A diabetic with learning disabilities, raised by a single mother in a South Bronx neighborhood, rose to the top of elite Ivy League universities.

Lawyer Sotomayor was then given the power to prosecute criminal defendants and, for the past 17 years has wielded the gavel of a trial court judge before judging trial court judges from the second highest court in the land; apparently, if one believes the man that now would elevate Judge Sotomayor to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, all in a callous land devoid of justice:

This woman is brilliant, she is qualified, I want her confirmed, I want her walking up those marble steps and starting to provide some justice.

Starting to provide some justice?

Sotomayor overcame all those odds despite the fact that justice remained in the starting blocks. But wait, DeVine Gamecock Law (pictured) in this fourth installment of our Sotomayor examination, three other factors may explain this late 20th and early 21st Century Alger Hiss story.

Did I mention that Judge Sotomayor is female and Puerto Rican? Did I mention that over 75% of the population of the unjust nation in which she was raised is Caucasion and that the legal profession in which she has achieved prominence has been dominated by white men?

Clearly, the gender and racial superiority combination of a Latina explains her better decisions that has her 51 Senate consent votes away from finally starting to provide some justice in America. Sotomayor admitted her advantage in 2001:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Too bad we can’t all raise our children to be Latinas, but how then do we explain the achievements of non-Latinas, especially the big non-Latina kahuna, Kenyan-Caucasian presently occupying the White House who seeks a Justice with empathy for superior Hispanic women? Can one achieve Latina-like superiority by empathizing with La Raza or many of the other race-based organizations with which Sonia has been obsessed most of her adult life? Has Obama’s dreams of his Marxist Kenyan father or Audacity of Reverend Wright’s hate-KKK America hope sufficed to elevate the President’s empathy and competence.

Rewinding the “start” of Obama-Sotomayor justice

One wonders what Latina tricked the exclusive white male electorate to outlaw slavery and demand equal protection of the laws by super-majorities in Congress and the states with the passage of the Civil War Amendments?

Was Chief Justice Earl Warren’s clerk a Hispanic woman who hypnotized her boss and eight other white men to end de jure racial discrimination across the fruited plain? Was Thurgood Marshall no good at starting justice?

Had justice not started in 1865, nor even by 1954? How about the overwhelming Republican white male and overall white male votes for the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts?

Where those respective acts, unjust? Was it a nation lacking in empathy that welcomed Barry Obama’s African dad or that affirmatively provided him with an education with the nation’s elite?

Given the Latina supremacist views of Sotomayor, one wonders if she agrees that justice hadn’t started when African-American crowds cheered Orenthal James Simpson’s acquittal from murder charges in the wrongful deaths of two white people, even if one of them was a woman (one half of the secret formula for superiority after all, but I digress…).

Would the start of justice provision upon ascending marble steps mean reversing her own decision to deny white males and one chromosome-lacking Hispanic male, merit-based promotions based on their race?

How would Latina-Wonder Woman start justice for the ACORN-gun-wielding voter intimidation thugs that Obama’s political appointees at the Justice Department exonerated over the objections of career (read non-empathetic white males?) un-Justice Department lawyers?

If only Miguel Estrada had been Margarita he could have out-smarted pasty white male Patrick Leahy and started providing justice several years ago…

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

For political reasons, I would not favor a Republican Party filibuster of the President’s first nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. But her record as an appeals court judge and publicly enunciated judicial philosophy do render her unfit to serve even as a traffic court magistrate.

Unfortunately, thanks in large part to past feckless GOP judicial nomination strategies, not only were previous unqualified nominees not filibustered; to the contrary, Republican Judiciary Committee leaders later boasted of the large number of their caucus that voted to approve their nominations.

To paraphrase Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the architect of the failed strategy as applied to Justices Breyer and Ginsburg: “After all, President Clinton was elected by the American people and elections have consequences.”

DeVine Law is confident that, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), also elected by American people, will un-Hatch that strategy; better exercise the advice portion of the Advise and Consent Clause; and lead a full scale attack against the dominant but weakened judicial philosophy favored by liberals for decades that essentially requires its adherents to violate their Oath to uphold the Constitution.

During the nomination proceedings for Justice Samuel Alito four years ago when the Democrats threatened to filibuster President George W. Bush’s nominee, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) admitted that judicial philosophy was the paramount issue, which any person paying attention should have known since at least the 1987 nomination brawl that sunk the nomination of Robert Bork.

Yet, despite that, and the later Borking of Justice Clarence Thomas, liberal Democrat Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne reminds:

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., warned during the Alito confirmation that if Democrats used ideology as a measuring stick with Bush nominees, it was inevitable that Republicans would apply the same standard to the appointee of a Democratic president.

“I say to my Democratic friends, think carefully about what is being done today,” Kyl warned in 2006.

“Its impact will be felt well beyond this particular nominee.”

Truly an astounding admission of the consequence of the previous fictions participated in by both parties, but taken advantage of only by the Democrats, in which the discussion of “qualifications” discussed everything but the most important ones.

Let us be clear, there is no history of the Republican Party ever conducting smear campaigns against the nominees of Democrat Presidents. None. And the lesson of Democratic Party “borking” is not that we start now with Judge Sonia Sotomayor. No.

Rather, the lesson that should have been learned in 1987, but really prior to that given the usurpation by the courts of the power to make law since the 1960s by banning voluntary prayer in schools and 1970s discovery of a right to abortion, is that the preferred liberal Democrat judicial philosophy is anathema to Liberty and self-government in a federal republic.

Presidents Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln considered the employment of the philosophy (now enunciated by the majority of lawyers and judges in America for the past 40+ years, including Sotomayor) to be grounds for impeachment. But thanks to the Hatch-Kyl past, the GOP can’t even claim it as an “extra-ordinary” circumstance that the Gang of 14 determined to be the only grounds for a judicial filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.

(*Full discussion of the issues regarding judicial filibusters and the so-called nuclear option raised in 2005 below)

Past debates have granted Democratic Presidents the kind of broad deference that should only be offered in the case of political appointments, but not lifetime appointments to the Third Branch of government. Republicans droned on about the “intelligence”, “temperment”, “character” and “experience” of the nominees, which usually were satisfied if they attended an Ivy League School; hadn’t been convicted of assaulting another lawyer; hadn’t been discovered with a dead girl or a live boy; and were given a satisfactory rating by the ABA.

Those days have changed, and our liberal friend Dionne joins us in welcoming the change:

To pretend that these judicial fights are about anything other than the court’s philosophical direction is a form of willful dishonesty. It’s better to be straightforward about the existence of a political struggle over the court…

President Obama has bemoaned the fatal flaws of the U.S. Constitution as merely a recitation of “negative right: that fails to grant positive rights to the government. He longed for us to “break free” of such constraints. Judge Sotomayor, who has publicly expressed her belief in Latina racial and gender supremacy, was recently chastised by a fellow Clinton appointee for her flippant silence on the Constitutional prohibition against denials of equal protection to the White Race in a judicial decision presently on appeal to the Court she desires to join. The Latina member of La Raza (The Race) also has publicly described the job of a judge to “make policy.”

Sotomayor is not solo in the above beliefs, but she is unique in having stated those mostly ordinary Leftist beliefs publicly. Such beliefs are usually kept quiet since the main reason for them is that they usually can’t get their policy preferences approved by We the People and their elected representatives. So, even if she can be defeated in her nomination quest, no doubt any future nominees from this President will be just as liberal.

But, all conservatives must vote against her. In fact, the vote on her nomination will, in many ways, determine who the real conservatives are.

Policy is prescribed to be made by the executive and legislative branches of government. Judges have a limited but vital role to interpret/apply the law as it is given them. But it is easy to pretend to do that with language in an opinion. It has always been a great temptation for judges to do this, and we have always had judges that could not resist. Dred Scott and Plessy come to mind.

Chief Justice John Roberts famously compared the role of a judge to that of an umpire in the game of baseball that the current New York nominee is said to have saved. The qualifications to be an umpire are also quite similar to that of a judge, for in that position one can also fall to the temptation to determine the outcome, and given Sotomayor’s Obama-like desire to empathize with her favored groups, we are certain the Red Sox wouldn’t stand a chance against the Yankees with her behind the plate.

Umpires have be able to see. Judges have to be able to read and comprehend the English language. Contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. Constitution was not written for lawyers to cloud in mystery with phalanzes of vague rhetoric. It was written in mostly plain and unambiguous language.

Umpires have to have character so that they resist the temptation to use their position to favor or punish any team or player based on ulterior motives. Lady Justice is supposed to blind, i.e. impartial to the race, gender or station in life occupied by the litigants.

Finally, umpires have to have the courage to call a third strike on A-Rod in the bottom of the Ninth of Game Seven of the World Series in the Bronx knowing that it will result in the Atlanta Braves winning the series!

Sonia may have saved America’s National Pastime but if her judicial philosophy were to again hold sway on American’s highest court, someone will be required to save America.

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

*Response to a question from “Cold Warrior”: [Is] a simple majority in the Senate [is] all that is needed for confirmation of a Supreme Court justice[?]

DeVine says:

Well, that depends. The Constitution does not require that, and in fact, it does not even require that the Senate give a nominee a roll call vote on the floor or that they do anything. That is why I opposed the nuclear option which some sought to invoke to shut down a Democrat filibuster of judicial nominees under Bush. The point of that option was to have the parliamentarian rule a filibuster out of order, despite the rules of the senate allowing same, to claim that the Advise and Consent clause and other provisions of the Constitution requiring super-majorities, require that nominees not be filibustered.

The A&C clause does not require the senate to do anything, much less vote, or much less that any vote only be by majority. The Senate may reject a nominee by inaction. (The President can make vacancy appointments for one year) The Constitution allows the senate to make its own rules and under the rules adopted in January, judicial nominations are not excluded from filibusters. (Budget reconciliations are)

So, the only real conflict that could arise is if the GOP tried to filibuster and the Democrats tried the nuke option.]

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

President Obama has made his choice and, as DeVine Law suggested upon Justice Souter’s announced retirement, he appears to have made a bold leftist ideological choice as well as a “twofer” Democratic Party political choice, with a female and a Hispanic in Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

We have suggested that the President had no reason to choose anything but a liberal activist ideological soulmate given his current popularity that is probably at its peak and with 59-60 votes in the Senate that must advise and consent for Sotomayor be confirmed, and so, we are not surprised that he passed over the much more moderate African-American Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears, a proponent of judicial restraint.

But DeVine Law is sure that the Republican ranking member on the Senate Judiciary committee, Jeff Sessions will rightly ignore the nominee’s gender, race and other extraneous information regularly focused on by Democrats and, rather, concentrate the opposition’s inquiry into the most relevant matter of her judicial philosophy.

As Sessions has said, it should not matter what a judge’s political policy preferences are so long as they understand their proper constitutional role is to apply the law that We the People thru Constitutions and statutes have already enacted after free speech policy debates, elections and votes.

But as we know, many liberals (like Republican appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy and the retiring Souter) but especially Democrats, prefer a “living Consitution” that let’s judges apply “evolving standards of decency” and “empathy”:

Obama had said publicly he wanted a justice who combined intellect and empathy—the ability to understand the troubles of everyday Americans.

Democrats hold a large majority in the Senate, and barring the unexpected, Sotomayor’s confirmation should be assured.

If approved, she would join Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman on the current court.

Sotomayor is a self-described “Newyorkrican” who grew up in a Bronx housing project after her parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico. She has dealt with diabetes since age 8 and lost her father at age 9, growing up under the care of her mother in humble surroundings. As a girl, inspired by the Perry Mason television show, she knew she wanted to be a judge.

A graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, a former prosecutor and private attorney, Sotomayor became a federal judge for the Southern District of New York in 1992.

As a judge, she has a bipartisan pedigree. She was first appointed by a Republican, President George H.W. Bush, then named an appeals judge by President Bill Clinton in 1997.

We congratulate Judge Sotomayor of her excellent role model in Lawyer Mason. DeVine Law was also inspired by Della Street’s boss and also sought to make sure justice was achieved for minorities and lower income litigants in his trial law career.

In fact, DeVine Law recognizes the role of “empathy” in lawyers, voters, legislators and, in limited degrees, in trial judges. But for the life of me, I can’t think of how it should be a major factor in an appellate court judge that is upholding their Oath to uphold Constitutions.

Even at the trial level, Justice is supposed to be blind. Procedures are to applied uniformly no matter the race of the plaintiff. Substantive law is to applied verbatim no mater the gender of the defendant. That one party in a case or controversy is wealthy and another is poor should make no difference in applying the law to the facts.

I would say that understanding the limitations of intellect, education and circumstance could matter in situations where one must determine the “reasonable” expectations in a tort case or certainly in a case where a litigant chooses to represent themself without a lawyer. And, when it comes to sentencing in criminal cases where Judges are given discretion, certainly empathy is allowed.

But generally, the matter of empathy has already been properly and legally applied by the people and their representative in the formation of the laws passed by the legislature.

It is the duty of a judge to faithfully interpret and apply the law as it is given to her.

I believe that no one should be confirmed to a lifetime appointment to the Third Branch of Government if they cannot uphold the Oath they take, and anyone that would apply a “living Constitution” would be violating that Oath. I favor impeachment for such applications (as did Presidents Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln), but alas, we haven’t the votes.

Nor do we have the votes to defeat such a liberal activist nominee given the numbers in the Senate, but it is vital that Republicans and conservatives (and we could very well persuade a few Democrats) educate the public on the matter of judicial philosophy during this confirmation process and, if it turns out the Judge Sotomayor sees a living constitution, that we vote en masse against the nominee on principle and to establish our bone fides for future political and legal battles.

We must not follow the old strategy of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and later brag that we voted for liberal nominees since “elections have consequences” and the nominee could put together a sentence and had no criminal record.

Yes, Presidents get elected, but so do Senators, and the Oath is what matters. Uphold it, and reject any nominee that would not.

[This will be the first in a series of DeVine Law columns addressing President Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court.]

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

America may never be able to re-pay the national debt to foreign bondholders that the ObamaDems’ stimulus and budget bills promise to incur and certainly we will never be able to re-pay the ultimate sacrifices so many Americans have made that we honor on this and every Memorial Day.

So, is it too much to as that our Commander-in-Chief at least not make it more likely that the latter debt in blood be increased exponentially while he surrenders what that memorialized blood bought?

The United States last paid off the national debt in 1835 at the insistence of President Andrew Jackson, whose victory as General of US forces in 1815 at New Orleans secured the revolution against taxation without representation and other evils made possible for non-self government, launched 39 years earlier and for which thousands died.

Yet, surely the fallen didn’t die for self-government that would find representatives like Senator Barack Obama voting to grant the Treasury unfettered power to squander $750 billion last September and a President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi tripling the national debt built up during the past 194 years in the next ten.

Surely those that fell for to secure Texas and the Southwest for the manifest destiny of a Fruited Plain from sea to shining sea in the 19th Century didn’t die so that ObamaDems could populate labor unions through an illegal invasion by the ancestors of those from whom they secured the Lower Forty-Eight in the 21st.

Surely those that fell to secure Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness didn’t die for a cap on such pursuits at $250K; liberty restricted by one man’s whim to hold back pitchforks; and life not even secure for born alive infants whose deaths are the object of conspiracies between expectant, yet reluctant mothers and the graduates of medical schools.

Surely those that died to defeat fascism under the leadership of Democrats FDR and HST in WWII didn’t fall so that a future President from the World’s Oldest Party would aid and abet the rise of totalitarians promising to provide a more complete Holocaust without the defenders of liberty firing a shot.

Surely those that died in the efforts that led to the capture of those whose squealings saved Los Angeles after 911, without harming one hair on the heads of prominent perpetrators of 911, didn’t fall so that those that defined interrogations down could be disbarred.

The fallen did die, though, for freedom of speech, even speech as vile as what periodically spews from prominent ObamaDem Dick Durbin who famously compared American armed forces heroes as akin to Nazis, who belched more slander yesterday:

MR. GREGORY: Senator Durbin, the vice president’s–former vice president’s daughter, Liz Cheney, said that President Obama has a September 10th mentality in his fight against terrorists.

SEN. DURBIN: Let me say–if you, if you step back and take a look at history for a moment, you will find the message we just heard from Mr. Gingrich, from Vice President Cheney and Mr. Rush Limbaugh to be the same, it’s a message of fear: “Be afraid, be very afraid.” And to say that this president is not doing everything in his power to keep America safe is just as irresponsible as anything I’ve ever heard said on your program.

Yes, Senator Durbin, let’s talk about fear, but first, let’s hear more of your slander against those that have kept more innocent Americans from being killed since 911 no thanks to you and Obama:

SEN. DURBIN: First, let me tell you that America cowering in fear is not going to be a strong nation. I disagree with Mr. Gingrich. We can understand the threat, we can deal with it rationally, we can be strong and we will be safe with President Obama. But this notion that fear is going to guide us is what brought us to the notion of weapons of mass destruction and this war in Iraq and all that it has cost us. You know, Vice President Cheney said the other day without hesitation, “I’d do everything all over again.” He hasn’t learned any lesson from history.

Now, as far as President Obama’s approach at the National Archives, he made it clear and he was open to the American people, and this is what he said: there will be military commissions, but these are going to be commissions that are going to follow our constitutional values. We’re going to basically say that we’re not going to have hearsay that has to be rebutted by a defendant. We’re going to allow for the right of counsel. We’re going to have the basic approaches under the law that the Supreme Court is going to demand this.

MR. GREGORY: But do you, do you see that correlation between President Bush’s approach and President Obama?

SEN. DURBIN: I would say they’ll both have military commissions, and we’ve had them back to the time of George Washington. But the approach of President Obama is one that is closer to our Constitution and our rule of law. And just consider this, in seven years in Guantanamo there were exactly three who were convicted by military commissions, and those were thrown out by the Supreme Court. The–President Obama has learned from that lesson of history. He’s going to make sure that any military commission, military tribunal in the future is one that can be sustained by the courts.

Before Hitler invaded Poland and Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, President Franklin Roosevelt declared that the only thing we had to fear economically, was fear itself. But apparently, according to ObamaDems, FDR was “cowering in fear” when he tried and executed German spies via military commissions. Apparently what ObamaDems fear more than the killing of innocent Americans is offending terrorists and giving them “recruiting tools” via nose swabbings.

Durbin and Obama want to return to the 1990s strategy that saw America repeatedly attacked before any nose swabbings at Gitmo. One could forgive the failure to “get it” before 911, but after 911 one must conclude that many ObamaDems will never get it, given their lack of fear of big holes in LA.

Apparently the status quo in the 90s was acceptable to ObamaDems whose only fear today is that we offend the already offended.

History suggests that such weakness invites aggression that ensures the number we will mourn on future last Mondays in May will increase exponentially.

The fallen didn’t die for this.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

Not one elected republican in D.C. has called for Speaker Pelosi to step down.

Not one.

Un-elected Newt initially called for her to resign but now only calls for an “inquiry.”

Not one elected Republican has recognized that the Dem refusal to fund the “closing” of Gitmo and their opposition to transferring Gitmo detainees to facilities in the Lower Forty-Eight justifies the Bush position that they all (but Lieberman) opposed for seven years.

Not one.

But we are supposed to eschew Reagan?

Ironically, given the Supreme Court rulings, there is no legal difference between Gitmo and St. Louis, but the GOP is letting the Dems pretend to be “tough” on protecting the American people via their silence on how the Dems and Obama said that Gitmo made us more un-safe for the past 6 years due to Gitmo.

Not one elected Republican is willing to take on President Barack Obama, whose actions on numerous war power policies affirm the wisdom of Bush and repudiate his own policies and those of the democrats over the past 7 years.

Not one.

The spineless Republicans must be lead!

By us.

They are pathetic.

The United States of America is under siege my brothers, and the only chance it has resides in us!

Us? Non-elected conservative patriots.

For God sakes, don’t dare count on elected Republicans serving in D.C.

Call them out! SHAME them!

That is our only hope.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

Is the debate over Congressional approval for funds to close Gitmo merely a cover for a President that doesn’t want to keep another far left war power campaign promise?

Funds in the current defense budget provide for the operation of the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Detainees at Gitmo have been shuttled back and forth from there to the United States and back during the Bush Administration and Obama can do the same. See pictured the U.S. Naval Brig at Charleston, S.C. where a number of Gitmo detainees have been transferred and continue to be housed.

No current law prevents President Barack Obama from transferring some or all of the prisoners at Gitmo to Naval Brigs or other secure locations within the United States any time the Commander-in-Chief decides.

One does not need funds to “close Gitmo” to transfer the prisoners. Gitmo was a naval base funded by the Defense budget before 911 and will be after the temporary detention facility ceases to operate.

And since when did ceasing to operate cost a dime? Operating is what costs! Ceasing to operate saves money!

President Obama can keep his promise to close the prison at Gitmo by January 2010 without any new act of Congress or any new authorization of funds.

If he has the courage and the will.

And quite frankly, given Supreme Court rulings, the detainees will gain no new civil rights in Kansas that they don’t already have in Cuba. The court has ruled that the length of the 99-year lease from Castro makes it US soil for the purpose of the application of the US Constitution, as distinguished from detention facilities for prisoners of war on the soil of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The court has ruled and Holder has confirmed that the Obama Administration agrees with the holding that POWs may be held indefinitely until the war is over, so that the only way any Gitmo detainee gets an “OJ” trial in civil court is if President Obama chooses to give them one.

So what’s the big whup? Is Obama hiding behind Pelosi’s skirts due to the Dems new found spines on a matter that is a distinction without a difference? The ONLY difference between Gitmo and Leavenworth, is the proximity of an escaped prisoner to Americans available to kill.

But does anyone really fear escape? I don’t.

What I do fear is that the GOP is again letting appeasing Dems off the hook by letting them look tough on a silly issue.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed

I have been in love with newspapers all my life.

I couldn’t wait to awaken each morning as a child so I could peruse the Major League Baseball box scores in excruciating detail in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. Fell in love with with the comics from Andy Capp through the Wizard of Id. Later came to love Lewis Grizzard and James Kilpatrick on the op-ed page. In college, I actually paid for an expensive mail subscription for the Charlotte Observer.

Upon moving to Atlanta in 2000 and discovering the Internet’s Drudge Report and the power to read and and all of the great columnists, I used to joke that had the internet existed during my childhood, I may never have left the house given my desire to know everything. I would have never played sports and probably would have died of obesity before high school.

But I continue to love a newspaper that one can make notes on and highlight and that enables me to never have to waste my time watching television commercials during local TV news broadcasts. I love a newspaper that you can read while lying on the couch with a sporting event on the TV. And finally, I love a newspaper because, unlike a website, you know when you are through!

But my love for the newspaper is tempered by the fact of the betrayal of the American public by the vast majority journalists in print and broadcast for so long. Maybe it began with Walter Cronkite’s lie that the U.S. military lost the Tet offensive and Vietnam War. Or maybe it began earlier with a New York Times above the fold fit to be print “news” of the same myth. Or maybe it began years earlier in editorial meetings of the NYT or CBS News when they decided that certain news wasn’t fit to print because the “that’s the way it is” that Walter wants wasn’t supported by inconvenient facts.

Which brings us to a plea from the Dragon Lady recently outed from behind the pay for play editorial page website wall at the Grey Lady, begging Congress or President Obama to bail them out from anemic sales born of their betrayals writ large. It seems people weren’t willing to pay extra for Dowd, Rich and Friedman psalms to Obama.

Appropriately titled “Put Aside Logic” on the subject of a desire for Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of government ownership to come true 25 years late, Maureen Dowd plays a paleface redheaded Uhura from Star Trek to try and woo her Big-Eared would be Savior:

Once, during his campaign trip to Europe, Mr. Obama told me that he had briefly sold subscriptions to The New York Times when he was at Columbia University to help pay for school, but confessed he wasn’t very good at it.

I said that if he won the presidency, he’d be pretty busy, but that maybe he could find time to sell a few more subscriptions. It would really help us out in the current business crunch.

He gave me that wry Spock look.

In the “Star Trek” prequel, Spock’s father tells him, “You will always be a child of two worlds,” urging him not to keep such a tight vise on his emotions. And Spandexy Old Spock, known as Spock Prime, tells his younger self: “Put aside logic. Do what feels right.”

Mr. Obama is also a control freak who learned to temper, if not purge, all emotion. But as a young man of mixed blood, he was more adept than Young Spock at learning to adjust his two sides to charm both worlds, and to balance his cerebral air with his talent for evoking intense emotion.

I guess Dowd forgot that candidate Obama failed to control his emotions early in the campaign when he sought her out to demand she quit making fun of his “Dumbo” ears in her NYT columns as he was very sensitive about them since being made fun of as a child. We can only hope that the real bad guys make fun of them soon so that the odds increase we would have a Commander-in-Chief determined to defeat real enemies of this country, but I digress.

The real story here is that One can’t imagine what more the President could do to sell the Times than what he is doing now. After all, what is the NYT if not dictation for their dream far left liberal President? In fact, other than actual government ownership, haven’t we already been living in a kind of “1984″ already for 40+ years with a news media mere drive-by sycophants for the Left which has held political power in Washington for most all of that time, especially in Congress and the bureaucracy?

What would be the practical difference if Obama rather than Pinch actually owns 50% plus one percent of the NYT common stock? Dowd tells us:

Newspapers do a praiseworthy job of trying to keep the dark side at bay, by shining sun on it. But society may not consider us obligatory, as we’re finding out.

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”

Senator Kerry’s hearing tried to determine, in a metaphor that was whipped to death, whether there was any way to shut the barn door now that the ink-stained horse has gotten out into the virtual pasture (making readers pay for content now that they’ve gotten used to getting it free online).

Did newspapers do a praiseworthy job of shining the light on Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers and State Senator Obama?

Not close. In fact, when it comes to liberals and Democrats, once the press knows they favor abortion rights, higher taxes and worship Gaia’ they turn into the most incurious group of Know Nothings since Sergeant Shultz on Hogan’s Heroes.

Before Speaker Pelosi forgot that Obama now ran the CIA and rolled out the Bushlied Era rhetoric against the intelligence community while calling for Truth Commissions to prosecute lawyers for writing opinions, she advocated a bill to grant targeted tax breaks to newspapers and change anti-trust laws, primarily to save her hometown rag.

Americans could soon be on the hook to pay a reduced Chrysler to build cars no one will buy. Should we be surprised if we are also required to subsidize newspapers no one reads?

Actually, I will read them, but that is because of the box scores and Ziggy, and that Rush taught me how to interpret them. Plus, if you go to the last three paragraphs of stories on page A17, you will find some useful facts.

Seriously though, there is no doubt a large technology component to the fall in newspaper sales, but then again, one sees sharp drops in all of liberal broadcast and cable tv media as well juxtaposed against the massive ratings of the more conservative Fox News. Maybe people would rather not get dictation directly from the White House via their newspaper. Just saying.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Foghorn Leghorn required to correct Time magazine’s vision of the “facts on the [Middle East] ground”

Newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington today for a hurriedly scheduled emergency meeting with the most pro-Palestinian U.S. President in 29 years. President Carter was reportedly disappointed with his pinnacle achievement Camp David accords because they “only” reconciled Israel with Egypt and did not require the Zionist state to emasculate itself with a “right of return” that would have effectively wiped the Jewish state off the map without a shot.

Now, Bibi is reportedly here to confront Barack due to an ultimatum that Israel dare not take any military steps to prevent Iran from wiping them off the map with one or two nuclear shots, lest they lose their vital financial aid from the United States.

No less a Drive-by media giant than Time magazine steps forward to enable our new President to wreak havoc on our vital democratic ally with the usual propaganda and/or naivete we have come to expect:

As Obama moves to revive the stalled Middle East peace process, Monday’s meeting has been widely predicted to be a tense affair, but that may be overstating the drama. Netanyahu, like any Israeli Prime Minister, has an overwhelming incentive to get along with Israel’s single most important ally; Obama, for his part, needs to fashion a peace process that produces results, for which he requires Netanyahu’s cooperation.

Our rooster clears away the fog and plants the legs of the truth on ground:

Since when did a Democratic Party president need to produce “results” in any policy, much less foreign policy in the Middle East? Unless one defines results as “caring” and “trying” to resolve foreign policy disputes through words and domestic matters by throwing other peoples’ money at them.

The “result” of all the attempts to rehabilitate the death cult that is the Palestinian people by giving them land for peace has done nothing but make Israel fight wars on more fronts.

Time continues:

The idea of creating an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel on the territory it occupied in 1967 is the overwhelming international consensus, accepted even — according to opinion polls — by a majority of Israelis. The Obama Administration is not content to simply articulate that vision, as President George W. Bush did; instead, it seeks to move briskly toward realizing such a solution before the evolving facts on the ground make it untenable.

How have the facts on the ground evolved since Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt and Gaza to the Palestinians? Did they get peace for all that land that had provided some protection buffer from the enemies that surround them and from when prior wars had been launched? No.

What has evolved has been the devolution of the Palestinian people into a nation where parents train their children to be suicide bombers in Tel Aviv pizza parlors and where majorities elect the terrorist group Hamas to govern them in Gaza. I hear they provide good day care amidst the rubble they invite with their rocket launchers on the swing sets.

President Bush was right to refuse to negotiate with Arafat before he died after he lied to him. Bush was backed up by President Clinton who spent the last year of his presidency entertaining the PLO terrorist in the Lincoln bedroom, only to have him reject 95% of all they demanded and then go launch the Intifada war.

The facts on the ground that the “international community” seems not to want to address are that there will be no peace until Palestinians get their minds right, which history’s facts on the ground suggest will only come after an utter and devastating defeat.

Past U.S. presidents of both parties have prevented Israel from sufficiently leveling the ground to exact that price and it appears that the current occupant may put Israel in peril of allowing a nuclear armed Iran to level its ground for the peace that comes from death.

Here is hoping Rahm Emmanuel intervenes with the Praiser of Minister Farrakhan in Chief at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to let Bibi be Bibi before its too late.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

God, America damned at South Bend by another South Sider

America’s chickens didn’t come home to roost on September 11, 2001, contrary to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “God Damn America” sermon.

Today, pro-life moral chickens will bestow an Honorary Humanities degree upon the 20-year pew-parked butt (at Wright’s Chicago South Side Church) from the Notre Dame roost.

But given President Barack Obama’s support for abortion on demand including the partial-birth variety and opposition to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA) requiring abortionists to afford life-saving medical care to babies that survive botched abortions, the only degree the University of Touchdown Jesus in Indiana could appropriately confer upon him would be one of the Dis-Honorable In-Humanities variety.

Those that mourn the millions of babies killed since 1972’s Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion should be thrilled at the recent poll that found a majority of Americans identifying themselves as pro-life for the first time and that so many are being jailed for Martin Luther King style civil disobedience in South Bend.

But our mourning for the dead must of necessity now include the death of moral courage at the second Catholic institute of higher learning this Spring at the behest of the current occupant of the nation’s Bully Pulpit. First Georgetown covered up the name of Jesus at Obama’s request and now the Fighting Irish surrender their pulpit without a fight. Are we witnessing a reverse post-Baptism temptation with the Church of Christ’s Vicar failing the first two tests? Will the President soon be speaking at Saint Joseph’s to receive a coat of many colors after losing one for Gipper?

The silence of the Vatican is especially deafening in the wake of such a self-inflicted public mocking of the Roman church’s signature social issue while ordinary citizens in the new Rome speaking anonymously to pollsters for the first time ever, dramatically shift to reject the pro-choice label.

But let us be clear, neither the Pope, Bishop of Indiana, nor President of the home of Knute Rockne, All-American is the exclusive voice of Christian America. Christians of all Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic persuasions have fought tirelessly against the barbaric slaughter unleashed by Roe vs. Wade to try and slow the slouching towards Gomorrah. And thanks to Roberts and Alito, if our four reading comprehension aces can last another four years, we could have the opportunity to add a fifth.

President Obama is attempting to abort (fundamentally change) the Miracle at Philadelphia, but if we will only stay strong and faithful, we can be a living enactment of our own “BAIPA” that would subsequently be known as the re-Born American Independence Poll Acts that throw out those abiders of South Siders Obama, Wright and the man Obama insists on calling “Minister” Farrakhan, that would damn America to a Godless posterity.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Don’t help Drive-bys and ObamaDems move the goalposts on Pelosi

GOP doesn’t need an investigation or truth commission to demand that the Speaker of the House step down now

Nancy Pelosi is on video tape contradicting herself on serious national security issues in such a way that renders her unfit to be the third person in the line of succession to the Presidency. We the People are the jury. We have seen the evidence and it is conclusive.

There are no more questions that need be asked and answered that could possibly rehabilitate the Speaker. All members of good conscience with a bare minimum of courage should feel compelled to demand her resignation from the Office of Speaker immediately.

And certainly all Republicans should not aid and abet the fiction of a criminal investigation on allegations of torture that could only serve as a vehicle for Pelosi’s exoneration or substitute for just consequences for her lapse in moral judgment.

Obviously, if the Democratic Party majority insists on the previously intended hearings on alleged Bush Administration torture and war crimes, then the GOP should of course use that forum to expose Pelosi and all Democrats’ unpatriotic speech and/or complicity by silence in their Bushlied era aiding and abetting of the enemies of freedom, but the best way to keep up the heat is to state the obvious conclusions from the admitted facts already in the public arena.

Too often the GOP plays the political game by the Left’s Drive-by rules that only serve to give the Dems cover. Much as when McCain and so many conservatives in the media and the Congress kept on saying that campaign revelations about Obama merely “raised more questions” that Obama needed to answer, too many seem poised to make the same mistake now.

Just as the Wright, Ayers and Obama dreams of his father socialist quotes provided the answers on Obama, so do Pelosi’s quotes today. Yet, last night on Hannity, GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra and GOP Sen. Kit Bond couldn’t answer in the affirmative considering whether Pelosi lied. Rather, each droned on for multiple meaningless sentences to avoid stating the obvious and seemed to see as their ultimate goal a congressional committee report. A congressional committee report? God help us in the Stupid Party.

Let us be clear. There is legal guilt and, then there is the obvious moral guilt. No crimes have been committed here. Nancy Pelosi can’t be charged with a crime for a lie spoken from the floor of the House or at a news conference. President Obama obviously doesn’t believe any war crimes were committed since he isn’t going after Bush, Cheney, Tenet or any CIA agent that authorized or carried out waterboarding. Pelosi and the Dems obviously don’t think waterboarding was a crime since they twice tried and failed to pass a law after they gained the majorities in Congress in 2006 and a majority of Dems obviously don’t think it ought to be since they defeated the measures.

Finally, there is no law a lawyer could possibly violate by writing a legal brief for policy makers to consider.

The only purpose for a special prosecutor or congressional investigation would be to determine legal issues. In this case, there are none.

One doesn’t need juries to fire employees or punish one’s children. That is reserved for the meting out of denials of liberty.

Grow a spine Republicans, if you ever want to relieve me of writing mere “minority” reports. Affirm what the eyes of all can see and declare the emperor naked.

In the process, we could also take this opportunity to finally indict the whole of the Democratic Party for their Bush “mislead” Big Lie complicity since 2003. Steny Hoyer is no more of a moral giant than Pelosi. It is quite difficult for an elected democrat to self-destruct given the cover they get from the Drive-bys. One must be especially inept at lying. Pelosi is the kind of witness that this trial lawyer would never allow to testify in a court of law, much less stand ready to control the nukes should Obama and Biden mistakenly occupy the same space at an inopportune time.

Finally, the GOP would also be smart to use the Dems‘ new found outrage at the prospect of “OJ” trials in LA for the Gitmo victims of George warcriminal Bush. (After all, given their outrage at the nose swabbing of KSM that saved the City of Angels, they obviously wouldn’t care if the similarly situated escaped and caused the Dodgers to have to return to Brooklyn, but I digress.)

The GOP makes a big mistake if it lets the Dems off the hook over the quite irrelevant issue of relocation of Gitmo to the Lower Forty-Eight. Given the Supreme Court’s ruling that determined Cuba to be the legal equivalent of The Fruited Plain, the only possible issue on re-location would be the proximity to Americans close enough to kill. But quite frankly, I bet true justice is more likely if they were released in the United States and left to the tender mercies of We the People.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer and Minority Report columns

Minority Reports are DeVine columns related to the purpose for the creation of The Minority Report by Steve Foley and Dave Hinz in 2006, soon after the elections that relegated the Republican Party to minority status in the House after 12 years in power. That purpose is to return the levers of power in the United States to its conservative/center right majority. I have been blessed with front-page privileges at TMR since it was launched.

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Tar Heel state turns deeper shade of blue as property rights trashed. Sir Walter Raleigh and George Washington heard rolling over in their graves.

Imagine you worked 16 hours a day since the age of 16 for 16 years to save the $16K for the down payment on a restaurant-bar and then worked 16 hours a day for 16 more years to establish a reputation and loyal clientele only to look outside today and see your private property Liberty rights in the U.S. Constitution being torn to shreds by a majority bearing these:

Where is your just compensation when Governor Beverly Perdue signs the bill replacing the Constitution?

Smoking will soon be prohibited in bars and restaurants across North Carolina, a state where tobacco was once revered for the money it generated for farmers, universities and community institutions.

The state House on Wednesday narrowly approved a compromise with the Senate on a smoking ban. The legislation moves to Gov. Bev Perdue, who said she will sign the bill into law. The ban would take effect Jan. 2.

Perdue, a Democrat, called it “an important and historic day for North Carolina.”

The bill, which passed 62-56, prohibits smoking inside bars and restaurants but doesn’t affect outside areas of those businesses. The bill makes an exception for cigar bars, although bars cannot start selling cigars to skirt the ban.

Fax Governor Perdue at (919)733-2120 if you object to this brazen abrogation of the Liberty our forefathers fought and died for, especially if you are a non-smoker that values private property rights that the Founders deemed essential to real freedom.

Whoever thought that the rights to the fruits of one’s labor would be a “minority” right that needed protection from a tyrannical majority? And don’t start in with the second-hand smoke health danger for workers. We don’t close textile plants and coal mines do we? No, at least not yet. Rather, we issue masks.

What is also so insidious about this exercise of raw majoritarian power is that the free market already provides non-smoking environments at the overwhelming majority of bars and restaurants.

This is a sad day for the South and America because this is just the beginning, and if you thought 2008 was a fluke due to eight years of Bush fatigue and excitement for Obama, disabuse yourself.

North Carolina skipped purple and tar heel blue for a darker, more foreboding hue.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

DeVine archive on smoking ban issue here.

DeVine Gamecock Law (pictured) recently made clear his loathing of past GOP strategies concerning Supreme Court nominees made by Democratic Party presidents. Yes, the president is elected and election have consequences, but senators are elected too, and the Constitution is written.

Supreme Court nominees should not be affirmed merely because an elected President nominates a judge that hasn’t been convicted of a crime. They must by judged on the likelihood that they will comply with their Oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Republicans should have voted against both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer so that Orin Hatch (R-UT) couldn’t have later boasted of the overwhelming GOP voted for them.

I anticipate that President Barack Obama will nominate an openly activist judge to replace retiring Justice Souter, but one of the potential nominees, Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears (pictured) could throw a monkey-wrench into my preferred strategy.

Atlanta’s Democrats Examiner spells out the case:

First, she’s a fair and even-handed judge who is known to err on the conservative side of the law—not in terms of politics but in terms of judicial restraint. Second, she’s very young and has the potential to enjoy a long tenure.

Third, and least important, she is a black woman, which says a lot about black women and how they have elevated their status over the past decades.

“She’s perfect,” says state Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield (D-Atlanta). “With Souter leaving, there is no one on the Court who has experience as a state Supreme Court Justice. Sears would take that experience with her and provide a good perspective.”

For no good reason, a Republican man tried to take her seat on the Court during her last election. To say she cleaned the carpet with him is really an understatement. That election also proved that African-Americans can run statewide and not only win, but win big for one of the most important posts in Georgia.

I covered Justice Sears while the legal editor of The (Decatur, GA) Champion and recall no case that stands out as evidence that she is an activist judge. Moreover, she upheld the death penalty regularly and is an outspoken proponent of marriage.

I doubt she will be nominated. But she should. If she is, we will examine her record more closely, but for now, we can confidently say, we hope she is nominated.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

Such laws only gain popular support where few blacks vote

Should gay marriage proponents be discredited as merely white north easterners given that the GOP is said to be fast becoming an insignificant regional party of only white male southerners?

That is the refrain liberal Democrats and their useful idiots in the Republican Party have sung since the 2006 election to suggest that conservatives must move left to be a relevant national party once more. No matter that the Democratic Party regained majorities in Congress primarily by running to the right in Southern and other “blue dawg” districts.

Since when did contiguousness of the like-minded matter so much and doesn’t the size of the region matter more? Is truth confined only to appeals affirmed by the diaspora?

Or is the claim anti-Southern bigotry disguised? See recent attacks on dreaded white, male Southerner, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

Yet, we are told that national gay marriage is inevitable based on its recent successes primarily confined to a puny region of the Lower Forty-Eight (pictured in green) where sitings of black folks are more rare that UFOs.

Given the size of the Southern region (pictured in red), wouldn’t it be more prescient to say that opposition to tea drinker opposition to government bailouts and tax hikes on businesses are going the way of the dinosaur?

And let’s look more closely at these New England (and other blue state) “successes”:

States where gays may marry now: MA, CT, and IA

Judicially imposed gay marriage: Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut

The number of states where gay marriage has been approved by votes of the people: 0

Prominent Blue states where the people have rejected gay marriage when given the chance: California, twice and Massachusetts

State Legislatures that have approved gay marriage not yet overturned by referendum: NH, VT, and ME

Pretty puny evidence of an inevitability especially when compared to this evidence:

States with laws prohibiting same-sex marriage: 45

30 states have constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage most of which have been passed within the last 15 years.

What is inevitable is that the Drive-by media will continually tell us that universally recognized and accepted gay marriage is inevitable.

But its not.

Another inevitability is the ObamaDem Left’s ongoing effort to criminalize speech opposing gay marriage.

Beware.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all verification links may be accessed.

Maximizing happiness pursuits via state sovereignty in the age of Obama

It is one of the great tragedies of American history that one of the key components in the brilliant governing structure erected by the framers of the Constitution got so inextricable and nearly exclusively identified with race.

I speak, of course, of the concept of federalism and state’s rights. The brilliance of this concept was in its de facto subjection of states to market forces and allowance of non-market eccentricities deemed more valued than the attraction of more settlers/citizens. It maximized happiness pursuits by allowing the like-minded to congregate in close proximity and enact laws reflecting their own values.

So powerful was the market for new settlers, that by 1840 no state imposed a state religion, despite their right to do so. Thomas Jefferson himself, never deigned to mis-apply the Establishment Clause to the states via Congress nor the courts. Yet, his religious freedom law of Virginia ended up winning the day in all states without the assistance of an oligarchical (Jefferson’s term) judiciary imposing its will on the nation.

Sadly, but probably inevitably, federalism couldn’t prevent the bloodbath that was the War between the States. A future President Abraham Lincoln famously declared that the American house would not stand divided free from slave, and with a Southern section so completely dependent economically on involuntary servitude and business interests in the Northern section so dependent on exploiting that southern dependence, a gradual, non-divisive unification on the issue of slavery was simply beyond ability of human beings even within the brilliant federal edifice.

The deaths of half a million Blue and Gray was the first step in discrediting state’s rights in the public mind, with Jim Crow, separate but equal de jure race discrimination and the growth of the regulation of interstate commerce being the second and third steps, about which we will return later.

But there had already been a New England flirtation with secession, about which the Constitution was silent, as well as the John C. Calhoun-led 1828 Nullification movement and first South Carolina secession threat 28 years before the firing on Fort Sumter.

What is significant about the above for our present purposes is its relation to current movement of state declaration’s Ninth and Tenth Amendment sovereignty. The most significant iterations of this movement have been the Secessionist throwaway line by the Governor of the Lone Star State and the Big Sky state’s brilliantly constructed guns in, by and for the borders of Montana only law.

First, let us deal with this issue of whether a state may “legally” secede from the Union and the so-called “Lincoln” precedent. The U.S. Constitution is silent on the issue but advocates for and against the right of a state to separate itself from the Union existed since at least as early as Thomas Jefferson’s pronouncements in the wake of U.S. Supreme Court rulings he deemed to be oligarchical usurpation’s of the powers of the executive and legislative branches and the right of self government.

But it was all quite theoretical until SC’s 1833 Ordinance of Nullification, which amounted to a refusal to pay tariff duties that were quite punitive to the Southern states. Punitive tariffs were also part and parcel of the post-Lincoln election secessions in 1860-1, inextricably tied to slavery and the South’s fear that a President Lincoln’s refusal to admit any more slave states from the western territories would put the institution on an inevitable path to elimination that would render monied interests in Dixie gone with the wind.

And while I think the non-judicial Lincoln precedent is quite instructive on the issue of secession, Calhoun’s nemesis on the issue better defined the matter for our purposes today.

President Andrew Jackson (pictured), also a native South Carolinian and Jeffersonian advocate for state’s rights, nevertheless was second to none in his belief in the Union.

Calhoun, previously a Unionist, had resigned the Vice-Presidency to lead an overreaching Nullification movement after a change of heart. I say overreaching, because Congress does have the explicit, enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce.

President Jackson declared that state nullification of a constitutional law passed by Congress to be treason and that secession was, by definition, to be impossible:

The most important among these objects [replacing the Articles of Confederation], that which is placed first in rank, on which all the others rest, is “to form a more perfect Union.” Now, is it possible that, even if there were no express provision giving supremacy to the Constitution and laws of the United States over those of the States, it can be conceived that an Instrument made for the purpose of “forming; a more perfect Union” than that of the confederation, could be so constructed by the assembled wisdom of our country as to substitute for that confederation a form of government, dependent for its existence on the local interest, the party spirit of a State, or of a prevailing faction in a State? Every man, of plain, unsophisticated understanding, who hears the question, will give such an answer as will preserve the Union. Metaphysical subtlety, in pursuit of an impracticable theory, could alone have devised one that is calculated to destroy it.

I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which It was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.

Jackson declared that “To say that any state may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States are not a nation.” He prepared to send troops to South Carolina and have Calhoun hanged, but actually resolved the crisis by compromising on the tariff law.

Texas governor Rick Perry did not actually threaten nullification or secession over tea this past April 15, but he did sign a state sovereignty bill and allude to the Republic of Texas’ entry into the Union and suggested that the particulars allowed Texas unique rights to secede. I think Perry is wrong if he thinks that given that acts of Congress are required for entry, I doubt any state would be allowed exit absent acts of Congress.

But the most significant aspect of Perry, Montana and other states engaged in the sovereignty movement is their avoidance of the mistakes of Nullification overreach, so far.

I think the only way this movement fully blossoms to reign in a century old diminution of the Ninth and Tenth are if states begin to refuse to accept federal dollars and the inherent strings attached.

Also important will be the recognition of the limitations of the Ninth and Tenth given the expansion of properly defined interstate commerce and court rulings that presently improperly expand it. But even if properly defined, the parameters of intrastate commerce are quite confined. The fact is that we depend on interstate trade from most good and services we use.

But on non-economic issues, the power of states should be quite plenary, which is why I had so hoped that Alabama’s governor had refused to allow federal marshalls to remove Judge Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments courthouse decoration from a state building. That would have forced President George W. Bush to make a very stark choice between accepting the fact that state’s don’t establish religions with art or treating the adornment as the equivalent of the murder of Medgar Evers.

What I find quite ironic about the present state’s rights movement is that it occurs with the nation having forever proven its redemption on the issue of race which had come to de-legitimize the federalism and separated powers concept that has been one of the keys to our growth, strength and longevity as compared with all other nations on Earth.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all for verification links may be accessed.

A confession of a 2000 conservative convert: I have never owned a gun and, until recently, had never been particularly animated by gun rights debates.

Don’t get me wrong, I have always favored the inalienable right to own a firearm for self defense and survival (hunting before and after Kroger) and always believed that the Second Amendment protected an individual right and not just a state collective militia right. I actually won two “turkey shoots” as a teen with borrowed rifles, but admit that I simply have not been comfortable enough with the idea of having a gun in my home. But I always cherished the right that if I ever need one, that I could go to the store and get one.

Consequently, I was very pleased with the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller that affirmed D.C. Circuit Court Judge Silberman’s tour de force on the inherent rights of We the People to self defense that pre-dates even the U.S. Constitution.

But what has really animated my conservative mind of late is the collective wisdom of the Gun Rights examiners, not only on the Second Amendment, but on all of the conservative principles I came to recognized that I cherished at the turn of the millennium that caused me to leave the Democratic Party after 18 years an activist and official in same.

Howard Nemerov, Austin (TX) Gun Rights Examiner (GRE), recently made a brilliant observation regarding personal liberties and gun rights related to the swine flu scare:

Old Media has become adept at using fear-based reporting to socially engineer people into becoming more dependent on government to save them. But once government has more power, it doesn’t deliver on this promise. The swine flu story is an excellent case in point. Old Media reports focus on swine flu and what the government is doing about it. [Nemerov cites several examples, my favorite of which follows.]

So prevalent is the fear message that New York’s CBS affiliate reported that “New Yorkers were able to breathe a breath of fresh air” when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced there were “no new confirmed cases of the swine flu.” Nevertheless, New York’s Cinco De Mayo festival was postponed due to flu fears.

The fear of people with guns seems to always be the mantra of the Drive-by media after every Columbine or Virginia Tech with the assumption if only we had more gun “control”, we could have avoided the latest Abel slain by Cain episode. Never does the media emphasize the “gun-free zones”, some even advertised with signs that are so convenient to the potentially murderous. And never does liberals acknowledge the vastly more numerous episodes of self defense that prevent criminal murders an reduce the number slaughtered when an armed law-abiding citizen is nearby when mass-killers go off.

And, of course, never do liberal politicians and celebrities eschew their own armed body guards to make us safer. It reminds one of the disconnect between the Osama bin Ladens that preach the virtues of suicide bombing yet choose delayed virgin gratification even if life is reduced to dialysis in a cave in between boot leg video distributions.

John Pierce, Minneapolis Gun Rights Examiner called out the self-contradiction of a conservative Democrat endorsing Barack Obama for the Presidency (soon after his vote empowering the left by voting to make Harry Reid the Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate):

Dear Senator Webb,

As both an honored veteran of the armed forces and one of the Senate’s most outspoken pro-gun democrats, your endorsement of the candidacy of Barack Obama carried great weight with gun-owning democrats and moderates.

After all, his voting record regarding gun-rights and the right to self-defense was abysmal and gun owners were justifiably hesitant to believe his sudden assertion that he “supported” the right to keep and bear arms.

It wasn’t until you, and other pro-gun democrats, began to speak out that the tide began to turn. And why wouldn’t it? Your voice means something to those of us who believe in the right to keep and bear arms. You have earned our trust, both by your service to our country and by your steadfast devotion to the 2nd Amendment. When you said that you trusted Barack Obama to “protect our right to keep and bear arms”, you extended the goodwill that you have earned onto him.

John is about to learn a lesson I learned many years ago concerning the outspokenness of democrats on issues and how easy it is for them to be “steadfast” when not voting in the Congress. It’s usually the drawl and that’s all that is steadfast.

John Longenecker, LA Gun Rights Examiner recently compiled a veritable cornucopia of historic quotes in which one can’t miss the inextricable links between gun rights and Liberty. My favorites:

“The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the high powers delegated directly to the citizen, and `is excepted out of the general powers of government.’ A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power.”
— [Cockrum v. State, 24 Tex. 394, at 401-402 (1859)]
“The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting, and I know I’m not going to make very many friends saying this, but it’s about our right, all of our right to be able to protect ourselves from all of you guys up there.”
— Dr. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, appearing before Representative Charles Schumer’s committee hearings on the assault weapons ban.

Most certainly, it is not about Duck Hunting, although certainly one had to have that inalienable right soon after Eve bit the apple. The right to bear arms is more fundamental than free speech and even more fundamental than the right to own private property as the fruit of one’s labors, which the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution, to a man (see also Dolly Madison with respect to the Founding Mothers), considered inherently required for Man to be considered free.

Before one can hunt for ducks, one must protect oneself from those that would prevent the duck hunting or the over-taxing of tea, like the Minutemen (pictured at top with musket) did.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” -  Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all for verification links may be accessed.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. - The Preacher

The statement from Ecclesiastes 1:9 is quite possibly the most conservative sentence ever written. I guess the former Governor of Florida together with the vast majority of elected Republicans over the past 13 years never heeded its wisdom nor did enough listening and learning recently over tea!

Yet, in the wake of our past two election year losses self-identified “fiscal conservatives”, moderates and mavericks inside the beltway have sought to pin those losses Big Spending, Iraq War and Economic bailout/recession-driven losses on their favorite religious right/social conservative bogeymen, including Ronald Reagan.

The latest to join the gratuitous “insult conservatives lecture circuit” now known as the “National Council For A New America” (NCNA) - sounds a lot like President Obama’s “fundamentally change” and “re-make” America, doesn’t it, but I digress - is Jeb Bush:

My reason for being here is that I think ideas have consequences and we that ought to have a thoughtful discussion about those ideas.

And from the conservative side, it’s time for us to listen first, to learn a little bit, to upgrade our message a little bit, to not be nostalgic about the past — because, you know, things do ebb and flow, and it’s nice to remember the good old days when the good guys, if you’re a conservative, were in power.

If you’re a liberal, you remember nostalgically when they were in power. None of that matters right now. What we need to do is to listen, to learn, and then there will be a new generation of leaders that will lead. Listen, learn, lead.

Ok, so what doesn’t matter are lessons from how conservatives won power? What does matter is that we “listen, learn and lead”? It competes for vagueness with Obama’s “hope and change”, but unfortunately, the concrete result of the NCNA’s three l’s would be a surrender to Obama.

Heck, they can’t stop praising the President in public. Our Minority “Whip” never misses a chance to flog Obama with his feather-made lash every chance he gets, and now his Sunshine State partner in Reagan nostalgia-killing offers his obeisance:

The context that I was talking about the past was really candidates running for office that have kind of a nostalgic view of the world. That’s a perilous thing.

And I think to President Obama, candidate Obama’s credit, he waged a 2008 campaign that was relevant for people’s aspirations, whether you agreed with him or not, it was not a look back, it was a look forward, and so our ideas need to be forward looking and relevant.

I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia for the good old days in the messaging and, you know, it’s great, but it doesn’t draw people towards your cause.

Obama looked back for two years in full public view as he trashed the framers of the Constitution for not empowering government to re-distribute wealth; President Reagan for “giving” tax cuts to the rich; and Jeb’s brother for every wrong thing under the sun.

Guess Jeb was too busy listening and learning elsewhere so he could lead us to a non-Reagan influenced democratic-lite future as seekers of complimentary Bob Michaelism passes for the congressional tennis courts.

Let’s look at some recent past learning and listenings that didn’t consult Reagan’s conservative principles and policies, shall we?

Bush 41 listened and learned from congressional democrats and led lip readers to higher taxes. Newt Gingrich listened and learned from President Clinton and led JC Watts to the woodshed for daring to call Rev. Jesse Jackson (The First lady’s guest at the State of the Union) a race pimp hustler and shakedown artist.

Bush 43 and Tom DeLay listened and learned from Senator Kennedy and led us to spend like Democrats. Eric Cantor listened and learned to who knows what (Obama and Geithner?) and led scores of Republicans to vote for a 90% tax on AIG employee insurance commission compensation.

Finally, Governor Bush himself listened and learned and opposed drilling for oil off his state’s coast. Yet, Jeb has the audacity to say:

“You can’t beat something with nothing. And the other side has something. I don’t like it, but they have it, and we have to be respectful and mindful of that.”

The “it” the Democrats have that you demand we respect, while seeking new things under the sun, is the oldest evil thing in the history of man. One that Whittaker Chambers (pictured above) noted as a “Witness” against that evil when he thought he was joining the losing side against communism:

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.”

It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

Afterwards, then Democrat Ronald Reagan looked back and listened to Whittaker Chambers. Aren’t we glad he didn’t eschew the wisdom of the past like Jeb Bush want’s to?

No Jeb, YOU certainly can’t beat something with nothing. So get out of our way. We have something all right, and it is what Reagan handed down: conservative principles and policies that work and when advocated in an unabashed and unapologetic way, lead to conservative Republican majorities.

There have been some suggestions in some circles that the outrage being expressed by many conservatives at the NCNA approach and statements by Jeb and others is misplaced, that Jeb doesn’t mean the same insults to Reagan’s legacy as the Frums and Brooks did, despite using the same words or that we have been fooled by misleading Drive-by headlines.

Poppycock!

I denounced this beltway concoction on the first day I learned of it and read their mission statement, one of the most gross of which was this adoption of the entitlement language of the left:

Healthcare: Building a 21st Century, Patient-Centered System

No one doubts that our nation’s health care system is in need of reform, but we must strike the right balance that builds on what works and fixes what is broken. All Americans deserve access to high-quality, affordable care.

Yeah, just like we all “deserved” to own homes we couldn’t afford.

No, we aren’t fooled by liberal media and we aren’t pining for some reincarnation of Reagan, Regan and Baker either. What we want is for our center-right nation to be governed by like-minded conservatives like we once were, for too brief of a moment. We want policies that don’t destroy the currency and threaten our prosperity and that of the next generations. We want policies that don’t invite aggression against weakness and we want courts that umpire rather than insist on pitching.

Yes, we need new ideas and policies to address health care and other issues, we don’t get any that will work without listening and learning to the likes of Reagan.

Postscript

I have been writing Minority Reports since 2006 and if we listen to the voices of Jeb and and the NCNA, I will be writing them the rest of my life.

Adam Graham recently said it best when he suggested that the dangerous voices in the GOP are those of the “good ole boys” rather than the grassroots. I just wonder if some recent grass roots have become too chummy inside the beltway. Rush Limbaugh has said that one reason he never considered broadcasting from The District is so that he would not be inhibited in Truth Detection due to friendships with those he covered.

I found it interesting today that Rush, a long-time friend of the Bush family (after they reached out to him after he backed Pat Buchanan soon after Bush 41’s tax hike broken promise) started out the show defending Jeb over the misleading headline, but then went on to refute everything Jeb said.

[Richard "Pilgrim" Lucy contributed to this article.]

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ The Minority Report, where all for verification links may be accessed

[*TMR debut at Examiner.com - see at bottom]

With a little help from the Gipper and his Laffer friends, of course

We bid farewell this weekend to a man that was instrumental in the Reagan Revolution that produced Reagan Democrats, a 25-year economic recovery, brought down the Evil Empire and eventually led yours truly to a 2000 conservative epiphany.

I had always loved Jack Kemp (while I was still a Democrat) in the 1980s, even before all the evidence of the revenue and recovery producing power of supply side tax cuts was in, because the former Buffalo Bills quarterback was so zealous in his efforts to reach out to blacks and minorities (see pictured at MLK Memorial). Race had been a defining issue in my Southern life due to integration efforts by my parents and later in my own way in hiring practices at my law firm.

But it wasn’t until my 21st century epiphany, after I was finally won over to the GOP due to the proven results of Kemp-advocated conservative policies, that I fully realized the power of Kemp’s reach out efforts. Kemp went into black communities with the same message he brought to all humans of every hue, i.e. that conservative policies are best for all races and income groups as they create more wealth and opportunity for all to achieve the American dream.

I was won over by that message.

One of the main reasons I switched after 18 years a Democratic Party activist and official was that I cared about the poor and lower income families that my old party seemed intent on keeping as victim dependants.

I had seen the Laffer Curve work with more revenue coming in from cutting tax rates, especially at upper income levels where the investor class lives. I saw the investors create the jobs that led to greater prosperity for all. I saw the revenue that funded Reagan’s victory in the Cold War.

I saw a Bill Clinton run barely touch the Reagan tax rates and then saw him later team with Newt to continue the Kemp philosophy on capital gains tax cuts.

DeVine continually perplexed that Democrats opposed tax cuts

But all during this time, I saw something else that was greatly disturbing to me about the Democratic Party. They would never admit that supply side tax cuts actually did increase tax revenues. They insisted they cared about balancing budgets and that to do so they would have to raise “taxes”. I began to see the obvious lie.

Most Democratic Party leaders cared not for balancing budgets. It was obvious that the reason we had deficits in the 80s was due to increased spending, not a lack of revenues. The Democrats claimed to care more for the poor and lower income and for minorities, yet continued to oppose tax cuts that worked and let people keep more of their own money.

I began to see my former party as vile and morally and intellectually bankrupt.

Kemp showed GOP the way to victory

By contrast, there was a smiling and cheerful and optimistic Jack Kemp advocating policies that helped all Americans and especially Black and minorities and lower and middle income families.

Then after my switch to the GOP I came to see some flaws in the spine of the GOP. They would win elections based on Kemp-like economic policies, but then fear the Drive-by media and PC police on the issues they had just won on and fear being called racists if they dared to treat blacks as equals.

They wouldn’t go into the black neighborhoods with the message of truth. No, they either didn’t go to the ‘hoods or they went with race-tailored messages that look like Dem lite.

I have always said that to win over Reagan Dems and blue dawgs we have to be bold leaders. We see that in 2006 and 2008 we lost mainly due to moderating our proven effective conservative policies.

The same goes for race.

Kemp showed the GOP the way on the main reasons for our 2008 losses: the economy and race.

Let us please learn the Kemp lesson now and going forward as we mourn the loss of one of the great Americans of our time.

Minority Reports are DeVine columns related to the purpose for the creation of The Minority Report by Steve Foley and Dave Hinz in 2006, soon after the elections that relegated the Republican Party to minority status in the House after 12 years in power. That purpose is to return the levers of power in the United States to its conservative/center right majority. I have been blessed with frontpage priviledges at TMR since it was launched.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all for verification links may be accessed

Foghorn Leghorns: DeVine Gamecock’s rooster crowings of grounded truth vs. truth-obscuring press fog originally published at Examiner.com

[We especially like to tweak our hometown's dead-tree observer of the news for whom we have served as conservative voice on the op-ed pages.]

The Charlotte Observer recently fogged up a report on a judge’s ruling against enviro-extremists that saves consumers on energy costs with a headline that characterized it as a  “victory” only for power companies

The actual story could be found buried beneath the fog. I find the legs of the truth on the ground here:

Environmentalists had urged justices to uphold an appeals ruling that found the Clean Water Act does not allow cost to be used when deciding what technology would best minimize environmental impacts.

It could have required an estimated 554 power plants nationwide to install technology that relies on recycled water - such as cooling towers - to cool machinery.

And so who is it that would ultimately have paid for the installation of fish-saving technology? We the People, after the power companies pass along their costs, as they must, if they are to keep generating the power that fuels a modern world, i.e. American prosperity. For a view of Obama’s green world, see Dickens’ smogged up and horse feces upped London of the 19th Century.

My Queen City paper’s editing an L.A. Times story on President Obama’s first defense budget hid defense cuts as front page “changes”; hid the draconian nature of the cuts in the 21st paragraph on page 11A where it shared space with the paragraph 23 report of missile defense cuts in wake of North Korean missile launch towards the 49th and 50th states.

The story was also an example of the largest paper in the Carolinas‘ regular practice of removing links to non-Observer originated stories. You will note that in the original story, that the headline and reporting at the Times was less obviously driven by a fogged up leftist agenda.

It’s hard to beat the Los Angeles paper at that game, but the Observer is up to the task, much as they are relentless in their vendetta against Bank of America (BAC), as evidenced by their recent disparate treatment of stories reporting the respective profits earned by BAC vs. Well Fargo.

Exhibit A headline: BofA’s profits rise, but so do worries

Exhibit B headline: Wells’ profits: $2.4 billion
Bank’s big 1st-quarter earnings are elevated by Wachovia purchase and mortgage business.

Disgraceful.

Finally, the local protector of illegal aliens continues the “child labor” fog device to demonize wicked employers without having to address the suffering illegals cause to citizens and other legal residents, with their recent Child labor going largely unchecked headline.

The “children” for whom these disingenuous and/or ignorant of history reporters cry crocodile tears are all over the age of 16. These are not repeats of late 19th and early 20th century situations of 9 year olds working from before dawn and after dusk in a cotton mill.

Persons aged from 16-18 are allowed to work in America, with restrictions. The problem of child labor violations is quite puny as compared to the millions of illegal workers and their families burdens on schools, hospitals and prison populations, but illegal Immigrants (never aliens) are only mentioned as objects of sympathy or in last paragraphs of child labor stories.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Miami Herald’s liberal op-ed columnist Leonard Pitts, who occasionally stumbles into conservative truths, recently visited Charlotte to deliver an angry call for education reform. He made some good points, but  never directs any anger at the party most responsible for the dysfunction that require reforms: the National Education Association (NEA), teachers’ labor union.

Sadly, one of the better conservative democrats (defeated in a bid for Tennessee U.S. Senate seat), Harold Ford, recently endorsed President Barack Obama’s radical education agenda.

The lesson: Even when liberals and/or Democrats get something right, they immediately get it wrong.

More than 200 people gathered at the Crowne Plaza hotel to hear Pitts talk about his lessons from traveling the country to explore what works in educating low-income minority students.

Moreover, right off the bat, Pitts makes it about race. The fact is that the same things that work for whites, also work for blacks and Hispanics. Mothers and fathers, high standards, disciplined schools that can expel thugs, free market educational choice and the right to fire incompetents.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer and  Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” -  Andrew Jackson

Candidate Barack Obama suggested last fall that, as President he would not rule out invading Pakistan. He was more hawkish on that issue than both his Democratic nomination rival Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee John McCain.

The Taliban didn’t believe him.

In short order this past week, the Taliban captured Buner (see map), a strategically vital district just 60 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad. The militants flooded in by the hundreds, startling Pakistani and American officials with the speed of their advance.

The President recently visited the troops in Iraq and assured the Iraqi people that:

“…we are [their] stalwart partner, that we are working alongside them, that we are committed to their success,” he added.

Obama said that in terms of training the Iraqi security forces, the U.S. must make sure “they know that they have a steady partner with us.”

The enemies of freedom in Iraq didn’t believe him.

A series of explosions killed at least 43 people Wednesday, making April the bloodiest month Baghdad has seen in more than a year.

Wednesday’s attacks are the latest sign that Iraq’s security gains are beginning to reverse. Large-scale bombings targeting civilians have been on the rise since March and there is widespread concern among Iraqis that the violence may quickly spread as the United States begins to drawdown.

Why should anyone other than American corporate CEOs fear threats of force from a man that voted twice as a Senator to cut off funds for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? And why should anyone trust a man that threw his white grandmother and pastor of 20 years under the bus?

After all, the Commander-in-Chief didn’t say he stood between the pitchforks and our Islamist enemies. The forces he prefers to command seek to satisfy class envy, not homeland security.

In fact, our enemies abroad didn’t even need the further instruction of the President’s recent apology tours to be emboldened. Last year, great progress was being made by the people of Pakistan against the al Qaida and Taliban terrorists.

At first, Buner was a hard place for the Taliban to crack.

When they attacked a police station in the valley district last year, the resistance was fearless. Local people picked up rifles, pistols and daggers, hunted down the militants and killed six of them.

What changed to reverse progress in Iraq and Pakistan?

Americans elected a member of the Democratic weak horse, paper tiger Party, that’s what.

The world has seen this movie before. Whether it was Democrats cutting off South Vietnam in 1975, appeasing the Soviet Union as they opposed President Reagan’s victory in the Cold War until it was won, treating acts of war as felonies to indicted in the 90s, or bush lied lies emboldening Iranian, Baathist and al Qaida to keep heart and soul together, thus lengthening the Iraq War and costing more American and Iraqi lives.

President Bush was able to stay the course given the requirement of 67 votes to override a veto, and so essentially won the Iraq War, which President Obama tacitly admitted while with the troops. And we also learned last year that U.S. forces had made at least 10 incursions into Pakistan in addition to drone attacks.

But unlike 2001, the Muslim extremists are not so ignorant during this transition. Osama bin Laden miscalculated that President George W. Bush would respond to 911 with bombings of empty camps and nightwatchman like his predecessor, so long ago had been the partisan lessons to be learned about American politics.

Our enemies heard all the weak talk and saw all the weak surrender votes of ObamaDems from 2003-2008. They laughed as Obama feigned outrage at nose swabbings of KSM; library card snoopings and the denial of “OJ” trials for man-made disaster causers at Gitmo.

So they began preparations for their offensives soon after Election Day.

Now, post-Inauguration Day, see America in the Age of Obama betraying Poland, Georgia and Ukraine by denying them Reagan’s missile defense that he also deprives his own country of, despite North Korea’s GPS sitings of Honolulu and Anchorage.

They see him bow to a Saudi king and indifferently shrug at Communist Sandinista anti-American harangues.

Evil men see weakness. Evil men act.

Such is the way life has been on Earth since Eve bit the apple and will be till Jesus returns.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all for verification links may be accessed.

Given the Democratic Party’s huge majority in the U.S. Senate, conservatives and Republicans cannot prevent President Barack Obama from appointing a replacement for the retiring Justice David Souter that will echo the Left’s unconstitutional judicial philosophy that regularly re-writes our founding documents.

All the more reason to focus on setting the stage for future nomination fights and establishing and maintaining credibility on the issue of the proper judicial philosophy expressed by Chief Justice Roberts of a justice as an “umpire”.

We must eschew the old Orrin Hatch (R-UT) mantra that since a President was elected, he gets his nominee so long as they can read and write; never smoked pot and were never discovered with a live girl or a dead boy or vice versa. That philosophy is fine when considering cabinet nominations but not for members of the third branch of government that serve for life.

The main thing the GOP needs to do is finally come up with a strategy for the confirmation hearing that can educate the public on the insidiousness of the judicial philosophy of the so-called “living constitution”. We must not confirm a nominee that gives indications that they will not uphold their oath to uphold the actual dead constitution under which the capital “L” Liberty of We the People to self govern is guaranteed.

Republican senators are elected too, and also take an oath to uphold that Constitution that grants them the right of advice and consent, and they mustn’t repeat their mistakes in affirming Clinton’s Ginsburg and Breyer.

For more than 45 years, liberal judges have been re-writing the Constitution so that during times when Democrats didn’t have super filibuster-proof majorities in Congress, the liberal agenda could be imposed oligarchically via five lawyers.

So, the Hatch strategy was inappropriate even before the Democrats smeared Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to try and keep justices off the U.S. Supreme Court that would leave the matter of self government to a center right people in their states and localities.

Even more so post-Borking, the GOP must not give up their “co-equal” status.

No, we should never stoop to defamatory smear tactics, but we must use the hearings to try and make headway is educating the public on this critical, yet difficult to explain matter of judicial abuse.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all for verification links may be accessed.