Common Sense University

            This is the second in a series of articles dealing with what is not right in America in our humble opinions. We are calling it in fact WRONG in that it is not beneficial for the country as a whole. These articles are not presented in any particular order of importance but merely as they might be timely.

There were times in America when the people could trust information passed on to them by the Federal Government or even State and local governments. This is sadly no longer the case. At the same time, it is ironic because computerized information technology has improved so vastly that data collection by government should be so much more reliable and timely. We stand corrected, it is timely. It does only take a few days for updates on unemployment filings nationwide and other such information being made public. The problem is, it is unreliable.

We could list several examples of this but instead will concentrate on the employment picture in America. The Department of Labor of the Federal Government comes out every week and shares with us the number of people who have filed for unemployment benefits. On a monthly basis, we get the overall unemployment rate in the country. This statistic includes a number of things such as new unemployment filings, new jobs created and also the number of people who simply ‘left the job market’ or do no longer receive unemployment benefits. This changes the base constantly and results in some truly weird numbers. There can be no doubt that some element of manipulation is involved and this is at times so apparent that one has to question the accuracy of the reports.

We will try and state our analysis in simple terms: We are, for the purposes of this view, assume that the approximate number of full employment in America is 150,000,000 (one hundred fifty million), can we not deduct that 15,000,000 equals ten percent of the total? We believe we should, it’s simple math! When the total number of people reportedly not working in America is somewhere between twenty to twenty-five million, why is the unemployment rate not at least thirteen to sixteen percent? Is this a stupid question? We do not think so! But the Government apparently believes this and the media is accepting this and reports it as such.

When the Feds in Washington report that the economic growth in the country during a given quarter of a year is 1.2 percent, how can we accept and trust when it corrects this number down to 0.5 percent three months later. This is wrong and to our way of thinking a clear sign of report manipulations that should be challenged by everybody and not at all accepted as fact. We could present many more such examples of immense inaccuracies when it comes to what the Government tells us. We are convinced that this type of reporting could easily have a political element to it. President Obama would of course like to see the unemployment go down this year and he is willing to setlle for a downward trend instead. It’s referred to as “moving in the right direction” but it is based on number manipulations that are vastly inaccurate and it should not be accepted.

Is it any wonder that Americans are increasingly suspicious of what the government tells them? To us here at Common Sense University it is not! Only the ignorant are happy and do not care what they are being told and that is a shame. Trust in government should be a goal pursued by everybody who is serving in whatever capacity the population of this country.

            This is the first in a series of articles dealing with what is not right in America in our humble opinions. We are calling it in fact WRONG in that it is not beneficial for the country as a whole. These articles are not presented in any particular order of importance but merely as they might be timely. This is the main reason we begin with this year’s primary election cycle which starts tomorrow in Iowa. The very beginning reflects the idiocy encumbered in this.

Iowa is a state in the middle of America, also referred to as ‘fly-over’ country. The state has a population of about three million, very similar to the population of San Diego County. Yet we hear that Iowa has 99 counties and some Republican candidates tell us with pride that they have visited all 99 counties. We say to this: ‘Whoopee‘! Now then, we are also being told that the Iowa caucuses on January will probably see a participation of one hundred to one hundred twenty thousand folks. That’s four percent of the population. Again, we say ‘Whoopee’.

The caucuses will determine which candidate will get how many of the 28 convention delegates. While we do not know any exact numbers, we estimate for purposes of presenting the absurdity of it all that the candidates combined spent altogether since last summer approximately twenty-eight million dollars in Iowa in campaign related expenses. This equates to one million bucks for one delegate. Now then, if this is not ridiculous, we don‘t know what is and we therefore say for the third time ‘Whoopee‘. Even if only twenty-one million were expended, it would still be ridiculous. From poll results in recent weeks and months, we know that no candidate has a share greater than thirty percent of the votes, this translates that the winner will walk away with about nine delegates and that is our last ‘Whoopee’.

If this does not show the idiocy with this primary election system, we do not know what is. We refuse to understand the importance of the Iowa caucuses. This is absolutely ridiculous and totally absurd. To boot, we are being told that there is a good chance that candidate Ron Paul could be the winner in Iowa. He has reportedly a great number of loyal supporters who will work hard to turn out the participants in the caucuses. And who is Ron Paul? He comes across as the disgruntled and grumpy old uncle who knows everything better than everybody else and his ideas and proposals are so whacky, Hollywood would not even make a funny movie out of it. He tells those who come and listen to him that he will when elected President cut one trillion dollars out of the annual federal budget. No details, no specifics just one nice round number! Since he hates the country’s military, can we assume that he will just abolish it? That would get him about two-thirds to his trillion dollar goal. Yet some people in Iowa must believe this absolute nonsense or else they would have run him out of the state a long time ago. Ron Paul espouses positions of such an extreme nature without any basis of reality or rationale, we can only conclude that some people in Iowa are truly backward hicks and hayseeds.

It is our hope that a victory by Ron Paul in Iowa will result in some serious re-thinking and review of the current primary election system. Tradition is nice but stupid is stupid and a continuation of stupid reflects just that, stupidity! We can do better than that in America.

            Michael Mukasey served as Attorney general of the United States from 2007-2009, the last two years of the George W. Bush Presidency. The following is adapted from a speech delivered in Washington D.C. on September 2011, at the Second Annual Constitution Day Celebration sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the third part of Michael Mukasey’s speech:

People who wish to quibble about what it is we are at war with take the discussion off into absurdity. One such person is the President’s Assistant for National Security, John Brennan, who, before an audience at the Center for Strategic Studies, ridiculed the idea of a war on terrorism or on terror, saying it is impossible to have a war on a means or a state of mind.

This lack of clarity also distorts the view of policy makers about what is happening in the Middle East, and so they daydream about democratic movements when the reality on the ground is more populist than democratic. The principal beneficiary of populism is more likely to be the Muslim Brotherhood than the local spokesman for Facebook. The credo of the Muslim Brotherhood is succinct and chilling: Allah is our goal, the Prophet Muhammad is our leader, the Qu’ran is our constitution, jihad is our way, and death in the way of Allah is our promised end.

If the death of Osama bin Laden is more than simply a spasm, or an opportunity to engage in self-congratulation—if it helps provide some insight into the nature of what it is we are fighting—then it will have been significant indeed. If not, its significance will be substantially diminished.

The signs do not seem promising. Even on September 11 itself, as was pointed out by Fouad Ajami, there was no discussion whatever of the 19 people who perpetrated the atrocity. Ajami pointed in particular to Ziad Jarrah, the most Westernized of the hijackers. Raised in Beirut, Lebanon, to be cosmopolitan in the spirit of that city, he then went to Hamburg, Germany, where he was radicalized, and he then wound up at the controls of Flight 93, the flight that was supposed to hit the U.S. Capitol. It didn’t because the passengers learned what had already happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, figured out what was in store for them and their country, and chose to act.

There is much to be learned from those facts. Start with the last. We learn the importance of intelligence. The passengers on Flight 93 were able to act because of what they had learned about what was going on elsewhere. Intelligence gathering must be our number one priority. The people waging war on us are part of a movement that does not occupy any particular place or country that we can demolish and then pronounce ourselves the winners. They live in some cases among us, and the only way of opposing them successfully is to find out in advance what they intend to do and to thwart it.

Second, note that Jarrah was radicalized not in the Middle East, but in the West. We must be aware of those in our society who wish to create closed ethnic zones, where Muslims essentially run their own affairs and outsiders enter only at their peril. This has already happened in the suburbs of French cities, in parts of England, and in other places you would not expect it such as Malmo, Sweden, and it allows radicalization to go on undetected. Guidelines have been put in place to allow the FBI to function for the first time in its history as an intelligence gathering organization and not simply as a law enforcement agency. If the Bureau partners with state and local law enforcement, then the kind of insular activity that allowed Jarrah to be radicalized can be broken up. Those guidelines must remain in place, and must be defended.

Doing that will require an intelligent understanding of the part of the Constitution I didn’t discuss at the outset, the part that animated so much criticism of the Bush administration by those now in charge—the Bill of Rights. This part of the Constitution provides robust protection to both public and private activity that we value, which is essential for the continuation of our civic life. But it does not require that we close our eyes when there are people plainly setting the stage for activity that is in no way protected.

The First Amendment protects free speech and freedom of worship. It permits preaching even violence in the name of religion. But it does not guarantee that such speech will go undetected. Nor does it guarantee that evidence of it cannot be presented in a court when and if it is appropriate to charge that the speaker and those to whom he spoke understood this protected speech and took it as a call to unprotected action. This includes action that itself consists only of speech—such as an agreement to commit a crime, which is itself the crime of conspiracy.

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and contains a separate warrant clause providing that warrants may issue only on a finding of probable cause. That does not mean that a search conducted for intelligence purposes requires a warrant, only that it be reasonable.

The Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee due process, counsel to those accused of crimes, and the right to confront witnesses, but their application is limited to trials occurring in Article III courts. How much process is due and what kind of evidence may be received and under what circumstances in other tribunals, such as military commissions, is an entirely different story.

The message lurking in the structure of the Constitution is that those acting lawfully under it deserve at least the benefit of the doubt when they act to protect the common good. That is not meant to be a statement or a suggestion of a jurisprudential standard, a standard of law; but it is meant as a prudential standard, a standard of civics and public discourse. This standard will help keep intact the system that we depend on to preserve the nation that Abraham Lincoln called the last, best hope of earth—words that are truer today than they were when he spoke them during another time of trouble.

            Michael Mukasey served as Attorney general of the United States from 2007-2009, the last two years of the George W. Bush Presidency. The following is adapted from a speech delivered in Washington D.C. on September 2011, at the Second Annual Constitution Day Celebration sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the second part of Michael Mukasey’s speech:

The administration also remains committed to figuring out a way to release those detained in Guantanamo, despite the fact that at least 20 percent of Guantanamo alumni have returned to the battlefield. We know that figure because 20 percent have been recaptured or killed. How many others are still in the fight is anyone’s guess.

So after all of this, where do we stand? The intelligence gathering techniques adopted and followed during the preceding administration not only remain on the books but are actively pursued. And thanks to a vigorous and courageous exercise of the Article II Commander-in-Chief power, and the splendid performance of a team of Navy Seals, Osama bin Laden is dead. I certainly would not minimize that achievement. He needed killing, and he and we needed it to be done at the hands of Americans. It was done in a way that allowed us to exploit the trove of intelligence that was found in his home—though one wishes that less had been said about it at the time, rendering it more effective. And his death has great symbolic significance, because of the status he had attained during the ten years since September 11. But it is impossible to gauge the significance of bin Laden’s death unless and until we recognize the simple fact that our encounter with what he stood for began much earlier than September 11, 2001.

What bin Laden stood for was Islamism, which—insofar as it holds the U.S. in a weird combination of awe and contempt—has been incubating for about as long as we have known about the other two “isms” that we successfully conquered in the last century. As a movement distinct from the religion of Islam itself, Islamism traces back to Egypt in the 1920s, when the loosely organized Muslim Brotherhood was established by a man named Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood as a reaction to the modernizing influence of Kemal Ataturk, who dismantled the shell of what was left of the Muslim caliphate in Turkey, banned the fez and headscarves, and dragged his country into the 20th century.

Al-Banna’s principal disciple was also an educator—a bureaucrat in the education department of the Egyptian government named Sayyid Qutb. Qutb caused enough trouble in Egypt to get himself awarded a traveling fellowship in 1948, the year al-Banna was killed. Regrettably for us, Qutb chose to travel to Greeley, Colorado. And although it would be hard to imagine a more inoffensive place than post-World War II Greeley, Colorado, for a man like Qutb it was Sodom and Gomorrah. He hated everything he saw: American haircuts, enthusiasm for sports, jazz, and what he called the “animal-like mixing of the sexes,” even in church. His conclusion was that Americans were “numb to faith in art, faith in religion, and faith in spiritual values altogether,” and that Muslims must regard “the white man, whether European or American . . . [as] our first enemy.”

Qutb later returned to Egypt, quit the civil service, and joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He welcomed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup against the corrupt monarchy of King Farouk in 1952, but then became disillusioned with Nasser for failing to institute Sharia law. He opposed Nasser, and was subsequently arrested and tortured. However, he continued to write and agitate for Islam and against Western civilization, particularly against Jews, whom he blamed for atheistic materialism and considered the worst enemies of Muslims. He was released for a time, but eventually was re-arrested, convicted of conspiracy against the government, and hanged in 1966.

Many members of the Brotherhood fled to Saudi Arabia, where they found refuge and ideological sustenance. Qutb’s brother was among those who fled and taught the doctrine in Saudi Arabia. Among his students were Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who would become a leading Al Qaeda ideologist, and a then-obscure Osama bin Laden, the pampered child of one of the richest construction families in the country. And the rest, as they say, is history.

That history did not come to these shores on September 11—or even on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb detonated in the basement of the World Trade Center, killing six and wounding hundreds. It came at the latest in the 1980s, when a couple of FBI agents spotted a group of men taking what looked like particularly aggressive target practice in Calverton, Long Island. When they approached, they were accused of what we now call racial profiling, and they backed off. In November 1990, one of those men, El-Sayyid Nosair, assassinated a right-wing Israeli politician, Meir Kahane, in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel. When the 1993 World Trade Center bombers demanded the freeing of Nosair from jail, it became apparent that the Kahane assassination had not been the lone act of a lone gunman. Authorities reviewed the amateur video of Kahane’s speech the night he was killed and discovered that one of those 1993 bombers had been in the hall when Kahane was shot. Further investigation disclosed that another was driving the intended getaway vehicle.

The man who served as the spiritual advisor to Nosair and the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheikh, along with Nosair and several others, were tried before me and convicted for participating in a conspiracy to conduct a war of urban terror against this country—a war that included the Kahane murder, the first World Trade Center bombing, and a plot to blow up other landmarks around New York and assassinate Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak when he visited the United Nations. The list of unindicted co-conspirators in that case included Osama bin Laden.

At the time, all of this was treated as a series of crimes—unconventional crimes, to be sure, but crimes nevertheless. This despite the fact that in 1996, and again in 1998, Osama bin Laden declared that he and his cohorts were at war with the United States.

In 1998, the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed almost simultaneously. Again the criminal law was invoked, this time in an indictment that named Osama bin Laden as a defendant. Apparently he was unimpressed, or at least undeterred, because in 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors. It would have carried out the bombing of another naval vessel, but for the fact that the barge carrying the explosives was overloaded and sank.

Then came September 11, and to the call “bring them to justice” was added the call “bring justice to them.” We were told that we were at war more than 50 years after Sayyid Qutb determined that Islamists would have to make war on us, about 15 years after Islamists had made it clear that they were training for war with us, and five years after Osama bin Laden made it official with a declaration of war.

In fighting Islamism, we are handicapped at the strategic level by the refusal of those in authority to acknowledge the goals of our adversaries. Those goals are essentially political, and involve the recreation of an Islamic caliphate and the imposition of Sharia law over as broad a swath of the world as possible. This is a profoundly anti-democratic movement at its core, and it regards the whole idea of man-made law as anathema. Instead, we try to be inoffensive by using a term that originated in the administration in which I served, and we refer to a war on terror or terrorism.

            Michael Mukasey served as Attorney general of the United States from 2007-2009, the last two years of the George W. Bush Presidency. The following is adapted from a speech delivered in Washington D.C. on September 2011, at the Second Annual Constitution Day Celebration sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the first part of Michael Mukasey’s speech:

President Obama campaigned for office largely on the claim that his predecessor had shredded the Constitution. By the Constitution, he could not have meant the document signed on September 17, 1787. Article II of that document begins with a simple declaration: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Not “some” or “most” or even “all but a teeny-weeny bit” of the executive power. The President is vested with all of it. This is particularly noteworthy when compared with the enumerated legislative powers vested in Congress: “All legislative Powers herein granted.” The Founders understood, based in part on their unfortunate experience under the Articles of Confederation, that the branch of government most likely to be in need of the ability to act quickly and decisively is the executive. The branch most likely to overreach is the legislature.

Perhaps, then, candidate Obama was thinking of the Bill of Rights in claiming that President Bush shredded the Constitution. But leaving that question aside for now, let us consider how President Obama has fared in undoing the Bush policies he opposed. He began dramatically in January 2009 by issuing a series of executive orders. According to one, Guantanamo was to be closed within a year. Even though the principal planner of September 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, had announced that he would plead guilty before a military tribunal at Guantanamo, the Justice Department announced in November 2009 that the military commission was cancelled. Instead, KSM would be brought to the mainland United States to stand trial. In response, Congress passed a statute, relying on its constitutionally-enumerated power of the purse, directing that no federal funds be used to bring any detainee from Guantanamo to the U.S. As a result, the Guantanamo military commission trial for KSM and other detainees charged in connection with September 11 is back on.

Another executive order in January 2009 suspended the CIA interrogation program. Instead of these allegedly disgraceful and unconstitutional interrogation techniques, it was announced that anyone acting on behalf of the U.S. government, even a highly trained CIA operative seeking sensitive security-related information, is limited by the Army Field Manual. This manual—because it was drafted for general use—is pitched to the capabilities of the most junior recruit in the field interrogating someone he has just captured. In fact, it has been available on the Internet for years and has been used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.

The abandoned CIA program involved—in what is probably the most disastrous marketing term since New Coke—“enhanced interrogation” techniques which were, in fact, completely lawful. When detainees were subjected to those techniques—detainees who self-selected as both knowledgeable of Al Qaeda and resistant to lesser techniques—we learned a great deal. Three of these detainees—Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abdel Rahim al Nashiri—gave up a huge trove of valuable information. Not only did KSM disclose general information on how Al Qaeda moved money and people, but also specific information that helped disrupt other plots. One such plot involved airplanes attacking the Library Tower in Los Angeles. It was to be carried out by a South Asian group headed by a man named Hambali. Other information resulted in the capture of people involved in a plan to develop a biological weapons capability in the U.S. The list goes on.

Not only has this interrogation program been abandoned, but when people today are apprehended in connection with terrorist plots directed at this country—and there have been more than 20 since September 11—most are turned over immediately to law enforcement authorities, informed of their Miranda rights, and treated as routine criminal suspects.

What do we lose in this process? With the would-be Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, we lost the chance at information about who had built his bomb. From bombs that have shown up in packages originating in Yemen, it appears that the same bomb maker is still in business, and he is believed to be responsible for a bomb that injured Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, the man largely responsible for Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Although Guantanamo remains open, the President remains committed to closing it. For example, no new detainees are being brought to Guantanamo. We learned a month or two ago that a man named Warsame was apprehended and was thought to be in possession of valuable intelligence. He was placed aboard a naval vessel and debriefed for two months, after which he was advised of his Miranda rights and brought to the U.S. The administration disdains military tribunals, notwithstanding the fact that they have been used in our history from the Revolutionary War to World War II and are provided for specifically in a statute passed by Congress called the Military Commissions Act.

            MVaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, spoke to friends of Hillsdale College in Berlin during Hillsdale’s 2011 cruise in the Baltic Sea. The speech was delivered at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon on June 11. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the second part of Vaclav Klauss speech:

After the fall of communism, the Czech Republic wanted to reassume its place among European democracies. We did not want to sit aside—as we were forced to do throughout the communist era—and European Union membership was the only alternative. Nothing else legitimizes a country in Europe these days. Therefore we joined the EU in May 2004. However, for those of us who spent most of our lives in the authoritative, oppressive, and non-functioning communist regime, the ongoing weakening of democracy and of free markets on the European continent represents something we did not expect and did not wish for in the moment of the fall of communism.

The most visible European problem today is the European monetary union, which was presented as the most important unification achievement following the Maastricht Treaty. The realization of this monetary union has not delivered the positive effects that—rightly or wrongly—had been expected from it. It was intended to accelerate economic growth, reduce inflation, and protect member states against external economic disruptions or so-called exogenous shocks. It has not worked. After the establishment of the euro zone, the economic growth of its member states slowed down relative to previous decades, thus increasing the gap between the rate of growth in the euro zone countries and that in other major economies. The internal disequilibria—such as trade imbalances and state budget imbalances—became larger, not smaller. And there is no indicator pointing towards a growing convergence in the euro zone countries. During its first decade of existence, a common currency has not led to any measurable homogenization of the member states’ economies.

It should have been clear to all, as it was to me, that the idea of a single European currency was essentially wrong—that it would create huge economic problems and lead inevitably to an undemocratic centralization of Europe. To my great regret, this is exactly what has been happening. The euro zone, which comprises 17 countries, is not an “optimum currency area” as defined by economic theory. In a currency or monetary union—which amounts to an extreme form of fixed exchange rates—it is inevitable that the costs of establishing and especially maintaining it exceed its benefits. Most economic commentators were satisfied by the ease and apparent inexpensiveness of the establishment of Europe’s common monetary area. In recent years, however, the negative effects of the straightjacket of a single currency have become more and more evident. When good economic weather prevailed, no visible problems arose. But when bad economic weather set in, the lack of homogeneity manifested itself quite strongly.

It is difficult to speculate about the future of the euro. I suppose that it will not collapse, because a huge amount of political capital was invested in its existence. It will continue to exist, but at a very high price in terms of large-scale fiscal transfers—the shuffling around of problems between countries, which amounts to a non-solution—and of low economic growth rates.

The second reason for European economic problems—not specifically European, but worse in Europe then elsewhere—has to do with the quality, productivity and efficiency of its economic and social system. Europe is characterized by a seemingly people-friendly, non-demanding, paternalistic and—in consequence—insufficiently productive economic and social system called die soziale Markwirtschaft, or social democracy. This system, with its generous social benefits, weakened motivation, shortened working hours, prolonged years of study, lowered retirement ages, diminished the supply of labor—both at the macro level and structurally—and led to very slow economic growth.

In Europe, we have witnessed a gradual shift away from liberalizing and removing barriers and towards a massive introduction of regulation from above, an ever-expanding welfare system, new and more sophisticated forms of protectionism, and continuously growing legal and regulatory burdens on business. All of these weaken and restrain freedom, democracy and democratic accountability, not to mention economic efficiency, entrepreneurship and competitiveness.

Europeans today prefer leisure to performance, security to risk-taking, paternalism to free markets, collectivism and group entitlements to individualism. They have always been more risk-averse than Americans, but the difference continues to grow. Economic freedom has a very low priority here. It seems that Europeans are not interested in capitalism and free markets and do not understand that their current behavior undermines the very institutions that made their past success possible. They are eager to defend their non-economic freedoms—the easiness, looseness, laxity and permissiveness of modern or post-modern European society—but when it comes to their economic freedoms, they are quite indifferent.

The critical situation in Europe today is visible to everybody. It is not possible to hide it. I had believed that this spectacle would be a help to the cause of political and economic freedom in Europe, but this is not proving to be the case. Of course, with the way your American government has been going, you might be able to catch up with us—in terms of our problems—very soon. But you are not as far along yet. So maybe seeing Europe’s crisis today will at least help you in America turn back toward freedom.

            MVaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, spoke to friends of Hillsdale College in Berlin during Hillsdale’s 2011 cruise in the Baltic Sea. The speech was delivered at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon on June 11. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the first part of Vaclav Klauss speech:

As some of you may know, this is not my first contact with Hillsdale College. I vividly remember my visit to Hillsdale more than ten years ago, in March 2000. The winter temperatures the evening I arrived, the sudden spring the next morning, and the summer the following day can’t be forgotten, at least for a Central European who lives—together with Antonio Vivaldi—in le quattro stagioni. My more important and long-lasting connection with Hillsdale is my regular and careful reading of Imprimis. I have always considered the texts published there very stimulating and persuasive.

The title of my previous speech at Hillsdale was “The Problems of Liberty in a Newly-Born Democracy and Market Economy.” At that time, we were only ten years after the fall of communism, and the topic was relevant. It is different now. Not only is communism over, our radical transition from communism to a free society is over, too. We face different challenges and see new dangers on the horizon. So let me say a few words about the continent of Europe today, which you’ve been visiting on your cruise.

You may like the old Europe—full of history, full of culture, full of decadence, full of fading beauty—and I do as well. But the political, social and economic developments here bother me. Unlike you, I am neither a visitor to Europe nor an uninvolved observer of it. I live here, and I do not see any reason to describe the current Europe in a propagandistic way, using rosy colors or glasses. Many of us in Europe are aware of the fact that it faces a serious problem, which is not a short- or medium-term business cycle-like phenomenon. Nor is it a consequence of the recent financial and economic crisis. This crisis only made it more visible. As an economist, I would call it a structural problem, which will not, by itself, wither away. We will not simply outgrow it, as some hope or believe.

It used to look quite different here. The question is when things started to change. The post-World War II reconstruction of Europe was a success because the war eliminated, or at least weakened, all kinds of special-interest coalitions and pressure groups. In the following decades, Europe was growing, peaceful, stable and relevant. Why is Europe less successful and less relevant today?

I see it basically as a result of two interrelated phenomena—the European integration process on the one hand, and the evolution of the European economic and social system on the other—both of which have been undergoing a fundamental change in the context of the “brave new world” of our permissive, anti-market, redistributive society, a society that has forgotten the ideas on which the greatness of Europe was built.

I will start with the first issue, because I repeatedly see that people on other continents do not have a proper understanding of the European integration process—of its effects and consequences. It is partly because they do not care—which is quite rational—and partly because they accept a priori the idea that a regional integration is—regardless of its form, style, methods and ambitions—an exclusively positive, progressive and politically correct project. They also very often accept the conventional wisdom that the weakening of nation-states, and the strengthening of supranational institutions, is a movement in the right direction. I know there are many opponents of such a view in your country—at such places as Hillsdale—but it has many supporters as well.

A positive evaluation of developments in Europe over the past 50 years can be explained only as an underestimation of what has been going on recently. In the 1950s, the leading idea behind the European integration was to liberalize, to open up, to remove all kinds of barriers which existed at the borders of individual countries, to enable the free movement of goods, services, people and ideas across the European continent. This was undisputedly a step forward, and it helped Europe significantly.

But European integration took a different course during the 1980s, and the decisive breakthrough came with the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991. Political interests that sought to unify and create a new superpower out of Europe started to dominate. Integration had turned into unification, and liberalization had turned into centralization of decision making, the harmonization of rules and legislation, the strengthening of European institutions at the expense of institutions in the member states, and what can even be called post-democracy. Since then, Europe’s constituting elements—the states—have been consistently and systematically undermined. It was forgotten that states are the only institutions where real democracy is possible.

The second part of this speech will be posted in two weeks…

It is very difficult to see anything reasonable or rational in the twice monthly conducted so called debates between ambitious men and a woman claiming to be Republicans as they are aiming to become the next President of the United States of America. In fact, in September 2011, there were three such spectacles, on the fifth, the twelfth and the twenty second of the month. And there are four more scheduled between now and the end of the year. On October 11 and 18, on November 9 and December 10.

Having seen all three September debates, we are only confused about why the powers to be in the Republican Party believe this to be good for the party and the country. From past experiences, we consider it to be factual that at least five if not six of the current flock of candidates do not have a snowballs chance in hell to ever becoming President of this great country of ours. We have long held the believe that this next election is probably the most crucial ever for America. The current administration has proven to all rational thinking people that they are totally incompetent from the top to the bottom and should have never been elected in the first place. But American voters have done this type of thing several times in our history. We are old enough to remember how Jimmy Carter got elected to the highest office of the land and how this micro-managing former peanut farmer from Georgia caused more problems in a very short period of time. But in 1980, Americans recognized this mistake and corrected course for the country by electing Ronald Reagan.

We do have a much worse situation now in that we are tumbling towards financial ruin and insolvency. Instead of discussing plans to reduce our unsustainable debt, we only hear how the country can reduce the speed towards bankruptcy by modifying the vast increase of more debt in the next decade. This is serious stuff, folks and we should not take this lightly.

But back to the Republican candidates and the multiple debates. Considering the dire economic situation we find ourselves in with high unemployment, ever increasing deficits, the incompetence in the White House, what do we have to hear from the Republicans? We hear them squabble over whether or not the Texas Governor Rick Perry issued an Executive order about vaccinations for sixth graders. This is an issue that never materialized to be a problem anyway. Then we have to listen to the Congressman from Texas Ron Paul that we in a way are to blame for the 9-11 attacks in America because we have stationed troops in a number of countries around the world.

What hogwash! It is a shame that the Republicans cannot do better than that or at least device a system whereby the number of ego-driven candidates is being reduced after each debate by at least one if not two. To our way of thinking, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are the clear frontrunners and there maybe a third candidate who could surprise us but if anybody in their right mind thinks that people like Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann, former Governors Huntsman and Johnson as well as former Senator Santorum have even a minor change, they are delusional. We also cannot see Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain ever winning the nomination of the party and it does not look like that Sarah Palin will join the race. The current debates are truly ego-serving events and do not help Americans to pick the right man for the job to oppose Barack Obama in the general election next year in November 2012. We can only hope that this absurdity will soon end.

It totally fails any logic whatsoever when one hears that anybody serious about America and its future still believes or wants to believe what President Barack Obama says and does. He has been on both sides of all issues since he first announced running for the highest office in the land until now. Take any issue: Raising taxes to not raising taxes or whatever else. He has been for it and he has been against it. The beauty of living today is the fact that everything one does or says is recorded and mostly on video. While he has accused big business and rich people for being greedy and selfish, he also has been saying the opposite.

We here at Common Sense University have been listening to him from the beginning when he first made noises about becoming President of the United States. Up until he got elected, it was all hyped in sloganeering “Yes, we can”, “Hope and Change” and more. Then he became President and he showed the world that he would deliver on his promises. He just needed some money to turn this economy around. Democrat-led Congress gave him all he wanted, nearly one trillion dollars, to immediately put America back to work with “shovel-ready jobs”. We know now how that turned out, no additional comment necessary!

Now he will give another speech this week to present his job creating plan and to turn the economy around. What he will read from his teleprompter we do not know in total but we know one thing for certain. He will ask Congress to pass another major stimulus bill to create jobs. In a way, the President reminds us of the two guys, let’s call them ‘Dumb’ and ‘Stupid’ who went into business for themselves. They decided to buy produce at a wholesale market and drive it to a major street corner in downtown where they would sell the apples, oranges, plums, strawberries and so on. They argued about what size truck to buy, Dumb wanted a small truck for starters while his buddy Stupid wanted a big truck. They settled on the little one. They now bought the produce every morning and drove into downtown to sell the goods. The only mistake they made was that they sold it for the same price. After one week, they tallied the money and found out there had been no profit. Stupid told his friend Dumb “I told you, we need a bigger truck!” End of story.

What we at this time have concluded about Obama is that he is way over his head and totally incompetent being President, what we do not know for certain is if what is happening to America is by design. His pre-election rhetoric would indicate it was his plan all along to bankrupt this country and turn us into a fully socialized one. Remember his little talk with Joe the Plumber in 2008 when he told him it was a good thing to spread the wealth around? The voters of America gave him a report card and answer to his plans and performance after his first two years in office when they turned the House of Representatives over to the Republicans. But he has not learned from that and instead now resorts to name-calling and the like to make the Republicans the fall guys for America’s misery and poor economic situation. He is still blaming his predecessor George Bush and unfortunately many people in this country still believe that.

Let’s not go along with his scheme! We just have to wait him out for the next seventeen months until January 2013. It will be hard for many if not most Americans but major mistakes are painful and we are seeing this play out before our eyes. We are simply paying a price for the mistake a majority of American voters made on Election Day in November 20008.

Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation as well as of the National Right to Work Committee, a 2.2 million member public policy organization. He holds aB.A. in finance from James Madison University and an associate’s degree in marketing from the State University of New York. His writings have appeared in such newspapers and magazines as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Orange County Register, the National Review and others. The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on January 31, 2011 during a conference co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the second part of Mark Mix’s speech, continued from last week:

Boeing’s Interest, and Ours

It cannot be overemphasized that compulsory unionism violates the first principle of the original labor union movement in America. Samuel Gompers, founder and first president of the AFL, wrote that the labor movement was “based upon the recognition of the sovereignty of the worker.” Officers of the AFL, he explained in the American Federationist, can “suggest” or “recommend,” but they “cannot command one man in America to do anything.” He continued: “Under no circumstances can they say, ‘you must do so and so, or, ‘you must desist from doing so and so.’” In a series of Federationist editorials published during World War I, Gompers opposed various government mandate measures being considered in the capitals of industrial states like Massachusetts and New York that would have mandated certain provisions for manual laborers and other select groups of workers:

The workers of America adhere to voluntary institutions in preference to compulsory systems which are held to be not only impractical but a menace to their rights, welfare and their liberty.

This argument applies as much to compulsory unionism—or “union security”—as to the opposite idea that unions should be prohibited. And in a December 1918 address before the Council on Foreign Relations, Gompers made this point explicitly:

There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. This is his right no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right and no one can dare question his exercise of that legal right.

Compare Gompers’s traditional American view of freedom to the contemptuous view toward workers of labor leaders today. Here is United Food and Commercial Workers union strategist Joe Crump advising union organizers in a 1991 trade journal article: “Employees are complex and unpredictable. Employers are simple and predictable. Organize employers, not employees.” And in 2005, Mike Fishman, head of the Service Employees International Union, was even more blunt. When it comes to union organizing campaigns, he told the Wall Street Journal, “We don’t do elections.”

Under a decades-old political compromise, federal labor policies promoting compulsory unionism persist side by side with the ability of states to curb such compulsion with right-to-work laws. So far, as I said, 22 states have done so. And when we compare and contrast the economic performance in these 22 states against the others, we find interesting things. For example, from 1999 to 2009 (the last such year for which data are available), the aggregate real all-industry GDP of the 22 right-to-work states grew by 24.2 percent, nearly 40 percent more than the gain registered by the other 28 states as a group.

Even more dramatic is the contrast if we look at personal income growth. From 2000 to 2010, real personal incomes grew by an average of 24.3 percent in the 22 right-to-work states, more than double the rate for the other 28 as a group. But the strongest indicator is the migration of young adults. In 2009, there were 20 percent more 25- to 34-year-olds in right-to-work states than in 1999. In the compulsory union states, the increase was only 3.3 percent—barely one-sixth as much.

In this context, the decision by Boeing to open a plant in South Carolina may be not only in its own best interest, but in ours as well. So in whose interest is the National Labor Relations Board acting? And more importantly, with a view to what understanding of freedom?

Public Sector Unionism

As more and more workers and businesses have obtained refuge from compulsory unionism in right-to-work states in recent decades, the rationality of the free market has been showing itself. But the public sector is another and a grimmer story.

The National Labor Relations Act affects only private-sector workers. Since the 1960s, however, 21 states have enacted laws authorizing the collection of forced union dues from at least some state and local public employees. More than a dozen additional states have granted union officials the monopoly power to speak for all government workers whether they consent to this or not. Thus today, government workers are more than five times as likely to be unionized as private sector workers. This represents a great danger for taxpayers and consumers of government services. For as Victor Gotbaum, head of the Manhattan-based District 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, said 36 years ago: “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”

How this works is simple, and explains the inordinate power of union officials in so many states that have not adopted right-to-work laws. Union officials funnel a huge portion of the compulsory dues and fees they collect into efforts to influence the outcomes of elections. In return, elected officials are afraid to anger them even in the face of financial crisis. This explains why states with the heaviest tax burdens and the greatest long-term fiscal imbalances (in many cases due to bloated public employee pension funds) are those with the most unionized government workforces. California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin represent the worst default risks among the 50 states. In 2010, an average of 59.2 percent of the public employees in these nine worst default-risk states were unionized, 19.2 percentage points higher than the national average of 40 percent. All of these states except Nevada authorize compulsory union dues and fees in the public sector.

* * *

Fortunately, there are signs that taxpayers are recognizing the negative consequences of compulsory unionism in the public sector. Just this March, legislatures in Wisconsin and Ohio revoked compulsory powers of government union bosses, and similar efforts are underway in several other states. Furthermore, the NLRB’s blatantly political and un-constitutional power play with regard to Boeing’s South Carolina production line is sure to strike fair-minded Americans as beyond the pale. Now more than ever, it is time to push home the point that all American workers in all 50 states should be granted the full freedom of association—which includes the freedom not to associate—in the area of union membership.

Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation as well as of the National Right to Work Committee, a 2.2 million member public policy organization. He holds aB.A. in finance from James Madison University and an associate’s degree in marketing from the State University of New York. His writings have appeared in such newspapers and magazines as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Orange County Register, the National Review and others. The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on January 31, 2011 during a conference co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the first part of Mark Mix’s speech:

BOEING IS A GREAT AMERICAN COMPANY. Recently it has built a second production line—its other is in Washington State—in South Carolina for its 787 Dreamliner airplane, creating 1,000 jobs there so far. Who knows what factors led to its decision to do this? As with all such business decisions, there were many. But the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—a five-member agency created in 1935 by the Wagner Act (about which I will speak momentarily)—has taken exception to this decision, ultimately based on the fact that South Carolina is a right-to-work state. That is, South Carolina, like 21 other states today, protects a worker’s right not only to join a union, but also to make the choice not to join or financially support a union. Washington State does not. The general counsel of the NLRB, on behalf of the International Association of Machinists union, has issued a complaint against Boeing, which, if successful, would require it to move its South Carolina operation back to Washington State. This would represent an unprecedented act of intervention by the federal government that appears, on its face, un-American. But it is an act long in the making, and boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom.

Where does this story begin?

The Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley

In 1935, Congress passed and President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), commonly referred to as the Wagner Act after its Senate sponsor, New York Democrat Robert Wagner. Section 7 of the Wagner Act states:

Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.

Union officials such as William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and John L. Lewis, principal founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), hailed this legislation at the time as the “Magna Carta of Labor.” But in fact it was far from a charter of liberty for working Americans.

Section 8(3) of the Wagner Act allowed for “agreements” between employers and officers of a union requiring union membership “as a condition of employment” if the union was certified or recognized as the employees’ “exclusive” bargaining agent on matters of pay, benefits, and work rules. On its face, this violates the clear principle that the freedom to associate necessarily includes the freedom not to associate. In other words, the Wagner Act didn’t protect the freedom of workers because it didn’t allow for them to decide against union membership. To be sure, the Wagner Act left states the prerogative to protect employees from compulsory union membership. But federal law was decidedly one-sided: Firing or refusing to hire a worker because he or she had joined a union was a federal crime, whereas firing or refusing to hire a worker for not joining a union with “exclusive” bargaining privileges was federally protected. The National Labor Relations Board was created by the Wagner Act to enforce these policies.

During World War II, FDR’s War Labor Board aggressively promoted compulsory union membership. By the end of the war, the vast majority of unionized workers in America were covered by contracts requiring them to belong to a union in order to keep their jobs. But Americans were coming to see compulsory union membership—euphemistically referred to as “union security”—as a violation of the freedom of association. Furthermore, the nonchalance with which union bosses like John L. Lewis paralyzed the economy by calling employees out on strike in 1946 hardened public support for the right to work as opposed to compulsory unionism. As Gilbert J. Gall, a staunch proponent of the latter, acknowledged in a monograph chronicling legislative battles over this issue from the 1940s on, “the huge post-war strike wave and other problems of reconversion gave an added impetus to right-to-work proposals.”

When dozens of senators and congressmen who backed compulsory unionism were ousted in the 1946 election, the new Republican leaders of Congress had a clear opportunity to curb the legal power of union bosses to force workers to join unions. Instead, they opted for a compromise that they thought would have enough congressional support to override a presidential veto by President Truman. Thus Section 7 of the revised National Labor Relations Act of 1947—commonly referred to as the Taft-Hartley Act—only appears at first to represent an improvement over Section 7 of the Wagner Act. It begins:

Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any and all such activities. . . .

Had this sentence ended there, forced union membership would have been prohibited, and at the same time voluntary union membership would have remained protected. Unfortunately, the sentence continued:

…except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 158(a)(3) of this title.

This qualification, placing federal policy firmly on the side of compulsory union membership, left workers little better off than they were under the Wagner Act. Elsewhere, Taft-Hartley did, for the most part, prohibit “closed shop” arrangements that forced workers to join a union before being hired. But they could still be forced to join, on threat of being fired, within a few weeks after starting on the job.

Continued in two weeks…

One decision we made before going on a nearly three week long vacation in Germany was to completely block out all media. Not to read any newspapers, not to watch television nor listening to radio. That turned out to be one of the best decisions we made. It was so wonderful to get out of the daily grind of politics, polling and budgetary discussions around the clock on the cable networks.

Our time in  Germany was spent with family and friends and equally divided between Bavaria and Lower Saxony in the northern part of the country. The weather was great, not too hot nor rainy or cold. June is always a good month to visit Germany since schools are still in session and the tourist season has not yet fully begun.

This particular vacation was different from previous ones in that we were accompanied by our grand-nephew Kevin – a 20-year old junior at USC – for whom this was the first such visit to Germany. Our agenda was focused on introducing him to the way German families live and enjoy life in general. We  therefore did not race all over the place from one worthy sight (of historical significance) to the next. While he had practiced some German before the trip, he found that most people, especially the younger ones were eager to try their English on him and so communications with Germans never turned out to be a problem.

Yet he noticed some differences from his California lifestyle. Nowhere was he offered ice cubes in his drinks. To get non-carbonated water, he had to always asked for it but he learned quickly by asking for “Stilles Wasser“. Even in most stores/supermarkets, non-carbonated water was seldom if at all available. But he accepted it and he compensated for it by enjoying the German beers, we even visited a famous brewery in Erding near Munich where they make among other brands Erdinger Weissbraeu, a popular thirst quencher. It is now Kevin’s favorite beer and he found out where he can get it in Los Angeles.

We noticed that Germany has made great strides when it comes to installing renewable energy sources. You can see solar panels on roofs everywhere on commercial as well as private properties. Another difference were the multitudes of ’round-about traffic’ intersections in all towns. It appears that Germany has adopted this method of traffic control from their French neighbors who have had these traffic tools for many years in their country.

Like the citizenry of many other European countries, the Germans do not generally like their tax rates and also feel that their country is the major bailout rescuer of the European Union. If you want to get into a heated discussion with them, just bring up this topic and you will see very little support for the actions of their government in this regard. Another major concern is the high price of gasoline. They are paying about 1.53 euros for a liter of gasoline. We computed this to be about $8.50 per gallon! More than twice as much what we pay for gasoline in the United States. And fuel efficiency is not that much better than it is here. They have a different way of measuring it, yet we paid for gasoline for our rental car, a small BMW 1er, while driving about 610 miles, approximately $180.00.

But we were on vacation and did not waste too much time dwelling on that. Life was good and we enjoyed ourselves and have hundreds of photos to remember it all. Being back in the States, we got used to our routines here fairly quickly and we are glad to be living here. We even found out that we had not missed much of any significance in terms of national, state and local news.

Ken Cuccinelli was elected the Attorney General of Virginia in November 2009. From 2002 to 2009 he was a member of the Virginia State Senate. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he has an M.A. in international relations from George Mason University and a J.D. from the George Mason University School of Law and Economics. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 1, 2011, in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. . Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

Last week we Common Sense University outlined the first part of Ken’s speech. Here is the second and final part of Ken Cuccinelli’s speech:

Liberty as an Environmental Principle

As bad as the federal health care law is, the economic consequences of what the EPA has in store for us will be equally damaging to our freedom and our economy. Thus the EPA is another front in Virginia’s federalism fight.

In December 2009, the EPA declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants dangerous to public health because they are alleged to cause global warming. This finding gave the agency the immense power to regulate CO2 emissions—and remember, this dangerous pollutant, carbon dioxide, is what we exhale from our bodies every second of every day.

For the ruling, the EPA relied primarily on data from a United Nations global warming report. Emails leaked in 2009 in the Climategate scandal showed that some of the world’s prominent climatologists manipulated data to overstate the effects of carbon dioxide on the environment. Much of the U.N. report relied on that questionable data, and the EPA relied on that report. Since the revelations from the leaked emails became public, some scientists involved in the report have had to back off some of their positions and research. Renowned climate researcher Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, a long-time proponent of the global warming theory, admitted recently that there is no question that data in the U.N. report was misleading, and that “it is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data” that would work against the theory of rapid global warming in the last century.

Pursuant to this, in February 2010, my office petitioned the EPA to reopen its hearings on greenhouse gases and review new evidence. Instead it ignored our request—in fact, it ignored the law. So we filed a federal lawsuit to force the hearings to be reopened, and we are still awaiting our day in court.

If the EPA is allowed to move forward with its regulation of carbon dioxide, costs to every American household are projected to increase by $3,000 a year due to higher prices for energy, food, clothing, and any other goods that require energy to manufacture or transport. Talk about taxing the poor!

In a document the EPA published on regulating greenhouse gas emissions in cars and light trucks, it admits that its new rules would add about $950 to the price of each new vehicle. And buried deep in the report, the EPA’s own models show that over the next 90 years these regulations would only reduce temperature increases by less than 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit. Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, in testimony before Congress, called this amount of temperature difference “immeasurable.” But that has not stopped the agency from trying to move the new auto regulations forward.

Greenhouse gas regulations will also cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in increased energy costs, and could price several industries out of business or force them overseas, resulting in permanent job losses.

These are serious consequences of decisions made by unelected bureaucrats. All we are asking the EPA to do is to look at all the data, not just the data that supports the pre-conceived views of the people in charge.

For my challenges to these rules and to the federal government, I am accused of being a flat-earther and an enemy of science. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not only an attorney; I was also an engineer. As a former engineer, I have a certain trust in science: the math, the scientific method, the certainties of the laws of physics, and the objective quest for new answers. But when science gets tainted by politics and money, and facts are set aside in the name of advancing a political agenda, it is no longer science.

And contrary to the image some in the media have created, I do not have a battle with environmental protection. In fact, my office works in close coordination with our Virginia regulatory agencies to enforce environmental laws. I also have seven children who will be on this earth for the better part of this century, and I have a vested interest in seeing that they have clean air, water, and land.

But I also have a vested interest in seeing that my children have the opportunity to get good jobs and achieve at least the same standard of living we have today. That means we have to balance care for our environment with care for our economy.

We also have to recognize that economic growth underwrites environmental protection. Wealthy countries pay for environmental improvement, and healthy economies are critical to it. The only places on earth that have strived for a clean environment share two key characteristics: free people and free markets. Economic success will help deliver environmental improvement far more effectively than any number of forcibly-applied regulations. Yet we are gradually suffocating our free market economy with command-and-control regulations from our federal government.

Freedom in the Balance

With the EPA’s attempts to regulate our lives by regulating the by-products of practically everything we buy and everything we do, and with the federal government’s attempt to assume the power to command us to buy its chosen health insurance, we face some of the most significant and unprecedented erosions of liberty in our lifetimes. And federalism—that tension between state sovereigns and the federal government—was designed for the very purpose of helping to preserve that liberty.

While we can derive some satisfaction from last November’s election results as a backlash against the centralization and growth of raw federal power, we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past where conservative victories were followed by liberal policies. We must ensure that the newly elected officeholders have learned from past mistakes. We must hold the representatives we put into office accountable to first principles, and then demand from them concrete action. For the failure of conservative principles has not been due to the principles themselves, but to the failure to fight for them.

At a time such as this, when principled conservatives do not control the reins of power in Washington, state attorneys general become the first line of defense against federal government overreach. When I ran for Attorney General of Virginia, I said that if the federal government crossed certain lines, I would challenge it. Unfortunately, we have a federal government that is giving us more opportunities to challenge it than I would like. But we are keeping our promise. With fellow Virginians and the American people, we have planted our flag and we are taking a stand. And if we are successful, future generations of Americans will have a chance to enjoy the liberty that has made America the envy of the world.

Success in this fight for federalism is critical, for as Ronald Reagan warned us:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We did not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Ken Cuccinelli was elected the Attorney General of Virginia in November 2009. From 2002 to 2009 he was a member of the Virginia State Senate. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he has an M.A. in international relations from George Mason University and a J.D. from the George Mason University School of Law and Economics. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 1, 2011, in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. . Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the first part of Ken Cuccinelli’s speech:

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 1, 2011, in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.

SOME FAVORITE VIRGINIANS OF MINE who inspired and crafted our federal Constitution—Mason, Madison, Jefferson, and Henry—also drafted the Constitution of Virginia. And in the latter, they included a critical statement that said, “No free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved . . . but by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

Our founders well understood that our liberty could not be preserved without frequently referring back to first principles. But while they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend those principles, we have often taken them for granted, as we have become complacent in thinking that government will take care of every problem.

We have asked government to do more for us, and all the government asks for in return is a little bit more of our liberty. Over the decades, we kept asking. And because the courts and the politicians were all too happy to oblige, regardless of what the Constitution said, we no longer have a federal government of limited powers. We have an overreaching central government—a government that seeks to plan and control virtually every aspect of our lives and our economy, from health care, to energy, to automobile manufacturing, to banking and insurance.

Thankfully, though, in the last several years, people have woken up and are pushing back. With this pushback, we are seeing the idea of federalism reemerge. People want to return to a government of limited, enumerated powers, and an arrangement in which states serve as a check when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds.

In the current lawsuits brought by the states over health care and against the EPA, state governments are pushing back and reasserting federalism as the Founders intended them to do. Indeed, I am not aware of a time in history when this many states have sued the federal government to rein in its power: Today, more than half are parties to lawsuits against the new health care act and its individual health insurance mandate.

Virginia was the first state to argue in federal court that the new health care law is unconstitutional. When we brought the suit in March 2010, most media outlets and many legal experts said we stood no chance. One law professor said our argument about constitutionality was, if not frivolous, close to it. Another legal expert said our case relied on a “controversial reading of the Constitution.” Apparently, it is controversial to apply the Constitution as it was written.

But back in December, when a federal judge ruled in Virginia’s favor that the mandate is unconstitutional, assertions that we did not stand a chance faded fast.

Shades of King George III

Let me explain a bit about our lawsuit. Our first legal argument is that the government’s attempt to use the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to mandate the purchase of a private product—in this case, health insurance—goes beyond Congress’s power. The reason there has never been a mandate like this in all of American history is because, up until now, everyone knew Congress lacked the power to impose one.

I often give the example of the colonial period, when the colonists were boycotting British goods while demanding that King George III and Parliament repeal the Stamp Act and the Intolerable Acts. I am sure it was to the king’s dismay, but his own lawyer—the solicitor general—told Parliament that the boycott was legal under British law. In other words, the colonists could not be forced to buy British goods.

Yet in 2010, we had a president and a Congress who believed they could compel Americans to buy a private product even when the king of England, whom we rebelled against, knew he did not have that power. And back then, we were merely subjects!

The federal government has argued in court that not buying health insurance is as much of an economic activity as buying it, and therefore that it can regulate a citizen’s decision not to buy government-approved health insurance under the Commerce Clause. Nonactivity is the same as activity in the governmentÕs argument. Clearly, someone in Washington needs a dictionary.

That same reasoning could be used to force us to buy cars, vegetables, or gym memberships. If Virginia loses this suit and the federal government is allowed to cross this line, Congress will be granted a virtually unlimited power to order us to buy or do anything. It would be the end of federalism—not to mention individual rights—as we have known it for more than 220 years.

There is also a secondary argument made by defenders of the health care act. The Obama administration’s fallback position if it loses its Commerce Clause argument is to say that the fine for not buying government-approved health insurance is not a penalty, but a tax. The administration is asserting this because a tax to pay for a health care scheme would be constitutional under Congress’s taxing authority. We argue in response that the government cannot all of a sudden start calling a penalty a tax to try to make the law legal. In fact, every court that has heard the government’s tax argument has rejected it.

When Congress and President Obama debated the health care law, for political reasons, they repeatedly said that the fine for not buying health insurance was a penalty, not a tax. And indeed, under the law they passed, they structured it as a penalty. So now the administration is both flip-flopping and misrepresenting facts.

We will soon see which arguments the appeals court agrees with, because we will be arguing the case in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on May 10th. Whatever that ruling, the case will end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. That is why we are also running a second track and asking the Supreme Court to skip the Fourth Circuit and take the case directly. We have asked the court for this expedited review because states are already spending huge sums to implement their portions of the health care act, businesses are already making decisions about whether to cut or keep employee health plans, and real health care reform is on hold until the Supreme Court rules. If we do not get this suit resolved as quickly as possible, we impose crippling uncertainty on the states, businesses, individuals, and our entire economy.

The remainder of this article will be posted next week…

Is it not amazing to watch a recent Nobel Peace Prize winner jubilate over the killing of a world renown terrorist? We do not have to repeat what happened on May 1, everybody knows it. Master terrorist Osama Bin Laden was assassinated in a midnight raid in Pakistan by a special SEAL team. We agree with the many who have congratulated the President for making the decision to proceed with the attack, the world is a better place after Bin Laden’s demise, no doubt about it.

What strikes us as odd here at Common Sense University is the extended victory lap the President is taking with his high profile speeches, visits to Ground Zero in New York and to the Special Forces units at Fort Campbell contrasted with his rhetoric. He decided not to show any photos of the dead Bin Laden and he ordered the body to be given a traditional Muslim burial on an aircraft carrier and the disposition of the body.

The President stated that it was not proper to show the “trophy” as he called it nor “to spike the football“. These terms are easily understood by Americans. But how does one accept that considering the fact that Obama did nothing else but spike the football for nearly a week? The answer is very simple: He is campaigning for re-election! By the end of that week, domestic news about the unemployment rate as of the end of April and the job creation were bad for him, so he did what he does best: He ignored that!

What is the most disgusting element in all this is as always, the complying liberal media who could not tell us often enough how brave President Obama had been in ordering the strike on this “slum-villa” in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was so extremely courageous because things could have gone wrong with the mission by the SEAL team. He took such a huge risk giving the ok for this event, it was just awesome.

It is sad that America has to listen to or read this nonsense. If risk analysis were made on anything that goes on in the country, we wonder how many sports events would be cancelled (after all, the home team could lose), how many people would simply not go to work on rainy or windy days because they might get into an accident or be hit by a falling tree? This is so silly, it makes no sense at all. If a person has this sort of decision-making philosophy, he or she should not be in a position to having to make such decisions.

In the meantime, we really do not know at this time how this operation to kill Osama Bin Laden was executed in terms of time line. When the news broke on the evening of May 1 that something big had happened and that the President would address the nation about it, the news were multitudinous in that it was first reported that Bin Laden had been killed a week earlier and that the wait until the official announcement was due to extensive DNA verification testing. Then the number of people killed varied, then the matter of Bin Laden having had a weapon in his hand when confronted by the Special Forces team members and so on. There have been so many statements since May 1, we wonder if we ever get a real report on what went down and if so, if we can believe it. For now, we consider this best to be summarized as: Obama killed Osama and we (the people) got 72 versions of how it happened. We do not know if Bin Laden got his 72 virgins after his life was ended, we are satisfied with him being dead.

Even after a month having passed, we still have a very bitter taste in our mouths over the Federal budget for the current fiscal year. But that’s what disappointments usually do, they leave bitter after-tastes. The main reason for this condition is the total despair over what to make of the current Congress. It could be easily summed up as “Business as usual” after having witnessed and just analyzed the drama of the budget battle that took place in Washington D.C.

Let’s recall: After the Democrats who had been in total control of Congress for the past several years had not even tried to pass a budget for the 2010/2011 fiscal year, the Republicans had campaigned last year on the promise to voters to cutting at least one hundred billion dollars out of the budget if they were to be elected as a majority. The voters bought their campaign promises, trusted them and voted the Republicans into a majority in the House of Representatives while they increased the number of Republicans in the Senate, balancing that chamber to a closer 53 Democrats versus 47 Republican. In essence, a smaller majority for the Democrats.

As soon as the new Congress was sworn in this past January, the Republican House leaders announced that they could not cut one hundred billion dollars out of the projected 3.7 trillion dollar budget since several months had already past. The one hundred billion number was therefore prorated downward to just 61 billion dollars based on the remaining number of weeks until the end of September.

As was to be expected, the Democrats from the President on down started to voice their strong opposition to this move by their political counterparts. They claimed that these cuts were“draconian” in its totality and would bring great harm to Americans and the liberal media happily played along and flooded the people with stories of hardships for many individuals and families who would be deeply effected by budget cuts. The proposed cuts of $61 billion represented only 1.65 percent, but for the Democrats this was Armageddon and they maligned the Republicans for even trying to do such a dastard deed.

Now let’s put this in perspective. If we assume that a family has to cut back on their financial outlays due to hardship caused by a reduction of income, the father talks to his teenage son and says: “Son, things are a little bit tough right now and I am cutting your allowance down from $100 a month to $98.35, I hope you understand!” Does anybody believe that the son would be calling this a draconian cut and that he could not get by with that reduced amount of money? Of course not. The teenager would understand and that would be the end of it. This demonstrates the total irresponsible and shameful mindset and behavior of Democrats.

Now then, in the real world, when the final budget deal was finally reached in early April, the cuts only amounted to $38 billion or roughly one percent of the total. That is a laughable small amount and yet the Republicans hailed it as a historic event and they celebrate their great achievement. It was a disgusting display of arrogance and betrayal of their campaign promises.

It is truly disappointing to witness the way these people behave and act and it is equally difficult to feel any sense of pride over the way this “budget battle” was fought and ended. There are five hundred thirty five member in Congress, if they were all asked to stand very close together and they were covered with a giant tarp; attacking this gathering with a baseball bat, one would never hit the wrong person. In other words, the American Congress is not an institution the American people can be or should be proud of.

For the past ten years or even more, the Catholic Church in America has been consistently criticized for one issue: Child abuse by priests!  Needless to say, the image of the Church has been severely tainted by this and its reputation has suffered greatly. To a certain extent, this could be considered justified especially in light of the fact that these abuses were covered up by Church leaders for nearly half a century. And the Church had to pay dearly, in fact, hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations to the victims of such sexual abuses.

It is therefore not surprising that the magnitude of good deeds by the Catholic Church are never mentioned. Yet the facts remain and are real. The statistics below will shed some light on the work of the Catholic Church as a whole:

• There are currently approximately 68 million Catholics in America;
• There are 259 Catholic Bishops countrywide, supported in 19,000 parishes by over 40,000 priests and about 17,000 deacons;
• The Catholic Church manages 561 hospitals and they are treating about 86 million patients annually;
• The Catholic Church manages nearly 5,900 elementary and 1205 high schools nationwide, totaling 2.2 million students;
• There are 234 Catholic Universities and colleges with about 770,000 students in America;
• The number of charitable organizations supporting local and overseas ministries is large, they are giving aid to the poor and helping the needy throughout the country;
• In addition most parishes have their own service groups such as the Knights of Columbus, Saint Vincent de Paul charities, Catholic Men’s Fellowships and women’s groups;
• This all amounts to many hundreds of thousands of men and women serving the needy and offering their time to do good work in the name of the Lord.

This immense volume of work by members of the Catholic Church in America as a whole for the good of humanity is evidence and testament that they practice what Jesus Christ taught them so many years ago. From the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, we know that Jesus said: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And that is exactly what they are doing, day in and day out, twelve months of every year. It should therefore be a thing of great pride to be a member of the Catholic faith.

The statistics above reflect exactly that and we are acknowledging that these types of Christian services are rendered daily in all other Christian denominations as well by hundreds of thousands of people. It is in this recognition that we want to say Thank You and are wishing not only Catholics but all Christians a very Happy Easter as they celebrate the Holy Days of the Church this week beginning with the Last Supper and ending with the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

As we helplessly stand-by and watch Congress battle over the ever increasing deficits in our country – the Republicans want to cut spending while the Democrats want to keep it going, with Republicans having a majority in the House, the Democrats still controlling the Senate – it is very difficult to understand how these people got elected to office as representatives of the people. There may be kinder words for this incredible fact but we have concluded that they are all utterly dumb, stupid and simply unwilling to even try and to bring our fiscal mess under control. Self-proclaimed experts and pundits explain this simply with the word: Politics!

What does this mean? Does politics excuse the fact that our Federal lawmakers are spending our country into unsustainable depths of debt? Have they gotten elected by telling their constituents before they got elected: Vote for me and I will support run-away spending as far as the eye can see? Of course not, they all said that they would work very hard and do everything necessary to reign in excessive spending so that our children and grand children would not be left with a heavy burden of debt. It’s the same crap we have heard from lawmakers about getting ‘energy-independent from foreign sources of oil’. It is a blunt lie whenever they say it. And so, the battle over our Federal budget goes on in Washington, D.C.

But wait, there was a Republican Senator who tasked the GAO (Government Accountability Office), the independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress to make a study as to whether or not there was duplicity in Federal agencies. The purpose for this report was see if there were potential areas for cutting spending by eliminating actual redundancies at the Federal level of government.. Please sit down as we list just a few of these duplicate services we are paying for.

?  The U.S. Government has more than 100 programs dealing with surface transportation issues;

?  82 programs monitoring teacher quality;

?  80 programs for economic development;

?  47 programs for job training;

?  20 offices or programs devoted to homelessness;

?  17 different grant programs for disaster preparedness;

?  15 agencies or offices to handle food safety and

?  5 offices are working to ensure the federal government uses less gasoline.

?  Even President Obama ridiculed the fact that the Federal Government has 12 different agencies dealing with international trade and at least two regulate salmon.

The GAO stated “reducing or eliminating duplication, overlap or fragmentation could potentially save billions of taxpayer dollars annually and help agencies provide more effective and efficient services.” Upon reading the GAO report, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn said “This report will make us all look like jackasses” Truer words have seldom been spoken. Government waste and abuse has been one of Coburn’s highest concerns and he equally blames the legislative and executive branches of government for this situation and the excessive spending. Last Halloween, he published a report concluding that the federal government has paid nearly one billion dollars to at least 250,000 dead people since 2000.

Will we see Congress in the near future tackle these numerous ‘Empires’ and streamline their activities or will this just be a ‘talking-point’ for fiscally conservative representatives only to be denied action by the free-spending Democrats? Only time will tell!

On January 20, 2009, the current President took the oath of office as follow by declarings: I, Barack Hussain Obama do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution  of the United States.

Well, so much for that. Even though he was allegedly a Constitutional lawyer, he had expressed many times in prior years that in his opinion the Constitution was flawed. When you are an American citizen, you have the right to have your own opinions, but when you are the President, you are expected to live by the oath you swore upon taking the highest office in the land. The critical words in the oath being – to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution – therefore a President cannot pick and choose which laws he will preserve, protect and defend. As President, he has to preserve, protect and defend them all.

We do not have the resources or time to find out if all previous Presidents lived faithfully by their oaths, but we know one thing for sure, President Obama is most certainly not. As example, we cite his recent decision to no longer defend the Federal Law known as “Defense of Marriage Act”, also known as DOMA. This law was enacted in 1996 when then President Bill Clinton signed the law which defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman.

Candidate Obama campaigned in 2008 stating that he firmly believed that marriage was a union between one man and one woman. We do not know if that helped getting him elected President but it certainly did not hurt him. Forward to 2011, he is getting ready for his re-election bid in 2012 and it must appear to him politically advantages to change his mind in order to lock up the votes of the gay community in America. As a candidate, that might be alright to do but there is one minor difference now, he is also the President. In that capacity, he has to uphold ALL Federal laws and not start cherry-picking for political purposes.

We consider this illegal and even unlawful by a President. If a President can decide which Federal law he wants to continue to preserve, protect and defend based on political posturing, then our Constitution becomes just a useless document. What if Obama finds another voting block that would vote for him if he just ignored and no longer defended certain laws, would that be acceptable to the American people? We most certainly do not think so.

The liberal media is naturally a different story when it comes to the dubious actions of their beloved President, for them, he cannot do wrong! It’s that simple. They will defend him in everything he does regardless if it is lawful, constitutional or defendable. This is the reason why we have not heard anything from them in this Presidential flip-flop. The liberals love him for this in that it shows his smartness when it comes to politics.

If you want to know what’s wrong in America today, just observe the liberals and their fanatical co-hordes in the media. It is a sad case of extreme bias from an element in our country that is expected to be unbiased. When the Constitution can be shredded or altered for political gamesmanship, this country is losing its foundation very fast. It should not be accepted.

At first glance, it appears as if political courage is back in vogue. Is it courage as in ‘guts’ or simply common sense? We believe to know the answer but let us analyze what happened in the Badger State Wisconsin for the several months. If nothing else, it has shown us a clear distinction between Republicans and Democrats. For many people, there has really not been a clearly identifiable difference between the two Party’s in many years.

Allow us to review what happened in Wisconsin during the past eight months:  People in the State of Wisconsin recognized that it would be very difficult to bring about a balanced budget without raising taxes, this being a situation almost fifty States found themselves in after the economic downturn of the past few years. Unlike the Federal government, the Constitutions of the States require a balanced budget. The Republican candidates campaigned on a platform of doing just that and the candidate for Governor, Mr. Scott Walker did precisely that. He even specifically outlined of what steps he would take to achieve balancing the budget without raising taxes but just sim ply cutting spending. One of those provisions was the removal of collective bargaining provisions of certain public unions. Having been a County Commissioner for several years prior, he recognized the unsustainability of ever increasing union benefits and he was honest about it.

Guess what? In November 2010, he won. The people of Wisconsin decided to give the incumbent Democrat the boot and allow the Republicans to fix this problem. But it was not only the Governor’s office receiving a new occupant, the people also voted for Republican majorities in the State legislature, the Assembly as well as the Senate. The State Senate of Wisconsin is now composed of 19 Republicans and 14 Democrats. And they went to work balancing the budget together with the Governor. In order to do that, they demanded higher contributions towards health insurance and retirement funds from the State’s public union employees and to not having to deal with this over and over again every year, they wanted to remove the collective bargaining powers of some public unions.

When it came to voting on this, the Democrat Senators in a cowardly way fled the State and went into hiding in Illinois. With this action, they wanted to prevent the Senate from voting since the State’s constitution requires bi-partisan participation on budgetary matters. They reasoned that by leaving the State they could prevent such action. And at first, they did. In the meantime, union members from all over the country came to Wisconsin and occupied the State building in Madison. Their protests were heard but it did not deter the Republicans, they remained firm. After a few weeks of this stalemate, the Republicans applied a legislative procedure by separating the union provisions from the budgetary issues and then voted on it.

This brought a rash of unjustified criticism from Democrats and the Union bosses and members. But the Democrat Senators came back to Wisconsin, their mission (action) had failed. This entire episode has shed light on the unholy alliance between Unions and Democrats throughout the country at all levels of government. We believe that the Wisconsin Governor and the Republican majority in the State legislature are to be congratulated for holding firm. They told the voters how they would deal with the State budget, the voters approved and voted them in and now they have delivered on their campaign promises. What a novel concept! The Democrats (and unions) who now want to recall the Governor will fail in their attempt and the people of Wisconsin will have won in the end. If nothing else, we know now that not all politicians are the same, some even do what they promise during campaigns even if it is unpopular and requires courage and guts.

The above title of this article might at first be somewhat confusing but it will become clearer what we mean by that near the end. On Friday, March 11, 2011 (local time in Japan), this country suffered one of the most devastating natural disasters in history. A 9.0 earthquake off the north-east coast of the Japanese island of Honshu resulted at first in incredible damage to structures in the vicinity only to be followed by a massive Tsunami with up to 30 foot high waves that devastated the coastline for several miles near the City of Sendai. The videos of the approaching waves and pictures were overwhelming in that entire structures were ripped away up to several miles inland. Estimates of the overall damage are at this time still vague in that the number of death vary from near ten thousand to possible double that number. Hundreds of thousand of people are homeless and rescue efforts are still ongoing. The damage will rise into the billions of dollars.

These two blows also resulted in severe damage to several nuclear power plants near the City of Fukushima and this is the most troubling aspect of this disaster. Radiation has leaked as a result of the structural damage to the plants and several reactors have had fires and explosions within and radioactivity has been recorded as far away as Tokyo. This is the greatest danger that looms and the true impact of this cannot even be estimated in that it could result in devastation like other similar incidents (like Chernobil in 1986). Radiation fallout could spread to other countries as well and the worst is feared as yet to come. The Japanese government is trying everything in their power to curtail the damage and the world has offered its help to support this country’s people in their hour of need. This triple whammy: Earthquake – Tsunami – Nuclear reactor damage and radiation fallout is of epic proportions and the entire world suffers and grieves with the Japanese nation as a whole and is trying to organize relief efforts and whatever it can to help out. In all this though, it is amazing to witness the dignity with which the Japanese people deal with this horror. One cannot even begin to sense the incredible impact this disaster will have on them for a long time to come. When one hears reports that thousands of residents simply vanished as a result of the Tsunami, it is incomprehensible how that must be for those afflicted by it.  While they are in shock and cannot even truly comprehend the full measure of this catastrophe, they have not lost their human dignity and decency.

And as is usually the case when something so devastating is happening, the world wide media immediately “invaded” Japan to be near the disaster zone and see firsthand the devastation and report home what they witnessed. And – as can be expected, the liberal media members could not help themselves by adding their own opinions to what they only should report as facts. Within a few days of March 11, the media was looking for and could not find any signs of “Looting” by the Japanese people and the victims in particular. Wow, they were perplexed and could not understand it, they, being the media hounds. This is what we mean by the ‘Plus’ in the title above.

There was also a true sharing of resources from food items, drinking water and other life necessities, the Japanese people suffered collectively and showed the world their true dignity and culture. If anything positive should come out of this disaster, it is the conduct of the Japanese people in this time of unimaginable hardship. They are to be admired for remaining the same as individuals and as a people even in terrible times like these. We think it is their culture and it is truly enviable.

Brian T. Kennedy is president of the Claremont Institute and publisher of the Claremont Review of Books. He has written on national security affairs issues in several national publications. He is also a co-author of the recent book: Shariah: The Threat to America. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 7, 2011, in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. . Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the third and final part of Brian Kennedy’s speech:

Which brings us to Russia and to the degradation of American strategic thinking during and after the Cold War. This thinking used to be guided by the idea that we must above all prevent a direct attack upon the U.S. homeland. But over the past 50 years we have been taught something different: that we must accept a balance of power between nations, especially those possessing nuclear ballistic missiles; and that we cannot seek military superiority—including defensive superiority, as with missile defense—lest we create strategic instability. This is now the common liberal view taught at universities, think tanks and schools of foreign service. Meanwhile, for their part, conservatives have been basking in the glow of “winning the Cold War.” But in what sense was it won, it might be asked, given that we neither disarmed Russia of its nuclear arsenal nor put a stop to its active measures to undermine us. The transformation of some of the former captive nations into liberal democracies is certainly worth celebrating, but given the Russian government’s brutally repressive domestic policies and strengthened alliances with America’s enemies abroad over the past 20 years, conservatives have overdone it.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that our policy toward Russia has been exceedingly foolish. For the past two decades we have paid the Russians to dismantle nuclear warheads they would have dismantled anyway, while they have used those resources to modernize their ballistic missiles. On our part, we have not even tested a nuclear warhead since 1992—which is to say that we aren’t certain they work anymore. Nor have we maintained any tactical nuclear weapons. Nor, to repeat, have we built the missile defense system first proposed by President Reagan.

Just last month, with bipartisan backing from members of the foreign policy establishment, the Senate ratified the New Start Treaty, which will further reduce our nuclear arsenal and will almost certainly cause further delays in building missile defenses—and this with a nation that engages in massive deception against us, supports our enemies, and builds ever more advanced nuclear weapons.

At the heart of America’s strategic defense policy today is the idea of launching a retaliatory nuclear strike against whatever nuclear power attacks us. But absent reliable confidence in the lethality of forces, such a deterrent is meaningless. In this light, deliberating about the need for a robust modernization program, rather than arms reductions through New Start, would have been a better way for Congress to spend the days leading up to Christmas—which is to say, it would have been supportive of our strategic defense policy, rather than undercutting it.

But what about that strategic policy? Some of New Start’s supporters argued that reducing rather than modernizing our nuclear arsenal places us on the moral high ground in our dealings with other nations. But can any government claim to occupy the moral high ground when it willingly, knowingly, and purposely keeps its people nakedly vulnerable to nuclear missiles? The Russians understand well the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American defense establishment, and have carefully orchestrated things for two decades so that we remain preoccupied with threats of North Korean and now Iranian ballistic missiles. We spend our resources developing modest defense systems to deal, albeit inadequately, with these so-called rogue states, and meanwhile forego addressing the more serious threat from Russia and China, both of which are modernizing their forces. Who is to say that there will never come a time when the destruction or nuclear blackmail of the U.S. will be in the interest of the Russians or the Chinese? Do we imagine that respect for human life or human rights will stop these brutal tyrannies from acting on such a determination?

If I sound pessimistic, I don’t mean to. Whatever kind of self-deception has gripped the architects of our current defense policies, the American people have proved capable of forcing a change in direction when they learn the facts. Americans do not wish to be subjected to Sharia law, owe large sums of money to the Chinese, or be kept vulnerable to nuclear missiles. Having responded resoundingly to the economic and constitutional crisis represented by Obamacare, it is now time for us to remind our representatives of the constitutional requirement to provide for a common defense—in the true sense of the word.

Brian T. Kennedy is president of the Claremont Institute and publisher of the Claremont Review of Books. He has written on national security affairs issues in several national publications. He is also a co-author of the recent book: Shariah: The Threat to America. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 7, 2011, in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. . Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the second part of Brian Kennedy’s speech:

Elsewhere this document says:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the means. The Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes . . . .

Now during the Bush Administration, the number of Muslims in the U.S. was typically estimated to be around three million. The Pew Research Center in 2007 estimated it to be 2.35 million. In 2000, the Council on American Islamic Relations put the number at five million. And President Obama in his Cairo speech two years ago put it at seven million.

In that light, consider a 2007 survey of American Muslim opinion conducted by the Pew Research Center. Eight percent of American Muslims who took part in this survey said they believed that suicide bombing can sometimes be justified in defense of Islam. Even accepting a low estimate of three million Muslims in the U.S., this would mean that 240,000 among us hold that suicide bombing in the name of Islam can be justified. Among American Muslims 18-29 years old, 15 percent agreed with that and 60 percent said they thought of themselves as Muslim first and Americans second. Among all participants in the survey, five percent—and five percent of the low estimate of three million Muslims in America is 150,000—said they had a favorable view of al Qaeda.

Given these numbers, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the political aims and ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood represent a domestic threat to national security. It is one thing to have hundreds of terrorist sympathizers within our borders, but quite another if that number is in the hundreds of thousands. Consider the massacre at Fort Hood: Major Nidal Malik Hasan believed that he was acting as a devout Muslim—indeed, he believed he was obeying a religious mandate to wage war against his fellow soldiers. Yet even to raise the question of whether Islam presents a domestic threat today is to invite charges of bigotry or worse.

And as dangerous as it potentially is, this domestic threat pales in comparison to the foreign threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies—a threat that is existential in nature. The government in Tehran, of course, is enriching uranium to convert to plutonium and place in a nuclear warhead. Iran has advanced ballistic missiles such as the Shahab-3, which can be launched from land or sea and is capable of destroying an American city. Even worse, if the Iranians were able to deliver the warhead as an electromagnetic pulse weapon from a ship off shore—a method they have been practicing, by the way—they could destroy the electronic infrastructure of the U.S. and cause the deaths of tens of millions or more. And let me be perfectly clear: We do not today have a missile defense system in place that is capable of defending against either a ship-launched missile attack by Iran or a ballistic missile attack from China or Russia. We do not yet today have such a system in place, even though we are capable of building one.

Since I have mentioned China and Russia, let me turn to them briefly in that order. The U.S. trades with China and the Chinese buy our debt. Currently they have $2 trillion in U.S. reserves, about half of which is in U.S. treasuries. Their economy and ours are intimately intertwined. For this reason it is thought that the Chinese will not go to war with us. Why, after all, would they want to destroy their main export market?

On the other hand, China is building an advanced army, navy, air force, and space-based capability that is clearly designed to limit the U.S. and its ability to project power in Asia. It has over two million men under arms and possesses an untold number of ICBMs—most of them aimed at the U.S.—and hundreds of short- and medium-range nuclear missiles. China’s military thinking is openly centered on opposing American supremacy, and its military journals openly discuss unrestricted warfare, combining traditional military means with cyber warfare, economic warfare, atomic warfare, and terrorism. China is also working to develop a space-based military capability and investing in various launch vehicles, including manned spaceflight, a space station, and extensive anti-satellite weaponry aimed at negating U.S. global satellite coverage.

Absent a missile defense capable of intercepting China’s ballistic missiles, the U.S. would be hard pressed to maintain even its current security commitments in Asia. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, however capable, cannot withstand the kinds of nuclear missiles and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that China could employ against it. The Chinese have studied American capabilities, and have built weapons meant to negate our advantages. The destructive capability of the recently unveiled Chinese DF-21D missile against our aircraft carriers significantly raises the stakes of a conflict in the South China Sea. And the SS-N-22 cruise missile—designed by the Russians and deployed by the Chinese and Iranians—presents a daunting challenge due to its enormous size and Mach 3 speed.

China has for some time carried out a policy that has been termed “peaceful rise.” But in recent years we have seen the coming to power of what scholars like Tang Ben call the “Red Guard generation”—generals who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, who are no longer interested in China remaining a secondary power, and who appear eager to take back Taiwan, avenge past wrongs by Japan and replace the U.S. as the preeminent military power in the region and ultimately in the world.

However far-fetched this idea may seem to American policymakers, it is widely held in China that America is on the decline, with economic problems that will limit its ability to modernize its military and maintain its alliances. And indeed, as things stand, the U.S. would have to resort to full-scale nuclear war to defend its Asian allies from an attack by China. This is the prospect that caused Mao Tse Tung to call the U.S. a “Paper Tiger.” Retired Chinese General Xiong Guong Kai expressed much the same idea in 1995, when he said that the U.S. would not trade Los Angeles for Taipei—that is, that we would have to stand by if China attacks Taiwan, since China has the ability to annihilate Los Angeles with a nuclear missile. In any case, current Chinese aggression against Japan in the Senkaku Islands and their open assistance of the Iranian nuclear program, not to mention their sale of arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan, would suggest that China is openly playing the role that the Soviet Union once played as chief sponsor of global conflict with the West.

Brian T. Kennedy is president of the Claremont Institute and publisher of the Claremont Review of Books. He has written on national security affairs issues in several national publications. He is also a co-author of the recent book: Shariah: The Threat to America. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 7, 2011, in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. . Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in three parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”

The following is the first part of Brian Kennedy’s speech:

WE ARE OFTEN TOLD that we possess the most powerful military in the world and that we will face no serious threat for some time to come. We are comforted with three reassurances aimed at deflecting any serious discussion of national security: (1) that Islam is a religion of peace; (2) that we will never go to war with China because our economic interests are intertwined; and (3) that America won the Cold War and Russia is no longer our enemy. But these reassurances are myths, propagated on the right and left alike. We believe them at our peril, because serious threats are already upon us.

Let me begin with Islam. We were assured that it was a religion of peace immediately following September 11. President Bush, a good man, believed or was persuaded that true Islam was not that different from Judaism or Christianity. He said in a speech in October 2001, just a month after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon: “Islam is a vibrant faith. . . . We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion.” But unfortunately, Mr. Bush was trying to understand Islam as we would like it to be rather than how countless devout Muslims understand it.

Organizationally, Islam is built around a belief in God or Allah, but it is equally a political ideology organized around the Koran and the teachings of its founder Muhammad. Whereas Christianity teaches that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s—allowing for a non-theocratic political tradition to develop in the West, culminating in the principles of civil and religious liberty in the American founding—Islam teaches that to disagree with or even reinterpret the Koran’s 6000 odd verses, organized into 114 chapters or Suras and dealing as fully with law and politics as with matters of faith, is punishable by death.

Islamic authorities of all the major branches of Islam hold that the Koran must be read so that the parts written last override the others. This so-called theory of abrogation means that the ruling parts of the Koran are those written after Muhammad went to Medina in 622 A.D. Specifically, they are Suras 9 and 5, which are not the Suras containing the verses often cited as proof of Islam’s peacefulness.

Sura 9, verse 5, reads: “Fight and slay the unbelievers wherever ye find them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war. But if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them . . . .”

Sura 9, verse 29, reads: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, even if they are of the 40 people of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Sura 5, verse 51, reads: “Oh ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors; they are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them for friendship is of them. Verily Allah guideth not the unjust.”

And Sura 3, verse 28, introduces the doctrine of taqiyya, which holds that Muslims should not be friends with the infidel except as deception, always with the end goal of converting, subduing, or destroying him.

It is often said that to point out these verses is to cherry pick unfairly the most violent parts of the Koran. In response, I assert that we must try to understand Muslims as they understand themselves. And I hasten to add that the average American Muslim does not understand the Koran with any level of detail. So I am not painting a picture here of the average Muslim. I am trying to understand those Muslims, both here in the U.S. and abroad, who actively seek the destruction of America.

Here at home, the threat is posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its organizational arms, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, and the various Muslim student associations. These groups seek to persuade Americans that Islam is a religion of peace. But let me quote to you from a document obtained during the 2007 Holy Land Trial investigating terrorist funding. It is a Muslim Brotherhood Strategic Memorandum on North American Affairs that was approved by the Shura Council and the Organizational Conference in 1987. It speaks of “Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and a stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’ causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic State wherever it is.”

Elsewhere this document says: . . . . part two next week

Our past three articles proposed something new, innovative and smart to the Republicans. But the verdict is in: They did not get the message, in fact, they completely ignored it. The 2011 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) gathering in Washington D.C. from February 10 through 12 saw multiple potential Presidential candidates for 2012, there were reportedly 11 to 12 thousand Republicans in attendance, most of them conservatives, old and young and what did they do? They let all those speakers fill their ears with slogans, Obama-bashing sound bites and suggestions for a better future for America, and in the end, what did they do? They conducted a straw poll among those present and they gave the highest number of votes to the one person who could not be elected President in a thousand years: Some grumpy old Libertarian, Representative Ron Paul from Texas!

Yes, he received thirty percent of the votes cast ahead of Mitt Romney who received 23 percent, all the other potential candidates received less than seven percent each, some as little as one percent. O.K., Ron Paul for President according to CPAC! If this is not the dumbest thing ever to come from such a gathering, we here at Common Sense University do not know what would be dumber. This man is living most of the time in another part of the universe, his ideas are so far out of whack and removed from reality, it is truly pathetic to think that there was even one person in that bunch who could seriously support Ron Paul’s ideas in today’s world.

And now, while no candidate has officially thrown his or her hat into the ring, the guessing game continues and we hear about some of the “Potentials” traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire to establish some support among the locals and build a campaign team for the early 2012 contests. We assume as soon as one of them formally announces his/her candidacy in the coming weeks or months the other dozen or more individuals will follow suit. This will then be followed with major fundraising efforts by all and the first, second and third multi-candidate forums in late spring and early summer. As before, these televised events will do nothing for the average voter since every candidate will be given thirty to sixty seconds to answer complex questions raised by a moderator. It will clarify absolutely nothing, they will be criticizing each other, they will all be dumping on President Obama, they will all speak in generalities as to how to deal with America’s current problems and how to make things better in the future. Everyone of them will talk about not indebting our children and grandchildren, blah, blah, blah, blah. It will be like watching a movie for the umpteenth time, a movie nobody even really wants to see.

We  are deeply disappointed in our realization that we expected to see changes from Republicans but will get nothing more than reruns from the past. The outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election will at best be a game of chance and if we had to bet on the outcome, the smart money would be on a re-election of Barack Obama. He has set a fundraising goal of over one billion dollars to remain President and the Republicans will probably spend a third of that money in their primary fights among themselves and then will have not enough time to raise funds to launch an effective campaign against Obama.

All we know for sure is that we here at Common Sense University will not under any circumstances contribute as much as a penny to the Republican primary fights, we simply do not like to waste money. It seems that the powers to be in the Republican Party have not learned anything from the last election in November 2010 and the establishment of the Tea Party. This could easily lead to the re-election of President Obama for a second term.