The Right Lane 1.03.13

In pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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In a Crisis, Humanists Seem Absent

Since the Newtown massacre on Dec. 14, the tableau of grief and mourning has provided a vivid lesson in the religious variety of America. An interfaith service featuring President Obama, held two days after Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, included clergy members from Bahai, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and both mainline and evangelical Protestant congregations. The funerals and burials over the past two weeks have taken place in Catholic, Congregational, Mormon and United Methodist houses of worship, among others. They have been held in protestant mega churches and in a Jewish cemetery. A black Christian youth group traveled from Alabama to perform “Amazing Grace” at several of the services. This illustration of religious belief in action, of faith expressed in extremis, an example at once so heart-rending and so affirming, has left behind one prickly question: Where were the humanists? At a time when the percentage of Americans without religious affiliation is growing rapidly, why did the “nones,” as they are colloquially known, seem so absent? To raise these queries is not to play gotcha, or to be judgmental in a dire time. In fact, some leaders within the humanist movement — an umbrella term for those who call themselves atheists, agnostics, secularists and freethinkers, among other terms — are ruefully and self-critically saying the same thing themselves.

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Does Congress Have the Authority to Tax Americans At Different Rates? by Gary DeMar

The 16^th Amendment gave the Federal Government the authority and power to tax every citizen. Here’s the wording of the Amendment:

“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

Please note that there is no provision in this amendment that Congress is given the right to unequally apply this power. In looking over all the Constitution’s amendments, I don’t see an unequal distribution of either a freedom or limitation. Equality under the law requires that as each of us stands before the courts or the Constitution, no one should be treated in an unequal way. The law applies to every citizen equally, except, it seems, when it comes to apply the 16^th Amendment. Does the First Amendment parcel out its freedoms in percentages? Doesn’t every person have the same right to speak, write, and assemble? Rich people and poor people have the same percentage of these rights — 100 percent. The same is true of religion. In constitutional terms, all religions are to be treated equally. The same is true of the Second Amendment. Everybody has a right to “keep and bear arms” at the same rate. Rich people and poor people have a right to purchase as many guns as they want. Because the rich can afford more guns does not mean that they have to pay more for those guns. The quartering of troops is similarly equal in the distribution that “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” No one could argue that because rich people have larger houses that they should be required to open their house to soldiers. The same is true about the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments. Read them over and try to apply the percentage differences to them like Congress and the President do with the 16^th Amendment. The 8^th Amendment might apply in the case of increased percentages in taxation because the practice could be considered to be “cruel and unusual punishment.” Liberals regard taxation at ever higher rates as punitive. High taxes are designed to punish the rich. Sen. Rand Paul notes the law of diminishing returns on raising taxes. Taxation is not about increased revenue:

"You may not get any more revenue. You may not get any more economic growth. But you can say, ‘I stuck it to the rich people."

A progressive income tax is “cruel and unusual punishment.” The 14th Amendment could also apply. No State “shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” “Equal protection.” Our government is not permitted to treat people in an unequal manner. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice John Marshall Harlan argued the following in his “Great Dissent”:

“[I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”

The rich are considered a “class” in American politics. We speak of “class warfare” on a regular basis. Why are the rich classes treated unequally when it comes to legislative law? The taxation of income at unequal levels deprives people of liberty and property. All we need now is some lawyer or group of lawyers to make this point in the courts. We need to have the same fortitude as those who have worked for decades to overturn capital punishment.

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Western Media Blames Capitalism For China’s Damage To Families by Mark Horne

China has passed a law that allows parents to sue their adult children if the children don’t visit them often enough. The law is an interesting one, but what grabbed me was the way the Western media reported on it. Here is part of the AP story:

“A rapidly developing China is facing increasing difficulty in caring for its aging population. Three decades of market reforms have accelerated the breakup of the traditional extended family in China, and there are few affordable alternatives, such as retirement or care homes, for the elderly or others unable to live on their own.”

Seriously? When you’re thinking of reasons for “the breakup of the traditional extended family,” the best you can guess at is thirty years of “market reforms” in China? How about forcing married couples to kill all future aunts and uncles? Wouldn’t that do some damage to the extended family?

Here is Slate’s take:

“The plight of elderly is one of the big challenges facing the fast-developing China as rapid industrialization has led to the breakup of the traditional family structure without an adequate state safety net to take its place.”

But why didn’t that happen in the United States? Yes, industrialization did affect the family, but it didn’t leave generations in jeopardy. It wasn’t industrialization that has left parents without support, it was the forced abortion of their children—something that Western Media personalities will commonly praise even as the pretend to condemn the coercion involved. No one wants to admit the most obvious truths: China’s state government exterminated Chinese society’s safety net. It wasn’t industrialization. It wasn’t market reforms. It was abortion. Killing babies has consequences. The word, “duh,” was invented for situations like this.

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The Senate-passed fiscal cliff bill that House Republicans now are debating is a “complete rout for Democrats” and ‘“complete surrender” for the GOP, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said Tuesday. By BOBBY CERVANTES

 “Look, there are a lot of conservatives in the Republican caucus in the House who hate the bill for good reason. This is a complete surrender on everything,” he said about the ratio of tax hike to spending cuts.

On Fox’s “Special Report,” Krauthammer offered his prediction on how House Republican leadership will proceed. ”I think what is likely to happen is that the leadership is going to look to get the 218 that it could secure to send the bill back to the Senate with equal number of spending cuts,” he said. “If they don’t get it, (House Speaker John) Boehner will have an open vote, unwhipped, Republicans will vote as they wish. They will probably be enough with all the Democrats to pass this.”

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62% Favor Across-the-Board Spending Cuts, But 57% Think They’re Unlikely

Bottom of Form

Even as official Washington signs off on a “fiscal cliff” deal with $1 in spending cuts to every $41 in new taxes, most voters continue to favor across-the-board spending cuts but doubt they are likely to happen. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 39% of Likely U.S. Voters think it is even somewhat likely that government spending will be significantly reduced over the next few years. Fifty-seven percent (57%) see significant spending cuts as unlikely. This includes 11% who believe such cuts are Very Likely in the near future and 20% who say they are Not At All Likely.  Voters expressing their lack of trust that their elected officials will "do the right thing".

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Most Feel Safer with Armed Security Guard at Child's School

Fifty-four percent (54%) of American adults would feel safer if their child's school had an armed security guard. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 26% would feel safer if their child attended a school where no adults were allowed to have guns.

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Cliff Deal Stuffed with Pork for Hollywood, Railroads, Rum Producers

The mix of tax perks covering the next year, but with budget implications for the next two years includes everything from incentives for employers to hire veterans to incentives for employers to invest in mine safety. But it also includes these:

• $430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States. Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects.

• $331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50 percent of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease.

• $222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.

• $70 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”

• $59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to $1.01 per gallon.

• $4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes.

*Note the price tags above reflect estimated forgone tax revenue if current credits – which have been due to expire – are extended for one year as included in the Senate bill, per Joint Committee on Taxation.

Don't you love it when the Political Class uses your money for their own selfish Political interests?

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Pulitzer Prize Nominee Suggests Killing NRA Members, Dragging Republicans Behind Pickups by Drew Zahn

For 50 years, the left-leaning columnist Donald Kaul has raged against guns, but after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, he says, it’s time for “anger,” killing gun owners and dragging legislators who disagree with gun control behind pickup trucks until they get the message. The Pulitzer Prize-nominated columnist penned an alarming screed published in the Des Moines Register in which he further suggested the Second Amendment be repealed and the National Rifle Association be declared a terrorist organization. “During my 50-year career,” Kaul wrote, “every time some demented soul would take a semiautomatic gun and clean out a post office, a school or a picnic, I’d get up on my soap box and let loose with a withering diatribe about guns, the National Rifle Association and weak-kneed politicians. Did it about 75 times, give or take.” Yet each time, he lamented, the only result was a spike in gun sales. “That’s obscene,” he opined. “Here, then, is my ‘madder-than-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore’ program for ending gun violence in America.”  Hey Donald, we are not listening and even more we don't care about your pathetic screed!

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Ron Paul: “We Have Passed the Point of No Return.”  listen here

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Reclaim the Language: Taxation is Theft by Gary DeMar

The first thing any good debater learns is that the debate is never with the guy on the stage. The debate is always with the audience. Os Guinness makes a very astute observation in his book The Gravedigger File. It’s the 10-10-80 principle. In most social movements, there are worldview spokespeople on both ends of the political spectrum. They each make up ten percent of the aggregate. The real battle is over the other 80 percent. The goal is to move some of the 80 percent to one side or the other. Politically we know that at a good percentage of the 80 percent have been bought off with stolen money. But there’s still a large enough group that can make a difference in elections. We’re talking about a three- to five-percent swing. That’s the group we need to address. Economics is not difficult. Most people can understand how it works if simple analogies are used. Reclaiming the language is the first step. Technically governments don’t have any money. They can either tax people to get money or print it. If the government prints money, it is involved in theft since inflation (increasing the money supply) dilutes the buying power of existing dollars. It’s economic alchemy, turning stones into bread, paper into money. Governments can do it because they’ve given themselves the power to do it, and there are enough people who are complicit in this form of theft. They are accomplices since they vote for people who promise to tax the “other guy” and print more money to “stimulate the economy.” Another way the State gets money is by taking it from people. This is called taxation. Taxation involves force. If you don’t pay up, you will be fined, have your assets levied, or imprisoned. If taxation means taking someone’s property and giving it to other people, how is this not a moral issue? The Eighth Commandment is quite clear: “You shall not steal” (Ex. 20:15). There is no “except by majority vote.” Here’s the truth of it. Deep down, this is what most politicians believe and those who put them into office (my words):

“We have the right to levy a tax at a certain percentage rate, up or down, on this amount or that amount because more than 50 percent of the people put us in office, therefore we can take 1 percent or 100 percent. The fact that we exempt a certain amount of income is proof of this fact. An exemption is what we allow you to keep.”

If it’s wrong for you and me to steal from our neighbors and the companies we work for, please explain how it’s right to steal from our neighbors and the companies we work for when we elect people to do it? “I’ll say this plainly, I’ve said it before —Taxation is theft. It presumes the government has a higher claim on our property than we do,” says Judge Andrew Napolitano.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." --Thomas Jefferson

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Gun Confiscation in Ten Easy Steps By Steve Sheldon

All the time fellow gun owners say things to me like, “Seriously, Steve, how would they possibly gather up all the hundreds of millions of guns that are out there?” Well my naïve friend, let me tell you how it works.  [Sheeple = mesmerized people]

Step 1: Create an anti-gun culture and make guns and gun owners the bad guys at every turn: On the evening news, every time a crime is reported, make sure there is a picture of a mean looking gun next to the chalk outline of a body. Portray hunters and sportsmen as backwoods unsophisticated hillbillies and rednecks. Feminize the society, especially the males. Create a culture where the police* are revered as heroes whose intentions can never be questioned. Demonize war and warriors. Label gun organizations “crazed lunatics” and “unreasonable extremists.” Make shooting restrictive by forcing participants to private ranges, then close the ranges by legal means citing reasons of safety, nuisance, environmental, or whatever possible.  Create terms like “assault weapon”, “high-powered sniper rifle”, “guns off the streets”, “weapons of war” when engaging in the gun debate making ordinary guns out to have extraordinary functions. Build on this disinformation by using movies, gaming, and entertainment that creates the falsehood that guns are capable of doing impossible things like firing hundreds of times without reloading or overheating or blowing up a car’s gas tank with the strike of a bullet.

Step 2: Build “security” systems that make the sheeple feel safe, giving them a false sense of security and overdependence on police and government authority while at the same time disarming them. Establish gun free zones. Install security cameras everywhere. Place roving security cars with strobes in mall parking lots. Create neighborhood watch programs under the careful supervision of law enforcement insisting that no one be armed and that all incidents are to be reported to the police. Install and maintain elaborate computer entry systems in buildings. Establish pat downs at sporting events, etc. Put “no gun” signs in all public places.

Step 3: Play soothing music prior to the execution: Tell the sheeple that the taking away of their protection is for their own good. Confuse them with emotional arguments. Convince them that you’re doing it for the children. Couch it as a safety issue. Use turncoats to make illogical but emotionally appealing arguments. Tell them you’re not coming for all the guns, just some of the more evil looking ones even though they function in exactly in the same manner.

Step 4: Wait until some horrible tragedy or series of events that make the sheeple susceptible to emotional arguments and knee-jerk reactions:

Step 5: Create a system that makes registration and confiscation simple and gun ownership very difficult and expensive: Close private sales between individuals. Create a national registration or database that can easily be turned to for confiscation. Create bureaucracies that are unaccountable to the people and can serve the purpose of registration, confiscation, and collection. Create processes so cumbersome that no one would possibly want to purchase and register a firearm.

Step 6: Begin the process of making certain kinds of guns illegal: Take incremental steps by isolating one group of firearm and pitting its owners against the “more reasonable” owner. Then continue to redefine “reasonable” insisting that if this class of firearm or that class of firearm were “off the streets” then society could be a better place and our children protected.

Step 7: Create “buyback” and “amnesty” programs that have the effect of identifying and confiscating guns that have slipped under the registration radar.

Step 8: Use some kind of national emergency to begin final implementation once the population has been sufficiently disarmed. This can be done through economic chaos or used as an excuse to quell civil uprising as a result of a variety of circumstances.

Step 9: Throughout the process, implement draconian fines and prison sentences for those who refuse to capitulate. Encourage neighbor to turn on neighbor and gun owner to turn on gun owner. Reward turncoats with positions of power or financial gain.  THIS STEP IS KEY: To those that think, “They’re not going to take my guns away,” you are a fool. Most people will capitulate when they are faced with huge fines and prison sentences. Look no further than the holocaust less than sixty years ago. These were not guns that were rounded up and destroyed, but human beings! Does any reasonable person think that this could not possibly happen again? And for those of you who think democracy is the answer, Hitler was put in power through the democratic process and then gained absolute power though various political moves eventually taking full control of the government.

Step 10: Welcome to disarmament!
My gun owning friends, do not fall for these steps. Resist them at every turn. Today it’s thirty round magazines, “military looking” guns, online ammunition sales and registration, tomorrow, it’s full confiscation.

One final thought: If safety, security, and protection of our children are really the issues, then why first go after something that is rarely used in violent crime? Why not start with something that kills far more innocents every year like abortion, prescription drugs, or automobiles? Don’t be lulled into false thinking. It’s not about safety or protecting children; there are better ways to protect against random acts of mass murderers than to disarm law abiding citizens.

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"That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." --Recommended Bill of Rights from the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1778

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Gun Opponents Should Learn What The Founder’s Meant When They Wrote The Second Amendment by Richard Skidmore

Every individual with a sense of humanity detests seeing families destroyed, innocent children sacrificed, and promising lives snuffed out, as witnessed at Sandy Hook School. The argument that reducing the number of guns will produce a safer society beguiles the public, promotes politicians, and fails to hold the perpetrator accountable for their actions.  Disarming innocent people does not make innocent people safer. Yet, the mob is even willing to punishing innocent people for the acts of the wicked.  While gun rights supporters assert that the right of the people to keep and bear arms, as found in the Second Amendment of our Constitution, is an individual right like the freedom of speech or religion, and has been supported by the Supreme Court of our nation. Gun opponents assert that the right pertains only to collective bodies such as the militia, the military, police or National Guard.  The Washington Post asserts, as a gun opponent, that “[T]he sale, manufacture, and possession of handguns ought to be banned…[W]e do not believe the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep them.” Believing that our Constitution offers no protection for individual gun ownership, gun opponents therefore encourage efforts to restrict or ban citizens access to firearms, particularly handguns. These opponents to our Second Amendment frequently utilize highly-publicized, tragic instances of violence (such as the Sandy Hook School shooting, the theater shooting in Colorado, etc.) to fortify their argument that guns should be left only in the hands of “professionals.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a supporter of Senator Feinstein, has stated “[T]he individual’s right to bear arms applies only to the preservation or efficiency of a ‘well-regulated militia.’” Except for lawful police and military purposes, the possession of weapons by individuals is not constitutionally protected.” Cabinet Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, prefers to abandon our Constitution, stating in a speech given at a Washington DC elementary school that “We have common values that go far beyond the Constitutional right to bear arms.” The Founding Fathers of this nation understood that there exists inalienable rights that individuals possess and that our American government was formed with the sole purpose of defending and protecting those individual inalienable rights. Among civil societies this concept of safeguarding individual inalienable rights as the purpose of government is solely unique to our nation.

The Second Amendment is one of those inalienable rights the Founding Fathers demanded of the government they created, embodied in our Constitution; and our office holders all take an oath to protect and defend.  Opponents will twist the Founders original intent to argue that they never intended to allow citizens to be armed with semi-automatic rifles. The fact is that a common error in constitutional interpretation is the failure to examine a document according to its original meaning.  James Wilson, one of only six founders who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was nominated by President George Washington as an original Justice on the Supreme Court, exhorted: “The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.”  Justice Joseph Story (appointed to the Supreme Court by President James Madison) also emphasized this principle, declaring: “The first and fundamental rule in the interpretation of all [documents] is to construe them according to the sense of the terms and the intention of the parties.” At the time it was framed, the Second Amendment was a certification to protect what was frequently called “the first law of nature”—the right of self-protection—an inalienable right; a right guaranteed to every citizen individually.  To understanding the import of the Second Amendment’s intention to secure an individual’s inalienable right “to keep and bear arms”, it is important to establish the source of inalienable rights constitutionally. Constitution signer John Dickenson, like many of the others in his day, defined an inalienable right as a right “which God gave to you and which no inferior power has a right to take away.” Our Founders believed that it was the duty of government (an inferior power) to protect inalienable rights from encroachment or usurpation. This was made clear by Justice Wilson, while a serving Justice on the Supreme Court, to his law students that the specific protections found in our government documents did not create new rights but rather secured old rights – that our documents were merely “…to acquire a new security for the possession or the recovery of those rights… which we were previously entitled by the immediate gift or by the unerring law of our all-wise and all-beneficent Creator.”Justice Wilson asserted that “…every government which has not this in view as its principal object is not a government of the legitimate kind.” The Founders of this nation understood the source of inalienable rights is never from government. When Government grants rights, government can remove those rights. They understood that self-defense is an inalienable personal right, and the Second Amendment simply assures each citizen that they have the tools necessary to defend their life, family, or property from aggression, whether from an individual or a government.