SCHLAFLY: Fumbling Jobs Issue Will Lose Reagan Democrats

From The Washington Times
Commentary By Phyllis Schlafly

Conservatives bounced back strong after the elections of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and we'll do likewise again in 2010. The Gallup Poll just reported that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states, and the trend is up. President Obama is aiding our task of reinvigorating conservatives.

A speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1975 to the Conservative Political Action Conference contains a message worth repeating:

"I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, 'We must broaden the base of our party' - when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents ...," he said.

"Our people look for a cause to believe in ... raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people. ... Let us explore ways to ward off socialism. ... A political party ... must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency," Mr. Reagan said.

Here is our banner of bold colors:

1. Restore fiscal responsibility. Conservatives must call a halt to Mr. Obama's reckless borrowing and spending. This means defeating the wildly extravagant health care bill and the cap-and-trade bill, which should be called cap-and-tax.

2. Stand tall for American sovereignty. This means rejecting all United Nations treaties including the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the U.N. Treaty on Women. They all invade our sovereignty by creating committees of hostile foreign bureaucrats to monitor our compliance.

Standing for American sovereignty also means repudiating all devious ways of erasing our borders by deceitful code words such as "economic integration," "labor mobility," "North American Union," or "Free Trade Area of the Americas."

3. Make foreign and military policies serve the national security of the United States. George Washington's advice to be "at all times ready for war" means, at long last, deploying an anti-missile defense that can protect our people from attack by rogue nations. As Margaret Thatcher reminded us, Mr. Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

4. We must recapture the three important voting blocs that abandoned conservative candidates in 2008: Reagan Democrats, unmarried women, and young people.

We lost the Reagan Democrats by fumbling the jobs issue. Millions of well-paying blue-collar jobs have gone overseas where workers are paid only 30 cents an hour. We must make clear that conservatives stand for maintaining middle-class jobs that support a family. We must rewrite the unfair trade agreements that allow foreign countries to pretend to reduce their barriers against our products but substitute an equivalent border tax called the VAT (Value Added Tax) that discriminates against U.S. products. Conservatives must reject the trade agreements that allow foreign countries to subsidize their exports by rebating their domestic taxes, while U.S. companies pay very high corporate taxes.

We lost 70 percent of unmarried women because the Democrats are the party of generous handouts to unmarried mothers. Conservatives must stand up for marriage as the basic institution of society and must not allow the liberals to undermine marriage by using taxpayer-financed incentives in the multibillion-dollar welfare, child-support, and domestic-violence agencies to promote divorce, fatherless children, and the matriarchy sought by the feminists. Mothers should look to husbands for financial support, not depend on Big Brother Government to be the provider. The liberals will always be the party of bigger taxpayer handouts.

We lost the majority of young people largely because of what they are taught in the public schools, which 89 percent of kids attend. We must demand that public schools teach respect for patriotism, the Constitution, moral standards, Western civilization instead of multiculturalism (all cultures are equal), diversity (all behaviors are OK), and "social justice" (the false notion that students are victims of an unjust, oppressive and racist America, which makes them ripe targets for community organizers to mobilize them to vote for socialist candidates). The National Association of Scholars defines "social justice" as "the advocacy of more egalitarian access to income through state-sponsored redistribution." That is academic verbiage for Mr. Obama's pledge to "spread the wealth around," which sums up his current policies.

If conservatives deal with these challenges, they can be the Comeback Kids in 2010.

Phyllis Schlafly is a founder of the modern conservative movement in the United States and has been a national leader on a panoply of national and foreign-policy issues.

Top 10 Books Every College Student Should Read

From Human Events
By Harry W. Crocker III


1. The Bible You can’t be considered a literate person without having read the most important book in the history of Western Civilization.

2. Caesar’s Commentaries I think it was Will Durant who said that Western Civilization is Caesar and Christ. So, as with the Bible, you might as well go to the source.

3. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (or Montesquieu’s harder to find
Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline) As we all know, empires and republics can decline and fall. Machiavelli wanted to learn from the history of Rome how to preserve a republic -- and so should we.

4. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Not a conservative book (though Gibbon was something of a conservative Whig) but a great one: History is the most important subject.

5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France All conservatives pay lip-service to this classic, not enough have actually read it. That’s a shame because it is memorably, beautifully written and provides a necessary check on the unreflecting populism of some conservatives.

6. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson Dr. Johnson reminds us that the first Whig (liberal) was the devil and that a truly conservative approach to politics is anti-ideological, anti-statist, and anti-political: “How small of all that human hearts endure that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”

7. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind College students who declare themselves conservatives should read Kirk so they’ll know something of what they’re declaring.

8. Shakespeare, Henry V All college students are potential leaders; here’s Shakespeare on leadership.

9. Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston Part of the impoverishment of the conservative mind these days is that it has no idea what it wants to conserve (or restore) in large part because so many conservatives don’t bother to cultivate a conservative imagination by reading novels. Sassoon didn’t become a political conservative (and a Catholic convert) until later life, but this brilliant, evocative, gentlemanly book shows a conservative society (which he loved) that produced a generation of heroes, like the author himself, a veteran of the Great War.

10. George Orwell, Collected Journalism Orwell was another professed Socialist who was in many ways conservative. For a college student, he’s a great tutor on how to write and how to recognize (and avoid) the politicization of language, an area where many political conservatives seem utterly tone deaf as “gender” replaces “sex,” “abstinence” replaces “chastity,” and “perception” becomes relative rather than acute. All of this is freighted with politics, which the left understands but our own folks don’t.

Mr. Crocker is the author most recently of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War.

Is Catholic-Orthodox Unity in Sight?

From National Catholic Register
By Edward Pentin

The Catholic Archbishop of Moscow has given a remarkably upbeat assessment of relations with the Orthodox Church, saying unity between Catholics and Orthodox could be achieved “within a few months.”

In an interview today in Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, Archbishop Paolo Pezzi said the miracle of reunification “is possible, indeed it has never been so close.” The archbishop added that Catholic-Orthodox reunification, the end of the historic schism that has divided them for a millennium, and spiritual communion between the two churches “could happen soon, also within a few months.”

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African Kin Seek Obama's Help

Brother's Keeper? Still Not a Dollar for the Brother in the Hut.

From The Boston Globe
By Farah Stockman

After Barack Obama was elected to the US Senate in 2004, a delegation from the remote African village where his father was raised journeyed to Washington, seeking financial help. But Obama offered them advice, not money.

Now that Obama has moved to the White House, expectations of financial benefit have grown even greater in this tiny hamlet where water is still delivered to thatched huts on the backs of donkeys.

“There are still those who are waiting for him to send millions,’’ said Nicholas Rajula, a Kogelo businessman.

Dreams alone seem to be sustaining those counting on an economic boom in this rural corner of western Kenya, near Lake Victoria, where the American president’s father - also named Barack Obama - grew up and where many of his relatives remain.

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Freemasons Await Dan Brown Novel `The Lost Symbol'

By Hillel Italie, AP National Writer

The lodge room of the Naval Masonic Hall is a colorful and somewhat inscrutable sight for the nonmember, with its blue walls, Egyptian symbols, checkered floor in the center and high ceiling painted with gold stars.

Countless secrets supposedly have been shared in this and thousands of similar rooms around the world. Facts of life have been debated, honors bestowed, rituals enacted. You would need to belong to a lodge to learn what really goes on.

Or you could simply ask.

"The emphasis on secrecy is something that disturbs people," says Joseph Crociata, a burly, deep-voiced man who is a trial attorney by profession but otherwise a Junior Grand Warden at the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the District of Columbia.

"But it's not a problem getting Masons to talk about Masonry. Sometimes, it's a problem getting them to stop."

Countless books and Web sites are dedicated to Freemasons, yet the Masonic Order has been defined by mystery, alluring enough to claim Mozart and George Washington as members, dark enough to be feared by the Vatican, Islamic officials, Nazis and Communists. In the United States, candidates in the 19th-century ran for office on anti-Mason platforms and John Quincy Adams declared that "Masonry ought forever to be abolished."

And now arrives Dan Brown.

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Obama Is Pushing Israel Toward War

President Obama can't outsource matters of war and peace to another state.

From The Wall Street Journal
Commentary By Bret Stephens

Events are fast pushing Israel toward a pre-emptive military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, probably by next spring. That strike could well fail. Or it could succeed at the price of oil at $300 a barrel, a Middle East war, and American servicemen caught in between. So why is the Obama administration doing everything it can to speed the war process along?

At July's G-8 summit in Italy, Iran was given a September deadline to start negotiations over its nuclear programs. Last week, Iran gave its answer: No.

Instead, what Tehran offered was a five-page document that was the diplomatic equivalent of a giant kiss-off. It begins by lamenting the "ungodly ways of thinking prevailing in global relations" and proceeds to offer comprehensive talks on a variety of subjects: democracy, human rights, disarmament, terrorism, "respect for the rights of nations," and other areas where Iran is a paragon. Conspicuously absent from the document is any mention of Iran's nuclear program, now at the so-called breakout point, which both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his boss Ali Khamenei insist is not up for discussion.

What's an American president to do in the face of this nonstarter of a document? What else, but pretend it isn't a nonstarter. Talks begin Oct. 1.

All this only helps persuade Israel's skittish leadership that when President Obama calls a nuclear-armed Iran "unacceptable," he means it approximately in the same way a parent does when fecklessly reprimanding his misbehaving teenager. That impression is strengthened by Mr. Obama's decision to drop Iran from the agenda when he chairs a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sept. 24; by Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly opposing military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities; and by Russia's announcement that it will not support any further sanctions on Iran.

In sum, the conclusion among Israelis is that the Obama administration won't lift a finger to stop Iran, much less will the "international community." So Israel has pursued a different strategy, in effect seeking to goad the U.S. into stopping, or at least delaying, an Israeli attack by imposing stiff sanctions and perhaps even launching military strikes of its own.

Thus, unlike Israel's air strike against Iraq's reactor in 1981 or Syria's in 2007, both of which were planned in the utmost secrecy, the Israelis have gone out of their way to advertise their fears, purposes and capabilities. They have sent warships through the Suez Canal in broad daylight and conducted widely publicized air-combat exercises at long range. They have also been unusually forthcoming in their briefings with reporters, expressing confidence at every turn that Israel can get the job done.

The problem, however, is that the administration isn't taking the bait, and one has to wonder why. Perhaps it thinks its diplomacy will work, or that it has the luxury of time, or that it can talk the Israelis out of attacking. Alternatively, it might actually want Israel to attack without inviting the perception that it has colluded with it. Or maybe it isn't really paying attention.

But Israel is paying attention. And the longer the U.S. delays playing hardball with Iran, the sooner Israel is likely to strike. A report published today by the Bipartisan Policy Center, and signed by Democrat Chuck Robb, Republican Dan Coats, and retired Gen. Charles Ward, notes that by next year Iran will "be able to produce a weapon's worth of highly enriched uranium . . . in less than two months." No less critical in determining Israel's timetable is the anticipated delivery to Iran of Russian S-300 anti-aircraft batteries: Israel will almost certainly strike before those deliveries are made, no matter whether an Iranian bomb is two months or two years away.

Such a strike may well be in Israel's best interests, though that depends entirely on whether the strike succeeds. It is certainly in America's supreme interest that Iran not acquire a genuine nuclear capability, whether of the actual or break-out variety. That goes also for the Middle East generally, which doesn't need the nuclear arms race an Iranian capability would inevitably provoke.

Then again, it is not in the U.S. interest that Israel be the instrument of Iran's disarmament. For starters, its ability to do so is iffy: Israeli strategists are quietly putting it about that even a successful attack may have to be repeated a few years down the road as Iran reconstitutes its capacity. For another thing, Iran could respond to such a strike not only against Israel itself, but also U.S targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

But most importantly, it is an abdication of a superpower's responsibility to outsource matters of war and peace to another state, however closely allied. President Obama has now ceded the driver's seat on Iran policy to Prime Minister Netanyahu. He would do better to take the wheel again, keeping in mind that Iran is beyond the reach of his eloquence, and keeping in mind, too, that very useful Roman adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Ancient Synagogue’s Remains Unearthed in Magdala; Jesus May Have Preached There

From Catholic World News

Remains of the ancient synaogogue of Migdal (Magdala), the birthplace of St. Mary Magdalene, have been unearthed. “It is possible that Jesus had preached in this synagogue since Migdal was an important Jewish city at the time,” the excavations director noted.

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Artifacts Dating to Time of Jesus Found (Vatican Radio)
• Remains of Jesus-era synagogue found in Israel (AFP)