All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

(emphasis mine)

This is important because it means that when the US signs a treaty, we are then committed to fully and completely honoring it with the full force of law from the Federal level all the way down to your local sheriff.

Consider for a minute the Kyoto Protocol.  If the US signed onto it, it would mean that the UN suddenly has the right to limit American ingenuty, technology, industry, advancement,  prosperity, and sovereignty.  It is a way of imposing taxes on industrial countries, paid to an un-elected world body with no enforcement powers, for the dubious cause of promoting second and third world dictators and despots with our cash.  All based on a pseudo-science of global warming that more scientists daily are speaking out AGAINST.

And if we signed it, we’d be on the hook.

Now take the Law of the Sea Treaty.  This Treaty has been bouncing around the UN since the Fifties and again, the US has refused to sign it. And for good reasons too:

• It vested control over seabed mining in countries that do not possess the necessary technology.
• Its governing structure guaranteed a permanent majority to the less developed countries of the G-77.
• It burdened companies who would be interested in mining with unusual costs and obligations and provided various permanent advantages to their competition. Private companies would bear the expense of developing technology, of prospecting, of paying taxes. The Authority would bear none of these. Moreover, the private company would be required to sell its technology to buyers and at prices determined by the Authority. The duration and extent of the mining rights would be determined by the Authority.
• These regulatory powers would protect markets and prices from the competition of seabed mining.

In plain English, it means that yet again, a UN council will be able to tell industrialized countries or what private companies within those countries CAN’T do, under law, within their own territorial waters, where ships of commerce or war can or cannot travel, and imposes fines (again paid to an unelected body with no enforcement power that supports dictators and despots) for violations. See this article for more detailed reasons the LOS treaty is a very bad idea.  Just a taste:

“One of the concerns raised by critics of the Law of the Sea Treaty is that it could be used to sharply limit U.S. military operations.  Among the examples they cite is Article 20, which stipulates: “In the territorial sea, submarines and other underwater vehicles are required to navigate on the surface and to show their flag.”

That pretty much sounds like someone else telling us, the United States, how we can deploy our own defense structure.  Answer the question of why anyone would want to force that issue and you have your answer about the real meaning of and reason for the proposed treaty.

Which brings me to the inspiration for this piece:  It seems that a treaty we signed is having some negative ramifications right here and now.  These folks seem to be in the right, constitutionally speaking.  Morally, I find it repugnant.  What I find more repugnant, however, is that the same administration that signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child sued these two towns in California who took advantage of it…and the current administration has done nothing to stop the lawsuit from pressing forward.

Washington DC, listen up. You can’t have it both ways.  It could be that this is just another case of our legislature not reading the damn bill or upon reading it didn’t understand its ramifications. Once signed and ratified, however, it is the law of the land.  If you want to break the treaty, fine.  If you wanted exemptions to the treaty, you should have done so before it was signed and ratified.  Take this as a learning moment and consider carefully the next time you have to, you know, actually THINK about something before you do it.

Yes, because the VA demands a permission slip, kind of like the ones you had to have your mommy sign before you could go a school field trip in grammar school, for anyone to interview a vet under their care.

The good news is that this flagrant violation of the First Amendment has apparently been rectified. Three days later. And then only after the news organization who hired this stringer in the first place wrote a nasty-gram to the VA reminding them of the First Amendment and the fact that the U.S. Supreme court has somehow managed to not yet disallow it.

But this is only part of the story as I see it. In essence, the VA has decided that they are in loco parentis for their patients.  Their claim during this incident is that a member of the media (and junior though he may be, he is still a member of the media) has to ask permission from the facility to do any sort of interview so the VA can “make every effort to protect the privacy of our patients.”  The assumption there is that our country’s veterans are not capable of making their own adult decisions.  Sure, these vets were adult enough to sign the dotted line.  These vets were adult enough to be given training on the most sophisticated military hardware on planet Earth.  These vets were adult enough to know that volunteering or accepting conscription meant that they were going to be asked to kill or die for our country and our Constitution.  But they are apparently not adult enough to know how to talk to a reporter.  They are apparently not adult enough to know that by speaking to a reporter that their words can be transmitted over airwaves or through cables and other people would hear or see their words.  And the VA apparently thinks that our disabled vets are not even adult enough to know that their names might be attached to their words.

How bloody insulting can the VA actually be without, oh, I don’t know, accidentally infecting our vets with HIV or hepatitis.

I am a disabled veteran.  (And, no, the nature of my injuries is not open for discussion.) I served in Desert Storm. I spent the last three years of my enlistment undergoing physical therapy and taking drugs that would get me arrested if not prescribed by a Navy doctor.  I spent four years after being discharged under the care of the VA hospital in Birmingham, AL.  I never saw the same VA doc twice in a row.  It took months just to get a test scheduled, months more to get the results.  I actually lost a job once because I told my boss if I don’t go to B’ham next week it would take four months to get another appointment, and he told me I couldn’t have the day off.  During those four years, I was given experimental drugs by an intern who was doing a study and couldn’t get volunteers at a civilian hospital or a prison.  I was given a pain drug that was a THC derivative so powerful that I couldn’t function through the hallucinations.  The VA sent me powerful narcotics through the US mail that were stolen from my mailbox and not replaced.  The VA required me to use private insurance or cash to pay for some of my drugs, but thankfully none of my treatments.

And I never got any better.

Not until I went cold turkey on my meds (with the resulting psychotic episode) and saved enough to go to a private doctor and pay her cash instead.

The VA had no agenda here.  They weren’t deliberately trying to make my life miserable. They just didn’t care.  They are trying to handle a gigantic mass of patients, some of whom cannot be fixed without surgery that they don’t have the budget to perform.  They have to deal daily with patients who may not have finished high school, might be senile due to old age, could be drug addled or mind melted from illicit drugs or alcohol.  So they are forced by neccessity to treat every single one of their patients the exact same way.  They are forced to assume that anyone who comes through their doors is the lowest common denominator just to save themselves some precious time for the next 50 burned out old vets who come through the door today. We won’t even discuss the psychiatric problems some of these guys have and the dearth of programs to help.  (Hint to the VA: sometimes the problem you are treating is not in the body, but in the mind. The extra ten seconds you spend with your patient might tell you that.)

And the VA has to have rules like this just to get through the day.  They have to make sure that some of their more emotionally or psychically damaged patients are protected from the vultures who make up our American press corps.   But it seems like a man who can get up and address a public forum is probably capable enough to make his own decisions regarding talking to a reproter after the town hall.  It is simple math though; there is not enough time in the day to make rational and individual decisions regarding patients, so the VA, by default, has to stop anything that isn’t in their little rule book.

This is the face of goverment health care.  This is the fate of us all with universal health care.

A bill to ensure the continued free flow of commerce within the United States and with its global trading partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain effective cybersecurity defenses against disruption, and for other purposes.

Well, as I see it, this is another thing that, on the surface, makes sense to a majority of folks.  After all, the .govs out there need to be protected in case of some kind of massive hack attempts by the Chinese, right?  And all the bank files need to be safe don’t they? We do own them now anyway, right? But Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air gets it right when he says

Section 14 may be a bigger problem.  It essentially revokes all privacy safeguards on Internet use for all networks.  The Fourth Amendment would go straight out the window with the explicit inclusion of “private sector owned critical infrastructure information systems and networks.”  While Section 18 limits jurisdiction to federal networks, Section 14 allows the government to go after private networks without search warrants.  The section also doesn’t limit the jurisdiction to acute attacks, either.  That jurisdiction exists at all times.

That’s right folks.  This administration wants to be able to control, search, seize, or shut down private internet networks, like the one we have with our hosting company, or you have with yours, without so much as a hint of a thought of an actual warrant.  Or, let’s just say you want to read about hydroponic farming because you, like us here at the Raffles, are under severe water restrictions.  Your internet address, the server you used, the sites you visited, etc. might possibly be added to a database of people who are growing pot in their houses because obviously only criminals would need that kind of information according to Skippy the civil servant.  Or maybe you want to buy ammo in bulk from an online ammo store, can we trust Skippy not to freak out because in his mind there is no reason for anyone to need to buy a thousand rounds of ammo at a time unless they were going to go all clock towery?  In response, Skippy shits down the website, shuts down the hosting company that has that site on its servers (thereby shutting down thousands of that company’s other client sites), and puts your name on the list of folks who need to be ‘interviewed’.  All in the name of national security, of course.  And all without a warrant, possibly without even some supervisor giving the OK.

The bill is asking for “a cadre of information technology specialists” to do this work, so we have to assume that means civil servants and all that it entails.  Low paid, disgruntled individuals who weren’t good enough to get an IT job with a private company, and their bosses who may not even know how the WWW works, let alone how to put together a search string on Google.

Now, one more thing…

How, if at all, does this bill (introduced on April 1) relate to the bill (introduced Jan 7) HR266, the Cybersecurity Education Enhancement Act of 2009?

To authorize the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish a program to award grants to institutions of higher education for the establishment or expansion of cybersecurity professional development programs, and for other purposes.

Is this a way for the Fed to be able to grow their own little e-nerds and funnel cash to lib universities at the same time? Otherwise, why would it be under the Sec of HS instead of say, Education?  If they do relate to each other, isn’t it odd that the oh-so-vaunted ‘transparency’ doesn’t seem to be in effect?

Like we’ve said folks, it isn’t just the Dems, it isn’t just this administration.  It is the culture of D.C.  They want subjects, not citizens.  They want to be a huge Uncle Sam who has control,  subtle for now, over every aspect of your lives that they can touch.  Do Not Fall For This.  The first bill will violate your First and Fourth amendment protected rights to free speech and due process.  The second one, which was actually introduced first, will give them the drones to pursue the policy.

Thanks to Byron Wolfsong who originally emailed this subject to us while we were off enjoying our weekend stimulating the economy.

Sometimes I think we aren’t being the whole truth about things.  Then I think that most of the time we don’t even know what the “things” they aren’t telling us the truth about are.