The Fundamentals of Nov 2nd, 2010

indyfromaz|

Newsweek’s Ben Adler was aghast at the clause in the GOP’s Pledge to America that Republicans will provide a “citation of constitutional authority” for every proposed piece of legislation. “We have a mechanism for assessing the constitutionality of legislation, which is the independent judiciary,” Adler wrote. “An extraconstitutional attempt to limit the powers of Congress is dangerous even as a mere suggestion, and it constitutes an encroachment on the judiciary.”
A progressive blogger, meanwhile, writes in U.S. News & World Report that such talk of requiring constitutionality is “just plain wacky.”
Before we get to the historical niceties, a question:
Does anyone, anywhere, think legislators should vote for legislation they think is unconstitutional? Anyone? Anyone?
How about presidents? Should they sign such legislation into law?
Yet, according to this creepy logic, there’s no reason for congressmen to pass, obey or even consider the supreme law of the land. Re-impose slavery? Sure! Let’s see if we can catch the Supreme Court asleep at the switch. Nationalize the TV stations? Establish a king? Kill every first-born child? Why not? It ain’t unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so!
Nationalize Health Care, sure, why not. Mandate that all citizens will have health care or else they will pay a fine (that is actually a tax but we don’t call it that except in court when we have to) or possibly go to jail.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Mandate that Companies must provide Health care or pay a fine (that is actually a tax but we don’t call it that except in court when we have to).
Whoops!, sorry the Democrats ALREADY DID THAT.
And of course, that means the president can’t veto legislation because it’s unconstitutional, because that’s apparently not his job. Wouldn’t want to “encroach” on the judiciary!
Especially, the judiciary we’ve been packing with Liberals for a generation or two.
Like suing a State of The Union, Arizona.
Get a Liberal judge to rule that if we want to ignore Border Security you can’t do anything about it! ~ 
Oh, and you’re a “racist” if you disagree with us.
Of course, reasonable people understand how absurd all of this is.
There’s nothing in the Constitution — nothing! — that says the Supreme Court is the final or sole arbiter of what is or is not constitutional.
But for Liberals, let’s just pass whatever the hell we want, when we want it, and if we can get a Liberal enough judge to agree we can do it, Go for it!
Nor is there anything in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court case that famously established judicial review. Nor is there in Cooper v. Aaron, the 1958 case in which the court ruled that its findings are the law of the land.
George Washington vetoed an apportionment bill in 1792 because it was unconstitutional. What was he thinking? If only he had a Ben Adler around to tell him what a fool he was.
Andrew Jackson vetoed the reauthorization of the national bank in 1832 because he believed it was unconstitutional. He added at the time that, “It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision.”
“Even the Supreme Court has never claimed that it is the only branch with the power or duty to interpret the Constitution,” says Jeff Sikkenga, a constitutional historian at Ashland University’s Ashbrook Center. “In fact, it has said that certain constitutional questions like war and peace are left to the political branches to decide.”
The debate over whether the courts are the final word on the Constitution is more than 200 years old. The debate over whether they are the sole arbiter of constitutionality is extremely recent and extremely silly.
But it’s also necessary because too many politicians — in both parties — have abdicated their most solemn duty: to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. George W. Bush signed campaign finance reform even though he thought much of it was unconstitutional. Nancy Pelosi thinks the Constitution has as much relevance as a pet rock. When asked if the health-care bill was Constitutional, her perpetually wide-open eyes grew perceptibly wider as she incredulously asked, “Are you serious?”
The real issue is quite simple. If more politicians were faithful to the Constitution, the government would be restrained. And restraining government is “weird,” “wacky” and “dangerous” to so many liberals today. (Jonah Goldberg).
And people who propose it, The Tea Party Movement, are “racists”, “stupid”, “morons” ,”idiots” ,”dumb”,”ignorant”,”fools”.
Fascinating.


A Reminder:
Unless something totally unforeseen occurs, Democrats are poised to take a real beating in November. Their response to the impending disaster has run the gamut. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is in denial: “One thing I know for sure is that Democrats will retain their majority in the House of Representatives.” Massachusetts Senator John Kerry is condescending: “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on, so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.” President Obama is angry: “It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election.” Why is the electorate ready to kick Democrats to the curb? Here’s why:
* An “unstimulated” economy. The original Mother of All Stimulus packages, $787 billion dollars, quickly grew to an astounding $865 billion. It wasn’t enough. Congress pumped out another $26 billion in “supplemental” stimulus in August. The results? Unemployment in the private sector remains well above the eight percent Democrats promised, even as public sector workers who support Democrats were rewarded; our Democratically-controlled Congress has amassed more debt in the last four years than nearly the previous two hundred and thirty combined; the Keynesian economic model Democrats stand by is a colossal failure; the Summer of Recovery was a propaganda fiasco.
* The health care bill. The absolute epitome of ideological, public-be-damned arrogance. A horrendous compendium of bribes, exploding bureaucracy, runaway costs, written in secret and unread by those who passed it. It includes a mandate, likely un-Constitutional, forcing people to buy health insurance or pay a fine. The same administration which originally claimed the commerce clause of the Constitution made such a fine possible is now saying that the federal governments’s “power to tax” justifies it. Irrelevant. 60% of Americans want this monstrosity repealed, ASAP.
* The federal lawsuit against the state of Arizona. Again, it’s the arrogance, stupid. Despite all the hectoring from Democrats and the Obama administration about racist this, and xenophobic that, fair-minded Americans recognized four things: people have a right to protect their life and property, and if the federal government can’t or won’t do it, they have a right to do it themselves; the idea that anyone opposing the “rights” of illegal aliens is a bigot is nonsense on stilts; the ruling class in Washington, D.C. is holding genuine border control hostage to “comprehensive reform;” the glaring double-standard of suing Arizona for violating federal immigration statues, even as the feds turn a blind eye to hundreds of “sanctuary cities” with illegal protection directives unquestionably in conflict with federal law.
* The demonization of the Tea Party movement. Take your pick: teabaggers, racists, angry white men, fringe elements, bigots, Astro-turfers, etc. etc. Democrats and the media have tried every one, and every one has been a miserable failure for one overwhelmingly simple reason: decent Americans know they’re decent, and getting insulted by Democrats running the country into the ground has only stiffened their resolve. Progressives want to demonize people who believe in smaller government, fiscal responsibility and a desire to return to Constitutional principles? Why not attack people who believe in guns, and religion too? Oh wait. The president already did that as well.
* A hopelessly compromised media. Air America tanked, CNN is tanking, and ABC, NBC and CBS news programs have been shedding viewers at historically unprecedented rates—even as Fox and the Wall Street Journal prosper. Americans don’t mind people in the media expressing their opinions, as long as they’re characterized as opinions, but they seethe when such opinions are portrayed as “hard news.” They get even angrier when certain stories are “omitted” by those same organizations, especially when Americans recognize such omissions are calculated to protect the progressive agenda. I wonder if it occurs to either Democrats or their media water-carriers that a majority Americans may savor whacking both groups in November. Depressed looks on the faces of Nancy Pelosi and Katie Couric? In theater circles, that’s known as a “two-fer.”
* The Ground Zero mosque. Yet another reminder of the contempt progressives and their media enablers have for ordinary Americans who had the “temerity” to allow their feelings to be known. Despite every attempt to characterize these Americans as Islamo-phobic bigots, the public wasn’t buying, again for one overwhelmingly simple reason: decent Americans once again demonstrated their decency by separating the legality of the project from the appropriateness of it.
* The complete disconnect between the First Family and ordinary Americans. The golfing, the soirees, and the high-priced vacations have created the perception that we are living through another “let them eat cake” moment in history. On Tuesday, the president called the public schools in Washington, D.C. a “‘struggling’ system that doesn’t measure up to the needs of first daughters, Sasha and Malia.” Those would be the same public schools Congressional Democrats tossed 3,300 low-income kids back into when they killed funding for vouchers that had freed those kids from D.C.’s educational ghetto. The First Lady is hectoring Americans to eat healthier. Perhaps more Americans would if they could afford to: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) stated in their Producer Price Index that the price of food increased 2.4% for March 2010. That’s the biggest increase in almost 30 years.
* The war on terror. A politically correct contingency operation against unnamed insurgents with a specific draw-down date? Democrats once again prove that all the talk about Afghanistan being the “good war” was complete rubbish. They want out, and victory—along with the heroic efforts of our men and women in harm’s way—be damned. Once again: has America ever fought another war where they knew the exact location of the enemy, had the ability to inflict possibly irreparable damage on them—and decided to split the difference instead? If you answered “Vietnam,” another progressively-instigated catastrophe resulting in the deaths of fifty-eight thousand American soldiers and three million innocent Asians, go to the head of the class. And when is that civilian trial of the 9/11 perpetrators scheduled to begin?
* Czars and nationalization. The Obama administration and Congressional Democrats may bristle when Americans call them socialists, but the nationalization of banks, car and insurance companies, student loans and healthcare sure isn’t free-market capitalism. Neither is wiping out oil jobs in Louisiana with a government-mandated ban on offshore drilling—after the feds completely bungled their role in cleaning up the spill which engendered it. Unelected czars who answer to no one but the president, along with out-of-control government agencies such as the EPA have made it clear to many Americans that this administration often considers Congress a completely unnecessary component of governance, especially if they don’t kowtow to the president’s agenda.
* “Unexceptional” America. Progressive contempt for the values and traditions which make this the greatest country on earth can no longer be disguised. An American president who “believe(s) in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism” has made it plain that this is not a great nation which needs tweaking, but a fundamentally flawed one needing a complete progressive make-over. Once one understands this basic premise, everything this administration and Democratically-controlled Congress does makes sense. All of it centers around the ridiculous premise that America owes the world an apology for any number of shortcomings, many of which can only be alleviated by government-mandated “social justice.” That would be the same social justice which demanded—and still demands—that Americans manifestly unqualified to own homes be given mortgages, regardless.
Unknown to the majority of Americans, this precise mindset was part of the financial “reform” bill which also requires banks to lend a certain percentage of capital to minority-owned businesses, even if it means lowering their lending standards. Apparently progressives won’t be satisfied with their odious social-engineering schemes until every sector of the American economy bears a striking resemblance to the housing sector. So far, Americans support financial reform because it’s been framed as “Main Street versus “Wall Street.” It’s not. Like every other initiative undertaken by this Congress and this administration, it’s the elevation of irresponsible and dishonest Americans over those willing to accept the consequences of their own behavior.
There you have it. Democratic control for four years in Congress, and two in the White House has been exactly what many predicted: an ideologically-driven disaster of epic proportions. For years, progressives obfuscated their true intentions, because even they knew most Americans couldn’t stomach them. The elections of 2006 and 2008 changed everything. Progressives bought into their own hype, believing they had pulled off a multi-generational transformation of the American mindset. As a result, they showed Americans their true colors: unbridled arrogance, utter contempt for the average citizen’s intellect, and a ham-fisted, never let a crisis go to waste determination to bend the electorate to their will, using government as a club.
That’s why they’re going down in November. And the most satisfying aspect of the whole scenario is this: despite every attempt they’ve made to blame anyone and everyone else for their problems, they brought it on themselves. (Arnold Ahlert)
And don’t forget the LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN AMERICAN HISTORY during a recession (or “jobless recovery”) that Congress was too chicken to vote on stopping.

But don’t worry, it’s all those damn Republican’s fault!!
And George W. Bush.
The Banks.
CEOs
Corporate America.
Wall Street.
Teabaggers.
The Right Wingers.
Christians.
“The Rich”
FOX News
Rupert Murdoch (who owns Fox)
Talk Radio
Did I leave anyone out?
Oh, yeah, DEMOCRATS!

Nuts to You

This is my kind of pizza!

I would add the ObamaCare Special: “I’m Sorry that’s bad for your Health, how about a nice organically grown  salad instead? no dressing, of course that’s evil fat”
But if you insist, that will $1,000.00 (That’s 992.00 for your Health insurance cost and 8.00 for the pizza with $50 per topping extra)
The Stimulus Pizza:  $1 Trillion dollars. And they serve you an empty plate because it will do nothing in the end so why bother but if you don’t buy it, the economy will crash!
The Mexican Pizza: If you don’t buy it you’re a Racist!
The Ground Zero Pizza: Islamic toppings but if you object you’re a Bigot!
Ever notice, Liberals are always wanting to point to a “few nuts” of their opponents as the mainstream way all of them are.
But you point to their “nuts” and you’re racist or a bigot for pointing to a “few nuts” as indicative of all of them.
Take Radical Islam. You point to the ground Zero Mosque and you are just overgeneralizing you bigot, but when they point to the 1 guy in 300,000 tea partiers who has a “nut” sign that’s indicative of the whole movement.
And the Liberal Media will be right their to ignore the Left’s “nuts” and 24/7 specials on the on the other “nut” (who may even be a plant by the Left to make it look like a “nut”). The Ministry of Truth really doesn’t care about silly little details like that.
Now that’s “journalism”.
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Now, this was funny, to a cynic like me.
The Federal government has turned Arizona in as a Human Rights abuser (for crimes that haven’t actually been committed but because they COULD be committed) for wanting to enforce immigration laws and if we pull people over legally and then ask them if they are citizens.
The Horror! The Racism! Evil! Pure Evil!
So, now we get this from The Progressive Liberals Bible, The New York Times:
The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.
That’s right. The Feds can do the racial profiling (“your papers please”) but if anyone else does it, you’re a racist and human right abuser!
Or as two lawyers on The O’reilly factor last night said when ask what’s the difference? They both said in near-unison, “It’s the Federal government not the States”.
So yet again, if the government wants to selectively enforce the law you aren’t allowed to protest or object and you sure as hell can’t do it yourself! God Forbid!
We are the Government and we are here to protect you. Doesn’t that swell your heart with Hope and love and peace.
“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”
And since all the leftist think those kind of questions are racist, except when they are doing it of course.
When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on.
So if you are an illegal, all you have to do is lie and the liberals will just move on.
It’s not like if they arrest you and you have no criminal record that they will deport you. The ICE policy detailed in an earlier blog details that you’re not a “priority” so they will just let you go EVEN IF you are arrested for being here illegally. They don’t really care.
So this is just a game. They can claim they caught X number of illegals. They just don’t mention they let most of them go afterwards. Details…Details…Details….
The deportation of criminals is up. The dismissal of cases against “non-criminal” (which is laughable on it’s face since it IS A CRIME to be here illegally to begin with) is also up. But we just won’t talk about that one.
But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.
RACIAL PROFILING!!!

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.
The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.
In New York yes, In Arizona. Hell No! Too Dangerous. Let’s just put up signs warning people to stay away instead!
The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agent’s flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.
Well, if it’s done on the Mexican Border it sure is, according to Liberals.

The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants — from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.
The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers — a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.
But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.
Where’s La Raza!? the ACLU!? Rev. Al?  This is an outrage!

For some, the patrol’s practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.
Don’t you love the mischaracterization and overgeneralization fallacies of that statement.

The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border.
But doing it 40 Miles south of Phoenix and hundreds of miles from the border is “racial Profiling” and could lead to human rights abuse!

But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizona’s law, the change is happening without public debate.
“It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”
YOUR PAPERS PLEASE!

Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.
In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border — 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains — though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.
“Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons,” said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. “We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”
Just Not in Arizona! That’s racist!

Legal scholars say the government’s border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.
Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation’s population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, “Technically, we can, but we don’t.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”
So as long as you lie, they move on and don’t feel any need to do more.
Note to terrorists: Just Lie. They won’t notice.
Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.
Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrol’s costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interior enforcement to sweep up farm workers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.
One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitor’s visa.
Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.
“I was shocked,” said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.
Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his “Asian appearance,” he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.
OOH!!! MORE RACIAL PROFILING!

Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the woman’s graduation from Vassar College.
“At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped,” said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. “Here, you’re sitting on the train asleep and if you don’t look like a U.S. citizen, it’s ‘Wake up!’ ”
Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries.
So how’s that different from Arizona? 43% of illegals are from other countries other than Mexico. OTM= Other Than Mexican to use Customs parlance.
So we have another liberal hypocrisy. It’s not racial profiling when they do it, but it is if the State does it or it’s the Mexican Border. I see…

Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passenger’s demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally — including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.
Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. “It makes me feel safe,” volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. “I don’t mind being monitored.”

To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. “I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,” recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.
Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.
“As a citizen I’m offended,” he said. But he added, “To say I didn’t want to answer didn’t seem a viable option.”

Don’t do as I do, Do as I say!

Human Rights Wronged

United Nations: The U.S. State Department is holding up Arizona as America's human rights problem, fishing for applause from the likes of Cuba and Libya. But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer isn't taking it lying down.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to go lower than even Andrew Young in his Carter-era heyday by holding up Arizona as a human rights violator in its groveling "Universal Periodic Review" for the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission.
The 29-page mea culpa of America's wrongs is nothing but a political advertisement for recent executive acts from the Obama administration, repackaged as human rights improvements.
Apologizing for legitimate domestic political differences is pernicious, given that hellish non-democratic nations like Cuba and Libya sit on the U.N. Human Rights Commission and no doubt are applauding. On human rights, the report managed to equate Arizona to Burma's tin-pot rule, Saudi Arabia's Shariah-law maimings, Iran's electoral fraud, and Cuba's "preventive" jailings of the innocent, obscenely blurring the lines between real human rights violations and mere policy differences.
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, to her credit, wrote a letter expressing "concern and indignation" to Clinton on Aug. 27, demanding that the reference to Arizona be removed.
She's right. The report's reference is a distortion of SB 1070, the state law Arizona passed to discourage illegal immigration and undercut the deadly Mexican cartels behind it. Brewer noted the cartels have left 170 dead bodies in Arizona's desert so far this year and pose a mortal danger to Arizona's citizens.
Moreover, Brewer points out that the Arizona law mirrors federal law, raising questions about why the law is considered a human rights violation if federal agents, but not state lawmen, can ask for ID from people who've already been arrested.
More to the point, Brewer underscored the hypocrisy of the federal stance, which hasn't managed to find any human rights grounds for challenging the law in court.
"In fact, the Department of Justice has correctly not included these so-called 'human rights' issues in the current litigation against the State of Arizona," Brewer wrote.
What it adds up to is an Obama administration that seeks to take its political battles to questionable forums like the U.N., using dissident states as its villains. It's a nasty abrogation of the U.S. duty to speak out on real human rights and, in the end, will only give comfort to tyrants and criminals.(IBD)

I’m Sorry We’re Evil!

Moral Equivalence: This fallacy compares minor misdeeds with major atrocities.

 

Move over Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria. The State Department has made it official: The United States violates human rights. In an unprecedented move, the Obama administration submitted a report to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights detailing the progress and problems in dealing with human rights issues in this country. The document is a strange combination of left-wing history and White House talking points.
It describes how the United States discriminates against the disabled, homosexuals, women, Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics and those who don’t speak English. There is the expected pandering to Muslims, noting that the government is committed to “challenge misperceptions and discriminatory stereotypes, to prevent acts of vandalism and to combat hate crimes,” offenses that the American people evidently keep committing. And the current economic woes are blamed on the housing crisis, which itself was the result of “discriminatory lending practices.” The implication is that if Americans had only been less racist, they would be enjoying prosperity today.
The report notes that until recently, the U.S. engaged in torture, unlawfully detained terrorist suspects and illegally spied on Americans communicating with terrorists – but the report assures readers that Mr. Obama has been putting a stop to all that.
The main impact of the document will be to confirm critiques of the United States as a haven for hatred and rights abuses. It turns the Obama administration’s domestic political agenda into an international scorecard by which other countries can judge American “progress.” And it makes it that much more difficult for those abroad who have held up the United States as a model for the kind of liberal, capitalistic democracy they would like to see in their own countries.
“Progress is our goal,” the report proclaims, “and our expectation thereof is justified by the proven ability of our system of government to deliver the progress our people demand and deserve.” This reflects the general tone of a report that sees the state, not the people, as the source of American progress. All the problems discussed have a corresponding federal solution, whether health care, nutrition, housing or any other issue. To read the report, one could conclude that, to the Obama administration, big government is not just everything – it is the only thing.
The authors claim that the United States does not, by filing the report, “acknowledge commonality with states that systematically abuse human rights,” but of course it does. Dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and theocracies competing for legitimacy on the world stage have been handed a potent new weapon, the kind of assessment they would never offer about their own governments. The report also cautions that it should not be read to reflect “doubt in the ability of the American political system to deliver progress for its citizens.” The authors of the report should understand that the doubts in the Obama administration to deliver progress are already well-established. And they come from the American people, who don’t need the United Nations telling them to shape up. (Washington Post)


The First chair of the Commission in 2006 was Mexico. MEXICO!?
Gee, I guess that’s the kettle deciding the pot is black and then you’re not suppose to notice that the kettle is even black.
Because in an international social justice world where everyone is equally evil the good guys are bad guys and the bad guys just need more understanding!
Take Radical Islam for instance, or Iran or North Korea…
.
“The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a state of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional,” AZ Governor Brewer wrote.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer demanded Friday that a reference to the state’s controversial immigration law be removed from a State Department report to the United Nations’ human rights commissioner.
The U.S. included its legal challenge to the law on a list of ways the federal government is protecting human rights.

Imagine that, wanting to secure our border and deal with people coming here illegally is a Human Rights Abuse!
Can’t imagine what this commission thinks of it’s former Chair-County Mexico and their immigration laws…

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Brewer says it is “downright offensive” that a state law would be included in the report, which was drafted as part of a UN review of human rights in all member nations every four years.
According to the ACLU, the U.S. report correctly acknowledges the need for improvement in several key areas, including racial justice, women’s rights, LGBT rights and discrimination against Muslims and Americans of South Asian and Arab descent. However, the report neglects to address other key areas where the U.S. has failed to meet its human rights obligations, including felon disfranchisement, inhumane prison conditions, racial disparities in the death penalty system and deaths and abuse in immigration detention. The report also defends the use of military commissions to try terrorism suspects, despite the fact that military commissions pose significant human and civil rights violations.

Oh, goody, The American Communist Liberals Union approves. Well, that settles it. We’re evil incarnate.
We are all equally evil.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4322918/controversy-as-us-admits-human-rights-shortcomings

While it’s not on the UN report, this ditty from Rachael “Mad Cow” Maddow on the “end” of combat in Iraq is telling:
“The history of Iraq for the last generation is, Saddam taking power, a decade of the war with Iran, where we took Iraq’s side, then the first American war, then a decade of sanctions, then the second American war, toppling Saddam, presiding over a civil war, and now there’s us leaving. After all that, good luck! Hope it all works out for you guys!”
But don’t worry, they are the Insufferably Superior Moral Left!
They are better than you.
So you should just bow down to their greatness and not question their infinitely superior wisdom.

The Last Stand of Liberals- Bigotry

Charles Krauthammer: Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the 40-year liberal ascendancy that James Carville predicted into a full retreat.
Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, ObamaCare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a Ground Zero mosque.
What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that pre-empts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.
The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?
And now the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia are near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief.
Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms).
Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it, “just downright mean”?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
AMEN!


And as for border security? Nothing to worry about there.
The body of an official investigating the massacre of 72 Central and South American migrants killed in a ranch in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas was found today dumped beside a nearby road alongside another unidentified victim, according to local media.
No big Deal. It’s racist to SECURE THE DAMN BORDER!

Reality is a Dish best Served Cold

Optimists think that if we manage to turn a few things around, their kids may have it . . . almost as good. The country they inherit may be . . . almost as good. And it’s kind of a shock to think like this; pessimism isn’t in our DNA. But it isn’t pessimism, really, it’s a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.
But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don’t act as if they do. I think their detachment from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past. I started noticing in the 1980s the growing gulf between the country’s thought leaders, as they’re called—the political and media class, the universities—and those living what for lack of a better word we’ll call normal lives on the ground in America. The two groups were agitated by different things, concerned about different things, had different focuses, different world views.
But I’ve never seen the gap wider than it is now. I think it is a chasm. In Washington they don’t seem to be looking around and thinking, Hmmm, this nation is in trouble, it needs help. They’re thinking something else. I’m not sure they understand the American Dream itself needs a boost, needs encouragement and protection. They don’t seem to know or have a sense of the mood of the country.
And so they make their moves, manipulate this issue and that, and keep things at a high boil. And this at a time when people are already in about as much hot water as they can take.
To take just one example from the past 10 days, the federal government continues its standoff with the state of Arizona over how to handle illegal immigration. The point of view of our thought leaders is, in general, that borders that are essentially open are good, or not so bad. The point of view of those on the ground who are anxious about our nation’s future, however, is different, more like: “We live in a welfare state and we’ve just expanded health care. Unemployment’s up. Could we sort of calm down, stop illegal immigration, and absorb what we’ve got?” No is, in essence, the answer.
An irony here is that if we stopped the illegal flow and removed the sense of emergency it generates, comprehensive reform would, in time, follow. Because we’re not going to send the estimated 10 million to 15 million illegals already here back. We’re not going to put sobbing children on a million buses. That would not be in our nature. (Do our leaders even know what’s in our nature?) As years passed, those here would be absorbed, and everyone in the country would come to see the benefit of integrating them fully into the tax system. So it’s ironic that our leaders don’t do what in the end would get them what they say they want, which is comprehensive reform.
When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns—even from the essential nature—of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.
Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination. (Peggy Noonan)

And as one who was not abundant, and still isn’t, when I see what I see and the complete disconnect from reality that is the Twilight Zone at the Beltway around D.C. I do wonder about this.
I have no kids, I probably never will.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t look at the kids I see on the street and wonder what life is going to be like for them when they are my age.
And I don’t think it will be that good, certainly not like their childhood.
And that is a sad legacy.
But to pick up on Mrs. Noonan’s point about Arizona. (as an aside, where is the lawsuit against Missouri for slapping the government in the face? Are there not enough Latinos in the state to warrant it?).
IBD: In federal lawsuits, defendants may answer litigation filed against them with a counterclaim against the plaintiff for damages or other relief.
The Constitution of the United States mandates at Article 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government … that the United States shall protect each of them (the states) against invasion and … against domestic violence.”
“Republican form of government” is defined as a republic that is a system of government in which the people hold sovereign power and elect representatives to exercise that power.
To “guarantee” means to warrant or undertake that something has happened or will happen. The term “invasion” is (regarding a country or territory ) a hostile incursion.
The term “shall” used in the third person singular denotes an imperative, without discretion or choice. Thus, the phrase “shall guarantee” leaves no wiggle room.
Remedies for breach of guarantee are damages (expenses incurred in repairing guaranteed product) or rescission (return of product for refund of purchase price — i.e., “money back” guarantee).
Recently, the federal government — the present regime in particular — has not only violated the guarantee of republican form of government and the pledge to protect Arizona from invasion and domestic violence, but has actively worked to achieve the exact opposite result.
By the federal government’s determined resistance to enforcing existing federal law against illegal immigration and attempting to penalize Arizona for attempting to cope with illegal immigration on its own, the federal government has crassly flouted its obligation to guarantee a republican form of government for the state of Arizona.
One of the most effective means for destroying a republic is to bankrupt it and beggar its people.SB
It’s the only thing Obama & Co ARE good at. :)

This is what befell Rome, which went from a republic to what would now be called a dictatorship as a result of the financial drain on the country resulting from the empire.
In the case of Arizona, recent figures disclose that illegal immigration costs the state $2.5 billion annually. This amounts to approximately $400 for every man, woman and child in the state, which has a population of less than 7 million.
The federal government has not only filed litigation against Arizona, but informed an association of Arizona sheriffs that it intends to prosecute as an example at least one deputy for enforcing Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration legislation (SB 1070).
There are reports the administration is seeking ways to cease doing business with Arizona and is encouraging other states to do the same, to exercise economic coercion on the state.
The administration has praised the efforts of states such as California for economically boycotting Arizona. The sanctions the administration has imposed on Arizona are hardly less draconian than those that the same administration has imposed on Iran to prevent Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. All this for Arizona’s daring to exercise its republican form of government and passing widely popular legislation in a manner completely consistent with Arizona’s Constitution.
The Obama administration has thus tried to take control of Arizona and abridge/suppress its republican government in substance and in process.
Also violated by the federal government is the pledge to protect Arizona from invasion. The enormous influx of illegal immigrants into Arizona—uninvited, demanding and belligerent—clearly constitutes a hostile incursion.
The surge in illegal immigration has brought with it crime and violence. Phoenix is now the kidnap capital of America as a result of the Mexican gangs that have invaded Arizona using kidnapping as a form of turf acquisition and protection.
Notably, on the Independence Day weekend this year a Mexican drug gang announced that the border with Mexico and Arizona was “moved” several miles into Arizona whereby Interstate Highway 8 would now be the border. There was no response to this by the Obama administration.

I feel I should point out that Insterstate 8 is not “several miles from the border. It is a LOT of miles from the border!!
Interstate 8 starts/ends at  Interstate 10 just south of  Casa Grande, AZ. THAT IS 40 Miles from My house in South Phoenix!!!!
That is 134 miles from the Nogales, AZ on the border!!!
What we do have at the border are signs warning Americans to stay away from the gangs and cartels!!



It is undeniable that the federal government has shamelessly and willfully violated its guarantee and pledges under Article 4, constituting suitable grounds for counterclaims by Arizona against the federal government.
The question is whether the remedy for such violation should be rescission or damages. If the latter, a figure of $2.5 billion annually could be employed per the latest studies projected backward as well as forward. As to the rescission alternative (the “money back” guarantee, whereby the contract is undone or rescinded), this would constitute rescission of the breached agreement whereby Arizona entered the union in 1912.
Gaspers in disbelief regarding rescission/secession should know that there is nothing sacrosanct about the federal government; only the Constitution is inviolable. When the federal government willfully refuses to comply with a constitutional mandate, the Constitution can be upheld only by implementing its provisions, in this case the “money back” guarantee.
An independent Arizona can contract with the federal government for defense, as do small cities with the counties in which they are located, for police/fire protection. The outsourcing of defense by an independent Arizona might be expensive, but with the money saved from illegal immigration, Arizona could afford it.
The federal government might even make money on the deal and, for the first time, turn a profit on something.
To those who would label this “draconian,” the answer is this is a race to a precipice with a sheer drop greater than that of Arizona’s crown jewel, the Grand Canyon.
Personally, we’d go for damages. What’s 10 or 20 billion nowadays anyway? If the verdict came down in the early-ish morning, the Obama administration could have the money printed up by lunchtime.
After all, after the $4 Trillion Dollars in 19 Months with nothing to so for it,so what if they’d spend what another few billion… :)
It’s not like it’s real money to them anyhow… :(


Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. –Martin Luther King, Jr.
The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery. —Pope John Paul II

Think Happy

I don’t claim to be an economics wiz. Never will.

But consider the following from two different sources:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy shed more jobs than expected in July while the unemployment rate held steady at 9.5%, a further sign the economic recovery may be losing momentum.
The U.S. economy lost 131,000 jobs in July, with the private sector adding only 71,000 to its payrolls. The unemployment rate held steady at 9.5%.
Companies in the U.S. added workers in July for a seventh straight month at a pace that suggests the labor-market recovery will be slow to take hold.
Private payrolls that exclude government agencies rose by 71,000 after a June gain of 31,000 that was smaller than previously reported, Labor Department figures in Washington showed today. Economists projected a 90,000 July increase, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. Overall employment fell 131,000 and unemployment held at 9.5 percent.
How can you lose 131,000 jobs but have job gains for 6 months in a row??
I don’t get it.
“Non-census payroll growth has averaged just 12,000 in the latest three months, which, no matter how you might try to spin it, is just plain lousy,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief US economist at MFR.
Those figures are expected to show that the US economy lost 63,000 jobs in July with the unemployment rate ticking up to 9.6 per cent. However, private sector employment is projected to rise by 90,000.
How does the unemployment rate increase, and employment rise at the same time?
And how can you have job gains and say the economy is recovering if unemployment is still 9.5 %  (and this figure doesn’t even touch the people who aren’t even looking anymore) and have Treasury Secretary Geithner say it’s going up before it goes down. How is that a “recovery”??
It’s not. But it sounds good. It’s Happy News.
Structural unemployment is defined as unemployment arising from technical change such as automation, or from changes in the composition of output due to variations in the types of products people demand. For example, a decline in the demand for typewriters would lead to structurally unemployed workers in the typewriter industry.
And it’s new buzzword.
And so, because of globalization and the the fact that the games has changed the nearly 10% unemployment is here to stay. That the long-term unemployed come to be seen as unemployable or as forgotten.
Shrinkage.
It’s not our fault.
It just is.
That seems to be the new line coming from the Elites.
We can’t do anything about it, so stop bitching about it.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who were excluded from the Financial “reform” lost $1.5 billion for the 12 quarter in a row!
But don’t worry, everything’s fine. Nothing to see here. Think happy thoughts.
**********************
The fundamental issue dividing America right now is whether the people with power represent those they govern. Democrats certainly won lots of elections in 2008, and they have large majorities in both House of Congress, but have those majorities done their job of accurately representing majoritarian opinion in the U.S.? Or did the president, campaigning as a centrist, usher in a hard left Congress and then himself lurch left?
I believe that there is a deep, deep disconnect between the elites and the mainstream, and the anger that is surging on both sides of the divide grows out of the sense that majorities are being trampled on. Left-wing activists point at the Senate and argue that a minority of Republican senators is blocking the majority’s will. Center-right activists applaud those Republicans as representatives of the genuine mainstream and point to the votes and polls noted above and argue that the current Congressional majorities are false positives, unrepresentative of where the country truly is, delivered in large part by an Obama-awed MSM dominated by Journolistas moving in lock step to promote the left’s agenda.
The self-righteous and angry rhetoric of scorn and indignation employed by Bloomberg (On The Ground Zero Mosque issue) and the opponents of Prop 8 this week, and routinely by the president and his Congressional allies over the past many months, provide the perfect fuel for the fires of the neopopulism of the Tea Parties. The vast majority of Tea Party participants are mainstream Americans who work hard, pay taxes –lots and lots of taxes– and are concerned about the huge lurch left. They are fearful about the incompetence of the economic team and the vast gusher of deficit spending which continues to flow out of D.C. –another $26 billion Wednesday!– and they are concerned that their childrens’ futures are being compromised by ideological zealots. They are sick to death of the media gamesmanship of “summits” and the president’s refusal to answer questions directly or to engage his political opponents with other than sneers. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the “leaders” of the left and they are mean-spirited and do not appear to be either very bright or at all good humored.

So that is where we are, 89 days from what may well be a historic “U Turn” election. The stakes are very very high, and the left has gone a long way beyond their previously announced goals and agendas.
And they will do anything to win. And after all, it’s all Bush’s Fault anyhow!
The left is, in a word, exposed. Clarity is a wonderful thing, as my friend Dennis Prager likes to say. As August unfolds, there isn’t any need to guess which way the Democrats and the cultural left wants to take the country. The only question is whether the country wants to go along, and that will be answered on November 2. (Hugh Hewitt)

So the counteraction is, REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER and vote them out.
Unless you like the status quo of Orwellian overuse of  “racism”, structural unemployment, debt, deficits, and a government running every facet of your life, that is.
And Just to make you feel good and happy: Even the innocence of childhood is being trampled by bureaucrats!

It’s hardly unusual to hear small-business owners gripe about licensing requirements or complain that heavy-handed regulations are driving them into the red.
So when Multnomah County shut down an enterprise last week for operating without a license, you might just sigh and say, there they go again.
Except this entrepreneur was a 7-year-old named Julie Murphy. Her business was a lemonade stand at the Last Thursday monthly art fair in Northeast Portland. The government regulation she violated? Failing to get a $120 temporary restaurant license.
Turns out that kids’ lemonade stands — those constants of summertime — are supposed to get a permit in Oregon, particularly at big events that happen to be patrolled regularly by county health inspectors.
“I understand the reason behind what they’re doing and it’s a neighborhood event, and they’re trying to generate revenue,” said Jon Kawaguchi, environmental health supervisor for the Multnomah County Health Department. “But we still need to put the public’s health first.”
It was for your good. Doesn’t that make you feel better that the government is looking out for rogue lemonade stands!
And in the news story about Riverhead, NY officials using Google Earth to spot unlicensed pools and boy you just gotta thank your lucky stars that the government is there to protect you.
That is, unless you’re in Arizona, then you’re not allowed to do that.

Julie had become enamored of the idea of having a stand after watching an episode of cartoon pig Olivia running one, said her mother, Maria Fife. The two live in Oregon City, but Fife knew her daughter would get few customers if she set up her stand at home.
Plus, Fife had just attended Last Thursday along Portland’s Northeast Alberta Street for the first time and loved the friendly feel and the diversity of the grass-roots event. She put the two things together and promised to take her daughter in July.
The girl worked on a sign, coloring in the letters and decorating it with a drawing of a person saying “Yummy.” She made a list of supplies.
Then, with gallons of bottled water and packets of Kool-Aid,  they drove up last Thursday with a friend and her daughter. They loaded a wheelbarrow that Julie steered to the corner of Northeast 26th and Alberta and settled into a space between a painter and a couple who sold handmade bags and kids’ clothing.
Even before her daughter had finished making the first batch of lemonade, a man walked up to buy a 50-cent cup.
“They wanted to support a little 7-year-old to earn a little extra summer loot,” she said. “People know what’s going on.”
Even so, Julie was careful about making the lemonade, cleaning her hands with hand sanitizer, using a scoop for the bagged ice and keeping everything covered when it wasn’t in use, Fife said.
After 20 minutes, a “lady with a clipboard” came over and asked for their license. When Fife explained they didn’t have one, the woman told them they would need to leave or possibly face a $500 fine.
Surprised, Fife started to pack up. The people staffing the booths next to them encouraged the two to stay, telling them the inspectors had no right to kick them out of the neighborhood gathering. They also suggested that they give away the lemonade and accept donations instead and one of them made an announcement to the crowd to support the lemonade stand.
That’s when business really picked up — and two inspectors came back, Fife said. Julie started crying, while her mother packed up and others confronted the inspectors. “It was a very big scene,” Fife said.
Technically, any lemonade stand — even one on your front lawn — must be licensed under state law, said Eric Pippert, the food-borne illness prevention program manager for the state’s public health division. But county inspectors are unlikely to go after kids selling lemonade on their front lawn unless, he conceded, their front lawn happens to be on Alberta Street during Last Thursday.
“When you go to a public event and set up shop, you’re suddenly engaging in commerce,” he said. “The fact that you’re small-scale I don’t think is relevant.”
Kawaguchi, who oversees the two county inspectors involved, said they must be fair and consistent in their monitoring, no matter the age of the person. “Our role is to protect the public,” he said.
From Childhood, obviously!

The county’s shutdown of the lemonade stand was publicized by Michael Franklin, the man at the booth next to Fife and her daughter. Franklin contributes to the Bottom Up Radio Network, an online anarchist site, and interviewed Fife for his show.
As for Julie, the 7-year-old still tells her mother “it was a bad day.” When she complains about the health inspector, Fife reminds her that the woman was just doing her job. She also promised to help her try again — at an upcoming neighborhood garage sale.
While Fife said she does see the need for some food safety regulation, she thinks the county went too far in trying to control events as unstructured as Last Thursday.
“As far as Last Thursday is concerned, people know when they are coming there that it’s more or less a free-for-all,” she said. “It’s gotten to the point where they need to be in all of our decisions. They don’t trust us to make good choices on our own.”
No they don’t.
But they can be pressured into sounding like they care, especially when they’ve been embarrassed into it.
PORTLAND, Ore. — A county official in Oregon has apologized after a 7-year-old’s business venture was soured because health inspectors shut down her lemonade stand.
Multnomah County Chairman Jeff Cogen, the county’s top elected official, said Thursday that running a lemonade stand is a “classic iconic American kid thing to do.”
He says he called Julie Murphy’s mother, Maria Fife, to offer his apology and says she appreciated it.
Fife helped her daughter set up a lemonade stand last week at a local arts fair in northeast Portland. They had to pack up and leave after being approached by two inspectors who said the stand lacked a license.
Cogen says while the inspectors were doing their job, the rules are meant for professional food service operators. He adds he ran lemonade stands as a child.
Cogen said the inspectors were “following the rule book,” but should consider that food-safety laws are aimed at adults engaged in a professional food business, not kids running lemonade stands.
But if someone does it again, what do you want the “fair” inspectors will be back.
And just what does it say about the mindset that would even go there on a lemonade stand to begin with?
How about this comment on the story: So the moral of this is that if you take your little darling to another location in the city away from your home and have them sell food or drinks from a stand, the health inspectors should do nothing to insure the food or beverage is safe. Great. Why even bother having health inspectors? This is a bad precedent to set. The inspectors did nothing wrong.
The government must be ever-present to save you from yourself!
Personal Responsibility is the Government’s job after all!
And if they can’t be there every minute of every day to protect you from yourself, anarachy will rain down upon us all!
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
So what happens with us adults when we want to do something the “rules” says we can’t do or we want the government to live up to it’s own rules that it’s ignoring? Or if we want the rules changed?
Like object to Health Care Mandate for instance? Or Illegal Immigration?
Hmmm…

Spin Cycle

Gotta See this: http://happybirthdayfromaz.com/
Send a Birthday greeting to the President who is in Chicago with Rev Wright, Tony Rezco, and other Chicago heavyweights while his Wife is taking over 60 rooms with 40 people at a 5- Star Spanish Hotel with the kids.
****************
“Summer of Recovery” (Obama’s Term) Update
WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government reported yesterday.
Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website.
Participation has set records for 18 straight months.
An average of 40.5 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according to White House estimates.
The figure is projected to rise to 43.3 million in 2011.
But the economy is getting better, according to the Obama Administration and Liberal Media.
“Make no mistake, we are headed in the right direction,” Mr. Obama said July 2nd.
The U.S. economy continued to grow in the second quarter, but the pace slowed more than economists had expected.-CBS News
It may not feel like we are in a full-fledged economic recovery yet but the Treasury Secretary seemed to imply otherwise in a recent New York Times piece entitled “Welcome to the Recovery”. Although Secretary Timothy Geithner noted in the piece that we still have a long way to go, it seems a little off-putting for the Treasury Secretary to welcome us to a recovery when the unemployment rate is still well over 9% and not expected to go down much further in the near future.
A new jobs report for July is due this week but the jobs report for June wasn’t terribly optimistic. A CNN.com news items about that report was titled “Job recovery hits a wall” and reported that the economy lost 125,000 jobs in June. One hopes that the July jobs report will be much stronger. Regardless, I’m sure that the millions of Americans out there who still don’t have jobs don’t feel like we are in a “recovery”.
Liberal economist Paul Krugman even seemed surprised by Geithner’s piece. After criticizing Republicans for obstructionism (unsurprisingly) and saying that the government has not done enough to stimulate the economy, Krugman wrote that ”the [Obama] administration has decided to engage in happy talk, saying that it’s all good. Do they really think this will work?”
The administration might think so but until a lot more jobs are added to this economy, it seems like it’s too early for the Treasury Secretary to welcome us to a recovery. (townhall.com)
Has anyone told the American People?
Oh right, they don’t care about that, they just care about pushing their agenda.
And Big Brother is always right, isn’t he.
And since anything that is wrong is Bush’s Fault they don’t have to worry about it anyhow!

***************
In an exclusive Newsmax interview, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich backs Arizona’s new immigration law and says Gov. Jan Brewer “ought to promptly file suit against the federal government to make them pay for all the costs that Arizona’s dealing with — costs in schools, costs in prisons, costs in hospitals. If the federal government’s basis of its lawsuit is that it has sole responsibility, then it ought to have sole responsibility. If I were [Gov. Brewer], I’d present them with a bill for several billion dollars on behalf of the people of Arizona who are currently suffering because eof the incompetence and failure of the federal government.”
Sounds good to me.
*********************
YOU HAVE BEEN SCANNED, CITIZEN
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
This follows an earlier disclosure  by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.
Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers.
This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA’s body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter  from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.
These “devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. “We think it’s significant.”
A 70-page document  showing the TSA’s procurement specifications, classified as “sensitive security information,” says that in some modes the scanner must “allow exporting of image data in real time” and provide a mechanism for “high-speed transfer of image data” over the network. (It also says that image filters will “protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.”)
“TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices,” Rotenberg said. “This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion–I think it’s outrageous.” EPIC’s lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches.
TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz told CNET on Wednesday that the agency’s scanners are delivered to airports with the image recording functions turned off. “We’re not recording them,” she said. “I’m reiterating that to the public. We are not ever activating those capabilities at the airport.”
The TSA maintains that body scanning is perfectly constitutional: “The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible, while still performing its crucial function of protecting all members of the public from potentially catastrophic events.”

Notice they did say they didn’t have the capability, they just were not using it. Uh, huh, sure I’m always willing to believe the angels of better nature when it comes to the Government, especially this one, and the Justice Dept and Big Sis Janet.
Don’t you fell safer now?
Don’t feel better about the economy.
Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Carry me back to old Virginny

The Commonwealth of Virginia is obvious the next target for the Chicago Mob in the White House.

But will they go there? That is the question.
The Commonwealth has enacted an Illegal Immigration strategy that is very similar to Arizona, but with some key differences.
But they have also won Round 1 in the “Up Yours!” Obamacare fight. And they are just the first out of the gate.
The state of Virginia can continue its lawsuit to stop the nation’s new health care law from taking effect, a federal judge ruled Monday.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson said he is allowing the suit against the U.S. government to proceed, saying no court has ever ruled on whether it’s constitutional to require Americans to purchase a product.
“While this case raises a host of complex constitutional issues, all seem to distill to the single question of whether or not Congress has the power to regulate — and tax — a citizen’s decision not to participate in interstate commerce,” Hudson wrote in a 32-page decision.
“The congressional enactment under review — the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision — literally forges new ground and extends (the U.S. Constitution’s) Commerce Clause powers beyond its current high watermark,” Hudson said.

“Given the presence of some authority arguably supporting the theory underlying each side’s position, this court cannot conclude at this stage that the complaint fails to state a cause of action,” he wrote.
The decision is a small step, but in no way a minor matter to opponents of the health care bill rejected by all congressional Republicans but signed into law by President Obama earlier this year.
“This lawsuit is not about health care, it’s about our freedom and about standing up and calling on the federal government to follow the ultimate law of the land — the Constitution,” said Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who brought the suit. “The government cannot draft an unwilling citizen into commerce just so it can regulate him under the Commerce Clause.”
“Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has brought forward a specific and narrowly tailored objection to the Act. It warrants a full and thorough hearing in our courts. It is meritorious and constitutionally correct. … I look forward to the full hearing this fall,” said Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
Cuccinelli filed the suit almost immediately after the law was signed, arguing that it conflicts with Virginia’s legislation — also passed this year — exempting state residents from the requirement that all Americans be forced into health care coverage. Cuccinelli argued that the law violates the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
The Commerce Clause allows the U.S. government to regulate economic activity. But Virginia argued that it’s not economic activity when someone chooses to refrain from participating in commerce.
The U.S. government, which was defending itself through the Health and Human Services Department run by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius argued that everyone will need medical services at some point in their life and therefore is either a “current or future participation in the health care market,” and therefore subject to taxation.
“We do not leave people to die at the emergency room door — whether they have insurance or not. Those costs — an estimated $43 billion annually — are absorbed by everyone else paying into the health care market including doctors, hospitals and insured patients. Congress has the authority under the Commerce Clause to address that cost-shifting burdening the interstate market for health care,” argues the brief filed by the Justice Department on behalf of HHS.
“Today’s ruling is merely a procedural decision by the court to allow this case to move forward. We believe there is clear and well-established legal precedent that Congress acted within its constitutional authority in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. We are confident that the health care reform statute is constitutional and that we will ultimately prevail,” the department said in a statement.
Supporters of the law say the decision Monday is merely procedural, but the law will be proven constitutional when it gets to a hearing on the content.
“This case is really a politically motivated ploy aimed at diverting attention from the many benefits of the new law,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, which lobbied in favor of the bill. “The decision today should not distract states and the federal government from focusing on implementing the new law in the most effective way possible. The benefits of the new law are just becoming apparent, and substantially more help is on the way.”
More than a dozen state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit in Florida challenging the federal law, but Virginia’s is the first to reach a courtroom. (FOX)
Missouri voters are expected to pass a measure on Tuesday to forbid the federal government from penalizing individuals for refusing to buy health insurance. But it could be symbolic because federal law typically supersedes state laws.
The federal penalty provision does not take effect until 2014 and the Obama administration has pointed to tax credits, subsidies and other mechanisms to help those who cannot afford to buy insurance. Some 46 million people in the United States lack healthcare coverage.
The Obama administration has countered that the government always has the ability to levy taxes and that the Constitution places the federal government’s powers over the states.
Shut up and sit down, we have supreme executive power and can do anything we want!
Never before has Congress sought to use its powers under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen to buy a good or service from another private person or entity.  If Congress can do that in the name of ensuring that everyone has health insurance, what is to stop it from ordering citizens to buy a particular brand of car to ensure that everyone has a car to drive?  The possibilities, and hence the power claimed, are virtually limitless.– Virgina AG Cucchinelli
Naturally, the Ministry of Truth and the Liberals are playing it down as no big deal. Just a “procedural” victory they all say in unison. It’s no big deal.
But the “procedural” partial victory they got in the Arizona case was a full-on party-hardy yippee! victory against the evil racists!
Fascinating…
The media’s bias and ideology shines through again!
Meanwhile, It’s Mayberry to the Rescue!
The latest ObamaCare ad, curiously out at the same time as this decision, has Andy Griffith touting the greatness of Medicare and now ObamaCare and how it’s going to take care of Seniors.
I saw they ad, it thought it was very self-centered, arrogant, and greedy. Which means it’s perfect for Obama.
Factcheck.org:
Would the sheriff of Mayberry mislead you about Medicare? Alas, yes.
In a new TV spot from the Obama administration, actor Andy Griffith, famous for his 1960s portrayal of the top law enforcement official in the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C., touts benefits of the new health care law. Griffith tells his fellow senior citizens, “like always, we’ll have our guaranteed [Medicare] benefits.” But the truth is that the new law is guaranteed to result in benefit cuts for one class of Medicare beneficiaries — those in private Medicare Advantage plans.
The White House released the ad on the 45th anniversary of the Medicare program, and said it would run nationally on cable TV networks. Griffith, whose “Andy Griffith Show” was a TV comedy hit at the time Medicare was first enacted in 1965, explains the “good things” that the new health care law will mean for Medicare beneficiaries.
“This year, like always, we’ll have our guaranteed benefits,” he says. An announcement of the ad on the White House website reinforces that claim, saying: “Under the Affordable Care Act … Seniors guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same.” But the truth is, for millions of seniors, benefits won’t remain the same.
As we wrote most recently last December, about 10 million Medicare Advantage recipients could see their extra benefits reduced by an average of $43 per month, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And more recently, a detailed analysis by the Medicare program’s own chief actuary, Richard Foster, stated in April:

Medicare Actuary Richard Foster: The new provisions will generally reduce MA rebates to plans and thereby result in less generous benefit packages. We estimate that in 2017, when the MA provisions will be fully phased in, enrollment in MA plans will be lower by about 50 percent (from its projected level of 14.8 million under the prior law to 7.4 million under the new law).

Even the head of the White House Office of Health Reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, acknowledges that Medicare Advantage benefits are going to be reduced. “I’m sure that some of those additional benefits have been nice,” the Wall Street Journal quoted her as saying in a July 25 report. “But I think what we have to look at here is what’s fair and what’s important for the strength of the Medicare program long term.”
A Weasel Word
So how can the Obama administration claim that “guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same”? The answer is that the term “guaranteed” is a weasel word — a qualifier that sucks the meaning out of a phrase in the way that weasels supposedly suck the contents out of an egg. It may sound to the casual listener as though this ad is saying that the benefits of all Medicare recipients are guaranteed to stay the same — and that may well be the way the ad’s sponsors wish listeners to hear it. But what the administration is really saying is that only those benefits that are guaranteed in law will remain the same.
There’s even a section in the new law (section 3601) that says: “Nothing in the provisions of, or amendments made by, this Act shall result in a reduction of guaranteed benefits under title XVIII of the Social Security Act” (the title that establishes the Medicare program). Section 3602 says even Medicare Advantage recipients won’t suffer any reduction of “any benefits guaranteed by law.”
But here’s the catch: The extra benefits generally offered by Medicare Advantage plans aren’t guaranteed by law. They are offered by private insurance companies as inducements. The companies have been able to offer somewhat more generous packages than traditional, fee-for-service Medicare because the system pays them as much as 40 percent more per patient than it pays for traditional Medicare, according to the chief actuary. The average in 2009 was about 14 percent more, according to the most recent analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, issued in February. But the new law generally eliminates the extra payments in the coming years. Foster, the chief actuary, estimates that federal spending for Medicare Advantage will be reduced by $145 billion over the law’s first decade.
Currently, about 1 in every 4 Medicare beneficiary is enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. For many of them, the words in this ad ring hollow, and the promise that “benefits will remain the same” is just as fictional as the town of Mayberry was when Griffith played the local sheriff.
But Barney Fife wrote the Law and now expects you believe them when they say, it’s for your own good.
The The American Spectator and American’s For Tax Reform:
The Spectator blog reports on a conference call held this morning by HHS Secretary Sebelius to promote a new report regarding the health law’s impact on Medicare.  Questioned about claims by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ chief actuary that the Medicare reductions in the law “cannot be simultaneously used to finance other federal outlays and to extend the [Medicare] trust fund” solvency, Secretary Sebelius replied that

There are two different operating methods of looking at this, and the CMS actuary in the report that you cite differs in his strategic opinion from every accounting methodology that’s used for every other program in the federal budget, that has traditionally used for Medicare.  And he has a different interpretation that is not agreed upon by either the Congressional Budget Office or the OMB or traditionally in Congress.

Unfortunately for the Secretary, however, the Congressional Budget Office has on numerous occasions confirmed that any claims the law will improve Medicare’s solvency revolve around notional double-counting under federal budgetary conventions.  A January CBO letter found that “the majority of the [Medicare] trust fund savings…would be used to pay for other spending and therefore would not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future Medicare benefits.”  And in a March letter, CBO quantified the amount of that double-counting, estimating that, if the law’s Medicare savings were actually set aside to improve the solvency of the Medicare trust fund (as opposed to being used for other spending), the bill would increase the deficit by $260 billion over its first ten years alone.
In other words, the CBO agrees with the CMS actuary that the same money the same money can’t be used twice – once to expand coverage, and a second time to extend the life of the Medicare trust fund.  The Secretary’s statement that “there are two different operating methods of looking at this,” and that CBO disagrees with the Administration’s own actuaries on the impact of this budgetary double-counting, is demonstrably FALSE.

But don’t worry, the Ministry of Truth is right on top of it.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/08/03/pkg.tuchman.sanctuary.city.cnn?hpt=C2
President Obama described officials who “demagogue” immigration or take sudden “anti-immigrant” stances as people who want to make a name for themselves and not help solve what he called “a national problem.” (CBS)
But his demagoguery is not worth mentioning.
“I understand the frustration of people in Arizona,” Mr. Obama said. “But what we can’t do is demagogue the issue, and what we can’t do is allow a patchwork of 50 different states, or cities or localities, where anybody who wants to make a name for themselves suddenly says, ‘I’m going to be anti-immigrant, and I’m going try to see if I can solve the problem ourself.’ This is a national problem.”– on CBS “Early Show”
But I end on a Vote of No Confidence  on ICE Director John Morton, from his own people.
http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/view_online.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkfyi.com%2Fcc-common%2Fmlib%2F622%2F08%2F622_1280843100.pdf
or http://kfyi.com/pages/jimsharpe.html
But don’t it’s all for your own good. We are the Washington Elites, we are just better than you unwashed peasant masses.
And now the New York City government elites says it’s ok for there to be a 13-story Islamic Mosque 600 yards from Ground Zero built by a guy who believes in Shiria Law in America.
Doesn’t that just make you feel safer about the government.