Saturday, March 16, 2013

DHS deploying in Homeland with ‘weapons of war’

Depending on one’s level of trust for this administration and its Homeland Security Secretary, his dire concerns will obviously not be shared by all. What should be are his questions, and one should not have to go tracking down links and sorting through motivations and agendas to get straight answers. Above all, any debate should not be dependent on ideologically-based speculation. [More]
Today's Gun Rights Examiner report notes some reasonable, common sense questions and challenges the notion that trust should be our automatic default mode when dealing with what is, in effect, a standing army.

5 comments:

Crotalus said...

"Department of Homeland Security".

Sounds more Naziesque every day.

Ed said...

http://www.usflag.org/uscode36.html

Title 36 Chapter 10 Section 176b:
"The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat. When the flag is displayed on a motorcar, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender."

The flag may be fixed firmly on that DHS vehicle, but it is at the left rear of that vehicle, not the right front.

Details, details. Not exactly leading by example, are they?

Chas said...

Standing army? While they're flying over our cities firing blanks at us? "Standing" would be a relief! These are actively, agressively threatening us with death. Obama is making it plain that he wants to murder us.

Chas said...

Try this for a refreshing change:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsRK3DNoa_Q

Anonymous said...

I can't help but think of the term "chickens, or rather appropriations, coming home to roost."

If conservatives had not for years supported a so-called strong national defense—which is just a pretext for supporting the military industrial complex and the Standing Army that the Second Amendment was specifically written to "prevent,"[1]—would this "engine of oppression"[2] be coming home to roost?

The Constitution calls for "no appropriations" longer than a strict limit of two years. I don't think the founders were enamored with arcane accounting trivialities about getting today's "renewed" appropriations spent inside 24 months. They were trying to prevent the establishment of a military industrial complex.

That's why they said "no." No means no. What part of "no" don't conservatives understand?

I consider it my Constitutional right to have a "well-regulated militia" to which Congress has been authorized "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining" in which to serve this nation for national defense.

A strong citizen-Militia defense that would probably cost 1/7th of today's profligate "defense" spending, if Switzerland's per capita defense outlays are any guide. And, yes, Switzerland is the model upon which the Second Amendment was written.[3]

I'm not just some old fogie Mennonite farmer baying on the windy northwest Ohio prairie. Attorney Stephen P. Halbrook has argued the same, very well in his book "Target Switzerland."

Pro-Standing-Army Conservatives like to trot out the old bromide that I'm arguing the right to bear arms is only in militia service as a limited, collective right. No, I'm not, and Stephen Halbrook addresses that also.

It's my personal right to bear arms, both for personal defense and security (as the Ohio Constitution recognizes,) to defend the nation in a organized and disciplined Swiss-model Militia, and not pay war taxes to a military industrial complex that spends as much money as the rest of the worlds military expenditures combined.

Peace isn't a dirty word, and "War is a Racket," at least mostly, as USMC Major General Smedley D. Butler so bluntly said.

While I appreciate men willing to die to defend this nation as much as Major General Smedley D. Butler did, there is very little real "defense" coming from all the United States' defense spending. It's mostly to bully other countries.

"I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."

So the muscle of the war racket appropriations chickens are coming home to roost, and it is as much the fault of conservatives' subversion of the Constitution and Second Amendment as anybody else's.

There is such a thing as unintended consequences for decisions that conservatives make too. It's time to take some personal responsibility for decades of supporting the military industrial complex and work towards supporting the complete Second Amendment, not just the last half.


___References___

[1] “What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty….” ~Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment, I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789

[2] "...no such engine of oppression as a standing army." ~Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814

[3] “The inhabitants of Switzerland emancipated themselves by the establishment of a Militia, which finally delivered them from the tyranny of their lords.” ~Representative Jackson, first U.S. Congress, when it met and turned to defense measures in 1791