Constitutionally Speaking

A Long Standing Question Finally Answered

In The News, Youth Educational Material May 13, 2009

Since the election in November, I have often asked myself: “How could so many Jews, especially ones I am or was close to at the time, vote for Obama?

Now, 6 months later, a writer at the American Thinker has answered my question. And the answer does not bring good news for our Constitutional Republic that the founding fathers fought so hard for. It leads us to a path that is ripe for striping “God” out of every aspect of American life to promote their destructive progressive agenda.

Unrequited Love: Evangelicals and Jews

By Stuart Schwartz
Who would have thought that the key to battling the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Obama’s United States lies in these words: “Jesus loves me! This I know, For the Bible tells me so.”

The children of Evangelical Christians sing this hymn in bible schools across the country, reflecting belief in a life lived according to the will of God as revealed in the bible. No moral relativism here: on the one hand, God-honoring living, and the other, sin and defiance. Right and wrong — it is that simple. And it is this biblical view of the world that underlies the unwavering Evangelical Christian support of Israel and Judaism. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has noted, Israel and the Jews “have no greater friends and allies” than the 70-million strong Evangelical Christian community in the United States — better friends, in fact, than much of the American Jewish Community…

This bible-based approach has produced strong Evangelical support. Christian tourism has kept the Israeli tourism industry afloat when Jews cut back. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism reports that 1.8 million of the 3 million visitors last year were Christians, capping a 40% increase in the past eight years in Christians from the United States.

Evangelicals are dramatically more supportive of Israel than the nearly half of the six million American Jews who, according to The National Jewish Population Survey, identify themselves as reformed and/or secular Jews, many of whom are hostile toward both Israel and bible-based Judaism. They reject God in favor of “peoplehood.”As Dennis Prager, the columnist and radio talk host who describes himself as a bible-honoring Jew, notes, “their religion is rarely Judaism.” Instead, “it is every ‘ism’ of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism, and environmentalism.” …

He continues: After “Marxist claims about the proletariat proved false and capitalism was vindicated as the best way to achieve economic affluence,” the left replaced “the proletariat” with “the oppressed” as its “object of affection.” For the Jewish left “Israel has merely replaced John D. Rockefeller at the top of the (enemies) list.” These Jews are part of a feverish left for which it makes sense that Evangelical Christians would support Israel, for both ensure terrorism as they oppress the “powerless.” Case in point: Rabid Marxist and anti-Semitic Jew Dr. David Boyarin, a Talmud (traditional Jewish bible commentaries) professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who maintains that the highest form of Judaism is the destruction of Israel, and that the genetic composition of the Jewish race — if allowed to grow — will result in the oppression by Jews of other people.

American Jews need to rethink alliances. Syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer warns the Jewish community “it is a sign of the disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.” He may well have had in mind the commentsof Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who heads the largest and largely secular (and least supportive of Israel) affiliate of American Judaism. Yoffie compared Evangelical leaders like the late Dr. Jerry Falwell to Hitler.

read the entire article here, it’s value in understanding so much of what is happening today is priceless.

In His Own Words

Action Item, Contact Your US Senators & Congresswoman, In The News, US Congress Legislation May 12, 2009

Obama goes on the record, off the cuff, about health care.

By Tevi Troy

Does anybody still read The New York Times Magazine? If not, everyone missed a recent interview with President Obama, in which he expounds, without a TelePrompTer, on his views on health care. In general, the interview reveals a good understanding of some of the challenges facing our system, such as high costs, especially during the end-of-life period. But it also hints at some unrealistic solutions, such as “comparative-effectiveness research” to drive down costs, an independent board to make health-care decisions, and some kind of non-democratic decision-making process that doesn’t go through what he calls the “normal channels.”

The president gets the interview off to a good start, encouraging consumer participation in the decision-making process. Consumer participation is part of what’s known as “value-driven health care,” an effort to use technology and transparency to let consumers make decisions based on both cost and quality of care. Obama even mentions an effort to correct “the asymmetry of information between patient and provider.” This would let covered consumers make smart decisions that contemplate cost.

The problem is that while the Bush administration had a clear and serious belief in all four elements of value-driven health care — information about cost, information about quality, technologies to make that information transparent, and incentives to encourage consumers to use said information — it’s not at all clear that Obama does. There’s some doubt whether Obama even means the same thing that Bush did when he mentions consumer involvement.

Obama also mentions Medicare and Medicaid and our “obligation to get those costs under control.” He is right about the problem of cost, but it was not clear what he could do to achieve this. While the White House is indeed looking for cost-cutting opportunities within Medicare, such ideas usually end up on Congress’s cutting-room floor.

One broader cost-cutting measure he mentions is comparative-effectiveness research, a $1.1 billion effort via the stimulus package to compare different therapies and try to get to official judgments about which ones work better. His vision for comparative effectiveness is one of objective studies through which you will learn that “the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one.” Once consumers have access to these studies, he believes, “if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.”

The problem with his vision of comparative effectiveness is two-fold. First, per the stimulus legislation, it is supposed to be a measure of effectiveness, not a cost-comparison tool. Second, and more important, this binary view of effectiveness (one therapy is more effective than the other) is not compatible with the emerging notion of personalized medicine, which takes individuals’ genomic structures into account. Personalized medicine may teach us that while therapy A works better in the aggregate, therapy B might be better for some individuals based on their unique DNA. We have made great strides in bringing about personalized medicine in recent years, particularly through the unlocking of the human genome, but the technological challenges may pale before the policy obstacles that cost-cutters could place in personalized medicine’s path.

A cost-cutting measure that he does not mention in the interview, but that began getting media attention yesterday, is the new health-industry-developed plan to reduce spending growth. It is an open question how “voluntary” these reforms from terrified industry reps really are, and how enforceable they will be in the future.

Another subject the president discusses with the Times is the problem of end-of-life care. He tells the story of his grandmother, who got an expensive hip replacement, then died two weeks later. President Obama says he “would have paid for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother.” At the same time, however, he notes that “whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.” Furthermore, he recognizes that Americans don’t want to hear that we will not provide expensive late-stage care, a la England. As the president puts it, “If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement, and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.”

His answer to this question, however, is also somewhat upsetting — and not just because he calls denying care to the terminally ill “very difficult” and “upsetting,” but never “something we won’t do.” He says that “there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.” And not only will this be difficult, he claims, but he has trouble imagining “the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.” It is unclear what this group will look like, but the notion of some empyrean body, developed outside the normal political channels, making health-care decisions for the country, is a notion that makes me very, very nervous.

— Tevi Troy, deputy secretary of health and human services from 2007 to 2009, is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

How Prayer Has Sustained the Republic for Over 200 Years

In The News May 8, 2009

Exclusive: William Federer cites historical incidents of nation calling on the Almighty

Posted: May 07, 2009
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Note: On this National Day of Prayer, William Federer offers a list of similar national commemorations in America’s history.

Early colonists declared Days of Prayer during droughts and Indian attacks.

One notable Day of Prayer was in 1746, when French Adm. d’Anville sailed for New England, commanding the most powerful fleet of the time – 70 ships with 13,000 troops – intending to recapture Louisburg, Nova Scotia, and destroy from Boston to New York, all the way to Georgia.

Massachusetts Gov. William Shirley declared a Day of Prayer and Fasting, Oct. 16, 1746, to pray for deliverance.

In Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the Rev. Thomas Prince prayed: “Send Thy tempest, Lord, upon the water … scatter the ships of our tormentors!”

Historian Catherine Drinker Bowen related that as he finished praying, the sky darkened, winds shrieked and church bells rang “a wild, uneven sound … though no man was in the steeple.”

A hurricane subsequently struck the French fleet.

With 4,000 sick and 2,000 dead, including Adm. d’Anville, French Vice Adm. d’Estournelle threw himself on his sword.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his “Ballad of the French Fleet”:

“Admiral d’Anville had sworn by cross and crown, to ravage with fire and steel our helpless Boston Town. … From mouth to mouth spread tidings of dismay, I stood in the Old South saying humbly: ‘Let us pray!’ … Like a potter’s vessel broke, the great ships of the line, were carried away as smoke or sank in the brine.”

All our founders’ inspiring, biblical quotes in one place – a must-have for your library: William Federer’s “America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations”

In 1774, Thomas Jefferson proposed a Day of Prayer when the British blockaded Boston’s Harbor:

“This House … from the hostile invasion of the city of Boston … deem it highly necessary that the first day of June be … a Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, devoutly to implore the Divine interposition.”

George Washington wrote in his diary, June 1, 1774: “Went to church, fasted all day.”

A few years later, March 6, 1776, Gen. Washington ordered:

“A day of fasting, prayer and humiliation, ‘to implore the Lord and Giver of all victory to pardon our manifold sins and … bless the Continental Army with His divine favor and protection.'”

Ben Franklin stated during the 1787 Constitutional Convention:

“In the beginning of the Contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for Divine protection.”

In 1794, after the Whiskey Rebellion, President George Washington declared a Day of Prayer.

In 1799, during a threatened war with France, President John Adams declared a Day of Prayer, urging Americans to:

“Call to mind our numerous offenses against the Most High God, confess them before Him with the sincerest penitence, implore His pardoning mercy, through the Great Mediator and Redeemer … and that through the grace of His Holy Spirit, we may … yield a more suitable obedience to His righteous requisitions.”

During the War of 1812, President James Madison, who interestingly enough had introduced the First Amendment in the first session of Congress, proclaimed a Day of Prayer:

“I … recommend … rendering the Sovereign of the Universe … public homage … acknowledging the transgressions which might justly provoke the manifestations of His divine displeasure … seeking His merciful forgiveness … with a reverence for the unerring precept of our holy religion, to do to others as they would require that others should do to them.”

On Aug. 25, 1814, the British invaded Washington and burned the White House and Capitol building. Suddenly dark clouds rolled in and a tornado blew off roofs and knocked down chimneys on British troops. Cannons were lifted off the ground and thrown yards away. British troops fled.

A British historian wrote:

“More British soldiers were killed by this stroke of nature than from all the firearms the American troops had mustered.”

Madison proclaimed another Day of Prayer, stating:

“In the present time of public calamity and war a day may be recommended … [for] public humiliation and fasting and of prayer to Almighty God … confessing their sins and transgressions … that He would be graciously pleased to pardon all their offenses.”

When President William Henry Harrison died in 1841, John Tyler, the first vice president to assume the presidency, issued a Day of Prayer:

“When a Christian people feel themselves to be overtaken by a great public calamity, it becomes them to humble themselves under the dispensation of Divine Providence.”

President Zachary Taylor declared a Day of Prayer during a cholera epidemic, July 3, 1849, stating:

“A fearful pestilence … is spreading itself throughout the land. … It is … recommended … a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer … to abstain … from secular occupations … to implore the Almighty in His own good time to stay the destroying hand.”

(Column continues below)

Prior to the Civil War, President James Buchanan proclaimed a Day of Prayer to avert civil strife, as did Lincoln, March 30, 1863, stating:

“The awful calamity of civil war … may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins. … We have forgotten God. … We have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become … too proud to pray to the God that made us!”

President Andrew Johnson proclaimed a Day of Prayer when Lincoln was shot.

During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson declared a Day of Prayer, stating:

“I … hereby proclaim … a day of public humiliation, prayer and fasting, and do exhort my fellow-citizens … to assemble on that day in their several places of worship … to pray Almighty God that He may forgive our sins … and purify our hearts.”

During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt prayed during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944:

“Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization. … Help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.”

When World War II ended, President Truman declared in a Day of Prayer, Aug. 16, 1945:

“The warlords of Japan … have surrendered unconditionally. … Our global victory … has come with the help of God. … Let us … dedicate ourselves to follow in His ways.”

In 1952, President Truman made the National Day of Prayer an annual observance, stating:

“In times of national crisis when we are striving to strengthen the foundations of peace … we stand in special need of Divine support.”

In April of 1970, President Richard Nixon had a Day of Prayer for Apollo 13 astronauts.

On Jan. 27, 1983, declaring a National Day of Prayer, President Ronald Reagan stated:

“In 1783, the Treaty of Paris officially ended the long, weary Revolutionary War during which a National Day of Prayer had been proclaimed every spring for eight years.”

President Reagan made the National Day of Prayer the first Thursday in May, saying:

“Americans in every generation have turned to their Maker in prayer. … We have acknowledged … our dependence on Almighty God.”

President George W. Bush declared Days of Prayer after the Islamic terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and after Hurricane Katrina.

Facing today’s economic crisis and fundamentalist Muslim threat, it may be time for Americans to once again observe a Day of Prayer.

The Star Spangled Banner, like you’ve never heard it before

Youth Educational Material May 7, 2009

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Pelosi Caught in a Bald-faced Lie About EIT’s (enhanced interrogation techniques)

In The News May 7, 2009

Pelosi Caught In Bald-Faced Lie– Report Shows She Was Briefed on “Use” of Waterboarding Back in 2002

On April 23, 2009, the Far Left Speaker denied she had been told that waterboarding or other illegal interrogation methods were being used on terrorist detainees:

How pathetic.

A report released today proved that Speaker Pelosi was told that waterboarding was used on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah way back in September 2002:

ABC News reported, via Free Republic:

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah in September 2002, according to a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News.

The report, submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Capitol Hill officials Wednesday, appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding or other special interrogation tactics. Instead, she has said, she was told only that the Bush administration had legal opinions that would have supported the use of such techniques.

The report details a Sept. 4, 2002 meeting between intelligence officials and Pelosi, then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, and two aides. At the time, Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

The meeting is described as a “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

Democratic Leaders of Congress were briefed at more than 30 meetings on enhanced interrogation techniques since 2002.

According to an earlier report, information gathered from Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) after waterboarding was used led to the discovery of a second wave attack planned for Los Angeles.

Mark Levin: Obama’s Vision of ‘Change’ is Destructive

In The News May 6, 2009

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“Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” by Mark R. Levin

In The News, Youth Educational Material May 6, 2009

In any given generation, there are but a few authors and thinkers whose creations can survive the ravages of time and the shifting sands of societal evolution. It is rarer still when a key book is written, recognized, and celebrated contemporarily. This is one such book.

Mark R. Levin logically lays out what has made the United States of America different from all other nations in the history of humanity. He re-introduces us to the founders and framers, and those people who inspired them long ago. At its most basic elements, our country was founded on the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…and that we have these rights conferred on us, not by man or government, but by Natural Law, which originates with the Creator. Mr. Levin puts us back in touch with our founding doctrines, which are the at the very heart of what conservatism is and has always been.

For too long, Conservatives have let themselves be defined by the media. Mr. Levin’s book recasts what it is to be a proud Conservative, and gives voice to those who are often silent in the face of ideological slander. If you believe in this great country, if you believe in truth and honesty, if you believe in life and principles, if you believe in freedom and patriotism, if you believe that all people are created equal and it is up to the individual to succeed according to their talents and interests, and if you believe in a smaller efficient government, and lower taxes, then this book is for you.

Released March 24, 2009, Liberty and Tyranny remains #1 on the best seller list and has already sold over a million copies and is in it’s 18th printing.

“Liberty and Tyranny is a “MUST HAVE” for every household and school library.

We’ve “ALL” Been “DEPUTIZED”

Action Item, Contact Your State Senators & Representatives, Contact Your US Senators & Congresswoman, Economy, In The News, South Dakota State Legislation, US Congress Legislation, Youth Educational Material May 6, 2009

According to a Chairman of the investigations and oversight board for the $787 Billion dollar “C.R.A.P” :

“We are, in essence, deputizing the entire American citizenry to help with the oversight of this program,” said Rep. Brad Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight.

So, there you have it folks. We have all been deputized. We have been given the “authority” by the “powers that be” to act and hold these thugs accountable for ruining the futures of our youth for generations to come.

Another “Grab Bag” Lame Brain Idea

Action Item, Contact Your State Senators & Representatives, Contact Your US Senators & Congresswoman, In The News, South Dakota State Legislation, US Congress Legislation May 6, 2009

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Going along a similar route of the s-chip program and nat’l health care to increase taxes on tobacco to pay for health care; the transportation and infrastructure committee has come up with a way to pay for their new high speed rail system that would only serve a minuscule of a fraction of the public:

Petra Todorovich, a director with the Regional Planning Association, said motorists around the nation will have to pay higher gasoline taxes. She recommended starting with a 10 cents per gallon increase that would be indexed to inflation.

Her organization is focused on New York, New Jersey and Connecticut but has a crafted a national infrastructure proposal.

I can’t wait to hear what they come up with to implement their “Green” programs.

On This Day In History . . .

In The News, Youth Educational Material May 5, 2009

Will our dear TIC ( Teleprompter in Chief) light a birthday candle for his MIC ( Mentor in Chief )?

On this date, May 5, 1818:

political philosopher Karl Marx was born in Prussia.

I only ask because he speaks so fondly in his memior, Dreams of My Father”, about surrounding himself with marxists whom he can relate to.