Fire in a Crowded Theatre

     The left does not have much imagination.  Once they latch on to some belabored phrase or slogan they won't let go of it until they realize that no one is impressed by it anymore or they find a new toy.  A current liberal mantra is 'fire in a crowded theatre'.  Whenever a lefty wants to squelch free speech he reminds us that a Supreme Court justice once opined that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech does not protect a man who falsely yells 'fire' in a crowded theatre.  He will seek to squelch free speech through the 'fairness doctrine' or its equivalent by another name, and through campus speech codes which ban all expressions of politically incorrect views as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on, whether or not such expressions have anything at all to do with those subjects.  If you argue the First Amendment to them they will remind you that it does not protect the yelling of 'fire' in a crowded theatre when there is no fire. They keep going until everything becomes the equivalent of fire in a crowded theatre.  If they could have their way even the Declaration of Independence would approximate 'fire' in a crowded theatre.  (After all, they might remind us, wasn't it a rather alarmist document)?
     One of their goals currently is to use the Fairness Doctrine to silence conservative talk show hosts.  This would occur, or so the left hopes, by causing local stations and advertisers  eventually to cancel current-events daytime talk shows by claiming that they aren't being "fair" with their conservative  broadcasting.  The idea is that stations and advertisers would decide that the game is not worth the candle and go exclusively to sports, music and local issues. It hardly matters to the left that the reason that conservatism predominates on daytime radio and Fox News is that conservatism gets the ratings and the ratings and public preferences are what they are in a free market.  The liberals retain massive quantities of liberal media outlets, but they want it all.  If you tell them that they ought to respect freedom of speech across the board and be consistent they may respond that the First Amendment is all well and good but it doesn't protect someone yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre and, of course, anyone who goes around saying things they do not like is equivalent to a man who yells 'fire' in a crowded theatre.
   

Conservative Women and the Gender Gap

          Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Christine O'Donnell, and Michelle Bachmann, among  other conservative women, are savaged in a daily barage of phony ethics charges (Palin) and trumped up campaign finance investigations (O'Donnell) for the express and sole purpose of silencing all conservative women.  Sarah Palin alone frightens the left out of its wits.  The goal of the left is exactly the same as that of the Bolsheviks  in Russia, the emasculation of conservatism and freedom in the United States, their inability to articulate rational argument being rather obvious.  Radical leftists know that the survival of their party, the Democrat Party, depends on the gender gap and gaining and keeping the Latino vote in a solid block, like the always dependable African American vote.

     Make no mistake about it; the Democraticic Party has fundamentally changed since the days of Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and other good Americans who simply went too far with spending and high taxes.  And make no mistake about this either; the radical leftist could not care less about the "oppressed masses".  He cares about power --- his own.  His strategy is simply to cobble together a collection of minorities, women and the disaffected at election time, largely conceding the majority of white males to the Republicans.  Without the gender gap in their favor the left is toast and they know it, so they must try to destroy conservative women who dare to callenge them.  It takes courage for conservative women to stand up to the radical left and they deserve the support and encouragement of all conservatives. 

                                                                                                

Death Panels and Tom Daschle

     The claim that there was never a provision for "death panels" in the original version of the 2009 health reform act is hogwash.  There was, and now the Administration, having failed to insert it into legislation which Congress would not enact, is attempting to ram it down the unwilling throats of the people by executive fiat by claiming that it isn't there.  The Nazis and Soviet Communists both had the idea that those who could not work were expendible but in recent American history it was discovered and advanced by Tom Daschle, former Democratic senator from South Dakota.  Daschle was intrigued by the notion that Government could usefully decide when senior citizens had become too infirm to warrant expensive measures to keep them alive.  (And, after all, seniors tend to vote Republican).  Of course they wouldn't be called 'death panels'.  Daschle wasn't that stupid.  When you want something which no one else wants you invent some euphemism  for it.  As his reward for coming up with such a brilliant idea, Obama tried to give him a cabinet post.  Fortunately that failed.

     But that's exactly how the idea was, and is, intended to function because it is perfectly obvious that health care will have to be rationed under Obamacare and what better way is there to do it than to get a foot in the door and keep pushing the Saul Alinsky way?  First you create some law or executive order which appears innocuous enough.  Call the program end-of-life-counseling or some such nonsense.  That's the 'foot in the door'.  Then you "interpret" what you now have, and then go from there.  Voila, you have a death panel.

What is Socialism and What Isn't?

     A recent letter to the editor of a large urban newspaper expressed reservations about conservatives who inveigh against socialism.  The writer opined that we already have socialism in the form of public libraries, fire departments, schools and bridges, among other similar things, and nearly everyone approves of that.  Aren't those things socialistic and aren't conservatives hypocrites when they support them and then denounce proposals for such things as universal health insurance as socialistic?  No, that kind of question reflects a misunderstanding of what socialism is.  It is not taxation of the general public for purposes which serve the undifferentiated mass of people on a non-discriminatory basis.  Libraries serve all the people, rich, poor, both genders and all races.  One may choose not to use a library, but it's there for anyone who does.  Schools serve a general public purpose even for those who have no school-age children.  Even if such purposes are served by excessive taxation or bureaucratic excess they are not socialistic.  They are objectionable, if at all, on other grounds. 

     Socialism is the taking from one group of people, usually the "rich", to benefit another, generally for political purposes.  It's chief tools are income-leveling devices such as the graduated income tax, welfare and the like.  The purpose and result are different from public-purpose spending of which almost everyone approves when it is proportinate to a valid public purpose.

The Job of a Corporate CEO

     The job of a corporate CEO is to earn a profit for his stockholders through the cost-efficient production, allocation and distribution of goods and services.  This serves the interests of the stockholders, the labor deployed for these purposes, the consumer and the country as a whole.  A CEO who builds a factory at home in order to employ more American workers when he could build it in Europe more cost-efficiently can fairly be questioned by the stockholders.  He has no right to play Mr. Bountiful with their money any more than he has a moral right to loot the corporation for his own benefit. 

     For  over thirty years I worked with and around CEOs and other executives of corporations, mostly large ones.  From the standpoint of intelligence, character, personality and generosity top executives are, on average, a cut or two above the general population.  A few are crooks.  Some are skinflints.  Unfortunately there is a problem here with greed when it comes to outlandish compensation packages in too many cases.  On the whole, however, I would sight unseen bet  on the CEOs and other top executives of large corporations against those who never stop complaining about them but are typically tight-fisted with their own money, frequently with Scrooge-like tenacity.  Their generosity applies to your money, not theirs, in all too many cases.

Wilful ignorance

     I have often wondered how anyone can really be an atheist, as the idea of an accidental Universe seems completely implausible to me.  The great British physicist Fred Hoyle, who originated the term 'Big Bang' wrote in his book 'The Elegant Universe' that the likelyhood of an accidental Universe was equivalent to the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard would leave behind it a Boeing 747.  That does not mean that all non-Christian religions are absurb or even that virtual agnosticism is.  One does not have to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Jesus, to realize the extraordianry implausibility of a Universe which simply exnihilates itself --- comes into existence out of non-existence.  To go from there to Christianity is a long road, which is not travelled without effort.
     But the stakes are enormous.  On one side we find a putative Saviour, Jesus Christ, who promises salvation, eternal life, achieved via His own death and sacrifice, offered freely, as a gift to all who will accept it, and on other side, what?  Who knows, but there is no other religion in the world which even makes the same claims as Christianity.  Some are too strange for any reasonable person to accept, while others have at least some superficial plausibility, particulary some Eastern religions, as the great Christian writer C. S. Lewis acknowledged.
     Without now attempting to decide what is true and what isn't, how can any sensible person ignore the questions; who was Jesus?  Was He a real person?  Can He be believed?  Yet we have to recognize the reality of Wilful Ignorance.  In other words, some people do not care enough to ask questions about their eternal existence or absence thereof.  Why? Is it because Christians are unintelligent and lack the sophistication of wiser and more practical skeptics, atheists and agnostics?  No, that idea is demonstrably false.  Even in the previous century alone we had such great intellectual lights as C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers and J. R. R. Tolkien, and many, many others whose intellectual bona fides cannot be seriously questioned.  Maybe they were mistaken, but any idea that they were unsophisticated, unintelligent provincials is simply out of the question.  They were the opposite.  They were intellectual heavy weights.
     A few years ago on a social occassion a woman who knew I was a Christian asked me to explain what Christianity is.  I told her that the circumstances did not permit me to offer an adequate explanation but that I would give her a book which I believed would satisfy her curiosity and I added that I would be glad to talk to her another time.  Shortly thereafter I gave her C. S. Lewis' "Mere Christiantity", the best product on the market for the purpose at hand.  A month or so later I saw the woman, who told me that it was too technical and frankly "boring" so she stopped reading it after an hour or so.  Here was a person whose eternal destiny was at stake, or so I believe, who would not exert even minimal effort to understand and deal with the matter.  That isn't innocent ignorance which I believe God forgives and remedies either here or in the hereafter.  That is wilful ignorance, and I just don't understand it.

The Establishment Clause of the Constitution

     More misunderstanding exists about the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment than anything else in the Constitution, usually in support of the claims that the Founders of the nation were atheists, which not one of them was, and that they prescribed a "wall of separation" between church and state in order to protect the state from religious encroachments.  Many were  Deists which, in the fashion of the time, embraced the notion that God started the Universe off and then more or less left it alone.  In other words He did not interact with man or interfere with the natural course of events.   But He was quite real and, consistent with that, Thomas Jefferson, who was frequently slandered as an atheist, wrote to his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, in a letter dated April 21, 1803, that his views were ". . . the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions".  Jefferson then wrote "I am a Christian . . ." though he questioned whether God accomplished His purposes through miracles.  He was not an atheist nor were the others.  No atheist drafted the Declaration of Independence.  He described Jesus as "meek, benevolent, patient, firm, disinterested, and of the sublimest eloquence".

     The Establishment Clause was put in the Constitution to prevent Congress from interfering with established churches in the states, of which there were many at the time.  By his "wall of separation" Jefferson meant a wall which protected churches from interference by governments, not the reverse.  The ridiculous idea of an establishment of a federally-chartered church was not in the minds of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution