Let Liberty Ring

My Response to Walter Block's Hit Piece Against Wendy McElroy

2011-12-12T10:59:00.000-08:00

For the record, here's my official Facebook status post on my wall serving as a response to Walter Block's hit piece aimed solely at libertarian/anarchist Wendy McElroy. The following is taken from my FB account in its unabridged entirety:

As much as I like Ron Paul tactically and not politically (I'm not an official financial supporter, although I did contact the Paul campaign and offer to volunteer my time and services to help him tactically), I think LewRockwell.com blogger and writer Walter Block's attack on libertarian/anarchist feminist Wendy McElroy is completely unfounded and uncalled for.

Wendy is right about Paul politically, but she's not the only person to have called Paul out on his anti-libertarian stands on a few issues such as abortion, immigration, religion, and antiwar if not authorized by the Constitution, and constitutional fetishism all on account of his status as a politician. (URL: http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php) I have called Ron out even though I have praised him during the debate (except for his "secure the border" rhetoric). I know Thomas L. Knapp has called him out in the past and still does to a certain extent. (URL: http://knappster.blogspot.com/2011/12/when-hes-right-hes-right.html) I know Stefan Molyneux has been critical of Paul in the past. I know Sheldon Richman criticized Paul over the old racist newsletter controversy that plagued the Paul campaign in 2007 and 2008, and he was completely spot-on regarding Paul allegedly being unaware of the letters (a claim which Richman didn't even buy at all). Even Jim Davidson has good reasons to oppose Paul's candidacy, simply because Paul supported a two-time bailout, prowar candidate named Lamar Smith over a libertarian Republican candidate who was more principled than Smith. Simply put I can't blame him for it.

With that in mind, because Block measures a libertarian's credentials simply by whether he supports his favored political candidate (who happens to be Ron Paul) and not by his ideology, will he attack me? Tom? Stefan? Sheldon? Anyone who dares to have a brain against him and the renewed deification of Paul (which seems to be happening already)?

I am so disappointed in Block that I truly question whether he is a libertarian nowadays or whether he's just a front for the GOP establishment, considering he no longer measures an individual's belief system solely on his ideology but rather whether he supports a candidate like Ron Paul. I totally resent and object to that game entirely.

Now that Block is trying to stir up bullshit in the movement with his claims against Wendy (who hasn't written about Paul in over four years now) and with anyone who doesn't agree with Paul (even if they're not neocons or progressives), he's merely doing more damage to the cause of Liberty and not helping it. That's my objection right there. Who the hell does he think he is just by doing this? Wendy has been an ardent defender of liberty for years and has never wavered since. For Block to stoop to that level the same way neoconservative Republican Eric Dondero has done is shameful, putrid, and disgusting. I'm embarrassed to have any association with him. I'll be more embarrassed to be in the same room with him. It's one thing to attack progressives and neocons who want Ron's head on the issues that he's right on. It's wrong to attack fellow libertarians who criticize and call out Ron on the issues that he's wrong on. Not only does that say more about Block, but it makes him politically and ideologically fair game, IMHO.

Not that I'm a fan of Kevin Carson or just his biggest fan, but he was right about the term "vulgar libertarian." Block fits that mold pretty damn well, and it shames me to say that.

What on earth was he thinking when he wrote that? Is he trying to push anyone out of the movement for not supporting Ron Paul for legitimate reasons? Is he off his rocker or what? Can someone please explain that rationale to me? I merely ask, because I don't get it.

Whether you agree or disagree with critics of Ron Paul is not the point and even neither here nor there. The point is that Block is not only off-base for making this libelous and accusatory charge against her, but he's also wrong to begin with. I will follow this up with this post and any updates to this commentary as well as my previous commentary on the subject.

Ron Paul Acolyte Walter Block Attacks Wendy McElroy

2011-12-12T10:10:00.001-08:00

I was disheartened to see LewRockwell.com columnist and Loyola University Professor Walter Block's newly-launched tirade against renowned libertarian/anarchist individual feminist Wendy McElroy in his LRC piece today entitled "Is Wendy McElroy Still A Libertarian?: No; She Opposes the Ron Paul Candidacy." (It's a shame that Lew Rockwell himself has even allowed this putrid, disgusting, preposterous, and outrageous filth to be housed and archived on his popular website, let alone its own server.)

I encountered this putrid, disgusting, and outlandish drivel when fellow left-libertarian/agorist/voluntaryist Edgardo Peregrino posted this on his Facebook wall a few hours ago.

Edgardo posted the following with Block's article on his wall, which caught my eye instantly:

I hate to disappoint Dr. Block, but not everyone who opposes Ron Paul is a bloodthirsty neocon or progressive.

Since then his wall has been hit with a few comments which have been largely negative about Walter's hit piece:

Caleb McGinn As brilliant as Walter Block is he sure writes some stupid shit sometimes. Lew Rockwell probably wrote it for him.
2 hours ago · Like · 1
Edgardo Peregrino I'm a big fan of Dr. Block but sometimes I wonder what's going through his head when he writes shit like this.
2 hours ago · Like
Bryan Tint What about Patrick Buchanan?
2 hours ago · Like
Steve Lolyouwish Maybe not but they're certainly not helping.
2 hours ago · Like

Wendy has responded to her old friend Block's knee-jerk hit piece on her website with the following post:

Apparently the litmus test for being a libertarian is whether you support a particular political candidate or not. At least, that's the message of Walter Block's article today on LewRockwell.com: Is Wendy McElroy Still a Libertarian? No; She Opposes the Ron Paul Candidacy. The attack is odd...for a few reasons. Just one of them is that I have not written of Ron Paul for over four years now. Indeed, I am ignoring almost everyone's political campaigning from now 'til November for the sake of my digestion. Ah well. Clearly, and especially from the last paragraph, Walter is trying to bait me into some sort of exchange. Alas, Walter, old friend, I am not a puppet and I do not jump to the jerk of a string.

UPDATE: My indefatigable husband just sent me a link from the past, a link to the 2007 blog post in which I responded to a similar article Walter wrote in a similar view years and years ago. I don't have anything to add. It is well-trodden territory.

(The article that Wendy wrote in response to Walter in a similar fashion some years ago over her August 1997 commentary titled "Ron Paul or Antiwar.com?" can be found here. Her commentary on the same piece before Block responded at that point can also be traced to here.)

I have responded to the entire affair on my Facebook wall in defense of McElroy, which I will post in a separate blog posting of my own. In another separate blog posting, I will be commenting on the entire matter, which will enable me to put my thoughts in correct order before I begin.

UPDATE (12-12-2011): A Facebook user identified as "Eric Lau" wrote a scathing attack on Wendy McElroy on Edgardo's post in which Block attacks her for opposing his campaign (while apologizing for and defending Ron Paul) in a pathetic, snarky attempt to discredit her:

Erik Lau What Wendy McElroy is writing about Ron Paul is ridiculous rant or outright lies. How can any libertarian accuse Ron Paul of not being a libertarian, but an enemy to freedom. She might really dislike most political action and especially from GOP but her factual opinion of Paul is savagely wrong - and that is very damaging.
about an hour ago · Like

The Derailment of the Herman Cain Train

2011-12-03T14:24:00.000-08:00

It's official: the Herman Cain Train has been derailed on the heels of a 13-year-old love affair with a woman (which he continues to deny completely). This also is in part due to a number of his supporters and donors dropping him over that ruckus and the sexual harassment allegations leveled against him (which he also continues to deny). This political train wreck can't be salvaged. Once it went off the railroad tracks, it couldn't be put back together again.

It's over for him politically. However, I don't think he will be riding off into the sunset entirely. Now he's peddling his new online political organization, which he will most likely employ to shore up his leftover base and bring it over to his cause and serve as a financial and political platform to establish a steady stream of cash flow for him and his opportunistic disciples.

This however does create some good news and some bad news for us on the freedom side:

Good News: Ron Paul will gain more of the attention and spotlight with Cain out of the race. With Cain's supporters now looking at both Newt Gingrich (who will probably get the bulk of the Cain support vote) and Ron Paul, a Paul backing would be stronger, more consistent, and more energized than Gingrich, considering that Newt is an ideological and political elephant in the presidential room.

Bad News: Gingrich gets Cain's votes at the present moment, but that could and may well likely change in the weeks and months to come, perhaps prior to the Iowa caucus primaries. He may be the flavor of the month for now, but what about the long term? Chances are his campaign will fizzle out, and that will most likely happen, largely in part because of his past history of infidelity and peccadillos, and all that makes him gravely fair game. At least Ron Paul doesn't have such skeletons in his closet, but Gingrich certainly has them.

Whatever happens, this may well be Ron Paul's light to shine in the days and weeks to come. At least Ron is ideologically principled and consistent, whereas Gingrich isn't. In the short term, Gingrich may be the top contender, but that will only heighten his political downfall - that is, if and ONLY if Ron Paul capitalizes on Cain's loss, brings Cain's supporters into his fold, and heads into 2012 with a strong shot at nabbing the GOP nomination crown.

The Republican Presidential Sideshow Freaks and Government Security

2011-12-03T02:46:00.000-08:00

Last week's nauseating, nonsensical, and pathetic GOP presidential debate hosted by CNN and the neoconservative think tank The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. is both an epitome and a disturbing reminder of the lunacy of the Republican sideshow freaks (except for Ron Paul as usual) who have consistently demonstrated their naivete to the American public at large. These reprobates - from Mitt Romney to Herman Cain - will never learn and acknowledge that an offensive, aggressive, and warlike foreign policy will proceed to put American lives in jeopardy until they trace the history of this interventionism from Jefferson's attack on the Barbary Pirates (rather than to pay bribes to them) to the present day evils committed in the Middle East. (Take the United States government's present incursions here for instance.)

However, it goes without saying that the stentorian choruses of defending, protecting, worshiping, idolizing, and insulating the status quo are certainly over-the-top but not surprising. Ranging from preserving American foreign aid to Israel to "American exceptionalism" and "America leading the free world," they are nothing but contrivances to prop up pseudo images of the State's "benevolence," the self-deceit and vanities of the governmental players involved, and the State's self-appeasing, self-serving, and self-aggrandizing way of fashioning its own hubris under the guise of self-reassurance.

All of these things are said to shroud "national security" (which is government security) from the American people. The Democrats are just as horrendous on this issue, because they see it as a part of the government's need to engage in humanitarianism abroad with the backing of the U.N., unlike the GOP that prefers to have Americans and the Pentagon declaring war against a foreign regime for "defending national security first" and then "humanitarianism second." (Even Rick Santorum shares the Democratic trait on that thinking alone, despite his tough talk on terrorists and terrorism.)

Despite their minute differences on those issues, both major parties favor barbarism and welfare-warfare equality. With Republicans and Democrats like these (who are the heart of the tyrannical two-party system that expands, operates, and fuels the federal government), who needs enemies at all?

Food For Thought

2011-11-02T10:53:00.001-07:00

Are we all better off or worse off that we now know about the increasingly mounting yet substance-lacking (although scathing) reports about the sexual harassment charges pending against GOP presidential contender Herman Cain? Not that I'm defending Cain on any grounds due to his waffling and conflicting answers in response to the allegations and his incredible statements about his version of the accounts of the story (which is still in progress), but why is this any more or less significant than the politically-charged sex scandals of the past? (Anyone remember then-President Bill Clinton's affair with Ginnifer Flowers and Paula Jones' infamous sexual harassment suit against him?)

The Conservative (and Libertarian) Love Affair with Maximum "Limited" Statism, Corporatism, and Constitutional Fetishism

2011-09-29T00:53:00.000-07:00

Whenever I hear (some) "limited government" conservatives and (minarchist) libertarians utter phrases like "We must keep the U.S. federal government to its Constitutional size" and "Only Congress has the legal and just power to [do this] or [do that]" or "These new laws and regulations are an affront to and assault on free market capitalism" or "President [Insert name here] has signed into law a bill that clearly violates the Constitution," I feel a sudden chill rushing down my spine. And it's not a good feeling. None indeed whatsoever.

The problem with this school of thought is that the individual who stands to defend this rhetoric bar none injects an enormous amount of political and ideological faith in a few areas under a blind guise of praxeological arguments. Not surprisingly, these aforementioned arguments are of the following:

That the United States of America as a quasi-governmental corporation must be governed by a blanket set of rules called a constitution and that these rules see the State as a pet to be tamed and put on a leash;

That, unless the Constitution "authorizes" the State to partake in legal functions (such as granting Congress the power to "coin Money" and to "declare War" against a foreign power) as "America's Founders had originally intended and envisioned them," the President, the Senate, and the Congress "has no constitutional authority" to engage in these said functions if said rules expressly forbid them to do so;

That the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which states in part, "The powers not expressly 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," is the law of the land and that Constitution "is only granted enumerated powers at the State level that the Constitution does not clearly spell out and define." Oh, and don't forget that they also say that Washington, D.C. "has no right to tell people and their States what they can and cannot do" because these issues (like taxes, economic regulations, immigration) pertain to "state sovereignty" and "states' rights."

(Some of these so-called limited statist conservatives reach an impasse with their ideological and political paradigms because they cannot reconcile their love affair for the Constitution and their alleged pro-liberty ideologies with their corporate socialist and privileged philosophies, given that they express deference to the State while appearing to favor laissez-faire "free market" capitalism);

That the U.S. Supreme Court was never meant to be an instrument of judicial activism (that is, the Court having legislative power from the bench on the whims of the judges on account of their personal and political views and interests) but rather a provider of a strict, restrictive interpretative federal power on interstate commerce and limited judicial power (as mandated by the 11th Amendment);

That the State was meant to be "limited" in nature, and that it must be confined to the chains of the Constitution, as "America's Founders intended it to be";

That the State is meant to be in place to have "federal powers few and defined," and that some functions of society (such as roads, the police, prisons, and the courts) must be socialized and not left in the hands of a free market;

And so on and so on;

What's equally troublesome is their easily-debunkable claim that free markets exist now (despite regulations by the State) and their corporatist/privileged safety net protection rackets are protected and carried out by state decree. Even Objectivists fall under this perturbing rubric all too well.

If those phrases are meant to be taken seriously, then I must ask those who employ them in political and ideological discourses this very paramount question: Why? Why must we care about "limited government" when the State is not some kind of a canine that can be put on a leash and trained to behave at his owner's command? Is it worth spewing those words, knowing how impossible it is to have a limited "minimized state" government because of its temptation to grow? This political opiate has taken on a life of its own. Even the Founders of whom some conservatives and minarchist libertarians have grown so fond had individually different ideas of what the role of government should be in civil society on its own merits. It's no secret that the "Founding Fathers" of the United States couldn't bring themselves to see eye-to-eye on how "small" the State should be. (The Articles of Confederation merely accomplished this [despite some of the problems that it had], but that document was thrown aside in favor of the current constitution.)

If we are an astute judge of constitutional history, then it is obvious that the great constitutional experiment that the Founders established has not created a government "limited" within power and scope but a plutocratic-autocratic hybrid apparatus. In other words, the State has become both an instrument of unlimited power and a collusive partner with Big Business and Fortune 100 and 500 corporations that enjoy privileged advantages at the expense of the underclasses. This is where the "free market capitalism" angle comes in: a politico-economic system that is state capitalistic in nature but disguised as a pseudo "free market capitalistic" system exploiting the underclass and protecting privileged elitism by according the ruling class with tangible perks that are not available to the poor a.k.a. the ruled.

And it doesn't help that a minor subset of libertarians, whether they fall under the minarchistic or, to a lesser degree, the anarchistic categories, have embraced this "vulgar libertarian" mindset, while forgetting that they condemn corporatism if it does not benefit them but, once it starts to work for them, they immediately embrace it. And some of their conservative allies who embrace the constitutional fetishism that the State is their enemy and that Wall Street and corporate America are enemies of true liberalism, a free market, and a peaceful civil society.

Conservatives (even the Ron Paul ones) have done the same, albeit a much lesser degree than the others. If nothing, they are their own worst enemies, and yet they don't recognize that.

The conservative and libertarian love affair with maximum "limited" statism, corporatism, and constitutional fetishism is enough for me to deliberately question the absolute integrity of these groups.

Ron Paul Wins The Fox News Debate Poll

2011-09-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

According to Fox News' "Who Won The Debate?" poll, Ron Paul has won it, garnering 37.75% of the vote.

This is what the following poll shows:

Who Won the Debate?

By You Decide
Published September 22, 2011

Fox News and Google's Republican debate Thursday night in Orlando featured eight presidential candidates: Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. Who won the debate?

Share your thoughts, answer our question then click "Leave a Comment."

Thank you for voting!

Mitt Romney 23.37% (9,021 votes)

Rick Perry 12.73% (4,914 votes)

Newt Gingrich 7.23% (2,792 votes)

Ron Paul 37.75% (14,573 votes)

Rick Santorum 1.47% (566 votes)

Gary Johnson 2.05% (790 votes)

Herman Cain 11.67% (4,507 votes)

Michele Bachmann 2.11% (816 votes)

Jon Huntsman 1.62% (627 votes)

Total Votes: 38,605

At least this is a sigh of relief, given that tonight's debate was the most pathetic and most predictable one of all.

Bill Maher Takes A Potshot At Ron Paul

2011-09-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

Real Time talking head Bill Maher, with a panel of guests such as Mullings.com publisher/founder and columnist, Republican strategist, and former Vice President Dan Quayle and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich press secretary Rich Galen, The Eisenhower Institute's Jennifer Donahue, and Current TV host "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" (which used to be on MSNBC) Keith Olbermann (himself), took shots at Ron Paul, due to his answer to Wolf Blitzer (of "The Situation Room") over the health care issue at the CNN/Tea Party GOP presidential debate last week.

The exchange that transpired and erupted into a national media ruckus went like this:

MR. BLITZER: Before I get to Michele Bachmann, I want to just -- you're a physician, Ron Paul. So, you're a doctor; you know something about this subject. Let me ask you this hypothetical question: A healthy, 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides: You know what? I'm not going to spend 200 (dollars) or $300 a month for health insurance, because I'm healthy; I don't need it. But you know, something terrible happens; all of a sudden, he needs it. Who's going to pay for it, if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?

REP. PAUL: Well, in a society -- in a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him.

MR. BLITZER: Well, what do you want?

REP. PAUL: But what he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not before --

MR. BLITZER: But he doesn't have that. He doesn't have it and he's -- and he needs -- he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays?

REP. PAUL: That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks. (Cheers, applause.) This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody -- (applause) --

MR. BLITZER: But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah!

REP. PAUL: No --

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah!

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes! (Applause.)

REP. PAUL: I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa

Rosa Hospital in San Antonio. And the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals. (Applause.)

And we've given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves, our neighbors, our friends; our churches would do it. This whole idea -- that's the reason the cost is so high. The cost is so high because we dump it on the government. It becomes a bureaucracy. It becomes special interests. It kowtows to the insurance companies, then the drug companies. Then on top of that, you have the inflation. The inflation devalues the dollar. We have lack of competition. There's no competition in medicine. Everybody's protected by licensing. We should actually legalize alternative health care, allow people to have -- practice what they want. (Cheers, applause.)

Incidentally, Maher neglected to mention the last set of statements that Paul made at the debate, which explained his position on the matter, and yet Maher tried to sandbag Paul by launching into a "Ron-Paul-wants-that-30-year-old-man-in-a-coma-to-die" tirade that was unbelievably laughable all the way.

Maher's nonsense can be found here:

(Maher's potshot actually takes place at time index 5:03 in the YouTube clip, just to showcase how obtuse and myopic this douchebag really is.)

Maher and his panel, in a pathetically snarky yet par-for-the-course statist Leftist fashion, begin their attack by quoting Blitzer and Paul's statements during that moment in the debate. When Maher paraphrases, albeit in a twisted way, Ron's answer, Maher condescendingly screams out, "He's in a coma! How the fuck can he know what he wants to do?" Then Galen snarkily nods, "It narrows his choices!" Maher agrees, "It narrows his choices!"

Oh please! Blitzer's hypothetical was ridiculous to say the least. One day a healthy 30-year-old man who chooses not to buy health insurance is somehow on life support the next day, and the hypothetical doesn't even allow wiggle room for what might have caused him to collapse in the first place? And Ron Paul's answer was outrageous, because he favors separating health care and State, whereas Maher and his cronies don't? Who's kidding whom here?

It certainly tells me that Maher and his companions need to have their heads checked if they think they can respond with emotion without logic and critical thinking standing in the way of their collective judgment.

The Three Economies of America

2011-09-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

There are undeniably and distinctly three separate yet existing economies in America. We have the State-regulated and not-very-productive economy which is run by Big Business as part of Corporate America and is in collusion with the State. We have a State-run non-productive political economy which is run by the U.S. federal government, the Congress, the Military Industrial Complex, and its political fat cats (lobbyists). And then there's the underground, highly-productive, highly-efficient productive REAL private (Agorist) economy which is run by individuals providing products and services to people. I choose the latter.

Obama's Precious Jobs Program

2011-09-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

President Obama came off seriously resolute when he told members of Congress to pass his jobs bill immediately. (A transcript of his political speech is provided here.) The move was a ploy to buy votes and shore up political support for his re-election campaign, which has already swung into full gear. But then nothing what he says ought to shock anyone. It doesn't for me, at least.

Here are the videos of his speech before the entire body:

Part 1

Part 2

and Part 3

And what is so special about his precious jobs program that he wants imposed upon the populace by federal edict? Nothing...that is, if you haven't drunk the statist Kool-Aid and bought into his pie-in-the-sky rhetoric that it will "create" jobs and "boost" the economy.

Here's the warped logic of his plan: he claims that his purported $447 billion package will "grow the economy" if Congress acts to pass it "right away." (Notice that he echoed those words 18 times in a row.) But that's not all of it.

According to him, the bill is laden with payroll "tax cuts" that will bring us out of the recession and boost the economy. (I put the pluralized term tax cuts in quotation marks because of the dubious, suspicious, and fallacious claim of his statements.) When one views cuts in payroll taxes, one sees that the cuts gut the Medicare and Social Security taxes that make up the FICA tax. However, one must recognize that those taxes fund both Medicare and Social Security. Both programs are running colossal deficits and creating cost overruns that threaten their very existence. That simply means that they are generating less revenue than they require to issue their payouts to retirees (who are supposed to be the intended recipients of those funds). That also means that more of the funds that haven't been touched yet and are withheld in the Treasury will have to be cashed in at some point.

The news gets worse than that. I should note that the Treasury is already plagued with a $1 trillion-plus deficit. That means more money will be extracted from the already-weakened, highly-regulated productive private sector to reimburse the Social Security and Medicare monies. That will be so unless the President chooses to radically alter the tax code to make up the lost difference. But it will not be so. The money will be coercively taken out of private capital markets in the economy and shifted right back into those sectors in the appearance of higher taxes under the guise of a payroll tax cut. In Obama's Bizarro World, that's expected to boost the economy.

The plan unsurprisingly subsidizes small firms in the form of a doled-out $4,000 tax credit as a condition to hire more employees who have been out of work for six months or more than it would otherwise. This is giving employers an incentive not to hire workers because of the additional costs that this requirement would impose on businesses, considering this is not done in real demand but on political gimmicks and musical chairs. It sounds great to hire employees with this tax credit, but with other regulatory, tax, and other expenisve burdens imposed on businesses, this is, as I have stated before, just merely window dressing to shore up political votes for his re-election.

This is the liberaltard logic to which we are all subjected. My head won't stop spinning right now.

Rep. Allen West (R-Florida): Right on Obama's Jobs Plan, Wrong on 9/11

2011-09-11T15:16:00.001-07:00

Florida Republican Congressman Allen West appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano's Freedom Watch show on Fox Business this past Friday night to discuss the economic and financial impact on President Obama's jobs plan which he attempted to peddle to Congress on Thursday night. Of course, West condemns Obama's jobs plan (which he deserves good talking points for stating the obvious about the jobs bill on which the President wants Congress to vote), but then Napolitano shifts attention away from that topic and veers into the 9/11 remembrance issue (which is today, in fact).

West responds with his comments (which starts exactly at 4:13 in the following YouTube video.

West states, "9/11 is a historic event that we must never forget." A "historic event?" Who is he kidding? One assumes in a single breath that West is likening the 10-year-old attacks to a NASA space shuttle launch. What happened was a horrendous and atrocious tragedy that transpired ten years ago. Of course Americans are never going to "forget" what happened. That shouldn't be foolishly construed to signify that we must let it rule our lives or shape our way of life for eternity. Americans don't make a habit of recalling the brutal events that led up to and after the events of that fateful day on a daily basis. It's more or less a political talking point to fuel the War on Terror than to draw paramount lessons from a tragedy that was born out of the U.S. government's incessant interventionistic foreign and domestic policies that guided America on its imperial path for decades and after 9/11. Claims by the establishment that the federal takeover of the airports and every facet of American life has made the nation safer are apocryphal and dubious, given the unconstitutional and tyrannical abuses of the State's TSA and Homeland Security Department agents and officials. It's all a matter of public record. What will take for West and his cronies to see it?

West then continues, "You know, in this year we're gonna celebrate the tenth anniversary of 9/11." Why would any American in his or her right mind would want to "celebrate" such an awful atrocity that claimed the lives of 3,000 Americans who were killed in the crossfire because the terrorists responded to the repeated interventions of the U.S. federal government that have been the heart and soul of modern U.S. foreign policy for decades?

If we really want to pay homage to the fallen men and women in the World Trade Center towers and the planes that went down in those areas, then there's only one thing to do: end our foreign policy of intervention and replace it with one of non-intervention, bring our troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya, and spread the message of liberty and peace to those regions. End the sectarian violence, the coercion, and the corruption that have engulfed the people and their respective lands.

It's too bad the GOP and its stalwarts including West can't see that.

The U.S. Postal Service Needs to Go

2011-09-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

According to Monday's edition as well as Tuesday's edition of the New York Times, the U.S. Postal Service is attempting to avoid a default in its monthly $5.5 billion payment to the U.S. Treasury. The long and short of it is this: the quasi-government agency is faced with some looming (yet very likely) possibilities resting squarely on its shoulders:

Yanking Saturday delivery for its residential and business recipients;
Closing down 3,700 offices nationwide;

Consolidating other post offices;

Laying off 270,000 of its 574,000 employees;

Altering retirement and health care benefits and programs that its dwindling employee base enjoys;

According to the Times on Monday, the costs and reasons for the declining use of the Postal Service are simply the following:

'Our situation is extremely serious,' the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview. 'If Congress doesn’t act, we will default.'In recent weeks, Mr. Donahoe has been pushing a series of painful cost-cutting measures to erase the agency’s deficit, which will reach $9.2 billion this fiscal year. They include eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers — nearly one-fifth of the agency’s work force — despite a no-layoffs clause in the unions’ contracts.The post office’s problems stem from one hard reality: it is being squeezed on both revenue and costs.As any computer user knows, the Internet revolution has led to people and businesses sending far less conventional mail.

The Obama administration unsurprisingly responded on Tuesday with the following:

The Obama administration said on Tuesday that it would seek to save the deficit-plagued Postal Service from an embarrassing default by proposing to give it an extra three months to make a $5.5 billion payment due on Sept. 30 to finance retirees’ future health coverage.

Patrick Donahoe, the postmaster general, speaking before the Senate. His office has proposed alleviating its fiscal problems by taking back an estimated $50 billion in pension overpayments.Speaking at a Senate hearing, John Berry, director of the federal Office of Personnel Management, also said the administration would soon put forward a plan to stabilize the postal service, which faces a deficit of nearly $10 billion this fiscal year and had warned that it could run out of money entirely this winter.

'We must act quickly to prevent a Postal Service collapse,' said Senator Joseph Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which held the Tuesday hearing on the Postal Service’s financial crisis.

Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe testified that even with a three-month reprieve on the $5.5 billion payment, the post office was likely to run out of cash and face a shutdown next July or August unless Congress passed legislation that provided a long-term solution for the ailing agency.

To help erase the postal service’s deficit, Mr. Donahoe has proposed several painful and controversial steps, among them, eliminating Saturday delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers — despite union contracts with strict limits on layoffs.'

The Postal Service is on the brink of default,' Mr. Donahoe testified. 'The Postal Service requires radical change to its business model if is to remain viable in the future.'

Mr. Berry said the Obama administration would push for legislation to allow a three-month delay in the $5.5 billion payment. But he stopped short of endorsing a far-reaching proposal, backed by the postal service, to allow the agency to claw back more than $50 billion that two independent actuaries have said the post office has overpaid into a major federal pension plan. Postal Service officials say such a move would go far to alleviate the agency’s financial problems.

Mr. Berry said the administration was studying the proposal, but not endorsing or opposing it at this point.

For the longest time the agency has engulfed itself in an economic, financial, and political quagmire. Although it is in some ways configured like a private business, it is not functioning like one, and it certainly is not one. The prices of its stamps, envelopes, packages, and other services proceed to spike on an annual basis with no end in sight. New Jersey-based Rutger University's very own The Daily Targum scribed in an op-ed that the agency's labor costs "make up 80 percent of the USPS's operating costs" and that its own mail inventory "is so small these days the USPS cannot keep paying as many employees as much money as it currently does." (Bear in mind that the paper is crying havoc over the complete shut-down of the agency, saying that "it is still something we don't want to see." Why? Because, according to the Targum, "The USPS is a valuable federal service.")

The Targum also opposes "privatization" of the institution for the following reason:

[T]he increased privatization of traditionally government-provided services is a frightening thought for too many reasons to list here, and, therefore, we'd rather not have to rely on private companies for all of our mail needs.

This refrain is all too common from the minds of "privatization" (preferably, marketization) opponents. They believe that a federal post office must be maintained, and that Congress must rescue the agency and save its workforce from the impending forces of layoffs as forced upon by real, natural market forces working against the federal establishment, their concession that the agency is unable to remunerate its employee base as much as it used to due to the excessively low demand for its services notwithstanding. What the paper fails to figure into account is the health care and pension costs that are drying up the funds for the agency, which are mandated by the labor unions in their existing contracts. The unions as well as Congress have made it virtually (almost) impossible for the agency to craft its health care and retirement benefits plans, simply due to the political and protectionistic nature of these parties. Oh, and let's not forget that the USPS is protected by congressional edict from free market competition with any company that wants to jump into the game and offers consumers a better value and service that the USPS has failed to accomplished at its given, ongoing rate. This means that the organization is a legally-protected, government-approved, and government-imposed monopoly on the delivery of first-class mail and standard mail (once known simply as third-class mail). No other firm can legally challenge the USPS and provide more efficient products and services to customers because of the government cementing the Offices as the only legitimate provider of delivered U.S. and international first-class and standard mail; thus, Congress merely restricts access to mailboxes by the USPS. Other private mail firms are legally prohibited by law allowed to drop off deliveries to mailboxes.

The reason for this is that the prices charged by the USPS are universally uniform across the board throughout the States, irrespective of where its customers live. And the old congressional law that sustains the enterprise's monopoly on these services ensures that package deliveries are set at a uniform price based on the weight and volume of the contents within them, especially when it is cheaper than Fed-Ex or United Parcel Service (UPS).

The Constitution's own Article 1, Section 8 stipulates that Congress is accorded with the power "to establish Post Offices and post Roads." But just because the Constitution allows the government to get involved doesn't mean that the State should get involved, and that it should be granted an exclusive monopoly over mail service.

But how did the Postal Service become powerful? Throughout the 19th century, just shortly before the passage of the Postal Act of 1863, mail was dispersed from city to city where a post office would pick up the volumes, or an independent contractor handled the delivery. Then came the Postal Code of 1872, which put into place a local monopoly on mail delivery by outlawing private carriers. At one point these carriers numbered to 147 and pioneered some innovative services. For instance, they introduced postage stamps just before the Postal Service got into that business.

Before 1971, postal service was provided by the U.S. Post Office Department, which centrally planned the agency by fixing prices of its products and services and determined which managers would be charge. The agency was the biggest recipient of globs of congressional subsidies and an annual appropriations budget as set by the governing body. By the time the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 was passed and signed into law, the Department was shut down and reallocated into what has become the USPS today, thus making it a quasi-public independent agency separated from the Executive Branch and structured to be a self-financing agency whose own existence and its operations depend upon the sales of its postage, mail products, and other services. According to federal law, it must cover its costs, and request the U.S. Treasury to lend funds to it (which is supposed to be limited to approximately $3 billion annually in bailout subsidies to its coffers and allow for a total debt ceiling of $15 billion).

What makes this firm so different from real private firms is that it carries privileges that other companies are not allowed to possess. For instance, it is not subjected to vehicle licensing requirements, and it pays no sales and property taxes. As Tad DeHaven of the CATO Institute noted a year ago:

It doesn’t have to pay parking tickets, and it has eminent domain powers. It pays to itself the income taxes that it would owe if it were a private business.

Understand this point for once: the USPS is more or less a wing of the U.S. federal government. The Postmaster General and a Board of Governors, along with some federal control and oversight by the Postal Regulatory Commission are unaccountable to the taxpayers and the American public at-large. The federal mail delivery organization in itself neither has any incentive to innovate, nor reduce its internal and external fixed and varied costs, nor enhance customer service and other areas in the name of efficiency, nor establish other ways to keep it financially and economically solvent.

And this claim that private companies are not capable of providing our needs is nonsense. A private mail service enterprise could provide physical delivery of mail at a much faster and cheaper rate than the USPS does and provide postage, packaging, and a variety of options and services for clientele that would be far superior in terms of innovation and quality than the USPS does. However, in the grandest scheme of things, the Internet and smart phone technologies have provided innovative means of electronic communications for customers by ISP and mobile phone carriers at a fraction of the costs that rival the high, exploding costs of the USPS, thus making physical mail delivery a relic of American history.

While DeHaven and other similar critics urge for the privatization (or marketization) of the organization, I dispute that notion. I call for the abolition of the firm and allow an unfettered free market to prop up and flourish, providing more quality and more pioneering products and services to consumers globally at the lowest price. This signifies an end of the U.S. Post Office, an idea whose time has ultimately come.

The Conservatives' Opposition to Obama's Rejection of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)

2011-03-03T05:20:00.001-08:00

The Republican support for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) reached an all-time low this past week when conservative Republican favorite Congressman Ron Paul (in many circles of the Liberty movement), Newt Gingrich, and many others stated their outright objections to President Obama's ardent abandonment of the law by viewing it as "unconstitutional." (Ironically, it was former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr who later ran for President on the Libertarian Party ticket originally drafted, supported, and lobbied for the passage of the law in 1996, which was a clear-cut bipartisan compromise between the duopoly parties and would be signed into law by then-President Clinton. He now claims to oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment and endorses a bill oddly dubbed as the Respect for Marriage Act which, if passed and signed into law, would repeal DOMA, but for now I'll cautiously take his word for it.)

It makes one in the left-libertarian camp cringe to say that Barr, if he is indeed sincere about his opposition to the law that he himself created and pushed in the mid-1990s, is more libertarian than Paul on this issue, and one would not be required to make that statement lightly. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder issued a public declaration, stating:

Much of the legal landscape has changed in the 15 years since Congress passed DOMA. The Supreme Court has ruled that laws criminalizing homosexual conduct are unconstitutional. Congress has repealed the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Several lower courts have ruled DOMA itself to be unconstitutional.

Holder continues:

But while both the wisdom and the legality of DOMA will continue to be the subject of extensive litigation and public debate, this administration will no longer assert its constitutionality in court.

Obama's White House Press Secretary Jay Carney vouched for Holder and came to his defense by going on public record, noting:

The Administration will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act in the 2nd Circuit. [T]he President directed the attorney general not to defend because of the decision that it is not constitutional.

Ron Paul, in a par-for-the-course yet still disappointing fashion, aimed his missiles primarily at Holder and even at Obama with this press release:

The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996 to stop Big Government in Washington from re-defining marriage and forcing its definition on the States. Like the majority of Iowans, I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman and must be protected.

I supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress’ constitutional authority to define what other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a same sex marriage license issued in another state. I have also cosponsored the Marriage Protection Act, which would remove challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act from the jurisdiction of the federal courts.

The people of Iowa overwhelmingly supported, both houses of the Legislature passed, and the Governor signed into law the Iowa Defense Of Marriage Act in 1998. Iowans then valiantly recalled three activist Judges who spurned the will of the people by over-turning the state’s law.

Today’s announcement that the Obama Administration will abandon its obligation to enforce DOMA is truly disappointing and shows a profound lack of respect for the Constitution and the Rule of Law. President Obama has just unconstitutionally said that Iowa should have to allow San Francisco and New York City decide its marriage laws. That position is unacceptable.

The Administration’s dereliction throws the door wide open for special interests to abuse Federal power and attempt to force Iowa to recognize non-traditional marriage. Upcoming battles are looming just over the horizon.

I will stand with the people of Iowa, against Unconstitutional federal power grabs, and will fight to protect each state’s right not to be forced to recognize a same sex marriage against the will of its people. If I were a member of the Iowa legislature, I would do all I could to oppose any attempt by rogue judges to impose a new definition of marriage on the people of my state.

Former House Speaker and frequent Fox News guest, and conservative author and commentator Newt Gingrich* leveled his attacks on the Obama administration with this following smear:

The president is replacing the rule of law with the rule of Obama. The president swore an oath on the Bible to ensure that the laws be faithfully executed, not to decide which laws are and which are not constitutional

(*Note: It is entirely unsurprising, typical, and pathetic to hear this from a conservative hypocrite whose staunch defense for "traditional marriage" and "traditional family values" is undermined by his wreck of a marital life. How? It's much simpler than you think. He divorced his first wife for a woman whom he married and later divorced as well after he was caught having an affair with a congressional staffer at the height of his involvement in the Republican witch hunt against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He even didn't want to be viewed as a hypocrite then, but he doesn't get a free pass on that deal. He didn't then, and he still doesn't now.)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Congressman Lamar Smith, whom Ron Paul ubiquitously supported in early 2010 which proved that he sold out the Liberty movement for doing so, shared similar sentiments with his rank-and-file Republicans via this nasty comment:

[T]he politicization of the Justice Department -- when the personal views of the president override the government's duty to defend the law of the land

All of these right-wing talking points made by the above-mentioned usual suspects are indicative of the politically-charged, homophobic-laced statist Republican agenda
that serves to kowtow to the special interests of the loopy conservative (religious and secular) establishment and its cohorts. These clods who monopolize on the cultural and public moralities upon which the Right and its voter and member bases
depend possess this aberrational, detestable notion that any state-approved sanction of, support for, and codification of same-sex marriage at the federal and/or state level is tantamount to domestic federal intervention in the private affairs

The Social Conservatives' Culture War Employed to Undermine Same-sex Marriage

At the forefront of the scrutiny of Obama's decision to jettison DOMA is the social conservatives who have waged a long-standing culture war with the Left because in response to the rise, popularity, and dominance of the counterculture of the 1960s. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano's FreedomWatch on Fox Business on February 25 and has been a very staunch populist social conservative on items like "traditional marriage" and "traditional family values," took great steps to fight the culture war to undermine Obama's rejection of DOMA when he took potshots at Obama's legal decision by declaring it "legally wrong, but more importantly, he was politically wrong, and [Obama] was morally wrong." Then he added, "He was wrong on every front."

Interestingly enough, Huckabee stressed:

[I]nterestingly, Chapter one of my book talks about why issues like marriage and family matter. Uh, the very first chapter is that the very most basic form of government is the family. This is where we first experience government at its most local level. It's not the city, the state, the federal government. It's mother and father raising children; that is government.

Then, when asked whether families can be non-traditional and what business the government has in the institution of marriage, the former government rejoins:

Well, here's the question: what is marriage? Marriage is a man and a woman. That's what it is historically. That's what it is legally. If we change the definition to accommodate a man and a man or a woman and a woman, then why can't we accommodate a man and two women or a woman and three men?

When Napolitano points out that marriage is a legal contract between two individuals and that the State has no business to interfere with it, Huckabee then claims:

The business of government is to ensure that we have a stable society, because we have a $300 billion a year dad deficit in this country. That's in Chapter one. I talk about the fact that this is an economic issue. As a libertarian, Judge, you've got to love the fact that we're spending a lot of money to pick up the pieces 'cause fathers don't do their duty.

This exchange between him and Napolitano is endemic of the social conservative paradigm that has infested the Republican Party and its core base. It is ample evidence showing that the culture war between the social conservatives and the pro-same sex marriage legalization camp is running primarily based on populist politics and antiquated religious dogma cloaked in theocratic rhetoric, and the rush to defend the definition of marriage is greater than the public at large believes. This is also evidenced by the strawman argument levied against pro-gay marriage advocates that opposite-sex marriages are a product of the conservatives' Christian God and "6,000 years of recorded human history," as Huckabee ludicrously suggests.

Has Huckabee studied human history at all? Is he aware of the fact that King Henry VIII and other kings (even emperors) have been in opposite-sex marriages, all the while choosing and retaining mistresses for their strict sexual, political, and royal pleasures? Is he also aware that the Vatican (a.k.a. the Holy See) has often in its recorded history condoned the actions of despotic rulers for engaging and indulging in fornication with, lust for, and lustful control of women who were nothing but second-class sexual property in their eyes? For over 6,000 years, "traditional" marriage has never existed at all, given that, within the last 60 years, it has been nothing but a religiously-charged political, cultural, and social contrivance propagated by the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

While it is true that many men throughout the modern ages have married women for the sacrosanct need to produce and rear children and create families, patriarchs and even Biblical prophets in ancient times (such as Saul, Solomon, David, and Abraham according to the Old Testament of the Holy Bible) had practiced polygamy, which is the practice of men marrying multiple wives simulanteously. (Polyandry on the other hand, which was practiced more exclusively in parts of China, northern parts of India, and by various nomadic Tibetans in Nepali, is the practice of women marrying multiple husbands simultaneously.) Even today's social conservative establishment would view these practices outside the norm, despite the fact that polygamy was extremely common in earlier Christian times. How can Huckabee reconcile "traditional marriage" and "traditional family values" in the conservative tradition with his religion that evolved from an earlier form of Christianity that permitted these customary practices? Has he failed to see that his Bible has referenced polygamy that was once considered to be an element of Christianity in Biblical times, or does he disavow that fact? Either way, his ignorance of an old custom that was part of his faith is evidence of his ilk's passive misguided ideal, and the fact that his lack of knowledge on the subject is solid cannot be challenged, even if it is addressed. The notion that "traditional marriage" has been part of humanity from time immemorial is ludicrous, as historical evidence indicates the opposite.

The religious propaganda coupled with political zealotry of this camp knows no bounds. The culture war that has been issued to undermine -- and perhaps demolish -- same-sex marriage has been unleashed.

Joanne Pedersen, Edith Windsor, and Gerald V. Passaro II: The People Behind The Obama Justice Department's Decision

At the heart of the Obama Justice Department decision involved two gay individuals who filed lawsuits in New York and Connecticut. This comes after the Obama DOJ review two cases - Pedersen v. OPM and Windsor v. United States.

Joanne Pedersen, the chief plaintiff in the Pedersen v. OPM case according to the New York Times, objects to the DOMA law being applied against her when she applied for medical benefits for her married partner Ann Meitzen via the Office of Personnel and Management agency. She was denied again, which is not unusual in her case. She and Meitzen have filed a lawsuit against the federal government for discriminating against her on the grounds of her marriage (which is legal under Connecticut law) being not legal at the federal level thanks to DOMA. According to the Times:

To Ms. Pedersen, the question is one of justice. She and Ms. Meitzen, who married in 2008, have been together in Connecticut for 12 years. Ms. Meitzen, a social worker, has had health problems, and Ms. Pedersen, a civilian retiree from the Department of Naval Intelligence, tried to enroll her spouse in the federal employee health benefits program — a move that would save them hundreds of dollars a month.

Both women had been married before, to men, and have grown children. The fact that the law values one of their marriages over another is a source of consternation, Ms. Pedersen said.

'If we were heterosexual, we wouldn’t be talking today, because we would have the benefits,' Ms. Pedersen said. 'I would just like the federal government to recognize our marriage as just as real as everybody else’s.'

Maggie Gallagher, the Chairwoman of the National Organization for Marriage (a social conservative special interest group which opposes same-sex marriage), told the Times that legal challenges to DOMA in the courts are indicative of gay rights advocates who "continue to push a primarily court-based strategy of, in our view, inventing rights that neither the founders nor the majority of Americans can recognize in our Constitution."

Edith Windsor, another plaintiff and a widow of her lesbian spouse Thea C. Spyer, filed her suit with the legal firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison in league with the American Civil Liberties Union on the grounds that, if the law allowing opposite-sex married couples to file for exemption on their estate tax had been equally applied to her as a same-sex married woman, her filing of her spouse's estate taxes estimated to be about $350,000 would be zero. Asserting "disparate treatment," she's challenging the constitutionality of DOMA, as it defines "marriage" as "a legal union between one man and one woman" and "spouse" as "a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." Imagine the social conservative reaction to those suits.

The Obama DOJ issued a Washington Post op-ed in November 2010 which was reprinted in its editorial board, a statement on these two cases, which states the entire following:

Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer were together for 44 years and legally married since 2007. They lived in New York, which recognizes same-sex marriage. But none of that mattered when Spyer died at 77 in 2009 after a decades-long struggle with multiple sclerosis.

Windsor, now 81, was treated like a stranger to Spyer because of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which recognizes only marriages between one man and one woman. She was forced to pay $350,000 in federal inheritance taxes.

Gerald V. Passaro II and Thomas M. Buckholz had been a couple for 13 years when they were married in 2008 in Connecticut, which legally blesses such relationships. Buckholz had worked for 20 years for Bayer Corp., which extends certain benefits to domestic partners; he was also vested in the company's pension plan. But when he died in 2009, Passaro was denied benefits for surviving spouses. Because federal law governs the pension plan, DOMA applies.

This month, Windsor filed a lawsuit in New York challenging the constitutionality of DOMA. Passaro is one of the plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit in Connecticut. Their experiences demonstrate the injustice of this law. DOMA was created for the purposes of 'defending and nurturing the institution of traditional heterosexual marriage,' 'defending traditional notions of morality' and "protecting state sovereignty and democratic self-governance" -- dubious goals, at best.

How does the denigration of committed same-sex relationships strengthen opposite-sex unions? How could it be moral to pile hardship upon grief by forcing surviving spouses to deal with financial strains others are shielded from? How is federalism bolstered when states are prevented from applying policy and legal preferences in defining marriage, long considered the states' domain?

This year, a Massachusetts judge ruled that DOMA violated the equal-protection rights of same-sex married couples. Windsor and Passaro offer convincing arguments for why the jurists overseeing their respective cases should reach the same result.

Plaintiffs nationwide will probably try to chip away at DOMA's indefensible foundations. And the Supreme Court may yet have a chance to weigh in. But justice would best and most gratifyingly be served if Congress simply repealed the law, once and for all.

Why The Social Conservatives in the GOP Are Wrong

The social conservatives in the GOP are wrong to relegate gay couples who want to legally marry to second-class citizenry for all sorts of reasons, political and otherwise. One reason is that this is a human liberty issue all the way. Human liberty is neither some pie-in-the-sky concept nor abstraction; it's about how one chooses to live one's own life, and what relationships in which one wishes to engage. As long as one harms no one else, that's all that matters. As oversimplified as that idea may be, it is nothing but the correct one. We are talking about gay and lesbian couples who are routinely denied legal, normal, and mutual benefits of marriage that are afforded to married heterosexual couples - benefits entailing hospital visitation, custody of children, medical-making decisions for incapacitated partners (such as power-of-attorney choices and so on), next of kin matters, and more. Social rightists can be as glib, callous, and condescending as they want to be on the subject, but this is certainly a pressing concern. If one gay couple's liberty isn't protected, then all couples -- even the common law married ones -- will find that their liberties are subject to the whims of the vile State. That's not freedom; that's slavery nonetheless.

Another reason is that the State should not be involved in the sphere of the institution. No argument there. However, in the interim, until that goal is successfully achieved, the State in its current set-up should be evenhanded in its decisions regarding the issuance of marital licenses to couples who seek to unite in wedded bliss. Social rightists say that state-protected heterosexual marriages must be protected, because they are the foundation of a stable and functioning society. How foolish they are! The State has seriously undermined freedom of association, the family, and marriage by involving itself in those three key matters. (How conservatives believe that the State's meddling in the institution of matrimony is the savior of the modern family is perplexing, but that's Rightist "logic" for you.) Interracial marriages were once outlawed at the state level once until the Supreme Court intervened by ruling in 1967 that such laws violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection clause in Section 1, which reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Whether conservatives like it or not, the Fourteenth Amendment exists. By refusing to accord the same rights to homosexual couples the legal right to unite in wedlock, they are violating the tenet and spirit of that amendment. No ifs, buts, or whats about it! (If they want to throw a conniption over it, they can check out the old Loving v. Virginia case and come to their own conclusions about it. Otherwise, they need to get over it once and for all.)

Another reason they are wrong on this matter is that marriage is set up for reasons other than procreation. Yes, social conservatives do believe that marriage is only for procreation, and they have nothing to back up this claim whatsoever. If there were a kernel of truth in that talking point, then infertile and childless couples would be barred from entering in these contractual agreements in the first place. Couples marry for all sorts of reasons not relating to child rearing: economic security, emotional support and love, and so on. (Stephen Horwitz, The Freeman's contributing editor, wrote an outstanding column which chronicles this point.)

Moreover, the welfare state plays a role in the problem as well. Huckabee is right to say that there is a "dad deficit" in the heterosexual family unit today, but he is echoing words that many conservatives in the past have expressed. (Even former Vice President Dan Quayle said in public regarding the title character of the old hit CBS TV show Murphy Brown having a child out of wedlock in 1992.)

However, the reason the "dad deficit" exists because of the welfare state, not because of purported looming threat of gay marriage. Huckabee may be against single parenthood (like Quayle was), but he is merely politicking for his own amusement. That said, other divorced conservatives and single conservative parents are unlikely to support Huckabee, given that the GOP would be making a huge mistake in this endeavor. (Perhaps such a view on that would alienate their constituency that are made up of broken-up, dysfunctional divorced families, as CATO's own David Boaz once suggested, but that's a lame cop-out if there ever is one.)

Finally, DOMA supercedes the states' authority to decide what laws can and will be enacted in their own jurisdictions. Conservatives, who claim to be "strict constructionists" (meaning that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, must be constrained to what they perceive to be their ideal interpretation of the Constitution), believe that the federal law must be protected because it grants states the power to legislate bills favoring heterosexual marriages. But the law merely undermines states from deciding what the definition of marriage should and/or should not be. (Not that the states should decide what that definition is, because such definitions provide excessive amounts of wiggle room.) Besides, in the absence of the law, it is not as if the states can't write their own bills and decide what that definition is. State constitutions have been amended by voter referendum in nearly every state to reflect the definition as "one man and one woman" anyway. Have social conservatives totally forgotten about that, or are they just plainly lazy?

Considering gay marriage as a legal option is a much more appealing alternative to failing heterosexual unions, it cannot be overstated that one out of two heterosexual marriages are ending in divorce, and the rates are climbing. Part of that is due to the reality that heterosexuals are widely perceived to be the reason for the decline of straight marriage, Stephen H. Miller argues. The Pew Research Center's new study even validates this further, stating that one out of four Americans believe that heterosexual marriage is becoming an extinct species of its own.

Obama has done the right thing: rejecting DOMA and pave the way for individuals (primarily gays and lesbians) to legally marry. Conservatives, if they really care about the modern-day American family as they purport, should sit this out and let things play out the way they have been. Otherwise, they'd be committing political suicide, and that alone could cost them re-elections for 2012.

Not only that, it's the only right thing to do. Nothing more and nothing less.

Wal-Mart Becomes Part of the Department of Homeland Insecurity

2010-12-07T23:34:00.001-08:00

Wal-Mart's decision to ally itself with the State - i.e. the Department of Homeland Insecurity -- "to report suspicious activity in the stores or the parking lots" is another reason to call for the abolition of corporatism -- the unholy alliance between corporations and the State, especially, in this case, on the War on Terror.

Sadly, about 588 stores in 27 states will adopt the program in the form of "security announcements," although only 200 stores will willingly embrace this new measure in 24 hours.

According to MSNBC:

A short video featuring Napolitano will appear on TV screens at select checkout lanes, asking Wal-Mart shoppers to contact local law enforcement to report suspicious activity.

The company claims that the employees won't be "receiving any special training" to carry out the functions of the program. But it appears that the managers will work with local law enforcement to deal with the threat of "suspicious activity" itself that arises on the company's grounds, whether inside the stores or the parklots.

Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman, when asked about this plan, stated:

'We work with local law enforcement all the time,' Fogleman said. 'If someone needs help, we will certainly assist. If someone asks us to call police, we will call police.'

Here's the DHS video announcing the agency's partnership with the low-cost retailer, as evidenced by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's statist comments on the matter:

The Smearing of Ron Paul Over The WikiLeaks Matter

2010-12-05T07:22:00.000-08:00

CNN talking head John King and his panelists RedState.com's conservative managing editor, blogger, and pundit Erick Erickson (who joined King's show as a CNN political contributor this year, by the way) and the network's liberal political contributor and syndicated columnist Roland Martin smeared Ron Paul over for his support for WikiLeaks. Paul tweeted his comments on the WikiLeaks matter, stating:

Re: Wikileaks- In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.
7:25 AM Dec 3rd via web
Retweeted by 100+ people

Here's the video of the slam against Paul by the state-worshiping shills on King's show:

Listen to Erickson as he calls Paul a "nut" for sticking up for free speech and the truth. He also quips: "I believe [Paul] actually starred in a cartoon a while back as Marvin the Martian."

While you're at it, listen to Martin who sneers at Paul with these glib and slimy comments: "You know what? Being a native Texan, it's little hard somtimes for me to realize that Ron Paul is also a Texan."

Martin then grumbles:

I mean, what's the...? First of all, first of all...but here's the whole, here's the whole deal for, for, for Ron Paul. The members of the House on Intelligence Committee....they learn about things that are secret, and we don't know about. So, what is he, what is he saying? They should talk about those things? Come on, Congressman!

When King points out that, in reference to Paul and his supporters as well as everyone in the Liberty movement, "a lot of people who watch, who tweet, who follow, who email" what the two panelists (dingbats, as I call them!) say on TV will result in the network's inbox getting "higher and higher," Erickson says that he would have to change his phone number, while Martin says, "If you email me, I will email you back. So you go right ahead."

Memo to Martin: We'll be sure to do just that.

The height of hubris, vanity, and the self-aggrandizing and self-serving mindset from these apologists is just mind-numbing and putrid but not a surprise to all of us in the movement.

Good job, Ron Paul! More kudos to him! Hisses to the statists who want to destroy WL at all costs.

To Boycott or Not to Boycott Amazon

2010-12-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com's most recent call to leave WikiLeaks in the dark is no doubt a paramount disappointment to libertarians, anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, left-libertarians, agorists, laissez-farists, and lovers of liberty of all stripes who have done business with the online retailer in the past. I certainly have done business with Amazon, buying books from them in the past. Their selection of products and services, no doubt, have been optimal and still proceed to remain that way on the front of the company's website. And yes, admittedly so, they do have low prices, and they do provide a supply of goods and services for the masses at large.

Putting those points aside, Amazon has undoubtedly put itself in a very volatile and very precarious situation. After the company gave WikiLeaks the boot, a number of libertarians objected to Amazon's response to the State's threats toward it. In response to Amazon's decision, libertarians like Eric Garris (the head of Antiwar.com) called for a boycott of Amazon for its wrongheaded immediate choice. On a blog post entitled "Boycott Amazon" (which is posted here in its entirety) dated December 1, Garris writes:

Earlier today, Amazon.com took down the cloud servers that were being used by WikiLeaks to serve their site. One of the products Amazon sells is space on their cloud servers at a very competitive rate. Thousands of websites, including WikiLeaks, use their service.

Amazon.com gave no notice to WikiLeaks. Normally, in an ethical and legal business relationship, notice is given when contracts are terminated to allow for smooth transition. In fact, if WikiLeaks had chosen to terminate the contract with Amazon, they would have been required to give 30 days notice.

Amazon.com gave no such notice, they just unplugged the servers. As a result, WikiLeaks was down for several hours today.

Why did they do this? Amazon.com got a call from Senator Joe Lieberman who threatened to start a boycott. Other officials reportedly leaned on Amazon. I can understand Amazon’s fear of the government, but that is no excuse to unethically target a customer without notice.

In the past year, Antiwar.com has received about $10,000 from Amazon.com for referrals on the sale of books and merchandise. We cannot continue to profit from or deal with Amazon.com. We are removing the Amazon ads and book widgets from our website, and urge other supporters of WikiLeaks to join the boycott.

Garris is spot-on. Amazon epically failed to furnish a written notice to WikiLeaks, as it would need to do to any customers who purchases a service from the firm. Usually, a company would have to provide to its customers a cancellation notice in writing of its service, whether the customer asked to cancel the service or not. In this case, Amazon, given that it entered into a legally-binding contract with WikiLeaks, neglected to do just that. Although Lieberman threatened to launch a boycott of Amazon (including a federal inquiry into the company's well-established rapport with WikiLeaks), it does not justify and rationalize the business's politically-coerced decision to sever its ties with WL without notice. This is an unethical business practice that should be frowned upon, and it is disheartening, disappointing, and troubling that numerous libertarians are automatically ganging up on those libertarians for excoriating the retailer's immoral and unethical business practice, especially when the company made the risky choice to enter in a formal agreement with WL in the first place.

On Antiwar.com's site, Daniel Ellsberg, the famed U.S. military official who leaked out the Pentagon Papers which documented the U.S. federal government's lies about the reason why the United States went to war with Vietnam and the time line of events that led to the build-up of the war, wasted no time jumping onto the Antiwar.com Blog and, in a blog post entitled "Daniel Ellsberg Says Boycott Amazon," writes an open letter to Amazon's Customer Service:

Open letter to Amazon.com Customer Service:

December 2, 2010

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better. I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Biblio and others.

So far Amazon has spared itself the further embarrassment of trying to explain its action openly. This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear–and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses–to leak that information. They can send it to Wikileaks (now on servers outside the US), to mainstream journalists or bloggers, or perhaps to sites like antiwar.com that have now appropriately ended their book-purchasing association with Amazon.

Yours (no longer),
Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg is fundamentally spot-on here. Amazon's actions are "cowardly" and laden with "servility," simply because it didn't remotely bother to stand up to the State and its thugs, never minding the fact that Lieberman and his goons didn't promise not to go after them legally and intended to act on and carry out their threats simply by asking the company the business relationship that it had with WikiLeaks. The fact that it threw WL under the bus by simply ending its business agreement with a much-hated news organization in the manner it pursued and failed to provide WL an explanation as to why their site was being pulled is an indication that it panicked too easily and that it neither gave WL a chance to pull their files off the company's servers nor a choice to end its relationship with Amazon and act accordingly after the fact. Yes, there are those who will wave the pro-Amazon flag, saying once and for all that the firm was in a tough predicament, and it was forced to choose between having its business taken down by the State or walking away from a business deal it had made with a customer. Certainly they are free to make that point, and Amazon certainly reserves the right to accept or reject doing business with any customer and treat its customers accordingly in any way it sees fit. That said, that talking point shouldn't be construed to mean or tacitly insinuate that Amazon was IN the right for rejecting to do business with an organization like WikiLeaks. There is in reality no middle ground in this context or any other context known in existence.

(By the way, it should be known that Lew Rockwell, Michael S. Rozoff, Stephan Kinsella, David Kramer, Butler Shaffer, and other Rockwellers at the Lew Rockwell Blog are foolishly siding with Amazon's decision on the issue, even while they tacitly mock those who are permanently refusing to do business with the retailer.)

On December 1, the British newspaper The Guardian reported this in part:

The US struck its first blow against WikiLeaks after Amazon.com pulled the plug on hosting the whistleblowing website in reaction to heavy political pressure.

The company announced it was cutting WikiLeaks off yesterday only 24 hours after being contacted by the staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security.

WikiLeaks expressed disappointment with Amazon, and insisted it was a breach of freedom of speech as enshrined in the US constitution's first amendment. The organisation, in a message sent via Twitter, said if Amazon was "so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books."

While freedom of speech is a sensitive issue in the US, scope for a full-blown row is limited, given that Democrats and Republicans will largely applaud Amazon's move. Previously a fully fledged Democrat, Lieberman won re-election to the Senate in 2006 as an independent; his status is that of an independent, albeit with continued close associations with the Democratic party's Senate contingent.

The question is whether he was acting on his own or pressed to do so by the Obama administration, and how much pressure was applied to Amazon.

Skip Oliva wrote in response in part on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website:

In response, I’ve seen a few libertarians who are now calling for their own boycott of Amazon — 'I won’t be shopping there this holiday season,' etc. — to protest the company’s capitulation. I’m sorry, but that’s childish and stupid. First of all, you’re adopting the very tactics the state used against Amazon. Second, what you’re basically saying is that you’re going to let statists like Joe Lieberman decide where you will and won’t shop. That’s asinine. Third, it’s one thing to boycott a firm that actively colludes with the state or, say, lobbies for political favors; Amazon was a victim here, not a belligerent.

My response to Oliva is pure and simple. Who is he to tell these libertarians (who are very likely the left-libertarian types) whether they can refuse to shop or refuse to not shop at Amazon? He calls the decision "childish and stupid." Ok, Mr. Oliva, where were you when the Bush administration directed the hands of the National Security Agency (NSA) to strong-arm telecommunication carriers like AT&T Corp., Verizon, and BellSouth into handing over private customer call data to these thugs as part of its wiretapping program, all in the name to monitor domestic calls by instituting an international and domestic call database program despite their promises to the contrary?

Did you object to those phone carriers willingness to assist the Bush administration in that wiretapping scheme by boycotting their services or did you call anyone in the Liberty movement "childish and stupid" for voluntarily refusing to do business with them because those poor carriers were just "victims" of the State's strong-arming? More to the point, have you forgotten that telephone carrier Quest Communications refused to join in on the spying of Americans, resulting in the company being the lone holdout in joining in the scheme despite the NSA threatening the powers-that-be at the firm that they would cancel their government contracts with them (which led to many libertarians and civil libertarians praising them for their wise decision)? They didn't cave in, despite the threats and calls made to them by the State, and they protected their clients' privacy. What do you say to that?

The only ultimate price Quest paid was that its former CEO Joseph Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of violating insider trading laws in 2007, which resulted in him being incarcerated in 2009 for six years. Why? Because his employees and he refused to kowtow to the demands of the statists who wanted his customer call records. Was Quest wrong to not cave in to the demands of the State? The company paid a steep price for this, but to him and his team it was well worth the risk. Were you cheering him on for opposing the mandate, knowing full well that he was risking the loss of his company, or did you think he was "childish and stupid" for doing what he felt was the right thing?

I don't know about you, but the answer is this: Nacchio did the right thing. The government would have gone after Quest anyway EVEN IF it cooperated, simply by auditing its tax records, its books, and what not. As a corporation, a company is under the direct thumb of the State. It's under a huge microscope. You and I know this to be true. If one digit in its SEC filings is off, the armed goons of the State can pursue the firm, and we both know this. When you incorporate your firm by inserting into the clutches of the State (making it an arm of the creature), you create an unholy alliance with the State. Once your firm goes public, it has access to the State's guarantees, privileges, special regulatory and tax breaks, and subsidies that it otherwise wouldn't have if it were still a privately-held enterprise. After all, corporations are not a free market specimen but rather a spawn of the State, contrary to what libertarians like Stephan Kinsella, Walter Block, J.H. Huebert, and Brad Edmonds of LvMI assert.

Of course, Oliva also erroneously asserts this Neanderthalic point, which should be construed as an insult to left-libertarians and the entire movement in its entirety:

First of all, you’re adopting the very tactics the state used against Amazon.

Sorry, but that's just flat-out wrong. What the State employed against Amazon was the threat of violence if it didn't cooperate. What the left-libertarians did (and are still doing) is voluntary, non-violent against Amazon. Simply put, we choose not to do business with Amazon.

And, please, drop the hypocrisy here. Your side of the pro-Liberty aisle boycotts companies all the time in private for all sorts of reasons: you didn't like the service, you didn't like how the business was treating its customers and employees, you didn't like the tone and attitude of the managers, you didn't like the quality, prices, and appearance of the products, the location of the particular company, the limited selection of products and services, the unethical business practices, etc. Whatever the personal reasons you have and why you didn't like the company, you stopped shopping there. Whether you see it or not, you sent messages to those companies that you weren't happy with the customer service, the products, the attitudes of the employees and the service they provided you, and so on. It's called freedom of association. We consumers choose which companies to do business with and which ones we don't want to do business with, and we're a fickle bunch. No one in an authoritarian manner tells us where we can and cannot shop. We all have our own reasons for doing what we do, rightly or wrongly.

And, let's make ourselves crystal clear: the State is still going after Amazon, despite the company's cooperation with Lieberman and his goons. Here's a case in point from a sentence in Lieberman's statement to the press:

I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information.' [Emphasis added.]

Did Lieberman say he would back off from pursuing Amazon after it pulled WikiLeaks' account? No, it didn't. He said that he would be asking -- meaning he would vehemently pursue a criminal investigation against Amazon in a governmental and legal fashion -- Amazon what its relationship with WikiLeaks was. That means the State will be investigating Amazon and having its armed cronies meeting with and interrogating the powers-that-be at the Amazon offices, demanding to know why it had established a rapport with WikiLeaks in the first place. If you think the State will back off now, then you're either deluded or naive or both.

Here's the third point Oliva makes:

Second, what you’re basically saying is that you’re going to let statists like Joe Lieberman decide where you will and won’t shop.

Again, wrong. We're telling Joe Lieberman and Amazon that we're not doing business with a company and the thuggish State that can dictate to us who we can and cannot support and what organizations we can and cannot financially and politically support. By supporting Amazon, we would be essentially saying that what Amazon did was ethically right and supporting the company would be an automatic endorsement of what Lieberman and Amazon did by default. Oliva can spin this any way he wants, but he doesn't get to speak for everyone in the movement, dictate to the left-libertarians and other opponents of Amazon's actions what they are allowed to and not allowed to do, and so on.

Who is he to tell those libertarians who they can do and not do business with? It's none of his business anyway. What does he care if they refuse to cater to Amazon again? There are other firms from which individuals can purchase products and services that are comparable to what Amazon sells. Granted, they are not as well known as Amazon, but so what? There's Overstock.com, which sells the same products and similar services like Amazon. The real free market is on the Web, and there are plenty of alternatives to Amazon to choose from. One must know where to find them if they want the best deals, and more often than those other firms offer better deals than Amazon.

Third, it’s one thing to boycott a firm that actively colludes with the state or, say, lobbies for political favors; Amazon was a victim here, not a belligerent.

It is true that Amazon didn't "actively collude with the State or lobby for political favors," but that's not the point, Skip, and you very well know it. Amazon made its choice, and it was the wrong one indeed. Now it will have to live with the consequences of its decision, whether the firm likes it or not. You, the Rockwellers and other libertarians who want to condemn our side for opposing Amazon's actions keep saying that Amazon "was a victim here." That statement alone is nothing but intellectually dishonest pabulum. Amazon was not a "victim" here. It is disappointing to see libertarians in that camp playing the victim card on Amazon's behalf, politically speaking. The real victim here is WikiLeaks, because it was never contacted by Amazon with a statement, saying that it longer wanted its customer's business in the first place. How do I figure? Let me explain.

Amazon knew fully well what WikiLeaks was and what kind of a business deal it was getting into from the beginning. The company knew (or at least had to have known) for months that WikiLeaks was depised and wanted by the American Empire for releasing the classified videos and documents on its website. After all, the website had been and still continues to be a source of much great controversy, even months after being a topic of widely-held public discussion.

Are you telling me that the powers-that-be at Amazon didn't know what they were walking into the second they inked the deal with WikiLeaks to host its website onto the firm's own servers? Are you also telling me that they didn't somehow know that they were taking a huge risk for having WikiLeaks in their system and that they were inviting the federal government to come after them, which the State in fact did? If anything, they set themselves up for that likelihood in the first place. Perhaps they didn't think it through before they inked the deal with WL, but it was a risky business to which they agreed. It's not as if they weren't aware of the potential risks and probability of their decision to have WL as a customer. And, despite all that, they ended up probed by the State. They invited the investigation and threats of the State the second the word got out. Perhaps they didn't mean for it to happen, but that's irrelevant. (I'm not really buying that argument anyway, but I'm certain someone is bound to be making it, so it's fair to use it in a theoretical sense.)

Amazon was faced with a choice: either fight for its customer WikiLeaks, tell the State to stick it, fight for its survival, and still be persecuted by the State's goons, or drop its client, fight for its survival, and still be persecuted by the State and its goons. It was going to lose either way. It was presented with a "damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't" scenario. If I were Amazon and I had to pick one of those items on the menu, I'd choose "damned-if-you-don't." I'd still lose, I'd still be persecuted by Amazon, but at least I tried to fight back, even if the odds were stacked against me. At least I would have preserved my dignity as a company, even if it were an uphill battle for me.

KN@PPSTER's Tom Knapp incidentally isn't buying into Amazon's story over the WikiLeaks affair in the form of a statement to the press as reported by The Wall Street Journal. What is Amazon claiming? It's undeniably pathetic, amusing, theatrical, and illogical at the same time:

Amazon.com Inc. Inc. says it stopped hosting WikiLeaks from its Web servers this week because the controversial group violated its terms of service.

It was 'inaccurate' to claim that pressure from the U.S. government or large-scale attacks by hackers caused the company to discontinue its service of WikiLeaks, said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener in a statement.

Responding to pressure from members of Congress, Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks on its servers Wednesday. Geoff Fowler explains to Stacey Delo why Amazon was hosting the sensitive documents and whether Amazon will see a backlash for pulling them.

Earlier in the week, WikiLeaks had turned to Amazon's Web services after its servers in Sweden were hit by computer attacks. On Tuesday, staff from Sen. Joe Lieberman's office said they contacted Amazon to ask why the Seattle-based company was providing Web hosting services to the group, which recently released a trove of sensitive U.S. State Department documents.

Amazon said its decision was based on the fact that WikiLeaks broke its rules. Amazon, which rents Web infrastructure on a self-service basis, 'does not pre-screen its customers' but does reserve the right to discontinue service if its terms aren't followed, said Mr. Herdener.

WikiLeaks 'doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,' one of the stipulations of Amazon's contractual terms, he said.

Mr. Herdener said that Amazon's terms of service also require that content 'will not cause injury to any person or entity.' Yet he said 'it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.'

First, Amazon's claim is false, because the State DID go after it. Putting the entire onus on WikiLeaks by saying that it had violated its terms of service agreement because WL as an organization had in its possession declassified government files that were protected by IP laws (which is not true) and saying that media group did not "have a right" to those files are just utterly ludicrous. Why did Amazon approve of WL's account if that were true? Oh wait, Amazon says that it doesn't pre-screen its prospective clients before it approves them. Well, that's its fault, not WikiLeaks'. Amazon staff members could have reviewed WikiLeak's application before approving them if that were the case, but they didn't. It is highly unfair to blame WikiLeaks for that, not to mention extremely retarded.

(Thankfully, Knapp, who had originally awaited an explanation from the firm, made his temporary boycott permanent. Kudos to him for doing that.)

Even Wendy McElroy's husband Brad objected to Amazon's decision, saying that it was a bad call on the company's part, urging everyone to boycott it and announcing that he would be joining it as well.

Here's Amazon's lying, deceptive denial of the State coercing it to remove WikiLeaks from its servers:

There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate.

There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.

We’ve been running AWS for over four years and have hundreds of thousands of customers storing all kinds of data on AWS. Some of this data is controversial, and that’s perfectly fine. But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.

We look forward to continuing to serve our AWS customers and are excited about several new things we have coming your way in the next few months.

— Amazon Web Services

Yeah, right, Amazon. Uh huh. Sure. (More will be explored in another blog post at a later time.)

Even Brad isn't swallowing Amazon's line of reasoning here.

All in all, it is up to the individual to decide whether he or she should continue to do business with Amazon.com. No one -- not even Wendy McElroy, her husband Brad, Tom Knapp, and/or I -- can force one to not purchase goods and services from Amazon or purchase anything from any other alternative out there. One must make the decisions based on how much he or she values Amazon's service despite all this evidence against the company. But I do strongly urge people to think about it before they even consider buying from Amazon, whether they are first-time customers or returning customers.

No one says that Amazon doesn't have the right to terminate its relationship with its customers any way it wishes; it does. Again, that doesn't by default translate into meaning that it's made the right choice.

WikiLeaks Looks to Swedish ISP BahnHof to Host Its Site After More Denial-of-Service, Political, and Ideological Attacks

2010-12-03T08:11:00.000-08:00

WikiLeaks, which was recently dropped by Amazon.com after Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) called the online retailer's offices with tacit threats and demands to know the exact rapport of the "terrorist organization" and issued a press release stating that the government would be pursuing Amazon even as it had severed its ties to the group, has been switched to a Swedish server last night. (The New York Times provides more coverage on this as well.)

After a reported "denial-of-service" attacks and a series of political and ideological attacks aimed at the stateless group, the website's DNS host EveryDNS.com kicked the site off of its servers by killing its domain last night, thereby enabling WikiLeaks to post an update tweet on its Twitter page, in which it states:

WikiLeaks,org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks KEEP US STRONG https://donations.datacell.com/
about 11 hours ago via web
Retweeted by 100+ people

(By the way, the French government, in a letter dispatched to Reuters, is looking to coerce French ISP hosts from hosting WL, considering the organization had its site hosted partially by French enterprise OVH.)

Because of these attacks, WikiLeaks is now up and running again via Swedish internet service provider (ISP) Bahnhof that employs the Internet country code top-level domain .ch, which enables WL to host it on their servers. thus making it very complicated for the U.S. federal government to attack the site because of the fact that it's no longer being hosted on any server on American soil. (When a Web surfer goes to the site, the URL will show up as http://213.251.145.96/. That number in the URL is actually the website's actual assigned IP address that serve as a cyber "telephone number" to WL's DNS host and its servers, allowing the Web surfer to access the organziation's site. (The IP addy is mainly represented by the hostname of the site, which is, in this case, www.wikileaks.ch.)

Perhaps the statists in the U.S. federal government haven't figured out (or perhaps they have!) that WL is now operating its site via an ISP that operates out of a former bomb shelter - an ultra-secure location - in Sweden's Pionen White Mountains. How they are going to shut the website down after having moved to its server there is beyond me. But one thing is certain: WL isn't going away.

Not now and not in the forseeable future.

Here's a YouTube of Jon Karlung, CEO of BahnHof, describing the construction of the facility as "the heart of civil defense of Sweden":

[H/T to the L.A. Times for providing the YouTube video.]

The State's Impending Assault on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

2010-12-01T02:27:00.000-08:00

WikiLeaks, the renown international news media organization of ill repute for its role in declassifying the American Empire's top secret government documents and videos of the Empire's Wars with Iraq and Afghanistan that were clandestinely hidden from the American public, is once again in the cross-hairs of the vile State and its hawkish shills on both sides of the ideological and political aisles. Statist conservatives and liberals are by and large outraged at the organization for its latest release of a set of ten documents unveiling more than 250,000 diplomatic cables.

It is no secret that WikiLeaks is the most reviled, the most despised, the most defamed, and the most uproarious entity by the United States government. The organization is known not only to the U.S., but also to the entire world. Why? Simply because it has the gall to open and disclose files, videos, and other documented evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the American Empire that many libertarians, anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, minarchists, constitutionalists, voluntaryists, left-libertarians, agorists, and other free agents in the libertarian movement have known about for years. Interestingly enough, other governments of many other nations have remained silent on their sentiments over the hubbub, yet that was to be expected nonetheless. To paraphrase Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald (who made this a vital point in his post yesterday), this shows that no other organization has generated this much fury, rage, and contempt for an entity as much as the organization's nasty, diabolical critics have. It goes further than that. Groups that expose clandestine evidence of the United States partaking in criminal wrongdoing are more despised than those in power who commit vile and diabolical war criminal acts utilize secrecy as a formidable weapon to preserve, shield, protect, defend, and guard their supreme legitimacy.

The statist conservatives are fired up over the release of these documents, which they claim should have remained clandestine and left alone. These thugs are now calling for the murder of WikiLeaks head honcho Julian Assange without any criminal charges pending against him, due process, an arraignment, and a fair trial. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin lashed out at him by turning to her Twitter page, caterwauling in part:

Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book "America by Heart" from being leaked,but US Govt can't stop Wikileaks' treasonous act?
6:25 AM Nov 29th via Twitter for BlackBerry® Retweeted by 100+ people

Then she writes a Facebook note titled "Serious Questions about the Obama Administration's Incompetence in the Wikileaks Fiasco," in which she whines in part:

[Assange's] past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?

It's quite convenient for Palin to libel, smear, and lie about Assange with this following statement:

He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.

(Interestingly enough, the Pentagon responded to that claim, rejecting it because it is simply untrue. Perhaps someone should send Palin a memo about that.)

Townhall.com statist conservative columnist John Hawkins published a column yesterday morning entitled "5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange," in which he enumerated 5 reasons why the CIA should have already taken out Assange in broad daylight. Other statist conservative critics such as Seth Lipsky (whose column was posted by Jeffrey Goldberg) [who also accused the WikiLeaks founder of "treason" illiterally]), Mark Thiessen, Congressman Pete King, National Review's Jonah Goldberg, and yesterday's Wall Street Journal branded Assange as a "traitor" and should be assassinated without a trial or due process of law.

Speaking of Goldberg (who asserts that he opposes fascism), he inquired more than two weeks ago as to why Assange wasn't killed in the first place. In case anyone didn't catch it the first time around, he asked again:

Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?

It gets worse. Today former Arkansas Mike Huckabee has urged for the execution of Assange, further stating that the release of the embassy documents has placed "American lives at risk." According to RawStory.com, Huckabee states in part:

'Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason,' Huckabee said. 'I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.'

Additionally, he asserts:

They’ve put relationships that will take decades to rebuild at risk, and they knew full well that they were handling sensitive documents, they were entrusted and anyone who had access to that level of information was not only a person who understood what their rules were, but they also signed under oath a commitment that they would not violate it. They did.

Furthermore, he opines:

'And I believe they have committed treason against this country, and any lives they endanger, they’re personally responsible for and the blood is on their hands,' he added.

Tom Flanagan, a political scientist who is a former adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper, even called for Assange's murder on CBC News Network, which prompted a shocked and dumbfounded reply from the anchor of the show that was heard as saying, "Tom, that's pretty harsh stuff! Just for the record, that's pretty harsh stuff!"

Here's a YouTube of Flannigan's remarks, which have been regarded as a "shockingly flippant" fatwa against Assange that aired on Canadian television yesterday at 8:38 a.m.:

Interestingly enough, Flannigan recanted his statement hours later:

'I regret that I made a glib comment about a serious issue,' Flanagan said Tuesday in a statement to CBC News. 'If Mr. Assange is arrested on the recently announced Interpol warrant, I hope [he] receives a fair trial and due process of law.'

A "glib comment," huh? Really, Mr. Flannigan? That's a pathetic excuse, considering you just called for violence against a peaceful individual who believes in honest transparency from not only the U.S. government but all governments throughout the world. Perhaps you should have thought of that before you made that outrageously disgusting statement on the Canadian airwaves. That statement alone, while not covered by the First Amendment in the U.S. because he made the comments on Canadian TV in his native homeland (where there is no First Amendment-protected right to free speech), is tantamount to using free speech as an excuse to incite violence against a human being who has not committed violence against other individuals in any way.

The reason these vile, despicable jackbooted thugs want Assange dead is clear: the WikiLeaks leader had the gall to release the State's own documents to the public, as he and many advocates of Liberty believe the public has the right to know what vital information the files contain. That data pertains to the U.S. government's illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomatic discussions between various embassies around the world, and the truth about the various actions of the State which the government wants to conceal from the American people. Tyrants like Jonah Goldberg, Lipsky, Flannigan, Palin, King, Huckabee, Jeffrey Goldberg, Mark Theissen, John Hawkins, and many others on that side of the aisle will do whatever it takes to get rid of Assange, Private First Class Bradley Manning (who gave Julian the 260,000 embassy cables documents and the Collateral Murder a.k.a. the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike and Granai airstrikes videos), and any one who stands in their way to protect "national security," which is really the State's security.

Here are the Collateral Murder and Granai airstrikes videos:

The other group of people who want Assange and WikiLeaks on the chopping block is the statist progressives, who are the angriest and most incensed of the bunch. For instance, Hillary Clinton, who according to the WikiLeaks documents has been allegedly engaging in espionage against the United Nations, calls the cables release:

[A]n attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conventions and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.

It gets uglier between Assange and Clinton. Assange called for Clinton's resignation, which alarmed White House press secretary Robert Gibbs who vehemently called it "absurd." It's apparent that the statists are becoming exceedingly desperate that they have shut down public access to the files stored in the State Department's computers, which have resulted in cutting WikiLeaks off from the U.S. government's servers. In response, WikiLeaks was forced to rent Amazon.com's computer servers so that its website could resume operations at once. Why? Because the U.S. government launched attacks on the stateless-supporting organization's website, effectively rendering it neutralized. This is the Empire's massive attack on free speech yet, although this wasn't the first time that has transpired.

To make matters worse, Interpol has called for the arrest of Assange to face allegations of rape charges brought by two Swedish women. According to The New York Times:

The accusations were first made against Mr. Assange after he traveled to Sweden in mid-August and had brief relationships with two Swedish women.

According to accounts they gave to the police and friends, each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One said that Mr. Assange ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use.

The charges certainly are serious but are rather dubious at the same time. It seems very convenient for these two women to charge him with rape on the heels of the cables release if these two women actually exist, and if these incidents really happened the way they described it. Assange himself denies the accusations, which is fathomable given the odd timing of the release of the charges pending against him and that his relationships with the women were, according to him, consensual. Even former Australian intelligence official and current independent member of the Australian Parliament Andrew Wilkie doesn't buy into the charges, theorizing that they "could definitely be a set-up."

Currently, the Obama administration wants to prosecute him for espionage under the Espionage Act of 1917, due to the fact that he can't be tried for "treason," because he's not an American citizen. Extradition may be difficult as Assange's whereabouts are primarily unknown, even though speculation has it that he is living somewhere in the UK.

Even if the Department of Justice wants him on a governmental silver platter, prosecuting him on the grounds of espionage alone will be extremely difficult. Greenwald notes on his Twitter that MSNBC commentator Chuck Todd is correct on this:

He's right: RT @emptywheel "To his credit, @ChuckTodd noted that any prosecution of Assange would justify prosecution of Woodward, too."

The idea that the State has a "right" to privacy is laughable. After all, the attempt to take out WL is not about protecting the lives of all Americans. It's about protecting the life of the State from any political elephants or eggs it always has on its face.

But more importantly, it sends a disturbing message to us all: "You can't make some omelets without cracking a few governmental eggs." Can the statists stop it? They could, but it will be so unlikely, given that they hardly ever care what happens in the final analysis and the ends always justifies the means. That should never be discounted for any reason.

No matter how you slice and dice it, this is the state's impending assault on Julian Assange and his stateless organization known simply as WikiLeaks. Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans are for the outright crucifixion and persecution of Assange, WikiLeaks, and all who have been and are a part of it must be called on it at any time whatsoever.

The future of human liberty largely depends on it.

Update: Amazon.com, which picked up WikiLeaks yesterday after the State Department shut down its entire mainframe thereby cutting the stateless-supporting organization from continuing to hack into its server and retrieve more classified and videos from the system, has decided to drop WikiLeaks from its rent-a-server system, because it caved in to political pressure from the U.S. federal government. According to The New York Times:

The move to drop WikiLeaks came shortly after members of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee pressed the company to explain its relationship with WikiLeaks. The site WikiLeaks had previously been using went down for several hours after an Internet attack over the weekend, prompting the group to switch over to an Amazon host site, which rents out bandwidth and other services.

Apparently, dark forces within the government has begun to direct its attack on the company. It appears that Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) issued a statement to the press, in which he is taking legal and political action against Amazon for its rapport with the organization. He decrees in the following:

WASHINGTON – Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., Wednesday issued the following statement after Amazon.com decided to terminate its relationship with Wikileaks. After reading press reports that Amazon was hosting the Wikileaks website, Committee staff contacted Amazon Tuesday for an explanation.

'This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website. I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks' previous publication of classified material. The company’s decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. [Emphasis added.] I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. [More emphasis added.] Wikileaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials. I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information.'

In other words, Joe Lieberman is the reason why Amazon backed off on its support for WikiLeaks out of fear of governmental reprisal from the statists in power. Amazon didn't want to take the potential legal and political risks that would more than likely arise in the fall-out, and it more than likely didn't want to be legally charged with "aiding and betting a 'terrorist' organization," so it took the easy way out and give in to the state, without considering that the First Amendment protects them and WikiLeaks on constitutional grounds.

But still, it doesn't excuse Amazon's decision to drop WikiLeaks, even if the State would have gone after them or anyone who supported the news organization in any form. To retreat from supporting, assisting, and helping the group when the U.S. government and the entire world are at a critical juncture is a sign that Amazon is nothing but a whore for the State, not to mention a coward. As WikiLeaks said about Amazon's call to remove the organization's account on their servers on its Twitter page:

If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.

Hear, hear WikiLeaks! You won't get an argument from me on that standpoint alone!

Update II: WL has now returned to its original Swedish host Banhof.

The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel Issues Mediocre Apology to John Tyner

2010-11-28T16:10:00.000-08:00

The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Huevel issues a mediocre apology to freedom-loving hero John Tyner for its direct hatchet/smear job targeting him. The reason I say it's "mediocre" because her apology does not extend to her rag's attack on renown occasional Free Talk Live co-host and FreeKeene.com blogger Meg McLain, who yesterday issued a very much-justified counter-assault on Yasha Levine and Mark Ames (the hack journalists responsible for their notorious and odious smear job that was in part aimed at her but mostly at Tyner).

Her apology would be more meaningful if it were also directed at Meg McLain, because Levine and Ames smeared her by tacitly and simply portraying her as part of an Astroturf operation that was a central thesis of The Nation hatchet job/hit piece. Her apology would be even more meaningful to LibertyOnTour.com's Pete Eyre, who was also a target in the article. Lumped in with McLain as purportedly being on the Koch brothers' payroll, the piece in part nastily writes about Eyre in the following context:

One of the libertarians that McLain met with, Peter Eyre, has spent much of the past five years on a variety of Koch payrolls: as an intern at the Koch-founded Cato Institute, a "Koch Fellow" at the Drug Policy Alliance and nearly three years as director for the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, home also to the Koch-funded Mercatus Center.

Eyre has since issued an outstanding "take-no-prisoners" rebuttal against the shoddy smear job.

George Donnelly, a co-founder of WeWontFly.com (as well as a good friend of mine), was also a target, although he was merely mentioned in one paragraph. He was unfairly lumped in with McLain in the following excerpt:

George Donnelly, a libertarian colleague of McLain's who writes that he "loves" her traveling libertarian friends in Florida and "learned a lot" from them, also happens to be one of two men behind the WeWontFly.com, one of the main websites pushing the "National Opt-Out Day" movement. The domain was registered on November 3, 2010, five days before McLain's fake airport incident. Donnelly provided McLain with the funds to return back to her libertarian commune in Keene, New Hampshire, after the (fake) incident.

Donnelly has leveled a brilliant attack on the rag with a blog piece, castigating them for tacitly framing him as a "Kochtopus."

Nonetheless, here is Heuvel's substandard apology in its entirety:

At TheNation.com we make it a point to practice fearless, bold, timely journalism that raises critical issues ignored by the mainstream press. On very rare occasions that ambition leads to mistakes, and when it does, we're committed to acknowledging them and setting the record straight. Unfortunately, a recent article by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, "TSAstroturf: The Washington Lobbyists and Koch-Funded Libertarians Behind the TSA Scandal," was one such moment.

As Glenn Greenwald of Salon quickly pointed out (and as other writers echoed), the article wrongly suggested that John Tyner, the libertarian citizen-activist who coined the "don't touch my junk" protest against the TSA's security procedures, might be linked to an Astroturf operation. Ames' and Levine's article didn't directly call Tyner a plant, and they didn't say that he was funded by the Koch brothers. Nonetheless, their article gave that impression--by placing Tyner in the article's lead and by using a generally disparaging tone to refer to him. The article also used innuendo to cast doubt on Tyner's motives, and when Tyner denied any connections to lobbyists and to Koch-funded organizations in an interview, we printed his denial--but we didn't press hard enough to get clarity on his actions and intentions. We should have stopped and done just that, and if Tyner's story checked out, we should have removed him from the piece.

We have published a reply by Ames and Levine that acknowledges some of these problems, but as editor of The Nation, I also want to apologize to John Tyner. The Nation hasn't been--and never will be--in the business of muffling citizen protest.

We are, however, committed to bold reporting and to airing intelligent debates even--or especially--when they challenge our preconceptions and make our readers uncomfortable.

Citizens from across the political spectrum are right to call out the TSA's invasive procedures and the threat to civil liberties they represent. We have long opposed, and exposed, the continuing encroachments of the national security state, though we also think that those who applauded each sacrifice of liberty for security under the Bush administration should expect to be regarded with skepticism if the presence of a Democrat in the White House suddenly prompts libertarian concerns. As John Tyner pointed out, this issue "isn't Republican and it isn't Democratic." It is also simply a fact that the backlash against TSA procedures has led to calls for racial profiling and for the privatization of the agency.

I believe the furor over the TSA scans warrants further reporting and analysis. We do, however, pledge to do it with the care and integrity that marks The Nation's best journalistic traditions.

Now, if she would kindly extend her apology to Tyner to McLain, Eyre, and Donnelly, then my fellow lovers of Liberty and I would be doing the happy dance. But we won't be holding our breath. Until then, her apology is second-rate at best.

Free Talk Live's Meg McLain Versus Yasha Levine and Mark Ames of The Nation

2010-11-28T00:34:00.001-08:00

Occasional Free Talk Live co-host and FreeKeene.com blogger Meg McLain, who was recently smeared (along with another hero John Tyner) by The Nation (specifically the rag's writers Yasha Levine and Mark Ames) in a piece entitled "TSAstroturf: The Washington Lobbyists and Koch-Funded Libertarians Behind the TSA Scandal," has authored a response to the statist liberal clods behind their invective-laced hit piece.

Incidentally, on November 24 (exactly on National Opt-Out Day), The Nation's top blogger Jeremy Scahill lambasted the writers for engineering this pathetic-joke-of-a-smear via a tweet on his Twitter page,in which he writes:

The article my magazine, The Nation, published about John Tyner is a shameful smear.

(More to the point, these ludicrous, irresponsible, and unfair acts of name-calling, libeling, and smearing show how partisan and political Ames and Levine really are and are endemic of the so-called journalists' ulterior motives.)

(Thankfully, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com authored a blog post to chime in on the uncalled-for smearing of McLain, Tyner, and the vile authors' libelous, pernicious, and baseless smears aimed at other libertarians in the movement over the TSA hubbub. Levine and Ames followed up with a response to Greenwald's piece, in which they claim that they didn't intend to smear Tyner, which is a baldfaced lie. Greenwald rebuts their rebuttal perfectly in Update III of his blog post, exposing their hateful, spiteful, and malicious lies, ill-intentions, and partisan biases all the way.)

Nonetheless, here's Meg's wonderfully-drafted response to The Nation regarding their hit piece targeting her in part.* (While there are some grammatical errors in the piece, and she didn't proofread it, that's not a major concern to me, as she brilliantly gets her message across to her readers about her experiences with the TSA [which I will include in a follow-up blog post about the TSA] and sets the record straight on the accusations that have for nearly a month sullied her good name.)

My Response to The Nation's TSA Articles

by Meg McLain

I was appalled at the absolute strait out lies The Nation found the balls to print about me, and I thought I would finally sit down and respond, both publicly and to the writers/editors at this abysmally written rag.

As there are now 2 articles (one making bold face lies about me, and another confirming their position on those lies); I have decided to start this response with a line-by-line deconstruction of the section that mentions me in the 2nd article. This pretty much sums up their stance in the first article, so I can give the broader answers here.

The Nation: "We also documented the story of the first “victim” of the TSA—a libertarian named Meg McLain"

First line, first lie. I am not a libertarian. I do not claim to be a libertarian. At no point during any interview did I say I was a libertarian. I find party politics of any kind to be repugnant, and 'libertarians' are a political party. I consider myself to be a sovereign human being who interacts with people on a voluntary and consensual basis. Politics have nothing to do with me, and I want nothing to do with them.

The Nation: "—who was found to have lied about being sexually molested by TSA agents."

I never stated, insinuated, claimed, or even came close to accusing the TSA of sexually molesting me. The whole reason I was kicked out of the Florida airport was because I was uncomfortable with the new "enhanced pat-downs", and I attempted to ask some questions to see if we could come to a compromise that would show I wasn't a threat but not require me to endure something I was personally not ok with. After asking the questions, the TSA blew things out of proportion, and assumed I had refused the pat down, so I was eventually escorted out for not completing screening. Moreover (and to the great embarrassment of this magazine's crap 'journalists') the TSA never claimed I lied about them sexually molesting me. Because I never said they did.

After my incident became public, the TSA posted up two security videos from my encounter with the TSA. They never outright said my story was untruthful; however, they insinuated it by saying something to the effect of "We'll let you [the viewer] decide what happened." The only problem is these two videos do not cover the entire encounter. The portion missing includes a few of the events I had spoken about on the radio that were never captured in the two videos posted (both from cameras angled away from that area). Nothing I said was a lie; however, much of what I said was misquoted, distorted, or even made up by the media.

I attempted to make a clarification after I listened to my original interview (which I had done less than an hour after the incident occurred). This was not to "cover up a lie", but rather to explain that when I said "nobody else was taken through the advanced screening" or sometime like that, I was trying to convey that nobody else was brought into the secondary screening area I was in. This was not an admission of lying, this was an attempt to clear up something that I misspoke on and could have worded differently to be better understood. But because I was telling the truth, the TSA and police couldn't even say I was lying when asked point blank. All they said was, "We cannot confirm or deny anything". It was purely an attempt on someone's part to sway the discussion of my incident from the real issue at hand to whether or not my story was even real. It was. And if you're going to take two videos without timecodes or full coverage of the incident as evidence of a "lie", at least have the intelligence to figure out the lie I'm accused of making.

*I would also like to add that the entire description of my version of what happened is so appalling misquoted, and so far off from what I actually said that I'm really wondering if the "journalist" even bothered to listen to the audio, or if he just read things and made it up himself. I also find it comical that the author was too stupid to realize he based the claim that nobody screamed "Opt Out" by referencing a video with no sound.

The Nation: "Before Tyner, McLain was being heralded by the same right-wing PR network, particularly Matt Drudge and Koch-funded libertarians, who later promoted Tyner to fame and who last year led the PR drive promoting the Tea Party movement. McLain’s ties to the Koch brothers are well-documented in our piece—and Greenwald, for reasons unclear, studiously avoids rebutting any of our evidence."

I have no idea who any of these people are, with the exception of John Tyner, whom I first discovered and met online well after both our incidents occurred.

Now here are some additional quotes from The Nation's original article that give more detailed lies to it's readers.

The Nation: "McLain is an occasional co-host of a libertarian radio show out of a libertarian quasi-commune located in Keene, New Hampshire."

I do not believe Free Talk Live is a libertarian radio show. It is the show a friend of mine hosts, and I enjoy the discussions and subject matter, so I sit in as a co-host from time to time. I have no idea where this quasi-commune thing came from. I live in a damn house with a roommate and a dog. Since when is that a commune? Because I have a roommate? Because once in a while we share our food? Really? Thats just flat out stupid writing intended to be offensive for no reason, and with no basis.

The Nation: "As reported in theWashington City Paper, the libertarian "Free Keene" movement where McLain makes her home is yet another libertarian project tied to the billionaire Koch brothers, the prime backers of the Tea Party campaign, through the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University."

How exactly is Free Keene tied to these guys I've never heard of? Does it go any further than 'the Koch brothers have mentioned it once'? If they do have some financial ties with Free Keene, I would like to know, cause I am poor as crap and don't make a dime off that website.

The Nation: "By her own account, McLain was down in Florida visiting a pair of traveling libertarians who were spreading the word of libertarianism in what they billed as "Liberty On Tour," funded at least partly by Koch-backed organizations like "Students for Liberty."

The Nation: "George Donnelly, a libertarian colleague of McLain's who writes that he "loves" her traveling libertarian friends in Florida and "learned a lot" from them, also happens to be one of two men behind the WeWontFly.com, one of the main websites pushing the "National Opt-Out Day" movement. The domain was registered on November 3, 2010, five days before McLain's fake airport incident. Donnelly provided McLain with the funds to return back to her libertarian commune in Keene, New Hampshire, after the (fake) incident."

You know why I was in Florida? The trip was an f-ing birthday gift from my mother, so I could visit a boy I had a crush on. I was going to see a boy I liked. Thats it. And it actually didn't work out that well for me in the end, in case you'd like to rub some salt in that wound too.

Before I had booked the trip, I checked on the TSA's website to determine which airports had body scanners, and Ft. Lauderdale was not listed. I had actually gone to the airport assuming I had done my due diligence to ensure I wouldn't have to encounter one of these machines. When I was chosen for the body scanner, I honestly had no intention of not going through screening; however, I WAS very nervous and uncomfortable with both the options the TSA were giving me, so I attempted to ask a few questions to remedy my discomfort. What happen as a result of those questions was not only unintended, it was downright frightening.

I didn't even know if the friends I was visiting were still in the area, and I could have easily gotten stuck sitting outside the airport with no money, and nowhere to go. I was lucky enough to get ahold of them, and they rescued me from the horrible incident. I was asked to call in to Free Talk Live shortly after and tell the story of what had just happened to me, so I did. I never expected it to be put in the media spotlight, as I didn't think it was that big of a story.

It wasn't until the next day that I even "met" (online only) George Donnelly, who had heard me on FTL the night before, and made the audio into a video for his website. While I didn't mind him doing that, I didn't want the attention of the media (The Nation's article is a glaring example of why entering the public eye is a horrible idea). I did the first few interviews simply as a way to raise funds so I could get back home, by promoting a chip-in that many people were kind enough to donate to. However, after the media started, I began getting thousands of emails. While many of them were less that friendly, much more of them were from victims of TSA abuses writing to tell me about their experiences and offer their moral support. It was these hundreds of heart breaking responses that made me continue responding to media after raising the money to get home. These people were hurting, and they had no voice to express that. I didn't want to be that for them, but I had to do something. If nothing else, shed light on the issue. I was fully aware that it meant more long hours, headaches, and enduring more of the most hurtful and mean things ever said to and about me.

This whole thing was never an intention. I never sought out fame over a situation I never wanted to be in to begin with. I haven't gained anything from it. And I sure as hell was never asked to do it, or offered payment for it. I have had weeks of stress, hate mail, heartbreak, and a massive loss in productivity, which has taken a financial toll on me. I marvel that The Nation would be so brazen and heartless to make up an entire story about a nice young girl from a little town in Oregon, and turn her into some key player of a domestic terrorism conspiracy, which now puts me at risk for any number of horrific consequences including government investigations, personal attacks, and other such nightmares. All this without making one effort to contact me to confirm the facts.

So all I have left to say to The Nation Magazine is:

Your journalistic integrity is an embarrassment, and you should be ashamed.

[*Note: Thanks is given to Meg for allowing me to reprint her piece on my blog.]

ABC's The View and Whoopie Goldberg Brand George Donnelly and James Babb of WeWontFly.com "Terrorists"

2010-11-26T22:06:00.000-08:00

Renown statist liberal Hollywood actress and The View co-host Whoopie Goldberg, along with her statist cohorts statist liberal "journalist" Barbara Walters, statist conservative Republican dingbat Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and statist liberals Sherri Shepherd and Joy Behar on the air, branded WeWontFly.com founders George Donnelly and James Babb "terrorists" for simply pushing National Opt-Out Day, which was a huge success on November 24 (a day before Thanksgiving).

Just for the record, Goldberg thinks that NOD is, to her, "an act of terrorism." Hasselbeck mentions George and Jim's names on the air, inquiring why their names are not on the terrorist watchlist. Behar says they should be on the list. Even Ron Paul was mentioned on the show, and they seriously took issue with Ron's opposition to the TSA's pedophiliac and sexually assault-inducing "security." I assume they think he is "a terrorist" too now?

What about the 94% (originally reported as 92%) of the public at large who opted-out of flying a day before Thanksgiving? I suppose they're all terrorists too, right? That's right. If you don't submit to being molested, raped, groped, and manhandled by the State, you must be a domestic terrorist.

Whoopi and her pathetic thugs on the show -- including her mindless, zombie-like viewing audience who eats up the show in droves -- might as well label me a terrorist for simply refusing to fly because I don't want my nude pics of my corpulent body showing up on the Internet or saved on file or being fondled by a grotesque-looking TSA agent who would definitely get off on it.

In any event, here's the video clip of Goldberg and The View hosts' comments that was put on Donnelly's YouTube channel:

R.I.P. David F. Nolan (1943-2010)

2010-11-21T16:16:00.001-08:00

I was shocked and horrified to hear of the sudden demise of Libertarian Party founder David F. Nolan, who passed away last night of "unknown causes," as reported by LP activist and medical marijuana advocate Steve Kubby, after having heard about it and confirmed it from Nolan's wife Elizabeth, on his Facebook wall. (Italian pro-Liberty activist Luca Fusari was the one who had heard about it and told me on Facebook but wasn't it was true or a joke. It is sadly true, as I have confirmed it from Lidia Seebeck and Kubby themselves.) Tom Knapp has reported on IPR and KN@PPSTER it as well.

Here's what Kubby wrote on his Facebook wall about an hour ago:

Steve Kubby DAVID NOLAN R.I.P. - Libertarian Party Founder David F. Nolan died last night of unknown causes. I just spoke to Elizabeth Nolan who confirmed David's passing.

According to David Euchner (who also spoke with Elizabeth) on his FB wall:

David Euchner
I just got off the phone with Elizabeth. David was feeling ill from valley fever and was driving to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription - a neighbor found him slumped over the wheel about a block from the house, off the road. He never re...gained consciousness.

We usually go out for dinner and a beer for our birthdays this week, so this was not the news I was expecting when I saw his phone number appear.See More
15 minutes ago · Like

Nolan was an interview guest in Episode 7 of Liberty Cap Talk Live with former panelist Jakki Smith, pro-Liberty friend and panelist Virginia Tuckey, Boston Tea Party member and former California BTP Chairman Joy Waymire, and long-time libertarian movement activist Donald Meinshausen and my co-host Jim Landrith, Jr. on the show, which aired on September 8, 2009 on BlogTalkRadio.com. He was on for a 51-minute interview on the show, which was a great interview that he had given because the panel, my co-host, and I asked him some great questions about the state of the LP, the race for LP Chair between Mark Hinkle and Wayne Allyn Root, and so on. Sadly, it remains as one of the last few interviews he gave before his untimely death. To me it's one of my favorite interviews of all time.

According to Kubby, Nolan was being treated for early stages of prostate cancer*, as he was getting his lab and other medical tests, blood checked regularly, etc. Unfortunately, until more facts are discovered after an autopsy is done on him, the cause of his death will remain unknown. What's worse is that, according to Kubby and a couple of people with whom I spoke on the phone, Nolan's birthday is coming up this Tuesday.

I can only imagine how his wife and family must be feeling right now. I wish them my condolences.

I had the pleasure to know Dave a bit. I confess that I didn't know him THAT well, but he was for better or worse the most influential person not only to the activists in the LP and the libertarian movement, but also to me. He was the one who helped shaped my ideas and thinking as an ideological purist not only in the LP but also in the movement. He's had a profound impact on my life, for which I will never, ever be ungrateful.

Soon there will be a tribute to Nolan by the members of both the Party and the movement.

Dave, we love you and miss you. You are our light and our inspiration in our movement, which is still not a huge movement at all. But you contributed to the pavement of its evolution and its growth, which will be handed over to generations for posterity.

You will be missed. Wherever you are, I hope you are at peace.

*Note: Paulie Cannoli told me he died of pancreatic cancer, but I'll take Kubby's word at this point.

[Update: Here's the video player for Dave's appearance on my show, dated October 8, 2009:]

Listen to internet radio with LibertyCapTalkLive on Blog Talk Radio

[Update II: I forgot to mention that Dave was 66 at the time of his death. This Tuesday he would have been 67 years old. Still, what a young age to die in this day and age.]

[Update III: I also forgot to mention that Dave was the creator of the Nolan Chart, which is used by The Advocates for Self-Government. Again, thanks Dave!]

Wesley Snipes to Serve Three Years for Tax Evasion

2010-11-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

In case anyone hasn't noticed, actor Wesley Snipes, who is a renown tax protester, has been sentenced to three years for tax evasion. Incidentally, the federal judge presiding at his trial has declined his appeal for a new trial.

'The defendant Snipes had a fair trial ... The time has come for the judgment to be enforced,' U.S. District Judge Terrell Hodges said in his ruling.

Revoking bail for the 48-year-old star of the 'Blade' trilogy, the judge ordered him to report to prison as directed by the U.S. Marshals Service or Bureau of Prisons.

"Fair trial"? What drug has this judge been smoking? The high-profile felony case was a joke to begin with, simply because the court refused to allow Snipes to meet with jurors for interviews and would not allow motions for a new trial.

And he calls it a "fair trial."

While I disagree with Snipes' tax protester arguments (which basically state that the federal income tax isn't legal), I agree that income taxation employed by the State is coercion. If anything, it amounts to nothing but thievery by the vile hands of the State.

The Earmarks Racket

2010-11-16T11:45:00.000-08:00

The Republicans' wailing over earmarks is laughable at best. That even goes for the mainstream media as well.

The claim that they are spreading is that earmarks account for 1% of the federal budget. That's hogwash! That's a cute ruse employed by the thugs in Washington to obfuscate the real picture of the budgeting itself. It's rather paramount to put this matter in its proper perspective. It actually accounts for 1% of discretionary spending, which only constitutes 37% of the entire federal budget. That said, earmarks only make up 2.70% of the budget itself. Still, that is a meager amount, and the elimination of them wouldn't make a dent in the entire spending whatsoever.

Another ruse that the media proliferates is that earmarking is spending, which is an absurd canard on its face. Earmarks are merely an allocation of appropriated ("assigned") tax ("stolen") funds to a politician's district for various political interests such as economic development, infrastructure, and other purposes. Remember the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" under former Governor Sarah Palin's watch?

Senate Republicans are already posturing as grand opponents of earmarks by signing on board with a two-year moratorium on the issue, although that is simply a farce by itself. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his fellow GOP colleagues are known on record for requesting earmarks for their districts. The Center for Public Integrity, which focuses on "investigative journalism for the public interest" by investigating congressional and senatorial politicians and their legislative records, points out that McConnell appeared on CNN in July of 2009, asserting the following:

The stimulus was a big mistake. I think we can fairly safely declare it now a failure.

The Center even went further:

Two months later [McConnell] signed five letters requesting funds from the Department of Transportation for a variety of stimulus projects, including a railroad rehabilitation program that he said could "attract industry, create jobs, and move goods through areas underserved by national highways."

At least one of McConnell’s requested projects was accepted, with $20 million being earmarked by the Department of Transportation for a bridge replacement between Milton, Ky., and Madison, Ind.

What's more, McConnell is also on record for requesting a $1 billion in pork for Kentucky. Now McConnell is having a crisis of morality years after supporting earmarks for his own district? Balderdash!

This is nothing more than political showboating and grandstanding from the Republicans as a way to snooker the public into believing that they are really cutting spending when that couldn't be further from the truth. Earmarks enable them to buy votes from their constituents and their special interests. The absurdity of their opposition to earmarks would be hilarious if it weren't terribly pathetic. Not that I'm defending this practice (as I really don't), but the reality is that, if they ban earmarking, it would destroy any political capital they could reap during every midterm and presidential election season.

Earmarks should absolutely be abolished; however, what the Republicans are calling for is nothing short of a racket. They must be called out on this fraud, which they are perpetrating.

Bush Is A Liar and a War Criminal

2010-11-15T10:34:00.000-08:00

Last week's Dateline NBC news correspondent and Today co-anchor Matt Lauer's highly-touted, highly-talked about hour-long interview with former President George W. Bush has sent attentive shock waves throughout the entire media establishment, the nation, and the world. More accurately, it has been a critical bust for the network and its show, considering it's accumulated a meager 7 million viewers, pushing it to fourth place.

More importantly, while it has been an eye-opener for the show's viewers, it hasn't been for its critics who finally see that Bush has admitted his war crimes against humanity -- waterboarding, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, rape, sodomy, torture, homocide, and other forms of sexual assault against detained Iraqi insurgents ("freedom fighters" or "rebels" in the eyes of the Iraqi populace in their native homeland). (Sadly, President Obama has continued these atrocities which have been largely ignored by the establishment and its media cronies, but that's not a surprise because they are heavily in bed with one another.)

The Lauer-Bush interview, which was conducted to promote Bush's new book Decision Points, ought to give observers pause. (Many pundits refuse to buy into Bush's war criminal and warmongering propaganda and lies, except for the Fox News commentators who are smiling in the background.) When water-boarding is discussed, Bush responds with the following statements taken from the show's official transcript (which is available at the network's Decision Points website):

BUSH: We believe America's going to be attacked again. There's all kinds of intelligence comin' in. And-- and-- one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda… ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He's got information." I said, "Find out what he knows.” And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use 'em."

LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?

BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer., but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.

LAUER: You say it's legal. "And the lawyers told me."

BUSH: Yeah.

So, Bush claims that water-boarding is "legal" because his attorney said it was. That's an outright confession of a war crime right there (which he even openly let slip in his book). Bush, while using the excuse that his "attorneys" said that it was "legal" to do it, knows that just because it was legal to do it under American law at the time of that incidents doesn't mean they were legal internationally. The U.S. like every nation is subjected to international law, whether the hawks in his administration and his supporters like it or not. (Are Bush and Co. aware that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949 mandate that prisoners of war (POWs) are to be "treated humanely" and that all acts of torture against them as well as homocide, rape, and all other vile atrocities are illegal under international law? I supect they do, but they apparently have no compunction in violating the terms of those treaties.)

The fact of the matter is that Bush and Co. had the legitimate power that they had given themselves to decide what is "legal" and what isn't. But, even when it was legal to employ such a horrendous technique, did it "keep America safe" as his defenders posited? Of course not! Everyone is well aware of the fact that, when a prisoner is subjected to water-boarding (which is the act of coercing the captive to believe that he or she is drowning when it is artificially, psychologically, and mentally induced, although water is sprayed or poured over his or her nostrils), no truly legitimate intelligence is extracted from the detainee. In the words of actor Jake Gyllenhaal's character CIA operative Douglas Freeman tells a U.S. government-backed Middle Eastern official in Northern Africa in the 2007 film Rendition:

In all the years you've been doing this, how often can you say that we've produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies.

Whether Bush, Obama, and Co. want to acknowledge it or not, he's right. As a matter of fact, the use of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of a citizen from one country and brought to another and kept at a clandestine location, as established by the Clinton administration, carried out by the Bush administration, and continued by the Obama administration has not come to a screeching halt. Although Obama has put a stop to extraordinary rendition via an executive order simply by allegedly ensuring that the practice is compliant under international and domestic law and establishing a Task Force, he has not put an end to "erroneous rendition" (the practice of kidnapping a citizen and employing extraordinary rendition due to mistaken identity).

Moreover, the use of water-boarding, even after the application of extraordinary rendition, does not result in attaining and obtaining reliable intelligence as stated above. The reason being? Captives who are held for these illegal proceedings will lie while being tortured just for the torture to stop. They will virtually say anything to get out of it. Besides, that unreliable data is inadmissible in a court of law. Japanese soldiers and officers who employed waterboarding on their American prisoners during World War II were tried for war crimes and hung in 1945, and our own courts set precedent for the criminal prosecution of those thugs by establishing water-boarding's status as torture. The real deep-seated message that Bush told Matt Lauer's viewers that night is, "Torture against our enemies is okay, as long as the state does it. If other governments do it to us, then it's not okay." This is nothing but purely blatant hypocrisy from Bush and his conspirators.

Of course, here comes this grotesque tidbit from the interview:

LAUER: Not everybody thought you should go to war, though. There were dissenters.

BUSH: Of course there were.

LAUER: Did you filter them out?

BUSH: I was-- I was a dissenting voice. I didn't wanna use force.

What's interesting is that the his following additional statements were deliberately omitted from the televised interview in contrast to the transcript that was leaked out to the press a few days before the telecast:

BUSH: I mean force is the last option for a President. And I think it's clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world's better off without somehow [or someone?] in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis.

(Why NBC omitted that bit from the aired interview when it was broadcast on the airwaves that night raises some eyebrows from a critical standpoint. I surmise that they didn't want the public to know that Bush was lying about giving "diplomacy a chance to work." That even includes his lie (which Bush apparently has made himself believe) that 25 million Iraqis are better off without Hussein in power.)

All of this is in reference to Bush's discussion of his claim that the CIA's "rock solid intelligence" showcasing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were stockpiled and directly controlled by Saddam Hussein prior to and leading up to the War in Iraq. Bush purports that he wanted diplomacy "to work," which is in stark contradiction to his actions in 2002 and 2003, in which his team and he knowingly contrived a report allegedly put out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that suggested that Saddam Hussein had violated U.N. resolutions by producing WMDs and having them in his possession, and that such weapons posed a threat to the national-security apparatus of the United States.

In his March 17, 2003 "ultimatum speech" he delivered to the American people, Bush claimed the following:

[T]he Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people.

The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends and it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda. The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other.

The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety.

In the same speech, Bush also declared:

In the case of Iraq, the Security Council did act in the early 1990s. Under Resolutions 678 and 687, both still in effect, the United States and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a question of authority, it is a question of will.

After listing Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs, Bush also warned at the time:

And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail.

This is, of course, the same Bush who also asserted the following canard in the same speech:

In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over.

More to the point, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush painted Hussein as "[t]he dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons" and also concluded his anti-Saddam rant with the following:

A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all.

On August 26, 2002 former Vice President Cheney even peddled this political fraud by appearing before members of the Veterans of Foreign Affairs with the following assertion:

Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

Approximately two weeks later, with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side, Bush, still peddling the lies about the WMDs, told reporters:

I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA, that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need.

Cheney, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, hocked the late show host Tim Russert the lie further with this new baseless claim:

[W]e believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

What a sham it turned to be! The IAEA made no such claims whatsoever. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the agency, told members of the U.N. Security Council at their 4714 meeting:

First, there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as having been reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.

Secondly, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.

Thirdly, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminium tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even if Iraq had pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminium tubes in question.

Fourthly, although we are still reviewing issues related to magnets and magnet production, there is no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment programme.

As I stated earlier, the IAEA will naturally continue further to scrutinize and investigate all of these issues.

After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear-weapon programme in Iraq.

This is scathing proof that Bush lied to his viewers and to Matt Lauer that night, knowing full well of the lies perpetrated on his side.

Bush furthers his lies by claiming that he felt "sick to his stomach" when reports of the abuses occurring at Abu Ghraib. The transcript from the interview goes like this:

LAUER: It was the spring of 2004 when you first learned that American soldiers operating as guards at a prison called Abu Gharib had terribly mistreated prisoners. Can you just give me your first reaction, your first emotions when you heard the--

BUSH: Yeah, I--

LAUER: --news?

BUSH: Sick to my stomach. Not only have they mistreated prisoners, they had disgraced the U.S. military and stained our good name.

If that's true, Mr. President, why didn't you go after them when you had the chance? Why weren't there calls for criminal prosecutions against those soldiers when the opportunity presented itself in the first place?

Why didn't he do this? Because what he said is a lie all by itself. Seymour Hersh, a progressive writer for the New Yorker, detailed the disgusting abuses transpiring at Abu Ghraib via a report (infamously known as "the Taguba Report") by Major General Antonio Taguba. Hersh writes in his May 10, 2004 report:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

It should be noted that, on the day of the publication of Hersh's article, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Bush's administration, stated in a TV interview that he did not read the Taguba Report.

Interestingly enough, Bush and Co. implemented damage control on their end, purporting that the leaked photos revealing the abuses were nothing short of aberrations stemming from a handful of sexually deviant National Guard soldiers. What they fail to understand is that Hersh's anonymous informant, who happened to be a military consultant who worked closely with the officials at the Pentagon, went on record with Hersh, telling him that the photographs were principally and specifically intended to be be used to blackmail the abused prisoners "to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." After that sentence, Hersh notes:

The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

Hersh even pointed out:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

That's proof that Bush didn't feel "a sickness in his stomach" when he saw the photos. He had plotted this all before the invasion and occupation of the Iraqi homeland. Again, it is more proof that Bush is a liar.

With all of these points put into their proper perspective, Bush is a definite candidate for prosecution for committing war crimes against humanity. He's a liar and a war criminal. Case closed. End of story.

Tonight's George Bush Interview

2010-11-08T16:17:00.000-08:00

I'll be watching (and DVRing at the same time) George Bush's interview on Dateline NBC at 8 p.m. EST tonight. I'll be drawing some conclusions of my own following the broadcast.

In the meantime, check out the preview of the interview here.

Here's an excerpted clip of tonight's interview:

George W. Bush: War Criminal

2010-11-08T14:28:00.001-08:00

George Bush writes in his new presidential memoirs Decision Points (which is due out tomorrow, November 9) that he did authorize the CIA to employ "enhanced interrogations," also known as water-boarding, of detained "enemy combatants," a.k.a. war-on-terror suspects (such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) at the height of his second presidential term. Water-boarding is the practice of torturing a prisoner simply by pouring water over his nostrils and face, forcing him to think that he is drowning when simply he is not. It produces an automatic gag reflex that is accompanied by physical symptoms such as deprivation of oxygen to the brain, pain, dry drowning, catastrophic damage to the lungs, and psychological trauma.

The practice is a crime under American and international law. When will charges of war crimes be brought against him? And what will it take to press those charges? His accomplices such as former Vice President Dick Cheney and former U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft should be slapped with the same charges.

It would behoove President Obama not to be viewed as one simply by ordering U.S. Attorney Eric Holder to prosecute that case.

Ron Paul on Scoreboard: Rand and I Will Introduce Legislation to End the Fed

2010-11-05T20:43:00.001-07:00

Ron Paul appears on Fox Business' Scoreboard, telling host David Asner that he and Rand will introduce a new bill to call for eliminating the Federal Reserve.

While this is encouraging across the board, I'm unconvinced as to whether they can achieve and attain a great amount of success in their bold effort to pull the plug on the Fed. I'll reserve judgment for the time being.

Until then, color me skeptical.

Bush Defends His Decision to Invade Iraq

2010-11-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

Former President George W. Bush, in an upcoming interview he gave with Today Show host Matt Lauer to tout his new presidential memoirs Decision Points, defended his decision to invade and occupy Iraq, all the while claiming that he was a "dissenting voice" against the war establishment's push for the invasion and occupation of that homeland.

MATT LAUER:
Not everybody thought you should go to war, though. There were dissenters.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
Of course there were.

MATT LAUER:
You know, there were questions at the Pentagon. Colin Powell had questions. Brent Scowcroft, your father's former National Security Advisor, and dear friend, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I'm paraphrasing here, saying, "It's not a good idea to go to war in Iraq." So there were dissenting voices.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
I was a dissenting voice. I didn't want to use force. I mean force is the last option for a President. And I think it's clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world's better off without somehow [or someone?] in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis.

Funny enough, he ends up contradicting himself, as evidenced in this following exchange with Lauer:

MATT LAUER:
You know the question. If you knew then what you know now--

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
That's right.

MATT LAUER:
--you would still go to war in Iraq?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
I-- first of all, didn't have that luxury. You just don't have the luxury when you're President. That's a very hypothetical question. I will say definitely the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, as are 25 million people who now have a chance to live in freedom.

History judges you on the decisions you make. Sometimes history doesn't judge you on the absence of a decision. And I believe Saddam Hussein in the Middle East today, if he were there in power he would be enriched, he'd be emboldened. He would still have the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction, whether we found the vats of weapons of mass destruction. And I believe it's likely you'd be seeing a nuclear arms race between Iran and Iraq. And the world would be much more unstable. And America would be-- less secure.

MATT LAUER:
Your words. "No one was more sickened or angry than I was when we didn't find weapons of mass destruction." You still have a sickening feeling when you think about it.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
I do.

MATT LAUER:
Was there ever any consideration of apologizing to the American people?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
I mean apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision. And I don't believe it was the wrong decision. I thought the best way to handle this was to find out why. And what went wrong. And to remedy it. And that's why we had the Silverman Robb Commission.

So let me get this straight: Bush was a "dissenting voice" in moving the U.S. into a war with Iraq, yet he doesn't "believe it was the wrong decision"?

After what's been leaked out thus far, I'm voting for the latter. According to Iraq Body Count, the number of deaths have now reached between 98,585 and 107,594 civilian casualties from 2003 to 2010, which he and President Obama combined now both have blood on their hands.

This claim that he had tried to employ diplomacy is a baldfaced lie. There is no evidence of any kind that he used this tactic to avoid launching his invasion and occupation. This is evidenced by the fact that Bush, his pro-war cronies, and their American allies claimed that Hussein was producing "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs) that purportedly jeopardized the national-security state of the U.S. Bush and former VP Cheney alleged in 2002 and 2003 that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) claimed in an alleged report asserting that Hussein was manufacturing "chemical and biological weapons" -- a document that the IAEA subsequently denied in the first place. In other words, that "report" was an outright fraud upon the American people, and Bush and Co. knew it the entire time. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has been on record stating that, while it is true that Hussein and his regime failed to abide by the United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for WMD disarmament, there were no WMDS found in his possession. Even if there had been, the stockpile would have been virtually useless because of years of deterioration and had become harmless.

[*Note: See Jim Bovard's piece "Bush's WMD Flimflam," which is an excellent piece that goes into great detail about the lies of the Bush administration and its flimflam that he and his ilk perpetrated on the American people.]

After all has been said and done, what kind of fools does Bush truly take us for?

29% of Americans Voted in Midterm Elections

2010-11-04T19:19:00.001-07:00

It turns out that the voter turn-out at Tuesday's midterms on a national level was not as high as observers and analysts predicted would be.

According to Channel 7 KBZK.com in Bozeman, Montana:

Nationally, voter turnout was higher Tuesday than for the mid-term elections four years ago....The turnout is projected at 42 percent of registered voters. That translates to about 90 million people, 6.2 million more than in 2006. [Emphasis added.]

To analyze it much further, the break-down of the math is like this:

According to the Midterm Elections 2010 Rates data table at the United States Elections Project website, 90,504,100 registered voters showed up to vote at the polls on Tuesday. That's 90.5 million voters casting their votes for Highest Office (which is the highest vote counted for Governor, U.S. Senator, and combined House of Representatives). The Voting-Eligible Population (VEP), which is the number of eligible registered voters for this year's 2010 midterms, is 218,054,301. Divide the Highest Office by the VEP, and what you end up getting is 42% of the total number of minority eligible registered voters electing the 112th Congress to office via pluralities/majorities.

According to the Census Bureau's U.S. Population Clock, there are exactly 310,636,612 Americans living in the United States. If one takes the total number of eligible registered voters -- that being 90.5 million -- who showed up to vote on Tuesday and divide it by the total U.S. population count (as given by the Clock), only 29% of the entire population, whether they are registered to vote or not, cast their votes, thereby electing the 112th Congress to office via pluralities/majorities.

That leaves 71% of Americans either choosing not to vote or being unable to vote because they were prohibited from doing so (because they were convicted of a felony which legally prevents and prohibits them from voting, they were under the age of 18, or they were fundamentally and legally disenfranchised). Furthermore, that percentage alone is not an indicator of why those who opted out of voting this year chose not to engage in the process. Thus, "apathy" is not the reason for those who embrace non-voting as a means to reject the political process; on the contrary, "non-consent," which is the tacit choice not to be governed by the ruling elite, is the reason for those who have turned their backs on voting.

For the next two years, the congressional and senatorial establishments will "represent" (rule) us, meaning that he or she, regardless of whether either he or she has an R or D next to his or her name, will have the legitimate power to have authority over us.

Quite par for the course.

[H/T goes to Tom Knapp of KN@PPSTER and the creator of the newly-formed Ⓧ2012 Project for bringing this to everyone's attention in the Liberty movement.]

Senator-elect Rand Paul Chooses Campaign Aide as Chief of Staff

2010-11-04T06:13:00.000-07:00

Senator-elect Rand Paul, who won his senatorial race in Kentucky against Democratic opponent Jack Conway, has chosen campaign aide Doug Stafford, a long-time GOP political consultant, to be his Chief of Staff who will be responsible for assembling a Senate staff.

WLKY.com reports:

Stafford serves as vice president of National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and as a consultant to the Campaign for Liberty, an organization chaired by Paul’s father, Ron Paul, a Texas congressman and former GOP presidential candidate.

I will admit that, while Conway was worse than Paul on a number of key issues, Rand has made me feel uncomfortable throughout the election season with his comments on a handful of issues that obviously paint him as a social conservative on that front. His troubling positions, as best as I can assemble them, include his positions on gay marriage and medical marijuana, Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act* (specifically because of his poorly-argued, poorly-worded semi-libertarian defense of private racist proprietors who refused service to people on the grounds of their skin color), his defense of the War on Terror (specifically his opposition to closing down Guantanamo Bay a.k.a. Gitmo and trying the "enemy combatants" in New York that issue became the center of a much-publicized controversy), his polarizing stances on illegal immigration and birthright citizenship, abortion, transferring some functions like disbursing student loans and Pell Grants of the Department of Education (which he does favor ending, and I concur with him on this) to other departments and agencies in lieu of eliminating them, to name a few. Additionally, his comments on the recent BP oil spill, in which he called Obama's criticism of BP "un-American," rankled me because, although I oppose the federal government's involvement in the clean-up, BP ought to have been held responsible for the spill and be forced to pay for the clean-up costs.

I'm willing to reserve judgment and see how he handles his first six-year term. But don't expect me to hold my breath either.

[*Note: While I agree in principle that racist proprietors have a right to be racist and do have a right to exclude anyone for any reason (even if it has to do with that individual's skin color) because of my support for freedom of association, that does NOT translate into me saying that I condone the behavior. I am a much bigger fan of community organizing (like Obama is), and I do favor boycotts, sit-ins, non-violent and voluntary ostracism, and other forms of non-violent protests aimed at private statist employers who use their bigotry as a moral and rational justification for averting non-violent customers from entering their establishments. Such criticisms of these grotesque practices are valid and widely accepted in the Liberty movement. It is regrettable that Paul had to reverse his position on that provision of the bill due to the ugly fall-out of his comments which were clearly poorly-constructed and ill-thought out.]

The GOP Reneges on Promises of Huge Spending Cuts

2010-11-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

Except for the Senate, the Republicans have complete control of the House. While the Tea Partiers are stoked over their newly-backed GOP congressional line-up and its "pledge" to "pare down" federal spending, "balance" the federal budget, and "slashing" the federal deficit, their enthusiasm for the new Congress after last night's election results will be short-lived.

House Republican leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, who's poised to become the next House Majority Leader and with congressional Republicans flocking to his side, has gone on record saying that his conservative colleagues and he will be pursuing "across-the-board" cuts in "discretionary spending" and cuts in the state's payroll. He has come out noting that he wants such spending levels pared down to 2008 levels not excluding defense, which is nonsensical because the GOP, especially prior to Election Day, has been vague on specifics on the budget, aside from talks about "saving" taxpayers $100 billion a year (which is meaningless). After all, Cantor has shown no interest in gutting discretionary spending at all, before and after the elections. (The GOP's only achievement so far is the push of a spending cap that would cut the outlay by $20 billion as opposed to what Obama wanted, but talk is cheap in the political scheme of things.)

Discretionary spending is a form of outlay that Congress authorizes by "appropriating" (stealing) taxpayer monies every fiscal year. This is separate from "mandatory spending" - another outlay specifically set (by default) to allocate stolen taxpayer funds to the entitlement programs for retirees and needy who are dependent on and can't live without their Medicare, Social Security, and food stamps.

Most Americans are not aware that discretionary spending (and this is what the two major parties don't want them to know) only accounts for approximately 33 percent of the entire federal budget. This translates into meaning that the GOP is only interested in a that minute amount of spending. They are set only on those cuts, the GOP pledging that military (defense) and "homeland security" spending are off-limits notwithstanding. So much for the "huge spending cuts" that the Republicans promised the Tea Partiers throughout the election year.

In other words, the GOP has just reneged on their promises of huge spending cuts - promises to which they made to the Tea Partiers. Their so-called referendum against Obama has, for all intents and purposes, gone up in smoke.

With all of this in mind, the only message that one can deliver to the Tea Partiers is this: don't you feel better now that the Big Statist Republicans whom you passionately and excitedly elected have your best interests at heart?

Yesterday's Midterm Elections

2010-11-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

My good friend and mentor Sheldon Richman is absolutely spot-on: elections are the American people's opiate. The political process may make you feel so special about yourself, but once you cast your vote for your "preferred candidate," you end up leaving the polls (and, if you're lucky, you may respond to the exit poll surveys they always give you), and go home and return to your daily business (whatever it was what you were doing). Then, as the obedient slave whom you're expected to be, you doze off until the next event comes. The magnificent state will coddle you, protect you, and be there for you while you're asleep.

Wow. What a great, noble system. Not!

Hypocrisy and Absurdity Reign in This Election Season

2010-11-02T03:57:00.000-07:00

Today is Election Day, and nothing can be worse than the incessant impetus of the state-worshiping electorate swarming into their local voting precincts, whether they are public "government" schools, firehouses, and other state-approved municipalities, to cast their state-sanctioned, state-endorsed, and state-approved votes for their preferred candidates for public "government" office. This even entails their votes for or against state-approved measures on the ballot.

The Tea Parties' call for constitutional government, tax-and-spending cuts, no cap and trade, fiscal accountability, and a repeal of the recently-passed, Obama-approved health care program, as stated in its recently-circled "Contract from America" document which has been pushed and lobbied by many of its backers, rings hollow in comparison to their steadfast backing of the establishment's Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and controlling and their need to militarize the borders between the U.S. and Mexico. One must include their lack of condemnation of the former Bush administration's profligate spending (although some of them like conservative The Dana Show host Dana Loesche have skewered W.'s domestic agenda). Last but not least, they have not even bothered to deplore the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration checkpoints' thoroughly invasive search and frisking procedures commonly known as "enhanced patdowns" along with its utter disregard and violation of passengers' privacy and civil liberties via its screeners' use of naked body scanners at nearly every airport across the country. (Ironically, the Bush and Obama administrations "informed" us that the scanners wouldn't record our images, but the recently-leaked photos of the scanners prove otherwise. Even the U.S. Marshalls Service admitted it.) Given that the conservatives' "revolutionary" movement has put Congressmen John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and nearly the entire GOP in the House and the Senate "on probation," should we seriously take them at their word?

The "Contract from America" document is a de facto embarrassment and fraud on the American electorate, its semi-libertarian undertones notwithstanding. It's nothing more than a descendant of Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America," although a number of GOP'ers more or less liken the GOP's "Pledge to America" document to it. No where in this newest proposal does it tacitly say anything about repealing nearly every federal agency, regulation, and a host of entitlement programs. There is no call to end the U.S. federal government's disastrous energy and foreign policies (which go hand-in-hand in reality). For example, the manifesto calls for an "Pass an 'All-of-the-Above' Energy Policy," which mandates the following:

Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition and jobs.

Even worse, there is no call to repeal the federal income tax, the capital gains tax, the estate tax, and repeal all the federal spending (which constitutional scholars on the laissez-faire/minarchist side would deride as "unconstitutional"). Only a mention of a "moratorium on all earmarks" unless a balanced budget appears, but why a moratorium? Why not outright abolition of the earmarks and the spending? In the interim, a gutting of the spending would be much preferable to that option, but obviously this is done specifically to pander to a base of conservatives who really don't want cuts in or repeal of entitlement, pork, and defense spending out of fear that such moves would affect their piece of the welfare-warfare pie. After all, there's nothing better than a conservative politician who is buying votes from blocs of welfare-worshiping, warfare-worshiping Tea Party activists and their voting base who are primarily interested in and defensive of propping up and maintaining their hegemonies of the Middle East.

One would think that the Tea Parties would field GOP candidates who are solid on pro-peace, pro-civil liberties platforms. With the possible exception of Ron Paul, the idea of said candidates is an oxymoron in terms. The vast majority of the Republican establishment is a warmongering outfit, and one can include all the Tea Parties on that column. Republican congressional candidates running on anti-war and national-security state platforms might have been worthy of consideration for the electorate (despite the likelihood of grumblings from the Tea Partiers), given that it might have energized scores of Americans who have been increasingly viewing the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as both fiscal albatrosses and embarrassing quagmires. But don't count on that. The Tea Party is fundamentally opposed to that idea, and their conservative underlings would scream bloody murder at the prospect of an anti-war, anti-state Republican in their midst. Thank you Tea Partiers and Republicans. Your pro-war, anti-civil liberties records have emboldened President Obama to magnify his assaults on the peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, the entire Middle East, and on our own shores as well and bolster international support for global hegemony. Obama's barbaric policies, which were carried over from the Bush administration and made into his own, ought to incite anger from every American.

The "Pledge to America" manifesto is worse than the above-mentioned one. It gives lip service to slashing spending and paring down the deficit, but it barely elaborates on some specifics. The Republicans' conservative base and the Tea Party are heavily putting an enormous amount of stock in the GOP to retake the House (which is very likely after today) and possibly conquer the Senate to carry their agendas, but they are foolish to do such a thing. The GOP is asking the Tea Party and their conservative supporters to have faith in their fiscal restraint, but what do they have to show for it after Bush's rampant spending during his years in the Oval Office? After being wiped out politically in 2008, their credibility and respectability have been virtually obliterated beyond repair. Even their support for the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and other pervasive government programs have never wavered. What will it take for the Tea Party candidates to wake up and realize that, despite one of their concerns is cuts in entitlement spending (despite the fact that 63 percent of the movement is opposed to that), Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are also government programs? Even the Pentagon and the Military Industrial Complex are programs too.

And what of the Democrats? The Democrats have come off as absurd hypocrites on the home and war fronts without question. President Obama has broken more than a handful of promises to the American people, promises that he made to his constituency and his base who backed him to deliver his promise of "change" to the U.S. His promises, such as making his administration transparent to an already-skeptical, already-cynical American public, ending the Bush-propped, Bush-backed War in Iraq (which he's failed to do twice in a row), digging the economy out of the Bush-imposed recession, and ending Washington's culture of interest interests and lobbyism, were never intended to be delivered. After all, he has already backpedaled on his intentions to end the military's old "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy (twice in a row, point of fact), and his appeal to a federal appeals court that overturned that Clinton-era executive order has already enraged his gay progressive Democratic base. Oh, and his expensive stimulus and Cash-for-Clunker programs and bailouts of GM and Chrysler have really bloated the deficit even further, which have become fodder for the right-wing talking heads on Fox News.

Obama has already embroiled the nation further in the Iraqi and Afghani conflicts than Bush ever had. After all, we are talking about the same current president who has proceeded with Bush's war policies by amplifying his genocidal killings in the Muslim nations and blatantly declared war on our civil liberties and the Constitution. Unlike Obama, Bush did not so much possess a morsel of authority to engage in assassinations of Americans in the name of the War on Terror without a shred of due process. His pledge to pull the plug on Guantanamo Bay -- that is, releasing all Americans imprisoned as "enemy combatants" who would be tried by a an American criminal court in New York (given that they are constitutionally accorded with the right to due process and a right to a speedy trial) in lieu of a U.S. military tribunal without the presence of a jury of their peers and the right to a defense by an attorney on their behalf -- was rescinded due to conservative outcries because expressions of sympathy and empathy for "terrorists" would be tantamount to appeasing and treason. Such a move would give the loopy fringe right wing plenty of ammunition, thereby denouncing Obama as a supporter of terrorism. Obama's backpedaling on reversing Bush's foreign policy would enable the Republicans to brand the President sympathetic to the terrorists' cause. Can you imagine how that would play out for Obama's re-election chances? Those labeled slapped on him and the Democratic Party would make the Democrats' chances for re-election to the House and the Senate more problematic than it is now.

Americans who are convinced that the country is moving towards the wrong direction should realize that the GOP's power grab of the House and possibly the Senate won't do anything to unroot the manifestation, cause, and flow of statism in this country and abroad. The state's tentacles have reached every facet of American and international lives as we know it. Republicans who claim that this election is about a "referendum against Obama" are deluding themselves because it's truly a referendum to exact more control of American lives and wiping away more of our freedoms than ever Republican-style. The Democrats are at least honest about not being in favor of laissez faire and individual liberty; after all, they have never believed in the individual, just only in the collective. But the Republicans' incessant claims of championing those values are not worth the campaign literature on which they are printed. Every statist action from exacting conquest of other nations (including the Muslim world) to engineering government-mandated pensions and medical care for retired and poor people must be scrapped. The much-worse welfare-warefare state that has inundated the United Kingdom and Europe will soon metastasize to our soil. The welfare-warfare statism in our homeland is untenable and unmanageable.

All the odious signs of the Republicans are there. Once they are in power (and after tonight, they will be), they will proceed with the War on Drugs and be more aggressive with their xenophobic, nationalistic, and jingoistic anti-immigration zealotry. All the campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, the Tea Parties and their Republican operatives will conquer and rule the American people like their Democratic counterparts in a statist conservative Republican manner.

Hypocrisy and absurdity surely reign in this election season. Especially on Election Day today.

Why Should We Care About Juan Williams and His Firing from NPR?

2010-10-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

National Public Radio's (NPR's) most recent decision to terminate Juan Williams' contract because of his incendiary rhetoric towards Muslims on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News certainly exemplifies the paranoid paradigm of today's mainstream conservatives and their cronies on the network. It also epitomizes how viscerally prejudicial and bigoted the "feelings" of commentators like Juan Williams and Bill O'Reilly are towards the Muslim community, especially when the 9/11 hijackers were not from Iraq or Iran but from Saudia Arabia, Egypt, and a few other regions of the Middle East. It's convenient for the Right to ignore Williams misrepresenting the views of Times Square bomber Faisal Shazhad, who has gone on record stating the following:

[T]he past nine years the war with Muslims has achieved nothing for the U.S., except for it has waken up the Muslims for Islam. We are only Muslims trying to defend our religion, people, honor, and land. But if you call us terrorists for doing that, then we are proud terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing until you leave our land and people at peace.

It should be noted that the Associated Press reported Shazhad's statement in quotes at his sentencing May of this year. Sadly, the Washington Post, like other media sources that wanted to spin the issue and take Shazhad's statement out of context, took it and deliberately misquoted it by stating:

We are only Muslims . . . but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing you

The Washington Times, as another example of the mainstream media lying about and doctoring the quote, took Shazhad's publicly-entered statement and distorted it, saying:

'We are only Muslims … but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you,' he told U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum.

USA Today has committed the same offense as the other sources:

'We are only Muslims ... but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you,' [Faisal Shazhad] said.

But let's get back to the Williams-NPR mess.

The most salient point about the Juan Williams-NPR matter is: why should we care about this "issue" in the first place? Conservatives like Sarah Palin, Newt Gringrich, and Republican Congressman John Boehner are up in arms over the firing in the first place, considering that "liberal" Williams' views are more in line with the conservatives than the progressives, despite his claim to the contrary.

More to the point, the above-mentioned party wants NPR defunded by an act of congressional legislation, as though they are suggesting the state continues to fund the organizational machine itself. The fact of the matter is that the federal government does NOT fund NPR at all, at least not since the early 1980s. While principal funding did come directly from the state from the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s, that simply ceased to be the case in 1983 when corporations, charitable foundations, and private individuals account for 40 percent of its budget. Only 16 percent of NPR's revenues - 6 percent coming from local governments and the other 10 percent coming from the federal government as CPB grants - are doled out by the state. That's a meager amount of tax dollars being spent on an organization that may or may not be politically influenced by George Soros and MoveOn.org (although I would agree that such funding from those sources should cease), as Bill O'Reilly and his co-horts allege. (The operative word being "allege" here.) The rest of its funding comes from annual fundraising drives that keep the company in business. Let's not omit the fact that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which does receive federal subsidies, only grants 1.5 percent of its funds to NPR. So the conservatives have no solid legal grounds to stand on with regards to their smear against NPR surrounding its alleged federal funding. (Fox News' claim that its "federal funding" has gone down from its previous fiscal year and that the Obama administration has sent $50,000 in grant funds to NPR to "retain an arts desk reporter" is very dubious, given that there is no viable, proven source to verify that nonsense.)

As for Williams' firing, the jury is in regarding this ruckus. Williams did state the following:

When I get a plane, I gotta tell you. If I see people in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried, I get nervous.

That constitutes a "feeling," which is highly irrational and nonsensical (although it is somewhat less insidious than what O'Reilly would say about the Muslim world). I, for one, live in the Metro Detroit area in the Southeastern Michigan region (in the suburbs of Detroit), and I can emphatically declare that I myself don't "get worried" about and "get nervous" around Middle Easterners in public, even if they are clad "in Muslim garb." Are the conservatives tacitly claiming that the 9/11 hijackers wore such attire? If they are, then they are fundamentally wrong. The terrorists on board those planes were dressed in Western clothing. How would the right-wing talking heads know otherwise? Are they privy to some clandestine information that we know nothing about? Besides, why should Williams care about what Muslims wear? He's been handed a $2 million, 3-year contract by the conservative network; thus, it's not as if he really lost everything and should be worried at all. With that in mind, he had nothing to lose simply by voicing his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Sad to say, many Americans share Williams and O'Reilly's viewpoints. (Unsurprisingly but still unfortunately, one of the Morning Joeys agreed with Williams' sentiments. It doesn't help that Pat Buchanan came to Williams' defense over his remarks.) It doesn't even help further that Joe Scarborough, the head talker on Morning Joe, states that the country's "prejudice" towards Muslims is "natural." I hate to rain on Scarborough's parade here, but it is not such a thing by any stretch of the imagination. It's an artificial construct, thanks to the hysteria created by the state and its pervasive discriminatory and hateful sentiments and views towards Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East and suppression of the Arab-American and Middle Eastern peoples' reactions to the U.S. federal government's diabolical invasion and occupation of Middle Eastern terroritory (specifically Iraq and Afghanistan). Worse, Iran and Pakistan (the latter of which has been the target of Obama's drones within the last year and a half) have long since been added to the list of targets as part of the Leviathan's list of the Axis of Evil. (Remember that, people?)

Sure, NPR CEO Vivian Schuller apologized for the way she spoke out against Williams, and yes she remains unapologetic about her decision to terminate Williams' employment. (I give it up for conservatives to criticize Schiller for her indecent comments about Williams keeping his comments between him and his psychiatrist, but that's as far as I go with that.) So what? Once again, why should we care about Juan Williams being fired from a network that simply was well within its legal rights to disassociate itself from a commentator who made some inflammatory statements about Muslims, despite the fact that he did argue with O'Reilly's smug, arrogant contention that "Muslims attacked us on 9/11." (By engaging in that discussion, Williams was showing that he wanted his cake and eat it too.)

After all, Schiller did mention that Williams was asked repeatedly by her and the NPR powers-that-be to knock off using NPR's name to identify himself on his Fox News appearances last year. Obviously, he refused to listen. And this business coming from the Rightists that Williams was "censored" is poppycock. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Censorship, despite what the Fox News gang and many talking heads across the political spectrum say, isn't the issue. NPR was well within its rights to get rid of Williams, and so it did.

As far as I'm concerned, Williams, O'Reilly, and those who are defending and tolerating anti-Muslim bigotry across the spectrum (like Whoopi Goldberg) are self-righteous jerks who are full of themselves. It is the height of smugness, hubris, and vanity of these pundits to embrace the irrational, racist, and prejudiced logic of Williams and Co.

It's too bad that many writers and other bloggers, with the dazzling, spectacular, and brilliant exception of Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Sheldon Richman, are not speaking out against this.

Listen to the Beatnik, Man

2010-09-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

He's groovy...

http://www.facebook.com/reqs.php#!/pages/The-Beatnik/101277766603781?ref=ts

If You Thought Hurricane Katrina Was Awful....

2010-08-31T05:24:00.001-07:00

...then get a taste of Hurricane Earl, which has been inflicting a significant amount of damage in the areas upon which it's touched down in San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean Islands. According to the weather report at NJ.com, the storm reportedly belted:

[S]mall northeastern Caribbean islands with heavy rain and powerful winds along the way.

Furthermore, the story reads:

The Category 4 storm hovered about 175 miles north-northwest of San Juan, P.R. at 7 a.m. today, carrying maximum sustained winds of 135 miles per hour. It was traveling west-northwest at 13 miles per hour.

The New York Daily News even further reports:

The major Category 4 storm was still growing Monday with sustained winds of 135 mph as it roared through the northern Caribbean, ripping off roofs on the island of Anguilla.

I pray that the people in Puerto Island and on those islands took shelter and were not in harm's way at all.

I hope the global warmists don't use that storm as political fodder to convince Americans and other people that "man-made climate change" is responsible for natural disasters such as the one that's about to occur.

[Update: Notice the inconsistency in the speed of the reported winds. You'd think the MSM would be spot-on on the wind speeds. Not by a long shot.]

The Unfortunate Libertarian Evasion of Same-Sex "Gay" Marriage

2010-08-30T23:47:00.000-07:00

The recent ruling made by California's very own U.S. Chief District Judge Vaughn Walker -- in which Proposition 8, which was a voter-approved referendum that banned gay marriage in the state (thanks to the state-approved homophobic Mormon Church that lobbied heavily to get their precious initiative on the state's ballot), has violated the civil rights of ardent gay activists (who want state-approved gay marriage codified into law) -- has undoubtedly ignited both praise by progressives and condemnation by statist conservatives for the judge. (Walker happens to be openly-gay himself, and the statist conservatives have put him in their cross hairs by accusing him, in a malicious fashion, of employing his sexual orientation as a political crutch for his ruling. Even though that kind of paradigm is unconscionable, immoral, and unethical to the Nth Degree, that pales in comparison to the type of mentality that has engulfed some libertarians in the libertarian movement, especially from those who employ semantical word game tactics to evade legitimate arguments as to why the state has no rightful, legitimate, and valid grounds for refusing to recognize same-sex "gay" marriage. The court's decision, as mandated by Walker himself, can be seen here [pdf].)

The arguments that some right-libertarians have thrown into the ideological and political mix have been dubious. For instance, right-libertarian (and yet anti-IP attorney) Stephan Kinsella, who, in a misguided manner, penned a piece on his Libertarian Standard blog condemning Walker's legal decision and brushing off any notion that the law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Kinsella notes:

Gay rights advocates filed lawsuits to have the constitutional amendment declared unconstitutional. I predicted they would lose. First, they could not prevail on state constitutional grounds since Prop. 8 actually amended the California Constitution. You can’t argue a provision of the constitution is unconstitutional. So the question is whether this provision of the California Constitution violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (see my The Libertarian Case Against the Fourteenth Amendment). In my view, it clearly does not; any argument that such a law violates equal protection is ludicrous–there is no way the equal protection clause at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) was understood to be so broad as to prohibit state laws that treated same-sex unions differently than traditional, heterosexual ones. As for due process–this was a validly enacted constitutional amendment, following regular legal procedures. So it was not a violation of due process (as for the doctrine of "substantive due process"–well this is a ridiculous, obviously dishonest, invented concept; process is, um, procedural).

(The notion that Kinsella [and others who share his point of view] has unveiled here is simply preposterous, but that will be explored later in this post. For now readers can simply make up their minds as to the "validity" of Kinsella's bogus claims on this issue.)

Even Lew Rockwell, the founder and former president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and creator (and blogger) of LewRockwell.com, formerly objected to Walker's ruling. In his blog post "Gay Marriage and Immigration" (how quaint that he married those two issues together!), dated August 5, 2010 at 10:24 AM, he writes in part:

[T]he Massachusetts. federal judge who ruled that marriage is none of the federal government’s business, and therefore Massachusetts may enact it, despite the defense of marriage act, had a strong case. He is ignored, however, while the crazed California judge is heralded.

And then, in the same post, he also writes:

[W]hile I can’t stand the foreign-government loving, war-mongering fundamentalist right, I do think they have one point. The heterophobes want to outlaw Church discrimination, that is, freedom. For many activists, government gay marriage is only one step towards even more totalitarian anti-discrimination laws.

"Crazed California judge"? "Heterophobes wanting to outlaw Church discrimination"? Who is he kidding? If anything, Rockwell has always been a homophobe against gays, especially on the issue of gay marriage. For him to use this language to condemn the actions of an openly-gay federal magistrate (even if he's not a libertarian) is entirely uncalled for and unfair.

Overall, here are four principle arguments made by some in the liberty camp against the state's attempt to recognize and embrace state-approved same-sex "gay" marriage*:

The State has no business in the marriage realm, so any approval of the ruling equates an acceptance of the State's role in it as well as granting and codifying such a marriage. That even includes the State.

There are more pressing and more paramount things to be concerned about.

Marriage is merely a means for procreation and nothing else.

Federal courts (especially the U.S. district ones) have no legal jurisdiction over such matters at the state level.

Here are my swift replies:

No one, not even Yours Truly, says that the State must be involved in private affairs such as the institution of marriage. Of course it neither has any legitimate role in marriage nor it should have anything to do with it whatsoever. No one except for statist progressives and conservatives has suggested otherwise. The problem is that it is involved in the institution now; therefore, it's in the State's best interest not to invidiously deny a certain group of people of their freedom to marry while granting other groups special rights and privileges at the discriminated group's expense. Will statist conservatives (including the religious ilk) and vulgar libertarians (mainly the right-libertarian ilk) use the power of the State to say that gays must be barred from eating in the same restaurants, going to the same schools, or driving on the same roads as straights do? Should the State be used to discriminate gays by prohibiting them from entering State-subsidized and State-controlled public buildings such as courtrooms, government schools, hospitals, and municipal buildings? (Let's include legislative chambers such as state legislatures, state capitals, and, not to mention, the U.S. Congress and the Senate.)

How can there be "more pressing and more paramount things to be concerned about"? When gays are prevented from having the legal and normal (and not to mention mutual) benefits of marriage (including hospital visitation, custody of children, medical-making decisions involving incapacitated partners, next of kin business, etc.), there are no "more pressing and more paramount things to be concerned about". Human liberty is at stake here. Liberty isn't some abstraction; it's about choosing to live your own life the way you want to live as long as you are not aggressing against your neighbor. Everyone's liberty must be protected at all costs or we become modern-day slaves to the State (although that has vastly and mostly happened today). It's very simple for libertarians to look the other way and pretend that this isn't a big deal. (After all, Jim Crow wasn't a pressing matter to the State-supported and State-backed white bigots in the South in the 1960s.) Besides, the ruling has been made, and we must learn to live with it. How is praising this recent decision a troubling distraction from what is more significant? As human beings we are more capable of multitasking than we realize.

This Neanderthalic view that marriage was constructed only for the purpose of procreation and nothing more than that is simply ludicrous. Marriage has never been exclusively institutionalized for that purpose. If that were entirely true, infertile couples, couples who choose to be childless, and even those who are elderly would have been forbidden to join in matrimony. Moreover, couples who are in wedlock choose to enter in such a partnership predicated on other values at the heart of their decisions: economic security, love and emotional fulfillment, and much more. The Freeman's very won Contributing Editor Stephen Horwitz opined on the evolution of the family which provides excellent insight on this subject.

Additionally, a related objection to this ruling is that heterosexual intercourse is the pillar of marital consummation. My argument to this: so what? Big deal! Institutions from time immemorial evolve. That's nothing new in the grand scheme of things. Even if consummation were pertinent in some manner, that simply changes nothing, considering the reasonable principle of mutatis mutandis still exists and will remain available indefinitely. This objection, whether it's levied on religious and secular grounds (even if it's predicated on some alleged moral and ethical standpoint), is flatly absurd in every immeasurable way.

This business that federal courts have no business interceding in statist matters propped up by the states and their localities that lead to the curtailing of other individuals' human freedom is nonsensical all the way around. We as individuals are dealing with crucial matters relating to liberty that must be applied to individuals consistently, especially when the State denies that consistency to other peace-loving people from all walks of life. This point even applies to Kinsella's and Rockwell's arguments as well: despite the Founders' good intentions involving the political apparatus of federalism (which is a loose confederation of nation-like states that reserve the powers to those individuals and not the "states" because they are merely abstractions), state rights do not exist. Kinsella, Rockwell, and their Misean right-libertarian ilk get frequently annoyed when the State and its foot soldiers ignore other people's already-owned First Amendemt, Second Amendment, and Fourth Amendment-protected rights. So how can they ignore the existence of the people's Fourteenth Amendment protections, which state in part in the following?:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. [Emphasis added.]

Whether Kinsella, Rockwell, their ilk, and statist conservatives like it or not, that amendment exists. What are they going to do about it? Call for a repeal of that amendment? And, if so, would that entail a mass movement of right-libertarians and statist conservatives coalescing to push the states to ratify a new constitutional amendment that would nullify that amendment in its entirety? I see no valid argument against the federal court's jurisdiction in this matter as far as I'm concerned.

Besides, would Rockwell, Kinsella, and their allies who have objections to the ruling make the same argument against interracial marriage? There was a time when interracial marriage was illegal in the South (at the height of the Jim Crow era) and in many other states as well. The Supreme Court refused to intervene in such affairs until 1967 when it ruled on a 9-0 vote in its landmark federal case Loving v. Virginia that such discrimination was illegal and in stark opposition to the Due Process and Equal Protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment as well. Kinsella objects to the Substantive Due Process claims that the amendment covers, which is ludicrous.

Critics may have been opposed to the ideas underlying that principle, but there have been critics of all sorts opposing this idea for years. Just because they criticized substantive due process doesn't mean that their arguments are in the right or just; in fact, they are substantially subjective without any legal basis whatsoever. The points made by Rockwell, Kinsella, and others who have raised similar arguments are nonsensical and excrement. They are simply naive and foolish to believe in and favor that discriminatory crud.

Moreover, it does not help that Rockwell's homophobia as the basis for his arguments against equal protection under the law (considering the law mandates that the State must be evenhanded in its application of such decisions) has become the face of the libertarian movement. Do some of those libertarians really want to alienate people more than they already have by taking that shameful position? Where's the fairness in that type of paradigm altogether?

As long as the State has its dirty hands in the institution of marriage, the system, like or not, needs to be even-handed. While the goal of eliminating the State's hand in marriage must be pursued, in the interim the State has no business discriminating considering all governments are created by their own laws that are the heart and soul of their own constitutions.

[*Note: I've taken the four points from Sheldon Richman's arguments in his blog post which is actually similar to my views on the matter and reworded his statements according to how I see them. A well-deserved hat tip to him for this.]

[Cross-posted on The Freeman Chronicles and the Free Dissent blog.]

Prince Declares That the Internet Is "Over"

2010-07-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

[*Note: I realize this news bit is a month old, but I'm posting it here anyway.]

The legendary pop rocker, musician, and recording artist Prince, formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, has declared that "the Internet is completely over." It wouldn't surprise me if his managers are going bananas over this PR mess.

According to the Detroit News:

'The Internet is completely over,' Prince told the Mirror. 'I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it.'

He added: 'The Internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated.'

Prince is not a fan of digital devices, either. 'All these computers and digital gadgets are no good," he said. 'They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you.'

Not "a fan of digital devices, either"? Computers and "digital gadgets are no good" because "[t]hey just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you"? Has he forgotten that the Internet is the best invention since popcorn and chocolate?

While he's at it, can he define what's "not good" about digital technology, including those "gadgets" and computers he's been talking about? Getting back to the Internet allegedly being entirely over, what planet has he been on? The Internet has paved the way for some of the most creative music of this generation and has made online shopping and purchasing easier than ever.

He has already shut down his website (which is now defunct) and he refuses to license his new music to download stores and subscription services. How is he going to sell his new CD without having them available online? Is he going to allow physical retailers like Wal-Mart (even its UK division), Target, Meijer, K-Mart, and perhaps even FYE to carry in stock and sell his albums?

Don't get me wrong. I loved him back in the '80s and even '90s. His 1984 album (not to mention his first film of the same name) Purple Rain, which was highly praised and lauded by critics for its innovative and experimental sound, made him an international star. As a soundtrack to the movie, it was just quite a sensational experience because of the originality and freshness of his melodies and lyrics. To this day it's regarded not only as a classic but also as one of the greatest rock albums of all time in the history of the music business.

Notwithstanding his odd behavior and uncanny and unconventional methods of performing on stage and composing and writing his music catalog, I have always viewed him as a legendary prodigy of his generation. But that does not excuse his own gross stupidity over his statement in which he directly compares the Internet to MTV. Comparing the Internet to MTV is like comparing the typewriter to a personal computer. Given his idiotic statement, this clod will find out that he's shot himself in the foot financially, professionally, and musically.

Because of his sheer illogic and lunacy, I find myself not inclined to purchase another CD of his again. By making that statement to the public (which should be viewed as an embarrassment to his publicist and his manager), he has certainly killed any chance of a possible comeback, let alone his pop music career. To make matters worse, he's made it his priority to legally sue the pants off after eBay, the Pirate Bay, and YouTuber users for buying and downloading his copyrighted catalog off the Internet.

The problem with Prince is that he's become irrelevant as a musician. He's not as young and hip as he used to be, and he's lost his knack for writing good material these days. (Ever listened to samples of his most recent CDs that came out within the last few years? They are abysmal as well. A lot of the crap that he's written lately is fueled in part of his loopy Jehovah Witness religion and ideology, but that goes without saying to be honest.)

O most Purple One: I hate to burst your bubble, but it's you who's over. You've been over for well over a decade. Your last couple of albums (I've sampled some of them off of iTunes) suck, and your new music sounds god awful, which is a stark contrast to the old legendary classics you put out years ago.

In a nutshell, Prince, you're a has-been. You've been yesterday's news for years, and acts like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are storming the charts. Get used to it.

Tea Party

2010-04-20T20:36:00.000-07:00

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Amendment One, United States Constitution
There has been a lot of talk recently about coinintelpro and agent provocateur infiltration of the Tea Party Movement and their events. Below is an account of my personal experience with my local Tea Party, as well as first hand reports from two other attendees.
I arrived early and set up on a city sidewalk at an intersection. Being a seasoned protester, I brought all the tools required for a lawful, peaceful public demonstration of my grievances with my government – Signs, literature, a camera and video device, a Pocket Constitution, and a megaphone.
Keep in mind that I was in my hometown. The city and county stole my money through force to build the sidewalk I was standing on. I was having so much fun chanting, “Taxation is theft and theft is violence” through my megaphone when one of the organizers walked up to me and told me I was not allowed to use a megaphone. I asked him by whose authority he was acting upon. The man reported that he was acting up on the City of Branson’s authority. I was as respectful as possible and told him that the City of Branson cannot restrict my right to peacefully assemble or my right to free speech.
The man left and I continued to use my megaphone. About thirty-minutes later he came back and reported that I needed permit to use the megaphone. I asked him again on whose authority he was acting. He reported that since he (as a business owner) was required to obtain a permit that I was, too. At this point, I took out my Pocket Constitution and told the man that the First Amendment was my permit. I told him that I would not stop using my megaphone.
So, the man left and I continued to use my megaphone again. The City of Branson Police Department drove by a few times while I was using my megaphone. Their presence gave me courage to shout louder, as my belief in free speech was affirmed. The Tea Party organizer walked up to me a third time and asked me to stop. I asked him why he was so adamant to silence me. He reported that the City of Branson had told him that if there was any electronic amplification used at this assembly he would not be issued another event permit.
I reported to the man that this was a serious issue that he needed to take up with the City of Branson. I told him that he should stop asking permission from his government to operate a business or act in the best interest of his business. I told him that the event he had helped organize was based on this type of freedom. He walked away with me shouting into my megaphone that freedom from tyranny comes from the individual actions that we take every day.
Renea McMasters – Branson, Missouri
Renea got a couple dozen copies of the Constitution from the YAL (Young Americans for Liberty) KU Chapter to hand out at the Branson Tea Party on Saturday April 17th. There were two parts of the rally, the street action along the Branson Strip with everyone holding up signs, and an outdoor, main-stage event with speakers and entertainment. There were also many booths setup on the parameter of the crowd. During the street action I went up and down the line of protesters handing out Campaign for Liberty tri-folds and S604 Audit the FED push cards.

One of the Tea Party Staff asked me not to hold up a sign that contained profanity. The sign says "O Shit" with the O being the Obama logo. He said that it wasn't consistent with the other signs at the protest and that I could go across the street by the We Are Change protesters because they "aren’t with us." I opted to trade it out for a large Gadsden flag and continued to go down the line of protesters handing out literature. I did not mention to the man that I was on a public sidewalk where my First Amendment right to hold any sign was protected by the United States Constitution
.
After the street action everyone headed to a private venue for the main stage event. We opted not to take the megaphone to the main stage event for fear that it would interfere with the free speech of the speakers on stage.

I went around to some of the booths picking up an Allen Icet for State Auditor t-shirt and Purgason for US Senate sticker. Then I asked Renea if I could hand out the Constitutions that she brought. She said I could so I started carrying them around in my hand. Since the constitutions had the Young American for Liberty website YALiberty.org on them I was looking for young people to hand them out to. There weren’t a lot of young people in the crowd other than a few small children. While I was walking around a lady came up to me and asked if she could have one, and I said sure and gave it to her. Then, an older couple came up and asked if I was handing out Constitutions and asked if they could have one so I gave them each one. I continued around the outside of the crowd looking for young people, high school or college aged, but didn't see any.

Then a lady with a Tea Party Staff t-shirt came up to me and asked me what I was handing out. I told her it was the constitution. She saw my sticker and asked if I was with the Purgason for US Senate booth. She said that only people who had a booth were allowed to hand out things because the Tea Party wanted to review what information was being disseminated. I told her that I did not have a booth. She said there was a formal process with paperwork for having a booth and handing out information at the tea party. She said there was already a booth handing out constitutions, and anyone who wanted one could go to that booth. I told her if she wanted to kick me out she could do that and that it would make for a great story in the newspaper tomorrow "Man kicked out of Tea Party for handing out the Constitution." I told her I think this is going to be a great story for the newspaper and that she should kick me out because I'm not going to stop handing out constitutions.

Then I went over to Renea and told her what was going on. The lady came over to where Renea was and Renea asked her if we weren’t allowed to hand out constitutions and she told Renea that we couldn't hand out anything. Renea asked if she could give her a DVD of Freedom to Fascism and insisted that she take it. When she told us again that we couldn't hand out anything I yelled, "This lady doesn't want us to hand out the constitution!" I yelled loud enough to interrupt the speaker that was on stage and part of the crowed turned to see what was going on including the We Are Change cameraman. Here is the footage the We Are Change Branson cameraman obtained:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI1BHUCYKZ0

After a couple seconds, several people rushed over to me to get a constitution. One guy yelled "I'll take a constitution, just shut up." All the constitutions I had were gone in less than half a minute with some going to young kids whose parents had sent them over get one.

A couple minutes later the cops came over and talked to us. The Branson Police were very polite. They said they just wanted to make sure that we weren't there to disrupt the tea party and they were sympathetic to the tea party organizers harassing us. I told them that we want to make sure that the speakers on stage had a chance to be heard so that they could exercise their free speech. Renea told them that we were here to be respectful and to celebrate liberty. They also asked us if we were the ones using the megaphone earlier, during the street action, and said that they were glad that we were able to use the megaphone and exercise our free speech.
Michael Mikkelsen – Kansas City, Missouri

While attending the Branson Tea Party on April 17, I was thinking how great it was to see so many people joined in the spirit of liberty. Unfortunately, this spirit was countered by what seemed to me to be a curious concern for control. The first tip off was the fact that the two guys who were taking a survey for purely academic purposes told us, my friends and me, that they were not allowed into the event. Then there was the fact that, although the organizers of the Branson Tea Party were handing out pocket size copies of the U. S. constitution, my friends were not allowed to give out the pocket constitutions that they had brought with them to hand out. Why would this be? I found this exclusionary attitude to be in conflict with the spirit of liberty and I am now suspect of the motives behind this behavior.

Dan McMasters – Branson, Missouri
I have seen other accounts of the First Amendment becoming an issue at Tea Parties.
I am not saying that this is an agenda being pushed by the Tea Party Movement. I am saying, however, that there are people in the movement who have an agenda of their own. Perhaps it is an agenda that promotes liberty at the expense of denying others their God given rights.

Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher's Answer to "Illegal Immigration"?: "Put Up A Fence and Start Shooting Them!"

2010-04-17T06:33:00.000-07:00

Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, the former conservative plumber's assistant who approached then-Senator Barack Obama about his tax cut plan during his 2008 presidential campaign and current poster boy for the Tea Party and conservative movements as well as the Republican Party, was a keynote speaker at a Cincinnati, Ohio Tea Party rally, in which over 10,000 angry white Republicans showed up at the event. (Interestingly enough, Fox News talker and talk radio show host Sean Hannity was supposed to show up at the same event but his appearance was scrapped over administrative fees; nonetheless, that's neither here nor there.)

Wurzelbacher, trying to appeal to the Tea Baggers' populist senses, flies into a nonsensical rant about homosexuality and abortion. According to Free Talk Live executive producer and co-owner and partner of CAI Credit Adjustments, Inc. (formerly Sakal/CAI) Jason Osborne, Wurzelbacher brings up the subject of illegal immigration. What does he propose the "people" should do about illegal immigration?

According to both Irish Central and the Times Reporter news sites, he exclaimed:

"Illegal immigration?" he said. "Put a fence up and start shooting [them]."

Sadly and disturbingly enough, the entire crowd stood up and gave him a standing ovation. How disgusting and twisted indeed!

Even more, The Times Reporter site, in reference to Wurzelbacher, also stated:

He drew an ovation with a talk emphasizing patriotism, taking responsibility and getting involved. "We need to get behind real Americans," he said, warning the crowd not to let "a bunch of liberal pansies" take away their rights.

I suppose Wurzelbacher was truly referring to "conservative rights"?

This is a reason why the Liberty movement as a whole needs to divorce itself and disassociate itself from the Tea Party movement as much as possible and as soon as possible. Racism, intolerance, and bigotry must be rejected and condemned across the board. But, more importantly, violence against independent migrants must be denounced at all costs.

This is sheer positive proof that the Tea Baggers, including their conservative ilk, are nothing short of racists and fascism across the board. Any conservative, right-libertarian, or Tea Bagger who condones the putrid vitriol and rhetoric coming from Wurzelbacher and the applause and praise from the right-wing crowd deserves to have his or her feet held to the fire, just for simply embracing and advocating that level of trash talk and violence.

Color me both blatantly sickened and confounded.

[H/T to Jason Osborne for mentioning this on last night's Free Talk Live and my show Liberty Cap Talk Live.]

Stossel's Show Inquires "What Is A Libertarian?"

2010-04-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

Fox Business blogger and Stossel talk show host John Stossel did an entire segment on his show on the meaning of the term libertarian. The question he posits to the public at large is, "What is a libertarian?"

Incidentally, his guests included CATO Institute Executive Vice-President David Boaz, self-proclaimed (but not truly) "libertarian" syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock, Harvard University Director of Undergraduate Studies Jeffrey Miron, Fox News' Freedom Watch talk show host and judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, conservative political satirist P.J. O'Rourke, and, of course, my good friend and fellow left-libertarian/anarchist and individual feminist writer and blogger Wendy McElroy.

Here are the unabridged YouTube videos of the entire show (as shown in five parts):

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

I will comment on the show at a later time, but for now these videos are available for your enjoyment.

Collateral Murder in New Baghdad, Iraq

2010-04-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

WikiLeaks has just unveiled a new yet highly-classified U.S. Military video that depicts the slaying over a dozen people, two of them being Reuters news staff.

According to the website:

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The website further reveals:

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.

Here's the 17-minute and 47-second clip in its entirety. I advise parents and everyone who are about to watch this may not suitable for your children, as it does contain graphic, obscene violence:

If Americans are shocked by this when they see this, my question to them will be, "Why?" What the U.S. federal government has done to the people of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East does not surprise me, but that does not mean it does not disgust me further.

Color me both unsurprised and sickened at the same time.

Financial Aid: There is No More Choice

2010-04-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

Attached as an Amendment to the “health care reform” deemed to have passed the House of Representatives and voted on in the Senate as part of reconciliation, was a provision known as “The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act” that forces potential college students to get financial aid directly from the federal government. US Senator Lamar Alexander said, "The government will borrow money at 2.8 percent and loan it to students at 6.8 percent, then spend the difference on more government. Any savings should go to the students, not the government.”

The House Committee on Education & Labor says that by converting “all new federal student lending to the stable, effective and cost-efficient Direct Loan program. Beginning July 1, 2010, all new federal student loans will be originated through the Direct Loan program, instead of through the federally-guaranteed student loan program. The Direct Loan program is a more reliable lender for students and more cost-effective for taxpayers.”
And will:
“Invest the bill’s savings to make college affordable and help more Americans graduate
* Invests $36 billion over 10 years to increase the maximum annual Pell Grant scholarship to $5,550 in 2010 and to $5,975 by 2017. Starting in 2013, the scholarship will be linked to match rising costs-of-living by indexing it to the Consumer Price Index. This includes an investment of $13.5 billion to fund a shortfall in the Pell Grant scholarship program due to increased demand for the scholarship.
* Invests $750 million to bolster college access and completion support for students. It will increase funding for the College Access Challenge Grant program, and will also fund innovative programs at states and institutions that focus on increasing financial literacy and helping retain and graduate students.
* Makes federal loans more affordable for borrowers to repay by investing $1.5 billion to strengthen an Income-Based Repayment program that currently allows borrowers to cap their monthly federal student loan payments at 15 percent of their discretionary income. These new provisions would lower this monthly cap to just 10 percent for new borrowers after 2014.
* Invests $2.55 billion in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions to provide students with the support they need to stay in school and graduate.
* Invests $2 billion in a competitive grant program for community colleges to develop and improve educational or career training programs.”

While this reform may make it “easier” for students to get financial aid, it ignores the real question. Why is college so expensive?
There are many reasons; increased administrative costs, increased teacher salaries both play a part, not to mention easy money that helps drive the cost up.
This “reform” will not bring down the cost of higher education, only a change in the philosophy of college presidents and administrators will bring costs down.

Starting Work on My New Book "Red, White, and Left-Libertarian"

2010-04-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

I am now announcing that I have begun working on my first new book, which will be officially titled Red, White, and Left-Libertarian: America's Need to Reclaim Its Pro-Freedom Heritage. I started to conceive this book project years ago under its original working title Red, White, and Libertarian: America's Need to Reclaim Its Pro-Freedom Heritage, but since then, my pro-liberty views have evolved to a certain extent. At one point, it was retitled The Free Marketeer, but I didn't like it in the grand scheme of things. I like the new title, as it is catchy, so it will be published by Xlibris under that name.

I project that the book will be released later this year, but it could be much later than that. Either way, work on this piece is under way.

I'm quite ecstatic about it, and I'm sure my blog readers are too. It will be out soon.

Keep your eyes peeled for future announcements. While I'm not at liberty to say what the book will be about, it's going to be quite an interesting read.

What's Sauce for the Goose Is Sauce for the Gander

2010-04-02T16:18:00.000-07:00

Proponents of Obama's pro-subsidized insurance industry medical-care "reform" a.k.a. ObamaCare are absolutely (and entirely) correct to object to the death threats and acts of physical violence directed at some congressmen that followed the recent ObamaCare vote in the House. It is paramount to stress that all decent and civil people must condemn and reject the actions of those who partook in them. Regardless of their reasons, what transpired was and still is immoral in every step of the way. It's immoral because it violates the essence and spirit of the Non Aggression Principle (NAP) and should not be tolerated across the board. Not only that, it sullies the cause of human liberty, which entails the diminishing of State power over the lives of freethinking individuals.

Having said that, the supporters of the so-called overhaul come off as nothing more than hypocrites because of their support for State violence against nonviolent individuals who just want to be left to their own devices. These individuals should be renouncing violence, yet they embrace it by supporting the plan. Considering the fact that the Obama administration has ordered the IRS to hire 16,00 new employees to be armed and loaded and carry out the medical-care mandate, violators, who happen to be uninsured Americans and who refuse to comply with the federal mandates and regulations by enrolling and paying for the newly state-mandated insurance, will be levied fines of nearly $700, which is nothing more than an assault on his or her liberty. Those fines can include, but not limited to, a confiscation of the violator's property, further sanctions such as arrest and incarceration, etc. All those things coupled with resistance to arrest and incarceration can, and will eventually, include the mighty wrath of the vile and pernicious State. And that simply can occur because an innocent and peaceful individual rightfully abstained from complying with a government mandate.

The point is that, if universal health care were such a noble endeavor and a goal truly worth of praise (and it would most certainly be), it would have been enacted freely and voluntarily in the absence of the State. This would be best achieved exclusively via voluntary exchange and social cooperation, not via brute force. After all, as the legendary George Washington once pointed out, "Government is not eloquence. It is not reason. It is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master." While they could have implemented otherwise, the proponents of ObamaCare decided that coercion must be employed (by using threats of violence) to get their way. That attitude is predicated on the notion that the ends must always justify the means. If they oppose violence by speaking out against the death threats and other threats of violence aimed at them, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. They are hardly setting a good example.

Advocates of liberty across the board must reject such calls of violence. They need not to sink to their level.

Reality or Alarmism?

2010-03-28T16:20:00.000-07:00

Democratic operatives and mainstream media shills and apologists for the Obama administration's just-passed and enacted medical-care overhaul are now accusing the rank-and-file Republicans and their cronies who oppose the much-touted yet highly-unpopular "reform" and warn people of dire medical and economic consequences of being alarmists. The standard argument now being offered goes like this: "You and your ilk made the same claims about Medicare when it was passed in 1965."

That is quite a hilarious contention, come to think of it. When Medicare was passed and enacted into law, opponents of the program at the time predicted that it result in the state's greater control of the medical system than ever.

Here's a couple of fair questions to people: does anyone now believe that Medicare was such a good idea to create? And while we're at it, does anyone now think that was a horrible prediction at all?

Medicare, as it stands, has an unfunded liability -- that is, empty promises -- of $37 trillion over the next 75 years, the insolvency of the program notwithstanding. To give the devil his due, Obama at least admits that Medicare is a major reason for the federal deficit, which creates the massive national debt. To rectify the problem (namely the out-of-control budget), coverage for a handful of services are being denied. Doctors are now routinely being prompted to stop accepting new Medicare patients, thanks to the insane bureaucratic burden imposed upon them.

All in all, the government medical program has stimulated supply and demand of services, thus propping up prices for everyone across the board by subsidizing medical care for the retirees. Costlier medical care results in costlier medical insurance. Medical insurance companies are soon priced out of the market, thus becoming wiped out of existence after the price of insurance skyrockets. That certainly adds to the number of people who are uninsured. (Although this is not the only factor of inflation, it remains a relatively large one.)

With prices rising higher and the number of uninsured growing larger (all because of the government product known as Medicare), there is no question that all this has energized the government's attempt to increase its power over the medical system.

Now, in the present day, the predictions made about Medicare have come true, not to mention legitimate. It has opened the door for more state intervention in our medical-care choices -- meaning us.

The question that needs to be asked is this: is what we've warned about ObamaCare making us alarmists or talking about reality?

The Moral and Economic Bankruptcy and Ignorance of Real Time Host Bill Maher

2010-03-27T13:25:00.001-07:00

Statist liberal and Barack Obama shill Bill Maher, host of his populist HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, fired a rant that contained a series of smears and ad hominems at the Republicans who are up in arms over the passage and enactment of ObamaCare.

Here's a YouTube clip* of Maher making his speech on the March 26, 2010 episode of his show:

Here's a transcript of what Maher said:

Finally, New Rule: You can't use the statement 'There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year!' as a threat if there was no cooperation in the first part of the year.

Here's a word President Obama should take out of his Teleprompter: Bipartisanship. People only care about that in theory, not in practice. The best thing that happened this year is when Obama finally realized that and said: 'Kiss my black ass, we're going it alone George W. Bush style.' [applause]

Now, two months ago, conservative Fred Barnes wrote, 'The health care bill is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection.' Well, if it's dead, you just got your ass kicked by a zombie named Nancy Pelosi. Seriously, the last time a Democrat showed balls like that John Edwards' girlfriend was filming it.

And yet, even before the Democrats got to take a single victory lap, they were being warned not to get drunk with power. I disagree. All you Democrats do a shot and then do another. Get drunk on this feeling of not backing down and doing what you came to Washington to do. [applause]

Do not listen to the people who are now saying that nothing else big should be attempted for a while because health care was so rough. Wrong. Because I learned something watching the lying bullies of the right lose this one. When they’re losing, they squeal like a pig. They kept saying things like, the bill was being 'shoved down our throats.' Or the Democrats were 'ramming it through.' The bill was so big they 'couldn't take it all at once.' [laughter]

And you know what? I realized listening to this rhetoric that it reminded me of something. It reminded me of Tiger Woods' text messages to his mistress that were made public last week, where he said, and I quote: 'I want to treat you rough, throw you around, spank and slap you and make you sore. I want to hold you down and choke you while I fuck that ass that I own. Then I'm going to tell you to shut the fuck up while I slap your face and pull your hair for making noise.' Unquote. [laughter]

And this, I believe, perfectly represents the attitude the Democrats should now have in their dealings with the Republican Party. [applause]

Yes, it does. That's what they should be saying to the Republicans: 'Shut the fuck up while I slap your face for making noise! Now pass the cap-and-trade law, you stupid bitch, and repeat after me, "global warming is real."' [applause]

The Democrats need to push the rest of their agenda while their boot is on the neck of the greedy, poisonous old reptile. Who cares if cap-and-trade bill isn't popular, neither was health care. Your poll numbers may have descended a bit, but so did your testicles.

So don't stop. We need to regulate the banks, we need to overhaul immigration, we need to end corporate welfare including at the Pentagon, we need to bring troops home from everywhere, we need to end the drug war, and we need to put terrorists and other human rights violators on trial in civilian courts -- starting with Dick Cheney. [applause]

Democrats, in conclusion, Democrats in America were put on earth to do one thing: Drag the ignorant hillbilly half of this country into the next century, which in their case is the 19th. And by passing health care, the Democrats saved their brand.

A few months ago, Sarah Palin mockingly asked them: 'How's that "hopey-changey" thing working for you?' Great, actually, thanks for asking. And how's that whole ‘Hooked on Phonics’ thing working out for you? [laughter]

This is a perfect epitome of the moral and economic bankruptcy and ignorance of Bill Maher and his cronies. He's morally and economic bankrupt because he doesn't care that the state is getting bigger, that it's exacting force on innocent individuals to fatten the pockets of Big Insurance, and it's confiscating the fruits of labor from those who earned and giving it to those who didn't, simply because it's the "good" of society. He's ignorant, because he refuses to fathom what the evils of the law are doing to those uninsured people whom he purportedly cares about (and who neither want nor have asked for the new government-provided insurance and expanded health care entitlement system in the first place).

He's also being disingenuous by framing the paradigm as though this is a "Democrat-versus-Republican" war, when frankly it's a "Democrat-and-Big-State-versus-Freedom-and-Non-Coercion" war in every step of the way. This argument of his is a perfect indication of cognitive dissonance, which is a psychological term referring to a set of simultaneously conflicting ideas coupled with a feeling of great discomfort between two or more groups of people. It's cognitive dissonance, because he, on one hand, believes that everyone should have health care and insurance, but health insurance is evil, so the state is justified into wiping the insurance industry (which lobbied for the passage and enactment of the law).

Hypocrisy, idiocy, and fallacies know no bounds when it comes to a cretin like Bill Maher. The sad truth is that he'll never understand that.

[*Update: YouTube took down the original video (that I had on this post) hosted by one of its users due to a copyright complaint filed by HBO. HBO has been watching YouTube to see if its users have been violating its copyrighted material and has been very tyrannical about it. Hence, an excellent argument to eliminate IP laws, but that's for another blog post for another day. Head to 2:57 to see Maher go off on the GOP with his lame diatribe.]

[*Second Update: Here's the video that was removed by YT. Enjoy!

Walter Block Responds to Sheldon Richman Once Again

2010-03-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

My friend Walter Block, whom I took to task for his argument against Sheldon Richman's Libertarians Against Capitalism Facebook group, issued another rejoinder to Sheldon's blog post criticizing his commentary.

Knowing how ridiculous Block's argument is getting, there's nothing else to be said.

Health Care Reform Is about "Control" Not "Health Care"

2010-03-26T22:04:00.000-07:00

Just a few days ago President Barrack Obama signed into law a piece of legislation that among other things mandates that every American will be required to purchase health insurance. There are also penalties for “offenders” and all sorts of regulations facing doctors and other health care professionals. Congress, who passed the bill using a combination of tactics “deem and pass” and reconciliation, doesn't know for sure what is in the bill. How do I know? Nancy Pelosi acknowledged the fact almost two weeks ago when she said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
I should also be noted that a copy of the bill, complete with amendments, wasn't posted online until after the House voted for a package of “fixes” to the Senate version and “deemed it” to have passed the bill; which oddly was signed into law before going to the Senate for reconciliation. This alone is questionably constitutional, not to mention the unconstitutionality of the bill itself.
Asked by Detroit radio host Paul Smith why if the bill’s insurance coverage is so important that the coverage isn’t implemented until 2014 Congressman John Dingell said, “Let me remind you this [Americans allegedly dying because of lack of universal health care] has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.” Finally, someone admits the purpose of this bill isn't “health care”, but about control. Sen. Orrin Hatch said, “They want to force people to do whatever they want them to do. That’s what you call totalitarianism. It is not really good government.”
In a bit of irony and hypocrisy, he continued, “In this country we believe in liberty. We believe in freedom. We believe people ought to have choices. We believe they can make their own choices.” This from the same Senator that supported the “PATRIOT Act,” FISA & “No child left behind.” Not to mention, the Senator doesn't believe you should have a “choice” about whether or not to use cannabis for medicinal purposes. He doesn't want you to have a choice when it comes to honest money and commodity based currencies.
Jack Hunter points out, “House Minority Leader John Boehner thundered, “Can you say it was done openly with transparency and accountability, without backroom deals and struck behind closed doors, hidden from the people? Hell no you can’t!”
Boehner’s right, but it was the House Minority Leader and his Republican Party that helped push through Bush’s Medicare expansion, a piece of legislation passed by cutting backroom deals behind closed doors and hidden from the people. Beginning with a national debt of a little over $5 trillion in 2000, the debt doubled in eight years, rising to over $10 trillion when Bush left office. Said Boehner in the wake of the passage of Democrats healthcare scheme Sunday night, “shame on us.” He was right to use the word “us.”...What the healthcare vote proved was that Republicans now have an issue to run on in 2010 and 2012 and they know it. What it does not prove is that if victorious, Republicans would behave any different than when they were expanding government healthcare and doubling the national debt while Bush was in office.”

British Actor Jude Law's Gaffe on The Daily Show

2010-03-26T20:54:00.001-07:00

British actor Jude Law recently appeared on the Daily Show, inadvertenely pulling a gaffe in front of Obama troglodyte Jon Stewart. He let slip the fact that England's health care system is not what it's cracked up to be because of its long lines, waiting lists, overworked and underpaid doctors, and the well-to-do opting out of the government system in favor of private health care.

He leaks this out to Stewart at 2:40:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Jude Law

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Reform

John Dingell: ObamaCare Was Put Together "To Control The People"

2010-03-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

Congressman John Dingell of my home state of Michigan discussed the vile health care law that was passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama, specifically in a recent interview with conservative talk show host Paul W. Smith on WJR 760AM in Detroit. Apparently, he let slip the real goal of ObamaCare and its provisions:

Here's an excerpt of his scathing yet honest answers regarding the hidden agenda of the new law:

The harsh fact of the matter is when you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

How nice of him, Obama, and the statist Democrats in power! In their eyes, we're all just a bunch of Pinocchios with strings attached to our arms and legs like hand-made puppets.

How quaint.

The True Prescription for Medical-Care Reform Is A Freed Market

2010-03-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

The recently-passed medical-care bill a.k.a. ObamaCare, which Barack Obama signed into law on Tuesday and which will be challenged in the form of lawsuits in federal court by many state attorney generals on the grounds that it is unconstitutional, has opened a Pandora's Box in the political, legal, constitutional, moral, and anti-liberty scheme of things.

It's political, because the bill, which was supposed to be brought to the Senate for reconciliation before Obama signed it, ended up being bypassed to Obama's desk for his signature, without the "fixes" (which are actually amendments) being applied to the document. After all, the Voice of America news site reported on March 22 just before the bill reached the Oval Office: "[T]he Senate must still sign-off on a series of changes approved by the House." (After Obama signed the bill into law, the Senate had just passed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.)

The law's conservative critics argue that it's both unconstitutional and illegal, because there's nothing in the Constitution that says that the U.S. federal government must coerce uninsured individuals into purchasing health-care insurance. I'm not much of a fan of the current document as established by our Founding Fathers, but the conservatives' argument is entirely flimsy. While it may be true that any constitutional scholar or historian worth his or her salt will say that this medical-care "reform" does not fall within the constitutional purview of the federal government, the Constitution is pretty cryptic in this area. So what if it is unconstitutional? Conservatives are wrongheaded to make this point. They should be arguing that the bill is wrong and unethical, because it initiates force against those who choose not to pay for other people's medical care, whether they are insured or not, and subsidizes those who would otherwise not need the insurance for a variety of reasons. Congressional Democrats, such as John Conyers of Michigan, say that the "general welfare" clause (found in the Preamble and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution) grants the federal government the power to establish dominion of the U.S. medical-care system. But what were the conservatives expecting? That Obama would just not sign the bill into law? Democrats have historically been hostile to human liberty across the board. Republicans are the same. Face it; if George W. Bush had proposed a similar law and lobbied hard to pass it, would the GOP and its cronies have argued against it then? Of course not! They would be all for it, because they would have been getting the credit for it, and they would financially and politically benefit from it like former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney did when he imposed RomneyCare in his state.

Finally, it's immoral and anti-liberty, because it is an assault on individual liberty while both protecting and expanding the parasitic medical welfare state (including the entitlement programs of Medicaid [which is universal medical care for the uninsured poor and needy] and Medicare [which is universal care for mostly wealthy retirees and the elderly collecting Social Security). (Medicare recipients will not be pleased to learn that this new law, which begins to take effect in its entirety by 2018, will undercut, undermine, or eliminate their coverage or see a significant rise in their premiums.) Individuals, who are already not allowed and had never been allowed to make that many decisions on their medical-care options, will find that their insurance premium costs will rise, the quality of health care to plummet, and the pool of available doctors shrinking at a much substantially higher rate than ever. The new law, which for months had been widely touted as a "reform" of the system, will not allow wiggle room for doctors to make medical decisions on their patients' health and patients to make medical choices on their health and what insurance plans work best for them. ObamaCare does not and will not address the state's intervention in the medical-care market, research, and the system in its entirety. It does not even allow patients to shop for insurance plans from insurers across state lines.

The medical care system certainly requires reforms -- true radical reforms. ObamaCare, on the other hand, is just too expensive, and powerful medical and insurance interests are prospering and will prosper even more at the expense of all of us. The status quo will merely profit from it, which hardly leaves any legitimate reason for any sane and rational individual to admire it. With that in mind, we have no sound reason to tolerate it.

The idea that a highly-bureaucratized, highly-socialized state-propped medical-care model such as ObamaCare costing only $940 billion is nothing more than a piece of fiction. Medicare, which was launched in 1966, actually cost $3 billion. Congress projected the costs of the program at about $12 billion by 1990 (an alleged conservative estimate). By the time that year came, the actual cost was $107 billion (if inflation is included in the costs). In 2003, the CATO Institute issued a report indicating that the program was going to be price-tagged at a projected $244 billion. Moreover, the Medicare system is rife with massive fraud and abuse. Fewer than 5 percent of the medical claims filed with the agency are audited. Cost overruns, rising deficits, lower payments to physicians and hospitals coupled with payment delays, medical services and procedures rationed by doctors, hospitals, and the state coupled with treatment delays, payroll taxes paid by employers and levied on employees, and HMO-style "assembly line" medicine have plagued Medicare for the longest time.

Thanks to the imposition of the Medicare Drug Prescription Benefit Act of 2003 (a Bush-era edict that was price-tagged at $400 billion) and a month after then-President Bush issued that decree, Medicare Plan D's price-tag went up to $534 billion. According to the 2009 Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds, the projected costs from 2009 to 2018 are $727.3 billion. But the economic reality is that the costs for that program are going to be higher -- much higher -- than deemed. Even James Bovard, a policy analyst for the Future of Freedom Foundation and author of The Bush Betrayal, noted in 2005 that the Medicare trustees would cost up to $7 trillion over the next 75 years (assuming the federal government and all of its various programs, including Medicare and its prescription drug program, still exist).

Obama, his progressive supporters who are behind the new model, and his medical and insurance cronies are misguided to believe that the new doomed medical-care system will be accepted by the American people, including their opponents and critics. But they are gravely mistaken. Critics of the law, for months before Congress passed it, have pointed out the obvious problems that the new system will create. Even more than 60 percent of the American people, according to many online polls, were overwhelmingly opposed (and still are) to the bill. This "reform" is nothing more of a repackaging of the current system, with the exception that it coerces more coverage and more people into the system.

Focus on the fact that the majority of the attention of nearly all the "reformers" centered on the health-insurance industry. The common denominator in the entire medical-care "debate" had been, still is, and will continue to be that health-insurance firms have been under-regulated. For months, what became a discussion on "health-insurance reform" soon morphed into "health insurance regulation." Of course, health insurers have been massively and obscenely over-regulated, but the "reformers" don't want to ruin the fun of their crusade against the companies because of that fact. The bulk of the "over-regulation" is imposed by the biggest insurance players such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Blue Care Network, and Aetna against the smallest insurers. More insurance firms will go under ObamaCare, which was the plan all along. The claim that Obama & Co. touted (saying that patients will get to keep their current insurance plans) is just bogus. Expect to see more insurance firms going under because of the massive mandates.

Another problem is that the Congressional Budget Office says that the new law will reduce the deficit in ten years. Anyone with a modicum of comprehension of economics knows that the CBO's report is nonsense. Lawmakers have been relaying dubious information to the agency with cooked figures on the issue. Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, in his latest op-ed titled "An Off-Budget Office?," debunked this lunacy by noting with respect to the San Francisco Chronicle's article on the matter entitled "Costly Bill Seen as Saving Money":

It's not hard to understand at all. It is a lie.

What makes this particular lie pass muster with many people, who might otherwise use their common sense, is that the Congressional Budget Office vouched for the consistency of the budget numbers that say you can add millions of people to a government-run system and yet save money.

The Congressional Budget Office does honest work. But it can only use the numbers that Congress supplies-- and Congress does dishonest work. It is not the CBO's job to give their opinion as to whether any of the marvelous things that Congress says it will do in the future are either likely or possible.

Sowell even further notes:

[N]one of this money is in the official federal budget that the Congressional Budget Office sees. There are many other financial liabilities of the government that are 'off-budget,' which means that they do not show up in the official numbers.

Even research analysts find the CBO's findings apocryphal. As Marc Goldwein, the policy director of the the Washington budget watchdog group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, points out:

CBO is the most trusted analysis out there, but everything they say, you should take with a humongous grain of salt.

Is health insurance the most lucrative and most profitable commodity in the industry? Not quite. Such insurance on average generates a profit margin that amounts to about 3-4 cents on the dollar. These firms do welcome a guaranteed clientele, even if it's foisted upon the public, because it ensures their profitability. Although Obama & Co. will appear as an populist opponent to the industry, he's actually its best ally. Why? Because Big Insurance will accept the onerous new regulations to decimate its much smaller competitors, leaving insurance consumers with fewer insurance options to purchase. Considering they are not incentivized to innovate and compete thanks to their politically-connected, politically-protected mandates, young healthy people will find that the individual mandates are compulsory and that they must purchase highly expensive products and services from these protected government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), thanks to the state. It's intriguing that the progressive critics of the insurance enterprises, who routinely bash their practices and support Obama's "reform," neglect to mention that the new model coerces everyone to transact with these entities.

The only objection that these GSEs have with the plan is that the penalties for not complying with or refusing to comply with the individual and employer mandates are not high enough. Most young people will likely choose to pay the penalties out of their pockets rather than purchase the insurance because of the cheap savings for them. Hence, a problem arises out of that mess: if and when the uninsured become sick and then apply for coverage, they can't and won't be denied because the new law prohibits it. Expect to see future changes (in the form of stricter penalties) in the federal law to avert more gaming of the system in the not-too-distant future. Thus, this is another victory for the already-protected insurance establishment.

Finally, the critics of the old government-created public-private hybrid of the medical-care system have been spewing ad nauseum for months that the system was the result of the free market, and that it has failed the American people. But that is a baldfaced lie. A free market medical-care system hasn't existed, nor has it ever existed over the last 100 years. The "reformers" continue to miss this paramount point every single time: what exists now, and will continue to exist, is the current system has been the result of an uncompetitive medical and insurance cartel system that has been codified by the state and thrives and exists entirely and purely, thanks to state privilege. This privilege has come into existence because of its extension of state governments through state-approved and state-sanctioned monopolistic licensing. Congress, if it wanted to, could end this nightmare by repealing the prohibition on interstate insurance sales and the horrendous tax favoritism for employer-provided medical insurance coverage. But don't let those points enter the mind of the vile, greedy, and pernicious Democrats, who stand to financially profit from the system at the expense of the poor (whom the ruling party claims to care about).

And to make matters worse, before the bill passed in both chambers of the House and were signed into law, many physicians across the country threatened to bolt from the system and give up their practices. Many of them have exited from the profession because of the low reimbursements and payments from Medicare and to avoid legal malpractice liability. Expect to see a much larger mass exodus from the system in the months and years to come.

The only good news coming out of this mess is that most Americans (if not, many) are seeing for the first time the fraudulent "reform" this law really is. It only secures and protects the government-created cartels, punishes the well-off, and merely postures as a friend of the uninsured who are largely impoverished.

At the end of the day, the true prescription for medical-care reform is a freed market. Two illusions need to be shattered. First, the idea that this is a matter between the status quo and this "reform" is preposterous. The "reform" IS the status quo in drag. Second, for generations, the state has bedded the medical profession and the insurance industry to ram down our throats the evil system we have today. A freed market is the only way out of this mess.

Medical Statism a.k.a. ObamaCare Passes in the House

2010-03-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

ObamaCare, which is officially known as Patient Protection and Affordability Act of 2010 (H.R. 3950), has just passed in the House. The vote tally comes at 219-212.

It's now expected that Herr Obama will sign it on his desk this upcoming Tuesday. But how can he sign a bill into law if the Senate hasn't applied the "fixes" that the Democrats made to the House-passed version of the bill hours ago? Because those "fixes" aren't REAL fixes. Those are just last-minute amendments to the bill AFTER it was passed, and they are heading to the Senate. The bill has already cleared the halls of Congress. According to the Voice of America news website, "[T]he Senate must still sign-off on a series of changes approved by the House."

Obviously, so many backroom dealings had occurred on the House floor. The key provisions of the legislation that the medical lobbyists and Big Insurance (like Blue Cross Blue Shield) are backing include:

Coercing individuals to buy insurance or be faced with a penalty of 2.5 percent of income. That penalty would come to an annual amount of $695 if individuals refuse to accept that coverage.

Coercing employers to offer insurance to their workers or face a penalty of $2,000 per worker. Specifically, employers will be coerced to cover 65% of family premiums or fork over a penalty based on payroll. Small businesses with less than $500,000 on payroll will be exempt and payrolls up to $750,000 will have a reduced contribution.

Banning private insurance firms (that don't have the political clout like Big Insurance does) that want new business from denying coverage to policyholders having preexisting medical conditions.

Coercing above-mentioned firms to accept new government regulations and mandates.

Coercing parents to keep their children on their medical plans until they reach the age of 26.

The most laughable aspect of this "debate" on the House floor is that Democratic Congresscritter Bart Stupak from my home state of Michigan, who was originally against the bill because of a provision in the bill that would allow taxpayer financing of abortions, flip flopped on it because of a meaningless deal that Obama cut with him by saying that he would issue an executive order to prohibit the funding. Stupak wasn't against the bill because it would solidify the state's entrenchment in the medical care system; he was against it because of his pro-life views. If that provision had not been written in the bill in the first place, does anyone really think he would have voted against it? Not in a New York minute!

(Interestingly and hilariously enough, the congressman was branded a "baby killer" by a Republican colleague in the House, although he has an idea of who said it.)

Once the bill is signed into law and goes into effect, one can be certain that millions of Americans will not obey the law. This is what happens when the state furthers itself into the medical care system much more than it has in decades. Any chance of restoring a true free market medical care system went up in smoke the second the bill passed.

It's time for all Liberty activists to start practicing civil disobedience and educate the masses in a clear, concise, and innovative way. No more the state! More freedom than ever!

Say "No" to Capitalism: In Defense of Sheldon Richman and the Libertarians Against Capitalism Facebook Group

2010-03-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

Walter Block, a good friend of mine who's also a fan of my show Liberty Cap Talk Live on Blog Talk Radio, a prominent blogger and writer at LewRockwell.com, a well-noted economics professor at Loyola University New Orleans, and a prominent senior fellow at the right-libertarian educational/academic organization Ludwig von Mises Institute, has penned a piece for LRC.com, in which he criticized my good friend and left-libertarian/agorist/anarchist mentor Sheldon Richman for having recently started his group Libertarians Against Capitalism on Facebook and positing his contention that the word capitalism lacks any value to and is a problem in the eyes of many purist free-market ideologues. (Here's Sheldon's rejoinder to Block on his Free Association blog.]

Curiously, Block writes in his piece in part:

If U.S. Presidents such as George Bush (41st or 43rd), Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are widely considered capitalist supporters, and they are, then I, along with Libertarians Against Capitalism, want no part of this moniker. (Ronald Reagan magnificently utilized free market rhetoric; but budgets and regulations increased when he was governor of California and President of the U.S.) And the same goes for the likes of Vice Presidents Spiro Agnew, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle and Nelson Rockefeller, along with talk show hosts Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. I will not say that there is a 180 divergence between what they mean by 'capitalism' and how I use this word, but the differences are very stark. This includes other politicians of the following ilk: John Boehner, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, and Fred Thompson. Their 'capitalism' and mine are very, very different.

Intriguingly enough, Block fails to distinguish his so-called term free-market capitalism (in its purported context) from the commonly-used term state capitalism at the end of his paragraph. But then again why ruin the fun when you can attempt to make a good although unconvincing case against the critics of the term capitalism because of its purported pro-freedom/anti-state roots when actually its true anti-liberty/pro-state baggage predates the 20th century and further extends to France's National French Assembly after the French Revolution of 1789, which was populated by the original leftists (laissez-faire advocates) on the Left (where Frederick Bastiat and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon sat) and the fascistic and mercantilistic aristocrats on the Right? Not only that, what about this term and its concepts' deep-seated ties to corrupted, seedy, and shady interventionistic state influence? Apparently, he refuses to acknowledge all and any of those historically factual points.

Then, after listing the names of many conservatives in the above paragraph, Block further writes:

Nor can we afford to ignore a large group of neoconservatives, who are also linked with 'capitalism' in the public mind, for example: Elliott Abrams, John R. Bolton, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, Carl Gershman, Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Schwartz, Leo Strauss, Ben Wattenberg, Paul Wolfowitz and James Woolsey. Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism, wrote a book called 'Two cheers for capitalism.' As for me, I want no part of this sort of 'capitalism.' It is three cheers for me, all the way.

Additionally, he writes:

And the same goes for conservatives such as Roger Ailes, David Brooks, William F. Buckley, John Derbyshire, David Frum, Robert Gates, Jim Geraghty, Jonah Goldberg, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh Ponnuru, Karl Rove, Mark Stein, John Yoo and Byron York. If they support capitalism, and they are widely seen to do so, then I, too, along with called Libertarians Against Capitalism, oppose it. For the "capitalism" of these people includes as a central tenet war, militarism and imperialism. They may call it 'American Greatness,' but what it amounts to is the U.S. tossing its military weight all around the world, in a totally unjustified manner.

Also, there are foreign dictators who have been, willy nilly, linked with capitalism, and I wouldn’t want to be linked, politically, with them either. For example, Pinochet, Franco, and even, help us please, Hitler.

And, finally, he says:

Reading the above, one might infer that I am as good a candidate as any other libertarian to join Libertarians Against Capitalism.

Ah, but, according to Block, "Not so, not so." Why is that the case, you ask?

As convoluted as his logic is, here's the following kicker coming from him:

My main reason is not etymological but rather linguistic. I readily admit that 'capitalism' has a bad press, and its historical use is none too salutary either. But, the enemies of libertarianism are always trying to take words away from us.

The "enemies of libertarianism" are "always trying to take words away from us"?

As much I love Walter personally (and I don't mean to get my digs in him as well), it's not that the "enemies of libertarianism" have been co-opting our terms for years. They have taken back the term libertarian, considering we took it from them. We did so as a response to the state socialists in the progressive camp having taken the word liberal from us! Look at "libertarians" like Neal Boortz, Mancow Muller, Wayne Allyn, and Bob Barr (who, although successfully had secured the Libertarian Party nomination in 2008, failed to win the presidential election). They have been acting as though they have been in favor of Liberty, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. And they even employ terms such as capitalism and libertarian that are in their vocabularies.

Furthermore, Block says:

They have already long ago stolen 'liberal.' We must now call ourselves 'classical liberals' if we want to use that appellation at all. Some have recently had the audacity to try to take away the word 'libertarian.' I refer, here, to Noam Chomsky, who has the temerity to characterize himself as a libertarian.

(Of course, his "attempted theft" charge against Chomsky doesn't holds any water whatsoever, considering that Chomsky has been using that term to describe his brand of state socialism [statism] for decades. Block's "evidence" against him is indicated here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Thus, Block's case is very weak and implausible and appears to be on shaky grounds.)

It's pleasant to know that Walter tries to differentiate himself from the capitalists he noted in the above paragraph. My question to him would be: why would you even want to associate yourself with a word that has historically been employed by state socialists (statists) such as progressive Bill Maher (who called himself a "capitalist" on his Real Time show last night) and conservative economist Ben Stein across the political spectrum? Right-libertarians like Block, Stephan Kinsella, and Brad Edmonds continue to embrace the term willingly and without question, despite their inherent incongruities and flawed, convoluted logic. John Stossel of Fox Business even qualifies as an example of this, especially when one considers his vulgar libertarian framing of the libertarian philosophy on his show Stossel and his libertarian and capitalist guests whom he often interviews in front of his live studio audience.

Free market capitalists apologizing for vulgar libertarianism and shilling for the conservative and corporatist shills by protecting the term capitalism, even with the best of intentions and in a vociferous manner, merely create the perceived impression that all voluntaryists and many other advocates of Liberty are in bed with the establishment. These moves land free-market radicals in trouble across the board, regardless of what many right-libertarians claim. These stooges set themselves up for disdain and alignment with the Republicans and their Wall Street-worshipping statist cronies. Should we, including Americans in general, be surprised with this type of behavior that has been an endemic (although embarrassing) part of our society, our culture, and the parasitic political establishment?

As for the word libertarian, Sheldon Richman posits:

Libertarian was used by left-wing Spanish anarchists during the 1930s civil war; they were no friends of private property and free trade. Going back further, the word was used by anarcho-socialists after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 because the word anarchist could land them in a heap of trouble. I doubt Block would regard those libertarians as comrades. The French word Libertaire appears to be the origin of our word libertarian, and it seems to have had nothing to do with what Block wants to call capitalism. Quite the opposite.

Sheldon is correct. The word capitalism has always had a twisted, dark, and vile history with the Liberty movement, thanks to and despite the efforts of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. Block's attempt to save the term is an exercise in futility, because the word has really never been ours to begin with. Trying to resuscitate it, putting new life into it, and cleanse it from its sins are nothing but ideological and historical revisionism. No amount of spinmeistering from the hacks in our movement will change that talking point.

Block finally concludes his piece by writing:

So, I beseech Sheldon Richman and the other members of Libertarians Against Capitalism to disband their group, and, instead, work with the rest of us to save as many words as we can for our own use.

I doubt Sheldon has any interest in saving the word simply by disbanding his group. No left-libertarian/agorist/voluntaryist worth his salt believes that such an endeavor is, as Sheldon correctly noted at the end of his blog post, "worth the candle." Capitalism, like the word libertarian, is not an ally - but rather an enemy - of laissez-faire. They do not truly go together like popcorn and butter. Laissez-faire capitalism is an artificial construct, not to mention a clever redundancy. Not only that, it is an oxymoron. One who calls oneself a laissez-faire capitalist is akin to one calling oneself a Christian Satanist. One cannot be a Christian and a Satanist simultaneously. Either one is a Christian or a Satanist; there is no such thing as "between one and other other" or "both." Besides, there are plenty of terms that advocates of Liberty can use such as market anarchist, voluntaryist, laissez-faire, and free market. Besides, capitalism is a word that free-market radicals have now rejected.

It would be wise of our pro-Liberty allies to wash themselves of the label and stay away from it permanently. After all, it can't be saved.

Besides, we have no need and use of that poisonous word we call capitalism. But we do have a need of the Libertarians Against Capitalism group on Facebook. Let's educate the masses about the true vile nature of capitalism as it stands today.