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Video Debate: Natural Law a… by The Instigator
The Fifth Annual Rosenkranz Debate was held on November 17, 2012, during The Federalist Society’s 2012 National Lawyers Convention.
Annual Rosenkranz Debate and Luncheon RESOLVED: Natural Law Should Inform Constitutional Law 12:30 p.m. — 2:30 p.m. Grand Ballroom
–Prof. Hadley P. Arkes, Edward N. Ney Professor in American Institutions, Amherst College –Hon. Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit –Moderator: Hon. Thomas B. Griffith, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit –Introduction: Mr. Eugene B. Meyer, President, The Federalist Society -
MSNBC Makes Lindsey Graham … by The Instigator
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Is Egypt about to become th… by The Instigator
It is not only the anti-government protesters in Egypt’s Tahrir Square who should be concerned about President Mohammed Morsi’s audacious power grab. Mr Morsi’s claim at the weekend that “God’s will and elections made me the captain of this ship” has echoes of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s claim during the 1979 Iranian revolution that his mission to overthrow the Shah enjoyed divine guidance.
Since his announcement that he was granting himself sweeping new powers, Mr Morsi has been trying to reassure sceptical Egyptian voters that he has no ambition to become Egypt’s new Pharaoh. But you only have to look at the violent scenes that have once again erupted in Tahrir Square to see that the majority of Egyptians remain unconvinced.
When Egyptian demonstrators first occupied Tahrir Square last year to call for the overthrow of Mr Morsi’s predecessor, President Hosni Mubarak, they were calling for a secular, democratic system of government that would represent the interests of all Egyptians, and not just the corrupt clique of presidential supporters. Similar sentiments were expressed by Iranian demonstrators during the build-up to the Shah’s overthrow in February 1979 as they sought to remove a similarly corrupt regime.
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eBay Yanks Beck’s ‘Obama in… by The Instigator
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Parting Company – A C… by The Instigator
For decades, it has been obvious that there are irreconcilable differences between Americans who want to control the lives of others and those who wish to be left alone. Which is the more peaceful solution: Americans using the brute force of government to beat liberty-minded people into submission or simply parting company? In a marriage, where vows are ignored and broken, divorce is the most peaceful solution. Similarly, our constitutional and human rights have been increasingly violated by a government instituted to protect them. Americans who support constitutional abrogation have no intention of mending their ways.
Since Barack Obama’s re-election, hundreds of thousands of petitions for secession have reached the White House. Some people have argued that secession is unconstitutional, but there’s absolutely nothing in the Constitution that prohibits it. What stops secession is the prospect of brute force by a mighty federal government, as witnessed by the costly War of 1861. Let’s look at the secession issue.
At the 1787 constitutional convention, a proposal was made to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, rejected it, saying: “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
On March 2, 1861, after seven states had seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that said, “No State or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the Union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States.”
Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession. Here’s my no-brainer question: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments if secession were already unconstitutional?
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Now they tell us: Majority … by The Instigator
The low information voter will be the death of America.
New Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans now disagree with liberals that it is the government’s responsibility to see that all Americans have health insurance:
For the first time in Gallup trends since 2000, a majority of Americans say it is not the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage. Prior to 2009, a majority always felt the government should ensure healthcare coverage for all, though Americans’ views have become more divided in recent years.
e current results are based on Gallup’s annual Health and Healthcare poll, conducted Nov. 15-18 this year.
The shift away from the view that the government should ensure healthcare coverage for all began shortly after President Barack Obama’s election and has continued the past several years during the discussions and ultimate passage of the Affordable Care Act in March 2010. Americans are divided on that legislation today — 48% approve and 45% disapprove — as they have been over the last several years.
Republicans, including Republican-leaning independents, are mostly responsible for the drop since 2007 in Americans’ support for government ensuring universal health coverage. In 2007, 38% of Republicans thought the government should do so; now, 12% do. Among Democrats and Democratic leaners there has been a much smaller drop, from 81% saying the government should make sure all Americans are covered in 2007 to 71% now.
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Whatever happened to the ri… by The Instigator
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was written in order to keep the government from invading the right to be left alone–today known as the right to privacy. The Framers who wrote the Constitution, and Jefferson and his colleagues who insisted on the Fourth amendment among others, had suffered grievously at the hands of the British king and his soldiers.
When King George III and Parliament were looking for new ways to extract revenue from the colonists, they devised the Stamp Act. This legislation required that on every piece of paper in the homes of every colonist there must appear a stamp issued by and purchased from the British government. This applied to all books, letters, financial and legal documents, even to pamphlets to be distributed and posters to be nailed to trees.
Question: How did the king and the Parliament who were 3,000 miles away and across the sea, know if colonists had the stamps on the papers in their homes?
Answer: Parliament enacted the Writs of Assistance Act. This legislation permitted British soldiers to write their own search warrants in which they authorized themselves to enter the homes of the colonists ostensibly to look for the stamps.
The Stamps Act and its enforcement proved so unpopular here that Parliament eventually rescinded the law. But the die had been cast, and the seeds of revolution had been planted. And thus, when the Constitution was being drafted after we won the Revolutionary War, the Fourth Amendment required that only judges could issue search warrants; and they could only do so if the government presented evidence of a crime about the person, paper, or place to be searched, and the warrant needed to describe specifically what the government was authorized to seek and seize.
All this worked generally well to keep the government from engaging in fishing expeditions, until 1986 when Congress enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. This law in fact did not protect privacy; rather, it permitted federal agents to invade it. It provides that digitally stored information that is less than 180 days old may only be sought via a search warrant, but data older than 180 days loses that protection. The loss of the protection is an unconstitutional invasion of the right to privacy mandated by the Fourth Amendment, which Congress is powerless to avoid or assault.
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AP Under Attack for Removin… by The Instigator
First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate.
Now the AP is throwing out Homophobia and Islamophobia on the grounds that they are inaccurate and conflate prejudice with mental illness. And that has led to outrage hysteria from the usual organs of the left who like sticking to their politicized words once they’ve made enough people aware of them.
“Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for a severe mental disorder. Those terms have been used quite a bit in the past, and we don’t feel that’s quite accurate,” AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn said.
Again, that is accurate, despite the progressive response that adding phobia as a suffix allows it to mean a completely different thing.
The Associated Press is not taking a conservative position here, but we have reached such a point of cultural decay that fact-based positions that derive their grounds from reason and proof are already innately conservative. Or as George Orwell put it, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
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Debt Deal: It is the establ… by The Instigator
The Bolsheviks, according to historians, robbed banks before they rose to power in Russia. That foreshadowed their economic policies. The Marxism they implemented once in power was just an extension of their armed robbery.
Today’s redistributionists in America don’t have bank robbery in their pasts but they do accept organized theft as the norm of politics. They see all wealth belonging to the state automatically, which is why they count all tax cuts as “government spending” and why they feel entitled to hike up taxes whenever a self-inflicted “crisis” appears.
Taxpayers didn’t cause the “fiscal cliff” emergency; derelict pols did. But the taxpayers, not the pols, will pay for it. To pay off their debts, pols will first rob the rich and then move on to the middle class, where much greater potential tax revenue resides.
The difference between bank robbery and politics is one of degree, not kind. But if you control the media, education, and culture, as the redistributionists in America largely do, politics as organized theft can be presented as good government. The “extremists,” according to this understanding of politics, are the ones who refuse to participate in the fleecing.
The whole fiscal cliff debate revolves around redistributionist hectoring that casts collusion in organized theft as compromise. Under the patronage of the media, the politicians most responsible for the debt get to dictate the terms of compromise to the ones least responsible for it. Fiscal hawks receive regular media scolding for not agreeing to tax increases while the most prodigal members of Congress feel no such scrutiny and remain in control of the debate.
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VIDEO: Obama ‘Is Not … by The Instigator
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