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Legal Brief on Congressional Power, Court Rulings, & the Constitution: The expressed powers of Congress are listed in the Constitution. Congress also has implied powers, which are based on the Constitution's right to make any laws that are "necessary and proper" to carry out those expressed powers. Congress has exercised its implied powers thousands of times over the years. Here are but a few major illustrations of that fact. 1780 1789 The Constitution gives expressed powers to Congress in Article 1, Section 8. 1800 1810 1819 In McCulloch v. Maryland, the Supreme Court holds that the powers to tax, borrow, and regulate commerce give Congress the implied power to establish a national bank. 1820 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden is the first commerce clause case to reach the Supreme Court. The broad definition of commerce the Court lays out in its ruling extends federal authority. 1830 1840 1850 1860 1862 The U.S. government issues its first legal tender notes, which are popularly called greenbacks. 1870 1870 In Hepburn v. Griswold the Supreme Court rules that the Constitution does not authorize the printing of paper money. 1870 The Court reverses its position on the printing of paper money and holds that issuing paper money is a proper use of the currency power in the Legal Tender cases. The decision in Juliard v. Greenman (1884) reaffirms this holding. 1880 1890 1890 The Sherman Antitrust Act, based on the commerce power, regulates monopolies and other practices that limit competition. 1900 1910 1920 1930 1935 The Wagner Act, based on the commerce power, recognizes labor's right to bargain collectively. 1935 The Social Security Act is passed. 1937 The Supreme Court upholds the Social Security Act of 1935 as a proper exercise of the powers to tax and provide for the general welfare in Steward Machine Co. v. Davis and Helvering v. Davis. 1940 1950 1956 The Interstate and National Highway Act, based on the commerce and war powers, provides for a national interstate highway system.

As many know, i spent quite a bit of time working for a Chinese Company seeking to enter the USA-European software market.  My task was to research the market, discover and define a market opportunity, design the product, and then work as product manager to get that service to market.  I took this job to better understand the Chinese marketplace and how sovereign Chinese companies work.  What i learned is how the Chinese seek to exploit and totally dominate open markets.  Software is just a category whose time has come.  and there are thousands of Chinese companies lining up.  The first step though is to fine tune the existing blueprint used by other Sina sovereigns.  amazing stuff. My take away from this experience is that the USA MUST set up a 30% tariff on ALL imports, and do so IMMEDIATELY!!!  Yesterday is not soon enough! As a newly minted libertarian, i wondered about the obvious conflict with Austrian Economics and their dedication to free markets and free trade?  I found the answer at this Libertarian forum, where many members were in heated discussion.  Comment #7 sums it up best i think.  Including a link to Ron Paul's Tariff-NAFTA speech. The thing is, the 30% Tariff should be part of an overall TAX REDUCTION PLAN.  I support the FAIR TAX and the Balanced Budget Amendment.  As an alternative to the Fair Tax, I would also support a 17% flat tax with no exceptions.  The ideal situation being an immediate, uncompromising, no exceptions 30% tariff on ALL imports coupled with the Fair Tax and the Balanced Budget Amendment.   And yes, i do believe this plan is consistent with the Founding Fathers Constitution.  But it took some kind of research to establish that opinion.   I've also concluded that "conservatism" is a convenient philosophical vehicle for the corrupt crony corporatism of both the military-industrial-complex, banksters and, international corporations.  Free trade and open markets concepts are perverted to become a thin veil

Excellent article on the importance of gun ownership in America.  The author is a defense attorney practicing law in Arizona.  He's also a war veteran and well versed libertarian.   Excerpts: "I am an American. As such, none of my rights depend on a showing of need. I am a free man who has the right to define and pursue my happiness in any peaceful way I see fit. The government does not grant me rights. I was born free. The legitimate role of government is to act as my agent to protect my rights; which exist independent of government. Americans do not beg the government for rights nor are they required to demonstrate a "need" for rights." "Government never has a more tempting opportunity to increase its size, power and scope, and to curtail the liberties of free people, than during or immediately after a crisis. Indeed, crisis is so tempting an opportunity for government that governments invent crisis whenever possible. This is why "emergency acts" and "wars" on anyone and anything are so popular for governments. Nothing entices people to stop thinking, act impulsively, and to relinquish liberties so easily as a "crisis" or a "tragedy" or an "emergency." We need to be smarter if liberty is to survive." "Although President Obama appears excited about the notion of banning guns, I have not heard him order a ban on the very guns used to protect him. Apparently, when it comes to his protection, President Obama prefers to be protected by people armed with guns. "

Excellent article other than the fact that the author erred in referring to the AR-15 as an "assault rifle." It is not. It is an "assault weapon," a semi-automatic rifle with only a cosmetic resemblance to the M-16 fully automatic "assault rifle." "Assault rifles" have been outlawed in the U.S. for decades. The U.S. had a complete ban on "assault weapon" rifles from 1994 to 2004. It did not affect gun violence rates at all, because semi-automatic rifles that lacked the cosmetic resemblance to "assault rifles" remained on the market. The distinction between the two terms is critical to understanding the current gun debate. Those who propose a ban on "assault weapons" are offering only a cosmetic sop to the anti-gun crowd, banning a sub-set of semi-automatic rifles whilst leaving equally capable semi-autos on the market. The correct question to ask is "why bother?" One might as well ban toy guns that bear a resemblance to assault weapons; other toy guns remain unaffected. For a more in depth discussion of "assault weapon" vs. "assault rifle" with references see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_weapon

I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha

Amazing letter from Columbine survivor, Evan Todd, to Obama, explaining why Obama's gun control proposals are non sense. Evan Todd's open letter to Obama, below. - Mr. President, As a student who was shot and wounded during the Columbine massacre, I have a few thoughts on the current gun debate. In regards to your gun control initiatives: Universal Background Checks First, a universal background check will have many devastating effects. It will arguably have the opposite impact of what you propose. If adopted, criminals will know that they can not pass a background check legally, so they will resort to other avenues. With the conditions being set by this initiative, it will create a large black market for weapons and will support more criminal activity and funnel additional money into the hands of thugs, criminals, and people who will do harm to American citizens. Second, universal background checks will create a huge bureaucracy that will cost an enormous amount of tax payers dollars and will straddle us with more debt. We cannot afford it now, let alone create another function of government that will have a huge monthly bill attached to it. Third, is a universal background check system possible without universal gun registration? If so, please define it for us. Universal registration can easily be used for universal confiscation. I am not at all implying that you, sir, would try such a measure, but we do need to think about our actions through the lens of time. It is not impossible to think that a tyrant, to the likes of Mao, Castro, Che, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and others, could possibly rise to power in America. It could be five, ten, twenty, or one hundred years from now - but future generations have the natural right to protect themselves from tyrannical government just as much as we currently do. It is safe to assume that this liberty that our forefathers secured has been a thorn in the side of would-be tyrants ever since the Second Amendmen

"The American Left's desire to crush Liberty and dissent in order to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" has reached metastatic levels. In the last three weeks alone, the following stories have surfaced. All of which indicate we are well on our way toward relinquishing our birthright. Even worse, millions of Americans are apparently more than willing to do so. First, this week the Supreme Court heard arguments in the United States v. Texas case that will determine whether a president can unilaterally rewrite immigration law. If SCOTUS rules in Barack Obama's favor, the separation of powers outlined in the first three articles of the Constitution will be rendered moot and, as political analyst Charles Krauthammer wryly observed, "you can send Congress home." And the Left is not content to stop there. A coalition of 118 cities and counties have filed a legal brief asserting they will lose up to $800 million in economic benefits if large numbers of illegal aliens remain subject to deportation. Second, the IRS has admitted it abides the use of fraudulent Social Security numbers used by illegal aliens to process tax payments - and refunds. Third, in New York and California, Democratic attorneys general Eric Schneiderman and Kamala Harris are pursuing fraud investigations against Exxon, based on the premise they can "prosecute persons and institutions with nonconforming views on global warming," writes National Review's Kevin Williams. "Prosecuting political institutions and businesses for political activism is brown-shirt business." Fourth, the Obama administration, already under fire for its determination to flood America with Syrian "refugees," announced it will reduce its vetting process to three months, instead of 18-24 months. They claim the reduced time is necessary to handle a sped-up "surge operation" whose population is 99% Sunni Muslim. Even more insulting, Gina Kassem, the regional refugee coordinator at t

I'll leave well enough alone on Mr. Ahert's positions regarding the U.S. v. Texas case and IRS reliance on fraudulent Social Security numbers; I have not studied those issues. But Mr. Ahert has not done his homework on the Exxon investigations and on the law governing the Syrian refugee situation. Re Exxon, the criminal investigations are to determine whether Exxon committed fraud against *investors* by concealing its knowledge of climate change the company was contributing to --- and knew of decades ago. We don't yet know the outcome of those investigations, but this is a far cry from prosecuting "persons and institutions with nonconforming views on global warming." If pursued, it will be a prosecution of a company -- and conceivably its managers -- who damned well knew through in-house scientific studies it sponsored that global warming was man-made and that their own company was a major causative agent. On the Syrian refugee situation, the right of war refugees to refuge in the U.S. and all other nations is, under the U.S. Constitution's Treaty Clause, "the law of this land." There is nothing in that body of international law created by treaty that permits the U.S. or any other nation to delay providing refuge for purposes of vetting refugees for possible terrorists among them. Vetting can, however, proceed lawfully after refugees are admitted while being held in refugee camps. One need only ask how one would feel were the tables turned and it was yourself fleeing from U.S. violence? Would you want to be forced to linger in the war zone while your anti-terrorism bona fides were established over a period of months? Refuge must be granted when it is needed, not months or years later, regardless of how much "terrorist" hysteria our mainstream media and the military-industrial complex drums up to fan the flames of war and industry profits. And this is all the more a moral case because it is the U.S. and its allies' illegal proxy war in Syria that is creating

"Enter Benghazi. This is an electoral year. Obama is absolutely terrified of another Benghazi - which Republicans have been trying non-stop to blame on his administration's incompetence. The last thing Obama needs is the Caliph's goons killing 'diplomats' in Erbil. "That would certainly raise a tsunami of questions all over again about the shady CIA weapon-smuggling racket - as in arming Syrian 'rebels' with weapons from Libya - at the time Benghazi took place. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, of course, also knew about it all. But then, and especially now, no one should know that the CIA was weaponizing the bulk of the future Caliph's forces." Yup. It's the same reason that the House investigation of the Benghazi incident will never punch through to the truth. The War Party doesn't want its Benghazi CIA ratline for Libyan weapons to Turkey being exposed because that leads directly to the fact that ISIS is a U.S.-Saudi creation. Remember Wayne Madsen's article on why Obama backed down from his planned missile and bombing attack on Syria after the Ghouta false flag Sarin attack in August 2013: ""Some within the Pentagon ranks are so displeased with Obama's policies on Syria, they have let certain members of Congress of both parties know that «smoking gun» proof exists that Obama and CIA director John O. Brennan personally authorized the transfer of arms and personnel from Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al Sharia Islamist rebels in Libya to Syria's Jabhat al Nusra rebels, who are also linked to Al Qaeda, in what amounts to an illegal «Iran-contra»-like scandal." http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/09/04/american-generals-stand-between-war-and-peace.html And the detailed confirmation that events had actually transpired in accordance with that plan by Yossef Bodansky - Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US House of Representatives from 1988 to 2004 and the center of an enormous global

Chas Freeman served as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the war to liberate Kuwait and as Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993-94. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "diplomacy" and is the author of five books, including "America's Misadventures in the Middle East" and "Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige."  I have largely omitted highlighting portions of the speech dealing with Muslim nations because Freeman has apparently lost touch with the actual U.S., Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, and Turish roles in creating and expanding ISIL. But his analysis of Israel's situation and recommendations for curing it seem quite valid, as well as his overall Mideast recommendation to heed the First Law of Holes: "when stuck in one, stop digging."   I recommend reading the entire speech notwithstanding his misunderstanding of ISIL. There is a lot of very important history there ably summarized.