Michael Badnarik On The Constitution: We The People Have the Power 5 min video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIggk2dFHMI

Another Story of Government Insulting Concerned Americans from American Liberty Alliance

This would suggest that someone working on taxpayer time, in a taxpayer funded office, using taxpayer funded email servers to contact taxpayer employees, deliberately chose to use the phrase “tea baggers” instead of “Tea Partiers.” (“tea baggers” is an explicit sexual term whose definition can be found at wikipedia.com)

• The implementation of government-wide policies and standards with respect to Federal regulations and guidance documents;
• The quality, utility, and analytic rigor of information used to support public policy;
• Dissemination of and access to government information;
• Privacy and confidentiality;
• Electronic records; and
• Federal statistics.

By a nudge we mean anything that influences our choices. A school cafeteria might try to nudge kids toward good diets by putting the healthiest foods at front. We think that it’s time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gentling nudging them in directions that will make their lives better.

In other words, you institute change by constantly tweaking the law, etc. until it becomes what you want it to be. Fascist baby steps if you will. From Wikipedia:

Sunstein (along with his coauthor Richard Thaler) has elaborated the theory of libertarian paternalism. In arguing for this theory, he counsels thinkers/academics/politicians to embrace the findings of behavioral economics as applied to law, maintaining freedom of choice while also steering people’s decisions in directions that will make their lives go better. With Thaler, he coined the term “choice architect.”

He also has views on a ‘New Deal’ for speech and he seeks to tweak the Constitution so to speak (actually, more like rewriting it) in this area as well as others…

1st Amendment

In his book Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech Sunstein says there is a need to reformulate First Amendment law. He thinks that the current formulation, based on Justice Holmes’ conception of free speech as a marketplace “disserves the aspirations of those who wrote America’s founding document.” The purpose of this reformulation would be to “reinvigorate processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views.” He is concerned by the present “situation in which like-minded people speak or listen mostly to one another,” and thinks that in “light of astonishing economic and technological changes, we must doubt whether, as interpreted, the constitutional guarantee of free speech is adequately serving democratic goals.” He proposes a “New Deal for speech [that] would draw on Justice Brandeis’ insistence on the role of free speech in promoting political deliberation and citizenship.”

Here are some Sunstein gems:

• “Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government intervention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions.”
  – Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 3
• “A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.”
  –Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet in his book, Republic.com 2.0, p.137
• “In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?… Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …”
  – Cass R. Sunstein, “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” The Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1999 

Colorado Citizens’ Coalition, a 527 pressure group, may have been behind an attack on a Democratic Party office in Denver calculated to depict opponents of ObamaCare as violent. Maurice Schwenkler, reportedly an anarchist who goes by the name Ariel Attack and whose sex is a subject of debate, was arrested for vandalizing the Denver office. One available photograph shows a shattered window that bears two signs on the inside reading “Want Health Care Reform? Come Inside” and “Today 100 Coloradans will lose their health insurance.” The damage may cost $10,000 to repair. Colorado Democratic Party chairwoman Pat Waak blamed opponents of President Obama’s healthcare nationalization scheme for the vandalism. “Clearly there’s been an effort on the other side to stir up hate,” she said. “I think this is the consequence of it.” … {As it turns out, that was not the case.] Waak has not yet apologized.  Video: http://tinyurl.com/n3dw8s 

A black bloc is a group of protesters dressed in black, who often cooperate in small, autonomous affinity groups to resist police. There may be several black blocs within a particular protest, with different aims and tactics. Black blocs tend to be anarchist-themed, and may include members of union flying squads, anarchists, situationists, pagans, communists and other anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist groups. What defines a black bloc is not ideology but action in self-defense of the larger group of protesters. They are named for the typical black garb they wear for uniformity. Many also wear masks and scarves over their faces, to avoid identification, to protect their faces against tear gas and pepper spray, and for symbolic purposes. Typical actions of a black bloc are distracting police, misleading police about protester motions, ‘unarresting’ people already arrested by police, administering first aid to persons affected by tear gas in areas where protestors are barred from entering, building barricades, attacking/disarming police, and unmasking police who pose as black blockers (easily identified as they attack protestors). Some black blockers also engage in vandalism and rioting. Although black blocking is usually connected with some form of direct action, black blocs also participate in wholly symbolic action, as well as action that falls entirely within traditional definitions of nonviolence. Property destruction carried out by black blocs tends to have symbolic significance: favorite targets include banks, institutional buildings, outlets for multinational corporations, pornography and sex shops, gasoline stations, and videosurveillance cameras. Groups such as the WOMBLES and Wild Greens advocate participating in black bloc activity, and have similar mandates. Groups that have engaged in similar forms of action include Radical Anti-Capitalist Blocs, Anti-Racist Action, and Anti-Fascist Action.