The manipulation and violation of our laws and the election process by well orchestrated corrupt actions of ACORN, SEIU and other unions and dishonest partisan Democrats and the news media’s malpractice in ignoring such transgressions, presents sever threats to our rights and freedoms.

Demand for probe into MN felon voting grows
Ed Morrissey July 16, 2010

Minnesota Majority spokesman Dan McGrath appeared on the Twin Cities Fox affiliate last night to explain their latest report on felon voting in Minnesota, and to expand on their demand for law enforcement action. According to their meticulous research of voting and conviction records, as many as 1,000 felons may have voted in the 2008 election in Minnesota. That would have been more than enough to swing the US Senate election to Al Franken, who prevailed by just over 300 votes in a protracted recount and election challenge over Norm Coleman. Noting that the data won’t have any impact on the 2008 results, McGrath wants action to ensure the integrity of the upcoming November election, but doesn’t appear to be getting much cooperation:

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to subtract felon voters once the ballots have been cast. That’s why federal law requires states to regularly audit and cleanse their voting rolls to remove the dead and ineligible, in order to protect the value of eligible votes.

The Department of Justice has become disinterested in enforcing this part of the Motor Voter Act, a fact pointed out specific to Minnesota by J. Christian Adams last week on a local talk-radio show. Ramsey County, which includes the capital city of St. Paul, has researched a few of the cases but as noted by Fox 9 reporter Jeff Passolt, doesn’t appear to consider it a priority.

Even if the Minnesota Majority report is entirely correct — and it appears very solid — it wouldn’t provide a basis of overturning Franken’s election. McGrath is right in that the report should be considered in the context of the future instead of the past, and all sides should be demanding enforcement of voter eligibility in order to ensure clean elections. To the extent that enthusiasm lacks, it’s worth asking how much value some people put in clean elections, both inside and outside of Minnesota.

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/16/video-demand-for-probe-into-mn-felon-voting-grows/

Probe Grows in MN Felon Voting Scandal

This surely can't be excluded and is not inconsistent with his other actions/inactions and ideologies.

Obama Boss George Soros Ready To Profit From Oil Disaster
June 14, 2010

Perhaps this is why drilling in Alaska is off the table– it would actually keep America safe and strong and won’t make Obama Boss George Soros even richer than he is now.

Interestingly, it seems the more trouble we have, the better it is for Soros. Last year, Soros noted he was “having a very good crisis” having bet against the United States and profiting from her economic downturn.

Now we learn Soros is set to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Gulf oil catastrophe. With Obama’s ‘moratorium’ and the Obama Admin’s general hostility to drilling, it’s reported many oil companies have already looked into with Brazil regarding a move those shores. And what is Soros principally invested in right now? Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company.

Obama’s Boss Sees Silver Lining in BP Spill

Reuters is reporting that Brazil stands to benefit from the BP oil spill catastrophe as the US moratorium makes more rigs available for other countries.

Even as an ecological catastrophe makes the future of U.S. offshore drilling less certain, Brazil is plowing ahead with a $220 billion five-year plan to tap oil fields even deeper than BP’s ill-fated Gulf well, which is still leaking crude.

It’s estimated that thirty five rigs are now sitting idle in the Gulf of Mexico. Brazil is already getting inquiries from companies wanting to move their rigs there. Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras already produces about a fourth of the world’s deep water oil…

The shortage of rigs could help Brazil become a major oil exporter.

What an amazing stroke of good fortune for Obama’s boss, unrepentant Nazi collaborator, George Soros! Soros is also invested in offshore oil drilling in Brazil, assisted by the American taxpayers.

Soros Fund Management, LLC holds a stake in Petrobras of approximately $900 million as of December 31, 2009.
George Soros’ principal investments are in oil; one in particular is Petrobras, the Brazilian-owned company. This happens to be the largest investment in the Soros portfolio at the present time.

Soros also owns quite a lot of real estate in Brazil. Soros’ Adecoagro, which invests in renewable energy, owns or leases about 840,000 acres of farmland in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay growing coffee, soybeans and other commodities. Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Bunge Ltd. Are also expanding into ethanol in Brazil.

When you get to boss the president around, you never have to let a good crisis go to waste.
UPDATE: Dan in comments reminded me of the $2 billion loan deal Obama made to Brazil last year, furthering the connection between Obama, our tax dollars, and Soros’ business. here’s the WSJ’s take on the matter on August 18, 2009

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling

Too bad it’s not in U.S. waters.

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

http://tammybruce.com/2010/06/obama-boss-george-soros-ready-to-profit-from-oil-disaster.html

http://tammybruce.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/sorosoil.jpg

These latter individuals did correctly assess the situation … but it is actually potentially worse than many of his ardent foes might have thought. Following painstaking research and analysis, Aaron Klein wrote a book entitled The Manchurian President in which he provides a chilling accounting of Obama’s radical past and evolution that goes all the way back to his early childhood. What he reveals should frighten every American and put them on notice that this man represents real and existential threats to our freedoms, rights and America as we knew it.

Obama must be thwarted!!

See Video of Aaron Klein being interviewed by Sean Hannity:

‘Exposing Obama’s Radical Past’: New Book Examines President’s Associations

The magnitude of importance of the ensuing outcome can’t be overstated as regards our future as a “free” country. American citizens are now fighting to preserve and regain their rights, freedoms and hard earned money from a rapidly expanding, over-reaching and oppressive government (to its productive citizens) that sees itself as the wise, privileged ruling class.

Not unlike pre-Revolutionary war times …

Tea Party Finds Its Motivation In Constitution
By Michael Barone 03/31/2010

Over the past 14 months, our political debate has been transformed into an argument between the heirs of two fundamental schools of political thought, the Founders and the Progressives. The Founders stood for the expansion of liberty and the Progressives for the expansion of government.

It's an argument that's been going on for a century but was largely dormant over the quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth after the Ronald Reagan tax cuts. It's been raised again by the expand-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders.

Those policies, thoroughly in line with the Progressive tradition, have been advanced by liberal elites in government, media, think tanks and academia.

The opposition, roughly in line with the Founders tradition, has been led by the non-elites who spontaneously flocked to Tea Parties and town halls. Republican politicians have been scrambling to lead these protesters.

The conservative rebellions of the late 1970s and middle 1990s were focused on taxes. The Tea Partyers are focusing on the expansion of government — and its threat to the independence of citizens.

The first mention of tea parties came in February 2009 from CNBC's Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, when he asked "if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages. How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage, that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?"

Then he called for a Chicago tea party.

This struck a chord. Tea Partyers began to dress in 18th-century costumes — political re-enactors — and brandished the "Don't tread on me" flag. They declared their independence by opposing Progressive policies that encourage dependence on government.

The Progressives have always assumed that people needed safety nets and would welcome dependence on government. The public's clear rejection of the Democratic health care bills has shown that this assumption was unwarranted.

Americans today prefer independence to dependence on government, just as they did 200 years ago.

All this was supposed to have been consigned to the past long ago.

The Progressives of the early 1900s — Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, New Republic founder Herbert Croly — argued that in an industrial era of mass production and giant businesses, ordinary people were helpless and needed government's guiding hand.

It would be more efficient, they argued, for centralized, disinterested experts to administer national institutions than to let chaotic markets operate freely and to observe the Constitution's horse-and-buggy limits on government power.

The Founders were out of date.

The Progressives had their way for much of the 20th century.

But it became apparent that centralized experts weren't disinterested, but always sought to expand their power. And it became clear that central planners can never have the kind of information that is transmitted instantly, as Friedrich von Hayek observed, by price signals in free markets.

It turned out that centralized experts are not as wise and ordinary Americans are not as helpless as the Progressives thought.

By passing the stimulus package and the health care bills, the Democrats produced expansion of government. But voters seem to prefer expansion of liberty.

The Progressives' scorn for the Founders has not been shared by the people. First-rate books about the Founders have been best-sellers. And efforts to dismiss the Founders as slaveholders, misogynists or homophobes have been outweighed by the resonance of their words and deeds.

The Declaration of Independence's proclamation that "all men are created equal" with "unalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" has proved to be happily elastic.

It still sings to us today, thanks to the struggles and sacrifices of many Americans who gave blacks and women the equality denied to them in 1776.

In contrast, the early Progressives' talk of an "industrial age" and an outmoded Constitution sounds like the language of an age now long past. Their faith in centralized planning seems naive in a time when one unpredicted innovation after another has changed lives for the better.

Polls and recent election results tell us that racial minorities and the so-called "educated class" — the people who expect their kind will administer centralized institutions — still take the side of the Progressives.

Most Americans, however, are rejecting the path of dependence and are intent on declaring their independence once again.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=529000

The rest of America won’t – we will either have to wait for it or die waiting.

And Obama doesn’t intend to end his pursuit of increasing control and domination by the Federal Government over the lives of us Americans.

America's New Nomenklatura
Investors Business Daily       03/29/2010

Government: With the passage of health care reform and the ongoing boom in federal hiring, it's becoming increasingly clear that America is now run by a new, privileged class of bureaucrats.

For those who remember the old Soviet Union, it was a grim place — at least for average citizens. But not so for those in government. Contrary to the official ideals of equality and a classless society that the ruling communist regime espoused, the USSR created a privileged class of party members inside government — the nomenklatura.

This semipermanent bureaucracy earned higher incomes, got better health care, ate better food and had greater job security than average Russians, the much-despised proletarians. Today, our bloated federal government seems, in significant ways, to be creating this same dynamic.

Take the just-passed health care bill that carefully excluded the White House, congressional leaders and their staffs from having to live under the reforms' restrictions.

"President Obama will not have to live under the Obama health care reforms, and neither will the congressional staff who helped to write the overhaul," said Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. "The message to the people at the grass roots is that it's good enough for you, but not for us."

The hypocrisy of these officials and the contempt they show for average Americans is bad enough. But Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public can also go to jail or be fined up to $250,000 for not buying insurance. And the government is spending $10 billion to hire 16,500 new IRS agents to make sure they don't escape the new system.

Under current budget plans, this won't end soon. With $45 trillion in new government spending planned over the next decade, this new privileged governing class can only grow.

Today, as we witness a massive shift of resources from the private to the public sector, the only place adding jobs is government. Since the start of last year, the federal government has added 81,000 jobs. By contrast, private-sector payrolls have shed 4.71 million.

Big government is the place to be these days. Federal workers are some of the country's best-paid, earning far in excess of their counterparts in the private sector. A recent report in Politico.com, for example, noted that 2,000 congressional staffers now have incomes in excess of $100,000, and that 43 make the $172,500 maximum.

But the bureaucrats — that silent, permanent government that now exceeds 2.8 million in number — make out just as well.
USA Today recently looked at federal pay vs. private pay in 2008 for specific occupations ranging from airline pilot and cook to computer manager and registered nurse. What they found was more than a little disquieting for those in the private sector.

The average federal worker that year took home on average $67,691 in salary, compared with $60,046 in the private sector — a difference of $7,645. Not that much, you say? Well, that was before benefits are factored.

The average government worker gets a whopping $40,785 a year in health care, pension and other benefits compared to $9,882 for a private worker. The difference in total compensation widens to $38,548 a year — for the same job with the same duties.

Anyone who has visited the slow-moving Post Office, talked to the surly and often hostile IRS agent or even gone to the local DMV to spend time in waiting-room hell can tell you that pay gap doesn't represent productivity, training or ability.

What it does represent is the new Nomenklatura — the privileged apparatchiks who now run our government and with it, sadly, much of our lives. This is very much a result of years of "progressive" thinking that has pushed the Democratic Party sharply leftward across the political spectrum.

Since the Civil War, the so-called Progressive Movement's dream has been to exalt bureaucratic expertise and control over free-market efficiency. With the new administration, their dream has become our nightmare.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=528809

We must counter their verbal attacks, false allegations and fabrications - persistently and loudly. If we don't and keep acquiescing to the Federal government's increasing restriction of our rights, freedoms and choices as well as their unrestrained confiscation of our hard earned money through taxes and fees, we will have little left. We will end up in a situation not dissimilar to that of communist Russia in the 1970's and early 80's with a privileged, powerful, and corrupt government ruling and repressing the rest of the people, the proletariat, and where there is controlled but not free speech and the government determines most aspects of our daily lives.

Speak loudly and often in defense of your rights so that we can continue to SPEAK FREE!

Speak Free

Media contributed by Tami Peterson Lewiski www.digitaldecorating.com

When was the last time a liberal speaker at a University had their speech cancelled by out of control conservatives? Can’t think of any.

If one unkind word is spoken against a far-left adherent, the media is in an uncontrollable frenzy. The reverse does not occur in that the media and our present government actually encourage wanton vicious attacks against the right.

There are several important lessons in all of this. First, we must stand up and protect and fight for our rights. We must not allow our conservative points of view to be officially suppressed, threatened or punished whether it is by our government or a public institution. If we back down and don’t fight back, the consequences will be further erosion of our rights and freedoms. This is what has happened even in Canada and, of course, elsewhere. Let’s not let it happen here in America. There are already proposals to do just this such as the "Fairness Doctrine" and Obama's information czar who suggested controlling, correcting or deleting information on the internet that the government may deem "inaccurate" or "inappropriate".

We also must not be apologetic for our points of view or for non-violent means to express them. The left has done this very well. We need to be more verbally aggressive, loud and persistent.

Oh, Canada!
by Ann Coulter   03/24/2010

Since arriving in Canada I've been accused of thought crimes, threatened with criminal prosecution for speeches I hadn't yet given and denounced on the floor of the Parliament (which was nice because that one was on my "bucket list").

Posters advertising my speech have been officially banned, while posters denouncing me are plastered all over the University of Ottawa campus. Elected officials have been prohibited from attending my speeches. Also, the local clothing stores are fresh out of brown shirts.

Welcome to Canada!

The provost of the University of Ottawa, average student IQ: 0, wrote to me—widely disseminating his letter to at least a half-dozen intermediaries before it reached me—in advance of my visit in order to recommend that I familiarize myself with Canada's criminal laws regarding hate speech.

This marks the first time I've ever gotten hate mail for something I might do in the future.

Apparently Canadian law forbids "promoting hatred against any identifiable group," which the provost, Francois A. Houle advised me, "would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges."

I was given no specific examples of what words and phrases I couldn't use, but I take it I'm not supposed to say, "F----you, Francois."

While it was a relief to know that it is still permissible in Canada to promote hatred against unidentifiable groups, upon reading Francois' letter, I suddenly realized that I had just been the victim of a hate crime! And it was committed by Francois A. Houle (French for "Frank A. Hole").

What other speakers get a warning not to promote hatred? Did Francois A. Houle send a similarly worded letter to Israel-hater Omar Barghouti before he spoke last year at U of Ottawa? ("Ottawa": Indian for "Land of the Bed-Wetters.")

How about Angela Davis, Communist Party member and former Black Panther who spoke at the University of Zero just last month?

Or do only conservatives get letters admonishing them to be civil? Or—my suspicion—is it only conservative women who fuel Francois' rage?

How about sending a letter to all Muslim speakers advising them to please bathe once a week while in Canada? Would that constitute a hate crime?

I'm sure Canada's Human Rights Commission will get to the bottom of Francois' strange warning to me, inasmuch as I will be filing a complaint with that august body, so I expect they will be reviewing every letter the university has sent to other speakers prior to their speeches to see if any of them were threatened with criminal prosecution.

Both writer Mark Steyn and editor Ezra Levant have been investigated by the Human Rights Commission for promoting hatred toward Muslims.

Levant's alleged crime was to reprint the cartoons of Mohammed originally published in a Danish newspaper, leading practitioners of the Religion of Peace to engage in murderous violence across the globe. Steyn's alleged crime was to publish an excerpt of his book, America Alone in Maclean's magazine, in which he jauntily described Muslims as "hot for jihad."

Both of them also flew jet airliners full of passengers into skyscrapers in lower Manhattan, resulting in thousands of deaths. No, wait—that was somebody else.

Curiously, however, there was no evidence that either the cartoons or the column did, in fact, incite hatred toward Muslims—nor was there the remotest possibility that they would.

By contrast, conservative speakers are regularly subjected to violent attacks on college campuses. Bill Kristol, Pat Buchanan, David Horowitz and I have all been the targets of infamous campus attacks.

That's why the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute (a sponsor of my Canada speeches) and the Young America's Foundation (a sponsor of many of my college speeches) don't send conservatives to college campuses without a bodyguard.

You'd have to be a real A-Houle not to anticipate that accusing a conservative of "promoting hatred" prior to her arrival on a college campus would in actuality—not in liberal fantasies of terrified Muslims cowering in terror of Mark Steyn readers—incite real-world violence toward the conservative.

The university itself acknowledged that Francois' letter was likely to provoke violence against me by demanding—long after my speech was scheduled, but immediately after Francois disseminated his letter—that my sponsors pony up more than $1,200 for extra security.

Also following Francois' letter, the Ottawa University Student Federation met for 7 1/2 hours to hammer out a series of resolutions denouncing me. The resolutions included:

"Whereas Ann Coulter is a hateful woman;
"Whereas she has made hateful comments against GLBTQ, Muslims, Jews and women;
"Whereas she violates an unwritten code of 'positive-space';
"Be it resolved that the SFUO express its disapproval of having Ann Coulter speak at the University of Ottawa."

At least the students didn't waste 7 1/2 hours on something silly, like their studies.

At the risk of violating anyone's positive space, what happened to Canada? How did the country that gave us Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd and Catherine O'Hara suddenly become a bunch of whining crybabies?

After Tuesday night, the hatred incited by Francois' letter is no longer theoretical. The police called off my speech when the auditorium was surrounded by thousands of rioting liberals—screaming, blocking the entrance, throwing tables, demanding that my books be burned, and finally setting off the fire alarm.

Sadly, I missed the book-burning because I never made it to the building.

But, reportedly, a Canadian crowd hasn't been this excited since they opened a new Tim Hortons. Local reporters couldn't make out what the crowd was chanting, but it was something about "Molson" and a "sled dog."

I've given more than 100 college speeches, and not once has one of my speeches been shut down at any point. Even the pie-throwing incident at the University of Arizona didn't break up the event. I said, "Get them!" and the college Republicans got them, and then I continued with my rambling, hate-filled diatribe—I mean, my speech.

So we've run this experiment more than 100 times.

Only one college speech was ever met with so much mob violence that the police were forced to cancel it: The one that was preceded by a letter from the university provost accusing me of hate speech.

(To add insult to injury, Francois didn't even plan to attend my speech because Tuesday is his bikini wax night.)

If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech—which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech—is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.

Either Francois goes to jail or the Human Rights Commission is a hoax and a fraud.

Now you know that our hard earned tax dollars are being used for a far-left agenda aimed at undermining our country and turning our youth against us.

Gov't Organizing Radicals In Our Schools
By PHYLISS SCHLAFLY     02/26/2010

President Obama's budget has added more than $100 billion in federal taxpayers' money to what is called "education," so that means it will be spent by alumni of the Saul Alinsky school of radical community organizing and/or the Chicago Democratic machine. We're indebted to Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com for exposing the shocking use of some of these funds.

Obama is using the public schools to recruit a private army of high-schoolers to "build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda." We now know Obama's "agenda" is to move the U.S. into European-style socialism.

Obama's Internet outreach during his campaign, Obama for America, has been renamed Organizing for America (OFA) in order to recruit students to join a cult of Obama and become activists for his goals.

Stirring It Up

Geller discovered that the teacher of an 11th-grade government class in Massillon, Ohio, passed out the sign-up sheet, headed with Obama's "O" logo, asking students to become interns for Organizing for America.

These interns will get an intensive nine-week training course using comprehensive lesson plans. Assigned readings include Saul Alinsky's notorious "Rules for Radicals," "Stir It Up: Lessons From Community Organizing and Advocacy" by left-wing activist Rinku Sen, and parts of "Dreams From My Father" dealing with Obama's days as a Chicago community organizer.

Republican students will be filtered out of the intern program by requiring applicants to answer questions that reveal their politics. One example: "What one issue facing our country is important to you and why?"

Geller said the purpose of this training to become Alinsky-style community organizers is, "of course, to elect more Democrats." The program is specifically geared to get the kids working in the 2010 elections.

Change Agenda

The sign-up sheet for Organizing for America starts with this instruction: "Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change."

The application explains that this national internship program is "working to make the change we fought so hard for in 2008 a reality in 2010 and beyond."

This is not the first time Obama has tried to enlist schoolchildren into an Obama cult.

Last fall, the instructions mailed to every school by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan added a very political dimension to Obama's speech that was broadcast to public school children on Sept. 8.

Geller explained the extensive political dimension of the intern program. The OFA student interns will be trained in the goals and language of the left: "anti-war agitation, anti-capitalism, Marx, Lenin, (Bill) Ayers, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) agenda promotion, global warming, soft-on-jihad and illegal immigration."

Also on OFA's reading list is "The New Organizers" by Zack Exley. It brags about "an insurgent generation of organizers" inside the Obama campaign that has "almost without anyone noticing ... built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people's organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level."

The 10-page "National Intern Organizer Curriculum" is very specific in describing the tactics that interns will be taught. It includes these components: "Using Story as an Organizing Tool, Building Relationships and Building Teams, Mobilizing to Win on the Issues (issue advocacy), Health Care Service Project."

Passage of ObamaCare is one of this intern project's major goals. The curriculum promises to provide "insight on the strategy and plan behind the health care campaign" and "further motivate them to work on the issue."

The sign-up sheet states that the "purpose" of training these students is "to build community" among the interns and teach them "to be leaders in OFA's organizing work." After all, Barack Obama knows a great deal about being a community organizer — that was his only real job before he got into politics.

Acorn Support

Job prospects may be bleak for many Americans, but they will be rosy for alumni of Obama's intern program.

After the students have been fully trained as Alinsky-style community organizers, they will be eligible for jobs in Senior Corps, AmeriCorps or Learn and Serve America.

Those three so-called "service" organizations, which annually dole out millions of dollars to left-wing groups, are overseen by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

The U.S. Senate just confirmed this corporation's new chief executive, Patrick Corvington, who was a senior official of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has given over a million and a half dollars to the Acorn network of organizations.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522422

Our freedoms can be ephemeral – they can be taken away in a flash. The “progressives” and the far-left in our country are relentlessly attacking our innate rights and freedoms, often in incremental and stealth ways. The Second Amendment not only allows us to protect ourselves from others who aim to harm us but as Thomas Jefferson noted, it also is what can protect us from a tyrannical, overreaching government.

We must be ever vigilant in protecting and defending these rights and freedoms.

'Right To Bear Arms' Means Just That
Investors Business Daily   03/03/2010

Gun Rights: Otis McDonald, 76, an Army vet who lives in a high-crime area of Chicago, thinks the Constitution gives him the right to bear arms to protect himself and his wife as he protected his country. We think so too.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on behalf of four Chicago residents led by homeowner McDonald, the Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association to overturn Chicago's three-decade-old ban on owning handguns.

In a 5-4 decision in 2008, Heller v. District of Columbia, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia's draconian, 32-year-old ban on the private ownership of handguns. Scalia wrote that an individual right to bear arms is supported by "the historical narrative" before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

The joy of Second Amendment defenders was short-lived. A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, led by Judge Frank Easterbrook, rejected subsequent suits brought by the National Rifle Association against the city of Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill.

According to Easterbrook, the Revolution was fought and independence won so that the Founding Fathers could write a Constitution with a Bill of Rights that applied only to the District of Columbia.

"Heller dealt with a law enacted under the authority of the national government," he wrote, "while Chicago and Oak Park are subordinate bodies of a state."

We're all for federalism, but the U.S. Constitution is the U.S. Constitution. Surely he can't be serious.

Alan Gura, the Alexandria, Va., lawyer who won the Heller case, has expanded the argument to include the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 to prevent infringement on constitutional rights by states and others concerned about newly freed slaves owning firearms.

Introducing the 14th Amendment to Congress, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan referred to "personal rights" such as "the right to keep and bear arms, " explaining that his amendment would compel the states "to respect these great fundamental guarantees."

In 2008, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed an amicus brief on behalf of 32 states that also challenged the constitutionality of the D.C. ban. Now he represents a group of 38 states fighting the Chicago ban. "The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is a critical liberty interest, essential to preserving individual security and the right to self-defense," Abbott explained.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass wrote in 2008 that in Chicago only two classes of people can possess firearms: "The criminals and the politicians."

City politicians, he noted, used their influence to "become deputized peace officers so they can carry" or "often go around surrounded by armed bodyguards on the city payroll."

Otis McDonald wants the same right to defend himself and his family. To deny him that right, city officials argue that repealing the ban will bring carnage in the streets. Yet in the forthcoming third edition of "More Guns, Less Crime," John Lott points out that the Windy City's murder rate fell relative to America's other 50 largest cities before the ban and rose afterward.

In an essay Monday for FoxNews.com, Lott noted that after the D.C. gun ban was ruled unconstitutional, murders in Washington plummeted 25% from 2008 to 2009. D.C.'s murder rate, he reports, is down to 23.5 per 100,000 people, its lowest since 1967.

More guns do seem to mean less crime. And as Mr. McDonald insists, those who gave us liberty gave us the means and the right to defend it.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522844

This is also exactly why they are viciously attacking and denigrating the Tea Party Movement, a grass roots movement that represents an angry middle America. We are sick and tired of politicians imperiously foisting expensive and irresponsibly solutions on us, ransacking ever increasing amounts of the fruits of our labor, and destroying our economy, jobs and freedoms yet they live by another set of rules (including their gold plated healthcare plan), corruptly aggrandize themselves with our tax dollars and evince a general antipathy toward the people who are suppose to be their bosses.

This must stop. These despicable, arrogant, corrupt politicians must be voted out of office ASAP!

As for much of the news media, a boycott of their products and programs can be quite effective. In the following article alone, several of these are quoted from that excoriate Americans that we can place on this list:

Times Magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker

To this we can add other far-left media like: MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS

Money, or the lack of it, talks. Let’s be quite loud on this issue!

Blame Americans First
Democrats lose patience with democracy.
By Matthew Continetti     March 1, 2010

What’s the clearest sign the Obama agenda is in trouble? That’s easy: the string of jeremiads in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets of fashionable opinion. Unable to tout the administration’s successes, and worried about Republican ascendancy, liberals have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in neither to their program nor to their methods but to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you.

You aren’t too bright, for one thing. After all, opines Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek, the “biggest culprit” behind “our political paralysis” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” You simply do not know what’s good for you. “On many issues these days,” writes the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, “the American people are badly confused.” “The people may have spoken,” writes the New -Yorker’s James Surowiecki. “It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.” In a blog post titled “Too Dumb to Thrive,” Time magazine’s Joe Klein cuts to the chase: “It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.”

The problem, as Weisberg sees it, is that America “simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.” Note the myopia. For Weisberg, the only conceivable “action” on any issue is limited to the policy preferences of liberal Democrats. No other options spring to mind.

This is nonsense. Just because the public says the economy is important does not necessarily mean it has to support a stimulus measure that has added massively to the debt without much benefit. Just because the public is concerned with rising health care costs does not mean that it has to support a bill that could alter existing health care arrangements and increase costs in the long-term. Steven Pearlstein writes that Americans “want to do something about global warming.” No they don’t. Global warming came dead last in a recent Pew survey of public priorities.

The reason health care, cap and trade, and the other blocks of Obama’s New Foundation are unpopular isn’t public ignorance. It’s that the public sees them as counterproductive—and in many cases beside the point. The people’s representatives have responded to a variety of signals, from falling poll numbers, to town hall protests, to GOP victories in -Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Which is precisely how democracy is supposed to function.

And that’s the problem, says Kurt Andersen in New York magazine. “American democracy has gotten way too democratic.” The “thoughtful, educated, well-off, well-regarded gentlemen” who designed our Constitution “wanted a government run by an American elite like themselves.” But the “populist impulse” abroad in the land today has scared legislators into obeying the people’s demands.

It was not always thus. “In the old days,” Andersen laments, “the elite media really did control the national political discourse” and “presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations” without the public trying to butt in. But there’s no going back now; “maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogenous population of 310 million.”
This liberal uneasiness with democracy is not new. In 2003, in The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria made the case against too much public involvement in government. In 2008, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman dreamed of America becoming “China for a day” so that he could impose his environmental agenda on a truculent populace. In a 2009 New York Times column, Friedman wrote that a dictatorship, “when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today,” has “great advantages” over democratic systems. In the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows writes that “whatever is wrong with today’s Communist leadership [in Beijing], it is widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away.” Nevertheless, the Democrats probably aren’t going to run on “Communist China Does It Better.”

What makes the liberal jeremiads confusing is that they work at cross purposes. On one hand, you’ve got the attacks on the people’s intelligence and representative government. On the other, you’ve got the attacks on American institutions for not being representative enough. Which is it? Are the people the problem, or is their government? According to Fallows, it’s the latter: “Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair.”

The culprit is the Senate, which gives equal say to states with small populations and requires 60 votes to pass legislation. Fallows says these minority rights have turned the Senate “into a deep freeze and a dead weight.” “America is not yet lost,” Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, “but the Senate is working on it.” In a Huffington Post blog, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, writes that special interests are “using the filibuster to stop legislation that would benefit the little guy,” whether the little guy likes it or not.

You can make a persuasive argument that the filibuster has been deployed too frequently in recent years, especially when it has prevented presidents, Republican and Democrat, from staffing their administrations. Nevertheless, the Senate and the filibuster are there for good reasons: to defuse momentary passions that could have unintended and harmful consequences for the country.

The system is designed to ensure broad consensus before Congress enacts major reforms. Such consensus existed during the New Deal and Great Society. And there was consensus behind certain elements of Reagan’s and Bush’s and Clinton’s programs, as well. That was not the case when George W. Bush attempted to overhaul Social Security, however. The public agreed with Bush that there was a problem, but it did not like his solution. It has had the same reaction to Obama’s proposals.

The liberal program is in disarray because liberals have failed to establish general agreement. They have found that simple majorities do not automatically translate into programmatic success. And when they are met with public opposition and institutional resistance, they do what comes naturally. They blame Americans first.

Matthew Continetti is associate editor of The Weekly Standard and the author, most recently, of The Persecution of Sarah Palin (Sentinel Books).

http://weeklystandard.com/articles/blame-americans-first