The president’s powers and ability to ignore the Constitution are breathtaking. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

Presidents don’t give up power.

Executive orders don’t expire at the end of each presidential term.

And every successive occupant of the Oval Office since George Washington, who issued the first executive order, has expanded the reach and power of the presidency.

The Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers. In recent years, however, American presidents have anointed themselves with the power to wage war, unilaterally kill Americans, torture prisoners, strip citizens of their rights, arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, carry out warrantless spying on Americans, and erect their own secretive, shadow government.

These are the powers that will be inherited by the next heir to the throne, and it won’t make a difference whether it’s a President Trump or a President Clinton occupying the Oval Office.

The powers amassed by…

Every once in a while a concept comes along that’s so bad it must be addressed- or at least, countered with something rooted in anything aside from abject pontification. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been a registered Libertarian since being eligible to vote- the Patriot Act pushed me in that direction, discovering a whole world of folks who seemed to embrace the philosophy of Locke with the passion of Thoreau and the rejection of the nepotism that comes from the two party snake. A lot of the talking points at least sound good, Survivalism and self-reliance was a long-standing cornerstone, the people seemed at least concerned with preserving and advancing the interests of individual liberty, a personal life philosophy of mine and one that’s becoming ever more difficult to reconcile.

Philosophy keeps being used- as with the classic exchange between Alec Lemas and Fiedler in Le Carre’s The…

The upper echelon and their captive media live in an alternative reality of their own invention. From The Zman on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

I had no intention of watching the debate as I’ve seen enough of them to know they will always be “two-on-one moonbat fun.” The moderator will gang up with the Democrat to attack the Republican. Even mild nothing-burgers like Mitt Romney got the business from that fat woman on CNN. But, friends told me Trump was beating the old bag up, so I tuned in just in time to see him put the saddle on the fat cow and ride her around the debate stage. I did not watch a lot of it, but it was fun seeing the good guys win.

The thing that crept into my mind was how weird it all felt. As a normie, I know that the two airheads installed…