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Cash in your clunky Congressman

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You've seen those buy-back programs where some nanny group wants to get guns off the streets by buying them back. One such program offered $250 per gun, no questions asked. (Since you can buy a new gun for less than that, a couple gun dealers showed up with their trunks full of cheap new guns to sell back at $250 a pop.) Just this past Halloween, a group of dentists even offered a candy buy-back program. But we face a danger greater than guns, or even sugar. Let’s go after the real danger on the streets. So I'm announcing the first

Congressional Buy-Back Program

Sponsored by CUSS and CRAP

CUSS (Citizens United for Safe Streets) and CRAP (Committee to Restore America’s Peace)

1. Who: Any registered voter may exchange their Congressman for cash.

2. What: Any member of Congress is eligible for buy-back, regardless of original selling price.

3. How much: it may seem like a problem deciding how much cash to offer to anyone who brings their Congressman in for redemption. But just like the gun buy-back programs, the cash offered need not bear any relationship to the actual value of the item, and in fact, a higher price will yield better results. So, let’s not be stingy here. We will offer a cash payment that is well above the actual worth of even the best Congressman. We suggest $10 for Representatives and $20 for Senators. Any residual bribes found on the person of the Congressman may be retained by the voter.

4. Limit: One per voter.

5. When: ASAP, especially before the next session of Congress.

Additional rules: As soon as Congress gets wind of this buy-back program, we expect many of them to go into hiding. So to improve the effectiveness of the program, we have analyzed actual features of successful gun buy-back programs in order to adapt them to our Congressional Buy-Back Program.

6. “Only weapons in working order will be accepted.” This presents a real challenge to adapt to Congressmen. In testing a small sample of Congressmen, we found none of them were in working condition. So we will accept all Congressmen, no questions asked.

7. “The MPDC works with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to trace the weapons and track their involvement with previously unsolved crimes.” This should be relatively easy; we can to use The Congressional Record to track the Congressmen’s previous criminal activity.

8. “All the weapons accumulated during gun buy-backs in DC are melted down and destroyed at an area foundry.” There might be environmental problems caused by dumping Congressmen into a foundry, so we will simply export them to France, which will raise the average IQ of both countries.

9. “No identification required.” This means you, not your Congressman. We may still require your Congressman to have valid ID or a passport (see #8 above).

10. “No gun dealers.” Since the people who regularly buy and sell guns are ineligible for gun buy-backs, we think, to be fair, we will have to declare lobbyists ineligible to sell back a Congressman.

11. “Those turning in weapons are granted amnesty from any gun possession charges that might apply.” Any voter who turns in a Congressman will be granted amnesty from such charges as tampering with the witless or obstructing injustice or transporting a moron across state lines.

12. “The program will not accept BB guns, air pistols, long guns and replicas.” Genuine elected Congressmen only, please. No coroners or school board members.

13. “Guns brought by car must be transported in the trunk and unloaded, and placed in a plastic or paper bag or shoe box.” This makes sense. We think Congressmen can be safely transported in the same manner.

14. “Bury our guns, not our people!” Burying Congressmen requires a hazardous waste permit from the EPA, which would take too long. We think the France option will work fine. However, as a back-up option, we have arranged for a 1-to-1 swap as Gitmo is emptied.

15. “Stolen weapons will be returned to their legal owners.” Actually, we have not seen a problem with anybody even wanting to steal a Congressman. However, some Congressmen who have been bought won’t stay bought and repeatedly resell themselves to the highest bidder. So, under the “doctrine of prior corruption” we will honor receipts for bought Congressmen based on earliest date of purchase rather than highest amount of purchase to determine legal ownership of the Congressman.

16. “Make our streets safer by taking unwanted guns off our streets.” We think that we will all be safer when we reduce the number of Congressmen roaming the streets. So, gather up your Congressmen and bring them in.

17. Critics of this buy-back point to the fact that gun buy-back programs have never shown a reduction in crime as a result. But why take the chance with something as dangerous as a Congressman? Even if only one law is prevented, wouldn’t it be worth it?

Drew Clark of Erie is a former member of the Colorado House of Representatives, where he was never for sale at any price.

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It's a fact: We're at war

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We are at war with Islam. How do we know? The Islamists tell us: from their pulpits, in their literature, on their websites and in their holy books. More precisely, they are waging Jihad against us as unbelievers (the “Kuffar). It is nothing we have done, and there is nothing we can do peaceably to stop it. This will come as a blow to the “Blame America First” adherents, who sincerely believe that if only America would “straighten out”, all the problems in the world would go away. Jihad is a process of forcing the “Kuffar” to submit to the Shari’ah and to pay a terribly expensive Jizya tax or to die(Qur’an Suras 2:16, 4:89, 9:5, 9:36). It is a process built into the Faith and has been underway for 1400 years, long before there was a United States or its foreign policy, and long before there was an Israel.

The longer we in the West stay in denial of this fact, the more rapidly our society, with its freedoms and prosperity, will disappear! Our attempts to assure the Muslims we mean them no harm and that we are not at war with them is irrelevant. Our wishful thinking that somehow not all Muslims subscribe to Jihad is just that! Wishful thinking! Our mythical construct of “moderate Muslims” that are benign denies the fact that Jihad is an obligation of all believers, by “Scholarly Consensus”! This means a believer is required to believe and to obey on pain of apostasy! (Reliance of the Traveller,o9.1).

An old anti-war sticker asked a rhetorical question “What if somebody gave a war and nobody came?” The answer is clear: you are enslaved very quickly.

We need to understand that Jihad can be waged four ways: with the mouth, with the pen, with money as well as with the sword. Our government’s concentration on Al Qaeda as the only threat is incorrect! The Muslim Brotherhood, and it’s myriad of front organizations, such as ISNA, CAIR, MAS and MPAC, are working right here to subvert our democracy with the other modes of Jihad.

Slowly but surely they are working to force us to submit to the Shari’ah! Their demands, in the guise of “Muslim rights”, are in reality designed to uproot our culture and prepare our society for eventual Islamization. Foot washing stations and prayer rooms in public schools and Universities are a prime example. Such facilities are non-existent even in Muslim countries! Their only purpose is to force the school systems to submit to the Shari’ah Law.

The so called “war on terror” has floundered for 8 years because the strategy is incoherent! Terror is a tactic, not an ideology! We need to construct our strategy for survival against the ideology of Islamic Jihad and nothing else. When we do that, what must be done becomes crystal clear!

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Health care and justice: Reply to Sasseen

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Your understanding of the health care debate is truly comprehensive and thoughtful. We must always be concerned with both individual rights and the common good. You have shown the way to deal with the present crisis in a way that is consistent with the Constitution and distributive justice. I do wish to make a few points. First, whatever the requirements of the common good, the constitutional question is crucial. That is, we are a people in virtue of the Constitution, which has formed our habits and shaped our character. These have contributed mightily to a market economy which not only distributes goods and services more efficiently and more abundantly than any other society, but has aroused expectations and even enriched and thereby empowered government agencies. We now desire universal health care because we have gotten closer to it than would have been possible in the market economy's absence. We are enduring the crisis, if not the revolution, of rising expectations.

Socialists can only dream of redistributing the wealth in the presence of the hated capitalistic system that generates massive wealth to redistribute. The socialists' quarrel with capitalism is not over its productive capacity, which even Marx more than acknowledges in the Communist Manifesto, but over its alleged failure to distribute the profits fairly. We need to be sure that, in dealing with the present difficulties, we do not "kill the goose that laid the golden eggs." That may sound trite, but we are talking about preserving our constitutional system that has brought us so many economic as well as political and social benefits.

The fact that private health insurance covers so much more than homeowners' or automobile insurance indicates just how much our expectations have been aroused. Home and auto insurance covers calamities beyond the normal or "daily recurrent needs of the household." Health insurance seeks to cover practically everything related to health, including routine office visits. More than this, the government, through Medicare and Medicaid, does much the same. The result is that most of us make health care decisions on the expectation that someone else will pay--at least directly--for them (even if we pay in the end through premiums or taxes).

We are acting less like self governing citizens of a free republic than like wards of the corporate and bureaucratic state, however benevolent. Proposals to micromanage this already socially generous system or even to replace it with a government bureaucracy threaten the constitutional order which made this generous health care financing possible. This restraint takes the form of many citizens' manifest preference for practically anything but what Democrats are now proposing, which is to scrap the free market in health altogether. Our regime made us what we are, including our generous and advanced health care.

My second point concerns the dynamics of democracy. Our constitution was established to temper and moderate the demos as much as possible, consistent with the equality and liberty sought by our people, and the authority of the majority to make public policy. While it is certainly true that democracy, in some sense, always threatens our delicate constitutional order, it is also true that in the public mind (perhaps not in the "theoretic politician's" mind) our country is not merely a democracy.  Citizens cherish constitutional restraints and protections no less. I think it remains rhetorically effective, as well as true, to appeal to the Constitution as the source of our political prosperity and not merely to defer to majority rule or to acquiese in its ultimate triumph over constitutional restraints.

The Republican party is the institutional vehicle for keeping us true to our national heritage, and it is currently doing as good a job of defending us as can be expected under the circumstances. The Democratic party, or what its founders called the Democracy, is the enemy of constitutionalism. To the extent that we Republicans make that case, we make the case against unrestrained democracy. The rule of law includes a healthy and free marketplace and not just the formal laws that govern it (not to mention the infinitude of bureaucratic rules that burden it).  That is the meaning, I believe, of your distinction between regulating commerce and managing it.

Finally, however much Hobbes and Locke have in common on the state of nature and the state of civil society, their starting and ending points differ. Because the state of nature for Hobbes is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," he opts for a monarchy over a democracy to govern it. He does leave the door open in theory to a democracy, but few readers of Hobbes believe that he has high hopes for it. On the other hand, for Locke the state of nature is "inconvenient," with all sorts of unresolvable disputes that require a settled, known law to adjudicate them. His preference for democracy is not only not theoretical but explicit, and the king is reduced to a mere executive with some but not all of the monarchical powers. In short, warlike mankind needs a monarch, according to Hobbes, whereas squabbling mankind requires a large element of self government through democratic institutions, according to Locke.

Locke, if he does not prescribe duties at least makes it far more likely that men will freely assume them because they are free to accumulate goods and therefore more able to provide for themselves and others, and even to support a government without being excessively burdened. This is another way of saying that the limited government and market economy that Locke did so much to foster satisfies the demands of the common good very well indeed.

We run the risk of "throwing out the baby with the bath water." Preserving our constitutional system is the key to maintaining our public health.

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