This is page contains links and information regarding actions by the Government, State, and Military which violate the fundamental principles of Individual Rights, Actions, Liberty and Freedom
Cinderella Laws - Who Decides How to Raise Your Children?
For the first time in history, the UK is planning to introduce into Parliment the so-called “Cinderella law”, which will jail parents failing to show love to children for up to 10 years in prison, putting it alongside physical or sexual abuse, local media reported.
The UK government is planning to introduce changes to child neglect laws, which will make “emotional cruelty” a crime for the first time, according to Daily Telegraph report. The law will protect children’s emotional, social and behavioral well-being.
The offence will include deliberately ignoring a child, not showing them any love over prolonged periods, forcing degrading punishments or to witness domestic violence, and making them a scapegoat.
The maximum sentence that parents neglecting children could face under the law will be 10 years.
The changes are due to be introduced in Parliament within the framework of the Queen’s Speech in early June.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman came close to confirming the report to the Daily Telegraph.
“The Government believes protecting children from harm is fundamental and that child cruelty is an abhorrent crime which should be punished,” he said. “Every child should be able to grow up in a safe environment. We are considering ways the law can support this.”
This follows a 3-year campaign by the charity, Action for Children, which hails the government’s support as a “monumental step” forward.
The law on child cruelty in Britain has remained unchanged for nearly 81 years, the charity stated. It is still based on the 1868 Poor Law (Amendment) Act.
Freedom of Association - An Essential Right
Freedom of Association - Essential for Private Individuals and Private Enterprise
25 August 2013
New Mexico’s highest court ruled Thursday that the owners of an Albuquerque wedding photography company violated state law when they turned away a lesbian couple who wanted to hire them to take pictures of their ceremony.
Upholding a lower-court ruling, the New Mexico Supreme Court held that the company’s refusal was an act of discrimination. They rejected the argument of the devout Christian owners of Elane Photography who claimed they had a free speech and religious right not to shoot the ceremony.
The decision comes at a time of turbulent debate over gay marriage in New Mexico, where a county clerk gained national attention this week by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples against the advice of the attorney general (though he’s not challenging it). As Law Blog noted earlier, gay marriage hasn’t been legalized New Mexico, though there’s a dispute over whether state law prohibits it.
Under the New Mexico Human Rights Act, it’s unlawful for a public accommodation to refuse to offer its services to someone because of the person’s sexual orientation. The same law also prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry and gender.
The Next US Financial Crisis - It's Not Far Away
Consumer Sentiment Index in U.S. Rose to 83.7 in May
By Lorraine Woellert - May 17, 2013
Americans’ confidence in the economy climbed in May to the highest level in almost six years as rising real estate values and record stock prices boosted household wealth.
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment increased to 83.7, the highest since July 2007, from 76.4 in April, a report today showed. Separately, the Conference Board’s gauge of the economic outlook for the next three to six months climbed 0.6 percent in April, more than forecast....
“As fiscal drag fades in the second half of the year, the case can be made that overall growth is going to accelerate,”said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York, and the top forecaster of consumer sentiment in the past two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gain in confidence “is testimony to underlying growth in spending power.”
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index jumped 1 percent to a record 1,666.12 at the close of trading in New York. The Dollar Index climbed as much as 0.9 percent to 84.371, the highest level since July 2010, before trading at 84.261 at 4:07 p.m. New York time, up 0.8 percent. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbed to 1.95 percent from 1.88 percent late yesterday. Genius’ t
Stopping War by Presidential Decree -- House Continuing Resolution (HCR) 107
112th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. CON. RES. 107
Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
March 7, 2012
Mr. JONES submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.
Whereas the cornerstone of the Republic is honoring Congress's exclusive power to declare war under article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that, except in response to an actual or imminent attack against the territory of the United States, the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress violates Congress's exclusive power to declare war under article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution and therefore constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.
Nuclear Holocast in Saudi Arabia
The Pentagon has allowed teaching a course in its Joint Forces College that advocates the use of nuclear weapons to destroy civilian targets and the religious cities of Medina and Mecca on the grounds that we are at war with Islam.
The course which was taught until this April, may have reached over 800 officers before someone complained about the material and its implications.
No Cash - No Freedom
Many people now believe there is no need to for anyone to use cash -- electronic transactions all that are needed. A cashless society would be safer, more convenient, more cost effective and more moral.
Exchanging One Prison for Another
Ahmad Tourson spent eight years in Guantánamo as an innocent man. Then, in 2009, he was shipped off to the tiny island nation of Palau. His new situation, though, is untenable -- but the US government seems unwilling to do anything about it.
On her sixth birthday, Muslima had one wish: to see her dada. On that day, Ahmad Tourson, her father, was trying to sleep. But slumber was a luxury in the windowless metal box to which he was consigned for 22 hours a day, sometimes 24. On Muslima's sixth birthday, Ahmad was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He had been there for her last five birthdays as well.
But in June 2008, after Muslima turned six, sunlight shone on the steel vault to which Ahmad was confined. Over six years of courtroom battles and cruel conditions of confinement later, the hundreds of men the US executive claimed the power to hold indefinitely won the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus to challenge the lawfulness of their detention. Ahmad's case was to be heard by a US federal judge.
The Right to Resist Tyranny
Anne Dekins was a loud-mouthed party girl -- or at least, that's what the arrest warrant suggested. Whatever she may have done in the past, Miss Dekins was quietly minding her own business when Officer Samuel Bray found her on the street and began to haul her away.
Dekins wasn’t inclined to go quietly, and she put up a struggle. Her cries for help attracted the interest of several armed men led by an individual named Tooley, who confronted Bray and demanded to know what he was doing to the frantic woman. The officer produced his official credentials and insisted that he was making a lawful arrest for “disorderly conduct.” When witnesses disputed that description, Bray called for backup.
Tooley and his associates ordered Bray to release the woman, and then took action to enforce that lawful order. After Bray’s partner was killed in the ensuing struggle, Tooley and his associates were arrested for murder. The trial court threw out the murder charge, ruling that the warrant was defective. Since the arrest was illegal, the court pointed out, Dekins had a right to resist – and bystanders likewise had a right, if not a positive duty, to assist her. The defendants were eventually found guilty of manslaughter, but quickly pardoned and set free.
The Hypocrisy of NATO's Libya Campaign
The price of liberation is plain to see on every street in the late dictator's home town of Sirte. The place intended be the showplace of a continent is destroyed
The swaggering architectural ambitions of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi never achieved the stylistic unity reached by Hitler in Berlin, but he had his dreams. And the most cherished of all his projects was to one day see his home town of Sirte turned into the shimmering, futuristic capital of a United Africa.
Well, he lived just long enough to see it – over his shoulder for one last time as he fled on Thursday morning – transformed into a grotesque husk of a city with broken bits of what buildings still stood sticking out from the ground like the shattered remains of the teeth of a mugging victim. It looks today like Ypres in 1915, or Grozny in 1995 after the Russian Army had finished with it.
The Lonely Planet guide once described Sirte as a "city without soul". Now it's almost without an intact building. Nearly every house has been pulverised by a rocket or mortar, burned out or riddled with bullets. Water floods the streets and the infrastructure of a city upon which the Libyan leader lavished many millions has simply ceased to exist. The devastation is comparable to that suffered by Misrata during the war. But the bombardment of Sirte and the burning of homes that belong to Gaddafi family members and supporters has raised suspicions that some fighters loyal to the National Transitional Council (NTC) brought a particular ferocity to their task.
Something's Rotten in Denmark
Fat tax: Denmark's answer for unhealthy foods
The Fat tax – imposed on butter, oil, other fatty foods – could be world's first. Denmark's fat tax would raise price of a hamburger by 15 cents; small package of butter, 40 cents. Denmark has imposed a "fat tax" on foods such as butter and oil as a way to curb unhealthy eating habits.
The Nordic country introduced the tax Saturday, of 16 kroner ($2.90) per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of saturated fat in a product.
Ole Linnet Juul, food director at Denmark's Confederation of Industries, says the tax will increase the price of a burger by around $0.15 and raise the price of a small package of butter by around $0.40.
The tax was approved by large majority in a parliament in March as a move to help increase the average life expectancy of Danes.
Denmark, some other European countries, already has higher fees on sugar, chocolates and soft drinks, but Linnet Juul says he believes the Nordic country is the first in the world to tax fatty foods.
In September, Hungary introduced a new tax popularly known as the "Hamburger Law," but that only involves higher taxes on soft drinks, pastries, salty snacks and food flavorings.
The Killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki
President Obama's relentless program of wiping out top al-Qaida leaders around the world through unilateral covert strikes claimed another victim on Friday, when Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born radical cleric identified as "chief of external operations" for al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in Yemen as he rode in a convoy.
Awlaki's death followed the takedown of al-Qaida's No. 2 official, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, in late August, and Osama bin Laden in early May. U.S. officials quickly sought to justify the strike against a U.S. citizen abroad. "Anwar al-Awlaki was one of AQAP's most dangerous terrorists, and was directly involved in planning attacks against the United States, including the 2010 cargo bomb plot and Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab's attempt to blow up a plane in December 2009," a U.S. official said. "His death takes a committed terrorist, intent on attacking the United States, off the battlefield."
Inserted from: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/exclusive/awlaki-dead-apparent-obama-covert-campaign-knows-no-161008956.html
Obamacare and the Commerce Clause
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's healthcare law suffered a setback Friday when a U.S. appeals court ruled that it was unconstitutional to require all Americans to buy insurance or face a penalty.
The Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but also reversed a lower court decision that threw out the entire healthcare law.
The legality of the individual mandate, a cornerstone of the healthcare law, is widely expected to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Opponents have argued that without the mandate, which goes into effect in 2014, the entire law falls.
The law, adopted by Congress in 2010 after a bruising battle, is expected to be a major political issue in the 2012 elections as Obama seeks another term in office and as all the major Republican presidential candidates have opposed it.
Obama has championed the individual mandate as a major accomplishment of his presidency and as a way to try to slow the soaring costs of healthcare while expanding coverage to the more than 30 million Americans without it.
US Aid to Haiti
2AR - Comment
Why is it the responsibility of the US taxpayer to fund relief efforts?
Why isn't this done through private donations?
Who gave the President, the Secretary of State, or Congress the authority to spend money on foreign aid?
Should not each citizen determine how much of his/her tax dollar is spent on foreign aid? Not to mention how much money should even be given to the Government.
Not in today's world - but after the Revolution it will be.
Nearly nine months after the earthquake, more than a million Haitians still live on the streets between piles of rubble. One reason: Not a cent of the $1.15 billion the U.S. promised for rebuilding has arrived.
The money was pledged by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in March for use this year in rebuilding. The U.S. has already spent more than $1.1 billion on post-quake relief, but without long-term funds, the reconstruction of the wrecked capital cannot begin.
With just a week to go before fiscal 2010 ends, the money is still tied up in Washington. At fault: bureaucracy, disorganization and a lack of urgency, The Associated Press learned in interviews with officials in the State Department, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the White House and the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy. One senator has held up a key authorization bill because of a $5 million provision he says will be wasteful.
Meanwhile, deaths in Port-au-Prince are mounting, as quake survivors scramble to live without shelter or food.
Death from the Skies
2AR Comment
US drone attacks kill more people in Pakistan. How are these attacks justified? What gives the US military the authority to summarily kill people suspected of militant acts? What theory of justice allows innocent men, women and children to be murdered because they were in the vicinity of these suspected militants? How can any person, possessing a conscience, commit such an action?
Through different glasses, what would be the reaction in the United States if the Mexican Government authorized drone attacks in the US against suspected drug lords? What if a Mexican drone attack killed five suspected drug dealers and twenty other men, women and children in a Tucson neighborhood? What would the reaction of the US media and Government? Can you imagine the clamor for retaliation or war upon Mexico?
If such attacks continued would it lead to further support of Mexican actions or greater retaliation against Mexico?
The US empire has no conscience. Its military has no conscience and has forgotten its oath to support and defend the Constitution.
The US Government, controlled either by Republicans or Democrats, will continue on the same course.
Change will require the 2nd American Revolution.
US drone aircraft have killed seven suspected militants in two missile strikes in north-western Pakistan, intelligence officials say.
A house and then a vehicle were hit in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan near the Afghan border, they said.
Saturday saw at least four militants reported killed in a similar attack in the same area.
More Debt - Paul Krugman's Cure
2AR Comment
Where do you start with Paul Krugman, the NY Times economist? He is the modern day John Maynard Keynes - never at loss espousing new ways for the Government to spend or borrow us into economic salvation. Even the title of his posts, "The Conscience of a Liberal," betray his understanding of what words mean.
The word 'Liberal' in it's classical sense has meant:
late 14c., from O.Fr. liberal "befitting free men, noble, generous," from L. liberalis "noble, generous," lit. "pertaining to a free man," from liber "free," from PIE base *leudheros (cf. Gk. eleutheros "free"),
Pasted from <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Liberal>
Or as it was used through the 1800s:
1) favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties. 2) favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of personal belief or expression
Pasted from <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Liberal>
Liberalism is the force that moved the West from oppression to Liberty, from despotism to Freedom. It should never be confused with Paul Krugman's distorted form of Progressivism which is nothing more than Socialism and Fascism slipped in disguised as Liberalism. Anyone who believes and espouses this approach can have no conscience.
Krugman's article is twisted logic. He contends 'excessive private debt' caused the economic debt without clarifying that it was Government that provided the credit. He calls it 'naïve' to believe that paying down the debt is good. Such actions by people would cause defaults, a depressed economy, and falling inflation. He then drags out the Paradox of Thrift argument again. The notion that individual virtue is a collective vice.
This is nonsense. Individual virtue, like Individual Liberty, is good for each Individual as it is for any number of Individuals. Any collective vice is only in the eye of Government and the Banking system who exist on easy credit and ever increasing debt.
Krugman's alternative of injecting 'moderate inflation' into the system to effective reduce debt is another amazing slight of hand. In his mind it is okay for the Federal Reserve and Government to create money out of nothing and dump it into the money supply. In Krugman's mind as well as most of today's economists, it's okay to destroy the savings of individuals, it's okay to crush those on fixed incomes, it's okay to drive up the costs of food, housing, and health care on Individuals in order save the economy.
The Austrian School of Economics has long argued that the Economy, like Society, is not real. The economy is created by Individual human action. It is the sum total of billions of small individual transactions, decided upon and acted upon by the Individual. That is the absurdity of Keynesian economics, it destroys the Individual, it destroys capital, it destroys the future - all for the egos of economists, the Government and the banking system.
CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL
by Paul Krugman
Default is in the Stars
Not in ourselves.
I think it’s fair to say that a majority of economists believe that excessive private debt played a key role in getting us into this economic mess, and is playing a key role in preventing us from getting out. So, how does it end?
A naive view says that what we need is a return to virtue: everyone needs to save more, pay down debt, and restore healthy balance sheets.
The problem with this view is the fallacy of composition: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is a depressed economy and falling inflation, which cause the ratio of debt to income to rise if anything. That is, we’re living in a world in which the twin paradoxes of thrift and deleveraging hold, and hence in which individual virtue ends up being collective vice.
So what will happen? In the end, I’d argue, what must happen is an effective default on a significant part of debt, one way or another. The default could be implicit, via a period of moderate inflation that reduces the real burden of debt; that’s how World War II cured the depression. Or, if not, we could see a gradual, painful process of individual defaults and bankruptcies, which ends up reducing overall debt.
Your Paycheck to the State First
The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.
The proposal by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.
Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year.
If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first. "The next step could be to use (real-time) information as the basis for centralizing the calculation and deduction of tax," HMRC said in a July discussion paper.
Government Hides Destruction of Individual Rights
The victims of the Bush administration's programme of "extraordinary rendition" will not be able to sue the private company which transported them to foreign countries for torture by the CIA, after the present White House stepped in to squash their lawsuit on the grounds of national security.
A California court has sided with the Obama administration, which argued that a case led by the British resident Binyam Mohamed against the aerospace giant Boeing was bound to reveal state secrets and sensitive intelligence information.
Legal supporters of Mr Mohamed raised uproar at the decision, which the judge in charge of the case said had presented a "painful conflict between human rights and national security".
Ben Wizner, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who argued the case, called it "a sad day not only for the torture victims whose attempt to seek justice has been extinguished, but for all Americans who care about our nation's reputation in the world", and vowed to appeal to the US Supreme Court. "To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture programme has had his day in court," the attorney said.