TRI: Commentary

The Race Question on the 2010 Census Raises Serious Questions

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."--Martin Luther King Jr.

Has America evolved to the point where the government no longer needs to know your race? It's an interesting and timely question, given our nation's colorful and, at times, painful history when it comes to matters of race, as well as the importance placed on race in the 2010 Census.

Certainly, we have come a long way since the days of slavery and Jim Crow laws. The election of Barack Obama as the nation's 44th president is a sign that America is becoming more color blind. Yet we still have a long way to go before we are able to do away with racial barriers, and it doesn't help when, instead of dispensing with race-identifying questions, the U.S. Census Bureau is requiring citizens to take a colored view of themselves.

The Census Bureau's phrasing...

Fred Phelps' "God Hates Fags" Message: Is It Free Speech?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

"You can't preach the Bible without preaching the hatred of God."--Pastor Fred Phelps

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to hear Snyder v. Phelps, a case dealing with anti-gay protests at the funerals of American soldiers, is stirring up debate over whether the privacy rights of grieving families trumps the free speech rights of demonstrators.

The case arose after members of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church picketed the Maryland funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in combat in Iraq on March 3, 2006. As part of their protests, church members held up signs during Snyder's funeral which stated, among other things, "God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11," "Fag Troops," "Priests Rape Boys," and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."

Understandably grief-stricken and outraged over Westboro's theatrics, Snyder's father, Albert, filed suit against Westboro Baptist Church and was awarded more than $10 million in damages. That...

Big Brother Wants to Know All About You: The American Community Survey

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

“This is Big Brother at its worst.”—Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX)

Over the past several years, I have been barraged with emails from Americans expressing their dismay over the American Community Survey, the latest census form to hit randomly selected households on a continuous basis. Unlike the traditional census, which collects data every ten years and is now underway, the American Community Survey is taken every year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And at 28 pages (with an additional 16-page instruction packet), it contains some of the most detailed and intrusive questions ever put forth in a census questionnaire. These concern matters that the government simply has no business knowing, including a person’s job, income, physical and emotional health, family status, place of residence and intimate personal and private habits.

As one frustrated survey recipient, Beth, shared with me:

When we first read through the American Communi...

The New Face of America—Will Our Freedoms Survive?

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I have seen the new face of America, and it is troubling.

According to an expansive study by the Pew Research Center, the Millennial generation is the so-called “new face of America.” Comprised of 50 million young people between the ages of 18-29, the Millennials have been so dubbed because they are the first generation to come of age in the new millennium. However, the study, which aims to shed light on what America might be like in the future, raises some provocative questions about this up-and-coming generation of citizens and leaders and what they might mean for the future of our nation.

For example, Millennials are “less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history. Their entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession, but they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.”<...

Is Joe Stack a Wake-Up Call to America?

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

“In my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.”—Joe Stack

On Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010, 53-year-old, financially strapped software engineer Joseph Stack crashed a small plane into an IRS office building in Austin, Texas. He left behind a wife, a stepdaughter and a suicide note he had posted on his software company’s website. By the following day, the various media pundits on the right and left had already dismissed Stack as a fringe lunatic, and anyone who agreed with Stack’s diatribe against an unjust government was labeled a crackpot. However, while you can--and should--disagree with the method of Stack’s madness, Americans shouldn’t be too quick to discount the source of his frustrations.

Clearly, Stack is neither a hero nor a martyr...

Raising Hell—Isn’t That What Patriots Do?

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed

Recently, I was invited to speak to a group of affluent, upper middle class retirees. The host’s estate was extensive, his home airy and spacious, original art graced the walls, and the guests ranged from dignitaries to activists from the civil rights era.

I had been invited to lead a discussion on ways to minimize political polarization and find common ground, and I agreed, hoping that these people, who are well-educated, well-connected and well-to-do, would want to get involved in the freedom struggle and effect change within their spheres of influence. Instead, I came face to face with those I’ve been writing about for years--materially comfortable, disconnected from reality and totally oblivious to what’s...

Virginians Should Say No to Expanding Death Penalty

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

As capital punishment studies have shown, whether or not you are sentenced to death often has little to do with the crime and everything to do with your race, where you live, and who prosecutes your case.

This is especially so in Virginia, which is one of the most pro-death penalty states in the country, second only to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 1976. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the Commonwealth continues to labor under an egregiously flawed (and expensive) justice system--and is once again in the throes of a massive budgetary crisis, the Virginia General Assembly is pushing through legislation that will only serve to worsen this state of affairs by expanding its death penalty. The various proposals to expand the death penalty include adding fire marshals, assistant fire marshals, auxiliary police officers, and uncompensated auxiliary police officers to the capital murder statute. One bill would also abolish Virginia’s “triggerman rule” by ma...

Are You Brainwashed? Seven Principles for Free Government

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Brainwashed in our childhood
Brainwashed by the school...
Brainwashing us in Washington...
Brainwashed by the media...
Brainwashed by computer
Brainwashed by mobile phones
Brainwashed by the satellite
Brainwashed to the bone.
—George Harrison, “Brainwashed”

Precisely because Americans are easily distracted--because, as study after study shows, they are clueless about their rights--and because the nation’s schools have ceased teaching the fundamentals of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights--the American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer toward authoritarianism. This is taking place with little more than a whimper from an increasingly compliant populace that, intentionally or not, has allowed itself to be brainwashed into trusting their politicians.

The Day the Music Died

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.
—Don McLean, American Pie (1971)

The snow was heavy that night. The only alternative to riding all night long in a dirty, unheated bus to his next concert date was a tiny airplane. Shortly after takeoff, however, the plane carrying Buddy Holly, along with Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, disappeared into a snowy cloud. Holly’s torn, mangled body was found a few hours later in a frozen Iowa cornfield a little past midnight on February 3, 1959. I was a 12-year-old kid at the time. For Buddy Holly fans like me, it seemed that all was lost--a feeling immortalized in Don McLean’s classic song.

As an artist, Buddy Holly was only with us for 30 months--between 1957 and 1959. But in that short period, Holly’s innovation and keen musicianship made him the Mozart of rock music and one of the most influential mu...

How Lucky It Is for Our Politicians That Americans Do Not Think

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”—Edward R. Murrow

“How lucky it is for rulers,” Adolf Hitler once said, “that men cannot think.” The horrors that followed in Nazi Germany might have been easier to explain if Hitler had been right. But the problem is not so much that people cannot think but that they do not think. Or if they do think, as in the case of the German people, that thinking becomes muddled and easily led.

Hitler’s meteoric rise to power, with the support of the German people, is a case in point. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in full accordance with the country’s legal and constitutional principles. When President Paul von Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler assumed the office of president, as well as that of chancellor, but he preferred to use the title Der Füehrer (the leader) to describe himself. This new move was approved in a general election in which Hitler ...

Should We Be Compliant Lambs or Nonviolent Gadflies?

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

“We must see the need for nonviolent gadflies.”--Martin Luther King Jr.

When it comes to the staggering loss of civil liberties, the Constitution hasn’t changed. Rather, it is the American people who have changed.

Once a citizenry that generally fomented a rebellion and founded a country, Americans are no longer the people they once were. Americans today live in a glass dome, says author Nicholas von Hoffman, a kind of terrarium, cut off from both reality and the outside world. In his words, they are “bobbleheads in Bubbleland. They shop in bubbled malls, they live in gated communities, and they move from place to place breathing their own private air in bubble-mobiles known as SUVs.”

Quite simply, most Americans, having been beguiled by materialism and technology, are more or less compliant lambs, only protesting when someone takes away their cell phone or causes them material discomfort. And if the specter of a terrorist attack (no matter ho...

The State of the Nation: I am afraid

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

"As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid."--Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America

Ominous developments in America have been a long time coming, in part precipitated by "we the people"--a citizenry that has been asleep at the wheel for too long. And while there have been wake-up calls, we have failed to heed the warnings.

Just consider the state of our nation:

We're encased in what some are calling an electronic concentration camp. The government continues to amass data files on more and more Americans. Everywhere we go, we are watched: at the banks, at the grocery store, at the mall, crossing the street. This loss of privacy is symptomatic of the growing surveillance being carried out on average Americans. Such surveillance gradually poisons the soul of a nation, transforming us from one in which we're presumed innocent until proven guilty to one in which everyone is a suspect an...

Obama and the Global Police: More Friendly Fascism?

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."-- James Madison

Over the course of his first year in office, Barack Obama has shown himself to be a skillful and savvy politician, saying the things Americans want to hear while stealthily and inexorably moving forward the government's agenda of centralized power. For example, in one breath, Obama pays lip service to the need for greater transparency in government, while in another, he issues an executive order that will result in even more government secrecy.

He is aided in this Machiavellian mindset by a trusting populace inclined to take him at his word and a mainstream media seemingly loath to criticize him or scrutinize his actions too closely. A perfect example of this is the media's relative lack of scrutiny over Obama's recent transformation of Executive Order (EO) 12425 from a document that constitutionally limits the Internation...

It's The Beatles' World (We Just Live In It)

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

"We were four relatively sane people in the middle of madness."--George Harrison

The Beatles--with two members of the group deceased--were, by the end of 2009, projected to make over $1.6 billion from the release of their 13 remastered albums, as well as the video game, Beatles Rock Band. As one commentator notes, "In one master stroke, the Beatles address falling sales of CDs as well as grab a new generation of Beatlemaniacs." Writing for Guitar Legend magazine, Alan di Perna explained, "The products are big sellers with people who were born long after the group's breakup or, for that matter, Lennon's death."

It's as if the Beatles never left us. But that's the point--they haven't. In fact, they seem to be everywhere.

The Beatles were much more than a rock group that changed pop music. John, Paul, George and Ringo unknowingly set in motion forces that made an entire era what it was and, by extension, what it is today. The ...

The Worst Person in the World

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Our winner [of the worst person in the world gold award]: John W. Whitehead, the founder of The Rutherford Institute....Whitehead wants [Congressman Tom] Perriello to move his office to make it easier for the tea baggers to protest and threaten him....John "you-want-that-we-should-carry-your-signs-for-you-too-because-they-are-so-heavy" Whitehead of The Rutherford...Institute...today's worst person in the world.--Keith Olbermann, "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," MSNBC (Dec. 14, 2009)

Who is the worst person in the world? Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, has actually named me the "worst person in the world" for coming to the defense of political protesters who believed their First Amendment rights were being restricted.

It gets better. Not only was I dubbed the so-called "worst" person in the world for defending free speech, but Olbermann actually ranked my behavior more reprehensible than that of (in his view)...

Christmas Without Carol

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Oh, you lucky Henry." --The angel to the Bishop concerning Julia, The Bishop's Wife

It's been a little over six months since my wife Carol passed away. Carol and I were married for 42 years and spent nearly every day together. She helped me found The Rutherford Institute and worked alongside me, never more than a few feet away. Unlike many couples whose outside interests take them in opposite directions, Carol and I were joined at the hip. We did everything together. Thus, when she passed away, I was devastated and more alone than I've ever been in my life.

Every occasion that Carol would have delighted in has become a little death for me now--Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's and Valentine's Day--all those occasions she fussed over and planned for endlessly, for weeks on end.

Now with Christmas approaching, my heart has that sinking feeling--like a dying sun at sunset. Everywhere I turn, I am accosted by reminders of the sea...

Is Christmas a Dirty Word?

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Doesn't anyone know the true meaning of Christmas?" --Charlie Brown

When I was a child in the 1950s, the magic of Christmas was promoted in the schools. We sang Christmas carols in the classroom. There were cutouts of the Nativity scene on the bulletin board, along with the smiling, chubby face of Santa and Rudolph. We were all acutely aware that Christmas was more than a season to receive--it was a special time to give as well.

Fast forward a mere 50 years, and Christmas is being eradicated. In fact, there is a phobia about Christmas, and it's all because of those first six letters, C-H-R-I-S-T. As a result, Americans are increasingly being pressured to avoid anything related to the religious holiday in public. Indeed, corporations and government officials are going to outrageous lengths in order to not offend those who do not celebrate the holiday. In the process, they're trampling all over the First Amendment.

Schools across the country no...

The Tragic Costs of War

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes ... known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."-- James Madison, 1795

"Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are going to perish together as fools."--Martin Luther King Jr., 1967

The madness continues. In a bitter stroke of irony, Barack Obama, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has set America on the road to endless war--and, it must be said, endless death. All the while, Obama has essentially anointed himself, in the words of a Spiegel commentator, the "Nobel War Prize laureate."

It is a terrible mantle for anyone to take on but most especially a...

Quelling the Revolution: 'Neutralizing' John Lennon

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

You say you want a revolution.
We all want to change the world.
You tell me that it's evolution.
We all want to change the world.
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out.
--John Lennon and Paul McCartney, "Revolution"

By the mid-1960s, Beatlemania had taken the world by storm and a revolution was in the making. Unlike their predecessors, the Beatles soon revealed themselves to be more than just entertainers. They were willing to critique and even debunk tradition--something that virtually no one did at that time. The defining moment came in 1966 with John Lennon's famous remark: "We're more popular than Jesus Christ right now."

The critical fallout was massive. The Beatles were lambasted as evil, their records were burned in bonfires, and they received death threats. However, within a year, with the critical acclaim of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles w...

Have We Forgotten God?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Statesmen may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."--John Adams, letter to Zabdiel Adams (21 June 1776)

American society has succumbed to a rampant materialism. And now it has passed down to our young people. In fact, studies show that a large percentage of young people between the ages of 16 and 25 don't see any meaning or purpose to life at all. Another study in 2009 showed that 15% of teenagers in grades 7 through 12 don't think they will live to the age of 35, which causes them to take part in adverse or risky behavior--drugs, wild parties, getting arrested by police, and even suicide.

As we have lost our sense of meaning, morality and spirituality, the erosion of our freedoms on virtually every front has accelerated. And, make no mistake about it, freedom in the true sense of the word is always undergirded by a common moral and religious sy...