Believe Steve

Historiography and Civil Rights

2015-01-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

With a determination unparalleled in science, the mass of American writers have started out so to distort the facts of the greatest critical period of American history as to prove right wrong and wrong right. I am not familiar enough with the vast field of human history to pronounce on the relative guilt of these historians of other times and fields; but I do say that it the history of the past has been written in the same fashion, it is useless as science and misleading as ethics. In simply shows that with sufficient general agreement and determination among the dominant classes, the truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the masters of men wish ...

In a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.

--W.E.B. DuBois, The Propaganda of History, 725-726, 727.

Written in 1935, DuBois was criticizing the then current state of the historiography of Reconstruction Era. Led by liberal scholars from Columbia and Johns Hopkins University, histories written about the Civil War and Reconstruction were inaccurate, false, and basically downright abysmal. From his study of the major textbooks and encyclopedias of the time, he found three dominant theses: 1) "All negroes were ignorant," 2) "All Negroes were lazy, dishonest and extravagant," and 3) "Negroes were responsible for bad government during Reconstruction." Thus, these texts concluded that Reconstruction was a horrible mistake, thus the Southern states were completely justified in passing the Black Codes and in forming the Ku Klux Klan, etc.

The sad truth is he could have been talking about how much of the Civil Rights Era is portrayed today.

#heisthegift

2014-12-03T23:22:00.000-07:00

Potent Quotables XXXII

2014-07-15T15:08:00.000-07:00

Female suffrage "works in fundamental opposition to the fundamental principles of our party ... the amendment was mothered by Susan B. Anthony and her kind of northern woman who were close associates of Thad Stevens and [Frederick] Douglas[s] and who sought to put the black heel on the white neck and place the Negro in power."

--Georgia State Senator J.J. Flynt (D), 1919.

The Economic History Lessons We Never Learned

2014-05-28T17:34:00.000-07:00

From The Heritage Foundation:

Are conservatives going to allow liberals to rewrite the history of the Great Recession, just as they so successfully did in writing the fictitious account of the Great Depression, which now appears in almost every American history text?

The central message of former Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in his new book Stress Test, is that the bank bailouts and the Obama stimulus plan saved us from a second Great Depression. President Obama recites that same line in nearly every speech he delivers.

This is what we call a counterfactual–what might have happened if we hadn’t done what we did. The left loves counterfactuals, because - like “climate change”–they are impossible to refute. No one can say for certain what would have happened in some parallel universe.

But getting the story right on this episode of history is a critical issue for American economic policy going forward. We let the left write the history books on the Great Depression and it was an Aesops Fable. Most Americans, my 12-year-old included, are taught that FDR’s New Deal ended the Great Depression and moved millions of Americans out of misery.

Actually as Amity Shlaes shows in her classic book The Forgotten Man, and Burt Folsom in New Deal or Raw Deal nearly every government regulatory bureau and spending program conceive during the Great Depression only lengthened the misery and disrupted the normal healing powers of a free economy. Eight years after the New Deal was launched, the unemployment rate was still in double digits, and it was not until the start of World War II, when millions of young men were put in military uniform and the nation mobilized for a global war, that the Depression ended.

Which brings us to the Great Recession in 2008 and its aftermath. What is highly inconvenient for apologists for the Obama blitzkrieg of government programs and debt in 2009 and 2010 is that at the start of his presidency, Barack Obama laid out his own counterfactual of what would have happened without the deluge of federal spending and debt.

According to the White House’s own calculations, the economy would have been better off today if the government had done nothing, rather than borrow and spend $6 trillion. The unemployment rate WITHOUT the stimulus was expected to be 5 percent today. Instead it is 6.3 percent and in reality closer to 10 percent.

Another way to put this is that if the labor force had not declined AND we had the 5 percent unemployment rate Mr. Obama says we would have had without the stimulus, there would be at least 10 million more Americans working today.

So, considering we are still 10 million jobs short and $6 trillion further in debt, here is another counterfactual to ponder: How much faster would the economy be growing today if we didn’t have the carrying cost of $6 trillion in debt to contend with? Think if we had used this money to finance a 21st century tax reform or for transitioning Social Security to a fully funded personal account system that has real assets building up each year, not a vault full of IOUs.

All this is important to remember as Geithner takes his faux victory lap around the country patting himself on the back for pulling America out of the financial abyss.

President Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, let the cat out of the bag in the earliest days of the new administration by saying the president should never let a crisis “go to waste.” This burst of honesty was an admission that the left used the financial crisis as an excuse to do all the things it had wanted to do for years—redistribute trillions of dollars to their voters, reregulate the economy, build massive green energy projects, refinance the Great Society welfare state, rescue the unions with auto bailouts, print money in the trillions, and when the economy fails to perform, blame it all on George W. Bush.

The real story of the financial crisis of 2008 was a massive real estate bubble facilitated by easy money from the Fed, government policies through entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that underwrite risky mortgage loans with near 100 percent loan guarantees, a Congress and White House that as Barnie Frank once famously put it “rolled the dice” on the housing market, and private banks, investors and home owners who got caught up in a speculation frenzy. Then we asked the bad actors such as Barney Frank to fix it. And now we’re repeating all those inane mistakes once more, with government again guaranteeing 90 percent of new mortgages, many with recklessly low down payments.

Here we go again. When we let the left write the history books, we never ever seem to learn from our mistakes.

Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. A version of this first appeared in Investors Business Daily.

The slow decline of America since the Great Society

2014-05-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

The slow decline of America since LBJ launched the Great Society

By George F. Will, Published: May 16

Standing on his presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier.

Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and racial injustice, “but that is just the beginning.” It would “rebuild the entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,” slaking “the hunger for community” and enhancing “the meaning of our lives” — all by assembling “the best thought and the broadest knowledge.”

In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing “just about always or most of the time”; today, 19 percent do. The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.

Barry Goldwater, Johnson’s 1964 opponent who assumed that Americans would vote to have a third president in 14 months, suffered a landslide defeat. After voters rebuked FDR in 1938 for attempting to “pack” the Supreme Court, Republicans and Southern Democrats prevented any liberal legislating majority in Congress until 1965. That year, however, when 68 senators and 295 representatives were Democrats, Johnson was unfettered.

He remains, regarding government’s role, much the most consequential 20th-century president. Indeed, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, in his measured new booklet “The Great Society at Fifty: The Triumph and the Tragedy,” says LBJ, more than FDR, “profoundly recast the common understanding of the ends of governance.”

When Johnson became president in 1963, Social Security was America’s only nationwide social program. His programs and those they subsequently legitimated put the nation on the path to the present, in which changed social norms — dependency on government has been destigmatized — have changed America’s national character.

Between 1959 and 1966 — before the War on Poverty was implemented — the percentage of Americans living in poverty plunged by about one-third, from 22.4 to 14.7, slightly lower than in 2012. But, Eberstadt cautions, the poverty rate is “incorrigibly misleading” because government transfer payments have made income levels and consumption levels significantly different. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, heating assistance and other entitlements have, Eberstadt says, made income “a poor predictor of spending power for lower-income groups.” Stark material deprivation is now rare:

“By 2011 . . . average per capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the U.S. average for 1980. . . . [Many] appliances were more common in officially impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of 1980. . . . DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are now typical in them — amenities not even the richest U.S. households could avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty.”

But the institutionalization of anti-poverty policy has been, Eberstadt says carefully, “attended” by the dramatic spread of a “tangle of pathologies.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined that phrase in his 1965 report calling attention to family disintegration among African Americans. The tangle, which now ensnares all races and ethnicities, includes welfare dependency and “flight from work.”

Twenty-nine percent of Americans — about 47 percent of blacks and 48 percent of Hispanics — live in households receiving means-tested benefits. And “the proportion of men 20 and older who are employed has dramatically and almost steadily dropped since the start of the War on Poverty, falling from 80.6 percent in January 1964 to 67.6 percent 50 years later.” Because work — independence, self-reliance — is essential to the culture of freedom, ominous developments have coincided with Great Society policies:

For every adult man ages 20 to 64 who is between jobs and looking for work, more than three are neither working nor seeking work, a trend that began with the Great Society. And what Eberstadt calls “the earthquake that shook family structure in the era of expansive anti-poverty policies” has seen out-of-wedlock births increase from 7.7 percent in 1965 to more than 40 percent in 2012, including 72 percent of black babies.

LBJ’s starkly bifurcated legacy includes the triumphant Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and the tragic aftermath of much of his other works. Eberstadt asks: Is it “simply a coincidence” that male flight from work and family breakdown have coincided with Great Society policies, and that dependence on government is more widespread and perhaps more habitual than ever? Goldwater’s insistent 1964 question is increasingly pertinent: “What’s happening to this country of ours?”

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

© The Washington Post Company

How Harry Reid is ruining the Senate

2014-05-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

The following is a transcript from the Journal Editorial Report which aired this past Saturday on the Fox News Channel. I happened to catch it at the gym in the middle of my 10-mile run. The "Journal" in the title of the show is The Wall Street Journal and the host is Paul Gigot. If you don't want to read it, the video is available here.

Harry Reid's Senate blockade

"Washington doesn't work" -- that was President Obama's message at a high-dollar fundraiser in Manhattan this week where he told attendees that, quote, "We have a party on the other side that has been captured by ideology that says 'no' to everything." But if the president wants to get to the true root of gridlock in Washington, he may also want to look at the Democratic-controlled Senate where Majority Leader Harry Reid has essentially shut down debate, refusing to allow a vote on all but nine -- that's right -- nine Republican amendments since last July and stopping several bipartisan bills cold.

For more, I'm joined by Wall Street Journal columnist and deputy editor, Dan Henninger; assistant editorial page editor, James Freeman; and Washington columnist, Kim Strassel.

So, Kim, why don't describe for us just what Harry Reid is doing.

KIM STRASSEL, WASHINGTON COLUMNIST: Look, here has been the long- standing deal in the Senate, Paul. The minority party would agree to move on to a bill, to gives the vote for cloture, to actually start debating a bill. The majority party, in return, would allow them to debate the bill and propose amendments. And everyone got something out of it. Harry Reid has turned that on his head. He does not want his members to have to vote for some of the amendments that Republicans are putting forward because they have bipartisan support and he and the White House don't like some of these provisions. So he's just stopped all amendments and stopped all debate. And the only way Republicans can fight back is to refuse, therefore, to move on the bill.

GIGOT: So you are saying that there are actual legislation moving through the Senate that has bipartisan majority support and would pass but Reid is saying, I don't know want to you vote on this amendment or that amendment and therefore, he's closing -- he's not letting the Senate work its will on these other pieces of legislation?

STRASSEL: That's right. You saw it this week. There was a bipartisan energy efficiency bill moving ahead. But Republicans were going to propose a number of amendments that have huge sweeping support on the Republican side and the Democratic side -- acceptance of the Keystone Pipeline, for instance, speeding natural gas exports. But the White House doesn't like those provisions. It was fearful those amendments would, in fact, pass, so Harry Reid simply didn't allow any of it to come up.

GIGOT: James, I covered the Senate for a long time. I think what -- and you were in Washington for many years, too. This is -- this is extraordinary. OK. This has not happened before. And I covered the Senate, whether it was Republicans in charge or Democrats in charge. The minority party was able to offer amendments. And part of their strategy to regain the majority was to offer amendments that put the majority in a tough spot, right? They take popular measures and they'd say we want to have a vote on this. And, hey, that's life. That's in a democracy. You've got to make tough votes.

JAMES FREEMAN, ASSISTANT EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: Yeah. He really changed the American legislature. You talked about how we used to work in Washington, observe it. In any standard textbook, it talks about how the House majority rules. But in the Senate, it is about deliberation and compromise and consensus.

GIGOT: Minority writes have been far more protected, I mean.

FREEMAN: That's right. And the idea is the Senate will be more deliberative and craft bills with input from all sides. He's really changed that. One, with getting rid of the filibuster last year, of course. And now we are talking about --

(CROSSTALK)

GIGOT: Nominees for -- presidential nominees.

FREEMAN: Presidential nominees. Now we are talking about limiting amendments. And it is a -- it is a different American legislature. It is a -- majority rules controlled by the dominant party. And I think that what is interesting now is it is basically about playing defense. Last year, it was about offense to get nominees to the executive branch approved or to the judicial branch. Now it is basically stopping popular items from getting a vote.

(CROSSTALK)

DAN HENNINGER, COLUMNIST & DEPUTY EDITOR: Can I defend Harry Reid?

GIGOT: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

And please, our viewers, please, send mail to Henninger.

(LAUGHTER)

HENNINGER: OK.

(LAUGHTER)

Now, as a result of my colleagues, the viewers of the "Journal Editorial Report" understand why gridlock exists in Washington.

GIGOT: But you love gridlock.

HENNINGER: Well, to some excellent, we love gridlock. We described three pieces of legislation, good for the country even. They are not going to happen.

(LAUGHTER)

Why aren't they going to happen? It's because the Democratic midterm strategy is, once again, to paint the Republicans as the party as "do nothing" and opposition. We just quoted the president of the United States giving that speech.

GIGOT: Right.

HENNINGER: Harry does this. The president goes out and tells the country. There is no bigger frustration out in the country than the fact that Washington isn't doing anything. And I think that the point of all of this is to discourage Republicans, to suppress the Republican vote, because they don't understand this Senate proceduralism and they are angry at the Senate leadership for not doing anything. So I think, given the hand they have been dealt, the Democrats are running a fairly good strategy.

GIGOT: Kim, do you, A, agree with that? And, B, what would you -- why haven't Republicans, if that's right if Dan is right, why haven't Republicans in the Senate fought back more to try to get Harry Reid to change that strategy?

STRASSEL: I think you are seeing them now starting to do it this week. They blocked two, again, very popular pieces of legislation. This is likely to get a lot of attention. The other one they blocked was a tax extender bill that has a lot you of support among the business community.

GIGOT: These are tax credits for businesses.

STRASSEL: Exactly. That the business community loves. They're routinely approved every year. So the fact they blocked it is going to get a lot of attention.

Dan is right. The procedural argument is harder for Republicans to make. But what you do see is more and more Republicans trying to paint Harry Reid as himself the face of the obstruction and making the very straightforward point if you want any of this bipartisan legislation to pass, you are going the have to elect a Republican Senate in the fall. And that's increasingly their campaign strategy and it has a better chance.

GIGOT: If you put -- if nothing happens, if even important legislation doesn't pass, that will raise the pressure on Reid to do something, won't it?

FREEMAN: The Democrats have to be careful here because they have a lot of incumbent, like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Kim has written about, she will have a problem because her basic argument to constituents is, look how influential I am in the Senate --

(CROSSTALK)

GIGOT: Because I'm the chairman of the Energy Committee.

FREEMAN: I'm the chairman of the Energy Committee and I'm pushing all of the issues you care about, like allowing energy production. If Reid keeps stopping that from happening, I don't know what her argument is.

GIGOT: All right. Thank you, all.

#BecauseofHim Happy Easter!

2014-04-20T14:35:00.004-07:00

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

—1 Corinthians 15:55

"And the angel answered and said unto the women, 'Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.'"
—Matthew 28:5-6

The Inconvenient Messiah

2014-04-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey R. Holland was president of Brigham Young University when this devotional address was given on 27 February 1982.

Henry Adams once said that any succession of American presidents that could start with George Washington and lead to Ulysses S. Grant disproved forever the theory of evolution. I may well be striking it another fatal blow by inserting myself into an otherwise outstanding devotional calendar. But one of the advantages of being president of the university is that when you ask to be the speaker, they have to let you. Let me tell you why I’m intruding.

I have been a little frustrated that the only real chance I get to address you is in our opening President’s Assembly the first week of the school year. As you well know, the atmosphere that day is a cross somewhere between Disneyworld and a Jamaican pep rally. I love that first hour with you, but neither the time restraints we face there nor the frame of mind you are in is very conducive to much of a presidential message. So after thinking about it for awhile, Sister Holland and I have determined to continue being chief animal tamers at the fall welcoming assembly and then sometime early in the winter semester—like now—we will have a slightly more serious moment with you about things we feel deeply and hope you will enjoy. So in that spirit I wish to ask Sister Holland to greet you and take a few moments to share her thoughts and testimony with you.

Patricia Holland

As my husband said, this is a little different setting than the opening assembly. There you are bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to set the world on fire, or at least one of the kitchens in Heritage Halls. Now as I watch you on campus, I think I detect a terminal case of the mid-winter blahs. Your roommate probably has mono, your grades have switched from Fahrenheit to centigrade as they approach absolute zero, your holiday menu consisted of no real date and lots of very real turkey, and you’re broke. Other than that it’s probably been a great winter.

I’ve come to you today in kind of a motherly way, if you’ll indulge me, to speak to those of you who feel a little bit disappointed at this point, and thus, a little bit discouraged. May I just share with you a personal disappointment we’ve had in our home recently. A few months ago our daughter, Mary, decided to run for president of her seventh-grade class. She was encouraged by a teacher who felt she could win, and so she began to campaign with lots of enthusiasm and a great deal of confidence. Both her parents and her brothers rallied behind and gave her all the support and help we could.

Well, she lost. Now I was told this earlier in the day before Mary got home from school, and you know mothers. I was totally devastated for her, and I just churned with emotions all day and most of the day hoped for something that I could say that might comfort her. When I heard her footsteps at the door, my heart and my feet leaped to the rescue, and all the words of comfort I could think of came tumbling out.

And you know, she just looked at me for a few minutes and then with sad little brown eyes she said, “Mother, will you just pray with me?”

As we knelt in prayer, she said, “Heavenly Father, I promised you I’d do anything if I could win, and now I know I must show how to be a good loser.” And then she said, “I don’t want you to be my servant anymore. I just want to be yours.”

You see, it was because of her pain and disappointment that she was given to say in a twelve-year-old way, “Maybe what I wanted would not be the best thing to serve you at all.”

I guess what I’ve come to you today to say is that God uses broken things—and I quote:
It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. . . . it is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever. [“Broken Things,” an excerpt from Vance Havner, The Still Water (Old Tappan, NJ: Flemming H. Revell, 1934). Quoted in Guideposts, October 1981, p. 5]

Our Father in Heaven sometimes uses our pain as a megaphone for very significant instruction as he did with Joseph Smith, with Spencer W. Kimball, with Mary Holland. And as he did with Peter who, weeping bitterly, returned to greater power and service than ever.

I want you, all of you, to know of my testimony of the divinity of the Savior and of his church to which this university is ancillary. It too is a servant. I also have a firm conviction that, if you trust in him, the growth and development and challenges you experience here at this university will be part of his design and ministry. And of this I bear testimony in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

President Holland

Many of you are aware, and all of you ought to be, that Elder Bruce R. McConkie has been writing and publishing a series of books on the Savior, tracing his role in the eternal plan from the councils in heaven through his earthly life to his exaltation in eternity. That series of books, entitled in several volumes as The Promised Messiah, The Mortal Messiah, and the soon-to-be-published Millennial Messiah, has been a part of my personal study material over these past several months of their publication.

For my purposes today, and with reasonable assurance that I won’t infringe on Elder McConkie’s series, I have labeled my remarks “The Inconvenient Messiah.” I wish to speak this morning of the demands of discipline and discipleship, of the responsibilities we have to face when we choose to follow Jesus Christ. In the Savior’s life and in ours, Satan counters such discipline with temptations of an easier way, with an offer of “convenient Christianity.” It is a temptation Jesus resisted, and so must we. Life was very inconvenient for him, and, unless I miss my guess, it will often be so for you and for me when we take upon us his name.

Frankly I would prefer to speak with you individually about such temptations. I would be thrilled if at this very large university there were a way to have that kind of personal moment with you. Because that doesn’t seem possible, let me generalize as best I can and let you make some application in your life the best you can.

Open Rebellion

Probably the most easily recognizable kind of evil is that which simply rebels openly against heaven, as Satan rebelled before the world was—willful, wanton opposition to God and his angels. From Cain through Caligula down to today’s domestic and international hostilities, Satan has attempted to lure children of promise into violent, destructive rejection of the gospel and its teachings. These are harsh sins which the world has known only too well but from which, in large measure, we are protected at this university nestled safely near the everlasting hills. We are, for the most part, untouched by wars and tyranny and terror. Indeed when measured against this world’s history where, to quote Nephi, Satan does “rage in the hearts of . . . men” (2 Nephi 28:20), this truly is Happy Valley. We have very few ragers between Payson and Lehi.

More Subtle Temptations

But there is another, more subtle tactic used by the primeval turncoat which is not so violent, not so vengeful, and at first glance not so vicious. But, ah, there’s the rub. Because Christ and his disciples—Satan’s most important and necessary targets—would never seem to be attracted by flagrant, raging wrongdoing, this second approach becomes all the more sinister. It comes in the siren’s song of convenience. It is, in the parlance of your day, “laid back.” It says to every would-be Messiah—“Enjoy!” Its anthem might well be from Diana Ross—“Ease on Down the Road.” Surely fluttering somewhere over the highway to hell is the local chamber of horrors banner reading, “Welcome to the ethics of ease.”

Then Jesus was led up of the Spirit, into the wilderness, to be with God. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, and had communed with God, he was afterwards an hungered, and was left to be tempted of the devil, and when the tempter came to him, he said, "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread."

But Jesus answered and said, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.'"

Then Jesus was taken up into the holy city, and the Spirit setteth him on the pinnacle of the temple. Then the devil came unto him and said, "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down, for it is written, 'He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.'"

And Jesus said unto him, "It is written again, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.'"

And again Jesus was in the Spirit, and it taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. And the devil came unto him again, and said, "All these things will I give unto thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me."

Then said Jesus unto him, "Get thee hence, Satan; for it is written, 'thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.'"

Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him. [JST Matthew 4:1–10, KJV Matthew 4:11]

One new convert to Christianity wrote of this moment:

Christ withdrew alone to the desert to fast and pray in preparation for a dialogue with the Devil. Such a dialogue was inescapable; every virtue has to be cleared with the Devil, as every vice is torn with anguish out of God’s heart. [Malcom Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), p. 26]

Because I believe such dialogues are entertained day after day, hour after hour, right here on the Brigham Young University campus—Happy Valley, USA—and because for us, like Christ, these temptations are far more tantalizing in their nature than the more hostile versions pursued by barbarians, let me comment briefly on the three. Each of them deserves a sermon on its own, and we will be limited by the clock to only a sentence or two.

Appeals to the Appetites

“If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.”

Whatever else Satan may do, he will certainly appeal to our appetites. Far better to play on natural, acknowledged needs than struggle to plant in us artificial ones. Here Jesus experiences the real and very understandable hunger for food by which he must sustain his mortal life. We would not deny anyone this relief; certainly we would not deny the Son of Man. Israel had its manna in the wilderness. This is Israel’s God. He has fasted for forty days and forty nights. Why not eat? He seems ready to break his fast, or surely must soon. Why not simply turn the stones to bread and eat?

The temptation is not in the eating. He has eaten before, he will soon eat again, and he must eat for the rest of his mortal life. The temptation, at least the part I wish to focus on, is to do it this way, to get his bread—his physical satisfaction, relief for his human appetite—the easy way, by abuse of power and without a willingness to wait for the right time and the right way. It is the temptation to be the convenient Messiah. Why do things the hard way? Why walk to the shop—or bakery? Why travel all the way home? Why deny yourself satisfaction when with ever such a slight compromise you might enjoy this much-needed nourishment? But Christ will not ask selfishly for unearned bread. He will postpone gratification, indefinitely if necessary, rather than appease appetite—even ravenous appetite—with what is not his.

There is too much sexual transgression on this campus. Any is too much, and we have much too much. This highest of all physical gratifications you were designed and created to enjoy. It is as natural as it is appealing. It is given of God to make us like God. And Satan has certainly capitalized on a divinely ordained appeal. But it is not yours without price. Not instantly. Not conveniently. Not with cozy corruption of eternal powers. It is to be earned, over time and with discipline. It, like every good thing, is God’s right to bestow, not Satan’s. When faced with that inherent appetite, a disciple of Christ must be willing to say, “Yes, but not this way.” In time, with love, after marriage. The right and proper and sanctified physical relationship of a man and a woman is as much a part—indeed more a part—of God’s plan for us as is the eating of our daily bread. But there is no convenient Messiah. Salvation comes only through discipline and sacrifice. Listen to the historians who wrote this after a lifetime of studying the story of civilization:

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group. [Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), pp. 35–36]

And we have purposes the Durants never dreamed of, “promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep” (Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”). I plead with you not to yield to what one has called the “glandular stench” of our times. In your hours of temptation and vulnerability I ask you not, in your case, to turn bread into stone with that fire that has gone unbanked and uncooled. Those loaves will be millstones—bogus bread—weighted with heartache and despair and pain. Care more. It is too easy today with movies you can see and the magazines you can read. It is all tragically, painfully, cunningly convenient. In our time the only restraint left is self-restraint. I ask you to say of this highest, most intimate, most sacred physical expression, “Yes, but not this way.” I ask you to be inconvenienced until you’ve earned the right and paid the divine price to know the body and the soul of the one you love. Excuse me for speaking boldly, but this must be said. Perhaps another time we can say even more.

Temptations of the Spirit

“If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from the pinnacle of this temple.”

Satan knows this holy scripture is the center of religious life for Israel’s people. It is the edifice to which the promised Messiah must come. Many are even now coming and going from their worship, many of who through their traditions and disbelief will never accept Jesus as their Redeemer. Why not cast yourself down in a dramatic way and then, when the angels bear you up, as the scriptures say they must, legions will follow you and believe? They need you. You need them—to save their souls. These are covenant people. How better to help them see than to cast yourself off this holy temple unharmed and unafraid? The Messiah has indeed come.

The temptation here is even more subtle than the first. It is a temptation of the spirit, of a private hunger more real than the need for bread. Would God save him? Would he? Is Jesus to have divine companionship in this awesome ministry he now begins? He knows that among the children of men only suffering, denunciation, betrayal, and rejection lie ahead. But what about heaven? How alone does a Messiah have to be? Perhaps before venturing forth he ought to get final reassurance. And shouldn’t Satan be silenced with his insidious “If, if, if”? Why not get spiritual confirmation, a loyal congregation, and an answer to this imp who heckles—all with one appeal to God’s power? Right now. The easy way. Off the temple spire.

But Jesus refuses the temptation of the spirit. Denial and restraint there are also part of divine preparation. He will gain followers, and he will receive reassurance. But not this way. Neither the converts nor the comforts he will so richly deserve have been earned yet. His ministry has hardly begun. The rewards will come by and by. But even the Son of God must wait. The Redeemer who would never bestow cheap grace on others was not likely to ask for any himself.

And so I ask you to be patient in things of the spirit. Perhaps your life has been different from mine, but I doubt it. I have had to struggle to know my standing before God. As a teenager I found it hard to pray and harder to fast. My mission was not easy. I struggled as a student only to find that I had to struggle afterwards, too. In this present assignment I have wept and ached for guidance. It seems no worthy accomplishment has ever come easily for me, and maybe it won’t for you—but I’m living long enough to be grateful for that.

It is ordained that we come to know our worth as children of God without something as dramatic as a leap from the pinnacle of the temple. All but a prophetic few must go about God’s work in very quiet, very unspectacular ways. And as you labor to know him, and to know that he knows you; as you invest your time—and your convenience—in quiet, unassuming service, you will indeed find that “he shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up” (Matthew 4:6). It may not come quickly. It probably won’t come quickly, but there is purpose in the time it takes. Cherish your spiritual burdens because God will converse with you through them and will use you to do his work if you carry them well. Do you recognize this struggle? The date is 14 July 1943.

No peace had yet come, though I had prayed for it almost unceasingly. . . . I turned toward the hills. I had no objective. I wanted only to be alone. I had begun a fast. . . .

My weakness overcame me again. Hot tears came flooding down my cheeks as I made no effort to mop them up. I was accusing myself, and condemning myself and upbraiding myself. I was praying aloud for special blessings from the Lord. I was telling him that I had not asked for this position, that I was incapable of doing the work, that I was imperfect and weak and human, that I was unworthy of so noble a calling, though I had tried hard and my heart had been right. I knew that I must have been at least partly responsible for offenses and misunderstandings which a few people fancied they had suffered at my hands. I realized that I had been petty and small many times. I did not spare myself. A thousand things passed through my mind. Was I called by revelation? . . .

If I could only have the assurance that my call had been inspired most of my other worries would be dissipated. . . .I knew that I must have His acceptance before I could go on. I stumbled up the hill and onto the mountain, as the way became rough. I faltered some as the way became steep. No paths were there to follow; I climbed on and on. Never had I prayed before as I now prayed. What I wanted and felt I must have was an assurance that I was acceptable to the Lord. I told Him that I neither wanted nor was worthy of a vision or appearance of angels or any special manifestation. I wanted only the calm peaceful assurance that my offering was accepted. Never before had I been tortured as I was now being tortured. And the assurance did not come. . . .

I mentally beat myself and chastised myself and accused myself. As the sun came up and moved in the sky I moved with it, lying in the sun, and still I received no relief. I sat up on the cliff and strange thoughts came to me: all this anguish and suffering could be ended so easily from this high cliff and then came to my mind the temptations of the Master when he was tempted to cast Himself down—then I was ashamed for having placed myself in a comparable position and trying to be dramatic. . . . I was filled with remorse because I had permitted myself to place myself . . . in a position comparable, in a small degree, to the position the Saviour found Himself in when He was tempted, and . . . I felt I had cheapened the experiences of the Lord, having compared mine with His. Again I challenged myself and told myself that I was only trying to be dramatic and sorry for myself.

. . . I lay on the cool earth. The thought came that I might take cold, but what did it matter now. There was one great desire, to get a testimony of my calling, to know that it was not human and inspired by ulterior motives, kindly as they might be. How I prayed! How I suffered! How I wept! How I struggled! [Edward L. Kimball and Andrew E. Kimball, Jr., Spencer W. Kimball (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1977), p. 192–95]

Now at this very hour 38 years and a mountain of tumors and troubles later, this sweet and godly man clings to life not because that life has been convenient but because he feels there might be one more mountain to climb, one more obstacle of body or spirit that needs to be overcome. The spiritual odyssey of Andrew Kimball’s son has been anything but easy. And maybe that of your father’s son or your mother’s daughter will require patience and perseverance too.

So if your prayers don’t always seem answered, take heart. One greater than you or President Kimball cried, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). If for a while the harder you try, the harder it gets, take heart. So it has been with the best people who ever lived.

“Name Your Price.”

Now in some frustration Satan moves right to the point. If he cannot tempt physically and cannot tempt spiritually, he will simply make an outright proposition. From a high mountain where they might overlook the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, Satan says, “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

Satan makes up for lack of subtlety here with the grandeur of his offer. Never mind that these kingdoms are not ultimately his to give. He simply asks of the great Jehovah, God of heaven and earth, “What is your price? Cheap bread you resist. Tawdry messianic drama you resist, but no man can resist this world’s wealth. Name your price.” Satan is proceeding under his first article of faithlessness—the unequivocal belief that you can buy anything in this world for money.

Not This Way

Jesus will one day rule the world. He will govern every principality and power in it. He will be King of kings and Lord of lords. But not this way. Indeed to arrive at the point at all, he has to follow a most inconvenient course. Nothing so simple as worshiping Satan or for that matter nothing so simple as worshiping God. At least not in the way some of us think worshiping is simple. His arrival at the throne of grace is to lead through travail and sorrow and sacrifice. Some seven centuries earlier Isaiah had prophesied of him,

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. . . . He was wounded for our transgression, he was bruised for our iniquities. . . . He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and . . . openeth not his mouth. [Isaiah 53:3, 5, 7]

Should earning our place in the kingdom of God be so difficult as that? Surely there is an easier way? Can’t we buy our way in? Every man or woman does have a price, don’t they? Can’t you buy anything in this world for money? Sometimes we wonder. I offer one sobering fact about our lives together. BYU is not here to help you make money. Any university in this land can do that. We hope your education brings income sufficient for your needs, but we have no mission at all if we are simply turning you out into the best current job market, whatever and wherever that may be. BYU has been established to extend to you the very glory of God, his intelligence, his light, and his truth. And that light and truth, by scriptural promise, is to forsake the evil one, your tempter. No, not everyone does have a price. Some things can’t be purchased. Money and fame and earthly glory are not our eternal standard. Indeed these can, if we are not careful, lead to eternal torment.

Emerson said once,

Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
[“Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” Poems]

Well, at BYU we refuse to be ridden. As much as this university and this Church and you and I as individuals need the wherewithal to feed and clothe ourselves and further the work of the kingdom, we do not need to sell our souls to get them. And here again, we are tempted to think there is an easy way, a fast buck, that in the world’s goods and the glories of men’s kingdoms, we may ride through reaping, as the very convenient Messiah. But why do we think it when it was never so for Him? What do we do with a stable for birthplace and a borrowed tomb at his death? And in his lifetime? Not one single mention of earthly possessions.

The foxes have holes and the birds . . . have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. [Matthew 8:20]

Forgive me if I go on. Just three weeks ago I was working with President Elliot Cameron on the BYU-Hawaii Campus only to open the Sunday edition of the Honolulu Advertiser to read this headline: “Mormon Utah Called a Test Market for Scams.” May I quote a few lines:

Utah’s large Mormon population has become a prime target for con artists and swindlers who annually gyp the state’s residents out of hundreds of millions of dollars. . . . Federal prosecutors say the state has gained a national reputation as “test market for scams. If it works here, they take it on the road. . . .”

“It has happened time and time again. . . . —It’s very easy for people to bridge the gap from unbelievability to believability if church affiliation is used.” . . .

The investor lists were drawn up on genealogy sheets used by church members to trace their ancestry. . . . Mormon leaders denounced the scheme in a stinging editorial which asked, “Why do people take chances like this? Why do people gamble?” One answer: “Their greed gland gets stuck. . . . [I]n this culture, financial success is often equated with righteousness.” [Peter Gillins, Sunday Star Bulletin and Advertiser, Honolulu, January 10, 1982]

Note this from Elder Marvin J. Ashton in our last general conference:

In today’s marketplace—yes, in your own neighborhood, town, and cities—scheming, deceiving promoters are making available to gullible purchasers all kinds of enticing offers. We are sorry to report thousands within our ranks are being duped by the glib tongues of those who offer and solicit in whispers: “Once in a lifetime opportunities” and “Just for you” approaches. [Ensign, November 1981, p. 90]

We can get our share of the earth’s bounties but not this way.

Speaking to this issue several years ago Professor Hugh Nibley wrote:

Why should we labor this unpleasant point? Because the Book of Mormon labors it, for our special benefit. Wealth is a jealous master who will not be served halfheartedly and will suffer no rival—not even God: “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” (Matthew 6:24) In return for unquestioning obedience wealth promises security, power, position, and honors, in fact anything in this world. Above all, the Nephites like the Romans saw in it a mark of superiority and would do anything to get hold of it, for to them “money answereth all things.” (Ecclesiastes 10:19) “Ye do always remember your riches,” cried Samuel the Lamanite, “. . . unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities.” (Helaman 13:22) Along with this, of course, everyone dresses in the height of fashion, the main point being always that the proper clothes are expensive—the expression “costly apparel” occurs 14 times in the Book of Mormon. The more important wealth is, the less important it is how one gets it. [Since Cumorah (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970), pp. 393–94]

Cost Sometimes Very High

As with appropriate, necessary income, so too with studies at school or any other honest endeavor. To the king who wondered if there weren’t an easier way to learn, Euclid said, “Your Highness, there is no royal road to geometry”—nor any other aspect of godly knowledge. Plan right now to work hard and earn your achievements. Postpone your gratification so you don’t have to postpone your graduation. You may feel school will never end and that your bills will never get paid. It will and they will. To work hard and to try earnestly and to deserve good things to happen is worth the effort and worth the wait. And they will happen, often sooner than you think. But it won’t be easy, and it won’t be convenient. An easy education is a contradiction in terms.

May I close with a story of inconvenience, now well known to you. Two weeks ago Air Florida’s Flight 90 to Tampa, a Boeing 737 with 74 passengers aboard, began rolling down the runway at Washington’s National Airport. Nothing seemed very different about this; hundreds of planes leave that airport every day. But you all know what happened next. The plane slammed into the 14th Street Bridge, smashed five cars and a truck, and then skidded into the ice-clogged river. To quote one source:

For a moment, there was silence, and then pandemonium. Commuters watched helplessly as the plane quickly sank. . . A few passengers bobbed to the surface; some clung numbly to pieces of debris while others screamed desperately for help. Scattered across the ice were pieces of green upholstery, twisted chunks of metal, luggage, a tennis racquet, a child’s shoe. . . .

Within minutes, sirens began to wail as fire trucks, ambulances and police cars rushed to the scene. A U.S. Park Police helicopter hovered overhead to pluck survivors out of the water. Six were clinging to the plane’s tail. Dangling a life preserving ring to them, the chopper began ferrying them to shore. One woman had injured her right arm, so [the] pilot . . . lowered the copter until its skids touched the water; his partner [then leaned out and] scooped her up in his arms. Then [a young woman] grabbed the preserver, but as she was being helped out of the . . . river by [a] fellow passenger . . . she lost her grip. . . . A clerk for the Congressional Budget Office who was watching from the shore, plunged into the water and dragged her to land. But the most notable act of heroism was performed by [another] of the passengers, a balding man in his early 50s. Each time the ring was lowered, he grabbed it and passed it along to a comrade; when the helicopter finally returned to pick him up, he had disappeared beneath the ice. [James Kelly, “We’re Not Going to Make It,” Time, 25 January 1982, pp. 16–17]

I quote from an essay entitled simply “The Man in the Water”:

His selflessness [is] one reason the story held national attention; his anonymity another. The fact that he [has gone] unidentified invests him with a universal character. For a while he was Every man, and thus proof (as if one needed it) that no man is ordinary.

Still, he could never have imagined such a capacity in himself. Only minutes before his character was tested, he was sitting in the ordinary plane among the ordinary passengers, dutifully listening to the stewardess telling him to fasten his seat belt and saying something about the “no smoking sign.” So our man relaxed with the others, some of whom would owe their lives to him. Perhaps he started to read, or to doze, or to regret some harsh remark made in the office that morning. Then suddenly he knew that the trip would not be ordinary. Like every other person on that flight, he was desperate to live, which makes his final act so stunning.

For at some moment in the water he must have realized that he would not live if he continued to hand over the rope and ring to others. He had to know it, no matter how gradual the effect of the cold. In his judgment he had no choice. When the helicopter took off with what was to be the last survivor, he watched everything in [his] world move away from him, and he deliberately let it [go]. . . .

The odd thing is that we do not . . . really believe that the man in the water lost his fight. . . . He could not, [like Nature], make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he [won]. [Roger Rosenblatt, Time, 25 January 1982, p. 86]

In this world we are all, you and I, the man or the woman in the water. We often, like this man and Hamlet, must “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them” (Act 3, scene 1, ll. 59–60). And sometimes the cost is very high. It was for Christ, it was for Joseph Smith, and it was for this lone man who counted the cost there in the Potomac—and paid it. It is not easy to go without—without physical gratifications or spiritual assurances or material possessions—but sometimes we must since there is no guarantee of convenience written into our Christian covenant. We must work hard and do right, as Abraham Lincoln said, and sometimes our chance will come. And when we’ve tried, really tried, and waited for what seemed never to be ours, then “the angels came and ministered unto him.” For that ministration in your life I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

© Brigham Young University. All rights reserved.

Joseph Smith was known as truthful

2014-04-06T11:15:00.001-07:00

Defending the Faith: Joseph Smith was known as truthful

By Daniel Peterson

In January 1819, Joseph Smith Sr. and his eldest son, Alvin, initiated a lawsuit against Jeremiah Hurlbut, the eldest male member of a prominent founding family in Palmyra, N.Y.

As a byproduct of his work on the legal papers of Joseph Smith, lawyer and legal historian Jeffrey Walker analyzes the documents surviving from the suit in his article "Joseph Smith's Introduction to the Law: The 1819 Hurlbut Case," which appeared in the spring 2010 issue of "Mormon Historical Studies," a semiannual publication of the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation. The specific issues of the case—the sale of a pair of horses, wages for some farmhands, and some offsetting claims for grain and seeds—aren't especially gripping, but some of its implications are very important indeed.

Continue reading here.

Conference is Here!

2014-04-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

Where does innovation come from?

2014-04-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

by Burt Folsom

From railroads to cars to iPhones, innovation mainly comes from entrepreneurs and private investors eager to back a new idea. Mariana Mazzucato, who has recently written The Entrepreneurial State, challenges this view and argues that the U.S. government, at least since World War II, has been the prime source of innovation–or at least of funding for new ideas.

She defends this thesis by citing many advances in science and national defense that were funded, in part or in whole, by the federal government. True, the federal government has increased in power since WWII, and has thrown money at boatloads of scientific projects, some of which have done well. But let’s look at two points that call this whole argument about “entrepreneurial government” into question.

First, once the federal government is allowed to fund scientific research, the funding is immediately politicized. Those scientific experiments that are considered to be politically correct, or politically connected, move to the front of the line, whether they have value or not. ... Read the rest here.

Poverty Culture

2014-03-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

Paul Ryan was right—poverty is a cultural problem

By George F. Will, Published: March 21

Critics of Rep. Paul Ryan’s remarks about cultural factors in the persistence of poverty are simultaneously shrill and boring. Their predictable minuet of synthetic indignation demonstrates how little liberals have learned about poverty or changed their rhetorical repertoire in the last 49 years.

Ryan spoke of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” adding: “There’s a real culture problem here.” This brought down upon Ryan the usual acid rain of accusations—racism, blaming the victims, etc. He had sauntered into the minefield that a more experienced Daniel Patrick Moynihan—a liberal scholar who knew the taboos of his tribe—had tiptoed into five years before Ryan was born.

A year from now, there surely will be conferences marking the 50th anniversary of what is now known as the Moynihan Report, a.k.a. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” In March 1965, Moynihan, then 37 and assistant secretary of labor, wrote that “the center of the tangle of pathology” in inner cities—this was five months before the Watts riots—was the fact that 23.6 percent of black children were born to single women, compared with just 3.07 percent of white children. He was accused of racism, blaming the victims, etc.

Forty-nine years later, 41 percent of all American children are born out of wedlock; almost half of all first births are to unmarried women, as are 54 percent and 72 percent of all Hispanic and black births, respectively. Is there anyone not blinkered by ideology or invincibly ignorant of social science who disagrees with this:

The family is the primary transmitter of social capital—the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of an individual’s life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement dismantled barriers to opportunity, there began a social regression driven by the explosive growth of the number of children in single-parent families. This meant a continually renewed cohort of adolescent males from homes without fathers; this produced turbulent neighborhoods and schools where the task of maintaining discipline eclipsed that of instruction.

In the mid-1960s, Moynihan noted something ominous that came to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” Two lines on a graph crossed, replicating a scissors’ blades. The descending line depicted the decline in the minority—then overwhelmingly black—male unemployment rate. The ascending line depicted the simultaneous rise of new welfare cases.

The broken correlation of improvements in employment and decreased welfare dependency was not just bewildering, it was frightening. Policymakers had long held a serene faith in social salvation through better economic incentives and fewer barriers to individual initiative. The possibility that the decisive factors are not economic but cultural—habits, mores, customs—was dismaying because it is easier for government to alter incentives and remove barriers than to alter culture. The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions—which government thinks it can manipulate—improve is refuted by the importance of family structure.

To say that poverty can be self-perpetuating is not to say, and Ryan did not say, that poverty is caused by irremediable attributes that are finally the fault of the poor. It is, however, to define the challenge, which is to acculturate those unacquainted with the culture of work to the disciplines and satisfactions of this culture.

Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist and demographer, notes that “labor force participation ratios for men in the prime of life are demonstrably lower in America than in Europe” and “a large part of the jobs problem for American men today is that of not wanting one.” Surely the fact that means-tested entitlement dependency has been destigmatized has something to do with what Eberstadt terms the “unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men.”

Next March, serious people will be wondering why the problem Moynihan articulated half a century earlier has become so much worse while so much else—including the astonishingly rapid receding of racism and discrimination—has become so much better. One reason is what Moynihan called “the leakage of reality from American life.” Judging by the blend of malice, ignorance and intellectual sloth in the left’s reaction to Ryan’s unexceptionable remarks, the leak has become, among some factions, a cataract.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Workbook teaches kids that Second Amendment includes gun control

2014-03-22T16:45:00.000-07:00

The complete lack of historical knowledge of history teaches never ceases to amaze me. I guess the only excuse the teachers really have is that they probably went through the Illinois public school system too.

A social studies workbook, used in an Illinois public middle school, is generating controversy among gun rights supporters because it claims that the Second Amendment permits only strictly regulated, registered gun ownership.
A screenshot of the workbook was first posted to the Facebook page for Illinois Gun Owners Rights. It provides the following description of the Second Amendment:
This amendment states that people have the right to certain weapons, providing that they register them and have not been in prison. The founding fathers included the amendment to prevent the United States from acting like the British who had tried to take weapons away from the colonists.

The actual text of the Second Amendment makes no mention of gun registration:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Read the rest here.

Ukraine R.I.P.?

2014-03-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

Jake Tapper: White House sources warn Russia may invade eastern Ukraine ‘this weekend’

CNN’s Jake Tapper reported Friday that unidentified White House sources are “very concerned” that tens of thousands of Russian troops menacing eastern Ukraine could invade their neighbor “as soon as this weekend.”

After officially annexing Crimea this morning, Tapper claimed that “there is now real apprehension that Vladimir Putin could push even further into Ukraine, perhaps as soon as this weekend.”

“Source tell me that the Obama administration is ‘very concerned’ that the Russians are not being truthful when they say their troops currently positioned on Ukraine’s eastern and southern border are merely there for training exercises,” the anchor said.

“Now that is based on intelligence from the field, sources tell me,” Tapper stressed. “A senior administration official cautioned that they are not certain Russia is planning an imminent move deeper into Ukraine, but they are ‘very concerned.’”

Russia has promised the Obama administration that their massive troop build-up on the Ukrainian border is related to training exercises — not an impending invasion.

“But Obama administration officials have received intelligence suggesting there is reason to be skeptical of Russia’s claims,” Tapper explained, “and that Russia, as soon as in the coming days, could use any number of pretexts to justify pushing its military incursions deeper into Ukraine.”

“Officials say that Russian troops could accomplish a move like this very quickly, and theoretically before any other nation could even raise objections that the border was crossed,” Tapper warned.

Judge Describes UK Court Case as "Abuse of Legal System"

2014-03-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

From mormonnewsroom.org:

A district judge in Westminster Magistrates Court in the United Kingdom today dismissed a private prosecution brought against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for alleged fraud and described it as "an abuse of the process of the court."

In throwing out the case brought by a former Church member, Judge Howard Riddle said, "I am satisfied that the process of the court is being manipulated to provide a high-profile forum to attack the religious beliefs of others."

Judge Riddle said no secular court in England would allow religious teachings to be put to a jury.

The Price of Failed Leadership

2014-03-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

The President's failure to act when action was possible has diminished respect for the U.S. and made troubles worse.

By Mitt Romney, from The Wall Street Journal

Why are there no good choices? From Crimea to North Korea, from Syria to Egypt, and from Iraq to Afghanistan, America apparently has no good options. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, Russia owns Crimea and all we can do is sanction and disinvite—and wring our hands.

Iran is following North Korea's nuclear path, but it seems that we can only entreat Iran to sign the same kind of agreement North Korea once signed, undoubtedly with the same result.

Our tough talk about a red line in Syria prompted Vladimir Putin's sleight of hand, leaving the chemicals and killings much as they were. We say Bashar Assad must go, but aligning with his al Qaeda-backed opposition is an unacceptable option.

And how can it be that Iraq and Afghanistan each refused to sign the status-of-forces agreement with us—with the very nation that shed the blood of thousands of our bravest for them?

Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied?

When protests in Ukraine grew and violence ensued, it was surely evident to people in the intelligence community—and to the White House—that President Putin might try to take advantage of the situation to capture Crimea, or more. That was the time to talk with our global allies about punishments and sanctions, to secure their solidarity, and to communicate these to the Russian president. These steps, plus assurances that we would not exclude Russia from its base in Sevastopol or threaten its influence in Kiev, might have dissuaded him from invasion.A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

Months before the rebellion began in Syria in 2011, a foreign leader I met with predicted that Assad would soon fall from power. Surely the White House saw what this observer saw. As the rebellion erupted, the time was ripe for us to bring together moderate leaders who would have been easy enough for us to identify, to assure the Alawites that they would have a future post-Assad, and to see that the rebels were well armed.

The advent of the Arab Spring may or may not have been foreseen by our intelligence community, but after Tunisia, it was predictable that Egypt might also become engulfed. At that point, pushing our friend Hosni Mubarak to take rapid and bold steps toward reform, as did Jordan's king, might well have saved lives and preserved the U.S.-Egypt alliance.

The time for securing the status-of-forces signatures from leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan was before we announced in 2011 our troop-withdrawal timeline, not after it. In negotiations, you get something when the person across the table wants something from you, not after you have already given it away.

Able leaders anticipate events, prepare for them, and act in time to shape them. My career in business and politics has exposed me to scores of people in leadership positions, only a few of whom actually have these qualities. Some simply cannot envision the future and are thus unpleasantly surprised when it arrives. Some simply hope for the best. Others succumb to analysis paralysis, weighing trends and forecasts and choices beyond the time of opportunity.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton traveled the world in pursuit of their promise to reset relations and to build friendships across the globe. Their failure has been painfully evident: It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office, and now Russia is in Ukraine. Part of their failure, I submit, is due to their failure to act when action was possible, and needed.

A chastened president and Secretary of State Kerry, a year into his job, can yet succeed, and for the country's sake, must succeed. Timing is of the essence.

Mr. Romney is the former governor of Massachusetts and the 2012 Republican nominee for president.

Potent Quotables XXXI

2014-03-17T22:19:00.000-07:00

When inventing new rights never before conceived or dismissing social customs or mores held and accepted for millennia, something to consider:

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), pp. 35–36.

Russia primed to invade rest of Ukraine

2014-03-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

Here it comes...

From The Daily Caller:

With Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk abroad gathering support for his imperiled government, Russian President Vladimir Putin amassed more than 80,000 troops, 270 tanks and 140 war planes on Russia’s borders with Ukraine.

Some of the units are within a three-hour reach of the capital, Kiev, The Associated Press reports.

After earlier denials, The New York Times reports that on Thursday, Russian military leaders admitted they were launching “significant operations involving armored and airborne troops in the Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov regions abutting eastern Ukraine.”

Read the rest here.

"With bosses like these ..."

2014-03-12T17:57:00.002-07:00

Brought to you by the same geniuses who orchestrated much of Eric Holder Approved "Operation: Fast and Furious"... From Katie Pavlich on Townhall.com:

An Update on Jay Dobyns' ATF "Horror Story"

When Special Agent Jay Dobyns put his life on the line to work undercover in the Hell's Angels gang for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, he expected his supervisors would have his back once his job was done. They didn't. Instead, ATF supervisors ignored death threats and tried to frame Dobyns in an effort cover-up their own corruption.

In 2008, after years of death threats towards Dobyns and his family, including a threat to gang rape his wife and daughter on video tape, Dobyns' home was burned to the ground in Tucson, Arizona. His wife and two children were sleeping inside and he was out of town when the incident occured. Luckily, they survived. Instead of sending out an investigative team to look into the arson, Bill Newell, ATF Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Field Division at the time, called the incident "minor scorching" and supervisors, with the support of the Department of Justice, proceeded in attempts to frame Dobyns by accusing him of starting the fire. You can read about the details of the situation here.

Read the rest of the article here.

Two of My Favorite Campaign Ads **UPDATED

2014-03-09T16:12:00.002-07:00

And a new favorite ... the award for "Best Opening Line" goes to:

Senate Votes to Block Nomination of Cop Killer Advocate Debo Adegbile and Obama is Upset

2014-03-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

From Katie Pavlich at Townhall:

The Senate has voted 52 to 47 to block the confirmation of Debo Adegbile, President Obama's nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. All Republicans and Democrats Coons, Heitkamp, Manchin, Pryor, Donnelly, Casey and Walsh voted against the nomination.

Adegbile came under heavy fire for his voluntary advocacy of convicted and unrepentant cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, who murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Major law enforcement orgazations, inlcuding the National Fraternal Order of Police and the National Association of Police Organizations, were opposed to the nomination. Philadelphia Democratic Prosecutor Seth Williams was also against the nomination. Daniel Faulkner's widow, Maureen Faulkner, repeatedly begged Senators to block Adegbile's confirmation. News of Adegbile's nomination first came from former DOJ attorney and whistleblower J. Christian Adams.

Now that Adegbile has been voted down (technically he could still be brought back, but that won't happen), President Obama will need to find someone else to fill the open position at DOJ.

Neil Munro at The Daily Caller:

White House officials blasted the Republican-led Senate rejection of Debo Adegbile, the former lawyer for a convicted cop-killer, who was nominated by the president for a top job in the Justice Department.

The Senate rejected the President Barack Obama’s nominee 47 to 52 after several Democrats lined up with the GOP caucus.

The vote was “a travesty based on wildly unfair character attacks against a good and qualified public servant,” said the White House statement.

Adegbile “represents the best of the legal profession, with wide-ranging experience, and the deep respect of those with whom he has worked,” the White House complained.

The statement tersely acknowledged Adegbile’s work for Mumia Abu-Jamal, who killed a wounded cop in 1981. Abu-Jamal was a member of the Black Panthers, and his case has become a fashionable cause among left-wing lawyers and activists.

Adegbile volunteered to legally aid Abu-Jamal during Adegbile’s tenure as acting president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Adegbile switched jobs in 2013, when he went to work for a Democratic Senator.

“The fact that his nomination was defeated solely based on his legal representation of a defendant runs contrary to a fundamental principle of our system of justice,” said the White House statement.

The statement didn’t name the killer, nor any of the Democratic Senators who voted for and against Adegbile.

Adegbile was backed by several Democratic Senators up for election this year, including North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, Virginia’s Mark Warner, Alaska’s Mark Begich and Colorado’s Mark Udall.

Several Democratic Senators voted against Adegbile. The no votes were cast by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, plus North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, We[s]t Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Alabama Sen. Mark Pryor and Pennsylvnia Sen. Bob Casey.

GOP leaders trumpeted their win.

“This is an embarrassment for President Obama and the Democrats who thought it was a good idea to nominate a convicted cop-killer’s most ardent defender to head a DOJ Department,” said Reince Preibus, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“Vulnerable Democrats running in 2014 just voted to confirm a radical nominee whose positions on civil rights, religious liberty, voting rights and the second amendment are far outside the mainstream,” Priebus gloated.

A little bit more from Susan Davis at USA Today:

The Democrats voting to block the nomination were Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, John Walsh of Montana, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Robert Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Chris Coons of Delaware. Coons, Pryor and Walsh all face re-election this year. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also voted against the nomination in the end, but only for procedural reasons that will allow him to bring it up again if he so chooses.

Adegbile's defeat occurred even after Senate Democrats last year unilaterally changed the Senate rules on judicial and executive nominations to lower the threshold from 60 to a simple majority of votes to end a filibuster. He is the first Obama nominee to lose on the floor since the rules were changed.

Crimea river

2014-03-05T17:35:00.000-07:00

From Ann Coulter:

It’s pointless to pay attention to foreign policy when a Democrat is president, unless you enjoy having your stomach in a knot. As long as a Democrat sits in the White House, America will be repeatedly humiliated, the world will become a much more dangerous place — and there’s absolutely nothing anybody can do about it. (Though this information might come in handy when voting for president, America!)

The following stroll down memory lane is but the briefest of summaries. For a full accounting of Democratic national security disasters, please read my book, Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

– JFK:

John F. Kennedy was in the White House for less than three years and, if you think he screwed a lot of hookers, just look what he did to our foreign policy.

Six months after becoming president, JFK had his calamitous meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna — a meeting the New York Times described as “one of the more self-destructive American actions of the Cold War, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.” (The Times admitted that a half-century later. At the time, the Newspaper of Record lied about the meeting.)

For two days, Khrushchev batted Kennedy around, leaving the president’s own advisers white-faced and shaken. Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze called the meeting “just a disaster.”

Khrushchev was delighted to discover that the U.S. president was so “weak.” A Russian aide said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.”

Seeing he was dealing with a naif, Khrushchev promptly sent missiles to Cuba. The Kennedy Myth Machine has somehow turned JFK’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis into a brilliant foreign policy coup. The truth is: (1) Russia would never have dared move missiles to Cuba had Khrushchev not realized that JFK was a nincompoop; and (2) it wasn’t a victory.

In exchange for Russia’s laughably empty threats about Cuba, JFK removed our missiles from Turkey — a major retreat. As Khrushchev put it in his memoirs: “It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba — for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable. We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along, security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey.”

– LBJ:

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, famously escalated the war in Vietnam simply to prove that the Democrats could be trusted with national security.

As historian David Halberstam describes it, LBJ “would talk to his closest political aides about the McCarthy days, of how Truman lost China and then the Congress and the White House and how, by God, Johnson was not going to be the president who lost Vietnam and then the Congress and the White House.”

LBJ’s incompetent handling of that war allowed liberals to spend the next half-century denouncing every use of American military force as “another Vietnam.”

– CARTER:

Jimmy Carter warned Americans about their “inordinate fear of communism” and claimed to have been attacked by a giant swimming rabbit.

His most inspired strategic move was to abandon the Shah of Iran, a loyal U.S. ally, which gave rise to the global Islamofascist movement we’re still dealing with today. By allowing the Shah to be overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1979, Carter handed Islamic crazies their first state.

Before the end of the year, the Islamic lunatics had taken 52 Americans hostage in Tehran, where they remained for 444 days.

The hostages were released only minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration for reasons succinctly captured in a Jeff MacNelly cartoon. It shows Khomeini reading a telegram aloud: “It’s from Ronald Reagan. It must be about one of the Americans in the Den of Spies, but I don’t recognize the name. It says ‘Remember Hiroshima.’”

– CLINTON:

Bill Clinton’s masterful handling of foreign policy was such a catastrophe that he had to deploy his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, to steal classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 to avoid their discovery by the 9/11 commission.

Twice, when Clinton was president, Sudan had offered to turn over bin Laden to the U.S. But, unfortunately, these offers came in early 1996 when Clinton was busy ejaculating on White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton rebuffed Sudan’s offers.

According to Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden unit at the CIA for many years, Clinton was given eight to 10 chances to kill or capture bin Laden but refused to act, despite bin Laden’s having murdered hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks around the world. Would that one of those opportunities had arisen on the day of Clinton’s scheduled impeachment! Instead of pointlessly bombing Iraq, he might have finally taken out bin Laden.

– OBAMA:

When Obama took office, al Qaida had been routed in Iraq — from Fallujah, Sadr City, and Basra. Muqtada al-Sadr — the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism — had waddled off in retreat to Iran. The Iraqis had a democracy, a miracle on the order of flush toilets in Afghanistan.

By Bush’s last year in office, monthly casualties in Iraq were coming in slightly below a weekend with Justin Bieber. In 2008, there were more than three times as many homicides in Chicago as U.S. troop deaths in the Iraq War. (Chicago: 509; Iraq: 155).

On May 30, the Washington Post reported: “CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays (al-Qaida) as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world …” Even hysterics at the New York Times admitted that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups had nearly disappeared from Southeast Asia by 2008.

A few short years into Obama’s presidency — and al-Qaida is back! For purely political reasons, as soon as he became president, Obama removed every last troop from Iraq, despite there being Americans troops deployed in dozens of countries around the world.

In 2004, nearly 100 soldiers, mostly Marines, died in the battle to take Fallujah from al-Qaida. Today, al-Qaida’s black flag flies above Fallujah.

Bush won the war, and Obama gave it back.

Obama couldn’t be bothered with preserving America’s victory in Iraq. He was busy helping to topple a strong American ally in Egypt and a slavish American minion in Libya — in order to install the Muslim Brotherhood in those countries instead. (That didn’t work out so well for U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans murdered in Benghazi.)

So now, another Russian leader is playing cat-and-mouse with an American president — and guess who’s the mouse? Putin has taunted Obama in Iran, in Syria and with Edward Snowden. By now, Obama has become such an object for Putin’s amusement that the fastest way to get the Russians out of Crimea would be for Obama to call on Putin to invade Ukraine.

Copyright 2014 Ann Coulter

Church Dedicates 142nd Temple

2014-03-03T21:43:00.000-07:00

Gilbert Temple, fourth in Arizona

The Church’s 142nd temple and Arizona’s fourth was dedicated on Sunday, 2 March 2014. Thomas S. Monson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presided over the dedicatory services and gave the prayer in the second session. His first counselor, President Henry B. Eyring in the First Presidency, offered the temple dedicatory prayer in two of the sessions.

Joining President Monson were President Henry B. Eyring, first counselor in the First Presidency; Elder Tad R. Callister of the Presidency of the Seventy; Elders William R. Walker and Kent Richardson of the Seventy; Ann Dibb, President Monson's daughter, and David E. and Nancy R. LeSueur, Gilbert Arizona Temple president and matron.

The Gilbert Arizona Temple, located east of Phoenix, was dedicated in three sessions, and broadcast to Church meetinghouses throughout the state. Choirs composed of Latter-day Saints from within the temple district (district is a geographical area around the temple) provided the inspirational music for the cornerstone ceremony and dedication.

Read more here.

... and they want their foreign policy back

2014-03-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

The 1980s called ...

2014-03-01T10:26:00.000-07:00

As it turns out Mitt was right on every point Barack says he's wrong on ...

UPDATE

From Patrick Howley at the Daily Caller...

Liberal mag admits: Romney was right about Russia

The liberal magazine The New Republic admitted that Mitt Romney was right about Russia after the Vladimir Putin-led nation invaded the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea late last week.

“Russia ... is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors ... But when these—these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when—when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go—we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors? It is always Russia, typically with China alongside,” Romney said in a 2012 interview during his presidential campaign.

Since the interview, Syria’s Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and China has come out “in agreement” with Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

“This all seems ... exactly right,” Isaac Chotiner admitted Monday for The New Republic.

Romney’s comments on Russia were roundly mocked in 2012 by a press that did not seem to like Romney very much compared to his Democratic opponent Barack Obama, who told Romney in a debate that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.”

“Governor Romney offered his judgment today that Russia is our nation’s number one geopolitical foe. This conclusion, as outdated as his ideas on the economy, energy needs, and social issues, is left over from the last century. Does Governor Romney believe that a Cold War foreign policy is the right course in the twenty-first century?,” said former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig in a statement distributed by the Democratic National Committee and featured on the blog of liberal anchor Rachel Maddow.

“I don’t know what decade this guy is living. It sounds like ’72, ’52 even. It’s not Stalin over there. It’s not Khrushchev. It’s not Brezhnev. It’s [Dmitry] Medvedev,” said red-faced MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews.

“If Mitt Romney has his way, the military-industrial complex will get its beloved Cold War back,” cried The Nation magazine.

But Romney was not the only media villain who knew what he was talking about.

“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin recently wrote on Facebook. “I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine.

“Here’s what this ‘stupid’ ‘insipid woman’ predicted back in 2008,” Palin continued, quoting her previous comments. “‘After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama‘s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.’”