Liberty Maven

As usual Walter Williams hits the nail on the head and hammers it home with a recent column. In “Dupes for the State”, he writes:

If we banned or restricted all activities that affect, harm or have the possibility of harming other people, it wouldn’t be a very nice life. Let’s look at what can affect or harm other people. Non-obese people are harmed by obesity, as they have to pay more for health care, through either higher taxes or higher insurance premiums. That harm could be reduced by a national version of a measure introduced in the Mississippi Legislature in 2008 by state Rep. W.T. Mayhall that in part read, “An act to prohibit certain food establishments from serving food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the state Department of Health.” The measure would have revoked licenses of food establishments that violated the provisions of the act. Fortunately, the measure never passed, but there’s always a next time.

and also:

The emerging tragedy is our increased willingness to use the coercive powers of government, in the name of health or some other ruse, to forcibly impose our preferences upon others. In the whole scheme of things, the tobacco issue itself is trivial. Far more important is its template for massive government disrespect for private property.

Read the full column

Call out the instigators
Because there’s something in the air
We’ve got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right

-Thunderclap Newman “Something in the Air“

“A neo-con is a former Marxist turned conservative who is in reality now a Fabian socialist.”

-Kelleigh Nelson

I confess I am puzzled by the folks who say “I like Ron Paul’s domestic agenda, but I do not like his foreign policy stance.”  Well isn’t that special.  They like Dr. Paul’s positions regarding liberty, the economy, and the US Constitution, but…but they oppose his positions on waging unconstitutional wars, giving away billions of our hard-earned tax dollars to foreign governments (many of them reprehensible, and some who hate us), and throwing our military men and women into unwinnable meat-grinder wars.  I suppose that they must just love big government.

Hmm, perhaps someday they will explain their nonsensical flip-flopping to me.  In any event, I am sure that the Power Elites and “merchants of death” welcome their myopic tunnel-visioned “patriotism,” their feeble grasp of the US Constitution, and their total failure to understand what liberty is all about.  Go get ‘em tigers and tigerettes!

Me — I smell freedom in the air.  I sense that even though the GOP elites, Democratic elites, MSM elites, entertainment elites, the Military/industrial complex elites, and all of The Powers That Be — that is, the establishment — are arrayed against the Ron Paul revolution, they are on the losing side of history.  ”An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government.”

Voting for Obama, who has shown himself to be in the pocket of the banksters and military/industrial complex is no longer an option for anyone who values freedom — nor is voting for any of the GOP-approved “Obama Lite” candidates.  ”We the people” must see through the web of lies, disinformation, and slander — whether they come from simple ignorance of the truth, or from Power Elite shills.  This is our last shot at saving America as a free republic, and if Ron Paul loses it all goes down the drain, on our watch.

The tired schtick of “meet the new boss; same as the old boss” is no longer playing in Peoria these days.  ”We the people” are increasing hip to how we have been played and gamed by the Power Elites — under whatever label they hide behind.  Time for a revolution, a real revolution, the Ron Paul Revolution.

…comes from Glenn Greenwald. I’ve always admired Greenwald; however, I found myself cheering in agreement as I read his latest article, “Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies”. He suggests that voters will have to decide for themselves on the lesser of evils (as usual). In doing so Greenwald pushes to the surface the numerous actions Obama has taken that goes directly against what self-righteous progressives are all about. It’s long, but read it. It is truth. Yes, even the part about the newsletters. Here is an excerpt:

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdrones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has wagedan unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Read it all at Salon.com.

A very eloquent plea from an Israeli settler. Read the entire thing. An excerpt is below.

What is it about Ron Paul that inspires such extremes? Such maddening support on the one hand, and such fear and loathing on the other? I can give the answer in one word: Soul.

The essential soul of a human being is by definition free. The idea that men are free as determined by God is a concept that is foreign to most men. This is because most men want to control others, to take away their freedom. This is usually referred to as the drive for power. The drive for power is antithetical to freedom because power means the ability to control others. There is only one legitimate thing that power can and should be used for, whether it be military, legislative, or executive power. That is, to legalize freedom.

Ron Paul doesn’t want to be President to “give” me freedom. He doesn’t own my freedom and he didn’t give it to me. The only reason Ron Paul wants to be President is to stop punishing people for using their freedom that is rightfully theirs. He wants no power. This is clear to anyone who listens to him speak.

Read it all.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government…we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.  In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address to the Nation, 1961                                    

“Ron Paul and I would disagree on many issues. …However, these are policy differences. They can be negotiated or legislated into a compromise.  But on liberty, on human rights, and on the Constitution, Ron Paul is the only candidate who gets it.  …Liberty is where we begin and end the conversation in America.  For far too long, government has chipped away at the rights of Americans.  Ron Paul would reverse that trend.  Whatever else he does is secondary to that prime directive.”

John Thorpe “Forbes“                                                                                                                                  

I agree with the sentiments expressed by Mr. Thorpe (a liberal) in the above paragraph.  I also agree with those expressed by conservative Steve Deace: “as much as I disagree with Paul, I’d choose him over the Republicrat ruling class any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.” 

The fact that individuals from both the left and right of the political spectrum find Ron Paul increasingly attractive is of no little concern to The Powers That Be (TPTB) and their long-knives are already out.  Should Ron Paul become the lead, or one of the lead Republican candidates they will attempt to slice and dice him like a Cuisinart — count on it.  The MSM, who cannot seem to find Obama’s past history with a bloodhound and a road map will suddenly become super-sleuths able to sniff out every nook and cranny of Ron Paul’s past — and where the truth does not suit their purposes they will twist it until it does.

It is understandable that the Far Left would oppose Ron Paul, because of his stance on state’s rights, limited government, and his staunch defense of the US Constitution.  What perplexes me is the animosity shown toward Paul by the purportedly conservative Republican establishment — and there can be no doubt that the GOP elites despise Paul’s positions.  Rush Limbaugh has dumped on him; the “conservative” press treats him as a joke, and “conservative” talking heads routinely dismiss him.  Recently Neil Cavuto took his fellow pundits at Fox News to task for their blatantly dismissive attitudes toward Ron Paul.                                                                                                                                  

All of which only makes Ron Paul all the more attractive to me as a candidate, and I suspect that a growing number of conservatives feel similarly — we know how lame “conservative” media can be. 

“We the people” are more than a little tired of the condescending arrogance thrown our way by Republican elites and their duplicitous mouthpieces.  The truth is that for all of their talk of being conservative, they find Ron Paul’s ideas about limited government anathema.  They want big government — they only differ from the liberal elites in their choice of what type of big government we should have.  It is of no importance to them that freedom decreases as government increases. 

I only recently became aware of just how much negative information TPTB have already put out about Ron Paul, so one of my first tasks has been to bring myself up to speed on what is true about Ron Paul, and what is false.  I found that I needed to brush aside much of the “common wisdom” surrounding him.

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By  Craig Hensler

This evening President Obama presented his latest plan to “stimulate” the United States economy;  this time, to the tune of $447 billion.  This stimulus is to be completely paid for by undefined savings at a future, undetermined date.  By now, as a nation, we’re all probably quite numb to this and a proposal of this nature doesn’t elicit the same level of anxiety and fear that it once may have.  However, what should really frighten each of us is the outrageous question posed by Mr. Obama in defense of his proposal:

Back in December of 2007 Liberty Maven discovered a letter written by The main Stream Media Czar to all media outlets outlining the tactics to use in order to ensure Ron Paul did not come close to winning the GOP nomination in 2008. Feel free to read that ancient document, if you like.

Now the same tactics appear to be in use today. The only difference is that the effort to ignore Ron Paul is much more blatant this time around. By now you’ve probably seen this segment by Jon Stewart. It pretty much sums up the bias against Ron Paul quite well.

Jack Cafferty used his own time on CNN recently on the same topic.

It would have been much more difficult for them to ignore Paul if he had won Iowa outright. So the same problem from 2008 is front and center for 2012.

How do we Ron Paul supporters combat this kind of treatment? The Jon Stewart segment above has nearly 700,000 views. That’s a good start.

What do we demand from government? Jobs? Prosperity? These days those come to mind first, but during the post World War II years we had prosperity and jobs and discontent was rampant. Did we want something else then? I came of age with the first Boomers in the 50’s and 60’s and the country’s prosperity did little to dampen our discontent. What were we so mad about? I believe we were mad because we didn’t have a good national story that pertained to our generation.

And I think that in addition to our clamoring today for jobs and a return to prosperity, mine and succeeding generations have continued the yearning for a good national story. Now we have the makings of the sort of compelling story we lacked before. The only problem, as I shall conclude, is that sometimes stories can be too satisfying, too soon.

First let’s rid ourselves of the idea that a story is essentially fiction. After all, the words “history” and “story” share the same root. This is not to say that stories and history are equally non-fictional- they may be equally fictional. Their truth or falsity is beside the point. We eagerly adopt stories of either kind to underwrite our lives.

Hitler is relevant to this discussion, as he was the most strident and successful storyteller of the generations just before mine. He told different stories to different people, and everyone believed him. He told Germans that Jews and the rest of the world generally had conspired to destroy the destiny of the German people. This story was a bestseller, so to speak. Great swaths of German society devoured it as precious mental nourishment, because it made them feel good, made them feel part of something important and justified, as an effective story does. Then he told the rest of the world that he was a ferocious megalomaniac, poised to take over and punish all states and societies that were not in his thrall. That story too was a great hit, in the sense that people followed it and adopted it as their story.

The stories told by Roosevelt and Churchill were predicated on Hitler’s story: We were the defenders against Hitler, the homicidal maniac. Of course Hitler was a homicidal maniac, but as I say my use of “story” denotes neither fiction nor non-fiction. It was Hitler’s story telling capability that put him on the map. Our mental wards are full of crazed megalomaniacs whose stories are listened to by no one but bored staff. Hitler might well have been one of these isolated souls, but as a powerful storyteller, his story became, well, “real.”

Then what was wrong with post-war America’s story? Looking back I see a few things: the dreadful Hitler-enhanced war story that our parents lived, with its heroism and triumph, was not available for us to identify with, partly because it had not happened on our soil, and partly because we were so definitively post-war. Nor could we derive self-esteem from the earlier Depression, with its tales of injustice and endurance, awash as we were in surplus. We had for our coming of age rituals- not recognition of triumph over adversity- but endless exhortations conveyed via the new wonder, TV, to spend our parents’ money on keys to popularity like Brylceem (a little dab ‘ll do ‘ya!). We were just consumers of hair grease always on the look out for new products. I think I sensed even then the potential for Tom Brokaw to slander my entire generation as something less than “great.”

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The season approaches when our national discussion will once again turn to the relative sainthood of our would-be federal leaders. And shadowed close by, in my own community in the fair city of Los Angeles, we will be able to choose a new mayor. This political season appears at both levels with time-honored tradition, festivities and picnics everywhere, yet I react to its approach with growing fatigue and irritation.

Why? Am I running for office, so that I have to sweat every little quirk in a typically quirky conversation? No, I’m not running for office- and I’m not “in with the in-crowd,” if you know what I mean- and have no actual use for attaching my free-floating American angst to the great battles of the day. At the risk of psychoanalyzing my apathy (yes, in my youth I had a three-legged collie), I’ll just say that it isn’t so much apathy as, well…caring too much. It’s the same thing that happened to me when, on the way back from a Dodger game in which “we” had ignominiously lost, I had to ask my sulking self, “Why are you investing emotional energy in this? It’s just a damn baseball game, get over it!” Did I mention that this happened in 1969, not last week?

It was in that same year that I cast my first and last vote during the casting of which I believed that I was expressing a sort of influence on the government. That vote was in favor of Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic anti-war incumbent, for whom I had cheered in Columbus Square in San Francisco, against the warmonger Republican Barry Goldwater. (Ah, youth!). I dropped Democrats, Dodgers and Republicans within two years of each other. Whether that made me a secular humanist, well, I’m still working that out.

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Marriage is and has long been a cultural, social and wedge issue in American politics. One of the more dramatic turns of defining marriage came in the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Some forty years later, interracial marriage inspires little debate and has mostly been seen as an acceptable definition of marriage. However, as the twenty-first century dawned and developed, the issue of marriage definition has again come into American politics.

In 1996, President Clinton signed the federal Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA into law. DOMA, which President Obama has recently (and unconstitutionally) declared unconstitutional, said that the United States federal Government recognized marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman. It also said that no state would have to recognize the gay marriage of another state. Thus, an Alabama gay couple could not be married in Massachusetts and return home as newlyweds.

In 2008, Californians passed Proposition Eight, a measure barring gays from marrying in the Golden State. The proposition had passed narrowly in the general election and was later struck down by federal judge Vaughn Walker. A similar measure had previously been declared unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court.

Still, all the talk about how government defines marriage begs another question: should the government define marriage?

In several interviews, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has expressed the idea that “love is bigger than government” and argues that government should recognize civil unions between any two consenting adults and that the term “marriage” should be saved for churches and the private sector.

This is an idea that Libertarians should embrace. Americans have become hung up on the term “marriage”. Still, public opinion poll has showed time and time again that the vast majority of Americans support basic rights for gay and lesbian individuals including legal and sometimes financial benefits. Granting every adult, consenting couple a civil union would allow all citizens the rights they deserve as far as their partners are concerned. Additionally, it would continue the support of separation between church and state.

For too long, the American People have allowed their government to define what is and what is not marriage. A couple who love each other shouldn’t need the State’s permission to bind themselves legally and equivalently together. Civil Unions would grant equality to law abiding citizens and would promote freedom for all individuals regardless of their political, professional or marital positions.