“For Conservative thinkers believe that man is corrupt, that his appetites need restraint, and that the forces of custom, authority, law, and government, as well as moral discipline, are required to keep sin in check.”
-Quintin Hogg
John Adams
“Experience has ever shown, that education, as well as religion, aristocracy, as well as democracy and monarchy, are, singly, totally inadequate to the business of restraining the passions of men, of preserving a steady government, and protecting the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.”
Q: This movie has a fair amount of gun violence and can be a bit flippant about it. Does that give you pause in the wake of what happened in Connecticut?
A: I don’t think movies or video games have anything to do with it. I don’t think [stopping gun violence] is about more gun control. I grew up in the South with guns everywhere, and we never shot anyone. This [shooting] is about people who aren’t taught the value of life.”
It seems that Progressives like Diane Feinstein have not understood that simple phrase. The problems that we see in mass murders (or single murders, or any other crime committed against another) is either one of a mental illness (who shoots their Mom or defenseless little kids as in Newtown?), or the latest where that previously incarcerated oldster (for killing his mom with a hammer) proclaimed “do what I do best – kill people – just plain black as night Evil. Or those that simply wish what others have for either the reasons of “I want what they have” and justify it with “they don’t need it” (just like Progressives / Liberals / Democrats) – its about control.
Diane Feinstein combines that latter part, control, with another. That is, Progressives so untrust their fellow citizens, they feel that they have the mandate to take away “all the toys” because we, the “unprogressed”, “uncivilized”, “uneducated”, stubborn, selfish, should-be-demonized ungrown-up child-citizen should not be allowed to have guns simply because those things either 1) insult their sensibilities (as guns do) or 2) have a longer range motive in mind.
As to #1, if “we” won’t cooperate and compromise with the Progressives as they head us from being the Land of the Free to that of the Land of We Submitted to Despotism, they will keep at changing the laws and changing the regulations to enforce their way to their Utopian version of Freedom (“you are free to do what we allow you to do – it’s not just for the common good but it’s good for you too – you’ll see!). Yes, it was enable citizens to protect themselves and their families at a personal level.
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell
In my last post just only hours ago, I posited the notion that Gun Guntrol advocates are, in fact “Coming for our Guns.”
“Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun, but permit it.” —NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo
During a radio interview New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated, “Confiscation could be an option,” referencing semi-automatic rifles, liberals like to call, “Assault Weapons.” Cuomo told WGDJ-AM of his gun control proposals that he will outline at his State of the State Address on January 9.
Gov. Cuomo said:
“I don’t think legitimate sportsmen are going to say, ‘I need an assault weapon to go hunting.’ There is a balance here, Iunderstandtherightsofgunowners.”
“Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option — keep your gun, but permit it.”
Governor Andrew Cuomo is a liar. Saying he understands
“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” – Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction author “…those who want people to be controlled” – Those that wish to oblige them? They be called “Progressives”
On commenting upon De Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution (emphasis mine) By the time their ancient love of freedom reawakened in the hearts of the French, they had already been inoculated with a set of ideas as regards the way the country should be governed that were not merely hard to reconcile … Read more
The State Constitution says that you must be domiciled in New Hampshire to vote here.
The legal definition of domicile is your residence. By law you can only have one of these.
But Judge Lewis allowed the ACLU’s “love the one you are with” definition of domicile to supersede the common law definition. Anyone can claim to live here to vote without having to so for any other purpose. Until that is resolved there is nothing ‘technically’ illegal about it; this ruling is, as I have said before, legalizing the theft of elections for the purpose of indefinite one-party rule.
It is, for all intents and purposes, the tyranny of factionalism we were long ago warned about. It is a sanctioned left wing mob complete with the potential for a perennial lynching at the ballot box.
“Liberty, like equality, is a word more used than understood. Perfect and absolute liberty is as incompatible with the existence of society, as equality of condition.” And… “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.” – James Fenimore Cooper
If you read part-1 of “Following the Trail from Sustainability to Tyranny“, you would have seen a list of “What If?” questions. The third question reads: “What If you could not grow a vegetable garden without a permit?“. Some people might say these are pie-in-the-sky questions, or conspiracy notions, simply because they are not necessarily happening today. Well, you’ve been warned!
This is part-2 of a series that breaks down the “sustainability” movement, and explains how some in NH are working to constrain individual liberties with it. Readpart-1 here.
The consummate community organizer, President Obama, knows the value of urban voters. He knows that urban living, with its clustered, infrastructure-heavy, and herd-like nature, depends on government more than suburban life, and far more than self-sufficient, independent rural living. He knows that more urban (or urban-like) voters mean utter dominance of the Progressive political class, at all levels.
He also knows that people have flocked away from cities, especially since the 1970’s, forming concentric suburban rings, referred to as “sprawl” (a word you will hear used quite a bit), which provide resistance to his urban, democratic-socialist ideals.
Continuing to use the environmental movement as cover, and using the Presidency for credibility and funding, Barack Obama and his fellow community organizers are advancing the simmering ideology of “sustainability” by attacking the suburbs.
The ‘Grok is doing its part on exposing what has been run on a semi-stealth process here in NH – the Federal Government’s implementation of President Obama’s promise made just before his inauguration: “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States”.
As Tom’s post / series thus far has been pointing out (Part 1, Part 2), there appears to be an effort by HUD / EPA / DOT to subvert local control and local zoning for environmental and “sustainable” reasons only. But the real story is not just subverting local control with Federal control of the Environment.
This caught my eye as one of the things that Romney said after announcing that Paul Ryan was to be his Veep pick:
“I love America. We’re going to restore American principles. We love this country. We don’t want to change it. We don’t want to transform it. We want to restore the principles of America that made us the hope of the earth.”
Again, I ask you, loyal reader, to compare that, going back to our Founders vision, to what Obama has said:
Abortion is an act of tyranny. It is the expression of legal force against another life that denies that life the right to the property of living and every expression of existence that follows from it. It denies these rights solely for the benefit of another (others), who have exchanged the risk of creation for their own pleasure.
Denying life for your own selfish pleasure; even excusing it because the state has made it legal? How is that not tyranny?
The pursuit of pleasure is a function of human existence–an animal instinct. And the promise of physical pleasure drives us toward intimate human contact. Societies try to manage this relationship with institutions like religion, marriage, even our government, but in recent decades the government has viewed these institutions as inimical to “personal freedom,” and sought to enact laws that prevent these social or cultural institutions from functioning as a brake on the unbridled human weakness for sexual pleasure. While the state should have a very limited if marginal interest in managing the terms of otherwise natural and productive human relationships, somewhere along the way the State has legalized a form of tyranny.
OK, Steve beat me to it here, but I had my own thoughts of the accident in Pelham that I started on last night but as you will read, similar.
There will be those out there that will react in horror to what I am about to write ( “BUT CHILDREN GOT HURT – BADLY!”). The news is coming out from Pelham that 11 people were hurt when a years long homeowner’s fireworks tradition went awry. The latest from both NECN (New Englan Cable News) and WMUR says that two children were severely burnt and medflighted to Boston. Of COURSE this is a tragedy, but I grimaced when I heard the Fire Chief’s pronouncement:
I’m not a fan of fireworks. This is a perfect example [of] what can go wrong. Well meaning people trying to have fun and an accident happened and caused a great deal of injuries to children and adults.”
The NECN newscaster said what I expected about Chief Midgley of the Pelham Fire Department:
He wants to work with lawmakers to make sure this never happens again.
Of course he does. Again, this has been a long standing tradition of this homeowner, and thus far, no news accounts have brought up any earlier accidents. No one else in Pelham had any reported serious injuries anywhere else in town (not that I’ve looked, but on the idea of “IF 1, then the news will report it as “AND! over here”). But here it seems, the Chief has decided that it is his business to force all others to comply with his viewpoint and morality, and no longer let people decide for themselves. Is that the role of an Government employee (no matter how good he is in performing that role)? Is the purpose of an appointed employee to lobby the Legislature against what many voters want to be able to do? And do it on TAXPAYER funding (isn’t there a law against that)?
Freedom. Versus the Safety & Security (the first Commandment of the Nanny-Progressive State)
Any story like this has to begin with our hopes and prayers for all the injured. A Fireworks accident at a private residence in Pelham New Hampshire resulted in 11 injuries, 5 of those being children, one as young as 8 month old–according to this morning’s Union Leader. So please take a moment to offer your thoughts and prayers for their quick recovery.
Now, let us ready ourselves for the sound of creeping tyranny…
“Every lazy nation is grave; for those who do not work regard themselves as sovereigns of those who work.” – Montesquieu For those who do not work regard themselves as sovereigns of those who do work. This could not be more true. It also occurs to me that this also applies to public sector union … Read more
On their site, they have a page of “FAQs” about why you can’t believe any who is a “climate change denier”, and this page is calling Exxon their personal bogeyman (I notice that no mention of ClimateGate and the MBs of emails and bad data is mentioned – and I just giggled when I read … Read more
Update and Bumped: Well, I just saw over at Michelle Malkin’s place that Capital One has pulled their ads. Well, I have just “pulled (re: cancelled) my credit card with them. And TMEW will be doing the same later on today. My message to the polite young lady (who said she’s been getting MORE than a few calls similar to mine) is: “put the ads back, and I’ll come back. Not until – pass that upward to the Chuckleheads upstairs”.)
————————————————–
Just as it isn’t about getting free contraceptives – it’s about standing up for the Constitution. Slutgate is the excuse for the Left’s faux outrage to pummel a single person – but that is the distraction the Left wants you to believe. It is not about civility – the Left has spewed far more vile at far more women on the Right over far more years. Why? To insult and to intimidate those on the Right, to force us to think that it is time for us to dejectedly leave the field of political / philosophical battle on our own. And then they win and then they have a clear road to continue to dismantle the Rights given to us by our Creator. To Progressives, ‘inalienable Rights” are simply an alien idea that has to be put down – for they have no God but Bigger Government. Freedom is what they would have us believe we get from men – in the political scene, they wish to believe they have the right to act as gods to determine how we shall run our lives.
And we see them, via Media Matters (funded by George Soros) and Van Jone’s Color of Change working behind the scenes, trying to achieve the real goal – seeing their political opportunity to silence Rush Limbaugh. Thus far, they (the tip of the spear of the Left, to give them their due) have convinced 22 advertisers to leave Rush Limbaugh. They have orchestrated a massive turnout of emails and calls to those companies to “leave Rush, or we leave you”: 400,00 have signed a petition to get Rush yanked.
The single greatest shortcoming among the secularists, the non-religious right, most of the left, the social justice “small ‘r’ religious left, and the mass of humans too confounded (or disinterested) by it all to be called anything but in the middle, is that humans are essentially selfish and immoral creatures whom–if left unchecked–will inevitably devolve into tyranny.
If given an opportunity to take advantage they do. And more often than not, if there are obstacles, be they divine commandments or temporal statutes, people find a way to not just break them, but to justify breaking them. We are lazy. The lowest common denominator is not beyond a single one of us. And not to put too fine a point on that but we currently live in a country where executing an infant at birth, simply because that child’s mother said they did not want them, is a major feature of one of the two current political parties in America, while most of the people in the other one, are afraid to bring that up.
Jack Lew used to be Obama’s Budget Director – well, given that the Democrat controlled Senate has now gone 1,100 days since passing a budget (as the law requires), methinks he has had little to do. Now given that Daley didn’t make nice (or couldn’t) with Jarrett or Michelle, he was elevated to The One’s Chief of Staff and he made the rounds of all of the major Sunday talking head shows. Pretty much, same speech, same words…
… and each and every time, Sherlock’s dog wasn’t barking. Good thing he wasn’t testifying in court, as he would have been held in contempt for not “telling the whole truth”. Just like Jeanne Shaheen, it is obvious that the values we hold dear and can plainly read in the Constitution are not those of Lew or Obama. In this, Lew is helping Obama to “…fundamentally transforming the United States of America” in arguing for Obama’s HHS rule to establish primacy of Government to determine what is a religious organization or not (and therefore, which falls under First Amendment protection or not).
He pretty much made the same argument using pretty much the same words on each and every one of the Sunday talking head shows. The only one that tried to challenge him was Fox News Sunday (and even at that, I think that Chris Wallace did not have his finest game on tap). It was obvious that Lew was spinning as fast as a windmill in a hurricane – and it was obvious as he tried to defend Obama’s “conciliatory” redo of the religious exemption of institutions being force to provide employees with contraception services (including sterilization, abortifacients, and abortion) and thus, violating their core theological tenets and morality. Simply stated, he would not allow that this is a Government overreach into the heart of religious theology and governance – simply “why can’t you morons understand this is ‘for the women’ with our revised policy?”
“The President has a very deep belief that every woman right to all forms of preventive healthcare including contraception. He also has a very deep belief that it is one of our core principles of our country that we have to respect the religious liberties of this country is built on. The solution we have reach is consistent with those core principles.”
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”
– President Barack Obama, Inauguration, 1/20/09
There is no difference between tyranny at the point of a gun or the point of a knife and tyranny at the point of a pen, especially when that pen is back by the power of the sword
We have certainly seen lately that Shaheendecided toshred the idea of Federalism when she used the force of The Feds to override the NH elected Executive Councilors in funding Planned Parenthood. And now, it seems, she not only has joined and gone all in with Obama with his assault on religious Liberty (Liberty – you know, the foundational philosophy of our country in all things personal, economic, and religious?). It seems that as well sneering at the five Republicans on the Exec Council (“Look at me, you puny people – *I* can use the force of Bigger Government to tell NH how it will be run!”), she’s also been in forefront of getting Obama to throw Catholics onto the tracks as the Progressive train runs the US away from the idea of individual Liberty to that vaunted goal of
“we’re all in this together – whether or not you want to!“
The ‘Grok is doing its part on exposing what has been run on a semi-stealth process here in NH – the Federal Government’s implementation of President Obama’s promise made just before his inauguration: “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States”.
Update and Bumped: Well, I just saw over at Michelle Malkin’s place that Capital One has pulled their ads. Well, I have just “pulled (re: cancelled) my credit card with them. And TMEW will be doing the same later on today. My message to the polite young lady (who said she’s been getting MORE than a few calls similar to mine) is: “put the ads back, and I’ll come back. Not until – pass that upward to the Chuckleheads upstairs”.)
We have certainly seen lately that Shaheen decided to shred the idea of Federalism when she used the force of The Feds to override the NH elected Executive Councilors in funding Planned Parenthood. And now, it seems, she not only has joined and gone all in with Obama with his assault on religious Liberty (Liberty – you know, the foundational philosophy of our country in all things personal, economic, and religious?). It seems that as well sneering at the five Republicans on the Exec Council (“Look at me, you puny people – *I* can use the force of Bigger Government to tell NH how it will be run!”), she’s also been in forefront of getting Obama to throw Catholics onto the tracks as the Progressive train runs the US away from the idea of individual Liberty to that vaunted goal of