Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): 500,000,000 Americans a month lose their jobs unless we pass another corrupt, disgusting economic stimulus bill to transfer money from the average American to the politically connected businesses and individuals.

Pete Stark (D-CA): The Federal Government can do most anything in this country

3 charges filed against Rep. Waters California Democrat Maxine Waters faces a House trial this fall on three charges of ethical wrongdoing, setting the stage for a second election-season public airing of ethics problems for a longtime Democratic lawmaker.

The charges focus on whether Waters broke the rules in requesting federal help for a bank where her husband owned stock and had served on the board of directors. She denied the charges Monday. (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

When I saw this story covered on CNN by Wolf Blitzer, the caption on bottom of the screen read “are black Congressmen being singled out?” or something like that, which seems like a desperate attempt at distracting from the issue of corruption.

This is a clip from a new documentary on knowing your rights when confronted by police.

Also, see Why you should NEVER, EVER, under any circumstances speak with the police.

The nation’s most influential small business lobby is joining a court challenge to President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, arguing that Americans cannot be required under the Constitution to obtain insurance coverage.

The National Federation of Independent Business will announce Friday it is joining a federal lawsuit filed in Florida by 20 state attorneys general and governors, NFIB President Dan Danner said in an interview.

. . . .

A groundswell of opposition to the law from small business owners prompted NFIB’s decision to join the court challenge, said Karen Harned, a senior lawyer for the group. “The second the law was signed, NFIB was hearing from its members: ‘What are you all going to do about this?’,” said Harned. “So we hunkered down. We looked around. This state attorneys general lawsuit made the most sense for us. It’s the only one that has a national presence.”

Freedom of speech, religion and other First Amendment issues are likely to be among the most visible during the coming Senate confirmation hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court.

As an illustration why, consider this quote dug up by the First Amendment Center’s David L. Hudson, who found it in a government brief signed by Kagan in United States v Stevens: “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.”

The case concerned a statute that made it criiminally unlawful to depict animal cruelty. The Court rejected Kagan’s reasoning, but had the justices accepted her assertion, it would have effectively repealed the First Amendment’s protection of speech and replaced it by granting government the authority to decide what speech should be permitted. (Read more from washintonexaminer.com)

If Joe Lieberman’s totalitarian plan to give the State Department authority to strip Americans of their citizenship is implemented, all those protections that citizens enjoy that are currently deprived from non-citizens would be a chimera. Since 9/11, the government has treated citizens and non-citizens differently, brutalizing both groups but being especially despotic toward those deemed non-Americans. In the habeas corpus rulings from the Supreme Court, conservative Antonin Scalia consistently argued that citizens should enjoy far stronger habeas protections than non-citizens—in his dissent for Hamdi (2004), Scalia boldly took the most civil libertarian position on the Court; in Boumediene (2008), his infamous dissent was the most anti-habeas. The grounds for his distinction were largely the issue of citizenship.

Conservatives have long been inconsistent on the concept of natural law. They say our rights come from God or human nature, but then turn around and say non-citizens do not have the same rights citizens have. But in any event, if Lieberman’s horrid idea comes to pass, the existence of citizenship will be contingent upon whether the State Department determines that a person has conspired with terrorist groups.

This is a dangerous proposal for many reasons. First, what constitutes terrorism and being an enemy of the United States has been somewhat up in the air over the last several years. Especially with the new Brown Scare aimed at the populist right, mainstream conservatives, libertarians, militia groups, violent extremists and everyone in between, we see the threat of a left-liberal administration cracking down on dissent with ever more despotic tools at its disposal. (Read more from independent.org)

IJ fighting a mandate to register with the government before becoming a “grassroots lobbyist.”

At least 36 states have laws requiring people who engage in this kind of activity to register with the government. In Washington, which has one of the most extensive regulations affecting citizen political participation in the nation, if you spend above an artificially low government-imposed cap to urge your fellow citizens to contact government officials, you are forced to register with the government and report your name, address, business, and occupation, the names and addresses of anyone with whom you are working to spread your message, and the names and addresses of each person who contributes as little as $25 to your efforts.

In other words, in Washington, if you speak too much about politics, the government wants to know about it. Moreover, the government does not merely collect this information—it makes it available to anyone with access to the Internet. Your name, address, business and occupation are provided to the world because you dared to exercise your fundamental First Amendment rights.

The Institute for Justice to file suit against the members ofWashingtons Public Disclosure Commission. Many Cultures, One Message et al. v. Clements seeks to vindicate the fundamental right of all Americans to engage in political activity without governmental interference.

Good and welfare clause?