When America Made Things, This Place Was Important

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Fake News - About Religious Freedom

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The picture at the top is from a Christmas Party in 1946 in an auto dealership in Paterson NJ where my father was the general manager.   I am showing it for a reason that will be clear by the end.   Conservatives make frequent reference to the founders but if you look closely, you will learn that they do so only when it suits them.  They pretend that the founders were a united group of men who had a single idea about how the US should be governed and about what our constitution meant, but the founders were far from being a single group with shared beliefs.  For example, the Massachusetts founders believed that government was an instrument for promoting progress.  The Virginia founders on the other hand were well to do planters, also slaveholders and who wanted rights for themselves (the ruling planter class) but who had not the least concern for the “servants” who worked for them, nor for the poor whites who lived in squalor in the hills and woods....
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Our Biggest Failure - Our Constitution.

Yes, our constitution is a failure.  And no , I don't want to move to Russia. Following the Connecticut shooting, we heard suggestions that the second amendment was no longer relevant – and then came the outrage from those who cannot accept any thought that our constitution may not be perfect.  Well guess what, it isn’t!  The central principal of our founding document is the separation of powers.  While this may make certain forms of tyranny impossible, it also impedes problem solving. In the 20 th century, when it came time for new republics to draft a constitution, they copied the parliamentary model, not our peculiar form of government.  Our founders may have guessed right with the bill of rights and an independent judiciary – but their guesses about the rest were just that, guesses.         Starting with the administration of George Washington, the process of securing  senatorial approval for ap...
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Can An Atheist Raise a Moral Child? ... Yes!

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I am sure you have heard Mike Huckabee say that our removal of religion from our public schools ultimately made the Connecticut shooting possible.  Right wing media have picked up on this and spread the word.  From an angry Mark Levin , to a more restrained Larry Kudlow (who spoke to a Fr. John McCloskey yesterday  on this same topic) the word it out.  Yep, the shooting was another instance of our secular society letting us down.  But did the recent shooting and all similar shootings occur because our society lacks morality?  And does it take religion to foster moral behavior?  No.  There is no correlation between religion and violent behavior.  Our “blue states” are nominally less religious than the red states, but they don’t show higher homicide rates than the “red states.”  In fact, the highest homicide rates include a number of Bible belt (and southern) states.  And the states with the lowest...
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