When you see stories like this:

…A West Michigan woman says the state is threatening her with fines and possibly jail time for babysitting her neighbors’ children.

Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.

The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors’ kids, or face the consequences.

“It’s ridiculous.” says Snyder. “We are friends helping friends!” She added that she accepts no money for babysitting.

Mindy Rose, who leaves her 5-year-old with Snyder, agrees. “She’s a friend… I trust her.”

To be sure, legislation is starting up to stop this bit of nonsense – but since when do the authorities even have a reason to look in to such matters? And where do we get people like the stoolie who called the cops? And how did a government agency get the right to issue fines and threats before a trial and conviction? For all our alleged efforts to ensure free choice and privacy, it sure seems to me that our area of liberty is shrinking.

In a free society, all is permitted unless there is a specific law against it. The mark of a tyrannical society is that nothing may happen unless the government permits it – right now, for this kind lady to watch the neighbor’s kids for a few minutes she’ll either have to get permission from the government, or wait to see if the government passes a law allowing normal, human interaction.

When I first read this story I was outraged – and I mean really outraged. I seriously desired, just for a moment, that everyone involved be flogged. 10 lashes with a cat o’nine tails for the stoolie, the government officials and whomever originally wrote a law which worked out as a ban on being human. I’ve calmed down since then – but I’m still enraged over this…and very concerned. Because it occurred to me as I pondered the issue that there are a myriad reasons for the authorities to arrest and/or harass us in our daily lives. To be sure, not in our sex lives – government has kindly resigned itself out of that (thanks, liberals…really good job there, boys and girls), but every other aspect of our lives is ever more under the thumb of government.

Which of us, stopped by the authorities, could really say we feel confident that justice will be done? Someone I know had a summary judgment placed against him in a civil suit – he had never been served; the plaintiff had put a notice in the newspaper, which this person never reads, and that was considered sufficient notice by a judge…and then it was in to efforts at wage garnishment. Someone could denounce any of us, anonymously, and the way things are working out, we’d have to prove our innocence. And that is only if we’re given the chance – there’s no indication in the linked story that the lady was charged with a crime and then convicted by a jury…nope, just an anonymous denunciation, a drum head investigation by bureaucrats, and then “watch it, slave, your masters are after you!”.

We need a genuine civil rights movement – probably an armed one, in to the bargain. We need to curb the government and the busy-bodies who set government upon us. First off, we should end the use of anonymous denunciations – I know, the cops like them: all the more reason to ban them. If a person is not willing to put themselves out on the line with their accusation, then it simply should not be used. Secondly, we should ensure that no government entity can take any adverse action against a person absent a confession in open court, or conviction by a jury. Third, anyone accused of any crime should not have their name and particulars released to the public by the authorities until after a conviction is obtained – true, the MSM will dig out a lot of such names, but only in prominent cases…we certainly don’t want our government covering us in muck, especially if we turn out to be innocent of the charges. Fourth, impose severe penalties for false accusations and for prosecutorial/bureaucratic misconduct.

Our freedom is at stake here – we’ve allowed our liberty to erode for too long. Time to take it all back.

As we all wait in expectation of the Charges rising to 2-1 and for the season, perhaps we can all discuss the importance – to our nation – of having the Chargers win the Super Bowl this year. Or, perhaps we can discuss something else?

Have at it, boys and girls.

Appropriate for our times:

Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries.

Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten,

your gold and silver have corroded,

and that corrosion will be a testimony against you;

it will devour your flesh like a fire.

You have stored up treasure for the last days.

Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers

who harvested your fields are crying aloud;

and the cries of the harvesters

have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.

You have lived on earth in luxury and pleasure;

you have fattened your hearts for the day of slaughter.

You have condemned;

you have murdered the righteous one;

he offers you no resistance. – James 5:1-6

Everyone who has been granted great wealth has also been granted great responsibility – and don’t anyone out there (liberals, we’re looking at you) think that you can discharge such responsibility by advocating for higher income taxes and more welfare spending. A billionaire who has hidden his money in tax shelters and then proceeds to yammer on about how we all have to pay more to government is a man who has fattened his heart for the day of slaughter.

To have wealth is to have an obligation to use it wisely – and in this matter I plead guilty: I, too, have not used the vast wealth which has passed through my hands over the years to the best service of my fellow man. I have, like all too many, thought only of myself. It might be that God doesn’t necessarily want us to earn 8% returns on our financial investments…but would very much like us to do for the poor ourselves, rather than farming out the work to government bureaucrats.

The lesson, for me, over the past few years is that it is time we started acting like adults – time we started looking for our problems in the mirror…and then started saying, each day, “what can I do, today, to help out?”

And it is getting tiresome:

…Some major presidential speeches deserve to be remembered, quoted and celebrated. Some deserve to be forgotten. A few deserve to be remembered and criticized, because they dishonor the history of presidential rhetoric.

Obama’s rhetorical method in international contexts — given supreme expression at the United Nations this week — is a moral dialectic. The thesis: pre-Obama America is a nation of many flaws and failures. The antithesis: The world responds with understandable but misguided prejudice. The synthesis: Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be. How great a world we all should see, if only all were more like…me.

Truth be told, most people who seek the office of the Presidency have a healthy ego. Outside of the genuinely humble – who would accept the burden in meek acceptance of God’s will in their lives – most people have to be a bit arrogant to assume that out of 300 million people, they are the best man for the job. So, to have a President who is rather stuck on himself is not unusual – but Obama’s self absorption is rather astounding.

It was on display when he moved his DNC acceptance speech to a stadium, complete with a Greek style stage set. It was further in evidence at the absurd set up for his victory speech on election day – we’ve got a man in the White House who really thinks he’s special…and the risk is that he won’t listen to contrary advice. Obama needs to take himself down a peg or two and realize that while getting elected President is a great achievement, most people who have done so turned out to be mediocrities….and some abject failures. Only a half dozen really mastered the job – and there’s zero indication that Obama is going to be one of the greats.

Arrogance matched to incompetence is a grave risk – especially to a Great Power. It is to be hoped that Obama will learn a bit of the humility a Christian is supposed to have.

UPDATE: President Pantywaist? Seems that the concept of foreign love for Obama has its limits.

I mean really; its a horrendous, anti-human organization. Why? Well, because as Mark Steyn points out, when you mix tyrants with democrats, you get a tyrant-dominated body…and then we have to have this:

By declining to distinguish between the foreign minister of Slovenia and the foreign minister of, say, Sudan, you normalize not merely the goofier ad libs of a Qaddafi but far darker pathologies. The day after the president of the United States addressed the U.N. General Assembly, the prime minister of Israel took to the podium, and held up a copy of the minutes of the Wansee Conference at which German officials planned the “Final Solution” to their Jewish problem. This is the pathetic state to which the U.N. has been reduced after six decades: The Jew-hatred of Ahmadinejad and others is so routine that a sane man has to stand up in the global parliament and attempt to demonstrate to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.

As long as we are tied to an organization which claims that the tyrants of China are the moral equals of the leaders of the United States, we will not have an international body capable of improving world conditions. All the UN does now is to serve as a fig-leaf for evil – we go through the motions and pretend we’re doing good while we’re actually enabling wicked men to continue in their evil unchecked.

Get U.S. out of the UN!

Some sage advice for President Obama:

..I thought it was a chance to study the reign of King Ethelred the Unready. The House will remember that that was a period of great misfortune, in which, from the strong position which we had gained under the descendants of King Alfred, we fell very swiftly into chaos. It was the period of Danegeld and of foreign pressure. I must say that the rugged words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written a thousand years ago, seem to me apposite… Here is what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said…

“All these calamities fell upon us because of evil counsel, because tribute was not offered to them at the right time nor yet were they resisted; but when they had done the most evil, then was peace made with them.”

That is the wisdom of the past, for all wisdom is not new wisdom. – Winston Churchill

Fight or quit – but don’t dawdle around and hope for the best. Do not place our future in the hands of unstable tyrants. State our position, and then act upon it immediately.

And that is bad news, because his whole foreign policy concept was wrapped around diplomacy:

…when President Obama addressed the General Assembly and Security Council he already knew that Iran was ignoring international standards, and its latest violations endangered international peace and security more than ever before. And yet he deliberately refused to put Iran on the agenda of the Council summit — the same Council that he claimed bore responsibility for responding to such threats.

President Obama knew that if the magnitude of the Iranian threat were revealed yesterday, the emptiness of his resolution would have been embarrassingly obvious and his cover blown. In public, at the highest levels of the U.N, he heralded generalities as significant. In private, he was petitioning lower levels of the U.N. to act on startling specifics of the Iranian threat.

Why did the president not present this same evidence to the Security Council, the body with “the authority and the responsibility to respond”? Why did he not challenge world leaders to deal with the same Iranian threat that he privately was pressing upon U.N. bureaucrats?

There is only one possible answer: President Obama does not have the political will to do what it takes to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Indeed – buy why doesn’t he have the political will?

1. Because liberals refuse to understand that tyrants are wicked people.

2. Because liberals think that diplomacy is a substitute for armed force, rather than each (diplomacy and military power) being indispensable to each other.

3. Because leaders, by and large, would rather not make a decision – make a decision and you might make the wrong one. It takes immense courage for any leader to make a choice…and this courage is rare in leaders (ie, note that in 1940 among all the various British and French leaders, only one had the courage to consistently demand that aggressive action be taken against Germany…Winston Churchill; everyone else was just hoping to get through the crisis with as little trouble as possible).

Naive world view, ignorance and cowardice..that is why Iran is set to build a bomb. More and more, its looking like the world will have to rely on Israel to do our duty, for us.

Over at Big Government:

Apparently NBC “Dateline” producer Jane Stone or someone else who has access to her Blackberry has a problem with groups that oppose ACORN and with an ethnocultural minority.

When Stone received an email urging Congress to defund ACORN from Alex Rosenwald, director of media outreach for Americans for Limited Government, the following sentence came back to Rosenwald from Stone’s account: “Bite me, Jew Boy!”

NBC denies emphatically:

Americans for Limited Government has chosen to launch an outrageous, reckless attack and smear campaign against an NBC News employee. Faced with irrefutable evidence that our employee did nothing more than ask to be removed from an email mailing list, the organization has maliciously published a fabricated email.

Our employee never sent any such email.. She is completely innocent of the outrageous charges and is being used by an organization to make a self-serving point. This is a shameless, hateful and defaming act which should be roundly denounced.

Someone is lying – either Americans for Limited Government, or NBC. It’ll be very interesting to see how this turns out.

All sides appear to agree that Ms. Stone did receive an e mail from ALG and that she did respond to it. No big deal – I think all of us who are politically connected in any way get a score or more such e mails per day, from friends and opponents. I, myself, have never asked to be taken off a list – opponents sending me e mails can be illuminating about what they are up to. I can imagine that someone would want to be taken off – but why would a news person want to be disconnected from an easy source for what is going on?

ALG appears to be a respectable libertarian/conservative organization dedicated to speaking truth to power – why phony up an anti-Semitic e mail from an MSMer? It is possible someone at ALG did it, but it doesn’t seem too likely. Given the rapidly rising anti-Semitism on the left, I think the ball is in NBC’s court to demonstrate to us that the e mail did not go out with that message.

Because in this, as in everything else related to the War on Terrorism, Bush was right, liberals are wrong:

(White House Counsel) Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. “I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives,” he said…

To translate from the liberalese: “heck, we were told over and over again by the liberal leadership and the MSM that closing Gitmo would be easy and was necessary…who knew that President Bush was right about this?”

A lot of assumptions were built up on the left after 9/11 – foremost among then being that President Bush was wrong about everything. This was not an accurate assessment of the situation – and now Obama and Co are caught…a leftist base which is still demanding that all of Bush be undone (because they really believe that Bush was wrong about everything – its what their masters have told them, and “gullible” doesn’t begin to describe rank-and-file leftists) standing against the sheer common sense of having a prison in which to hold people who would murder millions, if they got a chance. Obama is spinning between both of them – and I firmly believe that no real decision will be made on Gitmo until after election day, 2012.

I think so:

As the Obama administration wrestles with how to deal with the worsening military and political situation in Afghanistan and the worsening level of public support for the war at home, new details are emerging about how the president is thinking about his decision on whether to send more U.S. troops to the region.

According to Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-CA, the new top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Obama told Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus and Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal to “scrub” their assessments because he “wasn’t inclined to send troops over there.”

If McKeon’s claim is true, Obama’s instructions, relayed to McKeon through Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, show how resistant the president is to doubling down on the war in Afghanistan and how Republicans are prepared to take their push for an increased commitment of resources to the public.

Indeed, we should – along with the economy, if Obama punts on Afghanistan, we should make that a central issue of the 2010 campaign. The troops deserve a clear-cut plan for Afghanistan – a militarily sound plan which has a chance at success…what they may get from Obama is a cowardly compromise like Johnson’s in Vietnam: enough to prevent an outright loss, not enough to secure outright victory. The troops will fight, and some of them will die; a lot of the enemy will die, too; of course, a lot of people will be caught in the cross fire – many of them deliberately placed there by the enemy. The death toll will mount, and no goal will be in sight. It will end up the worst of both worlds – but Obama might merely be hoping that by punting, he can put off any real decision until after election day, 2012.

We must insist the President fight for victory – we will sustain him, if his own party does not. Defeat in Afghanistan will be unbearable; battle which is neither victory nor defeat would be a dereliction of duty…victory is the only rational outcome.