Indiana Supreme Court Ruling

The Indiana Supreme Court ruled last week the we, the citizens of Indiana, have no right to resist unlawful police entry into our homes. This ruling overturns centuries of common law, and is in direct violation of the 4^th amendment of the United States Constitution.  http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011105130380

Justice David wrote the ruling. Chief Justice Shepard and Justice Sullivan agreed with him.

On other hand, Justices Rucker and Dickson strongly dissented.

Can we do anything about this? Actually, YES WE CAN.

Justices are appointed to Indiana Supreme Court by the governor. After two years the justice is subject to statewide yes-or-no vote on the question of retention in office. After that they face another retention vote every 10 years, with mandatory retirement at 75.

Here is a chart with basic information about each justice, as well as a suggested vote on retention based on this ruling:

Name	Term Start	Term Expires	Appointed By	Retention Vote	Suggestion
Steven H. David	10/18/10		Daniels	Nov-12	No
Frank Sullivan, Jr.	11/1/93	11/1/13	Bayh	Nov-12	No
Randall Shepard	9/6/85	9/6/15	Orr	Nov-14	No
Brent Dickson	1/6/86	1/6/16	Orr	Nov-14	Yes
Robert Rucker	11/19/99	11/19/09	O'Bannon	Nov-18	Yes

One observation I make from this is that civil liberties are not protected by appointments from either political party.

As you can see, we have the opportunity to vote No to David and Sullivan in the 2012 election next year. Are we ready to mount the campaign to take them out?

Who is John Galt?

During these difficult times, when someone asks a question that has no answer, the response is often a near-vulgar expression--"Who is John Galt?"

12 years ago a man walk out of a meeting. The owners of the factory had decided several years before to become a model of social responsibility by adapting the motto "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need." How they accomplished this was to give each worker a pittance throughout the year, and then come together for  a meeting once a year to decide what each person's needs were, and distribute the profits of the factory accordingly. You can only imagine what happened to the workers under this system; actually, you probably can't, because "animals" became a better description of them then "workers". During this particular meeting, a young engineer stood up and walked out announcing "I will put an end to this, once and for all...I will stop the motor of the world." His young man's name was John Galt.

Over the next few years, one by one, the innovators, the producers, the artists and musicians and actresses, started to disappear. No one saw them go, or knew where they went; they were just gone.

During this time, strangely enough, there were unexplainable shortages of various kinds throughout the country. You see, when the oil man from Colorado disappeared, he lit his oil fields on fire. In the oil shortage that followed, there was a huge demand for coal furnaces, until the only foundry left that made these coal furnaces suddenly shut its doors then its owner disappeared.

The officials in Washington, of course, had a solution to every problem, and they eventually decreed that no one could leave his job. No business was allowed to shut down. Every factory was required to produce no more and no less then they had produced the previous year. No new patents could be issued for fear of destabilizing the entire system.

Meanwhile, any person who was willing to take the pledge, "I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." was allowed to move into a hidden valley in Colorado where each person could practice his trade without being told how to do it, and without taxation. Products were exchanged for their actual value, and the only acceptable currency was pure gold.

As the story ends, the country is collapsing into chaos, the last bridge across the Mississippi River has been destroyed, the lights of New York City have gone out, and the producers who have been on strike are preparing themselves to return to start rebuilding a new, free society.

Atlas is Shrugging

"Atlas Shrugged" was written 50 some years ago, and yet it describes a country that in an eerie way resembles the United States of today. A country in which the officials in Washington decide what is right and wrong. A country in which those officials have a solution to every problem, which inevitably cause more problems which need solutions. A country in which every person is expected to contribute according to his ability, and everyone is in turn compensated according to his need. A country in which the productive are robbed of their wealth in order to support the lazy less productive.

I found it shocking how accurately Ayn Rand was able to describe the world we live in today. You see, I had bought into an evolutionary theory, the theory that things somehow always get better automatically; that if something new is discovered, if obviously couldn't have been discovered before. But as the wisest man once said, "There is nothing new under the sun". We are simply going through a cycle that has happened countless times in human history. Ayn Rand saw it happen in Russia where she was born in the early part of last century. I grew up believing that Russians were the polar opposite of Americans, but now I see we are actually made up of the same stuff, and we are heading down the same track they went down.

What drives a civilization? It is the innovators, the producers, the thinkers that have created and sustained the lifestyle we live. There was no government directive to caused Thomas Edison to invent the light bulb, or Henry Ford to develop the assembly line, or Eli Whitney to discover the principle of interchangeable parts. But today we are seeing big business spending many, many years (and federal R&D dollars) to develop that hydrogen car. We are seeing small business deciding that borrowing and expanding is just not worth the risk. We are seeing people who think they will be better off just staying in that lower tax bracket.

In Greek mythology, Atlas was the giant who carried the world on his shoulders. What would happen if he decided the load wasn't worth the bother? What if he shrugged? You know, I think that he is shrugging about right now.

License to Marry

When I go married, the State of Indiana issued my marriage license. The US government did not. Nor should they have, because the federal government should never be involved in my personal life.

Since the State of Indiana is issuing marriage licenses, they are the ones who define what a marriage is in the State of Indiana. If the State of Utah or Vermont or California choose to define marriage in a different way then the State of Indiana, that is their prerogative...

But when a federal judge tells the State of California that the definition of marriage in their constitution is unconstitutional, that is just plain wrong!

If the federal government wants to claim the power to define marriage, they had better amend their own constitution to give them that power; until they do that, they had better leave it to the States. See Amendment 10.

The biggest objection to this principle is that we need a consistent definition of marriage so there will be fairness in our income taxes. If you had been paying attention, you should know that the federal government should never be involved in my personal life, including income tax. I know that is a part of our constitution now, but it defies the principle, because it requires me to give personal information to the federal government. It is wrong, and Amendment 16 needs to be repealed (For an example, see Amendment 21, my personal favorite.)

What's wrong with ObamaCare?

The problem with ObamaCare is that the federal government is involving itself with my personal life.

The purpose of the federal government is to deal with other nations and with the states. According to the original Constitution, the only time they should deal with me is in delivering my mail and counting me every couple of years. Since then there have been amendments that have expanded the reach of the federal government into our personal lives. One example of this would be the income tax of the 16th amendment.


We have a lot of discussion of social issues as it relates to government. On one side we have "social justice"; on the other side we have social conservatives.  Social is by definition the interaction of individuals. If we follow the principle of federal non-involvement in personal issues, then they have no reason to be involved in any social issue at all.


Let's look at a few examples:


Education: The feds should not be determining what curriculum my children need to study, neither is it there responsibility to make sure that no child is left behind. If the states or the local communities want to take those issues on themselves, the can and should, but not the feds. Also, there is absolutely no reason why I should need to request the federal government for a loan to attend college, especially when that request requires me to give them an awful lot of personal information.


Income: In deciding how much income tax I owe to the feds, I need to provide them with a lot of personal information. The 16th amendment should be repealed. They can (and will) figure out methods of taxing us without collecting personal information.


Marriage: When I got married, I got my marriage license from the State of Indiana. It is not  the federal governments responsibility to define marriage. Yes, the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. It is up to the states to define what constitutes marriage within that state. If the feds want to define it, they need to amend to constitution to give themselves the power to do that, but even that would go against the principle of federal non-involvement in personal issues.

Retirement: Social Security isn't giving any security to retirees, just a little icing on top of whatever else they have saved up during their lives. An nobody my age expects to receive anything more then a pittance from it when they retire. In reality, Social Security is nothing more then a big old Ponzi scheme, taking from those at the bottom (workers) to pay for those at the top (retirees). When I retire, they will not be giving back the money I put into the system; they will be give me money that someone behind me is putting in. Once again, we have an example of federal government involving itself in my personal life and resulting in failure.

Health: Perhaps the ultimate of federal involvement in my personal live. What is more personal then what is happening inside my body? The federal government is trying to regulate it, and it is just wrong.

Can you see how we got to this point? Social Security and income tax and all these other programs were such good ideas, right? Each one opened the door a little farther, allowing the federal government to get a little closer to my personal life. Their regulation of health care is just the next logical step.

Any power not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the States, or to the people (10th amendment). All the issues that I have listed should be deal with in our communities and in our states, but never in our federal government. If a state wants to provide health care, let them. If a state wants to provide education to its citizens, let them. If a state wants to become a communist state, let them. If I do not like what my state decides to do, I can either work to change those laws, or I can move to another state. In this way the states can compete with each other to become the best state, the state that people want to live in.

In conclusion, social issues should be dealt with at the local and state level, not by the federal government.

They are Control Freaks...We are Liberty Freaks

"...certain unalienable rights, among which are LIFE, LIBERTY, and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS."  234 years ago, Tom Jefferson wrote the words in the document that set us free from the CONTROL FREAKS of Great Britain. Now things have made a full circle and the CONTROL FREAKS in our federal government are hell-bent on turning the USA  into a European-style socialist nation.

This blog is dedicated to the original LIBERTY FREAK, Thomas Jefferson, and to his colleagues who understood that liberty was more important then life itself. From the Boston Tea Party to the Battles of Lexington and Concord to victory in Yorktown,  they pledged "to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor', and gave to us the legacy of liberty.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure". Abe Lincoln's word ring so true today.



Today, in 2010, we have made it past "Four score and seven years" to eleven score and fourteen years. How much longer can it endure? It will not endure much longer unless Americans once again say "Give me LIBERTY or give me DEATH!"

-Curt Nisly
"With Liberty and Justice for All"