Sometimes it seems...

...hard to talk to your children about the way the world is. Sometimes I didn't know where to begin. Sometimes I didn't know WHEN to begin.

Sometimes you just have to answer questions...

Len, over at One in a Row, shows us how. Good job Len!!!

Explanations

Earlier today, my daughter asked me what I thought about the New Orleans gun confiscations. I was in a chatty mood, and I'm afraid that she got a little more than she bargained for. I spoke for almost 3 hours. I spoke of the slippery slope, of sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. I spoke of bread and circuses, and the Dream That Was Rome. I spoke of how those that are in power do not work for the good of the people, they work to remain in power. I spoke of Ruby Ridge and Waco, gulags and concentration camps. I spoke of jihad and the Crusades. I spoke of Leonidas of Sparta and Horatio at the bridge.

The rest here...


"Whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it."
--Richard Henry Lee, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

We Don't Need Bushes and Kerrys, We Need Davy Crockett...

As I watched King George last night, giving his FDR-like wellfare speech in the evacuated Jackson Square, I was reminded of this story from the life of Davy Crockett. Davy's argument is just as valid today as it was in his time. Unfortunately, the sheeple of America can no longer wipe their ass without government approved toilet paper and a government goon to make sure they do it right.

Thanks to LewRockwell.com for reprinting this important lesson...

I was one day in the lobby of the House of Representatives when a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support – rather, as I thought, because it afforded the speakers a fine opportunity for display than from the necessity of convincing anybody, for it seemed to me that everybody favored it. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose. Everybody expected, of course, that he was going to make one of his characteristic speeches in support of the bill. He commenced:

"Mr. Speaker – I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. This government can owe no debts but for services rendered, and at a stipulated price. If it is a debt, how much is it? Has it been audited, and the amount due ascertained? If it is a debt, this is not the place to present it for payment, or to have its merits examined. If it is a debt, we owe more than we can ever hope to pay, for we owe the widow of every soldier who fought in the War of 1812 precisely the same amount. There is a woman in my neighborhood, the widow of as gallant a man as ever shouldered a musket. He fell in battle. She is as good in every respect as this lady, and is as poor. She is earning her daily bread by her daily labor; but if I were to introduce a bill to appropriate five or ten thousand dollars for her benefit, I should be laughed at, and my bill would not get five votes in this House. There are thousands of widows in the country just such as the one I have spoken of, but we never hear of any of these large debts to them. Sir, this is no debt. The government did not owe it to the deceased when he was alive; it could not contract it after he died. I do not wish to be rude, but I must be plain. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much of our own money as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."

He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.

Like many other young men, and old ones, too, for that matter, who had not thought upon the subject, I desired the passage of the bill, and felt outraged at its defeat. I determined that I would persuade my friend Crockett to move a reconsideration the next day.

Previous engagements preventing me from seeing Crockett that night, I went early to his room the next morning and found him engaged in addressing and franking letters, a large pile of which lay upon his table.

I broke in upon him rather abruptly, by asking him what devil had possessed him to make that speech and defeat that bill yesterday. Without turning his head or looking up from his work, he replied:

"You see that I am very busy now; take a seat and cool yourself. I will be through in a few minutes, and then I will tell you all about it."

He continued his employment for about ten minutes, and when he had finished he turned to me and said:

"Now, sir, I will answer your question. But thereby hangs a tale, and one of considerable length, to which you will have to listen."

I listened, and this is the tale which I heard:

More here...


There is nothing in the Constitution that allows congress to spend one penny on anything other than its enumeratred powers. Many think that the terms "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" grant carte blanche for congress to do as it wants. That was never the intent and such manipulation is a direct violation of the Constitution. As an act performed by the president or the legislature it is treason.

"Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction." (Letter of September 7, 1803 to Wilson Cary Nicholas).

But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.
Thomas Jefferson, September 6, 1789

And Jefferson saw the error of the Supreme Court, early on...

At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Monsieur A. Coray, Oct 31, 1823

The people are waking up...

Left wing, right wing...just different wings on the same bird of prey. 15 years ago I couldn't have believed much in the following article. I had been duped, since childhood, in believing the democrats and the communists were our enemy. The old create a monster game. Hell even before I gave up voting, I voted libertarian in the 2000 election, then when the ballot scandle put the whole thing in court, I was secretly relieved that Bush was selected by the court, rather than Gore.

Now I know better, of course. There hasn't been an honest election in this country for a long time. Maybe there never was. The Whiskey Rebellion happened too soon after the start of this country. Seems to have been a tyranny from the start.

Jack Kenny at LewRockwell.com goes after the loyalists (Torries)...

Anyway...enjoy...and think...

"If it weren’t so pathetic, it would be amusing. Bush loyalists will go to any length to blame anyone but George and the Republicans for anything that goes wrong in the government. The ironies abound. The same crowd that loves to preach "accountability" is scandalized by "finger pointing" whenever the Bush administration steps into what dear old Dad used to call "deep doodoo." Clearly, the buck doesn’t stop at the president’s desk anymore. This president spends the bucks too fast – faster than any president in history. Yet "conservatives" love him.

It must take a lot of faith to still believe that the prescription for curing our nation’s ills is to vote Republican. The party of Lincoln, Blinkin’ and Nod has held the White House for 24 of the last 36 years. It has controlled the Senate for most of the past 20 years, has held the House since Newtsie’s little "revolution" (oh, those Republican revolutionaries!) in 1994. All but two of the members of the current Supreme Court are Republican appointees. So the conservatives must be winning, right? I mean they must be busy rolling back "big government" programs till the federal government is about the size it was when Mr. Coolidge left office. They must be restoring a sound dollar, reigning in excess spending, eliminating "waste and fraud" and just generally giving us the kind of frugal, sensible government that Grandma knew, right?

Well, not exactly. Budgets are in the trillions, deficits in the hundreds of billions, the nation’s wealth and a considerable amount of its young blood is being squandered on a war we started by invading a country that didn’t attack us, in search of weapons of mass destruction that appear not to have been there. And the closest we have come to accountability is the Defense Secretary’s observation that "Stuff happens." Maybe this is the Forrest Gump administration.

Let us be blunt: There is not a shred of credibility left to the Grand Ol’ Party’s crusade against "big government." The "era of big government" has never been over, despite that white flag run up by Bill Clinton to the thunderous ovation from a Republican Congress, followed by a cover of the Weekly Standard, exulting: "We Win!" The GOP is surely the party of Pyrrhic victories."

More here...


UPDATE!

It seems Joe Plummer, at Strike-the-Root, has been thinking too...

Taking a serious look at government "wrong doing" is no easy task . . . . Not because the damning evidence is hard to find, but because the truth (once found) is very hard to swallow.

How does one reconcile the fact that we are being led into slavery (and to slaughter) by a group of pathological liars who, ironically, have been appointed to "protect us?" How does one come to grips with the fact there are still millions of Americans who believe there is a "good half" of the government and a "bad half?" . . . An intellectual twilight zone where "good" has nothing to do with the ACTIONS of elected officials and everything to do with whether or not they've dressed themselves in "blue" or "red."

As I began my journey into the bottomless pit of government tyranny and lies I was shocked to find things were MUCH worse than I had originally imagined. Even more upsetting, I came to understand that my 30 years of ignorant bliss had been carefully manufactured on an assembly line of distractions and disinformation. My ignorance had been no accident; it had literally been "by design."

After a few years of serious digging, I reached a point where I couldn't help but stand in awe at the amount of "dirt" I'd unearthed. I thought to myself "How the HELL can all of this be going on and so few know about it?" The logical answer came shortly thereafter: "It is only going on BECAUSE so few know about it."

What I had initially hoped was just a rare instance of wrongdoing, turned out to be standard operating procedure. What I hoped was just a new phenomenon (brought about under an exceedingly corrupt administration) turned out to be as old as history itself."

More here...

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
-- Thomas Jefferson

We have met the enemy...