The Broken Spectrum Of The World - Delivered

Does the city you live in have smoking ordinances? Mine does, and while I am not a smoker, I am against smoking bans. I look at it this way, the government shouldn’t have the power to enforce such a law, whether it be local, state, or federal. Whether or not to allow smoking should be the decision of whoever owns a particular building or business, no one else.

Concerned that sitting in the same room as someone that is smoking a cigarette is a health hazard? If whoever owns the building or business where you are has decided to allow smoking in their establishment, you have the power to walk out and not come back. You even have the power to make a complaint to the management, but ultimately, it is their decision, no one elses.

I’ve even heard reports of smoking being banned in bars, which really shows how some people in this society are so selfish, that they feel the need to impose their will on everyone else by passing these useless laws. This is destroying businesses and hurting many others.

Smoking bans infringe on people’s right to make their own decisions, taking power from the people and giving it to government. That is not a good path to follow, because in the end, it only leads to absolute power for government, and severely limits the right of the individual, which is one of this country’s basic principles.

Sen. Obama’s rhetoric is uplifting and positive, but the Senator who showed genuine foresight and courage in opposing the Iraq war spent most of the primary season edging away from his initial tough stand. Will he order the troops to exit Iraq? Will he bring them all home, or simply shift them from Iraq to another foreign country?

Similarly, it would be hard for Sen. Obama not to be an improvement over the Bush administration on civil liberties. However, here, too, Sen. Obama has demonstrated his willingness to trim under pressure.

President George W. Bush violated the law when he ignored both the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress should have held him and his appointees accountable for their law-breaking. Moreover, telephone companies that aided and abetted executive branch law-breaking should have been left liable in the courts.

Yet, Sen. Obama folded, backing a “compromise” that gave the administration most everything that it wanted. No individualized warrants or evidence of law-breaking is required to authorize government spying on U.S. citizens’ phone calls and emails. No administration officials paid the slightest cost for engaging in illegal conduct. No private firm suffered the slightest inconvenience for helping the government violate their customers’ constitutional rights. This was the moment for Sen. Obama to prove that he possessed a true dedication to civil liberties, and he failed.

Of course, we all hope that, as president, he will feel freer to stand up for American liberties. But there also will be voices advising him to use the executive powers so freely expanded by his predecessor. Will he be strong enough to resist this Siren’s Song? No one knows, but one thing is known: If freed from the limiting forces of public awareness and involvement, President Obama would follow a long line of presidents who talk of enhanced individual liberty, but practice a policy of increased government power.

In other words, the best way to encourage Sen. Obama, if he is elected president, to follow the straight and narrow is to actively and clearly demonstrate that we, the American people, are concerned both about our civil liberties and his commitment to protect them. The way to do that is to vote for Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party.

-Bob Barr

The City Club of Cleveland is hosting a debate between Libertarian Party Presidential Nominee Bob Barr, consumer activist Ralph Nader and Pastor Chuck Baldwin on Thursday, October 30 at 4:30 p.m. EDT.

• When: Thursday, October 30, at 4:30 p.m. EDT.
• Where: The City Club of Cleveland; 50 Euclid Ave, 2nd Floor, Cleveland, OH
• Topic: The Economy: “Where do we go from here?”

This will be the first professionally organized debate to include both Bob Barr and Ralph Nader. The Thursday visit to Cleveland is former congressman Barr’s fourth visit to Ohio — a state that will play a crucial role in the presidential election.

Being as seating is limited and there will be questions from the audience, please BE SURE TO ARRIVE AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. Barr’s name will appear before 95 percent of Americans when they vote on Election Day - more than any other third-party or independent candidate.

As some may have heard, there have been reports of people making dummies of both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama and then hanging them by the neck from ropes. These were all done separately, there isn’t a case of having both in the same place, just to clarify.

Cases of the Palin dummies are being dismissed as Halloween decoration, however cases of Obama dummies are being treated as possibly race related crimes. What the hell is our country coming to? Our country is so politically correct with every person standing ready to make race an issue, whether it is or not. These are double standards when people can hang a Sarah Palin dummy up by the neck and people say it is ok, and then make the Obama dummy into a hate crime.

When you get down to it all, its a matter of free speech anyways, not even considering any other factors. I support the right for anyone to hang any dummy in their yard that they want. I’m a great believer in the fact that society will police itself. I don’t mean vigilanty justice either, I’m talking about society as a whole accepting that people have the right to do what they want so long as it doesn’t harm another person and taking it upon themselves to act against such things, should they feel the need, in a peaceful manner that depicts the subject at hand, as being wrong.

Wake up America!

The issue has been irking me a lot lately. I constantly find myself asking the same question though. Why is this “insert sign/document here” written in Spanish? I know we have no official language here in the US, however just about everyone that lives here speaks English. So why are government documents, business literature, and a number of other things, written in Spanish? It just really makes no sense to me.

Personally, I believe it encourages illegal immigration from south of the border. By catering to these people, we are not requiring anything from them. They don’t assimilate and learn English and they believe that we ought to hand things to them. Personally I am tired of catering to outside interests. What happened to OUR interests? My god, we want to go out and help the world, yet we don’t take care of business at home. We want to cater to everyone else and not worry about ourselves, partially for fear of being called racist or being politically incorrect. It’s saddening.

I’ll be honest, when I walk into a business that has two signs up, one in English, the other in Spanish, I almost always immediately turn and walk out, never to return. However it’s getting harder to do that these days as almost everywhere you go, you see just about everything in both English and Spanish. I sometimes forget I live in Texas and not Mexico.

If I were to go to another country, I could not reasonably demand that everything be in English if the country’s main language was not English. It would be selfish of me to have everyone else conform to my standards. I definitely wouldn’t cross into a country illegally, and then on top of that, live there and demand everything be changed to English to convenience me. No person in their right mind could agree that should happen, and it shouldn’t.

I may even come off sounding like an asshole here, but anytime someone comes up to me and doesn’t speak English, I ignore them. I used to work for Sam’s Club, and from time to time, someone would come in that didn’t speak English. Lets take it from the top here. Sam’s Club is a membership only warehouse store. In order to attain a membership, you must have a picture I.D. Now I may be wrong, but I’m under the assumption that in order to attain a picture I.D., you must be a citizen of the country, and as I’m almost sure, if you’re a citizen, you know English. So I’m not sure how a person such as this even comes to be in such a place. Next, how can you expect to get anywhere not knowing English? I’m not going to give you service if you can’t speak my language, and I won’t go through the trouble of getting someone to translate either. I’m sure I’m not alone here when I say that either. The only way to get anywhere in this country, especially if you’re here illegally, is to know English.

I’ll wrap this up in saying, I believe we should make English the official language of this country. I’m not sure why it never was. I can guess, but it would be pretty long and wouldn’t be very pretty, as I’m not going to pull any punches. To keep it short, I believe politicans play it way too easy in order to stay cozy with voters and future “potential” voters. So we’ll continue to see government documents in both English and Spanish. As for businesses, I hope there are others out there such as myself that feel the same way and steer clear of businesses that cater to Spanish speaking people as much as possible.