hugo

Anarchy is the absence of government, not the expansion of it.

Anarchy is the one thing I do not fear coming under Obama.

Clearly, government is needed to defend citizens from internal and external aggressors. I believe that an economic system that provides opportunity for all to raise their fortunes in life, inside the law, is needed for a stable state. When you look at the fate of the English colonies, almost all of which are in the ranks of the first world nations versus the nations colonized by Spain, almost all of which have alternated between tyrannical governments and civil war and anarchy the historical evidence strongly argues that the ability of the common citizen to acquire property (basically land in the pre-industrial era) and to engage in free trade with his fellow citizens are the keys to a stable state that does not alternate between the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of the strongest. Spain sold huge land grants and sold monopoly rights in an attempt to profit from colonialism. The English attempted to profit through trade with its' colonies. The English colonists were basically left alone to allocate economic resources. A lot of it comes down to providing all citizens equal protection under the law. As governments grow bigger this becomes increasingly more difficult.

Yep, if ya confirmed Ruthie ya gotta confirm Sotomayor.

I'd like to make babies on Patricia Heaton's face.

Words can be twisted, or taken out of contest. Judicial decisions cannot. From: Sotomayor: Criticize, then Confirm by Charles Krauthammer Tests only discriminate against the dumb and lazy. Ricci was denied equal protection under the law. His 14th Amendment rights were violated. Sotomayor upheld this violation. From another source:

Is there a UN flag?

It's called getting old.

We got new allies---Venezuela and Cuba.

Idiot women are usually good in the sack.

Frederic Bastiat quotes: Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them. Law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. The plans differ; the planners are all alike... Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole?with their common aim of legal plunder?constitute socialism. But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds. Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation. The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely. ...the statement, ?The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign,? is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent. But we assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced organization, not natural organization. We repudiate the forms of association that are forced upon us, not free association. We repudiate forced fraternity, not true fraternity. We repudiate the artificial unity that does nothing more than deprive persons of individual responsibility. We do not repudiate the natural unity of mankind under Providence. Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. Law is solely the organization of the individual right of self-defense which existed before law was formalized. If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion?whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government?at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty.

Anyone around who can play taps for the Constitution?

You can't regulate war.

I am sick and tired of Sikh violence.

Still beats having your head cut off.

Obama's plan to to shut down Guantanamo got voted down 90-6. i should say lack of plan, since he had no idea where to put the scumbags after shutting down their current abode.

The US Constitution once protected us from a tyrannical majority.

The dollar is like a share of stock. Its' value depends on how well its' managers manage assets and debt.

It is a hoax, actually it is a black couple patronizing black owned businesses.

OF course, you can't have socialism without tyranny.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant ? society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it ? its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism. ? On Liberty J.S. Mill

Some schools allow points for missing class work | Top stories | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle Graduating from high school and many colleges no longer means you are capable of working anywhere but fast food joints. We are going to leave a generation of ignoramouses 100 trillion dollars in debt. Good thing they will be too ignorant to figure out how bad we screwed them.

Another government created crisis which Obama will find the solution is more government.

They should not have asked the damn question if they did not like the potential answer. What they did was impose a litmus test for winning the title. Give a pro-gay marriage answer or suffer consequences. "Isn't it a little ironic here? We pick politicians by how they look on TV and Miss America on where she stands on the issues. Isn't that a little backwards?" --Jay Leno

I could actually support some of the animal rights activists agenda if it was not for the fact their long-term goal is to have us all eating tofu.