The President's STFU Address

President Obama's address to the nation last week was Castro-esque, in length if not in tone.   This is a divide and conquer, in you face, agitator President. 


Cross him, and he'll call you out publicly just like Chairman Mao used to do.

QandO does a good summary of AP's fact checking, giving it an overall thumbs up:

Surprisingly, AP does it (credit where credit is due).  They cover the “spending freeze” (it would amount to less than 1% of the deficit) [...]  They also point out that the nonsense about the health care plan preserving the “right” of Americans to keep their doctor and their plan isn’t exactly true [...] And they take on the claim about lobbyists...

But the Stalin-worthy coup de grace was Obama's disgraceful denigration of a co-equal branch of government:

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”

QandO Continues:

And I have to say, trying to humiliate the SCOTUS in a public speech with them sitting right there open to such ridicule is a politically stupid stunt. [...]

They’re not underlings like the JCS who have to sit there and take it. They are members of an equal and separate branch. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of that little bit of political stupidity.

Politifact says that if it’s true, it is “barely true”. They have a very fine write up which I encourage you to read about why Justice Alito may have been absolutely justified in his silently mouthed “not true” as Obama took that shot.

The President's Demagogic Breach of Decorum was also "Factually Incorrect"

Foreigners still can't contribute to US Political Campaigns:

Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case.

Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any "expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication." (Bradley A. Smith, Professor of Law)

From Quieting Corporations to Banning Books

President Obama is angry at the Supreme Court for upholding free speech

"the government maintained that the Constitution allows the government to ban distribution of books"

The Washington Post reminds us that the ACLU fought on the winning side of this decision.  Why?  Maybe it was the specter of government book banning.  Maybe this will convince the angry anti-corporatist liberals that there's more to this than meets the eye...

Implicit in its briefs but laid bare at oral argument, the government maintained that the Constitution allows the government to ban distribution of books over Amazon's Kindle; to prohibit a union from hiring a writer to author a book titled, "Why Working Americans Should Support the Obama Agenda"; and to prohibit Simon & Schuster from publishing, or Barnes & Noble from selling, a book containing even one line of advocacy for or against a candidate for public office.

As David Barry would say, "I am not making this up."
The Court said "no," and the only shocking thing about the decision is that the four liberal justices said "yes."
 
The next time you download a book on Kindle, buy a Michael Moore screed at Barnes & Noble, or order up a political movie from video on demand, remember that it is the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United that guarantees you the right to do so. (WSJ - Bradley A. Smith)

Modern-day legislation is an embarrassing congeries of capricious fiats and clawing usurpations.  The Supreme Court just knocked one down.  

Lady Liberty won this one, but we must remain vigilant.  The progressives' Long March will continue, this time with more louder propaganda!.

Steve Chapman also has good commentary on this

President Obama's Faith Based Community Organizing

Hey all you religious zealots who thought President Bush's Office Of Faith Based Initiatives was a good idea:

President Obama's social kommissars have hijacked the joint. Oh, the name won't change; they need the religious cover. Plaster a cross on the community organizin' and it's all good!

The Obama approach will keep the basic structure that the Bush administration took. There will be a White House-based office and Centers for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the executive agencies.
White House officials and outside advisors say that Obama's effort will be broader than his predecessor's and he will expand the scope of the office to include more emphasis on community organizations and a greater coordination with policymakers.

It's not all good. It's all bad. I said it then and I'll say it again. It was bad when Bush did it and it's bad now that Obama is doing it.

A religion can only sully itself by contact with the government. Jefferson's separation of Church and State goes both ways. Everybody worries about the US becoming an Evangelical theocracy when what they really should be worrying over is government's grubby mitts corrupting and besmudging religion.

First Amendment notwithstanding, government may prohibit the free exercise of a religious organization that voluntarily enters into a lawful agreement with it. That money has strings attached. That is why I am opposed to my religious organization taking any federal funds.

The Mormons, God bless 'em, have the good sense to stay away from this nonsense.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has operated an "effective welfare and humanitarian program for more than 60 years without government funding," spokesman Scott Trotter said Wednesday, signaling the church also is unlikely ever to accept federal money under Obama's initiatives.

That stance continues the approach taken by the church in 2001, when President Bush created the first faith-based initiative.

"We like to do [our welfare projects] on our own," the late President Gordon B. Hinckley said at the time. "Once the government is involved, regulations follow."

Here's a libertarian lesson for social conservatives who don't mind hijacking government for their own social causes. It doesn't look so good when the other side does it, does it?
The only honest answer to all this is to get government out of all extra-constitutional activities, including buying off and co-opting religious organizations.

Militant Atheism is Un-American

Believers and unbelievers of all stripes have equal standing under the law. We have no national religion, thank God. President Obama, like all presidents before him will include "So help me God" in his oath of office and will engage in prayer during the inauguration ceremony. This is free exercise of religion, and it compels no one to do anything against their belief system. Opposing this is Un-American and historically ignorant.

The Religion Clause of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

It's a simple phrase: The federal government can neither establish a religion nor prohibit people from exercising their religious beliefs. The founders' writings show that they believed faith in God to be essential to the survival of the Republic. Indeed, public prayer and acts of fasting were common in those days, practiced by these great men, but never mandated by government.

Consider this quote by the father of our country, George Washington, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

Thomas Jefferson saw no role whatsoever for the federal government in deciding religious issues:

"I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority."
--Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:428

Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story, anti-slavery judicial pioneer and constitutional scholar summarized the founders' intentions, as explained at Findlaw.com.

''Probably,'' Story also wrote, ''at the time of the adoption of the constitution and of the amendment to it, now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.''

8 The object, then, of the religion clauses in this view was not to prevent general governmental encouragement of religion, of Christianity, but to prevent religious persecution and to prevent a national establishment. 9

But then the lawyers entered in, and the justices twisted this simple concept beyond all recognition.

This interpretation has long since been abandoned by the Court, beginning, at least, with Everson v. Board of Education, 10 in which the Court, without dissent on this point, declared that the Establishment Clause forbids not only practices that ''aid one religion'' or ''prefer one religion over another,'' but as well those that ''aid all religions.''

We went from "Congress shall make no law" to prohibiting small town school boards from starting their meetings with a prayer. Now comes a man wishing to shut down public inauguration prayers and the use of the phrase "So help me God." Monte Kuligowski reports in The American Thinker:

With the approach of the presidential inauguration, America's most notorious atheist, Michael Newdow, is back in the headlines. Once again, he and an assortment of other plaintiffs are challenging the long-standing addendum, "So help me God," to the presidential oath of office. The lawsuit, filed by the American Humanist Association on Dec. 30, also challenges as unconstitutional, the pending invocation and benediction prayers to be offered respectively by Pastor Rick Warren and Rev. Joseph E. Lowery at the swearing-in ceremony of President-select Barack Obama on Jan. 20.

Kuligowski does an outstanding job explaining this constitutional travesty in layman's terms. If you care about the 1st Amendment and what has happened to it, I highly recommend this short article.

Atheist crusades such as these are a direct contradiction of the founding principles laid out by Jefferson, Madison and the other brilliant men who founded this country. While our founders would argue for the rights of atheists, they would vehemently disagree with those who seek to expunge all traces of God from society.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/inauguration_2009_so_help_me_g.html
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djclpp/index.php?action=showitem&id=38#F148
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/