Restoring the Constitution to it's rightful place

It's being butchered piece by piece; can it be restored by a similar process?

Taking back Constitution piece by piece

It is an immutable fact that the Constitution is the law of the land, but the law of the land should not be presumed to be immutable.

It isn’t.

No artifact of the human mind can be maintained intact like a formalin-preserved insect on a pin. No matter how much comfort it would give us to have predictability and certainty in our law, the elements of human curiosity and cussedness would always give rise to unpredictability and chaos.

This introduces the possibility of improvement, whether through design or through accident, but it also raises the spectre of decline, whether through stupidity or sabotage.

Improvements have come in the form of amendments that accomplished the abolition of slavery and giving women the right to vote. Those were both long overdue by the time they passed.

But there have also been mistakes made in the amendment process, including the prohibition of alcohol and the decision to turn senators into panderers by making them directly electable by the people instead of through the choice of each state’s legislature.

With more than a hundred years of monkey-wrenching the prime law of the land through “progressive” court decisions, there is also lots of damage to undo that is based on “precedent” rather than the plain language of the Constitution.

You could start with the Commerce Clause, which has been shaped into a choke collar to restrict the freedom of the people to engage in trade and seek prosperity. You could start by re-instituting real limits on the powers of Congress or the president, as enumerated in Articles I and II. You could force the nation to honor the Ninth and 10th Amendments, which are included in the Bill of Rights but might as well have been written in invisible ink since they are treated as if they were nonexistent by the Supreme Court, Congress and many presidents. [...]

It's worth reading the whole thing. But we've already reached the point where many people don't know what the Constitution says, and they don't care. In fact, many see it as an obstacle to "progress", and want it abolished.

More people need to wake up, before it's too late.
     

How to silence your critics: A tax on bloggers?

Yes. In Philadelpha, it's happening:

Philadelphia tax fever: Bloggers get hit

The Founding Fathers must be rolling in their graves. In Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the city government has proposed smacking bloggers — our generation’s pamphleteers — with a $300 business tax. Yes, they are now requiring a license for Internet activists and hobbyists to exercise their free speech. [...]

Read the whole thing. They want to require blogs to have a business license, whether they make money or not, because blogs have the potential to make money, if they offer advertising.

Whatever happened to "free speech"? Remember free speech? The 1st Amendment? Is it soon to be nothing more than a relic of the past?


Also see:

Marxist Censorship Dreams, and the FCC

How much longer will our Republic last?
     

You can never go back, but can you bring the best forward, and discard the mistakes?

The Return of the Jeffersonian Vision and the Rejection of Progressivism

We are once again—as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers—a republic of property owners.

“No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” So reads a portion of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights passed by the First Congress and ratified by state legislatures, sponsored originally by Thomas Jefferson’s friend and political ally James Madison. It echoed, of course, Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Madison and Jefferson followed the tradition of John Locke, the British philosopher whose Two Treatises on Government was taken as the justification for the transfer of power known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89—the subject of my 2007 book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

Locke, therefore, thought that the responsibility for choosing legislators in representative government should be limited to property owners, as it was in elections to the House of Commons. In English counties, the franchise was limited to 40-shilling freeholders—owners of property that brought in two pounds a year. The franchise in the more numerous boroughs was limited in different ways, in some cases to the owners of specific pieces of property.

The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.

The Founders anticipated a limited but broader franchise in America. They provided that senators should be chosen by legislatures, whose members were typically selected by a large electorate, and that members of the House should be chosen by voters with “the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.”

The Founders had different ideas of the worthiness of commerce. Jefferson envisioned a republic of freeholding egalitarian farmers. Alexander Hamilton envisioned a republic on the path toward commercial and industrial preeminence. But Jefferson’s vision was a more accurate picture of the United States in the early years of the republic, where land was plentiful and labor scarce, where the large majority of white men were farmers and most of them owned the land they worked.

In this freeholders’ republic, it was natural to move toward universal manhood suffrage, to allow every white male adult to vote. Some states took longer than others to reach this goal—South Carolina still had the legislature choose its presidential electors until 1860. But the principle was widely accepted elsewhere: since almost everyone owned property, everyone should be allowed to vote. There was a danger, recognized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, that the poor would vote to strip the rich of their wealth and, in President Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber, “Spread the wealth around.”

The New Deal was an attempt to freeze an economy, then in a downward spiral, into one place.

Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep. But that danger seemed distant, even to Tocqueville, in an America whose dominant and more populist party, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, opposed government spending on public works projects and feared the power of a central bank.

Up through the end of the 19th century there did not seem to be a significant tension between universal democracy and property rights. The Founders’ vision prevailed.

A New Vision Based on Fear

But that was no longer the case in 1910. By then, another vision was being advanced, the vision of the Progressives—the vision of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, of political philosophers Herbert Croly and John Dewey.

The Progressives explicitly repudiated the Founders’ vision of limited government. They argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional. The Constitution, they said, was a “horse and buggy” document, suited perhaps to the simpler society of the 18th century, but dangerously out of date in a complex industrial society which could not expect ordinary citizens to make their way without government guidance and assistance. They were acting, they said, in the interests of the people. Their critics said they were acting out of hunger for power.

I want to advance another thesis: That they actually acted more out of fear than of benevolence. They feared revolution. [...]

Read the whole thing. There is lots to chew on here. It's pretty clear where we went wrong. But can we make corrections, and make it right?
     

We know how to recover the economy

We just have to get the government, which is sitting on our necks and strangling us, off of us and out of our way:

Restore Economic Liberty

[...] Reagan had succeeded in turning America’s ailing economy into a healthy and thriving one, and the leaders wanted to know how he did it. Reagan’s policies were defeating inflation and unemployment at a time when the rest of the world was still in recession. His key themes in answering them was to talk about how over taxation and burdensome government stifle the economy and individuals, and how economic freedom and limited government unleash the creativity and passion of the individual, allowing them to pursue their dreams and thrive. Reagan preached, and practiced, the old-time gospel of economic freedom.

Today, Americans are stifled by big government, smothered by over-regulation, and taxed to death. Our Founding Fathers who risked everything they had – their fortunes, their families, their lives – to secure freedom for us would not recognize our current economic reality as anything even close to the economic liberty they worked so hard to secure. Yes, we are endowed by our Creator with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". But the government formed to protect those rights now makes it awfully hard for Americans to see economic liberty anywhere and nearly impossible to pursue financial security and the happiness that comes with it.

It’s time to reclaim a bit of that old time religion. It’s time to secure economic liberty by cutting taxes, reducing regulations and shrinking the size of government. We’ve got to free individuals to use our God-given talents and imaginations to build a better life for ourselves and our children or we will eventually lose our liberty altogether. [...]

It goes on to say how we should do that, and ends with a great quote by Thomas Jefferson.

The economic truths Ronald Reagan spoke about are timeless. At this critical time when we desperately need to apply them, our current government is doing exactly the opposite. And the results will be exactly the opposite of prosperity. It's also why the recovery is stalling.

If this can still be turned around, we need to start this November by voting OUT the politicians who are promulgating this madness.
     

Did the U.S. government shake loose its constitutional moorings more than 70 years ago?

Paul Remarks Have Deep Roots

Republican candidate Rand Paul's controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act unsettled GOP leaders this week, but they reflect deeply held iconoclastic beliefs held by some in his party, and many in the tea-party movement, that the U.S. government shook its constitutional moorings more than 70 years ago.

[...]

In tea-party circles, Mr. Paul's views are not unusual. They fit into a "Constitutionalist" view under which the federal government has no right to dictate the behavior of private enterprises. On the stump, especially among tea-party supporters, Mr. Paul says "big government" didn't start with President Obama, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s or the advance of central governance sparked by World War II and the economic boom that followed.

He traces it to 1937, when the Supreme Court, under heated pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, upheld a state minimum-wage law on a 5-4 vote, ushering in the legal justification for government intervention in private markets.

Until the case, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Supreme Court had sharply limited government action that impinged on the private sector, infuriating Mr. Roosevelt so much that he threatened to expand the court and stack it with his own appointees.

"It didn't start last year. I think it started back in 1936 or 1937, and I point really to a couple of key constitutional cases… that all had to do with the commerce clause," Mr. Paul said in an interview before Tuesday's election, in which he defeated a Republican establishment candidate, hand-picked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky.).

Mr. Paul has said that, if elected, one of his first demands will be that Congress print the constitutional justification on any law is passes.

Last week, Mr. Paul encouraged a tea-party gathering in Louisville to look at the origins of "unconstitutional government." He told the crowd there of Wickard v. Filburn, a favorite reference on the stump, in which the Supreme Court rejected the claims of farmer Roscoe Filburn that wheat he grew for his own use was beyond the reach of federal regulation. The 1942 ruling upheld federal laws limiting wheat production, saying Mr. Filburn's crop affected interstate commerce. Even if he fed his wheat to his own livestock, the court reasoned, he was implicitly affecting wheat prices. If he had bought the wheat on the market, he would subtly have raised the national price of the crop.

"That's when we quit owning our own property. That's when we became renters on our own land," Mr. Paul told the crowd.

In an interview, Mr. Paul expressed support for purely in-state gun industries, in which firearms are produced in one state with no imported parts and no exports. Guns produced under those circumstances can't be subjected to a federal background check, waiting period or other rules, he reasons.

"I'm not for having a civil war or anything like that, but I am for challenging federal authority over the states, through the courts, to see if we can get some better rulings," he said.

To supporters, such ideological purity has made the Bowling Green ophthalmologist a hero.

"He's going back to the Constitution," said Heather Toombs, a Louisville supporter who came to watch him at a meet-and-greet at a suburban home last week. "He's taking back the government." [...]

Of course that doesn't mean we have to discard everything that's happened since 1937. It's not about trying to go back to the past, but about understanding the past and using that knowledge to make course corrections in the present, to keep us guided and protected under our Constitution. Read the whole thing for context, it's not a very long article.
     

Coffee House Collectivists VS Tea Party Individualists, and the Middle Ground

Coffee vs. Tea: A political movement is brewing

Washington (CNN) -- Is the Coffee Party on the scale of the Tea Party movement? Saturday is the first big test in attempting to answer that question.

Leaders of the fledgling movement say they plan to hold 350 to 400 events at coffeehouses across the country. While the Coffee Party has become an instant hit online, gauging the success of Saturday's coast-to-coast events could be an indicator of the group's strength.

"We need to wake up and work hard to get our government to represent us," says Annabel Park, the movement's founder.

[...]

Park, who worked as a volunteer for then-Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign and Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia's 2006 campaign, says the Coffee Party is not aligned with any party. She calls the two-party system out of date.

"It encourages people to think of politics as a kind of game, like a football game, in which there are two sides, and it's a zero sum situation. If one person wins, the other person loses. That's really not a healthy way to conduct collective decision-making. That's not a democracy."

Park said the bitter battle over health care is an example of how government is not working.

"We feel like the health care debate showed not only that we are a very divided country, but there's something really wrong with our political process. We kind of got to see the innards of the political process and realize there's something very broken. I think that's what we're responding to." [...]

What "health care debate" is she talking about? One side dictating to the rest of us, is not a "debate".

The two party system is out of date? Really? What do we replace it with? Seriously?

When I've talked to Leftists about this, the answer I usually get is that we need a one-party state, in order to "avoid divisiveness and conflict, to make sure that we all agree. It's VERY IMPORTANT that we ALL AGREE".

That's been tried before. It's called totalitarianism. Or fascism. Nazism. Communism. Whatever the name, it's absolute power, corrupting absolutely.

A Multi-party system is messy and contentious, to be sure. But adversarial, multi-party democracy is the only way prevent absolute power, and to fight the corruption that always goes along with wielding power. It's not perfect, but it beats the alternatives.

In my experience, when collectivists talk about "collective decision making", that means agreeing with them. Period. When they say we have to avoid having winners and losers, they mean we should have only one party so there is no "opposition", no competition in the market place of ideas.

Collectivists are always saying "we need more democracy". That's because a 100% pure democracy is the same as mob-rule. That can sweep the collectivists to power, but pure democracies always destroy themselves, only to be replaced with some sort of totalitarian system. That's fine with many collectivists, because they don't want to compete; a totalitarian system that does what they want, is what they want.

The only thing wrong with our political process is, that it's not being respected.

The US Constitution is there to limit the powers of Government, so that no one political party can trample all others; to ensure that there is a middle ground on which we can meet, and stand and govern from. We need to respect that middle ground.

Something about our system is "broken"? Well, yeah; Our political system can't "work" if it's not followed. Duh. Unfortunately, we have politicians in our system who are deliberately working to break it, so they can then replace it with something else; yet another power grab, mob rule degenerating into totalitarianism, as history attempts to repeat itself. Same old story. We've managed to avoid that for over 200 years. Are we going to give in to it now?

When we no longer respect the Constitution and it's roll in our government, then our Republic cannot last. Will we only appreciate it when it's gone?

Our country has always had both collectivist and individualist traditions. I don't say that we need to discard one for the other; we can keep having both! We just need to preserve the middle ground on which we can all stand. We can do that by respecting and following the US Constitution, which will continue to serve us well, if only we let it. If we actively support it and not allow it to be subverted. It's ours to hold or lose. Use it, or lose it.
     

Getting Around the Constitution: butcher it, until you have the power to utterly destroy it

So the slimeballs want to pass the bill with legal tricks: Louise Slaughter and Nancy Pelosi want to present a rule, issued by Slaughter's committee, that says that the House already adopted the Senate bill when it didn’t, so members of congress can say they voted for a rule, and not for the bill. WTF!?! How much deeper can the Bullshit get?


Constitution Butchers: Stop Pelosi’s Slaughter House

Just when you think they couldn't sink any lower, they do. They took an oath to uphold the constitution. Clearly it means nothing to them. Follow the link, and read about what they are doing. It's criminal.
     

PelosiCare and the Amercian Constitution

What Constitution?

[...] The linked editorial touches on the legal argument with respect to the mandated purchase of insurance. I can’t fully comprehend the the gory details (I’m not a lawyer), but you see the unprecedented nature of the intrusion. Under what other circumstances do you become a criminal just for existing and failing to purchase a mandated item? By way of example, you’re compelled (by your state) to buy car insurance… but you made the choice to buy a car. Obviously you’re compelled to pay taxes…but then, this isn’t a tax; Obama promised not to tax you, so it can’t be a tax.

[...]

My main objection to health control is fear of the life-and-death power that government will ultimately hold over individual citizens, as well as looming national bankruptcy. Our Constitution was designed to protect us from such government overreach and centralization of power.

Precisely. PelosiCare is unconstitutional, AND unsustainable. What is the point, unless you want to ruin out current system of government and economics, and replace them with... something else?

SO ... SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT PELOSICARE

[...] Pelosi's bill contains $250 billion dollars in deficit spending ... oh, but wait. They're voting on that separately so that you can't say the deficit spending is part of Pelosi's bill. Are you following this?

You do know that you'll start paying the taxes immediately --- but that you won't start reaping the benefits for another four years or so, don't you? Quite the con there. They say that PelosiCare will only cost $850+ trillion dollars over the first ten years ... but don't tell you will only receive benefits for six out of those ten years. Wait till the next 10 years hits you in the can.

Thus far nobody has explained where in our Constitution it gives the Imperial Federal Government the power to jail someone for a period of five years for failing to purchase a health insurance policy. But what the hell does Nancy Pelosi care about our Constitution, anyway? [...]

Is there hope, as this bill moves to the Senate? I think so. Consider:

Mutiny in Scrutiny?

[...] Greater scrutiny will not help the Democrats' efforts. In truth, their hopes for passage largely hinge on successfully hiding two plain facts from the voters: One, the House Republicans and the Congressional Budget Office have now shown that a bill costing $61 billion can lower Americans' insurance premiums, while bills costing $1.7 trillion cannot (and instead would raise them substantially). Two, the Democrats' plans would be paid for only if they follow through on plans to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars out of already-barely-solvent Medicare, and to do so just in time for the baby boomers' retirement.

Given the magnitude of the challenge of continuing to hide these plain facts from an increasingly attentive citizenry, the Democratic health-care train has a very bumpy ride ahead — as it rolls into the chamber that the American Founders thought from the beginning would ultimately decide our fate: the Senate.

61 billion and lower premiums, versus 1.7 TRILLION and higher premiums? Which one do you think the majority of Americans would prefer?

I live in hope. And intend to do what I can to insure that saner minds in the Senate prevail.

     

How much longer will our Republic last?

How committed is the Obama Administration to supporting Free Speech and upholding the American Constitution? It's awful to even have to ask that, but actions indicate we must:

Caesar Obama

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, provoked ridicule when he said last week that "Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar." He didn't mean that Barack Obama is a literary titan who doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus while petty men like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. But what he did mean, while no less fatuous, is also disquieting in its implications: for the first time, the United States of America has a president whose supporters talk about him in the same effusive and worshipful tones usually reserved for the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Il.

[...]

At a time when the Obama Administration is relentlessly demonizing dissenting voices and manifesting a shaky (at best) commitment to the freedom of speech, this is hardly a reassuring message to send. It demonstrates once again this Administration’s utter tone deafness and apparent indifference to genuine concerns about its commitment to core principles of the U.S. Constitution – witness Nancy Pelosi’s incredulous response of “are you serious?” to a questioner who asked her about the Constitutionality of nationalizing health care. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has declared her opposition to attempts at the United Nations to criminalize “defamation of religions” – that is, to make it illegal to speak about the motives and goals of Islamic jihad terrorists. Yet the Obama Administration is sending decidedly mixed signals about its commitment to free speech. Several weeks ago the Obama Administration actually co-sponsored an anti-free speech resolution at the United Nations. Approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council on October 2, the resolution, cosponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, calls on states to condemn and criminalize “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”

Yet “incitement” and “hatred” are in the eye of the beholder — or more precisely, in the eye of those who make such determinations. The powerful can decide to silence the powerless by classifying their views as “hate speech.” And now the President of the United States has given his imprimatur to this tyranny. [...]

As our government continues to assume more and more powers and controls that it has been previously denied, and it's members fail to uphold the Constitution they have sworn to honor and defend, we must ask, where is this going, and where will this power-grab stop? WILL it stop?

The Cold War Never Ended

It is now almost twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. But did it really end, and did we win it? Look at the situation in Europe today, where many of the former Communist countries in the eastern half of Europe are freer and safer than many of those in the western half of Europe. Instead of an Iron Curtain we now have an Iron Veil of Multiculturalism, and Western Europe is on the wrong side of it this time around. Did we trade the USSR for the EUSSR? If we really "beat" Marxism, how come Marxists and Leftists of all stripes virtually control Western media and academia a generation later, and why does the USA have a Marxist-inspired President Obama? [...]

Marxist ideology never left us. It just goes under different names and uses different methods now. Including "Hope and Change", and an increasingly Imperial US Congress.


Also see:

Dems "Not concerned" about the Constitution?
     

Democrats who promised transparency are breaking their own promise to publish the final bill publicly 72 hours before the vote

Pelosi is determined to hammer her bill through before we can even read it:


Democrats and the death of deliberative democracy

The House vote on Speaker Pelosi’s government health care bill is set for Saturday morning. She is scrambling to buy off recalcitrant Democrats on two of very issues that Rep. Joe Wilson and other House Republicans called out the White House for: abortion and illegal immigrant coverage. The wheeling and dealing is taking place behind closed doors. Once again, the Democrats who promised transparency are breaking their own promise to publish the final bill publicly 72 hours before the vote. [...]

The Democrats lied, and transparency died. When the Democrat leaders make promises, you can be sure they will just do whatever they want anyway, once they have power. They believe the rules don't apply to them, which is why they also disregard the Constitution, even though they have sworn to uphold it. It all means nothing to them; the ends justifies the means.

Today they plan to force a flawed and unsustainable healthcare system on us that they have exempted themselves from. Who the Hell do they think they are?

You can see live blogging of today's events here:

Liveblogging: The new Imperial Congress votes on Pelosicare; Update: Female Democrats turn House resolution process into circus; GOP responds; Obama rallies weakened Dems
     

Dems "Not concerned" about the Constitution?

From their actions, I would say that's easy to believe. From Neal Boortz:

THE CONSTITUTION AND HEALTHCARE

When it comes to achieving the Democrats dreams and schemes, there is nothing that will stand in their way. Not even that pesky little thing called the Constitution. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch put it all in perspective recently. He does not believe that the Democrat plans for healthcare are justifiable. He says that if the federal government can force Americans to buy health insurance "then there is literally nothing the federal government can't force us to do."

Ain't that the truth?

First it is healthcare. Then what? What comes next for the Democrats to achieve their goal of making you more and more dependent on government? Orrin Hatch's point is that right now, the Constitution still remains a "barrier" for the Democrats. But if they get their way with healthcare, the levies will be broken. There will be nothing stopping them from trampling over what is left of our Constitution.

And the White House doesn't seem to have a problem with that. Robert Gibbs was asked just yesterday whether White House lawyers had reviewed the Constitutionality of Obamacare. Robert Gibbs' response was that the White House is not seriously concerned about this.

Not seriously concerned? What is there to be MORE concerned about than upholding the foundation of this country? Then upholding the Constitution. Didn't The Community Organizer take an oath to protect and defend our Constitution? And now he's "Not concerned"? And if you will remember, Nancy Pelosi had a similar response last week. When asked about the Constitutionality of her healthcare plan, she actually thought the reporter was joking. She chuckled, "Are you serious? Is that a serious question?" Yes, Nancy. Yes, Robert. Yes, Obama. We are serious. And it is about time you get serious too before you completely destroy what is left of this great country.

I'm sick of the blatant disregard for the constitution that these creeps have supposedly sworn to uphold. But then liars can swear to anything, because they don't mean it. And speaking of lies, I'm getting really tired of the often repeated lie that the Republicans have no health care plans to offer:

HARRY REID --- LIAR

Harry Reid has some gonads. He is accusing the Republicans of not having any healthcare plans, when he himself technically does not have a completed healthcare bill to show the world. Last week, he sent off pieces of healthcare legislation for a CBO cost analysis. So the Republicans said they wanted to see the bill that he sent to the CBO. Well the truth of the matter is that this bill hasn't even been written yet. He is waiting for the CBO analysis to come back in order to decide which direction he wants to take. Then he took a shot at the Republicans for daring to request to see this elusive bill he submitted to the CBO. Reid said that the GOP health care plan "remains a secret, unless perhaps it does not exist." He goes on to say, "I fully understand if your plan is still under development, and would not presume to suggest that you publicly share draft legislative text for even an individual element of your plan, let alone an entire bill, before it is finalized."

Unfortunately for Harry Reid, the Republicans do have healthcare bills. Three of them. And they have been on the table since May and June of this year. CNSNews has the list:

In May, Republicans in the House and the Senate formed a bicameral coalition to produce the 130-page "Patients Choice Act of 2009."

In June, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) introduced the "Health Care Freedom Plan," a 41-page proposal.

And in July, the Republican Study Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), unveiled the "Empowering Patients First Act," a 130-page plan.

Harry Reid is desperate. So are his Democrat friends. They know that they are losing this battle to get their healthcare plans passed. So now they are complaining that the other side doesn't even have a plan. Shouldn't we be thanking these Democrats! Oh we should be so thankful ... at least THEY have come up with plans to take over 18% of our economy!

And they are readable sizes too, so they can actually be read completely before being voted on. Yet I have not heard about even one of these plans mentioned in the MSM. But I have heard the media often repeat the Democrats lies that these Republican proposals don't even exist.
     

Has US Currency already "collapsed"?

A post I did a while back, "What would a U.S. currency collapse look like?", has been getting more hits and rising up in my site meter. I found out it's been linked to at Ask.com, regarding the search words "currency collapse". I went to that page, and there were many interesting links to that topic. Here are a few that I found informative:

How Does a Currency Collapse? and the U.S. $?

When a currency loses the confidence of its people, its fall becomes exponential, as has happened to the Zimbabwe $, where in 1982 one U.S.$ equalled 1 Zimbabwe $. Today around Z$200,000 buys one U.S. $ if you can find someone idiot enough to sell one for the Z$.

In day-to-day terms, the smallest note in Zimbabwe a Z$500 is the size of a U.S.$. The price of a single-ply sheet of toilet paper is more expensive at around Z$867.

The U.S.$ is nowhere near there, but clearly the U.S. Administration has no plan or even desire to rectify the U.S. Trade deficit. Consequently, we are seeing a growing number of Central Banks turning to the Euro for its reserves and away from the U.S.$.

Whilst most observers and particularly U.S. observers like to have tangible facts and numbers with which to mathematically gauge the present and the different possible futures, a collapsing currency situation is not as neatly gaugeable. Indeed it is driven in stages of ‘confidence’, which are rarely measurable in advance.

For instance we see today the move of the Pension and other long-term funds into the gold E.T.F. one finds there are no mathematically measurable factors with which to measure the pace of change to these funds. Yes, the number of ‘Road-shows’ the World Gold Council does affects this move to some extent, but how do you measure the spread of that knowledge and resulting investment in the E.T.F.s outside of that? How does one measure the forces causing uncertainty and falling ‘confidence’.

It is an emotional progression, one that moves in lurches as particular incidents destroy confidence limb by limb. In such a climate a steady degeneration of confidence lead to an effect we shall call a "plateau - cliff" process.[...]

Read the whole thing. See the steps of the "process". See the graph. Yikes.


Then James Turk does an interview with Moneychanger.com. Turk maintains that our currency has already collapsed, that we are already in the "process", and it just hasn't reached critical mass yet. The interviewer argues forcefully against Turks assessments, but Turk holds his ground, answering a lot of good questions by the interviewer. Here's a sample:

JAMES TURK ON THE DOLLAR’S COMING COLLAPSE

[...]
Moneychanger Since, at least the New Deal and the succession of Roosevelt and all his monetary/inflationary tricks, people have been predicting that the dollar would collapse. Aren’t you ashamed to come along 70 years later and predict again that the dollar is going to collapse?

Turk By any logical interpretation the dollar has already collapsed. Today’s dollar only purchases five cents of what it purchased in the 1930s, ten cents of what it purchased in the 1960-70s, and maybe 50 cents of what it purchased in the 1980s. So inflation has already brought the dollar to an ongoing collapse. The sound money people have been warning about this through the decades: the dollar is no longer an effective form of currency.

That raises another question: will the dollar’s problems become more severe? That’s where it becomes a bit more troublesome in terms of projecting and looking at the future. Can this decades-long situation continue, or must it end in some cataclysm? In our view it must come to end in a cataclysm, and that’s what we lay out in the book.

Moneychanger But isn’t the word “collapse” misleading? The people who mange the dollar, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, have managed the collapse from 1934 until 2004, 70 years, so that the economy did not collapse along with the dollar. Can you really call that a collapse? Also, what’s to prevent their managing it a bit longer, through this decade? Even if it loses (as I expect) at least 75% of its value in this decade -- and it’s already lost nearly 30% from February 2002 to March 2004 -- it still won’t disrupt the economy too terribly.

Turk Let’s look at the first part of that question, the claim that the economy hasn’t collapsed. You’re widening the point that I was making earlier about the dollar collapsing in terms of purchasing power. When you bring the economy into the discussion you have to ask yourself another question. Are people better off now than they were 20-30 years ago? Looking at real wealth and adjusting for the dollar’s debasement, people are less wealthy today than they were 20-30 years ago. Incomes are lower today than they were 20-30 years ago, partly because the dollar’s been debased, partly because people take home less money after taxes. By any logical measure, I don’t think people are as well off as they were in the 1960s or 1950s when the dollar problems weren’t as severe as they’ve become in recent decades.

But there’s more to that question: we’ve created a debt mountain, a debt bubble. Bubbles always pop. We mortgaged our future trying to maintain standards of living by debasing the currency and borrowing. This is unsustainable and will ultimately bring about the dollar’s collapse.

Moneychanger But the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have managed the collapse. That’s what they do. They are crisis managers. They exist to manage the debasement of the dollar so that this infection does not give the whole economy a fever resulting in death. Would you agree?

Turk Yes, and as a clear result of their managing an unsustainable situation, we have less and less freedom. The Patriot Act just presents the latest example. Look at US financial history. They continue to erode and encumber our freedom. Why? Because they recognise that the present system is not sustainable and they are trying to keep the bubble in the air.

Moneychanger You claim the present system is not sustainable. Allan Greenspan says it is. George Bush says it is.

Turk Well, are they going to tell you that it’s not sustainable?

Moneychanger No, but they have 70 years of success to argue on their side. What makes it different this time? In the dollar’s darkest hours of 1980, when gold hit $850 and silver $50 and they pushed interest rates over 20%, well, yes, it’s a crisis, but we’ll muddle through this one, too. They’ve been muddling through since 1934. What is to prevent their muddling through this time? What specific things will make the dollar collapse this time? By “collapse” I don’t mean “erode” or even “erode quickly”, but I mean collapse in the sense that currency collapsed in Germany in 1923 or Argentina in 2002.

Turk That is exactly what I envision for the dollar. To answer your question we have to consider both supply and demand. In recent decades demand for the dollar has been, more or less, fairly consistent. As the financial bubble has been inflated and the Debt Mountain was built, people have continued to demand the dollar. They still use it for their day to day transactions. But what happened in Argentina and in Germany in the 1920s? Eventually, in a very short period of time, people realised that the hollow promises they were using for currency weren't worth what they had previously valued them to be. Then began the flight from the currency. The demand for those currencies dropped dramatically. In a long-term time frame, you could say almost overnight, but it was really over a period of weeks and months. People moved out of that currency as quickly as they could into other alternatives.

Demand for the dollar will ultimately drop for essentially the same reasons that demand for the Argentine peso and the Reichsmark dropped: they were fiat currencies oversupplied to the market.

Today far too many dollars are sloshing around the global economy. All it takes is a little break in confidence, then people quickly understand that the dollar is not worth the paper it’s printed on. There are a lot of hollow promises backing your dollar. That will lead to the flight from the currency that will ultimately bring the dollar down. But it’s the same outcome for every fiat currency. That’s the point that Americans don’t yet get. There is no logical reason why the dollar should end any differently than any other fiat currency.

Moneychanger But help me see the unseen. In 1923 Germany the people had already suffered through the inflation of World War I. They had seen their currency lose value as prices rose 800%, they had caught on. That “catching on” was necessary to precipitate the flight from the currency.

In Argentina in the decades of the 1980s and 90s, they had three different currencies, if I’m not mistaken. It may have been four, I can’t keep up with it. All Latin America has a century-long tradition of monetary instability. In the U.S. the last two generations have grown up without seeing gold in circulation, the last generation has grown up without seeing silver in circulation. Since 1971, the whole world has been on a fiat standard. Every currency has been inconvertible, backed by nothing. So why would American confidence break now? They don’t know anything else. They have only known a regime of inflation and ever-depreciating dollars. What will put the idea in their mind now that they have to flee out of dollars?

Turk What will trigger the flight from the dollar? We can’t really predict that. It could be some geopolitical event, some domestic financial event, a bankruptcy of Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. We just don’t know what the specific trigger will be.

Look at the overall picture of what the dollar is today, and ask yourself a question. Do I want to prepare for this coming event by moving assets out of dollars into other alternatives – other currencies, precious metals, tangible assets. Never mind asking what specific event will starts the flight.

Where we stand today in this country is not unlike where Russians stood in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. If you had possessed the terrific foresight to say that in two years the Russian Rouble will collapse and the Soviet Union will be history, the average Russian would have just laughed at you. And you know what he would have said? “The government will never let that happen.” Exactly what Americans say today.

“The government will never let that happen.”

But the reality is that the market is bigger than the government. Truth can be hid for only so long, and we have been hiding the truth. We’ve been creating illusions of prosperity, while in reality we’ve been consuming infrastructure and building a debt mountain. The Debt Mountain is ultimately going to be the problem that causes the dollar to collapse. [...]

Turk claims that a sound currency was written into our constitution, and he predicts the American people will demand that we go back to it. And that we have not had a sound currency since 1934.

Also, this interview was made in 2004. Yet he predicts some things that have since happened, or are happening now. Do read the whole thing.
     

Get the Czars out of our Government

Despite the fact that the Democrats managed to kill an amendment that would have imposed congressional oversight on some of Obama's Czars, there are still bipartisan efforts to hold hearings about the growing number of Czars in our government:

Feingold Plans Hearing on Czars

Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, plans to hold a hearing next week on the subject of the so-called “czars,” appointees who don’t go through the usual vetting process like presidential nominees needing confirmation by the Senate.

Mr. Feingold, the chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, has been one of the Democrats lending a bipartisan edge to what had been largely Republican complaints about the number of Obama “czars.” (The White House and leading Democrats have forcefully rebutted the notion that the president has too many; former President Bush had placed many officials in the same/or similar positions.) [...]

I've complained before about this Czar crap:

"Czars" have no place in American politics

And yes, it was George Bush who opened the door for this. It was wrong then and it's wrong now, and worse too if you consider the growing number of "Czars". One of several bad precedents set by our former President.
     

"Czars" have no place in American politics

This is another bad idea that the Obama Administration has taken from the Bush Administration, and expanded and strengthened. It was bad when Bush did it and it's even worse now:

Obama’s Unconstitutional ‘Czars’

Here’s a question that has been nagging me for months. Are Obama’s ever-growing number of “czars” constitutional? I am not a constitutional scholar, but I have read the document.

[...]

The Republican National Committee’s conservative caucus recently passed a resolution expressing their concern noting that “The U.S. Constitution explicitly states government officers with significant authority (called ‘principal officers’) must be nominated by the President and are subject to a vote of the U.S. Senate.”

Obama’s appointments are clearly “principal officers” though it will be argued that they are only advisors to the office of the President. Clearly, Obama’s appointments are not heads of departments, but they appear to have been granted an unknown degree of influence and control as regards their responsibilities. They function “in the dark.”

[...]

...there is an enormous amount of overlap going on and it involves appointees who give the appearance of being doppelgangers to the existing Secretaries and the huge bureaucracies they oversee. They answer directly to the President, but presumably so do the Secretaries whom we occasionally see gathered around a huge table in cabinet meetings.

If these people who have not been approved by the Senate or occupy positions that have not been “established by law” and are not “heads of departments” exist solely at the pleasure of the President, are we not hip deep in some very muddy waters concerning who is answerable to the Senate or House committees?

I am of the belief that Obama has methodically gone about creating a shadow government of men and women with undefined powers, but who likely have even more influence with the Oval Office than those who hold office under the mandates of the Constitution. [...]

It goes on to say there are 30 or more "Czars" right now, and the number is growing.

George Bush opened the door for this with his "drug Czar" nonsense. I was extremely offended at the time, by the term being used to describe anyone holding a position in our government. But at least Bush only had one. Now we have THIRTY?

Read the whole thing, for details about some of them. It's chilling. Isn't this unconstitutional? And where is it going?
     

Hooray for Honduras, for defending their constitution, judiciary and the rule of law

The Honduran President Mel Zelaya tried to pull a "Hugo Chavez" by breaking the law to rewrite the constitution to suit himself. He was overruled by the Honduran judiciary, whom he ignored. The country's Supreme Court ordered the military to intervene, because the law was being broken:

Honduras Defends Its Democracy
Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object

[...] It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya's next move will be. It's not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating "the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter" and said it "should be condemned by all." Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya's foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. "We won't go backwards," one sign said. "We want to live in peace, freedom and development."

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

For Hondurans who still remember military dictatorship, Mr. Zelaya also has another strike against him: He keeps rotten company. [...]

Read the whole thing for all the sordid details. The scariest part of all is that OUR government appears to be backing the criminal Mel Zelaya. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that they also have no respect for Constitutional law?
     

Why Europe is a bad example to follow

Belgium has been unable to form a government since their last election. So the Belgian King is simply re-appointing the old government that was rejected by the voters. In the end, Belgian votes mean nothing.

European voters rejected ratifiying the constitution for the new European Union. Now European leaders are pushing to have it ratified anyway, without a referendum in any of the member countries.

What are European votes worth? It's sham democracy.

Michael Huntsman at the Brussels Journal examines some of the differences between us and them:

American Democracy v. European Oligarchy

[...] One feature of American democracy is that a considerable amount of political discourse is founded on the Constitution which thus remains a living and breathing embodiment of both the spirit of a Revolution and of the modern United States.

For example, the rights of states to conduct and legislate upon their own affairs is something which continues to engage politics and trouble the Supreme Court, with States fiercely protecting their own rights as against the Federal power with terrier-like tenacity.

[...]

In contrast the bombastic overblown popcorn rhetoric of the Constitution of the European Union is routinely debauched by a largely self-perpetuating oligarchy which mouths the mantras of democracy and transparency but which behind closed doors subverts that very same democracy. And given the deliberate obscurity and bloated nature of its language, no citizen of the Union will find himself inclined to use the Constitution as a touchstone for anything: he is, given its sheer size and weight, more likely to use it as a door-stop.

If you bridle at the phrase ‘self-perpetuating oligarchy’, just ask yourself what the current government of Belgium, which lost the general election in June 2007 but has recently been reappointed is if it is not such? [...]

This article starts of by looking at the 1776 pre-able to the constitution of the state of New Hampshire; it ends with looking at the concept of revolution in Britain's past... and how it may need to be revived in the present.


Related Links:

The New EU: Definitely a Superstate

European schools demonize capitalism
     

How rare in human history our blessings are

And Mark Steyn reminds us, one of the greatest blessings Americans have is our constitution.

Mark Steyn: World should give thanks for America

[...] The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent's governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they're so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union.

[...]

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they've been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations. [...]

(bold emphasis mine)We have an enduring constitution that actually means something, even if too many of us now seem willing to throw it away. It's a blessing, and worth protecting and cherishing. There's much more, it's an excellent article. I wanted to post about it on Thanksgiving, but I was too busy with other stuff. Even today, I haven;t much time, there's a storm coming in tomorrow, so I've got a busy day ahead of me.

Pat also did some good excerpts on his blog.


Related Link:

From Soeren Kern at the Brussels Journal:
America Wake Up! Europe Wants to Be a Superpower

[...] So why do Europeans continue to assail American “hard power” as bad for the world, when their own “soft power” consistently fails to make the grade?

Because the American military magnifies the preponderance of US power and influence on the world stage, thereby exposing the fiction behind Europe’s superpower pretensions. Because the United States has set the standard for what it means to be a superpower, European elites seek to de-legitimize one of the main pillars of American might, namely its military hard power. Europeans know they will never achieve hard power parity with America, so they want to change the rules of the international game to make soft power the only acceptable superpower standard.

This is why Americans should care about further European integration: The EU is trying to ensconce a system of international law (based on its own image and on that of the United Nations) that it hopes will make it prohibitively costly in the realm of international public opinion for the United States to use its military in the future. For Europeans, multilateralism is all about neutering American hard power, not about solving international problems. It is about Lilliputians tying down Gulliver.

By bending over backwards to appease European sensibilities on Iran, for example, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has dragged the United States headfirst into a multilateral trap that has been set by pacifist Europeans. Their main desire is to prevent America from acting against Iran, even if it means that Islamic radicals in Tehran end up with a nuclear bomb.

Many Europeans are hoping the next American president will adopt a more postmodern relativist perception of reality. All the more reason, therefore, why Americans should examine if the leading presidential contenders are committed to the “hard power” that plays such a vital role in securing American interests and ideals around the world. Europeans may understand even better than do many Americans just how much is at stake in the upcoming US presidential election.

European elites are pushing the EU in a direction that should be deeply disconcerting to Americans concerned about international security and stability. The Reform Treaty will make Europe more centralized and far less democratic than it already is. In practice, this means that many foreign policy decisions that directly affect the United States, ranging from economics and trade to transatlantic cooperation on Islamic counter-terrorism, increasingly will be made by unelected anti-American bureaucrats in Brussels rather than by national governments. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) The weak don't deserve to survive. That's not my opinion; it's an impartial law of nature. It's reality, the way things are. If the Europeans wish to flout that law at their own peril, they are free to do so, but it seems to me quite obvious that their's is not a model we should try to emulate.

It was difficult to pick just an excerpt from this article, I recommend reading the whole thing.


Here's another good link, from Pat's blog:

The (reluctant) American Empire
This is the definitive answer to all those who whine endlessly about supposed "American Imperialism". Very informative, with many embedded links, too.
     

Fred Thompson: Restore the Reagan Executive Order on Federalism that was revoked by Clinton

I'm with Fred 100% on this. Here are some excerpts from one of his blog posts:

On Federalism

[...] The federalist construct of strong states and limited federal government put in place by our Founders was intended to give states the freedom to experiment and innovate. It envisions states as laboratories in competition with each other to develop ideas and programs to benefit their people, to see what works and what does not.

This ingenious means of governing a large and diverse nation prevailed for more than a century. But today our Constitution and the limited, federalist government it established, are considered by many to be quaint or out of touch with the world we live in, to be swept aside by political expediency. [...]

Fred understands the importance of the separation of powers, and has seen firsthand while serving in the Senate the consequences of disregarding those principles. He also has some good ideas as to what should be done about it:

[...] A good first step would be to codify the Executive Order on Federalism first signed by President Ronald Reagan. That Executive Order, first revoked by President Clinton, then modified to the point of uselessness, required agencies to respect the principle of the Tenth Amendment when formulating policies and implementing the laws passed by Congress. It preserved the division of responsibilities between the states and the federal government envisioned by the Framers of the Constitution. It was a fine idea that should never have been revoked. The next president should put it right back in effect, and see to it that the rightful authority of state and local governments is respected.[...]

(bold emphasis mine) Do read the whole thing. Fred's understanding of, and respect for, the Constitution, and his understanding of where things have gone so terribly wrong in Washington D.C., gives me hope that we can re-drain that swamp and take our country back from the extremists of both parties.

Run Fred Run!

Hat tip to Born Again Redneck Bourgeois