Get. This. Book.

This book.  Right here.  Get it.
Now you know what it looks like.
You have no excuses.

I remember driving to work the day after Obamacare passed.  I thought about the obnoxious Hillary Clinton pushing nationalized health care nearly 20 years earlier, and how widely -- and rightly -- derided she and her pure federal power grab were then.  I thought about this immense bill, read by nobody, containing God-knows-what, being ramrodded through Congress with little or no deliberation and without regard to what the American people thought about it.  I thought about the unconstitutionality, and even anti-constitutionality of this bill that purports to give the federal government sway over every crack and crevice of our lives, far beyond its constitutionally enumerated powers.  Driving through downtown Boise, I looked around at the shops and restaurants and other little businesses that line Main Street, and the people walking or biking or driving to work.  Everything looked the same as before.  But it was not the same.  The country was not the same.  The realization lay like a dead darkness on the heart.  A line had been crossed.  We had been edging closer and closer to that line for at least the last century, until the Reagan Era, when we retreated from it for a while; but then, after Reagan left office, we hurtled back toward it.  Now, on March 24, 2010, we had crossed it.  We had crossed over into territory that looked like the America we had grown up in, but really was not.

Of course, even the America that my Generation X grew up in was nothing like as free as the one the previous generation grew up in, which was nothing like as free as the one the generation before knew.  Thanks to the New Deal and the Great Society, the burgeoning administrative state was already going full bore by the time Generation X came along.  Now, as GenXers approach middle age, the statists no longer even bother with the rhetoric of liberty.  After decades of pushing abortion and contraceptives, breaking up the family, clearing the way for us to indulge our lusts without restraint, and training schoolkids in veiled Marxist ideology and the Marxist version of history, they consider it safe to proceed openly with their takeover of our lives, without caring what we think about it.  This is the judgment we have brought upon ourselves for scorning the laws of God and man, unmooring ourselves from our Christian and constitutional roots.

In other words, we had it coming.  But does that mean we should just give up, resign ourselves to the punishment, and let our nation be destroyed?  By no means.  Indeed, we have a duty to try to extricate ourselves from our current predicament, exhausting every lawful means available short of violence.  Mark Levin's new book, The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic, points out a solution that our Founding Fathers left us, foreseeing a day when the federal government would get to be too big for its britches.

Article V of the U.S. Constitution contains procedures for amending the Constitution.  It provides (emphasis added):

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article [dealing with powers denied to Congress]; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Levin proposes a convention, called by two thirds of the states, for the purpose of proposing amendments to the Constitution.  This means of amending the Constitution has been attempted, without success, on numerous occasions, and currently lies dormant.  But the Framers included it, precisely so that the States could have recourse against a federal government run amuck.  The Article V convention is not a constitutional convention that makes the whole Constitution up for grabs: the Constitution itself does not provide for its own abolition.  But then, the Constitution is effectively already up for grabs, and has been for decades.  Large swathes of it, such as the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, have been completely laid waste; other parts, such as the Commerce Clause, have been distorted beyond all reason and sense until they are wholly alien to what the Framers intended.  The point of Levin's plan is to restore the Constitution as a guarantor of liberty instead of the curtailer of it that the statists have made it; to breathe life back into its now dead letters; and, above all, to restore the sovereignty of the States, and rescue them from their current status as mere vestigial appendages of the federal government.

Levin is careful to point out that his plan is not meant to be a panacea, or definitive.  His plan does not address important social and moral issues that could, and should, be the subject of proposed amendments to the Constitution, such as the legal personhood of the unborn and the definition of marriage.  Instead, though not incompatible with the foregoing, it focuses on systemic, root problems that have overthrown the Framers' carefully constructed system of checks and balances and led to the consolidation of tyrannical power in Washington and the diminution of individual liberty.  In broad outline, he proposes the following amendments:

-- Term limits on members of Congress

-- The repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment (popular election of Senators)

-- Term limits on Justices of the Supreme Court and supermajority legislative overrides of Supreme Court decisions

-- Restrictions on federal spending

-- Restrictions on federal taxation

-- Restrictions on the federal bureaucracy

-- Restrictions on Congress' power to regulate commerce

-- A requirement of compensation for regulatory takings 

-- Authority for the States directly to amend the Constitution

-- A State check on acts of Congress

-- A voter fraud amendment

Levin makes no bones about how difficult and time-consuming it will be to get a State amendment convention going; nor does he ignore the problem of blue States.  But, fortunately, the level of society where the process must start is also that which is most accessible to us: first ourselves, then our families and friends, then our local communities.  A huge part of the strategy of totalitarians is the isolation and atomization of individuals: to keep us at each other's throats by means of imaginary grievances; to abolish long-standing mores and traditions; and to remove any and all institutions -- family, Church, local government, State government -- that stand as a buffer between centralized government and the individual.  We need to begin the work of restoring these.  People who live in liberal-dominated wastelands like Detroit have got to decide they are tired of living in a hell-hole, and then do something about it; those of us whose cities do not yet look like Detroit need to decide we don't want to see ourselves heading in that direction, and do something to avoid it.  When we have turfed the liberal bums out of our local and state governments, and replaced them with politicians who revere the rule of law and the Constitution, the momentum toward a convention will grow.  We should not be deterred from having recourse to this method of amending the Constitution merely by the fact that it has never been done before, or by the fear of a runaway convention.  The reality right now is that we already have a runaway federal government, and something has got to be done about it, before it destroys us.

On the eve of the Battle of the Bulge, General George S. Patton said there are three ways men get what they want: planning, working and praying.  Some of us have been praying, and there needs to be a lot more of that going on.  Levin's book gives us a pretty good start on the planning.  Now is the time to start working.

A Hole in Three in One

That's one less modernist stained-glass window!  Pic courtesy of Br. Peter Hannah, O.P.

Meet the Rev. Br. Peter Junipero Hannah, O.P., transitional deacon, who we hope will be one-sixth of the future founding fathers of Idaho's first Dominican priory.  The Bl. Margaret of Castello chapter just had Br. Peter come here and give us a world-class retreat, along with Fr. Vincent Kelber, O.P., whom we'd like to have as another Idaho one-sixther.  Despite the fact that it was late July, with temperatures at over 100, and our swamp cooler was not working very well, Br. Peter gave us conferences in full habit, including the heavy black cappa and capuce.  His talks were so good that he did not require the club to guarantee our undivided attention.

But Br. Peter wasn't always aware of a religious vocation, or on the track to the priesthood, to which he will be ordained next May.  He didn't even start out as a Catholic.  His prime ambition before entering the Catholic Church was...golf!

Read the whole story of how God plucked Br. Peter Hannah from the fairway and set him in The Way here.

The Great Communicator...

They just don't make 'em like this anymore.

Prayer for Those Who Have Committed Suicide

Almighty God, Our Heavenly Father, we understand that Thy fifth commandment, “Thou shalt do no murder,” includes self murder. But in Thy divine mercy, we beg Thy forgiveness especially for (name), who have been so confounded by the pressures of this life that they felt there was no way they could continue. Grant, we beseech Thee, that they be forgiven their terrible sin and accepted into Thy divine providence, and that they may come to understand Thy ways and Thy nature. We ask this in Jesus Christ’s name. Amen.

When I was in high school, the brother of one of my classmates committed suicide.  I did not know him personally, but I did know that he had been having problems for a long time.  His tragic death haunted me for a long time.  I pondered what could make someone seek such an irreversible solution to his problems.  I thought about his friends and family blaming themselves, replaying over and over again in their minds all their dealings with him, and what they could possibly have done differently, or said differently, or not done or said, so that he would not have taken himself away from them forever.  I hoped, and still hope, that his will and reason were so impaired and overwhelmed as to mitigate or even remove his guilt.  I hope this any time I hear about someone taking his own life.

Years later, I had someone tell me he was planning on killing himself at some indefinite point in the future.  All I could think to do was to tell him that there is a hell, and if he murdered himself, he would go there, and that, once there, there would be no escape or reprieve for him, ever.  I do not know whether that was the right thing to say.  But I felt convinced that he needed to be convinced that suicide is indeed murder, and that eternal damnation was a possible and very real outcome.  I suspect there are many people to whom this has never occurred, for no other reason than that nobody has ever told it to them.  There is hardly anyone, even in the pulpits, willing to gainsay our materialistic culture that celebrates death as the solution to everything from depression to unwanted pregnancies to terminal illness.  We are given the impression that our lives and our bodies are mere chattels to save or spend as we please, and that there is neither punishment nor reward after this life.

But there is a Final Judgment.  There is a Heaven.  And there is a Hell.  

Thanks to Marge Fenelon for publishing this prayer.  Pray to Mary, Untier of Knots, to intercede for those contemplating suicide.

I, Pencil

Why do command economies consistently fail? Because radical egalitarians, lofty in their disdain for free people enjoying an industrialized leverage on life, consistently fail to learn the lesson of the lowly pencil.

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Read and ponder the rest of "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" (1958) to find out more about the amazing history of a single pencil and how it relates to human freedom.

H/T Mark Levin.

The Cruise Ship of Peter

The modern world, which denies personal guilt and admits only social crimes, which has no place for personal repentance but only public reforms, has divorced Christ from His Cross; the Bridegroom and Bride have been pulled apart. What God hath joined together, men have torn asunder. As a result, to the left is the Cross; to the right is the Christ...The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces....Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears.  

Ven. Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

This weekend, I had the joy of attending Low Mass in the Dominican Rite, for the feast of St. Vincent de Paul; then a Novus Ordo Vigil Mass for Sunday celebrated ad orientem.  But it all had to be paid for this morning, when I found myself at a Mass with muzak-like campfire ditties played on piano and bass guitar and bongos and cymbals and tinkly chimes; girl altar servers with loose hair and flip-flops; people encouraged to socialize with each other instead of getting recollected for Mass; a priest improvising Mass parts; the canon gone through hastily and almost carelessly; and applause at the end for Murph and the Magictones, followed by raucous yakking inside the church.

Such is the Cruise Ship of Peter, the favorite fantasy of so many Catholics, even in the hierarchy.

Unlike the Barque of Peter, constantly under assault and in danger of sinking, yet manfully plowing forward through rough seas, the Cruise Ship of Peter is nice.  Its worship is uncontroversial.  It is bland.  It is insipid.  It is jejune.  It is decadent.  It is effeminate.  It kindles no fires, stirs no ardor, pricks no consciences.  Its lifeblood is mediocrity.  It docks at any old port, and will strike any old compromise to do so.  It insulates man from the uncomfortable mystery of the supernatural, and protects him from transports of zeal.  There is little enough to distinguish it from any other organization calling itself a church, or even from secular society: its very furnishings are precisely those of a posh country club.  That is why it always has smooth sailing, at least for as long as this serves the purposes of the prince of this world.  Even when sailing is not smooth, the ship is so grand and luxurious that nobody on board notices.  One leaves the liturgy on the cruise ship feeling as though one has just been to a really nice wine and cheese reception.  With its affluence and its amphitheater layout and its cushioned pews and its polished wood and its orchestra pit next to the sanctuary and its soothing, tranquilizing liturgy, the Cruise Ship of Peter is all ordered, down to the smallest detail, with a view to sealing up Catholics in a soft, warm cocoon of niceness and upper-class comfort, making them forget, or even filling them with friendly feelings toward, the pirates and cutthroats that smile back from their little boats that nevertheless daily increase and close in.

All are welcome aboard the Cruise Ship of Peter -- they even have a song about it that they sing at the beginning of Mass! -- all, that is, except anyone who might rock the boat.  What might the Cruise Ship do, one is tempted to wonder, with a Francis of Assisi, or a Dominic de Guzman, or a Catherine of Siena, or an Alphonsus Liguori, or a Fulton Sheen?  Would they have to walk the plank?  How much has the Cruise Ship liturgy to do with immemorial tradition?  Does it inspire missionaries and fortify martyrs?  Does it remotely resemble the Masses of Aquinas, wrapped in awe; or those of the Recusants in Elizabethan England, where it was death to be a priest; or of Father Willie Doyle on makeshift altars in the muddy trenches of the First World War; or of the Cristeros in their secret refuges from the Masonic Mexican regime; or of the first and only Mass celebrated by Bl. Karl Leisner, secretly ordained in Dachau on Gaudete Sunday, 1944, desperately ill yet on fire for souls?  Can one picture Father Augustine Tolton on board, his soul blazing like a beacon from the crumbling lighthouse of his overworked body, his trembling hands raised amid the mellow strains of "On Eagle's Wings"?

Is it worth it to try to trade the Barque of Peter in for this new luxury model?  Does the Cruise Ship of Peter connect Catholics to their illustrious past?  Does it prepare Catholics to meet their adversaries in battle in these increasingly stern times?  Is it counter-cultural?  Does it provide Catholics with a distinctive identity apart from the secular society?  Does it actively promote unity, rather than Balkanization, of Catholics of differing ethnic and linguistic backgrounds?  Does it make Catholics know that we are not of the world, though we are in it?

Or does it merely fatten and soften up the sheep for the slaughter?

You decide.

Unmistakable Fervor: Servant of God Augustine Tolton

The face of an angel: Servant of God Augustine Tolton (1854-1897).

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.  Luke 1:52

Augustine Tolton began life on a Missouri plantation as the son of Catholic slaves and the property of Catholic slaveholders, five years before the last slave ship landed on the shores of the United States.  After the Civil War began, his father escaped to join the Union Army; years would pass before the family learned that he had died soon afterward.  His mother , who had been taken away from her parents as a teenager, feared that her own three children would be taken from her, so she spirited them away to Quincy, Illinois in 1862.  

Amid trials and tribulations, and the death of his older brother, Charley, Augustine and his family made a life for themselves in the black district of Quincy.  Augustine found a friend and protector in the pastor of his local parish, Fr. Peter McGirr, who saw to it that the devout boy got a good Catholic education.  It was Fr. McGirr who discussed with him the possibility of his having a priestly vocation.  Augustine found more friends among priests and religious, and distinguished himself by his devotion, his diligence in his daily responsibilities at work and school, and his zeal for souls.  However, being black, he could not get into any seminaries in the United States.  Eventually, armed with his determination to become a priest and the help of his priestly patrons, Augustine secured a place as a seminarian at the Collegium Urbanum de Propaganda Fide in Rome.  On April 26, 1886, Holy Saturday, Augustine Tolton became Father Augustine Tolton, and celebrated his first Mass the next day, Easter Sunday, at St. Peter's Basilica.  The man who had begun his life as the legal property of men, and taken himself away from his human masters at the age of eight, now gave himself, body and soul, to his Divine Master and His Church.

At the time Fr. Tolton attended seminary at the Propaganda, part of the deal was that a seminarian had to promise, under oath, to work in any mission field in the world where the Church might send him.  Young Augustine expected to be sent to Africa, and even studied the languages and cultures of the various parts of Africa where he might be sent.  However, the day before his ordination to the priesthood, he was given the startling news that instead, he was to be sent back to his home diocese.  Remembering his escape from slavery and the bad treatment he had received at home on account of his negritude, Augustine received this news with disappointment and misgivings.  

But Fr. Tolton put away his apprehension and returned home to Quincy, Illinois.  There he rejoined his friends and benefactors from the old days and built up a parish and Catholic school for blacks, St. Joseph's.  Although the school was for black children, both whites and blacks attended the church, and the white parishioners helped keep both running with their contributions.  Sunday after Sunday, his church was packed.

Unfortunately, racism again reared its ugly head in the person of the dean of the Diocese who, as head of another parish in Quincy, was jealous of the white parishioners who flocked to Fr. Tolton for the Sacraments and for spiritual advice, and with many dollars to contribute to the black apostolate.  This priest made life miserable for Fr. Tolton, and succeeded in getting his ministry restricted to only black Catholics.  

Eventually, after several appeals to Rome, Fr. Tolton was able to secure permission to move to the Archdiocese of Chicago, where, with financial assistance from Mother Katherine (now St. Katherine) Drexel, he began work on the city's first black parish.  Once he had suitable lodgings, he brought his mother and younger sister to live with him.  His mother served as housekeeper, sacristan and chorister and was known in the parish as Mother Tolton.  Fr. Theodore Warning, a priest of the Archdiocese of Dubuque, spent the summer of 1896 with Fr. Tolton while he attended a summer session at the University of Chicago, and gives us a glimpse of his private life:

They lived in a poorly furnished but very clean house.  The meals were simple affairs.  Father Tolton, his mother and I sat at a table having an oil cloth cover.  A kerosene lamp stood in the middle.  On the wall directly behind Father Tolton's place hung a large black rosary.  As soon as the evening meal was over, Father Tolton would rise and take the beads from the nail.  He kissed the large crucifix reverently.  We all knelt on the bare floor while the Negro priest, in a low voice, led the prayers with deliberate slowness and with unmistakable fervor.

Fr. Tolton worked hard to minister to his flock: celebrating Mass and the Sacraments; making the rounds of his parish, visiting tenements and hovels; giving religious instruction.  He was still a young man, but the hard work sapped his strength.  His parishioners noticed that his hands shook when distributing Holy Communion, and that he had to sit down to preach on Sundays.

On Friday, July 9, 1897, walking from the train station to the rectory in 104-degree heat, Fr. Tolton collapsed in the street and was rushed to the hospital with heat stroke and uremia.  Later that evening, having received his last Sacraments and surrounded by his mother, his sister, the hospital chaplain and several Sisters of Mercy, Fr. Augustine Tolton passed away.  He was 43 years old.  In accordance with his wishes, he was given a solemn Requiem Mass at St. Peter's in Quincy, Illinois, the parish of his youth, and buried in the priests' cemetery there.  An immense crowd attended the funeral.  The monument over his grave reads:

Rev. Augustine Tolton

The First Colored Priest in the United States

Born in Brush Creek, Ralls County, Missouri

April 1, 1854

Ordained in Rome, Italy, April 24, 1886

Died July 9, 1897

Requiescat in Pace

Fr. Tolton was not in fact the first black American to become a Catholic priest: the Healy brothers (James Augustine, ordained in 1854, and Patrick Francis, ordained in 1864) were the sons of an Irish father and a mulatto mother, and technically born as slaves.  But, whereas the Healy brothers were widely known as Irish, Fr. Tolton was the first recognizably black American to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood and serve as a priest in the United States.  On February 24, 2011, Francis Cardinal George issued his edict opening the cause for the canonization of Fr. Augustine Tolton; on February 13, 2012, the Congregation for Causes of Saints granted Fr. Tolton the title "Servant of God."

But Fr. Tolton deserves recognition not merely because he was black and an escaped slave.  Fr. Augustine Tolton was practiced in virtues and great holiness: he was a man of devotion, fidelity to the duties of his state in life, zeal for souls, gratitude for benefits received, love for his flock, patience in suffering and immense self-sacrifice.  If he is raised to the altar, it will be, and should be, on those grounds.

It would be well to close with Fr. Augustine Tolton's own words, from a speech delivered to the first Black Catholic Conference in Washington, D.C. in 1889:

The Catholic Church deplores a double slavery – that of the mind and that of the body.  She endeavors to free us of both. I was a poor slave boy but the priests of the Church did not disdain me.  It was through the influence of one of them that I became what I am tonight.  I must now give praise to that son of the Emerald Isle, Father Peter McGirr, pastor of St. Peter's Church in Quincy, who promised me that I would be educated and who kept his word.  It was the priests of the Church who taught me to pray and to forgive my persecutors… it was through the direction of a Sister of Notre Dame, Sister Herlinde, that I learned to interpret the Ten Commandments; and then I also beheld for the first time the glimmering light of truth and the majesty of the Church.  In this Church we do not have to fight for our rights because we are black.  She had colored saints – Augustine, Benedict the Moor, Monica.  The Church is broad and liberal. She is the Church for our people.

Random Thoughts

-- Today is the 96th anniversary of the Fatima children's vision of hell.  Hell is a place filled with the souls of persons who did not believe that there is a hell.

-- The lower house of (formerly Catholic) Ireland's parliament has voted to legalize abortion in cases where there is a risk to the mother's life.  Abortion supporters are thrilled but already saying the bill doesn't go far enough.

-- I have not followed the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case, but I've followed it enough to see that it is a classic example of a trial that should never have taken place. How do you get a fair trial on charges that should never have been brought to begin with? This was manifestly a case of self-defense.  The law simply does not favor the unjust aggressor; nor does it take the position that the right to defend oneself kicks in only at the point where one is too incapacitated to defend oneself.  It does not even require that the person defending himself be upright and virtuous and of impeccable character.  All it requires is that the defendant reasonably believe he was in immanent danger of bodily harm, and that the action he took was necessary to save him from the harm threatened.

-- Reading and listening to accounts of testimony by the state's witnesses in the Zimmerman trial, I would have thought I was getting an account of the defense's witnesses if I didn't know the state was still putting on its case in chief.  Yet jurors, urged by prosecutors to call black white and white black, can still do the wrong thing.  That is why it's unethical for prosecutors to press charges they know they can't prove.  Let us not forget the Duke Lacrosse case, which resulted in the disbarment of the district attorney who brought those utterly bogus charges.  How can the prosecution's request for idiotic lesser-included instructions on charges relating to the abuse of a minor be understood except as an acknowledgment that they failed to prove their case?  

-- I am tired of having people who know nothing whatever about me tell me how much I hate minorities.  I don't hate minorities.  As a practical Catholic, I try not to entertain actual hatred for anyone, however much they may anger or annoy or hurt me.  I doubt that there are very many authentic racists among American whites.  But there are plenty of authentic racists among minority "leaders" and race hustlers of the sort that turned the Zimmerman case into a show trial.  This is not the Reconstruction Era; but for these demagogues and their allies in the media and the Obama regime, Americans would mostly get along pretty well.  Promoting strife and division and the pursuit of imaginary grievances is the devil's work.  When are we going to stop letting him and his tools push us around?

-- Probably the most pitiful figure to emerge from the Zimmerman trial is the pathetic, illiterate, mendacious "star" prosecution witness, Rachel Jeantel.  Thanks to the welfare state and the liberal-dominated public-school system of which she is a product, Rachel Jeantel is as much a slave in the 21st century as ever any of her ancestors were in the 19th.  In fact, her spiritual penury makes her even worse off than they were.  They were beaten, starved, racked with diseases, housed in hovels, separated from their families, overworked and used as concubines by their white masters; but at least they were under no delusions about their plight, or at whose hands they suffered.  That is why, as soon as blacks were given the opportunity to fight for freedom on the side of the Union during the Civil War, they had the will to do so and nearly two hundred thousand enlisted.  Do the Rachel Jeantels of the world have the will to fight and suffer for freedom?

-- And speaking of the welfare state, it seems that Michelle Obama's "healthy" school lunch program is generating a lot of food wastage and loss of money for school districts.  School lunches have always been notoriously bad; but the First Lady has apparently discovered a talent for improving on badness.  Still, the responsibility for feeding kids lies, it seems to me, not with the government but with their parents.  Hey parents: why not do what my mother did, and pack lunches for your kids?

-- While the nation ogles the Zimmerman trial, the Obama regime's burgeoning scandals -- Benghazi, the I.R.S., the N.S.A. -- go unnoticed and un-dealt-with.  

-- Which is an appropriate segue into Mark Levin's intriguing proposal for legal, constitutional recourse against our bloated, out-of-control federal government.  Did you know that Congress does not have the market cornered on amendments to the Constitution, and that the states can also propose amendments?  Article V of the U.S. Constitution provides (emphasis added):

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article [dealing with powers denied to Congress]; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Historically, all amendments to the Constitution have originated in Congress; the other method has been attempted on numerous occasions, even very recently, but although the threat of a constitutional convention has indirectly led to amendments, the method itself has never been successfully invoked.  Yet the Founding Fathers included it in the Constitution, foreseeing a time when the federal government could become oppressive and intransigent.  In an age in which the runaway regulatory state leaves virtually no aspect of our daily lives untouched, that time has surely come.  The question may be raised whether a rogue federal government would really feel less free to disregard an amended Constitution than it does the current one; but I think we should consider it our duty to exhaust all legal and constitutional means of bringing the ruling class in Washington to heel.  Levin has some proposed constitutional amendments in his forthcoming book, due out next month.

-- Still, I will see Levin and raise him.  There is something else that must be done if we are ever to restore our country, and without which we can never get our freedom back even if we hold a hundred constitutional conventions.  It is the one thing that few people are willing to try, even though it is the one thing that is certain of success.  We ourselves must begin to lead lives ordered according to natural law and right reason.  We must rein in our own passions and appetites.  We must stop confusing the pursuit of happiness with the selfish and unbridled pursuit of sensual pleasures.  We must resume the use of good manners and courtesy and consideration for others, and teach the same to our children.  We must live up to our responsibilities, embrace traditional Christian morality and lead virtuous lives.  Disordered individuals cannot help but create disordered societies.  

-- And just in case you think I'm some kind of nut, the critical importance of cultivating virtue was not lost on the Founding Fathers.  In a letter to a cousin, John Adams wrote:

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

And it seems well to close with these thoughts that Adams set down in a letter to his wife:

The furnace of affliction produces refinement in states as well as individuals. And the new Governments we are assuming in every part will require a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or they will be no blessings. The people will have unbounded power, and the people are extremely addicted to corruption and venality, as well as the great.

The Fourth of July

The Declaration of Independence, 1823 William Stone facsimile.

237 years ago today, the Continental Congress adopted and promulgated the Declaration of Independence at Independence Hall.  The Congress had voted for independence on July 2nd.

Vicksburg, Mississippi literally dug in during the seige.

Exactly 87 years later and 150 years ago today, the Union Army of the Tennessee under U.S. Grant followed up the Army of the Potomac's spectacular victory at Gettysburg with the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi.  Now the Mississippi River belonged entirely to the Union, and the Confederacy was cut in half.  The Civil War was by no means over; there would still be terrible battles and thousands more men would die.  But the Confederacy would never recover from the blows of that fateful first week of July, 1863.

Long live the United States!

Where Is the Justice?

Concerning the George Zimmerman trial, just one observation.

How can you have a fair trial in a case that should never have been brought to trial in the first place?