HERE'S A GREAT VISUALIZATION ON THE AMERICAN DEBT!

I DARE ANY LIBERAL PROGRESSIVE TO DENY THAT OBAMA HAS MADE THIS PROBLEM WORSE BY HIS LAME-BRAINED POLICIES OVER THE LAST 2 1/2 YEARS. BLAME BUSH ALL YOU WANT [For his part of it], OBAMA HASN'T HAD ANY HELP DOING WHAT HE'S DONE. THE TOTAL BLAME NOW IS HIS! HERE END'TH THE LESSON: GO HERE TO LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR DEBT AS NOTHING YOU'VE SEEN BEFORE! http://www.wtfnoway.com/

A Patriot's History Of The Modern World!

This National Debt is not exceptible! It is plainly "Generational Stealing"

BOTH PARTIES MADE THIS MESS...AND BOTH PARTIES MUST CLEAN IT UP!

Issues that matter

BLAME AMERICA FIRST? What's wrong with Progressives anyway?





The progressive movement in America was born of a small cancerous cell in the 1920's

and has grown into a massive monster of a political machine, by infiltrating BOTH

PARTIES.

If any politician in America has the slightest bit of this cancer in them they are NOT

TO BE TRUSTED.... PERIOD!

Here is a story that is meant as a Joke but has the makings of a true event in telling just how Liberals view our freedom which they USE EVERYDAY to tear apart our constitution:

A Harley biker is riding by the zoo in Washington, DC when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.
The biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.

Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly. A reporter who was there was watching the event.

The reporter addressing the Harley rider says,"Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I've ever seen a man do in my whole life."

The Harley rider replies,"Why it was nothing at all, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger and acted as I felt right."

The reporter says, "Well I'll make sure this story won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, you know, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page....So, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?

The biker replies, "I'm a US Marine and a Republican." The journalist leaves.
The following day the biker buys the paper to see if indeed the story was there of his actions, and as he reads the front page in SHOCK: "US Marine Assaults African Immigrant and Steals His Lunch"

This story pretty much sums up the Media's approach to the News these days.
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world."
Abraham Lincoln

 
"Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure."
Abraham Lincoln 
Read

By Naomi Wolf

"God cannot alter the past, though historians can." ~Samuel Butler, "Prose Observations"

"History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided." ~Konrad Adenauer

Read the following speech and see how we viewed America during the Reagan years!

And go here to READ THE BOOK "USEFUL IDIOTS"






1984 Jeane Kirkpatrick speech at the Republican National Convention
"Thank you very much for that warm welcome.
Thank you for inviting me.
This is the first Republican Convention I have ever attended.
I am grateful that you should invite me, a lifelong Democrat. On the other hand, I realize that you are inviting many lifelong Democrats to join this common cause.
I want to begin tonight by quoting the speech of the president whom I very greatly admire, Harry Truman, who once said to the Congress:
"The United States has become great because we, as a people, have been able to work together for great objectives even while differing about details."
He continued:
"The elements of our strength are many. They include our democratic government, our economic system, our great natural resources. But, the basic source of our strength is spiritual. We believe in the dignity of man."
That's the way Democratic presidents and presidential candidates used to talk about America.
These were the men who developed NATO, who developed the Marshall Plan, who devised the Alliance for Progress.
They were not afraid to be resolute nor ashamed to speak of America as a great nation. They didn't doubt that we must be strong enough to protect ourselves and to help others.
They didn't imagine that America should depend for its very survival on the promises of its adversaries.
They happily assumed the responsibilities of freedom.
I am not alone in noticing that the San Francisco Democrats took a very different approach.
Foreign Affairs
A recent article in The New York Times noted that "the foreign policy line that emerged from the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco is a distinct shift from the policies of such [Democratic] presidents as Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson."
I agree.
I shall speak tonight of foreign affairs even though the other party's convention barely touched the subject.
When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.
Today, foreign policy is central to the security, to the freedom, to the prosperity, even to the survival of the United States.
And our strength, for which we make many sacrifices, is essential to the independence and freedom of our allies and our friends.
Ask yourself:
What would become of Europe if the United States withdrew?
What would become of Africa if Europe fell under Soviet domination?
What would become of Europe if the Middle East came under Soviet control?
What would become of Israel, if surrounded by Soviet client states?
What would become of Asia if the Philippines or Japan fell under Soviet domination?
What would become of Mexico if Central America became a Soviet satellite?
What then could the United States do?
These are questions the San Francisco Democrats have not answered. These are questions they haven't even asked.
Carter Administration
The United States cannot remain an open, democratic society if we are left alone - a garrison state in a hostile world.
We need independent nations with whom to trade, to consult and cooperate.
We need friends and allies with whom to share the pleasures and the protection of our civilization.
We cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the subversion of others' independence or to the development of new weapons by our adversaries or of new vulnerabilities by our friends.
The last Democratic administration did not seem to notice much, or care much or do much about these matters.
And at home and abroad, our country slid into real deep trouble.
North and South, East and West, our relations deteriorated.
The Carter administration's motives were good, but their policies were inadequate, uninformed and mistaken.
They made things worse, not better.
Those who had least, suffered most.
Poor countries grew poorer.
Rich countries grew poorer, too.
The United States grew weaker.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union grew stronger.
The Carter administration's unilateral "restraint" in developing and deploying weapon systems was accompanied by an unprecedented Soviet buildup, military and political.
The Soviets, working on the margins and through the loopholes of SALT I, developed missiles of stunning speed and accuracy and targeted the cities of our friends in Europe.
They produced weapons capable of wiping out our land-based missiles.
And then, feeling strong, the Soviet leaders moved with boldness and skill to exploit their new advantages.
Facilities were completed in Cuba during those years that permit Soviet nuclear submarines to roam our coasts, that permit planes to fly reconnaissance missions over the eastern United States, and that permit Soviet electronic surveillance to monitor our telephone calls and our telegrams.
Those were the years the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran, while in Nicaragua and Sandanista developed a one-party dictatorship based on the Cuban model.
From the fall of Saigon in 1975 'til January 1981, Soviet influence expanded dramatically into Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Yemen, Libya, Syria, Aden, Congo, Madagascar, Seychelles, Nicaragua, and Grenada.
Soviet block forces and advisers sought to guarantee what they called the "irreversibility" of their newfound influence and to stimulate insurgencies in a dozen other places.
During this period, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, murdered its president and began a ghastly war against the Afghan people.
The American people were shocked by these events.
We were greatly surprised to learn of our diminished economic and military strength.
We were demoralized by the treatment of our hostages in Iran.
And we were outraged by harsh attacks on the United States in the United Nations.
As a result, we lost confidence in ourselves and in our government.
Jimmy Carter looked for an explanation for all these problems and thought he found it in the American people.
But the people knew better.
It wasn't malaise we suffered from; it was Jimmy Carter - and Walter Mondale.
Election of Ronald Reagan
And so, in 1980, the American people elected a very different president.
The election of Ronald Reagan marked an end to the dismal period of retreat and decline.
His inauguration, blessed by the simultaneous release of our hostages, signaled an end to the most humiliating episode in our national history.
The inauguration of President Reagan signaled a reaffirmation of historic American ideals.
Ronald Reagan brought to the presidency confidence in the American experience.
Confidence in the legitimacy and success of American institutions.
Confidence in the decency of the American people.
And confidence in the relevance of our experience to the rest of the world.
That confidence has proved contagious.
Our nation's subsequent recovery in domestic and foreign affairs, the restoration of military and economic strength has silenced the talk of inevitable American decline and reminded the world of the advantages of freedom.
President Reagan faced a stunning challenge and he met it.
In the 3 1/2 years since his inauguration, the United States has grown stronger, safer, more confident, and we are at peace.
The Reagan administration has restored the American economy.
It is restoring our military strength.
It has liberated the people of Grenada from terror and tyranny.
With NATO, it has installed missiles to defend the cities of Europe.
The Reagan administration has prevented the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations.
It has developed flexible new forms of international cooperation with which to deal with new threats to world order.
The Reagan administration has given more economic assistance to developing countries than any other administration or any other government, and has encouraged the economic freedom needed to promote self-sustaining economic growth.
The Reagan administration has helped to sustain democracy and encourage its development elsewhere.
And at each step of the way, the same people who were responsible for America's decline have insisted that the president's policies would fail.
They said we could never deploy missiles to protect Europe's cities.
But today Europe's cities enjoy that protection.
They said it would never be possible to hold an election in El Salvador because the people were too frightened and the country too disorganized.
But the people of El Salvador proved them wrong, and today President Napoleon Duarte has impressed the democratic world with his skillful, principled leadership.
They said we could not use America's strength to help others - Sudan, Chad, Central America, the Gulf states, the Caribbean nations - without being drawn into war.
But we have helped others resist Soviet, Libyan, Cuban subversion, and we are at peace.
Blame America First
They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do - they didn't blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians - they blamed the United States instead.
But then, somehow, they always blame America first.
When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the "blame America first crowd" didn't blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.
But then, they always blame America first.
The American people know better.
They know that Ronald Reagan and the United States didn't cause Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, or the repression in Poland, or the brutal new offensives in Afghanistan, or the destruction of the Korean airliner, or the new attacks on religious and ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, or the jamming of western broadcasts, or the denial of Jewish emigration, or the brutal imprisonment of Anatoly Shcharansky and Ida Nudel, or the obscene treatment of Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, or the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union.
The American people know that it's dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems that we did not cause.
They understand just as the distinguished French writer, Jean Francois Revel, understands the dangers of endless self- criticism and self-denigration.
He wrote: "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
With the election of Ronald Reagan, the American people declared to the world that we have the necessary energy and conviction to defend ourselves, and that we have as well a deep commitment to peace.
And now, the American people, proud of our country, proud of our freedom, proud of ourselves, will reject the San Francisco Democrats and send Ronald Reagan back to the White House.
Thank you very much."
(Sources: This is the Associated Press text of United Nations Representative Jeane J. Kirkpatrick's speech as delivered Aug. 20 to the Republican National Convention, in Dallas.)




"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution.

That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."

Abraham Lincoln

"I am a firm believer in the people.

If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts."

Abraham Lincoln

"If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday." ~Pearl Buck

Read these great BOOKS online (Limited Pages) To find a wealth if information about just what's going on with REAL AMERICAN HISTORY in Textbooks plus just what Politicians in Washington are doing to sculpt your Kids into their "Minions of the ignorant next Generation!"
"A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents." ~Richard Reeves
"History is past politics, and politics present history. "~John Robert Seeley, The Growth of British Policy

"History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves." ~George Macaulay Trevelyan
"A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia." ~David McCullough

"History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make. ~Author Unknown

A country without a memory is a country of madmen."

George Santayana

"If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development."

Aristotle

"We investigate the past not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened."

T. F. Tout

1.) Peace & freedom: foreign policy for a constitutional republic

By Ted Galen Carpenter

2.) Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame ...

By Mona Charen

3.) "Lies my teacher told me: everything your American history textbook got wrong" by James W. Loewen

4.) The American educational review, Volume 29 1907 an interesting read to see just how education was in 1907

5.) The American Nation, a History: Farrand, L. Basis of American history, 1500-1900 By Lyon Gardiner Tyler 1904

6.) American History Told by Contemporaries: Welding of the nation, 1845-1900‎

by Albert Bushnell Hart 1901

7.) A history of the American nation‎ - by Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin 1912

8.) Selections from early American writers, 1607-1800

By William B. Cairns 1909

9.) The American Hebrew‎ - 1896

10.) What hath God wrought: the transformation of America, 1815-1848

By Daniel Walker Howe

11.) Words that work: it's not what you say, it's what people hear by Frank I. Luntz

12.) The language police: how pressure groups restrict what students learn‎ by Diane Ravitch -  2003

13.) Chicken soup for the kid's soul: 101 stories of courage, hope, and laughter by Jack Canfield, Patty Hansen 1998

14.) Evolution in the courtroom: a reference guide‎ by Randy Moore

15.) Christian evidences viewed in relation to modern thought: Eight lectures ..By Charles Adolphus Row 1877

16.) The making of American liberal theology: idealism, realism, and modernity ...By Gary J. Dorrien

17.) Hello, Everybody!: The Dawn of American Radio‎ By Anthony J. Rudel

Anthony Rudel tells the story of the boisterous years when radio took its place in the nation's living room and forever changed American politics, journalism, and entertainment.

18.) Liberal fascism: the secret history of the American left, from Mussolini onward! By Jonah Goldberg The following work is by the Liberals themselves telling us HOW they frame the debate against Capitalism and the Right- read it and get to know the Enemy of America

19.) Don't think of an elephant!: know your values and frame the debate

Don't Think of an Elephant!is the definitive handbook for understanding what happened in the 2004 election and communicating effectively about key issues facing America today. Author George Lakoff has become a key advisor to the Democratic party, helping them develop their message and frame the political debate. In this book Lakoff explains how conservatives think, and how to counter their arguments.

He outlines in detail the traditional American values that progressives hold, but are often unable to articulate. Lakoff also breaks down the ways in which conservatives have framed the issues, and provides examples of how progressives can reframe the debate.

Lakoff's years of research and work with environmental and political leaders have been distilled into this essential guide, which shows progressives how to think in terms of values instead of programs, and why people vote their values and identities, often against their best interests. Don't Think of An Elephant!is the antidote to the last forty years of conservative strategizing and the right wing's stranglehold on political dialogue in the United States. Read it, take action-and help take America back.

by George Lakoff

20.) The progressive era's health reform movement: a historical dictionary By Ruth C. Engs

Religious, political, social, and health reform earmarked the Progressive Era. The era's health reform movement--like today's clean living movement--saw campaigns against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and sexuality. It included crusades for exercise, vegetarian diets, and alternative health care and concerns about eugenics and new diseases.

Covering the years leading up to the Progressive Era through the 1920s, this book provides entries on the central figures, events, crusades, legislation, publications and terms of the health reform movements, while a detailed timeline ties health reform to political, social, and religious movements. A valuable resource for scholars, students, and laymen interested in earlier health reform movements.

 



PROGRESSIVES TO VOTE OUT:

Congressional Members of the
Progressive Caucus

Rep Earl Hilliard (AL-07)
Rep Eni Faleomavaega (AS-AL)
Rep Ed Pastor (AZ-02)
Rep Lynn C Woolsey (CA-06)
Rep George Miller (CA-07)
Rep Nancy Pelosi (CA-08)
Rep Fortney "Pete" Stark (CA-13)
Rep Henry A. Waxman (CA-29)
Rep Xavier Becerra (CA-30)
Rep Julian C. Dixon (CA-32)
Rep Esteban Edward Torres (CA-34)
Rep Maxine Waters (CA-35)
Rep George E. Brown (CA-42)
Rep Bob Filner (CA-50)
Rep Diane DeGette (CO-01)
Rep Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC-AL)
Rep Corrine Brown (FL-03)
Rep Carrie P. Meek (FL-17)
Rep Alcee L. Hastings (FL-23)
Rep Cynthia A. McKinney (GA-04)
Rep John Lewis (GA-05)
Rep Neil Abercrombie (HI-01)
Rep Patsy Mink (HI-02)
Rep Jesse Jackson (IL-02)
Rep Luis Gutierrez (IL-04)
Rep Danny Davis (IL-07)
Rep Lane Evans (IL-17)
Rep Julia Carson (IN-10)
Rep John Olver (MA-01)
Rep Jim McGovern (MA-03)
Rep Barney Frank (MA-04)
Rep John Tierney (MA-06)
Rep David Bonior (MI-10)
Rep Lynn N. Rivers (MI-13)
Rep John Conyers (MI-14)
Rep Bennie G. Thompson (MS-02)
Rep Melvin L. Watt (NC-12)
Rep Donald Payne (NJ-10)
Rep Jerrold Nadler (NY-08)
Rep Major Owens (NY-11)
Rep Nydia M. Velazquez (NY-12)
Rep Charles Rangel (NY-15)
Rep Maurice Hinchey (NY-26)
Rep John LaFalce (NY-29)
Rep Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Rep Dennis Kucinich (OH-10)
Rep Louis Stokes (OH-11)
Rep Sherrod Brown (OH-13)
Rep Elizabeth Furse (OR-01)
Rep Peter A. DeFazio (OR-04)
Rep Chaka Fattah (PA-02)
Rep William Coyne (PA-14)
Rep Carlos A. Romero-Barcelo (PR-AL)
Rep Robert C. Scott (VA-03)
Rep Bernard Sanders (VT-AL)
Rep James A. McDermott (WA-07)


July 18, 2007

The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics



by Thomas G. West and William A. Schambra

First Principles #12

Progressivism was the reform movement that ran from the late 19th century through the first decades of the 20th century, during which leading intellectuals and social reformers in the United States sought to address the economic, political, and cultural questions that had arisen in the context of the rapid changes brought with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern capitalism in America.

The Progressives believed that these changes marked the end of the old order and required the creation of a new order appropriate for the new industrial age.

There are, of course, many different representations of Progressivism: the literature of Upton Sinclair, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the history of Charles Beard, the educational system of John Dewey.

In politics and political thought, the movement is associated with political leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Charles Merriam.

While the Progressives differed in their assessment of the problems and how to resolve them, they generally shared in common the view that government at every level must be actively involved in these reforms.

The existing constitutional system was outdated and must be made into a dynamic, evolving instrument of social change, aided by scientific knowledge and the development of administrative bureaucracy.

At the same time, the old system was to be opened up and made more democratic; hence, the direct elections of Senators, the open primary, the initiative and referendum.

It also had to be made to provide for more revenue; hence, the Sixteenth Amendment and the progressive income tax.

Presidential leadership would provide the unity of direction--the vision--needed for true progressive government. "All that progressives ask or desire," wrote Woodrow Wilson, "is permission--in an era when development, evolution, is a scientific word--to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine."

What follows is a discussion about the effect that Progressivism has had--and continues to have--on American politics and political thought. The remarks stem from the publication of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), to which Dr. West contributed.

Remarks by Thomas G. West

The thesis of our book, The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, is that Progressivism transformed American politics. What was that transformation? It was a total rejection in theory, and a partial rejection in practice, of the principles and policies on which America had been founded and on the basis of which the Civil War had been fought and won only a few years earlier. When I speak of Progressivism, I mean the movement that rose to prominence between about 1880 and 1920.

In a moment I will turn to the content of the Progressive conception of politics and to the contrast between that approach and the tradition, stemming from the founding, that it aimed to replace. But I would like first to emphasize how different is the assessment of Progressivism presented in our book, The Progressive Revolution, from the understanding that prevails among most scholars. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that few scholars, especially among students of American political thought, regard the Progressive Era as having any lasting significance in American history. In my own college and graduate student years, I cannot recall any of the famous teachers with whom I studied saying anything much about it. Among my teachers were some very impressive men: Walter Berns, Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, Martin Diamond, Harry Neumann, and Leo Strauss.

Today, those who speak of the formative influences that made America what it is today tend to endorse one of three main explanations. Some emphasize material factors such as the closing of the frontier, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the modern corporation, and accidental emergencies such as wars or the Great Depression, which in turn led to the rise of the modern administrative state.

Second is the rational choice explanation. Morris Fiorina and others argue that once government gets involved in providing extensive services for the public, politicians see that growth in government programs enables them to win elections. The more government does, the easier it is for Congressmen to do favors for voters and donors.

Third, still other scholars believe that the ideas of the American founding itself are responsible for current developments. Among conservatives, Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah adopts the gloomy view that the Founders' devotion to the principles of liberty and equality led inexorably to the excesses of today's welfare state and cultural decay. Allan Bloom's best-selling The Closing of the American Mind presents a more sophisticated version of Bork's argument. Liberals like Gordon Wood agree, but they think that the change in question is good, not bad. Wood writes that although the Founders themselves did not understand the implications of the ideas of the Revolution, those ideas eventually "made possible…all our current egalitarian thinking."

My own view is this: Although the first two of the three mentioned causes (material circumstances and politicians' self-interest) certainly played a part, the most important cause was a change in the prevailing understanding of justice among leading American intellectuals and, to a lesser extent, in the American people. Today's liberalism and the policies that it has generated arose from a conscious repudiation of the principles of the American founding.

If the contributors to The Progressive Revolution are right, Bork and Bloom are entirely wrong in their claim that contemporary liberalism is a logical outgrowth of the principles of the founding. During the Progressive Era, a new theory of justice took hold. Its power has been so great that Progressivism, as modified by later developments within contemporary liberalism, has become the predominant view in modern American education, media, popular culture, and politics. Today, people who call themselves conservatives and liberals alike accept much of the Progressive view of the world. Although few outside of the academy openly attack the Founders, I know of no prominent politician, and only the tiniest minority of scholars, who altogether support the Founders' principles.

The Progressive Rejection of the Founding

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, a large majority of Americans shared a set of beliefs concerning the purpose of government, its structure, and its most important public policies. Constitutional amendments were passed abolishing slavery and giving the national government the authority to protect the basic civil rights of everyone. Here was a legal foundation on which the promise of the American Revolution could be realized in the South, beyond its already existing implementation in the Northern and Western states.

This post-Civil War consensus was animated by the principles of the American founding. I will mention several characteristic features of that approach to government and contrast them with the new, Progressive approach. Between about 1880 and 1920, the earlier orientation gradually began to be replaced by the new one. In the New Deal period of the 1930s, and later even more decisively in the 1960s and '70s, the Progressive view, increasingly radicalized by its transformation into contemporary liberalism, became predominant.

1. The Rejection of Nature and the Turn to History

The Founders believed that all men are created equal and that they have certain inalienable rights. All are also obliged to obey the natural law, under which we have not only rights but duties. We are obliged "to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves" (Jefferson). The main rights were thought to be life and liberty, including the liberty to organize one's own church, to associate at work or at home with whomever one pleases, and to use one's talents to acquire and keep property. For the Founders, then, there is a natural moral order--rules discovered by human reason that promote human well-being, rules that can and should guide human life and politics.

The Progressives rejected these claims as naive and unhistorical. In their view, human beings are not born free. John Dewey, the most thoughtful of the Progressives, wrote that freedom is not "something that individuals have as a ready-made possession." It is "something to be achieved." In this view, freedom is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making, a gift of the state. Man is a product of his own history, through which he collectively creates himself. He is a social construct. Since human beings are not naturally free, there can be no natural rights or natural law. Therefore, Dewey also writes, "Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology."

Since the Progressives held that nature gives man little or nothing and that everything of value to human life is made by man, they concluded that there are no permanent standards of right. Dewey spoke of "historical relativity." However, in one sense, the Progressives did believe that human beings are oriented toward freedom, not by nature (which, as the merely primitive, contains nothing human), but by the historical process, which has the character of progressing toward increasing freedom. So the "relativity" in question means that in all times, people have views of right and wrong that are tied to their particular times, but in our time, the views of the most enlightened are true because they are in conformity with where history is going.

2. The Purpose of Government

For the Founders, thinking about government began with the recognition that what man is given by nature--his capacity for reason and the moral law discovered by reason--is, in the most important respect, more valuable than anything government can give him. Not that nature provides him with his needs. In fact, the Founders thought that civilization is indispensable for human well-being. Although government can be a threat to liberty, government is also necessary for the security of liberty. As Madison wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." But since men are not angels, without government, human beings would live in "a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger." In the Founders' view, nature does give human beings the most valuable things: their bodies and minds. These are the basis of their talents, which they achieve by cultivating these natural gifts but which would be impossible without those gifts.

For the Founders, then, the individual's existence and freedom in this crucial respect are not a gift of government. They are a gift of God and nature. Government is therefore always and fundamentally in the service of the individual, not the other way around. The purpose of government, then, is to enforce the natural law for the members of the political community by securing the people's natural rights. It does so by preserving their lives and liberties against the violence of others. In the founding, the liberty to be secured by government is not freedom from necessity or poverty. It is freedom from the despotic and predatory domination of some human beings over others.

Government's main duty for the Founders is to secure that freedom--at home through the making and enforcement of criminal and civil law, abroad through a strong national defense. The protection of life and liberty is achieved through vigorous prosecutions of crime against person and property or through civil suits for recovery of damages, these cases being decided by a jury of one's peers.

The Progressives regarded the Founders' scheme as defective because it took too benign a view of nature. As Dewey remarked, they thought that the individual was ready-made by nature. The Founders' supposed failure to recognize the crucial role of society led the Progressives to disparage the Founders' insistence on limited government. The Progressive goal of politics is freedom, now understood as freedom from the limits imposed by nature and necessity. They rejected the Founders' conception of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of the individual pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state.

To this end, Dewey writes, "the state has the responsibility for creating institutions under which individuals can effectively realize the potentialities that are theirs." So although "it is true that social arrangements, laws, institutions are made for man, rather than that man is made for them," these laws and institutions "are not means for obtaining something for individuals, not even happiness. They are means of creating individuals…. Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out." "Creating individuals" versus "protecting individuals": this sums up the difference between the Founders' and the Progressives' conception of what government is for.

3. The Progressives' Rejection of Consent and Compact as the Basis of Society

In accordance with their conviction that all human beings are by nature free, the Founders taught that political society is "formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good" (Massachusetts Constitution of 1780).

For the Founders, the consent principle extended beyond the founding of society into its ordinary operation. Government was to be conducted under laws, and laws were to be made by locally elected officials, accountable through frequent elections to those who chose them. The people would be directly involved in governing through their participation in juries selected by lot.

The Progressives treated the social compact idea with scorn. Charles Merriam, a leading Progressive political scientist, wrote:

The individualistic ideas of the "natural right" school of political theory, indorsed in the Revolution, are discredited and repudiated…. The origin of the state is regarded, not as the result of a deliberate agreement among men, but as the result of historical development, instinctive rather than conscious; and rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in law.

For the Progressives, then, it was of no great importance whether or not government begins in consent as long as it serves its proper end of remolding man in such a way as to bring out his real capacities and aspirations. As Merriam wrote, "it was the idea of the state that supplanted the social contract as the ground of political right." Democracy and consent are not absolutely rejected by the Progressives, but their importance is greatly diminished, as we will see when we come to the Progressive conception of governmental structure.

4. God and Religion

In the founding, God was conceived in one of two ways. Christians and Jews believed in the God of the Bible as the author of liberty but also as the author of the moral law by which human beings are guided toward their duties and, ultimately, toward their happiness. Nonbelievers (Washington called them "mere politicians" in his Farewell Address) thought of God merely as a creative principle or force behind the natural order of things.

Both sides agreed that there is a God of nature who endows men with natural rights and assigns them duties under the law of nature. Believers added that the God of nature is also the God of the Bible, while secular thinkers denied that God was anything more than the God of nature. Everyone saw liberty as a "sacred cause."

At least some of the Progressives redefined God as human freedom achieved through the right political organization. Or else God was simply rejected as a myth. For Hegel, whose philosophy strongly influenced the Progressives, "the state is the divine idea as it exists on earth." John Burgess, a prominent Progressive political scientist, wrote that the purpose of the state is the "perfection of humanity, the civilization of the world; the perfect development of the human reason and its attainment to universal command over individualism; the apotheosis of man" (man becoming God). Progressive-Era theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch redefined Christianity as the social gospel of progress.

5. Limits on Government and the Integrity of the Private Sphere

For the Founders, the purpose of government is to protect the private sphere, which they regarded as the proper home of both the high and the low, of the important and the merely urgent, of God, religion, and science, as well as providing for the needs of the body. The experience of religious persecution had convinced the Founders that government was incompetent at directing man in his highest endeavors. The requirements of liberty, they thought, meant that self-interested private associations had to be permitted, not because they are good in themselves, but because depriving individuals of freedom of association would deny the liberty that is necessary for the health of society and the flourishing of the individual.

For the Founders, although government was grounded in divine law (i.e., the laws of nature and of nature's God), government was seen as a merely human thing, bound up with all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. Government had to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.

Because of the Progressives' tendency to view the state as divine and the natural as low, they no longer looked upon the private sphere as that which was to be protected by government. Instead, the realm of the private was seen as the realm of selfishness and oppression. Private property was especially singled out for criticism. Some Progressives openly or covertly spoke of themselves as socialists.

Woodrow Wilson did so in an unpublished writing. A society like the Founders' that limits itself to protecting life, liberty, and property was one in which, as Wilson wrote with only slight exaggeration, "all that government had to do was to put on a policeman's uniform and say, ‘Now don't anybody hurt anybody else.'" Wilson thought that such a society was unable to deal with the conditions of modern times.

Wilson rejected the earlier view that "the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible." A government of this kind is unjust because it leaves men at the mercy of predatory corporations. Without government management of those corporations, Wilson thought, the poor would be destined to indefinite victimization by the wealthy. Previous limits on government power must be abolished. Accordingly, Progressive political scientist Theodore Woolsey wrote, "The sphere of the state may reach as far as the nature and needs of man and of men reach, including intellectual and aesthetic wants of the individual, and the religious and moral nature of its citizens."

However, this transformation is still in the future, for Progress takes place through historical development. A sign of the Progressives' unlimited trust in unlimited political authority is Dewey's remark in his "Ethics of Democracy" that Plato's Republic presents us with the "perfect man in the perfect state." What Plato's Socrates had presented as a thought experiment to expose the nature and limits of political life is taken by Dewey to be a laudable obliteration of the private sphere by government mandate. In a remark that the Founders would have found repugnant, Progressive political scientist John Burgess wrote that "the most fundamental and indispensable mark of statehood" was "the original, absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject, and all associations of subjects."

6. Domestic Policy

For the Founders, domestic policy, as we have seen, concentrated on securing the persons and properties of the people against violence by means of a tough criminal law against murder, rape, robbery, and so on. Further, the civil law had to provide for the poor to have access to acquiring property by allowing the buying and selling of labor and property through voluntary contracts and a legal means of establishing undisputed ownership. The burden of proof was on government if there was to be any limitation on the free use of that property. Thus, licensing and zoning were rare.

Laws regulating sexual conduct aimed at the formation of lasting marriages so that children would be born and provided for by those whose interest and love was most likely to lead to their proper care, with minimal government involvement needed because most families would be intact.

Finally, the Founders tried to promote the moral conditions of an independent, hard-working citizenry by laws and educational institutions that would encourage such virtues as honesty, moderation, justice, patriotism, courage, frugality, and industry. Government support of religion (typically generic Protestantism) was generally practiced with a view to these ends. One can see the Founders' view of the connection between religion and morality in such early laws as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which said that government should promote education because "[r]eligion, morality, and knowledge [are] necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind."

In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns.

First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on.

Second, government must become involved in the "spiritual" development of its citizens--not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment ("conservation"), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture.

7. Foreign Policy

For the Founders, foreign and domestic policy were supposed to serve the same end: the security of the people in their person and property. Therefore, foreign policy was conceived primarily as defensive. Foreign attack was to be deterred by having strong arms or repulsed by force. Alliances were to be entered into with the understanding that a self-governing nation must keep itself aloof from the quarrels of other nations, except as needed for national defense. Government had no right to spend the taxes or lives of its own citizens to spread democracy to other nations or to engage in enterprises aiming at imperialistic hegemony.

The Progressives believed that a historical process was leading all mankind to freedom, or at least the advanced nations. Following Hegel, they thought of the march of freedom in history as having a geographical basis. It was in Europe, not Asia or Africa, where modern science and the modern state had made their greatest advances. The nations where modern science had properly informed the political order were thought to be the proper leaders of the world.

The Progressives also believed that the scientifically educated leaders of the advanced nations (especially America, Britain, and France) should not hesitate to rule the less advanced nations in the interest of ultimately bringing the world into freedom, assuming that supposedly inferior peoples could be brought into the modern world at all. Political scientist Charles Merriam openly called for a policy of colonialism on a racial basis:

[T]he Teutonic races must civilize the politically uncivilized. They must have a colonial policy. Barbaric races, if incapable, may be swept away…. On the same principle, interference with the affairs of states not wholly barbaric, but nevertheless incapable of effecting political organization for themselves, is fully justified.

Progressives therefore embraced a much more active and indeed imperialistic foreign policy than the Founders did. In "Expansion and Peace" (1899), Theodore Roosevelt wrote that the best policy is imperialism on a global scale: "every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law, order, and righteousness." Thus, the American occupation of the Philippines, T.R. believed, would enable "one more fair spot of the world's surface" to be "snatched from the forces of darkness. Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace."

Woodrow Wilson advocated American entry into World War I, boasting that America's national interest had nothing to do with it. Wilson had no difficulty sending American troops to die in order to make the world safe for democracy, regardless of whether or not it would make America more safe or less. The trend to turn power over to multinational organizations also begins in this period, as may be seen in Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, under whose rules America would have delegated control over the deployment of its own armed forces to that body.

8. Who Should Rule, Experts or Representatives?

The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be "experts," but they should have "most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society" (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.

The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. They had confidence that modern science had superseded the perspective of the liberally educated statesman. Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. Government had taken on the vast responsibility not merely of protecting the people against injuries, but of managing the entire economy as well as providing for the people's spiritual well-being. Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere. Government, it was thought, needed to be led by those who see where history is going, who understand the ever-evolving idea of human dignity.

The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people's will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people's inchoate will into concrete policies. Local politicians would be replaced by neutral city managers presiding over technically trained staffs. Politics in the sense of favoritism and self-interest would disappear and be replaced by the universal rule of enlightened bureaucracy.

Progressivism and Today's Liberalism

This should be enough to show how radically the Progressives broke with the earlier tradition. Of what relevance is all of this today?

Most obviously, the roots of the liberalism with which we are familiar lie in the Progressive Era. It is not hard to see the connections between the eight features of Progressivism that I have just sketched and later developments. This is true not only for the New Deal period of Franklin Roosevelt, but above all for the major institutional and policy changes that were initiated between 1965 and 1975. Whether one regards the transformation of American politics over the past century as good or bad, the foundations of that transformation were laid in the Progressive Era. Today's liberals, or the teachers of today's liberals, learned to reject the principles of the founding from their teachers, the Progressives.

Nevertheless, in some respects, the Progressives were closer to the founding than they are to today's liberalism. So let us conclude by briefly considering the differences between our current liberalism and Progressivism. We may sum up these differences in three words: science, sex, and progress.

First, in regard to science, today's liberals have a far more ambivalent attitude than the Progressives did. The latter had no doubt that science either had all the answers or was on the road to discovering them. Today, although the prestige of science remains great, it has been greatly diminished by the multicultural perspective that sees science as just another point of view.

Two decades ago, in a widely publicized report of the American Council of Learned Societies, several leading professors in the humanities proclaimed that the "ideal of objectivity and disinterest," which "has been essential to the development of science," has been totally rejected by "the consensus of most of the dominant theories" of today. Instead, today's consensus holds that "all thought does, indeed, develop from particular standpoints, perspectives, interests." So science is just a Western perspective on reality, no more or less valid than the folk magic believed in by an African or Pacific Island tribe that has never been exposed to modern science.

Second, liberalism today has become preoccupied with sex. Sexual activity is to be freed from all traditional restraints. In the Founders' view, sex was something that had to be regulated by government because of its tie to the production and raising of children. Practices such as abortion and homosexual conduct--the choice for which was recently equated by the Supreme Court with the right "to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life"--are considered fundamental rights.

The connection between sexual liberation and Progressivism is indirect, for the Progressives, who tended to follow Hegel in such matters, were rather old-fashioned in this regard. But there was one premise within Progressivism that may be said to have led to the current liberal understanding of sex. That is the disparagement of nature and the celebration of human will, the idea that everything of value in life is created by man's choice, not by nature or necessity.

Once sexual conduct comes under the scrutiny of such a concern, it is not hard to see that limiting sexual expression to marriage--where it is clearly tied to nature's concern for reproduction--could easily be seen as a kind of limitation of human liberty. Once self-realization (Dewey's term, for whom it was still tied to reason and science) is transmuted into self-expression (today's term), all barriers to one's sexual idiosyncrasies must appear arbitrary and tyrannical.

Third, contemporary liberals no longer believe in progress. The Progressives' faith in progress was rooted in their faith in science, as one can see especially in the European thinkers whom they admired, such as Hegel and Comte. When science is seen as just one perspective among many, then progress itself comes into question.

The idea of progress presupposes that the end result is superior to the point of departure, but contemporary liberals are generally wary of expressing any sense of the superiority of the West, whether intellectually, politically, or in any other way. They are therefore disinclined to support any foreign policy venture that contributes to the strength of America or of the West.

Liberal domestic policy follows the same principle. It tends to elevate the "other" to moral superiority over against those whom the Founders would have called the decent and the honorable, the men of wisdom and virtue. The more a person is lacking, the greater is his or her moral claim on society. The deaf, the blind, the disabled, the stupid, the improvident, the ignorant, and even (in a 1984 speech of presidential candidate Walter Mondale) the sad--those who are lowest are extolled as the sacred other.

Surprisingly, although Progressivism, supplemented by the more recent liberalism, has transformed America in some respects, the Founders' approach to politics is still alive in some areas of American life. One has merely to attend a jury trial over a murder, rape, robbery, or theft in a state court to see the older system of the rule of law at work. Perhaps this is one reason why America seems so conservative to the rest of the Western world. Among ordinary Americans, as opposed to the political, academic, professional, and entertainment elites, there is still a strong attachment to property rights, self-reliance, and heterosexual marriage; a wariness of university-certified "experts"; and an unapologetic willingness to use armed forces in defense of their country.

The first great battle for the American soul was settled in the Civil War. The second battle for America's soul, initiated over a century ago, is still raging. The choice for the Founders' constitutionalism or the Progressive-liberal administrative state is yet to be fully resolved.

Thomas G. West is a Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas, a Director and Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, and author of Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).

Commentary by William A. Schambra

Like the volume to which he has contributed, Tom West's remarks reflect a pessimism about the decisively debilitating effect of Progressivism on American politics. The essayists are insufficiently self-aware--about their own contributions and those of their distinguished teachers. That is, they are not sufficiently aware that they themselves are part of an increasingly vibrant and aggressive movement to recover the Founders' constitutionalism--a movement that could only have been dreamt of when I entered graduate school in the early '70s.

To be sure, the Progressive project accurately described herein did indeed seize and come to control major segments of American cultural and political life. It certainly came to dominate the first modern foundations, the universities, journalism, and most other institutions of American intellectual life. But, as Mr. West suggests, it nonetheless failed in its effort to change entirely the way everyday American political life plays itself out.

As much as the Progressives succeeded in challenging the intellectual underpinnings of the American constitutional system, they nonetheless faced the difficulty that the system itself--the large commercial republic and a separation of powers, reflecting and cultivating individual self-interest and ambition--remained in place. As their early modern designers hoped and predicted, these institutions continued to generate a certain kind of political behavior in accord with presuppositions of the Founders even as Progressive elites continued for the past 100 years to denounce that behavior as self-centered, materialistic, and insufficiently community-minded and public-spirited.

The Progressive Foothold

The Progressive system managed to gain a foothold in American politics only when it made major compromises with the Founders' constitutionalism. The best example is the Social Security system: Had the Progressives managed to install a "pure," community-minded system, it would have been an altruistic transfer of wealth from the rich to the vulnerable aged in the name of preserving the sense of national oneness or national community. It would have reflected the enduring Progressive conviction that we're all in this together--all part of one national family, as former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once put it.

Indeed, modern liberals do often defend Social Security in those terms. But in fact, FDR knew the American political system well enough to rely on other than altruistic impulses to preserve Social Security past the New Deal. The fact that it's based on the myth of individual accounts--the myth that Social Security is only returning to me what I put in--is what has made this part of the 20th century's liberal project almost completely unassailable politically. As FDR intended, Social Security endures because it draws as much on self-interested individualism as on self-forgetting community-mindedness.

As this illustrates, the New Deal, for all its Progressive roots, is in some sense less purely Progressive than LBJ's Great Society. In the Great Society, we had more explicit and direct an application of the Progressive commitment to rule by social science experts, largely unmitigated initially by political considerations.

That was precisely Daniel Patrick Moynihan's insight in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. Almost overnight, an obscure, untested academic theory about the cause of juvenile delinquency--namely, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's structure of opportunity theory--leapt from the pages of the social science journals into the laws waging a war on poverty.

Indeed, the entire point of the Great Society was to reshape the behavior of the poor--to move them off the welfare rolls by transforming their behavior according to what social sciences had taught us about such undertakings. It was explicitly a project of social engineering in the best Progressive tradition. Sober liberal friends of the Great Society would later admit that a central reason for its failure was precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven engineering project, which had never sought the support or even the acquiescence of popular majorities.

The engineering excesses of the Great Society and the popular reaction against them meant that the 1960s were the beginning of the first serious challenge to the Progressive model for America--a challenge that the New Deal hadn't precipitated earlier because it had carefully accommodated itself to the Founders' political system. Certainly the New Left took aim at the Great Society's distant, inhumane, patronizing, bureaucratic social engineering; but for our purposes, this marked as well the beginning of the modern conservative response to Progressivism, which has subsequently enjoyed some success, occupying the presidency, both houses of Congress, and perhaps soon the Supreme Court.

Curiously, for Mr. West, this is precisely the moment--he settles on the year 1965--at which Progressivism achieves near complete dominance of American politics.

Recovering the Founders' Constitutionalism

Central to the modern conservative response, I would suggest, is precisely a recovery of the Founders' constitutionalism--serious attention to the "truth-claims" of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. This had begun in the mid-1950s but really gathered steam in the '60s. It was above all a result, as John Marini's essay in The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science suggests, of Leo Strauss's acknowledgement that the constitutional democracies of the West, no matter how weakened by the internal critique of Progressive elites, had alone managed to resist modern totalitarianism and were worthy of a spirited intellectual defense.

Suddenly, the founding documents, which had long been consigned to the dustbin of history, came once again to be studied seriously, not as reflection of some passing historical moment of the late 18th century, but rather as potential sources of truth about politics, government, and human nature. Harry Jaffa, Herbert Storing, Martin Diamond, Harry Clor, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and so forth all devoted at least some of their efforts to serious study of the Founders' thought--a process that the volume before us continues.

I would argue that linking the conservative resurgence to a recovery of the Constitution was in fact a critical part of its ability to flourish in a way that conservatism had not otherwise managed earlier in the 20th century.

*

Attention to constitutionalism sustained conservatism's appreciation for the central place of individual liberty in American political life, but now tempered by other principles that prevent it from flying off to the extremes of libertarianism, with its rather abstract theoretical commitment to individual liberty to the exclusion of all else.

*

The constitutional idea of equality helped us resist the liberal shift from equality of opportunity to equality of results, but it also severed the new conservatism from past versions of itself which had unhappily emphasized class, status, and hierarchy--notions which had never taken hold in America.

*

Attention to the concept of the commercial republic shored up the idea of free markets but without relapsing into a simplistic worship of the marketplace, given Hamilton's view of the need for an active federal government in creating and preserving a large national common market.

*

Speaking of Hamilton, his essays in The Federalist suggesting the need for a powerful executive branch that would lead America into a position of international prominence sustained conservatism's new understanding of America's role in the world, severing it from the isolationism that had previously marred conservative doctrine.

*

Finally, a recovery of the Constitution's concept of decentralist federalism informed conservatism's defense of family, neighborhood, local community, and local house of worship; that is, it gave us a way to defend local community against Progressivism's doctrine of national community but within a strong national framework, without falling into anarchic doctrines of "township sovereignty" or concurrent majorities.

In other words, to some degree, modern conservatism owes its success to a recovery of and an effort to root itself in the Founders' constitutionalism. Frank Meyer was famous for his doctrine of fusionism--a fusing of libertarian individualism with religious traditionalism. The real fusionism for contemporary conservatism, I would suggest, is supplied by its effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism, which was itself an effort to fuse or blend critical American political principles like liberty and equality, competent governance and majority rule.

As noted, the Founders' constitutionalism had continued to shape American politics and public opinion in a subterranean fashion throughout the 20th century out of sight of, and in defiance of, the intellectual doctrines and utopian expectations of American Progressive intellectuals. Modern conservatism "re-theorizes," so to speak, the constitutional substructure and creates a political movement that, unlike Progressivism, is sailing with rather than against the prevailing winds of American political life. That surely makes for smoother sailing.

Mr. West and his co-authors are all children of this conservative resurgence and are themselves obviously hoping to link it to a recovery of constitutionalism. So perhaps it is just modesty that leads them to profess that their efforts and those of their teachers have come to naught and to insist that Progressivism has succeeded in destroying America after all.

The Early Constitutionalists

This volume's pessimism also neglects the critical moment in American history which provided the indispensable basis for today's effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism. As you may know, in the Republican primaries of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency on a platform of radical constitutional reform enunciated in his "Charter of Democracy" speech, delivered in Columbus in February 1912. There and subsequently, he endorsed the full range of Progressive constitutional reforms: the initiative, referendum, and recall, including the recall of judges and judicial decisions.

Had Roosevelt managed to win the nomination of his party as he came close to doing, it is likely that it would have put its weight behind these reforms and others that appeared later in the platform of the Progressive Party, including, critically, a more expeditious method of amending the Constitution. That would probably have meant amendment by a majority of the popular vote in a majority of the states, as Robert LaFollette suggested. Had that happened--had the Constitution come down to us today amended and re-amended, burdened with all the quick fixes and gimmicks that, at one point or another over the 20th century, captured fleeting majorities--the effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism and reorient American politics toward it would obviously have been a much, much trickier proposition.

This is precisely what William Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and other conservatives understood. So they stood against Roosevelt, in spite of deep friendships and in spite of the certainty of splitting the party and losing the election. For they believed that the preservation of the Constitution as it came to them from the Founders had to be their first priority, and they believed that this question would be settled decisively in the Taft-Roosevelt contest of 1912. When the constitutionalists succeeded in keeping the magnificent electoral machinery of the Republican Party out of Roosevelt's hands, they were able to tell themselves that they had done the one thing needful.

And they were right, I would argue. In spite of the fact that Progressivism would go on to seize the commanding intellectual heights of the past century--in spite of the fact that law schools, political science departments, high-brow journals, and foundations alike told us to transcend and forget about the Founders' Constitution--it was still there beneath it all, still there largely intact, waiting for rediscovery, still the official charter of the Republic, no matter how abused and ridiculed.

This aspect of the election of 1912--that is, the contest within the Republican Party between Taft and Roosevelt about preserving the Constitution--is almost entirely forgotten today. Shelves and shelves of dissertations and books have been done on Progressivism and socialism in that election, but virtually nothing about conservatism. As we try to recover an understanding of the Founders' Constitution, so also conservatives need to recover our own history, which has otherwise been completely ignored by the Progressive academy.

Anyway, let us not neglect the sacrificial struggles of men like Root, Taft, and Lodge in seeing to it that we have a constitutional tradition to recover--or, rather, seeing to it that the recovery is worthwhile, because the written Constitution has come down to us largely as it emerged from the pens of the Founders and still commands popular allegiance.

William A. Schambra is Director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal and editor of As Far as Republican Principles Will Admit: Collected Essays of Martin Diamond (American Enterprise Institute, 1992).


1791 The Original Blueprint

Progressive's Violent Rhetoric: Where's the Love?

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It becomes necessary to every subject then, to be in some degree a statesman: and to examine and judge for himself of the tendencies of political principles and measures."

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Middle East Myths and Facts

1. Nationhood and Jerusalem - Israel became a nation in 1312 B.C.E., two thousand years before the rise of Islam.

2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C.E. the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.

4. Arabs have only had control of Israel twice - from 634 until the Crusader invasion in June 1099, and from 1292 until the year 1517 when they were dispelled by the Turks in their conquest.

5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran. There are vague references to Jerusalem in the Hadiths - stories about Mohammed - that he stopped his night journey (which the Koran explains took place in a dream!) at the "farther mosque" (or "distant place"). Muslims explain that this means "at the edge of the Temple mount", although no direct reference to Jerusalem or the Temple Mount is made.

7. King David established the city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.

8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Some Muslims (i.e. those between Israel and Saudi Arabia) pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.

9. Arab and Jewish Refugees - In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.

10. The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.

11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.

12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey.

13. The Arab - Israeli Conflict - The Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.

14. The P.L.O.'s Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them with weapons.

15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.

16. The U.N. Record on Israel and the Arabs - Of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.

17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.

18. The U.N was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.

19. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

20. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

For those of us who believe that the "Israeli Occupation" has been bad for the Palestinian people, these facts may change your perception. The "occupation" seems to have brought nothing but good to the Palestinians - we can only imagine how much worse they would be if Israel hadn't helped them!

1. During 20 years of Arab rule Palestinian male life expectancy grew from 42 to 44. During the next 20 years of Israeli rule Palestinian male life expectancy grew from 44 to 63.

2. During 20 years of Arab rule Palestinian female life expectancy grew from 45 to 46. During the next 20 years of Israeli rule Palestinian female life expectancy grew from 46 to 67.

3. During 20 years of Arab rule Palestinian infant mortality rate decreased from 200 per thousand to 170 per thousand. During the next 20 years of Israeli rule Palestinian infant mortality rate decreased from 170 per thousand to 60 per thousand.

4. During 20 years of Arab rule Palestinian crude death rate decreased from 21 per thousand to 19 per thousand. During next 20 years of Israeli rule Palestinian infant mortality rate decreased from 19 per thousand to 6 per thousand.

5. Before 1967, when Israel's rule began, only 113 hospitals had been built in the territories. By the time of 1989 Israel had helped establish more than three times that number to 387.

6. Before 1967 only 23 Mother & Child Centers had been established. After 1989 about six times as many could be found. (135)

7. Malaria, which had existed in the territories before 1967 was finally eliminated during the Israeli rule.

8. Israel also more than tripled the number of Palestinian teachers and boosted the Palestinian educational system by establishing a number of universities.

Among those universities were the College of Scientists (Abu Dis) - est. 1982, the College of Social Welfare (El Bira) - est. 1979, the College of Religion (Beit Hanina) - est. 1978 and the Islamic College in Hebron- est.1971.

9. This was not the only effect Israeli rule had on the Palestinian education system and the Palestinian people.

Before 1967 the percentage of illiterates on average had been 27.8% among men and among women even higher at 65.1%. By 1983 Israel had helped reduce illiteracy to only 13.5% among men and 38.9% among women.

The Truth About the Mideast
Fourteen fundamental facts about Israel and Palestine

By David G. Littman

October 7, 2002

It's time to look back on 14 fundamental geographical, historical, and diplomatic facts from the last century relating to the Middle East. These basic facts and figures were stressed in recent statements to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and its subcommission, to the surprise of representatives of both states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

1) After World War I Great Britain accepted the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, and then — with League of Nations approval — used its article 25 to create two distinct entities within the Mandate-designated area.

2) The territory lying between the Jordan River and the eastern desert boundary "of that part of Palestine which was known as Trans-Jordan" (nearly 78 percent) thus became the Emirate of Transjordan.

This new entity was put under the rule of Emir Abdullah, the eldest son of the Sharif of Mecca, as a recompense for his support in the war against the Turks, and of Ibn Saud's seizure of Arabia (Faisal, Abdullah's brother, later received the even vaster Mandate area of Iraq).

3) Turning a blind eye to article 15, Great Britain also decided that no Jews could reside or buy land in the newly created Emirate. This policy was ratified — after the emirate became a kingdom — by Jordan's law no. 6, sect. 3, on April 3, 1954, and reactivated in law no. 7, sect. 2, on April 1, 1963. It states that any person may become a citizen of Jordan unless he is a Jew. King Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994, but the Judenrein legislation remains valid today.

4) The remaining area west of the Jordan River (comprising about 22 percent of the original Mandate) was then officially designated "Palestine" by Great Britain. As stated in the 1937 Royal Commission Report, "the primary purpose of the Mandate, as expressed in its preamble and its articles, is to promote the establishment of the Jewish National Home." This was now greatly restricted.

5) U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (November 29, 1947) authorized a Partition Plan in this area: for an Arab and a Jewish state — and for a corpus separatum for Jerusalem. The plan was rejected by both the Arab League and the Arab-Palestinian leadership. Aided and abetted by the neighboring Arab countries, local armed Arab Palestinian forces immediately began attacking Jews, who counterattacked. On May 15, 1948, the armies of five Arab League states joined these militias in the invasion of Israel, but their armies failed in their goal of eradicating the fledgling state.

6) The armistice boundaries (1949-1967) left Israel with roughly 16.5 percent, or 8,000 sq. miles, of the original 1922 Mandate area (about 48,000 sq. miles), while about five percent — less Gaza, which was occupied by the Egyptians — was conquered and occupied in 1948 by British General Glubb Pasha, the commander of Abdullah's Arab Legion. The historic regions of "Judea and Samaria" — their official names as indicated on all British mandate maps until 1948 — were annexed and became the "West Bank" of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950. All the Jews were expelled from the area and from the Old City of Jerusalem; their synagogues, and even tombstones on the Mount of Olives, were destroyed.

7) Until King Hussein attacked Israel on June 6, 1967, Jordan's recognized de facto boundaries covered 83 percent of Palestine (78 percent east of the Jordan river, and five percent to the west). Following its military defeat in the Six Day War, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan lost the "West Bank," which it had illegally annexed 19 years earlier, retaining the huge "Transjordan" portion (78 percent) of the original League of Nations territory.

8) Of Jordan's current population of five million, about two-thirds (over three million) consider themselves "Arab Palestinians." They are the descendants either of the original Arab Palestinian inhabitants of the Trans-Jordan region, or of roughly 550,000 Arab refugees from west Palestine who lost their homes after the Arab League armies failed to eradicate Israel first in 1948, and again in 1967. Nearly two million Jordanian Bedouin citizens and others do not identify themselves as Palestinians.

9) After the 1967 disaster, an Arab League Summit Conference held in Khartoum that November reacted negatively to U.N. Security Council Resolution 247: "No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no concessions on the questions of Palestinian national rights." This was also the determined position of the PLO. Apart from Egypt's 1981 peace treaty with Israel, there was little change, for the next two decades, in this refusal to negotiate according to U.N. Resolution 242.

10) In those "West Bank and Gaza" areas, designated by the Oslo Accords of 1994 to be placed under the administration of the Palestinian Authority (covering about 5.5 percent of the "Greater Palestine" area on both sides of the Jordan), there is now a population of over 3,200,000, of whom about 35,000 are Christians, but none are Jews.

11) The population of the Jewish state — a state envisaged in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, and confirmed by the U.N.'s 1947 decision — is now roughly 6,500,000, of whom roughly 20 percent are Arabs (120,000 Christians), Druze, and Bedouin citizens of Israel. Of the more than five million Jewish citizens, about one-half are those Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and their descendants, who fled or left their ancient homeland when massacres, arrests, and ostracism made life impossible (a further 300,000 emigrated to Europe and the Americas, where they number over a million).

12) Today, a tiny, vulnerable Jewish remnant — scarcely 5,000 persons — remains in all the Arab world, less than half of one percent from the near million who were there in 1948 (this does not include the 50,000 in Turkey and Iran, left of about 200,000 in 1945). These are the forgotten Jewish refugees from Arab lands, from countries that will soon be totally judenrein just as Jordan has been since 1922.

13) The 22 Arab League countries cover a global surface of over six million square miles, over ten percent of the land surface on earth. Israel, by contrast, covers barely 8,000 sq. miles.

14) Security Council Resolution 242 has now become the panacea for Arab states, yet their interpretation of its key operative paragraph does not correspond to the English original, which version alone is binding. In March 2002, a Saudi "peace plan" was approved by the Arab League in Beirut, but behind it lurks the former 1981 "Fahd Plan" — with a facelift — that would leave Israel with impossible borders. After the Iraqi menace has been resolved one way or another, what is needed for the "Middle East peace process" is a concerted effort to support the Mitchell plan, which could one day lead to true peace and reconciliation for the whole region. But the Palestinian Authority will only become a genuine partner with Israel, alongside Jordan and Egypt, if there is a radical break with the past, and a new spirit of mutual acceptance prevails between the Arab world and Israel — with individual and collective security and dignity for all. This will only be feasible if democratic institutions and a respect for human rights and the rule of law become the norm, as they now are not. And it will only be feasible if the Arab world recognizes the inalienable legitimacy of Israel's existence in a part of its historical land.

— David G. Littman is a historian. Since 1986, he has been active on human-rights issues at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. His recent statements on this subject were made as a representative of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a nongovernmental organization.

James Madison - 4th U.S. President Said this:

"But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.

James Madison - 4th U.S. President

Who do you trust America?

I love this simply because it PISSES off Atheist's and Liberal's

What I believe as an American!

9 Principles

1. America Is Good.


2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

God “The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the external rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” from George Washington’s first Inaugural address.


3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

Honesty “I hope that I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider to be the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.” George Washington


4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

Marriage/Family “It is in the love of one’s family only that heartfelt happiness is know. By a law of our nature, we cannot be happy without the endearing connections of a family.” Thomas Jefferson


5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

Justice “I deem one of the essential principles of our government… equal and exact justice to all men of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political.” Thomas Jefferson


6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

Life, Liberty, & The Pursuit of Happiness “Everyone has a natural right to choose that vocation in life which he thinks most likely to give him comfortable subsistence.” Thomas Jefferson


7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

Charity “It is not everyone who asketh that deserveth charity; all however, are worth of the inquiry or the deserving may suffer.” George Washington


8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

On your right to disagree “In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude; every man will speak as he thinks, or more properly without thinking.” George Washington


9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

Who works for whom? “I consider the people who constitute a society or a nation as the source of all authority in that nation.” Thomas Jefferson

12 Values

  • Honesty
  • Reverence
  • Hope
  • Thrift
  • Humility
  • Charity
  • Sincerity
  • Moderation
  • Hard Work
  • Courage
  • Personal Responsibility
  • Gratitude

Voter Responsibilites....Its up to you now!

Learn about Islam's Obsession with Terror!

The Warriors Creed for God and Country!

The Warriors Creed says it all about what we all should be doing for God!
I Am a Soldier
I am a soldier in the army of God.
The Lord Jesus Christ is my Commanding Officer.
The Holy Bible is my code of conduct.
Faith, Prayer, and the Word are my weapons of Warfare.
I have been taught by the Holy Spirit, trained by experience, tried by adversity, and tested by fire.
I am a volunteer in this army, and I am enlisted for eternity.
I will either retire in this Army or die in this Army; but, I will not get out, sell out, be talked out, or pushed out.
I am faithful, reliable, capable, and dependable. If my God needs me, I am there.
I am a soldier. I am not a baby.
I do not need to be pampered, petted, primed up, pumped up, picked up, or pepped up.
I am a soldier. No one has to call me, remind me, write me, visit me, entice me, or lure me.
I am a soldier. I am not a wimp.
I am in place, saluting my King, obeying His orders, praising His name, and building His kingdom!
No one has to send me flowers, gifts, food, cards, candy, or give me handouts.
I do not need to be cuddled, cradled, cared for, or catered to.
I am committed. I cannot have my feelings hurt bad enough to turn me around.
I cannot be discouraged enough to turn me aside. I cannot lose enough to cause me to quit.
When Jesus called me into this Army, I had nothing.
If I end up with nothing, I will still come out even. I will win.
My God will supply all my needs. I am more than a conqueror.
I will always triumph. I can do all things through Christ.
Devils cannot defeat me.
People cannot disillusion me.
Weather cannot weary me.
Sickness cannot stop me.
Battles cannot beat me.
Money cannot buy me.
Governments cannot silence me, and hell cannot handle me!
I am a soldier.
Even death cannot destroy me.
For when my Commander calls me from this battlefield, He will promote me to a captain.
I am a soldier, in the Army, I'm marching, claiming victory.
I will not give up.
I will not turn around.
I am a soldier, marching Heaven bound.
There are four kinds of soldiers:
1. Active Duty: Serving the Lord faithfully, daily, and on duty 24-7-365.
2. Reserve Status: Serving only when called upon, or twice a year: Christmas and Easter.
3. Guard Status: Backing up the Active Duty group.
4. AWOL! Absent With Out the Lord.
Which kind are you?
Be an army of one TRUE SOLDIER for an audience of One TRUE GOD.
surrender All to his cause!

How the Banking system works....

Are these bank collapses some sort of banking scam, or is this just part of how our banking system is operated? Do you really understand how the banking industry works in this country? Why is a run on the bank such a disaster? Hasn't the bank had to take in just as much deposits as they have out in loans? Doesn't everything more or less balance out after a bank is sold off? The news is always talking about this enormous national debt that the US owes, Who exactly is that owed to? These very educational videos will help shed some light on all these questions. If you are worried about the future of this country in light of yet another banking collapse, help yourself by understanding how our banking system works.

The Fake Stimulus plan of Obama

Based on a theory known as Keynesianism, politicians are resuscitating the notion that more government spending can stimulate an economy. This mini-documentary produced by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation examines both theory and evidence and finds that allowing politicians to spend more money is not a recipe for better economic performance.

Glenn Beck: Global Warming greatest scam in history

John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel says global warming is the greatest scam in history.

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Shocking Video Unearthed: Democrats Covering up the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Scam !

Timeline shows Bush, McCain warning Dems of financial and housing crisis; meltdown....The Bush Admin and Senator McCain warned repeatedly about Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and what thus became the 2008 financial crisis -- starting in 2002 (and actually even earlier -- in the Clinton and Carter White Houses.)Democrats resisted and kept to their party line, extending loans to people who couldn't afford them -- just like you would expect of socialists.

Stimulus Package Protest - The People Speak

Join us for the Upcoming National American Tea Party - Houston, April 15, 4pm to whenever it ends - TAX DAY REVOLT. Downtown Houston across from the Post Office at 401 Franklin. Thousands will be there make sure you are! Website for upcoming protests Taxpayers from the Greater Houston region gather to protest massive government spending. Listen to their thoughts and opinions - get inspired and get involved to overturn out of control government spending.

This is what the IRS Deserves from every American.......................................

"Dear IRS, I'm sorry to inform you that I'm not going to be able to pay the taxes owed on April 15th, but all is not lost.

I paid these taxes, accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, corporate income tax, dog license tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gas tax, hunting license tax, fishing license tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, luxury tax, Medicare tax, city tax, school and county property tax up to 33% the last four years.

Real estate tax, Social Security tax, road use tax, toll road tax, state and city sales tax, recreational vehicle tax, sales franchise tax, state unemployment tax, federal excise tax, telephone tax, telephone federal state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local tax, utility tax, vehicle tax, registration tax, capital gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Colorado property tax, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Mexico sales tax and many more I can't recall and I've run out of space and money.


When you do not receive my check April 15th, just know that it was an honest mistake.

Please treat me the same as the way you've treated Congressman Charlie Rangel, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, ex-congressman Tom Daschle and, of course, your boss, Timothy Geithner.

No penalties, no interest. PS, I'll make at least a partial payment as soon as I get my stimulus check." Ed Barnett, Wichita Falls.

Big Government

The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

The Forerunner

Capitalism Magazine

A Real comparison to think about from Brian S. on Sodahead.com!!!

http://www.sodahead.com/fun/email-to-my-senators/blog-115011/

I made a comparison of the old USSR and the current state of the USA a while back and thought it was pretty interesting.

Only recently did the thought cross my mind to send the information to Washington, hope you find the information helpful.



Dear Senator _*+%$$@@#!!&***++

As there was no option for 'other' I had to choose the Deficit option.

It appears that nobody within the Washington political circles can see what is happening to this country, as they are too close to the situation.


Here is the comparison for the old USSR and USA.


The USSR

-operated a State owned Auto Industry

-operated a State owned Banking Industry

-operated a State owned Aircraft Industry

-had armed military at their airports and train stations

-made every one of its citizens keep their 'travel papers' while going from place to place.

-created the Berlin Wall, which made it next to impossible to enter without going through official checkpoints.

-had total control over the media (as other countries still maintain that control)

-collapsed not too long after their failed invasion of Afghanistan (which the US supported)



The USA

-just bailed out the Auto Industry (except for Ford) and has a large amount of stock/control over GM. Interesting because the Amtrak has been losing money continuously year after year. How can Congress think that they can help manage an Auto manufacturer?

-bailed out numerous banks with almost $1 Trillion dollars of money created out of thin air. Now, the banks are essentially 'owned' in part by the Federal Govt until the loans are paid off.

-unless I'm mistaken the Aircraft Industry has not yet gotten a bailout, but there have been talks about them wanting one

-we have armed military at some of our airports after 9-11

-the REAL ID is set to go into effect on Dec 31, 2009.

http://www.ncsl.org/realid/

(from the REAL ID web site) "Following the deadline of May 11, 2008, state driver's licenses and identification cards were not to be accepted for federal purposes unless the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined that a state was compliant with the REAL ID or a state had been approved for an extension by the Secretary of DHS.

All 56 U.S. jurisdictions have received an initial extension from the Secretary of the DHS. The initial extension is valid until December 31, 2009"


-the US is working to create the border between itself and Mexico with either a physical 'virtual' wall to try and slow down immigration.

I actually support this one, since our Congress cannot seem to get its act together and apparently wants to give the illegal immigrants extra rights, access to Social Security and welfare programs.


-is currently rebuilding Iraq (with tax dollars), fighting 'terrorism' in Afghanistan and crossing the border into Pakistan in a seemingly unending war.

-tried to pass a version of the 'Fairness Doctrine' which would require radio and television stations to give equal time to opposing views. As it currently stands, Conservative radio is unopposed by liberal radio stations. The Fairness Doctrine would reduce the amount of time allotted to Conservative talk shows, if not completely shut them down.

-is currently engaged in a war on drugs, yet is doing nothing about the poppy crops in Afghanistan, which is a major source of raw material in the drug war.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it appears to me that the US is on a road that is leading the wrong direction.

What we need is to reduce the overall Federal Government.

Once that starts, there will be a reduction in spending tax dollars on a useless bureaucracy.

How long is the Alarm going to ring before you wake up?

How long is the Alarm going to ring before you wake up?