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.

A quick reading of the Framers' writings makes it clear they believed the best way to maintain a free state was to have an armed populace.

It was an armed populace that finally freed the American people from the tyrannical British government of King George III. British soldiers, acting on secret orders, were on their way to seize our guns when the "shot heard 'round the world" was fired in Massachusetts on April 9, 1775. We all know how that turned out for the British.

So when the Framers enacted the Second Amendment, they knew exactly what they meant despite liberal revisionist history.

The problem rests, however, in the fact that the Bill of Rights only applies to the federal government.

Enter the 14th Amendment.

Adopted on July 9, 1868, a few years after the War for Southern Independence, the 14th Amendment radically altered constitutional law in the United States.

Included in the 14th Amendment is the Due Process Clause - "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The Supreme Court eventually interpreted that clause to mean that some of the amendments should apply to the states in a theory called "incorporation." In the 142 years since its adoption, every significant part of the Bill of Rights has been incorporated - applied to the states - with the notable exception of the Second Amendment.

While the Heller decision was a landmark Second Amendment case, it only applied to the federal government because it concerned a gun ban in Washington, D.C., which is a federal enclave.

The promise of McDonald, if the Supreme Court rules the way most observers expect by overturning the Chicago handgun ban, is that it will finally apply the Second Amendment to the states and thereby prevent state and local government from adopting Draconian, un-American gun laws.

As for those liberals who keep warning about a blood bath if Americans are free to keep and bear arms, it is important to note that after the Heller decision and repeal of one of the strictest gun-control laws in the nation, murders in the capital dropped to a 43-year-low.

The right to keep and bear arms is not only a constitutional right; it is a God-given natural right. By our nature as free human beings, we have the inalienable right to keep and bear arms. Any attempts by government to restrict that right should always be viewed skeptically and seen for what they are: an attack on our hard-fought liberties.

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.

I attended one forum recently in which the speaker, Mark P. Fancher, an attorney and director of the Racial Justice Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, said point-blank that all Americans are racists and that anyone who opposes President Barack Obama is simply showing that racism.

Those kinds of comments are simply counterproductive. It’s more likely that the vast majority of those opposing Obama do so because of his socialistic policies and fiscal irresponsibility of emptying the fisc to pay for every entitlement program that pops into his head rather than the color of his skin.

In another recent forum, Matthew Miko, of the Civil Rights Advantage Consulting Group, made a similar comment that Americans need to battle what he called “implicit racism,” racism that we exhibit without knowing it.

This country shed much blood bringing an end to slavery and overt racism. Now, civil rights activists want to blame us for “implicit racism.”

Give me a break.

He gave the ludicrous example of a white woman who squeezes her daughter’s hand as they pass three black teenagers. The daughter quickly starts to make the association, eventually acting in the same way without even thinking about it, his theory goes.

“It is bias that exists at the automatic level,” Miko said. “We have been so exposed or accustomed to believe something that it becomes routine.”

What Miko ignores is that given the crime statistics a white woman passing three black teenagers has cause to be fearful. In fact, any woman passing three black teenagers probably has cause to worry.

While Miko and other civil rights activists like to ignore crime numbers when railing against racial profiling, they have no problem spouting off other useless numbers in an attempt to prove that racism is rampant in our society.

Using Miko as an example again, he cited statistics showing that 78 percent of whites own homes while only 48.2 percent of blacks do.

“How can we say we have addressed the issue if these sorts of disparities still exist,” he said.

However, lack of homeownership does not prove racism is rampant. There could be any number of reasons explaining those numbers, including cultural differences or the fact that a large percentage of blacks live in urban centers where homeownership in general is lower than in rural areas.

Statistical disparity is often the basis upon which these activists make their claims. For example, Fancher made the claim that a civil service exam in New Haven, Conn., was racist because more whites passed than blacks did, a notion the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last year in Ricci v. DeStefano.

Using statistics to make such leaps of logic demonstrates either a serious disconnect with reality or intentional obfuscation in order to advance a weak agenda.

Of course, it is no coincidence that such ideas concerning race are coming from men such as Fancher and Miko who rely on the existence of racism to earn a paycheck. It is in their best financial interests that Americans continue to fret over race.

Of course, I am sure that causal relationship is simply “implicit” rather than “explicit.”

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.

The world's leading global warming alarmist admits that recent warming is not unprecedented and that there has been no warming in 15 years and the American media do not cover the story?

Amazing.

Of course, global warming apologists were quick to mitigate Jones' comments. At a news conference Wednesday, Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, brushed aside Jones' comments and would only say that it "is inappropriate to look at any particular short period of time to discern a long-term trend."

However, that is exactly the house of cards upon which the entire global warming movement has been built. Global warming alarmists are relying on a short period of warming at the end of the 20th century as proof that man must be destroying the world.

Equally as provocative as Jones' admission about the lack of warming during the last 15 years was his acknowledgement of the possible scope of the Medieval Warm Period, which occurred from about 800 to 1300.

Global warming apologists typically brush aside the Medieval Warm Period with unproved assertions that it was only a regional, rather than a global, phenomenon. After all, to admit that the Earth was warmer at a time when there was no human industry to speak of destroys their hypothesis that man caused the warming during the last quarter of the last century.

Global warming alarmists also forget that after the Medieval Warm Period came the Little Ice Age from about 1400 to 1850.

What happens to the globe after an ice age? It warms!

These scientists who have pushed global warming on the rest of the world are guilty of scientific misconduct. They have let politics, rather than science, guide how they interpret data and they have made grand pronouncements that have little bearing on reality.

Manmade global warming is a hoax and like all hoaxes, it is finally being exposed.

With the leaked e-mails in November, the world learned of the pattern of data suppression, manipulation of results, and efforts to keep contradictory studies out of peer-reviewed journals, all in an effort to manipulate a consensus on a scientifically dubious hypothesis.

Then the world found out that, among other errors, the IPCC's 2007 report wrongly predicted that it was likely Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. That was based not on peer-reviewed research but on a popular magazine article. The IPCC was also wrong in reporting that 55 percent of The Netherlands is below sea level.

Now, with Dr. Jones' revelations, we learn that not only is the debate not over, as former Vice President Al Gore ignorantly claims, it has been rigged the whole time.

We are seeing nothing less than a global warming meltdown.

Let's hope it melts even more before the politicians meet at climate summit in December in Cancun, Mexico, and sign some economically devastating treaty to fight what is essentially a natural global weather cycle.

OK, it was probably altered, but it is funny, nonetheless. Saw it floating around the Internet and I had to share.

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."

The rulings on such cases in the district and circuit courts have been contradictory, leaving school administrators confused on how to handle such issues. The Supreme Court has yet to take on the issue, but clearly, it is time for the high court to step in.

At least one Supreme Court justice has heard a similar case.

In 2008, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor was on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, she signed onto the decision in Doninger v. Niehoff ruling that schools had the authority to regulate off-campus online speech because that speech can disrupt the functioning of the school.

That seems to be the misguided logic used by the judges in the Blue Mountain case in which Judge Michael Fisher wrote in a footnote: "Electronic communication allows students to cause a substantial disruption to a school's learning environment even without being physically present. We decline to say that simply because the disruption to the learning environment originates from a computer located off campus, the school should be left powerless to discipline the student."

However, as McVerry wrote in his 2007 opinion, "The school's right to maintain an environment conducive to learning does not trump [a pupil's] First Amendment right to freedom of expression. ... Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited."

While separation of school and state would make this question moot, that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

Until then, courts need to protect the free speech of pupils. After all, as the Supreme Court ruled 40 years ago, students do not give up their free speech at the schoolhouse gates. School officials should not be permitted to reach into a family's home and police the Internet. If the speech is truly troublesome, there are alternatives.

"When students misbehave off campus, there are ample remedies in the real-world legal system," Frank LoMonte told ABA Journal a few months ago. He is the executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va. "If the speech is threatening, there are police for that. If it's libelous, there are courts for that. And if it's short of both of those things, there are phone calls to parents."

While children do not have complete freedom before reaching the age of majority, there is no compelling reason for the state to curb their freedom of speech outside the schoolhouse. 

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.

The watchdog said it received complaints about the university from David Holland, a retired engineer, in 2007 to 2008, but it has only recently become known that his requests for data were ignored.

"The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr. Holland's requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation," it said in a recent statement.

As the e-mails demonstrate, many climate scientists, including Michael Mann at Penn State University, who was a key contributor to the science cited by President Barack Obama's administration in pushing for cap-and-trade energy tax legislation, seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research.

Mann and other scientists put their political agendas ahead of science and fact in an effort to manipulate discussion and suppress dissenting views on climate change.

Finally, the kicker in recent carbon-scare news was that Obama, in his State of the Union address, said there was "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change."

In his latest message to the world, Osama bin Laden said that climate change "is not an intellectual luxury but an actual fact."

It looks as though the leftists have something in common with the elusive al-Qaida leader, belief in a fantasy.

Hopefully, the carbon scare is finally collapsing and we can get past this shameful era in human history.

The fact is the science behind the idea of global warming simply does not support the conclusion pushed by leftists whose real motivation is greed and power. For example, Obama's cap-and-tax plan would generate billions of dollars for government coffers that could then be used to fund entitlement programs such as socialized medicine.

The problem, however, is that the globe has been cooling despite man's continued use of greenhouse gases that emit carbon.

What the leftists and other manmade global warming adherents ignore is that weather changes and ice melts. During every minute of the Earth's 4.6 billion year history, the globe has been either in a state of cooling or a state of warming. That is how the Earth, and, indeed, most planetary bodies with an atmosphere, works.

It is the height of hubris to claim now that this cycle of change, which has been occurring for billions of years, is the result of human activity during the last century.

It is especially more so when the conclusion is based on just a few years of data that have admittedly been manipulated to achieve the desired result.

It is time to file anthropogenic global warming in the same drawer as the alien autopsy, Piltdown man and the Cardiff giant. Hoaxes all.

Lima City Councilman Tom Tebben is representative of so many politicians today as he so aptly demonstrated with this stupendously ignorant and downright dangerous statement during a meeting Monday evening:

“Some may look at this as an infringement on rights, but driving is a privilege,” Tebben said. “If you are texting while driving, you are the one infringing on rights. We all have to be safe while driving.”

What? Driving is a privilege?

Wrong again, Mr. Tebben.

Humans have a fundamental right to travel, and that includes driving.

Driving is not some privilege to be handed out by government thugs to reward proper behavior like a schoolteacher passing out gold stars to obedient pupils. It is a fundamental human right. To treat driving as anything other than a fundamental right gives activists, public health officials, judges, and legislators a ticket to invent new reasons for telling people they may no longer drive.

In fact, if you accept the idea that driving is a privilege and not a constitutionally protected fundamental human right, then you have to believe that the government has the power to ban driving altogether, if it so desired. Does anyone really believe government has the authority to ban driving (ignoring the obvious revolution that would result if such a law were imposed)?

In the modern world, the ability to travel is a matter of life and death for many. Humans must be able to get to work and back if they are to survive in this world. Government needs a gainfully employed citizenry if it is to function because government derives all its resources from the labor of the people.

That driving is a fundamental human right does not mean it cannot be subject to reasonable regulations. After all, all human rights have some limitations. For example, you do not have a First Amendment right to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater, as the age-old analogy goes. That does not make free speech a privilege, however, as Mr. Tebben and those of his ilk seem to believe.

Tebben is correct in believing that there is a legitimate state interest in maintaining safe roads. I reject the idea, however, that a ban on texting or cell phone use while driving is necessary. There are already laws on the books against reckless driving.

Still, the idea of a texting ban is open for debate and reasonable people can disagree on the necessity of such a regulation.

However, no reasonable person should ever accept Tebben’s theory that driving is a privilege. That is a dangerous and ill-considered position to accept. It is disappointing that a man in Tebben’s position holds such a view.

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.

Granted, $8 billion in the Obama era of epic spending does not seem like much. However, that is merely the seed money to get the project off the ground. The final price tag will likely near $100 billion, and that doesn't include the continual annual subsidies to keep the rail system running because anyone who has actually thought about the issue knows the system will not be able to generate enough funding to maintain itself without the subsidies.

Has this administration not learned anything from the failed Amtrak experience? Do supporters really believe Amtrak failed simply because the trains were not traveling fast enough?

Ludicrous.

I enjoy a train ride as much as the next person does. There is something, dare I say it, romantic about the idea of traveling by train.

However, here in the real world, high-speed rail is a romantic pipe dream only supported by big-government liberals who do not have the slightest understanding of how an economy operates.

If high-speed rail were such an attractive and desired option, the private sector would have already provided it.

The fact that no company has created a high-speed rail system is a testament to the lack of need for such an animal.

Additionally, while we all will share in its cost, only the wealthy elite will benefit. For example, Amtrak charges a minimum of $99 for its high-speed Acela from New York to Washington, but only $72 for its conventional train. For $99, you could take a plane from New York to Washington. For about $20, you can take a bus (including free Wi-Fi).

Who is going to shell out $100 when you only have to spend $20?

The European and Japanese train systems are often held up as examples to be emulated.

However, that is another illusion.

"Japanese and French high-speed trains are attractive to tourists, but they're not heavily used by local residents," O'Toole wrote. "Residents of Japan and France on average ride their bullet trains less than 400 miles a year."

The president, governors and mayors who are chasing after this elusive transportation system are no better than Don Quixote attacking windmills: they both seem silly to watchers but the participants are convinced they are doing something important.

If Obama is successful in guiding this project to fruition, the only thing that will be moving faster than those empty trains will be your money from your wallet to the government to pay for this epic boondoggle.

Another excellent video from the Cato Institute.