Saturday, April 21, 2012

Dr. Paul is a Super Hero!


Take Down the Fed with Ron Paul: the Adventure Game 


Ron Paul may not be the most avid gamer — but the leading libertarian certainly wouldn’t want to stop you playing his character in an upcoming videogame from Texas-based programmer Daniel Williams.
Ron Paul: The Road to REVOLution” is a side-scrolling adventure game that echoes console classics of days gone by. Players take control of Dr. Paul as he sprints across the U.S., collecting coins (made of gold, of course) and delegates in a race for the White House.
The browser-based game has one level for each of the 50 states, and 13 boss fights — one for each branch of the Federal Reserve. Once released, it’ll be free to play.
Williams, the game’s designer, has been selling Paul-themed merchandise for about a year. He’s a freelance programmer and entrepreneur who makes video games in his spare time. One day he got the idea to combine his coding skills, love of video games and Paul appreciation — and the game was born.
Williams turned to crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to raise the funds for the project. 163 people have pledged more than $8,400, easily topping the original $5,000 goal.
“I did the Kickstarter campaign as an experiment,” says Williams. “I was nervous about it. I wasn’t sure how Ron Paul fans would take it. I was hoping it was something people would get excited about it and help me make it as good as it can be.”
Williams says the Ron Paul community has given him overwhelming support, even though he didn’t have any kind of traditional advertising campaign. Pure word-of-mouth, social media attention and media coverage has been contributing to the game’s funding success.
Paul’s campaign hasn’t yet commented on the game, but Williams says it would be “awesome” if that happened.
The Kickstarter campaign ends on May 1, and the game will be released soon afterwards. Until then, Williams is adding some spit and polish to ready the game for launch day. Eventually, he might port it to mobile platforms.
Williams’ next move? “I do plan to continue making games,” he says. “I’ve got some ideas for other liberty-oriented games. I’d love to do this full-time.”
Check out the above footage with new features, exclusive to Mashable. Then tell us in the comments what you think of Williams’ game. Would you play it? Do politics and platform games mix?

We Have Already Lost The War!

Reason Magazine

The 5 Dumbest Things the Obama Administration Has Said About Mexico's Drug War

How the Obama administration talks to its neighbors about drugs.

At last week's Summit of the Americas, President Barack Obama reiterated his belief that the war on drugs is winnable, and that the alternative—legalization or decriminalization—isn't one the U.S. is willing to consider. This despite the fact that an increasing number of Central and South American governments are considering those very alternatives.
Despite campaign promises to scale back the war on drugs, Obama has been a hardliner since the first day of his administration. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the talking points the Obama administration has used to justify its proxy war with Mexico's drug traffickers, which has wreaked havoc on our southern neighbor. Unlike in the U.S., where Obama is careful to sound open-minded and compassionate about the effects of the drug war, when it comes to Mexico, the American position is defined by vulgarity, condescension, dishonesty, and nonchalance.
Read five of the worst, if not the five worst statements made by the Obama administration about Mexico's drug war below.
5.) "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians."
Who said it: Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State
Why she’s wrong: Dozens of news organizations cited Clinton’s (and Obama’s) claim that American guns are the weapons of choice in Mexico’s drug war, but that’s simply not true. “Many of the weapons are stolen from the Mexican military and police, often by deserters,” Jacob Sullum wrote in 2009. “Some are smuggled over the border from Guatemala; others come from China by way of Africa or Latin America. Russian gun traffickers do a booming business in Mexico.” Additionally, “the futile effort to stop Americans from consuming politically incorrect intoxicants is the real source of the violence in Mexico, since prohibition creates a market with artificially high prices and hands it over to criminals.”
4.) "The danger here is on several fronts. Number one is the tremendous violence. I think the numbers that Mexican officials have mentioned are 150,000 who have died by violence, mainly between cartels in Mexico.”
Who said it: Leon Panetta, director of the CIA
Why he's wrong: While the drug war in Mexico has been outrageously deadly, the highest publicly available estimate of drug war casualties during the presidency of Felipe Calderon, tallied by NGOs and journalists, is roughly 50,000. The Mexican government says even that number is too high. Either Panetta knows something the Mexican government doesn't know, or the director of America’s biggest intelligence agency mistated the number of people killed in a U.S.-backed war by a factor of three.
3.) "It's worth debating [legalization] in order to lay to rest some of the myths that are associated with the notion of legalization. The debate always occurs, understandably, in the context of serious violence that occurs with the society, particularly in societies that don't have the institutional framework and the structure to deal with organized, illicit operations."
Who said it: Joe Biden, vice president of the United States
Why he's wrong: A couple of reasons. The first is that the real “myths” associated with legalization, as demonstrated by Portugal, are the ones being spread by the White House and its agencies. Second, while the legalization debate may “always” occur in countries destabilized by drug war violence, it doesn’t occur only in those countries. The debate over prohibition is alive and well, for instance, in the United States, where violence is historically low. The president’s drug control strategy, heinous as it is, even admits that violence isn’t the only negative externality of the war on drugs. There’s also the effect on employment, education, and family stability.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

By A Twitching Of My Thumbs.......

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Recently by Charles Goyette: Cash for Freedom
 


Perhaps it's like shouting an alarm, unheard above the engine noise of two trains on a collision course. Or, screaming helplessly as a car slips its brakes and rolls toward a toddler playing at the bottom of the driveway.
It is gruesome imagery and I apologize for invoking it. But if anything, it may be inadequate to the prospect before us.
One only has to ask, "What is heading our way?"
Headline:
The Department Of Homeland Security Is Buying 450 Million New Bullets
And don't kid yourself; they're not for target practice. It's .40 caliber ammunition, hollow point rounds that promise "optimum penetration for terminal performance." The department also has a bid out for up to 175 million rounds of .223 caliber ammunition.
This isn't the flipping army, you know. This is an internal national police force, a department that didn't even exist 10 years ago.
Headline:
Supreme Court OKs Strip Searches for Minor Offenses
It's okay with the Supreme Court if you are detained and subjected to a demeaning strip-search for such serious offenses against the State as violating a leash law or having a headlight out.
Really, is being strip-searched and perhaps even forced to take a delousing shower for riding your bicycle without an audible bell reasonable? Of course not. So much for the 4th Amendment.
Headline:
Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool
Even in the absence of judicial authorization, cell phone tracking has become widespread. An ACLU report covering more than 200 police departments finds that nearly all engage in the practice, but only a few bother with a warrant.
Would you be shocked to discover that some police departments are trying to keep their activities secret because of the legal implications? Officers have even been warned to keep their cell phone tracking out of police reports. Now what was that oath about upholding the law?
Headline:
The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
The crown jewel of Federal spying is a new $2 billion, high tech center in Utah, a million square feet devoted to data gathering and storage. "NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the U.S. and its citizens," reports an account of the program.
The facility will help manage information from 10 to 20 domestic telecom "listening posts." "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state," says William Binney, a former senior NSA crypto-mathematician.
What Is heading Our Way?
These are only a few recent headlines. But the police state is growing much faster than even these stories suggest. There is the developing proliferation of domestic spy drones; a variety of so-called cyber-security bills – internet kill switches – are working their way through Congress; and, of course, there are executive power grabs like the presidential power to target American citizens for assassination found in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Some Germans, although not all, were willing to ask what wicked thing was headed their way in the 1930s. Sebastian Haffner was a young law student and aspiring court clerk at the time. After his death at the age of 91 in 1999, his son found Haffner's account of the era stuffed away in a drawer.
Haffner's manuscript, which he had left unfinished in 1939, was published as Defying Hitler," and became an immediate bestseller. The book is graced by fine writing, shown in a New York Times review citing Haffner's description of Hitler: ''… personal appearance was thoroughly repellent – the pimp's forelock, the hoodlum's elegance . . . the interminable speechifying, the epileptic behavior with its wild gesticulations and foaming at the mouth.''
But it is the candid search for self-knowledge, his honest inquiry of "what became of the Germans," that makes the work a place to begin answering how "it" could have happened. Haffner writes that nobody saw what was to come with any clarity in the early days of the fascist transformation of the land in 1933, but that he "had a sense of what was in the air. I felt distinctly that what had happened so far was merely disgusting and no more. But what was in the offing had something apocalyptic about it."
Haffner suggests that Germans saw in Hitler a "do-over," a chance to transform the defeat of World War I into victory. The martial mood he invoked, like that of the war, "provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer."
A 9/11 Do-Over?
Is it possible that Americans are squandering their birthright of liberty in nostalgia for post-World War II triumphalism, a golden age myth of good wars and greatest generations? It is a myth that exaggerates our might and insists on our universal benevolence.
But it is a myth that was shattered on 9/11, when we discovered ourselves to be both vulnerable and unloved.
Like the Germans, determined to prove that history got it wrong with the Allies' victory in November 1918, is ours an attempt to cling to an illusion about America that made us hold absurd beliefs about democratizing the Mideast and being "welcomed as liberators"?
Are Americans spending themselves into warfare-state ruin now to reenact the myth (for it is a myth) of the universally admired and invulnerable hero?
Like a middle-aged man squandering his savings on face lifts and hair plugs, on expensive sports cars, and absurdly inappropriate clothing, night clubbing with girls half his age, trying to relive a youth that was never anything like his imagination, are Americans trying to recapture a period that was nothing at all like the myth of their belief?
Is it the lingering myth of invulnerability, an unspoken promise for the storied omnipotence of skies darkened with aircraft and seas blackened with ships that has Americans spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined on warfare, and digging themselves deeper into ruin?
But we never were what the myth says we were. It is only our failure to confront who we really are and what we have been party to that makes us subject to the compulsion of myth, so that we act in unconscious and destructive ways.
We were never invulnerable before September 11, 2001.
Just ask public school children who were drilled to "duck and cover" under their desks when the sirens went off during the Cold War.
And we were never the global "Good American."
At least, the 20 million – 30 million human beings whose deaths the U.S. is responsible for since World War II would not have seen us that way. To them, we would more readily have been recognized as mighty brutes. But since we know nothing of their perception of our brutishness, and since we don't hold ourselves morally accountable for any of the slaughter, we have combined ignorance with our brutality.
In this unawakened state, Americans stand by silently as the national security state becomes more powerful by the day. Just as only the complete totalist state could allow Hitler to assert what was to be Germany's ultimate victory, only the unchecked might of such a state seems equal to the task of forcing reality to match the myth under which Americans labor.
The headlines tell the story … "Something wicked this way comes."
The line is from Macbeth. It is, of course, a tragedy about power and death.


April 9, 2012

Charles Goyette [send him mail] is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Dollar Meltdown. His new book is Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. He is also editor of Freedom & Prosperity Letter, a monthly political and financial newsletter dedicated to revealing the truth about the U.S.'s political scene and economic climate. To learn more, go here.
Copyright © 2012 Charles Goyette

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Let's Start By Opting Out Of NCLB!

To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
By Philip K. Howard
Successful schools don't have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.
America's schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower.
Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies -- nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don't emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students -- with spontaneity, authority, and wit. 
Good teachers typically are found in schools with good cultures. Experts say you can tell if a school is effective within five minutes of walking in. Students are orderly and respectful when changing classes; there's a steady hum of activity. Good school culture typically grows out of good leadership. Here as well, there are many variations of success. KIPP schools have a formula that includes, for students, longer hours and strict accountability to core values, and, for teachers, a cooperative role in developing school activities and pedagogy. David Brooks recently described a highly successful school in Brooklyn that abandons the teacher-in-front-of-class model in favor of collaborative learning. Students sit around larger tables trying to solve problems or discuss the task at hand. In every successful school, whatever its theory of education, a good culture sweeps everyone along, as if by a strong tide, towards common goals of discovery and learning.
Successful teaching and good school cultures don't have a formula, but they have a necessary condition: teachers and principals must feel free to act on their best instincts. Minute by minute, as they respond to students and each other, their focus must be on doing what's right. Humans can only focus on one thing at a time, sociologist Robert Merton observed. That's why it's vital for teachers to be thinking only about how to communicate the lesson to the students in front of them. Any diversion of this focus is apt to be seen as indifference or boredom, and will break the magic.
This is why we must bulldoze school bureaucracy. It is a giant diversion, focused on compliance to please some administrator far away. Every minute spent filling out a form or worrying about compliance interferes with the human interaction that is the essence of effective teaching.
Law is everywhere in schools. It permeates every nook and cranny. Teachers spend hours every week filling out forms that no one ever reads -- because the laws and regulations that have piled up over the years require them. Hardly any interaction is free of legal implications. Teachers are instructed never -- never ever -- to put an arm around a crying child: the school might get sued. Misbehavior and disrespect are met with weakness and resignation; teachers are trained to be stoics, tolerating disorder rather than running the risk of a "due process" hearing in which the teacher, not the student, must justify her decision. Principals suffer a similar inversion of authority with teachers, who are armed with hundreds of pages of work rules that prescribe exactly what teachers can be asked to do. Managing a school -- say, setting the hours, deciding how to spend the budget, and deciding which teachers are doing the job -- is an oxymoron. Public schools today are, by law, basically unmanageable.
Throw onto the legal pile a mono-minded compulsion -- complete with legal penalties -- to satisfy minimum standardized test scores. Recess has been canceled, arts and humanities courses scrapped, and creative interaction replaced by rote drills -- largely because of one law, known as No Child Left Behind. Another unintended effect of focusing only on the lowest performers is that all the all the other students get left behind. Teachers are treated like machine tools, their personalities and passions extruded through rigid drilling protocols. Demoralization has never been considered a good management strategy, but that's what NCLB has accomplished. One teacher in Florida put it this way: "I love teaching, I love kids, but it's become harder and harder when you're teaching to the test. Can you hear the discouragement in my voice?"
America's schools face many external challenges, particularly the breakdown of the nuclear family and an imbedded underclass. But numerous public, charter, and parochial schools succeed notwithstanding these challenges. What all these successful schools have in common is that somehow, usually with strong leadership, they figure out how to repress the bureaucracy and unleash the human spirit. "We have a great deal of freedom here," observed a teacher at a successful school studied by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, because the principal "protects his faculty from 'the arbitrary regulations of the central authority.'"
The organizational flaw in America's schools is that they are too organized. Bureaucracy can't teach. American schools have been organized "on the totally erroneous assumption," management expert Peter Drucker observed, "that there is one right way to learn and it is the same for everyone." We must give educators freedom to be themselves. This doesn't mean they should be unaccountable. But they should be accountable for overall success, including, especially, success at socialization of students through a healthy school culture, not just objective test scores. This requires scrapping the current system -- all of it, federal, state, and local, as well as union contracts. We must start over and rebuild an open framework in which real people can find inspiration in doing things their own way.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/to-fix-americas-education-bureaucracy-we-need-to-destroy-it/255173/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

And Everybody Thought We Were Paranoid About Big Brother!

Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us

Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US. Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.
One. The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of emails, texts and phone calls every day and has the ability to collect and sift through billions more. WIRED just reported NSA is building an immense new data center which will intercept, analyze and store even more electronic communications from satellites and cables across the nation and the world. Though NSA is not supposed to focus on US citizens, it does.
Two. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has more than 1.5 billion government and private sector records about US citizens collected from commercial databases, government information, and criminal probes.
Three. The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times recently reported that cellphones of private individuals in the US are being tracked without warrants by state and local law enforcement all across the country. With more than 300 million cellphones in the US connected to more than 200,000 cell phone towers, cellphone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and document the places the cellphone user visits over the course of a day, week, month or longer.
Four. More than 62 million people in the US have their fingerprints on file with the FBI, state and local governments. This system, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), shares information with 43 states and 5 federal agencies. This system conducts more than 168,000 checks each day.
Five. Over 126 million people have their fingerprints, photographs and biographical information accessible on the US Department of Homeland Security Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). This system conducts about 250,000 biometric transactions each day. The goal of this system is to provide information for national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence and other Homeland Security Functions.
Six. More than 110 million people have their visas and more than 90 million have their photographs entered into the US Department of State Consular Consolidated Database (CCD). This system grows by adding about 35,000 people a day. This system serves as a gateway to the Department of State Facial Recognition system, IDENT and IAFSIS.
Seven. DNA profiles on more than 10 million people are available in the FBI coordinated Combined DNA index System (CODIS) National DNA Index.
Eight. Information on more than 2 million people is kept in the Intelligence Community Security Clearance Repository, commonly known as Scattered Castles. Most of the people in this database are employees of the Department of Defense (DOD) and other intelligence agencies.
Nine. The DOD also has an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) to support military operations overseas. This database incorporates fingerprint, palm print, face and iris matching on 6 million people and is adding 20,000 more people each day.
Ten. Information on over 740,000 people is included in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) of the National Counterterrorism Center. TIDE is the US government central repository of information on international terrorist identities. The government says that less than 2 percent of the people on file are US citizens or legal permanent residents. They were just given permission to keep their non-terrorism information on US citizens for a period of five years, up from 180 days.
Eleven. Tens of thousands of people are subjects of facial recognition software. The FBI has been working with North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles and other state and local law enforcement on facial recognition software in a project called “Face Mask.” For example, the FBI has provided thousands of photos and names to the North Carolina DMV which runs those against their photos of North Carolina drivers. The Maricopa Arizona County Sheriff’s Office alone records 9,000 biometric mug shots a month.
Twelve. The FBI operates the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR) that collects and analyzes observations or reports of suspicious activities by local law enforcement. With over 160,000 suspicious activity files, SAR stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime but who are alleged to have acted suspiciously.
Thirteen. The FBI admits it has about 3,000 GPS tracking devices on cars of unsuspecting people in the US right now, even after the US Supreme Court decision authorizing these only after a warrant for probable cause has been issued.
* * *
The Future
The technology for tracking and identifying people is exploding as is the government appetite for it.
Soon, police everywhere will be equipped with handheld devices to collect fingerprint, face, iris and even DNA information on the spot and have it instantly sent to national databases for comparison and storage.
Bloomberg News reports the newest surveillance products “can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices,” change the contents of written emails mid-transmission, and use voice recognition to scan phone networks.
The advanced technology of the war on terrorism, combined with deferential courts and legislators, have endangered both the right to privacy and the right of people to be free from government snooping and tracking. Only the people can stop this.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Seeds? More Like Overgrown Weeds!

From the Sunday April 8, 2012 edition of the Wichita Eagle Letters To The Editor:

Seeds of Socialism

Sedgwick County’s acceptance of a $1.5 million federal grant to plan for sustainable growth has grave implications (April 5 Local & State). Do not think for a minute that the consequences of the 1914-17 Russian Revolution, where the government took control of every aspect of people’s lives, cannot happen here. Imagine a world where our children are told where to live and what mode of transportation they can have and where energy usage is controlled.
The seeds of socialism have been planted and are being watered by Sedgwick County Commissioners Dave Unruh, Tim Norton and Jim Skelton, as well as six Wichita City Council members. The only elected officials with the moral courage to say “no” to this federal bribe were City Council member Michael O’Donnell and County Commissioners Richard Ranzau and Karl Peterjohn. Everyone else voted to accept this money, posturing to know what is best for us. Their rationalizations were naive, shortsighted and lacking in sound judgment, and disregarded the U.S. Constitution.
An attitude of “this will never happen here” is one of passive acceptance. I am sickened by this major step toward social engineering. This is an outrageous intrusion of government into people’s lives. We must stand up to this now, as it might be harder to get up in the future.
HELEN COCHRAN
Wichita

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2012/04/08/2287001/letters-to-the-editor-on-bus-service.html#storylink=cpy

My Take: I hate to break this to you Helen but the seeds of Socialism have already been planted and the vegetation is overgrown in Sedgwick County and Wichita far in advance of what happened last week!  From everything to government subsidizing business to public health to property taxes to public schools to building codes and zoning laws. All items just listed are anti-liberty and therefore socialistic!

Saturday, April 7, 2012

James Altucher's Top Ten Movie List

  1. Schindler’s List
  2. Lawrence of Arabia
  3. The Godfather
  4. Superbad
  5. After Hours
  6. A Night On Earth
  7. Blade Runner
  8. The Conversation
  9. Slumdog Millionaire
  10. The Blues Brothers
  11. Groundhog Day (I threw this in as #11).
Oh, and for a #12. American Pop.

My take: After Hours and Groundhog Day never got the acclaim they deserved. Both movies are kind of a kooky dark humor. Superbad was not supergood in my opinion but they did feature the Motorhead song "Ace of Spades" so it was not all bad! Blade Runner was ahead of its time and a picture of our possible future if we do not get Big Government in collusion with Big Corporations under control!

James is slowly becoming a libertarian if not already one. He is a good writer with an interesting point of view. He has written several books both through conventional publishing outlets as well as self publishing his last two titles. Check him out at The Altucher Confidential  www.jamesaltucher.com

Dr. Paul Please Run As A Libertarian!

An Open Letter to Ron Paul

Recently by Justin Raimondo: George Packer and the Unfathomable
 

Dear Ron,
A lot of my readers are big fans of yours: on those rare but pungent occasions when I have criticized you, I've gotten lots of "blowback" in the comments section and in emails sent directly to my inbox. Whenever I praised you, I've enjoyed a veritable avalanche of favorable feedback. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with non-libertarians who praise you to the skies. Many people beyond the narrow confines of the libertarian movement are watching your campaign with great interest, and rooting for you – especially those who are concerned about our foreign policy of perpetual war. A lot of these people are not actually registered Republicans – although some have registered just to be able to vote for you – and that appears to be part of the problem.
You've captured the youth vote in practically every contest, while losing among the older set and among hardcore Republican voters. In short, the demographic you do best in winning over is the least likely to be able to vote in a closed Republican primary. I would estimate that roughly two thirds to three quarters of your constituency is outside the ranks of the GOP. In view of these realities, I have a question:
What is the endgame?
Yes, yes, I know, the campaign is educating people, building a movement, and it's necessary to take the long view. Yet I also know I am not the only one wondering what will happen in the short term.
There has been a lot of speculation, not only among your friends and admirers, but also in the media, about the prospect of a "deal." This is not based on anything you have said or done: every public statement coming directly from you has indicated quite the opposite. Listening to what you actually say in interviews, in response to questions about endorsing Mitt Romney, leads one to conclude it's highly unlikely bordering on downright impossible.
So what now?
Look, we don't endorse candidates here at Antiwar.com, for a number of reasons, but I can't ignore the many emails I've gotten from my readers, who are wondering about the answer to that question.
It's been exciting, even for a non-participant like me, to watch as you mobilize thousands at rallies all across the country, cheering your call to dismantle the Empire and bring the troops home. You were the voice of the majority during the debates, calling for getting out of Afghanistan immediately – not in a year or two or three, not conditional on the generals' diktat, but now, with no conditions or excuses. That's a major reason why you have inspired many people to get involved who would never have considered supporting a Republican candidate for any office, let alone President of the United States.
Yet, as the primaries wind down, and Romney gets closer to his seemingly inevitable victory, we are hearing, time and again, that certain individuals high up in your campaign are trying to make some sort of dubious deal. Business Insider reports:
"Sources close to the campaign told Business Insider that, behind the scenes, there have been ongoing discussions between the two campaigns that appear to include, or at least be the precursor to, an eventual deal. ‘The courtship has been underway for a long time,' a source who declined to be named, talking about internal campaign affairs told Business Insider. ‘They are smart enough to know that he [Paul] can't win the nomination or get a Cabinet position … but Ron Paul has to go somewhere.'"
I don't believe this "source," Ron, not even for a minute: if there has been a "courtship," it's been entirely one-sided, with the Romneyites suffering from a bad case of unrequited love. Just seeing the look on your face when asked by Bob Schieffer about an endorsement is enough to convince me of that – not that I needed all that much convincing.
On the other hand, the last sentence in the quote above is completely accurate: after Tampa, you do have to go somewhere. And the movement you inspired wants to know where you are taking them: is it only as far as Tampa, or will you go all the way and launch a third party campaign?
"You don't have to be a math genius to know that it is going to be very hard for us to get to Tampa with 1,144 delegates," says your campaign manager, Jesse Benton. "Short of Dr. Paul being the nominee, there would be a substantial price for us to throw our support behind someone else."
I don't know what Benton considers "substantial," in this context, but I can't imagine what the Romney camp could possibly offer you in exchange for an endorsement, and neither can the Business Insider: their piece lists a number of scenarios – the promise of a cabinet position for Rand Paul, a speaking slot in Tampa, concessions on the party platform – and then dismisses each and every one.
If I were 76 years old, I know I wouldn't be sprinting around the country making speeches and tirelessly spreading the message of liberty: I'd be sitting on my deck, taking it easy, watching somebody else cut my lawn. But you're in much better shape than I am, and besides that I can see you're clearly enjoying yourself – especially the crowds of young people who cheer you wherever you go.
The fun doesn't have to end in Tampa: if you decide to run an independent campaign for the White House – a strategy some of your supporters are already urging on you – your celebration of liberty and peace can continue right on up until November, and beyond. Because a third party candidacy will leave a legacy, a lasting monument to your campaign and the movement it created: a viable third party alternative to the twin parties of war and Big Government.
Polls show you getting as much as 17 percent of the vote in a three-way race – and those are just the starting numbers. It's a long way until November, and a lot can happen: another economic crash, another war, another federal power grab so egregious it makes the PATRIOT Act seem like a mild precursor.
Republicans and conservatives argue that a third party campaign on your part would ensure President Obama's reelection, a scenario I don't think is all that credible. If Romney loses it will be because most people simply don't like him, don't trust him, and don't want him anywhere near the Oval Office.
Yet even if it's true your third party run would cost Romney the election, then isn't it clear the Republicans deserve to lose? In the face of overwhelming public opposition to their warmongering, the other three GOP presidential contenders have relentlessly advocated escalating our overseas commitments: all three have explicitly threatened to go to war with Iran. Far from listening to your warnings about the dangers inherent in such a position, it's clear they have nothing but contempt for your foreign policy views. Nor have they made any significant concessions on the domestic front: they're all big spenders, Big Government "conservatives," and if they ever got into office they would continue along the same path.


In short, Republicans need to be taught a lesson, one they will never forget. By disdaining the substantial and growing libertarian wing of the GOP, and ignoring the desire for peace on the part of the larger public, they have earned nothing but defeat. You have said you are trying to save the Republican party, but it's too late for that: what's needed now is for someone to save the country from the GOP.
Yes, the Democrats also pose a major threat to liberty and peace, but the Republicans, I would argue, pose a much deadlier menace because their leaders and much of their base are unabashed militarists and dogged opponents of the Constitution. When it comes to foreign policy and civil liberties, the Obama administration is just as bad if not worse, but the difference is rhetorical: the Republicans openly proclaim their intent to continue and escalate our policy of permanent warfare, and take great pride in their willingness to throw the Bill of Rights overboard in the name of an endless "war on terrorism." Obama, on the other hand, is careful to sugar-coat his authoritarianism and belligerent foreign policy in terms of "liberal" bromides and appeals to "pragmatism."
The best thing that could happen would be for the GOP to split, with your supporters hiving off, leaving the GOP remnant to become a primarily southern-based regional party. This is their future, in any event, in spite of your energetic efforts to "save" them. Unfortunately – for them and for us – they don't want to be saved.
In looking at the Ron Paul web sites, of which there are several, and speaking with a number of activists, I've encountered the following argument against taking the third party route: the Paulians, they say, are in this for the very long term. They mean to take over the GOP at the local level, and eventually dominate it at the national level. One blog entry estimated it would take them 20 years or so to accomplish this goal.
Twenty years? By that time, if we aren't dead we'll be wishing we were. If this country doesn't change course soon, in 20 years we'll be bankrupt and well into our senescence as a nation – a declining empire beset on every front, with the last tattered remnants of our Constitution thrown to the four winds. Indeed, we are almost at that point right now.


Dr. Paul, I know I speak for many of my readers when I say you have accomplished what none of us thought was possible: you opened up the political debate in this country, not only in the GOP but more generally. Now you have the chance to take that achievement and build on it: not by telling your supporters they have to wait 20 years or more before they can hope to effect real change, but by forging ahead and taking the next logical step in our long, harrowing, and yet energizing journey to reclaim our country and our old republic.
In this radio interview with WMAL, you come pretty close to saying you will consider going third party "when the votes are counted" – i.e. after the Tampa convention, at the end of August. Unfortunately, the Libertarian party national convention is being held in May. While running on the LP ticket is just one possibility, it seems like the most viable. In spite of there being several declared candidates, the LP nomination would be yours for the asking – but you have to ask for it. LP rules forbid nominating a candidate who hasn't declared his intention to actively seek the nomination.
The other viable alternative is running for the "Americans Elect" nomination. Yes, I know the whole "Americans Elect" operation seems dubious on the face of it, but they qualified for ballot status in 35 states and counting. The "Ron Paul Draft" is already the top-vote getter in the Americans Elect nomination process, which runs through early May, with more than double the number of votes of the nearest competitor.
In fact, Americans Elect does not require candidates to accept their nomination until after they win their Internet primary (held in late June). Throughout May and June, you can expect your supporters to campaign for your nomination as the Americans Elect candidate, regardless of what you do right now.
There is also the independent option, which means getting on the ballot in all fifty states via petition, like Ross Perot did – but that seems prohibitively expensive.
Ron, I know you’re out there speaking to huge crowds – 10,000 at UCLA, even as I write – and how thrilled you must be by this kind of reception. And I know you’re remembering the time when those crowds amounted to a few dozen, at most – and I imagine how gratified you must feel. Finally, the pro-peace pro-liberty camp is making some progress – but it doesn’t have to end in Tampa. Please consider carrying the banner of peace and liberty all the way to November and beyond – because the future of the country, and the peace of the world, depends on it.
Sincerely,
Justin Raimondo



Reprinted from Antiwar.com with permission.


April 7, 2012
Copyright © 2012 Antiwar.com

Friday, April 6, 2012

Do We Really Believe In The Rule Of Law? If So then.......

To protect freedom, US jurists must pardon terror suspects caught by entrapment

Since 9/11, the majority of criminal convictions in high-profile terror cases in the US relied on sting operations. In many, the FBI crossed the line into entrapment, luring penniless men and teenagers into sophisticated plots they never could have dreamed of on their own.
Temp Headline Image
Terror suspect Amine El Khalifi appears before US District Judge T. Rawles Jones Jr. in federal court in Alexandria, Va in this Feb. 17 artist rendering. Op-ed contributors Joshua Woods and Jim Nolan argue the FBI sting operation that captured Mr. Khalifi is akin to entrapment. They say: 'We want the US government to recognize what social scientists call “the power of the situation” to influence terrorist behavior and to stop contributing to creating it.'
(Dana Verkouteren/AP/file)

By Joshua Woods and Jim Nolan  from the Christian Science Monitor
posted April 5, 2012 at 12:59 pm EDT
Morgantown, W.V. Here’s an indecent question: Under what conditions might a husband cheat on his wife?
Imagine if a major television network created a reality show designed to answer this question. Bringing together weeks of planning, heavy surveillance, psychological profiles of the target, and a cast of young, alluring undercover agents, the show would put unwitting husbands to the ultimate test of spousal loyalty.
After being conned for weeks, some of the men would likely capitulate and take that fateful step toward betrayal. With the hook set, the lights would flash on, a banner would drop from the ceiling revealing the deception, and the show’s host, Johnnie Cochran, would climb through a window to offer his legal services in the forthcoming divorce. Perhaps the show would air as a spinoff of MTV’s gotcha program “Punk’d.”
While this idea may seem farfetched, an analogous scheme is being cooked up and served on a regular basis by the FBI in its campaign against terrorism.
According to a recent study, since 9/11, the majority of criminal convictions in high-profile terror cases in the United States relied on sting operations and informants. In some of these cases, legal experts have raised concerns over whether the agents crossed the line into entrapment, using enticements to lure penniless men and sometimes teenagers into highly sophisticated plots they never could have handled (or even dreamed of) on their own.
Entrapment is a legal defense against criminal liability when it can be shown that the person would not have committed the crime but for the inducements of the government agents. The FBI argues that these sting operations do not amount to entrapment because the people they target are predisposed to commit the offenses given the opportunity.
Legal scholars have argued that the FBI gets away with tempting people into committing crimes because the courts focus more on the defendant’s subjective “disposition” than they do on the means of persuasion or inducements provided by agents.
One defendant in a recent case, Hemant Lakhani, agreed to sell missiles to an undercover FBI agent who was posing as a terrorist. When it became clear that Mr. Lakhani had no access to such weapons, another undercover agent sold him a fake version of the arms so that he could, in turn, make the illegal sale. During the transaction, incidentally, Lakhani appeared to test the weapon by placing it on his shoulder pointed in the wrong direction. His entrapment defense failed and he received a 47-year prison sentence.
In another sting operation, the defendant, James Cromitie, was a poor African-American who had allegedly converted to Islam in prison. He agreed to carry out an attack after being offered $250,000, other valuable enticements, and weapons by the FBI's undercover informant. The judge on the case, Manhattan Federal Judge Colleen McMahon called the defendants "thugs for hire, pure and simple." She described Mr. Cromitie as "incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own," saying a "zealous" government had "created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies...and then made those fantasies come true."
But before a jury, Cromitie’s entrapment defense, like all the others in the decade following 9/11, also failed. The ruling prompted legal experts to suggest that juries may be weighting these cases differently than other entrapment cases, given the dramatic events of 9/11 and the constant media spotlight on terrorism.
As in many of the previous cases, one of the FBI’s latest stings involved an isolated, impoverished young man. On Feb. 17, prompted by undercover officers posing as Al Qaeda members and offering the latest in high-yield explosives, Amine El Khalifi made his way to an attack site in Washington, D.C. before being swarmed by the authorities. If the previous pattern holds, he will now spend the rest of his life in prison.
Our point here is not to forgive Mr. Khalifi but rather to suggest that his behavior is not only a product of his personal disposition but also his social circumstances and the FBI’s sting operation in particular.
We recognize that the task of detecting and interrupting terrorist activities is difficult, dangerous, and at times requires sophisticated undercover operations to prevent atrocities from occurring. But the roots of terrorism – distrust, anger, and hatred – end up growing stronger in the environment the FBI is creating. Duping disgruntled citizens to act out criminally using means-justify-the-ends enticements in fact fosters the distrust and sense of injustice that breeds terrorism.
We want the US government to recognize what social scientists call “the power of the situation” to influence terrorist behavior and to stop contributing to creating it. To be frank, our hopes for this suggestion are not high. Most Americans are carrying too much emotional and historical baggage to summon even one word of situational understanding for a terrorist act.
But what about the would-be philanderers on the reality show? Without forgiving their behavior, wouldn’t most Americans at least acknowledge the extraordinary nature of the situation, and recognize that many of these cheaters would still be faithful husbands had it not been for the crafty, well-organized, sexually spectacular forces behind the deception?
If the answer is yes, a similar moral calculus must be used to evaluate the Khalifi case, the FBI’s role in creating this outcome, and the virtue of continuing these counterterrorism operations.

The success of an entrapment defense should not depend on the nature of the would-be crime, but on the nature of the FBI’s actions. Ruling in favor of a defendant like Khalifi may seem counterintuitive to any jurists wishing to protect Americans. But that’s exactly what these jurists should do if they wish to define and protect the civil liberties and freedoms that keep them safe.
Joshua Woods is author of the recently released book “Freaking Out: A Decade of Living with Terrorism.” Jim Nolan, a former police officer and FBI official, is coauthor of “The Violence of Hate: Confronting Racism, Anti Semitism, and Other Forms of Bigotry.” Both writers teach in the division of sociology and anthropology at West Virginia University.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

How About Repealing Sales Taxes Altogether?

Close online sales-tax loophole

There is a bill in the Kansas Legislature that would allow our state to join the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, which provides one uniform system to administer and collect sales tax. This would eliminate the burden of the country’s diverse sales-tax systems on retailers.
The reason our system is currently burdensome is because Internet-only retailers are not required to pay state sales tax while our brick-and-mortar stores are. The online sales-tax loophole has put stores in our community at a competitive disadvantage for far too long. Even when local retailers can match online prices, they still must collect sales tax from you, which in Kansas makes the price 7 or 8 percent higher.
Though the state bill is an important step in giving our community-based stores a fair chance to compete, ultimately we need a federal solution. The Marketplace Fairness Act, currently under consideration by the U.S. Senate, allows states such as Kansas to enforce their existing sales-tax codes by choosing a simplification solution that best fits the state.
I urge Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts to co-sponsor the Marketplace Fairness Act. Kansas retailers, the backbone of our economy, have been disadvantaged for too long.
SARAH BAGBY
Owner
Watermark Books
Wichita

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2012/04/04/2282926/letters-to-the-editor-on-streamlined.html#storylink=cpy

My Take On This: Instead of complaining about a so-called disadvantage, she should also try selling her wares online. Instead of asking the government to level the playing field for her on a State and Federal level, she should be advocating for the repeal of the state sales tax altogether!

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Supreme Dictators?

Rethinking America’s Supreme Judicial Dictatorship
Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Charles Koch Makes a Good Point



"The War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers."
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jeffersonians warned that if the day ever arrived when the central government became the final judge of its own powers, Americans would then live under a tyranny. The government, they believed, would inevitably proclaim that there are in fact no limits to its powers. That day came in 1865 when citizen control over the federal government ended along with the rights of nullification and secession. Not surprisingly, a warmongering, imperialistic megalomaniac like Woodrow Wilson would then celebrate this fact several decades later, as the above quotation attests.
The so-called system of checks and balances is a farce and a fraud; the reality is that all three branches of the federal government work together to conspire against the taxpayers for the benefit of the state and all of its appendages. As Judge Andrew Napalitano wrote in his book, The Constitution in Exile, the Supreme Court failed to rule a single federal law unconstitutional from 1937 to 1995. The Court is essentially a political rubber stamp operation with all of its black-robed ceremony being nothing more than part of the circus that is employed to dupe the public into acquiescing in its dictates.


There is no such thing as an "American union." The original union was a union of the free, independent, and sovereign states. If that union still existed, then Wisconsin, Florida, Massachusetts, Alabama, and all the other states would have at least a say in the current discussion in the Supreme Court over whether or not the American system of healthcare should be Sovietized. They do not. Every television and radio talking head is feverishly awaiting the Pronouncement from Upon High from the black-robed deities of the "Supreme" Court on this issue.
Did Thomas Jefferson, who penned the words, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," really think it was a good idea to place everyone’s liberty solely in the hands of five government lawyers with lifetime tenure? Or perhaps even one single government lawyer with lifetime tenure, i.e., the "swing vote" on the Supreme Court, thought by many to be one Anthony Kennedy? Not likely.


Now with perfect timing comes a great book that asks Americans to rethink the federal/judicial monopoly that is a primary source of their servitude to the state. Just published by Pelican Publishers is Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century, edited and with an introduction by Donald Livingston. It is a collection of essays by such authors as legal and constitutional scholar Kent Masterson Brown; Yours Truly; constitutional scholar Marshall DeRosa; philosopher Donald Livingston; Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the book, Human Scale; economist Yuri Maltsev; and Champlain College Professor Rob Williams.
A major theme of Rethinking the American Union is stated in Professor Livingston’s introduction where he quotes Thomas Jefferson as writing on August 13, 1800 that: "Our country is too large to have all its affairs conducted by a single government." Such a vast country detaches the people from their political representatives, which "will invite the public servants to corruption, plunder & waste," he wrote. In 1800! If "the principle were to prevail," Jefferson continued, "of a common law being in force in the U.S., (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the State governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government) it would become the most corrupt government on earth" (emphasis added). This of course is exactly the kind of government that has been existence since 1865, when all states, North and South, became mere appendages of the central government in Washington, D.C. This relationship was cemented into place in 1913 with the advent of the income tax and the creation of the Fed, which gave the federal government the ability to threaten and bribe all individuals and all state governments to acquiesce in its dictates. As Frederic Bastiat sagely observed in his classic, The Law, "democracy" can become indistinguishable from socialism if it is characterized by governmentally-coerced uniformity, whether it is for socialized healthcare or anything else.


What could "the public good" possibly mean in a nation of 305 million people, Livingston asks. Well, it is what it is: "Washington could not be anything other than a scene of frenzied pork-barrel spending, waste, inefficiency, corruption, and special-interest patronage for the politically well connected." As your author has often said, the purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not.
The essays in the book are a response by a proposal by the late George Kennan who, late in his life, proposed limiting the tyrannical proclivities of American government by dividing it "into a dozen constituent republics."


Nationalism was the ideological cornerstone of all of the evils of government during the twentieth century and beyond, from National Socialism (Nazism) to communism and welfare/warfare statism. Devolution of power and the denationalization of government as an antidote is the subject of the essays.
In his essay, "Secession: A Constitutional Remedy that Protects Fundamental Liberties," Kent Masterson Brown, a Lexington Kentucky trial lawyer and legal scholar, writes of how secession was – and is – a remedy that evolved over the centuries as an essential ingredient of contract law. If the Constitution is an agreement or compact, he writes, then the states that are a party to it have a right of rescission. "[T]he equitable remedy of rescission in the law of contracts was one of the most important concepts applied by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution . . ." Brown’s essay is a careful, lawyerly history of the right of secession, its role in American constitutional history, and of how it was undermined by statist politicians even prior to 1861.


Yours Truly contributes an essay on how, from the very origins of the American republic, such nationalist politicians and government bureaucrats as Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Justice Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln toiled mightily to rewrite American constitutional history in such a way that would have made the propagandists of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany blush. Indeed, the latter characters might well have learned their tactics from their fellow nationalists in America generations earlier. Hitler himself did in fact quote Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in Mein Kampf to make his case for centralized governmental power and the abolition of states’ rights in Germany.
Marshall DeRosa exposes the fatal flaw in the current Tenth Amendment Movement, namely, that it relies on the judgment of the Supreme Court as to whether nullification is constitutional. This "servile posture" to the central state has been so ingrained in the American mind by generations of government "education" that most "Tenthers" do not seem to realize the absurdity and futility of what they are doing. If they are serious about the devolution of power away from Washington and back to the people of the states, writes DeRosa, then they must realized that "there is neither divided sovereignty, an oxymoron if there ever was one, nor an imperium in imperio. Each of the several States is sovereign, and as sovereigns they have the prerogative to inform the national government that it has exceeded the grants of its authority. Whether that is by nullification (or interposition) via blocking national policies or a complete withdrawal from the onetime voluntary union of the States via secession is for each sovereign State to decide."


Of course, that would take principled courage on the part of any "Tenthers" who would not be intimidated by the state’s usual tactic of smearing all advocates of decentralization as racists who would like to bring back slavery or segregation. In utilizing this particular smear tactic the state relies on the "rational ignorance" of American history by almost all Americans these days, and believes that it can censor all discussion of its unconstitutional and tyrannical behavior by mere name calling.
The Tenthers must also realize that the Supreme Court is nothing more than "a facilitator of the national ruling class’s hegemony over the constitutional rights of the States." They must "be prepared to bypass the U.S. Supreme Court." DeRosa’s essay includes a scholarly history of how Jefferson’s cherished Tenth Amendment was destroyed by nationalist politicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats over the generations.


Donald Livingston presents the kind of essay that he has long been known for: a deeply scholarly effort that spans philosophy and history. He surveys the idea of republicanism going back 2,000 years in which it was always thought that republican government was only possible in relatively small polities. This is the history that informed Thomas Jefferson when he commented that the American polity of 1800 was too big to be governable by just one government. Over half of the states in the world today are not the massive mega-states like the U.S., but have populations of less than 5 million people, Livingston points out.
Kirkpatrick Sale revives the Aristotelian argument that everything in nature has a natural or efficient size beyond which it becomes dysfunctional. He makes the case that relatively small states of 3-5 million population have superior performance compared to large states in such areas as prosperity, crime, human rights, healthcare, literacy, and a general sense of well-being. He proposes a "Law of Government Size" that contends that "Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation."


Yuri Maltsev applies Austrian economics to explain the failure of the Soviet Union. Without the institutions of private property and free market prices, there was never any chance that socialism in the Soviet Union (or anywhere) else could work as an economic system. Maltsev explains why in detail, in a fine primer on some of the basic principles of Austrian economics. He also explains why, in realizing that socialism could never work, "Kremlin leaders realized from the first that the only way of managing an economy under socialism was . . . with direct government coercion based on mass murder and forced labor." The only people in the world who still believe in socialism, Maltsev writes, are academics, especially American academics, who always strut about their campuses posing as Keepers of the Moral High Ground despite the fact that the system they associate themselves with is inherently based on mass murder and forced labor or slavery. "We should all be thankful to the Soviets that they proved conclusively that socialism does not work," Maltsev concludes.
The final essay by by Rob Williams is a history of the most active secession movement in America, the Second Vermont Republic. Vermont was an independent country from 1777 until it joined the American union in 1791; hence the name. The state’s propaganda organs, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, have attempted to smear those associated with the Second Vermont Republic, but their attempts have been ludicrous. Claiming that these mostly liberal Democrats who are disgusted with both the national Republican and Democratic parties, are somehow part of a racist conspiracy to bring back Jim Crow Laws by advocating their independence from Washington, D.C. is only something that someone with an I.Q. of around 35 could believe. That is apparently the audience – and a major target of fund-raising appeals – of such repulsive race-hustling rackets as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the federal politicians who support them. Unlike most "Tenthers," the people of the Second Vermont Republic hold no delusions that the central state’s "Supreme" Court will someday dismantle the unconstitutional American empire that it has spent the past 150 years constructing.
March 28, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.