This Should Scare You

All of us who have spoken publicly know that there’s the rare occasion when you must speak extemporaneously - and there's the norm, when you have time to prepare enough to make the speech look extemporaneous. Those are the best speeches.

It’s been 48 hours - enough time to let it settle in - since the State of the Union speech. My initial impressions have not been modified by the pundits, but they have been generally confirmed.

Essentially, it was a very poor speech. It rambled, lacked cohesion - even a theme - and it was full of inherent contradictions or statements that were false on their face. Obama talked about the country having great debt - yet he never took responsibility. Obama claimed we needed a Sputnik moment to replicate the commercial successes of the Space Program - yet he never mentioned gutting NASA’s budget and essentially shutting it down. Obama talked about American exceptionalism - but he praised not only the failed Soviet Union, but modern Communist China. Obama called for a budget freeze but in the same breath referred to it as a budget cut - and at the same time insisted we needed to hire 100,000 new teachers. His examples of American ingenuity, which he employed as a lever for more “investment,” meaning taxing and spending, were achievements which had been accomplished by people and businesses without any support or interference from the government. His joke about salmon fishing and canning regulation also fell flat - partly because it wasn’t funny, but mostly because he was making light of how his cronies spend most of their time - regulating, legislating and controlling other people’s lives. It was like he was mocking his audience.

But, what I haven’t heard said is how thin the speech was. It lacked the trappings of leadership. It was absent the heart-felt rhetoric or emotion or a personal conviction. I don’t think even Obama believed what he was saying. In fact, I’m certain he didn’t.

I remember a friend, a performer, once telling me that when you perform - you must not hold back. The audience can tell when you’r holding something back and they won’t like it.

In my opinion, we didn’t hear what Obama is really thinking, what he’s really planning for his next two years. But in our hearts, I suspect we know what it is, and we know for sure, it isn’t good.

Null and Void

Associated Press reported yesterday that several state legislatures are working on bills to nullify Obamacare.


“GOP lawmakers introduced such a measure Wednesday in the Idaho

House, and Alabama, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, 

Texas and Wyoming are also talking about the idea.”



At least one of those measures would call for the prosecution of anyone - including state officials - who refused to enforce the bill’s provisions. So, they’re serious.

But, according to the AP, “The efforts are completely unconstitutional in the eyes of most legal scholars because the U.S. Constitution deems federal laws ‘the supreme law of the land.’”

But one constitutional scholar disagrees. His name is Thomas Jefferson, he was intimately familiar with the Constitution and served as the third president of the United States. Though some today might regard the opinion of the Associated Press as more credible, in 1799, Jefferson wrote that "nullification ... is the rightful remedy" whenever the Federal government commits an act so egregious that the states cannot allow themselves to be compelled to submit. Jefferson created the doctrine to express his disgust with the Alien and Sedition Acts that were enacted by then-President John Adams during the war with France.

Certainly there is case law that clearly demonstrates the Supreme Court’s opinion that Federal Law supercedes state law. The Supreme Court may or may not one day turn a different direction. But in this case, we’re not looking at a clash between two contradictory laws. Nullification is a rejection of an act by the Federal government. In our opinion, the Constitution. It is, in effect, a means of suing the Federal Government outside of court by expressing simultaneously the state’s and the people’s sovereignty. Both of which, by the way, are guaranteed in the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

There are already law suits between states and the federal government where the states are suing the Federal government for injurious legislation. Obamacare has recently been the subject of such suits filed by about half the Union. But, is that the only way to stop an out-of-control Federal government?

No. The ratification process enshrined within the Constitution shows that the Framers recognized the power and authority, post confederation, of state sovereignty. They allowed for any part of the Constitution itself to be altered if simply enough state legislatures so desired. That Constitutional authority does not suggest that the Federal Government, its Congress or its Supreme Court is the superior governing body. It suggests the opposite.

This is a very important argument to those of us who see the strength of this nation, believe it or not, in its diversity - cemented by its great brotherhood - formed of a single idea. States that pass nullification laws are expressing their exquisite understanding of our freedom, and their willingness to participate in a Union of States, only as long as they are held sovereign. It is a midway point between oppression and secession.

Cruel and Usual

The shooting at the Safeway may make it more difficult for those who are desperately seeking greater border security by playing into the hands of the Obama Administration and the Liberals who want porous borders. As usual, their minions are out making cruel accusations, trying to stir the pot with perverted statements.

The shootings in Tucson will make it seem to many as creating an extremely difficult situation for those who want more force on the border. Anything seen as presenting a violent potential will be used by the perverted Left as an example of violent speech.

Therefore, the time is right now to get out in front of this argument with some thoughtful and simple-to-understand comments to defeat the Left and rally the people who might otherwise be crestfallen by the turn of events in the face of their dire need for security.

Here are the words that need to be said in order to create a pre-emptive argument:

The lack of focus on the border may have been made even worse by this psychopath’s attack on our Republic. We must not be distracted from the greater peril.
The shooting at the Safeway is over, but the decapitations, the drug trade, the invasion of our sovereignty continues unabated. Will Obama speak to that?
As bad as it was, the shooting at the Safeway pales in comparison to the violence in Mexico that’s behind the drug trade coming across the border.
Why does Obama give more attention to the actions of a psychopath that threatened the life of one Congresswoman than he’s willing to give to the actions of a cartel that threaten entire States?
The Left is quick to make cruel accusations against their fellow Americans, yet where there is real crime, by foreign invaders, they are silent. It is time for them to join Americans everywhere and stand up for our sovereignty.


Oh, and when they make a cruel accusation, don’t address it. Just tell them it’s cruel, which makes it psychopathic - wanting deliberately to hurt innocent people is sick - and that it’s unfounded, and well beneath the standards you have set for yourself for public discourse. That ought to do it.

Deathers

Like you, I’ve been consumed and saddened by the shootings in Arizona. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it. Of course, that’s a futile effort. The shooter was irrational, crazy, maybe knew right from wrong, but you can’t rationalize an irrational act.

The really egregious part, the part that’s stirred the biggest reaction, has been the perverted attempt by politicians to try to elevate themselves and their political ideologies by standing on top of the corpses so they can get more attention. It’s an act that may actually be more twisted than the shootings themselves because it’s done by seemingly rational people. The pain inflicted by them on perhaps millions of others by accusing them, their words, and their beliefs of evoking any part of this tragedy is plainly an act of pre-meditated cruelty. And cruelty is psychopathic.

Why would they do it?

We all know someone who manages to turn the conversation around to them, no matter what the subject. It gets annoying. Like, “But enough about me, what do YOU think of me.” So, after you suddenly realize what you’re hearing - and how often it happens - understandably, you try to analyze your friend, why does she do that? Is she so insecure? Or maybe it’s the opposite, she’s so egocentric that she really only sees the world in the first person.

Perhaps, finally, you realize you can’t really know the answer, so you settle for the only facts you know for sure- that it’s symptomatic of something, that she does it, she does it constantly, and she does it predictably.

That’s where I’m at with the Liberals and Progressives. I can’t really analyze them, but I know what they’re doing is wrong and why it’s wrong. I know it’s cruel, and I know cruel is sick. But I’ve also just realized that what they’re saying is their most common discourse. They are obsessed with death as a tool for political ideology, while it seems quite clear that the opposite political ideology embraces discussions of life.

Sarah Palin was quick to point out that Obamacare’s rationing would lead to Death Panels. Proved true by the release of a private Democrat document. The progressives are still apoplectic for being called out - no doubt one of the reasons they chose to turn demographic targets into metaphoric rifle scope images on a Palin campaign piece.

Abortion is an easy example. As clearly as it seems to Conservatives that a death results, Progressives and Liberals have spilled drums of ink attempting to deny that anything but a surgery takes place. All I know is that when I have surgeries - the cells removed and destroyed all had my DNA - not someone else’s.

Why do the Liberals want a body count of US war dead, and not a body count of the enemy. To impose their cruelty. They want it to hurt, all the while they decry torturing our enemies.

Something is happening as you see the Liberals and Progressives sink further into the Dark Side. Their cache is fading, their credibility is being eroded by simple observation, their words are cutting more and more people who once felt there was truth in their claims that they represented the thoughts and dreams of their constituents - now, a lot of those dreams have turned to nightmares, and very few others have those thoughts, thank God.

So now, when the perverted legislative initiatives are presented once more to ban criticism of politicians and ban guns and ban public meetings, people will see more clearly what is happening. Free speech is inversely proportionate to political violence. But these politicians are opportunists. They are trying to make us believe that the behaviors of a sane society should be regulated on the basis of the acts of the insane among us.

That thought sits just a bit farther down the same scale of irrationality the shooter sits on.

Thoughts on the Giffords shooting.

Guns
Anyone who has lived in this country for even the past few years has learned that we are a place where some people kill other people with guns. That’s a crime everywhere, so people who do that are not only morally wrong, they are criminally wrong, too. Only a very, very, very small percentage of people who ever own a gun use it to shoot someone. Nevertheless, a lot of people, including some who own guns, are continually trying to restrict gun ownership by rational people, on the basis of the behavior of irrational people. This shooter is clearly as irrational as they come.

Politics
When the president talks about a nut shooting someone, it tells the other nuts that they can get the president’s attention this way. Bad idea. He said nothing that he couldn’t have said on paper. He referred to the Congresswoman in the past tense though she is still very much alive, and he really added nothing. Bad form.

When the Daily KOS makes the Congresswoman a political target of its venom and then burns up the social media accusing every Republican and Conservative it can name for provoking this individual, it reflects the same dementia inherent in the shooter. This shooter needed no provocation and left zero evidence he had been provoked by anyone other than some of the best known Leftists - Hitler, for example - whose Mein Kampf was on the shooter’s recommended reading list.

Reaction
Some conservatives called for not politicizing the act. Of course, that’s not possible. Assassination is patently political. But the hasty reaction from Paul Krugman and the Daily KOS, are indicative of a deep sickness that appears to thrive in the political Left. It’s important for the Right to refuse to debate whether or not this criminal was provoked by the Tea Party or Sarah Palin, but instead, to simply respond, “That’s sick thinking, take it somewhere else.”