who's listening in on you - the new american magazine - 3-17-08.pdf

16th Annual Movieguide Awards • Myths of Presidential Power • State-sanctioned Counterfeiting

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March 17, 2008

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The European Union (EU) is superseding the laws of 27 nations. A North American Union (NAU) would supersede the laws of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

The European Economic Community began as a free-trade agreement in 1972. Today’s European Union is well on its way to becoming a federal superstate, with one currency, one legal system, one military, one police force — even its own national anthem. The British people have never given their consent for this to happen.

In this documentary featuring members of the EU Parliament and other EU analysts, producer Phillip Day covers the history and goals of the European Union, as

well as the disturbing, irrevocable implications the EU continental government has for every British citizen.

With a similar process unfolding in America under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Americans are starting to ask themselves if their elected officials should be allowed to go down the same path and create a North American Union.

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Will history repeat itself?

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ProdUctSFeatured

Day of ReckoningHow Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart

American elder statesman Pat Buchanan warns in his new book that America faces an uncertain future unless we take action soon to protect the country. (2007, 294pp, hb, $22.95) BkDOR

Exposing the Real Che GuevaraMeet the Godfather of modern terrorism and the naive fools who lionize him. As Humberto Fontova reveals in this myth-shattering book, Che was actually a bloodthirsty executioner, a military bumbler, a coward, and a hypocrite. Also revealed are the names of the movie stars and socialites who idolize him. (2007, 224pp, hb, $19.95) BkeRcg

In Mortal DangerCongressman Tom Tancredo makes a case that if the United States doesn’t take immediate actions — especially reinstalling proper border security — we will be next in a long line of super-powers to come crashing down. (2006, 310pp, hb, $22.95) BkimD

A Nation of Sheep Judge Napolitano frankly discusses how the federal government has circumvented the Constitution and is systematically dismantling our rights and free-doms. He challenges Americans to recognize that they are being led down a very dangerous path and that the cost of following without challenge is the loss of the basic freedoms that facilitate our pur-suit of happiness and that define us as a nation. (2007, 256pp, pb, $22.95) BknOS

Blowing Up RussiaThis book by former FSB (KGB) Russian Lt. Col. Alexander Litvinenko, with Yuri Felshtinsky, presents convincing evidence that the infamous apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999 — which ushered in Vladimir Putin as Russia’s new, “anti-terrorist” president — were the work of the FSB, not terrorists. (2007, 322pp, hb, $24.95) BkBUR

Vol. 24, No. 6 March 17, 2008

Cover Story

SURVEILLANCE

10 Who’s Listening In on You?by Wilton D. Alston — Will the Protect America Act provide the means necessary to surveil and catch terrorists, while safeguarding Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections? No and no.

COVER Design by Joseph W. Kelly

FeatureS

THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE

17 My Five Minutesby Thomas R. Eddlem

CULTURE

18 Faith & Inspiration on Center Stageby William F. Jasper — The 16th Annual Movieguide Awards.

21 Lost Artby Paul Ingbretson — Any “art” that has lost its center in the beautiful has, in fact, ceased to be art.

CONSTITUTIONAL CORNER

24 Myths of Presidential Powerby Edwin Vieira, Jr. — The presidency has slowly accumulated unconstitutional power that the Founding Fathers never intended.

ECONOMY

28 State-sanctioned Counterfeitingby Charles Scaliger — The Fed’s latest money-creation gimmick.

BOOK REVIEW

31 A Reputation Rescuedby John F. McManus — A compelling account of the McCarthy era.

HISTORY — PAST AND PERSPECTIVE

34 Liberty at Home, Not Crusades Abroadby Michael E. Telzrow — For over 100 years after its founding, the United States avoided foreign aggression, knowing such actions would lead to endless problems. Then we veered off course.

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5 Letters to the Editor

6 Inside Track

9 QuickQuotes

30 The Goodness of America

41 Exercising the Right

42 Correction, Please!

44 The Last Word

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Congress, Listen In on ThisIn the January 21 issue of The New Ameri-cAN, the next-to-last paragraph of the article “Bill to Extend FISA Surveillance Powers Stalls in Senate” says, “The chief point of dispute in the bill — the telecom immunity provision — grants immunity to telecom-munications companies that complied with administration requests to supply phone numbers of suspects without going through the traditional, constitutionally mandated warrant process.”

Please notice that “complied” is past tense, thus such legislation is unconstitutional be-cause it is an “ex post facto law” — it is a law having retroactive effect. According to Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, “No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed” — Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (Cranch) 174, 176 (1803).

FrANk B. TurBerville, Jr.Milton, North Carolina

Tax Rebate or Tax Penalty?It is going to take a lot more than “Bread & Circuses” for this fella to cry, “Hail Caesar!”

It is certainly no surprise that the only thing Congress and Dubya can agree on is fast-tracking socialism with a “tax rebate” (“The Stimulus Sham,” March 3). The whole proposal angers me and insults me at so many levels. One, I am a free-market capi-talist. Two, as a born-again, Bible-believing, Bible-reading believer, I can see clearly how this rebate violates Scripture. Three, no one is asking, “Where’s the money coming from?”

Remember when printing money with no gold or silver to back it up was called hy-perinflation? This measure further devalues an already weak American dollar by printing fiat money. Or perhaps we’ll borrow even more money from the Chinese communists (who, we know, are already bankrolling George Bush’s wars). Will taxes increase to pay for this insanity? Will vital programs be cut? Will our children and grandchildren pay for our folly?

In 2 Kings 20, King Hezekiah’s life was extended 15 years by God. Warned to change his ways or his posterity would go into cap-tivity and the nation of Israel would pay for his folly, Hezekiah’s response was, in effect, “Hey, at least it won’t happen in my lifetime!” As I pointed out to my Sunday-school class recently, “I’d be willing to guess Hezekiah had an ‘I’m spending my grandchildren’s in-

heritance’ bumper sticker on his chariot.”I’m on record as telling all my elected

representatives, “No Thank You!” Just like the mantra, “If you think medical costs are high now, just wait until it’s free” — wait until we get the bill for this “Tax Rebate”! The Ship of State is sinking and the crew is walking around on the decks passing out free cocktails and snacks. I, for one, don’t want a handout. I can take comfort in two things. First, God is in control. Two, there are peo-ple on board working hard below the water line to keep the ship afloat — patriots like Dr. Ron Paul, Pastor Chuck Baldwin, Judge Roy Moore, Bob Dill, Pastor Tony Romo, and Pastor Mark Dibler.

GeNe PAPke

Greenville, South Carolina

Stop the Sheep ShearingThere are no qualms about David Stertz’s review of Judge Napolitano’s book, A Na-tion of Sheep (The New AmericAN, January 21). But I do believe his suggestion for a cure is too simplistic and will never occur. The reviewer states: “The reader is urged to carefully study the book and then work to put government back into its constitutional straitjacket.” That won’t work for permanent change anymore!

Since there is a reason and cause for events, the first thing to resolve is why America has become a “nation of sheep.” That answer is found in what it takes to create permanent change. We lost our constitutional adherence through our shift in education away from Americanism and into a one-world view. The American contingent of the world socializ-ers, the Fabian Socialists, took control of the National Education Association (NEA) in the 1950s. In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter gave them the Department of Education. Ever since then, American schools have been educating a “nation of sheep” (unconscious socialists).

We have to help the patriotic teachers and administrators to retake their NEA. Then America can educate its youth into support-ing a constitutional straitjacket again.

ToBy elsTer

Wichita, Kansas

Send your letters to: The New AmericAN, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912. Or e-mail: [email protected]. Due to vol-ume received, not all letters can be answered. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.

Publisher John F. McManus

Editor Gary Benoit

Senior Editor William F. Jasper

Associate Editor Kurt Williamsen

Contributors Dennis J. Behreandt

Christopher S. Bentley Steven J. DuBord

Jodie Gilmore Gregory A. Hession, J.D.

Ed Hiserodt William P. Hoar

R. Cort Kirkwood Warren Mass

Michael E. Telzrow Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Editorial Assistant Denise L. Behreandt

Art Director Joseph W. Kelly

Desktop Publishing Specialist Steven J. DuBord

Research Brian T. Farmer Bonnie M. Gillis Wayne Olson

Marketing Larry Greenley

Public Relations Bill Hahn

Web Manager Brian Witt

Advertising/Circulation Julie DuFrane

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Rates are $39 per year (Hawaii and Canada, add $9; foreign, add $27) or $22 for six months (Hawaii and Canada, add $4.50; foreign, add $13.50). Copyright ©2008 by American Opin-ion Publishing, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at Appleton, WI and additional mailing offices. Post-master: Send any address changes to The New AmericAN, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912.

The New AmericAN is pub-lished biweekly by Ameri-can Opinion Publishing

Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

THE NEW AMERICAN • MARCH 17, 2008 5

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

While the Bush administration continues to insist that American citizens must accept increased inconveniences at airports and more privacy intrusions under the Real ID Act, it is waiving se-curity checks for tens of thousands of new immigrants, including many who are being hired as Border Patrol officers.

“Facing a rapidly growing backlog of immigration cases, the Bush administration will grant permanent residency to tens of thousands of legal U.S. immigrants without first completing re-quired background checks against the FBI’s investigative files,” the Washington Post reported on February 12. The change, it said, applies to about 47,000 permanent residency, or green card, applicants whose FBI checks have been pending for more than six months.

Even more disturbing is information that the administration is using the same “wave them through” policy when it comes to ap-plicants for the Border Patrol, including applicants who are “for-mer” members of violent Mexican gangs and Mexican drug cartels. “A lot of [Border Patrol] agents are very upset by the big influx of Mexican gang-bangers” into the service, a recently retired BP

Throughout his February Africa tour, President Bush reaffirmed his support for the programs promoted by the United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Bank that are responsible for tens of millions of people being infected by malaria. Early in his first term President Bush signed the UN Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Convention, effectively banning many important insecti-cides, including DDT, that are essential for controlling malaria-car-rying mosquitoes. The UN’s ineffective programs instead call for confronting malaria with insecticide-treated bed nets and drugs.

“It breaks my heart to know that little children are dying need-lessly because of a mosquito bite,” Bush said during his visit to Tanzania. At a hospital in Arusha, Tanzania, he said: “For years malaria has been a health crisis in sub-Sahara Africa. The dis-

agent told The New AmericAN. “This is insane, and is being done under the excuse of increasing the number ‘native Mexican speak-ers’” in the Bor-der Patrol.

According to the former agent, the admitted gang members are merely asked to promise that they have broken with their gangs and then are being allowed to continue the application process. “Some of our [Border Patrol] background investigators have brought up serious security con-cerns about many of these guys, things that in the past would have weeded bad guys out. But the investigators get over-ruled by higher-ups in the administration.”

ease keeps sick workers home, schoolyards quiet, communities in mourning. The suffering caused by malaria is needless and every death caused by malaria is unacceptable.”

Paul Driessen, senior policy adviser for the Congress of Ra-cial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, echoes the outrage of many scientists and medical profes-sionals who condemn the U.S. and UN programs that are respon-sible for the horrendous malaria toll throughout the developing world. Driessen has scorching words for the U.S. and European “anti-pesticide activists and bureaucrats — safe in their air-condi-tioned, malaria-free offices” who “worry about trivial risks from pesticides — and ignore the devastation and death caused by dis-eases that pesticides could prevent.”

Sabotaging Border Security From Within

Misdirected Malaria Program Causes Disease to Spread

President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush wound up a six-day, five-nation tour of Africa on April 21 in Monrovia, Li-beria, doling out more than $1 billion in additional foreign aid to the beleaguered continent. In Libe-ria, the president pledged continued support to train Liberia’s army, and also to provide one million textbooks and 10,000 school desks and chairs. In Tanzania, President Bush provid-ed President Jakaya Kikwete’s gov-ernment with a $698 million Millen-nium Challenge Compact grant.

The tour also included stops in

Benin, Ghana, and Rwanda. Benin is the recipient of a $307 mil-lion Bush Millennium Challenge grant. Ghana has signed a $547 million Millennium Challenge Compact with the United States

and receives millions more in various U.S. aid programs. President Bush announced a $100 million grant to the UN-African Union mission in the Darfur region of Sudan. Along the way, Bush also reiterated his call for Congress to double his President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, from $15 billion to $30 billion over the next five years.

Bush’s Africa Tour and Foreign-aid Bonanza

Inside Track

6 THE NEW AMERICAN • MARCH 17, 2008

Two illegal immigrants arrested by U.S. Border patrol officers near Sasabe, Arizona

Bush in Tanzania

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On February 4 the Utah House passed H.R. 1, a “Resolution Encouraging United States Withdrawal from the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” and “any other activ-ity which seeks to create a North American Union,” by a vote of 57 to 15. Then, on February 22 the Utah Senate passed by a vote of 26 to 2 a slightly revised version of the model anti-illegal- immigration resolution discussed in “How to Fix Illegal Immigra-tion” in the March 3 issue of this magazine.

The Utah Senate’s anti-illegal-immigration resolution “urges the

By recognizing an independent Kosovo, the United States is play-ing a dangerous game in the Balkans, one that has led to war in the past and could lead to war in the near future. The way World War I began demonstrates the tinderbox the Balkans can be.

That war started when Serbian nationalist hostility led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That falling dom-ino brought about a harsh Austrian response that further provoked the situation, eventually causing Austria to declare war. The rush toward hostilities caused similar declarations, on opposite sides, from Germany and Russia and then from France and England and eventually the United States.

By recognizing Kosovo, are we starting down that path again? Consider: the Russians, longtime allies of the Serbs, have signaled their displeasure with the present turn of events. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, reportedly said the Ko-sovo declaration of independence is illegal and immoral. “A country’s territorial integrity is based on the founding principles of international law,” Putin argued, saying that Europe prac-tices a double standard on the issue. “The independent republic

United States Congress to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States’ by passing the necessary and appropriate legisla-tion to resolve the illegal immigration crisis; urges that the legisla-tion should address U.S. border security, stop illegal immigration, and end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants; and urges that the legislation reject amnesty for illegal immigrants and cease any government program or agreement that would lead to the creation of an open borders North American Union.” The Idaho state legislature is also considering a similar bill.

of Northern Cyprus has existed for over 40 years. Why don’t you recognize it? Aren’t you Europeans ashamed to address the same situations in different parts of the world with such double standards?” Putin asked.

The Russians also suggested they might use force if the situ-ation continues to deteriorate, from their perspective. According to BBC News, “Russia’s ambassador to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, has warned that Russia could use military force if the Kosovo independence dispute escalates.”

Said Rogozin: “If the EU develops a unified position or if Nato exceeds its mandate set by the UN, then these organisations will be in conflict with the UN.” In that case, he said, Russia would “proceed on the basis that in order to be respected we would need to use brute force.”

This does not mean that the world is on the cusp of war at the moment over the Balkans. It does demonstrate, however, that mishandling of the Balkans on the diplomatic front can have enor-mous consequences, in this case further straining already conten-tious relations between the United States and the Kremlin.

Utah State Legislature Opposes the NAU and Illegal Immigration

A Dangerous Game in the Balkans

On February 18, the United States and several western Eu-ropean nations granted official recognition to the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo. The move fanned ethnic ten-sions between the predominantly Muslim population of Kos-ovo and the Orthodox Christian Serbs who have traditionally viewed Kosovo as part of their homeland. It also generated fierce anti-American sentiment among the Serbs.

According to MSNBC, “Ethnic Serbs rallying in northern Kosovo angrily denounced the United States and urged Russia to help Serbia hold on to the territory that Serbs consider the birthplace of their civilization. Protesters also marched in Ser-bia’s capital, and that nation recalled its ambassador to the U.S. to protest American recognition for an independent Kosovo.”

Also following U.S. recognition of Kosovo’s indepen-dence, a crowd of protesters attacked the U.S. embassy in Belgrade. The building was set on fire and one person died while hundreds were injured in the violent attack.

United States Recognizes an Independent Kosovo

7THE NEW AMERICAN • MARCH 17, 2008

kosovo Serbs rally with flags of nations that do not recognize kosovo’s independence.A

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The Counterfeiters won the foreign-language Oscar on February 24, creating buzz for the Austrian film that had opened in this country in limited release just two days earlier.

Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, the movie is about a wartime Nazi plot to destroy the economies of Great Britain and the Unit-ed States by using concentration-camp prisoners to print massive amounts of counterfeit currencies that would then be interjected into the target economies. The movie is based on the memoir The Devil’s Workshop by concentration-camp survivor/counterfeiter Adolph Burger, though in the movie the name of the real-life Burger is changed to Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch.

Notwithstanding the evil nature of the Nazi regime, the plot brought to the silver screen by The Counterfeiters does illustrate the fact that the Nazis fully understood that inflation (increasing the money supply) can be used to destroy a currency. The Nazi regime fell before this plot got very far, but without the help of the Nazis

or any other hostile foreign regime, our own Federal Reserve Sys-tem has for many years been inflating our currency, effectively ac-complishing what the Nazis had hoped to accomplish, albeit more gradually. Thanks to the Fed, almost $12 would be needed today to equal the purchasing power of $1 in 1945.

The Counterfeiters … and the Fed

A February 21 report in the New York Times headlined “For Mc-Cain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk” raised questions about Senator John McCain’s ethical practices. The article prompted the candidate to conduct an impromptu news conference that same morning denying the article’s allegations.

The most controversial aspect of the report was that it resur-rected eight-year-old “concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. [Vicki ] Iseman,” a lobbyist whose connections with the Arizona senator had raised questions of a conflict of interest. A hint of undocumented sexual impropriety added intrigue to the report, stating: “A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet.”

A more substantive ethical issue raised in the article focused on McCain’s involvement in the 1990 “Keating Five” scandal, in

which the Senate Ethics Com-mittee launched an investiga-tion of the five senators, includ-ing McCain, who were accused of improperly interceding with federal officials to help Charles Keating, the head of the failing Lincoln Savings and Loan.

McCain’s senior campaign aide Charlie Black told Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts on the day the story ran: “Un-fortunately, the New York Times, the largest liberal newspaper in America, is running a false smear campaign against the integrity of the new conservative Republican nominee for president, John McCain, printing false news with no sources.”

McCain Denies Allegations of Ethical Improprieties

After suffering from diabetes and emphysema according to his son Christopher, William F. Buckley, Jr. was found dead at his desk on February 27 at age 82. The author of 45 books, he wrote about sailing, penned a series of spy novels, and tweaked liberals with a string of politically oriented works beginning with God and Man at Yale. That book, written while Buckley was still a student at the liberal Ivy League university, made him a folk hero of sorts in the eyes of many conservatives.

In 1955, he launched National Review magazine with a staff that was top-heavy with Trotskyite socialists who would be prop-erly labeled neoconservatives today. He used the magazine to redefine conservatism along neoconservative lines and also to try to purge the John Birch Society (this magazine’s parent organiza-tion) from the conservative movement. While the JBS was (and

still is) an adherent of traditional conservatism based on consti-tutional principles and limited government, the neoconservatism championed by Buckley entailed support of extra-constitutional government and an internationalist foreign policy.

One of the ironies of recent history is that John F. McManus, the current and longtime president of the JBS, before knowing much about the JBS, once wrote a letter to Buckley’s National Re-view thanking the publication for an attack on JBS founder Robert Welch. The letter was published. A JBS member who read the letter contacted McManus and provided him with JBS materials, which soon led to McManus’ break with Buckley/National Review. In 2002, McManus wrote William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment, a 240-page critical biography about the celebrated publisher, author, columnist, and television personality. n

William F. Buckley, Jr. Found Dead in His Home at 82


Stefan Ruzowitzky

John mccain

Inside Track

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She Wishes She Had Said It Differently“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”The wife of the Democrat who hopes to be his party’s nominee, Michelle Obama later claimed that she has al-ways been proud of her country.

China Is Not a Good Place for Journalists “There are more journalists detained in China now than there were when China was chosen in 2001 to host the games. We have the feeling that nothing will really change before the Olympic Games.”Speaking for the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, head researcher Jean-Francois Julliard re-ported that China is the worst censorship offender and the largest jailer of activists for free expression. It currently imprisons at least 31 journalists.

He Has a Dim View of Newspaper People“A lot of newspaper people would rather be wrong than be scooped.”Responding to the New York Times article suggesting several improprieties in John McCain’s past, McCain lawyer Bob Bennett issued a broad indictment of most journalists when commenting about the curious timing of the article’s release.

Rising Wheat Price Is Surprising“Anyone who tells you they’ve seen something like this is a liar.”With the price of wheat 50 percent higher than it was last August, South Dakota commodities trader Vince Boddicker shook his head in amazement and wondered how much higher the price would go.

Some Iranians Are No Longer Spouting Anti-Americanism“I used to be one who chanted ‘Death to America.’ It was a slogan that came up during the revolution. People don’t mean it now. I like American goods, and I prefer American people. It’s just the govern-ment I don’t like.”Referring to his attitude during the 1979 revolution when the Shah of Iran was deposed, Tehran ice cream shop owner Abolfazl Emami now expresses a view shared by many of his countrymen.

House Committee Chairman Wishes Baseball Hearing Was Never Held“I regret we had the hearing. The only reason we had the hearing was be-cause Roger Clemens and his lawyers insisted on it.”Lawyers for baseball star Roger Clemens sharply disputed the claim of Committee on Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and accused him of creating “the circus” that ensued.

Che Guevara’s Portrait Seen in an Obama Campaign Office“That this sadistic thug’s face also adorns the office of a U.S. presidential candidate’s supporters is appalling and disgraceful. That the candidate

couldn’t bring himself to say so is even worse.”Asked how a portrait of Fidel Castro’s long-deceased comrade could be found in an Obama-for-presi-dent office, top campaign officials stated merely that it was “inappropriate” and did not “reflect Senator Obama’s views.” Their statement did not satisfy columnist Jeff Jacoby.

Candidates for the Democratic Party Nomination Joust Over Mere Words“If your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words. Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not about change you can believe in; it’s change you can Xerox.”Candidate Hillary Clinton couldn’t find very much to separate herself from fellow candidate Barack Obama. Nor could he find much of sub-stance to distance himself from her. So their debate degenerated into arguing about a few words. n

— comPiled By JohN F. mcmANus

THE NEW AMERICAN • MARCH 17, 2008

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hillary clinton

henry Waxman

michelle Obama

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by Wilton D. Alston

On February 12, the U.S. Senate approved, by a 68-29 vote, espio-nage legislation that would ex-

pand the government’s authority to inter-cept international phone calls and e-mails

and to block lawsuits against U.S. tele-communications companies that aided in past spying efforts. The legislation would permanently expand the Foreign Intelli-gence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). FISA, which has been amended several times, established a special court and spe-

cific procedures for gathering both physi-cal and electronic foreign intelligence in-side the United States.

Wilton D. Alston, a libertarian activist and writer, is

a principal research scientist working in the field of

transportation safety.


SURVEILLANCE

Will the Protect America Act provide the means necessary to surveil and catch terrorists, while safeguarding Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections? No and no.

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An Electronic Police State?To keep Americans safe, says Mike Mc-Connell, the Director of National Intel-ligence and erstwhile National Security Agency spook who has spent much of his recent time promoting this expansion, government agents must have the ability to intercept electronic information, including that crossing the Internet, throughout the United States. (There are those who believe the NSA has been doing that for years, but that is a debate for another day.) The ra-tionale is the fact that much of the world’s communication crosses channels in the United States at some point. The govern-ment figures the situation presents a great opportunity to listen in on communications to and from supposed terrorists who may actually be outside the United States.

The obvious problem behind such leg-islation is that allowing such listening in, particularly without the establishment of probable cause, will likely lead to abuse.

In a bit of cruel irony, this legislation is named “The Protect America Act.” (No, it’s not you; the Twilight Zone music did just start playing.)

A summary of selected provi-sions follows, with some explanatory commentary.

The Protect America Act empowers the Attorney General or Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to authorize, for up to one year, the acquisition of com-munications concerning “persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States” — even if the foreign persons are communicat-ing with citizens in the United States — without a warrant, if the Attorney General and DNI determine that each of five crite-ria has been met:

• There are reasonable proce-dures in place for determining that the communications are from

persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States;

• The surveillance does not in-volve solely domestic communi-cations;

• The surveillance involves obtaining the communications data from or with the assis-tance of a communications ser-vice provider who has access to communications;

• A significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign in-telligence information; and

• The dissemination of infor-mation gathered on Americans is “minimized.”

This determination by the At-torney General and DNI must be certified in writing, under oath, and supported by appropriate affi-davits. If immediate action by the government is required and time does not permit the preparation of a certification, the Attorney General or DNI can direct the acquisition orally, with a certification to follow within 72 hours. The certification is then filed with the FISA Court.

Essentially, based upon an oath (a promise) that what they wish to do is necessary, the DNI or Attor-ney General can authorize surveil-lance upon anyone they wish, if

that surveillance is supposedly directed at someone outside the United States. That surveillance can continue for a year, and the DNI can compel communication com-panies — the telecoms, for instance — to obey his commands. Perkins Coie’s Inter-net Case Digest explains:

Once the certification is filed with the FISA Court, the Attorney General or

mike mc connell, the Director of national intelligence, says the government must have the ability to intercept electronic information. The problem is that such listening in, without the establishment of probable cause, will likely lead to abuse.

He signs with glee: President Bush signs a 15-day extension of the so-called Protect America Act, which had reached the date on its sunset provision. The act, which revises the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Act that was created to safeguard Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections, allows the government to intercept communications of Americans without a warrant if they are communicating with someone in a foreign country.

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DNI can direct a provider to under-take or assist in the undertaking of the acquisition.

If a provider fails to comply with a directive issued by the Attorney General or DNI, the Attorney Gener-al may seek an order from the FISA Court compelling compliance with the directive. Failure to obey an order of the FISA Court may be punished as a contempt of court.

In other words, the Protect America Act allows the DNI to make the telecoms ac-complices in spying on the U.S. public, no matter what the companies may or may not think about the request, and severely punish them if they do not comply.

Not only does the act compel the action of the telecoms, it also protects them from prosecution should their actions be later shown to have been improper. It further protects the telecoms from actions they took before this act becomes law! Es-sentially, the act compels an action and simultaneously removes all responsibility for that action in one fell swoop.

The White House, operating under the premise that the original FISA legislation is now out of date, claims that FISA needs changes lest the war on terror be lost. This is patently false. In fact, the original FISA legislation arguably went too far in provid-ing opportunity for abuse, as will be de-tailed. Despite that, the recent legislation is being offered as yet another means to protect the U.S. public. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Returning to the BeginningAll of this should make one wonder what the original FISA legislation, to which the Protect America Act is but an amendment, was supposed to allow and why.

Basically one can break the whole bill down into a few compo-nents, which are:

• A need to gather intelligence arises, generally, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mak-ing the request.

• The target of this intelligence is “a foreign agent” or someone working for a foreign government, or someone who can reasonably be assumed to be such.

• A formal request is made to a secret court for a warrant to conduct this in-vestigation on this foreign agent, although it is possible, in some circumstances, to conduct months of investigation before the warrant is requested or granted.

• The court grants (or denies) the war-rant and the investigation — including wire tapping, searches, etc. — is conducted.

FISA was meant to allow needed sur-veillance while at the same time safe-guarding citizens’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. (FISA was enacted after the

Nixon Watergate scandal revealed that Nixon was using presidential authority to surveil his personal enemies.) That really is about all there is to it. For the record, since the existence of the court, only two of the thousands of warrants requested have been denied.

Of course, the definition of “need to gather intelligence” and who is actually a “foreign agent” are somewhat malleable. Under the original FISA, a foreign agent could be anyone believed to be working for a foreign government. Furthermore, the issue of oversight is somewhat spe-cious, since, as will be mentioned later, the results of the investigation and the conduct of the investigators are not nor-mally reviewed after the fact. Still, with the existing FISA legislation there were (supposedly) limits to what and who could be subject to surveillance.

The original law allowed for a court — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) — to decide if the proper informa-tion was being sought under the proper circumstances. Still, several rather obvi-

The protect America Act allows the Director of national intelligence to make the telecoms accomplices in spying on the U.S. public, no matter what the companies may or may not think about the request, and severely punish them if they do not comply.


SURVEILLANCE

ous challenges make even this initial scenario suspect. If the court meets in secret, exactly how can this “properness” be judged? For example, if the foxes meet weekly to deter-mine if the hens should be al-lowed certain rights and privi-leges, to whom can the hens complain? If three guys meet in secret to determine if beat-ing up a fourth guy meets the requirements of law, who can decide if they were wrong? In other words, the premise of the original legislation was flawed. The premise for the new, expanded legislation is even more so.

Ends Not Justifying MeansMore troubling than even the details of such legislation is the lengths to which those who wish to justify the need for newer and more expansive power will go to do so. From a Newsweek article enti-tled “Spy Master Admits Error,” we find:

Also on September 10, [2007] DNI Mike McConnell testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Se-curity and Governmental Affairs that the Protect America Act had helped foil a major terror plot in Germany. U.S. intelligence-community of-ficials questioned the accuracy of McConnell’s testimony and urged his office to correct it, which he did in a statement issued September 12, 2007. Critics cited the incident as an example of the Bush administration’s exaggerated claims and contradic-tory statements about surveillance activities. Counterterrorism offi-cials familiar with the background of McConnell’s testimony said they did not believe he made inaccurate statements intentionally as part of any strategy by the administration to persuade Congress to make the new eavesdropping law permanent. Those officials said they believed McCon-nell gave the wrong answer because he was overwhelmed with informa-tion and merely mixed up his facts.

So, the spy in charge drastically overstates

the usefulness of increasing surveillance, under oath, and we’re supposed to believe “he was overwhelmed with information and merely mixed up his facts” or some such? If he is overwhelmed by the facts just trying to justify the legislation, one has to wonder what will happen after he obtains even more sweeping power with the legislation. Surely this is an outtake from Saturday Night Live, and not the con-text of serious discussion. But wait, there’s more. From C-Net News Blog, we find:

Bush also called for retroactive im-munity for telecommunications com-panies who had cooperated with gov-ernment surveillance efforts, saying, “It’s particularly important for Con-gress to provide meaningful liability protection to those companies now facing multibillion-dollar lawsuits only because they are believed to have assisted in efforts to defend our nation, following the 9/11 attacks.”

Even if one is generally open to letting by-gones be bygones, it smacks as disingenu-ous to suggest that the telecom providers can be forgiven for previously breaking the law even before this more expansive, more “forgiving” set of amendments to FISA was dreamed up. What is being suggested here is something of a universal mulligan for those who ignored not only the Con-stitution but also their responsibilities to

their customers’ privacy — a new law that lowers the bar for infringements to an old law! Nice racket.

When the people who break the law represent the government that ostensibly made the law, or were acting in collusion with the government to break the law, one has to be even less inclined to be forgiv-ing. Make no mistake, however; this is not about forgiveness. This is about hiding the bodies. We get a solid clue from another Newsweek story entitled “We Hear What You’re Saying” with:

The telecommunications immunity provision [of the Protect America Act] has proved especially contro-versial because it would effectively shut down more than 40 private lawsuits alleging that firms includ-ing AT&T and Verizon violated the privacy of American customers by secretly turning information about their phone calls and e-mails over to U.S. intelligence agencies with-out the authorization of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If the lawsuits were allowed to go forward, they could become vehicles for a full public examina-tion of still secret orders and legal rulings that the president and Justice Department used to justify warrant-less eavesdropping on American citi-zens after September 11.


National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell speaks to the Senate Judiciary committee on September 25, 2007 to discuss how the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Act affects civil liberties. many people are concerned that the act’s protections are being undermined and abandoned.

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Evidently “full public examination” is ex-actly what is needed here. Certainly there are those who would suggest that one has to break a few eggs — eggs being a euphe-mism for privacy rights — to assure the safety of the U.S. public, but this justifica-tion, aside from presenting a false choice, only takes into account a small part of why such surveillance is bad.

You Can’t Get There From HereThe fact of the matter is this: the unac-countable surveillance is unlikely to thwart terrorist activity because there is simply too great a volume of information. Breaking eggs when one still won’t get an omelet is just not that smart. There is no scenario under which one is very likely to catch terrorists by examining the routine communications of the U.S. public, or the communications that could be to or from someone in the United States, unless it oc-curs via dumb luck. The reason: too little signal and too much noise.

It is like finding a tan piece of hay in a gigantic stack of yellow hay — a stack of hay that gets renewed each day. Norwegian professor Floyd Rudmin, using a mathe-matical construct to determine probability called Bayes’ Theorem, concluded:

The probability that people are ter-rorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as ter-rorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.

Simply put, monitoring every phone call, every e-mail message, and every instant message flowing through America will not result in a reasonable reduction of the risk of terrorist attacks. Unless there are

a lot more terrorists in the United States than even the most pessimistic estimates would suggest, increased monitoring will result in little else but loss of privacy and increased expense. (It would also result in a veri-table cornucopia of business for security firms and tech-nology providers, all paid for with taxpayer money.)

Not to mention that, assuming the ter-rorists aren’t complete morons, they can simply and easily bypass the electronic surveillance altogether by resorting to old-fashioned spy gadgets like packages containing microdots.

Finding a terrorist with either the old

rules or the expanded rules is less effec-tive than just randomly stopping cars and flipping a coin. Given that level of dis-crimination, it would seem all the more important to have a feedback mechanism in place to correct for errors. Certainly if searches and/or warrants are obtained improperly or lead to abuse, those in-fringed upon and those who might later be infringed upon deserve to know about it. The original structure of the FISA, and the recurring theme in every attempt to widen its reach, is in direct contradiction to any such feedback mechanism. The Electronic Privacy Information Center clarifies the existing law:

The records and files of the cases are sealed and may not be revealed even

The unaccountable surveillance is unlikely to thwart terrorist activity because there is simply too great a volume of information. catching terrorists by examining the routine communications of the U.S. public would be a matter of dumb luck.

Under the Protect America Act, the attorney general — now Michael Mukasey (shown) — or the director of national intelligence may authorize surveillance on foreigners without a warrant, even if the person surveilled is communicating with a U.S. citizen. There is no real oversight over what takes place during the surveillance or what is done with the information that is gathered.

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SURVEILLANCE

to persons whose pros-ecutions are based on evidence obtained under FISA warrants (except to a limited degree set by district judges’ rulings on motions to suppress). There is no provision for the return of executed warrants to the FISC, for certification that the sur-veillance was conducted according to the warrant and its “minimization” requirements, or for in-ventory of items taken pursuant to a FISA war-rant. [Emphasis added.]

Having a secret court make a secret ruling about prob-able cause is one thing, but having no mechanism to determine if the ensuing action — action taken by those who obtained the warrant — was ap-propriate makes the whole process rather, well, needless. If one asks for authoriza-tion to do one thing, but does another, and is never asked to verify if what he did was done pursuant to the previous instructions, he might as well not have asked in the first place.

Presidential aspirant Ron Paul has no-ticed the shaky ground upon which this legislation is based. He stated on the floor of Congress:

We must remember that the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 as a result of the U.S. Senate investigations into the federal government’s ille-gal spying on American citizens. Its purpose was to prevent the abuse of power from occurring in the future by establishing guidelines and pre-scribing oversight to the process. It was designed to protect citizens, not the government. The effect seems to have been opposite of what was intended. These recent attempts to “upgrade” FISA do not appear to be designed to enhance protection of our civil liberties, but to make it easier for the government to spy on us!

Different Question, Same AnswerIndeed. The original FISA legislation was passed to prevent abuse, not allow for more of it. One can only wonder if FISA curtailed any substantive abuse. It is doubtful. Examining the justifications for allowing even more sweeping power, one can’t help but come to this conclu-sion: the Protect America Act is intended to reduce the ability of the original FISA legislation to preclude abuse. Apparently even the minor limits imposed by the original FISA still put a cramp in the style of abusers everywhere! Talk about irony.

In his little-known (and currently un-published) masterpiece, “The Theory of Anarcho-Capitalism and its Libertarian Opponents,” the late Per Christian Mal-loch says:

Constitutions, bills of rights, state-ments of principle, party platforms, and all other Guarantees can never be more than self-im-posed restrictions which cease to af-fect the people who run a government the instant they cease to believe in their rightness, or as soon as it is

clear that the people will not punish the government for ignoring them.

It seems clear that any protections sup-posedly provided by the FISA (or the FISC) long ago ceased to restrict anyone or protect the U.S. public. And that is as-suming — rather naively — that they ever restricted any behavior.

Despite that irony, Bush and his minions seek to push the abuse envelope even fur-ther. DNI McConnell and his compatriots seem determined to give the phrase, “Can you hear me now?” a whole new mean-ing. If they succeed, no one should feel any safer, because they won’t be. n

To send an editable online letter to your U.S. rep-

resentative opposing the House version of legisla-

tion expanding FISA, go to http://capwiz.com/jbs

/issues/?style=D and click on “Help House Defy

Bush on Secret Surveillance Law!” under “Legisla-

tive Alerts and Updates.”

EXTRA COPIES AVAILABLEAdditional copies of this issue of

The New AmericAN are available at quantity-discount prices. To order, visit www.thenewamerican.com/marketplace/ or see the card between pages 38-39.

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Who are they serving? VeriSign is one of the world’s predominant companies in the business of protecting phone calls, e-mails, and instant messages from being intercepted by hackers. The company, which routes billions of communications a day, also works with several other companies to create hardware and software to intercept the same communications for law-enforcement agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.

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W hile senators generally have unlimited time

for debate, members of the U.S. House of Rep-resentatives often have only five minutes to make their point heard before a final vote on important legislation. After the U.S. Senate passed the latest amendment to the For-eign Intelligence Surveil-lance Act on February 12, I thought about what I’d say if I had the chance to speak for five minutes before the assembled U.S. House of Representatives (which was next on the legislative path for the bill). Here’s what I’d say:

The pending bill, already passed by the Senate in a 68-29 vote, proposes to allow wiretap searches without warrants or probable cause. What that means in practical terms is that the federal government is going to be tapping the phones of people who are — by definition — probably not committing a crime. They are going to be tapping the phones of people who are probably law-abiding citizens. That’s not only a colossal waste of law-enforcement resources and effort, it is also blatantly unconstitutional.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, hous-es, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Fourth Amendment sets forth a preamble of how it intends to protect the people from unreasonable searches, and then de-fines four tests needed for a search by the federal government to be constitutional. One, you need a warrant issued by a court. Two, the warrant needs to be based upon probable cause, mean-ing that there is more than a 50-percent chance a crime has been committed. Three, the warrant has to be supported by an oath. And finally, the warrant has to state — specifically — what is being searched for.

Those aren’t very high hurdles for a search to take place.

Police officers at the state and local level have to surmount those hurdles every day, for a much larger menu of crimes — and for the most serious crimes, such as murder. They don’t wail about these requirements being unreasonable or making the people unsafe.

But the president said in his February 16 week-ly radio address that if he isn’t given a pass by Congress to ignore the Constitution, we are all in danger: “Because Congress failed to act,” he said, “it will be harder

for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack.”The president has essentially said that he can uphold the Con-

stitution, or he can keep America safe from foreign attack. But he’s not capable of doing both — and would prefer the latter.

If President Bush says he is not competent enough to adhere both to the limits of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and keep America safe from foreign attack — like the presidents before him, and police officials in every state and municipal-ity — I’ll take his word for it. But if that is the case, he should resign to let someone more competent take charge of the Oval Office.

If his weekly radio address of February 16 is not an admission of incompetence, I don’t know what such an admission would look like.

I’m sure the White House doesn’t like the legislature reading the Constitution its members swore an oath to uphold, or, for that matter, critically analyzing President Bush’s words against the lens of the Constitution. I know that perhaps some of my col-leagues — and certainly White House legal officials — would say that I am “interpreting” the Constitution incorrectly. And I do confess that I need an interpreter … when I am reading Latin or Greek. But the Constitution is written in simple, clear, declarative English sentences. While I don’t speak Greek or Latin, I do speak and read the English language. I would ask my colleagues: “Have you been in Washington so long that you now need an interpreter to read the simple English prose of our Constitution?”

I don’t think that the American people need an interpreter either, unless it is for the double-talk coming out of this city, and especially from the White House.

And no, I don’t need to revise or extend my remarks. This pretty much sums up the legislation. n

Thomas R. Eddlem, a freelance writer, served as the John Birch Society’s direc-

tor of research from 1991-2000.

My Five Minutes


by Thomas R. EddlEm

THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE

by William F. Jasper

On the evening of February 12, most of Hollywood and the Big Media were abuzz with news of

the just-ended screenwriters strike and the upcoming 80th annual Academy Awards. But at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Bev-erly Hills, the buzz was about a very different — and increasingly important — film awards event: the 16th Annual Movieguide Faith & Values Awards Gala sponsored by the Christian Film & Televi-sion Commission.

The stars coming down the red carpet may not have constituted Tinsel Town’s A-list of actors and actresses. However, as in years past, the Awards Gala featured a respectable lineup of movie veterans and upcoming stars and starlets, as well as ex-ecutives from the major studios. While still a ways off from a full spiritual conversion, Hollywood is getting the bottom-line mes-sage that audiences want uplifting, faith-friendly, family-friendly movies. Dr. Ted Baehr, founder of the Christian Film & Television Commission and Movieguide, a family guide to movies, powerfully drove that message home with his Annual Report to the Entertainment Industry, in conjunc-tion with the Awards Gala.

The report cites a new five-year study by Movieguide of the top 250 movies at the box office, showing that movies with very strong Christian worldviews earn the most money. Although many of Holly-wood’s hedonist elite seem to be perpetu-ally obsessed with producing films that glorify the crude, lewd, and nude, their self indulgence is being punished at the box of-fice. “Sex, nudity, obscenity, and profanity don’t really sell that well, especially in ex-treme forms,” Dr. Baehr notes, “but mov-ies with very strong Christian worldviews do three to 11 times better than movies with sex, nudity, and foul language. They also perform much better than movies with very strong non-Christian, immoral, false, or even anti-Christian worldviews.”

“Moviegoers want to see movies with very strong Christian content,” says Baehr. “They want the Savior to overcome the darkness, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to defeat injustice, and beauty to overcome ugliness: they want the Good News of Jesus Christ.” The box office bot-tom line bears this out, with audiences in recent years richly rewarding the makers of films such as The Passion of the Christ; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; The Lord of the Rings and the Spider-Man trilogies; the

Shrek and the Pirates of the Caribbean series; and others.

The 2007 cash register bling-bling win-ners also featured wholesome and faith-friendly fare, such as Ratatouille, En-chanted, Spider-Man 3, I Am Legend, The Great Debaters, Transformers, Live Free or Die Hard, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and Shrek the Third.

As past Oscar, Emmy, and Golden Globe Award winner Louis Gossett, Jr. told The New AmericAN at the Movieguide Awards, “Hollywood is getting the picture that it’s profitable to make films that Christians want to see. This is a trend that I am very happy to see.”

According to the Movieguide study, in the last five years, movies with a very strong Christian worldview earned more than $73 million per movie, but movies with a very strong atheist, agnostic, non-spiritual, or anti-spiritual worldview aver-aged only $19.3 million.

Movieguide notes that “movies from 2003 through 2007 with very strong spiri-tually uplifting worldviews (earning more than $73 million per movie) also earned three to 11 times more money than movies with excessive or explicit sex and nudity and excessive foul language, which only

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The 16th annual movieguide® Faith & Values awards

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averaged between $6.3 million per movie at the lowest end of the scale to only $27.7 million per movie at the high end of the scale.” Moreover, movies “with no Chris-tian content whatsoever averaged between $21 million per movie to $26.4 million per movie from 2003 through 2007.”

Unfortunately, many of Tinsel Town’s denizens stubbornly insist on turning out films that promote a degenerate culture. The Movieguide study found that during the five-year period examined, 54 mov-ies could be categorized as having a “very strong Christian worldview,” while 287 movies presented “very strong non-Chris-tian, unbiblical, immoral, or false world-views.” Nevertheless, it is the trend that is so encouraging. As Dr. Baehr often points out, when he began publishing Movieguide 23 years ago, there was only one film that year with strong, positive Christian con-tent: The Trip to Bountiful. This year there were 49, with many receiving critical and popular acclaim.

Teddy Bears, Epiphanies, and GraceThe Annual Movieguide Awards honor films, actors, and filmmakers in several categories. The $50,000 Epiphany Prizes for the Most Inspiring Movie and TV pro-gram are sponsored by the John Temple-ton Foundation and are given to the best movie and the best television show during the previous year that “resulted in a

great increase in either man’s love of God or man’s understanding of God.”

Amazing Grace (Samuel Goldwyn Films), based on the life of British Member of Parliament and anti-slavery pioneer Wil-liam Wilberforce, won the movie Epipha-ny. Other movie nominees included: Bella (Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate), I Am Legend (Warner Bros.), In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm), Spider-Man 3 (Sony), The Ten Commandments (Prome-nade Pictures), and The Ultimate Gift (Fox Faith/20th Century Fox).

The Epiphany Prize winner for a tele-vision program was The Valley of Light, telecast by CBS-TV, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production. The other TV nomi-nees included the “False Heroes” episode of Friends & Heroes from the BBC, and Lost Holiday and Saving Sarah Cain from Lifetime TV.

The Grace Award for Most Inspirational Movie Acting in 2007 went to Eduardo Verástegui of Bella, one of the surprise breakaway films of the year. Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, the small-budget, indepen-dent film is a moving story of kindness,

compassion, and redemption with a pow-erful pro-life message.

Also nominated in the movie acting category were Alice Braga of I Am Leg-end, Albert Finney and Ioan Gruffudd of Amazing Grace, and Forest Whitaker of The Great Debaters.

The Grace Award for television act-ing went to Bailee Madison and Abigail Mason of Saving Sarah Cain. The Other TV acting nominees were Judith Buchan of Lost Holiday and Chris Klein of The Valley of Light. Little Bailee Madison and fellow starlet Madison Pettis (The Game Plan) were two of the top celebrity darlings of the evening. Both girls bubble with talent, innocent panache, energy, and charm.

Bella also won the Faith and Freedom Award for promoting positive American values.

Other nominees in that category were The Astronaut Farmer (Warner Bros.), In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm), Ratatouille (Walt Disney Pictures), and The Ultimate Gift (Fox Faith/20th Cen-tury Fox).

The winner of the Crystal Teddy Bear Award for Best 2007 Movie for

Pride — nominee, Best Filmfor mature Audiences


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Movieguide

Awards presenters at the gala event included (from left) movieguide founder Dr. Ted Baehr and Cory in the House stars madison pettis, maiara Walsh, and John D’Aquino.

Families was Ratatouille, the rollick-ing animation-adventure hit about a rat named Remy who is determined to real-ize his dream of becoming a great French chef. The Crystal Papa Bear Award went to Amazing Grace.

Tinsel Town’s DisconnectBy way of contrast, the 2007 Oscar and Golden Globe nominations almost com-pletely ignored the films honored by the Movieguide Awards. Still hopelessly mesmerized by vice, ultra-violence, and liberal-left ideology, Hollywood’s self-absorbed elites are all agog over the usual high-gloss, but low-class, R-rated celluloid offerings: There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, American Gangster, Eastern Promises, Michael Clayton, Atonement, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Although No Country for Old Men won best picture, There Will Be Blood was the odds-on favorite of the movieland glitterati and the media culturati. Critics lavished it with superlatives: “best movie of the year,” “a must-see,” “pure genius.” The New York Times found it “above all a consummate work of art.” Time magazine praised Blood as “one of the most wholly original American movies ever made.” By virtually all accounts, Daniel Day-Lewis turns in a riveting performance as the lead character, a ruthlessly ambitious oilman in turn-of-the-century Texas. And sumptuous kudos were also being heaped on Robert Elswit for outstanding cinematography. But, clearly, what had left-wing hearts all

atwitter about the film is the ideological lens through which writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson shot this 21⁄2-hour-plus adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s socialist diatribe against capitalism and Christianity. MSNBC reviewer Alonso Duralde, who is head over heels for the movie, said: “It’s hard to capture the greatness of There Will Be Blood,” which “triumphs as a char-acter study, as a stunning vi-sual recreation of a bygone era, and as one of the most devastating attacks on greed and capitalism to come out of Hollywood since 1948’s Force of Evil.”

That’s an interesting comment from Duralde, who doesn’t mention that Force of Evil was written and directed by Abra-ham Polonsky, one of Hollywood’s most infamous and unrepentant members of the Communist Party, USA. Apparently sharing Polonsky’s ideological leanings, MSNBC’s Duralde opined: “It could be argued that the two most corrupting influ-ences on humanity today are oil companies and organized religion, and as There Will Be Blood demonstrates, ’twas ever so — or at least since the turn of the 20th century.”

Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen, writing for the Socialist Party of Austra-lia, observed: “In bringing Upton Sin-clair’s 1927 novel, Oil, to the screen as

There Will Be Blood, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has been faithful to the author’s socialist intentions.” And, thanks to Anderson’s cinematic skills, McQueen approvingly notes, “We are shown, not told, what capitalists must do, thus spared a lecture in Marxism 101.”

Fortunately, even with the fulsome praises that have been showered on There Will Be Blood and movies of similar ilk, they are unlikely to do large business at the box office. It is obvious that Hollywood still has a long way to go to clean up its act. But if consumers continue to become more morally discerning when voting with their pocketbooks, while also becoming more assertive in voicing their concerns to the movie studios and television networks, Tinsel Town may just get the picture. n

The Ten BesT Movies for faMilies 1. Ratatouille

2. enchanted

3. alvin and the chipmunks

4. Bella

5. the Game plan

6. in the shadow of the moon

7. shRek the thiRd

8. the ultimate Gift

9. nancy dRew

10. BRidGe to teRaBithia

The Ten BesT Movies for MaTure audiences

1. amazinG GRace

2. auGust Rush

3. spideR-man 3 4. i am leGend

5. stRike

6. the GReat deBateRs

7. the astRonaut faRmeR

8. pRide

9. tRansfoRmeRs

10. live fRee oR die haRd

Movieguide’s Top Pics of 2007 www.movieguide.org

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Spider-Man 3 —another smash hit

Red-carpet interview: The New AmericAN’s William Jasper interviews Dr. Ted Baehr (left) at the 16th Annual movieguide Faith & values Awards gala.

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by Paul Ingbretson

The perception of likeness and unlikeness generates the whole of “rational” or “necessary” truth.

— Will James

Two books hit the bookstores recently featuring what their editors anoint as the major art and artists of our times, focusing mostly on the past couple decades.

As a “contemporary” artist, I was intrigued and proceeded to do a cover-to-cover review of the images Art Today and Art Now parade before the public as art.

One volume claimed to be “a concise selection of the very best art of the past two decades,” the other, “a comprehensive guide to contemporary art.” Page after glossy page projects images of vicious violence and death as art; gross tasteless-ness as art; technology as art; cleverness as art; human deg-radation and perversion as art; goofiness and parody as art; excrement and guts as art; piles of rocks and junk as art; paint slobbering as art; madness and blackness as art; alienation, angst, and anger as art; chaos and incoherence and just plain ugliness as art; and everywhere, politically correct polemics all being paraded before the reader as the important art of today.

Instead of feeling uplifted and inspired as when looking at so many of the old masters of past centuries, however, I just felt dirty, degraded, and disgusted — perhaps the way one might feel on leaving a madhouse or a slaughterhouse. Few images on those pages except an occasional pretty color would have ever led to the development of the idea of aes-thetics. There was little evidence that the primary motive of much if any of the work was the good, the beautiful, and the true — never mind the elevation of the human spirit.

The editors of these publications celebrate their inclusive-ness. Unfortunately, “inclusive” to the publishers of these vol-umes clearly means that anything can be called art, except, oh, amazingly, the large body of contemporary work that continues the tradition of the beautiful and the true. In fact, knowing that many if not most of the successful artists working today are still painting beautiful landscapes, portraits, and the like, it

Paul Ingbretson is a classically trained New Hampshire artist (see his work

at ingbretsonstudio.com).

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“Floral” by Mary Minifie is an example of the work of just one of many fine living artists who might have been considered for the books reviewed. When she was at the university graduate level, a serious but unsuccessful attempt was made by this artist’s teachers to turn her away from the art she loved.

“Measured Horizon” by Gyorgy Kepes: The works of Kepes, a recently deceased abstract master who headed the Visual Arts Department at MiT, show an understanding and support for the importance of beauty in the color and texture of abstract art. When working on this type of picture, he would frequently have with him in the studio large bouquets of beautiful flowers to draw inspiration from.


CULTURE

Despite modern culture’s “anything goes” attitude toward defining art, any “art” that has lost its center in the beautiful has, in fact, ceased to be art.

becomes clear that little work in that direction was even consid-ered. These volumes represent a seriously biased selection of to-day’s art that furthers a peculiar, limited, and historically novel-definition of art.

In any event, it has never been clearer to this writer than when reviewing these publica-tions that two roads have di-verged in a wood, and unless

we are truly schizophrenic, we have to admit it. When an art critic glibly equates architecture with a mere pile of stones, he displays mad-ness. Similarly, when he allows that a pile of excrement is art and as such must in some way compare to the works of Tit-

ian, he is deranged.The art of the past

has been judged largely by the effec-tiveness of its use of the images before us

in nature to elevate the soul. That art fed on the splendors of nature which led to the awareness of higher intangible things. Today’s art similarly uses things in the environment, but its clear intent is closer to criticism, to ridicule, to mocking or sport, to debasing and debunking. And in the end their creators only seem aware of the life on the street — at its lowest and most superficial. Where the ancients seem to rise — and lift us with them — into the heavens, these moderns are stuck in a materialist world, in the muck and slime and the mind-numbingly banal, and they want us there with them. How then, when the intentions as well as the ends are so different, could that of old and that said to represent the now be equated? Cicero believed great art softened the manners, but I assure you that will not be the effect of this “art.”

In his recent book The End of Art, critic Don Kuspit, like others recently, recog-nized that art has strayed from its roots in the aesthetic — actually referring to it as “postart.” He rather dramatically ended his

When an art critic glibly equates architecture with a mere pile of stones, he displays madness. Similarly, when he allows that a pile of excrement is art and as such must in some way compare to the works of Titian, he is deranged.

Art Today and Art Now claim to present the significant art and artists of the past 10 or more years. Their reviews, however, are largely limited to producers of the latest gimmicks. Below are just two of the many examples they use in an attempt to redefine art away from creations that are aesthetic.

CULTURE


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book by observing that life is more ugly than beautiful. Sadly this is the spirit of modernism. It focuses on the painful and difficult and transient and cannot see the glory, the transcendent. It insists life is mere flesh or rocks or even death, and fails to see the beautiful architecture underlying all. How different from the outlook of the 19th-century painter Millet. Instead of the apparent chaos everyone else was brought down by, he saw “infinite splendors” in the countryside. He heard Emerson’s “whis-pers of the gods” and saw with Michelan-gelo the “celestial source from which we are all come.”

The reality is that today’s “art” is a whole different species as different as dogs and birds, and should be handled dif-ferently — and will be. Your mama will no more be hanging signed plastic cubes of New York City garbage on her walls than she will be putting it on the table to feed her family. Your mama knows it is not art and it is not food whether created by an “artist” or a “chef.” She will continue to hang beautiful still lifes of flowers and sun-drenched landscapes and put out fruit and vegetables to eat because her purpose is to create a healthy environment for her loved ones. Incidentally, such a view in no way diminishes the world of abstract painting — so long as the intention and re-sult is beauty and the elevation of the soul. Frankly, I have seen it doing just that on a number of occasions and marveled at it as at great classical music.

In Art Now and Art Today even people themselves are ugly. Featured is a number of figurative artists most of whom obvi-ously see no beauty in the human figure, no premonition of eternity — only gross-ness, ugliness, or absurdity.

It is clear that the “man as matter only” philosophy of today prevents some folks from seeing the timelessness of anything, including art. They seem unable to grasp that that which underlies art has no begin-ning and no end — like the laws of math-ematics or physics. Art, tied as it is to the aesthetic, cannot evolve or be co-opted into debasing negation — or whatever we in our incredible arrogance decide it will be now, for today — and remain to any rational man, art. Any art that has lost its center in the beautiful and the true, what poet E. Merrill Root once called the “eter-nal yes,” simply ceases to be art. n


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Over the course of many successive administrations, the presidency has slowly accumulated unconstitutional power that the Founding Fathers never intended.

by Edwin Vieira, Jr.

The Bush administration daily bombards Americans with hyperbole about the “inherent powers” of the president. With each new act the president predi-

cates on these mythical powers, their destructive conse-quences expand.

Recently, the president indicated in a “signing state-ment” that he would disregard four provisions of the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act which, he claimed, “could inhibit the president’s ability … to execute his authority as commander in chief.” One provision forbids expenditures “to establish any military installation or base

for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq.” Another requires intelli-gence agencies to turn over to congressional committees “any existing intelligence assess-ment, report, estimate or legal opinion.” A third creates a com-mission to investigate misman-agement, waste, and excessive force by contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the fourth provides protection for whistle-blowers working for government contractors. Defiance of Congress — and of the Constitution — so blatant requires that the legal record be set straight.

The Constitution provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” This does not grant limitless authority. Rath-er, constitutional “executive Power” consists of those pow-ers explicitly delegated to the

president, and created in the “Laws” that Congress enacts “for carrying into Execution the … Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

Inasmuch as “All legislative Powers … granted [by the Constitution] shall be vested in a Congress of the United States” and “Congress shall have Power … to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” the president’s powers, the president enjoys no lawmaking power. The president cannot add to or subtract from his constitutional or statutory powers or duties by proclamations, executive orders, directives, “signing state-ments,” or any other decrees.

The Constitution subjects the president to Congress’ control in several ways:

• First, exercising its authority “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper,” Congress may give to or

Edwin Vieira, Jr. is an attorney and author who concentrates on issues

of constitutional law. He has won three cases in the Supreme Court of

the United States.

Myths of Presidential Power

Can’t shake his limitations: As commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, President Bush’s power is constitutionally very limited. He cannot take the nation into war without a declaration of war from Congress. He can control how troops are deployed, but may do so only after Congress funds the deployment.

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CONSTITUTION CORNER

withhold from the president whatever constitutionally valid ex-ecutive powers it deems fit, qualifying or restricting those pow-ers as to the periods of time in which they may be effective, the purposes for and conditions under which they may be employed, the extent to which their operations may be subject to judicial review, and so on.

• Second, because “No Money shall be drawn from the Trea-sury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” Con-gress may specify precisely when, where, and how the president shall spend — or not spend — whatever “Money” may be neces-sary “for carrying into Execution” any or all of his powers.

• Third, within the limits of its own constitutional authority, Congress can create whatever agencies, offices, and officers it deems “necessary and proper” to fulfill the functions of the ex-ecutive branch, and can set their durations, purposes, powers, terms and conditions of service, and budgets.

• Fourth, the president can neither dispense members of the executive branch from their duties as imposed by law, nor add to those duties — Kendall v. United States ex rel. Stokes, 37 U.S. (12 Peters) 524, 610, 612-613 (1838). And he must assume ultimate responsibility for whatever transpires in the executive branch.

• Fifth, if the president balks at carrying out Congress’ di-rectives, or if he orders, is complicit in, allows, or recklessly disregards illegal activities within the executive branch — in violation of his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” — he can be im-peached, convicted, and removed from office for “high Crimes and Misdemean-ors,” and then prosecuted criminally, not only under the laws of the United States proper but also for “Offences against the Law of Nations” that Congress has “define[d].”

That the status of commander in chief is explicitly delegated establishes that it is not inherent in “The executive Power.” Had it not been delegated, the president could not claim it. Moreover, the president is not commander in chief of the country as a whole — akin to some Führer or Duce — or even of the General Govern-ment. In the words of the Constitution, he is merely “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” This narrow specification of authority proves how little power the president can exercise.

Here, one must contrast the executive power the king of Great Britain exercised in the late 1700s. As Sir William Black-

stone explained in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, the king enjoyed “the sole prerogative of making war and peace”; acted “as the generalissimo, or the first in military command, within the kingdom”; and exercised “the sole power of raising and regulating fleets and armies” and “the sole supreme govern-ment and command of the militia.” The Constitution, however, denies the president all of this authority, except the office of commander in chief, assigning it instead to Congress. The king’s “sole prerogative of making war and peace” has become the congressional power “To declare War”; the king’s “sole power of raising and regulating fleets and armies” has become the con-gressional powers “To raise and support Armies,” “To provide and maintain a Navy,” and “To make Rules for the Government

The Constitution provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” This does not grant limitless authority. The president enjoys no lawmaking power, and he cannot add to or subtract from his constitutional powers in any way.

Ignoring the law of the land: A declaration of war was not passed by Congress to invade iraq in 2003, as the Constitution demands. (There was instead a war authorization passed by Congress the previous fall.) But on March 21, 2003, the day after the United States invaded, the U.S. House voted on a resolution supporting the invasion. Only 11 representatives opposed it.

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and Regulation of the land and naval Forces”; and the king’s “sole supreme government … of the militia” has become the congressional powers “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions,” and “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States.”

Thus, the president is “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” — but subject to the power of Con-gress “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” He is “Commander in Chief … of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States” — but subject to the power of Congress “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Mili-tia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States”; and he may take up his au-thority only after Congress has exercised its power “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions,” and in compliance with Congress’ directive. The president is commander in chief of nothing else. And in fulfillment of his duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” he must conform to these constitutional limitations.

Moreover, nothing requires Congress “To raise and support Armies” or “To provide and maintain a Navy,” if it believes these establishments are unnecessary. True, “the Militia of the several States” are permanent constitutional institutions. But the president becomes their commander in chief only when they are “called into the actual Service of the United States” — and Congress alone exercises the power “To provide for calling forth the Militia.” So, if Congress determined that “Armies” and “a Navy” were unnecessary, and that no reason existed “for calling forth the Militia,” the president would be commander in chief of nothing.

What of the “war power”? There is no single “war power,” but many powers that may be exercised in relation to “War” (e.g., Article I, Section 8, Clauses 11 though 16). But all of these — except the status of commander in chief and the “Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties” — are powers of Congress, not the president.

Moreover, “War” is a state of hostility that the Law of Na-tions recognizes and attempts to regulate between two, or among more than two, sovereign nations. This is why the Constitution empowers Congress “To declare War,” not simply to wage it. The only distinction the Constitution recognizes is when dis-loyal Americans engage in “Treason” by “levying War” against the United States. In contrast to “War,” armed attacks by interna-tional criminals fall within the “Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations” that the Constitution empowers Congress “To define and punish,” separate and distinct from its power “To declare War.” Thus, no metaphorical “wars” — such as a “war on terrorism” — are constitutionally possible.

Even Congress is constrained where “War” is concerned. Any constitutional “War” must be a “just war.” The authority of the Constitution rests upon the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Thus, no “Government” can exercise un-just powers, even with “the consent of the governed.”

In “natural law” — “the Law of Na-ture and of Nature’s God” to which the Declaration appeals — a “just war” has several requirements. It must be defen-sive, never aggressive, which the Con-stitution recognizes in its references to “the common Defence.” A “just war” must be commenced by lawful authority, which the Constitution assigns to Con-

One Congress after another has allowed one president after another to usurp one power after another. Yet a remedy still exists — if “We the People” care enough to do our duty and demand that Congress use its constitutional power to end presidential usurpation.

Swearing in: Every congressman in the United States swears to uphold the Constitution, but it is rare when one actually lives up to that oath.A

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CONSTITUTION CORNER

gress “To declare.” A “just war” must advance a just cause with a right intention, against an enemy that has incurred undoubtable and grave legal or moral guilt, and must never serve as means of mere ter-ritorial expansion, seizure of other peoples’ resources, or maintenance of a “balance of power.” “The ge-nius and character of our institu-tions are peaceful, and the power to declare war was not conferred upon Congress for the purposes of aggression and aggrandizement” — Fleming v. Page, 50 U.S. (19 Howard) 603, 614 (1850). And a “just war” must not do one’s coun-try more harm than good. It profits a country nothing to bring “democ-racy” to its enemies, at the cost of erecting a police state at home. So even the “existence of a state of war could not suspend or change the op-eration upon the power of Congress of the guarantees and limitations” of the Bill of Rights — United States v. L. Cohen Grocery Co., 255 U.S. 81, 88 (1921).

The president’s status as commander in chief does not license the president to declare “War” — or to start one in any other way. “The Constitution … invests the president, as Commander in Chief, with the power to wage war which Congress has de-clared” — Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 26 (1942).

And during a declared “War,” the president commands only “the Army and Navy of the United States” that Congress pro-vides, and “the Militia of the several States” that Congress calls forth. He is as subject to the rules governing these forces as is the lowliest soldier, and cannot dispense the armed forces from either those rules or any other law. For, “upon principle, inde-pendent of the weight of judicial decision, it can never be main-tained that a military officer can justify himself for doing an un-lawful act, by producing the order of his superior” — Mitchell v. Harmony, 54 U.S. (13 Howard) 115, 137 (1851). The president must conduct his operations under whatever financial and other logistical constraints Congress imposes, and in compliance with whatever additional necessary and proper laws Congress makes to prosecute the “War.”

Finally, the Constitution delegates to Congress — not the president — the power to declare a “War” finished, to determine what measures the cessation of “War” requires, and to “remedy the evils” arising out of the “War” — Commercial Trust Com-pany of New Jersey v. Miller, 262 U.S. 51, 57 (1923); Fleming v. Mohawk Wrecking & Lumber Co., 331 U.S. 111, 116 (1947).

Thus, President Bush’s recent “signing statement” is plainly unconstitutional. Because the Constitution specifies that “no Money may be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Ac-count of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time,” and because the Constitution also specifies that Congress may “make Rules for the Govern-ment and Regulation of the land and naval Forces,” of course Congress can forbid expenditures “to establish any military in-stallation or base for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq,” can create a commission to investigate mismanagement, waste, and excessive force by contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, and can protect employees of government contractors who expose waste, fraud, and other abuses. And because every intelligence agency is a creature of Congress, of course Congress can require them to disclose to Congress “any existing intelligence assessment, report, estimate or legal opinion” they generate.

Unfortunately, Congress’ control of the president has become weakened, because one Congress after another has allowed one president after another — the present incumbent more than any of his predecessors — to usurp one power after another. Yet a remedy still exists, because the Constitution has not changed and can be enforced — if “We the People” care enough to do our duty and demand that Congress use its constitutional power to end presidential usurpation. n

Answering the call: President Bush has repeatedly called up National Guard troops, such as Nevada’s 593rd transportation company shown here in iraq, but the Constitution only allows him to deploy state troops after Congress calls them up.

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The Federal Reserve’s little-understood financial operations have just gotten a bit more arcane, thanks to the recent creation of the Term Auction Facility, or TAF.

State-Sanctioned counterfeiting

by Charles Scaliger

The Federal Reserve, like all cen-tral banks, is primarily engaged in manipulating the money supply.

Nowadays, in the absence of any precious-metal standard tied to government money, the amount of money that central banks can create out of thin air (aptly named “fiat money”) is limitless. But to conceal the re-ality of their operation — what amounts to state-sanctioned counterfeiting — the Fed-eral Reserve and other central banks have developed various complex mechanisms for pumping new money into the financial system without the general public becom-ing wise to what they are doing.

Traditionally, the Federal Reserve has had several techniques for expanding (or contracting) the money supply (or “liquid-ity,” in the rarefied jargon of high finance). It may, for example, change the interest rate that the Federal Reserve charges com-mercial banks for borrowing money — the so-called discount window. When the Fed lowers the discount-window interest rate, banks historically have been more willing

to borrow money from the Fed — money that the Fed creates out of nothing. This new money, in the form of bank credit, in-creases the amount of liquidity, that is, the supply of money. But because borrowing via the discount window has come to be used mostly as a last resort, banks, always interested in appearing as financially sound as possible, are skittish of taking advantage of the discount window.

The Fed’s most important tools for ma-nipulating the money supply are known as open market operations (OMOs). These fi-nancial activities are carried out on every business day at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the behest of the manag-er of the System Open Market Account (SOMA). SOMA officials responsible for OMOs purchase and sell large amounts of financial instruments, by which they either create money by issuing credit or destroy money.

SOMA’s portfolio consists of U.S. Treasury securities that are generally held until maturity as well as large amounts of both short-term (one-day) and long-term (14-day) repurchase agreements (repos). In a repurchase agreement, one party sells a financial instrument to a second party,

and agrees to repurchase the instrument, along with interest, after an agreed-upon lapse of time. The Fed uses repos to inject money into the banking system and the economy by issuing banks cash or credit in exchange for some type of collateral. At the end of the repos’ terms, the banks buy back the collateral. Because of their brief life span, one-day and 14-day repos are the Fed’s primary instruments for dealing with short-term issues like market volatility and fluctuating bank reserve levels. The money created by each repo technically disap-pears when a repo’s term ends (the repo “matures”), but the Fed issues short-term repos every business day, thereby sustain-ing or increasing the total money supply.

However, OMOs are transacted only by a few privileged “primary dealers,” and the funds created are deposited initially in large money-center banks. Last year, when the subprime mortgage-fueled glob-al financial crisis began to unfold, these megabanks started hoarding liquidity from open-market funds rather than lending it out. Unable to access credit and unwilling to use stigmatized discount-window bor-rowing, other commercial banks began circumventing the Fed altogether, seeking liquidity instead from other sources like the Federal Home Loan Banks.

With the ability to manipulate the finan-cial sector slipping from its grasp, the Fed-eral Reserve took action late last year. On December 12, the Fed announced, to ho-sannas from the financial media, a brand-new device for the creation of money, the Term Auction Facility (TAF). The TAF was hailed as a long-overdue measure to give the Fed greater flexibility in expanding the money supply, and as a much-needed re-sponse to money markets reeling from the subprime mortgage crisis.

The new Term Auction Facility auc-tions funds to banks a couple of times each month. The amounts to be auctioned are announced in advance, with each of two December auctions for $20 billion apiece, and additional auctions in January and Charles Scaliger is a teacher and freelance writer.


ECONOMY

February for $30 billion. In each case, the funds are transacted in the form of repos with one-month terms of maturity, and all institutions that qualify for discount-window loans are eligible to participate. The TAF thus combines features of open-market and discount-window operations, and has so far been a rip-roaring success, if the enthusiasm of participating banks is any indication. By mid-February, tens of billions of dollars had been borrowed, with banks flocking to take advantage of relatively attractive rates and, more omi-nously, the new laxity of terms by which assets could be pledged as collateral.

Yet the rush to the TAF’s new money trough is unsettling some observers of U.S. banking, who see in the facility a last-ditch effort to conceal massive bal-ance-sheet weaknesses. “The TAF … al-lows the banks to borrow money against all sorts of dodgy collateral,” according to Christopher Wood, an analyst at CSLA, a major Hong Kong-based international bro-kerage firm, speaking with the Financial Times. “The banks are increasingly giving the Fed the garbage collateral nobody else wants to take.... [This] suggest a perilous condition for America’s banking system.”

The TAF’s future is uncertain. The Fed introduced the facility as an experimental measure, but “some Fed officials have ex-pressed an interest in keeping and possibly expanding the TAF,” according to JPMor-gan Chase economist Michael Feroli.

Of course, if the Fed decides to termi-nate the TAF program, those tens of bil-lions of dollars of new money the facility has created will evaporate once the repos mature. This is an outcome the inflation-ary Fed is not likely to countenance, sug-gesting that the TAF will become a per-manent new option for inflating America’s money supply.

There is nothing revolutionary about the Term Auction Facility in principle. Like the discount window and open mar-ket operations, the TAF is just another deliberately obscure device by which the Fed, in cahoots with the Treasury Depart-ment and the money markets, creates new money out of nothing. The infusion of new money dilutes the value of the dol-lars already in circulation, causing prices to rise. The ever-poorer American public recognizes that their dollars buy less — without recognizing why. n


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Principal Offers KidneyMorgan Corliss, a 13-year-old middle school student in Franklin, New Hamp-shire, had very modest wishes. She did not yearn for designer clothes or other expen-sive material things; she just wanted to live the same kind of life as her classmates. In an interview with ABC News, she said she wanted “just to go to school dances and play basketball and just have fun.”

However, Morgan did not feel very well most of the time and that severely limited her activities. The problem was Focal Seg-mental Glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), a rare kidney disease Morgan has been battling since she was four.

“Morgan is showing a lot of symptoms. She gets a lot of headaches,” said Mor-gan’s mom, Caryn Corliss, who also suf-fers with FSGS and lives with a donated kidney. “She always has an upset stomach, feels like she’s going to throw up.”

“And I just want to sleep all day,” said Morgan. Severe fatigue is a common symptom for kidney dialysis patients, who must rely on mechanical filtration of their blood to perform the work of their own failed kidneys.

The only permanent solution was a kid-ney transplant, but a suitable donor had to be found. Because matching the patient’s tissue is essential, blood relatives are usu-ally considered first, but Morgan’s mom was eliminated because of her own health problems, as were other family members.

But then the offer of a kidney came from an unexpected source — Morgan’s school principal, James Friel. Though Friel did not know Morgan very well, when he learned about her situation, it did not take long for him to decide his proper course of action.

“I just had this overwhelming feeling,” Friel told reporters. “It’s the right thing to do. I’ve spent 24 years of my life trying to make a difference in the lives of kids, and if this isn’t making a difference in the life of a child, I don’t know what is.”

Morgan’s mother expressed her pro-found appreciation: “There’s no way I can ever thank him so that it’s enough. [Morgan will] be able to go to those school dances. She’ll be able to play outside — do all those things and live a teenage life.”

Morgan echoed the sentiment when she said: “It’s special because he’s my mid-dle school principal, and I just really like him.”

The surgery is planned for early 2008.

Brotherly LoveCody Barenbrugge, 16, and his sister Lindsey Miller, 15, are both freshmen at Bloomfield (Indiana) Junior-Senior High School and both are cadets in the Navy’s Naval Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (NJROTC).

Last November, Cody was driving to school with his sister when their usual route was blocked because of an accident. Cody took an unpaved gravel road, but while rounding a curve, his car began slid-ing. He braked in an attempt to slow down, but the car slid off the road and landed up-side down in a stream, in over four feet of water.

The pair were hanging upside down from their seat belts but Lindsey, trauma-tized by the incident, did not move.

“She just froze,” Cody told the Greene County Daily World (Indiana).

Cody unbuckled his sister and helped her into the back seat, where he thought an air pocket would form and buy them some time to make their escape. He kicked out the glass from the passenger side window and, as the car filled with water, climbed through the window and pulled Lindsey out to safety.

After the pair made it to the stream bank, Cody ran to the road and flagged down a motorist who drove the soaked siblings home.

Because of his clearheaded action, Cody was given the NJROTC’s “Meri-torious Achievement Award” in January. Lieutenant Clayton Ostergren, the cadet’s NJROTC instructor at his school, praised his student at the award event.

“This is the number one ribbon in NJROTC. There is no higher award,” said Ostergren. The lieutenant explained that the award was based not on length of ser-vice or participation in activities.

“It’s for heroism,” he emphasized.Having proven himself capable of keep-

ing his head in an emergency, Cadet Cody

Barenbrugge undoubtedly has a promising future as a naval officer.

Boy Saves MotherJeremy Cooper, an eight-year-old third-grader at Ockerman Elementary School in Florence, Kentucky, was home with his mother and younger siblings last Decem-ber 22 when his mother, Natasha Coo-per, suffered a grand mal seizure. Jeremy called his dad at work, and his father told the boy to hang up and dial 911. He did as his father had instructed, and got his mother to sit in an upright position, which was safer for her.

When the Boone County Sheriff’s De-partment car arrived out front, Jeremy ran out and directed Deputy Chris Hall to where his mother was and showed the deputy where his mother’s medication was located.

“I really don’t want to lose my mom,” Jeremy told the deputy.

When Jeremy’s younger siblings, who are two and five years old, kept coming to see how their mother was, Deputy Hall asked the children to go back to their room and Jeremy took the youngsters back where they would be out of the way.

Jeremy then flagged down the ambu-lance when it arrived, and afterwards, called his grandparents to come over and help with the children.

Deputy Hall described Jeremy’s actions as “truly heroic.” He told the Community Press (Cincinnati, Ohio): “Normally, you don’t see an eight-year-old that composed in a pressure situation.”

On January 4, Jeremy was recognized for his heroic actions by being sworn in as a Boone County Sheriff’s Department junior deputy. He was also given a sher-iff’s coin reserved for deputies who have performed acts of heroism and Colonel Les Hill’s special coin for heroism and bravery.

Kentucky State Representative Addia Wuchner presented Jeremy with a Com-monwealth Award from the common-wealth’s House of Representatives, and Wal-Mart presented him with a new bicycle. n

— wArreN mAss

THE GOODNESS OF AMERICA


Anyone interested in the McCarthy era will not want to miss this compelling and factual account of the valiant senator from Wisconsin.

A Reputation Rescuedby John F. McManus

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy, by M. Stan-ton Evans, New York: Crown Publish-ing Group, 2007, 664 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

I have a vivid personal memory of my father banging his fist on the kitchen table, angered because of the way

numerous politicians and media pundits were trashing Senator Joseph McCarthy. “I know he’s right and these characters are covering up for their communist friends,” said my dad.

That happened more than 50 years ago — before I went off to college and found myself amongst a swarm of others telling me that McCarthy was a scoundrel, that he unfairly and viciously attacked innocent people, and that America had nothing to worry about because there really weren’t any communists or communist sympathiz-ers in government.

In the early 1950s, I’d never heard of Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, Samuel Klaus, and several others who had already sounded grave and credible warn-ings about the communist penetration. Elizabeth Bentley had served the Commu-nist Party as a courier carrying messages and data from one spy cell to another in Washington and New York. She gave her information to the FBI in 1945, but noth-ing was ever done about her revelations until Joe McCarthy emerged. Whittaker Chambers, the former communist who told State Department officials in 1939 that the Roosevelt administration was loaded with communists, and who was the key figure in the exposure of top State Department official Alger Hiss as a communist agent, stated in one of his books that he felt he had left the winning side (the communists) and joined the losing side (those loyal to America). In 1946, State Department of-ficial Samuel Klaus delivered his lengthy memo to superiors detailing communist

infiltration at the State Department but nothing was done. Bentley, Chambers, Klaus, and others had sacrificed much — even placed them-selves in jeopardy — for what seemed to be nothing. McCar thy eventually made their ef-forts meaningful.

Nor did I have in the 1950s the benefit of digest-ing the amazing Venona In-tercepts, the back-and-forth messages between Moscow and their U.S. agents during and after the 1940s. The con-tents of these messages, known to government officials as they were being transmitted and tran-scribed for posterity, confirmed the identities of those communist agents inside our country and in-side our government. Again, noth-ing was done to remove the commu-nists, however. Though these Venona documents provided corroboration for what McCarthy would later charge, they weren’t made available to the American public until 1995.

Another treasure trove of information vindicating McCarthy became available during the apparent demise of Soviet com-munism in the early 1990s. Not only were many Kremlin files opened for inspection by researchers from our country, so too were the records in various former Soviet satellite capitals. Author Stan Evans took the time to avail himself of all of this in-formation, dig more deeply into the files of the FBI and other government agen-cies, and put all this material together in a single volume to show that Joe McCarthy should be praised, not condemned.

Over the years, scores of books have been written about the Wisconsin senator’s campaign to rid the U.S. government of in-

ternal enemies. Almost all of these volumes condemned him as a disreputable rogue. A few buttressed my father’s opinion: McCarthy was correct and he attempted to do what many other senators and congressmen should have been doing to protect this nation. But those that could have been called pro-McCarthy were scorned.

All the books about McCarthy, both pro and con, must now stand aside. In Blacklisted by History, Stanton Evans has produced a masterful, scholarly, and ex-tremely thorough 664-page compilation of evidence completely exonerating the man whose name has been made a detestable symbol of “unfair accusations” and “rogue investigative techniques.”

Evans supplies the details any critic would need to reverse the popularly held view of the Wisconsin senator. According


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to Evans, McCarthy began his crusade against the communist penetration of the U.S. government with a February 1950 speech at a Republican gathering in Wheel-ing, West Virginia. He had been provided with a copy of the Klaus memo, found it credible, and told his audience about its contents. Liberals and pro-communists, using both infuriating and laughable “evi-dence,” have sought to debunk what Mc-Carthy said on that single occasion. Evans tells the whole story.

The important Klaus memo disappeared from government records, but Evans locat-ed a copy and published it in its entirety as an appendix. In the book’s prologue, the widely read author, editor, columnist, and commentator who trained hundreds of young conservatives at the National Jour-nalism Center in Washington over the past 30 years gave a backdrop on his sleuthing and told of unearthing “once secret records of the FBI” that helped to make the case for defending McCarthy. The FBI knew the truth at the time, but as a gatherer of information wasn’t free to publicize what it knew, and many of its personnel waited in vain for government officials to call for airing its information in public sessions.

In his book, Evans details the informa-tion the FBI was privy to: “The Bureau knew as early as December 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physi-cist then becoming a central figure in the [U.S. government’s top-secret] atomic en-ergy project, was identified by Commu-nist leaders as a secret party member who had to be inactive because of the wartime work that he was doing. Likewise in 1945, the FBI obtained credible information that high-ranking government figures Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, and Harry Dexter White were Soviet agents. Also in 1945, the Bureau knew the espionage case of

John Stewart Service and the pro-Red magazine Amerasia had been fixed, lied about, and covered up by a cabal of top officials.”

For readers who know little or nothing about these individuals, consider that Oppenheimer has always been reasonably thought to have been the key individu-al who supplied the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons

technology. Alger Hiss wormed his way into government so ably that he was at President Roosevelt’s side as a key adviser at the 1944 wartime Yalta Conference at-tended by the “Big Three” — Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. At this summit, it was agreed to betray post-war Eastern Europe and Manchuria into the hands of the communists. Hiss then secured the appointment as secretary-general of the UN founding conference in 1945 where he was able to welcome a score of fel-low communists into the U.S. delegation at that gathering. Harry Dexter White, a close associate of Hiss, arranged to deliver engraved plates to print U.S. currency to the Soviet Union, became Secretary of the

Treasury, and participated in the formation of the UN’s International Monetary Fund which he later led. And Lauchlin Currie held down an office in the White House where he served as a top adviser to Presi-dent Roosevelt. Each of these extremely key individuals was loyal to the Soviet Union, not to the United States.

Evans recounts many of the details sur-rounding the pro-communist State Depart-ment official John Stewart Service, one of many government officials targeted by McCarthy. Service was a leader of the in-famous Institute of Pacific Relations that played an important role in the sellout of China to Mao Tse-tung and his commu-nist forces during the late 1940s. When McCarthy produced reliable information about Service’s communist background, Truman administration officials weren’t interested in removing Service; they, in-stead, desperately sought to impede the McCarthy effort. Evans explained: “John Service had been kept on the State De-partment payroll for five full years after passing papers to Philip Jaffe, confidant of Communist bosses and Soviet agents; but anyone caught passing data to Joe Mc-Carthy concerning Service himself would be out on his ear by sundown.”

in Blacklisted by History, Stanton evans has produced a masterful, scholarly, and extremely thorough 664-page compilation of evidence completely exonerating the man whose name has been made a detestable symbol of “unfair accusations” and “rogue investigative techniques.”

In March 1954, a smiling Senator Joseph McCarthy presided at a hearing conducted by the Senate committee he chaired. He was soon targeted and condemned on trumped-up charges.

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Blacklisted by History is surely not a partisan political treatise. Evans is es-pecially hard on Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, even on the presi-dent himself and with good reason. But when Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953 and McCarthy thought he might re-ceive the kind of cooperation one would expect from a U.S. president, business as usual continued. Democrat or Republican in high office, it didn’t matter. McCarthy wanted to rid the government of disloyal employees. But, over and over again, Mc-Carthy himself, not the obvious commu-nists and pro-communists, was the target of our nation’s top officials.

As Evans shows, McCarthy became the subject of investigations by other Senate committees and their pro-communist lead-ers. His extremely valuable research assis-tant, J.B. Matthews, was driven out of staff service by a combined attack led by the left-wing media and pro-communist forc-es in government. And when the senator aimed his efforts at rooting out pro-com-munist influence at the Army’s sensitive Signal Corps facility at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the anti-McCarthy forces con-verted a proper investigation into a carni-val designed to make McCarthy look like a clown or a vicious cutthroat willing to smear innocent people with false charges. If you want the proof, read Evans’ book!

After listing the various accomplish-ments attributable to McCarthy’s efforts — the many pro-communists who fled government service, the tighter security procedures, and the admission by officials that there had been foul-ups followed by corrective measures — Evans recounts the true circumstances behind, and actual language of, the Senate vote to condemn the senator. (Hint: it was not a repudiation of his allegations.) Then, in obvious sad-ness, he relates that McCarthy “became a non-person to be ignored and shunned, a ghost figure with no relation to the serious business of the Senate.” But, according to Evans, Joe McCarthy “was a good man and true — better and truer by far than the tag teams of cover-up artists and backstage plotters who connived unceasingly to de-stroy him.”

No serious scholar of the McCarthy era will be able to avoid this compelling and factual account of the valiant senator from Wisconsin. n


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For over 100 years after its founding, the United States avoided foreign aggression, knowing such actions would lead to endless problems. Then we veered off course.

Liberty at Home, Not Crusades Abroad

by Michael E. Telzrow

Watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the vantage point of the British ship where

he was held captive, American patriot Francis Scott Key anxiously spied the star-spangled banner through the dawn’s early light. The moving scene prompted him to put to words a poem he titled “Defence of Fort McHenry.” The fourth stanza of that poem encapsulated the stakes that com-pelled McHenry’s garrison to withstand the might of the British armada and keep the flag flying at all costs:

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand

Between their loved home and the war’s desolution!...

During the War of 1812, freemen did stand, and their stand preserved our beloved coun-try. Key’s stirring words describing that stand at Fort McHenry in 1814 were set to music and are of course known to us as the “Star-spangled Banner,” our National Anthem. And what an anthem it is! Just as Key was moved by personal observation to pen his famous words, one generation of Americans after another has been moved to experience the heartfelt sensations of what it means to be an American by Key’s beautiful words set to music.

America once again finds itself em-broiled in a war, a “modern” war. Instead of defending our country against an en-croaching foreign invader, our men and women in uniform have once again been sent far from home for dubious reasons. The ostensible cause for the Iraq War, recall, was to find and destroy Saddam Hussein’s reputed weapons of mass de-struction. It was not to attack a regime that had attacked us, since Hussein, unlike al-Qaeda, did not have anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack. When the reput-ed WMDs were not found, our war aims shifted to nation building.

President Bush’s interventionist for-eign policy posits that the United States has a unique duty to help Iraqis discover “democracy” amongst the wreckage of Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. For Bush, America is an embodiment of an idea that must be exported through force of arms if necessary, not so much a political or com-munal entity that must be protected. If he

did view our country as a political or com-munal entity, he would have secured our borders long ago.

The notion that American ideals must be exported to other countries is not new, but it was something that our Founding Fathers considered unwise, and it did not provide the rationale for either our War for Independence or the War of 1812.

Francis Scott Key, author of the “Star-spangled Banner,” searches the horizon over Fort McHenry for a sign of victory. in 1814, the beleaguered American garrison withstood an all-night bombardment in defense of the homeland during the second war with Britain.

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— PAST AND PERSPECTIVEHISTORYHISTORY

Put simply, President Bush’s grand stra-tegic vision does not find its roots in the Founding Era. Nonetheless, those roots still go back many years — certainly to the Spanish-American War in 1898, which could arguably be called our first imperialistic war.

But even though America has increas-ingly engaged in foreign interventionism and nation building, there is no reason why we should not or could not once again adopt our traditional foreign-policy doc-trine — where, if we must go to war, it would be for the purpose of defending our own country.

The Founders’ DoctrineOur Founding Fathers and their succes-sors throughout much of the 19th century viewed the United States as a land and cul-ture set apart from the rest of the world. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson believed that our coun-try’s greatness stemmed from what we did at home, not what we might do in faraway lands. The benefits of our constitutional re-public and economic free enterprise were not to be exported to other lands through foreign adventurism, but should instead serve as shining examples to nations that lacked such admirable attributes.

Washington and Hamilton both warned against involvement in foreign wars and intrigues. In his Farewell Address of 1796, Washington cautioned Americans: “Noth-ing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is suf-ficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

Washington asked rhetorically in his Farewell Address: “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by in-tervening our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and pros-

perity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?” Why in-deed? But Washington was not recommending isolation-ism. He supported commer-cial relations, and in general he recommended: “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”

Hamilton echoed Wash-ington’s sentiment against entangling al-liances when he penned a similar admo-nition: “It is very material that while we entertain proper impressions of particular cases of friendly or unfriendly conduc-tion of different foreign nations towards us, we nevertheless avoid fixed and rooted

antipathies against any, or passionate at-tachments for any, instead of these culti-vating, as a general rule, just and amicable feelings towards all.”

The cause for Washington’s and Ham-ilton’s warnings stemmed from unrest in Europe that threatened to spill over into the

The notion that American ideals must be exported to other countries is not new, but it was something that our Founding Fathers considered unwise, and it did not provide the rationale for either our War for independence or the War of 1812.

Before leaving office, George Washington advised his countrymen to avoid entangling the nation’s interests with those of the great European powers. Li

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American continent, as well as England’s refusal to evacuate their frontier forts in the Northwest Territory, and her penchant for impressing American sailors on the high seas. France and Spain were engaged in war, and the seemingly never-ending Ang-lo-French animosities were poised to erupt again in armed conflict. In any case, nei-ther Washington nor his successor Adams wanted to go to war with England or France. Washington knew that the United States was in no position to go to war with Britain, or any other European power. So he pushed for ratification of John Jay’s con-troversial treaty with England which elimi-nated British control of their western forts but forced the United States to relinquish neutrality on the high seas. Under the treaty, American ships suspected of carrying sup-plies to Britain’s enemies were still subject to interdiction by British naval ships, and Jay’s treaty also failed to resolve the issue of impressments of American sailors. Jay was hung in effigy by some Americans who felt his treaty was pro-British, but his treaty did postpone the inevitable conflict with Britain until 1812, at which time the Americans were better prepared.

When John Adams took office in 1797, he faced a popular backlash as a result of what many perceived as Washington’s pro-British policies. Relations with France had deteriorated badly. The French, the saviors of Yorktown, had naturally expected the Americans to come to their aid in their pe-rennial wars with Britain. But the bloody revolution in France and a hardening policy of nonintervention kept the United States from siding with the French. Matters were made worse when French naval privateers began to harass American merchant ships. For two years, America and France fought a quasi-war at sea with U.S. naval ships engaging French vessels when they could. Adams refused to push for a declaration of war, and by 1800, he was successful at working out a new treaty with France in which that country accepted U.S. neutral-ity rights at sea and released it from its mutual defense obligations formed during the War for Independence.

The die had been cast. The United States would not shrink from protecting its interests but it would not pick sides in European conflicts, and the thought of forcibly exporting its governmental virtues or distributing aid abroad was unheard

of. Years later, Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, would write succinctly of the philosophy which would guide America until 1898, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to de-stroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the cham-pion and vindicator only of her own.”

American Liberty the WatchwordAmerican liberty was the watchword which informed and guided Americans during most of the 19th century. It was dur-ing this period that America expanded her borders, fought a civil war, and emerged as a transcontinental power of economic strength unrivaled in the world — all while managing to avoid involvement in conti-nental wars and idealistic foreign policies. Walter McDougall, author of Promised Land, Crusader State: The American En-counter With the World Since 1776, writes that American exceptionalism, unilateral-ism, the Monroe Doctrine (against outside encroachments into our hemisphere), and Manifest Destiny (on behalf of our west-ward expansion) were “designed by the founding fathers to deny the outside world the chance to shape America’s future.”

McDougall argues that American excep-tionalism was never about forcing oth-ers to be like us or about pursuing moral foreign policies. It was about defending the United States from foreign threats. In McDougall’s words it meant, “Liberty at home, not crusades [abroad].”

Manifest Destiny, a term first used in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, was embraced by Americans almost immediately. O’Sullivan argued that the vast tracts of western lands stretching to the Pacific Ocean belonged to the republic “by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us.” Divine Providence had elected the American people, according to O’Sullivan, to spread republicanism and liberty across the conti-nent. Americans believed in Manifest Des-tiny not because they necessarily wanted to bring American-style liberty and gov-ernment to other lands, but because they knew that acquiring these lands would pre-clude foreign interference in their affairs. Manifest Destiny ran up against territorial

James Monroe’s famous foreign-policy doctrine sought to erect barriers to foreign interference in American affairs. it was the culmination of American foreign-policy development that sought to set America apart from the world.

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claims of Britain and Mexico, but Ameri-cans had no desire to export the virtues of a free and republican self-government they wanted the land for other reasons.

America’s territorial expansion led to conflict with Mexico in 1846, after Mexi-co refused an American offer to purchase California. A small skirmish on the Rio Grande in which Mexican troops ambushed American troops led to a declaration of war on May 13, 1846. After decisive vic-tories in California and General Winfield Scott’s daring invasion of Mexico, Mexi-can forces were forced to capitulate. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded the Mexican territories of California and New Mexico to the United States.

Besides adding a sizeable chunk of territory to the United States, the war is notable in a sense that it illustrates Amer-ica’s traditional doctrines of unilateralism and expansionism. At no point did the United States ever contemplate export-ing its republican ideals to the Mexican state. Indeed, there was a rather unseemly belief that the Mexicans were incapable of aspiring to such an advanced level of liberty. McDougall again writes that there was never an impulse “to reform a wicked world.” The war was defensive in nature and part of a wider approach, along with

the Monroe Doctrine, that countered attempts of Euro-pean countries to “come over to America.” The primary objective was to secure and protect America from intru-sion, not to force American ideals upon our southern or northern neighbors.

When America purchased Alaska from a somnolent Russia, it did so for economic reasons and to extend its buf-fer against foreign powers over the North American continent. Contrary to common perceptions, America was engaged not in isolationism but in a vigorous policy of expansionism within its immediate geo-graphical sphere.

Birth of an American EmpireAnd so it remained until the late 19th century, when America broke from its traditional moorings and began to acquire territories beyond its natural and conti-nental borders. More disturbing was the abrupt rejection of the warnings from the Founding Fathers to avoid searching for “monsters to destroy.” America’s war with Spain in 1898 was exactly what Washing-ton, Jefferson, and Adams had managed to

avoid and had warned against. American politicians, including President William McKinley, capitalized on popular sympa-thy for Cubans struggling in a revolution-ary war of independence against Spain to enter the fray. At once Americans who traditionally and wisely avoided foreign conflicts were swept into a war in order to slay a dragon that posed no threat to the United States.

A trumped-up incident involving an en-gine room explosion on the battleship U.S.S. Maine provided the pretext for entering the war. The media and eager politicians were complicit in convincing Americans that the Maine had been sunk by an explosion det-onated by the Spanish in Havana Harbor. The “yellow press” whipped up American

passions with reports of Spanish atroci-ties and on April 25, 1898, McKinley had his formal declaration of war. Author Mark Twain and industrialist Andrew Carnegie de-nounced the unusual intervention as blatant imperialism.

Once again U.S. forces were successful. Admiral Dewey’s im-pressive victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay was followed by victories in Cuba and Puerto Rico. On De-cember 10, 1898, Spain and the United States signed a peace treaty ending the conflict. Spain relinquished its claim to Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico and

John Quincy Adams would write succinctly of the philosophy which would guide America until 1898, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

General Winfield Scott’s amphibious landing at Veracruz in March 1847 was followed by a string of battlefield victories that ended in the conquest of Mexico City. At no time did the United States contemplate exporting its republican ideals to Mexico after achieving victory on the battlefield.

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Guam to the United States. Additionally, the United States acquired the Philippines for $20 million. The latter came with a na-tive insurrection that lasted until 1902 and claimed the lives of 4,234 Americans.

In one fell swoop, America had traded its time-honored traditions that had kept us safe in return for entanglements in foreign wars and native insurrections in a drive for hegemony. It would only get worse, as Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the United States as a world savior was lurking on the horizon.

Wilsonian DoctrineBy 1900, America had adopted a new foreign-policy doctrine that favored an imperialist and interven-tionist approach. Combin-ing themes of racial superi-ority, social progressivism, and a newly defined na-tional destiny, imperialists like Albert J. Beveridge called for “the regenera-tion of the world” through American expansion. Gone was the doctrine of American exceptionalism and neutrality. It was this non-traditional crusading mission that compelled America to enter the First World War.

Woodrow Wilson spoke in terms of mission and Manifest Destiny as he laid out his vision of America in the new century. In Wil-son’s first inaugural speech he spoke of the need for the government to achieve so-cial justice. This translated to America’s role in world

affairs, and Wilson imagined America as the guarantor of justice for all the peoples of the world. Speaking at a memorial service for Marines killed at Veracruz, Mexico, Wilson re-ferred to the slain warriors as Americans “who have gone down to Mexico to serve man-kind if we can find out the way. We do not want to fight the Mexicans. We want to serve the Mexicans if we can.”

When war came to Europe in 1914, Wilson maintained an air of neutrality, but the American financial, diplomatic, and material aid he sent to France and Brit-ain revealed a less-than-neutral approach. When he ran for reelection in 1916, he promised to keep us out of war, but that of course turned out not to be the case. Then, when American troops were sent to Eu-rope, Wilson promised to make the world “safe for democracy” — a not-too-vague admission that American troops would not be used to protect our own country but to build a new global empire.

Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, many other presidents have carried out his doctrine to varying degrees. This particu-

larly includes the current occupant of the White House, George W. Bush, who has repeatedly argued that we must spread de-mocracy globally and who has even used the word “crusade” to describe his Wilso-nian vision.

America’s Founding Fathers had a much more humble understanding of America’s role in global affairs. They hoped that America might serve as a shining example of self-government under the rule of law, guided by a Constitution of self-limiting powers. They were not uncomfortable with the idea of pursuing a foreign policy based purely on national interests — one in which the safety and well-being of the country was central to its doctrine. But they harbored no dreams of exporting our form of government, and the thought that America would someday assume the mantle of savior of the world would have shocked them to their core.

America’s new mission in which it in-creasingly sees itself as the protector and provider of every citizen in the world is a self-destructive endeavor that, if continued, will not only complete the transformation of our great republic to a global empire but will lead to national bankruptcy and the loss of our cherished liberties. n

America’s new mission in which it sees itself as the protector of every citizen in the world is a self-destructive endeavor that, if continued, will not only complete the transformation of our republic to a global empire but will lead to national bankruptcy and the loss of our liberties.

One hundred years of American foreign-policy tradition was swept away when President McKinley asserted American interests in a war for independence between Cuba and Spain. The spoils of war included some far-flung colonies along with a nasty native insurrection in the Philippine islands.

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Fatal Family AffairThe fact that most people who are mur-dered in the United States know the per-son who kills them was becoming all too apparent to a family in El Dorado Hills, California, on January 6 before a neighbor came to their aid.

In a wealthy gated community on that Sunday at 2:20 in the afternoon, a de-pressed, 33-year-old Behnam Pazoki, who was visiting relatives, decided to commit suicide. When the family tried to stop him, “He grabbed a knife and chased terrified relatives into the street,” according to the Sacramento Bee. During his rampage, Pa-zoki stabbed two men. He chased down his uncle Ahmad Pazeky and stabbed him fatally, and while Pazoki was attacking his uncle, he also stabbed another rela-tive, Vahid Seyedin, who tried to come to Pazeky’s aid.

One of the neighbors who had gath-ered to watch the gruesome scene, Sha-hin Kohan, then intervened. Armed with a pistol, he told Pazoki to stop, and then fired two shots in the air. Pazoki, however, just directed his aggression toward Kohan, and so Kohan shot Pazoki, killing him. Ac-cording to a report in a local news venue, edhtelegraph.com, “an armed response by a neighbor to a distress call in the foothills area, even one leading to a fatality, is not all that unusual” because it takes police so long to respond to emergency calls.

A Gun as an EqualizerDonald Robertson of Indianapolis, who suffered a stroke in May and is still recov-ering, and his 12-year-old son were asleep just after midnight on January 10 when he was awakened by the sound of breaking glass. He saw a man outside and, grabbing a shotgun, he went to confront him.

Though Robertson has difficulty mov-ing his left arm, he struggled briefly with the man, later identified as 43-year-old Chester Burkett, and then he shot Burkett in the legs. Robertson, not sure if his shot had struck Burkett, began beating Burkett with the butt of his gun until the butt broke. Then Burkett fled. Robertson shot twice at the fleeing man.

Burkett was caught when he knocked on

the doors of neighboring houses for help. According to IndyChannel.com, Robert-son’s actions were justified under Indiana law because he believed that both his life and his son’s were in danger.

Take TwoIn the late hours of January 23 and the early hours of January 24, two burglars were shot in Memphis, Tennessee, prompting an outburst of glee by some of the city’s residents.

News Channel 3 reported that the first burglary and shooting took place when a man backed his car through the front door of a feed store. An employee was in the store at the time, and he told the driver to stop where he was. When the driver got out of the car, the employee shot him in the leg. The wounded criminal’s accomplice then drove the wounded man to the hospi-tal, where the police caught up.

In the second incident, according to MyEyeWitnessNews.com, a homeowner heard a noise in his garage about 2 a.m. and went to investigate. When he did, an intruder wielding a weedwhacker attacked him. The homeowner shot and killed the burglar.

When an article about the shootings was posted online, the public commentary made clear that the locals are fed up with crime. The first comment pretty much sums up the others: “Score 2 for the good guys! I feel no sympathy for the criminals. If you break into my house, you can ex-pect the same.” In-depth coverage makes clear why the residents feel the way they do. MyEyeWitnessNews.com learned that in the area of the second shooting “around the 800 block of Avalon … there have been 18 home burglaries reported to police in the past month. There have also been 55 assaults, 24 car burglaries, and 12 robberies.”

Not AgainOn January 29, a clerk in a Bosque County, Texas, convenience store saw a man wear-ing shorts and a ski mask coming through the door. The clerk, having been robbed and severely beaten in 2006, wasn’t about

to just allow the apparent criminal to do as he wished. The clerk pulled a gun, and as soon as he verified that the masked man had a weapon, opened fire, hitting the robber in each thigh, forcing the robber to flee.

A short time later, police located the getaway vehicle and arrested 29-year-old Stafford Jones.

After the incident, detectives in Waco, Texas, recognized the similarity between this encounter and one that happened in China Springs at 1:30 a.m. A warrant for Jones’ arrest was issued by China Springs. At the time of these incidents, Jones was out on bond for a robbery arrest from a December incident, according to the Waco Tribune.

They Keep TryingThe Y and M market in Coachella, Cali-fornia, has been robbed three times in four years. In 2002, the owner shot a robber twice, reported mydesert.com.

On December 21, the store was again hit by robbers. Three armed men entered the store at about 11:30 a.m. In response, a store clerk got a gun and fired three shots at the robbers, striking one of them and knocking him down.

The wounded robber’s two companions fled without him, but they didn’t get away successfully. They were involved in a ve-hicular collision, and when they tried to flee the scene of the accident, the driver of the other vehicle followed them. They were arrested.

Relaxed RobbersOn September 27, a group of men walked into the 904 Fashion store in Jacksonville, Florida, and began “stuffing clothes into bags,” reported NewJax4.com. One of the men also pulled a gun and demanded money from the register.

After the clerk gave the men some money, she pulled a gun of her own, but when she didn’t begin firing immediately — because she had forgotten to take off the gun’s safety — the robbers ignored her. Then she got the safety off and began firing, causing the men to flee. n

— kurT williAmseN


“... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” EXERCISING THE RIGHT

The McCain IllusioniTeM: U.S. President George W. Bush, reported Reuters on February 10, “told conservative members of his Republican Party that White House hopeful Sen. John McCain needed to do some work to win them over but he was a ‘true conserva-tive.’” The president “also warned Repub-licans that they would not find a perfect candidate. ‘You’ll never find that person,’ Bush said.”iTeM: Newsweek’s February 18 story on John McCain, emblazoned on the cover with “There Will Be Blood: Why the Right Hates McCain,” was entitled “So Much for a Warm Welcome.” Throughout, the piece attacked conservatives who find fault with McCain’s positions and votes. “As McCain draws closer to the GOP nomination, many leaders of the conser-vative movement have gone into convul-sions,” said the magazine. McCain “is ‘unwilling to bow and kiss the ring’ of his antagonists, says one adviser” cited by Newsweek. John McCain “may, in fact,” contended the magazine, “have a better sense of America’s shifting political mood than his detractors.”correcTion: Neither President Bush nor Newsweek can be considered, by any rea-sonable measure, to be either stalwart con-servatives or reliably supportive of conser-vative positions. So when they agree that John McCain is a true conservative who has his pulse on what is best for the country — and lay into those on the right who disagree — that should be a very large red flag.

McCain’s overall legislative record frequently makes him the favored Repub-lican by left-leaning newspaper editors and Democrats everywhere. The Boston Globe and New York Times would not toss an endorsement to an authentic conserva-tive GOP leader, but they threw out one for McCain. The Times, for example, has been enamored of McCain’s love affair with the global-warming issue and his pro-illegal immigrant stance. This is what the Times means when it gushes over how he has “a record of working across the aisle to de-velop sound bipartisan legislation.”

Yes, he has often worked with Demo-crats — against conservative principles.

He would prefer to play this down while garnering Republican votes but it is true. McCain brandished the same class-war-fare rhetoric as did his partner, Senator Teddy Kennedy (D-Mass.), in their mutu-al effort to oppose the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. (McCain was one of only two Re-publicans to oppose the tax cuts in 2001 and one of three in 2003.) He and Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) pushed through a vicious assault on political free speech in the name of campaign reform (more on this later). And McCain and Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) attempted to choke the free market with legislation against greenhouse gases that carried an estimated price tag of $76 billion annu-ally, which might finish off our ailing economy. He cosponsored with Kennedy and another liberal Democrat, former trial lawyer John Edwards, the so-called Patients’ Bill of Rights. This legislation, as the Club for Growth has pointed out, “allowed the government to impose a set of onerous mandates on insurance cov-erage instead of allowing individuals to make their own decisions about health-care plans in the marketplace.”

The Washington Post, Newsweek’s left-wing sister publication, was quick to deem McCain as the presumptive Republican

candidate. The Post is delighted that so many of McCain’s positions are parallel to liberal Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Whichever of these candidates wins, the Post editorialized, “the next president will not start as a skeptic about the danger posed by global warming, and he or she will favor, not resist, legislation to impose mandatory caps on greenhouse gases, even without an international agreement bind-ing other nations. The next president will support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and vigorous regula-tion of the campaign finance system. The next president, however chastened by the angry debate over illegal immigration, will believe in the need for comprehensive im-migration reform and support the idea of giving those in this country illegally a path to earn legal status.”

Little wonder why McCain met with leading Democrats in 2001 to consider switching political parties. Little wonder why Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) tried to get McCain to be his running mate. What is a wonder is how little these facts are mentioned these days.

So how long will the left-wing media continue promoting McCain? The relatively favorable media treatment, predicts former

Where he stands: John McCain is trying to woo Republican voters with three platforms: he will win the iraq War; he will cut back on government entitlement spending; and he will continue to involve the United States in so-called free-trade agreements. He hopes to snare Democrats with a pro-illegal-immigrant and pro-solar and wind energy stance and an anti-global-warming crusade.

AP

Imag

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longtime CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg, is going to end the second the campaign “starts for real between one Democrat and one Republican. That’s when you’re going to hear stories about ‘Is he too old?’ ‘Is his temper such that he shouldn’t be Presi-dent?’ The media like him because he’s the one who pokes his thumb in Republican and conservative eyes, mostly conservative eyes. But as soon as it’s McCain against Obama or Clinton the media goes over to the other side.”

The left seems to sense this even if some conservatives don’t. Jonathan Chait, senior editor of the liberal New Republic, concludes that conservatives don’t realize the “full extent” of “McCain’s disloyalty.” Writes Chait:

Even though it is in the public rec-ord, McCain’s voting behavior dur-ing Bush’s first term is almost never mentioned in the press anymore. Yet McCain’s secret history is simply astonishing. It is no exaggeration to say that, during this crucial period, McCain was the most effective ad-vocate of the Democratic agenda in Washington.

In health care, McCain co-spon-sored, with John Edwards and Ted Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. He joined Chuck Schumer to sponsor one bill allowing the re-importation of prescription drugs and another permitting wider sale of generic al-ternatives. All these measures were fiercely contested by the health care industry and, consequently, by Bush and the GOP leadership. On the en-vironment, he sponsored with John Kerry a bill raising automobile fuel-efficiency standards and another bill with Joe Lieberman imposing a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emis-sions. He was also one of six Repub-licans to vote against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge....

McCain voted against the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. He co-spon-sored bills to close the gun-show loophole, expand AmeriCorps, and federalize airport security. All these

things set him against nearly the en-tire Republican Party.

McCain in particular set himself up as the monitor of what type of political speech should be officially authorized, under the guise of instituting campaign-finance reform. “Every aspect” of the 2002 Mc-Cain-Feingold law, comments Sheldon Richman, senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, “is without doubt a violation of freedom of speech, among other liberties. McCain has sanctimo-niously insisted he’s only trying to take corruption out of politics — as though that were possible — but in fact he and his allies in this cause are mainly concerned with protecting incumbents from ‘nega-tive’ advertising. The floor debate in the Senate made that abundantly clear.”

Despite this assault on political speech, corruption obviously did not disappear. Indeed, the Arizona senator has placed himself in the position of violating at least the spirit of his own “campaign reform.” McCain evidently expects the voters to forget how, during his 2000 presidential effort, he railed against corporate political contributions, fuming that this was “little more than an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.” The Wall Street Journal, however, has remembered, and recalled not long ago how McCain got the cash to stir his latest campaign from the doldrums. As pointed out by the Journal:

Mr. McCain’s candidacy was by last fall in serious trouble, his campaign coffers having drained away. Desper-ate for cash, the McCain campaign went to the bank for a loan — in this case Fidelity & Trust Bank of Maryland, which lent $3 million on the strength of Mr. McCain’s will-ingness to document his fundraising prowess.

The Arizonan is one of the most influential members of the Senate Commerce Committee, which regu-lates much of American business, and he would remain powerful even

if he lost his Presidential bid. With industries lining up to pay protection money to committee Members, Mr. McCain would not be short of donors to help retire his Presidential cam-paign debt. Subprime he is not.

According to Federal Election Commission regulations, loans to candidates must be made “in the ordi-nary course of business.” That means market interest rates and the same re-payment terms that a similarly situ-ated non-politician borrower would face....

The Senate has strict ethical rules about mixing the powers of office with re-election tactics. Cleta Mitch-ell, a lawyer who specializes in cam-paign finance law, says that by pledg-ing his fundraising lists as collateral, Mr. McCain “used his position in the Senate to receive treatment not available to others.” Other experts disagree that this crossed an ethical line. However, there’s no doubt the November cash infusion helped Mr. McCain survive long enough to com-pete and win in New Hampshire, and ultimately to become the GOP’s pre-sumptive nominee.

The American voters should be able to de-cide for themselves whether a candidate is being unduly influenced by donors or other backers. But McCain anointed him-self the arbiter of that right. Whether the appearance of hypocrisy comes back to haunt him is not yet clear. Still, this ques-tionable loan is more than a little disin-genuous, as is the reputation for straight talk attributed to the Arizona senator.

No, McCain is not a principled conser-vative. He believes in forcing Americans to acquiesce to the whims of politicians. As even his home-state Arizona Republic has acknowledged, McCain “sees nothing untoward about the federal government telling cable TV companies how they have to bundle and sell their wares.”

Similarly, Americans are being pack-aged and sold a sham story about John McCain being a conservative. n

— williAm P. hoAr


Afghanistan is im-mensely distant from what has

always been known as the North Atlantic region. Yet U.S. and other coali-tion forces in Afghanistan are now serving under the auspices of the North At-lantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Those forces were transferred to NATO com-mand in 2003. That transfer of power also placed our Afghanistan military opera-tions under United Nations command since NATO has always been a UN subsid-iary. Hence, once again, NATO is being employed as the UN’s military arm to enforce Security Council resolutions.

Formed in 1949 under Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter, the leaders of the alliance have rarely been forthcoming about NATO being a UN “Regional Arrangement” subject to the world body. But, as membership in the pact was being con-sidered almost 60 years ago, Secretary of State Dean Acheson enthused that NATO is “an essential measure for strengthening the United Nations.” Only 13 senators voted against inserting our nation into the organization and, once the United States was entangled, the (then) 12-nation alliance was launched.

Senator Robert Taft opposed entry into the pact because NATO’s Article 5 pledged all member nations to consider an attack on one as an attack on all. He insisted that the use of the U.S. armed forces should be exclusively “to protect the liberty of our people,” not those of other nations. His plea to fellow sena-tors included criticism of the Truman administration because it “had adopted a tendency to interfere in the affairs of other na-tions, to assume that we are a kind of demigod and Santa Claus to solve the problems of the world, an attitude that is more and more likely to involve us in disputes where our liberty is not in fact concerned.”

After the United States became a NATO founding member in July 1949, American military personnel took up stations in Europe for the stated purpose of countering the Soviet threat to Western Europe. Yet NATO has since grown to include numer-ous nations from the old Soviet bloc, thereby exposing the lie behind the alliance’s supposed raison d’être.

Since its founding, NATO’s real role has been to provide the United Nations with military clout. When President Truman was questioned about sending U.S. forces to Korea in 1950 without a congressional declaration of war, he relied on his newly ac-quired authority to send troops to NATO. Senator Taft termed

this willingness to enforce UN Security Council reso-lutions “a complete usur-pation of the authority to use the Armed Forces of this country.” He predicted that Truman would cancel the Constitution’s grant of power to Congress alone to send the nation to war. U.S. forces in Korea, let us never forget, fought openly under the UN flag. NATO had done its job of help-ing to strengthen the world body. The UN-led Korean War has never been settled and there have been tens of thousands of American

troops stationed in Korea for over 50 years.Anyone who views NATO as a bulwark against communism

should take a look at NATO’s current hierarchy. Such a look would show that Hungarian native Sandor Laborc is chairman of NATO’s intelligence committee, a position he has held since January. A veteran of six years’ service during the 1980s at the KGB’s training center in Moscow, Laborc is now the top NATO official assigned to gather and oversee the alliance’s intelligence. Many in NATO now expect member nations to be less willing to share intelligence data within the alliance.

Laborc’s six years in Moscow were spent at the Dzerzhinsky Academy, a school named for the founder of the bloody USSR secret police. His appointment to this strategically important NATO post even failed to gain approval from his native nation’s national security committee. But he was nevertheless named to the rotating post by Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurc-sany, another “former” communist. An unnamed diplomat from a Western nation told the New York Times, “It would have taken one phone call by the U.S. ambassador to NATO to stop this ap-pointment.” Obviously, that call was never placed.

For decades, any high-level member of the Nazi Gestapo has been shunned, imprisoned, or worse. A veteran of the KGB dur-ing the years of Soviet rule should be treated similarly. The nam-ing of Laborc to the NATO post actually says plenty about the alliance, as well as plenty about its UN parent.

If the United States has any good reasons to continue mili-tary operations in Afghanistan, it should do so under its own flag and under its own leaders. Allowing our forces to be under NATO’s overall command is a betrayal of all who wear the uniform and a constant invitation to our leaders to “strengthen” the UN. Our nation should never have joined NATO, and the same conclusion ought to be reached about having joined its United Nations parent. n

NATO Is a uN Subsidiary


THE LAST WORDBy JohN F. mcmANus

AP

Imag

es

Immigration ReportSince the 1980s, Americans have repeatedly trusted political promises to secure our borders in exchange for amnesty after amnesty. Americans don’t believe the promises anymore; they’re demanding change! This issue tells what steps need to be taken to prevent more unfulfilled promises. (March 3, 2008, 48pp) TNA080303

Nuclear Waste: Not a Problem Did you know that 97 percent of nuclear waste can be recycled as nuclear fuel? That nuclear workers are generally healthier than their peers? That uranium can be held in your bare hands with no ill effects, and that many Americans live atop concentrated uranium ore? The exaggerated dangers of nuclear wastes are keeping us from a plentiful, safe energy source. Read more here. (February 18, 2008, 48pp) TNA080218

Who’s Listening In on You?The debate over whether the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act’s new revision called the Protect America Act is too intrusive on Americans’ privacy skips several fundamental questions: “Did FISA ever protect Americans’ privacy?” and “Is the government actually preventing terrorism by intercepting wholesale communications?” Get the answers here. (March 17, 2008, 48pp) TNA080317

Reining In Spending Is the U.S. economy faltering fast? Yes. Is the U.S. economy doomed? Not if we act quickly and decisively. Read this issue to get the prescription for our ailing economy. (February 4, 2008, 48pp)TNA080204

Special Report: Merger in the MakingThe importance of this special edition on the North American Union cannot be overstated. It tells how U.S. political and business elites are working below the radar to merge the United States, Mexico, and Canada into an entity similar to the European Union — and how it will affect you if they succeed. (October 15, 2007, 48pp) TNA071015

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