Happy Fourth

Jeff Jacoby:

Words to transform the world
America was the first nation self-consciously founded as the embodiment of an idea — the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and endowed by God with an “unalienable” right to life and liberty. In a world that had always connected nationhood and citizenship to blood, soil, and ethnicity, the democratic republic born in 1776 presented a prospect that was revolutionary in the profoundest sense imaginable — and Americans from the outset were certain that their model of self-government was destined to radiate outward, shaping the course of human events.

To Tocqueville, this was more than mere patriotic braggadocio. He could see that the world was ultimately going to be transformed by the enlightened doctrines of democratic liberty and individualism. But in America — remarkably — this great transformation had already “been effected with ease and simplicity.”

Keeping it is not turning out to be easy and simple. This is becoming a big struggle-- the struggle between people who believe in limited constitutional government and people who believe in unlimited government with little constitutional check-- as little as a "living" constitution allows, which is none, really.

For the first time in my life I am worried about the survival of our constitutional democratic government. We are governed by a crime syndicate that infests not only the White House and many seats in Congress, but reaches into countless crevices in our alphabet federal agencies. This syndicate collects massive data on each of us each day, and lies to us about it, openly and without consequence. It has shown no reluctance whatsoever to use unlawful and unconstitutional means to hold power and to corrupt democracy, when it suits their ends. It is maintained in power by what is essentially a state-run mainstream media and an immense labyrinth of crony capitalism for the collaborating rich and Obamaphones for the collaborating poor.

We are increasingly ruled by the elites and by people who are useful to the elites. The corrupt 2012 presidential election, in which at least one powerful arm of the federal government systematically attacked and supressed a large portion of the electorate, is a stark example.

Angelo Codevilla still has the best analysis of what is happening to us-- the struggle between the ruling class and the country class.

But America remains a very beautiful thing. These are still the best words (outside of the Bible) ever written:

“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.”

Our unalienable rights are from God, and are prior to government. Government cannot legitimately take away what it did not bestow.

 Just as relevant to our crisis today are Jefferson's words that follow:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...

We're getting closer to that.

Today let's celebrate our Declaration. But we must celebrate it for what it is. We must not forget, notwithstanding the eloquent prose, that it is a Declaration of war.

At least they've given up chanting about women's health

From Ed Morrissey:

Classy: Pro-abortion protesters drown out “Amazing Grace” with chants of “Hail Satan”

I admit I was skeptical of this story when it came across my e-mail yesterday evening. Generally speaking, stories that are either too good or too bad to be true aren’t. Even at the beginning of this short clip, it’s nearly impossible to make out what the pro-abortion protesters are yelling — at least until the camera swings around, and a young woman helpfully boosts the message. 

It’s been a very interesting day at the Texas State Capitol. Cahnman’s Musings hasn’t been following the hearing. Instead, we’ve been participating in the surrounding events. LetTexasSpeak has been doing a live broadcast from the rotunda where women have been sharing their abortion related testimonies. The pro-abortion crowd has responded with repeated chants of “hail Satan.” It’s taken us all day to get a video recording, but here it is … For the record: They’ve been doing this all day, this is just the first time we caught it on video.

It is hard to tell what the aborties are chanting in the background, but the young woman chants "Hail Satan", and it seems to be what at least some of them were saying.

Honesty does count for something.  

Wow

This looks like a movement even the IRS is gonna have trouble suppressing.

From Doug Ross:

15 Photos From the Tahrir Square Protests You'll Never See In Legacy Media. #Egypt #Morsi #Obama

Curiously, a massive wave of anti-Obama sentiment in Egypt has been utterly ignored by vintage media, even though the protests may be the largest in all of human history.

\

Wendy Davis is outraged...

... that politicians are using abortion politics to make a name for themselves:

Overnight Star Wendy Davis Condemns Politicians Using Abortion Issue 'To Boost Their Own Political Aspirations':

WENDY DAVIS: "You know, I think really what's happening here... is politicians are using this issue to boost their own political aspirations, their own political aspirations, their own political ambitions . . ."

:-/


It'd be funny, if it weren't so sick.

This is why so many newspapers are called "The Mirror"

Kevin Willaimson has a remarkable essay about the Gosnell abortion-murders, and the press cover-up.

No Job Too Small 

A blind spot in the media's all-seeing eye.

Excerpt:

... There is no context in which the grisly serial murders of a still-uncalculated number of newborns is not news. The horrific case of Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia has been the subject of something very closely resembling an intentional media blackout by a great deal of the major media. When Washington Post writer Sarah Kliff was pressed on her refusal to acknowledge the story, she sniffed that she covers “policy, not local crime.” To which National Review’s Robert VerBruggen replied: “Similarly, national gun-policy people do not cover local crime in places like Aurora or Newtown.” Strange that we all know about such local-yokel crime stories as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which the relatively modest number of seven mobsters lost their lives. 

Our country is trying very hard not to think about abortion — about the physical reality of abortion. Earlier this year, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld a ban on the use of what critics insist on calling “graphic images” — but what is in fact simple photography — in abortion protests. Similar attempts to suppress free speech on the subject of abortion crop up regularly. Abortion is a strange issue in that it is the allegedly secular and materialist side of the debate that finds itself taking refuge in metaphysics, in this case the fiction of “personhood” that suddenly descends upon a human being at some point. The other side, thought to be populated mostly by religious cranks, is content to address the physical reality of abortion, the facts that cannot be denied but may be ignored. 

The Gosnell case is shocking, but only because it makes visible and explicit what had been hidden and implicit. Every abortion is a shocking act of grisly violence — against the baby, who is murdered, and against the mother, whose body is converted into a crime scene. Taking some account of the moral reckoning of what our country has been up to for the past 40 years is a task of great scope and complexity. It is a job that is too big for the mass media. But willfully ignoring the story is a job that is not too big for them, even though doing so reveals our mighty newspapers and television networks to be smaller than we had thought. If this is what American newspapers have to offer, then they do not deserve to survive, and they will not. But the culpability is not theirs alone: There is a reason that there are many newspapers called The Mirror.

The Gosnell cover-up, and the horrendous crimes and legal acts against children that the media covers up, isn't merely an indictment of the mainstream media. We watch and read what these people spew. The American public keeps these frauds employed. We provide their advertising revenue. These hacks and anchors and executives make tens and tens of millions of dollars, their fraudulent "journalistic" corporations make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, happily paid by us. 

A substantial portion of the American public doesn't want to know about abortions and infanticide, or countless other crimes like Constitutional outrages against freedom of speech and religion and against the right to keep and bear arms and against the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, or massive debts that will impoverish our children and that will never be repaid, or gross foreign policy incompetence that borders on treason, committed by our secular elites. 

Most Americans are not "victims" of our dishonest journalists. They are complicit. As Williamson wryly notes, that's why so many of our newspapers are called "The Mirror". 

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day to Crus and to all of our friends in Canada! It's a wonderful day to celebrate a great nation and good people.

We Americans are blessed to have such good neighbors.

The Washington Post on abortion restriction's "formidible" foe

WaPo editorial on Senator Wendy Davis fillibuster of a Texas bill protecting children in the third trimester, with my commentary:

Wendy Davis is a formidible foe of abortion restrictions

By Editorial Board, Published: June 28

IN A moment made for Twitter, Texas Sen. Wendy Davis stood for more than 13 hours and filibustered an abortion-restricting bill into the wee hours of Tuesday night. Ms. Davis’s physical feat and her remarkable personal story captured the country’s attention — but her victory looks shaky. The state legislature is convening for another special session Monday at which the bill — which restricts abortion by creating unnecessary regulations — is expected to be reintroduced.

The bill didn't come to a vote because of Davis' filibuster and because of an abortion mob who disrupted the legislature until the session closed.

The legislation Ms. Davis is fighting resembles abortion-restricting bills that other state legislatures (including Virginia’s) have enacted. In addition to banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, the Texas bill would require abortion clinics to meet the same standards as surgery centers, like those in hospital wings.

Surgery centers are not "hospital wings". Surgery centers are free-standing buildings in which many types of less-than-major surgery are performed. They are meant for same-day surgery procedures.

All states regulate surgery centers. The regulations are quite specific, including building layout, equipment and personnel that must be up to standards for patient safety. Even my outpatient center, where we see patients but don't do surgery, is heavily regulated. There are hundreds of standards we must meet.

Doctors who perform abortions would have to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, which may require them to live near one and/or meet a quota of hospital admissions per year. 

Obviously doctors who perform abortions should have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Sometimes things go wrong, or patients become ill, and a doctor who performs the abortion needs to have privileges at a nearby hospital so he/she may participate in the patient's care.

The case that such standards are needed to protect the health of abortion patients, as the Republican sponsors of the legislation claim, is weak.

The case is strong. I wouldn't consider doing any outpatient surgical procedure if I didn't have the ability to admit the patient to a nearby hospital and provide care in case something went wrong. If I do a procedure, and there is a complication, I would not abandon my patient.

The real point is to force most abortion clinics out of business.

If adhering to basic standards of public health and medical ethics is too onerous for an abortion clinic, it should go out of business.

Doctors have responsibilities to patients that exceed those of business transactions.

The proposed Texas requirements would be so costly to meet as to cause the closure of all but a handful of clinics.

Abortion clinics are extraordinarily lucrative. George Tiller performed 60,000 abortions in his "career". Fees run from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, depending on the age of the child. Assuming an average of $1000 per baby, Tiller made $60,000,000 in his 30-year career. That's $2,000,000 per abortionist per year. Overhead is very low compared to most outpatient surgical centers.

Compliance with basic health and safety regulations is unlikely to drive abortion mills out of business.

I wish it would.

They offer no real safety protections to women seeking abortions, and they would cost women access to important health-care services such as contraceptive care, cancer screenings and other routine tests. 

Obviously health and safety regulations provide "safety protections" to women. That's the whole point. It's unclear who the WaPo editors would claim that meeting basic health and safety requirements would interfere with contraception, cancer screenings, etc. Health and safety regulations are in fact a part of the process of providing cancer screening, providing basic checkups, etc.

Gosnell's clinic is what happens when abortionists are not held to standard health and safety practices.

Unfortunately, Texas is not an outlier but part of a pack of states imposing suchspurious regulations. Bills containing expensive facility requirements have been passed in Alabama, Virginia, Indiana, Michigan, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Utah. Bills requiring hospital admitting privileges were passed in Alabama, North Dakota, Mississippi and Tennessee; similar legislation is expected in Ohio and Wisconsin.

Good!

In all these states, women who are unable to access services other than abortion that these clinics offer, and in some cases safe abortions, find themselves in circumstances in which their health is at risk — the very problem these laws claim to minimize. 

The solution to providing health care to the poor is not to lower the standards for health care to the poor.

Again, Gosnell.

In Virginia, the final version of regulations issued by the Virginia Board of Health pursuant to a 2011 law requires abortion clinics to have public hallways at least 5 feet wide procedure rooms at least 120 or 150 square feet and heating and ventilation systems that meet certain specifications.

Hallways and operating rooms have to be wide enough to allow resuscitation equipment and personal to enter and work if there is an emergency. Try getting a stretcher and resuscitation equipment and personnel down a three-fool wide hallway into a tiny room in which a woman who is bleeding to death from a botched abortion.

There are reasons for the rules.

The expense of meeting those requirements is prohibitive, a fact illustrated when Norfolk’s Hillcrest Clinic closed in April because it was unable to pay some $500,000 in renovation and other compliance costs. 

If two abortionists are employed at Hillcrest Clinic, the net income to the practice is $4,000,000 dollars per year. $500,000 was necessary to make the clinic safe for women. You decide is that is onerous.

Admittedly, the closed clinic is now safer for all involved.

Today, abortion is a constitutional right.

All "constitutional rights", even fake ones, have limits. Routine health and safety regulations are obviously reasonable, even necessary, limits. If you don't understand, google "Gosnell".

Until that no longer is the case, it is deceitful for lawmakers to circumvent the rule of law with unjustified provisions.

"Circumvent the law?" Lawmakers were passing a law, requiring abortion mills to meet basic health and safety standards.

On the other hand, filibustering to prevent legislators from voting is close to circumventing the law, and disrupting the voting process by assembling a mob in the gallery to shout down the process is most certainly violating the law.

No doubt Ms. Davis will make that point when the debate resumes in Austin; sadly, the odds that her fortitude and common sense will prevail again don’t look good.

Thank God her chances for success don't look good.

On reflection, two things come to mind.

First, the Washington Post is correct when they observe that Davis is a formidable foe of abortion restrictions. Her brand of hateful abortion-mongering is a real problem in our country, and poses a deadly threat to the lives of millions of innocent children and to the health of millions of women. How people like Davis can demand the "right" to kill third trimester babies, without restriction and without minimal health and safety standards for the mothers, is beyond comprehension. That they do this in the wake of the Gosnell atrocities is beyond shame. This stuff is deep evil.

Second, America's elite newspapers ought to spell-check their editorials. It's a formidable help. One can't help but wonder if the fellow who posted the WaPo editorial may have been less than enamored of this hateful editorial, and provyded his own commentairy, wryly.