1 - Eleven teens die each day because of texting while driving. Maybe it's time to raise the age of Smart Phone ownership to 21.
2 - If gun control laws actually worked, Chicago would be Mayberry, USA.
3 - The Second Amendment makes more women equal than the entire feminist movement.
4 - Legal gun owners have 300 million guns and probably a trillion rounds of ammo. Seriously, folks, if we were the problem, you'd know it.
5 - When JFK was killed, nobody blamed the rifle.
6 - The NRA (National Rifle Association) murders 0 people and receives $$$$ 0 nothing in government funds. Planned Parenthood kills 350,000 babies every year and receives $500,000,000 in tax dollars annually.
7 - I have no problem with vigorous background checks when it comes to firearms. While we're at it, let's do the same when it comes to immigration, Voter I.D., and candidates running for office.
8 - Folks keep talking about another Civil War. One side knows how to shoot and probably has a trillion rounds. The other side has crying closets and is confused about which bathroom to use. Now tell me, how do you think that would end?
Until that event, should it come to be, "we the people" are moving with their feet.
What I cannot understand is why these same people maintain their same political affiliation and thought processes, which led them to flee, after they moved.
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Bob Livingston Alerts
As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 14, "In the first place, it is to be remembered, that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any."
And what are those enumerated powers? Most can be found in Article I of the Constitution.
Briefly they are: power to lay and collect taxes, pay debts and provide for common defense and general welfare, borrow money, regulate commerce with foreign nations, establish uniform rules of naturalization, and uniform laws on bankruptcies, coin money and regulate its value, fix the standard of weights and measures, provide for punishment of counterfeiting, establish post roads and offices, promote progress of science and useful arts by establishing copyright laws, constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court, define and punish piracies and felonies on the high seas, declare war, raise armies, provide and maintain a navy and make rules for government and regulation of the land and naval forces, provide for calling forth the militia and for arming, organizing and disciplining it and to make laws necessary to execute those powers.
There are very few others found in other places of the Constitution.
As Madison wrote, anything the government does beyond those enumerated powers means government is overreaching. And it's this overreach that has finally begun to draw the ire of many—including those who were a part of the Tea Party movement.
Our Founders wanted to limit government because they saw how oppressive it could become. The future they saw and warned against is our present war against government overreach.
Unfortunately, many of today's voting-age Americans have never even read the U.S. Constitution. Apparently, most civics classes in public schools today dwell on other things. So, far too many people have no clue how far their government has overreached and taken away their liberty.
Progressives in media, Big Tech, and politics often insist that the government designed by our Founding Fathers, as expressed in the Constitution, is flawed and outdated.
How should defenders of the Constitution, like you and me, respond?
A few early champions of the Constitution — Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison — have given you the guide: The Federalist Papers.
But here's the truth: The Constitution gives the three branches of government certain enumerated powers. Those not enumerated are reserved to the states, and to the people.
Very few people truly understand this truth, even though I and other Libertarians have been saying it for many years while enduring ridicule and disdain all the while — including Ron Paul, who is no longer in congress. My critics disparage those of us who speak of the District of Columbia as if it were a sewer. (It is!) And they criticize those who want to eliminate such unconstitutional and intrusive federal agencies as the Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, etc.
In fact, this belief in self and local governments and States' rights apparently makes those of us in the liberty movement are possible "domestic terrorists" according to the Department of Un-Justice. But we are merely normal, everyday Americans concerned about the course of government. We are not terrorists seeking a building to blow up. This is merely another fear being stoked in order to remove more of our liberties and put more power in the hands of Big Government.
Reverse the government curse
Human liberty can only exist or be restored with an accurate perception of reality. Mind distorting fictions of government must be exposed. To do otherwise is to keep us dependent on an ivory tower mysticism based on lies and the duplicity of politicians and bureaucrats.
Government is a parasite cult, organized, and disguised behind a peculiar language of code words and phrases that wants to control your life and transfer your wealth to itself..
Nothing significant in our lives can or will happen unless and until we challenge our mental processes to investigate the morality and philosophy of government.
We have a great challenge but also a responsibility to free our minds from entangling myths that dominate our thoughts. Remember these so that you can live as free as possible:
Your rights do not come from government. They are not "granted." Your rights are inalienable, and natural.
Individuals are free and self-sovereign. You are in full control of your life and family. You can speak freely on any subject, and worship however your conscience dictates.
There is no money of account, only a credit system created by government. This voodoo can only be understood as we continue to demystify the facts of government credit creation — that it creates fiat "credit" through the Federal Reserve and regulates it through the IRS.
You are controlled by keeping you sick. All so-called medicine in the United States is controlled by the pharmaceuticals. Medical research is about looking and never finding cures because that would interrupt the revenue stream. And they would prosecute anybody who claims to find a cure.
The separation of you from your assets begins with your volunteering private information to the government. Information is to government what blood is to a vampire.
The greatest enemy of government is the individual. In order to defeat government control, the answer is to be an individualist. Ignore the party line. Parties are only interested in building their power base and collecting your money.
Understand that what the government feeds you under the guise of information, you don't need. Search out the alternative media. Read books and publications like The Bob Livingston Letter® that enlighten, and challenge government conformity and conventional wisdom.
Yours for the truth,
Bob Livingston
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And:
It always seems to get back to education.
For Winsome Sears, Education Is the Key to Black Success
America hasn’t always been perfect, says Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect, but it isn’t 1963 anymore.
By Tunku Varadarajan
You don’t need a doctorate in futurology to be convinced that when Republican Glenn Youngkin is sworn in as governor of Virginia next Saturday, he’ll take his oath alongside someone who could likely be, four years hence, the first black woman elected chief executive of an American state.
The woman in question is Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect and Mr. Youngkin’s running mate in the Republican sweep of the state’s highest offices in November. (A third Republican, Jason Miyares, won election as attorney general.) Virginia’s Constitution bars consecutive gubernatorial terms, and should Mr. Youngkin prove a success in office, Ms. Sears would be nearly certain to secure the Republican nomination for 2025. Mr. Miyares would also be a contender to succeed Mr. Youngkin as governor, but he’s a decade younger than Ms. Sears and will likely have to wait his turn.
Born in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, some months after her father emigrated to New York in 1963, Ms. Sears is quick to acknowledge a political debt to her native island, from which she, too, emigrated as a child. She claims descent from Nanny of the Maroons, an 18th-century leader of runaway slaves who fought Jamaica’s British rulers in a guerrilla war. “Nanny was an African princess, and my mother comes from those people,” Ms. Sears tells me from her home outside Winchester, Va. Less dramatically, she ascribes her own political confidence—and her belief that there are “no limits to what black people can achieve”—to her quotidian experience of Jamaica, where “the generals are black, the lawyers are black, the doctors are black, the Rhodes scholars are black.”
As a child in third grade in New York, she noticed how much worse her schooling was compared with that of her cousins of the same age in Jamaica. “I was spelling words like ‘this’ and ‘where,’ and they were spelling ‘acknowledgment’ and ‘accomplishment’—and knew exactly what those words meant.” This was the first of her many revelations about black underachievement in the U.S., which have instilled in her a fierce contempt for an overly politicized educational establishment as well as an adamant belief in school choice.
Ms. Sears recounts how she was buttonholed at a gospel concert recently by an 83-year-old black man, a lifelong Democrat. She says he told her, “I have never voted for Republicans, but this year I decided that I could.” The reason, she tells me, was “education, education all the way.” Voters like this man “know our children aren’t learning, that 84% of our children, by the time they reach the eighth grade, can’t do math.” She portrays school choice in terms of class: It’s available, she says, for the rich, but not for the poor. “The money in education follows the brick building, it doesn’t follow the child,” she says. “I don’t care about the brick building. I care about the human life. We don’t get do-overs for our children.”
Education reform was a rallying cry in Mr. Youngkin’s campaign, and Ms. Sears shares his hostility toward critical race theory, a sociological credo that holds that racism shapes all important aspects of a person’s life and development. Under Gov. Ralph Northam, Mr. Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, teaching of the theory had begun, inexorably, to filter into Virginia’s schools.
But Mr. Youngkin has promised to curb critical race theory. Ms. Sears laughs at the idea that America is racist. “Look, we must teach the good, the bad and the ugly of history,” she says. “America certainly has not been all that she should have been, but she’s getting there. It’s not 1963!” Even in those oppressive days, she adds, “black people found ways to excel despite the problems they faced.” Yet today, “when we’ve had a black president elected not once but twice, black secretaries of state, and black billionaires,” Democrats tell us “there’s nothing we can do to better ourselves,” and that “we should let them take care of us.” She acknowledges that the Republican Party hasn’t done nearly enough to appeal to black voters, but believes schooling can be its trump card. “Education is our entrée, because, mama bears and papa bears, we’re looking out for our children.”
Ms. Sears can’t resist a last reference to Jamaica, where, she says, you can’t tell a person’s politics until you sit with him and talk. It’s the same with white people in the U.S. “If I see a white person walking down the street, I don’t know if he’s libertarian, Reform Party, Green Party, Republican, Democrat.” But if you see a black person pass by you, “you immediately say, ‘Democrat!’ ”
“That’s no political power at all. And we aim to change that.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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Why just Europe? Is America Chopped Liver?
A Dangerous Moment for Europe
What will Biden give Putin to avoid an invasion of Ukraine?
By The Editorial Board
astern Europe in decades, and not merely for the chances of a Russian invasion. Another, perhaps greater, risk is what President Biden might concede to Vladimir Putin to prevent an invasion.
On Friday NBC News reported that “U.S. officials are ready to propose discussions on scaling back U.S. and Russian troop deployments and military exercises in Eastern Europe.”
Citing current and former officials, the report said talks “could potentially address the scope of military drills held by both powers, the number of U.S. troops stationed in the Baltic states and Poland, advance notice about the movement of forces, and Russia’s nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in the Russian territory of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania.”
Wow. The report quickly stirred consternation, and pushback from the White House. “Reports that the administration is developing options for pulling back U.S. forces in Eastern Europe in preparation for discussions with Russia next week are not accurate,” a National Security Council spokesperson said.
She added: “We’ve been clear that should Russia further invade Ukraine we would reinforce our eastern flank NATO Allies, to whom we have a sacred obligation. We are tightly lashed up with our NATO Allies as we address this crisis, on the principle of ‘nothing about you without you.
We’re glad to hear it, and NBC may have hyped its story. But Mr. Putin has put demands like these on the table as the price of standing down from invasion. Moscow has publicly called on NATO to rule out further expansion eastward—that is, to block Ukraine’s potential membership. The Kremlin also seeks to limit Western military activities such as the ones that NBC says the White House is considering rolling back.
Merely by threatening invasion, Mr. Putin has already gained an advantage. He’s the one making demands of the West, and he’s already won two virtual head-to-head meetings with Mr. Biden. The President has conceded to next week’s security talks, which will address Russia’s concerns about NATO. But Russia’s troops are massed on a neighbor’s borders. NATO has only token forces in Poland and the Baltics.
Mr. Biden offered “two paths” to Mr. Putin during a recent phone call. “One is a path of diplomacy leading toward a de-escalation of the situation, and the other is a path that’s more focused on deterrence, including serious costs,” a senior Administration official said afterward. “Those costs include economic costs, include adjustments and augmentations of NATO force posture in Allied countries, and include additional assistance to Ukraine to enable it to further defend itself.”
Yet Mr. Biden has held off significant deliveries of additional military aid to Kyiv. Assistance sent after Russian tanks begin rolling across the border may arrive too late. The White House apparently fears that making an invasion more costly would provoke the Russians before bilateral negotiations begin in Geneva. But Mr. Putin may interpret that reluctance as a sign of U.S. weakness.
Mr. Putin has long desired to rebuild a Greater Russia sphere of influence, and he clearly thinks the first year of the Biden Presidency is a moment of opportunity. It’s hard to know if this is partly a personal calculation about Mr. Biden and his will and capacities. But Mr. Biden’s willy-nilly flight from Afghanistan can’t have given Mr. Putin any greater fear about U.S. resolve.
No one wants a Russian invasion, but worse than a new war in Ukraine would be to let Mr. Putin intimidate NATO into a retreat from Eastern Europe in order to avoid an invasion in the short term. Mr. Putin would pocket that concession, use it to shore up his standing at home, and wait for the next opening to look for more. Would the Baltic states be next?
An invasion of Ukraine would be a tragedy for that country, but letting Mr. Putin dictate Western security terms would be worse for everyone.
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NY SUN: https://www.nysun.com/foreign/
biden-getting-set-to-accept- irans-status-as/91881/
By Majid Rafizadeh, GATESTONE INSTITUTE
- No amount of appeasement and no deal is going to change the core pillars of the Iranian mullahs’ revolutionary principles, which include anti-Americanism, antisemitism, supporting terror groups, and brutally repressing their own population. The theocratic establishment uses international and regional agreements, such as its election last April to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, to advance its revolutionary ideals.
- The Biden administration might begin to understand, nearly four decades after the establishment of the mullahs’ regime, that, as Henry Kissinger remarked, “The exercise of diplomacy without the threat of force is without effect.”
The “quiet” on the northern and southern fronts that Israel’s leaders point to is the result not of Israeli deterrence, as they claim, but deterrence by our enemies.
By Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM
Hezbollah fighters hold their group’s flag as they stand in front of a statue of the late Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and swear their oath of allegiance to him during a ceremony to mark the second anniversary of his assassination, in a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, on Jan. 4, 2022 | Photo: AP/Hussein Malla
Something happens almost every day that tells us that Israel’s enemies are preparing for war. On the other hand, Israel’s responses to these events indicate that Israel is not preparing for war.
Three separate events this week exposed this distressing state of affairs.
Read more...
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