Archive

Posts Tagged ‘University of Mobile’
October 19th, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Smaller Government, Strong Economy

At the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I review the record showing that limited government leads to stronger economies. There much more in the column than the following passage, but here’s a taste:

Indeed, historians are hard-pressed to show any time in American history when major domestic-discretionary spending growth actually generated a stronger economy. But when Reagan cut discretionary spending in the 1980s, combined with his tax cuts, the economy did superbly. When the Newt Gingrich Congress passed major spending cuts in 1995-96, the economy again boomed.

September 20th, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Celebrating the Constitution

The University of Mobile held a “Constitution Day” event this week to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the great document’s signing, with me emceeing an address by and discussion with the superb federal appellate court judge William H. Pryor, in front of university students plus 120 pupils from nearby high schools. It inspired me to write this column. A sample passage:

The United States and its Constitution serve as one big laboratory of republican government. When the Constitution was written, most of the world’s people thought true republics were by their very nature unstable, destined to be short-lived and to lead to either anarchy or tyranny. The men of Philadelphia, and then the American people who put into practice the system the founders designed, proved otherwise. Indeed, we continue to prove that representative democracy works. It can assure freedom, ensure a high degree of justice, and promote societal stability, simultaneously.

It remains for us to make sure that we ourselves in the United States do not let down our guard. Just because our Constitution has worked for so long does not mean, in the words of the title of a famous book on the Constitution, that our government is “a machine that would go of itself.”  The Constitution only provides a framework by which American citizens can protect our liberties; The Constitution does not do the work all by itself.

September 13th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
The Right Way to Remember 9/11

At the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I reflect on 9/11 and its lessons.

I wrote the piece and handed it in just before news came about the uprisings in northern Africa. As it turned out, these sentences were apropos:

Worse, some of our national leaders seem to misunderstand, to this day, what 9/11 was all about. These leaders still push forward some sort of moral semi-equivalency, in which they quickly zip through boilerplate language about how America was wronged on that day but then start listing all the ways we need to be more “sensitive” to the concerns of the rest of the world – concerns as expressed by world leaders who were not fairly elected by their own people, who do not allow their people the basic freedoms or human dignity that Americans take for granted, and who have never done a single thing to earn any level of sympathy, empathy, or respect.

This, of course, is a false equivalency. Our nation is better than other nations, because we do guarantee freedom and limit the powers of the government and of individual leaders within that government.

September 9th, 2012 at 10:42 pm
Just the Facts… and the Truth

Late last week, for the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I tried to delve a bit more deeply into current controversies about media “fact checkers.” It’s not just the media, but society in general, that seems to have an increasing problem understanding even what constitutes a “fact” in the first place.

A taste:

Second, a statement can be inaccurate without being a “lie.”…. Situation two: President George W. Bush was inaccurate when he said Saddam Hussein still had an active program of “weapons of mass destruction” when the United States began its liberation of Iraq – but he didn’t lie. A lie by definition involves deliberate intent to deceive; but every single bit of evidence shows that Bush and every other major political figure of both parties believed Saddam was hiding numerous WMDs. (As a matter of fact, Iraq still did possess WMDs, but only in small amounts.)  It is a fact that Saddam once had many such weapons, that he tried to manufacture and/or acquire more of them, that he had used them in the past, that he even fooled his own senior Iraqi military officials into believing he still had them, and that he never showed proof that he had disposed of them. If Bush believed Saddam still had WMD, then he wasn’t lying. Period. He was just mistaken.

May 4th, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Statistics on Vote Fraud are Astonishing

As a companion piece to my CFIF column this week on the True the Vote summit held last weekend, here is a stats/examples-filled column for the publication affiliated with the impressive University of Mobile. An excerpt:

More numbers: In Texas, a voter must by law identify a permanent address, but in 2008 alone, 6,178 new registrants were accepted without one. Overall in Texas there are 29,345 names on the rolls with no address. In the town of Nacogdoches, 1,665 are registered from one P.O. Box. Statewide, 74,730 names of dead people remain on the rolls. In Florida, 29,935 dead people are still listed. In the largest county in Wisconsin, only 709,854 people are adults eligible to vote, but a stunning 954,008 names are on the registration lists.