American Policy Center » 2005 » May
- The Real Disease is Called Government
- STOP National ID Bill!
- Good Riddance: Clinton “Roadless Rule” Dead
- Time to Declare Our Independence from the United Nations
May 16, 2005
By Tom DeWeese
The DeWeese Report has reported many times of the outrageous campaign to control what we eat. Obesity has become the tobacco of the day as trial lawyers line up to file class action suits to make restaurants responsible if you get fat. Schools have rushed to empty anything good out of the school cafeteria while practically force-feeding tofu to our poor, oppressed kids. Obesity has been ranked as the number two preventable death, right behind smoking. The nation is in a panic. Americans are too fat, moan the food police. The government has to do something, cries the herd.
Now comes a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), that a mistake was made in the estimates on obesity-related deaths. It seems that the original estimate of 365,000 per year (corrected in July from 400,000) is really only 25,814. Oops!
25,814 is not a national crisis. It’s barely a bump on the road. It’s less than the number of people killed in auto accidents or by gun shot wounds. There simply is no obesity crisis in this country.
What we have are lies, lawyers and fraud. Obesity is the disease of the day – even if it’s just a fabrication. Even with its own report, the CDC refuses to change its public awareness campaigns. It intends to keep right on scaring the fat cells out of you. There are too many federal grants to be gained to tell the truth now. And the lawyers intend to ignore the report as well. Money is money.
The truth is, as reported by The Center for Consumer Freedom, in 1998, the federal government changed the rules measuring the Body Mass Index (BMI). Overnight, 30 million Americans, without gaining a pound, went from normal BMI to overweight. Now, Tom Cruise, Michael Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger are listed as obese. It’s a lie. There is no obesity epidemic. There is only the disease of government run by overweight, droopy-joweled bureaucrats, fat-headed special interest groups hoping to feed at the federal trough, and lawyers.
Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center, a grassroots activist think tank headquartered in Warrenton, VA. The Center maintains a website at www.americanpolicy.org.
May 10, 2005
Action Alert! Action Alert! Action Alert!
The Senate is scheduled to vote TODAY on the “REAL ID Act.” You must call both of your Senators immediately and tell them and their staff to VOTE NO on the REAL ID Act. The REAL ID Act does nothing to prevent terrorism or stop illegal immigration. All it does is strap legal, law-abiding Americans with a National ID card system.
Act NOW! There is absolutely no time to lose!
*Action to Take*
1. Call the Senate Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for your Senators by name. Tell them they MUST VOTE NO on the REAL ID Act.
CALL NOW! ONLY PHONE CALLS WILL BE EFFECTIVE AT THIS POINT!
Remember:
- The REAL ID Act requires the linking of all state driver’s license databases — thereby creating one massive database harnessing the private details of every U.S. citizen.
- The REAL ID Act requires that all state driver’s licenses have a common machine-readable technology, including a digital photo of the card holder. Of course, much more intrusive information will likely be required in the near future.
- The REAL ID Act gives the federal government the unprecedented power to dictate what data states collect for license holders. This could include virtually anything, including fingerprints and/or eye retina scans known as “eye-prints.”
The REAL ID Act is a national ID scheme, plain and simple. It is NOT a border security bill, as some have tried to spin it. In fact, the bill still permits illegal aliens to acquire driver’s licenses!
***PLEASE SEND THIS URGENT ALERT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE***
By Peyton Knight
Finally, more than four years after its hideous birth, the Clinton “Roadless Rule” is dead. The Bush administration and the Forest Service just announced a final rule that effectively undoes Clinton’s reckless decree. Dying with the “Roadless Rule” are the following:
- threats of catastrophic wildfire
- threats of forest infestation and disease
- lack of public access to public lands
- improper resource management
- unhealthy forests
- top-down federal overreach
Recall that Bill Clinton, just eight days before he left office, in the dark of night, penned his infamous, unilateral, executive order that locked up over 58 million acres of public land. No congressional deliberation. No public input. Just one constitutionally-challenged man overriding the will of the U.S. Congress, the states, and the public at large, in a bold attempt to give a last minute gift to his loyal green buddies.
Predictably, the environmental left is in convulsing. The rent-a-rioters at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are dubbing the new measure “the treeless rule” saying that President Bush has “deprived future generations of their birthright and natural heritage.” That’s hysterical even for the hysterics at NRDC.
(Note to the gullible who may be reading this: Relax. Your birthright and heritage are still firmly intact.)
In reality, all this new rule does is return state and local input to forest and public land management. It’s that simple. Rather than have one man’s last second, dictatorial rule govern over 58 million acres of public lands, now states, local governments, and private citizens can have access to their lands, and input into how their resources are managed. The horror of it all.
Of course, we’ve all seen what happens when the federal government shuts down access to public lands and shuns proper forest maintenance. Disease and infestation thrive. The forests burn out of control. Houses are reduced to ash. People die. Livelihoods are lost. Habitat is incinerated. Wildlife is destroyed and displaced. And to think, some people actually think the greens are pro-environment.
So let the green elite at the Sierra Club, the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the NRDC, and the Wilderness Society kick and scream. Like all petty tyrants, they haven’t much use for local decision-making and citizen input. They much prefer to rule like…well…like Bill Clinton in the waning days of his presidency.
Peyton Knight is executive director of the American Policy Center, an activist think-tank located in Northern Virginia. The Center maintains a website at www.americanpolicy.org and can be reached via phone at (540) 341-8911.
May 6, 2005
By Tom DeWeese
The United Nations is a mess. It now finds itself buried under scandals. It has Oil for Food scandals. Sex scandals. Power-abuse scandals. Smuggling scandals. Theft scandals. And unpaid traffic tickets. Rob, rape, and pillage seems to be the UN’s modus operandi.
Yet why is anyone surprised? The UN considers itself above the law of mere nations. And it answers to no one. There is no vote on UN leaders (other than by the culprits themselves). There is no international referendum on its policies. The UN sets its own standards of conduct and it controls its own judge and jury. These, of course, are the very reasons why many have opposed U.S. membership in the UN. And it’s why many have feared the UN gaining any sort of power to gain its own ability to tax, field an army, or create a court system. Possessing these three powers drastically changes the UN from a volunteer membership organization to a global governing body.
Compliant nations simply give the UN a pretense of legitimacy. The United States government plays to the folks at home by talking tough about the need for “UN reform.” Yet not once has the Republican-led Administration or the Republican- controlled Congress taken any steps to withhold funds for UN programs. Instead, the U.S. continues to go along with nearly every policy scheme, international conference and peace-keeping mission, paying the majority of the funds, thus supplying huge amounts of tax-payer money to UN coffers so that business as usual goes on down at UN headquarters.
There is one public entity to which the UN at least pretends to react. The court of public opinion. There is a growing awareness, at least in the living rooms of common Americans, that something is very wrong with the UN. The UN’s greatest fear is that those Americans might influence our leaders to withdraw from the world body. If that ever happens, then the UN is finished and it knows it.
Articles are surfacing and pundits are pondering, questioning the future of the UN. To sidestep the obvious that the UN has utterly failed in its stated mission to promote world peace, or to even have a hint of influence in making anyone’s life better voices are beginning to suggest the word “reform.” Reform the UN, make it more “workable.” American leaders, looking for a way to get around the growing argument to dump the UN may latch on to such a reform movement. But they should be careful what they wish for because they may not get the kind of reform they are expecting.
The UN is never without a contingency plan for its well-prepared agenda of global governance. A major thorn in the side of those who seek to drive the UN into a position of international power is the Security Council and the veto power of its permanent members. Many say the United States controls the UN with its veto power. Solution: take it away.
One of the twelve points of the Charter for Global Democracy, which surfaced prior to the UN’s Millennium Summit in 2000, was a plan to “reform” the UN by doing away with the Security Council and replacing it with an “Assembly of the People.” The Assembly would be made up of “people from the world” in the form of non-elected, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). Take note, these are the same NGO’s which write the background material for most of the UN treaties like Agenda 21, the Biodiversity Treaty, Rights of the Child, and even the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. NGOs are special interest groups (almost all leftist) who are seeking to create the UN as a global government. They are the ones pushing for UN tax schemes, standing armies, and the International Criminal Court. While the average citizen focuses on the Security Council and its dramatic, even heroic image, NGOs have become the driving force in setting UN policy.
To them it would be a dream come true for the UN to scrap the Security Council, which still pretends to be a place where nations simply air their differences. They would then be free to install the Assembly of the People through which their drive for UN power could accelerate unabated by pesky U.S. vetoes.
The fact is the UN is not an instrument for guarding the peace. The UN is the source for international unrest and “reform” will not fix it. Most urgently, American leadership must not fall into the trap set by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to allow the UN to take the lead in rebuilding Iraq. Worse, Blair is also attempting to bully the United States into embracing the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol. Such a foolish move would be a disaster to the U.S. economy and would do nothing to cool the planet.
For the past fifty years, as the UN lived off the perception that it provided a forum where nations could air their differences off the battlefield, more wars were fought than ever before in human history. Instead of removing the threat to peace, the UN has encouraged, even nurtured, regimes that waged violence on their neighbors, and indeed, oppressed and tortured their own people.
The first great challenge to the UN’s ability to provide peace was the Korean conflict in 1954. Allowed to operate on its own, the United States would have waged war against this aggressor and eliminated the communist regime and its threat forever. However, because American leadership abided by United Nations diplomatic authority instead of reason, not only was the regime allowed to survive, the conflict was never resolved. Indeed the North Korean communists’ greatest ally, Red China, was also allowed to take root and grow. As a result of that UN failure, today, both North Korea and communist China are two of the leading international threats to peace. These are festering sores that the United States will eventually have to deal with, most certainly over UN objections.
Almost the exact scenario was played out in the Vietnam conflict in the 1960’s as UN resolutions tied American hands from destroying the communists, allowing another brutal regime to remain in power, again within the axis of China.
Today, fifty years after the inception of the United Nations, the international community is a dangerous place. Instead of peaceful, prosperous, stable trading partners, the world is full of brutal, murdering dictatorships which starve and torture their own people while threatening the security of their neighbors, as once-great powers cower and use diplomatic doublespeak to ignore responsibility. Most of these international thugs have two things in common. 1) Each has a voice and a vote in the United Nations. 2) None would be a threat if they didn’t.
The United Nations has come under the control of outlaw nations, petty and tarnished former superpowers and self-ordained special interest groups. Each promotes a socialist agenda that seeks to redistribute the world’s wealth into their own coffers as they diminish the power of the United States and enslave the citizens of nations in a dark ages of poverty and misery.
That’s why terrorist states like Libya and Syria are allowed to serve on the UN’s Human Rights Commission as Israel is condemned in resolution after resolution. It’s the reason why a prosperous, industrious nation like Taiwan is refused membership in the UN while a murderous thug like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is given a prominent voice at UN conferences.
The United Nations is not “dysfunctional,” as some “reformists” have claimed. It is a criminal enterprise in which no moral nation should ever participate, let alone perpetuate.
Many of our elected officials indicate that the United States is bound to some kind of forced membership in the UN, as if it’s our legal duty. Congress has resisted Congressman Ron Paul’s efforts to pass his “American Sovereignty Restoration Act” (H.R. 1146), which calls for the complete withdraw of the United States from UN membership. Critics say it just isn’t reasonable in today’s society. They say that the United States would become isolated from the rest of the world. They say that the United States is bound by a treaty to stay in the UN.
But according to legal and Constitution scholar, Herb Titus, the Charter of the United Nations is neither politically nor legally binding upon the United States or the American people. Says Titus, “The Charter of the UN is commonly assumed to be a treaty. It is not.” Instead, Titus explains, the UN Charter is a constitution. As such, it is illegitimate, having created a supranational government, deriving its powers not from the consent of the governed (the people of the United States and peoples of other member nations) but from the consent of the peoples’ government officials, which have no authority to bind either the American people nor any other nation’s to any terms of the Charter of the United Nations.
Titus goes on to explain: “Even if the Charter of the UN were a properly-ratified treaty, it would still be constitutionally illegitimate and void because it transgresses the Constitution of the United States in three major respects: 1) It unconstitutionally delegates to the UN the U.S. Congress’ legislative powers to initiate war and the U.S. president’s executive power to conduct war; 2) It unconstitutionally transfers to the United Nations General Assembly the US House of Representatives’ exclusive power to originate revenue-raising measures; and 3) It unconstitutionally robs the 50 American states powers reserved to them by the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
Titus declares that H.R.1146 is the only viable solution to the continuing abuses by the United Nations. He says, “The U.S. Congress can remedy its earlier unconstitutional actions of embracing the UN Charter by enacting H.R. 1146.”
The world of the UN is like a parallel reality. It is no place for a nation born from the minds of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. How would today’s American leaders in Congress react if they were suddenly brought before a tribunal of Founding Fathers and told to justify American participation in such a folly?
Rather than wasting more time and money on hearings and debates over a new UN Ambassador, the Congress would better use its resources to simply ignore the UN and quit. It is past time for the American people to demand action of our elected officials to uphold the U.S. Constitution they have sworn to defend. Just as our Founding Fathers did when confronted with tyranny, it’s time that the American people declare their independence from the United Nations.
Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center, an activist think tank headquartered in Warrenton, VA. The Center maintains a website at www.americanpolicy.org.
