It’s time to stop.  Just stop.

Every day we learn more and more about selfish idiocy that created the big problems directly affecting all of us.  The new administration has taken great advantage of the situation- taking control over things that are fundamentally and Constitutionally not their responsibility.  AND WE HAVE LET THEM.

Oh, sure, some people are speaking out, but this administration continues to call them names and make fun of them.  It seems that most of the population sits and stares stupidly at their dwindling 401k funds, wonders if they’ll be able to continue to pay their upside-down mortgage, then wonders if they’ll even have a job tomorrow.  Some sit there with their hands out, looking for Pater Obama to give them something for nothing.

In today’s news, it is being reported that Congress is unveiling their latest proposal for an “energy bill“.  Pay attention – it’s all about leading us into cap and trade and in the end raising the cost of EVERYTHING that we, the people, use – and eat – every single day.

Yesterday, the Department of Transportation released a report outlining new fuel economy standards.  These are on top of the increased fuel economy standards put in place in 2007.  So while on the one hand we bail out the auto companies and the President replaces CEOs, on the other hand they are adding inordinate costs to the auto makers.  Costs that the consumers will not recoup for some 8 years (if at all).  In effect, “President Barack Obama directed the Department of Transportation” to set the automakers up to fail.

Last Friday, the Senate killed an amendment to the National Service Act (H.R. 1388) that would exclude funding for ACORN.  Yes, ACORN will continue to reap massive financial benefits from the federal government, despite their never-ending illegal activities – ranging from outright voter registration fraud to breaking and entering.  Funny that you don’t hear very much about all this, isn’t it?  The more I read about them, the more I feel I need to go take a shower; it’s hard to understand why the media keeps ignoring tabloid-worthy after tabloid-worthy problem, though after all the campaign donations ACORN made, it’s easier to understand why Democrats simply deny it.

And in what is becoming old news, or perhaps simply business as usual in this new administration, yet another cabinet nominee, House and Human Services candidate Nancy Sebelius  is revealed to have somehow not paid all her taxes.  (Senator Grassley doesn’t think this is a big deal.  Please tell me that’s an April Fool’s Day joke.)  Just like all the other failed nominees, she is a poster child for the “rich” – the very same folks the administration asks to be “patriotic” by paying more taxes.  Congessional liberal leaders like Feinstein, Kennedy, Kerry, Kohl, Pelosi, Rockefellar are all mulitmillionaires, yet get their panties in a bunch about Wall Street bonuses and pass ex post facto laws to stop them.  While they and their Congress brethren hand out “traditional” bonuses – made up of our hard-earned tax dollars, of course – to their own employees.

We also have a little “human interest” story.  Another lawbreaker getting a break, and using the excuse of our administration-derided health care system as justification:

Barack Obama’s Kenyan aunt lost her bid for asylum more than four years ago, and a judge ordered her deported. Instead, Zeituni Onyango stayed, living for years in public housing.

Now, in a case that puts the president in a tough position both personally and politically, Onyango’s request is being reconsidered under a little-used provision in U.S. immigration rules that allows denied asylum claims to be reheard if applicants can show that something has changed to make them eligible.

Such as the ascension of her nephew to the presidency of the world’s most powerful country.

Onyango’s reasons for seeking asylum have not been made public, and her immigration hearing will be closed at her lawyer’s request.

Onyango’s lawyer, Margaret Wong, may also argue that she needs to stay in the United States for medical reasons. Onyango, who has been photographed walking with a cane, has some kind of a neurological problem, said Mike Rogers, Wong’s spokesman.

All these things upset me to no end.  But awareness is only the first step.  Action must be the second.  Honestly, folks, we don’t have to take this lying down.  There is power in numbers and it is imperative that everyone who cares about stopping the dangerous direction in which the administration is taking this country raise their voices in loud and insistent protest.

When was the last time you told your elected representatives to stop the bullshit…errrr…stop the madness?  If you need to find them, go here.  Tell them you’re tired of their hypocrisy.  Tell them you don’t want the government to be running the private sector.  (Put an “i” for “I won” in the word “run” and you get “ruin”.)  Tell them you don’t want bailouts and handouts.  Tell them you want less government, not more.  Tell them to get themselves out of the way of our Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms and allow capitalism and the free market to do what they have always done – help we, the people, create the opportunities to pursue our individual, unique happiness.

Frankly, all current government programs and most of its operations should be eliminated.  Collectively, our federal taxes should fund only the military and the national infrastructure.  Government’s only business is to oversee that we all play nicely in the sandbox together.  Private enterprise  is not the government’s business.  Government doesn’t belong in our factories, in our boardrooms or bedrooms, or on our car lots.  Government doesn’t exist to pay anyone’s medical bills or to insure they have a cell phone in their pocket.  If states or local municipalities want to fund such things, then let the people who make up that state or municipality pay for it.  Let them reap their own benefits but not subject the rest of us to the expense of their failures.  Simply put, this “minimalist’ government is what the Founding Fathers gave us in the Constitution.

Go back and read it.  The Constitution is the “supreme law of the land” and, as such, gives the federal government only the powers “necessary and proper” to:

1. Collect taxes
2. Regulate interstate commerce
3. Coin money, regulate currency, set standards of weights and measures
4. Declare war
5. Raise and maintain an army and navy

It explicitly denies the federal government:

1. The writ of habeas corpus cannot be suspended unless in cases of rebellion or invasion, when deemed necessary to national safety.
2. No bill of attainder or ex post facto law can be passed.

Everything else falls to the states, per the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”)  Such sovreignty was by design in order to avoid the problems inherent in a central, all-powerful seat of government.  (Think North Korea.  Think Venezuela.  Think Iran.)  The individual states, like the people of the United States, are to be seen and treated as equal but allowed to operate individually.

Note for the record that the taxes on AIG and other bailout bonuses can be interpreted as ex post facto law.  Meaning, they are passed and encompass something that has already occurred.  This would be similar to a state deciding to institute the death penalty and then executing people serving a life sentence for a crime that would fall under the new law without due process.

I don’t know if it’s ignorance or laziness or a combination of both that has put so much garbage into the American definition of government, but in the same way some shout that AIG and the auto companies should be allowed to go into bankruptcy, so, too, should our government be stripped down and reorganized.  The power, the control, must be returned to the people, to the states, but I fear wresting it from the smarmy, greedy hands that now sit in Congress and the White House will prove very, very difficult.  For to do this would require great courage in terms of personal responsibility.  We would each have to face our individual failures and unfortunately it is always so much easier to blame someone else than look in the mirror.

But if the buck doesn’t stop here, just where does it stop?