Author Archive | Steve Palmer

This video was shared in my facebook news stream today. Catchy tune…

Note how the video conveniently debunks itself at 1:15.  No chance that facts will interfere with the cultists’ mythology, though.   Maybe next they’ll sit us all around a campfire and tell us the story about how the Department of Agriculture saved Yorick the Brave from being eaten by a two headed dragon.

cross-posted from the Pennsylvania TAC

Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

…

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

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For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

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He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

…

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

NDAA for 2012:  Continue Reading →

cross-posted from the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center

Debt Slavery: Debt bondage (or bonded labour) is when a person pledges him or herself against a loan.   In debt bondage, the services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services’ duration may be undefined.  Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.

With more than $15 Trillion in debt, our government has institutionalized debt bondage against our adults, our children and even against generations yet unborn.  Yet, our legacy media remains mostly silent.

Instead, they smugly and self-righteously lecture Victoria’s Secret for allowing children to work, (presumably) voluntarily and with the consent of their parents in order to lift themselves out of poverty.

In the movie, Annie, when Annie and Daddy Warbucks meet with President Roosevelt, Daddy Warbucks makes a comment along the lines that Roosevelt’s redistributionist policies were “big-hearted and empty-headed”.  In today’s world, these sorts of policies are still empty-headed, but they can no longer lay claim to being big-hearted.

When you promote policies that require the government to conscript the labor of countless unborn children for scores of years to come in order to satisfy the whims of the moment…  When you would enslave my son in debt to pay for my neighbors’ electric golf carts… you can no longer claim to be big-hearted.  When you promote these policies, you are a thug and a slaver, nothing else.

At least the child labor that feeds Victoria’s secret’s business is not done at the point of Uncle Sam’s guns.  We truly live in some sort of bizarro world when the would be slave masters laud themselves as humanitarians.

Lesley Swann, of the Tennessee Tenth Amendment Center posted this video in facebook…

This is a case in point as to why the federal government should stop meddling in scientific research. Continue Reading →

cross-posted from the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center

In April, 2010, I wrote the following words

Shortly thereafter, the congressional minority party began campaigning on the platform, “Repeal and Replace“.   As-if…  This is the party we elected in 2000 on promises to privatize social security.   After six years in power, instead of privatizing social security, they gave us No Child Left Behind, The Patriot Act and Medicare Part-D.   After the congress changed control, the same president gave us TARP and Auto-Maker bailouts.  With that track record, does anyone really believe they’re going to repeal the Intolerable Act of 2010?  Not likely.

We need to remember that all politicians respond to incentives.  The incentives for the Washington republicans in this situation are to give the plausible appearance of trying to repeal it, without actually getting it done.  That way, they get reelected and they get to keep their new-found power too.  Incentives work in our favor at the state level, but not in Washington.

Looking at the (R) primary field that has been shaping for the 2012 presidential election during the last couple of months, I have been reminded of those words frequently.  From the “main stream” republican press, and even many tea parties, we hear that defeating Obama is paramount.  Nothing else matters.  And hardly a word about repealing the Intolerable Act of 2010.  Call me cynical, but (without naming names) there’s only one candidate who I honestly believe will act to repeal… and in reality, according to intrade.com, that candidate is not likely to win.

I hope I was  wrong when I wrote those words, but in preparation for the possibility that they turn out to be correct, I want to float a couple of rhetorical questions.  What is the point of defeating Obama if his policies are left in place?  What do we do if the GOP establishment stabs us in the back, again!, the way President Bush did, with his big-government policies?  When do we stop throwing good votes after bad?  Is this all there is?  Voting for people who (we hope) will drive us into collapse more slowly than the other ones?  When do we finally stand up and say that we will not be ruled by the left branch or the right branch of the big-government party?

cross-posted from the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center

Matt Peterson at the blog of the Competetive Enterprise Institute, writes,

…

Article 1, Sec. 8, the infamous “Commerce Clause” grants the federal government the power to “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” And ever since it was written, this seemingly open-ended phrase has been used to justify the federal government’s ever-expanding scope and power.

… Continue Reading →

cross-posted from the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center

Which version do you like better?

The new one’s good, but I like the older ones with the banjo. I especially like the Grandpa Jones version, but the visuals in this youtube video are a bit over the top.

PA Senate Votes Unanimously for Real ID Non-Compliance

The Pennsylvania State Senate passed SB354, An Act relating to compliance with the Federal REAL ID Act of 2005, 50 to 0 today, stating (in part),

Neither the Governor nor the Department of Transportation or any other Commonwealth agency shall participate in the REAL ID Act of 2005 or regulations promulgated thereunder.

Senator Folmer, the legislation’s primary sponsor noted in his sponsorship memorandum that,

Real ID threatens the privacy rights of all Pennsylvanians.  The Department of Homeland Security would be empowered to mandate the collection of biometric data.  Currently, Homeland Security requires capturing “face prints” — biometric data via facial recognition software.  Unfortunately, REAL ID offers no controls on what confidential data can be collected from driver’s licenses, where and how long it can be stored, and who is authorized to obtain, share, trade or sell that information.

We applaud Senator Folmer and the Pennsylvania State Senate for passing this important legislation for the second consecutive year.  Similar House legislation, HB1753, remains assigned to the House State Government Committee.

As Tenth Amendment Center Founder, Michael Boldin, wrote last year,

When more than two dozen states refuse to comply with yet another unfunded mandate from D.C. – that mandate may sit on the books, but it’s as good as repealed, even without going to the federal courts to oppose it.

With action in the House and the Governor’s signature, Pennsylvania will add itself to the list of states who are protecting their citizens’ privacy.  You can track Real ID Nullification efforts around the country at the Tenth Amendment Center’s Real ID tracking page.

cross-posted from the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center

Sound Familiar?

Give Me Liberty, by Rose Wilder Lane (1936)

“…In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over.   The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.

The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle.  It does not stand for American individualism.  Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics.

Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles therefore have no means of peaceful political action.  A vote for the New Deal approves national socialism, but a vote for the Republican Party does not repudiate national socialism.

Defeating the New Deal at the polls might possibly check our country’s back-sliding, but it is not enough to set America on its forward way again.  The collectivist state was not invented in 1932.  The New Deal’s political principle comes from Plato through the Dark and Middle Ages to various developments by Machiavelli, Rousseau, Fourier, Hegel – who defines freedom as ‘submission to The State’….” (from chapter XV)

cross-posted from the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center

On September 21, a federal court recognized what we all knew already (well, OK, everyone except the president and the geniuses in congress…).  The PATRIOT Act is an unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment tothe US Constitution.  As MSNBC reports,

Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

Earlier in the year, when the house was voting on whether or not to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, I contacted my representative in the House of Representatives, Congressman Patrick Meehan.  I asked him to vote against this unconstitutional abuse of power.  I received this e-mail in reply.

February 28, 2011

Dear Mr. Palmer:

Thank you for contacting me regarding recent legislative activity pertaining to the PATRIOT Act.  I appreciate hearing from you and having the benefit of your views.  Recently, I joined 274 of my colleagues in a bipartisan vote to temporarily extend three provisions of the PATRIOT Act and the related Intelligence Reform Act that were set to expire at the end of February.  Section 215, the “Business Records Provision,” enables the FBI to apply for FISA court approval to access books, records, and other “tangible things” in intelligence and terrorism cases. Section 206, the “Roving Wiretaps Provision,” authorizes FISA courts to order multi-point wiretaps that follow an individual person rather than a single, specific communications device.  Section 6001, the “Lone Wolf Provision,” permits the surveillance of foreign terrorists who cannot be directly linked to an identifiable foreign power or terror organization. Continue Reading →