The Texas 18th District Blog

Another view on why the stock markets are so bad  Wall St Journal article you should see.

 Obama and the Politics of Crowds

“On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest — African-Americans and affluent white liberals — has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking — Canetti’s feeling of equality within the crowd…”

Obama and “The Left” 

A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.”

Walter Williams on Political Monopoly

Star Parker on CEOs

Supreme Court Upholds Violation of Federal Law in Ohio 

Our Supreme court may be in deep trouble.  They acknowledged that the Ohio Secretary of State is guilty of complicity in committing voter fraud.  They concluded though that the Ohio Republican Party had no legal standing to sue or get an injunction.  Under the legal concept of misprision though they had better report their knowledge of the crime or they face jail.  Since they agreed that it was a crime they have a legal obligation to report it to prosecutors.

United States federal law

“Misprision of felony” is still an offense under United States federal law after being codified in 1909 under 18 U.S.C. § 4:

Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

Misprision

First Amendment 

““I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls,” he said” He being Obama.

“By the way, what Obama fails to mention is that without NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times doing his cheerleading every day, John McCain would be up by 10 points.”

Read Monica Crowley here

It’s up to us to elect members of Congress who will represent us. Let’s work together to put John Faulk in office. We need to elect members of Congress with strong financial backgrounds.

When congress passes a bill that covers many things they call it an omnibus bill.  I saved this document before I put a title on it and was afraid I had lost it.  Fortunately the software gave it a title, post # 298.  That wasn’t very descriptive so I changed it to something else undescriptive.

Palin envy - Katie Couric wore her hair in the Governor Palin style last night at the annual Afred E. Smith dinner.  Do you think Palin is influencing American women.

Agent provocateur - 20 people including secret service agents at the McCain speeches were interview to get more information about the hecklers shouting kill him pertaining to Obama.  No one saw or heard them.  It was made up by Obama and he said it on national TV.  I believe even the hecklers at the Obama speeches were setups by Obama to make McCain look bad.  Would someone who steals votes and pads voter roles do something like that?

I also think the person at McCain’s rallies shouting take the gloves off may be an Obama plant.  McCain has maintained a calm, polite manner when talking about Obama even in the debates.  Obama calls attention to McCain’s negative ads when there aren’t any.  An ad referring to something a person has done in his past is not negative if factual.  An ad pointing out that a senator has voted present instead of yes or no 99% of the time is not negative.

The voter registration workers in Ohio have identified 200,000 registrations they believe are fraudulent and want access to the drivers license database and social security number database to verify their suspicions (they are permitted to look at the last 4 digits only).  The Secretary of State in Ohio has refused to allow them to do that.  Federal law requires that the registration people check each new registrant against those databases.  The Secretary of State has been taken to court to force her to obey the law.  She is still refusing.  Her defense, “it would take too long”.  The registration people have already identified the suspicious cards.  Well, after going through 2 lower courts the case is now in an emergency session with the US Supreme Court.  Talk about audacity and determination to commit fraud.  I contend that a group of people could look up 200,000 social security numbers manually within 3 weeks.  My conclusion:  Obama must be desperate.

Students from Palestra, a college group, have done independent investigation on those questionable voter registration cards and have established that they are fraudulent.  One person who lives in England flew in to Ohio, registered, voted early and returned to England.  The students have identified that although he is a US citizen he has no connection to Ohio.  They have hard proof of all 200,000 being fraudulent.  The problem now is that the Supreme Court Justice, Stevens, is a liberal and may enact a new law overriding the law congress passed.  This of  course is unconstitutional but it is nothing new.  It is called judicial activism.  Ignore the actions of congress, the representatives of the people who sent them there, and do what you want to generate the outcome you want.  Supreme court judges are not elected to represent the people.  They are usually lawyers appointed by the president and congress to determine if laws are within the constitution and have been applied correctly.  What the law profession calls judge-made law is actually not law. BTW why isn’t our representative doing something about it?  What’s her name again?

McCain said the other night that nuclear power is the only way to go for the immediate future along with more offshore drilling.  Those who for whatever reason oppose nuclear power point to the 3 Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania as an example of what can go wrong.  I lived in Pennsylvania and had spent a few months in Harrisburg at the time so I had an above average interest in the event.  No one was harmed and the safety features of the plant operated according to design.  That big concrete dome that you see in pictures of nuclear power plants is called the containment facility.  Its job is to prevent the escape of the super heated (non-radio active water) should something burst. The radioactive material is in rods deep in the ground.  The water flows through those rods and creates steam.  The steam rises and turns blades like a fan (in reverse).  The turning mechanism is attached to a generator.  The steam is then cooled and flows into cooling ponds as purified water and after reaching air temperature flows back into a river or stream.  No water escaped the plant.  When the gauges on the control panels indicated a problem, the operators shut down the plant.  Nothing was harmed.  No one was killed.  It was all media hype.  We have about a dozen nuclear power plants in this country that have been in operation since the 1960s.  Nuclear power is the main source of energy for many European countries and China.  They have hundreds.  The opposition to nuclear power has to be radical politics.

Obama also talked about farm subsidies by the taxpayers.  Small family farms today are rare.  They cannot compete.  It is not immoral.  It is a problem for those who wish to be farmers but  it is just like the Mom and Pop grocery stores.  The large grocery chains as the large agribusinesses can buy in large quantities and get better prices.  They can also hire experts to research technology, fertilizers, pesticides. etc.  Family farms were essential years ago but today they are functionally obsolete.  So if Obama subsidizes farmers with  your tax dollars, he is in fact making you pay more for your groceries.  This is occurring today already and should be stopped.  But those large agribusinesses make campaign donations that congress just can’t resist.  The answer to who is our representative today above is “Sheila jackson Lee”.

“One criticism of subsidy comes from proponents of free market economics, stating that subsidies are against the principles of free trade. Prices are the signals by which farmers, and other entrepreneurs, find out what people want.”  Go here for pro’s and con’s

More information here and more here

Agribusinesses don’t need subsidies.  It reminds me of Wall St.  Let the inefficient and mismanaged businesses go out of business or hire better management.

Let’s work together to put John Faulk in office. We need to elect members of Congress with strong financial backgrounds.

Today’s Historic Supreme Court 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s 32 year old ban on handguns under Second Amendment rights.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted. Scalia further stated: The Constitution does not permit “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home”.

This is a “landmark decision” because the court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791.

The 2nd Amendment Reads:

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Political comments were swift in coming:

John McCain (press release):

Today’s decision is a landmark victory for Second Amendment freedom in the United States. For this first time in the history of our Republic, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was and is an individual right as intended by our Founding Fathers. I applaud this decision as well as the overturning of the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and limitations on the ability to use firearms for self-defense.

Barack Obama:

“Today’s ruling, the first clear statement on this issue in 127 years, will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio:

“”In the most significant victory for the Second Amendment in recent memory, the Supreme Court today reaffirmed our citizens’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms…This decision should send a clear message to opponents of the Second Amendment. The Constitution plainly guarantees the solemn right to keep and bear arms, and the whims of politically correct bureaucrats cannot take it away.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas:

“The nation’s top court made the correct decision by reaffirming one of our founding principles, the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. This historic ruling has implications far beyond the District of Columbia.”

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas:

“Today’s ruling is a major victory for the rights of all Americans to protect themselves and their families. The Supreme Court sent a clear message to local, state, and federal governments that this individual right cannot be unreasonably infringed.”

I believe either Barack misquoted himself or the press did. He probably meant to say “217 years” instead of “127 years”. The Supreme Court has not really attempted clarifying the 2nd Ammendment since its ratification in 1791. 2008-1791=217 years, not 127. Obama and his campaign members may want to check their history or math there.

American Citizens in Chicago, New York, Houston and across America need to have full legal rights to protect our homes, families and children, especially in bleaker economic times when home invasions are occurring at an accelerated pace. 

Ken

Today, the Supreme Court summarily banned, by judicial decree, sentencing child rapists to death. Now the most despicable of criminals can thank the Robed Enforcers of European Sophistication that they will not be given a punishment befitting of their crimes. Everyone knew the four liberal justices would rule in favor of the rapists, but people were waiting for how Justice Kennedy, the “swing” vote, would come down. I had a sense beforehand.

I wrote a paper on Kennedy for my Constitutional Law class, and during my research I learned that Kennedy is conservative in his jurisprudence on some issues, liberal on others. Criminal punishment, specifically the 8th Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” is one of his liberal ones.

Just exactly what the 8th Amendment means seems to have been settled in 1958. That year, in the Supreme Court case “Trop v. Dulles”, Chief Justice Earl Warren rejected the argument that if the writers of the Constitution didn’t think a punishment was “cruel and unusual” (they allowed it in their time), it was Constitutional. Warren argued, in a phrase that is now among the most infamous for judicial conservatives, that cruel and unusual punishment must be judged by “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Since then, the Supreme Court has pretty much stuck to that as a rule: Does the punishment violate the values of contemporary society? The problem is, the Supreme Court decides what society’s values are, and in that it is often inept.

Justice Kennedy seems to relish the job, and even takes it a step further, becoming the classic philosopher-king.

His opinions on the 8th Amendment ponder at length the philosophical and moral consequences of sentencing someone to death. You might remember his opinion in “Roper v. Simmons” striking down the death penalty for juveniles because, in his words, the murderer was not able “to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity.”

Once Kennedy concludes that applying the death penalty is somehow philosophically wrong, he decides that there is a “national consensus” against it. Of course, the logic he employs always enables him to arrive at that conclusion. If the majority of states allow the death penalty for a particular crime but a few have moved away from it, he declares that society is moving away from the death penalty. If most states don’t execute for a certain crime but a few have started to, he declares that society as a whole doesn’t want the death penalty for that crime.

Then, as any dictator would, he issues a decree stating that, henceforth, since he is the arbiter of societal values and has “decided” that people don’t want the death penalty for (in this case) child rapists, all citizens of the United States must obey his will.

Maybe Kennedy forgot a little thing called the American Revolution, which we fought to free ourselves from people like him.