Dakota Beacon

In the reason corner, we have the birther foolishness, Obama fascism, and the Fed conspiring with foreign powers. Anyone, not just Tea Partiers, putting significant energy into any of these three areas is wasting their time.

Now for the nonsense corner. To deny that Obama has driven America toward socialism, that Soros has financed vitriol-filled anti-American organizations and efforts, or that some Muslims are trying to push the tenets and customs of Islam into various American communities requires the blindness and naïveté discussed above.

The real genius of the American political system is the original understanding, born more of experience and compromise than of theory, that power should be limited, divided, and dispersed. Spreading power thinly is one way - imperfect, but practical - of protecting liberty.

In a truly federal system, states are united on a few specified points, but free to differ in all other respects. How ironic, but how typical, that the apostles of "diversity" want to make the states uniform. Real diversity, the kind the United States used to have, is the last thing they want. This is E pluribus unum with a vengeance.

It’s time to quit ignoring our Constitution as the three branches of government so frequently do. Let’s get back to basics in government. Last week was believed to be the first time that the complete Constitution had ever been read in Congress. Let’s make reading the Constitution in Congress an annual event, as it is for Washington’s Farewell Address.

Opening the 112th Congress by having a succession of representatives read the Constitution aloud on the floor of the House was a worthwhile exercise, despite heated criticism to the contrary. If nothing else, it showed how little respect many members of Congress have for the supreme law of our republic. Fewer than half the members even bothered to be present during the reading.

This is a metaphor for what you, Dupnik, and the rest of your leftist ilk are visiting upon our once-great nation.  Do you really want to prevent violence, sheriff?  Then drop the inflammatory-rhetoric artifice and stop the immoral actions.  Stop attacking Western culture and traditions.  Start believing in and seeking Truth, yielding to reason and abiding by the Constitution.  Stop the lies and deceit.  We yell fire because you and your fellow travelers really are pyromaniacs.  Pick up a hose and help, or America will be hosed down by 1984 – or 1776 – whether you, I, or anyone else likes it or not.

Jingoists push the notion that America must grow exports faster than imports. These preachers preach that importing more than we export is somehow bad. But mathematics doesn't lie. Look again at those last two paragraphs. There's a 38% higher correlation between imports and GDP than there is between exports and GDP. The math says this: Go ahead and focus on growing your exports, but when you do, your economy will grow less than if you had let the market run free to produce increased demand which spurs imports. A rising gross domestic product goes along with rising imports--plain and simple. Trade deficit worriers may reject that reality, but reality it is.

In summary, when imports increase, the economy and the job market expand. When imports decrease, the economy goes into recession and employment falls. There is no similarly strong correlation in the case of exports.

Absent real reform, the property tax program is simply destined to cost more and more each Session.  The Legislature must evaluate new ways of to make local governments more accountable and appreciative of what the Legislature does for them by shifting local government burdens onto the state's books.

Local government must make a good faith effort to reduce their own property tax property taxes as part of the state's efforts to do the same.

The United States cannot force these states to change, but Washington should make religious persecution part of its human-rights dialogue with other nations. Equally important, Americans should support and pray for the oppressed around the world.

Religious liberty is the proverbial canary in the mine. If a state won’t respect this most basic freedom of conscience, it isn’t likely to respect people’s lives and dignity in any context.

His straightforward reasoning went like this. If voters were willing to elect public “servants” who would take care of them in exchange for a bit of their freedom, that was their choice. His choice was to recoup at least some of what the government had taken from him in taxes by claiming his share of benefits as soon as possible. After all, he argued, he had worked long and hard while the government took more and more of his income. Why shouldn’t he get something in return?

He claimed he felt no guilt from transgressing the old American ethic of getting ahead through hard work. He indicated he understood a new ethic, an overriding unspoken ethic, affirming the right to live off one’s fellow man. This was his subtle observation of the public mind-set.

The hysteria fanned by the hyperbolic catastrophism of the ‘carbon klatch’ and a sensationalist press have created a ‘Ready Fire Aim’ mentality, pushing the nation and the world toward drastic action, before cost-effective capture methods and energy alternatives are established and operational – based on a blind faith

A chronic state of crisis, readers suggested that the IHS should be abolished, sustain a positive business climate, proceed with caution, public administrator and guardianship services, Remarkable Run Ends for Team North Dakota, the “heart” landed lightly on his feet, You would think they might notice, new diesel tractor engines, an expensive boondoggle, for disobeying road closures, more frequent competency tests for older drivers, Fighting Sioux nickname, State Dairy Queen

That the Democrats took a thumping last November is obvious. In the House of Representatives, over 60 seats changed from Democrat to Republican. Less-remarked upon, however, was the equally dramatic switch to pro-life legislators, which, not coincidentally, accompanied that Democrat-to-Republican shift.

In short, the Democratic Party, which was already heading down this path, now has preciously few pro-lifers in the House or Senate. We’re approaching the point where you can count them on two hands, potentially one hand. Alas, I say this with regret. I honestly do. I’m a pro-life Republican, but I know that the parties, and what they stand for, change over time. I’m far more concerned with the lives of unborn babies than political lives of Republicans.

Three years ago, I witnessed a cocktail-sipping San Francisco area Sierra Club attorney sit and hold court with enthralled listeners.  The attorney described the pleasure that she derives from inflicting economic pain on manufacturers and sending "messages" to consumers of capitalists' products.  I wondered aloud if her computer, refrigerator, TV, phones, and air conditioners were powered by electricity.  Court spectators chuckled.  But the jab flew over the head that sported the up-tilted chin, spittle-flinging lips, and angry eyes peering down a nose with nostrils flaring each time the brain recalled a legal victory over planet-hating wretches.

It seems that our neutered, post-Christian culture just can’t do enough to vindicate Muslims’ accusation of Western decadence.  And the latest affront to common sense and Truth is an attack upon the family: The State Department will remove the terms “father” and “mother” from passport applications and replace them with “gender neutral terminology.”

Insofar as government is going to be involved in influencing the family, it has a duty to not undermine familial health.  The family is the central building block of civilization, and nations rise and fall with its fortunes.  And as with obesity and other physical problems, familial anomalies will inevitably exist (e.g., single-parent households).  But this doesn’t mean they should be normalized.

I’m delighted to see the left wring its collective hands over an entity with no single leader, no headquarters, no “bullseye” at which they may aim.  I’m pleased to watch them waste time and resources trying to identify a single monolithic Tea Party movement, try to portray certain Sarah Palin types as the de facto leader, and throw the same old Alinsky playbook at the straw man they’ve created.  All the while they’re motivating us even more, the average citizen-turned-activist who continues to fly under their radar.  We’re out here in numbers, we’re resolute in our cause, and we’ll make our presence known during every legislative session and election cycle.

How did the “Minot Mafia” react to the Dakota Beacon article?  It moved, through the Minot city attorney, seeking a GAG ORDER prohibiting this writer from discussing, writing about, or making public comments about the claims, defenses and evidence in the case.

American liberals have enthusiastically celebrated the passage of a law requiring the Armed Forces to recruit homosexuals. The celebration in some cases (for example, Rachel Madow, liberal host at MSNBC) is so excessive that one has to wonder if homosexuality will replace abortion as the cardinal defining principle of contemporary American liberalism. Even the Republican liberals joined on this issue.

While the Democrats in the congress of the United States are holding hearings on seizing our nation's 401Ks to cover the budget shortfall in the socialist Social Security and Medicare programs, the liberal leaders of Europe have already made up their minds.

It is not an anti-intellectual bias against “book-learning” we’re seeing. It is contempt for indoctrination disguised as education. It is respect for real competence, measured by success in the essential wealth-creating work of any civilization: making stuff, growing stuff and moving stuff around.

And it is exactly what the Tea Party supporters have been loudly and plainly stating in a manner that requires no interpretation or search for deep psychological meaning, a distrust of the elitist assumption they are more fit to run our lives than we are.

From researchers who use/destroy human embryos in an attempt to find cures for all that ails us, to perhaps one day fetal tissues grown from cells taken from our own body to replace, say your kidneys, “this is the natural consequence of deciding that human life has no dignity,” said Wesley Smith, a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. 

Patients right now, some unknowingly, are using ten vaccines and three high-tech bio-drugs that contain voluntarily aborted babies’ cell lines. Scores more of these so-called designer drugs are on the way.

With governments going broke, we literally cannot afford politics as usual. We face financial ruin accompanied by some catastrophic mix of monetary breakdown, economic collapse, and social unrest. When a maniac is about to drive the car you are in over a cliff, you don’t make a deal to reduce your speed from 60 mph to 30 mph; you either stop or proceed onward to your doom.

OIL, OIL, OIL, OIL BOOM CONSEQUENCES, ELECTION ROUT, KELLEY IS NOT A FIGHTING SIOUX, VALLEY CITY HAS AN “OH, OH” MOMENT, WE CAN’T KEEP MEETING LIKE THIS, THE STRANGE FATE OF EARL POMELOSI, “IT’S VERY EMBARRASSING” -- INTERIM PRESIDENT DICK HANSON, OIL IS PAVING THE WAY, SOMALIS ARE COMING

While our focus should be winning a war, Democrats turned our military into a liberal social experiment by repealing “don’t ask don’t tell”. Conrad and Dorgan voted ‘yes’.

Kent Conrad promised North Dakota “one of the most significant lame-duck sessions in the history of the United States” and helped Democrats deliver.

Democrats showed you who they really are. Never forget.

End of the year recaps, with the pundits and TV talking heads, now warn us in ominous tones that the coming 112^th Congress will, in their view, not accomplish much because there will be insurmountable gridlock. If only. We can pray that it will be so. Stop these people before they commit another atrocity--please!

On the heels of a recent Sunday magazine profile of Glenn Beck, The New York Times published a roundtable discussion among six scholars on the issue of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson has become a popular Beck target, and has suddenly emerged as a hot topic in our current politics.

My take on Wilson, however, is very different from what I'm hearing from Beck or from scholars on the left or right, whether pro-Wilson or anti-Wilson. It relates to a crucial aspect of Wilson that needs to be better known and which, dare I say, might even prompt Beck to amend his view—slightly perhaps.

Nothing that could reconcile the flat-out Marxist-Leninist Obama was in his college days with the man he supposedly is today.  There’s no one who says, “Yeah, man was he was a radical guy in his youth, and I just couldn’t believe how he became disenchanted with his old ideas.”  There are no stories about a great epiphany, an overseas trip that opened his eyes or a personal tragedy that inspired growth.  There’s nothing to explain how a radical Marxist became a reasonable politician.  And if there is such an explanation, it’s the most elusive of missing links.