Last night there was some discussion that spread to a few topics. I mentioned some videos and books [and will tac on a couple] that I will merely link to here to make anyone interested [involved in the convo] to canvas. Enjoy.
This is not to prove or disprove any portion of the discussion. These are just articles or media I am familiar with that as I discuss these issues – they are some resources I am familiar with that I think others should be as well.
Money in Politics: What’s the Problem? (PRAGER U) | Is “campaign finance reform” a good way to regulate money in politics? Nationally syndicated, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and best-selling author George Will shows that, despite the innocent name given by its proponents, campaign finance reform is really a euphemism for controlling free speech. If the goal is to get money out of politics, the real solution is to get politics out of money. In other words, shrink government. In five minutes, learn the truth.
Campaign Finance Reform Corrupts (PRAGER U)| What corrupts politics more: Millionaires and billionaires? Or the rules that intend to limit the influence of wealthy donors? George Will, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, explains who designed campaign finance reform and why Congress’s solution to the problem may actually be the bigger problem.
David Bossie Explains How Liberals Mischaracterize Citizens United (RPT’S YOUTUBE)| Michael Medved interviews president of Citizens United, David Bossie. What I didn’t know is that the government was arguing for banning political books. Crazy!
Medved Explains Citizens United and “Corporations are People” Ideas (RPT’S YOUTUBE) | In this multi-part broadcast of the Michael Medved Show, the context of Romney’s “corporations are pole” is clearly explained. I add the entire show about Citizens United (Medved loves to take dissenting calls, so make sure you listen to them) and what this ruling means.
Justice Scalia on Citizens United (C-SPAN) | During a C-SPAN Q&A interview, Justice Antonin Scalia discusses Citizens United. Watch the complete interview on Sunday, July 29 at 8:00 p.m. ET on C-SPAN.
3 Reasons Not To Sweat The “Citizens United” SCOTUS Ruling (REASON TV)| No recent Supreme Court ruling have evoked more liberal fury than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a campaign-finance case involving government censorship of a political documentary called Hillary: The Movie.
Civil War
What Was the Civil War Over? (RPT)| A long post of mine brining a few of the [immediately] below videos together — separated below for ease of access:
Was the Civil War About Slavery? (PRAGER U) | What caused the Civil War? Did the North care about abolishing slavery? Did the South secede because of slavery? Or was it about something else entirely…perhaps states’ rights? Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, settles the debate.
Professor Colonel Ty Seidule On the Civil War (RPT’S YOUTUBE) | Dennis Prager interviews Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colonel Ty Seidule, about the recent Prager University video on the reasons for the Civil War
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (again, 1858) | Notes from Lincoln (Douglas Debate):
“If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B — why not B snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?
You say A is a white, and B is black. It is –color–, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be the slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.
You do not mean color exactly? — You mean the whites are –intellectually– the superiors of the blacks, and therefore, have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
But, say you, it is a question of –interest; and, if you can make it your –interest–, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”
Confronting Civil War Revisionism: Why The South Went To War (WALL BUILDERS)| ….From December 1860 through August 1861, the southern states met individually in their respective state conventions to decide whether to secede from the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to decide in the affirmative, and its secession document repeatedly declared that it was leaving the Union to preserve slavery….
Of Course The Civil War Was About Slavery (PACIFIC STANDARD)| Concrete concerns about saving and expanding slavery, and not the nebulous theology of states’ rights, ignited the U.S. Civil War. Why does that message keep getting lost?
Industry and Economy during the Civil War (NATIONAL PARK SERVICE) | …the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the prewar years was almost exclusively limited to the regions north of the Mason-Dixon line, leaving much of the South far behind….
Crippled by Their Culture – Thomas Sowell (WSJ) | ….The North had four times as many schools as the South, attended by more than four times as many students. Children in Massachusetts spent more than twice as many years in school as children in Virginia. Such disparities obviously produce other disparities. Northern newspapers had more than four times the circulation of Southern newspapers. Only 8% of the patents issued in 1851 went to Southerners. Even though agriculture was the principal economic activity of the antebellum South at the time, the vast majority of the patents for agricultural inventions went to Northerners. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Northerner…..
Slavery Did Not Make America Richer (AIER) | (A lot of good information regarding the Southern economy)
TWO BOOKS I highly recommend:
What This Cruel War Was Over | With letters from the soldiers themselves and battlefield communiques, what did the men on the ground think the war was over;
Half Slave and Half Free | One of the best books combining the time from our founding to the roots of the Civil War.
(HUFFPO):
…Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, said the Southern states would fight to keep “the negro” in “his place” in a hard-to-misread statement on the day the Civil War began:
Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material — the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory. The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.
Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, cited slavery as the reason for going to war in 1861 and rallied in its defense until his death in 1889. His take on the Emancipation Proclamation, reiterated in his memoirs, is quite telling:
A proclamation, dated on January 1, 1863, signed and issued by the President of the United States, orders and declares all slaves within ten of the States of the Confederacy to be free, except such as are found in certain districts now occupied in part by the armed forces of the enemy. We may well leave it to the instinct of that common humanity, which a beneficent Creator has implanted in the breasts of our fellow-men of all countries, to pass judgment on a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race — peaceful, contented laborers in their sphere — are doomed to extermination, while at the same time they are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters by the insidious recommendation “to abstain from violence, unless in necessary self-defense.”
The Confederate leaders couldn’t have been clearer about what they were fighting for….
WMDs
WMD (RPT)| Why this VERY LONG post? Originally this was a debate in a forum involving a professor of history from the University of Michigan during the beginning years of the Iraq War. The forum this particular debate took place in shut down and so I lost a bulk of my responses to the professor. No matter, what I did save has transformed into a continuing response to the many past [and still popular] mantras from the left regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).
While I have updated this post recently, there shouldn’t be too many more updates needed for it. You see, when the New York Times (NYTs) caves on the issue, the Left is then forced — yes forced — to reason through the issue. Voltaire said “once the people begin to reason, all is lost.” And it is because the progressive democrat lives by emotion… simple, rudimentary, brutish responses to their environment. Deep thinking is a hand in cards they will never get.
Commerce Clause
Wickard v. Filburn (1942)
Commerce Clause Just Keeps On Expanding (HERITAGE FOUNDATION) | “Whatever the correct interpretation of the foreign commerce power may be,” Justice Thomas wrote, “it does not confer upon Congress a virtually plenary power over global economic activity.”
Appellate Court Upholds Constitutionality of Federal Hate Crimes Act Conviction Based on the Commerce Clause (REASON.COM)| The decision is a complicated ruling that potentially sets a dangerous precedent for the scope of federal power under the Constitution.
Commerce, Commerce, Everywhere: The Uses and Abuses of the Commerce Clause (HERITAGE FOUNDATION)| Over the course of the last decades, the commerce clause has been used as a primary source for the regulatory expansion of the national government. This reading of the clause, granting virtually unlimited regulatory power over the economy to the federal government, came out of a series of Supreme Court decisions at the time of the New Deal.
Commerce Clause: Not a Grant of Unlimited Congressional Power (FREEDOM WORKS) | The Commerce Clause is a short phrase of 16 words, none of which are difficult to understand. Despite this, the clause is one of the most misunderstood in the Constitution. Unfortunately, abuse of the Commerce Clause has justified a massive expansion of federal government interventions in the marketplace and in the lives of everyday Americans. From nationalizing labor laws to the EPA regulating mercury and carbon dioxide emissions, the expansion of the Commerce Clause has redefined the scope of government.
Commerce Clause Abuse: How Congress Circumvents Both the Letter and Spirit of the Constitution (CAPITALIST MAGAZINE – WALTER WILLIAMS) | Several weeks ago, under the title “Is It Permissible?” I discussed how Congress systematically abuses the Constitution’s “welfare clause” to control our lives in ways that would have been an abomination to the Framers. Quite a few readers pointed to my omission of Congress’ companion tool to circumvent both the letter and spirit of the Constitution, namely the “Commerce Clause.”
Back to the Future? (TOWNHALL – THOMAS SOWELL) | When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know that something unusual is going on.
QUOTE MENTIONED
Of course the history of this movement (“feminism” ~ not the suffrage movement) has been this radical for quite some time, as one liberal professor* explains in his book The Dark Side of the Left:
Among the most important legacies of the 1960s and the New Left is the contemporary feminist movement.(a) Of course, feminism, even its more radical variants, long predates the 1960s. In the decades before the Civil War, radical abolitionists such as Stephen Foster and Abigail Kelley assailed the patriarchal family structure and the “slavery of sex,”(b) while nineteenth-century utopian communities strove to construct alternatives to the conventional bourgeois family, in some cases forbidding marriage in favor of “free love,” in others separating children from their Parents so the young could be raised by the collective rather than the “isolated household.”(c) The term “feminism” itself came into widespread Usage in the United States during the early 1960s, at the height of Progressive ferment.(d) Those who identified themselves as “feminists” in the 1910s sharply distinguished the new “feminism” from the old “suffragism.” For these new self-described feminists, the vote was seen not as an end in itself but as a means to achieve what one activist described as a “complete social revolution” in gender relationships.(e) Their aim was not only the political inclusion of women but a radical restructuring of private relationships between the sexes. For these early-twentieth-century feminists, the personal was political.(f)
Feminism, then, was not born moderate and then radicalized by the 1960s. From its inception, the term “feminism,” in the minds of both its proponents and its opponents, has been linked with radicalism and even socialism.(g) “Feminism,” as Nancy Cott explains, “was born ideologically on the left of the political spectrum, first espoused by women who were familiar with advocacy of socialism and who, advantaged by bourgeois backgrounds, nonetheless identified more with labor than with capital.”(h) Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, both self-proclaimed feminists and socialists, frequently used the pages of the Masses to plead the case for the emancipation of women, and Randolph Bourne saw Greenwich Village feminism as a leading edge in the radical assault on deadening bourgeois conventions.(i)
Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 193-194:
(a) See Stephen Macedo, ed., Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York: Norton, 1997), especially the chapters by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jeremy Rabkin, and Martha Nussbaum.
(b) See Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
(c) Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), especially 86-91. Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), especially 197-211, 35363; “isolated household” quotation on 19q. John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870 John L. Thomas, “Antislavery and Utopia,” in Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 257. Robert F. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 106, 199, 215; also see 66-72 for a description of the Women’s Commonwealth, or the Sanctified Sisters of Belton, which Fogarty characterizes as “the first feminist collective in the United States” (66).
(d)Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 3, 13-15.
(e) Ibid., 15.
(f) Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1863: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Vintage, 1965), 90.
(g) Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 15, 35. Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922; reprint ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), 74-92. Lasch, New Radicalism in America, 91.
(h) Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 35.
(i)June Sochen, ed., The New Feminism in Twentieth-Century America (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1971), viii–ix, 33-36, 45-46. Lasch, New Radicalism in America, 91.
* In his second paragraph, Ellis quickly points out that he is a lifelong Democrat, a card-carrying member of the ACLU, an environmentalist, a supporter of women’s rights and a federalist.
ALSO OF NOTE IN REGARDS TO RADICAL POLITICAL BEHAVIOR:
Wall Street bombing of 1920, bombing that struck Wall Street in New York City on September 16, 1920, killing 38 people and injuring hundreds more. No group claimed responsibility for the crime, which remains unsolved. (Wall Street bombing of 1920 – BRITTANICA)
Her bed became a veritable meeting place for the Fabian (socialist) upper crust: H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Arbthnot Lane, and Norman Haire. And of course, it was then that she began her unusual and temptuouse affaire with Havelock Ellis…. virtually all of her Socialist friends, lovers, and comrades were committed Eugenicists as well—from the followers of Lenin in Revolutionary Socialism, like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Julius Hammer,” to the followers of Hitler in National Socialism, like Ernest Rudin, Leon Whitney, and Harry Laughlin.” But it wasn’t simply sentiment or politics that drew Margaret into the Eugenic fold. She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.” (Margaret Sanger and the Racist History of Planned Parenthood — RPT)
Political Spectrums
I just remembered we discussed political spectrums a bit. I deal with that graphic in a post looking at various aspects of the issue, also dissecting a tad graphs discussing “political spectrums” – and you (AJ) mentioning you had not heard it put like that. Here is my understanding/use of it….
TWO LINKS TO FOLLOW – the first has more graphs and is my old, combined posts discussing political spectrums. The second is the Capitol Riots and the varying political spectrums there.
