Category Archives: Ron Paul

Rich Republicans Denying Desperate Americans Funds Don’t Get That The Small-Government Ship Has Sailed

COVID-19, Debt, Economy, Foreign Aid, Government, Hollywood, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State, Welfare

From Mitt Romney to Rand Paul, quite a number of oleaginous Republicans are opposing President Donald Trump’s push for bigger $2,000 stimulus checks.

These Republicans have “expressed concerns that $2,000 checks would cost the government too much money. Increasing the original $600 direct payments would mean the government would have to borrow another $464 billion.”

Has Rand Paul lost it? He says,

“I think giving money to people, though, who are already working—look, my kids are working and don’t need a check. They’re not rich, but they don’t need a check. And most working Americans don’t need a check right now,” he said.
“It’s a really foolish, eggheaded, left-wing, socialist idea to pass out free money to people,” Paul went on. “So I part ways with the president on giving people free money.”

It’s when politicians point to their kids as exemplars of ordinary working stiffs—that the gag reflex kicks in.

As to “free money”: The money is the people’s money returned to its rightful owners. You, sir, are getting free money. Politicians, paid out of taxes, are thieves–never wealth creators, but, rather, wealth consumers–and worse, parasites.

The Bill squanders minted money overseas and stateside, such as on  authorizing “a Smithsonian Women’s History Museum and a National Museum of the American Latino.” Foreign aid, of course, being a government-to-government grant, seldom helps anyone but the corrupt bureaucrats in charge of its dispersal.

Here is what’s in the “$2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief and government funding bill“:

  • $4 billion for New York’s MTA as part of bailouts for mass-transit systems.
  • $15 billion earmarked toward grant programs for live entertainment venues such as Broadway.
  • $7 billion toward expanding broadband access.
  • $1.4 billion for a construction of a wall on the southern US border.
  • A new law saying that violating copyright laws with unauthorized online streaming will become a felony punishable by five years in prison for first offenses and 10 years for repeat offenses. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) pushed the provision.
  • A rule saying the US Postal Service can no longer deliver e-cigarettes.
  • $500 million earmarked for Israeli defense purchases, including to equip the Iron Dome missile defense system.
  • $250 million over five years for Palestinian economic aid, which was pushed by New York Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey.
  • $2.5 million for “Internet freedom programs in closed societies”
  • $10 million for “gender programs” meant to help women get education and start businesses in Pakistan.

To their credit, Trumpian Republicans—Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Susan Collins, David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler and Deb Fischer—have distanced themselves from the inappropriate objections, coming from their camp, to money for desperate Americans whose livelihoods have been destroyed by state response to COVID.

However, other Republican senators—John Cornyn, James Inhofe, Martha Blackburn, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Mitt Romney—have demonstrated a corporate, Beltway sensibility, as detached as that of the Democrats.

Most ludicrous is that these Republicans still believe there’s a case to be made for “small government.” Have they looked at the debt clock? Do they think the American State will ever again be small; can ever be shrunk?

The Small-Government ship has sailed and some Republicans don’t even know it.

UPDATED (1/16): NEW COLUMN: Should The U.S. Be The Globe’s Judge, Jury & Executioner?

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Ron Paul, War

NEW COLUMN is: “Should The U.S. Be The Globe’s Judge, Jury & Executioner?” It’s currently on The Unz Review, WND and “The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom.”

An excerpt:

Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general, was assassinated by a U.S. drone air strike, at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). Soleimani was traveling with one Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Al-Muhandis was an Iraqi, born and bred. He was even elected to the Iraqi Parliament, in 2005, until the U.S. intervened. (Yes, we intervene in other nations’ elections.)

Iraq’s caretaker prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, was furious, denouncing “What happened [as] a political assassination.” Unanimously, Iraqi lawmakers “responded to the Soleimani assassination by passing a nonbinding resolution calling on the government to end foreign-troop presence in Iraq.”

Yes, it’s a complicated region. And America, sad to say, still doesn’t know Shia from Shinola.

The consensus in our country is that “Soleimani deserved to die.” That’s the party-line on Fox News—and beyond. It’s how assorted commentators on all networks prefaced their “positions” on the Jan. 3 killing of this Iraqi-born, Iranian general.

Even Tucker Carlson—the only mainstream hope for Old Right, anti-war, America-First columns like this one—framed the taking out of Soleimani as the killing of a bad guy by good guys:

“There are an awful lot of bad people in this world. We can’t kill them all, it’s not our job.”

However you finesse it, the premise of Tucker’s assertion is that the American government, and the smart set who live in symbiosis with it, gets to adjudicate who’s bad and who’s good in the world.

The debate is only ever over whether the U.S. government should or shouldn’t act on its divine rights as transnational judge, jury and executioner, never over what’s right and what’s wrong.

Stateside, the only inquiry permissible is a cost-benefit calculus. Will the assassination of Soleimani, a military official of a sovereign state, and an avid and effective slayer of Islamic State terrorists—pay strategic dividends for America in the long run?

This is crass pragmatism bereft of principle. It’s currently on display everywhere, even surfacing on BBC News, where a female analyst, an American, was deploying the childish “bad man” meme to outline America’s Disneyfied foreign policy.

This angels-and-demons production always starts with the prototypical evil dictator who was alleged to be messing with his noble people, until the avenging, angelic empire sent a drone to the rescue.

Again, even Tucker, whose antiwar credentials in recent years have been impeccable, conceded that this Soleimani guy probably needed killing, which is the same thing Iraqis old enough to remember America’s destruction of Iraq, circa 2003, would say about President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice.

So, who’s right? Or, is blind patriotism predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world? …

… READ The Rest. The complete column, “Should The U.S. Be The Globe’s Judge, Jury & Executioner?“, is currently on The Unz Review, WND and “The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom.”

UPDATED I (1/16):Mercer has written one of her best and most well balanced …” on Soleimani and US foreign policy.”

UPDATE II: 

“The reverend name is Ibrahim Naseir. His church in Aleppo was destroyed by NATO-sponsored fundamental Jihadists. The same terrorists who almost ethnically cleansed Syrian Christians from their towns and cities. General Soleimani crushed those Jihadists.”

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Rand Paul Is A Loser For Sabotaging Trump’s National Emergency Declaration

Constitution, Donald Trump, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Republicans, Ron Paul

Put plainly, Rand Paul will vote against the president’s warranted—long overdue—declaration of a national emergency at the southern border.

Senator Paul, Republican of Kentucky, will “support a resolution that would overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, appearing to provide the crucial vote needed for the Senate to pass the measure.”

Said Rand (via the New York Times):

I think he’s wrong, not on policy, but in seeking to expand the powers of the presidency beyond their constitutional limits.”

“I cannot support the use of emergency powers to get more funding” for a wall along the border with Mexico, he wrote, “so I will be voting to disapprove of his declaration when it comes before the Senate.”

Mr. Paul joins three other Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — in backing the resolution. His support appears to provide the slim majority Democrats need to send the measure to the president’s desk, offering a stinging repudiation of the declaration.

What Constitution? Like it or not, the original Constitution is a dead letter, having suffered decades of legislative, executive and judicial usurpation.” Doesn’t Rand Paul understand that we no longer have a Constitution? Doesn’t the senator get that “Trump’s candidacy is for the age when the Constitution itself is unconstitutional. 

Trump, as I explained in “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (published June of 2016), is the “quintessential post-constitutional candidate”

Put differently, in this age of unconstitutional government—Democratic and Republican—the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counteraction, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.

But each blow Trump attempts to inflict on the opposition is met with resistance from self-aggrandizing idiots.

Rand is in shitty company. He is joined by “three other Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.”

READ: “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016)”

The Last Refuge Of A Brussels Or British Scoundrel: Bureaucracy

Britain, Donald Trump, EU, Europe, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Republicans have The Romney Rule Or Rule 40(b) which they passed to thwart Ron Paul’s chances. The same GOP scoundrels still hope they can use sleight of hand to change the rules at Convention to defeat Donald Trump.

Brussels has a bureaucracy so formidable, it hopes to mire Briton Brexiters in rules and bamboozle the poor people who voted to leave, so that they’ll never notice something called “Article 50,” necessary for departure, is never triggered.

This is mandarin mambo-jumbo for pulling a fast one on the voters:.

Britain “may never” trigger the formal divorce process with the EU despite last week’s referendum in which the country voted to leave, EU diplomats said Sunday.

“My personal belief is they will never notify” the EU about their intention to leave, a senior EU diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

A state leaving the EU must formally notify the European Council of all 28 EU leaders under Article 50 of the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, setting the clock ticking on a two-year period for Britain to negotiate its divorce.

“We want London to trigger Article 50 now, to have clarity. I expect, as we can’t force them, for them to take their time,” the diplomat added.

“And I would not exclude, it’s my personal belief, that they may never do it.”

The official did not specify if he believed Britain would avoid it by holding a new referendum, or simply dragging out the process to extract a better divorce deal, but said all such decisions were up to London.