Who is a terrorist and who is a patriot?

Lady Liberty writes:

"According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English language, terrorism is either 'the unlawful use or threat of violence especially against the state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion' or 'violent and intimidating gang activity.'

"The idea behind terrorism is basic: to generate terror. The methodology, regardless of the specifics, is just as simple: sudden and deadly violence of the kind that any rational human being would find terrifying. Terrorists hope their actions will engender whatever change it is they're aiming to facilitate through such intense fear...

"In its knee jerk reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the federal government rapidly defined its targets not only as terrorists but as those who are broadly defined as 'potential' terrorists... From the perspective of both the laws and the agencies, the most immediate result was that of a curtailment of civil liberties...

"Distilled down to its most basic premise, virtually any human being could loosely be termed a 'potential' terrorist...

"The biggest problem for those of us who are innocent is that some in government have gone much further. They've enaged in what is essentially a rewriting of definitions so as to target some people who are not... particularly popular with those same government authorities. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), many of the people falling under these more refined definitions are the same people who are the most likely to be railing against government inroads against various freedoms...

"For reasons that can easily be logically refuted, the government has determined that the ID cards are a great way to fight terrorism. Do you really think they're going to take any refusals to participate particularly well?

"recently... at a kind of educational seminar... conducted by the Department of Homeland Security... he was also informed that those supporting a strict interpretation of the Constitution are terrorists.

"Even as the label 'terrorist' is being redefined, so is the term 'patriot.' A patriot is, quit simply, one who loves his country. But now some government officials suggest that anyone who criticizes the war effort in Iraq is 'unpatriotic.' Others in positions of government authority... have made it clear that anyone who suggests that civil liberties might be more important than absolute safety are behaving unpatriotically...

"I do believe that the National ID card and similar tracking measures are evil because they undermine freedom... I am concerned at the rapidly growing mindset that potentiality is all but synonymous with actuality... I do support a literal interpretation of the Constitution as well as a return to the ideals of the Constitution as they were originally presented to the 13 colonies prior to ratification...

"In George Orwell's infamous novel 1984, one of the hallmarks of the tyrannical government under which his characters lived was something called 'newspeak.' By using 'newspeak,' the government redefined various words to mean whatever it wanted them to mean, and via incessant propaganda, it made sure the general population knew the 'correct' definitions as well. In the novel, bad was redefined as good, and war became peace; history was rewritten on an almost daily basis to conform.

"This habit of redefining words might be a little more subtle in the real world, but there's very little question that it's happening. The recent discoveries of government propaganda films released as 'news' stories was dismaying, but not unsurprising... In the short run, I suppose, then, I should consider any government attempts to label me and people like me as 'unpatriotic' or a 'terrorist' as actually being a compliment. But in the long run, government's predilection to change such definitions on a whim doesn't bode well for me...or for any of the rest of you, either."

03-13-05: By Definition

The Price of Patriotism ... by Christopher Manion

Christopher Manion explains why it's getting more and more difficult to fill the ranks of the all-volunteer army:

"as the war in Iraq grinds on, it offers a rare glimpse into market forces and their impact on patriotism...

"military recruiters are working night and day to fill the ranks of the U.S. government’s 'volunteer forces.' In spite of signing bonuses of $20,000.00, there are still not enough enlistees. When asked why recruiting is so tough, military recruiters... answer simply and truthfully: 'the war.'

"Second, the Financial Times reports that American mercenaries in Iraq, coyly referred to as 'private forces,' receive just under half a million dollars per man a year to perform the same duties, and run the same mortal risks, that most U.S. government troops do...

"As the war grinds on and troop strength continues to diminish, two options emerge clearly on the horizon. Either the pay received by the 'volunteer' forces will continue to rise toward the market value, or involuntary conscription will become the law of the land. A third option – that the war will end and the need for additional troops will subside – has been ruled out by the Bush Administration...

"Rousseau gave us that timeless slogan of ideological empire: the citizen 'must be forced to be free.' ...

"America’s Founding Fathers recognized the entire democratic charade as the nightmare of power-hungry madmen. They embraced instead the notion of a national government with strictly limited powers, where the voice of the states and of the people commanded the government, and not vice-versa. With regard to war, the Founders sided with Augustine and the Just War theory that had reigned in Christendom for a millennium and more...

"Increasingly, the American population is turning against the war. In a traditional democracy, where the people rule, that judgment would eventually lead to disengagement and peace...

"But not in Rousseau’s totalitarian democracy. There, instead of heeding the will of the people... the Sovereign imposes the 'General Will' – his ideological vision of what is good for them. And then, logically, 'they must be forced to be free,' and they are conscripted and sent into mortal combat...

"The rising demand for troops invites a closer look at the two alternatives. The first – the market – is unlikely to provide the necessary manpower. As the value of patriotic 'goodwill' declines even further, the bonus and pay formulae would have to approach the price of $450,000.00 per man per year already paid in the market – to the mercenary forces now serving by the thousands in Iraq.

"The only alternative is the draft. What the free market and natural law... cannot provide must be supplied by coercion – involuntary servitude of the youth who refuse to buy into the flag-waving happy-talk endless wars of the Leviathan state...

"Of course, this scenario reveals the profound contradiction between the symbolic language of 'democracy' that the U.S. government uses to justify its wars...

"And the future conscripts? 'They must be forced to be free.'

"May they rest in peace."

The Price of Patriotism ... by Christopher Manion

Spy vs. Spy in the Drug Wars :: PEJ News

Bill Piper writes:

"Proposed legislation would compel people to spy on their family members and neighbors, forcing all Americans to become foot soldiers in the war on drugs.

Neighbors spying on neighbors? Mothers forced to turn in their sons or daughters?

These are images straight out of George Orwell's 1984, or a remote totalitarian state. We don't associate them with the land of the free and the home of the brave, but that doesn't mean they couldn't happen here. A senior congressman, James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), is working quietly but efficiently to turn the entire United States population into informants--by force..."

Spy vs. Spy in the Drug Wars :: PEJ News

Why I prefer Indiana in the Central timezone

Indiana's Governor Daniels signed Senate Bill 127 into law on May 13. This act requires Indiana to observe daylight saving time (DST) throughout the state, beginning in 2006.

In addition, this act also requires the governor to petition the United States Department of Transportation within ten days to initiate proceedings to hold hearings on the location of the boundary between Eastern and Central Time in Indiana.

Now that we will be observing DST, I would very much like to see as much of Indiana as possible on Central Time.

State Representative Jackie Walorski of Lakeville says, "If we do nothing, we'll end up in Eastern Time. If we're proactive and do something, we can probably petition to be in Central Time.

"Several of the counties are going to go together and give a resolution to the governor in a couple of weeks and say we're petitioning to be on Central time. I really want us to be in this consortium of counties that makes a presentation to the governor, because we have a lot more power when we come together, as separate counties in a region instead of being all by ourselves on the issue..."

A "Central Time coalition... plans to make a presentation to the governor in a few weeks, which is well in advance of the federal hearings that will probably take place this summer."

I would like to see as many counties as possible be part of this consortium or coalition.

Because most localities prefer to have their clock read 12:00 at local noon, the earth has been divided up into 24 natural time zones, each 15 degrees wide on the average. This results in approximately the same number of hours of sunlight in the morning (before noon) as in the evening (after noon) in the middle of each zone. The Eastern zone is centered on 75 degrees and the Central on 90. This puts the natural boundary between Eastern and Central time at 82.5 degrees.

If you look in the atlas, with Fort Wayne at 85 degrees in the northeast and Evansville at 87 degrees in the southwest, you can see that all of Indiana lies well within the natural boundary of the Central timezone, as well as virtually all of Kentucky and Michigan, and the western half of Ohio.

Over the years, the statutory boundary has gotten moved quite a bit west of the 82.5 degree line in the U.S., especially north of Kentucky. I would like to see this boundary moved back closer to the natural boundary in Indiana by being drawn up our eastern border, aligning our time with our neighboring states to the west rather than those to the east.

Because most of Indiana has been observing Eastern time, and since Indiana is well within the natural boundary for Central time, there is already plenty of daylight in the evening to suit me. Even as we have been from 1966 until now (year round Eastern Standard) we already have anywhere from nearly an hour (November) to nearly two hours (February) more daylight in the evening than in the morning.

If Indiana successfully petitions to go to Central time, this would stay the same in the summer. If we continue on Eastern time, the sun would rise in July about 6:40 am and set about 9 pm, giving us only 5.3 hours before noon and 9 hours after noon, or a whopping 3.7 hours more sun in the evening than in the morning. Our clocks would read 1:50 pm at local noon. This just seems excessive to me.

I find it helpful to be able to wait until twilight before trying to get the family to bed. I find 8:45 pm already late enough for that in the summer months. It would be even tougher to get children to bed at a decent hour if we had to to wait until 9:45 pm for twilight on Eastern Daylight time.

Central Daylight Time, which most of Indiana effectively observes now in the summer, would still give us nearly two extra hours of sunlight in the summer evenings. Observing Central Standard Time in the winter would give us one more hour of morning sunlight than we have now. Having the sun up by 7am instead of 8am in December would be a nice help to dispel the mid-winter gloom.


Ref: http://www.wndu.com/news/052005/news_41952.php (3 May 2005, Jackie Walorski quote)
Ref: http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~oliver/ast3722/lectures/CoordsNtime/time.htm
Ref: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/us_tzones.html (timezone history)
Ref: http://www.mccsc.edu/time.html (more Indiana time history)


Following are some of the e-mail addresses and websites at which Indiana citizens can contact politicians and bureaucrats who are likely to have some influence on Indiana's timezone.

http://www.dot.gov/ost/ogc/subject/faqs/regulation/timezone.html
- joanne.petrie@ost.dot.gov { U.S. Department of Transportation }

Governor Mitch Daniels
- http://www.in.gov/gov/contact.html

Indiana state legislators
- http://www.in.gov/cgi-bin/legislative/contact/contact.pl

U.S. legislators
- senator_lugar@lugar.senate.gov
- http://bayh.senate.gov/LegForm.htm
- http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/

The case for sweatshops and child labor in developing countries

Radley Balko makes an interesting case for sweatshops and child labor in developing countries.

--[ Libertarian International. Network of liberty-minded individuals and organizations in Europe. ]--

WorldNetDaily: The law or good ideas?

Dr. Walter E. Williams writes:

"Whether 'evolving standards,' the 'weight of international opinion' and good ideas should determine court decisions underlies much of the ongoing conflict over President Bush's federal court appointees. A federal court appointee who'd say his decisions are guided by the letter and spirit of our Constitution would be tagged by Democrat senators and a few Republican senators, such as Arlen Specter, as an extremist. They'd prefer justices who share former Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes' vision that, 'We live under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.' Translated, that means we don't live under the Constitution; we live under tyrannical judges.

"Many law professors, and others who hold contempt for our Constitution, preach that the Constitution is a living document. Saying that the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don't have a Constitution. For rules to mean anything, they must be fixed. How many people would like to play me poker and have the rules be 'living'? Depending on 'evolving standards,' maybe my two pair could beat your flush.

"The founders were right about a lot of things, but they were dead wrong when they bought into Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 78 prediction that the judiciary was the 'least dangerous' branch of government."

WorldNetDaily: The law or good ideas?

Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder by Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff writes:

"For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history.

"She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state...

"I saw no sign that [the ACLU] has ever examined... the egregious conflicts of interest of her husband and guardian Michael Schiavo, who has been living with another woman for years, with whom he has two children, and has violated a long list of his legal responsibilities as her guardian, some of them directly preventing her chances for improvement. Judge Greer has ignored all of them.

"Michael Schiavo, who says he loves and continues to be devoted to Terri, has provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife (the legal one) since 1993... He insists she once told him she didn't want to survive by artificial means, but he didn't mention her alleged wishes for years after her brain damage, while saying he would care for her for the rest of his life.

"Terri Schiavo has never had an MRI or a PET scan, nor a thorough neurological examination. Republican Senate leader Bill Frist... said reasonably, 'I would think you would want a complete neurological exam' before determining she must die.

"In death penalty cases, defense counsel for retarded and otherwise mentally disabled clients submit extensive medical tests. Ignoring the absence of complete neurological exams, supporters of the deadly decisions by Judge Greer and the trail of appellate jurists keep reminding us how extensive the litigation in this case has been — 19 judges in six courts is the mantra...

In his book Forced Exit (Times Books), Wesley quotes neurologist William Burke: 'They feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. Imagine going one day without a glass of water! . . . It is an extremely agonizing death.' ...

"Contrary to what you've read and seen in most of the media, due process has been lethally absent in Terri Schiavo's long merciless journey through the American court system.

"'As to legal concerns,' writes William Anderson — a senior psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University — 'a guardian may refuse any medical treatment, but drinking water is not such a procedure. It is not within the power of a guardian to withhold, and not in the power of a rational court to prohibit.'

"Ralph Nader agrees. In a statement on March 24, he and Wesley Smith... said: 'If this were a death penalty case, this evidence would demand reconsideration. Yet, an innocent, disabled woman is receiving less justice. . . . This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live.' ...

"What kind of a nation are we becoming? The CIA outsources torture — in violation of American and international law — in the name of the freedoms we are fighting to protect against terrorism. And we have watched as this woman, whose only crime is that she is disabled, is tortured to death by judges, all the way to the Supreme Court.

"And keep in mind from the Ralph Nader-Wesley Smith report: 'The courts . . . have [also] ordered that no attempts be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical treatment. This outrageous order proves that the courts are not merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld, they have ordered her to be made dead.'

"In this country, even condemned serial killers are not executed in this way."

village voice > news > Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder by Nat Hentoff

WorldNetDaily: The culture of death advances

Pat Buchanan writes:

"Terri Schiavo will not have died a natural death. She will have been put to death by the state. The coroner's report should read: This was a state-sanctioned killing of a woman because she was brain-damaged, and the method of execution was by starvation and denial of water. These are methods most of us would protest if imposed on the Beltway snipers.

"Why did Florida put Terri Schiavo to death? Because that was the demand of a husband who refused to divorce her and denied her medical care, while he lived with another woman. Michael Schiavo is the ACLU poster boy for family values.

"In the Old Testament, King Solomon ruled that the mother who had been willing to give up her baby to the woman who had kidnapped the child rather than see the baby cut in half should have the child. Our Florida Solomon ruled that the husband who wanted Terri dead should have custody of her, not the parents who wanted her alive.

"Under the Constitution, no person may be deprived of life without due process of law. This has traditionally meant a trial of one's peers, proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a heinous crime and no cruel or unusual punishment. Though she committed no crime, Terri was put to death in a manner most decent men and women would not use to put a suffering animal out of its misery...

"Americans must face a hard truth. The state of Florida put Terri Schiavo to death. Before Holy Week, she was neither dead nor dying. For 15 years, she had been cared for by nurses and visited by loving parents. She was not dying until the judge ordered her dead, by ordering her feeding tube removed. Then it has taken her nearly two weeks to die, as he blocked the reinsertion of the feeding tube and ordered police to prevent anyone from giving her water.

"When the courts failed Terri, and Congress and the Florida Legislature failed Terri, the governor of Florida, who took an oath to defend the constitutional rights of Florida's citizens, should have taken custody of Terri, ordered the tube reinserted and let the federal courts proceed with the de novo hearing of the evidence, while Terri was still alive... He should have rescued Terri from the death sentence unjustly imposed upon her. If the court held him in contempt, so what? Who does not hold that Florida court in contempt?"

WorldNetDaily: The culture of death advances

Four Years Growth by Laurence M. Vance

Laurence M. Vance writes:

"George Bush was right when he said a few years ago: 'The American people have been overcharged for Government, and they deserve a refund.' The only problem with his statement is that it is now Bush and the Republicans who have overcharged the American people for government, and there is no refund in sight."

Four Years Growth by Laurence M. Vance

Remarks at the Founding Meeting of Primary Challenge by James Ostrowski

James Ostrowski writes:

"Duh, if they [politicians] were going to spend your money the way you wanted, why would they have to get you to pay up by threatening to throw you into a dungeon if you don’t?"

Remarks at the Founding Meeting of Primary Challenge by James Ostrowski

Against the Central Planners of Left and Right by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. writes:

"Forget going after government armed with public-policy studies showing that federal farm policy has been an expensive boondoggle or that federal poverty policy has only entrenched social pathologies that have rendered our cities unlivable. True and valuable as these statements are, they do not penetrate to the fundamental immorality of a system that is based on fleecing ordinary citizens in order to bestow special privileges on sectors of the population that did nothing to earn them...

"this supposedly 'failed' government program hasn’t failed at all. It has done just what its architects wanted it to do: it enriched well-connected big farmers as well as a huge class of bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture. These people... are ripping us off...

"Rather than agitating for this or that reform, the entire system must be demystified and delegitimized. Superstitious reverence for Washington, D.C., must yield to the conviction that society, like the market itself, can order its affairs without the central direction of an imperial capital. Property owners, families, voluntary organizations, churches – in other words, all the institutions that the central state consistently seeks to marginalize or displace – can maintain a livable and decent social order far better than the would-be central planners of left and right."

Against the Central Planners of Left and Right by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Those Bush Vetoes by Laurence M. Vance

Laurence M. Vance writes:

"So for those who still think that Bush has a fiscally conservative bone in his body, read the following statement slowly and carefully: During his first term in office, George W. Bush did not veto a single bill sent to him by Congress. Not one. This means that Bush shares responsibility with the spendthrift Congresses that have for the past four years squandered not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money. To argue that Bush did not veto any bills because he was a Republican with a Republican Congress is ludicrous. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter were Democratic presidents with Democratic Congresses and it didn’t stop them from vetoing bills."

Those Bush Vetoes by Laurence M. Vance

Tangle Tongue by William Norman Grigg

William Norman Grigg writes:

"During a recent interview with the Washington Post, Mr. Bush was asked if significant changes needed to be made in his policy toward Iraq. After all, the administration now admits that Saddam did not possess a fearsome arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction. With casualties mounting, and scandals accumulating with respect to torture and faulty intelligence, the Post inquired, could we expect to see changes in policy or personnel? To judge from Mr. Bush’s astoundingly self-serving reply, the answer is – apparently not.

'We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections,' Mr. Bush told the Post. 'The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me.'

This statement earns a full 9.0 on the Clinton Scale of artful dishonesty... the president did not say that his assessment was truthful or reliable, but only that a spare majority of the voting public bought into it. Rather than being subject to accountability, in other words, Mr. Bush and his handlers are now beyond accountability."

Tangle Tongue by William Norman Grigg

Walter E. Williams: Not yours to give

Walter Williams writes:

"What about President Bush's $350 million commitment for earthquake and tsunami relief... ? Charity is reaching into one's own pockets to assist his fellow man in need. Reaching into someone else's pocket to assist one's fellow man hardly qualifies as charity. When done privately, we deem it theft, and the individual risks jail time...

"I'd like to ask President Bush and members of the 109th Congress whether they've discovered the constitutional authority for charitable expenditures undiscovered by James Madison, William Giles, Presidents Franklin Pierce and Grover Cleveland, and Davy Crockett...

"[T]he lion's share of the blame rests with 280 million Americans. Elected officials simply mirror public misunderstanding or contempt for constitutional principles. Tragically, adherence to the constitutional values of men like James Madison and Davy Crockett would spell political suicide in today's America."

Walter E. Williams: Not yours to give

Thomas Sowell: Ending slavery

Thomas Sowell writes:

"It seems so obvious today that, as Lincoln said, if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. But no country anywhere believed that three centuries ago...

"Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened...

"As anti-slavery ideas eventually spread throughout Western civilization, a worldwide struggle pitted the West against Africans, Arabs, Asians and virtually the entire non-Western world, which still saw nothing wrong with slavery. But Western imperialists had gunpowder weapons first and that enabled the West to stamp out slavery in other societies as well as in its own...

"It was a worldwide epic struggle, full of dramatic and sometimes violent episodes, along with inspiring stories of courage and dedication. But do not expect Hollywood to make a movie about anything so contrary to their vision of the world."

Thomas Sowell: Ending slavery

Iraq: Purple or Still Black and Blue?: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

Ivan Eland writes:

"When armed guerrillas roam the countryside, even a free and fair democratic vote may be irrelevant to the outcome. According to a New York Times article from 1967, the Johnson administration was pleased as punch then about an 83 percent voter turnout in South Vietnamese elections. We all know how that conflict turned out: the majority went to the polls and the armed minority eventually went to the halls of power.

"In Iraq, as in Vietnam, the key to peace and prosperity is to get the armed minority to cease committing acts of violence. To do that, the U.S. government must honestly examine why the Sunni insurgents are fighting. Instead, the president calls the rebels terrorists, criminals, and holdovers from Saddam’s regime. In fact, although some of them fall into those categories, experts agree that most are average Sunnis battling the perceived foreign occupier and fearing that any new Shiite government would exact reprisals for years of oppressive Sunni rule. The insurgency wouldn’t be nearly so effective without substantial support in the Sunni community.

"If the president and the Republican Congress really wanted to do the Iraqi people a favor—after authorizing an unneeded invasion, which caused widespread chaos and violence against Iraqis—they would abandon the illusion that merely allowing the Iraqis to vote will eventually make them free and prosperous."

Iraq: Purple or Still Black and Blue?: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

Bullies and Their Pulpits - Mises Institute

P. Gardner Goldsmith writes:

"Bush has opted to put a government mask on private charity. The participants of the free market, though their money will be collected, will not be seen by those who are helped...

"The government of the United States will take the credit around the world...

"Of course, this is nothing new. In an abstract way, the US government has been taking credit for private international aid since the close of World War Two. When the federal Marshall Plan showered $1.7 billion in loans and direct aid on West Europe, it was heralded as a profound success. There was little mention that the money was expropriated from the citizens of America for an entirely unconstitutional program, and that the system actually worked to retard economic growth in the area... It... has been instrumental in creating a false impression in the minds of many Americans that if international help is needed, it must be done through the 'mighty' power of government...

"Government aid, be it direct financial aid, or below-market loans through quasi-governmental entities like the World Bank, can only exist at the expense of private citizens...

"There is no way that government aid can help rebuild a devastated economy as efficiently or as fast as private enterprise...

"It is the players in the free market, who risked their own capital, and now freely donate it to causes in which they believe, who ought to be seen around the world."

Bullies and Their Pulpits - Mises Institute

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: Apply 'Ownership Society' to Government Schools by Terence P. Jeffrey

Terence Jeffrey writes:

"As in all socialist regimes, this one redistributes wealth in perverse ways. America's education bureaucracy takes money from working and middle class families who sacrifice to send their children to religious and private schools (because they prefer the values and perspectives taught there to those taught in government-owned schools) and spends it for the benefit of those rich families who don't mind sending their children to the government-owned schools in their neighborhoods.

"Parents who struggle to scrape together the tuition to send their children to religious and private schools are now doubly taxed--locally and federally--to support government-owned schools they do not like and do not use.

"When 'moderate' Bob Dole was the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, he ran on a platform calling for abolition of the federal Department of Education because the Constitution does not grant the federal government a role in primary and secondary education

"Conservatives in Congress should fight to kill Bush's new federal education spending plan and return to the principles of the Dole platform and the U.S. Constitution. If every American family cannot instantly be given sole ownership of their children's schooling, at least they shouldn't have to pay twice for the schools the government insists on owning."

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: Apply 'Ownership Society' to Government Schools by Terence P. Jeffrey

Bush Reveals the Truth on Iraq :: PEJ News :: Features, Opinion and Analysis: Peace, Earth & Justice News

Kurt Nimmo writes:

"... the current political landscape of the Middle East is a result of American and European colonialism and direct and covert intervention in the political affairs of millions of Arabs for more than a hundred years. No mention of the fact that the borders of modern Iraq were not drawn by Iraqis, but an Oxford-educated “Arabist,” Gertrude Bell. No mention of the fact Britain spent forty years killing Iraqis, who resisted occupation from 1920 onward with the same ferocity they are now resisting the Americans. Not a word about Winston Churchill, who did “not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas” against “uncivilized tribes,” in other words Iraqis resisting occupation. No mention of the CIA’s role in the Ba’athist coup of 1961—that would result in Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship—a coup the Ba’ath secretary-general at the time remarked upon as follows: “We came to power on a CIA train.” Certainly no mention of the fact Saddam Hussein “was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim” in 1959, according to United Press International. If there are “hate-ridden psychologies” in the Muslim Middle East, they were sustained and magnified—indeed, imported—by Americans and Europeans..."

Bush Reveals the Truth on Iraq :: PEJ News :: Features, Opinion and Analysis: Peace, Earth & Justice News

To Whom Does the Bill of Rights Apply? by Harry Browne

Harry Browne writes:

"The important point is that the Constitution doesn't apply to Americans, it doesn't apply to citizens, it doesn't even apply to 'people.' It applies to the federal government. The body of the Constitution tells the federal government what it is allowed to do... The Bill of Rights tells the federal government what it is not allowed to do...

"[U]ntil a suspected 'terrorist' gets a fair and impartial trial, you don't know whether he is a terrorist. So even if you think non-citizen terrorists have no rights, how do you even know for sure that they are terrorists – or that they are non-citizens – until every facet of due process has been applied."

To Whom Does the Bill of Rights Apply? by Harry Browne