‘Veterans in Defense of Liberty’ Rises Up to Give Veterans a New Voice in the American Conversation

When men and women join the American military, they take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies. It’s an oath we all take very seriously, but when they leave the service, many veterans lose a tangible way to continue to fulfill it. They also lose the brotherhood and camaraderie that go along with serving our country in the armed services. A new veterans group, called Veterans in Defense of Liberty, has risen up to fill both voids.
Dr. Scott Magill, founder and executive director of Veterans in Defense of Liberty, served in the Marine Corps from 1965 to 1971, and then in the Army Medical Corps from 1981 to 1988. He says the new group fulfills a longstanding need.
“Never in the history of the world has there been an organization to allow veterans to continue to honor the oath they took to defend the Constitution against all enemies. For years veterans have been crying out, saying ‘What can we do?’”
Magill says there are currently 28 million veterans in the United States. Many belong to groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion, or to no group at all. VDL (or “ViDoL) is not just another veterans group that functions as a social club or lobbying arm to defend veterans in federal budget battles. Magill says ViDoL is a veterans’ group with a clearly defined mission: Restore the constitutional republic that veterans spend years, and devote their blood and lives, to defend.
Dr. Magill: “You can poo-poo the Tea Parties as we’re seeing people on the left do today, but let them try to denigrate our 28 million veterans. It doesn’t take a large percentage of that number to stand up and say ‘We will take back our constitutional republic’ for us to have an impact.
“We’re going to accomplish that by several means. We have a lot of educating to do. We have to educate ourselves and the public as to why the Constitution is important.”
Quoting Daniel Webster, that should the Constitution fail there will be anarchy throughout the world, Dr. Magill cited the need for veterans to stand up and be counted. One way Veterans in Defense of Liberty plans to do that is to educate active duty military serving in the continental United States (CONUS in military-speak) on voting. Dr. Magill says that just 11% of active duty military across CONUS voted in the 2010 elections, and just 30% voted in 2008. He cited various reasons for the low voting rate, including the fact that many active duty are young and have not yet established the habit of voting before being stationed away from home around the country. ViDoL will educate and register active duty military to vote where they’re stationed, to make an impact on their host states.
ViDoL is also working on a way to fight the politicization of naming Navy ships. In 2010, the Navy named the LPD-26 the USS John Murtha, after the late congressman known for smearing US Marines serving in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2011 it named the USNS Cesar Chavez after a leftist labor leader who had no connection to the military at all. Both namings angered veterans across the country. VDL has a remedy that’s working its way through Congress, which would take the naming duties out of political hands and put them in the hands of veterans groups, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Veterans should get a say in the images and names that the military projects now and into the future, Magill says.
Though the group has only existed since September 2010, it has already had an impact. When the Veterans of Foreign Wars PAC endorsed liberal Democrats Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in the 2010 elections, ViDoL stood up and opposed those endorsements. The VFW PAC eventually dissolved over the issue.
Veterans in Defense of Liberty’s board includes Dr. Magill at the helm, along with Medal of Honor recipient Major General James Livingston, Kris Kobach, Sharron Angle, Jim Robbins and others. With its focus on constitutional issues, it aims to be more than your average veterans group. As one Vietnam veteran explained when he joined, VDL finally gives him sense of legacy.
It’s that legacy that drives Dr. Magill: “It is an honor to be surrounded by men and women who understand not only the rights but also the responsibilities, which come with liberty. To be in the company of those who understand that unless we exercise those responsibilities the rights will soon dissolve into history, thereby leaving our children, our grandchildren and their grandchildren, devoid of the understanding of either.
“Veterans in Defense of Liberty provides the love and brotherhood we shared in the military, the ability to come together again, with a mission that allows vets to fulfill their oath to the Constitution. No other group does this. Long after we’re gone, Veterans in Defense of Liberty will exist to make sure these threats to the Constitution we see now will never happen again.”

President Obama Again Refuses to Accept any Responsibility, Offers No Deficit Reduction Plan

President Obama was behind schedule in delivering his remarks on the US credit downgrade this afternoon. S&P downgraded US credit for the first time in history on Friday evening, but rather than address the downgrade at that time, the president took a few close advisers to huddle at Camp David over the weekend. The president’s closest adviser, David Axelrod, led a blame chorus over the weekend, telling the nation that the historic downgrade was the fault of the Tea Party.
While the nation awaited the president’s remarks, we were treated to this image on the cable nets. It’s an image that in many ways sums up the president’s leadership style.

The president opened his remarks, nearly an hour behind schedule, highlighting Warren Buffet’s confidence in the economy. That’s a fallacious appeal to authority and tells us nothing about what the president would do to right our ship. The president went on to once again blame the Japanese tsunami and the Arab Spring for our bad economy. That marks at least the fourth time the president himself has blamed these specific outside events for a moribund economy that predates them both.
The president then blamed gridlock, and called for more tax hikes on the rich and “modest” reforms to Medicare. He then appealed to the proposals put forth by the deficit commission that he set up, and whose recommendations he ignored.
The president then slammed “drawing lines in the sand” and refusing to compromise — but it was his own line in the sand, to push the next debt ceiling discussion past the 2012 elections, that made last week’s debt deal more difficult to reach. He actually decried others’ lines in the sand, but not his own. He also decried a lack of plans, when he has yet to offer a single concrete plan to reduce the deficit.
Stumbling through his remarks at times, the president once again called on Congress to do things he has called for in the past: Extending the payroll tax breaks, and yet more stimulus spending on roads and bridges and the like. The former is a good idea but will not on its own stimulate the economy; the latter will lead to yet more government spending and debt.
President Obama mouthed words about “how we respond to tests” is the measure of our strength. It’s worth taking a look, then, at his own responses since becoming president. He proffered one budget that was so unserious it was voted down in the Senate, 97-0. Since then he has consistently cast blame on others and outside events while offering no plans of his own, and in response to the clearly awful performance of his economic team, has not fired any single individual.
The president ended his remarks on a somber note, acknowledging the major losses of life in Afghanistan over the weekend. The president said “we will press on and we will succeed.” But the military is a few weeks into the retreat from Afghanistan that this president has ordered to be accomplished prior to the 2012 elections — a purely political timeline. It’s reasonable to question the president’s own will to press on and succeed, in the war, on the economy, and on anything other than continuing to expand the regulatory state.
These were President Obama’s first remarks since the credit downgrade last Friday. While he did not specifically blame the Tea Party as his allies have, he did suggest that they are to blame by invoking “gridlock” as one of the downgrade’s causes. While the president spoke, the markets continued to slide downward.

Gone Berserk: What’s with Calling the Opposition ‘Terrorists’?

If it was some frothing-at-the-mouth liberal blogger calling Republicans “terrorists,” we could dismiss it as the mindless babblings of a hyperpartisan nitwit.
But incredibly, it is not. It is leading Democrats including the vice president of the United States who are referring to their fellow Americans who disagree with them as terrorists:

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.
Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.
“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

It is New York Times columnists:

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

It’s MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who not only referred to conservatives as “terrorists, but also as “wahhabis of American government.”
In fact, referencing terrorists, or Osama bin Laden, or al-Qaeda when describing conservatives who decided to put their foot down and demand a change in how Washington works — this done in order to save the country from a fate worse than default in a few years — has been the du jour pastime among Democrats of all levels. “Hostage takers” is another bric-a-brac tossed around when describing Republicans as well.
All of this name calling is supposed to remind the public that the tea party and those who agree with them are “extremists.”
But what is “extreme”? You can start by saying that running a $1.4 trillion deficit — recession or no recession — is “extreme.” You can also call it “obscene,” “nauseating,” “incomprehensible,” “irresponsible,” “imprudent,” and throw in a “nutzo” for good measure. And don’t get me started on what you should call running trillion dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see. My thesaurus would catch fire.
And the (at least) $66 trillion in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare? I’m sure there are some excellent, guttural German swear words we can find to describe that situation.
The name callers never mention what precipitated this behavior by the “extremists,” never acknowledge the extraordinary danger such deficits — and the $14 trillion national debt — place the country in. Should we mention what Greece is looking like these days? Or Portugal?
It’s amazing. It’s like the actions of tea party conservatives exist in a vacuum so that we can ignore all the external stimuli that is responsible for their position while only acknowledging  the existence and the legitimacy of the hysterical criticism they are receiving.
It is an eye-popping turn in the debate over the deficit and one which Democrats will almost certainly regret one day.

Will DOJ Shoot Down South Carolina’s New Voter ID Law?

Attorneys General are seldom viewed as naive, but how else can you explain South Carolina AG Alan Wilson? The man has opted to submit his state’s new voter ID law to review by the U.S. Justice Department.
Surely he must know that the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division is one of the most highly-politicized enclaves within the Justice Department. Wilson would have done far better to go directly to court for judicial review of the law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
To the liberal ideologues inhabiting the Division, voter ID is the equivalent of Jim Crow, a completely ridiculous and historically preposterous claim. Their handling of Georgia’s voter ID law in 2005 (not to mention Arizona’s voter ID statute) makes it clear that they have no regard for the legal standards that apply under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. [Note: Every court decision on voter ID laws has found them to be not racially discriminatory.]
In the Georgia submission, several Division lawyers assigned to the case basically tried to ignore all of the evidence that the State submitted, including detailed driver’s license records from the DMV and college ID records from the state university system. These records showed that minority voters in Georgia would have no problems meeting the ID requirement. Still, the ideology-driven lawyers wanted to challenge Georgia’s voter ID law as racially discriminatory.
The subsequent litigation, as well as the record turnout in elections since the law took effect, proved that those lawyers never should have questioned the law in the first place. Fortunately, that was prevented by the adults who were in charge of DOJ at the time. Unfortunately, political activism in the Division has only gotten worse since then.
Those same people who wanted an objection to Georgia’s voter ID are now in charge and will call the shots on South Carolina’s voter ID. The fact that DOJ previously precleared Georgia’s voter ID law as well as Arizona’s ID law is precedent that they will probably do their best to ignore.
The NAACP recently announced it is “betting the farm” that the Holder Justice Department will object to the South Carolina voter ID law.
That’s a safe bet, considering that the new leadership of the Voting Section is comprised largely of former NAACP officials. Why would the state submit its statute to these officials for review when the Voting Rights Act provides for an alternative path — going straight to federal district court? Inexplicably, Attorney General Wilson rejected the federal court option. When the NAACP bets the farm, General Wilson should be concerned that the cards won’t be dealt fairly. If Justice does object to South Carolina’s statute, he will have no one to blame but himself.
Wilson’s colleagues to the south are playing it smarter. Last week, Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning yanked a submission from DOJ that the NAACP targeted and instead went to court. The NAACP also labeled the Florida law as the return of Jim Crow. What did the law do? Move early voting days and require voter registration forms to be turned in by third party groups in a timely fashion. Quite likely, the NAACP’s hyperbole (not to mention its overly cozy relationship with Voting Section attorneys and staff) is what caused Florida to pull the submission from DOJ.
South Carolina can look to other states besides Florida for guidance.
Texas made a very smart move recently when it went straight to court to obtain preclearance for its redistricting plans. Louisiana and Virginia also went directly to court over their redistricting plans.
Georgia discovered it had to go to court to obtain approval of a law that ensures only citizens are registered to vote. The Justice Department was objecting to the law. When faced with actually having to present evidence of claimed discrimination before federal judges, the Division capitulated almost immediately. It agreed to clear the law under Section 5 if Georgia dismissed its lawsuit. The law is in place today because Georgia went to court.
States must understand that they are better off in federal court where DOJ cannot use rank hearsay and imaginary evidence, something it does all too often in its own administrative review. If states don’t go to federal court until they are appealing an administrative decision by DOJ to object to their law, they are already on the defensive both in the courtroom and in the public relations battle.
South Carolina should pull its administrative submission from DOJ and go straight to district court for approval of the new voter ID law.

President Jumps The Gun, Makes Awful Assumptions

Earlier today, President Obama took to the White House briefing room to announce that a deal had been struck between Democrats and Republicans.  The president clearly stated that not everyone got what they wanted, but it is a deal that will be best for the country.  As always, he added his standard platitudes about the wealthy paying more, and corporations have to “…pay their fair share.”
The president spoke as if the deal was done.   Nothing could be further from the truth.  While House Republicans and Senate Democrats have come to an “agreement,” the bill has not been voted on in the Senate, or in the House.  As of the time Obama spoke on Sunday evening, only highlights had been distributed to the rank and file in the House and Senate.
The president jumped the gun, and on purpose.  By speaking in the White House briefing room, he made the attempt to set the nation’s expectations.  If you were a layman just watching TV, you left Obama’s statement saying to yourself, “OK…done deal.  Good.  Finally.”
It is an obvious ploy, designed to put massive pressure on House Republicans to pass the legislation. We will now see how Speaker John Boehner responds to this pressure.  A long look has to be taken at the “triggers,” which include major cuts to defense, as opposed to across the board cuts.  Further, the deal raises the debt limit by $2.4 trillion, a number that might be more than most House members can accept.
House Democrats also have issue with this “compromise.”  Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the head of the Progressive Caucus, has stated that the 70+ members of the caucus will not support this bill, as it does not include tax increases.
While the president may be positioning House Republicans for a fall, it is the president who has put himself out on a limb.  If this deal doesn’t go through, many will wonder how he got it so wrong, how he misread his own party, and if there is time enough before 2012 to mount a primary challenge against him.