Category Archives: States’ Rights

UPDATED: State of Disunion Stars Two Chief Dividers

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Politics, Republicans, States' Rights, The State

A most divisive president, Barack Obama, will be devoting his last State of the Union extravaganza to dispelling the conviction that he, Obama, has been an extraordinarily divisive and antagonistic president. Even Obama’s decision not to mention the capture, today (1/12/2016), by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of 10 American marines will prove divisive. But hey, legacy before loyalty. In that tradition, hubristic Obama will be speaking to the things that unite America, namely his legacy.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who’ll be delivering the Republicans’ SOTU response, is an equally divisive figure, having chosen, last year, to excise a part of Southern history: Haley tore down the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia from the State House grounds, even though the Confederate flag “never flew over an official Confederate building,” and “was a battle flag intended to honor the great Robert E. Lee.”

I won’t be dignifying Il Duce’s last SOTU address. Instead I’ll excerpt the 2010 WND column about this “Stalinesque Extravaganza.” Just about everything in the column, “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State,” still obtains:

Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire has described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John (he’s a friend) goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (This year, the most repulsive among the representatives staked out aisle seats for themselves, starting early in the morning.)

“On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45). The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

The razzmatazz includes a display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the royal box. These are “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate.” Last year it was the family of the girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter. This year’s “Lenny Skutnik” was Debbie Bosanek, Warren Buffett’s secretary. Bosanek is supposed to embody the Barf(fett) Rule, described by the Divine One thus: “If you make more than a million dollars a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”

“We Are Doomed” deconstructs this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and the trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.” In Obama’s simplistic scheme of things—as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level”—to recreate the glory of America, it is essential to reinvent the state. Since Obama has no understanding of how the economy works and why it collapsed, he honestly thinks that centrally planned political projects are every bit as productive as profit-driven investments of private property.

Ever the source of deafening demagoguery, the president promised pay dirt to businesses that heeded his call to greatness. Should a company “relocate to a community that was hit hard when a factory left town,” the president will plunder (private property), print (funny-money), and beg (borrow) in order to help these friends-in-fascism to “finance a new plant, equipment, or train for new workers.”

In the spirit of brute-force statism, the POTUS also promised a Trade Enforcement Unit to police “unfair trading practices,” and a “Financial Crimes Unit to “crack down on large-scale fraud.” And he, BHO, will corral corporations into “model partnerships” with community colleges, while simultaneously redesigning the curricula and websites of said colleges.

Il Duce’s next derring-do? Send him the bill, and Obama will even instruct the provinces to incarcerate local kids in high school “until they graduate or turn 18.”

To keep the student-loan bubble afloat, America’s potentate wants to mandate more loans at fixed prices, as well as expand federally financed research and development. Nowhere is it authorized by the Constitution, but—don’t you know it?—without “federally financed labs and universities” and “public research dollars,” the Internet and assorted “technologies to extract natural gas out of shale rock” would never have come about.

Having used the military to great political effect, Obama now intends to deploy the Department of Defense, no less, in the “clean energy business.” In Obama’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary—the DOD is bound to do a bang-up job.

From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of the state’s creation. If not for government, Obama would have never managed to write himself into history. As a product of the state, Barry Soetoro sees it as the source of all possibilities.

And so the president forges ahead with plans to grow the Dead Zone of government.

(From “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”)

UPDATE: So was it good for you? Did the earth move? Barack Obama’s presidency was to be, by his account “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.”

Those were the words of the Messiah himself, excerpted from the nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota.

UPDATED: Principled Patriots React To Ranchers Hammonds’ Plight

Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Natural Law, Private Property, States' Rights

The 3.1K number on my WND column, “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best of America,” refers to the number of times the column has been shared via any of the methods represented by the logo buttons to the left of the 3.1K. So that’s 3,100, a really big number, if accurate, but who knows?

LETTERS:

Writes Tim:

Ms. Mercer,

The show isn’t Hammond or bundy or even the Feds; it’s the transformation of rural America from a once-independent/gutsy psyche to what you saw today – the Burns locals showing up and asking the take-over guys to leave. Who planted fear and gutlessness into a community like Burns? I came back from combat in the Nam (usmc) and worked many jobs in the Oregon high desert; timber felling, loading hay trucks, fighting wild fires. These were once tough people who (then) would have supported the take-over stand, unanimously – seen its higher value as part of their own heritage. You’re smart, Ms Mercer, so tell me how urban fear and self-seeking became homogenized into this country’s entire demographic landscape. Was it media? Was it public education? Was it greed? Bottom line, there ain’t gonna be no more “Alamos.” Yes, the Hammonds are good guys, but even they want Bundy’s bunch outa town. It’s tragic and irreversible. What’s left is a man’s (person’s) responsibility to truth and courage; individual-by-individual, against the storm of darkness. And a lot of grace from God for that act.

Writes HS:

Another good column, Ilana. Do you ever feel like you are a voice crying in the wilderness? Your assessment of the situation of the land grab in Oregon and of those who have commented on it is a welcomed relief amid all the grandstanding from the powers that be and the media. Thank you for the level-headed analysis. You make much sense and we are indebted to you for enlightening us. Keep it up.
Humphrey

UPDATE: “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best Of America” was discussed on The Bill Meyer Show, January 8, 2016 (LISTEN).

UPDATED: Ranchers Hammnod And Bundy: The Best Of America

Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Government, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Private Property, Propaganda, Regulation, States' Rights

Friday, at 8:10 AM Pacific Time, I will be chatting to Bill Meyer, Program Director for News Talk FM106.7/AM-1440 KMED, in Medford, Oregon, about the WND column, “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.” An excerpt:

America, as one wag put it, is a “post-constitutional” country. Even worse, a plurality of Americans has now turned, en masse, against the First Principles of its founding. The organizing principle that currently informs American thinking is statism. It’s the state über alles: its laws, and the foot soldiers that enforce hundreds of thousands of arbitrary rules.

This sorry state-of-affairs is abundantly clear from the standoff between farmers and Fédérales, brewing in Burns, Oregon.

To look at rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son, Steven, 46, is to see the salt of the earth; the best of America. Any decent American ought to be able to see that these family ranchers, so different from politically connected agribusiness, are better and braver than all of us city slickers put together.

We slickers consume the rancher’s grass-fed, organic, “local” beef, while we cheer his oppression. Fellini, the Italian film maker who excelled at portraying corruption of the soul, as expressed in the decay of the flesh, could not have set the scene better. The idiom of Greek Tragedy works, too:

Our protagonists are the two ranchers aforementioned—sentenced to five years in jail, due to a double-jeopardy like maneuver by the federal government.

The Antagonists are the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service, The Courts, who’ve come down upon citizens with limited resources, citizens whom this Federal juggernaut is supposed to serve, not screw.

Other Antagonists in this morality play are the chorus of trash-talking radio, TV mouths and assorted bobbing heads (Republicans and Democrats), who say they care for The Folks but don’t know good folks when they see them.

Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon, has come to stand in solidarity with Dwight and Steven Hammond. The case of the Bundys of Bunkerville, Nevada, is instructive in understating the First Principles involved in the Oregon standoff.

In 2014, the BLM had come to steal Cliven Bundy’s cattle, in lieu of back taxes the BLM claims the rancher has owed it since 1993, when Bundy stopped paying grazing fees. The Bundys had homesteaded the disputed land, southwest of Mesquite, in 1877. Bundy’s forefathers had lived off the land well before the Bureau of Land Grabs came into being. The Feds subsequently passed laws usurping Bundy’s natural right to graze his cattle. The elderly rancher offered the following rejoinder: “I have raised cattle on that land, which is public land for the people of Clark County, all my life. … I can raise cattle there because I have preemptive rights,’ among them the right to forage.”

Also edifying, via The Conservative Tree House, is that “the Hammonds were forced to grant the BLM first right of refusal.” In other words, were “the Hammonds ever to sell their ranch, they would have to sell it to the BLM.” The BLM may get its way, for how are the Hammond women to pay the shakedown fines levied by the Fédérales? These amount to hundreds and thousands of dollars. How will the wives continue the Sisyphean struggle against the federal occupier, and, simultaneously, run the ranches sans the men?

Here we arrive at the “Catastrophe,” also an element in Greek tragedy. …

… Tune into to patriot Bill Meyer’s show. And, of course, read the rest on WND. The complete column is “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.”

UPDATE: “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best Of America” was discussed on The Bill Meyer Show, January 8, 2016 (LISTEN).

Deport George Soros

Democrats, EU, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, States' Rights, The West

If leftists of the Anglo-American and European spheres had any sense—they don’t!—they’d be demanding the deportation of George Soros from their respective countries. Soros, chairman of the Open Society Foundation, is a traitor to the nations within which he has embedded himself. Here are some components of Soros’ stated program to further swamp the indigenous peoples of the West:

… First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future. And, to do that, it must share the burden fairly – a principle that a qualified majority finally established at last Wednesday’s summit.

Adequate financing is critical. The EU should provide €15,000 ($16,800) per asylum-seeker for each of the first two years to help cover housing, health care, and education costs – and to make accepting refugees more appealing to member states. It can raise these funds by issuing long-term bonds using its largely untapped AAA borrowing capacity, which will have the added benefit of providing a justified fiscal stimulus to the European economy.

It is equally important to allow both states and asylum-seekers to express their preferences, using the least possible coercion. Placing refugees where they want to go – and where they are wanted – is a sine qua non of success.

Second, the EU must lead the global effort to provide adequate funding to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey to support the four million refugees currently living in those countries. …

Bad actor and traitor Soros fails to demand the only ethical solution to the refugee crisis the world over: Stop the wars and the “democratic outreach” that have destroyed the refugees’ countries of origins. This omission tells you everything you need to know about the measure of the man.

East European leaders are so much more adept than the treacherous West European political class at fending off assaults on the sovereignty of their nationals. Said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban:

“ … [Soros’] name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything that weakens nation states, they support everything that changes the traditional European lifestyle. These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network.”

Orban has drawn the fire of liberal civil-rights groups for constructing a razor wire fence along the border and for tightening laws granting asylum to those from other nations. Orban has also been slammed for siding with those who want to stem the tide of migrants heading into European Union nations from Syria and other Mideast regions. …

Perceptive.

Remember, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are in agreement with Soros’ globalism. So are establishment Republicans. Note how these Republicans keep excoriating Democrats for their history as the party of States’ Rights and Southern agrarian interests.

Of course, the “deport” of the title is figurative speech. George Soros can move an agenda from wherever he resides. He simply buys politicians and governments—The Davos “smart” set doesn’t need buying; it’s naturally corrupt—who, in turn, sell out their own people.