The article by James Delingpole from which we quote is about property rights and what he rightly calls the “green religion”; matters of concern equally on both sides of the Atlantic:

Property rights are a cornerstone of our liberty, our security, our civilisation. …

Here’s the Virginia Bill of Rights, precursor to the US Declaration of Independence:

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Here’s Samuel Adams:

“The Natural Rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.”

And here, most trenchantly, is the philosopher who inspired them, John Locke:

“Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience …”

Time for a revolution, then, for the theft of our property rights is exactly what is happening to us now under our notionally “Conservative” prime minister and his increasingly desperate and damaging attempts to position his collapsing administration as the “greenest ever.” I’m thinking especially of the ongoing renewables scam.

The wind farm industry is surely the worst offender. Some vexatious twerp complained the other day about my claim that wind farms reduce property values by between 25 per cent and 50 per cent. Actually, if anything, I’m understating the problem here. I know of cases where properties have been rendered unsaleable by wind farms. But whatever the exact figures, I think those of us not in the pay of Big Wind or trotting out propaganda for the preposterous and devious Renewable UK would all agree that the very last thing we’d want on our doorstep would be a wind farm and that we certainly would never dream of buying a property near one. QED.

Since not a single one of the wind farms blighting Britain would have been built without state incentives (in the form of Renewable Obligations Certificates, Feed In Tariffs, and legislation which makes it very hard for communities to prevent wind farms being built in the area) we can reasonably say therefore that wind farms represent a wanton assault by the state on property rights. We expect such confiscatory measures “for the common good” from socialist regimes. But from a Conservative-dominated Coalition it’s a disgrace.

The Coalition itself is a disgrace. How a co-called Conservative Party ever decided to team up with a Liberal Democratic Party that is well to the left of the opposition Labour Party would be beyond comprehension to anyone who didn’t know that the so-called Conservative Party of Great Britain is not remotely conservative. In fact its leader, David Cameron, is an ardent fan of Saul Alinsky, the communist revolutionary who inspired Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But it’s not just the wind farm industry which is complicitous in this scam. … The hydro power industry turns out to be very nearly as damaging, unpleasant, slimy and untrustworthy as its nasty elder brother Big Wind. …  yet another taxpayer-subsidised boondoggle for rent-seeking scuzzballs, which produces next to no electricity and which – just like wind farms – causes immense damage to wildlife (in this case fish rather than birds or bats). …

The hypocrisy of it! Environmentalists going to endless lengths to protect a smelt while they feed other fish and innumerable birds to their terrible engines. Above all, they hurt people. Delingpole gives a particular instance where property rights are harmed:

Nottingham Angling Club … in 1982 forked out £150,000 for the fishing rights to a one and half mile stretch of the river Trent above a weir which is now about to be converted to hydropower. The quality of their fishing will almost certainly diminish. And there are stories like this from all over the country. Whether its wealthy fly fishing enthusiasts who’ve paid a fortune for a prime stretch of river in Hampshire or Dorset, or an ordinary working man’s club like the one in Nottingham, people are going to suffer as a result of this state-sponsored drive for renewables. Again, as with wind power, the only reason these hydropower schemes are going ahead is because of the government subsidies and incentives for those canny or cynical enough to get in on the scam. So again, what we have here is a clear case of the state arbitrarily confiscating people’s property rights because of its desire to be seen paying lip service to the green religion.

But the harm to people caused by governments pursuing the green superstition is far greater than that. It is general, affecting the price everyone has to pay for electricity. Not just property rights but liberty itself is going with the wind.

All over America, city councils, implementing Agenda 21, are trying to increase the amount of energy they provide from “green sources” at ever greater expense. What’s more, they hope to ration it, to keep us colder in winter and hotter in summer.

This is the newest form of religious persecution.

John Adams said:

The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.

Thomas Paine said:

The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing and admits of no conclusion.

The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.

The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense.

The Church was resolved to have a New Testament, and out of the loads of rubbish that were presented it voted four to be Gospels, and others to be Epistles, as we now find them arranged.

This is the rubbish called Revealed Religion!

Thomas Jefferson said:

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.

George Washington said:

Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society.

James Madison said:

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.

In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.

Benjamin Franklin said:

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absented myself from Christian assemblies.

Theodore Roosevelt said:

To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life.

David Limbaugh asks these questions at Townhall:

Does Obama truly harbor a grudge against America? What did he mean when he said he wanted to fundamentally change America? What did his wife mean when she said she’d never been proud of America in her adult life before he rose to power? What possesses Obama to deride and apologize for America? What drives him to instinctively distrust business and the private sector and to believe that federal planners ought to have enormously more discretion in how our income and wealth are distributed? What drives him to reject the American concept of equal opportunity and promote the notion of equality of outcomes? Why is he determined to energize labor unions and encourage a permanently adversarial climate between labor and management? Why is he so adamant about the United States deferring to international bodies in the conduct of its foreign affairs? Why is he hellbent on downscaling our nuclear and conventional forces and dismantling our military space program and our missile defenses?

The questions ineluctably give rise to another. He asks:

Do I believe that he wants to “destroy” America, as such?

To which he answers?

No.

!

Then why is Obama doing this wrecking job?

Apparently, David Limbaugh thinks, out of a kind of insanity:

In his mind, as warped and foreign as I think it is, he doubtlessly believes he is helping to create a better America – a utopia of sorts. That is, he is intentionally trying to fundamentally transform America into something that he believes would be better but that most Americans – and infinitely more if they understood the full scope of what he is up to – would consider horrific, an America that we would barely recognize as the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.

On the financial front alone, Obama is single-handedly preventing entitlement and discretionary spending reform, without which — as I’ve said dozens of times — America will face financial catastrophe. There is less than zero question that he is doing that on purpose, regardless of whether you think he is otherwise intentionally damaging America. There is no question that he is acting as though he has a vendetta against the oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power industries. There is also little question that he is intentionally dividing Americans on the basis of race, economic class, gender, sexual orientation and, sometimes, religion.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize the damage Obama is doing to the republic, and we haven’t even touched on his unconstitutional and lawless usurpations of authority.

And yet –

The question isn’t whether he is intentionally destroying America. The question is whether he is intentionally pursuing a set of policies that are definitely damaging America, irrespective of his motives.

The answer is — irrefutably, emphatically — “yes.”

So David Limbaugh thinks that Obama is destroying America;  that everything he is doing that is destroying America he is doing on purpose; but that he might not really mean to destroy America, only make it something quite different that he – Obama – thinks will be better, because his mind is “warped and foreign”.

While he is right about all that Obama is doing, and we applaud him for raising the questions he does, we find that his explanation doesn’t  make sense. Ignoring the implications of the possible “foreignness” of Obama’s mind, we consider the plea-in-mitigation that his mind is “warped” as he deliberately wrecks the Republic and turns it into a poorer, weaker, ever more collectivist, nightmare.

We declare it a monstrous crime, and reject the insanity defense.

This is from the PJ Tatler:

A stunning exchange took place today when Assistant AG Tom Perez of the DOJ Civil Rights Division refused to commit to the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution that it would never advance a law criminalizing the right to criticize any religion.

The non-commital answer by Perez was in response to a question asked by Rep. Trent Frank (R-AZ): “Will you tell us here today that this Administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?”

Here’s the exchange:

The Muslim Brotherhood has deeply infiltrated the Obama administration, and its influence could not be more glaringly obvious.

The UN must be destroyed.

Obama is energetically pursuing his policy of making as many Americans as he can dependent on the government.

This is from the Heritage Foundation:

The imperial Presidency has overturned Congress and the law again. Not content to stop at rewriting immigration policy, education policy and energy policy, yesterday, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the Clinton-era reform. …

Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). … The whole point was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving welfare aid.

This reform was very successful. TANF became the only welfare program (out of more than 70) that promoted greater self-reliance. It moved 2.8 million families off the welfare rolls and into jobs so that they were providing for themselves. Child poverty fell, and single-parent employment rose. Recipients were required to perform at least 20–30 hours per week of work or job preparation activities in exchange for the cash benefit.

Now, Obama’s HHS is claiming that it can waive those work requirements that are at the heart of the law, and without Congress’s consent.

When it established TANF, Congress deliberately exempted or shielded nearly all of the TANF program from waiver authority. They explicitly did not want the law to be rewritten at the whim of HHS bureaucrats. In a December 2001, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service clarified that there was no authority to override work and other major requirements…

But that did not stop the Obama Administration, which has been increasing welfare spending at an alarming rate already. President Obama has added millions to the welfare rolls, and his Administration has come under fire lately for its efforts to expand and add more Americans to the food stamp program. …

Over the past two decades, welfare spending has grown more rapidly than Social Security and Medicare, education, and defense. The TANF reform was one small step in the direction of reducing Americans’ dependence on government programs and getting them back on their feet. Cutting its work component is likely to unnecessarily swell the ranks of welfare recipients and with no way to pay for it.

Heritage experts Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley explained further …:

In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as “work.” These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama Administration has abolished those standards, we can expect “work” in the TANF program to mean anything but work. The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly guts the law.

What can be done about a president who breaks the law, whose administration executes his orders in defiance of the legislature?

Will the Supreme Court stop him? Probably not.

This is from Townhall, by Ken Blackwell:

Chief Justice Roberts shows extraordinary deference to the federal government when the actions of the president or Congress are challenged for exceeding federal powers under the authority clauses. …

Part of the consternation from the Obamacare decision was seeing Chief Justice Roberts engage in linguistic gymnastics to ignore Congress’ word choice in writing the statute and the president’s televised vows, upholding the individual mandate as a tax despite 200 years of precedent that penalties are not taxes. …

This reluctance to unapologetically apply judicial review when authority clauses are implicated bodes ill for many current court challenges. There might not be five votes to succeed in challenges to Dodd-Frank, EPA’s cap-and-trade rules, the FCC’s internet-control rules, the recess-appointment challenges, and other power grabs.

Mr. Obama announced on July 6 in Ohio that this election is about a “clash of visions” about the role of government in our lives, arguing for massive entitlements and regulatory controls. If he wins, he will claim a mandate and take federal power to heights we’ve never seen. We can no longer be confident that the Supreme Court will stop him.

Liberty endures only when each branch fully and fearlessly checks and balances the other two branches. Abdicating judicial review empowers President Obama to subvert the Constitution with an imperial presidency, and fundamentally transform the United States to the detriment of future generations.

One remedy of course is to vote Obama out of office.

But if he is not voted out in November, how will the Republic be saved from becoming a full-blown dictatorship?

The Constitution was carefully composed to protect Americans from tyranny; to keep them free. The Health Care law which has been upheld by the Supreme Court takes away their freedom. In the name of being true to it, the Court has nullified the Constitution. Its essential purpose has been discarded.

Neal Boortz, as much in anger as in sorrow it would seem, wants to be sure that Americans understand that this is what has happened.

He writes:

Do Americans – do you — really understand the gravity of what happened in the Supreme Court … ? Do you have any idea at all how the power of the Imperial Federal Government of the United States has been exponentially increased?

Answer? No, you probably don’t. You really can’t be faulted for that, I guess. After all, our wonderful government school system was designed to educate you, but only to the point that you don’t become a threat to your political rulers. The American people are a product of those schools, and the American people are, by and large, acting in the manner proscribed by those who “educated” them. …

I think a lot of people are missing something here; missing something very important. The Court’s ruling on ObamaCare grants the Congress of the United States the power to command virtually any action – any action that would not in and of itself constitute a crime – of any individual in this country, and to demand compliance with that command or be penalized. The federal government can now regulate virtually any human activity in which you wish to engage, and to regulate whether or not you will be allowed to refuse to participate in that activity, so long as a penalty is attached to your noncompliance. …

This is a sad day indeed for our Constitution.

A sad day for the people of the United States.

Sit back now and try to imagine anything the federal government cannot require of you – just so long as there is a penalty if you say “no.”

Is there no hope then? Is liberty, in the land of the last best hope of mankind, irrecoverably lost?

Perhaps not irrecoverably. But a re-election of Obama in November would signify that a majority of Americans no longer want to be free.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust

Die eine will sich von der andern trennen

(Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast

The one would sever itself from the other)

– Goethe: Faust I.

We deplore the ruling of the Supreme Court, issued yesterday, that upholds Obamacare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act).

Why did Chief Justice Roberts, whose vote decided whether the tyrannous law should stand or fall, vote to let it stand?

A plausible – but not consoling – explanation is offered by Charles Krauthammer.

He writes:

Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of ObamaCare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time. 

He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against ObamaCare, while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law — and thus prevented the court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration.

Why did he do it? Because he carries two identities.

Jurisprudentially, he is a constitutional conservative.

Institutionally, he is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the court’s legitimacy, reputation and stature.

As a conservative, he is as appalled as his conservative colleagues by the administration’s central argument that ObamaCare’s individual mandate is a proper exercise of its authority to regulate commerce. That makes congressional power effectively unlimited. Mr. Jones is not a purchaser of health insurance. Mr. Jones has therefore manifestly not entered into any commerce. Yet Congress tells him he must buy health insurance — on the grounds that it is regulating commerce. If government can do that under the Commerce Clause, what can it not do?

But now government can do it not under the Commerce Clause, thanks to the ruling. Mr. Jones can be ordered to do anything, and be fined if he doesn’t, on the grounds that the fine is a tax.

“The Framers … gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it,” writes Roberts. Otherwise you “undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers.”

That’s Roberts, philosophical conservative.

But he lives in uneasy coexistence with Roberts, custodian of the court, acutely aware that the judiciary’s arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held …

National health care has been a liberal dream for a hundred years. It is clearly the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Roberts’ concern was that the court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.

How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.

Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the Commerce Clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the Commerce Clause fig leaf. 

Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce Clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.

That’s not how I would have ruled. I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The “tax” is obviously punitive, regulatory and intended to compel.) Perhaps that’s not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice, and not the chief. But that’s how he did rule.

ObamaCare is now essentially upheld. There’s only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress.

So it is up to the voters to decide in November whether they want a government that is their master or their servant.

To choose between tyranny and freedom.