Washington warned us. We forgot his warnings, and are paying for it.

In his farewell address at the end of his second term as president on September 19, 1796, George Washington warned the nation of the problems with political parties “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.”

The “spirit of party” has its roots in the “strongest passions of the human mind,” he said, and exists in all governments, to varying degrees, being stifled, controlled or repressed in most. But even in the young nation he had led, perhaps because of the high degree of freedom provided by its Constitution, “is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.”

Looking across the political landscape today, Washington’s words are brought to life. And he can objectively address the issue of political parties, as he is the only president to have had no party affiliation. Washington had to be persuaded to seek a second term, and refused to run for a third term, despite great popular support for him to do so.

Essentially, parties are dangerous because they are collections of persons who share passions, and inevitably passion creates ideas that do not fit within constitutional guidelines.

Perhaps there exists a circumstance that prompts the party to encourage expanding the meaning of the General Welfare Clause to deliver “welfare”; to imagine the need for a federal department to dictate the kinds of light bulbs or toilets we should buy; or to reinterpret the plain language of the Second Amendment “for the common good.” None of these actions are legitimate under the processes set forth by the Constitution. Such ideas may highjack party members, and shift their attention from strict adherence to the principles of the Constitution.

“Well,” the members may say, “the Founders could not have foreseen this development. The Constitution does not address this.” The party starts to rationalize how to achieve these things without following the methods provided to change the Constitution.

Maybe this perspective results from a sincere desire to fix a significant problem; maybe it is merely means to an end. Either way, it is a step away from the intent and the letter of the law of the land. Devising circuitous routes to somehow find a way to do what the Constitution does not say you may do is objectively wrong, yet our government has grown absurdly large and expensive and immorally oppressive as a result of precisely these types of activities, and is what Washington warned of.

 “[T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it,” Washington advised. “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.”

America’s elected leaders have seemed to be more concerned with the activities of political parties – the spirit of party – than with focusing on the principles of the governing document. This has made a mishmash of a once-clearly defined government structure. It is a tribute to the government structure the Founders’ created, however, that even after these attacks on its foundations, it still remains singularly better than any other nation on Earth. That may not be true for much longer, however.

Were all Americans focused laser-like on following the U.S. Constitution when addressing national issues, would political parties form? Would there be a need for a formal organization to defend the Constitution? Does not the very existence of political parties signal motives other than strict adherence to the Constitutional principles?

The idea of originalism, the dedication to the language and intent of the Constitution, will draw strong disagreement from those that maintain that a document created more than 200 years ago cannot possibly apply satisfactorily to today’s circumstances. Which proves Washington’s point rather well, as it is primarily ideologically driven political parties and their adherents that want to loosen the specific language espousing the principles of the Founders, so that it means what they want it to mean, rather than what is says.

Neither major political party any longer strongly represents and defends the founding principles. The Republican Party – which once fairly strongly defended the founding principles, and still outperforms the Democrats in that category – has let spirit of party rule its integrity.

The leadership of the Democrat Party long ago adopted liberalism/socialism in stronger and weaker forms, and many/most of its goals run headlong into Constitutional prohibitions.

So liberals in both parties have decided that rather than properly change the Constitution through amendments or a constitutional convention – either of which is a long, difficult path to follow – they will instead sneak through the back door, pretending that the Constitution is outdated and must therefore be reinterpreted, all the while aided in their subversion by like-minded liberal judges.

It is unlikely we can do away with political parties, but given what they have done to the country, “wouldn’t it be loverly?”

A look at the world’s largest solar energy production facility

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, built by Bechtel, is a joint effort of NRG, Google, and BrightSource Energy, and is said to be the largest state-of-the-art renewable energy production project of its kind.

Ivanpah is a $2.2 billion solar project in the California desert consisting of three solar thermal power plants on a 4,000-acre tract of public land near the Mojave Desert and the California-Nevada border. The facility was financed in part by $1.5 billion in federal loans, utilizes more than 170,000 mirrors mounted to the ground that reflect sunlight up to three 450-foot-high towers topped by boilers that heat water to create steam, which in turn is used to generate electricity.

The green energy and climate change lobbies are, of course, excited about from this dream-come-true example of how the U.S., and eventually the world, can survive and thrive without pollution-causing coal-burning and natural gas-burning electricity production facilities.

But their hopes have exceeded reality, as is so often the case with these idealistic dreams. The project has three major problems, one of which has produced a huge rift between the left’s internal factions. While green energy folks are ecstatic over the huge solar plant, other environmentalists are outraged that the plant has killed thousands of birds, many of which are fried to death.

The second problem is that the so-called green energy plant is not as green as you might expect: It burns fossil fuels and produces pollution. Ivanpah burns natural gas each morning for start-up, up to 525 million cubic feet of natural gas annually, and reportedly burned 867,740 million BTU of natural gas, which is enough to power the annual needs of 20,660 Southern California homes, and it emitted 46,084 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014.

Furthermore, it has so far failed to produce the expected power it is contractually required to deliver to PG&E Corp. As a result, the solar plant may be forced to shut down unless the California Public Utilities Commission gives permission for PG&E to overlook the shortfall and give Ivanpah another year to sort out its problems.

The Wall Street Journal reported that spokesmen for Ivanpah’s operator, BrightSource, and NRG declined to comment on its future, but NRG said it has taken more than a year to adjust equipment and learn how to best run it. The Journal also reported that the Energy Department supports giving the plant, which started operating in early 2014, more time.

Advocates also paint an over-positive picture of solar energy job creation. The Solar Energy Industries Association touts spectacular job growth in the solar industry, boasting “the solar industry continues to support robust job growth, creating 35,052 new jobs in 2015, a growth rate of approximately twelve times greater than that of the overall economy.”

The overall job creation rate was a pitiful 1.74 percent, and 12 times that figure means roughly 21 percent for the solar industry. That sounds pretty good, but fast job growth during new industry “booms” is not unusual. Touting such growth is good PR, even when it exaggerates reality.

But when you analyze this project, it quickly becomes clear that government has more to do with this increase than does the actual market demand for workers in solar energy. You, the taxpayer, heavily subsidized this industry, and when taxpayer money pays the bills, an industry can and does create jobs without a real demand for them.

Under President Barack Obama, the federal government has wasted billions of dollars of hard-earned taxpayer money on green energy efforts that failed, or under-performed, even as it enacted policies that punished Americans working in the coal industry and related businesses with substantial unemployment, created income problems in the economies of coal producing states, and burdened all Americans with higher energy prices. The administration’s tunnel vision on reducing the non-existent or miniscule effects on the environment of fossil fuel energy production that have powered the U.S. and most of the world for decades, has caused untold misery.

The heralded Solyndra debacle put 1,100 people out of work when it closed down, and wasted $535 million in government loans. And, the Abound Solar plant, which got $400 million in federal loan guarantees in 2010, when the Obama administration sought to use stimulus funds to promote green energy, filed for bankruptcy two years later. That facility sits unoccupied, is littered with hazardous waste, broken glass and contaminated water, and will require an estimated $3.7 million to clean and repair the building for use.

None of this pain and suffering was needed; the normal progress of technological advancement would eventually have gradually replaced fossil fuels as the primary source of electricity, when those less polluting methods were up to the task, like the automobile replaced the horse and buggy.

Once the left gets an idea, however, it dives in head first, eyes closed, with a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” approach that generally produces more harm than good.

Barack Obama lets nothing get in the way of his ideological fantasies, least of all reality. Any harm and destruction that occurs is regarded as necessary collateral damage on the way to his socialist Utopia.

We must restore conservative principles to the courts

The raging controversy over filling the Supreme Court vacancy of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose tragic death unleashed a political firestorm over whether President Barack Obama should nominate his successor, or whether the next president should make the nomination, must be looked at in perspective.  It is a true waste of time giving more than a bemused passing notice to the ranting of Democrats, who accuse the Republican-led Congress of all manner of wrong-doing in its opposition to a nomination by Obama, all the while hypocritically ignoring their own precedent-setting actions over the last 10 or so years, when they wrote the book on how to oppose Supreme Court nominations. This process is and has long been a political exercise.

And, at least one high-ranking judge proclaims that the High Court itself is politicized. Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, explains this in a commentary published by The Washington Post, where he wrote, “Rather, the significance of the Senate’s action lies in reminding us that the Supreme Court is not an ordinary court but a political court, or more precisely a politicized court, which is to say a court strongly influenced in making its decisions by the political beliefs of the judges.”

We expect Congress to be heavily political, and while the president belongs to a political party and is chosen through a political process, we expect the administrative agencies to apply regulations and laws in a fair, neutral, non-political manner.

Judges at all levels are expected and presumed to be impartial in applying the law and are sworn to follow the precepts of the U.S. Constitution. They must resist allowing their personal ideals or political leanings to affect the rulings or opinions they produce. The Constitution created three co-equal branches of the government, therefore all branches must employ restraint in order to remain within their Constitutional boundaries.

Posner excuses the tendency of judges to fall back on their personal and political beliefs because there is no clear instruction from the Constitution in situations the Framers could not have foreseen more than 200 years ago. Justice Scalia, however, had little trouble following the Constitution’s language when deciding his position on cases before the Court.

Scalia, you see, was a “conservative” judge, an “originalist.” According to the Oxford Dictionaries “conservative” means: “Holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation.” Applied to the federal judiciary, as viewed by believers in strict constructionism and originalism, the term means adhering to the meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as they were understood by those who wrote those documents at the time they wrote them.

Thus, judicial conservatives rely on the original language and intent of the Constitution, while judicial liberals assert that the Constitution must be a “living” document, the exact meaning of which changes with the times or depends upon who is interpreting it. Such a view allows for “judicial activism.”

“Judicial activism occurs when judges write subjective policy preferences into the law rather than apply the law impartially according to its original meaning,” according to a definition from the Heritage Foundation. “As such, activism does not mean the mere act of striking down a law,” it also means making law from the bench.

But the Constitution gives Congress the authority and responsibility to make law, not the judicial or executive branches, and that plainly stated Constitutional principle is clear and unmistakable.

Judges should consider things like whether Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and the others would have approved of the size, power or cost of the federal government, given the abuses that produced the Revolution and the deliberate efforts to restrict all of those features. Or, whether they would have allowed the Supreme Court or the executive branch to misappropriate the law making authority of the Congress.

If you still doubt that the Supreme Court has become an activist court, consider this tidbit from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who told The New York Times that “she was fully engaged in her work as the leader of the liberal opposition on what she called ‘one of the most activist courts in history.’”

Making laws from the bench and judicial expansion are not products of judicial conservatives, whose adherence to original intent maintains a stable legal foundation. That is unpopular among judges who want to expand the authority and power of the courts.

The Supreme Court must not reinterpret the Constitution. If what might prompt the activists to vote in favor of one side or the other in a case before the Court is something that is indeed a good thing for the country, and passes the standard of constitutionalism, then it must be sanctioned by an act of Congress, not the courts.

The growth of activist judges argues for restoring judicial conservatism to the nation’s highest court. President Obama is unlikely to nominate such a person. Reports say that the list of potential nominees for the Scalia seat on the Court has been reduced to five, and four of them contributed to Obama campaigns.

R.I.P. GOP?

The Republican Party is a mess. It has:
    •    Lost its way as a political force;
    •    Largely abandoned American traditions and founding principles;
    •    Become “Democrat lite,” because Republicans nowadays so often think and vote like Democrats;
    •    Failed to listen to its members.

With the GOP disintegrating there is little to halt or slow the devolution of the United States into just one more failed socialist state, something Barack Obama has worked tirelessly to achieve, and which either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would continue.

Donald Trump leads conventional Republican candidates in the primaries and caucuses, which surprises and confounds the party elite, who thought he would be a flash in the pan, and would soon fade away, leaving them to continue abandoning their party’s role in protecting the American way of life, and ignoring the concerns of their voters. This effectively demonstrates how badly they have misjudged the level of anger and disgust with the current state of their party that rank and file Republicans feel today, as well as the high degree of dissatisfaction they and a host of non-Republicans have with the federal government.

Trump’s behavior is at once energizing and destructive. It has won him a large following, and at the same time has exaggerated the party’s fracturing, pitting candidates against him and against each other in an elementary schoolyard brawl. But his tactic of saying things others are afraid to say, and ignoring the stupid but daunting rules of political correctness, has energized millions of dissatisfied Republicans, and has attracted non-Republicans, including blacks and Hispanics, to his campaign.

The “establishment” Republicans – those whose weak-kneed perspective has transformed the party to Democrat lite – are working to subvert the primary process, disenfranchising the Republican primary/caucus voters. The establishment’s behavior over recent years is precisely why things are as they are, and hardly anything could be worse than ignoring the plain message sent by the voters in the primaries and caucuses that substantial change in the GOP is needed. It is difficult to imagine that the Republican Party will be able to survive if it betrays the loud voices of those who make up the party telling them to man up, and still remain a viable political entity.

A perfect example of the tone-deafness of the party elite is the blistering condemnation of Donald Trump by 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who turned backflips to make Trump seem like the Devil incarnate. If that doesn’t seem strange, consider that during the campaign four years ago, following Trump’s endorsement, Romney effusively praised him, and then proceeded to lose the election by failing to be as strong in his opposition to Obama as he was in his praise of Trump.

It is another tribute to the failure of the GOP establishment that it regards Romney’s foolish trashing of Trump more highly than the candidate now leading the party’s nominating process.

Peggy Noonan, who was Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and now a political columnist for The Wall Street Journal, wrote last week, “I think we are seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes. I’m not sure I see a way around or through.” Of the spectacle of last Tuesday’s debate in Detroit she noted that the current GOP crisis is “something bigger than 1976, that traumatic year when a Republican insurgent almost toppled the incumbent Republican president. Bigger too than 1964, when Goldwater conservatism swept the primaries and convention and lost the country.”

She asserts that what is happening now is more serious and less reparable because it is not about political philosophy. But it seems that the party’s abandonment of conservative principles is precisely what this is about.

By ignoring the increasing frustration of the rank and file over Republicans in Congress failing to stand up against liberalizing of government policies and recent executive branch excesses, the party elite set the stage for Donald Trump’s stunning dominance among those seeking the party’s nomination.

Where Trump is concerned the party elite is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they allow the process to play out and he wins the nomination, someone believed by millions to be neither a Republican, a conservative or suitable to be president will carry the Party banner into the election.

If they continue the plot to subversively prevent Trump from getting the nomination, they will alienate millions of otherwise dependable Republican voters.

It seems likely at this stage that the Republican Party will endure, but not as a meaningful political force equal to the Democrat Party. The Republican establishment will be left holding the tatters of a once-Grand Old Party while conservatives move on to greener pastures.

Disaffected Republican voters and others dissatisfied with the status quo that might have stuck with or joined a conservative GOP now will seek an organization that honors and defends the U.S. Constitution not only in word, but also in deed.

The question is whether without a viable opponent to Hillary or Bernie, or a split among those opponents, will it be possible four or eight years later to repair the damage likely to result from another liberal/socialist in the White House?

The left turns to thuggishness and indoctrination to sell its poison

College campuses, once a garden where divergent ideas flourished, are more and more becoming known for their ideological imbalance and even outright censorship of ideas, and a recent incident demonstrates just how weed infested that once diverse garden has become.

The Daily Caller online reported that conservative writer Ben Shapiro had been scheduled to speak on behalf of Young Americans for Freedom, a registered student organization at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). Following complaints by some students, the institution’s president, William Covino, tried to cancel the appearance, favoring an event with a broader set of topics, but the Young Americans group persisted, and the president backed down. The event was funded by the CSULA student government organization.

As the audience tried to enter the auditorium for the program last Thursday, liberal protesters had linked arms in a human chain to block entry, and video of the protesters shows a lot of pushing and jostling at the entrance, including the pushing and shoving of police officers, and epithets such as “racists” and “white supremacists” were reportedly shouted at those wanting to attend the event.

People eventually did enter the auditorium, but only by being escorted to a back door by police, and eventually that entrance also was blocked by protesters. During the speech, someone pulled a fire alarm, although Shapiro and the audience ignored it.

What topic would produce such a radical reaction? Was he to talk about doing away with student loans, or education grants, or argue against free tuition? No, nothing so inflammatory as that. What got the mob all up in arms was the idea that an institution of higher education would allow a speech titled, “When Diversity Becomes a Problem.” Apparently, diversity is only a problem when it involves ideas that some students don’t like.

Unsurprisingly, getting out of the auditorium afterward was as hard as getting in, as the diversity protesters also blocked the doors after the event ended. Shapiro and his audience had to wait to leave until police could clear demonstrators, allowing them safe exit.

This episode is both a symptom of the poison that has spread throughout the country, and particularly on campuses, a growing idea that anyone offended by anything outside of their narrow set of beliefs is entitled to some make-good effort when their delicate feelings are injured, but it also is a measuring stick showing how far down the road to ruin America has traveled.

Looking at why we are so far down that road leads to the conclusion that it is largely through deliberate efforts to subvert two of our most basic and most important societal functions: educating the younger generation and providing information to the people. These critical areas are largely keys to the heart and soul of America, as they are vehicles through which its ideals and traditions are communicated to the populace, and give people the information they need to discharge the duties of citizenship responsibly.

In America today the traditional family, that once was where children learned the basics of life and how to function in a complex society, has been heavily damaged through social liberalism, so that many or most children now receive their basic education and cultural footing not in the home, but in public schools. And public K-12 education and higher education have changed dramatically over recent decades. Today, the federal government has a great degree of influence over public education, replacing control and oversight by states and localities, and leftist indoctrination has crept into textbooks, curricula and faculty, with far too little resistance.

Thus, when kids graduate from high school and enter college, if they weren’t already indoctrinated with liberal drivel, they are heavily at risk of falling victim to it on campus. The criminal behavior of leftist students at CSULA, suffering under the false belief that what they think is more important than what others think, supports that idea.

And news journalists and the organizations they work for, too frequently manage the news to serve an ideological purpose, providing not the pure information the people need and depend upon, but a slanted version designed to strengthen a set of liberal ideals.

Some good news on this front comes from recent opinion polls. A Gallup poll showed that six in ten Americans have little or no confidence that the national media report the news fully, accurately and fairly, and a survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 65 percent believe that the news media have a negative effect on the nation.

Such insecure behavior has at its foundation the knowledge that if Americans are provided with the pure information they deserve, they would reject the left’s narrow and destructive ideas, which is why they must employ dishonesty and indoctrination.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

America is increasingly a nation of delicate personalities, self-made victims and government dependents. These trends serve the needs of those who prefer socialism to freedom, our liberal fellow citizens. To see where this leads, look at Venezuela.

The politics of filling vacancies on the United States Supreme Court

Lovers of the United States Constitution were deeply saddened by the passing of Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, a champion of the Constitution’s original meaning.

His death has triggered a political crisis and there is now great weeping and gnashing of teeth across the land over finding a replacement for him. The need to do so is constitutional, but the weeping and gnashing is political.

Scalia was a believer in the idea that words have specific meaning that should not be subject to the whims of mere mortals who think that the Constitution is rendered moot because many decades have passed since those words were carefully configured, and humanity and America has evolved, or because some ideological group finds the original language inconvenient.

The challenge is finding a suitable replacement for Scalia, who believed in textualism: reading the actual language; and originalism: understanding the written words. He and others who value the meaning of words and who honor the Founders cannot abide the concept of a “living Constitution,” a document that means only what a particular group wants it to mean to satisfy a particular desire at a given time.

Addressing the idea of changing the Constitution’s meaning for convenience or ideological preference, Scalia asked the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., in 2005, “What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?”

And in his dissent in the United States v. Virginia in 1996, he wrote: “It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its members’ personal view of what would make a ‘more perfect Union’ (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a ‘more perfect world’) can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.”

So much of the nation’s problems result from changing the meaning of words to allow things that would appall the Founders, if somehow they were to return tomorrow to check up on how their wonderful creation is faring. Would they recognize their country? Would they want to live here? Would they feel appreciated enough to dare to walk the streets?

Walking the streets would subject them to such foreign concepts as that the term “founding fathers” is now regarded by some as a sexist phrase, even though all of the people who created the U.S. Constitution were, in fact, men. If they then passed an appliance store with a TV in the window, they might see Bernie Sanders offering Americans “free everything” in return for their votes, see Hillary Clinton barking and screaming at her audience, or observe the President of the United States routinely circumventing the U.S. Constitution, perhaps inducing chest pains, and maybe producing their second death, this time from unnatural causes.

The Supreme Court is supposed to be an impartial arbiter, using the plain language of the Constitution to guide it in rendering constitutionally appropriate rulings. A “living Constitution” that means different things at different times is no governing document at all, not so different from a compass that instead of pointing always to magnetic north may be redirected by a swarm of bees, a strong wind, or a Democrat caucus.

As Republicans and conservatives work to prevent the virtual certainty of a Barack Obama nominee who is similar in ideology to himself, Clinton or Sanders, or Justices Kagan, Sotomayer or Ginsburg, Democrats and liberals decry those efforts as unconstitutional and political, conveniently ignoring their own past behavior.

In 2007 long-time New York Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer told the American Constitution Society that if a new Supreme Court vacancy opened up during the rest of George W. Bush’s term, Democrats should not allow Bush the chance to fill it, except in extraordinary circumstances.

“The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance,” he said. “We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts, or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.” At the time he expressed that sentiment, Bush had 19 months left in office, nearly twice what Obama has left today. During the same speech, Schumer lamented that he hadn’t managed to block Bush’s prior Supreme Court nominations.

And then there is Obama himself, who recently said he hoped "that we can avoid the political posturing and ideological brinksmanship that has bogged down this process, and Congress, in the past.”

But in January 2006, Sen. Obama joined 24 colleagues in a futile effort led by Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, explaining to George Stephanopulos on "This Week" that he would "be supporting the filibuster because I think Judge Alito, in fact, is somebody who is contrary to core American values.…"

And that bastion of Constitutional behavior and Senate tradition, Sen. Harry Reid, D-NV, who was then Majority Leader, said in 2005, “Nowhere in [the Constitution] does it say the Senate has a duty to give presidential nominees a vote.”

Liberals and Democrats, stumbling down Hypocrisy Highway, in addition to trying to rewrite history, are trying to rewrite the U.S. Constitution by stacking the Court with activist jurists who allow their feelings to rule their opinions.

Hillary in South Carolina seeking to lock up the black vote

As the presidential campaigns move to South Carolina, Democrat hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders seek to endear themselves to black voters. Sanders began by having tea with Al Sharpton. How will Hillary proceed?

Following her dramatic loss to Sanders in New Hampshire by a 60 percent to 38 percent margin, she hired a press aide from the Department of Education as her new director of black media to help protect and grow the early double-digit lead she held in South Carolina.

Hillary praises Obama and his presidency, all but promising that she will continue in the same vein if she can win the primary and general elections, and escape legal issues from her disastrous tenure as secretary of state. And since black Americans overwhelmingly support the Democrat Party, this might seem smart.

However, getting broad support from the black community should not be automatic or even very easy for her, given what happened in South Carolina in 2008. There, she was beaten badly by Barack Obama as she gave her all in the attempt to prevent him from becoming the first black President of the United States. Will black voters remember that?

Furthermore, the reality of the negative effects Obama’s presidency has had on the black community gives reason to think that pledging to follow his policies might be a big mistake.

Having noticed how poorly black Americans had faired in Obama’s first term, PBS’s Tavis Smiley told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in 2013, "The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category."

In 2014 Newsmax reported that while the national unemployment rate had dropped to 7 percent since Obama took office, the jobless rate for blacks has hardly moved, declining from 12.7 percent in 2009 to 12.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, the poverty rate for blacks sharply increased in 2014, rising from 12 percent in 2008 to 16.1 percent.

Median income declined by 3.6 percent for white households to $58,000, but fell 10.9 percent to $33,500 for black households, according to Census Bureau reports.

Realizing that things have not improved for black America since then, Smiley repeated his 2013 assessment last month on HuffPost Live: “Sadly – and it pains me to say this – over the last decade, black folk, in the era of Obama, have lost ground in every major economic category." Smiley said black America got "caught up in the symbolism of the Obama presidency," and made two mistakes. They did not accurately evaluate his policies, and they reacted against GOP criticisms of Obama and Republican opposition to his policies.

With these highly negative results for black Americans from the administration of the first black president of the U.S., will Hillary Clinton’s tactic of praising Obama and implying she will follow in his footsteps really work to attract the support of black Americans?

Perhaps it is with this in mind that the Department of Justice has initiated legal action against Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the justified shooting death of Michael Brown in 2014. As reported by The Patriot Post, Ferguson’s City Council voted unanimously to approve the Justice Department’s settlement to reform the city’s “unjust” policing practices — but “subject to certain conditions.”

“The DOJ responded to the city’s request [to alter the agreement] by filing a lawsuit against Ferguson, just in time to agitate the black vote in the southern primaries,” the report noted, adding: “Make no mistake: Timing is everything. The DOJ’s actions will benefit Hillary Clinton throughout the southern primaries, as blacks are reminded once again of injustice. Never mind that Ferguson (and every other city in which Black Lives Matter is fomenting discord) is run by Democrats.”

There are other signs that a Hillary victory might be being engineered behind the scenes, such as in the New Hampshire primary, where despite a massive victory by Bernie Sanders, he and Hillary came away with the same number of delegates.

Last Thursday, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) PAC endorsed Hillary, saying she had done the most to support the Democrat Party and also to support blacks seeking office. “The partner that the CBC PAC has had over the years to elect Democrats has been Hillary Clinton,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, New York Democrat and chairman of the CBC PAC. Hillary won the endorsement of 90 percent of the PAC, with no members voting for Sanders and some abstaining.

The CBC PAC endorsement is a definite plus for her, but if black Americans realize that Obama’s policies have worked so dramatically to their detriment, raising the black unemployment rate and pushing more black citizens into poverty, the highly desirable black vote may not accrue to her.

And things could get worse for the nation, and much worse for the black community, as Obama’s policies, which have failed to produce a recovery to the 2007 recession in seven years, have brought the country to the brink of another recession that will undoubtedly produce very unpleasant circumstances for black Americans.

Freedom to get the job you want not always possible in West Virginia

The American concept of personal freedom takes a back seat in West Virginia and other states that do not protect their citizens’ ability to get some jobs without being forced to join or pay fees to a labor union. For state governments or the federal government to allow such conditions for going to work to exist is as antithetical to the idea of individual freedom that our nation was built on as it gets.

Half of the 50 states have already embraced worker freedom and passed right-to-work laws. These laws have a positive impact on the economies and job picture for those states, and are creating jobs. And now West Virginia is poised to become the 26th state where workers are free to choose whether or not to join a union.

The state House of Delegates and Senate have both passed right-to-work legislation. The Mountain State’s Democrat Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, has vowed to veto the bill, but the Republican majorities in both houses can override that veto.

Advocates of right-to-work in the state legislature say they are not opposed to unions, per se, but do oppose state laws dictating that unions receive taxpayer and worker funds.

West Virginia and 25 other states believe that people should be free of pressure to join a union to get a job and believe that such mechanisms are deterrents to business development and job creation, and thus are harmful to the economy of states.

Characterized as pro-worker, pro-growth, pro-freedom and pro-job, abolishing forced unionization and the prevailing wage rule in the state are predicted to improve the state’s business climate, increase job opportunities for West Virginians, and help overcome the economic damage to the state’s economy brought on by the Obama administration’s war on coal.

The rub arises when a union has negotiated a contract for workers in a business, and some workers do not want to join the union. The union argues that it isn’t fair for non-union workers to benefit from union negotiations, and the union is correct about that. So then non-union workers are assessed a fee to compensate the union for their benefits.

But then that isn’t exactly fair, either, as non-union workers have nothing to say about how the union uses their money.

The solution is simple: Those workers who want to join the union should be able to do so, and to benefit from the union negotiated work conditions and wages, and those who choose not to join should not be required either to join, or to pay money to the union, and therefore would negotiate their own deal with the employer.

Labor unions evolved from workers wanting better conditions, having endured conditions that were generally unfair and even dangerous for many years. Over the years after workers became organized, however, federal and state governments put laws and rules into effect that provided protections for workers, taking on the primary role that labor organizations had been providing.

With their prime function now essentially covered by laws and regulations, labor unions had to change their focus in order to survive. They have become active and influential political organizations, using member dues and non-union worker fees for political purposes. And too often, the demands they make to attract membership frequently involve things that no sensible business would do on its own, such as demanding work rules that are inefficient and designed to increase union jobs, rather than increase efficiency and productivity. They often demand pay practices that ignore individual worker performance, basing pay on considerations other than the worker’s abilities. And they routinely protect the job of all members regardless of their performance, or the health of the business.

Despite their actions on behalf of their members, which frequently are harmful to the businesses in which their members work, union membership has declined sharply from its peak in the mid-1950s, when one in three workers belonged to a union. The decline began to accelerate in 1980, according to Economy Watch online, and today union membership is a mere 11.1 percent.

That figure includes public-sector workers, who among all workers have the least justification for union representation, given that their employers are the governments that enforce labor law. Public workers are 5 times more likely to belong to a union than their private-sector counterparts, with a union membership rate of 35.2 percent, while the private employee rate is just 6.7 percent.

Many of the demands of unions on businesses, while good for union members, make profitability more difficult for businesses, artificially raising wages and labor costs, thereby increasing the price of goods and services for everyone, including union families. 

Rather than being an adversary of management, unions could become partners, focusing on providing a better trained and more productive workforce, assisting business in succeeding, and creating jobs through natural economic methods, rather than blackmailing employers into actions that benefit only one side of the labor/management equation.

Under this scenario unions could succeed on their own merits rather than depending upon government force and political intrigue for their survival.

More arguments countering the human-caused climate change theory

Frantic over the flood of evidence that shows that climate change is a natural phenomenon and is not made significantly worse by fossil fuel use, which runs contrary to the narrative that fossil fuel use is slowly killing the planet, officials in two states have begun using government power to punish those who dare to speak against the climate change demagoguery.

The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky writes, “California Attorney General Kamala Harris has joined New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in trying to prosecute ExxonMobil for supposedly lying to its shareholders and the public about climate change, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times reported that Harris is investigating what ExxonMobil ‘knew about global warming and what the company told investors.’”

Von Spakovsky’s article in The Daily Caller continues: “Neither Harris nor Schneiderman recognizes the outrageousness of what they are doing — which amounts to censoring or restricting speech and debate on what is a contentious scientific theory. In fact, they want not just to stop anyone who questions the global warming theory from being able to speak; they want to punish them with possible civil sanctions or even criminal penalties.” He goes on to suggest the two AGs badly need a refresher course on the First Amendment.

While trying to punish contrary opinions through government oppression is fairly new to the climate change debate, proponents of human-caused climate change have long been guilty of hiding inconvenient data, distorting and manipulating data, and ignoring a more recent and more accurate method of measuring the Earth’s temperature that does not produce “favorable” data.

For example, 37 years of satellite-based instrument measurements have provided the world's most accurate and unbiased temperature data. These measurements are free from coverage gaps and siting problems – such as artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts – that pollute measurements of land-based instruments. Satellite measurements show no warming of the climate for 18 recent years. Despite their own satellite data, NASA advances theories based upon land-based measurements, which support the human-caused warming theory.

Mike van Biezen addressed the satellite measurement result in an article published on The Daily Wire online discussing ten of the “many scientific problems posed by the assumption that human activity” is causing climate change. In his commentary, the adjunct professor of physics, mathematics, astronomy and Earth science at Loyola Marymount University and Compton College, acknowledges things he says we know to be correct, such as that the global average temperature has increased since the 1980’s; since the 1980’s glaciers around the world are receding and the ice cap of the Arctic Ocean has lost ice since the 1980’s, especially during the summer months; and that the average global temperature for the last 10 years is approximately 0.35 degrees centigrade higher than it was during the 1980’s.

But while acknowledging that those points from 25 years ago are true, and charging that the global warming community exploits those facts to prove that human activity has caused increased temperatures, he then asserts that “no direct scientific proof or data has been shown that link the current observations to human activity.  The link is assumed to be simply a fact, with no need to investigate or discuss any scientific data.”

Among the many things he says are falsely assumed to be linked to human activity:
** Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today’s temperatures are unusual
** Current temperatures are always compared to the temperatures of the 1980’s, but for many parts of the world the 1980’s was the coldest decade of the last 100+ years
** The world experienced a significant cooling trend between 1940 and 1980
** Urban heat island effect skews the temperature data of a significant number of weather stations
** The CO2 cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes
** There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution
** Glaciers have been melting for more than 150 years
** “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming

Biezen provides scientific arguments to refute those commonly advanced ideas, and explains why they fail to demonstrate a connection to climate change from human activity, threatening the comfort and success of human-caused climate change advocates.

The American left, whose ideas routinely fall to logical counter-arguments, frequently resort to force of one sort or another to combat their opponents. Desperation clearly has set in, as evidenced by the radical and tyrannical use of government force by the California and New York AGs to silence dissent. But they and others who think they can quiet the voices of dissent should remember that the United States thrives because it protects its citizens’ right to think for themselves and make their own decisions based on their own preferences.

Whatever you believe about human activities contributing to changes to Earth’s climate, honest people of all ideological persuasions must agree that if you have to deceive the public in order to gain support for your ideas, perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with those ideas.

The verdict is in: college professors are overwhelmingly liberal

Colleges are infected with liberal foolishness to a higher degree than ever before. It seems the most popular activity in colleges today is being offended. Many students are offended by such dastardly threats as contrary opinions, and males standing up while talking to seated females. This is the nature of things at too many campuses these days.

“Trigger warnings” are required to warn students of potentially “troubling class material,” and “microaggressions,” which are words and phrases that offend someone, even when the speaker intended no offense, are a really big deal.

A Harvard Law School dean has compared microaggressions to sexual assault and violence, and the University of California lists things that are just too horrible to say, including threatening phrases, like "everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough" and "America is the land of opportunity." Rough stuff, that.

Such terrifying things slip by traditional, older Americans unnoticed, but cripple younger folk. These hallmarks of modern American liberalism have grown from the seeds that sprouted the belief that feelings are more important than anything, and that everyone deserves a trophy for merely showing up.

Americans who graduated from the school of hard knocks are amazed and bemused at the hypersensitive nature of our once-tough culture, and wonder how this could have occurred. Our education system, at all levels, played a big role.

As these changes occurred they were accompanied by, and perhaps abetted by, the liberalization of the college professoriate.

The Daily Signal published an article discussing a UCLA Higher Education Research Institute study that documents the increase in liberal professors. “During the past quarter-century, academia has seen a nearly 20-percent jump in the number of professors who identify as liberal,” writes Natalie Johnson. “That increase has created a lopsided ideological spread in higher education, with liberal professors now outpacing their conservative counterparts by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1.”

In 1990 only about 41 percent of professors identified themselves as “liberal” or “far-left,” but by 2014 the percentage had risen to 60. Over that same period those identifying as “conservative” or “far-right” fell from 18 to 13 percent.

In 2011 liberal profs reached their highest point at 63 percent, while conservatives reached a high of only 22 percent, in 1993. At the other end, liberals never fell below the 41 percent mark, while conservatives were as low as 12 percent in 2011.

In a perfect world this political imbalance should make little difference. After all, what difference does it make if your math professor is a Democrat, Republican, unaffiliated with a party, a Trotsky-ite or whatever? Math is math, right? Biology, music theory, graphic arts, English grammar and most other subjects are not political in nature. And in an atmosphere where professors merely guide students in learning their subject, it wouldn’t matter. But what if for some strange reason it became trendy for professors to inject a bit of political proselytization into their lectures and lessons?

But isn’t secretly and deliberately indoctrinating young people with ideological attitudes while they think they are only studying how to write a proper sentence, determine a standard deviation, or studying the War Between the States fundamentally dishonest, you may ask? Yes, it certainly is. But bias isn’t always deliberate, according to Matthew Woessner, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Penn State Harrisburg.

He said this ideological imbalance “raises critical questions of whether students are getting a balanced education—not because there’s some conspiracy to block out conservative ideas, but merely because the people who are teaching are either not familiar with or don’t embrace conservative ideas.” Even when faculty attempt to present an issue in a balanced and impartial manner, he said, personal biases naturally bleed into material.

The UCLA study reflects that this liberal tilt among professors has had an effect, with data from 2009 showing that the number of students who said their political views were “liberal” or “far left” grew by 9.2 percent from their freshman year to their senior year.

Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University, cast more of a cloud on the collegiate atmosphere, opining that the reported 5-to-1 ratio is “not very meaningful” because the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have become “exceedingly troubled.” Instead, Klein suggested that the imbalance between faculty members who vote Democratic compared with those who vote Republican is closer to 9-to-1 or even 10-to-1.

Ideally, there would be relative equality of liberal and conservative ideology among faculty. Woessner, however, suggests that equal numbers of liberal and conservative professors really isn’t necessary for higher education to work well, so long as a sufficient number of faculty hold different views “to create a space for enough conservative ideas that students are exposed at least nominally to these other perspectives,” he said.

It is critical for colleges and universities to work much harder to even out the ideological divide if higher education is to regain credibility for delivering a balanced education. No group should want that more than the professors themselves, who should prefer a reputation of integrity as opposed to one of having a finger on the scale.

Obama's last State of the Union: Just another campaign speech

President Barack Obama gave his eighth and final State of the Union (SOTU) message last Tuesday night, to a mixed set of reviews. Commentators had noted that a president’s last SOTU generally is predictable and boring. Obama’s final flourish was both predictable in its petulance and arrogance, and boring, because most of it has been said before. And often.

Pledging near the beginning that this one would be short perhaps gave false hope. Going back to Lynden Johnson’s presidency from 1963 to 1969, our presidents’ addresses have averaged right at 50 minutes, and Obama’s speeches have averaged 63 minutes. Only in comparison to Bill Clinton’s average of 75 minutes does this one qualify as short, running just under 59 minutes. At 29 minutes, Richard Nixon’s 1972 address holds the record for the shortest.

Perhaps it is due to his 12-year stint as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School that the address was an hour-long lecture, one part of which dealt with the tone of current political discourse and contained an uncommon admission of failure. “It's one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,” he said. “I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide...” That is no doubt true, as it is a commonly and broadly held opinion that Obama is the most divisive president in recent memory, or perhaps ever, and he has done nothing to calm the raging political waters in seven years.

Complaining that there has been precious little progress in Congress, he noted: “Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise…” But compromise depends upon the details of the issue. Sometimes, compromise is simply not possible if it means one side abandoning fundamental principles. If one party demands the other party sacrifice their right hand, for example, the other party cannot be blamed for refusing to compromise by giving up two or three fingers. This is the nature of the compromise Obama and the Democrats slam Republicans for not indulging in, as they routinely demand things that even acquiescent Republicans cannot accept.

Burnishing his accomplishments, Obama said we have “a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry and booming energy production.” He also said that the U.S. is in the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. Typically, this is the most non-specific and favorable part of the story, and there is much there deserving of clarification. Many jobs have, indeed, been created and the unemployment rate (U-3) is in good territory, but that is due to millions of Americans having stopped looking for work because they couldn’t find a job in the Obama economy. The Workforce Participation rate is at its lowest point in 35 years.

Wages have stagnated during Obama’s tenure, personal debt has increased by about $1 trillion, and fewer Americans are buying homes. And then there is the national debt, which has increased substantially under Obama. He took office in January of fiscal year 2009, with a national debt of nearly $12 trillion. In fiscal 2015 that figure stood at more than $18 trillion. Fiscal 2016 will end September 30 of this year, and it is likely that by that time the national debt will be $20 trillion.

All the while GDP limps along at rates ranging from a low of minus 2.8 percent in 2009 to 2.4 percent in 2014, never rising above 2.5 percent. GDP finally began approaching respectable levels in 2015, fully six years after Obama took office. Not much to brag about there.

Obama said it is a hallmark of his economy that today more Americans work in the solar industry than in the coal industry. But at what cost? He gave well over a billion dollars of taxpayer money in subsidies to a few solar firms that not long thereafter went bankrupt, and the administration’s harsh and unwarranted attacks on the coal industry put tens of thousands out of work and closed several coal-fired electric generation plants well before natural changes in energy production would have more gradually and less chaotically replaced coal with other methods.

In West Virginia, the loss of income from the Coal Severance Tax and Income Tax collections from out-of-work coal miners and workers in support industries have seriously damaged the state’s economy, and Kentucky and Virginia also have suffered job losses and economic harm, all without a sympathetic tear from the president.

Each year as the State of the Union address grows near there is talk of doing away with it, because it no longer has a valid purpose. “What’s tiresome is the hoopla about a speech that hardly anybody watches, and that, as a general rule, contains nothing new,” stated Yale law professor Stephen Carter. The SOTU originally was intended for the president to report to Congress on the condition of the nation, but also allowed the President to outline his legislative agenda.

Ah, but those were the good old days. More recently it has devolved into a grand political opportunity, as Obama so well demonstrated.

Obama brought to tears talking about gun violence in America

In his comments last Tuesday prior to signing an Executive Order expanding background checks for gun purchases, President Barack Obama became uncharacteristically emotional and shed tears as he discussed children killed in mass shootings. His emotional reaction gave weight to his message, but some doubted the sincerity of his tears, seeing them as a device to increase support for his proposal. The Executive Order issued days later expands background checks for firearms purchasers, but is an action that would not have prevented the shooting that brought the tears, or other recent horrific shooting events.

This rare show of emotion calls attention to Obama’s lack of tears for other tragedies – such as the death of an innocent young woman at the hands of an illegal alien in California, or the San Bernardino murders by radical Muslims – as further evidence of his selective use of emotion for political purposes.

Emotion is the driver of liberal initiatives, which are highlighted by the generous use of false information and/or exaggeration, and the twisting of truth. Demagoguery and shaming are always close at hand, as well. If someone opposes abortion, they don’t really want to protect life, they just want to deny women control of their bodies. If someone opposes stronger gun control measures, it isn’t because they value and want to defend Constitutional liberties, it is because they don’t care that children and other innocents are being murdered daily. Although this tactic sounds like it was developed on an elementary school playground, a lot of people rely on it and fall for it.

Obama quotes the statistic that there are more than 30,000 gun deaths each year, and Democrat presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton breaks that down to an average of 90 gun deaths a day. Those large numbers surely catch one’s attention, but throwing out large numbers cheats the public of both perspective and true understanding of gun deaths. For example, roughly 19,000 gun deaths are suicides. How many of those severely troubled individuals would decide to go on living because they could not lay their hands on a gun?

About 1,800 are gang related, and 900 others are accidents. A majority – 80 percent – of the remaining gun-related deaths is attributed to urban problems. And, of course, some gun deaths are justified, as in cases of self-defense. The CDC reports that there are 3.5 gun deaths in the U.S. per 100,000 people while the number of all deaths is 821.5 per 100,000 people.

The self-defense aspect receives far too little discussion. In 2013, Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assess the existing research on gun violence, and a report prepared by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council stated, in part: “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year … in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

Some suggest that three million is likely an unrealistically high number, but if guns are used defensively a half-million or more times a year, that is compelling. Given the record of people using guns to defend themselves from criminal activity and even death, wouldn’t it be appropriate for tears to be shed because so many have died in “gun-free zones,” where they were denied the ability for self-defense or protection from other people who were in the line of fire who were armed? There is a better than average chance that mass shooters would make a point to avoid places where they knew guns were being carried by their potential victims.

Americans are a rebellious lot; they don’t like to be controlled. Thus, in order to persuade them to go along with ideas like gun control, they have to be made to believe that existing laws are being enforced but that existing laws just aren’t enough, and we need more regulation. This is accomplished through various techniques, including heavy propaganda based upon myths.

Some examples: Background checks are not required for purchases on the Internet. Law enforcement is not present at gun shows, which are a free-for-all for prohibited individuals to obtain firearms. Obama has made firearms enforcement a priority, and his executive action on gun control will thwart criminals’ ability to obtain firearms. There is a general consensus in America that greater gun control is needed to prevent mass shootings in the United States.

Those statements are all false, and have been shown to be so by Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who wrote a commentary published on The Daily Caller online, listing and disproving 10 myths about guns, including those above.

Neither gun violence nor climate change is a critical problem for the United States. The threat of Islamic terrorism, a government too weak on the world stage, but grown too large and too controlling here at home, and a president who thinks he is an emperor, however, are critical problems. And that is why restoring conservative government is so important in the next election.

Asset forfeiture provides huge monetary benefits for law enforcement

The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act became law in 2000. Asset forfeiture is a tool that gives law enforcement the power to seize property and cash if they suspect it is connected to a crime, and is hailed by law enforcement groups as a vital tool for combating drug trafficking and money laundering.

The Institute for Justice reports that the Justice Department’s program furnished state and local law enforcement agencies some $4.7 billion in forfeiture proceeds from 2000 to 2013. What better way to help fund law enforcement than through the confiscation of property from criminals?

But the DOJ now plans to halt the program. Naturally, law enforcement wants this program to continue, and the possibility of the program being halted has raised concerns and prompted letters to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The National Sheriff’s Association, to cite just one of the law enforcement groups expressing concern, said the Justice Department’s decision will hinder law enforcement agencies’ ability to do their jobs. “While Congress and the president vacation in peace and tranquility, law enforcement knows all too well that the criminals, terrorists, and criminal aliens do not take a holiday,” the sheriff’s organization noted. “Those seeking to do us harm can rest easier knowing one less tool can be used against them.”

However, typical of governments at all levels, which are operated by humans and not angels, this program has been abused to illegally confiscate the private, legally possessed property of innocent Americans. Essentially, the message government sends out far too frequently is, “Any useful program that governments have at their disposal will eventually be misused, to the detriment of the people for whose benefit it was developed.”

If you need a recent example of government power misused by government employees, remember Lois Lerner and the IRS targeting and harassing certain conservative organizations seeking non-profit status. Other examples of misbehavior are not hard to find.

The asset forfeiture program also is abused. From the ACLU Website: “Police abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws has shaken our nation’s conscience. Civil forfeiture allows police to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime. Owners need not ever be arrested or convicted of a crime for their cash, cars, or even real estate to be taken away permanently by the government.

“Forfeiture was originally presented as a way to cripple large-scale criminal enterprises by diverting their resources. But today, aided by deeply flawed federal and state laws, many police departments use forfeiture to benefit their bottom lines, making seizures motivated by profit rather than crime-fighting. For people whose property has been seized through civil asset forfeiture, legally regaining such property is notoriously difficult and expensive, with costs sometimes exceeding the value of the property. With the total value of property seized increasing every year, calls for reform are growing louder, and [the ACLU and others are] at the forefront of organizations seeking to rein in the practice.”

Adam and Jennifer Perry exemplify people who were victimized by this law and law enforcement officers willing to capitalize on it.

On October 25, 2012, the couple was stopped for speeding in Henry County, Mass. Police searched the couple’s vehicle and found a suitcase containing $107,520 in cash. Suspicious? Yes, but not a crime or necessarily evidence of a crime. And although no drugs or any other evidence of a crime were found, the police said they suspected the Perrys of criminal activity, and seized the cash and their vehicle.

During nine hours of questioning the Perrys insisted they had done nothing wrong and that the money was theirs legally, from various legal sources, and had evidence confirming that for some of the funds. Lacking any real evidence, the police had to release the couple. But they kept the money and the vehicle, even though no charges were filed, no trial was held, and no guilt was proved. Three years later, the Perrys are still fighting to get their property back.

If this legalized theft from innocent citizens isn’t bad enough, now a federal judge has demanded that the Perrys prove how they got the money, this after they had already given explanations to the police, who did not disprove those explanations. Question: If there was no evidence of a crime, and no charges filed, why should these citizens be compelled to prove where they got their own money?

A fundamental American legal principle is the presumption of innocence, that Americans are innocent until “proven” guilty, and that the onus is on the judicial system to prove guilt, not on citizens to prove they aren’t guilty.

On December 23, the Justice Department announced it will discontinue the asset forfeiture program, but the discontinuation is temporary.

The tyrannical treatment of the Perrys by Henry County, MA police and a federal judge epitomizes what “un-American” means. Before it can be reinstated, asset forfeiture laws must be amended to protect Americans from rogue actors in law enforcement who seek improved work conditions at the expense of law-abiding citizens. Stiff criminal penalties for abuse are essential. These people soil the reputations of the 99 percent who honorably serve the people.