From Illinois State University

I found this and it is too good not to post. Talk about summing up the entire disaster called Barack Obama in one letter:

“No He Can’t” by Prof. Anne Wortham

By Michael Eden

Anne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

No He Can’t
by Anne Wortham

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president.

Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is
worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival, - all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the “change” that Obama asserts has come to America.

Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared “progressive” whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them. I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration, - political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that “fairness” is the equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to “go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice” is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the “bottom up,” and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting “Yes We Can!” Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead - and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States , the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over - and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America . Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to - Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine, - what little there is left, - for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

The Bill of Rights and The State of Nature

Thomas Jefferson once said, “A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.” Jefferson borrowed from Locke again in the Declaration of Independence, citing both the “State of Nature” and “Nature’s God.”
In order to understand the contemporary political landscape of the United States, one must first be aware of a number of political theories including, at a minimum, what exactly “rights” are. After all, our first President recognized the importance of public awareness for the sake of the public good:

“Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened." -George Washington, Farewell Address, 19 September 1796

In a society more adept in the lives of American Idol contestants than of Presidential candidates, we have arrived at a critically disturbing low level of public awareness. The purpose of this blog is not to chronicle the history of the demise of public perception (perhaps I will tackle that bear in the future). It is, however, to make my small contribution to curbing the downward trend. So…let’s begin.

Politicians often like to throw patriotic-sounding words out like “democracy” and “liberty” when referring to the government they serve. Unfortunately these words are abused not only in the United States. Take the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for example. Also known as North Korea, this state is not a democracy, not a republic, and is arguably one of the most repressive and despotic regimes in history. Indeed, the DPRK’s human rights violation makes the British Parliament’s offenses against the colonists look like time-out. Their people revere Dear Leader (Kim Chong-il) as a deity in human form, and they really believe it because they have no opportunity to know anything else. The grip is that tight. So from one extreme to the other, what are rights and why do we have many while North Koreans have none?
As political philosopher John Locke stated in his three Treatises on Government, people are born with rights. Yes, all people, everywhere, are born with rights. These rights, in a nutshell, include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (sound familiar?). The environment in which you enter this world, however, can have a profound effect on your realization of said rights. If you are born in the United States you have a reasonable chance at enjoying at least most of your God-given rights. If you are born in the People’s Republic of China (there’s those pesky people’s words again!) you won’t do so well with speaking your mind (see: Tiananmen Square Massacre).



So what is the fundamental difference between the states mentioned? The difference is the style of government (and therefore the political philosophy of its founders) and if that government understands its purpose. The Founders of the United States were extraordinarily frustrated with their rulers. You won’t read long before you notice the vile disdain most of those men held for their government in Great Britain. Ironically, it was British philosophers that arguably sparked the thinking that led to the American Revolution.

When the brightest minds in the United States convened to draft a new form of government in 1787 (after the failure of the too-weak Articles of Confederation), they had a monumental series of decisions to make. They had to strike a balance between the oppressive British-style rule and the uselessness of the Confederation. Led by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay through their series of articles called the Federalist Papers, a new Constitution was drafted. The Bill of Rights is what I find paradoxically interesting.

The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Brace yourself: As a matter of principle, I disagree with the Bill of Rights altogether. “What!? How can you say that!” you may well ask. I agree completely with Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper #84. The Constitution, as it exists, already covers what the Bill of Rights essentially reiterates. Unfortunately, many states would not ratify the Constitution unless it included a Bill of specific and enumerated Rights. So, they drafted the first ten amendments protecting freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly, petition, firearms ownership, against self-incrimination, etc.. The very creation of the Bill of Rights creates an illusion the Founding Fathers never intended. It appears as though the Bill of Rights is from where our rights originate. This is critical because it is the very foundation on which our government is built. Fortunately, however, these genius men had the presence of mind to include the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which read, respectively:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

To me, the Ninth Amendment means that just because a certain specific right may not appear verbatim on the list in the previous eight amendments does not mean its not a right the people retain. Likewise, the Tenth Amendment takes it a step further and says that if something is not listed here, the Federal government has no authority in that case. Yes, look around you for a violation of that one. In fact, you’re probably physically touching something right now that is unconstitutionally regulated by the federal government.
You know that feeling you get when you get out of the hot tub and jump in the pool? Well, if the pool water was 35 degrees, that’s the feeling I get when I look at Barack Obama’s coming Administration. Never before has the Constitution been so verbally disparaged and the offender continue to hold a public job, much less the highest office in the land.

I hope I have scratched the tip of the iceberg for you. Next time you see the talking heads on CNN begging for a bailout, stop and think about what the Constitution might have to say about it. Better yet, stop to think about the Founding Fathers twitching in their graves at the idea of Congress nationalizing the Big 3. My, how far we have fallen from principle.

Edited for Clarification: While I disagree with the establishment of the Bill of Rights in principle, I vigorously defend it in practice...there is a difference.

Furthermore, I have already had multiple liberals point out that, in reference to Washington's quote, institutions of knowledge already exist. True. However, that does not change the fact that most of America is simply ignorant. This video will speak for itself: How Obama Got Elected

Labeling My Political Philosphy

I have spent a considerable amount of time mulling over where I stand politically. I often try to identify with certain schools of political thought only to find different groups having certain attributes I don't like. While I generally vote Republican you will probably never hear me call myself one (I would rather not identify with a party that has abandoned its identity altogether). I often lean Libertarian, with certain non-anarchist caveats. On the anarchy note, however, I have embraced some principles of modern anarcho-capitalism. In any case, recently, while doing some reading on the nature of government, I stumbled upon the Cato Institute's description of where they stand within the political spectrum. After I read it, I sat back and said, "yeah, that's it."

From the Cato Institute:

Today, those who subscribe to the principles of the American Revolution--individual liberty, limited government, the free market, and the rule of law--call themselves by a variety of terms, including conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, and liberal. We see problems with all of those terms. "Conservative" smacks of an unwillingness to change, of a desire to preserve the status quo. Only in America do people seem to refer to free-market capitalism--the most progressive, dynamic, and ever-changing system the world has ever known--as conservative. Additionally, many contemporary American conservatives favor state intervention in some areas, most notably in trade and into our private lives.

"Classical liberal" is a bit closer to the mark, but the word "classical" connotes a backward-looking philosophy.

Finally, "liberal" may well be the perfect word in most of the world--the liberals in societies from China to Iran to South Africa to Argentina are supporters of human rights and free markets--but its meaning has clearly been corrupted by contemporary American liberals.

The Jeffersonian philosophy that animates our work has increasingly come to be called "libertarianism" or "market liberalism." It combines an appreciation for entrepreneurship, the market process, and lower taxes with strict respect for civil liberties and skepticism about the benefits of both the welfare state and foreign military adventurism.

The market-liberal vision brings the wisdom of the American Founders to bear on the problems of today. As did the Founders, it looks to the future with optimism and excitement, eager to discover what great things women and men will do in the coming century. Market liberals appreciate the complexity of a great society, they recognize that socialism and government planning are just too clumsy for the modern world. It is--or used to be--the conventional wisdom that a more complex society needs more government, but the truth is just the opposite. The simpler the society, the less damage government planning does. Planning is cumbersome in an agricultural society, costly in an industrial economy, and impossible in the information age. Today collectivism and planning are outmoded and backward, a drag on social progress.

Market liberals have a cosmopolitan, inclusive vision for society. We reject the bashing of gays, China, rich people, and immigrants that contemporary liberals and conservatives seem to think addresses society's problems. We applaud the liberation of blacks and women from the statist restrictions that for so long kept them out of the economic mainstream. Our greatest challenge today is to extend the promise of political freedom and economic opportunity to those who are still denied it, in our own country and around the world.

There you have it.

Here is My American Story

I sent the following to the Obama Team with the following link: Your Story

Congratulations to Mr. Obama on winning the election. This is truly an historic milestone for the United States and the world.

On January 20, 2009, in accordance with Article II, Section I of the United States Constitution, Mr. Obama will raise his right hand and make an oath before Almighty God saying: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." To preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Senator Obama will soon be President Obama, the executor of this awesome and solemn task. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama, in the past, has overtly expressed his distaste for this great document. He has even gone as far to say that he feels the Constitution is incomplete; that it is a document of negative liberites. With all due respect to Mr. Obama, I would take this opportunity to point out that the Founders recognized the need to restrain government. If I could highlight, underscore, bold, and italicize that statement I would. Government is, by its very nature, an organization prone to growth. As time weathers its founding institutions, our government has grown wildly beyond its original intended purpose.

While I am hopeful of the coming Obama Administration, I will not be holding my breath for Mr. Obama to be the new Constitutionalist in the White House. Indeed, even the Republican Presidents in the latter half of the previous century did little or nothing to protect the tenets of that document.

To Mr. Obama directly: The Constitution is not a series of suggestions or guidelines. It is the law which you will soon swear to uphold and defend. The ability to express ideas (like on talk radio for example) or the right to keep and bear arms is spelled out clearly. These rights, sir, are granted by God. Your job is to protect them. I look forward to your support of my God-given rights.

It will now be my policy to sign every post with the Gadsden Flag, as perhaps nothing better embodies the spirit of resistance to tyranny in government.

Class Warfare and the Nature of Emotion in Politics

We are now under the two weeks to go mark for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. Barack Obama, in oh-so-typical ultra liberal fashion, continues to wage class warfare (and this mysterious specter of "change") as his primary tactic to secure victory. Just short of actually uttering references to the Proletariat, Obama dutifully provokes nationalized pity on the middle class. Mr. Obama is a master of his use of emotion in politics. You see, by painting the so-called "rich" as a collective greedy group of corporate executives who care nothing for the worker bees below them, a candidate can be very successful at drumming up cries of "unfair!" Do I deny the existence of greed of the elite of the elite? No, of course not. The bigger and significantly more pertinent question, though, is where does greed fit into the equation of capitalism? Surely the "worker bees" should be compensated for the collective greed of their employers! Right?

Like the great tax debate among the two candidates, most political discourse can be boiled down to fundamental principles. So, there is essentially one fundamental component, and one fundamental difference in leftist and rightist economic principles. The component is wealth. A nation's wealth exists among the people...the distribution thereof comprises classes. Where capitalism actually creates new wealth (and promotes individualized merit based success), socialism aims to utilize existing wealth to promote the general welfare (yeah, I said it) of the people. This is where wealth re-distribution, and media darling Joe the Plumber, come in. Obama's rhetorical plan involves no tax increases on 95% of Americans, while simultaneously establishing a massive tax increase on the other 5%. Well, you may be interested to know that more than a third of American already don't pay any income taxes. That's correct, the top two-thirds of wage earners are already covering the entire federal income tax revenue (this is under Bush's tax cuts!). Wait...here comes the best part: under the Obama tax plan, those people not paying any federal income taxes, will actually receive an annual check from the IRS. Aha! There's the light bulb...wealth redistribution. This isn't new, it will only be greatly expanded under Obama's plan. It has actually been going on for years. What nobody in Washington is willing to admit is that only by significantly curbing the size, scope, and influence (and therefore spending) of the federal government will this problem go away. As the budget deficit continues to grow legislators will seek a greater and greater tax burden on those actually still paying taxes. Oh yes...and that one third with no income tax liability at all? That number will actually expand to nearly half of all tax filers. This, folks, are those small doses of socialism finally manifesting itself as full blown Marxism that Nikita Kruschev was always talking about.

One paradox of our culture in the United States that I find exceedingly interesting is our nationalized sense that any intrusion of the government into private affairs, the basic tenet of socialism, is a bad thing. The paradox is that we continue to standby while we drift further and further in that direction. The enemies of free market capitalism have been very crafty in their approach. When you control the hand that feeds, you can create an environment of cultural dependency. As much as the analogy is degrading it is true: average Americans are sheep. This why emotive politics have been an invaluable tool for the left. It is not difficult to incite dissension among the ranks of classes...just use your bullhorn to inform the sheep that the people enjoying a higher standard of living than they are achieved it on their backs. These selfish fuedal lords are mindlessly driven by blind and unbridled greed to squash the "little guy" and sit around eating caviar and filets before having a cigar in their private smoking rooms. A poweful image indeed. It's also exceptionally untrue. The vast majority of the over-taxed public are hardworking Americans who set out to achieve the American Dream that they realized early on is not an entitlement or a right. It is a reward. It is a reward that is being eroded by the left in an attempt to "spread the wealth around," in the Promised One's own words.

And such is the nature of emotion in politics. Not unlike the Salem Witch Hunts of the 17th Century, all you have to do is spark the ignorant mob into a little finger pointing and everything else falls into place. Barack Obama must be sitting back, privately grinning at the prospect of his subjects engaging in class warfare (which he provoked) and then he publicly claims to be the savior of that great struggle.

When history judges our time, I sincerely hope for the sake of posterity that they can admire our generation as the one that finally saw through the wool over our eyes. Personally, I can breathe a slight sigh of relief in the knowledge that history will not look to my generation as the one that failed to restrain our government.

Sources and Further Reading:

The Wall Street Journal - 95% Illusion

The Washington Times - Tax Cut Socialism

The Wall Street Journal - Obama Talks Nonsense on Tax Cuts

Gadsden Flag

Obama is a Socialist

Barack Obama’s candidacy for President ostensibly exists as the one true vessel for “hope and change” for our troubled nation. Indeed, tens of thousands of the junior Senator from Illinois’ supporters consistently fill professional sporting venues to hear the Democrat Party nominee’s ideas for what he can do for them. They eagerly await the flood of government spending programs they feel they are entitled to.
This strikes me with more than a little irony. Was it really so long ago that another young Democrat was promoting a very different idea? On a cold January day in 1961, John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural address to his nation, and to the world. In his famous, and not so subtle, challenge to the American people he said, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” A concept undoubtedly lost on most people, the general electorate is only interested in what each candidate has to offer me, me, me.
Mr. Obama is not short on ideas. It’s the integrity (or lack thereof) of said ideas that has me worried. Make no mistake: Barack Obama is a socialist. From his plan to socialize (excuse me, nationalize) healthcare to his tax breaks for the “middle class” (how does anybody think he is going to pay for these programs), Obama’s entire platform is nothing more than modern, chic Marxism. The Obama campaign would have us believe that the privatization of Social Security is a bad thing! I suppose people currently investing anything in Social Security ultimately making more money would be a bad thing for Barack Obama, his campaign, and the Democrat Party. I shudder when I think about the average voter buying into this line of thinking.
One thing even Barack Obama is unabashedly unashamed to admit is that his Administration would promote massive spending. Somehow, this ridiculous expansion of government spending will be accomplished not by raising taxes, but by actually cutting them for the middle class. Wait, what? Mr. Obama should be careful with his plan to further tax the “upper” class; in 2005 the top 5% of wage earners paid almost 60% of all federal income taxes (IRS Data as published in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119786208643933077.html). Who is complaining about a lack of fairness again?
I challenge the reader to understand what the American dream really is. The American dream is not the hope of receiving a government check to buy your house or go to college. What is it that entitles you to these things anyway? Are you entitled to go to college because you happen to be born in the United States? Sadly, I think many people have assumed the mindset of living in the Land of Entitlement instead of the Land of Opportunity, and Barack Obama is their fulfiller.
Obama is no John F. Kennedy. The inexperienced, empty-suit, all talk no walk, junior first-term senator from Illinois is full of good intentions but short on realistic application. It’s really no surprise that the top ten poorest cities in the United States have one thing in common: Democrat leadership. “It’s the disadvantaged who habitually elect Democrats, yet are still disadvantaged.” Barack Obama preys (politically) on the less-than-fortunate. I fear they are taking the bait. Hook, line, and sinker.

The Foundation

"...to disarm the people is the best and most effective way to enslave them..." - George Mason

Indeed, history has demonstrated this very principle time and time again.

The intention of this blog is not to rant about gun rights. The mentality of the gun-control lobby, however, is indicative of a much larger, and more invasive, problem. That mentality is one that has not truly paused to consider the nature of the establishment of government itself. It is true that human beings have been establishing an "order" to their societies since societies have been organized but few ever truly consider "why?" Frequently, and in the case of our own state, governments are established following a thorough dissatisfaction with the previous one. Mere dissatisfaction ultimately festers into bloody revolution and, voilà, new government. What is it, then, that consistently compels the people to resort to bloodshed to achieve even a hope of a better quality of life? Well, Thomas Jefferson may have had a thing or two to say on the subject:

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

In a nutshell? Jefferson argued that rights are not granted by governments but are granted by God, and government is the tool that men have devised to protect these God-given rights. However, Jefferson recognizes that a time comes with many governments where the tables are turned. This generally doesn't happen overnight but is rather a long process. Once the process is full speed, however, it would appear to the casual on-looker that the rights of the people are granted by the government, instead of by God. This scenario, people, is the difference between subjects and citizens.

So what do gun rights have to do with anything? As George Mason so discerningly pointed out, an unarmed populace is one that is easily manipulated by the powers that be. Armed citizens, however, are a final guard against tyranny in government. Does that mean I think Jim Brady is working to disarm citizens for an eventual police state? No. Jim Brady is just an idiot. However, the constant focus on "gun control" (instead of crime control) is just another link in the chain...in that very gradual process.