Where's the nation going? Why are we in this handbasket?

The Supreme Court has been handing down some interesting decisions lately. One decision came down yesterday that was a 7-2 vote that made it impossible to sue a police department for not enforcing a restraining order. What I heard on the radio yesterday was that during the hearing a Supreme Court justice directly asked the legal council for the police department what an officer’s duty was if they saw a man being beat up by five other men. The response was a bone chilling nothing. That's right, police duties have been reduced to protect their jobs and serve them more donuts. The blue canaries really are not there to protect anyone or to enforce the laws, not unless they feel like it.
The court has been accused of being too conservative or too liberal; I am going to accuse them of something else, being far too pro-government. The Constitution is no longer regarded as a limit on government and instead the legal system is being used to shackle the American people. Government can now do pretty well what it wants to. These non-elected, non-representative officials have tilted the balance of power squarely into the hands of the government. I feel like Obi-Wan yelling at Darth Vader: "You were supposed to bring balance to the Constitution. You were supposed to defeat the nannyists, not become one!!!"
I will offer one piece of advice to the courts and the government in general. Not that I expect any of them to listen. Consider what you are taking away from the American people, because in addition to the rights you are taking away you are also taking away hope. When the people believe they have no hope left they will hand down a decision of their own: secession.

Got Freedom?

Rush Limbaugh has a saying: "Freedom has worked every time it has been tried." Of course he likes to trot that saying out in defense of our efforts in Iraq, but what about here, at home? If you equate freedom with the maximum absence of government then our freedom is in a hurting state of affairs right now. As Limbaugh himself has stated that our federal budget only grows. What politicians call cuts are only cuts in projected growth rates, not actual cuts into any department’s budget. Now we have the Supreme Court deciding that the commerce clause of the Constitution can be projected to include federal prosecution of marijuana users who grow their own plants and never cross state lines. The interstate commerce clause had already been bent out of recognition, now it is totally broken. We have a sitting President who has made his administrations policy one of pre-emptive warfare. If anyone cares about national sovereignty it should be the US, yet our policy is now to INITIATE hostilities towards other sovereign nations. I agree that freedom needs to find its way into every corner of this world but modern nations need to establish means that agree with the intended ends. How do you say we want you to enjoy freedom so we are going to attack your country? There we have it, the trifecta. Our congress is ignoring the constitution, our judicial is breaking the constitution to meet their needs, and the executive branch is invading other countries. You can try to rationalize any of these actions however you would like but you cannot dismiss the underlying truth that the government is ignoring the ground rules this nation was founded on. For the record, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in essence an agreement between the government of this country and the people. It establishes the rights of the people and the limits of the government, not the other way around. The ground rules established by these two documents only protect the people if the people enforce the rules. Americans have taken the path of least resistance and allowed their freedoms to slip away from them. The fight to regain those freedoms will be difficult and needs to start soon before the Great Experiment becomes a footnote in the history books of the socialist future.

Triumph for the weird.

I know everyone and their dog will be chiming in on the Michael Jackson verdict today. However, that will not stop me from throwing in my two cents worth. The way I see it the verdict was a triumph for the weird. People can still stand there and talk all they want to about how an older man shouldn't have young boys in his bed but that is simply a moral judgment and what we saw yesterday was justice. Society has had a hard time distinguishing between the two lately. Too many moral crusaders have used the power of concentrated interests to put into place laws based on morality not justice. After this verdict I don't have a doubt that there will be ugly bills drafted all across our beautiful nation that will specifically say that what Michael Jackson did is a criminal act, not that Jackson would be caught dead living in most of those places. For that matter, I would be surprised if he stuck around the US at all. Given the toll this trial took on his health I can't say that he should feel all that welcome here when his own government tried to take him to task on charges that could not stand up to a trial by his peers. Ten counts, that is how many laws the prosecutor felt he could convict Jackson of violating. Not a meager amount of work involved there. He must have felt he really had the law on his side, didn't he? Or did he simply jump into the arrest and trial of a man he knew he would have a hard time convicting simply because he as an individual felt outrage over Jackson's moral indiscretions? My vote is for the latter. In my opinion, the prosecutor needs to have his decision reviewed by his peers on the bar and if they feel he did not press the charges with the intent of getting an actual conviction, then he needs to be disbarred. This is all assuming that the legal community has the courage required to police their own. We have enough moral crusaders writing the laws, we don't need more of them enforcing the law. The jury found Jackson innocent on all counts, but the peanut gallery of moral crusaders never will because they have, and will continue to confuse morality with justice.

By the people, for the people, where?

Being a child of the seventies I have never known a nation not belittled by the childish antics of modern politics. Men and women who are elected by a system that seems like but somehow is not democratic or even representative. I know there are people out there that say that if you vote that your vote counts and that the representative elected are your representatives. Why do I not buy that? Oh yeah, because the power brokers in the two main parties do their level best to quash any third party candidate. They have the market pretty well cornered on fundraising because who ever heard of a serious third party candidate. Since they are our elected representatives they get to write laws about how the elections are held, who can contribute to whom and who gets to be included in the debates. The media in this country also plays a part in this two party monopoly of power. Who is going to vote for a person who you have never heard of? How do you hear about people? From the media. I have hope however. With the advent of the World Wide Web and the blogosphere the word is getting out that there are viable alternatives to the status quo in Washington. I was raised by my mother who is in the Democrat camp in just about every area except gun control. Then I went off to college and learned something about economics. I was converted to conservatism, but not entirely. I backed Perot the two times he ran. When 2000 came around I had just graduated from the Colorado School of Mines, and with the limited number of choices available to a conservative in that election I voted for W. I had not discovered the Libertarian movement at that time and was hell bent on not voting for a Democrat who was set on prying into my wallet after I finally had some money in it. To my great surprise however, I had not voted for a fiscal conservative, just a social conservative, I had screwed myself in the worst possible way. W has no problems with a “be thy brothers keeper” state of affairs. He has allowed the Democrats to continue their spending spree on social engineering programs that in reality only benefit the government employees who administer the programs. Then 9-11 happened. The politicians went into full "we have to do something!" mode. Viola! The Patriot Act was born and that on top of years of deterioration of our civil liberties pretty well sealed the deal. Now you are saying, "You're writing this blog right now so you still have all of your civil liberties, what are you complaining about?" I'm complaining that the paving is being laid for the superhighway to Hell. Do you think the Germans still thought they were in good shape after Hitler got a firearms registration passed. Some of them may have been nervous but it wasn't until the government started using those registration rolls to start gathering firearms that people started to realize they weren't in control anymore. Thomas Jefferson said that "the price for liberty is constant vigilance." Without exaggerating, this literally is a mandate for paranoia when it comes to everything our government does. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are just a listing of the base rules our government is supposed to follow. These two documents do not protect our civil liberties they merely define them. Defending our civil liberties falls squarely on the shoulders of those who would not live without them. H.G. Wells once said that "History is a race between education and catastrophe." I wonder if he understood how deeply true that quote is. Most people today just equate education with reading, writing, arithmetic, and science. I would say that the race more specifically applies to civil education. Without a thorough understanding of the civil liberties our founders meant for us to have, we have no idea what we have lost. We have no appreciation for how important it is to stop the government from encroaching on the liberties that make the people free and make the country great. People need to be taught a fundamental truth. Our country was founded with the idea that each person is endowed with certain inalienable rights. Inalienable means cannot be taken or SURRENDERED. The concept of living in a free country must include the idea that you have to be free to do anything that does not infringe on the rights of another citizen. Another basic tenet of living in a free country if that the economic system must be based on voluntary interactions between buyers and sellers. We currently live in a country where inalienable rights might be confused with alien rights and being an alien anything will get you arrested. The economy is hardly voluntary with all of the government controls there for your "safety".