The Argument of Tyrants.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves.”

Those familiar with this quotation from William Pitt the Younger, who was the British Prime Minister around the time our Founding Fathers were penning the Constitution, might shake their heads sadly when contemplating the uncanny relevance of his words some 227 years after they were delivered in a speech to Parliament.

It would have been apt had he spoken them in the United States Congress in 2010.

After forcing us to witness the parade of unfortunate victims of medical insurance horror stories, used so despicably by Democrats as political props, we are being cajoled into believing that the intrusion of the federal government into our health care system is a “necessity.”

Now, go ahead and read the quote again.

How stupid do they suppose us to be? The current administration, with the help of its adoring media, harangues us daily with the necessity of dealing with the “crisis” of uninsured Americans. Of course, their big-government preferences for dealing with any problem, large or small, triggers a huge and inevitably malformed growth on the body politic – one with a trillion dollar price tag, a price tag the United States can ill afford in this time of the one true crisis: a faltering economy and high unemployment.

Lost in the wailing and hysteria during this latest power-grab by an Administration of elitists so smug as to believe that we, the unwashed masses, cannot possibly merit the freedom to pursue life, liberty, property and happiness without their guidance and direction, is the fact that the American free-market system would make this problem disappear if left to its own devices.

Simply put, markets work much better than manipulation.

If freed of the heavy hand of mandates and regulation, and if they wish to survive, health insurance companies would by necessity be more responsive to the needs of health consumers - in the same manner as an automobile manufacturer, or indeed, an automobile insurance company. They would be forced by consumer demand to be sensitive to the price and quality of the goods and services they provide to their customers.

All the things that free-market companies do to win and keep customers, coupled with common sense reforms including tort reform, competition across state lines and the lifting of the ridiculous anti-competitive mandates, would certainly result in lower premiums and hence, more coverage for more Americans.

But that does not feather in with the goals of this administration and the Democratic majority in Congress; goals which include dramatically expanding the power of the government over every aspect of our lives.

And so it has come to pass that those of us who oppose government-run health care because we find the abridgement of our individual liberties to be a crushing oppression are labeled as heartless.

Soon, we will be labeled as dangerous.

American men and women have died beneath a flag of stars and stripes for over 200 years, not for kings or presidents, but for the ideals represented by that flag – the recognition that the natural state of man on earth is freedom, and that no government has may impinge upon that freedom under any guise, including that of a perceived “necessity.”

Necessity does not give anyone a “right” to anything, a fact often obscured in debates such as this.

The rights given to us, according to the Declaration of Independence, by “nature and nature’s God” include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights, take notice, are rights to action, not rights to the fulfillment of needs or desires.

Rights cannot impose obligations upon other people, except the obligation to leave us to pursue our own interests unimpeded. Basically, we have the right to be left alone, so that free from obstructions, we can work for what we want, need and desire.

My right to life does not oblige my neighbor to feed and clothe me or my family – it merely gives me the right, no matter how hard the struggle may be, to feed and clothe my family by the sweat of my own brow.

My right to liberty ensures that I may act for my own benefit, keep the fruits of my labor, and that my neighbor – or my government – may not steal them from me. Conversely, I have no right or claim to the actions or property of another.

And finally, I have the right to pursue happiness, but may make no claim on others to provide me with it. If a “right” were to impose a duty upon another, it would be a violation of that person’s basic rights; we would become a society of master and slave.

When something is given for nothing it is charity; let’s not be afraid to call it what it is. Even if such charity is provided by the government, they must confiscate the wealth of others to do so, and so within the framework of our moral code in the United States, charity is not a right – no matter how much those in Congress wish to portray it that way.

Our country of free men and women has been wounded by this incursion into our liberties, and so this is a time for action; we have an obligation to our forebears, ourselves and our posterity. We’ve been asleep for far too long; we need to get up, get educated and vow to educate others. We must pledge to teach our children that entitlement programs such as the one being rammed down our throats are a curse, and in the long run a tool of enslavement.

Like those brave men and women of colonial America, we need to pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to the cause of liberty – because without freedom, without our rights, what do we really have?

We will rally again my friends, on April the 15th. We will use our strong hearts and our strong voices to tell this government that we will not be cowed, that we will never give up, and that we will put this right again.

And finally, I leave you with the final, breathtaking words of William Pitt, uttered on his deathbed in 1806. I would ask you to never forget them. I know I won't.

“My country! Oh my country! How I love my country.”

A Statement by the Staten Island Tea Party

With the passage of the health care reform bill, the United States Congress took an extraordinarily reckless first step on the path to socialized medicine, and set the stage for a federal takeover of 1/6^th of the American economy.

In doing so, Democrats in Congress who voted for this bill showed their contempt for the public by ignoring the wishes of the majority of the American people, who told them not only with the election of Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but in poll after poll, that this bill was too large in scope, too intrusive on our personal liberties, and simply too expensive.

Instead of achieving the noble goal of bringing affordable health insurance to additional millions of Americans through the application of traditional American ideals, such as free markets, innovative thinking and competition, Democrats have signaled a new era in America - an era in which United States citizens will find themselves dependent for their very lives upon government agencies and bureaucrats to a degree never before seen in the history of this great country.

This bill will ultimately result in the degradation of the greatest healthcare system in the world, and eventually make it impossible for private insurers to remain viable. Its goal is to eventually saddle us with the single-payer system President Obama has so often said he believes in and supports, and yet has been a failure wherever in the world it is implemented.

This bill is a power grab that has only a passing acquaintance with the rule of law, little to do with health care, and everything to do with an expansion of the reach of the federal government into our lives far beyond those powers enumerated by the United States Constitution.

This bill will add a trillion dollar entitlement to an economy that is already groaning under the weight of extraordinary debt - a debt so large that is almost impossible for us to grasp, incurred by massive spending without regard to the burden it will place on American taxpayers for generations to come. This unprecedented debt had put our credit rating at risk even before the passage of this bill, and so we are now put in much greater, imminently catastrophic, fiscal jeopardy.

This bill mandates that every person born in the United States must purchase insurance under the threat of fine, imprisonment, or both. Those who write and pass such laws cannot be said to truly understand the concept of individual liberties, and it seems incredible to think that they can in fact appreciate what it is to be free – indeed, the likelihood is that they no longer care.

This bill was purchased with backroom bribes and deals that would put any businessman, banker or broker behind bars for the rest of his natural life, and this despicable display causes the American people ask themselves if they want any laws to be created under such circumstances. The answer to that question is most obviously no; yet, deaf to the will of the people, Democrats will soon make this horribly flawed legislation the law of the land.

This bill, at the moment it is signed by the President, will signal the beginning of the end of the greatest health care system in the world, and it will show us the true and ugly face of the change that our President promised us as a candidate. Whatever we thought that might be, it has turned out to be a radical shift in the relationship of the government to the people. With arrogance and disregard for our Constitutionally-mandated liberties, these elitists are telling us once again that they know better than we how to run every aspect of our own lives.

In November of this year, we will see if this is indeed the change that voters wanted or expected.

America’s Slow Descent Into Insanity: Part 13,457

The incident eventually came to be known as “The Boston Massacre.” It happened on March 5th of 1770, and history buffs will remember that the British officers and soldiers charged with murder in that case were defended in court by nascent Founding Father John Adams.

Mr. Adams, later to become our second President, was vilified by fellow Bostonians for his spirited defense - which was ultimately successful for 6 of the 8 accused. Naturally, anyone defending the despised “lobster-backs” would become unpopular in colonial bean-town, and indeed Adams’ law practice suffered badly after the trial. Still, Adams considered his legal performance to be "one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country."

How ironic that those who chose to defend Gitmo terrorists called themselves “The John Adams Project,” since what they have done goes far beyond mere "defense." John Adams may have been many things, but traitor was not one of them.

Yes, I know that branding these attorneys as anything less than noble is to incur a firestorm of criticism from the left: I’m beyond caring. When our Congress can use stealth, manipulation, fraud and illegal rules to create new law by fiat, of what importance is a bit of inelegant language?

The men who defended the Gitmo terrorists acted in a manner that I consider to be traitorous, and that they are now part of Obama’s Holder-led Department of Justice is a travesty of the highest order.

Andrew McCarthy, prosecutor of the Blind Sheik responsible for the first Trade Center bombing and writer for National Review Online, asks the question: What’s a modern day John Adams to do? He answers:

Why, hire private investigators to take surveillance photos of CIA agents and hand them off to other latter day Adamses, who then showed them to top members of al Qaeda — thereby identifying for the terrorists the agency's interrogators and, potentially, tipping the terrorists off to the locations where the agents' families live. [snip]

Actually, I would call the enterprise — just for starters — a wartime felony violation of the federal law barring disclosure of the identities of U.S. intelligence officers, as well as a wartime felony violation of the espionage act, which prohibits, among other things, obtaining national defense information with reason to know it will be used to the injury of the United States (including taking and using photographs "of anything connected with the national defense").

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz has more…[t]o summarize, a cabal of the enemy's volunteer lawyers, led by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and calling itself the "John Adams Project," is alleged to have hired investigators who staked out CIA agents believed (no doubt based on classified discovery in the detainee court cases) to have been interrogators.

The investigators snapped pictures of the CIA agents — in some instances, apparently, in the vicinity of their homes where they reside with their families — and gave them to the lawyers, who, in turn, got them to other members of the Gitmo Bar (including at least some military lawyers) who showed them to top al Qaeda detainees, enabling them to identify the CIA agents.

The scandal was uncovered because there are a lot of the photos and they've evidently been circulating around the detention camp, so some were discovered and seized by military guards... [snip]

In any event, look on the bright side: No matter what happens to this investigation, the Left's lawyers now have photos they can use for the reckoning Holder promised against the Bush administration. Anyone doubt that the Center for Constitutional Rights, among other modern John Adamses, will try to use the photos to buttress its efforts to get some foreign tribunal to charge the CIA and Bush officials with "torture" and other war crimes?

Debra Burlingame writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

We obtained Justice Department accounts of some of those incidents under a Freedom of Information Act request. Examples included an incident in which a lawyer sent his detainee client the transcript of a virulently anti-American speech that compared military physicians to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor of Auschwitz, called DOJ lawyers "desk torturers" and suggested that the "abuses carried out by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib . . . could involve the President in the commission of war crimes.

Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp's layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that "we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing" and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with "interviews" of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees.

Patently despicable – but surprising? Of course not. This is the Obama Administration we’re talking about. And the Eric Holder Department of Justice. Are you shocked to know that 7 of these attorneys are now Holder hires, and are working on, get ready for it...detainee cases? Holder refuses to identify them or their jobs, but it really doesn’t matter.

America’s descent into madness continues, but American outrage grows.

The Left is racing to the finish line now, but to get there they’ll have to come through me – and you.

To the Gallows.

America is slowly being marched to the gallows. Step by agonizing step, this administration and its complicit Congress is leading our country to a crossbeam, a noose and a trapdoor.

It is sometimes surreal to watch, isn't it? I keep thinking that someone will come forward to stop this unnecessary tragedy - after all, it is not being accomplished through stealth or deceit, it is happening in plain sight of the entire world.

The Democratic Party is inexplicably and blindly following its radical President into strange, uncharted, and extra-Constitutional territory. For their part, the Republican Party seems ineffectual, at times even complacent, and in any event often appears too weak and damaged to mount a strong defense. It seems now that only the Tea Party movement, the great silent majority, has any hope of bolstering the opposition to the Obama administration and halting our country's seemingly inevitable slide into oblivion.

Like our founding fathers, we too make an appeal to heaven; but we must do more. We must appeal to the hearts and minds of our neighbors and friends. We can work hard to fix what is becoming broken in America, we can help to right the wrong, we can educate and inform. We can, at least in the short term, use our voices, and finally our vote, to rebuild our great country.

November looms. The last, best chance of America rests with a single election; we will either cast off a Democratic Party that has become blind to the principles that made America great, or we will condemn ourselves to generations of debt and darkness, wherein free Americans will be at first a fond memory, then a distant one, then a relic to be gradually forgotten.

But we can win. We can take the country back - the country for which our fathers fought and bled and died. We can recapture an America that believes in the paramount importance of individual liberties, an America comprised of citizens who recognize and honor the natural rights bestowed upon us by our Creator, and who recognize that NO rights can be conferred upon us by any government. An America of pioneers, entrepreneurs, risk-takers and patriots. An America of men and women who want to work hard and keep what they've earned, and make the best life they can for their families without apology and without guilt.

We want to once again be a country in which the government exists only to ensure a level playing field - not to own and control it.

In November we can smack the Democratic Party - hard, Cagney-style. Once, twice, three times, and keep smacking until they come to their senses and cast off the mantle of hard-left Progressivism that has so damaged both their party and their country - and so angered those who remember what America is supposed to be, and who refuse to forget it.

So let's rouse ourselves, let's use all the strength and will at our disposal. Let's pay attention. Let's vow to make a difference. Let's talk to our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers. Let's support the candidates who support the Constitution.

November seems like a long way off. It is not. Start rolling up your sleeves, because we have much work to do.