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

-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.

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.

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.

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.

I have found that many of the “problems” with Ron Paul are not problems at all, and that most of his troublesome positions are in fact either outright fabrications invented by those who oppose him, or statements taken out of context.  Granted, there are still a few things that as a conservative make me cringe, but I am sure that liberals can say the same.  The thing is, as John Thorpe points out, liberty trumps all.  Next to freedom, most all of the other issues that we concern ourselves with become peripheral sideshows — and the one thing that Ron Paul definitely stands for, almost uniquely, is freedom.

For those of you who may not be aware of Ron Paul’s positions regarding several controversial issues, let me give some examples of what I have found out.

Ron Paul’s position on illegal immigration includes physically securing our borders, no amnesty, no welfare for illegal aliens, and ending birthright citizenship.  That does not sound like Paul is an open borders La Raza aficionado to me.                              

Ron Paul is not a proponent of abortion.  Doctor Paul has delivered over 4,000 babies, and no doubt understands more about the complexities involved in the debate than most of us.  As is the case with a number of issues, he has been made out to be a proponent of things that he does not endorse, but simply believes should be left up to the individual states to decide, as per the US Constitution. 

Ron Paul’s fiscal policies seem to me to be much more sane than anything I have seen come out of Washington since…well, actually I cannot think of any sane fiscal policy that has come out of Washington.  That is to say, Ron Paul’s ideas for responsible fiscal behavior are the sanest things to have come out of Washington in a loong time — end the Fed, end taxes, stop the government’s insane spending spree, and clean up rampant corruption.  You had better believe TPTB do not like the sound of any of that.                                                  

Claims that Ron Paul is racist are absurd.  Read the quote of his below and judge for yourself:  

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals.  Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups.  By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups.  …The true antidote to racism is liberty.  Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims.  …Rather than looking to government to correct what is essentially a sin of the heart, we should understand that reducing racism requires a shift from group thinking to an emphasis on individualism.” That bears rereading.                                            

John Nichols, writing for NPR on the Ron Paul candidacy notes that “what frightens Republican party leaders [is] the notion that the Grand Old Party might actually base its politics on values, as opposed to pay-to-play deal-making, [which] unsettles the Republican leaders who back only contenders who have been pre-approved by the Wall Street speculators, banksters and corporate CEOs who pay the party’s tab—and kindly pick up some of the bills for the Democrats, as well.  And if [Ron Paul] wins Iowa, he could begin a process of transforming the Republican Party into a conservative party.  That scares the Republican bosses who currently maintain the party concession on behalf of the Wall Streeters.  But it…quite intrigues the folks on Main Street who may be waking up to the fact that the “conservatism” of a Newt Gingrich or a Mitt Romney is a sham argument designed to make the rich richer and to make the rest of us pay for wars of whim and crony-capitalist corruption.”  (Italics added)    

I basically agree with Mr. Nichols, pausing only to mention in passing that the shoe is on the other foot, and that it is mainly the Democrats, not the Republicans, who are in bed with Wall Street.  The numbers paint a different story than liberals would have us believe: “These Democrats may claim to be on the side of the Occupy Wall Street Protesters, but the numbers don’t lie. They are clearly capitalizing on the populism of the day while continuing to line their campaign coffers with money from the very people they are now demonizing.”  In the spirit of détente I will drop that particular subject for the time being, and move onto Ron Paul’s “anti-war/non-intervention” stance of which much has been written.  

Not many people alive today remember the time when America was not the world’s “policeman,” but the current state of affairs is a rather recent development that did not start coming into being until shortly after WW II.  For most of America’s history the idea of policing the world would have been considered ludicrous.

Todd S. Purdum writing for “Vanity Fair” lays the blame for the rapid expansion of the military/industrial complex at the feet of George Kennan and an article he wrote in 1947 for the Council on Foreign Relations.  In his article Keenan outlined the need for America to fight communism in one hot-spot after another.  Keenan meant to fight it diplomatically and politically rather than militarily, but no matter, the military/industrial complex was born.  (John Bolton in a recent article gives Keenan much less credit, writing that Keenan “was simply a verbalizer for ideas swirling at the State Department” at the time). 

In any event, Keenan lived to rue his article and when US troops were sent to Somalia in 1992 he wrote “The dispatch of American armed forces to a seat of operations in a place far from our own shores, and this for what is actually a major police action in another country and in a situation where no defensible American interest is involved—this, obviously, is something that the Founding Fathers of this country never envisaged or would ever have approved. If this is in the American tradition, then it is a very recent tradition.”                                                                                                  

Exactly Ron Paul’s point — that all of this international military involvement is against the grain of America’s history, and at odds with our founding principles — if not flat out unconstitutional.  While our military is engaged in numerous operations overseas, the country that they are “defending” is going to hell in a hand-basket — economically, morally, and culturally.

I recently saw an article headlined “Draft Hillary.”  I thought to myself “”great idea!”  Issue her an M-16 and let her have at it in Afghanistan.  Send some of the more objectionable members of Congress along with her.  Let them get blown up, let them deal with suicide bombers, let them deal with insane ROEs in a tar-baby backwater surrounded on all sides by hostiles.  We would no doubt see a rapid “attitude-adjustment” on their part                                                                        

And if we were to successfully colonize Afghanistan — then what?  Colonize the surrounding countries of Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Yajikistan, and Pakistan?  We have to go after those terrorists you know.  Shall we colonize Yemen — we know they hide out there.  Somalia?  What about Sudan?  Where does it end?  What brainiac thought up this grand strategy?  I support our troops, and I want them out of Afghanistanbecause I support them.

I am not the non-interventionist that Ron Paul is, but I am for bringing most of our troops back home to regroup and reevaluate things.  We should concentrate on getting our own house in order, before we go waltzing around the world telling other folks how to run their business.  The United States has the world’s highest divorce rate, we lead the world in rapes, car thefts, and drug use.  We are by far the world’s main supplier of pornography, and we possess the planet’s most complicated tax system.  We have the most people behind bars, and we have far more foreign military bases that any other country.  Oh, and we spend over seven times more on our military than any other country.  What’s not to love?  Plenty.                                                                                       

It is no secret that war is big business and that many powerful people have a vested interest in seeing to it that wars continue unabated.  The “defense” industry beats out illegal drugs for profitability — only the oil industry brings in more money.  The “death merchants” make out like bandits while our young men and women lose lives, limbs, and heart.           

Speaking of drugs, now might be a good time to point out that Ron Paul is not for drug use, again he simply feels that it is something that should be left up to the individual states to decide.  (An interesting aside: did you know that Afghanistan’s multi-billion dollar opium trade rapidly expanded under US occupation?  Somehow I doubt that all that money goes to the Taliban).       

If you are under the delusion that our men and women in uniform are rabidly opposed to Ron Paul’s anti-war/isolationist stance, then you might be surprised to learn that Ron Paul receives more donations from active duty military personnel than any other politician — in either political party.  Paul Joseph Watson writes “judging by how their donations have flooded into Ron Paul’s campaign coffers, efforts to characterize Paul’s non-interventionist policy as a fringe viewpoint are clearly without any foundation whatsoever.”        

The meme that Ron Paul is unelectable is rubbish — scare tactics courtesy of TPTB.  I “guesstimate” that apart from a small percentage of voters who will find some of Paul’s positions to be beyond the pale (which is of course their right), there is a large majority that may very well end up voting for him.  

The Ron Paul revolution is a real across-the-board revolution, and not some dialectical sophistry designed to hoodwink one ideological side or the other. The establishment, no matter what political banner they carry, will fight tooth and nail anyone who threatens their grip on the status quo.   They like things just the way they are — with them in charge.  

At least in regard to Ron Paul a truce should be called between “we the people” on the left and on the right.  Let us agree to disagree, and “keep our eyes on the prize” — our freedom.  It is not impossible that “we the people” can win this thing.          

In truth this is not about left vs. right; it is about up vs. down.  Up to freedom, truth, light and hope, or down to darkness, lies, despair and ruin.

As “we the people” move forward toward restoring liberty in our land it would be wise to keep in mind that Ron Paul is only one man, and a revolution should not be about just one person.  Using Ron Paul as a figurehead, a touchstone, and a rallying point is fine, but fundamentaly this revolution is about “we the people, and restoring hope and freedom to our children and future generations. 

That being said, I wholeheartedly and without reservation endorse Ron Paul for President of the United States.  Now let’s go kick some butt – lovingly of course.  Power to the people – right on.             

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:

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oULpsuoEY7c

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.

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.”

When we entered the hormone driven mania of adolescence we had no state sanctioned release- no righteous cause leading to carnal and moral fulfillment. Drugs like marijuana that had been confined to marginalized Hispanics and Blacks were accepted by middle-class whites to assuage our stifled impulses, and the government, though it benefited from the apolitical nature of drug mediated visions of flower-power, cleverly kept the drugs illegal to engender a sense of resistance to authority, of a sort of war which drug users could think they were part of, and this of course became, on the government’s side, the equally phony “War on Drugs.” (For contrast check out George Lucas’ masterpiece, THX 1138, in which the the central crime of a future society is “drug evasion.”)

Of course the government detected, as governments do, the people’s unsettled need for traditional war, and it had a military establishment to keep busy, so it (along with other governments facing the same problem) gave us a series of wars. The Korean War was the first, but the Boomers were too young to understand it (I remember asking my dad if the war took place at the radio station, since it seemed to be emanating from there). Too bad, because, since it involved a Chinese invasion of Korea, there was a credible foe.

Not so the Vietnam War. The Chinese, conniving even then to wreck our stories, did not invade Vietnam, leaving us with a highly questionable story about bombarding a peasant nation that posed no obvious threat to us. I marched carrying signs proclaiming many lofty ideals, but looking back my sign should simply have read, “Give us a good story!”

The rest is, well, history. The Bay of Pigs? No one will claim that was a good story. I would make an exception for the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was over so fast, with no real action, and whatever heroism was involved reflected well only on distant, mostly older leaders.

Our various involvements in the Gulf might have given us fulfilling stories had they been better told, particularly the only potentially effective one, involving Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, with its story potential of a heroic U.S. response to the plight of dispossessed Kuwaitis taking refuge in European night clubs, but, as in most of our mid-east adventures, we have ruined the narrative with our inability to acknowledge the importance of oil, so obvious a motivator for involvement that leaving it out sent the Gulf war stories into hopeless spirals of cognitive dissonance.

Of course things changed with 9/11, a completely compelling and defining story- the first since World War II. The timing of this story was so historically distinctive (coming at the end of the Cold War) that its appearance spawned a world of conspiracy theories. I’m going to stay away from these, however, as they do not pertain to my thesis, that people need stories. Whether those stories are essentially true or develop in a shadow land where truth and fiction intertwine, I will leave for a time when the public has access to the relevant information (I’m not holding my breath).

I simply point out that since 2001 we have been run by the story of 9/11. It is now our central myth. It has reconfirmed our belief in the military as the essential element of the American character, and it has unified us as a coherent nation.

Of course, stories need updating, and even 9/11 started to flag. Just imagine that only a few short weeks ago people in airports were complaining about having to stand in line to take off their shoes and present facsimiles of their naked torsos to federal agents. More ominous still, much attention was being paid to the fact that the American public school system is collapsing in insolvency, along with the dream of owning a home.

All that kvetching has faded now, however, because we’ve killed Osama! Who could have guessed that the next chapter of the story would be so compelling? I’ve quite forgotten that the high school from which my youngest son is graduating in June is laying off a third of its teachers. Really, who cares? Osama is dead!

Let me hasten to emphasize that I’m not knocking the role of stories in human society. We need stories, whether personal or communal, simply because we need to be part of a meaningful scenario, a plot, with cause and effect, so that we will be more than just respiring blobs of protoplasm. I am pro-story.

We ought to be aware, though, that the clever people who generate our stories tend to have agendas of their own.

And maybe we should take a second look at certain elements of this latest chapter, in particular those which define the summary execution of bin Laden as a victory requiring overt self-congratulation and sustained celebration. Such reactions are premature. The losers in this story are numerous and well-funded- they did not die with bin Laden, nor did their cause. When Hitler was dead, his movement was dead with him; we had really won. That was a time for sustained celebration. The end of bin Laden is not the end of a war, but the beginning. The only confirmed beneficiary so far is Obama’s chance for a second term.

And on that note, I offer a scary question: What will it take to make voters forget that America’s public schools collapsed on Obama’s watch? There are almost two years to go until the next presidential election, and the warm glow of Osama bin Laden’s death will not last that long.

—————————————–
Doug Lasken is a Los Angeles high school English teacher and debate coach. Write to him through his blog at http://laskenlog.blogspot.com/

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.

Anyway, the story’s not over. Like millions of my fellow baby-boomers, I continue to vote. It’s just a natural progression from following the news, a popular pastime with retirees. We do a lot of reading between the lines, that sort of thing. It’s engaging because the media really do offer you an endlessly fascinating cascade of sometimes credible and usually ominous news. One day I opened my paper to find that the medical plan that’s folded into my teacher pension is the most corrupt thing anyone’s ever heard of, and people are shouting, “By golly, we’re a’gonna shut this place down if’n we don’t get our rightful money back!” Like a tortured Steinbeck character I cry, “That’s me they’re screamin’ at, Ma! Me’n the union! They’se out to break us, Ma!” (unfortunately of course, the union is itself in thrall to the forces of cupidity and sloth, marring this otherwise motivational story).

So I vote, just to feel on top of things, and it adds a pleasant chore to my morning. The icing on the cake is that my voting station in the San Fernando Valley is at the high school where I taught. Aside from meditations on the influence I may or may not be exerting by completing a ballot, I bump into old colleagues and we joke about how no one votes except geezers who are afraid that their old high school civics teacher is watching. It’s got everything but a pickle jar.
But it’s not my mission here to denigrate the system any further than the situation merits.

Concerning candidates for next mayor of our City of the Angeles, or those at the federal level who wish to try against Obama’s seemingly invincible shield, I will read newspaper articles about your positions and gossip with my friends about you on the condition that you answer this question honestly: Why do you want the job? No one is saying that the only reason you want it is so you can line your pockets, be famous and a sort of rock star at a surprisingly advanced age- what’s wrong with those things anyway? But please answer me this: in addition to enjoying the obvious benefits of office, what else is on your mind? Are you, for instance, going to have an impact on public education? If so, what exactly will that impact be, how will its implementation unfold on schools, how will it be funded, does it have any chance of becoming policy?

As an old debate coach, I know I’ve just put myself in a defensive position where my opponent can claim, “Candidates do explain all those things. You just never listen!”

To which I retort: most policy speeches appear to be written by English teachers who couldn’t sell their screenplay and who are about to be automated out of a job by software that recycles phrases like “We won’t accept second best!” and “The time is now!”, so what’s to listen to? I’m sure it would be different to have a one-on-one conversation with a candidate.

One imagines it would be highly reasoned dialogue, if rushed and left a bit fuzzy at the edges.

But candidates can’t give each of us quality time. They have to talk to all of us at once. That’s where I want to see the improvement.
Let’s discuss these things further. Hope to see you at the polling booth! (I may just bring a pickle jar).

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Doug Lasken is a retired 25 year veteran of the Los Angeles Unified School System. Reach him through his blog at: http://laskenlog.blogspot.com/

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.

“I don’t think my friend should be able to kill herself,” pontificated a fellow classmate. “Because then I will be sad and this will affect me negatively.”
For whatever reason, the concept that one can do something to themselves but not others was ungraspable for many of my fellow students. Mill argued that people must have control of their own lives and be free to do whatever they wish with it as long as it does not hinder the rights of others to do whatever it is they wish with their lives. In a society that is becoming increasingly collectivist, it may be surprising to some people that victimless crimes actually exist. They include prostitution, smoking marijuana, not wearing a seat belt among others.

In his address to 2008’s Campaign for Liberty, former New Mexico Governor Gary E. Johnson joked, “When I go out on my motorcycle, I wear protection from head to toe. However, if someone doesn’t want to wear a helmet when riding their motorcycle, that should be their choice. There is a donor shortage in this country.”

The idea behind victimless crimes is simple. You have a right to your life. You have a right to make decisions, and yes even obviously stupid ones, because it is your life and yours alone. The idea that government intervenes on your behalf even with the best of intentions is a tragic and corrupting suggestion and one that should be abandoned. Only when you do something that would hinder the rights of others should the law involve itself.

The most important figure in the libertarian movement is the individual. If collectivists are allowed to control aspects related only to the individual, even in an effort to good on the part of the individual, than libertarianism has no chance at surviving and flourishing. Mr. Mill understood the benefits of individual liberty and warned in his timeless manuscript that if victimless acts are allowed to be crimes, than the individual, for all other factors of liberty, cannot be free.

These days I don’t talk to as many kids as I used to, but the discourse is surprisingly similar. Consider, for instance, the reply of a California Democrat to this question: “What do you think state money should be spent on?” You’ll get a simple answer: “It should be spent on services for society’s most needy: children, the indigent,” etc. That’s an answer a child could understand. And most children, hearing such a statement, would think, “Well, why would anyone not be a Democrat? We should help children and poor people.”

Thus partisanship, the adherence to one party over another, is born. The problem, of course, is that adult political life is not so simple. To put it bluntly, Democrats don’t particularly care about children and poor people. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Take, for instance, the question of President Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) grant, which, we’re told, is supposed to help children. In California, as in the rest of the nation, almost all office-holding or appointed Democrats are for it, while many Republicans are against it. What I am arguing here is that, while this is a partisan struggle, it is not about whether or not we should help children.

To begin with, RTTT applicants must commit to adopting new federal “Common Core” academic standards (CCS). The reason given is that many states have poor standards. But California, in the estimate of virtually everyone who has studied its standards, is not in that category. Nonetheless, the Schwarzenegger appointed state school board approved paying, according to the non-profit group EdSource, up to $1.6 billion to cover the costs dropping our standards and adopting the CCS, and the board’s new members, appointed by Democratic governor Jerry Brown, are not perturbed at the prospect. Meanwhile our RTTT application was rejected and we will receive no federal money, so we will be paying the $1.6 billion with state funds, increasing by that amount our $25 billion deficit.

So Democrats do want to spend money. But are they spending it on children? The money will go to test writing companies, textbook publishers and professional development pundits. Does that sound like children? Do you hear the words “student,” “teacher,” or “school” in that description?

But our partisan state, our Democratic state under Governor Brown and his new appointees to the state board is proceeding with CCS adoption because, well, because if you’re a Democrat you believe in spending money.

When last I wrote for Liberty Maven, the struggle over RTTT and CCS was under the radar, but now that states across the nation are at last dealing with their huge deficits there is a lot of noise. Washington, Maine, Massachusetts and others have been addressing CCS for several weeks, with heated debates occurring in their state houses, and Rand Paul is asking the right questions in Congress. What is happening in our Democratic state of California? That depends on where you look. If you look at online forums, whether Democrat or Republican, you’ll see scores of outraged teachers, parents and education researchers asking where the adoption money is supposed to come from, and what good it will do to spend it on new standards. But if you look at Sacramento, you’ll see partisanship in action: a lockstep march towards embracing CCS. No one anywhere is questioning the wisdom of adoption, or even admitting that we are not yet committed to it. Per education writer Tom Chorneau, the newly-established state advisory panel tasked with “providing professional development to teachers on the Common Core changes” had its first meeting in late February, and everyone discussed the done deal of adoption in total harmony.

This is great news for the recipients of the anticipated windfall. If you look at the textbook companies’ websites you’ll see glowing reports on their CCS compliance. Here’s what major publisher Pearson has to say on its home page, (http://commoncore.pearsoned.com/): “Only Pearson offers complete and cohesive support to implement the new Common Core State Standards and provide the easiest possible transition.” Note: the last realignment of textbooks for newly adopted California standards cost $1 billion over four years (see the Schiff-Bustamante bill, 1998).

“Democrat” is getting a little harder to define, isn’t it? We’ve gone from spending money on those in need to spending money on those in greed.

But it gets worse. Even normally impartial and informative education commentator John Fensterwald, in a recent exchange with me in his online forum, Thoughts on Public Education, brought partisanship into a new Alice and Wonderland dimension:

Me: Every research institute from Fordham to Pioneer has found that the current CA standards are among the best in the nation and are in no need of replacement.

John: Doug: “Every research institute from Fordham to Pioneer” is like saying “every politician from Ron Paul to Sarah Palin.”

As a consultant for both Fordham and Pioneer during their assessments last summer of state standards in relation to CCS, it was news to me that a positive evaluation of California’s standards denotes any kind of politics at all. I’m still working on John’s meaning. I think it’s something like, “We won, so our side gets the loot.”

Let’s tell it like it is: Democrats want to spend money, yes, on their buddies. Now that’s something any child can understand.

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Doug Lasken is a retired LA Unified teacher, freelancer and consultant. Write him at doug.lasken@gmail.com