Phyrfight Intel

From: Chuck Norris

As for other Americans who oppose his far-left agenda, the president jeered at them before a live audience a few months back, when he condescendingly declared: “Those folks who are trying to stand in the way of progress, let me tell you: I’m just getting started! I don’t quit. I’m not tired. … It is important for those folks to understand I’m just ready to go. We’re just going to keep on going.”

The president demonizes any opposition and even tried socially to quarantine No. 1 Fox News as an illegitimate news organization because some commentators disagree with him. His actions remind me of these words of Fulton J. Sheen’s: “Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.”

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Texas Independence Day was yesterday, March 2nd. It is an easy day for me to remember not only because I am a proud Texan but also because it is the day that many years ago my first ex-wife (actually the only one but you never know how long this internet fad, and thus this post, is going to last) told me that she no longer loved me. So you see that for us Texans and me in particular March 2nd is all about emancipation and freedom from tyranny.

Like the United States before it, the Republic of Texas made a Declaration of Independence. In it the new republic listed its grievances with Mexico. My ex offered a similar declaration and continues to list grievances to this day, but I digress. Below is an excerpt from the Texas Declaration of Independence.

It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defense, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments.

From: Google Public Policy

The U.S. and other countries have been negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, known as ACTA, for the last two years. A number of consumer advocates and technology companies, including Google, have raised serious concerns about ACTA’s potential reach and the impact it could have on Internet users’ rights and innovation.

From: Michael Geist

Monday March 01, 2010

On the heels of the leak of various country positions on ACTA transparency, today an even bigger leak has hit the Internet.  A new European Union document prepared several weeks ago canvasses the Internet and Civil Enforcement chapters, disclosing in complete detail the proposals from the U.S., the counter-proposals from the EU, Japan, and other ACTA participants.  The 44-page document also highlights specific concerns of individual countries on a wide range of issues including ISP liability, anti-circumvention rules, and the scope of the treaty.  This is probably the most significant leak to-date since it goes even beyond the transparency debate by including specific country positions and proposals.

The document highlights significant disagreement on a range of issues.  For example, on the issue of anti-circumvention legislation and access controls, the U.S. wants it included per the DCMA, but many other countries, including the EU, Japan, and New Zealand do not, noting that the WIPO Internet treaties do not require it.

A brief summary of the key findings are posted below, but much more study is needed.

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From: John Stossel

Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn’t just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit. F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist living in Britain, wrote ‘The Road to Serfdom’ in 1944 as a warning that central economic planning would extinguish freedom. … Hayek meant that governments can’t plan economies without planning people’s lives. After all, an economy is just individuals engaging in exchanges. The scientific-sounding language of President Obama’s economic planning hides the fact that people must shelve their own plans in favor of government’s single plan. At the beginning of ‘The Road to Serfdom,’ Hayek acknowledges that mere material wealth is not all that’s at stake when the government controls our lives: ‘The most important change … is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.’ This shouldn’t be controversial. If government relieves us of the responsibility of living by bailing us out, character will atrophy. The welfare state, however good its intentions of creating material equality, can’t help but make us dependent. That changes the psychology of society. According to the Tax Foundation, 60 percent of the population now gets more in government benefits than it pays in taxes. What does it say about a society in which more than half the people live at the expense of the rest?

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From: Reason

And many people classified as millionaires aren’t millionaires at all. Out of the 300,000 or so joint tax filers earning more than $1 million, about 90 percent have small business income. That’s because 75 percent of America’s small businesses are structured as pass-through entities and pay their business taxes at the individual level. So the $1 million isn’t going into those individuals’ pockets; it’s money they use to run their businesses. To avoid the new tax, those businesses would have to adopt a new structure and start paying the complicated corporate income tax.

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Don’t think Google is protecting Islam? Watch this.

From: Ann Coulter

…Also prohibited in the last hour of international flights will be: blankets, pillows, computers and in-flight entertainment. Another triumph in Janet Napolitano’s “Let’s stay one step behind the terrorists” policy!

…This, allegedly, was the price we had to pay for safe airplanes. The one security precaution the government refused to consider was to require extra screening for passengers who looked like the last three-dozen terrorists to attack airplanes.

Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed.

The rest of the story.

From: StarTelegram

OLYMPIA, Wash. — In a decision that could give momentum to other efforts to expand voting to inmates, a federal appeals court ruled that incarcerated felons should be allowed to vote in Washington state.

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I was reading a recent article on Reason.com and came across this quote that hits my feelings like the proverbial nail’s head:

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place(d) under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

This is alleged to have happened on an AirTrans flight from Atlanta to Houston just after push-back. If true, it is unbelievable. The email from Tedd  Petruna that started this is bouncing all over the Internet.  I received a copy today.

From: Debbie Schlussel

I begin with the caveat that I don’t know whether or not this is true.  However, it certainly sounds like it is, and the guy-Tedd J. Petruna of NASA–has his e-mail address and home and work phone numbers plastered all over the internet as does his friend, A. Gene Hackemack, who sent this out.  I’m glad he did.  People need to know about this stuff, which the FBI, TSA, and every other fed in the alphabet soup of the “We’re Here to Help You” Souffle is trying to keep under wraps.  I think it’s probably true.

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Threatened Voices.

A collaborative mapping project to build a database of bloggers who have been threatened, arrested or killed for speaking out online and to draw attention to the campaigns to free them.

http://threatened.globalvoicesonline.org/

From: Threat Level

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is ticked off.

He’s tired of signing bills that don’t address the pet causes he deems important. So when another unworthy bill crossed his desk recently for signing — addressing funding issues for the Port of San Francisco — the guv vetoed it and sent lawmakers a little note saying why. Only the note said a little more than lawmakers were expecting.

Satire from: Pajamas Media

Conservative arguments against President Obama are becoming increasingly silly. They oppose Obama rescuing businesses despite all the jobs on the line, they’re against government taking control of health care from soulless insurance companies, and they oppose increased taxes on energy consumption despite the sorry state of the environment. And why do they oppose these most sensible actions? Because of their irrational, brain-dead obsession with liberty

…Liberty doesn’t feed your family. Liberty doesn’t heal you when you’re sick. Liberty doesn’t educate your children. A strong government can do all those things, but apparently that’s against liberty.

… Most of the civilized world has moved beyond this uncompromising view of “freedom” — if they were ever foolish enough to adopt it in the first place. Can you think of any other country that would permit its citizens to have guns like America does? Of course not; that’s beyond moronic. People know freedom is a dangerous, scary thing, and you have to be careful how much you tolerate.

Read the whole thing.

Finally something the on the Internet Congress doesn’t want to control. Probably because they realize this would put most of the Huffington Post Bloggers in jail.

From: Threat Level

Proposed legislation demanding up to two years in prison for electronic speech meant to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person” was met with little enthusiasm by a House subcommittee on Wednesday.

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Been thinking a lot about Nineteen Eighty-Four lately. Seems Communism, Marxism, and Fascism have been on my mind, though I can’t imagine why.

From: Wikipedia

The story begins on 4 April 1984: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”. The date is questionable, because it is what Winston Smith perceives. Historical facts and documents have been rewritten and revised so many times that even the correct year is uncertain. In the story’s course, he concludes it as irrelevant, because the State can arbitrarily alter it; the year 1984 and its world are transmutable.

From: WSJ

Next year’s census will determine the apportionment of House members and Electoral College votes for each state. To accomplish these vital constitutional purposes, the enumeration should count only citizens and persons who are legal, permanent residents. But it won’t.

Instead, the U.S. Census Bureau is set to count all persons physically present in the country—including large numbers who are here illegally. The result will unconstitutionally increase the number of representatives in some states and deprive some other states of their rightful political representation. Citizens of “loser” states should be outraged. Yet few are even aware of what’s going on.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/eff-defends-wikipedi

Legal Analysis by Fred von Lohmann
As has been widely reported, the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) recently sent a legal threat to an American Wikipedian, Derrick Coetzee, over his posting approximately 3,000 photos of public domain paintings to Wikipedia. Because of the importance of this issue for the public domain and the Internet generally, EFF has taken Mr. Coetzee as a client.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – CS Lewis   God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics