“Capitol Hill Police Block Tea Party Activists from Immigration Rally”
They’ve since backed off, but it’s pretty clear they were hoping their early, pre-reported attempts to intimidate a particular demographic from attending a public event being put on by elected officials was an active decision by the Capitol Hill Police force.
At every level of government — where the power lies, and where the powerful are insulated and protected by their hired guards and their media enablers — the TEA Party, which represents the voice of the people, petitioning our government for redress of grievances (particularly those brought about by an overreaching federal government acting outside its constitutional authority), is looked upon by the establishment and its protection forces as a bigger threat than, say, the Occupy movement, or any of the other leftwing cranks and identity bloc groups who routinely hold rallies that draw virtually no one to the Hill.
In fact, we are looked upon as wacko birds, Hobbits, racist terrorists lying in wait.
Why is that, do you think? He asked. Rhetorically.
Capitol Hill police are trying to block activists attending Wednesday’s “Audit the IRS” rally from also attending a nearly day-long press conference on immigration, hosted by Reps. Steve King and Louie Gohmert. The IRS rally is on the west side of the Capitol, while the immigration event is on the east side. Organizers for the IRS event were told by Hill police that “your people” can only assemble on the west side. Organizers were told to remove the activists from the immigration event.
Capitol Hill police left a voicemail for Kevin Mooneyhan, Deputy Executive Director of Tea Party Patriots, saying that “your people” only are permitted to assemble for the event on the west side of the Capitol. The activists’ presence at the immigration event on the east side, supposedly violates the terms of the Tea Party’s permit. Mooneyhan was instructed to move any activists who planned on attending the Tea Party rally away from the immigration event.
Keep in mind, the immigration event is hosted by sitting members of Congress. The notion that citizens can’t attend an event featuring duly elected Representatives in a public space is absurd.
Remember: only fringe lunatics and hyperbolic talk show hosts believe we’ve entered a phase of soft tyranny and are watching the beginnings of a police state form around coalesced federal authority.
Whereas our more pragmatic, realistic brethren on the right — those who are the good ones, inasmuch as they don’t consider any of this untoward to the point of necessitating histrionic displays of victimhood (and please, won’t you small government types just shut the fuck up and stop ruining our election chances? I mean, we’ve got Jeb and Chris waiting to lead us to the promised land!) and who sniff right along with the progressives they’re hoping to find grudging acceptance among at the True Believers who are so unhelpful — recognize and accept this all to be business as usual, part and parcel of the contact sport of politics.
– Never realizing that by having reduced politics to a game they are themselves a willing participant in the establishment’s view of government and who really gets a say in it.
Purists can’t play the game. So they should just leave the heavy lifting to the nuanced GOP realist crowd, who knows all the angles and has succeeded in, well, driving the country ever more leftward.
Great job, fellas! Who I’m nearly certain will very soberly point out the overreaction by those who were being barred and allow that this was merely a communication error and a misunderstanding, giving the benefit of the doubt to those who would molest you being a hallmark of nuance.
(h/t sdferr)
“Houston Man Arrested After Threatening to Kidnap, Murder and Burn Ted Cruz and His Father”
The supreme irony? ABC’s Brian Ross is reporting that a person with a similar name may have ties to the TEA Party!
Okay. So I made that part up:
A Houston man is accused of threatening to kidnap, murder and burn U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and his father and also to “blow up” the sun if he wasn’t paid $3 million.
Nick Gates was being held Tuesday in the Harris County jail on a $10,000 bond. He’s charged with making a terroristic threat.
Investigators allege threatening phone calls made June 5 to Cruz’s offices in Austin and San Antonio were traced back to Gates.
Court documents show the 37-year-old admitted to FBI agents he made the calls and that Cruz was told he had a choice: give Gates the money or “lose the sun.”
Me, I think Cruz ought to pony up. I mean, this is the sun we’re talking about, and nobody wants his family kidnapped and burned to death.
Unfortunately, I hear that the GOP establishment is pressuring Cruz behind the scenes to stay strong, not give into terrorist demands, and — completely coincidental political upside! — they’ll be able to position themselves as demonstrably against global warming once the sun is blown up and the world is soothed by the icy cold darkness of a world without heat!
The GOP is rebranding, you see. So, like, you’d really be helping the party out, Ted. Do them a solid. For the Greater Good.
(h/t Gatewaypundit)
“The 14-year-old kid arrested over his pro-NRA shirt now faces a year in jail”
They will get you on something. And you will pay for your refusal to kiss the ring. Bank on it:
The West Virginia eighth-grader who was suspended and arrested in late April after he refused to remove a t-shirt supporting the National Rifle Association appeared in court this week and was formally charged with obstructing an officer.
As CBS affiliate WTRF reports, 14-year-old Jared Marcum now faces a $500 fine and a maximum of one year in prison.
The boy’s father, Allen Lardieri, is not pleased.
“Me, I’m more of a fighter and so is Jared and eventually we’re going to get through this,” Lardieri told WTRF. “I don’t think it should have ever gotten this far.”
“Every aspect of this is just totally wrong,” Lardieri added. “He has no background of anything criminal up until now and it just seems like nobody wants to admit they’re wrong.”
And they don’t have to. Bureaucracies are built to absorb and redistribute blame until you’re left muttering “you can’t fight City Hall.” This is by design. Just as you’re to live in fear of an IRS that can no longer be trusted to act with any neutrality, you are being conditioned to live in fear of running afoul of any of the other governmental tentacles, from the public schools to law enforcement to prosecutors out to pad their records and make an example of you.
This is Kafka’s world, Orwell’s world, and we are the drones who must never be allowed to believe in the value of our own independence.
In a move The Daily Caller can only characterize as courageous, Marcum returned to school after his suspension wearing exactly the same shirt. Students across the rural county showed their support for Marcum by wearing similar shirts on that day as well. (RELATED: Eighth-grader arrested over NRA shirt returns to school in same shirt)
There are no accounts of any additional arrests or suspensions when Marcum returned to school.
Lardieri has claimed that police in Logan City (pop. 1,779) threatened to charge Marcum with making terroristic threats during the incident that led to his arrest.
In legal documents obtained by the CBS station, the arresting officer, James Adkins, reportedly fails to inform the court about any terrorist threats or any violent action. Instead, Adkins asserts that the 14-year-old boy did not follow his orders to stop talking. This verbosity somehow prevented Adkins from performing his police duties.
[...]
The school district’s policy doesn’t prohibit shirts promoting Second Amendment rights.
Logan police and the prosecuting attorney, Michael White, declined to answer questions.
That would be this West Logan City Police Department: (304) 752-3244, and this Logan City City Hall: (304) 752-4044.
Maybe one kid and his dad and attorney can’t fight the bureaucratic momentum designed to turn everyone either into a criminal or a rat, but thousands might be able to do so.
Give them a jingle and let theme know what you think about the pussy petty tyrant James Adkins, hiding behind his badge and “procedure”; and the cowardly prosecutor going after a kid knowing that a kid with no record will likely strike a deal to keep in the good graces of the governmental data collecting matrix.
If we don’t start fighting and winning the little battles, what chance do we have to take on the bigger ones?
(h/t Guido)
Return of the black helicopters
I threw this out there earlier, back when people were speculating on the nature of Glenn Beck’s promised revelation that he said would take down the entire power structure, and now here we are again: “Was Justice Roberts Intimidated Into Voting for ‘ObamaCare’? Senator Mike Lee Presents the Evidence”:
On the Glenn Beck radio program Tuesday, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) explained why he believes Roberts was intimidated into changing his vote late in the process, as laid out in his new book Why John Roberts Was Wrong About Healthcare.
Lee’s argument is not based on the NSA or its monitoring of the nation’s communication. Rather, Lee said, there are indications that Roberts originally intended to vote against the act, but that a public “campaign of intimidation” made him change his mind.
First, the senator claimed “the opinion was written in a way to suggest he switched his vote,” and that the dissenting opinion reads like it was originally written as the majority. He added that several news outlets reported that Roberts did change his vote, based on insider information.
Not only that, he said, but the court performed an unusual feat of “legal gymnastics” in upholding the legislation, particularly with regard to whether the fines incurred are or are not taxes. They had to re-write sections of the the bill not once, but twice.
Lee continued to say that he has “no evidence” that Roberts was being blackmailed, but said that doesn’t mean Roberts wasn’t under any kind of “direct pressure.”
But even if he wasn’t, Lee reminded the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers were open in their warnings to the court, “denigrating the authority of the house,” and saying the Supreme Court would become irrelevant if it failed to uphold ObamaCare.
The argument that Roberts changed his vote has been made in the past, but is certainly lent additional credibility when a U.S. senator writes a book making the case.
Oh, the RINOs and the left will squeal and sneer and dismiss Lee, a TEA Party favorite, as a fringe crackpot. But so what?
This is the country we live in, and a government that will use the IRS and the NSA and the EPA et al., to try to gain election victories, create dislocation, ruin businesses, and do harm to its political rivals — all while insulated by a fraternal legislative branch that won’t perform anything other than cursory and symbolic investigations, shielding the ruling class status quo — wouldn’t hesitate for a moment, I don’t think, to “nudge” a SCOTUS justice into upholding the “signature legislation” of an “historic” president.
Which doesn’t have to mean they have pics of him with Jimmy Swaggert sitting on his face. They just needed to know where to press.
Obama is the culmination of leftist politics: arrogant, uninformed, vengeful, insular, detached, narcissistic, and born from a stew of economic, social, and academic falsehoods and misconceptions that all but guaranteed, once he’d firmed up, that he’d rise through the ranks of the identity politicking left, then fuck up everything that makes a constitutional republic a bastion of liberty. Probably intentionally, too.
And we’ll all have to pay the price for not having opened up our eyes to the man and not to what we dreamed he represented.
Or, perhaps I’ll write it this way: we all should have hoped he failed.
(h/t JHo)
Reportedly, the GOP establishment is not at all happy with Ms Palin’s hyperbolic rhetoric
I can’t be the only one who finds it ironic that RINOs with mushpits for souls simultaneously dismiss and denigrate conservatives while working feverishly to usurp and co-opt the “conservative” label for themselves.
X
What could have been. But, you know, what would our liberal friends say were we to suggest Palin is anything more than a deluded, self-serving populist snowbilly? I mean, as it stands, we may disagree politically with the liberal opinion shapers, but there’s no denying their educated pedigree.
It simply isn’t done. We’re some of the good ones, you see. Which means we’ll get to be eaten last.
“Why the IRS IG Stopped with an Audit”
Gerald Walpin, NRO:
Among all the unanswered questions about the IRS’s illegal targeting of conservative organizations, one is most crucial: Who ordered this extreme scrutiny?
Amazingly, IRS inspector general J. Russell George, responsible for the investigation asking those questions about the IRS, has testified that he did not obtain that information.
Details of that testimony are interesting. Representative Tom Graves (R., Ga.) asked, “Have you asked the individuals who ordered them to use this extra scrutiny to punish, or penalize, or postpone, or deny?” George turns around to confer with his assistant. Just the fact that the inspector general had to confer to know the answer to this crucial question is amazing. George’s assistant says something to him that is not recorded, but one can see the assistant shaking his head back and forth. Then George responds publicly to the question, saying, “During our audit, Congressman, we did pose that question and no one would acknowledge who, if anyone, provided that direction.”
Anyone who knows anything about the rights and responsibilities of an inspector general has to be shaking his head in disbelief at George’s explanation. First, every employee of the government has the responsibility to cooperate with and provide information to an IG concerning his work.
Second, George was particularly careful to limit his answer to the “audit phase.” Every IG has two procedures to obtain information. One is audit procedure, to which IG George referred. That’s generally limited to accounting analysis, to determine whether there may be reason to open an investigation. Once there is reason — and there clearly was reason here, given the obviously illegal conduct — the IG opens an investigation, in which investigators, not auditors, pose the questions, the department employees are placed under oath, and, as a federal court has approved, informed that “failure to answer completely and truthfully may result in disciplinary action, including dismissal.” The question is why George’s office didn’t do this immediately.
From my personal experience as an IG of another agency, I suspect the answer. I do not blame IG George personally, as he is a career civil servant who depends on a steady salary and, thereafter, a pension.
But I learned, through being fired by the Obama administration, that performing one’s responsibilities as one should, and potentially adversely affecting the administration’s image, is not the way to keep one’s job. (Fortunately, I was not dependent on my federal IG salary.)
That reality was made apparent to me — and, through what happened to me, to all IGs — when I supported my staff of longtime dedicated civil servants, who had recommended taking action against one Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player who had misused, for personal purposes, about $750,000 of an AmeriCorps grant intended for underprivileged young people. What I did not then know was that he was a friend and supporter of President Obama — a fact that caused the proverbial you-know-what to hit the fan.
Without detailing all that happened, the bottom line was that I started to receive pressure to drop the case against Mr. Johnson. When I declined to repudiate my staff’s work, the guillotine fell: I was summarily telephoned that if I did not resign in one hour, I would be fired. And I was, along with my special assistant, John Park. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote of my firing: “The evidence suggests that [President Obama’s] White House fired a public official who refused to roll over to protect a Presidential crony.”
[...]
This administration’s treatment of IGs is not conducive to active, independent, and objective inspectors general, and explains at least in part why key questions about the IRS still have not been asked or investigated.
Yes, but by all accounts Obama’s a terrific father. When he’s not playing golf or traveling to fund-raise. So we can forgive him his few little differences in policy opinion, can’t we? Isn’t that what we civil, practical, pragmatic and very public people do, refuse to condemn Good Men simply because they show a bit of loyalty to some buddies?
As an aside: I still believe, very very very seriously, that one of the reasons we don’t have a special investigator in the IRS case is that establishment Republicans, either by commission or intentional omission, were just as instrumental in the targeting of TEA Party groups as were the progressives.
And they don’t want that coming to light.
The rest is merely theater.
Our federal government is corrupt to its core. And yet the Bushies are now arguing that to protest it — to call for a limited government, because we can see how the massive Leviathan is both unwieldy and sinister — is anti-conservative, such disrespect for government showing an unhealthy refusal to grant deference to the importance of our electoral system.
Right.
X
(h/t sdferr)
“Federal Budget Cuts Blamed for Girl’s Rape, Mother’s Murder”
There isn’t a single fucking things the statists, be they big government pols or activist judges, won’t politicize — often through what should to everyone be the most transparent of crocodile tears.
I suppose I could comment more on this, but why bother?
These are evil, self-serving, power-hungry pigs demanding you give them more to keep their slop trough overflowing. In a way, listening to statist politicians is like watching an episode of “Hardcore Pawn”: someone comes in, drops a worthless piece of shit trinket on the counter, asks way too much for it, then — when rebuffed — demands the shop take their valueless garbage and “give” them “their” money.
It’s entitlement narcissism. And it’s frightening to recognize that a large part of our political class believes just as that-type pawn customer does — that they are owed, that the citizenry is their personal ATM, and that we need to give them what’s theirs or else we’re to blame for their poverty and bad decision making.
X
(that last being the spot on my screen where the lugee hit.)
The Supreme Court and the Effective End of a Federalist System
In case you hadn’t already heard, the Supreme Court by a vote of 7-2 struck down an Arizona voter proposition that had required that potential voters augment their federal motor voter forms with proof that they have the legal right to vote — be it by showing a copy of a license, a passport, a social security card, or any other similar kind of documentation. The people of Arizona, who are enjoined by SCOTUS from being able to police their own borders — that authority, the Court ruled, being vested solely at the federal level, with the federal government having at its discretion the right to ignore federal immigration laws entirely — were likewise (and as a consequence of the former) having their votes canceled out by fraudulent votes from ineligible voters, many of them illegals. So they determined by ballot initiative to protect the integrity of their voting system within the state, something Justices Scalia, Roberts, and Kennedy — along with the left liberals — now say they cannot do.
This despite what is a clear history of the separation of state and federal authority over election responsibilities, with the states, as a condition for ratifying the Constitution, retaining for themselves the right to determine who is eligible to vote (within the bounds of civil rights and citizenship concerns). This is precisely why we have Constitutional amendments post-slavery and with respect to women’s suffrage: the states had to ratify by 2/3 those changes.
The upshot is, the Court, incorporating a “conservative” textualist and a “conservative” federalist (along with whatever the hell it is Anthony Kennedy might be) among the majority opinion, has essentially removed the state buffer from federal election jurisdiction, a move that completely inverts the intent of the framers (and ratifiers), who viewed the states’ sovereignty as a necessary and profoundly important (and moral) check on the power of an always insatiable centralizing impulse.
And just like that, together with Wickard and Kelo and Raich and a ruling in favor of federal jurisdiction over immigration policy, it has enshrined precedent that corrupts the integrity of a constitutional republic. In fact, it neuters it entirely, changing it into something else entirely.
Or, to put it another way, the “conservative” SCOTUS has now concluded that of course the government can write health care plans for private companies, force those private companies to sell them, fix the prices of those plans, and force Americans to purchase them under penalty of a “tax” on not doing what they were told; it has ruled that states who joined the union only after insisting upon a Bill of Rights that included the 9th and 10th amendments as a protection against potential and inevitable attempts at federal overreach have no legal right nor recourse to protect their own borders and thereby protect the property and franchise of their legal citizens, that concern, per SCOTUS ruling, falling entirely to the Executive in the swamp city of Washington DC, leaving the fate of border state residents to a man who has already shown he will use his agencies to punish those who don’t toe the progressive / establishment line (be it through the EPA, HHS, Interior, or most obviously the IRS), and who understands that the way to turn reliably red states blue is to take away their ability to tamp down on the voter fraud that comes by way of illegal immigration, itself a crime that the President and his Justice Department, along with DHS, don’t feel compelled to pursue or prosecute; it has concluded that though states can’t really protect their own sovereignty, their enforcement officers can collect DNA as a condition of arrest — a procedure they determined wasn’t unduly intrusive — all this taking place in the context of a law enforcement milieu in which officers cannot ask about citizenship status.
All of which is proof that we no longer live in the country of our founding. And the people who have changed it are politicians and jurists at the federal level whose power and wealth grows as a direct result of their willingness to repudiate intent — and of a public’s willingness to abide a linguistic incoherence that I’ve demonstrated time and again moves us inexorably leftward. And is designed to do just that.
It’s all over but for the shouting. Lie back and think of England. And King George. Because that’s where we are now, anyway. Only the wigs have changed.
****
update: not everyone agrees with me. (h/t jls, who doesn’t agree with me, either).
J Christian Adams notes that the left got only one of 5 things it wanted. So it’s batting .200, while election integrity proponents are batting .800 (his scoring). To which I reply, how is it a win for election integrity opponents when they lost 20% of election integrity?
Adams has it backwards. This isn’t a win. It’s part of losing more slowly. Does Adams not think progressive activist groups will have access to federal forms? Does he not think they’ll be making sure certain voting blocs are provided those forms through their institutions and front groups? Does he not realize that states run by Democrats will scuttle any state forms — that Colorado, for instance, has undergone a logistical and political shift thanks to rulings like these? Adams is saying it’s a win so long as red states stay red and are at all interested in voter integrity. But once states go blue, they are gone. Forever.
All of which is irrelevant. I’m not interested in who won the politics of the battle. I’m interested in what this opens up constitutionally for new attacks on state sovereignty.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m “confused and bewildered” having never litigated a case involving voter fraud (although Landmark Legal participated in this case, and it’s my understanding that Levin came down on the side of the minority, as well).
Or maybe I just don’t see “only lost a little this time” as a big win to celebrate. Other than through the lens of some sort of republican fatalism.
The Constitution as “living document”
Under the article linked in the previous post, wherein a moronic state college professor calls for rescinding the 2nd Amendment — that is, the repeal of what is a natural right by those the framers and founders were determined to make sure could not take that right away — sits a comment that I addressed there but that I’ll address here as well, given this site’s commitment to language and intent.
Writes the commente, who is taking issue with the quip that we should maybe do away with the First Amendment, too (and who strangely seems to share the author’s last name),
[...] The first amendment hasn’t caused anywhere near as many deaths as the second amendment. As Dr. Oberg said in the article, the constitution is a living document, which can and should be changed when the situation calls for such change. I believe Thirty-Thousand Plus gun deaths is a pretty sufficient reason to move for change.
To which I replied,
The Constitution is not a “living document,” Adam. Texts don’t “live.” They are a collection of intended (if we’re talking about language) signs imbued with meaning by those who produced them. They are a communicative means to an end — namely, fixing meaning or distributing it over time and distance, using code and convention to aid in the interpretation [required in a second order system of reference] . In the case of our Constitution, corporate intent plays out in the process of ratification. To make the claim that the document is living is to make the claim that it is unstable and that therefore law is open to the whim of temporary majorities who pretend to extract from the document meaning that it never had. It is the rejection of the text of the Framers and the ratifiers and the embrace of a fraud, whereby just because THEY can create new texts from the fixed text by way of their own intentions, proponents of the “living Constitution” try to convince you that they are allowing the Constitution to grow and breathe. They aren’t. They are granting themselves power and privileging their own intent using methods that are linguistically incoherent. If you wish to change the Constitution, go ahead and try to repeal the 2nd Amendment. But don’t pretend it doesn’t mean what it means, or that there doesn’t exist an abundance of evidence to suggest exactly the intent behind the 2nd Amendment, which exists to protect a natural right FROM the government.
One of the reasons I left academy is that it has been overrun by leftist thinking. And that makes it a bastion of anti-intellectualism and dogma, not a place to think or consider — lest what you end up believing and considering matches the hivemind’s approved conclusions.
Imbeciles like this professor, passing off sophistry as argument, are a dime a dozen — and commenters like Adam, sadly, are assured that they are subtle, sophisticated, rigorous thinkers just so long as they parrot the approved narrative rather than thinking through problems for themselves, and agree to view the shallow and the tenuous as deep and solid.
Like nearly all the left takes hold of, the academy — in many ways — has degenerated into a sham and a scam. And its priests are either perverse or mere puppets, dancing along on strings they are too un-self-aware to feel tugging them to and fro.
