UPDATE II: Paving the Way for a Rand Paul Presidency

Iran, Republicans, Ron Paul, War

Gas bag Newt Gingrich reiterated today, following victory in Georgia, his promise of Monday “to eliminate the government of Iran if it blocks passage through a key oil route in the Middle East.” Obama has already subjected Iran to an economic siege through ruthless, counterproductive, boycotts and sanction—all tantamount to a declaration of war. Yet the smug Mr. Gingrich still “described the Obama foreign policy in the region as ‘children’s hour.”

For those who still have faith in the Republikeynesians, no amount of good the big-government Republican troika might do can offset the war wrecking ball each one of is sure to unleash.

If Ron Paul cannot win the nomination, let BHO return to the throne and lay waste to the country, thus paving the way for a Rand Paul presidency.

UPDATE I: “Ron Paul’s strength in both the Vermont and Virginia Republican primaries came largely from Independent voters and, to a lesser extent in Vermont, Democratic voters who chose to participate in their state’s Republican primary. Although Mitt Romney won both states handily, Paul won a significant portion of the vote.” (CBSNews)

DELEGATES:

Gingrich 74

Paul 24

Romney 299

Santorum 99

UPDATE II (March 7): “Dennis Kucinich Offed by Democrats,” writes Lew Rockwell:

Even though he always ended up supporting the Democratic warmonger presidential candidate, the party decided to get rid of this voice for peace and civil liberties through gerrymandering. He’s no Ron Paul–Dennis is a socialist, for example–but he was often an ally for Ron on war and the police state. Dennis, now that you are freed from politics, I hope you start an organization to promote peace and civil liberties. Let the crazed protectionist Marcy Kaptur have the congress.

UPDATE II (2/26/2017): Napolitano-Koch Connection? (Sixth Sense)

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media, Old Right, Political Correctness, The State

As you all know, I was no fan of Freedom Watch, which, in my opinion, had that distinct CATO/Beltway, left-libertarian bent. The following item, via LewRockwell.com, seems to lend credence to the Napolitano-Koch connection:

“Last year, [Koch-allied board members] used their shares to place two of their operatives — Kevin Gentry and Nancy Pfotenhauer — on our board against the wishes of every single board member save for David Koch. Last Thursday, they used their shares to force another four new board members on us (the most that their shares would allow at any given meeting); Charles Koch, Ted Olson (hired council for Koch Industries), Preston Marshall (the largest shareholder of Koch Industries save for Charles and David), and Andrew Napolitano (a frequent speaker at Koch-sponsored events). Those four — who had not previously been involved with Cato either financially or organizationally — were likewise opposed by every member of our board save for Gentry, Pfotenhauer, and David Koch. To make room for these Koch operatives, we were forced to remove four long-time, active board members, two of whom were our biggest donors. At this moment, the Kochs now control seven of our 16 board seats, two short of outright control.”

UPDATE I (March 7): My sixth sense doesn’t often fail me. I sensed something fishy about Napolitano. Was he intertwined with the Kochtopus or what? No wonder every women on Freedom Watch was from the (CATO run, as we find out) Independent Women’s Forum.

Read “Cato and the Kochs.”

UPDATE II (2/26/2017): The Rockwell link has disappeared. Fishy? But here is another hyperlink that suggests Andrew Napolitano was being pushed at CATO by lefty moguls, the Koch Brothers.

“Cato and the Kochs” by Will Wilkinson:

It seems clear enough that the Kochs are trying to take over by stacking the board. I have no idea what they’re up to, but judging from their board nominees and appointees, it doesn’t look at all good. On the other hand, the hand-wringing over the new Koch-nominated board members–Ted Olson, Andrew Napolitano, Nancy Pfotenhauer, and Kevin Gentry–strikes me as overwrought. It’s worth noting that David Koch has been on the Cato board for years, the whole time I was employed there and more, and I don’t remember anyone once suggesting he was an ideological or strategic danger to Cato’s mission. But suddenly he’s an existential threat! Cato and Cato’s chairman Bob Levy didn’t seem to have a huge problem with Ted Olson, a Solicitor General under G.W. Bush, when he was at Cato arguing for gay marriage on constitutional grounds. Andrew Napolitano is a stout libertarian who put a ton of Cato guys on Freedom Watch, his recently cancelled show on Fox Business. Cato executive VP David Boaz seems to get along pretty well, ideologically and otherwise, with Napolitano in this recent clip. …

“A stout libertarian” of The Left: That’s Judge Napolitano, at least until recently.

UPDATED: Russians Voted; The West Objects (The Two-Party Fraud)

America, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Russia, The West, UN

Russians voted. International monitors approved the rambunctious process as the fairest so far. Having failed in egging on a “successful,” “color-coded or plant-based revolution” in Russia, the know-it-all, monolithic media of the West have expressed the standard contempt about Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming majority, calling the victory a “stolen election.” Way to go.

Russians, a naturally nationalistic people, like the hardcore Putin, and do not apprecaite the NATO attempt to “demote it, weaken it geopolitically or undermine its defensive potential.”

UPDATE: THE TWO-PARTY FRAUD. In “The Cannibal In Chronicles” post, I recommended Tom Fleming’s “Daily Mail Blog” (which I cannot link to directly because of some code in the “British” link that throws IlanaMercer/com’s home page). About the West vs. Russia, Fleming writes this:

Everyone knew that Putin was going to win, and even anti-Putin pollsters admitted he would get at least 60% of the vote, which would be a landslide in an American election. But, cry the pundits, Putin has the support of the peasantry. The smart people in the cities who can watch the BBC and read the New York Times–the people who really count in any country–they are holding spontaneous anti-Putin demonstrations. Pro-Putin demonstrators are either state employees doing a job or mere yokels. In other words, Russia=the USA, where only rubes and crazies would support Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul.
The pundits, long in advance, were also predicting corruption and irregularities, as they always do whenever the the US regime disapproves of election results. The fall-back position is that Putin and his cronies rigged the election in advance by restricting the pool of candidates. …
merican elections have never been clean. Nevertheless, the sauce for the Russian goose cannot be ladled on the American gander. This is especially clear in the case of the charge that Putin’s party rigged the election in advance by restricting the pool of candidates. Here in America, we call this manoeuvre the primary system.
In our two-party party state, ballot access for third party candidates is very restricted. After all, only Democrats and Republicans were involved in writing federal and state election laws. There is no mention political parties in the Constitution, and while two political coalitions emerged very early–the faction of Hamilton versus the faction of Jefferson–they did not function as political parties in the later sense. There were no chairmen, party lines, or caucuses to enforce discipline on independent-minded members of Congress or state legislatures.

Read on by clicking “Tom Fleming Daily Mail Blog” on Barely a Blog’s Blogroll.

UPDATED: Talking Truth Until You’re Blue In the Face

Debt, Economy, Education, Political Economy, Propaganda, War

Freedom’s real warriors labor with little support (and by “true” warriors I do not mean the Republican TV circus animals and tele-tarts who get face time and popular love in excess of their worth). Economist Robert Higgs laments “the bitter disappointment of seeing the [invaluable] research and writing [he has] carried out over more than forty years prove to have been completely in vain.” He wonders whether perhaps his mother ought to have strangled him in the crib, to spare him the bitter disappointment:

For all of the good I’ve done in correcting people’s understanding of what happened to the U.S. economy during World War and what lessons one might justifiably draw from that experience about, say, the scientific validity of the Keynesian model or its related fiscal-policy implications, I might just as well have held my breath and turned blue. Here we are in June 2011, and millions of Americans are being presented with the purest potion of economic misinformation one can imagine, an account in no way superior to those the young Keynesians were peddling so confidently in 1944, when I was born. …
When I began to teach U.S. economic history at the University of Washington in the late 1960s, I quickly realized that this tale of the wartime “Keynesian miracle” could not withstand critical scrutiny once one went beyond the barest account of it in terms of the elementary Keynesian model and the standard government macro measures, such as GDP, the consumer price index, and the rate of civilian unemployment. Almost immediately I saw that unemployment had disappeared during the war not because of the beautiful workings of a Keynesian multiplier, but entirely because about 20 percent of the labor force was forced, directly or indirectly, into the armed forces and a comparable number of employees set to work in factories, shipyards, and other facilities turning out war-related “goods” the government purchased only after forcing the public to pay for them sooner (via wartime taxes and inflation) or later (via repayment of wartime borrowing). Thus, the great wartime “boom” consisted entirely of (1) some people’s mass engagement in wreaking death and destruction and (2) other people’s employment in producing supplies for these warriors after the government’s military labor drain, turning out ”goods” never valued by consumers or private producers in voluntary transactions, but rather ordered by government functionaries and priced completely arbitrarily in a command-and-control economy. In no sense was the alleged ”wartime prosperity” comparable to real, normal prosperity. The pervasive regimentation, rationing, price controls, direct government resource allocations, and forbidden forms of production (e.g., civilian automobiles) should have served as a tip-off.

READ “World War II: Still Being Touted as the Quintessential Keynesian Miracle.”

UPDATE (March 5): “WARTIME SOCIALISM”: “… what politician would not warmly welcome an economist who, with the aid of indecipherable econometrics, legitimizes immoral power and property grabs? This is why the anti-free market central planning advocated by the late John Maynard Keynes has been embraced with renewed verve…”