April 20, 2013

WATERTOWN POLICE CHIEF: DZHOKHAR KILLED BROTHER BY RUNNING OVER HIM

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by TONY LEE 20 Apr 2013, 3:19 PM PDT 39POST A COMMENT VIEW DISCUSSION

Watertown police chief Edward Deveau said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspected Boston Marathon bomber who was captured alive on Friday, killed his older brother Tamerlan by driving over him and dragging his body through the street with a carjacked SUV Thursday night.

Deveau, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Saturday, said police officers were handcuffing Tamerlan, who had run out of ammunition, when Dzhokhar came at them in a carjacked SUV. Watertown officers were able to get out of the way.

The brothers were armed with pipe bombs, firearms, and explosives and had been in a firefight with officers on Thursday night after they reportedly "assassinated" an MIT police officer. Deveau said a pressure cooker bomb also went off during the firefight, causing a major explosion. The brothers threw explosives at the officers.

Dzhokhar eventually abandoned the SUV, fleeing on foot. He hid in a land-docked boat in a Watertown neighborhood, where law enforcement found him Friday evening.

According to Deveau, a person who had gone out for a walk and noticed a trail of blood leading to the boat called authorities.

When officers first arrived on the scene, Dzhokhar fired at them, and heat-sensing helicopters told law enforcement when there was movement in the boat.

After the initial "heated exchange," Deveau said there were no more shots fired.

Based on Thursday night's shootout, Watertown officers were afraid the younger brother would have explosives strapped to his body. Officers forced him to lift his shirt up so they could see his bare chest to make sure he did not have explosives strapped on him.

Police are not sure what kind of weapons Dzhokhar had, and the crime scene is still live. Deveau said he does not know what is in the boat.

April 19, 2013

Boston Bomber Could Have Been Deported After 2009 Conviction

April 19, 2013 | No Comments

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One of the Chechen terrorists who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings could have been deported years ago after a criminal conviction and the other was granted American citizenship on the 11^th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity to deport Tsarnaev but evidently did not feel he represented a big enough threat.

Adding insult to injury, the other bomber, little brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was rewarded with American Citizenship on September 11, 2012 in Boston, according to JW’s source. The 19-year-old, who is still on the run, was granted asylum in Arlington Virginia on September 27, 2002, JW’s source reveals.

Years before these Chechen terrorists carried out the Boston Marathon bombings Judicial Watch uncovered critical intelligence documents detailing al Qaeda’s activities in Chechnya, including the creation of a 1995 camp—ordered by Osama bin Laden—to train “international terrorists” to carry out plots against Americans and westerners.

The goal, according to the once-classified documents obtained by JW in 2011, was to “establish a worldwide Islamic state capable of directly challenging the U.S., China, Russia, and what it views as Judeo-Christian and Confucian domination.” Further, radical Islamic regimes were to be established and supported everywhere possible, from “sea to sea,” including Chechnya. “Terrorist activities are to be conducted against Americans and westerners…” according to the report issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

In other words, it was only a matter of time before terrorists from the predominantly radical Islamic republic carried out an attack on U.S. soil. Chechnya declared independence from Russia in 1991 and Chechen militants are quite the savvy terrorists because they’ve successfully targeted Moscow with bombings and hostage plots for more than two decades.

In 2004 Chechen Islamic militants attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia and they murdered 380 children, parents, teachers and visitors after holding more than 1,000 captive for three days. Judicial Watch also obtained intelligence documents from the government detailing that terrorist attack. Jointly released by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the October 12, 2004, report analyzes the Beslan terrorist attack with a view toward gleaning lessons for potential attacks on schools in the United States.

There’s no telling how many of these Chechen terrorists have infiltrated the United States or how many opportunities the government has missed to protect the country by deporting them. Osama bin Laden specifically chose Chechnya as a terrorist training camp because it’s an “area unreachable by strikes from the west,” according to the intelligence report obtained by JW years ago.

April 12, 2013

Walter E. Williams Column: Black Unemployment

By Walter E. Williams | April 12, 2013 | 18:53

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A couple of weeks ago, Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson, speaking at The National Press Club, said the nation "would never tolerate white unemployment at 14 and 15 percent." Black unemployment has been double that of white Americans for more than 50 years. The black youth unemployment rate is more than 40 percent nationally. In some cities, unemployment for black working-age males is more than 50 percent. Let's look at this, but first let's look at some history.

From 1900 to 1954, blacks were more active than whites in the labor market. Until about 1960, black male labor force participation in every age group was equal to or greater than that of whites. During that period, black teen unemployment was roughly equal to or less than white teen unemployment. As early as 1900, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites; today it's about 30 percent longer. To do something about today's employment picture requires abandonment of sacred cows and honesty.

The typical answer given for many black problems is racial discrimination. No one argues that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated. But the relevant question is: How much of what we see can be explained by discrimination? I doubt whether anyone would argue that the reason for lower unemployment, higher labor force participation and shorter duration of unemployment among blacks in the first half of the 20th century was that there was less racial discrimination. I also doubt whether anyone would argue that during earlier periods, blacks had higher education and greater skills attainment than whites. Answers must be sought elsewhere.

I was a teenager during the late 1940s, living in North Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing project. Youngsters in my neighborhood who sought after-school, weekend or summer jobs found them. I picked blueberries in New Jersey, caddied at Cobbs Creek Golf Club, shoveled snow for the Philadelphia Transportation Co., delivered packages for a milliner, performed janitorial work at Horn & Hardart restaurant, and huckstered fruits and vegetables. As a high-school student, Christmas employment for me included after-school and weekend work at Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s mail-order house, and one year, I delivered mail for the U.S. Post Office.

Such opportunities for early work experiences are all but gone for today's teens living in Richard Allen homes. A major reason is the minimum wage law, which makes hiring low-skilled workers a losing economic proposition. In 1950, only 50 percent of jobs were covered by the minimum wage law. That meant the minimum wage didn't have today's unemployment effect. Today nearly 100 percent are covered. Today's child labor laws prevent youngsters from working in perfectly safe environments. The minimum wage has destroyed many jobs. That's why, for example, in contrast with the past, today's gasoline stations are self-service and theater ushers are nonexistent.

Then there are super-minimum wage laws, such as the Davis-Bacon Act, which were written for the express purposes of excluding blacks from government-financed or -assisted construction projects. Labor unions have a long history of discrimination against blacks. Frederick Douglass wrote about this in "The Tyranny, Folly, and Wickedness of Labor Unions," and Booker T. Washington did so in "The Negro and the Labor Unions." To the detriment of their constituents, black politicians give support to labor laws pushed by unions and white liberal organizations.

Then there's education. Black youths are becoming virtually useless for the increasingly high-tech world of the 21st century. According to a 2001 report by Abigail Thernstrom, "The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement," many black 12th-graders dealt with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade; they wrote about as well as whites in the eighth grade. The average black high-school senior had math skills on a par with a typical white student in the middle of seventh grade. The average 17-year-old black student could only read as well as the typical white child who had not yet reached age 13. That means an employer hiring the typical black high-school graduate is in effect hiring an eighth-grader.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

April 11, 2013

Sebelius Tries To Blame GOP For Coming ObamaCare Failures

Posted 07:00 PM ET

Health Care: As Democrats grow increasingly worried that ObamaCare will explode on the launch pad just as midterm elections get going, the Obama administration seeks to pin blame on Republicans. Good luck with that.

Earlier this week, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius admitted that she didn't realize how complicated getting ObamaCare off the ground would be.

Sebelius complained that "no one fully anticipated" the difficulties involved in implementing ObamaCare, or how confusing it would be with the public.

She wasn't talking about the massive and impossible task of imposing central planning on one-sixth of the nation's economy.

Instead, she was trying to find a way to blame Republicans for ObamaCare's failures when the inevitable problems start emerging.

Rather than say "let's get on board, let's make this work," recalcitrant Republicans have forced her to engage in "state-by-state political battles," Sebelius said at a Harvard School of Public Health forum. "The politics has been relentless."

So let's see if we get this. Democrats shoved an unpopular, expensive, ill-conceived and poorly written law down the country's throat with no Republican support, and without bothering to see whether states would want to take on the thankless and costly task of helping the feds implement it.

And now that many of these states are rebelling, it's the Republicans' fault?

Sebelius' fellow Democrat, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, had a more accurate take on the problem the administration faces: the law is "probably the most complicated piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress" and "if it isn't done right the first time, it will just simply get worse."

Rockefeller, like a growing number of Democrats, realizes that ObamaCare is shaping up to be a political disaster for the party next November.

The influential Cook Political Report noted earlier this month that almost all of the Democratic insiders they talked to "voiced concern about the potential for the issue to hurt Democrats in 2014."

And just what could explain these concerns?

Maybe it's because even Sebelius now admits that ObamaCare will force insurance claims up 32%.

Or possibly it's because, despite endless assurances that the insurance exchanges would be ready on time, the administration had to delay for a year a key feature meant to give small business a choice of health plans.

Or because neither Sebelius nor the states have provided evidence they can get the rest of the exchanges ready by Oct. 1, when ObamaCare's open enrollment begins.

Or perhaps Democrats' fears stem from state insurance commissioners warning of a rate shock once ObamaCare's "community rating" rules and benefit mandates start. Or from rising evidence the law is hurting job growth as small businesses try to avoid its costs.

None of this, mind you, has anything to do with Republicans. And if the GOP were smart, it'd be focused on making sure that, come next November, the public knows that, too.

April 6, 2013

ISSUE BRIEF #3893

Heritage Employment Report: March Job Market Goes Out Like a Lamb

By James Sherk and Salim Furth, Ph.D.

April 5, 2013

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report for March had some silver linings, but overall the report was disappointing. Employers added a net of only 88,000 new jobs, and labor force participation dropped sharply. The labor force drop caused the unemployment rate to fall by 0.1 percentage point to 7.6 percent despite the low job gains. However, revisions to the January and February reports found better job creation than previously estimated.

Labor force participation dropped to 63.3 percent, the lowest rate since 1979. BLS estimates that the U.S. civilian population has increased by 2.4 million during the past year, but only 300,000 have entered the labor force.

One of the most significant features of the report was what it did not find. Government employment barely changed despite the implementation of sequestration. Government jobs declined in March due to job losses in the Postal Service, a long-term trend driven by electronic communications. Thus far, sequestration has had little noticeable effect on government payrolls. To the extent the slowdown can be attributed to government policy, the January tax increase is a more likely culprit.

March Employment Report

Both the payroll and household surveys found the labor market softening in March.[1] The payroll survey found that the economy added only 88,000 net new jobs, a sharp drop from the 268,000 added in February. Job growth was modest across the board, with moderate expansions in professional and business services (+51,000) and health care (+28,000) representing the largest gains. There was more tepid growth in construction (+18,000) and in leisure and hospitality (+17,000). Retailers posted significant job losses (–24,000), and government employment also fell slightly (–7,000).

Average weekly hours edged up slightly (+0.1) to 34.6 hours, while average wages increased by just one cent an hour. One bright spot in the payroll survey was the revisions to previous months. Newer data show that 61,000 more jobs were created in January and February than previously reported. Revisions to the March numbers could show a similar increase over the disappointing initial figures.

The household survey found unemployment falling 0.1 percentage point to 7.6 percent—its lowest level since 2008. However, this drop occurred entirely because people left the labor market. The labor force decreased by almost half a million (–496,000) despite considerable population growth. As a result, the household survey found both the number of Americans with jobs (–206,000) and the number of those unemployed and looking for jobs (–290,000) falling. The household survey reported lower unemployment only because people stopped looking for work. It did not find lower unemployment because of more people working.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout the recovery, as Chart 1 shows. While unemployment has fallen, the overall proportion of the population with jobs has not increased. The unemployment rate has fallen 0.6 percentage point since March 2012 (from 8.2 percent to 7.6 percent). The employment-to-population ratio has remained unchanged at 58.5 percent over that time. Unemployment is falling without employment increasing.

Part of this can be blamed on the aging of the baby boomers, more of whom are reaching retirement age each year, but falling labor force participation is occurring even among prime-age Americans. Over three-fifths of the drop in unemployment among 25-to-54-year-olds is due to decreasing labor force participation. Only two-fifths occurred because of increasing employment. Even workers who are not able to retire are dropping out of the labor force in large numbers. The labor market remains far weaker than the headline unemployment rate suggests.

Little Sequester Effect

It is too soon to tell whether March’s meager job numbers tell us anything about recent federal policy changes. Some will want to lay the poor jobs report at the feet of federal budget sequestration, which took effect on March 1.[2] If the report had shown a large drop in federal employment, that might be justified. However, the only large losses in government were at the troubled U.S. Postal Service (–12,000), which has been in decline since the advent of e-mail. (The Postal Service was unaffected by sequestration.[3])

State and local governments had good news in the new jobs report. The positive revision to February’s job growth came mainly from state and local education (+25,000), and March figures show very little change in government employment at any level.

Instead, the sector with the worst news was retail trade (–24,000), particularly stores selling clothing, electronics, and building and garden supplies. Perhaps the expiration of the temporary payroll tax cut, which lowered take-home pay for most families by at least 2 percent, is catching up with consumers. The tax increases that took effect on January 1 were much larger than the spending cuts associated with sequestration, as Chart 2 illustrates.

International evidence indicates that when deficit reduction is needed, as it is in the U.S., spending cuts are much less harmful than tax increases.[4] In fact, large tax increases often lead to larger budget deficits because they hurt the economy, raise less revenue than hoped, and indirectly lead to higher government spending. Instead of drawing conclusions from one month of bad data, policymakers should pay attention to the deeper trends. If job growth continues to lag behind population in April and beyond, this month may be seen as a turning point. Otherwise, it will remain a blip on the larger trends of this bleak recovery.

Keep Cutting Spending

The U.S. needs to end the government spending binge of the past five years and return the economy to the growth of the private sector. Washington can often be shortsighted and tempted to boost short-term jobs numbers at the expense of long-run growth. The huge increase in federal spending and transfers during the recession failed to keep unemployment down as proponents of big government claimed it would. Now, the massive deficits of 2008–2012 have led Washington to adopt harmful tax increases and poorly executed spending cuts.

The sequestration cuts should be replaced—and increased. Sanity in Washington means spending federal revenue on high-priority items and allowing the economy to grow and flourish. Gimmicky short-term measures (pitched under the Panglossian name “stimulus”) will not succeed in bringing Americans back to the labor force. Only sustained growth can reverse the labor force losses of the past five years.

—James Sherk is Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics and Salim Furth, PhD, is Senior Policy Analyst in Macroeconomics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation.

[1]The payroll survey comes from a sample of employers. The household survey is a direct sample of households that are asked questions about their employment status as well as personal characteristics such as age, sex, race, education, and disability. The 90 percent confidence interval for the payroll survey is +/–100,000 jobs, while the confidence interval for the number of unemployed in the household survey is +/–280,000 people.

[2]Amy Payne, “Obama Fulfills DeMint’s Prediction, Blaming Sequester for Future Economic Problems,” The Heritage Foundation, The Foundry, March 1, 2013,http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/01/obama-fulfills-demints-prediction-blaming-sequester-for-future-economic-problems/.

[3]Ginger Gibson and Darren Samuelson, “Sequester Survivors,” Politico, March 3, 2013,http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/sequester-survivors-88329.html (accessed April 5, 2013).

[4]See Salim Furth, “Research Review: Spending Cuts Are Better Than Tax Increases,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 3868, March 5, 2013,http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/03/spending-cuts-are-better-than-tax-increases.

People Not In Labor Force Soar By 663,000 To 90 Million, Labor Force Participation Rate At 1979 Levels

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/05/2013 08:58 -0400

Things just keep getting worse for the American worker, and by implication US economy, where as we have shown many times before, it pays just as well to sit back and collect disability and various welfare and entitlement checks, than to work .The best manifestation of this: the number of people not in the labor force which in March soared by a massive 663,000 to a record 90 million Americans who are no longer even looking for work. This was the biggest monthly increase in people dropping out of the labor force since January 2012, when the BLS did its census recast of the labor numbers. And even worse, the labor force participation rate plunged from an already abysmal 63.5% to 63.3% - the lowest since 1979! But at least it helped with the now painfully grotesque propaganda that the US unemployment rate is "improving."

People not in labor force:

Labor participation rate:

Average:

April 4, 2013

ALEXANDER'S COLUMN

A Jerk Java Jolt for 'Gay Marriage'

The Latest Cultural Entropy Entries

By Mark Alexander · April 4, 2013

"Marriage is ... in its origin a contract of natural law. ... It is the parent, and not the child of society; the source of civility and a sort of seminary of the republic." --Justice Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws)

There's never a dull moment when it comes to Leftist miscreants endeavoring to dismantle Liberty and the very culture that has sustained it since our Founding. This week was no different, especially in regard to the disoriented gender crowd.

First, there was news that the somewhat Reverend Luis Leon used his "Easter sermon" pulpit as a political soapbox for the Obama clan attending St. John's Episcopal Church. "It drives me crazy," Leon lamented, "when the captains of the religious right are always calling people back, never forward, forgetting that we are called to be a pilgrim's people. The captains of the religious right are always calling us back, back, back. For blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet and for immigrants to be on their side of the border." (Somebody call the IRS and have them revoke St. John's non-profit status!)

For that remark, Leon received our Non Compos Mentis Award Monday. Of course, Leon is no Jeremiah "G-d Damn America" Wright, who spewed the sort of awful, divisive, America-hating sermons that now largely inform Obama's worldview.

Next came the news that another lynch mob was gathering to hang Dr. Ben Carson, who was already under fire for having delivered a bold and unapologetic defense of Christian morality at the National Prayer Breakfast -- with Obama scowling a few feet away at the head table. (So much for the Left's support of those who speak truth to power.)

Typical of the assault on Carson, who is black, was this observation from one of MSNBC's talkingheads, who claimed Dr. Carson is an Uncle Tom for conservatives, their "new black friend" who is "helpful in assuaging their guilt."

The Leftmedia is quick to brand any black citizen who departs the ObamaNation Plantationssimilarly. (See Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Allen West, Tim Scott, Ward Connerly et al.) Of liberals, Carson says, "They're the most racist people there are because they put you in a little category, a box. 'How could you dare come off the plantation?'"

Apparently Dr. Carson, a brilliant neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, offended a minuscule but very vocal minority this week when he defended the traditional Judeo-Christian context for marriage -- a historic definition consistent with every religion on the planet. Carson said, "Well, my thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman. It's a well-established, fundamental pillar of society, and no group -- be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are -- they don't get to change the definition."

How dare he mention homosexuals in the same sentence with pedophiles and other sexual miscreants -- even though NAMBLA is, by its very definition, a homosexual group which predates on young boys.

Students at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine are protesting a scheduled speech by Dr. Carson at this year's commencement, claiming his views are "deeply offensive to a large proportion of our student body."

Post Your Opinion

(Sidebar: In other news from Hopkins, the Student Government Association has declined to allow the formation of a pro-life group, Voice for Life, but has approved a Students for Justice in Palestine group. An SGA memo, leaked to the media, compared Voice for Life with a white-supremacist group.)

I have met Dr. Carson, the subject of the TV movie, Gifted Hands, about his rise from abject material poverty to the pinnacle of the neurosurgical profession. His character and devotion to fellow Americans is unimpeachable.

Responding to the protests, Carson said, "They want to shut us up completely, and that's why the attacks against me have been so vicious. I represent an existential threat to them. They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me. They can't find anything else to delegitimize me, so they take my words, misinterpret them, and try to make it seem that I'm a bigot."

Next came news that a Salt Lake City School Board is booting Cub Scouts out of elementary schools because of the Boy Scouts of America policy prohibiting "avowed homosexuals" from holding Scout leadership positions.

Responding to the assault on the BSA, Texas Governor Rick Perry, an Eagle Scout, said at a rally, "There is this very vocal, very litigious minority of Americans willing to legally attack anybody who dares utter a phrase or even a name that they don't agree with. In a twisting of logic, they insist on silencing the religious in the cause of tolerance. Now I ask you, where is the tolerance in that?"

Next came news that Howard Schultz, who heralds over the Starbucks java empire, was confronted at the company's annual meeting by a shareholder who objected to Schultz's imposition of his Leftist politics on the entire company and its shareholders by way of a formal memorandum supporting "gay marriage."

Schultz told the stockholder, "You can sell your shares of Starbucks and buy shares in another company ... thank you very much."

OK, that last item wasn't "news," because virtually nobody reported it.

Of course, that wasn't the case last July when the MSM went into hysterics because Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy humbly professed his support for the traditional family: "We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that. ... We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that. ... We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles."

Cathy's remarks led to a failed national boycott against Chick-fil-A, and inspired Leftist mayors like Boston's Tom Menino and Chicago's Rahm Emanuel, chief among Obama's legions of faith-intolerant politicos, to declare they would keep Chick-fil-A out of their cities by refusing to issue the company new building permits. (An adoring media seemed more than happy to ignore the unconstitutional nature of that threat.)

I should note here, one major difference between Starbucks and Chick-fil-A: The former is a publicly held company, which is to say that when it registers support for a political platform, it does so on behalf of all its stockholders, many of whom undoubtedly object. Chick-fil-A, on the other hand, is a very successful privately held company. The chairman speaks for himself and his family, not for millions of shareholders.

Starbucks stock is currently trading near record highs, not because the coffee is so good -- in my humble opinion it is not. I dumped Starbucks years ago, as a matter of taste, not social policy. I enjoyed the premium beans before the company became a huge coffee cash cow. I now find their product no better than the low quality, over-roasted beans next to them on grocery shelves.

Post Your Opinion

Starbucks stock is soaring because Schultz closed some 900 U.S. stores in recent years, laying off tens of thousands of employees. Now, his job is, rightly, to make a profit for his stockholders by keeping their company profitable. The realignment certainly did that, and apparently that worked out well for Schultz, whose total annual compensation in 2012 was $28,909,800.

So, what is one to make of the "gay marriage" agenda now?

If you want some perspective, consider reading "Gender Identity, The Homosexual Agenda and The Christian Response," a brief but comprehensive commentary I wrote on the subject a few years ago. Nothing has changed since then, other than homosexuals now have a CINC -- a Cheerleader in Chief to drive public opinion in their direction.

Marriage is the foundation for the family, which in turn is the foundation for society. But marriage, as an institution, is currently under vicious assault from many quarters, one of the most menacing being the homosexual challenge to its historic definition. The consequences for Liberty are dire.

Regarding the biblical context for marriage, my colleague Dennis Prager wrote this week, "I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American -- indeed a modern Westerner, period -- can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom. I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral. I say this because there is nothing -- not any religious or secular body of work -- that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world."

Post Your Opinion

Regarding the natural state of marriage, and the implications of its redefinition to Liberty, another colleague, Terence Jeffrey, wrote, "The Founding Fathers of this nation not only believed in the natural law created by God, but insisted it was the justification for the United States becoming a nation. The 'Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,' they said, 'to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station' of an independent state. ... A state that no longer recognizes that it is subservient to the Laws of Nature and Nature's God will also no longer recognize the God-given rights of individuals. In such a state, there will only be those privileges the powerful decide to grant us -- until they decide to take them away."

In his farewell address to the nation, George Washington wrote, "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indespensible supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness -- these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. ... [L]et us with caution indulge the opposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Footnote: For additional context, watch this video clip of Capital Tea Party member Doug Mainwaring, who is openly homosexual, but recently spoke out against "same-sex marriage" at the National Organization for Marriage's rally on the National Mall.

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis

Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post

April 2, 2013

A photo of Steven Goff from his Facebook page. Goff of Atlantic County was 18 when he allegedly stabbed and killed a 15-year-old. He just turned himself in Monday, nearly 23 years after the slaying. / Facebook

FILED UNDER

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP — An Atlantic County man has turned himself in to police nearly 23 years after he allegedly stabbed and killed a 15-year-old.

Steven Goff, 41, of Ventnor surremdered to Galloway Township police around 6 a.m. Monday and was subsequently charged with the murder of 15-year-old Frederick Hart, the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office announced this morning.

Goff is accused of stabbing the teen multiple times in the woods behind Clubs Condominiums in Galloway Township on May 7, 1990, authorities said. Goff was 18 at the time of the attack.

Hart was reported missing on May 8, the day after he was killed, authorities said. It wasn’t until December 1991 that a hunter discovered human remains in the woods. The remains were later identified as Hart’s but a cause of death was never determined.

Goff now faces one count of murder and one count of possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, authorities said.

Goff, held on $1 million cash bail, is scheduled to appear in Superior Court in Atlantic County at 1:30 p.m. today.

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