Tenure was supposed to create an atmosphere of open debate and inquiry, but instead has created havens for talentless cowards who want to be insulated from life. Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry.
Even liberals don’t try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth. They simply invoke “free speech,” like a deus ex machina to end all discussion. Like the words “diverse” and “tolerance,” “free speech” means nothing but: “Shut up, we win.” It’s free speech (for liberals), diversity (of liberals) and tolerance (toward liberals).
Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that “free speech” is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That’s why you don’t see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other well-known people who have been punished by their employers for their “free speech” include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.
I have seen confusion regarding one’s free speech rights regarding one’s employer on more than one occasion on various e-mail lists. In this country, you have the right to political free speech, but this does not necessarily translate to a right to said speech while on your employer’s dime. Your right to said speech also does not translate in to a right in having it heard or accepted by those who disagree.
Tag: liberty
Today we celebrate Washington’s Birthday. Yet on every calendar I own, today is noted as President’s Day, where we supposedly honor both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the latter of whom’s birthday was the 12th. (Another notable President, Ronald Reagan, would have been 94 on the 6th.)
Per Matthew Spaulding, a Heritage Foundation scholar, in today’s Federalist Brief (No. 05-08):
“Although it was celebrated as early as 1778, and by the early 19th Century was second only to the Fourth of July as a patriotic holiday, Congress did not officially recognize Washington’s Birthday as a national holiday until 1870. The Monday Holiday Law in 1968–applied to executive branch departments and agencies by Richard Nixon’s Executive Order 11582 in 1971–moved the holiday from February 22 to the third Monday in February. Section 6103 of Title 5, United States Code, currently designates that legal federal holiday as ‘Washington’s Birthday.’ Contrary to popular opinion, no action by Congress or order by any President has changed ‘Washington’s Birthday’ to ‘President’s Day’.”
So how did this come to be known popularly as “President’s Day”?
It truly is quite amazing how prescient our Founding Fathers were:
“It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression…that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary;…working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.” –Thomas Jefferson
You don’t have to be a financial wizard to know that Social Security is a lousy investment. Unlike the money you deposit in a bank or salt away in an IRA, you don’t own the money you pay into Social Security. You have no legal right to get those dollars back, and when you die you can’t pass them on to your heirs. Nor can you use your Social Security account before you retire — you can’t borrow against it and you can’t cash it in. You aren’t allowed to put the money into a balanced portfolio. You can’t even watch as the interest accumulates, since your Social Security nest egg doesn’t earn any interest.
Your nest egg, in fact, doesn’t even exist. Because Social Security is financed on a pay-as-you-go system, the dollars withheld from your paycheck today aren’t being saved in an account with your name. They are immediately paid out to retirees. The benefits you receive when you retire will be funded by the payroll taxes then being collected. But because the ratio of workers paying in to retirees taking out is steadily shrinking — it has plummeted from 16 to 1 in 1940 to 3 to 1 today — Social Security is headed for a crisis.
[…]
This of course is the background to President Bush’s campaign to create personal investment accounts, which for the first time would allow workers to own and invest — really own, really invest — part of the Social Security tax taken from their paychecks. With personal accounts many of the features that make Social Security such a crummy deal for today’s workers would be transformed into a package most of them could support. A social-welfare program created in the age of gramophones and the Model A would be updated for a world of iPods and superhighways.
But to many Democrats, such talk is heresy. Letting Americans own some of their Social Security would be too risky, they argue – another way of saying that Americans are too dumb to be entrusted with their own money. Much better to continue entrusting it to Washington, which has managed Social Security so skillfully that workers younger than 50 know they will never get back in benefits what they are paying into the system now. (Perhaps that explains why 58 percent of Americans under 50 support personal accounts, according to a new poll by Zogby International.)
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: can we get politicans brave enough to just kill Social Security once and for all? Pick a year, grandfather in everyone born prior to that year, and those born after are on their own for retirement. Year after year, as those in the program die off, the amount required to sustain Social Security will dwindle, and ultimately, two or three generations from now, no longer exist. Why is this such a hard concept to grasp? Forget partial privatization of this government-run Ponzi scheme, just kill it!
Today would have been President Ronald Reagan’s 94th birthday.
Jeff Harrell:
President Reagan meant a lot to me. I never met the man, nor did I ever vote for him; I was two weeks shy of my eighth birthday when he was first elected to the White House. But growing up in the Reagan era, I couldn’t help but be influenced by his policies, his philosophies and most of all his presence. He was just there, like a permanent fixture, and I grew up around him.
Likewise with me. I vividly remember President Reagan’s first inauguration, watching the coverage on television the afternoon and evening after I got home from school. First, at the sitter who take care of several children after school while their parents were still working, and later, with my parents, over dinner.
As with Jeff, President Reagan has influenced me even more as I got older, and took more of an interest in politics. Many consider FDR the greatest president of the 20th century, but I would have to disagree. FDR offered shorter-term solutions to short-term problems that have blossomed in to a monster federal bureaucracy. FDR may have done most of the work toward winning the Second World War, but he did so while allowing the evil influence of communism to spread throughout Asia, Eastern Europe, and even within the ranks of his own administration. He left us the Cold War.
Which Reagan won. The left called Reagan crazy, a cowboy (sound familiar?), one who would get us in to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Instead, Reagan won victory after victory after victory against the Soviets, without a missile ever being launched. At the same time, he oversaw the greatest eight-year period of growth our nation has ever enjoyed. For me, and many others, it’s Ronald Wilson Reagan who stands on the shoulders of giants in the 20th century.
John Fund, in today’s Political Diary:
Republican members of Congress have a ready response for Democrats crying foul over President Bush’s constant references to Franklin Roosevelt and other icons of liberalism to bolster his call for Social Security reform.
They note that in an address to Congress on January 17, 1935, President Roosevelt foresaw the need to move beyond the pay-as-you-go financing of the current Social Security system. “For perhaps 30 years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions,” the president allowed. But after that, he explained, it would be necessary to move to what he called “voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age.” In other words, his call for the establishment of Social Security directly anticipated today’s reform agenda: “It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans,” FDR explained.
“What Roosevelt was talking about is the need to update Social Security sometime around 1965 with what today we would call personal accounts,” says one top GOP member of the Ways and Means Committee. “By my reckoning we are only about 40 years late in addressing his concerns on how make Social Security solvent.”
Jeff Harrell sums up my feelings from the State of the Union. I cried, too, Jeff.
Last month’s Wired has a short article with a lot of graphs and charts on the Free versus the Unfree worlds, as it relates to consumers and producers, IP registrations and pirates. It looks at four industries: media, medicine, agriculture, and software. Worth a look.
I figured since so many people out there like to poke fun at George W.’s verbal blunders, turnabout was fair play:
“My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state.” –Gray Davis, California governor, at a press conference; quoted in Time magazine, Vol. 162, No. 13, September 29, 2003, p. 15
I realize that the above may seem like a misnomer in these days of the far Left hijacking of the Democratic Party, but such an animal does exist. In recent times they have been known as “Reagan Democrats,” a title which should be worn as a badge of honor and not shame, as current DNC leadership would have things.
The Toad points to Kim du Toit’s essay today that responds to a letter from a reader, who is a conservative Democrat. Kim offers an extremely lucid argument on why the Democratic Party cannot be trusted in its current state to run the nation, and makes the case on why conservative Democrats have far more in common with Republicans and should think about switching parties.
Of course, the latter doesn’t really fix the Democratic Party, but rather gives more of a hold of it to the far Left, which has gotten the Democratic Party, and partly the nation, in to its current state of affairs.
I don’t care for some of Kim’s language (not that Kim would care what I think), but he’s spot on:
Handing Democrats access to the levers of power is like giving a teenage boy a bottle of wine and the keys to the Ferrari: a great old time is had by all, until a f***ing catastrophe ensues. Then, when the feckless irresponsibility of the Democrat Party is made plain for all to see, and Republicans have to clean up the mess, the Democrats scuttle across the border into New Mexico in a childish sulk and suck their thumbs until they get their own way again.
Every time a conservative tries to treat liberal Democrats with politeness and fair play, the f***ing bastards use that as a bargaining chip to further their own agenda. Parliamentary rules are fine, as long as they’re invoked only by Democrats — when Republicans even attempt to do likewise, they’re “mean-spirited”. Don’t ask me for examples or this will be longer than a Bill Whittle essay.