This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nation’s Brundtland Report, which defined Sustainable Development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” But aristocratic socialists have corrupted the sustainable development movement into a vehicle to achieve vast administrative power for themselves. Nations that adopt Sustainable Development are doomed to fail at meeting the needs of the present generation and through debt accumulation from deficit spending will consign future generations to a life as debt slaves.

Through the early 1980s, socialist Latin American economies powered growth by quadrupling their indebtedness from $75 billion to $315 billion. With aristocrats controlling government, while the poor had no voice in these loan matters, nor did they benefit from them as most of the loan proceeds were siphoned off to benefit the aristocrats and their crony amigos.

When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, the U.S. economy had suffered a decade of stagflation, turning our Midwest manufacturing base into the Rust Belt. Reagan was determined to regain international economic dominance by reasserting our Founding Father’s demand for limited government and maximum personal liberty. Reagan viscerally believed what John Adams wrote:

“ the moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence”

Reagan’s relentless focus overcame the bi-partisan drumbeat to continue the socialist expansion of the money supply to promote growth. He then leveraged monetary restraint with the largest income tax cut in American history to power the American economy to sustained growth with low inflation.

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More than 50 years after Sam Cooke first sang about his educational deficiencies, many American teens “don’t know much about history.”  Or so their latest test scores suggest.

Only 12 percent of all 12^th graders are “proficient” or “advanced” in U.S. History according to the 2010 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).  And less than half of all high school seniors display even a “basic” knowledge about American History.

The latest NAEP scores for civics are almost as bad:  Less than two-thirds of all seniors show a “basic” understanding of our system of government.  And a 2010 study commissioned by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that “civics, once the cornerstone of public education, has fallen off the radar” as teachers have felt increasing pressure to show progress in other areas.

That many educators today give considerable attention to other subjects would not disturb America’s founders.  While we tend to think of them largely as political figures, America’s founders recognized that there are many higher and grander pursuits in life than those in the political realm.

This no doubt explains why the scientifically-curious Ben Franklin went outside in a thunderstorm with his kite – and why the educationally-minded Thomas Jefferson had his gravestone identify him as the founder of the University of Virginia, but not as the third president of the United States.

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Those listening to President Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden yesterday may have been hoping for remarks outlining a comprehensive debt reducing package from the nation’s chief executive, but what they got was yet another class warfare screed.  Replete with admonitions that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share” (as defined by Him of course) and sprinkled with his patented scare tactics rooted in the fallacy of the false alternative (either hedge fund managers pay more or seniors will go hungry) the president to me revealed more of himself even than he has in the past about what really makes him tick, both philosophically as psychologically.

He is, at heart, an ardent believer that the wealth of a nation’s citizenry is in the end the property of their government into which the haves pay and bureaucrats then distribute out as social justice in the form or largess to the have-nots.  His increasing vibe of anger, that seems to conversely rise as his poll numbers fall, reveals to me a rather petulant man, unable to grasp the notion that he may not actually be the smartest guy in the room (despite the assurances of his orbiting satellites of sycophants in and out of  the MSM media) and that there are those who disagree with him not because they haven’t heard his message, but rather because they have and have found it wanting.

I found myself listening to his speech and thinking that I’d heard most of it before.  Most but not all.  One new tact that the historian in me found fascinating, and quite cynical, was his reaching down into the soil of Mount Vernon to summon the ghost of our most esteemed first president, George Washington, to help make his case.  Mr. Obama offered up this snippet from Washington’s September 19, 1796 Farwell Address to the nation to bolster his tax raising stance:

“…towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; and no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.”

Here is how Mr. Obama’s speech-writers interpreted our first president’s advice,   Said our current president:

“It’s always more popular to promise the moon and leave the bill for after the next election or the election after that.  That’s been true since our founding.  George Washington grappled with this problem.  He understood that dealing with the debt is — these are his words – ‘always a choice of difficulties.’  But he also knew that public servants weren’t elected to do what was easy; they weren’t elected to do what was politically advantageous.”

I wonder if anyone in the Obama administration studied history because to reach back to Washington to support, in effect, raising already burdensome income taxes to sustain a massive federal bureaucracy and social welfare state is about as far a reach as one can stretch before toppling over into the abyss of utter nonsense.

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When Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around,” he was not taking off on some libertarian tangent or making an obscure philosophical point. He was following in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers who erected a frame of government that began with the words “We the People.” He was also trying to return government to its important but limited role in people’s lives—a role that both political leaders and the people understood until 1912 but has been mostly misunderstood and abandoned since then. At Philadelphia in 1787, the Framers of the Constitution created a national government that would be effective—even energetic—in its functions but also limited to those functions. The people were to be the ultimate guardians of both the effectiveness and limitations of government. The only way such a republic—unprecedented in modern history—could work would be if the people acted as a vigilant and constitutionally-minded sovereign jealous of their rights.

The authority of the people is made clear in at least three respects in the Constitution, and their vitality is powerfully suggested in a fourth. First, the Constitution holds both the lawmakers and the executive accountable to the people through elections, whether direct or indirect. The foremost depository of the people’s will is obviously the House of Representatives, whose members are directly elected every two years. According to James Madison writing in The Federalist, every constitution is designed to find rulers with the wisdom and virtue to pursue the common good and to make sure those rulers remain virtuous while holding the public trust. Elections are the means to both of those ends. In other words, if those in office lose their virtue, they can be thrown out of office by the people through regular elections. The people are the true source of term limits.

Second, the Constitution embraces, indeed creates, the system known as federalism. Not only can the people exert their authority through elections at the federal (national) level, they can also throw their support behind the state governments against federal encroachment. The chief means of doing so in the original Constitution was through the Senate, whose members were elected by state legislatures. Indeed, the Framers of the Constitution originally thought that the people’s loyalties would lie overwhelmingly with the states, not the remote national government. Their opinion owed to the history of the Revolution—in which the states were extremely jealous of their powers; the confidence that men of great talents and ambitions at the national level would devote their energies to the high pursuits of “commerce, finance, negotiation, and war,” to quote Hamilton in The Federalist, not with local concerns; and the general tendency of human nature to prefer the things closest to us. (Not many people living in Dallas root for the Steelers.) To this end, should the national government extend its powers beyond those enumerated in Article I, section 8, the Senators—whose loyalties lie, and whose careers are made, not in the national capital but in the state capitals—would defend the prerogative of the states and thereby the liberties of the people.

Third, for the Constitution to be adopted, it was imperative that the first Congress adopt a Bill of Rights to be appended to it. The Bill of Rights, authored mostly by Madison, was meant to serve as an education to the people in what their rights are and an encouragement to them to guard those rights jealously. It is also abundantly clear what would be the greatest threat to their rights. The Bill of Rights begins with the words “Congress shall make no law respecting” and ends with the words “or to the people.” That is, the greatest threat to liberty would come from government—though republican—exceeding its constituted authority and encroaching on the rights of the people.

Finally, there is the latent suggestion in the Constitution that the people will be doing the vast majority of the work in civil society, and the government will be needed chiefly to establish the rule of law, to protect the society from internal and external enemies, and to set up a system of uniform commercial exchange.

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“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he will fight, nothing that is more important than his own personal safety is a more miserable creature and has no chance of ever being free unless by the efforts of greater men then himself. “

-John Stuart Mill

I read this quote in the past couple days and it struck me square in the face. The ideology of modern western thought was forged on the American continent from the effort and struggle to survive that imbued us with a fierce sense of independent thought and rugged individualism culminating with the DECLARATION of INDEPENDENCE and the birth of a nation. This is what the Declaration of Independence was talking about in the first paragraphs. All people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”. It is so obvious the writers of this document had deep values precious to them and worth capturing on paper.

At this point in history, monarchies monopolized governments in countries around the world. And our colonies were ruled by leadership more than 3,000 miles away …. But everyone has their limit, right?

The early Americans had been taxed and humiliated by unjust laws and ignorant leadership. Colonial Americans knew what was being done to them was wrong and they felt ANYTHING was better than what was happening to them. So, they chose to stand for a simple notion: Man is in control of his own destiny.

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Recent developments in the Middle East seem to have a new or unique quality. For the first time, “ordinary” people appear to be rising up against oppressive and even tyrannical regimes. This is, of course, desirable on a number of levels. Somewhat distressing, however, is the little-discussed fact that many (though certainly not all) of these “ordinary people” have clear and unmistakable ties to America’s most bitter enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda.

Whatever U.S. policy is—and currently, it appears that even the President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense cannot get on the same page, let alone develop a united strategy with allies—it needs to be guided by only one thing: what is in the security interests of the United States of America? Our Founders, both in the Constitution and in their actions governing the early Republic, spoke clearly on how to deal with such overseas adventures. While the threats may be current, they are neither new nor unique.

First, it is critical to understand that virtually all of the Founders had served in the military at one time or another and most of them had actually seen combat. These were not wild-eyed dreamers, nor pacifists. They knew blood; they knew struggle. Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Knox, Livingston, Greene, Randolph, and many more had seen war up close, and none of the Founders believed in disarmament. Their only disagreements came over whether militias could be whipped into shape quickly enough to defend the nation. Jefferson, one of the last to come around, finally admitted the need for a U.S. military academy to train officers.

Second, while the phrase “entangling alliances” is commonly thrown out by some conservatives as a warning against any alliances, the fact is that the U.S. had benefitted greatly from an “entangling” alliance with France. Washington’s warning, in his Farewell Address, warned against “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations.” Put simply, he believed people were capable of change. But then Washington made clear that Europe had different interests than our own—and that, indeed, the U.S. did have national interests. He argued for a standing army to protect those interests. It is all the more odd, then, that Washington (and John Adams) paid tribute, or bribes, to the Barbary Pirates to prevent them from seizing our shipping. But in the meantime Adams began construction of our first blue-water navy, which was completed in time for his successor, Thomas Jefferson to use it. When the Bey of Tripoli engaged in the time-tested declaration of war (back then, cutting down the U.S. flag), Jefferson did not hesitate a moment to send the entire U.S. fleet—without a declaration of war—to not only eliminate the Bey himself, but to take out any of his allies whether those states had declared war on the U.S. or not!

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Well, my friends, it’s Christmas in America once again. And one way to keep our gratitude levels high (and stress levels low) is to reflect on how Christianity and Freedom go together, both in the words and deeds of the Founders, and even in our secular society today. Many of us are not religious at all these days, but we all benefit from the influence of Christianity on the men that designed and built this amazing Nation of Desire.

Plus, the Sears catalog! And we use the word “mountebank” post-ironically!

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On Fox News Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer spoke of his dissenting decisions in the several Second Amendment cases that he heard as a Justice. He told host Chris Wallace that he thought that James Madison only included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights as a sop to the states and Breyer insisted that historians agreed.

In essence, Breyer was saying that Madison was not interested in an individual’s right to gun ownership and self-protection and for that reason his dissenting opinions against that individual right accorded well with what the founder’s thought on the issue.

But Breyer’s assumption that a citizen’s right to bear arms is not sacrosanct and his following contention that the founders would agree seems to ignore much of the history of the era not to mention the precedents in law and the historical record upon which the founders relied to define their political ideas — including Madison.

Of course, it is a bit ridiculous to take one lone founder’s words and assume that it represents the opinion of all of them. It is quite easy, after all, to find quotes from any particular founder that in no way reflected even a minority opinion of the day. For instance, Thomas Jefferson once advocated that all laws be dumped every few decades so that the next generation could start over with their own ideas unencumbered by past generations. Even Madison thought that idea was absurd. Hamilton found that many of his most dearly held financial ideas left his fellows cold. John Adams thought that we should call the president “your majesty,” an idea that earned him much derision. And Poor Richard himself, Benjamin Franklin, once proposed that each galaxy had it’s own “God” that ruled in his own sphere meaning that there were infinite gods for infinite galaxies. Not every idea the founders had were gems, to be sure.

Still, Madison spoke with most of his contemporaries, not outside them, when he considered the meaning of the Second Amendment.

It is certainly true that the founder’s chief interest in creating the Second Amendment was to serve two important roles. One was to create a citizen army, a militia that could be called upon to defend the nascent nation. The second was to prevent the necessity of a large standing army, a body that most of the founders feared. Based on a clear reading of history, the prevailing opinion of the day was that a standing, powerful army served the forces of tyranny far more often than it served those of liberty. Consequently they wanted to figure out a way to make sure that the U.S. Army was small and too weak to threaten the citizenry.

This fact is what Breyer pointed to in order to prove his contention that Madison was not concerned with an individual’s right to own firearms.

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After Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008, many in the Democratic Party and on the political left argued that the GOP and the conservative movement were finished and that Democrats were destined to control, in perpetuity, the presidency, Congress, and culture, writ large. But then something unexpected happened–millions of sleepwalking, mall-shopping Americans finally woke up.

The activist left, which denigrated the previous president in a merciless fashion, took the reins of power with reckless abandon and shoved its brand of poisonous hope and change down the throats of the American people. So we the people, the reawakening silent majority, responded in the form of a grassroots movement that is turning into a juggernaut set to roll past November 2nd and become something transcendent and long-lasting. Our Founding Fathers would be proud that we have rediscovered the spirit and the essence of their ideas.

While the Tea Party has not been specifically partisan–many Republican carcasses lie in its rubble–this conservative and constitutional checks and balances has created a rejuvenated GOP, chastened and wiser.

This weekend I have the honor of sharing the stage with one of the Tea Party’s and Republican Party’s fearless leaders, Sarah Palin. Since her arrival on the national stage, the Democratic Party has recognized her potential as a political powerhouse and has worked in tandem with its partners in crime, the mainstream media, to wage an unprecedented personal campaign against her and her family. The Tea Party can relate.

But the power of Alinsky and the politics of personal destruction vis a vis the Democrat Media Complex has reverse effects when the object of the hate bravely stands up to the bullies and thugs. The Tea Party and Sarah Palin have given America a great lesson in standing up to the bullies who have co-opted the Democratic Party and the American media. (more…)

The “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial was inspiring. That should be just the beginning of a “Restoration Movement.” We don’t really need a revolution in America; all we need to do is restore what once was. I have a suggestion for another aspect of our Founding that needs to be restored—a suggestion that some will call unrealistic, yet one that the Founders considered essential.

Let’s restore the provision in the original wording of the Constitution that allows state legislatures to choose a state’s senators who serve in Congress.

Article I, Section 3 says, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof.”

The reasoning was lucid: the people of each state already had direct representation into the national government via the House of Representatives; it was necessary as well to provide representation for the state governments in the national Congress. The goal was to make sure that laws passed by each state were not going to be overturned by the national government without good reason.

It was one of those key checks on power; it was to provide balance in the federal system.

Why did this change?

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As we all know, the result of the left’s takeover of our media and universities has been a vast ignorance among the young about America’s history, philosophy and institutions. That’s the disease but – huzzah! – PJTV’s Klavan on the Culture is the cure.

Here in just around four minutes is a complete refresher course on the history, meaning and importance of the United States Constitution for all you young dudes and dudettes. All right, it’s complete nonsense. Still, when you man and woman the barricades, at least now you’ll know what you’re fighting for! Sort of.

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I’ve met a lot of people across the country since those news cameras caught me doubting Barack Obama’s ideas for giving my money to someone else. Over the last 18 months I have mostly enjoyed my role speaking as and for average working Americans.

Nobody puts a cordon around me to keep the “little people” away because this Ohio plumber is one of the little people. I talk with just about everybody and it’s been an education.

Everywhere I go at least one person asks me what it’s like to meet the political and media “stars” I’ve come across and who we all see on the national stage. Maybe we all want to believe that the best about us can be found in these people because it is they who will have the real power to change the direction of the country.

I can tell you that some of these national figures are real and some are not. What else is new? The hotter the spotlight, the more the tendency to “go cardboard” with scripted remarks, handlers keeping people away and a distance between what is real and what is “packaging”. It’s not always the case but pretty common from what I’ve seen.

What I have found, however, is a deep well of good ideas, common sense, decency and strength of character in the everyday people I meet. If you really want to know what makes America strong and good and resilient, look to our hometowns, not to the national stage.

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Once again, this weekend, Americans will gather with their families to “celebrate” the 4^th of July.  What are we celebrating? What stirs us on this day? How much time will be spent reflecting upon its relevance to our way of life? Is it, as it should be, a celebration of the founding of this Republic, and its independence as a nation? Will many Americans talk with one another or with their children about the impossible dream made true by a handful of remarkable men?  Will many of our fellow Americans even think about the new concept of government they created for us, one based upon the adoption of a Constitution, which established the principles of self-government and the limitations on the powers granted to that government?

Unfortunately we fear that the answer to the rhetorical questions posed above, increasingly, is “no”.  If somehow our national government were to set aside that day as “National Take a Day Off from Work Day” little would change.  Families would gather for a mid‑summer day of hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue and good old fun.  Yes, the 4^th of July features flags and parades but they often seem divorced from what it is we are all celebrating. They provide a sort of faux patriotic pageantry with an abundance of food, sparkle and noise.

Actually the 4^th of July, by its correct name, is Independence Day.  It signifies the true meaning of what was declared on July 2, 1776 and affirmed by the Continental Congress on July 4:  the document known as the Declaration of Independence.  This simple document lays out the fundamental meaning of America and it touched off a bloody revolution and several years of war to establish that all our citizens have the right to an independent life, to the liberty that allows for the freedom to exercise one’s own judgment and to the right to pursue one’s own path, career, associates, friends, etc., e.g. the pursuit of happiness.

John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, correctly predicted that the day (he referred to the actions of July 2 not July 4) would be celebrated for as long as the American experiment in government continued.

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The Constitution of the United States of America is a remarkable document.  It is eloquent in its simplicity, clarity and in its power.  It revolutionized (first in America, and then throughout most of the western world) the relationship between those who are governed and those who govern.  It has served as a governing template for much of the democratic western world.

Every federal office holder swears allegiance to the Constitution, not to any leader, not to any party, not to any political philosophy—only to this document, which is the foundation upon which our form of government is based and against which all legislation and judicial actions are measured.  The President vows to do his job faithfully and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And while there is no way of divining what today’s crop of leaders would have thought of the Constitution had they been present at the founding when it was first circulated prior to ratification, we have our doubts whether many of today’s ruling class, including President Obama, would have found common cause with Washington, Adams (John), Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton or Jay, all of whom loomed so large on the emerging American landscape.

This speculation is not intended as criticism of our political leadership or of the president.  Many great American patriots who were present at the founding opposed ratification of the Constitution.  Indeed, such American icons as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Mason and James Monroe, were resolutely opposed to ratification of the Constitution, so wary were they of concentrated federal power. Time has, of course, demonstrated the remarkable wisdom of those who fought for ratification and the value of the gift they bequeathed to us all.  The question raised by this essay, however, is posed as the basis for discussion of whether a document written so long ago, which lays out with simplicity certain fundamental rules and relationships, can truly guide this nation 221 years later.

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This past April, an undated photo of two slave children was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, North Carolina, accompanied by a document detailing the sale of  “John” for $1,150 in 1854.  (John is presumably one of the children).  The photo was purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $30,000.  As a father of a little boy, this photograph reaches out to me in a distinctly personal level for I cannot imagine ever being separated from my child and the unbearable anguish I would suffer having him literally sold out from under me and taken away never to be seen again…left always to wonder about the son I lost to the horrors that was American slavery.  The two forlorn children in this photo stare back at us through the chasm of time. They are the ghosts of an ugly national past.  The victims of a monstrous injustice that would take the violent deaths of 620,000 Americans to rectify.

Still, I am struck by the breathtakingly steep arc of moral ascendency we have seen in this great country since the horrible bloodlettings that occurred on the battlefields of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and over six thousand others to determine once and for all what kind of country we would become.

That we have gone from a nation in which three million fellow Americans were held as slaves literally in chains and shackles, with no more legal rights than a goat, to a country that elects a Black man to the highest and most powerful office in the land says much about who we are as a people.

There will be those on the left who will predictably use the upcoming Independence Day holiday to highlight the hypocrisy of the Declaration we celebrate.  They will mock the document of a slave state that had the brazenness to announce to the world our vision of a better nation founded in the conviction that such basic human rights as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come not from governments or royals, but from a higher power than ourselves: Divine Providence.

But these cynics will miss the point.

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On April 15th, it is always a worthy enterprise to reflect on one of the major motivations of the American Patriots that caused them to break away from England. Of course, I am referring to “Taxation Without Representation.” Today, we know from the Tea Parties multiplying around the Country that Gerald Berzan is quite to say right that “Taxation with representation ain’t so hot either.” Perhaps that is why Douglas Adams declared that he was “spending a year dead for tax reasons.”

In that lively spirit, I give you my Top 10 Anti-Taxation Quotes with my annotations:

No. 10.

“In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” Benjamin Franklin. It is hard to start anywhere else. The little known full quote is “Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” The Founders, who framed a Constitution to protect us from government, did not dare consider an income tax. Franklin obviously did not trust future politicians.

No. 9.

“I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.” Milton Friedman. The 1st of two Friedman quotes in this countdown brings up the question: Why the Republican Party is (or should be) so anti-tax? Franklin obviously warned us. Friedman accepted his warning and knew that unless we fought them at every turn, taxes would be more than inevitable.

No. 8.

“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.” Legendary Judge Learned Hand. I guess it turns out Joe Biden was wrong?

No. 7.

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.” The first of John Marshall’s 2 quotes in the countdown: Simply stated, but sadly not well understood: that maxim also applies to income as well – which is why higher rates result in less tax revenue. Later Alan Greenspan would say that “Whatever you tax, you get less of.” It REALLY is that simple – if only our politicans would learn that lesson.

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In my other life, I’m a food writer for The Boston Herald – a cultural raisin in the sun in the far-left world of food journalism here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.

Voltaire

So I was shocked, during a dinner the other night with a bunch of folks in the biz, when one local restaurant critic declared that he had “a very illiberal” view of abortion: he was pro-life! Several table-mates nearly spit up their merlot and brie.

I stood by his side, but not by his phraseology. “It’s a liberal view if you’re the baby,” I said, making my point but not many friends in the process.

The incident highlighted an issue that’s been eating at me for quite some time: the misuse of the word “liberal” in the current political lexicon.

As you know, the American cultural divide is defined by two terms: on the right we have “conservatives” and on the left we have “liberals.”

There’s only one problem: the leftists are anything but “liberal.” In fact, I stopped using the term “liberal” to describe leftists quite some time ago. I call them what they are: “leftists,” i.e., people who espouse weakness in the face of dictators overseas and favor a dictatorial big-government doctrine here at home.

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The left has been at war with traditional American values for decades: the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, free enterprise, Christianity. All are objects of scorn and ridicule by those who hope to “remake America” – to use President Obama’s phrase – into some sort of leftist utopia on the model of those that have already failed all around the world.

The war on Christianity is a particularly disturbing fight. The battle has been lowlighted over the years by leftists who twist themselves into intellectual knots in an effort to remove Christ from Christmas – which is like trying to remove the wet from water.

But the fact that they’re trying to defy the laws of physics doesn’t stop leftists.

Their war on American culture took a new turn this week, when the city of Davenport, Iowa, at the urging of its civil rights commission, decided to rebrand Good Friday as the “spring holiday.” A certain Baptist minister from Montgomery, Alabama might be shocked to find that civil rights activists these days are devoted to striking Christ from the public lexicon.

The decision sparked a national firestorm – Good Friday, after all, is merely the day that Christians around the nation and the world mark the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The city finally had to reverse its decision.

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Both represent ideals we Americans hold dear. But they aren’t really the same thing and as we have seen in the still acrimonious national debate over the issue of health care and the government’s proper role in providing it, the two concepts come into stark relief.  Moreover, a tension between the meaning of freedom and the meaning of equality will be tested further as President Obama and his newly muscular acolytes in Congress, still intoxicated by the success of their battering-ram legislative strategy, begin to eye other opportunities to (as our president likes to remind us) transform America.  And make no mistake about it; the transformation “party” the president is hosting has only just begun. Think card check, think cap and trade, think compensation control, think regulatory expansion and think, REALLY THINK, about the greatest search in the history of America, through every nook and cranny of our economy, for new sources of tax revenue to pay for the transformation.

To us the word “freedom” embodies the individual right of free choice. The word equality encompasses the bedrock principle that every person should have the same rights to all the protections and rights granted under our Constitution.  Thus, the rallying cry of Patrick Henry, “give me liberty or give me death” exists side by side with the proposition best enunciated by Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech where he envisioned a world “where people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”   In other words, the concept of  “equality” defined as Dr. King stated it can, and should, live side by side with the concept of “liberty (an individual’s right to personal choice as enunciated by the famous remark of Patrick Henry. But with regard to the expansion of government into the private sector the two words can run into conflict.

Those of us who were, and are, appalled by last week’s heavy-handed spectacle of one-party rule mandating the biggest expansion of government in the lifetime of almost everyone reading this essay are alarmed about the ramifications of almost tyrannical rule by a ruling class seeking to expand government into the furthest reaches of what has always been within the domain of the private citizen’s personal choices. Our friends on the left say that we are on the wrong side of history, but it is they who occupy that space.  It is they, including our president and his party, who are racing full speed backwards to emulate societies with entitlement systems that threaten to hobble one nation after another. Think Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, Great Britain, France, Ireland, Japan and on and on.  The governments and economies of Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain are hanging on by their finger tips, more or less, counting on the healthier members of the EU (e.g. Germany) to bail them out although “not so fast” say the Germans.  We could go back into history a little further and romanticize the failed egalitarian dreams of the Soviet revolutionaries or, perhaps, Chairman Mao’s People’s Republic of China.  But the Soviet Union crashed nearly a generation ago and China abandoned Chairman Mao’s dream as soon as he died (and they have had nothing but robust economic growth to show for it).  So exactly who is on the wrong side of history here?

Make no mistake; the transformation that the left has in mind for America is nothing more than a grab for the redistribution of wealth.

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On Monday, I floated a theory about the purple bracelet Robert Gibbs was wearing on a couple Sunday talk shows.  I wondered if it had any connection to a similar purple bracelet SEIU heavy Andy Stern had worn at some point.

The silly theory, which I called “doubtful,” solicited a reaction that surprised even me.  Besides Robert Gibbs himself tweeting about it, I scored the lefty trifecta: MediaMatters, DailyKos and a blogger for Salon.com all responded.

A rash of hysterical e-mails also came through.  Consider this gem:

Really Mr. Olson, REALLY? While I’m aware you wingnuts are not the brightest bulbs around, and the fact you are associated with the huge steaming pile of moron known as Breitbart indicates you are quite possibly mentally retarded…

Or this:

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