Almost a two hundred years ago, one of our greatest statesmen, Daniel Webster, made a passionate plea to the Supreme Court to let small Dartmouth College survive the onslaught of bureaucratic zeal “Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out. But if you do so you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land. It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it”

Well, the heavy hands of the Obama administration are now on the tiny Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. A small liberal arts institution run by the gentle Benedictine monks, Belmont Abbey is on the receiving end of federal investigation and possible prosecution by three arms of this administration: the Civil Rights Commission, the EEOC, and the Justice Department.

The crime of Belmont Abbey is its faith: it is college that follows the Roman Catholic teachings in letter and spirit. And few trait are more worthy prosecution and persecution in these times than authentic, counter-cultural, traditional Roman Catholic living.

You all know that KsReaganite is neither Roman Catholic nor subscribes to every tenet of Catholic teaching. But I urge you to support the cause of Belmont Abbey College because if is the cause of individual liberty and conscience. So, please help the college out as it fights against a bureaucracy that has no limits on zeal or funding. You can make a contribution here to the Belmont Abbey Chancellor’s Fund.

https://secure2.convio.net/bac/site/Donation2?idb=396605211&2480.donation=form1&df_id=2480&JServSessionIdr004=d7e5dejl25.app9a

Apart from the fact that he belongs to the same fraternal organization that I do, there is little to like politically about Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. It was all the more refreshing, thus, to find him bravely sponsoring an amendment to allow the re-importation of prescription drugs from abroad. Apart from the obviously cost cutting element inherent in the proposal, it embodies the very essence of free markets. With drug prices at all time highs, the only two ways to control them would be to either slap price controls or allow for more competition.

The fact is that drugs of a similar or even better quality are significantly cheaper abroad due to regulations, competition, and production costs. Notwithstanding the incessant propaganda, not only are drugs made in many countries at least as safe as ours, but our bureaucracy has the tools and staff to check for quality at the point of importation. Heck, even today the number one source of chemicals that go into our drugs is India; and to think that somehow Canadian drugs are unsafe!

The drug companies, as Senator Dorgan rightly points out, want the American people to subsidize their profits but fighting against trade and competition. Sadly, otherwise pro-free trade Republican senators are buying into the drug companies’ argument hook, line, and sinker.  By failing to pass the Dorgan amendment, the Senate has shown that it has a strong bi-partisan caucus that abjures the principles of free trade and swallows the nonsense of xenophobia for the sake of contributions from the drug lords..er…the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies.

There is understandable anger at big banks raking in loads of money when the average American is mired in economic uncertainty. The instinctive reaction, perhaps tinged with a liberal dose of vengefulness, is to impose more regulations to keep banks honest. Most of these regulations fall into one of three categories:

1. unnecessary, i.e. requiring checking account statements to have square sized grids on the bottom of the last page to display overdraft fees
2. counterproductive, i.e., making overdraft privilege very difficult for debit card transactions which will result in two (from bank and merchant) overdraft fees to customers, not to mention the embarrassment
3. designed to create more jobs for bureaucrats, i.e., the proposed legislation to create a fourth financial regulatory agency, notwithstanding the three we already pay for

A better solution would have been helping banks police themselves for standards of service and ethical conduct. Why not a White House conference pulling in all the major banking CEOs who can set up an industry-wide authority (like a banker’s Better Business Bureau) which sets standards, grades service, sanctions bad behavior, and publishes all this so that the public can make more informed decisions? Those banks that score well on these measurements could be rewarded with more access to government contracts while those who come up short will have an incentive to do better to compete for the same largesse, without costing an additional cent in public money.  Together as partners, rather than as adversaries, can the government and banks be better stewards of the consumers’ shaken confidence.

 It is only fitting that the first state dinner of the Obama presidency was for the Prime Minister of India. I will venture out a loud prediction that in thirty odd years, the only ‘other’ super power will be India. For all the talk of a united Europe, resurgent Russia, and gigantic China becoming peers to the greatness of the United States, frankly it hasn’t happened and is not likely to. Sure, Europe or Russia or China are great powers with even greater potential in some areas of achievement. But none of them have the ‘package’ of India’s strengths, a package that mirrors that of a rising America of the 1920s and predicates sustainable success across the board.

Supporting the infrastructure of a multi-party federal democracy is a market that is growing by the thousands every day as more and more Indians leap into the middle class and hundreds join the elite of information technology professionals. Undergirding a very diverse multi-ethnic society in India is the extended family unit, not unlike our own during the frontier days of the late nineteenth century, which is largely untouched by the meltdown of the family structure that rages through much of old Europe. Old fashioned in many ways but equipped with cell phones and speaking English in the spheres of commerce and technology, Indians are a bunch on the move with strength.

Not surprisingly that strength is also visible in India’s military. Producing much of the hi-tech hardware itself, manned by regiments whose warrior traditions have been proven from the fields of the Flanders to the peaks of the Himalayas, India’s million strong armed forces are easily a match for China and Russia today (interestingly, today India has more aircraft carriers than Russia and China put together).

India has potential for the long term, a potential built on a sustaining blend of participatory politics, strong family structure, and an economy fuelled by a mass market and professionals of tomorrow’s technology. This will be our adversary, hopefully, without being our enemy.

We have put a considerable distance, I’d like to think, from the times and climes which strictly dictated what a woman should wear or shouldn’t. Granted that many women, just like many men, do take the concept of sartorial autonomy to the edge, as any HR manager will tell you.  The wardrobe or makeup of female anchors and reporters on FOX News is anything but outside the bounds of business decorum. Nonetheless, there has been a consistent whine all around liberal blogosphere about this silly matter, culminating in it being brought up this week on CNN’s Joy Behar show.  Unhappy and outraged over FOX’s stratospheric ratings success, its leftwing enemies are desperate; hence the targeting of the ladies at FOX. The trigger was provided, unfortunately, by FOX’s own Megyn Kelley who, in answer to a joke, affirmed that women at the network preferred wearing skirts because such attire was more feminine than pants. A matter of opinion that is neither here nor there but perhaps one that finds nods across much of FOX’s audience demographic.

Of course, an innocuous remark like that set off the cholesterol levels of the liberals and feminists. They took umbrage, they were outraged, and their avante garde research concluded that FOX was the most sexist network because..get this…its female anchors were all blonde, attractive, and wore nice skirts. You’d think those are the criteria that feminists would be outraged to judge any woman by! But then, what do I know about the most recent advances in contemporary feminist thought.

If the wardrobe of FOX anchors was an issue at all, a normal person would have concluded this: the anchors wear what they prefer in their professional wisdom. Were there space for even more spin, we could add that indeed the slightly center right fan base of FOX probably associates pantsuits with Hillary Clinton anyway. Then there is the simple business fact that most of FOX’s most ardent viewers are men between thirty and fifty years of age. How many such men do you know who do not like an articulate blonde in a fitted skirt and heels?  

Take it from an MBA: it makes business sense.

That justice has to be seen to be done is a maxim as old as the basic architecture of the laws of the English speaking peoples. It is just and proper to try the accused masterminds of 9/11 at the vey place where this cowardly massacre took place. Our very constitution makes it crystal clear in the Sixth Amendment. Not only will our faith in the supremacy of our constitution be vindicated thus, but also our declaration to the world that our cause is so just that it needs not hiding behind barbed wire off the shores of a little island. American justice must be seen and done, in open, with boldness, and with the faith of our Founding Fathers guiding us and the trust of the generations to come held in sanctity. Yes. KSM and his cronies must be tried at the American bar of justice next door to the sanctified ground where we shall one day build the Freedom Tower.

It is not often that I write to sing praises of a liberal Democrat who supports public employee unions and votes for tax increases. Tonight is one of those rare exceptions because the courage showed by Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI) during the weekend’s healthcare debate is even rarer. On behalf of a constituency that has no rights, no voice, and no vote, and against the wishes of the entire machinery of his own party and President, the former lawman showed why once upon a time cops were universally respected.  I do hope fervently that the healthcare bill is packed off into history to bother us no more. In the very unfortunate even that it does become law, however, I would be somewhat relieved if the Stupak Amendment is part of that law. Nothing is more politically offensive than being asked to pay my tax dollars to support, even indirectly, those hedonistic people who kill their own children for convenience. The Stupak Amendment assures that those tax dollars will not go to support infanticide, but rather help poor children with needed pre-natal, post-natal, and immunization regimes.

Last week Pope Benedict moved to welcome traditional Anglicans/Episcopalians into the Roman Catholic Church with their liturgies and episcopates largely intact. Whether the pontiff’s initiative is a genuine reflection of his concern for greater Christian unity or cynical ploy for ‘expanding market share’  when the ‘competition’ is in disarray, it does serve to put in glaring light the abyss, spiritual and temporal, that is the American Episcopal Church (ECUSA). Some would argue that calling New York based ECUSA a ‘church’ is stretching the definition of the word too much.

Indeed, today’s rapidly declining ECUSA is better known for liberal activism on behalf of any number of colorful causes like global poverty, climate change, hate speech legislation, and gay marriage rather than for sublime spirituality or substantive theology.  Leading ECUSA bishops openly question the most basic Christian precepts and creeds. The result has been a heaemmoraghe of members from an organization which, a mere generation ago, was considered the premier church of America counting amongst its congregants any number of Presidents, CEO, chancellors, cabinet members, and theologians. The marriage of the ECUSA with the equally theologically irrelevant ELCA Lutherans some years ago has done nothing to stanch the flow of orthodox Episcopalians and Lutherans to the more substantive branches of their own heritage (or to the various evangelical denominations).

The Pope’s gambit, as one East Coast journalist called it, should serve as another impetus in the continuing task of consolidating the several strands of non-ECUSA Anglicanism in North America which began this summer with the launch of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). Seeking ultimately to become a full fledged province of the global Anglican Communion, ACNA is ambitiously bringing together and diligently organizing disparate elements of disaffected ECUSA parishes, Anglo-Catholic and Anglo-Evangelical congregations, and small outposts of reformed Anglicans across Canada and the United States.  It is a gigantic task but a noble one with the ultimate aim of bringing under one umbrella the millions of Christians who devoutly hold to both Biblical precepts and their Anglican heritage as enshrined in the 39 Articles of Faith that have served as the anchor of Anglican Christianity since the sixteenth century.

 I have said this before and I will say it again: victims of crimes are victims of crimes, glaring reminders of a law enforcement system that failed them and utterly deserving of swift justice that a free society can and must provide them. The race, religion, gender, sexual habits, or disability of the victim should be of no concern to the justice system whose task remains the identification, prosecution, and conviction of the perpetrator(s).  We cheapen the horror of a crime and violate the principle of equal justice under the law when we decide that some victims of the same crime are less worthy than others.

By signing the so called ‘hate’ crimes legislation today, President Obama and his radical liberal allies have gone down that very path of creating two sets of victims: the preferred ones and the ordinary ones. On top of that, they have expanded the heavy hand of the federal government both into state jurisdiction and into free speech and free thought. Another proof that liberals are not really friends of, well, liberty.

Liberals and their middle class educated ‘moderate’ cohorts will rejoice today at the so-called Matthew Shepard Act. But no mistake about it, not too far in time from today the basis of that very law will be used to expand federal power to control the actions of groups and individuals with whom liberals sympathize; it will be perhaps a war time Republican president who will find it easy to expand his powers to consider anti-war speech to be a ‘hate’ crime. Moderates and liberals who cheer today will be shedding tears that day; tears that they will very richly deserve.

This despicable law is another effort to raise money from San Francisco donors, muzzle religious speech, and provide federal employment graduates of second class law schools and third class gender studies programs.

The fact that mental health has not been an issue in the otherwise volatile national healthcare debate is to be commended: mental health coverage is included in all the bills and proposals by default. We have come a long way from a mere generation ago when it was almost a taboo topic.

But I fear, we are fast trivializing the health of the mind by making it a fad and pop culture item. Every personal difficulty, communication problem, marital discord, or even mere sadness elicits the same hackneyed response of ‘have you considered counseling’. In the America of today, uniquely amongst industrial nations, the concept of ‘counseling’ is taken to be the psychological equivalent of the wonder drug aspirin. As for counselors, a cursory glance at the myriad of post-nominal letter combinations will tell you that anyone can call herself/himself a counselor.

Therapy Nation, the title of a book from the 1990s, rightly foreshadowed where we were headed with this fad of ‘talking it out and taking Prozac’ spreading from the elites to the masses.

At the risk of sounding nonchalantly unimpressed by fancy titles, let me suggest that being sad at the loss of a pet dog does not require seeking therapy. Nor does it require counseling, whatever that means in today’s water cooler side conversation, when a normal person is having a sad day or two because of an argument or the weather or stress. Newsflash to pop-psychologists: happiness and sadness are regular elements in the regular life of regular folks.

Mental health is a serious matter that manifests itself in manic depression, obsessive compulsiveness, schizophrenia, and several other substantive maladies.  We do no service to those suffering from such ailments by falsely elevating a sad day or a foul mood to the level of ‘mental illness’ needing therapeutic counseling. Please let us have our sad days and let qualified psychiatrists and certified psychologists handle the care of people with real mental health problems. Ignoring mental health problems in the past did us no good; trivializing them today does us no favors either.

 

Today the President met with his national security team about Pakistan, in the aftermath of last week’s passage into law of the Pakistan Aid Act, which commits millions to the Pakistani regime. A brainchild of Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Richard Lugar, the law gives the President-who spent time in his childhood and in his youth in Pakistan-broad authority to disburse American taxpayer money to Pakistan to help the country combat terrorism. While some conditions are attached, by and large, they are less severe than in the past, and still allow the President to ignore them citing ‘national interest’. So far, so good.

Except that Pakistan has had a poor history of using American money for noble purposes. Mostly such aid has been used, as successive CBO reports point out, to prop up the domestic priorities, including subsidies to politicians and drug lords, of the men in power. And while Pakistan and its Washington friends talk about using the aid to do important social uplift work, they fail to mention the stark truth about Pakistan’s abiding shame when it comes to doing humanitarian work: for thirty eight years, hundreds of thousands of Pakistan’s own citizens-now well into their third generation-have languished in squalid refugee camps in impoverished Bangladesh while Pakistan squandered billions of American aid dollars. How can America expect the Pakistani regime to do anything uplifting with our dollars when they have purposely and deliberately let their own citizens rot in camps for generations?

At the very least, conservatives should demand that Pakistan take back its own citizens rotting in foreign lands before embarking on other elaborate projects for social uplift.

She was a 13 year old child, Ms. Applebaum, who was drugged and then sodomized by your beloved Roman Polanski! I have never believed that Left liberals particularly cared for children, and this proves that belief’s veracity again. After all, when you call it a mere ‘choice’ to kill the most vulnerable of kids, why should I be surprised that you condone the rape of a teenager.

In this off-year, we still have three marquee statewide elections coming up. Two such races-the gubernatorial ones in VA and NJ-have been covered extensively by the traditional new outlets. The third one, arguably the only one with long-term impact on our social fabric, remains largely ignored except for the protagonists on the ground.

 I speak of the referendum Question One in Maine that seeks to restore the customary definition of marriage, which was changed earlier this year by politicians in the pockets of leftwing special interests. Special interests have not taken the gauntlet, thrown openly when regular Maine folks gathered 100,000 signatures to put the question to ballot, lightly or in good grace. Millions in money, tens of thousands in services, and hundreds in staff have been deployed from California, Washington DC, Boston, and New York to fight the old fashioned notions of the regular people of Maine. All the big name corporations, bar associations, East Coast special interest outfits, and the Maine political establishment are firmly arrayed in support of imposing the Hollywood definition of marriage on the rock ribbed good folks in the state. No amount of scare tactics or misleading PR is enough for these powerful Goliaths of the Establishment.

It matters. From a purely political perspective, keeping the definition of marriage intact in a deep blue state like Maine would be a powerful coda to the Proposition 8 victory in equally blue California.  Such a victory would firmly underline the truism that that Americans across the political and geographic spectrum deeply believe in the sanctity of marriage.

Beyond the immediate political angle, the momentum from a Question One victory will slow down the intense drive by the ruling elite to impose-via judicial means or otherwise-its own definition of m across the country. In other words, a victory in Maine will give a new breather of life to the concept of representative democracy.

 Far more important, however, is the issue of individual and parental rights. States where gay ‘marriage’ is legal, can and do require children as young as toddlers to learn about it. Parents do not have the right, contrary to the propaganda of the other side, to opt their kids out of classes that conflict with their values. Those objecting to strenuously about imparting their own values to their children can go to jail (Parker v. Hurley).  

 The electoral battle in Maine is one that impacts us and our liberties. Ordinary people like you and I are standing up there in defense of their right to live, work, and raise their families in accordance with their deeply held beliefs. The opposition is well organized, well funded, well equipped, and comprised of a grand list of Who’s Who in corporations, bar associations, journalists, and special interests.  On the other side, defending the sanctity of marriage and the right of people to live their conscience is a loose alliance of ordinary, everyday men and women from across Maine. They fight a battle at a place where America literally begins, a battle waged on behalf of all of our rights all across the country.

Lend these brave Mainers a hand, if you will. This is their website where you can read the story and rationale behind Question One, and donate a few dollars to the worthy cause of defending the very basis of any self-perpetuating civilized society.

 Too often it seems that Democratic presidents confuse form with substance when it comes to international relations and end up spurning our allies to curry favor with those who despise us, all in the name of ‘democracy’. Sounds less like a measured foreign policy approach made by professionals and more like the Model UN conferences I frequented in college where elaborately (but often bizarrely) dressed twenty something sorority loudmouths spent hours trying to impress upon the rest of us the theoretical glories of international engagement, global initiatives, and disarmament..blah, blah, blah.

The cost of Democratic foreign policymakers acting like over-idealistic college kids out of control in an out of town conference has often been disastrous. Harry Truman’s desire to see a friendly Soviet Union led the United States to condone the  post WW II the rape and pillage of Eastern and Central Europe that made Attila the Hun sound almost humane. Jimmy Carter stood silent as Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocracy pushed aside our ally the Shah of Iran n 1979; Carter further disgraced America when, buckling under the threats of the ayatollahs, he didn’t allow the dying Shah to be hospitalized in the United States. Bill Clinton, too afraid to challenge the appeasement mentality of the French and the British, allowed Serbs to visit genocide on Bosniaks and Croats in the 1990s while using the United States military to help the Serbs in disarming the victims. Not to be outdone, Barack Obama is putting tremendous pressure on the legitimate government of our ally Honduras to let the absconding fugitive Zelaya become president of that country again.

Time and again the Democratic foreign policy wonks have let down our allies and disgraced our values thus endangering our standing in the world and compromising our long term national interests.

Can we really blame a Turkey or Israel someday asking, ‘can I trust the United States to stand by me?’