I believe Cedar Rapids is the center of Czech country. I did a couple of jobs there delivering computer systems to Rockwell Collins. Nice town, had a great time, flew down from Mpls on a Saab puddle jumper, bumpy ride both ways.Originally Posted by ziero0
So are you retired as you seem to have a lot of time for banter?
My passport is a United States of America Passport applied for online at the Dept. of State website, issued to me at the Dept. of State Consulate in Los Angeles, California and delivered to me in my hand. I got the official passport photo at the Post Office.
The only thing declared necessary in the Constitution & Bill of Rights is the #2A Militia of the several States.
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a freeState”
https://ConstitutionalMilitia.org
Yep. Try their Czech-Mex food sometime.
Retirement is an institution established for the living un-dead. I find non-participation to be a logical course of action unless I develop an insane desire to be taken care of.
Well I am still having a go at Anna, because her Post Office issued Passport application form does not seem to exist.
She's not answering, but she is pretty busy writing one missive after another.
If the Post Office issues Passports, the door to walk through is pretty hard to find.
monty (10th August 2018)
OK, how big is your tractor? Does it have air conditioning?
Anna von Reitz
Yesterday at 12:11 PM ·
The Civil War Fraud
-- This is a reprint of an article that explains a small but important part of what went on after the Civil War and it places a glaring spotlight on the mis-administration of our country that went on then and which has continued under the auspices of the Territorial and Municipal United States Governments ever since. ENJOY ---- and thanks to Bill Ward:
The Civil War Fraud
By Bill Ward
When the War Between the States ended, the victorious Northerners viewed Jefferson Davis, as the former President of the Confederate States of America, much differently than others who had served the Confederacy.
For example, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to U.S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, the meeting between the two generals was amicable. Lee was received and treated with courtesy as a senior officer. The terms were so apparently lenient, with Grant conceding to Lee’s requests on behalf of his soldiers, the surrender was referred to as “a gentleman’s agreement.”
However, even after signing a loyalty oath, Lee and other former Confederate Army officers and members of the CSA government were later disenfranchised and treated as second-class citizens. But in the eyes of the northern public, Jefferson Davis was set apart for still a different kind of treatment.
On May 10, 1865, about a mile from the town of Irwinville, Georgia, Federal troops captured Davis. With his arrest on that spring morning, his government ceased to exist. His wife, Varina, and their children were sent to Savannah, where she was kept under virtual house arrest and forbidden to leave the city. Because the soldiers, carpetbaggers and Union supporters treated the Davis children so badly, Varina arranged for them to go to Canada along with her mother.
Davis had been taken back to Virginia and imprisoned in Fort Monroe, where he would stay for the next two years. At first, he was bound in leg irons. Guards watched him around the clock but were not permitted to speak to him. He was allowed no visitors; a light burned in his cell day and night; and his only reading material was a Bible. His treatment was a clear violation of the Bill of Rights.
Many Northern Congressmen and newspapers were nothing short of vicious in their public attacks of Davis. They wanted to see him tried for treason and hanged. In one article, and in one very long sentence, the New York Times referred to Davis by every insulting comment and offensive name that was fit to print. Rhetoric far outran legal reasoning.
But if Davis was in an unusual legal predicament, so was the United States government. The dilemma faced by Washington was how to handle the Davis case. The government under Lincoln had created its own major obstacles by spending four years proclaiming that secessionists were “traitors and conspirators.” The U.S. military had silenced opposition to the administration by closing down newspapers that dared challenge the party line or to make the slightest suggestion that secession might be legal. Thousands of Northerners had been jailed for exercising their First Amendment rights, and those thousands had friends with long memories in the Northern bar.
Northern lawyers were angry for having their clients locked in prison with no civil rights as guaranteed by the Constitution; having civilians tried by military courts for non-existent crimes; having a government that ignored the Supreme Court, setting itself above the constitutional plan of checks and balances. They didn’t like having to beg the president for justice for clients convicted by phony courts-martial or locked up for long periods without any trial. Under Lincoln, the U.S. government had become tyrannical, and certainly anything but a free and constitutional society.
The best lawyers of the day were willing to volunteer to defend Jefferson Davis, because they were angry at the way Lincoln’s government had trampled the Bill of Rights and the Constitution for four years. Even those who didn’t believe in secession were repulsed by the conduct of the Republican administration and the U.S. military.
Charles O’Connor of New York, one of the most famous trial lawyers of the era and a man of great stature in the legal profession, volunteered to be Davis’s counsel. Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, would be the trial judge.
But interesting things began to happen, and the government’s dilemma became even worse. University of Virginia Law Professor, Albert Bledsoe, published a book, “Is Davis a Traitor?” Bledsoe methodically took apart the case against secession, delivering a solid blow to the prosecutors and dampening their zeal to try Davis. Prosecutors actually began to look for a way to avoid trying him without vindicating the South.
Then another method was decided on for prosecution. The attorney general would bring in outside, independent counsel, as we have seen in modern times, such as in Watergate or the Clinton scandals. The government needed someone of great standing in the legal community to be the lead prosecutor. It chose John J. Clifford. But after reviewing the case, Clifford withdrew citing “grave doubts” about the validity of the case. The government could “end up having fought a successful war, only to have it declared unlawful by a Virginia jury,” where Davis’s “crime” was alleged to have been committed.
President Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, thought the easiest way out would be to pardon Davis, as he had pardoned many other Confederates. But Davis refused, saying, “To ask for a pardon would be a confession of guilt.” He wanted a trial to have the issue of secession decided by a court of law — where it should have been decided to begin with — instead of on battlefields. Most Southerners wanted the same.
Northerners either forgot or were unaware of a great secessionist tradition in America. Southerners were not alone in their view that each state had the right to determine its own destiny in the Union. The procedure for joining the Union also applied to withdrawing from the Union.
That thought harkens back to an editorial by the Cincinnati (Ohio) Daily Inquirer, in the summer of 1861, after the “traitor” label was let loose by the North: “The Republican papers are great on treason. . . . It is treason to circulate petitions for a compromise or peaceful readjustment of our national troubles . . . to question the constitutional powers of the President to increase the standing army without authority of law . . . to object to squads of military visiting private houses, and to make search and seizures. . . to question the infallibility of the President, and treason not to concur with him. . . It is treason to talk of hard times; to say that the war might have been avoided. It is treason to be truthful and faithful to the Constitution.”
A year after John Clifford withdrew, the government appointed another special counsel, Richard Dana of Boston, who had written the novel, “Two Years Before the Mast.” But after reviewing the evidence, he agreed with Clifford; the case was a loser. Dana argued that “a conviction will settle nothing in law or national practice not now settled…as a rule of law by war.” Dana observed that the right to secede from the Union had not been settled by civilized means but by military power and the destruction of much life and property in the South. The North should accept its uncivilized victory, however dirty its hands might be, and not expose the fruits of its carnage to scrutiny by a peaceful court of law.
Now, over two years after Davis’s imprisonment and grand jury indictments for treason, the stage was set for the great public trial of the century. Davis had been released from prison on a $100,000 bond, supported by none other than Horace Greeley, the leading abolitionist writer in the North and a former Lincoln supporter. Greeley and a host of others were outraged at the treatment Davis had received, being locked up in a dungeon for more than two years with no speedy trial.
Since two famous special counsels had told the government its case was a loser, finally, none other than the Chief Justice, in a quirk of Constitutional manipulation, devised an idea to avoid a trial without vindicating the South. His amazing solution was little short of genius.
The Fourteenth Amendment had been adopted, which provided that anyone who had engaged in insurrection against the United States and had at one time taken an oath of allegiance (which Davis had done as a U.S. Senator) could not hold public office. The Bill of Rights prevents double jeopardy, so Davis, who had already been punished once by the Fourteenth Amendment in not being permitted to hold public office, couldn't be tried and punished again for treason.
Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase secretly passed along his clever argument to Davis’s counsel, Charles O’Connor, who then made the motion to dismiss. The Court took the motion under consideration, passing the matter on to the Supreme Court for determination.
In late December 1867 while the motion was pending, President Johnson granted amnesty to everyone in the South, including Davis. But the Davis case was still on the docket. In February 1868, at a dinner party attended by the Chief Justice and a government attorney, they agreed that on the following day a motion for non-prosecution would be made that would dismiss the case. A guest overheard the conversation and reported what was on the minds of most Southerners: “I did not consider that he [Davis] was any more guilty of treason than I was, and that a trial should be insisted upon, which could properly only result in a complete vindication of our cause, and of the action of the many thousands who had fought and of the many thousands who had died for what they felt to be right.”
And so, the case of United States versus Jefferson Davis came to its end — a case that was to be the trial of the century, a great state trial, perhaps the most significant trial in the history of the nation — that never was.
Anna von Reitz
23 hrs ·
Pernicious Confusion About Milligan Ex Parte
The Supreme Court decided Milligan Ex Parte in 1866, a year after the creation of quasi-military courts in ten military districts covering eleven Southern States in May of 1865.
These courts were formed by the Rump Congress immediately following Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, in April of 1865.
Basically, a General "of at least the rank of a Brigadier" was put in charge of appointing civilians loyal to the North to act as Judges in Southern Courts: carpetbaggers.
These people were all either transported to serve as judges in these new quasi-military courts or they were hated members of their own communities --- Yankee Sympathizers --- who were given plenary power over their defeated neighbors, to rape, pillage, and plunder whatever property was left in the South.
It caused such an outcry that Milligan Ex Parte was rushed through the United States Supreme Court for remedy just a year later. The Court clearly stated that when civilian courts resumed operations in the military districts, the quasi-military tribunals were to shut down.
Instead, by a process of fraud based on similar names deceit and usurpation, the civilian courts were surreptitiously replaced by these same quasi-military tribunals operating throughout the nation.
That's where we find ourselves today, still cluelessly wrestling with the unresolved detritus of the so-called Civil War, still putting up with quasi-military courts --- which we could replace simply by operating our own civilian courts and invoking Milligan Ex Parte.
Recently, people unaware of this history, have brought forward Milligan Ex Parte and attempted to use this as an argument against President Trump's proposed use of military tribunals to try civilian criminals ---- however this reasoning is based on false assumptions that derive from ignorance about which courts Milligan Ex Parte is talking about, and assumes that it is addressing military courts in general.
As you can see, instead, it is only addressing the quasi-military civilian tribunals created in May 1865, not the actual military courts at all.
In my opinion, President Trump is acting correctly and Milligan Ex Parte has nothing to do with it. The vast majority of the criminals he is dealing with are US Territorial or Municipal citizens and they are subject to military courts as a result.
As for the rest of us, it is long overdue for us to stir our stumps, get our own political status records corrected, form our Jural Assemblies, and shut down the quasi-military courts operated by the Territorial United States using Milligan Ex Parte in its correct place and interpretation to do so.
Anna von Reitz
23 hrs ·
Demand and Decree
To boil it down pure and simple --- the Federal Government was created to exercise certain "Delegated Powers".
Three different levels of Federal Government were created --- the actual Federal Government operated by the States of America formed in 1781, which was moth-balled under conditions of deceit and fraud in 1868, the Territorial Government designed to administer new territorial acquisitions under the Northwest Ordinance and such Insular States and possessions (like Puerto Rico and Guam) and the Municipal Government to administer Washington, DC.
Over the last three years, all three levels of this "Federal Government" have been rendered incompetent. The actual Federal Government is still dormant pending completion of its "reconstruction". Both the Territorial and Municipal Government have gone bankrupt.
By Operation of Law, the Delegated Powers have returned to the source Delegating those Powers in the first place ---- The United States of America, its member States, and its People.
The text of The Demand and Decree accepting and acknowledging the return of these Powers and demand for the return of our assets is dated June 6, 2018 and the actual pdf copies and mailing receipts are being posted on my website: http://www.annavonreitz.com/
http://annavonreitz.com/demand/Deman...20page%201.pdf
http://annavonreitz.com/demand/Deman...Receipt%20.pdf
http://annavonreitz.com/demand/Deman...%20Mailing.pdf
Anna von Reitz
16 hrs ·
Native Leaders -- Use Your Heads
If I had gone along with the "deal" Chief Fasthorse was promoting, I would have been signing your death warrants instead of welcoming you to the table. Most likely, I would have been signing my own death warrant, too.
You have to think things through and not just from your own perspective.
There is no way for 15 million Native Americans from at least 100 different tribes to come in and establish a superior claim and take away the land rights of 350 million other Americans without a bloodbath.
Such a thing would create a reason--- that otherwise doesn't exist--- for the final decimation and destruction of the Native Nations.
About the time you swaggered up some guy's driveway and told him that you were the new "owners" of his property, the same old war would begin, and there is no reason to think that the results would be any better or different.
Instead, you get to come home to the land and soil jurisdiction and get out of the "Second Class Citizen" status you were all stuck in, and are now able to live and stand on the land again as free men and women.
There are other reasons, too.
The United States of America is the established lawful government of this country. We have contracts and agreements with these "High Contracting Powers" that we can exercise ---- and not only treaties, but commercial contracts and trusts that we are heir to already. We don't have to recreate any wheels, fight any wars, or cause any problems. All we have to do is invoke what already exists and operate the General Government already owed to this country.
Any sort of new Native Super State would have none of that in place and would be prey to any number of foreign alliances coming against it and all sorts of traditional tribal squabbles and internal power struggles, on top of having 95% of your neighbors mad at you.
What chance would such a new "Indigenous Nation" have?
Not much.
You cannot hope to address injustices that occurred in the past by creating new injustices against other people in the present. Number One --- that doesn't work. Number Two -- all it does is create more injustice.
Injustice against anyone is a form of violence and violence just begets more violence. So if you want peace and plenty in your lifetimes, give justice to others who have paid their dues to be here, too, whose bodies have come from this land, and whose bodies will return to it when they die, just the same as yours. And stop fighting a war that ended 150 years ago.
You have a rich heritage and thanks to the work of The Living Law Firm, it can finally be a happy and abundant heritage, too.
As for me, I have always valued the great compliment that the local Winnebago Tribe, the Ho-Chunka Nation, gave to me as a youngster. It's an honor to be considered a member of the tribe, but we all know that I will never be a Winnebago by blood and so, we would be building a new nation on another "fib" of sorts, an honorary title "as" a Winnebago. That's not good enough to form the foundations for a new start for a whole country.
Finally, I want to point out that I have retrieved the "Natural and Unalienable Rights" our forefathers fought for from the dust bin of history, and if I were to turn my back on The United States of America [Unincorporated] I really would be committing treason against this country and its people----all of them, of every color and creed --- who have fought and died and suffered for it.
How many lures do you have in your tackle box and do you use worms, minnows or stink-bait? Do you fish for the sport or to survive?
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