us-first.us Blog

If we in these United States still had an actual president who puts US-First — that is what he would have told the Mexican president as he walked away at the start of being lectured about our being the cause of their people scrambling to run the border to get over here because it is such a stinking hell hole over there.  And on top of that, President Bush is their best friend here in their bid to allow more of their people to come and stay here.  Has anybody gotten around to whispering in El Presidente Calderon’s ear, “Quit being a dumb, stupid jack-ass!”.

Now, let’s get on with building that wall.  And, the next time some jack-ass compares it to the Berlin Wall, you remind them that the purpose of that wall was to keep people in — people were shot as they tried to scale it.  The purpose of our wall on the border with Mexico is to keep people out — we do not shoot at them as they try to make there way into our country.  Come to think of it, President Bush should have cut in on Calderon’s lecture and told him to stop squandering all them petro pesos that Pemex generates and start using them to build better lives for his people so that they don’t live in a hell hole that anyone in their right mind would want to flee..

Yahoo carried this news item today, in which the FBI is said to have admitted repeated violations of portions of the USA Patriot Act. My fellow citizens, we have some house claening to be done…

The FBI has broken the law by going beyond the extended powers given them by the USA Patriot Act passed after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That law allows them to conduct certain kinds of surveillance within the US without needing to first obtain a public court order in the hopes that they would have an easier time breaking up future terrorist plots. We have not had any large-scale attacks since then, so it looks like the law has worked as designed. (We have had announcements over the years of various plots which have been broken up and people have been caught in what looked like practice operations.)

I view surveillance by the government with a very, very suspicious eye. Our Constitution was written by people with similar views, who held so strongly that government power must always be kept in check that they wrote the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to our Constitution and insisted that they be ratified along with the Constitution — or they would separate themselves from the emerging USA. The Patriot Act relaxes some of the traditional checks we have on government police power — for a set period of time. We are at war and need to protect ourselves from an enemy that walks among us — but we also must very carefully watch the people to whom we give such powers so that they do not become corrupted by that power. We are now at a time for testing, to see if we as a people still believe in protecting the freedoms which we talk about and think that the rest of the world should adopt. (I have dealings in Ukraine, and our State Department has just issued a report which states that there are some such abuses of power there — and I tend to agree with that report from my reading of English-language Ukrainian news sources.) It was a certainty that there would eventually be a misuse of power — to abuse power is the nature of people — including me and you. We shall now see whether those who broke the law are held accountable to the law as in years past. It has been over 30 years since the last large-scale incident — and it cost Richard Nixon the presidency and several of his underlings went to jail.

The news story about the violations of the Patriot Act states, “The nation’s top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans. They apologized and vowed to prevent further illegal intrusions.” An apology is not good enough — people need to go to jail!!! If President Bush, who’s handling of the terrorists I tend to support, was an active participant, he needs to be impeached like Nixon was. Those who apologize and are not made to pay for their actions eventually become the Soviet KGB or the Nazi SS. It has been stated that, “all evil needs in order to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” I have contacted the President,  and my Congressman and Senators to demand investigations and prosecutions. I will also ask the same of anyone else who will listen. I believe there will be prosecutions and jail time for some, but only if We The People demand it and do not rest until we have it.

What has this story about the Parliament of England have to do with us here in the US?  Ignorance, that’s what.  Ignorance about the system of government given to us by the writers of our Constitution.  The following statement appears in the article, “Legislators took an unprecedented step Wednesday toward ending an age-old tradition of allowing Britain’s non-elected elite to hold political power, backing proposals for an entirely elected House of Lords. … The move, which requires new legislation, would bring the previously unelected upper house in line with similar institutions, such as the U.S. Senate. … Campaigners lobbying for an entirely elected second parliamentary chamber claim only Lesotho — a poor African kingdom — has a system similar to Britain’s, allowing a mix of unelected and hereditary appointees to influence laws.”

The Senate of the United States, as created by our Constitution, did not enshrine the elite.  It enshrined the concept of federalism by giving the several, independent and sovereign states a say in the activities of the federal government which they and The People had created, and to which they had delegated certain duties and responsibilities of sovereign statehood.  Because that concept was not written well enough into the original document, the Tenth Amendment was passed to make it perfectly clear that the several states retained (or The People by pass-thru) all rights and duties not specifically delegated to the federal government.

This changed with passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, which provided for direct election of Senators — and the subjugation of the several states to the federal government.  It is instructive to note that major political subdivisions, analogous to our states, are still called ‘oblasts’ in countries of the former Soviet Union — translation: ’subjects’.

Thus, the writer of the article, David Stringer, has demonstrated his ignorance of our system of government by equating our Senate with the British House Of Lords.  If he is a Brit, he has an excuse for his ignorance, just as I am ignorant about many of the intricacies of the British political system and might well make an equally silly statement when discussing it.  If he is an American, he is without excuse.  Either way, I’m using the opportunity to [re-]educate my fellow citizens on the concept of, and the need to return to, a federal system of government by repealing the Seventeenth Amendment.