Supreme Court Upholds Digital Privacy In Major Decision

In a far reaching decision that establishes a major precedent for digital privacy, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that warrantless searches of cell phones are unconstitutional except in very narrowly defined circumstances for “exigencies” that arise, such as major security threats.

The case involved was Riley v. California, a case the Court chose out of a group of ten cases involving warrantless searches of cell phones after an arrest.

 

In a 1973 decision, United States v. Robinson, the Court had ruled that the police can conduct a complete search of an arrestee's person, but they recognized in today's decision that a cell phone represents different territory, as Chief Justice John Roberts explained:

Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life,” Boyd, supra, at 630. The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought. Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple— get a warrant.

While Robinson’s categorical rule strikes the appropriate balance in the context of physical objects, neither of its rationales has much force with respect to digital content on cell phones. On the government interest side, Robinson concluded that the two risks identified in Chimel—harm to officers and destruction of evidence—are present in all custodial arrests. There are no comparable risks when the search is of digital data. In addition, Robinson regarded any privacy interests retained by an individual after arrest as significantly diminished by the fact of the arrest itself. Cell phones, however, place vast quantities of personal information literally in the hands of individuals. A search of the information on a cell phone bears little resemblance to the type of brief physical search considered in Robinson.

Justice Roberts wrote that a cell phone could lay bare someone’s entire personal history, from their medical records to their “specific movements down to the minute” and noted that there was a huge difference between asking someone to turn out his pockets versus “ransacking his house for everything which may incriminate him.”

The storage capacity of cell phones has several interrelated consequences for privacy. First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of information—an address, a note, a prescription, a bank statement, a video—that reveal much more in combination than any isolated record. Second, a cell phone’s capacity allows even just one type of information to convey far more than previously possible. The sum of an individual’s private life can be reconstructed through a thousand photographs labeled with dates, locations, and descriptions; the same cannot be said of a photograph or two of loved ones tucked into a wallet. Third, the data on a phone can date back to the purchase of the phone, or even earlier. A person might carry in his pocket a slip of paper reminding him to call Mr. Jones; he would not carry a record of all his communications with Mr. Jones for the past several months, as would routinely be kept on a phone.


This is a huge win for the Fourth Amendment and protection against unusual searches and seizures, and the first victory for an individuals right of privacy in some time.

40 Percent of What You Pay for Beer Goes to Taxes!

Yes, 40%. And that's just an average. In high tax Blue states ( and especially in Democrat run big cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) it's even higher:

The next time you pour yourself a cold one, give yourself a pat on the back in the name of patriotism. On average, 40 percent of the price you paid for that beer is going straight to Uncle Sam and the state.

Lobbyists in Washington are pushing to reduce those taxes, at least by a few cents. The Beer Institute is supporting legislation cleverly titled the BEER Act, which would reduce the federal excise tax from $18 per 31-gallon barrel (an amount that doesn't actually exist; a keg is 15.5 gallons) to $9 for large brewers. Smaller operations would pay nothing in excise taxes on the first 15,000 barrels they produce, while kicking in a mere $3.50 through 60,000 barrels.

Passing the bill would not only (slightly) reduce the cost of beer, but could also lead to an uptick in the number of breweries in the United States. The industry, which the Institute has tracked since 1887, has been growing rapidly in the last two decades, thanks in part to tax breaks for small brewers.

The original excise tax on beer was levied by the Feds as a small, temporary tax to help pay for the cost of the Civil War. Needless to say, it wasn't removed after the war and has been a reliable 'sin tax' for politicians to plunder ever since.

Lobbyists for the brewers who want the tax lowered are arguing that it would allow them to grow their operations and create jobs, which would actually provide more tax revenues.

While the BEER Act seems pretty much destined to die in committee, it's largely a push back by the industry to prevent even more tax hikes,which have already been proposed at the federal and state levels as well as various municipal levels.

The result, as with most regressive taxes is that people simply buy less. In California, for example, politicians in state and municipal governments raised taxes on tobacco products and then spent the money they anticipated making from those awful smokers feeding their habit. They then passed laws severely limiting where the people they anticipated plundering could smoke.

Caught between massive price hikes and limited areas to smoke, guess what? Tobacco sales plummeted as people either quit, moved to roll your own or to electronic cigarettes and the anticipated tax revenues never materialized.

While that may have been a good thing health-wise (full disclosure, I'm a non-smoker) it turned out to be lousy fiscal policy. And higher taxes on beer would be even a worse idea, since it's comparatively easy to make at home.

In fact, now that you know this, I suggest that every American who enjoys a cold beer on occasion avoid being ripped off by unreasonable taxation that I'm sure you never voted for. Save a ton of money and extend a raised digit to the greedy politicians by making your own at home. It's what our forefathers who founded our beloved Republic did faced with the same situation.

Senate Panel Okays Legislation Attacking Bloggers And New Media

 

The senate judiciary committee just cleared the way for legislation defining who a journalist is..and thus who qualifies for protection from warrantless surveillance, having to reveal sources and secret government subpoenas of phone records, e-mails and personal information.

This emerged out of the Obama Administration scandal involving the Associated Press, when the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed almost two months of telephone records for 21 phone lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press and secretly used a warrant to obtain some emails of a Fox News journalist.

The new legislation follows closely on guidelines given to the committee by Attorney General Eric Holder, and they are designed specifically to make it a lot easier to attack bloggers and new media journalists and video makers.

Under these guidelines, a "covered journalist" is defined as an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information. The individual would have been employed for one year within the last 20 or three months within the last five years.

It would apply to student journalists or someone with a considerable amount of freelance work in the last five years.

'Freelance' in this case is defined as paid work.

For example, writing unpaid freelance pieces for internet outlets like American Thinker, or unpaid op-eds for other publications is not does not protect your rights.

The committee later approved the overall bill on a 13-5 vote.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a chief proponent of the medial shield legislation, worked with Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., as well as representatives from news organizations, on the compromise.

"I think journalism has a certain tradecraft. It's a profession. I recognize that everyone can think they're a journalist," Feinstein said.

The overall measure would incorporate many of the changes proposed by Attorney General Eric Holder in July. Criticism of the collection of the material without any notice to the news organizations prompted President Barack Obama to order Holder to review the department's policy.

Holder's revised guidelines called for the government to give advance notice to the news media about subpoena requests for reporters' phone records unless the attorney general determines such notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the investigation. Search warrants for a reporter's email would only apply when the individual is the focus of a criminal investigation for conduct not connected to ordinary newsgathering.

The bill makes clear that before the government asks a news organization to divulge sources, it first must go to a judge, who would supervise any subpoenas or court orders for information. Such orders would be limited, if possible, "in purpose, subject matter and period of time covered so as to avoid compelling disclosure of peripheral, nonessential or speculative information."

Holder's revised guidelines do not call for a judge to be involved before the government asks a news organization to divulge sources. However, the guidelines call for a new standing News Media Review Committee to advise the attorney general on such requests.

These protections only apply to the new definition of 'journalist'. If you have a blog or a YouTube channel, no matter how well established or reputable and the writers or videographers are unpaid citizen journalists, it's open season.

First amendment? Huh? Wha?

Call your representatives to broaden this narrow definition if you value your freedom of speech and press.

Defund ObamaCare? Why Not? The Time Is NOW

 

The RINO cohort of the Republican Party along with a number of pundits are doing their very best to stave off what would be an extremely popular, common sense and no-lose proposition- the defunding of ObamaCare.

There's every reason to do it and no reason not to.

What we're talking about is attaching a rider or an amendment to one of those must pass budget bills, like spending or the debt limit to prohibiting any funds from being spent to implement or enforce ObamaCare, takes any funds appropriated but not spent and puts them back in the treasury and shuts off all government subsidies for the new medical exchanges and the new Medicaid spending that are now automatically funded through ObamaCare.

It's certainly possible to do this. In 2011, the Republican Majority House actually passed this as an amendment to the debt ceiling bill, but foolishly agreed to scrap it in negotiations with President Obama.

Here's why it's important. In 2014, the main entitlements from ObamaCare kick in, with an estimated $48 billion to be spent on funding the ObamaCare subsidies, the new exchanges and the vast Medicaid expansion.

Another thing that happens is that Americans will all be required to buy healthcare, or face penalties administered by the IRS. President Obama has already requested over $400 million from congress to fund the vast new army of bureaucrats he wants to hire to implement this monstrosity. Not only that, but the vast new laws and regulations to be enforced will increase the average American's premium by over $2000, according to the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

You take away the funds to implement ObamaCare and it collapses.And in less you defund it, you can't repeal it.

There are a lot of reasons why it's important to do this now rather than later.

ObamaCare is a financial dead weight hanging around the neck of the American people. The further it is allowed to progress, the more money will be wasted and the harder it will be to undo the damage after January 1, 2014.

The sooner its defunded, the fewer the full time jobs that will be converted into part time employment to skate under the 50 full time employees threshold and the fewer company provided health plans that will be junked.

This kind of damage will take a long time to correct even if the bill is eventually repealed, one reason to utterly reject the nonsense that we should wait 'until it collapses on its own' being being peddled by the likes of Karl Rove and others.

Following that kind of advice makes as much sense as waiting for a cholera epidemic to 'collapse on its own.'

Aside from the fiscal and structural reasons there are significant political benefits.

ObamaCare is an incredibly poor piece of legislation, and it is widely unpopular with good reason. Moving to defund it right now is going to resonate with the American public.

Action of this sort would also remind President Obama that it is Congress, and especially the House that holds the purse strings of government. That would re-establish the checks and balances between the three branches of government that have largely been lost since this president came to town. And might very well lead to President Obama being a lot more cooperative when it comes to investigating the raft of scandals the administration is embroiled in.

And finally it would put the president in the position of either allowing the defunding to go forward or vetoing a bill and shutting down government to defend a massively unpopular law.

In short there's no downside. Just the usual lack of courage and responsibility from certain members of the legislative class.

Make sure these boys hear from you NOW, via fax e-mail and telephone. And if you can, attend any town hall meeting or events that come up so they have a clear understanding of how you feel and what's at stake for them personally if they fail to do their sworn duty to the people that employ them.

Senator Ted Cruz's Father On America And Liberty

Rafael Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz's father experienced both Batista's dictatorship and Fidel Castro's 'socialist' one in Cuba before he emigrated to America. He had a few things to say about liberty and tyranny that are well worth hearing, especially in Obama's America.

Because there's nothing new under the sun, really. Only the players change.

GOP chairman of House Intelligence Committee Puts His Foot In His Mouth...

Rep.Mike Rogers(R-MI) is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He went public on one of the Sunday shows today, saying that the NSA's surveillance program was just dandy, stopped 'dozens of plots' (which of course no one can recall or name a single one) and that there was a lot of what he called “misleading rhetoric,” including reports that the NSA was listening to phone calls. He called the program a “lockbox” with “lots of protections.”

Too bad for Rep. Rogers that at he wasn't paying attention. Just the day before, the NSA was admitting that they did in fact listen to phone calls..without any warrants whatsoever. And simply on the say so of one 'analyst':

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Whoopsie.

Not only that, but there's little or no oversight over who has access to the private data on American citizens that been stored digitally...perhaps for later use against the Obama regime's political enemies, just as the IRS was.

Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.

William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. "They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that's what they record," Binney said.

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.

'We Don't Need No Education' - Americans And History

These videos pretty much speaks for themselves.

Since public school education became just another union gig and our universities became an industry prizing 'diversity' and 'the college experience' over a true Liberal arts education,this is what we've come to.

The Fate of the Republic

 

by Geoffrey Britain

The RINO Republican Leadership have repeatedly demonstrated that they are at best, appeasers and at worst collaborators. In attempting to protect the financial status quo demanded by their big donors, they are incrementally sacrificing American liberties by cooperating in the PARTIAL abrogation of the Constitution.

To obtain that cooperation from Republicans, the Far Left engages in a three step process; Lie through omission, Revise history to support the Lie, Demonize any opposition. Then rinse and repeat until the issue reaches its 'date of expiration'. That is effective but limited in its long term efficacy. The left's needing to lie, in order to advance its agenda, reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of that which is lied in favor of, which is in fact, a form of evil.

Evil and incompetence are almost always intertwined, as to justify its behavior, evil has to continually rationalize away the truth of the matter. To do so requires habitually lying about that which reality consists... when done long enough, the ability to recognize reality itself is lost. And recognizing reality is the most basic prerequisite for competence.

That is why the Obama administration so often behaves incompetently.

Only utter ignorance or willful denial can support the contention that the Obama administration still feels bound by law. The latest example being the stonewalling of emails from 'second channel' governmental email addresses. Any subpoena for all communications requires that all the secret and hidden files be turned over. However, if a regime is already not obeying the law, then compliance in any area becomes optional. And when such revelation can bring consequences far more negative than the penalties for non-compliance, what incentive is there to comply?

This administration long ago burst outside the bounds of law. The recent revelatory scandals have shown that they wish to control every aspect of our lives and thoughts and have no hesitation about violating the law, the Constitution, or any set of non-situational ethics. All means are justified by the ends sought.

This administration has a hunger for absolute power, possesses an authoritarian collectivist ego, and habitually practices the concealment of reality from the public. A combination fatal to constitutional government. And we are there.

History demonstrates that when those in power routinely resort to extralegal means, it inevitably leads to those viewed as a mortal threat, being 'disappeared'. Though Benghazi may argue otherwise, we are probably not there yet. But with the accumulation of extraordinary statutory powers, DHS troops loyal only to this regime, the massive accumulation of firepower by civilian agencies; all aimed explicitly at the civilian population... how far away can we really be?

The defiance of the White House and its executive branch departments of the IRS and DOJ to normal Constitutional processes is already common. The Obama administration is simply refusing and ignoring questions, subpoenas and legal demands for specific information that is within Congress' lawful purview. The courts are being ignored at will. The unconstitutional and thus illegal recess appointments to the NLRB have been struck down by two Circuit Courts of Appeal and upheld by none. Yet the illegally appointed members are still operating, demonstrating that the lawful Constitutional processes designed to restrain factions within the government from operating outside the law have broken down. Our Constitutional checks and balances are no longer working due to the massive infiltration into the government, mass media and academia of far left ideologues who regard constitutional protections, laws and regulations as inconvenient, meaningless impediments to implementation of the progressive agenda.

And the Obama administration is using its powers to prevent appropriate prosecution of government officials who have engaged in highly unethical and/or illegal actions.

We have not had a constitutional budget for 5 years, and have little prospect of ever having one again. Our electoral system has been corrupted to the point where the voter rolls and vote counts are actively disenfranchising Americans.

The left is actively engaged in adding millions upon millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal who are strongly inclined toward socialism, in order to permanently institute its agenda.

The former Soviet Premier Khrushchev foretold all of this; "We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders into repeatedly and gradually giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have [de facto] Communism.”

None of this is accidental and all of it prima facie evidence that the Far Left is engaged in a planned, seditious campaign attacking both the Constitution and the American people.

There is however, a reason for hope, though slim it may be, for we are not Europe, where bureaucratic regulation and "hate speech" laws are superseding unwritten but previously assumed freedoms. Our written Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land is as much a legal document of what the government cannot do as of what it can, which is why our Constitution is a LEGALLY insurmountable stumbling block to the full implementation of the "Progressive Agenda" that is required for that agenda to last.

“Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.” Abraham Lincoln

Which means that sooner or later, the Far Left is going to have to discard all pretense and, through illegal means, attempt to fully abrogate the Constitution. That is when low-information, "useful idiot" liberals will face an unavoidable choice; awaken to what their political support has really wrought or become through willful denial, fully complicit in tyranny.

Upon that determination hangs the fate of the Republic.

A Must Read: David Mamet on Gun Control

 

Award winning playwright, producer and author David Mamet has an excellent article at the Daily Beast  on gun control and tyranny that simply is superb. The Fools of Chelm, by the way, are an old part of Jewish folklore popularized by Isaac Bashevis  Singer, about a town where a group of people lived in perfect amity and content until they started listening to the elites, the so-called Council of Sages. Here's a slice of Mamet's piece:

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.

Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

Read the rest here. Kol tov, David Mamet!

Obama's Gun Grab: Liberty In The Crosshairs

 

President Obama revealed his plans to subvert the Second Amendment by executive order today in a speech about gun control.

The emphasis, of course, was on executive orders he can implement unilaterally without bothering to go through Congress.Why seek the consent of the governed? Who cares?

Particularly ghoulish was the president's use of innocent children as a prop. These children reportedly were selected out of a number of kids who wrote letters to the White House on gun control, or to use the new Leftist talking point, 'gun violence'. There isn't a doubt in my mind that many of these children received an explicit order to write these letters to the president from their personal in-house teacher's union member. I'm only surprised they weren't taught a Song of Praise to sing for our Dear Leader.

Not only that,but it is sickening to hear this president  go on about 'our precious children' when he's a huge fan not only of abortion on demand but a vociferous,outspoken advocate of actual infanticide.

And speaking of children, the president's diktats are unique in that while waving the bloody shirt of Sandy Hook over his head, not one of the executive orders he intends to implement would have prevented the tragedy.For that matter, none of them will have the least effect on curbing crime committed using firearms.If measures like these actually worked, Chicago would have the lowest homicide rate in the country.


The complete list is at the first link above, but to summarize:

The president intends to unilaterally reinstate the ban that expired in 2004 on what the Left likes to refer to as 'assault weapons' ( probably best defined by them as 'any gun that looks vaguely military')and what he referred to as high capacity magazines. This is another vague term that can be defined according to whom you ask. If you're New York Governor Chris Cuomo,who just signed a ridiculous gun control measure into law, it means 7 bullets, and if you're caught defending your life and property with eight, it's a felony. You had better pray that if you are attacked, it won't be by more than one assailant at a time, as this 15-year-old and his sister were.

The president plans a thoroughly invasive violation of the Fourth Amendment, destroying any right to privacy, including mandating under ObamaCare that your private physician inquire about whether you have guns in your home. In Obama's Brave New America, the feds in the person of the Attorney General will define and decide who's characterized as mentally ill and unfit to own a firearm, and will require that names, addresses and personal information be part of a national data base. Look for anyone,particularly a veteran 'crazy' enough to vote Republican or be affiliated with the Tea Party or other conservative causes to have their right of self -defense revoked permanently...which will of course stop a lot of law abiding people from seeking treatment.

And of course, if that database is hacked, or if someone with access to the system is bribed, criminals will have perfect knowledge of who has what and can plan whose house to hit either to steal weapons and ammo or other crimes accordingly. For that matter, should the Feds later want to confiscate all privately owned firearms, their task is going to be infinitely easier.

The president wants all federally licensed gun dealers to run full background checks for private sellers as well as buyers, and the police to run full background checks on the owner of any gun confiscated for any reason. In other words, if your home is burglarized, a firearm of yours is stolen and then held by the police as evidence,this president wants the police to run a full background check on you even though you're innocent of any wrongdoing.

And of course, all this is going to have a price tag, at least $4.5 billion in new spending and almost certainly more.

I have to give this president credit of a sort for really reaching for the maximum effect on this one. Not only is he attempting to subvert the Second Amendment, but the First, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth!


This trampling of the Constitution by our president was not without its unintentional moments of levity.

Here's one excerpt from President Obama's speech today that was particularly funny:

And finally, Congress needs to help, rather than hinder, law enforcement as it does its job. We should get tougher on people who buy guns with the express purpose of turning around and selling them to criminals. And we should severely punish anybody who helps them do this.

Let's see...does anyone remember Fast and Furious, when the ATF pressured gun store owners to sell to straw buyers whom the ATF knew were going to sell them to Mexican drug cartels? And how the Obama Administration and Attorney General Eric Holder deliberately stonewalled Congress' attempt to get to the bottom of it by subpoenaing documents and hearing testimony? Is this president planning to 'severely punish' AG Holder and himself for hindering law enforcement by preventing people from testifying, deliberately misrepresenting what occurred and putting all those documents Congress subpoenaed under executive privilege to hide what happened?

Over 300 people lost their lives because those guns were illegally smuggled across the border, and the last time I checked none of the people involved in transporting them had been punished in the least, especially the ones at the top who gave the orders and then attempted a coverup.

I also found the president's vacuous statement that if we can save even one life with the measures he proposes, we should do it. Using that kind of logic, we ought to restrict people from owning their own automobiles because some people drive drunk.

The president made some of the expected pro forma remarks about how he respects the Second Amendment, and that people should trust that he's not out to disarm them. He probably isn't, just now. That will come later, after the new database he's planning is complete.

In another wonderful moment of clarity, CBS talking head Bob Schieffer equated gun owners to the Nazis and President Obama's latest trampling of our Constitution to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This ridiculous, over the top hack is the sort of 'journalist' the Dinosaur media expects us to view as a competent, unbiased choice to fairly moderate a presidential debate.

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Today, as our president likes to say, is a teachable moment. We have here in front of us a blatant attempt to hijack those G-d given rights the Founders spoke of, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They were willing to risk, in those words that have come down to us from history, their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to obtain those rights. And as they found out, some people were willing to stand with them and a surprising amount of others were not.

Do we, as a nation still value those rights? What are we willing to risk to stand up for them?

Will we see massive civil disobedience to tyranny, which is what this is, or sullen compliance?

I have a feeling we're about to find out.

How The West Lets Jihad Stifle it's Freedom

Ace has a superb post on the subject, entitled 'The Normative Power of Law and the Emotional Power of Drama'. It expresses exactly how the west is cooperating in sabotaging its own freedom.

Here's a slice:

Suppose you accidentally click on a link and wind up seeing the raunchiest, most grotesque pornography imaginable.

What do you do?

You probably close the link and perhaps bark at whoever linked you to it.

But do you attempt to have the site shut down?

In all likelihood you do not. And that doesn't mean you approve of the pornography, or even tolerate it.

You don't attempt to have the site shut down, or stir up a rage, because you know it will be futile. The law has spoken on this point; and where the letter of the law hasn't spoken, the actions of thousands of LEO's and politicians have. There will be virtually no action taken against pornography, ever.

So you don't attempt to get the site shut down because the letter of the law, and the actions of those enforcing it, have informed you that it is a situation you'll just have to live with.

The law has become normative. You may not agree with it (or, of course, you might). But you have internalized the teaching of the law, just as a student internalizes the real rules of his school, what he can get away with, what he can't.

The law has taught you what you will have to accept, what you will have to work around, what you will have to teach yourself to ignore and come to peace with.

The law is normative. It establishes our norms.

The law is currently establishing a new norm. Some -- liberals, chiefly, are quick to line up to embrace the new norm.

The new norm is that certain religions -- oh, why be coy with the plural? One religion -- shall have the protection and sanctification of state power.

One religion, and one religion only.

Piss Christ is being shown in New York City again. There are few calls for the exhibit to be banned, and none for the artist to be arrested -- or vigorously investigated to find if there are any breaches in his past to be arrested for.

Because we know the law and the action of government in executing the law would not be responsive. Not even a little bit.

The law is normative. We have learned there is no point protesting Piss Christ, or any thousand "slanders" against the Prophet of Christianity. We have learned that we will just have to live with it, and, if such things offend us, learn to control our tempers, and learn to avoid certain things that might otherwise give us pleasure, like museums.

What norms are the laws currently teaching the most extreme and intolerant members of Islam?
That they must respect other people's rights to engage in free speech? That they must accept that their religion, like any other, is subject to critique, disrespect, and even hate?

No. They are learning that threatening violence, or actually engaging in violence, is not futile at all, but rather achieves the precise goals they seek (a de facto prohibition against Islam or Mohammad, and no other religion).

The law is normative. This is what it is teaching. This is the lesson it is currently filling minds with.

Violence works. Intolerance -- at least intolerance with a brown face -- is justified and even noble.

And Islamic values are superior to American ones. After all, when the two come into conflict, which values win out?

Read the rest here. We have been teaching this lesson to the Muslim world since the formation of OPEC and the takeover of our embassy in Iran, that we can be rolled and will submit to them. Unfortunately, while the Bush Administration certainly did its part to show Islamists there was no penalty for their violence and savagery, the Obama Administration has doubled down on the matter to the point of sheer cravenness. Appeasement of this kind doesn't end violence, it only make an aggressor reach for more. That's the situation we find ourselves in today.

The Forgotten Man

A video by artist Jon McNaughton trying to tell us what's at stake..you need to see this.

To see the painting at full size, go here.