Category Archives: morality

John Silber

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…was, among other things, the President of Boston University and the son of an immigrant.  Here’s what he had to say in April 1996 about a bilingual America, as reprinted last week in The Wall Street Journal [emphasis mine]:

English has never been declared our official language for the simple reason that, until recently, no one doubted that it already was.  The country was established by English speakers, its founding documents and laws are written in English and its legislatures transact their affairs in English.

This is a lesson my father learned soon after he came to this country from Germany in 1903 to work on the German pavilion at the St Louis World’s Fair.  When the fair closed he went to look for work.  Walking down the street, he saw a sign saying, “Undertaker.”  Supposing this to be a literal translation of the German word “unternehmer,” meaning “contractor,” he went inside and was surprised to find himself in a room full of coffins.  Embarrassed, he concluded that it was time to learn English.

Like all immigrants seeking naturalization, he had to demonstrate proficiency in English.  It would never have occurred to him or to any of the millions of other immigrants speaking many different languages to seek accommodations such as ballots in their native tongue.  He, like them, had freely chosen to live in a country where the language was English.

This is our historic tradition.  But in 1975 Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to require bilingual ballots.  Thus the lawmakers abandoned tradition, making a change of Constitutional consequence, amending in effect the very concept of US citizenship.  The naturalization statutes presume that English is the language of US citizens.  Why else is English required for naturalization? …

In the last weeks of the Soviet Union, I visited Moscow.  I was struck, reading my visa application, to see that the Soviet government wanted to know both my citizenship and my nationality.  I found this incomprehensible, for as an American, my citizenship and my nationality are one and the same.  America is a nation based on a set of ideals and allegiance to those ideals—it’s not based on ethnicity or national origin.

What he said.

Lies of my President, Part 5

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This is Part 5 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

In a repeat of Obama’s 2008 fundraising technique, in the present campaign Obama—who spent the summer whining about being outraised by the Romney campaign, has again chosen to eschew controls on credit card donations.  Power Line describes the “standard controls:”

Federal law prohibits foreign contributions and requires the disclosure of identifying information for contributions in excess of $200.  Campaigns must accordingly keep running totals for each donor and report them once they exceed $200.

And so Obama gets—and retains—donations from such worthies as

“John Galt” (the hero of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged).  [The test donor] provided the equally fictitious address “1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch, CO 99999.” He checked the box next to $15 and entered his actual credit-card number and expiration date. He was then taken to the next page and notified that his donation had been processed.

and

Others repeated “John Galt’s” experiment, giving to Obama under such fictitious names as Della Ware, Joe Plumber, Idiot Savant, Ima BadDonation (with a Canadian bank card) and Fake Donor.

Scott Johnson expanded on this with a New York Post article.

It’s useful, also, to note that the above Della Ware tried the same donation to the McCain campaign in 2008, and it was rejected.  And

If you go here you will note that credit card donations to the Obama election campaign do not require the credit card security code [i.e., the CVV code]. What they have done is disable the Address Verification System (AVS) which prevents credit card fraud.

Adrian Murray advised Urgent Agenda that he’d tried the following:

Name – Adolph Hitler
Address – 123 Nuremburg Way, Berlin, Germany
Occupation – Dictator
Employer – Nazi Party

Murray promptly received an email from the Obama campaign:

“Dear Adolph, thank you for your generous donation….”

Murray tried the same thing with the Romney and Santorum campaigns; the “donations” were rejected.  I’ve been to the site, and the…deficiency…was still present last Sunday.

Hmm….

Yet Another Thought on Immigration

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The Wall Street Journal has another article on immigration, entitled, tellingly enough, “Washington’s New Twist on Human Sacrifice.”  The sacrifice?  Sending away foreign students who’ve graduated from our colleges and universities, rather than making it easy for them to stay.  And maybe naturalize.

The WSJ, among other things, provided a list of immigration bills that have failed passage:

  • Stopping Trained in America PhDs from Leaving the Economy Act
  • Advanced Degree Visa Bill
  • Startup Act
  • Immigration Driving Entrepreneurship in America Act
  • Benefits to Research and American Innovation through Nationality Statutes Act

And the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Jobs Act, proposed this year by Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX), which treatment in Congress was typical.  This bill would have granted visas to graduates from qualifying universities in the hard sciences instead of the current program, a lottery for a limited numbers of visas, with the limits based on national origin. As Congressman Smith said,

Unfortunately, the Democrats voted today [20 Sep 12] to send the best and brightest foreign graduates back home to work for our global competitors.

And there’s this, a bit ago, from Steve Jobs on conversations he and a group of Silicon Valley execs he’d put together had with Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama:

The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done.  It infuriates me.

What’s up with all this obstruction?  Do we want immigration and immigrants, or do we not?  Progressives oppose school/education reform, and they oppose steps to welcome trained, talented, intelligent folks from other countries into our nation.  What’s up with that?

If Progressives put as much energy into doing things as they do to blocking them, we’d be a whole lot better off today, three years after the “end” of the Panic of 2008.

Lies of my President, Part 4

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This is Part 4 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

Here’s this little episode, reported by James Taranto, where Obama lied to the Catholic church.  Here’s how then-Archbishop, now Cardinal Timothy Dolan described a conversation and its aftermath with Obama over HHS’ mandate that insurance providers provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients, even when that coverage contradicts the religious teachings of the provider:

I said [in summary of his conversation with Obama], “I’ve heard you say, first of all, that you have immense regard for the work of the Catholic Church in the United States in health care, education and charity….  I have heard you say that you are not going to let the administration do anything to impede that work and…that you take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness….  Does that accurately sum up our conversation?” [Mr. Obama] said, “You bet it does.”

The archbishop, says Taranto, asked for permission to relay the message to the other bishops. “You don’t have my permission, you’ve got my request,” the president replied.

“So you can imagine the chagrin,” Archbishop Dolan continues, “when he called me at the end of January to say that the mandates remain in place and that there would be no substantive change, and that the only thing that he could offer me was that we would have until August….  I said, ‘Mr. President, I appreciate the call.  Are you saying now that we have until August to introduce to you continual concerns that might trigger a substantive mitigation in these mandates?’  He said, ‘No, the mandates remain.  We’re more or less giving you this time to find out how you’re going to be able to comply.’ “

Then there’s this cynical distortion of President Ronald Reagan’s position on tax increases, as described by Steven Hayward in Commentary.  In arguing for his permanent tax increase on a group of Americans of whom he greatly disapproves, Obama cited this from Reagan:

Would you rather reduce deficits and interest rates by raising revenue from those who are not now paying their fair share, or would you rather accept larger budget deficits, higher interest rates, and higher unemployment? And I think I know your answer.

As Hayward pointed out, what Reagan was talking about was this: all the “tax increases” to which Reagan agreed were temporary excise hikes on cigarettes and telephone calls and technical changes in the tax code (such as the elimination of depreciation schedules and the reduction of tax credits and deductions).  Moreover, Reagan refused to accept any rollback or other alteration to the reduced tax rates he’d already fought so hard to win.  Even in the ensuing recession.  Especially in the ensuing recession.  But that’s OK, there’s nothing like a remark taken out of context and then distorted further by its present usage.

Lies of my President, Part 3

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This is Part 3 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

Last February, Obama had this to say through his Chief of Staff and former Budget Director, Jack Lew.  The remarks first came in response to a question from Dick Gregory, of MSNBC’s Meet the Press, and then in an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley.

Gregory: Here’s a stat that a lot of people may not know, but it’s pretty striking.  The number of days since Senate Democrats passed a budget is 1,019.  Can you just explain as a former budget director, how do you fund the government when there’s no budget?

Lew: Well, you know, one of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50 votes to pass something.  And there has been Republican opposition to anything that Senate Democrats have tried to do.

and

Crowley: I want to read for our viewers something that Sen Harry Reid, the Democrat Majority Leader in the US Senate, who said, “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year.  It’s done, we don’t need to do it.”

Lew: He’s not saying that they shouldn’t pass a budget.  But we also need to be honest.  You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support.

It stretches credulity far beyond the breaking point for Obama—or his ex-budget director—not to know that it takes 51 votes to pass a budget resolution; budget resolutions cannot be filibustered, the point of the 60-vote red herring.  This is a lie, pure and simple.

On the Keystone XL pipeline, there’s this bit of dishonesty.  Recall that Obama killed the pipeline that would have run from Canadian oil sands into central and Gulf-coastal US because he felt “rushed” by Republicans.  Last March, he staged a photo-op to take credit for “expediting” the permit process for a southern portion of Keystone XL, a part that runs in Oklahoma.  And a part that doesn’t need his, or State’s, approval since it doesn’t cross an international border.

And this one:

If you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.

Never mind that more and more companies are limiting the health insurance coverage they’re offering as insurance costs rise (wait—weren’t these supposed to come down?).  Never mind that as health insurance coverage alters, doctors are increasingly opting out of—or being driven from by the insurance companies—accepting patients with this or that insurance company’s policy.  And never mind that Sears and Darden Restaurants are moving to a plan where they don’t offer health insurance coverage at all.  Instead, they’ll give their employees a sum of money and allow them to shop for their own coverage via an online exchange.

And this: Senator Barack Obama spoke against recess appointments, including signing a letter to President Bush the Younger objecting to a recess appointment.  He also insisted that it’s “the wrong thing to do,” to appoint people who “couldn’t get through a Senate nomination.”

As president, though, Obama has made “recess appointments” while deliberately bypassing any opportunity for the Senate to weigh in: Donald Berwick to Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after leaving the position vacant for 15 months before nominating any one at all, just because he didn’t want to hassle with Republicans; Professor Elizabeth Warren to a created just-for-the-purpose “special assistant” position in his office in order to make her the functional head of the new CFPB, when it became clear that she had no hope of being confirmed; three people to the NLRB while the Senate was still in session.