Nullification

“The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the people at the time the Constitution was adopted, that powers not granted to the United States were reserved to the States or to the people. It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified.” – United States v. Sprague, 282 U.S. 716, 733 (1931).

The founding fathers had good reason to pen the Tenth Amendment.

The issue of power – and especially the great potential for a power struggle between the federal and the state governments – was extremely important to the America’s founders. They deeply distrusted government power, and their goal was to prevent the growth of the type of government that the British has exercised over the colonies.

Adoption of the Constitution of 1787 was opposed by a number of well-known patriots including Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others. They passionately argued that the Constitution would eventually lead to a strong, centralized state power which would destroy the individual liberty of the People. Many in this movement were given the poorly-named tag “Anti-Federalists.”

The Tenth Amendment was added to the Constitution of 1787 largely because of the intellectual influence and personal persistence of the Anti-Federalists and their allies.

It’s quite clear that the Tenth Amendment was written to emphasize the limited nature of the powers delegated to the federal government. In delegating just specific powers to the federal government, the states and the people, with some small exceptions, were free to continue exercising their sovereign powers.

When states and local communities take the lead on policy, the people are that much closer to the policymakers, and policymakers are that much more accountable to the people. Few Americans have spoken with their president; many have spoken with their mayor.

Adherence to the Tenth Amendment is the first step towards ensuring liberty in the United States. Liberty through decentralization.

http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/about/about-the-tenth-amendment/

Disagreement is Treason

"A horrifying aspect of modern life is how nearly daily threats to fundamental freedoms and human rights nearly require that citizens become politically aware and active.

Here we are struggling to put food on the table, cultivate a civilized private life, support things we care about, manage our households, and otherwise meet all the challenges of modern life, and then some jerk politician pushes some dangerous legislation that poses an all-out attack on everything we take for granted.

One of those things we take for granted is the freedom to disagree with the government and its policies.

Consider now the Enemy Expatriation Act now being pushed by Republican Charles Dent of Pennsylvania and Democrat Joe Leiberman of Connecticut. This act adds to existing law that makes it a crime to support materially governments with which the U.S. is at war.

As Dent explains, the U.S. no longer limits its wars to governments. It takes on what it calls terrorists without regard to national identity. Therefore, he says, we need a new law that grants broader power to the state to crush its home-grown foes.

The Enemy Expatriation Act therefore allows the U.S. government to strip citizenship from anyone who is found to be “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.”

The ironic effect of a law like this is that the best citizens we have will end up being stripped of their citizenship, leaving only the cowards, sycophants, and brainless as the model citizens with full rights to live here and vote. Granted, it is the dream of every government that all its subjects obey without question. That day that dream comes true is that day we should all welcome banishment."

- Jeffrey Tucker

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/its-treason-to-disagree/

Gridlock is good

Gridlock is a good thing.  The Founding Fathers designed our bicameral system so legislation, good and bad, can’t be ramrodded down the throats of Americans.  Debate, no matter how contentious, is vital to our liberties and to government transparency.  The less that happens in Washington, the better off we all are.  Too bad Congress didn’t fall into gridlock over Obamacare or Homeland Security, but hindsight is always 20/20.  Until we can shed 90% of the FedGov, just be thankful for gridlock.

Politics in a Police State

Sen. Rand Paul said his misunderstanding with the TSA Monday morning could have been avoided if he would have simply been able to go through a body scanner in Nashville again.

After missing his original flight because he would not submit to a pat-down, Paul told reporters staked out at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after stepping off a re-booked flight from Nashville that “it would be so simple and people would be less offended by the pat-downs if they were given the chance to go back through the screener.”

The Kentucky Republican went through a body-imaging machine Monday morning and refused to submit to a pat-down after setting the machine off. He said he tried to show TSA officers that there was nothing hidden in his leg that would set off the scanner, “but they didn’t really care about my leg too much.”

Paul then bared his knee for reporters.

“It may not be pretty, but there’s nothing there,” he said, rolling up his dress pants.

Both Paul’s spokeswoman and his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), had tweeted that the senator had been detained by TSA officers in Nashville, a characterization the TSA disputed.

“Probably a matter of semantics,” Paul said. “I was told not to leave a cubicle and when I did step outside the cubicle I was sort of surrounded and put back in the cubicle. Seems a little bit like I was being detained. But when they got tired of detaining me, they evicted me. And then I was told to leave. I think I would have been arrested had I not done what I was told,” Paul said.

In missing his morning flight, Paul said he missed what was “probably the biggest speech of my career” at the March for Life rally in Washington.

Paul also said he didn’t understand why he went through a scanner once and set it off, then after his flight was rebooked, went through the same scanner, which did not go off.

“I suspect that the scanner is randomly setting off an alarm that’s not a real alarm so you’re made to feel like you did something wrong and then you get the pat-down,” Paul said, adding that sometimes he is allowed to go through scanners again without being asked to submit to a pat-down. “Does the screener have the ability to push a button and randomly get someone to set off the screener?”

A TSA rep was not immediately available to comment on Paul’s question.

Asked if the high-profile TSA incident will come up in tonight’s presidential debate which his father is participating in, Rand Paul demurred.

“I don’t know, but he hasn’t been real happy with the TSA either,” he said.

Ron Paul’s campaign released a statement Monday noting he would eliminate the TSA if elected.

“The police state in this country is growing out of control,” Ron Paul said. “One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors, and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.”

- Politico 1/23/12

Santorum is a Big Government Neocon Punk

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum was the top choice among about 150 conservative leaders who assembled in Brenham over the past couple of days to discuss who should be the Republican presidential nominee. However, Santorum has revealed himself as a big-government frontman, who is totally opposed to the Founding Fathers vision for America.

“One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a Libertarianish right. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional conservatives view the world.  There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.”

- Rick Santorum

"Santorum seems to oppose a basic American principle - the right to the pursuit of happiness. I agree with him on this, but there is something even more fundamental here than that. It has to do with the conservative philosophy itself. One of the statements that Santorum makes is true. "That is not how traditional conservatives view the world."

There is a great disconnect between average Americans who refer to themselves as "conservatives" and the small group of politicians and politically-connected businessman who likewise refer to themselves. The members of the former group believe in the founding principles of the United States, including the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They believe that these rights are endowed by their Creator. In other words, they preexist the government. They are not created by the government. It is the government's one and only job to protect those rights and when the government fails to protect them and instead violates them, it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish the government.

These inalienable rights are also referred to as "natural rights," meaning that man possesses them even in the state of nature (the state without government). For Jefferson, whose philosophy was inspired by Locke, the reason that men formed governments was to protect these rights better than they could be protected otherwise.

Contrary to Rick Santorum's assertion that no society based upon radical individualism has ever succeeded, the libertarian, radical individualist principles upon which the United States was founded were precisely why it succeeded so spectacularly. It was libertarianism that made America different from any society before or since - what made it the "shining city on the hill" as Santorum calls it. It was the collectivist conservative philosophy that helped bring it down - with a lot of help from a third philosophical movement called Progressivism. Neither more conservatism nor more progressivism - nor any combination of the two - can solve the problems that America faces today. If Americans want to see liberty and prosperity restored in the United States, then restoring libertarianism is their only hope."

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America

Obama bush Laden

Regarding the death of Osama bin Laden: "We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, [and] the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."

- Noam Chomsky

1984 is Now... Linguistics, Propoganda & Terrorism

“There can be no let-up for terrorism — it must be hit with an iron fist. The battle with terrorism is a battle for everyone, a national battle, not only the government’s battle…  There’s no tolerance of terrorism or of those who use weapons to kill… We will not be lenient with those who work with outsiders against the country… Those who stand in the middle are traitors… We will defeat this conspiracy.”

- Syrian President Bashar Assad/ 2012

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime… But the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows… Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them… We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home.”

- President George Bush/ 2001

“Go to the internet and go to the FBI website and go to their international list of top ten terrorists. You will see Bin Laden there, bring his name up and his picture. Amazingly, all the charges: the embassy of '98 and this other stuff is all listed. But, ironically nothing on 9/11. NOTHING! Now when the FBI was pressed as to why 9/11 wasn't included, their response was "We don't have enough evidence." Now, people, if you're like me that is extremely disturbing; we've fought two wars, we've changed our entire foreign policy and we've had the PATRIOT act put on us, all, supposedly, because of Osama Bin Laden!”

- Jesse Ventura

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

- George Orwell, 1984

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. ~ Goeth

"HAPPY NEW YEAR: YOU CAN NOW BE DETAINED INDEFINITELY."  The terrifying NDAA is mainstream now, and it was signed by President Obama on New Years Eve, making it the law of the land. No one is safe now.

Passing of the National Defense Appropriations Act, with Amendment 1031, allows for the military detention of American citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen could be held without due process. The language of this bill can be read to assure Americans that they can challenge their detention — but most people do not realize what this means: at Guantanamo and in other military prisons, one’s lawyer’s calls are monitored, witnesses for one’s defense are not allowed to testify, and one can be forced into nudity and isolation. Incredibly, ninety-three Senators voted to support this bill and now most of Congress: a roster of names that will live in infamy in the history of our nation, and never be expunged from the dark column of the history books.

After the legislation cleared Congress, the ACLU commented that signing the bill “will damage both his legacy and American’s reputation for upholding the rule of law,” while executive director of the Human Rights Watch blasted the President for being ‘on the wrong side of history,’ noting that “Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

Presidential candidate Ron Paul went even further, declaring that the NDAA bill begins the official establishment of martial law in the United States


(from various sources)