- Part 13

Author Archive

Immigration Crisis 101 and 102

Immigration Crisis 101:

“Immigration Crisis 101” is caused by the current Immigration regulations, policies and laws. Roy Beck’s “Immigration by the Numbers” on the internet shows that the current regulations, policies and laws will end up flooding the United States with legal immigrants. This will eventually result in an increase of the National Debt to multi-trillions of dollars. The United States will then be delivered to those nations who supported our extravagant policies by lending us billions and billions of dollars.

Please go to Roy Beck’s “Immigration by the Numbers” on the internet. After viewing the 13 minute video you will understand the crisis that the current Immigration regulations, policies and laws have bought about. Roy Beck shows the logical conclusion that we will have to build an infrastructure that will cost multi-trillions of dollars if the current regulations, policies and laws are not changed. We, our children and our children’s children will be paying excessive taxes for the debt that is being created as a result of the current Immigration regulations, policies and laws.

Conclusion:

The American People cannot afford the millions of immigrants that will enter the United States legally. Combined it all adds up to a National Debt that the cost of which will amount to trillions of dollars in interest alone and create a fiscal crisis that will make the current recession look like a picnic. Yes, the price of all of the above will be beyond the means of the American People.

As the Immigration regulations, policies and laws now stand, the American People are faced with a disaster. They must be revised to reduce the projected number of immigrants that the current Immigration regulations, policies and laws.

Immigration Crisis 102:

“Immigration Crisis 102” is caused not by legal immigrants, which as stated in “Immigration Crisis 101” is a long term threat, but by the current “Invasion” of approximately 10 to 25 million “Illegal Aliens”. These “Illegal Aliens” have by invading by crossing the borders of the United States illegally and are responsible for adding approximately 10 to 25 million souls to the population of the United States. So the United States is faced with 2 crises; the long term problem of “Legal Immigration” and the immediate problem caused by “Illegal Aliens”.

The number of “Illegal Aliens”, approximately 10 to 25 million, is a threat to the U.S. economy and to the safety, security and promised future of the American People. This is true because the population of the United States has increased by approximately 10 to 25 million people that have entered the United States illegally in only a few short years.

The media and our Government has mentioned little about this influx of approximately 10 to 25 million “Illegal Aliens” and what it will do to the economy of the United States. Nor have they disclosed the fact that among the “Illegal Aliens” currently residing in the United States there are undoubtedly terrorist cells waiting to be activated by al Qaeda or other Terrorist Organizations.

President Obama, the Democratic Congress, the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security don’t know who these “Illegal Aliens” are, where they are, or what they are doing. There are approximately 10 to 25 million “Illegal Aliens” that have “invaded” by gaining access to the United States by illegally crossing our unprotected southern borders. Many of them now have the privileges of Citizenship. It would be easy for al Qaeda or any other organization to infiltrate those crossing the border and thus gain access to the United States. They would fade into local populations and become respected members of the community while awaiting the signal to be become active to attack and kill Americans in their homeland.

Conclusion:

Immigration is a serious threat to the welfare of the American People………..

First current Immigration regulations, policies and laws will flood the nation with immigrants requiring schools and expanding infrastructure creating a National Debt that will be too much for the American People to liquidate and remain solvent. (Immigration Crisis 101)
Secondly, the approximately 10 to 25 million “Illegal Aliens” certainly contain a number of Terrorist Units dedicated to the killing of American Citizens and the destruction of the United States. (Immigration Crisis 102)

The above two immigration crises make the “Immigration Problem” solution critical to the safety, security and future of the American People and the very survival of the United States.

Jul 19, 2010 | 2 comments | View Post

Headlines Tell the Story (July 11 – 17, 2010)

At “Union of Americans” we offer a review of some of the previous week’s significant news. This is done by listing headlines of that week. If you would like to view an entire article, simply click on that headline.

Wall Street Journal (7/17/2010)
Optimism Fades, as Do Stocks

Wall Street Journal (7/16/2010)
Boeing Hedges 787 Delivery

Wall Street Journal (7/16/10)
Law Remakes U.S. Financial Landscape

Wall Street Journal (7/15/2010)
Oil Spill Halts, for Now, as BP Tests Out New Cap

Wall Street Journal (7/15/2010)
China Starts Looking Beyond Its Era of Breakneck Growth

Wall Street Journal (7/14/2010)
Signs of Risky Lending Emerge

Wall Street Journal (7/14/2010)
Stock Momentum Wanes
Advance Stops at Six Days in Europe, but U.S. Stretches It to Seven

Wall Street Journal (7/13/2010)
Eating to Live or Living to Eat?

Wall Street Journal (7/13/2010)
U.K. Will Revamp Its Health Service

Jul 17, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Cicero, Well Spoken

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome becomes bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” ~ Cicero , 55 BC

It’s hard to believe that the words spoken in 55 B.C. about the Roman Empire could be applied to the United States today. But it has been stated that history will repeat itself, unless we learn from it.

Jul 16, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

9 States Back Arizona Immigration Law in Legal Brief

By David Runk, Associated Press Writer

DETROIT – States have the authority to enforce immigration laws and protect their borders, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox said Wednesday in a legal brief on behalf of nine states supporting Arizona’s immigration law.

Cox, one of five Republicans running for Michigan governor, said Michigan is the lead state backing Arizona in federal court and is joined by Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia, as well as the Northern Mariana Islands.

The Arizona law, set to take effect July 29, directs officers to question people about their immigration status during the enforcement of other laws such as traffic stops and if there’s a reasonable suspicion they’re in the U.S. illegally.

President Barack Obama’s administration recently filed suit in federal court to block it, arguing immigration is a federal issue. The law’s backers say Congress isn’t doing anything meaningful about illegal immigration, so it’s the state’s duty to step up.

“Arizona, Michigan and every other state have the authority to enforce immigration laws, and it is appalling to see President Obama use taxpayer dollars to stop a state’s efforts to protect its own borders,” Cox said in a statement.

Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, in a statement released by Cox’s office, said she was thankful for the support.

In a telephone interview, Cox said the nine states supporting Arizona represents “a lot of states,” considering it was only Monday that he asked other state attorneys general to join him. The brief was filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona on the same day as the deadline for such filings.

“By lawsuit, rather than by legislation, the federal government seeks to negate this preexisting power of the states to verify a person’s immigration status and similarly seeks to reject the assistance that the states can lawfully provide to the Federal government,” the brief states.

The brief doesn’t represent the first time Cox has clashed with the Obama administration. Earlier this year, he joined with more than a dozen other attorneys general to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of federal health care changes signed into law by the Democratic president.

Like with his stance on health care, the immigration brief again puts Cox at odds with Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Granholm, who can’t seek re-election because of term limits, disagrees with the Arizona law, her press secretary Liz Boyd said. The Michigan primary is less than three weeks away on Aug. 3.

“It’s a patently political ploy in his quest for the Republican nomination for governor,” Boyd said.

Jul 15, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

There Are No Free Lunches…The Taxman Will Be Waiting

Jeff Jacoby’s interesting article on basketball, big money and bigger tax problems shows. Keep in mind the fact that those who follow basketball are responsible for the outrageous compensation sporting figures, particularly in basketball, are paid.

Yep, everyone who paid to see basketball are responsible for the outrageous compensation paid professional athletes. So, don’t complain unless you show your distain for the outrageous prices that basketball teams charge to view the game.

Yep, it’s your fault; don’t blame the players or the owners of the team. Each time you pay to see a game or click on the T.V. and watch a game you are supporting the outrageous salaries, the advertising income. Than again you may have no objection to paying the price for watching the game.

Conclusion:
If you want to do something about it boycott the sport. Find something else to do with your free time. On the other hand, if you are enjoying the sport continue to support it as you have in the past. ~ dhb, “Union of Americans”

(Editor’s Note: Our Publisher abuses the privilege that you have extended to him by your responses to the Journal of the Patriots Patrol. He just wanted to get something off his mind and I thought you might be interested. ~ Cathie, Editor)

Fouled by the taxman
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
July 14, 2010

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/7714/fouled-by-the-taxman

A WEEK before LeBron James’s announcement on ESPN that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat, the New York Post and Rush Limbaugh saw it coming — and for reasons having nothing to do with sports.

“If LeBron James goes to the Miami Heat instead of the Knicks,” the Post noted gloomily on July 1, “blame our dysfunctional lawmakers in Albany, who have saddled top-earning New Yorkers with the highest state and city income taxes in the nation, soon to be 12.85 percent on top of the IRS bite. There is no state income tax in Florida.” Consequently, a five-year, $96 million contract (the estimated deal he could get in either city), would cost James $12.34 million in New York taxes, but nothing in Miami (though he may be taxed when he plays in other cities). “Quite a penalty for the privilege of working in Midtown.”

On the radio that day, Limbaugh, an ex-New Yorker, amplified the point: “Here you have these poor schlubs that . . . own the Knicks and they’re going to try to persuade LeBron James to move to New York to play for the Knicks and they gotta tell him, ‘By the way, you’re going to pay about 12 to 15, maybe $20 million more in taxes in New York than you would [in Florida].'” Limbaugh drolly asked his audience whether James should take the Knicks’ offer “and pay the additional taxes to show his ‘compassion,'” or sign with Miami and “use the additional money for his own economic stimulus.”

Other armchair accountants raised the tax issue after James’s announcement on July 8. The Miami Herald and CNBC pointed out that because Cleveland has a city income tax and Miami doesn’t, even a Heat contract worth $29 million less than what the Cavs offered him would still leave James with $1 million more in take-home pay. The Wall Street Journal remarked that Cleveland should be used to high-income refugees fleeing its excessive tax rates, having seen half of its Fortune 500 companies — and tens of thousands of taxpayers — leave in recent years.

In sports as in most other enterprises, the more you tax something, the less of it you generally end up with it. World-class athletes are no more immune to financial incentives than world-class doctors, lawyers, or entrepreneurs.

On Monday, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, the world record-holder in both the 100- and 200-meter dash, pulled out of next month’s Diamond League track meet at the Crystal Palace in London. The reason: Britain’s exorbitant tax laws, which would force Bolt to pay more in taxes than he would earn by winning the race. Lewis Hamilton, a British Formula One racing star, moved to Switzerland after his first season in 2007. He initially said he was seeking “to escape the public eye,” commented the Wheels blog at NYTimes.com, “but there’s no getting around the fact that Switzerland is also a tax haven.”

Thanks to New York’s sky-high taxes, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao won’t be fighting a title bout in Yankee Stadium any time soon.

The first boxing event at the new Yankee Stadium in June — a fight between Miguel Cotti and Yuri Forman for the World Boxing Association’s junior middleweight title — attracted well over 20,000 spectators. But Yankees COO Lonn Trost conceded afterward that future fights of that caliber are unlikely, since the tax on a fighter’s purse in New York is much higher for non-residents than it is elsewhere. That extinguishes any hope of a Yankee stadium superfight between champions Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. “We’d love to do [Mayweather-Pacquiao], but I believe both of them are non-residents,” Trost told the New York Post, “and the tax could be as much as 13 percent on the purse, where the tax out in Vegas is zero. That’s a big difference.” It sure is.

Avoiding high taxes is not the only reason sports stars — or anyone else — move from one jurisdiction to another. Weather, family, education, love — any of them may play a role. But it is no coincidence that far more people migrate from high-tax states (California, New York, Ohio) to low-tax states (Florida, New Hampshire, Texas) than the other way around. When tax rates bite, taxpayers and businesses are driven to escape — or are deterred from coming in the first place. There’s nothing inexplicable about the fact that people don’t like paying high taxes and may change their lives to avoid them. The real mystery is why so many advocates of high taxes never seem to learn that lesson.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

Jul 14, 2010 | 2 comments | View Post

Straight Talking Mark Twain

“Union of Americans” Reader “B3” sent this article about one of our favorite authors, Mark Twain. ~ Publisher

Dead for a Century, Twain Says What He Meant
by Larry Rother

Wry and cranky, droll and cantankerous — that’s the Mark Twain we think we know, thanks to reading “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in high school. But in his unexpurgated autobiography, whose first volume is about to be published a century after his death, a very different Twain emerges, more pointedly political and willing to play the role of the angry prophet.

Whether anguishing over American military interventions abroad or delivering jabs at Wall Street tycoons, this Twain is strikingly contemporary. Though the autobiography also contains its share of homespun tales, some of its observations about American life are so acerbic — at one point Twain refers to American soldiers as “uniformed assassins” — that his heirs and editors, as well as the writer himself, feared they would damage his reputation if not withheld.

“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed them in 1906. “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.”

Twain’s decree will be put to the test when the University of California Press publishes the first of three volumes of the 500,000-word “Autobiography of Mark Twain” in November. Twain dictated most of it to a stenographer in the four years before his death at 74 on April 21, 1910. He argued that speaking his recollections and opinions, rather than writing them down, allowed him to adopt a more natural, colloquial and frank tone, and Twain scholars who have seen the manuscript agree.

In popular culture today, Twain is “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” Ron Powers, the author of “Mark Twain: A Life,” said in a phone interview. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.”

Next week the British literary magazine Granta will publish an excerpt from the autobiography, called “The Farm.” In it Twain recalls childhood visits to his uncle’s Missouri farm, reflects on slavery and the slave who served as the model for Jim in “Huckleberry Finn,” and offers an almost Proustian meditation on memory and remembrance, with watermelon and maple sap in place of Proust’s madeleine.

“I can see the farm yet, with perfect clearness,” he writes. “I can see all its belongings, all its details.” Of slavery, he notes that “color and condition interposed a subtle line” between him and his black playmates, but confesses: “In my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it.”

Versions of the autobiography have been published before, in 1924, 1940 and 1959. But the original editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, was a stickler for propriety, cutting entire sections he thought offensive; his successors imposed a chronological cradle-to-grave narrative that Twain had specifically rejected, altered his distinctive punctuation, struck additional material they considered uninteresting and generally bowed to the desire of Twain’s daughter Clara, who died in 1962, to protect her father’s image.

“Paine was a Victorian editor,” said Robert Hirst, curator and general editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, where Twain’s papers are housed. “He has an exaggerated sense of how dangerous some of Twain’s statements are going to be, which can extend to anything: politics, sexuality, the Bible, anything that’s just a little too radical. This goes on for a good long time, a protective attitude that is very harmful.”

Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.

In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

He is similarly unsparing about the plutocrats and Wall Street luminaries of his day, who he argued had destroyed the innate generosity of Americans and replaced it with greed and selfishness. “The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars,” Twain observes. “He pays taxes on two million and a half.”

Justin Kaplan, author of “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography,” said in a telephone interview: “One thing that gets Mark Twain going is his rage and resentment. There are a number of passages where he wants to get even, to settle scores with people whom he really despises. He loved invective.”

The material in Volume 1 that was omitted from previous editions amounts to “maybe as little as 5 percent of the dictations,” said Harriet E. Smith, chief editor of the autobiography. “But there will be a much higher percentage in Volumes 2 and 3,” each expected to be about 600 pages.

By the time all three volumes are available, Mr. Hirst said, “about half will not have ever been in print before.” A digital online edition is also planned, Ms. Smith said, ideally to coincide with publication of Volume 1 of “the complete and authoritative edition,” as the work is being called.

Some of Twain’s most critical remarks about individuals are directed at names that have faded from history. He complains about his lawyer, his publisher, the inventor of a failed typesetting machine who he feels fleeced him, and is especially hard on a countess who owns the villa in which he lived with his family in Florence, Italy, in 1904. He describes her as “excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward.”

About literary figures of his time, however, Twain has relatively little to say. He dislikes Bret Harte, whom he dismisses as “always bright but never brilliant”; offers a sad portrait of an aged and infirm Harriet Beecher Stowe; and lavishly praises his friend William Dean Howells. He reserved criticism of novelists whose work he disliked (Henry James, George Eliot) for his letters.

Critics, though, are another story. “I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value,” Twain writes. “However, let it go,” he adds. “It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.”

As aggrieved as he sometimes appears in the autobiography, the reliable funnyman is in evidence too. Twain recalls being invited to an official White House dinner and being warned by his wife, Olivia, who stayed at home, not to wear his winter galoshes. At the White House, he sought out the first lady, Frances Cleveland, and got her to sign a card on which was written “He didn’t.”

Mr. Hirst said: “I’ve read this manuscript a million times, and it still makes me laugh. This is a guy who made literature out of talk, and the autobiography is the culmination, the pinnacle of that impulse.”

Jul 13, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

Headlines Tell the Story (July 4 – 10, 2010)

Wall Street Journal (7/10/2010)
States Shift to Hybrid Pensions

Wall Street Journal (7/10/2010)
U.S., Russia Swap Agents to End Crisis

Wall Street Journal (7/7/2010)
U.S. Retailers Weathered a Bumpy June

Wall Street Journal (7/7/2010)
BP Sets New Spill Target

Wall Street Journal (7/7/2010)
U.S. Hits Immigration Law

Wall Street Journal (7/6/2010)
Long Recession Ignites Debate on Jobless Benefit

Wall Street Journal (7/5/2010)
Obama Decried, Then Used, Some Bush Drilling Policies

Jul 10, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

The Story of Peng Shuilin

From “Reader B2”. Proof positive………..the human spirit ……… indomitable.

Peng Shuilin is 78cms high. He was born in Hunan Province, China. In 1995, in Shenzhen, a freight truck sliced his body in half. His lower body and legs were beyond repair. Surgeons sewed up his torso.

Peng Shuilin, 37, spent nearly two years in hospital in Shenzhen, southern China, undergoing a series of operations to re-route nearly every major organ or system inside his body. Peng kept exercising his arms, building up strength, washing his face and brushing his teeth.

He survived against all odds. Now Peng Shulin has astounded doctors by learning to walk again after a decade. Considering Peng’s plight, doctors at the China Rehabilitation Research Centre in Beijing devised an ingenious way to allow him to walk on his own, creating a sophisticated egg cup-like casing to hold his body, with two bionic legs attached. It took careful consideration, skilled measurement and technical expertise.

Peng has been walking the corridors of Beijing Rehabilitation Centre with the aid of his specially adapted legs and a re-sized walking frame. RGO is a recipicating gait orthosis, attached to a prosthetic socket bucket. There is a cable attached to both legs so when one goes forward, the other goes backwards.
Rock to the side, add a bit of a twist and the leg without the weight on it advances, while the other one stays still, giving a highly inefficient way of ambulation. Oh, so satisfying to ‘walk’ again after ten years with half a body!

Hospital vice-president Lin Liu said: “We’ve just given him a checkup; he is fitter than most men his age.”

Peng Shuilin has opened his own bargain supermarket, called the Half Man-Half Price Store. The inspirational 37-year-old has become a businessman and is used as a role model for other amputees. At just 2ft 7ins tall, he moves around in a wheelchair giving lectures on recovery from disability.

His attitude is amazing, he doesn’t complain. “He had good care, but his secret is cheerfulness. Nothing ever gets him down.”

Jul 09, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Independence Day

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Action of Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America

WHEN in the Course of human Events,
it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great- Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.
HE has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.
HE has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
HE has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only.
HE has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures.
HE has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.
HE has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of the Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and the Convulsions within.
HE has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
HE has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
HE has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.
HE has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance.
HE has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.
HE has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
HE has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
FOR quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us;
FOR protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
FOR cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World:
FOR imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
FOR depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury:
FOR transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences:
FOR abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rules into these Colonies:
FOR taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
FOR suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.
HE has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
HE has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.
HE is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.
HE has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
HE has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.
IN every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.
NOR have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native Justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.
WE, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATED OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

Jul 04, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

Headlines Tell the Story (June 27 – July 3, 2010)

Wall Street Journal (7/03/2010)
U.S. Jobs Picture Darkens

Wall Street Journal (7/02/2010)
Car Sales Slowed in June

Wall Street Journal (6/30/2010)
Iran Arms Syria With Radar

Jul 03, 2010 | 2 comments | View Post

Patriots Patrol