smellthetruth.com

Dr. David M. Berman

Throughout history there have been many revolutions. Most of the time, they are bloody and involve internal fighting, insurgencies, or outright civil war. For the last 80 or so years we have been living in a slow bloodless coup. Slowly, culturally, and systematically we have been experiencing this in the proverbial old “frog in a pot” scenario in which our entire basis of philosophical thought has been captured and slowly thrown in prison. In every institution including much of the Church, the coup has taken place in front of our very eyes.

How has this happened? It happened through generations neglecting their responsibility to teach the next generation the principles of liberty. The Constitution is often portrayed as some sort of difficult document that needs “professors” and “Constitutional experts” to interpret for the average citizen. It is not. It is a very straight forward document that anyone can understand.

Over time the citizenry simply stopped caring about knowing, understanding, and passing on the principles of liberty to future generations and instead relied upon the “experts” to tell us what is and is not “constitutional.” This neglect has had grave consequences starting with F.D.R. who instituted massive federal government control with his so called “New Deal” socialist Trojan horse. This mindset continued as we get to the 1960’s and President Johnson comes up with his misnamed “war on poverty” big government socialist economic enslavement policies. Particularly since Johnson, we have been in a steady decline concerning personal liberty and responsibility. This has slowly turned us into a culture of entitlement as our young people believe they deserve a living for just showing up. Some believe they deserve a living even if they do not show up.

The leftist, big government Marxists have largely won this bloodless coup over time because they systematically convinced large amounts of the population through controlling education, entertainment, and the news media, that socialism is “fair.” They do not call it socialism, they call is “social justice.”

There has been a death of logic, and a death of common sense. Our culture is now motivated not by long term principled thinking but rather by short term gain that leads to long term loss. Our tyrannical [Alleged] President Obama, has made it clear that he wants to, as he put it, “fundamentally change America.” His idea of changing America is quite clear. He desires a nanny state in which the power is in the hands of the government elite rather than in the hands of the individual citizens. He desires to place as many people as he can under the enslavement of government power in order to fundamentally change us from an individual liberty and responsibility society to a collectivist society (otherwise known as Marxist).

People often scoff at those of us who call [Alleged] President Obama a socialist/Marxist however the facts speak clearly. The definition of socialism is:

A theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

This is exactly what [Alleged] President Obama believes in. Does anyone doubt that if given the chance, he would nationalize everything he could?

[Alleged] President Obama is not just a man that is in over his head, he knows exactly what he is doing. He wants America to no longer be a free enterprise, individual liberty, limited government society. He wants Marxist theory to prevail in America and that is what Obama Care is really all about. Once the government can control your healthcare, they can tell you what to do in everything since they can express their “right” to govern your every more because as they put it; “The commerce clause gives us this power.” If the government uses the commerce clause to govern your healthcare, they can then regulate everything you do because everything you do can be related to your possible need for healthcare.

There has been a long train of abuses by the federal government. For many years they have confiscated land, taxed without equal protection under the law, ruled with an iron fist and the power of their agencies. Interfered with private contracts, and used the intimidation of their power against the individual. The presidents have abused their authority. Article I, Section 1 of the United States Constitution is concise in its language:

"All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."

Rather than being a representative Republic where our representatives legislate under the strict limited powers of the Constitution, we have Presidential power like a king who can use so called “executive orders” to pronounce just about any decree any president wishes. Here are some examples:

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 allows the government to seize and control the communication media.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 allows the government to take over all food resources and farms.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

Shocked yet? Here are some more:

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 12148 created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that is to interface with the Department of Defense for civil defense planning and funding. An "emergency czar" was appointed. FEMA has only spent about 6 percent of its budget on national emergencies, the bulk of their funding has been used for the construction of secret underground facilities to assure continuity of government in case of a major emergency, foreign or domestic.

•    EXECUTIVE ORDER 12656 appointed the National Security Council as the principal body that should consider emergency powers. This allows the government to increase domestic intelligence and surveillance of U.S. citizens and would restrict the freedom of movement within the United States and granted the government the right to isolate large groups of civilians. The National Guard could be federalized to seal all borders and take control of U.S. air space and all ports of entry.

Because of the natural tendencies of people in positions of authority to power grab, our nation has always had those who wanted more power than the Constitution granted them. From President Andrew Jackson who tried to use executive powers to force the law-abiding Cherokee Nation off their ancestral lands, to President Lincoln who used executive orders to suspend trial rights and closed down newspapers. Many presidents have used so called executive orders to usurp the power of the people and dictate what they wanted like a king. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Now we have all three branches of government who simply ignore the Constitution.

Yes a coup has taken place slowly. The usurpation of rights has happened. It is no longer the America that our founders envisioned and left to posterity. The Declaration of Independence says:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpation's, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security”
We Americans must wake up and throw off this tyranny. If we do not it will be future generations that suffer even more despotism, and they will lament our unwillingness to protect our heritage of liberty that we have the responsibility to pass on to them. Obama must go, the Democrats must go, and the Republican establishment must go! We must forge a new movement that will not settle for the “lesser of two evils” because the lesser of two evils is still evil!

Indeed there has been a slow bloodless coup that has overthrown our Constitution. I fear that only a bloody one will restore the principles of liberty to our beloved country. My fellow patriots; speak out, teach, stand for liberty, and do not allow those in both parties to play you any longer. Stand up and say it “Don’t tread on me!” and “no king but Jesus!” 
 
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"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."

--George Washington, First Inaugural Address, 1789

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"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."

-- Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774

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America's Party Endorsed Independent Projects -> Free the First Amendment Committee

HHS tells religious believers to go to hell. The public notices.

Wall Street Journal

The political furor over [Alleged] President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

***In late January the Health and Human Services Department required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and liberals from the likes of Planned Parenthood, amid government promises of compromise.

In the end, Planned Parenthood won. HHS chose to draw the rule's conscience exceptions for "religious employers" so narrowly that they will not be extended to religious charities, universities, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other institutions that oppose contraception as a matter of religious belief.

The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion. What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what "health care" must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions.

To take a small example: The HHS rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration's legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives. Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius's ministry. That may explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed.

Bad call. The decision has roused the Catholic bishops from their health-care naivete, but they've been joined by people of all faiths and even no faith, as it becomes clear that their own deepest moral beliefs may be thrown over eventually. 

Read this story at wsj.com ...

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_"How much more do they deserve our reverence and praise, whose lives are devoted to the formation of institutions, which, when they and their  children are mingled in the common dust, may continue to cherish the principles and the practice of liberty in perpetual freshness and vigour."

-- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

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_“What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.”

— Learned Hand

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__ By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought”
“Israel Today” Newsletter, December 20, 2011

The legacy of Chanukah – faith, patriotism, defiance of extreme odds and tenacity in the battle of liberty against tyranny – has underlined the American spirit since the early Pilgrims, enhancing the unique foundation of the US-Israel covenant: shared values.

For instance, the statue of Judah the Maccabee, the hero of the Jewish rebellion against the Syrian-Seleucid Empire, is displayed at the West Point Military Academy, the most prestigious US military academy, founded in 1802. The statue of Judah the Maccabee, known for his principle-driven leadership and daring battle tactics, is displayed along with the statues of Joshua, David, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hector, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon – “the Nine Worthies.”

George Washington became acquainted with the spirit of the Maccabees, upon settling, in December (Chanukah) 1777, at his new headquarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, with ill-equipped, weary troops. Faced with a super-power, George III of Britain, Washington concluded that only a dramatic change could avoid a defeat. According to the diary entries of Louisa Hart, Washington told the Harts about a Jewish solider at Valley Forge who lit a Chanukah candle and explained its significance. Washington’s reaction was: “Perhaps we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. I rejoice in the Maccabees’ success, though it is long past…It pleases me to think that miracles still happen.” Six months later, on June 19, 1778, the Continental Army implemented the battle tactics of Judah the Maccabee, leaving Valley Forge in pursuit of the British, who were moving towards New York. Although the war would linger for five more years, Washington won a decisive victory.

Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were inspired by the Maccabees, proposing “Rebellion against Tyrants is obedience to God” as the American official seal. Just like the Founding Fathers, the Maccabees were a tiny minority of “rebels” – condemned by the “loyalist/pragmatist” Jewish establishment – rebelling against an oppressive super-power. They prevailed due to their conviction-driven determination. They knew that swimming against the stream gets one closer to the source. The Maccabees were a role-model for Paul Revere, who was referred to as “a modern day Maccabee” and the organizers of the Boston Tea Party, who realized that there were no free lunches for freedom-seeking nations.

“In God We Trust” was inspired, also, by the Maccabees’ battle cry, which adopted Moses’ battle cry against the builders of the Golden Calf. A literal translation of the battle cry is “Whoever trusts God; join me!” The Maccabees’ sacrifice and political-incorrectness, also, inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”

In 2011, Chanukah is still a living experience in the US. For example, the residents of Billings, Montana celebrate Chanukah in solidarity with the Jewish community of forty families, and in protest of the 1993 vandals who broke windows of Jewish homes that displayed Chanukah menorahs. In response, more than 10,000 of the city’s residents put make-shift menorahs in their own windows. They persist, annually, in this ritual.

Chanukah and the Maccabees have become an integral part of the American way of life, culturally and politically. Americans respect the legacy of the Maccabees, who fought the Syrian-Seleucid super-power, mostly, in the mountains of Judea and Samaria, in the Judean Desert and in Jerusalem. Judah the Maccabee’s own Valley Forge was at Beit El; his capital was Jerusalem; he scored dramatic victories in Beit Horon (over Seron), Hadashah (over Nicanor), Beit Zur (over Lysias) and Ma’aleh Levona (over Apolonius); he was defeated at Elazar and killed at Ba’al Hatzor – all are located beyond the “1967 Lines.”

The descendants of the Maccabees are not “occupiers” in the cradle of their own history. Chanukah is not a holiday of “occupation,” but a holiday of deliverance. Chanukah is a holiday which highlights the moral-high-ground of Jews in their ancestral homeland.

Shimon the Maccabee – who succeeded Judah and Yonatan the Maccabees – articulated the Jewish territorial case, when responding to an ultimatum by Antiochus, who demanded an end to the Jewish “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer and Ekron: “We have not occupied a foreign land; we have not ruled a foreign land; we have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation.”

Pressuring the Jewish State to withdraw from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria defies the American story. Either you are with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other defenders of liberty, or you provide – inadvertently – a tailwind to the forces of tyranny.


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_
The Claremont Institute

Mark Helprin

According to the Charlottesville daily progress, Doris Boitnott, assistant director of the Virginia Education Association (something one might once have called a union), opined last year that employees of local government should enjoy no options in regard to their retirement funds, both to hold the workers in their jobs and because many of them lack the knowledge to make informed decisions. "If you give your kids the choice of having chocolate for dinner or having broccoli for dinner," she says in reference to her presumably adult members, "they may choose the chocolate, which may not be the best for them."

Children, teachers, you, and I may not know what is best, but not Doris Boitnott. She knows. She knows that her members are better off when told what to do, even with their own money. And in the march of creeping paternalism, she is hardly alone. More and more of each American's livelihood, and therefore more and more of each American's time and life's blood, are directed away from his power of decision and disposition and into that of a diffuse collective, meaning actually a relatively small number of elites and experts who look down upon those who have raised them up. Putting in power the kind of person who believes he achieves moral elevation by compelling recalcitrants to his supposedly higher plane is like sending a beagle to an all-you-can-eat buffet. He doesn't know where or when to stop, and, as is not the case with beagles, there is neither limit to his presumption nor a ceiling to his self-congratulation.

We are familiar with political incarnations of dirigisme throughout history that have at least given rise to an opposition that keeps them partially in check. We do not, for example, have a king. Except among movie stars, the feudal aristocracy is gone. Resistance to such overt political paternalism is alive and well, perhaps because statism—confiscating and commanding—is hard medicine to take. But the general tendency of mankind to render itself into a kind of clay to be shaped by others persists under democratic conditions, and is hardly confined to the relation of citizen to state. It is unfortunately ever active in temptations more dangerous than any the state can devise, for being sweet, habit-forming, and irresistible. Among other things, freely offered and freely accepted entanglements cannot be criticized for suppressing freedom of decision. Such criticism—the most powerful means of attack upon state encroachments—misfires.

In every sphere apart from government, individual autonomy can be eroded, diminished, and eliminated, exactly as in government, by dependency—which to be crippling need not be compelled. A vivid illustration of this is the extent to which we have run to entrust information to servers we neither own, control, see, nor even have the ability to locate. Because of a mistake, crime, or burst of electro-magnetic pulse; our financial and health records, correspondence, photographs, and, for some incautious souls, the work of a lifetime, could be wiped out in a fraction of a second and no one would even know where to look.

Apart from the question of safety and preservation, the recklessness of surrendering all our information to the custody of people we do not know in conditions we have not fully vetted or even, in most cases, bothered to ascertain, creates a potential for abuse that would make even Kim Jong Il blush. Imagine if from the time of its founding the post office had not delivered mail but kept it, letting you see it but retaining every letter and document, photograph, proposal, statement, love missive, and farewell, and then developed a way that they can to search, catalog, and cross-reference it mechanically, while knowing—from the hand-held device you cannot do without—where you are, where you have been, what you buy, with whom you associate, what you read, and so on.

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal last August—and this is not a parody—"I actually think people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.... The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not been tailored for them." But it isn't just what you eat or what you buy. Google will control serendipity: "Serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically." And the next step? "You really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant.... I think we will be the world leader in that." That is, the world leader in telling you what you meant.

* * *

Eric Schmidt, meet Doris Boitnott. You're made for each other. Who knows? As the various types of paternalism grow, they may burst from the cocoons of government and private enterprise and marry into a new and overwhelming entity. Each seems to be led to the other by a force greater than either. Otherwise, for example, how to explain the government's passion for expanding bandwidth? Only 1% of bandwidth is consumed by anything other than gaming (55%), and TV, movies, and video (45%). These things cultivate passivity. They root you to the chair, hold your gaze, and either entirely suppress your input or channel it into pre-programmed Hobson's choices. Why then is expanding bandwidth a public obligation?

With the dawning of 1984, many felt relief, because—just as in the '50s and '60s it was assumed that by 2001 there would be hotels of a sort on the moon—they had entertained the possibility that 1984 might be a surveillance dictatorship, and it wasn't. But now the sheep are falling all over themselves to get into the pen. Though the gates are still open, it would be so easy for the world's Doris Boitnotts and Eric Schmidts to swing them closed, and that must not be allowed to happen.



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_"The instrument by which [governments] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!"

-- Alexander Hamilton, Tully, No. 3, 1794

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