UPDATE II: CPUKE 2012 (FREEDOM WATCH: Teaching Tool, But Not the People’s Libertarianism)

Elections, Ethics, Founding Fathers, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Neoconservatism, Private Property, Republicans, Ron Paul

OMIGOD: Look at the speaker lineup at CPAC 2012, currently underway. There is nary a place in this GOP for our ideas—also, those of the Founding Fathers. They’ve even called on little, retarded RINO Lolita SE Cupp to perform. Cupp can barely conceal her vacuity in this MSNBC clip, where she showcases her grasp of American liberties and her debating skills with the trademark wild grimaces and gestures. Desperately, she latches onto a catchy phrase the host has floated, so that a paraphrasing of the host replaces serious argument.

And where’s Ron Paul at CPUKE?

I call her The Helmet. Callista Gingrich speaks, or shall I say issues forth?

What would a Republican Party gathering be without the Synopohobic vulgarist, Donald Tramp

This looks interesting:

The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity
– Wilson C
Sponsored by: ProEnglish
Speakers: Robert Vandervoort, Executive Director, ProEnglish; John Derbyshire, contributing
editor at National Review and author of We Are Doomed; Peter Brimelow, author of The Patriot
Game: National Dreams and Political Realities and founder of VDARE.com; Dr. Serge
Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor for Chronicles magazine; & Dr. Rosalie Porter, author of
American Immigrant: My Life In Three Languages, chairwoman of the board, ProEnglish
Open to all CPAC attendees

The agenda item below is plain ridiculous, given that Baby Bush was every bit as bad for civil liberties as his “non-identical, evil ideological twin, Barack Obama.”

Obama’s Agents Are Reading Your Emails: Privacy Concerns of the Digital Age – Taylor
Sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute

A lot of awards conservatives give themselves. And lots of book peddling and signings by the pols, which, as you know, I believe to be a symptom of America’s rotten politics. And that includes the Ron Paul signings.

“Politicians—all public servants—should be put on a very tight leash and prohibited from exploiting their already exploitative positions for yet more profit. (Then again, you know that I believe government workers should be disqualified from voting. For one thing, they don’t pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. Taxpayers pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. For another, they are in the position to vote themselves higher and higher wages. Which they do.)”

Sure, I like that Paul gets our message out with his books, but I think that all US politicians should be barred from using their powerful positions to peddle products, however laudable. And freedom of speech has nothing to do with this. Freedom of speech is not immutable, but tethered to property. So long as they live on our dime; the oink sector should be prohibited from profiting on our dime.

The Founders would have been appalled by the celebrity and high profiles politicians pursue on the public purse.

Myron, or anyone else: Time permitting, do regale BAB readers with a precis of one of the speeches.

UPDATE I: FREEDOM WATCH NEWS. Sorry for your loss, John. I tuned in yesterday, then switched off when “good friends of the show” warrior Bob Barr (hardly a libertarian) and Kirstin Powers (banal brain) hogged the screen and were fawned upon. Again, I’m sorry for the fans, although I seldom watched an entire episode because of the typical, mainstream, buddy-buddy, close to power, Beltway think-tank bias that came to pervade and dominate it.

RELATED: “More Reasons to Secede From The Pundit Pantheons of Fox, MSNBC and CNN.” I guess I’m uncompromising.

UPDATE II (Feb. 13): MORE FREEDOM WATCH NEWS. We agree, John, but even if we didn’t: “respek,” as Ali G. would preach. As a general educational tool, The Judge did good. Still, I often had to switch off even mid-soliloquy, due to the endless annoying “What ifs”: “what if the government this, what if the government that”X 100. The style of the show—that includes the pompous music and the screaming—did damage to the contents. It bled into the content and damaged it. Ironically, I switched to RT on the day of the sad announcement, because I could not stomach the Powers and Barr combo. The show was full of these characters which turn off good, gun-touting, property minded Americans. It also crapped all over cops—continuously—often for rounding up illegal immigrants. Americans hate that. And it offered the hideous contradiction vis-a-vis immigration: when you like what the federal Frankenstein does (help illegals remain in the states), you stick up for Federal overreach, rather than for the right of the people of the states to evict trespassers. Sorry, John: This was not the libertarianism of The People.

The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt

Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism

The following is excerpted from my latest column, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”:

“The Egyptian Justice Ministry, under the authority of the military council, has detained and indicted 19 American democracy activists. To listen to the malfunctioning media stateside, however, the Egyptians are being petty, picking a fight with their American benefactors for “operating in Egypt without a license.”

Or, if you want ‘expert’ opinion, courtesy of Politico.com, the Egyptian plan to prosecute these ‘Americans and two dozen others’ ‘is more over the future of U.S. aid to Egypt and who controls it.’

Among the Americans detained in Egypt is Sam LaHood—son of Ray LaHood, the Obama administration’s secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois.

Try as it did to obfuscate Egypt’s allegations against LaHood, the New York Times was forced to mention the military-led government’s suspicion that LaHood’s organization had been funneling funds through Washington ‘to stir unrest in the streets’ of Cairo. The Gray Lady nevertheless attributed this preposterous figment of the Arab imagination to an ‘escalating drumbeat of anti-American statements’ in Egypt.

LaHood fell under suspicion in his capacity as head of the International Republican Institute (IRI). And, wouldn’t you know it, he was working alongside the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Freedom House—described by the Times as ‘a Washington-based group that promotes democracy and open elections.’ Also arraigned were the director of the NDI and one ‘Patrick Butler, vice president of programs at the DC-based International Center for Journalists.’

The IRI and the NDI are excrescences of the Republican and Democratic parties respectively.

Yes, on the foreign-policy front, not much distinguishes America’s duopoly. Republicans and Democrats work in tandem, Saul-Alinsky style, to bring about volcanic transformation in societies that desperately need stability. …

Dr. Ron Paul excepted, conjuring up new missions abroad is a project shared by the incumbent president and his Republican rivals.

To cap it all, the troublesome meddling is paid for by the unsuspecting, overburdened American taxpayer. …

The hypocrisy in all this is that we Americans do not live under the Athenian democracy seemingly promoted abroad. On the contrary, we the people labor under a highly evolved technocratic, militarized Managerial State, which is far more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are the tin-pot dictators, who’ve been built-up into mega-monsters in infantile, Disneyfied minds.

… Were Americans to run riot, as the spirited Egyptians have done pursuant to the Port Said stampede, they’d probably come face-to-face with the Military. In contravention of The Posse Comitatus Act—and in furtherance of freedom, of course—the 2006 version of The National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Armed Forces to ‘restore public order’ during “major public emergencies.”

Read the complete column, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATED: The Price Of Independence: Typical Anecdote (Patrons Anon)

Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Journalism, libertarianism, Liberty, Media

The front-page’s “Be-a-Patron” post has been updated with an anecdote that gives a sense of what writing outside the accepted orthodoxy is like. It’ll also give you a laugh.

I am forever being peppered with patronizing notes from readers—hardly patrons, for a patron is “one that supports, protects, or champions; a sponsor or benefactor.” This persistent condescension (usually from older, authoritarian males, some in position of influence) necessitates that I remind reality bound readers of the following: The age of the Internet guarantees the futility of energetic efforts to marginalize myself and others, who like me, write outside the orthodoxy. In my case, for almost two decades.

A recent exercise helped me to appreciate just how much the libertarian establishment, much like its mainstream cohort—and in desperation to sustain its sinecured monopoly over the marketplace of ideas—will forever opt for the “statist quo” (to use a Jeff Tuckerism), in the face of popular trends to the contrary.

I was asked to attend a workshop and deliver an address at a local chapter of a property rights organization. Closer to the time, however, I was informed that I had been dropped in favor of an individual from a well-heeled think tank. You see, this writer is an independent, one-woman band, whose fidelity is to the truth alone. As such, or so I was told, I lacked name recognition. Since I had never heard of the individual who was to fill my much-smaller shoes, I did a few Internet searches. I discovered that the group had opted for establishment, not for name recognition.

GOOGLE threw up 245,000 results for the establishmentarian to my name’s 1,310,000 results.
FACEBOOK had me at 2870 Friends. Mr. Establishment was stuck at … 4.
MY BOOK’S FACEBOOK FAN PAGE garnered 394 Likes; Mr. Establishment’s Author Page had all of 25 Likes. Amazon was as dismally populated.
TWITTER: Mr. Name Recognition had 67 followers to my modest 498.
WND & RT, as mentioned, carry my weekly column. They rank, respectively, 2,943 and 1,280 on the WWW by Alexa, the premier website ranking site. I presume that Mr. Establishment produces the occasional ponderous, desiccated, extremely well-concealed position paper. If so, he does it on a site that ranks 47,094th on Alexa.

How long can these Beltway based think tanks and their patrons delude themselves about their reach or appeal? They excite as much passion as a wet blanket during the perennial, Washington State power outage.

ALL IN ALL, patrons are preferable to the patronizing. I thank my patrons—you know who you are.

(A message to Myron: As you know, kvetch, kvetch, I maintain all my websites and social-media forums; do all the data imputing, Comments Section editing and posting, and necessary site backups, in addition to the daily articles and blog writing. I’ll spare you details of the cleaning, cooking, house and parrot upkeep—to say nothing of the 12 mile per-week running habit. This is just to say that I promise to post on BAB images of our fabulous get-together and donor’s dinner. You are and have been a pal and a patron for years. You and your daughter are a delight.)

UPDATE (Feb. 10): Myron: I didn’t mention your lovely daughter’s name—and not because I forgot it in my dotage. Rather, this animated fabulous girl might be tainted or endangered for her association with you and me. (I’m being funny, of course.)

UPDATED: Hopeless Politics (Alarming Poll)

Democracy, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul

I scanned a few headlines for coverage of Ron Paul’s showing in yesterday’s Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri presidential contests, but could find no mention of the man who placed second in Minnesota. Skim this New York Times page. The Congressman from Texas is absent from the report. (And some have argued with me over the utter corruption and cretinism of the American media, although, given that the lead doesn’t even contain the contested states, I suspect that idicoracy more than ideology is at play here). Finally, while Rick Santorum swept these states, they “were essentially nonbinding straw polls.”

Buried on the PBS News Hour’s page is one line to the effect that “Texas Congressman Ron Paul finished second in Minnesota, third in Missouri and last in Colorado.” No more.

The matter of low turnout interests me more. “One of the big losers was GOP turnout, which was down in every state, compared to four years ago,” observes The Guardian. “The ratio of turnout from 2012 to 2008 in both counties were in the bottom quarter of all counties in Iowa. Had turnout in either county been at the same level relative to 2008 as the average county, Romney’s less-than-100 vote loss would have been turned into a win.”

Perhaps voters who poured their heart and soul into Tea-Party politics have prefigured that the nature of American politics is such that even if their candidate wins, nothing will change in their lives or in the politics. It is amazing that in the face of hopelessness—growing economic misery commensurate with the assurances of trillions more in debt—the only shot across the bow comes from the confused and revolting Occupy Wall Street Movement. Or “Freak Street.”

Promises by the presidential contender to repeal all the unconstitutional legislation the incumbent has passed are just that: promises that can never be fulfilled. The fact that presidents come and go and leave in their wake such devastation—essentially trashing the office and the country—demonstrates the reality of power without limitation. Since the Constitution is a dead letter, the political process consists in each faction passing its unconstitutional infractions into law, as the other gang guarantees repeal.

“The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.”—ILANA (January 15, 2010)

“No sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right. At some point, McCain reaches across the aisle and the creeps converge.”—ILANA (January 15, 2010)

UPDATE: (Feb. 9): “Obama would defeat all of the four Republicans if the election were held today, but Ron Paul fares the best against the incumbent. Obama leads Paul 44 percent to 40 percent, with 16 percent undecided,” says a “WND/WENZEL POLL.”

TELL ME the generic Republican isn’t stupid:

“In every case except the match-up against Ron Paul, more than 20 percent of Republican voters said they are more likely to support Obama than the Republican challenger. And Ron Paul is close, as 19 percent of Republicans said they are more likely to support Obama than Paul.”

A hopeless polity.