End the War on Freedom

Kim du Toit - Opening Salvo - Notes on H.R. 2038, the text of which is now available from Thomas. This puppy has no chance of passage, but if it does, IMNSHO, it will be time to shoot the bastards. Kim's piece is a summary of a longer piece by publicola, who is not as optimistic about this bill's liklihood of defeat. He links to an NRA-ILA summary of the bill. I sent the following to my congress critter: [kimdutoit]

H.R. 2038, the "Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2003", was introduced last Thursday by Carolyn McCarthy of New York's fourth district. This law does California's ban one better by making illegal virtually every semi-automatic weapon. It is an abomination. Its passage would turn this peaceful freedom-lover into a violent revolutionary. I doubt that I'm alone. Blood would flow in the streets.

Hopefully, it won't get out of committee, but if it does, oppose it with every ounce of your being. Should the Senate's weaker continuance of the "assault weapons" ban, S. 1034, get to the House, oppose that as well. The 1994 "assault weapons" ban must be allowed to sunset in 2004. America's very existence depends on the uninfringed right of individuals to keep and bear arms, modern military arms.

I suggest that you initiate impeachment proceedings, followed by criminal proceedings, against every one of H.R. 2038's sixty-eight cosponsors. Their crime: high treason. You can start with Ms. McCarthy and the traitors from New York's fourth, fifth, first, seventeenth, eighteenth, fourteenth, eight, eleventh, fifteenth, tenth, twelfth, and ninth districts: Gary L. Ackerman, Timothy H. Bishop, Eliot L. Engel, Nita M. Lowey, Carolyn B. Maloney, Jerrold Nadler, Major R. Owens, Charles B. Rangel, Edolphus Towns, Nydia M. Velazquez, and Anthony D. Weiner.

"Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what ANY of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings." -- L. Neil Smith

Charley Reese - No Big Difference - between the two wings of the Boot on Your Neck Party. A glorious libertarian screed from an unadmitted libertarian. [lew]

There is a lot of talk about Democrats not offering any leadership, and that's true. What alternatives they do propose are simply variations of what the Republicans have proposed. That's because both parties agree on the same basic premise: There must be a strong, central government with an imperialist foreign policy.

The true alternative to both parties is to return to the constitutional republic the Founding Fathers created. That would mean getting the federal government entirely out of such areas as welfare, education and medical care. It would mean disbanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and abrogating the treaty that makes us a member of the United Nations. It would mean repeal of the legislation authorizing the World Trade Organization, closing all of our overseas military bases, eliminating all forms of foreign aid and strictly limiting the CIA to nothing but collecting information.

James Ostrowski at The Ludwig von Mises Institute - The Why of Gun Ownership - it still can't happen here, but beware the gun grabbers. If they succeed, it can. [lew]

Gun control is one of those notions that seems to make sense on the surface; that reasonable people are initially inclined to accept; that seems to offer an easy solution to a difficult problem. That is the problem with gun control. It is wishful thinking: simplistic, naïve, even juvenile. It is typical liberal thinking: social problems can be solved by putting words on paper in state and federal statute books. And not only liberals: the Bush administration has upset the National Rifle Association by agreeing to legislation that would extend the ban on semiautomatic firearms thatwere previouslyin use for decades and are virtually never used in crimes.

Whenever you hear about bans of this or that weapon, remember that no word on paper ever changed human nature. There are bad people out there who will prey on good people. They will not be deterred by words on paper inAlbanyorWashington, D.C. Good people, however, wishing to obey the law, will be deterred. That is why muggers, rapists and murderers know that in gun control havens likeNew York Cityand Washington D.C., citizens are virtually helpless against them.

Carl F. Worden at Sierra Times - Good Cop/Bad Cop - how to tell a bad cop from a good cop. [sierra]

1: First things first: If you are a police officer, and you have sworn to enforce the laws of your state and the Constitution of the United States -- but you haven't quite gotten around to reading the Constitution, then you are a BAD cop. You can't be a good cop if you don't have a clue what you swore your oath to, you damned fool. Now read it!

2: If you regard yourself as a good and honest cop because you are not participating in the questionable and outright illegal activities of your fellow officers, then you are a BAD cop. Notice to all such misguided fools in blue: You have a sworn obligation to arrest ANYONE who violates the law, regardless of what position they hold or what color their uniform is. If you make exceptions to that rule, you are a BAD cop.

3: If you are afraid you might lose your job if you take action regarding the above scenario, you compound being a BAD cop with being a yellow-bellied, gutless coward of a man, no matter how well you think you're being received in public. Did I sugarcoat that enough for you, Sweetie?

What Really Happened - The United States Is In Deep Doodoo! - Authorship not stated (the Traficant quote is just the first paragraph), but this is a good outline of America's severe financial straights. How the Federal Reserve has wrecked our economy. And why John F. Kennedy was assassinated (new to me, but makes sense). [whatreallyhappened]

The swindle of the system is simple. The Federal Reserve Bank hires the US Treasury to print up some money. The Federal Reserve only actually pays the treasury for the cost of the printing, they do NOT pay $1 for each 1$ printed. But the Federal Reserve turns around and loans out that money (or credit line) to banks at full face value, those banks which have exhausted their deposits then loan that Federal Reserve fiat money to you, and you must repay it in the full dollar value (plus interest) in work product, even though the Federal Reserve printed that money for pennies, or created it out of thin air in a computer.

As the Federal Reserve overprints more money, the money supply inflates, and too much money starts chasing too few goods and services, which means prices go up. But contrary to the charade put on by the Federal Reserve, inflation doesn't just come and go due to some arcane sorcery. The Federal Reserve can halt inflation any time it wants to by simply shutting down those printing presses. It therefore follows that both inflation and recession are fully under the control of the Federal Reserve.

...

This brings us to the issue of collateral. We've borrowed so much money the lenders are getting nervous. Back during the Johnson administration Charles DeGaulle demanded the United States collateralize the loans owed to France in gold and started carting out the bullion from the treasury. This caused several other nations to demand the same and President Nixon had to slam the gold window closed or the treasury would have been emptied, since the United States was even then in debt for more money than the treasury could cover in gold.

But Nixon had to collateralize that debt somehow, and he hit upon the plan of quietly setting aside huge tracts of American land with their mineral rights in reserve to cover the outstanding debts. But since the American people were already angered over the war in Vietnam, Nixon couldn't very well admit that he was apportioning off chunks of the United States to the holders of foreign debt. So, Nixon invented the Environmental Protection Agency and passed draconian environmental laws which served to grab land with vast natural resources away from the owners and lock it away, and even more, prove to the holders of the foreign debt that US citizens were not drilling. mining, or otherwise developing those resources. From that day to this, as the government sinks deeper into debt, the government grabs more and more land, declares it a wilderness or "roadless area" or "heritage river" or "wetlands" or any one of over a dozen other such obfuscated labels, but in the end the result is the same. We The People may not use the land, in many cases are not even allowed to enter the land.

This is not about conservation, it is about collateral. YOUR land is being stolen by the government and used to secure loans the government really had no business taking out in the first place. Given that the government cannot get out of debt, and is collateralizing more and more land to avoid foreclosure, the day is not long off when the people of the United States will one day wake up and discover they are no longer citizens, but tenants.

...

In the end, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You cannot make money grow in value by shaking it back and forth from one bank to another. You cannot prosper a nation by doing each other's laundry, or filling out their government mandated and greatly obfuscated paperwork, or flinging stock certificates around which may have as little real worth as Federal Reserve Notes. To make money, to show a profit, you must make products that somebody else wants to buy, and sadly, that is a capability the United States has allowed to slip away in great measure. The "service economy" was political propaganda to make the public believe that the decline of our manufacturing ability was a good thing.

Our nation is broke, bankrupt, and having sold much of its machinery and technology (or given it away to political donors), is unable to easily return to those endeavors which once made our nation great. Our infrastructure is in decay (the percentage of roads in the US with major damage doubled last year alone), our public schools unable to produce a workforce able to function in a high-tech manufacturing environment, and those managers end engineers with manufacturing experience have in great part been lured away to other nations. The severity of our total government debt has reached a point where the promise that the taxpayers can be made to cover any foreign investment loss rings hollow, because we can no longer pay the debts our government has now.

Richard Wallace at The Mirror - What Did Happen to Flight 93? - it was shot down by a military jet, or course. But you knew that. I don't consider The Mirror to be a trustworthy source for anything, but it would not surprise me if this story is true. [whatreallyhappened unknown]

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