First, Second and Fourth Amendments To Our Constitution? Kiss Them Goodbye!

Kenneth Melson, the acting director of the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms (ATF), is expected to step down in the wake of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scheme in which weapons were sold to Mexico’s drug cartels.

"Melson, who has been acting director since April 2009, is likely to resign within the next couple of days", says CNN.

Under Operation Fast and Furious and its sister program Project Gunrunner, about 2,500 weapons were sold to so-called straw buyers, who in turn sold them on to the cartels. The idea was that it would allow the ATF to trace the weapons and discover who was selling them on.

But the plan went disastrously wrong and the weapons have been used in at least 150 shootings. The ATF now admits it lost track of two-thirds of the guns. The "plan went disastrously wrong" because of disastrous decisions made by those responsible for enforcement of our firearms laws!

The controversy came to a head in December when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in Arizona and two weapons discovered at the scene were found to have been part of Project Gunrunner. Brian Terry was only one of several law enforcement officers and civilians who have been murdered by guns sold illegally to these straw buyers... sold at the direction of ATF agents.

President Barack Obama has acknowledged that the plan was flawed. “There may be a situation here in which a serious mistake was made. If that's the case then we'll find out and we'll hold somebody accountable,” he said in March. Obama said he had no prior knowledge of the operation.

I don't think that having "no prior knowledge" is an acceptable excuse from the Head Monkey of any organization, much less the Federal Government. After all, a military commander can be held accountable for the actions of all the men who serve beneath him, why is Obama any different. And, Obama is the cherry on the top of the chain of command sundae. Certainly underlings wouldn't be allowed to do anything as illegal as knowingly encouraging firearms sales to those who are fully expected to transfer control of those firearms to Mexican drug cartels. But the ATF DID! They coerced law-abiding, federally-licensed firearms dealers into making these otherwise illegal sales. How did they manage to do that? The ATF determines who does - or does not - get issued a license to sell firearms. You can probably work out the intricacies of the "how" question for yourself.

I mentioned in a recent blog that politicians will "create the conditions" if none exist "to support their claims". The Obama administration is, almost to a man, anti-Second Amendment, and virulently against any form of private gun ownership in the USA. Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung were smart enough to recognize that the only way to enslave their people was to remove their means of resistance, and put all the firearms in the hands of their military.

Would our military support a government that turns against the will of the people? Would our military attack the civilian population? There is a little-known, and never taught, historical precedent for exactly such an action by our military.

In the spring-summer of 1932 - in the midst of the Great Depression - roughly 43,000 people descended upon Washington D.C. - approximately 17,000 WWI veterans, their families and "affiliated groups", demanding immediate cash payment of their service certificates. According to the "World War Adjusted Compensation Act" of 1924, Congress entitled each veteran to a "bonus pay" of $1.00 per day (not to exceed $500) for each day of domestic service, and $1.25 per day (not to exceed $625) for each day of overseas service. Amounts of $50 or less were paid immediately. These were Americans who had served our country honorably when it called upon them, yet they were unable to provide for their families... while the government wanted to sit on the bonuses that they were promised until 1945.

On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. The D.C. police were met with resistance, shots were fired, and two veterans were wounded, only to die later. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the Army to clear the veterans' campsite. Two men touted as American "heroes" were dispatched to do the deed - Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the infantry and cavalry, backed by six tanks, and then-Major George S. Patton who led the cavalry charge. The Bonus Army veterans, with their wives and children, were driven out of Washington D.C. and their shelters and belongings burned. And that should answer the question of "Would our military attack the civilian population?".

Thanks to the reinstatement and extension of the so-called "Patriot Act", almost any federal law enforcement agency can now ignore the requirements of the First, Second and Fourth amendments to the Constitution. They now have the Congressional approval to search and seize without a warrant, and to wire tap any and all forms of communications - like this blog - with only a letter from a federal field agent. Your mailman may bear close watching now, along with the storm troopers of the Department of Education (mentioned in a previous blog).

The BATF now has all the authority of Russia's FSB (previously known as the KGB), or Secret Police for Internal Affairs.

God save us from the sheer socialist folly of our leadership...

Your Government Says: "Trust Us - We Have Your Best Interests At Heart"

The United States Government does not enjoy the same level of trust the people had in it 100 years ago... or even 50 years ago. Some of our politicians seem incapable of understanding how and why they lost that trust. Let's take a look at the history of the U.S. Government's ethical treatment of it's citizens -

1. This is the same Government that, between 1778 and 1894 made and (forced upon) Native American tribes more than 750 land cessation treaties. The government broke the majority of those treaties before the ink was dry.

2. This is the same Government that - authorized and conducted the "Tuskegee Experiment" - For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.

3. This is the same Government that, in 1932 allowed units of the United States Army, commanded by Major General Douglas MacArthur to initiate a cavalry charge which was led by Major George S. Patton against the so-called Bonus Expeditionary Force. The BEF (also known as the Bonus Army) was made up of some 15,000 veterans and their civilian families, who had staged a protest in Washington, DC in hopes of obtaining payments of the World War I bonus which the Government had promised them.. and WWI ended in July of 1919.

4. This is the same Government that, on July 16th,1945, conducted testing of the atomic bomb on human subjects at White Sands Proving Ground, NM. Excess risk associated with radiation started to appear about ten years after exposure. (Although there were no reported serious injuries as a direct result of the testing, the military personnel that were in attendance eventually reported an extremely high incidence of various cancers.)

5. This is the same Government that, in the 1960's and early 1970s exposed our soldiers in Vietnam to Agent Orange (Thank You, Monsanto!), a defoliant herbicidal chemical for which the government had not developed protective gear. Agent Orange has been linked to cancers and other diseases in several epidemiological studies. The Agent Orange cancers and diseases include prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, (lung, trachea/bronchus, larynx), soft-tissue sarcoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin disease, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and multiple myeloma.

6.This is the same Government that controlled our Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security Programs... and bankrupted those programs!

7. This is the same Government that now asks us to trust them to manage our health care! How stupid do they think the American people are? Or, I suppose the proper question to ask is, "Are we just as stupid, complacent and gullible as the government thinks we are?"

Will Americans allow their loved ones to be led "like lambs to the slaughter" because they are chronically ill, developmentally or physically challenged, or because they have committed the sin of aging? Dr. Jack Kevorkian could have been the poster-boy for the Obama administration!(Remember, if you are 35 today you will be 65 in 2039, and that may just be the age at which your government decides you are to be recycled... unless you become chronically ill or disabled before then!)

I could be wrong about this... after all, we do have the best politicians that money can buy in the USA! I'm certain they have our best interests at heart... but then, I might have thought the Edsel was a good idea, too.

Census Workers Marking GPS Coordinates of U.S. Homes

I have seen that headline - or one very similar - in several different places over the last few months, but I do not personally know it to be a fact. However, I do believe I may have actually seen a census worker with a hand-held GPS in front of my house a few weeks ago. I can find no other plausible explanation for his actions.

This 'older man' was afoot, holding an object which appeared to be an electronic device (approx 5"x7") in his hands. He paused in front of the house, looked down at the device in his hands and then approached the front door (I can observe the front yard from my computer room window). I was waiting for a knock at the door... which never came. A few seconds later I saw him walking away from the house back into the street, putting an end to this 'close encounter of the weird kind.' The government's excuse for conducting such a census is, "GPS technology allows us to reduce the amount of time spent by census workers in locating addresses while increasing productivity. Most importantly, by adding a GPS coordinate to each housing unit, the Census Bureau is able to ensure that residents are counted in the right location. This is important as the data are used to apportion congressional representation and used to draw redistricting lines.”

Here are a few of the problems I have with anybody GPS'ing my domicile:
1. First and foremost, it seems unnecesarily intrusive. Why does the government need to know the exact coordinates of any individual's living quarters? It smacks of the groundwork for the fabled "Black Ops" - black helicopters and SUV's showing up, and citizens being spirited off in the middle of the night, never to be seen again. But, there's no real proof of "Black Ops" against the citizens of the USA... yet. The U.S. Census Bureau is simply an excuse—a harmless-looking means of obtaining the front door coordinates. The creation of GPS coordinates for front doors has nothing to do with the Census, in all honesty, no matter how much the United States Government tries to convince you that it does.

2. Given that our national security is significantly less-than-bulletproof, at both our physical borders and the 'borders' of our ostensibly secure government computer systems, to what use could this GPS information be put by those who bear us ill will? I can envision a scenario wherein a foreign power hacks into the appropriate government database and retrieves every bit of data needed to pinpoint heavily populated areas as well as the locations of critical utilities. (The only reason I didn't include the locations of sateside military installations in that scenario is that the rest of the hostile/envious world already knows precisely where those bases are located.)

Our government has already overstepped the bounds of the charter of the U.S. Census Bureau, by using them to gather information beyond a simple headcount. Questions like "Do you have running water in your household?", "Do you have insurance?", questions about educational level, number and kinds of disabilities , etc., have no place in the "census". Census is defined thusly:
1: a count of the population and a property evaluation in early Rome
2: a usually complete enumeration of a population ; specifically : a periodic governmental enumeration of population
3: count, tally

It was designed as a system of "how many"... not a system of "how much"!

Can we afford to forget the scenes of smart bombs and tomahawk missiles, guided by GPS coordinates, going through the windows and doors of buildings during the invasion of Iraq? "That could never happen here.", you say? Ask the Native Americans what they think about that. And do a little research on the "Bonus Army", Washington D.C., 1932 while you're at it - wherein a cavalry charge was led against WWI military veterans by our own 'heroes', General Douglas McArthur and Major George S. Patton.

As Government grows larger, I am reminded of the words of Thomas Paine, who said, ""Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." and Daniel Webster's quote, "There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." And, although often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, the only verifiable attribution for "The best government is that which governs least." is to Henry David Thoreau. They all make sense to me!

I could be wrong about this... I suppose... perhaps... maybe... or maybe not!