SUNLIT UPLANDS

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Pageant with Flotilla of 1000 Boats

2012-06-03T13:38:00.000-04:00

George Frideric Handel - Zadok the Priest

2012-06-03T06:00:00.002-04:00

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

2012-06-03T02:32:00.000-04:00

This is part of the Responsory Benedicamus Patrem, for the feast of the Holy Trinity, as sung from late fifteenth century Antiphonary.

Chant group Psallentes was founded and is directed by Hendrik Vanden Abeele. The group particularly focuses on late medieval chant.

Obama At Large: Where Are The Lawyers?

2012-06-02T14:07:00.002-04:00

"The bombings by Mr. Obama, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, trample proper constitutional authority, separation of powers, and checks and balances and constitute repeated impeachable offenses."

By Ralph Nader

The rule of law is rapidly breaking down at the top levels of our government. As officers of the court, we have sworn to “support the Constitution,” which clearly implies an affirmative commitment on our part.

Take the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The conservative American Bar Association sent three white papers to President Bush describing his continual unconstitutional policies. Then and now civil liberties groups and a few law professors, such as the stalwart David Cole of Georgetown University and Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, have distinguished themselves in calling out both presidents for such violations and the necessity for enforcing the rule of law.

Sadly, the bulk of our profession, as individuals and through their bar associations, has remained quietly on the sidelines. They have turned away from their role as “first-responders” to protect the Constitution from its official violators.

As a youngster in Hawaii, basketball player Barack Obama was nicknamed by his schoolboy chums as “Barry O’Bomber,” according to the Washington Post. Tuesday’s (May 29) New York Times published a massive page-one feature article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, that demonstrated just how inadvertently prescient was this moniker. This was not an adversarial, leaked newspaper scoop. The article had all the signs of cooperation by the three dozen, interviewed current and former advisers to President Obama and his administration. The reporters wrote that a weekly role of the president is to personally select and order a “kill list” of suspected terrorists or militants via drone strikes or other means. The reporters wrote that this personal role of Obama’s is “without precedent in presidential history.” Adversaries are pulling him into more and more countries – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other territories.

The drones have killed civilians, families with small children, and even allied soldiers in this undeclared war based on secret “facts” and local grudges (getting even). These attacks are justified by secret legal memos claiming that the president, without any Congressional authorization, can without any limitations other than his say-so, target far and wide assassinations of any “suspected terrorist,” including American citizens.

The bombings by Mr. Obama, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, trample proper constitutional authority, separation of powers, and checks and balances and constitute repeated impeachable offenses. That is, if a pathetic Congress ever decided to uphold its constitutional responsibility, including and beyond Article I, section 8’s war-declaring powers.

As if lawyers needed any reminding, the Constitution is the foundation of our legal system and is based on declared, open boundaries of permissible government actions. That is what a government of law, not of men, means. Further our system is clearly demarked by independent review of executive branch decisions – by our courts and Congress.

What happens if Congress becomes, in constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein’s words, “an ink blot,” and the courts beg off with their wholesale dismissals of Constitutional matters on the grounds that an issue involves a “political question” or that parties have “no-standing-to-sue.” What happens is what is happening. The situation worsens every year, deepening dictatorial secretive decisions by the White House, and not just regarding foreign and military policies.

The value of The New York Times article is that it added ascribed commentary on what was reported. Here is a sample:

- The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, quoted by a colleague as complaining about the CIA’s strikes driving American policy commenting that he: “didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.” Imagine what the sidelined Foreign Service is thinking about greater longer-range risks to our national security.

- Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, calls the strike campaign “dangerously seductive.” He said that Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is “the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.” Blair, a retired admiral, has often noted that intense focus on strikes sidelines any long-term strategy against al-Qaeda which spreads wider with each drone that vaporizes civilians.

- Former CIA director Michael Hayden decries the secrecy: “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president and that’s not sustainable,” he told the Times. “Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. [Department of Justice] safe.”

Consider this: an allegedly liberal former constitutional law lecturer is being cautioned about blowback, the erosion of democracy and the national security by former heads of super-secret spy agencies!

Secrecy-driven violence in government breeds fear and surrender of conscience. When Mr. Obama was campaigning for president in 2007, he was reviled by Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden Jr. and Mitt Romney – then presidential candidates – for declaring that even if Pakistan leaders objected, he would go after terrorist bases in Pakistan. Romney said he had “become Dr. Strangelove,” according to the Times. Today all three of candidate Obama’s critics have decided to go along with egregious violations of our Constitution.

The Times made the telling point that Obama’s orders now “can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know.” Such is the drift to one-man rule, consuming so much of his time in this way at the expense of addressing hundreds of thousands of preventable fatalities yearly here in the U.S. from occupational disease, environmental pollution, hospital infections and other documented dangerous conditions.

Based on deep reporting, Becker and Shane allowed that “both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Obama became president.”

In a world of lawlessness, force will beget force, which is what the CIA means by “blowback.” Our country has the most to lose when we abandon the rule of law and embrace lawless violence that is banking future revenge throughout the world.

The people in the countries we target know what we must remember. We are their occupiers, their invaders, the powerful supporters for decades of their own brutal tyrants. We’re in their backyard, which more than any other impetus spawned al-Qaeda in the first place.

So lawyers of America, apart from a few stalwarts among you, what is your breaking point? When will you uphold your oath of office and work to restore constitutional authorities and boundaries?

Someday, people will ask – where were the lawyers?

Diamond Jubilee Preparations

2012-06-02T06:20:00.000-04:00

The Diamond Queen, Episode 1

2012-06-02T06:00:00.007-04:00

Episode 1, Parts 2, 3 and 4

Feds to Florida: Halt Non-Citizen Voter Purge

2012-06-01T12:06:00.000-04:00

The Justice Department has ordered Florida's election division to cease purging non-citizen voters and illegal aliens from its voter rolls. Could there be any clearer indication of the Democrat Party's reliance on voter fraud and the intent of Eric Holder, the nation's chief law enforcement officer, to sanction it in the 2012 elections.

One of the most important things patriotic citizens can do in the crucial election year is to become a knowledgeable poll worker or watcher who is prepared to challenge ineligible voters and unlawful polling place activity.

The Miami Herald has the details on this shocking story.

Federal Court Declares Part of Defense of Marriage Act Unconstitutional

2012-06-01T11:36:00.005-04:00

From Catholic World News

In a 3-0 decision, the First US Circuit Court of Appeals has declared a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. The 1996 law passed by wide margins in both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Massachusetts Catholic Conference, and several other religious organizations had filed friend-of-the-court briefs in defense of the act’s constitutionality, as had various organizations and individuals, including the attorneys general of five states, the Thomas More Society, and Professor Robert George of Princeton University. Numerous associations, unions, and religious organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the National Education Association, and the Anti-Defamation League, had filed briefs asking the court to declare the law unconstitutional.

“Congress’ denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest,” the court stated in its decision. “DOMA does not formally invalidate same-sex marriages in states that permit them, but its adverse consequences for such a choice are considerable. Notably, it prevents same-sex married couples from filing joint federal tax returns, which can lessen tax burdens, and prevents the surviving spouse of a same-sex marriage from collecting Social Security survivor benefits.”

“In reaching our judgment, we do not rely upon the charge that DOMA's hidden but dominant purpose was hostility to homosexuality,” the court added. “The many legislators who supported DOMA acted from a variety of motives, one central and expressed aim being to preserve the heritage of marriage as traditionally defined over centuries of Western civilization.”

“To conclude, many Americans believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and most Americans live in states where that is the law today,” the court continued. “One virtue of federalism is that it permits this diversity of governance based on local choice, but this applies as well to the states that have chosen to legalize same-sex marriage. Under current Supreme Court authority, Congress' denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest.”

The court did not strike down Section 2 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which declares that “no State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.”

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Henninger: Church Is Still Not State

2012-05-31T22:00:00.000-04:00

Catholics are being told to substitute state belief for their religious belief.

From The Wall Street Journal

By Daniel Henninger

How ironic it will be if Catholic voters, about 27% of the electorate, put the first Mormon in the White House some 50 years after John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic president. More telling, though, about the current state of the American mind will be the fact that after more than a thousand days and events in Barack Obama's presidency, the reason for this result will be an unexpected reaffirmation of an American principle older than the country's first presidential election: the free exercise of religion.

Also telling about the current American mind is that the Democratic progressives who inhabit the administration either didn't see this coming or, more likely, thought that the idea of free religious exercise no longer counted for much among American Catholics in today's political calculus.

Surely someone inside the administration, perhaps Joe Biden (Archmere Catholic high school, '61), brought this matter up during the comment period preceding the January 20 statement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that religious institutions, primarily hospitals, would be required to extend insurance coverage to the widest definition of birth-control treatments. The Catholic bishops conference urged the Obama administration not to push them inside this mandate, citing religious belief as what one could call their conscientious objection to it.

The backlash among Catholics to the HHS order, across the political spectrum, was an astonishing thing to witness. One anecdote sticks with me from the first days. A friend in Ohio told of talking to a diocesan priest of no apparent political persuasion who said, "I hope these bishops are prepared to go to jail over this."

Go to jail? What's going on here?

St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in Adams, Mass.

Some writers of late have said the initial crack back by Catholics overstates the political danger to the president. They've argued that the "Catholic vote" is a myth, that Catholics have become socially diverse and the direction of their votes is unpredictable. In these times, who could doubt it?

Some things don't change, though, and among them is an American antipathy to being pushed too far. Americans are a tolerant people, but past some point they push back. With the HHS mandate upon them, a lot of Catholic voters are thinking resistance. It's an old American tradition.

The Catholic lawsuits filed against the HHS mandate are based in the Constitution's Free Exercise Clause. That's the legal issue. But the reason so much hell broke loose after the Obama administration's decision is that it runs afoul of the Constitution's Establishment Clause against creating a state religion. The issue here isn't the parsings of constitutional law but the American religious experience that led to the Establishment Clause.

In pre-Revolution America, the believers who fled persecution in Europe often tried to make their religion official in the colonies. Virginia established the Church of England. Less appreciated but relevant now is that all such efforts at establishment in the colonies collapsed, not just because the Constitution in time forbade it but because the early Americans wouldn't accept being told to toe an official line of religious belief.

Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger says Catholics are being told to substitute state belief for their religious belief.

Along with their intensity of religious belief, these earliest Americans had a habit of ornery independence. The history of religion in America is a story of pushed-around people who, rather than consent, divided into schismatic movements and breakaway sects, often literally heading into the wilderness. One of the most successful such groups stopped their traipsing in Utah. They have now produced a candidate for the presidency.

Suddenly amid this hallowed tradition, we get Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius (Trinity College, '70) claiming with the zeal of secular fanatics that these priests, nuns, their hospitals and the people who work in them will find a way to pay for and permit sterilizations and abortifacients. Catholics can believe what they want inside their churches, but in public they too must show belief in reproductive rights as defined in law by the state. Welcome to 3rd-century Rome.

The resisting Catholic bishops, say the administration and its factions, are "out of step" with the current American consensus on women's reproductive rights. Possibly so, but official Catholic doctrine and the HHS mandate are in opposition.

The Obama administration is effectively saying that all the practices and beliefs embedded in the Obama health-care law are established in America and consent is required, no matter what some religion purports to believe. It is this attempt to displace religious belief with an alternative belief system that goes against the American grain and has Catholics up in arms.

Perhaps the Catholic-myth people are right that most Catholics are OK now with abortifacients. And maybe the pundits dripping ridicule and bile on New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan have got the modern American Catholic pegged right. I doubt it. Not yet.

S.C. Ethics Panel Reopens Probe of Gov. Nikki Haley

2012-05-31T14:20:00.001-04:00


House Speaker Harrell has accused Gov. Haley of lying about the status of an ethics probe into her activities while serving as a SC House member.

The House Ethics Committee voted unanimously Wednesday to reopen its inquiry into whether Gov. Nikki Haley illegally lobbied while a S.C. House member, exploiting her public office for her personal gain and to benefit her employers.

Read the rest of this entry >>

How The Poles Saved Civilization, Pt. II

2012-05-31T00:00:00.005-04:00

From Crisis Magazine

By M. D. Aeschliman

Among the most momentous events of twentieth-century history is the defeat of the Communist Red Army in the Battle of Warsaw in the summer of 1920, “the miracle on the Vistula,” the subject of Adam Zamoyski’s excellent recent book Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe. In the aftermath of the catastrophic First World War, with its 13 million deaths, the old order in much of Europe collapsed, and though the armistice was concluded in the West on 11 November 1918, eastern Europe, Italy, and the Middle East remained on fire for another five years. This is the background to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” finished in Lausanne in 1922, and gives it an apocalyptic quality: “Falling towers/ Jerusalem, Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal” (Part V). Four vast empires collapsed—Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, propelling several hundred million people into conditions of intermittent chaos, starvation, and war. Given the discrediting of nearly all continental European political regimes (and the Ottomans) and the demobilizing of vast numbers of soldiers and their subsequent unemployment and bitterness, Europe was a powder-keg, with fiery instruments everywhere. There were Communist and Fascist strikes, riots, and coups d’etat throughout the continent, including Berlin, Budapest, Munich, and Milan. The Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia in 1917 and defeated their “White” Russian opponents in a bloody civil war over the next three years. Meanwhile, with the advent of the Americans in the West, the Germans, who had driven the Russians to their knees in the east, precipitating the Bolshevik revolution and Russian withdrawal from the war, were themselves forced into an armistice that became a surrender and led to the fall of the Kaiser.

Now, in 1920, the victorious, resurgent Red Army, a hungry horde effectively organized by Leon Trotsky and led by a brilliant young general, whom Zamoyski calls an “aristocratic Russian nihilist,” Mikhail Tukhachevsky, swept westward into what had been Byelorussian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Polish provinces of the old Russian, German, and Austrian empires. The north European plain that stretches from the Russian Ural Mountains to the English Channel and the Atlantic seaboard of France is a vast, flat stretch, with few defensible natural borders and some large but slow-moving and easily-fordable rivers. Mongols, Tartars, and Huns had swept across it into Europe for hundreds of years, and then Napoleon’s armies had swept through it into Russia and then retreated ruinously back across it in 1812. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia had liquidated the old Kingdom of Poland in a series of partitions, concluded in the 1790s, that the courageous, renegade Austrian historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn called “the original sin of modern European history.”

In 1920 Europe was aflame and the appeal of the victorious revolutionary Lenin and Communism was immense throughout Europe, among the unemployed, the demobilized, and the intellectuals. Marxist ideas of “permanent revolution” and “historical inevitably” were widespread and the charismatic authority of fanatical but brave revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky seemed to have world-historical significance.

The newly-revived Polish state, which had disappeared from the map of Europe for 125 years, was comprised of pieces of the former Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, a war-exhausted terrain with no easily defensible borders and no recent experience of self-government. Large numbers of Poles were themselves sympathetic to Communism, not least Jews, who had so often suffered under the previous empires. Some Poles had high positions in the Bolshevik hierarchy, including Feliks Dzierzynski, the ferocious head of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and Lenin had confidently set up a Red Polish government-in-exile to take power when Warsaw fell.

The progress of Tukhachevsky and the Red Army into Poland was extraordinarily rapid, and though his vast armed horde was poor and hungry it was effectively indoctrinated and inspired by the same fanatical, egalitarian morale and utopian hope that had animated French Jacobin army victories against larger, better-equipped monarchical armies from 1793 on, and on whose momentum and trajectory Napoleon built his military success. At a different level, the discrediting of the old empires and their class system by the horrific, fruitless carnage of World War I had left Europe with a moral-political vacuum that was felt from London and Paris to Milan, Rome, Istanbul, Vienna, Budapest, Munich, and Berlin. Even decent liberals and non-Marxist Socialists felt the pull of the utilitarian ideal of Communism, its apparently “scientific” understanding of history, its universal, trans-nationalistic moral appeal. Lenin and Trotsky were not alone in seeing 1920 as the miraculous year, the initiation into the final, progressive phase in which the Communist Revolution would spread like wildfire throughout the world. They thought the key was spreading the revolutionary flame to Germany; but between their revolution and the German turmoil and opportunity stood a fragile, infant state: Poland. “World revolution seemed with reach,” writes Adam Zamoyski.

Zamoyski’s brief, lucidly-written, well-researched study of the Battle of Warsaw tells this story very well, not least in the particular, crucial details of the military campaign, using excellent maps. The Poles were led by Jozef Pilsudski, a veteran of German and Russian jails and the Polish Legion of the Austro-Hungarian Army, and a number of other gifted Polish officers who had previously served in the German, Austrian, Russian, or French armies. Their soldiers were a hodge-podge of Poles, mostly from the same armies or from illegal, insurgent, pre-war, Polish para-military associations. Their preparations and arms were radically diverse; their numbers vastly smaller than the Red Army. The Poles were advised by French Gen. Maxime Weygand and Major Charles de Gaulle, who had himself been a German POW in the immediately preceding years, but no troops were given them by their nominal French and British allies.

Throughout June, July, and early August, 1920, the rapid westward drive of Tukhachevsky’s Red Army, covering several hundred miles, seemed unstoppable, and fear and fatalism seemed to possess many of the Polish troops. The Red Army came within ten miles of Warsaw and Polish Communist fifth-columnists within the city began sabotage activities. But rather than cracking, morale remained high in the city and in most units of the army, and a brilliant, risky strategic counter-attack conceived and undertaken by Pilsudski had immense success, routing vastly larger forces and sending the Red Army reeling eastward and destroying large pieces of it.

Yet perhaps the most interesting issue raised by the Russo-Polish War and the battle of Warsaw comes down to questions of worldview, faith, and historical experience. Despite their subjection by their powerful authoritarian neighbors Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia, especially the latter two, for the 125 years until 1918, the Poles had a national history, and one with long periods of effective self-governance. Catholicism had kept alive their language, national self-consciousness, and moral awareness. A history of serving as a bulwark against, and victim of, barbaric, eastern invasions of Europe—Mongol, Hun, Tartar, Moslem, Russian, Cossack, or Bolshevik—predisposed them to see themselves as civilized, Christian Europeans. In the event, the “Polish masses” were less susceptible to the universalistic, “scientific socialist,” Bolshevik propaganda appeal, which was extraordinarily intense, despite the large number of “Red” Poles beyond their borders and some within them.

If Tukhachevsky’s Red Army had taken Warsaw in the summer of 1920, “Red” insurrections further west and south—in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Vienna, Munich, the Rhineland, perhaps Lille, Paris, Turin, Milan—would most likely have opened the gates of their cities to the apparently “world-historical” Communist forces of the future, with incalculably disastrous consequences for human civilization. Adam Zamoyski’s Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe reminds us of how perennially fragile the status and transmission of even a minimally decent civilization is, of how grievous a deficiency it is that most college graduates in our time know so little about their own era (the century in which they were born), and of how little our vast Western university systems—especially their fad-prone humanities and social-science departments, devoted to nominalist scholarship of diminishing circles of significance and intelligibility—have done to remedy that deficiency. Nevertheless, as two recent popes—a Pole and a German—who lived through the tragic events of the 20^th century have repeatedly struggled to make clear, only moral truth can make us free, in any sense of “free” that is worth having.

M.D. Aeschliman (Ph.D., Columbia) is Professor of Education at Boston University, Adjunct Professor of Anglophone Culture at the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano), the author of The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism (1983; second edition, Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1998), and a widely-published scholar and literary critic.

How the Poles Saved Civilization, Part I

2012-05-30T11:39:00.001-04:00

From Crisis Magazine

By M. D. Aeschliman

On a June evening in 1979 I was having a drink on a small balcony outside a sixth-floor apartment in downtown Warsaw with a very civilized, elderly Polish intellectual, a retired mathematics professor who had taken a degree at Cambridge between the two world wars and spoke a refined, witty, patrician English. Inside the apartment about a dozen much younger Poles, twenty-five to forty-five years old, were having a secret meeting, their voices inaudible due to the classical music being played so as to hide or muffle their discourse in case the apartment was bugged. They had each arrived separately, by pre-arrangement, from different parts of the city. The elderly professor, whom I will call Professor X, had discreetly let them into the apartment, then offered me a drink and retired with me to the balcony, apparently either uninterested in their conversation or prudent enough not to want to know its content. (As a non-Polish speaker, I could not follow it anyway.) Among the young men in the apartment were several figures who would later become known for their prominent participation in the underground Polish anti-Communist movement and some who already were, including my friend Pawel B., a meteorologist who had brought me along by a circuitous route that required our rapid and sudden exit from a tram-car, the immediate flight to two hidden bicycles, and a fast ride across a large urban park, measures designed, successfully, to elude the two Polish secret service agents who had clearly been following us both, and one of whom was apparently assigned to watch his apartment full time. (It was an apartment that Pawel and his family shared with another family, where in the single bathroom the only toilet paper consisted of successive pages torn out of a stack of the Polish-language edition of Stalin’s collected works.)

By contrast, Professor X lived alone in the apartment to which we had come, but it had not always been his apartment; it had belonged to a prominent, exiled friend, Prof. Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009), a once-eminent Marxist historian, philosopher, and theoretician who had left the Communist Party, publicly criticized the regime, and managed to leave the country about a decade before, going on to appointments at McGill, Berkeley, Oxford, and the University of Chicago, and subsequently winning many awards in the West, including the Erasmus Prize and, in 2003, the U.S. Library of Congress’s lifetime scholarly achievement award, before dying in 2009. Along with the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz and Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, Kolakowski was one of the three great post-World War II cultural figures of Poland and apparently a great inspiration to the young Poles assembled in his former apartment. Such were the Byzantine arrangements prevailing in Communist but in some ways half-hearted Poland that Kolakowski had been allowed to leave his apartment to his old friend Professor X, a widower, who was allowed to take up residence in it.

Professor X was a genial host with a pleasantly ironic manner who, to my surprise, fended off my questions about the young men inside and their political activities, preferring to talk about remote, high-cultural, literary topics and Warsaw sights visible from our balcony. Somewhat frustrated with this conversational tactic, I pressed him, until, wry but unannoyed, he said to me: “Look, I sympathize with these cowboys, I’ll even help them a bit, but it will all come to nothing, or it will only cause them harm.” He then pointed to a gigantic, ugly, multi-story building in the distance, lit up brilliantly for the evening. “Do you see that?” he asked. “It is the Palace of Culture, the gift of our fraternal Russian Communist friends, our big Slavic brothers.” After a moment’s silence, he went on. “Do you know how many Russian military divisions there are in this country?” I didn’t, but he did, and after telling me, he said: “They’ll never leave. Believe me, they’ll never leave, or if they do, only in the midst of a nuclear holocaust that will kill us all. I’m an old man,” he said, “who was born here when Warsaw was part of the Russian Empire. I have survived Russian, Polish, and German regimes, and I know what is possible here. They’ll never leave.”

A few days later in Cracow, in southern Poland, I was present in a vast park where over a million people assembled enthusiastically to welcome home the native son, Bishop Karol Wojtyla, who had a year before become Pope John Paul II. A cynical French woman journalist with whom I had struck up an acquaintance stood next to me and said: “The poor Slavic idiots! Credulous as ever. They simply don’t understand the modern world.” Though I was not a Polish-speaker, I was a keen student of modern history, I had already seen and heard a lot in Poland, and I thought she was wrong, as I had thought Professor X was wrong in Warsaw.

I had come to Poland at the invitation of my friend Pawel B., a courageous dissident who had managed by subterfuge to get a travel visa out of Poland in 1977 and then, instead of attending the meteorologists’ conference somewhere in Germany that was his ostensible destination, had proceeded to pick up a large packet of photographs sent out of Poland for his use and travel to Venice. The post-World War II Venice Biennale, a major international art show, had for years been used as a forum for Italian Communist agitprop and anti-American propaganda, but in the mid-1970s the Venice City Council, which runs the Biennale, had fallen into the hands of a non-Communist majority under the leadership of an ex-Communist, Socialist politician named Carlo Ripa di Meana. This majority took the unusual decision of devoting the 1977 Biennale to “The Literature and Art of Dissent in Russia and Eastern Europe,” and I attended. Pawel B. had set up his exhibition of photographs called “Uncensored Poland,” which showed churches being built illegally by night, anti-government worker demonstrations, and marches of church parishioners protesting mandatory Communist indoctrination in schools. One marching banner had an icon of the “Black Madonna” of Czestochowa, with Latin words written above it: “Nec temere nec timide”—neither arrogant nor frightened; the words and the icon blending symbolically the elements that comprise the classical-Christian tradition that gave us Western civilization itself. I befriended Pawel B., but when I kept stepping out of the way so as not to hide him from photographers, he stopped me with a smile: “Don’t bother. They’re Communists, Poles and Italians, documenting my presence here; I’ll see the photographs when I get home.” After his time in Venice and before his return to Poland I was able to be of some help to him, and my 1979 trip to Poland was at his invitation. Returning to Poland, he was rebuked, surveillance of him was increased, and, subsequently, after my visit, he had to hide for several months in the Carpathian Mountains of southern Poland under an assumed name before managing to emigrate to the USA, eventually arranging to get his wife and two children out too.

About the eventual fate of Communist Poland and its larger, fraternal neighbor, Professor X, the French journalist, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Paul Samuelson, and E.J. Hobsbawm were all wrong. Not only did Communism in Poland disappear, but the Polish revolt that I was so honored to see first-hand was the key domino that led to the fall of Communism throughout eastern Europe and Russia. Our tenured historical professoriat cannot easily deny this, but they can neglect to admit it or teach it in their courses in modern history. In fact they can neglect to teach the political history of the twentieth century altogether, as it is so damaging to Marxist or secular, Whig assumptions and expectations about human nature and action and about the inevitability of progress. But the fact remains, unremarked or untaught or embarrassing as it is: the Poles began the overthrow of Communism; they changed history. “Rien n’est beau que le vrai,” as Malcolm Muggeridge used to say: Nothing is beautiful but the true.

In the galleries of the Vatican Apartments in Rome there is a vast historical painting that depicts the arrival at the gates of Vienna in 1683 of King Jan Sobieski and a Polish army. From 1453 to 1683 the Ottoman Turks had progressively penetrated the Balkan peninsula and then central Europe, subjecting the inhabitants to Moslem rule. Sobieski and the Poles arrived at the very last moment when it was possible to defeat them before they took Vienna, and this victory was a turning-point in the history of Europe and the world. It began a steady movement by Christian Europeans to expel the Turks from the Balkans. The painting of the victory of Sobieski and the Poles must have been a favorite of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, himself born in 1920, the year the Ottoman Empire finally fell, with complex and ambiguous effects, to be sure, which is the case with many historical events. But if the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 is a lasting, permanent shame for Christians, much of the twentieth century comprises a permanent shame for atheists of the left and right. Absurdism, post-modernism, de-constructionism, perspectivalism, radical relativism, and other interpretive fads provide convenient intellectual escape mechanisms for our dominant intellectual elites from having to make normative moral evaluations of modern history, though what Michael Polanyi called their own ‘morally inverted’ agenda assumes and requires some cross-cultural, universal sense of obligation. Despite oceans of words, our voluble, neophiliac, leftish utilitarians aren’t very good reasoners.

Continued tomorrow.

A Reagan Forum with the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili

2012-05-29T19:03:00.000-04:00

Remarks by the President of Georgia, H.E. Mr. Mikheil Saakashvili on Wednesday, May 23, 2012.

For more information on the ongoing works of President Reagan's Foundation, please visit http://www.reaganfoundation.org.

DeMint: Over 90% of Bills Passed Secretly With No Debate, No Vote

2012-05-29T16:37:00.000-04:00

Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) recently reminded his colleagues that the Senate passes over 90 percent of legislation without any debate, without amendment, and without a roll call vote.

Donald Trump on the Kenyan

2012-05-29T16:19:00.000-04:00

SC House Member: Send Haley Ethics Complaint to AG

2012-05-29T15:46:00.000-04:00

A House Ethics Committee member says she will propose sending an ethics complaint against Gov. Nikki Haley to the attorney general.

Republican Rep. Joan Brady of Columbia said Tuesday the case has gotten too complicated, and Attorney General Alan Wilson should handle it to uphold the governor's and committee's integrity.

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Daniel Hannan: 'My New Anglosphere Hero is New Zealand's John Key'

2012-05-29T15:25:00.001-04:00

By Daniel Hannan

Prime Minister John Key of New Zealand

Is it possible for a Right-wing government to freeze spending and cut the deficit while remaining popular? As they say in New Zealand, ‘yih’. I’ve remarked before that, while no country is physically further from Britain, none is temperamentally closer. Yet there is a difference when it comes to public expenditure. A slowing of the rate of increase in the UK – there have, as yet, been no net cuts – is howled down as an assault on the poor directed by a clique of ancien régime aristocrats. In New Zealand, by contrast, ‘zero budgets’ are seen as prudent and sensible.

Ah, you might say, that’s because Kiwis have got away from the inherited inequalities and class hang-ups of the old country. Perhaps. Then again, their prime minister, John Key, had a hugely successful career as head of foreign exchange at Merrill Lynch. Leftie crowds occasionally gather at his house and chant ‘You don’t care, you’re a millionaire!’ (logic plainly not being their strong point).

None of it prevents John Key from polling well above his party. Indeed, he is the most popular prime minister that anyone can remember – and, having now met him, I can see why. He is very clever and, at the same time, utterly charming in the informal and artless way that New Zealanders have. While he has little time for dogmas and theories, he has a clear sense of where he wants to take his country, and is able to communicate that sense to people around him.

His countrymen admire his modesty, affectionately calling him ‘Low Key’. You can see their point. He slipped discreetly onto my flight from Auckland to Wellington without anyone noticing. Kiwis like that sort of thing,

To be honest, I’m slightly surprised to find myself admiring him as much as I do. I have blogged before about the two heroes of the Anglosphere, Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott. Both men are idealistic conservatives. Harper is comprehensively dismantling the Trudeau settlement, cutting taxes, devolving power and making Canada the Anglosphere’s foreign policy hawk. Abbott horrifies Australia’s metropolitan establishment by opposing restrictions on free speech, attacking carbon taxes, believing in God and pwning Labor in the polls.

John Key has a very different style: practical, moderate, distrustful of doctrine. Like David Cameron, he bases his appeal on competence rather than ideology. The two men, as you'd expect, are close, and our own PM often cites John Key as a soul-mate.

The thing is, his competence is visibly yielding dividends. New Zealanders know an able manager when they see one. While other countries have toppled into recession, theirs is growing. Most Kiwis understand that this didn’t just happen on its own and, being a level-headed people, they see their PM’s background in international finance as an asset rather than a cause for resentment.

This week, John Key will come to Britain to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. I asked him what advice he had for us. ‘Get into Asia,’ he replied simply. ‘It’s growing while Europe is shrinking’. Put like that, it’s impossible to disagree, no?

Pope Benedict Names Bishop Aquila of Fargo as New Archbishop of Denver

2012-05-29T13:40:00.005-04:00

Pope Benedict XVI today named Bishop Samuel J. Aquila of Fargo, N.D., to be the new Archbishop of Denver. A priest of the Archdiocese of Denver before he was assigned to Fargo, Aquila is a strong, orthodox churchman and his appointment, along with appointments in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia, signals a blessed change from the days of Bernardin, Mahony and McCarrick.

Archbishop-designate Aquila is known for his love for the priesthood, a passion for pro-life advocacy, and a heart for youth. This is another appointment that will inspire and encourage the surge in priestly vocations and the New Evangelization in the United States. Thank you, Holy Father. Deo Gratias!

In the following video, Bishop Aquila reflects on the World Youth Day held in Denver in 1993.

A Memorial Day Tribute

2012-05-28T00:37:00.000-04:00

The secret of Happiness is Freedom, and the secret of Freedom, Courage.

Thucydides

Pentecost Sunday

2012-05-27T00:00:00.001-04:00

"And when the days of Pentecost were drawing to a close, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a violent wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as of fire, which settled upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in foreign tongues, even as the Holy Spirit prompted them to speak" (Acts 2, 1-4)

From the Pastor - A Red Letter Day

2012-05-26T14:16:00.000-04:00

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

The term “Red Letter Day” goes back to 325 AD when the First Council of Nicaea decreed that great feasts be marked in red on the calendar. Pentecost is quite literally a Red Letter Day since its liturgical color is red, to match the fire that came down on the apostles fifty days after the Resurrection remade the world.

Saint Augustine said that God made us without our help, but He will not remake us without our cooperation. We did not invent the biological process by which we were conceived and, as zygotes, given the 38 chromosomes that encode the physical nature we have throughout life, but we do have a moral freedom to decide how we are going to use that physical life. The Holy Spirit gives each of us in Confirmation, as he gave the whole Church at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem, seven powers to enable God to make us what He wants us to be: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord.

It is good to study the subtle differences between these gifts. This can easily be done by reading the Catechism, and praying daily for their increase. This is what Blessed Teresa of Calcutta meant when she used to say so often, “Just give God permission.”

There is no need to regret lost opportunities when we still have the breath of life, if we let the Holy Spirit breathe into that life the love that made us. What you might have wanted to become does not matter, so long as you let God make you what he intends you to be. Thomas S. Jones, Jr., a New York poet who died in 1932, wrote a gentle poem that still crops up from time to time:

Across the fields of yesterday
He sometimes comes to me,
A little lad just back from play –
The lad I used to be.

And yet he smiles wistfully
Once he has crept within,
I wonder if he hopes to see
The man I might have been.

We would be condemned to perpetual wistfulness at the contemplation of unfilled promise, were it not for what the Holy Spirit can still make us with our consent. Aristotle taught that the qualities of a good rhetorician are Ethos (talents and integrity of character), Logos (right use of the mind) and Pathos (sharing a sense of the challenges of life in a difficult world). The Holy Spirit shifts this to a formula for holiness by an Ethos that shares the heritage of the saints, a Logos which is God's own truth, and the triumphal suffering of Christ who died and rose again so that we might live forever with Him. So Pentecost is the reddest of Red Letter Days.

Diamond Jubilee March-past in Windsor Castle

2012-05-26T05:19:00.002-04:00

Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Brtish Armed Forces mounted a special Parade and Muster at Windsor in honor of The Queen's 60 year reign on Saturday, May 19.

Troops representing the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force paraded through Windsor Castle and town before Her Majesty and The Duke of Edinburgh. This was followed by a muster in the Castle grounds for a unique event before an audience of more than 3,000 Armed Forces personnel, their families, and veterans. An impressive, tri-Service flypast of current and historic aircraft concluded the celebrations.

Let Freedom Ring!

2012-05-25T23:02:00.000-04:00

Archbishop Lori delivers an address on the Obama administration's assault on religious liberty.

The Archbishop of Baltimore, William Lori, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, delivered the keynote address at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s National Religious Freedom Gala Reception and Award Dinner in Washington May 24.

It has now been just over a week since I became the archbishop of Baltimore, and I find myself surrounded by history there. I live near the Basilica of the Assumption, the oldest cathedral in the U.S. The cornerstone was laid in 1806. The nation’s first bishop, John Carroll, is buried beneath the basilica, as are many of my predecessors.

John Carroll was a cousin of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Charles Carroll’s story — and indeed Maryland’s early history — teaches us about the fragility of religious liberty and the importance of exercising vigilance in protecting it.

Maryland was founded in the mid-17th century by the Catholic Lord Baltimore as a society where people of different faiths could live together peacefully. This vision was soon codified in Maryland’s 1649 Act Concerning Religion (also called the “Toleration Act”), which was the first law in our nation’s history to protect an individual’s right to freedom of conscience.

Maryland’s experiment in religious toleration, however, ended within a few decades. Around the turn of the 18th century, the colony was placed under royal control, and the Church of England became the established religion. Discriminatory laws, including the loss of political rights, were enacted against those who refused to conform. Catholic chapels were closed, and Catholics were restricted to practicing their faith in their homes. The Catholic community lived under these conditions until the American Revolution.

Both Charles Carroll and his father, although wealthy landowners, were barred from active participation in politics because of their Roman Catholic faith. Despite this legal restriction, in the early 1770s, Charles Carroll became a powerful voice for independence from British rule.

He eventually was elected to represent the colony of Maryland in various committees and was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1776.

Carroll then signed the Declaration of Independence and was the only Catholic to do so.

Just a few years later, our Founding Fathers included protection of the free exercise of religion in the First Amendment to our Constitution. In reflecting on his time in the Constitutional Convention, George Washington stated in 1789: “If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed in the Convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it” [Letter to the United Baptist churches in Virginia, 1789].

Washington went on to state, “[I]f I could now conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny and every species of religious persecution” [Ibid.].

Twenty years later, in 1809, another of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, emphasized the value of freedom of conscience when he stated that “no provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority” [Letter to New London Methodist, 1809].

Current Challenges

Thus, we can be confident that our Founding Fathers understood the foundational value of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. But today, we are reminded of the lesson of Maryland’s early history and the story of Charles Carroll, because that value is under attack, and it will require our active vigilance to protect it — not just for ourselves, but for future generations.

Pope Benedict XVI recognized and highlighted this threat in his address to a group of Catholic bishops from the Mid-Atlantic region earlier this year.

The Pope spoke forcefully about the need to defend religious liberty in the United States:

“With her long tradition of respect for the right relationship between faith and reason,” he said, “the Church has a critical role to play in countering cultural currents, which ... seek to promote notions of freedom detached from moral truth.”

Pope Benedict went on to say that “the legitimate separation of church and state cannot be taken to mean that the Church must be silent on certain issues, nor that the state may choose not to engage or be engaged by the voices of committed believers in determining the values which will shape the future of the nation.”

HHS Mandate Litigation

That was on Jan. 19 of this year. On Jan. 20, as if on cue, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had no intention of changing the mandate it had proposed in August, which would force virtually all employers — even those with conscientious objections — to provide health coverage for contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. The mandate would be subject to an extremely narrow exception, one that covers houses of worship, but leaves out the manifold ministries of charity that flow directly from that worship.

This has now become the most critical religious-liberty challenge that we face in the United States today.

This is the first time that the federal government has compelled religious institutions to facilitate and fund a product contrary to their moral teaching.

Compounding the problem, the exemption has the federal government defining which religious institutions are “religious enough” to merit protection of their religious liberty.

For these reasons, a great number of Catholic dioceses, charities, universities and other Catholic institutions around the country found it necessary to file lawsuits this week against the federal government, challenging the mandate as a violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

It is unfortunate — even tragic — that Catholic institutions and other religious groups were forced by the federal government into this situation.

Part of the tragedy is how easily, and on how many different occasions, this conflict could have been avoided entirely. Despite the best efforts of our bishops’ conference, the executive and legislative branches have failed to head off the problem.

For example, back in 2010, before the health-care-reform law was even passed, Catholic bishops warned Congress about the need for clear conscience protection in the face of the new health-coverage mandates in the law.

Soon after the bill became law, the bishops’ conference supported the passage of the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, which offered a complete solution to the conscience problem, drawing on language used in federal statutes repeatedly since 1973.

Once the administration began hinting that the “preventive services” mandate would include things that Church institutions could not morally facilitate or fund, the conference staff began filing comments and appearing at hearings, as early as fall 2010. Once the regulations finally came out in August 2011, we filed more comments. When the decision was announced that those August regulations would not change, we protested again.

Despite these numerous opportunities to avoid the train wreck, on Feb. 10, HHS finalized the August regulations “without change,” closing the door on any chance of removing the offending items from the mandate or expanding the exemption.

All that remains is the so-called "accommodation,” which is constrained by the final rule that precedes it and which addresses itself to only a small part of the overall problem, and does so inadequately.

Catholic institutions have thus been forced to take action by litigation, a course no one desires, but a course that appears to be the only alternative left in order to seek relief from this unjust federal government mandate.

This is not about the Catholic Church wanting to force anybody to do anything; it is instead about the federal government forcing the Church — consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions — to act against Church teachings.

This is not a fight we want or asked for, but one forced upon us by government on its own timing.

This is not a Republican or Democratic, a conservative or liberal issue; it is an American issue.

The Church forms its positions based on principles — here, religious liberty for all and the life and dignity of every human person — not polls, personalities or political parties.

Strange Inversions

Now I’ve said what this litigation is not about. So what is it about?

For starters, it is about opposing an unwarranted government definition of religion. The mandate includes an extremely narrow definition of what HHS deems a “religious employer” deserving exemption — employers who, among other things, must hire and serve primarily those of their own faith.

This exemption attacks religious freedom by defining it away — by limiting protections essentially to houses of worship, the exemption reduces the freedom of religion to the freedom of worship. But more importantly, the purpose of the litigation is to block government coercion to act against conscience. Those deemed by HHS not to be “religious employers” will be forced by government to violate their own teachings within their very own institutions.

This is not only an injustice in itself, but it also undermines the effective proclamation of those teachings to the faithful and to the world.

I emphasize the fact of government coercion because it is one of the key differences between a mere dispute over reproductive health policy and a dispute over religious freedom. Those who would try to conceal that religious-freedom aspect have done all in their power to conceal the key fact that the Church is being forced by the government to violate its own beliefs. In a bizarre turn, those same advocates accuse the Church of somehow forcing its beliefs on others through the law, when the exact opposite is true.

To be sure, the mandate entails a breach in the separation of church and state, but it is an incursion by the state into the Church’s territory, not the other way around.

This is not the only strange inversion that we have seen in public discourse since the mandate.

In the name of protecting “choice,” the government is depriving the Church of its choice in how it runs its very own institutions. In the name of protecting a “diversity” of views within Catholic institutions, the government is imposing uniformity on employers, all but eliminating workplaces ordered according to Catholic values.

Worse still, these radical distortions seem to have some sway in our culture, when they should be laughed out of the court of public opinion.

This underscores the depth of the problem we face and points to the long-term remedy for it, which is teaching about religious freedom — the very value that brings us all here tonight.

Broader Problem

Put in other words, the HHS lawsuits, if successful, would only provide a band-aid solution to the greater problem of radical secularism that we face in this country.

Blessed Pope John Paul II discussed this problem almost two decades ago when he visited Baltimore and stated, “The challenge facing you, dear friends, is to increase people’s awareness of the importance for society of religious freedom; to defend that freedom against those who would take religion out of the public domain and establish secularism as America’s official faith.

"And it is vitally necessary, for the very survival of the American experience, to transmit to the next generation the precious legacy of religious freedom and the convictions which sustain it.”

So how do we pass on our great legacy of religious freedom to the next generation? As Americans, we must learn about the legacy of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

As people of faith, we must mine our own religious traditions on religious freedom and share the treasures we find — not only with our own communities, but with society at large.

And then we need to pray diligently as communities, as families and as individuals for religious liberty.

With this in mind, the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty has suggested that we celebrate a “Fortnight for Freedom” this summer, from June 21 to July 4. This is to be a special period of prayer in the two weeks leading up to the Fourth of July.

In the Catholic tradition, these two weeks include the feast days of members of the Church who were martyred by the state for their religious beliefs, beginning with St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher.

But regardless of your tradition, and what may otherwise fall within those two weeks, we invite you to join us in prayer and in a great national campaign of teaching and witness for religious liberty.

This may take as many forms as there are great religious traditions in our country and will itself serve as a sign of the religious diversity that flows from religious freedom and that makes our country great.

For example, we are encouraging all Catholic churches to ring their bells on July 4 at noon Eastern (9am Pacific). So we hope that other houses of worship with bells will join us in that special sign of solidarity and support for religious liberty — to “let freedom ring.”

But the possibilities are endless, including prayer services for religious liberty within your own tradition and ecumenical events to show the breadth of support for this foundational value — to name just two.

The key point is this: U.S. bishops and faithful Catholics in this country, numerous though we may be, cannot fight the tide of radical secularism alone. And so we ask you to help however you might help. Together we can achieve great things.

Conclusion

Although fighting the tide of secularism in general and current threats to religious liberty in particular can seem like a daunting task, we know that with God all things are possible; and we know that prayer is the ultimate source of our strength in this fight.

Thank you so much for this honor this evening. And thank you for seeing the urgency of defending religious liberty for all believers. Thanks for listening, and may God bless our nation!

Chaplain Barred from Celebrating Mass in South Carolina Jail

2012-05-25T14:07:00.002-04:00

From Catholic World News

A Catholic chaplain has been told that he cannot celebrate Mass in a South Carolina jail.

Msgr. Ed Lofton, who had been celebrating Mass at Charleston County jail for 15 years, was blocked from entering the facility because he was carrying altar wine. The jail’s policy bans all alcohol, and while state regulations in South Carolina make an exception for sacramental wine, Charleston County does not.

Msgr. Lofton reports that he bring a single ounce of wine to the jail, all of which he would consume himself. Prison officials told him that he must substitute grape juice. But a valid Mass cannot be celebrated without wine.

Additional sources for this story
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Ousted after demanding wine for Mass, jail chaplain claims rights were violated (Post and Courier)

Doctors Tell the Truth About ObamaCare

2012-05-25T04:33:00.000-04:00

The Democratic Party has produced a TV ad purporting to show Rep. Paul Ryan throwing grandma off a cliff for opposing ObamaCare. A couple of San Antonio doctors have responded with the following ad: