POTUS Wonders What to Say about Freedom

Washington Wonders What to Say about Arab Freedom
By David Bromwich

From Egypt to Pakistan, February 2011 will be remembered as a month unusually full of the embarrassments of empire. Americans were enthralled by a spectacle of liberty in which we felt we should somehow be playing a part. Here were popular movements toward self-government, which might once have looked to the United States as an exemplar, springing up all across North Africa and the Middle East. Why did they not look up to us now?

The answer became clearer with every equivocal word of the Obama administration, and every false step it took in trying to manage the crisis. A person suffers embarrassment when something true about himself emerges in spite of reasonable efforts to conceal it. It is the same with nations. Sovereign nations are abstract entities, of course -- they cannot have feelings as people do -- but there are times when they would blush if they could.
Tom Dispatch

Atlas Shrugs Readers Changed History in 2010

Atlas readers conflict with those who would deny us our freedom. We Americans won't go the way of Britain under the yoke of Shar'ia Law.

Freedom"s Unfinished Revolution

A textbook designed for high school classrooms, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction, examines one of the most contested periods in America’s history where social conflict and change shaped the national landscape for generations to come.

Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution links the Civil War to the problems and promises of the Reconstruction era, providing a broader historical context to the racial injustice and social upheavals that followed. Filled with rich primary sources—letters, speeches, photographs, engravings, novel excerpts, among others—this textbook uses critical thinking exercises and supplementary resources to help students construct historical narratives. Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution was produced by ASHP/CML, written by William Friedheim with Ronald Jackson, and published by The New Press.

When a Citizen Has Power

The CIA can't plant a virus to blow up his computer.
The FBI can't wire tap his bedroom phone to determine his sexual preferences.
The local bank can't seize his house when he is hospitalized.
The dogcatcher can't break into his garden to haul off his pets.
The Health Department can't sell his kids to foster parents.
He can incarcerate his Representative, his Senators and his President.

The Fragility of Freedom

By Rabbi Berel Wein, Aish.com
In the measured cadence and soaring beauty of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (a speech that American students were once required to commit to memory) there appears a phrase at the end -- "a new birth of freedom." Lincoln hit upon a basic value in Jewish life and in the Torah.
Freedom, rather than being a permanent and expected state of being, is fragile and rather rare in human history. Therefore, because of its very fragility and scarcity, freedom has to be treasured, appreciated and constantly renewed. Every person and every society regularly requires a new birth of freedom to maintain its hard-won liberty.

Passover is a holiday of constant rebirth and renewal.

And this is one of the basic messages of Passover. The Haggada teaches us that "in each and every generation the Jew has to envision himself or herself as though he or she just left Egypt and its bondage." Passover is therefore not merely a commemorative holiday, though it is that as well, but more importantly it is a holiday of constant rebirth and renewal.
In our prayers, we refer to Passover as zman cheruteinu -- the time of our freedom. This implies not only past freedom but current freedom as well. Passover demands from us that we continue to struggle and appreciate our freedom. It is not without dangers and weaknesses. It must therefore be zealously guarded and always renewed.
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Violence Promotes Freedom - Big Brother?

Overseas, the administration hones its skills of repression. They enlist the media in disinformation. After the coup d'etat, they can assure the public that domestic spying, torture and imprisonment are prerequisite for safety.

Martial Law will maintain the new order through violence. "It's going to take awhile, but it's a necessary part of the development of a free society," Bush said.