Beating the Powers that Be

Saying Good-Bye

2007-02-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

This will be my last post on Beating the Powers that Be. A new blog Conservative Times is coming out that I will be a part of that will eventually evolve into a new journal of traditional conservative thought with some friends of mine that I met at the John Randolph Club Meeting.

My life right now is about joining with others to work together whether its at work or at home. The blog was abut selling a book and I'm simply not famous enough nor work for a larger publication to do my own blogging to have the kind of impact I wish to have. By joining with other bloggers, I can do so and use my time more effectively.

This article I found on My DD confims my thoughts on the subject:

As a blogger, one of my specialties has become the regular production of "meta" posts on the blogosphere (browse MyDD's meta and blogosphere archives here). For a long time, this specialty included regular attempts to estimate the size of the cumulative, daily audience of the political blogosphere. Since late 2005, I have seen a mounting array of evidence to suggest that political blogosphere traffic has reached a plateau, and that the nature of the political blogosphere is shifting away from a top-down content generation model toward a bottom-up audience generated model. While it is possible that the traffic evidence could be countermanded by a rising tide of traffic in during the long, slow build up toward the 2008 Presidential election, the sheer amount of evidence is becoming hard to ignore. A new era in the world of online politics is dawning.

Take a look at some of the evidence. For example, since early September of 2005, when it first reached three million daily page views on weekdays during the height of the Katrina debacle, The Liberal Blog Advertising Network has only increased in traffic by adding new members or by temporary, election related traffic frenzies. Otherwise, the combined traffic of its members has remained flat. Also, the largest progressive "blog" in the world, The Huffington Post (which is not in the LBAN), has also experienced stagnant traffic for some time now. Late 2005 was also the last time any new progressive political blogs with exceptionally large audiences were founded, as Glenn Greenwald and Fire Dog Lake entered the scene around then. Even apart from looking at individual blogs or even at the progressive, political blogosphere as a separate entity, both Gallup and Pew released data last year that strongly suggested the daily audience of all blogs had become flat after a long period of uninterrupted growth. . Further, the expected surge around the Connecticut Senate primary and November elections not withstanding, blogs and the right and the left experienced traffic problems during much of 2006.

While this is not conclusive evidence of the political blogosphere reaching an audience plateau over the past year, it does strongly suggest a plateau has occurred. Current estimates of a daily audience of 4-5 million for progressive political blogs, and an occasional audience of up to 13-14 million for all political blogs, are now appearing in multiple sources. While this gives the progressive blogosphere a substantial, at least 2-1 edge in both daily and occasional traffic on the conservative blogosphere, since our traffic is now stagnant I am not ready to toot our horn when pointing that out. Just as I once proclaimed that the aristocratic right-wing blogosphere was stagnating, it now seems that the community oriented left-wing blogosphere is stagnating as well.

Despite these numbers, I believe it would be a mistake to argue that "the death of political blogging" is imminent (I put that phrase in scare quotes because I can't even begin to count the number of times I have been asked about what will result in the death of political blogging). Instead, I believe this means is that the world of online political content generation is moving away from the top-down model of an individual, independent blogger producing the majority of new content for a given website--a model which was dominant through most of 2002-2005. Now, the paradigm is shifting toward a more networked, community-oriented model where a much higher percentage of the audience participates in the generation of new content. Blogging, including political blogging, is still quite healthy, as long as it encourages user-generated content and relies on a group of main writers rather than a single individual. However, the days when an individual blogger can start a new, solo website and make a big national splash are probably over. The blogosphere and the netroots are transforming, not dying off.

Take, for example, Dailykos. According to resident statistician jotter, while overall site traffic on Dailykos slightly declined in 2006 compared to 2005, user participation in the generation of new content on the site actually increased by 20%. This shifted the overall reader to content generator ratio within the Dailykos audience from about 25-1 in 2005, to just 15-1 in 2006. That is a substantial shift for only one year, and demonstrative of larger trends. Looking at the websites ranked in the top fifteen in terms of page views the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, only two and a half, Political Animal, Eschaton and the Talking Points Memo side of the TPM netowrk, are still primarily single-blogger operations (those also happen to be some of the oldest political blogs around). Further, while political blogosphere traffic has remained generally flat over seventeen months now (apart from election-related spikes), social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have continued to expand at the same exponential rates that the political blogosphere once expanded (although MySpace is starting to flatten out as well). It is entirely possible, if not likely, that the growth social networking sites continue to experience while even community oriented progressive blogs remain flat was mirrored in 2003-2005 when group and community-oriented progressive blogs rocketed past top-down, individual-based, no comments allowed, right-wing blogs in terms of traffic. Even though it is benefiting a small number of large websites, the ability websites such as YouTube or Facebook give their audience to produce their own content has allowed those websites to perpetuate their viral stage of growth and development much longer than websites which offer fewer avenues for community-generated content and networking.

In addition to the end of the era of the highly successful solo-blogger, I forecast that this development toward user-generated content will carry two other important ramifications for the political blogosphere. First, the already extreme gap between the political engagement of netroots activists and rank-and-file voters will grow even wider. With more people not just consuming political information online, but helping to generate it, netroots activists will continue to consolidate as a sort of "elite influential" subset within the American political system. Second, in order to remain successful, more than more political blogs will transform into full-blown professional operations that can be considered institutions unto themselves. In addition to community development, they will more frequently produce difficult, original work (beat reporting, investigative journalism, professional lobbying, national activist campaigns, original video, commissioned polls, mass email lists, etc.) that until now have been mainly the province of long-established news and political organizations. Competition from other high-end blogs will continue to raise the bar in this area, as the days of thriving on punditry alone are further confined to diaries and comments off the front-page.

Phew. This is not going to be easy, and it may all collapse if blogger can't find better revenue streams. After all, you can't run a professional organization and upgrade your user generated content options without money to pay programmers and full-time employees. Many wags compared the collapse of Howard Dean's Presidential campaign in 2004 to the dot.com bust of 2000, but the real bust could happen in a more traditional economic sense two or three down the road. I know hat I won't stop trying to find ways to keep the progressive political blogosphere moving forward, but I can't deny the difficulties that lay ahead."

Thanks to all those who come here and read my articles and have posted here as well. Please join me at my new site, www.conservativetimes.org to my articles, posts and other musing along with those many other talented writers and people with something interesting to say.

Good Bye and Farwell!

Political Power and the Rule of Law by Rep. Ron Paul

2007-02-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

Political Power and the Rule of Law
by Ron Paul

With the elections over and the 110th Congress settling in, the media have been reporting ad nauseam about who has assumed new political power in Washington. We're subjected to breathless reports about emerging power brokers in Congress; how so-and-so is now the powerful chair of an important committee; how certain candidates are amassing power for the 2008 elections, and so on. Nobody questions this use of the word "power," or considers its connotations. It's simply assumed, in Washington and the mainstream media, that political power is proper and inevitable.

The problem is that politicians are not supposed to have power over us – we're supposed to be free. We seem to have forgotten that freedom means the absence of government coercion. So when politicians and the media celebrate political power, they really are celebrating the power of certain individuals to use coercive state force.

Remember that one's relationship with the state is never voluntary. Every government edict, policy, regulation, court decision, and law ultimately is backed up by force, in the form of police, guns, and jails. That is why political power must be fiercely constrained by the American people.

The desire for power over other human beings is not something to celebrate, but something to condemn! The 20th century's worst tyrants were political figures, men who fanatically sought power over others through the apparatus of the state. They wielded that power absolutely, without regard for the rule of law.

Our constitutional system, by contrast, was designed to restrain political power and place limits on the size and scope of government. It is this system, the rule of law, which we should celebrate – not political victories.

Political power is not like the power possessed by those who otherwise obtain fame and fortune. After all, even the wealthiest individual cannot force anyone to buy a particular good or service; even the most famous celebrities cannot force anyone to pay attention to them. It is only when elites become politically connected that they begin to impose their views on all of us.

In a free society, government is restrained – and therefore political power is less important. I believe the proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else. In other words, the state as referee rather than an active participant in our society.

Those who hold political power, however, would lose their status in a society with truly limited government. It simply would not matter much who occupied various political posts, since their ability to tax, spend, and regulate would be severely curtailed. This is why champions of political power promote an activist government that involves itself in every area of our lives from cradle to grave. They gain popular support by promising voters that government will take care of everyone, while the media shower them with praise for their bold vision.

Political power is inherently dangerous in a free society: it threatens the rule of law, and thus threatens our fundamental freedoms. Those who understand this should object whenever political power is glorified.

February 6, 2007

Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.

Presidential front runners will surrender America's sovereignty

2007-02-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

This post comes from Rev. Chuck Baldwin, VP candidate of the Constitution Party in 2004. Basically we have a field of turkeys running for President.

---Sean Scallon

Looking at the potential presidential frontrunners for both the Democrat and
Republican parties reveals that virtually everyone of them would surrender
America's borders. Not one of the presidential frontrunners from either
party would protect our borders against illegal immigration. Just the
opposite. They would continue George Bush's policy of wide open borders,
including his determination to grant amnesty to illegals. In other words,
when it comes to protecting our borders, there is not a nickel's worth of
difference between the two major parties' leading presidential contenders.

Democratic presidential frontrunners include John Edwards, Barak Obama, and
Hillary Clinton. Republican frontrunners include John McCain, Mitt Romney,
and Rudy Giuliani.

In fact, virtually every Democratic candidate, and even the vast majority of
Republican candidates, would provide no relief to America's border problems.
And, yes, that includes Sam Brownback and Newt Gingrich. Notable exceptions
include Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, and Tom Tancredo, with Tancredo at the head
of the class.

Obviously, should Hunter, Paul, or Tancredo miraculously win the White
House, the push for a North American Union (NAU) complete with a NAFTA
superhighway and a trilateral, hemispheric government, would be stopped dead
in its tracks. For this reason, the GOP machine (and the insiders who
control it) will never allow someone such as Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, or Tom
Tancredo to obtain the nomination.

It's time the American people faced a hard, cold reality: no matter who the
two major parties nominate in November 2008, the push for open borders,
amnesty for illegal aliens, and the NAU will continue unabated. In other
words, anyone one believes that unimpeded illegal immigration (and related
issues) just might be the biggest threat to our national sovereignty and
security (and count me as one who does) will not be able to vote for either
the Republican or Democratic nominee in 2008. It's time to start preparing
for that reality now.

Does that mean that Republicans should not do everything they can to help
Tancredo, Paul, or Hunter gain the nomination? Of course not. If the vast
majority of the GOP rank and file would get solidly behind these three men,
one of them might have a chance of succeeding. However, the track record of
the GOP faithful is not very reassuring.

Instead of supporting principled, uncompromising men of integrity, such as
the three men named above, Republican voters will doubtless buy into the
party mantra of pragmatism and help nominate another spineless globalist
such as currently occupies the White House, which will leave us exactly
where we are now.

So, here is the sixty-four million dollar question: What will principled
conservative voters do in 2008? My hope and prayer is that after failing to
receive their party's nomination, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter
(or at least one of them) will leave the party and bring their (his)
followers to the Constitution Party (CP). In all likelihood, the CP will
have ballot access in over 45 states. It is already the third largest
political party in the country and is currently the fastest growing
political party in the nation. A national leader such as Paul, Tancredo, or
Hunter would provide the CP with a very attractive alternative to the
globalist candidates being offered by the two major parties.

By nature, I am not a single issue voter. However, I am sensible enough to
realize that there are currently a handful of issues that will literally
make or break America's future. And right now, the illegal immigration and
emerging North American Union issues are at the very top of the list.
Further failure on these issues will mean the end of America as we know it.
And I mean very soon.

Regardless of what Hunter, Paul, and Tancredo ultimately do, Republicans,
Democrats, and Independents who believe we must protect America's borders,
stop the burgeoning North American Union, and secure our national
sovereignty must be prepared to abandon the two major parties' presidential
nominees in 2008 and support an "America First" third party candidate. Even
a virtually unknown candidate with limited experience, but someone who
understands the issues and has the backbone to do what is right, would be
head and shoulders above what the two major parties are currently shoving
down our throats.

Better start preparing yourselves for it now, folks.

Who's side is Bush on?

2007-02-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

This article comes from Rev. Chuck Baldwin

---Sean Scallon

During President Bush's State of the Union speech there was someone he would not dare publicly recognize. Even though he knew she was there, I'm confident he never even bothered to look up at Gallery 5, Row B, Seat 9, because sitting in that seat was Monica Ramos, the wife of imprisoned former Border Patrol agent Ignacio Ramos. She was the invited guest of Republican California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.

Representative Rohrabacher is incensed at Bush's Justice Department for
imprisoning Ramos and former Border Patrol agent Jose Alonso Compean for
their actions in the shooting and wounding of a Mexican drug smuggler.

In case you missed the story, the two BP agents intercepted a Mexican drug
smuggler who brought more than 700 pounds of marijuana (that we know of)
across the border into the United States. In the process of attempting to
capture the criminal, he pointed something at the agents, and they opened
fire. He was apparently hit in the buttocks, as he turned to run. However,
the smuggler appeared to not be injured, as he continued to run swiftly back
into Mexico and into a waiting van. Both van and smuggler raced out of
sight. The smuggler's weapon was not found.

Why, you ask, were the two agents imprisoned (for a term of more than 11
years each, no less)? For firing their weapons and not filing the proper
paperwork. You read it right.

"TJ Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union
representing 1,500 agents, argued failure to report the discharge of a
firearm is an administrative offense that, at the most, merits a five-day
suspension," reports World Net Daily.

"How that translates into 11-and 12-year prison terms is beyond me," Bonner
said.

Making matters worse, the Mexican drug smuggler was even granted full
immunity by the Justice Department and brought back at U.S. taxpayers'
expense to testify against the agents. He is even being allowed to sue the
two agents for over $5 million for having his "civil rights" violated. No,
he is not an American citizen. He is a Mexican criminal who entered the
United States illegally for the express purpose of smuggling drugs.

More than 70 lawmakers signed a petition pleading with President Bush to
pardon the two agents. To no avail. Agents Ramos and Compean began their
prison terms on January 17.

Representative Rohrabacher called President Bush a "disgrace" for refusing
to pardon the two BP agents. About Bush, he said, "This is the worst
betrayal of American defenders I have ever seen." He further said, "He
[Bush] obviously thinks more of his agreements with Mexico than the lives of
American people and backing up his defenders."

Rep. Joe Wilson said, "Convicting Ramos and Compean is a slap in the face to
every American who respects the rule of law and expects our government to
enforce its own laws."

However, the story gets even more bizarre. Writing for World Net Daily,
Jerome Corsi reports, "New evidence suggests prosecuting U.S. Attorney
Johnny Sutton of El Paso lied about how the government found the fleeing
illegal alien Mexican drug smuggler, Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, according to a
Border Patrol advocate closely following the case of former agents Ignacio
Ramos and Jose Campean.

"Contrary to claims, no Mexican attorney was involved as an intermediary
offering to reveal the identity of the drug smuggler and bring him back to
the U.S. in exchange for given immunity to testify against Border Patrol,
contended Andy Ramirez, chairman of Friends of the Border Patrol.

"'It's shocking how much lying Johnny Sutton has done about Aldrete-Davila,'
he told WND."

Ramirez said emphatically, "If the truth about how the government got their
hands on Aldrete-Davila had been told to the jury, there is no way the jury
would have believed a word of his story that he was unarmed."

Obviously, much of the prosecutor's cased hinged on the testimony of the
drug smuggler that he was not armed. In the end, the jury had to decide in
favor of a U.S. Attorney and a Mexican drug smuggler or the two Border
Patrol agents. Pathetically, they chose to believe the Mexican criminal and
the collaborating U.S. Attorney.

Worse still, President Bush ignored the pleas of members of Congress and the
thousands of American citizens begging him to pardon the two agents.

In response to Bush's decision to leave the two BP agents behind bars,
Rohrabacher's spokeswoman, Tara Setmayer, said that the "lives of two brave
men, her husband Ignacio Ramos and Border Patrol agent Jose Compean, have
been destroyed by an inexplicable policy of open borders and amnesty this
administration has toward our southern border.

"If the Bush administration cared about securing our borders, these two law
enforcement officers would not be behind bars, and U.S. prosecuting
attorneys wouldn't be prosecuting Border Patrol agents while drug smugglers
go free."

Congressman Rohrabacher even went so far as to say, "He [President Bush]
talks about being a Christian, but he has shown no Christian charity." He
went on to say that because of the decision of Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales and President Bush to prosecute the two Border Patrol agents, "The
word is out that the southern border is undefended. Border agents won't dare
to draw their weapons, and the drug cartel will double their effort to drive
a wedge in our border."

Makes one wonder whose side George W. Bush is on, doesn't it?

(c) Chuck Baldwin

Does Romans 13 demand we pay our taxes

2007-02-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

This article comes form Doug Newman and is a welcome rebuke to those Christians who wish to use the Bible to justify tyranny.

--Sean Scallon

DOES ROMANS 13 DEMAND THAT WE PAY INCOME TAXES?
By Doug Newman

January 28, 2007

Jimmy writes:

“… as acts 5:29 says we are to obey God rather than men, and when a government such as the Nazi regime comes into power and tells us to report all Jews in hiding, that government has become un-Biblical and may be rebelled against, but what about less extreme examples? Take, for instance, the incremental destruction of our economic liberties, such as the creation of the income tax, and the Federal Reserve. How can we complain about the income tax when Romans 13:7 tells us to pay taxes?”

I replied:

Thanks for writing. Romans 13:1-7 (1) is the favorite Scripture of control freaks everywhere. However, to read it as demanding total obedience to earthly authorities is absurd. Christianity is an intellectual exercise. We are to love God with our hearts, souls and minds. (Mark 12:30)

No Scripture stands isolated from the rest of God’s Word. Disobedience is a common theme throughout Scripture. To cite just a few examples:

The three Hebrew children endured the fiery furnace rather than worship Nebuchadnezzar’s God. (Daniel 3)

Daniel is thrown into the lions’ den for defying King Darius. (Daniel 6)

Jesus was crucified on political charges – i.e. treason – for claiming to be God and therefore a counterforce to Caesar. (Luke 23:2)

Peter and John defy the authorities’ decree that they not teach in Jesus’ name. (Acts 4:18-20, Acts 5:29)

Christianity was an outlaw religion for the first few hundred years of its existence.

Several of Paul’s letters – Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon -- were written while he was in Roman jails.

The Prophet John wrote the book of Revelation while in exile on the Isle of Patmos.
Moreover, while we hear time and again that “America was founded on Christian values”, no one ever tells us what this means. While some Founders were Christian and others were not, their worldview was far more biblical than almost anything we find in the contemporary church. Not only did they say all kinds of nasty things about King George III, many were big time scofflaws! Among them were smugglers, tax resisters and militia members who engaged in shootouts with their own government!

This government was nowhere nearly as large, costly and intrusive as our current government. The people were taxed at less than three percent, there was no war on drugs and no Royal Department of Education. I hope this answers your question about "less extreme examples."

The Declaration of Independence, while not an explicitly Christian document, appeals to a God who takes an active concern in political affairs. When the 56 signers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, they were dead serious. Many paid huge prices so that you and I could live and breathe in freedom.

Consider also the northerners of good conscience who harbored runaway slaves in the 1850s in defiance of the fugitive slave laws. Consider Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Alabama in 1955.

Consider all the people who risked their lives either resisting or fleeing from Nazism and Communism.

Consider the underground churches in many countries throughout the world which exist in direct defiance of their governments. The spirit of the early church lives!

The First Commandment states that “You shall have no other Gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) “No other Gods” includes earthly governments.

I am not an expert on various translations of the Bible. However, I invite you to look at Romans 13:1 in the New International Version and then in the King James Version.

NIV “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

KJV “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”
The concept of “higher powers” is far stronger than that of “governing authorities”. The governing authorities of this world are not exempt from God’s Judgment. The governors of this world have a Governor. (Psalm 2)

Jesus tells us to “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” (Matthew 22:21)

Concerning this passage, a few observations:

Jesus never gets specific about what is Caesar’s and what is God’s. Indeed, He never assigns any duties to Caesar.

The contemporary church would have you think that this Scripture means “Render unto Caesar everything Caesar demands and then sit down and shut up.” They never discuss particulars. Jesus’ words are a charter of liberty while contemporary church teaching is a recipe for slavery.

In America, Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution delegates 18 specific duties to Caesar. The Tenth Amendment forbids any other federal activity. The distinction between what is Caesar's and what is not is very clear.
There you have it: this idea that Christians should always do as told has no practical or scriptural basis.

Let us now address the issue of paying taxes. Romans 13:7 says, “If you owe taxes, pay taxes.” But do we owe taxes? I caused quite a stir on some message boards recently when I asked: “Please show me the law requiring us to pay income tax.” Click on this link to see the responses I received.

I personally have not had the fortitude yet to test this, but numerous people have. And some have paid dearly. Some have done jail time. (2) This is just a partial list, in no particular order, of people who have either spoken out about the absence of a law requiring us to pay income taxes, questioned the supremacy of the IRS over the church, exposed the fraud of the Sixteenth Amendment or who have challenged the absence of such a law directly by not paying income taxes: Irwin Schiff, Sherry Peel Jackson, Ed and Elaine Brown, Rick Stanley, Devvy Kidd, Robert Schultz, Bill Benson, Joseph Bannister, Larken Rose, Rose Lear, Vernice Kuglin, Whitey Harrell, Marcella Brooks, Larry Becraft, Greg Dixon, Gene Chapman, Kent Hovind, Robert Raymond and – most prominently – Aaron Russo.

If you are not seen Mr. Russo’s phenomenal documentary “America: Freedom to Fascism”, you need to. It chronicles his quest to find out if there is in fact a law requiring Americans to pay taxes on their incomes. No one ever cites the specific law.

When the matter has gone to court, the defendants have almost always had the deck stacked against them. Years ago, a defendant would have the opportunity to a trial by a jury that had far greater power than today’s juries. Jurors had the right to judge not only the facts pertaining to a case, but also the law relevant to that case. If so much as one juror thought the law was unconstitutional, immoral, stupid or even non-existent, the juror could vote to acquit and the defendant would walk.

Again, I have not had the audacity to test this myself. However, I am profoundly convinced of this: some day I will commit some act of civil disobedience. I do not know when or where or what the details will be. However, I see it coming.

In I Corinthians 7:23, Paul exhorts us not to “become slaves of men.” A slave may be described as someone who labors involuntarily for someone else’s benefit. A tax on income is a form of slavery.

In America’s Constitution, the “things that are Caesar’s” are few and defined. Hence, the cost of funding these activities is quite minimal and non-intrusive. The principle of direct taxation on one’s labor was abhorrent to the Founders.

The Founders’ vision of a minimal state was consistent with a worldview that was heavily influenced by the Bible. Even though God ordained civil government – Romans 13 – such government had to be severely limited. Christians have a King, but His Kingdom is not of this earth. (John 18:36) A Christian’s true citizenship is in Heaven, and not on earth. (Philippians 3:20)

Jesus sent His followers out “like sheep among wolves” and instructed them to be “shrewd as serpents.” (Matthew 10:16) The world will be hostile to Christians. This hostility will take many forms. It is your duty as a Christian to navigate through this world wisely, to discern the endless wiles of the enemy and to stand firm until the end in the face of evil. (Matthew 10:22)

Support the Troops by Ending the War -- Rep. Ron Paul

2007-02-01T05:06:00.000-08:00

Support the Troops by Ending the War

by Rep. Ron Paul

I have never met anyone who did not support our troops. Sometimes, however, we hear accusations that someone or some group does not support the men and women serving in our armed forces. This is pure demagoguery, and it's intellectually dishonest. The accusers play on emotions to gain support for controversial policies, implying that those who disagree are unpatriotic. But keeping our troops out of harm's way, especially when war is unnecessary, is never unpatriotic. There's no better way to support the troops.

Since we now know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and was not threatening anyone, we must come to terms with 3,000 American deaths and 23,000 American casualties. It's disconcerting that those who never believed the justifications given for our invasion, and who now want the war ended, are still accused of not supporting the troops! This is strange indeed!

Instead of questioning who has the best interests of our troops at heart, we should be debating which policy is best for our country. Defensive wars to preserve our liberties, fought only with proper congressional declarations, are legitimate. Casualties under such circumstances still are heartbreaking, but they are understandable. Casualties that occur in undeclared, unnecessary wars, however, are bewildering. Why must so many Americans be killed or hurt in Iraq when our security and our liberty were not threatened?

Clichés about supporting the troops are designed to distract us from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war. Anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

Many now agree that we must change our policy and extricate ourselves from the mess in Iraq. They cite a mandate from the American people for a new direction. This opinion is now more popular, and thus now more widely held by politicians in Washington. But there's always a qualifier: We can't simply stop funding the war, because we must support the troops. I find this conclusion bizarre. It means one either believes the "support the troops" propaganda put out by the original promoters of the war, or that one actually is for the war after all, despite the public protestations.

In reality, support for the status quo (and the president's troop surge) in Iraq means expanding the war to include Syria and Iran. The naval build up in the region, and the proxy war we just fought to take over Somalia, demonstrate the administration's intentions to escalate our current war into something larger.

There's just no legitimacy to the argument that voting against funding the war somehow harms our troops. Perpetuating and escalating the war only serve those whose egos are attached to some claimed victory in Iraq, and those with a determination to engineer regime change in Iran.

Don't believe for a minute that additional congressional funding is needed so our troops can defend themselves or extricate themselves from the war zone. That's nonsense. The DOD has hundreds of billions of dollars in the pipeline available to move troops anywhere on earth – including home.

We shouldn't forget that the administration took $600 million from the war in Afghanistan and used it in Iraq, before any direct appropriations were made for the invasion of Iraq. Funds are always available to put our troops into harms way; they are always available for leaving a war zone.

Those in Congress who claim they want the war ended, yet feel compelled to keep funding it, are badly misguided. They either are wrong in their assessment that cutting funds would hurt the troops, or they need to be more honest about supporting a policy destined to dramatically increase the size and scope of this misadventure in the Middle East. Rest assured one can be patriotic and truly support the troops by denying funds to perpetuate and spread this ill-advised war.

The sooner we come to this realization, the better it will be for all of us.

The More the Merrier….Not the Case with the GOP Presidential Field

2007-01-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

When it was leaked out that U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex) was forming an exploratory committee to run for the GOP nomination for President, the excitement and electricity on the internet was enough to give full power to Baghdad. Paul has long been a favorite among many on the information super-highway for his paleolibertarian views on foreign and domestic policy and his opposition to the war in Iraq. Many were enthusiastic about the possibility of Paul gaining a broad coalition of support among libertarians, "real" conservatives and maybe even a few leftists as well to form a new electoral coalition.

Unfortunately all that euphoria had to be tampered because just a week later another favorite of the internet political posting crowds, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Col.), decided that he was going form his own presidential exploratory committee.

I'll give my endorsement of Paul over Tancredo near end of this article. But once again it shows that when it comes to nominating a presidential candidate, too many cooks can spoil the broth on the GOP side. History has shown that anti-establishment or other sincerely conservative candidates have been hurt by the divisions caused when there are too many presidential candidates and not enough pool for them to swim in.

There really hasn't been united conservative backing to one presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964. Some may ask what about Ronald Reagan but truth be told when Reagan ran for president in 1968 and 1974 many southern Goldwaterites who become ensconced in the party after 1964, supported Richard Nixon in 1968 and in 1972 and Gerald Ford in 1976. Indeed, it was those very persons, like Mississippi's state Republican Party Chairman Clarke Reed, that ultimately gave Ford the nomination. Even when Reagan ran in 1980 there was a candidate to his right, U.S. Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.). Crane was the favorite of intellectual conservatives because they didn't think Reagan had the brain matter for the job ("Its not that Reagan lacks principals," one conservative joke went. "It’s that he doesn't understand the one’s he has.") and thought that if his candidacy collapsed, which nearly happened thanks to the inept leadership of campaign manager John Sears, then Crane would be left to pick up the pieces. Of course Reagan's candidacy didn't collapse and Crane was out the door after New Hampshire. There were Republican candidates like John Connally and Bob Dole in 1980 who were seen as reasonably conservative, but whose ties to a discredited GOP establishment at that time ruled them out among conservative voters.

The apparent unity within the old conservative movement cracked in 1986 and by the time of the next GOP nominating contest in 1988, several factions had their own candidates. In subsequent years, those divisions have only grown worse and the number of candidates has grown each time. However, each of these candidates are or have been trying to swim in a pool that simply doesn't have enough water to hold all of them.

What makes a person decide to run for president after all? It would seem that raising the money required to win along with the travel and hard work required would make it too daunting a task for a mere mortal. Walter Mondale thought spending all that time "sleeping in Holiday Inns" was too much for him back in 1974. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) formed an exploratory committee this year and quickly pulled the plug on it when he realized he couldn't win. And yet others are willing the make the sacrifice even though they don't have snowball's chance in hell of being president because modern presidential campaigns are not as taxing as you might think. Federal matching funds provides some cash to work with. You've got all sorts of free media nowadays to get your message out. You can live off the land in a low budget campaign to try and gain delegate or two to make a point at the convention. You can even use such a bid to gain attention for yourself for the gigs to come. John Kasich was an also-ran GOP candidate in 2000, but that didn't stop him getting his own show, "Heartland," on Fox News. Alan Keyes became a talk-radio host after his losing campaigns. Some loser candidates have parlayed their losses into cabinet posts like Bruce Babbitt or U.S. Senate campaigns like Elizabeth Dole or statewide office back home like Gerry Brown. Bob Kerry became a college president. You never know what awaits you even if you only gain 1 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. And of course if lighting does strike, as it did for an unknown former Georgia Governor named Jimmy Carter back in 1976, you too can be president.

So this new environment means that lots of candidates can run for president and all the factions in the GOP and the conservative universe gives them the rational. Unfortunately, all these candidacies accomplish is making it easier for the powers that be, both in the Republican and conservative establishments, to maintain their status and their control of the political scene.

The thing I despise most about political reporting and punditry is the fact that that such reporters and pundits lazily continue to mouth stereotypes and formulas and generalizations about voters and voting habits that have long ceased to be, if in fact ever were. This is especially true with the Republican primary electorate. Supposedly the GOP primary electorate is heavily conservative, which is true compared to moderate or liberal GOP voters, but such reporting doesn't delve into the kind of conservatism such voters espouse. GOP nominating history has shown time and again that most conservative candidates are usually not nominated and yet reporters and pundits seem blind to this fact and report about each candidate in reference to their support from the "conservative movement" or support among social conservatives, economic conservatives and national security conservatives and so forth.

Yet if support among social conservatives was the most important aspect in the Republican presidential nominating process, then we would have had GOP nominees Robertson, or Bauer or Keyes. If support among economic conservatives were important, then we would have had GOP nominees Kemp or Forbes. If strength among libertarian, anti-government conservatives was critical, we would have GOP nominees Gramm and or Kasich. If national security credentials made the difference among GOP primary voters, then we would have had nominees Haig or Dornan.

All of these candidacies just go to show how the divisiveness in the nominating process hurts candidates who have the opportunity to put together broad coalitions of support, especially those candidates who have a real opportunity of shaking things up in Washington. I speak of course of Pat Buchanan. In 1996, a little-known former UN ambassador and twice failed U.S. Senate candidate from Maryland, Alan Keyes, didn’t let his electoral failures or lack of notoriety keep him from somehow thinking he was presidential timber. Had Keyes not been around in Iowa, Pat Buchanan would have beaten Bob Dole in the caucus there and, with a win in New Hampshire, could have rolled his way to the nomination. Three years later in Iowa, Buchanan not only had to contend with Keyes once again, but former Reagan White House aide Gary Bauer. Instead of supporting someone whom he had very little disagreement with, Bauer decided to run himself because "Pat's had his turn. Now it's my turn," or something to that effect. Bauer was going to be Pat with a smile face, without all the nasty rhetoric or old newspaper columns that said bad things about Israel or women or whoever else was offended. He began to try and outdo Buchanan on the issues of economic nationalism, immigration and globalism while also coming out for more subsides for Iowa farmers. The end result was Buchanan saw his vote totals at the Iowa Straw Poll cut in half. Instead of being a top tier candidate along with George Bush II and John McCain, he began to run for the Reform Party nomination and the rest is history. Way to go Gary! You did the establishment's job quite nicely.

Not only that, but many within the conservative establishment of special interest groups, think tanks and political consultants on both coasts stay away from such boat-rockers like Buchanan for fear their own status could be compromised if they support candidates that aren’t given the seal of approval within in the establishment university they exist and work in. No one wants to be an outcast when trying move with the powers that be.

Of course such history doesn’t stop potential GOP candidates who should know better from pandering to such conservative factions which only further splits up the vote into atom-sized measurements. There are three good examples of this:

--- In 1988, Delaware Gov. Pierre S. DuPont ran for president with the reputation that all governors have of being a "moderate." So much so that the campaign staff of George Bush I feared that he could cut into Bush I's vote totals and threatened his chance of winning the GOP nomination. But DuPont decided to run like a whole-hog conservative, making a speech attacking the "moderate" wing of the party and even proposing a plan to privatize Social Security. Bush I advisers reacted with glee at their good fortune and DuPont wound up with six percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

--- In 2000 publisher Steve Forbes, coming off a solid run in his first try for the presidency in 1996, decided, like any good businessman would, that a certain segment of the GOP audience, namely social conservatives, didn't like his product very much, meaning himself, and decided that he would target himself to this audience until they came around. When they did, he would win the Republican nomination. The upshot was the audience that helped propel Forbes in 1996: economic conservatives and young, libertarian-leaning Republicans along with independents, felt abandoned by Forbes and rushed head-long into the waiting arms of John McCain. The end result was that Forbes slugged it out with Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer for the social conservative vote and saw his campaign end a lot earlier that year than it did in 1996.

--- Heading into 2008, both McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney have been pandering and tailoring themselves to the conservative voting bloc. McCain, like Forbes, is trying to convince that certain segment of the GOP base to come around to his side by trying to kiss and make-up to their so-called leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, leaders that he once attacked as "agents of intolerance." Romney is touting his anti-homosexual marriage credentials. This, of course, is the old Richard Nixon strategy of running to the right to win the primary/run to the center to win the general election. Unfortunately, in a day and age where voters are more cynical about politics and distrustful of politicians in general and when Google and You Tube can catch your words in previous speeches or debates, such attempts at positioning can backfire. McCain is trying to convince a GOP electorate that still mistrusts and despises him that he's really one of them even to the point of supporting an unpopular war just so he can be seen as supporting a President who’s becoming unpopular with Republicans. Meanwhile, Romney's old debate tapes back from 1994 when he ran for the Senate against Ted Kennedy show this Mormon saying he would outdo Kennedy when it came to promoting homosexual rights and defending abortion. Romney's says he's seen the light, but you have to wonder if such conversions have come about the minute he announced his candidacy and what serious Mormon would say such things

Either way, it's this pandering that adds more swimmers to an ever-shrinking pool to splash in leaving little water for candidates that either do not have the money or bases of support outside of a few thousand hardcore followers. GOP primaries voters are not at all that different than anyone else for wanting to be on the winning team, being bandwagon fans or jumping on the train as it leaves the station. So whichever leading candidate jumps out ahead of the others after the first few primaries and caucuses, will more than likely be the nominee. And left behind will be another large group of candidates like messers. Brownback, Romney, Gingrich, Huckabee, Tancredo, Cox, Gilmore, Hunter, Thompson and any other joker who wants to jump into an empty, mud-filled hole without their clothes on.

But before we dump Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee onto the ashbin of history, we should ponder their candidacies for a just minute. Both claim to be the champions of social conservatives but they’re not running as fire and brimstone candidates. Brownback plans to spend a night in jail to highlight one of his main issues, prison reform. And Huckabee, who reportedly plays a mean bass guitar, says the U.S. should open its borders and allow in as many Hispanics from south of the border as possible because that will give the U.S. a chance to make up for past racism. Gee, are these fellows vying for the Jesse Jackson wing of the Republican Party? Actually what they are vying for are younger Christian evangelicals, Roman Catholics, (Brownback converted from Methodism to Catholicism so we’ll see if any “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” sentiment still exists alongside anti-Mormonism within the so-called “religious right”) fundamentalists and Pentecostals who are fed up with being nothing more than back-seat drivers in the GOP coalition and who are fed up with being defined as voters only interested in abortion and homosexuality. They want to talk about different issues like the environment, like wealth disparity and poverty, like prison reform, and like immigration and Huckabee and Brownback are here to service them. They truly are “compassionate conservatism’s” bastard children.

The problem is that the trollops that bore them are in the food processing industry and who reap big benefits from open immigration policies that both Brownback and Huckabee have supported over the years. Indeed, Arkansas-based Tyson Foods has been instrumental in taking Huckabee from being an obscure Baptist preacher to being governor and he’s rewarded them with by helping Tyson import their workforce from Mexico and Central America into Arkansas. Brownback too, has extensive ties to the food industry going all the way back to when he was Secretary of Agriculture in Kansas and they have backed his career. And while Huckabee and Brownback, along with Romney and maybe even former Virginia governor and RNC Chairman Jim Gilmore, slice and dice up the social conservative vote, the issue immigration could well sink the “compassionate conservatives” in the race. As more and more rank-and-file Republicans oppose any kind of liberal immigration policy, those who support such policies are not going to be on the top of their voting lists. Indeed, immigration could well supersede abortion as a GOP litmus test issue and you heard it here first well before it will be reported in the corporate press or by corporate political writers and pundits.

Tom Tancredo has said he doesn’t think he’d make a good presidential candidate, or even president for that matter, doesn’t think he has a chance of winning it all. But he’s running anyway because he thinks the immigration issue is not being given the proper attention it should from the declared GOP candidates and he sees a vacuum of support for his kind of restrictive immigration policies. Certainly it is a vacuum he hopes to fill using Minutemen activists as his supporters, especially out West. And while many, including myself, have supported Tancredo and realize that without him in Congress we would already be in the process of providing amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, this writer is backing Ron Paul for President in 2008 come what may.

Tancredo’s candidacy is one-trick pony and he knows it. He gave up the opportunity to run a winning campaign for the U.S. Senate in his home state of Colorado, which would gain him a bigger platform and wider audience for his views, and instead decides to go on a fool’s errand. On top of that, he isn’t the only GOP candidate opposed to mass immigration or guest-worker bills in Congress because so is U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Cal.). And no doubt Hunter will be trying play up his opposition to such proposals in order to gain a niche as the anti-immigration candidate. Plus, they both support the war in Iraq. They are virtually the same kind of candidate. So while they’re busy chopping up their shares of vote into pieces like so many outside the establishment, it’s time for people who are serious conservatives, serious libertarians, and even a some serious liberals, those who are on the outside looking in on the powers that be, to give serious look at Ron Paul.

Ron Paul wants to make a serious bid for the White House (meaning no non-major party runs if he doesn’t win) by running for the GOP nomination.Not only does he support decentralization policies such voters can agree with (or at least on most issues anyway), his candidacy, if successful, could represent the beginning of a new movement and or voting coalition of such aforementioned groups who’s primary interest it is to dismantle the empire that’s led us into a bloody and disastrous war, that tries to enforce its values on people who don’t want such values imposed upon them (right or left depending on the community in question), that steals our money for its own vainglorious and unconstitutional pursuits and tries to steal our legitimate freedoms bit by bit. A successful Paul candidacy will destroy the cancer of centralism. This goes way beyond being a protest candidate or running just to “educate” voters in a shell. So much potential can come from Paul’s candidacy that can benefit so many. Paleos of all stripes can join hands with regular Republicans, libertarians, so-called “crunchy conservatives” and liberals for such a movement and members of non-major parties like the LP or CP and maybe even the Greens could leave their enclaves in their respective states and join with a man who doesn’t have to recant his support for this illegal war because he’s opposed it from the beginning. Much this sounds like dreaming I know, but I also know that by the fall of 2007, Ron Paul will be the only Republican candidate (assuming Chuck Hagel doesn’t run) having opposed an unpopular war that will be unpopular with a majority of Republicans. That’s a powerful position to be in with campaign that’s going to be dominated by the war whether the politicians like it or not. Considering the other options out there and considering what could become of a successful Paul campaign, it’s time to support someone standing proudly on shore rather than wallowing in the mud with the other also-rans.

Bong 4 Jesus Madness

2007-01-29T09:55:00.001-08:00

This is the latest article from Doug Newman

--Sean Scallon

Bong 4 Jesus Madness
By Doug Newman

When I was growing up somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, I had a friend who would sometimes ask the following when things were blown out of proportion: “Do you have to make a federal issue out of it?”

I was reminded of this when I read that the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of Morse and the Juneau School Board et al. v. Frederick.

The case began in early 2002, when Joseph Frederick, a high school student in Juneau, Alaska, went on a school field trip to watch the Olympic Torch as it passed through town en route to Salt Lake City. It was there that he unfurled a banner that read “Bong hits 4 Jesus.”

Isn't this just free-spirited high school mischief?

Deborah Morse, the high school principal, did not think so. Even though Frederick displayed the offending, seditious, end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it banner off of school grounds, Morse suspended him for ten days.

This was just the beginning of the "Bong hits 4 Jesus" madness. Frederick eventually sued in federal district court on First Amendment grounds. The court ruled in favor of the school district. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court and ruled in Frederick’s favor.

Enter Kenneth Starr, the former US Solicitor General and Whitewater prosecutor who was very active in pushing for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He has convinced the Court to hear this case. He will represent the school district.

Starr, who is now dean of the law school at Pepperdine University, wants the Court to have the chance “to clear up the ‘doctrinal fog infecting student speech jurisprudence.’"

Did I miss the Big News? Did they catch bin Laden?

How about clearing up the doctrinal fog infecting the Bill of Rights?

The Bill of Rights is really a bill of prohibitions on federal intrusions on the rights of thee and me. If federal judges actually read the first ten amendments to the Constitution, we would live in quite a different America.

Free speech – protected by the First Amendment – would be secure. Your rights to do things such as have your bong hits and to opt out of government education -- protected by the Ninth Amendment – would be secure. Federal intrusion in education – forbidden by the Tenth Amendment – would be non-existent. No doctrinal fog here.

In short, your right to do as you willy-nilly pleased as long as you did not harm anyone else would be secure from the predations of control freaks left and right. Your right to be left alone would be secure.

A YouTube video made the point that the ACLU is defending Frederick’s right to unfurl a banner that included the name of “Jesus”. At the same time, a stalwart of the Christian Right has his trousers in such a wad that he has convinced the Supremes to hear the case.

If the mere mention of “bong hits” sends these Holy Joes over the edge, how about Genesis 1:29?

"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth,
and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." (KJV)

"Every herb bearing seed" means exactly that: "every herb bearing seed". This includes hippy lettuce.

It is enough that – in a post-9/11 America -- what was left of the Constitution was sent through the shredder under the guise of fighting terrorism. (Most of it had already been finished off in the name of the War on Drugs.)

In the future – in a post-“Bong hits 4 Jesus” America -- will everyone who has just a little too much fun wind up before the Supreme Court in order to clear up someone’s "doctrinal fog”?

I opened with a question asked by a friend from New Jersey. I will close with a question once asked by a friend from Arizona:

“Lord, when’s the Big Rock gonna hit?”

Ron Paul and Free Republic

2007-01-29T09:51:00.000-08:00

I met Dr. Dan "Red" Phillips at last year's JRC gathering in Rockford and we've corresponding ever since. He's a writer like myself to I'm happy to put his pieces on my blog like this one on Ron Paul and Free Republic:

--Sean Scallon

Since the beginning of the Bush administration genuine conservatives have been taking a beating, but now there is hope. Friday 12 January 07 finally brought some good news for the conservative movement and the cause of authentic conservatism and constitutionally limited government! Rep. Ron Paul has set up an exploratory committee for a possible presidential campaign for the GOP nomination in 2008. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Rep. Paul, he is a Republican Congressman from the 14th District of Texas. In the Congress he is a bright shining light of limited government in a bastion of big government darkness. In an age when many Republicans have embraced the cause of activist, “big government (sic) conservatism” at home and abroad, Rep. Paul has been keeping the limited government faith. (Of course “big government conservatism” is an obvious oxymoron.) Rep. Paul’s, who is a physician by trade, support of constitutionally limited government has earned him the moniker “Dr. No,” because he so often votes against big spending bills. Rep. Paul, in an era marked by the abandonment of core principles, has remained a genuine constitutionalist.

For awhile, I have had to set back and listen to conservatives debate whether Sen. McCain or Gov. Romney was the least objectionable candidate. Or even worse if that is possible, I had to listen to speculation about whether Mayor Rudy Giuliani could win the Republican nomination. Almost in despair I listened as conservatives mentioned amnesty supporters Sen. Brownback and Gov. Huckabee as possible conservative alternative candidates. I wondered to myself and also aloud, “Has the conservative movement really sunk this low?”

As I have indicated before, I am a serious political junkie. The problem is there has seldom been a candidate that I could whole-heartedly endorse. My paleoconservative and constitutionalist beliefs would not allow me to enthusiastically support such obvious moderates as Dole in ’96 or Bush in ‘00 and ‘04. In fact, I felt like Bush’s embrace of “compassionate” big government (sic) conservatism was more in line with the editorial page of the New York Times a la David Brooks than it was with main street small government conservatism. And his foreign policy was certainly not small government conservatism. It was big government Wilsonian liberalism.

So when I heard about Rep. Paul’s announcement, I was ecstatic. I immediately went to a few e-mail groups I belong to to share the good news, but good news travels fast. Many were already aware. Since Rep. Paul’s announcement, the conservative blogosphere and conservative internet sites have been on fire with the news of a possible Paul candidacy. Finally there is a candidate who is right on all the right issues, a candidate I can whole-heartily endorse. I have already priced tickets to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Rep Paul is right on spending, he is right on taxes, he is right on the border, immigration and amnesty, he is right on life, and he is right on guns. Unlike many “federalist” conservatives, he understands the importance of decentralization and State’s rights. And given the current situation in Iraq, he understands the importance of a truly “humble” foreign policy. Bush campaigned on a “humble” foreign policy but gave us Jacobin revolution instead. Rep. Paul understands that the only foreign policy consistent with small, limited government is non-intervention. His foreign policy is the policy of the Founders. His is the foreign policy of authentic, historic conservatism. His is a foreign policy of humility that recognizes the limitations of fallen man. His is not the foreign policy of revolutionary Jacobin transformation and overthrow. Political Science and History 101 should teach us that Jacobin style transformation is a policy of the left, not the right.

Rep. Paul’s campaign is really the answer to prayer for many conservatives. Here is a paragraph I wrote from a previous column. This column first appeared 9 Jan 07.

Based on the reaction to the Baker commission and talk of surges, the official Right does not look like it will be abandoning its embrace of neo-con interventionism any time soon. The base is still broadly supportive of the policy. None of the potential GOP presidential candidates in 2008 are anti-war. Senator Hagel (R-NE) could probably be described as a realist, but the base hates him because of it. Both possible paleo-esq candidates, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), are pro-war. Front-runner Senator McCain (R-AZ) is the loudest voice calling for more troops. (Rep. Ron Paul, are you listening?)[emphasis added]

I am not trying to take credit for his decision to run. I just want to demonstrate that Rep. Paul’s potential campaign really is for many of us, the best political news in a long, long time.

So I was eager to share my excitement with my paleo friends, but I was also interested to see how some of the more militantly (no pun intended) pro-intervention sites were dealing with the news. So I went to the “Mother of All” pro-intervention sites, Free Republic.

I went to Free Republic and searched “’Ron Paul’ President.” There were already a few threads. One had 40+ replies, and it is the first one I looked at. I only got to look at the 40+ reply thread briefly before it was deleted. In it, some clueless Freeper had written “Paleoconservatism = fake conservatism.” Of course, this infuriated me. Statements like that are either the result of ignorance or are a deliberate attempt to smear and distort. No thoughtful, well-informed person could make such a silly statement. The rap against paleoconservatism is that it is too conservative: that it rejects certain modernist, liberal assumptions. It can not simultaneously be too conservative and fake conservative. That makes no logical sense. So I replied with the following:

“Paleoconservative = fake conservative”

You have got to be kidding me. The paleocons are the only true conservatives. It is actually not them who need a pre-fix. Neocons and the mainstream conservatives who have bought their rhetoric are liberal Wilsonian interventionists. Interventionism is inconsistent with small government conservatism. Look at what the right in this country believed before the Cold War. Contrary to the myopic belief of some “conservatives,” human history and conservative history did not start 50 years ago. Perhaps you should take a look at Washington’s Farewell Address.

For that statement I joined the large and proud legion of those who have been “banned” by Free (sic) Republic. I recognize the above statement is unpopular with many on the “right,” especially the Free (sic) Republic style “right,” but it is certainly a defensible position. It is a position held by many respectable conservatives/rightists. It is not a lone or eccentric opinion. So why did it warrant my banning? Clearly I was not banned for foul language or personal attacks or some other legitimate reason. I was banned because I expressed what Free (sic) Republic determined to be wrong think. It is really very sad. There was a time when invoking the past proved your conservative bona fides. Now it seems at Free (sic) Republic that invoking the past is wrong think. How dare I worry about what Washington and the Founders believed, at Free (sic) Republic all that matters is what the Dear Leader believes. I will leave it to the readers to determine if “Dear Leader” refers to President Bush or Jim Robinson, the founder of Free (sic) Republic. Or come to think of it, has anyone ever seen “Jim Rob” and President Bush in the same room together? Hmmm …

Anyway, after my banishment, I returned to the website to check on the status of the thread I had attempted to post on. In good Orwellian fashion, it had been erased as if it had never existed. Ron who? Perhaps there was some problem with the thread such as foul language that caused it to be deleted, but I doubt it. I suspect the problem with the thread was the same problem with my comment; it expressed wrong think. Other Ron Paul for President threads remain. I really have no idea what makes the difference. Maybe it has to do with who is moderating at the time or whether the non-interventionists are getting the better of the interventionists.

I sent “Jim Rob” two e-mails asking him for an explanation for the thread being deleted and why my innocuous comment warranted banning, but he has yet to reply. I’m not holding my breath.

I discussed this situation with many people via e-mail and several replied that they thought Jim Robinson and the Free (sic) Republic crowd feared Ron Paul. Ron Paul does have a tremendous amount of support among the grassroots base. He is an articulate spokesman for the principled non-interventionist position. He does have the potential to unite people from across the political spectrum and draw in a lot of third party activists and those who have previously given up on the system. But I honestly don’t think Jim Robinson and the boys at Free (sic) >Republic fear Ron Paul. What they fear is honest, open, and intelligent debate. Who needs paleoconservatives with their pesky ideas and concern for the past constantly invoking Washington’s Farewell Address and the Founders and making all those learned references to Jacobins, the left-wing and the French Revolution? It is so much less taxing on the brain to read over and over again “Kill all the Islamo-fascists,” chant “regime change,” “creative destruction,” and “benign global hegemony” and lap up the rest of the revolutionary, left-wing faith that passes for “conservatism” these days.

But the actions of the thought police at Free (sic) Republic are not a sign of strength. They are an indication of weakness. Their position of the more foreign intervention the merrier (Let’s take out Iran and Syria while we are at it) is rapidly deteriorating and becoming increasingly untenable. When the War first began they could count on a lot of support and consent on the mainstream right. But as things have gone poorly in Iraq as the conservative war critics predicted (I take no joy in being right about that), they are in an increasingly smaller minority. Their interventionist strategy is opposed by more and more Americans on the right, left, and center. I’m not arguing that public opinion is always right. It isn’t. But no one is buying their strategy anymore. They are spending all their time talking to each other and shouting down, or banning, dissent. Again this is a sign of weakness, not strength. And it is a sign of intellectual atrophy. They certainly can not prove that their interventionist ideas are from the right, because they manifestly are not. And they can’t defend their leftist position beyond mindless slogans and accusations. “Kill them Islamo-fascist!” “You’ve got your head buried in the sand.” “Pacifist.” “Appeaser.” “Neville Chamberlain.” “Cut and run.” “Surrender.” And my very favorite of all, the completely mindless “I would rather fight them over there than fight them over here.” Can you tell I am a veteran of these wars?

Well Jim Rob and the boys can mindlessly continue to backslap each other and cheer on global Jacobin revolution and hoot down all those who dare to call them on their left-wing ideological crusade, but fewer and fewer on the right are buying it. It is my hope that a Ron Paul campaign will continue to chip away at the pro-war “right,” and restore some integrity to the word conservative and return the conservative movement to its Old Right, anti-interventionist roots. Global revolution is not now, nor has it ever been conservative. Run Ron run!

—–
Dr. Dan E. Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia. He specializes in the treatment of alcohol and drug abuse. He can be reached at Phillips_de at mercer dot edu.)

Maine rejects Real ID

2007-01-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

I always love it when a state or locality tells the Feds to go to hell and I am happy to tell about it as this article appeared on Yahoo.com this morning.

---Sean Scallon

Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards on Thursday, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year.

Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly "refuses" to force its citizens to use driver's licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the U.S. Congress to repeal the law.

The vote represents a political setback for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Republicans in Washington, D.C., which have argued that nationalized ID cards for all Americans would help in the fight against terrorists.

"I have faith that the Democrats in Congress will hear this from many states and will find a way to repeal or amend this in the coming months," House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview after the vote. "It's not only a huge federal mandate, but it's a huge mandate from the federal government asking us to do something we don't have any interest in doing."

The Real ID Act says that, starting around May 2008, Americans will need a federally approved ID card--a U.S. passport will also qualify--to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service. States will have to conduct checks of their citizens' identification papers, and driver's licenses likely will be reissued to comply with Homeland Security requirements.

In addition, the national ID cards must be "machine-readable," with details left up to Homeland Security, which hasn't yet released final regulations. That could end up being a magnetic strip, an enhanced bar code or radio frequency identification (RFID) chips.

The votes in Maine on the resolution were nonpartisan. It was approved by a 34-to-0 vote in the state Senate and by a 137-to-4 vote in the House of Representatives.

Other states are debating similar measures. Bills pending in Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana and Washington state express varying degrees of opposition to the Real ID Act.

Montana's is one of the strongest. The legislature held a hearing on Wednesday on a bill that says "The state of Montana will not participate in the implementation of the Real ID Act of 2005" and directs the state motor vehicle department "not to implement the provisions."

Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, said he thinks Maine's vote will "break the logjam, and other states are going to follow." (The American Civil Liberties Union has set up an anti-Real ID Web site called Real Nightmare).

Pingree, Maine's House majority leader, said the Real ID Act would have cost the state $185 million over five years and required every state resident to visit the motor vehicle agency so that several forms of identification--including an original copy of the birth certificate and a Social Security card--would be uploaded into a federal database.

Growing opposition to the law in the states could create a political pickle for the Bush administration. The White House has enthusiastically embraced the Real ID Act, saying it (click for PDF) "facilitates the strengthening by the states of the standards for the security and integrity of drivers' licenses."

But if a sufficient number of states follow Maine's lead, pressure would increase on a Democratic Congress to relax the Real ID rules--or even rescind them entirely.

A key Republican supporter of the Real ID Act said Thursday that the law was just as necessary now as when it was enacted as part of an $82 billion military spending and tsunami relief bill. (Its backers say it follows the recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made in 2004.)

"Real ID is needed to protect the American people from terrorists who use drivers licenses to board planes, get jobs and move around the country as the 9/11 terrorists did," Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said in an e-mailed statement. "It makes sense to have drivers licenses that ensure a person is who they say they are. It makes the country safer and protects the American people from terrorists who would use the most common form of ID as cover."

New York Times article on Ron Paul

2007-01-26T20:47:00.000-08:00

Please enjoy this New York Times op-ed page article on Ron Paul from Bruce Bartlett that was published back on Jan. 23

--Sean Scallon

Not Your Average Republican Presidential Candidate

By Bruce Bartlett

The other day, I went by to visit Congressman Ron Paul, Republican of Texas. My first "real" job in Washington was working for him when he was initially elected to Congress in 1976, and I wanted to see how he was doing. Little did I realize when I made the appointment that I would be talking to a candidate for president.

I remember clearly when I first heard of Ron. It was in an article in The Washington Post on April 5, 1976, which said that he had just won a special election. My memory was that he had said he was to the right of Barry Goldwater, which sounded pretty good to me. But rereading the article, I see that Ron had not said this; it was his opponent, Bob Gammage, a Democrat. The charge was not altogether true, as I eventually discovered.

I was looking for a job at the time, so I sent a resume and a couple of articles I had published to Ron’s office and about a month later got an interview with him. I remember that his office had a complete set of books distributed by the Foundation for Economic Education, in Irvington, N. Y., the most prominent free market think tank in the United States at that time.

This was a good sign because I had published two articles in the foundation’s journal, The Freeman. I think Ron was impressed by this, so he hired me as a legislative assistant. I spent most of my time monitoring his principal committee, which was then known as the House Committee on Banking and Currency. With inflation climbing through the roof, it was an interesting assignment.

Ron saw the roots of the inflation problem in fiat money – currency not backed by gold or other tangible assets. At the time, this was a controversial position. But there was no denying that inflation had accelerated in 1971, when the United States cut the dollar’s last link to gold. This meant that the Federal Reserve Board was no longer constrained by how much it could increase the money supply, which increased rapidly along with inflation.

Although few economists supported a return to the gold standard, as Ron did (and still does), his critique of the Fed for creating the inflation problem dovetailed with that of "monetarists" like Milton Friedman, the late University of Chicago economist. At that time, most economists thought something other than the money supply was the main cause of inflation – budget deficits, higher prices for oil engineered by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, bad harvests, whatever.

The Fed chairman at that time was Arthur Burns, who had been Friedman’s teacher at Rutgers and Columbia. I remember being impressed by Burns’s appearances before the banking committee, in which he would take long pauses to fiddle with his pipe before answering questions – giving himself time to think and using up his questioners’ time as well. Burns’s performances were masterful, but unilluminating. He always found some way to blame inflation on something other than Fed policy.

Since Burns was a Republican who had been appointed by Richard Nixon, criticizing him wasn’t really in the Republican playbook. But Ron was adamant that inflation had no other cause than too much money and that Burns could stop it if he wanted to. Most economists now agree with this view. That period of inflation ended only when Burns’s successor, Paul Volcker, slowed growth of the money supply.

In other ways as well, Ron was not your average Republican or a typical member of Congress. Most Republicans reflexively voted whatever way the White House told them to – Gerald Ford was still president, and party unity was the order of the day. And most congressmen hate being on the wrong side of a lopsided vote. But Ron voted his conscience and was often the only "nay" vote out of 435.

Since Ron is a medical doctor, he became known as "Dr. No," which delighted him. He hadn’t run for Congress as a stepping stone to becoming a lobbyist, but to define the political spectrum by showing how a consistent libertarian would vote. This meant being for the free market and against gun control – conventional right-wing positions – but also being in favor of drug legalization and nonintervention in foreign affairs – more commonly left-wing positions.

This is still Ron’s philosophy. It is why he has consistently opposed the war in Iraq, making him something of a darling among those on the left who see no connection between Ron’s free market views and his antiwar position. But to him and other libertarians the issues are one and the same. They’re against unjustified government intervention at home or abroad.

Unfortunately, Ron was defeated in the general election the same year he was first elected. But he came back two years later, in 1978, and served until 1984, when he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination to fill a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. In 1988, he was the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, garnering 432,000 votes nationally.

In 1996, Ron was re-elected to Congress in a different district. (Tom Delay had his old district.) The Republican leadership wasn’t too happy to have him back, however, because they had persuaded the Democratic congressman in Ron’s new district to switch parties with a promise that he would run unopposed. But Ron had made no such promise.

Ron upset the Republican leadership’s plans to get other Democrats to switch party and embarrassed them by winning the Republican nomination and the general election. When he came back to the House, his fellow Republicans denied him the seniority to which he was entitled because of his previous service, and generally treated him as an outcast.

Other members of Congress might have been bitter over such treatment, but not Ron. He didn’t give up a successful medical practice to be a congressman because he craved the perks of office, but because he had a point to make. As long as he can continue making it, he is perfectly happy.

When I asked Ron why he kept running for office despite having little to show for it in terms of legislation or other tangible accomplishments, he said it was because he enjoyed the job. He gets to say what he thinks, meets interesting people, and shows that honesty and adherence to principle are not the political albatrosses that most politicians think they are. It’s worth noting that in 2006, when Republicans were losing control of Congress, Ron got 60 percent of the vote in his district.

One thing that came through to me as I was talking to Ron was his similarity to Ronald Reagan in a key respect. Reagan always said that he had already been a success in life before deciding to run for president – he had been a big Hollywood star, of course. Because being president didn’t define him as a person, it was easier for him to cope with the pressure of being in the White House.

Ron Paul had been a successful surgeon who delivered some 4,000 babies before giving up his practice. So like Reagan, he does not regard his current position as the pinnacle of his career. To him, serving in politics at the national level is more a privilege than a job.

During my visit, Ron had to leave for a vote, and that prevented my asking him about his future – according to press reports he has formed an exploratory committee to seek the Republican presidential nomination. Obviously, this is a long shot, but at least he has the advantage of being the only announced candidate in either party who has already received a political party’s presidential nomination.

In any other year, one would automatically dismiss Ron’s chances as quixotic at best. But 2008 is shaping up as an unusually fluid year politically, with no clear front-runner in either party, and new candidates emerging almost weekly. And the Internet has leveled the playing field in many ways. It may be a year when anything can happen.

Dream it all up again

2007-01-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

Here's one piece of some short originality. It's part of an email letter I wrote today:

"Dr. Fleming had interesting article in the February edition of Chronicles that said that the elements of movement are out there, what it takes to bring together is hate and fear and that ideas are really an overrated aspect of politics compared to sense of "what's in it for me." I think a lot of it is true to a certain extent, but I would just dismiss the idea people because they have shown that small bands of persons working together and motivated by ideals can take over a party like the Goldwaterites did to the GOP or the McGovernites did to the Dems and neoconservatism did for U.S. foreign policy. Now this sense of control may very well illusionary and it may be true that the idea people need the politicians to engineer their takeovers, but again, it has happened.

"Let's face it, demographics and changes in society did much to power the conservative movement as "ideas" did. Any movement is a reflection of the people in it or involved and what motivates them. It may be that hate and fear ultimately motivates a person vote when you boil it down, but voters also WANT to believe they are voting for the right reasons even if they are not. You could spin together a movement made up of those who are traditional, don't like big government or high taxes, want something about immigration on the premise that 1). U.S. foreign policy endangers U.S. security with foreign alliances, 2). Immigration must be controlled for economic, social and environmental reasons, 3). Reducing the size of the federal government preserves liberty and increases reliability of government services; 4). Communities should be allowed to develop as they see fit "Let Utah be Utah and let San Francisco be San Francisco." 5). The West's traditions and heritage must be preserved. This kind of movement should be anchored by "Crunch Cons" types but be able to reach out to ordinary conservatives, libertarians paleo or otherwise, and even leftists concerned about the environment or who are "Power to the People" types. Economically it should be encompass professionals but also manufacturers and farmers. Socially it should encompass most Christians but with an emphasis on Orthodox faiths, European ethnic groups but also traditional Hispanics and traditional African-American as well. It should encompass conservationalists as opposed to environmentalists.

"In short, it's a naturally conservative movement opposed being ideologically conservative."

Indeed what's needed is to dream it all up again. What's needed is to move conservatism away from being an ideology back to beaing a state of mind.

--Sean Scallon

Ron Paul interview with Reason Magazine

2007-01-23T11:37:00.000-08:00

Here is an interview Ron Paul gave to Reason Magazine. Yes I know I promised some original stuff for today but it may have to wait until tomorrow. Until then chew on this.

---Sean Scallon

Paul for President?

The maverick libertarian Republican talks on war, immigration, and presidential ambition.

Brian Doherty January 22, 2007

Excitement spread like wildfire last week across the libertarian web: Ron Paul has entered the presidential race! Even the mainstream press took notice. As we’ll see in the interview with Rep. Paul (R-Texas) below, the excitement may have been premature.

The reason for the excitement is understandable: Ron Paul has been the most consistent successful politician advocating the limited-government principles that he sees embedded in the Constitution. Part of his appeal, to a voting base that we can safely presume isn’t as libertarian as Paul is himself, is that of the very rare politician following his own conscience and mind with steadfast integrity. Indeed, Paul is not afraid of aggravating even parts of his libertarian constituency when he thinks it’s the right thing to do, as on immigration (where he’s against amnesty and birthright citizenship, and for increased border control) and his vote this month in favor of prescription drug negotiation.

I first wrote at length about Paul in a 1999 American Spectator profile. Its discussion of Paul's nature and appeal is worth revisiting, even with some old details. Just remember, he’s continued to win his reelection since 1999. In 2004, the Democrats didn’t even bother running anyone against him. And in 2006 he won with 60 percent of the vote.

Though his name rarely appears in the national press, his face almost never on Sunday morning news shows, in 1996 he was third only to Gingrich and Bob Dornan in individual contributions to Republican House members. Though he hasn’t managed to get any of his own bills out of committee since re-entering the House in January 1997, he’s considered a vital asset by a large national constituency of libertarians, goldbugs, and constitutionalists. He’s defied one of the holy shibboleths of electoral politics—Thou Must Bring Home the Bacon—by being a consistent opponent of agricultural subsidies in a largely agricultural district…..

Ron Paul has been defying standard political rules since he first won an off-term House election in 1976--a post-Watergate year when new Republicans weren’t widely embraced. He lost the regular election in ‘76, but came back to win in ‘78, ‘80, and ‘82, then left the House for an ill-fated go at the Senate seat won by Phil Gramm. He ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988. He was a hero to a national constituency of hard-core skeptics about the State—the one successful politician who was always steadfast even on the less-popular aspects of the live-free-or-die libertarian philosophy. He’d talk about ending the federal drug war when speaking to high school students. In 1985, he spent his own money to fly and testify on behalf of one of the first draft-registration defiers to go to trial, not blanching when confronted with the hot-blooded youngster’s use of the phrase “Smash the State.” He might not use that verb, the sober obstetrician, Air Force veteran, and family man said, but from his first-hand experience with how the U.S. government disrespects its citizens’ natural liberties, he could understand the sentiments.

I talked to Paul Thursday afternoon by phone about presidential and congressional politics. Here is an edited transcript of our talk.

Reason: Does launching an official exploratory committee necessarily mean you will end up launching an official campaign?

Ron Paul: Last week it leaked that we were getting ready to organize an exploratory committee—I haven’t even officially announced that yet. If I find with the exploratory committee that there is some support out there, that we can raise the money you need, then [I’d] declare that [I’m] running.

Reason: Now that it has leaked, what have you thought of the response so far?

Paul: I think it’s been impressive. I’ve been pleased and surprised.

Reason: Who are some of the staff and supporters behind the committee?

Paul: I’m not going into any of that now--we haven’t even officially made the announcement! It was leaked info and I’m still in the process of organizing a team. [In an AP story, Kent Snyder is identified as chairman for the exploratory committee.]

Reason: What would you anticipate the major issues you’d emphasize in a presidential run, if it comes to that?

Paul: Everything I’ve talked about for 20 years! I think the biggest thing for Republican primary voters is that most Republicans are turned off right now. They’ve had a beating and are reassessing their values. They have to decide what they believe in. The Republican Party has become about big government conservatism, and Republicans need to hear the message they used to hear: that conservatives are supposed to be for small government.

Reason: You appeared at a bipartisan press conference today on a resolution regarding possible war in Iran….

Paul: Walter Jones (R-N.C.) has a resolution he’s introducing, sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, saying that the president can’t go into Iran and spread this war without permission of Congress. I don’t know the total number of supporters, but we had a real nice bipartisan group, seven or eight members of Congress, split between Republicans and Democrats. I thought it went well. [The resolution has 12 co-sponsors.]

I think the feeling [on the Hill] is getting more against the war every day. Republicans have generally benefited from being on the other side of war issues, and lately we’ve been pressured into supporting pre-emptive war, and it has hurt us politically. The Old Right position was [antiwar] and through the 20th century conservatives in the Republican Party have generally been trying to keep us out of war, and we’ve generally benefited by this. Eisenhower was elected to end the Korean War. Nixon was supposed to end the Vietnam War and in 2000 Bush ran on a policy of “no nation building” and not being the policeman of the world. He criticized Clinton on Somalia. It’s a strong tradition for Republicans to be on the side of avoiding military conflicts. Democrats have generally been the international instigators.
Reason: One of the Internet rumors is linking you with Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Col.) in a possible joint run…

Paul: Tancredo? No. We’ve never talked about anything like that.

Reason: And another rumor is that the GOP run could be a lead-in to some sort of third party run…

Paul: A third party run? No.

Reason: Have you noticed any differences about being in the minority party in Congress again? Will that affect you?

Paul: Well, the Republican Party leaders are acting in a very defensive manner--which they’ve earned! It probably doesn’t change what I do very much. I’m just as likely to get Democratic support in things I want to do as from Republicans. Republicans were too determined to support the president rather than thinking things through and standing up to his requests to expand government internationally or to expand entitlement program at home. They’ve just gone along here.

Reason: Do you think the losing Congress will liberate more Republicans to revolt against the administration?

Paul: That’s the other Republican politicians’ dilemma: They don’t want to annoy some Republican voters, but at the same time realize that it’s not very popular to have to defend the war. When you see someone like Brownback [R-Kan.] scurrying away from the war….there’s a big change in attitude [in the GOP] and Republicans are starting to remember where they came from and that they don’t have to be supporters of war. I think a year from now there will be a lot more Republican antiwar people around.

Reason: Do you expect the Democrats to do anything substantive to stop the war?

Paul: I think we’ll see more rhetoric than a real desire to do [something specific]. We’ll see hiding behind just saying that “we don’t like this, Bush made a mess, but we can’t cut the money because then we won’t be supporting the troops.” I think that’s a cop out. There’s plenty of money to take care of the troops, billions of dollars in piles.

Reason: What did you think of Rep. Joe Biden’s declaration that there’s really nothing Congress can do to stop the war?

Paul: I think Biden is absolutely wrong. The Constitution gives more responsibility to Congress in dealing with foreign policy than to the executive. The only thing the president can do is be commander in chief after being given directions to pursue. If we had followed the rules he wouldn’t have been able to do a thing, with no declaration of war. How can the commander in chief fight a war that hasn’t been declared? If Congress had not been so complacent in its responsibilities….The war in Vietnam finally ended by definancing, but tragically after 60,000 Americans died. Congress has lots of responsibility, for defining policy, raising an army, buying equipment, the whole works. For Biden to say that–that’s avoiding the responsibility of doing what we can do.

Reason: Have you had much interaction with the larger active antiwar movement from the left?

Paul: Not really. I have a lot of people who correspond with me who come from the left, but I don’t go to their events since there’s so often more on their plate than just the war. They have an agenda I don’t endorse. I’m interested in reviving that spirit that says conservatives and limited-government constitutionalists can support the antiwar position, can be comfortable without aggressive foreign policy.

Reason: What do you have to say to libertarians who disagree with your immigration position, such as on amnesty, birthright citizenship, and a concentration of federal money on border security?

Paul: If they don’t agree, they’d have to be anarchists, and I’m not. I believe in national borders and national security. My position is, take away incentives--why are states compelled to give free education and medical care? I don’t endorse easy automatic citizenship for people who break the law. They shouldn’t be able to come reap the benefits of welfare state. I don’t think libertarians can endorse that. I think removing the incentives is very important, but I don’t think you can solve the immigration problem until you deal with the welfare state and the need for labor created by a government that interferes with the market economy. We’re short of labor at the same time lots of people are paid not to work. Take away [illegal immigrants'] incentives. I do believe in a responsibility to protect our borders, rather than worrying about the border between North and South Korea or Iraq and Syria, and I think that’s a reasonable position.

Reason: Some of your libertarian fans were also upset about your vote on government price negotiations for Medicare drugs….

Paul: The government is already involved in giving out prescription drugs, in a program that the drug companies love and spend hundreds of millions lobbying for, this interventionist program. The drug corporations love it. Should government say something about controlling prices since it's a government program? I want to cut down spending, so why not say that government has a responsibility to get a better bargain? Both choices were horrible, but the person who complained on the Internet did not understand the vote. I don’t vote for price controls, obviously, but if government has to buy something—even if they shouldn’t be buying it!--they have a responsibility to get the best price. But most importantly, we shouldn’t be in that business [of buying drugs].

Reason: When can we expect an official announcement about your presidential plans?

Paul: It’s going to be several weeks. We want to get our ducks lined up, be better prepared to line up committees and all the things we didn’t get together before the information about [the exploratory committee] was leaked. I was impressed with how quick it leaked, and the reaction, O man!

Reason: Any reaction from your congressional colleagues or Republican Party types?

Paul: Not a whole lot. I didn’t expect them to say too much. I mean, they mention it—it’s not like they refuse to talk about it—but it’s not the hottest subject around. It’s much hotter on the Internet.

It will have to be a grassroots campaign and rely on the internet. If we don’t learn how to use that to its maximum benefit, we won’t have a very viable campaign. We’ll be able to raise significant amounts, but obviously we’re not getting money from corporate giants and we’re not apt to raise $100 million. Money is pretty important, but it’s not the final issue. There are other ways of running, more so today than ever before, new ways of reaching people in an economical manner. Obvious you have to get a certain [minimum amount] of money, but right now I have no idea of the number.

2007-01-23T08:17:00.000-08:00

This article comes from Doug Newman

--Sean Scallon

THIS IS NOT AMERICA(WHAT THE HOLLIS WAYNE FINCHER CASE MEANS TO YOU.)
By Doug Newman
January 17, 2007

“All laws repugnant to the Constitution are void of law.”Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Does the Bill of Rights still serve as a guarantee of God-given rights against arbitrary abuses of government power? Or is it just a 215-year-old piece of paper that can be disregarded at the whim the authorities?

These are the central questions in the case of Mr. Hollis Wayne Fincher, 60, of Fayetteville, Arkansas. (1) If you are not familiar with this case, you need to be. What happened to Mr. Fincher could happen to you.
Mr. Fincher was arrested on November 8 of last year when his home was raided by agents from the FBI, BATFE and several local law enforcement agencies. He was charged with possession of a machine gun in violation of the Firearms Act of 1934. He had incurred the ire of the authorities for his activism on behalf of the Second Amendment and after protesting proposed local zoning ordinances. (2)

In late December, Assistant US Attorney Wendy Johnson filed a motion with the court requesting that the judge, Jimm Larry Hendren, not allow the defense to use any arguments based on the Constitution or on jury nullification. Heads the feds win; tails Fincher loses.
Fincher went to trial on January 8. After the prosecution rested, Hendren ruled that Mr. Fincher would be able to use the Second Amendment in his defense. Then, Hendren reversed himself, contending that the Second Amendment protected a collective, but not an individual, right.

Then the vise grip tightened on Fincher even more. He was forced to present his testimony before the judge only, and not the jury. Hendren had ruled that the defense could contest the government’s evidence, but not the law relevant to the case. After hearing Fincher’s testimony – with the jury out of the room, mind you – Hendren decided that Fincher’s focus was on the legality of federal gun laws rather than the legality of the firearms that Fincher had in his possession.

On January 12, the jury found Mr. Fincher guilty of possession of illegal machine guns and a sawed-off shotgun.

As I write this, I know not what the sentence will be or what appeals are planned.

While David Bowie and Pat Metheny are supremely talented in music, their politics are waaaaay to the left. However, when I read stories like that of Hollis Wayne Fincher, I cannot help recalling the following lyric from that wonderful theme song from The Falcon and the Snowman.

“A little piece of you, A little piece of me will die … This is not America.”

Every time the authorities so recklessly and wantonly disregard the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, a little bit of freedom – your freedom and mine -- dies. We are not living in the America I thought I was living in during the early years of my life.

The government and the media want us to think that we are engaged in and apocalyptic struggle against terrorists “who want to take away our freedom and undermine our very way of life.” It is not some Islamopsychopath in a cave in Afghanistan who is denying Mr. Fincher his freedom. It is our own wretched and pathetic excuse of a government in Washington and its flunkies in Little Rock, Springdale and Fayetteville. “The terrorists” have not even taken over Afghanistan, one of the poorest most backward countries on earth. Our own government, however, has been slicing and dicing our Constitution and Bill of Rights for decades.

The Bill of Rights guarantees rights that already existed prior to being put to paper in 1791. The Second Amendment states, in part, that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Any restriction upon that right, no matter what the reason, is unconstitutional. Period.

At this point, people always ask me about the “need” for people to own machine guns and the like. How much firepower did the Branch Davidians “need” when they were so savagely attacked at Waco? How about Randy Weaver and the family of Elian Gonzales? What about all the people who have had their homes raided by DEA stormtroopers for the heinous offense of ingesting the only substance that provided real relief from their illnesses?

Firearms are like insurance: you never know exactly how much you are going to need until faced with a crisis. Indeed firearms are insurance. They insure “the security of a free State” against the actions of a rogue government.

The Sixth Amendment states, in part, that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed…”

Trial by jury means just that: trial by jury and not the “judge’s instructions.” Trial by jury means that jurors have the right to judge not only the facts, but also the law pertaining to the case. If so much as one juror thinks that the defendant is being charged under a law that is unconstitutional, unjust or just plain stupid, that one juror can vote to acquit, and the defendant walks!

This is the way it was in the beginning of this Republic. Fully informed juries were hugely instrumental as a check on the Fugitive Slave Laws in the 1850s. If Juror Smith thought the Fugitive Slave Laws were stupid, immoral or whatever, his single vote could acquit Defendant Jones who stood charged with harboring runaway slaves.

Fast forward 150 years. The jurors in the Fincher case were only allowed to hear the prosecution’s arguments, and were not even allowed in the room when Mr. Fincher was testifying.

People always ask me if jury nullification gives jurors license to “make up the rules as they go along.” I respond that jury nullification is actually the ultimate check against bad laws made by a government that makes up the rules as it goes along.

America has two constitutions. One was ratified in Philadelphia in 1787. Its purpose is not to restrain the people, but to restrain the government. It is really a simple document. Its greatness is in this simplicity.

However, it is not a self-enforcing document. Unless “we the people” put its words into practice vigorously and vigilantly, it is of no value. It is reduced to just a piece of paper.

America’s other constitution lies in the hearts, minds and souls of its people. If we are ignorant, apathetic and willing to sacrifice freedom for security, our written Constitution has no clout. If we want to be free people, our personal constitutions must consist of, in the words of author Tom Wolfe, “the right stuff.”

We think we are a free people. Oh sure, we can vote and we can criticize our government. However, there are two things you need to know about life in America in 2007: this nation has the world’s highest incarceration rate and all ten policy planks of the Communist Manifesto are part of the law of the land.

The trial and conviction of Hollis Wayne Fincher would prompt national outrage in a nation wherein the citizens were truly vigilant in defense of liberty. However, we do not live in such a country. Whenever I raise issues such as this, or Waco, or Ruby Ridge, or Elian, or my friend Rick Stanley or any number of other abuses of government power in recent years, people look at me as if I am speaking Swahili.

I am going to say this in English and I am going to say this once: WE ARE NOT FREE!

When you can be arrested for exercising a God-given right (3), forbidden from using the Constitution in your defense, and denied a jury trial, you are not free. This is the stuff of which totalitarian states are made! No one named Osama, or Mohammed, or Raheem, or Omar or Abdul is imposing this on us. People named Jimm, Wendy and George are. Terrorists cannot take away our freedom. Our own government is actively doing so, frequently with our blessing!
I know, I know. This is not Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Red China or North Korea. However, America is on a bobsled ride toward a totalitarian future. And unless we end this denial, we will find ourselves slaves on the very land that was once the freest nation on earth.

I started down this libertarian constitutionalist road in late 1991 over the rights of the accused. Bush 41 had signed into law a bill pertaining to racial quotas. An employer charged with violating the provisions of this law would have to prove themselves innocent. Yes, guilty until proven innocent! I said to myself “that could be me some day”! I pray fervently that I am never denied the presumption of innocence or the opportunity for a fair trial.

However, in a land where a man like Hollis Wayne Fincher, who has peacefully exercised his God-given rights and harmed no one, can be denied any semblance whatsoever of a fair trial, I ask you this: how can you feel safe, secure or free?

Ron Paul - Can we achieve peace in the Middle East?

2007-01-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Can We Achieve Peace in the Middle East?
by Ron Paul

Former President Carter’s new book about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine has raised the ire of Americans on two sides of the debate. I say “two sides” rather than “both sides,” because there is another perspective that is never discussed in American politics. That perspective is the perspective of our founding fathers, namely that America should not intervene in the internal affairs of other nations.

Everyone assumes America must play the leading role in crafting some settlement or compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington explicitly warned against involving ourselves in foreign conflicts.

The conflict in Gaza and the West Bank is almost like a schoolyard fight: when America and the world stand watching, neither side will give an inch for fear of appearing weak. But deep down, the people who actually have to live there desperately want an end to the violence. They don’t need solutions imposed by outsiders. It’s easy to sit here safe in America and talk tough, but we’re not the ones suffering.

Practically speaking, our meddling in the Middle East has only intensified strife and conflict. American tax dollars have militarized the entire region. We give Israel about $3 billion each year, but we also give Egypt $2 billion. Most other Middle East countries get money too, some of which ends up in the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Both sides have far more military weapons as a result. Talk about adding fuel to the fire! Our foolish and unconstitutional foreign aid has produced more violence, not less.

Congress and each successive administration pledge their political, financial, and military support for Israel. Yet while we call ourselves a strong ally of the Israeli people, we send billions in foreign aid every year to some Muslim states that many Israelis regard as enemies. From the Israeli point of view, many of the same Islamic nations we fund with our tax dollars want to destroy the Jewish state. Many average Israelis and American Jews see America as hypocritically hedging its bets.

This illustrates perfectly the inherent problem with foreign aid: once we give money to one country, we have to give it to all the rest or risk making enemies. This is especially true in the Middle East and other strife-torn regions, where our financial support for one side is seen as an act of aggression by the other. Just as our money never makes Israel secure, it doesn’t buy us any true friends elsewhere in the region. On the contrary, millions of Muslims hate the United States.

It is time to challenge the notion that it is our job to broker peace in the Middle East and every other troubled region across the globe. America can and should use every diplomatic means at our disposal to end the violence in the West Bank, but we should draw the line at any further entanglement. Third-party outsiders cannot impose political solutions in Palestine or anywhere else. Peace can be achieved only when self-determination operates freely in all nations. “Peace plans” imposed by outsiders or the UN cause resentment and seldom produce lasting peace.

The simple truth is that we cannot resolve every human conflict across the globe, and there will always be violence somewhere on earth. The fatal conceit lies in believing America can impose geopolitical solutions wherever it chooses.

January 23, 2007

Bad reviews

2007-01-18T13:28:00.000-08:00

I received my first bad review, (or at least not a positive review, two stars, for my book) Beating the Powers that Be on Amazon.com (well, I'll still get the royalty for it I guess.) from a J.M. Miller from Madison.

I'd say his comments are fair. The book was poorly edited because the editing was done by yours truly. It needed another set of eyes, but in order to get published in 2006, which I felt it had to be to be released in time for the election when interest in political books would be high, I felt I had to edit it immediately. I did the best I could but I'm not a good proofreader and for that I apologize to all those who bought the book. If there any inaccuracies I also apologize for poor research as well. Again, an editor would have helped but that water under the bridge.

But I also thank those who did overlook the editing and did give the work good marks.

One issue I will contest with Miller and at least explain is my highlighting Polk County as a center of Progressive Party activity in Wisconsin. Yes, I could highlighted Progressive activity in Madison and Dane County, but without places like Polk County there would not have been a statewide Progressive Party. Polk County had the demographics that are the building blocks of any political party needs to be successful. Non-major parties need to organize themselves in this fashion, that is the thesis of my book. Demographics is destiny. It was true back then, it still true now. A movement of upper-class Madisonians would not have cut it, the Progressives needed Scandinavian farmers and co-op members to work and Polk was demographically as good as any representative of a rural Progressive county as you would have found in the state.

On that points I have no regrets. There are plenty of books on Madison Progressives. Somebody needed to throw a word in for Polk County and small places like it.

Same time, next Tuesday

2007-01-18T13:22:00.000-08:00

I know I promised an article Wednesday but there is such a thign is being sidetracked. Sorry about that. We'll get back to a normal routine next Tuesday with an article on the GOP field for President in 2008 and we'll close out the month with a piece on Canadian foreign policy.

---Sean Scallon

Gang Violence - A libertarian solution

2007-01-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

This article comes from Doug Newman

--Sean Scallon

Gang Violence - A libertarian solution

By Doug Newman

RB is a Christian friend who is of sound mind on political matters. He is no fan of either the present administration or of big government in general. He writes:

“I watched Peter Boyles’ talk show last night on PBS. They covered gangs and the Darrent Williams' murder and all that gang-related stuff. Denver is not LA or NY, but we have a problem with gangs, something the politicians, churches (not the inner city churches) and us honkies in south suburban-land (i.e., Littleton, Centennial, Highlands Ranch) are not willing to look at or deal with. Your thoughts on that subject, especially being from back East, etc.”

I replied in this letter:

"Thanks for writing. The tragic shooting death of Bronco cornerback Darrent Williams may well have been gang related. Thus it has got everyone asking: “What should we do about gangs and gang violence?” My thoughts on the subject are shaped not so much by my growing up in New Jersey – in a honky suburb – but by my Christianity and libertarianism.

People who ask “what should we, as a society, do” about a given problem always conclude that we need more laws, policies and programs as if we did not have enough already. America has more social programs than any other country on the planet.

Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. We drive ourselves crazy enacting more and more laws, policies and programs while the problems we attempt to solve get worse and worse.

Here are just a few suggestions:

The words “solve” and “problems” do not appear in the Constitution. The idea that government could solve problems was totally foreign to the Founders. Moreover, the idea that we could render our problems unto Caesar so the he could solve them has zero basis in Scripture. Utopia is not an option. Gang violence will never be totally eliminated no matter how many laws, programs and policies are in place.

End this absolutely insane War on Drugs, which is totally unconstitutional under the Ninth Amendment. We have a nightmare on our hands that we never could have envisioned in 1937 when we started outlawing hippy lettuce. After 70 years and God knows how many billions of dollars, we have more drugs than ever; more dangerous drugs than ever and – in the land of the free – the world’s highest incarceration rate. Moreover, just as alcohol prohibition resulted in huge profits for the likes of Al Capone and Joe Kennedy, Sr., drug prohibition makes drug trafficking extremely lucrative for the Crips, the Bloods, MS-13, etc. (Moreover, because it is illegal, drug dealing is a cash business and tax free.) Legalizing drugs would minimize the profit and largely defund the gangs.

Repeal all gun laws. The original gun laws in America were put in place to disarm racial minorities. Gun control only disarms law abiding citizens. Criminals, by definition, have zero respect for gun laws. Compton, Bed-Stuy and New Orleans’ Ninth Ward are killing fields because only the criminals have guns. Let everyone be armed, keep would-be criminals guessing and watch the crime rate plummet.

Repeal all minimum wage laws. If you know anything whatsoever about economics, you know that when you mandate a price above the market price, you immediately create a surplus of the commodity in question. Unskilled labor is no exception to this rule. Why is teenage unemployment so tragically high in the inner cities? It is because Uncle Sam has forced employers to pay an unjustifiably high wage to unskilled workers. Where is a teenager in the hood better off? Employed at $4 per hour or unemployed because of a mandated wage of $6.85 per hour? The true minimum wage is zero. No wonder drug dealing looks so appealing.

Stop asking Uncle Sam to be our national parent. Someone once remarked that while Democrats want to be your Mommy and Republicans want to be your Daddy, libertarians believe you are an adult and that you can look after yourself. Seventy-plus years after the New Deal, forty-plus years after the Great Society and fifteen years after Dan Quayle’s “family values” speech, I think we can conclude one thing: there is no substitute for family. The family is God's primary form of government. Families were a whole lot stronger and effective and morals were a world stronger before we started asking government to solve all our problems.

As a friend used to say, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the only tool you have is government, every problem looks like it can be solved by a law, a policy or a program. Again, America has more of this nonsense than any other society in history. All this micromanaging has not worked and will never work.

It didn’t save the life of Darrent Williams. More of the same would still not have saved the life of Darrent Williams."

Contribute to Ron Paul

2007-01-16T16:03:00.000-08:00

If you wish to contribute to Ron Paul candidacy and help nudge into the race, go to this website, www.ronpaulexplore.com

The Free State Project is holding their New Hampshire Liberty Forum meeting Feb. 22 and hopefully Rep. Paull will make it there. It would be a great way to kick off his New Hampshire campaign with the support of the Free Staters.

Early momentum in important in the nomination process. John Kerry in 2004 threw everything he had in to Iowa and when won their he basically won the nomination. The dynamics pulled in his favor. Bascially what Rep. Paul needs to do is get a good anti-war Republican vote in the Iowa straw poll, win in New Hampshire and then win in South Carolina. Pull that off and he'll be on that kind of roll.

But of course, here comes Rep. Tom Tancredo ready to enter the race as well and muddy the waters. I'll have an article about this as well tomorrow.

Latest speech by Ron Paul - Will Bush II pull an LBJ?

2007-01-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

You can find Rep. Ron Paul speeches to the House reprinted on Lew Rockwell.com as did this one or Antiwar.com from time to time. I'll be posting them myself as Rep. Paul geras up for a Presidential run.

--- Sean Scallon

Escalation Is Hardly the Answer
by Ron Paul

Before the US House of Representatives, January 11, 2007

Mr. Speaker, A military victory in Iraq is unattainable, just as it was in the Vietnam war.

At the close of the Vietnam war in 1975, a telling conversation took place between an NVA Colonel named Tu and an American Colonel named Harry Summers. Colonel Summers reportedly said, “You never beat us on the battlefield.” Tu replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” It is likewise irrelevant to seek military victory in Iraq.

As conditions deteriorate in Iraq, the American people are told more blood must be spilled to achieve just such a military victory. 20,000 additional troops and another $100 billion are needed for a “surge.” Yet the people remain rightfully skeptical.

Though we’ve been in Iraq nearly four years, the meager goal today simply is to secure Baghdad. This hardly shows that the mission is even partly accomplished.
Astonishingly, American taxpayers now will be forced to finance a multi-billion dollar jobs program in Iraq. Suddenly the war is about jobs! We export our manufacturing jobs to Asia, and now we plan to export our welfare jobs to Iraq – all at the expense of the poor and middle class here at home.

Plans are being made to become more ruthless in achieving stability in Iraq. It appears Muqtada al Sadr will be on the receiving end of our military efforts, despite his overwhelming support among large segments of the Iraqi people.
It’s interesting to note that one excuse given for our failure is leveled at the Iraqis themselves.

They have not done enough, we’re told, and are difficult to train.
Yet no one complains that Mahdi or Kurdish militias or the Badr Brigade (the real Iraq government, not our appointed government) are not well trained. Our problems obviously have nothing to do with training Iraqis to fight, but instead with loyalties and motivations.

We claim to be spreading democracy in Iraq, but al Sadr has far more democratic support with the majority Shiites than our troops enjoy. The problem is not a lack of democratic consensus; it is the antipathy toward our presence among most Iraqis.

In real estate the three important considerations are location, location, location. In Iraq the three conditions are occupation, occupation, occupation. Nothing can improve in Iraq until we understand that our occupation is the primary source of the chaos and killing. We are a foreign occupying force, strongly resented by the majority of Iraq’s citizens.

Our inability to adapt to the tactics of 4th-generation warfare compounds our military failure. Unless we understand this, even doubling our troop strength will not solve the problems created by our occupation.

The talk of a troop surge and jobs program in Iraq only distracts Americans from the very real possibility of an attack on Iran. Our growing naval presence in the region and our harsh rhetoric toward Iran are unsettling. Securing the Horn of Africa and sending Ethiopian troops into Somalia do not bode well for world peace. Yet these developments are almost totally ignored by Congress.

Rumors are flying about when, not if, Iran will be bombed by either Israel or the U.S. – possibly with nuclear weapons. Our CIA says Iran is ten years away from producing a nuclear bomb and has no delivery system, but this does not impede our plans to keep “everything on the table” when dealing with Iran.

We should remember that Iran, like Iraq, is a third-world nation without a significant military. Nothing in history hints that she is likely to invade a neighboring country, let alone do anything to America or Israel. I am concerned, however, that a contrived Gulf of Tonkin–type incident may occur to gain popular support for an attack on Iran.

Even if such an attack is carried out by Israel over U.S. objections, we will be politically and morally culpable since we provided the weapons and dollars to make it possible.

Mr. Speaker, let’s hope I’m wrong about this one.

January 16, 2007

Beltway Insiders vs. Neocons

2007-01-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

Matt Roberts forwards me this article by John Walsh that appeared on the Counter Punch web magazine site at www.counterpunch.com. It's a good read. James Baker III may be many things but a radical he is not and that is good enough for me.
---Sean Scallon

Beltway Insiders vs. Necons

By John Walsh

A titanic power struggle is being waged within the policy elite orpower elite, or more simply the U.S. ruling class. The clash is taking place over the war on Iraq, U.S. policy toward Israel--andultimately over the best way to run the U.S. empire.

The war onIraq is shaping up as such a disaster for the empire that it can nolonger be tolerated by our rulers in its present form. The struggle is as plain as the nose on your face; nevertheless it draws littlecomment. One reason is that we are taught to view matters political through the prism of Democrat versus Republican, whereas thisstruggle among our rulers cuts across party lines. On the "Left," few so much as allude to this internecine war, much less use it to good effect.

This is apparently due to a very rigid, very dogmatic view of how empires function, indeed how they "must" function, anddue to a fear of being labeled anti-semitic and thus running afoulof the Israeli Lobby. In many cases this silence reflects an actualsympathy among "liberals" for neocon foreign policy, either out ofa latter day do-gooder version of the White Man's Burden, or anattachment to Israel.This struggle is in no way hidden and definitely not a secret conspiracy. It is out in the open, as it must be, since it is in great part a battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. This fact makes the absence of commentary about it all themore chilling. The fight among our rulers sets the neocons againstother very important elements in the establishment: the senior officer corps, represented by Jack Murtha and Colin Powell; the old money like Ned Lamont; the oil men, like James Baker III (With Baker against the war, how then can oil be the only reason for the war?); those who want to see the American imperium run effectively, like Lee Hamilton and Robert Gates of the Iraq Study Group; many in the CIA, both active duty and retired; policy makers like ZbigniewBrzezinski who has long opposed the war which he has ascribed tothe influence of certain "ethnic" groups; and even former presidents Gerald Ford who kept his mouth shut and Jimmy Carter whohas not and whose frustration with Israel and the neocons is alltoo clear in his book "Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid. Influential voices tied to the ruling circles include some writers for the militantly anti-war publication of the Old Right, TheAmerican Conservative.

On the other side are the neocons, based in the Washington "Think"Tanks, in the civilian leadership of the pre-Gates Pentagon, in Dick Cheney's office, in large parts of both parties in Congress,and in the editorial and op-ed pages of the print media. Most ofthe House and much of the Senate is still under the control of theneocons thanks to the fund-raising exertions and threats from AIPAC and its minions. Hence, the most powerful political allies of the neocons are the leading Democrats, who indulge in the most intenseand shallow anti-Bush rhetoric but are reliable allies in the neocon crusades in the Middle East. The neocon side has relied heavily on the power of ideas. This in turn hinges on the secondrate level of those writing for the mass media who think little forthemselves and go along with whatever framework for policy discussion is put forward by the neocons. Good examples of this are most op-ed pages, TV programs like the Sunday morning talk shows,Weekend Edition on NPR and Washington Week in Review on PBS. The neocons have not dominated the weekly news magazines, with the exception of U.S . News and World Report, but they are working to remedy that. Witness, for example, the adoption of William Kristol as a star columnist at Time! Given this balance of forces, it would seem that the neocons must lose but the outcome remains an open question. If they do prevail, that will be the end of our democracy and freedoms as we have known them. If you have any doubts about that, consult their philosopher, Leo Strauss. The neocons cannot be automatically counted out, even though their base is narrow, for they can draw on all the resourcesof a mighty nation state, Israel, a modern Sparta, with its vaunted intelligence services and special forces which span the world andoperate in the U.S., as well as its ability, if it desires, tolaunder cash and deliver it to U.S. operatives. And of course thewar profiteers like Halliburton and others love the Iraq adventure.The arms manufacturers may be less happy with it, since money is not being spent on profitable high-tech weapons which do not haveto function but rather on highly unprofitable "boots on the ground."The public forays of the anti-neocons in this struggle are well-known.

James Wilson in the New York Times, accusing Bush oflying about uranium from Niger; Richard Clarke's expose on theincompetence behind 9/11; the exposure of Judith Miller as lying about WMD, thus corrupting the NYT reportage (even the Washington Post, dominated as its opinion pages are by the neocons did notallow its reporting to be undermined by the likes of JudithMiller); the antiwar stance of John Murtha indicating the unhappiness of the senior officer corps with the dominance of US Middle East policy by the Israel-first neocons; Mearsheimer and Walt's paper, as important for who wrote it as for its content,which finally took on the Israeli Lobby, the core adversary of theanti-neocons; and most recently Jimmy Carter's book which inevitably raises the question of the shedding of American blood topreserve Israeli apartheid and to lay waste every and any nationperceive by Israel to be a threat. Add to this the report of theBaker Commission and the near-simultaneous removal of Rumsfeld and his replacement with a member of the Baker Commission.The biggest blow to the neocon agenda came from the peoplethemselves, in the form of the 2004 election defeat of theRepublicans.

Unfortunately, this defeat amounted only to a registration of national disgust over the war in Iraq but not onewhich would result in policy changes since the establishment Demsare solidly neocon in their foreign policy especially when itcomes to the Middle East and Israel. The same is true of many progressives. One looks in vain for a reference to the Lobby on theMichael Moore web site for example or in the missives from UFPJ orfrom "P"DA.Two questions emerge. Are there advantages to be gained from this struggle for the peace movement? Most definitely. We are beingprovided with powerful testimony from the most unassailable sources, Jimmy Carter, Richard Clarke and Mearsheimer and Walt to name afew. And we should not allow this important information to be discredited by the neocons. The leading anti-neocons are notanti-empire, but at least they want to end the bloody war on Iraqand the dominance of Israel over key segments of U.S. foreignpolicy. That is a step forward. And second, given the key power of the Israel Lobby, can the peace movement fail any longer to ignoreit as though it were irrelevant? Absolutely not. We ignore it atour peril. And we must get rid of all fears of being labeled asanti-semites. Most Jewish Americans, much to their credit, oppose the policies of the Lobby, which in the long run may be responsiblefor stirring up considerable anti-semitism in the U.S. and aroundthe world. Would it not be wonderful if an anti-Lobby organizationof Jewish Americans emerged with a title like "Not in Our Name"?

Finally, given the balance of forces at play, it is difficult todiscern what Bush is likely to do in the coming days and months.The punditry is now predicting an escalation of the war in Iraq(aka a "surge"), but Bush surprised once with the firing of Rumsfeld of which there was no advance hint quite the contrary. Heis certainly under enormous pressure to alter course, and he mayhave to do so no matter how much he recoils from it. He may even doso after a "surge" which could be used as a smoke screen for a policy shift. But escalating the conflict even temporarily willsink his ratings below 30% and make him the most unpopularpresident in history. We shall see.

Sore loser laws

2007-01-13T17:01:00.000-08:00

I believe I may be mistake on the "sore loser laws" when it comes to presidential candidates as this piece on Ballot Acces News indicates

--Sean Scallon

On January 11, Congressman Ron Paul filed incorporation papers to create a presidential exploratory committee. This allows him to raise money for a campaign to seek the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. He has not yet actually announced that he will seek that nomination, but it seems likely that he will.

Paul describes himself as a lifelong Libertarian who has been elected to Congress as a Republican. He was the only Republican member of the U.S. House to vote against Dept. of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 2007, and he is strongly opposed to U.S. policy in Iraq.
If Paul fails to win the Republican presidential nomination, he could then seek the Libertarian nomination (which he would be virtually certain to obtain) and run in November as the Libertarian nominee. John Anderson established the precedent in most states that “sore loser” laws do not apply to presidential candidates. John Anderson ran in two-thirds of the 1980 Republican presidential primaries, and he also won a place on the November 1980 ballots as an independent candidate in all 50 states. In some of the states in which Anderson happened not to run in the 1980 Republican presidential primary, there is still a precedent that “sore loser” laws don’t apply to president, because others set such precedents. These include Lyndon LaRouche (who ran in Democratic primaries and then as an independent in 1984, 1988 and 1992) and David Duke (who ran in Democratic presidential primaries in 1988 and then ran in November 1988 as the Populist Party nominee).

Only four states maintain that their “sore loser” laws apply to president: South Dakota, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas. After LaRouche won in court against Ohio in 1992, Ohio amended its “sore loser” law in 1993 to specifically apply to presidential candidates. No precedents have been set in Mississippi or South Dakota. In Texas, unfortunately, in 1996 the Constitution Party filed a lawsuit against Texas to get a ruling that the “sore loser” law doesn’t apply to president. The federal judge who got the case, James Nowlin, refused to enjoin Texas’ interpretation that the “sore loser” law does apply to president. The denial of injunctive relief is reported as US Taxpayers Party v Garza, 924 F Supp 71 (1996).

However, the opinion does not discuss the fact that the true candidates in November are running for presidential elector, not president. A presidential candidate’s name is not listed on the November ballot in his or her role as a candidate. Instead, the name is an identifier for specific slates of candidates for presidential elector.

Since Congress has repeatedly recognized that presidential electors may vote for anyone who holds the constitutional qualifications to be president (by always counting the votes for so-called “faithless electors”, except in 1872 when some electors voted for Horace Greeley even though he was deceased), it seems plain that no state can tell a slate of presidential electors that they cannot label themselves with the name of anyone they intend to vote for. Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court said in Anderson v Celebrezze that a single state has a lesser state interest in blocking a presidential candidate from its ballot than from blocking candidates for other office. Since the overwhelming majority of states permit “sore loser” presidential candidates, it is likely that a court in the future would not uphold Texas’ interpretation.
And, if it did, the Texas Libertarian electors could always say that they are pledged to Ron Paul, Jr., the Congressman’s son. Then, if they were actually elected, they could vote for Ron Paul, Sr., notwithstanding their ruse.

Living in a Bizzaro World at War

2007-01-13T14:23:00.000-08:00

War has a way of coming up with its own bizarre logic that makes it truly frightening if not unintentionally hilarious. This is what made Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove so successful because it took that logic, parodied it, and made a hilarious comedy about the dark subject of nuclear war. Other such movies like MASH and Catch 22 and TV shows like MASH and Black Adder did the same with conventional warfare.

The current war in Iraq is no different. In fact, Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com and Etherzone theorizes that the explosion of 9-11 ripped a role in the space-time continuum and created a "Bizzaro World" where all logic is turned upside down on its head and reversed just like the Bizzaro planet in D.C. Comics.

Such is the Bizzaro World that Raimondo, in a recent column, actually called for mass
protests and sit-ins in Washington D.C. itself to bring the operation of the federal government to a halt.

Yeah, it's that strange.

And the latest cause of turbulent weirdness is the so-called "surge" option being introduced by the Bush II Administration as its latest strategy to pacify turbulent Iraq.

Forget for a moment the arguments of whether this option will work, whether it's just the same planned dressed up in new clothing, or whether it will make a bad situation already worse. Instead, let us just revel in the illogic of it all and see if we can get a good chuckle.

This "surge" of 21,500 troops only brings the numbers U.S. military forces up to 153,000. Even when U.S. forces were this large in Iraq in the past the insurgency still raged on regardless and the difficulty of policing a nation of 18 million people the size of California remain. The Army's own counter-insurgency manual calls for ratios of numbers of troops to the population that would require between 200,000-250,000 troops in Iraq, but we're quite content with 153,000. Of course while we're surging, our erstwhile allies in the "Coalition of the Willing" are contracting their already limited forces as Great Britain recently announced it was cutting its force in Iraq by 3,000 troops and many other nations plan to remove their contingents out by the end of the year. The "surge" itself is not a redeployment of U.S. forces from around the globe to provide fresh reinforcements, but merely simply extends tours of duty for several units and speeds up the deployment of others.

Let's continue with the bizzaro logic shall we? We’ve spent $18 billion on reconstruction of Iraq already which hasn't dampened the insurgency's will to fight so we'll give them another $10 billion for New Deal-style jobs program. The Iraq Study Group report recommends talking with Syria and Iran to try and deal with the region's problems, but in Bush II's latest speech, he talks about going to war with both nations. We're targeting not just the Sunni insurgents by Shiite militias as well, many of which were created in response to the insurgency and who back the same government the U.S backs as well. The "surge" plan itself was supposedly drawn up or promoted, if you believe administration officials, by Iraqi PM Maliki himself, the same person Bush II's own NSC Advisor Stephen Hadley called incompetent.

Incompetent people are drawing up U.S. strategy?

Well I suppose better an incompetent Iraqi rather than the incompetents Americans that already left the situation such a mess that need a "surge" in the first place. But here's the truly bizarre situation. This "surge" is coming just a few months after the President's party lost control of Congress in the recent elections and is supported by and indeed promoted by the very neoconservatives whose screw ups have left over 3,000 U.S. soldiers dead and Iraq in a state of internal war. Why would the President listen to such people, especially when many of them like Richard Perle, Ken Adleman, Michael Ledeen and David Frum stabbed the Administration in the back in pre-election interviews in Vanity Fair?

You have to give the neocons credit for one thing: Like the vermin that they are, they figure out ways to survive and still be able to project influence even from a disadvantageous position. Very few are left in government now and one their views before the voters. They prefer to operate in the shadows or the back rooms where policy is made. They know how to stroke people. Know how to take care of them and call in chits when they need to. Why is Irving Kristol considered the "godfather" of the neocons? Well, as Chronicles editor Dr. Thomas Fleming says, because like a godfather he takes care of people. Cheney is a good example. While he was out of government from 1993-2001, the neoconservatives cozied up to him, made his wife Lynne a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and took interest in what he was saying. The end result was that Cheney staffed the Administration with lots of neocons when it took power in gratitude. So as long as Cheney is still vice-president, the neocons will have some influence on policy. They also know the best way to influence someone is to parallel their thinking and with George Bush II, they have the perfect person upon which to whisper in the ear.

Bush II may not know anything about neoconservatism, but he does know himself. And what he knows is that he's on a mission from God. Ever since 9-11, Bush II has said to anyone who will listen that God has chosen him and him alone to lead the country in the Global War on Terrorism. And when you're on a mission from God, you just don't turn it down. That would be like Moses leading the Israelites through the desert and just deciding one day "Ahh, the heck with it. Let's go back to Egypt." It just doesn't work that way. One fellow from the Bible who did try to escape a mission from God, Jonah, spent a good chunk of time in a whale's belly because of it.

Because Bush II sincerely believes this, he will see the Iraq disaster through to the end of his term regardless what happens. That's why he's ignored the election results. That's why he's ignored the Iraq Study Group recommendations (along with his contemptuous view of his father's former advisors) even thought it could have been a bi-partisan platform to construct a plan for Iraq. That's why the "surge" option is so appealing to him. Every other plan smacks to him of defeat and withdrawal, a turning back on the mission from God. But the "surge" is a plan of action, a plan of victory and that's why he's chosen this course. All that was needed was for the neocons to draw up the blueprints. They make perfect team. And that's why everyone within the Administration that wasn't on the same page was let go whether it was Don Rumsfeld or Gen. John Abizaid.

You may call it stubbornness and you may call it pig-headedness, but Bush II calls it faith and so long as he maintains this faith, the neocons' hidden hand will steer the President's course and more U.S. troops will die needlessly in their stupid endeavor. But even if the disaster deepens, don't worry about the fate of the neocons. They will still have their foundations, their newspaper columns, their magazines and think tanks, their talk shows and TV gigs, their university chairs along with their connections to high places. They can wash their hands of this mess even if the average soldier who lost a leg or a buddy in Iraq cannot. For you see, even in disaster they will still be around and still referred to as foreign policy experts.

Now that's bizarre.

--Sean Scallon

News on Paul's Presidential annnouncement

2007-01-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

Here's the news story on Rep. Paul's presidential annoucement from thast broke last night. This comes from a Houston TV station.

--Sean Scallon

Texas Congressman Ron Paul Files For Presidential Bid

Ron Paul, the iconoclastic nine-term congressman from southeast Texas, took the first step Thursday toward launching a second presidential bid in 2008, this time as a Republican.
Paul filed incorporation papers in Texas on Thursday to create a presidential exploratory committee that allows him and his supporters to collect money on behalf of his bid. This will be Paul's second try for the White House; he was the Libertarian nominee for president in 1988.

Kent Snyder, the chairman of Paul's exploratory committee and a former staffer on Paul's Libertarian campaign, said the congressman knows he's a long shot.

"There's no question that it's an uphill battle, and that Dr. Paul is an underdog," Snyder said. "But we think it's well worth doing and we'll let the voters decide."

Paul, of Lake Jackson, acknowledges that the national GOP has never fully embraced him despite his nine terms in office under its banner. He gets little money from the GOP's large traditional donors, but benefits from individual conservative and Libertarian donors outside Texas. He bills himself as "The Taxpayers' Best Friend," and is routinely ranked either first or second in the House of Representatives by the National Taxpayers Union, a national group advocating low taxes and limited government.

He describes himself as a lifelong Libertarian running as a Republican.

Paul was not available for comment Thursday, Snyder said.

But he said the campaign will test its ability to attract financial and political support before deciding whether to launch a full-fledged campaign. Snyder said Paul is not running just to make a point or to try to ensure that his issues are addressed, but to win.

Paul is expected to formally announce his bid in the next week or two, Snyder said.

Snyder said Paul and his supporters are not intimidated by the presence of nationally known and better-financed candidates such as Sen. John McCain of Arizona or former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.

"This is going to be a grassroots American campaign," he said. "For us, it's either going to happen at the grassroots level or it's not."

Paul limits his view of the role of the federal government to those duties laid out in the U.S. Constitution. As a result, he sometimes casts votes that appear at odds with his constituents and other Republicans. He was the only Republican congressman to vote against Department of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 2007.

The vote against the defense appropriations bill, he said, was because of his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he said was "not necessary for our actual security."

The folly of outscorcing - Ocwen

2007-01-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

The folly of outsourcing U.S. jobs overseas came home these past few weeks as my wife and I have been trying to refinance our home in Arkansaw.

Our current mortgage holder, Ocwen, is dragging its feet through this process, largely because, I believe, it operates as an etherical company on fiber-optic cable and telephone lines rather than through a real building or a real center of operations. Although they do keep a P.O. Box in Orlando, Fla.

Most of the Ocwen representatives I've dealt with are from India. That's where the calls are being routed to after going through an extensive automated process. They're English is fine, but it's still spoken in an Indian accent which makes them hard to understand nonetheless and I doubt they understand my flat Midwestern accent.

Not only that, but when have to go through so many departments to put in requests or try to get them to move on something, something is going to be lost in translation. And what is someone in New Dehli going to care about my particular situation to get things done? They're not. They're just employed by the calling company that contracts with Ocwen. Sometime soon, these people will be answering phones for another company. I'm just another American customer to them. I'm not saying that's intentional. I'm saying that's life. They collect their paycheck at the end of the day and go home. They're not going to worry about whether or not my mortgage is stuck in limbo, they've got their own problems to worry about.

Ocwen may think its saving a buck employing people thousands of miles away to handle my account, but it will lose in the end when customers refuse to deal with it because they refuse to deal with their customers as Americans. I'm exercising my free-market right to say I will have no more dealings with Ocwen when this is all finally settled and I urge others not to touch them with a 10,000-foot pole, not unless you enjoy international telephone calling. At least Wells Fargo Financial gives me a real-live person who lives in my community to deal with.

If we all take our business to places that will deal with as real people, then companies will see no benefit to outsorucing and stop the practice.

Paul for Prez!

2007-01-12T07:55:00.000-08:00

The announcement that Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex) is beginning the process to run for President has produced an electric response on all the blogs and online sites. I intend to make this blog "Ron Paul for President" central over the next year given that my orginial purpose for the blog, promoting the book Beating the Powers that Be, has pretty much its course and I will be writing something new this summer. In other words, the blog's been given cause, a gulp of gas, to keep going for the coming year.

What a conicidence! Wednesday, on the Sloan Ranger talkshow on WGNU AM 920 in St. Louis being interviewed on my book Beating the Powers that Be, I talked up Ron Paul as being the only person out there capable of unting desperate groups outside of and on the fringes of the two major parties. I was hoping, and we had talked about this here first, a fusion candidacy of the LP and CP with Paul at the head of that ticket. But I think Paul is going to take his shot with the GOP and see what he can accomplish. He’s certainly to have a better chance of winning than Brownback, Huckabee, Thompson, Hunter, Cox and the other jokers in the GOP field. To me, Paul is in tier one with Romney, McCain and Guliani.

Of course, by doing this, Paul foreswears running a Third Party candidacy because sore loser laws prevent this from happening. This is why Buchanan had to jump to the Reform Party when he did. Good luck Ron! We’re right behind you!

For Paul to have any chance at winning or at least doing well, then he needs grasroots support. Here's where third party activists can help. Free Staters could help Paul in New Hampshire. LOS activists can help Paul in South Carolina. All over the country members of the CP, LP or other non-major parties could join in Paul's campaign and work for it. Because his cause is their cause as well. While Paul may be running for the GOP nomination, this is a marvelous opportunity for non-major party people to organize themselves and help affect the political process because Ron Paul shares many of the same views on issues of concern to non-major party voters whether on immigration, the size of the federal government, trade, and this accursed war in Iraq. Paul is not perfect by any means, but he's the best we've got and given the support I've seen for him on internet sites for the past six years, this is the moment we've been waiting for.

Paul's campaign is golden opportunity for the issues that matter to us get a hearing in debates and forums across the country. Maybe he won't win the GOP nomination, but the potential affect the debate, change paradigms as my friend Red Phillips says and bring many people around to the view of true conservatism is an opportunity we can't afford to pass up. I can't wait for Ron Paul to get into a GOP debate and say "J,Accuse! to the neocons and to John McCain. We wouldn't have gotten that opportunity with anyone else.

Once an official campaign website goes up, I'll make sure to link to it. Finally we have someone and something to look forward to.

From Catholic to Orthodox, From (nominal) Christian to Islam - Potential religious trends in the 21st Century

2007-01-04T06:49:00.000-08:00

Demographics is destiny and that's true not just in politics but business, education, sports, entertainment, culture and religion.

Especially religion.

That's because numbers and numbers of adherents determine whether or not your faith is taken seriously or is just another kooky cult.

There are two demographic trends that may occur in the 21st Century inside the U.S. that
could alter several faiths in the process. Those trends are from Catholic to Orthodox and from (nominal) Christian to Islam.

We start with the Catholic Church. It's no secret the U.S. Catholic Church is in a deep crisis. The numerous sexual molestation scandals and the class action lawsuits that have followed are draining diocesan treasuries dry. Many such dioceses are selling off buildings like closed churches and schools and other real estate properties they own. On top of that, the shortage of priests and nuns in the U.S. mean more such closures are on the way. And because of that shortage, the Church's institutions, its colleges, hospitals and other charitable foundations, will become completely secularized within the next 20 years. The whole infrastructure of the Church within the U.S. could be almost gone by within that time period.

The U.S. Catholic Church will survive however. It has faced worse challenges in its history and has always survived. But to survive means to adapt and adapting means change and the U.S. Catholic Church will be transformed by this process. The transformation will come demographically as what once was a European-ethnic church will become a predominantly Hispanic and Third World immigrant church.

This is also a process that's going on world wide as well. Philip Jenkins, the Penn State University theology professor and writer for Chronicles, has documented this coming transformation of the Christian world thanks to demographics in numerous articles and books. Numbers mean power and such power within the Church will come from its Third World adherents. There's no doubt next pope will be probably be from the Third World, perhaps Latin or South America first (with a bishop of European immigrant descent) followed by an African pope after that. We've already seen the Third World's power within the Anglican community already. Several Episcopal churches in the U.S. have left their local dioceses in schisms to align themselves with Anglican dioceses in Third World locations because their bishops are more traditional than their Western counterparts, who are ordaining women and homosexual bishops.

What is fueling the change in the U.S. Catholic Church is immigration. More Hispanic immigrants and other Catholic immigrants from the Third World are filling the pews and in many cases what were once empty pews, especially in big cities. Now as immigration spreads from big cities and the coasts to small towns in the Midwest and South, such change will take place in churches in these locations as well. It's the Catholic Church that will absorb most of the new immigrants. Although a good chunk of Hispanic immigrants are Pentecostals, they tend to form their own churches separately. Hispanic Catholics are moving into existing communities and existing churches.

All this leaves the European ethnic in a quandary. The term "Catholic" means universal and as such it should not matter what race or ethnic group anyone who calls themselves Catholic is. All are welcomed. Yet such churches were the anchors of previous ethnic communities. Such change can be quite jarring, especially when you add it onto change within the neighborhood, change in the business community and change within the schools thanks to unlimited immigration. It doesn't take long for one Hispanic mass to become all masses at some point.

Because of this change, some European ethnic Catholics wish that the bishops would either take a stand against immigration or least not be noisy promoters of it like Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahoney. Unfortunately they are whistling past the graveyard. Not even the most conservative of bishops, like Omaha's Roman Bruskewitz, are going to oppose unlimited immigration nor will any be recalled by Rome for such support like Mahoney. The Catholic Church in the U.S. is an immigrant church. Always has been. Always will be. To its bishops and administrators, seeing one immigrant group coming into the church and overtaking another is simply the natural wave of history. It would be unthinkable of them to turn oppose immigration, especially when such immigrants and their money are going to be ones to keep the Church afloat during its time of transformation. Opponents of unlimited immigration must understand that is how the church thinks and operates and it perfectly fits with its history. It not a "Popish" plot to undermine the United States. This writer (and Catholic) nearly deleted VDARE.com from his list of favorite websites last year because some of its writers began waving the bloody shirt of "rum, Romanism and rebellion" until Peter Brimelow thankfully set them straight and also pointed out Protestantism's many contributions to our nation's immigration problems.

But again the quandary for European ethnic Catholic remains. His numbers have been reduced by intermarriage, by the destruction of ethnic neighborhoods by urban renewal and the interstate highway system, by suburban sprawl, by the church's own problems and divisions within it and by his or her own laziness and sloth. If you don't show up for mass or to volunteer or be a part of the community, you will lose power and influence to those who do. Whoever said that life is all about showing up was dead on in this regard. So what to do? Join the Orthodox Church.

The Orthodox Church has a number of appeals to the European ethnic Catholic. It is a church that is ethnically conscious and fuses the idea of the church to that of the nation and the culture. That's why there are Greek Orthodox churches, Russian Orthodox Churches, Romanian Orthodox churches and so forth. (Only the Polish Catholic Church and Uniate churches loyal to Rome are that way amongst Catholics). It is a decentralized church, which means its doctrines and practices of worship are not subject to the whims of a whole Vatican Council. It's a church that has avoided a lot of the doctrinal disputes that has divided the Catholic churches because it stays true to its traditions and doctrines which it traces back to the original Christian church. Its mass has gone unchanged for many centuries and one doesn't have to worry about whether the new priest is going to allows guitars and drums during the worship service, disallows bells or kneeling or whatever fashion of mass is in vogue from the seminary. It's a church who's priests are married which means the problems the Catholic Church has had with homosexual priests (the one's that don't take their vows of celibacy seriously anyway) aren't a problem with the Orthodox. It is the Orthodox that is going to be more suspicious of mass immigration (especially immigration from Islamic nations) than other religions.

Of course, if you are an Irish, Italian, French or German Catholic, you just can't pop into Serbian Orthodox Church and say "I'm a new convert!" unless you marry a Serb. It just doesn't work that way. To solve that problem, the Orthodox Church of America (OCA) exists. Formed in the early 1970s by the Russian Patriarchy and separate from it, the OCA is an Americanized version of the of the Russian Church with its services in English and with pews and so forth (the Orthodox church who's fall festival I annually attend in Clayton, Wisconsin, Holy Trinity, is part of the OCA.) Many of the churches are old Russian ones like Holy Trinity, but the OCA also incorporates other ethnic groups like Albanian and Romanian Orthodox that never had separate ethnic bishoprics like the Greeks or Serbs do. The OCA could very easily incorporate ethnic European Catholic refugees in their own churches. Right now the OCA has over 100 churches and a million members, slow but steady growth that I think could easily accelerate in the 21st Century. Conservative writer Rod Dreher of Crunchy Cons fame has already made the switch from Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy and I think others will to.

The other trend that will take place will be those from nominal Christian backgrounds converting to Islam. Such conversions have taken place among African Americans for long time and famous ones like Lew Alcindor to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. The Nation of Islam, an organization of Black Muslims, has dominated the Islamic discourse within U.S for many years. However, the NOI's racist rhetoric against whites has kept Islam's numbers in the U.S. down from what they could potentially be.

This will change too in the 21st Century. Growth in Islam will come from Third World immigration of course. But it will also come from white converts as well and they will come from two sources of thought.

Islam always has had an ideological appeal to those on the far left and right. To a cultural Marxist, Islam is the God that hasn't failed (unlike Communism), at least not yet. Its diverse, multicultural following and the fact that it is the religion of the Third Word i.e. it was founded there and expanded there outside of Europe and the West, makes it a perfect vehicle for cultural upheaval and egalitarianism. Marxism derided religion which limited its appeal while Islam is a religion and has mass appeal. And within an adversarial culture, converting to Islam becomes the perfect vehicle to shock one's parents and friends and peers. Indeed, Jean-Paul Sartre himself became more and more fascinated with Islam as the communist left declined in his later years. This has more of chance of happening with the nominal baptized or secular Christian than anyone else. Think of John Walker Lindh, the Marin County, California teenager who got fed up with empty secularist lifestyle of parents and neighbors and converted to Islam and joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and you'll understand the type. Since 9-11 and since George Bush II give Islam his stamp of approval by calling it a "religion of peace," there's been a growing study of Islam within in the media and with others who are curious to know more about it. Such study, no doubt, will increase the size of the pool of converts for Islam within the U.S.

On the other side, Nazis have always appreciated Islam's marshal spirit and ascetic, non-bourgeois lifestyle along with its ability to submit the will of the mass towards one deity or person. They found it far superior to Christian piety which they found to be nothing more than religion for wimps, not the supermen they were supposed to be. Those who are not inclined towards Nazism still find these same qualities admirable, along with Islam's male-dominated patriarchy. Women and men do not pray together. If you are a fellow who is unchurched right at the moment because you think the modern church in the U.S. is too female dominated and has no place for you, then Islam may be your scene. Think of guy who used to attend Promise Keeper rallies in football stadiums and spent his time crying on the shoulder of another guy while being told what an awful person he was. When he realized the whole thing was nothing more than a religious version of 1990s male bonding without the tom-tom drums, campfires and war paint and when he realized his wife and her friends were laughing their heads off at him down at the solon, then you'll know the kind of person I'm talking about. In fact the crisis of the maleless church has become such a concern that, according to religious news reports, that certain pastors have gotten to the point of parking Harley Davidson motorcycles out front of the entryways of their churches and putting on football uniforms and using football metaphors to attract males back into the pews again. But Islam's call may be more enticing than that just more passing Christian fads.

Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy have never played major roles within the cultural, political or economic milieus of the United States largely because their numbers have never been large enough to do so, let alone attract any attention. But in this century, that could change as numbers and demography head in both faiths' direction.

--Sean Scallon

Blows against the empire

2007-01-02T10:22:00.000-08:00

This article comes to us from Doug Newman.

--- Sean Scallon

You probably have not thought much about the nation of Mongolia lately. However, before 2006 draws to a close, it would be instructive to remember what happened in Mongolia 800 years ago.

1206 marked the dawn of the Mongol Empire, in its time the mightiest empire on earth. At its height, the Mongol Empire had a population of 100 million. It covered 14 million square miles, making it the largest contiguous empire in history. By comparison, the Soviet Union covered 8 million square miles.

Empires don’t last. The Mongol Empire was a case in point. The Babylonian, Persian, Assyrian, Greek, Egyptian and Roman Empires are all gone. Spain is no longer a world power. Neither is Portugal. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires were carved up after World War I. The French, Italians, Dutch and Belgians have cut their colonies loose. What is left of Britain’s overseas possessions has a combined population of about 200,000. The Soviet Empire is a goner. Japan got into the empire business in 1931 and got out of it aboard the USS Missouri in 1945. Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich came up 988 years short.
America – “the last superpower” -- has all the trappings of an empire. Our troops are stationed in 130 countries. We act as if we have the right to determine how other countries must govern themselves. We have no inhibitions about bombing the crap out of countries to enforce our will.

If this is not an empire what is?

It matters not how noble our stated intentions might be. Politicians always have good intentions. Our excessive pride clouds our judgment. King Solomon warned that “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18)

It is pride that causes Americans to think that we are selflessly spreading freedom and goodness across the globe and that the only people who hate us are a few fringe elements here and there.

It is pride that leads Americans to think that we can end terror and tyranny in the world.
And it is pride that causes Americans to think that we will forever be a superpower.

If you are one of these evangelicals who think that America has some mandate from heaven to throw its weight around the way it does, read Matthew 4:8-10. When Satan offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, Jesus refuses the offer.

If the King of the Universe refuses all the kingdoms of the world, what makes so many American Christians think that America can rule the world?

America is not immune from God’s Laws and His Judgment. We are woefully mistaken if we think we can continue carrying on the way we do. Several secular trends point toward an end to American world dominance.

First of all, empire, like polo, is a rich man’s game. It costs a lot of money to sustain an empire, and America is not going to have that money in a few years. There is an economic earthquake coming in this country that no politician is talking about. And when it hits, we will simply not be able to afford to be a superpower any longer.

Specifically, I am talking about the impending collapse of Social Security and Medicare. In 2010, the Baby Boomers – talkin’ ‘bout my generation – will start retiring en masse. This will place an unbearable strain on these programs. Not only will they be drained of funds at an unprecedented rate, but there will be fewer working people “contributing” to these programs. As I write this, Uncle Sam has $53 trillion of unfunded liabilities. When the bills come due, it will not be pretty.

When it comes to paying for Grandma’s hip replacement or for an unprovoked war on the other side of the world, what will people demand? Not that we can afford it now, but there will come a time when we will have no choice but to cut and run from our military adventures abroad. The money will simply no longer be there. (I yearn for the day that we are no longer a superpower. I just wish it would happen differently.)

Second, our economy is every bit as regulated and controlled as any on earth. Jobs are going overseas for many reasons – NAFTA, GATT -- one of which is almost never discussed. I speak of the regulatory burden imposed by EPA, OSHA, IRS, EEOC and a whole host of other unconstitutional alphabet soup agencies. It now makes more sense to manufacture products in Communist China than it does in America, i.e. “the land of the free.” Nothing in life is free. This country has paid a huge price for all of these measures we have taken to “protect” our labor force.

Third, while we say we are fighting a “war on terror” abroad, we are doing next to nothing here at home to control our borders with Mexico and Canada. Well over one million people enter this country illegally every year. God only knows how many terrorists are in this country as a result of this. I am fairly liberally minded about who gets to come to America. If people come here to work, learn English, assimilate into the culture and become citizens, this is fine. However, America is now home to all sorts of flotsam and jetsam who refuse to learn English and who sponge off of our welfare state. (If we just turned off the entitlement tap we would greatly mitigate the immigration problem.)

If you don’t have borders you do not have a country. You just have a plot of land. This is the direction in which America is headed.

In March, 2005, GW Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mexican President Vincente Fox met in Waco, Texas, and launched the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). This is a merger of the United States, Canada and Mexico into a North American Union with a common currency, the Amero. There was no vote on this in the House and Senate at all. GW Bush unitarily signed off on this. The SPP means the end of our sovereignty as a nation.

Americans like to think they are carrying the torch of liberty across the globe. Not only is this not true – we imposed an Islamic constitution on Iraq – but our liberty is rapidly evaporating at home. For several years America has had the world’s highest incarceration rate. Since 9/11, we have seen such abominations as the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. We have put our stamp of approval on warrantless searches, domestic spying, hideously intrusive airport security, torture, the presumption of guilt and the suspension of habeas corpus. With recklessness eerily reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, we have surrendered liberty in the name of security.

You cannot give your government unlimited power and retain any measure of personal security. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights severely limit the federal government for a reason: when government gets out of control you have neither freedom nor security. The greatest threat to your liberty comes not from the enemy without, but from the enemy within.

Moreover, Americans have adopted all ten policy planks of the Communist Manifesto as the law of the land. Such things as federal control of land and property, a central bank, a state education monopoly and a progressive income tax have no basis whatsoever in the Bible or any of our Founding documents. They are all policy prescriptions of the Communist Manifesto.

What will it take to wake enough people up to this? Death camps? As long as enough people live under the mistaken notion that they are free, they will continue this bobsled ride into totalitarianism.

Revelation 18 prophesies “commercial Babylon”, which will be fantastically wealthy but also diabolically immoral. In one hour this great city is brought to ruin. Is the Prophet John speaking of America here? I do not know, but I cannot help thinking he is talking about America.
If you think that "it can't happen here", think again. God is not going to extend any special protection to a nation wherein one million innocent babies are killed in their mothers’ wombs each year. Instead of thinking we are deserving of God’s Blessing, we need to be on our knees asking for His Forgiveness.

Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson: "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever."

Will America go the way of Mongolia? Will future generations look at America as some insignificant historical curiosity? Will our only cultural export be American barbecues at strip malls in Ulaanbaatar?

There are just far too many indicators pointing toward America’s demise. I love this country and I do not enjoy writing these words. They are some of the more difficult I have ever had to write.

I pray fervently that I am wrong.

Let us recall the words of II Corinthians 7:14:

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

May God forgive America.

Happy New Year.

Article in Chronicles

2006-12-27T17:24:00.000-08:00

I have an article entiled "The Company Town," another Letter from the Upper Midwest, in the Januray edition of Chronicles. Check it out on newstands now.

--Sean Scallon

New years and old passings

2006-12-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

May everyone have a blessed New Year. I'll hopefully be back to writing on a routine schedule starting in 2007 with my new piece "From Catholic to Orthodox, From Christian to Islam" on possible new trends in religious faith.

As a child of the 1970s, I should say something on the passing of Gerald Ford although too young at the time (I was four years old) to remember his presidency (political conciousness began with Jimmy Carter). It's interesting that his death comes at the end of this year for the party he represented clearly has changed. Ford was a Republican back when it was seen as northern political party. He represented Michigan's fith Congressional District, which is centered around Grand Rapids and is home to many conservative Dutch Calvinists. It's one of the few remaining traditional GOP districts in the north (most of these located in the Midwest). He shared their values of frugality and was always seen as a fiscal conservative. The maelstrom of the 1960s (there we go again, always the '60s) put Ford on the opposite side of many Republicans in terms of foreign policy and social policy. The Ford-Reagan contest for the GOP nomination in 1976 was fascinating (as all primary campaigns are fascinating) because it was a struggle between the new and old GOP. Ford held on, barely, because the old structures of the party held firm (and because many southern Goldwater Republicans who would have supported Reagan became ensconsed in the party during the Nixon Administration and stayed loyal to Ford, especially Mississsippi's Clarke Reed who's contested delegation made the difference at the '76 GOP Convention in Kansas City.)

Afterward Reagan was urged by National Review publisher Bill Rusher and others to form a third party to unite all the conservatives and run on his own but Reagan refused. "Bill, they can't stop me the next time," Reagan said. And he was right. He undertsood the political and demogrpahic trends that would, four years later, deliver him the nomination overwhelmingly. George Bush I tried to run on the old structures and was walloped.

But it's Ford that truly is the last northern Republican and not the Conneticut Yankee Bush. For Bush, behind the patrician facade, is as much a political animal as Bill Clinton, and all through his career he has changed and altered and shifted himself to fit the realties of the new GOP. That's how he became vice president, that's how he was nominated by the party for president, that's how he got elected President, that's how he was able to bequethe his political legacy to his sons. There's a reason why George II and Jeb were governors of Texas and Florida and not Massachucetts and Conneticut or Maine. That's why the Bushes live in Texas now. Ford at least, will be buried in his home in Michigan. A home he truly loved.

Reqieum im Pacem.

---Sean Scallon

My favorite dictator - The left loves Castro, the right loves Pinochet

2006-12-19T17:14:00.000-08:00

would seem unusual, in a nation like ours that celebrates the tenants of democracy such as free speech, free association, free elections, and freedom to worship, that there should exist people who offer words of support if not downright love and admiration to anti-democratic leaders throughout the world.

We have a lot of dictator-lovers here in the U.S.

The recent death of former Chilean President Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte has once again brought out the woodwork his supporters on the ideological spectrum, along with his opponents as well. And as this debate erupts, inevitably Cuban President Fidel Castro’s name gets dragged in as well, given that both men are polar opposites of each other.

So here we have groups of U.S. citizens, supposedly those lovers of democracy and the Founding Fathers and of Locke and Burke and Jefferson and Adams, lining up on the barricades arguing who was better (or worse), Castro or Pinochet.

Why are we even having this discussion?

It’s amazing that either man would even have such stout supporters whether in the Nation or the National Review. Both men sanctioned the killing of their political opponents. Both men oppressed their populations and destroyed free societies during the tenure of their rule (although Chile is back to being democratic after Pinochet was forced to step down in 1988 after a referendum) while Cuba continues to suffer under the Castros, Fidel and Raul. Both men used torture and terror in setting up their police states. Both stole and looted their nation’s wealth.

Both men broke a lot of eggs to get their omelets.

So why such support given that we’ve just fought a war to bring down a tyrant like Saddam Hussein and given the U.S. history of fighting tyranny across the globe? Why would anyone support dictators?

The reason, of course, is all ideological. The dictator, given that he can bend the country to his will at the snap of his fingertips, can get things done through rubber stamp congresses and parliaments that cannot be done so easily or quickly in the U.S.

Take free health care in Cuba. The U.S. still does not have universal health care while Cuba does thanks to Castro’s efforts. It may very well be lousy care without the latest in medical technology or drugs but at least it’s there.

Or with Chile, take Social Security. Chilean economists serving under Pinochet introduced a privatization plan to its old-age pension program similar to privatization schemes offered by conservatives in the U.S. Although one wonders whether Pinochet was more interested in economics compared to eliminating Communism in Chile. I think it’s safe to safe to say one took priority over the other.

So implementing such programs free of any compromises that would be a part of any democratic system through the normal legislative process, appeals to the ideologue because it allows he or she to say “See, such and such a program works.”

But this of course begs the question whether such programs really need such brute force in order to be established. Was free health care worth repression and show trials and neighbor spying on neighbor? Were better Social Security benefits worth electric shock torture by DINA to suspected leftists and communists?

Do the ends justify the means?

Obviously Castro’s predecessor Fulgenico Batista wasn’t a lot better when it came to protecting political freedoms than Castro and Pinochet’s predecessor Salvador Allende presided over a collapsing Marxist government that was turning Chile into a communist satellite. Both men were seen as saviors when they took power. Yet like all dictators given absolute power, they abused it frequently and fragrantly.

Why these men are given places of honor on their respective side of the political spectrum is beyond me. And yet, it’s nothing new. Leftists were enamored of murders and despots like Lenin, Mao, Stalin and (if you’re a neoconservative) Trotsky while there were Hitler and Mussolini supporters here in the U.S. and Franco had his fans too (although he was more of a Catholic authoritarian than a true Fascist.) Right-wingers have backed the Somoza dynasty and the Shah of Iran and even the Argentine junta. In fact, if you read the history of the Falklands War, there were some in the Reagan Administration who came close to supporting Argentina over traditional ally Great Britain because of such blinding ideology.

This is really a pointless discussion. To see U.S. citizens lend support to those who would violate our own traditions speaks almost to lack of faith in our form of government and Constitution. To see people get killed, imprisoned without trial or tortured just to see free health care established in another place in the world says that tyranny is okay so long as it has a point. But as history has taught us from the Jacobins on down through their successors, even such tyrants with a mission become corrupted by the power they bring into their own hands, even if it’s in the name of “humanity.” And ultimately such tyrants show themselves for what they are. Castro has turned a once dynamic society into a backwards ruin and Pinochet turned out be nothing more than thief, a kleptocrat like Mobutu stashing millions looted from the country into the Riggs Bank in Washington D.C.

U.S. citizens should forget these stupid discussions of “my favorite dictator” and opinion magazines should quit publishing them. For any real U.S. citizen, their attitudes towards dictators should the same as the motto the State of Virginia adopts.

Sic semper tyrannus

Thus always to tyrants.

--Sean Scallon

Constitution Party adds new member, Paynesville, Minn. mayor

2006-12-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

The Constitution Party's new Veteran's Coalition is starting to catch fish and the first big catch is the mayor of the Minnesota town of Paynesville.

What this shows is that by targeting groups of voters by who they are rather than by ideology, parties build themselves. That's essence of Beating the Powers that Be.

Paynesville was the site of a sit in by Paul Wellstone in a bank to protest farm foreclosures during the 1980s. They also have a good wrestling program.

---Sean Scallon

CPMN Adds New Member - Mayor of Paynesville

For 25 years I served as an active duty, Army Reserve, and Minnesota National Guard soldier. That career included serving as a Military Intelligence battalion operations NCO, and stints as a First Sergeant in both the Army Reserve and Minnesota National Guard. Today I embark on a new mission.

I've been very active in "major" party politics for some time. My first experience, growing up in a DFL environment, was serving as a district and state delegate shortly after being old enough to vote. I also helped on individual campaigns, including such things as serving as county coordinator for a congressional candidate.

As I matured, which having to work for a living and enlisting in the Army can facilitate, my political leanings drifted to the right. Upon returning to civilian life back here in Minnesota, I became active in the Republican Party, serving in such positions as precinct chair, BPOU treasurer, BPOU co-chair, and district and state delegate.

I've also been involved in non-partisan politics and local government. I've served on the Paynesville city council since 1989. In 1996 I ran for, and was elected mayor, and have served in that position since. On November 7th I ran again and was elected to my sixth two-year term.

Above I referred to my so-called maturation. But as I've matured and gathered experience, I've come to understand that it is not I that has changed. What has changed is what our so-called "major" parties have become and have to offer. Like big-box super stores, they're willing to promise, say, or do anything to get our vote or contribution. We're the sweatshop workers toiling away for the benefit of others. We're the small business owners run out of town over political greed. Lobbyists, PACS, special interest groups, and party leaders make up the political boards of directors. I began to wonder if there was a political party at all that was a steady, principled party that had any values at all.

I've been studying the Constitution Party for some time, and have seen it as a very principled party, with a very strong and stable platform. But, I had been hesitant to take the plunge until learning of the new Veteran's Coalition. At last I've found a party that takes our country's veterans seriously and is not interested in using them as political pawns or cannon fodder in political battles.

For 25 years I served as an active duty, Army Reserve, and Minnesota National Guard soldier. That career included serving as a Military Intelligence battalion operations NCO, and stints as a First Sergeant in both the Army Reserve and Minnesota National Guard. Today I embark on a new mission.

Upon consultation with the Constitution Party of MN chairman, I hereby announce my service as the founding chairman for the CPMN chapter of the Constitution Party Veteran's Coalition. Please watch for details in the coming months as developments occur. With that, I just would like to say that I am delighted to be on board with the party of "conservative" principle here in Minnesota, and am looking forward to getting involved with the CPMN and Veteran's Coalition.

Instant runoff voting heading towards Minnesota

2006-12-12T17:53:00.000-08:00

This editorial in support of instant runoff voting (IRV) appeared in the Timberjay Newspaper group online section of northern Minnesota (Ely, Cook, Tower, Orr, Soudan) and I got it of the Independence Party website. If there's a state where IRV can catch-on its right here with the state's usually strong non-major party system. Hopefully from the Twin Cities outward, IRV catches fire and spreads to the surround countryside as well if it works well.
Truly progress is being made.

---Sean Scallon

Time for better choices: the case for the Instant Runoff
By Marshall Helmberger

Why did Peter Hutchinson receive just six percent of the vote for Minnesota governor on Nov. 7? Certainly, it wasn’t for lack of qualifications. As former superintendent of the Minneapolis school district, you could argue he had already taken on the toughest administrative job in the state. He was well-spoken, actually answered questions during debates, and put forward the clearest policy positions of any of the three major party candidates in the race. And most of his ideas were good ones.
Almost everyone I spoke to about the campaign agreed that Hutchinson was the guy they really wanted to vote for. Yet very few of them did, because they feared it would elect the guy they liked least. And that’s what’s wrong with our electoral system.

In so many ways, we live in a society that glorifies the idea of choices. From cereal to soups to automobiles, we expect an almost endless number of options in our lives. If we were forced to choose between corn flakes or raisin bran for breakfast most of us wouldn’t be too happy about it. But when we walk into the voting booth, we hold our noses and vote for one of the two major parties, even when both candidates are less than appealing.

Why do we put up with it? Maybe we just don’t know there are alternatives to our current method of voting. In Minneapolis, residents found out there was another way to vote, and by a two-to-one margin, they opted on Nov. 7 to give it a try in future elections. Known as single transferable voting, it has become popularly-known as the instant runoff. The instant runoff ballot lists the candidates’ names as usual, but rather than just voting for one, it lets you rank your preferences. If your favorite candidate doesn’t get enough support, your vote is automatically transferred to your second choice. If your second choice doesn’t get enough backing, your vote goes to your next choice...and so on.

The advantages are several. For one, it ends the spoiler factor. We’ve all heard the arguments that Ralph Nader handed George W. Bush the election in 2000. Under instant runoff, Al Gore would probably be president today. And last week, the Associated Press examined exit polls in the Minnesota governor’s race and found that Peter Hutchinson did the same for Gov. Tim Pawlenty, since most Hutchinson voters would have settled for Mike Hatch had Hutchinson not been on the ballot.

If Minnesota had the instant runoff, those Hutchinson voters could have listed Hatch as their second choice, and their votes would have transferred to him if Hutchinson came in third in the initial tally. A second tally almost certainly would have given Hatch a majority of the vote, electing him as governor, rather than Pawlenty.

Such a system helps elect the candidate that’s acceptable to the most people— which makes it more democratic. As it is, a majority of Minnesotans expressed unhappiness with Gov. Pawlenty, by voting for somebody else. Yet Pawlenty gets another four years. It’s the third straight gubernatorial election in Minnesota in which the winner failed to obtain a majority of the vote. It really doesn’t make any sense.

But instant runoff could do much more than eliminate spoilers. It has the potential to open up our electoral process like never before. Under instant runoff, Minnesotans could have voted for a Peter Hutchinson or a Ken Pentel, or whoever, in the knowledge that doing so wouldn’t elect that guy they really didn’t want. Suddenly, voters can start to really listen to these other voices in the campaign and cast their votes based on their real preferences rather than their political calculations. You might find some of them getting elected, and you might find the two major parties having to finally begin to address the concerns of average voters.

The good news is that instant runoff may have a future in Minnesota. The overwhelming support of Minneapolis voters shows the idea is a politically popular one. And Mark Ritchie, our next Secretary of State, has indicated he wants to open up the political process, and has noted the instant runoff is one way to do that. State Rep. Tom Rukavina told me this week that he plans to introduce legislation allowing instant runoff in Minnesota. Hopefully, Ritchie, Rukavina, and the new DFL-dominated Legislature will take the Minneapolis results as a mandate for change. The voters are tired of just corn flakes or raisin bran. It’s time for real choices.

Book review by Clark Stooksbury in Chronicles

2006-12-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

Here's the book review of Beating the Powers that Be that Clark Stooksbury did in the November issue of Chronicles magazine.

--- Sean Scallon

All Honorable Means
by Clark Stooksbury

Beating the Powers That Be
by Sean Scallon
Baltimore: Publish America; 203 pp., $19.95

The political culture of the United States is cramped and stunted by the narrow range of acceptable viewpoints and the utterly banal, subliterate tone of our political campaigns—to compare American elections to the marketing of soap is an insult to the people who sell soap. If, as Sean Scallon notes in Beating the Powers That Be, culture precedes politics, the state of American politics says nothing good about the state of American culture.

Beating the Powers That Be is, in part, a story of the constriction of the American political spectrum since World War II. Scallon describes three related political movements that began in the Upper Midwest in the first half of the 20th century: the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, and the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota. These organizations were representative of the far left in this country at a time when the left cared more for working people than about securing the civil rights of the transgendered.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scallon begins his narrative with a remembrance of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, the latest in a line of “Minnesota Mavericks” that include U.S. Rep. Charles Lindbergh, Sr., and Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Wellstone was a professor who wanted to make a difference. “He wanted to link academics with social activism the way professors did back during the Great Depression and the New Deal years of the 1930s . . . ” Wellstone entered politics and served two full terms in the U.S. Senate before his untimely death in a plane crash in October 2002, only days after courageously voting against the then wildly popular Iraq-war resolution.

The tradition that Wellstone represented began in 1918, when the Farmer-Labor Party was founded. (It later merged with Minnesota’s Democratic Party.) Unlike the fringe third parties we are used to today, Farmer-Labor was once powerful in Minnesota, winning elections for governor and senator. Scallon describes the factors that lay behind the alliance between farmers and laborers:

A farmer owns his land and pays taxes on it, no matter how small the plot. Holding onto that land and making a profit from it to provide for [his family] and pass [it] on to [them] is his primary concern. . . . He can be radical if ownership of his land is at stake and be quite conservative in order to use that land as he . . . sees fit. . . . Before World War II a laborer didn’t own much more than his or her labor power. A laborer can be conservative if that labor is perceived at stake . . . Or he . . . may turn radical if working conditions are so tough [that he feels he has] nothing left to lose.

Owing to the efforts of Floyd B. Olson and the suffering of the Great Depression, the Farmer-Labor Party dominated Minnesota in the 1930’s, but it couldn’t long survive the death in 1936 of then-governor Olson. Although the party still carries the name Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Scallon pronounces it dead as of November 5, 2002.

The election results declare that Minnesota has officially become suburbia just like everywhere else—and the Democrats will adjust accordingly. There are far more soccer moms and office-park dads in the land of 10,000 lakes than there are farmers, factory workers and the Scandinavian socialists who once formed the DFL’s backbone.

To Minnesota’s east lies Wisconsin, a state whose political culture is described by Scallon as “clean, high-minded and infused with a civic tradition and ethos.” Here, Robert La Follette, Sr., disgusted with corruption in the state Republican Party, became a progressive reformer, advocating regulation of banks, railroads, and insurance companies. A very successful politician, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives before serving as governor and senator from Wisconsin. In 1912, his first presidential campaign was done in by another progressive Republican—Teddy Roosevelt:

[W]hat both men thought progressivism was began to diverge by 1912. To LaFollette, it was a movement of political reform and social justice. Inequities in the great transition from farm to factory and the corruption it spawned would be straightened out . . . [M]ore so than just being from the East, Roosevelt’s views resonated with those who weren’t just interested in anti-trust legislation or removing some hack politician from a county commission for corruption. [His progressivism] was about changing the nature of man itself so [he] would no longer accept bribes or be so greedy. It led to beliefs that man could be made perfect or progress from his primal urges and lusts.

As David Frum says, “War is a great clarifier.” La Follette distinguished himself from Roosevelt by opposing America’s entry into World War I, for which he was called a traitor by the New York Times. Robert La Follette, Jr., succeeded his father in the Senate—both as a Republican and, later, as a representative of the Progressive Party—and opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s committing the country to World War II.

After the New Deal and World War II, there was little room in America for the kind of movement that Scallon describes. As the federal government grew, taking over many of the functions of the states, Cold War conformity narrowed the scope of acceptable opinion. On occasion, broad discontent with the status quo bubbled up in the form of presidential campaigns by such candidates as George Wallace and Ross Perot, but Scallon notes a more interesting phenomenon occurring in political movements at lower levels of government. He focuses on three such movements—two in the New England states of Vermont and New Hampshire and a regional movement in the South, where the League of the South seeks to promote the “independence of the South ‘by all honorable means.’” I remain somewhat skeptical of the prospects for success of this last enterprise. Nothing about the quality of political leaders that the South has produced in the last few years, including our sitting president and his immediate predecessor, inspires my confidence (as a Tennessean) in a Southern regime. Decentralization of our monstrously overgrown federal government, however, remains an excellent idea, while dissolution of the Union should be a legitimate topic of discussion, not a hate crime.

Accordingly, Scallon profiles the Second Vermont Republic, an organization dedicated to keeping the Green Mountain State from becoming a giant Wal-Mart-McDonald’s-big-box strip mall and reestablishing it as the independent republic it was from 1777 to 1791. And, next door, the Free State Project is working to encourage at least 20,000 libertarian ideologues to move to New Hampshire for the purpose of taking over the state’s political system. While the thought of an invasion by libertarians may be frightening, the free marketeers are, in fact, relatively harmless. If the Free State Project succeeds in making any change more substantive than requiring Granite State high-schoolers to suffer through Atlas Shrugged—including all 60 pages of John Galt’s speech—I’ll be surprised.

Clark Stooksbury writes from Knoxville, Tennessee. This article first appeared in the November 2006 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Never Give Up Your Rights!

2006-12-05T09:51:00.000-08:00

This article commes from Doug Newman.

---Sean Scallon.

A recent column on World Net Daily, Robert Ringer states that “In order to preserve freedom, some freedoms must be restricted.” Although I have heard similar things God knows how many times since 9/11, this particular column got my dander up. I guess it is because it so neatly summarizes the panic mentality that has come over so many Americans in the last five years.

Ringer says he wishes things were otherwise, but in a world gone mad he believes that surrendering freedom in order to preserve freedom is a “reality.” Orwellian Doublethink doesn't get much more straightforward than this.

Ringer wrote this in response to the recent removal of six Muslim imams from a US Airways flight before it departed Minneapolis for Phoenix. According to the AP report, “Witnesses said the men prayed in the terminal and made critical comments about the Iraq war, according to the police report, and a US Airways manager said three of the men had only one-way tickets and no checked baggage.”

US Airways, as a private entity, has every right to exclude anyone from flying and to “profile” whomever it pleases without asking permission. What is disturbing is that so many people to want the FEDGOV to do this profiling and to institutionalize it throughout society. They thereby sacrifice their liberty for the illusion of security. Ben Franklin was right: those who do this deserve neither liberty nor security.

Let us examine Ringer’s column in terms of the events of 9/11, and of freedom attacked and freedom lost. (1)

First of all, freedom was not attacked on 9/11. America was attacked. In spite of the massive death and devastation, those 19 Islamopsychopaths did not infringe what was left of our freedom. This idea that Osama bin Laden is going to take over America and have us all speaking Arabic and praying to Mecca five times a day is absurd. Bin Laden holds no office, commands no armies and has perhaps a few thousand followers. He has not even taken over Afghanistan, so he is no threat to take over America or the world.

Second of all, 9/11 would not have happened had we not already relinquished one of our most fundamental freedom, i.e. the God-given, constitutionally guaranteed “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” (Italics mine.) This right had already been infringed aboard airplanes for decades.

Ringer writes: “In all fairness, I must say that I believe most free-speech and civil-rights advocates are well meaning – well-meaning, but naive. Sorry, but when someone points a gun at you and says he's going to kill you, you don't have time to engage in an intellectual dialog about free speech and civil rights. The first order of business is to kill the guy with the gun in his hand.”

On that horrible morning of 9/11, the passengers and crew of those four jets were unable to defend themselves when the Islamopsychopaths whipped out their box cutters and went to work. (Oh sure, some brave souls on Flight 93 fought back, but not until after the terrorists had commandeered the plane.) If the first order of business is to kill the guy who wants to kill you, the 9/11 passengers were denied that ability.

I have heard it said by those who would take away our civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism “your civil liberties don’t matter when you’re dead” and that “3000 people lost their civil liberties on 9/11”. To this I say: 9/11 would not have happened had air passengers and crew members not been forced to sacrifice the civil liberty to bust a cap on the guy who has a gun or a box cutter or whatever pointed at you and has announced that he wants to kill you.

Since 9/11, there has been endless dialog about confronting terrorism. Almost all of it points to taking away even more freedom. We now have the Patriot Act, warrantless spying, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the hideously intrusive TSA grope-and-grab airport searches. (Can anyone think of just one actual terrorist that TSA has apprehended?)

And if you implicitly trust our current president with such sweeping power as he now has, let me ask you something. Would you have so trusted the last president? And would you trust a future president from the last president's party, especially if she were married to the previous president?

Who would ever have thought that, in "the land of the free", we would have “security crackdowns” and that federal flunkies would be splitting hairs over the size of toothpaste tubes that people can carry on with their luggage?

We would not be having any of these conversations – and September 11, 2001 would have been just another day – had we not succumbed to the absurd notion that we must surrender or God-given rights when we board airplanes. We turned airplanes into gun-free zones and we got 9/11. (We turned schools into gun-free zones and we got Columbine and numerous other tragedies.)

The moral of the story is never give up your rights! Whenever you surrender your rights, bad things happen. And when bad things happen, there is always someone smiling from ear to ear asking you to give up even more of your rights.

Those who will take your freedom always purport to have the best of intentions. However, it is your duty as a citizen to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Especially if they are with the FEDGOV.

What will you do when your government assumes unlimited power? (Isn’t this the kind of government we are supposedly fighting against in this War on Terror?) What rights will you have then?

The prospect of an out-of-control, all-powerful FEDGOV is far more frightening than terrorists. The enemy within can do far more damage than the enemy without. And this is why you must never give up your rights!

Thoughts of a young paleo

2006-12-05T09:41:00.000-08:00

In attending my first-ever meeting of the John Randolph Club in October, I noticed a definite set of younger paleos (conservatives, populists, libertarians, liberals, whatever you attach to the prefix) like myself in their 20s, 30s and even 40s distinct from the older paleos who had helped to originate the movement some 20 years ago.

I wonder if such paleos came to the movement the way I did. Despite living only 30 miles away, I had no idea the Rockford, Ill. Institute even existed, let alone know of the existence of Chronicles magazine while growing up in Beloit, Wisconsin. The first time I heard either mentioned at all was in the hit piece done on them by David Frum in his book Dead Right which came out in 1993. It wasn’t until 1997 that I picked up my first edition of Chronicles at the newsstand section of my local bookstore in Shawano, Wisconsin where I was working at the time. The reason I so identified with the paleo movement after reading Chronicles was the fact that while I considered myself nominally a conservative, those who were the dominant conservatives in the 1990s as pundits, political leaders and talk show hosts were repugnant to me. Maybe it was my Midwestern humility, but I never was able to identify with a right so filled with smart asses and arrogant jerks. They were simply mirrors of their leftist counterparts.

When I found out that the writers and editors of Chronicles felt the same way, I knew I had found a home for my then still formulating beliefs. I also realized that what I was reading was far different than any other opinion magazine I had read up until then. It gave a context to conservative thought that was more important than writing about the next election or the latest up and coming politician. Other magazines dealt with politics and policy, Chronicles dealt with what makes politics and policy and that is culture. I will also add the fact I lived and worked in small farming towns since graduating from college also added to Chronicles’ appeal because it is written from the point of view of such communities rather than the point of view of the coasts.

Being young and presumably the future what paleo movement will be brings about its own set of challenges that I’ve thought a lot about since the JRC meeting and in reading many opinion pieces about the future of conservatism in general (or lack thereof) in various publications. Such thoughts are what I am turning into text:

1). I may be old enough to have lived without the internet, but unlike older paleocons, not old enough to have lived without television, or at least in the case of Aaron Wolf, have someone in the family keep the set off. I may be speaking for myself, but the sad fact is younger paleocons, especially those who haven’t been homeschooled or have more than one TV set in the house, are going to be touched by modernity like it or not. We are simply too far gone not to have it tinge our thinking or outlook in some way. Now that doesn’t mean we’re watching Entertainment Tonight with great interest, but it does mean we are quite aware of the culture we are in right now and have been shaped by it even in the smallest of ways and simply cannot just give up what we’ve liked in the past or forget what we’ve seen or heard even though we read Chronicles now. It may very well be that Bono and his bandmates are pretentious hypocrites in social activism like a lot of celebrities (being Irish tax cheats for example) but I have always liked their music.

It would not bother me in the least if in the future the Rockford Institute board made a rule that any future editor of Chronicles be home schooled in the Classics. I would support it wholeheartedly if only to preserve the character of the magazine because it will be difficult for those coming out of the current educational system to have the same kind of education as the older paleocons have had. The tough standards in many fields are gone, they’ve become completely politicized, and it’s much easier to get through school today since educators are more concerned with handing out diplomas through the assembly line so kids can have their golden ticket into the middle class in order to pay off their debts. The whole point of founding the Rockford Institute 30 years ago, as founder John Howard told the JRC banquet audience, was to counterbalance the trends within society and culture that were taking place in the aftermath of the 1960s that made it difficult for Rockford College to fulfill its mission in educating young minds. Does anyone not believe the situation is far worse now than it was back then?

When the older paleocons are gone and the younger ones move into their place, it will undoubtedly change the way movement thinks of itself.

2). The culture wars are coming to a close. The Rockford Institute was founded just as those wars were underway and paleoconservatism itself is a reaction to those wars within the larger culture and within conservatism itself.
Since many of those cultural struggles took place on college campuses, let us compare those same campuses back then when my parents went to school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and to the era when I went to college at the UW (and my brother and sister too because they are four years older and younger than I am respectively).

When my parents were in school, social activism and protesting were the “in” things to do at that time. When I went to school? The biggest crowds were for sporting events. A good protest when I went to school would have drawn 3,000-5,000 people down State St. or in Library Mall. That number would have been considered paltry back in the 1960s and the idea that sports would be the most important social event on campus would have been preposterous (especially when the football and basketball teams at UW back then were lousy to mediocre and few cared about them). The biggest crowds for anything political when I was school were a candidate rallies for Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton. That hardly compares to Dow Day, The Black Strike, the GE Strike and the Kent State-Cambodia protests.

The late UW history professor George Mosse once said that despite all the turmoil on campus (including the bombing of Sterling Hall) he truly missed the students of the ‘60s because their interests were a lot broader than where the coolest house party will be on a Saturday night which meant they were probably more attentive in class. In many ways, college has become an extension of high school only without the parents around. Where parties and sporting events take precedent over intellectual aspirations and where a college diploma now, as a high school diploma was back then, is a ticket to the middle class. Everyone is simply waiting to get into the job market.

So the passions that once animated baby boomers as students that they carried with them through adulthood will pass as they grow old and die. My generation (X if you want to call it that although nobody asked me) and I would say the generation afterwards has no passions. If all we’re focused on is personal wealth creation, who has time for passions? The debates that engaged my fellow poli sci students were along Democratic-Republican lines, not over grand ideas or changing the world. The College Republicans and Democrats are organizations whose main focus is basically teaching youngsters how to become dirty politicians and as job placement firms for activists in Washington or the local state capital.

If there is one main ethos to my generation’s politics it’s live and let live. We’ve never been interested in telling others to “Be like us or else!” I think as the cultural wars fade into history, it will be important for younger paleos to shift the locus of the movement from such wars to decentralization. As Bill Kaufman said: “Let Utah be Utah and let San Francisco be San Francisco!” Most of my generation would not have a problem with that and think as the U.S. empire eventually falls apart as all empires eventually do, the aftermath politically and socially will be towards developing thousands of Little Americas, each communities set up by like-minded people. This will especially be true if immigration patterns do not change at all in the next 50 years. The nationalist/localist divide that I perceive within paleoconservatism will be settled by the movement of one’s feet.

A good example of this took place in my home state of Wisconsin this past election. Conservatives wanted to add a measure banning homosexual marriage into the state constitution. Republicans made sure this got on the ballot in the hopes of ginning up turnout in their favor. Instead, it backfired. While the measure passed comfortably, many Republicans in the state legislature, especially those in districts with college towns, lost their seats because of a backlash of younger voters against them. Again, the live and let live ethos speaks for itself.

3). What are we creating for future generations? Chilton Williamson Jr. nailed it during a column in a recent issue of Chronicles. What are we, as young paleocons, writing or creating that is relevant, new or long lasting? If all we are doing is just blogging or writing internet columns, heck that’s what Jonah Goldberg does too everyday. What does it say when National Review Online is more relevant to so-called conservatives than National Review the magazine?

Austin Bramwell also put it well in his recent American Conservative article:

“Whatever its past accomplishments, the conservative movement no longer kindles any “ironic points of light.” It has produced fewer outstanding books even as it has taken over more of the intellectual and political landscape. This trend will only continue. Worse, no reckoning will be made: they hope in vain who expect conservatives to take responsibility for the actual consequences of their actions. Conservatives have no use for the ethic of responsibility; they seek only to “see to it that the flame of pure intention is not quelched.” The movement remains a fine place to make a career, but for wisdom one must look elsewhere.”

I recently went to a Borders book store to buy a DVD for my father’s birthday and was just amazed at the number of books in the politics section. The problem was, for all the quantity of books out there, the quality is just utter crap. Most are either ghost-written screeds from talk-show hosts or pundits, self-serving biographies or short-term political party strategy books.

My next two books will be works of fiction and hopefully find a broader audience than my first book and hopefully better myself as a writer. We don’t always need to write non-fiction to get our point across. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien made their point quite well with fiction and the rest of the world thought so too. There’s nothing better in writing than a good story and if we can’t tell them then we’ll be truly lost in modernity.

4). There is a movement out there. I read a story in a newspaper recently about a small town in rural Virginia that’s trying to use what has to sell itself as a place live rather than sell out to the god of progress and try to lure some big industry to town with basket full of tax breaks or build big box stores over cornfields. That’s important because it shows that resistence to globalization isn’t just confined to leftist college towns. One can find it all across the country in the rural areas of the Midwest, West, South and New England or what remains of cohesive neighborhoods in large cities.

Rod Dreher hit upon this with his book Crunchy Cons. Now I think Dreher should be sued for plagerism because much of what he’s written about comes right out the pages of Chronicles itself but I’m sure TRI is content to know its work has not been done in isolation. What thiis shows is that there is a large pool of tradition-minded, local-minded, patroon-like people out there caught in between the squeeze of multiculturalism, globalism, the mammon worshippers and the neoconservatives. This is why we’ve rejected the conservative movement, because it wasn’t about conserving anything anymore and because we couldn’t figure out which side of the “fusionist” coalation its victories were due to. Not to mention the fact its promoters are some of the most repulsive, annoying and stupid people on earth.
A Georgia farmer can call himself a conservative like his neighbors do, but if he willingly takes his peanut-subsidy from Feds, what good is his conservatism? For many its simply a standard of tribal loyalty they’ve really give little thought to other than they know who they are and who the “other” isn’t as Bramwell also points out:

“Conservatism is entertaining. Understanding the world, though rewarding, provides nothing like the pleasures of a “Two Minute Hate,” a focused, ritualized denunciation of enemies. To induce its own Two Minute Hates, conservatism, like Ingsoc in 1984, manufactures bogeymen such as “judicial activists,” “so-called realists,” or “moral relativists” that become symbolic representations of detested outsiders. Meanwhile, like the Inner Party in 1984, conservative leaders tolerate the more vulgar, angry purveyors of ideology—think talk-show hosts or authors of bestselling political books. The most vicious attacks, meanwhile, are reserved for turncoats, like Goldstein in 1984. (Of course, as many paleoconservatives could attest, the hatred is usually mutual.) Rooting for conservative ideology is as engrossing to its partisans as rooting for the local football team is to its fans.
The roots of ideology lie deep in our cognitive limitations and instinct for group loyalty. One could make similar observations of any ideology. The most distinguishing feature of conservatism is its misleading name. Lexically, “conservatism” denotes caution, prudence, and resistance to change. Conservatism the ideology, however, has if anything tended towards recklessness. “Nuke ‘em!” has always been a popular conservative sentiment, never more so than today with respect to the Muslim world. For frantic boast and foolish word / Thy mercy on thy people Lord!

No movement can exist without ideas, likeminded people and a place where they all come together. Certainly the original conservative movement could not have existed without a book like Witness and a place like Southern California. With TRI and other institutions we can create the ideas, with magazines like Chronicles and the American Conservative and a book like The Politics of Human Nature along with a few leaders we can find and bring together the likeminded people and with decentralization we can create the places where it all comes together.

--Sean Scallon

Good-Bye to All That - A former National Review trustee surveys the wreckage of contemporary conservatism.

2006-11-21T09:02:00.000-08:00

I'll be back with some new material including my promised "Thoughts of a Young Paleo" after Thanksgiving. Until then chew on this intertesting article from Austin Bramwell, former board member of the National Review on the death of the conservative movement. Now is the time we start a new movement.

---Sean Scallon

Good-bye to All That

A former National Review trustee surveys the wreckage of contemporary conservatism.

by Austin W. Bramwell

Until recently, it has been almost impossible for me to speak candidly about the conservative movement, for it was my strange fate to serve as director and later trustee of the movement’s flagship journal, National Review. Earlier this year, at William F. Buckley’s request, I resigned both positions. I can therefore now declare what perhaps has oft been thought but never, at least not often enough, expressed. Notwithstanding conservatives’ belief that they, in contrast to their partisan opponents, have thought deeply about the challenges facing the United States, it is they who have become unserious.

The unseriousness began not long after 9/11. On Oct. 15, 2001, for example, National Review—still the most powerful brand in conservative opinion, whose pronouncements the movement must either accept or at least refrain from challenging—wrote, in an editorial entitled “At War: Defining Victory”:

The logic of a ‘war on terrorism’ points beyond itself. … The phrase is meant to suggest that our hostility is not confined to those people who can be proved to have materially aided the attacks of September 11. It encompasses all those who mean to do our people harm. … Bombing bin Laden, if we find him, will not end [this war]. Nor will overthrowing the Taliban. Victory requires either changing the regimes of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, and Sudan, or frightening them enough to change their behavior towards us.

“Defining Victory” describes the post-9/11 world in terms that have since become familiar. First, it insists on a war that has no definite enemy and no foreseeable end. Short of one-world despotism or universal brotherhood, the U.S. cannot literally defeat “all those who mean to do our people harm.” To trim the hyperbole, NR goes on to name five examples of potential enemies (plus, in later editorials, Saudi Arabia) but does not explain how the list was generated or whether it is even complete. The reader gathers only that we should threaten or go to war with an unspecified number of troublesome nations.

Second, the editors use the term “war” in a purely figurative sense. At the time of the editorial, the U.S. was not at war with Syria, Sudan, or Iran nor, realistically speaking, with any other nation on the list. No matter how vulnerable or despised, no Muslim nation can be turned into a sacrificial substitute for bin Laden. Nor, no matter how often incanted, can the phrase “at war” be made to describe an actual state of affairs. A rhetorical bludgeon designed to compel assent to certain policies, it begs the question of whether war is advisable in the first place.

Third, “Defining Victory” does not identify a casus belli. Neither Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, nor Sudan attacked us on 9/11. Later debate would focus on the legitimacy of preventive war as a defense against future threats. All foreign nations, however, by definition pose hypothetical threats; at some point, those threats become so remote, trivial, or contingent that preventive war cannot be distinguished from an aggressive war of domination. By urging belligerence against nations with no known designs—to say nothing of any capacity—for harming the U.S., “Defining Victory” surely advocated crossing that point.

Finally, the editorial defines “victory” in terms of a goal—regime change—that war advances only incidentally. War by itself cannot cause regime change. To overthrow and replace a government militarily, one must either invade and occupy a country (a technique that works best when the occupier has made a policy of slaughtering civilians en masse, as in Dresden or Hiroshima) or else so punish the civilian population that they rise up against their government. By saying, incoherently, that the United States was “at war” with a list of regimes, NR gave no indication of what policies it was actually touting.

In sum, NR declared that we were “at war” when we were not, for reasons that it did not specify, against enemies that it could not define, and to achieve goals that war does not advance. “Defining Victory” dresses up as policy but inchoate thirst for vengeance against someone, anyone who hates us. How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed / when vengeance listens to the fool's request! On Oct. 15, 2001, National Review had no position on post-9/11 foreign policy.

Nor did it find a position thereafter. In December 2001 NR declared:

Even Osama bin Laden, whose humiliation and death is one of our prime war aims, is only a pustule on the diseased body of the Middle East. After Afghanistan comes Iraq. … After it comes Saudi Arabia …

A fortnight later:

If Saddam Hussein were toppled and Saudi Arabia reformed or restructured, the Middle East would be emptied of many of its poisonous humors, like a bathtub when the plug is pulled away.

Upon a metaphor and a simile—the diseased body and the wet bathtub—did National Review hang all its post-9/11 prescriptions. Yet the editors never explained what these figures actually meant. Presumably, the theory to which they allude is that (a) the Middle East suffers from certain conditions (b) that cause threats to the U.S. to emerge and (c) that by removing those conditions the threats will cease.

Thus spelled out, however, the theory behind the metaphors provides little policy guidance. First, what conditions cause threats to emerge? Lack of democracy? The world is full of non-democracies, very few of which actually threaten us. Lack of a sound ideology? Crazed ideologues are ubiquitous, even (perhaps especially) in democracies. Sophisticated Westerners can’t even agree on what democracy is. Islam itself? It is a major world religion that comes in diverse forms and which American policy cannot mould to its liking as if it were soft wax. Tyranny? Philosophers have agreed that democracy itself is a kind of tyranny.

Second, what threats emerge from the Middle East and how do the alleged conditions cause them? Terrorism? It flourishes in democracies, especially under conditions of occupation, no matter that the occupier or the occupied is democratic. Democracy may even worsen terrorism as it tends to arm terrorist groups politically as well as technologically. Nuclear proliferation? Many nations, of all ideologies, religions, and political systems, seek nuclear weapons, largely as guarantors of their security. Hostility to our ally Israel? It is Arab dictators who strike deals with Israel; anti-Zionism, by contrast, is a demotic passion.

Finally, how do you change the alleged conditions that cause the alleged threats? By what psychological techniques, for example, do you cause people to accept a new ideology? Brainwashing? Relentless propaganda? Feats of strength? And how do you go about establishing a democracy in the first place?

Each of these questions alludes to a serious policy debate. Possibly, by speaking only in metaphor, National Review was announcing that it had resolved them already and no longer needed to be troubled. If so, the editors concealed their reasoning in the dunnest haze. NR’s subsequent editorials offered one nebulous metaphor after another. After curing diseased bodies and draining bathtubs, NR was changing “the political map of the Middle East,” erecting a “new model for Middle Eastern governance,” “transforming the geopolitical balance in the Middle East,” and establishing a liberal “beachhead.” Bodies, bathtubs, swamps, maps, models, balances, beachheads: each metaphor conceals a paucity of analysis.

Despite their vacuity, the metaphors have inspired specific policies. In defending the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and possible attacks on Syria or Iran), conservatives invoke 9/11 with astonishing alacrity. I once heard an NR senior editor, a man revered for his high-mindedness, begin his defense of the Iraq occupation by reminding the audience that on 9/11 “they” attacked “us.” In his mind as in others’, the invasion of Iraq has so inescapable a connection to 9/11 that only a traitor or fool would deny it.

But the movement’s leaders have no more defined the connection between Iraq and terrorism than they have defined the war on terror. While acknowledging that the occupation of Iraq may be increasing the short-term risk of anti-American terrorism, NR nonetheless argued more recently:

If we prevail [in Iraq], we will have destroyed a dictatorship supportive of terrorism and Arab radicalism and replaced it, we hope, with a government opposed to both of those things. That will be a significant step forward in the War on Terror. … If we succeed in creating a stable, democratic Iraqi state, it will be clear that the terrorists are opposed not so much to the ‘crusaders’ and ‘occupiers’ as to the legitimate aspirations of Muslims in the Middle East. [Quoting John Negroponte] ‘[S]hould the Iraqi people prevail in establishing a stable political and security environment, the jihadists will be perceived to have failed, and fewer jihadists will leave Iraq determined to carry on the fight elsewhere.’

Never mind the conflation of “Arab radicalism”—presumably a reference to Ba’athism—with bin Laden’s Muslim jihadism (how would discrediting Saddam’s ideology discourage bin Laden’s?), the allusion to Hussein rewarding the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (how does terrorism in Israel threaten the United States?), or the assumption that foreign terrorists are driving the insurgency in Iraq (if Iraqis hate the relatively benign Americans, why would they turn over their country to a bunch of foreign wackos?). Let us observe only that the conservative movement’s best argument for staying in Iraq is that jihadists “will be perceived” differently, for “it will be clear” that they are harming Muslims at large. In short, if all goes well, the occupation of Iraq might just produce a useful propaganda victory. War as propaganda: surely this is the thinking of clownish dictators rather than mature analysts.

To justify the long-term occupation of a foreign country, the supposed propaganda victory must bring overwhelming benefits to Americans. Consider, however, what must happen before Iraqi democracy can make us safer from terrorism. First, Iraqi democracy must exist. National Review, by offering the occasional potpourri of new tactics that might or might not improve the situation, poses as the voice of maturity (neither unrealistic like the neocons nor defeatist like the cut-and-run Democrats) in the debate over whether Iraq can be salvaged. To the extent, however, that NR dares to name what forces are actually driving events in Iraq, it offers either blandishments (“we must keep the political process on track as the key to making progress on the ground”) or such naïvetes as the theory that peace and stable government have a chance in Iraq because that is what Iraqis ultimately want. Alas, if people always got what they wanted, the whole world would be well-governed. A nation cannot afford to premise its policies on the universal hope for something better.

Second, Muslims must recognize Iraqi democracy as such. Accurately perceiving “democracy,” however, requires a degree of information and political sophistication beyond most people, Muslims included. Conservatives complain, for example, that the media give Americans a distorted view of Iraq. Surely the Muslim media would do even worse. Most people around the globe, after all, dispute that even the United States is a democracy on the perfectly plausible theory (given lack of information) that Bush simply crowned himself president.

Yet even if fully informed, Muslims may still not perceive Iraq as a “democracy.” Scholars can’t even agree on the meaning the word. Joseph Schumpeter, the most penetrating modern theorist of democracy, argued in essence that “democracy” is a misnomer, while economist Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel Prize for proving (on one interpretation) that it is literally impossible for a democratic process to satisfy all relevant normative criteria of legitimacy. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people (what George Orwell in 1984 called the “proles,” or the 85 percent of the world so uninterested in politics as to have no ideology whatsoever) have not even the most basic grasp of the concepts of democracy or legitimacy. Even if everything in Mesopotamia came up roses, therefore, Muslims may never see the Iraqi government as legitimate. To do so, they would need the minds of angels, not men.

Finally, before Iraqi democracy can cure terrorism, Muslims in general, and Muslim extremists in particular, must infer from “democracy exists in Iraq” that “terrorism is wrong.” But even assuming that Muslims think logically, surely it is too much to ask them to commit a non sequitur. Democracy in Iraq will leave in place any number of grievances—our occupation of Muslim lands, our support for Israel, and our continued alliance with Muslim dictators—any one of which may continue to inspire terrorism. Ironically, conservatives pooh-pooh the danger that the occupation plays into the hands of terrorist propagandists yet blithely assume that Iraqi democracy would play into the hands of our own. To the chagrin of ideologists everywhere, however, Muslims are creatures as complex and unpredictable as the rest of us. They cannot tenderly be led by the noses as asses are, no matter that the U.S. adds Iraq to the ranks of Muslim democracies.

In short, the steps in the causal logic whereby Iraqi democracy defeats anti-American terrorism are so numerous and doubtful that it becomes impossible to believe that Bush’s supporters have ever actually thought them through. Those who wonder what error befell the conservative movement since Bush took office are asking the wrong question. Since 9/11, the conservative movement has not made unsound or fallacious arguments for supporting Bush’s policies. Rather, it has made no arguments at all. T.S. Eliot once asked, “Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?” The answer: “Nothing, again, nothing.”

It follows that Mephistophelean neoconservatives did not suddenly commandeer the conservative movement. Whatever may be said of neoconservatives, at least they know what they think. (The Weekly Standard for this reason has always been a good read.) Every nation has a faction zealous for national glory and horrified by decadence and dishonor; in the United States, a famously idealistic country, that faction emphasizes the blessings that American power confers upon all mankind. Today, we call them neoconservatives, but in some sense they have always existed.

After 9/11, neoconservatives championed any war that we waged in reaction. In this, they were acting opportunistically but not hypocritically: in their view, 9/11 is what happens when the United States suffers any challenges to its authority. The rest of the movement knew only that it wanted a ruthless response. Neoconservatism just happened to provide a convenient ideological infrastructure with which to justify metonymic revenge against some Muslim Arab or other. Before 9/11, the movement was praising modesty in foreign affairs; after 9/11, it did not so much embrace neoconservatism as blunder into it by accident.

To be sure, conservatives have hotly denied the charge of neoconservatism but never by actually disagreeing with it. (National Review Online, which now far outshadows the magazine in influence, has become the world’s most prolific organ of neoconservative opinion.) In an article in The National Interest, for example, NR editor Rich Lowry and an anonymous co-author contrasted neoconservatism to what they called the “Reagan synthesis.” The Reagan synthesis, as they describe it, endorses the neoconservative project of expanding liberty abroad and exerting American power as a force for good but nonetheless recognizes that foreign policy “should be prudent, flexible, aware of power relationships and immune to juvenile excess.” When exactly do prudence and awareness of power relationships conflict with the imperative to spread the blessings of American power abroad? The authors do not say. The grand Reagan synthesis turns out to be nothing more than “as much neoconservatism as the world lets us get away with.” As the world has a strong tendency to frustrate neoconservative ambitions, no practical difference exists between actual neoconservatism and the authors’ neoconservatism-in-everything-but-name.

As it happens, the broader conservative public supports Bush for very sensible, non-neoconservative reasons. Those reasons just happen to be poorly informed. For example, many believe—including an astonishing 90 percent of soldiers serving in Iraq—that the U.S. invaded to retaliate against Saddam Hussein for his role in the 9/11 attacks. Now that Saddam is gone but Iraqis are still giving us trouble, they reason, we must kill them before they kill us. If Americans understood that soldiers were dying not to kill the bad guys but to prevent them from killing each other, Bush’s popularity would evaporate.

The movement’s leaders may be better informed, but they have no clearer idea of what they actually think. What they need is analysis: the skeptical tradition extending from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Hamilton, and Burnham that seeks to understand the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be. Analysis, however, requires intellect, but the movement’s mainstream, perhaps to avoid embarrassment (some mainstream figures favorably compared Bush not just to Ronald Reagan but to Abraham Lincoln), has increasingly ostracized its brightest minds.

Sadly, analysis is also often lacking outside the mainstream movement. Every movement throws off disgruntled outsiders (conservatives sometimes call them “paleoconservatives”) who feel bitterly their loss of power. They write obsessively, sometimes quite fancifully, on the alleged perfidies of the mainstream. Often, however, their critiques want credibility.

Some, for example, carry on the Cold War obsession with the so-called “crisis of the West.” Convinced that history at some point took a wrong turn, they pore over ancient texts in search of some Hermetic insight into the fatal error. (Not surprisingly, this approach has little popular appeal, although it still commands respect among professional conservatives.) The notion of a crisis of the West, however, grossly overestimates the importance of ideas; indeed, it requires an unphilosophical and almost paranoid ability to treat ideologies (most conspicuously, liberalism) as living, breathing omnipresences to which intentions, tactics, strategies, feelings, disappointments, and conflicts can all be attributed. Believers in the crisis of the West rest almost their entire worldview on an elusive notion—modernity—borrowed from a half-formed science—sociology. Crisis-of-the-West conservatism, at one time a fruitful response to the calamities of the 20th century, has become more a posture than a genuine school of thought.

Another group pleads for the conservative movement to return to its alleged first principles. “If only people would still read Russell Kirk,” one hears. But the movement never had any first principles to begin with. Although it boasts a carefully husbanded canon of supposedly foundational texts, the men who wrote them—Kirk, Strauss, Voegelin, Weaver, Chambers, Meyer—were notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure. Russell Kirk, for example, even as he shrewdly positioned himself as the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement, had almost no political opinions whatsoever.

Still others eulogize local attachments and ancestral loyalties. They invoke a litany of examples: family, church, kin, community, school, the “little platoons” in which Burke found the basis of political association. Celebrating such “infra-political” institutions may well have made sense in the 1950s, the high tide of American nationalism and federal government prestige. At most other times, however, ancestral attachments are dangerously subversive. The U.S. could not have survived had it not ruthlessly extirpated the ancestral loyalties of both natives and newcomers; Great Britain suffered endless civil wars before the great constitutional oak that Burke praised took root; the West itself succeeded precisely because it cut short the reach of the extended family or clan. Ancestral loyalties are the curse of uncivilized peoples, most especially in the hypermnesiac Middle East. Most ominously, praise of local attachments now comes in the guise of multiculturalism, perhaps the most insidious threat to a just order today. Not for nothing did communitarianism become a left-wing vogue.

For all their philippics, disgruntled conservatives remain decidedly of the movement, if not in it, for they share with the mainstream the fundamental conceit that conservatism exists to advance some core set of beliefs or principles. Like a soul animating a body, these principles allegedly guide, smooth or grim, all the movement’s institutions, programs, publications, alliances, tactical feints, and shifting positions. Hence, even those outside the mainstream keep the faith that the movement will not stray forever. Conservatism, in this view, can no more betray its principles than the God of Abraham can betray His covenant with Israel.

But “conservatism” has no mystical essence. Rather than a magisterium handed down from apostolic times, it is an ideology whose contours are largely arbitrary and accidental. By ideology, I mean precisely what Orwell depicted in 1984. I do not mean, of course, that conservatism is totalitarian. Taken as prophecy, 1984 has little merit. Taken as a description of the world we actually live in, however, it is indispensable. 1984 reveals not the horrors of the future but the quotidian realities of ideology in mass democracy. Conservatism exemplifies them all.

First, like Ingsoc, conservatism has a hierarchical structure. Like Orwell’s “Inner Party,” those at the top of the movement have almost perfect freedom to decide what opinions count as official conservatism. The Iraq War furnishes a telling example. In the run-up to the invasion, leading conservatives announced that conservatism now meant spreading global democratic revolution. This forthright radicalism—this embrace of the sanative powers of violence—became quickly accepted as the ineluctable meaning of conservatism in foreign policy. Those who dissented risked ostracism and harsh rebuke. Had conservative leaders instead argued that global democratic revolution would not cure our woes but increase them, the rest of the movement would have accepted this position no less quickly. Millions of conservative epigones believe nothing less than what the movement’s established organs tell them to believe. Rarely does a man recognize, like Winston Smith, his own ideology as such.

Second, conservatism is concerned less with truth than with distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker. At the same time, to rise in the movement, one must develop a habitual obliviousness to truth, or what Orwell labeled “doublethinking.” Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

Third, and closely related to doublethinking, the conservative movement engages in selective editing of history. When events have a tendency to disconfirm ideology, down the memory hole they go. Thus, conservatives do not recall their dire warnings about the Soviet Union during the Cold War or about the economy after the Bush I or Clinton tax increases. On the Iraq invasion, they will not remind you of their claims that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, that the world would soon be applauding the Iraq invasion, or that events in Lebanon and the Ukraine heralded global democratic revolution. Nor will conservatives remind you of their predictions that the insurgency’s demise was imminent, that Saddam Hussein and then Zarqawi were the Big Men of the insurgency, or that the insurgency consisted largely of foreign jihadis. As in 1984, the ability to forget that any of these events ever occurred signals one’s loyalty to the movement. (Hence, the rise of hawkishness against Iran, not four years after the last effort to sell a war to an otherwise balky public.) To prove his loyalty to the emperor, everyone must compliment him on his new clothes. The most loyal believe that the emperor is wearing clothes to begin with.

Fourth, conservatism is entertaining. Understanding the world, though rewarding, provides nothing like the pleasures of a “Two Minute Hate,” a focused, ritualized denunciation of enemies. To induce its own Two Minute Hates, conservatism, like Ingsoc in 1984, manufactures bogeymen such as “judicial activists,” “so-called realists,” or “moral relativists” that become symbolic representations of detested outsiders. Meanwhile, like the Inner Party in 1984, conservative leaders tolerate the more vulgar, angry purveyors of ideology—think talk-show hosts or authors of bestselling political books. The most vicious attacks, meanwhile, are reserved for turncoats, like Goldstein in 1984. (Of course, as many paleoconservatives could attest, the hatred is usually mutual.) Rooting for conservative ideology is as engrossing to its partisans as rooting for the local football team is to its fans.

None of this is to suggest that conservatism is uniquely pernicious. The roots of ideology lie deep in our cognitive limitations and instinct for group loyalty. One could make similar observations of any ideology. The most distinguishing feature of conservatism is its misleading name. Lexically, “conservatism” denotes caution, prudence, and resistance to change. Conservatism the ideology, however, has if anything tended towards recklessness. “Nuke ‘em!” has always been a popular conservative sentiment, never more so than today with respect to the Muslim world. For frantic boast and foolish word / Thy mercy on thy people Lord!

Whatever its past accomplishments, the conservative movement no longer kindles any “ironic points of light.” It has produced fewer outstanding books even as it has taken over more of the intellectual and political landscape. This trend will only continue. Worse, no reckoning will be made: they hope in vain who expect conservatives to take responsibility for the actual consequences of their actions. Conservatives have no use for the ethic of responsibility; they seek only to “see to it that the flame of pure intention is not quelched.” The movement remains a fine place to make a career, but for wisdom one must look elsewhere.

A victory for reality - The real meaning of the 2006 mid-term elections

2006-11-16T10:15:00.000-08:00

The recent mid-term elections were nicely framed between the “reality-based” community and the Bush II Administration, as this quote from journalist and author Ron Suskind shows:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Thus like ancient gods of myth and lore did the Bush II Administration believe they could create the reality in the world we all live in all by themselves. And when you control the most powerful military the world ever seen, one has the means to make all sort of realities I suppose.

But alas the would-be gods have failed and their failure was confirmed in the latest accountability moment. It seems that other people and forces have a way of affecting reality too besides “history’s actors” and ultimately they bended reality to their will rather than the Administration’s.

Those realities include the Iraq insurgency, which was a reality none in the Administration admittedly foresaw or chose to ignore despite repeated warnings. Then there was the reality of hurricane Katrina, an act of Mother Nature that was compounded in its magnitude by governmental incompetence that shattered any illusions that “history’s actors” could read their lines. The Mark Foley scandal exposed the reality that there was a culture of corruption that permeated throughout the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress, not mention a homosexual cabal that occupied staff level positions of a party who’s members often preach their damnation. Then there was the reality of our undefended borders that in this age of 9-11 and mass immigration that can no longer be kept out of sight and mind. All these realties combined until the voters finally realized what was reality and what was fantasy.

Reality bites, doesn’t it?

Thus reality got its revenge against those who thought they could control
it, shape it, fix it, spin it, and do whatever they could to make reality conform to their own fantasies. In doing this, the current Administration has shown themselves to be no better than their predecessors when it creating illusions they tried to pass off as reality, which is interesting when you recall that they were supposedly elected in a backlash against the Clintonite spinmeisters. I guess you can’t beat them, join ‘em.

Yet, to the end, history’s actors tried to prove all was well and prove that they could not be defeated. Supposedly reality was microtargeting Republican voters, 72-hour Projects, spending millions more than their opponents and residing in safe, gerrymandered districts. They tried to convince the reality-based community everything was going there way with help from their allies: the conservative radio talk-show enablers, the pundits and bloggers all across the nation.

But then came the final reality that they could not control, actual votes. And when those votes were counted the reality was they were out of power on Capital Hill and in many statehouses and they could not act to change it. Money and political machinery are nice things to have, but the reality in politics is that no amount of machine muscle or TV commercials change voters mind when events, real events, dominate their thinking. And Iraq and Capital Hill corruption were plainly on their minds as they entered the voting booth.

Thus the fantasy that history’s actors tried to pass off as reality was shattered into itsy-bitsy pieces and first to feel the affects was Donald Rumsfeld. Whether the rest of the Administration sees the world the way it is rather than how they wish it to be remains to be seen. As far as their allies go, some have reacted better to being hit upside the head by the reality 2x4 than others. In full spin mode have the Limbaughs and Hannitys describe the election as a victory for conservatism and call for the GOP to return to so-called Reaganite principals. That’s a funny statement considering that even Ronald Reagan never lived up to own principals, so why should we think far lesser men will be able to do so? The true reality of Reagan as far conservative principals go is less than the mythology that has been created around him. That myth is largely based on the Reagan the campaigner, not Reagan the governor of California or Reagan the President. To believe the reality the talk-show jokers are trying to create, you would have to believe that a group of alien body-snatchers took control of the GOP and only pretended to act like Republicans and that if we just get rid of them all will be right once again.

But alas, the reality is old conservative movement is long since gone away what has replaced it is in reality, right-wing social democracy masquerading as conservatism. What is needed is not a return to a past that never was, but a new movement altogether. Once that is based on what’s real, like blood, soil and faith, rather than the unrealities of finance, power and self-righteous hypocrisy. Only then will we all be back in the real world instead of arrogantly trying to create it in our own image.

---By Sean Scallon

No we won't all be speaking Arabic next year

2006-11-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

This article was sent to be by Doug Newman.
---Sean Scallon

NO, WE WON'T ALL BE SPEAKING ARABIC NEXT YEAR
By Doug Newman

November 9, 2006

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Lies are powerful things. Hitler knew that if you just tell lies often enough -- no matter how outrageous they might be -- people will believe them. Just keep lying and lying and lying.

For the 14,425th time, George W. Bush is not Adolph Hitler. However, he and his spin doctors also know the power of lies. Ever since September 11, 2001, they have told the American people countless times that We Are At War With Terrorists Who Seek to Take Away Our Freedom And Undermine Our Very Way Of Life.

Millions of Americans believe that Osama bin Laden wants to take over the world, when he hasn’t even taken over Afghanistan. Millions of Americans still support a war in Iraq, a nation which even GWB admits had nothing to do with 9/11. Millions of Americans still believe that Osama and Saddam posed a clear and present threat to what was left of America’s freedom. Millions of Americans support a domestic police state to thwart these threats.

Just scare people enough and -- if they lack any moral convictions -- they will believe anything.

GWB wants us to believe that you are with him or you are with "the terrorists". The Democrats' triumphs in Tuesday's election have already been called a "win" for "the terrorists." As someone said to me last weekend, "If it weren't for Bush, we'd all be speaking Arabic!"

On that horrible afternoon of September 11, I received an e-mail from an old friend which has turned out to be downright prophetic.

The subject line read: “They Want You to Panic...”

The body of the e-mail read, in part, as follows:

“...So don't.

“I already have had enough conversations with people across the country (via phone) to know that the sheeple are thinking everyone is a target and are losing any remaining common sense because of other people who have become detached from reality by this horrific act.

“Please: The nation is on these bastards' menu -- not you, personally.

“I know this is going to sound horrifically insensitive, but the fact that what amounted to -- militarily speaking -- a strategic pinprick can bring a nation's people to a state of disarray we're seeing unfold (even as I type this initial response) gravely concerns me. As terrible as this may sound, ultimately, it is the financial blow -- both real and perceived -- that will concern you and yours. I have even greater concerns...

“Yes, pray for the dead, the dying, the injured and their loved ones, but NEVER lose sight of the fact that many more people gave their lives over the past 226 years to make sure you live and breathe in Freedom -- relative Freedom though it may be these days. Do NOT go off the deep end and cry for ‘more security’ at the cost of your basic Liberty. Believe me -- there are powerful men who will willingly accommodate you at ANY cost.

“This nation no longer shares the same collective soul we did in 1941 -- or even 1962. We have, in recent years, become a nation of cowards who believe we can legislate our way to safety and security. We have to be better than that now. We have to be much better than that now. We have to be strong. We have to act in concert, BUT AS FREE MEN -- not as national socialists.

“America: Scream for their heads to be handed to you on a platter, not your own.

“So, while you're not panicking, and if you are of a mind to see farther than the latest newscasts' ill-informed speculation, please take this one warning to heart: The enemy from without is a far less formidable threat to our Liberty than the one presented by the enemy from within.

“From one who loves his country and zealously guards its welfare against all enemies -- foreign, domestic and elected:

“God Bless America and the Republic for which it stood.

“In respectful memory of those who died the Day America Changed,”

Ever since 9/11, we have seen what was left of our Constitution sent through the shredder. This was done not by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, but by GWB and the U.S. government. We have seen this in the USA Patriot Act, (1) warrantless domestic spying, horrendously intrusive airport security, torture of prisoners and, now, the Military Commissions Act of 2006. (MCA 2006)

To be sure, other presidents – John Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and Clinton – have recklessly disregarded the Constitution to accomplish their ends. However, two – or five or ten or fifty – wrongs don’t make a right. (And do all you Bush groupies out there want to use Bill Clinton as your moral yardstick?)

And, no, the end did not justify the means. We are far less free in America than we were in 1798, 1861, 1918, 1942 or 1993. (Slavery was on its way out in 1861 and would have gone away without Abe Lincoln’s war.)

Is there anything less American than suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional guarantee against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment? What is American about arbitrarily arresting someone and detaining them indefinitely with no presumption of innocence, no right to face their accuser, no right to see all the evidence against them, no jury of their peers, no right to obtain witnesses in their favor or any other aspect of due process of law?

(If I had lunch with Keith Olbermann, I would probably enjoy talking baseball with him. Politics, on the other hand, would spark a few disagreements. However, his commentaries on MCA 2006 are among the most eloquent political observations in recent times.) (2)

But we are at war, you say, and don’t extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures? We have lost 2800 Americans in Iraq, supposedly in the name of fighting a rogue government. Those who survive combat tours in Iraq now come home to a land that has just taken a huge lurch in the direction of everything we say we are fighting against.

If you would trust GWB to exercise prudently his newfound authority under MCA 2006, let me ask you two questions. First, would you trust Bill Clinton with such power? Second, would you trust a future Democratic president -- say, Hillary Clinton -- with such power?

Norman Vincent Peale once remarked that “Americans used to roar like lions for liberty. Now they bleat like sheep for security.” If, as the neocons want us to believe, Osama Bin Laden wants to bring America to its knees, he has, with GWB's help, been quite successful.

Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano recently pointed out that freedom was not attacked on September 11. America was attacked. Freedom was subsequently attacked by GWB’s drastic expansion of police powers.

Terror is a tactic that has been around at least since the French Revolution. While terrorists are horrible people who deserve severe punishment for their crimes, there is no unified terrorist front hell bent on world domination. A global war against a tactic is a totally illogical idea.

"The terrorists" have not even taken over Afghanistan, so it is preposterous to think they can take over the world. It is similarly preposterous to believe that Democratic majorities will result in us "all speaking Arabic" come the middle of next year.

It is not "the terrorists" who threaten what is left of our freedom. It is our own government.

It is not "the terrorists" who are recklessly “undermining our very way of life” in America. It is our own government. And they are doing so with our blessing.

But, hey, you know, like, I’ll give up my freedom for a time so that the feds can do what they need to do to fight terrorists. And when they get their victory over the terrorists, then I’ll get my freedom back.

Like totally, dude. Just how much freedom will you give up and for how long? In 1933, the German people gave up their freedom – like, totally -- for the promise of security. They got it back in 1945.

But I am not a terror suspect. What do I have do worry about?

To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemoller, who spent eight years in prison for opposing Hitler:

When they came for the dope smokers, you did not say anything because you were not a dope smoker. When they came for the Branch Davidians, you did not say anything because you were not a Branch Davidian. When they came for the terror suspects, you did not say anything because you were not a terror suspect.

When they come for you will you still be able to say anything?

Intrusions on freedom frequently start out mildly. In 1935, no one could have envisioned that your every move and transaction could be tracked by means of your Social Security Number. In 1913, the original income tax had a top rate of six percent.

If the screening process at airports is any indicator, we are all terror suspects already. Someone far wiser than I am has stated that, on September 11, 2001, horrible crimes were committed. On September 12, 2001, the American people became suspects.

Freedom is being attacked, but not by "the terrorists." Freedom is being attacked by GWB and the government over which he presides.

And freedom must be defended.

Calhoun puts blame on GOP losses right where it belongs

2006-11-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

William Calhoun cries J'Accuse! to the neocons who caused the GOP defeat at the polls. Like me he calls for a new cosnervative movement with them left out on the fringes where they belong, to brood in the dark.

---Sean Scallon

GOP Losses the Fault of NeoCons
By William H. Calhoun

What does the 2006 election signify? What should conservatives do? On email lists, I have been hearing the same story: "It's the fault of the neocons." "These neocons have completely screwed us over." And you know what, they are right.

Conservatives should whole-heartedly rebuke the neocons and their reptilian allies. Neocons should be removed from places of power. They should be fired from editorial positions. And, in some cases, they should be deported.

According to almost all exit polls, the primary issue in this election was the war in Iraq - an unnecessary neocon war. The irrational transformation of the Middle East to democracy is hardly conservative. It is Jacobean; it is Wilsonian utopianism. Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, criticized the first Iraq war for these reasons, and predicted the horrors to come from these ideologues who "mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States."

The second greatest issue was corruption, much of which can be traced to neocon sources. Whether the lying about WMDs, making bribes or seeking to undermine American sovereignty with the NAFTA superhighway, neocons have been front and center in these scandals.

The third issue of importance was free trade, which helped to decide the Senate races in Ohio and Missouri. Free trade has destroyed the American economy, and it must end. Historically, conservatives have opposed free trade. Russell Kirk and other traditional conservatives noted the destructive tendencies of free trade; it undermines first-world markets and national sovereignty. Real conservatives do oppose free trade, but many in the GOP have been "neoconned" on this issue.

Despite the neocon lies in the media, Americans still overwhelmingly oppose increases in both legal and illegal immigration. Every candidate – Democrat or Republican – was running on a platform to reduce immigration. Recent Zogby polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans prefer an enforcement-only approach to any path-to-citizenship treason. Unlike John McCain, Bush and Linda Chavez, most Americans do not want to see the US become a third-world cesspool. American voters punished House Republicans because of Iraq, not immigration.

What would be done in a just world? All neocons should be removed from the Republican Party. First of all, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should be ousted. Neocon publications like Weekly Standard, American Spectator, Wall Street Journal, First Things, and Commentary should be condemned. Thugs like Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol and Podhoretz should be expatriated.

David Frum, Feith, and Ledeen should be removed from US soil. Propagandists like Medved, Krauthammer, Jaffa, Jonah Goldberg, and Neuhaus should be ostracized. The neocon henchmen like Specter, McCain, Condoleezza Rice, Fred Barnes, David Brooks and Andrew "Bareback" Sullivan (all radical left-wing activists in disguise) should be shut out from all discussion. And traitors like Alberto Gonzales, Linda Chavez, and Gutierrez should all be deported to Mexico.

Real conservatives (such as those you would find at the American Conservative or Chronicles Magazine) have been vindicated. They have always been right about these traitorous Trotskyites.

This neocon stranglehold on "conservatism" must end. Neocons have done more to kill conservatism than a whole army of Leftists. The neocon, in short, is the conservative's worst enemy. Neocons delendi sunt!

-----------
William H. Calhoun is a conservative, writer and graduate of the University of Chicago. He can be reached at williamhcalhoun@yahoo.com

Time magazine article about FSP

2006-11-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

This article on the Free State Project appears in the latest issue of Time Magazine.
--Sean Scallon

How to Stage a Coup, American-Style
Libertarian activists are moving to a state where they'll have maximum clout

By NATHAN THORNBURGH
Posted Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006

If Ron Helwig can join the revolution, then so can you. All you have to do is believe, as Helwig does, that the government has gone way too far in regulating your personal life, taxing your income and invading your privacy. And, of course, you have to move to New Hampshire.

That's exactly what the affable computer programmer from Minnesota did this year. He's a new member of the Free State Project, a group of like-minded libertarians from around the U.S. whose goal is to come together in the tiny New England state in sufficient numbers to create a libertarian showroom for the rest of the country.

The Free State idea was the brainchild five years ago of Jason Sorens, then a grad student in political science at Yale. Card-carrying libertarians make up just under 1% of voters around the country, a number that has made them achingly irrelevant in national politics. Sorens argued in online forums and later at political events that if 20,000 libertarians would move to the same small state, they would no longer be in the electoral wilderness. They could finally make a difference and show the rest of America what real liberty looks like--the kind where you don't have to wear seat belts or register your guns and nobody passes laws about what the neighbors can do in their bedroom.

By 2003 thousands had agreed in principle to make the move once a total of 20,000 had signed on. They settled on New Hampshire as their destination. The state's motto, after all, is LIVE FREE OR DIE, and its low taxes and high regard for minding your own damn business proved irresistible. Republican officials were delighted. "Come on up," Craig Benson, the Governor at the time, told them. "We'd love to have you."

At a recent Free State Project meet-and-greet in Deerfield thrown by Helwig and his two housemates, also Minnesotan émigrés, it was clear that 20,000 is an ambitious goal. No more than a few dozen movement members from around the state showed up for the beer and pizza. In all, fewer than 200 have moved to New Hampshire in the past three years. "Getting libertarians to do anything together is like herding cats," groused a partygoer.

It would be wrong to write off the Free Staters entirely, though. Those who have moved have been putting on a display of rambunctious, representative democracy. Some prefer civil disobedience and street demonstrations: one was recently arrested at a local IRS office handing out pamphlets that said, "Hitler had a revenue service too." Although the Free State Project doesn't endorse political candidates, some members have been making competitive runs for local office, including some staunch home-schooling advocates who have been elected to local school boards. With one state legislator for every 3,000 or so citizens (the best ratio of any state), New Hampshire has a proud tradition of hyper-representative government, but as in the rest of the country, many of its citizens are apathetic about politics. By simply showing up and speaking out at public meetings, the Free Staters are filling the participatory void. They helped block a statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants and joined forces with elements of the two main parties to pressure the statehouse to vote down a pilot program for a national ID card.

the Republican establishment was expecting the movement to deliver loyal conservative voters, the libertarians--who want to lift controls on both guns and narcotics--are proving more complicated creatures. Cathleen Converse used to be a by-the-book conservative in South Carolina. But she says that the free-spending, prying Bush Administration sped up her defection from the G.O.P. and eventually brought her husband and her to the Free State Project. "As Republicans showed their true colors," she says, "we had to choose the side of liberty." She adds, "Back home, most of the people thought we were crazy. But here, when you talk about real freedom, people actually nod their heads."

Moving to New Hampshire has given Helwig a new faith in politics. "Democracy isn't really ruled by the majority," he says. "It's ruled by the vocal minority." With more Free Staters driving their U-Hauls north each month, the vocal minority may slowly be growing a little louder.

The state within a state - The centralists better get used to it

2006-11-09T19:43:00.000-08:00

Last weekend 43 delegates from a variety of local secessionists, independence and decentralizing movements from across North America descended upon Burlington, Vermont for the first-ever North American Secessionist Convention hosted by the Middlebury Institute, the intellectual force behind the Second Vermont Republic movement.

The fact that the Philadelphia Inquirer sent a reporter to cover this event and the fact the Los Angeles Times and New York Sun did preview articles of the convention showed that this was no mere fringe grouping, as it would have been dismissed even just a few years ago. Indeed, the fact that many of people attending the conference either were or are part of academia shows there is a growing intellectual foundation for secession for the first time since the War Between the States.

It may very well be that such dreams of secession for say, Hawaii or Alaska or even the South once again, may very well be just that, just dreams. But as events around the world are showing, there are ways to declare one’s independence on a de facto basis, whether it is secession of the mind or culture, or creating parallel governments to rival the central authority.

In short, the state within a state.

The centralizers better get used to it.

It is the wave of the future.

If there was one thing that seemed to annoy the Bush II Administration more than anything about Hezbollah during its recent war with Israel, was that Hezbollah was “a state within a state,” i.e. a parallel government was operating within the bounds of sovereign state (Lebanon). Apparently the Bushes and the centralizers within the Beltway don’t like “state within states” very much. Apparently such an idea seems to run afoul of the U.S.’ global hegemony. If the U.S. is the dominant power on the globe, then there is supposedly no room for such little entities to be able to operate. Don’t they know we’re an empire now according to one administration official?

They probably do and they could care less.

Hezbollah is a good model for the state within a state. It is homogenous, meaning that it is largely made up of one particular religious, ethnic, regional or racial or economic group. In this case, Hezbollah represents the Shiites of South Lebanon. Shiites as group may make up at least 45 percent of Lebanon’s population and yet all they control within the Lebanese government is the speakership of the parliament, whatever that’s worth. Many Shiites feel Hezbollah is the only political party that represents their interests and that feeling has been created by the wide variety of social services Hezbollah provides to the residents of rural South Lebanon and the slums of South Beirut. In so doing, Hezbollah, like an old U.S. political machine, maintains its political control for the goodies it hands out, like free medical care or money to rebuild bombed out homes thanks to the IAF. Since the Lebanese government has been unwilling or unable to help the Shiites, Hezbollah has stepped in and filled the vacuum and the residents have given Hezbollah their loyalties, like it or not. Such bonds helped the Hezbollah guerillas fight off the Israeli Defense Forces thanks to an extensive tunnel network, local intelligence and safe houses to hide in as well.

There are other examples as well. Sadr City in Baghdad, for all intents and purposes, is a state within a state. That's something that drives the U.S. military in Iraq up a wall because their enemy, the radical cleric Motaqda Al-Sadr, can act with impunity thanks to the loyalty of the 2.1 million Shiites who live in the slum and give its loyalty to Sadr’s Mahdi Army. No doubt another Hezbollah is in the making and this one has its guns targeted at U.S. soldiers. Meanwhile in Mexico, presidential candidate Lopez-Obrador plans on forming a parallel government after losing a disputed race with the apparent president –elect Calderon. No doubt such a parallel government will want to form in Mexico’s southern provinces where Lopez-Obrador‘s PDR did quite well and in Oaxaca state where there has been much leftist-inspired unrest. In a reverse example, regions in eastern Bolivia wish to be a state within a state to protect its natural gas resources from being nationalized from the leftist, western Bolivian government of Indian miners.

Other, less violent, states within states include Quebec and Alberta within Canada; Scotland and Wales within Great Britain; the Breton regions of France, Sicily within Italy; Catalonia and the Basque regions within Spain; Bavaria within Germany; Transylvania within Romania and Hungary; The Trans-Dneister region of Moldavia; Lapland in the Scandinavia Artic Circle as European examples. Kurdistan is a state within many states of the Middle East (and a destabilizing one at that) while Tibet is a captive state within a state inside China. Taiwan is considered a “rebellious” province.

So if such places can have “states within states,” why not the U.S.? Especially why not the U.S.? After all, modern global connecting technology like the internet and GPS satellites give such small places the opportunity to survive economically and preserve their unique cultures through independence, de facto or de jure. An independent Vermont could very well survive on its own no worse than tiny Singapore, Lichtenstein or Andorra. And even if Vermont, or New Hampshire, or the South was just independent in the mind only, such distinct regionalism is the very hallmark of the American experiment.

It should be pointed out that when the U.S. won its independence, what it did more or less was secede from the British Empire. And for much of that struggle, it governed not by the Constitution, but by the Articles of Confederation, which allowed the states a great deal of freedom within structure of the American nation. It only because of powerful economic, commercial and political interests that the convention that ultimately adopted the Constitution was called to convene. Such forces tend to be the gravitational pull of centralism. But the very technologies that are supposed to pull the world together in one globalized mass, can also pull it apart. Such technologies make persons across the globe realize there is no "golden straightjacket" that encloses them. They can "be yet separate" in mind and in fact as well, one way or another and not suffer some sort of catastrophe as the elites always warn. They just have to be brave enough to do so.

---Sean Scallon

The morning-after the accountability moment

2006-11-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

Looking at the election results from a variety of different angles:

1). Conservative Democrats indeed have risen again. The party smarty figured out that their previous majorites dependended on such Tory Democrats and needed them once again and several prominent ones were elected. This is a good thing because this increases the amount of normal people within the Democratic Party and keeps them from becoming akin to French Communist/Socialist Left.

2). The culture wars maybe becoming to end, at least in some cases. The political left (not the activist left) may very well be dropping activism on cultural issues like gay marriage, gun control and abortion because it does not help them politically, especially in "red" states. This goes back to the rise of Conservative Democrats. What would keep such Democrats like Jon Tester, Heather Shuler and Jim Webb in the fold?....

3). ....The rise of economic nationalism. Many Conservative Dems are economic nationalists, not Clinton-style "New Democrats." There is little prospect for any free-trade agreements being passed through this Congress as such Dems join with liberals and many Republicans.

4). There were disappointments like the loss of the abortion ban in South Dakota, loss of some anti-immigration Congressmen and races here and there. Some success too like the election of the CP's first state legislator Rick Jore of Montana and the Free State Project electing one of its supporters to the New Hampshire legislature. Percentages for many non-major party candidates were up at least but not too many victories. Kinky Friedman crashed and burned although he at least ended the apathy surrounding Texas politics. LP had a bad, bad night overall. They may have changed their platform but they still need to find the groups that can help it increase it votes to become a factor in local politics, stressing the word, local.

5). In my neck of the woods, the Independence Party of Minnesota once again cost the DFL the governor's chair for the third election in a row and also cost it a seat in Congress. But the IP is at a crossroads now. It's perceived in many circles as DFL lite and unless it develops a strong local and regional base, voters will abandon it as a spoiler party soon enough.

Again, for non-major parties, it comes back to such parties developing strong local bases and candidacies for local offices and perhaps state legislative seats. They need to find groups of voters who can support them and give them good percentages at the polls. Otherwise they're just spinning their wheels. I said this at the beginning of 2006 and its true after election day as well.

Report on secessionist conference

2006-11-06T15:50:00.000-08:00

Here's a good report from the Philadelphia Inquirer on the first-ever North American Conference on Secession held in Middlebury, Vermont last weekend sponsored by the Middlebury Institute.

--- Sean Scallon

By Paul Nussbaum

Inquirer Staff Writer

BURLINGTON, Vt. - Separatists, unite!

That was the pitch this weekend by neo-Confederates, New England free-staters, Hawaiian nationalists, and a clutch of other dissenters who want out of the United States.

The First North American Secessionist Convention, billed as the first national gathering of secessionists since the Civil War, included an eclectic mix of conservatives, liberals, libertarians, left-wing Green Party zealots, and right-wing Christian activists.

The bearded, denim-vested representative of the Alaskan Independence Party sat next to the United Texas Republic man in his gray suit and red tie, just across from the blond pony-tailed representative of Cascadia (better known as Oregon, Washington and British Columbia).

They joined folks from such disparate groups as the League of the South, the Confederate Legion, the Free State Project, Christian Exodus, Free Hawaii, the Alliance for Democracy, the Abbeville Institute, and the Center for Democracy and the Constitution.

All agreed on one thing: their disdain for "the empire" of modern America.

The latter-day separatists inveighed against government intrusion, the influence of corporations, and the loss of individual freedoms. They castigated the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, and corruption in Congress.

"Reform is useless. Rebellion and revolution are useless," said Kirkpatrick Sale, a New York author who organized the session. "What is left? Secession."

But what about that annoying precedent of the Civil War?

That is a problem, the secessionists acknowledged.

"Abraham Lincoln really did a number on us," said Thomas Naylor, a former Duke University economics professor who is a leader of the Second Vermont Republic movement. "He convinced the vast majority of Americans that secession is illegal, immoral and unconstitutional."

At the moment, most Americans show little interest in divorcing their government. Even here in Vermont, home of one of the most active secessionist movements, only 8 percent of residents said in a recent University of Vermont poll that they favored secession.

The separatists see hope in the widespread citizen dissatisfaction with Washington. And they predict that global political unrest and natural disasters may soon push disaffected Americans toward the exit. It's only a matter of time, they insist, before so many citizens see the light that the federal government will have to let its people go.

"We have to make secession sexy, we have to make it a viable option, as it was in the first 70 years of this country's history," said Rob Williams, a Champlain College history professor who is a leader of the Second Vermont Republic, which advocates for Vermont independence. "Secession is every American's birthright."

Don Kennedy, the Louisiana author of The South Was Right, warded off the Vermont chill by wearing his gray Confederate greatcoat, which he usually reserves for Civil War reenactments. Kennedy, a leader of the League of the South, said that was as close as he intended to get to civil war.

"We're not going to repeat that," he said. "What we're talking about is not raising an army and declaring our independence tomorrow. We want to change minds. It may look impossible, but I think it's worth doing."

Some of the Northern secessionists quizzed the Southern secessionists about race. The 12-year-old League of the South has been accused by the Southern Poverty Law Center of being a white-supremacist "hate group," which the League denies.

"How can you believe in liberty and discriminate against your neighbor?" Kennedy said. "Equality before the law is something we want, and we're on the record for that."

Race was only one issue where the Southern and Northern separatists showed strains beneath their common goal. Mark Thomey, of the Louisiana chapter of the league, said an independent South would not permit abortion on demand, gun control or open borders, and would not take the Ten Commandments out of courthouses.

The Alaskan Independence Party representative, Dexter Clark, promptly asked about states that might want to permit abortion.

Thomey acknowledged that if a state "wanted to allow that immoral and heinous act to continue, it would be allowed." He said that "in a new Southern republic, states may have different ideas of how they want to order their society, and if you don't like it in Louisiana, you can get your butt out" and go to a state more to your liking.

The general tone, though, remained congenial, with animosity mostly reserved for "the empire." At the end of the day Saturday, the group adopted a Burlington Declaration, borrowing liberally from the Declaration of Independence and asserting that "any political entity has the right to separate itself from a larger body... and peaceably to establish its independence."

The obvious challenge for the group was finding a way to make its effort more than just an intellectual exercise.

"I'm glad to see it didn't implode over ideological differences," said Cory Burnell, leader of Christian Exodus, a group that says it wants to import conservative Christians to South Carolina. "At some point, though, you eventually have to see movement. The question is, how long do you give it to come to fruition?"

David Towery, a leader of the Confederate Legion, said, "I haven't been hearing how we're going to make this happen... . How do you get the majority of the people behind you and believe that this is a real possibility?"

The Politics of Rush Limbaugh: The gloomy people vs. the happy people

2006-10-30T23:12:00.000-08:00

A writer's best ideas or thoughts are based on inspiration and more often than not, that inspiration comes from other people. Some may be loath to give credit where credit is due but I am not.

So this piece is brought to you by blogger Daniel Larison (www.larison.org) courtesy of fellow blogger Clark Stooksbury (www.clarkstooksbury.blogspot.com)

Limbaugh it seemed, during one of his interminable rants, did actually say something profound or at least gave some insight on his primitive political philosophy. And no, this has nothing to do with Michael J. Fox. This actually occurred during a broadcast just after the Mark Foley scandal broke. To quote El Rushbo:

"You know, Republicans are said to be racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic. The liberal policy, liberal philosophy is to assume bad behavior, bad human behavior. They assume it, they have a condescending look toward people in general. It’s what makes them liberals. People are incapable of doing the right thing without liberals’ guidance, people are incapable of making the right decisions to get ahead in life without liberal guidance, they’re incapable of earning a decent living. . . Liberalism assumes bad human behavior and then coddles it as imperfect. After they coddle imperfect, bad human behavior, they are able to say those who judge imperfections in people and come out strong for right and wrong, the simplistic black and white, good versus evil, people who come out for law and order and so forth, they’re the sinners, because none of us are perfect. The liberals understand this, they coddle the imperfections, they create victims out of those who are imperfect, turning them into a cause celebre, and blaming the right, these Draconian, intolerant, inflexible people who judge others while ignoring their own foibles."

Such a statement is an interesting one coming from someone heading up the EIB Network's Advance Institute of Conservative Studies. For any instructor at such an institute would know that the early philosophy of the conservative movement had very much to do with man's imperfections, especially given the many Catholics who were conservative intellectuals back in the 1950s and 60s. Indeed, Larison's initial take on this is as one just dumbstruck at Limbaugh's idiocy, until he stumbles onto the answer to the politics of Rush Limbaugh:

"It will hardly come as news to anyone here that Limbaugh’s conservatism was never, ever all that terribly similar to Burkean-Kirkian conservatism. It was originally, back in the old days of the early ’90s, a rehashed low-tax, pro-market conservatism that was good on mocking bureaucratic absurdity and Clintonian pretenses but basically superficial and empty. It could even occasionally border on a sort of populism given its medium on the radio, but as Limbaugh became more successful he increasingly embraced the establishment GOP views on everything and frequently became their willing propagandist in a way that was not the case when he began. Once the debate over Iraq started, he was no longer funny and became something like a WSJ-programmed robot, reaching a particularly low point when he lent his name and popularity to the lie that Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague to help solidify the fraudulent claim in the public mind that Al Qaeda and Iraq were working together.

For a time, to the extent that he had a touchstone, it was Reagan, which meant that conservatism was made up of Reagan (and more broadly, Republican) apologetics in the same way that it has become Bush apologetics in the new generation. There was always the sickening emphasis on optimism as the core of this “conservatism” and Limbaugh never tired of reiterating (and I should know, since I listened to him often when I was growing up) that Reagan was successful because he was optimistic and that Americans love optimists (this may unfortunately be true), and liberals are tiresome and oppressive because they are not. It was always a struggle of the happy people vs. the gloomy people, which somehow translates into believing that the gloomy people think that man is flawed–because, well, that is a gloomy thing to think. If man is fallen, flawed and imperfect, optimism doesn’t seem very reasonable, but if he is perfectible and can make progress towards that perfectibility optimism is the essence of common sense.

In this sense, there is nothing surprising about Limbaugh’s embrace of the old liberal conceit that everyone is basically OK. He would almost have to think that if we just create the right conditions (for a right-liberal, this typically ought to mean less government regulation) everything in society will work out just fine. It is perhaps why Limbaugh has had no difficulty switching gears and getting on board with the Iraq project and the “freedom agenda,” since he would have no strong, principled reasons to object to social engineering as such–he just doesn’t want social engineering run by Democrats–since he must think that injustices and imperfections in the world are the result of having the wrong kinds of structures and environments around us rather than permanent features of life here below. Give people “freedom,” make the environment optimal for “opportunity” and stand back! And throw in the occasional war or two for the sake of American greatness and the glory of the superpower. That seems to sum up Limbaugh’s worldview pretty well. It says volumes about modern “conservatives” that millions of them listen to this man daily and take what he says as some kind of wisdom; it says plenty about the vapidity of popular conservatism if Limbaugh is one of its representatives."

Thus the subtitle of this article: "The Gloomy People vs. the Happy People." Again, thanks both to Mr. Larison and Mr. Stooksbury for the inspiration.

Limbaugh once admitted during a broadcast that he wore a "WIN" button back in the 1970s. "WIN" stood for "Whip Inflation Now," which was Gerald Ford's attempt to solve the inflation problem of that time through the power of positive thinking. So you can see why "optimism" as an ideology has an appeal to Limbaugh. The problem is, there's no consistency to it. If we were living during the 1930s, Limbaugh would be on side of the Democrats and the New Dealers, because they were the ones back then who were "optimistic." In fact, it may not be a stretch that Limbaugh sees himself as a latter day FDR and his radio broadcasts a modern day version of the "Fireside Chats," dishing out the daily does of "optimism" to the American people. Meanwhile, the gloomy people were the conservatives and the Republicans and they had a lot to be gloomy about. If they were a small manufacturer, they were gloomy that their plant was going to be forcibly unionized. If they were a banker, they were gloomy about the fact that they were now going to be regulated by the federal government and have to pay a progressive tax rate of 90 percent. If they were religious, they were despairing at the march of Communism and if they were an intellectual, they despaired over never seeing the old republican form of government ever again. Yep, not exactly the fun-bunch here.

Conservatism's association with gloom lasted until the 1970s when new groups began to challenge it. One such group was the "fusionists," who believed that the American people were essentially good but were being turned bad by the government. Then there were the neoconservatives, many of them former Leftists, Socialists and New Dealers themselves who brought their 1930s cheer with them along with their faith in the "masses." And along with all of them came the politicians like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp, who were tired of conservatives being portrayed as bunch of Ebenezer Scrooges or angry demagogues and were determined to put a 1970s-style happy face on conservatism.

What allowed the "optimists" to take control of the conservative movement back when it really was a movement was a philosophic vacuum that led to electoral success. The 1970s liberals began a downcast turn. They were becoming the gloomy people. It all began with the savage reaction from the chic New Left to Hubert Humphrey's "Politics of Joy," and has gone downhill ever since. Liberalism became identified with gloomy environmental forecasts about the destruction of the Earth, gloominess about nuclear war, gloominess about the economy and oil shocks and the increasing shrillness and divisiveness of the civil right movement. All of this was encapsulated in Jimmy Carter's singular "malaise" speech in 1979, which ultimately did much to undermine his presidency and liberalism in general because it gave an opening to Reagan and his Republicans charging that the Democrats and liberals had basically gave up on the American People and the American Dream and wished to live in a world of "limits." Since "limitation" was not something in the U.S. lexicon, whether as a pioneer, a homesteader or a Navy pilot, it was easy for Republicans to claim the "optimistic" label and carry it through 1984's "Morning in America," Reagan re-election campaign until the disastrous GOP convention of 1992, where the party lost the optimistic label and became not the gloomy party but the "angry party" of Clinton-haters in 1990s. That was until George Bush II's "compassionate conservatism," gave the GOP an optimistic sheen once again in 2000. Since Rush Limbaugh came to political consciousness in the late 1970s and early 1980s after his FM "stoned" age, it was natural for him to gravitate towards the happy people and thus, conservatism and the GOP. They were happy and the other side wasn't. It's that simple.

The splits within the Republican Party and within conservatism after Reagan left the scene in 1988 falls down in large part on an axis of optimist vs. gloomy, or, maybe a better term, optimist vs. realist. Gloom, for obvious reasons, is not much of a seller politically or, one would suppose, as a talk-radio radio format. The liberals can have the monopoly on gloom. But the problem the optimists have, as once described by David Frum during his better Dead Right days, is that "it prefers to avoid thinking hard about anything unpleasant." To think about anything unpleasant means being gloomy, not happy. This is why, I think, not much planning or thought was put into what a postwar Iraq would be like because the optimists naturally assumed Iraqis would welcome the U.S. liberation of their country with candy and flowers and thus all would be well after the war was over. No siren songs of warning were heeded because that would be "gloomy" thinking and that's not the way conservatives think. They think happy thoughts. And if you extend that logic even further, you can see why there was a slow federal response to Katrina, why today's so-called conservatives ignore the budget deficit and the growth of big government or the ill-affects of illegal immigration and the loss of the U.S. manufacturing base. All not happy subjects and therefore not discussed. Remember, only happy thoughts now.

So the politics of Rush Limbaugh, it seems, has nothing to do with any kind of "Burkean/Kirkian" conservatism, but a chorus of the song "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy."

---Sean Scallon

North American Conference on Secession, Nov. 3-4

2006-10-30T13:44:00.000-08:00

This post came from the Vermont Commons website and deals with a conference on secession that includes groups I talked about in my book, The Second Vermont Republic, Free State Project and the League of the South. This may very well be the first time such a meeting has taken place on a continental scale instead of just local groups. I hope it goes well or at least, isn't raided by the Feds anyway.

---Sean Scallon

Kirkpatrick Sale: The First North American Secessionist Convention
The First North American Secessionist Convention

By Kirkpatrick Sale
The Middlebury Institute, in keeping with its mission of “the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination,” is holding the First North American Secessionist Convention this fall in Burlington with a dual purpose: to assess the secessionist movement on the continent at this time and to bring together those with an interest in the movement for a discussion of strategies and policies to make it stronger.

There is a great deal of talk about secession in various quarters, picking up as the American empire continues with its illegal, ineffective, intrusive, and immoral actions here and abroad, and more and more people are thinking that, extreme as it may at first seem, it really is the most sensible of the various options for serious political action. As did the participants at the 2004 Middlebury conference that issued the Middlebury Declaration, they are finding do-nothingism intolerable, party politics a reformist dead-end, and rebellion and revolution useless and self-defeating. So if you want to lead a better life, with some democratic control over your affairs, without participating in the corrupt and dangerous system provided by this increasingly imperialistic failed state called the United States, secession seems to provide an answer.

As of this writing, over 30 people have signed up—most of them genuine representatives of state separatist movements, plus a few expert observers. They represent movements in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Alaska, the three oldest movements, the League of the South, Southern National Congress Committee, Southern Caucus, Christian Exodus, New State Movement, State of Jefferson, and groups in Texas, California, Michigan, South Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Washington City, Maine, and of course Vermont. It seems clear evidence, as Vermont’s Thomas Naylor says, that “not since the end of the Civil War has there been this much interest in political independence by the states.” (I’ll have to remind him that it was not a civil war but a war of secession, quite a different thing.)

The League of the South looks to be one of the strongest groups, with chapters in 16 states and members in ll others. It was formed in 1994, it has a national office in Arkansas, a bimonthly newpaper, a national conference, a website (Dixienet.org), and an associated LOS Institute for the study of Southern culture. Its primary goal is establishing “a free and independent Southern republic...by 1) de-legitimating the American Empire at every opportunity; 2) by proving our willingness to be servant-leaders to the Southern people; and 3) by making The League of the South a strong, viable organization that will lead us to Southern independence.” It argues that “legally speaking,” the old Confederacy still exists because it never formally surrendered, and its strategy is to get “an educated and willing public” to realize this and create “a climate conducive to Southern independence.” As Michael Hill, the LOS President, has put it: “Let us gain the confidence and support of our people by becoming their worthy servants. Then let us re-assert our independence and nationhood on the firm foundational principles of 1776 and 1861.” He adds, “Though the South is presently a nation by right, this will mean nothing until the South starts acting like a nation in fact. To bring Dixie to that point is the League’s goal.”

Alaska’s movement, the Alaska Independence Party, has been in business since 1984 and regularly runs candidates for statewide offices. It bills itself the largest third party of any state, pulling in between 10-20,000 voters and 3-4 per cent of the vote—once even electing a governor, Walter Hickel, who then tuned his back on the party and acted as an ordinary Republican in office. It has a website (Akip.org) with a great many interesting links, an annual conference, and occasional press releases, but it has been somewhat quiet in recent years—it drew only 14,000 voters at last fall’s election, at 3.03 per cent. Its chief aim is to have a revote on the question of statehood, which was put on the ballot as a yes-or-no proposition in 1958, instead of a choice between statehood, remaining a territory, becoming a commonwealth, like Puerto Rico, or becoming an independent nation—and it’s that last one that AIP favors. Some sense of its politics can be seen in its website response to the question of whether an Alaskan would lose U.S. citizenship if the state seceded: “Depending on the form of independence, several forms of citizenship would be possible, including the retention of U.S. citizenship or dual citizenship. However, considering the moral, educational, and economic decay of the U.S., Alaskans who hold themselves to a higher standard might very well decide to at least maintain an arm's length distance from a country in decline.”

The movement in Hawai’i is a bit of a mix, and some there even argue that secession is irrelevant since they regard Hawai’i as a sovereign state that has simply been conquered illegally by the United States and doesn’t need to secede from anything. But since a removal of the conqueror and an act of secession would have the same effect, there are groups willing to put their struggle in that light. Among them are the Hawai’i Nation, Kingdom of Hawai’i, Free Hawai’I, Huaka’i I Na ‘Aina Mauna, and Sovereign Hawaii’I Government, and I have no way of knowing from this distance why there are so many different groups, since they seem to be working for the same thing. The general take would seem to have been well expressed in a 1994 proclamation by a General Council of native Hawai’ians stating that “we are the original inhabitants and occupants of these islands [and] have always been in possession of our land and are entitled to re-establish our Independent and Sovereign Nation.” It concluded that the “General Council Assembled...do solemnly publish, declare and proclaim that the Independent and Sovereign Nation of Hawai’i is free and absolved from any other political connection to any other Nation State.” A representative of that Council will be at the November convention.

Two other active groups that are not strictly secessionist, but with a strong interest in the convention because to fulfill their aims would probably come down to secession, are the Christian Exodus and the Free State Project. The first of these, begun in 2003 “in response to the moral degeneration of our nation” and the failure of regular political parties to halt it, has a scheme to settle large numbers of its adherents in South Carolina, which it deems to be the most conservative and Christian state in the Union. Once a critical mass is present there, they would begin to take over local and county institutions and eventually the state government, creating a constitution that would guarantee “the protection of human life at conception, the Ten Commandments as the foundation of law, the prohibition of any redefinition of marriage, and a strong reserve clause” of undelegated powers to local government. “If this cannot be achieved within the United States,” they say, “then we believe a peaceful withdrawal from the union to be the last available remedy.”

The Free State Project similarly intends to move people in to take over a state—in this case New Hampshire, because it has the smallest tax burden of any state and is small enough to be influenced by a small number of immigrants—and create a strongly libertarian government. The project was begun by Jason Sorens, then a Yale graduate student in political science, in 2001, who determined that 20,000 active people would be sufficient to wield influence over the state government—and as of June 2006, 7, 166 have signed on. The aim is to create a government that would “support policies such as abolition of all income taxes, elimination of regulatory bureaucracies, repeal of most gun control laws, repeal of most drug prohibition laws, complete free trade, decentralization of government, and widescale privatization.” It is explicitly against secession, it says, but its literature recognizes that such a move might have to be taken if its program was resisted by Federal forces—as would seem to be likely.

It may be too much to say, as Thomas Naylor has said recently, that “once again secession fever is spreading across America just as it did back in 1776 and 1861.” But there is no doubt that something is in the air, and the November convention will be the barometer of just how strong and purposive this movement is.
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Creating a new conservative movement

2006-10-30T13:40:00.000-08:00

I found this post linking to it from Washington Monthly from the weblog On Commons. It's quite good and I think explain what many paleos are trying to do.

---Sean Scallon

Conservative Commoners?

Posted by Jonathan Rowe on Thu, 10/26/2006 - 9:24am Tools

About half a century ago, a prominent writer described automobiles as “mechanical Jacobins” for their disruptive effects on American life and mores. It was not a young Ralph Nader rehearsing for Unsafe At Any Speed. . It was Russell Kirk, intellectual patriarch of the modern conservative movement, writing in his seminal book The Conservative Mind.

The difference between the two is instructive. Nader was writing from a standpoint of utility. He did not object to the social and cultural impacts of cars, not outwardly at least. His argument was that they weren’t safe. Kirk by contrast was talking values – the nature of our communities and ultimately of ourselves. This is the deeper territory that liberals in America pretty much have forfeited, with their focus on such things as consumer protection and safety. Safety is important; but we humans cannot live on it alone.

There are ironies aplenty. Nader himself is much more Kirkean than most people realize. He waxes rhapsodic about his small town upbringing in Winsted, Connecticut, where he could walk to the library, and then to his father’s bakery-restaurant, and from there to the courthouse where he listened to lawyers argue and where his father spoke often at Norman Rockwell-style town meetings. He once took me to Highland Lake, where he used to ride his bike. “It was great – except for the damn cars,” he said.

Ralph used to quote his older brother Shafik, who stayed home in Winsted. "Every genuine innovation in America has begun at the local level." He embraced federal regulation not because he loved the federal government and bureaucracy -- he didn't. The problem was the corporation. The federal government was the only entity with the power -- potentially -- to stand up to it and hold it accountable. There just wasn't an alternative.

Ralph’s concerns for safety were genuine. When he hitchhiked around the US he encountered gory car wrecks, the toll of which could have been reduced with simple safety engineering. But his critique of cars drew from a deeper emotional well. And Kirk, for his part, was an authentic conservative; by which I mean he was alert to the corrosive effects of market culture upon integrity and community and other values he held dear.

The automobile was a natural focus. No product so epitomizes the embedded narrative of “the market:” the glorification of mobility and self-gratification, the casting aside of community and tradition. Literally and figuratively, it is the cocoon for the solipsistic market “me.” Kirk’s conservatism did not restrain him from saying this. To the contrary, it was the reason he said it. (Though he did not say it as pointedly as I just did; and in his day the Red Menace seemed the greater Jacobin threat.)

In recent decades that kind of authentic conservatism has not been much in evidence. It has been displaced by a “movement” version that is politically expedient and cynical to the core. Movement conservatism is really market worship that embraces the disruption of traditional mores and values so long as corporations are making money in the process. It channels the truly conservative impulse into a few red-meat issues – abortion, gays, school prayer – that pose no threat to the corporate moneybags who bankroll the Republican party.

Most leftist writers are tone-deaf to these distinctions. They sneer about “conservatives” the way right wingers sneer about them; and in the process they do their adversaries a favor. Ann Coulter is to conservatism what she is to chastity. She is a screaming polemical Jacobin; and the same goes for most of the Right Wing crew. To call them “conservatives” just helps keep their act going, at the very time it is starting to fray.

Genuine conservatives are getting disgusted with the whole show in Washington; and are feeling, rightly, that they have been used. They are starting to sniff out the corporatists, market libertarians and neo-con empire builders who have been operating in conservative disguise. A spate of recent books has explored aspects of this theme, such as Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. Now comes American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, the lead editor of which is Bruce Frohnen, who teaches law at Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor.

The Encyclopedia is a surprisingly good read, and a rich resource for those of leftward bent who have not paid enough attention to the growth of the movement that has dominated the nation’s politics for much of the last twenty-five years. Without intending to be, the book also is a guide to the tensions and fissures in the conservative camp. The editors do not dramatize these. The free-marketeers such as Friedman and Hayek get their glowing write-ups. The performance artists such as Coulter and Limbaugh get nods as well.

Sometimes the tensions are positively repressed. The entry for Wilhelm Ropke, the free market economist and compatriot of Hayek, does not mention that his book, A Humane Society, was about the limits of market ideology and the need for a sphere of civic life that is guided by higher values and aims. Still they are there. How many of you would have expected an encyclopedia of conservatism to include Wendell Berry, for example?

I didn’t. Yet the entry lauds Berry’s commitment to community, locality, tradition and virtue. It praises too the way he lives these convictions as a farmer. (Russell Kirk was a localist and an agrarian.) There’s an entry also on Ralph Borsodi, who established an experimental community during the Depression, and whose book Escape From the City, was an early text of the back-to-the-land movement. Borsodi was seeking an alternative to the centralizing and corporatizing tendencies of the New Deal – a standpoint the left today too easily forgets.

These inclusions are not idiosyncratic. When I went to a discussion blog on Dreher’s Crunchy Cons on the National Review website, I found references to Jane Jacobs, E.F. Schumacher, Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and James Howard Kunstler (Geography of Nowhere.) There even was praise for the New Urbanism. True conservatives are not the corporate greedbags who run the Republican Party. They are localists who care about culture and community and distrust schemes from Washington that would jeopardize these.

An even bigger surprise was William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner. The editors admire the Scriptural basis of his economics and his small town traditionalism, which outweigh for them his advocacy of the progressive income tax. Perhaps most surprising of all is the entry on Henry George. George was the homegrown economist who deplored the way land speculators were reaping value that the society as a whole was creating. He advocated a tax on land values – not structures, just the land – to recapture for the benefit of society what the society had created.

Such a system would make it possible to reduce most taxes on income and sales, George said. It also would lead to more compact development, since the owners of close-in, higher-value land would seek to develop it more intensively in order to generate revenues to pay the tax. Sprawl would be greatly diminished. The land barons of George’s day reviled him as a kind of socialist. But the editors of the Encyclopedia are wise enough to see the justice in his plan, and its essential conservatism.

To recapture for society that which the society has created, would make it possible for individuals to keep more of what they themselves have created through their own enterprise and toil. There is of course a large social component in all individual wealth, and not just land. Where would Google be today without the Defense Department which funded the creation of the internet? Where would George W. Bush be without the taxpayers of Arlington, Texas who funded a new stadium for his Texas Rangers baseball team?

Still, it’s a good start. It is not what you hear from Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter, and it’s a lot more appealing. George’s argument is the basic rationale for environmental taxes; and for my colleague Peter Barnes’ Sky Trust proposal. You take from the common pool of earth’s resources, then you should have to pay, and enough to diminish your taking. Let’s derive public revenue more from what people take, and less from what they make.

I interviewed Frohnen on my radio show recently and found it more appealing still. He lamented what he called “Wal-Mart conservatives,” by which he meant people who worship at the alter of the “cheapest price,” and the utilitarian values of the market right generally. He expressed dismay with the Bush Administration on everything from foreign adventures to his imposition of federal standards on local schools and the diminution of local control.

His dismay was akin to that of many on the decentralist left when the Clinton Administration stumped for corporate globalism; and when his “liberal” appointees to the Supreme Court voted to affirm the power of local governments to use eminent domain to kick people from their homes and give the land to Wal-Mart. (That’s “public purpose”?) There is congruity here, if not outright convergence. It would be a stretch to call a Russell Kirk a commoner, or a father of them. He had too much of a patrician quality, too much distrust of the rabble.

Still, someone who is a friend of Wendell Berry and Ralph Borsodi, and hangs with the thinking of Jane Jacobs and E.F. Schumacher, is sniffing around the right tree. When was the last time we heard a Democrat in Washington invoke such people? Those of us who are concerned about reviving communities and rebuilding their social wealth, have got to stop heeding ideological stereotypes. There are allies out there.

Non-major party election preview

2006-10-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

For those in the non-major party community watching the election results in few weeks, there are a couple of places to take note of:

Illinois -- The Green Party candidate for governor is taking 14% in recent polls and even Randy Stufflebeam's write-in candidacy might actually win a few percentage points with unpopular Democrat and GOP nominees.

Minnesota -- This election the Independence Party can have a place in the Minnesota political milleau instead of just being "DFL light." A good place to start would be in the Fifth Congressional District where IP candidate Tammy Lee has the unofficial endorsement of retiring Congressman Martin Olav Sabo and is facing radical DFLer Keith Ellison. She has the best chance of any IP candidate to win on Election Day and doing so would be a huge boost to the party.

Georgia - Libertarian party candiates are polling well, siphoning votes from unpopular but dominant state GOP in the face of the weak Democrats and could force governor's race into a run-off.

Florida - Reform Party Candidate Max Linn may very well be a spolier in the governor's race

Texas - Four-way governor's race with two independents plus similar situation in Georgia, unpopular but dominant GOP, weak Democrats benefiting LP candidates.

Montanta - Can Rick Jore win a state legislative seat for CP-Montana?

Conneticut - Many Greens (like Ben Manski) would pooh-pooh any alliances with the Democrats but if it means three ex-GOP Congressmen and women and ex-U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in return for votes for complete pullout of U.S. forces, then the Greens will have accomplished what they've wanted in true third party fashion, moving Dems in their direction.

The LP does have a good deal at stake in this election. If the LP does reasonably well on Election Day, they can say present themselves and their new platform is a positive light of relevance for the first time in a long time and think seriously of strategies for long-term achievement while entertaining possibilities for national alliances with either major party or certain presidential candidates.

Book Notes...

2006-10-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

In my line of work its rare to get a Friday night off so I want to take the free time that I have to update you on the book this blog is entitled from.

I want to thank Clark Stooksbury and the staff at Chronicles Magazine for their review of Beating the Powers that Be. You can find it in the November issue of Chronicles (pp. 35-36). I especially liked this part of the review " a story of the construction of the American political spectrum since World War II."

I've managed to get the book located on a couple of local bookstore shelves, and the shelves at the Minnesota State Historical Society bookstore. But I've passed out more free copies than I have sold at present and there's really not much more I can do this year given my schedule to promote the book, especially when I wish to start writing another work as soon as next year.

Writing Beating the Powers that Be was a labor of love that I truly enjoyed and again I wish to thank all those who I interview for their time and thoughts as well as friends and family for their help and encouragment and all those who bought the book. It wasn't perfect, I did the best I could and I have no regrets. I think I have had some impact, however small, on the thinking of those involved with non-major parties and other such movements and that was the purpose of the book. Hopefully we can get more sales at Christmas or perhaps as I become more famous as a writer, God willing.

---Sean Scallon

The Enablers: Conservative talk-radio hosts ushered the GOP to Congressional power in 1994, and may usher them out in 2006

2006-10-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

When Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Denny Hastert (R-Ill.) needed to get his side of the story out to the media in wake of the Mark Foley page scandal, he didn’t choose any old media.

No 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace. No Meet the Press Sunday morning session with Tim Russert.

Instead, Hastert interviewed with Rush Limbaugh, Lars Larson, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingram, Mark Levine, etc. Everyone who was anyone in the so-called conservative talk-show establishment, or at least nationally syndicated.

There’s a reason for this of course.

Not just because such interviewers would shy away from finding out the truth about Hastert’s knowledge of Foley’s sexually explicit emailing to House pages and instead engage in delusional paranoid fantasies about the scandal being a Democrat set-up. It’s also because there’s a real kinship between House Republicans and talk-radio hosts. The former believe the latter helped them win control of the House back in the 1994 mid-term election, and to a certain extent that’s true. But just as these talk show hosts contributed to Republican rise to power 12 years ago in Washington, they could very well shown them the way back to minority status in Congress after this year’s mid-term election.

It’s interesting the to see the way conservative publications and pundits have been harshly critical of the GOP Congress while talk show hosts have more or less been in their corner or have defended them without hesitation. It was the Washington Times that called for Hastert to step down and resign after the Foley scandal broke while talk show hosts provided the support Hastert needed to stay on the job. Had that support not been there, maybe Hastert would be on his way out.

There’s a reason for this too. Journalists, regardless if they have “left” or “right” leanings have to have a certain level of skepticism or reserve about the subjects they report on, otherwise they are nothing more than PR flacks. The Washington Times is a very conservative newspaper, but they have to tell it like it is regardless of how it plays out and in their judgment, Hastert had to go. It was the pundit class that also the most critical of President Bush II’s nomination of Harriet Meiers to the Supreme Court.

Talk show hosts, on the other hand, will tell anyone who listens and then some that they are not journalists, only entertainers. Thus there are no parameters of journalism that tinge their thinkers, just whatever gets ratings. No doubt they must have sensed their GOP-bound listeners wanting to fight back, saw the White House supporting Hastert and then took their cue: unabashed support for the Speaker regardless whether he or the rest of the GOP leadership are leading the party anywhere but utter defeat in November.

Not only that, but unlike journalists, talk show hosts aren’t bound by any ethics rules either. So they’re free to take junkets to Iraq sponsored by the Republican Party, get interviews with top Republican leaders, sit in on strategy sessions and be speakers at Republican fundraisers or other party events as well. Why would they jeopardize that relationship with the powers that be? Since many of these hosts were nobodies before they became famous through the magic of the transmitter and the “golden microphone”, being close to power is powerful enough to dull their critical thinking (Rush Limbaugh’s reaction to being the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House is good example of this. The George Bush I administration was trying to buy him off and he could have cared less because he was in the Lincoln Bedroom.) And having your listeners believe that you have power and influence with the holders of such power is no doubt a great way to get ahead in the Arbitron ratings over your afternoon drive-time competition.

The end result is most of the talk-show host commissariat, not all but most, supported the Meiers’ nomination (and accused its critics of “elitism”), supported nation building in Iraq, and supported or at least enabled the GOP Congress and the President to approve such less than conservative measures like the Department of Homeland Security, No Child Left Behind, The Patriot Act, and a new entitlement for prescription drugs. Maybe some were opposed to this or that, but there was never the collective outrage to such proposals as there would be if, say, a Democrat, was in the White House or if the Democrats were controlling Congress. Imagine if it was Bill Clinton as President and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi held open a vote on the House floor for three-hours! in order to round up enough votes to approved the prescription drug entitlement. Just think how the phone lines would have been lit-up like Christmas trees to such an outrage and the FAX machines humming after the talk-show host gave out the numbers for the Congressional switchboard. Where was the upheaval from AM talk radio to this clear violation of House rules that there was over the Congressional pay raise of 1989, or the crime bill or the Clinton health care proposal? Hell, a Republican controlled Congress has raised its pay many times since 1995 yet no tea party that I know of organized by a talk -show host has been held to protest such raises.

It was clear by the late 1990s that political talk-radio had ceased to be a useful forum for conservative ideas and activism outside the traditional media and became nothing more than the propaganda wing of the Republican National Committee (just like Free Republic website did in largely the same manner). This was more apparent after the 2000 election when support of George Bush II became a loyalty oath among conservatives for fear of the return of the Clintons, Al Gore and the big, bad Democrats. 9-11 just sealed the deal. Anything and everything from this administration could be justified in the context that the alternative would be worse and that the nation is at war and that’s exactly what the talk-show hosts are saying now; even though many conservative writers and pundits who know their history a lot better than talk show hosts do realize a GOP defeat would do wonders in humbling the arrogant party establishment, getting rid of the deadwood of party hacks and other leaders who’ve made a mess of things of Washington and Iraq and force the GOP to decide what kind of party they want to be and what they want to stand for. Defeat in 1964 led to victory in 1966 and 1968. Defeat in 1976 led to victory 1980. Defeat in 1992 led to victory in 1994. And even in 2000, when for the third time in a row the Republicans failed to capture the majority of the nation’s vote in a presidential election, a near-defeat led to victory in 2002 and 2004. So why wouldn’t the pattern repeat itself after 2006 for 2008?

Obviously many talk show hosts would prefer to keep their access to the Speaker’s office and their seats on the plane to next junket then contemplate this on the AM dial. Instead of keeping the GOP on the right path, they followed them where ever they led, even if it meant off a cliff. Even if they did protest every now and then, how amazing with all those listeners, that they have such little influence in the overall direction of the party they are now tied at the hip with, and conservatism in general. Republicans became as spendthrift and power hungry as Democrats and not a thing they said or did changed that. And when one host, Charles Goyette down in Phoenix, did challenge this orthodoxy how was he treated? His station fired him thank you very much.

Pretty soon, such talk shows may have very little influence at all because they have very few listeners. Apparently surveys show that younger radio listeners that advertisers and radio stations crave, will not listen to the AM dial no matter whom or what is on. The folks at Clear Channel, who have so many of those stations and talk show hosts locked up in their contracts, panicked at this and decided to do something about it. Earlier this year in the Twin Cities a new FM station, KTLK begun on the 100.3 frequency with Limbaugh as its flagship program, moving the AM dial’s KSTP 1500 signal. The strength and clarity of the FM signal over AM will no doubt send many talk shows in the same direction especially if Clear Channel is leading the way (leaving AM in the same precarious state as it was in the late 1980s outside of the high powered frequencies before the talk format revived it). However, there’s a catch. A rating of 4.7, or a little higher or lower, in the context of an AM radio market, is very good. But why would advertisers suddenly switch from profitable FM radio accounts at stations that draw double the ratings that the talk shows do with their all-music formats? Your guess is a good as mine too.

Selling one soul, it seems, has become second nature in the conservative talk radio establishment. But, as always, there’s a price to be paid. And that may come in many ways, starting on November 7th.

---Sean Scallon

Conservative Democrats rising?

2006-10-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

I got this email the other from a conservative website. It enclosed a New York Times story about Jack Davis who's running in Upstate New York vs. Tom Reynolds. I hope Davis wins, not just to remove a pedofile enabler like Reynolds, but also to put more conservative or independent Congressmen in the Democratic caucus. U.S. political parties have never been ideological constructs by themselves alone and yet Liberal and Conservative intelelctuals and activists keep trying to make them so. But they forget the cultural reasons that people vote for the GOP or for the Democrat. Right now the Democrats occupy and ideological and geographic enclave to which they have been driven to. If they want to win traditionally or culturally Republican areas or districts, they need candidates like Jack Davis or Jim Webb in Virginia. Hopefully they can win to provide a little more diversity in the GOP caucus.

---Sean Scallon

DEAR FRIENDS:

We have an announcement.

Conservatism is bigger than the GOP or any party. One should not be a party lapdog.

For example, no true conservative would support an open-borders traitor like Mike DeWine.

While we still support a number of Republicans (e.g. Tancredo, Ron Paul, John Duncan), we have decided to throw our support behind a Democrat this election, Jack Davis.

Jack Davis is a former conservative Republican running on the Democratic ticket in NY.

He is:

1) Vehemently anti-legal and anti-illegal immigration

2) anti-free trade

3) anti-outsourcing

Some of the GOP lapdogs may have a problem with the free-trade bit, but conservatives historically have been opposed to free trade. Just read TS Eliot, Richard Weaver or Russell Kirk's criticisms.

Free trade undermines national sovereignty, and it places vital economic decisions in the hands of international bureaucrats (e.g. WTO).

We now have the largest free-trade deficit of any country in the history of the world. Free trade is destroying our economy.

Conservatives always have opposed free trade, and they should once again. Unfortunately, the GOP lapdogs have been neoconned on this issue.

Some may object to Jack Davis not being pro-life enough, but the whole abortion issue has become a money making gimmick for both parties. And appointing new judges will never solve the problem. If Bush and crew were really opposed to abortion, they should just have congress pass a Bill returning it to the states and attach a rider to the bill removing any jurisdiction over it from the Supreme Court. But the GOP says "this is too radical."

The three greatest issues facing America today are Immigration, Free Trade, and Outsourcing. Although the Republican has a good record on immigration, he is in favor of free trade and outsourcing, a more subtle form of treason.

We must seek candidates that are opposed to all 3. Jack Davis is our man.

Good luck, Jack Davis

----------------

NY Times Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/nyregion/16davis.html

A Maverick Who Worries Both Parties

BUFFALO — Jack Davis, the multimillionaire businessman running here in western New York to unseat one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, makes his fellow Democrats a little nervous.

Mr. Davis is prone to overstatement. He has warned about “Red China,” for example, and suggested he would take a bat to anyone who sent his sons sexually explicit e-mail messages like those a congressman sent to young male pages.

He defies liberal orthodoxies. He has said he wants to “seal” the nation’s borders and has held memberships in conservative groups like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

And he is a bit of a maverick. He has banished his handlers from the room when a reporter interviews him, and he has yet to invite any national party luminary to campaign with him in the district.

His behavior unsettles some Democrats as they seek a prize trophy: the defeat of Representative Thomas M. Reynolds, the chairman of the Republican re-election committee in the House of Representatives.

“It keeps me up at night,” said one Democratic operative familiar with Mr. Davis’s independent streak. “And I’m sure I’m not the only one who stays up at night worried about what he’ll say next.”

And with good reason. Democrats in New York and Washington suddenly have a lot riding on Mr. Davis and the relatively unorthodox campaign he has put together using his own money. After months of being written off as a long-shot candidate, Mr. Davis is in what polls indicate is an increasingly tight race with Mr. Reynolds. The independent Cook Political Report is now rating the Reynolds-Davis race a “tossup.”

Mr. Davis’s fortunes changed almost overnight, after Mr. Reynolds and other top Republicans acknowledged in late September that they had been aware for months of unusual e-mail exchanges between Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, and a former teenage page.

Mr. Reynolds has tried to tamp down the controversy, holding news conferences to explain himself and even running a television advertisement saying that he had alerted Speaker J. Dennis Hastert last spring when he first learned of the e-mail messages between Mr. Foley and the young page. Yet questions about whether he did enough to stop Mr. Foley are continuing to dog Mr. Reynolds, and he has not been a particularly visible figure on the campaign trail in recent weeks.

But one big wild card for Democrats is Mr. Davis, who captured 44 percent of the vote in his 2004 loss to Mr. Reynolds and who has vowed to spend $2 million of his own money to defeat him this time around. Top party officials privately acknowledge that this is one race that they will have difficulty shaping, given Mr. Davis’s independent streak.

“This one is in God’s hands,” said one party official, a national Democratic strategist who did not want to be seen as chastising the party’s own candidate.

Anyone who has followed Mr. Davis’s career should find none of this particularly surprising. In 2004, he left the Republican Party after a bitter dispute that has become the stuff of banter, if not exactly lore, among political types here.

The rift partly stemmed from an episode that occurred at a fund-raiser he attended that featured Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney’s aides asked Mr. Davis to leave after he began talking to reporters about an advertisement he had bought in the local newspaper criticizing the Bush administration’s free-trade policies, according to Mr. Davis’s campaign.

“That really stuck in his craw,” said Curtis Ellis, a Davis campaign spokesman. “He was a member of the party his whole life. He gave countless dollars to Republicans. And they shut him down.”

Mr. Davis, who is 73 and married, with 6 children and 13 grandchildren, has deep roots in this region. He grew up in western New York and attended Amherst Central High School. In 1955, he graduated from the University of Buffalo with a bachelor’s degree in engineering.

He went on to serve in the Marine Corps Reserves and in the Coast Guard Reserves. In 1964, after leaving the Coast Guard with the rank of lieutenant, he started a company out of his garage that would eventually make him a millionaire. The company, I Squared R Element Company, makes special heating elements for electric furnaces.

Politically, Mr. Davis is hard to define, though he has a strong libertarian streak, supporting, for example, both abortion rights and gun rights.

He says that he was a Republican for 50 years, first as a Goldwater Republican, then as a Reagan Republican. But he says he became disillusioned with the party because it did not share his disdain for free trade and the multinational corporations that reap its benefits. (He is also critical of Democrats in the free-trade camp.)

In fact, until the Congressional page scandal erupted, he had made his anti-free-trade message a focus of the campaign. Again and again, he has argued that free-trade policies supported by Mr. Reynolds have been a major reason that the economically beleaguered region has lost manufacturing jobs to other countries.

“Reynolds cannot be trusted to defend your rights, your children’s rights, your job, your farm or your industry,” he said in a speech earlier this year that typifies the populist message he has carried throughout the campaign.

But the Reynolds camp has hit back. In a televised ad that began running last month, Mr. Reynolds asserts that Mr. Davis’s plan to increase tariffs on foreign goods to protect American companies “is really a tax increase” on working families. “Millionaire Jack Davis: raising taxes, hurting families,” the spot concludes in a line that irritates Mr. Davis.

“He’s trying to make people jealous of my wealth,” Mr. Davis said in a recent interview at his plant, where he employs 75 people. “I got my money the old-fashioned way.”

Mr. Davis is an amiable man with a slender build, a thick head of white hair and a penchant for letting his emotions flow. He got teary several times during the interview at his plant. And on Thursday, during an appearance at a union hall, he was surprisingly blunt in talking about Mr. Foley’s behavior in the page scandal. “If any of my sons had received that kind of letter from anybody, I’d have looked for a baseball bat and gone after the guy,” he said.

Democratic officials closely monitoring the race like to say that Mr. Davis would not have had a prayer of winning a Democratic primary if a traditional Democrat had challenged him for the party’s nomination to run against Mr. Reynolds.

But the fact that Mr. Davis does not have a pure Democratic pedigree may turn out to be one of his greatest assets running in New York’s 26th Congressional District, a Republican bastion that runs between the suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester.

“All the ways that Tom Reynolds would normally try to defeat a Democratic rival are off limits with Jack Davis,” said Blake Zeff, a spokesman for the New York State Democratic Party. “He can’t call Davis a liberal because it clearly isn’t true. He can’t tie him to national Democrats who might be unpopular in the district because people know Jack’s a maverick who isn’t taking his pointers from anyone but himself.”

Glad to have met you John Randolph

2006-10-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

In an hour I'll be heading back home to Arkansaw, Wisconsin after a wonderful weekend of camaraderie at the 17th annual meeting of the John Randolph Club hosted by the Rockford Institute.

Many of the Institute's events like the JRC or their summer schools or its international trips have a coterie of people that makes paleoconservative movement almost like semi-large, extended family of cousins and second cousins in many ways. There were people I had met five years ago at the summer school that I talk about in my book that I became reacquainted with again, not to mention meeting the Rockford Institute staff after a long, long while.

The theme to this year's club meeting was "Global Problems, Local Solutions" and it really sums up what the Rockford Institute and paleoconservatism is about. You can't get more local as a think tank than TRI. It's right on Main St. itself in Rockford, Ill. which is a industrial Midwest town, the "heartland" so to speak. It's in a small two story home that blends into the neighborhood and not in a glass tower. It is not a Washington or New York or Los Angeles institution and thus allows itself to think of practical ways the average citizen can affect global issues right where they live and they don't have to even "think globally," they just need to love they place where they are.

Thus the discussion topics ranged from immigration to the judiciary, to the culture at large, especially as it is being affected by open borders immigration, abortion and the state of American manufacturing and the economy. All of these questions have local angles or ways to deal and think about these issues from a local perspective. The most important aspect of "paleoism" is not basing one's hopes on an "election," or a session of Congress, but trying influence where you live first and foremost. It is a way to break through the political paralysis and deception about issues that has crippled the nation's politics and policy. The Minutemen movement is a perfect example of this, border residents in Arizona doing something about illegal immigration when the federal government clearly would not. If it was not for them, then George Bush II would not have stationed National Guard troops at the border. It is a simple as that.

The JRC also celebrated the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Rockford Institute and the founding of Chronicles Magazine. Institute founder John Howard, the former president of Rockford College, was on hand during the banquet dinner to give a speech on the history of the institute and reasons for its founding. As he said, the cultural upheavals of the 1960s had changed the ethos of the nation that Howard felt threatened the College's ability to fulfill its mission to its students and that the College needed to develop a cultural institution to maintain and fight against the trends that were damaging higher education. Needless to say the Rockford College Institute was not successful in that calling since the College severed all ties to the Institute sometime later. But it was successful in incubating a movement that right now is the only thing out there that willing to defend and promote the traditional conservatism against its bastard children (literally and figuratively).

The founding of the institute as a place to help maintain the mission of Rockford College to its students comes to mind as I reflect on my first JRC meeting. There clearly were a good number of young paleos around my age and a little older and younger who attended and who have maintained contact and correspondence with each other over the past couple of years online. You could see the old and new generations clearly marked in the lounge off the Cliffbreakers Hotel where all gathered after the traditional JRC debate. Clearly for us there is a movement to inherit but are we as young paleos going to value that inheritance or spend it as foolishly as the Prodigal Son did even if we don't intend or mean to. Sometime after the election, after I finish a couple of articles in mind that I wish to write, hopefully on a regular schedule again, I wish to start a dialogue of young paleos who both were here at JRC this past weekend and around the country and the world starting with an article entitle "Reflections of a Young Paleo," about my hopes and concerns about the Generations X, Y (and maybe even Z too) as they, like all young generations, rise into prominence. Are we going to continue on with what has been started, or are going into different directions affected by our own experiences and education? This is what needs to be discussed.

Thanks again to the Rockford Institute, Cliffbreakers Hotel and the wonderful people I met and met once again for a wonderful weekend.

--Sean Scallon

Please to meet you John Randolph

2006-10-13T06:29:00.000-07:00

I'll be attending my first John Randolph Club meeting this weekend. It is the paleoconservative club of the Rockford Institute. I'll report back on Sunday.

--Sean Scallon

It takes a police state to raise a child

2006-10-06T09:11:00.001-07:00

This article came to me courtsey of Doug Newman
--Sean Scallon

In the aftermath of Wednesday's hostage taking and murder-suicide at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, I can just hear all the gun grabbers proclaiming that it only goes to show that we cannot tolerate guns in -- or anywhere near -- schools. Well, one of their dream billss has just been passed by Congress.

On September 23, World Net Daily reported that the House of Representatives has passed an anti-drug and anti-weapon bill – HR 5295 -- that “would require local districts to develop search policies – including strip searches – with immunity against prosecution for teachers and staff.”

HR 5295 reads in part as follows:

"A search referred to in subsection (a) is a search by a full-time teacher or school official, acting on any reasonable suspicion based on professional experience and judgment, of any minor student on the grounds of any public school, if the search is conducted to ensure that classrooms, school buildings, school property and students remain free from the threat of all weapons, dangerous materials, or illegal narcotics. The measures used to conduct any search must be reasonably related to the search's objectives, without being excessively intrusive in light of the student's age, sex, and the nature of the offense."

Five things came to mind immediately.

First, the requirement of “reasonable suspicion” of a teacher or school staffer is not nearly as strong as the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a judge’s warrant that shall not be issued “but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or Affirmation.” In the case of Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the Supreme Court stated that students do not "shed their constitutional rights when they enter the schoolhouse door". These rights also include the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Second, student-teacher sex is happening more and more frequently across America. Moreover, there is a new trend of female teachers having sex with male students.
Third, while schools have been gun-free zones for years, this do-gooderism did not prevent the orgy of blood at Columbine. The Harrises and Klebolds of the world do not give one flying rip about anyone’s little pantywaist gun laws. On that horrible morning in 1999, the students, faculty and staff were absolutely defenseless as those two little pukes sprayed bullets all over the school.
Fourth, the War on Drugs has been a monumental failure. There is now one drug arrest every 40 seconds in America. Largely because of the War on Drugs, America – the land of the free – has the world’s highest incarceration rate. America has more drugs than ever and more dangerous drugs than ever. Drug prohibition has not solved anything and has created a whole new host of problems that did not exist when we started down this road decades ago.
Fifth, there is no constitutional authority whatsoever for federal intrusion in education. Article 1, Section 8, which spells out the 18 duties of the federal government, does not even mention the word "education". The Tenth Amendment forbids Uncle Sam from intruding in any area not authorized by the Constitution. (The Constitution thereby forbids the drug war as well.)
The same folks who laughed convulsively when Hillary Clinton stated that “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child” evidently have no problem with the idea that it takes a police state to raise a child.

Well, I have some news for police state groupies: disarming students did not stop Columbine and it did not stop Wednesday's bloodshed 38 miles southwest of Columbine. Duane Morrison, 53 -- totally undeterred by everyone's stupid gun laws -- entered a classroom, fired a warning shot and ordered all the students out of the room, except for six girls. Over the next four hours he sexually assaulted several of the girls and killed one -- 16-year-old junior Emily Keyes -- before killing himself.

I can hear people saying: I basically support the Second Amendment, but do we really neeeeed guns in schools?

Let me give you a little thought experiment.

Let's say that one of the students ordered to leave the room on Wednesday at Platte Canyon High had a gun in his book bag. And let us say that, fearing for his life and the lives of those around him, he shot Morrison. The innocent life of Emily Keyes would have been saved and no girls would have been sexually assaulted and traumatized.

Let me give you two more little thought experiments.

Let's say that students were not forced to "shed their constitutional rights when they enter the schoolhouse door". Let us say that Eric Harris and Dyaln Klebold would have been deterred by the mere possibility that someone somewhere on the Columbine campus could have busted a cap on them on that horrible morning in 1999.

Let's say that the mere thought that someone somewhere on the Platte Canyon campus could be packing heat could have been enough to deter psycho sicko Duane Morrison from doing what he did on Wednesday.

When you disarm innocent people, bad things happen.

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In the seven-plus years since Columbine, nothing has changed. We throw more and more money at schools, and they just get worse. We lock up more and more druggies, and things just get worse. We continue to disarm students and we get more school shootings. We continue to beg for our government to "do something" after every crisis, and things get worse.

It takes neither a village nor a police state to raise a child. It takes loving, dedicated, involved parents. Nothing will change in America until enough people realize this and starting acting accordingly. No law or "policy" can bring about this change. The needed change has to come in the hearts and minds of the American people.

It takes a police state to raise a child

2006-10-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

A coalition unraveling - Foley exposes the fault lines of the GOP and conservatism

2006-10-04T21:29:00.000-07:00

There's a dirty little secret that the Republican Party doesn't want you to know about. The party that is supposedly for "family values" and is prominently against homosexual marriage and homosexual rights, is chock full of homosexuals, like disgraced former Florida Congressman Mark Foley.

This may seem very strange. How can the GOP function when one-half of the party - its conservative, white Baptist and Pentecostal base - wants see another part of the party either go through mass reconciliation or burn in hellfire? But those who know and study how U.S. political parties have traditionally been organized know it's not strange at all to see two seemingly opposite groups belong in the same political party. However, how long that arrangement lasts is another question.

Unlike European or Third World political parties, U.S. parties have never been exclusively created for one class of people, one religion or tribe, or one ideology. A good example of course is the Democrats. They were formed in 1796 as a matter of political expediency. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, representing the landed Southern gentry, needed allies to compete against the then dominant Federalists. They found them amongst the middle and working class people of the large cities in the form of a political machine called the Society of St. Tammany (eventually to be known as Tammany Hall) in New York City, run by Aaron Burr. Madison and Jefferson visited Burr while supposedly on a "butterfly hunting expedition," in New York and cemented an alliance that created the Democratic Party. It was two of the most unlikeliest groups of people ever working together to win elections.

But even unlikeliest groups have to have something in common to stay working together. And for the Democrats, their something was the fact they opposed what its voters felt were their rivals, the commercial and moneyed elite of the East, whether they were known as Federalists, National Republicans, Whigs or Republicans. Likewise, the Republican Party formed with some pretty odd groupings as well: Puritan moralizers from New England, big business, including the nation's new industrial base, anti-slavery Democrats and Protestant ethnic groups in the Midwest. Yet their opposition to slavery and to the South and its way of life helped to bind them together for many years.

Nothing lasts forever of course, and such political alliances come to an eventual end. For the Democrats, their partnerships ended in 1964, when Southern whites started voting for Republicans for the first time en masse and Strom Thurmond switched parties and when reformers took control of the New York County Democratic Party away from Tammany Hall, which signaled their and other political machines' death knell in the years to follow. The Democratic Party could not be a party of political reform and yet have corrupt machines in their midst. They could also not be the party that supported civil rights and opposed segregation while also being a party of segregationists, North or South, especially after World War II. Something had to give.

Now in 2006, we may be very well witnessing the unraveling of another coalition, one that not only defined a party, but a political ideology as well.

Like your average political party, there were many kinds of different people and ideas that made up the conservative movement in the 1950s and 60s, from traditionalists, monarchists, Buckleyites, Ayn Rand libertarians and John Birch anti-communists. What brought all these groups together was their strident anti-communism and a theory called "Fusionism," which welded the tradition-minded to the libertarian. If public morality was on the decline, the people were not at fault, it was the government's fault! If education is on the decline due to bad standards, the government is to blame! If the American people are decent, God-fearing folk, that decency will show if only the government can be removed from the equation! That's Fusionism in a nutshell and it has worked for the last half century.

Some of those libertarians, however, were homosexuals. They were attracted to libertarianism and to Barry Goldwater-style conservatism because it promised a government that would not pry into their private lives which was fine with them. They wished to remain anonymous. Plus, the people that were considered social conservatives back in the 1950s and 60's were urban and Midwest Catholics and Southern Protestants and both groups were aligned with the Democratic Party. So to the Republicans and to Barry Goldwater, such homosexuals were attracted to (in a political way). That attraction survived even when the specter of communism disappeared because such homosexuals were opposed to their counterparts on the left's desire to turn them into another special interest group willing to codify special rights, protections and privileges on their behalf. These were not people interested in being a part of the civil rights movement because philosophically, they opposed it.

But the connection is starting to unravel and it started when the GOP began incorporating large numbers of those very Catholics and Baptists into their ranks who used to be Democrats. They may not have liked homosexual rights anymore than the libertarian homosexuals did, but they also didn't like such people period, especially when the Bible says, according to Rev. Fred Phelps, "God Hates Fags." So long as such homosexuals stayed in the closet, there weren't any problems. But in this day and age of exposure, that's very hard to do. And once such persons became "outed," their lives and careers were wrecked. Terry Dolan, who's National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) helped the GOP win control of the U.S. Senate in 1980, was disowned by the conservative movement when he was diagnosed with AIDS. When the secretive Arthur Finkelstein, who was a part of Jesse Helms' political organization, "married" his long time companion in a ceremony in Massachusetts, he suddenly found himself no longer in politics. Homosexual Republican Congressmen like Jim Kolbe of Arizona and Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin found their careers short-circuited. Indeed, there is a "gay-ceiling" within the GOP. One can be homosexual and be a member of the party. One can belong to the Log Cabin Society. One can even be in public office on the local level or in a legislative district. But a statewide office? Never. Something Foley found out the hard way when rumors of his sexuality wrecked his planned run for the U.S. Senate back in 2004.

Now Foley has been "outed" in the worst way possible, as a potential criminal pervert. In fact, he really didn't try to hide himself all that well to begin with (Maf54? Are you kidding me? Why don't you wear a name tag too?). Holding public office and remaining in the closet becomes virtually impossible, especially if you are a Republican. Leading a different life from the way you vote and the way you speak in public is a cognitive dissonance that can drive a person crazy, crazy enough to start sending sexually explicit emails to a teenager. Republican House leaders were certainly driven nuts enough to try and hide and protect Foley's peccadilloes in order to protect their Congressional majorities.

That's a lot of hiding to do, almost too much. At some point, something's got to give. Either the social and religious conservatives are going to walk away from the GOP and the conservative establishment in disgust at their hypocrisy and manipulation of their honest views they have no desire to follow through on, or the libertarians are going to walk away because they cannot stand to lead double lives in both their orientation and their votes. Nor can they no longer stand a "conservatism" that wishes to expand the government's reach in U.S. citizen's personal lives for their own political purposes or to advance their own religious views. One group will be true to itself and its political views and the other will be true to the party and consolidate its control of it.

The bet is it's the libertarians that walk. After all, what place do they have in a GOP that's now the party of federal intervention in the Mary Schiavo case, the party of the Patriot Act, the party of torture, the party of immigration restrictions, the party of the Iraq war, the party earmarks and farm subsides every other non-libertarian thing you can imagine? With Democrats more and more chafing at the expansion of federal power in the Bush II Administration, the libertarians are going to find themselves allied with a group of unlike people once again, united only by what they dislike more than they like.

And thus the cycle of U.S. politics repeats itself.

--Sean Scallon

Season of violence

2006-09-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

There was a school shooting in homestate of Wisconsin for the first time. It took the life of a school principal.

Weston High School and the village Cazenovia are not far from my family's ancestral homestead or my parent's place in southwest Wisconsin. I've been through the area and been by the school. This is so sad. They don't deserve this, no one does. It will be years before they get over it. This also took place over homecoming weekend for Weston. Now every homecoming for them from now on will be with a heavy heart and many of those kids will be affected for life.

Hopefully, all of us in Wisconsin can all mourn together. The streets of Milwaukee may seem a million miles away from the farms and fieldes of Cazenovia, but their are greieving mothers who have lost their children to the same kind of senseless violence. They've lost someone they love irregardless of place. Let's hope this season of violence will come to an end someday.

--Sean Scallon

Sorry I haven't been writing for a while

2006-09-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

I've been busy lately but I will get a new work schedule next month so I should be able to have the time write on a weekly basis. See you soon.

Starting to sink in

2006-09-06T21:41:00.000-07:00

How much influence has Beating the Powers that Be had since its relase in January? Well, I think this recent annoucement by the Constituion Party shows that at some non-major parties are looking outside of trying to find votes ideologically and find them culturally. Veterans are a cultural group and hopefully the CP can mine a mother lode among them.

---Sean Scallon

Jim Clymer, chairman of the Constitution Party National Committee, America’s largest and fastest growing third party, announced today the formation of the Constitution Party National Veterans Coalition.

"I am very pleased to announce that a most distinguished group of American veterans led by Brigadier General Charles Jones, USAFR Ret., of Las Vegas, Nevada, who will serve as chairman, have come together to form the Constitution Party National Veterans Coalition for the purpose of reaching out to America’s true heroes, its veterans. We wish to let them know they have a political home in the Constitution Party, a party which seeks to preserve and protect the national security, constitutional principles and freedoms for which they sacrificed so selflessly,” said Clymer.

General Jones added, “Veterans nationwide strongly believe the Democrat and Republican Parties have failed the American people in many ways and have done little to correct major problems in our society. Examples include allowing our borders to be unsecured, permitting an illegal invasion of over 20 million aliens, failing to protect against the effects of Islamic extremism and making us dependent upon foreign oil controlled by states that support terrorists. The safety of our people, our culture and the very future of America is at great risk because the politicians of both major parties have been derelict in not placing principle above party and country before self. We are asking fellow Military Veterans to once again band together, this time at the ballot box, before we descend into a national political disaster fostered by an invasion of illegal aliens and terrorism sponsored by nations on whom we depend for oil.”

The Veterans Coalition propounds that the only real solution is to reject the failed policies of the past and replace those politicians who are responsible for those failures with leaders who will faithfully follow the Constitution and truly represent the interests of the American people. To save our civilization, we must enforce our laws by securing the borders, imposing severe sanctions upon employers of illegal aliens, halting all taxpayer funded subsidies and social programs for illegal aliens and removing 20 million illegals by attrition through enforcement. Illegal immigrants are crushing our medical, educational, welfare, economic and penal systems and the American taxpayer in the process.

The Veterans Coalition’s immediate goal is to reach out to the 26 million veterans, plus their families and friends, to let them know that the Constitution Party stands 100% beside them in defense of America’s Constitution and its national security, its sovereignty and its freedoms. It will let them know that there is a strong Constitution Party option at the ballot box for those who want to change policy rather than merely changing administrators of failed policies.

The Veterans Coalition will focus on six urgent national issues:

1. Secure Borders

2. Strong National Defense

3. Punish Employers of Illegal Aliens to the full extent of the law

4. Limit Taxes to those for Constitutionally authorized expenditures(to include abolishing the IRS and replacing the current tax system)

5. Eliminate Taxpayer Subsidies and Social Programs for Illegal Aliens

6. Attain Energy Independence within five years

Veterans and their families and friends are encouraged to find out more about the Constitution Party and to join in this effort by visiting the national party website at www.constitutionparty.com or by calling 1(800) 2VETO-IRS or (717) 390-1993.

Another message to the nihlists

2006-09-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

Lew Rockwell recently wrote a column on his website critizing the Libertarian Party for changing or "watering down" their party platform. In his view, the LP has sold out to try and win elections or at least get more votes. He says the LP would be better off being a party of perpetual opposition and perpetual criticism to the Powers that Be.

Maybe the LP won't increase their share of the vote as Rockwell claims or maybe they will, who knows? But at least they're trying to do something to shake up a moribund party. They would be no worse off anyway. You can't win anything unless you aim to and a party that doesn't at least try is nothing more than a professional bitiching society nobody is going to take seriously.

Freepers often refered to Rockwell as "Loser Rockwell" and now I see their point. First he tells people that voting itself is pointless act and that no one should bother to do so to try deligitimize the system itself. Then he tells LP members to continuously waste their time in losing campaigns because they are somehow "better" than the electorate deserves. Well, they're getting their wish I guess.

Here's the brutal reality to Lew and the Rockwellians: 1). The system doesn't care if you vote or not. All they need is a single vote, for or against, to make them legitimate. 2). You cannot influence or even be a part of the debate unless you try. Nobody pays attention to losers, especially those who lose on purpose. Why would think a strategy of trying to avoid victory would make you any more influential? Would you tell Ron Paul this?

This is the same kind of debate I engaged with CP members a month ago. Those who want to avoid any kind of success in politics should not even bother with it. Why waste your time, energy and fortune? You're better off with doing good work with think tanks like the Von Mieses Institute or websites like Lew Rockwell.com, which both do good work every day, than worrying about campaigns you don't plan on winning. I understand their feelings that politics is fundementally corrupt, that absolute power corrupts and that abandoning principle is a fundemental part of politics. Often cases that's true. But it often times depends on the person involved as to how corrupted they are. Would anyone call Ron Paul corrupted because he's a politican and runs for office every two years? There are always exceptions and if one presents and defends a large framework for one's policies, one can compromise on the small details.

That's what the LP is trying to do, be broader rather than narrower. I've looked at summaries of the LP's new platform and I don't think they've sold out their basic principles. They've just decided to take out the kooky language and special emphasis on drug legalization that's become a drag on their fortunes in recent years. They want to win or at least have some influence on the process and if that means the Starchilds or Chief Wana Dubies of the party are left out, so much the better. Libertarians are tired of being left of out the national debate and they cannot take on the Powers that Be unless people take them and their ideas seriously. If Rockwell and other purists have a problem with that, then the best they can do, as I told dissident CP members, is foreswear politics altogether. There's no point getting involved when you don't really want to be. There're other venues one can be a part of other than elections to frame the debate or educate voters. That's what they should focus on.

Local book review

2006-09-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

This brief book review came from Dave Wood and recently appeared in several papers that are part of the company (Forum Communications) that I work for.

On the regional front we have “Beating the Powers that Be,” by Sean Scallon (Order at www.PublishAmerica.com). With Democrats and Republicans seemingly unable to get anything done other than hurling insults at each other, it seems particularly appropriate that Scallon should write a book about successful third parties of the past, including the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin.

Dave Wood is a past vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle and former book review editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Wood is currently a columnist and book reviewer for Rivertowns Newspapers and the Red Wing Republican-Eagle.

A man before his time

2006-09-05T10:31:00.000-07:00

As someone who was a Pat Buchanan supporter, I found this article interesting and well written by Bob Strodtbeck from today's Etherzone.com. Like a lot of people, Buchanan was a man before his time. While it's nice to see him vindicated in many ways, cheering in the ruins is not much for celebration. Still, as someone who fought the Powers that Be throughout the 1990s, he is still inspirational.

--Sean Scallon

BUCHANAN'S THE ONE TO FOREGO A PRESIDENTIAL RUN
By: Bob Strodtbeck

Almost immediately after Pat Buchanan's newest book, State of Emergency, became available for purchase, remnants of the Buchanan Brigades, the Peasants with the Pitchforks, and new converts who have been encouraged that someone finally has the courage to recognize that uncontrolled immigration is hurtful to America's stability began clamoring for him to mount a new run for president.

The idea is personally gratifying because I have witnessed, since the GOP vilification of us populists who rallied around Our Pat in 1996, the country become imperiled because Republican leaders have run from the very issues Buchanan has raised since 1992.

When I think back to how the party characterized us as a bunch of xenophobic, racist bigots who lived in irrational fear of the great global utopia into which they promised to usher America, I can't help but to feel a bit smug about how the GOP's titular leader, President Bush, struggles to find the right words to tell us that what we are seeing with the melt-down in the Middle East, the erosion of working wages, the strains that dual careers are causing to families, the transplanting of American factories to the labor markets of the third world, and the choking out of the working middle class is not a reflection of the reality he wants to create for us. My continual, vengeful, mean-spirited, human instinct is to simply think, “It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people.”

Is it too much point out that besides warning against uncontrolled immigration, Buchanan declared to America, in 1992, that, “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America,...” Sadly too many of us did not understand what was at the core of that struggle for America's soul, and now we are largely stuck with dealing with the consequences of our ignorance.

In his first book that took on the direction of the nation in the post Cold War era, The Great Betrayal (Little Brown, 1998), Buchanan pointed out that America grew to become a global economic and social power through labor, industry, and a protected working middle class that was that was dedicated to providing for home and family. He documented how, since 1945, the nation had been led from that foundation to gorge itself on consumerism, corporate profit, and elusive promises of world peace and plenty provided by free trade and the global economy.

When Pat talked of the culture war, we didn't want to accept the idea that the value we place upon our work was a central part of that. Too many of us who banked our future on the hopes of an ever-growing stock market, perpetually expanding 401-K's, expanding borders promised by faithfully repeating “The Prayer of Jabez”, and the promise of always going to Wal Mart and finding everyday low prices on goods “Made in the USA”, thought that the culture war was about seeing nudity on the TV, teenagers getting pregnant, and homosexuals getting married. So we eschewed the message of the value of work and labeled it to be pro-union and, perhaps communist at its core.

Now, though, the American working middle class is in a full-fledged wage war with the caste systems of the world. Profits are soaring for the Fortune 500 and the top executives are rewarding themselves with huge raises—just so they can stay ahead of professional athletes, lobbyists, and political advisers, but the real wages of Americans are in their harshest decline in 15 years.

The emergence of the new American caste system that can only come from a materialistic and amoral culture that values power, wealth and self gratification above principle, people and their social, cultural, and economic contributions has provided great benefit to the political system and the news industry. Political campaigning has become a year-round industry that sees nearly a billion dollars filter through Democrat and Republican coffers during presidential election years—and this does not include money spent on congressional, state, local elections. That money filters through the political parties and goes into the media machine that produces the information we use to select our elected leaders.

The fact of the matter is that the political system is not going to allow any movement or individual to threaten that flow of wealth. The one thing that doomed the Buchanan movement during those heady days of the mid-'90's was his promise that, “...when I raise my hand and take that oath of office, that New World Order comes crashing down.” Buchanan has detailed, through four books since The Great Betrayal, the reasons for our national decline, the principles that can preserve American culture and society, and the steps that we need to take to turn the nation back to its roots.

In every case his message is that we take stock in each other and resist the temptation to pass power to a central authority to care for our problems—whether that central authority be a manufacturer that can promise us cheap consumer goods because it uses Chinese slave labor, or a federal government that steps in and tells us who we can hire at what rates while it neglects controlling an immigration movement that is placing downward pressure on working wages.

Another Buchanan campaign for president is not going to successfully turn the ship of state around. Primarily because if it is successful, he will be alone in a bipartisan sea dedicated to self preservation. If he should gather enough popular support to conquer the political process to be elected president, the political system will take that as a direct threat on its hold on power and respond as a wounded animal fighting for its life.

More importantly, however, those of us who consider a new Buchanan candidacy to be an opportunity to change the direction of the country need only to review what the GOP did to choke off his campaign so it could forfeit the presidency to the re-election to Bill Clinton. The venom of the system will be much more deadly this go around and it will be aimed at not only incapacitating the head, but killing off the body as well—after all, why are unwarranted wire taps proceeding without congressional oversight?

Buchanan's prose has been an inspiration to millions of Americans for more than a decade. The problem for us is that inspiration has been scattered through a nation of more than three hundred million with a political system that has been increasingly centralized for more than a century. The political system has too much control over the minds of the public to think that it can be displaced easily—taking on that system will require a long march of reason and activity.

For that reason the suggestion is made here to the Buchanan Brigades, the Peasants with Pitchforks, and the newcomers who have been put off by the election-year bate and switch conservatism of the GOP that we now devote ourselves to verbalizing the principles of constitutional federalism and work to the election of local and state office holders who will uphold them. Doing so will begin building a new infrastructure to give political support to someone who will actually respect America's governing principles upon his election.

League of Women Voters in Oregon refuse to let major parties set terms of gubenatorial debate

2006-08-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

This article came from Third Party Watch.com from an online Oregon newspaper. Kudos to the League of Women Voters for not letting the majors push them around.

Sorry I haven't be blogging much lately because I've been busy. Hopefully after Labor day I'll get into a new routine.

- Sean Scallon

The League of Women Voters of the Rogue Valley has withdrawn its sponsorship of a planned gubernatorial debate because the two main candidates refused to allow challengers from minor parties to participate.

The League of Women Voters of Oregon recently opened its sponsored debates to any candidate who receives at least 5 percent support in an independent poll. Until last year, the league required a candidate to poll at least 10 percent to participate.

After seven months of planning, the league decided it wouldn’t co-sponsor the debate with KOBI Channel 5 because Gov. Ted Kulongoski, his Republican challenger Ron Saxton, and KOBI managers were all unwilling to open the debate to candidates who could show at least 5 percent support to participate, said Trish Bowcock, president of the League of Women Voters of the Rogue Valley.

“We were put in the position of saying we wouldn’t follow our own rules, and we couldn’t do that,” Bowcock said.

“They were given the format,” she said, “but they agreed to everything but the 5 percent rule.”

The decision means the debate will be closed to Mary Starrett, the Constitution party’s candidate for governor, as well as Libertarian candidate Richard Morley and Joseph Keating of the Pacific Green Party of Oregon.

Although the league has dropped its sponsorship, the debate is still scheduled for live broadcast on Channel 5 from 6:30 to 8 p.m., Oct. 24. The league estimated that the debate could reach as many as 380,000 registered voters in Southern Oregon.

Kulongoski and Saxton will field questions from members of the news media, including Bob Hunter, Mail Tribune editor.

Representatives from the Kulongoski and Saxton camps had their own explanations for why the league decided to withdraw.

Anna Richter Taylor, said the Kulongoski campaign’s only condition concerned when the polling had to be completed to determine which candidates would be involved in the forum.

“We wanted to know when they were going to make the decision,” she said.

Richter Taylor said the governor’s campaign welcomed the league’s sponsorship.

“We never put conditions around their involvement,” she added.

Angela Wilhelms, spokesperson for the Saxton campaign, said she wasn’t aware of any concern about minor-party candidates.

“We were given a format and asked to participate and we agreed,” she said. “We haven’t had any follow-up conversations with anybody about this.”

Bob Wise, vice president and general manager of KOBI, said, “I would have loved to have worked with the League of Women Voters.”

Wise said that after discussing the 5 percent issue with the Kulongoski and Saxton campaigns “It became apparent that that was an issue.”

He said the Kulongoski and Saxton campaigns wanted to set the limit at 10 percent support for a minor candidate, which Wise described as “reasonable.”

“It didn’t seem like an unrealistic expectation of the candidates participating,” said Wise. He said it was important to continue to hold the forum in the interests of his viewers even though the league has dropped its sponsorship.

Margaret Noel, chairwoman of the League of Women Voters of Oregon education fund, said it is very difficult for any minor party candidate to get 5 percent support. She said she had not seen any polls so far that showed any of the minor candidates with 5 percent.

Noel said the filing deadline for gubernatorial candidates is next Tuesday, so it would have been premature to say that no other contenders should be in the debate.

She said the league also wants to extend the deadline for minor candidates to show 5 percent support right up until the time of the debate.

“If a candidate had got the 5 percent, they would deserve to be in the debate,” she said.

The Christian Conservative Who Opposed the Vietnam War

2006-08-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

I found this article on Antiwar.com today. I wish there more leaders like Eugene Siler around.

-- Sean Scallon

The Christian Conservative Who Opposed the Vietnam War

by David T. and Linda Royster Beito

To the extent a Religious Right of any kind existed in 1964, Eugene Siler easily qualified as a platinum-card member. In his nine years in the U.S. House, he was unrivaled in his zeal to implement "Christianism and Americanism." Yet 42 years ago this month, on Aug. 7, 1964, he did something that would be extremely rare for one of his modern counterparts on the Religious Right. He dissented from a president's urgent request to authorize military action in a foreign war. It was Siler who cast the lone vote in the U.S. House against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Because he "paired against" the bill (meaning he was absent during the vote), however, most historical accounts do not mention him.

A self-described "Kentucky hillbilly," Siler was born in 1900 in Williamsburg, a town nestled in the mountains in the southeastern part of the state. Unlike most Kentuckians, he, like his neighbors, was a rock-ribbed Republican. The people of this impoverished area had backed the Union during the Civil War and had stood by the GOP in good times and bad ever since. Siler served in the Navy in World War I and two decades later as an Army captain during World War II. His experiences with the realities of war left him cold to most proposals to send American troops into harm's way.

After graduating from Columbia University, Siler returned to Williamsburg to be a small-town lawyer. A devout Baptist, he gained local renown as a lay preacher, eventually serving as moderator of the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky. He abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and profanity. As a lawyer, he turned away all clients seeking divorces or accused of whiskey-related crimes.

He began service as an elected judge of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky in 1945 and promptly refused his regular monthly allotment of $150 for expenses. Instead, he gave the money to a special fund he set up for scholarships. Not surprisingly, Siler often quoted the scriptures from the bench. He did the same in his speeches as the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in 1951, earning him a statewide reputation as a "Bible Crusader."

Siler consistently stressed social conservatism during his tenure in the U.S. House, which began in 1955. He sponsored a bill to ban liquor and beer advertising in all interstate media. He said that permitting these ads was akin to allowing the "harsh hussy" to advertise in "the open door of her place of business for the allurement of our school children." Of course, he was "100 percent for Bible reading and the Lord's Prayer in our public schools."

Like his good friend, and fellow Republican, from Iowa, Rep. H.R. Gross, Siler considered himself to be a fiscal watchdog. He disdained all junkets and railed against government debt and high spending. Siler made exceptions for the homefolks, however, by supporting flood control and other federal measures that aided his district.

As with Gross, Siler was a Robert A. Taft Republican who was averse to entangling alliances and foreign quagmires. A consistent opponent of foreign aid, he was just one of two congressmen to vote against Kennedy's call-up of reserves during the Berlin crisis. He favored Goldwater in 1964, but never shared his hawkish views. The people back home did not seem to mind. Sometimes, the Democrats failed to even put up a candidate.

Siler was an early, and prescient, critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In June 1964, shortly after deciding not to run again, he quipped, half in jest, that he was running for president as an antiwar candidate. He pledged to resign after one day in office, staying just long enough to bring the troops home. He characterized the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized Johnson to take "all necessary steps" in Vietnam, as a "buck-passing" pretext to "seal the lips of Congress against future criticism."

The worsening situation in Vietnam prompted Siler to come out of retirement in 1968 to run (unsuccessfully) for the U.S. Senate nomination on a platform calling for withdrawal of all U.S. troops by Christmas. Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon, the only two U.S. senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, also went down to defeat that year.

Although Siler lived on until 1987, few remembered his early stand against the Vietnam War. It is doubtful that this particularly bothered him. He knew that his reputation was secure among the plain, Baptist, Republican mountain folk of southeastern Kentucky who had sent him to Congress for nearly a decade.

Reprinted courtesy of the History News Network.

Lieberman the liar

2006-08-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

In another time I would have welcomed Sen. Joe Lieberman's call for Domald Rumsfeld's resignation and criticisms of the war in Iraq. The problem is, all of this is nothing more than a transparent attempt to curry favor with anti-war voters in Conneticut. If he had said such things six months ago, chances are, he probably would have won the primary. Now he says such things and pretends he said them for the past two years when blantanly lying. This is the same man who criticized war opponents for trying to undermine the presidency itself. I may not share Ned Lamont's politics, but I hope he beats the pants off of Lieberman the liar just to get that neocon slime out of the Senate.