No Rock Big Enough to Crawl Under
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 25 Nov 2003 13:00:00 GMT
From smith2004:
"It's my estimation that...every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another." -- Mal in the "Jaynestown" episode of Firefly
From The Federalist:
"The quality of American life must keep pace with the quantity of American goods. This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor." -- John F. Kennedyand:
"The French couldn't hate us any more unless we helped 'em out in another war." -- Will Rogersand:
"Restoring the Framers' notion of enumerated, delegated and thus limited powers will get the state out of our lives and out of our wallets." -- Bob Levyand:
"The Ten Commandments Decision: And You Thought All The Pharisees Were Dead." --Michael D. Shawand:
"The U.S. Army discharged two gay translators this week. Gay translators? I didn't even know they had their own language. No wonder I can never understand those Broadway plays." -- Jay Lenoand:
"The U.S. military has had considerably more success in turning Iraq around than liberals have had in turning the ghettos around with their 40-year 'War on Poverty.' So far, fewer troops have been killed by hostile fire since the end of major combat in Iraq than civilians were murdered in Washington, DC, last year. How many years has it been since we declared the end of major U.S. combat operations against Marion Barry's regime? How long before we just give up and pull out of that hellish quagmire known as Washington, D.C.?" -- Ann Coulterand:
"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 B.C.and:
"To those who cite the First Amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions everyday; I say: The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny." --Ronald Reaganand:
"In the dead of night, at 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning, the House began voting on HR 1, the Medicare reform bill which includes that new prescription drug benefit. Members, as always, were allowed 15 minutes to vote 'yea' or 'nay'. After the 15 minutes were up, Democrats and a small band of conservative Republicans teamed up to provide the 218 votes needed to BLOCK passage of the bill! A HUGE victory for limited-government conservatives who saw the bill as nothing more than an extension of LBJ's liberal and hugely expensive Great Society program. Oh, well. Back to the drawing board boys. Same time next year?and:
"Ah, but not so fast Buckaroo. GOP leaders decided NOT to close the vote after the prescribed 15 minutes. Instead, they left the vote open for an additional THREE HOURS and mounted a furious arm twist-a-thon in an attempt to get two Republicans to change their votes and obtain the number necessary for passage. It is believed that NO vote has EVER been kept open that long. In the end, they had to call in the Big Dog, fresh from his trip to merry ol' England. According to Richard Cohen of National Journal, President Bush personally laid on the carrots and sticks to targeted House Republicans who had initially voted 'no'. Ultimately, he got the two votes he needed when Reps. Butch Otter of Idaho and Trent Franks of Arizona flip-flopped and voted for the bill. I'm betting they both got a LOT more than 30 pieces of silver for THIS one! What does it say about the merits of this bill that it required such extraordinary machinations to obtain passage in the House? And what will the Senate do with it now? Will Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton DARE to mount a filibuster against a bill that the AARP wants so desperately? And if so, do they have the 41 votes to block it?" -- Chuck Muth
Open letter to George W. Bush: "Today you arrive in my country...and I bid you welcome. You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable. I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin. It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second. ... For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il....and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time." -- Novelist Frederick Forsyth
Henrietta Bowman at Sierra Times - Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD - commentary and links to stories concerning Tommy Franks' recent Cigar Officianado interview. Our "leaders" have been planning for martial law for a long time. Bush may be the one who imposes it. It will start a civil war, though the freedom fighters will be depicted as terrorists by the lapdog press. If Mr. Franks were not retired, I would be calling for the convening of a Grand Jury to consider trying him for treason. As it is, his is just idle chatter, though the Busheviks may view it as a trial balloon. [sierra]
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Medicare Plunder - what Congress wrought over the weekend. The new Medicare Prescription Drug insurance plan will likely cost $1 trillion over 10 years.
The vast majority of older Americans already have private prescription drug coverage that they don't want changed, and this 78% of seniors may well lose their good private coverage altogether. In fact, the government's own Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least one-third of all private companies will dump their retirees into the Medicare system as a result of the new bill. Big corporations love the Medicare drug plan, because they want to shift the responsibility for providing drug benefits to their retirees onto taxpayers. Dozens of major companies shamelessly advertised in the Washington Times and elsewhere in support of the Medicare bill for this very simple reason. Their pension plans are dangerously underfunded, so naturally they use their lobbying influence to promote a Medicare drug system. In this sense the Medicare bill is a taxpayer-funded corporate bailout for hundreds of American companies.
Tony Mauro at Legal Times - Will the Justices Bite the Bullet? - will the Supreme Court grant review of Silveira v. Lockyer? We'll know soon, possibly next week. [scopeny]
The Silveira case, brought by a group of "California gentlemen," according to their brief, asks the Court to reverse a December 2002 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the state law, first enacted in 1989 and broadened in 1999. In an extensive section of the ruling on the Second Amendment, Judge Stephen Reinhardt found the amendment "does not establish an individual right to own or possess firearms for personal or other use." Reinhardt's liberal rulings are often scrutinized and reversed by the Court.
...
The last time the Supreme Court expressed a formal view on the meaning of the Second Amendment was in the 1939 case United States v. Miller. Although the meaning of the ruling in Miller is still debated, it framed the discussion of the Second Amendment right in terms of the needs of organized militias, not individuals. Ever since, the Court has denied review in cases that would force it to re-examine its stance.
Gary Gorski, a solo practitioner from Fair Oaks, Calif., filed the petition with the Supreme Court, asserting that lower courts are in "serious conflict" over the meaning of the Second Amendment. Gorski cites the 5th Circuit's 2001 ruling United States v. Emerson, which upheld a federal gun control statute -- but also stated that "the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans."
Gorski is backed by the North Fort Myers, Fla.-based gun rights group Keep and Bear Arms. "We must settle the 'question' of the Second Amendment sooner rather than later," the group states on its Web site devoted to the case, keepandbeararms.com/Silveira/.
Claire Wolfe - I Don't Think There's a Rock Big Enough for Me to Crawl Under - Sunni Maravillosa's response to the newest expansion of warrantless search power for the f.b.i. I avoided posting a link to this yesterday because I am speechless. I don't know any curses strong enough for this. [claire]
Charley Reese at LewRockwell.com - Some People - why democracy alone will not solve Iraq's problems, or anybody's. [lew]
Some people, including our president, seem to think that once free elections are held in Iraq, democracy will exist and everything will be just fine and dandy from there on out.
This rather widespread belief stems from a misunderstanding or ignorance of our own country and its history. It isn't the elections that have given us the country we all cherish. It is the Constitution and the general consensus that everyone must obey it. That is the key difference between the United States and many other countries in the world.
As with religion, some Americans have paid lip service to the Constitution, professing more than practicing. There have certainly been differences in interpretation, sometimes powerful differences. Still and all, to a remarkable degree, the American people have maintained their devotion to the basic charter of government.
...
Iraq is an Arab country, and whatever government emerges must be consistent with the Arab heritage and traditions, or it will not last. As with the human body, transplants generate their own opposition.
Joe Blow at Strike the Root - Rise of the American KGB - The f.b.i. will likely soon get authority to collect DNA from anyone arrested for any reason. [kaba]
Once passed, this law will enable any State agent to arrest you for any reason, specious or otherwise, just to get DNA material from you. Once they have it, you can be freed, with all "charges" dropped.
When the State needs a fall guy, all it has to do is plant one of your hairs at a crime scene. The FBI's computer will then find the "criminal" and you will be quickly arrested, charged, tried, and convicted because, as we all know, DNA matching is virtually 100% proof positive.
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Presumption of innocence is out the door -- welcome to the Soviet Union , comrade!
