Firm Foundation

April 15 saw a nationwide phenomenon of grassroots rallies for liberty, smaller government, and lower taxes, dubbed “TEA Parties” (Taxed Enough Already), in honor of the Boston Tea Party of the Revolutionary era.  This Independence Day, July 4, 2009, the TEA-partiers are gearing up for another surge of rallies to fight yet more surges of big government proposals from an already power-bloated Washington, D.C.

Here in Montgomery, AL, there will be a tri-county-wide TEA Party on Saturday from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Overlook Park on Bell Street in Montgomery.  According to the Wetumpka Herald:

The patriotic rally and celebration will include a WWII airplane formation flyover, a cigar boat river driveby, a motorcycle honor/color guard, patriotic music and several speakers. Topics will include potential legislation and its impact on citizens and their freedoms.

The event is open to the public and there is no admission fee. Attendees are encouraged to bring chairs, water, flags and signs.

Find your local TEA Party at the “official” TEA Party website here or by clicking the banner below.

It’s time Americans began defending our independence from tyranny rather than merely celebrating it.

In response to the damning audio evidence released yesterday that showed Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Birmingham covered up a report of alleged statutory rape, an investigation into PP’s probably criminal activity is being launched by . . . Planned Parenthood.

CBS 42’s story on this sex abuse cover-up, Planned Parenthood Caught on Tape, included this statement by PP:

Planned Parenthood of Alabama provides high quality health care and takes any allegation of this nature very seriously. An essential part of our mission is to protect teens, and to make sure that they get the counseling and medical care they need. We will conduct an internal, fact-based review to ensure that all our high standards of care have been met. Planned Parenthood of Alabama is committed to following all laws, and regularly makes reports to law enforcement officials. The health and safety of our patients is our top priority and we know that parents trust their teens to get accurate information and quality care at Planned Parenthood health centers. We will continue to work exceptionally hard to maintain that trust.”

In other news, the Fox has announced an objective, “internal, fact-based review” of the Hen House.

Thankfully, in addition to PP’s  self-serving announcement designed to cover up its cover-up, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office is also looking into the matter.  According to Lt.Randy Christian, who reviewed the tape yesterday:

“Anyone who sees that should be disturbed by it, and I hope they’re disturbed by it. For a 31 year old to have sex with a 14 year old, that is rape in the second degree. I think they are not only morally obligated to report it - the law requires them to report it, and there could be some serious consequences otherwise,” says Christian.

Lt. Christian is absolutely right: PP has both a moral and legal obligation to help a minor child get out of an unlawful, sexual relationship.

Planned Parenthood, of course, has a monetary interest in covering up criminal sexual activity of this sort because it brings them more abortion business, whether because the young, pregnant girl wants the abortion or, as is often the case, the statutory rapist forces the victim to abort, “or else.”  (This is the dark side of “choice” that pro-abortionists do not want to address.)  But putting money over morality, law, and the well-being of women (not to mention unborn children) is just business as usual for PP.

PP’s “internal” investigation into their own policy of deceit and lawbreaking is patently worthless—and the Sheriff’s investigation, therefore, is all the more important.

How many other clinics in Alabama act as silent accomplices to child sex abusers? As we stated yesterday, only statutory rapists stand to gain from abortion clinics’ continued failure to report sexual abuse of minors.

“The Foundation for Moral Law in Montgomery, Alabama called on the Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR) and law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute the Planned Parenthood clinic in Birmingham, AL, for recorded evidence released today that shows a staff member telling an alleged statutory rape victim that the clinic will “sometimes bend the rules a little bit” rather than report sexual abuse to state authorities, as required by state law.”

Read the rest of the press release here.

In an address at an 1837 Independence Day celebration at Newburyport, Mass., 6th President John Quincy Adams, son of Pres. John Adams (who helped draft the Declaration), linked the birth of Jesus Christ to that of our country:

“Why is it, Friends and Fellow Citizens, that you are here assembled? Why is it, that, entering upon the sixty-second year of our national existence, you have honored with an invitation to address you from this place, a fellow citizen of a former age, bearing in the records of his memory, the warm and vivid affections which attached him, at the distance of a full half century, to your town, and to your forefathers, then the cherished associates of his youthful days? Why is it that, next to the birth day of the Savior of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day? – And why is it that, among the swarming myriads of our population, thousands and tens of thousands among us, abstaining, under the dictate of religious principle, from the commemoration of that birth-day of Him, who brought life and immortality to light, yet unite with all their brethren of this community, year after year, in celebrating this the birth-day of the nation?

Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon the earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity, and gave to the world the first irrevocable pledge of the fulfilment of the prophecies, announced directly from Heaven at the birth of the Savior and predicted by the greatest of the Hebrew prophets six hundred years before?

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) recently announced that when it comes time to fill out the 2010 U.S. Census forms, “for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home. We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution does not require any information beyond that.”

Shelly Lowe of the U.S. Census Bureau countered that Rep. Bachmann is “misreading” the law, and that the U.S. Code provides penalties for those who refuse to answer the census.

Ms. Lowe, did you not learn in elementary school civics classes that the U.S. Code is not the same as the Constitution? Do you not recall that, ever since Chief Justice John Marshall announced the Supreme Court’s decision in Marbury v. Madison (1804), a statute that is repugnant to the Constitution is null and void? Where, Ms. Lowe, does the Constitution — not a statute, not a federal regulation, not an executive order, but the CONSTITUTION — authorize census-takers to require any more information beyond the number of people in a household?

Constitutional authority for the census is found in Article I § 2, which provides that representation in the House of Representatives and direct taxation shall be based upon the “respective Numbers” of people in each State. It is therefore necessary to determine the number of people in each State, so “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.” Note that this head-count is not even called a census; it is called an “Enumeration,” and its purpose is to ascertain congressional representation and direct taxation. By what stretch of the imagination can this provision be interpreted to authorize anything but a head-count and nothing more?

Rep. Bachmann also noted that the integrity of the census is open to question because ACORN will conduct a large portion of it, and that during World War II President Franklin D. Roosevelt used census records to round up Japanese-Americans and inter them in concentration camps.

A survey of liberal websites reveals that Rep. Bachmann has been excoriated as a nutcase and called every name you can imagine. However, not one has either (1) called into question her claim that FDR used census records to inter the Japanese, or (2) cited any constitutional authority whatsoever for a census that goes beyond a head-count.

To those who say she has placed herself above the law, I answer that she has done the exact opposite: she has placed herself, her fellow congressmen, and the U.S. Census Bureau under the Constitution.

And to those who think Rep. Bachmann is engaging in a political stunt, I answer that you don’t know her. She was my law student and research assistant in law school over 20 years ago, and our families have been close friends ever since. She is and always has been 100% sincere in her belief in limited government under the Constitution.

And so, Michele, I say, God bless you, hang in there, and keep up the good work! The Left would not attack you so viciously if they didn’t consider you a threat.

Most of us remember PRAVDA as the official organ of Soviet Communism. But times have changed. and Stanislav Michin, a Pravda columnist, now warns that “the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.”

Michin warns of the process by which Americans have been seduced into accepting the socialist agenda. It began, he says, with public education:

“First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their ‘right’ to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights.”

Next, Michin says, came an invisceration of America’s religious faith through a watered-down and liberalized version of Christianity:

“Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different ‘branches and denominations’ were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the ‘winning’ side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the ‘winning’ side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.”

This undermining of the minds and souls of the American people set the stage for the elections of 2008:

“The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.”

With frightening speed, Michin says, American business have been seduced by the President’s tantalizing offer of stimulus funds. “Then came Barack Obama’s command that GM’s (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of ‘pure’ free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

“So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a “bold” move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our ‘wise’ Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.”

Michin warns his countrymen, “The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.”

Michin’s warning to Americans is similar to that of de Tocqueville* 170 years ago: “The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.”**

*In DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, Vol. II (18 40), Alexis de Tocqueville warned: “Our contemporaries are ceaselessly agitated by two conflicting passions: they feel the need to be directed, as well as the desire to remain free. Since they are unable to blot out either of these hostile feelings, they strive to satisfy both of them together. They conceive a single, protective, and all-powerful government but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They derive consolation from being supervised by thinking they have chosen their own supervisors. Every individual tolerates being tied down because he sees that it is not another man nor a class of people holding the end of the chain, but society itself.”

**Before writing this post, I checked the Michin quotation on Snopes.com and found that it is indeed genuine. Snopes notes, however, that the Pravda which served as the official voice of Soviet Communism closed in 1991, and the new Pravda opened in 1999.

Stanislav Mishin

In his June 4, 2009 speech at Cairo University in Egypt, President Obama stated,

“As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University – that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughhout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

Obama may call himself a “student of history,” but this history lesson deserves an “F.” If he really believes what he is saying, he has swallowed the bait of the Muslim Golden Age hook, line, and sinker. Centuries before Mohammed, the ancient Egyptians, Indians and Babylonians developed algebra, the Chinese invented the magnetic compass and movable-type printing, and the Greeks developed architecture and medicine.

How, then, do Muslims and their apologists spin their myth of the Muslim Golden Age of about 850 – 1100 AD? First, they inherited a legacy of cultural achievement. For thousands of years, the Middle East had been the cradle of civilization and enjoyed a higher level of science and civilization than almost any other part of the world. Islam inherited this advanced civilization but cannot take credit for it.

Second, many of the Islamic achievements — which consisted mainly of making minor improvements to existing sciences and arts and spreading them to other parts of the world — were actually the work of Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Hindu slaves.

Third, even of those “Muslim” scientists and thinkers who can truly be called great, few could be called true Muslims. Abu Bakr Muhammed Ibn Zakarya al-Razi (865 – 925 AD), the notable Persian physician and philosopher, called the Muslim prophets “billy goats [who] pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves in spouting their lies,” and denounced the Qu-ran as an assorted mixture of “absurd and inconsistent fables.” Muslim leaders of his time denounced him as a blasphemer; today they acclaim him as a pillar of Islam’s Golden Age. Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1122 AD), a great mathematician and astronomer as well as a poet, was an epicurean philosopher, a rationalist skeptic, and scornful of all religion and particularly Islam. Ibn Rushd (1126 – 1198 AD), known to the western world as Averroes, was a remarkable Aristotelian scholar, but Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike denounced him as a heretic, and the Caliph ordered that his philosophical books be burnt. Crediting Islam for the contributions of these anti-Muslim thinkers is like crediting Christianity for the works of Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud.

Yes, there were a few scientific and philosophical achievements in the Islamic world during this period, and interaction with the Muslim would did help to spread science and culture throughout Europe. But these contribution are minuscule compared with those of the Jews, or the Chinese, or people of the British Isles.

And even Muslims have to admit that this so-called Golden Age came to an abrupt halt around 1400 AD, and for the next several centuries thereafter, Muslim civilization, culture and power declined and decayed.

Consider Muslim contributions to civilization in recent years. Of the top 50 scientific breakthroughs of 2007 listed in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, not one comes from any of the world’s 56 Muslim nations. These Muslim nations have contributed less than 2% of the world’s scientific literature. Of the three million foreign inventions patented in the United States between 1977 and 2004, only 1,500 came from Muslim nations. Saudi Arabia established a patent office in 1990, but did not grant its first patent until 1996. In 2001 Iran registered only 1 patent, Indonesia a total of 30 over the past 5 years; the United States averages over 100,000 per year. South Korea issues more patents in any single year than the entire Muslim world in the last 30 years. Jews worldwide have received 169 Nobel Prizes; the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims have received a total of 7, one of which went to Yasser Arafat.

“Civilization’s debt to Islam,” Mr. President? I don’t think so. But besides questioning your statement, Mr. President, I question even more why you insist, over and over again, on glorifying Islam while minimizing and apologizing for America, Christianity, and Western Civilization.

And as for your claim that “Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities [I note your careful wording] of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

Islamic tolerance, Mr. President? That’s an even greater myth, but I’ll have to save that for a future post.

Independence Day is approaching and, in light of President Obama’s recent statements praising Islam and rejecting America’s heritage as a Christian nation, Judge Roy Moore explains in his WorldNetDaily column why we as a nation have always depended upon the Christian God and were founded on Christian principles. We have never declared our “independence” from the God of our fathers, and the actions and words of Congress, past presidents, and even the U.S. Supreme Court make that evident.

For instance, our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, gave a speech in the town of Newburyport, Mass. on July 4, 1837, in which he noted that America loves celebrating Independence Day almost as much as celebrating Jesus Christ at Christmas:

“Why is it that, next to the birth day of the Saviour of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day? . . . Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birth-day of the Saviour? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth? That it laid the corner stone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity . . . ?”

Read more in Judge Moore’s column, Obama’s attack on our Christian heritage.

President Obama’s June 4th speech in Cairo reflects his accelerated efforts to portray a Islam in a favorable light. Declaring that “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear,” he proceeded to credit Islam with all sorts of scientific advances (which were actually the inventions of Christian slaves and subjects of Muslim rule), quoted bogus language allegedly from the Treaty of Tripoli about the United States bearing no enmity against Islam, and perpetuated liberal myths about so-called Islamic “tolerance.”

Then he declared that “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” Note that word “revealed.” He didn’t say the Middle East was the region where Islam was first developed, or conceived, or proclaimed, but the region where Islam was first “revealed.” Muslims believe that Allah “revealed” Islam to Mohammed through visions that he sent to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel. Does Obama agree that Islam is a “revealed” religion? “Revealed” by whom?

He cited or quoted from the Quran at least five times, always calling it the “holy Quran,” and expressses the hope that the day will come “when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra — as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed — peace be upon them — joined in prayer.”

Most Westerners have never heard the story of Isra. It is based upon two verse in the Quran, sura 17, which are amplified in the Hadith (supplemental writings that Muslims consider second only to the Quran in authority). According to the story of Isra, Mohammed was resting in the Kaaba of Mecca, when the angel Gabriel appears on a winged horse and carries him to a faraway mosque (considered by Muslim traditionalists to be the Noble Sanctuary or Temple Mount in Jerusalem), where he joins other prophets in prayer. Gabriel and the winged horse then take Mohammed on the second part of the journey, called the Mi’raj, during which he tours heaven and speaks with earlier prophets including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and then Gabriel takes Mohammed to speak with Allah. Muslims disagree as to whether this was a dream or an actual physical journey.

Significantly, Obama cites a Muslim story from the Quran and the Hadith to make his point. Significantly, also, he treats Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as though they were equals, and uses the Islamic blessing “peace be upon them” which is usually reserved for those who are dead. (Jesus is alive, Mr. President!)

President Obama says he is determined to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” But who, then, is going to stand up for America?

Should judges base their decisions on an impartial evaluation of the law as applied to the facts? Or should they judge based upon the criterion set forth by President Obama — “empathy”? Do men and women, young and old, white and black, rich and poor, have different versions of law, truth, and justice?
Even more than her liberal views on most subjects, the greatest danger posed by Judge Sotomayor may be her subjective approach to judging. For more, see Judge Moore’s WorldNetDaily column “Judging by law or feeling?”