Tuesday, December 5, 2023
WSJ Publishes My Solution To The Social Security Solvency Problem
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Thanksgiving Proclamation In The Year Of The Independence Of The United States Of America The One Hundred & Forty-eighth
A Proclamation
The American people, from their earliest days, have observed the wise custom of acknowledging each year the bounty with which divine Providence has favored them. In the beginnings, this acknowledgment was a voluntary return of thanks by the community for the fruitfulness of the harvest. Though our mode of life has greatly changed, this custom has always survived. It has made thanksgiving day not only one of the oldest but one of the most characteristic observances of our country. On that day, in home and church, in family and in public gatherings, the whole nation has for generations paid the tribute due from grateful hearts for blessings bestowed.
To center our thought in this way upon the favor which we have been shown has been altogether wise and desirable. It has given opportunity justly to balance the good and the evil which we have experienced. In that we have never failed to find reasons for being grateful to God for a generous preponderance of the good. Even in the least propitious times, a broad contemplation of our whole position has never failed to disclose overwhelming reasons for thankfulness. Thus viewing our situation, we have found warrant for a more hopeful and confident attitude toward the future.
In this current year, we now approach the time which has been accepted by custom as most fitting for the calm survey of our estate and the return of thanks. We shall the more keenly realize our good fortune, if we will, in deep sincerity, give to it due thought, and more especially, if we will compare it with that of any other community in the world.
The year has brought to our people two tragic experiences which have deeply affected them. One was the death of our beloved President Harding, which has been mourned wherever there is a realization of the worth of high ideals, noble purpose and unselfish service carried even to the end of supreme sacrifice. His loss recalled the nation to a less captious and more charitable attitude. It sobered the whole thought of the country. A little later came the unparalleled disaster to the friendly people of Japan. This called forth from the people of the United States a demonstration of deep and humane feeling. It was wrought into the substance of good works. It created new evidences of our international friendship, which is a guarantee of world peace. It replenished the charitable impulse of the country.
By experiences such as these, men and nations are tested and refined. We have been blessed with much of material prosperity. We shall be better able to appreciate it if we remember the privations others have suffered, and we shall be the more worthy of it if we use it for their relief. We will do well then to render thanks for the good that has come to us, and show by our actions that we have become stronger, wiser, and truer by the chastenings which have been imposed upon us. We will thus prepare ourselves for the part we must take in a world which forever needs the full measure of service. We have been a most favored people. We ought to be a most generous people. We have been a most blessed people. We ought to be a most thankful people.
Wherefore, I, Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States, do hereby fix and designate Thursday, the twenty-ninth day of November, as Thanksgiving Day, and recommend its general observance throughout the land. It is urged that the people, gathering in their homes and their usual places of worship, give expression to their gratitude for the benefits and blessings that a gracious Providence has bestowed upon them, and seek the guidance of Almighty God, that they may deserve a continuance of His favor.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this 5th day of November, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-three, and of the Independence of the United States, the One Hundred and Forty-eighth.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
By the President:
CHARLES E. HUGHES, Secretary of State.
Calvin Coolidge, Proclamation 1680—Thanksgiving Day, 1923 Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/206745
Thursday, November 16, 2023
Galston Column Takes Opposite Approach To RTE
Like most Americans, I knew little about the Insurrection Act until recently. But the more I learn, the more I worry about its potential to erode our fundamental liberties.
The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, mostly barred the U.S. military from the role in civil law enforcement that it had played during the Civil War and its aftermath. The act permitted legislated exceptions, however. The most important of these is the Insurrection Act.
This act gives the president the authority to deploy the military to assist law-enforcement agencies in three situations: when a state government requests federal aid to suppress an insurrection in that state; when the president deems military deployment necessary to "enforce the laws" of the U.S. or to "suppress the rebellion"; and when the president deems such deployment necessary to suppress "any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy" in a state whose government is unable or unwilling to enforce the constitutional rights of its citizens or "opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws."
I quote from the statute to make a point: Its scope, which is both broad and vague, gives the president enormous discretionary power. Key terms—insurrection, rebellion and domestic violence—aren't defined. As an analysis by the Brennan Center shows, the president alone may decide whether these prerequisites for deploying the military have been met, and the Supreme Court has said it has no authority to review the president's decision.
To be sure, a 1932 Supreme Court decision held that courts may review the lawfulness or constitutionality of acts the military performs after it has been deployed, but in the swirl of events basic liberties may be curtailed well before the judiciary can step in.
Consider this scenario: After a divisive campaign, a presidential candidate opposed by half the country is inaugurated, and a massive protest breaks out in Washington. While observers and authorities report that the demonstrators are mostly peaceful, the new president disagrees, federalizes the National Guards of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, and deploys them with orders to suppress the protests.
Or this one: After police in a large city kill an unarmed black man, protests break out and spread to other cities. Although the protests are peaceful at first, the president argues that similar events in the past have turned violent in a manner that exceeded local and state capacity to suppress them. He then orders the deployment of military forces to break them up before threats to life and property arise.
In situations such as these, fundamental rights such as the freedoms of speech and assembly are at stake, and the potential for the arbitrary and capricious use of the Insurrection Act is evident. This possibility should disturb anyone who doesn't trust every president to use his authority prudently and within constitutional restraints. After 2020, Congress should have reformed the Insurrection Act to prevent future presidents from using it to suppress basic liberties.
In one of the most enduring lines of the 2016 presidential campaign, veteran reporter Salena Zito wrote of Mr. Trump that "the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally." She implied—plausibly—that his supporters, not the press, were reading him correctly. But that was then, when his plans were relatively unformed and his understanding of how to staff his administration wasn't informed by any government experience.
Things are different now. In his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Mr. Trump declared that he had learned a great deal during his first term about who is strong and who is weak, about who can be trusted and who can't. With the help of such groups as the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Trump's team is busy formulating policies and making lists of people on whom it can rely to staff his administration.
A second Trump term would be much more effective than the first, a prospect that thrills his supporters and sends shivers through those who fear, as I do, that his re-entry into the White House would trigger the biggest threat to constitutional governance since the Civil War. Let's take him literally as well as seriously.
Sunday, November 12, 2023
Trump's Dereliction Of Duty During The "Summer Of Love"
The Constitution's enumerated powers specifically grant Congress the power to call out the militia (Militia Clause - Article I, Section 8, Clause 15) & the President the authority to command the militia (Commander Of Militia Clause - Article II, Section 2, Clause 1) when needed in the active service to the U.S. Starting in 1792 with the above named Militia Act (also known as the Calling Forth Act) Congress delegated to the President the authority to call out the militia for two years. This delegated authority was made permanent in 1795 & remained permanent as the laws were revised over the years like in 1807, 1903, & Title 10 of the U.S. code pertaining to Armed Forces.
In addition, President Lincoln believed that the "preserve, protect, & defend" language of the presidential Oath of Office clause (Article II, Section 1, Clause 8) placed a special constitutional duty on the President to fight for the nation's survival whether Congress had declared war or not, & by inference, whether or not a governor had invited him to call up the militia to suppress rebellion.
The Take Care clause (Article II, Section 3) requires the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" & with particular emphasis on Article II executive branch Power to restrain violations of life, liberty, & property of American citizens by effective criminal law & prosecution of criminals who destroy homes & businesses.
In summary, the President has the legal authority to deploy U.S. military & federalized National Guard troops within the United States to suppress civil disorders, insurrections, or rebellions as documented above.
Accordingly, Trump was derelict of duty when he left people in Seattle to fend for themselves against a band of marauding thugs for over three weeks in the summer of 2020 & only talked about doing something about it if he was reelected in November. A shameful irresponsible failure to fulfill his presidential obligation.
Special note - Presidents are aware of our history of quartering soldiers in houses during the Revolutionary War & the use of the army in civil law enforcement during the Civil War & Reconstruction so they design limited missions specifically to restore order & quickly remove the military presence once order is restored. See Third Amendment & the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
Sunday, October 29, 2023
Mike Pence & The Electoral History Of The United States
Thursday, October 12, 2023
The XYZ Quiz
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Preserving Liberty Through Education
Sunday, September 10, 2023
The Real Poverty & Slavery Story
Slavery, the Left, and Truth
Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here are some truths about slavery.
America's Slavery Compared to Slavery Everywhere Else
If you are interested in morality and committed to truth, you do not ask, "Who had slaves?" You ask, "Who ended slavery?"
Who had slaves?
Every civilization throughout history had slaves: Asian societies, Africans, Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples around the world, and the Muslim/Arab world, which may have had the most slaves of all.
Who ended slavery?
There was only one thing unique about slavery in the West: It raised the issue of the morality of slavery, ferociously debated it and finally abolished it there, before it was abolished in any other civilization. If you care about moral truth rather than, for example, promoting America-hatred, you must recognize — and you must teach — that America was one of the first slave-holding societies to abolish slavery. This even includes Africa. Cornell professor Sandra Greene, a black scholar of African history, notes, "Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost World War I."
The Numbers of Slaves
According to the authoritative SlaveVoyages.org, the total number of black slaves imported from Africa into America was 305,326. The number of black slaves other countries imported from Africa into the rest of the New World — i.e., into the Caribbean and South America—was 12,521,337. In other words, other countries imported 41 times the number of black slaves into the Western Hemisphere than the United States did including the years before American independence. Yet, the American Left never mentions this important moral point—because the Left-controlled education system suppresses facts it finds inconvenient, and the Left is not interested in morality or truth, but in vilifying America.
And then there is Arab/Muslim enslavement of blacks. Professor Paul Lovejoy, in his "Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa" (Cambridge University Press, 2012), reveals that from the beginning of Islam in the 7th century through the year 1600, the estimated number of Africans enslaved by Muslims was about 7 million. After 1600, it was about a million per year. Do American students ever learn about the Arab/Muslim slave trade? How many know, for example, that a great percentage of the African male slaves were castrated so that they could not have families?
Black Slaves Built America
This is another lie of the Left.
Those who make this argument point to the lucrative cotton manufacturing and trade in the 19th-century — the industry in which black slaves were primarily used in the American South.
But University of Illinois professor of Economics, Deirdre McCloskey, answered this:
"Growing cotton, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk… That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production…
"The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would have become just as rich without the 250 years of unrequited toil. They have remained rich, observe, even after the peculiar institution was abolished, because their riches did not depend on its sinfulness."
But one need not know anything about cotton to understand how false "Black slaves built America" is. All you need is common sense.
First, even if slavery accounted for much of the wealth of the South, the Civil War that brought slavery to an end in the United States wiped out nearly all of that wealth and cost the Union billions (in today's dollars).
Second, if slavery built the American economy, the most robust economy in world history, why didn't Brazil become an economic superpower? Brazil imported four million black slaves, about 12 times as many as America. Why did the slave-owning American South lag so far behind the North economically? Why did England, which, though it played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade until the beginning of the 19th century, had almost no slaves, become the most advanced economy of the 19th century?
"Black slaves built America" is left-wing propaganda to vilify America and to discredit capitalism.
America is Systemically Racist
This is the Great Left Lie.
Four million black people have emigrated to the United States since the 1960s—and tens of millions more would if they could. Are they all fools? Why would anyone move to a country that is systemically bigoted against them? Did any Jews emigrate to Germany in the 1930s?
Blacks have emigrated to the United States because they know what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black woman who fled her homeland of Somalia and who now writes and lectures in America, knows:
"What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you."
Blacks emigrating to America know what Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, writing in Le Monde and Le Point, knows:
"It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything."
As regards American slavery and everything else, always remember this: Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value. It is not a left-wing value.