Move On. Nothing More To See @ The Site Of The Rand Paul Crash (Ron, Rand: Politicians Both)

English, Iran, libertarianism, Republicans, Ron Paul

Libertarians seem fascinated with tracking Rand Paul’s every move, waiting for some critical-mass of evidence to show that Rand is no libertarian. How often can one relive the same eureka moment? Move on. There’s nothing more to see at the site of the Rand Paul crash.

“Rand Paul: Action Hero, Or Political Performance Artist?” was penned in 3/1/2013, when Rand was first presenting himself to the public in a big way. Back then, there were still questions to be asked. Matters were inconclusive on the Rand Paul front.

Like most Americans, I like an action hero. I am just incapable of telling whether Rand Paul is such a hero, or whether he is no more than a political performance artist.

One thing should always be a certainty for libertarians:

“It is a smart libertarian who retains a healthy contempt for politicians, even the libertarian ones. Ultimately, they’re all empire builders, who see nothing wrong in using fame and the public dime to peddle their influence and their products.
The people—at least those who’ve never fed at the “public” trough, unlike every single politician and his aide—are always morally superior to the politicians.
In all, some politicians are less sickening than others, but all fit somewhere along a sick-making scale.”

The Daily Beast’s “Why Real Libertarians Hate Rand Paul” is yet more hoo-ha about Rand Paul’s latest un-libertarian mistep—Paul signied Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) open letter to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The letter stated, rather condescendingly, that Iranian leaders ‘do not fully understand our constitutional system.’ Soon a new president would be in office, Cotton wrote, and that president could (if Republican, would) ‘revoke’ any executive agreement President Obama signs.”

While the Beast pardons Justin Raimondo for his prolonged Rand Paul crush; I cannot forgive the Beastly writer for a usage such as “cyber-bullying” and “… it feels like.”

UPDATED (3/22): Ron, Rand: Politicians Both.

Ron and Rand Paul are just … politicians. A few years back, in the midst of the Ron Paul orgy, Karen De Coster pointed this out rather gruffly. She must have gotten flack of the order even she didn’t feel like handling, because she did not repeat the observation. It bears repetition. Here: Rand and Ron Paul are politicians. Senior is way better than junior, but he too showed all the trappings of a politician. We just turned a blind eye, b/c he was ours.

Your Get-With-The-Program, Demography-Is-Destiny Policy Paper

Education, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism

You know just how scholarly an essay is when it is studded with loaded pop-words like “conversation”: “We need to have a conversation about race (when we do nothing but subject ourselves to one-way brow-beatings about imagined slights committed against the pigmentally burdened). “We need to have a conversation about immigration (translation: Get with the program of mass immigration from the third world and its implications for your communities—reduced quality of life, poorer education, environmental degradation; less safety and security, more taxation).

Jennifer Bradley of the liberal Brookings Institute lectures Middle America on how to prepare its diverse workforce for tomorrow.

Thus, for example, it is stated that “America is on the cusp of becoming a country with no racial majority, where new minorities are poised to exert a profound impact on U.S. society, economics, and politics.” The implication is that the seismic shift is due to a mystic force, and not to willful policies in which the host population has never had a say.

A feature of the Minneapolis-St. Paul diversity explosion, as Bradley sees it, is a widening “race-based education and achievement gap” that will “become a drag on workforce growths unless something was done to reverse these trends.” In other words, the immigrant population isn’t up to scratch.

I can think of a few options to narrow the gap. One is to welcome immigrants who’ll add value, not drain resources. But Bradely is here not to explore all options, but to dictate them.

The raiment of scholarship is shed as quickly as a hooker sheds her clothes (only less admirably; working girls deserve respect). Bradely brays about the need to “reframe the conversation about race-based education and achievement gaps in Minneapolis-St. Paul — turning what had been a moral (and insufficiently effective) commitment to its underserved communities into an economic necessity. Leading figures from the worlds of government, business, and academia, and public and private groups throughout the region, are now trying to figure out how to undo the effects of decades of neglect, tackling the problem from many perspectives and with an ever greater sense of urgency.”

If a population is not achieving parity it is inferred that it has been “underserved”; that its inhabitants need more resources rather than that the fault lies with the kind of incompatible immigrant being privileged by policy makers. The essay’s premise is that America is “underserving” her immigrant population, when it is the other way round:

Averaged out, the immigrant population is underserving the American economy.

And, research is only as good as the semantics used to state the hypothesis.

MORE braying (with apologies to donkeys; they’re adorable).

The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR

Capitalism, Communism, Crime, Free Markets, libertarianism, Russia

“The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR” is the current column. It questions the current libertarian support (my own included) for Russia, and recounts how ‘grotesquely Stalinist’
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was. An excerpt:

… One can well understand why the medieval blood ties that tethered some Ukrainians to the Russians would have been severed by the criminal communist regime, which targeted the Ukrainian breadbasket with a vengeance. The communists robbed the Ukrainian peasants of their fertile farms, forced them into slave labor by corralling them into state-owned, collective farms, and systematically starved them by requisitioning most of their grain. The peasants had been left with a fraction of the amount of grain required to sustain life.

Yet these heroic, individualistic farmers rose up against the Reds.

The slogans of the Ukrainian peasantry, in 1919, were “Ukraine for the Ukrainians, down with the Bolsheviks and the Jews (whom they associated with the Bolsheviks), free enterprise, free trade.” Besides the standard mass executions, in order to wipe out this class of people, Stalin devised a diabolical man-made famine which killed up to 10 million .

Fast forward to Kiev, circa 2013, where Ukrainians tore down the statue of the founding father of Bolshevism and a mass murderer in his own right. But that man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, still reposes in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square.

Why, pray tell? …

Read the rest. “The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR” is now on WND.

Israelis Should Ignore American ‘Ethnic Agitators’

Elections, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Will the America’s political caste succeed in infecting Israelis with the pigment burden? I hope not, but they’re trying mightily:

Bibi Netanyahu urged his supporters, on Tuesday morning, to head to the polls, by warning them that Arab Israelis were being bussed to the polls by “left-leaning organizations.” Does that sound like a familiar strategy? Something the Democrats do? Indeed, says Ann Coulter. And “Instead of [Republicans] cowering in the face of left-wing ethnic agitation, how about pointing out that they’re busing Somalis to the polls in Minnesota; that they’re dumping illegal-alien ballots at the polling booths in Arizona.”

Netanyahu’s realistic appeal was viewed as “racist” by the US media. Via Newsbusters:

… the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg repeatedly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral strategy which he labeled “the Israeli version of the Southern Strategy. … basically [trying] to scare his base into coming out and giving their votes to him by saying essentially the Arabs are coming.

When advocating for Israel’s 1.7 million Arabs citizens, Christiane Amapour had to be reminded by her fairer colleague, Jack Tapper, that “these Palestinian voters … are citizens with full voting rights.”

How about that? Not only do Israeli Arabs have equal voting rights – Israel is one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women may vote. Israeli Arabs have freedom of speech, assembly and press, as is evident from the many Islamic, anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic journals that thrive in Israel. Arabs hold seats in the Knesset. Israeli Arabs have held government posts and serve on the bench. Arabic, like Hebrew, is an official language in Israel.

That’s the real story here. For the rest, Israelis should ignore the terminally self-righteous preaching about racism coming out of the US.