Bill of Rights

Seventeen-year-old Amon Schute is social drek. He's sneering, jeering and hateful. He proves it with ostentatious displays of filthy jeans, long matted hair, body piercings and tattoos. He's exactly the kind of kid you'd expect to spend his entire adult life in lockup. Sixteen-year-old Coy Minyon is a social cipher. He's weak, meek and fearful. He proves it with a timorous mask of ultra conservative clothing, neatly groomed hair, unobtrusive appearance and a permanent muted existence that makes him invisible to the world. He's exactly the kind of kid you'd expect to spend his entire adult life in total obscurity. Amon and Coy are best friends. Together they plan to gun down a bunch of people in a public place and then off themselves in a blaze of everlasting glory.

"YOU, as one individual, cannot do much to effect legislation. But YOU can effectively defend the Constitution when a gun owner, a tax resister, or someone who knows he owns his individual body, is on trial for not following government-made laws that are both unconstitutional and violate human rights. The primary responsibility of any juror is to protect innocent humans from government tyranny. That means any violation of basic human rights should be nullified by you, the juror. This is your individual executive veto power, built into our justice system by our founders."

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"President Bush last week signed into law a bill which will see the federal government begin to screen the DNA of all newborn babies in the U.S. within six months, a move critics have described as the first step towards the establishment of a national DNA database."

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"One health care expert and prominent critic of DNA screening is Twila Brase, president of the Citizens' Council on Health Care who has written a detailed analysis of the new law in which she warns that it represents the first program of populationwide genetic testing."

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Seventeen-year-old Amon Schute is social drek. He's sneering, jeering and hateful. He proves it with ostentatious displays of filthy jeans, long matted hair, body piercings and tattoos. He's exactly the kind of kid you'd expect to spend his entire adult life in lockup. Sixteen-year-old Coy Minyon is a social cipher. He's weak, meek and fearful. He proves it with a timorous mask of ultra conservative clothing, neatly groomed hair, unobtrusive appearance and a permanent muted existence that makes him invisible to the world.

"As described by an FLDS mother named Marie, Texas authorities physically separated the children from their mothers and then forced the mothers to assemble in a closed room.

""They read a court order and said, 'Your children are ours,'" recalled Marie during a press conference, an account that has been, so far, left un-rebutted by Texas officials. Indeed, the state is brazenly working to make that separation permanent"

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"SAN ANGELO, Texas — The mothers of children removed [kidnapped] from a West Texas polygamist sect's ranch after an abuse allegation are appealing to Gov. Rick Perry for help."

And this comment sums the situation up nicely:

Tubal wrote:

Wow. Baptist ministers* rape teen girls too. Let's go take all the Baptist kids and lock them up. Then when their mothers want to come see them, lets tell them no. Then when the mothers that they rounded up too want to call their loved ones to tell them what's happening, lets take away their cell phones.

Last month, the House amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to expand the government’s ability to monitor our private communications. This measure, if it becomes law, will result in more warrantless government surveillance of innocent American citizens.

Though some opponents claimed that the only controversial part of this legislation was its grant of immunity to telecommunications companies, there is much more to be wary of in the bill. In the House version, Title II, Section 801, extends immunity from prosecution of civil legal action to people and companies including any provider of an electronic communication service, any provider of a remote computing service, “any other communication service provider who has access to wire or electronic communications,” any “parent, subsidiary, affiliate, successor, or assignee” of such company, any “officer, employee, or agent” of any such company, and any “landlord, custodian, or other person who may be authorized or required to furnish assistance.” The Senate version goes even further by granting retroactive immunity to such entities that may have broken the law in the past.

"All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it. But be careful ..."

"4) The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn’t invalidate the passport, so you can still use it."

Mr Speaker, I rise in opposition to this latest attempt to undermine our personal liberties and violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. This bill will allow the federal government to engage in the bulk collection of American citizens’ communications. In effect, it means that any American may have his electronic communications monitored without a search warrant.

As such, the bill clearly violates the Fourth Amendment

The folks at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services have devised a new citizenship test for those few illegal immigrants who, for some unknown reason, are actually trying to become lawful citizens. The new questions, the USCIS claims, are calculated to better measure how well newbies understand what it means to be an American rather than how well they can memorize answers. Of course, most libertarians are convinced that most natural born citizens don't know what it really means to be an American either. As a service to all, here are some actual USCIS test questions followed not by the politically correct answers but by the actual realpolitik answers that have been certified as being true based on real-life experience.

It has been said that “he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.” And in the case of Eliot Spitzer this couldn’t be more true. In his case it’s the political sword, as his enemies rejoice in his downfall. Most people, it seems, believe he got exactly what he deserved.

The illegal tools of the state brought Spitzer down, but think of all the harm done by Spitzer in using the same tools against so many other innocent people. He practiced what could be termed “economic McCarthyism,” using illegitimate government power to build his political career on the ruined lives of others.

"That is the all-important context in which the Bill of Rights was created. The Anti-Federalists, men filled to varying degrees with fear, mistrust, and loathing of the new federal government, insisted on a bill of rights as additional shackles imposed on that new government. Knowing that alone, knowing that the famous Bill came into existence only to please those most apprehensive of the new government, definitively ends any confusion or debate surrounding the meaning of the Second Amendment.

As a United States Congressman, I take my oath to uphold all of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights very seriously. Unfortunately, too many in Washington DC believe they can pick-and-choose which provisions of the constitution they can uphold. For example, many politicians, judges, and bureaucrats believe they have the power to disregard our right to own guns, even though the second amendment explicitly guarantees the people's right to "keep and bear arms."

Like the Founding Fathers, I believe that the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental to a free society. Where law-abiding citizens are most freely allowed to defend themselves, communities are safer, while crime rises when law-abiding people's access to firearms is restricted. Gun laws only disarm those who respect the law. Those with criminal tendencies do not turn in their weapons and reform their ways because government bureaucrats enact statutes that tell them to. Gun control laws turn peaceful citizens into sitting ducks for criminals to prey upon.

Congressman Ron Paul has signed on to a letter to the President asking that an amicus curiae brief filed by U.S Solicitor General Paul D. Clement on DC v. Heller, otherwise known as the DC Gun Ban Case, be withdrawn on the basis that the reasoning within, were it to be accepted by the Supreme Court, leaves open the door for more encroachments on individuals’ Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms.

The brief in question argues that categorical bans of virtually all self-defense firearms may be upheld as constitutional if a court determines that these prohibitions are “reasonable” restrictions of constitutional rights. The reasonability standard is the lowest standard of constitutional review our courts utilize, a much lesser hurdle than the “strict scrutiny” review that courts use in many cases in which regulations threaten individual rights.

On April 16, 2007, twenty-seven students and five faculty members at Virginia Tech lost their lives to a madman who possessed one distinct advantage over his victims—He wasn't concerned with following the rules. Undeterred by Virginia Tech's status as a "gun free zone," this mentally unstable individual carried two handguns onto the university campus and indiscriminately opened fire.

Over the last quarter-century, the vast majority of the mass shootings in America—from the recent shooting at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, to the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's massacre—have occurred in "gun free zones." Though labeling an area "gun free" may make some people feel safer, feeling safe is clearly not the same as being safe.