If you view the entire speech given on July 2nd in Colorado Springs, it's obvious what Obama's intent is when his statements are put into the correct context.

Our military is stretched to it's max and we are going to need civilian forces to help fill in the gaps.

Whether it be from natural disaster or infrastructure building.

Does anyone remember G. Bush, Sr.'s "Thousand Points of Light?" Obama'a Civilian Security force will amount to about the same thing.

How about his attempts to destroy the 2nd amendment?


As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama must demonstrate executive experience, but he remains strangely silent about his eight years (1994-2002) as a director of the Joyce Foundation, a billion dollar tax-exempt organization. He has one obvious reason: during his time as director, Joyce Foundation spent millions creating and supporting anti-gun organizations.

There is another, less known, reason.

During Obama’s tenure, the Joyce Foundation board planned and implemented a program targeting the Supreme Court. The work began five years into Obama’s directorship, when the Foundation had experience in turning its millions into anti-gun “grassroots” organizations, but none at converting cash into legal scholarship.

The plan’s objective was bold: the judicial obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Joyce’s directors found a vulnerable point. When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles. Law reviews are impartial, and famed for meticulous cite-checking. They are also produced on a shoestring. Authors of articles receive no compensation; editors are law students who work for a tiny stipend.

In 1999, midway through Obama’s tenure, the Joyce board voted to grant the Chicago-Kent Law Review $84,000, a staggering sum by law review standards. The Review promptly published an issue in which all articles attacked the individual right view of the Second Amendment.

In a breach of law review custom, Chicago-Kent let an “outsider” serve as editor; he was Carl Bogus, a faculty member of a different law school. Bogus had a unique distinction: he had been a director of Handgun Control Inc. (today’s Brady Campaign), and was on the advisory board of the Joyce-funded Violence Policy Center.

Bogus solicited only articles hostile to the individual right view of the Second Amendment, offering authors $5,000 each. But word leaked out, and Prof. Randy Barnett of Boston University volunteered to write in defense of the individual right to arms. Bogus refused to allow him to write for the review, later explaining that “sometimes a more balanced debate is best served by an unbalanced symposium.” Prof. James Lindgren, a former Chicago-Kent faculty member, remembers that when Barnett sought an explanation he “was given conflicting reasons, but the opposition of the Joyce Foundation was one that surfaced at some time.” Joyce had bought a veto power over the review’s content.

Joyce Foundation apparently believed it held this power over the entire university. Glenn Reynolds later recalled that when he and two other professors were scheduled to discuss the Second Amendment on campus, Joyce’s staffers “objected strenuously” to their being allowed to speak, protesting that Joyce Foundation was being cheated by an “‘agenda of balance’ that was inconsistent with the Symposium’s purpose.” Joyce next bought up an issue of Fordham Law Review.The plan worked smoothly. One court, in the course of ruling that there was no individual right to arms, cited the Chicago-Kent articles eight times. Then, in 2001, a federal Court of Appeals in Texas determined that the Second Amendment was an individual right.

The Joyce Foundation board (which still included Obama) responded by expanding its attack on the Second Amendment. Its next move came when Ohio State University announced it was establishing the “Second Amendment Research Center” as a thinktank headed by anti-individual-right historian Saul Cornell. Joyce put up no less than $400,000 to bankroll its creation. The grant was awarded at the board’s December 2002 meeting, Obama’s last function as a Joyce director. In reporting the grant, the OSU magazine Making History made clear that the purpose was to influence a future Supreme Court case:

“The effort is timely: a series of test cases - based on a new wave of scholarship, a recent decision by a federal Court of Appeals in Texas, and a revised Justice Department policy-are working their way through the courts. The litigants challenge the courts’ traditional reading of the Second Amendment as a protection of the states’ right to organize militia, asserting that the Amendment confers a much broader right for individuals to own guns. The United States Supreme Court is likely to resolve the debate within the next three to five years.”


The Center proceeded to generate articles denying the individual right to arms. The OSU connection also gave Joyce an academic money laundry. When it decided to buy an issue of the Stanford Law and Policy Review, it had a cover. Joyce handed OSU $125,000 for that purpose; all the law review editors knew was that OSU’s Foundation granted them that breathtaking sum, and a helpful Prof. Cornell volunteered to organize the issue. (The review was later sufficiently embarassed to publish an open letter on the affair).

The Joyce directorate’s plan almost succeeded. The individual rights view won out in the Heller Supreme Court appeal, but only by 5-4. The four dissenters were persuaded in part by Joyce-funded writings, down to relying on an article which misled them on critical historical documents.

Having lost that fight, Obama now claims he always held the individual rights view of the Second Amendment, and that he “respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.” But as a Joyce director, Obama was involved in a wealthy foundation’s attempt to manipulate the Supreme Court, buy legal scholarship, and obliterate the individual right to arms.

This is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause.

To top it off, he even plans to compensate college students very well for serving, giving them a $4000 tax credit for just 100 hours of community service. That works out to an effective pay rate of $40 an HOUR! What a great opportunity for someone struggling to pay for our outrageous higher education costs. Looks to me like it's a win/win proposal benefiting our country and the American youth. To each his own I guess.

There is no other way to look at this...

“Requiring” folks to do anything that they do not want to do, is a blatant assault on our liberties.

If you view the entire speech given on July 2nd in Colorado Springs, it's obvious what Obama's intent is when his statements are put into the correct context.

Our military is stretched to it's max and we are going to need civilian forces to help fill in the gaps.

Whether it be from natural disaster or infrastructure building.

Yes, he did. And thank you for saying so.

Barack Obama will be my President.

I will pray for him. And respect the office he will hold.

As a great man once said, "Country first."

And if it does, nowhere in that speech did Obama say that this service would be "REQUIRED."

No, but his chief of staff certainly did.

The more plausible scenario would be a voluntary service.

Not. The person Obama picked for a VERY powerful position has made made clear it would be mandatory. I think based upon that, that is lost likely the more plausible scenario.

Do you really believe that teenagers/college students w/ three months of "training" are going to form some massive paramilitary force to oppress the American people? Which scenario do you think is more plausible?

Can't exactly respect the office if you're back to fanning conspiracy theory flames 10 days later.

Our defense budget in enormous. What is the Peace Corps going to do w/ an amount equal to the billions of dollars we spend on aircraft or ships? Or the payroll for over 1 million?

There is no way that I believe it is possible to take college kids and train them... and have them rebuild infrastructure in THREE MONTHS TIME. It is a ridiculous notion, IMO.

Most teenagers/college kids are interested in partying and hooking up. How does he intend to make them show up on time, let alone get them to rebuild infrastructure?

In the meantime, I would prefer to give the benefit of the doubt until he proves otherwise.

When?

When the jackboots are marching through your neighborhoods and busting in doors to remove the "enemies of the state"?