(Updated) Sgt Gary Stein dismissed from USMC for Facebook posts, loses all benefits

Marines discharge sergeant for Facebook posts 


The Associated Press 
Published: Wednesday, Apr. 25, 2012 - 11:17 am 


SAN DIEGO -- 


The Marine Corps has decided to discharge a sergeant for criticizing President Barack Obama on Facebook.


 The Corps says Wednesday that Sgt. Gary Stein will be given an other-than-honorable discharge for violating Pentagon policy limiting speech of service members. The San Diego-area Marine has served nearly 10 years in the Marine Corps. He has said he was exercising his free-speech rights. 


 The discharge will mean he loses all benefits.


 Read more here

Raw deal, not unexpected. Stein served the American people and the Constitution faithfully for 10 years, did nothing morally or constitutionally wrong, and is now stripped all benefits, with "less than honorable discharge..."

 SAN DIEGO – The Marine Corps said Wednesday it has decided to discharge a sergeant for criticizing President Barack Obama on Facebook. The Corps said Sgt. Gary Stein will be given an other-than-honorable discharge for violating Pentagon policy limiting speech of service members. 


The San Diego-area Marine has served nearly 10 years in the Marine Corps. He has said he was exercising his free-speech rights. The discharge will mean he loses all benefits. 


A federal judge previously denied a request to block military discharge proceedings against Stein, who called Obama an enemy on Facebook. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff ruled then that the military has the right to respond to Stein's online comments in a case that has called into question the Pentagon's policies regarding social media and the limits regarding the speech of active duty military personnel. 


Attorney J. Mark Brewer told Huff the entire process violates the First Amendment, which federal courts have the right to uphold[sic] and WTF-HM. 


Huff disagreed, calling Stein's postings "truly troubling."


 Service members have had their speech limited since the Civil War, especially if their comments are believed to disrupt good order and discipline. 


The judge pointed out Stein's March 1 comments on a Facebook page used by Marine Corps meteorologists in which the sergeant stated, "Screw Obama and I will not follow all orders from him." 

  Read more: Link


Sgt Stein is ENTIRELY justified in making a statement that he will not "follow ALL orders from him".


He has a legal and moral obligation to himself, and his brothers in arms, to DISOBEY unconstitutional orders.

Major C. Miller, USMC, Ret., Delegate for Ron Paul

Liberty Summit, Mercer, PA, April 27-29

Verbatim post from TLinExile.blogspot.com 

 Every Branch And Vine 

 If one were standing on the brink of societal collapse and they knew it deep down, but society moved along, normalizing the absurd and treasonous, desperately trying to deny the obvious, what would you do? What have you done? It is at that point right now, is it not? 


 It is time for action, pure and simple. This is a nation gone insane, rationalizing everything designed to protect the people as a reason to protect the government from the people. 


 We, as citizens of America, have been given a valuable resource in the Constitution, but more importantly the letters and thoughts of those who fought the war for independence and those who inspired and led it. Nothing in their writing suggests that the government should be given ultimate authority over the people and that the people should submit for their own safety. This is an alien thought to those brave founders, it was in violent protest to this prospect which began the conflict. 


 The TSA, instituted by George Bush, is the exact sort of reasonable oppression that the gullible public typically embrace, which, a few years later, runs amok. The threat is always dire predictions of catastrophe that would befall the people were they to resist the tyranny. In the days of the American Revolution the British offered protection from Indian attack, from the hardships of the frontier and yet our forefathers shrugged off their compassionate threats and said: "We can do for ourselves." 


 Ours is a complex society. The government has stepped in to provide many things: maintained highways and roads; social security; protection from terrorism; protection from each other; all in the name of liberty, the freedom to travel, to conduct business for ourselves, but that is no longer an easy burden to carry and the yoke must be shrugged off and the chances taken. 


 The Liberty Summit is next weekend in Mercer, PA. It is a gathering of those who have acknowledged this fact, or it would seem. It is not so important that we see hundreds of people for the sake of numbers, it is important to know who will take the time to participate when the chips are down and the roll has been called. It is important to find the twenty or so people with whom one might begin their resistance to this onslaught of government oversight and control. 


 But, even if one does not participate in a gathering, their dedication to the idea, the principles that this government cannot go on ruling itself constitutional when it is not, is vital. 


 Tyranny does not begin with midnight trains and internment camps, it begins with a little safety rule, that while a good idea, buried deep within it is the concept that the government will help us keep ourselves safe. It begins with something as seemingly innocuous as a seat belt law, but in that seed is the growth of a giant tree extending every branch and vine into our lives, because we have accepted the idea that the government should enforce our own good thoughts on others. It comes when we think we can only be safe by making other people be safe. 


 It is a dangerous world out there. There are a lot of things that could hurt us and each one, each concern becomes a weapon of the tyrannical force that is our government. The fear of improperly prepared food, of sharp toys, are all that it takes to transform a nation of freedom into a prison. Every TSA agent who sifts through your things like a Nazi guard at a concentration camp, has that license to do so by your assent, by your concern for others and if you thought you were going to avoid them by taking a train, or driving a car, you are wrong. They will chip our cars and search the trains for our papers. They have the bug, they see the power and no government is able to resist that drug. 


 It is time to act against it, to take some chances, to let dangers exist before we find ourselves the safest of all people, those restrained from themselves, locked away in a padded room and fed sterile food and filtered water.
------------------------------

The premise of American Insurgents, American Patriots, by T.H. Breen,  is to demonstrate with historical evidence that the people (ideologically and in body) led the representatives of the Continental Congress to the secession from and fight against the Monarchy and Parliament. The book focuses on 1774 and 1775.


From the Introduction of American Insurgents, American Patriots: 


 Two years before the Declaration of Independence, a young, evangelical colonial population accomplished something truly extraordinary. In small communities from New Hampshire to Georgia, it successfully challenged the authority of Great Britain, then the strongest empire in the world. 


The vast majority of Americans have never heard the people's story. Instead, we have concentrated attention on the lives of a small group of celebrated leaders. 


Without the people, however, there would have been no Revolution, no independent nation. 


Confident of their God-given rights, driven by anger against an imperial government that treated them like second-class subjects, American insurgents resisted parliamentary rule, first spontaneously, as loosely organized militants who purged the countryside of Crown officials, and then, increasingly after late 1774, as members of local committees of safety that became schools for revolution. (emphasis added-HM)


It is with this hope, and in this spirit, that I will attend the Liberty Summit next week.