The New York Times tries a new way to tackle the Bill of Rights

In response to another attempt by the depraved and subversive New York Times to usurp our Constitution:

The problems with (il)liberal efforts to curtail or eliminate the ability of American citizens to defend themselves are several:

First, the right to self-defense is a God-given and unalienable right, period. Only tyrants and criminals want the innocent defenseless.  If you're a criminal seeking to harm someone, and you have a choice between two homes -- one in which the residents are armed and one which is defenseless -- which would you choose?

Second, we already have multiple laws forbidding homicide; if mass murderers and other criminals refuse to follow a law as basic as that, what makes you think that they'll obey gun laws? They won't; only the naive and the nescient think otherwise.

Third, you'll never eliminate firearms; if you make them illegal, only the law-abiding will be weaponless; government and criminals will still be fully-armed.

Germany tried that. Communist and Islamic states, too. How does that work out?

Fourth, the president and other elected tyrants who want to take away our ability to defend ourselves would never, ever, under any circumstances give up their armed security (for which we pay). What makes their lives and the lives of their families more valuable than ours?

If Barack Obama wants the nation disarmed, then him first.

Finally, why would you voluntarily give up your right to defend yourself, those whom you love, and your neighbors? And even if you would, why would you use the coercive power of the state to steal away from the rest of us our ability to do so?

How perverse.

There will never be peace in the Middle East nor anywhere that men consider Muhammad a prophet of anything but hell

From The Blaze, by way of Patriot Update, here:

"The religion of peace has morphed into the religion of pieces. Actions speak louder than words. The only reason all of Islam is being blamed is that the overwhelming majority of terrorists on the planet are Muslim and the silence from the Ummah is deafening and damning."

Those who blame Islam on the basis of Muslim atrocities alone are wrong; how many people who claim to be Christian steal, rape, or murder?

The reason Islam can, should, and must be blamed for Islamic terrorism is because it's directly responsible for it -- the genocidal pedophile Muhammad preached and practiced the rape, enslavement, and slaughter of all who refuse the "invitation" to convert.

Islam has never, ever, under any circumstances been a "religion of peace." No major school of Islamic jurisprudence rejects offensive warfare against non-Muslims; the Ahmadiyya, who do oppose such violence, are persecuted by their more orthodox coreligionists even in modern and moderate Islamic states like Indonesia.

Muslims who rape, enslave, and butcher non-Muslims are not "taking passages out of context"; they're doing exactly what Muhammad preached and practiced:

"the Messenger of Allah [...] would say: 'Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war. [...] When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. [...] Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them. [...] If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them [...]'" (Muslim Book 19, Number 4294).

Consider another example of Muhammad's genocidal intolerance, evidence that Islam has never been peaceful and that those who abduct, brutalize, barter, burn, behead, and butcher in Allah's name are doing just what their "religion" commands:

"The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter [...]" (Qur'an 5:33).

Islam's great exegete Ibn Kathir explains this verse:

"'Wage war' mentioned here means, oppose and contradict, and it includes disbelief, blocking roads and spreading fear in the fairways. Mischief in the land refers to various types of evil."

So, Muhammad requires execution, crucifixion, or cutting off hands and feet from opposite sides for "disbelief."

(This passage immediately follows one cited often as proof of Islam's tolerance. In fact, Ahmed mentions it: "It says in the Koran killing one person is like killing the whole of humanity.” Tragically, ironically, fiendishly, Qur'an 5:32 is a warning against Jews, whom Muhammad especially hated.)

This is why there will never be peace in the Middle East nor anywhere that men consider Muhammad a prophet of anything but hell.

The "lone wolf" is not alone; he's obeying the "sacred texts" of more than one billion people and a tradition one and one-half millennia old

How many more Americans have to die, how many Yazidi girls have to be gang-raped and sold into slavery, how many more Christians have to have their homes and churches razed and their heads severed before people wake up? Before the nation demands action?

The Muslim "lone wolf" is not alone; he's obeying the "sacred texts" of more than one billion people and a tradition one and one-half millennia old.

Islam kills. It is not a "religion of peace." Except for the Ahmadiyya, who reject offensive warfare against non-Muslims (and are persecuted as heretics by their more orthodox brethren, even in modern and moderate Islamic states like Indonesia), every major school of Islamic jurisprudence endorses the rape, enslavement, and slaughter of all who refuse the "invitation" to convert.

What are our "leaders" doing in our defense? Don't look to media; serious news people scold not the president for giving Iran's nuclear genocide program a greenlight while they still hold Americans hostage, but the sole reporter who dared to ask him about his perfidy. The professional pretenders are no better; the world burns, and Hollywood rises to the defense of ... chickens. And academia is now an indoctrination center for the jihad against Israel.

Our politicians are swelling Muslim ranks in the United States; rather than telling the truth about Islam's war against the West (and humanity, in general), and acting accordingly, they're importing the enemy.

As these "lone wolf" examples show -- how many "lone wolves" does it take before they become a pack? -- the problem is neither ISIS/ISIL/IS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, nor the imam down the street "radicalizing" the impressionable -- they're merely foot soldiers working from the genocidal pedophile Muhammad's playbook.

The problem is Islam.

We need a mass movement, a public revolt, a popular uprising against this treason; our politicians are not just ignoring the problem, they're making it worse. Bush 43 was bad enough: in the most teachable moment in modern history, he called Islam a "great world religion of peace. And Barack Hussein Obama, the (allegedly) former Muslim, has done everything in his power to facilitate the rise of Islamic states throughout the Middle East and Africa, including a nuclear Iran.

There is no negotiation, no "live and let live" with "kill the pagans wherever you find them" (Qur'an 9:5).

Pervasive (il)liberal bias hides the tilt, or When the world's crooked, the straight look biased

I recall speaking with a friend (quite a few years ago) about media bias. He thought that Fox News was slanted to the Right. I shared that Fox News is pretty center of the road; it just looks biased in view of the rest of Media's overwhelming (il)liberal tilt.

Since when is patriotism a partisan issue? How can opposing the burning, crushing, and tearing to pieces of the innocent in the womb by their own mothers be "extreme"? Liberals lock their doors; shouldn't our borders be secure? They arm their security; what makes them and their children more deserving of protection than our own? And how is the self-evident truth that the human body was created for male-female unions suddenly "hate"?

The Left thinks that jihadists merit understanding, inclusion, negotiations, and access to nuclear weapons, but when a member the leftist media asks about American citizens' essential, God-given, unalienable rights?

You should know better.

And the Republicans are useless (or worse), giving the Tyrant-in-Chief everything he wants.

Some good observations on the Left's divine right of kings, from here:

The most maddening aspect of the polarization debate is the hidden presumption of liberalism’s right to rule. Authors such as Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann attribute most of the polarization in Washington to the Republican Party, which they and other observers argue has become too extreme. This will come as news to grassroots conservatives, who overwhelmingly believe that Republicans in the capital haven’t been nearly extreme enough in opposing President Obama’s governmental gigantism. It’s an implausible case, as there is little in conservative ideology today that you can’t find in Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative or in Ronald Reagan’s famous “Time for Choosing” speech of 50 years ago. The difference today is that Republicans have won some landslide elections and lately a majority in Congress, and this galls liberals, whose real answer to polarization is conservatism’s unconditional surrender.

A defense of Liberty in Wisconsin

Democrats will do anything to take, maintain, and increase power. Just ask Barack Obama.

A defense of Americans' rights, from here:

“It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, the special prosecutor was the instigator of a ‘perfect storm’ of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent Unnamed Movants and those who dared to associate with them. It is fortunate, indeed, for every other citizen of this great State who is interested in the protection of fundamental liberties that the special prosecutor chose as his targets innocent citizens who had both the will and the means to fight the unlimited resources of an unjust prosecution. Further, these brave individuals played a crucial role in presenting this court with an opportunity to re-endorse its commitment to upholding the fundamental right of each and every citizen to engage in lawful political activity and to do so free from the fear of the tyrannical retribution of arbitrary or capricious governmental prosecution. Let one point be clear: our conclusion today ends this unconstitutional John Doe investigation.”

Parallel cases: Abraham Lincoln and Ted Cruz on judicial supremacy

Another reason to like Ted Cruz: No other presidential candidate has articulated the same basic truth about the Supreme Court's recent dictum in favor of the paraphilia du jour.

When the Supreme Court decides a case, the parties of that case are bound to that decision, as are those in parallel circumstances. But the Court cannot establish law by extending beyond that strict limit whatever "principle" they've suddenly created.

The current struggle between the friends of the Constitution and those who despise it and them will end in one of two places: either the reasonable and the decent will assert themselves and reestablish the rule of law, common sense, and basic decency, or there will be no barriers to any deviant impulse's being enshrined as "law."

From here:

Clearly anyone seeking a same-sex marriage license in a state who was not party to the Obergefell suit falls under what Lincoln would call a “parallel case.” But what about someone who runs to federal court or a state marriage license bureau, and holds up Obergefell’s doctrine of “dignity” on behalf of, say, polygamy? Must the court or marriage license bureau shrug their shoulders and say, “Well—I guess so”?

When Lincoln arrived in the White House in 1861, he found two executive branch decisions to which he objected. A free black man in Boston had applied to the State Department for a passport to travel to France, which the State Department had denied on the ground that the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott, had declared that blacks could not be citizens because blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” And in Philadelphia, a free black man had applied to the Patent Office for an invention, and been denied on the same ground. Lincoln ordered both decisions reversed.

I often tell this story to my students in classes on the Constitution, with the question appended: “Was Lincoln defying the Supreme Court? Did he act unconstitutionally?” It is amazing—and depressing—that the overwhelming majority of my students get the answer wrong. Such is an example of how deep the idea of judicial supremacy—“the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is,” as the Court self-congratulated in Cooper v. Aaron—has crept into the public mind today.

Look again at Lincoln’s careful language in that passage above. He is saying that the reasoning of Dred Scott must be respected as to the parties of that particular case and in parallel cases (i.e., a slave owner who brings his slave into a free state, as Dred Scott’s owner had done). But in his decision to reverse the executive branch decisions supposedly based on Dred Scott in circumstances that were not parallel—both were free blacks in free states, with no one asserting ownership claims to them—Lincoln was asserting that the executive branch was not obligated to extend the principle of the Dred Scott case more broadly. The Constitution belongs to all three branches of government, each of which may assert its constitutional prerogatives in its own sphere—pending a legal challenge in the courts that concludes otherwise.

Antonin Scalia obliterates the perverse Left's black-robed tyranny

The obliteration of Marriage, the death of the Constitution, and the Abolition of Man.

You can sit in a garage and call yourself a car, but that doesn't mean that you're a car.

Marriage is and can be only one man and one woman; one man's urge to insert himself into another man's digestive system is not "love," and it can never be marriage.

Sodomy-as-marriage is a delusion, a fantasy, a violation of Nature, and a (temporarily) successful attempt to use the force of law to coerce the endorsement of perversion. (Or at least, intimidate its critics.)

This is the abolition of Marriage, for there is no legally, logically, practically, nor morally consistent way to endorse homosexual unions and still deny "the right to love," "due process," and "equality" to practitioners of the other paraphilias.

And just wait; Islam is licking its lips in anticipation of its chance to argue in favor of Muhammad-endorsed and Allah-ordained polygyny and child sex slavery.

Justice Antonin Scalia obliterates the perverse Left's judicial tyranny, from Power Line:

The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance.

Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

[...]

[W]hat really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not.

They are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called for by their “reasoned judgment.” These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.

The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so.

Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent. “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.” (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.)

Rights, we are told, can “rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” (Huh? How can a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?) And we are told that, “[i]n any particular case,” either the Equal Protection or Due Process Clause “may be thought to capture the essence of [a] right in a more accurate and comprehensive way,” than the other, “even as the two Clauses may converge in the identification and definition of the right.” (What say? What possible “essence” does substantive due process “capture” in an “accurate and comprehensive way”? It stands for nothing whatever, except those freedoms and entitlements that this Court really likes. And the Equal Protection Clause, as employed today, identifies nothing except a difference in treatment that this Court really dislikes. Hardly a distillation of essence. If the opinion is correct that the two clauses “converge in the identification and definition of [a] right,” that is only because the majority’s likes and dislikes are predictably compatible.)

I could go on. The world does not expect logic and precision in poetry or inspirational pop-philosophy; it demands them in the law. The stuff contained in today’s opinion has to diminish this Court’s reputation for clear thinking and sober analysis.

Scott Johnson notes Justice Scalia’s footnote 22:

If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

The Republic is dead.

Turning fiends into friends: The bad medicine of Barack Obama

One might assume it took quite a presidential beer summit to turn those demoniacal health insurance companies into allies of the Demagogue-in-Chief. But make no mistake, it was greenbacks, not six packs, that turned fiends into friends.

And it's not unusual. Donor helps politician get elected. Politician makes law favorable to donor. Donor helps politician get reelected, and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. It's a never-ending cycle of corruption, like Poe's tragedy:

That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

It's a perverse thing, studying something in order to learn how to undo it. Like the serial killer who studies anatomy, or the pyromaniacal fire-fighter, or the liberal educator. Many of our elected officials are experts in the law (not the least of whom is the "smartest president ever," the Constitutional professor in the White House). All of them swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Yet they use their knowledge of law, government, politics, and human nature to serve not We the People, but themselves.

Barack Obama is to the Constitution as Jack the Ripper was to the ladies of Whitechapel. Which makes the president Barack ... the Ripper.

And the electorate wonders what happened.

Posted here:

"The administration waived conflict-of-interest laws ...."

Of course they do.

Despite his best efforts to disarm and bankrupt the Republic, the president has provided one valuable service to the nation: He has dispelled forever (except to the most deluded) the notion that liberals are noble public servants who care only about helping the "common man." They are as corrupt and cruel and greedy for wealth, power, and status as the most demonic Conservative of leftist fantasy.

Democrats today (and a lot of Republicans) are nothing more than professional campaigners who care only about maintaining their power and position no matter the cost to the rest of us. They live like kings off our backs while promising to the dull and greedy crumbs for which we all have to pay.

And so will our children.

"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -Thomas Jefferson