Contraception Debate: Why waste the teachable moment?

There it is, among the liberals most condescending expressions:  teachable moment.  How often has the public been exposed to the President and his allies using national crises (never let a crises go to waste) to educate the nation in the post modern religion of statism and serfdom?  Why then not use the President's rhetorical weapon against him when ProgWorld extends its reach to the truly absurd?  The contraception debate presents us with an opportunity to score like Walter Payton taking a play action draw up the middle against a mistimed Cowboy mad dog blitz. 

Although the modern liberal rarely justifies anything by reference to the American Constitution (the more subjective and utterly unlimited "human rights" is their stock in trade), the "right" to purchase and employ contraception arises logically and legally from the same Bill of Rights that legally establishes and protects the rights of religious, or any other, objection to the involuntary provision of contraception to others.  The Ninth Amendment clearly recognizes the existence of human liberty interests well beyond the specific rights enumerated in the Constitution.  

Both original and modern Constitutional scholars largely agree that the primary right protected by the Ninth Amendment is the right of privacy.  Personal autonomy is, after all, the essence of the Constitutional scheme of government.  Most, indeed nearly all, Republicans and conservatives (like most Americans of any political belief) believe that such privacy rights include the right to purchase contraceptive drugs and devices.  

Where is the opportunity for conservatives if we generally agree with one of the premises of the liberal contraception attack?  Our knock out argument can be expressed in ten seconds.  "While women have a legal right to purchase and employ contraceptive drugs and devices there is no right to have those drugs and devices purchased for them by an unwilling buyer."    

Why have we not heard that argument from Republican candidates, party officials and the broader alliance of conservative PACs and causes?  Our argument, our best argument, rejects the liberals' unstated silent premise-a right to purchse contraception creates an obligation for others to buy it.  The same Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments that protect the right to buy contraception also protect the right to not buy it, for oneself or others. 

Why do we concede the liberal premise (with which Republicans and conservatives largely agree)-women have a right to purchase contraceptives-but stumble over expression of the Constitutional corollary-other women have a right, religious or otherwise-to refrain from purchasing contraception?  Our failure to clearly state and argue the distinction between right and provision only serves the ProgWorld media fabrication of a war on women while distracting from the further diminution of everyone's real Constitutional rights.

The argument should find an open ear.  A majority of Americans over the age of fourteen understand that contraceptive drugs and devices and whatever medical care is involved in the sale or prescription of such drugs and devices are just goods and services  One buys "the pill" like one buys any other pharmaceutical.  

Persuasive analogies are obvious and easily expressed.  In the same sense one has a "right" to travel, from place to place, at largely times of one's choosing, one does not have a right to the provision of the means of travel.   Following the logic of Sandra Fluke, religious institutions like  the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris could be compelled to provide Quasimodo with comely prostitutes because he was otherwise unable to enjoy the sexual activities of his preference-due only to the misfortune of his birth as a disfigured bell ringer.  Exposition of the obvious dichotomy between right and provision should be the instinctive response from anyone who believes in our Constitutional government.  For some reason our leaders and spokesmen, are whiffing at the liberals' conflation of rights and goods. 

The winning argument is apparent and devastating in its impact on both the  faux contraception controversy and the larger justification for a statist educational and political establishment's abandonment of Constitutional government.  If the last twenty years have taught us anything, we have surely learned that conservatives and Republicans can no longer assume that most people understand basic Constitutional concepts-or even the physical realities that surround them.  This voting public has been dulled by forty years of liberal mis-education in schools and universities and liberal mis-information by the liberal entertainment and news media.  

Will our leadership squander this tremendous opportunity to reacquaint the public with the genius of a Constitutional system that respects both the "civil" right to purchase and employ contraception and the "civil" right to refrain from compulsory purchase of the means of that contraception?  The early answer is not promising but there is still time to deliver a very hard blow and lasting impression before this issue disappears from public curiosity.

We have a mandate making message. Do we want it?

Ever wonder why the GOP, with factual reality, actual history and logical inference on our side, find it so hard to squirrel up a message more unifying and small "e" evangelical than merely being ourselves not Democrats?  If our message remains nothing more than a recitation of the many, almost innumerable failings of the Obama Administration (not least of which is the sacrifice of economic prosperity on the alter of faux egalitarianism) then we may well carry the election, but not the country.

If conservatism is to obtain a mandate to change more than the identity of recipients of federal tax largess, we must re-educate the population as to the first premise of American government:  the Constitution of the United State, as informed by the Declaration of Independence, is the organic law of the United States.  The Constitution clearly defines and limits the reach of government.   Since Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans have slowly abandoned the Constitution as the basis of public policy.  Now compromise has become so difficult because the conservatives have little further ground to give.  As a result, the essential concept of Americanism is no longer taught in most schools, never mentioned in the popular press and forgotten by most Republican speakers, candidates and office holders.  Yet, after a century of neglect, our national Constitution, particularly absent the disastrous Progressive Era 16th (income tax) and 17th (direct election of Senators) Amendments,  provides the most appealing of arguments should we choose to embrace it.

The message of freedom and a return to Constitutional limited government is simple, exhaustive and inclusive.  But, like all simple messages, the brighter the line the more accountable the surveyor for deviations from that line.  If we embrace, as we should, adherence to a textual predicate in the Constitution as the litmus test of policy, divorcing law from the unlimited and subjective test of "public good" we have the chance to earn the mandate conservatives need to reverse the drift to national oblivion.  We cannot earn the mandate without persuading the population at large to reject not just the growth of the federal government but the central role of the federal government in the everyday lives of American citizens (other than our physical security from foreign and definable interstate threats-more on than in the days ahead).

The task of persuasion is both easy and hard.  Easy because most people want freedom.  Every survey, and the anecdotal experiences of every reader, shows that almost all Americans feel increasingly restrained and frustrated by the faceless assertion of power.  Public anger extends far beyond a temporary hostility to "Obamacare", the emergency corporate bailouts,  gridlock in Washington or "record deficits" but arises from the growing loss of self-determination that is, itself, the essence of personal freedom.  "Remember when America was free" is the 21st Century answer to "Who is John Galt".

The attraction of freedom as a core message of domestic policy is abundantly evidenced by Ron Paul's blowing across the country like a Texas dust devil.  Imagine the effect of a well funded and concerted pan-Republican message promoting the idea of personal freedom and Constitutionally limited government?  A daily, constant and consistent message of the benefits of personal freedom would be an easy sell on the front end.  The back end, however, not so easy.  

The application of principle to policy generates two perils for the advocates of Constitutional limited government.  The first peril: people will lose tangible financial benefits and no one likes to lose money-especially free money. Tens of millions of Americans are very direct beneficiaries of hundreds of billions of federal tax money, both those who receive and distribute.  Liberals will screech at the elimination of federal food stamp programs, federal subsidy of state and local education (other than perhaps investment in legitimate scientific research) and the even more ridiculous "preschools", to ending federal subsidy of  county and municipal law enforcement and depriving nonprofit NGO charities of federal taxpayer money.  Transition of the collectivized federally subsidized social security entitlement to a far more privatized Chilean model has historically caused the liberal demagogues to channel their inner Mao and no reason exists to think a future dialogue will be any less, well, demagogic.  That very demagoguery forms the foundation of the second, and far greater peril. 

The second peril is lure of federal money to feed our sacred federal cows, no pun intended.  Goring the liberal ox while clinging to the myriad of laws and taxes that empower multi-state and multi-national corporations-the source of much of our corporate political capital-at the expense of individuals, small businesses and family farms convicts us of hypocrisy.  The courage to walk back the wasteful and counterproductive social services network and the millions of social workers that grow the social net ever wider will be necessary.  Ultimately, this battle for the hearts and minds of the American voter and future voter will be hard and more than a little bloody but if we are serious about saving the Constitution and the America it creates, is it not the good fight?  Truly the hill on which to die? 

So the choice and the challenge for the entire national Republican Party, and all of our candidates from the proverbial courthouse to the White House and our extended alliance of PACs and  talking heads  is simple and stark.  Either we remain a party of ideological ambiguity, at best slowing the incremental avalanche of federal power and the corollary march to socialism (or worse) or we become the party of freedom, prosperity and opportunity, reversing the 20th Century exaltation of the collective at the expense of the individual, by restoring Constitutional limited and defined government.

We can do it.

Next:  Let's get started-the 10th Amendment.

Mormon Massacre: What the Washington Post missed.

Not just every Washington Post story can rouse commentary.  Most reasonably intelligent and even minimally informed news consumers have long since abandoned interest in ProgWorld's dying old media wing.  Today, however the WaPo dropped a journalistic thermonuclear device hotter than Hiroshima in August of '45; a scoop so critical to the Presidential contest that it required exposition on the very day of the Arkansa primary. 

Most news consumers have lost interest in the GOP primary insofar as Mitt faces no live opposition.  Thank God the sleuths at the WaPo have not been afflicted with the disease of disinterest in the otherwise now concluded Republican primary fight.  The WaPo devoted one thousand three hundred and nineteen words to the revelation of an enormously significant but heretofore undiscussed indictment of Mitt Romney's character and fitness to hold public office. 

On September 11, 1857, a date identified by the WaPo as "the first 9.11"  a group of Arkansas Mormons killed some 130 Christians in a battle identified by the WaPo as the "Mountain Meadows Massacre".   The relevance of a long ago and little known battle between violent hillbillies of different faiths is manifestly obvious to the 2012 Presidential Election.   

Oddly enough, however, WaPo's archives contain no mention of the words "Obama" and "Mau Mau".  While no living American was around for the "Mountain Meadows Massacre" millions are alive that may remember the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion. 

A brief history.  The Mau Mau Rebellion was the first and most significant burst of anti-colonialism in Kenya.  From around 1952 through about 1960 the Kenyan revolutionary movement waged a particularly violent and atavistic civil war with the goal of expelling the British colonials and exterminating minority tribes and Kenyan Christians.  While the British crushed the savage rebellion with military force they also orchestrated Kenyan independence and the transfer of power to a civil, albeit hopelessly corrupt and authoritarian, Kenyan national authority. 

If the Obama autobiographies are to be believed-an eminently fragile premise to be sure-there is no question that the President's father and grandfather were sympathetic to the Mau Mau cause, although not complicit in its crimes.  Obama Sr. served in the Kenyatta government for many years following his return from the West in 1963. 

This is not to say that the President participated in the brutal Mau Mau massacres, like Mitt he was not yet born when the atrocities happened, or that his father did, or that his grandfather was a Mau Mau terrorist.  Then again, the WaPo does not accuse Mitt or any other member of the Romney clan of participation in the Meadow Mountain Massacre, or even presence in the state of Arkansas in the entire 19th Century. 

Having untethered the connection to reality the mind can hardly imagine the historical atrocities to which the ProgWorld press can link Mitt.  For example, Romney is an old English name and Mitt is descended from the famous English admiral, George Brydges Romney, 1st Baron Rodney.  Such a famous ancestor is sure historic proof of Mitt's complicity with John Plantagenet, Duke of Bedford, in the burning of St. Joan of Arc.  Seriously, you know there has to be a genetic connection there somewhere and we are just waiting for Dan Rather and Mary Mapes to produce the documents that convict Mitt of that historic crime. 

Then again, why limit the search for Mitt's contemporary guilt for historical anti-Christian atrocities to Europe?  Approximately sixteen million men are descended from Genghis Khan, among them Timur the Lame.  The Mongols killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Christians, over the course of three hundred years of empire.  You know, Mitt has those kind of Asian looking eyes, he's surely connected to the most historic of killers of Christians. 

If descent from Genghis Khan fails to terrify the American public there is always the relationship between Mitt and Casca Longinus or other Roman soldiery on the hill of Golgotha.

Fortunately we can all sleep well tonight with the knowledge that the WaPo remains ever vigilant and has almost six more months to explore the historical Romney complicity in the massacres of Christians.  

Iowa HF 244: Empowering the Biggest Bully

Kenneth Weishuhn's tragic suicide has returned the issue of bullying to the forefront of political dialogue.  Even Governor Branstad has weighed in on the subject.  When the public talks loud enough about a problem the General Assembly typically acts.  The question then turns to how best and proper action to best solve the problem.

We can all start with the premise that no one likes bullies.  Every mature adult knows that bullying is atrocious behavior that should be suppressed at every opportunity.
 

Iowa law already has overburdened the educational system with the absurdity of the existing bullying statute, Iowa Code 280.28.  The statist approach is embodied in Iowa HF 2444 is quintessentially liberal/progressive.

HF2444 imposes yet another duty on educators that has nothing to do with the core function of education.  The statute literally requires:

... school officers shall attempt to work with the student and the student's parent, guardian, or legal or actual custodian to find the cause for the student's harassing or bullying behavior and to ensure that the student does not engage in further harassing or bullying behavior.

The stated purpose of HF 2444 is the imposition of civil liability on the parents of bullies.  In the even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut category the liberals have stumbled on a good point.  Parents are responsible for the actions of their children, not government.  Parents.  Government's responsibility ends at the schoolhouse door so to speak.

Even more ridiculous is the search for a "cause" of the bad behavior.  The cause of bad behavior is not a collective concern.  It does not matter if the bully bullies because he or she was bullied, or otherwise have some complaint against the larger world.  The collective has interest only in terminating the bad behavior.

Iowa already has a legal answer to bullying: the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress.  The elements are simple:

1.  Commission of an act so outrageous that it cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.  (There is surely a general consensus that bullying falls within the scope of such prohibited acts).

2.  With the intention of causing extreme emotional distress.

3.  The outrageous conduct causes extreme emotional distress.

If the alleged conduct meets the above criteria then the victims have always had a remedy that requires no new bureaucracy or further dilution of the educational mission.

Only three short paragraphs provide a far more complete and fair remedy for the victims of bullying and to impose liability for bullying on parents and schools that fail to stop bullying that occurs within their knowledge:

1.  The parents or legal guardians of any minor child are liable for actual damages, punitive damages and attorney fees in an action against their child or ward to recover damages caused by their minor child or ward's outrageous conduct toward any other minor child or to obtain injunctive relief from said outrageous conduct.

2.  Schools and individual educators are liable for actual damages, punitive damages and attorney fees in an action to recover damages caused by a student's outrageous conduct toward another student that occurs on school premises, at school activities or through mediums of communication provided by the school or to obtain injunctive relief from said outrageous conduct.

3.  No parent, legal guardian or educational institution, or it or their employees and agents can be liable for outrageous conduct that ocurred without their  knowledge.

No new social workers, no new reporting requirements.  No bureaucratic intrusion into family relationships.  No dilution of the educational mission.  Just imposition of responsibility for the conduct of children on the people that are supposed to have control over that behavior; educators and parents. 

A non-bureaucratic approach also imposes responsibility for vindicating the rights of a purported victim of bullying where the rights of all victims have been vindicated-on the individual victim themselves.  Moreover such an approach allows the community to define the conduct it will not tolerate through the jury system, the same system that has worked since long before the United States had a constitution to define political rights and limit the permissible reach of government.

Most modern problems can be solved without resort to extending the permissible reach of government.  The conservative's responsibility is to offer such traditional remedies as the American Constitutional system already provides to new problems.   Otherwise the liberal progressives take the battlefield of ideas by default.  And that means giving government, the biggest bully of all, an even bigger fist with which to threaten everyone.

Breitbart is Here!

Great tribute to the Godfather of citizen journalism.  Learn it; live it; love it.

More importantly-pass it on!

Those Damn Farmers

Family farmers have always been among the most serious threats to socialism.  Throughout its history, socialism has fought to destroy the family farm so the Obama Administration's antipathy to Iowa's family farms should come as no surprise. 

The progressives attack on family farming accelerated this week.  The Department of Labor opened an entirely new onslaught on the ability of farm kids to, uh...well, farm.  This proponent's of this attack justify the massive limitation of family farm activity as the protection of children.  The progressives' premise this latest attack on the need to protect children from their evil farm parents who would otherwise risk their children's lives and safety to maximize their farming profits. 

This attack on farm kids follows closely on the heels of last month's EPA regulation of the dust created by farmers driving on gravel roads and working machinery on dirt fields.   Perhaps the Administration feels that dust free hydroponic agriculture, perfected by America's urban marijuana croppers, can replace traditional earth based agriculture.  The progressives seek to justify the ludicrous limitations on farming dust as necessary to protect our planet from evil family farmers who will sacrifice the world's health for their farming profits.

While the attack on family farming is new to the United States it is historically consistent with socialism wherever history has found it.

The original socialist government, the Lenin/Stalin led Soviet Union, starved (and otherwise massacred) almost seven million Ukrainian "kulaks" between 1923 and 1932.  Mere seizure of the private farms and surplus grain was insufficient to protect the Soviet state's interest in controlling the food supply.  The Soviets deemed it necessary to destroy the farmers because the independent nature of private family farming placed the food supply outside government control.  State control of the food supply could not be assured without the annihilation of the entire class of family farmers.

The Chinese communists, led by Anita Dunn's favorite political thinker Mao Zedong, engaged in very similar policies, albeit with somewhat less mass starvation and somewhat more old fashioned execution as the means of extermination.  During the "Great Leap Forward" Chinese agriculture was entirely collectivized and those who resisted were simply exterminated.  State control of the food supply could not be assured without annihilation of tens of millions of family farmers.

Unsurprisingly socialist governments everywhere followed similar, if less violent, policies.  Most recently, President Obama's partner in socializing the western hemisphere, Hugo Chavez, has begun the same predictable process in Venezuela.  Control of the food supply is essential to socialist theory of governance.  Failing government needs something to ensure its continued popular support.  Control of the food supply, much like control of access to higher education and healthcare, provides the currency through which public quiescence is purchased by the always unsuccessful socialist economic economic model.

This is not to say that President Obama is another Mao or Stalin.  However, the need to subordinate production of the food supply to government control is a trait the President shares with every other socialist is history.   The next socialist president may well feel the need to dictate the distribution of food if this socialist POTUS is permitted to advance federal power over production of food.  Something about which every voter should reflect.

The voters in agricultural states like Iowa need to do more than merely reflect-they'd better study socialism's relationship to the family farmer.  If the voters make that effort 2013 will see not only a President Romney but massive extinction of Democrat Congressional careers throughout the Farm Belt.

Sunday Morning Civility: Axelrod Calls Republicans Terrorists (Again)

It looks like the Administration of civility in Washington has once again called Republican opponents terrorists.

President Obama's chief political operative David Axelrod Republicans just accused Republicans in Congress of waging a "reign of terror".   We were quickly able to find the link since CNN's "Last Word" is apparently prerecorded.

Axelrod is merely echoing the Administration's general description of Congressional Republicans.  Early in the Obama Administration the DNC compared Republican criticism of the President's Nobel Prize to Hamas and the Taliban.  Last August the Vice-President characterized Congressional Republicans as terrorists.  In January of this year, Obama surrogate Rep. Henry Waxman reiterated the same analogy.

This latest attack, coming on the heels of Brian Schweitzer's Friday attack on Mitt Romney's polygamist great-grandfather, well serves to remind us all that civility runs just one way on Obama Street.

Brian Schweitzer: Get to know the face of ...

... well, you fill in blank but read on before you fix the word.

The Democrat Governor of Montana is Brian Schweitzer.  Although everyone knew it was coming, today  Schweitzer became the most prominent Obama surrogate to unleash polygamy from their arsenal of ad hominem.

As is well known Mitt Romney's father, four term Michigan Governor George Romney, was born in a Mormon colony in Mexico.   Mitt's father was born in 1907-that's one hundred five years ago.  Mitt's father was monogamous.  Mitt's grandfather, Gaskell Romney,  was married to his only wife, Anna, in 1895.  That accounts for one hundred seventeen years of monogamy in the Romney family. 

However, Gov. Schweitzer is apparently unimpressed with only one hundred seventeen years of Romney's without sister wives.  Gov. Schweitzer reached all the way back to 1869, one hundred and forty three years ago, to taint Mitt with the polygamy of his great-grandfather Miles Park Romney.

The particular hypocricy of this President and his radical adherents stoking religous bigotry through guilt by association has become so common as to be unremarkable.  No, the truly splendid irony arises from a much, much more recent experience with plural marriage in this President's immediate family.  It seems the President's father was either a polygamast or a bigamist.  Although the precise adjective is not entirely clear, the fact is the President's father was simultaneously married to two women for much of his adult life. 

Obviously this attack is merely an opening salvo.  Having presided over the worst economy with the highest level of poverty and welfare dependence in at least 80 years,  fueled by greater public debt than the collective borrowing of his forty three predecessors, President Obama's only hope is to utterly disqualify his opponent.  Since, whatever else can be said of him, Mitt Romney is a good man, the disqualification must come from personal attackis

Schweitzer is not some rouge, one might even say "maverick", mid-level party bureaucrat.  Nor is Schweitzer a mere celebrity in search of a spot light.  As a blue governor in a very red state, Schweitzer is major player in in Democrat politics.

Today's outrage goes to show how low they will go to save the quicksand empire of the welfare state and the power it provides them.