Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya is a test of Progressive global governance and subornation of the Constitution.

By Seth Richardson

President Obama gave a stirring patriotic and humanitarian speech to the nation on Monday night. The problem is that he gave it to the wrong audience and he gave it far too late. It’s a speech he should have given before Congress, as a part of a constitutionally-mandated process by which this nation goes to war. But he didn’t, he ignored Congress and the Constitution and instead consulted with the United Nations, NATO, and astonishingly, the Arab League.

Why did he abandon the Constitution and illegally levy war on Libya, which was no threat to the United States? Because he’s a Progressive and a Marxist, and to him the Constitution is just so much toilet paper with which he wipes himself. Sure, he pushed all the appropriate emotional buttons, propagandistically invoking genocide and evil and cynically pandering to all the best aspects and instincts of American character and our propensity to come to the rescue of oppressed people around the world.

The problem is that launching more than a hundred cruise missiles, destroying tanks and armored vehicles from the air, and sending soldiers into Libya to mark targets is not a humanitarian act by any sane definition. It’s an act of war, and only the Congress can declare war.

His defiance of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the sole and plenary power to declare war, was deliberate and calculated. Make no mistake, Obama is a constitutional scholar and knew exactly what he was doing. It was a test of the tenor of the public, a probing of the will of the People to accept without comment or objection the plenary exercise of executive power under the guidance of and subject to the approval of global government under circumstances where a plausible argument of necessity and humanitarian concern could be made.

It was a classic exercise of the Rahm Emmanuel maxim “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” After encouraging the youth of the Middle East to rise up in rebellion against brutal dictators and helping to set the Middle East aflame with his rhetoric and his sub-rosa machinations to foment unrest, Obama seized the golden opportunity of open insurrection in Libya to turn on our former “friend,” Moammar Gaddaffi, dictator of Libya, for whom Obama is seeking $1.5 million in “humanitarian” aid in his latest budget.

Why would Obama turn on Gaddafi and support an unknown group of insurrectionists who may end up being far worse for both Libya and the United States if they succeed in deposing Gaddafi? Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, excoriated Obama for the unproved attack and U.S. support of Libyan rebels saying, “Believe me, one day you will wake up and you made a big mistake with supporting these people.” So again, why would Obama risk censure and impeachment by knowingly violating the Constitution and declaring war on Libya?

Because his goal is not to liberate Libya, it’s to test the resolve of the the Congress and the People to see if we have abandoned our fundamental principles and the rule of law. What Obama is hoping is that the Congress has finally become impotent and irrelevant and will not dare to oppose him or repudiate his high crimes, and he believes that the time is right to advance his “fundamental transformation” of the United States into a vassal state of One World Government under the aegis of the United Nations and World Socialism.

This test of public sentiment towards unitary Progressive executive action and resort to international authority to make war rather than obedience to the Constitution is carefully and insidiously intended to strike another very serious blow against the sovereignty of the United States and our foundational documents and laws. Obama believes that the public will blithely accept his platitudes and humanitarian zeal as sufficient justification to excuse his outright, blatant, deliberate, knowing and treasonous violation of the Constitution and the Separation of Powers Doctrine.

If we buy his propaganda, if we ignore his defiance of the Constitution, he will have achieved what Woodrow Wilson could not with his advocacy for the League of Nations, and he will have set a precedent that even George Bush the Younger, Wilson-loving Progressive that he was, dared not attempt in Iraq. Bush at least sought and received Congressional authorization for the Iraq war. Obama has assumed dictatorial executive power by committing an unprovoked and unauthorized act of war against Libya, and doing so in a manner that proves his disdain for Congress and the Constitution, and his fawning obedience to the global power elite and the U.N.

Obama has admitted that he decided to attack Libya more than two weeks ago, while he was in Washington and while the Congress was in session, and while he could have presented the arguments that he presented to us tonight to the Congress for their debate and approval or rejection. Instead, he deliberately waited until Congress was not in session, and he was in South America, precisely so that he could claim urgency and the unavailability of Congress as his excuse for taking unilateral action to levy war on Libya. His consultation with the United Nations and NATO rings hollow as well, since neither organization has any power or control over the United States, much less any constitutional authority to authorize the President of the United States to levy war on a nation that is not a direct or even credible threat to the United States.

His platitudes and excuses after the fact simply do not excuse his defiance of the law and the Constitution. Nor should we allow him to get away with this arrogation of power. If we do, then the Constitution is indeed nothing but a piece of paper that might as well be used to wipe Obama’s rear, and we might as well acknowledge that the United States is no longer a sovereign power and a nation of laws, not men.

We, the People must flood our representatives in Congress with letters and phone calls demanding two things: First, that the Congress immediately defund the unprovoked warlike actions of our military in Libya, and second we must call for impeachment and removal of the President, who has finally violated the Constitution in a way that makes it imperative that we repudiate his “fundamental transformation” of our nation into a vassal of a one-world government.

© 2011 Altnews

Government has no business regulating marriage

By Seth Richardson

In 1992, Amendment 2 to the Colorado Constitution tried to bar the state from granting “minority status, quota preferences, protected status or claim of discrimination” to gays. That Amendment was overturned as a violation of the right to equal protection under the law by the Supreme Court in 1996. In 2006, Colorado voters approved Amendment 43, which says “only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Colorado.” Amendment 43, petitioned onto the ballot, won by a 55 to 45 percent margin. This Amendment has not been successfully challenged in the courts, and remains part of the basic law of the land in Colorado. In that same election, voters turned down Referendum I, the Colorado Domestic Partnership Benefits and Responsibilities Act, which provided legal rights to same-sex couples, by a 52 to 48 percent margin.

Today, state Senate Bill 172, which would create a right to a civil union giving any two unmarried adults, regardless of gender, substantially the same legal rights as married persons winds its way through the legislative process. The bill has passed the Senate, but faces an uphill battle against conservative Republicans in the House.

Senate Bill 172 should become law because it resolves the primary infirmity of Referendum I, which was its specific reference to same-sex couples. But this should only be a stepping stone to the ultimate goal, which should be to extract the state from regulating marriage at all.

As early as 1691, marriage laws in America were imposed for blatantly racist reasons. Miscegenation laws barring marriages between whites and blacks and other minorities, and which controlled marriage among minorities were the genesis for modern marriage licensing by the state, and such laws endured until 1967. The Supreme Court overturned them in Loving v. Virginia, where the court resounding rejected the Virginia Supreme Court’s claim in 1965′s Naim v. Naim that the State of Virginia had legitimate purposes “to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride.” The Supreme Court held:

“These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”

As a civil institution regulated by the government, it is argued that marriage between one man and one woman, deserves special, exclusive status, preference and privilege in the law because such regulation “strengthens the family” and “provides stability for the individuals, their families, and the broader community.”

Notably absent from such assertions is any critically robust evidence that providing fundamental equality under the law for other forms of domestic partnerships in any way impairs the goals associated with protection of the marriage relationship.

In essence, those who object to civil unions between non-married individuals are falsely claiming that marriage and civil unions are somehow a mutually-exclusive zero-sum game where the rights of heterosexual married persons are disparaged or harmed by the extension of rights to other couples who choose a civil union over marriage. In short, if gays are allowed to enjoy certain legal rights and benefits under a civil union law that are also enjoyed by married heterosexuals, some undefined and vague harm would be perpetrated on society as a whole.

This zero-sum argument is, of course, utter nonsense and factually speaking is based in the same sort of  irrational bigotry, hatred and fear of homosexuality that is manifest in the ruling of the Virginia Supreme Court in Naim v. Naim. Replace the word “race” with “sex” in the Supreme Court’s ruling and the parallels become clear. It’s also important to note that not every intimate personal relationship is about sex, homosexual, heterosexual or otherwise.

Moreover, according to Supreme Court precedent, government has no legal right to pry into the sexual preferences or otherwise-lawful sexual practices of anyone. The assumption that the only possible reason two people might want to form an intimate personal bond is for sex is a prurient, prudish, Puritanical and entirely unconstitutional criterion upon which to base public policy.

Many people choose to live in close relationship with others completely outside the traditional bounds of marriage and procreation and sex, and they deserve to have the right to enjoy legal protections afforded to other familial relationships including rights of survivorship, medical decision making, assumption of debts and filing of claims for wrongful death.

For example, a brother and sister, or two sisters or brothers, or other close relations who cannot marry, like an uncle or aunt, or those who may be divorced or widowed may wish to meld their families together insofar as the legal rights and protections they wish to enjoy for perfectly rational and practical reasons not involving sex.

Or an uncle may wish to take financial and legal responsibility for, and assign legal benefits he is entitled to receive to his brother’s widow and children, or to his widoed sister and her children. Traditional marriage laws do not allow this sort of beneficial, but entirely non-sexual assumption of mutual responsibility and benefit that provides stability for families, children and society as a whole. A civil union law would. There are many reasons why two people who do not wish to, or cannot be “married” to desire to bond themselves and their families together for mutual protection and benefit, particularly in these hard economic times.

Why should a single man who does not wish to, or cannot marry for religious reasons (for example, a Catholic man or woman who is sterile and cannot be married in the Catholic church) be denied all ability to benefit from and contribute to a close family relationship? Suppose such a man wishes to assign benefits like his pension or medical insurance benefits to a widowed female friend or relative who is struggling to support her children. Those rights and benefits, which he has earned and which would automatically accrue to his legal spouse were he married, cannot be likewise assigned to someone he cares deeply for, but does not wish to or cannot marry. Why should the children be deprived of the benefits that he wishes to voluntarily assign for their benefit merely because he’s not married to their mother? Is not the stability of the woman and her children, and society, better served by the State acknowledging and ratifying a contract for a civil union that reduces the burden on the taxpayers that might otherwise have to provide social services benefits and entitlements to the widow and children?

Marriage is, at its core, the melding of two individuals in a spiritual, religious, intimate and loving relationship that is neither amenable to or an appropriate subject for governmental interference or regulation. It is a contract between two individuals, and perhaps their God, if they are believers. It is only marginally the province of government regulation.

Because marriage is fundamentally spiritual and religious in nature, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the State must have a “compelling need” to regulate marriage at all, and it must only regulate marriage in ways that both achieve only the legitimate governmental objective and do so with the minimum possible regulatory interference with what is a constitutionally-protected religious practice.

Only when it comes to the protection of the rights of children, and the orderly dissolution of the relationship and distribution of marital assets does the government have any legitimate interest in regulating any intimate domestic relationship. It is not within the proper province of government to regulate religious and spiritual matters like marriage in order to provide “stability for the individuals, their families, and the broader community.” It is up to the individuals to provide their own stability and it is their right to conform their intimate personal relationships however they believe it will best serve their fundamental right to pursue happiness.

The only other legitimate role of government in such relationships, irrespective of the gender of the parties, is as a recorder and enforcer of a written civil contract that details the rights and responsibilities of the parties who have come to a meeting of the minds about how they wish to construct and live their lives. Stability in both relationships and in society and fundamental fairness are indeed better served by requiring that such intimate relationships be carefully constructed as written contracts that specify the nature, duties, rights and duration of the contract that are legally binding on both parties and which may be enforced by the State when a breach of that contract occurs.

Therefore, where our society should be headed is towards the complete withdrawal of the State from the regulation of “marriage” as a personal, intimate, spiritual and/or religious institution, which is best left to the partners or their respective religions.

The Colorado General Assembly should not only pass Senate Bill 172 into law, but it should also amend and/or repeal every mention of the word “marriage” and replace it with the words “civil union” in our statutes.

Marriage then becomes a matter beyond the pale of civil law, as it should be, and squarely the province of religion and personal commitment alone, while at the same time, the legitimate and reasonable regulation of the legal aspects of intimate domestic relationships, which are within the power of the State to regulate, provide equal protection and due process to everyone.

And it also respects the will of the voters by removing from the ambit of government authority the recognition of marriage by the state. Those who wish to be married may be married simply by representing themselves to be married. But that representation would not grant them any legal rights or impose upon them any legal obligations. For that to occur, they must have a civil union contract specifying the rights, duties and obligations of each partner recorded by the County Clerk.

Fairness for all, and the orderly administration of law and justice would be best served by limiting the State’s role in intimate relationships to recording and adjudicating civil contracts.

© 2011 Altnews

Pandering to environmental zealots and slopping at the federal trough is not what we pay the Commissioners to do.

By Seth Richardson

It’s time to face facts about electric cars. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and for every benefit an all-electric car might have, there are environmental and economic problems to match.

“Zero emission” electric vehicles are anything but zero emission, and in a number of ways they are more harmful to the environment than the gasoline-fueled vehicles they seek to replace. Take for example the battery pack required by an electric car. They are massive, heavy, and are filled with toxic materials that have to be disposed of when the battery pack eventually fails, as every battery ever designed by mankind does, and they have to be replaced. The manufacturing of batteries of all types consumes energy and has its own “carbon loading” and pollution coefficient which is rarely factored in when analyzing just how “green” the vehicles actually are. While most automotive batteries can be recycled, there is still an environmental cost to be considered in both the manufacturing and recycling of any battery that’s usually left out of the environmental analysis.

And then there’s the electrical generating capacity improvements that are required to replace the fossil fuels that are supposedly avoided by using all-electric vehicles. Unlike a standard gasoline powered automobile which can be refueled at any of a thousand gas stations in the area at need in a matter of minutes, an electric car must be recharged at a charging station that may require special circuitry and connectors, which limits the locations where they can be recharged, and it can take many hours to recharge them. And the infrastructure for charging stations is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. The price of copper wire, for example, is at an all-time high at the moment. But that’s hardly the only issue with all-electric vehicles. And then there’s the additional air pollution resulting from increases in generating capacity, even with natural-gas fired plants, much less coal-fired ones.

In addition to extremely limited range for electric vehicles, which is usually less than 100 miles, and is often around 40 or so, using an electric vehicle requires a good deal of planning and careful attention to charging if the operator is not to be left stranded somewhere with a dead battery.

In 2000, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, purchased a fleet of 20 electrically-powered Ford Ranger delivery trucks intended to provide clean, efficient movement of materials around the sprawling lab located on the slopes of an ancient volcano high above Santa Fe. Twenty sophisticated charging stations were installed all across the lab’s facilities to recharge the trucks. The intent was laudable, but within a year or so, the entire program had been abandoned, the vehicles disposed of, and the charging stations removed.

According to Steve Sandoval of the Communications Office at LANL, “a determination was made that the maintenance costs were prohibitive. For example, to conduct regular maintenance on the vehicles required that the truck (s) be driven to Albuquerque, 90 miles from Los Alamos each way.”

But according to confidential sources one of the primary reasons for the failure of this well-intentioned program was the confluence of the inherent design flaws of the electric trucks and the human factor.

It seems that employees would just jump in a truck, as they were accustomed to doing with gasoline-powered vehicles, and would take off to make their deliveries without carefully checking the state of charge on the batteries. This lead to frequent occurrences of the trucks stalling out in inconvenient places, which required the truck to be towed to a charging station, where the employee would have to cool his heels for hours, or find another way to transport the materials, while the truck charged up.

Eventually, managers at the facility decided that the cost of towing the vehicles and the delays associated with having to recharge them, combined with the servicing costs, exceeded their value as fuel-saving vehicles, so the program was abandoned.

This points out the inherent flaw in short-range electric vehicles. They only work well when both the route and timing of their use is both consistent and predictable, and there is sufficient time at either end to recharge the vehicle. In other words, an all-electric vehicle might work very well for a daily commuter who lives less than 20 miles or so from his place of work and who drives it to the office in the morning, puts it on a charger while at work, and then drives it home in the evening. But electric cars are not well suited to moving public employees about the city, much less the entirely of El Paso County, on their less-predictable daily travels.

I predict that what happened at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will happen to the County Commissioners if they decide to buy all-electric vehicles, and they will end up abandoning the program for the same reasons; inefficiency and excessive costs caused by the failure of employees to properly manage battery charge necessitating expensive tows and lost productivity.

Perhaps one day, when all-electric cars can swap a discharged battery pack for a charged one as quickly and easily as one can fill up a gas tank, such vehicles will be suitable for more than the limited purpose of commuting to and from work every day. But that day has not yet arrived, and the County Commissioners should steward the public’s money better and resist the urge to slop at the federal trough by participating in a grant program that has to extract the money for the grants from taxpayers to begin with.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, particularly where the federal government is concerned, and like the Los Alamos National Laboratory experience, the Commissioners may spend taxpayer money for a feel-good sop to mindless environmental correctness and end up with an expensive white elephant of a program it’s obligated to support even when the costs involved far exceed what it would cost just to go buy a fuel-efficient subcompact car.

Hybrid vehicles are substantially better when it comes to energy management because they can operate on gasoline alone if their battery runs out, but there is evidence that they are not nearly as cost-effective as some would have you believe. Toyota is touting a few of its Prius hybrids that are said to have more than 200,000 miles on their battery packs, and they claim that some may have close to 400,000 miles on them, but the common consumer experience appears to be far different.

While Toyota warranties their battery packs for between 100,000 and 150,000 miles these days, depending on model and year, it appears that no few battery packs need to be replaced right about the end of the warranty period, and the costs of replacing a battery pack can easily wipe out the savings in fuel costs realized over time. One Prius owner in Santa Fe owns a 2004 Prius and recently had to replace his battery pack at only 120,000 miles, and it cost him nearly $6,000 to do so, which wiped out any cost savings on fuel he had accrued. His story is far from unique.

Greg Thome, manager of Toyota Division Communications, says, “We have not had a complete hybrid vehicle battery replacement due to failure. We have mentioned that in past interviews and perhaps speeches. The hybrid battery is made up of 28 individual modules, and on rare occasions we’ve replaced and individual module for an owner if needed (under our 10-year hybrid powertrain warranty). Only the equivalent of about one percent of the total batteries in operation have been sold as replacements overall, including those damaged in accidents.”

But this statement fails to explain the many complaints about poor battery performance and the high cost of replacing a hybrid battery pack that can be easily found on line, and which literally wipe out any accrued fuel savings with a single battery pack replacement.

Nor has Toyota responded to questions about their dealership qualifications or willingness to diagnose and repair a faulty battery module in a pack. According to the best information available at press time, neither Toyota nor its dealers will offer to repair a faulty module in a pack if the pack is not under warranty, so the owner is compelled to buy an entire new battery, even though only one module may be defective.

Commissioners should strongly resist the urge to pander to eco-correctness or slop at the federal trough, and should buy only vehicles of proven value and durability that will most efficiently serve the public at the lowest possible cost for the longest possible time, and which do not become useless and require expensive battery replacement when an ordinary gasoline powered vehicle can be expected to rack up at least twice as many miles without substantial need for major repairs.

Hybrid vehicles may be a valid option for El Paso County, but the Commissioners should pay for it on their own and resist participating in feel-good federal grant programs which always come with strings attached.

© 2011 Altnews