(“The Skunk Doesn’t See Its Tail” — Mexican Phrase)

This past Monday I read an article laced with race baiting and many unsubstantiated comments I’ve ever set my eyes on.  A black woman, Elizabeth Ivy, a member of the Star-Telegram’s Community Columnist Panel, wrote the piece “Brutal Political Debate Once Again Widens a Cultural Divide”.  Honestly, there were so many false accusations in Ms. Ivy’s piece that I really don’t know where to start.

I’ll begin by pointing out that in her piece, Ms. Ivy was comparing the Tea Party activists to the way segregationist acted towards blacks during the Civil Rights struggle in our country in the 1960s, particularly in Selma, Alabama and Little Rock, Arkansas.  To aid Ms. Ivy in her venomous piece the Star-Telegram posted a photo of Arkansas National Guard troops blocking the way of 9 black students from entering an all-white school in Little Rock in 1957.  What Ms. Ivy conveniently failed to mention in her diatribe was that the politician who ordered the National Guard to deny entrance to the 9 black students was a member of the party most blacks vote for today, a Democrat, Governor Orval Faubus (of course let’s not forget another lovable Democrat, Sen. Robert Byrd an ex-Klansman).  Let me set the record straight for some of you who are unaware of the history of that time which is no longer taught in public schools.  In 1954 the Supreme Court in the historic Brown v. Board of Education stated that all public schools in the United States had to accept black students.  To de-escalate the racial situation in Little Rock, President Dwight Eisenhower, (a mean Republican according to most liberals) summoned Gov. Faubus to meet him.  The President warned the governor not to interfere with the Supreme Court’s ruling.  The next day, Woodrow Mann, the Mayor of Little Rock, asked President Eisenhower to send federal troops to enforce integration and protect the nine students.  On September 24, the President ordered the 101^st Airborne Division of the United States Army to Little Rock and federalized the entire 10,000 Arkansas National Guard, taking it out of the hands of the lovable Democrat, Governor Faubus.  The 101^st took positions immediately, and the nine black students successfully entered the school on the next day, Wednesday, September 25, 1957.  Incidentally, in 1968, Gov. Faubus was among five people considered for the vice-presidential slot of third-part presidential candidate George Wallace, an avowed racist Democrat who ran officially as a Democrat three times and in the American Independent Party once.

In a recent downtown Fort Worth Tea Party rally, Ms. Ivy compared those in attendance similar to the anti-integration violent crowds she saw in the documentary Eyes on the Prize when she was 13 in an integrated school in Connecticut.  She further stated: “And then I was taken back yet again.  Back to my surprise encounter with the Tea Partiers — right in the middle of downtown Fort Worth where, for a moment, I felt unwelcome on the streets of a city I have loved for many years.  My experience right here at home, coupled with what seems to be spreading to every community in this country, has led me to the realization that, for some, this Tea Party movement is about more than the unwanted promise of healthcare.  I think it just might be about something personal, selfish and vile.”  I let you decided what she is implying with those comments.

Folks, undoubtedly, Ms. Ivy isn’t aware that Fort Worth is one of the fastest growing cities in Texas.  One wonders if Ms. Ivy is implying that people come to Fort Worth because we’re a mean racist city that hates anyone that is not white.  Personally, I don’t think so.  People come here because we’re a very conservative city and there are many job opportunities here for hard working people of all colors.

Born and raised in Fort Worth I, as an American Hispanic, along with blacks, felt the sting of racism and segregation.  We were restricted where we could live, eat, and work.  However as an American Hispanic I got it not only from whites but from Hispanics as well.  Living in North Fort Worth as a young man I couldn’t go to a Hispanic function outside my barrio (neighborhood) without being physically threaten.  I remember that our parish (San Jose) would host fiestas and dances and Hispanic airmen from Carswell Air Force Base, who weren’t allowed at white dance clubs would come to our Hispanic community to enjoy themselves.  There they would get beaten because they would simply ask a girl to dance.  Is that ignorance or what?

Due to segregation and Hispanic turf boundaries to have a good time in white and Hispanic clubs I soon started to frequent black clubs in South Fort Worth.  Quickly, I felt in love with the black man’s music and artists (Joe Turner, B. B. King, Bill Doggett, Faye Adams, Lavern Baker, The Clovers plus others).  All the years I frequented black bars and clubs I can’t recall every feeling unwanted.  To the contrary, blacks were extremely good to me.

In the 1960s, President Johnson enacted the Great Society Bill whereby many, along with black Americans, soon were able to get food stamps, rental assistance, and welfare checks.  Within a few years that once thriving business driven black community I so dearly loved became a run down crime infested ghetto, which still remains unchanged to this very day.

A year ago my youngest daughter asked me where I took her mom dancing when we were dating.  I drove her to the aforementioned black community in South Fort Worth.  Seeing the boarded up businesses and churches with burglar bars and tall fences around homes she asked, “Dad, who are these people afraid of?”  I responded, “Their own.”

There’s an old Mexican phrase, La zorra no se ve la cola. (The skunk can’t see its tail).  Meaning: “Before you start throwing mud at others, don’t forget that your tail smells.”

As a Hispanic I’d feel safer at a Tea Party rally than walking at night in my old black stomping grounds community in South Fort Worth.  I’d bet Ms. Ivy would to.

It is amazing how observable circumstances can produce varying opinions about what to do.  If two people agree on a problem, they may nevertheless disagree on a prescriptive solution.  For instance, author Don Peck says that unemployment and social problems attributable to joblessness are likely to persist for years.  I happen to agree that recovery may be slow, and the impact of sustained chronic unemployment is corrosive on society.  Peck says we have a civic and moral responsibility to do everything in our power to stop the economic hardship on the unemployed and the underemployed.  He believes our bias should be towards doing too much in terms of government stimulus and intervention, rather than too little.  He concludes that paying higher taxes in the future involves a "trade worth making."  Well, I think he's nuts.  Paying the piper may be the least we can do. 

The call is also very familiar.  Crisis begets extreme measures and the inevitable justification for still more government control and less individual freedom.  It sounds impractical and darkly romantic, but I would rather die free by the viaduct, than live as a slave on the expropriated largesse stolen by the government from hardworking fellow taxpayers-receiving a government check, living in government quarters, working the government job, going to a government provided doctor.  I'm not talking about military life.  I've been there, and the context is unique and special and at any rate provided for in the Constitution.  What I'm talking about is the inexcusable transformation of civil society into a quasi-military environment.  I'm talking about the Imperial Presidency; about the semblance of Parliamentary supremacy coming from a corrupt Congress; about living legislation emanating from the Bench-all in contravention to the will of the People and terms of the United States Constitution.  I'm talking about the end of the Republic, if we don't come together and get it right in 2010 and 2012.  The rhetoric may sound shrill to you. 

Then listen to what the experts are saying.  Last month the Congressional Budget Office Director, Douglas Elmendorf said that U.S. fiscal policy, as "a matter of arithmetic" is simply not sustainable.  Further, he said fixing the problem requires fundamental changes not just tinkering at the margins. That's a nice way of saying that revenues aren't even close to keeping up with all the wild spending.  Metaphorically if you're paddling a boat, you're about to get swamped by the next wave.  Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke likewise sounded an alarm over America's growing and unsustainable debt level.  He counseled that big changes are needed soon, in order to reduce the deficit-either higher taxes or the reduction in America's most cherished entitlement programs.  So we've finally come to this: sacrifice the golden goose, or-as so-called "realistic" liberal ideologues would have it, raise taxes to save our country!  Just swallow hard and do your civic duty.  If you ask me, that kind of civic duty is a total crock.

The darling answer for many a Progressive is the Value Added Tax (V.A.T.). Lots of countries have it.  It's a tax on consumption aimed mostly at businesses and it requires a considerable government accounting mechanism. Nevertheless, it is sure to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars more in revenue to the government.  The problem is that every country in the world that has enacted the V.A.T. has never achieved one iota of fiscal discipline.  Quite the opposite: what they have done instead is to extend their social netting even further, as well as to enlarge the government apparatus.  There is absolutely no reason or empirical basis whatsoever to believe the U.S. Congress or President will rein in spending or use the money to pay down debt.  There is every reason to believe they will as quickly relapse, like hopeless food addicts at a pastry shop. Metaphorically if we're aboard the Titanic as Elmendorf and Bernanke suggest, despite their warnings we're headed for an iceberg, at least with this crew in charge. 

The only hope we have is to radically change government by ousting the political class at the helm-by repealing Congress in 2010 and Obama in 2012. We have to replace Big Brother profligate spenders with frugal accountable servants, who respect the U.S. Constitution and who are willing to stay within the bounds of enumerated constitutional powers.  What we need are representatives and elected officials who are not beholden to special interests, men and women of integrity.  We dare not vote to raise taxes or enact a V.A.T., because our better judgment tells us that what is missing most of all from government is plain honesty and integrity-higher taxes won't solve anything.  Even if they could, we can't trust those politicians who tell us they would use taxes to pay down and keep down the annual deficits or national debt.  Our political system is such anyway they can't bind their successors, so every precedent grows the government.  New powers to tax inevitably become new powers to destroy American businesses and entrepreneurship.  We don't need more would be tyrants to lord over us, but rather we need a few humble spirits to apply the military ethics of hard work and integrity to public office: to say what they mean, mean what they say, and most of all to act accordingly. 

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.  Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

Although his name was no household word, the philosopher Antony Flew, who died recently at the age of 87, was truly one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. As I noted in The American Spectator at the time, Flew’s decision to embrace theism in 2004 was an immensely important event:

Flew has indeed conceded what must be seen as the criticial point. It is this: that atheism has, at its base, a leap of faith exactly identical to that which theists make. Theists look at all the evidence we encounter in the natural world and conclude that it is consonant with belief in an intelligent, all-powerful being behind it, whom we call God. Atheists look at the same evidence and conclude that this cosmos must have all just happened somehow. The critical point is that neither position is provable.

Flew’s great innovation in his 1950 article “Theology and Falsification” was to point out the first half of this formulation: that the belief in God is not scientifically falsifiable and hence not a scientific statement. Well and good. Flew is exactly correct, if we are willing to narrow our concept of science to a concern for only that which is materially provable—a perfectly reasonable position. What Flew failed to do, however, and what is indeed impossible to achieve, was to prove that the atheist case is scientifically falsifiable and hence a truly scientific position. It is neither. What Flew’s clever argument did was to place theists on the defensive by suggesting that their position was uniquely unscientific. It is most decidedly not, and never has been so.

The argument succeeded brilliantly, however, even though it had already been answered by writers such as C. S. Lewis. The great Oxford don Lewis had pointed out, in his book Miracles, published in 1947, that there are only two possible philosophies, or worldviews, in our world: Christianity (under which he which placed all theist orientations) and Hinduism (in which he included all naturalist/materialist philosophies). Lewis’s argument made it clear that contrary to the claims of its adherents, materialist philosophy had no fundamental philosophical advantage over theist positions.

Hard as he tried, Flew’s argument did nothing to change that, although he did succeed in emboldening materialist philosophers and their adherents and in placing Christians on the defensive.

Flew’s original argument was, as noted, extremely favorable to atheism. As the Daily Telegraph aptly put it, “He argued that any philosophical debate about the Almighty must begin by presuming atheism, placing the burden of proof on those who believe that God exists.”

Hence hhis eventual recognition of the argument I outline above was a truly world-changing concession. Flew told the theologian Dr. Gary Habermas, ”a knock-down falsification . . . is most certainly not possible in the case of Christianity.”

As I noted in the aforementioned American Spectator article, “It is undeniable that [Flew] has now conceded the main point: that neither atheism nor theism has any special, fundamental, philosophical advantage or disadvantage over the other. That is a huge change.”

It was so important because the very man who had unfairly knocked the pins out from under theism had finally acknowledged his mistake and corrected the record and put theism back on equal footing with materialism:

From a philosophical perspective, that is all that the theists need: to have the argument back on level ground. It is indeed the correct philosophical position and the right scientific one, and Flew is to be commended for his willingness to “go where the evidence leads.” The conclusion is a simple one: Atheists have no greater claim to scientific truth or rationality than theists do. If theists are allowed to argue on the same footing as atheists, it will be better for science and philosophy alike. That makes Antony Flew’s recent change of thinking very important indeed.

Flew was also a great defender of classical liberalism, a position that earned him few friends during the UK’s steady drift into statism throughout the previous century.

I knew Flew only by his writings, but Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance in the UK, knew him personally in the philosopher’s later years. Gabb wrote a remembrance of him for the Libertarian Alliance website, which he has kindly given me permission me to reprint:

I came across Antony’s work in the early 1980s, when I first discovered David Hume. I admired Antony without ever supposing I’d meet him. We did eventually meet in June 1992. I was sitting in my office in the Prime Minister’s Palace in Bratislava. The telephone rang. It was one of the guards on the main door. He told me there was a strange old man with him who understood a little German, but no Slovak, and who was unable to make himself understood.

I went down, and found it was the great Professor Flew. He’d arrived at the main railway station to give some lectures for the Jan Hus Foundation, but hadn’t been met. So he’d wandered the streets of a Bratislava where almost no one in those days knew any English. Eventually, for some reason I was never able to discover, he’d been pushed towards the Prime Minister’s Palace. I took him off to his hotel and got him booked in. Before we parted, he asked if I’d like to go with him the following morning to the site of Austerlitz (Slavkov) to inspect the battlefield.

Next day, I went off with him as his interpreter, and spend the day translating all the inscriptions there out of Czech and French and Latin. It was a jolly outing.

Back in England, I found myself bumping into him at an increasing number of libertarian and conservative events. Most people, I regret to say, regarded him as something of an old bore. He liked the fact that I always regarded him with awed admiration and enjoyed discussing his favourite subjects–empirical epistemology and so forth.

I remember walking with him to Charing Cross Railway Station in late 1997. He surprised me then by wishing for a Christian revival to counter what he regarded as the much more malign force of Islam. This did sort of prepare me for his later conversion to theism–though I was always surprised at his acceptance of the argument from design in terms that our common Master, David Hume, had already demolished.

I was too polite in any of our later conversations to press him on this. Instead, I let him talk and talk about the quite irrelevant facts of DNA and its complexities. And, since I’m a sceptic rather than an atheist, I’ve never tried to argue anyone out of a belief in God that might well be correct, even if I don’t feel terribly drawn to it myself.

During his last few years, his mind began to fail him. I met him once while he was wandering lost in London. He recognised me and was grateful that I was able to get him onto the right railway train back to Reading. But he was increasingly vague about everything except philosophical issues on which he’d spent his entire life working, and that were unlikely to leave him even after he’d most much sense of his own identity.

He lived long. He lived well. If there is a God, I don’t think He’ll hold against him the little matter of sixty years of philosophical atheism. I bid farewell to a friend and a guide:

E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen
qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda vitae,
te sequor o Graiae gentis decus inque tuis nunc
ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis….

Originally posted in The American Culture.

“As Chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, I have grave concerns about the true impact of the Obama Administration’s stimulus program on job opportunities for unemployed Americans,” said Tom Pauken. The TWC Chairman addressed the claims made in a White House press release last week which called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) a great success, “responsible for 2.2 to 2.8 million jobs created through the first quarter of 2010.”

In that statement, Vice President Joe Biden is quoted as saying, “the [Obama] Recovery Act is firing on all cylinders when it comes to creating jobs and putting Americans back to work.” 

The press release quotes a report released by the Council on Economic Advisors that 205,000 jobs were created by the Recovery Act in Texas alone, and millions created nationwide. “That’s news to us here in Texas where our state is arguably doing better than any other large state in the nation in job creation, but the Obama stimulus plan has not ‘created’ 205,000 jobs here,” said Pauken. “This claim is completely misleading and inaccurate.  There is no direct evidence that the Obama stimulus plan actually created any new private sector jobs in Texas.”

In contrast, March job growth and unemployment data released by the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics reported there were 2.3 million job losses in the United States over the past year and that 15 million Americans still are unemployed.

Pauken added, “The Council of Economic Advisors’ report, upon which the White House claim is based, even calls into question the accuracy of their own estimates, stating ‘these disaggregate estimates are inherently … speculative and uncertain’.”

The Statistical Projection Approach used to arrive at the 205,000 ‘saved or created jobs’ has little basis in fact, and is based on an assumption that the Recovery Act had a national employment impact of 2.8 million jobs, which is higher than the Council’s own Quarterly Report. The statewide breakdown divides the ‘2.8 million jobs saved or created’ among the states on the basis of an average of the share of all states’ national non-farm employment, the distribution of Recovery Act outlays among the states, and the sectoral composition of employment in each state. 

The statewide breakdown also assumes that any jobs ‘saved or created’ in a particular industrial sector are distributed across states in the same way as are existing jobs in that sector.  That’s a big assumption, as is the initial estimate of 2.8 million Recovery Act jobs.  In the end, the Council’s report is only good for estimating the proportional impact of the Recovery Act among the states, not for the ‘estimated total’ of jobs created as the White House release infers.” 

Annual private investment has fallen nationally by $316 billion since the recession started--a 20 percent drop. This fall continued even after the Obama Administration’s stimulus became law, providing a clear indication that less private investment means less job creation. As long as business investment remains low and entrepreneurs refrain from starting new enterprises, job creation will remain low and unemployment will stay high nationally.

“Rather than issuing misleading press releases touting jobs not actually created, the Obama Administration should follow Texas’ example and invest in building American businesses,” said Pauken. “The Vice President should quit touting flawed Washington economic policies that are doing little to put Americans back to work and prolonging our nation’s most serious national recession since the Great Depression.”

“The truth of the matter is that Texas has led all large, labor market states in private sector job creation over the last decade because of sound economic policies followed by Governor Rick Perry and our Texas legislative leaders, said Pauken. “Texas had 9.3 percent growth in private sector jobs from 1999 to 2009.  Florida increased private sector employment by 4.3 percent.  The remaining eight largest labor market states had negative private sector job growth during that decade.”

“These new claims from the Obama Administration remind me of when they told the American people that their stimulus plan would result in national unemployment going no higher than 8 percent,” said Pauken. “Yet, today the unemployment rate nationally is at 9.7 percent with no indication that those numbers will decline significantly anytime in the near future.”