Yes. Mr Obama is quite that ignorant. He will continue to spend this nation into unrepentant doom. Rick Santelli makes an obvious point that is clearly beyond most GOWPs — Mr Obama and his entire cabinet and coterie included:
BZ
Yes. Mr Obama is quite that ignorant. He will continue to spend this nation into unrepentant doom. Rick Santelli makes an obvious point that is clearly beyond most GOWPs — Mr Obama and his entire cabinet and coterie included:
BZ
In a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. The court ruling — which one gun advocacy group compared to the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling — stemmed from cases challenging ordinances in Chicago and suburban Oak Park, Ill., that effectively ban the possession of handguns.
The court split along its usual ideological lines: the court’s more conservative justices — John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — voted to extend gun rights, while Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor voted to hold the line against such arguments.
“Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day,” Alito wrote in the court’s majority opinion. The right to bear arms, he wrote, applied to the states because of the 14th Amendment, adopted in part to ensure uniform national standards of justice after the Civil War.
“It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” Alito wrote.
The court’s majority suggested the ruling is a logical extension of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2008 declaring that the right to bear arms is an individual one — and not one that simply acknowledges the existence of state militias. However, in the new ruling, the justices did not give precise guidance about how broadly the right to bear arms applies, and which particular kinds of regulations might be unconstitutional.
In the main dissenting opinion, Breyer wrote that he found “nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes.” Ginsburg and Sotomayor joined Breyer’s dissent.
A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the US president the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.
Senator Joe Lieberman and other bill sponsors have refuted the charges that the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act gives the president an Internet “kill switch.”
Instead, the bill puts limits on the powers the president already has to cause “the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication” in a time of war, as described in the Communications Act of 1934, they said in a breakdown of the bill published on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website.
One critic said Thursday that the bill will hurt the nation’s security, not help it. Security products operate in a competitive market that works best without heavy government intervention, said Wayne Crews, vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulation think tank.
“Policymakers should reject such proposals to centralize cyber security risk management,” Crews said in an e-mail. “The Internet that will evolve if government can resort to a ‘kill switch’ will be vastly different from, and inferior to, the safer one that will emerge otherwise.”
Cybersecurity technologies and services thrive on competition, he added. “The unmistakable tenor of the cybersecurity discussion today is that of government steering while the market rows,” he said. “To be sure, law enforcement has a crucial role in punishing intrusions on private networks and infrastructure. But government must coexist with, rather than crowd out, private sector security technologies.”
On Wednesday, 24 privacy and civil liberties groups sent a letter raising concerns about the legislation to the sponsors. The bill gives the new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications “significant authority” over critical infrastructure, but doesn’t define what critical infrastructure is covered, the letter said.
Fears that the legislation is aimed at bringing the Internet under the regulatory power of the U.S. government in an offensive against free speech were heightened further on Sunday, when Lieberman revealed that the plan was to mimic China’s policies of policing the web with censorship and coercion.
“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley.
While media and public attention is overwhelmingly focused on the BP oil spill, the establishment is quietly preparing the framework that will allow Obama, or indeed any President who follows him, to bring down a technological iron curtain that will give the government a foot in the door on seizing complete control over the Internet.
From The Washington Post:
Gun rights extended by Supreme Court
By MARK SHERMAN
The Associated Press
Monday, June 28, 2010; 10:46 AM
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution’s Second Amendment restrains government’s ability to significantly limit “the right to keep and bear arms,” advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.
By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices also signaled, however, that some limitations on the right could survive legal challenges.
Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right “applies equally to the federal government and the states.”
Two very important points I should like to make upon first consideration:
1. This is a 5 – 4 decision. Mr Obama will stack the deck and your Constitutional / Bill of Rights freedoms will be ground away;
2. Isn’t it sad that we were concerned about how SCOTUS would rule on such a basic freedom?
Next up to bat: your written and vocal freedoms are soon to be questioned.
Chalk this up as a “win.”
For now.
BZ