CURBING GOVERNMENT POWER

Has government exceeded its power with Covid shutdowns? Some have thought so from the beginning, but almost everyone cooperated for the first few weeks to “flatten the curve.” It seemed logical not to overload our hospitals and I heard no one object in my small circle, but that’s changing. 

The curve has been flattened for some time now but media hype continues unabated and, consequently, so does public fear. Mask-wearing is viewed as a public responsibility to some and an exercise in virtue-signaling for others to whom it has become a woke, fashion accessory.

Michigan Governor Whitmer

We’ve learned that not all of us are vulnerable to the virus — that only elderly persons with multiple co-morbidities need worry. We’ve also learned that the first dire predictions of millions dying in the the U.S. were way overblown. We’ve learned that the CDC has been over-counting Covid deaths by 94%. Studies are beginning to emerge indicating that shutdowns may not have curbed spread of the virus at all — but it’s becoming almost treasonous to suggest that.

Months ago, some Americans filed suit against blue-state governors for exceeding their constitutional authority and rulings on those suits are beginning to come down. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge ruled that Democrat Governor Wolf’s lockdown orders are unconstitutional. Plaintiffs include Republican state representatives, county officials, and Congressman Mike Kelly from the Pittsburgh area. The decision was issued in September and Wolf has appealed. A circuit court stay is in place and it will take more time to work this through to a final conclusion.

Meantime, in Michigan, the state supreme court ruled that Democrat Governor Whitmer exceeded her authority with Covid restrictions as well. The Michigan attorney general declared he would no longer enforce her edicts. It’s hard to determine how much her autocratic behavior around the virus contributed to the FBI-foiled plan by anarchists to kidnap her. Perhaps that will come out at trial, assuming the perpetrators don’t plea-bargain.

And what an odd bunch they are. Governor Whitmer immediately blamed President Trump for the kidnapping plot, but then a video came out of one potential plotter wearing earlobe-stretching disc earrings as he expressed his hatred for the president. Given leftist, anti-government riots perpetrated by BLM and Antifa on one hand and right-wing, anti-government actions by the likes of Terry McVeigh and Terry Nichols twenty-five years ago, it’s hard to position these plotters on the political spectrum.

WHO reverses itself on shutdowns

Just days ago, the World Health Organization reversed itself and advised world leaders to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method” with the Coronavirus, and “Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.” It wasn’t long ago that President Trump cancelled US support to the WHO for being in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party. Now they’re on the same page.

It’s not just political groups rebelling against autocratic edicts by Democrat officials. In New York City, conservative Jews openly defied Democrat Mayor DiBlasios’ and Democrat Governor Cuomo’s ban on religious gatherings by dancing in the streets. Also in NYC, Brooklyn Roman Catholic Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio filed suit against the state of New York for violating his First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion. New York’s usually-timid Cardinal Timothy Dolan surprisingly backed DiMarzio’s suit.

After President Trump tested positive for the virus, mainstream media claim it’s because of his refusal to wear a mask. Some outlets imply that he got his just desserts for his reluctance. I do not believe they’re effective against spreading the virus and I resent the signs on entry doors telling me I cannot enter without a mask. Although they cost me $15 apiece, I purchased some face masks online which declare: “THIS MASK IS USELESS, AND SO IS YOURS.” Some shoppers just stare at me, while others tell me: “I love your mask.”

As I’m about to submit this column on Tuesday, I see a report by national security correspondent Jordan Schachtel that:

“[A]CDC study, which surveyed symptomatic COVID-19 patients, has found that 70.6% of respondents reported “always” wearing a mask, while an additional 14.4% say they “often” wear a mask. That means a whopping 85% of infected COVID-19 patients reported habitual mask wearing. Only 3.9% of those infected said they “never” wear a face covering.”

Last August, according to the Huffington Post, Joe Biden said: “Let’s institute a mask mandate, nationwide, starting immediately, and we will save lives.” A few days ago though, Biden said he’s not sure a president can do that, but he would mandate them on federal property. A glance at the map of federal land in the USA, you’ll see that half of California and nearly all of several western states.

Moving The Electoral Goal Posts

Democrats have been bitterly disappointed by some election results over the past two decades — both nationally and in Maine, so now they want to move the goal posts. Maine Democrats were burned when they nominated a weak gubernatorial candidate in 2010 in the person of Libby Mitchell. She got only 18.8% (108,387) of the vote, while the winner, Governor Paul LePage got 37.6% (218,065). He might not have won if there weren’t a spoiler candidate named Elliot Cutler in the race who obtained 35.9% (208,270) of total votes cast. 

Mitchell, Cutler, and LePage

Cutler was an Independent but ran on a platform far to the left of Republican LePage. He supported public funding for abortion, opposed education vouchers, favored same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. If either he or Mitchell were running head-to-head against LePage, the outcome would likely have been different. 

LePage, Cutler, Michaud

In 2014, Maine Democrats nominated former congressman Mike Michaud, but again Elliot Cutler ran as an independent liberal — and again he was the spoiler drawing 8.43% ((51,405) of the vote that, if it were added to fellow liberal Mike Michaud’s 43.34% (264,369), would have put him over the top against LePage who won reelection. Democrats were furious. They hated LePage who was a fighter much like President Trump whom he endorsed for President in 2016. 

Democrats nationally never got over losing the 2000 election to George W. Bush after their candidate, Al Gore, had won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. That’s only happened five times in US History but the last two occurred in the past two decades and both times it was the Democrat candidate who was burned. The second one, as I’m sure you know, was Hillary Clinton in 2016.

After the hated Maine Governor Paul LePage’s reelection with a plurality of the vote, Democrats circulated a referendum petition for something called “Ranked Choice Voting” which passed in 2016. It was employed against Republican Congressman Bruce Poliquin who won a plurality of the 2018 popular vote and thought himself the winner — but the goal posts had been moved. Voters were urged to vote for all candidates on the ballot for a particular office. They could vote for just one candidate as they always had, or they can rank their choices first, second, third, etc.

If no candidate gets a majority of first choices, the candidate with the lowest vote total is eliminated and counting starts over. If there still isn’t a candidate with a majority of first choices, the process is repeated until there is. That’s how Democrat candidate Jared Golden was declared the winner. If balloting were done as it always had been, Republican Bruce Poliquin would have won reelection.

Supporters call ranked-choice balloting an “instant run-off.” Republicans call it an instant rip-off and consider the election flawed. A real run-off, the way other states like Louisiana do it, would mean the top two vote-getters then go head-to-head in another election. That way, the candidate with the most votes would win — a process voters can support because they understand it. If Poloquin and Golden were to have gone head-to-head, the result might well have been different.

Most Mainers who hated Governor LePage also hate President Trump and would like to eliminate the electoral college process that elected him. To do that, however, requires a constitutional amendment and that’s a very difficult process. I remember former Maine US Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, a Democrat, came to Fryeburg years ago and said the amendment process is intentionally difficult because our plan of government — which is what our constitution is — should never be changed without a broad, public consensus.

Article Five declares that to eliminate the electoral college, two-thirds of both houses of Congress would have to propose an amendment. Then it would have to be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures. Democrats know there isn’t enough support for all that so, rather than follow the Constitutional process, they’re trying to circumvent it by forming something called “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” or NPV. According to last month’s Imprimis:

Until this year, every state that had joined NPV was heavily Democratic: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The NPV campaign has struggled to win other Democratic states: Delaware only adopted it this year and it still has not passed in Oregon (though it may soon). Following the 2018 election, Democrats came into control of both the legislatures and the governorships in the purple states of Colorado and New Mexico, which have subsequently joined NPV.

Maine Democrats almost passed a bill to join NPV but it lost narrowly last month. Had it passed, Maine would have forfeited power over its four electoral votes. They would instead have been awarded to whatever candidate won the most popular votes nationally.

Left & Right July 18, 2018

We have a guest filling in for Gino: Tony Zore, an on-air personality at WMWV, our local radio station. He's a Libertarian and well-spoken.

We start with Trump/Putin press conference and comment on John McCain's put-down of Trump's performance. Tony thinks McCain and most media reaction is overblown. I agree.

Is Trump more anti-Russian than Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.? I think yes, Tony too. He thinks NATO's effectiveness is diminished as France's and Germany's military preparedness has gone fallow.

Tony questions the wisdom of almost any US involvement in the Middle East. Trump's intervention against ISIS was wrong-headed because we shouldn't get involved when our enemies are fighting each other.

He predicts Turkey will be the biggest problem in the region for the United States and states his reasons.

We further discuss the complicated ethnic/religious conflicts within Islam but also the geography of the Middle East.

I bring up American's deepening divisions. I'm afraid it will get beyond words and so is Tony. I invite him to speculate on why. He gets into two different views of rights: individual rights vs what's good for the group -- society. As the national government amasses more power, the danger of civil war increases. He advocates returning federal power to states.

Tony thinks rising property taxes are the biggest issue facing the Mount Washington Valley. Also, balancing development with preservation of natural resources and scenic areas.

He endorses land trusts buying up development rights rather than government passing restrictive ordinances.

We'll Do The Rest

After spitting in a tube my adult children sent me for Fathers’ Day last year, then mailing it out and waiting six weeks, ancestry.com sent me DNA results. My sputum — or 98% of it at least — matches that of people living today in three regions of Ireland: the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal; County Mayo in west/central Ireland; and the southwestern counties of Cork and Kerry.

None of this surprised me. Those DNA findings confirm forty years of research into family origins and three trips to various parts of Ireland, but one thing did puzzle me at first. The McLaughlins I met while traveling in Inishowen told me the Gaelic version of our name — MacLochlainn” translates to “Of the Vikings” so I expected to find DNA traces from Scandinavia. Viking raiders started raping and pillaging the Irish coast during the 9th century, then established settlements in many places over the next 400 years. They founded Dublin itself, so many Irish should have Scandinavian DNA after all that.

Further research into ancestry.com's site explained it. My DNA profile matches people living in those regions of Ireland now — many of whom would likely have Scandinavian ancestors, whereas people living in Denmark, Norway, or Sweden would not tend to have Celtic ancestors from Ireland. The Irish didn’t raid or settle in those colder regions, so my DNA would not match many people now living in those countries.

Most historians agree that Celtic people first settled in Ireland only 2500 years ago — around 500 BC. There were already people living there when the Celts arrived, but historians disagree about who they were or where they might have come from. Some claim they arrived from northern Iberia and I’ve read claims of migration from North Africa, the Fertile Crescent, and what is now Russia going back 5000-8000 years. Recent DNA research at Dublin’s Trinity College offers corroborating evidence for these claims.

After Vikings were assimilated, the British took over large parts of Ireland by the 14th century. Some Irish accepted British conquerors but most continued to resist and were banished westward to rocky hills and bogs “beyond the pale.” The “pale” was line of wooden stakes driven into the ground as a boundary. That now-familiar English phrase has come to mean “outside the bounds of acceptable behavior” and both meanings were applied to my ancestors by British conquerors.

When Oliver Cromwell began his depredations in Ireland around the 1640s, he further banished rebellious Irish “To hell or Connaught.” The latter is in western Ireland “beyond the pale” where most of my forebears lived before emigrating to America beginning in the early 1800s. Some, including the Haggertys and McDonalds, then settled around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and worked in the coal mines. They moved north to Boston in the early 20th century, intermarried with the Fitzgeralds and McLaughlins, and begat me.

While all that interests me and I’m still researching ancestors named Sullivan, McQuire, Harrington, Mahoney, Cassidy, and others, I think of myself as 100% American. That’s not an ethnicity; it’s an attitude. It’s an idea for organizing humans to the extent they wish to be organized. To be American is to believe the Constitution is the most brilliant governing document ever written, even if Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg disagrees.

As an Irishman who calls himself “Bono” said:

“America is an idea, isn’t it… That’s how we see you around the world: as one of the greatest ideas in history… The idea is that you and me are created equal… the idea that life is not meant to be endured but enjoyed, the idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us; we’ll do the rest. This country [he was speaking at Georgetown University] was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper. And God love you for it…”

He was referring, of course, to the Declaration of Independence, but the ideas expressed there were soon after codified into our plan for government: the US Constitution. To the extent that we preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, as so many of have sworn to do, we preserve the idea of America. The Constitution curtails government and confers “liberty and justice for all” — then leaves it to us to do the rest as we see fit.

It’s the idea of America that makes us great. It makes us the kind of country to which so many others want to come. We have many races and ethnicities in America. They’re all welcome so long as they endorse the idea. If not, they shouldn't be allowed in.

Out of Fashion?

This is the unabridged version of a speech I’m delivering for a luncheon at the Eagle Mountain House in Jackson, New Hampshire later today. An abridged version will run in newspapers tomorrow. Young women from area high schools whose essays were selected by the Daughters of the American Revolution will receive awards and possible scholarships.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.

By greeting you in such a manner, I have identified myself as someone who views the human race as binary. That means I know and publicly state that every human is born male or female and remains so throughout his or her natural life. There are two sexes, and I reject attempts by academia and many in government to refute that basic truth. We are not “assigned a gender” at birth. We are created male and female.

It’s likely that, holding these beliefs and being inclined to profess them, I would not be permitted to speak at whatever university you ladies attend next year. If you joined student government — which is likely, given each of your records in high school — and you were to suggest inviting me to speak, you would be criticized. You would be opposed, and if the invitation were issued anyway and I showed up, I might be shouted down. That’s how it has become on campuses across our great country. Colleges and universities preach diversity, but only the diversity of skin color. Most disdain intellectual diversity and censor opposing views.

Many faculty in our colleges and universities today have been strongly influenced by movements like post-modernism, critical theory, and other neo-marxist-freudian ideas which may read like so much gobbledygook if you were to look up definitions for them. If you have courage enough to admit confusion and question professors who propound them, you’ll likely be told that they’re “dialectical,” as if that would explain everything. If you remain courageous and ask what dialectical means, you’ll be given still more of what sounds like gobbledygook. If you reach this point, trust your instincts. Remember the axiom: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

Deliberate gobbledygook accepted and published in "academic" gender studies journal

Realize that many college faculty today do not believe there is any such thing as objective truth. considering that idea only a social construct. In other words, they don’t believe it exists so they do not seek it. Their view of the world can be summed up by the old Beatles tune Strawberry Fields: “Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.” So, don’t let them take you down to Strawberry Fields of nihilism. Objective Truth is real. Seek it, always.

Perhaps you noted that I believe we were created, you and I. That’s what our Founding Fathers believed as well, and proclaimed in our founding document — The Declaration of Independence, and I quote: “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…”

That concept has also become unpopular among our academic and political elites. When President Obama spoke during his first term before a group of Hispanic Americans, he stumbled over the passage I just quoted you. As he read from his teleprompter “…we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal” — here he paused and fluttered his eyelids nervously before continuing: “endowed with certain inalienable rights, life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” He conspicuously left out the phrase, “…by our Creator.”

Belief in a Creator has declined among those who govern us and who teach our children in government schools. They believe our rights come from government, which would imply that the government which grants those rights could also infringe on them or even take them away entirely. They’re enumerated in our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to our Constitution, which each of you praised in your qualifying essay.

Our academic and government elite believe that most important of documents to be malleable — something that can be changed in ways that were not intended by the men who wrote it, that is, changed by judicial fiat in our courts and not through the amendment process outlined in Article Five. The Constitution allowed for change but only through a deliberately long and difficult process. It’s much easier to “legislate from the bench” with the votes of only five Justices on the Supreme Court. Whatever opinions they might render, however, can be overturned just as easily by five votes on a subsequent court. That’s an unstable process and not what our Founders intended.

The men who wrote our Constitution were nearly all godly men and assumed American citizens would be as well. As John Adams stated, and I quote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

There are still religious people on college campuses but they’re increasingly closeted. Religion is considered naive, childish, even moronic — certainly not fashionable. The pervasive idea now is that God did not create man but that man created God. “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create Him,” goes the aphorism. Some claim that new Gods have been created by those who believe the Judeo/Christian God to be dead, as philosopher Frederich Neitzche declared more than a hundred years ago. Those gods include the newer religions of environmentalism and big government.

Speaking of big government, this year, 2017, marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin birthed an 80-year experiment called the Soviet Union — the ultimate state of atheistic, big government that mandated equality (for everyone but Communist Party members) and brutally persecuted dissenters. Historians estimate that somewhere between 40 and 60 million were exterminated by the Party in the name of preserving “The Revolution.” Documentation of this tragedy is so thin due to the absence of a free press that we cannot know if it’s 40 million or 60 million. Twenty million are simply unaccounted for. Consider that. Twenty million people were “disappeared” from the historical record.

President Reagan called it “The Evil Empire” and he is credited with winning the Cold War that brought it down shortly before you were born. The killing was even worse to the southeast during the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. Some historians estimate that 80 million died there under Mao Tse Tung. Then there was the communist regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia where three million more were murdered. It’s a sordid history of which your generation seems largely unaware. An article last week in the Sacrament Bee contended, and I quote: “Ask a millennial if they would rather live under a socialist or capitalist country, and they’re likely to give an answer much different than their parents or grandparents would.”

“That’s according to a new YouGov study commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist organization, which found that 44 percent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, with another 7 percent saying the same about communism.” Remember, the Founders wrote a Constitution designed to restrict government, not grow it into the behemoth it has sadly become.

How many of you were born in the 20th century? One could say the struggle between capitalism and communism defined that century. Did capitalism prevail? For now it has, but your generation may see communism’s revival. Right now you seem to believe the US Constitution to be the most brilliant governing document ever written.

Well, you’re right. It is. Never forget that.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Gospels Not Gospel Anymore?

President Evo Morales gift to Pope Francis

It was worse than I thought. The Roman Catholic Church was being undermined by Marxists further back than I ever imagined. I knew there were Jesuits and other priests holding official positions in the Marxist Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1970s, but I thought they were anomalous. Now I’m learning that a majority of Jesuits believe Marxism and Christianity have more commonalities than differences.

For decades, Marxist Catholic priests and bishops stayed in the closet, just as Marxist Democrats in the US government did, but Marxists in Catholic Church came out first — during the 1970s near as I can tell. They were led by Jesuits who had for centuries been the most conservative of priestly orders. By the seventies they’d become the furthest left. Marxists in the Democrat Party are mostly closeted, though Bernie Sanders opened the door by declaring himself socialist. The support he received last year indicates like-minded Democrats are in the majority.

Sanders came close to the presidency in 2016. Had he won, he’d have replaced the deeply-closeted Barack Obama. He lost the nomination, however, to Hillary Clinton, who chose as her running mate Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. He was nearly elected vice-president — a heartbeat away from the presidency. Kaine was educated by Jesuits. He’s also a true-believer in Marxist “Liberation Theology” under which Jesuits justify making revolution alongside Marxist guerrillas in the jungles of Central America and elsewhere.

One Jesuit, James Francis Carney, SJ was born and raised in Chicago and killed while fighting with Marxist revolutionaries in Honduras. “We Christian-Marxists have to fight side-by-side in Central America with the Marxists who do not believe in God,” Carney wrote, “in order to form a new socialist society . . . To be a Christian is to be a revolutionary.” If you google Carney's name, you’ll find nothing but adulatory posts about him from other Jesuits and Catholics in general. Tim Kaine sought out and spent an evening with Father James Carney in Central America before he was killed.

I’m nearly done with a book called The Jesuits, by the late Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit. It was published in 1986, and I wish I’d gotten my hands on it sooner. Martin makes a strong case that Jesuits moved away from the traditional Christian view that the individual human soul is where the battle between good and evil is fought. Now, he says, there exists within the order a “tendency to disassociate the concept of evil from the individual man and woman and to place it instead within a societal framework.”

Evil in that “societal framework” is capitalism — as practiced in Central America and elsewhere under the leadership of the United States. That’s what Jesuits fight now. On page 57 of The Jesuits, Martin describes the nexus of Liberation Theology and Marxist-Leninism, in part, thusly: “Hell became the capitalist system. The American president, leader of the greatest capitalist country, became the Great Satan.” In 2013, the conservative Pope Benedict XVI resigned and was replaced by Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope.

Martin sometimes called Jesuits the pope’s “rapid deployment force.” That’s apt, as he explained when describing former soldier St. Ignatius of Loyola’s purpose in founding the Society of Jesus, as the Jesuits are called officially, back in the 1500s. They were like soldiers, only they were fighting intellectually and morally, not physically. Each member had to undergo a rigorous educational training regimen so as to be ready to match up with the sharpest theologians, scientists, philosophers, politicians and government officials the world over. For centuries they engaged in intellectual combat with anti-Christian leaders in Enlightenment Europe and more than held their own.

For more than four hundred years, Jesuits took the usual vows other priests did as well as an additional vow of total obedience to the pope himself, whoever he might be and whatever he might order. Under conservative Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Jesuits chafed against their orders. What will happen under Pope Francis — one of their own?

Recent remarks from Father Arturo Sosa Abascal, the new Jesuit Superior-General, are making big waves. He claims we cannot know what Jesus actually said because there were no tape recorders two thousand years ago. He claims the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John cannot be taken literally, and that: “Doctrine is a word that I don’t like very much. It brings with it the image of the hardness of stone,” he said. “Instead, the human reality is much more nuanced. It is never black or white. It is in continual development.”

What he said about the gospels is much like what Democrats claim about our Constitution: There are no absolutes. They can mean whatever you want them to mean.