Wednesday, July 30, 2014

I bid you good afternoon. I am @ dialysis & hooke...

I bid you good afternoon. I am @ dialysis & hooked up. I have 4:25 left. I'll come off around 5:31pm
Carl Ray Louk

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Halbig Is an Opportunity for Supreme Court To Rededicate Itself to Rule of Law D

David Limbaugh
True, the Halbig case, if it makes its way to the Supreme Court, will present an opportunity for Chief Justice John Roberts to redeem himself from his abominably activist salvation of Obamacare. But more important, it will be an opportunity for the high court to reaffirm this nation's commitment to the rule of law.

In Halbig v. Burwell, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that under the Affordable Care Act federal health insurance subsidies are available for policies purchased only on state exchanges and not those purchased on the federal exchange.

If the Supreme Court takes the case, it will also have a rich opportunity to slap down the out-of-control, politicized Internal Revenue Service. Under this administration, the IRS has behaved as though it were a super-legislature with authority not just to promulgate regulations beyond its narrowly prescribed statutory power, but also to change laws wholesale in order to serve the administration's policy ends.

A proper wrist slapping of the IRS might well send a long overdue message to all federal administrative agencies -- take the renegade EPA, for example -- that they don't have carte blanche to do whatever they decide to do.

The ACA provides for the establishment of state exchanges through which consumers can purchase health insurance. The law did not make the establishment of such exchanges mandatory, and only 14 of the 50 states did so.

The law, in a separate section, also provides for the establishment of a federal exchange through which consumers can purchase health insurance in the event their state opts not to establish an exchange.

That's just half the story. President Obama and his Obamacare architects wanted subsidies (in the form of tax credits) to be provided to people who purchase Obamacare policies. The subsidies would shift the cost of the policy from the individual to the government -- thus, the proverbial "free health care."

Here's where it gets tricky. The law says the "subsidy" is available only for policies purchased through the state exchanges and not the federal exchange. Honest readers of the law and of the political considerations behind the relevant provisions must concede that the law was carefully drafted with this distinction in mind. There was a deliberate intent to make the subsidies available only for purchases through the state exchanges.

There are two salient sets of facts that make this clear. The first is the unambiguous statutory language. The law provides for subsidies to those who purchase policies from an "exchange established by the state." There is no mistaking the plain meaning of those words.

Moreover, despite multiple sections and subsections dealing with these subsidies, there is no hint that Congress intended to have them apply to policies purchased from the federal exchange.

Legally, the question should end there because it is a generally recognized rule of statutory interpretation that statutes shall first be interpreted according to the plain meaning of the statutory language. Unfortunately for the administration, if you go further and apply other rules of statutory interpretation, such as that a statute should be read as a harmonious whole, you get the same result.

There is another interpretive rule with which all statutory draftsmen and contract lawyers are intimately familiar. If the statute or a contract specifically includes language in one section but omits it in another, it is presumed to have done so intentionally.

For example, if I draft a contract to provide that the company will reimburse my client for airplane travel expenses and mention no other type of travel, I understand that my client will not be reimbursed for automobile or train travel. When Congress expressly provided for subsidies for state exchange policies and did not include such a provision for federal exchange policies - even though there were separate sections covering the federal exchange -- it is presumed they meant that the government would not subsidize federal exchange policies.

The second salient fact is that if we examine congressional intent beyond the words of the statute we will find that the too-clever-by-half Obama administration had a specific reason not to subsidize policies purchased through the federal exchange. They wanted to use financial coercion to incentivize states to set up exchanges.

Again, unhappily for the administration, it used this exact kind of coercion with Medicaid under the statute, providing that states that don't adopt the law's standards for Medicaid eligibility will be denied federal Medicaid funding. Even worse, we have "smoking gun" evidence from one of the administration's Obamacare gurus, Jonathan Gruber, who stated that if a state doesn't set up an exchange, its citizens won't get their tax credits.

But when 36 states thumbed their noses at Obamacare by not establishing exchanges, the autocratic IRS, on its own initiative, issued a regulation in August 2011 making the subsidies apply to policies purchased on federal exchanges.

The Supreme Court must reaffirm its commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law by affirming Halbig, making a firm statement that the law is not merely a tool for ideologically obsessed statists to twist at their capricious discretion to achieve their political ends.

 
David Limbaugh

David Limbaugh

David Limbaugh, brother of radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, is an expert in law and politics and author of new book Crimes Against Liberty, the definitive chronicle of Barack Obama's devastating term in office so far.

©Creators Syndicate
 
Carl Ray Louk

"FRIENDSHIP NEVER ENDS" SG-1996
"LET LOVE LEAD THE WAY" SG-2000
"THE PHOENIX SHALL RISE" SD
"EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE IN HEART AND SAYS HIS PRAYERS BY NIGHT, MAY BECOME A WOLF WHEN THE WOLFBANE BLOOMS AND THE AUTUMN MOON IS BRIGHT." LT-1941
"FLESH OF MY FLESH; BLOOD OF MY BLOOD; KIN OF MY KIN WHEN SAY COME TO YOU, YOU SHALL CROSS LAND OR SEA TO DO MY BIDDING!" CVTD-1895
"FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE, FOR HATE SAKE I SPIT MY LAST BREATH AT THEE" CA-1895 
"I HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS SHALL BE YOUR FRIEND" Spock 
"TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT CANDY IS DANDY BUT MURDER, OH MURDER, IS SO SWEET" CRL-2003 
"EYE OF NEWT, AND TOE OF FROG, WOOL OF BAT, AND TONGUE OF DOG ADDER'S FORK, BLIND-WORM'S STING, LIZARD'S LEG, AND OWLET'S WING. FOR A CHARM OF POWERFUL TROUBLE, LIKE A HELL-BROTH BOIL AND BABBLE. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE, FIRE BURN, AND CALDRON BUBBLE" WS

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Lambs to the GMO Slaughter Chuck Norris | Jul 29, 2014

Chuck Norris

American diets are being bombarded with genetically modified foods. Big seed companies initiate it. Big government enables it. Big food business loves it. But Americans are the ones paying the price through their pocketbook and especially their health. And worst of all, as the old song goes, it may be "killing you softly."

For those who may be unaware, genetically modified plants are grown from genetically modified or engineered seeds, which are created to resist insecticides and herbicides so that crops can be grown to withstand a weed-killing pesticide or integrate a bacterial toxin that can ward off pests.

As I pointed out in my C-Force health & fitness syndicated column this week on the same issue, genetically modified foods have been sliding into our diets since 1995, when the EPA analyzed genetically engineered corn.

Today, in the United States, as much as 80 percent of packaged foods contain ingredients that have been genetically modified, according to the Grocery Manufacturers Association. And 90 percent of many U.S. crops are grown with genetically engineered seed. In Iowa, for example, 91 percent of the corn and 93 percent of the soybean acres were genetically modified last year.

But unlike 60 other countries around the world -- including the European Union, which has required that genetically engineered foods be labeled since 1997, most Americans will never know if they are consuming GMOs because there are no federal and few state laws that require GMOs to be listed among food ingredients.

And where does our government stand on all this GMO business and proliferation?

The Chicago Tribune reported that the Food and Drug Administration has permitted the sale and planting of genetically modified foods for 15 years and that the Obama administration has approved an "unprecedented number of genetically modified crops," such as ethanol corn, alfalfa and sugar beets. The Alliance for Natural Health added that the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture now wants to eliminate any regulatory controls from genetically altered corn and cotton.

Strangely, instead of overstepping their boundaries as they do with virtually everything, the Obama administration retreats from any type of enforcement or regulation forcing food companies to list GMOs among their foods' ingredients.

Can you say aiding and abetting the enemy?

Leading the pro-GMO march is Monsanto, the world's largest seed maker and a publicly traded American multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation. The colossal seed giant is moving full-steam ahead to become the No. 1 U.S. and global farm supplier. They are so monopolizing the seed industry that Forbes recently cited a Fortune article noting that Monsanto "expects to earn about $5.1B in the current fiscal year and double its earnings per share within the next 5 years." The article concluded by calling Monsanto: an "unstoppable Leviathan" and saying that "GMOs are here to stay."

Public demand for transparency when it comes to GMOs is becoming louder, yet government approval advancing their use moves ever so quietly forward. For example, missed by media and little corporate fanfare, the USDA weeks ago gave its stamp of approval of a second-generation GMO soybean plant designed to resist a toxic herbicide called isoxaflutole, an agent that has been labeled by the Environmental Protection Agency as "a probable carcinogen."

Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety has been tracking the introduction of these second-generation GMO crops. Says Freese: "Biotech companies are now poised to introduce a host of 'next generation' GE crops resistant to more toxic herbicides as a false 'solution' to massive weed resistance. But their effects will be to generate still more intractable weeds resistant to multiple herbicides."

Almost all genetically engineered foods have been engineered for one purpose: to tolerate higher levels of herbicides. The problem is, weeds are constantly becoming more tolerant to the weed killer, creating a vicious cycle resulting in higher usage of more and more toxic herbicides such as Dow' AgriSciences' 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange. This requires more modifications to genetically modified foods.

As I've pointed out on this issue before, instead of eradicating the need for insecticides and herbicides, genetically modified plants will warrant stronger and more intense pesticides in order to outwit and overcome superbugs and greater strains of diseases.

And who's to say what GMOs will do -- now or in generations -- inside our bodies as we consume them on a greater scale and they become a part of the bacteria in our digestive tracts?

With more and more U.S. foods being grown, manufactured and imported from places such as South America and Eastern Europe -- the precise areas outside the U.S. where Monsanto's biotech seeds are gaining their greatest foothold, food imports are quickly becoming a recipe for disaster. Remember, too, much of the GM crop grown around the world is used for livestock feed, so there's more than one way for GMOs to be ingested in your diet, such as from meat and dairy products.

According to GMO food proponent Dr. Pamela Ronald from UC Davis, "Genetically engineered crops currently on the market are as safe to eat and safe for the environment as organic or conventional foods."

But is that the case?

The Alliance for Natural Health cited the late George Wald, a Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology and one of the first scientists to speak out about the dangers of genetically engineered foods: "Recombinant DNA technology faces our society with problems unprecedented, not only in the history of science, but of life on the Earth. ... Now whole new proteins will be transposed overnight into wholly new associations, with consequences no one can foretell, either for the host organism or their neighbors. ... For going ahead in this direction may not only be unwise but dangerous. Potentially, it could breed new animal and plant diseases, new sources of cancer, novel epidemics."

Equally alarming is a recent study that was published in the journal Neurology. According to Medical Daily, a review of 104 studies conducted around the world revealed that exposure to pesticides, insecticides, weed killers, fungicides, solvents, etc., increased the risk of developing Parkinson's disease by 30 to 80 percent.

If there's a bright light on the GMO horizon, it's going to happen because we consumers put the pressure on the food industries and cry out to individual food companies.

As a result of consumer advocacy, Whole Foods plans to require labeling in all products sold in U.S. and Canadian stores by 2018. And General Mills plans to stop using bioengineered cornstarch and sugar cane for its original Cheerios and to prominently display the fact.

Who's next? That's up to you and me.

 
Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris is a columnist and impossible to kill.
 
Carl Ray Louk

"FRIENDSHIP NEVER ENDS" SG-1996
"LET LOVE LEAD THE WAY" SG-2000
"THE PHOENIX SHALL RISE" SD
"EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE IN HEART AND SAYS HIS PRAYERS BY NIGHT, MAY BECOME A WOLF WHEN THE WOLFBANE BLOOMS AND THE AUTUMN MOON IS BRIGHT." LT-1941
"FLESH OF MY FLESH; BLOOD OF MY BLOOD; KIN OF MY KIN WHEN SAY COME TO YOU, YOU SHALL CROSS LAND OR SEA TO DO MY BIDDING!" CVTD-1895
"FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE, FOR HATE SAKE I SPIT MY LAST BREATH AT THEE" CA-1895 
"I HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS SHALL BE YOUR FRIEND" Spock 
"TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT CANDY IS DANDY BUT MURDER, OH MURDER, IS SO SWEET" CRL-2003 
"EYE OF NEWT, AND TOE OF FROG, WOOL OF BAT, AND TONGUE OF DOG ADDER'S FORK, BLIND-WORM'S STING, LIZARD'S LEG, AND OWLET'S WING. FOR A CHARM OF POWERFUL TROUBLE, LIKE A HELL-BROTH BOIL AND BABBLE. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE, FIRE BURN, AND CALDRON BUBBLE" WS

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End Torture, Shut Down the CIA Ron Paul | Jul 29, 2014

Ron Paul

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier.

Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA had not only lied about the torture of large numbers of people after 9/11, but it had vastly exaggerated any valuable information that came from such practices.

However secret rendition of prisoners to other places was ongoing

The US not only tortured people in its own custody, however. Last week the European Court of Human Rights found that the US government transferred individuals to secret detention centers in Poland (and likely elsewhere) where they were tortured away from public scrutiny. The government of Poland was ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to two victims for doing nothing to stop their torture on Polish soil.

How tragic that Poland, where the Nazis constructed the Auschwitz concentration camp in which so many innocents were tortured and murdered, would acquiesce to hosting secret torture facilities. The idea that such brutality would be permitted on Polish soil just 70 years after the Nazi occupation should remind us of how dangerous and disingenuous governments continue to be.

This is the first time the European court has connected any EU country to US torture practices. The Obama administration refuses to admit that such facilities existed and instead claims that any such "enhanced interrogation" programs were shut down by 2009. We can only hope this is true, but we should be wary of government promises. After all, they promised us all along that they were not using torture, and we might have never known had photographs and other information not been leaked to the press.

There are more reasons to be wary of this administration's claims about rejecting torture and upholding human rights. The president has openly justified killing American citizens without charge or trial and he has done so on at least three occasions. There is not much of a gap between torture and extrajudicial murder when it comes to human rights abuses.

Meanwhile, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior current and former CIA officials are said to be frantically attempting to prepare a response to a planned release of an unclassified version of a 6,500 page Senate Intelligence Committee study on the torture practices of that agency. The CIA was already caught tapping into the computers of Senate investigators last year, looking to see what information might be contained in the report. Those who have seen the report have commented that it details far more brutal CIA practices that have been revealed to this point.

Revelations of US secret torture sites overseas and a new Senate investigation revealing widespread horrific CIA torture practices should finally lead to the abolishment of this agency. Far from keeping us safer, CIA covert actions across the globe have led to destruction of countries and societies and unprecedented resentment toward the United States. For our own safety, end the CIA!

 
Ron Paul

Ron Paul

Ron Paul is a former congressman from Texas and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
 
Carl Ray Louk

"FRIENDSHIP NEVER ENDS" SG-1996
"LET LOVE LEAD THE WAY" SG-2000
"THE PHOENIX SHALL RISE" SD
"EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE IN HEART AND SAYS HIS PRAYERS BY NIGHT, MAY BECOME A WOLF WHEN THE WOLFBANE BLOOMS AND THE AUTUMN MOON IS BRIGHT." LT-1941
"FLESH OF MY FLESH; BLOOD OF MY BLOOD; KIN OF MY KIN WHEN SAY COME TO YOU, YOU SHALL CROSS LAND OR SEA TO DO MY BIDDING!" CVTD-1895
"FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE, FOR HATE SAKE I SPIT MY LAST BREATH AT THEE" CA-1895 
"I HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS SHALL BE YOUR FRIEND" Spock 
"TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT CANDY IS DANDY BUT MURDER, OH MURDER, IS SO SWEET" CRL-2003 
"EYE OF NEWT, AND TOE OF FROG, WOOL OF BAT, AND TONGUE OF DOG ADDER'S FORK, BLIND-WORM'S STING, LIZARD'S LEG, AND OWLET'S WING. FOR A CHARM OF POWERFUL TROUBLE, LIKE A HELL-BROTH BOIL AND BABBLE. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE, FIRE BURN, AND CALDRON BUBBLE" WS

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Cease the Cease-Fires Thomas Sowell | Jul 29, 2014

Thomas Sowell

Many years ago, on my first trip around the world, I was struck by how the children in the Middle East -- Arab and Israeli alike -- were among the nicest looking little children I had seen anywhere.

It was painful to think that they were going to grow up killing each other. But that is exactly what happened.

It is understandable that today many people in many lands just want the fighting between the Israelis and the Palestinians to stop. Calls for a cease-fire are ringing out from the United Nations and from Washington, as well as from ordinary people in many places around the world.

According to the New York Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is hoping for a cease-fire to "open the door to Israeli and Palestinian negotiations for a long-term solution." President Obama has urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have an "immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire" -- again, with the idea of pursuing some long-lasting agreement.

If this was the first outbreak of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis, such hopes might make sense. But where have the U.N., Kerry and Obama been during all these decades of endlessly repeated Middle East carnage?

The Middle East must lead the world in cease-fires. If cease-fires were the road to peace, the Middle East would easily be the most peaceful place on the planet.

"Cease-fire" and "negotiations" are magic words to "the international community." But just what do cease-fires actually accomplish?

In the short run, they save some lives. But in the long run they cost far more lives, by lowering the cost of aggression.

At one time, launching a military attack on another nation risked not only retaliation but annihilation. When Carthage attacked Rome, that was the end of Carthage.

But when Hamas or some other terrorist group launches an attack on Israel, they know in advance that whatever Israel does in response will be limited by calls for a cease-fire, backed by political and economic pressures from the United States.

It is not at all clear what Israel's critics can rationally expect the Israelis to do when they are attacked. Suffer in silence? Surrender? Flee the Middle East?

Or -- most unrealistic of al -- fight a "nice" war, with no civilian casualties? General William T. Sherman said it all, 150 years ago: "War is hell."

If you want to minimize civilian casualties, then minimize the dangers of war, by no longer coming to the rescue of those who start wars.

Israel was attacked, not only by vast numbers of rockets but was also invaded -- underground -- by mazes of tunnels.

There is something grotesque about people living thousands of miles away, in safety and comfort, loftily second-guessing and trying to micro-manage what the Israelis are doing in a matter of life and death.

Such self-indulgences are a danger, not simply to Israel, but to the whole Western world, for it betrays a lack of realism that shows in everything from the current disastrous consequences of our policies in Egypt, Libya and Iraq to future catastrophes from a nuclear-armed Iran.

Those who say that we can contain a nuclear Iran, as we contained a nuclear Soviet Union, are acting as if they are discussing abstract people in an abstract world. Whatever the Soviets were, they were not suicidal fanatics, ready to see their own cities destroyed in order to destroy ours.

As for the ever-elusive "solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflicts in the Middle East, there is nothing faintly resembling a solution anywhere on the horizon. Nor is it hard to see why.

Even if the Israelis were all saints -- and sainthood is not common in any branch of the human race -- the cold fact is that they are far more advanced than their neighbors, and groups that cannot tolerate even subordinate Christian minorities can hardly be expected to tolerate an independent, and more advanced, Jewish state that is a daily rebuke to their egos.

 
Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The Housing Boom and Bust.

Creators Syndicate

 
Carl Ray Louk

"FRIENDSHIP NEVER ENDS" SG-1996
"LET LOVE LEAD THE WAY" SG-2000
"THE PHOENIX SHALL RISE" SD
"EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE IN HEART AND SAYS HIS PRAYERS BY NIGHT, MAY BECOME A WOLF WHEN THE WOLFBANE BLOOMS AND THE AUTUMN MOON IS BRIGHT." LT-1941
"FLESH OF MY FLESH; BLOOD OF MY BLOOD; KIN OF MY KIN WHEN SAY COME TO YOU, YOU SHALL CROSS LAND OR SEA TO DO MY BIDDING!" CVTD-1895
"FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE, FOR HATE SAKE I SPIT MY LAST BREATH AT THEE" CA-1895 
"I HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS SHALL BE YOUR FRIEND" Spock 
"TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT CANDY IS DANDY BUT MURDER, OH MURDER, IS SO SWEET" CRL-2003 
"EYE OF NEWT, AND TOE OF FROG, WOOL OF BAT, AND TONGUE OF DOG ADDER'S FORK, BLIND-WORM'S STING, LIZARD'S LEG, AND OWLET'S WING. FOR A CHARM OF POWERFUL TROUBLE, LIKE A HELL-BROTH BOIL AND BABBLE. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE, FIRE BURN, AND CALDRON BUBBLE" WS

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Monday, July 28, 2014

I bid you good afternoon. I am @ dialysis & hooked...

I bid you good afternoon. I am @ dialysis & hooked up. I have 4:16 left. I'll come off around 5:20pm
Carl Ray Louk

Friday, July 25, 2014

I bid you good noon. I am @ dialysis & hooked up. ...

I bid you good noon. I am @ dialysis & hooked up. I have 2:54 left. I'll come off around 3:50pm
Carl Ray Louk

Thursday, July 24, 2014

What If Democracy Is a Fraud? Judge Andrew Napolitano | Jul 24, 2014

Judge Andrew Napolitano
What if you were allowed to vote only because it didn't make a difference? What if no matter how you voted the elites always got their way? What if the concept of one person/one vote was just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance?

What if democracy as it has come to exist in America today is dangerous to personal freedom? What if our so-called democracy erodes the people's understanding of natural rights and the reasons for government and instead turns political campaigns into beauty contests? What if American democracy allows the government to do anything it wants, as long as more people bother to show up at the voting booth to support the government than show up to say no?

What if the purpose of contemporary democracy has been to convince people that they could prosper not through the voluntary creation of wealth but through theft from others? What if the only moral way to acquire wealth is through voluntary economic activity? What if the government persuaded the people that they could acquire wealth through political activity? What if economic activity includes all the productive and peaceful things we voluntarily do? What if political activity includes all the parasitical and destructive things the government does? What if the government has never created wealth? What if everything the government owns it has stolen?

What if governments were originally established to protect people's freedoms but always turn into political and imperialist enterprises that seek to expand their power, increase their territory and heighten their control of the population? What if the idea that we need a government to take care of us is a fiction perpetrated to increase the size of government? What if our strength as individuals and durability as a culture are contingent not on the strength of the government but on the amount of freedom we have from the government?

What if the fatal cocktail of big government and democracy ultimately produces dependency? What if so-called democratic government, once it grows to a certain size, begins to soften and weaken the people? What if big government destroys people's motivations and democracy convinces them that the only motivation they need is to vote and go along with the results?

What if Congress isn't actually as democratic as it appears? What if congressional elections don't square with congressional legislation because the polls aren't what counts, but what counts are the secret meetings that come after the voting? What if the monster Joe Stalin was right when he said the most powerful person in the world is the guy who counts the votes? What if the vote counting that really counts takes place in secret? What if that's how we lost our republic?

What if the problem with democracy is that the majority thinks it can right any wrong, write any law, tax any event, regulate any behavior and acquire any thing it wants? What if the greatest tyrant in history lives among us? What if that tyrant always gets its way, no matter what the laws are or what the Constitution says? What if that tyrant is the majority of voters? What if the majority in a democracy recognizes no limits on its power?

What if the government misinforms voters so they will justify anything the government wants to do? What if the government bribes people with the money it prints? What if it gives entitlements to the poor and tax breaks to the middle class and bailouts to the rich just to keep everyone dependent on it? What if a vibrant republic requires not just the democratic process of voting, but also informed and engaged voters who understand first principles of human existence, including the divine origin and inalienable individual possession of natural rights?

What if we could free ourselves from the yoke of big government through a return to first principles? What if the establishment doesn't want this? What if the government remains the same no matter who wins elections? What if we have only one political party -- the Big Government Party -- and it has a Democratic wing and a Republican wing? What if both wings want war and taxes and welfare and perpetual government growth, but offer only slightly different menus on how to achieve them? What if the Big Government Party enacted laws to make it impossible for meaningful political competition to thrive?

What if the late progressive Edmund S. Morgan was right when he said that government depends on make believe? What if our ancestors made believe that the king was divine? What if they made believe that he could do no wrong? What if they made believe that the voice of the king was the voice of God?

What if the government believes in make believe? What if it made believe that the people have a voice? What if it made believe that the representatives of the people are the people? What if it made believe that the governors are the servants of the people? What if it made believe that all men are created equal, or that they are not?

What if the government made believe that it is always right? What if it made believe that the majority can do no wrong? What if the tyranny of the majority is as destructive to human freedom as the tyranny of a madman? What if the government knows this?

What do we do about it?

 
Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano is the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey. He sat on the bench from 1987 to 1995, during which time he presided over 150 jury trials and thousands of motions, sentencings and hearings. He taught constitutional law at Seton Hall Law School for 11 years, and he returned to private practice in 1995. Judge Napolitano began television work in the same year.
 
Carl Ray Louk

"FRIENDSHIP NEVER ENDS" SG-1996
"LET LOVE LEAD THE WAY" SG-2000
"THE PHOENIX SHALL RISE" SD
"EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE IN HEART AND SAYS HIS PRAYERS BY NIGHT, MAY BECOME A WOLF WHEN THE WOLFBANE BLOOMS AND THE AUTUMN MOON IS BRIGHT." LT-1941
"FLESH OF MY FLESH; BLOOD OF MY BLOOD; KIN OF MY KIN WHEN SAY COME TO YOU, YOU SHALL CROSS LAND OR SEA TO DO MY BIDDING!" CVTD-1895
"FROM HELL'S HEART I STAB AT THEE, FOR HATE SAKE I SPIT MY LAST BREATH AT THEE" CA-1895 
"I HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS SHALL BE YOUR FRIEND" Spock 
"TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT CANDY IS DANDY BUT MURDER, OH MURDER, IS SO SWEET" CRL-2003 
"EYE OF NEWT, AND TOE OF FROG, WOOL OF BAT, AND TONGUE OF DOG ADDER'S FORK, BLIND-WORM'S STING, LIZARD'S LEG, AND OWLET'S WING. FOR A CHARM OF POWERFUL TROUBLE, LIKE A HELL-BROTH BOIL AND BABBLE. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE, FIRE BURN, AND CALDRON BUBBLE" WS

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Wednesday, July 23, 2014

I bid you good afternoon. I am @ dialysis & hooke...

I bid you good afternoon. I am @ dialysis & hooked up. I have 4:24 left. I'll come off around 5:31 pm
Carl Ray Louk

Do Blacks Need Favors? Walter E. Williams | Jul 23, 2014

Walter E. Williams
Earlier this month, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act was celebrated. During the act's legislative debate, then-Sen. Hubert Humphrey, responding to predictions, promised, "I'll eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas." I don't know whether Humphrey got around to keeping his promise, but here's my question: Is it within the capacity of black Americans to make it in this society without the special favors variously called racial preferences, quotas, affirmative action and race-sensitive policies? What might a "yes" answer to that question assume and imply about blacks? Likewise, what would a "no" answer assume and imply? Let's look at it.

There are some areas of black life in which excellence can be found without the slightest hint of racial preferences. Young blacks dominate basketball, football and some track-and-field events despite the fact that there has been a history of gross racial discrimination in those activities. Blacks are also prominent in several areas of the entertainment industry. Those observations mean that racial discrimination alone is not an insurmountable barrier to success. By the way, I can't think of any two fields with more ruthless competition.

You say, "OK, Williams, everyone knows about the success of blacks in sports and entertainment, but what about the intellectual arena?" A few inner-city junior high and high schools have produced black champion chess players, schools such as Philadelphia's Roberts Vaux High School and New York's Edward R. Murrow High School. Last year, two black teens -- from Intermediate School 318 Eugenio Maria de Hostos in Brooklyn, New York -- won the national high-school chess championship. All of this is in addition to quite a few black international masters and grandmasters in chess. Moreover, there's a long list of former and current black inventors and scientists. So there's no question that black people have the capacity to compete intellectually.

Civil rights organizations and their progressive allies, who all but suggest that blacks cannot achieve unless they are given special privileges, grossly insult and demean black people. But worse than that, when civil rights organizations and their progressive allies pursue special privileges for blacks in college admissions and when they attack academic performance standards as racially discriminatory, they are aiding and abetting an education establishment that delivers fraudulent education. They let educators off the hook, thereby enabling them to continue to produce educational fraud.

You say, "What do you mean by educational fraud, Williams?" There are many inputs to education that are beyond the control of educators, such as poor home environment, derelict parental oversight and students with minds alien and hostile to the education process. But there's one thing entirely within the control of the education establishment. That is the conferral of a high-school diploma. When a school confers a diploma upon a student, it attests that the student has mastered the 12th-grade levels of reading, writing and arithmetic. If, in fact, the student cannot perform at the seventh- or eighth-grade levels, the school has committed gross fraud. Even worse is the fact that black people, including those holding fraudulent diplomas, are completely unaware. It has absolutely nothing to do with racial discrimination. In fact, black education is the worst in cities where blacks have been the mayor, chief of police and superintendent of schools and where most of the teachers and principals are black.

Racial preferences in college admissions give elementary schools, middle schools and high schools a free hand to continue their destructive educational policy. If colleges did not have special admissions practices for black students, there would be far fewer blacks in colleges, and the fraud would be more apparent to parents. They might begin to ask why so many blacks with high-school diplomas could not get into college.

If the civil rights establishment and the progressives have their way, blacks will have to rely on special privileges in perpetuity.

 
Walter E. Williams

Walter E. Williams

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of 'Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?' and 'Up from the Projects: An Autobiography.' 
 
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