The Huffington Riposte

MARK LEVIN IS RIGHT ABOUT NEWT GINGRICH

2012-01-28T06:06:00.000-08:00

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CHECK IT OUT:

http://www.therightscoop.com/mark-levin-newt-did-more-for-the-conservative-movement-than-virtually-all-of-his-critics-today/

THE OBAMA ELIGIBILITY CASE GOES TO TRIAL IN GEORGIA

2012-01-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

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http://www.thenationalpatriot.com/?p=4138

OBAMA ELIGIBILITY COURT CASE…BLOW BY BLOW

By Craig Andresen on January 26, 2012 at 9:25 am

Given the testimony from today’s court case in Georgia, Obama has a lot of explaining to do. His attorney, Jablonski, was a NO SHOW as of course, was Obama.
The following is a nutshell account of the proceedings.
Promptly at 9am EST, all attorneys involved in the Obama Georgia eligibility case were called to the Judge’s chambers. This was indeed a very interesting beginning to this long awaited and important case.
The case revolved around the Natural Born clause of the Constitution and whether or not Obama qualifies under it to serve. More to the point, if found ineligible, Obama’s name would not appear on the 2012 ballot in Georgia.
With the small courtroom crowded, several in attendance could be seen fanning themselves with pamphlets as they waited for the return of the attorneys and the appearance of the judge.
Obama himself, who had been subpoenaed to appear, of course was nowhere near Georgia. Instead, Obama was on a campaign swing appearing in Las Vegas and in Colorado ignoring the court in Georgia.
Over the last several weeks, Obama’s attorney, Michael Jablonski, had attempted several tactics to keep this case from moving forward. He first tried to have it dismissed, then argued that it was irrelevant to Obama. After that, Jablonski argued that a state could not, under the law, determine who would or would not be on a ballot and later, that Obama was simply too busy with the duties of office to appear.
After all these arguments were dispatched by the Georgia Court, Jablonski, in desperation, wrote to the Georgia Secretary of State attempting to place Obama above the law and declared that the case was not to he heard and neither he nor his client would participate.

Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, fired back a letter hours later telling Jablonski he was free to abandon the case and not participate but that he would do so at his and his clients peril.
Game on.
5 minutes.
10 minutes.
15 minutes with the attorneys in the judge’s chambers.
20 minutes.
It appears Jablonski is not in attendance as the attorneys return, all go to the plaintiff table 24 minutes after meeting in the judge’s chambers.
Has Obama’s attorney made good on his stated threat not to participate? Is he directly ignoring the court’s subpoena? Is he placing Obama above the law? It seems so. Were you or I subpoenaed to appear in court, would we or our attorney be allowed such action or, non action?
Certainly not.
Court is called to order.
Obama’s birth certificate is entered into evidence.
Obama’s father’s place of birth, Kenya East Africa is entered into evidence.
Pages 214 and 215 from Obama’s book, “Dreams from My Father” entered into evidence. Highlighted. This is where Obama indicates that, in 1966 or 1967 that his father’s history is mentioned. It states that his father’s passport had been revoked and he was unable to leave Kenya.
Immigration Services documents entered into evidence regarding Obama Sr.
June 27^th, 1962, is the date on those documents. Obama’s father’s status shown as a non citizen of the United States. Documents were gotten through the Freedom of Information Act.
Testimony regarding the definition of Natural Born Citizen is given citing Minor vs Happersett opinion from a Supreme Court written opinion from 1875. The attorney points out the difference between “citizen” and “Natural Born Citizen” using charts and copies of the Minor vs Happersett opinion.
It is also pointed out that the 14^th Amendment does not alter the definition or supersede the meaning of Natural Born. It is pointed out that lower court rulings do not conflict with the Supreme Court opinion nor do they over rule the Supreme Court Minor vs Happersett opinion.
The point is, to be a natural born citizen, one must have 2 parents who, at the time of the birth in question, be citizens of the United States. As Obama’s father was not a citizen, the argument is that Obama, constitutionally, is ineligible to serve as President.
Judge notes that as Obama nor his attorney is present, action will be taken accordingly.
Carl Swinson takes the stand.
Testimony is presented that the SOS has agreed to hear this case, laws applicable, and that the DNC of Georgia will be on the ballot and the challenge to it by Swinson.
2^nd witness, a Mr. Powell, takes the stand and presents testimony regarding documents of challenge to Obama’s appearance on the Georgia ballot and his candidacy.
Court records of Obama’s mother and father entered into evidence.
Official certificate of nomination of Obama entered into evidence.
RNC certificate of nomination entered into evidence.
DNC language does NOT include language stating Obama is Qualified while the RNC document DOES. This shows a direct difference trying to establish that the DNC MAY possibly have known that Obama was not qualified.
Jablonski letter to Kemp yesterday entered into evidence showing their desire that these proceedings not take place and that they would not participate.
Dreams From My Father entered.
Mr. Allen from Tuscon AZ sworn in.
Disc received from Immigration and Naturalization Service entered into evidence. This disc contains information regarding the status of Obama’s father received through the Freedom of Information Act.
This information states clearly that Obama’s father was NEVER a U.S. Citizen.
At this point, the judge takes a recess.
The judge returns.
David Farrar takes the stand.
Evidence showing Obama’s book of records listing his nationality as Indoneasan. Deemed not relevant by the judge.
Orly Taitz calls 2^nd witness. Mr. Strump.
Enters into evidence a portion of letter received from attorney showing a renewal form from Obama’s mother for her passport listing Obama’s last name something other than Obama.
State Licensed PI takes the stand.
She was hired to look into Obama’s background and found a Social Security number for him from 1977. Professional opinion given that this number was fraudulent. The number used or attached to Obama in 1977, shows that Obama was born in the 1890. This shows that the number was originally assigned to someone else who was indeed born in 1890 and should never have been used by Obama.
Same SS number came up with addresses in IL, D.C. and MA.
Next witness takes the stand.
This witness is an expert in information technology and photo shop. He testifies that the birth certificate Obama provided to the public is layered, multiple layered. This, he testifies, indicates that different parts of the certificate have been lifted from more than one original document.
Linda Jordan takes the stand.
Document entered regarding SS number assigned to Obama. SS number is not verified under E Verify. It comes back as suspected fraudulent. This is the system by which the Government verifies ones citizenship.
Next witness.
Mr. Gogt.
Expert in document imaging and scanners for 18 years.
Mr. Gogt testifies that the birth certificate, posted online by Obama, is suspicious. States white lines around all the type face is caused by “unsharp mask” in Photoshop. Testifies that any document showing this, is considered to be a fraud.
States this is a product of layering.
Mr. Gogt testifies that a straight scan of an original document would not show such layering.
Also testifies that the date stamps shown on Obama documents should not be in exact same place on various documents as they are hand stamped. Obama’s documents are all even, straight and exactly the same indicating they were NOT hand stamped by layered into the document by computer.
Next witness, Mr. Sampson a former police officer and former immigration officer specializing in immigration fraud.
Ran Obama’s SS number through database and found that the number was issued to Obama in 1977 in the state of Connecticut . Obama never resided in that state. At the time of issue, Obama was living in Hawaii.
Serial number on birth certificate is out of sequence with others issued at that hospital. Also certification is different than others and different than twins born 24 hours ahead of Obama.
Mr. Sampson also states that portion of documents regarding Mr. Sotoroe, who adopted Obama have been redacted which is highly unusual with regards to immigration records.
Suggests all records from Social Security, Immigration, Hawaii birth records be made available to see if there are criminal charges to be filed or not. Without them, nothing can be ruled out.
Mr. Sampson indicates if Obama is shown not to be a citizen, he should be arrested and deported and until all records are released nobody can know for sure if he is or is not a U.S. Citizen.
Taitz shows records for Barry Sotoro aka Barack Obama, showing he resides in Hawaii and in Indonesia at the same time.
Taitz takes the stand herself.
Testifies that records indicate Obama records have been altered and he is hiding his identity and citizenship.
Taitz leave the stand to make her closing arguments.
Taitz states that Obama should be found, because of the evidence presented, ineligible to serve as President.
And with that, the judge closes the hearing.
What can we take away from this?
It’s interesting.
Now, all of this has finally been entered OFFICIALLY into court records.
One huge question is now more than ever before, unanswered.
WHO THE HELL IS THIS GUY?
Without his attorney present, Obama’s identity, his Social Security number, his citizenship status, and his past are all OFFICIALLY in question.
One thing to which there seems no doubt. He does NOT qualify, under the definition of Natural Born Citizen” provided by SCOTUS opinions, to be eligible to serve as President.
What will the judge decide? That is yet to be known, but it seems nearly impossible to believe, without counter testimony or evidence, because Obama and his attorney chose not to participate, that Obama will be allowed on the Georgia ballot.
It also opens the door for such cases pending or to be brought in other states as well.
Obama is in it deep and the DNC has some…a LOT…of explaining to do unless they start looking for a new candidate for 2012.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Also:
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http://obamaballotchallenge.com/an-empty-chair-defense-in-atlanta

THE STATE OF SOCIALIST ILLUSION

2012-01-26T09:26:00.000-08:00

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The Right Opinion

Alexander's Essay – January 26, 2012

Obama's State of Disunion

AKA, 'State of the Campaign'

http://patriotpost.us/alexander/2012/01/26/obamas-state-of-disunion/

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." --Article II, Section 1, Constitution of the United States

On Tuesday, Barack Hussein Obama recited what I hope will be his last tele-prompted State of the Union address. In attendance was a room half full of his Leftist sycophants, inebriated on their lust for power and hanging on every word from their "dear leader."
As anticipated by all parties present, there was not one solitary free market economic remedy mentioned in his entire diatribe. Every "solution" was predicated on government engineering via intervention, regulation or redistribution -- consistent with his dogmatic Democratic Socialist ideology. Predictably, he peppered his prose with populist appeals and classist rhetoric focused on "fairness."
BO's classist message was contradicted by his wife's iridescent cobalt blue dress. I'm told it came from the Barbara Tfank Resort Collection, but at $2,400, I doubt Michelle picked it up on one of those photo-op trips to Target. The two Obamas act like trailer trash who won the lucky lotto in 2008, and they've now elevated their station to the bourgeoisie.
What follows are two assessments of Obama's SOTU, one brief and the other more comprehensive.
The short version: "I went ... I know ... My ... My ... I took office ... I'm president ... I will work ... I intend ... I will oppose ... I want ... I took ... I refused ... me ... my ... my ... me ... I will sign ... I set ... I will go ... I will not ... I promise ... I hear ... I want ... me ... My ... I want ... I am ... I spoke ... me ... I believe ... my ... I took ... me ... I will sign ... my ... my ... my ... I will not ... I will not walk ... I will not cede ... I will ... I'm directing ... my ... I will sign ... I've ... my ... my ... I've ... I guess ... I will not ... I will ... I will not ... I will ... my ... I told ... my ...me ... my ... I get ... I don't ... I recognize ... I bet ... I've ... me ... I will ... I ask ... I've ... me ... I believe ... my ... my ... I can ... I have ... I will take ... I mean ... I intend ... I've ... I've ... I've ... me ... I began ... my ... I sat ... me for president ... me ... I look ... I'm (Applause.)"
Amazingly, there wasn't a single "uh" in the entire speech, which is to say that he gave the Obamaprompter his undivided attention -- except for his failed attempt to appear unscripted with that strange "spilt milk" bit.

And now, for a rebuttal analysis, I've excerpted key points from Obama's comments with parenthetical remarks for proper context.
"Think about the America within our reach. (Think quickly, because it's disappearing before our eyes.) The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. (Indeed it is!) An [America] where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. (By "fair share," Obama means that it is not fair for Americans who pay no taxes to bear the burden of all those who do pay taxes. And, by whose "set of rules"?) What's at stake aren't Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. (Correct.)"
"Let's remember how we got here. In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. (It's still Bush's fault) ... It was wrong. It was irresponsible. It plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hardworking Americans holding the bag. (And he rode that collapse into office.)"
Obama devoted a significant part of his speech to blame-shifting, particularly suggesting that the near-economic collapse in 2008 was precipitated by the "irresponsible" private sector, which was solely accountable for all the problems that plague both our economy and his re-election bid.
In fact, the collapse was largely attributable to government interference in the free market -- specifically Democrat manipulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lending practices, which spread across the entire mortgage banking industry -- leading to a real estate boom and bust, which Obama blames on "my predecessor" and Wall Street.
So, let's "remember how we got here" -- and do a bit of fact-checking along the way. Here is a brief overview of the catalyst that really collapsed "the house of cards."
In 2003, the Bush administration upgraded its concerns about Fannie and Freddie, requesting much stronger oversight. According to testimony by then Treasury Secretary John Snow, "We need a strong, world-class regulatory agency to oversee the prudential operations of the GSEs and the safety and the soundness of their financial activities." The New York Times reported that the administration's plan was "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago," and "an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken."
But Democrats would not support additional oversight or restrictions. Former House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank declared in congressional hearings: "These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios. And even if there were a problem, the federal government does not bail them out."
Frank insisted, "I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. I believe there has been more alarm raised about potential unsafety [sic] and unsoundness than, in fact, exists."
And roll the dice they did!
In the Senate, Charles Schumer objected to concerns raised by Sen. John McCain, about the solvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: "My worry is that we're using the recent safety and soundness concerns ... as a straw man to curtail Fannie and Freddie's mission." The "mission," as amended by Democrats, was to reach out with home loans to millions of marginal or unqualified "customers" -- thus fueling the real estate boom.
In 2004, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified: "What we're trying to avert is we have in our financial system right now two very large and growing financial institutions [which subsidize loans and] that prevents the markets from adjusting appropriately, prevents competition and the normal adjustment processes that ... creates stability. ... [By] enabling [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] to increase in size ... we are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk. If we fail to strengthen GSE regulation, we increase the possibility of insolvency in crisis."
In 2006, Sen. McCain again went to the Senate floor warning, "The GSEs need to be reformed without delay." However, every Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee voted against regulatory reforms. That year, housing prices peaked and started to reverse.
In 2008, amid eroding consumer confidence, the entire economy began spiraling toward collapse. Even Bill Clinton admitted, "I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress ... to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."
(For a more comprehensive examination of "how we got here," read "Crisis of Confidence.")
Now, Obama says, "I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place." This is the Big Lie he's been telling ever since he became a failed president. In fact, his policies are all about government intervention and manipulation of the economy.
Returning to excerpts from his SOTU: "There are fewer illegal [border] crossings than when I took office. (There are fewer jobs than when he took office.) Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away. (That law already exists -- Obama's administration has ignored it.) We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. (That was in reference to his administration.) Our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be... (out of business.) The payoffs on these public investments... (taxpayer-funded union votes.)"

"Take the money we're no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home. (I think he meant "take the debt we're no longer spending," and for "nation-building here"? more like "nation wrecking." For the record, since the ratification of our Constitution, the 43 presidents that followed added, $4.16 trillion in debt. Since taking office, the 44th president has added more than $4.6 trillion in additional debt.) We'll run out of money. (We already did.) Government can't fix the problem on its own. (Government IS the problem!) We need smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior. They make the free market work better. (Yes, a regulated free market.) When it comes to the deficit, we've already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. (Not really.)"

"Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. (OK, it is class warfare.) We don't begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. (Just drink the Kool-Aid.) I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right about now. (When will this guy shut up?!) Can you blame them for feeling a little cynical? (Nope.)"
"I've talked tonight about the deficit of trust. (In fact, you increased it exponentially.) I've asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy. (More centralization?) We should all want a smarter, more effective government. (We should all want a smaller more irrelevant government.) America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. (Even sitting down for a beer summit?) Working with our military leaders, I've proposed a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world ... gay or straight. (You knew where that was going, didn't you?)"
Remember when Obama proclaimed he was going to oversee "the fundamental transformation of the United States of America"? Well, he did. "How this incredible transformation will end remains uncertain," he said in his address. "But we have a huge stake in the outcome."
Indeed, we do have a huge stake in the outcome, as does our posterity. Patriots have staked our ground on the the side of Liberty.
Obama concluded, "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn't know what they're talking about." Anyone who does not think America is in decline, must be a socialist or profoundly ignorant -- but then I repeat myself.

(For a thorough breakdown on "how we got here," see the detailed analysis prepared by our colleagues at Heritage Foundation.)
Next election will be either a Sunrise or Sunset on Liberty. From across the nation, American Patriots must rise up, band together and expel through the ballot box Obama's socialist regime. We must replace him with a president who will, first and foremost, abide by his oath to "Support and Defend" our Constitution.
(A footnote about all the Republican intra-party bickering: Obama may well change the dynamics of this election cycle by announcing a new vice presidential running mate in the run-up to the Democrat National Convention in September -- Jon Huntsman comes to mind -- and unity among conservatives, starting right now, is critical to victory.)

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Libertas aut Mortis!

Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Poste authors best reflect good Right Thinking. We post these essays – without advertising or frills – by 0800 ET each day. –Mark Alexander, Executive Editor

(Please pray for our Armed Forces standing in harm's way around the world, and for their families -- especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)

MEET NEWT, THE ENERGIZER BUNNY

2012-01-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

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Newt's Surge

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL / POLITICAL DIARY ONLINE
Monday, 23 January 12

The Republican establishment is aghast at Newt Gingrich's victory in South Carolina Saturday, with some calling it "cataclysmic" for the GOP. They point to Real Clear Politics polls showing Mitt Romney tied or ahead of Barack Obama, but Mr. Gingrich down by double digits to the president.

But this misses something. Mr. Gingrich did well in South Carolina because he helped the GOP overcome what I have described previously as the "excitement deficit." Mediocre turnout in Iowa and New Hampshire pointed to a potentially crippling lack of enthusiasm for this field of White House wannabes. But in South Carolina, turnout appears to have been up by as much as one-third.

Michael Barone, the dean of election analysts, finds that "turnout increased in South Carolina from 445,377 in 2008 to 600,953 in 2012 -- a 35 percent increase." Low turnout in 2008, he writes, "turned out to be a good indicator of the low spirits" of Republican voters that year. Mr. Barone says the "stagnant turnout" in Iowa and New Hampshire was a "bad sign" for Republicans in November.I heard some GOP commentators this weekend disparaging Mr. Gingrich as the Sharron Angle or Christine O'Donnell of the GOP field, referring to the two conservative Senate candidates in 2010 who lost to Democrats in the general election. But for now Mr. Gingrich is the GOP Energizer bunny who is

electrifying voters still not sold on Mitt Romney.

-- Stephen Moore

TODAY: GINGRICH 41%, ROMNEY 32% IN FLORIDA

2012-01-23T08:32:00.000-08:00

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2012 Florida Republican Primary

Florida GOP Primary: Gingrich 41%, Romney 32%

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2012/election_2012_presidential_election/florida/2012_florida_republican_primary

Monday, January 23, 2012

Less than two weeks ago, Mitt Romney had a 22-point lead in Florida, but that’s ancient history in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Following his big win in South Carolina on Saturday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich now is on top in Florida by nine.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Florida Republican Primary Voters, taken Sunday evening, finds Gingrich earning 41% of the vote with Romney in second at 32%. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum runs third with 11%, while Texas Congressman Ron Paul attracts support from eight percent (8%). Nine percent (9%) remain undecided.(To see survey question wording, click here).

Florida allows early voting, and Romney leads among those voters by 11 points. Gingrich leads by 12 among those who have not yet voted. Fourteen percent (14%) have already cast their vote.

One-in-three (32%) say they still could change their minds before they vote in the January 31 primary. Another nine percent (9%) have no initial preference yet. Fifty-nine percent (59%) are already certain of their vote, including 73% of Romney supporters and 62% of Gingrich voters.
Rasmussen Reports has begun daily tracking of potential matchups between both Romney and
Gingrich against President Obama (receive free daily e-mail updates).

Throughout the GOP race, Romney has always benefited from the perception that he was the strongest general election candidate in the field. However, among Florida voters at the moment, that is no longer the case. Forty-two percent (42%) now believe Gingrich would be the strongest candidate against Obama, while 39% say the same of Romney. At the other extreme, 64% see Ron Paul as the weakest potential candidate against Obama.

This Florida survey of 750 Likely Republican Primary Voters was conducted on January 22, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Seventy-seven percent (77%) have a favorable opinion of Romney, while 69% say the same of Gingrich. Sixty-four percent (64%) give Santorum positive reviews, but only 33% have a favorable opinion of Paul. In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Paul did better among non-Republicans than Republicans. In the Florida primary, only registered Republicans are allowed to participate.

By a 45% to 30% margin over Gingrich, Romney is seen as the best candidate to manage the economy. Gingrich has a 54% to 23% edge over the former Massachusetts governor when it comes to who is best qualified to handle national security matters.
As for which candidate is best in terms of social issues, 30% prefer Romney, 30% Gingrich and 23% Santorum.

When asked which candidate has the best personal character, 41% say Romney, 30% Santorum, 11% Gingrich and 10% Paul.

Gingrich leads by 28 among Very Conservative voters and by seven among Somewhat Conservative voters. Among all other voters, Romney leads by 20.

Gingrich picks up 52% of the Tea Party vote. Romney gets 17% and Santorum 16% of these voters.
Regardless of their personal favorite, most Florida primary voters (52%) still think Romney will be the eventual nominee, but that's down dramatically from 79% two weeks ago. Thirty-five percent (35%) now think Gingrich will be the GOP nominee.

PONCE DE LEON FOUND THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IN FLORIDA, WILL NEWT GINGRICH REDISCOVER IT?

2012-01-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
JANUARY 23, 2012
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Gingrich Challenge

A test for Romney, GOP officials, and the former speaker himself.

Newt Gingrich's sweeping victory in South Carolina throws the GOP Presidential contest into a useful uproar and poses a challenge for Mitt Romney, what's left of the Republican establishment, and not least for Mr. Gingrich himself. We'll see who rises to the occasion.

There's no denying the breadth of the former House speaker's triumph in the Palmetto State. He won among rank-and-file Republicans, tea partiers, men and women, all manner of conservatives, most income groups, and every age group save those under 30 (who went narrowly for Ron Paul over Mr. Gingrich).

Most strikingly, he routed Mr. Romney on what had been the former Massachusetts governor's greatest strength—electability. Some 45% of voters in the exit poll said defeating President Obama was the candidate trait that mattered most, and they went for Mr. Gingrich over Mr. Romney, 51% to 37%.

This reflects Mr. Gingrich's debate skills but perhaps more his willingness to promote conservative values. Since Reagan, Republicans have had a President or nominee who was typically either tongue-tied or timid in defending their policies and principles. With Mr. Obama preparing a re-election assault on those principles, GOP voters understandably want a tenacious advocate. Voters sense that, whatever his other failings, Mr. Gingrich can match Mr. Obama on the issues and won't go down without a fight.

This is in contrast to Mr. Romney, who is cautious at his most tenacious but in the last week has seemed befuddled by questions he surely knew were coming. The demand to release his tax returns was inevitable, especially with Mr. Obama preparing to attack him as "Mr. 1%." Mr. Romney said Sunday he will release his 2010 tax return on Tuesday, but blowing that layup suggests either personal stubbornness or the lack of an adviser who can tell him when he's wrong.

The more serious flaw exposed by the tax debate is Mr. Romney's inability, or unwillingness, to make a larger and persuasive case for free-market economic growth and lower tax rates. Before last week, he seemed to believe he could dodge a class-war battle by not proposing a cut in tax rates. This was always implausible given Mr. Obama's campaign, but it is impossible now that he has disclosed that his own effective tax rate is 15%.

He faces a fundamental political choice: Duck and cover against the barrage of attacks on his 15% rate, the lower rate on "carried-interest" and any overseas income he might have, or go on offense by standing for something larger than his own career, such as a major tax reform to spur growth.

Mr. Romney and his advisers are making the mistake that John Kerry made against George W. Bush in 2004—believing that voters are so unhappy with the incumbent that all Mr. Romney has to do is present himself as a safe alternative. Mr. Romney seems to think it's enough to run on his biography as a businessman.

It won't be enough—unless the economy goes into another recession, which no one should want in any case. The Republican nominee will have to make a sustained and specific case that Mr. Obama's policies made the recovery weaker than it should have been (stimulus, health care), squandered resources on political boondoggles (Solyndra), and how and why GOP policies will do better. Mr. Romney's 59 economic proposals are fine but forgettable little ideas. He needs a big idea.

In the wake of his victory, Mr. Gingrich has his own challenge because he has always been at his worst when he is on top. The Georgian's main vulnerability isn't his failed marriages, as South Carolina proved. It is his penchant for over-the-top statements and sudden shifts of strategy or policy based on personal whim. In South Carolina, for example, he began to rise when he muted his misguided attacks on Bain Capital and focused on other issues.

Rick Santorum is candidly saying he plans to stay in the race, despite a distant third-place finish, mainly because he thinks Mr. Gingrich will blow himself up again. Mr. Romney and his surrogates will also try to portray the former speaker as unreliable and erratic, a Hindenburg sure to explode if he gets the nomination. If Mr. Gingrich handles the attacks with good humor and rational explanation, he'll reassure voters. If he erupts in anger or unleashes his inner de Gaulle, he'll play into the hands of his competitors.

Mr. Gingrich will also eventually need a more inclusive message than he is now offering. He made a stab at it in his South Carolina victory remarks by mentioning the strengths of his competitors. His bow to Mr. Paul's "sound money" platform was especially shrewd, but then he kept talking and talking in his familiar undisciplined fashion.

Mr. Gingrich's biggest problem is that more voters say they dislike than like him. In a recent Fox News poll, 56% said they had an unfavorable view of him, versus 27% favorable. That's a net unfavorable rating of minus-29%, compared with a plus-5% for Mr. Obama and plus-7% for Mr. Romney.

Mr. Gingrich is never going to be well loved, and voters may overlook that if they want a hard man for hard times. But he can't only practice the politics of contrast and win an election. Media-bashing may work when the questions seem unfair, but not when they are legitimate queries concerning his record at Freddie Mac or in Congress. He needs to practice the politics of addition with independents and nonconservatives.

As for the GOP establishment, such as it still is, Mr. Gingrich's re-emergence is likely to cause a panic attack. They don't believe he is electable. Our advice would be to relax and let the voters decide. If Mr. Romney can't marshal the wit and nerve to defeat the speaker, then he isn't likely to defeat Mr. Obama.

If GOP office-holders had a better candidate, they should have rallied behind one to get into the race, and they still could if the primary contest drags on without a clear winner. In any case the record of elected GOP politicians in picking nominees is hardly inspiring. Rank-and-file voters are likely to have a clearer sense of what the country needs. On to Florida.

ROMNEY'S BANE IS BAIN

2012-01-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

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The Right Opinion

Alexander's Essay – January 19, 2012

The Problem With Rich Republicans

"As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature." --Alexander Hamilton, 1788

A week before the unwarranted criticism of Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, I had a debate with a friend who is himself a successful venture capitalist. Our debate was about the rights and responsibilities that attend free enterprise capitalism.
I asserted that one of his partners, who amassed a great fortune from "payday loans," a particularly egregious form of usury akin to loan sharking but targeting mostly those with low income, had ethical and moral obligations associated with his wealth.
My friend feigned SHOCK that I would suggest such responsibilities exist, given my unmitigated support for free enterprise, my fervent defense of the accumulation of wealth and my condemnation of Leftist class warfare politics. He acted as if the mere mention of such obligations was tantamount to supporting Democratic Socialism.
Of course, his reaction framed a false dichotomy that often emerges when conservatives mention rights and responsibilities in connection with wealth. He knew better than to question my devotion to Liberty, including first and foremost, my advocacy for Essential Liberty and free enterprise as foundational tenets sustaining our Republic.
Indeed, there is an enormous difference between ethical and moral obligations according to the dictates of one's conscience, and Leftist endeavors to enforce their interpretation of those obligations through implementation of socialist economic policies, which inevitably result in trickle-up poverty. Those differences need to be elucidated, not obfuscated.

What obligations are associated with wealth? Post Your Opinion

The failure of socialist doctrine was evident long before the word "socialism" became part of the common lexicon. In 1766, for example, Founder Benjamin Franklin wrote in "Management of the Poor," "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
Unfortunately, that lesson is lost on the Left today, as they endeavor to undermine the authority of our Constitution by replacing Rule of Law with rule of men, and enacting economic policies that are anathema to Liberty.
That notwithstanding, like it or not, ethical and moral obligations are irrevocably linked to our vocations, including those that produce great wealth. How we respond to these obligations will, in large measure, determine whether our Republic can transcend the "Fatal Cycle of Democracy": From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to courage; From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law); From Liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage (rule of men).
Though my friend's investment partner has the legal right to make as much money as he can on "payday loans," that does not exclude ethical and moral questions regarding how he makes his money and to what benefit or detriment of others. He is free to make and dispense with his wealth as his conscience prescribes, as we all should be. He is also free to insulate and isolate his conscience from the overarching ethical and moral dictates that inform the consciences of most Americans. He is free to justify that disconnect with all manner of rationalizations, as too many very wealthy people are predisposed to do. But those freedoms have inescapable consequences both for the individual and our country.
Too often, conservative leaders, both elected and in policy organizations, hide from mentioning wealth-related obligations for fear of offending those who butter their bread. But the average donation in support of The Patriot Post from our grassroots countrymen is less than $50 -- so we are not beholden to a few wealthy donors, not that having such donor support would influence our message one way or the other.
I believe that conservatives fail to acknowledge the moral and ethical responsibilities related to material wealth at great peril to Liberty.

Is the aggregation of wealth threat to Liberty? Post Your Opinion

So, first, who are "the rich"? That subjective opinion varies widely across our nation, for everyone has more than someone.
Barack Hussein Obama, in his classist rhetoric, claims that couples earning more than $250,000 per year and individuals earning more than $200,000 are rich. In reality, however, a lifestyle that most people consider "rich" -- living within gated communities; owning multiple homes; commuting in private aircraft, boats and expensive autos; recreating with other rich and famous folks (Obama's lifestyle) -- requires a much higher income and substantial net worth.
Of course, a well-kept secret is that there are plenty of rich on the Left, and because of the seductive nature of wealth and its influence on those who hold it, I believe they have wealthy conservatives badly outnumbered. Inheritance welfare liberalism, like welfare liberalism and dependence upon the state, has produced generations of Useful Idiots. In terms of their foundational character, liberals who are dependent on inherited wealth and welfare recipients who are dependent on the state for their sustenance never embraced self-reliance as the essential ingredient of a free society.
Unfortunately, too often there is little that distinguishes the Leftist rich from most of ours, other than the fact that limo-liberals are burdened with the hypocrisy of holding great wealth while advocating socialist policies for everyone else. For the elitists on the Left, wealth is evil only when in the hands of those who hold opposing philosophies and worldviews.
So, what are the implications if Mitt Romney, a rich white guy who amassed millions as a venture capitalist, wins the Republican nomination?
Well, presidential elections tend to be decided by Independent voters in the gap between Republicans and Democrats, and that is truer than ever in this election. Thus, it is important to understand that the concentration of wealth in America concerns a much broader cross section of voters than just Leftist occupiers. According to reputable polling firms, a substantial majority of Americans are concerned about the aggregation of wealth, particularly of the "Wall Street" variety.
Obama and his Leftmedia sycophants have succeeded in elevating this conflict above many other political issues.

The recent criticism of Romney's role at Bain Capital is a strawman, a classist proxy target for Obama if he opposes Romney. The fact is, neither Bain Capital nor Romney were, or are, heartless leveraged buyout liquidators. Romney has his faults, but he is no "vulture capitalist" as Rick Perry labeled him.
What concerns me more about Romney is that 26 of the 29 members of Congress who received the largest contributions from Bain executives since 2000 were Democrats. Indeed, Bain executives were major supporters of Weiner, Franken, Kerry and Kennedy. Of course, most of the money flowing from Wall Street to Washington supports Democrats.
Romney has thus far politically capitalized on his fortunes made at Bain by rightly claiming his business experience is a substantial qualification for the office of president. However, he needs to frame his wealth in the context of the obligations incumbent upon it. Unfortunately, to date, he has avoided doing so.

What does Romney need to say about his wealth? Post Your Opinion

There are legitimate concerns about the implications of wealth aggregation on Liberty, and the only way to defuse those concerns is to address them directly.
Obama's compulsory socialist solution for addressing those concerns was outlined by Karl Marx: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
Historically, however, it is the voluntary Christian context for wealth that is most compatible with Liberty. Long before the tyranny of statist Marxism emerged, a far superior framework for the ethical and moral obligations connected to wealth was outlined in the Gospel according to Luke, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be expected; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."
It is that context to which Romney subscribes, with the subscript of the Book of Mormon. That he should make plain and do it now.
Obama's classist rhetoric on economic disparity has been very effective, and will be central to his political strategy in the upcoming general election. Like a cruise ship captain who detours from the authorized course, Obama's detour from the course of Liberty and free enterprise authorized by our Constitution, with the help of Leftists and Republicrats in Congress, will sink our ship.
If Romney is the nominee, he must boldly distinguish the moral and ethical obligations of his wealth within the framework of Liberty as "endowed by our Creator," opposed to Obama's socialist agenda. Romney's accumulated wealth is his "Achilles' heel." Romney will grease the skids for Obama to win the class warfare debate unless he frames that debate now.
Regardless of individual net worth, virtue related to wealth is shaped not so much by what we own, but by what owns us. I hope Romney has demonstrated great virtue through an outstanding record of generosity. If not, then I hope enough Independents are prepared to vote against Obama, regardless of who is on the Republican ticket.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Libertas aut Mortis!

Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED

2012-01-19T09:09:00.000-08:00

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Newt Gingrich

The news this morning is that Newt Gingrich's former wife has given a two hour interview with the Washington Post in which she savages Newt. Truly, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It is easy to see why Newt wished to be free from such a woman. His daughter from his marriage to his first wife makes the case that all this happened a long time ago and that Newt's second wife is simply an angry, bitter and vengeful woman. Newt's daughter, Jackie, has already written what should be a definitive account (in Townhall.com months ago) explaining that his visit to the hospital was when she was being successfully treated for cancer, it was to accompany his children to see their mother, NOT to serve divorce papers on her because SHE was the one who filed for divorce. This, plus the fact of his conversion should be widely advertised in the media but it will probably not be. The media and RINOs are scared to death that Newt might win the nomination.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM NEWT GINGRICH'S SHINING MOMENT IN THE SOUTH CAROLINA DEBATE

2012-01-18T11:44:00.001-08:00

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http://www.redstate.com/repair_man_jack/2012/01/17/what-we-can-learn-from-newt-gingrich%E2%80%99s-shining-moment/

THE SCANDAL OF MITT ROMNEY'S TAX RETURN

2012-01-18T11:34:00.000-08:00

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

POLITICAL DIARY

19 January 2012

Quote of the Day

After refusing for weeks to release his taxes, Mitt Romney now says he'll do so -- by tax day, April 15. But the real news is what Romney has now admitted about his taxes -- the fact he doesn't want to become news once the media begin scouring his tax forms. It's not how much Romney earns. Everyone knows he's comfortably in the top one-tenth of one percent . . .

The real smoking gun is how Romney manages to pay only 15 percent on what's been his money-gusher of compensation from Bain Capital. Romney hasn't released his tax returns yet, but the most obvious answer is he treats his Bain income as capital gains -- subject to the current capital gains rate of only 15 percent.

A loophole in the tax laws allows private-equity managers like Romney to treat their compensation as capital gains. It's legal but it's a scandal. Income from employment is employment income, period. Private-equity managers cling to the technicality that the money they take out of their companies comes from the appreciation of assets they own and sell. That may be true, but it's still income they get from their jobs. Common sense would dictate it be treated as ordinary income. Congress has vowed for years to close this loophole. But somehow it persists. Even when Democrats have been in charge, they haven't been able to close it.

Guess why. The managers and executives of private-equity funds are big donors to Republicans and Democrats alike.

-- Robert Reich blogging at huffingtonpost.com on Jan. 17.

NEWT GINGRICH LAST RECEIVED THE ONLY STANDING OVATION IN ALL THE DEBATES TO DATE

2012-01-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

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BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
JANUARY 17, 2012
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

Why They Stood and Cheered

Gingrich confronts the left's insidious theory of racial supremacy.

By JAMES TARANTO

Bye-Ku for Jon Huntsman
Call me crazy, but
I think insulting voters
Will warm them to me

Why They Stood and Cheered

The live-audience reaction to Republican presidential debates is a matter of great public significance--so great that even the president of the United States takes time out from his duties to evaluate it. We anxiously await President Obama's comment on what, as far as we know, is a first in the history of presidential debates: a standing ovation.

It happened at last night's debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., which was sponsored by Fox News Channel and The Wall Street Journal. FoxNewsInsider.com describes the exchange that prompted it:

Juan Williams questioned Newt Gingrich about his recent comments that black Americans should "demand jobs, not food stamps," and that Obama is a "Food Stamp President." When asked if he could see why these comments might be insulting to African-Americans, Gingrich said flatly, "No, I don't see that."

He then went onto [sic] propose a janitorial program that would allow students to do light janitorial work while continuing their studies, paying them and teaching them the value of work. He said that they would be earning money, "which is a good thing if you're poor. Only the elites despise earning money."

Williams then pressed, suggesting that Gingrich's comments, including references to President Obama as a "Food Stamp President," were intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities.

Gingrich responded, "The fact is more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history."

He proclaimed, "I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their Creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job."

One might ask: What's race got to do with it? An essay carrying that title appeared on the New York Times website two days before the debate, but the question turned out not to be rhetorical. The author, Lee Siegel, was writing about Mitt Romney's campaign, not Gingrich's, but there is a clarifying resonance between his piece and Gingrich's response to Williams.
Siegel writes that "Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory." That sounds like a promising start to a Chris Rock comedy riff, but Siegel means it as a serious thesis.
"I'm not talking about a strict count of melanin density," Siegel writes. Rather, he refers to something he imagines is less ludicrous: Romney's "whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America."

This is almost like a Peggy Noonan observation from a few months ago:

Mr. Romney's added value is his persona. He's a little like the father in one of those 1950s or '60s sitcoms that terrorized and comforted a generation of children from non-functioning families: Somewhere there was a functioning one, and it was nice enough to visit you on Wednesday at 8. He's like Robert Young in "Father Knows Best," or Fred MacMurray in "My Three Sons": You'd quake at telling him about the fender-bender, but after the lecture on safety and personal responsibility, he'd buck you up and throw you the keys.

Almost but not quite, for Noonan did not racialize the type. In her telling, it is Romney's confident, responsible masculinity that is reassuring. In Siegel's, it is the color of Romney's skin.
Siegel also conflates Romney's ideological criticism of Obama with "whiteness":

While Mr. Romney may, in some people's eyes, be a non-Christian, he is better than any of his opponents at synching his worldview with that of the evangelicals. He likes to present, with theological urgency, a stark choice between, in his words, President Obama's "entitlement society" and the true American freedom of an "opportunity society." . . .

In this way, whether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum.

Siegel isn't the first to define the "opportunity society" as being for whites only. Last June, as we noted, MSNBC's Chris Matthews accused Romney of having employed a "slur" for observing of Obama that in his approach to economic policy, "he's awfully European." Matthews apparently is unaware that Europe's biggest export to America has been white people.

Romney and his fellow Republicans are making a case (at least relative to President Obama) for economic freedom and against the expansion of government. To be sure, one may prefer Obama's policies on reasoned grounds that have nothing to do with race. It is also true that for most of America's history, and as recently as the 1960s, blacks were denied the freedoms, economic and otherwise, that whites took for granted.

Getty ImagesThat's telling them.

But no Republican running for president is proposing a return to Jim Crow or a repeal of civil rights laws. Siegel's implicit notion that only whites are capable of benefiting from economic freedom under a regime of legal equality amounts to an insidious theory of racial supremacy.

That is the idea that Newt Gingrich repudiated in answer to Juan Williams's (not particularly objectionable) question. That is what brought the crowd to their feet.

The people who stood and cheered as the former speaker forcefully defended the freedom of "every American of every background" were mostly white members of today's Republican Party in the state that started the Civil War and later produced "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman and Strom Thurmond. That it was Martin Luther King Day was lagniappe.

Next to the election of a black president, we'd say that Gingrich's standing O was the most compelling dramatization of racial progress so far this century. Which isn't to say that racism has been completely eradicated. It lives on in the minds of liberals who see Bull Connor when they look at Ozzie Nelson.

WHO WON THE GOP DEBATE LAST NIGHT?

2012-01-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

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http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/who-won-the-debate-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert-8/

WHAT WE NEED IS THE REARRANGEMENT OF FOCUS OF THE OLD MEN WHO SEND YOUNG MEN TO WAR

2012-01-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

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Another grovel, not a rebuke

By Wesley Pruden Where’s a Porta-Potty when a few good men need one?

This is the question Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, ought to concern himself with, instead of trying to top Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, with over-the-top “outrage” over a Marine patrol taking a leak on the bodies of several freshly killed terrorists in Afghanistan.

If Mr. Panetta had been doing his job, he might have found enough Porta-Potties to spell battlefield relief for the Marines. This should teach him a needed lesson. Battlefield rest rooms are important, and will become even more important when women are dispatched to the battlefield. Lady grunts will expect something more than toilet-seat etiquette or an inconvenient bush or tree stump to protect their modesty.

Mr. Panetta and Mrs. Clinton were each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and out-bewail the other.

The defense secretary and the secretary of state were each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and out-bewail the other, playing for the cameras a ferocious game of “can you top this?” Mr. Panetta said what the Marines did was “utterly deplorable.” It’s hard to get beyond “utterly,” but Mrs. Clinton called in her crack linguistics team at the State Department—where plain speech is utterly frowned on—and she soon pronounced herself in “total dismay” on hearing the news, and was sure that the “vast, vast” majority of “American military personnel” would never, ever do what those awful Marines did.

Mrs. Clinton’s description of that “vast, vast” majority, and not merely a “vast” majority, was taken to be an indication that she thought the Marines’ offense must have been twice as bad as the offense of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” tormenting Bubba for indulging in inappropriate merriment with a regiment of big-haired ladies at the White House. A secretary of state should use language precisely, and carefully ration her vasts.

Nevertheless, urine is rarely a proper salute even to dead terrorists, and the four Marines who relieved themselves on Taliban corpses should be properly disciplined. Americans, instructed by a culture informed by the certitudes of Jewish and Christian faith, are better than that. Still, sending two senior Cabinet officers do what a second lieutenant could have done was just short of a full grovel. The Obama administration stopped just short of sending the president himself to deliver a deep bow and a fulsome apology to the Taliban terrorists.

Mr. Panetta, who served two years as an Army intelligence officer several decades ago, knows better. Mrs. Clinton, whose hands-on knowledge of warfare and weaponry is limited to the lamps she threw at Bubba in the White House, has no knowledge of what Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the infamous Civil War firebug, was talking about when he famously said “war is hell.”

Dehumanizing the enemy is the first task of the men who send boys to war, men who never have to learn that war is more than merely a policy option. “But of course [these Marines] have dehumanized the enemy,” Sebastian Junger, a documentary filmmaker who spent a year with an Army platoon in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, observes in The Washington Post. “Otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather than demonstrate a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince themselves that they haven’t just committed their first murder—that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.”

Rick Perry got it right when he said the Obama administration’s rhetoric showed “a disdain for the military.” The incontinent Marines should be reprimanded, but filing criminal charges against them is unreasonable. “Kids, 18- and 19-year old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what occurred here. To call it a criminal act is over the top.”

An anonymous veteran of the Vietnam war makes a similar point in an Internet blog. “I was on the line in the A Shau Valley with the 101st Airborne Division. At Camp Sally, not a Club Med place to be. Nor for the faint of heart. You must understand that those who live war are a different breed. Perhaps later, much later, maturity rearranges one’s focus.”

What we need now is the rearrangement of the focus of the old men who send young men to war. They don’t have youth and inexperience to excuse their sins, miscalculations and misjudgments. These old men should keep this in mind when deciding how to discipline the Marines sent across the seas to defend and, if need be die, for their country.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

IS RON PAUL A FAERIE QUEEN

2012-01-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

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A crawl through the fairy dust

By Wesley Pruden George McGovern promised to “crawl on my knees” to Hanoi to quit the war in Vietnam. That didn’t win many friends among the grunts who fought the war designed by all those Harvard men, and Mr. McGoo’s campaign crashed and burned to the applause of nearly everyone in that distant year of 1972.

No one has accused Ron Paul of being a crawler, but he sometimes channels Mr. McGoo with his angry rhetoric against the wars in the Middle East. If he were president, he said last summer, he would bring home the new generation of grunts from Afghanistan “as quickly as the ships could get there.” Ships would find it hard going in land-locked Afghanistan, but we take his point.

But Mr. Paul has been nothing if not consistent, and he has consistently pushed himself to the margins of the national debate with his prescription for retreat into the Twilight Zone, where the world’s bad guys would roam unmolested by American arms. You might reasonably think this would make him a pariah among the young professionals who bear those arms in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. McGovern didn’t win many friends among the grunts who fought the war in Vietnam.

But you would think wrong. Mr. Paul boasted in an interview with PBS “News Hour” that he’s the favorite, by one measurement, of the men and women serving in the military in the region.

“It’s insane what we’re doing [in the Middle East],” he said. “And I’ll tell you one thing about this business with the military. We just had a quarterly [campaign finance] report, and they listed all the money that all the candidates got from the military. I got twice as much as all the other candidates put together on the Republican side, and even more than [President] Obama got, which tells me that those troops want to come home as well, because they know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Figures compiled by the Federal Election Commission, which identifies donations by the donors’ employers, confirm the particulars of his boast. During the second quarter of 2011, for one example, Ron Paul received $25,000 from members of the military services. Six other Republican candidates received almost $9,000 during this reporting period, and Barack Obama pulled in $16,000.

Ron Paul says the troops just want to come home, and he’s no doubt right. For soldiers, like everyone else, there’s no place like hearth and home, be it ever so humble. But the men and women in Afghanistan are professionals and volunteers, sworn to go where they’re told to go. Like everyone else they make private judgments about the why and wherefore.

David French, who soldiered with an armored cavalry squadron in Iraq, observes in National Review Online that the wars in the Middle East have taught many American soldiers to be cynical. (Others would call them skeptical.) They’ve learned that the region “is a savage place that views human life cheaply and will never, ever be worth fighting to change.”

They feel betrayed by “good-idea fairies,” idealists whose good but unrealistic intentions get good soldiers killed by misplaced idealism and Sesame Street multiculturalism. Soldiers are accustomed to blunt, to-the-point talk, and that’s how Ron Paul talks. Some of them send him a few bucks from their Saturday-night beer money.

Many of these men in “the boots on the ground” have listened to the moonshine dispensed by the men who sent them on fool’s errands in the Middle East, from George W. Bush and his theological assurance that “Islam is a religion of peace” to Barack Obama’s craven tours of the Islamic world, bowing and apologizing for being an American. Ron Paul’s rhetoric, if you don’t listen to much of it, can sound pretty good. The soldiers don’t hear soft words, but hear someone “telling it like it is.”

Men dispatched to fight the fights disdained by “good-idea fairies” have small tolerance for the fairy dust the politically correct sprinkle on reality. When the Pentagon announced this week that a new aircraft carrier strike group had arrived in the Arabian Sea, where Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to disrupt oil shipments, and that another carrier was on the way, a spokesman insisted that the maneuvering of the carriers was mere coincidence.
“I don’t want to leave anybody with the impression that we’re somehow [speeding] two carriers over there because we’re concerned about what happened,” the Pentagon spokesman said. Well, of course not.

And all that fairy dust was enough to choke everybody but Ron Paul.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

SIGN THE PETITION

2012-01-13T07:29:00.000-08:00

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President Obama's Department of Justice (DOJ) just released a memo attempting to give political cover for "recess" appointments he made while the Senate was still in session. In fact, the political memo was issued two days AFTER the appointments were announced.
It changes nothing. President Obama's actions are unconstitutional and ignore a century of bipartisan precedent.

The ACLJ has taken action, and nearly 60,000 Americans are standing with us so far.
Sign your name to the ACLJ's Petition to Retract Obama's Unconstitutional Appointments now.

The DOJ office that drafted the memo -- headed by a political appointee who was hand-selected by President Obama -- is attempting to use a political smokescreen to hide the fact that he violated the Constitution.

The memo wrongly claims that the President can determine when the Senate is in recess. The Constitution is clear: only Congress, not the President, has the power to determine when it will enter a recess. We cannot allow President Obama to shred the Constitution for political gain.
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have sent the Justice Department a letter expressing their concern about this tactic, Members of Congress have put forward a resolution condemning this power-grab, and now it is time for the American people to take a stand for the Constitution.

As we continue considering our legal options, we will keep you informed. Thank you for standing with us today.

Jay Sekulow
ACLJ Chief Counsel

American Center for Law and Justice
P.O. Box 90555, Washington, D.C. 20090-0555
Phone: (800) 296-4529

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY WILL BE SCUTTLED BY MINOR v HAPPERSETT

2012-01-10T13:41:00.000-08:00

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MINOR v. HAPPERSETT REVISITED.

…the only time the US Supreme Court ever did define the class of persons who were POTUS eligible under Article 2 Section 1 was in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874), wherein it was held:

“The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.” Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 168.

There’s a quote for you. It really exists. And it tells you exactly who are natural-born citizens; those born in the country of parents who are citizens. The words are plain-spoken and self-evident. There are two classes of persons discussed in the above quotation. Those born in the country of citizen parents were labeled by the Court as “natives or natural-born citizens”, but these were also further identified as being “distinguished from aliens or foreigners”. The distinction is crucial.

On one side are those who have no citizenship other than that of the United States… as distinguished from those on the polar opposite side who have absolutely no claim to citizenship in the United States; “These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.” Those who fall in between these two extremes make up a third class of persons whose citizenship status, the Court noted, was subject to doubt:

“Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of the parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first.” Id. (Emphasis added.)

Had this third class been contemplated as having any claim to being natural-born citizens, the distinction employed by the court would not make sense. The distinction was employed to more specifically identify the class of persons who were natural-born citizens under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5. The two classes discussed are in direct polar opposition to each other. Had this distinction not been employed, it might be argued that those born in the country of one citizen parent were also natural-born. But the distinction leads to the necessary conclusion that the Court in Minor was identifying a two-citizen parent rule.

For example, a person born in the US to a British father and U.S. citizen mother would, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution (and at the time Minor v. Happersett was decided), be considered as a natural-born subject of the U.K. Whether this child would be, at his birth, a citizen under the 14th amendment, was left undecided by the Court in Minor. But let’s assume that the child was a U.S. citizen. Where does that child fit into the distinction offered by the Court in Minor? The child is not on either polar extreme, since the child was not exclusively a US citizen at birth, nor was the child exclusively a British subject at birth. He does not fit into the distinction.

By choosing two extremes – those who, at their birth, are nothing but U.S. citizens – “as distinguished from aliens or foreigners” – those who, at their birth, are in no way U.S. citizens – the Supreme Court in Minor provided the necessary criteria to properly discern their holding.

Nothing has been left open as to the Minor Court’s definition of a natural-born citizen. This is further made clear by the Court’s other – somewhat overlooked – federal citizenship holding:

“The very idea of a political community, such as a nation is, implies an association of persons for the promotion of their general welfare. Each one of the persons associated becomes a member of the nation formed by the association…

For convenience it has been found necessary to give a name to this membership. The object is to designate by a title the person and the relation he bears to the nation. For this purpose the words ‘subject,’ ‘inhabitant,’ and ‘citizen’ have been used, and the choice between them is sometimes made to depend upon the form of the government. Citizen is now more commonly employed, however, and as it has been considered better suited to the description of one living under a republican government, it was adopted by nearly all of the States upon their separation from Great Britain, and was afterwards adopted in the Articles of Confederation and in the Constitution of the United States. When used in this sense it is understood as conveying the idea of membership of a nation, and nothing more.”

Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 165-166 (1874). (Emphasis added.)

Therefore, when the Court uses the words, “citizen” or “citizenship”, no other meaning may be imputed other than, “membership of a nation”. But Jack Maskell believes he can overrule this specific holding of the Supreme Court by inserting the words “natural-born” where they do not appear. ”Natural-born” only pertains to a requirement for the municipal office of President. Those who are natural-born meet that qualification, but all who are citizens, natural-born, naturalized abroad, naturalized here, at birth or later in life, are members of our nation. The word citizen – according to the Supreme Court in Minor – refers to “membership of a nation, and nothing more“. It’s the “nothing more” that Maskell fails to recognize.

In Maskell’s CRS memo, he alleges that the following statement from Minor left open the issue of whether persons born of aliens could be considered as natural-born citizens:

“Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.” Id. at 167-168. (Emphasis added.)

Reading this passage in light of the definition of “citizen” from pg. 166 of Minor’s unanimous opinion, it becomes evident that what is referred to here is membership in our nation, and nothing more. Any attempt to insert the words – “natural-born” – into this passage to imply that the court left open the issue of whether those whose citizenship was in doubt might also be eligible to be President would be in direct opposition to the Court’s very holding of the case. This expression of doubt must be limited to the political status of the person, not to their eligibility to hold a municipal office. Political status is a legal term of art which means, “membership in a nation, and nothing more”. Presidential eligibility refers to municipal status. The holding not only determined Virginia Minor’s citizenship, it directly defined “citizen”, and that definition remains the law of the land today.

First, on pgs. 165-166, the Court defined the meaning of the word “citizen”. Then, on pgs. 167-168, the court defined the class of “natural-born citizens”. The Court left open the issue of who were “citizens” under the 14th Amendment, which the Court wisely avoided by exercising judicial constraint. Instead, the Court construed Article 2 Section 1, Clause 5, the natural-born citizen clause. In doing so, they defined and closed that class to persons born in the country to parents who are citizens.

The Minor Court’s unanimous opinion and definition of natural-born citizen have never been overruled or even questioned. In fact, the very passage defining the natural-born citizen class was re-stated in Justice Gray’s opinion from Wong Kim Ark. Had he intended to take issue with that definition, or to expand it, then his opinion would certainly contain something like this:

Wong Kim Ark is a natural-born citizen eligible to be President.

But no such statement exists. It’s also important to remember at all times that the Court in Minor specifically avoided construction of the 14th Amendment, thereby defining the class of natural-born citizens and identifying Virginia Minor as a member of that class. Virginia Minor directly petitioned the Court to determine that she was a citizen under the 14th Amendment. But the Minor Court declined to construe the 14th Amendment, and thereafter set about defining the class of persons who were natural-born citizens of the United States in determining that she was a citizen.

In 1996, the US Supreme Court’s majority opinion by Justice Breyer in Ogilvie Et Al., Minors v. United States, 519 U.S. 79 (1996), stated that when the Court discusses a certain reason as an independent ground in support of their decision, then that reason is not simply dictum:

“Although we gave other reasons for our holding in Schleier as well, we explicitly labeled this reason an ‘independent’ ground in support of our decision, id., at 334. We cannot accept petitioners’ claim that it was simply a dictum.”

The Minor Court’s construction of Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5, of the United States Constitution was the independent ground by which the Court avoided construing the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause.

Therefore, such construction is precedent, not dicta, despite POTUS eligibility not being an issue. The Court determined it was necessary to define the class of natural-born citizens, and the definition is current legal precedent.

Had the Court in Wong Kim Ark identified him as a natural-born citizen, there would have been no need to construe the 14th Amendment, just as it wasn’t necessary to construe it to determine Virginia Minor’s citizenship. But Wong Kim Ark was not natural-born, and therefore the Court was required to construe the 14th Amendment to determine his citizenship status.

Again, had Justice Gray’s opinion intended to state that Ark was natural-born, there would be a sentence in Gray’s opinion stating, Wong Kim Ark is a natural-born citizen. But there isn’t. No amount of tongue twisting can insert those words where they do not exist and do not belong.
The same is true for the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Minor v. Happersett. Had the court intended to say – Some authorities go further and include as natural-born citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of the parents – then that is exactly what the US Supreme Court would have said. But they didn’t.

And the same can be said for the framers of the 14th Amendment. Had they intended to include the words “natural-born citizen” in the Amendment, then that is exactly what they would have done. But they didn’t. Any attempt to read those words into the 14th Amendment would render Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5, to be superfluous. And that goes directly against our entire body of national jurisprudence on the issue of statutory construction.

I will more thoroughly address the issue of statutory construction in the days ahead. (Since the state of Georgia will be hearing this issue on Jan. 26, 2012, I have decided to come forward with everything I have now, rather than waiting to publish my book.)

Leo Donofrio, Esq.

MITT ROMNEY STARTED GAY MARRIAGE IN MASSACHUSETTS

2012-01-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

!!!!

Former Vatican Ambassadors, pro-family advocates misrepresent Romney record on defense of marriage

bostoncatholic.blogspot.com

January 10, 2012

In our post yesterday, “Pro-family advocates misrepresent Romney’s record on life, marriage,” we talked about how the Boston Pilot had erred by publishing an endorsement of a political candidate on the front page of the archdiocesan newspaper (“Pro-family advocates defend Romney’s record on life, marriage.”) Furthermore, the letter referenced in the article, and signed by former Vatican embassadors, Mary Ann Glendon and Ray Flynn, and former Mass Catholic Conference head, Gerry
D’Avolio, contains a series of incorrect statements or flat-out misrepresentations of facts and reality.

Yesterday we talked about the misrepresentations regarding the record of former Gov. Romney on emergency contraception. Today we discuss the misrepresentations on the issue of “same-sex marriage.” BCI admits we are a bit “over our skis” on this one, and we are relying on information provided to us from a number of sources and legal experts with permission to republish their information. Our point here is that The Boston Pilot published information that was inaccurate.

But in addition, it now appears to BCI that our own Catholic lawyers advising the archdiocese at the time on defense of marriage gave faulty advice that contributed to a surrender on this battle rather than a legitimate constitutional fight. We are assembling rather conclusive proof of that. Some of those lawyers are also now apparently giving political air-cover to Gov. Romney in his campaign instead of speaking the truth.

Among many issues with the letter is that the signatories said Romney “staunchly defended traditional marriage”, claimed he did not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and “worked hard to overturn ‘same-sex marriage’ in the Commonwealth with substantial results.”
These issues could take days and many posts to cover, so BCI must take an abbreviated path and will cover this with an addendum to the main post (so come back to read more later). First, some background and then an explanation of what is inaccurate in the letter from Prof. Glendon, Ray Flynn and others.

The Goodridge Ruling

November 18, 2003: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4 to 3 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. The court specified that the original marriage law banned homosexuals from marrying partners of the same sex as themselves. This law was left intact by the Goodridge ruling (“Here, no one argues that striking down the marriage laws is an appropriate form of relief.”) The court gave the Massachusetts Legislature 180 days in which to “take such action as it may deem appropriate” following its November 18, 2003 ruling.

What the Massachusetts Constitution Says

The first place that “Boston Lawyer” suggested we look is to the Massachusetts Constitution, written in 1870 and the oldest written, still-governing constitution in the world, with clear separation of powers. Gov. Romney took a sworn oath to uphold. It says:

Part the First

Article X: “…the people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent.”

Article XX. The power of suspending the laws, or the execution of the laws, ought never to be exercised but by the legislature, or by authority derived from it, to be exercised in such particular cases only as the legislature shall expressly provide for.

Article XXX. In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.

Chapter 3, Article V.
Article V. All causes of marriage, divorce, and alimony, and all appeals from the judges of probate shall be heard and determined by the governor and council, until the legislature shall, by law, make other provision.

“Boston lawyer” said, “The simplest way for people to understand this is to just look at Chapter 3, Article V–anything having to do with marriage according to the Mass Constitution separation of powers is the purview of Governor and the Legislature–the SJC is banned by the state constitution from ruling on marriage.”

Articles XX and XXX of the constitution say the courts have no power to suspend laws or change the laws. Article X says the people of the commonwealth are only bound by laws passed by the people they elect to the legislative branch of government, not judges.

Several lawyers and experts on this topic say that if Mitt Romney had just followed the Massachusetts Constitution–as he took an oath to do–he would have said two things–the court had no constitutional authority to rule on marriage, and only the legislature could change the laws. Since the elected Legislature never approved changes in the law to permit and legalize “gay marriage,” the Romney administration–Romney himself, his general counsel and Department of Health under his authority–had a constitutional duty to uphold the law on the books. Thus, they should not have directed town clerks to issue “same-sex marriage licenses,” and the people of the commonwealth should never have been bound by a supposed new “law” that really was never a law at all, and is not even a law today, despite popular misconception.

Here is the bitter irony and grave tragedy as we understand it. Even the attorney for the gay and lesbian couples in the Goodridge case, Mary Bonauto, acknowledged in November 2003 that the legislature had to act to change the marriage laws before “same-sex marriages” were permitted, but it was Gov. Romney and our own Catholic lawyers who said that was not necessary!

MASSACHUSETTS COURT RULES BAN ON GAY MARRIAGE UNCONSTITUTIONAL (Nov. 18, 2003)

“While seen as a victory for gay rights advocates, the decision itself does not make it immediately possible for seven same-sex couples who sued the state to receive marriage licenses since the court left the details of the issue to the legislature.
Attorney Mary Bonauto, who represented the seven gay couples who sued the state, said the only task the court assigned to state lawmakers is to come up with changes in state law that will allow gay couples to marry by the end of the 180-day period.”

As BCI understands it, an undisputed fact is that those changes to state law never occurred. Lawyers tell BCI that the ruling was not somehow “self-executing” as emails from some of the Catholic lawyers leaked to BCI suggest they believed and still believe today. Consider the following:

The lawyer who represented the gay couples felt the legislature had to change the state law before same-sex marriages would be legally permitted
The SJC said the previous law on the books banned same-sex marriage and said the legislature had to change the law
Gov. Romney himself said he was waiting for legislature to change the law in this April 16, 2004 Boston Globe article, “Romney seeks authority to delay same sex marriage”:

“He [Romney] placed the blame for the confusion on the Legislature, which has yet to follow a directive from the SJC to change the state’s marriage laws to reflect the legalization of same-sex matrimony.” ‘‘I believe the reason that the court gave 180 days to the Legislature was to allow the Legislature the chance to look through the laws developed over the centuries and see how they should be adjusted or clariﬁed for purposes of same-sex marriage; the Legislature didn’t do that,’’ Romney said. Senator Bruce E. Tarr (R) of Gloucester, said he believes the Legislature will ultimately pass bills that will insert gender-neutral language into the state’s marriage laws in time for the May 17 deadline. ‘‘No one should interpret inaction thus far with the idea that no action is forthcoming,’’ he said

But, no action was forthcoming. No laws ever changed. Yet Romney proceeded to order issuance of same-sex marriage licenses anyway in mid-May of 2004. As BCI sees it, this is perhaps one of the most impactful “head-fakes” on society of all time–one which continues to this day.
This is not just the opinion of BCI and people who have fed us information. A multitude of other sources, including constitutional law experts agree.

This blog reports the following from Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel:

“… I litigated in Massachusetts by filing a suit in federal court to prevent the implementation of same-sex marriage. Due to federalism issues with the federal courts being asked to block a state court action, the federal courts were constrained not to get involved.
Having spent considerable time reviewing the Massachusetts Constitution, drafted by John Adams, I can say that the Massachusetts Constitution is unique with respect to marriage and domestic relations by vesting the authority over marriage to the Legislature. The provision is explicitly set forth in the Massachusetts Constitution. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the Legislature should act within a certain time to implement same-sex marriage, but the Legislature refused to act. Yet, Gov. Romney on his own went ahead of the Legislature and forced the implementation of same-sex marriage. Not only was he not required to implement same-sex marriage, the Massachusetts Constitution gave him no authority to do so. Gov. Romney should not have acted until the Legislature acted as that is the body vested by the Massachusetts Constitution with authority over marriage.

Staver is also the dean of Liberty University Law School. Staver is a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society. He’s written 11 books.

Dr. Herb Titus was the founding dean of the School of Public Policy at Regent University, and later served as the founding dean of Regent Law School. Before that he studied under Dr. Francis Schaeffer, and graduated from Harvard Law School. Titus has worked with the U.S. Justice Department, and is admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here is what Dr. Titus said on this matter:

“Rick Santorum challenged Mitt Romney to justify the former Massachusetts Governor’s decision to implement the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruling that declared that the exclusion of otherwise qualified same-sex couples from civil marriage violated the state constitution.
After the debate, Mr. Romney stated to Mr. Santorum that he did all that he legally could to stop the implementation of the court’s decision before he exercised his duty as Governor to enforce the court’s decision requiring local officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He issued a challenge to Mr. Santorum to find any qualified legal authority that would not agree with him. I have been asked to meet that challenge.
I am a graduate of the Harvard Law School. I am an active member of the Virginia bar and the bar of a number of federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. As a professor of constitutional law for nearly 30 years in four different ABA-approved law schools, and as a practicing lawyer, I have written a number of scholarly articles and legal briefs on a variety of constitutional subjects; including the nature of legislative, executive and judicial powers and the constitutional separation of those powers.
I am generally familiar with the Massachusetts Constitution, and especially familiar with that constitution’s provision dictating that no department shall exercise the powers that belong to either of the other two departments “to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”
As Governor, Mr. Romney has claimed that he had no choice but to obey the Supreme Judicial Court’s opinion. This claim is false for several reasons.
First, Mr. Romney was not a party to the case. Only parties to a case are bound to obey a court order. As President Abraham Lincoln said in support of his refusal to enforce the United States Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott case – the nation’s policy regarding slavery was not determined by a court opinion, even by the highest court of the land. Likewise, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ policy regarding marriage may not be determined by the Supreme Judicial Court, the State’s highest court.
Second, the Supreme Judicial Court did not order any party to do anything. Rather, it issued only a declaration that, in its opinion, excluding otherwise qualified same-sex couples access to civil marriage was unconstitutional. Thus, even the Massachusetts Department of Health, which was a party to the case, was not ordered to do anything.

Third, the Massachusetts Board of Health was not authorized by statute to issue marriage licenses. That was a job for Justices of the Peace and town clerks. The only task assigned by the Legislature to the Board of Health was to record the marriage license; it had no power to issue them even to heterosexual couples. So the Department of Health, the only defendant in the case, could not legally have complied with an order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Fourth, if the court were to order the Department of Health to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, then Mr. Romney’s duty as governor would have been to instruct the Department that it had no authority to do what the court ordered. Nor could the court confer such authority, such an authorization being in nature a legislative, not a judicial, act.
Fifth, the decision whether to implement the Supreme Judicial Court’s opinion was, as the court itself acknowledged, for “the Legislature to take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of [the court’s] opinion.” By the very terms of the order, the Massachusetts legislature had discretion to do nothing.
Sixth, because the legislature did nothing, Mr. Romney had no power to act to implement the court decision. By ordering justices of the peace, town clerks, and other officials authorized to issue marriage licenses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Mr. Romney unconstitutionally usurped legislative power, a power denied him by the Massachusetts constitution that separated the three kinds of powers into three different departments.

Apparently both Gov. Romney and the signatories of this letter are misrepresenting what he did and did not do to protect marriage. Even worse is that a surrender of major proportion apparently happened under the watch of our own Catholic lawyers advising the Boston Archdiocese, and some of these lawyers apparently continue to propagate misconceptions today for whatever reason, rather than speaking the truth.
BCI cares about the truth and believes faithful Catholics are entitled to hear that from our leaders.
We must pause here for now. More coming later.

Pro-family advocates misrepresent Romney’s record on life, marriage: Part 1

January 9, 2012

The Boston Pilot has made yet another mistake–this time by publishing an endorsement of a political candidate on the front page of the archdiocesan paper, and by not fact-checking the piece. A careful fact-check would have revealed a series of incorrect statements or flat-out misrepresentations of facts and reality. If there is one thing that gets the blood boiling here at BCI, it is when people say or publish things that are objectively deceptive. That is the case here.
BCI is not getting into politics and preferred to not even comment on this issue. However, we have been hit by a number of messages and complaints from readers since this was published. These include Catholic lawyers and pro-life, pro-family activists who provided BCI with extensive documentation. Since the official archdiocesan newspaper, The Boston Pilot, chose to publish the Catholic News Agency story on the front page, and since the story is laden with false information, BCI feels compelled to correct the misrepresentations. This will take us several posts.
Here is a link to the CNA story from the front page of The Boston Pilot: “Pro-family advocates defend Romney’s record on life, marriage.”

A group of nine individuals from pro-family organizations in Massachusetts have written an open letter defending Mitt Romney’s record of protecting marriage, promoting a culture of life and supporting religious freedom during his time as governor of the state. The Dec. 30 letter attempts to “set the record straight” after Romney’s commitment to life and marriage was questioned in media reports.
Among the signatories were Raymond L. Flynn and Mary Ann Glendon, both former U.S. Ambassadors to the Holy See, as well as former executive director of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, Gerald D. D’Avolio.

First problem: the letter itself reads like a political endorsement: Essentially, “Ray, Mary Ann, Gerry, et al say Mitt Romney is a good guy and defend his record.” It has no place in the archdiocesan newspaper, let alone on the front page. If “Msgr. G. says President Obama is a good guy,” does that belong on the front page of The Pilot as well so that everyone gets equal ink? The Catholic Church should be stating the views of the Catholic Church on certain issues and can distribute voter guides that list the publicly-stated positions of various candidates on a number of issues of importance to the Catholic Church, but the Church cannot endorse political candidates. In this case, The Pilot did not specifically endorse Mitt Romney, but it published a letter through with others gave their implicit endorsement. They should not have published this at all.
Second problem: Neither the CNA article nor The Pilot disclosed the affiliations of several of the signatories with the Romney campaign. For example, Mary Ann Glendon is a chairperson of the Romney Justice Advisory Committee, announced by his campaign on August 2, 2011.

The Chairpersons of the Advisory Committee – Judge Robert Bork, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, and Richard Wiley – issued a joint statement saying, “…We fully support Mitt Romney’s campaign and look forward to working with other members of the committee as we advise him on today’s pressing legal issues.”

Kristian Mineau, one of the signatories, is president of the Massachusetts Family Institute. BCI was informed of this 2007 NY Times report that discusses how MFI received a $10,000 donation from Mitt Romney. Coincidentally, not long afterwards MFI stopped criticizing Romney as “taking liberal stands during his first years as governor,” and instead “Mr. Mineau sought to enlist other Massachusetts social conservatives in signing an open letter supporting the governor.” Romney also is reported to have given $15,000 to Mass Citizens for Life. Coincidentally, another signatory, Joseph Reilly, is former Chairman of the Board, Massachusetts Citizens for Life and husband of Evelyn Reilly, public policy director for MFI. During most of his tenure as governor, Massachusetts Citizens for Life was critical of Romney, but in the months after receiving the donation, by coincidence, its officials issued favorable statements about his record.
If people and their organizations are going to accept money from a political candidate or serve as chairpersons of their political campaign sub-committees, their affiliations should be disclosed– and furthermore, their endorsements should not be published by a Catholic archdiocesan newspaper.
Third problem: a lot of what is in the actual letter itself that claims to “set the record straight” is in fact incorrect and misleading. BCI will fact-check what Romney did or did not do around three issues–emergency contraception (the “morning after pill”) forced on Catholic hospitals, Catholic Charities being mandated to allow adoption by gay couples, and “gay marriage.” Hold onto your seats.
We start with emergency contraception in this post.
The letter says:

“Some press accounts and bloggers have described Governor Romney in terms we neither have observed nor can we accept. To the contrary, we, who have been fighting here for the values you also hold, are indebted to him and his responsive staff in demonstrating solid social conservative credentials by undertaking the following actions here in Massachusetts.
Affirmed the culture of life. Governor Romney vetoed bills to provide access to the so-called “morning-after pill,” which is an abortifacient…

Yes, in 2005 Romney vetoed a bill to provide access to the so-called “morning-after-pill,” but what the signatories and The Boston Pilot fail to tell people is that a) Romney had publicly claimed the bill did not apply to private religious hospitals, and b) he reversed his own July 2005 veto against abortifacients by signing an October bill seeking a federal waiver to expand distribution of Plan B abortifacients. Even more troublesome is that shortly after Romney vetoed the requirement that hospitals offer Plan B to rape victims, Romney reversed himself and issued an executive order on December 8, 2005, against the legal opinion of his own State Department of Public Health, instructing all Catholic hospitals and others to provide the chemical Plan B “morning after pill” to rape victims! Surely, the letter signatories know this.
With help from several readers who asked to remain anonymous but gave permission for us to use their ideas and content, BCI has reconstructed the sequence:
1975. Massachusetts statute passed which allowed private hospitals to opt out of abortion, sterilization, and contraception.
Prior to July 25, 2005, when Gov. Romney vetoed the emergency contraception bill, the legislation had already been modified to expressly remove any amendments which would NOT allow that 1975 statute to prevail. (Although the House had added an amendment to S. 2073 that specifically applied the 1975 statute protections and the Senate had offered its own amendment stating the new bill superceded the 1975 statute, in the end both amendments were taken out, so the 1975 law prevailed and remains in force). See this July 2005 Mass Catholic Conference Notes from the Hill from when Mr. D’Avolio was Exec Director of MCC, but since removed from the MCC website. Even if the 1975 statute were not in place, Article II of the Massachusetts Constitution still guarantees freedom to practice religion without interference by the government.
December 7, 2005: In view of the 1975 statute and the removal of any provision in the 2005 legislation that impacted that 1975 conscience exemption, the Dept of Public Health wrote the regulations to exclude Catholic and private hospitals. This was announced on December 7, 2005 and described in this Boston Globe article, “Private hospitals exempt on pill law“:

“The state Department of Public Health has determined that Catholic and other privately-run hospitals in Massachusetts can opt out of giving the morning-after pill to rape victims because of religious or moral objections, despite a new law that requires all hospitals who treat such victims to provide them with emergency contraception…
The ruling, which the department plans to outline to hospital CEOs in a letter this week, says the new law applies to all hospitals but does not nullify a statute passed years ago that says privately-run hospitals cannot be forced to provide abortions or contraception.
”We feel very clearly that the two laws don’t cancel each other out and basically work in harmony with each other,” Paul Cote Jr., commissioner of the Department of Public Health, said in an interview yesterday.
The Department of Public Health decision is welcome news for Catholic hospitals who do not provide emergency contraception and feared that the new law would make them do so”

But, pro-abortion groups started protesting. Then Lt. Governor Kerry Healey objected (her pro-choice views on this issue were long a matter of the public record). Apparently, Romney’s own staff was waffling. His legal counsel, Mark Nielson, claimed the new law superseded the preexisting conscience protection statute, even though there was nothing in the bill to indicate this, and Nielson was claiming the bill said something the authors of the bill had purposely left out. (Coincidentally, Nielsen had run for Congress in 2000 as a pro-abortion candidate and received over $7K from pro-abortion groups). It appears Romney himself was not sure if he was going to run for re-election as Governor (in which case he needed to be a “moderate”) or he was going to run for President (in which case he needed to be a “conservative”). Listen to this audio clip for the story.
Romney did not listen to the opinions of the Catholic Church, the State Health Commissioner, his own health department, or the intent of the bill writers. Instead, he retreated.
December 9, 2005: Romney announced he was overruling the DPH (but for some reason, did not announce he was also overruling the Massachusetts Constitution). See this Boston Globe article, “(“Romney says no hospitals are exempt from pill law“):
“Governor Mitt Romney reversed course on the state’s new emergency contraception law yesterday, saying that all hospitals in the state will be obligated to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims. The decision overturns a ruling made public this week by the state Department of Public Health that privately run hospitals could opt out of the requirement if they objected on moral or religious grounds.”
Lifesite News reported at the time, “Romney Does Flip-Flop and Forces Catholic Hospitals to Distribute Morning-After-Pill”:

In a shocking turn-around, Massachusetts’s governor Mitt Romney announced yesterday that Roman Catholic and other private hospitals in the state will be forced to offer emergency contraception to sexual assault victims under new state legislation, regardless of the hospitals’ moral position on the issue.
The Republican governor had earlier defended the right of hospitals to avoid dispensing the “morning-after pill” on the grounds of moral dissent. The Boston Globe reported that Romney’s flip on the issue came after his legal counsel, Mark D. Nielsen, concluded Wednesday that the new law supersedes a preexisting statute related to the abortifacient pill.

A constitutional law expert advising BCI says that the LEGISLATIVE INTENT was clearly to allow the 1975 statute to prevail. The formulation of the regulations is supposed to follow the legislative intent. Romney actually violated the law and his oath of office by NOT going with the legislative intent, and overruling the legislative intent (as well as the Constitution).
But it gets worse. It was not merely a legal interpretation by the legal counsel to Romney. He said he personally thought it was the “right thing” for hospitals to provide access to emergency contraception for any rape victims. See this Dec 9, 2005 AP report:

Romney: Catholic hospitals not exempt from offering emergency contraception
By GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press writer
BOSTON –Facing opposition from women, the Democratic Party and even his own running mate, Gov. Mitt Romney abandoned plans yesterday to exempt religious and other private hospitals from a new law requiring them to dispense emergency contraception to rape victims.The governor had initially backed regulations proposed earlier this week by his Department of Public Health, which said the new law conflicts with an older law barring the state from forcing private hospitals to dispense contraceptive devices or information.
The interpretation would have allowed hospitals operated by the Roman Catholic Church, which opposes abortion, to forego compliance with the new regulation. Opponents accused Romney, a Republican considering running for president in 2008, of trying to assuage social conservatives.
Despite defending the Health Department regulations as late as Wednesday, Romney opened a news conference yesterday by declaring that a fresh analysis by his legal counsel concluded the new law supersedes the old law, and that all hospitals must be required to offer the so-called morning-after pill.
“On that basis I have instructed the Department of Public Health to follow the conclusion of my own legal counsel and to adopt that sounder view,” Romney said. “I think, in my personal view, it’s the right thing for hospitals to provide information and access to emergency contraception to anyone who is a victim of rape,” he added.

The Boston Pilot, the signatories and the archdiocese should have known this. It was also reported in this Boston Pilot article. If the signatories were oblivious to this, then they should retract their letter and also be more careful in the future with fact-checking anything they sign their name to.
BCI must ask the question, how can people like the signatories of this open letter claim to be “setting the record straight” when they, in reality, neglect to share the critical facts and objective information? Instead of “setting the record straight” they are obfuscating the record. The Pilot served to advance this misrepresentation by publishing the CNA article.
BCI will tackle the other issues in separate posts.
ps. In the meantime, if anyone out there is familiar with the constitutional issues around the SJC decision on gay marriage–and in particular, the instructions and training by then-Gov. Romney and his legal counsel to town clerks to issue marriage licenses, please drop us an email.

McCAIN'S ENDORSEMENT OF ROMNEY WILL PROBABLY BACKFIRE

2012-01-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

!!!!

A 'referendum' on Romney

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 7, 2012

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/10992/a-referendum-on-romney

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SALEM, N.H. -- Mitt Romney has been thought for months to have the New Hampshire primary in the bag. But one vote he didn't have locked up until Wednesday was that of Steve Rowe, a Vietnam-era veteran who spent much of the 1970s aboard the USS Saratoga, a US Navy supercarrier. Like a lot of New Hampshire residents, Rowe headed into the final week before the presidential primary still unsure whom to support. It was only the endorsement of another Navy vet -- US Senator John McCain, the GOP's 2008 presidential nominee -- that moved Rowe into the Romney camp.

Rowe showed up early Thursday morning, camera in hand, for a Romney town hall meeting at the Boys and Girls Club here. It wasn't the former Massachusetts governor he wanted a picture of, but the former war hero. "Now that McCain's behind Romney, he'll pull a lot of votes from people like me," Rowe predicted.

That, of course, is what Romney and his staff are hoping. McCain has long been a favorite of New Hampshire Republicans and independents: He crushed George W. Bush in the state's 2000 primary and beat Romney in 2008. And thanks to his brave record as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, McCain -- though a frequent thorn in the GOP's right side -- has retained lasting respect even in his party's more conservative circles. (Which explains why, after endorsing Romney in New Hampshire, McCain flew with him to campaign in South Carolina.)

But there are limits to McCain's influence, even among Republican voters who served in Vietnam.

John Anderson, a nuclear engineer from Pittsburg, NH, was the first on his feet with a question for Newt Gingrich when the former speaker visited Littleton, a town in the White Mountains near New Hampshire's border with Vermont. Gingrich had repeated his description of Romney as a "legitimate Massachusetts moderate," ticking off the issues -- from gun control to health care to judicial appointments -- on which Romney had disappointed conservatives during his term as governor.

"You call him a moderate, and that's being generous," boomed Anderson, a retired Air Force officer who was involved in Operation Ranch Hand against the Viet Cong in 1965. "And as a Vietnam vet, I was pretty upset with a certain person that endorsed him the other day."

Anderson told me afterward that while he deeply admires McCain, he has no intention of voting for Romney, whom he considers too willing to tilt to the left whenever it is politically expedient to do so. "I'm not a Romney-hater," he said. But given Romney's philosophical flexibility, "I do not believe he can take on President Obama."

Every presidential re-election campaign eventually becomes a referendum on the incumbent. No matter who the GOP eventually nominates, voters next November will be deciding whether Barack Obama deserves a second term in office. But the Republican nomination contest has itself become a kind of referendum -- a referendum on Romney. In the "Mitt" camp are those who see in the former consultant and venture capitalist and pragmatic politician the skill set needed to defeat Obama and revive the economy. In the "not-Mitt" camp are those who find it impossible to rally behind a candidate who seems to lack clear and resonant principles.

At the Iowa caucuses, entrance polls showed, Romney handily won the support of voters who cited electability as the most important criterion, while the great majority of those looking for a principled conservative voted against him.

"I'm willing to be another Ronald Reagan if that's what you want me to be," then-Senator Bob Dole unconvincingly promised Republicans in 1995. Dole went on to win the GOP nomination the following year, but the party's conservative core never got enthusiastic about him, and independent voters weren't attracted to a candidate who couldn't even excite his own base.

The case against Romney boils down to the perception that to become president, he is prepared to say anything. The case for him boils down to the conviction that virtually any Republican, even a political weathervane, would be better than Obama. "We cannot afford another four years of this man," a voter in the audience said to Romney at the Boys and Girls Club Thursday morning. "We've got to get him out of the White House."

Before Republicans can take on Obama, they've got to figure out what sort of leader they want to replace him with. "Mitt" may have New Hampshire's primary in the bag, but "not-Mitt" still seems pretty formidable.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).

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JUDGE RULES OBAMA MUST PROVE ELIGIBILITY TO BE ON GEORGIA BALLOT

2012-01-08T06:33:00.000-08:00

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BREAKING NEWS

Patriots- THIS IS BIG!

ORDER ON OBAMA'S MOTION TO DISMISS DENIED

Robert Quinn robertquinn@earthlink.net

https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&utm_source=en-et-more&utm_medium=et&utm_campaign=en#inbox/134bb3a9411160d1

January 3, 2012 (TPATH) - Georgia State Judge Micheal Mahili has refused the motion to dismiss a lawsuit that would require Barack Obama to prove he is eligible to run for the Office of President of the United State.

Description: President Obama's lawyers filed a motion that would keep him from presenting proof of his eligibility to be President of the United States. THAT MOTION HAS BEEN DENIED!

PART OF THE RULING STATEMENT:
The Georgia Election Code (the "Code") mandates that "[e]very candidate for federal and state office who is certified by the state executive committee of a political party or who files a notice of candidacy shall meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought." O.C.G.A. § 21-2-5(a).

Both the Secretary of State and the electors of Georgia are granted the authority under the Code to challenge the qualifications of a candidate. The challenge procedures are defined in Code Section 21-2-5(b), which authorizes any elector who is eligible to vote for a candidate to challenge the qualifications of the candidate by filing a written complaint with the Secretary of State within two weeks after the deadline for qualifying. O.C.G.A. § 21-2-5(b).

Code Section 21-2-5(a) states that "every candidate for federal and state office" must meet the qualifications for holding that particular office, and this Court has seen no case law limiting this provision, nor found any language that contains an exception for the office of
president or stating that the provision does not apply to the presidential preference primary.

Accordingly, this Court finds that Defendant is a candidate for federal office who has been certified by the state executive committee of a political party, and therefore must, under
Code Section 21-2-5, meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought.

Why is this big? For the very first time in this long and arduous process of state and local court cases where the citizens of this country have demanded that Obama prove he is eligible to be President, under our Constitution, a judge has sided with the law and ruled accordingly.

It is very possible that Hawaii may now have to show, if they have it, the long form birth certificate that Obama has claimed he photocopied the one he released in April of 2011.

The Social Security Administration may now have to release records on how and why Obama is using a Connecticut SSN.

It is possible that Obama may have to submit to questions while under oath.

Finally, this is big because it is the first brick to be pried from the wall of judicial malfeasance and media cover-up which has never before been seen in this country.

If Obama refuses to submit to deposition and / or allow inspection of his documents, the ruling of this court will not only preclude Obama's name form being on the Primary ballot in Georgia, but it would keep his party from having his name on the ballot in November.

Thank God for Judge Mahili in Georgia.
Now! Does this country have any other judicial or political patriots.
America is waiting to see.

Attorney Orly Taitz has been relentless in her efforts to keep America from falling into the abyss of lawlessness like the country of her birth, the old Soviet Union.

She has been fined, ridiculed, maligned and threatened.
She has devoted her time, her money and her expertise.
She is a true American hero.
God Bless Orly Taitz!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

OFFICE OF STATE ADMINISTRATIVE HEARINGS STATE OF GEORGIAORDER ON MOTION TO DISMISS

On December 15, 2011, Defendant, President Barack Obama, moved for dismissal of Plaintiffs' challenge to his qualifications for office. The Court has jurisdiction to hear this contested case pursuant to Chapter 13 of Title 50, the "Georgia Administrative Procedure Act."
For the reasons indicated below, Defendant's Motion to Dismiss is    DENIED. 1

I.␣    Discussion 1.

The Georgia Election Code (the "Code") mandates that "[e]very candidate for federal and state office who is certified by the state executive committee of a political party or who files a notice of candidacy shall meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought." O.C.G.A. § 21-2-5(a).

2.

Both the Secretary of State and the electors of Georgia are granted the authority under the Code to challenge the qualifications of a candidate. The challenge procedures are defined in Code Section 21-2-5(b), which authorizes any elector who is eligible to vote for a candidate to challenge the qualifications of the candidate by filing a written complaint with the Secretary of State within two weeks after the deadline for qualifying. O.C.G.A. § 21-2-5(b).

3.

The Georgia law governing presidential preference primaries mandates that "[o]n a date set by the Secretary of State . . . the state executive committee of each party which is to conduct a presidential preference primary shall submit to the Secretary of State a list of the names of the candidates of such party to appear on the presidential preference primary ballot." O.C.G.A. § 21- 2-193. On October 6, 2011, Secretary Kemp issued a notice to the chairman of each political
1 Because Defendant's Motion to Dismiss is denied, in the interest of efficiency, the Court finds it unnecessary to wait for the Plaintiffs' responses before denying the motion.

Page 2 of 4

party to notify them that the deadline for submitting the list of candidate names for the 2012 presidential preference primary was November 15, 2011. On November 1, 2011, the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party submitted President Barack Obama's name as the sole candidate for the Democratic Party. To be timely, complaints challenging a presidential candidate's qualifications in the presidential preference primary had to be filed no later than November 29, 2011. Plaintiffs, as electors eligible to vote for Defendant, timely filed challenges with the Secretary of State before the deadline of November 29, 2011.

4.

In the instant motion, Defendant contends that Georgia law does not give Plaintiffs authority to challenge a political party's nominee for president in a presidential preference primary because Code Section 21-2-5 does not apply to the presidential preference primary.

5.

Statutory provisions must be read as they are written, and this Court finds that the cases cited by Defendant are not controlling. When the Court construes a constitutional or statutory provision, the "first step . . . is to examine the plain statutory language." Morrison v. Claborn, 294 Ga. App. 508, 512 (2008). "Where the language of a statute is plain and unambiguous,
judicial construction is not only unnecessary but forbidden. In the absence of words of limitation, words in a statute should be given their ordinary and everyday meaning." Six Flags Over Ga. v. Kull, 276 Ga. 210, 211 (2003) (citations and quotation marks omitted). Because there is no other "natural and reasonable construction" of the statutory language, this Court is "not authorized either to read into or to read out that which would add to or change its meaning." Blum v. Schrader, 281 Ga. 238, 240 (2006) (quotation marks omitted).

6.

Code Section 21-2-5(a) states that "every candidate for federal and state office" must meet the qualifications for holding that particular office, and this Court has seen no case law limiting this provision, nor found any language that contains an exception for the office of president or stating that the provision does not apply to the presidential preference primary. O.C.G.A. 21-2-5(a) (emphasis added). Although the word "candidate" is not explicitly defined
in the Code, Section 21-2-193 states that the political party for the presidential preference

Page 3 of 4

primary "shall submit to the Secretary of State a list of the names of the    candidates of such party to appear on the presidential preference primary ballot." O.C.G.A. 21-2-193 (emphasis added). Accordingly, this Court finds that Defendant is a candidate for federal office.

7.

Code Sections 21-2-190 to 21-2-200 set out the procedures of the presidential preference primary and also provide no exception to the Section 21-2-5 qualification requirement. This Court finds no basis under Georgia law why the qualification requirements in Section 21-2-5 would not apply to a candidate for the office of the president in the presidential preference primary.

8.

Accordingly, this Court finds that Defendant is a candidate for federal office who has been certified by the state executive committee of a political party, and therefore must, under Code Section 21-2-5, meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought.
II.␣    Decision Based on the foregoing, the motion to dismiss is    DENIED.

SO ORDERED, this the 3rdday of January, 2012.

Page 4 of 4

MICHAEL M. MALIHI, Judge

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

THANK GOD!

By Orly Taitz

January 3, 2012

http://www.orlytaitzesq.com/?p=29976

Thank you god!!! I am ready to cry! After 3 years of battle for the first time a judge ruled that Obama’s motion to dismiss is denied. I can now depose Obama and everybody else involved without any impediment.

Farrar Motion to dismiss by Obama is denied

I still can’t believe this. The order is in the link above. Judge Malihi, Deputy Chief judge of the Administrative court in GA, ruled, that Obama’s motion to dismiss is denied. He will have to stand trial and prove his eligibility for office.

This is particularly sweet, as it is happening in GA, where judge Clay D. Land maligned me so badly and attacked me with $20,000 of sanctions in order to silence me, to stop me from challenging Obama. Judge Land was sending a message to other attorneys and intimidating them, de facto telling them, “you dare to go after Obama, raise the issue of his forged birth certificate and invalid Social Secrity number, establishment will attack you and sanction you, just like attorney Taitz”.

Now judge Malihi is sending a message: “nobody is above the law”

I am filing a motion for judicial notice in the other 5 courts, where I have cases. Please, spread the word.

I wanted to thank evrybody, who was helping me so far to repay those $20,000, who donated to help me fly to other states, including my prior flights to GA.

PS I have a professional video cassette, shot by Kevin Powell, where I together with Carl Swenssen, Kevin and a number of GA civil rights leaders visited offices of prior governor Sonny Purdue, Attorney General, elections board, Sec of State, CNN and so on. The video cassette is in a format, that I can’t play or upload on you-tube channel. If someone knows, how to convert it, let me know, I will post it. I think, it is called Sony DVCAM   94 Advanced ME.

IT'S A MIGHTY NICE DEAL IF YOU AN GET IT

2012-01-04T12:19:00.000-08:00

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Pull the parachute

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 4, 2012

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/10979/pull-the-parachute

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A YEAR AGO THIS WEEK, just two days before being shot by a deranged assailant in her district, Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords introduced legislation to cut congressional salaries by 5 percent, from $174,000 to $165,300.

Needless to say, the bill didn't become law -- the last time the House and Senate actually trimmed their members' pay was during the Great Depression. Yet there are few things Congress could do that would be more certain to win public esteem. In a national poll commissioned last month by The Hill, a Washington newspaper, 67 percent of voters said lawmakers should be paid less. With Congress's approval rating barely above single digits, and with so many Americans feeling the sting of a weak economy, you might think support for a modest one-time pay cut would be a no brainer -- especially since congressional pay has been hiked 10 times since 1998.

Yet legislation to curb Congress's outlandish pay and perks rarely gets far on Capitol Hill. The relatively few members willing to make noise about the issue are not rewarded with the love of their colleagues. Former Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin once told me he got "the coldest stares" whenever he introduced legislation to block congressional pay hikes from kicking in automatically. Sometimes his colleagues would try to change his mind, Feingold said. "They tell me about their kids' tuition. Or they say, 'Don't you think you're worth more money?'" He would respond that if they thought they deserved an increase, they should be willing to openly vote for one.

Feingold left Congress last year, but other lawmakers have taken up the cause. Representative Mike Coffman of Colorado -- who is as conservative a Republican as Feingold was a liberal Democrat -- last month introduced a bill that would ban "stealth" pay hikes by preventing any congressional pay raise from taking effect unless members of Congress first cast a recorded vote. Another Coffman bill would cut congressional salaries by 10 percent.

Coffman's top priority for reforming Congress, however, is H.R.2913, which would end the gold-plated congressional pension plan enjoyed by members of Congress. Of all the ways in which members of Congress reward themselves, none is as lucrative as their defined-benefit pensions, a perk more lavish than anything most private-sector workers will ever see.

Under the current system, senators and representatives can collect an annual pension worth 1.7 percent of their present salary for every year they serve in Congress up to 20 years, plus an additional 1 percent for each year beyond that. With congressional pay now at $174,000, a member of Congress who retires after just six years can thus look forward to receiving more than $17,700 a year for life beginning at age 62. (That doesn't include the generous cost-of-living adjustments -- another benefit unavailable to most private-sector retirees.) A 20-year congressional veteran would collect more than $59,000 a year -- and the payments begin at age 50. For members elected before 1984, there is an even more generous setup.

And how much of their salary do incumbent senators and representatives contribute to this sumptuous pension plan? A puny 1.3 percent. (They also participate in Social Security, and are eligible for a 401(k)-style plan, neither of which would be affected by Coffman's bill.)

US Rep. Mike Coffman: "To say that Congress is somehow immune to sacrifice is just wrong."

It's a mighty nice deal if you can get it -- between twice and three times as munificent as pensions offered to similarly-salaried workers in the corporate world, according to the National Taxpayers Union. For the most part, mere mortals like us -- who are, of course, paying for Congress's lifestyle with our taxes -- can only gape from the sidelines.

A veteran of both the Army and the Marine Corps, Coffman says his military training instilled in him a fundamental leadership principle: Never order someone else to do something you would not be prepared to do yourself. "For us to navigate out of this economic crisis that we're in," he told me yesterday, "we're going to have to make tough decisions that will affect other people's pay and benefits. To say that Congress is somehow immune to sacrifice is just wrong."

So far Coffman has rounded up 15 cosponsors for his pension bill, with new ones joining at about one per week. He expected to have more backing from colleagues who ran as fiscal conservatives, but he is confident that public pressure will bring them around.

Congress must set an example, he says, and ending its rich pensions is the way to set it. "Either incumbents sign on, or they're going to be giving their opponents some serious leverage."

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).

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THOUGHTS ON THE POLITICAL SITUATION

2012-01-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

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FROM THE PATRIOT POST

http://patriotpost.us/edition/2012/01/04/chronicle/

"Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the past three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, '$16.4 trillion' has no real meaning, any more than '$17.9 trillion' or '$28.3 trillion' or '$147.8 bazillion.' It doesn't even have much meaning for the guys spending the dough: Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank, and you realize that, even as they're borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That's to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion and, eventually, 173 dollars and 48 cents. At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done." --columnist Mark Steyn
"[I]f you tax people who work, and you pay people who don't work, don't be surprised if you find a lot of people not working. I have never heard of a poor person spending himself or herself to prosperity. It doesn't work." --economist Arthur Laffer

Essential Liberty

"Judges are not divine and their opinions are not holy writ. As every American schoolchild learns, the judiciary is intended to be a co-equal branch of government, not a paramount one. If the Supreme Court wrongly decides a constitutional case, nothing obliges Congress or the president -- or the states or the people, for that matter -- to simply bow and accept it. Naturally this isn't something the courts have been eager to concede. Judges are no more immune to the lure of power than anybody else, and their assertion of judicial supremacy ... has won them an extraordinary degree of clout and authority. That aggrandizement, in turn, they have attempted to cast as historically unassailable. ... But the heart and soul of American democracy is that power derives from the consent of the governed, and that no branch of government -- executive, legislative, or judicial -- rules by unchallenged fiat." --columnist Jeff Jacoby

Insight

"Courage is the greatest of all the virtues. Because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others." --English author Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
"Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody." --President Calvin Coolidge (1873-1933)

The Demo-gogues

The BIG Lie, Part I: "I'm a hundred percent confident that the people of Iowa and the American people will win the day on November 6th of this year when President Obama is re-elected because of his policies, because of the fact that he has brought this country out of the worst economic disaster that we faced since the Great Depression and the people of America know." --DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)
The BIG Lie, Part II: "If there is anyone who has set an example about making sure that we reduce the influence of lobbyists and of corporate and outside special interests on campaigns it is President Obama." --Debbie Wasserman Schultz
All the world is a stage: "People who know me know that I am a softie. I mean, stuff can choke me up very easily. The challenge for me is that in this job, I think, a lot of times the press or how you come off on TV, people want you to be very demonstrative in your emotions. And if you're not sort of showing it in a very theatrical way, then somehow it doesn't translate over the screen." --Barack Obama
Mockery: "Remember Yogi Berra. I don't like the food at that table and the servings are too small. [Republicans] don't like the tax cut and now they are claiming that it is too small." --House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi

PRESIDENT NEWT GINGRICH COULD HELP RESTORE THE BALANCE TO OUR JUDICIAL SYSTEM

2012-01-02T09:50:00.000-08:00

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THERE IS HOPE FOR OUR COURTS IF GINGRICH IS ELECTED

!!!!

The Supreme Court’s judgment isn’t absolute

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 1, 2012

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/10961/the-supreme-court-judgment-isnt-absolute

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NEWT GINGRICH’S PRESIDENTIAL AMBITIONS may be heading for the exits — opinion polls suggest that the former House speaker’s hour has come and gone — but his critique of judicial supremacy deserves to taken seriously no matter what happens in Iowa or New Hampshire.

Contrary to popular belief, their judgments were never meant to be revered “almost as if God has spoken.”

In a 54-page position paper, Gingrich challenges the widely held belief that the Supreme Court is the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution. Though nothing in the Constitution says so, there is now an entrenched presumption that once the court has decided a constitutional question, no power on earth short of a constitutional amendment — or a later reversal by the court itself — can alter that decision.

Thus, when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was asked for her reaction to the Supreme Court’s notorious eminent-domain ruling in Kelo v. New London, she replied as though a new tablet had been handed down from Sinai: “It is a decision of the Supreme Court. If Congress wants to change it, it will require legislation of a level of a constitutional amendment. So this is almost as if God has spoken.”

But judges are not divine and their opinions are not holy writ. As every American schoolchild learns, the judiciary is intended to be a co-equal branch of government, not a paramount one. If the Supreme Court wrongly decides a constitutional case, nothing obliges Congress or the president — or the states or the people, for that matter — to simply bow and accept it.

Naturally this isn’t something the courts have been eager to concede. Judges are no more immune to the lure of power than anybody else, and their assertion of judicial supremacy — plus what Gingrich calls “the passive acquiescence of the executive and legislative branches” — has won them an extraordinary degree of clout and authority. That aggrandizement, in turn, they have attempted to cast as historically unassailable. In Cooper v. Aaron, the 1958 Little Rock desegregation case, all nine justices famously declared “that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution” — a principle, they asserted, that has “been respected by this court and the country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.”

That wasn’t really true. In the words of Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford’s Law School (and a former clerk for Justice William Brennan, one of the court’s liberal lions), “The justices in Cooper were not reporting a fact so much as trying to manufacture one.” It worked. In recent decades, the claim of judicial supremacy has clearly prevailed. Look at the way it’s taken for granted, for example, that whatever the Supreme Court decides next spring about the constitutionality of the ObamaCare insurance mandate will settle the issue once and for all.

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, is “a very dangerous doctrine indeed.”

Gingrich argues that this is unhealthy, and that the elected branches have an obligation to check and balance the judiciary. “The courts have become grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful and, I think, frankly arrogant,” he said in Iowa last month. From the unhinged reaction his words provoked — “this attempt to turn the courts into his personal lightning rod of crazy is simply Gingrich proving yet again that he needs to be boss of everything,” railed Dahlia Lithwick in Slate – you’d think he had declared war on the heart and soul of American democracy.

But the heart and soul of American democracy is that power derives from the consent of the governed, and that no branch of government — executive, legislative, or judicial — rules by unchallenged fiat. Gingrich is far from the first to say so.

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, is “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.” Abraham Lincoln — revolted by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott that blacks “had no rights a white man was bound to respect” — rejected the claim that the justices’ word was final. “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court the instant they are made,” he warned in his first inaugural address, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

Not all of Gingrich’s proposals for reining in the courts, such as summoning judges before congressional committees to explain their rulings, may be wise or useful. But his larger point is legitimate and important. Judicial supremacy is eroding America’s democratic values. For the sake of our system of self-government, the balance of federal power needs to be restored.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).

PUBLIUS SPOKE OUT ON THE SUBJECT OF JUS SOLIS CITIZENSHIP

2011-12-30T07:21:00.000-08:00

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James Madison, Fourth President of the United States, 1809-1817

Barack Hussein Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States and thus is ineligible to be President of the United States.

It is important to distinguish between being born a citizen of the United States and being born a natural born citizen of the United States. Only those persons who are born on the soil of the United States of two parents, BOTH OF WHOM WERE CITIZENS OF THE U.S. AT THE TIME OF THE BIRTH, are citizens of the United States within the meaning of Article Two, Section One of the United States Constitution that specifies the necessary qualification for becoming President.

By act of Congress late in 19th Century any person born on the soil of the United States is a citizen of the United States regardless of the nationality of the child's parents, but that child is not a natural born citizen if both parents were not themselves citizens at the time of the birth.

Some have argued that according to British Common Law those persons born on the soil of the United States of parents who themselves were not citizens of the United States were citizens even though Congress in the 1802 Naturalization Act specifically denied the applicability of British Common law in the matter of citizenship in the United States.

Leo Donofrio, posted the article below on his blog Natural Born Citizen showing that Publius (who was probably President James Madison) strongly stated British Common Law did not apply in a case involving James McClure.

- Leo Rugiens

.............................................................

THE PUBLIUS ENIGMA: Newly Revealed Evidence Establishes That President James Madison’s Administration Required Citizen Parentage To Qualify Native-Born Persons For U.S. Citizenship.

by Leo Donofrio

naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com

I was recently forwarded an incredibly amazing article from the October 10, 1811 edition of The Alexandria Herald newspaper. RXSID of Free Republic sent it with a brief note, stating, “Check out this case.” The Herald article is entitled, Case of James McClure. The author is…PUBLIUS.
Publius was the pseudonym used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, for their anonymous authorship of The Federalist Papers. By 1811, Hamilton was dead and Jay retired. My research leads me to believe that the article was written by James Madison, but this has not been conclusively established yet. Regardless of authorship, Madison was President at the time the article was written, and it discusses the official position of his administration denying U.S. citizenship based upon simple birth in the country.
The official position of the Madison administration was that persons born in the U.S. to alien parents were not U.S. citizens. This was the ruling concerning James McClure, despite the fact that his parents had been settled in the country for many years prior to his birth. The article makes clear that the United States Minister to France, General Armstrong, refused diplomatic protection for McClure by denying he was a citizen of the United States.
This was the official decision despite McClure having been born in South Carolina in 1785 to a father who was naturalized months later in 1786. Armstrong informed the French authorities that the man was not a U.S. citizen, and McClure was left in French custody. The article by PUBLIUS indicates that Armstrong might have mis-applied the 1802 Naturalization Act, but PUBLIUS also makes clear that McClure was not a citizen by virtue of his native birth in South Carolina:

There was no statute in South Carolina in 1785 which granted citizenship to persons born there similar to Virginia’s statute mentioned in the article by PUBLIUS. Simply being a “son of the soil” was not enough, and this evidence repudiates the contention that the British common law had been adapted in all of the states after the revolution. Since there was no statute in place making those born in South Carolina citizens, McClure was not held to be a native-born citizen. That argument was utterly rejected throughout the affair.
The article goes on to question whether the 1802 act is defective in that PUBLIUS seems to believe citizenship ought to be revoked for naturalized persons who return to their original country and establish domicile there again. But the article makes clear that Madison’s administration steadfastly denied that simple birth in the United States was enough to establish citizenship. This, of course, discredits the conclusions of Justice Horace Gray in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, as well as the infamous New York Chancery opinion of Lynch v. Clark. Both cases contain erroneous assumptions that the British common law rule of jus soli governed citizenship from the very genesis of the United States.
I tracked down the original article published in the Richmond Enquirer on October 1, 1811, which was then republished in The Alexandria Herald on October 10, 1811. Both of these newspapers were published in Virginia, Madison’s home state. Furthermore, the PUBLIUS penned article was the grand finale of nearly a year-long argument which went viral in various newspapers of the day starting in January 1811.
I have been up and down the East Coast tracking down the remaining newspaper articles on this as well as other supporting historical information. I have also consulted with professionals and am preparing an extensive section for my forthcoming book which details everything that has been unearthed.
The whole story cannot be understood by way of online searches. The internet is barren on this case. Some of the necessary information isn’t even available in the Library of Congress or National Archives.
Here are the images from the Alexandria Herald and Richmond Enquirer. The Herald scan is much easier to read than the Enquirer scan.
Leo Donofrio, Esq.
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2 Responses to “THE PUBLIUS ENIGMA: Newly Revealed Evidence Establishes That President James Madison’s Administration Required Citizen Parentage To Qualify Native-Born Persons For U.S. Citizenship.”

naturalborncitizen Says:
December 29, 2011 at 10:01 AM
When Publius states, “The case of James McClure is clearly a nice one -”, the word “nice” is used to indicate “requiring accuracy”.
nice [nahys] Show IPA
adjective, nic·er, nic·est.
1.
pleasing; agreeable; delightful: a nice visit.
2.
amiably pleasant; kind: They are always nice to strangers.
3.
characterized by, showing, or requiring great accuracy, precision, skill, tact, care, or delicacy: nice workmanship; a nice shot; a nice handling of a crisis.
4.
showing or indicating very small differences; minutely accurate, as instruments: a job that requires nice measurements.
5.
minute, fine, or subtle: a nice distinction.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nice
naturalborncitizen Says:
December 29, 2011 at 11:03 AM
Everything you’ve been force fed about the early citizenship standards in the fledgling United States which insists that the British Common law jus soli rule had been adopted by our new federal government is wrong. Justice Horace Gray should have recused himself in Wong Kim Ark because he was directly determining whether or not the President who had appointed him was eligible. Therefore, Gray was determining his own fate and how history would view his appointment. His opinion in Wong Kim Ark is built on a foundation of lies and half truths. This case of James McClure was not even mentioned by Gray, yet it destroys his false assumptions.
There was no general rule in this country for Jus Soli citizenship. Gray was full of crap, but he was really smart at dishing out crap. He was a genius at obfuscating the truth of the law, but history will now correct the lie.
Don’t forget, it was the US Government which denied Wong Kim Ark to be a citizen. But I guess the Executive Branch was occupied by a bunch of birthers in 1898. The Attorney General just didn’t like Obama, who he must have seen in a prophetic vision. Damn birthers.
Damn facts. James McClure was not a US citizen by birth on the soil. The Madison administration required his father to be naturalized before he was born for him to have been considered a citizen at birth. James McClure was NOT eligible to be POTUS. The article makes clear that months after McClure was born, he might have been entitled to citizenship via derivative naturalization, but he certainly was not a citizen at the time of his birth, and therefore was not natural born. His birth in the US did not make him a US citizen at all, let alone natural-born. The case of James McClure speaks volumes to the original meaning of Article 2 Section 1.
More to come on James McClure et al.
Leo

HAIL, CAESAR!

2011-12-29T06:39:00.000-08:00

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IN OBAMA HE TRUSTS

by Dr. Milton R. Wolf

THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Wednesday 28, 2011

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/28/in-obama-he-trusts/

There’s something profoundly tragic about the failed presidency of Barack Obama.

He was supposed to be a new kind of president, a man who embodied hope and would transcend petty politics and even race. Instead, we’re left with a downgraded America that is stagnating under the weight of its bloated government. As tragic as that alone is, even this is but a mere symptom of Mr. Obama’s larger fundamental failure: He simply does not trust the Americans who entrusted him with the presidency.

Most presidents, we believe, ascend to the Oval Office, but for the 44th president, the reverse seems true. Whatever majesty the White House can muster must rise to the grandiosity of Barack Obama. “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” said the man who writes autobiographies and later would claim to control the rise of the oceans.

As recently as this month, the food-stamp president of 13 million unemployed Americans declared himself the fourth-most-accomplished president in the history of the United States, eclipsing, in his own mind, President Reagan and even our nation’s father, George Washington. That in only three years. Barack the Magnificent won’t allow trivialities like $15 trillion debts or historic national credit downgrades dissuade him.

Mr. Obama may care deeply for America, but he believes in only one thing: Barack Obama. And you are not Barack Obama.

Where once the American flag was hailed universally as the ultimate symbol of freedom, we who live under it have slowly but surely surrendered our liberties to an insatiable government. Consider our decline in just the past two generations. Our grandfathers, who stood against evil and shed their blood to stop it, never would have tolerated their own government becoming so totalitarian that it would dictate to them what car they should drive, what (if any) health insurance they should choose or even what light bulb they should buy.

Has our generation been worthy of earlier Americans’ sacrifices? Or have we surrendered their hard-fought victories in return for false promises of a big-government utopia that never materializes? Look no further than the politicians we elect. We have chosen as our president a man who believes we are unworthy, not of the previous generations’ sacrifices, but rather unworthy of freedom itself.
The sum total of Mr. Obama’s political philosophy, the unifying theme of his presidency, amounts to this: You cannot be trusted to live as a free American.

President Obama’s first major legislative action, the failed $787 stimulus, revealed his fundamental distrust of free Americans. A president who actually trusts his people would stand aside as they freely chose how to invest their capital and their labor. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, simply doesn’t believe you are smart enough to know what’s best for you. He commandeered nearly $1 trillion dollars from the taxpayers and redirected it as he saw fit. That he squandered billions on crony boondoggles such as the Solyndra solar-panel company or laughable efforts to measure the malt-liquor habits of Buffalonians and the like is evidence merely of his incompetence. That he trusted only himself to allocate taxpayers’ money in the first place - even if he had had the capacity to do so brilliantly - is evidence of a much larger offense: This president distrusts his subjects.

Obamacare is a modern-day monument to government arrogance. So untrustworthy are Americans that they cannot be allowed to decide for themselves whether to purchase health insurance or, if so, how much. Likewise, physicians are too untrustworthy to provide you with care without first consulting the government’s “best practices” guidelines. Obamacare would solve both.

Untrustworthy bankers would become angelic under the restrictions of Dodd-Frank. Untrustworthy bloggers would fall in line under the Stop Online Piracy Act. Untrustworthy manufacturers would create the only jobs worth having under the dictates of the National Labor Relations Board. And untrustworthy energy consumers would act responsibly only under the restrictions of “cap and trade” or at least a dictatorial Environmental Protection Agency.

For statists like Mr. Obama, no matter how bloated our government has become, America is forever just one legislative act away from utopia, if only those untrustworthy Americans would just get in line. The man who ran on hope has instead embraced a tragic pessimism that views all free Americans with disdain as either incompetent rubes in need of his salvation or unrighteous villains in need of his rules. Either way, Mr. Obama embraces a command-and-control government and rejects American freedom.

Mr. Obama’s distrust of Americans is his fatal flaw, and Republicans would be wise to exploit it fully. The GOP should resist the temptation simply to become a cleverer version of autocrats who pull the same powerful levers of government but in different directions. Instead, they should become the party that embraces liberty.

If the 2012 election is between Republicans and Democrats or even between conservatives and liberals, Republicans might win. But if the election is instead between a bloated, ineffectual government that distrusts its subjects and Americans who still yearn to breathe free, Republicans will win. Only then will voters have a dramatic choice between a party that trusts Americans to be free and a party that does not.

Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, is a radiologist and President Obama’s cousin. He blogs at miltonwolf.com.

RECOGNIZE ANYONE YOU KNOW? PERHAPS SOMEONE IN YOUR OWN FAMILY!

2011-12-28T17:38:00.000-08:00

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MEET OUR WEALTHY OLIGARCHS

2011-12-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

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The House of Representatives of the United States Congress was designed by our Founding Fathers to be the mirror image of the people of the Nation, while the Senate was designed to be the voice of the states and for most of the Nation's history the senators were selected by state legislatures. It is indicative of how far our federal government has lost touch with the voters of the Nation that the members of the House are now wealthy oligarchs as this item from the Political Diary of the Wall Street Journal Online shows:

At least one group of Americans has been profiting despite the faltering economy: members of the U.S. House of Representatives. They're supposed to be the part of the government that's "closest to the people." But as the saying has it, they came to do good and stayed to do well. In their cases, mostly very well.

"Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home equity," the Washington Post reported Monday. By contrast, the typical American saw his "comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500." The data came from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan.

That means the average representative's net worth is 35 times that of the average American's. This helps explain why Congress is so out of touch with the ordinary Americans they claim to represent and who in too many cases are suffering unemployment, foreclosures, even evictions. And it looks like the Occupy Wall Street movement needs to march about 228 miles south, from Manhattan to Capitol Hill.

-- From an editorial in the Orange County (Calif.) Register on Dec. 27.

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS NO SPIRO AGNEW

2011-12-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

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The Agnew Funeral.

Posted in Uncategorized on December 24, 2011 by naturalborncitizen

http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/

Today we can finally bury, and lay to rest, the slander that Spiro Agnew, Vice President under Richard Nixon, did not meet the two citizen parent standard defined in Minor v. Happersett.

I was at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. yesterday and today double checking the information I found at Princeton’s amazing Firestone library earlier this week. Before that, I was in Baltimore where I received a couple of important clues.

A few weeks ago, I was researching this issue at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, only blocks from where Spiro Agnew grew up. I asked the head reference librarian to help me track down the 1910 census. I was hoping it would provide more information than the 1920 and 1930 census info, which contain a serious discrepancy. The 1920 census indicates Spiro’s father was not naturalized by 1920, two years after Spiro was born, which, if true, would mean Agnew was born to an alien. This has been alleged as precedent for Obama, who was born of an alien father.

The 1930 census indicates that Spiro’s father Theodore had been naturalized by then. It was also common knowledge that the 1920 census info contradicts a World War I draft registration card on file for Theodore Agnew dating back to September 12, 1918, which indicates he was naturalized just prior to Spiro’s birth on November 9, 1918.

In Baltimore, the librarian told me that Agnew’s father lived in Schenectady, N.Y. in 1910 and that I should check the census for that city. He also warned me that the name might be spelled wrong so I should try various spellings. This turned out to be quite prophetic.

At Princeton, I found catalogue records for many biographies on Spiro Agnew, but most of them were not available on the shelves. I had to order them from a special annex and it took 24 hours for them to arrive. Meanwhile, I began Googling these biographies and was able to unearth a very relevant fact from the snippet view at Google for, “What Makes Spiro Run: The Life And Times Of Spiro Agnew“, by Joseph Albright (published by Dodd, Mead & Company New York, 1972). The snippet told me something I did not know, that Spiro’s father first shortened his full Greek name to Theodore Anagnost, not Agnew.

I then plugged the name “Theodore Anagnost” into the database at Ancestry.com and searched the Schenectady N.Y. area. Direct hit. And the Md. Historical Society librarian was spot on, the name was listed on the 1910 census, and Ancestry.com had it catalogued as both Theodore Anagnost as well as Amagnost. It clearly shows that Theodore entered the U.S. in 1902 and that he was naturalized by the time this census was taken in 1910. It also contains the correct year of birth, 1878, and it includes the other members of his family.

Here is a hi res scan of the 1910 census record. (See lines 5-8.) The birth year is identical to the year listed on the draft card as well.

The next day I returned to Princeton and the biographies were waiting for me. Two of them confirmed all of the above and more. The Albright book states that Spiro Agnew’s father was born on September 12, 1878, named Theofraste Spiro Anagnostopoulos. He entered the United States on September 19, 1902 through the port of Hoboken, N.J. But before we discuss more from that book, separate relevant details stated in, “Spiro Agnew’s America” by Theo Lippman, Jr. (W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., New York, 1972), must come first.

Lippman’s book states that Theodore Anagnost declared his intention to naturalize in 1906, and that he submitted his petition for naturalization in 1907. The declaration and the petition are two different documents.

Back to the Albright book now, and he indicates that Theodore had become a United States citizen in 1909 and then changed his name again in 1911 to Theodore Agnew. Albright’s book gives a lot of detail on the genealogy of Spiro’s parents.

Here is a PDF of the relevant pages from both books.

Albright’s book also includes important details which corroborate the accuracy of the 1910 census regarding other household members who were included in that census and who were also included in the book. Albright mentions Theodore’s brother George, his girl cousin Angeliki, and a male cousin who had anglicized his Greek last name to Lambert. All of these people are listed in the 1910 census right under Theodore Anagnost, and all of these people are mentioned on the same page in Albright’s book as having lived together in Schenectady.

I also tracked down a high res image of the World War I draft card which is right next to brother George’s on the microfilm at the National Archives. They both registered for the draft on the same day, Theo’s birthday, September 12, 1918. Furthermore, both of them were listed as having been naturalized.

I also took a hi-res scan at Nara of the 1920 census. If you look a few spots down from Theodore Agnew’s family entry, you will see the entry for George Agnew’s family. It’s obvious now that many mistakes were made. Both men are listed as having entered the U.S. in 1887. That is absolutely wrong. Furthermore, it lists both men as aliens, and it lists their wives as aliens. This is also not accurate according to the 1910 census, the 1918 draft cards, and two thoroughly researched biographies from Spiro Agnew’s heyday.

Spiro Agnew was born in the U.S. of two parents who were citizens. Therefore, he was a “natural born Citizen”.

Leo Donofrio, Esq.

MEET MITT ROMNEY, THE LGBT CANDIDATE

2011-12-20T08:13:00.000-08:00

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Dec. 20, 2011

MassResistance Update

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"In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell

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Campaigning in Iowa, Mitt Romney publicly re-states his pro-homosexual positions on military, judges, and more.

An unsettling glimpse into a Romney Administration . . .

As the campaigning for the Iowa caucuses on January 3 heats up, Mitt Romney has publicly — and rather shockingly — restated his support for many of the homosexual movement's goals. These recent statements, while fairly shocking, certainly square with his actions as Governor of Massachusetts, which we have documented. They differ sharply from the hardcore "social conservative" façade he presented when he ran for president in 2008. He did his best to disguise his radical viewpoint on "sexual orientation" record then.

But Romney was candid about his pro-gay positions during the national televised candidates' debate in Iowa on Thursday, Dec. 15 and also during a newspaper editorial board meeting on Dec. 9.

At national Fox News debate in Iowa on Dec. 15. From left: Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and Jon Huntsman.

Romney emphasized that the one exception to his pro-gay positions is regarding marriage. He said he always did everything possible to fight against same-sex "marriage." But even that claim has serious problems.

These positions certainly make Romney in the minority among the Republican presidential candidates, and would make him the most pro-homosexual Republican presidential nominee ever were he to get the nomination. And they should be a pretty clear window into what a Romney Administration would be like regarding this issue.

In particular, Romney discussed his positions on:
(1) Support for gays in the military

On Dec. 9, Mitt Romney met with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, Iowa's major newspaper. Here is what he said (see video) regarding this issue:

Reporter: How do you feel about gays serving openly in the military?

Romney: That's already occurred. I'm not planning on reversing that at this stage.

Reporter: But you're comfortable with it?

Romney: I was not comfortable with making the change during a period of conflict, by virtue of the complicating features of a new program in the middle of two wars going on. But those wars are winding down. And moving to that direction at this stage no longer presents that problem.

In December 2010, in a cowardly lame-duck session, the Democrat-controlled US House and Senate pushed through a repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell," effectively homosexualizing the US military. The margin of victory was by liberal legislators who had already lost their re-elections the previous month. They knew it would never have passed after January 1, 2011 when the new Congress came in. It was greeted with universal outrage in the conservative movement.

Romney speaks to editorial board of the Des Moines Register. See video here.

So, Romney supports the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. His only issue was making the change during wartime.

He had been vague on this issue throughout the campaign four years ago. But in 1994 while running against Ted Kennedy for US Senate, he said in his infamous letter to the homosexual group Log Cabin Republicans that open service for homosexuals in the military was a goal he agreed with. (See link to letter below.)
(2) Romney's strong support for "gay rights" in society

During the debate, Moderator Chris Wallace asked Romney about his 1994 pledge to the homosexual lobby that he would aggressively "seek full equality" for homosexuals. [See his letter to the Log Cabin Republicans here.]

"In 1994, when you were running for the Senate, you wrote a letter to the Log Cabin Republicans in which you said, "I am more convinced than ever before that, as we seek full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent," who was Ted Kennedy. . . So you are still more of a champion of gay rights than Ted Kennedy was?"

Romney replied:

"Let me go back and say that. I do not believe in discriminating against people based upon their sexual orientation. There are some people that do . . . I believe as a Republican, I had the potential to fight for antidiscrimination in a way that would be even better than Senator Kennedy, as a Democrat, was expected to do so."

As we all painfully know, "full equality" and "anti-discrimination" when used with "sexual orientation" are code words for forcing everyone in society under penalty of law to accept homosexual (and transgender) behavior into their lives as normal, subverting their moral and religious beliefs.

During Romney's term as Governor, this was particularly manifested in the public schools, where Romney's "Governor's Commission for Gay and Lesbian Youth" was well-funded, had access in the schools, and put on an annual "Youth Pride Parade" and "gay/transgender" prom in Boston. On two occasions (2003 and 2004) Romney signed proclamations for "Gay Youth Appreciation Day" to coincide with those events.

While Romney was governor, most people weren't aware that their tax dollars were supporting homosexual "Youth Pride" events.

This 2005 parade was led by "transgender warrior" Leslie Feinberg (in dark jacket on left of banner).

[Mass-Resistance photo]

Romney's moral position on homosexuality: it's not immoral

As Amy Contrada points out in her book The Mitt Romney Deception, the best key to understanding Romney's moral position on homosexuality may be his condemnation of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, General Peter Pace. In March 2007, Pace committed the politically incorrect sin of saying that homosexuality is immoral. Romney said in response:

"I think General Pace has said that he regrets having said that, and I think he was wise to have issued an apology, or a withdrawal of that comment. I think that we, as a society, welcome people of all differences, whether there are differences in ethnicity, faith, or sexual preference, and I think he was wise to correct his comment and to suggest that was an inappropriate point to have made."

In other words, it's not a problem. It's just a "sexual preference" that we need to learn to tolerate.
(3) Willing to appoint homosexual [activist] judges

Romney has strongly indicated that he does not believe that homosexuality is a moral issue and not a concern even when appointing judges.

During the debate Romney said:

"I do not believe in discriminating against people based upon their sexual orientation . . . I didn't ask justices that I was looking to appoint . . . what their sexual orientation was."

We saw that first hand in Massachusetts when Romney was Governor.

One of Romney's known homosexual judge appointees was Stephen Abany (in May 2005) to district court. Abany was an activist for gay-rights causes. He was a board member of the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Bar Association which heavily advocated for homosexual "marriage." Abany also had testified at the State House in 1999 advocating repeal of the Massachusetts law criminalizing sodomy. Such activism and glaring opposition to Romney's stated support for traditional marriage apparently did not keep him from making this appointment.

At 2010 Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Bar Association fundraiser. From right: Judge Stephen Abany, gay activist lawyer Gary Buseck, Dinner co-chairman Richard Moore.

Another Romney district court appointee was Marianne C. Hinkle. Hinkle is a Democrat who worked as an aide to Governor Michael S. Dukakis in the late 1970s and prosecuted John C. Salvi III in the 1994 Brookline abortion clinic shootings. Hinkle, in her application for the bench, describes herself as a longtime active member of Dignity/USA, a group that advocates for expanded gay rights in the Catholic Church and in society.

While in office, Romney created a Judicial Nominating Commission to help find people for him to nominate as judges. The state lesbian and gay bar association was given a seat on that committee, and its members encouraged to apply for judgeships. (See Amy Contrada's new article on "Romney's Judicial & Legal Appointments.")

In our experience every judge (and every politician) who publically "outs" himself as a homosexual is also an emotional, active advocate for the homosexual movement's political goals. This includes "gay marriage" and support for homosexual-transgender programs in the schools. We've seen this over and over again. That's why the homosexual lobby goes to such lengths to get homosexuals appointed as judges and elected as public officials.

Romney apparently doesn't get it. In this regard he could be particularly dangerous for the pro-family movement.

Romney's 'Governor's Council' excuse. At one point during the debate, Romney said that as Governor he only "nominated" judges, and the Democrat-dominated elected Governor's Council actually approved them, so he needed to nominate judges who would pass muster with the Governor's Council. In theory that's true. But in fact the Governor's Council always acts as a rubber stamp and very rarely rejects a judge's nomination for any reason whatsoever. It's a disingenuous argument.
(4) Touting pro-homosexual/transgender daycare center as "success story"

Twice during the debate Romney mentioned Bright Horizons Children's Centers as one of his businesses successes. Sounds good, until you dig deeper (as MassResistance researcher Amy Contrada recently did).

To social conservatives, Bright Horizons, a national day-care provider, is a huge red flag. Like Bain Capital, Romney's old company, Bright Horizons has earned a 100% rating with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a national homosexual advocacy organization.

What does a 100% HRC rating mean?

Company must give full transgender benefits, including hormone treatments, cosmetic, and even surgical procedures.
Company must have domestic partner benefits and full "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" equal opportunity policies.
Company cannot donate any money to, or have any financial relationship with, pro-family groups, or in the case of law firms, give them legal advice.
And MUCH more.

Bright Horizons describes its commitment to diversity to include, among other things, celebrating the value of all "sexual orientations, family structures and genders."

It's troubling, to say the least, that Romney would have no problem with all this. Is he not even bothered by the obvious possibility of transgender teachers at day care centers? What does that say about how a President Romney would run the federal government?
(5) Romney on "gay marriage": yes and no.

During the debate, Romney said emphatically: "I oppose same-sex marriage. That's been my position from the beginning." But Romney's definition only extends to the word "marriage." He supports state-sanctioned same-sex marriage-like relationships, even involving children.

Refused to support strong marriage amendment: In 2001-2002 — before the Goodridge "same-sex marriage" decision (Nov. 2003) — a strong petition referendum for a pro-marriage constitutional amendment was put forth by Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage (MCM).

The 2001 MCM constitutional amendment read:

Only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Massachusetts. Any other relationship shall not be recognized as a marriage or its legal equivalent, nor shall it receive the benefits or incidents exclusive to marriage from the Commonwealth, its agencies, departments, authorities, commissions, offices, officials and political subdivisions. Nothing herein shall be construed to effect an impairment of a contract in existence as of the effective date of this amendment.

A candidate for Governor at the time, Mitt Romney refused to sign it. As the Boston Globe reported, Romney said it was "too extreme." This was despite the fact that his wife, son, and daughter-in-law had signed it.

As the Globe reported in the article (3/22/2002):

Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney campaign spokesman, said Romney opposes gay marriage but also opposes the amendment, since he sees no reason to change the current laws, which allow for domestic-partner benefits to public employees. Currently, state employees' partners get limited benefits, but no health benefits.

Romney's family members signed the petition to put it on the ballot "without reading the fine print," Fehrnstrom said, but he has no reason to believe they do not support it.

"Mitt did not know they signed it, and Mitt does not support it," he said. "As far as Mitt is concerned, it goes farther than current law, and therefore it's unnecessary."

In refusing to sign it, Romney was out of step with the overwhelming conservative movement in Massachusetts. The amendment required 56,100 certified signatures to go to the Legislature. Over 100,000 people signed it, and 76,000 of those were certified. Unfortunately, when it got to the Legislature, the Senate President Tom Birmingham refused to allow a vote on it. The Supreme Judicial Court later ruled that Birmingham had acted illegally, but said that they couldn't force him to follow the Constitution and hold a vote.

Supported civil unions. After the Goodridge same-sex "marriage" court decision, Romney supported a constitutional amendment written by the Legislature, the "Travaglini-Lees Amendment," which would have created marriage-like civil unions in the Constitution with complete legal equivalence to marriage. (That amendment eventually died.)

Supported domestic partnerships. Later, in 2005, when another marriage amendment which was not as restrictive had emerged as a referendum initiative, Romney told a State House press conference that if the amendment were to pass, he would support domestic partnership legislation for homosexuals.

As Romney said at the press conference:

"There will be children born to same-sex couples, and adopted by same-sex couples, and I believe that there should be rights and privileges associated with those unions and with the children that are part of those unions."

July 2004: Man-on-the-street reaction to "gay marriage" ruling in Massachusetts.
[MassResistance photo]

(6) Romney re-intreprets the Massachusetts Constitution on marriage

During the Dec. 15 debate, Rick Santorum challenged Romney about how he fatally mishandled the "gay marriage" ruling in 2003 and began issuing same-sex marriage licenses the following year — and ordering justices of the peace to perform them if asked — without any legal authority or directive from a court or the Legislature.

Santorum said:

"Governor Romney — the court then gave the legislature a certain amount of time to change the law. They did not. So Governor Romney was faced with a choice: Go along with the court, or go along with the constitution and the statute. He chose the court and ordered people to issue gay marriage licenses, and went beyond that. He personally as governor issued gay marriage licenses. I don't think that is an accurate representation of his position of saying tolerance versus substantively changes in the laws."

Romney answered:

"That is a very novel understanding of what our Supreme Court of Massachusetts did. I think everybody in Massachusetts and the legal profession in Massachusetts and my legal counsel indicated that the Supreme Court of Massachusetts determined that under our constitution, same-sex marriage was required. And the idea that somehow that was up to me to make a choice as to whether we had it or not is a little unusual. We got together with our legislature and I fought leading an effort to put in place a constitutional amendment in Massachusetts to overturn the court's decision to make marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman."

Actually, there were widespread calls from the conservative legal community across the country for Romney to ignore the judges' ruling, since Constitutionally it could only possibly apply to that particular case, and only the Governor and Legislature can deal with marriage issues. The Constitution also states that only the Legislature can make or suspend laws, and the Massachusetts marriage law then (and now) clearly states marriage is between a man and a woman. (Even the Court acknowledged it couldn't change the law.)

An excellent analysis of this and the exchange between Romney and Santorum can be found on Steve Deace's blog in Iowa. Steve Deace is a longtime political commentator in Iowa as well as a major radio talk show host. Deace reports that after the debate Romney issued a challenge that Santorum wouldn't be able to find any respected legal authorities that would agree with his characterization of Romney's culpability. Deace went right to work on that! (Besides, Amy Contrada's book, Mitt Romney's Deception, already included well- documented expert legal analysis.)

Rick Santorum charges Romney with misrepresenting the Mass. Constitution for his own expediency, as Romney looks on. See video here on Steve Deace's website.

Moreover, Romney's legal counsel at the time of the ruling, Daniel Winslow, was a pro-gay advocate who supported "gay marriage". As a reward for work persuading Romney to move forward on that issue, Winslow was subsequently enthusiastically endorsed by the homosexual lobby when he ran for State Legislature in 2010.

As we said, all of this gives a view of what a Romney Administration would be like from a traditional values perspective.

MEET MITT ROMNEY, CAREER POLITICIAN

2011-12-20T07:53:00.000-08:00

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MITT ROMNEY, on the set of "Morning Joe," to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski: "I think that the only way we're gonna get President Obama out of the White House - because it's HARD to replace an incumbent - is if we have someone run against him who is different than a lifelong politician. ... There's nothing wrong with being a lifelong politician: We got one in the White House right now. Newt Gingrich has spent his life in Washington. And I don't think someone who has spent their life in Washington is going to be able to be sufficiently distinctive from President Obama to actually beat him. I think my background of 25 years in the private sector gives me credibility on the economy and on creating jobs that President Obama doesn't have. And that distinction is gonna make the difference."

OK, but what Mitt Romney does not say is that he has spent the last seventeen years of his life running for public office, participating in the political game of raising campaign fund and wheeling and dealing with other politicians for support for his campaigns. If that does not make him a lifelong politician I do not know what does.

- Leo Rugiens

LIFE IN THE NANNY STATE

2011-12-16T20:13:00.000-08:00

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Winning the war against ‘civility’

By Wesley Pruden If only the peasants would sit up and pay attention, the liberal nannies could straighten out “the mess” in Washington overnight.

The nannies, Democrats almost to the man (and woman), are frustrated that the system is working the way it was designed to work—with arguments (some of them angry), querulous debates and contentious disputation, leading at last to a fragile but workable consensus.

This frightens liberals who have controlled the national debate for lo, these many decades. Some of them prescribe a cure called “civility,” which, accurately translated, means “sit down, shut up, and eat your spinach.”

Thomas Jefferson distrusted the federal government because he knew it would grow too big and arrogant.

A little less debate and a little more acquiescence would, for current example, resolve the debate over extension of the payroll tax cut, set to expire with the year. President Obama is trying to sound enthusiastic about the payroll tax cut extension, making all manner of noise about how he’s looking out for “the little people” while the Republicans are only interested in the good fortunes of tycoons who light their illegal Cuban cigars with thousand-dollar bills. But what the president is really enthusiastic about is getting congressional approval of $1 trillion (or maybe more, we’re only talking multiples of zeroes) in new federal spending.

The partisan passion could be softened with “civility,” followed by a vote approving a continuation of his profligate ways. It’s not really rocket science. It’s so simple you might think even a cave man (i.e., a Republican) could master it.
Naturally the liberals—or “progressives,” as the people who stunk up the word “liberal” now want to be called—find others to blame for the parlous condition of the body politic. The monthly Bulletin of the reliably liberal American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) blames air conditioning, cable-TV and Thomas Jefferson. Tamara Lytle, writing in the current issue, makes the case that this array of bad phenomena is responsible for the polarization of the electorate, the “permanent campaign,” “citizen shortcomings,” the “dysfunctional design” of government by the Founding Fathers, and the rule of the “special interests.”

So frustrated are the people, she argues, “that the tea party and the Occupy Wall Street movements have sprung up from opposite ends of the political spectrum to voice public anger at the federal government.” If “the system” worked like it once did, and the way it ought to, there would be no public anger because the nannies would have had their way with the spinach. Alas, now a handful of newspapers, cable-TV networks and Internet blogs have given voice to the peasants who once had to tug their forelocks and say “yessir, boss,” and no sass or back talk. Such were the “civil” times.

“The system is broken,” mourns David Gergen, the director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard (naturally). “You’d have to be blind not to see dysfunction in government. And if you’re blind, you’d hear it.” Actually, blind people are perfectly capable of “seeing” dysfunction, too, and many do. They see dysfunction with a clarity that escapes Mr. Gergen, blinded as he is by politically correct eyesight. Even the blind see that the cure for dysfunction is fewer laws, not more; fewer regulations written by unelected bureaucrats, not more; smaller government, not larger; and more trust in the wisdom of the people, not less.
Where you stand always depends on where you’re sitting.

The rap on air conditioning, one of the great blessings of the 20th century, is that it enabled the growth of cities in the sunny precincts. Before air conditioning tamed ferocious summers, cities like Atlanta, Miami, Jacksonville, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix were small towns asleep in the sun, where nothing moved in June, July and August. Now they’re powerhouse cities, redoubts of Republican voters, and of course this is bad. As air conditioning spread, many retirees moved south with their conservative politics, making the South even “more . . . Republican and tilting parts of the urban Midwest and Northeast more Democratic,” writes Miss Lytle of the AARP. She might have observed, but didn’t, that this further increased the obstructionist strength of the liberals in the Northeast unable to “grow” with the times.

Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father to whom we all owe the most, arouses liberal ire because he argued against usurping the rights of the states that created the federal union. Like certain of his fellows, Jefferson distrusted the federal government because he knew it would grow too large, become disconnected from the people, and be heir to the arrogance, insolence and prideful haughtiness that is the lot of the unrestrained homo erectus. It’s being deprived of this arrogance, insolence and prideful haughtiness that makes the liberal nanny’s teeth itch.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

FROM LOS ANGELES TO RANCHO MIRAGE

2011-12-15T10:39:00.000-08:00

!!!!

Ben Stein's Diary

It's Gingrich-Huntsman

By Ben Stein on 12.14.11 @ 6:09AM

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ONLINE

A very clear view from Rancho Mirage.

Monday

A grueling drive down from rainyLos Angeles to Rancho Mirage. It is about the drabbest drive thereis anywhere on earth. The New Jersey Turnpike is like the 17 MileDrive in Carmel by comparison.
We always make a lot of stops because, well, because we'reold and get tired easily. I visited with people at a hotel inOntario, then at a CVS and a gas station in Calimesa, and at aBob's Big Boy. I am like a small town politician and my districtruns along Highway 10 from Los Angeles to Rancho Mirage.

In Rancho Mirage, we stopped at Pavilions to buy a fewanimal food things. The immense superstore was eerily empty. Only afew elderly men and women, alone, not in couples, shopped carefullyfor cat food and casually for frozen TV dinners. They lookeddesperately lonely. What if I were one of them? And how much itevokes my father when my mother died. He was miserable until he meta woman who took him to concerts at the Kennedy Center. Then he washappy. A good woman is everything.

I had wandered far away in the store from Big Wifey andsuddenly I could not see her any longer. I got frightened. What ifshe were gone? What if I were alone without my wife? I was totallyscared. I don't want to be 67 and alone. Or any age andalone.

I scurried around and found her smiling her big Denmangrin at the checkout counter. Now, it's Christmas. My gift from Godwas standing there looking at magazines. The most beautiful,kindest, smartest, most loving, most generous woman, with the bestsense of humor on this earth. The best creature I have everencountered and I get to have her as my wife. It is Christmas allyear long. I think my wife has more of the spirit of “love thyneighbor as thyself" than anyone else I have ever met. She'sliterally the best person on the planet and I get to call her BigWifey! CHRISTMAS! EVERY DAY!

We got home, unpacked, rested, then went up to theclubhouse for dinner. There was almost no one else there. Wewatched C-Span, by far the best reality channel there is, as weate. On air was a calm, extremely thoughtful debate between thenext President of the United States, Newt Gingrich, and the nextVice President, Jon Huntsman. This was a scholar's debate. Long,intelligent answers, no glib bullet points, no wisecracks, nozingers. Just a super smart analysis of foreign policy and defenseissues.

My wife and I were awed. These guys have it over BarackObama and Joe Biden by so much it's almost unbelievable. They aretruly impressive. Newt's position on defense -- get the bestdefense you can and need and then figure out how to pay for it;sequestration -- the worst possible way to play the budget game;Iran -- the greatest threat on the planet -- all of these werebrilliant. He loves America. He loves Israel. He loves freedom. Heis not bent over with self-loathing and conflict. I likehim.
This is vital: Newt stands up for America. So does Mr.Huntsman. I see them as dynamic campaigners and I see Newt knockingObama out in every debate. Comparing Mr. Huntsman with Joe Biden isjust plain cruel to my neighbor from Delaware.
I like these guys and now I have hope. If I were Mr.Obama, I would be worried.

Then, back home and a long, long swim under the stars.Perfect. We have a lot of worries at home in town with intrudersand scary lawyers. But out here, it's calm and peaceful. It'sChristmas.

About the Author

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American Spectator.

MARCO RUBIO IS NOT ELIGIBLE TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

2011-12-14T10:36:00.000-08:00

!!!!

I am an ardent fan of Senator Marco Rubio!

I believe that he has a great future as a United States Senator.

He is bright, intelligent, conservative and politically very smart.

He accumulated a lot of praise for his work as Speaker of the House of the Florida State Legislature.

He is attracting a lot of attention nationally now as a United States Senator.

Inevitably he is being mentioned as a possible choice for Vice-President if a Republican should win the presidency in 2012.

However, I am very sorry to have to say that he is neither eligible to be Vice-President in 2012 nor President in 2016.

The reason is because, like Barack Hussein Obama, Marco Rubio is not a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN within the meaning of that term as set forth by the United States Constitution in Article 2 and in the United States Supreme Court decision in the case Minor v Happersett. Here is the relevant passage from that decision:

At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. (Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 167 [1874])

Like Barack Hussein Obama, Marco Rubio was not born in the United States of parents who at the time of his birth were citizens of the United States.

IT IS FRAUD, CORRUPTION OF OUR LEGAL SYSTEM, POLITICAL SABOTAGE

2011-12-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

!!!!

December 14, 2011

JustiaGate: 'Natural Born' Supreme Court Citations Disappear

By Dianna C. Cotter with L. Donofrio Esq.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/m-justiagate_natural_born_supreme_court_citations_disappear.html

Did Justia.com deliberately aid Barack Obama in 2008 by helping to hide the one legal case that might prevent him from legally qualifying for the presidency?

On October 20, 2011, New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio accused online legal research behemoth Justia.com of surgically redacting important information from their publication of 25 U.S. Supreme Court opinions which cite Minor v. Happersett, an 1874 decision which arguably contains language that appears to disqualify anyone from presidential eligibility who wasn't born in the country to parents who were citizens. According to the decision in Happersett:

At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. (Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 167 [1874])

Justia is a Google Mini-powered website which has singled itself out as one of the most comprehensive and easy-to-search legal sites on the internet. Other legal resources such as Lexis can cost as much as $5,000 a month for a subscription, and it's impossible to hyperlink to cases which include copyrighted headnotes and analysis. This is why powerful law firms such as Perkins Coie (where former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer practices law) have cited Justia's pages.
The Wayback Machine, run by InternetArchive.Org, is the means by which the changes made at Justia were documented over time. Among the first responses from Justia regarding this controversy was to block its Supreme Court Server from being viewed by the Wayback Machine.

Click the following link for an image documenting the pattern of changes made to one of those 25 cases, Luria v. U.S., 231 U.S. 9 (1913). Notice that the case name "Minor v. Happersett" has been removed, minimizing the case searchability.

The cover-up simply reeks. While Justia owner Tim Stanley told CNET that there were more cases which had also been "mangled," there is no way to identify how much bogus law was published by Justia over the three-year period in question. Minor v. Happersett simply disappeared from cases which cited it, minimizing its footprint on the internet at a critical juncture in history -- the election of 2008.

McCarthy v. Briscoe, 429 U.S. 1317 (1976)

On Nov. 3, 2008, one day before the election, Donofrio petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the ballots in New Jersey from being used the next day in the case Donofrio v. Wells, claiming that the eligibility of both Obama and McCain had not been verified by the NJ secretary of State as required by law.

In his research, Donofrio had found a reference to McCarthy v. Briscoe, 429 U.S. 1317 (1976), an important precedent which allows the Supreme Court -- or even one justice acting alone if an emergency stay is requested -- to order a secretary of state to insert a name on the ballot. The holding of the case implies a reciprocal power to remove names from ballots for the several secretaries of State, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.

Back in '08, Donofrio couldn't find the in chambers decision anywhere online. Forced to go old-school, he procured it from a brick-and-mortar law library. But to this day, McCarthy v. Briscoe remains elusive at Justia. If you look in their "Volume" database and click "429," all of the in chambers opinions are mysteriously absent.

In chambers opinions generally begin on pg. 1,301, but not every official volume has them. For example, Volume 428 has no in chambers opinions, but 429, 434, and 439 do. Justia's database for Volumes 434 and 439 do exhibit the in chambers opinions, but Volume 429 has them scrubbed.
If you search Justia's Cases & Opinions by Year in 1976, McCarthy v. Briscoe is listed. There are two cases, an insignificant one-page opinion at page 1,316, followed by the relevant decision on pg. 1,317. There are links to the preview as well as "Full Text." However, all of the links are broken, leading back to Justia's front page.

Additionally, Justia's publication of a following 1977 5^th Circuit case, 553 F.2d 1005, includes a hyperlink back to 429 U.S. 1317, and that link is also mysteriously broken.

It would be instructive to track the timeline of changes in the Wayback Machine, but Justia is steadfastly preventing that transparency. Furthermore, if Justia continues its previous pattern, the links (eg: http://supreme.justia.com/us/429/1317/) will be restored upon publication of this article.

Take your screenshots now.

With numerous state-level challenges being prepared by opponents of Obama's eligibility for 2012, McCarthy v. Briscoe will be a required citation. That it continues to be unavailable at Justia seriously calls into question Stanley's contention that the cases on Justia's servers were mangled by an innocent coding error.

This claim of innocent technical error was debunked by Dr. David Hansen, a Ph.D. in computer science. McCarthy v. Briscoe, 429 U.S. 1317 (1976) at Justia shows a completely different pattern of information removal from what could be explained away by a single coding error which erased case names.

The removal of prior versions of cases from the Wayback Machine by Justia amounts to nothing less than supreme hypocrisy considering Stanley's high stature as a leading light championing transparency of legal information for the public.

Use at your own risk

Justia in 2008 tangled with the State of Oregon when it downloaded and republished the State Statutes without either informing the state or gaining its permission, in violation of copyright law. Dexter Johnson, the head of the Office of Oregon State Legislative Counsel Committee reported that the Committee received information that the State Statutes were available at a website other than the state. Upon investigation, the Committee ultimately decided not to pursue legal action against Justia for copyright violation; instead, "the committee decided to waive its copyright on the Oregon Revised Statutes going forward," said Johnson in a phone interview.

It is left to a user of Justia to verify the information to be found within its pages, despite a disclaimer of "Full Text of Case" on its pages. Upon inquiry with the U.S. Supreme Court, Patricia McCabe Estrada, deputy public information officer of the U.S. Supreme Court, responded that "the official opinions of the Supreme Court are posted on the Court's Website and we don't generally monitor other sites."

Johnson says Oregon also does not have a monitoring policy in place. When asked how a person using Justia's services would know if he were receiving accurate information or not, Johnson replied:

The only way, it seems to me, would be to compare that with what's on the legislature's website. In which case you might as well go directly to the legislature's website. It's one of the reasons why we had originally suggested that they have their website simply point in the direction of our own.

Justia publishes SCOTUS cases with the positive affirmation "Full Text of Case." Clearly this was not done with regards to the specific opinions it redacted and covered up. Whether a violation of law or not, various non-profit agencies, students, law firms, and private researchers who relied upon Justia's services remain in the dark, unable to determine if their research materials were altered by Justia, as the company has released neither what it redacted nor in what cases. Without an effective means of verifying accuracy, Justia's transparency and credibility are questionable.

Public.Resource.Org

It turns out that Justia received additional help from their close counterpart in the open government information movement, Public.Resource.Org (PRO), founded and run by Carl Malamud. Malamud was also the chief technology officer for The Center for American Progress, a progressive think-tank funded in part by none other than George Soros. Tim Stanley is on the Board of Trustees at Public.Resource.Org, and Justia is PRO's top benefactor. Stanley is also a co-convenor of Malamud's Law.gov organization, which, despite appearances, is not a government entity.
PRO makes available a huge database of court cases to other organizations such as the Cornell Legal Institute, which has now been dragged into the Justia mess through a case that cements Minor v. Happersett as defining "Natural Born Citizen." Ex Parte: Lockwood states:

In Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, this court held that the word 'citizen' is often used to convey the idea of membership in a nation, and, in that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution as since[.]" (Emphasis added.)

However, at Cornell, the opinion is cut off right after "Minor v.". Someone searching for "Minor v. Happersett" will be detoured from this case and its holding in support of Minor's precedence. Cornell's version of Ex Parte: Lockwood is completely mangled. Yet Lockwood helps prove that the decision in Minor created a legal definition of "Natural Born Citizen," something the national narrative states that no Supreme Court Case has ever done, in part because Minor's importance was effectively obscured.

There has been a deliberate, targeted effort to minimize if not erase the legal importance of Minor v. Happersett in defining the term "Natural Born Citizen." Justia and PRO champion freedom of information yet at the same time hypocritically redacted the law to suit a political goal. Justia and Tim Stanley butchered these cases and, when caught, removed Wayback Machine's access to Justia's entire Supreme Court server. The only thing hidden now is the evidence of Justia's deliberate scrubbing, as the cases are available in the public domain.

Tim Stanley has not returned messages asking for comment on this story at time of publication. Sometime last week, Justia added a disclaimer at the bottom of its SCOTUS case texts:

Official Supreme Court caselaw is only found in the print version of the United States Reports. Justia caselaw is provided for general informational purposes only, and may not reflect current legal developments, verdicts or settlements. We make no warranties or guarantees about the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of the information contained on this site or information linked to from this site. Please check official sources.

The disclaimer speaks volumes about the credibility and accuracy of Justia.com.

COMMENTS ON AMERICANTHINKER

Showing 18 comments

groman Today 03:57 AM

What is incredible to me, is that we have a mountain of hidden or fabricated facts about Obama's life prior to his selection as president. No transcripts from any of the colleges he attended, no one at these schools remember him. A trip to Pakistan when no American would normally be allowed to enter the country. Two highly lauded books which now appear to be ghostwritten frauds. We have evidence of voter fraud and intimidation during both the primary process and the general election. We have many "coincidences" such as the timely disappearance of pertinent information on Justia dot com and yet to mention any of this in public is to be thrown into the category of "tin foil hat" wearing fool. Call me a fool, but this man and his entire administration stinks on ice.

willmay Today 05:06 AM

The audacity, hoping no one would notice. Thank goodness we have intrepid true journalists like you. The unfathomable becomes ever more believable with each discovery like yours that hints at the extensive preemptive and follow-on manipulation of information the purveyors of "the facts" carried out in order to smooth over any bumps on the road to the left's anticipated glory days.

PE Today 06:58 AM

Just like the relentless efforts of the NAZI hunters, continue your pursuit. when you bring this fraud to justice with all his enablers and abettors, the "oceans will recede, the tyranny will be overturned, and America will rise again". thank you!

notnow Today 07:24 AM

The good ole USA. Our laws are only as good as our lawyers internet skills? OMG. I love a hard copy. It's why they made them. I have lots of books. More importantly, I know where to get them. This doesn't seem that hard to me, and yet we have an illegal running our country. As far as anyone knows. What's an uneducated guy to do? Inconsolable weeping?

TonyRome Today 07:52 AM

Can anyone tell me why the main stream media (includes Fox as of late) hasn't covered this story? I will save you the time to think about it, they are all carrying Barack Hussein Obama's water. They all fear that if they criticize Barack they will be labeled racist. Shame on all of them. Starting in 2003 Congress made no less than 8 attempts to change the Constitutional requirement that a person who wanted to be POTUS or VP had to be a "natural born Citizen." This is proof positive that the Congress of the United States knows what was meant by "natural born Citizen" or they would not have made such a strong effort to change the requirement avoiding the use of an amendment.

The fact that Barack Hussein Obama was not forced into a vetting process which John McCain was forced into to prove he was a "natural born Citizen" will eventually result in nothing but total embarrassment for our nation and in particular our Congress. McCain proved he was a "natural born Citizen" via a birth certificate that showed both his parents were American citizens at the time he was born. Barack will never qualify and he is presently...

borderraven Today 08:03 AM

"At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. (Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 167 [1874])"

Two words in the above quote bear weight. In the clause "it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves", the word "in" implies jus soli and the word "of" implies jus sanginis. So, if the phrase were written, "it was never doubted that all children born jus soli in a country jus sanguinis of parents who were its citizens became themselves...".

imsi12b Today 08:20 AM

Wish I could say something as lofty as my predecessors here, but all I can think of is George Orwell's "Animal Farm" where every time the other animals (the non-pigs) looked at the Constitution it was slightly different than they remembered it.

Chrisden Today 09:07 AM

Why has nothing been done about this issue? Why have we allowed the "coverup" to continue? I have to believe that our entire government and legal system have been corrupted. I told my Senator about Minor v. Happersett 3 years ago. His response was that Congress declared Obama a citizen (nothing said about the natural born requirement) and thus eligible for POTUS. Case closed. The entire ruling class is involved in this coverup.

Liberty Today 09:07 AM

Our enemies have told us that they were going to destroy this great country from within for decades and the older I become the more I see their desires and threats coming to fruition. And with the election of Barack Hussein Obama our enemies have truly grasped the golden ring and yet, with all the utter disasters and imcompetence displayed by this Nowhere Man in the Oval Office, he is still polling in the 40+ percentages and could win re-election. This is utterly nightmarish and while reading this excellent article I know my blood pressure must have gone off the scale realizing just how deep the conspiracy to protect 0bama runs and how wide its tenacles continue to grow with each new revelation.

In a lighter point, I sure do hope Mr. Peabody and Sherman can get that Way Back Machine fixed and please give me a call when you do, I would love to tag along and go back for a short respite from all that I see and hear going on in a very screwed up world -- maybe to when I was eight years old when my biggest fear was that a rain shower was going to cause the cancellation...

JQAdams Today 09:22 AM

So JustiaGate committed fraud...shame on them. The question remains how did this help Obama bypass the law? Is there not any old dusty law books and court records regarding Minor v. Happersett. Oh that's right you found those court cases without Justiagate. It appears to be settle by the supreme court the Natural Born clause definition. Now what do we do about it since it is settled law?

RJ118 Today 09:45 AM

Just another coverup in an administration of cover ups. It sickens me to think that all of the future generations will suffer directly as a result of the election of this non american hateful leftist to the lofty position of president. When I joined military years ago the FBI background check for a secret security clearance went all the way back to my 5th grade teacher, I was born and raised in one place and attended one school system from 1-12 grade. I cannot believe that our great nation has devolved into such a patently oblivious state.

2012 is the last hope, either we get the elitist in D/C back under the rule of law or this nation is doomed to the ashpit of history. History will not be kind to those who sat back and allowed this to occur. Think of the normal nation loving Germans who sat on the sidelines or the soldiers who herded 6 million jews into the rail cars and killing stations. Rational thinking Americans blinded by political correctness are quickly becoming the next in a long line of sheep being lead by the Judas goats into the grinder of socialism.

angrytom 41 minutes ago

There has to be a direct challenge from a lawyer for the client challenging the issue.Where are these people? Why are they waiting for?

Conrad 33 minutes ago

I would urge fellow conservatives to exercise a bit of skepticism and not accept every new conspiracy theory that pops up. At most, the authors have shown that Justia's version of old cases aren't necessarily accurate. However, they haven't shown that the discrepancies exist due to a deliberate effort to hide “conservative” cases from public view . If we're really interested in avoiding the "tin hat" label, let's be realistic about a few things: 1. Justia’s entire business model depends on people accepting the accuracy of its online databases. Given this, how likely is it that its officers would intentionally misrepresent the text of old cases, KNOWING that there are myriad correct versions of those same cases available both to the public and, more importantly, to lawyers and judges? 2. If Justia were trying to "diminish the importance" of Minor v. Happersett in establishing a definition of NBC, wouldn't it make a great deal more sense for them to alter that particular case in some way (or disappear it completely) rather than simply alter cases that cite to Minor? 3. Wouldn't any lawyer or judge actually involved in litigating the NBC issue be aware of the existence and significance of Minor and thus address that case as part of their analysis of the issue? I'm trying hard...

Muldoon1 29 minutes ago

What kind of movie are we watching, what kind of book are we reading, to where this situation is allowed to continue. How can little barry be placed on state ballots without being properly vetted. We have a little over 10 months to correct this wrong before the 2012 election, and no one with the power to fix this seems concerned. If this is not corrected, in my mind, it proves the Republicans are complicit in this scheme to defraud the American people. I expect as much from the socialists, but for the Repubs to sit idly by and watch this happen is unthinkable!

babysam 25 minutes ago

So what?

Obama is in place and possession is 9/10 of the law. Obama with his troops depend on this. They are living their "dream". Long planned and engineered in America, as in Europe with the present EU fiasco, i.e. the entire West. Obama is culmination of Progressives aims. To transform, to change a strong structure it is necessary to "deconstruct" to make way for the "new".They "know their enemy" and use this most important rule of warfare very successfully. The engines of the nation have BEEN GIVEN into their hands to drive the nation to where they want because they have no serious effective opponents to stop him/them from their attacks on the nation's laws and structure. Few willing to risk, singly or in cooperation, their seats on the gravy train of politics to stop him.

Few in those positions to which has been given the DUTY to stop unlawful arrogations of power: Congress, Senate and Judiciary. All busy playing in-group games, bowing and kneeling to this Obama and his generals for personal advantage, or seeking ways for self aggrandisement in "not letting a crisis go to waste". Forgotten is their bounden duty to their oath of office in their contract with...

11bravo 22 minutes ago

This article is years late, although another was published here a few months ago. Like everyone else is asking; do something! Don't just write an article exposing it. Find someone to file a law suit. This is where the GOP gets its head handed to it everytime-the media and legal war. It is a conspiracy (war) of sorts and the socialists are cleaning our clocks!!

I am an unemployed nuclear technician, I do not have the resources but I have ideas. One is the fight over this issue was over on election day 2008-welcome to the party.

DaveOregon 19 minutes ago

After reading this - dod you really want the government controlling the Internet? Obummer and his allys - which seem to be many in private as well as public domain - are rewriting facts and creating fiction and posting/publishing it as facts. No government agency should ever be able to control the content of the internet; you should be prosecuted for knowingly providing false inforamtion; prosecuted for knowingly abridging court records, etc. Bankers, financial managers and attorneys working in collusion with communist/socialists to get Obummer elected. Saw that coming -remember "Manchurian Candidate" - coure Hillary Clinton was the Chinese's main effort there - but Obummer was their "ace" in the hole. We are in one sorry state of affairs people...not sure we can stop the ship from sinking if no one admits the boat has holes in the hull.

inspectorudy 14 minutes ago

This says a lot about the state of our nation. For a legal reference web site to DELIBERATELY erase information that may be used by site PAYING visitors is a total violation of trust. How can anyone in the future trust a web site that they know has lied or cheated in the past? This is on a par with Wikipedia and there totally unreliable definitions. Who at this point in time would ever pay to use their service again? I am thankful that someone has gone to the trouble to ferret out this deliberate lie and I can only hope that you are able to entice the networks to make an issue of it. Good work.

GOODBYE U.S. CONSTITUTION, HELLO TOTALITARIANISM

2011-12-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

!!!!

Permit Me A Diatribe

by Leo Donofrio

http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/

Posted in Uncategorized on December 14, 2011 by naturalborncitizen

Let’s talk about the Constitution. This is a Document that provided the means by which justice could prevail. Before it was created, there was slavery. At first, the document allowed it to continue. But the men who drafted it were humbled by the faith citizens had put in them and the blood of brothers who died for each other. Their triumph over the tyranny of monarchs humbled them. The creation of the nation changed them, changed the way they thought.

In order to end slavery, they needed to create jurisdiction over the South. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves. After the revolution, Washington provided for their freedom and gave his entire estate to them to keep them free and safe. The Revolution humbled him and changed him.

Some original provisions of the Constitution may seem counter-intuitive now, but in the end the Document was amended and slavery died. Had they pushed too hard for it at first, there would never have been jurisdiction over the South.

The framers needed to create jurisdiction over the South thereby growing forces and using taxes available from the South. Would Jefferson have commanded the respect of the South had he not owned slaves? Food for thought. It took longer than they hoped, but the Constitution got the job done and those who were previously slaves became equal citizens.

This week I’ve been listening to the Lincoln/Douglas debates. Stephen Douglas makes me want to puke. And some of the things Lincoln said do too. But I am convinced Lincoln was playing chess the whole time. He won that chess game, ended slavery and paid for that victory with a bullet to his skull. Rest in peace, Abe.

Would slavery ever have ended had the Constitution not been written? We don’t know. But the world would be a very different place without the Document. My point in all of this is to highlight just what a miracle of liberty the Constitution is. It involved a process of thinking ahead and creative intuition. It has kept this nation free, strong and proud. Men willingly die for it.

So what it is to come of it?

We have told the world – rightfully – that our system of government is the best known to man. We proclaim the public holiness of civil liberties in the Bill of Rights to all nations. And hearing our call, the downtrodden flocked to us and made us great.

But as to those very liberties, the current federal occupants now say…”not so much”. Suddenly, they tell us our jury system must no longer be available to us if one man – the President – decides we are to be taken in the middle of the night and locked in a small black box indefinitely and without due process of law. (I don’t refer to the current President specifically, I refer to the office in general, and for decades to come.)

This is Constitutional depravity defined.

Why is this necessary? It’s certainly not. Our system works brilliantly. That’s why men die for it.
Our dear leaders now tells us in Senate Bill 1867 that we must forfeit our Constitutional safeguards. Isn’t this a victory and concession to terrorists? Because of their belligerent acts, our liberties are now required to be suspended? How is that not a victory for terrorism?

True enemies hate our Constitution. They know it stands as a wall of protection from foreign ideologies which we deplore. And now our leaders are doing their dirty work for them. I say that those who are taking our liberties away are in league with terrorists. Treason can be indirect. SB 1867 is treason.

But it’s not the first. When Congress rendered the 5th Amendment power of presentment “obsolete”, that was treason.

And then we have the natural-born citizen clause. They tell us that the children of Osama Bin Laden and Kim Jong Il can be Commander In Chief of our armed forces. Would that not be treason?

The 1st Amendment protects against the establishment of religion. But it still says “In God We Trust” on federal reserve notes. The God mentioned on the dollar bill is not my God. The symbols of the pyramid and the eye do not represent my faith. So why are they there? The 1st Amendment does not allow for them, but they remain. If we sanction even one exception for religion, we are paving the way to a funeral for the 1st Amendment. What if the majority wants Sharia law? What if the minority wants Satanism? My Father in heaven has no need for money. And he doesn’t require worship in Congress or any municipal place.

He only requires the pure silence of your hearts… but our Constitution requires your loudest proclamations of faith. Raise up your voices as one. Surround the Document. Shield it for your posterity. It is bleeding and its blood now stains the very lips of usurpation. The time is nigh, America.

Make a stand.

Stop Senate Bill 1867.

- Leo Donofrio, Esq.

IS NEWT A HINDENBURG AIRSHIP ?

2011-12-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

!!!!

Cool Hand Newt?

by Paul A. Gigot, Editorial Page Editor
The Wall Street Journal
Political Diary Online
Monday, 12 December 11

Newt Gingrich is at his scrappy best as the underdog or minority leader. He tends to get into trouble when he's riding high and begins to let his sense of personal historical destiny get the better of his judgment. Now that he's leading in the GOP presidential polls, the big question is whether he can control his tendency toward condescension and vainglory.

His first test came in Saturday night's ABC-TV debate, and he held up well. Under attack from nearly all sides, he kept his sense of humor, sheathed his snarl, and cheerfully rebutted the accusations. His sharpest reply noted that the only reason Mitt Romney isn't a career politician is because he'd lost a Senate race to Ted Kennedy in 1994. But the gibe was softened with a matter-of-fact delivery and a can-you-believe-this smile. The closest he came to a sneer came in a reply to the "Newt Romney" barbs of Michele Bachmann, whose practiced sound bites must be hard to take given her general lack of depth. But Mr. Gingrich never stepped over the line that would make him look mean.

The former House Speaker was especially good in admitting his marital mistakes and saying he'd had to seek "forgiveness" and "reconciliation." He also made the best of the hash he had made earlier in the week by calling the Palestinians an "invented" people. That earlier remark showed Mr. Gingrich still likes to be the candidate-provocateur, and his campaign had to backtrack on Saturday and say he didn't mean that the Palestinians had no right to a state. By the debate, Mr. Gingrich put the issue in its proper context, which is the continuing Palestinian use of terror against Israel.

Can Mr. Gingrich maintain his message and personality discipline? His advisers say he's mellowed with age and since his conversion to Catholicism and that he has a new calm about him. Others say he can't help himself -- and that he is, in the analogy offered by one Republican, "the Hindenburg," a hydrogen airship that will blow up sooner or later. The nomination may hang on who's right.

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES, HIS KANSAS SPEECH PROVES IT

2011-12-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

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BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
DECEMBER 12, 2011
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

Smart and Dumber

Why intellectuals love the president's brainless rhetoric.

By JAMES TARANTO

Republicans who favor Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney are making a big mistake, New York Times conservative Ross Douthat argues in an extraordinarily interesting column. Support for Gingrich, Douthat argues, arises from "a desperate desire to somehow beat Barack Obama at his own game, and to explode what conservatives consider the great fantasy of the 2008 campaign--the conceit that Obama possessed an unmatched brilliance and an unprecedented eloquence."

That is a mistake, Douthat argues, because everybody has already figured out that the emperor is unclad:

It isn't 2008 anymore, and conservatives don't actually need to explode the fantasy of Obama's eloquence and omnicompetence. The harsh reality of governing has already done that for them. Nobody awaits the president's speeches with panting anticipation these days, or expects him to slay his opponents with the power of his intellect. Obamamania peaked with the inauguration, and it's been ebbing ever since.

We've been sounding the theme of Obama's intellectual inadequacy since at least October 2010. Our colleague Bret Stephens was also ahead of the game with his August 2011 column titled "Is Obama Smart?" Lately, though, the subject has been much more widely remarked upon, especially after the president's latest dreadful speech, last week in Kansas. The usually mild-mannered Peter Wehner of Commentary declared the president a "political hack":

In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama took another stab at summarizing the philosophy of the Republican Party. And this is the best Obama could do: "Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules."

This is a silly and intentionally misleading statement--silly because it's so transparently false and intentionally misleading because the president surely cannot believe his own rhetoric. The problem for Obama is it's becoming a pattern. Earlier this year, he charged that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to "fend for themselves."

After that, he told us the GOP plan is "dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance." . . .

These are the kinds of things a politically desperate and intellectually bankrupt politician says. The president must believe he cannot win a debate on philosophy on the merits, so he instead employs the crudest caricatures he can.

The Washington Examiner's Michael Barone:

Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of smart people. And over the last four years we have heard countless encomiums, and not just from Democrats, of the intellect and perceptiveness of Barack Obama. But a reading of the text of Obama's December 6 speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, billed as one of his big speeches of the year, shows him to be something like the opposite.

Even by the standards of campaign rhetoric, this is a shockingly shoddy piece of work. . . . What's really staggering is the weakness of his public policy arguments. The long-term unsustainability of our entitlement programs he blames solely on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts--an explanation no serious observer regards as anything but incomplete, to say the least. He points to growing income inequality and to remedy it advocates policies that are utterly inadequate to the task. We need to be "making education a national mission," he says, and in essence argues for channeling more money to teacher union members.

Douthat, however, deserves some special credit. Given the eagerness of New York Times liberals to find ways of charging conservatives with racism, it takes some courage for a New York Times conservative to disparage the intellect of the first black president.

"What we have here, it seems [is] a president who has no serious interest in public policy," Barone concludes. "Those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people should be embarrassed."

A smart Democrat might observe that, unlike the children of Lake Wobegon, the American electorate includes many people who are below average. They're entitled to a little representation, as Sen. Roman Hruska famously observed; and outside a few college-town districts, no politician will ever win election by appealing only to the far right of the bell curve. By this argument, Obama's populist appeal has a practical justification, even if its content is embarrassing.

But the funny thing about "populism" is that it doesn't seem to be very popular. As Mickey Kaus observes (ellipses in original):

So pro-business, centrist chief of staff William Daley is demoted, Obama moves to a feisty, fight back, progressive posture, casting Republicans as the party of the 1%, and . . . he loses three points in Ohio? Isn't Ohio one of the states where populism is supposed to work? . . . The poll in question was taken before Obama's big "inequality" speech in Kansas. Still . . . the shift's been going on for weeks. . . . Look at this chart of the President's national approval rating and tell me it's working.

Yet it would overstate the case to say that Obama's so-called populism, or "flopulism" in Kaus's droll portmanteau, is completely without appeal. There is one group that just loved the Kansas speech. Among its members were journalists like E.J. "Baghdad Bob" Dionne, Joe Klein and the editorial board of the New York Times, along with academics such as Robert Reich, Geoffrey Stone and Michael Kazin.

There's an irony for you. The one group to which the president's brainless bashing of businessmen and conservatives appeals consists of . . . intellectuals. Or, as Barone puts it, "those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people." Obama's appeal to these self-styled brainiacs is not reasoned but emotional: He taps into their resentments.

The lefty intellectual resents successful businessmen and conservatives because they threaten his own sense of superiority. Wealthy businessmen's material success is a mark of higher status than the professor or journalist's mere affluence. Conservative politicians act as if the lefty intellectual is not morally superior. In addition, conservative intellectuals challenge his sense of cognitive superiority. Within journalism and academia conservatives are smarter than liberals on average, because the former are those who have managed to succeed despite going against the grain ideologically.

Left-liberal intellectuals, then, fail to appreciate the intellectual shallowness of the president's class-warfare rhetoric because it seduces them by reinforcing their own superiority over competing elites.
The Kleins and Dionnes, Reichs and Kazins are never going to be won over by Newt Gingrich, no matter how well he does in debate against Obama. Is anyone else? Douthat plausibly doubts it:

Gingrich might debate circles around Obama. He might implode spectacularly, making a hot mess of himself while the president keeps his famous cool. But either way, setting up a grand rhetorical showdown seems unlikely to supply a disillusioned country with what it's looking for from Republicans in 2012.

Conservatives may want catharsis, but the rest of the public seems to mainly want reassurance. They already know Barack Obama isn't the messiah he was once cracked up to be. What they don't know is whether they can trust anyone else to do better.

This is the best argument against Gingrich that we've heard. Everyone old enough to remember the late 1990s is aware of his weaknesses. But Douthat raises a pertinent question about the former speaker's greatest strength. Anyone who's watched the Republican debates this year knows Gingrich is capable of performing dazzlingly. But if Douthat is right about the degree to which Obama's intellect has already been discounted (except among lefty intellectuals), a dazzling debate performance may be neither necessary nor sufficient to defeat the president.

Another possibility occurs to us: What if Gingrich does get elected president after out-debating weak opponents, then proceeds to overread his mandate and overreach in ways that prove disastrous to his party? That pretty well describes what happened with the guy who won in 2008.

MORE DECEPTION OF THE ISSUE OF NATURAL BORN CITIZENSHIP

2011-12-06T12:29:00.001-08:00

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Debunking The New Natural Born Citizen Congressional Research Propaganda.

http://www.naturalborncitizen.blogspot.org

December 1, 2011

Yesterday, attorney Jack Maskell issued yet another version of his ever changing Congressional Research Memo on POTUS eligibility and the natural-born citizen clause. The CRS memo is actually a blessing for me in that I’ve been putting a comprehensive report together on this issue for about a month now. But not having an official source standing behind the entire body of propaganda made my job more difficult.
The complete refutation will be available soon, but for now I will highlight one particularly deceptive example which illustrates blatant intellectual dishonesty. On pg. 48, Maskell states:

In one case concerning the identity of a petitioner, the Supreme Court of the United States explained that “[i]t is not disputed that if petitioner is the son” of two Chinese national citizens who were physically in the United States when petitioner was born, then he is “a natural born American citizen ….”221

221 Kwok Jan Fat v. White, 253 U.S. 454, 457 (1920). The Supreme Court also noted there: “It is better that many Chinese immigrants should be improperly admitted than that one natural born citizen of the United States should be permanently excluded from his country.” 253 U.S. at 464.

Reading this yesterday, I had a fleeting moment of self-doubt. Could I have missed this case? Did the Supreme Court really state that the son of two aliens was a natural-born citizen? The Twilight Zone theme suddenly chimed in. I then clicked over to the actual case, and of course, the Supreme Court said no such thing.
The petitioner was born in California to parents who were both US citizens. His father was born in the United States and was a citizen by virtue of the holding in US v. Wong Kim Ark. His mother’ place of birth was not mentioned. Regardless, she was covered by the derivative citizenship statute, and was, therefore, a US citizen when the child was born.
It was alleged that the petitioner had obtained a false identity and that the citizen parents were not his real parents. But the Supreme Court rejected the State’s secret evidence on this point and conducted their citizenship analysis based upon an assumption these were petitioner’s real parents.
Having been born in the US of parents who were citizens, petitioner was indeed a natural-born citizen. But Maskell’s frightening quotation surgery makes it appear as if the petitioner was born of alien parents. The Supreme Court rejected that contention. And Maskell’s ruse highlights the depravity of lies being shoved down the nation’s throat on this issue. I can imagine Mini-Me sitting on his lap while this was being prepared.
When you look carefully at Maskell’s creative use of quotation marks, you’ll see that the statement is NOT a quote from the case, but rather a Frankenstein inspired patchwork. He starts the reversed vivisection off with the following:

“[i]t is not disputed that if petitioner is the son…”

These are the first few words of a genuine quote from the Court’s opinion. Then Maskell goes way out of context for the next two body parts. The first is not in quotation marks:

of two Chinese national citizens who were physically in the United States when petitioner was born, then he is

And finally, an unrelated quote from elsewhere in the Court’s opinion:

“a natural born American citizen ….”

Put it all together and you get the following monstrosity:

…the Supreme Court of the United States explained that “[i]t is not disputed that if petitioner is the son” of two Chinese national citizens who were physically in the United States when petitioner was born, then he is “a natural born American citizen ….”

But the Supreme Court never said that. Here’s what they actually said:

“It is not disputed that if petitioner is the son of Kwock Tuck Lee and his wife, Tom Ying Shee, he was born to them when they were permanently domiciled in the United States, is a citizen thereof, and is entitled to admission to the country. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 , 18 Sup. Ct. 456.” Kwok Jan Fat v. White, 253 U.S. 454, 457 (1920).

This real quote – when liberated from Maskell’s embalming fluid – does not resemble the propaganda at all.
Maskell avoids the inconvenient truth that the Court took direct notice of the authorities having established that the petitioner’s father was born in the US and that he was a voter:

“…the father of the boy was native born and was a voter in that community.” Id. at 460.

Maskell never mentions that the father and mother were US citizens at the time of petitioner’s birth in California.
This deceitful exercise alone strips the entire memo of all credibility.
Had Maskell simply offered his arguments fairly, using real quotes instead of Frankensteining this crap, I would not have attacked him personally. But such deceptive behavior deserves no respect whatsoever. The memo is pure propaganda, and it’s not even shy about it.
LOOMING CONSTITUTIONAL DISASTERS
The timing of the memo’s appearance is alarming. I have been saying for quite awhile now that Obama doesn’t really have to worry about the natural-born issue coming back to haunt him in court unless he attempts to suspend the Constitution. I know that sounds paranoid. And nothing would please me more than to be wrong on that prophecy. If my fears don’t come to pass, I will gladly wear the tin foil hat of shame. But the appearance of the updated CRS memo at this particular moment portends a Constitutional disaster.
If Obama attempts to suspend the US Constitution and/or declare martial law and/or suspend the 2012 election… chances of the natural-born citizen issue finding its way to the Supreme Court on the merits increase exponentially.
Leo Donofrio, Esq.

This entry was posted on December 1, 2011 at 7:20 AM and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Debunking The New Natural Born Citizen Congressional Research Propaganda.”

naturalborncitizen Says:
December 1, 2011 at 6:03 PM
More from pg. 460 of the Court’s opinion:
“Ernest Michaelis, for 26 years a justice of the peace and for many years the official collector of fish licenses, testified, making reference, for purpose of identification, to a photograph of the petitioner. He said he had known the parents of the boy since shortly after he himself went to live at Monterey in 1879; that there were two boys and three girls in the family; that he had seen the petitioner frequently as a little fellow when he went to collect fish licenses (the boy’s father was a fisherman); and had known him ever since; and, referring to the photograph, he declared positively that he was sure of his identity and that he was born in Monterey. He added that the father of the boy was native born and was a voter in that community.”
I smell desperation. If I ever tried to cut up quotes like this… and re-assemble them in such a recklessly cavalier manner, the Court would thrash me. It would be ugly as all hell. Nobody is submitting Frankenstein’s monster to the SCOTUS, not unless they want to be reemed out in oral argument.
The CRS memo is so full of holes… swiss cheese of the rotten variety. I would take a sledgehammer to it, but all I need is a xylophone mallet. Coming soon…
Leo

IS HABEAS CORPUS REALLY DEAD?

2011-12-06T12:21:00.001-08:00

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Martial Law: The Fix Is In

http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/

Monday, 05 December 2011

The new Martial Law Bill which affirms the detention of American citizens indefinitely without due process of law passed the Senate 93-7.
Habeas corpus just got knifed in full daylight, left to bleed in the cracks of the Capitol commingling with the blood of patriots who died for this country. The blood drawn like butter by Senate vampires drooling and gurgling with delight, appetites satiated… for now. Their ecstasy whisps through depraved neurons as their spit foams upon the very name of freedom.
And while there are hints Obama may veto it, my opinion is that the bill has been set up with the sole purpose of having him do just that.
This bill is a gift to Obama in that it will allow him to look like a true man of the people after he does veto it. But the bill is simply reflective of alleged powers already granted. So the veto won’t change anything. It will only make him look more Presidential for when he finally does use the already existing draconian measures to detain or kill anyone he wants.
Please see Empire Burlesque’s article on this, and all of the links:

“We’ve been mourning the death of the American Republic here (and at other venues) for many years now, since Congress surrendered its Constitutional responsibilities with the “Enabling Act” it passed on September 14, 2001, giving Bush a blank check for “all necessary and appropriate force” against any organization or individual that he alone declared was somehow connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. Three days later, Bush then declared that he had the right to kill anyone on earth anytime he felt like it and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.”

I see a lot of bitching and whining now, but how many of you were doing the same routine when Bush was President?
MARCO RUBIO’S SLANTED POSITION ON SB 1867.
Rubio erroneously claims that the bill does not deny habeas corpus to US citizens:

“In particular, some folks are concerned about the language in Section 1031 that says that this includes “any person committing a belligerent act or directly supported such hostilities of such enemy forces.” This language clearly and unequivocally refers back to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or its affiliates. Thus, not only would any person in question need to be involved with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or its surrogates, but that person must also engage in a deliberate and substantial act that directly supports their efforts against us in the war on terror in order to be detained under this provision. There is nothing in this bill that could be construed in any way that would allow any branch of the military to detain a law-abiding American citizen if you go to the local gun store or grocery store.”

Bunk! Notice Rubio’s qualifier “to detain a law-abiding American citizen”. What about citizens who break the laws protesting? What about peaceful demonstrations of civil disobedience? What if citizens dispute that the conduct even breaks the law? This guy should never get near the White House (and he’s not eligible). His statement above is so blatantly misleading, I can only wonder if he anticipates being drunk with power should the country continue its ignorance of the natural-born citizen clause and one day elect him.
Acts of Congress are interpreted by the courts directly pertaining to the words used in the act itself, and not by the speeches of big brother doublespeak cheerleaders such as Rubio. Mr. Rubio is an attorney who knows better. His statements above are not naive, nor are they stupid. They are carefully crafted doublespeak from a rising star in the political scene who knows how to skillfully crap from both sides of his mouth.
Let us examine the relevant provisions:

SEC. 1031. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.

(a) In General- Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.First note the title, “Affirmation of Authority”. This bill is simply elucidating the powers already held by the President. It “affirms” his authority, but such an affirmation is not necessary if he already has the authority. So whether this bill passes or not, the President still has the authority to carry out the things mentioned in this bill. Therefore, this is simply a dog and pony show, and if Obama does veto it, he still has the power to do anything the bill states.
If Obama were truly a man of the people, besides vetoing this bill, he would push through a bill which renounces all of the power that this ugly bill “affirms”. Until such a law is enacted, his veto, like this bill, changes no law already in effect.
You can see this more clearly in Sec. 1301(e):

(e) Authorities- Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities, relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.

Now let’s turn to Sec. 1032(b)(1):

(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.

That sounds re-assuring, doesn’t it? Except for one thing, folks. It only applies to “this section”. The protection against military detention pertains only to section 1032. It does not apply to Section 1031 which lists various forms of restraint. If the military detention prohibition for US citizens from Section 1032 applied also to Section 1031, there would be no need for both sections to contain separate provisions for “covered persons”. But 1031 and 1032 are independent sections and the prohibition against detention of US citizens does NOT apply to those citizens detained under 1031, which provides:

(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.”While “military detention” is the specific form mentioned in 1032, Section 1031 affirms the authority of detention generally. This includes non-military detention. Such detention could be potentially in a FEMA or DOD concentration camp. Those are civilian divisions and detention therein is not military detention. However, Section 1031(c)(1) provides for indefinite detention of anyone including US citizens, and this section does not include the prohibition against military detention in 1032. Therefore, 1031 provides for both military and non-military detention of US citizens.
Rubio knows this and his comments are parsed carefully in this regard. It’s so very creepy how these bastards cast their legislative spells. Rubio didn’t lie. He simply used a language most citizens don’t understand or even know exists – federal doublespeak, or fedspeak. This is how they stand there with a straight face. It’s not a lie, but it acts just like one. When Bill Clinton said, “It depends on what the meaning of is is…”, he was talkin’ fedspeak.
As you will see from his insidious delicate parsing, Rubio knows all too well that the two sections work independently. First he referred specifically to 1031(b)(2):

“(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

Covered persons under this act include a “person who… supported al-Queda, the Taliban, or associated forces…including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities…“ If the statute used the word “and” here, instead of “or“, then Rubio might have a point on this issue. But the word “or” clearly indicates that a person is guilty of violating the act even if that person has not “directly supported” the hostilities of al-Qaeda, the Taliban etc. The statute only requires a belligerent act, it does not require the person to be a part of al-Qaeda or to directly support al-Qaeda. Indirect support is enough according to the statute.
Words matter. The definition of “belligerent” includes: “a warlike or aggressively hostile nature, condition, or attitude.”
Therefore, if you are a person who has publicly expressed a spirited dis-belief in the official 911 story, it can be argued that you have exhibited a hostile attitude about the official story. If you don’t believe al-Qaeda was ultimately responsible for the towers falling, and that the government has covered up truth – ie, that the towers fell as a result of a controlled demolition – the government might assert that you have supported al-Qaeda.
If you doubt al-Qaeda’s ability to have pulled this atrocity off, then the government might argue that you are defending al-Qaeda. Your statement/blog may qualify as a belligerent act even though you have never expressed any direct support of al-Qaeda. Under this construction, you could truly hate al-Qaeda, but if the belligerent act appears to support al-Qaeda in any way, that may be enough to trigger the statute.
But this statue isn’t limited to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It also covers anyone who substantially supported “associated forces” engaged in “hostilities” against the US or its coalition partners.
The normal definition of “hostilities” includes, “opposition or resistance to an idea, plan, project“. Therefore, speech is a form of hostility under this statute. But so is thought. As the statute is written, even singular mental opposition to an idea, plan, or project qualifies as hostilities. Nebulous terms are chosen by these legislative vampires to be purposely evasive and universally inclusive.
I don’t really give a crap what the statute was meant to cover, Mr. Rubio. I care what it does, in fact, cover. One thing we have learned as a nation is that judges are more than capable of fitting meaning into statutes which lay persons could never imagine in their wildest dreams. Moreover, the rule of statutory construction in our courts looks first to the meaning of the words used in the statute, and there is a presumption that the words mean what they say. I have given you a clear example of how the words in this statue could be used against those expressing doubt in the official 911 story. But that’s only one example. We don’t know who “associated forces” covers as well. And the bill includes no statutory definition of “hostilities” either.
And finally, this statute is so poorly written that one possible construction of it could include any belligerent act not tied to al-Qaeda or the Taliban at all. The words, “including any person who has committed a belligerent act”… may refer back to subsection (b), and not to the first part of subsection (2). By this I mean that covered persons referred to in (b) are listed in (2), and these include those involved with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but perhaps also any person who committed a belligerent act. It’s not hard to imagine some court crafting just that meaning if they wanted a person bad enough and this was the only way to ensnare him.
The wording of this statute sucks. And Marco Rubio’s cheerleading for it also sucks. I do not trust this guy at all because of his statements on this issue. He’s learned the DC doublespeak well, has this one. The forked tongue force be strong with him. Watch him parse without abandon as he carefully works his magic concerning Section 1032:

“Section 1032 of this bill concerns a smaller group of people who Congress feels are required to be detained by the US military because people who fit within this criteria are a more serious threat to our national security. Any person detained under Section 1032 must be a member of, or part of, Al-Qaeda or its associates AND they must have participated in the planning or execution of an attack against the US or our coalition partners. Simply put, the application of this detention requirement is limited to Al-Qaeda members that have tried to attack the US or its allies. However, this detention requirement is clearly limited by a clause that states that the requirement to detain does not extend to US citizens or lawful permanent residents.”

He’s very careful here to limit his discussion in this paragraph to Sec. 1032, while 1031 is avoided. This is because 1031 is the section which truly guts habeas corpus, not 1032. These gargoyles in DC speak a language designed to accomplish mis-direction with the eloquence of Houdini.
Habeas corpus is at the heart of the nation. It literally means, “You may have the body”. And it’s got 93 daggers stuck in it today.
This Martial Law affirmation comes on the heels of the Congressional Research propaganda I wrote about in my last report. Two alarms have gone off. Be warned, America… martial law is coming.
Obama will probably veto the bill, but like I said above, the bill is only an affirmation of existing powers. His veto will not change those pre-existing laws. The veto will make him look like a good guy, so that when Obama does reach for these horrific powers, those who support him will point back to this veto to show that he was always against suspension of habeas corpus, etc. But the excuse will then surface that, “an emergency we simply did not foresee has come to pass and the President must now use all of his powers to defeat the enemy”.
This is a dog and pony show. Nothing happens without these federal freaks knowing about it first. Martial law is coming and they are setting up the script now.
I do pray that reams of tin foil are my inheritance for posting this alarming missive. Please, oh Lord, let me wear the blessed tin foil hat of shame and take this burden from our nation. Let me live in ridiculous splendor accepting with glee the blogosphere’s tomatoes launched at my head forevermore.
Unfortunately, my read on this hand of poker… is that my prayer is not going to be answered.
Leo Donofrio, Esq.
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This entry was posted on December 5, 2011 at 11:12 AM and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Martial Law: The Fix Is In”

naturalborncitizen Says:
December 6, 2011 at 1:23 AM
Judge Napolitano covered sb 1867 tonight on Fox… confirmed that indefinite detention of American people was in the bill and that the Senate snuck this past us. He was really unhappy about this and did a good job of explaining that habeas corpus was basically dead.
For those who doubt the Bush connection to this just follow the links in the article.
naturalborncitizen Says:
December 6, 2011 at 1:44 AM
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/terrorism/july-dec01/jr_09-14.html
This states the “use of force” resolution… which makes “harboring” “such organizations or persons” responsible for 911 available for execution… But the definition of “harboring” includes:
“To entertain or nourish (a specified thought or feeling): harbor a grudge.”
Therefore, again, if you “harbor” the idea that al-Qaeda did not bring down the Towers… one might be covered under the resolution. Like I said, the terms of these draconian measures are purposely nebulous.
Then there’s the Patriot act as well. My point was that since 911 the government has been issuing these directives with nebulous language that is designed with catch alls to ensnare who they like.
Measures with implications that would involve the indefinite detention of US citizens are unconstitutional.
A case involving the meaning of the word “harbor” could happen. If they want you bad enough, they will use these vague orders as best they can.
This is America and I don’t give a crap how bad the alleged crime is… citizens are entitled to due process of law. Either the system works or it doesn’t… for all crimes. If a person is a terrorist, we have laws to convict them and we have a jury system. Our system is as good as it gets. These measures seem to indicate that the government does not believe in the jury system and that it can’t be trusted. Too damn bad. This is the US and citizenship means total control of the US Constitution, not draconian paranoid measures which avoid the Constitution.
Bush is guilty of this rape of habeas corpus and he does not get a pass from me. I realize that many people who support this blog do not agree. But the people trying to destroy this nation are grateful that you don’t agree.
Leo
naturalborncitizen Says:
December 6, 2011 at 1:52 AM
Also, keep in mind the title of this act… it simply “affirms” existing powers… those powers do exist and they existed before Obama. The act, as worded, is only declaratory of existing legislation and executive orders. Some of the powers were enabled before Bush as well as those enacted just after 911.

LET'S HAVE MORE BUONO FORTUNO

2011-12-06T07:23:00.001-08:00

!!!!

I love Marco Rubio! He has all the qualifications to be President of the United States some day, except that he is probably not eligible because his father was not a citizen of the United States when Marco was born and therefore he is not a Natural Born Citizen within the meaning of Article II of the United States Constitution. For that reason alone I welcome the addition of Luis Fortuno to the list of possible future candidates for the Presidency.

- Leo Rugiens

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Fortuño Favors the GOP

Puerto Rico's Republican governor would be a fine choice for vice president.

By WILLIAM MCGURN

He's young, dynamic, and well-spoken. As a Republican vice presidential nominee, he could help with Latino voters in 2012.

And he's not Marco Rubio.

His name is Luis Fortuño, and he's part of a rising generation of Republicans pushing pro-growth, small-government agendas. Like many of these men and women, Mr. Fortuño is a governor. What makes him striking is that he's governor of an American territory, Puerto Rico, rather than an American state.

"I'm flattered," says Mr. Fortuño when a reporter pitches the vice presidency to him. "But what I've done in Puerto Rico hasn't been about my own re-election or advancement. It been about doing what I think is right."

Spend any time with Mr. Fortuño, and you will learn that high on his list of doing what's right is ensuring government lives within its means. When he was elected governor in 2008, one out of three Puerto Ricans were working for the government. When he was sworn in, there wasn't enough money to meet the payroll. In response, Mr. Fortuño cut spending and 20,000 government workers, provoking angry protests.

The governor stood his ground. Earlier this year, he signed a bill slashing individual and corporate taxes—and he says there's much more to do. For example, because Puerto Rico is not connected to the U.S. electric grid, it gets 68% of its electricity from oil (against about 1% for the U.S.), making its economy especially vulnerable to high oil prices. Just last week, Mr. Fortuño won a huge victory when the Army Corps of Engineers issued a favorable preliminary ruling on a natural-gas pipeline that would run 92 miles from southern Puerto Rico toward San Juan.

As a student at Georgetown, Mr. Fortuño subscribed to the conservative magazine "National Review." In 1980, he was so inspired by Ronald Reagan's message that he volunteered to stuff envelopes for the Gipper's presidential run. Twenty-five years later, he returned to Washington as a Republican representing Puerto Rico in Congress.

Yet as historic as he may be for Puerto Rico, Mr. Fortuño offers even greater possibilities for the Republican Party. Ever since JFK's 1961 speech about transforming the Western hemisphere, just about every U.S. president has spoken of paying more attention to our own backyard. In that enterprise, few vice presidents would come with Mr. Fortuño's experience in the region—or the ability to speak about free markets in a way that resonates with our neighbors to the south.

For his part Mr. Fortuño notes he's only one of many Latino Republicans in public life today. He points to Florida's Sen. Rubio, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as just a few of the rising stars. Latino voters, he says, are hard working and patriotic, noting that Puerto Ricans serve in greatly disproportionate numbers in the U.S. military.

"We Republicans don't have to run away from our principles," he says, "but we don't have to sound anti-Hispanic either." By that he means talk about immigration should be focused on fixing the legal system—not complaining about those who come seeking opportunity.

Of course, a Fortuño vice presidential nomination is not without its possible downsides. For all the governor's reforms, Puerto Rico's economy continues to struggle. (Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher also had some grim years before their own economies picked up.) The murder rate is approaching record levels, largely because a crackdown on America's southern border is pushing much of the deadly drug and weapons trade through the Caribbean.

Though there's no constitutional prohibition against Mr. Fortuño's serving as U.S. president or vice president—Puerto Ricans have been American citizens since 1971—perhaps the biggest issue is simply that the governor is not well known here. In our media-driven age, that means he would likely face a ferocious public vetting like the one directed at Sarah Palin when she was announced as John McCain's running mate. In other words, some of the same things that are exciting about a Fortuño VP nomination could make it a distraction.

Then again, the payoff is potentially much higher than the risks. It is no dismissal of Marco Rubio (who has said he's not interested in the VP slot) to observe that, as a Puerto Rican, Mr. Fortuño might enjoy greater appeal among the broad Latino community than a candidate from a traditional GOP constituency such as Cuban-Americans. In short, he might inspire a critical and fast-growing demographic to give the Republican Party another look.

In a 2012 contest where the big question is the proper size and reach of government, Mr. Fortuño would more than hold his own. Still, when asked point-blank about whether he'd accept a vice-presidential nod, Mr. Fortuño talks about any number of things: the attraction of an opportunity-driven society, the mistake of equating Latinos with Big Government, the aspirations that all Americans share.

But he doesn't say "No."

A WONDERFUL DEMONSTRATION OF WHY OBAMA STYLE SOCIALISM MUST FAIL

2011-12-06T07:15:00.001-08:00

!!!!

When the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
Is this man truly a genius?

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

It could not be any simpler than that. (Please pass this on)

Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

These 5 sentences areall applicable to this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

The Huffington Riposte

MARK LEVIN IS RIGHT ABOUT NEWT GINGRICH

THE OBAMA ELIGIBILITY CASE GOES TO TRIAL IN GEORGIA

THE STATE OF SOCIALIST ILLUSION

Obama's State of Disunion

AKA, 'State of the Campaign'

MEET NEWT, THE ENERGIZER BUNNY

TODAY: GINGRICH 41%, ROMNEY 32% IN FLORIDA

2012 Florida Republican Primary

PONCE DE LEON FOUND THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IN FLORIDA, WILL NEWT GINGRICH REDISCOVER IT?

ROMNEY'S BANE IS BAIN

The Right Opinion

The Problem With Rich Republicans

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM NEWT GINGRICH'S SHINING MOMENT IN THE SOUTH CAROLINA DEBATE

THE SCANDAL OF MITT ROMNEY'S TAX RETURN

NEWT GINGRICH LAST RECEIVED THE ONLY STANDING OVATION IN ALL THE DEBATES TO DATE

Why They Stood and Cheered

Gingrich confronts the left's insidious theory of racial supremacy.

By JAMES TARANTO

WHO WON THE GOP DEBATE LAST NIGHT?

WHAT WE NEED IS THE REARRANGEMENT OF FOCUS OF THE OLD MEN WHO SEND YOUNG MEN TO WAR

IS RON PAUL A FAERIE QUEEN

SIGN THE PETITION

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY WILL BE SCUTTLED BY MINOR v HAPPERSETT

MITT ROMNEY STARTED GAY MARRIAGE IN MASSACHUSETTS

McCAIN'S ENDORSEMENT OF ROMNEY WILL PROBABLY BACKFIRE

A 'referendum' on Romney

JUDGE RULES OBAMA MUST PROVE ELIGIBILITY TO BE ON GEORGIA BALLOT

IT'S A MIGHTY NICE DEAL IF YOU AN GET IT

Pull the parachute

THOUGHTS ON THE POLITICAL SITUATION

Essential Liberty

Insight

The Demo-gogues

PRESIDENT NEWT GINGRICH COULD HELP RESTORE THE BALANCE TO OUR JUDICIAL SYSTEM

The Supreme Court’s judgment isn’t absolute

PUBLIUS SPOKE OUT ON THE SUBJECT OF JUS SOLIS CITIZENSHIP

James Madison, Fourth President of the United States, 1809-1817

Barack Hussein Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States and thus is ineligible to be President of the United States.

By act of Congress late in 19th Century any person born on the soil of the United States is a citizen of the United States regardless of the nationality of the child's parents, but that child is not a natural born citizen if both parents were not themselves citizens at the time of the birth.

Leo Donofrio, posted the article below on his blog Natural Born Citizen showing that Publius (who was probably President James Madison) strongly stated British Common Law did not apply in a case involving James McClure.

- Leo Rugiens

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THE PUBLIUS ENIGMA: Newly Revealed Evidence Establishes That President James Madison’s Administration Required Citizen Parentage To Qualify Native-Born Persons For U.S. Citizenship.

by Leo Donofrio

2 Responses to “THE PUBLIUS ENIGMA: Newly Revealed Evidence Establishes That President James Madison’s Administration Required Citizen Parentage To Qualify Native-Born Persons For U.S. Citizenship.”

HAIL, CAESAR!

RECOGNIZE ANYONE YOU KNOW? PERHAPS SOMEONE IN YOUR OWN FAMILY!

MEET OUR WEALTHY OLIGARCHS

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS NO SPIRO AGNEW

MEET MITT ROMNEY, THE LGBT CANDIDATE

MEET MITT ROMNEY, CAREER POLITICIAN

LIFE IN THE NANNY STATE

FROM LOS ANGELES TO RANCHO MIRAGE

About the Author

MARCO RUBIO IS NOT ELIGIBLE TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

IT IS FRAUD, CORRUPTION OF OUR LEGAL SYSTEM, POLITICAL SABOTAGE

JustiaGate: 'Natural Born' Supreme Court Citations Disappear

COMMENTS ON AMERICANTHINKER

Showing 18 comments

GOODBYE U.S. CONSTITUTION, HELLO TOTALITARIANISM

by Leo Donofrio

IS NEWT A HINDENBURG AIRSHIP ?

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES, HIS KANSAS SPEECH PROVES IT

Smart and Dumber

Why intellectuals love the president's brainless rhetoric.

By JAMES TARANTO

MORE DECEPTION OF THE ISSUE OF NATURAL BORN CITIZENSHIP

Debunking The New Natural Born Citizen Congressional Research Propaganda.

December 1, 2011

One Response to “Debunking The New Natural Born Citizen Congressional Research Propaganda.”

IS HABEAS CORPUS REALLY DEAD?

Martial Law: The Fix Is In

Monday, 05 December 2011

3 Responses to “Martial Law: The Fix Is In”

LET'S HAVE MORE BUONO FORTUNO

Fortuño Favors the GOP

Puerto Rico's Republican governor would be a fine choice for vice president.

By WILLIAM MCGURN