Obama’s branches of government

By William Warren | April 5, 2012 | NetRightDaily

NRD Editor’s Note: As always, you may reprint this cartoon anywhere you please, but we ask that you provide a link back to this source. To see more Warren Toons, click here.

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Mark Stevens: A Profile in Courage

By Jeffrey Lord | April 5, 2012 | American Spectator

Threatened for sticking with Rush, defiant advertiser declares “Battle for America.”

In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of his conscience — the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men — each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient — they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.
— John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage

Mark Stevens was 17 years old when his father died.

A self-described “lower middle class” rebellious kid from Queens, when Mark went about the task of ordering his father’s affairs, he discovered his father’s bank account — containing $84. He was told that his best option was “to go on welfare.”

Marks Stevens had another idea. Said Stevens in an interview with The American Spectator: “I knew then at 17 I wasn’t going on welfare.” If Mark was going to achieve anything in life, he would have to be responsible for making that happen.

He made it happen.

Today the suddenly fatherless 17-year-old with an $84 dollar inheritance is a highly successful businessman and bestselling author of 25 business books, the very embodiment of the American Dream. His marketing firm, MSCO, is “a business-driven, entrepreneurial-minded marketing and business advisory firm relentlessly driven to accelerate the growth of our clients.” The company, located in Rye Brook, New York, has 40 employees, and — since health care is very much in the news — yes, Stevens pays for their health insurance.

Life was good for Mark Stevens. Minding his own business, literally and figuratively, he got up every day and went about the business of business. Part of any business, of course, is advertising. And as a routine part of his business, Mark Stevens spends a considerable dime advertising MSCO in the expensive New York media. MSCO ads have appeared on CBS, Bloomberg, ABC, WINS radio in New York and even, where doable in the format, on NPR.

Then one day last month, out of the seeming blue, Stevens arrived at work to learn the startling news that his office was “getting actual phone calls” from people using (he eventually realized) phony names and leaving phony numbers. What were the callers saying? They called his female executive assistant a “slut.” Another employee, also a woman — a lawyer and like Stevens an up-by-her-bootstraps professional — was taking calls from hostile strangers telling her she was “anti-woman.”

What was this?

It didn’t take long for Stevens to find out.

One of the places MSCO was advertising was on The Rush Limbaugh Show. Mark advertised MSCO there for one reason — and that reason had nothing to do with politics. Simply put, Rush has a huge audience, an audience of precisely the kind of potential customers MSCO wants to reach.

Rush, Mark was aware, had generated controversy with a joking description of the leftist Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” — following a Limbaugh tradition of illustrating the absurd by being absurd. Mark thought it a mistake and he disagreed. In fact, Rush himself was shortly out there saying that his “choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”

No matter.

MSCO was now being targeted because it was an advertiser on The Rush Limbaugh Show. The calls and now an increasing volume of hostile e-mail were pouring into MSCO.

Mark Stevens is a smart guy — and he quickly realized he was being targeted by somebody using a highly skilled, highly organized campaign that was deliberately designed to make the target feel besieged. When in fact marketing expert Stevens understood he was on the receiving end of a campaign involving a tiny handful of people extremely skilled in making others think dozens were tens of thousands.

Read the full article here.

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Andrew Klavan: Stop the Hate!

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State Nullification

By Tom Woods | TomWoods.com

What Is It?

State nullification is the idea that the states can and must refuse to enforce unconstitutional federal laws.

Says Who?

Says Thomas Jefferson, among other distinguished Americans. His draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 first introduced the word “nullification” into American political life, and follow-up resolutions in 1799 employed Jefferson’s formulation that “nullification…is the rightful remedy” when the federal government reaches beyond its constitutional powers. In the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, James Madison said the states were “duty bound to resist” when the federal government violated the Constitution.

But Jefferson didn’t invent the idea. Federalist supporters of the Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788 assured Virginians that they would be “exonerated” should the federal government attempt to impose “any supplementary condition” upon them – in other words, if it tried to exercise a power over and above the ones the states had delegated to it. Patrick Henry and later Jefferson himself elaborated on these safeguards that Virginians had been assured of at their ratifying convention.

What’s the Argument for It?

Here’s an extremely basic summary:

1) The states preceded the Union.  The Declaration of Independence speaks of “free and independent states” that “have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.” The British acknowledged the independence not of a single blob, but of 13 states, which they proceeded to list one by one. Article II of the Articles of Confederation says the states “retain their sovereignty, freedom, and independence”; they must have enjoyed that sovereignty in the past in order for them to “retain” it in 1781 when the Articles were officially adopted.  The ratification of the Constitution was accomplished not by a single, national vote, but by the individual ratifications of the various states, each assembled in convention.

2) In the American system no government is sovereign.  The peoples of the states are the sovereigns.  It is they who apportion powers between themselves, their state governments, and the federal government.  In doing so they are not impairing their sovereignty in any way. To the contrary, they are exercising it.

3) Since the peoples of the states are the sovereigns, then when the federal government exercises a power of dubious constitutionality on a matter of great importance, it is they themselves who are the proper disputants, as they review whether their agent was intended to hold such a power.  No other arrangement makes sense.  No one asks his agent whether the agent has or should have such-and-such power.  In other words, the very nature of sovereignty, and of the American system itself, is such that the sovereigns must retain the power to restrain the agent they themselves created.  James Madison explains this clearly in the famous Virginia Report of 1800.

Why Do We Need It?

As Jefferson warned, if the federal government is allowed to hold a monopoly on determining the extent of its own powers, we have no right to be surprised when it keeps discovering new ones. If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, it will continue to grow – regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power. In his Report of 1800, Madison reminded Virginians and Americans at large that the judicial branch was not infallible, and that some remedy must be found for those cases in which all three branches of the federal government exceed their constitutional limits.

Read the full article here.

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Obama Puts Out Figurative Bounty on Supreme Court

By Rush Limbaugh | April 03, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Obama and his attack on the Supreme Court yesterday.  It happened toward the end of the program in the last half hour and it was happening on the fly.  I didn’t really have enough time to listen in detail to what Obama said, and thus I didn’t have a chance to, in detail, reply.  I’ve now listened to what Obama said.  I’ve got three sound bites here.When I got home yesterday at about six o’clock last night I got a flash encrypted message from a friend who says, “You know, somebody in the court leaked to Obama. That’s why he went out there and did this today. Somebody called him. He lost the vote, the preliminary vote on Friday. He lost it, and somebody leaked it.” And that became an active theory that began to be bandied about amongst a lot of people that I know. Because people were saying,

“Why go out,” as Obama did yesterday…? It was in the form of a question. We must remember that he was asked a question about this. He didn’t launch into this on his own, but once he got the question, it was, “Katie, bar the door,” and he was off to the races.

And the question everybody was asking is: “Why do this? Why attack the court? Why intimidate them, why threaten them if they had voted to uphold the mandate?” And I have an answer for that. See, I know these people. I know liberals. I don’t want that statement to sound bombastic. You people here — new listeners to the program — that’s not a braggadocios statement. It’s not bombastic. It’s not outrage or any attempt to shock. I just know them, and so when somebody asks me, “Why would Obama say that if he didn’t have to? If he had been told that the preliminary vote on Friday was in his favor, why take the attitude that he took?” There is an answer to that. I don’t know if it’s right, but there is an answer.

He’s a thug.

And again, I’m not trying to be provocative when I say this. I’m just quoting Bill Clinton, folks. Bill Clinton referred to Barack Obama as a Chicago thug during the 2008 presidential campaign. This after Clinton some years earlier had told Juanita Broaddrick, “Put some ice on that lip” after she said he raped her. (I mentioned that for this “war on women” that supposedly the Republicans are waging.) But there’s every possibility that Obama feeling his oats, being told that the vote went his way, would still go out and do this, ’cause he knows there are more votes to come. I’m not predicting it. I’m just saying I could understand it.

It’s easier to understand that somebody leaked to him that the preliminary vote went against him and that the mandate fell by whatever the preliminary vote was and that explains his attitude yesterday. But I can see him saying what he said if the vote went in his favor as well, as a means of further intimidation, making sure they don’t change their minds or whatever. You might say, “Well, how would that work? Wouldn’t that just kind of make them be more resistant?” The reason this is all a crock in the first place is that (and we will go through this as we play the Obama sound bites) it is obvious that to the left this is an entirely political process.

There’s nothing judicial going on here. There’s nothing legal. This isn’t even really about the Constitution. This is about politics, pure and simple, and Barack Obama’s reelection. It’s all it is. But he says things in these sound bites which you’ll hear coming up and they’re chilling to me. “The court has to understand…” “The court must understand,” is one of his sound bites. No, the court must not — does not have to — listen to you. What is this, “The court must understand”? That is a threat! How many of you think it possible that Obama will make a trip to the Supreme Court before the vote, before the final vote? Can you see it happening? I can.

I’m not predicting it. (interruption) You’re shaking your head. You don’t think it would ever happen? Why would he be…? Why would Obama visiting the Supreme Court between now and June be any more unconscionable than what he did yesterday? (interruption) It’s a visual? No! He’s just going up to say hi to Kagan. He’s going up to say hi to Kagan and Sotomayor, to see how they’re doing. (interruption) He called ’em out of the State of the Union right to their face. Remember that with Justice Alito? Anyway, let me take a break. We’ll come back and we will get into some of these sound bites and we’ll tear this down as it happened sometimes line by line. Mike, be prepared when I say, “Stop.” There might be some frequent stops and starts as we go through this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Reuters was just as excited as they could be over what Obama did. “Obama Takes a Shot at the Supreme Court Over Health Care — President Obama took an opening shot at conservative justices on the Supreme Court on Monday, warning that a rejection of his sweeping health care law would be an act of judicial activism that Republicans say they abhor.” Warning? Warning? And Reuters is happy! (That’s right! You take it to these conservatives!) Judicial activism? You know, the debate is constantly held: “Is he really this ignorant or naive, or is this just strategic?”

Everybody knows that judicial activism is not what Obama is explaining it to be. Judicial activism is the court MAKING law. Judicial activism is the court WRITING law. What Obama is trying to say here is that the court will be engaging in judicial activism if it judges the law according to the Constitution. That’s not what judicial activism is. I know exactly what they’re doing. They’re trying to take this term, and they’re trying to redefine it publicly to fit their needs and redefine the language (as they constantly are). But, folks, I’m gonna tell you something. It is preposterous, and it’s even a little scary to hear such abject ignorance from a supposed constitutional scholar.

This is a man, Barack Obama, who was once paid to teach law, constitutional law, and he doesn’t even know the meaning of the term “judicial activism.” No one ever accuses any judges of judicial activism for following the Constitution! Judges are accused of judicial activism for not following the Constitution, for legislating from the bench, for writing their own law. This is basic knowledge. Now, maybe this is why we’ve never seen Obama’s grade transcripts, if he really doesn’t know the difference. But I suspect that he does know the difference, and I suspect that he’s trying to redefine terms here to fit. Because this has become a template argument for the left.

You remember Jeffrey Toobin? You talk about a guy who’s done a 180 here, turned on a dime. During the week of oral arguments, Jeff Toobin, CNN legal analyst, was in an abject panic. These people on the left… And again, ladies and gentlemen, this is the solid truth. They do not expose themselves to any ideological thinking other than their own. They have assumed that conservatism is racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, all of these cliches they attach to it. And they’re not interested in talking to anybody that they think is a conservative. They really are not familiar with other ideas. They don’t speak the language. We, of course, can speak liberalism as well as they do. We understand it.

Read the full article here.

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Tom Woods: Nullify Now Tour, Philadelphia, March 31, 2012

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]