In April of 2015, Franklin Graham began publicizing his Decision America Tour, an aggressive effort to activate the faith community in all 50 states. His stated goals are to pray for the United States and to encourage citizens to vote specifically for candidates who align with a Judeo-Christian worldview. He is also using the tour to persuade Christians to run for public office at all levels, but he has made it clear he will not endorse any political candidates this cycle. He also recently withdrew from the GOP.
Despite my deep respect for Rev. Graham, I believe some of his stated reasons for the Decision America Tour are questionable. First, he claims that as many as 20 to 30 million Christians did not vote in the 2012 election year. While this may be technically true, there is real question whether those missing votes really would have meaningfully changed the election results. Second, Franklin Graham suggests that encouraging Christians to vote will result in them voting for candidates who embrace Judeo-Christian values. This is also far from settled.
Research from 2014 shows that Protestant Christians are in decline and that they are no longer the majority in the US. This means that the missing votes from the last presidential election are undoubtedly also becoming fewer in number as a percentage of the total vote. It is also surprising that in the last presidential election – while more evangelical Christians turned out to vote than in 2008 – an amazing 21% of that total voted for Obama, someone who most would agree largely rejects evangelical values.
Since self-described evangelical Christians can’t agree on who best represents their values, the only way their voting block could make the difference Graham wants is if they could mostly agree on who is best to vote for. That’s unlikely to happen unless the voters have trusted leaders in their faith communities willing to offer explicit direction on – and support to – the best candidate. This is especially important in elections where politicians – like Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski – use millions of dollars of advertising to deceive voters into believing that they are something they aren’t.
Regrettably, Franklin Graham has chosen not to personally endorse any candidates. While the nonprofit organizations he runs (Samaritan’s purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) are not allowed to endorse candidates, he personally is able to – and should.
That being said, Rev. Graham is likely cautious due to past issues with the IRS. In 2013 he said the IRS audited his ministries after they ran ads in North Carolina supportive of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
Franklin Graham is absolutely correct that the United States needs a revival and fervent prayer to rescue it. But whether his Decision America Tour will make a real difference in the 2016 elections – without offering specific guidance to evangelical voters – remains to be seen.
Without a doubt, God intervenes in the affairs of man, but generally relies on us as His hands and feet. For Rev. Graham, that is his personal support and endorsement of those who answer his call to action. Such bold action from Franklin Graham and other Christian leaders could make a real difference this fall.
On January 1st Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ordered the Marines to provide plans by January 15th for boot camp to go coed. ABC.com reports that “Mabus also warned Marine Corps leaders not to use any concerns about integrating women into combat jobs as ways to delay the process.” The problems with integrating boot camp are the same as those of integrating the combat arms, so the Marines are not allowed to talk about it.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter used this tactic when, ahead of his Dec. 3 decision, he put a gag rule on discussing women in combat and the Marines’ 9 month integration study which showed that compared to males in combat tasks, female Marines were slower, couldn’t lift as much weight, were less accurate shooters and retained more than twice the injuries. Now the Marines must comply not only with integration of the combat arms but, suddenly, integration of boot camp, post-haste. Any problems with either will be blamed on leadership and training. That leadership will be purged and purged again until everyone is singing the right tune. If you were interested in what Soviet-style dictatorship looks like, this is it.
As a nation, we already compared separate-sex and coed boot camps and found the Marine Corps’ methods far superior. In the 1999 Congressional Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related Issues, the commission’s chairman, Anita Blair said, “gender-integrated training entails special problems that simply do not arise in gender-separate training. These problems revolve around the difficulties of providing appropriate privacy for both sexes, accommodating fundamental physiological differences, and controlling sexual conduct.”
Sexual Dynamics & a Myriad of (Expensive) Consequences
The Army knows intimately what can go wrong combining young end-of-teen-aged kids together in the formative period of boot camp. Remember Aberdeen? Multiple Army drill sergeants were abusing their authority and having sex with or raping females under their charge. Even when relationships are consensual the damage can be just as great. The expenses are high in time, money and effort to shuffle personnel due to relationships, fraternizing, pregnancy, misconduct and the litigation thereof, let alone the destructive impacts to the personnel themselves and their units. That we’ve come to tolerate this mess in the fleet and other branches’ boot camps hardly justifies doing more of it by forcing the Marines to follow suit.
If there’s one thing that’s primal and unchanging, it’s that men and women are distracted by each other. The second you throw them together they’re checking how they look and competing for each other’s attention. The fallout can run the spectrum from marriage and/or babies to serving in the brig for rape. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the east, and all the ripples created detract from the objective: training to become the nation’s enemy-killers. Advocates for total integration insist “we’re professionals,” as if professionals don’t hook up and mess up their lives and jobs. Regardless, new recruits are hardly professionals, and boot camp is not an office job. Harassment? That’s boot camp: you can’t train young kids to attack and defend without some touching. A drill instructor’s simple correction or instruction can be construed as harassment when done by the opposite sex.
Having separate boot camps allowed the Marines to postpone or at least greatly minimize the opportunity for all these problems until after recruits had finished their training and earned the title. (The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has worked to sexualize areas that were once neutral, worsening these negative impacts. Same-sex sexual assaults are on the rise since its repeal.)
Quotas & Lowered Standards
Double standards for women have been in place since their full integration into the military in 1948 because every time they tested against men’s standards, they didn’t perform as well as the men and retained more injuries. Also, men and women don’t like being treated the same. What’s neutral between men can be considered harassment to a woman and vice versa, and what’s tough for women tends not to be challenging enough for men.
When West Point was integrated and 61% of female plebes failed the men’s physical fitness test (PFT) compared to less than 5% of men, separate lower standards were created for women. It was the same in the Air Force’s Cadet Wing when they couldn’t perform the pull-ups or complete most of the men’s other standard tests. In every branch’s PFT, women have more time to run and don’t have to do as much or the same requirements as men. In 2013 the Marine Corps tried to get female recruits to achieve the men’s minimum three pull-ups and gave active duty females the option to do pull-ups instead of the arm-hang. They dropped the requirement when, in over a year of boot camp cycles training for the goal, less than half of female recruits (compared to 98% of males) could make the standard and only 15% of active duty females elected to do them at all.
Marine General John Kelly is right in saying “There will be great pressure” to lower the standards to accommodate women and fulfill the Obama administration’s destructive policy. While claiming there will be no quotas, Mabus has already demanded an increase to 25% female representation in the ranks. The only way to satisfy that requirement is to lower those standards. They will call them gender-normed “new” standards, and “equal” will be equally lower for all. (For more from the author of “What’s Wrong With Coed Boot Camp?” please click HERE)
Is someone holding a gun to the heads of Western politicians, forcing them to state immediately after every Muslim terror attack that “Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with terror”? Who cares about whether Islam has or has not something to do with terror? The only people who care about Islam’s reputation are the so-called “moderate” Muslims who have been making excuses for jihad terror, and covering up for Islamic atrocities for centuries, while blaming Western foreign policy for their jihad.
As for all the jihadist groups themselves, they couldn’t care less about associating terrorism with Islam. In fact, jihadists have no problem with expressing pride in their terrorism, and love to see us disappointed and confused in our Western dilemma over what is or what is not Islam.
[Listen to this interview between Joe Miller and the author:]
But now Western leaders are joining the ranks of “moderate” Muslims to cover up the real agenda of Islam. While their statements defending Islam are getting more and more outrageous and even sickening in the eyes of the informed Western citizen, they continue to mislead people as they blame Western thinking for not being tolerant enough.
It is not the job of Western leaders to defend Islam’s reputation from being connected with terror, especially if major Muslim institutions have consistently refused any condemnation of ISIS as un-Islamic. In fact, not one major Islamic university or leader in the Muslim world has condemned ISIS as un-Islamic. Usama bin Laden continues to be called Sheikh and held in high regard by many Muslims, even by the Arab media itself. The leaders of Al-Azhar University in Cairo keep telling the world over and over again that if Al-Azhar condemned ISIS, it would mean they are condemning themselves and their own teaching as un-Islamic.
So why do President Obama and the embarrassed moderate Muslims keep hammering us with defending Islam? The only explanation for this defense of Islam as having nothing to do with terror is that it is really not intended to please Muslims, as many might think. But in fact, it is intended to shame the uninformed American citizen into respecting Islam and capitulating to its agenda.
The head of the cheerleading team for Islam, President Obama, has inspired many other American politicians and world leaders to do the same thing, disciplining their own citizens to put up with Islamic tyranny to the point of insanity. In that process, Western leaders have no problem with using twisted logic, such as the idea that whatever negativity is done in the name of Allah must be tolerated because it has nothing to do with Islam.
The virus of this defective logic has penetrated the minds of almost all Western political leaders and the media, including the very people who are supposed to inform and protect us, such as the mayor of Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They are all echoing the same thing in order to silence their citizens into accepting the dawn of a new multicultural era in which lawlessness, rape, and terror are to be tolerated and excused, lest we speak ill of Islam.
Western leaders are acting like hostages of the Islamic State, and are seriously expecting the obedient Western citizens to believe them. Nothing seems to work to remind those leaders as to who they are actually working for. They are not only defending Islam, but are also covering up for it and minimizing its danger to Western freedom, stability and law and order.
Even the mainstream media seems unshaken by all that is going on, and is cooperating with the political leaders into the shaming the side that supports freedom and the truth.
Discontent and fear are now brewing among the average Western citizen, who feels defenseless and scared to death of the Islamic agenda, and of loosing life in an orderly society. But instead of getting the message, Western leaders are doubling down on their assault on their own citizens, in order to force them into respecting anything and everything Islamic and never ever criticizing it.
It is now obvious that the 9/11 terror attack has achieved its Islamic goal, and has worked wonders on the psyche of the West. Terrorism is an old Arabian trick and tool for submission, and has always achieved wonders for Muslims. Even Mohammed was quoted saying, “I have been made victorious through terror.” Now that most Western leaders have capitulated, and instead of fighting back against Islam’s declaration of war, they have chosen to fight their own citizens.
Who could have ever imagined that this would have happened a little over a decade after 9/11? That Islamic rape, terror and violence would be running wild daily all over Europe and America, and Sharia blasphemy laws which go against all Western constitutions are being illegally enforced on Western citizens.
The defense of Islam by Western leaders has become pathological and extremely offensive to the majority of Americans, especially families and friends of victims of terrorism. And thus the only logical explanation for it is that Western leaders are selling out to Islam.
The abuse of the Western citizen, not only by Islam, but also by Western political leaders and its mainstream media, must end, because this is a recipe for disaster and a guarantee of future violent confrontations between the forces of freedom and forces of dhimmitude to Islam.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-14 00:22:002016-04-11 10:53:52Why Have Western Leaders Sold-Out to Islam?
If Nidal Hasan had not committed his heinous crime, could he have been President?
Yes, according to conventional political wisdom.
For the sake of argument, let’s make a hypothetical comparison between Nidal Hasan and Marco Rubio, who are of similar age and backgrounds in terms of Presidential eligibility.
Nidal Malik Hasan was born on September 8, 1970 in Arlington, Virginia. According to the New York Times, Hasan’s parents emigrated to the U.S. from a small town near Jerusalem, were presumed to be Jordanian citizens, became permanent U.S. residents and, before their deaths, became U.S. Citizens.
On November 5, 2009, Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” (or “God is Great”) and opened fire in the Soldier Readiness Center of Fort Hood, located in Killeen, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding over 30 others in the worst shooting ever to take place on an American military base.
Senator Marco Antonio Rubio (R-FL) was born on May 28, 1971 in Miami, Florida. His parents, Mario and Oriales, emigrated to the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, were both permanent U.S. residents when Senator Rubio was born and became U.S. citizens in 1975.
[Constitutional Law Expert KrisAnne Hall, Esq. discusses presidential eligibility at 18:15 below]
Senator Rubio is now a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination.
What is the difference between Nidal Hasan and Marco Rubio in terms of Presidential eligibility according to the conventional political wisdom?
None. They are both considered “natural born citizens” and both are eligible for the Presidency.
Article II Section I Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, which proscribed Presidential eligibility states:
“No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
What was the original public meaning of the phrase “natural born citizen” that establishes the eligibility for the office of President of the United States?
“There is general agreement on the core of its meaning. Anyone born on American soil whose parents are citizens of the United States is a ‘natural born citizen.'”
What is then the difference between Nidal Hasan and Marco Rubio in terms of Presidential eligibility according to an originalist interpretation of the Constitution?
None. Neither are “natural born citizens” and neither are eligible for the Presidency.
To understand who is a “natural born citizen” according to the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution, one needs to refer to the republican principles expressed in Emer Vattel’s, “Law of Nations,” with which the Framers were intimately familiar.
Pundits of the conventional political wisdom often mistakenly refer to “natural born subjects” in English common law as the source of the concept of “natural born citizen.” There is a difference between English common law, from which the American colonists broke away, and the republican principles espoused in Vattel’s “Law of Nations”, that is, monarchies have subjects, republics are formed by citizens. Natural-born subjects are born within the dominions of the crown of England and subject to the king, whereas, our Constitution created a federal government which was subject to us, the citizens of the republic.
Vattel says in “Law of Nations”, Book I, Ch. XIX:
§ 212: Natural-born citizens are those born in the country of parents who are citizens.
The republican concept of “natural born citizen” is radically different from the feudal notion of “natural born subject.” Under English common law merely being born in the domains of the King made one by birth a “natural born subject”. In Vattel’s model and in our constitutional republic, citizens are “natural born” only if they are born of citizens.
In addition, having just separated from Great Britain and fearing foreign influence on the President and Commander in Chief of the American military, the future first U.S. Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, on July 25, 1787, asked the convention presiding officer George Washington to strengthen the requirements for the Presidency:
“Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.”
It is important to note that pundits of the conventional political wisdom make two other errors when attempting to define “natural born citizen:” (1) the “one-parent” argument for “natural born citizen” only began in 2008 to accommodate the eligibility of Barack Obama and (2) statutory law, that is, laws passed by Congress may only define the manner in which one becomes a citizen, per Article I Section VIII of the Constitution; not the concept of “natural born citizen,” which can only be changed by Constitutional Amendment.
Senator Ted Cruz, for example, claims to be a “natural born citizen” because he was a “citizen at birth” through his one-parent US citizen mother.
If the Framers of the Constitution meant the eligibility requirement to be “citizen at birth,” why didn’t they write it that way?
In a letter written to James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton had suggested that “born a citizen” be used:
“No person shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States unless he be now a Citizen of one of the States, or hereafter be born a Citizen of the United States.”
Such phrasing was known at the time of the writing of the Constitution and it was rejected.
It appears that our corrupt political-media establishment does not wish the American people to understand to true intent of the Framers of the Constitution, when they created the eligibility requirements for President of the United States. (For more from the author of “Is the Fort Hood Shooter a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ and Eligible for Presidency?” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-13 00:23:532016-04-11 10:53:54Is the Fort Hood Shooter a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ and Eligible for Presidency?
Dear President Obama, my prayers are with you as I write this letter today, anticipating your State of the Union address.
Sir, you recently tweeted: “If there’s even one thing we can do, if there’s just one life we can save—we’ve got an obligation to try.” Your appeal seemed to be directed at gun control. Yet, the one life chord is vibrating on a frequency that embraces not just victims of gun violence, but even reaching the innocent lives in the womb . . .
As you may know, I am a pro-life activist. I am concerned about all human lives. I write to you today because, like you and so many other Americans, I am concerned about the growing violence in America. But I am also concerned over the millions of lives lost to the violence of abortion.
Mother Teresa once said, “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.”
I’m writing today to appeal to your compassion for those lost to violent acts, and I ask you to consider that what our world needs is not just gun control but violence control. We need to turn to LOVE for the answer. (Read more from “Alveda King’s Open Letter to Obama: ‘Are the Babies in the Empty Chair?'” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-13 00:16:542016-04-11 10:53:55Alveda King’s Open Letter to Obama: ‘Are the Babies in the Empty Chair?’
Many members of the political-media establishment are either deliberately misrepresenting facts for political reasons or they are simply ignorant of those facts, that is, the manner in which one becomes a citizen as opposed to the concept of natural born citizenship.
Those who equate “citizen” with “natural born citizen” often misinterpret Constitutional law and statute law, the latter meaning that Congress may pass laws only defining the manner in which one becomes a citizen, either citizen by birth or a naturalized citizen, not the Constitutional concept of natural born citizenship.
In addition, many people mistakenly cite English Common Law as the origin of the natural born citizen concept, which, in that regard, the Founders rejected; rather than its true origin, the codification of natural law described by Emerich de Vattel in his 1758 book “The Law of Nations.”
Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 states:
“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
Recognizing the Constitutional nature of the natural born citizen concept, there have been numerous attempts, in recent years, both by Democrats and Republicans, to amend the Article II “natural born citizen” clause, including:
January 14, 1975 – Democrat House Rep. Jonathon B. Bingham, [NY-22] introduced a constitutional amendment under H.J.R. 33: which called for the outright removal of the natural-born requirement for president found in Article II of the U.S. Constitution – “Provides that a citizen of the United States otherwise eligible to hold the Office of President shall not be ineligible because such citizen is not a natural born citizen.”
June 11, 2003 – Democrat House member Vic Snyder [AR-2] introduced H.J.R 59: in the 108th Congress – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes a person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 35 years and who has been a resident within the United States for at least 14 years eligible to hold the office of President or Vice President.”
September 3, 2003 – Democrat Rep. John Conyers [MI] introduced H.J.R. 67: – “Constitutional Amendment – Makes a person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 20 years eligible to hold the office of President.”
September 15, 2004 – Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher [CA-46] introduced H.J.R. 104: – “Constitutional Amendment – “Makes eligible for the Office of the President non-native born persons who have held U.S. citizenship for at least 20 years and who are otherwise eligible to hold such Office.”
According to Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the U. S. Constitution, a candidate for the Presidency must be a “natural born citizen,” that is, a second generation American, a U.S. citizen, whose parents were also U.S. citizens at the time of the candidate’s birth.
That there is a difference between “citizen” and “natural born citizen” has been clear since the writing of the U.S. Constitution on September 17, 1787 and its ratification on June 21, 1788.
A first draft of what would become Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, submitted by Alexander Hamilton to the Constitutional Convention on June 18, 1787 stated:
“No person shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States unless he be now a Citizen of one of the States, or hereafter be born a Citizen of the United States.”
Fearing foreign influence on the President and Commander in Chief of the American military, the future first U.S. Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, on July 25, 1787, asked the convention presiding officer George Washington to strengthen the requirements for the Presidency:
“Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.”
The term “or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution” referred to loyal Americans who lived in the thirteen colonies at the time of the Revolutionary War, thus establishing the first generation of United States “citizens,” upon which future “natural born” citizens would be created. The Founders, under Article II, allowed these original U.S. citizens to be eligible for the Presidency.
As understood by the Founders and as applied to the U.S. Constitution, the term “natural born citizen” derived its meaning less from English Common Law, than from Vattel’s “The Law of Nations.”
They knew from reading Vattel that a “natural born citizen” had a different standard from just “citizen,” for he or she was a child born in the country to two citizen parents (Vattel, Section 212 in original French and English translation).
That is the definition of a “natural born citizen,” as recognized by numerous U.S. Supreme Court and lower court decisions (The Venus, 12U.S. 253(1814), Shanks v. Dupont, 28 U.S. 242 (1830), Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856), Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875) , Ex parte Reynolds, 20 F. Cas. 582 (C.C.W.D. Ark 1879), United States v. Ward, 42 F. 320 (1890); Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), Ludlam, Excutrix, & c., v. Ludlam, 26 N.Y. 356 (1863) and more) and the framers of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th Amendment, the Naturalization Act of 1795, 1798, 1802, 1885, and our modern 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1401.
There are historical arguments too numerous to include in a short article, which explain why the definition of “natural born subject,” as found in the English Common Law, was not used as the basis of “natural born citizen” in the U.S. Constitution because Great Britain was a monarchy and the new nation was a constitutional republic.
Legal precedent and interpretation leave no doubt regarding the meaning of “natural born citizen.”
The Venus, 12 U.S. 8 Cranch 253 253 (1814)
“The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives or indigenes are those born in the country of parents who are citizens.”
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)
“The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”
John Bingham, father of the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to American slaves after the Civil War, stated on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1862:
“All from other lands, who by the terms of [congressional] laws and a compliance with their provisions become naturalized, are adopted citizens of the United States; all other persons born within the Republic, of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty, are natural born citizens.”
In 1866, Bingham also stated on the House floor:
“Every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.”
Minor v. Happersett , 88 U.S. 162 (1875)
“The Constitution does not in words say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first.”
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898)
“At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children, born in a country of parents who were its citizens, became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.”
As recently as September 2008, in a Michigan Law Review article entitled “Originalism and the Natural Born Citizen Clause,” Lawrence B. Solum, then John E. Cribbet Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, wrote:
“What was the original public meaning of the phrase that establishes the eligibility for the office of President of the United States? There is general agreement on the core of its meaning. Anyone born on American soil whose parents are citizens of the United States is a natural born citizen.”
Citizen parents, plural.
Just as the Presidential oath of office is unique “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” the eligibility requirements for President are equally unique, to ensure allegiance and prevent foreign influence at the highest levels of government.
I think the Founders had anticipated the mess in which we find ourselves today. (For more from the author of “The Difference Between a U.S. Citizen and a Natural Born Citizen” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-11 00:26:562016-04-11 10:53:58The Difference Between a U.S. Citizen and a Natural Born Citizen
Illegal amnesty in the form of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA is currently being held up by court injunction), is one of the harshest forms of penalties for immigrants – many of whom are married to Americans – trying to legally come or stay in the United States. Legal immigrants are being penalized with longer wait times for loved ones to enter the country or to legally stay. President Obama flat-out lied that illegal aliens would be going “to the back of the line”.
What has been seen instead is that illegal aliens applying for DACA are able to receive work permits within 4 to 6 months while U.S. citizens end up waiting as long as 15 months to bring their children and spouses here. Under DACA, illegal aliens are also able to reapply every two years so that they will continually be able to stay here without fear of deportation. DAPA is President Obama’s expansion of DACA and is purportedly designed to allow illegal alien families to stay together. Neither of these options allow a direct legal pathway for citizenship.
When DACA was created it was the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), who had to handle the huge increase in workload. USCIS is also responsible for processing applications for United States Citizens seeking visas or green cards for their spouses and children needing to immigrate. While it seems that currently the USCIS has finally gotten the workload decreased back down to around 6 months for citizen’s spouses, DAPA will undoubtedly create much longer delays for US citizens.
The basic premise for Obama’s illegal DACA and DAPA is to allow illegal alien families to stay together as it is deemed impossible to deport all of the millions of illegals currently in-country. Obama has maintained that it is most important to prevent crossings at the border and to deport illegal aliens who are dangerous and just let the others stay legally, even though he really isn’t even doing that. This is similar to the same type of reasoning Presidents Reagan and Bush used in order to legally allow millions of illegal aliens to stay. However, history has shown that those programs did not prevent millions of more illegal aliens from coming here. In fact, after Reagan’s and Bush’s amnesty, even more illegal aliens came to stay because of the obvious precedent.
Most illegal aliens enter this country primarily for economic reasons. Whether or not we can deport the millions of illegals from the U.S., it should be a top priority to eliminate all incentives for illegal aliens to come and stay here. I have personally met illegals working on farms who regularly travel back to their home countries during winter. However, Obama’s new programs incentivize these agricultural workers to bring their entire families here illegally. The hordes of illegal alien children coming here recently are undoubtedly due in large part to President Obama’s DACA.
DACA is rewarding the illegal aliens for their original unlawful behavior. Meanwhile, relatives of law-abiding Americans who would like to come legally have to bear the burden of staying for years in their country of origin waiting for their permanent visa. If they had come illegally, they would have been able to spend those years with their families and earn more money than they could back home. The end results for both paths are similar as those with DACA can still apply for their green card through marriage to a United States citizen and this is much easier if they are already living here illegally. Obviously, this unlawful behavior should not be rewarded with amnesty. If we truly want our legal immigrants to be at the front of the line, as President Obama has falsely promised, then his illegal amnesty programs must first be terminated.
Here’s my personal story: I have family members who have waited nine years in their country of origin to get a green card. They would have jumped at the opportunity to live those nine years in the United States with their family members that are already here. Had they chosen to break US law, they could have been here with their families for almost a decade and then qualified for Obama’s amnesty. Instead, by respecting our laws they are now rewarded with even more delay: Obama’s illegal DACA undoubtedly caused one of my in-laws to wait several more months for a green card than she otherwise would have.
The uncomfortable truth is that illegal alien families should be forced to go back to their country of origin. Instead of blaming American laws, illegal alien parents should look in the mirror, realizing that their actions have caused, or will cause family separations. It is not the responsibility of the United States to keep illegal alien families together. Also, any person who chooses to marry an illegal alien should realize the risks that are involved. Illegal aliens need to be held responsible for their actions and not demand that the US give them special rights for their unlawful behavior. It is a slap in the face to the law-abiding immigrants attempting to become part of this great nation the right way.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-11 00:22:182016-04-11 10:53:58Obama’s Unconstitutional Amnesty: Spitting in the Faces of All Legal Immigrants
News that CAIR has demanded an apology from Donald Trump for evicting a Muslim protester at his rally and reports that left-wing protesters and police have turned out in force to bottle up “far-right” demonstrators in Germany bookend a single story. It’s on — the long-awaited fight against PC orthodoxy is finally on. Trump is unlikely to apologize, and CAIR is even more unlikely to back down. With 3 million Middle Eastern and African refugees due to arrive in Europe this year, the clashes between German protesters are only likely to intensify.
The commotion you hear is not going to stop, it will only get worse. The Western Spring is finally here, and before it’s done it threatens to change everything.
The tension between the forces of political correctness and the pent-up forces of repressed cultural traditions is now bursting like a spring wound up beyond containment. Things may start slowly at first but ramp up rapidly, mirroring Cornelius Ryan’s famous description of the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance as the Red Army stood at the gates of Berlin.
The drum beat was almost imperceptible. Softly the tubas answered. The muffled drum roll came again. Low and ominously the tubas replied. Then the massed basses came alive and the awesome grandeur of Die Götterdämmerung rolled out from the Berlin Philharmonic … it told of the evildoing of the gods, of Siegfried on his funeral bed of fire … with cymbals crashing and drums rolling, the orchestra thundered to its climax: the terrible holocaust that destroyed Valhalla
Actually the last performance of the doomed orchestra “was of Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene at the end of the opera.” Ryan’s word painting may get the history wrong but nevertheless gets the analogy right. It’s the twilight of the gods. In 1945 the musicians wore escape clothes under their overcoats because it had been arranged for them to escape toward the American lines as soon as the performance ended. (Read more from “The Western Spring” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-11 00:16:092016-04-11 10:54:01The Western Spring
Don’t confuse most military women with the tiny feminist cabal comprised of a few officers and a lot of political groups who’ve been pushing for complete integration of the combat arms.
There is a vindictive refrain accompanying Ashton Carter’s recent dictat that the combat arms be opened to women without exception. “You women asked for this,” some seem to be saying, “now suck it up.” No, most military women did not ask for it, but the few times they’ve been asked, their voices have been ignored in favor of a teeny tiny group dishonestly claiming, “This is equality.” Some 92.5% of enlisted women surveyed by the Army in 2014 said they didn’t want to be assigned to combat units. Surveys by the Army Research Institute have yielded similar results. This colossal majority matters because it is they who will pay the price for this asinine policy pushed by a small few.
That some men who join the military may also be unwilling is irrelevant. Men are uniquely suited to the demands of combat and we will always need them to fight. We don’t need women in direct ground combat and, in fact, evidence shows they hinder success and incur greater harm than men.
More than anyone, military women know how much harder the physical demands are on our bodies compared with men. Our military training makes us tougher, but it doesn’t make us interchangeable with male peers, let alone men at the infantry level.
There is zero evidence showing that women strengthen combat units and plenty of evidence to the contrary. That’s why the administration and its mouthpieces, Ray Mabus and Ashton Carter, ignored the Marine Corps’ 9-month integration study that showed all-male teams outperformed coed teams on 69% of combat tasks and women suffered over twice the injuries. The study was heavy on oversight and engaged the best personnel. Its results echoed what we already know from decades of testing and injury stats. In other words, the results were nothing new. After saying they would consider exemption requests upon serious review of data, the administration ignored all of it.
Many women who fail to make infantry standards think it’s only they individually who cannot prove to be the equal of infantrymen, but that some women out there might. But we never seem to see the amazon women materialize in real life. Women are finding they cannot overcome Nature but they’re being told it’s men’s attitudes holding them back. What cruelty.
Women want to serve their country with dignity and honor. They want to be successful where they serve. They don’t want the standards lowered, to be quota fillers or to hinder the units that require the best of the very best, the most skilled at direct violence on behalf of our national defense. The decision to fully integrate the combat arms without exception puts women in the worst place of all, at far greater risk than their male peers and on the receiving end of undeserved resentment.
When making military policy that has sweeping ramifications for all America’s women, responsible stewards would base the decision on the 99.9% who don’t volunteer for such service, not on the tiny feminist element of the tiny fraction who do volunteer.
The blame for soon-to-be lowered standards, weakened combat effectiveness, increased injuries, greater expense, lost battles and higher rates of attrition lies with the feminist harpies who’ve been pushing this for the better part of 45 years and the men who’ve surrendered to them without a fight. These men are spineless politicians in uniform who’ve stood up neither for combat readiness nor for the welfare of men and women alike serving in uniform, and spineless members of Congress who have been derelict in their oversight duties.
They’ve had all the facts on their side — a mountain of them — for both effectiveness in battle and troop welfare. Yet they have been unwilling to claim their responsibility or make the case. Our enlisted men and women will pay with heavier loses of life and limb, the country with weakened national defense.
The Obama administration has been undermining and dismantling the military since Obama took office. That he would impose a reckless and destructive policy on a group that has no choice but to obey orders is no surprise. That the supposed opposition would capitulate so abjectly is inexcusable. (For more from the author of “The Vast Majority of Military Women Don’t Want to Be Fully Integrated Into the Combat Arms” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-08 00:18:582016-04-11 10:54:07The Vast Majority of Military Women Don’t Want to Be Fully Integrated Into the Combat Arms
Sometimes the truth is too painful or offensive to speak directly, so we tell it by means of a story. An old joke goes that while a sensitive eight-year-old boy was away for his first summer at camp, his beloved tabby cat, Rufus, got crushed by a passing car. His overprotective parents decided to break the bad news to him gradually, so their first note said that Rufus had climbed on the roof, and wouldn’t come down. He worried at night, but didn’t despair. The next week he got a note that the fire department had tried but failed to catch the cat. The boy sulked a little, but he didn’t fall apart. On the third week, he learned that Rufus had disappeared, and probably would not be found. He cried for a while, but having been gradually prepared for losing Rufus, he took the news pretty well. Then a few weeks later, the boy got a fresh new note that informed him, “Your grandma is up on the roof….”
Ladies and gentlemen, our country is up on the roof, and with it our fragile liberty. Since we care about these good things even more for our descendants than for ourselves, in fact it is our children and grandchildren trapped on the roof — the roof of the White House, peering down with tearful eyes and trembling fingers to see if the next President who comes to inhabit it will offer them a ladder down to safety… or will set the place on fire.
We didn’t get here by accident. There were wise men who foresaw it, whose sensitivities as artists let them craft works of fiction that warned the West where it was headed. They weren’t heeded. But there is still time to learn from them now. So here’s a gift list of five prophetic novels, which I recommend that you read, then hand out to well-meaning friends who don’t quite “get” the gravity of the threats to faith and freedom. Each book is listed by the crisis that it predicted:
The Islamic Colonization of the West
The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail (1973) is a powerful apocalyptic novel and a scathing political satire. Its target is liberal Camp of the Saintselites and their systematic perversion of Christian compassion into a civilizational death wish.
In the book, a mass exodus of non-Christian refugees is sailing for the West, in numbers large enough to overwhelm any country that accepted them. At the borders of every Western nation, including Israel, large crowds of disgruntled “have-nots” gather to see if the West will turn back the armada, or shrug and accept them — which they will take as a signal for tens of millions more to pour across Western borders. Endorsed by National Review when it was translated from French, this novel has done more to change minds on undisciplined immigration than any other book. Some of the language is rough, and borderline racist — but then, that’s true of many great works of literature, which this undeniably is. The portrait of the masochistic, multiculturalist, open-borders pope in the novel is worth the book’s price by itself.
Ecological Tyranny and the Attack on Sex and Marriage
The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess (1963) is a fascinating and deeply disturbing book, which imagines all Western history as a seesaw between those who imagine that human nature can be perfected, and those who consider it hopelessly depraved.
The first group thinks that big government, central planning, eugenics, and strict population control can solve the problem of scarcity, dissolving all reasons for social conflict in a pink fog of mild goodwill and quasi-brotherhood. And it’s these perfectionists who are in charge at the novel’s outset, reacting to food shortages and environmental problems by imposing a rigid Malthusian scheme akin to China’s One Child Policy.
To emphasize the evils of heterosexual reproduction, the government encourages flagrant homosexuality, sterilization and even castration — granting plum positions via affirmative action to characters who will remind you of “Caitlyn Jenner.” Of course, this can’t last forever, and the conflict in the novel comes when rebels who emphasize man’s fallenness, to the point of wallowing in it, push back in the form of religious fanaticism and terrorism … an eerie prognostication of Islam’s response to the West’s Culture of Death. (Full disclosure: the author didn’t see quite that far ahead; his religious terrorists are radicalized Anglicans — a detail which is unintentionally hilarious.)
The Hedonistic Culture of Death
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) is a book that you probably had to read in high school, when yoBrave New World Coveru were too young to appreciate it. The society crafted by technocrats in this novel is in fact what too many high school students (especially boys) would find the perfect world: Sex is abundant, guilt-free, and offered with no strings attached. Work is easy, pleasant, and brief. All anxieties and unhappiness are dulled immediately with a quick dose of happy pills. The price of these happy times is that the state suppresses religion and bans great works of literature, such as the Shakespeare plays that high school students would rather not have to read anyway. What’s not to like?
Of course, as the book makes clear, the down side of organizing society around the greatest number of pleasant moments for the greatest number of people is that no one becomes an adult. No one makes any meaningful sacrifice for any cause at all, much less for another person. So there is no real love, either — not even parental love, since all reproduction is done in labs and children are raised by government experts to be cheerful and well adjusted. Sound familiar? Because Huxley was a masterful literary artist, his depiction of this dystopia is rich and three-dimensional; he doesn’t stint when he shows the painful price of embracing tradition and religion as alternatives to post-modern subhumanism. The outcome is a novel that helps us to understand exactly why so many of our contemporaries are willing to trade their human dignity for a promise of greater contentment, and the book helps grant us the imaginative sympathy required if we hope to guide souls to the straighter, narrower path.
The Infantilizing Power of the Secular State
Love Among the Ruins, by Evelyn Waugh (1953), is a futuristic novella, by turns amusingly horrifying and darkly, sadly funny. It was Waugh’s attempt to follow the logic of milk-and-water humanitarian socialism to its logical conclusion: a society where criminals are treated as wounded victims, where private property is seized by the state and used “for the common good,” and every moral or character ideal is turned upon its head, in the name of a false, post-Christian humanism. (The Christmas season, in Waugh’s future, is renamed “Santaclaustide.”)
Waugh’s “hero” is a lifelong arsonist, whom the state houses in a cozy rehabilitation center set in an old aristocratic home that had (of course) been confiscated. He pursues his love of pretty, pretty fires and of a lovely hermaphrodite, a woman whom state experiments with gender identity have equipped with a long, golden beard. Fittingly, in this socialist paradise, the only government agency that is profitable and popular is the Ministry of Euthanasia, where the lines of hopeful customers always extend around the block. This is not Waugh at his subtlest, but at his most bleakly prophetic. The book reads as if he had somehow been granted access to this year’s newscasts from Belgium.
The Dissolution of Christian Faith into Humanitarian Sentiment
The Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson (1908) is a long and psychologically insightful novel, a precocious instance of the genre that sci-fi fans now call “Cybersteam.” It was written in the wake of the Victorian era by the son of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, who had dabbled for some time in the occult before converting to Catholicism. The novel takes the strands of religious liberalism current around 1900 and projects them a hundred or so years into the future — to create a society perfectly ripe for the coming of the Antichrist.
What’s so chilling about the book is how accurately the author predicted the church of today, where many Christians have lapsed into a teary-eyed, self-aggrandizing “tolerance” and abandoned core Christian doctrines, especially when the State applies the slightest pressure and offers its squalid bribes.
As the Antichrist arrives, it is as a sponsor of humanitarian values, winning the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize simply for showing up. In due course, he does defuse a threatened European war, and dissolves social conflicts with a preternatural ease. He also offers to solve all ecclesiastical conflicts, by drawing believers together into an uplifting, pan-religious movement that goes beyond “divisive” moral issues and “outdated” doctrinal claims. Those Christians too pig-headed and uncharitable to accept his kindly offer face the prospect of euthanasia or worse — chief among them, the reigning pope. (For more from the author of “Five Page-Turner Conservative Novels That Predicted the Mess We’re In” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-01-03 23:28:072016-04-11 10:54:17Five Page-Turner Conservative Novels That Predicted the Mess We’re In
