by State Rep. Matthew Shea (WA-4th)

This summer, legislators from several states met to discuss the steps needed to restore our Constitutional Republic. The federal government has ignored the many state sovereignty resolutions from 2009 notifying it to cease and desist its current and continued overreach. The group decided it was time to actively counter the tyranny emanating from Washington D.C.

From those discussions it became clear three things needed to happen.

A.State Legislatures need to pass 10 key pieces of legislation “with teeth” to put the federal government back in its place.
B.The people must pass the legislation through the Initiative process if any piece of the legislative agenda fails.
C.County Sheriffs must reaffirm and uphold their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
With the advent of the Tea Party Movement, many people have been asking how exactly we can make the above reality. What follows is Part I of the outline of that plan regarding state legislation, the action steps any concerned citizen can take to see this legislation to fruition, and the brief history and justifications behind each.

Step 1: Reclaim State Sovereignty through Key Nullification Legislation

Our Constitutional Republic is founded on a system of checks and balances known as the “separation of powers.” Rarely, however, are the states considered part of this essential principle.

Enter the “doctrine of nullification.”

Nullification is based on the simple principle that the federal government cannot be the final arbiter of the extent and boundaries of its own power. This includes all branches of the federal government. In the law this is known as a “conflict of interest.”

Additionally, since the states created the federal government the federal government was an agent of the states; not the other way around. Thus, Thomas Jefferson believed that, by extension, the states had a natural right to nullify (render as of no effect) any laws they believed were unconstitutional.

In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 he wrote,

“co-States, recurring to their natural right…will concur in declaring these acts void, and of no force, and will each take measures of its own for providing that neither these acts, nor any others of the General Government not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shalt be exercised within their respective territories.”1

Alexander Hamilton echoed this sentiment in Federalist #85 “We may safely rely on the disposition of the state legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.” 2

It is clear then that State Legislatures can stop the unconstitutional overreach of the Obama administration through nullification. Here is a list of proposed nullification legislation to introduce in all 50 States.

A.Nullification of Socialized Health Care [current efforts] [example legislation]
B.Nullification of National Cap and Trade [example legislation]
C.Federal Enumerated Powers Requirement (Blanket Nullification) [details]
D.Establishment of a Federal Tax Escrow Account [example legislation]
If imposed, socialized health care and cap and trade will crush our economy. These programs are both unconstitutional, creating government powers beyond those enumerated by the Constitution. If those programs are nullified, it will give the individual states a fighting chance to detach from a federal budget in freefall and save the economies of the individual states.

Next, blanket nullification.

The Federal Government, particularly the House of Representatives, needs to abide by its own rules. In particular, House Rule XIII 3(d) specifically states that:

“Each report of a committee on a public bill or public joint resolution shall contain the following: (1) A statement citing the specific powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact the law proposed by the bill or resolution.” 3

Needless to say, this rule is generally ignored. The idea behind blanket nullification is that if the Congress does not specify the enumerated power it is using according to its own rules, or the power specified is not one of the enumerated powers granted to Congress in the United States Constitution, then the “law” is automatically null and void.

Lastly, the federal government cannot survive without money. I know that seems obvious but many states are missing the opportunity to use money as an incentive for the federal government to return to its proper role. Most visibly, states help collect the federal portion of the gasoline tax. That money should be put into an escrow account at the state level and held there. The Escrow Account legislation includes a provision that all consumer, excise, and income taxes payable to the federal government would go through this account first. This would do two things. First, it would give states the ability to collect interest on that money to help offset revenue shortfalls. Second, it would allow states to hold that money as long as needed as an incentive for the federal government to return within the enumerated boundaries of its power.

Step 2:   Erect an impenetrable wall around the County Sheriff and the 2nd Amendment.

As recently stated in the famous Heller opinion by the United States Supreme Court, the right to bear arms “is an individual right protecting against both public and private violence” and “when the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized they are better able to resist tyranny.” 4

Thus, it is clear that the 2nd Amendment not only protects the right to self-defense but that right extends to defending oneself against tyranny. As with any historical attempt to establish a dictatorship weapons must be seized or severely regulated. 5

Here is a list of legislation to prevent this from happening, some of which has already been introduced in states around the country:

◦Sheriff First [model legislation]
◦Extension of the Castle Doctrine (right to protection) [sample legislation]
◦Prohibition of Gun and Ammunition Tracking [see above]
◦Firearms Freedom Act [current efforts] [model legislation]
The county Sheriff is the senior law enforcement officer both in terms of rank and legal authority in a county. This comes from a tradition of over 1000 years of Anglo-Saxon common law. Anglo-Saxon communities were typically organized into “shires” consisting of approximately 1000 people. 6

The chief law enforcement officer of the shire was the “reeve” or “reef.” Hence, the modern combination of the two words, as we know them today, “shire reef” or “Sheriff.” 7

Consequently, the Sheriff’s pre-eminent legal authority is well established. This was confirmed in Printz v. United States. 7    Justice Scalia quotes James Madison who wrote in Federalist 39:

“In the latter, the local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority, than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere.”9

Sheriff 1st legislation would formally declare that all federal agents and officers must give notice of, and seek permission before, any arrest, search, or seizure occurs. Thus, federal agents and officers seeking to enforce unconstitutional laws must go through the county Sheriff first.

Extending the castle doctrine to one’s person would go a long way toward eliminating the arbitrary “no carry” areas. Like Virginia Tech, it is these areas where guns for self-defense are most needed.

Many gun and ammunition tracking schemes have been, and are still being, attempted. The intended purpose of “reducing gun related” crime is never realized. Instead, law-abiding citizens are punished with regulatory burdens and fees. Quite simply we need transparency in government not in the people.

Montana started the firearms freedom act to rein in the federal government’s use of the Commerce Clause to regulate everything within the stream of commerce. The original intent of the Commerce Clause was to regulate commerce between states not within states as Professor Rob Natelson points out in his 2007 Montana Law Review article.10

The Montana FFA simply returns to that original understanding regarding firearms made, sold, and kept within a state’s borders.

This list is by no means exhaustive. However, it does contain some immediate steps that can be taken toward freedom and restoring our God honoring Constitutional Republic. Hitler’s laws of January 30 and February 14, 1934, should serve as a stark reminder of what happens when state sovereignty is abolished.

In the coming few weeks I will publish the next part of the plan.

Matthew Shea [send him email] is a State Representative in Washington’s 4th District. He’s the author of HJM4009 for State Sovereignty.  Visit his website.

Copyright © 2009 by TenthAmendmentCenter.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

NOTES:

•1. Kentucky Resolution of 1798, Thomas Jefferson, Adopted by Kentucky Legislature on November 10, 1798.
•2. Federalist No. 85, Publius (Alexander Hamilton), August 13 and 16, 1788.
•3. Rules of the House XIII 3(d), “Content of Reports,” Page 623, 110th Congress.
•4. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. ___ (Actual Pages 11, 13) (2008)
•5. Id at (Actual Page 11).
•6. http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/history/ancient/1859-teutoburg-forest-the-battle-that-saved-the-west
•7. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=sheriff&searchmode=none
•8. Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997)
•9. Federalist No. 39, Publius (James Madison), January 16, 1788
•10. Tempering the Commerce Power, 68 Mont. L. Rev. 95 (2007).

A letter from Eric Odom

Fellow Patriots,

Illinois held the nation’s first primary election today, and one of our endorsed candidates, Adam Kinzinger for Congress, dominated his race for the nod in the 11th Congressional District.

According to the AP, there were a total of 50,443 votes cast in the district. Of those votes cast, Adam Kinzinger walked away with a whopping 32,121.

This gave Adam Kinzinger 64% of the vote in the primary, with the second place coming in with just 10%.

Yesterday, we ran a full page ad in The Herald News support Kinzinger’s candidacy for the 11th District. We also cut an audio ad that we’ll soon begin running throughout the district.

You can listen to the audio ad here.

This is a huge victory for our movement. But today was just a battle, and liberal incumbent Rep. Debbie Halvorson is going to put up a very, very tough general challenge for us.

We’re going to be putting together phone banks, GOTV campaigns, TV ads, radio ads and direct mail over the coming months. And we need your help to do it.

Please consider a contribution to help us work to defeat Debbie Halvorson and replace her with Adam Kinzinger.

Unified, we can move mountains. This is the first campaign that we’ve had direct involvement in, but it certainly won’t be the last. Keep an eye out for upcoming endorsements.

And thank for all that you’ve done so far!

For Liberty,
-Eric Odom

Great rally put on by John Caldara of The Independence Institute: Colorado’s Free Market Think Tank:  www.i2i.org.
Defend Colorado from Obama Care!

Help defend states’ rights in Colorado!! Independence Institute President Jon Caldara is calling for an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would opt Colorado out of the onerous health insurance mandates coming out of Washington DC. Read the “Right to Health Care Choice” ballot language here.

“Colorado has a right to decide how we choose to deal with health care,” Caldara told the Denver Post. “And it is my goal to make sure that Washington doesn’t jam Obama Care down the throats of Coloradans.” Check out the whole story at the Denver Post.

Take a look at more press coverage here:

• Colorado Springs Gazette supports our effort with this op-ed.
• Denver Post writer Lynn Bartels covered our press conference here.
• The Denver Biz Journal writes, “Caldara offers health-mandate opt-out initiative.”
• Grand Junction Sentinel offers coverage in this article.
• KRDO Channel 13 picked us up here.
• Fox 31, KDVR Denver offered this article and video of Jon speaking here.
• “Federal health care foes plot for state opt-outs” from the Washington Times.

How you can help…

* Become an Defend Colorado fan on Facebook
* Support our education efforts by making a tax deductable donation to the Independence Institute

While North America’s airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel’s, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

“It is mind boggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago,” said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He’s worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

“Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don’t take s— from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.”

That, in a nutshell is “Israelification” – a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight.  How do they manage that?

“The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport,” said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check.  All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

“Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of “distress” — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

“The word ‘profiling’ is a political invention by people who don’t want to do security,” he said. “To us, it doesn’t matter if he’s black, white, young or old. It’s just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I’m doing this?”

Once you’ve parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion’s half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

“This is to see that you don’t have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious,” said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

“The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds,” said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil’s advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

“I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is ‘Bombs 101′ to a screener.. I asked Ducheneau, ‘What would you do?’ And he said, ‘Evacuate the terminal.’ And I said, ‘Oh. My. God.’

“Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let’s say I’m (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let’s say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, ‘Two days.’”

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain ‘bomb boxes’. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

“This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports,” Sela said.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

“But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America,” Sela said.

“First, it’s fast — there’s almost no line. That’s because they’re not looking for liquids, they’re not looking at your shoes. They’re not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you,” said Sela. “Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes … and that’s how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys.”

That’s the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

This doesn’t begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

“There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States,” Sela said. “Absolutely none.”

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport’s behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

“We have a saying in Hebrew that it’s much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it’s dark over there.   That’s exactly how (North American airport security officials) act,” Sela said. “You can easily do what we do. You don’t have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training.. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept.”

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.

“Do you know why Israelis are so calm?    We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies.

“They know they’re doing a good job. You can’t say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don’t trust anybody,” Sela said. “But they say,… ‘ So far, so good  .’    Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you’ve spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

“But, what can you do?   Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don’t know any different.”

Democrats sang a different tune when inner-city minister Rev. Wayne Perryman sued the Democratic Party for that party’s 150-year history of racism, a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.  Democrats came into court and, under oath, admitted their racist past that Sen. Reid is now trying to foist on the shoulders of Republicans.  In court, Democrats refused to apologize for their racism and, using an army of lawyers, relied on the legal technicality of “standing” to avoid a court order against them, knowing they can take the black vote for granted.

So, what did the Democrats admit under oath?  Below are highlights of civil rights history.  For additional details, see the NBRA Civil Rights Newsletter posted on the website of the National Black Republican Association.

As author Michael Scheuer stated, the Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s:  slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.  Democrats have been running black communities for the past 40 years, and the failed socialist policies of the Democrats have turned those communities into economic and social wastelands.  Incredibly, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions created by Democrats.  Since the so-called War on Poverty of the 1960’s, over nine trillion dollars have been spent on poverty-related programs, with no movement in the poverty needle.

Etched in history and exposed in Perryman’s book, “Unfounded Loyalty”, is the sordid details of Democratic Party racism – past and present.  The Democratic Party, through its racist agenda and “States’ Rights” claim to own slaves, sought to protect and preserve the institution of slavery from 1792 to 1865, thus keeping enslaved millions of blacks. Democrats formed the Confederacy, seceded from the Union and fought a Civil War (1861 to 1865), a war where over 600,000 citizens were killed, including many thousands of blacks.   In his book, Perryman also provides the details about how the Republican Party was started in 1854 as the anti-slavery party, fought to free blacks from slavery and championed civil rights for blacks and women.

During the Civil War, Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 which ordered the freeing of slaves in states that were rebelling against Union forces.  Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865 that was ratified on December 6, 1865 to abolish all slavery in the United States.

Democrats passed discriminatory Black Codes in 1865 to suppress, restrict, and deny blacks the same privileges as whites.  The Codes forced blacks to serve as apprentices to their former slave masters.  Democrats also prevented blacks from getting the promised “40 acres and a mule”.

In 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was started by Democrats to lynch and terrorize Republicans, black and white, and the Ku Klux Klan became the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.  Over 3,000 Republicans were killed by the Klan, of whom 1,000 were white and 2,000 were black.  Details about the Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan can be found in the book “A Short History of Reconstruction” by Dr. Eric Foner.

To counter the discriminatory and terrorizing actions by Democrats, Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that were designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks.  Further, the Fourteenth Amendment championed by Republicans was ratified in 1868 that granted blacks citizenship.  The Fifteenth Amendment also championed by Republicans was ratified in 1870 that granted blacks the right to vote.

Determined to stop blacks from having equal rights, Democrats passed discriminatory Jim Crow Laws starting in 1875 to restrict the rights of blacks to use public facilities.  In response, Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which prohibited racial discrimination in public facilities.

Shamefully, Democrats fought against anti-lynching laws, and when the Democrats regained control of Congress in 1892, they passed the Repeal Act of 1894 that overturned civil right laws enacted by Republicans.

Further, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Democrats and against blacks in the case of “Plessy v. Ferguson” in 1896 where the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine.  That opinion stated that it was not a violation of the U.S. Constitution to have separate facilities for blacks.  It took Republicans nearly six decades to end these restrictions and finally get the civil rights laws of the 1950’s and 1960’s passed over the objection of the Democrats.

During the civil rights era of the 1960’s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. fought to stop Democrats from denying civil rights to blacks.  It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican as has been affirmed by one of his nieces.

Dr. King fought against Democrat Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor in Birmingham who let loose vicious dogs and turned skin-burning fire hoses on black civil rights demonstrators.

Democrat Georgia Governor Lester Maddox famously brandished ax handles to prevent blacks from patronizing his restaurant.   Democrat Alabama Governor George Wallace blocked the entrance of two black students at the University of Alabama in 1963 and thundered, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.   All of these racist Democrats remained Democrats until the day they died. In fact, racist Democrats declared that they would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than a Republican because the Republican Party was known as the party for blacks.

The so-called “Dixiecrats” remained Democrats and did not migrate to the Republican Party.  The Dixiecrats were a group of Southern Democrats who, in the 1948 national election, formed a third party, the State’s Rights Democratic Party with the slogan:  “Segregation Forever!”  Even so, they continued to be Democrats for all local and state elections, as well as for all future national elections.

The Democratic Party supported the Topeka, Kansas school board in opposition to school integration in the 1954 “Brown v. Topeka Board of Education” Supreme Court decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.  This landmark decision ended school segregation and declared that the “separate but equal” doctrine created by the 1896 “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision violated the 14th Amendment.

After the Brown decision, Democrat Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus tried to prevent desegregation of a Little Rock public school.  President Eisenhower sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate the schools and pushed through the 1957 Civil Rights Act.  In 1958, Eisenhower established a permanent US Civil Rights Commission that had been rejected by prior Democrat presidents, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Little known is the fact that Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, pushed through the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.  In fact, Dirksen was instrumental in the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968.   Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hailed Senator Dirksen’s “able and courageous Leadership”, and “The Chicago Defender”, the largest black-owned daily at that time, praised Senator Dirksen “for the grand manner of his generalship behind the passage of the best civil rights measures that have ever been enacted into law since Reconstruction”.

The chief opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd (a former official in the Ku Klux Klan).  Democrat Senator Byrd who conducted a filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act is still in Congress.  None of those racist Democrats became Republicans.

Democrats ignore the pivotal role played by Senator Dirksen in obtaining passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, while heralding President Johnson as a civil rights advocate for signing the bill.  Notably, in his 4,500-word State of the Union Address delivered on January 4, 1965, Johnson mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only thirty five words were devoted to civil rights.  He did not mention one word about voting rights.  Information about Johnson’s anemic civil rights policy positions can be found in the “Public Papers of the President, Lyndon B. Johnson,” 1965, vol. 1, p.1-9.

In their campaign to unfairly paint the Republican Party today as racist, Democrats point to President Johnson’s prediction that there would be an exodus from the Democratic Party because of Johnson’s signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Omitted from the Democrats’ rewritten history is what Johnson actually meant by his prediction.

Johnson’s statement was not made out of a concern that racist Democrats would suddenly join the Republican Party that was fighting for the civil rights of blacks.  Instead, Johnson feared that the racist Democrats would again form a third party, such as the short-lived States Rights Democratic Party.  In fact, Alabama’s Democrat Governor George C. Wallace in 1968 started the American Independent Party that attracted other racist candidates, including Democrat Atlanta Mayor (later Governor of Georgia) Lester Maddox.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is also lauded as a civil rights advocate.  In reality, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil rights Act while he was a senator.  After he became president, John F. Kennedy opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph who was a black Republican.  Dr. King criticized Kennedy for ignoring civil rights issues.  This criticism was one of the reasons that Kennedy, through his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

When the King family sought help with getting Dr. King out of a Birmingham jail, Richard Nixon did not respond because he knew that no individual Republican could have any control over the actions of the racist Democrats in the South.  Kennedy’s civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford who was a personal friend of Dr. King, made a telephone call on behalf of President Kennedy without Kennedy’s knowledge that resulted in Dr. King’s release.  Kennedy was angry about the call because he feared that he would lose the Southern vote.  History shows, though, that the call By Wofford eventually worked in Kennedy’s favor and is the primary reason so many blacks wrongly revere Kennedy today.

In the arsenal of the Democrats is a condemnation of Republican President Richard Nixon for his so-called “Southern Strategy.”  These same Democrats expressed no concern when the racially segregated South voted solidly for Democrats for over 100 years, yet unfairly deride Republicans because of the thirty-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party that began in the 1970’s.  Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was an effort on his part to get fair-minded people in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were discriminating against blacks.  Georgia did not switch until 2004, and Louisiana was controlled by Democrats until the election of Republican Governor Bobby Jindal in 2007.

As the co-architect of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, Pat Buchanan provided a first-hand account of the origin and intent of that strategy in a 2002 article.  In that article, Buchanan wrote that when Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column about the South (written by Buchanan), Nixon declared that the Republican Party would be built on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the “party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace to squeeze the last ounce of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice”.

The fact that Republicans today are not racist is explained clearly in the article”The Myth of the Racist Republicans” by Gerard Alexander that is posted on the Claremont Institute’s website.

Democrats generate false charges of racism against the Republican Party in order to keep blacks from voting for Republicans by making unfair accusations against Republican leaders such as Trent Lott who Democrats denounced for his remarks about Senator Strom Thurmond.  However, there was silence when Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd praised Senator Byrd, a former official in the Ku Klux Klan, as someone who would have been “a great senator for any moment.”  Senator Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan.  After Thurmond had a change of heart and joined the party of freedom and equality for blacks – the Republican Party – Thurmond defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats.

While claiming to care about diversity, Democrats readily demean black Republicans who do not toe the Democratic Party’s liberal agenda line, denigrating them as “sellouts”, “Uncle Toms”, “House Negroes”, “House N-word”, and worse.

The time is now for Democrats, starting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to stop using race baiting as a political weapon and apologize to blacks for their history of racism so that our nation can finally heal our racial wounds.

The NBRA delivered a petition in 2007 to Sen. Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanding an apology for the Democratic Party’s racist history.  We also sent an open letter to President Barack Obama requesting that he, as the leader of the Democratic Party, issue a formal proclamation of apology for the documented atrocities and accumulated wrongs inflicted upon black Americans by the Democratic Party for over 150 years.

It’s the right thing to do, but we won’t hold our breath.

Frances Rice is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, a lawyer and chairman of the National Black Republican Association.  She can be contacted at: www.NBRA.info

© National Black Republican Association, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

This article is reprinted here with permission from Frances Rice, NBRA.

Without bullets, a gun is no more useful as a weapon than a rock or a hammer. Although an unloaded gun could be thrown at an intruder or a tyrant, the lack of ammunition ultimately reduces it to the status of a glorified paperweight.

And this is not lost on the nearly 100 million gun owners in America, a number of which are asking if the current shortage of bullets is the result of backdoor efforts at gun control (via ammunition control) by the Obama Administration?

The quick answer to that question is — not exactly.

In other words, the reasons behind the current shortage, as the well as the price increases on what little ammunition is available, are both governmental and nongovernmental in nature.

As for the government’s role, a prime example arose in March 2009 when the Department of Defense (DOD) suddenly changed its policy about selling old brass from spent military rounds to Georgia Arms, an ammunition manufacturer located in Winston, Georgia.

According to Curtis Shipley, President of Georgia Arms, on March 12, 2009, the DOD, which had been a longstanding source of cheap brass for the ammo manufacturer, decided that brass could only be purchased from the military if it was “mutilated.” In other words, it would not longer be possible to buy empty brass casings that Georgia Arms could then clean, quickly reload, and sell to the public at a low price.

When I spoke to Shipley, who had been accustomed to buying spent brass in increments of fifteen tons from the DOD, he said, “This portended higher prices because it required us to either mutilate perfectly good brass when we picked it up from a military base or have a DOD employee travel with us (and the brass) to verify that we did indeed mutilate it at a another site.”

Once mutilated, Georgia Arms would have had to melt the brass down, re-alloy it (casings for each caliber require a specific alloy blend that can sustain the pressures for that caliber), and then re-shape it into the proper casing for whichever caliber they were manufacturing. Said Shipley: “Such a process would add approximately $90 to the cost of one thousand rounds of 9mm ammunition right off the bat.”

Fortunately, the public outcry against this DOD maneuver was so great that the order to mutilate all brass was rescinded after just five days. However, those five days were enough to contribute to another problem the government had been causing since November 2008 – namely, fear of an all out Obama-led assault on guns and ammo.

Speaking to this fear, Larry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, said: “You can go to gun stores all over the country and many of them will have a picture of President Obama hanging on the wall. However, when you get up close to the picture and look at the caption on the bottom, instead of saying ‘President’ it says ‘Gun Salesman of the Year.’”

Pratt said gun owners are rightly leery of this administration. Obama supports the new California law that will require every semi-automatic pistol sold in that state to come equipped with a special firing mechanism that makes a distinctive mark – a “fingerprint” – on every bullet casing it fires. And currently, some Democrats in the House of Representatives want to take that law a step further and enact legislation that would force ammunition companies to place serial numbers on every shell casing they manufacture.

Let me just say that if you think ammunition is scarce and expensive now, wait till manufacturers have to put a serial number on every casing and maintain records containing the names, addresses, etc., of everyone who purchases such casings.

No wonder Pratt said: “None of this is about safety. Rather, it’s about finding ways to create an ammo and gun registry that will allow the government to finally figure out which son got daddy’s gun when daddy passed away.”

And while the government is doing its part to make ammunition harder to find, either directly, via episodes like the one between Georgia Arms and the DOD, or indirectly, by scaring citizens to death through anti-gun posturing that has caused a run on ammo sales, the market plays a role as well. With demand outpacing supply the market sustains higher prices for ammo under Obama than it was able to sustain for that same ammo during the presidency of a pro-gun politician like George W. Bush.

Add to this the fact that we’re now sending the majority of the lead from our recycled car batteries to China, instead of selling that lead to ammunition manufacturers who can cheaply reclaim it to make affordable bullets for their casings, and it’s no wonder consumers are scrambling to find ammunition and then paying a fortune for it when they do.

Did I fail to mention that millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition are currently being diverted to our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere right now as well? While this is understandable, it further highlights the fact that we gun owners are in a tight spot, as far as getting ammunition for our guns is concerned.

With all these variables affecting the availability of ammunition, this would be a great time to join a group like Gun Owners of America. By so doing we would assure the politicians in D.C. that if they use their offices to further deny us bullets for our guns, we will use the voting booth to deny them the very offices they now hold.

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HUMAN EVENTS columnist A.W.R. Hawkins holds a Ph.D. in U.S. Military History from Texas Tech University. He will be a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal during the summer of 2010.

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Alaska resident David Ross’ flight into Pittsburgh Airport for a short visit to the Keystone State last July 1st was uneventful – until, that is, he was arrested for retrieving his sidearm from checked baggage and holstering up on the way out of the airport.

Mr. Ross told the Examiner.com that he tried to explain to Magistrate Judge Anthony Saveikis that Allegheny County’s ordinance banning gun carry at the airport was “preempted by Section 6120 of the Pennsylvania Uniform Firearms Act,” but Saveikis found him guilty anyway.  Ross then hired Pennsylvania attorney J. Michael McCormick to appeal his conviction to the court of common pleas.

After Mr. McCormick filed this briefing with the court, the District Attorney’s office for Allegheny County conceded that the County’s ordinance was not legally enforceable.  As a result, Judge Robert C. Gallo entered a judgment of “not guilty” in the case according to court records.

John Pierce, co-founder of OpenCarry.org maintains a map of state by state airport gun carry laws and says that Pennsylvania is “just like most states” which allow gun carry in the non-sterile areas of airports just like they do in shopping malls, parks, and most other public venues.  But what irks gun rights organizers the most about this case is that public officials should already know that state law preempts local gun bans because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court settled that issue a decade ago in Ortiz v. Commonwealth.

“This should never have been an issue to begin with,” said Rich Banks, founder of PAOpenCarry.org, a Pennsylvania gun rights group, referring to open carry at the airport which requires no license in Pennsylvania and most states.  Banks contends that Pennsylvania public officials too often “treat guns like they are an ‘exception’ to the rule of law” and that the Allegheny County Council should now move quickly to repeal what Banks said is “an illegal gun ban ordinance.”

That wasn’t always true, says Lesley Hollywood, a spokeswoman for the Tea Party of Northern Colorado. Back in November, her outfit sponsored a well-attended political forum in Loveland. Plenty of candidates showed up to speak, but not McInnis, who didn’t even respond to her invitation to participate until afterward, “when he found out what a success it was.”

Hollywood, a mother of two daughters age ten and under, hesitates to call herself the leader of the Northern Colorado tea party. “That’s not the way our tea party is set up,” she says. “We don’t have an actual board of directors. We have a core group that comes together and acts like a think tank. We all work together to provide one strong voice.”

In the past, Hollywood hadn’t been deeply involved in politics. But in recent years, she says, “I’ve become increasingly more alarmed about what’s happening in this country. I feel like progressives have taken over much of our government — and much of the Republican party. I’m concerned for the future of our country. I don’t want that for my children. I feel they deserve to grow up with this country supporting the values of when it was founded.”

She found a way to channel these feelings when she attended “a tax-day tea party in Denver,” she says. “I was a little unsure of what I was going to find down there. I’ve never really been an activist, so I was a little out of my element. But when I started talking to people, I realized that this was something really big we need to continue.”

In the months since then, the size of the Northern Colorado tea party has grown considerably. “We have over a thousand members right now, and we’re growing by about five members a day,” Hollywood says. “It’s really beginning to pick up speed, and we haven’t actually started recruiting yet. That’s happening after the first of the year.”

An indication of the tea party’s increasing clout was the aforementioned forum, dubbed Candidate Search 2010. Hollywood was in charge of contacting the various office hopefuls. “We invited both Democrats and Republicans,” she says. “It wasn’t a debate, just a forum where we could ask some tough questions and get some answers — and ten candidates showed up.”

The Democrats were all no-shows for the event — and so were McInnis and Senate candidate Jane Norton. But while Norton reps confirmed that their candidate wouldn’t be attending, no one from McInnis’ camp did likewise.

No wonder a Fox News interview in which host Neil Cavuto characterized McInnis as the tea party candidate of choice stuck in Hollywood’s craw.

“He hadn’t done anything to reach out to these groups, or allow us to reach out to him,” she says. “I know, because I contacted everyone multiple times. So seeing that, it was a little bit personal for me.”

At this point, ignoring the tea party is easier said than done for McInnis or any other Republican. Hollywood estimates that 600 people came to the forum, and various events targeting Representative Betsy Markey have drawn impressive throngs. She feels the size of these protests had a lot to do with Markey’s decision to vote “no” on the House’s healthcare bill.

“She had a choice,” Hollywood said. “She could outrage her base or outrage us — and she chose to outrage her base. That in itself is the beginning of a victory. It shows that we’re starting to have some pull.”

Dan Maes, who portrays himself as the only conservative left in the gubernatorial race, would love for the tea party to put its people-power at his disposal. But he doesn’t have the group’s official backing quite yet.

“I wouldn’t say we’ve endorsed Dan Maes, but we’ve come out in support of him for one reason — to keep him in the race until we caucus in March,” Hollywood explains. “That’s when the people will truly endorse a candidate — and if Scott McInnis is the only candidate, then we don’t have a choice.”

She adds that if the situation was reversed, “we would do the same thing for Scott McInnis.”

That means the window of opportunity for McInnis isn’t closed yet. But neither is it wide open. He’s got some making up to do.

by Michael Roberts in Follow That Story, Politics, Wed., Dec. 9 2009 @ 1:21PM, Denver WestWord News Blog

http://www.candidatesearch2010.com/