Braceletgate Update: Left, White House Actually React to Silly ‘Doubtful’ Theory

On Monday, I floated a theory about the purple bracelet Robert Gibbs was wearing on a couple Sunday talk shows.  I wondered if it had any connection to a similar purple bracelet SEIU heavy Andy Stern had worn at some point.

The silly theory, which I called “doubtful,” solicited a reaction that surprised even me.  Besides Robert Gibbs himself tweeting about it, I scored the lefty trifecta: MediaMatters, DailyKos and a blogger for Salon.com all responded.

A rash of hysterical e-mails also came through.  Consider this gem:

Really Mr. Olson, REALLY? While I’m aware you wingnuts are not the brightest bulbs around, and the fact you are associated with the huge steaming pile of moron known as Breitbart indicates you are quite possibly mentally retarded…

Or this:

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: Andy Stern, Bart Stupak, Chicago Way, Daily Kos, founding fathers
Posted Mar 16th 2010 at 12:09 pm in Big Labor, Congress, Healthcare, Obama | 90662180 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/kolson/2010/03/16/braceletgate-update-left-white-house-actually-react-to-silly-doubtful-theory/Braceletgate+Update%3A+Left%2C+White+House+Actually+React+to+Silly+%E2%80%98Doubtful%E2%80%99+Theory2010-03-16+19%3A09%3A09Kyle+Olson

The Consent of the Governed

Knowing that the 111th Democrat-Progressive ruled Congress is indeed tyrannical in its endeavors to ram through ObamaCare, the Left continuously touts that the American people want this bill. Now, I have seen the polls and so have you, and so have the Democrats, including Obama, and they clearly know that they American people are vehemently against this healthcare takeover.

This leads me to my next point. I search through our Founder’s words in the Declaration of Independence. I’m searching for guidance, for the Founders must have known there would be tyranny lurking at every corner to deconstruct the nation that they had instituted. So many of us read the founding documents today, dusting them off, reading every word, clinging to every word. And there it is:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. emphasis mine

What’s missing is the how. We have the Right. But, does it go further?  An obligation, perhaps? Do the Founders leave the door open to any effective means? The people have the Right to abolish an oppressive form of government. Because we do not consent, we have the Right to institute a new government–to abolish all that exists and start new. All the entitlements, bribes, kickbacks, deals, unfair taxation–everything.  They give Americans the Right, directive, and ability to dissolve the current tyrannical government.  They knew this would happen.  That is why they give us the “Right” to guard this great nation against future tyranny.

In addition, our Founders, as only Fathers could to, give us the directive in the Declaration of Independence:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, 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. emphasis mine

It is our duty to ”throw off such government.” Not optional.  An obligation.

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: Anita Dunn, Blue dogs, Cass Sunstein, consent of the governed, executive power
Posted Mar 15th 2010 at 1:21 pm in Uncategorized | 89050234 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/sahiller/2010/03/15/the-consent-of-the-governed/The+Consent+of+the+Governed2010-03-15+20%3A21%3A54SusanAnne+++Hiller

Liberty and Government: An American Tipping Point

Thomas Paine said that “It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.”  He did so amidst the long shadow of a centralized government which regarded individual rights as secondary to its own.  Today, “56% of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey  . . . say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”  They do so in the shadow of a government seeking to take control of nearly 17% of the US economy, if not that portion of our lives, in the name of caring for our health.

For any that have cared to listen to the debates over multi-trillion dollar spending programs, tax hikes, cap and trade or health care, at issue is not simply whether those huge government programs would provide lasting solutions – they will not – at issue is our basic right to Liberty.  Quite frankly, it was never the assumption of the Founding Fathers that it was the role of government to provide a moving target standard of living for Americans.  It was their sincere hope that the government of limited powers they set up would allow people to pursue their lives, Liberty and happiness.  To do so they, wanted to hamstring government’s ability to act – not ours.

Since then, of course, the scale has tipped in favor of government power over our pursuits.  Each step along the way, those concerned with our Liberty have heard the echoes of Senator Daniel Webster when he said:

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”

As you consider his words, it may worthy to also consider the lives of Americans, at the dawn of these United States, and the lives of Americans today.

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: american founders, Articles of Confederation, daniel webster, expanded government, founding fathers
Posted Mar 1st 2010 at 7:51 am in Culture, History, Local Government, Politics, Regulation, Tax Reform, Tea Party, federal spending | 8196676 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/tdelbeccaro/2010/03/01/liberty-and-government-an-american-tipping-point/Liberty+and+Government%3A+An+American+Tipping+Point2010-03-01+15%3A51%3A32Thomas+Del+Beccaro

Our Time for Choosing

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.  We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

Ronald Reagan spoke these words some forty-six years ago in his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech.  Tragically, today in America it appears the time for choosing is fast passing. As each day goes by our debt grows more untenable; our security more imperiled; our economy more shackled; our government more tyrannical.

These are symptoms of an America that has chosen the wrong path.  We lost our way on the road to civilization, veering onto the road to serfdom. Our plight is the result of a hundred-plus year campaign by the socialist sophists to slowly but surely undermine the bedrock principles on which we had built our strength.

While the ends of a nation are peace, prosperity and culture, from our founding there was a dichotomy of opinion as to how best to achieve these ends.  It was not merely a matter of state versus federal or small versus big government.  Rather, at its core the split rested and continues to rest upon embracing liberty or embracing tyranny.

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: Cold War, Constitution, founding fathers, Frédéric Bastiat, Islamism
Posted Feb 15th 2010 at 5:51 am in Congress, Culture, Featured Story, History, Justice/Legal, Politics, Tea Party, federal spending | 74866151 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/amellon/2010/02/15/our-time-for-choosing/Our+Time+for+Choosing2010-02-15+13%3A51%3A50Andrew+Mellon

Remembering Lincoln: What is ‘The New Birth of Freedom’?

As he prepared “Notes on Government” for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself. “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.”

As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the American regime contained a self-contradiction. With most Americans of his generation, he hoped that the eventual removal of slavery would remove this potentially fatal flaw. In fact many states did abolish slavery in that first, founding generation. But his “Southern States” did not. It took civil war and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to continue the liberation that the founders had begun.

Lincoln came to the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg to say in public what Madison in prudence could not say some seventy years before. In declaring their independence, their self-government, in 1776, “our fathers,” the founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth: this is the language of fertility, of childbirth. It is a paradoxical conception and childbirth—the work of fathers not of mothers. Somehow the signers of the Declaration of Independence were fathers and mothers, men who conceived and gave birth.

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, declaration of independence, founding fathers, George III, Gettysburg Address
Posted Feb 13th 2010 at 6:12 am in Featured Story, History, News, Politics | 74602145 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/wemorrisey/2010/02/13/remembering-lincoln-what-is-the-new-birth-of-freedom/Remembering+Lincoln%3A+What+is+%27The+New+Birth+of+Freedom%27%3F2010-02-13+14%3A12%3A41William+E.+Morrisey

Is the GOP Worthy of Governance?

The Democrat Party’s “40 year majority” will come to a close 38 years early. The unbearable trinity of Pelosi, Reid, and Obama has managed to alienate a nation desperate to support new leadership. They accomplished this by an insistence on unwanted quasi-Socialist policies and an irritating propensity to lead with their chin in foreign policy. The era of Obama is over, even as his Health Care proposal will likely pass. But does this mean a new era of Republican leadership is about to begin? This remains to be seen.

Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter who supported Obama, has views similar to many who consider themselves centrist. She now realizes her support for Barack Obama was misguided. Yet she is tempted to take a “pox on both your houses” approach. She remains skeptical of the Republican Party, as I imagine many voters do. In her recent opinion essay in the Wall Street Journal she states:

“The question isn’t whether they’ll win seats in the House and Senate this year, and the question isn’t even how many. The question is whether the party will be worthy of victory, whether it learned from its losses in 2006 and ‘08, whether it deserves leadership. Whether Republicans are a worthy alternative. Whether, in short, they are serious.”

I had grown weary of many of Ms. Noonan’s commentaries. Her support for Obama was predicated on an obvious misunderstanding of his politics, nature, and ideology. But her implicit challenge to the GOP is spot on. While the critique premised in her comment is not completely fair, without question Republicans are viewed with skepticism. After all, it was a Republican administration which brought us bailouts, supported expansionary and unsustainable housing policies, expanded domestic spending, proposed an immigration policy as unpopular as the Democrat’s current Health Care Bill and made “earmarks” a household name. Worst of all, the party seemed to lose any sense of foundational principles. Just what do Republicans stand for?

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: Barack Obama, first principles, founding fathers, founding principles, Harry Reid
Posted Jan 18th 2010 at 1:16 pm in Obama, Politics | 61430236 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mrulle/2010/01/18/is-the-gop-worthy-of-governance/Is+the+GOP+Worthy+of+Governance%3F+2010-01-18+21%3A16%3A27Michael+S.+Rulle+Jr.

The Survival of the Republic: A Second Reason for Reading Montesquieu

In earlier posts – here and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least one of the reasons for his pre-eminence is still pertinent today. There are other such reasons, which I addressed at length in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, and they, too, deserve consideration. I will discuss one such here.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws is a large book, and it is difficult to know which elements within it are the most salient. There is, however, one passage in which Montesquieu tells us outright that what he is about to say is fundamental to everything else that he says. “I,” he writes near the end of the first of the work’s six parts, “shall be able to be understood only when the next four chapters have been read.” Then, in those four chapters, he argues that forms of government are closely related to the size of the territory that must be governed. Republics are well-suited to polities small in extent; monarchies, to polities of intermediate size; and despotisms to polities great in size.

The pertinence of this claim to the situation of the American Founding Fathers should be obvious. Especially in modern times, this would appear to mean that republicanism can only be viable in mountainous places such as Switzerland, where the geography virtually rules out the establishment of anything but tiny states. It is, then, in no way surprising that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists turned to a considerable extent upon the question whether it is somehow possible to establish a viable republic on an extended territory.

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: anti-federalists, despotism, federalists, form of government, founding fathers
Posted Jan 9th 2010 at 5:07 am in Culture, Featured Story, History, Politics | 57522130 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/prahe/2010/01/09/the-survival-of-the-republic-a-second-reason-for-reading-montesquieu/The+Survival+of+the+Republic%3A+A+Second+Reason+for+Reading+Montesquieu2010-01-09+13%3A07%3A26Paul+A.++Rahe

Montesquieu: The Rules of War and Lessons For Today

In an earlier post, I bemoaned the fact that very few well-educated Americans know who Montesquieu was – and I drew attention to the fact that the author of The Spirit of Laws was more often cited by the American Founding Fathers than any other figure, that his magnum opus was quickly translated into virtually every European language, and that he exercised an influence in England and on the European continent during and for a time after the second half of the eighteenth century no less profound than that which he exercised in our own country.

Needless to say, there were reasons for Montesquieu’s pre-eminence. That his thinking deserves attention today may be less obvious, but it is no less true. To begin with, Montesquieu was the first to grasp the conditions within which modern war is waged, and his insights bear on the history of our country and on its situation today.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu was born on the 18th of January 1689, at a time in which the Glorious Revolution was underway in England, and he came of age in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1713. He watched from afar with dismay as England’s duke of Marlborough repeatedly annihilated the legions of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France: first at the battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704, when Montesquieu was fifteen; then – in the brief span of years stretching from 1706, when Montesquieu was seventeen, to 1709, when he was twenty – at Ramillies, Oudenarde, Lille, and Malplaquet.

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: Blenheim, Duke of Marlborough, founding fathers, Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws
Posted Jan 3rd 2010 at 6:29 am in Culture, Defense, Economics, Education, Featured Story, History, Politics | 54782138 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/prahe/2010/01/03/one-reason-for-reading-montesquieu/Montesquieu%3A+The+Rules+of+War+and+Lessons+For+Today+2010-01-03+14%3A29%3A08Paul+A.++Rahe

ObamaCare Corrupt Deal Shows Need to Amend the Speech and Debate Clause

Several state attorneys general have been asked, or plan, to investigate the deal struck by Senator Ben Nelson to permanently exempt Nebraska from paying Medicaid expenses in exchange for his voting for Obamacare.

An investigation of the Nelson deal would likely have two focuses. First, is the Nebraska exemption unconstitutional under Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which requires “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States?” Secondly, did the deal constitute a form of corruption?

Whether the Nebraska exemption constitutes unlawful corruption obviously depends on the facts surrounding how Senator Nelson cut his deal. However, even a pure constitutional challenge would benefit from a clear understanding and presentation of the facts underlying how and why the Nebraska exemption was reached.

(more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: ACORN, ACORN corruption, Ben Nelson, bribery, Constitution
Posted Dec 31st 2009 at 7:59 am in ACORN, Congress, Healthcare, Justice/Legal, News, Politics | 5372695 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mfitzgibbons/2009/12/31/obamacare-corrupt-deal-shows-need-to-amend-the-speech-and-debate-clause/ObamaCare+Corrupt+Deal+Shows+Need+to+Amend+the+Speech+and+Debate+Clause2009-12-31+15%3A59%3A40Mark+J.++Fitzgibbons

‘Big Government’ Rises Again

n7h6ycxmg5In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the nation and proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” The following year, the federal budget deficit stood at 1.4% of GDP. Thirteen years later, in 2008, the deficit had doubled, to just over 3% of GDP. This year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal budget deficit will equal 11.4% of GDP.

As George Will would say, “Well.”

This is the real source of our “summer of discontent.” Yes, millions of Americans spent the month of August holding Tea Parties, attending town halls, organizing, marching and protesting against ObamaCare, i.e. Congressional and Administration proposals to reconstruct the entire health care sector. But to suggest that health care alone is at the root of this backlash is to miss the forest for the trees. To paraphrase Democrat strategist James Carville, “It’s the big government, stupid.”

Since last September when the financial markets stumbled, we’ve seen a Wall Street bailout, government takeovers of AIG, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, Chrysler, and numerous banks. The Federal Reserve has opened its discount window to almost all-comers and has taken the unprecedented step of aggressively buying up the federal government’s own debt. Congress rushed through a “stimulus to nowhere,” moved closer to a “cap-and-trade” remake of the energy sector and openly talked about higher taxes and more regulation. (more…)

Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | Tweet this |

Tags: AIG, American Revolution, banks, Bill Clinton, Boston Tea Party
Posted Sep 9th 2009 at 5:26 pm in Congress, Culture, Economics, Featured Story, History, Justice/Legal, Media Criticism, News, Obama, Politics | 98274 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2009/09/09/big-government-rises-again/%27Big+Government%27+Rises+Again2009-09-10+00%3A26%3A17Mike+Flynn