Punishing Liberty

It’s big news in the American media this week that Christians in Iran are being sentenced to 80 lashes with the whip for the “crime” of drinking wine as part of their religious communion sacrament -- “a shocking punishment meted out even as a new United Nations report blasted the Islamic republic for its systematic persecution of non-Muslims.”

Well yes, it is indeed a shocking punishment of liberty, imposed by savages stuck within a 7^th century mindset, but that is what we can expect with any government of savages, run by savages for savages. This is exactly the kind of thing all barbarous statist and religious savages do to the hapless multitudes under their domination and control.

Four Christians were arrested in a house church and charged with consuming alcohol in violation of the government theocracy's strict laws. Iran is a place where the “crime” of converting from Islam to another religion can commonly result in the death penalty. The clerical rulers there see Christianity as a threat to Iran’s majority ultra-orthodox Shiite Islamic religion.

Understand that when any authoritarian rulers within a group of religious fanatics begin to doubt their own faith in the imaginary dogma, they resort to cracking down on others who decide to leave the fold. If you don’t happen to accept their brand of religion they see that as a threat to their existence.

Americans see it as a human rights and freedom of religion issue. “It should be no surprise that Iran’s human rights record as documented by the UN is nothing short of atrocious," observes Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "If the regime thinks that its international charm offensive will help whitewash its appalling human rights record as documented by the UN report, they are sorely mistaken.”

“The sentences handed down to these members of the Church of Iran effectively criminalize the Christian sacrament of sharing in the Lord’s Supper and constitute an unacceptable infringement on the right to practice faith freely and peaceably,” explains Mervyn Thomas, chief executive of Christian Solidarity Worldwide.

Yes, but this story isn’t confined to just a Christian thing. If any self respecting Muslim man residing in the savage nation of Iran is caught enjoying an alcoholic beverage, he’s going to get the same 80 lashes from the whip.

The Christians in this story were not punished for being Christians – there are some 370,000 Christians lawfully living in savage land – they’re being punished for drinking alcohol.

The Iranians are punishing liberty as a crime.

Does that sound familiar?

It should, because that is exactly what the government of the United States of America does.

Americans once suffered under the same kind of alcohol prohibition laws. Folks weren’t sentenced to 80 lashes from the whip then but they often received stiff jail or prison sentences which were every bit as much draconian.

Our government routinely sentences innocent people even today for the “crime” of ingesting substances that the authorities have deemed by fiat illegal.  We have our own War on Drugs and the victims are filling up American prisons to overcrowding. It was done with alcohol in the early 20^th century just as its being done with other recreational drugs today.

Would some of these innocent prisoners rather endure 80 lashes by the whip and go free as opposed to suffering a lengthy prison term? The prison experience seems a far worse human rights violation by my reckoning.

By my reckoning the United States government is just as downright savage to its people as the government of Iran when it comes to punishing liberty.

Government Gunslingers

The United States military, Secret Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation are not the only government entities packing heat nowadays. Far from it; America has become a police state and that means that there are government gunslingers just about everywhere.

That’s right. Today there are at least 70 federal government entities which have armed divisions employing about 120,000 full-time officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests according to a June 2012 Justice Department report.

Now even the Library of Congress, National Institute of Health and Federal Reserve Board, among several other non-law-enforcement type agencies, are employing armed gunslingers ready to riddle the sheep with bullets at the slightest perceived provocation.

In short, our government has armed itself for protection against the very people it is charged with serving and protecting.

That is the hallmark of a police state.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, is just another fully armed federal police force. 

Recently they descended in full force and body armor upon the tiny Alaskan gold mining town of Chicken, together with a team of several other armed federal and state officials, including the FBI, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Coast Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Park Service.

It was part of an Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force investigation to look for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.

EPA officials deny that the operation was a “raid.”

“Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say "POLICE" emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,” said one gold miner of the incident.

These pollution police are treating clean water violations nowadays in the same fashion as bank robberies or kidnappings.

"Environmental law enforcement, like other forms of law enforcement, always involves the potential for physical, even armed, confrontation," said an EPA spokesman in defense of the Chicken Alaska raid.

Of course; when government goons engage in violent physical armed confrontations with people, they should expect some level of physical violence in return. On the other hand, if they would simply investigate peacefully and issue court citations to violators, they would have no need to arm themselves to the teeth.

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell has ordered an investigation, saying: "This level of intrusion and intimidation of Alaskans is absolutely unacceptable."

Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Republican, and Mark Begich, Democrat, have also inquired about the incident. “This seems to have been a heavy-handed and heavy-armor approach. Why was it so confrontational? The EPA really didn’t have any good answers for this,” Murkowski observed.

North Carolina resident Larry Keller was visited by armed EPA agents in May 2012 after sending an email complaining to the regional administrator who was video-taped saying his enforcement strategy was to "crucify" executives from big oil and gas companies. "The charter of the EPA is to protect the environment and public, not to act as a quasi federal police department," Keller told them after they challenged his conduct as suspicious.

You see, in a police state, such as what we have in American today, the police will come to your door fully armed to investigate and intimidate you for the suspicious “crime” of registering a complaint against one of them.

Our nation has become a government of gunslingers. 

American Welfare Program for Terrorists

The United States government has been generously supplying its avowed enemies with welfare packages during the entire War on Terror. Americans have armed the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, terrorist insurgents in Iraq, and Al Qaeda aligned rebel groups in Syria.  

Now we learn that our military geniuses have ‘donated’ huge amounts of expensive, highly sophisticated and sensitive military weapons and equipment to terrorist aligned militia groups in Libya.

Actually the stuff was just left lying around so that the enemy could conveniently swipe it. Hundreds of U.S. military weapons which were used for training by U.S. Special Forces in Libya are now in the hands of terrorists thanks to the War on Terror. The U.S. military training team was pulled and the weapons left behind as a gift.

The loot includes dozens of highly sophisticated armored vehicles called GMV's, featuring state of the art GPS navigation devices, various sets of weapon mounts which can be outfitted with smoke-grenade launchers. Hundreds of Glock pistols, M4 rifles, and every set of advanced technology night-vision goggles have also disappeared.

"It's not just equipment ... it's the capability. You are giving these very dangerous groups the capability that only a few nations are capable of," one Fox News source said. "Already assassinations are picking up in Tripoli and there are major worries that the militias are using this stolen equipment to their advantage. All these militias are tied into terrorist organizations…"

This directly endangers the U.S.-supported government in Libya and the concern is that the equipment is now going to be used by these groups in an attempt to overthrow the government and install a more hard-line Muslim leadership. In short, the stuff we supplied the terrorists is going to be used against us.

"The European ambassador was attacked and we are now commonly seeing robbing and attacking of people in broad daylight. ... This isn't perception, this is actually happening," said another anonymous source, referring to an August incident where an escort vehicle for the European Union ambassador was attacked in Tripoli.

A U.S.-developed training camp on the outskirts of Tripoli has now been taken over by one of these militia groups who are hoarding weapons. The worry is that this camp, abandoned by U.S. trainers within the last month, is being used in preparation for an attack on the new Libyan government.

You see, America brings in huge and expensive quantities of weapons and equipment into enemy territory and then just abandons the stuff again and again.

Training camps throughout eastern Libya continue to train terrorists, and border controls right now around the country are non-existent in most areas. "The theft of these weapons and the open borders are feeding Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and threatens Libya's neighbors as well. It's already bad. ... and now it's really bad."

No wonder the War on Terror is never-ending.

Our government is supporting the enemy.

It’s our American welfare program for terrorists.

American Dream: Not About Money

The so-called American Dream has been slowly and steadily diminishing in the hearts, minds and lives of all Americans over the last century, and this tragic situation has very little to do with money.

News media reports of two studies released this month, however, ostensibly “point to a troubling demographic shift that puts the American Dream out of reach for an increasing number of U.S. citizens, especially children.”

The Southern Education Foundation found that, for the first time in 40 years, the majority of public school students in 13 southern and four western states are living at poverty levels. "We've had very slow economic growth, and particularly falling real wages for workers with less experience and less education for more than 30 years. So, this is a long trend in the making," explains Russell Sage Foundation president Sheldon Danziger.

Another study by the group Opportunity Nation found that one in seven young adults between the ages of 16-24 is "disconnected" -- meaning neither in school, nor working. "We have too many kids who graduate from high school who are not well-educated, they're not good in reading, they're not good in their numbers and they're not prepared to learn a lot more that a company would want them to learn in order for them to work for that company," says Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.

They point to a 1965 report by then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan which referenced a demographic trend of single parent families as the primary cause. Now about 70 percent of black and 50 percent of Hispanic children are born to single mothers while the single parenthood rate among white families is rising faster than for the other two groups.

"The kids in single-parent families are around five times as likely to be poor as in a married couple family,” says Haskins. "The key thing about the Moynihan report that doesn't get discussed a lot, is the way he said to stop it is to make sure people have jobs. And there's pretty good evidence that in areas where there are more jobs, there are more married couples," says Danziger.

"High-income families have much greater parental inputs, they're better fed, they're better housed, better clothed, they have extracurricular activities, their parents provide them with iPads and educational activities that low income families can't afford," Danziger adds.

"As long as that's the case,"  Haskins opines, "it's going to be very difficult  for any government program to have a substantial reduction in poverty, unless we just give them money, which American voters don't like, and I don't think will happen."

What’s wrong with this picture?

Both of these firmly entrenched government statists are convinced that the American Dream involves money. If only the government would provide more jobs or, failing that, more money to poor people, they reckon, those people would realize the American Dream. They actually think that the American Dream can be furnished through government programs and handouts.

But the American Dream is not about money.

The American Dream is what the American colonists were fighting for during the Revolutionary War. It is what every immigrant has been seeking since that war was won as the reason for coming to America.

The colonists weren’t fighting to force the British government to give them more money. They weren’t fighting to force the king to furnish them with more jobs. 

The waves of new immigrants who turned the United States of America from a backwater nation into a powerhouse of innovation and wealth did not come to these shores with their hands out begging for government provided jobs and financial assistance.

The American dream is about liberty.

The American dream is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

That liberty is gone.

There is only one way to restore the American Dream to all Americans:

The American people must rise up in unison and demand restoration of their liberty!

No it is Not Reasonable

A House of Representatives stenographer was dragged off the floor last week when she took the dais to deliver an unscheduled religious rant. "Praise be to God Jesus Christ… Thus spoke the Lord… This is not the Lord's work,” she proclaimed, along with other similar statements.

"I hammered to get control and hush her up. She said something about the devil. It was sudden, confusing and heartbreaking. She is normally a gentle soul," explained Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the presiding officer, who banged the gavel to restore order several times. 

The disruption stunned members of Congress and U.S. Capitol Police took the woman to a local hospital for a mental health evaluation.

I guess they thought she was crazy and suffering a mental breakdown, but I really can’t understand exactly why as these same members of Congress employ a paid professional religious chaplain to get up in front of them in the same spot every single day to babble on about exactly the same kind of nonsense.  

How is it that they can sincerely believe that this woman is crazy, or at least unreasonable, while on the other hand they believe that their Christian chaplain is perfectly reasonable and of sound mind?

This question brings me to comment here on the article by Kevin Vallier referenced in RRND last week entitled: “Christian Belief is Reasonable, So Respect It.” He makes an argument as best he can that theism, revealed religion, the Gospel stories, the Holy Trinity, and thus the whole body of Christianity are all reasonable, sound and rational beliefs which deserve far more respect from intellectuals than they presently enjoy.

As a libertarian, let me acknowledge that I respect the rights of all people to believe anything they like, including any religion, as long as they don’t employ their beliefs to interfere with the rights of others. I think that perfectly reasonable people can often entertain perfectly unreasonable beliefs, that is to say: beliefs which do not rest upon a firm intellectual foundation of reason.

So while most Christians are indeed reasonable people, the truth about Christianity and all other theistic religions is this:

No, it is not reasonable.

It is not reasonable because it specifically rejects reason and the realities of existence again and again as the foundation for human existence, morality and behavior. Theistic religions, including Christianity, are culturally premeditated assaults upon reason. The relentless calls for self denial and sacrifice are wholly irrational, grounded entirely upon an imaginary conceptualized abstraction, and conceived by cunning men for the benefit of their own parasitical human Authority!

The first moral lesson in the Old Testament book of Genesis has God warning Adam and Eve against eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. The use of individual consciousness, i.e., reason to discern morality is considered evil and sinful in the Bible – the original sin – against God’s Authority!

From that point on the Bible stories relentlessly assault the concept of human reason and logic as the means by which we should live our lives. Christianity especially demands that men and women live by faith alone. To accomplish that an otherwise reasonable human must be willing to deliberately suspend reason, ignore reality and even sacrifice themselves if called upon to do so by the Authority!

“A scorner seeks wisdom, and finds it not, but knowledge is easy to him that understands; Ways which seem right to man are the ways of death.” Prov. 14:6

“And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, [as to why it seemed to them that he was committing blasphemies for claiming the ability to forgive sins] he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts?” Mark 2:8

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God,” preached the Apostle Paul “that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Romans 12:1-2

“This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:” Paul: Ephesians 4:17-18

“Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision; for we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.” Paul: Philippians 3:2-3

Vallier maintains that a reasonable, rational and well-informed person can believe in a revealed religion, which includes belief in a divinely inspired set of social practices and sacred texts such as the above, and I agree with him, because reasonable people can often be found to believe in unreasonable ideas and concepts.

So yes, a reasonable person can be a theist, believe in the Gospels and the Holy Trinity, but it does not follow logically that Christian theism, a concept which is entirely imaginary, is based upon reason.

No, it is not reasonable.

Parasite Party Pork Platter Passes

As expected at the 11^th hour, a bipartisan majority of parasites in Congress, led by  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, passed legislation in a deal to end the phony government shutdown, raise the debt ceiling one more time, and keep the spending and borrowing party rolling along as usual until the next hysterical “crisis” pops up in about 3 months time.  

And just like almost every other piece of congressional legislation this “clean” bill passed with plenty of pork heaped upon the parasite party platter.

The lawmakers, for example, made sure that each one of the 800,000 federal workers who were “furloughed” over the last 16 days will receive full back pay “as soon as practicable.” Thus, all received a two week plus fully paid vacation at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.

Dubbed by some conservatives as the "Kentucky Kickback," $2.2 billion in additional funding, a sum which more than triples the original $775 million originally allocated for a dam project on the Ohio River was gratuitously inserted into the bill.

That river, of course, just happens to run through Sen. McConnell's home state of Kentucky.

You have to hand it to a Congress that finds no bill is off limits for pork.

The parasite political swine just can’t help themselves when it comes to pure pork spending with other people’s money. "These people are like alcoholics. They can't resist taking a drink. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous," says Arizona Sen. John McCain. "It shows that there are people in this body who are willing to use any occasion to get an outrageous pork-barrel project done at the cost of millions and millions of dollars. It's disgusting."

Residents of the State of Colorado will be happy to learn that the bill allocates $450 million in pork on top of the $100 million from the Department of Transportation Disaster Relief Appropriations Act, for rebuilding projects on the Colorado River affected by recent flooding.

A similar bill died last month after the House declined to vote on it, according to Colorado Sen. Mark Udall. So U.S. taxpayers will now be footing the bill for pure pork projects, not originally intended by Congress, benefiting the citizens of Colorado.

A generous slice of pure pork prize in the sum of $174,000 will go to the widow of the late New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, one of the richest members of Congress, who died last June. This guy was worth more than $59 million as of 2011, and his parasite pals are giving away a tidy sum to augment his widow’s vast fortune at the taxpayer’s expense.

There’s lots more pork on the platter too, hundreds of $millions more, but you get the picture. It’s disgusting; obscene; parasitical; and irresponsible.

Add to it all the fact that a provision to deny the lawmaker’s and their staff’s generous healthcare insurance subsidies which allow them all to escape the consequences of ObamaCare was scuttled in the final hour, and you have even more congressional unjust enrichment at the expense of the commoners.

By the way, First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which was halted because of the shutdown, will be back, along with her famous White House kitchen garden, which went untended during the last two weeks and is now an overgrown mess.

That’s the same garden that she employs with the help of her White House army of servants to harp endlessly on the American people about what they ought to eat and what they ought not to eat.

Well now her garden has gone to seed; the tomatoes are rotting on the vines; and the squirrels ruining the beds. No one is available to tend it. Plans for the annual autumn harvest party -- during which school kids help the First Lady pick everything from okra, sweet potatoes and squash to turnips, garlic and chili peppers – will have to be cancelled.

But if it was so damned important to her and her nanny message to the American people, why didn’t she take her own fat ass out there and tend to it herself? Why didn’t she bring her able bodied teenage daughters out there with her to give them a taste of some honest work for a change? She might have brought along a large group of her elite socialist friends to help out as well.

She surely didn’t have to sit around and wait for it to deteriorate.

That’s part of the trouble with parasites. They don’t like to do honest work.

They simply wait around with their hands out for the parasite party pork platter to pass.  

Bill of Rights Cancelled at Public Schools

Statist State laws in every single jurisdiction within the United States compel young American citizens to attend public or equivalent schools during as many as 13 of their most formative years and require them as well to surrender their most precious Constitutional rights in the process.

The government thinks that it owns people; it treats them that way, particularly young people; and can therefore dictate to them all aspects of their thoughts, speech, and behavior even when they are not physically present in the classroom.

Examples of this government trampling upon the Bill of Rights with respect to school-aged minors are happening every day all across the nation.

Kaitlin Nootbaar, the 2012 valedictorian at Prague High School in Oklahoma was denied her diploma for innocuously using the word "hell" instead of "heck" during her commencement speech. The statist school officials forced her to issue a formal written apology in return for her right to graduate with the rest of her class.

The government believes that straight-‘A’ high-school valedictorian graduating students enjoy no First Amendment rights.

Just this week, Erin Cox, a 17-year-old Massachusetts honor student attending North Andover High School was demoted as captain of her school’s volleyball team and suspended for five games for engaging in a perfectly legal activity on her own time having nothing whatsoever to do with school.

Her “crime” was acting as a designated driver for a friend who contacted her at home asking for help driving home from a party because she was too intoxicated to drive herself. So Cox went to the party site to pick up her friend just as police showed up and started arresting and handing out summonses to several suspected underage drinkers, including Cox, who had not been drinking and was not in possession of alcohol at any time.

Even though she was cleared by the police of any violation the school punished Cox anyway on the dubious grounds that she has violated its zero tolerance alcohol and drug use policies. “The school is really trying to take a very serious and principled stand regarding alcohol,” explained Geoffrey Bok, an attorney who represents the school.

Someone should explain to this pseudo attorney that high-school students are supposed to enjoy Fifth Amendment Constitutional rights just like everyone else in America, and that government public school officials have no legal right to punish them without due process of law for lawful activities they engage in on their own time while not at school.

School district officials in suburban Los Angeles have hired a private firm to monitor and report to them on the Internet social media activities of students, activities they engage in while on their own time away from school.

Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to the firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year.

The statist compulsorily education goons are poking their noses into the public postings on social media by middle and high school students – stalking, snooping and spying on them -- ostensibly for the purpose of searching for possible violence, drug use, bullying, truancy and suicidal threats, any “inappropriate behavior” which they will use as a basis for intervention and punishment.

The private spy agency sends a daily report to school authorities upon which students' comments could be causes for concern, explained an official. They monitor whether students are talking about drug use, cutting class or violence or using their Smartphone during class time.

But it is not the function of government operated compulsory education systems to involve themselves with the lives of students while they are not at school. That is true even if there might be a good faith possibility of preventing bad behavior. In a free society, that’s the job of parents, friends and extended family.

"This is the government essentially hiring a contractor to stalk the social media of the kids," explains an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends privacy, free speech and consumer rights. "When the government -- and public schools are part of the government -- engages in any kind of line-crossing and to actually go and gather information about people away from school, that crosses a line," he explains.

Yes, the American government in the 21^st century believes it can cross the line because it thinks that its sheep enjoy no privacy rights. We know for a fact from NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden, that the government is not limiting its spying activities on children. Big brother is spying on all of us all the time.

And now we know that the Bill of Rights has been cancelled at public schools. 

Let Them Eat Dog Food

“Let them eat cake.”

That’s the infamous phrase commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of the fabulously wealthy French King Louie XVI, that got their royal heads chopped off during the French Revolution while the common people were starving because the ruling class had all the money. It represents perfectly the utter arrogance of the monarchy and obliviousness of the ruling class to the suffering of the common people.

Two centuries have passed since then yet it appears that little has changed in the attitudes of governments and the ruling class toward their sheep.

Today, figuratively speaking, Jacob Lew, Treasury Secretary of the United States under the feckless Obama administration is saying the very same kind of thing to the nation’s vulnerable sick and old people living on Social Security, Medicare, as well as other low level commoners with respect to the looming government shutdown:

“Let them eat dog food.”

This top cabinet level government parasite delivered a stern warning to Congress last week about the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling, saying that Medicare, Social Security, and military veteran’s checks will likely be first on the government chopping block if the debt ceiling deadline is missed.

His remarks are meant to scare the daylights out of old and sick people so that they will prevail upon their congressmen and senators to cave in to the president’s heavy handed demand to raise the debt ceiling without cutting more and more spending.

He’s deliberately and cynically targeting vulnerable defenseless elderly people who have worked hard all their lives; folks who were forced by government laws into the Social Security and Medicare schemes whether they liked it or not; people who deserve every dime of those retirement benefits, and now are stuck with it as the only means with which to fund their meager health, living and financial needs as they approach the end of their lives.

"Under any scenario, we will be defaulting on obligations," Lew said.

But Lew and the rest of the top government parasites won’t have to worry about their paychecks. The bond holders who hold the massive government debt instruments won’t have to worry about their interest payments. All the grasping foreign nations and their parasite rulers who gobble up $billions in American foreign aid every year, year after year, won’t have to worry about their loot.

Virtually every fat-assed freeloader who currently feeds at the government trough will continue to feed there as usual.  It is only the old, the sick and the vulnerable Americans who will suffer.

"We believe the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt, even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact," says Credit-rating agency Moody's in a recent report. Moody's explained that the Treasury Department would find a way to pay interest on its debt above all else. "The debt limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming revenues; it does not prohibit the government from servicing its debt. There is no direct connection between the debt limit (actually the exhaustion of the Treasury's extraordinary measures to raise funds) and a default."

"The United States should not be put in a position of making such perilous choices for our economy and our citizens," Lew whined. But he conveniently omits the fact that the United States would not be in this position had it not been for the parasite political class spending and borrowing and then spending and borrowing more and more as if the money supply were endless and no extravagance were too much.

The United States government credit card has been maxed out for decades now. But instead of reducing the outrageous spending, balancing the budget and otherwise acting responsibly to get the financial situation under control, it just keeps demanding over and over again that the credit limit be raised, and Congress has caved in every time because Congress is addicted to the drug of recklessly spending money.

The old folks on Social Security and Medicare didn’t get our country into this mess. Far from it.; they are the responsible trusting citizens who paid taxes all their lives, obeyed the government’s laws and lived frugally within their means.

So now Treasury Secretary Lew is saying that their government is going to fuck them over like a bunch of dupes:

“Let them eat dog food.”

GOP lawmakers fight to nullify Establishment Clause

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision in 2011, after many years of contentions litigation, declaring a 29 foot tall Christian cross erected on public land is unconstitutional because it conveys a message of government endorsement of religion in clear violation of the First Amendment Establish Clause.

In 2012, the Supreme Court refused to take the case. Thus the decision of the federal Circuit Court of Appeals is final and constitutes the settled law of the case, right?

Wrong, several Republican U.S. Congressmen are insisting today. That’s because when it comes to their own privately held Christian religion they have no problem whatsoever with violating their solemn oaths to uphold the Constitution, including the First Amendment.

They’re Christians and they want to nullify the Establishment Clause.  

The Court of Appeals noted that this same huge Christian cross was dedicated on Easter Sunday in La Jolla, CA, and used for religious gatherings on public government property for nearly three decades before it became part of a memorial dedicated in 1954 in honor of Korean War veterans. It also acknowledged that the community of La Jolla has a "well-documented history" of anti-Semitism from the 1920s to around 1970.

Never-the-less, instead of simply removing the cross from public property as the court has ordered; instead of perhaps erecting it elsewhere in a private setting where no one would object to it, the American Center for Law and Justice filed a brief in U.S. District Court on behalf of 18 GOP members of Congress in yet another legal effort to have the court ignore the Establishment Clause.

ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow said putting the memorial in the hands of a private nonprofit group, the Mount Soledad Memorial Association, would be an appropriate alternative to removing the memorial's cross. "We're urging the court to permit a private organization to obtain and operate the war memorial – a remedy that would remove any constitutional questions and protect this longstanding tribute to our men and women in uniform," says Sekulow.

City officials maintain that this Christian cross is part of a secular war memorial embraced by San Diego area residents who in 2005 overwhelmingly approved a measure to preserve it by donating it to the federal government.

They actually believe that a Christian cross sends a secular message and that the religious display is OK if they’ve donated it to the federal government. So they donated just that part of the land under the cross to the federal government, but simply can’t understand now why the courts have said that ruse doesn’t render the display constitutional.

Religionists will do anything to try to get around the Establishment Clause.

Officials for the city of DeLand, Fla., for example, are also fighting to keep a Christian cross displayed prominently on their city seal despite the fact that the religious symbol constitutes a clear endorsement of religion by the city in violation of the Establishment Clause.  

"This is an intrusion of religion into the world of government," explained Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, president of the Flagler County chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "And the world of government and the world of religion should be separate as called for in the First Amendment of the United States constitution.”When the government establishes a Christian cross as part of its official seal, it tends to make non-Christians feel "like second-class citizens."

Not surprisingly, the City is taking the position that a Christian cross is not religious. "Nothing in the history of the city's seal suggests that it was adopted to promote any particular religion or even religion in general," declared DeLand City Attorney Darren Elkind.

Christian crosses are not religious symbols.

Christian crosses are secular symbols.

That’s the type of excuses we get when religiously oriented lawmakers fight perpetually to nullify the Establishment Clause. 

Happy Shutdown Vacation Holiday

I want to take this opportunity to wish all you federal government parasites out there a very merry and happy shutdown vacation holiday as you enjoy your time off from work secure in the knowledge that none of you will lose so much as a penny in your generous pay and benefits.

Yes, as is always the case, the very last of the people who lose out in this ludicrous government shutdown fiasco will be the folks who reside within the bloated ranks of government agents, employees and officials.

That’s right. The republican majority in the House of Representatives together with all the congressional democrats, the Senate, as well as the President of the United States – that’s 100% of our nation’s pinnacle parasite political class -- are going to fast track legislation this week which will guarantee each of the 800,000 furloughed federal workers affected by the shutdown, now it it’s eighth day, all of their back pay and benefits as soon as it ends as of course it surely will.

It is not a question of whether but only of when. In the meantime 800,000 government leaches are living it up while enjoying a fully paid vacation holiday at the expense of the taxpayers; you know, the only people who are actually going to be affected adversely by the shutdown charade.

So the two opposing factions in this meaningless fiscal debate can bicker and quarrel as long as they like and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to anyone feeding at the government trough. Why should they worry? They’ll all get paid in full while the rest of the country suffers the inconvenience of it all.   

"This isn't some damn game," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, referring to a quote in The Wall Street Journal from an anonymous White House official that "we are winning ... It doesn't really matter to us" how long the shutdown lasts, as the White House and Democrats held to their position of agreeing to negotiate only after the government is reopened and the $16.7 trillion debt limit raised.

But it is indeed a game. The shutdown will end, the debt ceiling will be raised, all the parasites will be paid, and the lumbering leviathan of government will just keep rolling along, spending more and more money, increasing the debt, and taking the United States of America and its people further down the path to eventual bankruptcy and financial ruin.

More than 100 stopgap continuing resolutions have passed without much difficulty since the last shutdown in 1996. This time the issue is just another temporary funding measure to keep the government fully open through mid-November or mid-December, at which time we will face yet another financial crisis in this dance of fiscal death.

"Republicans are eager to end the shutdown and move ahead with the fiscal and economic reforms that our country so urgently needs," said Texas Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP's weekly address. "I was disappointed when certain parts of the federal government were forced to shut down because Senate Democrats refused to make any changes whatsoever to the deeply flawed health care law known as Obamacare."

Democrats and the President say they are eager to end the shutdown too; they just won’t compromise unless they first get "clean" stopgap spending bills and debt-limit increases. "The American people don't get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their job," Obama said in his address. "Neither does Congress."

And on and on; surely there will be many more shutdowns to come.

In the meantime its government business as usual as the Pentagon is sending several new $50 million cargo planes straight from the assembly line to mothballs because it has no use for them, yet it still hasn’t stopped ordering the aircraft, according to a report.

A dozen nearly new Italian-built C-27J Spartans have already been shipped to an Air Force facility in Arizona dubbed “the boneyard,” and five more currently under construction are likely headed for the same fate. The boneyard is located at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, where some 4,400 aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles, worth more than $35 billion, sit unused and deteriorating in the hot sun.

What’s a mere $35 billion to these American military parasites? It amounts to just a miniscule fraction of the almost $17 trillion of our ever increasing national debt. It’s pocket change to them.

So until the next financial crisis and government shutdown, I say: Happy shutdown vacation holiday to all, and to all a good night.