The Party of Science Ignores... Data

About 20 years ago I read a piece about the North Miami police department eliminating the swimming requirement for the police.  With a working knowledge of geography and having visited Miami many times, I thought this was a bit odd and kind of a bad idea.  After all, North Miami has hundreds of miles of canals, lakes and beaches. Predictably, the reason the requirement was being dropped was because “blacks are less likely than whites to know how to swim because of economic disparities between the groups…”  Basically because not enough blacks were qualifying to become police.

That was long before the cancer of wokeness had taken hold of much of America.  I was dumbfounded.  Nobody with a functioning brain would have looked at that situation and said we have to eliminate a key element of the job requirements so we can let more members of X group join.  But that’s what the people in charge decided.  If someone with a functioning brain were actually in charge they would have said something like, “If our goal is to have a more diverse workforce…” a questionable assertion in the first place “and not enough otherwise qualified black candidates can pass the swim test, maybe we should simply take those candidates who meet the other requirements and teach them how to swim.”

But that’s not what they did.  And that is just another demonstration that Democrats aren’t actually serious people seeking to help the communities they represent.  No, their goal was to cater to the “equity” crowd, even before it had a name.  And they have continued to do so for the last two decades. 

Take gun control.  They have been gun grabbing for decades.  They use every mass shooting as a lever to try and wrest guns out of the hands of Americans and eviscerate the 2^nd Amendment.  While it is certainly the case that gun violence is a problem in America, the reality is, it’s not the guns, it’s the criminals and the Democrats who pamper them.

There are 350 million people in the United States.  Of those there are 280 million adults, 90 million of whom say they own at least one of America’s 400 million guns, with an average of almost 5 guns each.  And how frequently do those 90 million gun owners commit crimes with those guns?  Not very often.

It’s estimated that more than 80% of gun crimes are committed by people who came into possession of their weapons illegally, which means that conservatively 20% of gun crimes were perpetrated by legal gun owners.  There are almost 100,000 shootings in the United States each year (not counting suicides). If we assume that 20% of those shootings were by legal gun owners, that would be 20,000 shootings.  To put that in perspective, that would mean that .0002% of legal gun owners commit crimes with their weapons, or conversely, 99.9998% of legal gun owners never use their guns in crimes… As a matter of fact, despite what the Democrat media tell you, “Good guys with guns” help stop between 1/3 and ½ of all active shooter incidents nationwide.  But Democrats work continuously to take guns away from all of those apparently violence eschewing citizens while at the same time seeking to free actual violent criminals from jail or prison or not send them there in the first place.  And they are the ones who actually commit most of the crimes and the worst crimes, and it’s not even close.  Making matters worse, Democrats rarely seek to focus on the strong correlation between anti-depressants and violence, particularly with young people.  They would rather preen in front of cameras and accuse Republicans of having blood on their hands than actually focus on the real issues that spill so much blood. 

And there is indeed much blood on the hands of Democrats.  In what must seem counterintuitive to them, more gun control results in more mass shooting deaths.  California is a perfect example.  As it’s become more difficult for law abiding Californians to legally obtain guns over the decades, to the point where it’s almost impossible to actually exercise the right, the rate at which the state exceeds the rest of the country has skyrocketed:  “From 2010 on, California’s per capita rate of mass public shootings was 43% higher than the rate in Texas and 29% higher than in the rest of the United States. Since 2020, the rate in California is 276% higher than in Texas and 100% higher than in the rest of the U.S.” That is partially because there are fewer of those “Good guys with guns”… In LA Country where one mass shooting took place this year there is one gun permit for every 5,660 adults and in San Mateo County, where another took place, there is one permit for every 24,630 adults. By comparison, there is one permit holder for every nine people in the 43 right-to-carry states.

Whether it’s murder on a small scale or a large, this data would only be of interest if someone were actually interested in solving the problem and reducing the amount of bloodshed.  Needless to say, Democrats rarely look at the data and conclude that making it easier to allow law abiding citizens to own weapons might actually help reduce said bloodshed.

Then there’s the border.  The Democrat Party, led by Liar in Chief Joe Biden, tells us that the American border is secure while Americans watch thousands of illegal immigrants stream across the border every single day. Those poor “asylum seekers” are given phones, have to promise to return to court to have their cases adjudicated – sometimes in 5 or 10 years – and are sent on their merry ways.  Of course many of those never even bother to show up for court. And hundreds of thousands more are simply released without even being given a court date.  To make things even more ridiculous, while they’re busy gaslighting the entire country, Democrats are shivving their single most solid constituency. 

Of course the border is not a new problem. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act which granted asylum to 2.7 million illegal aliens in return for securing the border.  Democrats took the asylum and screwed Reagan and the nation on securing the border.  Since then no president other than Trump has had any interest in securing the border, and he was stymied at every single turn by Democrats and leftist judges.  The result is that today there are upwards of 40 million illegal aliens in the country with millions more crossing the border every year. 

Like the gun data, the data on illegal aliens isn’t hard to understand. It’s pretty simple math.  The phones alone the Biden administration gives to illegals cost $360,000 every day while in aggregate illegal aliens cost Americans $250 billion PER YEAR. To put that in perspective, the wall Trump wanted to build was estimated to have a price tag of under $25 billion.  And now, it’s only going to get worse with Biden ending the Trump era Title 42 which was the equivalent of trying to stop your car by dragging your feet on the ground, a-la Fred Flintstone.  But now that that’s gone Biden is sending 1,500 Army troops to help… let even more illegals in! 

Whether it’s standing on shore as victims drown in Miami, not allowing armed citizens to protect themselves and their communities or simply ignoring the costs associated with illegal immigration, it’s clear that Democrats aren’t serious people and don’t care about the average American. Given that Democrats demonstrate their disdain for citizens every single day one wonders why anyone votes for them.  Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

Five For Freedom - A Contract With America For The 21st Century

  America’s in a civil war.  Not a cocktail party war like Vietnam or Afghanistan where Americans stand around and talk about it but relatively few are personally impacted.  No, this a WWII level existential threat war where the difference between victory and defeat is literally freedom or tyranny.  One need look no farther than what Adolph Trudeau is doing in Canada right now to understand what the future holds. 

This war has been simmering for decades and most Americans didn’t even notice.  Now it’s obvious. Virtually every element of traditional American culture is being destroyed.  The left has decided that the United States is a plague on humanity and must be eliminated.

In this case the “left” consists of government, media, big tech, big business, and academia, among others.

Here’s a short list of their targets…    

Turning schools into leftist Indoctrination centers

Government control of your neighborhood

Open borders

Money / Driver’s licenses / Voting for illegals

Legalizing crime / No bail  

Encouraging / Empowering homelessness

2^nd Amendment

Censorship

Gender reimagining

Control over your body

Free exercise of religion

Peaceably assemble

Men having babies

Banking

Climate Change

CRT

Government spying on citizens

Girl’s sports

And of course, most problematic of all is their successful coup d'état.

With that and more, do we still live in a free country?  Obviously not.

Which brings us back to war.  Ask yourself, if someone declared war on America, what more might they do in victory? Other than killing you or turning you into slaves, what more is there?

Some argue we’re not in a war, citing polls that show a majority of Americans don’t like those leftist positions.  That’s accurate, but it doesn’t matter. The majority doesn’t count. The people who “count”, the opinion makers, those in academia, media, high tech, etc are the hardcore leftists behind all of this, and as we all know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Americans have traditionally been ambivalent about government. For most politics was something to be endured every four years and after the election life got back to normal.

But no longer.  If you were a Teddy Roosevelt partisan or a fan of Truman or IKE, whether your guy won or lost didn’t matter tremendously to the average American.  Maybe your taxes would go up or down a bit or maybe the price of gasoline or chicken might change a bit, but that was it for most people, because government, particularly the federal government had little impact on their everyday lives.

Today not so much. In America of 2022 the federal government impacts almost every aspect of American lives, daily.  The price of gas, grades of meat, rate of pay at work, MPG for your car, Epi-Pens, not to mention vaccine mandates, gun regulations and shipping illegal immigrants to your neighborhood.  But it’s not just the federal government.  It’s state and local government as well.  From inane licensing requirements for hairdressers, bartenders and Uber drivers to union-centric dysfunctional schools and gun laws that outlaw the 2^nd Amendment in all but name, the fists of the federal fit perfectly into the state and local regulatory gloves, together strangling American freedom. 

But government’s not the only front in this war. There’s culture too.  From social media – the 21^st century’s public square – to mass media to academia and big business, the left dominates.  Not just dominates as in winning, but dominate as in ruling over everyone else.  Live and let live is not an axiom the left recognizes or exercises.  No, the left demands fealty or will crush you.  They’ll destroy your business, get you fired or banned from social media, take your kids away, kick you out of college and anything else they can think of.

Today we’re seeing the government leviathan becoming even more powerful as it assimilates with the leftist borg.  We saw it for four years as the FBI worked side by side with the media to tarnish Donald Trump’s name and destroy his presidency. Now, Joe Biden has encouraged the silencing of “misinformation”. 

At the same time the federal government has essentially established a gulag to house political prisoners who participated in the “insurrection” despite many being invited into the building by the police, some never entering the building at all and most having been involved in no violence whatsoever.  Some of these “terrorists” have been sitting, without charges or bail, in jails for over a year.  That treatment stands in stark contrast to the treatment of those who participated in the violent and deadly BLM / Antifa riots of the summer of 2020, most of whom were bailed out in the unlikely event they ended up in custody in the first place. 

All of this points to a fracture of America. Observations about “majorities” give one hope, but the reality is that unless the “majority” who reject leftism react, it won’t matter because, as we’re seeing in real time in Canada, the wall between freedom and fascism is fragile, and once it’s breached it’s likely game over.       

If the Republic is to survive it will be up to that “majority” to do something to arrest the slide into tyranny.  The GOP needs to take a page from Newt Gingrich and give them something to focus on, to talk about, and most importantly, vote on. The Contract with America was pivotal in nationalizing the election, and that’s exactly what we need now, a message that patriots can rally around.

The fronts upon which the left is attacking are too numerous to defend against simultaneously.  The battle lines need to be streamlined just as the Contract did.  As such, here are Five for Freedom… five common sense items that every GOP candidate or official must agree with if they want to win.  If they refuse on any one of them, they should be primaried or defeated in favor of someone who does support them.

1.  The 2020 election was fraudulent and such fraud cannot be allowed to occur again.

2.  Covid mandates are unconstitutional and must stop.

3.  The #1 job of the federal government will be to seal the southern border.

4.  The United States must be energy independent.

5.  CRT has no place in American schools.

If any candidate running on the GOP ticket can’t support these five positions, they have no place in the GOP. The threats to liberty are too numerous, the threats to the Constitution too grave to elect someone who will waffle on these basic principles.

If there is indeed a majority of Americans who are interested in saving the Republic, they have to have something to rally around.  Thus far the GOP has done an atrocious job of focusing America’s attention.  They need to do that now and Five for Freedom is the tool to do just that.  It’s likely it will have to happen over the objections of establishment Republicans like McConnell, McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel, but so be it.  At the end of the day you’re either on the side of freedom or not.  As the last two years have demonstrated, liberty is fragile and without citizens willing to stand up for it, it vanishes. This is the time, this is the place and Five for Freedom is the weapon with which patriots can vanquish the borg of woke leftism that has been seeking to assimilate America for decades.  The only question is, does the GOP have the courage to wield it? 

(Image courtesy of www.AmericanThinker.com)

We the People... Address 2020 Now, Otherwise Our Constitution is Just Another Crumbling Piece of Paper

A solid majority of Americans know that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That’s a big problem for a country with a representative government, one in which the leaders are supposed to represent the will of the people. We’re a nation of laws ostensibly flowing from a Constitution that sets out explicit limitations on the federal government’s powers and protects a variety of citizens’ rights upon which said government cannot infringe. To the degree that a significant majority of citizens feel that the leader of this government was not constitutionally elected, that’s a problem.

For all its importance, our Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. It doesn’t make laws. It doesn’t have an army. It’s not the police. It’s just words on paper. It functions because Americans have confidence in its words as the foundation for the laws of our country and the guideposts governing the actions of those who actually control the army and the police and write the laws.

When that confidence is shaken, society’s foundation is shaken. While the fraudulent election of 2020 is not the first example of that shaken confidence in government, it’s easily the most important. From the economic upheavals wrought by the Industrial Revolution to widespread hopelessness during the Depression to the perceived fecklessness during the Vietnam War and economic malaise of the 60s and 70s, confidence in government has been shaken before but never before has the government’s legitimacy been in widespread doubt.

That changed with the 2020 election. Americans watched as the fraud played out in real-time, right in front of them. With violent riots in the streets that went unrestrained in the months leading up to the election, with courts inexplicably ignoring countless unconstitutional changes to voting laws, and with the media and social media censoring true stories that harmed Democrat chances, it started to seem as if the scales were tipped to one side. On election night and during the following weeks it became clear that this was indeed the case.

When almost 60% of the American people feel as if the man who is both the leader of the country and the head of the federal government is illegitimate, what are they supposed to do?

There’s nothing to be done we’re told… Not true. The election can be overturned. Not that I imagine there’s sufficient internal fortitude among Republicans to do so but, ideally, they should make the attempt. But how?

The Constitution doesn’t address anything remotely close to reversing a fraudulently achieved election. That’s true, but then it also says nothing about the right to abortion, the government providing welfare payments to citizens (or non-citizens), government control of healthcare, the imposition of CAFÉ standards, or collective bargaining rules. Indeed, there is much that goes on in government that is not in the Constitution. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson worried that the Constitution did not give him the power to make the Louisiana Purchase, but today all or part of 15 states exist because of it.

Like John Marshall’s judicial review doctrine, which you won’t find anywhere in the Constitution, things don’t exist until they do. In this case, in states where fraud is proven or where voting laws were enacted unconstitutionally, the legislatures should withdraw their Electoral College votes and recast them based on accurate and lawful counting of the votes.

It’s true there’s no existing Constitutional mechanism to facilitate that remedy, and the likelihood of a Democrat-controlled Congress doing anything to further it is less likely than a healthy college student dying of COVID, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. It should, and it should be driven by those states where fraud so clearly occurred and tipped the election; essentially ground zero for the coup: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all five of which have nominally GOP legislatures.

Many will say that this is extra-constitutional, and that may indeed be true. But what is beyond debate is the fact that the 2020 election itself was extra-constitutional. The Constitution states that elections are to be run according to rules set by state legislatures. That didn’t happen across the country.

If one is going to have an election run beyond the explicit parameters of the Constitution, I’d prefer to have it hew as close as possible to what the document actually says, rather than what some hack Secretaries of State or uber partisan jurists say that it is. Our Founding Fathers gave the power to craft election rules to state legislatures and that is where it should reside.

Now, assuming that the legislatures of these five states—and others as they choose—take seriously their duty to address the fraud of the 2020 election, Congress will have a decision to make. Congress can either engage with the states to address the issue or simply ignore them. Currently, there is zero chance of action, but after the 2022 midterms Congress will likely look different and the opportunity to address the issue can be revisited.  Although with spineless weasels Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy leading the GOP in Congress the outcome would likely be exactly the same as one led by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.  Nonetheless…

This may sound like spinning wheels, but it’s not. On the contrary, affirmatively excising the demons of the 2020 election should force all politicians or candidates to make their positions known. They either admit that the 2020 election was fraudulent and are willing to do something about it or they don’t, won’t, and should be primaried if GOP or defeated if Democrat. There can be no in between. If the flaws of 2020 are not admitted and addressed, then 2024 is gone before the campaign even begins, and almost every American understands that.

Why this matters is simple: The nation is changing, rapidly and not in a good or constitutional way. From vaccine mandates to CRT seemingly everywhere to locales providing COVID medicines based on race to transgender men competing in women’s sports to mayors and governors essentially giving their communities over to the homeless and violent criminals, America in 2022 is not one someone from even a decade ago would recognize. It’s changing, rapidly, and in most cases against the wishes of large majorities of the American population.

Importantly, though, we’re not a democracy, and the Constitution is built to rein in the passions of the majorities. It’s not a suicide pact. American citizens with confidence in their election system are willing to wait for the next election cycle to direct a change of course. Those same citizens, however, if they feel that the system is fraudulent and if they know the game is rigged against them, will find alternative means to stop the evisceration of the nation so many of them cherish. When the majority—and a growing majority, at that—of a population believe their leaders are illegitimate, bad things tend to happen.

Illegitimate regimes can stay in power for decades, but only with an army of stormtroopers and Gestapo to suppress a cowed population. The United States is not Germany in the early 1930s nor China today and Americans are not yet cowed. Indeed, they have 1^st Amendment, a 2^nd Amendment and a 250-year-old legacy of freedom most are wont to give up. This Democrat fascism will eventually come to an end. The question is how. The ideal solution is to be found at a ballot box, with all Americans confident their votes will be counted fairly. Let’s hope our leaders can find the courage to lead us down that path. 

The NFL has become the No Freedom League - How Wokeness Helped Bring America to the Brink of Revolution

I grew up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before they had satellite TV. As such, on the Monday after the Super Bowl everyone on the entire base would try and get through the day without knowing who won the game. That night, after a tape of the game had been flown down from the US, we'd watch the game and be riveted to our TVs. The military TV stations weren’t allowed to show private commercials so we would all greet a Pepsi or McDonalds commercial that might slip by the censors with wondrous applause. The NFL was my passion, along with my sainted Dolphins, with Gods Bob Griese and Dan Marino at the helm. Today however, I doubt I’ll watch another NFL game and most certainly won’t spend a penny on NFL merchandise.

Why? It’s simple. The NFL, helmed by men who are ostensibly some of the smartest businessmen in America, literally helped bring America to the brink of revolution, maybe even led the way. Of course we’re talking about Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter.

The NFL, and to a lesser degree, MLB and the NBA used to be oases from which all Americans could seek refuge from the slings and arrows of daily life. Monday at the office used to be “Did you see that catch?” or “The zebras blew another one!” Since Kaepernick started his grandstanding however the conversations became more about who was kneeling, what star was lecturing America about this grievance or that and ceased to be about the excitement or pain or joy of the actual games.

In a sad irony, Charlie Daniels once wrote an anthem called “In America” where he used an NFL team to demonstrate American's unity. 

And we may have done a little bit of fighting among ourselves, 

but you outside people best leave us alone...

Cause we'll all stick together, and you can take that to the bank,

that's the cowboys and the hippies and the rebels and the yanks...

You just go and lay your hand on a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and I think you're gonna finally understand”

It’s almost apropos that Daniels died in the very year when it’s not outsiders who have started a revolution, but other Americans, and they were set on that course by the NFL.

Had the “geniuses” who run the NFL understood anything about America and put a stop to Kaepernick’s on field preening four years ago, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Freedom of speech had nothing to do with anything. Kaepernick had and has every right to say what’s on his mind. The NFL however did not have to allow him to hijack their platform to trumpet it. Had they not helped him become a media darling, he probably wouldn’t have walked away from is multimillion dollar contract and become the least worthy “martyr” in the history of martyrs.

And just to be clear, it's not because they couldn't have done anything.  The NFL controls virtually every single thing about its games and programs. It choreographs everything!!! Uniform colors… check. Shirts tucked in… check. Fines for faux cellphone celebrations after a touchdown? Check. Yet somehow they weren’t able to tell players that they could not disrespect the American flag and National Anthem. They could have required standing, or required those not wanting to participate to stay in the locker room, or they could have kept all the players in the locker rooms and let the fans sing the song… But they didn’t. Instead, they allowed what would have been a flash in the pan to become a raging inferno that has the potential to turn the United States and its Constitution into ashes.  The fires and riots and attacks on police and federal buildings and America are simply the progeny of the boiling tempers fueled in part by the victim mentality emboldened by the NFL's wokeness.

Today in the United States the idea of free speech is vanishing and the NFL, by showcasing a struggling, marginal, spoiled quarterback with a chip on his shoulder helped make it so. Today in America, everything is political… science, education, healthcare and now, sadly, even sports. Sure politics in sports has been around for a while, go back to the 1968 Black Power Olympic protests or Muhammad Ali, but those were news, not everyday life.

Now politics has infested every corner of American life and you can’t help but see it everywhere from shopping to going to the movies to wedding cakes to science. Not to mention workplaces.  Up until about 2016 Americans had at least one refuge from the cancer of political rage… that was sports. Americans of different colors, of different religions of different national origins could get together and cheer for (or against) the Cowboys, the Raiders, the Patriots or the Steelers and feel like they were part of something bigger than themselves, members of the same team.  "How'd we do this weekend?" or "Where are we at this Sunday?" wasn't reserved for players or coaches... Fans were part of the team, the 12th man, they weren't just observers, they were family.  Sports made fans' differences inconsequential, even if only for as long as they were cheering together or drinking beer together or wearing the their matching Giants jerseys.

In putting politics front and center of their offerings, in letting their platforms become a cultural litmus test, in actively turning their sport into a vehicle for wokeness, the NFL has destroyed their brand as an American icon. Never again will many Americans look to it for a welcome respite from the chaos of everyday life. Never again will it have the capacity to change American life the way the Heidi Bowl did.

The NFL may continue to be a viable business for some time, but its place in history will be sealed by its engagement in wokeness. The thing about wokeness is that there are always new victims to be supported, new causes to be championed and new targets for expropriation and destruction. The geniuses who run the league shouldn’t be surprised that eventually they will be on the wrong side of some victims rights group and their businesses will be targeted, their directors will be hounded and eventually their assets will be taken, one way or another. When that happens they shouldn't be surprised that more than a few people might be whispering feelings of Schadenfreude.

First They Came...

With a respectful nod to Martin Niemöller, I present First They Came...

From your Facebook passwords to Section 8 housing... why Barack Obama should be impeached for dismantling the very Constitution he swore to preserve, protect and defend.

We all know that Barack Obama was a Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago. He spent more than a decade lecturing on what is possibly the greatest document ever written by men. Later, when elected to the Senate and then the White House he swore to defend that same Constitution. Despite all of that, one has to wonder, does Barack Obama not actually understand the document he has spent a quarter century studying, teaching and “defending” or is he some kind of self directed progressive Manchurian Candidate? Whichever is the case, one thing is unassailable, Barack Obama is a using the power of the presidency to eviscerate the Bill of Rights. Not the whole thing mind you, but enough to turn the granite foundation of American freedom into a termite ridden balsa wood floor that could give way at any moment.

So how has Obama undermined the Bill of Rights? Let us count the ways…

1st Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

Just to be clear, in this context the framers said Congress but meant the federal government because they expected Congress would make all laws and the President would execute and enforce them.

Freedom of Speech: President Obama used the IRS to quash the voices of the most rabid and politically dangerous of his opponents, the Tea Party and in doing so stole the 2012 election.

Freedom of the Press: Obama’s Justice Department purposely bypassed judicial review and secretly subpoenaed records from the AP as well as the personal phone records of a number of its editors and reporters in an attempt to discover the source of a leak about terrorist plots. This is the same Obama Justice Department that characterized routine reporting practices as criminal activity by labeling Fox News reporter James Rosen a "co-conspirator" for reporting on North Korea and then tracking both his professional and personal actions and emails. In these cases, and perhaps others yet unknown, the President and his team sought to use the police power of the state to intimidate the press.

2nd Amendment: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Right to keep and bear Arms:  The Obama administration has spent much time and effort seeking to find ways to limit American’s right to bear arms. From supporting UN treaties that require gun registration to floating the idea of forcing psychologists to report on your gun ownership, to talking about working on gun control “under the radar”, President Obama has made it clear that the 2nd Amendment is no barrier to his desire to eliminate our right to own guns.

4th Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

...to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects: This is one of President Obama’s favorite targets. We’ve all heard of the NSA gathering data on citizen’s phone calls and Internet surfing habits without warrants, which would seem a crystal clear violation of the 5th Amendment. Now we discover that the Obama administration is demanding that major Internet companies turn over users' stored passwords. required to have data collecting black boxes installed. Those boxes collect a variety of data from how fast you’re going to whether or not you’re wearing your seat belt to how long it took you to step on the brake. Add to that the fact that most cars will have OnStar like capabilities and the government could pull a NSA redux and easily know everything about every trip you ever make as well as listen to everything you say the entire time.

That means that potentially a phalanx of nameless, faceless bureaucrats from the IRS or the NSA or the DHS can sit there and scrutinize your every message or like or post on Facebook or Match.com or any other social media platform. And it’s not just online.  In 2012 the NTHSA proposed that by 2014 all cars be requiredto have data collecting black boxes installed.  Those boxes collect a variety of data from how fast you’re going to whether or not you’re wearing your seat belt to how long it took you to step on the brake.  Add to that the fact that most cars will have OnStar like capabilities and the government could pull a NSA redux and easily know everything about every trip you ever make as well as listen to everything you say the entire time.

5th Amendment: …Nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb, nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

This Amendment too has come under particular attack by the Obama administration.

Double jeopardy:  After the jury returned a not guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin trial, the Justice Department actually set up an email address with the specific purpose of soliciting tips so that it might help them bring charges against George Zimmerman for the same act, only under a different statute.

...private property be taken for public use, without just compensation:  Then there is the Takings Clause that has been felled by Barack Obama’s hand. In 2009, after failing to intimidate two state retirement funds who held secured Chrysler bonds, the President ignored contract law and simply took their property for the government and the UAW without just compensation.

...private property be taken for public use, without just compensation:  Finally there is the administration’s plan to achieve their diversity goals by using a variety of tools to force communities – and indirectly owners of suburban rental properties – to accept government Section 8 vouchers. Section 8 is a welfare program where government pays most of the rent and utilities for low income renters. While some landlords may be happy in the short term to have tenants whose bill gets paid on time, in the long run they and their neighbors will experience a significant “taking” of their property as the introduction of Section 8 housing almost invariably leads to dramatic increases in crime rates followed by significant declines in property values.

And this of course is only a partial listing…

Barack Obama sees the Constitution in general as little more than a list of suggested rules to be considered and the Bill of Rights in particular as a Maginot Line to simply be bypassed whenever deemed necessary. The unfortunate thing about all of this is that federal power is like Pandora’s Box, once it is unleashed, it’s almost impossible to rein in. The perfect example of this was last week’s House bill seeking to limit the NSA’s power to spy on Americans. It failed.

What makes this particularly unseemly is the fact that the Bill of Rights was the key to the ratification of the Constitution in the first place. Had it not been for the Massachusetts Compromise it’s likely that the Anti-Federalists would have carried the day and the Constitution would never have been ratified.

Given the central role the freedoms codified in the Bill of Rights have played in the triumph and prosperity of the United States, it’s no wonder that Barack Obama seeks to disembowel it. In 2008 he promised to “fundamentally transform the United States”. He has achieved his goal. Thanks to Barack Obama, in 2013, before a citizen can begin thinking about setting off on some new adventure, begin solving some new (or old) problems, begin dreaming of new ideas or innovations, consider starting a new company or doing any one of the millions of things Americans have done for centuries, we must now stop and wonder what that act might look like if it were pulled out of context by some apparatchik, wonder how our private conversations might sound if heard by a government lawyer who knows nothing about us and for whom those words were not intended, wonder what might befall us if we criticize the government or what might become of our investments if they end up on the wrong side of some government redistribution scheme… In other words, we have to imagine we're living in George Orwell's 1984. 

All of that is by definition the opposite of freedom and they are the kinds of fears dictators seek to instill in their subjects. That is exactly why the Founding Fathers insisted on a Bill of Rights as the price for the ratification of the Constitution with its federal system. Barack Obama has driven a knife through the heart of the freedoms Americans fought and died for for centuries and he should be impeached for dismantling the very Constitution he swore to preserve, protect and defend.

In defense of the slippery slope argument...

Liberals constantly decry conservatives’ slippery slope arguments against their progressive legislation as simply red herrings. Their refrain is usually “Don’t be absurd, no one’s trying to do _____ (insert the relevant slippery slope argument here).” They suggest that such an argument is mere hyperbole and conservatives are introducing ideas no one wants.

As usual, the liberals are wrong on both scores. History provides a rich trove of liberal camel noses leading to a tents full of camels.

The most famous of course is the income tax. In 1913 when the income tax was established, the top rates began at 1% on income over $20,000 ($450,000 in today’s dollars) and topped out at 6% for income over $500,000 ($11,430,000 today). Today, 100 years later, the income tax applies to virtually everyone earning more than $11,000 per year and tops out at 39.6% for incomes above $400,000. Think about that… the highest rate today applies to an income that would not even have qualified for the lowest tax bracket in 1913. And a tax code that started out four pages long is today four times as long as the Bible!

Then there is Roe v. Wade. In the run up to Roe v. Wade, liberals claimed women simply deserved the right to choose for themselves. How different would the arguments have been in the statehouses and courthouses if opponents could see that in 40 years the government would require abortifacients be available to underage girls without their parents’ consent or that government would be funding hundreds of thousands of abortions a year?

How about the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was intended to prohibit discrimination against the handicapped? What started out seeking sidewalk ramps, wider doors and job security for the handicapped has morphed into the government demanding companies allow alcoholics to drive trucks, forcing cities, towns and businesses to spend thousands of dollars or shut down swimming pools, and requiring companies to offer separate bathroom facilities to those too shy to pee in public bathrooms. Today the Americans with Disabilities Act has become a tort tool for lawyers and leaches to extort millions of dollars out of the pockets of small businesses.

Liberals may not like it, but the slippery slope is indeed a reality. What is outlandish hyperbole today is tomorrow’s reality. That is the fundamental nature of government. History clearly demonstrates the avaricious nature of government and its intent to expand its power in myriad ways once it gets a toehold in virtually any arena.

Unfortunately, the slippery slope is not just a parlor game. It has real consequences in the real world. Today there are two issues where the slippery slope argument is particularly relevant: gay marriage and guns.

Gay marriage: Liberals suggest the issue is simply one of equal rights for gays. All they want is for gay people to be able to marry like anyone else. Not surprisingly, conservatives see it as something quite different, and the slippery slope provides a compelling illustration. Conservatives say that if the definition of marriage is changed from one man to one woman, then on what grounds would the momentum for redefinition stop there, and would chaos not ensue? Two men and one woman? Three woman and four men? A village? A man and his son? (Jeremy Irons makes a valid point in asking why that shouldn’t be allowed as there is no chance of procreation.) And once gay marriage is legal, how long until gays demand to be married in the Catholic church or any other Christian church where the teachings are explicitly against homosexual marriage? (Ask the Boy Scouts about that.) Liberals of course say, that’s just and example of hyperbolic scare mongering or homophobia. Luckily we don’t have wait for history to see the chaos that lies around the corner. A Kansas town passed a resolution that would force churches to rent facilities for gay weddings. (This measure later lost at the ballot box.) A Florida judge has already allowed the listing of three people as parents of a child while a Kansas man is being sued for child support for acting as a sperm donor for a lesbian couple. Then of course there is the federal judge in Utah who is considering reversing the ban on polygamy. Liberals can call this slippery slope argument hollow, but the reality is that history is on the side of just such as slope.

Then there is gun regulation. In the wake of events like Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and Columbine Americans are understandably concerned about gun violence. Unfortunately however the liberal solution is to seek to take the guns away from law abiding citizens, which seems particularly ludicrous as gun violence in the US has been declining dramatically for 20 years. While many Democrats are talking about “enhanced” background checks and bans on “assault style” rifles, make no mistake their goals are far more sinister and go much deeper.

Despite the 2nd Amendment’s explicit protection of the right to bear arms, liberals seek to ignore that right. Not sure? This too we don’t have to wait for history to demonstrate. The proof is already here. A Democratic proposal in Washington State would allow sheriffs the right to enter and inspect the homes of semi-automatic firearms owners annually. A new New York law allows police to track ammunition purchases and the state is already confiscating guns from people who were once on anti-anxiety medicine. Under a new Maryland law, gun buyers will have to be fingerprinted and licensed. The new Connecticut law now bans magazines over 10 rounds and outlaws the ownership of a variety of semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15. The argument is that government simply wants to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Of course that all hinges on who gets to decide who is “dangerous”… Remember, it wasn’t very long ago when Homeland Security suggested that “disgruntled war veterans” or “those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority” might be terrorist threats. No doubt 2nd Amendment advocates and small government Tea Party types are not far behind in being added to that list…

Of course this slippery slope history is exactly why conservatives advocate small, limited government. Government power is rapacious, arbitrary and virtually unstoppable once it gets started. Both conservatives and liberals recognize this. The difference is conservatives fear it while liberals count on it. Think about that the next time a liberal seeks brush aside your concerns by claiming “Your slippery slope argument is fallacious”.

Life imitates art... Liberals see the world as they imagine it is, not how it actually is

I’ve always been a fan of Van Gogh’s paintings. I similarly like Renoir, and Seurat. Although I like some of Picasso’s early work, most of it I find a bit odd. My favorite artist however is William Adolphe Bouguereau, a 19th century French artist whose works are the polar opposite of the impressionists, literally.

From the 1870s his realistic portrayal of the human form was increasingly seen as passé in an art world increasingly captivated by Impressionism – a style which influenced both Van Gogh and Seurat. By the early 20th century Bouguereau’s work had completely fallen out of favor among cultured art devotees, – i.e. everyone except those uncivilized Americans.

Impressionist art was less precise than that of Bouguereau and most artists who came before him. It began a march that has brought us a century of modern art that is often anything but precise… Think Jackson Pollack or Christo.

A challenge of art is that what the artist is trying to convey (if anything) is often up for debate. Take any three people and ask them what is the artist’s intent behind one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles and you’ll no doubt get three completely different ideas.

Such lack of clarity works well in the subjective world of art. Not so much in the not so subjective world of politics and government. It is perhaps no surprise then that the rise of modern liberalism has evolved over a similar timeline and path as modern art.

Politicians on the left no longer look to objective facts to define the world around them. Rather, they look at the world as they would like it to be and interpret it accordingly. How else could one explain the lunacy that pervades the Democrat party today?

Data clearly show that stricter gun laws lead to more crime but that is of no consequence. President Obama and the rest of the progressives who want to pass gun laws that will magically make the world a safer place... as if there were no knives, swords, cars or anything else that might ever be used as a weapon.

Maybe they forgot about Prohibition? It doesn’t take much looking to see the negative consequences of that. Not only did it not work, but it created a paradise for gangsters to grow rich and powerful. Fast forward 80 years and while smoking is not illegal, per se, many states are trying to tax it out of existence… while simultaneously padding the tattered state coffers at the same time. Surprise… it’s not quite working out the way they had planned. High cigarette locales are seeing their sin tax base actually decline as as much as 60% of the cigarettes sold in their states are illegal. Indeed, even in the face of such failure Chicago is planning on doubling down on its bad bet.

Then there are government schools. Could there be a more crystal clear example of government failure on the planet than public schools? Yet somehow the union backed Democrats continue to fight vouchers and school reform despite the physical and intellectual carnage government schools have wrought on American children.

Of course the most important example of the liberal failing to see exactly what is in front of them is on economics. In 2009, just as Canada was beginning to look at free markets to fix its state controlled healthcare sector Nancy Pelosi was crafting ObamaCare to strangle the American people. Over the last four years, just as Greece, Spain and Italy collapse under the weight of their social programs and confiscatory tax rates, the Obama administration has sought to expand government welfare, increase taxes on those who create wealth and further strangle the economy with regulation.

At some point one has to wonder what exactly liberals are looking at that would cause them to make such illogical choices. It makes you think of a doctor who studies medicine with anatomy books illustrated by Picasso. Do you really want that guy operating on you?

Government is not like art. In art, the artist can paint what he wants, the way he wants. He can imbue it with hidden messages, explicit messages or no messages at all. The beauty of art is that anyone can interpret it any way they want and in doing so they don’t impact anyone else’s ability to enjoy it. With government on the other hand, the realities of life are quite different. Regardless of the author of a bill’s limited intentions, its passage almost always presages a reinterpretation and expansion once it becomes law. Do you imagine when the 16th Amendment was passed Americans expected tax rates to quickly rise to 90%? Do you think when the Civil Rights Acts were passed in the 1960s the writers expected white and Hispanic firefighters to lose promotions because no black firefighters did well on the promotion tests? Do you think when Nixon created the EPA he planned on the agency eventually seeking to regulate milk spills, rainwater and lightbulbs? No, no and no!

None of that matters to liberals however, and that’s the problem with government: Government regulations are rarely limited to benign interpretation or precise application. They have real world consequences, most of which are unintended, and most of those are negative. And the rest of us are stuck with them because they rarely get repealed and almost always grow more restrictive.

Taking a page from the Impressionists, at some point the citizens who drive prosperity in the United States will stop operating in the world of realism – i.e. high taxes and oppressive regulations – and opt to do something altogether different. Maybe they will work a bit less or be satisfied with 40 employees rather than adding a few more. That might sound benign right now, but just as Impressionism began an evolution that led to everything from Robert Mapplethorpe to Willem de Kooning to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, government regulations have a way of morphing the world in ways that were unimaginable (to liberals) when they were passed. When America is left with only the dependants and bureaucrats, the wealth and job creators either dead or long gone to places like Switzerland or Australia, the legacy of liberal failure will be complete.

As President Obama begins the second leg of his quest to “fundamentally transform America” we should keep that in mind. Thankfully the Constitution limits his time in office to 8 years, unfortunately the shackles of liberal government he leaves us with will likely last far longer and morph into things even he didn’t imagine. The reality of that hell is one that even Monet would have a hard time blurring.