RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not just anyone can become a citizen of the United States. You first have to come into the country legally. Or illegally, and get amnesty. Then you have to apply for citizenship. And there is a brutal civics test! It is so difficult, that the government decided to give out the answers in advance.

The civics portion of the citizenship test consists of up to ten questions chosen from 100 questions, the answers to which are listed on the federal government’s website. Applicants must get at least six right. That means people who want to become citizens have to pre-learn the answers to at least 95 short questions! But there are some real tough questions, like,

“What is the name of the President?”,

“If the President can no longer serve, who becomes President?”

“What do we show loyalty to when we say the Pledge of Allegiance?”

“Name one state that borders Mexico”,

“Where is the Statue of Liberty?”, and

“When is Independence Day?”

There, that’s six questions! If you know all the answers, you know enough to become an American!

It is no surprise, then, that over 90% of applicants pass the test. But it should be equally of little surprise that most applicants, having the questions and answers in advance, simply memorize the answers, learning little or nothing about American history.

Even worse, if you can claim that you have a “mental disability” you don’t even have to take the test.

Why not instead have applicants actually study American history and answer a few essay questions? From what I see in the media, immigrants (legal and otherwise), are often bright valedictorians who are at or near the top of their class.

It’s good to be a Senator, especially if you are a Republican who is the most important opponent of tort reform on Capitol Hill. Witness the largesse that the plaintiffs bar is bestowing on South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham in its moment of maximum political peril.

On Thursday Mr. Graham was feted in Houston at a fundraiser hosted by Mark Lanier, who can afford it. The Lanier Law Firm has vacuumed up some $13 billion in tort verdicts over the years from Vioxx to asbestos. The invitation asks Mr. Lanier’s tort comrades to share their wealth to the tune of $500 to $5,400 for “Team Graham.”

“Our goal is to show Senator Graham an appreciation from both sides of the bar for what he can help do, especially with tort reform running rampant from the house,” Mr. Lanier added in an email. “It will take Senator Graham to help educate folks and lead the charge from the Republican side.”

Mr. Graham has every right to take campaign cash from all comers, and in this case he is a true believer. He’s long fought tort reform, and his legal friends have rewarded him with some $3.7 million over his 24-year Senate career.

Now his services are truly needed, like Bonasera the undertaker in “The Godfather.” Mr. Lanier wants Mr. Graham to use all of his powers, all of his skills, to bury at least two bills that have passed the House that address major tort-bar abuses.

The Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act would crack down on trial-attorney fees that are many times larger than the payout to the class of litigants they represent. The Furthering Asbestos Claims Transparency Act would require the nation’s 60-some asbestos trusts to provide courts the records of trust payouts. This would reduce the plaintiffs bar practice of “double dipping”—secretly raiding the trusts while also pursuing claims via lawsuits. In court they claim the company they’re suing caused asbestos disease, but to the trusts they blame the defunct company financing the trust.

Senator Graham is on the Judiciary Committee where Republicans hold a mere 11-9 majority. His defection on any tort bill would result in a tie that could kill it. Chairman Chuck Grassley will be loathe to move bills that he knows will fail, so Mr. Graham can whisper to Mr. Grassley that he is undecided and perhaps never have to take a vote.

Mr. Graham’s office didn’t respond to our request for comment about the Lanier event, but Mr. Grassley should take his reform bills to the Senate floor despite a tie vote in committee. Even if the bills are defeated, Senators would have to go on record. In any case the trial bar will get its money’s worth from Thursday.

Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obama’s soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

He elaborated: “What I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Disasters, such as the September 2008 financial crisis, were thus seen as opportunities. Out of the chaos, a shell-shocked public might at last be ready to accept more state regulation of the economy and far greater deficit spending. Indeed, the national debt doubled in the eight years following the 2008 crisis.

During the 2008 campaign, gas prices at one point averaged over $4 a gallon. Then-candidate Obama reacted by pushing a green agenda — as if the cash-strapped but skeptical public could be pushed into alternative-energy agendas.

Obama mocked then-Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s prescient advice to “drill, baby, drill” — as if Palin’s endorsement of new technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling could never ensure consumers plentiful fuel.

Instead, in September 2008, Steven Chu, who would go on to become Obama’s secretary of energy, told the Wall Street Journal that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

In other words, if gas prices were to reach $9 or $10 a gallon, angry Americans would at last be forced to seek alternatives to their gas-powered cars, such as taking the bus or using even higher-priced alternative fuels.

When up for reelection in 2012, President Obama doubled down on his belief that gas was destined to get costlier: “And you know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”

Yet even as Obama spoke, U.S. frackers were upping the supply and reducing the cost of gas — despite efforts by the Obama administration to deny new oil-drilling permits on federal lands.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said she and other GOP senators are questioning why President Trump is spending so much time away from the White House.

Trump has spent more than half of his weekends at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, including hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. His son, Eric, defended the trips and 16 golf outings in 13 weeks of presidency as “a very effective tool” for the commander in chief: “If he can befriend people and find common respect, common ground and friendship – if you can have a good time together – then you are always going to see somebody in a very different light.” Membership dues at Mar-a-Lago have also doubled since Trump ascended to the Oval Office.

Judicial Watch, which tracked and slammed President Obama for $96 million in travel over eight years, said they would similarly scrutinize Trump’s travel, including the Mar-a-Lago trips that are estimated to run taxpayers about $1 million to $3 million each and could outpace costs of Obama’s total travel in one year. The Government Accountability Office told lawmakers last month that they would conduct a requested review of Trump’s travel costs, including examining whether adequate spaces exist at Mar-a-Lago to deal with classified information.

The GAO is also studying whether the Secret Service and Defense Department have mechanisms to rein in travel costs. CBS News reported last week that the Secret Service had spent $35,185 on golf cart rentals in Palm Beach before Easter weekend.

Trump, who was critical of Obama’s travel, hasn’t used the highly secure Maryland presidential retreat he dubbed “very rustic,” Camp David.

At a town hall in her home state Tuesday, Ernst was asked about the frequent Mar-a-Lago trips.

“I wish he would spend more time in Washington, D.C., as that’s what we have the White House for and we’d love to see more of those State Department visits in Washington, D.C., and I think it’s smart that he does business in Washington, D.C., so I’ve had those same concerns myself,” Ernst replied.

“I have not spoken to him about the Florida issue yet, but that is something that I think has been bothering not just me but some other members of our caucus,” the senator added. “So, I think that is going to be a topic of discussion that we have when we get back to Washington, D.C.”

Gerald McDermott is Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School. He is the editor of The New Christian Zionism and author of Israel Matters.II

If there is agreement that a life is human, the individual’s right to choose is not final. The state has a responsibility to protect innocent life.
In other words, the decision in Roe v. Wade declares that the individual right to choose abortion is not absolute, but that there are times when the state can interfere in order to promote “its interest in the potentiality of human life.”

Imagine you are driving on a foggy night and you see a dark figure ahead. It could be a fallen branch. It might even be a little deer, or, God forbid, a little child. Do you keep on driving full speed and crash through it, or put on the brakes? If you think it might be a human person, either dead or alive, what should you do?

Most of us would say that even if we are uncertain, we should stop and check. We should give the benefit of the doubt to something that might be human, and, if it is, treat it with care.

I am sure that most everyone would stop and do everything he or she could to protect anything that might be human. But a recent article for Gatestone suggests that society has no obligation to interfere with a woman who chooses to get an abortion. The article concedes that question of when life begins is complex, and suggests that after the first trimester the question becomes more difficult. But it fails to distinguish between early and late abortions. The author criticizes “anti-abortion right-to-life advocates” who say that the state should sometimes step in:

“They do not want any woman to have the right to choose abortion for herself. They want to have the state choose for her — to deny her the right to choose between giving birth to an unwanted child and having an abortion.”

According to the article, the question comes down to who should make decisions about life and death — the pregnant woman or the “impersonal state.” Of course, conservatives agree that in most cases there should be individual freedom, particularly when it comes to very personal choices about pregnancy and children. But while conservatives differ on public policy for abortions in the first trimester and in cases of incest and rape (which according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute total less than one percent), they agree with some liberals that the state should protect life in the last trimester. Perhaps a majority of liberals, however, would say the state should never intervene on abortion, even when the baby is healthy and viable in the last trimester.

Liberals and conservatives generally agree that the state must intervene to protect innocent human life when it is threatened, and so should prosecute and punish murderers who take the lives of innocent children or adults. So, the individual’s right to choose to protect or end a life is not absolute. If there is agreement that a life is human, the individual’s right to choose is not final. The state has a responsibility to protect innocent life.

A certain hyperbole and obscuring of the full truth are seen as necessary to advance the kind of society that progressives want us to embrace.

Fred Reed, a talented commentator and former Marine who now lives in Mexico, recently posted a gutsy piece about all the achievements that white people should be proud of. Fred admits that whites, like other races, have committed their share of outrages; nonetheless, he also calls attention to their past and present attainments in the arts and sciences, and their respect for the ideal of freedom. Fred also predicts that if anyone comes up with a cure for cancer, this too will likely emanate from the mind of a white scientist or else from the talented descendant of someone who came here from the Far East.

Fred is clearly responding to the predominantly white Millennials who are protesting “white privilege” and screaming that “Black Lives Matter,” but presumably not white ones. If only “white college students” and the smug leftist media and professoriate who influence them could be reminded of what they owe to a predominantly white civilization, then perhaps they would take a more favorable view of their ancestors and kinsmen!

Fat chance of that happening, for more than one reason. One, the pitifully little concerning the Western past that has entered the consciousness of the average “white college student” is filtered through the multicultural left. It usually enters the student’s mind in this and no other way Fred’s corrections will not likely change the balance of power in our educational system or in our cultural industry. I recall that by the time I retired from teaching college after forty years, the only “cultural facts” that students entering a Western Civilization class could provide are that “Islam is a religion of peace” and “diversity is strength.” And perhaps it isn’t necessary for these products of our educational system to know more about the Western past to navigate through life. Their low opinion about their inherited civilization may actually bring academic and social benefit. It may be already part of a new shared culture. For most of our young, there may be little incentive to search beyond the clichés that Fred sets out to refute.

Two, and perhaps even more significantly, those whom Fred is trying to reach have no sense of belonging to a civilization that reaches back into the distant past. Their frame of reference is shaped by others who are living in a one-dimensional present. These young people, as far as I can tell, think that they know one thing for sure about the past: bad white dudes ran it. And we’re well rid of those times. Of course, those whose minds Fred hopes to change have no idea of their cultural debt to long dead males like Euclid, Dante, Bach, Newton, etc. But, even more relevant, they don’t see themselves as standing in any line of descent, culturally or physically, going back to the artistic, religious, and intellectual giants of the past. In fact, it’s doubtful that they even know much about their families, whatever their race, going back for more than one generation.