[COLUMN] Gun battle returns to Supreme Court

McDonald v. City of Chicago, a Supreme Court case in which oral arguments took place Tuesday, is perhaps one of the most important cases since the end of the War for Southern Independence.

The case deals with a patently un-American handgun ban in Chicago.

Fortunately, it appears the court is going to rule the ban unconstitutional and return a little bit of freedom to the American people.

While facially, the case is about the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, it's the 14th Amendment ramifications that will prove the most interesting.

It has been almost two years since the court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment is a personal right. In other words, the Framers intended to protect the right of the individual to keep and bear arms rather than, as liberals ignorantly like to claim, protect the right of the states to maintain a militia.

To anyone who reads the Second Amendment - "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." - the meaning is clear. Unless, of course, you hate the idea of people being free and wish to impose your personal fear of guns on the rest of the population.

The underlying principle of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights was to maintain individual liberty. The Framers were bright men who understood that government should fear the people.

[COLUMN] ‘Race’ the real cause of racism

Americans will never move beyond the question of race so long as government officials and civil rights activists continue to make racial classifications seem important.

For example, governments across the country continue to ask people questions about their race, most notably in the upcoming decennial census.

Why should the federal government care about anyone’s race? Does the concept of race even have significance in the modern world?

There is only one human “race.” The popular connotation of race is nothing but a social construct that carries no significance. Racial lines are imprecise, arbitrary, have many gradations, and vary from culture to culture.

In the end, the idea of race only serves to promote racism. When governments ask for your race, they are advancing the false idea that there are substantive differences, rather than superficial ones, between humans that warrant classification.

Even more insidious than government data collection of race are the various civil rights activists who insist that not only is race important, but Americans are racists at the core, even when they don’t even realize it themselves.

[COLUMN] Global warming suffering a meltdown

While you may know who Phil Jones is, you can be forgiven if you were unaware of his latest revelations. The mainstream media in the United States has, predictably, all but ignored the story.

Jones is the British climatologist at the center of the so-called climategate scandal. He is the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and has temporarily stepped down from that post after the leaking of e-mails that show scientists were manipulating data.

The e-mails also show that Jones did not properly respond to British Freedom of Information Act requests for his data.

The data in question is crucial to the so-called "hockey stick graph" used by climate change alarmists to support the hypothesis. The hockey stick graph supposedly shows temperatures that are relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

This data were also used extensively by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Now, for the news.

Jones admitted to the BBC in a Feb. 13 interview that he is guilty of sloppy recordkeeping (and sloppy work in general?), the globe might have been warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than it is today, and that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.

Wow.

[COLUMN] Off-campus online speech deserves protection

While it might seem obvious to those who cherish freedom, there still seems to be some confusion among judges when it comes to free speech and schoolchildren.

The confusion concerns whether in the Internet age government schools should be permitted to discipline pupils for online speech when it occurs away from the school.

Judges are so confused that two separate panels of the 3rd U.S .Circuit Court of Appeals reached two very different conclusions in two separate cases Feb. 4.

In 2005, while a high school senior in the Hermitage School District in western Pennsylvania, 17-year-old Justin Layshock created a fake Facebook profile parodying the high school principal. He was suspended for 10 days and, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the district.

In 2007, a federal judge sided with Layshock and ruled that school districts cannot discipline pupils for off-campus speech.

School officials argued they have the right to regulate online off-campus speech because the speech can be accessed at the school.

U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry rejected that argument: "The mere fact that the Internet may be accessed at school does not authorize school officials to become censors of the World Wide Web."

The 3rd Circuit rightly agreed with McVerry.

However, in the second case, a different panel of judges thought differently.

The court sided with the lower court in upholding a 14-year-old pupil's 10-day suspension from Blue Mountain Middle School.

The Schuylkill County eighth-grader posted sexually explicit material along with her principal's photograph on a fake MySpace page. She was suspended in March 2007.

The Web page, which used a fake name but an actual photo of the principal, was purported to have been posted by an Alabama principal who described himself as a pedophile and sex addict. The page included the phrase "kids rock my bed."

[COLUMN] Global warming hoax unraveling

Is the biggest hoax in human history finally collapsing?

In light of the revelation late last year -- thanks to the unauthorized (stolen?) release of e-mail correspondence among themselves -- that climatologists have been essentially lying to the rest of the world for years, it came as no surprise that other manmade climate change claims would begin to unravel.

A key U.N. climate change panel member said a projection by the group on how fast the Himalayan glaciers are melting appears to lack scientific evidence.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report says the Himalayan glaciers are very likely to disappear by 2035 if the present melting rate continues.

However, Chris Field said it was not exactly clear what the source was for the claim.

Field is co-chair of one of the panel's working groups. He told The Associated Press that the panel was working hard to clarify the situation.

Additionally, many scientists, including Field, are claiming several other errors in the IPCC report, including one dealing with losses from disasters and another on the subject of Amazon forests, though the IPCC refuses to back away from its claims.

Several groups that support the idea of anthropogenic climate change, including Greenpeace UK, want Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, replaced because he refused to acknowledge the mistakes in the report.

Meanwhile, in Great Britain, the Information Commissioner's Office, the nation's data-protection watchdog, reported that the aforementioned stolen e-mails at the University of East Anglia's climate research unit demonstrate that the university was illegally hiding data from the public.

[COLUMN] High-speed rail: Fast track to the poorhouse

It must be a sickness. Perhaps the superb doctors at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., can give President Barack Obama something to cure his delusional state.

On Thursday, a day after a State of the Union address in which St. Barack made silly promises such as a spending freeze that might save $250 billion if maintained for 10 years, he handed out $8 billion for a high-speed rail project that will be a further drain on our already fragile economy.

Better yet, his administration is comparing this latest ill-considered raid on the public treasury to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate highway project.

What hubris!

The two projects are incomparable. As Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute wrote last year, high-speed rail is not the new interstate highway system.

O'Toole pointed out five differences: 1) Before Congress approved the Interstate Highway System, it had a good idea how much it would cost; 2) Highway users paid for interstate highways, whereas high-speed rail will be almost entirely subsidized by general taxpayers who will rarely use it; 3) Interstate highways connect all 48 contiguous states and major metropolitan areas and the high-speed rail plan consists of six unconnected networks that reach only 33 states and fewer than two-thirds of the nation's 100 largest urban areas; 4) The average American traveled 4,000 miles on interstates in 2007 while high-speed rail proponents optimistically estimate that the average American would ride the high-speed rail system fewer than 60 miles per year; and 5) Interstate highways improved social welfare by increasing highway safety while high-speed rail would actually increase energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

However, none of that really matters to liberals who have ignorantly jumped on the high-speed-rail bandwagon.

[COLUMN] Court decision a victory for free speech

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck another victory for those who believe the Constitution is relevant and that free speech is more than a slogan.

The court, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, struck down as unconstitutional a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act. This was probably the most significant First Amendment ruling in many years.

"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits jailing citizens for engaging in political speech," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in announcing the decision.

The law in question, enacted in 2002, prohibited advertising about candidates funded by corporations or labor unions in the days leading up to primaries and general elections.

A conservative nonprofit corporation, Citizens United, produced a documentary titled "Hillary: The Movie." The 90-minute movie explored the myriad scandals involving Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton. The movie was shown in theaters and sold as DVDs in 2008 while Hillary Clinton, then a U.S. senator and now the secretary of state, was running for president.

The trouble began when Citizens United sought to advertise the movie on television and distribute it through video-on-demand on cable TV.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the film was an "electioneering communication." Under that designation, it became subject to the restrictive regulations set forth in McCain-Feingold.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court rightly disagreed with the District Court and ruled as unconstitutional the provision of the McCain-Feingold Act that prevented corporations and unions from spending freely from their own treasuries in the final days of political campaigns.

[COLUMN] Federal aid to Haiti illegal

By now, most of us have seen the devastation in Haiti. Sometimes, living in the modern world, with the technology to beam images of death and destruction in high-definition color right to our handheld devices, televisions and computer screens, is a curse.

However, as the latest natural disaster has proved, that curse is a two-edged sword. The very technology that is delivering pictures of the bodies in the streets and collapsed school buildings is also giving Americans the opportunity to assist those in the disaster area very quickly.

It is now possible to donate by sending a text message from a cellular phone. For example, to donate $10 to the Red Cross, just text the message "Haiti" to the number 90999.

Done.

What this shows is that Americans, as a whole, are a generous lot. Citizens have already donated millions of dollars to the relief effort.

That is how it is supposed to work.

Unfortunately, our politicians love to be generous with money that does not belong to them. President Barack Obama is no exception. He has pledged to give the stricken country at least $100 million.

However, he lacks the legal authority to do so.

I have thumbed through my well-worn copy of the U.S. Constitution (OK, it is no longer so well-worn as I have retired my pocket Constitution in favor of an electronic one on my Palm Pre) and I have been unable to place my finger on the exact section and paragraph that says the federal government can give money from the public treasury for acts of benevolence or philanthropy.

That is because it does not exist.

[COLUMN] Bureaucratic nightmare on horizon

Although a Canadian, Americans could learn much from the story of Coree Hanczyk.

Hanczyk is an example of everything that is wrong with government-run health care systems.

This is not your typical horror story about a person living in a country with socialized medicine and who dies while on a waiting list for a medical procedure Americans take for granted. While those things happen with alarming regularity under socialized medicine, they probably only affect a small percentage of the population.

No, Hanczyk's story, while not as tragic, is more typical of what Americans should begin to expect when the federal government completes its unconstitutional seizure of our health care system.

Hanczyk is a 45-year-old flight attendant who lives outside Toronto. Canadian doctors found a tumor in her breast.

The problem arises, however, in determining whether chemotherapy is necessary.

When faced with small, estrogen-receptor-positive tumors, with lymph nodes free of cancer, chemotherapy is beneficial to only a few. The trick is in determining who they are.

While the tumors look the same under a microscope, a test -- the Oncotype DX test -- can determine if the cancer is likely to return within the next decade by analyzing 21 genes.

Without the test, women must make a choice: undergo chemotherapy, with its possible side effects of leukemia, neurological damage, infertility and premature menopause, or risk a recurrence in the next decade.

Herein lies the problem. Government bureaucracies move at a snail's pace and are certainly ill-suited when it comes to working in the fast-paced world of personalized medicine.

[COLUMN] Armed passengers better than a watch list

The Christmas Day attempt by an Islamic militant to blow up an American airliner is further proof that the Obama administration lives in a fantasy world when it comes to terrorism.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Candy Crowley last week on the CNN program "State of the Union" that the thwarting of the attempt to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit airline flight Christmas Day demonstrated that "the system worked."

"We have no suggestion that he was improperly screened," she said with a straight face.

For those keeping score at home, Napolitano said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian Muslim, was able to board Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam with explosives in his underwear after being "properly screened."

Oh, by the way, he was in the government's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database and there was intelligence information before the attack that a Nigerian was plotting to blow up an American plane. He was also on the United Kingdom's security watch list and denied a visa in that country in 2008.

Additionally, his own father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official, warned the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, in October that his son had developed radical views and might have traveled to Yemen. Yet, officials did not revoke his two-year multiple-entry visa, which was issued in June 2008.

So, "the system worked"? If that is "proper screening," I would hate to see improper screening.