Vote Early; Vote Often

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has signed a bill into law that requires voters to produce photo identification in order to participate in the election process.  ACORN, professional victim groups, illegal aliens, government unions, and the rest of the Theftocrats' permanent entitlement constituencies are beside themselves.  They are convinced that it is their birthright to steal elections.  How dare the rest of us demand honesty of them!

Making sure we have legislation that protects the integrity for an open, fair and honest election in every single case is important, said Walker.  The chronically bereaved responded by chanting, Recall Walker!  Wisconsin is now the 11th state to have approved requiring some form of photo ID at the polls.

Open, fair, and honest runs counter to the dictates of progressives' amorality.  They believe that they should be exempt from enduring any unwanted consequences that might result from their actions because lying, cheating, and stealing are essential to achieving their holy goals.

The Wall Street Journal's John Fund has these observations.  Coercion and chicanery are made much easier by the excessive use of absentee ballots.  Most of the elections thrown out by courts—Miami, Florida's mayoral election in 1998, the East Chicago, Indiana's mayor's race in 2005—involved fraudulent absentee votes.  Three decades ago, absentee and early ballots were only 5% of all votes cast nationwide.  In 2008, they exceeded 25%.

In the 2004 presidential election, Milwaukee election officials reported that some 5,000 more ballots were credited than were recorded as having been cast.  Additionally, more than 1300 votes cast by people who registered to vote on the day of the election--this invitation to fraud should be eliminated--were declared invalid.  The Milwaukee Police Department, a government union operation, had a plan for the 2008 national election.  The police department's Special Investigative Unit was ordered by superiors not to send anyone to polling places on Election Day.  What a shock.

Election laws should be clear, simple, applied equally, and balance ease of voting with the need for ballot integrity.  A unanimous Supreme Court warned about the danger of loose election laws when it vacated a Ninth Circuit opinion, which had enjoined the use of Arizona's new voter ID law on the grounds it would disenfranchise voters.

The court made the obvious point that "disenfranchisement" is a two-way street.  Fraud, it noted in Gonzales v. Arizona (2006), "drives honest citizens out of the democratic process. . . . [V]oters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised."

For Corruptocrats, election theft is merely part of their overall plan for the theft-welfare state.  They invented the mommy state to reflect their belief that they have discovered the way, the truth, and the light.  These delusions drive them to force everyone to live as they dictate; these dictates are unilaterally beneficial to themselves.  Theirs is not a society of taboos, boundaries that we are forbidden to cross.  Their utopia is one of enforced totems, or mandatory kow towing to the omniscient, omnipresent, and oppressive state deity.

May your gods be with you.

Landless in America

Totalitarian states keep the governed politically impotent by preventing them from owning land.  Landowners use and dispose of land as they choose and hold it free from liens or encumbrances.  Government reserves these rights for itself.  Unelected bureaucrats determine how we use land, regulate its disposal, and keep perpetual tax liens against it. 
 

Individuals cannot not own land outright; instead, government confers legal privileges to citizens concerning it, and the state can rescind those privileges arbitrarily.  Fourth Amendment guaranties are being eroded daily.  This article reveals one frightening instance.

Just last week, however, in a move that would have made King George III proud, the Indiana Supreme Court cavalierly decided that police can enter a person’s home for any reason – or no reason, or an unlawful reason — and the homeowner forced to stand aside and let them do their deeds.  Unless overturned by the federal courts or the state legislature, Indiana residents will be deprived of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” enjoyed to at least some degree by people in other states and under federal law.  The specific issue at hand is whether or not you can resist someone – anyone, including a police officer – attempting to illegally enter your home.

The American Thinker’s Daren Bakst offers thoughts on how the state gutted the Fifth Amendment in order to steal property rights from individuals and redistribute them to others.

Six years ago, the United States Supreme Court effectively gutted property rights protections in the Fifth Amendment.  A pending bill in the United States House could help to address some of the damage caused by the Court.  In Kelo v. City of New London, the Court held that the government can seize private property from one private citizen and transfer the property to another private citizen for economic development.  If a home would generate more tax revenue as a mall, then the government can seize the home.  The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution states "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."  This language is supposed to limit the government's power to take private property except for a "public use."

At Global Research, Paul C. Wright describes what the current administration is doing to the public; they are incrementally remanding the Constitution.

The pretext for the destruction of Americans’ civil liberties is the “global war on terror,” which – according to all three branches of government – requires that Americans surrender their liberties for security and protection from foreign and domestic threats…local law enforcement agencies are increasingly becoming a tool of state authority and state security.  Without a reversal of this trend, law enforcement will soon exist primarily to protect the interests of government.
 
Government should protect the little guy from the rich and powerful, especially when the rich and powerful is the government.  The Institute for Justice cites a case in which they prevented Donald Trump and the state of New Jersey from confiscating an elderly widow’s home.

Vera Coking, from Atlantic City, knows firsthand the power of unaccountable government agencies. [They] sought to take her property and transfer it—at a bargain-basement price—to another private individual: Donald Trump. Trump convinced the State agency to use its “eminent domain” power to take Vera’s home so he could construct a limousine parking lot for his customers...unfortunately, cases in which government agencies act not as protectors of constitutionally guaranteed rights, but instead as agents for powerful, private interests, have become all too common. 

'Individual freedom finds tangible expression in property rights.' This statement, penned by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, recognizes how central property rights are to a free society.

The people are no longer the government because the government is no longer accountable to the people.

May your gods be with you.

Gang O-buma: The Ruling Class Elite

Angelo M. Codevilla's article about America's ruling class offers insight into many of the country's ills and why solving problems at the national level is so difficult.  The current ruling class elites are resolute enemies of liberty.  That is, if liberty is the extent to which the lives of individuals are free from government interference.

The Corruptocrat's totalitarian mommy state is the enemy of liberty because, through it, they hope to establish complete control of virtually every aspect of life by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.  From Julius Seizure Genachowski's attempts to muzzle free speech on the Internet, to O-bumaCare's edict that all Americans must buy health insurance, to the Environmental Protection Agency's carbon propaganda intended to make our light bills skyrocket, there are regulations that control and manipulate nearly every aspect of Americans' lives.    

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

In his article “How to short circuit the ruling class,” author Wes Vernon poses an interesting question.  He wonders, [m]aybe we should have the right to elect (or defeat) the faceless bureaucrats who presume the right to dominate our lives. Why not?  After all, these people have anointed themselves with the power to create legislation arbitrarily, not merely taboos, or thou-shalt-nots that prohibit actions, but totems, or must-do orders that force kow towing to their supreme authority.
 

They are the segment of our population that presumes to set the limits of what Americans should be told, what issues are to be discussed (and which ones are to be ignored), the cultural tenor of the nation, what we can eat, what we can hear, what we can wear, what we can drive, and — what we can say.

This is why voters should have the right to vote them into and out of office.  Vernon offers a concise version of Dr. Codevilla’s message, he states, Basically, here's what the professor would say to the arrogant, faceless bureaucrats with ipso facto quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers as to how the rest of us are to live our lives: Let the voters decide whether you get to keep your job.

Bureaucrats are the hammer that fashions progressives’ totalitarian state.  In Investor’s Business Daily, an article titled “Obama’s ‘Progressive’ Failures” quotes the president bragging that he had enacted the most progressive legislative agenda in decades.  The article continues by describing the progressive philosophy such that it stresses the importance of centralized government control over Americans' lives as paramount. It actively seeks to diminish the constitutional limits on what government can — and can't — do. 
 

It further exposes progressive totalitarianism by revealing that its [a]dherents understood that the idea of limited government based on individualism, natural rights and property rights — as defined by the Founding Fathers — had to be discredited.
 

It stood in the way of their social engineering agenda, which views patriotism as a danger, religion as a vice and constitutionalism as a mere historical tic to be eradicated.

In short, progressivism is a creed of Big Government — government with few checks and balances; government not of the people, by the people and for the people, but government of, by and for the special interests and elites that form the movement's backbone.
 

Senator Rand Paul has a plan to save taxpayers one-half a trillion dollars and significantly reduce the federal government’s footprint.  This article is required reading for lovers of liberty everywhere.
 

The elections in November, 2010, showed clearly that Americans want a live-and-let-live world in which liberty and free expression are championed and cherished.  We are chafing under the oppressive yoke imposed on us by The One and the other socialist-progressive ruling class elites.  It is time for the governed to seize the reins of government once again.  Remember the words of Barry Goldwater.  I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

May your gods be with you.  
 

We Are Not Happy

Today's effort is a jumble of eclectic electronic articles, images, and opinions that are intended to enlighten, provoke, challenge and, possibly, inspire.

The prevaricator-in-chief just cannot bring himself to acknowledge the inconvenient truth; he lied about raising taxes.

The Patriot Act may be a necessary evil; however, parts of it give the federal government far too much power and cost citizens too much liberty.  This is a welcome and heartening consequence of trying to stampede authorization through Congress without adequate examination, analysis, and debate.  This odd consortium of left wingers, tea partiers, and Republicans snatched the arrow out of midair and dragged it back for reexamination.

WalMart is targeting 8-12 year old girls with a makeup sales campaign.  Eight year old girls should look like eight year olds, not fifteen year olds.  This article about two moms who write a blog about motherhood is a call to arms for everyone who opposes child exploitation and sexualization.  These women also exposed a company that is best described as Victoria's Secret for pre-pubescent girls.  Together, these two business operations seem to offer a pedophile's fantasy-land.  Little wonder that the television show Skins is popular.  Yuck!

A book has been released recently that punctures progressives' pandering balloons.  A newly discovered cache of documents in England reveals that Abe Lincoln conspired with the British Government to ship newly freed slaves to Belize and Guyana.  Lincoln wanted to free the slaves to punish southerners for objecting to his confiscatory tax policies, but he was squeamish about having freed slaves mingling with whites in northern cities.  

This information must be a terrible affront to those whose delirious naiveté prevents them from recognizing the folly of believing that, in the 1860s, millions of white guys got together and fought a war to free a bunch of slaves.  They killed some 600,000 of themselves and squandered untold fortunes to fight a war on principle, not because the Confederates wanted to be equitably compensated for the unlawful seizure of their property.  You bet, now to look for the Easter Bunny.

Surely the American Association of University Professors would not stoop to featherbedding by trying to bloat the number of unqualified university students in the US, no more than they would want to add members to their fiefdom at almost any cost.  It seems mercenary that they oppose a report revealing that abroad and in 'sharp contrast to the US, vocational education is seen as a mainstream, well-respected pathway while a university education is reserved for people interested in a narrower band of professions like law, medicine, and research.' 

The authors of the article continue by asserting that placing 'all our bets on classroom-based pedagogy...is simply unacceptable for anyone who cares about America.'  "Many students are dropping out of high school and becoming delinquents and single mothers.  Those who complete their schooling are often unemployed and...dependent on their parents."  This "is because there is not enough correlation between studies and future careers."  Barack Obama called on all students to commit to a year or more in "community college, a four-year school, vocational school, or an apprenticeship."

It seems as though vocational school is an idea whose time has come once again. 

"Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see.  The morning will come when the world is mine.  Tomorrow belongs to me!"  For those who are thinking pre-WWII Germany, think again; this is Egypt 2011.  The Muslim Brotherhood intends to establish Sharia law from border to border and ocean to ocean in the US and Europe as well.

There was a country once that was founded, in part, upon the principle of religious freedom.  This guaranty was even enshrined in its supreme laws and upheld many times by its courts.  As it has repeatedly revealed, the national education collective is above laws and has given itself the privilege of abiding only by those legal requirements that are expedient.

Finally, here is an article about teaching ethics.  At one time ethics was a required course in order to earn a degree from universities' four year programs. Nowadays, it is sometimes not even part of the curriculum.  We have suffered as a nation since the national political dialog became about economics rather than ethics.  

May your gods be with you.