CONVENTION of STATES
BECOME a MEMBER-PARTICIPANT of CONVENTION of STATES here.
Get into the Action; Get information. Join here.
|
My Gun
To the Editor:
Today I swung my front door wide open and placed my Remington 870 right in the doorway. I gave it four shells, left it alone and went about my business.
While I was gone, the mail gal delivered my mail, the trash man picked up the trash, a girl walked her dog down the street and quite a few of my neighbors drove past.
Well, after about an hour, I checked on the gun. It was still sitting there right where I had left it. It hadn�t killed anyone even with the numerous opportunities it had been presented to do so.
In fact, it hadn�t even loaded itself. Well, you can imagine my surprise with all the media hype about how dangerous guns are and how they kill people.
Either the media is wrong, and it is the misuse of guns by criminals, or I have one of the laziest shotguns ever made. I must hurry off now and check on my spoons. I heard they are making people fat.
Walter �Digger� New Shady Grove
Anyone who believes this country is free is an idiot!
"The politicians only want power so they can 'serve' you."
"Extortion and thuggery are good things when they're called law!"
Larken Rose
|
CONVENTION of STATES
BECOME a MEMBER-PARTICIPANT of CONVENTION of STATES here.
Get into the Action; Get information. Join here.
|
|
Joseph Story, Supreme Court Justice
... when the court wasn't part of the L-E-J Cabal
Joseph Story (1779�1845) was born during the American Revolution, and came of age in the early years of the new United States of America. He was a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, and, eventually helped found the Harvard Law School.
In 1811, Story was appointed to the Supreme Court by President James Madison � who knew a few things about the U.S. Constitution, in that he helped write it. Story was a contemporary of another famous member of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall (1755�1835).
In 1833, Justice Story published a study titled, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. In a discussion of the Second Amendment, Story stated:
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
|
|
The majority falls prey to the delusion�popular in some circles�that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth�born of experience�is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks� homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341- 42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to �keep and carry arms wherever they went�). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.
. . .
All too many of the other great tragedies of history � Stalin�s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few � were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.
The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late.
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed � where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees.
However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Judge Alex Kozinski dissenting in Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F.3d 567 (9th Circuit 2003) (full text)
Also, the above decision which concluded that individuals did NOT have the right to keep and bear arms was nullified by the Supreme Court in 2008.
|
|
See the following links for more related articles:
|
|
[Editor's Note: what I have dubbed the "Legislative-Executive-Judicial Cabal" which the American People have caused by ignoring the generational transition from our Constitutional Republic to what now is, in effect, an "elected" dictatorship. Never mind who is elected. Never mind which bogus party is in power. The superficial, theatrically staged, choreographed appearance of debate, disagreement, and stalled legislation always resolves into more government and less FREEDOM. We the People still lose more freedom after every "emergency" or unnoticeably when CON-gress passes another general, open-ended law that enables the Executive (dictator) and its unaccountable agencies to formulate more freedom-restricting regulations (200 pages a day get posted to the Federal Register). The "Dictator's" agencies (police force) continue to pile-up more weapons to squelch uprising(s) when the People finally realize and understand their tyrannical government.
A Convention of States is necessary to amend the Constitution for Congressional Term Limits to twelve (12) years and restrict time in DC to only six (6) months per year. Such an Amendment is only a FIRST step in restoring America to its Constitutional roots. Back in the day when the People still feared kings, the president's term was limited by Constitutional Amendment.
Currently, CONgress is just a group of socialists, progressives, and faux-conservatives (career politicians) that, on a daily basis, ignores the Constitution, many of their own past statutes, and cedes their responsibilities to the president ("elected" dictator). A comparison to the history of Rome becomes more and more credible with the Executive and its "featherbedded" lackeys gaining more power while CONgress sits back all fat-dumb-and-happy.
CONgress has made recent efforts to expose State Dept. failures in Benghazi (inept political leader), Fast-and-Furious gun-running (criminal AG), IRS 1st amendment violations, gov't union Veterans Administration fraud, and whining about Obama(Reid)-killer-Care, but these efforts are mostly politics as usual. Most "citizens" will forget about these infringements from our unaccountable, uncontrollable Executive branch with its tyrannical agencies staffed by socialist unions that extort "juicy" contracts from the "elected" dictatorship.
Most positions in the federal government whether elected, appointed, or hired are nominal, make-work jobs (confidentially) designed merely to grow government, bilk money from private businesses and citizens, and eventually fully transform America into a totalitarian state. When this happens, CONgress will have destroyed the economy and the country by their negligence and counter-liberty policies, and it will be almost impossible to Restore America. The 'Restore America' list is only a beginning too.]
|
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
James Madison, Federalist Paper 47, Friday, February 1, 1788
|
Anyone who believes this country is free is an idiot!
"Extortion and thuggery are good things when they're called law!"
Larken Rose
|
[Editor's Note: a Constitutional Convention is required to reverse the damage to freedom and liberty since 1900. This Article V was ratified by the participants at America's founding Constitutional Convention as an alternate path for repairing damage to freedom and liberty, a path for the People to restore damage caused by our failed representatives in the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of a government designed to represent the wishes of We the People.
The States must "demand" a Convention and explicitly specify an agenda of:
- laws to be repealed or modified,
- Amendments to existing constitutional clauses that define the co-equal branches to further specify and define, and
- new Amendments or statutes to be eventually ratified by States.
These Amendments should further specify and clarify the powers of the Legislature and Executive Branches. A good example is the definition of a "Bill".
A Bill should contain ONLY verbiage in regards to the topic of the future law. NO earmarks and NO unrelated sections or attacments.
Many past Bills sent to a president for signature contained unrelated but essential funding sections that rendered the Bill veto-proof when it warranted a veto.
CON-gress can override a veto if the Bill is deemed absolutely necessary by CON-gress.
If the Bill requires SPECIFICALLY related amendments, the CON-gress can "debate" (with its usual theater) and vote any new amendments.
The original text of the Constitution contains some very GENERAL clauses enabling both CON-gress and Executive branches to write laws and
regulations with their particular nuances expanding powers beyond intent. "Intent" may be gleaned from a complete understanding of
Federalist Papers.
An example of further specification and clarity for CON-gress should be a clear, very specific definition of the boundaries for the interstate Commerce Clause.
To restore freedom, liberty, and individuality - minimally these must be repealed:
- the 16th Amendment,
- the Federal Reserve Act,
- the War Powers Act,
- all Asset Forfeiture laws,
- the Controlled Substances Act (CSA)
- the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act
- NDAA
- Homeland Security which includes TSA
- the Dodd�Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
- most Eminent Domain laws, and
- the Affordable Care Act
Currently, even with computer-searching systems, the list of antiquated and/or obsolete statutes (and related regulations) is unwieldy.
These statutes must be invalidated unless there remains an applicable reason for retaining the law(s).
Aside from invalidating statutes, there are many regulations that are biased in favor of large enterprises (who buy support from bureaucrats)
at the expense of the competition, effectively repressing the Free Market. Any regulations not related to public safety that gives a financial advantage
to some companies over their smaller rivals must be rescinded to enable all companies with good consumer products to excel without burdensome regulations.
Additionally, the Convention should adopt for ratification at least these new Amendments or statute modifications:
- clearly define and limit the role of government in regards to the term "general welfare",
- Term Limits for CON-gress (12 years) including a 6 month limit on time residing in DC,
- strict Prohibition of Lobbying (with a comprehensive definition of "lobbying"), and
- a Balanced Budget Amendment to stop wreckless spending. During a CON-gressionally declared "war" (only after USA is attacked or attack is proven "imminent"),
deficit spending is permissible.
- Restore America to its roots, i.e. Defense, State, Treasury, and Justice. Some Agencies are required like CIA and NSA, both respectively focused on defense against real foreign aggressors and not fictitious paranoid delusions of war mongers. Other agencies help where certain interstate communications are necessary. Most agencies like Agriculture, Education, DEA, IRS (eliminated with 16th Amendment) and many other listed here should be eliminated.
- Restore the world Gold Standard with five contentious steps, and
- Replace the IMF, World Bank, and Export-Import Bank with facilities that reflect the new Gold Standard, and
- After decentralizing and economizing, if tax revenue is needed to fund all or part of the federal government, then implement the Fair Tax.
Regarding a Constitutional Convention itself, some of the available literature warns the reader about a possible "unstructured" and "mismanaged"
Convention that might propose and adopt amendments that could damage the Republic.
Possible, however, it is difficult to envisage how much more damage could done over what the L-E-J Cabal has already done.
If the Convention's agenda and rules of order strictly prohibit violation of the rules and enable a vote on unlisted Amendments AFTER all others are adopted,
then the Convention will be properly structured and managed. ]
|
The FairTax is a consumption tax unilaterally applied to all Americans at the same rate. For businesses, payroll taxes would no longer exist. Our exports would include a heavy tax for overseas buyers purchasing our products, while our imports would be cheaper for us to purchase. I'm not sure how this would affect GDP, as more information is necessary.
According to the FairTax website, "Under the FairTax, every person living in the United States pays a sales tax on purchases of new goods and services, excluding necessities due to the prebate." The prebate gives every legal resident household an "advance refund" at the beginning of each month so that purchases made up to the poverty level are tax-free.
So a family of four making something like $50,000/year should not have to pay taxes, thus preventing an unfair burden on low-income families. Since the FairTax eliminates both federal and payroll taxes, you get to keep your gross pay amount of each paycheck earned.
|
|
Why Do We Need Term Limits?
John Adams said, �Without [term limits] every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey�. That being said, here are some of the reasons we believe our country needs Term Limits.
- Term Limits can help break the cycle of corruption in Congress. Case studies show that the longer an individual stays in office, the more likely they are to stop serving the public and begin serving their own interests.
- Term Limits will encourage regular citizens to run for office. Presently, there is a 94% re-election rate in the House and 83% in the Senate. Because of name recognition, and usually the advantage of money, it can be easy to stay in office. Without legitimate competition, what is the incentive for a member of Congress to serve the public? Furthermore, it is almost a lost cause for the average citizen to try to campaign against current members of Congress.
- Term Limits will break the power special interest groups have in Congress.
- Term Limits will force politicians to think about the impact of their legislation because they will be returning to their communities shortly to live under the laws they enacted.
- Term Limits will bring diversity of people and fresh ideas to Congress.
Term limits for lawmakers: when is enough, enough?
[Editor's Note: If you want to get rich, i.e. advance from a low paying government bureaucrat job on the local or state level, THEN GET ELECTED TO THE US CONGRESS (House or Senate). Once you're elected, it's easy to steal from your campaign contributions or the Congressional budget allocated to your seat and staff. You can go on a government-funded junket with 'lavishly' paid expenses. The list of ways to steal from the government while in office is inexhaustible. There are only a few Congressmen who left Congress just wealthy instead of a multi-millionaire. Of course, there are several who arrived in Congress as multi-millionaires and don't need to steal from the government.]
|
|
