Thursday, December 29, 2011

Juridics: Individual Mandate: Niceties of the interpretation of the Commerce Clause before the Supreme Court

The American Spectator (December 29, 2k11)
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The Bell Tolls for Obamacare

The key to the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling will be clear recognition of constitutional alternatives to Obamacare.
On November 14, the Supreme Court granted the Writ of Certiorari to hear the appeal of the cases testing the constitutionality of Obamacare. The resulting decision will mark an historic watershed not only in the restoration of constitutional jurisprudence, but in fundamental, market reform of the entire entitlement state.
Historic Decision BrewingI write serving as the General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), as one of several current positions. The ACRU was started by former top Reagan aide Robert Carleson, with former Attorney General Ed Meese as Chairman of the Advisory Board, along with other former Reagan Justice Department officials, besides myself as a former Reagan White House staffer.
In my capacity for the ACRU, I wrote and filed amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the ACRU in both the district court and the circuit court in the challenge by 26 states in the 11th Circuit that resulted in an order striking down the entire Obamacare law. I also wrote and filed ACRU amicus curiae briefs in the challenge by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in both the district court and the circuit in the 4th Circuit. The district court found the individual mandate unconstitutional, while the circuit court ruled that Virginia had no right to bring the case (two Obama appointed judges on the three-judge panel).
I am predicting that the Supreme Court will strike down the entire Obamacare law on a 5-4 ruling. That starts with the individual mandate, which the Court will find unconstitutional because it has reiterated several times in recent cases that it will enforce some limit on the Commerce Clause as justification for federal regulation, reserving the role of police power to regulate for the general public good to the states. Virtually all the judges in all the lower court cases concluded that there was no precedent anywhere in U.S. history upholding a law requiring citizens to purchase a good or service. Not participating in interstate commerce by choosing not to buy a product or service leaves no basis for regulation to compel such participation under the Commerce Clause power to regulate interstate commerce.

Read more ... click the time-stamp below ...

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

PoliticsNorthKorea: 'Great Successor' takes power: Kim Jong-eun

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Materials from Financial Times on Kim Jong-eun
Reposted from email newsletter by Politicarp
‘Great Successor’ takes power in N Korea - FT.com






‘Great Successor’ takes power in N Korea

Financial Times - UK Homepage

Kim Jong-il’s youngest son has taken the reins of power in North Korea after the ruthless dictator died from a heart attack over the weekendhttp://link.ft.com/r/4RNQTT/08597N/9VCLF/7A592Y/4CXLOU/N9/h?a1=2011&a2=12&a3=19

Instability of dynastic shift

Kim Jong-eun will struggle to sustain the semi-divine aura created by the Pyongyang dynasty – and a messy breakdown of the reclusive nuclear state could draw the US, China and Japan into an attritional conflict. By Christian Oliver and Jamil Anderlinihttp://link.ft.com/r/4RNQTT/08597N/9VCLF/7A592Y/KQ15IA/N9/h?a1=2011&a2=12&a3=19

Investors cautious on North Korea uncertainty
Asian markets rebound from Monday’s steep losses following the death of Kim Jong-ilhttp://link.ft.com/r/4RNQTT/08597N/9VCLF/7A592Y/XHARTT/N9/h?a1=2011&a2=12&a3=19


Financial Times - Asia homepage

North Korea faces tough survival battle

With the death of Kim Jong-il, North Korea faces its toughest battle for survival since the collapse of Soviet economic support in the late 1980s and early 1990shttp://link.ft.com/r/4RNQTT/08597N/9VCLF/7A592Y/5VKTC7/N9/h?a1=2011&a2=12&a3=19


Financial Times - Comment



Kim’s death is watershed moment for N Korea

It is not at all clear that the plan to hand over power to Kim Jong-il’s youngest son can be carried out successfully, writes Victor Chahttp://link.ft.com/r/4RNQTT/08597N/9VCLF/7A592Y/97E8Z5/N9/h?a1=2011&a2=12&a3=19

Death could trigger wider Sino-US power play

Chinese support for North Korea is probably one of the most controversial aspects of the country’s foreign policyhttp://link.ft.com/r/4RNQTT/08597N/9VCLF/7A592Y/HY3ZKX/N9/h?a1=2011&a2=12&a3=19








PoliticsKazakhstan: Oppressive new Religion Law: Government touts 'progressiveness'

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By Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service
State Secretary Kanat Saudabaev ordered the devotion of considerable resources to promoting what he claimed to be "the significance and the progressiveness" of Kazakhstan's highly restrictive new Religion Law at a closed meeting of senior state officials on 27 October. He ordered not only the "observance of the demands" of the Law, but "their positive acceptance by subjects of religious activity [i.e. religious communities]", according to documents from the meeting seen by Forum 18 News Service. Forum 18 notes that members of a variety of religious communities are increasingly afraid to voice criticism of the new Law publicly. One media company was threatened with closure if it gave the new Law negative coverage. Kazakhstan's sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna was ordered to hand further money to the government-backed Fund for Support of Islamic Culture and Education. "I wouldn't call it support for one faith," a Samruk-Kazyna official told Forum 18. And Baptist parents have been threatened with fines or imprisonment for refusing to send their children to compulsory Self-Recognition lessons in schools. [read more...]
And an earlier report from neiboring Azerbaijan suggests a pattern:

By Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service
Following Azerbaijan's passage of its latest set of legal changes restricting and punishing the exercise of freedom of religion or belief, groups of people who produce or distribute religious literature or objects without going through the compulsory prior state censorship now face prison terms of two to five years, or maximum fines equivalent to nearly nine years' official minimum wage per person. Azerbaijan has been steadily increasing restrictions on freedom of religion or belief and punishments for exercising this human right in recent years, Forum 18 News Service notes. Censorship-related "crimes" have mainly been moved from the Code of Administrative Offences to come under the Criminal Code, and in the Administrative Code an "offence" of leading Islamic prayers by those who have studied abroad has also been introduced. Particularly significant is a wide range of massively increased fines for exercising the right to freedom of religion or belief, which many "offenders" would struggle to pay. [read more...]
In neiboring Uzbekistan the pattern is somewhat confirmed: 
By Mushfig Bayram, Forum 18 News Service
The authorities in Uzbekistan's city of Angren have warned local religious communities not to be involved in unspecified "proselytism" and "missionary activity", as well as not to allow children and young people to take part in meetings for worship, Forum 18 News Service has learned. Saidibrahim Saynazirov, Deputy Head of the Administration, made these demands at a meeting of representatives of a variety of religious communities. He also demanded that the communities provide him with lists of their members. Many at the meeting do not want to do this, as one put it to Forum 18, for fear of pressure by the authorities against individual members. When asked what legal basis he had for his demand for membership lists, Saynazirov told the meeting "it's not in the law but we recommend that you do it". He adamantly denied to Forum 18 that he had demanded that communities provide lists of their members. "I did not demand such lists," he insisted. But he admitted that he "only asked" for them. However, the city's Catholic community hope that they will at last be allowed to be legally registered. [read more...]
— collected and reposted by Politicarp

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Pisteutics: Christianity/ies: Native American is proclaimed Catholic saint

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USA Today (December 20, 2k11)
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The Vatican on Monday announced a 17th-century Mohawk-Algonquin woman will be canonized as a Catholic saint, the first Native American from North America so proclaimed.
  • Jake Finkbonner receives a Children's Miracle Network Champions award in Florida.
    2009 family photo
    Jake Finkbonner receives a Children's Miracle Network Champions award in Florida.
2009 family photo
Jake Finkbonner receives a Children's Miracle Network Champions award in Florida.
It takes proof of two miracles to certify that a Catholic is clearly in heaven asking God to help people who pray in their name. Now, a second critical miracle has been credited to prayers in the name of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, who died in 1680 at age 24.
Jacob "Jake" Finkbonner of Ferndale, Wash., was 5 years old in 2006 when he split his lip playing baseball, developed a deadly flesh-eating strep infection and lay near death for months at Seattle Children's Hospital.
Jake's father, Don, is Native American and a member of the Lummi tribe. Its parish priest at the time, Timothy Sauer, urged Jake's parents to pray to Kateri to seek God's miracle, said Jake's mother, Elsa Finkbonner.
Sauer said he suggested Kateri because "I knew Kateri herself had been deeply disfigured by smallpox, so it seemed like she would be a good person to call on for this young boy whose face and head were infected.
"And I knew that Native American Christians have been looking forward to the church's acknowledgment of their contributions in a more public way. Kateri Tekakwitha has always been a rallying point for their faith."
Elsa Finkbonner said Jake turned the corner toward survival after a visit by a member of the Tekakwitha Conference, based in Great Falls, Mont., which evangelizes to a half-million Native American Catholics. The woman, also named Kateri, brought a small coin with an image of Blessed Kateri and a prayer card, Finkbonner said.
"I pinned that relic to his pillow and I read that prayer to him every single day," she said.
Today, Jake is training to be an altar boy at church and still playing basketball.
"I pray to Kateri now myself," Jake said Monday. "Other people have asked about my story and told me their stories, and I pray to her for other people to be healed."
The Vatican scrupulously investigates miracle claims for proof that recovery was not a result of medical or surgical attention.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told NPR about 10% to 15% of patients with Jake's variation of strep die.
Sister Kateri Mitchell of the Tekakwitha Conference, a Mohawk herself, was among 400Native Americans who attended the beatification ceremony in 1980, when Kateri's history of miracles was first recognized by the church.
On Monday, Mitchell said, "I think thousands of us will try to go to Rome for the canonization. We have waited so long for this."
Native American Catholics were once doubly ostracized for their culture and their faith, says church historian Matthew Bunson, co-author of a biography of Tekakwitha, Mystic in the Wilderness. It will be reissued in 2012 under a new name, Saint Tekakwitha: Glory of Many Nations.
Known as the Lily of the Mohawks, Tekakwitha was born in what is now Upstate New York, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and Algonquin Christian mother.
She was just 4 or 5 when she was scarred in the smallpox epidemic that killed her parents and most of her family.
Believers say her scars vanished at her death.
Another American woman will be canonized in 2012.
Blessed Marianne Cope, the German-born Sister of St. Francis from Syracuse, N.Y., joined recently canonized St. Damian of Molokai treating lepers in Hawaii and took over their care after his death from leprosy.
The dates for the celebration of their canonization will likely be announced by February, Bunson said.
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Posted 14h 15m ago | Updated 2h 20m ago
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Monday, December 19, 2011

PoliticsNorthKorea: Death of His Imperial Majesty: Can NorKor master the transition?




Hat Tip to Gregory Baus
To be great is to be misunderstood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ9wkXbubWY

www.youtube.com
I'm so lonely, so lonely. So lonely and sadly alone. There's no one, just me only, sitting on my little throne. I work really hard, and make up great plans. ...



Who's next 




in the narrow North?





Old guy's trying to blow 

up the world,

stuck on the thawt 

that it all comes on one deal, 




all someday to play 


p o p i n j a y 


in the halls of the world's 






heads of state  






and diplomatic corps.






What a chore!


What a bore!

Media: Statement by publisher of refWrite, Albert Gedraitis 'Here we go ...'

Here we go: 


about Albert Gedraitis,


refWrite's publisher

I'm 71, plagued thru much of my life by a complex of illnesses, problems of both physical and mental health.  I'm now at the best period of my existence.  Thru the whole implied journey of life with the health issue in the background, I became a student of philosophy, and from reading the philosophical apologetics of Cornelius Van Til in h+ school, I continued on to the start of my studies of Herman Dooyeweerd in college and spread the word at Shelton College (now gone into the mires of history).  I did some studies at Faith Theological Seminary, but dropped out after my brother's death by lightning (he was 18, I was 21).  



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Hermitary (December 18, 2k11)













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My OT prof told a really bad joke the day after I returned to classes, having buried my brother Sterling.  In the joke, the prof told the story of a father and son hunting-team, where the father saw movement in the underbrush of the forest, and shot his rifle.  We students in the class were all set up to anticipate the father shooting the son to death.  I remember distinctly the floor opening and me wanting to jump into the abyss.  Instead, after the class was over, I got up from my seat, gathered my books and walked to the little road that led to the campus gate of Faith Theological Seminary, Elkins Park, Philadelphia.  I left the seminary and walked to the wooded suburb's closest bus stop, got on board, and rode into the city center where I took the train to my mother's home in Levittown, Pennsylvania.  And never went back to seminary — except for a visit to Westminster (from which Faith had split off decades before) near Philadelphia, where I presented my manuscript for my later book, Worship and Politics, to the Kuyper Club, sponsored by Dr Robert Knudsen.


The second severest event, emotionally, as a young adult (21) was the death by suicide of my mother, Ruth, who died of pills and a laundry see-thru plastic bag.

I'm homo, I'm a vowed celibate (tho my libido is now next to zero) and I live an urban neo-monastic eremitic life in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (I was influenced by Thomas Merton's Contemplation in a World of Action and Maggie Ross's The Fountain and the Furnace: The way of tears and fire.)  I started using a computer 11 years ago, and have found an outlet for my writing as a service to Christ and, in my own distinctive way, the Christian community.  I follow the 24-hour newscycle in my blogging, altho sometimes I stop for a day, a month.  It's just too much sometimes to confront the mayhem abroad in the world, and there's not much I avoid when functioning in a somewhat-role of journaletician (I dislike English-language words ending in -ism or -ist — except when appropriate, indicating an absolutization).  In ad hoc journaletic practice, I am seeking to establish online a signpost to a future daily Christian reporting of news and opinion in the English language and of a reformational editorial perspective, serving in the first instance an international intellectual readership, but not at all in an intelleltual tone (ahem!) and one in which I can generate my own opinions and stands on a wide range of issues — toward, as Steve Bishop says, "all of life redeemed" (that is, the oncoming of the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ here on earth).  In my blogging, I select what I want to recommend and entice others to take at least a glance, a look at, maybe somebody will read at length whenever I have something to offer.

I do this on my Google > Blogspot > blog, refWrite (but , as to spelling of my actual title, Facebook makes me elevate the first letter of the name to produce "RefWrite" [ugh!]).  I have four main pages, each has a number columnists who post in their own memnomic name, all of whom are refWrite columnists for the various pages — refWrite frontpage is devoted mainly to politics, juridics, economics, and enviro; refWrite page 2 focuses on pisteutics (faith and faith communities, world religions, ideologies which try to be their own Archimedean point, and the pisteutic aspect of everything), sciences news, and a related free-standing section on journaletics.  refWrite page 3 is concerned with Special Features, which for instance at the moment consists of a free ad for upcoming scholarly conferences;  detailed and illustrated book notices, sometimes with only the publishers hype and data. reWrite page 4 is the stay-in-touch-with-culture page, both pop and fine-arts cultures -- our team for this section this session, this season -- consists of Audiovisiotor, Musikos, Sportikos, Techknowlb, Country Gal, Musicman, Satirikos, (and here we're getting fictional, textually mixing serious-about-the-world realities with our own brand of fiction), and refWrite's general editor for that team, me Owlb (get the last word on all posts) .  There's also a much-neglected fifth page, free standing entitled, refWrite refBlogger Insert (rrI), a blog advancing my call for civil disobedience against attacks upon freedom of speech, whether by activists or by governments, corporations, institutions.  Americans especially must retain all the clauses of the First Amendment of the Constitution, seeing them respected and enforced by the Congress of the USA and the Courts all the way up to SCOTUS — that woud be a good project of an american affiliate of rrI. But, that strictly American concern, there's the broader goal of report instances of censorship wherever the take place, the status of blogger and journalist, freedom of blogging a form of freedom of speech. We oppose the corporate behemoth of Google (which I love and criticize), Facebook (which I love and criticize), YouTube (which I love and don't criticize much), Twitter (just starting to get the hang of it, and a few others — which said mega-corporations are concertedly  trying to take control of what you can get on the Net and what the Net can get from you to deliver wherever4 you see fit — but no spamming! At least in the USA, with a lot of pressure on Canada to conform.

I promote Christian thinking, including Christian philosophy in the tradition founded by Herman Dooyeweeerd and, my personal fave, Dirk Hendrik Theodoor Vollenhoven, famous for his history of philosophy, his historical charts, and his development of "the Consequent Problem-Historical Method" for that discipline.  My mentor in that latter endeavour is Dr Robert Sweetman who holds the Runner Chair at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto.  He's also an excellent medievalist, well-received by some Roman Catholic historical scholars in regard to Orders of Religious.  In Dr Sweetman's case I know he specializes in Augustine, Aquinas, Dominicans, Cistercians, select Franciscans -- including both St Francis himself and Bonventura who interpreted ("superseded") the Founder of the Order, by giving it the Platonic twist, says Mathew Fox, Catholic -> Episcopalian maverick.  I've read the manuscript for Sweetman's forthcoming book, Delineations, so I'm very hot on his work at the moment.  Another of the academics I follow is Dr Thomas McIntire who teaches at University of Toronto in the History Faculty and the Study of Religions Faculty.


I'm a poet (but that's another story).

I'm a believer in Christian organization (which raises the problem of strategy and geostrategic studies in the various realms of life).  My chief organizational concern is the pattern suggested by CNV Netherlands, Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC), Christian Labor Association USA, and my big prayer project along these lines is the establishment of a Christian Labour Association in England (CLAE).  I won't here asses (evaluate) each of these organizations and projects, but may I say the pattern is one of uniqueness in representation of workers, organization, and relations in the various industrial sectors and business firms (from co-ops thru small entreneurships to Big Business ... demonization of business is not the answer). There are some experts writing on these matters from a Christian perspective, with philosophical awareness, in these countries mentioned.  There are also Catholic-inspired unions these days, some of which have travelled the route in the last three decades to take the path of Christian Marxist identity (widespread in Brazil), some have simply dropped their Catholic identity in their representation of workers (the unions have "secularized").  I think what we call the reformational movement thru-out the world is tragically remiss, not taking on as a project of interaction and support (however otherwise critical) the structurations of work, the work community, and the plural representation of labour organization around the globe today — and forthrightly supporting Christian labour organization around the globe.  Readiness for the development of Christian labour unions in China is the great goal envisioned for us, I believe, by the Holy Spirit of God at work in the world today.

I'm going on far too long.  For now, yours, Albert






CONTEMPLATION IN A WORLD OF ACTION.
 
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CONTEMPLATION IN A WORLD OF ACTION.[Hardcover]

Thomas Merton. (Author)


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The Fountain & the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire
  

The Fountain & the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire [Paperback]

Maggie Ross  
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