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Post by philunderwood on Aug 16, 2012 6:39:20 GMT -5
November's Choices By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | We are in terrible straits this presidential election. We have a choice between a president who has posed more of a danger to personal freedom than any in the past 150 years and a Republican team that wants to return to Bush-style big government. President Barack Obama has begun to show his hand at private fundraisers and in unscripted comments during his campaign. And the essence of his revelations is dark. His vision of a shared prosperity should frighten everyone who believes in freedom, because it is obvious that the president doesn't. He believes the federal government somehow possesses power from some source other than the Constitution that enables it to take from the rich and give to the poor. He calls this "a new vision of an America in which prosperity is shared," and he declared, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." Today in America, nearly half of all households receive either a salary or some financial benefit from the government; the other half pay for it. In Obama's vision for America, no one will be permitted to become too rich, no matter his skills and hard work. He somehow believes that government seizures and transfers of wealth generate prosperity. We know, of course, that the opposite occurs. Seizing wealth through taxation removes it from the private sector for investment. That produces job losses and government dependence on a massive scale. The federal government has a debt of $16 trillion. We have that debt because both political parties have chosen to spend today and put the burden of paying for the spending onto future generations. The debt keeps increasing, and the feds have no intention of paying it off. Every time the government has wanted to increase its lawful power to borrow since World War II, members of Congress and presidents from both parties have permitted it to do so. Last week, Gov. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, blasted Obama for borrowing more than one trillion dollars in just the past year. He must have forgotten to look at the voting record of his designated running mate, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan. Ryan voted for nearly every request to raise the debt ceiling during his 14 years in Congress. He voted for TARP, the GM bailout and most of the recent stimulus giveaways. He also voted to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on a credit card, which added another trillion dollars to the government's debt. And he voted to assault the Constitution by supporting the Patriot Act and its extensions, as well as Obama's unconstitutional proposal to use the military to arrest Americans on American soil and detain those arrested indefinitely. We have a rough idea of how Obama would bring about government control of private industry through Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. From Ryan's voting record, we have a rough idea of what Romney-Ryan would bring us: more of the Bush-era big government. In other words, Ryan is just another big-government Republican holding himself out as a fiscal conservative. Even his controversial budget proposals — which the House approved, but the Senate declined to address — would have increased government spending. It was less of an increase than Obama wanted, which is why the Senate Democrats refused to consider it, but it was not a cut in spending. I am a firm believer that the Constitution means what it says. The federal government can only do what the Constitution authorizes it to do. The modern-day Republican and Democratic Parties have made a shambles of that principle. Nevertheless, I understand the "anybody but Obama" urge among those who fear his excesses, as do I. Obama has killed innocents, altered laws, rejected his oath to enforce the law faithfully, and threatened to assault the liberty and property of Americans he hates and fears. Even though Ryan is a smart and humble and likeable man who was once a disciple of Ayn Rand on economics, as am I, the Republicans want the Bush days of war and spending beyond our means and assaults on civil liberties to return. The Bush years were bad for freedom; without them, we would not have had an Obama administration. Which do you want?
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Post by philunderwood on Aug 30, 2012 17:07:35 GMT -5
Abortion and Rape By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | The criticisms of the recent absurd comments by Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin, who at this writing is his party's nominee to take on incumbent Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in November in a contest he had been expected to win, have focused on his clearly erroneous understanding of the human female anatomy. In a now infamous statement, in which he used the bizarre and unheard-of phrase "legitimate rape," the congressman gave the impression that some rapes of women are not mentally or seriously resisted. This is an antediluvian and misogynistic myth for which there is no basis in fact and which has been soundly and justly condemned. Akin also stated that the female anatomy can resist unwanted impregnation. This, too, is absurd, offensive and incorrect. Medical science has established conclusively that women cannot internally block an unwanted union of egg and sperm, no matter the relationship between male and female. I think even schoolchildren understand that. What has gone unmentioned, however, in the cacophony of condemnation by Republicans and Democrats, is the implication in Akin's comments that rape is not a moral justification for abortion. In that, he is correct: It is not. Abortion takes the life of innocent human beings who are the most vulnerable in our society. Abortion is today the most frequently performed medical procedure in the United States. American physicians perform about two abortions every minute of every hour of every day: about 1 million a year since 1973. In my home state of New Jersey, abortion is permitted up to the moment of birth, and the state will even pay for it if the mother meets certain financial criteria. How low have we sunk? What are the consequences of this mass slaughter? How did we get here? We got here because of the most reprehensible and unconstitutional Supreme Court opinion in the modern era. In a throwback to its infamous Dred Scott decision — in which a pre-Civil War Supreme Court declared that blacks are not persons and hence cannot claim the protections of the Constitution — the court essentially said in Roe vs. Wade the same of fetuses in the womb. Roe vs. Wade has spawned more slaughter than all 20th-century tyrants combined. The consequences of this slaughter are vast lost generations of human beings who were denied by the law the right to live. The economic consequences from which we all suffer today — entitlements too costly to afford and too few wage earners to pay for them — are directly attributable to the absence of population growth. I am not arguing in favor of entitlements. The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to provide them. But when FDR and LBJ concocted their entitlement schemes in order to build permanent dependence on the Democratic Party, they understood population growth. Their understanding, too, was slaughtered by abortion. A society that prefers death to life not only cannot prosper; it cannot survive. Soon 40 percent of federal tax revenues will be dedicated to interest on the federal debt, and most of that borrowing has been to pay for entitlements. We are headed for a cliff. So are the babies in the womb. But isn't the baby in a womb a person? Of course the baby in a womb is a person. The baby is produced by the physical interaction of two human parents, and every unborn baby possesses a fully actualizable human genome: all the material necessary to grow to adulthood and to exist independently outside the womb. What about rape? Rape is among the more horrific violations of human dignity imaginable. But it is a crime committed by the male, not the female — and certainly not by the child it might produce. When rape results in pregnancy, the baby has the same right to life as any child born by mutually loving parents. Only the Nazis would punish a child for the crimes of his or her father. Every abortion ends the life of an innocent unborn human being. When politicians in both parties claim to be pro-life but favor abortions because of the criminal behavior of the father, as in rape or incest, they are politically rejecting that hard truth. What other violations of the natural law will they condone for political expedience?
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 4, 2012 9:21:30 GMT -5
Two Failures By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Obama is a failure as a president, and Gov. Romney is a failure as a candidate. When he took office, Obama told the press that if he couldn't cure the economic mess he inherited from President George W. Bush in four years, he wouldn't deserve a second term. I guess he didn't anticipate making the mess worse. When he took office, the federal government owed $11 trillion to its creditors; today it owes $16 trillion. When he took office, gasoline was running about $1.85 a gallon and today costs about $3.85 a gallon. This is price inflation that he directly caused by flooding the markets with cash, and that directly harms the middle class and the poor. Unemployment has remained north of 8 percent throughout his presidency for those still looking for a job, and about 16 percent if you count all able-bodied out-of-work adults, half of whom have stopped looking for work on his watch. He supported radical fanatics in their takeovers of the governments of Libya and Egypt, even going so far as to help them kill Col. Gadhafi, the former Libyan strongman who was once our ally. In the process, they opened jails in Libya, and out came some of the same folks the U.S. government has been fighting against in the Middle East since 2001. Obama pushed from power Hosni Mubarak, the strongman in Cairo, and he was replaced by the head of a criminal organization that Obama's own State Department has prohibited Americans from engaging with. (Query: If the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, how can the government help a foreign group and at the same time prohibit Americans from doing the same?) In his lust to build a new world order in the Middle East, a goal for which he roundly criticized President George W. Bush, Obama has unilaterally, unconstitutionally and unlawfully killed Americans there. He killed Osama bin Laden when he could have captured him, and he let a mob kill our ambassador to Libya when he could have protected him — all to justify a value-free foreign policy that has no lasting friends or enemies, just fleeting interests. And he has killed thousands in foreign lands in secret, using drones that will soon find their way here and come back to haunt him. Perhaps the next month will prove me wrong on Romney, but so far he is putting the electorate to sleep. I believe him when he claims to favor free market approaches to the nation's economic ills, but I don't believe him when he rails against big government and central economic planning, because his record belies his words. He is, of course, the father of the individual mandate — a totalitarian giant leap forward for the welfare state. And he has stated that if elected and re-elected, he will borrow money every year he is in office until the last. When he was interviewed with the president on "60 Minutes" last week, I purposely did not watch or listen to the show. The next morning, I read the transcript of the interview and thought many of Romney's answers were articulate and rational. Then I watched the same interview on tape and was bored nearly to death. Romney cannot put a fire in people's bellies. The only reason he gives for voting for him is that he is not Obama — a reason that appeals to just under half the country, but is not enough to seal the deal. He needs to recognize that his audience for victory is not his former neighbors in Boston, but Joe Sixpack in the heartland. He supports all of Obama's killings in the Middle East, but claims he wants to control events there with a more muscular foreign policy. He cannot justify that view, along with the fact that it has failed and put us close to bankruptcy, to an electorate weary of wars. He rips into Obama's borrowing, but overlooks his running mate's voting record in Congress, which authorized all of it. At first he vowed to repeal Obamacare saying it is unconstitutional, and then he said he wants to keep the parts he likes, even if they are unconstitutional. Can anyone get excited about Romney? Aside from a capitalistic attitude about the economy — as opposed to the president's love of central economic planning — does anyone know what views he will embrace on Inauguration Day? Do you know anyone just aching to vote for him, the way conservatives were for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and progressives were for Obama in 2008? I do not know of such a person. What do we do? The president's failures are legion and have made all of us the worse for them. Gov. Romney's failures are obvious and will give us four more years of Obama. Who says the system is not fixed?
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 11, 2012 8:56:09 GMT -5
Let Gary Johnson Debate By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Obama has been a failure. On his watch, the American economy has significantly deteriorated largely because he has stifled free market forces by over-regulating them and because he has laden taxpayers with debt. Those two factors alone — the federal government increasing the cost of doing business by telling businesses from physicians to major industries how to do their work, and the federal government spending trillions it doesn't have and pushing the debts onto future generations — are enough to sink any economy. In this arena, Mitt Romney has it half-right. He does understand that only free market forces can produce prosperity, but he fails to see that when the government spends what it doesn't have, the result is inflation and higher taxes for future generations. Why does the federal government now spend half a trillion a year in debt service? Because every president, Republicans as well as Democrats, from FDR to Obama has borrowed money in order to spend more than he collected and has let future generations deal with repaying the debt. Because the feds do not repay (they merely roll over) their debt, the cost of interest payments has skyrocketed. Romney's ability to articulate the virtues of the free market and to dance around the issue of debt, while the president nearly fell asleep, are the reasons he did so well in the presidential debate last week. In the realm of foreign affairs, the president has unleashed a torrent of violence in the Middle East by supporting some of the people his predecessor was fighting a few years ago. Those folks now run the government in Libya and Egypt, and those places are now unsafe for Americans. What would Romney do? He'd insert the U.S. military to extend American dominance and build a new world order. What has Obama done? He's bombed and killed innocents with drones. Neither has learned the lessons of 9/11: You cannot kill people or occupy foreign lands without moral and legal justification, lest you suffer deadly consequences. Because Romney and Obama are different only in degree, I wish the cabal of former leaders of the two major political parties that runs the debates would permit former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson to participate. He is the Libertarian Party candidate who is on the ballot in all 50 states and the only current national candidate who if elected would shrink the government and keep it within the confines of the Constitution. Don't hold your breath. The debates are crafted by the folks who run the Romney and Obama campaigns. Romney is afraid of Johnson because he might take the votes of those who are tired of unconstitutional government and deficits and war. Obama is afraid of Johnson because he might take the votes of those who are appalled at the government's murderous drug wars and its assaults on personal freedom and who also are tired of war. Both sides fear Johnson because he is essentially fearless when it comes to his belief that the Constitution means what it says — meaning if it does not authorize the feds to regulate health care, fight undeclared wars or mortgage the future, then they simply cannot do it. But the powers that run the means by which we elect presidents have decided that they can ill-afford a frontal assault on the big government they have created, on national television much less, and four weeks before a presidential election. You see, without Johnson in these debates, the argument will remain how much the feds should regulate, rather than whether they should do so. I was disappointed but not surprised when Romney defended the concept of the feds regulating ordinary commercial transactions and borrowing money to spend it on things like federal aid to education, rather than defending the free market and the constitutional restraints on the feds. Obama is either a Marxist who doesn't believe in personal freedom or private property, or a nihilist who doesn't believe in anything except his own ability to exercise governmental power. Romney sounds like another big-government Republican who wants to regulate part of the economy, fight wars on a credit card and let your grandchildren pay for it. If you want a real debate — one that will explore the proper constitutional role of the federal government in our lives before it gets so big that we cannot safely challenge it — you will be disappointed, unless Gary Johnson is let in.
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 18, 2012 8:53:07 GMT -5
Who Is Responsible for the Mess in Libya? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | How many times have you heard the truism that in modern-day America the cover-up is often as troubling as the crime? That is becoming quite apparent in the case of the death of Chris Stevens, the former U.S. ambassador to Libya. Stevens and three State Department employees were murdered in the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last month, on September 11th. About an hour before the murders, the ambassador, who usually resides in the U.S. embassy in Tripoli but was visiting local officials and staying at the consulate in Benghazi, had just completed dinner there with a colleague, whom he personally walked to the front gate of the compound. In the next three hours, hundreds of persons assaulted the virtually defenseless compound and set it afire. Around the same time that these crimes took place in Benghazi, a poorly produced, low-grade 15-minute YouTube clip was going viral on the Internet. The clip shows actors in dubbed voices portraying the prophet Mohammed and others in an unflattering light. The Obama administration seized upon the temporary prevalence of this clip to explain the assault on the consulate. Indeed, the administration sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to represent it on five Sunday morning TV talk shows on September 16th, to make the claim that the attack on the consulate was a spontaneous reaction to the YouTube clip, that it could not have been anticipated, and that the perpetrators were ordinary Libyans angry at the freedom moviemakers in America enjoy. Soon, U.S. intelligence reports were leaked that revealed that the intelligence community knew the attack was not as described by Rice. The intelligence folks on the ground in Libya reported before September 16th that the attack was well organized, utilized military equipment and tactics, and was carried out by local militias with ties to al-Qaida. In response to these leaks, the State Department, for which Rice works, acknowledged that the assault was an organized terrorist attack. The Obama administration has publicly rejected the intelligence leaks and insisted as recently as last week during the vice presidential debate that "we" did not know the assault was an act of terrorism against American personnel and property. The word "we" was uttered by Vice President Biden, whose credibility hit a new low when he insisted that the government did not know what we now know it knew. A day after the debate, the White House claimed that the "we" uttered by Biden referred to the president and the vice president, and not to the federal government or the State Department. This is semantics akin to Bill Clinton's "it depends what the meaning of 'is' is." Earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in one of her rare forays into domestic politics, backed up the White House. She actually claimed that the White House was kept in the dark by the State Department. What's going on here? What's going on here is the unraveling of a value-free foreign policy and its unintended consequences. The whole reason that the streets in Libya are not safe and the country is ruled by roving gangs of militias is because the U.S. bombed the country last year. In an unconstitutional act of war, the president alone ordered the bombing. It destroyed the Libyan military, national and local police, roads, bridges, and private homes. It facilitated the murder of our former ally Col. Gadhafi and ensured the replacement of him by a government that cannot govern. The consulate attack defies the claims of the president, articulated loud and long during this presidential campaign, that because he killed Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida is dead or dying, and the terrorists are at bay. Thus, in order to be faithful to his campaign rhetoric, the president has been unfaithful to the truth. I personally have seen excerpts from intelligence cables sent by American agents in Libya to Washington on September 12th, the day after the attack and four days before Rice's TV appearances, acknowledging the dominant role played by al-Qaida in the attack. So, who is to blame here? The president. He is responsible for destroying the government in Libya, and he is responsible for the security of U.S. personnel and property there. He is accountable to the American people, and he is expected to tell the truth. Instead, he has leaked the possibility of more bombings in Libya. These bombings would be more than a month after the Benghazi consulate attack and would attack the very government that Obama's 2011 bombs helped to install. Is it any wonder that Bill Clinton, in an unguarded private moment, referred to Obama as "the amateur"?
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Post by philunderwood on Oct 25, 2012 9:12:11 GMT -5
Silence on Libya By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | The final presidential debate earlier this week was a tailor-made opportunity for Mitt Romney to rip into President Obama's inconsistent, value-free and at times incoherent foreign policy. And it was also an opportunity for the president to explain his administration's material misrepresentations on the murders of our ambassador and others in Libya. Instead, we heard silence from both of them on this topic. One can conclude from this that the president uttered a silent sigh of relief when he dodged a bullet. And one can conclude that Romney wanted to look and sound presidential and emphasize his economic credentials and allay fears that he wants another war. Whatever the gain and whatever the strategy, this matter of American deaths in Libya is of vital importance to American voters. It is important because it shows how far the American government has drifted from the confines of the Constitution and how far we as a people have drifted from the rule of law. The president bombed Libya last year in a successful effort to remove Col. Gadhafi from power. Gadhafi was a monster, but he kept the streets safe, the mobs from foreign embassies and consulates, and the terrorists in jail. In 2005, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Gadhafi as a partner in the war on terror because he disposed of his nuclear weaponry and he arrested and resisted al-Qaida operatives. Obama, who last year claimed he did not have the time to seek authorization from Congress to bomb Libya as the Constitution requires, but did have the time to seek approvals from NATO and the Arab League, also claimed at the time and as recently as last Monday night that there were no American boots on the ground during the bombing. That, of course, is patently false and is known to be false. American fighter planes (boots in the skies) would not be sent to bomb a foreign land without guidance from troops on the ground. I suspect that by "boots," Obama meant "uniforms." We know that American intelligence agents and American Special Forces — neither of whose personnel wear uniforms, but most of whom no doubt wear boots on their feet in the Libyan desert — were there, are still there and were providing intelligence about Gadhafi and his military to aid the assault by U.S. warplanes. The assault was devastating not only to the Gadhafi government, but also to the Libyan people. It destroyed much of Libyan authority structures as they then existed. Not only were Libyan government personnel and buildings and equipment destroyed, but so were Libyan intelligence agents and assets, police stations, roads and bridges, and innocent civilians, as well. This resulted not only in the death of Gadhafi and the destruction of his government, but also in a vacuum into which moved the roving gangs of militias who reign there today. The militias opened up Gadhafi's jails and released many of the prisoners Bush and Blair had praised Gadhafi for incarcerating. Fast-forward to September 11th of this year, and some of these al-Qaida-led and populated gangs murdered our ambassador and his colleagues. The Obama administration — which knew of the al-Qaida role in all this and knew that the president's unconstitutional behavior facilitated that role — denied what it knew and dispatched the American ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, to deliver lies to the American public. Rice claimed on five TV shows that U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed by the spontaneous reaction of ordinary Libyans to a cheap Hollywood-made YouTube clip about Mohammed — not by an organized terrorist gang. Shortly after Stevens' murder, European newspapers began to speculate that though Stevens was the bona fide U.S. ambassador to Libya, he was also a member of the U.S. intelligence community, as were his now-murdered colleagues. Earlier this week, my colleagues at Fox News discovered that the building in which they were killed was and was known locally to be a CIA facility, and that the future Ambassador Stevens had used that facility to meet with Libyan rebels during the Gadhafi years. Now we can connect some dots. If Stevens was a CIA agent, he was in violation of international law by acting as the U.S. ambassador. And if he and his colleagues were intelligence officials, they are not typically protected by Marines, because they ought to have been able to take care of themselves. And if Rice knowingly lied to the American public about a matter as grave as this, she should be fired, no matter who asked her to lie. And 14 days before a crucial presidential election, when both major-party candidates have an audience of 60 million voters, why were they mysteriously silent about all this? Might U.S. intelligence agents who routinely brief Romney have whispered the same instructions into his ear that they received from the president when they briefed him? I still think Romney has a far better understanding of economic forces and a far superior appreciation for the free market than does Obama. But I had hoped he could demonstrate a better understanding of the proper role of the U.S. in foreign lands than has the president. On this from Romney, thus far we have heard only silence; from the president, only boasts.
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 8, 2012 9:27:23 GMT -5
Four more years to crush personal freedoms By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Only in America can a president who inherits a deep recession and whose policies have actually made the effects of that recession worse get re-elected. Only in America can a president who wants the bureaucrats who can't run the Post Office to micromanage the administration of every American's health care get re-elected. Only in America can a president who kills Americans overseas who have never been charged or convicted of a crime get re-elected. And only in America can a president who borrowed and spent more than $5 trillion in fewer than four years, plans to repay none of it and promises to borrow another $5 trillion in his second term get re-elected. What's going on here? What is going on is the present-day proof of the truism observed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who rarely agreed on anything in public: When the voters recognize that the public treasury has become a public trough, they will send to Washington not persons who will promote self-reliance and foster an atmosphere of prosperity, but rather those who will give away the most cash and thereby create dependency. This is an attitude that, though present in some localities in the colonial era, was created at the federal level by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, magnified by FDR, enhanced by LBJ, and eventually joined in by all modern-day Democrats and most contemporary Republicans. Mitt Romney is one of those Republicans. He is no opponent of federal entitlements, and he basically promised to keep them where they are. Where they are is a cost to taxpayers of about $1.7 trillion a year. Under President Obama, however, the costs have actually increased, and so have the numbers of those who now receive them. Half of the country knows this, and so it has gleefully sent Obama back to office so he can send them more federal cash taken from the other half. It is fair to say that Obama is the least skilled and least effective American president since Jimmy Carter, but he is far more menacing. His every instinct is toward the central planning of the economy and the federal regulation of private behavior. He has no interest in protecting American government employees in harm's way in Libya, and he never admits he has been wrong about anything. Though he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, he treats it as a mere guideline, whose grand principles intended to guarantee personal liberty and a diffusion of power can be twisted and compromised to suit his purposes. He rejects the most fundamental of American values — that our rights come from our Creator, and not from the government. His rejection of that leads him to an expansive view of the federal government, which permits it, and thus him, to right any wrong, to regulate any behavior and to tax any event, whether authorized by the Constitution or not, and to subordinate the individual to the state at every turn. As a practical matter, we are in for very difficult times during Obama's second term. Obamacare is now here to stay; so, no matter who you are or how you pay your medical bills, federal bureaucrats will direct your physicians in their treatment of you, and they will see your medical records. As well, Obama is committed to raising the debt of the federal government to $20 trillion. So, if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives goes along with this, as it did during Obama's first term, the cost will be close to $1 trillion in interest payments every year. As well, everyone's taxes will go up on New Year's Day, as the Bush-era tax cuts will expire then. The progressive vision of a populace dependent on a central government and a European-style welfare state is now at hand. Though I argued during the campaign that this election was a Hobson's choice between big government and bigger government, and that regrettably it addressed how much private wealth the feds should seize and redistribute and how much private behavior they should regulate, rather than whether the Constitution permits them to do so, and though I have argued that we have really one political party whose two branches mirror each other's wishes for war and power, it is unsettling to find Obama back in the White House for another four years. That sinking feeling comes from the knowledge that he is free from the need to keep an eye on the electorate, and from the terrible thought that he may be the authoritarian we have all known and feared would visit us one day and crush our personal freedoms.
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 15, 2012 7:46:34 GMT -5
Silencing General Petraeus By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | The evidence that Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the author of the current Army field manual, Princeton Ph.D. and, until last week, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was forced to resign from the CIA to silence him is far stronger than is the version of events that the Obama administration has given us. The government would have us believe that because the FBI confronted Petraeus with his emails showing a pattern of inappropriate personal private behavior, he voluntarily departed his job as the country's chief spy to avoid embarrassment. The government would also have us believe that the existence of the general's relationship with Paula Broadwell, an unknown military scholar who wrote a book about him last year, was recently and inadvertently discovered by the FBI while it was conducting an investigation into an alleged threat made by Broadwell to another woman. And the government would as well have us believe that the president learned of all this at 5 p.m. on Election Day. We now know that the existence of a personal relationship between Broadwell and Petraeus had been suspected and whispered about by his senior-level colleagues and by his personal staff in the military, who worried that it might become publicly known, since before the time that he came to run the CIA. We also know that when he was nominated to run the CIA, that nomination was preceded by a two-month FBI-conducted background check that likely would have revealed the existence of his relationship with Broadwell. The FBI agents conducting that background check surely would have seen his visitor logs while he commanded our troops and would have interviewed his military colleagues and regular visitors and those colleagues who knew him well and worked with him every day, and thus learned about his personal life. That's their job. And that information would have been reported immediately to President Obama and to the Senate Intelligence Committee, prior to Petraeus' formal nomination and prior to his Senate confirmation hearing. In the modern era, office-holders with forgiving spouses simply do not resign from powerful jobs because of a temporary, non-criminal, consensual adult sexual liaison, as the history of the FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton presidencies attest. So, why is Petraeus different? Someone wants to silence him. Petraeus told the Senate and House Intelligence Committees on September 14, 2012, that the mob attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, three days earlier, was a spontaneous reaction of Libyans angered over a YouTube clip some believed insulted the prophet Muhammad. He even referred to that assault — which resulted in the murders of four Americans, now all thought to have been CIA agents — as a "flash mob." His scheduled secret testimony this week before the same congressional committees will produce a chastened, diminished Petraeus who will be confronted with a mountain of evidence contradicting his September testimony, perhaps exposing him to charges of perjury or lying to Congress and causing substantial embarrassment to the president. It's obvious that someone was out to silence Petraeus. Who could believe the government version of all this? The same government that wants us to believe that FBI agents innocently and accidentally discovered the Petraeus/Broadwell affair a few months ago and confronted Petraeus with his emails a few weeks ago is a cauldron of petty jealousies. From the time of its creation in 1947, the CIA has been a bitter rival of the FBI. The two agencies are both equipped with lethal force, they both often operate outside the law, and they are each seriously potent entities. Their rivalry was tempered by federal laws that until 2001 kept the CIA from operating in the U.S. and the FBI from operating outside the U.S. In one of his many overreactions to the events of 9/11, however, President George W. Bush changed all that with an ill-conceived executive order that unlawfully unleashed the CIA inside the U.S. and the FBI into foreign countries. Rather than facilitating a cooperative spirit in defense of individual freedom and national security, this reignited their rivalry. FBI agents, for example, publicly exposed CIA agents whom they caught torturing detainees at Gitmo, and Bush was forced to restrain the CIA. Isn't it odd that FBI agents would be reading the emails of the CIA director to his mistress and that the director of the FBI, who briefs the president weekly, did not make the president aware of this? The FBI could only lawfully spy on Petraeus by the use of a search warrant, and it could only get a search warrant if its agents persuaded a federal judge that Petraeus himself — not his mistress — was involved in criminal behavior under federal law. The agents also could have bypassed the federal courts and written their own search warrant under the Patriot Act, but only if they could satisfy themselves (a curious and unconstitutional standard) that the general was involved in terror-related activity. Both preconditions for a search warrant are irrelevant and would be absurd in this case. All this — the FBI spying on the CIA — constitutes the government attacking itself. Anyone who did this when neither federal criminal law nor national security has been implicated and kept the president in the dark has violated about four federal statutes and should be fired and indicted. The general may be a cad and a bad husband, but he has the same constitutional rights as the rest of us. No keen observer could believe the government's Pollyanna version of these events. When did the CIA become a paragon of honesty? When did the FBI become a paragon of transparency? When did the government become a paragon of telling the truth?
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Post by philunderwood on Nov 29, 2012 10:03:31 GMT -5
Republicans and Taxes By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | When President Obama won re-election last month by a larger margin than even his most fervent supporters had expected, though with fewer popular votes than he received in 2008, most commentators initially opined that not much had changed in Washington. The president would remain in the White House for another four years, the Democrats would keep control of the Senate, and the House would stay in Republican hands. Most Republicans re-elected to both houses of Congress had publicly pledged not to vote to raise taxes under any circumstances. And most of those Republicans have adhered to that promise — until now. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the false congressional fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party began to reveal their true selves. Led by the Republican presidential standard bearer in 2008, Arizona Sen. John McCain, at least a half-dozen Republican members of Congress have renounced their public promises never to vote to raise taxes. In the case of Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., Congressman and Senator-elect Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., they had restated their promises, directly or indirectly, as recently as last month during their successful campaigns. Did they blatantly dupe the voters? Did they genuinely change their minds? Did they ever sincerely accept the pro-freedom anti-tax logic? The Founders certainly embraced the pro-freedom anti-tax logic, as they gave us a Constitution that barred the federal government from imposing any direct tax on any persons. That was part of the genius of the document. If the feds really needed cash, they'd need to tax the states. If the states were feeling over-taxed, they could block federal taxes in the Senate, where for 135 years senators were chosen by state governments as delegates to the Senate, rather than elected by voters. This procedure, too, was part of the Founders' genius. It came about in order to assure a place at the federal table for the states, many of which were older than the federal government and all of which retained their sovereignty when they voluntarily joined the union. This procedure for choosing senators was also a check on the growth of the federal government. Those constitutional provisions were cast aside during the progressive era about 100 years ago, when, during a period of just five years, the Constitution was amended so that the states lost their place at the federal table and Congress could tax incomes, and the feds got a new printing press for cash in the form of the Federal Reserve. I have described this dreadful time in our history in my new book, "Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom." (Buy the book for 41% off the cover price by clicking here or in KINDLE at a 52% discount, $11.99 by clicking here) The duo did so by inverting the concept of limited government. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln, every president from George Washington to TR's predecessor, William McKinley, accepted the truism that the federal government is one of limited powers, and it may only in engage in behavior that is specifically authorized by the Constitution or reasonably inferable therefrom. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who ran against each other and who hated each other, turned this value on its head. They jointly argued that the Constitution does not mean what it says and is not the Supreme Law of the Land as it states. They held that the federal government can do whatever it wishes unless those wishes are expressly prohibited by the Constitution. For 100 years, the Republican Party resisted the progressive onslaught. As recently as this past election just a few weeks ago, Republicans argued that increased tax revenue, whether from increased tax rates or from decreased tax deductions, effectively moves wealth from the productive sector and delivers it to the consuming sector — which would be the government. This argument is really one of the basic laws of economics, so why are Republicans now rejecting it? I suspect that they are drunk with power and have concluded that they — just like Obama did — can assure their re-elections, their continued possession of governmental power, if they deliver bigger pieces of the federal pie to the folks back home. Stated differently, they are unwilling to address a system that soon will deliver more in entitlement payments and interest payments on government debt than it collects in revenue by reducing the entitlements, shrinking the government, cutting the debt, returning to the confines of the Constitution and letting hardworking Americans retain what is theirs. Instead, they now want to raise federal taxes. They would be unwise to try to pull this off — and would be wise to recall recent history. The last Republican president to pledge "Read my lips. NO NEW TAXES" and then violate that promise was dispatched by the voters to a hotel suite in Houston, rather than to four more years in the White House. I bet George Herbert Walker Bush today would stick to his pledge.
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 6, 2012 8:49:54 GMT -5
Republicans for Big Government By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Do you know anyone who voted Republican this past election in order to further President Obama's big government agenda? Or is it more likely that Republican voters sought to advance a smaller version of the federal government? And if they did, why are Republican congressional leaders offering to help the president spend us into oblivion? I suspected that those questions might be asked when Mitt Romney was nominated to oppose Obama. My view of his campaign then and now has been that he presented a choice to the voters of big government versus bigger government, and bigger government prevailed. Romney argued during the campaign that he was at a disadvantage because the president had distributed federal tax dollars to persons and groups critical to his re-election. He has since argued that he lost the election because nearly half of Americans — some by chance, some by choice and some by force — are dependent on government for much of their income or subsistence. His argument sounds harsh, but it's true. A formerly working and now retired couple in their mid-80s who are receiving monthly payments from the Social Security Administration into which they were forced to make payments while they were working can hardly be considered slackers. But they can be considered dupes. All of us who have fallen for the government's nonsense about it holding our money for our future use have been duped. The government doesn't hold anyone's money for him. It spends whatever it collects as soon as it receives it. When its entitlement bills come due, it uses current tax revenue, or it borrows money in order to acquire the cash to make the payments. The president knows this. Congress knows it. The courts have endorsed it. In endorsing it, the courts have held that the government's decision to pay entitlements is a political, not a legal, one. Stated differently, the federal government has no legal obligation to pay any money to any Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid applicant. That's why those who have relied on the political wisdom of politicians, rather than their own prudential judgment, are dupes. Let me rephrase that: Those who have permitted politicians to use the force of law to compel us all to contribute our hard-earned income to a bankrupt government Ponzi scheme are dupes if they think this can work without end. When FDR first proposed his Social Security scheme, he knew that only force and duplicity would get enough people into the system to generate the cash flow at the entry side of the Ponzi scheme to make it salable to Congress and to the American people. LBJ knew the same was the case for his expansions of Social Security with Medicare and Medicaid. What LBJ probably did not anticipate is that health insurers would largely cease offering products of primary insurance to seniors, and thus seniors would require the government entitlements into which they had mistakenly believed they were contributing, because the government would become the only game in town. Now that the emperor has no clothes, and we are confronting more and more seniors who have been lulled into this false sense of security, and fewer young workers are even entering the job market, the government's voracious need for cash is difficult to fulfill. Earlier this year, when members of both parties in Congress recognized this ticking time bomb, they agreed to address it by punting. Now, that punted political football is falling to the earth, and no one wants to catch it. The punt they bequeathed to themselves is a tax increase for everyone and reductions in spending that even they find to be odious. The odor they dislike is the realization, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, that they are running out of other people's money. The president was re-elected on promises of more of the same: more borrowing, more spending and new taxes on the rich. The Republicans who got elected did so on promises of lessened spending and no new taxes, to paraphrase George H.W. Bush. The president, who is the most liberal president since Woodrow Wilson, is largely ignorant of economics 101. But his ignorance is consistent with his beliefs that the feds can continue to spend more than they collect and continue to borrow without ever repaying. The Republicans in the House are largely more conservative than at any time since Wilson left office. One would expect them to understand the intent of the voters who sent them there and thus say no to more taxes, no to more spending and no to more borrowing. Instead we have Republican leadership in the House that actually proposed raising more revenue by eliminating deductions on income taxes. They somehow claim that they are being faithful to their stated mission of fiscal conservatism by making you pay more money but at the present tax rates. They, too, have failed economics 101. Any significant movement of wealth from taxpayers to tax consumers will not enhance prosperity; it will crush it, and it will breed dependence on a government that is fiscally out of control. But the recipients will no doubt vote to re-elect those who gave them these payments.
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 13, 2012 10:10:01 GMT -5
Government Spying Out of Control By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | After President Richard Nixon was forced from office in 1974, congressional investigators discovered what they believed was the full extent of his use of the FBI and the CIA to engage in domestic spying. In that pre-digital era, the spying consisted of listening to telephone calls, opening mail, and using undercover agents to infiltrate political organizations and, as we know, break into their offices. Nixon claimed he did this for the protection of national security. He also claimed he was entitled to break the law and violate the Constitution. "If the president does it, that means that it's not illegal," he once famously said. Since no one was prosecuted on the basis of data stolen or retrieved by his spies, the courts rarely encountered this behavior and never had to rule on it, and thus it went largely unchecked. A few victims challenged the spying, but the Supreme Court ruled that without palpable harm, the challengers lacked the legal ability to complain in court — what judges call "standing." But many Americans did complain to Congress, which in 1978 enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, commonly called FISA. FISA provided that all domestic surveillance be subject to the search warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment, except for spying on foreign agents operating in the U.S. For those cases, FISA established a secret federal court that has been authorized to issue search warrants to spy on foreign agents. The constitutional standard for all search warrants is probable cause of crime . FISA, however, established a new, different and lesser standard — thus unconstitutional on its face since Congress is bound by, and cannot change, the Constitution — of probable cause of status . The status was that of an agent of a foreign power. So, under FISA, the feds needed to demonstrate to a secret court only that a non-American physically present in the U.S., perhaps under the guise of a student, diplomat or embassy janitor, was really an agent of a foreign power, and the demonstration of that agency alone was sufficient to authorize a search warrant to listen to the agent's telephone calls or read his mail. Over time, the requirement of status as a foreign agent was modified to status as a foreign person. This, of course, was an even lesser standard and one rarely rejected by the FISA court. In fact, that court has rarely rejected anything, having granted search warrants in well over 97 percent of applications. This is hardly harmless, as foreign persons in the U.S. are frequently talking to Americans in the U.S. Thus, not only did FISA violate the privacy rights of foreigners (the Fourth Amendment protects "people," not just Americans); it violated the rights of those with whom they were communicating, American or non-American. It gets worse. The Patriot Act, which was enacted in 2001 and permits federal agents to write their own search warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment, actually amended FISA so as to do away with the FISA-issued search warrant requirement when the foreign person is outside the U.S. This means that if you email or call your cousin in Europe or a business colleague in Asia, the feds are reading or listening, without a warrant, without suspicion, without records and without evidence of anything unlawful. The Patriot Act amendments to FISA also permit the feds to use anything they see or hear while spying in a federal court. The amended FISA statute permitting these warrantless searches of emails, telephone calls and postal mail expires at the end of this month. Last month, the House quietly voted to extend this dreadful authority for another five years, and in the next week, the Senate will consider doing the same. What's wrong with Congress? FISA gives the government unchecked authority to snoop on all Americans who communicate with any foreign person, in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment. The right to privacy is a natural human right. Its enshrinement in the Constitution has largely kept America from becoming East Germany. Moreover, everyone in Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, which could not be more clear: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." shall not be violated, except via a warrant issued by a neutral judge upon the judge finding probable cause of crime. If we let Congress, which is a creature of the Constitution, change the Constitution, then no one's liberty or property is safe, and freedom is dependent upon the political needs of those in power. The president and the leadership of both political parties in both houses of Congress have abandoned their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have claimed that foreigners and their American communicants are committed to destroying the country and only the invasion of everyone's right to privacy will keep us safe. They are violating the privacy of us all to find the communications of a few. Who will keep us safe from them? Their behavior is committed to destroying the Constitution.
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Post by philunderwood on Jan 24, 2013 7:50:25 GMT -5
Guns and the President By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | Here is an uncomfortable pop quiz: Who has killed more children, Adam Lanza or Barack Obama? We'll hold off on the answer for a few paragraphs while we look at the state of governmental excess — including killing — in America. But you can probably guess the correct answer from the manner in which I have posed the question. We all know that the sheet anchor of our liberties is the Declaration of Independence. The president himself quoted Thomas Jefferson's most famous line in his inaugural address earlier this week. He recognized that all men and women are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The president would no doubt like to modify the word "created" to read "shall be maintained," since his presidency seems dedicated to keeping us equal, not in terms of equality of rights and opportunity but of outcome. He has dedicated himself to using the coercive power of the federal government to take from those who have and give to those who don't. Under the Constitution, charity is a decision for individuals to make, not the government. This forced egalitarianism was never the purpose of government in America. When the people in the original 13 states gave up some of their personal liberties to create their state governments so they could perform the services that governments in the West do, and when the states themselves gave up some of their liberties to create the federal government of limited powers to address the issues of nationhood, they never authorized government to impose taxes to transfer wealth to those who lack it or need it. This may sound harsh, but there is simply no authority in the Constitution for the feds to tax Americans or to borrow money in their names to rebuild private homes in New Orleans or at the Jersey Shore. And there is no moral authority for that, either. If folks want to give money to those whose properties were damaged by natural disasters and lacked adequate insurance coverage, they are free to do so, but nowhere does government have the authority to compel us to do so. This shows how far we have come from the Constitution the Founders gave us. They "constituted" a government of limited powers, and they did so because they wanted the government to protect our freedoms, since they understood that personal responsibility and freedom — not government handouts — are the soundest routes to prosperity. Hence, they limited the government because they knew the lessons of history. And those lessons informed them that often it is the government itself that is the greatest threat to personal freedom. One hundred years ago, during the Progressive Era, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson turned the concept of limited government on its head. They argued that the Constitution could be disregarded because the federal government possesses unlimited powers to address the people's needs. Barack Obama is their ideological heir. As their heir, he is not only the head of the executive branch of the federal government, but he is also the head of one of the two dominant political parties. That political party has dedicated itself to making certain killing legal. The Democrats have continually celebrated the abominable decision of the Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade, issued 40 years ago this week. They have championed abortion for the past 40 years. They have assaulted the greatest and most fundamental of human rights: the right to live. In doing so, they have succeeded in causing the government to permit the killing of more than 50 million American babies in their mothers' wombs in the past 40 years — for the sake of convenience and sexual activity without consequence, in a manner that is antiseptic and lawful. And no one hears the babies' cries of pain or anguish. The president himself has more directly killed about 176 children in Pakistan by the use of CIA drones. These drones have been dispatched by him alone — not pursuant to any congressional declaration of war. At least two of these murdered children were Americans. But since the cameras were kept away, since all of this takes place 10,000 miles from America, and since the survivors are legally and politically helpless, no one here hears the Pakistani children's cries of pain and anguish. One of the reasons we have the constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms is to enable us to resist a drone sent to the path of our children by shooting it down, no matter who sent it. But you can't stop a drone with a BB gun. Hence the need for serious firepower in the hands of ordinary Americans — to give tyrants pause and to stop tyrants when they don't pause. The president wants to use Lanza's horrific slaughter of 20 babies in a public school in Connecticut with a stolen gun as an excuse to restrict the freedoms of all law-abiding gun-owning Americans, any one of whom would have stopped Lanza in a heartbeat with a lawful gun, before the police could, had they been in that school. Now back to our pop quiz: Who has killed more children, Lanza or Obama? Does a president with blood on his hands have any moral standing to infringe upon the natural right to self-defense of those whose hands are clean? Would you sacrifice your liberty to defend yourself and your children so that the government can kill whom it pleases? The answers are obvious.
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Post by philunderwood on Jan 31, 2013 8:27:24 GMT -5
Both sides in immigration debate overlook main issue By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | As President Obama and Congress grapple for prominence in the debate over immigration, both have lost sight of the true nature of the issue at hand. The issue the politicians and bureaucrats would rather avoid is the natural law. The natural law is a term used to refer to human rights that all persons possess by virtue of our humanity. These rights encompass areas of human behavior where individuals are sovereign and thus need no permission from the government before making choices in those areas. Truly, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, only G0D is sovereign — meaning He is the source of His own power. Having received freedom from our Creator and, in America, thanks to the values embraced by most of the Founding Fathers, individuals are sovereign with respect to our natural rights. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that our sovereignty is a part of our human nature, and our humanity is a gift from G0D. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson himself recognized personal sovereignty in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote about Nature's G0D as the Creator and thus the originator of our inalienable human rights. The rights that Jefferson identified consist of the well-known litany of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. By the time his ideological soul mate James Madison was serving as the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the list of natural rights had been expanded to include those now encompassed by the Bill of Rights. Yet again, the authors of the Constitution and its first 10 amendments recognized that the rights being insulated from government interference had their origin in a source other than the government. This view of the natural law is sweet to the heart and pleasing to the ear when politicians praise it at patriotic events, but it is also a bane to them when it restrains their exercise of the coercive powers of the government. Thus, since the freedom of speech, the development of personality, the right to worship or not to worship, the right to use technologically contemporary means for self-defense, the right to be left alone, and the right to own and use property all stem from our humanity, the government simply is without authority to regulate human behavior in these areas, no matter what powers it purports to give to itself and no matter what crises may occur. Among the rights in this category is the freedom of movement, which today is called the right to travel. The right to travel is an individual personal human right, long recognized under the natural law as immune from governmental interference. Of course, governments have been interfering with this right for millennia. The Romans restricted the travel of Jews; Parliament restricted the travel of serfs; Congress restricted the travel of slaves; and starting in the late 19th century, the federal government has restricted the travel of non-Americans who want to come here and even the travel of those already here. All of these abominable restrictions of the right to travel are based not on any culpability of individuals, but rather on membership in the groups to which persons have belonged from birth. The initial reasons for these immigration restrictions involved the different appearance and culture of those seeking to come here and the nativism of those running the government here. Somehow, the people who ran the government believed that they who were born here were superior persons and more worthy of American-style freedoms than those who sought to come here. This extols nativism. Nativism is the arch-enemy of the freedom to travel, as its adherents believe they can use the coercive power of the government to impair the freedom of travel of persons who are unwanted not because of personal behavior, but solely on the basis of where they were born. Nativism teaches that we lack natural rights and enjoy only those rights the government permits us to exercise. Yet, the freedom to travel is a fundamental natural right. This is not a novel view. In addition to Aquinas and Jefferson, it has been embraced by St. Augustine, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pope John Paul II and Justice Clarence Thomas. Our fundamental human rights are not conditioned or even conditionable on the laws or traditions of the place where our mothers were physically located when we were born. They are not attenuated because our mothers were not in the United States at the moment of our births. Stated differently, we all possess natural rights, no more and no less than any others. All humans have the full panoply of freedom of choice in areas of personal behavior protected from governmental interference by the natural law, no matter where they were born. Americans are not possessed of more natural rights than non-Americans; rather, we enjoy more opportunities to exercise those rights because the government is theoretically restrained by the Constitution, which explicitly recognizes the natural law. That recognition is articulated in the Ninth Amendment, which declares that the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution shall not be used by the government as an excuse to deny or disparage other unnamed and unnamable rights retained by the people. So, if I want to invite my cousins from Florence, Italy, to come here and live in my house and work on my farm in New Jersey, or if a multinational corporation wants the best engineers from India to work in its labs in Texas, or if my neighbor wants a friend of a friend from Mexico City to come here to work in his shop, we have the natural right to ask, they have the natural right to come here, and the government has no moral right to interfere with any of these freely made decisions. If the government can restrain the freedom to travel on the basis of an immutable characteristic of birth, there is no limit to the restraints it can impose.
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Post by philunderwood on Feb 7, 2013 10:24:59 GMT -5
Obama Gives Himself Permission To Kill By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | After stonewalling for more than a year federal judges and ordinary citizens who sought the revelation of its secret legal research justifying the presidential use of drones to kill persons overseas — even Americans — claiming the research was so sensitive and so secret that it could not be revealed without serious consequences, the government sent a summary of its legal memos to an NBC newsroom earlier this week. This revelation will come as a great surprise, and not a little annoyance, to U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon, who heard many hours of oral argument during which the government predicted gloom and doom if its legal research were subjected to public scrutiny. She very reluctantly agreed with the feds, but told them she felt caught in "a veritable Catch-22," because the feds have created "a thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret." She was writing about President Obama killing Americans and refusing to divulge the legal basis for claiming the right to do so. Now we know that basis. The undated and unsigned 16-page document leaked to NBC refers to itself as a Department of Justice white paper. Its logic is flawed, its premises are bereft of any appreciation for the values of the Declaration of Independence and the supremacy of the Constitution, and its rationale could be used to justify any breaking of any law by any "informed, high-level official of the U.S. government." The quoted phrase is extracted from the memo, which claims that the law reposes into the hands of any unnamed "high-level official," not necessarily the president, the lawful power to decide when to suspend constitutional protections guaranteed to all persons and kill them without any due process whatsoever. This is the power claimed by kings and tyrants. It is the power most repugnant to American values. It is the power we have arguably fought countless wars to prevent from arriving here. Now, under Obama, it is here. This came to a boiling point when Obama dispatched CIA drones to kill New Mexico-born and al-Qaida-affiliated Anwar al-Awlaki while he was riding in a car in a desert in Yemen in September 2011. A follow-up drone, also dispatched by Obama, killed Awlaki's 16-year-old Colorado-born son and his American friend. Awlaki's American father sued the president in federal court in Washington, D.C., trying to prevent the killing. Justice Department lawyers persuaded a judge that the president always follows the law, and besides, without any evidence of presidential law breaking, the elder Awlaki had no case against the president. Within three months of that ruling, the president dispatched his drones and the Awlakis were dead. This spawned follow-up lawsuits, in one of which McMahon gave her reluctant ruling. Then the white paper appeared. It claims that if an American is likely to trigger the use of force 10,000 miles from here, and he can't easily be arrested, he can be murdered with impunity. This notwithstanding state and federal laws that expressly prohibit non-judicial killing, an executive order signed by every president from Gerald Ford to Obama prohibiting American officials from participating in assassinations, the absence of a declaration of war against Yemen, treaties expressly prohibiting this type of killing, and the language of the Declaration, which guarantees the right to live, and the Constitution, which requires a jury trial before the government can deny that right. The president cannot lawfully order the killing of anyone, except according to the Constitution and federal law. Under the Constitution, he can only order killing using the military when the U.S. has been attacked or when an attack is so imminent that delay would cost innocent lives. He can also order killing using the military in pursuit of a declaration of war enacted by Congress. Unless Obama knows that an attack from Yemen on our shores is imminent, he'd be hard-pressed to argue that a guy in a car in the desert 10,000 miles from here — no matter his intentions — poses a threat so imminent to the U.S. that he needs to be killed on the spot in order to save the lives of Americans who would surely die during the time it would take to declare war on the country that harbors him, or during the time it would take to arrest him. Under no lawful circumstances may he use CIA agents for killing. Surely, CIA agents can use deadly force defensively to protect themselves and their assets, but they may not use it offensively. Federal laws against murder apply to the president and to all federal agents and personnel in their official capacities, wherever they go on the planet. Obama has argued that he can kill Americans whose deaths he believes will keep us all safer, without any due process whatsoever. No law authorizes that. His attorney general has argued that the president's careful consideration of each target and the narrow use of deadly force are an adequate and constitutional substitute for due process. No court has ever approved that. And his national security adviser has argued that the use of drones is humane since they are "surgical" and only kill their targets. We know that is incorrect, as the folks who monitor all this say that 11 percent to 17 percent of the 2,300 drone-caused deaths have been those of innocent bystanders. Did you consent to a government that can kill whom it wishes? How about one that plays tricks on federal judges? How long will it be before the presidential killing comes home? Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is "Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom." To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.
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Post by philunderwood on Feb 14, 2013 7:49:38 GMT -5
Obama's Secret Court for Killing By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Obama willingly admits he dispatched CIA agents to kill an American and his teenage son and the son's American friend while they were in a desert in Yemen in 2011. He says he did so because the adult had encouraged folks to wage war on the United States and the children were just "collateral damage." He says further that he'll do this again when he is convinced that killing Americans will keep America safe. He says he knows the adult encouraged evil, and his encouragement caused the deaths of innocents. The adult was never charged with a crime or indicted by a grand jury; he was just targeted for death by the president himself and executed by a CIA drone. International law and the law of war, to both of which the U.S. is bound by treaty, as well as federal law and the Judeo-Christian values that underlie the Declaration of Independence (which guarantees the right to live) and the Constitution (which permits governmental interference with that right only after a congressional declaration of war or individual due process) all provide that the certainty of the identity of a human target, the sincerity of the wish for his death, the perception of his guilt and imminent danger are insufficient to justify the government's use of lethal force against him. The president may only lawfully kill after due process, in self-defense or under a declaration of war. The reasons for the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war are to provide a check on the president's lust for war by forcing him to obtain formal congressional approval, to isolate and identify the object of war so the president cannot kill whomever he pleases, to confine the warfare to the places where the object's military forces are located so the president cannot invade wherever he wishes, and to assure termination of the hostilities when the object of the war surrenders so the president cannot wage war without end. But when war is waged, only belligerents may be targeted, and advocating violence against the U.S. is not an act of wartime violence and does not make one a belligerent. Were this not so, then nothing would lawfully prevent the U.S. from killing Americans who spoke out in favor of al-Qaida, and then killing Americans who spoke out against war and killing, and then killing Americans whose words became an obstacle to killing. That's the reason the enabling federal legislation enacted in support of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force specifically exempts expressive conduct from the ambit of prohibited criminal or warlike behavior that can provide the basis for any government prosecution or military belligerence. So, the feds can shoot at a guy with a bomb in his hands when he is about to explode it, but not at a guy with a megaphone in his hands when he is about to speak through it. Thus, if New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki had been shooting at American troops at the time the government took aim at him, naturally, the troops can shoot back. But when he merely encourages others to shoot, his behavior is protected by the natural law, the First Amendment and numerous federal statutes. As well, he was 10,000 miles from the U.S., never known to have engaged in violent acts, and having a private conversation at a roadside cafe in a desert when he was killed. No law or legal principle justifies the U.S. government killing him then and there; in fact, numerous laws prohibit it. The president's use of the CIA for offensive killing also violates federal law. Intelligence agents may only lawfully kill in self-defense, not offensively. Only the military may lawfully kill offensively. In the al-Awlaki case, intelligence sources have confirmed to Fox News that a team of American and Yemeni intelligence agents had followed al-Awlaki and had him under continuous observation at the time of his killing and for the preceding 48 hours. They easily could have arrested him — had he been charged with a civilian crime or a war crime, which he wasn't. Of course, the murder of his Colorado-born son and the son's American friend are not even arguably defensible, and the president's spokesman who suggested that the young al-Awlaki should have "chosen a different father" shows a seriously defective thought process and an utter antipathy for the rule of law in places of power. We now confront the truly unthinkable: a proposal to establish yet another secret court, this one with the authority to authorize the president and his designees to kill Americans. This proposal has come from Congress, which seems more interested in getting in on the killing than in upholding the Constitution. The federal government only has the lawful powers the states delegated to it. As the states cannot kill Americans without due process, neither can the feds. Congress cannot create this killing court, and no judge on such a Stalinesque court can authorize the president to kill. The president has made a political calculation that it will be easier for him to justify killing folks he can demonize than it will be to afford them due process, by capturing, housing and trying them. Now, he has come to believe that it will be easier still if unnamed federal judges meeting in secret take the heat. Politically, the president may be correct. But he has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, and he lacks the moral and legal basis to reject that in favor of killing. When he kills without due process, he disobeys the laws he has sworn to uphold, no matter who agrees with him. When we talk about killing as if it were golf, we debase ourselves. And when the government kills and we put our heads in the sand, woe to us when there is no place to hide.
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Post by philunderwood on Feb 28, 2013 9:32:44 GMT -5
Obama's False Alarms By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | In an effort to remove the hot-potato issue of excessive government spending from the 2012 presidential campaign, and calling the bluff of congressional Republicans who always seem to favor domestic spending cuts but increased military spending, President Obama suggested the concept of "sequester" in late 2011. His idea was to reduce the rate of increased spending by 2 percent across the board — on domestic and military spending. To his surprise, the Republicans went along with this. They did so either because they lacked the political fortitude and the political will to designate specifically the unconstitutional and pork barrel federal spending projects to be cut, or because they thought that with the debt of the federal government then approaching $15 trillion (it is now $16.6 trillion and growing), any reductions in spending money the government doesn't have are preferred to no reductions. So, instead of enacting a budget, and instead of recognizing that much of its spending is simply not authorized by the Constitution, Congress enacted the so-called sequester legislation, and the president signed it into law. The reductions the sequesters require are reductions in the rate of increased spending from those originally planned by Obama and authorized by Congress. Since the federal government has not had a budget in four years, even though federal law requires it to have one every year, these are planned expenditures, not budgetary items, on which the president wants to spend more money. Congress does not feel bound to obey the laws it has written; hence it has disregarded the legal requirement of a budget. Without a budget, the president has great leeway as to how to allocate funds within each department of the executive branch of the federal government. Nevertheless, even if these sequesters do kick in, the feds will spend more in 2013 than they spent in 2012. That's because the sequesters are not cuts to spending; rather, they are reductions in planned increases in spending. The reductions amount to about two cents for every planned dollar of increased spending for every federal department. The question remains: What part of each federal department (Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, etc.) will suffer these reduced increases? Here is where this sequester experiment gets dicey. The president — who once championed the idea of sequesters and even threatened to veto any congressional effort to dismantle them — now has decided he can't live without that additional 2 percent to spend. So, he has gone about the country trying to scare the daylights out of people: Prisoners will be released from federal prisons, soldiers won't have enough bullets in their weapons, we will need to endure five-hour waiting lines at the airports, Social Security checks will be late, and similar nonsense. If the fears Obama predicts do come to pass, we will have only him to blame. Remember, the sequesters only cut planned increases in spending. Suppose the president planned to hire 100 more soldiers for the Army and agents for the TSA and air traffic controllers for the FAA. Is the president required to hire only 98 of them? Well, under the law, he has a choice. He can hire all 100 and cut back elsewhere, or he can make do on 98 percent of what he has determined are the government's additional needs. But he cannot just intentionally release prisoners or weaken the military or inflict maddening delays on the flying public in order to make his fearful warnings come to pass. His job is to uphold the Constitution, to make the executive branch of the federal government work. The president has taken an oath to "faithfully execute" his office. The words of the oath are prescribed in the Constitution. The word "faithfully" requires him to enforce the laws whether or not he agrees with them. It also requires him to enforce the laws in such a manner that they make sense — so that the federal government basically performs the services we have grown to expect of it. I know, we have grown to expect more of the federal government than the Founders dreamed, and far more than we can possibly pay for, and infinitely more than the Constitution authorizes. But that's the good thing about these sequesters: They will force the president to prioritize. If he prioritizes so that we stay free and safe, so that the government does what we basically have paid it to do, he'll be doing his job and saving us a tiny bit of cash. But if the president enforces the laws so that they hurt rather than work well just so he can say "I told you so" rather than "I'll work with you," then he will be inviting his own political misery or even his own impeachment. And we will have sunk deeper into the abyss of fear, division and red ink that already engulfs us.
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Post by philunderwood on Mar 8, 2013 9:43:15 GMT -5
The Right to Self-Defense By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | In all the noise caused by the Obama administration's direct assault on the right of every person to keep and bear arms, the essence of the issue has been drowned out. The president and his big-government colleagues want you to believe that only the government can keep you free and safe, so to them, the essence of this debate is about obedience to law. To those who have killed innocents among us, obedience to law is the last of their thoughts. And to those who believe that the Constitution means what it says, the essence of this debate is not about the law; it is about personal liberty in a free society. It is the exercise of this particular personal liberty — the freedom to defend yourself when the police cannot or will not and the freedom to use weapons to repel tyrants if they take over the government — that the big-government crowd fears the most. Let's be candid: All government fears liberty. By its nature, government is the negation of liberty. G0Dhas given us freedom, and the government has taken it away. George Washington recognized this when he argued that government is not reason or eloquence but force. If the government had its way, it would have a monopoly on force. Government compels, restrains and takes. Thomas Jefferson understood that when he wrote that our liberties are inalienable and endowed by our Creator, and the only reason we have formed governments is to engage them to protect our liberties. We enacted the Constitution as the supreme law of the land to restrain the government. Yet somewhere along the way, government got the idea that it can more easily protect the freedom of us all from the abuses of a few by curtailing the freedom of us all. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that's where we are today. The anti-Second Amendment crowd cannot point to a single incident in which curtailing the freedom of law-abiding Americans has stopped criminals or crazies from killing. It is obvious that criminals don't care what the law says because they think they can get away with their violations of it. And those unfortunates who are deranged don't recognize any restraint on their own behavior, as they cannot mentally distinguish right from wrong and cannot be expected to do so in the future, no matter what the law says. When the Second Amendment was written and added to the Constitution, the use of guns in America was common. At the same time, King George III — whom we had just defeated and who was contemplating another war against us, which he would start in 1812 — no doubt ardently wished that he had stripped his colonists of their right to self-defense so as to subdue their use of violence to secede from Great Britain. That act of secession, the American Revolution, was largely successful because close to half of the colonists were armed and did not fear the use of weaponry. If the king and the Parliament had enacted and enforced laws that told them who among the colonists owned guns or that limited the power of the colonists' guns or the amount of ammunition they could possess, our Founding Fathers would have been hanged for treason. One of the secrets of the Revolution — one not taught in public schools today — is that the colonists actually had superior firepower to the king. The British soldiers had standard-issue muskets, which propelled a steel ball or several of them about 50 yards from the shooter. But the colonists had the long gun — sometimes called the Kentucky or the Tennessee — which propelled a single steel ball about 200 yards, nearly four times as far as the British could shoot. Is it any wonder that by Yorktown in 1781, the king and the Parliament had lost enough men and treasure to surrender? The lesson here is that free people cannot remain free by permitting the government — even a popularly elected one that they can unelect — to take their freedoms away. The anti-freedom crowd in the government desperately wants to convey the impression that it is doing something to protect us. So it unconstitutionally and foolishly seeks, via burdensome and intrusive registration laws, laws restricting the strength of weapons and the quantity and quality of ammunition and, the latest trick, laws that impose financial liability on law-abiding manufacturers and sellers for the criminal behavior of some users, to make it so burdensome to own a gun that the ordinary folks who want one will give up their efforts to obtain one. We cannot let ourselves fall down this slippery slope. The right to self-defense is a natural individual right that pre-exists the government. It cannot morally or constitutionally be taken away absent individual consent or due process. Kings and tyrants have taken this right away. We cannot let a popular majority take it away, for the tyranny of the majority can be as destructive to freedom as the tyranny of a madman.
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Post by philunderwood on Mar 14, 2013 9:31:03 GMT -5
What if Nanny Is a Thug? By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | What if a dictator in America used the force of law to tell you what to eat? What if the same dictator told you what to drink? What if the dictator told you the sizes of the containers in which you could purchase a lawful beverage? What if the dictator just made up the rules according to his own personal taste? What if the product he regulated was lawful, sold nearly everywhere and consumed by nearly everyone? What if that product came in flavors and degrees of sweetness the dictator didn't like? What if that product was part of a huge national market that provides choices to consumers and jobs for those who want them? What if that product was simple soda pop? What if the dictator declared that you could consume all the soda pop you wish to consume, but you need to purchase it in small containers? What if the enforcement of this container-size rule raised the price of soda pop? What if the container size was just something the dictator dreamed up? What if the dictator believed his judgment was superior to yours with respect to deciding what you should drink and how you should drink it? What if the dictator pretended his container-size restrictions were based on sound science? What if he hired and appointed medical personnel who feared for their jobs if they did not agree with him? What if he ordered those people to support his container-size regulations whether or not they agreed that this is the proper role of government? What if he constituted these medical lackeys into a Board of Health? What if the Board of Health pretended it seriously studied the detrimental effect of sugar-based soda pop on human beings but never did? What if the rules for container size were written in secret? What if those rules were so complicated that a judge concluded they would be impossible to enforce? What if the rules only applied to certain sugar-based drinks, such as soda pop and coffee, but not to others, such as chocolate milk and alcohol? What if the rules only applied to some stores and shops but not to all? What if the rules were so ridiculous that in order to buy a cup of coffee larger than 16 ounces, they required you to put milk and flavoring and sugar in yourself, and the seller of the coffee could not lawfully help you or do so for you, even at your request? What if under the fundamental law of the land the dictator was not authorized by law to write laws but only to enforce them? What if the dictator knew that the governing body elected by the people to write laws would never write the laws he wanted because its members like power and fear losing it, which could happen if they try to tell the voters who elected them how to live? What if the dictator never presented his proposals on sugar-based drinks to the elected governing body because he knew they'd be rejected? What if the dictator was more interested in his own legacy as a reformer than in personal liberty in a free society? What if he believed he could write any law and regulate any event because his knowledge of human behavior and unintended consequences was superior to that of the people he swore to serve? What if the same dictator once made campaign contributions to members of the governing board so that they would change the fundamental law of the land — which only the people directly can lawfully change — so as to let the dictator stay in office longer than the fundamental law permitted? What if that law could only be changed by the voters themselves, but the dictator persuaded the lawmakers to take his campaign cash and change the fundamental law for him? What if the dictator was very unpopular but continued to impose his will on the people because he desperately wanted a legacy? What if some people who sell soda pop challenged the dictator in a court he did not control? What if a judge of that court told the people they could buy soda and coffee in whatever sizes it was sold because the dictator did not have the power to regulate their intake of liquids? What if the judge even recognized that there are areas of human behavior immune to regulation by the government? What if all of this really happened? What if this is not a fable but a fair recounting of life today in America's biggest city? What is the state of human freedom in New York City when the mayor can tell people what soft drinks to consume and how to consume them and the voters let him do it? What will they let the government do to us next?
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Post by philunderwood on Mar 28, 2013 8:23:37 GMT -5
Hope for the Dead By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | What does freedom have to do with rising from the dead? When America was in its infancy and struggling to find a culture and frustrated at governance from Great Britain, the word most frequently uttered in speeches and pamphlets and letters was not safety or taxes or peace; it was freedom. Two acts of Parliament broke the bonds with the mother country irreparably. The first was the Stamp Act, which was enforced by British soldiers writing their own search warrants and rummaging through the personal possessions of colonists looking to see whether they had purchased the government's stamps. The second was the imposition of a tax to pay for the Church of England, which the colonists were forced to pay, no matter their religious beliefs. The Stamp Act assaulted the right to be left alone in the home, and the tax for the Church of England assaulted the freedom to choose to support one's own means of worship. The two taxes together caused many colonists to realize they needed to secede from England and form their own country in which freedom would be protected by the government, not assaulted by it. Today it seems the power of the government continues to expand and the freedom of the individual continues to shrink. The loss of freedom comes in many forms. Sometimes it is direct and profound, as when the government stops you from doing what you formerly had the freedom to do — like choose your own doctor and your own health care insurance or choose not to have health care insurance. Sometimes it is more subtle — like when the government prints money to pay its bills and, as a result, all the money you already have loses much of its value. And sometimes the government steals freedom without you knowing it — like when federal agents write their own search warrants, authorizing themselves to learn of your computer use or medical or banking records; and they never tell you what they've done. Freedom is the ability of every person to exercise his own free will, rather than be subject to the will of someone else. Free will is the essence of humanity, and humanity is God's greatest gift. When the government affirmatively takes away freedom, the government violates the natural law; it prevents us from having and utilizing the means to the truth. Your moral ability to exercise your free will to seek the truth is your natural right, and the government may only morally interfere with the exercise of that right when you have used fraud or force to interfere with the exercise of someone else's natural rights. We know from the events 2,000 years ago, which Christians commemorate and celebrate this week, that freedom is the essential means to discover and unite with the truth. And to Christians, the personification, the incarnation, the perfect manifestation of truth is the Son of God. On the first Holy Thursday, Jesus attended a traditional Jewish Passover Seder. Catholics believe that at that last supper, He performed two miracles so that we could stay united to Him. He transformed ordinary bread and wine into His own body, blood, soul and divinity, and He empowered His disciples and their successors to do the same. On the first Good Friday, the government executed Him for claiming to be the Son of God. He had the freedom to reject this horrific event, but He exercised His freedom so that we might know the truth. The truth He manifested is that His acceptance of the destruction of His body would demonstrate to us that we can liberate our souls from the slavery of sin and our free wills from the oppression of the government. Three days later, on Easter, that manifestation was complete when He triumphed over death by rising from the dead. Easter is the linchpin of human existence: With it, life is worth living, no matter its cost or pain. Without it, life is meaningless, no matter its fleeting joys or triumphs. Easter has a meaning that is both incomprehensible and simple. It is incomprehensible that a human being had the freedom to rise from the dead. It is simple because that human being was and is God. Easter means that there is hope for the dead. And if there's hope for the dead, there's hope for the living. But, like the colonists who fought the oppression of the king, we the living can only achieve our hopes if we have freedom. And that requires a government that protects freedom, not one that shrinks it. Do we have such a government today?
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Post by philunderwood on Apr 4, 2013 10:25:12 GMT -5
When the Government Goes Bankrupt By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano www.JewishWorldReview.com | What happens when the government goes bankrupt? This question is one that sounds like a hypothetical exercise in a law school classroom from just a few years ago, where it might have been met with some derision. But today, it is a realistic and terrifying inquiry that many who have financial relationships with governments in America will need to make, and it will be answered with the gnashing of teeth. Earlier this week, a federal judge accepted the bankruptcy petition of Stockton, Calif., a city of about 300,000 residents northeast of San Francisco, over the objections of those who had loaned money to the city. The lenders — called bondholders — and their insurers saw this coming when the city stopped paying interest on their loans — called bonds. In this connection, a bond is a loan made to a municipality, which pays the lender tax-free interest and returns the principal when it is due. Institutional lenders usually obtain insurance, which guarantees the repayment but puts the insurance carrier on the hook. The due dates of many of these bonds have come and gone, and the bondholders and their insurers want Stockton to repay the loans. But the city lacks the money with which to make the repayments. It borrowed money from the bondholders during good financial times, when its real estate-generated tax receipts were greater than today, and when its advisers predicted no foreseeable end to the flow of cash to the city. The expected flow of that cash, the natural inclination of those in government to want to give away other people's money, and the self-serving manipulations of those in power who rewarded their friends and themselves with rich pensions combined to cause the city to make generous pension commitments to its employees. It is politically easier to offer generous pension payments to municipal employees in the future than it is to raise their salaries today. The promise to pay a pension to qualifying retirees upon their entry into the retirement system, just like the promise to repay bondholders the money they loaned, is a legally enforceable contract. So, confronted with an obligation to repay more than $200 million in loans to bondholders and more than $900 million to the California pension system for its current and former employees, and confounded by a serious reduction in real estate tax revenue, so serious that Stockton cannot afford to pay either the bondholders or the pension system, let alone both, the city that over-borrowed and over-spent and over-promised has sought the protection of a federal bankruptcy court. Bankruptcy in America is a strange bird. It permits debtors to be relieved of their financial obligations by paying less, often far less, than they owe. It compels creditors to accept less, often far less, than they are due. It is generally an orderly and mechanical process presided over by a neutral judge without a jury. Its goal is to get the creditors something, leave the debtors with something, and let all parties go home in peace and resume their livelihoods. But it rarely happens to the government. That's because the government, which has no competition, creates no wealth, doesn't produce anything of value and needn't attract clients, has a monopoly on the use of force with which it can extract what it needs to pay for its mistakes in the form of higher taxes. These extractions, of course, are not voluntary transactions as when you buy gas for your car or food for your table. They are mafia-style transactions: Pay us more, or else. But there must be a limit even to the Stockton taxpayers' willingness to part with their wealth in the form of taxes, hence the filing for bankruptcy. The Stockton case presents a rare opportunity for a federal judge to interfere with the contractual obligations of a municipal government and actually modify or even nullify them. It also presents a confluence of a culture in California of high taxes and generous — often non-contributory — pensions for even short-term government employees and a federal system that when it faces a shortfall simply goes to its banker — the Federal Reserve — and asks it to print more cash. Stockton cannot legally print cash the way the Fed can. How does this affect the rest of us? Currently, state and local governments owe about $4 trillion in pension benefits that they do not have to current and former employees, and they know they cannot politically acquire it by raising taxes. This affects all 50 states. So the odds are that the states and the similarly situated Stocktons in America will go to the Obama administration and ask for free cash. And the president will no doubt find it for them. That "found" cash will be borrowed from the Federal Reserve and, like all of the federal government's debts to the Fed, will never be repaid. But countless generations of American taxpayers will make enormous and endless interest payments on it. Does that sound too apocalyptic for you? Well, consider this: The federal government is still paying interest on the $30 billion it borrowed to wage World War I nearly 100 years ago. So, to the feds, mortgaging your children's future to save the Stocktons of the country from the consequences of their own profligate ways is a no-brainer. Should Americans yet unborn pay for all of this? Is this what you elected the government to do? What will it take to keep the government within the confines of the Constitution?
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