Thursday, May 9, 2013
Statists Use Twisted Logic To Attack The Bill Of Rights
May 8, 2013
alt-market.com
By Brandon Smith
In the war for the continued existence of our Nation’s Constitutional principles, I had long wondered whether statists were simply confounded by the Bill of Rights and ignorant of its function or whether they were maliciously inclined, knowing exactly what it means but seeking its destruction anyway. In recent years, I have decided it is a combination of both faults.
Statists are people who view every aspect of society through the lens of government power. If you want to know the primary difference between Constitutionalists and anti-Constitutionalists, you have to understand that some people in this world only want control over their own lives, while other people desperately clamor for control over other people’s lives. Why do they do this? Usually, it’s fear. Fear of the persistent unknowns in life. Fear that they do not have the intelligence or the will to take responsibility for their own futures. Fear that they will be forced to take care of themselves. Fear that their ideologies will be found lacking. Fear that if others are allowed freedom, they will one day indirectly suffer for it. Read More
Monday, May 6, 2013
Video: Mattera and Redford go Sundancing over The Company You Keep
May 6, 2013
hotair.com
You have to feel a little sorry for Robert Redford, don’t you? He just released a feature film asking audiences to reconsider their harsh feelings about the Weather Underground, which set off bombs, killed police officers, and robbed banks for more than a decade of domestic terrorism, but who were just misunderstood people acting on their deeply-held beliefs about justice. Unfortunately for Redford, a couple of misunderstood kids did the same thing at the Boston Marathon ten days after the film opened. So far, Redford’s paean to leftist terrorists and murders has grossed only $3.5 million since its limited April 5th opening, and in the last two weeks, its wide distribution has only made $1.9 million: Read More
hotair.com
You have to feel a little sorry for Robert Redford, don’t you? He just released a feature film asking audiences to reconsider their harsh feelings about the Weather Underground, which set off bombs, killed police officers, and robbed banks for more than a decade of domestic terrorism, but who were just misunderstood people acting on their deeply-held beliefs about justice. Unfortunately for Redford, a couple of misunderstood kids did the same thing at the Boston Marathon ten days after the film opened. So far, Redford’s paean to leftist terrorists and murders has grossed only $3.5 million since its limited April 5th opening, and in the last two weeks, its wide distribution has only made $1.9 million: Read More
No, BO: "The voices of the Founders resounded with a multiplicity of warnings against trusting government..."
May 6, 2013
americanthinker.com
Our grand "Campaigner in Chief" Barack Obama had these words for the graduates of Ohio State University on May 5, 2013.
Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.
Had any of these graduates read and understood the words of the founders of the United States of America that afforded them the freedom to pursue their dreams, they would absolutely reject President Obama's admonition to "reject these voices". The voices of the Founders resounded with a muliplicity of warnings against trusting government. Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14 in 1781 warned:
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.
Perhaps James Madison in his speech at the Virginia State Conventionon Dec. 2, 1829 said it even better.
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
This distrust of government by the founders is well documented, yet President Obama would have all Americans place their unbridled trust in his government and ignore any voice that speaks out against the overreaching power of government. A true leader would admonish the People to listen to the voices of distrust of government, not reject them for in them lie the truths of good governance. The despotic rely upon the ignorance of the governed in their quest for power. A true servant of the People seeks only the Peoples' Liberty and revels in their education. Daniel Webster voiced his concern on this when he wrote:
I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe . . . Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.
Reject these voices"? No Mr. President, celebrate these voices, for in them lies the nature of the liberty our forefathers bequeathed this Nation.
U.S. Military in Tripoli Ordered Not to Go to Benghazi
May 6, 2013
weeklystandard.com
By Stephen Hayes
A top U.S. diplomat will testify Wednesday that as fighting raged in Benghazi, Libya, in the early morning hours of September 12, 2012, military officials in the region told a second rescue team preparing to deploy from Tripoli to Benghazi not to make the trip.
In an interview with the House Oversight and Reform Committee last month, Greg Hicks, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Libya during the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, recalled his conversations with Libyan government officials and U.S. military leaders as he tried to get support to U.S. diplomatic and intelligence officials under attack in Benghazi. Hicks says he received a call from the Prime Minister of Libya shortly after 3am informing him that Ambassador Chris Stevens had been killed. Hicks became the top US diplomat in Libya after Stevens died.
In the hours that followed, Hicks says, the Libyan military agreed to fly a C-130 from Tripoli to Benghazi in the early morning hours of September 12 – a flight that was to include a second team of Special Operations soldiers – dispatched from the Libyan capital to join a team sent earlier to Benghazi. But as those reinforcements were leaving for the flight, they were told to stand down. Hicks received the news in an early morning phone call from a top military commander in the region.
“So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C‑130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can't go now, you don't have authority to go now,’’ Hicks recalled. “And so they missed the flight.”
Pushed to clarify whether they second rescue missed flight because they were told not to take it, Hicks responded: “They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”
Hicks says he was talking to officials in Washington all night but because the C-130 would be taking off from Mitiga International Airport, on the other side of Tripoli, he didn’t have time to push anyone in the United States to reverse the decision. “The flight was leaving. And, you know, if they missed ‑‑ you know, if the vehicles didn't leave when they leave, they would miss the flight time at the airport.”
Hicks remembers Gibson saying: “I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.”
The team would have likely arrived after the fighting in Benghazi had ended, but those who made the decision not to send them had no way of knowing that when they ordered them to remain in Tripoli.
Hicks will also tell the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday that military officials twice declined to send air support to Benghazi because the U.S. military didn’t have “tanker assets” to support the trip from Aviano, Italy. Read More
Federal Reserve Blows More Bubbles
May 6, 2013
News with Attitude
By Ron Paul
Last week at its regular policy-setting meeting, the Federal Reserve announced it would double down on the policies that have failed to produce anything but a stagnant economy. It was a disappointing, but not surprising, move.
The Fed affirmed that it is prepared to increase its monthly purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities if things don’t start looking up. But actually the Fed has already been buying more than the announced $85 billion per month. Between February and March, the Fed’s securities holdings increased $95 billion. From March to April, they increased $100 billion. In all, the Fed has pumped more than a half trillion dollars into the economy since announcing its latest round of “quantitative easing” (QE3) in September 2012.
Although many were up in arms when the Fed said it would buy $600 billion in government debt outright for the previous round, QE2, all seems quiet about the magnitude of QE3 because it doesn’t come with huge up-front total price tag. But by year’s end the Fed’s balance sheet could hit $4 trillion.
With no recovery in sight, where’s all this money going? It is creating bubbles. Read More
Obama’s SS: Here NOW
May 6, 2013
News with Attitude
By John Galt
ShutzStaffel.
The name which struck terror into the German people who still believed in freedom and wanted their nation to remain a peaceful, respectable member within the international community. Nazi Germany’s SS was a force for terror and intimidation, creating an aura of fear within the citizenry and horror for the remainder of the world watching the spectacle of a police state far more brutal than any in human history up to that time. Apparently this lesson has not been lost on the dictators of the world since that era as the communist leaders and rulers around the world learned that building an effective domestic spying and military police apparatus was the key to remaining in power.
Welcome to modern America my friends, as Obama’s SS is here now.
Think I am crazy? Let’s start by reviewing the following video:
The video created by the DHS above appears to reflect a peaceful national law enforcement agency which supports local LEO’s by hitting hard at the most difficult criminal situations and engaging with highly specialized and sometimes classified investigations in addition to a terrifyingly effective paramilitary force known as Homeland Security Investigations, Special Response Team (SRT). The HSI-SRT is not shy about their role in American society but a story in this morning’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune caught my attention and caused me to take a step back and review what other toys and roles they have taken on. In the story titled “The law enforcement agency you’ve probably never heard of” written by Shannon McFarland, a strange reference as to the size of the HSI having 6,700 plus special agents caused me to realize that this was a far more powerful group than initially indicated. In fact the DHS website about the HSI states: Read More
Sunday, May 5, 2013
The man behind the Benghazi cover-up?
May 5, 2013
americanthinker.com
By Ed Lasky
"Not long ago, Rhodes was one of the obscure guys who wrote Obama's campaign speeches in Starbucks and played video games into the early morning hours. Now he attends national security meetings and takes writer's refuge in a secret office on the third floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building."
Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has a must read column regarding the Benghazi cover-up by White House officials.
CIA career officials clearly and repeatedly identified Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-linked Islamic terrorists as the culprits behind the murder of four Americans.
Of course, this would cause embarrassment for the Obama team, especially in the few weeks before the election. They had been boasting for years that Al Qaeda had been decimated, the "tide of war" was receding; they had been on a mission to whitewash the prospect of Islamic terrorism as a threat to America (see Lauri Regan's superb column ("Can a President who has promised to stand with Muslims protect America? ). Obama's Cairo speech before an audience that included Muslim Brotherhood officials that he compelled Egypt to include, was a paean to Islam. It was also, to a great extent, a work of fiction that included grandiose and subsequently disproven claims about the positive contributions Islam has made to America and the world.
That speech was written by Obama's foreign policy speechwriter and now National Security Council team member, Ben Rhodes.
That is the man who Hayes "outs" as a key person behind the Benghazi cover-up. Read More
Saturday, May 4, 2013
How can Obama speak about guns in Mexico with a straight face
May 4, 2013
americanthinker.com
Silvio Canto, Jr.
President Obama's Mexico trip has just taken a turn for the bizarre.This is what President Obama told Mexicans:
"...I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people. That can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States. It's the right thing to do,...." (RCP
First, the Obama administration put 2,000 high powered weapons in the hands of Mexican cartels. Did President Obama forget about that little tragic episode from his first term? We hear that 200-plus Mexicans were killed by these weapons. Why didn't President Obama apologize to the soldiers' families? Or the widows? Or the orphans?
Second, cartel leaders, or criminals in the US, will continue to have guns because outlaws always do. Can someone remind President Obama of what is happening in Chicago? President Obama's hometown has very strict gun laws but Juarez is Disneyland compared to the killings in Chicago!
Third, all of these guns are already outlawed in Mexico and in the US.
How do you say "The Twilight Zone" in Spanish? I think that it's "La dimension desconocidad," i.e. the unknown dimension literally. Read More
The Great Education Power-Grab
May 4, 2013
americanthinker.com
By E. Jeffrey Ludwig
Did you know that reformers intent on implementing the Core Curriculum (National Standards) have invaded public education? They do not care about kids or about individuals. Armed with statistics and vast software systems, their intent is to establish one-size-fits-all curricula and success parameters in public education nationwide. The scope of their ambitions leads this educator to the conclusion that their underlying impulse is totalitarian.
These reformers are driving toward the six- or seven-class-a-day high school teaching load, the 9-5 schedule for the schools (or longer), school provided free and compulsory for ages 2 to 22 (or 26), the six- or seven-day school week, and the 12-month school year (with two- or three-week vacation breaks scattered throughout the school year), all controlled by a vast bureaucracy nationwide and justified by the implementation of "national standards." A database of answers to 400 questions by all U.S. students K-20 will be compiled and maintained at a tremendous cost to the public. Forty-six states are already on board. This 20-plus years of control and indoctrination will, if implemented, become a cornerstone of statist control.mic
Who's doing it? These reforms are led by Bill Ayers, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City. They are also led by educational publishers such as Cengage, Pearson, McGraw Hill, and McDougal Littel. They have a host of supporters including, but not limited to, the Coalition of Essential Schools, New Visions, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and other NGOs that want to bring equality and progress [sic] to institutions supposedly failing to their very core. These "reformers" are being abetted by their so-called adversaries, the education unions: UFT, AFT, NEA, and NYSUT. Claiming to object to some of the teacher hostility expressed by the "reformers," these unions actually are 100% in tune with the political and social agenda of those reformers. Why? Because the movement toward "national standards" by these reformers means increased membership and dues for the unions, consolidation of power, and national promotion of their left-wing agenda. The education unions become junior partners in one of the greatest power plays in the history of this country.
The key to their vision, if one can call this Brave New World and 1984 nightmare a "vision," is to bring in a whole new class of school administrators. These administrators do not have teaching experience. Teaching experience tends to breed respect for the individual. Instead, the drive of national standards is to collectivize, to standardize, and to establish one-size-fits-all educational benchmarks, goals, and curricula. The new mandarins of education are people in their twenties or early thirties who are to come in and uproot the supposed garbage of the past. Likewise, pressures are being brought to bear on older teachers and experienced administrators to get out of the way of the "agenda of change." Read More
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