Sounds like magic!

My Brother

We used to fight all the time, when we were younger. Of course, that is typical for brothers, close in age, growing up together. It drove our mother crazy. Whenever she caught us, she would break it up and tell us, “You’re brothers! You’re supposed to love each other!”

Certainly, we loved each other; yet, during those early years of our lives we had only vague understandings of such great concepts as love, faith, freedom, and honor. Thankfully, our mother and father successfully instilled us with Judeo-Christian values.

We eventually came to understand those greater human concepts – concepts that speak through one’s actions as well as one’s words. My brother may not be a man of words, but he is certainly a man of great actions.

My brother is currently a Corporal in the United States Marine Corps. He joined the United States Marines when he was 18, just after graduating high school. In the midst of a War on Terror, he left his comfortable civilian life to serve this great country.

In January 2008, he was deployed for his first tour in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Unlike heroes in the wars of old, my brother is blessed with modern technologies that allow him to keep in frequent contact with his family. We frequently exchange e-mails and the occasional telephone call. He has even been able to send us pictures taken with his digital camera.

He recently spent his 21st birthday on Iraqi soil - a landmark age in the United States. He has expressed to me how excited he is to get home and experience being 21 in America; yet, he knows his duty to his country and accepts it proudly.

Unlike me, he strays away from conversations about Republican versus Democrat or Right versus Left. Politics are not something that he enjoys. America is.

He loves his country very much. He has a bigger understanding of its greatness and its liberties than most Americans do. He has given up countless freedoms we take for granted every day to fight and if necessary, to die for this country. He is a true American Hero, as all of those men and women over there are.

Over the course of our lives, he has been the greatest friend I could ask for. I could not be more proud, and I love him very much. I have faith that God will bring him safely home to us, and I look foreword to the day I see him again. He will be back on American soil later this year. It is a true honor to be his brother.

]]> http://www.americantraditionalism.com/2008/04/11/an-american-hero/%/feed http://www.americantraditionalism.com/2008/04/03/the-american-dream/% http://www.americantraditionalism.com/2008/04/03/the-american-dream/%#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:28:00 +0000 Justin http://slayingthegoliath.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/the-american-dream/ “As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful, the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream.”  - Steve Forbes

The Statue of Liberty

Welcome to America - the land of opportunity. Even today, the American Dream is still alive and well. All Americans have unique opportunities to follow their dreams. With hard work and determination, a person like Bill Gates can drop out of college and create a software empire, or a simple high school graduate like Rush Limbaugh can create the most successful radio show of all time. Anyone who has the privilege of being in America can take advantage of these opportunities granted by our liberty.

Unfortunately, the American Dream has come under attack, and not just in the form of endless class-warfare rhetoric spewing from the Left. Indeed, the Left relentlessly undermines the American Dream with their Socialist agenda. Their primary weapon is a heavy, progressive income tax that punishes success and rewards failure and lack of effort.

The Left frequently demonizes businesses, corporations, and “the rich” as evil or greedy. They imply that the rich are hording all of our nations’ wealth while the rest of us live on government food stamps and welfare. They have created, for themselves, a popular Robin Hood image of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Now, they are promising to take even more by raising taxes higher and giving even more handouts in the form of new entitlements and money to pay of mortgages.

In the first place, raising taxes is in no way beneficial to the poorest Americans, or America as a whole for that matter – even a tax increase strictly for “the rich” is detrimental. Who wants to work harder to make more money, only to have more of it taken away without consent? Such a progressive income tax punishes success and there is simply no denying it. A cornerstone of the American Dream is to reap the rewards for one’s success; moreover, increasing taxes on the producers of the American economy will only lead to one of two outcomes, or both.

One, businesses will pass the new costs incurred from taxes along to the consumer by increasing the cost of products. In effect, it simply becomes a tax increase on all consumer Americans, even “the poor.” Two, businesses will attempt to cut the costs of labor via layoffs of working Americans. Either of the two outcomes is bad for America.

Second, government handouts and entitlement programs are completely ridiculous. Aside from losing the war in Iraq, the 2008 Democratic platform is simply: “We’ll give you a bunch of free stuff if you elect us.” It is purely an attempt to purchase the people’s votes with the people’s own money. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America in 1835, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

Of course, many on the Left will argue that it is not the money of the general population they are going to take but the money of “the rich”; yet, as I have previously stated, that heavy new billion-dollar tax bill will just be passed along to consumer Americans. Nothing is free - not even “free government Healthcare.”

The next argument advanced is, of course, that it is a right for all Americans to have Healthcare; therefore, it is the government’s duty to provide it for the American people. Some even go so far as to claim it as a right implicit in the Constitution itself. Well, if rights are to be funded by the government for all citizens why stop with Healthcare?

The government is then bound by the right to freedom of speech to provide all materials necessary to advance that freedom - including but not limited to: Paper, pencils, pens, computers, internet access, radio and television appearances, flags and draft cards to burn, megaphones, and a printing press. Without such luxuries, one cannot properly exercise his freedom of speech.

Of course, there is no need to stop with the First Amendment. We can move right on to the right to bear arms and other rights as well. We need firearms to protect our family and household. Should the government buy us all guns as well?

All of these things, including Healthcare, are supposed to be earned through hard work. They are part of the incentives of fulfilling that American Dream and making a good living doing what one wants to do. The Left is undermining the American Dream by taking away all of those incentives. Successful Americans are punished for their success; moreover, the government will give other Americans anything they could ever want. They do not even have to get a job to feed their families. The government will provide Americans with all the welfare and food stamps they need.

America still is the land of opportunity, but fewer and fewer Americans are making good use of those opportunities. Instead, they are opting for the easy way out – to be taken care of by an ever-growing leftist nanny state. The Left encourages such a path because those people then become dependents that reliably vote Democrat. Every time the nanny state grows, the American Dream dwindles. As the American Dream dwindles, so goes America itself.

In Santa Ana, California, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Capistrano Valley High School is suing his teacher, James Corbett, for making overtly anti-religious statements during class.

The student, Chad Farnan, claims in the lawsuit that his teacher demonstrates “a sense of hostility toward religion” that causes Christian students to “feel ostracized and treated as second-class citizens.” Farnan claims to have taped the teacher’s lectures which include such offensive statements as “when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can’t see the truth” and religion is not “connected with morality.”

Farnan’s attorney claims that they “will not seek damages if the teacher is removed.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, a Tomah High School student is suing his art teacher for giving him a zero on an art assignment because it featured a cross and a reference to a biblical verse.

The assignment was to draw a landscape. The student drew a landscape with a mountain range to the right and a road leading to a large cross on the horizon. In the upper right hand of the picture he wrote “John 3:16 A sign of love.”

After completing the drawing, the teacher asked him to remove to religious references in it. He refused to do so and received a zero. The assistant principal told him that his drawing infringed upon the rights of the other students.

The lawsuit claims that other students were allowed to draw “demonic” images; moreover, there are non-Christian religious items prominently displayed in other areas of the school. Buddha and Hindu figurines are on display in a social studies classroom. A picture of another Hindu deity is on display in the school’s hallway. Even the art room itself features drawings of Medusa and the Grim Reaper.

Both of these cases give us a larger picture of the hostility Christianity faces nation-wide in the public school systems manipulated by the Academic Left. Since when has a student gotten a zero for drawing a cross? Public schools should be less concerned with riding students of their “Jesus glasses” and more concerned with teaching them Art, History, Math, Science, and other subjects.

The book Persecution by David Limbaugh presents numerous examples of this overall assault on Christianity taking place all over our country, and the secular Left is spearheading it.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Last year, we permanently deprived over 1.2 million innocent Americans of their God-given unalienable rights. Among those rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such rights are at the very core of the great American experiment, and without them, none of our guaranteed Constitutional rights may follow.

Our republic was founded for the very purpose of securing those rights from any power or person who attempts to extinguish them. Yet, in 1973, the Supreme Court condoned a mother’s right to deprive her unborn child of those and all subsequent rights; moreover, it invented a constitutionally protected right to do so. Obviously, I am referring to the right to abortion on demand granted in Roe v. Wade.

The death toll since Roe v. Wade will reach 50 million sometime this year.

Roe v. Wade is bad law for reasons in addition to the moral issues raised in killing an unborn baby. Indeed, there are numerous constitutional issues involved as well. As was already stated, we are approaching 50 million Americans deprived of every right protected by the constitution and endowed by our Creator in the name of a woman’s right to an abortion, which is apparently inherent in their right to privacy.

One can search high and low in both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution and neither document has anything to say about the right to an abortion or the right to privacy. This is not because abortion is some new modern marvel either. Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, noted in his opinion of the court that abortion dates as far back as the Ancient Greeks.

The truth is that some activist Supreme Court Justice invented this Constitutional right out of thin air. Such a scheme of inventing Constitutional rights is itself Unconstitutional. The United States Constitution lays out the amendment process in perfect detail in Article V. To totally ignore that process goes beyond usurping the power of the elected legislature. Such an endeavor confiscates the power of the people of the United States. The Constitution does not give the Judiciary such authoritarian power. On the contrary, the Court took it for itself.

Leftists argue that this is merely an act of the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution – applying modern standards to an old document. Actually, Roe v. Wade goes far beyond interpretation. Creating a wholly unmentioned right to abortion on demand is far different from interpreting the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause to grant Americans the right to speak freely online. That would be an example of applying modern standards.

Roe v. Wade is some of the worst case law in American history. It belongs with the likes of Dread Scott v. Sanford. If the American people wanted a Constitutional right to an abortion, then we can amend the Constitution. Unfortunately for the Left, Roe v. Wade was initiated in response to a Texas statue outlawing abortion and enacted by the popularly elected Texas Legislature; furthermore, at the time that Roe v. Wade was heard and for at least a century prior, 45 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia had anti-abortion laws – all classifying abortion as a felony. This hardly seems like the fundamental right Justice Blackmun claims it to be.

If the Left cannot accomplish their goals at the ballot box, then they will shove their beliefs down our throats via an activist Supreme Court and a fill-in-the-blank Constitution; however, it is truly tragic that this belief of theirs will soon have resulted in the death of 50 million innocent Americans.

There has been a lot of talk in the various media outlets of the Left about Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos.” As a participant in Operation Chaos, Republican Voters are asked to temporarily switch their party affiliation to Democrat and vote for Hilary Clinton in an effort to, above all, create chaos among the Democrats and keep them fighting amongst themselves. Then, in November, Republican voters will switch back and vote for Senator John McCain.

At first, the talking points consisted merely of how exit polls showed that Operation Chaos seemed to be working and how “unfair” and “undemocratic” it was to vote, insincerely, in the other party’s primary. (Conversely, the Left had no problem with Independents and Democrats selecting John McCain as the Republican nominee.)

Recently, however, the Leftist media has changed their talking points to accusations of mass criminal law violations of Republicans in Ohio and other states – states where voters are required to sign some sort of pledge of sincerity when the switch party affiliation. Many people are now “investigating” the possibility of brining criminal indictments against insincere Republicans who voted Democrat in Ohio. If convicted, such voters could serve jail time for violating state criminal law.

In reality, such indictments would be nearly impossible to convict, because it requires a trial court to get into the mind of a voter and determine what he or she was thinking. It is really just an effort by the media and others on the Left to scare Republican voters in upcoming primaries from doing the same, and to prevent them from helping Hilary Clinton as they did in Texas and Ohio earlier this month.

On its surface, however, attempting to criminally punish voters based on their sincerity – indeed, their very thoughts - is eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s Thought Police in 1984. Of course, an authoritarian state with absolute control over the lives of its citizens is exactly what they Left desires in the end anyway.

We believe in the exact words the founders chose to brilliantly establish our nation. If our Constitution was meant to be a living, breathing document whose meaning changes, then the founders would have adopted an unwritten Constitution similar to Great Britian. Instead, they created a different method, if necessary, for making changes to the Constitution - the amendment process.

The Constitutional amendment process was intentionally made difficult to serve as one of many safeguards that limit the power of the national government. We believe in that process and a strict reading of the text of the Constitution. Judges legislating from the bench and creating whole new constitutional rights is a subversion of the supremacy of the Constitution; moreover, it endangers the liberty of every American.

Additionally, Conservatives believe in the Bill of Rights. Unlike the Left, we believe in all of them. I am going to discuss just three of them here, and how they are abused by the Left in their attempt to make their Socialist nightmare a reality.

The First Amendment guarentees a number of rights; however, the only part of the amendment that seems to interest the Left is the Establishment Clause - stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This, of course, is designed to prevent a state established church such as the Church of England - a church that compells membership and tax payments. Unfortunately, the Left twists this clause to deny Americans their right to the free execise of religion. Providing students with an optional moment to pray does not establish a religion. It provides them with the oportunity to freely execise their religion. No one is compelled to pray.

Freedom of speech and of the press are two First Amendment rights that the Left also twist to meet their socialist agenda. When a person want to burn an American flag on the steps of the capital - the Left claims freedom of speech; however, when talk radio show hosts practice their freedom of speech, the Left attempts to silence them with policies such as the Fairness Doctrine. More recently, Harry Reid and over 40 other current Democratic United States Senators authored and sent a letter to Rush Limbaugh’s broadcasting partner in an attempt to silence him.

The Second Amendment is one of America’s most important rights. The Left constantly abuse it and attempt to undermine it. This right, however, keeps a certain element of power in the hands of the people - a right that our revolutionary founders made great use of. The right keep keep and bear arms ensures that we have the ability to assemble an armed militia in the case of a government that grows totalitarian. Had the founder’s themselves not had this right, our country would not exisist, and it exists today as a further limit on the growth of the government. It is, in a manner of speaking, our final safeguard. It also has the bonus advantage of helping to defend against a possible invasion.

Every one of the Bill of Rights are designed to limit the power of the national government. The founders were incredibly understanind in the area of human nature. They knew that the more power that the government had the more likely it would be that even the best of men would abuse that power. Instead of giving the government broad authority over the nation, the Constitution established certain enumerated powers.

This leads us the the all important Tenth Amendement. Unfortunately, this incredible amendment has been almost wholly ignored by the Socialist Left. The Tenth Amendment states: “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.” This means that the government can do what the Constitution explicitly says it can do and no more. If we wish to grant the government additional powers, we can amend the Constitution.

Unfortunatly, the federal government has grown substantially over the last century - largely due to the precedents set by FDR and his Leftist Supreme Court. His New Deal legislation attemptted time and time again to violate the Constitution, and the Supreme Court ruled as such time and time again - until he threatened to pack the Supreme Court by adding six more justices that agreed with his ideology. Under such political pressures and fear, the court completely shifted its rulings; furthermore, over his 4 terms in office FDR was able to appoint 8 Justices to the Court. Following the empire of FDR, the American people saw that there was a need to limit Presidents to just 2 terms, and correctly, the Constitution was amended.

The founding fathers set out to create a nation based on certain principles and values that they believed were of the greatest significance. We have all heard lists of such values: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, et cetera. They saw such rights as unalienable and bestowed upon us from God. Furthermore, because the founders had such a seemingly unprecedented understanding of human nature and the world in general, they established a government designed, ultimately, to protect against infringement of those rights.

This understanding of human nature and acknowledgement of inalienable rights from God (meaning the government does not give the rights to us, therefore they cannot take them away) is what has made the United States so very unique – so revolutionary. What has made our country so blessed is not the fact that we established a democratic form of government. The Greeks did so centuries ago. America, however, took democratic government a step further by establishing limits on government power, even the instance of a majority opinion. We officially embraced the notion for the first time in human history that the government serves the people and not vice versa.

We must defend the Constitution and reverse the current growth of Government power. We are on track to become an authoritarian Socialist state, and although those on the Left would rewrite history to show otherwise, history has show us time and time again that Socialism leads to submission, death, and destruction.

This truly is remarkable. It seems like ancient American History to some of us. Some believe, perhaps, that it is apart of some post-Civil War era. The truth is quite the contrary; however, relative to the earlier civil rights achievements we certainly have come far in a short amount of time.

Today, in over twenty states, Blacks will join all other American races to go to the polls together and excercise their right to vote. Perhaps they will vote for Barak Obama. Perhaps they won’t. I am by no means saying that Americans of any race should vote for Obama. That is totally up to the individual voter, and no American, regardless of race should vote for someone because of their race - just as no one should be prevented from the office of President because of their race. Either way, it is truely a great time in American History.

Speaking of Blacks and voting today, I once again reflect on African American voting trends. The majority of African Americans typically vote Democrat. This is a widely known fact among those who study politics. African Americans have, to a large extent, become a base of the Democratic Party. The question I always ask myself and others is: why? What have Democrats done that is so overwhelming deserving of the Black vote? Lets go through a list of just a few of the major milestones in the civil rights of Black Americans:

• In 1964, the United States passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed segregation in schools and in public places. 82% of Republican Senators voted for it, while only 68% of Democratic Senators supported it. In fact, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd voted against the act, and he remains a Senator in the Democratic Party today. In the House of Representative, 80% of Republicans supported the act, while only 63% of Democrats supported the Act.
• Republican President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation granting freedom to all African Americans in the United States. Later the Republican majority in Congress voted unanimously in favor of the 13th Amendment, which officially abolished slavery.
• In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of seperate-but-equal was Unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren was the author of the opinion of the court. Earl Warren was appointed by a Republican President and before being Chief Justice, he was a three-term Republican governor of California.
• Republican President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law making Martin Luther King day a national holiday.
• Republican President George W. Bush appointted the first ever Black Secratary of State: Colin Powell. Giving Colin Powell the highest ranking office an black person has ever held. That position is now held by Condelizza Rice - a black woman.

The list can go on much longer, but the point is that the Republican Party has done a great deal to further the rights of Blacks, so why does the Black community in particular continue to vote almost straight Democrat? What does the Democratic Party do for this particular demographic? The Democratic Party seems to have convinced the American people that the Republican Party is the party of racism, which the Republican Party’s record will show is clearly a fallacy. In fact, it is the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, that has a current Senator who was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. If a Republican Senator were once a member of such a horrid organization, I assure you that we would never hear the end of it from the Left.

This prompted me to reflect upon the many newly enacted laws all over the country regarding smoking. It seems like very soon every city and state will have laws preventing smoking in bars or restaurants; in fact, many cities and states already have such laws. I was not, however, aware of such laws such as the California one preventing smoking on beaches or in parks.

Let me state early on that I do not smoke. I have never once in my life even taken one small puff of even one single cigarette. I think the habit is disgusting, and frankly, most of the time I can’t stand to be around the smoke.

All that being said, I find these laws to be utterly ridiculous. First of all, it’s Anti-American. How can the government be allowed to decide what is and is not acceptable within a private establishment such as a bar or a restaurant? And how can the government get the nerve to try and direct the health of private individuals by trying to curb smoking. It’s a free country! Our very constitution is based on ideas such as individual freedoms without interference from the government. If a person wants to smoke that is their decision, not the people in national, state, or local governments.

Additional Anti-American ideals can be found in the laws against smoking in restaurants and bars. This is a capitalistic economy. Our businesses are independent from the government. They are privately owned. It is up to the business whether or not it wants to allow smoking on its premises. If a bar allows smoking and a customer doesn’t like it, the customer can always leave. Restaurants could even post signs on the doors to warn people that say something like: “This is a smoking establishment.” Capitalism will create areas for such people who are repulsed by smoking, such as the old smoking and non-smoking areas that are a dying breed.

The fact that government is trying to exercise this kind of control, no matter how remote, over private individuals and private establishments is contrary to the concept of liberty embodied in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The public beaches and parks are another story, while it does seem allowable to me because they are public beaches and therefore, government property, it still seems ridiculous that government is trying to regulate the decisions its citizens make. Like something about a congressman, governor, president, or mayor makes those individuals more capable of making decisions about our health and well-being than we are. That is not only ridiculous, but also extremely arrogant.

I expect, unfortunately, that the anti-smoking laws in America will continue to grow. In fact, maybe they’ll just limit our availabilities to make our own decisions about smoking to a certain arbitrary schedule:

Sunday: Citizens are allowed to have one cigarette at 5:00 PM EST, but only if the wind is blowing slower than 5 miles per hour.
Monday: Citizens are allowed to have one cigarette at 9:00 PM EST, but only if it is the second Monday of the month.
Tuesday: Citizens are allowed to have one cigarette at 4:00 PM, but only if it isn’t raining.
Wednesday: Citizens are not allowed to smoke. We request that each citizen allow his or her lungs to rest from the three cigarettes earlier this week.
…
etc.

Then, they’ll try to make themselves seem considerate by giving us a “bonus” cigarette under certain circumstances. Like, “on Tuesdays citizens are permitted to smoke two cigarettes if there is a full moon.” This is sort of similar to how they make themselves seem considerate by giving us a tax refund. They act like its some kind of gift even though they are just giving us back OUR money that they took. It would be like a friend borrowing $5 and giving it back to you on your birthday as a present.

Anyway, my whole point, which is probably obvious by now is how ridiculous and how Anti-American these laws are. A large portion of citizens support these laws because, obviously, good health of citizens is good for the nation; however, people overlook the infringement these types of laws are on our most basic and core rights of freedom and liberty. It may be just a small step in light of some of the much more unconstitutional things people can think of, but each step away from our American ideals will eventually make us more likely to accept even more outrageous trespasses on our liberty.