Tag Archives: morality

Our Offensive Constitution

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So says the city of Seattle.

An internal memo at Seattle City Hall is causing quite a stir.  It suggests government workers no longer use the terms “citizen[….]”  According to the Office for Civil Rights, the terms are potentially offensive….

Our Constitution has this, though:

Article I, Sect 2: No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

And

Article I, Sect 3: No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

And

Article II, Sect 1: No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President….

And

Article IV, Sect 2: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

And

11th Amendment: The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

And

14th Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States….

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

And

15th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

And

19th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

And

24th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

And

26th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

This evil document is filled with that hateful word.  There ought to be a law.

These…officials…also say “brown bag” lunches are offensive, too, but that’s a separate bit of idiocy.

Transparency and a Phony Scandal

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Here‘s some more on President Barack Obama’s phony scandals—the IRS one.

The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee letter directly blames acting Commissioner Danny Werfel for the “systematic manner” in which his agency has “attempted to delay, frustrate, impede and obstruct” the committee’s investigation, despite his promising just weeks earlier to fully cooperate.

“The actions of the IRS under your leadership have made clear to the committee that the agency has no intention of complying completely or promptly with the committee’s oversight efforts,” wrote committee Chairman Congressman Darrell Issa (R, CA).

Indeed, Werfel has only delivered some 12,000 pages of the requested 64 million—less than 2 hundredths of a single per cent of the request—and many of those are merely duplicates or so badly redacted as to be useless.

This is transparency of Orwellian proportions.

Pollution and China

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Estimates from state-affiliated researchers say that anywhere between 8% and 20% of China’s arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals.  A loss of even 5% could be disastrous, taking China below the “red line” of 296 million acres of arable land that are currently needed, according to the government, to feed the country’s 1.35 billion people.

And

Mr. Zhuang [Guotai, head of the Ecological Department at the Environment Ministry], of the environment ministry, said at his recent news conference that only 35% of the fertilizer used in China was being properly absorbed by crops.  The remaining 65%, he said, was being discharged as pollution that was seriously tainting China’s farmland.  Runoff of nitrogen fertilizer, among the most widely-used varieties in China, can contaminate water sources and lead to soil acidification, soil erosion and lower crop yields.

And

China has long sought to industrialize its countryside, dating to Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward beginning in 1958, when he sought rapid industrialization by urging peasants to set up backyard steel furnaces at the expense of agricultural output.  The cumulative impact of decades of building up rural industry is now taking an environmental toll, particularly as industrial growth surges forward in China’s breadbasket.

Because some things are more important than others, and Government Knows Better what those things are:

effort to keep urbanites comfortable and well-fed has also led to the poisoning of parts of the food chain, and some of the pollution is traveling back to the cities in a different—and for many, more frightening—guise.

Cadmium, arsenic, lead, chemical waste from chemical factories, and waste runoff from excessive use of chemical fertilizers—these are all now in the PRC’s food chain, from the soil up.

Unfortunately, the old are much more vulnerable to the privation of inadequate food supply than are the younger and healthier.  The coming starvation from this food debacle might alleviate the coming demographic implosion of the PRC’s aging population, but it’s the wrong way for demographics to be adjusted, even where that’s not the intent.  At least as bad, the children and babies also are extremely vulnerable to the ravages of privation.  Their coming starvation will leave little or no capacity in the population for recovery on the far side of the disaster.

This is an inevitable outcome, if not in detail, of a Know Better government that dictates rather than protects individual capacities.

It Isn’t Your Money

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Or, gimme, gimme, gimme.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told “Fox News Sunday” that President Obama will neither sign government funding bills that slash domestic spending nor negotiate with Republicans over spending cuts to reduce the federal debt limit.

That’s not all.  He told ABC’s “This Week”

I think the president has made crystal clear, he’s not going to negotiate over the debt limit.

But he’s willing to “work with” all comers.  Sure.

This President, and his cronies in the Senate, are perfectly willing to blow up our credit rating (or what’s left of it after their last fiasco just a couple of years ago) and shut down the government if they’re blocked from taking more of your money away from you (in their demanded higher taxes) or taking more of your children’s money away from them (in their demanded continuing borrowing) and spending ever more of your money (their demanded spending increases).

All because these…politicians…think they know better than you—or your children—what that money should be spent on, and they’re convinced it’s their money and not yours in the first place.

Cynical Goals for our Economy

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Most Democrats want tax-overhaul efforts to fund government programs or contribute to deficit reduction.

Indeed.  In addition, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, UT) demands that any tax “reform” raise Federal revenues ($975 billion more over 10 years is his minimum bid) for the purpose of supporting increased Federal spending.

“Contribute to deficit reduction.”  How disingenuous.

Here’s a thought: how about tax reform that reduces rates against a backdrop of reduced/eliminated government “programs,” so that the Federal government is out of the way (or at least less in the way) of our economy?  The result would be a robust and growing economy that would both raise revenue for the Feds from that increased activity and that actually would eliminate the deficit instead of cynically perpetuating it.

And from that deficit elimination, facilitate actually paying down a ruinous Federal debt.