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Post by philunderwood on Oct 20, 2011 9:06:01 GMT -5
Is Freedom in America a Myth or a Reality? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Does the government exist to serve us or to master us? If the government exists to serve us and if freedom is part of our humanity, how can the government take freedom from us? Is human freedom in America a myth, or is it a reality? Today is the release date of my newest book, "It Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong." This is my sixth book. All have been about human freedom and the government's failure to protect it. In all of my previous works, I have emphasized the theme that all human beings possess natural rights as part of our humanity. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we view these rights as gifts from our Creator. This is particularly so if you are an American and if you mark the founding of this nation at July 4, 1776, as it was then that the Continental Congress promulgated in the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson's immortal — though hardly novel — words to the effect that we humans are created equal and are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Historians have speculated that Jefferson originally planned to use the concept of property ownership in that iconic litany of human rights, but he feared that addressing slavery in the same document in which he had characterized the long train of abuses visited upon the colonists by the King of England would have opened the Declaration and its signers to charges of hypocrisy. Nevertheless, Talmudic and Christian scholars and renowned skeptics, even atheists and deists, had long held, by Jefferson's time, that the divine right of kings was a myth, that all humans own their own bodies, and that personal freedoms are integral to those bodies. Whether the ultimate source of human freedom is found in theology or biology, freedom exists, freedom is ours by nature, and the long history of the world is really one unceasing, increasing catalogue of the epic battles for personal freedoms against tyranny. Stated differently, I have argued in my work at Fox News, as a judge, as a lawyer, and as an author, lecturer and law school professor that our basic human liberties — thought, speech, press, worship, travel, privacy, association, self-defense, bodily integrity, dominion over ownership of property, fairness from the government, and the presumption of liberty at all times under all circumstances and in all conflicts — are the essence of humanity. If you read the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments of the Constitution — you will see that the theme of my work was pretty much accepted by the Framers. They, like I, were skeptical of Big Government. Some, such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, were, as I am, skeptical of all government. The Framers viewed, as do I, the only legitimate role of government as protecting freedom. That connotes protection from force and fraud, but it surely does not connote punishing the politically unorthodox, transferring wealth, regulating personal private behavior, stealing property, manipulating currency or fighting wars of imperialism. Now the dark part: There is no human liberty, natural or constitutional, expressly guaranteed in the Constitution or traditionally viewed as belonging to all persons, that has not been nullified by the government in America. We are deluding ourselves if we think the government thinks the so-called guarantees of freedoms are truly guarantees. They are not. They have been tolerated by American governments unless and until the governments have felt threatened by them. Of course, a guarantee that can be suspended whenever those obligated on the guarantee no longer feel bound by it is no guarantee whatsoever. Throughout our history, persons in America have had all natural rights denied by different levels of government, from slavery to abortion, from punishment for speech to theft of property, from denial of due process to invasions of privacy; and the government has prevailed. What is it about the Constitution that the government has sworn to uphold, that the government manifests an unrestrained willingness to disregard it? As this column will, "It Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong" tells stories that generally do not have happy endings. Most of the time, freedom loses. But these arguments I will make come from my heart as well as my head; and they should resonate in your heart and head. Every day, in many a way, seen and unseen, liberty is lost. It is the purpose of this column to address the seen and the unseen, to argue for the primacy of the individual over the state, and to help foment a reawakening of the natural human thirst for freedom. Let me spend some time with you in the privacy of your own thoughts. Let me take you on a wild ride through the annals of freedom in America. As you read the pages of these forthcoming columns, ask yourself if, at each turn, we are closer to freedom or slavery, if the majesty of the law really means what it says, and why — why — it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. You'll be educated and agitated, but you won't be disappointed.
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 27, 2011 7:59:21 GMT -5
What Have the Wars Done for You? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Can we fight a war, kill foreign leaders, declare victory, and then leave? How about travelling the world looking for monsters to slay? Will this keep us free and safe? In the past week, three events occurred around the globe that have great implications for American freedom. On Thursday of last week, Col. Moammar Kaddafi, the acknowledged head of the government in Libya, was shot in the head on a public street corner by a young Libyan man wearing a New York Yankees cap and in the presence of about 25 witnesses, none of whom have stated that Kaddafi was armed. President Obama praised Kaddafi's demise, while human rights groups condemned it. The rebels who chased him from office have proclaimed themselves to be the legitimate Libyan government, and the U.S. has welcomed them. As recently as 2006, then-President Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair proclaimed Col. Kaddafi a partner in the war on terror. And as recently as 2009, Sen. John McCain personally met with Col. Kaddafi, and promised to provide him with military weapons. On Friday of last week, President Obama announced that all American military personnel in Iraq, except for about 100 who provide security for our new billion dollar Vatican-sized embassy in Baghdad, will be home before Christmas. Why did we go to Iraq in the first place? First, it was to seek out and destroy weapons of mass destruction, but none was found. Then we got involved in a civil war, and took sides with the group that had been excluded from the government. Then we were told that our purpose was regime change because Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, whether he had WMDs or not. Then we captured Saddam and he was tried in a kangaroo court and executed. We lost 4500 troops, 32,000 more were injured, 650,000 Iraqis were killed, and over two million Iraqis fled the country. This, along with our military adventurism in Afghanistan, cost the American taxpayers about a trillion dollars. The stated purpose for our departure is the decision of the popularly-elected Iraqi government to decline to afford immunity to American military personnel. Stated differently, the Iraqi government — which we installed — decided that after ten years, Americans in Iraq needed to obey the same laws as Iraqis do. That was too much for us, and so we are leaving. And on Saturday of last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a frequent guest in the U.S. of Congress and of President George W. Bush, and whose country the U.S. took back from the Taliban, announced that should the U.S. engage in military conflicts with Pakistan, his government would side with the Pakistanis. This would mean that over 100,000 U.S. troops would be kicked out of Afghanistan and we would lose all our military hardware; or we would need to fight against the forces of the country we have supposedly liberated, and whose military we have trained, and which we have occupied for ten years. This war in Afghanistan has been the longest in U.S. history. It has cost us 2700 lives, 3400 injured; produced 3.5 million refugees; and because the U.S. government doesn't break these numbers down for us to see, consumed part of the trillion dollars we have spent in fighting these two useless wars in the Middle East. Your government has few lasting friendships, but many lasting interests. After all this death and injury and after hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage we are repairing, we are still saddled with a trillion dollar cost because we borrowed the money to pay for these wars and have yet to pay it back. We are leaving Iraq; and Afghanistan wants us out; and the new government in Libya has announced that it will enact Sharia Law, which means polygamy and the stoning of women who disobey their husbands. Are we more free or safer from all this? Of course not. We are less free because an entire generation of Middle Easterners has come of age resenting and hating the U.S. government, and an entire generation of Americans has come of age saddled with an additional trillion dollars in government debt. Without learning from history, we will be less safe. In Vietnam, we lost 50,000 troops, and we lost the war. Did we learn the lessons of our failures in Vietnam? NO. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Russians lost over 100,000 troops, and lost their war. Did we learn the lessons of the Russians' failures in Afghanistan? NO. Is it any wonder we have an economy that is collapsing here at home and young people demonstrating in the streets and the most unsettled time in America in the past 80 years? NO.
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 3, 2011 7:38:25 GMT -5
Look at What the Government Has Done with Your Money By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | The federal government has lost another 72 million of your tax dollars. Here we go again. The feds have gambled with your money again, and they've lost it again; this time with a company called Beacon Power. You've probably never heard of this company. Candidly, before the announcement of its bankruptcy filing this week, neither had I. Just as you probably had never heard of Solyndra before its bankruptcy, neither had I. But your government has heard of both. Solyndra and Beacon received loans the government guaranteed — $535 million and $72 million respectively. In each case, your tax dollars were spent when these companies borrowed money they couldn't return. In each case, federal bureaucrats used your money to pay back loans investors gave to these failing companies because the bureaucrats want to wean us off of oil and onto so-called green energy, and because the government was friends with the investors. In each case, the investment the federal government made in these firms was risky and was lost. How did this happen? The phenomenon of the government picking winners and losers is as old as our country itself. When we were colonists and the king and Parliament imposed the Stamp Act on us — everyone needed to affix a government stamp to all documents in his possession — the king gave the monopoly on selling the stamps to his favorite colonists. Competition for business in stamps was illegal. Abraham Lincoln gave away federal land to his favorite railroads so they could have a leg up on the competition that had to pay for its land. Woodrow Wilson gave government business to bankers who were his political allies, and they made money even in bad times, while the competition struggled. But we have not seen government intervention into the free market the likes of which has become apparent recently. President George W. Bush borrowed money in your name and bailed out the insurance company AIG, General Motors and Chrysler before they went bankrupt, and hundreds of banks. President Obama has received legal authority from the Congress to bail out or even to finance whomever he wishes, and he has used the bureaucrats in the Department of Energy to advise him how to do so. When you invest your own money, your biggest concern is that you'll lose the investment. To relieve you of that, you research a company before lending it your money or buying its stock. You make your decision on the likelihood and the amount of money you will earn from the investment, and whether or not you can afford the loss of your investment. This is your natural right to choose to do with your money as you wish. But when the government invests money for you, its decision-making is not grounded in free choice or in sound business judgment. Its decision is grounded in power and politics. The power is its ability to extract tax dollars from you even if you profoundly disagree with the way it will spend what it has extracted. The power is the government's ability to borrow cash in your name, even if you disagree with the borrowing. Since the government isn't risking its own money, but yours, it needn't worry about affording a loss. Stated differently, the government doesn't care if it loses your money. It only cares if it loses your votes and thus loses power. Its goal is not a return on investment; its goal is staying in power. Its decision-making on risking your money is not based in sound business judgment, but on power politics. It wants to tell you how to live, and it wants you to keep it in power. Calling this crony capitalism actually gives cronyism a good name. Capitalism is freedom. It is your unfettered ability to do with your money, as an investor, as a consumer, as a saver, as an employer, as a worker, as you wish, with no government intervention. We have seen what happens when the government intervenes: Your money goes to a place where you would never voluntarily send it. That's not capitalism. That's private ownership but government investment. That's private ownership but government control. That's extracting money by the force of law and spending it against your will. And that is called fascism. Do we want this fascism here? It's already here.
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 10, 2011 9:29:35 GMT -5
Does the Government Work for Us, or Do We Work for the Government? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | In America, the federal government seems to control everything. Light bulbs, shoe leather, refrigerators, even the water strength in your shower. Your banker, your doctor, your lawyer, your computer all are regulated beyond belief. What is it in America that the feds can't control? The answer is simple: human nature. We need to eat, and we need to move about; and that means we will use the free market in order to do so, with or without the government. Every capable human engages in market exchanges, even in those countries where it's illegal. Through all of history, humans have advanced civilization by building up the avenues of trade so as to increase their standards of living. When you buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas, you are freely choosing to engage in what remains of the free market. I emphasize "what remains" because when you buy bread, you are paying the local or state government a tax for a product that was baked under conditions set forth by the feds and one of the 50 states, and when you buy fuel for your car, up to one quarter of the cost of the fuel consists of state and federal sales taxes. Sales taxes constitute a grand theft concocted by politicians and bureaucrats so as to provide them with a never-ending supply of cash they can use to bribe people for their votes. Sales taxes also make items we need more expensive. And they intrude upon our privacy. Think about it. If I want a loaf of bread and you are a grocer willing to sell me one, what business is that of the government? None. What involvement has the government had? None. What has the government done to add value to that transaction? Nothing. The protesters on Wall Street seem not to understand that free trade is a natural right — like speech, travel, religion, self-defense, privacy — and is mutually beneficial to the buyer and the seller. That's why at the end of a transaction, each party says "thank you." We have both benefited. It's a win-win. I have food and fuel, and the seller has revenue. So how is it today that this natural and daily activity has become much maligned and exploited and hated by government elites? As the global economies have collapsed in the past decade, nothing has been certain except for uncertainty. The world's central banks, drunk on power, loaded their people up with debt and then slowly guided their economies to destruction. That's the consequence of government control of the monetary system and means of exchange. Prices in an economy are like traffic signals, signaling where goods and resources should go and how fast. Central banks distort those traffic signals and even give the wrong signals. That's why we get crashes — because of government traffic signals, because the government has taken "free" out of the marketplace. But free trade does occur in the United States in some ways. The black markets are where people trade what they want for the price agreed on, free of taxes and free of government regulations, and at prices that are acceptable to the parties. Simply banning the transaction will not deter some portion of the population from attempting to acquire something — whether it's bread, tobacco, drugs or guns — that the government doesn't want us to have, at prices we are willing to pay. People will always trade what they have for what they want or need. That's human nature. That's a natural human right. The government cannot stop that. But, of course, governments have tried to stop the exercise of this right. During World War II, for example, FDR and his cronies rationed sugar, leather, tea, tobacco, guns, coffee, fuel and many other items our parents and grandparents needed for everyday use. The stated purpose was that the troops needed these items and there was not enough to go around, so the feds would decide who got what and how much all these things would cost. But there was a black market for all these items, and there, the items were plentiful and the price was freely agreed upon. If the government had stayed out of the picture, the market could have existed in the light of day. We now know that FDR was as much interested in control of the population as in supplying the troops. The government fears trade because it can't control it. The feds would do well to remember the historical truth that where goods and services don't move freely, armies will; and where goods and services do move freely, armies don't. And when the black market becomes more prosperous than the one the government regulates, it will be time to change the government.
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 17, 2011 7:27:37 GMT -5
Congress and Secrecy By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | You know this story. Congress cannot get its act together, again. It is facing a government shutdown by this Saturday, again. It has retreated to secrecy, again. It seems redundant and ridiculous to say "here we go again," and yet that's what's happening. Congress, which is charged and authorized by the Constitution to write the federal laws and to decide how to spend the people's money and to keep public records of all its deliberations, has simply declined to do so. In establishing the debt supercommittee — which consists of six representatives and six senators — Congress is violating the Constitution by keeping its work and deliberations from you. Every hour at Fox News, our intrepid Capitol Hill producers inform us of who is meeting with whom to discuss what — not among members of the House or Senate, but among members of the supercommittee. Try to find that in the Constitution, and you won't succeed. This is what has become of the world's greatest deliberative body. It is hiding from you. Its members are supposed to be working for you. The government is the servant of the people. As revolutionary as that sounds, it is the principle underlying both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Some of you have sent me very funny emails asking why I often ask if the government works for us or if we work for the government. Now, you have the answer. The government calls the shots. Both political parties stand for Big Government. Few in government really want it to be subservient or transparent. The government treats us as if we have unending piles of cash from which it can extract what it wishes; and it treats us as if we work for it. It is the height of arrogance and of disrespect — for you, for the Constitution and for basic principles of personal liberty in a free society — for the government to work in the dark. Indeed, the Founders feared secret government because they had suffered so heavily under the Privy Council. The Privy Council was not the king, and it was not the Parliament. It consisted of a dozen of the king's most trusted advisers — some of whom were members of Parliament — who really ran the British government when we were its colonies; and the Privy Council met in secret. To assure that the new government here would not do to Americans what the British had done to the colonists, the Founders wrote into the Constitution the obligation of Congress to meet in public, to keep a public journal of all it does, and to be the only entity in the new government that can write laws, regulate behavior or tax events. Our representatives in the House and in the Senate have made a mockery of our Constitution. The secret supercommittee — around which have swirled all sorts of rumors about raising taxes and increasing regulations — has effectively become the Congress. Once it reports whatever it has agreed to, Congress cannot debate that report. Congress cannot publicly discuss that report. Congress cannot amend that report. Congress can only vote that report up or down. This modern-day Privy Council has robbed you of your representation in government and the transparency guaranteed by the Constitution. What can we do about this? We can continue to challenge the government, and we can throw out of office any member of Congress who favors secrecy over freedom.
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 23, 2011 12:44:28 GMT -5
What if the Constitution No Longer Applied? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress' enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress, but were actually used as justification to extend Congress' authority over every realm of human life? What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has become a democratically elected, term-limited monarch? What if the president assumed everything he did was legal, just because he's the president? What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming for a special message from him? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without warning? What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the states were mere provinces of a totally nationalized and fully centralized government? What if the Constitution was amended stealthily, not by constitutional amendments duly passed by the states, but by the constant and persistent expansion of the federal government's role in our lives? What if the federal government decided whether its own powers were proper and constitutional? What if you needed a license from the government to speak, to assemble or to protest the government? What if the right to keep and bear arms only applied to the government? What if posse comitatus — the law that prohibits our military from our streets — were no longer in effect? What if the government considered the military an adequate dispenser of domestic law enforcement? What if cops looked and acted like troops and you couldn't distinguish the military from the police? What if federal agents could write their own search warrants in defiance of the Constitution? What if the government could decide when you weren't entitled to a jury trial? What if the government could take your property whenever it wanted it? What if the government could continue prosecuting you until it got the verdict it wanted? What if the government could force you to testify against yourself simply by labeling you a domestic terrorist? What if the government could torture you until you said what the government wanted to hear? What if people running for president actually supported torture? What if the government tortured your children to get to you? What if the government could send you to your death and your innocence meant nothing so long as the government's procedures were followed? What if America's prison population, the largest in the world, was the result of a cruel and unusual way for a country to be free? What if half the prison population never harmed anyone but themselves? What if the people had no rights except those the government chose to let them have? What if the states had no rights except to do as the federal government commanded? What if our elected officials didn't really live among us, but all instead had their hearts and their homes in Washington, D.C.? What if the government could strip you of your rights because of where your mother was when you were born? What if the income tax was unconstitutional? What if the states were convinced to give up their representation in Congress? What if the government tried to ban you from using a substance older than the government itself? What if voting didn't mean anything anymore because both political parties stand for Big Government? What if the government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, the Constitution be damned? What if the government was the reason we don't have a Constitution anymore? What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it? What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if I'm right? What if the government is wrong? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 15, 2011 10:34:48 GMT -5
The Government as Lawbreaker, Again By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Can Congress make legal something that is inherently wrong, and can Congress take a freedom that is a part of our humanity and make its exercise criminal? If there were no First Amendment, would we still have the freedom of speech? The answer, like many in the law, depends on what values underlie the legal system. If the government is the source of our rights, then without the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech, any government could legally punish you for saying words and expressing thoughts it hated or feared; and it could even silence you before you spoke. On the other hand, if our rights come from our humanity and our humanity is a gift from God, then we would still enjoy the freedom of speech, whether it is insulated from government interference by the First Amendment or not. The wording of the First Amendment itself gives us a peek at what its authors thought. They wrote: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." It doesn't say that Congress shall grant freedom of speech; rather, it prohibits Congress from interfering with it. And by referring to free speech as the freedom of speech, the drafters recognized that the freedom of speech already existed before the country that they were founding even came to be. The same founders who drafted the First Amendment also accepted Thomas Jefferson's values articulated in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our "Creator with certain inalienable rights, (and) that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It is clear beyond serious dispute from just scratching the surface of history that wedded to this country at its birth is the Judeo-Christian concept of the natural law. The natural law is the self-evident truth that our rights come from our humanity; that we have them by virtue of our mortal existence; that they do not depend upon government for their existence; that they do not vary as a consequence of where we are now or where our mothers were when we were born; and thus we remain fully endowed of these rights so long as we live, wherever we go. If you believe that we are the present result not of a supreme being, but of natural selection, you can accept as the founders did that humanity — and not government — is the repository of freedom. I suspect that most people accept the natural law. We have even seen people in the government claim to accept it. Yet almost as soon as they take the oath to uphold these values, they start rejecting them. In the Patriot Act, for example, Congress made it a crime to reveal that the feds came calling on you with a search warrant in which a federal agent authorized himself to search records that you might have. This, of course, not only violates the Fourth Amendment, which stipulates that only judges may authorize searches, but it also violates the First Amendment because it punishes speech. This week, Congress is wrestling with more proposals that violate the natural law. One of our fundamental natural rights is the right to be free from government restraint, absent a proven case of criminal behavior. This, too, was articulated by the framers when they wrote in the Fifth Amendment: "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." This recognizes the right to be free from restraint by the government, unless the government, utilizing due process, can make a case against you. That means a fair trial in your presence, with lawyers defending you and jurors deciding your case under the guidance of a neutral judge. Yet, your representatives in Congress are about to authorize the president to violate your natural rights by enacting legislation that would permit him to use the military to arrest Americans and restrain them without due process. Even King George III, against whose armies the colonists fought for freedom, did not have the power to do that. And, just because Congress votes to make these acts of tyranny legal does not mean they are constitutional. The Constitution is a higher law than anything Congress can write; and all that Congress writes must conform to it. Since the Constitution was written to keep the government from violating our natural rights, what can you do when the very government we have hired to protect those rights is violating them? If you live in Iowa or New Hampshire, you can vote for the only Republican candidate running for president who believes that the Constitution means what it says. You know who he is.
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 22, 2011 10:10:43 GMT -5
New Ideas or Fidelity to Old Principles? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | If you've been watching cable television regularly, you've heard from many analysts who know Newt Gingrich personally. They either call him the smartest man in the room or they tell us Gingrich believes he's the smartest man in the room. Gingrich has always been a government ideas man, and whenever he says something odd, out of the ordinary or otherwise eyebrow raising or provocative, it's explained away as Newt being Newt. His ideas are, in fact, what get him in trouble. When Gingrich called Palestinians an invented people, that wasn't a Rick Perry moment. There is a long academic debate behind the Palestinian question. Yasser Arafat, after all, was born in Cairo as a poor Egyptian, but died in Paris as a wealthy, corrupt Palestinian leader. There was never an independent state of Palestine, and the people now known as Palestinians were known simply as Arabs before the creation of the State of Israel. None of this, of course, is relevant to U.S. foreign policy, because none of it is relevant to U.S. national security interests. It is only relevant to politics. When Gingrich mused that the federal government ought to hire poor children to work as janitors, that, too, was no Rick Perry moment. There is something to be said about instilling a sound work ethic in youth. Indeed, as Gingrich noted, most of this country's productively wealthy people started working at an early age, and he points to that as a primary driver of their successes later in life. But is there a role for the federal government in micromanaging how the nation's youth are imbued with a work ethic? No, there is not. The government can't deliver the mail. Perhaps the most telling of Gingrich's ideas is that the federal government ought to expand its presence in space, up to and including mining the moon for minerals. It's a pie in the sky idea, literally, and scientifically absurd. But it, too, is not a Rick Perry moment. It's not like Dennis Kucinich admitting he believes in UFOs. It's just Newt being an ideas man. Yet, all of his out-of-the-box ideas have a common thread: He wants to expand the government. Gingrich doesn't belong in government, because government isn't subject to the forces of the free market. Because it's not subject to the free market, it becomes difficult for government to filter bad ideas from good ones. After all, Gingrich may have a good idea in trying to instill work ethic in troubled youth. But he also had the idea to use the death penalty when it comes to marijuana, a substance that's only been banned by the federal government in the past 40 years and is less harmful than alcohol. The whole drug war is a horrible idea, costing us valuable treasure and blood but doing nothing to prevent drug use. But it keeps those government bureaucrats involved in the war on drugs steadily employed, and so Gingrich loves the war on drugs and wants to expand it. None of Newt's nutty ideas belongs in the federal government, because the federal government must be confined to the Constitution, not to the new ideas of a self-important insider who's grown rich off of government fat. How can we ever get rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when our self-identified conservatives leave government and then use those entities to make money for themselves? Newt's nutty ideas perpetuate the problem of government because by profiting off of unconstitutional government policies, they incentivize government to keep those policies. We don't need new ideas in government; leave those for the free market. Good ideas are advanced by consumers and investors who choose to spend their own money on them, not by bureaucrats who spend your money on them. We don't need Newt's new ideas about drugs and Palestinians and the moon. We need some old ones Newt has forgotten, like that government is best which governs least, like the people are entitled to a government that stays within the confines of the Constitution, like the Constitution was written to keep the government off the people's backs. Gingrich has Big Government written all over him; and Big Government has brought us all our woes. If you live in Iowa or New Hampshire, you can do something about Big Government in the next three weeks. You can vote in a caucus or a primary for a candidate who believes government should be confined and not expanded; someone who believes the Constitution will restrain him, not unleash him; someone who believes the Constitution actually means what it says. You know who that man is. He is the game changer.
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 29, 2011 10:43:18 GMT -5
The Case for Austerity By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Do you remember this summer's debt debate debacle? It ended with the supercommittee, which ended in failure, which resulted in no cuts in government spending. Do you remember the summer before that, when tea party protesters came out in full force against Obamacare and members of Congress who were contemplating supporting it? Do you remember when the tea party movement made the Republicans the majority in the House and replaced a few prominent liberal Republicans in the Senate with small-government conservatives? Where was all the raucous protest when those who were elected to Congress in 2010 on the promise of reining in spending so spectacularly and clearly failed to do it? It seems everybody wants something for nothing and everybody wants something from the government. Frankly, this is why Ron Paul has never been the flavor of the week. He is the only serious presidential candidate who is actually advocating real austerity, real spending cuts, a real shrinking of government. Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney don't want to shrink government. They love government. They just want to manage it better. The problem with that approach is that government by its very design is always mismanaged. The centralization of decision-making amplifies the effects of poor decisions while disincentivizing prudent ones. Unlike an individual or a well-run corporation, government is not motivated by how efficient it can be, but rather by how lucrative it can be for those associated with it, and how those who run the government can stay in power. Someone who was philosophically opposed to government domination of the housing market wouldn't perpetuate it by taking one red penny of taxpayer money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, like the former Speaker did, whether he calls himself a historian or a lobbyist. Someone philosophically opposed to government domination of the health care market would never offer up government as the solution to the problem of the uninsured, like the former governor of Massachusetts did, since the problem of the uninsured was created by government's involvement in the health care market in the first place. The federal government does not need an efficient manager. That's a pipe dream based on the noble but flawed premise that government can be made to operate as a business. It cannot. Business is subject to the forces of free choice, supply and demand, and competition. Can you imagine government subjecting itself to the forces of competition? Can you imagine government permitting us to ignore it? The government's biggest sacred cow is the Pentagon. The mere thought of reductions in the growth of defense spending has the Washington careerists screaming bloody murder. Yet military expert after military expert, not connected to the Pentagon and not employed in the defense industry, has told us that austerity will force the government to do what Congress lacks the political courage to do. Stated differently, we will keep spending on bases we don't need, on planes that sit unused in hangars and on military hardware stored all over the world, and not for any national security interest, but simply because a congressman earmarked it — unless we get serious about our future. A dollar of military spending is not a dollar of military strength, but it is a dollar into the coffers of those who contribute to congressional campaigns. Which is the greater threat to our national security, an impoverished gaggle of Third World revolutionaries 10,000 miles away, or our national debt? The answer is obvious. Government is not a jobs program, and government is not your caretaker. Government is an arrangement made by free individuals to protect their rights and their property. It doesn't take $3.6 trillion a year to do that effectively in America today. I doubt it takes a trillion. We must swallow the bitter pill of austerity now, on our own terms, while we are still the undisputed leader of the free world and while we still have a Constitution, so that we can restore our prosperity in a way consistent with personal liberty. It is a far better option than waiting for the bitter pill of austerity to be forced upon us when our country has become a shell of the proud and prosperous free nation it once was. Our cousins in Europe are learning that the hard way, even as we marvel at their sudden but inexorable demise.
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Post by philunderwood on Jan 5, 2012 8:39:24 GMT -5
Big Government Cannot Pay Its Bills, Again By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Since Barack Obama became president on Jan. 20, 2009, the federal government has not had a budget. It did not have one for the first two years of his presidency, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and it did not have one for 2011, when the Democrats controlled the Senate and the Republicans controlled the House. The Senate — continuously under Democratic control during the entire Obama presidency — has not voted out and sent on to the House any annual budget since George W. Bush was president. The House sent a budget to the Senate a year ago, but the Senate rejected it and sent nothing back in return. In the nearly three years that Obama has been in office, the government has been collecting revenue, borrowing cash and spending ravenously on the basis of what the government calls continuing resolutions — known in Washington by the initials "CR." When Congress enacts a CR, it basically authorizes the government to operate for a finite and brief period of time. The period of time does not coincide with the government's fiscal year. The federal government's fiscal year runs from October 1st to September 30th. Here we are at the beginning of a new calendar year, and your government does not have a budget for its fiscal year that began more than three months ago. Instead, the feds have operated under 15 continuing resolutions throughout the Obama presidency. Some of these CRs have been for as long as nine months, and one was as short as 24 hours. There was a time when the end of a continuing resolution would have brought intense media scrutiny. Will the government stay open? Will it shut down? Who will get blamed? Will Congress let the president spend money the government doesn't have? None of this produces drama any longer, because the bizarre has now become the routine. This new year will bring certain new tax rates, specifically for the payroll tax. The payroll tax is what you pay and what your employer pays to fund Social Security. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme: It pays out more than it takes in, and the government lies about its solvency. It once had a cushion, called the Social Security Trust Fund, but Congress took that money and spent it. Can you think of any crimes here? Running a Ponzi scheme is a crime — just ask Bernie Madoff. And spending money you have lawfully agreed to hold in trust for someone else can get you in a lot of hot water, and likely criminal charges. Just ask Jon Corzine. So here we are, at the beginning of a new year, and employers and employees don't know what their payroll taxes will be in March. You cannot run a business, and you should not run your household, without knowing months in advance what your regular expenses will cost you. But when you have a government in which both wings of the Big Government Party — that's the Republican wing as well as the Democratic wing — think they can bribe the people with their own money and the only difference between the two is how much of a bribe, when both wings think they can write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, no matter what the Constitution says, no matter what federal law says and no matter what the laws of economics say, is it any wonder the government is dysfunctional? All of this demonstrates that the government lives in its own world. It writes laws for the rest of us and breaks them itself. It requires openness of corporations that trade publicly, but it won't be transparent itself. It doesn't read the laws it writes, and it doesn't care about the Bill of Rights. What can you do? If you live in New Hampshire, you can vote for a game changer next week. There is only one on the ballot.
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Post by philunderwood on Jan 12, 2012 7:21:41 GMT -5
What If Elections Don't Matter? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | What if Democrats and Republicans were two wings of the same bird of prey? What if elections were actually useful tools of social control? What if they just provided the populace with meaningless participation in a process that validates an establishment that never meaningfully changes? What if that establishment doesn't want and doesn't have the consent of the governed? What if the two-party system was actually a mechanism used to limit so-called public opinion? What if there were more than two sides to every issue, but the two parties wanted to box you in to one of their corners? What if there's no such thing as public opinion, because every thinking person has opinions that are uniquely his own? What if public opinion was just a manufactured narrative that makes it easier to convince people that if their views are different, there's something wrong with that — or something wrong with them? What if the whole purpose of the Democratic and Republican parties was not to expand voters' choices, but to limit them? What if the widely perceived differences between the two parties was just an illusion? What if the heart of government policy remains the same, no matter who's in the White House? What if the heart of government policy remains the same, no matter what the people want? What if those vaunted differences between Democrat and Republican were actually just minor disagreements? What if both parties just want power and are willing to have young people fight meaningless wars in order to enhance that power? What if both parties continue to fight the war on drugs just to give bureaucrats and cops bigger budgets and more jobs? What if government policies didn't change when government's leaders did? What if no matter who won an election, government stayed the same? What if government was really a revolving door of political hacks, bent on exploiting the people while they're in charge? What if both parties supported welfare, war, debt, bailouts and big government? What if the rhetoric that candidates displayed on the campaign trail was dumped after electoral victory? What if Barack Obama campaigned as an antiwar, pro-civil liberties candidate, then waged senseless wars while assaulting your rights that the Constitution is supposed to protect? What if George W. Bush campaigned on a platform of nonintervention and small government, then waged a foreign policy of muscular military intervention and a domestic policy of vast government borrowing and growth? What if Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, but actually just convinced Republicans like Newt Gingrich that they can get what they want out of big government, too? What if the Republicans went along with it? What if Ronald Reagan spent six years running for president promising to shrink government, but then the government grew while he was in office? What if, notwithstanding Reagan's ideas and cheerfulness and libertarian rhetoric, there really was no Reagan Revolution? What if all this is happening again? What if Rick Santorum is being embraced by voters who want small government even though he voted for the Patriot Act, for an expansion of Medicare and for raising the debt ceiling by trillions of dollars? What if Mitt Romney is being embraced by voters who want anyone but Obama, but don't realize that Romney might as well be Obama on everything from warfare to welfare? What if Ron Paul is being ignored by the media not because theyclaim he's unappealing or unelectable, but because he doesn't fit into the pre-manufactured public opinion mold used by the establishment to pigeonhole the electorate and create the so-called narrative that drives media coverage of elections? What if the biggest difference between most candidates was not substance but style? What if those stylistic differences were packaged as substantive ones to re-enforce the illusion of a difference between Democrats and Republicans? What if Romney wins and ends up continuing most of the same policies that Obama promoted? What if Obama's policies, too, are merely extensions of Bush's? What if a government that manipulated us could be fired? What if a government that lacked the true and knowing consent of the governed could be dismissed? What if it were possible to have a game-changer? What if we need a Ron Paul to preserve and protect our freedoms from assault by the government? What if we could make elections matter again? What if we could do something about this?
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Post by philunderwood on Jan 20, 2012 8:38:16 GMT -5
How Much Economic Freedom Do We Have in the United States? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | The root of economic freedom is the recognition of the right to own private property. That includes the right to utilize it unmolested, to dispose of it without anyone's permission and to exclude anyone from it, even the government. Suffice it to say, no American president since the advent of the income tax and the Federal Reserve 100 years ago has fully accepted or meaningfully defended that right. The more the government extracts in taxes and the more it inflates the money supply, the more it rejects and assaults property rights. Every president in the 20th century, even Ronald Reagan, signed legislation raising income taxes. The theory behind the income tax is that the government's need for cash is so great, it can just take it from your employer after you earn it but before your employer pays you — before you even see the cash — and use it as it sees fit. This presumes that the federal government has a greater right to your income than you do. There really can be no rationale for income taxes without that belief. Do you know anyone outside the government who believes this? If you believe you have the natural right to own your property and to trade and spend your money as you see fit, then there is only one Republican presidential candidate who agrees with you. That candidate, when asked last week in South Carolina what the rate of income taxes should be, replied: ZERO. One needs to laugh at Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as they pitifully attempt to defend natural rights and the right to pursue happiness, when they have no respect for the right to own private property. The absence of economic freedom today is nothing new and didn't come about overnight. It is the culmination of the Progressive Era, which gave us the Federal Reserve and the income tax; the New Deal, which gave us the beginning of entitlements; the Great Society, which enhanced the numbers of people who received entitlements; Ronald Reagan, who bashed entitlements during the six years he was running for president but did nothing to dismantle them; and every president from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, all of whom just accepted the welfare and warfare state as if the Constitution didn't exist. Today, we have President Obama, committed to private ownership but government control of the means of production, who wants to enhance the welfare and warfare state by having socialized medicine and perpetual war at the same time. The essence of the governmental assaults on freedom is presidentially proposed, congressionally engineered and judicially accepted redistribution of wealth via the central planning of the economy. And the consequence of all this is the present lamentable state of affairs where half the country is financially dependent on the other half. When this state of affairs was reached in Ayn Rand's great novel "Atlas Shrugged," she had the productive half stop working just to see what the government would do. It wasn't pretty. Obama's beloved Dodd-Frank law is the latest act of government theft of freedom in the name of economic equality. It brings us one step closer to total government control of the means of producing wealth. With its unaccountable bureaucracy, Federal Reserve-generated funding, and standardless and appeal-proof rulemaking, it reposes into the hands of an unconfirmed-by-the-Senate nanny stater the power to monitor and to regulate virtually all economic activity in the U.S. Do you know anyone outside the government who wants this? There is not a single example in human history of central economic planning producing more prosperity than a free market. The framers understood that. That's why they wrote a Constitution that prohibited an income tax, forbade the states from interfering with contracts, and prevented the feds from taking life, liberty or property without due process. All those constitutional prohibitions have been nullified by amendment or disregarded by consensus. Do you know anyone inside the government who admits this? The need for a game changer in the White House, who will commit the government to the defense of private property and free enterprise, is obvious. There is only one on the ballot in South Carolina, and he's creeping up in the polls just like he did in the days before Iowa and New Hampshire. You know who he is.
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Post by philunderwood on Jan 25, 2012 7:35:23 GMT -5
A Few Words About Abortion By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Last week marked the 39th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that permitted abortions. Prior to that case, abortion was regulated by each state, and most of them prohibited it unless two physicians could certify that the baby growing in the mother's womb would likely result in the death of the mother. Even the states that permitted abortions when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, an extremely rare occurrence, did not permit it after the sixth month of pregnancy. Roe vs. Wade changed all that. It permits abortions in all 50 states during the first three months of pregnancy for any reason or for no reason. It permits abortions during the second three months of pregnancy for the health of the mother. "Health of the mother" can mean mental health; thus, most states have taken the liberal position that if a continued pregnancy would make the mom sad or challenge her psychologically, or if she has second thoughts about the pregnancy, the baby may be aborted. Roe vs. Wade also permits the states to prohibit or to allow abortions during the last three months of pregnancy. Most states prohibit all abortions during the final three months, as this is the period of viability; when the baby can live — assisted, of course — outside the mother's womb. New Jersey, my home state, is the exception, as it permits abortions up to the moment of birth. In the past 39 years, American physicians have performed more than 50 million abortions. Abortion is the most frequent medical procedure performed in the U.S. The linchpin to Roe vs. Wade is the Court's rationale that because the decision to undergo an abortion ordinarily occurs between patient and physician, and because that interaction ordinarily takes place in private, the right to privacy insulates abortion from the reach of the State. Roe vs. Wade itself does not define the right to an abortion, but it does unambiguously declare that the baby in the womb is not a person, and that the right to privacy protects the mother's decision to kill the baby. Did you catch that? The Supreme Court declared that the baby in the womb is not a person. When it made that declaration, it rejected dozens of decisions of other courts, in America and in Great Britain, holding that the baby in the womb is a person. This is reminiscent of the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 in which it ruled that blacks were not persons. In both cases, it cited no precedent, it gave no rational basis, and in Roe vs. Wade, it merely said that because philosophers, physicians and lawyers could not agree on whether babies in wombs are persons, it would declare them not to be persons. If the baby in the womb is a person, then all abortion is unlawful. That's because of the constitutional protection for all persons. The Constitution unambiguously prohibits the government from impairing or permitting others to impair the life, liberty and property of persons without due process. Here's my political beef with so-called pro-life politicians in both parties. In the years in which the pro-life Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush were in the White House, from time to time, both chambers of Congress had pro-life majorities. Did you see any legislation passed that declared a baby in the womb to be a person? No. This could have been done by a simple majority vote and presidential signature, and Roe vs. Wade, and all the killing it spawned, would have ended. How scary is this? The Supreme Court declares a class of humanity not to be persons, and then permits people to destroy the members of the class. That's what happened to blacks during slavery; that was the philosophical argument underlying the Holocaust; that's what is happening to babies in the womb today; and that might become the basis for the government killing persons it hates or fears in the future. It will declare them to be non-persons. Is the baby in the womb a person? Of course babies in wombs are persons. From the moment of the union of egg and sperm, there is present a fully actualizable human genome; meaning all the genetic material necessary for post-birth existence is there. And the parents of that union are human beings. With human parents and a human genome, what else could a baby in a womb be but a person? If you have any doubt, why not give the benefit of that doubt to life, rather than to death? Unless you prefer death to life and killing to nurturing and misery to joy, I expect you agree. Since you have been reading this essay, 10 babies have lost their lives, as abortions occur in the U.S. about two and a half times a minute. How long can a society last when we cannot protect the weakest among us, and when we destroy them out of convenience, and when we make that destruction legal? Who will be destroyed next?
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Post by philunderwood on Feb 2, 2012 8:59:28 GMT -5
What Is a Just War? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | When President Obama announced last April that he was sending the United States military to bomb Libya, he not only violated the United States Constitution, which he has taken an oath to uphold, but he also violated the moral principles of the just war. The Constitution permits only Congress to declare war and the president to initiate on his own only a truly defensive war. When the president takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, he also promises to uphold the treaties into which the U.S. has entered and the laws that have been written pursuant to those treaties. St. Thomas Aquinas is the modern articulator of the idea that governments are required to follow the same moral principles as the rest of us. This is particularly so in the case of a government that claims its source of power is the consent of the governed. St. Thomas More once put it this way: "Some men say the earth is round and some say it is flat. If it is round, can the King's command flatten it; and if it is flat, can Parliament make it round?" Of course, the answer to those questions is no; and the reason it is no is that kings and parliaments — all governments — just like all living beings, are subject to the laws of nature. One of those laws was articulated by Aquinas and embraced by More and accepted by Thomas Jefferson and taught by many Judeo-Christian scholars, and was eventually engrafted into treaties and into American law. It is the concept of the just war. In American law and culture, for war to be valid, it must not only be lawful, meaning either declared by Congress or defensive; it must also be just. What is a just war? For a war to be just, generally, a half-dozen principles must be met. First, since force destroys, and there is a presumption against its use, the presumption must be overcome by first using all peaceful and viable means and alternatives to war; and it must be clear that these alternatives are fruitless before a war can be just. Second, the cause must be just; that is, the purpose of the war must be to correct a grave, profound, enduring public evil that directly impairs the freedom or safety of those contemplating war. Third, only a lawfully competent authority may commence the use of violence, as was not the case when President Johnson bombed North Vietnam or President Nixon bombed Cambodia or President Obama bombed Libya. Thus, the internal laws of the nation using military violence must be crafted so that war is the public policy of the nation, not just the temporary personal preference of whoever is running the government. Fourth, there must be a probability of success, so that men and women are not sent to certain death for a lost cause. Fifth, the use of force must be proportional to the harm it seeks to eradicate; thus, no more persons may be harmed by the use of military force than are absolutely necessary to achieve the just goals of the war. Finally, the war must be fought fairly and ended quickly. Have you ever heard of these rules before? Since they're universally accepted in the West, wouldn't you expect that they'd be discussed and debated openly? Did the Congress apply these rules to any war in your lifetime? Congress has not declared war since Dec. 8, 1941. But it has, from time to time, debated these principles while it permitted the president to fight unjust wars. It did so when LBJ tricked it into adopting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, authorizing him to bomb North Vietnam, a backward country that posed no threats to America. It debated these values when it enacted the War Powers Act in 1973 in order to restrain Nixon from bombing Cambodia, another country that did not harm and could not have harmed the U.S. It did not debate these principles when it authorized President George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The problem with most wars is that they are more strategic and adventurist than they are just. We now know that Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the U.S. Regrettably, it took 5,000 American lives, more than a half-million Iraqi lives, nearly a trillion borrowed dollars and two presidential election campaigns for voters to realize that. What was the grave, profound, enduring public evil from Iraq that directly threatened the freedom or safety of Americans? There wasn't one. The same may be said for Afghanistan, about which, shortly before he was fired, Gen. James Jones, Obama's first national security adviser and a former Marine commandant, stated that the U.S. had 100,000 troops wasting their time chasing fewer than 100 al-Qaida there. Did we assure that no more innocents — or even combatants — died than was necessary to end that war? No. And my guess is that you don't know anyone in America whose freedom and safety were threatened by the Libyan government last April. The concept of a just war can induce a debate without end, unless and until we repose the Constitution for safekeeping into the hands of men and women who accept the concept. If we do that, we will bring the troops home and save many lives and much taxpayer money and be free and safe and prosperous. If we don't, it seems whoever is the president gets to fight whatever wars he wants. Is that what you want?
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Post by philunderwood on Feb 9, 2012 10:01:47 GMT -5
Do Catholics Have Too Many Babies? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | When we were colonists and fought a war against the king and Parliament so that we could secede from the British Empire and be independent of it, we also fought for the value of personal freedom. That is the idea that in matters of personal choice, the government should play no role. The king only cared about the colonists' personal choices if he could control or tax them. One of the taxes he imposed was to support the Church of England. The Church of England that the colonists' tax dollars supported was, of course, in England; it was not here. So, among the hateful taxes that impelled the colonists to revolt was this tax to support the king's church. When the Constitution was written, religious freedom was a principal matter for discussion and debate among the Framers. They addressed this in the first clause of the First Amendment. Before the Constitution even protects the freedom of speech, it protects the natural right to worship or not to worship, free from the government. Here is what it says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." That is very direct and clear. It was intended to prevent any tax money from going to a church, and it was intended to keep the government from using its coercive powers to influence or to punish religious institutions. For 125 years, most governments in America left churches alone. Then along came the progressive attitude that some ethnic groups are superior to others. This is a damnable and racist view that was foist upon the federal government by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, in direct response to the influx of southern European immigrants at the beginning of the last century, most of whom were Catholic. Roosevelt and Wilson and their progressive followers thought these immigrants had too many children, children who would grow up to be voters and vote out their Nanny State central-planning values. So they began to encourage birth control and sterilizations and even abortions. The Catholic Church resisted this by its teachings on birth control. The Church had made its teaching on contraception a core part of its mission for 400 years, and Pope Paul VI reaffirmed these teachings in a permanent way in 1968. That the Church embraces these teachings is well known, and equally as well known is the policy of the federal government to resist them. But that resistance reached unconstitutional proportions a few weeks ago when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, herself a Catholic, issued regulations that require all employers in America to provide health insurance that makes contraceptive materials and devices available to their employees. The "all employers" includes Catholic universities, Catholic hospitals, Catholic schools and even local Catholic churches. The failure to comply with this law will result in a fine to these institutions and the provision of contraceptive coverage to their employees by the government itself. This is quite literally Congress making a law that interferes with the free exercise of religion. This is not about the morality of contraception. This is about the constitutionality of government coercion, coercion of religious institutions, coercion directly and profoundly prohibited by the Constitution itself. The motivation for the coercion — that Catholics have too many babies — is reprehensible, and those in government who embrace that and are willing to use the power of government to resist that should be voted out of office. But the coercion is the same as that faced by the folks who seceded from England because of the king's tax to pay for his church. We have a king today, and he wants a tax to pay for his church. The king is the president, and his church is called Obamacare. We can't let this happen here. This is not just a Catholic issue. This is an issue about whether the Constitution means what it says. Does the Constitution let the government compel Jews to eat pork, or Protestants to genuflect, or Muslims to own dogs, or Catholics to pay for contraception? The answer is obvious.
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Post by Ritty77 on Feb 9, 2012 21:30:32 GMT -5
I already thought we had free or low-cost , easy access contraception availability?
The Libs are now calling free contraceptives a "right." So now we have to subsidize people getting their rocks off?
They brought this issue up to get out the talking points in case Santorum takes hold and to have another issue (ANY issue) other than the economy. I don't think they expected as much backlash, though.
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Post by philunderwood on Feb 16, 2012 8:33:08 GMT -5
Time To Tame the Federal Beast By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | When the federal government was created, those who risked their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honors to secede from England were animated by recent events. The government did not come into existence in a vacuum. Rather, those who led the Revolutionary War joined those who fought and financed it to create a central government that would be constitutionally incapable of doing to Americans what King George III and Parliament did to the colonists. The king abridged many personal freedoms, but among them, religion and the right to keep income were at the top of the list, along with the freedom of speech and the right to be left alone. The reason that religious rights and property rights so animated the Founders is simple: They had been aggressively assaulted by the British government, and most of it had to do with money. The king and Parliament imposed a tax on the colonists to support the king's church in England. And the king and Parliament imposed an obligation on the colonists to purchase the king's stamps and to affix them to all papers in their possession in America. The Stamp Act led to the invasion of the colonists' homes by British soldiers without warrants, ostensibly looking for the stamps. Both of these taxes led to the Revolution, and the bitter aftertaste they left behind, in turn, led to a firm determination on the part of those who wrote the Constitution to craft a document that would assure that the new government would be constitutionally incapable of similar behavior. How well have the Framers' hopes and plans and constitutional craftsmanship worked out? Not very well. I have written six books about the violations of the Constitution that the government has gotten away with. The feds take your taxes and give it to folks who will vote for them. They even fine churches that fail to violate their core teachings on contraception. These are not light or fleeting issues. Today, Americans who rely on government entitlements receive an average of $32,700 worth of benefits every year. The average American's annual income after taxes — Americans who work, not those who receive benefits — is $32,400. This is the first time in history that we have seen this inversion. I realize that this is just an average, but the numbers show, by a tiny amount, that the average recipient of entitlements has more disposable wealth than the average wage earner. These entitlements cost the taxpayers about $2.5 trillion per year. The federal government collects only $2.5 trillion a year in revenue. So, the rest of the government — defense, justice, the goons in the TSA, national parks, even the Post Office — is paid for by borrowing. And most of the borrowing is paid for by the Federal Reserve printing cash. And that causes inflation, which decreases the purchasing power of your savings. On top of all of this is Obamacare. That is the president's signature piece of legislation. It is the instrument by which the president is threatening to fine religious institutions — mostly Catholic — that dare not to pay for contraception health care coverage for their employees. That would be the same Obamacare that is forcing every person in America to buy health insurance. This brings us back to where we started historically: The last time the central government in America tried to force all Americans to buy something against their will, it was the king of England and his Stamp Act. And that fomented the Revolution. You can see how far we have come from the freedom the Framers intended — and how far we need to travel to return. The federal government refuses to leave us alone. It taxes too much, borrows too much, regulates too much, gives away too much money and is in our faces over something as intimate as contraception. We need a game changer in the White House, now more than ever.
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Post by philunderwood on Mar 8, 2012 11:21:26 GMT -5
Can the President Kill You? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Can the president kill an American simply because the person is dangerous and his arrest would be impractical? Can the president be judge, jury and executioner of an American in a foreign country because he believes that would keep America safe? Can Congress authorize the president to do this? Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to justify presidential killing in a speech at Northwestern University law school. In it, he recognized the requirement of the Fifth Amendment for due process. He argued that the president may substitute the traditionally understood due process -- a public jury trial -- with the president's own novel version of it; that would be a secret deliberation about killing. Without mentioning the name of the American the president recently ordered killed, Holder suggested that the president's careful consideration of the case of New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki constituted a substituted form of due process. Holder argued that the act of reviewing al-Awlaki's alleged crimes, what he was doing in Yemen and the imminent danger he posed provided al-Awlaki with a substituted form of due process. He did not mention how this substitution applied to al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son and a family friend, who were also executed by CIA drones. And he did not address the utter absence of any support in the Constitution or Supreme Court case law for his novel theory. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that the government may not take the life, liberty or property of any person without due process. Due process has numerous components, too numerous to address here, but the essence of it is "substantive fairness" and a "settled fair procedure." Under due process, when the government wants your life, liberty or property, the government must show that it is entitled to what it seeks by articulating the law it says you have violated and then proving its case in public to a neutral jury. And you may enjoy all the constitutional protections to defend yourself. Without the requirement of due process, nothing would prevent the government from taking anything it coveted or killing anyone -- American or foreign -- it hated or feared. The killing of al-Awlaki and the others was without any due process whatsoever, and that should terrify all Americans. The federal government has not claimed the lawful power to kill Americans without due process since the Civil War; even then, the power to kill was claimed only in actual combat. Al-Awlaki and his son were killed while they were driving in a car in the desert. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the Constitution applies in war and in peace. Even the Nazi soldiers and sailors who were arrested in Amagansett, N.Y., and in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., during World War II were entitled to a trial. The legal authority in which Holder claimed to find support was the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was enacted by Congress in the days following 9/11. That statute permits the president to use force to repel those who planned and plotted 9/11 and who continue to plan and plot the use of terror tactics to assault the United States. Holder argued in his speech that arresting al-Awlaki -- who has never been indicted or otherwise charged with a crime but who is believed to have encouraged terrorist attacks in the U.S. -- would have been impractical, that killing him was the only option available to prevent him from committing more harm, and that Congress must have contemplated that when it enacted the AUMF. Even if Holder is correct -- that Congress contemplated presidential killing of Americans without due process when it enacted the AUMF -- such a delegation of power is not Congress' to give. Congress is governed by the same Constitution that restrains the president. It can no more authorize the president to avoid due process than it can authorize him to extend his term in office beyond four years. Instead of presenting evidence of al-Awlaki's alleged crimes to a grand jury and seeking an indictment and an arrest and a trial, the president presented the evidence to a small group of unnamed advisers, and then he secretly decided that al-Awlaki was such an imminent threat to America 10,000 miles away that he had to be killed. This is logic more worthy of Joseph Stalin than Thomas Jefferson. It effectively says that the president is above the Constitution and the rule of law, and that he can reject his oath to uphold both. If the president can kill an American in Yemen, can he do so in Peoria? Even the British king, from whose tyrannical grasp the American colonists seceded, did not claim such powers. And we fought a Revolution against him.
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Post by philunderwood on Mar 15, 2012 8:47:56 GMT -5
Can the Secret Service Tell You To Shut Up? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | The First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from infringing upon the freedom of speech, the freedom of association and the freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Speech is language and other forms of expression; and association and petition connote physical presence in reasonable proximity to those of like mind and to government officials, so as to make your opinions known to them. The Declaration of Independence recognizes all three freedoms as stemming from our humanity. So, what happens if you can speak freely, but the government officials at whom your speech is aimed refuse to hear you? And what happens if your right to associate and to petition the government is confined to areas where those of like mind and the government are not present? This is coming to a street corner near you. Certain rights, like thought and privacy and travel, can be exercised on their own. You don't need the government to cooperate with you; you just need to be left alone. Other rights, like those intended to influence the political process, require that the government not resist your exercise of them. Remember the old one-liner from Philosophy 101: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make any noise? Here's the contemporary version of that: If you can criticize the government, but it refuses to hear you, does your exercise of the freedom of speech have any value? When the Framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment, they lived in a society in which anyone could walk up to George Washington or John Adams or Thomas Jefferson on a public street and say directly to them whatever one wished. They never dreamed of a regal-like force of armed agents keeping public officials away from the public, as we have today. And they never imagined that it could be a felony for anyone to congregate in public within earshot or eyesight of certain government officials. And yet, today in America, it is. Last week, President Obama signed into law the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. This law permits Secret Service agents to designate any place they wish as a place where free speech, association and petition of the government are prohibited. And it permits the Secret Service to make these determinations based on the content of speech. Thus, federal agents whose work is to protect public officials and their friends may prohibit the speech and the gatherings of folks who disagree with those officials or permit the speech and the gatherings of those who would praise them, even though the First Amendment condemns content-based speech discrimination by the government. The new law also provides that anyone who gathers in a "restricted" area may be prosecuted. And because the statute does not require the government to prove intent, a person accidentally in a restricted area can be charged and prosecuted, as well. Permitting people to express publicly their opinions to the president only at a time and in a place and manner such that he cannot hear them violates the First Amendment because it guarantees the right to useful speech; and unheard political speech is politically useless. The same may be said of the rights to associate and to petition. If peaceful public assembly and public expression of political demands on the government can be restricted to places where government officials cannot be confronted, then those rights, too, have been neutered. Political speech is in the highest category of protected speech. This is not about drowning out the president in the Oval Office. This is about letting him know what we think of his work when he leaves the White House. This is speech intended to influence the political process. This abominable legislation enjoyed overwhelming support from both political parties in Congress because the establishment loves power, fears dissent and hates inconvenience, and it doesn't give a damn about the Constitution. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and only three members of the House voted against it. And the president signed it in secret. It is more typical of contemporary China than America. It is more George III than George Washington. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to assure open, wide, robust, uninhibited political debate, debate that can be seen and heard by those it seeks to challenge and influence, whether it is convenient for them or not. Anything short of that turns the First Amendment into a mirage.
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Post by philunderwood on Mar 22, 2012 8:03:32 GMT -5
Is the CIA in Your Kitchen? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | If this question had been asked by a fictional character in a spy thriller, it might intrigue you, but you wouldn't imagine that it could be true in reality. If the Constitution means what it says, you wouldn't even consider the plausibility of an affirmative answer. After all, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was written to prevent the government from violating on a whim or a hunch or a vendetta that uniquely American right: the right to be left alone. Everyone wants, at some point in the day, at some places in the home, to be left alone. The colonists who fought the war of secession from Great Britain were no different. But that war and the wish to keep the government at bay had been heightened by the colonial experiences involved in the enforcement of the Stamp Act. That law, which applied to the colonies and not to residents of Great Britain, required that government stamps be purchased and printed on all legal, financial and even political documents in the possession of every colonist. The enforcement of that law — which was done by British soldiers who entered private homes armed not only with guns but also with search warrants that they had written for themselves, which Parliament authorized them to do — was so disturbing and resulted in such anti-British political animosity that Parliament eventually rescinded the act. But the damage to British rule had been done, and it was irreparable. After the Founders won the Revolution and wrote the Constitution and added the Bill of Rights, they rested in the assurance that only judges could issue search warrants "particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized," and that judges could only do so if they found probable cause of criminal behavior in the place the government targeted. The war on drugs has regrettably weakened the intended protections of the Fourth Amendment, and the Patriot Act — which permits federal agents to write their own search warrants — has dealt it a serious blow. That act, which has not yet been ruled upon by the Supreme Court, fortunately has not yet animated the Supreme Court's privacy jurisprudence. Last year, the court invalidated the police use of warrantless heat-seeking devices aimed at the home, and it will probably soon invalidate the warrantless use of GPS devices secretly planted by cops in cars. Regrettably, unless the government attempts to use the data it has illegally gathered about a person, the person probably will not be aware of the government's spying on him, and thus will not be in a position to challenge the spying in a court. Relying on the Patriot Act, federal agents have written their own search warrants just like the British soldiers did. They have done this more than 250,000 times since 2001. But the government has rarely used any evidence from these warrants in a criminal prosecution for fear that the targeted person would learn of the government's unconstitutional and nefarious behavior, and for fear that the act would be invalidated by federal courts. Now, back to the CIA in your kitchen. When Congress created the CIA in 1947, it expressly prohibited the agency from spying on Americans in America. Nevertheless, it turns out that if your microwave, burglar alarm or dishwasher is of very recent vintage, and if it is connected to your personal computer, a CIA spy can tell when you are in the kitchen and when you are using that device. The person who revealed this last weekend also revealed that CIA software can learn your habits from all of this and then (SET ITL) anticipate them. Acting "diabolically" and hoping to "change fingerprints and eyeballs" in its "worldwide mission" to steal and keep secrets, the CIA can then gut the Fourth Amendment digitally, without ever physically entering anyone's home. We already know that your BlackBerry or iPhone can tell a spy where you are and, when the battery is connected, what you are saying. But spies in the kitchen? Can this be true? Who revealed all this last weekend? None other than Gen. David Petraeus himself, President Obama's new director of the CIA. I wonder whether he knows about the Fourth Amendment and how the Supreme Court has interpreted it and that federal laws prohibit his spies from doing their work in America. I wonder whether he or the president even cares. Do you?
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