Category Archives: Rights

Updated: Big Daddy Dodges Questions About Healthcare Diktat

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Media, Propaganda, Rights, Socialism, Taxation

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos exposes BO’s thesaurus of excuses for what most media are euphemizing as “a mandate to buy health insurance,” also a tax.

Writes Stephanopoulos:

“…in our most spirited exchange, the President refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy health insurance is equivalent to a tax.

Here it is:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate…

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax? …

[Observe the president’s slithering and sliming for yourself.]

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

[SNIP]

BO’s ignorance and evasion would pose no major obstacle given the dogged devotion among the dogs of the media to minimizing and covering up Da Man’s many mistakes.

However, even this master of manipulation might find it hard to slither away from his latest faux paux: The Baucus bill reads:

Excise Tax. The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is between 100-300 percent of FPL, the excise tax for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or an individual claimed as a dependent) is $750 per year. However, the maximum penalty for the taxpayer unit is $1,500. If a taxpayer‘s MAGI is above 300 percent of FPL the penalty for failing to obtain coverage for an individual in a taxpayer unit (either as a taxpayer or as an individual claimed as a dependent) is $950 year. However, the maximum penalty amount a family above 300 percent of FPL would pay is $3,800. [P. 29]

Of course, the Baucus-Obama coercion is simply a natural extension of the collectivization of choices. If the state is to become the custodian of every individual in this country, and assume the onus of their care—then said serfs cannot act as they please. Big Daddy puts it as follows:

[F]or us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

Being a freeman and receiving freebies from the State are mutually exclusive. A pact with the devil has consequences. These will be bearable for the parasites who demand some form of taxpayer-subsidized care. Not so for those of us who yearn to live free.

Update: Here are a few pertinent points (which, naturally, do not address rights) made by Philip Klein of the American Spectator:

“While it is true that some people end up showing up in emergency rooms without paying and that imposes costs on others, there’s two things that Obama isn’t taking into account. First, just because you mandate coverage it doesn’t mean you elimate [sic] the uncompensated care. Second, if you have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidies enabling people to purchase insurance, then that costs far more than whatever would be saved by reducing uncompensated care. … Many of those who are currently uninsured simply have very low health care costs, which they are willing to pay out of pocket when they get sick. The reason why Obama supports a mandate is that he wants to be able to force insurers to cover those with preexisting conditions, and the only way to do that is to bring uninsured healthy people into the system. So really, this isn’t about eliminating freeloaders, it’s about forcing healthy people to pay for more health care than they need to so that they can make premiums more affordable for the sick.” [My italics]

Update III: The State of the Tea Party Movement (Coulter Mistakes Movement's I.D.)

Ann Coulter, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Rights, Taxation, The State

Written by James Ostrowski.

The state of the Tea Party Movement is great.

Despite what the lying left says, it’s mostly ordinary citizens acting spontaneously. The old hacks aren’t even invited or welcome to most events.

It’s not anti-Obama but anti-Big Government and that includes Bush and the Republican Congress when they had the majority. Naturally, as soon as they lost power, they fell in love with limited government again.

Alas, the Republican Party is a pathetic joke and the Tea Party Movement has become the real opposition party to the Democrats. Good.

Now, the blowing off steam phase is over and the movement must get serious fast or lose its momentum.

A movement needs a goal. Here’s a good one:

Restore the Republic.

By which I mean the pre-constitutional Republic. The American Revolution was not fought for the Constitution. The Constitution didn’t exist yet.

Nor will griping about the Constitution do. Face it. To the extent that the Constitution was designed to preserve the old Republic, and I have serious doubts about that, it failed. Constitutionalism failed. Parchment did not stop the steamroller of big government!

Why? That question has been answered by Learned Hand:

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

A movement needs its own symbols and ours are there for the taking: The Betsy Ross flag is a no-brainer. And let’s use the old national anthem. My Country Tis of Thee. It speaks of liberty, not bombs bursting in air during a war whose meaning is still unclear. And let’s pledge allegiance to the principles of the American Revolution for Christ’s sake! (Peace is the common theme.)

Face it. The symbols of patriotism have been hijacked by evil men for evil purposes such as mass murder and massive bankster theft.

We will take patriotism back and make it true and good again.

Then, we need a plan. Why?

*Because most of us are naturally inclined to two activities that history shows are usually a waste of time: lobbying politicians and trying to elect new ones.

*Because no movement to shrink the federal government has succeeded since 1800-1804!

*Because many people are inclined to think we can reform our way out of this mess. In fact, reforming a rotten system merely extends its lifespan.

*Because the trajectory of America is downward fast and we have no time or margin of error for mistakes.

*Because if we do not give our people something constructive to do, right now, they will burn out and be gone.

At the April 18th WNY Tea Party, we will roll out a 12-point plan for direct citizen action that would make Gandhi smile. It’s a devastating one-two punch: education, then action! The plan fits on one side of one sheet of paper.

So, two things. If you are within driving distance of Buffalo and you miss this tea party, you will regret it when you see the video.

Two, if you are running a tea party on April 15th and wish to learn more about our plan, contact me.

Thanks and good luck at your event.

Jim Ostrowski
WNY Tea Party Program Committee
jameso@apollo3.com
Cell–(716) 435-8918

Update I (April 15): I’ll be interviewing our pal Jim for my WND column on Friday. Jim, a major tea-party organizer, continues the thread in “Pitfalls for the Tea Party Movement”:

“It’s time for a checklist of the pitfalls we need to avoid to be successful. These will roughly track the smears expected to be made against us.

*Do not be an appendage of the failed Republican Party or neoconservative movements.

*Be open to all American citizens who share our core philosophy.

*Have a positive agenda for real change.

*Be for something other than merely electing Republicans. The country is rightly sick of Republicans after the last eight years.

*Bring something to the table other than Constitutionalism. All that has happened happened in spite of the Constitution.

*Avoid conspiracy and arcane legal theories including Obama’s citizenship. Our opponents control the courts and will never accept your “common law” or “Patriot” legal theories. Never!

*If you support lower taxes, be prepared to specify the spending cuts required to pay for them. And never say you will cut “waste, fraud, and abuse” because then everyone will know you are full of crap. …”

Update II: Hero Joe Horn makes an appearance at the Alamo, from where Glenn Beck is broadcasting. Read about Horn in “JOE HORN: WANTED MAN…AND A HERO.” If only I were in Texas. People are flying the Gadsden Flag; there are signs that read, “Revolution Brewing,” and ALL express disgust with Republicans and Democrats alike.

Although I don’t much like the celebrity oriented focus of Glenn’s show today (and my Sean is a way superior guitarist than Nugent), there are, at least, no Party Republicans in sight. And that’s a good thing. I suspect that Hannity and O’Reilly will make up for this welcome omission by convening the usual suspects for their parties. You know: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Karl Rove. Glenn has enough of a feel for freedom to keep those sickening sorts away. A wise decision if to judge by this animated Texan crowd. G-d bless them.

Update III (April 16): In her latest column, Ann Coulter doesn’t think twice about claiming the tea-party movement as Republican. She’s usually cleverer about concealing the fact that she writes in support of the Stupid Party—always.
Incidentally, Coulter berates California as a laboratory for Democratic governance. I thought that state was governed by a Republican.

Update #V: Beware the Police

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Rights, The State

Evidence is mounting for the increasing brutality of the police, especially your local “friendly” state troopers.

Read and watch how this journalism student is carted away and tasered for the offense of questioning John Kerry persistently. Kerry the coward didn’t intervene. Were a Republican present, I suspect the outcome would have been the same. Worse: the students sat there like golems as Meyer was assaulted. What obedient little lap dogs. Whatever one thinks of the 1960s, that generation would have started a riot, then and there. Here’s the account:

“Videos of the Monday night incident, posted on several Web sites and played repeatedly on television news, show University of Florida police officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President George W. Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.
… Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting. As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student’s ‘very important question,’ Meyer yells at the officers to release him, crying out, ‘Don’t Tase me, bro,’ just before he is shocked by the Taser. He is then led from the room, screaming, ‘What did I do?’”

There have been many other incidents, the last of a young man, Brett Darrow, who had the good sense to mount a dashboard camera in his car and film an officer, Sgt. Kuehnlein, threatening to fabricate charges against him. The poor lad was terrorized, but showed remarkable composure.

Here Radley Balko exposes more of the ubiquitous violations perpetrated by our protectors—and worse: the laws that help police conceal crimes against those they swore to protect.

Update # I: The fascists on cable all, left and right, with no exception, agreed with glee that for the police to assault this manifestly non-violent protestor, sans provocation, was A-Okay. It would be poetic justice if the son or daughter of one of the cable capos was tasered and thrown in jail overnight for speaking loudly and waving his or her arms in the air during a debate. You’re a slave if you rationalize this incident. Even if, as one reader claimed, this was a set up (whatever that means), isn’t it obvious that a non-aggressor, who has hurt nobody should never be assaulted, hurt, and incarcerated, not in a free country. Even if he was being provocative.

Balko makes the same point with respect to Brett Darrow: “I’ve heard people make the argument that this kid’s habit of baiting cops into abuse somehow diminishes the excesses he’s captured on tape. I don’t agree at all. His ‘baiting’ thus far has consisted of asserting his rights. Perhaps not as politely as he should, but being impolite isn’t and shouldn’t be a crime. Neither is parking in a commuter lot, or asking why you’ve been pulled over when you haven’t broken any laws.”
America isn’t free.
I do want to give Dick Morris, of all people, credit for showing the utmost revulsion at the brutality of the cops. I have never seen the smarmy smooth Morris grow as livid as he did earlier today on Hannity and Colmes, who both giggled about the incident. Morris called it fascism. A Taser, moreover, is not without its dangers. It can cause permanent heart-muscle damage and even kill. Tasering Meyer was so clearly sadistic, unnecessary, and reckless. It’s obvious that the cops use the Taser very flippantly.

Update # II: Tasers do kill. Here, the cowards are incapable of controlling a wheelchair-bound woman, so they kill her. Ann Coulter once wrote a fine column about the increased deaths associated with women in the police force. Women, being weaker and generally more fearful than men, tend to use lethal force more frequently. The sadist cop who used her Taser for 160 seconds on the victim was female.

Update # III: Some of the responses to the Comments Section, unpublished, alarmed me, in their inability to grasp that this is not about an annoying kid, who might have been playing to the cameras. Rather, this concerns the proper role of law enforcement in a free society. Free people grasp that assaulting a person who has not aggressed against a soul is unconscionable and authoritarian. As I say, if you can’t recognize that, you are a slave—or perhaps you haven’t internalized the fact that you could just as well be on the receiving side of such brutality.

To those who accused me of generalizing from a few isolated incidents, I suggest you bring yourselves up to speed, fast. Under the auspices of the Drug War, our militarized feds conduct daily “no-knock” raids, barge into homes, confiscate property, and rob people of their liberty—sometimes of their lives.

The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Paul Craig Roberts is highly recommended as well. As I wrote in “Remember Reno”:

“Back in the day, the law was intended as a bulwark against government abuses. It has now become an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good’—the founders’ Blackstonian view of the law has been supplanted by a Benthamism that encourages ambitious prosecutors to discard a defendant’s rights.
Add the aggravating circumstances of a highly militarized federal law enforcement that shares the judiciary’s contempt for the Rights of Englishmen, and is abetted by a public dimmed by statist schools and media—and one has a recipe for disaster.”
I’ll leave you with another startling visual from rural America of a man being violated by police for no reason other than that THEY CAN.

Update # IV: More evidence that “‘To Protect and Serve’ often translates into harass and control”:
• Salty Burger Lands McDonald’s Employee in Jail
• The Case of Monica Montoya

Update # V: I confess that I’ve become quite fearful of the liberties these government goons seem to take—the brazen “I’m your boss, you serf, free to do with your body as I please” attitude. When I venture down the road to the gym, for example, I always make sure I don’t forget my driver’s license. It’s hard not to speed in this torqued-up devil, but I do my best.
It’s quite uncanny how, no matter how hard free men and women have illustrated what the issue here is, slaves of the state on this blog have demonstrated an inability to grasp what liberty means. Freedom is the unassailable right to raise your voice, flail your arms—even make a harmless nuisance of yourself during a debate; fascism is when those acts could get you assaulted, injured, even killed. That’s all there is to it! The cops who’ve written in supporting the vile conduct of their colleagues enforce my fears.
Incidentally, when Sean and I went down to our local police station to get our carry-concealed licenses, the cop spat bitterly: “Yes, you ex-South Africans like your guns.” I was naïve then, imagining, somehow, that he’d be happy we were proponents and practitioners of the magnificent 2nd Amendment.

A Triumph for Individual Rights

Individual Rights, Rights

From Breitbart.com:

“A federal appeals court overturned the District of Columbia’s long- standing handgun ban Friday, rejecting the city’s argument that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applied only to militias.”

Here’s an excerpt from the decision, courtesy of Volokh Conspiracy:

“In determining whether the Second Amendment’s guarantee is an individual one, or some sort of collective right, the most important word is the one the drafters chose to describe the holders of the right — ‘the people.’ That term is found in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. It has never been doubted that these provisions were designed to protect the interests of individuals against government intrusion, interference, or usurpation. We also note that the Tenth Amendment — ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people’ — indicates that the authors of the Bill of Rights were perfectly capable of distinguishing between ‘the people,’ on the one hand, and ‘the states,’ on the other. The natural reading of ‘the right of the people’ in the Second Amendment would accord with usage elsewhere in the Bill of Rights.
The District’s argument, on the other hand, asks us to read ‘the people’ to mean some subset of individuals such as ‘the organized militia’ or ‘the people who are engaged in militia service,’ or perhaps not any individuals at all — e.g., ‘the states.’ These strained interpretations of ‘the people’ simply cannot be squared with the uniform construction of our other Bill of Rights provisions….
The District points to the singular nature of the Second Amendment’s preamble as an indication that the operative clause must be restricted or conditioned in some way by the prefatory language. However, the structure of the Second Amendment turns out to be not so unusual when we examine state constitutional provisions guaranteeing rights or restricting governmental power. It was quite common for prefatory language to state a principle of good government that was narrower than the operative language used to achieve it.
We think the Second Amendment was similarly structured. The prefatory language announcing the desirability of a well-regulated militia — even bearing in mind the breadth of the concept of a militia [which the court had earlier concluded ‘was a large segment of the population’ rather than just a government-selected National Guard-like subgroup -EV] — is narrower than the guarantee of an individual right to keep and bear arms. The Amendment does not protect ‘the right of militiamen to keep and bear arms,’ but rather ‘the right of the people.’ The operative clause, properly read, protects the ownership and use of weaponry beyond that needed to preserve the state militias….
[I]f the competent drafters of the Second Amendment had meant the right to be limited to the protection of state militias, it is hard to imagine that they would have chosen the language they did. We therefore take it as an expression of the drafters’ view that the people possessed a natural right to keep and bear arms, and that the preservation of the militia was the right’s most salient political benefit —” and thus the most appropriate to express in a political document.”