Keyword: jefferson
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I have a couple of concluding thoughts about the ignorant, bigoted screed from Jamie Stiehm and published by US News a couple of days ago, both of them about Thomas Jefferson. In attempting to defend the big-government project of ObamaCare, Stiehm oddly (and ignorantly) invoked the storied libertarian to boost her claims that the government should dictate the expression of faith: Catholics in high places of power have the most trouble, I’ve noticed, practicing the separation of church and state. The pugnacious Catholic Justice, Antonin Scalia, is the most aggressive offender on the Court, but not the only one. Of...
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In 1776, the Tories timidly hid behind closed doors where it was safe and popular. They wallowed in pessimism and lamented that nothing could be done. The British were too strong. Why make a big fuss? But the rebels – men like Samuel Adams and John Hancock, Patrick Henry and Paul Revere – would have none of it. They possessed only a rag-tag army, but they knew they had moral truth on their side, and that the British Gargantua would fall precisely because of that. Entrenched authority has to justify itself morally and philosophically. And that is something that today’s...
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Springfield, Ills, April 6, 1859 Messrs. Henry L. Pierce, & others. Gentlemen Your kind note inviting me to attend a Festival in Boston, on the 13th. Inst. in honor of the birth-day of Thomas Jefferson, was duly received. My engagements are such that I can not attend. Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago, two great political parties were first formed in this country, that Thomas Jefferson was the head of one of them, and Boston the head-quarters of the other, it is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend politically from the party opposed to Jefferson...
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The powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. ~ Thomas Jefferson writing in Notes on the State of Virginia Some historians are either woefully ignorant about our Republic or intentionally deceitful. You're reading false claims that the House of Representatives "shutdown the government" . . .
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The intense political polarization of the United States is most clearly reflected by the dysfunctional nature of the federal government. At a more local scale, it is seen as well in the growing movement to create new states by splitting existing ones. Most of these cases involve the desire of people in rural, conservative counties to secede from the more liberal states in which they are currently located. A front-page story in the October 7 edition of the New York Times, for example, highlights a drive to devise a new state of “Northern Colorado.” Eleven Colorado counties will vote on...
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This is the third and final installment of my (limited) review of A.E. Harvey’s book, Is Scripture Still Holy? Coming of Age with the New Testament. Prior installments can be found here and here. As we have seen in prior posts, Harvey’s book is designed to critique the traditional Christian doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture. After arguing that (a) Scripture isn’t revelation anyway, only Jesus is God’s revelation; and (b) since humans were involved in writing and transmitting Scripture, then it is unreliable and likely corrupted, one might wonder whether Harvey tries to salvage any authority for the Bible...
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At the core of America’s founding was a simple, yet literally revolutionary, idea: that all people deserve to be free because they are created by God in His image, and that our rights come from God, not government. This was articulated in the most important sentence in America’s founding, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Those 36 words are sometimes called the best-known...
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YREKA (CBS/AP) – Supervisors in a far Northern California county where residents are fed up with what they see as a lack of representation at the state capitol and overregulation have voted in favor of separating from the state. . . They want other rural counties in Northern California and Southern Oregon to join them in the creation of a new state called the State of Jefferson.
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Since 52% of American voters were foolish enough to buy the story that Barack Hussein Obama is some sort of "liberal messiah," I thought it would be interesting to compare the belief systems of America's father of liberalism and author of our Declaration of Independence, with the Marxist belief system of the false messiah. And since today's liberals have so much trouble properly interpreting our Founders' simple message to future generations, I am under no illusion that these facts will carry anymore weight with modern Marxists than Article II - Section I of the Constitution, which clearly states that Barack...
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The following fhatestimony3 is my testimony to the House Financial Services committee on Wednesday at 9am. I. Introduction Chairman Hensarling and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to testify at today’s hearing on “Examining the Proper Role of the Federal Housing Administration in our Mortgage Insurance Market” and to provide my perspective on the ongoing mortgage debacle, the resulting decline in the private mortgage insurance market and the need to return the FHA’s share of the insurance market back to pre-bubble levels. I am Anthony B. Sanders, Senior Scholar at George Mason University. The Federal Housing...
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Over three programs and two days, ABC devoted 15 minutes to a fawning profile of Hillary Clinton. On Wednesday's Nightline, Cynthia McFadden even compared the outgoing Secretary of State to Thomas Jefferson, hinting that Clinton could follow his footsteps to the White House. McFadden lauded, "There was a time not so very long ago when Hillary Clinton was seen as one of the most divisive figures in American politics." Noting Clinton's high approval rating, she announced this view was "changing." VideoIn an interview that, just coincidentally occurred in front of a statue of Jefferson, the reporter embarrassingly hyped, "As Jefferson...
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Thursday Jan 17, Tom Brokaw was given time on MSNBC to tell the Founding Fathers the self-evident truths they laid their lives on the line for are farfetched. Are we lucky, or what? Our talking heads know so much more than the men who pledged their lives, their sacred honor to free us from the tyranny of Kings and establish real freedom. Brokaw spoke with Andrea Mitchell. He aimed his remarks at people who believe in the Constitution by saying, in a scholarly formal tone (which passes for derision in his circles), that 2nd Amendment types who say the Amendment...
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Congressional Research Service confirms Jefferson's pension should continueBy Bruce Alpert updated December 12, 2012 at 7:27 PM WASHINGTON - A new report by the Congressional Research Service reiterates previous legal findings -- that Congress can't deny pension benefits to former members for criminal conduct covered by a 2007 law if the illegal acts occurred before the law's enactment. That means former Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans, now serving a record 13-year prison sentence, will continue to collect his pension -- estimated at $40,000-$50,000 a year. Until 2007, only crimes relating to espionage, treason or several other national security violations could...
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Believing a free press to be a vital safeguard of liberty, Thomas Jefferson said, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Many believe the inverse of Jefferson's maxim — the people are uninformed, and therefore the government can't be trusted. After all, what well-informed American would knowingly allow politicians to lead us to the monumental economic and budgetary “cliffs” we face? Despite a proliferation of new media, it's increasingly difficult to separate fact from narrative. Combined with rancorous political discourse in which opponents are demonized in order to delegitimize competing arguments and render unnecessary...
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The truth is a hard thing to hear and even a more bitter pill to swallow. But until we face the truth, we are doomed to sink lower into the abyss as a society. The truth is that a godless nation is a nation doomed to fall. We as a nation have slowly accepted and pompously come to believe that wisdom begins and stems from us. Secularism is the view that all things religious should be excluded from daily public living, specifically pertaining to political and social concerns. Thanks to secularism, the mindset today is that God and religious opinion...
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THOMAS JEFFERSON is in the news again, nearly 200 years after his death — alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon Meacham comes a damning portrait of the third president by the independent scholar Henry Wiencek. We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because we seem unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the reality of his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and again, we play down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox as somehow indicative of his complex depths. Neither Mr. Meacham, who...
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Contemporary opinions, including those of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, say the idea of a state’s right to secede died with the hundreds of thousands of bloodied victims of the Civil War, and that the sentiment behind the dozens of petitions on a White House website seeking permission for most of the 50 individual governments to leave the union will be fruitless. But historians would note that even Thomas Jefferson, a “pole star among political philosophers because he based his politics on the eternal, self-evidence, fundamental truths that all men are created free and equal and that they are endowed...
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From the days surrounding the American Revolution, Baptists used religious arguments to make political points and political arguments to make religious points, historian James P. Byrd, associate dean at Vanderbilt Divinity School, told a conference at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. At the same time Baptists argued for separation of church and state, they did not hesitate to preach on political topics or embrace patriotic causes with religious fervor, Byrd said, addressing an Oct. 12-13 conference on “Baptists and the Shaping of American Culture.” In a sense, Baptists reflected their culture. Neither Thomas Jefferson nor Benjamin Franklin accepted orthodox Christian...
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President Barack Obama made a major gaffe when he recently said that we are owned, or "belong to", government. In the United States the government is supposed to "belong to" the people instead of the other way around as he suggests. We the people are supposed to own the government and tell it what to do. Obama and other elitists believe that government exists to control our personal lives and even tell us how much we can eat or drink. Some government controls are necessary to prevent people from harming others. Government needs to restrict sale of some substances that...
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