Supreme Court Justices are sworn to uphold the Constitution Of The United States. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we select Justices who have respect for that document. That's why it was fairly disturbing to discover that one particular liberal Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, does not think so highly of our Constitution:

As Egyptian officials prepare to send to trial 19 American democracy and rights workers, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg visited Cairo last week where she suggested Egyptian revolutionaries not use the U.S. Constitution as a model in the post-Arab Spring.

"I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012," Ginsburg said in an interview on Al Hayat television last Wednesday. "I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, have an independent judiciary. It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done."

Ginsburg has said in the past that she looks to foreign law when weighing issues. That is a violation of her Constitutional oath of office, but at least now we know why she does it.

When liberals speak of a government that embraces "basic human rights", they aren't talking about a government that guarantees individual liberty, as does our Bill Of Rights. They are talking about something entirely different. To liberals, "basic human rights" means the government should intercede and provide everyone with things like food, shelter, education, health care, universal pre-school, birth control, utility bill payments, welfare payments, retirement income, etc. Basically, if anyone lacks anything, liberals believe the government should provide it for them, and that it is a "right".

Nothing the government does is free, however, so when liberals provide some people with these unnamed Constitutional "rights", they must infringe on the rights of others. This is commonly known as "redistribution of wealth", which is also nowhere to be found in our Constitution.

President Obama holds the same view of our lousy Constitution as does Justice Ginsburg. He has called it "fundamentally flawed", and opined that it contains an "enormous blind spot". This Obama statement from a few years ago explains what he meant:

Obama said, “The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.”

When liberals use the phrase "economic justice", they mean that if you have something your neighbor does not have, the government should force you to provide that thing for your neighbor. This is the essence of "redistribution of wealth", and it's also why liberals whine endlessly about income inequality (rather than focusing on the undeniable rising standard of living of all Americans over the last 100 years). A major difference between liberals and conservatives is, conservatives believe in equal opportunity for all, while liberals believe in equal outcome for all. This is also the difference between capitalism and socialism, and it explains liberal disdain for capitalism (unless liberals can use a rising stock market as evidence Obama is doing a good job, as they've been doing recently. Consistency is not liberals' strong suit). By the way, the rising American standard of living came from capitalism, not socialism, but liberals would prefer you not know that.

After a liberal Supreme Court Justice expresses her disdain for our Constitution, she's going to need some assistance in removing her foot from her mouth. Who better to provide such assistance than the liberal New York Times, who conveniently ran a column called 'We The People' Loses Appeal With People Around The World in the wake of Ginsburg's remarks. Here's a taste:

The Constitution has seen better days.

Sure, it is the nation’s founding document and sacred text. And it is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. But its influence is waning.

A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

The study, to be published in June in The New York University Law Review, bristles with data. Its authors coded and analyzed the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them.

Translation – Our Constitution is old and musty, and just not hip for these modern (left-wing) times. And why is this so ? One guess:

There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.

Notice the cover for Ginsburg's behind. Liberals want more and more "rights", but oddly, they also want to end certain existing rights:

[Our Constitution] has its idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as the Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms. (Its brothers in arms are Guatemala and Mexico.)

Yeah. That crazy Constitution of ours allows our citizens to arm and protect themselves. Big Brother doesn't like that. A defenseless and docile (dependent) population is much easier to control. Independence is so "idiosyncratic" these days.

Liberals wish we were more like Canada:

“America is in danger, I think, of becoming something of a legal backwater,” Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia said in a 2001 interview. He said that he looked instead to India, South Africa and New Zealand.

Mr. Barak, for his part, identified a new constitutional superpower: “Canadian law,” he wrote, “serves as a source of inspiration for many countries around the world.” The new study also suggests that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982, may now be more influential than its American counterpart.

The Canadian Charter is both more expansive and less absolute. It guarantees equal rights for women and disabled people, allows affirmative action and requires that those arrested be informed of their rights. On the other hand, it balances those rights against “such reasonable limits” as “can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

Groovy. I wonder why they left out the part about how Canada doesn't even have free speech. If the Canadian government thinks what you are saying is offensive (politically incorrect), they can arrest you. For one example, the Canadian government threatened to arrest conservative columnist Ann Coulter BEFORE she gave a speech in Canada. I guess Coulter was guilty of thought crimes. This is what happens when liberals start determining what is a right and what isn't. Another name for it is "oppression", and left-wingers admire it.

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out something about rights – the more rights that are guaranteed, the more the government becomes totalitarian:

…Justice Antonin Scalia told the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. “Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights,” he said.

“The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours,” he said, adding: “We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!”

I prefer to stick with individual liberty over government diktat, but that's just me. Maybe it's because I was taught that if you want something, you go out and earn it. You don't just demand that someone else give it to you for free. That seems RIGHT to me. I don't need the government to control every aspect of my life. I always thought the greatest thing about America was that here it didn't. If that concept is old and musty, then I suppose I am too.

I spent the last week in Las Vegas, where I purposely avoided television, the internet, talk radio, and newspapers. I didn't even check in on my own blog. All things political were jettisoned from my life for an entire week. It was fantastic. I'd be quite happy to remove politics from my life completely, but alas, I cannot…not while the systematic destruction of the U.S. Constitution is underway in this country…not while the fascists leading our government are hell-bent on destroying the underpinnings of American liberty…not while our so-called leaders are busy destroying our collective economic future. I can't simply sit back and ignore these things, much as I'd like to.

It seems I missed a lot in my week away. On the plus side, the Iraq War ended. Thank goodness for that. I'm happy our troops are finally coming home, even if warmongering politicians like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are not happy. That war should never have been waged. It took the lives of 4,500 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis to get rid of the evil Saddam Hussein. There had to be a better way.

On the down side, the Bill Of Rights is about to take another big hit. The House voted in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), 283-136, which eliminates the Due Process clause from the Bill Of Rights. The NDAA would allow Americans to be detained indefinitely without trial, and President Obama made sure Americans were included in the "you don't have no stinking rights !" group:

As [Senator Carl] Levin (D-MI) said last week, it was the White House itself that demanded Section 1031 apply to American citizens.

“The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved...and the administration asked us to remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section,” said Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Obama was insistent on nullifying the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, a curious position to take for a man who is allegedly an expert in Constitutional Law. Then again, Obama already has a history of ignoring the Constitution, as he did when he perverted the Commerce Clause by signing ObamaCare into law. The President is not alone in wanting to discard those quaint old rights found in our Constitution. 93 of his fellow Democrats also voted to discard them by voting for the NDAA. This is what Democrats means when they talk about a "living" or "evolving" Constitution. They mean they want to destroy it when it gets in the way of their political goals.

Even more interesting is the way the alleged limited government advocates on the Republican side of the aisle voted. The small government Constitution-adhering GOPers in the House voted FOR the NDAA by a margin of 190-43. What a bunch of phonies. Here's the money quote from Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC):

“It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” remarked Graham. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”

And here I thought Kim Jong Il died. Guess not. He's a Senator from South Carolina. We should build a Lindsay Graham Memorial in D.C. with the words "Shut up. You don't get a lawyer" inscribed on it to inspire future generations of fascist Americans.

The only bad thing about voting the totalitarian Obama out of office is that one of these Graham-like Republicans will probably take his place, assuming Ron Paul (R-TX) can't win the GOP nomination, which he probably can't, despite the fact that he's currently leading in Iowa.

When the Great Prevaricator, Obama, isn't eliminating our Constitutional rights, he's busy regulating us into submission. The Great Prevaricator does this while simultaneously pretending that the GOP wants to strip away all regulations and turn the country into the Wild West all over again. Obama says the Republicans want "dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance" to cover up for the fact that regulations have exploded during Obama's tenure in the Oval Office. The Wall Street Journal exposes the truth:

A lack of regulations is not the problem, despite what the Great Prevaricator would have us believe. Our problem is the control freak nature of the Obama administration.

Coming next, those skyrocketing electricity rates Obama promised us a few years ago:

In the next few days, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue another final regulation directed at electricity utilities. This rule, known as the Utility MACT, will impose an estimated $11 billion each year in new costs on our economy. It will threaten electricity-generating capacity in many parts of the country. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this administration’s runaway rulemaking.

Obama's three-step plan for our economy is 1) Regulate 2) Control 3) Repeat.

And it doesn't matter how many jobs it costs us. It doesn't matter how negative are the effects on the economy. Those like Obama will use the negative effects of their policies to call for yet more control, more regulation, and less Constitutional restrictions on their power. That's the way totalitarians roll.

When I heard we killed the terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki with a Predator drone strike in Yemen, my first reaction was "good, we got another one !" When it comes to killing al Qaedans, I'm on-board with the idea, mainly because al Qaedans are on-board with the jihadist idea of killing us. If it's going to be us or them, I want it to be them. Putting them on the 72 Virgin Express is fine by me. Better that than the Capitol Bldg. blowing up.

But this is 2011, and even killing a terrorist bent on killing Americans is not without controversy. Here's Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX):

“That’s not a good way to deal with our problems,” [Paul] said of the drone strike in Yemen that killed Awlaki. “He was born here,” said Paul. “He is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged with any crime. Nobody knows if he killed anyone." Paul said the precedent of striking against Americans, even those suspected of being terrorist masterminds, is not a good one. “If the American people accept this blindly and casually – have a precedent of an American president assassinating people who he thinks are bad. I think it that’s sad,” he said.

Ron Paul is not the only member of the political right who sounds a lot like Glen Greenwald on this matter. There are several others. Here's Kevin Williamson of National Review:

Awlaki was obviously in the camp (metaphorically and then literally) of our mortal enemies. If propagandizing on behalf of a mortal enemy were enough to justify the assassination of a U.S. citizen, then we would have shot half the faculty of Harvard and 93.8 percent of the Motion Picture Academy a few decades back. But this is wartime, the argument goes. So was Korea, Vietnam, and much of the second half of the 20th century, but we managed to get through it without ordering the assassination of I. F. Stone, and his beloved Soviets were a far greater threat to this nation than is al-Qaeda.

If the Authorization for Use of Military Force does indeed permit all this, then it is only a law legalizing lawlessness. Citizenship, as I have argued before, is my main concern here. If citizenship in a republic means anything, it means that raw political clout is not the only thing standing between the citizen and arbitrary violence on the part of the state. The extrajudicial killing of American citizens — not on a battlefield, mind you, and not in the course of combat — fundamentally changes the relationship between citizen and state. I have my doubts that any sensible person would have let himself freeze to death at Valley Forge to establish such a government.

Yes, Awlaki is an American citizen. He was born in New Mexico.

And yes, we do have that piece of paper known as the U.S. Constitution, which is supposed to be the supreme law of the land. American citizens are supposed to be covered under the Constitution, and the Bill Of Rights contains a Fifth Amendment, which states the following – "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

The President Of The United States is sworn to uphold the Constitution. The question reduces down to this – Have we set a very dangerous precedent where the government can now execute an American citizen without any due process, or are the President's actions justified by the Fifth Amendment exception for "service in time of War or public danger ?" When it comes to battling enemies of the United States and national security, that's about the only time I give our government any constitutional leeway, so I'm inclined to give the President the benefit of the doubt here…but my inner libertarian is scolding me, calling me a fool to ever trust the government to hold it's own expanded power in check. History has shown that when you give government an inch, it takes a mile. A great deal of my personal political philosophy is based upon the tendency of governments toward tyranny. The idea of limited government is a lot more than some right-wing or libertarian talking point. It's an essential prerequisite to a free society.

I find myself in a dilemma. I'm wary of the precedent we're setting here…but I'm still glad we took Awlaki out.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on the matter.

I have more to say about the Fourth Amendment, so I thought I'd put it in a new post.

The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) states that any e-mail left in the cloud may be searched by the government without a warrant if it is older than 180 days. Cloud e-mail is e-mail stored on a third party server, as opposed to being stored on your own computer hard drive. The government does need a warrant to search your personal computer hard drive (in theory. I'll come back to this later).

The problem with this law is, since the advent of the internet, consumers increasingly store their e-mail on third party servers instead of their own hard drives, and as most of you know, when you delete an e-mail on a computer, it isn't really deleted. It remains on the server. This means the government has been able to access huge amounts of our personal computer communications for a very long time without any probable cause or warrant. There is no Fourth Amendment protection of this data.

A coalition of internet service providers and others, known as Digital Due Process, is lobbying the government to correct the situation so cloud e-mail and home-stored e-mail are both protected under the Fourth Amendment. Congress held a recent hearing on the matter.

But the Obama Administration says it don't want no stinking Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Here's the congressional testimony of Associate Deputy Attorney General James A. Baker:

Congress should recognize the collateral consequences to criminal law enforcement and the national security of the United States if ECPA were to provide only one means — a probable cause warrant — for compelling disclosure of all stored content. For example, in order to obtain a search warrant for a particular e-mail account, law enforcement has to establish probable cause to believe that evidence will be found in that particular account. In some cases, this link can be hard to establish. In one recent case, for example, law enforcement officers knew that a child exploitation subject had used one account to send and receive child pornography, and officers discovered that he had another email account, but they lacked evidence about his use of the second account.

The argument is always the same. The public is guaranteed a Constitutional right to privacy, but the government says that right to privacy interferes with it's ability to catch criminals. The government's position has caught on big in the post-9/11 atmosphere, when the public was worried about more terrorist attacks, but the government has basically always held to the same belief. For instance, you might think NSA warrantless wiretapping of phone calls began with President Bush after 9/11, but you'd be wrong. The first major case of warrantless wiretapping I could find was the 1928 Olmstead v. United States case, and in that case the Supreme Court ruled warrantless wiretapping was NOT a violation of the Fourth Amendment. The decision was later overturned in a 1967 case.

These cases serve as a reminder to us of how important it is to have an independent, Constitution-minded judiciary, because it is the judiciary that serves as a bulwark against the tyranny of our own government. When the Supreme Court struck down several of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's laws as unconstitutional in the 1930's, FDR responded by to attempting pack the court with crones who would ignore the Constitution and serve as his own personal rubber stamp. Our Constitution would not long survive if the judiciary became so compromised.

It is the judiciary that will have to stand up to the Obama Administration as well. In December, a federal appeals court ruled that e-mail does come under privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment:

The government must obtain a court warrant to require internet service providers to turn over stored e-mail to the authorities, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was the first time an appellate court said Americans had that Fourth Amendment protection.

“The government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber’s e-mails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause”, the appeals court ruled. The decision — one stop short of the Supreme Court — covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.

Score one for the courts. This isn't over yet, but so far, so good.

Liberals and others were very upset with President Bush for his post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping (which was the one and only time I actually thought the government should be granted some leeway to prevent more terrorist attacks), but as I said before, that activity didn't begin with Bush. President Clinton did it before Bush did, and I don't recall the same outrage (or any outrage) being directed at Clinton. From Wikipedia:

On July 14, 1994 President Clinton's Deputy Attorney General and later 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that “The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes…and that the president may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General.” This “inherent authority” was used to search the home of CIA spy Aldrich Ames without a warrant. "It is important to understand," Gorelick continued, "that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities."[7]

Perhaps liberals look at things in a different light when a President has a 'D" next to his name ??? I'm just asking, though I already know the answer

Lastly, I can't let any discussion of privacy go by without bringing up Project Echelon. It is a government signals intelligence network that can scoop up satellite communications, e-mail, telephone calls, etc. Nobody seems to know exactly what it is being used for, which is why I said before that your e-mail is private "in theory". In reality, yeah, Big Brother is probably watching, and listening too. If I were you, I would always assume so.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. – Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

That's what it says in the Bill Of Rights, but the Indiana Supreme Court just said differently:

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer's entry.

"We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence," David said. "We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest."

There are so many things wrong with this Judge's statement that I barely know where to start. The Indiana Supreme Court is actually defending an "unlawful police entry into a home". What part of "unlawful" don't they understand ? The law applies to the police as well as the public. I guess "modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence" means the Fourth Amendment no longer applies. I cannot effing believe this. And I'd really like to know what "public policy" the Judge is talking about that nullifies the supreme law of the land. As for the Judge's attempted justification that resistance to an unlawful police raid "unnecessarily escalates the level of violence", what the hell is that about ? A woman who resists a rape attempt is risking an escalation of the violence level too, but that doesn't mean she should let herself be raped. This Judge is a freaking idiot. He's condoning unlawful behavior on the grounds that resisting it might lead to violence. Well, no sh*t, Sherlock, but the crime is being committed by the person(s) engaging in the unlawful behavior, not the victim(s).

The idiot Judge David continued:

David said a person arrested following an unlawful entry by police still can be released on bail and has plenty of opportunities to protest the illegal entry through the court system.

Oh, how kind of the idiot Judge David to maintain that a citizen still has a right to his day in court following his unlawful arrest from an unlawful entry by the police into his home. What a guy. I'm so glad he doesn't want to destroy ALL our civil rights in one fell swoop. Maybe Judge David won't try to get rid of that silly "day in court" thingy until next year. Then we can go full-on Gestapo.

You can read the details of the case that brought about this putrid ruling at the link above. The two dissenting judges pointed out the painfully obvious:

Justice Robert Rucker, a Gary native, and Justice Brent Dickson, a Hobart native, dissented from the ruling, saying the court's decision runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

"In my view the majority sweeps with far too broad a brush by essentially telling Indiana citizens that government agents may now enter their homes illegally — that is, without the necessity of a warrant, consent or exigent circumstances," Rucker said. "I disagree."

Rucker and Dickson suggested if the court had limited its permission for police entry to domestic violence situations they would have supported the ruling.

But Dickson said, "The wholesale abrogation of the historic right of a person to reasonably resist unlawful police entry into his dwelling is unwarranted and unnecessarily broad."

Yes, the police can enter your house with probable cause, but torching the entire Fourth Amendment is most definitely an "unnecessarily broad" ruling, to put it mildly. It's like saying a policeman shooting your entire family in the head because you were caught driving 35 miles per hour in a school zone is an "unnecessarily broad" reaction to your infraction. No kidding.

This isn't the first recent Indiana Supreme Court ruling on the subject:

On Tuesday, the court said police serving a warrant may enter a home without knocking if officers decide circumstances justify it. Prior to that ruling, police serving a warrant would have to obtain a judge's permission to enter without knocking.

Let me see if I have this straight. In Indiana, the police can now enter your home without knocking at any time and arrest you, all without a warrant, probable cause, or anything.

Hmmm. Isn't that exactly what Anne Frank was worried about during the Nazi occupation ? Isn't that why she was hiding ? It's good to know we've brought that to Indiana now, right here in the alleged land of the free.

For what it's worth, here's what I have regarding the political appointments of these Indiana Judges.

The good guys who dissented:
Judge Dickson was appointed by a Republican Governor (Robert Orr).
Judge Rucker was appointed by a Democratic Governor (Frank O'Bannon)

The bad guys who ruled to destroy the Constitution:
Judge David was appointed by a Republican Governor (Mitch Daniels)
Judge Shepard was appointed by a Republican Governor (Robert Orr).
Judge Sullivan was appointed by a Democratic Governor (Evan Bayh).

I'm not sure what this means, other than neither political party has a corner on ignorance, or wisdom. I bet Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN), who is considering running for President, isn't going to be too happy to be connected to the idiot Judge David, unless Daniels agrees with him. I sure hope he doesn't.

Recently, the Boeing Corporation announced plans to build a $1 billion commercial jet production plant in South Carolina.

With the national unemployment rate at 9%, and manufacturing jobs leaving America in droves, it's certainly good news that Boeing is building it's new plant right here in the good old USA, eh ?

While it may sound like good news to most of us, the Obama administration objects. Obama's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has sued Boeing to prevent the plant from being built in South Carolina. The NLRB is accusing Boeing of unfair labor practices. The NLRB is accusing Boeing of union-busting. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the NLRB, it is a branch of the federal government whose board members are all appointed by the President. Three of the four current NLRB board members are Democrats. The stated purpose of the NLRB is to protect employee rights, which includes the right of workers to collectively bargain, as outlined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Note to Democrats in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana – the National Labor Relations Act specifically excluded federal, state, and local government employees from collective bargaining rights. It only applies to private sector workers).

The NLRB demands that Boeing build it's new plant in Washington state instead of South Carolina. The reason is, South Carolina is one of 22 right-to-work states, while Washington is not. In right-to-work states, workers cannot be forced to join a union and pay union dues as a condition of their employment. Needless to say, forced unionism is exactly what the unions want, ergo the complaint against Boeing.

I have a few observations. First of all, aside from the union vs. right-to-work issue, I have a problem when our own government opposes an American company that wants to produce jobs and manufacture products in this country. Isn't job creation supposed to be what we are encouraging ? Second, why should the government have the potential to compel a private corporation to do business in one state over another ? I thought this was supposed to be the land of the free, the UNITED States, not the land of political friends and enemies. Third, there is no statute prohibiting collective bargaining or the creation of unions in right-to-work states. Workers are free to unionize if they wish, or not unionize. It's the worker's choice. I don't see a big problem there, but in the interest of fairness, here is the argument for and against right-to-work laws, via Wikipedia:

For Right-To-Work:

Proponents of right-to-work laws point to the Constitutional right to freedom of association, as well as the common-law principle of private ownership of property. They argue that workers should be free both to join unions and to refrain from joining unions, and for this reason sometimes refer to non-right-to-work states as "forced unionism" states.[2] They contend that it is wrong for unions to be able to agree with employers to include clauses in their union contracts (also known as a union security agreement) which require all employees to either join the union, or pay union dues as a condition of employment.[3] Furthermore, they contend that in certain cases forced union dues are used to support political causes, causes which some union members may oppose.[4]

Against Right-To-Work:

Opponents argue right-to-work laws create a free-rider problem,[8][9] in which non-union employees (who are bound by the terms of the union contract even though they are not members of the union) benefit from collective bargaining without paying union dues.[8][10]

Opponents further argue that because unions are weakened by these laws, wages are lowered[10] and worker safety and health is endangered. For these reasons, they often refer to right-to-work states as "right to work for less" states[11] or "right-to-fire" states, and "non-right-to-work" states as "free collective bargaining" states. They also cite statistics from the United States Department of Labor showing, for example, that, in 2003, states with right-to-work laws in general had a higher rate of workplace fatalities per 100,000 workers.[12]

The Libertarian in me is persuaded by the freedom of assocation argument of the right-to-work supporters, but I also acknowledge the important role private sector unions have played in the past in securing rights and decent wages for American workers. That is no small thing, and it's also Libertarian to allow private sector workers to unionize (or not) as they see fit. In the end, it's that choice that is essential, and in the end, if workers in right-to-work states are being abused, they CAN still unionize. It's up to them. As long as that choice remains in place, I side with the right-to-work people.

Many Republicans, especially those from South Carolina, are taking issue with the NLRB's action against Boeing. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley called it "nothing less than a direct assault on the 22 right-to-work states across America." South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham said, "If successful, the NLRB complaint would allow unions to hold a virtual ‘veto' over business decisions. Left to their own devices, the NLRB would routinely punish Right to Work states that value and promote their pro-business climates." South Carolina Senator Jim Demint said, "This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama's re-election campaign. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of hundreds of jobs in South Carolina and thousands of jobs nationwide."

The International Association of Machinists And Aerospace Workers (IAM) union claims Boeing is building it's new plant in South Carolina in retaliation for past union strikes against Boeing. The NLRB, which is supposed to be an independent agency, is clearly acting as a mouthpiece for union grievances. The NLRB's Acting General Counsel, Lafe Solomon, said Boeing was building it's plant in South Carolina "to retaliate for past strikes and chill future strike activity."

Boeing denies the accusation:

“We hold no animus toward union members, and we have never sought to threaten or punish them for exercising their rights, as the NLRB claims,” Boeing CEO Jim McNerney wrote. “To the contrary, union members are part of our company's fabric and key to our success. About 40% of our 155,000 U.S. employees are represented by unions — a ratio unchanged since 2003. Nor are we making a mass exodus to right-to-work states that forbid compulsory union membership. We have a sizable presence in 34 states; half are unionized and half are right-to-work.”

Boeing received about $900 million in tax breaks and other incentives from South Carolina.

For the sake of argument, let's say the IAM is right, and Boeing is moving to South Carolina to get away from the repeated union strikes. You must remember, Boeing is not a public service organization or a charity. It is a company that has to make a profit to stay in business. Therefore, Boeing acts in the business interests of Boeing, and it's not in Boeing's interests to have it's production halted by union strike after union strike, is it ? Thus, the repeated strikes are actually an INCENTIVE for Boeing to relocate elsewhere. I saw this exact same scenario play out in Akron, Ohio in the 1970's with the rubber shops. They moved production to the south to escape the unions, and Akron ended up high and dry, with nothing. Thanks for nothing, unions. You drove our jobs away, and they were good blue collar jobs. Our city was left a lot worse off because of it. That same scenario is turning parts of Detroit, Michigan into a ghost town today. Sometimes the unions end up being their own worst enemy. Personally, I'd rather have an actual job that pays $20 per hour than a non-existent union job that pays $30 per hour, but that's just me. I like to feed my family, and I can't do that in Akron if my job is in Alabama, or China.

To my knowledge, President Obama hasn't said a word about the Boeing situation, which led Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to wonder aloud whether Obama has an "enemies list". I'd phrase it a bit differently. What I think is, Obama has a friend's list, and Republican-voting right-to-work-states like South Carolina aren't on it. After all, our President is already in 2012 fundraising campaign re-election mode. He's looking to raise a billion dollars and reward his friends. Cronies unite !

I didn't quite know what to make of a President who would launch an attack on Libya as he flew off with his family to South America for some sightseeing and chats with trading partners. That seemed pretty odd. Then I found out the Secretary Of Defense, Robert Gates, was in Moscow talking to the Russians as the war broke out. Then I found out Vice President Joe Biden was in Boston doing fundraisers for the Democratic party as the war broke out…maybe it's just me, but I always thought invading a country was pretty serious stuff. I always thought our leaders would be on hand in the war room, talking to the Joint Chiefs, ready to make decisions, etc., not going about their daily routines as if destroying Libya's air force and bombing Gaddafi's compound was equivalent to weeding a garden. I guess I was wrong. I guess it goes more like this:

"If you need me, Joint Chiefs, I'll be in Rio with the fam. Good luck. I'll take a picture of the Christ The Redeemer statue for you. You got my cell digits, right ? Anyone seen my Nike ballcap ? Call me. Luv ya, bye !". Then it's off to Air Force One for a mocha cappucino and an in-flight movie as the Tomahawk missiles rain down. Class move, Mr. President.

At least VP Biden is done with his fundraisers and is on-hand for some war strategy, right ? (please excuse me for putting the words 'Biden" and "strategy' in the same sentence. I'm aware of the contradiction). Well, not exactly. After Biden finished up his fundraising activites for the Democrats, he….went to spring training with the New York Yankees yesterday.

No wonder the Obama administration didn't bother to get the approval of Congress before bombing Libya. It would have interfered with their busy social calendars. When one is an elite, who has the time to keep the little people apprised of things ? It's so tedious.

However, like Obama, Vice President Joey saw things a bit differently back in 2007, when our President was from that other political party,..you know, the one with the elephant instead of the donkey.

Ladies and gentlemen, I drafted an outline of what I think the Constitutional limits [garbled] have on the President with the War Clause. I went to five leading scholars, Constitutional scholars, and they drafted a treatise for me that is being distributed to every Senator. And I want to make it clear, and I’ll make it clear to the President: that if he takes this nation to war in Iran, without Congressional approval, I will make it my business to impeach him – Senator Joseph Biden, 2007.

There you have it. Both President Obama and Vice President Biden, by their own words, think Obama has shredded the Constitution. Biden even thinks Obama should be impeached, or at least he did when Obama was Bush, and Libya was Iran. Who am I to disagree with such eminent men as these (not that it ever stopped me before) ?

But far be it from me to portray Obama as uncaring or hypocritical. In fact, the President cares sooo much that he even cancelled his trip to some Mayan ruins in El Salvador, returning to the USA two whole hours early to focus like a laser beam on Libya. It's all about "shared sacrifice", folks, and it starts at the top, as you can clearly see. I bet those Mayan ruins were pretty cool, and Obama sacrificed them…for YOU. That's commitment, by god. That's leadership.

Today's schedule has Obama lunching with Biden at 12.45pm (ooh, I bet Biden got him a ball signed by the Yankees ! Awesome !!!), and then meeting with Treasury Secretary Geithner this afternoon at 2:15pm, so Geithner can tell Obama he has no clue what to do about the economy. And Geithner will have statistics to back that up.

As for progress in Libya, I can only relate what I've heard. Obama said we'll be out of there in a week, but he also said we're committed to removing Gaddafi from power. I'm not sure how those two goals go together. Defense Secretary Gates said there was no timeline for withdrawal. Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton announced yesterday that the humanitarian crisis in Libya has been averted, while the Washington Post at the same time was printing a story about the humanitarian crisis that was happening in Libya. The U.S. is saying Gaddafi's air force has been destroyed, but his ground troops are still moving forward against the rebels. Our leaders all seem to be operating individually, with no coordinated, coherent message. As for the overall UN/NATO effort, Der Spiegel is calling it a "coalition of the unwilling", with everyone disagreeing on the objectives of the mission and how to carry them out.

Getting back to the new United Nations standard of going to war to prevent a humanitarian crisis – guess what's happening in Syria, and might be happening soon in several other Middle Eastern countries ? You guessed it, a budding humanitarian crisis:

DAMASCUS, Syria – Residents of the southern city of Daraa held a sit-in Thursday to protest the killing of 15 people in clashes between security forces and anti-government protesters, an activist said.

The activist, who is in contact with residents of Daraa, said the situation there was still tense, with a heavy armed presence in the streets. He said dozens of people were demonstrating in the al-Mahata neighborhood near the city center.

Inspired by the wave of pro-democracy protests around the region, the uprising in Daraa and at least four nearby villages has become the biggest domestic challenge since the 1970s to the Syrian government, one of the most repressive in the Middle East. Security forces have responded with water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition.

Syrian police launched a relentless assault Wednesday on a neighborhood sheltering anti-government protesters, fatally shooting at least 15 in an operation that lasted nearly 24 hours, witnesses said. The total death toll now stands at 22.

An official at the Daraa National Hospital told The Associated Press by telephone that the hospital received a large number of casualties Wednesday and was "overwhelmed" with wounded people. He declined to say how many people were dead or hurt, saying he was not authorized to give out numbers or talk to the press.

Is the UN (led by America) going to step in to stop the killing now any time there's a humanitarian need ? That's what they said with the Libyan resolution. I fear that resolve will be tested very soon.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) has discovered a way to fix the unemployment problem. It involves changing the Constitution and creating a bunch more rights for people. Listen up, y'all, and let Jesse drop some knowledge on ya:

They say the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. Seems so, but….

J.J. Jr's idea is so super-groovy !!! I only wonder why nobody thought of this sooner !!!! We can fix unemployment by creating Constitutional rights to things like houses, health care, education, ipods, and laptops !!! You see, if these things were Constitutional rights, people would HAVE to build these things and supply them to everyone, whether they wanted to or not !!! And if you can't afford to buy these things, then the government would step in and FORCE somebody else to buy them for you, because, hey, these things are Constitutional rights now !!! It would be the government's job to guarantee them !!! It's Fan-tastic !!!

And why stop there ??? Let's keep the gravy, er, I mean, the groovy train going !!! We can also create Constitutional rights to things like automobiles, central air conditioning, jet skis, food processors, fitness center memberships, broccoli, European vacations, NFL tickets, Playstation 3's, and so on and so forth. The list of new Constitutional rights would be virtually endless. I imagine we could keep people pretty darned busy if we MANDATED them by law to produce and pay for a whole bunch of products/rights for other people. Yes indeedy. We'd need a whole lot more government bureaucracy, regulations, and intervention to FORCE people to comply with all these new rights, of course, but that's alright, isn't it ? I mean, there wouldn't be any problems associated with this groovy new Rights-a-Palooza envisioned by Jesse Jr., would there ?

Nope. I can't think of anything.

Rep. Jr. continued his magnificent mental machinations by tying all jobs to the First Amendment. This is the foundational (ill)logic for all those new handouts rights he wants to create. Here's Junior again, courtesy of Ace Of Spades:

I asked the Congressional Research Service the other day how many jobs are tied to the First Amendment, that amendment added to the Constitution in 1791 by the founders of our Republic. You know what they told me? Congressman, it is impossible to calculate how many jobs are tied to the First Amendment.

I said: Impossible to calculate? I said: Why?

He said because to be an American is tied to the First Amendment. He said: Congressman, you must understand–which I did–that all corporate activity in America is First Amendment activity.

Look at the jobs that come from the First Amendment: Washington Post, Washington Times; New York Post, New York Times; Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times; AM/FM, and all of the radio stations, First Amendment.

ABC, NBC, CBS, C-SPAN, all of the jobs, First Amendment.

Magazines, First Amendment.

iPods, iPhones, applications, First Amendment.

Time Square, First Amendment activity. Advertising, the Super Bowl, First Amendment activity.

All of these jobs–the original capitalists who came to the conclusion that this was worth protecting in our Constitution–established in the freedom system, the greatest jobs program in our Nation's history. They called it freedom of speech. And in that same amendment, they included freedom of religion.

Think about the jobs tied to 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(4)s, 501(c)(5)s, all of that First Amendment activity. All charitable giving, all foundation activity, all tied to First Amendment activity.

As Ace said at the previous link, this is profoundly silly. It is also profoundly wrongheaded thinking by Rep. Jackson. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and other rights, but it does so with a proscription against the government ("Congress shall make no law…"). Jackson's new "rights" would do just the opposite. They would empower the government to trample all over the rest of the Bill Of Rights and constitutional government restraints in order to provide people with the goodies the government deems appropriate. What Rep. Jackson is proposing is a natural outgrowth of the unconstitutional ObamaCare mandate, where the government decides what you need and then goes about mandating that you have it by whatever means necessary. It is the culmination of nanny state thinking, and it would render the free market nearly unrecognizable. Imagine the lobbying and corruption associated with a government that was deciding which company would get the contract for 50 million laptops or 100 million cell phones, and then imagine what would happen to the companies that didn't get those contracts. We'd be living in a totalitarian state in no time. The government would dominate industry as the entire economy became command-and-control from the top down.

And who would pay for all these new "rights", all this new free stuff ? Why you would, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, same as always…not that people like Jesse Jr. even bother to think about how to pay for things. That's not exciting. It's giving people all that free stuff that's exciting. That's how congressmen get votes ! We'll let some other generation worry about paying for stuff, as usual. Because we're the gravy groovy train generation. We want the free stuff, and we want it now. And we call ourselves compassionate and generous as we bankrupt the future with our mindless, massive irresponsibility. It's all so gravy groovy.

The only mandate I'd be interested in regarding Rep. Jackson Jr. is a mandate that requires potential congressmen to pass IQ and Civics tests before they run for office. I'd like to mandate that Jesse Jackson Jr. acquire a few brain cells before he opens his yap.

I'll leave you with Ace's closing line at the previous link:

It's fun to mock an idiot like Jackson, Jr. but let's be honest, his "understanding" of what rights are and how the economy works is shared by a lot of people.

That's for sure. I call those people "liberals" for lack of a better word, and they scare the bejesus out of me.

Twenty six states are challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

The House Of Representatives voted to repeal ObamaCare.

A majority of Americans are against the ObamaCare mandate (60% in the latest CNN poll).

Two federal judges have declared ObamaCare to be unconstitutional (two other judges, appointed by Democrats, have declared it to be constitutional. I don't know what Constitution they were reading, but it couldn't have been ours).

A reading of the U.S. Constitution immediately reveals the unconstitutionality of the ObamaCare mandate. The Commerce Clause states that Congress shall have the power to "To regulate Commerce…among the several States". The ObamaCare mandate doesn't regulate Commerce, it forces people to engage in commerce or be fined. Forcing people to purchase a product from a private company is an egregious perversion of the Commerce Clause, and is therefore unconstitutional. The ObamaCare mandate forces people to engage in commerce where there was none before. If the ObamaCare mandate stands, the government could force the people to do anything it wished. It could force us all to eat broccoli, buy guns, buy houses, drink milk, go to church, take vitamins, etc, etc. If the ObamaCare mandates stands, the power of the government would be unlimited, exactly the opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended. I think even Democrats know this is unconstitutional, but they don't care. They believe the end justifies the means, a principle attributed to Macchievelli. I cannot dispute that the Dems are Macchiavellian, so I'll leave them to defend that.

Yesterday, the Senate held a vote to repeal ObamaCare. It was defeated by a vote of 47-51. All 47 Republicans voted to repeal the unconstitutional bill. 51 Democrats voted for unconstitutionality. No Democrat voted in accordance with the U.S. Constitution. None. Zero. Lieberman and Warner didn't vote.

The lone bright spot on the Democratic road to unconstitutional tyranny is that one aspect of ObamaCare was repealed:

Another amendment to the health care repeal law did see passage, however – an amendment to repeal a provision that requires businesses to file a 1099 form with the IRS for every vendor with which they've done $600 worth of business or more. Both parties were sympathetic to complaints from the business community that the provision would create onerous paperwork requirements, and the amendment passed easily and with bipartisan support, 81-17.

Thank goodness for small favors.

Senators vow to uphold the U. S. Constitution when they are sworn into office. Fifty one Democrats just violated that oath…so, why can't we remove them from office ? I'm not talking impeachment, because that wouldn't work. Congress has impeachment power over itself, and the Democrats would certainly vote against impeaching themselves. Forget impeachment. I'm talking about holding recall elections. The people can do that themselves by getting enough signatures on a petition. Our government has overstepped it's bounds time and time again, and the Constitution is becoming increasingly irrelevant because of it. It's about time we stand up and stop it. The power really does belong to the people, for now at least, but we need to be awake to exercise it.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. – Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution

This is the infamous passage in the original Constitution that counts slaves as three-fifths of a person. Because yesterday was Martin Luther King day, it seems like a good time to bring this topic up. Almost every time I hear a reference made to this part of the original Constitution, it is offered up as proof that the Founding Fathers were racists. It is offered up as proof that they considered blacks to be subhuman. A caller to the Glen Beck radio program made this typical assertion:

"I noticed you reference the founding fathers a lot," said the caller. "And to me it's kind of offensive because most of those guys were slave-owners. The Constitution that they wrote up — they didn't even recognize my people as even human."

"Where'd you learn that, Josh?" Beck soon responded, after asking him to explain his question. The caller said he "learned that in school."

I don't know what they are teaching in school these days, and it's true some of the Founders were slaveowners, but the three-fifths clause in the Constitution did not mean blacks were subhuman. It was actually designed to reduce the power of the slave-owning states in the U.S. Congress. Counting slaves as three-fifths of a person in the Census was actually a compromise position reached between northern and southern states at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. Delegates opposed to slavery didn't want to count slaves in the Census at all, because it would inflate the representation of the slave owning states in Congress. The number of representatives in Congress was determined by the number of people being represented. Counting slaves a full persons, as the slave owning states wished to do, would only increase the political power of the slave owners. Thus, the three-fifths compromise was reached. It would have been better if the wishes of the anti-slavery people had won out, and slaves were not counted at all, and only free persons were counted. (note – free black people were counted as full persons). After all, it's not like the interests of the slaves were being represented in Congress by the slave owners. Only the slave owners interests were being represented. Counting black slaves as full persons at that time would have only increased the power of their masters. Not a desirable outcome.

Even counting slaves as three-fifths of a person instead of non-persons, as odd as it sounds, had profound political repercussions. It increased the power of the slave states. From Wikipedia:

The three-fifths ratio, or "Federal ratio" had a major effect on pre-Civil War political affairs due to the disproportionate representation of slaveholding states relative to voters. For example, in 1793 slave states would have been apportioned 33 seats in the House of Representatives had the seats been assigned based on the free population; instead they were apportioned 47. In 1812, slaveholding states had 76 instead of the 59 they would have had; in 1833, 98 instead of 73. As a result, southerners dominated the Presidency, the Speakership of the House, and the Supreme Court in the period prior to the Civil War.

After the Civil War and abolition, the three-fifths compromise was superseded by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which reads, ""Representatives shall be apportioned …counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed..." There was no longer a need to reduce the power of slave owning states after slavery was thankfully ended. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, gave black men the right to vote. That left women as societal outcasts. Women didn't get the right to vote for another fifty years, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.

In summary, the next time you hear someone say the "three fifths of a person" clause means the Founders thought blacks were subhuman, know they are ignorant of history. The ones who thought blacks were subhuman were the SLAVE OWNERS, who wanted black slaves to be counted as full persons to serve their own nefarious ends.

Government tyranny has been staved off for a bit longer, as Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled the ObamaCare mandate is unconstitutional. The mandate would have forced all Americans to purchase private health insurance or pay a fine, a clear perversion of the Commerce Clause, which states Congress shall have the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

Getting right to the heart of the matter:

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson wrote that no court had expanded the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to allow the government to regulate a person's decision not to buy a product.

"At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance — or crafting a scheme of universal health insurance coverage — it's about an individual's right to choose to participate," Hudson wrote.

From the Judge's actual case opinion:

Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. In doing so, enactment of the [ObamaCare mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I.

In another crucial part of the ruling, the Judge explains why the ObamaCare mandate was so dangerous:

Of course, the same reasoning [to require Americans to purchase health insurance] could apply to transportation, housing or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation.

In other words, if the ObamaCare mandate is allowed to stand, the government could force us to do almost anything it wished. There would be virtually no limitations on government power, rendering the Constitution a worthless piece of paper, and subjugating individual liberty to the whims of our government overlords….which pretty much explains why progressives LIKE the ObamaCare mandate. They're a bunch of control freaks. They WANT to subjugate individual liberty to their idea of the collective good. They want to tell the rest of us what to eat, what to drive, what to wear, what to think, what to see on television or hear on the radio, how much money we should make, how much of our own money the government should let us keep, how we should spend the money we do have, etc, etc, etc. Individual liberty is the arch enemy of the leftists.

So naturally, the White House is "disappointed" that a Federal Court has ruled Congress "exceeded it's authority" with the ObamaCare mandate (actually, only congressional Democrats exceeded their authority. Republicans correctly voted against ObamaCare). Tyrants don't like limits on their authority. Here's Obama defending his unconstitutionality in an interview with ABC last month:

"What I think is appropriate is that in the same way that everybody has to get auto insurance and if you don't, you're subject to some penalty, that in this situation, if you have the ability to buy insurance, it's affordable and you choose not to do so, forcing you and me and everybody else to subsidize you, you know, there's a thousand dollar hidden tax that families all across America are — are burdened by because of the fact that people don't have health insurance, you know, there's nothing wrong with a penalty," [Obama] said.

What a pantload. Where should I start ?

No, Obama, nobody HAS to buy car insurance. Nobody even HAS to buy a car. Nobody has to drive. Those are individual choices. What Obama is doing with his health insurance mandate would be equivalent to FORCING people to buy a car, a clear violation of liberty. It doesn't matter whether the ObamaCare mandate is convenient to Obama's agenda or not. He shouldn't have the power to force such a thing upon the people. That's why we have a Constitution limiting the government's power in the first place. Plus, Mr. President, it's the STATES that require insurance if one chooses to drive a car, not the federal government. Read the 10th Amendment if you haven't yet, Mr. Constitutional Law Professor.

Obama's reasoning that others have to pick up an uninsured person's healthcare tab is even more specious, especially when you consider that Obama is a known wealth redistributor, as are all liberals. Obama has NO problem with other people subsidizing the housing, food, and healthcare of others. Are you kidding me ? What do you think welfare, section 8, food stamps, and Medicaid are all about, not to mention liberal views on tax policy ? Obama is for subsidization EVERY time. That's how his party gets elected to office, by offering to subsidize one group at the expense of another group. Now, all of a sudden, Obama reverses course and is worried about someone else subsidizing healthcare ? Bull-Spit. What a laughable lie. He could care less about that, as all his other beliefs prove. ObamaCare itself subsidizes healthcare for others. What Obama is really interested in is power. When the Constitution gets in the way of that power, it's damn the Constitution. He's not the first politican to act this way, of course, just the latest example.

Judge Hudson also shot down the White House's revisionist argument that the ObamaCare mandate is a tax and therefore constitutional. You may remember, Obama insisted over and over that the ObamaCare mandate penalty was not a tax, until the case went to court, at which time the Obamaniacs realized arguing that it WAS a tax was better for their case. Judge Hudson writes:

Having concluded that [the ObamaCare mandate] is, in form and substance, a penalty as opposed to a tax, it must be linked to an enumerated power other than the General Welfare Clause…in order for the noncompliance penalty to survive constitutional challenge, it must serve to effectuate a valid exercise of an enumerated power – here the Commerce Clause.

And in a footnote:

If allowed to stand as a tax, [the ObamaCare mandate] would be the only tax in U.S. history to be levied directly on individuals for their failure to affirmatively engage in activity mandated by the government not speciically delineated in the Constitution.

How I love it when the Court gets it right. The Court really is the last bastion of freedom against a tyrannical government. No wonder FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court with those friendly to his unconstitutional wishes. As I said before, tyrants don't like limitations.

We can't pop the champagne corks just yet. This case is not over. The Obamaniacs will no doubt appeal this ruling all the way to the Supreme Court.

But this is a hell of a good start. Score – Freedom 1, Tyrants 0.

It shouldn't be too much to ask of our political leaders, prospective leaders, and media pundits that they have some knowledge of the founding documents and history of this country, such as the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration Of Independence.

But apparently, it is too much to ask.

First up, I give you a debate between Chris Coons (D) and Christine O'Donnell (R), who are running for the Senate in Delaware. O'Donnell displayed her ignorance of the First Amendment, as follows:

On the issue of whether creationism should be taught in public schools, a highly skeptical O'Donnell questioned Coon's assertion that the First Amendment calls for the separation of church and state.

"The First Amendment does?" O'Donnell asked during the Tuesday morning debate. "Let me just clarify: You're telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?"

Coons responded by quoting the relevant text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

"That's in the First Amendment?" a still skeptical O'Donnell replied smiling, as laughter could be heard from the crowd.

Yes, Christine. Mr. Coons quoted the First Amendment accurately. That's in the First Amendment, and why the hell are you running for the Senate if you don't know the First Amendment ? Now go away, you simpleton. You'd think someone like O'Donnell, who wants to stake out goofy claims against the separation of church and state, would at the very least have SOME idea of what she was talking about. Then again, perhaps her ignorance of the matter is the entire point.

Later in the same debate, candidate Coons couldn't remember the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment:

O’Donnell was later able to score some points of her own off the remark, revisiting the issue to ask Coons if he could identify the “five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment.”

Coons named the separation of church and state, but could not identify the others — the freedoms of speech, press, to assemble and petition — and asked that O’Donnell allow the moderators ask the questions.

“I guess he can’t,” O’Donnell said.

Coons only got one out of five. O'Donnell also couldn't remember what the 14th and 17th Amendments were. I might be able to excuse her for those, but having two candidates who don't know the First Amendment is inexcusable. Every 5th grader knows the First Amendment. Oy vey. I weep for Delaware. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Gaffemaster VP Joe Biden was a Senator there. Somebody should check Delaware's water supply. Something is amiss.
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Next up, we have left-wing dullards, including Gwen Ifill of PBS and Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, displaying their historical ignorance surrounding a remark Sarah Palin made at a Tea Party rally. Palin warned the Tea Partiers not to get overly excited until the election results are in, and she said only then could they "party like it's 1773." Left-wing illiterates immediately started tweeting the meme that Palin was soooo stupid, she couldn't even keep her historical years straight. I assume the clueless lefties thought Palin should have used 1776 as the correct year, however, Palin was in fact correctly referencing the Boston Tea Party, which TOOK PLACE IN 1773. Duh, lefties !
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Next, we have Barack Obama misquoting the Declaration Of Independence AGAIN. I already mentioned this the first time he did it, but it has now become a pattern. Here's Obama:

"As wonderful as this land is here in the United States, as much as we have been blessed by the bounty of this magnificent continent that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, what makes this place special is not something physical. It has to do with this idea that was started by 13 colonies that decided to throw off the yoke of an empire and said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” Obama said in Monday's speech.

For the second time, our alleged Christian President has left "by their creator" out of his Declaration Of Independence quote. The actual quote is:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Maybe our politically correct President doesn't want to offend atheists, who believe they created themselves. I don't know, but I do know he is doing this intentionally now.
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Maybe we should have some kind of test for our aspiring political candidates, to make sure they have some basic knowledge of the Constitution and American History. Most other professions require some kind of certification, yet the people who are vying to run our country and control our lives aren't held to any standard whatsoever. All they have to do is fool enough people into voting for them. They don't even have to pass a drug test, let alone have knowledge of the Constitution. Let's say Christine O'Donnell won the election and became a Senator, heaven forbid. How could she swear to uphold the Constitution, when she doesn't even know what's in it ??? Ditto for Coons. It's embarassing. Too bad Delaware can't choose 'None Of The Above' and start over.

Here is Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) informing a crowd that the federal government can do almost anything it wants, the U.S. Constitution be damned.

The crowd was none too happy to hear that American citizens are not free to engage in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as they see fit. No, instead of such trivialities, Rep. Stark says we are little more than pawns on a government-run chessboard who must obey any and all requirements placed upon us by our kings and queens. I rather thought we fought a Revolutionary War against ideas like Rep. Stark's, but I guess I could be mistaken. Maybe we are rewriting history about our founding in the same way that Rep. Stark would like to rewrite the Constitution. Maybe the Revolutionary War was about nothing more than a boatload of British tea, but I gather it was about much larger issues, such as liberty and self-determination.

I would write Rep. Stark off as a clueless nutball who could be ignored and laughed at, but he most certainly is not alone in his radical beliefs. The Democratic party is trumpeting the new "right" known as ObamaCare, and has no problem with the mandate requiring all American citizens to participate in this "right" or be fined/jailed. Apparently, most Democrats don't see the contradiction inherent in referring to something forced on the people by the government as a "right." The capacity to understand irony must be beyond them.

Leading the Democrats extremist charge of the "right" brigade to nullify the Constitution is none other than the Obama administration, which has taken to the court system to fight off challenges to it's regal omnipotence. Virginia, an upstart colony formerly known as a state, has claimed the ObamaCare mandate is unconstitutional. Lord Obama and his Superfriends sought to summarily dismiss the legal challenge of it's Virginia fiefdom, but a funny thing happened on the way to the quorum…a federal judge actually consulted the Constitution Of The United States, that musty old document these post-modern hipster Dems have no time for (I apologize for putting old Pete Stark anywhere near the phrase "post-modern hipster"). Go figure. A judge reading the Constitution. Maybe this could be the beginning of a trend. Here's what the judge said in his ruling:

In the opening salvo of the legal fight, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson refused to dismiss the state's lawsuit, which argued the requirement that its residents must have health insurance is unconstitutional and conflicts with state law.

Hudson, who noted that his ruling was only an initial step, decided the issue the state raised — whether forcing residents to buy something, namely healthcare, is constitutional — had not been fully tested in court and was ripe for review.

"The congressional enactment under review — the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision — literally forges new ground and extends (the U.S. Constitution's) Commerce Clause powers beyond its current high watermark," Hudson said in a 32-page ruling.

By "forges new ground" and "extends the Commeric Clause powers," Judge Hudson is telling us that the Commerce Clause was never intended to be used for such a purpose as requring American citizens to purchase health insurance from a private company. There are no constitutional grounds to mandate Americans to purchase health private health insurance. Here's what the Commerce Clause actually says about the powers of the federal government:

"To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".

Regulating commerce means the government has powers to ensure commerice is equitable. The word "regulate" would have to be changed to "mandate" in the Commerce Clause in order to support ObamaCare. The Commerce Clause clearly doesn't say that.

It's so obvious that ObamaCare isn't supported by the Commerce Clause that left-wingers (and some right-wingers too), in order to justify their ongoing destruction of the Constitution, have taken to creating a second parallel Constitution out of whole cloth to replace the original one. In this parallel Constitution, the words of the Constitution mean something other than what they actually say. In the parallel Constitution, the words mean whatever the left-wingers want them to mean (and thus have no meaning at all). You'll know you're hearing about the actual Constitution when words like "originalist" are attached to it. You'll know you're hearing about the parallel Constitution that doesn't really exist when words like "living" and "evolving" are attached to it.

We could ignore and laugh at the advocates of the parallel Constitution just like we could laugh at the pathetic Rep. Stark, but we'd be making a grave mistake. Don't forget, the progressives and others have been progressively eating away at the original version of the Constitution for well over a century now, and they've achieved a great measure of success. Much of their unconstitutionality has legal precedent now, because judges have political ideologies too. We are getting dangerously close to Rep. Stark being correct, that the federal government can do whatever it wants to do, the Constitution be damned.

And anybody who isn't concerned about that is a fool of the first order.

Or a communist.

As the lady who questioned Pete Stark asked, if the government can get away with this, what can't they get away with ?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. – The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The First Amendment couldn't be more straightforward. Congress shall make NO LAW abridging the freedom of speech. or of the press.

Simple, right ?

Not for liberals it isn't. When the Supreme Court struck down a clearly unconstitutional provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law with it's Citizens United v. FEC ruling, liberals went wild. Never mind that the McCain-Feingold law in question criminalized free speech in America. Liberals were fine with that. That's what they WANTED. Anti-freedom Democratic Congressmen like John Kerry and John Conyers even considered a constitutional amendment to "fix" the First Amendment, as if free speech is a concept that needs "fixing".

While I'm on the subject of the Citizens United ruling, here's a very interesting opinion on the ruling from Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. I find Kagan's thinking to be so misguided as to call into question her fitness for the bench. Here is the political chameleon Arlen Specter talking about Kagan. From The Hill:

“She was very forthcoming in our discussion,” Specter said. “We talked about the Citizens United case and she said she thought the court was not sufficiently deferential to Congress."

Pardon me ??? The Supreme Court isn't supposed to be deferential to Congress, and I dearly hope it never becomes so. The Supreme Court is supposed to be deferential to the Constitution, period. Congress should also be deferential to the Constitution, but too often is not, as partisan fervor overrules constitutionality. The Supreme Court serves as a check against illegal congressional power grabs. Checks and balances, remember ? The Court doesn't waive the Bill Of Rights out of deference to Congress, or to the Executive branch either. Kagan should have some serious splainin' to do at her upcoming confirmation hearings.

Once the Citizens United ruling was in the books, the outraged Democrats had no choice but to accept the restoration of free speech in America, regardless of how much they dislike the idea. The Kerry-Conyers "fix" to the First Amendment was going nowhere, thankfully.

But still, the Democrats have elections to win come november, and the Dems are afraid corporate campaign ads might not cast the Democratic party in a very favorable light, seeing as how Czar Obama is prepping us for the early stages of the Russian Revolution, Part II..with government takeovers of corporations, the abandonment of due process, huge increases in government power and spending, wage mandates, talk of price controls, etc. Democrats fear America's business sector just might end up helping Republicans win some elections and remove the Dems stranglehold on power. GASP ! Something had to be done, so the Democrats have come up with a devious little plan known as the DISCLOSE Act. The DISCLOSE Act passed the House yesterday, and the White House "strongly" supports it, even though it is as unconstitutional as can be.

Here's why. On it's surface, the DISCLOSE Act appears to be a bill that will increase transparency in campaign spending, which most of us would welcome as a good thing. It requires corporations to disclose the top five donors in their political ads (that's not too bad if applied equally to ALL groups), and it requires the head of the company to appear at the end of the ad (I can't think of a reason for this provision, other than to make it a bit harder to produce a campaign ad).

But that's not why the law is bad. The DISCLOSE Act unconstitutionally exempts some groups from it's requirements and not other groups, which is as clear a violation of the Constitution as you will find. It violates equal protection under the law, and it picks and chooses who may engage in free speech and who may not. It suppresses free speech for some and not for others. As CBS reports:

…the bill exempts the NRA, AARP and the Humane Society from the requirements. It exempts 401C4 organizations with over 500,000 members.

U-N-C-O-N-S-T-I-T-U-T-I-O-N-A-L, and discriminatory. Here's more:

"The Democratic majority in the House jammed through a piece of legislation that clearly violates the Constitution, as well as basic principles of fairness and equity," U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue said in a statement. Donohue's powerful business lobby would be subject to the disclosure rules under the legislation.

Said Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence: "This bill exempting the NRA, and only a handful of other wealthy groups, from having to follow the same rules as other advocacy groups involved in political campaigns is fundamentally flawed, likely can't survive judicial scrutiny, and should be rejected by the United States Senate as currently written."

In case you're wondering why the NRA was exempted, the Constitutionally-challenged Democrats in the House needed the votes of some conservative Democrats who have actually read the Second Amendment in order to pass this farce of a bill.

Naturally, President Barack "Che" Obama supports the blatant violation of the Constitution of the United States of America. Here's Che's take on the legislation:

"The DISCLOSE Act would establish the strongest-ever disclosure requirements for election-related spending by special interests, including Wall Street and big oil companies, and it would restrict spending by foreign-controlled corporations. It would give the American public the right to see exactly who is spending money in an attempt to influence campaigns for public office. The House bill is not perfect – I would have preferred that it include no exemptions."

Ah yes, we see. Che Obama would have "preferred" that the legislation not be a blatant violation of several portions of the Bill Of Rights, but the Constitutional Law Professor supports it regardless. I wonder which class at Harvard Law taught him that constitutional principles only apply SOMETIMES. Until this question is answered, I propose a moratorium on all Harvard grads being elected to Congress (note to liberals – that was satire).

The bottom line here is this – The Democrats know the DISCLOSE Act is unconstitutional, but they don't care. If they pass the legislation into law in July, they calculate it will not be overturned by the courts in time for the november elections, and that's their endgame here. The Democrats are knowingly putting forth an unconstitutional law because they think it will help them in this one election cycle.

Thus, in addition to willfully violating the U.S. Constitution, they are committing election fraud…with the full support of the President Of The United States Of America.

Left-wing political mythology holds that President Bush referred to the U.S. Constitution as nothing but "a goddamned piece of paper" in 2005. Bush allegedly said this in frustration over constitutional issues with the Patriot Act. Though it is very unlikely Bush ever spoke those words, many left-wingers still believe he did say them, even though the unreliable anti-Bush website that originally made the allegations, Capitol Hill Blue, has removed the story from their database.

While it's not the least bit surprising that lefty sources would invent an anti-Bush story, it occurs to me that Congress and the Executive branch almost always treat the Constitution as nothing but a g-d piece of paper. They treat it as a nuisance, or they ignore it altogether. This is a pretty shabby way to treat the supreme law of the land, the law both Congress and the President are sworn to uphold. Rather than uphold the Constitution, our federal government invents specious justifications to get around it.

On the ObamaCare health insurance mandate, which forces all Americans to buy health insurance from a private company, our scoundrels in Congress ludicrously cite the General Welfare clause (see here what the Founders actually meant) or the Commerce clause (whichs has NEVER been used before to force a person to purchase a product from a private company). They completely distort the meaning and intentions of those portions of the Constitution. To add insult to injury, when 16 states (so far) announced their intentions to sue the federal government over the unprecedented insurance mandate, the White House responded by calling it a political stunt. Now, I don't know what the outcome of those lawsuits will be, but referring to constitutional issues as a "stunt" is greatly troubling, especially from a President who is a former Constitutional law professor. I can't help but wonder what he was teaching his students.

Republicans don't get off the hook here by any means. They may be concerned about the Constitution now, finally, but they haven't been so very concerned with it in the past either. Conservative columnist Walter Williams wrote an article called Ruled By Scoundrels, which points out that many of the most outrageous, constitutionally-questionable intrusions of the federal government DIDN'T come from the Democrats:

The March 10 issue of Human Events carried a special report on the 10 most outrageous government programs. Their 18 judges included conservative/libertarians such as former Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, former Delaware Gov. Pete Dupont, Mark Levin, president of the Landmark Legal Foundation, and David Boaz, Cato Institute's vice president.

The Legal Services Corp. headed the list, followed closely by the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act and the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931. Rounding out the list were: Americorps, Endangered Species Act, No Child Left Behind Act, Amtrak, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards, Title X Family Planning Act, and the provision of welfare payments to non-citizens and illegal aliens.

Human Events, a conservative, Republican-leaning publication, unlike Democrats who protect scoundrels in their party, wasn't reluctant to list the presidents who sponsored or supported these outrageous government programs. Most of the programs were born during Republican administrations. Herbert Hoover was in office when the Davis-Bacon Act was written in 1931. Richard Nixon presided over the births of the Legal Services Corp. (1974), the Endangered Species Act (1973), Amtrak (1971) and the Title X Family Planning Act (1970). Gerald Ford sponsored CAFE standards (1975), and George W. Bush signed off on the No Child Left Behind Act (2002).

If we have two political parties ignoring the Constitution, why do we even have a Constitution ? What good is it ? If it can be ignored at will, it IS nothing but a goddamned piece of paper.

Walter Williams included the following in his article:

Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., has introduced the Enumerated Powers Act several times. It would require each act of Congress to contain a concise and definite statement of the specific constitutional authority relied upon for the enactment of each portion of that act or else the bill could not go forward. Shadegg's Enumerated Powers Act (HR 175) went down to three crushing defeats.

Can we ask for more compelling evidence of Congress's contempt for our Constitution, or do you think our congressmen are simply reflecting the constitutional contempt of the people?

Why do you suppose Congress would repeatedly vote against a bill that required constitutional authority for it's actions ???????

It wouldn't be because Congress doesn't want ANYTHING to limit it's power, would it ? And if Congress can do anything it wants, we really don't have a Constitution at all, do we ? It IS just a goddamned piece of paper. Sure, maybe the Supreme Court will strike down a law here or there once in a while, but we also have Presidents and Congresses trying to install activist judges who will rule THEIR way, who will change the meaning of the Constitution according to political ideologically rather than proper application of constitutional principles. The left-wingers are professionals at that game.

A final word of warning….

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." – Thomas Jefferson

If you want to incite right-wing extremist groups to violence, here is how you do it – you have elected officials say they don't care about the Constitution Of The United States. We've seen an awful lot of Congressers saying things to that effect over the past year, and now I give you Democratic Congressman Phil Hare from Illinois. You won't believe this numbskull:

Hare-brain not only said he "doesn't worry about the Constitution" when it comes to health care, he also was very irritated that someone would ask him about it. He cited the words "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as a Constitutional justification for health care reform, even though those words come from the Declaration Of Independence, not the Constitution. After being confronted with his own ignorance, Hare-brain admitted he didn't know what gave the government the Constitutional authority to mandate health insurance. This is clearly a man who doesn't give a whit about the supreme law of the land, the law he swore to uphold as a Congressman. He also didn't seem to know that ObamaCare will not cover every person in the USA, even though he claimed to have read the health care bill three times. Hare-brain later claimed (as he read from prepared notes) that he was, drumroll please, "taken out of context," ha ha ha, insulting our intelligence yet again.

I'm thinking one should have to pass a basic Constitutional literacy test before one is allowed to run for Congress. I'd make it an essay test, with the answers becoming part of the public record.

Then we might not have guys like Phil Hare in office.

1. How can President Obama hold a jobs summit and not invite the Chamber Of Commerce ? That's like holding a football game and forgetting to invite the offense.

2. How can the unemployment rate drop from 10.2% to 10% when 11,000 more jobs were lost in november 2009 ?

3. From 1776 to 1913, the value of the dollar increased by 13%. In 1913, the Federal Reserve was implemented. Since 1913, the value of the dollar has dropped by 92%. Why do we have a Federal Reserve ?

4. Why would the President announce a withdrawal date of july 2011 from a war that is not yet won ?

5. Why would President Obama call the november 2009 jobs report "the best jobs report since december 2007" and talk about White House administration officials hugging each other in joy over the good news, when the november unemployment rate is 10% and the december 2007 unemployment rate was 4.9% ? FYI – the january 2008 unemployment rate was also 4.9%.

6. Why are the extramarital affairs of golfer Tiger Woods a big news story ?

7. If the Federal Reserve prints money out of thin air, backed by nothing, in order to, say, lend $85 billion to AIG, and then AIG pays back that money from profits, isn't the net effect nothing but a devaluation of the dollar ?

8. Isn't a devaluation of the dollar nothing but a hidden tax on the assets of all Americans ?

9. If a citizen continually spends more money than he/she makes, he/she will go bankrupt. How is it any different when the government does the same thing, except that the government will take all the citizens down along with it ?

10. Why would we hand health care over to government control when the part of health care the government does control (Medicare/Medicaid) is already so far in the red ?

11. How can the Obama stimulus possibly be working when it is based upon money borrowed or printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, and is therefore entirely artificial ? (See questions #3, #7, and #8).

12. If question #11 is too confusing, perhaps this will help simplify the matter. Does a man up to his neck in credit card debt improve his financial situation by getting more credit cards ?

13. What is wrong with asking the President of the United States to produce his original birth certificate ?

14. Is there any major Obama policy that is supported by the American people ?

15. Why don't we just put Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in front of a firing squad and save everyone a lot of time and money ?

16. How do tax increases ever help the private sector economy ?

17. Shouldn't there have to be at least one act of Tea Party-related violence (from the Tea Party side) before the media denounces the crazy, violent, extremist Tea Partiers ?

18. On the same subject, why is it considered crazy and extreme to be in favor of fiscal responsibility, liberty, and the U.S. Constitution, as the Tea Partiers are ? What does that say about the state of our country ?

19. On the jobs front, which Obama policies are pro-business ?

20. Why are Democrats now in favor of cutting Medicare, when they've been against Medicare cuts for four decades ?

One of the most disturbing things about Barack Obama is not Obama himself, but rather some of the people around him, including several people he has put into positions of authority. I've already detailed the radical nature of a couple Obama administration personnel, Science Czar John Holdren and FCC Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd. Holdren has a number of crazy beliefs, among them being the idea that the U.S. Constitution doesn't entitle people to have children. Holdren declared “neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce" in his 1977 book, Ecoscience. Evidently, Holdren missed the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence – "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In Holdren's defense, he only attended MIT and Stanford. Maybe they don't teach the basics at those elite schools. I don't know. I could only afford to go to Podunk University in Backwater, USA (so I am oppressed and demand reparations ! Just kidding. My inner whiny liberal took over for a second there). Yet, somehow I know the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution better than Holdren does. I must have read about it on a bathroom wall somewhere, or maybe at a gun show.

Mark Lloyd is another elite. He was a professor at Georgetown and a visiting lecturer at MIT prior to becoming a Hugo Chavez-loving Nazi hell-bent on destroying free speech on America's airwaves. Here's a quote from the well-educated Professor Lloyd:

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. . . . This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. . . . At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”

Yes, Mr. Lloyd, it certainly IS clear that your focus is not free speech. That's why you should take the Che poster down from the wall of your office, clean out your desk, and go peddle your commie crap someplace like Cuba or Venezuela, but not here. Not in this country. We still call this the land of the free, not the land of government diktat.

Another Communist in the Obama administration is the eminent Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar. Mr. Jones went to Yale, so he's a real smart fellow, just like the other radical nutjobs I've mentioned. Jones claims to have been radicalized by the Rodney King verdict. By his own words, that drove him to embrace Marxism. I can't say I follow Mr. Jones' logic there, but like I said, I'm not one of the elite. To me, embracing communism because of a perceived American civil rights injustice is like jumping out of an airplane in flight because you don't like your seat. It's a hysterical and moronic overreaction. Maybe Jones doesn't realize that, under Communism, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY CIVIL RIGHTS to begin with. What a boob, er, I mean, deep thinker. Liberal groups have been claiming that Jones radical Communist days are behind him, but here's Van Jones in April, 2009:

"This [green] movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don't stop there! Don't stop there! We're gonna change the whole system! We're gonna change the whole thing. We're not gonna put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system. We want a new system!…And our Native American sisters and brothers who were pushed and bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn't want, where it was all hot and windy. Well, guess what? Renewable energy? Guess what, solar industry? Guess what wind industry? They now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources. No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth! Give them the dignity. Give them the respect that they deserve. No justice on stolen land. We owe them a debt…What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about people who come here from all around the world who we're willing to have out in the field, with poison being sprayed on them, poison being sprayed on them because we have the wrong agricultural system. And we're willing to poison them and poison the earth to put food on our table, but we don't want to give them rights and we don't want to give them dignity and we don't want to give them respect?…We're really entering a third wave of environmentalism in the United States. The white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people of color communities."

Sounds to me like Jones is still a radical, and a race-baiter to boot. Whitey is poisoning people of color ????? We need to change the whole system ? Into what, Mr. Marxist ? Glenn Beck has been on a tirade against Van Jones for awhile now, and a group Van Jones founded, Color Of Change, has been trying to get Beck kicked off the air (which kinda proves Jones is a Communist. That's what Communists do, silence the opposition. They aren't about the free and open exchange of ideas, in case anyone hasn't figured that out yet).

The next commie-loving race-baiter on the radical hit parade isn't a member of Obama's administration, but her stupidity merits recognition. Her name is Diane Watson, Democratic Congresswoman from California. This woman LOVES her some Fidel Castro, and is so lost in identity politics that she can't even think straight. Dig it:

"You might have heard their philosophical leader. I think his name is Rush Limbaugh. And he said early on, “I hope that he fails.”…And remember: They are spreading fear and they are trying to see that the first president that looks likes me fails [Watson is black]…. just want you to know: People look at the United States as a country that has changed its way and has elected someone from Kenya and Kansas, I’ll put it like that. And they’re saying, “We thought you would never do that.” So we don’t want to have this young man, and he just turned 48 — we want him to succeed, because when he succeeds, we regain our status. We regain our status….

It was just mentioned to me by our esteemed speaker, “Did anyone say anything about the Cuban health system?”

And lemme tell ya, before you say “Oh, it’s a commu–”, you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met. [APPLAUSE]

And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found…well, just leave it there (laughs), an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro…"

First of all, Ms. Watson, we are allowed to oppose Obama's policies, even though he looks like you. His skin color is completely irrelevant, except to those like yourself who are too blind to see anything else. These race-based comments are really just attempts at thought suppression. There's no other way to view them.

About Cuba, yes, please, let's "go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place." I believe the generally accepted term for it is OPPRESSION, along with a health dose of POVERTY, as happens with all Communist states. Cuba is a police state. Fortunately, the Democratic primary challenger for Watson's congressional seat doesn't share Watson's myopic view of Cuban health care. Let's vote him into office.

The final person on today's list is Cass Sunstein, Obama's Regulatory Czar. This guy is an intellectual heavyweight. He's a former Harvard Law Professor, and an expert in constitutional law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. I'm not certain how radical he is, because he's a complex man, but he has at least some very confused ideas. Here are a few of his elite ramblings:

“Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government intervention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions"

This is quite the straw man argument. I don't know of a single person who doesn't think the government has a legitimate role to play. Government is uniquely qualified for certain roles, and those were laid out in the very beginning by the Constitution. What I distrust is GOVERNMENT INTRUDING INTO EVERY ASPECT OF SOCIETY, as it has been doing by gradual degree for my entire lifetime. And Mr. Sunstein, individualism is not "pernicious." Railing against it is.

"A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government"

This is Sunstein endorsing the Fairness Doctrine in order to control political speech. Looks like we have another nut who doesn't believe in free speech.

I just LOVE this next Sunstein quote. Love it.

“In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?… Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …”

Did we earn our own money ? Um, YES.
Did we earn it by our own efforts ? YES.
Could we have inherited it without probate courts ? YES.
Could we save it without bank regulators ? YES. (We could even save it without banks).
Could we spend it without public officials ? YES.

Sunstein sounds like the typical government drone, who thinks absolutely everything is derived from government. Wrong.

"Without taxes there would be no liberty," says Sunstein. To an extent, this is true, because taxation supports the government, which exists to secure our liberties. As George Washington said, "Freedom is not free." I think everyone agrees with that much. But should we "celebrate tax day" when our resources are stripped from us to pay for everything under the sun that the government can dream up, waaay beyond securing our liberty ? I think not. Should we celebrate pork barrel spending, special interest handouts, bailouts of the big corporations, the ripoff of our own Social Security system, private jets for congresspersons, trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities ? That would be NO. "Celebrate tax day," indeed. I'd almost as soon celebrate the day burglars broke into my home and stole my television, stereo, and my wife's jewelry. I never once thanked those burglars for helping to redistribute my wealth, nor will I thank the government for stealing my paycheck for unconstitutional purposes. Government exists to secure our liberties, not to rip them away.

Barney Frank (D-VT) wants the federal government to decide how much Wall Street executives (and all other executives of private companies) are paid. Barney also wants the government to decide how they are paid. Legislation to ban incentive-based pay for private corporations has been approved by the House Financial Services Committee.

I don't know where in the U.S. Constitution the federal government thinks it obtains the authority to do this, but, hey, we don't use that musty old Constitution thingy anymore anyway. The notion of limiting centralized governmental power (federalism) envisioned by the founding fathers is as outdated as bell bottomed jeans. These days, we seem to be climbing all over ourselves to give the federal government all the power it wants (totalitarianism). The statists are on the march, making all the same false promises the statists always make, the false promises that never quite seem to materialize (FYI – health care reform = forcing all Americans to buy health care insurance and then having the government determine what medical procedures you are allowed to have, in case you haven't figured that out yet).

Here is Barney's rationale for limiting executive pay:

"The problem with executive compensation is essentially, from the systemic standpoint, that it gives perverse incentives," said Frank, a Democrat. Without penalties for bad bets, the system means "heads you win, tails you break even," he said.

Perverse incentives. That means people shouldn't be rewarded for driving their companies into the ground. They should be held accountable instead. I think we can all agree with that, if not with the idea that the federal government should dictate people's salaries. That is so……Soviet.

Let's continue with these ideas of accountability and perverse incentives. As of July 31st, 2009, the federal debt stood at $11,617,400,889,464.57. That's over $11.6 trillion. As soon as I write these words, they are outdated, because the national debt is now higher. The debt has increased by $3.89 billion PER DAY since September 2007. In addition, the federal government is projected to run nearly a $2 trillion deficit in 2009. We paid $451 billion in interest on the federal debt in 2008. This year it will be much higher. The interest on the debt is money flushed down the toilet (or sent to a foreign government, like China) that could easily pay for any imaginable health care reform we could dream up. Instead, our federal government has burdened every American citizen with roughly $38,000 in debt. The federal government is the poster child for incompetence.

This means the federal government, if viewed as a corporation (FedCorp), would be the worst run corporation in the entire history of the world (with the possible exception of those defunct Soviets we're trying to emulate). So, how are we holding FedCorp accountable ? Why, we're about to hand the entire health care system over to them !!! We're going to reward the worst company ever, FedCorp, by handing it control over 16% more of our economy. Talk about perverse incentives. This is equivalent to handing the entire energy sector over to Enron. FedCorp has shown NO ability to be responsible managers of taxpayer dollars, so, naturally, let's keep giving them ever more and more. That's the ticket. And never mind that the part of health care FedCorp already controls, Medicare/Medicaid, has such massive unfunded liabilities that it is threatening to destroy our economy down the road. If not addressed, the unfunded entitlement liabilities will hit our economy with such an economic tidal wave that the current recession will look like a ripple in a pond by comparison.

While we're on the subject of salaries, FedCorp is holding itself accountable for it's putrid mismanagement by…..giving all FedCorp's civilian employees a 2.9% pay raise in 2010. This is after Congress voted itself a 2.8% pay raise in January 2009, with the country in the depths of the recession. Apparently, accountability and perverse incentives don't apply to FedCorp, only to that horribly greedy entity known as the private sector (the sector that produces all our goods and services). FedCorp is spitting directly in your faces, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. YOU tighten your belts. THEY get raises.

There are so many examples of the federal government throwing away taxpayer dollars that I could never list them all. This post would be a thousand pages long if I tried. Go to the website YouDontKnowJack to see some examples of how just one Congressman, Jack Murtha (D-PA), aka, the King Of Pork, throws YOUR money around to his cronies and special interests. It's disgusting.

And it wasn't that much better when the Republicans were in charge. During the Bush years, with Republicans controlling Congress, government spending STILL skyrocketed. Federal spending went from $2 trillion to $3 trillion per year during Bush's tenure (and those guys were supposed to be conservatives ??? I don't think so). The only way the Bushies were conservative is if you compare them to Obama and the Democrats, who are trying to match Bush's 8-year federal spending increase total ($1 trillion) in their FIRST YEAR. If Bush was the frying pan, Obama is the fire. I find myself longing for the return of Bill Clinton and his Republican Congress. At least those guys realized the economy was EVERYTHING. Those guys look like geniuses compared to Bush and Barry, and even Clinton ran net deficits and added $1.5 trillion to the debt. Things have been so bad since then that Clinton and his GOP'ers seem like the good old days.

Our federal government is so far out of control that I barely know where to start. This post is only a drop in the bucket in trying to describe it. FedCorp is like a bunch of crack addicts with our money. They can never get enough. With an addict, there's only one cure. You have to MAKE them stop. WE have to make them stop. WE have to get rid of the whole bunch of them. WE have to vote them all out of office and start over. That's the only way WE can make a difference, the only way WE can make the federal crackheads stop. Barring that, WE are screwed. Barring that, America, the land of the free, will very soon be OVER. There is only so much money that FedCorp can spend. There are only so much taxes that FedCorp can take from us. We're on the express train to poverty as long as this continues. Wake up, America. Your country is disappearing before your very eyes.

The Senate formally apologized for slavery yesterday, one hundred and forty four years too late, one hundred and forty four years after slavery was abolished.

Do we all feel better now ? A bunch of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery have apologized for it. Now we know that America doesn't condone slavery (and here I thought the Civil War settled that issue). Thank goodness. All those American pro-slavery groups can go pound salt. If there are any, that is, which there aren't (I hope).

But even the Senate's unaminous and meaningless kumbayah vote to apologize for slavery isn't without controversy here in grievance-based America, where it seems everyone feels slighted over something. The Senate's slavery apology contained a disclaimer which stated the apology didn't authorize any reparations claim for the descendants of slaves.

Cue the outrage. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus objected to the reparations disclaimer.

Sigh.

To be clear, I believe reparations for slavery were in order, but they were in order 144 YEARS AGO, not now. They were in order for people who actually WERE slaves. There are no reparations in order for people who are six or seven generations removed from slavery, for people who have the same civil rights as everyone else, for people who even have MORE civil rights than everyone else (affirmative action). I agree with President Obama, who said the best reparations are "good schools in the inner city." Obama embodies the lunacy of the reparations argument. Should we pay reparations to Barack Obama, the most powerful man in the world, just because his skin contains the required amount of melanin ? I don't think so.

As I'm writing this, there are some teevee talking heads arguing about whether or not the coverage of Michael Jackson's death is motivated by race. One talking head is saying it is, that the media is talking about all Jackson's drug use because he is black.

Sigh.

That talking head must not remember the teevee coverage of the deaths of Heath Ledger, Kurt Cobain, Anna Nicole Smith, or Elvis Presley. The media wallowed in all the minutiae of each one's drug use, ad nauseum. It's about celebrity, not race.

Speaking of race-based issues, the Supreme Court reversed the appellate court ruling in the Ricci case, and ruled that New Haven discriminated against 19 firefighters (18 white and 1 hispanic) when they threw out the results of a promotion test because no blacks scored high enough to be promoted. New Haven officials were afraid of protests by civil rights groups if no blacks were promoted, so they discriminated against the 19 firefighters and denied them the promotions they earned. As with so many of these types of cases, the Supreme Court vote was split. The 5-4 majority decision was resisted by the Court's four liberal members (who think discrimination is fine and dandy as long as it's done against white people). Of note is the fact that President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, was one of those overturned by the Supremes. As one of the appellate court judges, Sotomayor thought discrimination against white people was hunky-dory in the Ricci case too.

Your going to hears lots of grievance-mongering and spin about the Ricci case, but there is no reason for any of it. This country was founded on the notion that all men are created equal, and equal protection under the law is mandated in our Constitution. We have a Civil Rights Act that says you may not discriminate against people based upon race. That goes for ALL races. That's why slavery and Jim Crow laws were wrong. All we should do in this country is give everyone the same opportunity (as in, all the New Haven firefighters had the SAME opportunity for promotion, regardless of race. They all took the same test. That's equality). When we go beyond that to dictate outcomes based solely upon race, we violate our own principles and make a mockery of them.

It's time to get beyond race, as well as all the other false constructs that divide us. I've watched the civil rights movement go from one of righteousness in the 60's to the "gimme" entitlement mindset of today. No. You aren't entitled to anything in this country, except the equal opportunity to achieve or fail. After that, it's up to you, no matter who you are.

Baffle 'em with you-know-what.

If Washington D.C. has a credo, that must surely be it. The media isn't far behind.

But before I get into that, I'd like to take a moment to thank President Obama for saving us all from last week's swine flu pandemic (worldwide epidemic). Just think, if Bush was still the President, we'd probably all be dead now. Plus, Obama saved the country for the bargain basement price of $1.5 billion, which hasn't even been spent yet. Oh man, that Obama is GOOD.

The media was speculating today that the recession has bottomed out, because we only LOST 539,000 jobs in April. This rosy optimism came because the experts had predicted job losses of over 600,000. The media left out that the government hired 66,000 people to do the census, and the government hired many others as well (which accounts for almost the entire difference between the projections and the actual job numbers). Those government jobs are all on the taxpayer dime, of course, and add nothing to economic growth. The private sector is still hemorrhaging jobs as fast as ever, but I guess the media is looking for something positive to hand their hat on, because Obama is the president now, and that means CHANGE has come. Call me crazy, but I'll say the recession is over when we start CREATING jobs instead of losing them. The media's optimism comes in spite of the fact that GDP shrunk by 6.1% in the first quarter, and that we're $11 trillion in debt, and that we'll be running a $1.8 trillion deficit this year, and that we have massive deficits projected as far as the eye can see, and that Obama is projected to double the national debt in four years and triple it in eight years, and that unemployment is 8.9%, the highest in 25 years, and that we had a Treasury bond auction with demand so weak that we had to pay higher interest rates just to continue selling our long-term debt (which will raise Obama's deficit and debt projections even higher), and that our industrial base is vanishing, and that what's left of it is collapsing, and that we have massive unfunded entitlement liabilities looming on the horizon (growing at the rate of $2 trillion yearly), and that most of our state governments are broke, and that many banks failed the stress tests (they need $75 billion more bailout dollars, with more surely to come), and that credit still isn't flowing after $700 billion spent on TARP, and that companies all across the country are cutting back the hours of the workers they are retaining, and that if you add the folks who have fallen off the unemployment rolls to the unemployed numbers, unemployment comes out close to 15%, and that the federal government is spending dollars it doesn't have at an all-time record pace, and that the government is printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, and that the government has committed a total of $12 trillion thus far in fighting the recession, and that on top of that, Obama wants to raise energy prices through the roof and create lots more entitlements…………

I guess other than that, happy days are here again.

Oh yeah, and we're still fighting two wars, Obama has no idea what to do with the Gitmo prisoners, we're funneling money to Hamas, we're pondering whether to charge Bushco with war crimes, Pelosi's STILL lying about her knowledge of waterboarding even after the leaked CIA information proves she lied her butt off, Obama is looking for a Supreme Court Justice who is "empathetic" to certain groups as opposed to one who follows the law, the price index is rising in while we're in the depths of recession, Iran is almost certain to have nuclear weapons soon, the Pakistan government is in jeopardy (and Pakistan has nukes, which just maybe could be a problem if the Taliban gets their hands on)…

But other than that, everything's coming up roses.

Plus, Obama cut $17 billion from the budget. Golf clap for Obama. What the media left out of that story was that Obama isn't reducing the deficit by that $17 billion, oh no, he's going to use that money for OTHER government programs, so the net savings to taxpayers is ZERO. This is what passes for fiscal responsibility in the new Obama CHANGE era.

But it's all good. Thar's a new sheriff in town, and he reads that thar teleprompter REAL good.

Never mind that in order to avert fiscal armaggedon, Obama is going to have to come up with a tax increase of proportions never before contemplated in this country's history. By my reckoning, it will have to be at least $2 trillion per year to cover the deficits, interest on the debt, and the unfunded entitlements. It's either that or make drastic government spending cuts, and you know our new sheriff ain't 'bout to do that. Only them thar rightwing extremist fellas talk that kind o' crazy talk.

Welcome to the age of universal government.

I've gone on several rants on this blog previously about what a Ponzi scheme Social Security is. I now realize I've been thinking too small. It isn't just SS that is a Ponzi scheme. It's our entire federal government, and that Ponzi scheme is unraveling. The new funds required from the taxpayers can no longer keep up with the demand for funds the federal government requires. Like all Ponzi schemes, even one on as grand a scale as our government, it is destined to collapse.

But remember, put your hand over your mouth when you cough, and wash your hands frequently. Then everything should be fine.

Last friday's Glenn Beck show was a townhall meeting with several Tea Party protesters. Needless to say, I found myself agreeing with much of the sentiment expressed. Two main themes were repeated by several of the Tea Partiers – 1) The mainstream media completely misrepresented the Tea Party protests (no doubt about that), and 2) The two party system is broken. The Tea Partiers looked at both Democrats and Republicans as betrayers of the public, and betrayers of the Constitution (the media ludicrously portrayed this sentiment as 'rightwing extremist racists against Obama for no good reason').

Those Tea Partiers are some smart folks. They give me hope.

I spend most of my time on this blog criticizing the political left, because they are the statists, the totalitarians who believe big government is the answer to everything. Such a threat to individual liberty, our Constitution, our founding principles, and our country cannot be overstated. I will resist that to my dying breath. After a 20th century in which Americans shed so much blood fighting fascism and communism, I'll never accept those very things in my own country.

Some people, mainly liberals, think my criticisms of the left mean I am the reincarnation of George W. Bush. It's as if they think there is only Michael Moore or Dick Cheney, and nothing in between. They'd be wrong. My contempt for Republicans is only slightly less than my contempt for Democrats. While the Republicans SAY they stand for limited government as prescribed by the founding fathers, which is a natural attraction for me, the Bush administration proved otherwise. We've seldom seen such an increase in government as we did with the Bush administration and his Republican Congress (at least until Obama came along and made the Bushies look like small government types by comparison, no small feat). I look at the Republicans as big government, and the Democrats as bigger government. That's a Hobson's choice I've never been comfortable with. I invariably enter the voting booth thinking, 'should I vote for the Republican just to vote against the liberal Democrat, or should I vote for a third party candidate I actually believe in, but who has no chance of winning ?'

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Many Tea Party protesters feel the same, and I talk to lots of people who think the Democrats and Republicans are just two sides of the same corrupt coin. The people feel helpless, because the two big parties form a virtual duopoly, with so much money and power that the game is heavily rigged in their favor. More people categorize themselves as Independents than as members of either of the two big parties, and I am one of those.

I ask the readers, where do you stand on the political spectrum ? Maybe you are a Libertarian. You could be a Libertarian or have Libertarian leanings, and not even know it, so I'm going to link you to the world's smallest political quiz, which is designed to tell you where you stand politically.

Take the test, and let me know how you scored. It's a very short test. I come out as a slightly right-leaning moderate Libertarian, which is pretty accurate.

You can find out more about the Libertarian party here.

Just in time for the Tax Day Tea Parties that are scheduled across the nation, President Obama's new head of the Department Of Homeland Security (DHS), Janet Napolitano (D-AZ), has released an unclassifed report outlining a terrorist threat against the United States Of America. The threat comes from (drumroll, please) – RIGHT WINGERS. Imagine that. The DHS report is titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The report's stated purpose is:

…to facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks against the United States.

And what are the characteristics of this "violent radicalization" taking place in Right America ? Where are these "terrorist attacks" going to come from ? I'm glad you asked. Here's some of what is driving those wingnuts so crazy:

The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.

Um, wait a minute. Is it only the Right who is concerned about the economic recession ? No, and the Obama admin is milking it for all it's worth ("never let a crisis go to waste.") Is it only the Right who complains about the outsourcing of jobs ? No. During the last election cycle, job losses was a huge election issue for the Left. How many times did you hear "Bush lost four million jobs" coming from Democrat politicians ? And as for threats to U.S. power and sovereignty from foreign powers, who were all those protesters at the recent G20 Summit ? Were they right-wingers ? Nope, not by a mile. Yet, this DHS report isn't about left-wingers at all, only about right-wingers.

Here's another thing to fear, according to the DHS report:

The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.

Okay, now I get it. What we should be fearing are those crazy people who believe in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and we should also fear OUR OWN RETURNING VETERANS. The American Legion has already responded to Janet Napolitano's politically-biased smears.

The DHS also points out the following for your edification:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

Aha ! The right-wing "haters" reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority. There's the mark of an extremist, by golly. I can name several extremists who thought just like that. They were wingnuts with names like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. The concept those wackos believed in is called federalism, and the notion is wholly supported by our Constitution, which limits federal authority, and a 10th Amendment that cedes remaining matters to the states. It seems the Constitution itself is now some kind of national security threat (and some of y'all thought I was kidding about the Constitution being shredded the other day. I wasn't. I'm introducing you to some of the shredders right now).

I also have a teeny-weenie problem with our federal government calling people who are anti-abortion or anti-illegal immigration "right-wing extremists." Another teeny-weeny problem I have is when racism is equated with the political right. Racism crosses all political boundaries. To say anything different is merely propaganda.

But wait, there's more from the DHS:

the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.

Scary, eh ? Now, if you substituted the word "leftwing" for "rightwing" in that last statement, it would be just as equally true or untrue, yet somehow we're only supposed to be afraid of the righties.

This same type of bullspit goes on for 9 pages in the DHS report, but when it comes to specific cases of crazy right-wing terrorist plots, the DHS is forced to admit….THERE AREN'T ANY. That's right, NONE:

The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence

So, no violence is being planned by the right, but, you know, you should still be VERY AFRAID of them. Imagine the outcry if the DHS came out with a report like this about ANY other group – "No Jews are planning any violence, but you better watch out for those Jews anyway. You never know when they're going to blow." I also noticed that Obama's DHS freely uses the word "terrorism" when referring to imaginary right-wing plots, but when referring to folks who really are plotting terrorist activities, like Al Qaeda, the word "terrorism" is now politically incorrect. Al Qaeda deals in "man-made disasters." I guess only imaginary violent right-wingers are terrorists now.

In summary, the DHS has issued a report "to facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of [right-wing] violent radicalization in the United States" even though the report acknowledges there is no evidence of right-wing violent radicalization in the United States. Sooooo, why issue the report in the first place ?

It wouldn't have anything to do with politics, would it ? Some might even call it "the politics of fear."

Sure glad we don't do that kind of stuff anymore.

I'll say one thing about the Obama administration. They promised transparency, and they sure delivered. I can see right through them.

Theft – a: the act of stealing ; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it (from Mirriam-Webster dictionary)
—–
Question: Is it legal for the government to steal your property and give it to someone else at the government's whim ?

Answer: If you think the answer is 'no,' you better think again, because as things currently stand, the answer is an unqualified 'YES.'

Questions: How can such a thing possibly be legal when we have a Constitution that provides for equal protection under the law, the right to privacy, and the protection of private property ? How can such a thing possibly be legal when we adhere to the idea that all men are created equal ? How can such a thing be possible when our entire citizenry would say they are against theft ?

Answer: That's a long story, but in shorthand, it's known as the redistribution of wealth (taxation). Under the Constitutional vision of our founding fathers, taking away the income and property of one individual only to hand it to another individual would have been a crime. That crime is known as theft, and it's against the law all over the world….until the government gets involved, that is. Somehow theft is accepted by some when the government does it. It makes absolutely no sense, but that's the way some people see it.

Now for the long version of how we got to where we are today, where the government can legally steal almost anything it wants to steal. This is the story of how the Constitution was subverted over time, and the Constitutional limits on government were stripped away, leaving government as your virtual lord and master, where liberty is granted or stolen at the government's discretion.

Some of you may be saying to yourselves, 'wait a minute King, the government has ALWAYS had the power to tax. That's in the Constitution too.' And that's true. Congress does have the power to tax, but the government had to amend the original Constitution in order to tax people UNEQUALLY. That was accomplished with the Sixteenth Amendment, which made the income tax legal in 1913. Prior to the income tax, the Constitution stated that taxes had to be apportioned among the states (equally applied). The Sixteenth Amendment overruled existing law, and overruled existing court decisions, such as Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895), which greatly limited the Congress' authority to levy an income tax. With the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, the door was opened for Congress to start confiscating private property at it saw fit (your wages are your private property. They don't belong to anyone else).

If you want to see what the income tax has led to, just look at the explosion of government spending in the following chart:

After 150 years of relatively stable government spending, it didn't take long after the establishment of a limitless income tax for the government to realize it could confiscate money from the people any time it liked, to be used for any purpose the government wished. In other words, the power to tax without limits and without any sense of equality has allowed the government to become the all-powerful behemouth it is today.

The above chart also explains perfectly why we are in such dire financial straits today. We have allowed the federal government to have far too much dominion over our lives, and as it has proven time and again, the federal government is an inefficient and dumb beast that can't manage anything, least of all itself.

But government tyranny and legalized theft didn't stop with the income tax. That was only the beginning of the subversion of our Constitution. Once we started down the road of abandoning Constitutional protections for the people, we continued right on allwoing it to happen. George Will wrote a column called 'Racing Past The Constitution,' that discusses some of the ways the government is denying our Constitutional rights.

In 2005, we had a radical Supreme Court ruling in the Kelo v. New London case that trashed the Fifth Amendment, perverted the rule of eminent domain (which previously only allowed the government to take property 'for public use'), and allowed the government to take private property from one person and give it to another private entity just for the sake of increased tax revenue. And we the people accepted it, when we should have risen up against our government over such a blatant redefinition of Constitutional intent. We allowed the government to make our country less about the people, and more about – of the government, for the government, and by the government.

We've also allowed the Fourth Amendment to be trashed repeatedly, through RICO laws, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and a variety of other ways. Due process is denied to American citizens as their property is taken and the citizens have to prove their innocence, rather than the government having to prove them guilty. Privacy hangs by a thread. You may as well consider it a relic from the past.

While I'm on the subject of trashing the Constitution, the Tenth Amendment, which guarantees states rights, is virtually repealed. Fedzilla has mowed that one down too, as all power coalesces to the federal government. Second Amendment rights are narrowing and under attack.

How long will it be until the First Amendment, the right to free speech, is assaulted ? There is already a movement in Western culture to prohibit speech against religions, which is endorsed by the United Nations, as free speech begins to become secondary to political correctness and diversity. How long before America starts down that road, if we haven't already ?

Beware, America. The freedoms you take for granted are dissolving right before your eyes. You can't take them for granted. You must fight for them. As legalized theft of your property and rights increases, your individual liberty diminishes. As George Washington once said, "freedom is not free."

A couple days ago, the Senate voted 61-37 in favor of granting voting rights to the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives.

The problem with the bill is, it's blatantly unconstitutional, and shouldn't survive a Supreme Court challenge. Article One, Section Two of the Constitution says the following:

Section 2. The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen.

The Constitution grants House seats to STATES, and D.C. isn't a state. That's why D.C. doesn't have voting rights in Congress now.

As usual, the vote was mainly along party lines, with only two Democrats opposing the shredding of the Constitution, and six Republicans voting in favor of shredding the Constitution. The Republicans in favor were mostly the usual suspects – Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar, George Voinovich…and the Stimulus Three – Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter. Figures.

Question – Don't Senators swear to uphold the Constitution ? I'm sure I heard that somewhere. Can we kick them out when they don't ?

Beyond the Constitutional issue, there is another issue here, and it's a big one – TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. Residents of Washington D.C. pay taxes, yet they have no representation in Congress. I seem to recall taxation without representation being a pretty huge issue back around 1776. We broke away from England and founded our own country because of it, and rightly so. Everyone in our country should have voting rights.

A remedy for the people of D.C. is in order, just not THIS remedy. One course of action would be a Constitutional amendment to grant D.C. a vote in the House. Another less ideal remedy would be to exclude D.C. from paying federal taxes. A third remedy would be for D.C. to become part of the state of Maryland.

Back in 1978, the Democratic Congress approved a constitutional amendment that would have given D.C. a House representative and two Senators. That amendment failed to win support from the states.

In case any of you haven't figured it out yet, the reason this issue is arising now is – Washington D.C. voters are about 90% Democrats. The House seat, and two Senate seats if they can get them, are almost certain to go to Democrats, further consolidating the Dem majority. This bill is the first step, and Democrats aren't going to let anything as trivial as the Constitution of the United States stand in the way of more power for Democrats. Heck no. After all, the voters wanted CHANGE, didn't they ? Here it is. That's why the Democrats are rejecting all possible constitutional remedies for D.C. voting rights, and going with an unconstitutional one instead. It gives them the best chance of acquiring more power.

I can't imagine the Supreme Court upholding this bill, but maybe President Obama knows something I don't. Maybe he can get a new Supreme Court appointee or two who can "properly" interpret the Constitution. Maybe he can find a few Justices to interpret the word "state" to mean something other than "state." Maybe "state" will suddenly mean "state of being," or something. It depends what the definition of "is" is. I don't know, but I'm beginning to think the Hopenchangers are capable of anything.