HBO Mini-series: “John Adams”
November 25th, 2009Americans uncomfortable with economy.
February 4th, 2010Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just nine percent (9%) of adults put more blame on the unwillingness of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.
Ninety-four percent (94%) of Republicans and 91% of voters not affiliated with either major party place the blame on politicians, and two-thirds (66%) of Democrats agree. Of course, neither party seems to be willing to cut spending so that they can take the blame for lowering taxes.
Just 11% of all voters now think the government spends taxpayers’ money wisely and well. Seventy-eight percent (78%) do not believe that to be true.
This is probably why 46% of voters favor a tax cut for all Americans. With concerns about the economy and mounting federal deficits before them, 46% of voters nationwide favor an across-the-board tax cut for all Americans. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 35% oppose such a tax cut, and 19% are not sure. Of course Obama does not favor this kind of stimulus package which would prove better than the one he and Bidden love which is the tax-and-spend method. It must be working. His approval rating rose all the way to -8.
The bank bailout still seems to remain unpopular, despite the insistance by Obama that it saved jobs, as 42% of Americans still seem to have faith in the banking system. Those figures include just 6% who are very confident and 10% who are not at all confident. I haven’t seen the movie theater ads by Ben Bernake and the Federal Reserve (brought to you by your tax dollars), but one wonders if they are working.
From the E-mail
January 5th, 2010Congressional Reform Act of 2010
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> 1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.
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> A. Two Six year Senate terms
> B. Six Two year House terms
> C. One Six year Senate term and three Two Year House terms
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> 2. No Tenure / No Pension:
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> A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> 3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:
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> All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, Congress participates with the American people.
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, server your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> 4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans.
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> 5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> 6. Congress looses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> 7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people.
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> 8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.
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> The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
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> Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
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> If you agree with the above, pass it on to all in your address list. If not, just delete.
Native American Wanting Coffee
December 29th, 2009An Native American walks into a cafe with a shotgun in one hand, pulling a male buffalo with the other. He says to the waiter, “Want coffee.”
The waiter says, “Sure, Chief. Coming right up.”
He gets the Native American a tall mug of coffee.
The Native American drinks the coffee down in one gulp, turns and blasts the buffalo with the shotgun, causing parts of the animal to splatter everywhere and then just walks out.
The next morning the Native American returns.
He has his shotgun in one hand, pulling another male buffalo with the other. He walks up to the counter and says to the waiter, “Want coffee.”
The waiter says, “Whoa, Tonto! We’re still cleaning up your mess from yesterday. What was all that about, anyway?”
The Native American smiles and proudly says, “Training for position in United States Congress: come in, drink coffee, shoot the bull, leave mess for others to clean up, disappear for rest of day.”
(Received through the email and made “politically correct.”)
US Court Orders Records Unsealed In Cap-And-Trade Fraud Case
December 22nd, 2009By Ian Talley, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- U.S. legislators have obtained a court order unsealing documents in a case involving a multi-million-dollar cap-and-trade fraud.
Republican legislators say the records–due to be opened to the public in early January–could shed light on the potential challenges of policing a new, trillion-dollar commodities market that would be created under climate legislation that Congress is considering.
In a rare filing by House lawyers, Reps. Joe Barton (R., Texas) and Greg Walden (R., Ore.), the ranking members respectively of the Energy Committee and the Oversight Subcommittee, asked a federal district court in California to unseal all the closed records regarding the successful prosecution for fraud of Anne Masters Sholtz, a former California Institute of Technology economist.
Lawmakers say Sholtz’s case could expose the weaknesses of a federal cap-and- trade system because it involved the same market mechanism meant to cut emissions.
What Is The U.S. Constitution?
December 22nd, 2009Timothy Baldwin
Tenth Amendment Center
December 22, 2009
After my latest article, Our Dead Constitution, was released, I received much response, many from those who understood and agreed, and some by those who were opposed to my statement, “Our constitution is dead.” This leads me to reasonably believe that many of us need to be educated about what a constitution actually is before constitutional law and freedom can be restored throughout the states.
1. A constitution does not create freedom. A constitution is created only to protect and secure freedom which already exists, through forms, structure and limitations of government. This is what our founders said in the Declaration of Independence: “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Therefore, if one’s perspective about the U.S. Constitution is that it statically creates freedom for all the people of the states, then I could understand how he would be shocked or angered at the suggestion that the U.S. Constitution is dead. To the contrary, we know that freedom exists in a state of nature, created by God, as expressed 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.” These natural laws and rights never die. They existed prior to 1787 and they will exist after we are gone. Thus, a distinction must be made between natural freedom (which never dies) and a constitution (which can die).
2. A constitution may be worthless to secure freedom. History proves this–even America’s history. A constitution rests upon a serious distrust of human nature, and simultaneously upon the skeptical and temporary trust placed in delegated power, which supposedly will “be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the prerogatives of their governments.” James Madison, Federalist Paper (FP) 46. These principles determine the constitution’s nature, character, form, and function. This necessarily means that a constitution itself is to be contrasted to the eternal principles that formed the constitution, and where government does not conform its actions and intentions to the principles of the constitution, the constitution itself is practically meaningless and dead. American jurist, William Rawle, expresses the same: “By a constitution we mean the principles on which a government is formed and conducted.” William Rawle, A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, 2.
That our government must conform its actions and intentions to these principles is confirmed by the United States Supreme Court, by those who formed our constitutions, and by those who helped form the very fundamental thoughts of American jurisprudence: (1) “Let the nature and objects of our Union be considered; let the great fundamental principles on which the fabric stands be examined.” Cohens v. Virginia, 19 U.S. 264, 423 (1821). (2) “[N]o free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but…by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” Benjamin Kidd, Principles of Western Civilisation, citing Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776, (London, The Macmillan Co., 1902), 511. (3) “Once the principles of government are corrupted, the very best laws become bad and turn against the [people of the] state.” Charles de Baron Montesquieu and Julian Hawthorne, ed., The Spirit of Laws: The World’s Great Classics, vol. 1 (London: The London Press), 116.
Thus, a maxim must be admitted: where the principles of freedom are abandoned, the constitution no longer serves its constituted purpose; that is, to limit the government as the consent of the governed demanded at its creation. And once the constituted purposes and principles are abandoned, how could it be argued that the constitution has life? Is the form (the constitution) greater than the substance (the principles)? Certainly not.
3. When a government breaches its limitations placed upon it by a constitution, (a) the government agent loses its trust to rule, (b) the powers delegated to it are reverted back to the creators of the constitution, and (c) the constitution becomes non-binding on those who created it. This is the natural law concept of “the consent of the government,” as expressed in our Declaration of Independence. It is further a concept regarding the rights of the parties who enter into a compact. As noted by our founders, we do not normally exercise this natural and compact right over “light and transient causes,” but in cases where a “long train of abuses” are evident. European forefather, Hugo Grotius, recognizes that when a government contradicts the principles that created its power, that creation (i.e. kingdom/constitution) dies and the people have the right to institute new government:
“[I]f the king act, with a really hostile mind, with a new to the destruction of the whole people…that the kingdom is forfeited; for the purpose of governing and the purpose of destroying cannot subsist together.” Hugo Grotius and William Whewell, trans., Hugo Grotius on the Rights of War and Peace, Book II, (Cambridge: University Press, 1853), 57–58.
December 22nd, 2009
The Barr Code:
Welcome to Health-care Bizarro World
28th amendment.
December 21st, 2009A proposed amendment to the Constitution.
Amendment 28 — Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.—Thomas Jefferson
Brewer Christmas Executive order
December 17th, 2009Governor Jan Brewer issued an Executive order to allow the executive branch to celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah. In other words, she used the unconstitutional edict to enforce a Constitutional provision.
The First Amendment provides that
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
So in the thirties, as he so often did, Roosevelt went around the Constitution using the Klu Klux Klan member Justice Hugo Black to declare a “separation of Church and State.” Roosevelt was the first to appoint Supreme Court Justices based on their adherence to the Communist Manifesto. This is a procedure followed by Republicans and Democrats since. To appoint based on ideology since they can make legislation from the bench.
Brewer’s executive order reads:
Executive Order 2009-11
Declaring Christmas and Hanukkah Celebration
WHEREAS, Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, the founder of the Christian religion, and has been celebrated annually for more than two millennia as a significant historical, cultural, and religious event; and
WHEREAS, Hanukkah also known as the Festival of Lights, is an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt of the 2nd century BC; and
WHEREAS, Christmas and Hanukkah bring joy, love and good will to the hearts of the people of the State of Arizona and hundreds of millions of people across the world; and
WHEREAS, the spirit of good will which has been found each December has been at the heart of our ability to live as one people despite differing faiths and backgrounds; and
WHEREAS, the Constitution does not permit the government to tolerate or engage in hostility toward religion, and the United States Supreme Court has affirmed that the public celebration of religious holidays, and the acknowledgment of religious origins, does not offend the Constitution; and
WHEREAS, state and local officials in Arizona (and elsewhere) in the past have attempted to strip both Christmas and Hanukkah of their meaning, including establishment of policies forbidding state employees from placing religious items of celebration at their desks, re-naming of Christmas trees as “holiday” trees, and renaming of Menorahs as “candlesticks;” and
NOW THEREFORE, I, Janice K. Brewer, Governor of the State of Arizona, by virtue of the authority vested by the Constitution and the laws of the State of Arizona, do hereby order and direct as follows:
1. No executive agency of the State of Arizona shall require that any state employee refrain from personally celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah, including the placement of items traditionally associated with a particular holiday.
2. No executive agency of the State of Arizona shall prohibit any state employee from referring to the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays by their accurate names and wishing others a “Merry Christmas” or a “Happy Hanukkah.”
4. No executive agency of the State of Arizona shall participate in any censorship of the lawful celebration and acknowledgment of Christmas, Hanukkah or any other recognized religious holiday.
5. All executive agencies of the State of Arizona, and any political subdivision thereof, are authorized and directed to cooperate with the implementation of the provisions of this Order.
6. This Order is effective upon signature and shall continue in effect until amended, modified, terminated, or rescinded by the Governor, or terminated by operation of law.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have set my hand officially and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of Arizona, at the Capitol, in the City of Phoenix, on this 16th day of December, 2009.
City threatens to fine Milwaukee man with ten commandments sign in front yard
December 16th, 2009WITI-TV, MILWAUKEE – Ron Stanis is told by the city he has 14 days to remove a sign from his yard, but the man says he’s been unfairly targeted. He says it’s not the sign itself that’s the problem. he says some neighbors just don’t like what the sign says and called the city to complain. The sign has been up for more than five-years.
A sign in front of a house that displays the 10 Commandments is causing a stir in Milwaukee.
Homeowner Ron Stanis says the sign has been in his yard for five years.
No one ever objected to the sign until this year when someone filed a formal complaint.
Officials told the homeowner he must apply for a permit or take down the sign.
Stanis says he won’t do either and plans to protest against the city.
If he doesn’t comply with the rules, he could be issued citations that would cost him more than $300.
WITI Milwaukee
Ten Commandments Sign on Front Lawn Creates Controversy
CBN.com
Administrative Legislation
December 15th, 2009I heard a term, today, during a conversation with a friend that I have never heard before. It is an interesting term because it describes succinctly a process that is unconstitutional and that your Congress has used for years. The term is “administrative legislation.” I have, probably, heard the term bandied about but it never sank in. I know what it is and I am sure that you do, also, but may have never thought of the process. We have all heard of “legislating from the bench” in reference to judges, for example
Let us first understand the legislative process as granted by the Constitution. The Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, are granted the authority to make laws and set up bodies of enforcement. If the president agrees with the law, he signs the bill that the Congress sends him. If he disagrees, he vetoes the bill. He does this by returning the bill to Congress with his objections.
Read the rest of this entry »
FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE
December 14th, 20091. “Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.” ~Thomas Jefferson
2. Those who trade liberty for security have neither. ~John Adams
3. Free men do not ask permission to bear arms.
4. An armed man is a citizen.. An unarmed man is a subject..
5. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them.
6. Gun control is not about guns; it’s about control.
7. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
8. Know guns, know peace, know safety. No guns, no peace, no safety.
9. You don’t shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.
10. Assault is a behavior, not a device.
11. 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday.
12. The United States Constitution (c) 1791. All Rights Reserved.
13. The Second Amendment is in place in case the politicians ignore the others.
14. What part of ’shall not be infringed’ do you NOT understand?
15. Guns have only two enemies; rust and politicians.
16. When you remove the people’s right to bear arms, you create slaves.
17. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
Quote
December 11th, 2009“All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don’t discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It’s what you do for others.”—Danny Thomas (January 6, 1912 – February 6, 1991), Actor/Television Producer/Director
USS ARIZONA: Death brought immortality
December 6th, 2009Before Pearl Harbor, USS Arizona’s life included movie role
We take a moment, this December 7, to remember and honor those veterans who fought and died against a tyrannical government and apologize for allowing one to be place in America by election.
USS Arizona at sea.
Donald Stratton, who left the Arizona’s flaming wreck with two-thirds of his body burned, remembers boxing matches his fellow sailors held next to a trash incinerator below deck.
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President for a day.
December 5th, 2009
David Rice Atchison
He was born in Frogtown, Kentucky on August 11, 1807, attended a University in Lexington and studied law. He was a Senator for Missouri; member of the state house of representatives in 1834 and in 1838; the judge of the Platte County circuit court in 1841, and chairman of the Committee on the Militia. He died at his home January 26, 1886 in Plattsburg, MO.
Atchison served as unofficial President of the United States for a day on Sunday—March 4, 1849. Vice-President George Dallas had resigned, leaving Atchison (President of the Senate) next in line for the Presidency. James Polk resigned his office a day early to head home to Tennessee and Zachary Taylor refused to take the Oath of Office on a Sunday for religious reasons. Although Atchison never took the Oath of Office, his tombstone does list him as President for that day. What is more interesting is that history records that, because of fatigue from inaugural partying the night before, Atchison slept through the entire day of his Presidency.
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