant, an act clearly unconstitutional, has been reversed. Houston Mayor Annise Parker has told her enablers to withdraw the subpoenas to seize the sermons of five Houston pastors. Her reason for the subpoena? It violated her new anti-gay/anti-free speech edict.

She received immediate push-back. The Texas Attorney General wrote her a letter informing her that she was violating the 1st Amendment. The Houston-Five, as they are now known, refused to comply with the Mayor’s order. Christians and conservative began to send Bibles to the mayor. Finally, when she realized she had really stepped into a pile of hot, steaming dung, she reversed her order.

Houston mayor drops bid to subpoena pastors’ sermons

By , FoxNews.com

Subpoenas issued to five Houston pastors demanding all sermons and correspondence dealing with homosexuality, gender identity and the city’s Equal Rights ordinance have been withdrawn, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor announced at a Wednesday press conference.

“After much contemplation and discussion, I am directing the city legal department to withdraw the subpoenas issued to the five Houston pastors who delivered the petitions, the anti-HERO petitions, to the city of Houston and who indicated that they were responsible for the overall petition effort,” said Mayor Annise Parker in remarks covered by television station KPRC.

My column on the issue sparked a bit of national outrage – well – a lot of national outrage. To be honest it was a full-scale hullabaloo. City Hall was deluged with telephone calls, letters, emails – along with hundreds of Bibles and sermons. More than 50,000 supporters signed a petition.

Nevertheless, the mayor still seems hell-bent on defending the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance – a piece of legislation that will in part give grown men who identify as women the right to use the restrooms of their choice.

“It is extremely important to me to protect our Equal Rights Ordinance from repeal, and it is extremely important to me to make sure that every Houstonian knows that their lives are valid and protected and acknowledged,” Parker said. “We are going to continue to vigorously defend our ordinance against repeal efforts.”

Tyranny retreats in the face of opposition. As she was quoted above, Houston’s tyrant has no intention of backing down. This setback is just a small pause in the progress of her tyrannical agenda.

We, here near Kansas City, have another example of tyranny. Over the summer, Kansas City Mayor Sly James rammed through the city council an ordinance banning the open carry of firearms. In itself, such an act has been done in cities across America. What was most tyrannical in this case was the motivation behind the ordinance—suppression of free speech.

He said aggressive open carrying of weapons can be intimidating for customers and bad for business. — Kansas City Star.

Mayor James’ logic for the ordinance was that he didn’t want to see people legally carrying firearms openly in Kansas City. He could not provide any evidence that carrying weapons increased lawlessness but he could create a law to make open carry illegal. The Missouri Legislature passed a law this year that made James’ ordinance invalid—but only for those licensed carry a weapon concealed.

Mayor James knew his ordinance would soon be invalid but he pushed it through anyway. His purpose was not public saftety. He knew he had no evidence that his law would improve that. No, the ordinance was enacted solely to curb acts of free speech from the Open Carry advocates.

There are more instances of liberal tyranny across the country. In Idaho, a city passed an ordinance requiring churches to perform same-sex marriages regardless of the minister’s religious views. The order was a clear violation of the 1st Amendment but liberals ignore the Constitution when they violate it.

That Idaho city has now backed off from their order—which included jail time and heavy fines for non-compliance. But never doubt, tyranny is only waiting for attention to wander and they will return. That is why we must be always vigilant and ready to respond to every tyrannical act.

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Liberal Assault on Truth

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Liberals, democrats, seem to be inheritantly incapable of being truthful. Whenever they are pressed for truth, they attack the opposition. Case in point. The City of Houston passed an ordinance that restricted the 1st Amendment and free speech. When the residents submitted a petition to abolish the ordinance, the city council claimed the petition was faulty, regardless of the 50,000 signatures. Much more than the number required for action.

In Kansas City, Missouri, the city council, at the instigation of Mayor Sly James, passed an ordinance banning Open Carry of a firearm. Their motivation was not public safety, nor a request from law enforcement. Open Carry had been legal in Kansas City for decades and had never been an issue—until Mayor Sly James made it one.

Mayor James publicly stated that the ordinance, “was intended to send a message,” to Open Carry advocates. That made the issue, not a 2nd Amendment issue, but a 1st Amendment issue, banning the free expression of those Open Carry advocates. A lawyer friend said the ordinance and the public admission of the motivation behind it, was clearly illegal, a constitutional violation. But, he said, it would take a barrel of $100 dollar bills to fight it in court and so far, no one with deep pockets has come forward to finance a lawsuit against the ordinance.

In Houston, because Houston’s churches were in opposition of the ordinance and by extension the Mayor who was a self-avowed homosexual, the Churches have been subpoenaed to submit transcripts of their sermons that opposed the ordinance. The subpoenas are a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. The churches and church leaders are banding together to fight the city of Houston on this issue.

An article appeared in the American Thinker that addresses this lack of truthfulness by liberal and democrats. With the actions of the Houston Mayor and City Council, its timing could not have been more appropriate.

Liberals Wage War on the Truth

By Trevor Thomas, October 15, 2014

When it comes to political “wars,” in spite of the meme perpetrated by most liberals, no one is more hawkish than modern liberals and the political party that they own, the Democrat Party. By and large since the 1960s, their efforts are summed up by one succinct and extremely accurate appellation: a war on the truth.

In the history of our nation, only the pro-slavery Democrats of the 19th century rival the political deception employed by today’s liberals that lead the modern Democrat Party. Support of everything from abortion, to gender perversions, homosexuality, pornography, a redefinition of marriage, wicked climate policies, and an enslaving welfare state have made today’s Democrat Party little more than a modern-day Mephistopheles. Instead of magic to lure their Faustian targets, today’s Democrats employ, among other things, bribery, class warfare, fear, greed, lust, propaganda, scientism, vengeance, and violence.

This is really unsurprising. When your politics regularly conflict with absolute truth, constant deception is required. The evidence is, of course, all around us. This is especially the case given that we are in the midst of another election season. Take note of the political ads run by Democrats. How long before we get to meet the next Julia or Pajama Boy? How many times will we get to hear about, if elected, what Democrats will do in order to give out more goodies from the government? Where will the next fraudulent statistics in the “War on Women” originate?

How much “linguistic limbo” will Democrats perform in order blandly to describe their embracing of the “right” to kill children in the womb? (Or they simply video their abortions and tell us that everything is “super great!”) What deceit will liberals use to explain or embrace the fiscal and medical disaster that is Obamacare? How many times will we get to hear the phrase “marriage equality” (knowing full well that the liberal position on marriage also “discriminates”)?

How far away will Democrats attempt to run from what they really are in order to keep themselves in power? Liberals all over the country are running from Obama and their own party in an attempt to win elections. As most who are following this election season know well, Democrats are going so far as to avoid the label “Democrat” or even admit that they voted for Obama.

In Kansas, Greg Orman is a Democrat running as an Independent. He has shamelessly refused to say with which party he would caucus if elected. “Truth makes the Devil blush,” wrote the English historian Thomas Fuller. As liberalism has created a culture that is nearly bereft of shame, today’s Democrats rarely blush, even as they mock their wheelchair-bound opponents. This usually happens only when someone becomes a political liability (as did the Democrat candidate that Orman replaced) and not because some proper moral standard has been violated.

If Orman does win, as the Wall Street Journal notes, he will most certainly owe his election to Washington Democrats. Kentucky Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes squirmed like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar as she attempted to avoid revealing to the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board whether she voted for Obama in the last presidential election. Mary Landrieu and Michelle Nunn have played similar games as they try to win U.S. Senate seats in conservative states.

Given how far our culture has fallen morally, getting elected in the United States these days is much more challenging when you are accountable to absolute truths. As I noted earlier this year, because their moral bar is so low and easily adjusted to whatever is politically popular, liberals today generally have an easier time “playing politics” than conservatives — especially Christian conservatives.

When asked recently how to break the stalemate in the culture war that divides American conservatives and liberals, Catholic scholar George Weigel replied, “When you have a gnostic philosophy that ignores the very fabric of reality — and it is wed to a coercive state — it’s hard to know where to go.”

Ignoring “the very fabric of reality” is a frequent practice of modern liberals. Liberalism is so far removed from truth and reality that many liberals today can’t even acknowledge explicit evil when confronted with it. Ben Affleck has plenty of company among his fellow leftists when it comes to denying the rotten fruit of Islam. As the recent exchange with fellow liberal Bill Maher illustrated, many American liberals, in the name of the supreme virtue of liberalism – tolerance — will eagerly and angrily deny lesser virtues of their “faith.”

“Tolerance is a virtue of a man without convictions,” wrote G.K. Chesterton. A “man without convictions” who frequently “ignores the very fabric of reality” and who is enthusiastically “wed to a coercive state” is an apt description of modern liberals, but not perfect. In spite of what they themselves might think — lost in their fallacy that is today’s tolerance — liberals are not completely tolerant, and thus not devoid of convictions.

The convictions of modern liberalism are numerous and growing: Abortion, homosexuality, hook-ups, same-sex marriage, gender confusion, man-made global warming, universal healthcare, income redistribution, and whatever is the next perversion or deceit that will strike at the heart of biblical truths.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” helped launch the American Revolution. If America is to remain, we need a spiritual revolution bringing us back to those truths that were once so “self-evident.”

Liberals and democrats have perverted our Constitution. We must all fight to take it back.

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Truthy

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I was at a meeting of local county conservatives last night and one of the members started talking about how much personal information people, unthinkingly, release on the ‘net. Personally, especially on Facebook, my profile is sparse. I post my name, that I’m married and the company name I used to work for. I thought long and hard before I added that last bit and did so only at the request of a few former work buddies.

But all too many people post everything—all their personal information, phone numbers, personal details, family photos by the ton, oblivious just how much they release. We hear of the NSA spying on US citizens and no one really believes the NSA’s claims of innocence.

PRISM is one such spy program that examines all email traffic looking for specific pieces of information.

The Prism program collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to Internet companies such as Google Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.[6] —  Wiki.

http://static.tumblr.com/k6l9ga7/1pRlvb0xk/big-brother-1984-cropped.jpgThe conversation from last night was still fresh in my mind this morning when I found the article below in my morning news basket from Ed Morrissey. He compared “Truthy” to George Orwell‘s Big Brother watching everyone.

Media curiously silent on “Truthy”

posted at 8:41 am on August 27, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

It’s been a couple of days since the Washington Free Beacon’s Elizabeth Harrington first reported on the three-year-old  federal grant from the National Science Foundation for the “Truthy” database, and … not much else has happened. Blogs have picked it up, including our own Mary Katharine, and Reason’s Bobby Soave did a good job of highlighting its inherent contradictions. Twitchy has collated a number of tongue-in-cheek attempts to kick-start Truthy. Other than that, the national media appears to have gone radio silent on this latest project; according to a Bing news search this morning, no national outlet has yet picked up the story from WFB.

That’s interesting, because one might have guessed that they would take notice of a million-dollar effort to encroach on their fact-checking turf. In my column for The Week today, I wonder why the federal government is spending a million dollars to create a mechanism that sounds like it could come straight out of Orwell when we have a perfectly good private-sector market for free speech:

The better question is this: Who makes these subjective judgments? At least at first, the answer would be the researchers who are building Truthy under a federal grant from the NSF. It’s not to hard to imagine a scenario in which the federal government would eventually find a use for Truthy, and would make the subjective judgments on how best to monitor political speech on social media.

Reason’s Bobby Soave points out the basic contradiction in claiming, as the abstract does, to support “the preservation of open debate” while attempting to apply labels to speech such as “suspicious memes,” “hate speech,” and “subversive propaganda,” as well as determining which arguments constitute an “organic meme” versus an “inorganic” one. “Those seem like conflicting goals,” Soave writes, “even if pursued in a totally apolitical way.”

Or an “inorganic” way, for that matter. Truthy is the very definition of a top-down determination of the legitimacy of public speech. In a free society, citizens make those determinations for themselves. That is the organic approach to political speech, stemming from those who wish to engage in — or become spectators to — the contest of ideas, arguments, analyses, and proposals. Instead of allowing people to reach their own conclusions about those ideas and arguments, Truthy and the NSF instead appear to want to delegitimize the people who engage in those debates, which would in any other circumstance become the very kind of political smear that Truthy is supposedly designed to protect against.

The fact-checking industry, for all its faults, at least uses a free-market approach to criticism and debate that “Truthy” would pervert. Citizens of a free nation who value political speech shouldn’t pay a dime for Truthy, let alone a million dollars. Its abstract describes an apparatus for state control of political thought, as though its proposers read George Orwell’s 1984 as a how-to rather than a cautionary tale.

The Inquisitr takes a look at the principals involved in this project, and wonders just how non-partisan this project really is:

The project website also says that while many memes are created in a “perfectly organic manner,” others are allegedly driven by the “shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns.” Free speech advocates say, “so what” to the organic vs. organized meme creation. If a political advocacy group makes a Barack Obama golf meme, will they wind up in the government-funded database? According to the description and focus of the Truthy database project, the answer would be a resounding “yes.”

But speaking of “the shady machinery of high-profile … campaigns,” we have this:

The Truthy database project is billed as a non-partisan effort, but the “lead investigator” on the project is reportedly involved with a multitude of progressive or liberal groups, Filippo Menczer has reportedly uttered support for Moveon.org, Amnesty International, and President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, among other groups. Filippo Menczer is also a computer science and informatics professor at Indiana University. Links to the political and activists groups the Truthy database leader supports are posted on his bio page at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. Menczer’s page also says that he is on sabbatical at Yahoo! Labs for the 2014-15 academic year. The $1 million grant funded by the taxpayers runs during the same year.

But don’t worry … you’ll love Big Brother! They promise not to make that a “suspicious meme,” too.

For most of us, bits and pieces of our history and personal details are already in some database—a piece here, a piece there, including our tax and income data, even our medical history. It’s too late for us but we should be ever vigilant to not allow more of our personal data to come into some one’s hands. Privacy is achieved only through constant vigilence.

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It’s Fridaayyy!

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Yes, I’m sure it’s Friday, I double checked.

After stepping into a large pile of brown and stinky, I bet Governor Jay Nixon wishes today was Saturday. Unfortunately for him, Nixon created that large pile on his own. His mouth made a bad situation worse and he has no one to blame except for himself.

What did Nixon do? He publicly called for the “vigorous prosecution” of Officer Darren Wilson before the investigation was complete. Then, when evidence began to appear that showed Wilson killed Brown in self-defense, Nixon compounded the problem by refusing to recant his earlier statement. Instead of supporting the law and legal process, Nixon sided with the mob for nothing more than personal political gain.

Missouri Governor under fire after calling for ‘vigorous prosecution’ of cop who shot dead Michael Brown but grand jury won’t make decision until OCTOBER

  • Governor Jay Nixon said on Tuesday ‘a vigorous prosecution must be pursued’ after Ferguson officer Darren Wilson shot dead teen Michael Brown

  • The governor called for the prosecution of Wilson comes ahead of the grand jury meeting today to see if the officer will even be charged

  • Officer Wilson, a six-year veteran of the Ferguson force with a clean record, has not been arrested or charged with any crime

  • Missouri’s Lt. Governor criticized Nixon saying he had ‘prejudged the case’ 

By Louise Boyle for MailOnline and Associated Press, Published: 10:31 EST, 20 August 2014 | Updated: 16:39 EST, 20 August 2014

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has come under fire after calling for the ‘vigorous prosecution’ of the Ferguson police officer who shot dead unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

The Democrat governor released a five-minute video on Tuesday, where he said: ‘A vigorous prosecution must now be pursued.’

His statement began: ‘Ten days ago, a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in broad daylight. The world has watched as a community has been engulfed in grief, anger, fear, at times violence.’

The governor then called upon Attorney-General Eric Holder and St Louis county prosecutor Bob McCulloch to ‘meet expectations’ by finding justice for Michael Brown and his family ‘thoroughly, promptly and correctly’. 

Governor Nixon’s call for the prosecution of Officer Darren Wilson comes ahead of any decisions by the grand jury who are meeting today to see if the 28-year-old will be charged.

St Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said on Wednesday that he estimated it would be the middle of October before the grand jury reached a decision on whether Officer Wilson will face charges over Michael Brown’s death.

Nixon made his statement before some FACTS came to light—the video of the convenience store robbery, the video of the confrontation with the background voices confirming Officer Wilson’s account, the recantation of the statement by Dorian Johnson, Brown’s accomplice, that said Wilson shot Brown in the back, the independent autopsy that showed Brown was shot from the front, two dozen or more eye-witness statements that said Brown charged Officer Wilson before being fatally shot. Nixon ignored all this real evidence deciding it was a good opportunity to gain political points at the expense of Wilson’s life and reputation.

Nixon prejudgment ignored the accumulating evidence. The Grand Jury, empaneled in May 2014, won’t release its results until October. So why did Nixon attempt to politically lynch Officer Wilson?

Maybe because Nixon has further political ambitions. One rumor is that he would be Hillary’s Veep in 2016. I don’t think that will happen now. Nixon’s bungling attempt to gain liberal creds from the black community failed. Instead he’s now being held in ridicule by nearly everyone including members of his own party.

But probably the worse cut of all comes not from a news item or a reporter but from a cartoonist. Michael Ramirez posted this cartoon and it cuts directly to the issue.

http://www.investors.com/image/RAMclr-082214-lynching-IBD-COLOR-FINAL-147.gif.cms

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