What are the limits on government power?

Recently the county I live in decided that people have to pay for paper bags at stores and that plastic bags can't be used.

I tried to find out who had created this new law only to discover it wasn't really a law since it wasn't passed by any elected officials.  Instead a bunch of county bureaucrats who were appointed to a board made the decision.  It was nearly impossible to find out who appointed them.

So unelected paper pushers determined what bags grocery stores could use. They of course ignored studies that show that using recyclable bags can be worse, due to bacteria on the bags, in both cost and environmental impact than disposable plastic bags.  In addition they require the stores to charge for the paper bags the stores used to give out for free.

Is this really what most Americans think of as something that unelected government employees can force Americans to do?

What can't the government force us to do?

It's a small thing but that's the point. If the government can control even the smallest parts of our lives why should we  doubt that they can control the most important things as well?

But if the government can control everything it will be impossible to find candidates who agree with even a plurality of Americans and that being the case it will be impossible for voters to vote for candidates who actually represent them in any meaningful way.

Liberals new Prohibition

America banned alcoholic beverages during Prohibition because a small portion of non-tee-totalers misused booze. That small portion, much larger back then than now, generally speaking didn’t murder anyone but they did beat their wives and children, cause public disturbances, and generate a burden on society because they couldn’t take care of themselves.

Liberals, and most Americans, have declared that in hindsight Prohibition was a very dumb idea. The simple fact is that the vast majority of drinkers do so responsibly and the idea of banning something that is only abused by a tiny minority and which provides benefits to the vast majority is stupid.  We know liberals agree with this reasoning since it’s the reasoning they use, rightly or wrongly, to show why marijuana should be legal.

Yet liberals are using the exact same reasoning used by Prohibitionists to try and keep Americans from owning guns.

When it comes to guns liberals perform some mental gymnastics and declare that anything that causes the death of children should be banned.  Liberal reasoning can best be defined by the Obama Rule; We should do anything that would save the life of even one child.

To understand the absurdity of the Obama Rule note that it would lead us to a new Prohibition on peanuts because a tiny fraction of the population, including children, can experience life threatening allergic reactions to peanuts.

As with alcohol the vast majority of legal American gun owners never do anything bad with their guns.  In fact privately owned guns are regularly used to protect innocent lives and deter violent crimes. How many people, especially single women, sleep better at night or feel more comfortable in various potentially dangerous situations because they have a gun and know how to use it? Additionally guns, like alcohol used in moderation, can improve the lives of people who hunt or like practice shooting.

But like guns alcohol is, if we use liberal reasoning where it is things rather than people that shoulder the brunt of responsibility for people’s actions, the cause of many deaths and much suffering each year.

Each year roughly 450 children die due to alcohol related traffic accidents. That’s more than 20 times the number of children who were killed at Sandy Hook; and that’s each and every year not just once every few years like gun related killings.  Accidental deaths of children due to guns runs around 180 a year so it’s clear that alcohol is a far greater killer of children than guns—children killed by criminals with guns as part of a crime will not be reduced by keeping honest people from having guns; in fact given that gun ownership reduces crime rates more children will die because of guns if liberals succeed in their new Prohibition.

If we use liberal gun “logic”, The Obama Rule, we should clearly reinstate Prohibition, of alcohol, for the children’s sake. 

But why stop at alcohol?  Every year roughly 1100 children under the age of 8 die each year in all types of traffic accidents. That’s nearly 6 times the number of children that die to gun related accidents and incidents like Sandy Hook combined.  Liberals tell us that cars are evil and we should use mass transport so to use President Obama’s reasoning we clearly need to start a new Prohibition on privately owned cars.

Then there’s marijuana.  While it’s hard to OD on marijuana it impacts cognitive abilities just like alcohol does. As marijuana use increases there will be more drug related car accidents and more children dying in those accidents as a result of legal marijuana.  According to the Obama rule if even one child dies due to legalized marijuana use we need to outlaw marijuana.

Sex is also a killer of children. Liberals tell us we can’t expect people to say no to casual sex the way liberals know that people can say no to cigarettes yet promiscuous sex, primarily gay sex, is the most common way to get AIDS.  Born babies die when they contract AIDS from their mothers. So AIDS kills children. By the Obama Rule we must immediately establish a Prohibition on all sex that could spread AIDS; which means all sex except monogamous committed sex.

Our current mental health system is a key cause of child murders.  The Sandy Hook killer was clearly unstable and his mother was desperately trying to get him committed. But liberals are so concerned about the “rights’ of the insane that liberals have made it insanely difficult to get the most troubled among us the help they so desperately need. The Obama Rule clearly states we must have a Prohibition on the dangerously mentally troubled being free to walk the streets where they can steal guns and kill children.

And the criminal justice system shouldn’t escape the Presidents eagle eye either.  Because of changes to the legal system it’s harder to convict criminals, including those who kill children. As a result the murderers of children accidentally hit in drive by shootings often are left to walk the streets and kill more kids.  If the Obama Rule is to ring true and help usher us into a new age of compassion for children the President has no choice but to immediately push for the prohibition of rules that toss out viable physical evidence due to procedural mistakes.

Clearly the Obama Rule if applied to our society would result in a number of new Prohibitions ranging from alcohol to casual sex.  Yet we have yet to hear the clamoring of the liberal chattering masses, especially the Main Stream Media, for any of these other bans that, based on our esteemed Presidents reasoning, are unequivocal moral imperatives.

While waiting for the inevitable liberal realization of the obvious need for these new Prohibitions let’s take a look at how liberals treat those who kill children.

The most obvious example of liberal leniency towards child killers is of course abortion. Abortion does not make a woman unpregnant it just makes her the mother of a murdered child.  Of course due to liberal media lies most women who have an abortion honestly don’t understand that abortion kills their son or daughter. They have been told-- by the media, by Planned Parenthood, by politicians, and by their schools—that abortion is no different than having a wart removed. 

Pro-lifers generally agree that women who have been lied to their whole lives and who are put in a tough situation by the uncaring fathers of their unborn babies deserve mercy and forgiveness.  But liberals are perfectly comfortable with giving a pass even to women who know that science unequivocally shows that every abortion kills a human being.

A similar trend of forgiving the perpetrator by liberals can be seen in how liberals treat people who kill children with guns.  Conservatives believe you can never “cure” or “rehabilitate” someone who guns down children. Liberals on the other hand have worked for decades to modify the American legal system so that the Sandy Hook killer may be found innocent by reason of insanity thereby making him eligible for parole as soon as some psychiatrist declares him to be “sane”—the man who tried to murder Reagan was found not guilty by reason of insanity and is now allowed out on his own for example.  In a bizarre twist the same liberals who have worked for decades to ensure that “cured”, as declared by psychiatrists, child killers can walk the street some day condemn those Catholic Bishops who, clearly wrongly in retrospect, listened to psychiatrists who told the Bishops that priests who had molested teenagers could be “cured”.

The new Obama Rule is clearly a bald faced lie. The President will not do anything to save the life of even one child since he won’t lift a hand to save the more than a million children killed by abortion each year, ban cars, or ban casual sex. Similarly he won’t push for modifications to the legal system that would ensure that the guilty, including those who kill children, can’t walk free on technicalities or make it easier for the mentally troubled to be helped.

The sad reality is that it is liberal policies that directly contribute to the early demise of many children in America today.  If liberals really cared about children they’d be concentrating on things that would save children’s lives not just using the deaths of children to further liberal causes. Don’t let liberals use your natural conservative sadness over the death of a child to intimidate you into silence on liberals attempt to nullify the Second Amendment.

Israel and moral compasses

Israel has done a lot of bad things, like trying to get Christians to leave Jerusalem;albeit in a non-violent way. 

But they haven't directly targeted innocent civilians nor have they advocated genocide.

That's why even though I don't support everything Israel does I have to acknowledge that even in their bad actions they are far more considerate of others than any Arab state. 

That's why I find Obama's policy towards Israel so bothersome even though I don't support the way the state of Israel was founded--I think if the allied powers were feeling guilty about the Holocaust they should have forced Germany to buy Israel from the Palestinians--; it's not right for us to abandon Israel to neighbors who openly deny the Holocaust and call for the mass murder of Jews.

Take the worst case scenario, one I don't agree with, and say the Israeli's stole Israel from the Palestinians.  Since when do we advocate executing thieves?


From  a purely selfish perspective we know that Israel will treat Christians better than any Palestinian government would based on the oppression of Christians in all Muslim countries that lack a strong secular ruler.  Additionally Israel will not serve as a training ground for terrorists who target the US; spies yes terrorists no.

From an idealistic perspective in the 1990's Israel began making huge steps towards a fair solution for the Palestinians. Steps that I'm not sure the US would have made if we were under the same sort of military threat as Israel was.  Now given how Israel was founded I believe those steps were morally required, just as the US has an obligation to native Americans even though those native Americans waged war against the US.

If the Palestinians would have been willing to put aside their genocidal hatred of Jews, which in fact contradicts at least one part of the Koran, by now we'd probably have a world with a thriving Palestinian state living next to Israel.

But because the motivating force was not a desire for a better life for Palestinians but rather a desire to punish Israeli's the Palestinians are living in poverty without a true state of their own.

Given the olive branch the Israeli's extended the only one to blame for the state of Palestinians today are the Palestinians themselves.

Which is why Obama's policy which tilts towards the militantly aggressive Muslims who surround Israel and who will continue to be enemies of the US even if the US stood by and let Israel be exterminated makes no sense from the perspective of what's good for the US.

The US should be working to get the Palestinians to be rational and ensure that any eventual solution is fair to both Israel and the Palestinians.  Instead the US seems to be siding with the Palestinians even as the Palestinians, at least in Arab language media, call for the destruction of Israel.

This is another example of Obama siding with Islam and Third World groups against the traditional interests of America and the West.  Obama is not a Muslim but he does appear to share his fathers belief that America is the evil imperialist country and we owe those in the Third World who we've supposedly oppressed or offended.

What have you done for God lately?

Most of us are constantly asking God for something. But we rarely realize we can do things for Him.

Of course God doesn't need us in any way. But He wants us to help each other.

Every act of charity is a service we do for God.

He gave you life and everything you have; pay it forward.

Liberal Logic 102: The utility of guns

A real life liberal would be meme on Facebook is that the famous former Navy SEALs sniper Chris Kyle was killed with a gun so obviously guns don't provide any protection.

Aside from the fact that Kyle was at a shooting range, not in a situation where he would expect any threats, and was probably shot in the back the same liberal reasoning used in this case would say no one should get flu shots because not everyone who gets a flu shot avoids getting the flu.  Similarly we shouldn't have seat belts since not everyone who uses one is saved in car crashes.

What makes it even better is that liberals are always telling us how much more intelligent and rational they are than us red necked conservatives.

The unaccomodating "accomodation"

Obama is still apparently unaware that Americans are guaranteed the right to exercise their religious beliefs which means that people should not be required to directly pay for things that they find to be immoral.

Americans have always accepted that some of their tax money may go to things that they believe may be immoral; funding Planned Parenthood for example.  But that is not direct complicity.

Under the HHS mandate Obama is trying to force people to directly pay for things they find immoral.  It's identical to forcing a Jewish Deli to sell pork sandwiches with the excuse that the proprietors don't have to pork themselves.

It is clear that Obama is a fan of the concept of the government as Leviathan which can force the people to do anything.  Sadly that's not what America is all about.