Category: Health & Freedom

The reason? A series of raw milk-related charges lobbed against them by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office evaporated virtually over night. The two had been arrested and jailed back in August 2011, along with co-defendant and Rawesome manager James Stewart, and charged with various felony and misdemeanor crimes. The charges stemmed from a herd-share arrangement between the farm and the private food club, by which Palmer provided raw goat milk to Rawesome members. All three defendants had made bail within a week of their arrests and for more than one year, have been in and out of court, and working to prepare their defense.

In a surprise move, on the very September morning the trial was set to begin, the D.A. seemed to be offering up its most generous plea deals yet, as though they were hot potatoes. Instead of presenting its case evidence before the court, they appeared to be in full-steam negotiation mode. Palmer had previously rejected an offer from the D.A. that would have had her pleading guilty to one felony count, serving five years felony probation, and thereby crippling her ability to sell foods at farmers markets. That wasn't ever an option, Palmer has said.

But now that sorry deal has sweetened considerably. All charges against Palmer and Bloch would be dropped, if they each would plead guilty to one misdemeanor (Palmer to distributing milk product in "unsanitary conditions," and Bloch to mislabeling one vial of goat milk), pay a small fine and agree to summary probation. In addition, Palmer would have to perform 40 hours of community service but would be able to continue selling her product at local farmers markets.

This dramatic turn of events reportedly came after Palmer's attorney subpoenaed Richard Estes, Chief Counsel for the California Department of Food & Agriculture, intending to challenge the agency's position on herd-shares. The trouble with the charges – and the Los Angeles District Attorney's office knows it – is that California has NO current law in place regarding herd-shares. So, rather than have Estes testify and then spend considerable time defending their reasons for having filed charges in the first place, prosecutors opted to make a deal. And Palmer and Bloch, glad finally to put the whole mess behind them, agreed.

In a later interview, Palmer added that the term "unsanitary conditions" was misleading, as it refers to milk she fed one of her pigs, which was kept in a non-food container. And even that milk, Palmer said, had tested clean and was free of pathogens.

The developments mean that Stewart may perhaps be offered a similar deal by or before his next court appearance in Los Angeles, on October 18. He is currently in custody at the Ventura County jail, after being rearrested for missed court appearances and, ironically, was reportedly held back by Ventura from attending the September court date in Los Angeles with Palmer and Bloch.

Stewart and Palmer both face additional charges in Ventura County, related to financial crimes and defrauding farm investors. But it's a whole lot of nonsense. Previous reports by Natural News and other alternative media outlets have already exposed the Ventura County District Attorney office's prosecution for the frivolous waste of taxpayer dollars that it is. The case there is equally as flimsy – if not more so – than the raw milk-related charges in Los Angeles.

Still, they hold captive one of southern California's most pioneering champions of high quality health foods. In hopes of changing this fact, supporters of both James Stewart and Sharon Palmer have started a petition demanding Ventura County immediately release Stewart and drop all charges against the two. You can sign and share the petition by clicking here: http://www.change.org

However, if the Ventura County District Attorney's office chooses to ignore the demands by the people, then trial will move forward as scheduled, beginning as early as October 30.

In other words, the federal government's powers are few and defined; state, by comparison, was supposed to be numerous and plentiful.

But that was then. It certainly isn't that way these days, as states have increasingly fallen under the control over a growing federal Leviathan and its multitude of bloated bureaucracies.

Well, the time seems to have come when states – some of them at least – appear to have had enough. Take Virginia.

A group from the Commonwealth has filed suit in federal court alleging that one of the crown jewels of federal bureaucracy – the Environmental Protection Agency – has stepped way over the central government's constitutionally limited powers with new rules governing, of all things, rain water run-off.

According to the complaint filed by the Occoquan Watershed Coalition, the EPA violated the Tenth Amendment by imposing a "coercive … unfunded mandate" on a watershed, "to implement a federal program – one not imposed by or under Virginia Law."

New standards equals hundreds of millions of dollars

The group says the EPA's rules unconstitutionally force Virginia to control the amount of rainwater allowed to flow into a stream in Fairfax County. The mandate seeks to protect benthic organisms – the benthic zone is the lowest area of a body of water, along the bottom – that the EPA says are killed off by the sediment-rich rainwater.

The suit was filed on behalf of the coalition by the Free-Market Environmental Law Clinic, which estimated the cost of the EPA's mandate at about $225 million.

"If the county is forced to spend that much money on a single watershed, it will mean not one of the other 29 watersheds in the county will receive funds for their restoration, including the eight watersheds in the OWC's territory," says the law clinic, on its Web site.

The suit says a small portion of Accotink Creek, with about 120 miles of shoreline, is "impaired," under the EPA rules, because soil along an 8.1-mile stretch has eroded and, when it rains, the soil runs off into the creek.

"To address this problem, Fairfax County would normally place rock against those parts of the stream bank that erode the most, and take other actions that fit within its budget," says an analysis of the case by the American Tradition Institute. "Virginia and Fairfax County have been working together to address Accotink Creek, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rejected those efforts and in their place adopted a new water quantity standard that limits the total amount of water that can be discharged into the stream each day."

That "standard" is what is being challenged by OWC.

Trampling the sovereignty of the state

"The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that this kind of coercive federal mandate on a local government is simply not allowed," said Dr. David W. Schnare, Director of the FME Law Clinic.

"Because Fairfax County and the Commonwealth of Virginia refused to raise this constitutional challenge in their recent suit against EPA, the citizens directly harmed by EPA are the only ones left to protect the rights and privileges of the Commonwealth and FME Law is representing their interests," he said. "Without that assistance, the serious problems in 29 watersheds will go unaddressed while EPA asks Fairfax County to empty its coffers in a vain effort to fix a problem of minor significance."

In its suit, the OWC claims the Clean Water Act gives EPA the authority to regulate sediments flowing into streams via pipes or point sources, but gives states and local governments the power to manage non-point sources.

"This is the kind of coercive commandeering the Constitution does not authorize – commandeering that tramples the sovereignty of the state and local governments," the complaint says.

An economic embargo ordered by the FDA and obeyed by Google Adwords
This action is just the latest round in the FDA's war on nutritional supplement companies, which have been subjected to armed raids, threatening warning letters, product seizures, and even international kidnapping by the FDA itself (http://www.naturalnews.com/027750_Greg_Caton_FDA.html).

In this case, the FDA is conducting an economic embargo on the company known as Global Healing Center (www.GlobalHealingCenter.com), founded by Ed Group III. Dr. Group is not a medical doctor, but he is a globally-recognized formulator of nutritional detoxification products that really work to help eliminate heavy metals from the body.

Ed Group's company has been a long-time advertiser with Google Adwords, using the service to not only bring Google hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in revenue, but more importantly to help reach people with high-quality nutritional products that are revered throughout the industry for their safety, potency and efficacy.

None of this seemed to matter to Google Adwords, which shuttered his entire account without notice, then claimed the FDA told them to do so (see below).

"On June 29th we noticed our sales had dropped off about 25-30% over the previous week," Dr. Group told NaturalNews. "After some research we found it was due to Google blocking our AdWords account from advertising. We tried contacting Google to see why our account had been blocked, but it wasn't until July 27th (almost a month later) that we received the answer below."

He goes on to explain:

The FDA contacted Google and demanded Google shut down our ads containing our heavy metal cleansing keywords. Google then shut down our ENTIRE account including all other non-chemical and heavy cleansing related ads resulting in a loss of approximately $70,000 in sales over a period of 3-4 weeks. The FDA did not contact us directly nor did Google contact us to let us know before shutting down our account. It seems as if the FDA has started a gestapo campaign to attack supplement companies indirectly through Google advertising.

[This was] an intentional campaign by the FDA to take money from our pockets because we never even had a product on our site which mentions chelation and the FDA has never contacted us or issued a warning to us as they are required to do by law. The FDA inspects our facility one to two times each year and have never mentioned any concern to us.

The letter from Google
Here's how Google Adwords finally responded to Global Healing Center, approximately one month after shutting of their Adwords account:

From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Phone Call Follow-up
Date: July 27, 2012 6:03:25 AM PDT

Hi,

I just heard back from the review team and the information that they provided me with is as follows:

* Currently your website is advertising for and selling Dr. Group's Chemical & Heavy Metal Cleanse as a Chelation agent. The FDA considers non-perscrition chelation products to be unnapproved drugs because they are "dangerously misleading" and can cause serious harm to consumers.

* See http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm229320.h… for more information.

Moving forward, once you have removed this product from your website feel free to call me to have your site re-reviewed. Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Have a great day!

Best,
Spencer L

Google Inc. – The Google AdWords Team – 1-866-2-GOOGLE – adwords.google.com

Analysis
• The FDA letter cited by Google Adwords does not even mention Global Healing Center. (Huh?)

• The FDA letter is from 2010. Why is Google Adwords shutting down companies in 2012 while citing a letter from 2010 that doesn't even mention the advertiser?

• The FDA's position that heavy metals chelation products are "unapproved" drugs is absurd. A description that a nutritional product binds with heavy metals is not, by any reasonable logic, a claim to "treat a disease." It's nutritional cause and effect. By the FDA's own admitted logic, a company selling vitamin C cannot claim that vitamin C halts scurvy. That would be an "unapproved drug claim."

Interestingly, NaturalNews agrees with the FDA that there are some fraudulent nutritional products being sold in the market — in fact, NaturalNews helped expose one of the most outlandish such "detox" products ever marketed on the internet (http://www.naturalnews.com/034005_Adya_Clarity_consumer_alert.html). That product was very high in aluminum and sulfuric acid. It was marketed as a dietary supplement to be consumed with "daily shots" (shot-glass drinks) and it was claimed the product would cause heavy metals to come out of your ears and fingernails, or that large snakes would be emitted out of your colon. (Seriously, I'm not making this up.) That product was clearly fraud.

But the FDA makes no distinction between fraudulent supplements and legitimate, high-quality supplements. To the FDA, all supplements making a detox claim are unapproved drugs and therefore illegal. Such a position grossly demonstrates the FDA's complete lack of nutritional supplement discernment.

Meanwhile, the FDA openly tolerates repeated and willful violations of pharmaceutical off-label marketing, which is the prescribing of medications for health conditions that have never been approved by the FDA. All the major drug companies engage in the (wink-and-nod) off-label marketing of their drugs, and the FDA does absolutely nothing about it. (http://www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.html) Thus, the FDA's position, as stated in this letter, that "companies that market products that claim to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure diseases must file an application with the FDA and provide data that demonstrate their products' safety and effectiveness" is flatly false.

In reality, pharmaceutical companies merely need to receive FDA approval of their drug for any disease, and then they are allowed to market that drug for ALL diseases and health conditions! (http://www.naturalnews.com/025698_drug_FDA_marketing.html) It's not legal, but it's tolerated if you run a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company, which is where the FDA derives the bulk of its own operating budget revenue.

Google supporting the FDA is, in many ways, worse than Google supporting China
What's most disturbing in all this is not that the FDA is engaged in economic warfare against the nutritional supplements industry — that's to be expected of a criminal government regulatory mafia group. What's really disturbing here is that Google Adwords went right along with it.

I can only hope that this is some sort of temporary oversight on the part of some low-level Google Adwords employees who are easily intimidated by the FDA. While none of us wish to see Google Adwords used to promote truly dangerous products, you have to wonder why Adwords is perfectly willing to promoting deadly pharmaceuticals and prescription medications that have been scientifically shown to kill 106,000 Americans each year (http://www.naturalnews.com/036679_doctors_guns_fatalities.html) — yet at the same time, Google Adwords won't allow the advertising of a nutritional product that can help people eliminate toxic mercury or other heavy metals.

Google, it seems, is increasingly allying itself with the FDA, an organization that can be reasonably and convincingly shown to be a criminal group whose primary purpose is to protect the Big Pharma monopolistic profit racket, even at the expense of destroying public health. (A diseased population, even better, boosts pharma profits.)

If this trend continues, Google will only harm the credibility of its own advertising, because it won't take long for internet users to realize that Adwords ads shown on Google.com are censored to comply with corrupt government guidelines. Adwords is, in other words, being directed by the U.S. government to limit consumer choice rather than expand it. This seems to contradict the very purpose of Google's search engine, which is to put knowledge and information within reach of people everywhere. But what if that knowledge threatens the profits of the pharmaceutical industry? Will Google censor its information offerings in order to help the FDA protect drug industry profits?

China-style censorship is now FDA-style censorship
If all this censorship talk rings a bell, it's because Google was at one time caught up in the question of whether search results should be censored in China in order to keep the Chinese people ignorant of issues like freedom, public protests, democracy and the like.

For many years, Google went along with the Chinese government's censorship requests. "Until March 2010, Google adhered to the Internet censorship policies of China," reports Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Re…).

But on January 12 of 2010, Google announced, in response to a hack attempt on Google's servers in an effort to access information about Chinese dissidents, "…we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn"

And yet, Google is willing to censor its results on Google.com right at home in the USA, as long as the FDA tells them to, it seems.

The FDA's attempts to keep the American population ignorant of nutritional supplements perfectly mirrors Communist China's attempts to keep its population ignorant of history. If Google isn't willing to go along with China's censorship, why is it willing to go along with the FDA's?

We must encourage Google to rethink its compliance with corrupt governments
I hope all NaturalNews readers will join me in encouraging Google to rethink its policies of automatically adhering to FDA demands. If the FDA were really an honest organization working on behalf of the People to protect the health and safety of the American public, it might not be such a bad thing to listen to the agency's requests.

But the FDA is no such thing. The FDA threatens and surveils its own scientists, for one thing (http://www.naturalnews.com/036558_FDA_spying_whistleblowers.html). In fact, the FDA hacked the Gmail accounts of suspected whistleblowers, thereby violating Google's own terms of use (http://www.naturalnews.com/034824_FDA_scientists_hacking_whistleblowe…).

The FDA openly allows the electroshock torture of autistic students in the USA (http://www.naturalnews.com/036287_electroshock_torture_students.html), behaving a lot like China and its own secret torture prisons. Maybe that's why U.S. Senators have been trying to overhaul the corrupt agency and force it to reform (http://www.naturalnews.com/035966_Rand_Paul_FDA_censorship.html).

But apparently the IRS does not have the legal authority to force anyone to pay this tax, regardless of whether or not they choose to purchase health insurance. According to the law, the IRS will not be permitted to freeze the bank accounts of taxpayers who choose not to purchase health insurance, nor will the agency be allowed to garnish wages. The IRS also does not have the authority to levy interest charges on those who choose not to pay the penalties.

The only thing the IRS is permitted to do under the new law is withhold tax refunds from those that are due them, and that do not purchase health insurance. Since the majority of tax filers every year are owed refunds, the IRS hopes the threat of not receiving one will be enough to convince the American public to comply with the federal government's forced health care system.

If this does not work, the IRS is likely to simply send out threatening letters in a desperate attempt to scare people into paying the tax. According to Elizabeth Maresca, a former IRS trial attorney who now supervises the Tax & Consumer Litigation Clinic at Fordham University's Law School, most people end up paying whatever is demanded of them by the IRS when it comes in the form of a scary letter.

The fact that the IRS lacks any legal authority to collect an Affordable Care Act tax needs to be spread far and wide so that the American people know their rights. When it comes time to "pay the piper," taxpayers need to know that, legally, they have the option to refuse both mandatory health insurance and the penalties associated with non-compliance.

You can read the full report here: http://www.scribd.com

The same section of the report calls for the passage of real health care reform that will allow all Texans to choose the health care of their choice. The Texas Republican Party specifically endorses a truly "market-based, competitive, and transparent health care system" that is not controlled by Big Pharma and other special interests, but rather serves the health needs of individuals.

Later on in a section titled Promoting Individual Freedom and Personal Safety, the party calls for mandatory labeling of all GMOs "in a uniform and recognizable fashion." The party also opposes the mandated use of "Smart Meters," which can be used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other government agencies to spy on individuals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/035355_CIA_television_surveillance.html)

Though the Texas Republican Party still endorses the use of war to fight so-called terrorism, the party has called for the elimination of policies that allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens without due process, and in violation of the U.S. Constitution. This platform position presumably implies opposition to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which directly violates both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. (http://www.naturalnews.com)

Along these same lines, the Texas Republican Party is calling for the complete elimination of the TSA, including the agency's ridiculous naked body scanners and invasive, full-body pat downs. Airport security should be handled by state and local law enforcement, according to the party, which are far less prone to constitutional abuses.

Though not perfect, the Texas Republican Party's 2012 platform supports many important positions that aim to protect health freedom and oppose government tyranny. You can read the party's full platform here: http://www.scribd.com

Potts, who filed his complaint in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, said in court papers he was seeking to "vindicate" his "free speech rights" under "federal and state constitutional and statutory law."

"Defendant officers of the Trinity County Sheriff's Office have reprimanded Mr. Potts for engaging in expressive political speech and have prohibited him from speaking as a citizen on important matters of public concern," the complaint reads.

"This action seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to redress the violation of Mr. Potts' rights under the United States Constitution, the California Constitution, and the Public Safety Officers' Procedural Bill of Rights Act (POBRA)."

According to the complaint, Potts said he began writing politically themed letters to the editor of the The Trinity Journal newspaper "several years ago."

No disruption in the work place

"These letters, authored and signed by Mr. Potts in his capacity as a private citizen, addressed a variety of topics of public concern, including the wisdom and constitutionality of various laws, and the appropriate scope of federal governmental authority," the complaint said.

The complaint went onto say that Potts was not in uniform nor did he use public/county resources when writing his editorials.

His "letters have never caused a disruption of the workplace, affected the performance of his job duties, or otherwise interfered with the operations of the Sheriff's Office," said the complaint, adding that during the course of his official duties, he "consistently received positive performance reviews."

Prior to Haney's 2010 election as Trinity County Sheriff, the complaint says, the county district attorney asked then-Sheriff Lorrac Craig to force Potts to discontinue writing his letters, a request that Craig refused to carry out.

After Haney assumed his office in January 2011, he and "Undersheriff Ken Langton called Mr. Potts in for a meeting to discuss his letters to the editor," says the complaint. "Sheriff Haney stated that the District Attorney had threatened not to prosecute any cases that Mr. Potts investigated if he continued to write letters to the editor, and that Mr. Potts needed to stop writing letters to the editor."

Some months later, in August of last year, the complaint says Potts was once more warned to stop writing his letters by sheriff's deputy Sgt. Ray Hurlbert, who allegedly said Potts' letters were a "problem" for the department.

"Mr. Potts asked for guidance on the scope of the prohibition of his written expression but was never provided with guidance on what topics would be deemed by the Sheriff's Office to be acceptable or unacceptable," said the complaint. "Unable to obtain any clarification from the Sheriff's Office about the scope of any prohibition, Mr. Potts understood the Office either to be imposing a blanket ban on all letters to the editor, or to be requiring Mr. Potts to draw his own line between" what he felt was and was not appropriate.

Sought guidance but a reprimand instead

The complaint said Potts published four more letters to the editor in the local paper between October and November 2011 on topics ranging from "drug policy, including drug legalization, and the right to carry concealed weapons."

"On December 5, 2011, Sgt. Hurlburt provided Mr. Potts with written notice of an administrative investigation into his expressive letter-writing activities," said the complaint. "The notice letter cited six provisions of the Trinity County Sheriff's Office Policy Manual and explained that Mr. Potts was being investigated for possible violations of these provisions. Mr. Potts was ordered to appear for an interrogation concerning the potential violations."

Two weeks later, the department conducted "an investigatory interrogation" of Potts, in which he objected "on the grounds that his free speech rights were being violated."

In February, the department issued Potts a formal reprimand for his conduct, saying that by writing his letters he was in violation of a number of departmental policies. Potts stopped writing letters following his reprimand.

In March, Potts; through his attorneys, asked Trinity County to expunge the reprimand from his work record, a request that was denied a month later.

There is an old saying in the military that goes, "We're here to defend democracy, not practice it." It sounds like that's the case in Trinity County, Calif. as well.

No one can know the true motivations for the idiosyncratic rationale in the health care decision written by Marshall's current successor, John Roberts. Often five member majorities on the court are fragile, and bizarre compromises are necessary in order to keep a five-member majority from becoming a four-member minority. Perhaps Chief Justice Roberts really means what he wrote — that congressional power to tax is without constitutional limit — and his opinion is a faithful reflection of that view, without a political or legal or intra-court agenda. But that view finds no support in the Constitution or our history. It even contradicts the most famous of Marshall's big government aphorisms: The power to tax is the power to destroy.

The reasoning underlying the 5 to 4 majority opinion is the court’s unprecedented pronouncement that Congress' power to tax is unlimited. The majority held that the extraction of thousands of dollars per year by the IRS from individuals who do not have health insurance is not a fine, not a punishment, not a payment for government-provided health insurance, not a shared responsibility — all of which the statute says it is — but rather is an inducement in the form of a tax. The majority likened this tax to the federal taxes on tobacco and gasoline, which, it held, are imposed not only to generate revenue but also to discourage smoking and driving. The statute is more than 2,400 pages in length, and it establishes the federal micromanagement of about 16 percent of the national economy. And the court justified it constitutionally by calling it a tax.

A 7 to 2 majority (which excluded two of the progressive justices who joined the chief in rewriting tax law and included the four dissenting justices who would have invalidated the entire statute as beyond the constitutional power of Congress) held that while Congress can regulate commerce, it cannot compel one to engage in commerce. The same majority ruled that Congress cannot force the states to expand Medicaid by establishing state insurance exchanges. It held that the congressional command to establish the exchanges combined with the congressional threat to withhold all Medicaid funds — not just those involved with the exchanges — for failure to establish them would be so harmful to the financial stability of state governments as to be tantamount to an assault on state sovereignty. This leaves the exchanges in limbo, and it is the first judicial recognition that state sovereignty is apparently at the tender mercies of the financial largesse of Congress.

The logic in the majority opinion is the jurisprudential equivalent of passing a camel through the eye of a needle. The logic is so tortured, unexpected and unprecedented that even the law's most fervent supporters did not make or anticipate the court's argument in its support. Under the Constitution, a tax must originate in the House (which this law did not), and it must be applied for doing something (like earning income or purchasing tobacco or fuel), not for doing nothing. In all the history of the court, it never has held that a penalty imposed for violating a federal law was really a tax. And it never has converted linguistically the congressional finding of penalty into the judicial declaration of tax, absent finding subterfuge on the part of congressional draftsmanship.

I wonder whether the chief justice realizes what he and the progressive wing of the court have done to our freedom. If the feds can tax us for not doing as they have commanded, and if that which is commanded need not be grounded in the Constitution, then there is no constitutional limit to their power, and the ruling that the power to regulate commerce does not encompass the power to compel commerce is mere sophistry.

Even The Beatles understood this.

In accordance with state law, members of Charlene's buying club each pay the farm directly for their milk, and later pick it up from Charlene's drop point. The setup is a convenient, practical way for raw milk buyers in the Twin Cities area to access their milk without having to each drive separately to the farm to pick it up.

But when officials from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) got wind of what Charlene and the others were doing, they quickly swooped in and tried to shut the whole thing down. MDA claims that the drop point violates state law, even though it clearly does not.

"People are not buying milk from me — they're buying from the farm," said Charlene to the Twin Cities Daily Planet (TCDP). "It's not like this is a hallucinogenic substance. I don't think [I'm doing] anything wrong or illegal … I'm willing to go to jail. But to be jailed for something like this, it's just wrong."

Practicing civil disobedience in the face of government tyranny promotes liberty
Charlene's decision to stand up for her freedom of food choice is one that could lead to more trouble for her and her family, as authorities in her area have convinced themselves that sharing the burdens associated with storing and transporting multiple families' purchased milk from the farm violates state law. But it is one that she is bravely willing to take.

When Charlene's now 22-year-old daughter Amanda tested positive for rheumatoid arthritis several years ago, the young woman ended up quickly becoming bedridden as a result of chronic, debilitating pain. But raw milk would end up being the cure for Amanda's condition, and the motivating factor for her mother to make it accessible to others.

Charlene has continued to stand her ground in the face of government tyranny, refusing to back down to its unlawful demands. And in the process, she is setting a powerful example for the rest of us to follow, should we, too, be faced with rogue statists hellbent on stealing away our freedoms.

If only we had more Charlenes in the world who were not afraid of government threats, who bravely stood up for what they believed in no matter what the cost. This type of civil disobedience, after all, is how real liberty is both promoted and preserved. Are you willing to follow Charlene's lead in the face of tyranny?