Author Archives: Robert

You Gotta Love the <span style="font-style:italic;">far</span> Left

Paul Craig Roberts, writing for counterpunch, touches all the bases in grand polemical style. There are the requisite ad hominem attacks against Bush, Cheney, Israel and America’s other “puppets” in the Middle East.

Nothing new there, but I was struck by an interesting bit of hypocrisy. Compare this:

Fox “News,” which in fact is the most thorough-going dispenser of war propaganda since the Nazi Third Reich…

…with this:

The US breeds terrorism by its 60-year old policy of interfering in the internal affairs of Muslim lands and ruling them through surrogates. The US assaults Muslim sensitivities with the export of “American culture,” a euphemism for sexual promiscuity. The US creates enormous animosity by appearing to exploit Muslim oil wealth and by turning a blind eye while Israel expropriates the West Bank.

If the counterpunch article isn’t a prime example of propaganda,

the word is meaningless.

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Legislative Lunacy

An old friend of mine (Jon, who really ought to start blogging) sent this little gem of a story to me via e-mail.

A pro-pot group alleges that an Aurora police officer pulled over one of its members this week because he had a marijuana legalization sticker on the back of his vehicle.

[…]

The officer, who wasn't identified, allegedly told Wansing [the 25 year-old ”criminal”] that he wouldn't have been cited if he didn't have the sticker on his vehicle and that he didn't want his children to see such “trash.”

Nice…! It seems that Joe Cop is unaware

of the fact that, if marijuana legalization stickers are outlawed, only outlaws will display marijuana legalization stickers.

For more ludicrous lawmaking, see this and this.

Update: In a comment to this post, John Newman wrote: <span style="font-sty

<a href="http://canexback.com/" title="how to win casino pa natet back your ex”>how to win back your ex

le:italic”>”Let me guess, you think we can fix things through the political process.”

Well, according to a somewhat suspect conspiracist website (it claims that 9/11 was planned by the US government and that the US is a police state), there’s a bill in New Hampshire, sponsored by Rep. Paul Hopfgarten, that was “proposed at the request of local Free Staters“.

The bill reads: “Any law enforcement officer, person acting as a law enforcement officer, or other public official who confiscates or attempts to confiscate lawfully carried or lawfully owned firearms in this state during a declared state of emergency shall be charged with a class A felony.”

So yeah, if the bill is signed into law, then clearly the political process will have been instrumental in restoring an important aspect of

individual liberty.

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Could this happen to &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span style=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;font-style:italic;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;you&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;?

The War on Drugs is reminiscent of the tyranny that our forbearers revolted against. Hyperbole? I think not. There’s a horrible miscarriage of justice, which Radly Balko summarizes this way:

Cops mistakenly break down the door of a sleeping man, late at night, as part of drug raid. Turns out, the man wasn't named in the warrant, and wasn't a suspect. The man, frightened for himself and his 18-month old daughter, fires at an intruder who jumps into his bedroom after the door's been kicked in. Turns

out that the man, who is black, has killed the white son of the town's police chief. drugs) in his possession at the time of the raid.

…with liberty and justice for all?

Battlepanda has a round-up of blogs—of all persuasions—that shed light on this travesty. Join the chorus so maybe, just maybe, those that support the criminalization of “drugs” will see the consequences of creeping authoritarianism.

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Renewing The Patriot Act

Despite their faults, the ACLU is quite rightly questioning the authority of the US Government where individual liberty is concerned. Specifically, they have been relentless in their opposition to the Patriot Act, legislation that all but ignores the Fourth Amendment and the Viagra online presumption of innocence.

Under the Patriot Act, the FBI can demand the disclosure of personal records about innocent people without getting approval from a judge.

Simply by issuing a National Security Letter, the FBI can force Internet service providers, universities and other institutions to turn over customer records.

Even more disturbing, anyone who receives an NSL is gagged forever from telling anyone that the FBI demanded records. Secrecy surrounding NSLs has made it difficult for the public and Congress to know just how the FBI is using its new power.

What made the Congress and Bush think that they could just dispense with due process? Yes, we’re at war with a network of psychos that don’t wear uniforms, but does that mean that we, US citizens, must forfeit the constitutionally

protected right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures?

Think of the implications of such arbitrarily assumed federal power. The FBI could, after having issued an NSL, search, seize, arrest and jail one indefinitely without providing an iota of proof in open court. Joe Stalin and Saddam might approve of this, but Bush?

There may yet be hope. According to an AP story, the House and Senate are negotiating a deal that will mitigate the injustice of NSLs.

The compromise CryptoLogic Operations Ltd operates as a platform subscriber of Ongame Network Ltd, a registered license-holder of the Government of Gibraltar under a license (License No. also makes changes to national security letters, an investigative tool used by the FBI to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a court order or grand jury subpoena.

Under the agreement, the reauthorization specifies that an NSL can be reviewed by a court, and explicitly allows those who receive the letters to inform their lawyers about them.

While the changes are a step in the right direction, I’m not sure that those in Washington appreciate the potential danger of such legislation. For example, “the Bush administration contends that such consultation already is allowed, citing at least two court challenges to NSLs.” Nice try, Bush, but those two court challenges were raised after you signed that piece of crap into law!

Sigh…just remember, Mr. & Mrs. America, if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear…right?

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Leftists, in their own words

I am certainly no fan of progressive political theory, but it is instructive to know what, specifically, its proponents advocate. Fortunately, Washington Monthly’s blog, Political Animal (Kevin Drum), features a series of articles called The New Progressivism. The introduction of which reads in part:

Conservatives say they want to use choice (school vouchers, private accounts in Social Security) to shift power from government to individuals. We think that conservatives’ real aim is to shift more risk onto individuals in order to cut government, and that only liberals can deliver a choice revolution in government that people would actually want. But we also believe progressives should go a step further, with policies that shift power from corporations to individuals.

While clever, that type of rhetoric is very misleading. For

as Jefferson explained: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed…” The rights of which he spoke are life, liberty, [property] and the pursuit of happiness. That being the case, individuals posses the bulk of political power; a limited portion of which is merely lent to government, as delineated in the tenth amendment to the Constitution: The powers not 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. Therefore, it’s not as though political power belongs to government, as is implied by Drum.

The other bit of slippery verbiage in the introductory paragraph is the implication that “to shift more risk onto individuals in order to cut government” is somehow a bad thing. The truth is that with freedom comes risk; the cost of diverting risk from the individual to government is freedom itself, which is priceless. Additionally, there is the stated goal of formulating “policies that shift power from corporations to individuals”. On the surface this seems innocuous, for in a consumer-based market economy, individuals vote with their dollars and corporations ought not to be allowed to defraud the consuming public with impunity. But that’s not exactly what progressives mean by “shifting power from corporations to individuals”. Progressives see corporations (large and small) as a means to an end, i.e. corporations exist for the benefit of “the common good”, rather than to earn profits for investors. Think of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

One of the articles deals with Bush’s “ownership society”. In it, Paul Glastris attempts to show that choice is not as popular as one might casino online think.

Americans love the idea of choice—in the abstract. But when faced with the actual choices conservatives present, they aren't buying. The reason is that conservatives have constructed choices that fail to take human nature into account. People like to have choices but feel quickly overwhelmed when they lack the information or expertise to decide confidently, and they turn downright negative when the choices themselves seem to put what they already have at risk. Conservatives were bound to make these mistakes because their very aim has been to transfer more risks from government to individuals so that government's size and expenditures can be cut. That's not a bargain most Americans will accept. They like choice just fine, but they won't trade security to get it.

Supposing, for the sake of argument, that human nature is risk averse, and that a majority would trade freedom for security. So what! The Constitution does not delegate to the government any authority to assume the ordinary risk of individuals. Furthermore, Constitutional protections of individual liberty are not (at least not legitimately) subject to popular vote…inherent rights are unalienable. Such rights not only inhere to those that cherish them, but also to those that would sell their freedom for

a type of servitude that masquerades as security.

Choice, then, can be a powerful tool to advance public ends as long as one ironic truth is recognized: People like having choice but often don't like to choose.

This concept is at the center of a brewing movement within public-policy circles, one that Cass Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago have affectionately, if cheekily, dubbed “libertarian paternalism.” The idea is for government to shape the choices people have so that the natural human tendency to avoid making a decision works to the individuals' and society's advantage.

The paternalistic disposition of progressives, however well-intentioned, does not justify the immoral use of coercion that is inexorably linked to the implementation of entitlement programs—those that purport to help the helpless. That is, governments don’t run on sweetness and light; governments need funds, which are seized through force and/or the threat of force. And when laws are passed to benefit some at the expense of others, the liberty of all is diminished.

But the cost of progressive policies is not limited to lost liberty and the seizure of property and wealth. There are hidden costs as well, such as: higher unemployment due to the over-regulation of business (e.g. “living wage” laws, Kyoto Protocol, etc.), lessened purchasing power resulting from excessive tax rates and a general lack of motivation that stems from a disincentive to be self-reliant. After all, the government has—so the thinking goes—an endless reservoir of resources with which to supply one’s every need. buy real viagra online This, of course, is belied by how the social democracies of Europe are fairing with their grand progressive experiment. And if leftists succeed, America will travel the same miserable path.

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