Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Grading Time
Dear Friends: Thank you for your kind e-mails. I have been grading over 100 term papers for my classes. As well I bought a car 10 days ago, plus my father-in-law visited us last week, so I haven't had time to blog! I'll get caught up soon!
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Bob Robbins's Letter to the US Supreme Court
Bob Robbins just forwarded the following e-mail that was sent to the US Supreme Court
>Revised, December 7th, 2008
To the Most Honorable
Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20543
Dear Chief Justice Roberts:
Although this letter is addressed to you, your Honor, it is in reality an open letter to all of the Honorable Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. And, my hope Sir is that you will make its content available to your esteemed colleagues on the Bench.
Ever since the founding of our great nation, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, through tenuous and uncertain times at Valley Forge, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, and thereafter to the final battle of Yorktown, our nation’s future and Liberty hung tenuously by a slender thread. Since those perilous times, we have faced together many other challenges to the existence of our freedom. We endured the war of 1812, the Civil War, two world wars, and most recently the attack on the two World Trade Centers in New York City.
That slender thread was and has always been, the courage and wisdom of the men in the breach of history, whose moral and mental compass turned their wills and their souls unerringly to the cause of liberty, and to the preservation of our nation and its Constitution.
Comes now into the breach in the year 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States. Our founding fathers knew that our nation could be lost by direct assault, or by subterfuge. And it was the latter case to which they addressed the Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution to direct all citizens to the diligence of electing only a “natural born” citizen of this country to be President.
This matter was of such import that they being men themselves born in another nation, excluded only themselves and men alive at the signing of the Constitution, leaving forever thereafter, that only men born of this nation according to the law, and men who preserved their citizenship status only to this nation would ever become President.
Whether the current and most recent candidate elected to that office would ever misdirect our nation or do harm is not the consideration. Whether he indeed meets the qualification of “natural born” citizenship, and has maintained only that citizenship in the United States, is the crucial issue that must be resolved.
If he could have readily clarified this matter and ended this contention, it would seem to honorable and respectful citizens that he should have already done so, as the matter has been brewing for several months. But alas, critical and numerous documents that might shed light on his qualification in this regard have been purposefully and carefully “Sealed” to prevent revelation to public knowledge.
The 300 million citizens of these United States deserve to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they have elected a man who indeed meets the Constitutional qualification requirements to become their President or otherwise as the case may be. This President needs that same stamp of approval of those same forefathers who signed the Constitution in order to serve honorably in this most high office.
Several separate cases have now come before the Supreme Court, and another just was denied in the Superior Court of California and has undoubtedly began its journey to your court. Unless this matter is resolved to the letter of the law and the Constitution, there can be no civil rest among the vastly growing number of those who have and those who will yet become aware that a growing shadow of doubt falls upon the qualification of our highest elected official.
Two clear courses, and two consequences lie before us. And the Supreme Court holds the charge and the key to resolution of this most crucial issue. The issue is historical, and critical because a most dangerous precedent can be set, by allowing a President to serve who does not meet the Constitutional requirement set forth by our founders.
Thereafter, any non-citizen could challenge that provision of “natural born” citizen in Article 1, Section 2, citing the already served term of office of one who did not quite meet that requirement.
It is apparent that other entities whose purview should have checked the qualification of the candidates for Constitutional criteria, have failed in their duty. And the matter has been allowed to continue unresolved to the point that multiple lawsuits have been filed, and more are likely to arise. Those entities that failed to verify citizenship of candidates for President must be properly brought to task and the error in their duty pointed out.
Either the matter is taken up and clearly resolved, and the Constitution is preserved, or We the People may look back in history upon a gaping hole burned in our Constitution in the year 2008 by the simple lack of due diligence.
Such a travesty it would be to our collective and everlasting shame, and would place our nation in new degrees of jeopardy.
So now, We the People turn to our highest court for Justice, and for resolution of truly a Constitutional crisis of historical significance. We trust your Honorable Court will not fail to recognize the importance of this matter and will stand with that long line of patriots and defenders of liberty to preserve and secure our nation’s future.
To this end I remain …
Very Respectfully and Sincerely Your Humble Servant,
Name withheld
>Revised, December 7th, 2008
To the Most Honorable
Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Supreme Court of the United States
One First Street, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20543
Dear Chief Justice Roberts:
Although this letter is addressed to you, your Honor, it is in reality an open letter to all of the Honorable Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. And, my hope Sir is that you will make its content available to your esteemed colleagues on the Bench.
Ever since the founding of our great nation, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, through tenuous and uncertain times at Valley Forge, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, and thereafter to the final battle of Yorktown, our nation’s future and Liberty hung tenuously by a slender thread. Since those perilous times, we have faced together many other challenges to the existence of our freedom. We endured the war of 1812, the Civil War, two world wars, and most recently the attack on the two World Trade Centers in New York City.
That slender thread was and has always been, the courage and wisdom of the men in the breach of history, whose moral and mental compass turned their wills and their souls unerringly to the cause of liberty, and to the preservation of our nation and its Constitution.
Comes now into the breach in the year 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States. Our founding fathers knew that our nation could be lost by direct assault, or by subterfuge. And it was the latter case to which they addressed the Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution to direct all citizens to the diligence of electing only a “natural born” citizen of this country to be President.
This matter was of such import that they being men themselves born in another nation, excluded only themselves and men alive at the signing of the Constitution, leaving forever thereafter, that only men born of this nation according to the law, and men who preserved their citizenship status only to this nation would ever become President.
Whether the current and most recent candidate elected to that office would ever misdirect our nation or do harm is not the consideration. Whether he indeed meets the qualification of “natural born” citizenship, and has maintained only that citizenship in the United States, is the crucial issue that must be resolved.
If he could have readily clarified this matter and ended this contention, it would seem to honorable and respectful citizens that he should have already done so, as the matter has been brewing for several months. But alas, critical and numerous documents that might shed light on his qualification in this regard have been purposefully and carefully “Sealed” to prevent revelation to public knowledge.
The 300 million citizens of these United States deserve to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they have elected a man who indeed meets the Constitutional qualification requirements to become their President or otherwise as the case may be. This President needs that same stamp of approval of those same forefathers who signed the Constitution in order to serve honorably in this most high office.
Several separate cases have now come before the Supreme Court, and another just was denied in the Superior Court of California and has undoubtedly began its journey to your court. Unless this matter is resolved to the letter of the law and the Constitution, there can be no civil rest among the vastly growing number of those who have and those who will yet become aware that a growing shadow of doubt falls upon the qualification of our highest elected official.
Two clear courses, and two consequences lie before us. And the Supreme Court holds the charge and the key to resolution of this most crucial issue. The issue is historical, and critical because a most dangerous precedent can be set, by allowing a President to serve who does not meet the Constitutional requirement set forth by our founders.
Thereafter, any non-citizen could challenge that provision of “natural born” citizen in Article 1, Section 2, citing the already served term of office of one who did not quite meet that requirement.
It is apparent that other entities whose purview should have checked the qualification of the candidates for Constitutional criteria, have failed in their duty. And the matter has been allowed to continue unresolved to the point that multiple lawsuits have been filed, and more are likely to arise. Those entities that failed to verify citizenship of candidates for President must be properly brought to task and the error in their duty pointed out.
Either the matter is taken up and clearly resolved, and the Constitution is preserved, or We the People may look back in history upon a gaping hole burned in our Constitution in the year 2008 by the simple lack of due diligence.
Such a travesty it would be to our collective and everlasting shame, and would place our nation in new degrees of jeopardy.
So now, We the People turn to our highest court for Justice, and for resolution of truly a Constitutional crisis of historical significance. We trust your Honorable Court will not fail to recognize the importance of this matter and will stand with that long line of patriots and defenders of liberty to preserve and secure our nation’s future.
To this end I remain …
Very Respectfully and Sincerely Your Humble Servant,
Name withheld
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Liberalism And The Certificate
The founders of the United States did not believe that democracy or majority rule was a sacred process or even that it was of preeminent importance, but rather that democracy was a safeguard against incursions on liberty. Much of the Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, Madison and Jay, was devoted to explaining why the availability of a frontier and the checks and balances inherent in a republican form of government could counteract faction and tendency toward tyranny inherent in democracy. Until the time of the founding, democracies and republics had been short lived and had inevitably devolved into tyranny. These included the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic.
By 1900 the American democracy had lived longer than the Athenian democracy and by a number of measures had been more successful. The claim that the frontier would provide an overflow space to which persecuted minorities could escape hearkened back to the days of Roger Williams, who had founded Rhode Island after being kicked out of Massachusetts for religious heresy. But by 1900 the physical frontier had been filled and the "Progressives" of that day began to call for a reassertion of democratic (as opposed to republican) principles based on European and Rousseauean arguments that there is a "popular" or "general" will that can be expressed through democracy and that the republican safeguards of liberty that the founders had established were unnecessary because American democracy had matured. This was an explicit rejection of the concept of natural rights and freedom on which American republican had previously been based. It was not, as the historian Louis Hartz argued, a liberal argument. It was a rejection of liberalism in favor of statism and authoritarianism.
The chief Progressives, Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl, made the Progressive arguments in slightly different ways. Croly saw Progressivism as the fulfillment of democracy and he saw democracy as an end in itself. Weyl saw Progressivism as a stepping stone to socialism, and in this he was closer to the New Deal Democrats who in many ways fulfilled the aims of the earlier Progressive politicians, especially Theodore Roosevelt.
One far reaching aspect of Progressivism was its claim that there is no such thing as rights. Institutionalist economists such as John R. Commons, who based their doctrines on the German historical school of economics, argued that natural rights were mystical or illegtimiate constructs. Rather, the popular will ought to be ascendant. Of course, this argument can be made about any moral value, including democracy, popular will, social justice and the like. However, the Progressives had a one-sided skepticism that smashed the individual as it mystically exalted the collective.
The claim that democratic processes lead to benign decision making is itself a mystical belief. This is so because the belief in "social good" is an emotional, artificial construct that is vacuous of meaning. As well, and more concretely, the political processes that democracy opens up counteract democracy. More means less. That is, on a practical level the reduction of republican safeguards results in less, not more, democracy.
This latter observation has been made by economists like Mancur Olson and George Stigler who have studied the behavior of special interest groups. The economics of public choice inhibit intelligent decision making by population masses because the economics of obtaining information inhibits most people from learning the facts. Conversely, narrow special interests, which include economic interests like banks, the auto industry, public employee unions and environmental and other do-good lobbies, tend to be more effective at lobbying than the general public. The reason is that economic incentives favor narrow interest groups that enjoy high levels of economic benefits. Two classic examples are the role of Wall Street and the banking industry in lobbying the Federal Reserve Bank and the health industry in securing licensure and favorable regulation. Of course, there are countless lobbies that get their way, from hair dressers to insurance agents to school teachers. The one thing you can be sure of is that Joe the Plumber cannot tell you the ramifications of an oil depletion allowance or the details of a regulation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. However, lobbyists can tell you, and often write the law.
America was not founded on the doctrine of popular will but rather of protection of liberty. The election of president increased in importance because of Progessivism, and Herbert Croly explicitly argued that the election of President ought to reflect the newfound popular will.
The question has recently arisen as to Barack Obama's citizenship. It is probable that there is nothing wrong with his elibilibity to be president, but the question is a Constitutional one. Article II of the Constitution requires that the president be a natural born citizen, and there is little reason to change this requirement. The question of divided loyalty is important enought to take seriously.
The quickness with which today's Progressives, ill-educated in elite universities that indoctrinate as to the values of Progressivism as opposed to Lockean liberalism, would ignore or amend the Constitution to reflect Mr. Obama's election is indicative of a long standing trend toward authoritarianism cloaked in democratic garb. The Constitution serves as a safeguard against incursions on liberty, and its erosion implies the expansion of state power, the reduction of individual freedom and, therefore, the erosion of the freedom on which American success rests.
This is not a picaynune or partisan claim. The Founders were right to be concerned about what de Tocqueville called tyranny of the majority. As Madison pointed out, faction is an ever present threat to liberty, and constitutional safeguards are necessary to protect liberty. Over time, America has seen an erosion of liberty even as democratic processes have been enhanced. One cannot save much of one's income because it is taken by taxation. One cannot freely start a business because regulation inhibits free enterprise even as the state's favored businesses, banks and automobile companies, receive massive tax transfers. These erosions have been made possible in part because of a lax attitude toward the Constitution.
The question of Mr. Obama's birth certificate is a legal one, and if Mr. Obama is ineligible to be president because he does not meet constitutional requirements, he cannot be allowed to serve. Without a clear constitution, the United States will continue along the path to centralized, authoritarian rule. This is entirely consistent with democracy by a slow witted, easily bamboozled public that is susceptible to media manipulation and has been miseducated to believe in authoritarian, statist solutions.
By 1900 the American democracy had lived longer than the Athenian democracy and by a number of measures had been more successful. The claim that the frontier would provide an overflow space to which persecuted minorities could escape hearkened back to the days of Roger Williams, who had founded Rhode Island after being kicked out of Massachusetts for religious heresy. But by 1900 the physical frontier had been filled and the "Progressives" of that day began to call for a reassertion of democratic (as opposed to republican) principles based on European and Rousseauean arguments that there is a "popular" or "general" will that can be expressed through democracy and that the republican safeguards of liberty that the founders had established were unnecessary because American democracy had matured. This was an explicit rejection of the concept of natural rights and freedom on which American republican had previously been based. It was not, as the historian Louis Hartz argued, a liberal argument. It was a rejection of liberalism in favor of statism and authoritarianism.
The chief Progressives, Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl, made the Progressive arguments in slightly different ways. Croly saw Progressivism as the fulfillment of democracy and he saw democracy as an end in itself. Weyl saw Progressivism as a stepping stone to socialism, and in this he was closer to the New Deal Democrats who in many ways fulfilled the aims of the earlier Progressive politicians, especially Theodore Roosevelt.
One far reaching aspect of Progressivism was its claim that there is no such thing as rights. Institutionalist economists such as John R. Commons, who based their doctrines on the German historical school of economics, argued that natural rights were mystical or illegtimiate constructs. Rather, the popular will ought to be ascendant. Of course, this argument can be made about any moral value, including democracy, popular will, social justice and the like. However, the Progressives had a one-sided skepticism that smashed the individual as it mystically exalted the collective.
The claim that democratic processes lead to benign decision making is itself a mystical belief. This is so because the belief in "social good" is an emotional, artificial construct that is vacuous of meaning. As well, and more concretely, the political processes that democracy opens up counteract democracy. More means less. That is, on a practical level the reduction of republican safeguards results in less, not more, democracy.
This latter observation has been made by economists like Mancur Olson and George Stigler who have studied the behavior of special interest groups. The economics of public choice inhibit intelligent decision making by population masses because the economics of obtaining information inhibits most people from learning the facts. Conversely, narrow special interests, which include economic interests like banks, the auto industry, public employee unions and environmental and other do-good lobbies, tend to be more effective at lobbying than the general public. The reason is that economic incentives favor narrow interest groups that enjoy high levels of economic benefits. Two classic examples are the role of Wall Street and the banking industry in lobbying the Federal Reserve Bank and the health industry in securing licensure and favorable regulation. Of course, there are countless lobbies that get their way, from hair dressers to insurance agents to school teachers. The one thing you can be sure of is that Joe the Plumber cannot tell you the ramifications of an oil depletion allowance or the details of a regulation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. However, lobbyists can tell you, and often write the law.
America was not founded on the doctrine of popular will but rather of protection of liberty. The election of president increased in importance because of Progessivism, and Herbert Croly explicitly argued that the election of President ought to reflect the newfound popular will.
The question has recently arisen as to Barack Obama's citizenship. It is probable that there is nothing wrong with his elibilibity to be president, but the question is a Constitutional one. Article II of the Constitution requires that the president be a natural born citizen, and there is little reason to change this requirement. The question of divided loyalty is important enought to take seriously.
The quickness with which today's Progressives, ill-educated in elite universities that indoctrinate as to the values of Progressivism as opposed to Lockean liberalism, would ignore or amend the Constitution to reflect Mr. Obama's election is indicative of a long standing trend toward authoritarianism cloaked in democratic garb. The Constitution serves as a safeguard against incursions on liberty, and its erosion implies the expansion of state power, the reduction of individual freedom and, therefore, the erosion of the freedom on which American success rests.
This is not a picaynune or partisan claim. The Founders were right to be concerned about what de Tocqueville called tyranny of the majority. As Madison pointed out, faction is an ever present threat to liberty, and constitutional safeguards are necessary to protect liberty. Over time, America has seen an erosion of liberty even as democratic processes have been enhanced. One cannot save much of one's income because it is taken by taxation. One cannot freely start a business because regulation inhibits free enterprise even as the state's favored businesses, banks and automobile companies, receive massive tax transfers. These erosions have been made possible in part because of a lax attitude toward the Constitution.
The question of Mr. Obama's birth certificate is a legal one, and if Mr. Obama is ineligible to be president because he does not meet constitutional requirements, he cannot be allowed to serve. Without a clear constitution, the United States will continue along the path to centralized, authoritarian rule. This is entirely consistent with democracy by a slow witted, easily bamboozled public that is susceptible to media manipulation and has been miseducated to believe in authoritarian, statist solutions.
American Solutions Poll on Auto Bailout
I just received this e-mail from David Ryan of American Solutions. You can vote on the auto bailout here. As of this writing, the poll is 91% against.
Dear Mitchell,
As you may know, the Big Three were back on Capitol Hill today to ask for a $34 billion bailout.
Times are tough right now, and we need the best solutions to get the economy back on the right track. We want to know what the American Solutions community thinks about the auto bailout.
Please take a moment to vote in this online poll and leave us your comments.
Thanks for your support.
Sincerely,
Image Blocked
Dave Ryan
President
American Solutions
Dear Mitchell,
As you may know, the Big Three were back on Capitol Hill today to ask for a $34 billion bailout.
Times are tough right now, and we need the best solutions to get the economy back on the right track. We want to know what the American Solutions community thinks about the auto bailout.
Please take a moment to vote in this online poll and leave us your comments.
Thanks for your support.
Sincerely,
Image Blocked
Dave Ryan
President
American Solutions
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
