For the record, the only reason this interests me is since it is bloody hot down here most of the year, and wearing a jacket or long shirt over my usual t-shirt is simply not going to happen.  And since I’m a girl, wearing the typical shorter-tailed girlie type shirts, this means belt carry under my shirt is not possible.  Any sort of movement, even walking, will cause my holster to be visible, which will undoubtedly cause old ladies to keel over in fright.  Therefore I usually wind up carrying in my purse, which A) is extremely heavy and annoying, and B) is like not carrying a gun at all.  Passage of this bill means I can belt carry and not worry about being arrested when some Neanderthal deputy – which seems to be the only kind they’re hiring these days – sees a flash of holster on a sunny day.

Alas, my county’s sheriff – who on a good day has delusions of being the next Joe Arpaio – thinks this is all Very Bad:

A visible weapon could provoke crimes of opportunity, and concealed-weapon permit holders — unlike deputies — don’t have to pass physical fitness tests, said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.

…

In phone interviews, each sheriff said he supports the Second Amendment. Judd said he’s an advocate of the NRA.

“But at the end of the day, this is bad legislation and should not be passed,” he said.

They’re worried that deputies who respond to a conflict won’t know who to disarm if they see several people with guns.

I am quite pleased the top cop in my county is apparently a sniveling moron, who will not take responsibility for hiring adequately evolved individuals with enough native intelligence to disarm “several people with guns” long enough to check their IDs/permits.  I am also pleased there’s no intention of better training said Neanderthals to carry out the above simple operation sans pants-filling.  This seems like a spectacular usage of the property taxes I pay to this county every year.

Here’s a thought, Sheriff Judd:  If your homunculi deputies come across “several people with guns,” shoot the ones who turn the guns on your deputies.  Because if folk who have bothered to sit through the concealed carry class (as well as get fingerprinted and background checked, and pay the cash money required for the license) are stupid enough to actually point their pieces at a man with a badge, then we surely don’t need them in our rank and file and you are more than welcome to their cooling corpses.

Alternatively, man up and actually TRAIN your people to be more than mere shit-kickers.  Oh, and kindly check the stats in the OTHER FORTY THREE STATES that allow open carry to their CC holders.  Rube.

Updated to add anecdote: Yesterday the kids and I were grocery shopping.  My son – who is 13 – said, “Hey, did that open carry bill pass?”  I said, “Not yet, why?”  He said, “There’s a guy over there with a gun on his belt.”  I looked, man with a high and tight wearing nice dress pants and a dress shirt, gun holstered neatly on his belt.  I said, “Probably a cop.”  Son shrugged and said, “Hey, can we get some Cheerios?”

No hysteria, no pants-filling.  And unsurprisingly (at least to those of us with sense) none whatsoever from the rest of the grocery-shopping public as well.

Congratulations on your victory!

It now means nothing.

Remember who put you there. We, the people.

Remember why we sent you there. Because we are done with the way Congress works today.

You were elected because we are giving you a last chance. We hear a lot of promises and platitudes. The fact is, we’ve heard them all before. What we want is for you, our employees, to do the job that we sent you to do.

This consists of basically two ideals, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. First is limited government. Make certain we have one to pass on to our children.

The second is Free Enterprise. Guarantee it without exception.

Not too bad, eh? You even have this handy guide to help you make decisions! We call it the Constitution of the United States. Keep it on you at all times. There are neat little pocket versions available everywhere. Refer to it early and often and you won’t go wrong.

Here’s the catch, though, in exchange for our vote.

There is to be NO compromise, no “spirit of bipartisanship”. Obama and the Democrats will feed you that line so that you may think it is your patriotic duty to work with them. Make no mistake: if you do, you will be working for them. To quote the Admiral, “It’s a trap.”

Get thee to Washington, but keep one ear turned back to your district. Because we want you to fix it up there. But we also want you to listen to us, back here.

Remember, we are watching and waiting, but our patience has run out.

Should you believe, once this heady time of  ”we the people” is past, that you may continue your ruinous and rapacious ways, we here at Simon Jester – and indeed, all across the country – would advise you to think again.

No more “stimulus” that stimulates exactly nothing.

No more government “support” of private industry.

No more pushing through legislation that you freely admit you did not read.

No. More.

Either act like adults charged with the responsible management of this country, instead of drunken teenagers with mom’s credit card, or we will un-elect you at the first opportunity.

Have a nice day.

Washington, D.C. already lords over some 650 million acres, or 29 percent of America’s land. The federal government owns 45.3 percent of California, 48 percent of Arizona, 57.45 percent of Utah, 69 percent of Alaska, and 84.5 percent of Nevada. No state from the Rockies west is less than 30 percent federal, as are Montana and Washington.

I know the Civil War changed a lot of things, but the land grab of the western states to be held in trust or reserve or whatever just doesn’t sit well with me. Who is the Fed to say that they can manage this land better than the states in whose territory the land exists? I beg the next Congress to stop spending shit-tons of money maintaining this land and return it to its respective state. You are not in the real estate business. In fact (not to get me off on a rant here), you really should only be in the national defense business.

Oh, and we have borders, too. Go over there and stop Mexican drug cartels from invading and shooting American citizens on our territorial waters.

They. Have. No. Idea.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The American Revolution was started by about one third of the population of the thirteen colonies. This one third encompassed the landed wealthy, the educated, the middle class, the yeoman farmers, and the illiterate.  Basically every strata of society in terms of money, education, prestige, personal or political power. But it was ONLY one third of the population. And the reasons theses thirteen colonies eventually revolted against England were what exactly? Come on class, I know you know.  Yes, the young lady in the back.  Correct. They rebelled because they were sick and damn tired of not being represented by their government, weary of abuses by that government, and convinced upon logical, moral, philosophical, legal, and spiritual reasons that their government no longer cared about the well being of it’s subjects.  After the war was over, the Loyalists were allowed to keep their homes, farms, businesses, and lives.  The loyalists went on to become citizens in a new country; free to engage in commerce, free to hold public office, worship how they wished, and be an integral part of their local and state communities.

The French Revolution was another animal altogether.  The French rebelled not just against their king, but their entire wealthy class.  The revolutionaries at this point were the poor and the scant middle classes. They were essentially used as pawns by figureheads. Figureheads who, after the revolution, engaged in bloody purges, expropriation of property, and let us not forget the systematic redistribution of wealth and lands.  The idea of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, took a while to really catch up when pitted against the public spectacle of watching your particularly boorish former landlord get his head whacked off.

And then there was the American Civil War.  To say that the Civil War was fought to end slavery in the southern states is to say that pushing the gas pedal makes the car go.  The complex myriad issues of that time cannot be recounted by anything less than a thorough study of American history and law since the founding of freaking Jamestown up through the actual night Fort Sumter was taken by the Confederates.  Over a deuce and a half centuries of uniquely American jurisprudence, legislation, taxation, bank failures, bitter fights in the new Congress, personal injustices and rivalries, philosophical antipodes of thought, and what exactly our own law (as embodied by our Constitution and Bill of Rights) stood for and exactly how much power our federal government had over local and sovereign rule of the individual states came to a head.  The argument over states’ rights verses federal power grabbing was lost in the emotional impact of the Emancipation Proclamation.   During that little revolution, innocent and apolitical people in the South were murdered and had their homes burned to the ground during Sherman’s march to the sea.  Outnumbered, outgunned, under financed, and with the moral low ground, the Confederacy still managed to stave off Federal oppression for the four bloodiest years in American history.  After losing their revolution, the Confederacy was subjected to punitive taxation, forced labor, direct violation of the Third Amendment for the only time in US history, it’s citizens were locked out of political power for over a generation, its wealth divided by fiat, and property rights trampled.  Aside from the question of the injustice of one person being able to own another person, every single OTHER aspect of the Union’s prosecution of the Civil War was illegal, immoral, and contrary to the very things this country was founded upon.  On the other hand, our country was still young enough that if it had been torn asunder, foreign powers would have looked at the pieces as just something else to fold into their own empires, which could have just led to the cycle repeating itself as in paragraph one.

So what’s my point?

Good question.

When I started writing this, I was thinking about how each time a vast revolution has occurred in the last couple centuries, the warfare has been bloodier and the victors more harshly treated the losers.  (I obviously left out most of the turmoil the world has witnessed as petty dictators and avowed socialists/fascists fomented revolution for their own ends. I left out the changes that happened as progressions of a political nature as well.  I was thinking more about a popular, democratic type of revolution rather than say, a communist one.) As I got to the part about the US Civil War, however, I realized that no fight is more bitter than a fight between brothers.  No one fights more fiercely than the man who knows, in his heart, that his enemy should be his friend and their goals should be toward the common good, not the good of one over the other.  No man, who has to face his brother, or his neighbor, or his friend, across a line of battle, is more aware of that voice in his head that says, “how could he be so wrong about this?”

So folks, pick your flavor. Choose your fate. Decide NOW if we need to keep heading towards civil unrest, disobedience, and outright rebellion.  Then decide what it will look like, based on history, and extrapolate out from there.  Decide if what you believe is true and right and good will keep being true and right and good if you have to go a-soldier for it.  I think I know my answer.  I hope I know what the people who hold public trust would answer.  I only fear that both they (and far too many of us) haven’t even thought about the question yet.

cross posted at LibertyGirl.org

The BoR also says that these are not our ONLY rights, but that we do indeed keep other, unenumerated rights exclusively.

Bill, Happy Birthday.  I hope to be able to wish you that again next year.

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their Constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.”

“A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”

“Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.”

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”

“This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”

“Let it [the Constitution] be taught in schools, seminaries and in colleges; let it be written in primers, in spelling books and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, enforced in courts of justice. In short, let it become the political religion of the nation.”

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.”

“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”

“I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from … the Declaration of Independence … that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence … I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

“Ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections.”

“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

“The Shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shephard as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.”

“When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest.”

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

All of the above are A. L. quotes.  I think B.O. gave us some things a little less inspiring, yes?

The organization, machinery, or agency through which a political unit exercises authority and performs functions and which is usually classified according to the distribution of power within it

Definition from Cambridge:

The group of people who officially control a country:

Definition from Dictionary.com:

The political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states; direction of the affairs of a state, community, etc.; political administration: Government is necessary to the existence of civilized society.

Mortimer J. Adler defines government thus:

“Government, with the authority to make laws, to adjudicate disputes, and to issue administrative decisions, and with a monopoly of authorized force where it fails to persuade, is an indispensable means, proximately, to the peace of communal life.”

So, in the English Language, we cannot quite agree what exactly “Government” means.  We can make moral judgments on what a government is supposed to do, what powers it has, and who controls it. We can have philosophical discussions about the extent of government reach, what limits the government has when applied to the daily lives of the governed, or how the government is allowed to enforce its will.  We could even debate by what moral code the government has actually achieved its place of power in the first place.

And it is all bullshit.

I am a pragmatist and a realist.
Government is simply this, according to Ted Bronson, not a philosopher, not a poly-sci major, and most days not even particularly interested in what the majority of people around the world do to occupy their time:

Government is the instrument that human beings create and use to control other people.

People want so very much to exert external control on the internal workings of the human mind that they create governments.  People have so little faith in their fellow man, that they want somebody, anybody, to keep them safe from the vandals at the gate.  People have so little faith in themselves that they create a mystical uberbody that they then empower to do the things that they themselves cannot do.  In other words, people want stability, safety, and order in an unstable, dangerous, and disorderly world.  For this they invent governments.

The rules that any given government operates under are as varied as there are countries, ya?  From Communist China to Canada, Zaire to Aden, the U.S. of A. to Mexico.  Not one governmental system on this planet is identical to another.  Some work better than others, most just do the best the can and struggle through.  Nazi Germany worked. The Pharaohnic dynasties worked.  Rome and Greece worked. I think it is safe to say that the value of the individual was pretty damn low on the totem pole in their list of priorities, but they all worked.  At least until they stopped working.

Regardless of how these governments came to power, via whatever form of cultural evolution or chicanery, divine right or logical thought, they all failed for one simple reason:

They broke faith with their populations.

They stopped listening to the people who had entrusted them with power. These governments failed to notice that they were no longer giving to their populations protections from predation, stability of commerce, or even an orderly progression of events that allowed them, the people, to raise their families without fear.

And now it is happening again.

When ACORN is actually empowered to count the votes in Minnesota, when Ohio has 200,000 ‘questionable’ registrations and election is decided by 200,000 votes, when racist thugs are standing outside the polling booth in Pennsylvania, I say that the order and safety of the election is probably in question.

When our current administration is hell bent on selling us down the river in order to ‘rescue’ the economy, heedless to the fact that there is no way in the nine hells of the Inferno that we could ever pay it back, I say that stability of commerce is in question.  Especially when one considers that the original “plan” puts a blank check in the hands of ONE man who is then charged with fixing everything but has no controls or oversight placed on him; and he then changes the plan that got rammed through the Legislature.

When our borders are a sieve through which the uneducated dregs or the violent zealots of the world pass through with impunity, and the guards who are charged with securing it are put in solitary confinement, I say that the predators are already amongst us.

The predators are inside the walls. Failure one.

Businesses cannot function without massive governmental interference. Failure two.

The very system that is supposed to create the orderly transfer of power from one officeholder to another has been corrupted. Failure three.

And here we sit, watching it happen.

A couple hundred years ago, some bright boy figured out that the purpose of government was to protect the ability of an individual to pursue Happiness.  The same guy said something about Liberty, rights being so obvious that they were self-evident, and that governments should be laid on a foundation of principles and organized to best effect such pursuit.  He also said a little something about the government deriving its power from those it served.

There might be something to all that.

We live in a Republic.  Meaning we all have a voice, but we hire people to carry out our will.

Is it our will that land and homes can be confiscated in order to make room for a higher taxable mega property?

Is it our will that we are barred from utilizing our own resources?

Is it our will that a moneyed minority can affect the transition of our elected offices?

Is it our will that laws passed by a majority of voters, changes to a state constitution no less, can be abrogated by a room full of lawyers and guys wearing robes? Or even that such laws be allowed to be placed on a ballot in the first place?  Or that a State’s governor won’t touch it but will encourage the courts to rule against it?

Is it our will that our government has reason one to poke its nose into what you and your doctor talk about behind the office door, or how you bargain for payment?

Is it our will that a labor union can bring an entire industry to it’s knees, and our government will only make it easier for unions to continue their stranglehold?

Is it our will that the federal government owns more real estate than any single private citizen, thereby preventing citizens from utilizing it?

Is it our will that our government deny us the ability to protect ourselves in our homes or places of business with the best or most effective tools available?

Is it our will that the fruits of our labor be divided forcibly between us and those who need an apple? How about when they come for the whole tree? The orchard?

Is it our will that the people we hire to represent us and hear our voices refuse to listen when we seek relief from what we see as injustice or even just poor management?

Is it our will to be “volunteered”?

Is it our will to send billions of our soon to be inflated/deflated/stagflated currency overseas in an effort to ‘combat worldwide poverty’?

Or is that above list of questions somewhat similar in tone to that list of grievances that same bright boy made a couple hundred years ago?

The current administration has shown no signs of being responsive to the people who put them office, nor has it fulfilled all of the basic tenets of what a government is supposed to do or not do. The next one that takes office in January has stated that not only will it continue said poor governance, but will heap further abuses upon us, the citizens of this country. 300 million people live here.  Less than half voted in the last election.  About eight million votes (three percent of the population) made the difference between winning and losing.

There are at least 23 million veterans in this country.  Vets who, like myself, took an oath to defend my country and my Constitution from ALL enemies, foreign and domestic.  If these continued abuses don’t stop, if my government continues to ignore the basic foundations of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, will we see the day when these vets will stand up and say, with one loud voice, that these scoundrels are no longer representing the citizenry, and we want our government back?

Our government has broken faith with us.

My city on the hill isn’t shining right now.

Is it time to turn the lights back on?

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way to talk to people who can seriously hold an opinion like this:

jeff Joke-oby, you are a racist buffoon. You and your sick rich cohorts run our economy into the ground and make an absolute mega fortune, it all goes bust (as it had to) and then you turn around and blame….Minorities????!!!?? You must be kidding me! The depths of your unreason know no bounds. You should be ashamed of yourself, You Rush Limbaugh clone…perhaps the Mexican laborers who built your McMansion brought a mutated strain of bubonic plague over the border and infected the entire financial system with evil immigrant nefarious virus stuff. Whatever Jeff, face it. YOU LOST. REAGAN LOST. THE FREE MARKET LOST. Your days of sucking the peoples blood to make your points and those of your corporate masters are OVER. Now go get a real job. (IF you can find one). 

That bit of sparkling commentary was in response to Boston Globe writer Jacoby’s column on the actual cause of the current “financial crisis,” namely the subprime mortgage boom as pushed by left-wingers dating back to the Carter administration.

Clearly nothing Jacoby cited in his article is actually true, according to the above commenter, and it’s actually those of us who have been successful over the past few decades that are at fault here.  For being successful, yes. 

Note the key phrases, “sucking the people’s blood” and “corporate masters.”  

I have friends who espouse the ideals of socialism, and the only way we stay friends is if we refrain from talking politics….but how long is that going to work, when our ideologies are diametrically opposed?  I simply Can Not Understand why someone would subject themselves to the State on anything, but then I was always mortally offended by seat belt laws.  The State has no right to tell me if I may die or not, goddammit.

What do you suppose it is about the regimes of Lenin, Mao Zedong, Castro, Hussein and Chavez that inspire emulation?  Could it be the widespread poverty?  Or maybe the decrease in personal freedoms has some appeal?   

“It won’t be the same, here, we’ll be DIFFERENT!” 

Yeah, in centuries of experimentation it has not been different.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  End of story.