Are you aware that Liberty has been steadfastly held by the Supreme Court to include the Right to pursue a livelihood?

And that such fundamental rights cannot be subject to a tax or fee because if it were otherwise, such rights could be taxed out of existence ?

And that the courts have never adjudicated the income tax does, or does not, infringe upon such a right?

If the income tax is a valid tax upon the pursuit of a livelihood, the government can properly confiscate 100 percent of the earnings of everyone.

Would this not be a condition of slavery and stand the concept of the “sovereign citizen” upon its head??

It’s true, it’s true. You just know those writers were lab-grade specimens of the aristocratic left – heavy on the moralistic attitudes, light on any genuine respect for individual freedom and choice.

They gave us the civil rights movement, and followed it up with the welfare state. They “stopped” the war in Vietnam, but did nothing to slow the drug war. They demanded free speech on campus in the 1960s, only to muzzle it when they rose to faculty status in the 1990s. They fought for the rights of the accused, then made sure there were enough laws on the books to accuse any American at any time. They refused to sacrifice earthly happiness in the name of religion, and grew up to demand that everyone else start sacrificing earthly happiness in the name of the environment. They stood for tolerance and fought against the stale consensus, then they went on to build modern progressivism into a ruthlessly intolerant and shamelessly preachy consensus.

Hey…ask me what I think of the prospects for a left-libertarian alliance? Go ahead, ask.

I haven’t seen the episode, but from Maggie’s description it sounds like the targets are lowbrow christians. Well those guys have their flaws, but in this decade, they are not the people placing a temple guard around the US constitution. Quite the opposite in fact.

So many people people ignore the earliest violations of the Constitution by presidents and congress, they tend to instead focus on only the most recent violations, but if the people had taken action on those first violations, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now and we’d be having to deal with only the current attempts to violate our rights and our Law of the Land.

“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.” — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark – Mapp vs. Ohio

The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it’s a whole lot better than what we have now.

Yeah – intellectual honesty at its finest, right here on display.

The space visitors arrive in the 1700s to seed Earth’s culture with a series of revolutionary texts. For whatever plot-advancing reason, they can only decode two languages: English, and much less effectively, French. So most of humanity is at first totally untouched by their intervention.

Things do not go well from there. The French texts fail straight away, and even the better English translations turn out to be far from complete. Key concepts are omitted, fundamental questions left unanswered. Humanity is forced to fill in the blanks as best it can.

It does not do very well. The legacy culture people use to replace those missing concepts turns out to be a totally corrupt amalgam of violence, inequality, superstition, sexual repression, bigotry, and bad logic. These ingredients do not mix well with the new text, and soon terrible perversions arise. The texts fall into the hands of professional sophists, who win power by promising to interpret them for the good of all.

For a long time, too many earthlings are too desperately poor even to spend time thinking about the texts. Worse, they are too powerless and too meek to challenge the sophists, who they’ve been taught from childhood to admire.

When the space visitors return in 2012, they are disgusted to see the wreckage of their plans.

They find that only a few small groups have come to understand the authentic meaning of the texts. But no one listens to them yet, and still they use up most of their energy debating with each other. They work for changes that will not happen while they live, and may not even happen in the centuries after they have died.

The space travelers, calculating the extent of past, present, and future human misery resulting from their failure, argue about whether the planet should be destroyed or allowed more time to discover the true meaning of the texts.

I’ll call it “Independence Day”. No, wait. Shit! That’s not gonna work.

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

——————-
The consensus at the time, in response to the outrage, and doubt, was that credible references claimed they were present when Bush allegedly uttered those words, and the precision of syntax, by witnesses, in addition to the guy’s personality, tends to lead me to believe he did.
I suppose we can let the historians fight it out, regarding veracity.
If he did not *say* it, he certainly left one huge, steamy heap of a dung
atop that precious document…

Believe me, if there was ever a president I’d believe had uttered those words, it would be W. His actions sure reflected that sentiment; as have Obama’s. And of course plenty of congress members.

But as always, we weaken our position when using unfounded material in debate.

If the alien uses a blog, then it avoids the need for face-to-face (biological risks), and also cuts down on the risks that we would try to imprison or hurt the truth-speaking alien if we found out what he really was.

Chances are that the alien would take summers off from blogging to report back to the mother ship and also so he wouldn’t become too lonely for the lack of lady aliens here on Earth.

We have no way of knowing if this is already happening, but it probably isn’t. It just seems too crazy to believe.

“It’s gotta be Burgers!” (TM)