Good Morning,

We start the morning with a bang as the usually moderate Bill O’Reilly went off on Obama last night. The FOX News host says Obama will destroy this country in his second term.

While I agree with Bill here I would like to share with you an interesting conversation I had yesterday with a new acquaintance, one in which the word ‘fear’ was used countless times. It got me thinking….How many of us are afraid of Obama getting another 4 years? How many of us are fearful of speaking out/voicing our opinion b/c of our job or potential job or alienation from our own family? How many of us, in silence, are fearful?  Harry Emerson Fosdick once said that “Fear imprisons while faith liberates. Fear paralyzes while faith empowers. Fear disheartens while faith encourages. Fear sickens while faith heals. Fear makes useless while faith makes serviceable. And most of all fear puts hopelessness at the heart of all while faith rejoices in God.” Powerful stuff no?

Dan Doyle, a retired professor of English and Humanities wrote that “All of us have known fear. It is a part of life and a very important part, for it warns us of real dangers. It can keep us on our toes, sharpen our senses and make us careful when such care is necessary for our well-being. On the other hand fear has its limits. Sometimes we let a fear of some kind dominate our lives and it paralyzes us from living whole lives. Our fear becomes a prison for us and prevents us from taking the necessary risks that come with life in the journey toward growth and maturity. We have examples of how fear threatened to scuttle the project of humanity’s growth in faith in both the Old and the New Testaments. In the Old Testament we see Moses who has been told by Yahweh to go down to Egypt to tell Pharaoh to “let my people go.” Moses begs God to let his brother Aaron go in his place. His fears are profound, and rooted in the knowledge of what he had done before he left Egypt, and also in his own abilities to speak well enough to convince Pharaoh. He, of course, overcomes this fear with God’s help, and brings about the liberation of his people from slavery. In the New Testament we have the great story of the storm at sea. The apostles and Jesus are in a boat crossing the Sea of Galilee. They get caught in a raging storm half way across and Jesus is asleep. The disciples are frantic, fearful, angry with Jesus for his lack of concern at their plight. Jesus’ response was: “Why are you so afraid, have you no faith?”

There’s a great picture I came across awhile back – It is most appropriate right now..

After watching O’Reilly and going back over my conversation with this new acquaintance I thought – It’s Time to put away the fear – the fear that we might offend; the fear of retaliation; the fear of O’s re-election. It’s time to talk facts with everyone – everywhere. We Must Not – We Can Not – live in fear or silence. As Reagan once alluded to – there comes a time when we must choose whether we are going to sit on the sidelines in fear and complain at everything or join the fight and move toward freedom!

No fear is found here – yesterday Sheriff Arpaio concluded that Obama’s Birth Certificate is an absolute, 100%, no doubt about it, Forgery.

The question turns to … Now What? How many (if any) in DC will do a damn thing about this?? My bet is 0 thanks to their buddies in the media who are more interested in the credentials of the investigators then what they proved (WND has that story: http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/media-ignore-sheriff-joes-evidence-shoot-messenger/ ) and until the media pushes Arpaio’s findings I expect the Reps to stay mum on the topic out of ‘fear’ or appeasement. If you missed the press conference – here it is in full. While it is long – it’s worth the time so we can speak from a factual standpoint:

Yahoo reports that the Obama campaign declined to comment on Arpaio’s allegations (shocking). The Arizona Democratic Party said in a statement that Arpaio’s investigation is intended to draw attention away from problems within his own agency, such as hundreds of sex-crime cases that the sheriff’s office failed to adequately investigate over a three-year period. (I’m sorry I have to laugh – what is Alinsky’s rule … “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and ‘frozen’…    “…any target can always say, ‘Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?’ When you ‘freeze the target,’ you disregard these [rational but distracting] arguments…. Then, you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack” … gosh they play it to the T don’t they?) Anyway… Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed Obama’s citizenship, and state officials did again Tuesday. “President Obama was born in Honolulu and his birth certificate is valid,” Joshua A. Wisch, a special assistant to Hawaii’s attorney general, said in a statement. “Regarding the latest allegations from a sheriff in Arizona, they are untrue, misinformed, and misconstrue Hawaii law.” Wisch also said that “not only are Hawaii’s vital records some of the best managed, but they also have some of the strongest restrictions on access to prevent identity theft and fraud.”

Hmmm – I’d say that’s highly debatable.

Mark Levin wrote a political ad about Obama… It’s Nightime in America – it’s going to give you chills:

Changing gears – Some GREAT news:

LOST has been stopped dead in its tracks and it is due to YOUR emails and phone calls – there is no mistake about it! It’s easy to make a phone call and write an email but when we get results from that minimal work – woohoo – things are clearly looking up!

Speaking of changing gears did you know that Obama has changed gears – again – ‘its not a tax – it’s a penalty – it’s a tax – nope it’s a principle’. He said, and I quote “It’s less a tax or a penalty than it is a principle — which is you can’t be a freeloader on other folks when it comes to your health care, if you can afford it,” in an interview with Toledo’s WTOL. Interesting but obviously he realized people didn’t like the word ‘tax’ but I have to say I am personally offended that he is using the word ‘principle’ here. But perhaps, it’s examples like this that leave us with the fact that Condoleeze Rice offered up yesterday – “Our friends can’t count on us, our foes don’t fear or respect us”

Staying with Obama –

At least someone is talking about reining in the tyranny of the Obama administration. If Obama gets a second term he will ignore congress and do whatever he wants. Remember he told the Russians to “just wait until after the election” when he would “have more flexibility.” Can we stand four more years of Obama’s tyranny?

A few more articles you need to be aware of this morning –

Are people being murdered to protect Obama’s reputation and assure his political future as President. http://patdollard.com/2011/11/mother-of-obamas-murdered-gay-lover-speaks-up/

Fed Chairman Bernanke delivered a bleak assessment of the U.S. economy to lawmakers on Tuesday but have no fear – Chuckie Schumer wants more Fed easing and is going to pressure Bernake into it. Hmm – I thought we had a separation of powers. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303754904577532691046290350.html

Speaking of Chuckie – he’s awfully busy lately. Yesterday he decided to take on the First Amendment saying: “I believe there ought to be limits because the First Amendment is not absolute. No amendment is absolute. You can’t scream ‘fire’ falsely in a crowded theater. We have libel laws. We have anti-pornography laws. All of those are limits on the First Amendment. Well, what could be more important than the wellspring of our democracy? And certain limits on First Amendment rights that if left unfettered, destroy the equality — any semblance of equality in our democracy — of course would be allowed by the Constitution.”

“And the new theorists on the Supreme Court who don’t believe that, I am not sure where their motivation comes from, but they are just so wrong. They are just so wrong.”

His floor speech focused on the Disclose Act.

Now, let’s parse some of this, because Schumer is disguising a non sequitur as an argument. And as it happens, he gets only one thing right in this speech – namely, that there are limits on the First Amendment. Justices from Antonin Scalia on backwards have all accepted that the Founders never meant for that concept to be applied with absolute force, though there is also the matter that the Founders expected states to decide what forms of speech were and weren’t acceptable, not the Federal government. However, it is still technically true that the exceptions Schumer describes exist. Mytheos Holt writes: But are they actually part of the Constitution, or were they intended? Debatable. Anti-obscenity laws (the “anti-pornography laws” to which Schumer refers) have yet to be litigated before the Supreme Court at the Federal level,  and the same goes for defamation (“libel”) laws, which are also enforced on a state-by-state basis. So those two exceptions don‘t particularly help Schumer’s case for campaign finance, because they would have been irrelevant to the Founders’ concept of Federal power, and don’t implicate questions of Federal power even today.

But what about the “fire in a crowded theater” exception? Technically, that does refer to a question of Federal power, but once you hear what that Federal power is, you‘ll wish it didn’t. The example of yelling fire in a crowded theater was first invoked by Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1917 case Schenck v. U.S., in a case questioning whether the Federal government could enforce a piece of legislation called the “Anti-Espionage Act” against a socialist agitator named Charles Schenck.

However, Schenck wasn‘t today’s variety of socialist. In fact, he was arguing for something rather akin to what Tea Partiers might be seen as doing by the extreme Left today – that is, asserting one’s rights against an oppressive Federal mandate. That mandate, in this case, was the wartime draft of World War I, instituted by (who else) President Woodrow Wilson. Naturally enough, Wilson‘s government didn’t take kindly to Schenck distributing pamphlets urging citizens to resist the draft, and so they had him arrested. Schenck cried foul and appealed to the Court. This was where Holmes, one of the Court’s noted progressives, came in, writing:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Now, not only was this standard nowhere in the Constitution, but Holmes didn’t do a particularly strong job of tying the idea of yelling fire in a crowded theater as a First Amendment exception to the idea that speaking against the government in wartime is equivalent. Nevertheless, Holmes was joined in this opinion by the rest of the Court, and so far, this remains the only exception ever granted to the Federal Government regarding when it can step on the First Amendment.

So does Schumer have a leg to stand on comparing this to campaign finance? Definitely not. Not only is he reaching to an insane degree when complaining that “equality” and “democracy” are destroyed by corporate money, but he’s bringing up concerns that never motivated the Founders when they drafted the document. There was no concern on the part of the Founders that people exercise their First Amendment Rights to an equal degree, nor that everyone should even have equal political rights. In fact, this last part is especially true since, as we have repeated ad nauseam, America was never intended to be a democracy, and property owners were originally the only people who could vote.

Which, come to think of it, sounds rather like Schumer’s nightmare dystopia where those with the most property have the loudest voice. Some might consider it highly revealing when a leader of a major political party does not wish to abide by the political system originally envisioned by his country’s Founding Fathers, but as for us, we couldn’t possibly comment.

Katie Pavlich over at Townhall has something to say on this matter too: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/07/18/chuck_schumer_there_should_be_limits_to_the_first_amendment

LOCAL:

A federal judge is ordering the New York City Fire Department to implement racial quotas to address grievances from minorities who failed entrance exams. Did you catch that…they FAILED the exam but they get the job. Insanity is all I can say. Affirmative Action must be stopped!

Keep Talking – Keep Thinking – have a great day!

Lisa