by Daniel Clark
You can tell that things are looking up in Iraq, because President Bush's enemies are having to delve deeper into the mothballs to come up with reasons to criticize him. One example of this is an Aug. 9th Houston Chronicle story by Julie Mason, in which she revives the fatuous argument that Bush spends too much time on vacation.
Citing numbers that had been compiled by a CBS reporter, Mason writes that Bush is only a couple weeks away from breaking Ronald Reagan's record for vacation days taken by a president. This assumes, ridiculously, that the President of the United States is no longer on duty when he leaves the White House. In reality, there is seldom any particular reason that the president must stay in Washington when Congress is out of session. It stands to reason, then, that Republican presidents would leave town more often, rather than remain in the midst of a hostile Washington press corps.
From the way that liberals talk about Bush's "vacations," you'd think that when he moved operations to his Crawford ranch, his work went undone. One imagines him returning to his desk to find one of those pink "While You Were Out" slips, saying something like, "Putin called. Said it was urgent, but you know how he is. Told him you'd gone fishing."
The headline of Mason's story dubs Bush "the vacation president," but the truth be known, President Clinton was more on vacation in the Oval Office than Bush has ever been in Crawford. For all we know, one of Clinton's many sordid trysts might have even involved a snorkel.
It was Clinton who said that the one thing he'd miss most about being president would be the White House movie theater. Any other president would have said something about the privilege of serving the American people, or maybe the dedication of his staff and secret servicemen, but leave it to Bill Clinton to take that question as an opportunity to audition for MTV's Cribs.
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Posted by Walt as Biased Media at 10:22 PM EDT
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by Nancy Salvato
"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again." — Alexander Pope
Around this time last year I participated in the Center for Civic Education’s National Academy, where Professor Will Harris led a selected group of students in 21 days of intense study on the basic issues of political theory, and the values and principles of American constitutional democracy. Early on, the importance of gaining a "surplus of mind," as a crucial element of the democratic process, was discussed. In order to become thinkers or problem solvers, our citizenry must be taught by teachers who are ambitious in their learning goals. When teachers over simplify learning objectives, this conditions our citizenry to fail at more complicated tasks. Conversely, giving the populace the tools to figure out the world’s complexity enables each person to be more powerful and free. Moreover, this is a necessary component of our system of government.
To elaborate further, a surplus of knowledge is especially useful when dealing with unexpected situations. When weighing the possible consequences of a decision, an intelligent person draws on these reserves. The key to "intelligence" is a capacity to weigh the variables that come into play when assessing individual situations. A surplus of knowledge gives us a reasonable shot at being able to anticipate short and long term repercussions of actions or inaction. Indeed, as a colleague of mine recently noted, every choice comes with regret.
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Posted by Walt as Education, U.S. Constitutional Issues at 10:25 PM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
If you want to witness the most blatantly un-Constitutional and un-American laws at work than just take a walk through your local schools. They are currently under the control of the federal government.
Why any town or city bothers to hold an election for members of the local board of education is a mystery to me. Between the U.S. Department of Education and a union, the National Education Association—masquerading as just a group of concerned teachers—local boards have no real power to reverse the subjugation and destruction of the nation’s education system.
Since the Constitution does not even mention education, it is a continuing mystery why the federal government has a department devoted to it. Well, it’s less of a mystery if you consider that its purpose is to indoctrinate the children passing through it to accept a whole range of values and ideas that lots of Americans think are wrong.
From the Head Start program to the International Baccalaureate, the whole purpose of “education” today is to create new generations of Americans who think that the United Nations should govern the entire planet and who uncritically accept politically correct beliefs about gender issues, diversity, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. To insure this occurs, Congress and some States are ready to sign off on programs that would evaluate the mental stability of every child from pre-school on through graduation. That’s Big Brother!
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Posted by Walt as General Commentary at 7:50 PM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
In a month, August 20 and 21, the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico will sit down together in Montebello, Quebec to discuss making the borders between these three nations disappear. They will discuss progress on a vast highway project passing through America to link Mexico with Canada.
So far, no one has asked the citizens of these three nations whether they want to do this. It is not up for a vote in Congress and, indeed, Congress has no supervision over the gnomes in the U.S. Department of Commerce who are busily “harmonizing” the laws under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP).
This, we’re told, is not a treaty so Congress has no constitutional oversight obligation. I guess it’s more like a nice big handshake between the presidents and prime minister of these three nations who, let’s face it, just know better than the rest of us. I mean, do Canadians really think they’re in charge of Canada? Americans should have a say about programs affecting America? Or has anyone asked Mexicans if they want to be part of some “harmonized” configuration not unlike the European Union?
Last time I checked, the European Union lacked a constitution because some of its member states, notably France, had rejected the one that was offered.
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Posted by Walt as North American Union, U.S. Borders Issues, U.S. Constitutional Issues at 5:25 AM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
Sometimes I fear America has become the Paris Hilton of the world, forever in the media, an incredibly wealthy, pretty creature that often appears to be vacuous, in need of an occasional spanking, and yet fascinating for reasons that defy an easy explanation. Whatever the nation does, however, it does from a set of values and a cultural heritage that sets it apart from every other nation on earth.
These values of freedom and individual liberty need to be taught in our schools, spoken of around the dinner table, and in all the institutions of the nation as a constant reminder why America is such an economic dynamo, a source of endless innovation, and a place where one can literally travel from coast to coast and consistently be greeted with courtesy and warmth by complete strangers.
Writers are, by nature, people who love the written word and turn to it for answers. Let’s look at some thoughts that celebrate freedom and liberty in a world where it exists only for a lucky few of the six billion people who share our planet.
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Posted by Walt as Patriotism at 9:22 PM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
The murders on the Virginia Tech campus, the worst such rampage in our history, might have been mitigated if just one member of the faculty or a student had the means to return fire.
I have owned guns for decades. On rare occasions, I have had to “show” one of my guns to people with bad intentions. Not surprisingly, they changed their plans to take my money and do me some harm. The Virginia Tech murders confirm the value of empowering ordinary citizens to carry a concealed weapon.
On March 9 I learned of a ruling in the case of Parker v. District of Columbia in which Senior Judge Lawrence H. Silberman wrote an opinion, with Judge Thomas B. Griffith concurring, that restored the Second Amendment to the citizens of the District and, by extension, to every citizen of these United States. Not since 1976, had residents of the District had the right to defend themselves with force of arms.
Judge Silberman wrote, “In sum, the phrase ‘the right of the people’, when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual.”
As Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, noted succinctly, “The right of self-preservation was understood as the right to defend oneself against attacks by lawless individuals, or, if absolutely necessary, to resist and throw off a tyrannical government.”
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Posted by Walt as Terrorism, U.S. Constitutional Issues at 9:37 PM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
Here’s one of those statistics that sums up everything you need to know about America’s immigration crisis. The May 14 edition of US News & World Report had a small item noting that, “Mexico has lost more people to migration to the United States than to death since 2000.”
“An average of 577,000 people moved to the United States annually during the 2000-2005 period, while 495,000 people died in Mexico.” The U.S. agency providing this data estimates that about 11 million Mexicans are living, legally or not, in the United States.
This is not about disliking Mexicans. Many have come here legally, become citizens, and have risen in our society to contribute in business, academics, and government. This is about saving America from a wholesale and entirely illegal invasion, and its consequences.
Mexico has an entirely different view of people who would move there. The Center for Security Policy points out that Mexico prohibits foreigners from owning land within 100 kilometers of the Mexico border and within 50 kilometers of the Mexican coastland, prime real estate. Mexican law permits the government to revoke the naturalized citizenship of anyone who chooses to live in his country of origin more than five years.
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Posted by Walt as Immigration, U.S. Borders Issues, U.S. Political Issues at 7:48 PM EDT
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