Our rights do not originate with government, but they are to be "secured" by government.

Monday, March 21, 2011

“If the president does it it’s not illegal!”

US Government 101 – The constitution is clear only Congress, not the president, may declare war. Due to the actions of past presidents concerning the use of the US Military after WWII,the Korean Police Action and the undeclared Vietnam war, with a two thirds majority of both the house and Senate they passed the War Powers Act.

The War Powers Act of 1973 (50 U.S.C. 1541–1548) was a United States Congress joint resolution providing that the President can send U.S. armed forces into action abroad only by authorization of Congress or if the United States is already under attack or serious threat.

Nobody can reasonablly claim that Libya has attacked or poses a serious threat to the United States directly or to it’s National Security. What is Obama’s legal or constitutional justification to go to war and bomb a sovereign nation that has not attacked the US nor poses a serious threat, without a congressional declaration of war?

Libya, a despicable but sovereign nation, is using the full force of its government against some of its own citizens who are violently rejecting the government itself. As much as I want the citizens of Libya to have freedom and liberty, how does this action within a sovereign nation warrant the US bombing Libya? Does an uprising of people anywhere in the world against their oppressive government justify other sovereign nations bombing that government? If that is so then there would be more justification to bomb a government that attacks and shoots its citizens who have not attacked the government. This would mean that Mexico, Iran, or even Libya would have been justified in bombing the United States over the federal slaughter of 76 Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.

Obama has unconstitutionally put the US Military at the control of the UN. On March 19, at meeting in Paris, attended by Hillary Clinton and representatives from other nations, as a group of "state actors” they issued guidance and control mechanisms that resulted in the bombing of a sovereign nation, using U.S. military assets without congressional approval. This action is global governance in action. Global governance must be rejected and national sovereignty reaffirmed as the only authority that governs the citizens of the United States. Obama's dictatorial like actions will lead us to tyranny.

During a Democratic Caucus conference call on Saturday, a group of House Democrats questioned the constitutionality of U.S. missile strikes against Libya, with one lawmaker raising the prospect of impeachment. It has been reported by two Democratic lawmakers who took part in that conference call that Reps. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Mike Capuano (Mass.), Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Rob Andrews (N.J.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) “all strongly raised objections to the constitutionality of the president’s actions.”

“Almost everybody who spoke was opposed to any unilateral actions or decisions being made by the president, and most of us expressed our constitutional concerns. There should be a resolution and there should be a debate so members of Congress can decide whether or not we enter in whatever this action is being called,” added another House Democrat opposed to the Libyan operation. One Democrat lawmaker said that the White House, “consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress, They’re creating wreckage, and they can’t obviate that by saying there are no boots on the ground. … There aren’t boots on the ground; there are Tomahawks in the air.”

Democrat Rep. John Larson (Conn.), chairman of the Democratic Caucus and the fourth-highest ranking party leader called for Obama to seek congressional approval before committing the United States to any anti-Qadhafi military operation.

Unlike president Bush, who responding to a direct attack on US soil, not only consult ed Congress but won overwhelming congressional support for his actions in Iraq, Obama ignored both the law and the Constitution and dictated military action against Libya at the direction of the UN. Obama supports and wants global governance and dictatorial powers for the president. His actions clearly indicate that he does not believe in the concept that sovereign nations have the right to rule themselves, including the United States of America. His actions indicate that he believes that he and the UN not Congress have the power to determine if, when, and where the awesome violent power of the US Military is used.

Both Democrats and Republicans in congress know what Obama has done is not only unconstitutional but illegal. What Obama knows is that congress is made of wimps, whose only worry is how to keep themselves in power, and keep money flowing into their own coffers. As such Obama clearly has no fear of congress. He knows that even if congress did impeach him, which they won’t, the Democrat party controlled Senate, would not hold a trial and if it did would not convict him. The reason Obama didn’t consult congress is because he knows regardless of the constitution and the law he has the power to ignore congress. The reality is that the rule of law, equal protection under the law, and constitutionally limited government are dead.

Obama was a professor of Constitutional Law, so there is no doubt he knows about the constitution and the limits on the presidency, and knows about the further restrictions that Congress has put on the President. The laws and Constitution of the United States are very clear, concerning the use of the US Military. The President can send U.S. armed forces into action abroad ONLY by authorization of Congress or if the United States is already under attack or serious threat. What Obama has demonstrated is that although he knows the law and the limits on the presidency, he doesn’t care about them and that to advance his agenda he holds the same beliefs that former president Richard M. Nixon expressed in his famous David Frost interview, “If the president does it it’s not illegal!”

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

No bullying! Except ...

By A.F. Branco © 2011

Monday, March 14, 2011

The Government Owns You!

Wow, that’s a sensational title for this article. How dare I make such an outlandish claim? Simple, it’s true. You no longer own yourself, but are the property of the government. True the government doesn’t choose to exercise total control over you, its property, but it does lay claim to you as property.

The government is slowly but surely doing away with private property rights, including the most precious property right, the right to yourself. The very idea that you can secure property and use it as you see fit, so long as you don’t use it to infringe upon the rights of another, is the heart of the beliefs that formed this nation. If you want to purchase a motorcycle, and ride it around your land, your free to do so, you can fuel it with alcohol or gasoline, you can take care of it or store it under a tree, you can even ride it up a ramp do a back flip and crash it into your own pond (thus destroying or damaging your motorcycle). That motorcycle is your property, you can crush it, throw it away, do whatever you want with it so long as you don’t infringe upon somebody else’s rights. Nobody would argue that, as you own it.

Now you don’t own your body, the government has laid claim to it, and for the protection of their property not only determines what you can and can’t do with it, what you can and can’t voluntarily feed it, but even what you can and can’t know about your own body. Because they have claimed ownership of you, they claim the right to protect their property (your body) from you.

In the words of Alabama Rep. Parker Griffiths, "It's very difficult to protect the public from itself and its desire to be healthy." It seems the position of the Federal Government through the Food and Drug Administration is that your own genetic code is a controlled substance. Because of that the FDA has the controlling authority and as such determined that you must be prevented from receiving any information without first going through an FDA-approved authority. At least that’s what Alabama Rep. Parker Griffiths said in the 2010 congressional hearing into the direct-to-consumer genetic testing industry. The government says it has authority over what information about yourself, you may be permitted to acquire.

Consider laws that infringe upon you right to yourself. The FDA now claims the authority to not just require that the information be available so that you know what is in what you are eating, but actually control the contents of what you choose to purchase just because you may not choose to eat what the FDA has determined is in your own best interest. The government now accepts the idea that the FDA’s job is to "protect the public from itself."

Does the idea that the of government as controller of what kind of light bulb you must purchase to illuminate your living space, what you are allowed to eat, right down to what you know about yourself, disturb you at all?

What moral or political basis is there to justify the government determining what information about your own body that you should be permitted to acquire? The only moral or political reasoning that could justify such a position is based on the assumption that the government has a greater right to you than you do yourself. In essence this assumes that the government owns you and can determine, what it thinks you should and shouldn’t know.


Assume you’ve amassed some wealth, paid every dime of taxes the government wants, and you decide that you want to leave the country with a million dollars in gold coins, can you? The answer is No you can’t. Since you can’t, is it truly your property? Do you own your house, or is it the government’s property, and they allow you a “title” in exchange for annual rent (property taxes)? If it’s truly your property, not the governments, then why do you have to pay for it every year?

Slave owners determine what their slaves are taught, what they can be exposed to, what they eat, what they can wear, etc. To keep a slave happy and productive, certain freedoms are allowed but controlled. According to the World Dictionary a slave is a person legally owned by another and having no freedom of action or right to property. According to the U.S. Government, you don’t even have the right to knowledge about your own body, or the right to choose what food you want to use to fuel your own body. If you don’t have the right to yourself, self-ownership, and although we are allowed some freedoms to keep us happy and productive, are we actually slaves of the Federal Government, our masters.

Maybe it’s a bit extreme to say slaves; serfs may be a more apt description, but liberty, freedom, and self ownership are not words that can be used in a description of a people that must get their masters permission to learn what’s in their own DNA.

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Truth will Set You Free

On August 21, 2010 Obama said the following, "The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are the people with something to hide."

The following is a list of some of the records that President Obama has refused to release to the public see:

  • educational records from kindergarten at Noelani Elementary through the swanky private Punahou School;

  • his SAT scores;

  • records from Occidental College that would reveal whether he attended as a foreign student;

  • the transcript of courses and grades he took at Occidental College, or Columbia University, or Harvard Law school.

  • his thesis written at Columbia on "Soviet Nuclear Disarmament," on which he reportedly spent a year of research;

  • his LSAT scores;

  • Harvard Law Review articles during the time he served as the first black president of the institution;

  • University of Chicago scholarly articles;

  • medical and health records;

  • files and schedules during his years as an Illinois state senator from 1997 through 2004;

    If what Obama said is true, "The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are the people with something to hide," what is he trying to hide by not releasing those records?
  • Thursday, March 10, 2011

    Our inviolable right to self-defense

    by Phil Elmore
    March 10, 2011 © 2011

    The state in which I live, New York, is contemplating a law that would register and tax every firearm in the state. Already ruling the state most hostile to gun owners, New York's Democrats wish to enact a precursor to confiscation that is not just transparent in its intensions, but onerous in its financial burdens. What is often lost in debates over laws of this type is what they truly say to the citizens they affect. A law that restricts the technology of self-defense is a law that criminalizes self-defense itself. It is a law that violates your civil rights. It is a direct affront to you as a human being.

    The Founding Fathers of the United States indicated their acceptance of, and based the United States Constitution on, the concept of natural rights. For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not. Most deists and theists believe rights are God-granted, while others believe natural rights come from nature. Natural rights exist regardless.

    Because you are a discrete biological entity, you are an individual. Every group of people can be broken into individuals. No group of people can exist as a single living organism because they simply aren't one, any more than a parking lot full of cars can be a single automobile.

    Because no human can be another human, no one can live another's life. By virtue of your nature as an individual, you are born with the inalienable property right to yourself as a person. This means that no human being has a claim on your time or your effort without your consent. Think about it. If you do not own you, who does? If you are anything but your own property, you belong to someone else, which makes you that someone's slave. Are you a slave?

    Your property right to your person extends to a general right to possess legally acquired property, for no human can exist without property of some kind. This is an axiom of existence. You cannot exist in space unconnected to all other existents, the sole resident of an empty bubble of space-time. This does not mean you have an automatic claim to someone else's property by virtue of your need for it, however. This means that you necessarily have the right to possess property if you can indeed acquire it. Claims to the contrary made by Marxists, collectivists and Michael Moore are empty. If you have no right to possess property once you have obtained it, those making this assertion must be making it naked while floating in empty rooms from which even air has been evacuated.

    Your property right to yourself and your effort can be used to obtain rights to real property (land). He who first "mingles his labor with the land" earns a property right to it. What of land (or other property, for that matter) whose acquisition is disputed as being illegitimate? The longer an illegitimate claim goes uncontested, the more the passage of time legitimizes it – because the passage of time increases the possibility that an attempt to correct the illegitimate acquisition would harm parties who themselves have acted in good faith and who have committed no immoral actions. When redress of wrongs creates more wrong than it cures, it is not credible.

    What is a property right, anyway? A right to property is the right to its use. If property belongs to no one, we have none, which contradicts the necessity of property. If we say all property belongs to everyone, we have a problem, because we would then only be able to use property with the mutual consent of every member of society. Because this is impossible, some delegation of humans within society would have to make this determination – and it would then be those people, not all the people, who hold the property right.

    This points to a critical issue concerning rights. Either you recognize that you have sole dominion over your person, as does each human, or you do not. If you do not, you are saying either that all of society – the Collective, the State, whomever – has first right to you as property, or that some other person does.

    A right is, by definition, unquestionable, and not dependent on some responsibility on your part. Many times, those who support some infringement on your natural rights will appeal to the idea that "With rights come responsibilities." This is not true. A right carries with it no concomitant responsibility, because it is, by definition, inviolable. Responsibilities, by contrast, are accepted, not imposed.

    You are born into society accepting, by virtue of your existence, exactly one clause of the "social contract" – the agreement not to infringe on the natural rights of your fellow human beings. Humans who operate according to this guideline obtain what they require from other humans through exchange to mutual benefit. They are traders, giving value for value received. No human being has a claim to your life or your assets simply because you are born into his society. Your property rights to your person remain intact and inalienable regardless of the circumstances of your birth.

    Given these facts of existence, the only legitimate role of government in a free society is the protection of individuals' natural rights. That is why governments are instituted among human beings – or at least, that is why they should be.

    When a government denies its citizens' rights or actively seeks to infringe on these rights, it subordinates the individual to the state and injures that individual in the name of the community. By what right is this done? By what right is this force initiated and this theft made? How dare New York's commie libs steal the right of self–defense through their burdensome taxes and their obvious schemes for future confiscation? They have no right to do this; there is no justification for it.

    Self-defense is an individual right and, as such, is inviolable ... no matter what lies Democrats tell.






    Phil Elmore is a freelance author, technical writer and publisher of the self-defense e-zine The Martialist. This article originally appeard at WND.com

    Wednesday, March 9, 2011

    Politifact Loses All Credibility.

    Without using even a single outside source it is clear that Politifact has lot's it's credibility.

    In claiming that the statement health care reform law a "government takeover" is a lie they clearly have to stretch the meaning of a lie and government takeover.

    Here's what they said:
    When government determines the limits of insurance coverage and medical fees and patient treatment through price controls, that's not a government takeover of health care. It may feel like one, it may have the same effect as one, but the federal government doesn't actually own the hospitals, clinics and medical practices. It just controls their prices and policies by controlling health insurance. Ergo, any talk of a government takeover of health care is not just wrong but a lie. Indeed, the biggest lie of the year.

    To Politifact if the government doesn't own hospitals, clinics, and medical practices they haven't taken them over. They even admit that the Obamacare has the "same effect" as a government takeover, but because they don't actually "own" the physical property they haven't taken over health care.

    Since when has taking over something equated to owning something. Lots of bullies have taken over a playground without owning the property. Nobody would argue that TSA hasn't taken over control of airport security without actually owning the airports.

    Obviously the credibility of Politifact as a source to determine if a politician in telling the truth or not has been dramatically compromised. Politifact has lost its credibility, and cannot be trusted, especially if the subject in question concerns Obama and his policies.

    Sunday, March 6, 2011

    The Left is Very Confused

    The left, mostly democrats and collectivists of all kinds, is presenting the country with a schism that is difficult to comprehend.

    On one hand for decades the continually bombard us with the doctrine that the government is the solution to all our problems; that only the government can save us from ourselves.

    On the other hand, they are supporting and promoting the unions and unionization of all government workers. This unionization implies that the workers need to be protected from the abuse of the government, who if not for the union’s power and collective bargaining would trample the rights and abuse government workers.

    It appears as the very workers who deliver and are mechanism for the service the government provides is presenting themselves of victims of that same government.

    Which is it, is the government the solution to our problems and protector of the people, or is it an evil monstrosity that the workers and people must be protected against?

    Wednesday, March 2, 2011

    It’s not all Bad News

    The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday against government suppression of free speech. The Court ruled that Illinois students have the right to wear anti-gay shirt. The shirt in question said “Be Happy Not Gay.”

    Justice took a long time. A teen sued in 2006 after school officials blacked out the words "Not Gay" on her T-shirt. The incident happened the day after a "Day of Silence," which was held to draw attention to the harassment of gay students.

    The court rightly said a school that "permits advocacy of the rights of homosexual students cannot be allowed to stifle criticism of homosexuality."

    This is clearly an action where the US courts correctly protected free speech. There is Hope for America as this is a clear indication that we live in a country of laws, where all laws apply equally to everybody. It’s easy to stand up for the rights of those we agree with but the true test of liberty is when we protect the rights of those whose opinions we don’t agree.