WEBVTT

NOTE Nation of Sheep

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I am privileged because of my work at Fox to be invited to speak at a lot of gatherings

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all over the country, some large, some small, some happy, some hostile.

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But being anywhere with the name von Mises or Lew Rockwell means that I am home.

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And I am happy to be speaking here at a home which I have never visited before on this

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This beautiful day, in this beautiful town, in this beautiful part of the country, and

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I thank you for welcoming me.

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I think I was on the bench, oh, maybe about two or three weeks, and they give you these

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cases where you have about 15 minutes a case, small claims cases.

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Somebody will typically come up and say, the dry cleaner ruined my dress, but he also tried

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to pick up my sister, and you have to sort of resolve the case in about 15 minutes.

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A guy comes up, a lawyer, and he says, Your Honor, we need a translator for this particular

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and I said, well what language does your client speak? He said Italian. I called the courthouse administrator, the translator was busy in another courtroom, so I said to the throng, there were a couple hundred people in the room, is there anybody here that speaks Italian?

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Lawyer to Translator, give the court your name Translator to Witness, what is in your name?

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I said, all right, let me see where this is going to go. Ask the next question. Lawyer

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to translator, give the court your address. Translator to witness, where is you house?

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I looked at this guy, I said, I thought you told me that you could speak Italian. He said,

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One time I was picking a jury in New Jersey, and in most states the judge actually picks

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the jury.

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And you interrogate citizens to make sure that they have no bias, no prejudice, no interest

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in the outcome.

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This was a drug distribution case.

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I was very young at being a judge, and a woman raised her hand and says, Judge, I can't

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be on this jury because of my occupation.

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Drug distribution case.

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I said, all right lady, what do you do? She said, I'm a soothsayer. This is 1990, who

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calls themselves a soothsayer? So I fall for it, and I said, all right madam, how does

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that keep you from being on this jury? She said, judge, I already know how the case ends

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up. All right, you're excused, you're excused. As you will hear in a few minutes, and if

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If you know me from Fox or from any of my other works, I have not hesitated to be harshly

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critical of the Bush administration and what it has done to the Constitution and what it

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has done to our natural liberties, but I must publicly confess, and I've done this before,

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that I am in some unique and bizarre way even responsible for the Bush administration coming

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into existence.

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It was eight years ago. It was early December. It was the recount. We had been going 40 days straight at Fox.

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I was and am the chief legal guy and had to become an expert in hanging chads and all those bizarre Florida election laws.

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And one night I was on the air with my colleague, Britt Hume. He's in Washington.

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I'm in New York through the magic of television. It looks like I'm sitting next to him.

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and you see one of those things that Fox does

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about 10 or 15 times every 30 minutes, a swoosh Fox alert.

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So we had this swoosh Fox alert

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and Brit Hume says the Florida Supreme Court

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has just announced that it is ordering the recounts

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not only resumed in the four counties

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that Vice President Gore has requested

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but in all 70 counties of the state of Florida

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And we understand, Judge, that the Bush campaign is going to appeal this to the United States

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Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta.

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What do you think?

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Now, if you're a lawyer, the rules are pretty basic.

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I said, well, the Court of Appeals in Atlanta does not have jurisdiction to hear an appeal

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from the Florida Supreme Court.

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He said, what should they do?

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I said, well, Bush's lawyers should go to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., where Justice

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Anthony Kennedy lives.

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He's the circuit justice.

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He's assigned to hear emergency appeals from state supreme courts in the 11th circuit,

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which includes Florida.

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They should knock on his door and they should ask him to sign an emergency stay, fancy word

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for stop, the decision of the Supreme Court of Florida so that the other eight justices

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can vote on this in due time.

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Now this was about ten minutes of seven.

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At seven o'clock the Bridegroom show was over.

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I went up to my office to take a nap, because in those days I said we were going 24-7, and

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at 10 o'clock I had to be on with O'Reilly, and of course you need all the energy you

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can get for that kind of an encounter.

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At five after seven, as I'm dozing off in my office with the television on in the background,

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my ever-charming, ever-handsome, ever-garrulous Fox colleague Shepard Smith is on, and another

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one of those swooshes comes down.

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And the swoosh is, Governor Bush's lawyers have just been sighted in their cars in Georgetown

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in Washington D.C.

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And they're looking for the House of Justice Anthony Kennedy, they ask him to sign some

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kind of an emergency document, I don't know what it is.

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Then he looks in the camera and he goes, you know what that means?

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means that George W. Bush is watching Fox, and he's listening to Judge Napolitano.

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The rest, regrettably, is history.

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True story.

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Who knows where they learned their law from?

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The Bush administration continues, even up to the present moment, to assault our liberties.

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It assaults our liberties that are specifically, expressly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

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It assaults our natural liberties, which Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence are

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hours by virtue of our birthright, and it assaults liberties that are guaranteed in

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specific statutes, some of which President Bush himself has signed into law.

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Many of you have heard me talk about the Patriot Act.

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It is the single most abominable, as in hateful, as in un-American, as in anti-liberty, piece

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of legislation enacted by the Congress of the United States since the Alien and Sedition

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Act in 1798, which made it a crime to criticize certain members of the government.

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Remember how the government was elected in 1798?

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Think of this happening next week.

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Whoever finishes first in the Electoral College becomes president.

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Whoever finishes second becomes vice president.

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We since have modified that with the 12th Amendment.

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But you had Jefferson and Adams running against each other for president.

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Adams wins, Jefferson finishes second.

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So you have President Adams, big government, Hamiltonian guy, versus Vice President Jefferson.

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Small government, states' rights, natural liberties that each of us has.

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Adams believed with Hamilton and with many of the others at the time, with the people

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that called themselves Federalists, that our rights came from the government.

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That our rights came from the government.

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And that the same government that turned on freedom of speech, turned on right to privacy,

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turned on freedom to travel, turned on freedom of religion, right to think, right to develop

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your personality, could just as easily turn it off.

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Jefferson, of course, argued that that's absurd, that our rights come from our humanity.

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We were made in the image and likeness of God.

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And God is perfectly free.

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And our freedoms are gifts from him.

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And we can only lose those freedoms when our behavior assaults someone else's natural freedoms

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and then a jury with a fair judge, not a political judge, but a fair judge, and a fair jury,

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not the lady that thought she knew the outcome already, decides that we have violated somebody

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else's rights.

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That tension between the Jefferson view, which lawyers today call the natural law, and the

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and the Adams View, which lawyers today call Positivism.

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That tension has existed in the United States from the beginning.

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Unfortunately, regrettably, Positivism has won virtually every clash between it and the

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natural law in Congress and in the minds of the President.

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The only time the natural law wins, occasionally and from time to time, and we saw it as recently

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as this past June with a couple of Supreme Court decisions, occasionally because lawyers

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study the natural law and lawyers become Supreme Court justices, it wasn't always the case,

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but in the latter part of this century they've all been lawyers.

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They show a healthy respect for the natural law and will say to the Congress, thou shalt

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not pass, because this is a right that individuals have and the government can't turn it off.

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So that tension between positivism and natural law is ever present.

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And to make matters worse, here's what the positivists believe.

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The positivists believe if the government says it, then it must be so.

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Now even the people who wrote the Declaration and who wrote the Constitution believed in

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the natural law.

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Think of the words of the First Amendment.

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Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

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What does that tell you?

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It doesn't say Congress shall grant freedom of speech.

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It says Congress shall not abridge it.

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Therefore it must have pre-existed Congress.

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It must have pre-existed the Constitution.

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It must have pre-existed the Bill of Rights.

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Of course it did because it comes from our humanity.

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The only reason we have a Bill of Rights is because Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists

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would not put the Constitution to a vote in their states unless the Federalists agreed

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to put the Bill of Rights to a vote in their states.

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And so the Constitution came into existence and three years later the Bill of Rights did

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and hence that wonderful First Amendment, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom

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Eight years later, Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime, punishable by up to two years in jail to criticize any member of Congress, any member of the cabinet, any member of the Supreme Court, and the President.

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Note who was missing. The Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, who relished in the fact that he was not protected by a law that violated natural liberty.

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The Alien and Sedition Acts, fortunately, and people were prosecuted and did go to jail and did wallow in medieval style American federal prisons for two years.

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You didn't get out early in those days. Two years meant two years because of their words, because they dared to criticize the federal government.

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The statute expired of its own weight. That is, the statute had a date in it by which it would expire.

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Jefferson, when he was elected president, four years after Adams, they run against each other.

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This time, Jefferson wins. By that time, there is a new amendment, so he doesn't have John Adams as his vice president.

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He has whoever his running mate was. It wasn't necessary for Jefferson to refuse to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts

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the time came in which they expired. But he did say that he would refuse to enforce them.

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So here's the question, how can the same generation that rebelled when British soldiers knocked

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on the door and wrote out their own search warrants pursuant to an act of the parliament

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called the Writs of Assistance Act, how can the same generation that rebelled when British

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soldiers knocked on the door pursuant to the Stamp Act which required that every piece

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A book, a financial instrument, a deed, a poster you were going to nail to a tree, have the king stamp on it.

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How can the same generation, that pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honors, to shoot against the king and to shoot against the king's soldiers,

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How can the same generation that said we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

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How can the same generation that wrote the First Amendment write a law making it a crime punishable in jail to criticize them when they're in the government?

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Because power is an aphrodisiac. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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This is nothing new, this observation. This is a truism. This isn't even something that can be debated.

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From John Adams to George W. Bush, and including in every generation and virtually every presidency,

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I would accept Jefferson, I would accept some of Andrew Jackson, I would object most, I would accept most of Grover Cleveland who simply said, where's this in the Constitution, and vetoed law after law after law that the Congress has sent to him.

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But with those exceptions, every president and in every generation has disregarded the Constitution.

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When Franklin Roosevelt had been in office for about a month, and he proposed that the Secretary of Agriculture be allowed to engage in Soviet-style central planning, telling farmers what they could grow, where they could grow it, how much they could charge for it.

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So rigid and so draconian that it regulated what you could grow in your own backyard for your own consumption.

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A young Columbia Law School professor who he hired to advise him, who would later achieve

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fame as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials by the name of Rexford Tugwell, suggested

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that this was unconstitutional, that the government could not engage in Soviet-style, central

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planning of agriculture, that the government could not tell you what you could grow in

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your own backyard.

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But FDR, who had just taken a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution, said, it's quaint,

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was written in the horse and buggy era, don't worry, the court and the people will agree

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with me.

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He happened to be right, the court and the people did agree with him, but it shows the

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cavalier attitude.

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That quaint horse and buggy document is the same one on which every president has taken

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and an Oath to Uphold, and is the same one from which all presidential powers flow.

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Emphasis on all.

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Because in the Bush administration, their lawyers would argue to federal judges, and

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this has not been accepted in a single court in the land where they've argued it, but

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they've made this argument, that the president has powers that come from a source other than

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the Constitution.

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Well, what could that be?

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The heavens?

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There is this scene in W, the movie, it's just a movie, where young George Bush is not

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having a very good night, and he says to Laura, Jesus wants me to be president.

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And she says, have you lost your mind?

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But fast forward to a time when he is the president, and will dispatch very bright lawyers

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to argue before the highest court in the land that he has powers that come from some source

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other than the Constitution, that come from the concept of being both the head of state

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and the head of government, because every head of state and every head of government

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throughout history has been able to torture, therefore this president should be able to

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order torture.

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Now that's not literally the argument they use because they don't use that word.

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George Orwell would be very happy with them because he predicted their behavior 60 years ago.

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They say enhanced interrogation techniques, but that's the type of argument that they make.

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The government today rejects the notion of natural rights,

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rejects the idea that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are ours by virtue of our birthright.

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Pull this one on your friends.

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There's a piece of literature in our history, the Declaration of Independence,

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that says when the government ceases to recognize natural rights,

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quote, it is the duty of the people to alter and abolish it, close quote.

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Now, if your friends who are big government types will say,

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The Declaration of Independence is the law of the United States of America.

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Not only did it give birth to the country, but it was adopted by the Congress.

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If you go in the United States Code, you will find it there.

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It is the law of the land that when the government ceases to recognize guaranteed natural rights,

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It is the duty, underscore duty, of the people to alter or to abolish it.

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How do you alter or abolish it when you have a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama?

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It is the dilemma that we face today.

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You will hear, I think, later this weekend from a giant among you, who courageously battled

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against John McCain and the Republican primaries, and who had the foresight to predict with

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uncanny accuracy the economic problems that we confront today.

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I wonder if that jackass that used to be the governor of New York City would laugh at Ron

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Paul today as he laughed at him during one of those debates.

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Oh, life goes on.

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When September 11, 2001 happened and the government forced the Patriot Act on the Congress, I

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mean literally forced it on the Congress, there was zero debate in the House of Representatives.

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There was just a few hours of meaningless debate on the floor of the Senate.

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Nobody in the House of Representatives had the opportunity to read the Patriot Act.

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How do I know that?

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I know it because it was placed on the house intranet, that's the internal internet to

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which only members of the House of Representatives and their senior staff have access.

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It was posted there for 15 minutes before they had to vote on it.

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Now I've read it twice, it's 315 pages long, it doesn't read like a novel.

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In order to read the Patriot Act, you need to have the United States Code in front of

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you, which is all the federal statutes.

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All 4,000 criminal statutes that the federal government has written.

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Now the United States Code probably fills about a third of this long wall here.

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So you have to have all those books in front of you because the Patriot Act basically consists

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of amending statutes that already exist.

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Think about it.

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If you change or to and, if you change a semicolon to a comma, if you change six months to six

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It can have a profound effect once you see what is being changed.

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But if you don't read the statute on which you're voting, then how would you know that it assaults the Constitution

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by allowing FBI agents to break into your house?

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The British soldiers went through the farce of writing their own search warrants.

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FBI agents don't even have to go through that. They can write their own search warrants and show up while you're at a basketball game or a Friday evening football game and plant a listening device underneath your kitchen table or take your checkbook or go through wherever you keep documents that you have and you'll never even know that it was the friendly FBI because they don't have to tell local law enforcement and they don't have to tell you that it was them for 18 months.

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They can have that kind of literature or that kind of private invasion of you.

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This is authorized in the Patriot Act.

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John Ashcroft, who was the Attorney General of the United States at the time,

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said the same thing that Hank Paulson did last month.

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The sky will fall if I don't have this.

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There isn't even enough time to debate.

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Haven't you heard all this before?

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You've got to listen to what we want because we have the only viable solution.

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The Taliban is under every bedpost and behind every refrigerator and under every kitchen table.

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If you don't give us the means to find these people, God knows what will happen.

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And if we show up at your house or at your banker's office or at your doctor's office or at your lawyer's office

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or at your jewelry, the jewelry store where you go or at the place where you bought your automobile or your boat

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If you're at your boat or at your real estate office or at the hospital where you just had surgery and we give them one of these self-written search warrants, they have to comply.

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They can't call a lawyer, they can't challenge it in court, and they can't tell anyone that they received it.

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In the old days, if the government wanted information on you, it would go to the bank and serve them with a grand jury subpoena or a search warrant.

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The bank had 10 days in which to reply.

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The bank had a duty to you, the depositor, to say, there's an FBI agent here, there's

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a formal piece of paper, they want your records, we're going to comply with it in 10 days.

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Here's a copy, go hire a lawyer and challenge it.

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You had 10 days in which to challenge it.

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And a neutral judge, a federal judge who took the same oath as FDR to uphold the same constitution

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would rule that the government had the right to go in or the government did not.

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All of that changed after the Patriot Act.

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Now, if the banker tells anyone, you, his general counsel, his wife in bed, his priest

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in confession, if the banker tells anyone, then the banker is told that he will be charged

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with violating the Patriot Act, that's five years in jail.

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If the banker is in a public federal courtroom and is asked under oath if he received one

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of these self-written search warrants and answers truthfully, yes, I did, he violates

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the Patriot Act.

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Can you imagine the conundrum that the government has visited upon us?

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has literally made it a crime to tell the truth under oath in a public courtroom.

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Even the great monsters throughout history haven't claimed that kind of power.

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The president said that he could lock anybody up, throw away the key, they didn't know where

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to bring them.

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Alberto Gonzalez and John Ashcroft said, send them to Cuba!

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The Constitution doesn't apply, the criminal laws don't apply, and best of all, Mr. President,

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there are no federal courts in Cuba. Those pesky black rogue judges can't get to you.

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Of course, we all know the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 against that. Wherever the government

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goes, the Constitution goes. Wherever the Constitution goes, federal judges go. I was

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once arguing with O'Reilly on air about this, and I said to him, look, it was the days when

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and we all thought it would be Hillary against Rudy.

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I said, if Hillary ever becomes president,

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she will ship you to Guantanamo Bay

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under this very theory that you're defending.

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And you will have no access to any lawyer

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and no federal judge will be able to hear your plea.

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And he looked at me and he said,

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will you come and visit me?

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And I said, no, because they'll probably keep me there as well.

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You know we can laugh about this. St. Thomas More on his way to the scaffold told the joke to the executioner, which the church teaches as a sign of sanctity, that a person in the face of certain death can be humorous about the certainty and likelihood of eternal bliss.

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So it is good always to be happy. It is good always to be cheerful.

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I'll tell you one of the reasons why it's good to be cheerful is because the people who hate our freedom are never cheerful.

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They are never cheerful about anything that they do. Most of them don't recognize an afterlife. None of them recognize that these rights and values that we have come from the God who created, sustains and loves us all, but unfortunately, dear Lord, allows these monsters to take over the government.

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I'll just talk a few minutes about the bailout. I mean, I could talk about the Patriot Act and all the other indignities visited upon so many innocent human beings for a long time.

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I will tell you this, one of the clauses of Patriot Act II, there are two of them, one of the clauses of Patriot Act II which a unique combination of liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans managed to get in the document was that the Justice Department had to report to the Congress from time to time how many times these self-written search warrants were used and how they were used. Now they're not called self-written search warrants, I mean the government is brilliant

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at naming things. I mean, the Right to Privacy Act of 1986, you can bet them farm that it's not going to enhance your privacy. It doesn't.

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They're called national security letters. And the statute says they are to be used in national security cases.

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But the last report, and I read these things because Fox pays me to read them,

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The last report from the FBI on these national security letters showed thousands of them,

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which did not have two signatures, it requires two, isn't that great?

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Two FBI agents to write a self-written search warrant, not one.

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There were thousands that didn't have two signatures, and there were thousands in cases

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that had nothing to do with national security.

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Look, if you're an FBI agent and you're investigating a crime, and there's two ways you can do

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do it. You can go out and develop evidence. You can follow the Constitution. You can get

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forensic evidence. You can interview witnesses. You can compile all that in affidavit and

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present the affidavit to a federal judge and ask the federal judge for a search warrant.

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Or you could write your own search warrant. What do you think human beings will do? Power

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corrupts. And of course it corrupted some very fine FBI agents, none of whom has been

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The report just became a joke, oh well, the FBI abused its power, let's bring Bob Mueller in and get him to agree under oath, it's the director of the FBI,

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The FBI, not to do so again.

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So we wake up one morning in September and Hank Paulson says, I need a checkbook with

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$700 billion in the checking account and give it to me right now.

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And I wrote the law.

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It's three pages long.

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And if you don't give it to me, the skies will fall.

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Banks will go out of business, your credit cards won't work, the ATM machines won't

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work.

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We'll be fighting each other like dogs after Katrina.

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My dog that I love with all my heart I adopted from Katrina, because the same government

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that let those poor people get on buses wouldn't let them take their dogs.

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Somebody ripped her tags off her, and she was found fighting other dogs for food six

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weeks after the hurricane passed through.

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Hank Paulson predicted that we would become like that when the banking system collapsed.

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What does he think of our intelligence and our morality?

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And he predicted that the banking system would collapse if he didn't have the checkbook by

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By the end of the week, I remember watching the roll call, well, it's not a roll call,

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but I remember watching the vote in the House, the House of Representatives, as Congressman

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Paul can tell you only too well, you vote with a card, you put a card in a machine and

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the vote is recorded.

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And then they put up on a screen, Democrats, yeas, nays, Republicans, yeas, nays, independents,

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yeas, nays, and we were on the set of Fox News watching this thing, and I knew that

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And as soon as one side had 218, that's a majority in the House, that it would either

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pass or fail.

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And I confess that I lost myself when I saw 218 nays.

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And I stood up and I said, yes, the beast is dead!

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So I sent the beast over to the Senate, and the Senate returned it with 153 billion dollars.

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Six million dollars to study the skin of sheep in order to determine how that skin can produce

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more wool.

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If they had made the six million dollars to study the skin of pigs, it would be a lot

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easier.

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This would be figuratively and literally pork.

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$12 million tax break for people that make bow and arrows out of wood instead of out of plexiglass.

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I mean, this is just absurd. And some, what I thought were free market Republicans who voted against the beast when it was only three pages long

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and consisted of a $700 billion bank account borrowed from the Chinese to be paid back by our children and our grandchildren.

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They voted against it in that pure form. They voted in favor of it when it was worse,

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when it had the 153 billion added to it. There is a person running for president who claims that

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he's made his whole career by voting against pork. He voted for more pork in that one single vote,

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153 billion, than he voted against in all 24 years in the Senate. I'm not taking sides

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In the election, I'm showing you how power corrupts, how these guys and gals in Washington think they can get away with anything they want.

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So Paulson says, look, we're not going to own these companies. We're going to make them loans.

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And there'll be conditions on the loans, and the conditions will be when we loan you this 10 billion, you have to put it in the credit markets immediately.

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He wins the vote, goes back to the house, the beast prevails, it comes back from the dead with the 183 billion Christmas tree ornaments on it.

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And then Hank Paulson, in a secret meeting on a Saturday morning with the presidents of the 10 largest banks in the United States,

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States, two of whom said, we don't even need your money, we're fine, told them, I'm not

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going to make your loans, I'm going to buy stock.

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And when he bought the stock, he forgot, he's just a shareholder, he can't tell management

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what to do.

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So some of those tens of billions of dollars that went to the banks, the banks used to

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To pay dividends, to pay creditors, to pay vendors, to pay officers and employees.

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The government forgot that by buying stock, it just became another shareholder.

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And then they went back and they looked at the statute, which had grown from three pages

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to 499 pages, and there is a clause in there that says, if the government buys X percent

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Ex-percent of your stock, here's what you must do with the proceeds of that sale.

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And if the government buys, this is chilling, ex-percent of your stock, you cannot pay your

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chief executive more than $500,000, otherwise the tax on the payment above $500,000, otherwise

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you'll pay a tax on what's above $500,000.

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Think of it.

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The government gave itself authority to buy shares of stock in any corporation it wants,

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and by virtue of that acquisition, tell management what to do.

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When AIG collapsed, the government didn't go in and say, would you like us to buy these

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assets?

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The government came in and said, shares of stock are worth nothing.

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So under the Fifth Amendment, there is no taking, because the Fifth Amendment, if they

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take property, you have to pay the fair market value of the property.

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Here's a stocker worth nothing, you, you, you and you are out, we now own the business.

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Now I didn't just describe what Hugo Chavez did to Sitko, I described what the United

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States government did to AIG.

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Whatever you think of AIG, where does the government get the power to come in and decide

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that the government owns it?

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Nowhere in the Constitution.

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We have created a government in which it has become fashionable standard and even relies

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relies on the precedent of prior generations for people in the government to disregard

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the Constitution, to call it quaint, to consider it in the horse and buggy age, and to aggrandize

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to themselves awful power.

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I buy your stock, I tell you what to do.

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You tell the truth under oath in a court of law, you commit a crime.

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Here's a doozy for you.

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The Military Commissions Act of 2006, one would think that if someone were tried before

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a military commission and were found not guilty, one would be free.

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The president has the authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to incarcerate

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even an acquitted person for the rest of his life.

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Allen, Mao, Hitler, the great monsters in all time who produced show trials to convict

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the innocent, even they never claimed that kind of power.

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Jefferson of course obviously never lived to see these days and I often wonder what

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he and his colleagues, those who really believed in the natural law, would think if they could

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They'd recognize all of you. They'd recognize Lew Rockwell. They'd recognize people who put their necks on the line, who put their money where their ideology and their hearts are, to stand up for human freedom, in the face of an onslaught so strong, so overwhelming, that we don't even have an adversarial system in which to stand up for human freedom.

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Jefferson argued that human freedom comes from the heart.

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And when it lives there, nobody can take it away.

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But when it dies there, look at the government that we get.

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Does the government recognize any restraint on its ability to enact any statute for any purpose?

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Yes, its own perception of whatever it can get away with.

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I am sorry to bring you such an unhappy tale in such a happy and wonderful place.

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Here, in the middle of America, in a beautiful town, on a beautiful college campus, a wonderful human being operates a magnificent entity devoted to human freedom.

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Can you think of anything greater than that? Thank you, and God love you.

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16 years after its enactment.

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Was the Patriot Act actually written before 9-11?

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That's a very good question, and I don't know the answer to that.

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I believe that I know who wrote the Patriot Act.

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I believe it was written by Michael Chertoff, who's the Secretary of Homeland Security,

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even though that's not the public story they put out.

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Now, I've known Michael since we were young lawyers practicing in Newark, New Jersey.

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They will tell you that it was written by Viet Dinh, who's a professor at Georgetown

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Law School and was one of the scholars, the so-called scholars in the Justice Department

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at the time.

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The reason your question is so intriguing is because it is so long and so arcane and

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so complex, it is hard to believe that it could have been compiled by any amount of

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bright lawyers in such a short period of time.

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How the funds have your way for you to speak about FISA?

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The US is communicating among themselves and with foreigners, and these Americans have sued all the telephone companies that went along with the government, and that's all of them except Quest.

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The chairman of Quest told the government to go take a hike when it showed up and said, we want to use your equipment to spy, and we don't have a warrant.

418
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Unfortunately, he was indicted for insider trading about two months later, was convicted, and the 10th Circuit overturned the conviction after two years of aggressive litigation by the Justice Department.

419
00:41:25.880 --> 00:41:31.880
Another story by itself. So the litigation is going on in California. The defendants are the telephone companies.

420
00:41:31.880 --> 00:41:36.880
The plaintiffs are the people that we know had their phone calls listened to.

421
00:41:36.880 --> 00:41:41.880
The telephone companies we know spied on Americans when there was no authority to do it.

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00:41:41.880 --> 00:42:11.880
In the midst of the lawsuit, presided over by a wonderful, freedom-loving judge by the name of Vaughn Walker, a Reagan appointee in San Francisco, of all places, who basically says the Constitution means what it says and threw out all the motions to dismiss, the Congress enacts the new FISA statute, and the new FISA statute says, Judge Walker shall dismiss the lawsuit against the telephone companies because we're giving

423
00:42:11.880 --> 00:42:17.280
Making Them Immunity Now, all is not lost.

424
00:42:17.280 --> 00:42:19.680
Judge Walker is a giant.

425
00:42:19.680 --> 00:42:26.080
If you are a federal judge and on the middle of a trial there shows up on your desk a document

426
00:42:26.080 --> 00:42:30.220
signed by the president saying, dismiss what you're doing.

427
00:42:30.220 --> 00:42:35.320
You can take that document and throw it in the garbage because the branches of government

428
00:42:35.320 --> 00:42:36.320
are equal.

429
00:42:36.320 --> 00:42:37.780
Prediction?

430
00:42:37.780 --> 00:42:43.220
George Walker will find the FISA statute unconstitutional and keep the telephone companies and the government's

431
00:42:43.220 --> 00:42:51.820
feet to the fire.

432
00:42:51.820 --> 00:42:55.900
The briefs are due on December 2nd, oral argument will be right before Christmas.

433
00:42:55.900 --> 00:43:00.220
We may have a nice Christmas Eve gift for those of us who love freedom.

434
00:43:00.220 --> 00:43:01.220
Young man.

435
00:43:01.220 --> 00:43:09.160
There are some cases where the judge has told the defendant that there are some arguments

436
00:43:09.160 --> 00:43:10.160
he cannot make known to the jury.

437
00:43:10.160 --> 00:43:11.160
Yes, this is another, its a good question.

438
00:43:11.160 --> 00:43:16.620
The question is there are some cases in which federal judges have told, its always defense

439
00:43:16.620 --> 00:43:21.020
counsel, its never the government, that they can't make certain arguments before a jury.

440
00:43:21.020 --> 00:43:24.460
Yes, its another canard called the state secrets doctrine.

441
00:43:24.460 --> 00:43:31.060
And the government will persuade judges that it can't give all of the information it has

442
00:43:31.060 --> 00:43:34.700
is about the defendant, to the defendant's lawyers, or if the defendant's lawyers got

443
00:43:34.700 --> 00:43:38.800
it through some other means, they can't say it in a public courtroom because it would

444
00:43:38.800 --> 00:43:43.060
violate the state secret doctrine.

445
00:43:43.060 --> 00:43:47.460
This is a trick which was used by the Soviets many, many times when they wanted to prosecute

446
00:43:47.460 --> 00:43:48.460
people.

447
00:43:48.460 --> 00:43:49.460
Ha, ha.

448
00:43:49.460 --> 00:43:52.020
We have this evidence against you, but you can't see it.

449
00:43:52.020 --> 00:43:54.540
Unfortunately, some judges have gone along with it.

450
00:43:54.540 --> 00:43:56.820
Unfortunately, some judges have not.

451
00:43:56.820 --> 00:44:00.740
The issue has not yet reached the Supreme Court.

452
00:44:00.740 --> 00:44:30.740
I think all liberties in the United States seem to exist in 1861. Do you think there are still any liberties left and so forth?

453
00:44:30.740 --> 00:44:53.860
The Civil War destroyed the nature of state sovereignty and the relationship of the states

454
00:44:53.860 --> 00:44:58.540
to the federal government and established a bizarre relationship between the federal

455
00:44:58.540 --> 00:45:03.380
Government and Individual Persons, something that Jefferson and even some of Jefferson's

456
00:45:03.380 --> 00:45:07.740
opponents could never have imagined would happen.

457
00:45:07.740 --> 00:45:14.100
I also never thought that our liberties would be saved by my black-robed brethren and sisters,

458
00:45:14.100 --> 00:45:19.740
but they're the only ones that seem to be doing it today who can't be cowed by threats,

459
00:45:19.740 --> 00:45:22.900
whether they come from John Ashcroft or Hank Paulson.

460
00:45:22.900 --> 00:45:24.660
Enjoy your weekend.

461
00:45:24.660 --> 00:45:29.780
If you get to shake Ron Paul's hand, he's a great human being in American history.

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00:45:29.780 --> 00:45:30.780
Do so.