Old Link Bundle: More Trumpiness

 My tabs are REALLY piling up...

A reminder that Trump has been using government agents to target opposition protests long before the current BLM protests.

"Mr. Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it," 2019 style.

And again. And again.

Remember, Trump's cabinet is just as corrupt and incompetent as he is.

 Reminders that Trump wants to shut down all immigration except rich white people permanently, law be damned: here, here.

Reminders that Trump loves him some white supremacist terrorists: here, here.

Reminders that Trump is himself a white supremacist: here, here. And that he surrounds himself with white supremacists and does nothing about them: here.

Trump on health care: let the corporations run wild, stick you with the bill. Hell, he even wants that to be the case in England.

Reminders that Trump is wholly corrupt not just morally but financially: here, here.

Reminder that Trump believes it's all right for him to make doing his job conditional on electoral support: here. 

Reminders that Trump's tax plan was designed specifically only to benefit people like himself: here, here.

Reminders that Trump uses his power to deliberately cover up his own scandals: here, here.

Reminders that Trump hates the poor: here, here, here.

Reminders that Trump is loading the federal courts with bigots and corrupt dealers wholly unqualified for their roles: here.

Reminder that Trump is absolutely incompetent at foreign policy: here. 

Reminder that Trump believes loyalty goes only one way: here.

Reminder that there is zero evidence that Trump will relinquish power voluntarily: here.

And, finally, reminders that Republicans and conservatives won't lift a finger to stop Trump: here. 

Because they had the chance to stop Trump once, for these reasons, and for others, and chose not to.

Because Trump is exactly what Republicans, as a group, are.

Link Bundle: Prejudice

Well, I have too many tabs on my laptop web browser, so let's clean them up. I think I can get a bunch of them off just by picking those involving racism and bigotry...

A reminder that modern day conservatives use religious liberty as an excuse to defend bigotry and discrimination... if they bother to require any excuse at all.

Reminders that conservatives only believe in free speech if it's speech that upholds white supremacy. Otherwise, if you speak out against injustice and for equality, they want you dead.

Reminders that our judicial system itself is built on racial bias.

Reminder that Eisenhower, yes, was quite thoroughly racist.

Reminder that, for Trump and his cronies, even legal immigrants must be purged. And, eventually, native born citizens that the conservatives don't like.

Reminder that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is an organization out of control, violating our most basic freedoms at will.

Reminder that conservatives still believe women are property.

Reminder that the party of Lincoln now believes the South should have won the Civil War.

Reminder that there will always be members of a persecuted group who pretend that their persecutors actually like them.

Reminder that, when a system is biased, a computer programmed to follow that system will also be biased.

Reminder that conservatives are working to prevent non-whites from voting at all costs.

Reminder that Trump and his followers are willing to waste money and make America less safe in order to advance nakedly racist goals.

Reminder that "Go back where you came from" has always been racist.

Reminder that, in America, "normal" is defined as "straight white man".

Reminder that racism is alive and well in our schools.

And, finally, reminders that our current administration has no interest whatever in serving any American who isn't white.

Link Bundle 8

Reminder: it's not just Trump who wants to silence all dissent.

Meanwhile, the people who want to stifle dissent quite happily lie to you about the media.

Reminder: our new CIA director is guilty of war crimes.

A gun in public is a threat. Nothing less.

Here's the inside story from the man who helped Steve Bannon weaponize Facebook.

Conservatives cannot endure even peaceful protests, as witness the steps a public school took to quash a student anti-gun protest.

If you want the freedom of speech to call for ethnic cleansing, we demand the freedom to call you out for the evil fascist asshole you are.

Reminder: Trump's foreign policy is completely incoherent. Those "resistors" in his Cabinet must be so proud.

Reminder: the old billionaires who claim to advocate freedom want to control higher education.

And this is the kind of rape-defender scum they're funding.

In my home state it is a legal defense to a murder rap to claim that your victim made a sexual advance on you.

Enough for now, I hope...

Link Bundle #4

A computer crash didn't lose all my tabs, so while I'm waiting for my replacement computer, here's me clearing out more tabs with the laptop...

Republicans, when they lose an election, do everything in their power to obstruct the winners. When they win an election, they demand that they be allowed to enact their full agenda without dissent.

Pro-Trump vandalism and terrorism, example Nth.

Charitable giving peaked in 2006. It was never sufficient to meet the needs of the poor and sick. It's even less so now.

One of the reasons Trump won: although Obamacare is better for some than what came before, it's still a crappy system with a LOT of people who lose out because of it. Here's one example.

Don't expect the Israeli peace process to advance one inch while Trump's in power, if this is the kind of diplomat he wants.

Remember: Republicans only support freedom of speech if it's the freedom of straight white Christians to persecute people not of their own kind.

Another example of Republicans eager to block free speech if it challenges white supremacy.

Seriously, Jeff Sessions is so blatant about it that he calls for free speech for conservatives while denouncing blacks attempting to use it... IN THE SAME SPEECH.

This article references Chuck Coulson, the Nixon aide who went to jail as part of Watergate, got religion, and then used his religion to advance the same politics he supported under Nixon. His foundation today is the principal funder of Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and Bryan Fischer's American Family Radio, with their motto of "muscular Christianity." In the end it's all the same thing: using God's name to justify hate, bigotry, and fear.

Thesis for three books: the single greatest political disaster of America's 20th Century was the day Ford pardoned Nixon. Since then, accountability in high office has been a dead letter, and conservatives have felt no compunctions about breaking both the spirit and letter of the law ever since.

The free market creates poverty traps- in fact it ENCOURAGES poverty traps like, for example, mobile home parks. Only by people working together for a common good, and taking power away from unaccountable landlords, can they reclaim control of their own lives.

Republicans try this every year, because they believe women and children should be property. They also try things like this with much more success.

Tom Price, Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, wants to make it easier for medical corporations to bankrupt elderly Americans. He also wants to push people out of group employer plans and into more expensive, less comprehensive individual plans, because even voluntary, market-based collective action is intolerable to him when there's medical profits at stake.

Quote:

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

Yet another example of how useless the Democratic Party is, with a quarter of its members in Congress supporting Trump's ignorant nativism. These Congresspeople need to be thrown out.

This cartoon pretty much sums up the modern Democratic Party; ignore or stifle the little people until you need to fundraise.

Reminder: Trump is using the Presidency to add to his personal wealth.

Seriously, a lot. Probably illegally, but Trump and the Republicans control the machinery that would (or won't) prosecute.

After Trump refused to mention Jews in his Holocaust speech, Democrats tried to get Congress to pass a resolution correcting the matter. Republicans blocked it, because they know they need to obey the racists they've been encouraging for forty years.

This is the kind of thing that goes on when a mentally lazy person becomes President.

"Why don't they come here legally?" Because most of them CAN'T.

A reminder that, for all the logjams in Congress, Trump is still making a lot of major changes to America. This is the damage he did in his first two weeks.

OK, time to get back to work...

Free speech needs limits if other freedoms are to be respected.

I do not believe freedom of speech is, or ought to be, absolute. I believe words matter, that words have consequences, and that words can be used and are being used to harm others and to tear down our society.

I have a couple simple rules that guide what I consider speech not worthy of protection by our society.

If you tell a deliberate lie which can be objectively proven to be a lie, with any reasonable expectation that it will be taken as the truth by a normal listener, that speech should not be protected.
If you advocate for the physical harm, dispossession, separation, or expulsion, either directly or as a proposal for public policy, of a group of people as a group, without regard to justice for any individual within that group, with any reasonable expectation that other people might be persuaded to act upon your advocacy, that speech should not be protected.

I'm sure, with enough careful parsing, I could come up with one or two more, but these two are the big ones. Deception should never be free speech; and bigotry should never be free speech.

This is why, for example, I regard Colin Kapernick's protest as free speech, but I do NOT regard InfoWars and Breitbart's lies as free speech. The former told no lies and did not advocate for anyone else's harm. Alex Jones and Steve Bannon do both on a daily basis.

Likewise, I don't regard the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville as free speech. I regard it as a terrorist rally advocating the destruction of democracy and equality in the United States- in short, as an act of war against the rest of us.

I take seriously how important freedom of speech is, both as a creator of fiction and as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about political matters. For example, if you tell a lie not knowing it was a lie, that is defensible up to the point you are informed otherwise. As much as I would like to say, for example, that spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy claims, not objectively disprovable but designed to make people more likely to accept violence towards Jews, shouldn't be protected... I don't see any way of doing it without also taking away the right of voters to hold elected officials under suspicion without obvious evidence of wrongdoing.

But although there may not be a clear line to show where a speaker's good faith ends, lying and demonizing others by race, religion, gender, or sexuality are so far beyond that line that there ought not be any doubt.

And I believe it's high time that we, as a society, quit holding the viper to our breasts. Totalitarians will always use a society's freedoms as a tool to bring that society down... but it is possible to maintain most of those freedoms without letting the totalitarians win.

No deception. No advocating pogroms. Not even as jokes (or, as Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh continually claim in court, "non-factual entertainment programming").

Because your right to free speech ends where your fellow man's right to not be attacked in the streets begins- even if you're not the one doing the attacking.

A post-truth society cannot survive.

Sid Miller, Texas's Secretary of Agriculture, called a public radio show to basically say he feels no shame in peddling lies and bullshit to his supporters.

“I’m not a news organization,” Miller told reporter Nathan Bernier. “Y’all are holding me to the same standards as you would a news organization, and it’s just Facebook.” On his Facebook page, according to the Tribune article, Miller has warned that terrorists are preparing "for their jihad against the state and our nation” in a compound outside Houston. Another post claimed President Obama had held up a T-shirt printed with a likeness of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara during a trip to Cuba. He said much of what he posted on Facebook was “satire, or comedy” and that his Facebook page wasn’t a reliable source for “factual news.” “I shouldn’t be held to that standard,” he said. “It’s like Fox News: I report, you decide if it’s true or not.”

Okay, I'm now convinced: there needs to be a restriction on freedom of speech.

To explain, let me give a quick synopsis on why bad precedents make bad law.

Schenck v. United States (1919) is the source of the famous "fire in a crowded theater" line. It was also the source for the standard that speech can be made illegal when it poses a clear and present danger. This was overturned for the most part in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which set the standard that speech can only be illegal when it calls for direct and immediate action to break the law, and even then only when the speaker has a reasonable expectation that he or she will be obeyed. (This test was severely weakened by Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), which held that free speech in the form of money and advocacy could be criminalized without any intent to break the law or harm others, so long as it might have the effect of supporting those who do break the law or harm others.)

And by the way, I'm of the opinion that all three of the cases mentioned in the above paragraph were wrongly decided.

The thing is, in those cases, and in all the cases that form the chain of judicial thought linking them, the primary concern of the government was whether or not the speech would be a link in a chain of some other criminal activity- blocking a national draft from being enforced, inciting violence against non-white races, committing terrorist acts, organized crime, etc. etc. etc.

The courts have focused entirely on the wrong thing.

Oliver Wendell Holmes himself believed that true speech intended to present a political argument to other people was sacrosanct. His test for whether or not speech could be criminalized had two components. "Clear and present danger" was only half of it.

The full quote I'm referring to is this:

"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

The emphasis is mine.

For Holmes, it wasn't sufficient that speech bring about danger. It had to be FALSE speech. Statements of true and accurate facts, presented in good faith, were in his mind given absolute protection by the First Amendment. Congress had no right to regulate such speech, period.

Lies? Speech intended to deceive? Falsehoods created to inspire hatred, violence and insurrection? All fair game for regulation. (Remember, Holmes was an officer in the American Civil War. He'd seen firsthand what lies could do.)

But pretty much no court, no judge of note since Holmes died has upheld his theory. It's taken for granted today that in the United States you can lie all you want, gin up hatred based on falsehoods and conspiracy theories all you want, and it's perfectly legal, no matter the consequences.

If I've learned anything from 2016, it's this: that precedent, that assumption, needs to be changed.

Schenck v. United States was decided wrongly (with Holmes writing the unanimous opinion) because there was no lie involved. Schenck's calls to resist the draft were based on an honest belief that national conscription was involuntary servitude- read slavery- and thus not only unconstitutional but a direct threat to American liberty.

Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided wrongly because Mr. Brandenburg was spreading lies- lies of racial inferiority, lies that blacks sought to conquer whites, etc.- for the purpose of winning popular support for a race war to exterminate non-whites in America. (Since then, his spiritual descendants in the alt-right have softened their tone, but not their actual meaning or their final plans, and the lies continue to be spread.)

When people seeking power deliberately muddy the truth, spread false information, and perpetuate bigoted lies for the purpose of advancing their political agenda, they commit fraud. The thing is, if they were bilking people out of money, there's a small chance they might be prosecuted. For bilking people out of their guaranteed rights, out of their government, out of democracy altogether, there is no punishment whatever.

And now those who do this have become totally shameless about it- and Donald Trump is only one among a legion.

It must become illegal to pull confidence schemes on voters.

My proposal: "Falsehoods presented, deliberately or with obvious carelessness for the truth, as factual and accurate to the people, shall not be regarded as protected speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and Congress and the states shall have power to regulate such speech and to pass laws for the enforcement of such regulations."

Any thoughts?

2 + 2 = 5.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

--- George Orwell, 1984

A man went into a Washington pizza place with a gun intending to "self-investigate" the restaurant based on a conspiracy theory peddled by the alt-right that the Clintons, Anthony Weiner, and several unnnamed Congresspeople were using the restaurant as a front for a child prostitution ring. Thankfully nobody was hurt, although one report I've seen claims that at least one shot was fired before the man surrendered to police.

Normally this would only be national news for a day. The original rumor that the Clintons and their inner circle engage in child sex slavery is one of a multitude of outlandish and obviously false stories made up by the Alt-Right to discredit the Clinton presidential campaign.

On Oct. 30, a white supremacy Twitter account that presents itself as belonging to a Jewish lawyer in New York tweeted that the NYPD was looking into evidence that emails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained evidence of Clinton involvement in an “international child enslavement ring.” ... no law enforcement agency has said anything about these crazy claims. There is no evidence to back them up. The claims have been concocted and are being spread to misinform people.

 Sadly, this is business as usual. 

What isn't business as usual- and what must NEVER be treated as business as usual- is this:

 On Nov. 3, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then a Trump campaign adviser and now Trump’s choice to be his national security adviser, shared a tweet linking to the True Pundit story along with the comment, “U decide - NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc...MUST READ!”

And this:

On Sunday, Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., tweeted, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidences’ tied to it.”
The younger Flynn, who has served as his father’s adviser, linked to the account of Jack Posobiec, whose Twitter account describes him as the special projects director of a group called Citizens4Trump.

Posobiec said Welch’s actions were a “false flag,” and claimed he was an actor carrying out an elaborate conspiracy to discredit sites that spread the fabricated #PizzaGate accusations.
“Planted Comet Pizza Gunman will be used to push for censorship of independent news sources that are not corporate owned,” he tweeted.

For weeks, Comet Ping Pong has been the victim of false news stories about Clinton trafficking children in the local D.C. restaurant's back rooms. The stories appeared on Facebook, in addition to such dubious outlets as The New Nationalist and Alex Jones' Infowars.

Since then, a hashtag, #PizzaGate, has been used to defame the restaurant. The owner and employees of the pizzeria have also been victims of harassment. Scurrilous and defamatory posts continue to appear on Twitter on a daily basis even as D.C. police have said the restaurant is not under investigation.

Not only is the Alt-Right moving into power in Washington as an integral part of the Trump administration, but it's bringing its callous, shameless disregard for objective facts with it. They're even coming out and openly saying that there's no longer any such thing as facts:

What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.

“Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”

It’s a fact that she said this: I heard it live, as did Rehm, Politico’s Glenn Thrush, and the Atlantic’s James Fallows, who wrote about it, citing a recording of the show.

. . .

“You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” said Lewandowski, who was another ill-advised CNN hire. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

. . .

There was more from the Harvard event. When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway about the same election-fraud claim discussed above — specifically, whether disseminating misinformation was “presidential” — it was clear that she and Hughes got the same memo.

“He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behavior,” Conway said, using mind-bending pseudo-logic, reminiscent of the Nixonian “When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”

We have an administration which, from the top down, believes it can and should lie blatantly to the voters. From Trump right on down, they have decided that not only will they say and do anything to get what they want, no matter who it hurts, but also believes that this is the way things ought to be done.

Twenty years ago conservatives were screaming about a national identification law proposed under the Clinton administration, and then again under the Bush administration. "Mark of the beast!" they shouted. "1984! 1984!"

Ten years ago conservatives were screaming about traffic cameras, cameras in public places, and police surveillance. "Big Brother!" they shouted. "Big Brother! 1984! 1984!"

The problem is, Americans remember George Orwell's book for its universal police state and forget its fundamental lessons. The IngSoc regime was terrifying not because it could see what you were doing at all times. It was terrifying because the entire IngSoc regime, from beginning to end, was bent on molding human brains like clay into the desired shape- and them smashing it flat.

Why? Because they could. No other reason.

1984 was Hitler's Big Lie, Stalin's official history, and every dictatorship's propaganda machine turned up to its ultimate limit. By erasing the line between lie and truth, IngSoc made it possible to create their own reality and force its subjects to conform to it- which, as it turned out, wasn't very hard at all.

The alt-right, founded as it was in white supremacy groups, knows this full well. They've been using the big lie for generations to convince their followers of the coming race war, of the innate inferiority of all non-white races, of the truth that whites in America are the most persecuted minority group. Lie, lie, lie.

But it took the likes of Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, etc. to fill in the gap that the old white-supremacist movement missed. It's not enough to tell a lie loud enough, often enough. You must also discredit all other sources of information that don't agree with your own. Your lie must be on a level playing field with the truth to win out.

It doesn't help that the modern mass media, with its total misunderstanding of what "showing all sides of the issue" actually means in practice, played right along. The lie was almost never questioned or challenged, because that would be seen as "taking sides in a political debate." The effect was so strong that even Barack Obama, in his first year of office, referred to the use of torture by the Bush administration as "a policy difference" rather than what it was- a heinous and unacceptable war crime.

Thus the forces of evil in this nation took advantage of the First Amendment, using its protection to spread lies and deceive the people and, gradually, to make themselves look respectable and knowledgable.

Result? Today trust of the consensus media, the media that seeks out fact and tries to present it without obvious political bias, is at all-time lows. Media that lies blatantly and cheerfully to stir up fear and hate and advance its own agenda, particularly at the right, grows stronger every day.

And now the kind of men who run that latter kind of media- Steve Bannon being foremost among them- are moving into the White House, where they will have the kind of "dark power" they want.

One more Orwell quote:

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

And at a pizza shop in the District of Columbia, we've had our first concrete indication of how the Trump administration intends to use that power.

Be very, very afraid.
 

Conservatism and cowardice go hand in hand.

Wow, it's been a very long time since I used this blog, hasn't it?

So, today I saw a friend of mine repost on Facebook a status which began by saying it was time for liberals to begin some "real talk" about Islam, lest we "give up the issue to conservatives."

I did not respond well to this, as you might guess. "Real talk about X" is a long-time dog-whistle for, "I want to say something bigoted about X group, but I don't want to look like a bigot, so I'm going to present my prejudices as common sense." And I responded to the status, saying, more or less, "What you're saying is, liberals need to agree with conservatives in hating and fearing Muslims." This triggered an exchange with the original status poster until my friend yanked his repost and stopped the exchange.

That said, there were several points that merit response.

First, on the original poster's claim that his "real talk" was not about hating and fearing Muslims; bullshit. The whole point of his original post is that liberals are silent about Islam and terrorism and that "real talk" is necessary, but has been censored by the left. Well, since the general liberal position on Islamic terrorism is that we need to dismantle the terrorist organizations that carry out attacks without blaming an entire religion for the crimes of fewer than one percent of its adherents, the "real talk" that is being censored is almost certainly the conservative view: "Islam is evil, Muslims are evil, and we need to punish Muslims regardless of their individual roles in anything at all."

Second: do you know how this person said this alternative view was being censored? "People are afraid to speak the truth because they'll be called racists."

Uh huh. So you believe something strongly, but won't say anything because you're afraid someone will call you a name? You think that, when someone holds an opinion and says it openly, that act by itself is censorship against anyone who differs?

Horseshit. 

I can't count how many names I've been called in online discussions about this and that: communist, socialist, statist, traitor, idiot, asshole, sheep, shithead, and worse and worse. I won't pretend I don't care about some of those labels, but I've certainly never let them even slow me down from expressing my opinion and arguing my position on anything and everything. I've certainly never felt censored because of namecalling. No epithet posted on the Internet has yet resulted in my loss of access to the Internet, my arrest or imprisonment, or my being sued or fined for my beliefs.

Your opinion, whatever it is, cannot force my silence; and my opinion cannot force your silence.

Third, and finally: if you're afraid that speaking your opinion on X might make you seem like a bigot, it might just be because you ARE being a bigot. If you're self-censoring yourself on that grounds, then you need to stop and carefully re-examine your beliefs and why you hold them. Hint: if you are classifying a group of 1.5 billion people as if they are all identical and interchangable, that's bigotry. If you believe that membership in any arbitrary group is sufficient cause to consider a person evil or criminal, with no further evidence, that's bigotry. And if your opinions sound anything like, "All X are dangerous," or, "We can't allow X into our country because they'll destroy us all," then guess what? That opinion is based on hate, fear, and prejudice- in other words, bigotry.

And guess what? That puts you side by side with the likes of ISIL, whose entire belief system is built on bigotry and anti-liberalism. It is the nature of liberals to disagree, but to accept the presence and equal rights of those who disagree with them. It is the nature of conservatives, and especially religious fundamentalist conservatives, to attack all who disagree with them and seek to drive them out or destroy them outright.

Because liberals are brave enough to accept that not everyone is alike, and that it is possible to be different or strange and not be hostile. Conservatives, on the other hand, are scared livid of anything different or strange, and hate, fear and hold in contempt all that is different from themselves.

And yet, while liberals defend their positions even when attacked and beaten, conservatives are such shrinking violets that they apparently silence themselves for fear that they might be called by the nasty, horrible name of "racist."

I suspect that's why Trump is doing so well among conservatives: with every bigoted and ignorant thing he spews from his mouth on the campaign trail, he's saying the things conservatives are too cowardly to admit they still believe. And he gets away with it.

Trump is "real talk."

And, ironically, Trump has pledged that the first thing he'll do when he becomes president is to make it illegal for anybody to criticize him. He's already put it into the contracts he makes his volunteers sign; anyone who works for him is never again allowed to say anything bad at all about Donald Trump, ever, for the rest of his or her life, on pain of lawsuit.

Because even Donald Trump is too cowardly to live in a society where other people don't agree with him on absolutely everything. Instead, while Bernie Sanders and even Hillary Clinton listen to their protesters and sit down with them and discuss their views, Trump silences them, then encourages his followers to beat them into submission and promises to pay the legal costs. 

Just as ISIL is too cowardly to live in a world where any religion other than their unique and ultra-fundamentalist sect of Islam exists. Instead they kill everyone who doesn't follow their faith in their exact way.

What happened in Brussels today is the act of an organization of cowards. And it is their devout hope that their acts of murder will empower our cowards here to respond in kind, to trigger the war of religious extermination they desperately desire.

I refuse to be a coward, and I refuse to be silent while cowards call for "real talk" as a way to veil their prejudices and fears in a haze of respectability.

The religion of Islam has many different sects and subdivisions, just as Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism do. The crimes of one particular group of Muslims lie on the head of members of that group and no one else. Any policy which treats all members of a group as culpable for the crimes of a small group of individuals, without regard to any facts on an individual basis, is injustice to those affected. And no matter how much you hate or fear a group, for whatever reasons, such policy remains now and forever unjust.

That's not "real talk." That's just truth.

And if you disagree, have the courage of your convictions and say so- and don't fear whatever names I or anyone else might call you.

A letter to my new Congressman...

I have absolutely zero faith that this will do any good whatsoever.

But I have a new congressman now- Steve Stockman. Yes, that Steve Stockman. I've tried putting this in as conservative and freedom-loving a way as I can, so we'll see if this gets any response.

Feel free to write your own Congressperson, who may be more inclined to the anti-corporate point of view.

The Honorable Representative Mr. Steve Stockman

326 Cannon Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Sir;

I write to you today urging your support for House Joint Resolutions 20 and 21, two proposed amendments to the Constitution of the United States to provide for proper regulation of campaign finance and corporate speech.

By the laws and traditions which we live under, I have one vote, just like any other citizen of the United States of the age of eighteen or older. Likewise George Soros, Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Art Pope, and other billionaires each have one vote, the same as you or I. Likewise, under the First Amendment, we are each guaranteed full freedom of conscience- to believe, to say, to print and to make public what we believe without fear of persecution under the law.

Yet thanks to Supreme Court rulings made over the past forty years, and especially in the past five years, any one of the billionaires I just mentioned has a vastly greater control over government than people like myself. In any given year I can afford to donate to political causes no more than perhaps $100. The billionaires, on the other hand, can donate a million dollars, or ten million dollars, or (in Adelson’s case) over one hundred million dollars. This money is spent to influence not just the voters, but also the candidates who are being voted for, making it appear that those candidates, to be blunt, are bought and paid for by the billionaires.

The use of corporations and anonymous donations to political action committees is even more egregious. When I say something, or when I donate to a candidate, it is perforce a public act, and my name and identity are associated with my speech. Corporations and political action committees allow the speakers to remain anonymous. This enables them to advance false and misleading arguments which, if the names of the actual people involved were revealed, would disgrace and shame those people. This anonymity violates the basic principle that rights have responsibilities; just as, as a gun owner, I have the responsibility to use my gun responsibly and with due caution for the safety of others, just so does must a speaker take responsibility for his or her speech.

Corporate abuse of anonymous speech is even more outrageous when one considers the origin of corporations. Corporations were originally instituted by government for the purpose of accomplishing great tasks for the universal good of the people. They were given limited liability under the law in exchange for the social benefits they provided. That purpose has been lost. Today corporations exist for the sole purpose of bringing profit to their shareholders and executives, with no concern for the good of the people; and yet they retain all of the rights and powers of people, with none of the responsibility.

For these reasons I ask you to support the proposed constitutional amendments proposed by the Hon. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. HJ Res 20 would, if ratified, grant Congress the power to regulate campaign spending, thus ensuring a greater equality of political influence among all Americans. HJ Res 21 would draw clear and distinct differences between the rights of individual human beings (which remain sacrosanct) and corporations (which are creations of the government and not actual people), and grant Congress the power to regulate the rights of corporations to restrict the chronic abuse of their power.

By supporting HJ Res 20 and HJ Res 21 you would take a stand for the freedom and equality of all Americans, rich and poor alike. You would severely reduce the corruption currently endemic in our political system. You would preserve the rights of the individual from abuse by the wealthy few who, under the present system, can buy immunity from their responsibility as American citizens. For these reasons I ask you to lend these amendments your support.

                                                                        Sincerely yours,

                                                                        Kristan Overstreet

I've Been Thinking This For Ages

Now I have supporting evidence: Ryan Sager reports on a study that shows that, at the least, the prevalence of pornography in American is harmless.

And, in fact, there is some associative, but not causal, evidence that suggests that the availability of porn reduces rape:

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined.

And I especially find interesting the line that says that the single biggest associative factor with sexual abuse or rape is not pornography... it's a sexually repressive religious upbringing.

So there's actually a scientific reason why there are so many sexual skeletons in Republican closets...

Anyway, in light of this research, I ask all of you readers to support my program to make the world a better place...

Letter to the Houston Chronicle Comics Editor

Comics Editor
Houston Chronicle

To Whom it May Concern;

I am writing to you today in response to today's Prickly City strip, which depicts a waterboarding.

I presume that you are going to get a lot of letters of complaint, saying that such material is not suitable for young readers, or not fit material for a comic or cartoon.

This is not one of those letters.

The only outrage of this strip is that our government is doing these things and worse to people we have imprisoned, people who cannot appeal to the courts for release, people who, according to our leaders, are non-persons. Too many people are complacent on this issue. Too many people believe the weasel words of our government, who repeatedly claim, despite all evidence, that what they are doing is not torture, not cruel, and not un-American.

It takes great courage for a nationally syndicated newspaper cartoonist to present this issue, in graphic and explicit fashion, next to cartoons about cute dogs and cats or mischevious children or cultural icons. The fact that you- a newspaper in the home state of George W. Bush- support this artist demonstrates your own courage, for which I commend you.

Thank you for printing this strip. Thank you for taking a stand.

And thank you for remembering that, in order to educate the public, it is often necessary to shock and outrage them.

Kris Overstreet
Livingston, Texas

Cull Day, After a Long Time

My web browser's running slow, possibly due to all the news articles I've been holding onto the past few days. Let's get rid of some of those, shall we?

First, Hillary Clinton. The last couple days Hillary has been singing John Edwards' praises, but it's worth remembering that the Clinton campaign ran negative robo-calls the day of the South Carolina primaries. Granted, I agree with the content of the calls: I'm glad as hell John "Got Rich on Malpractice Suits Using Junk Science" Edwards is out of the race. But the transcript of these calls shows more and more what kind of people the Clintons are: burn your bridges now, mend them later after the battle's won. I'm hoping that Obama represents a bridge too far...

The rump FEC commission rules that two people pooling their money to attend a political convention or do anything else constitute a PAC... and thus must file with the FEC and abide by spending and donation limits and reporting. Thank God the Democrats are blocking four replacement members of the FEC against Bush's board-packing scheme, otherwise this piece of garbage would actually act as law. As it is, this ruling would quite effectively prevent any new or small groups from getting anywhere in the political arena, while old established PACs and the two big political parties can keep trundling on. Anyone who thinks the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was a good idea and that "public funding" of elections is a better one, beware... this is what your policies result in- the silencing of individual free speech.

You've probably heard this one again and again... Bush Administration Lied Nearly 1,000 Times About Iraq. My response: no shit, Sherlock.

Ezra Klien debunks Republican claims that the Bush years have been good for the economy. In truth, Dubya, who claims an economic record "other Presidents would envy", only beats out his father. All other Presidents back to JFK had greater economic growth in their Presidencies... even Jimmy Carter. (Shocker: Carter had the same rate of economic growth in his Presidency- four years- that Reagan had in his Presidency- eight years.)

The day after the State of the Union, the Bush administration kills the largest clean-coal experimental project. Apparent reason: the FutureGen project had chosen a site in Illinois for construction... rather than any of several proposed sites in Texas. Irony: this was done the day after Bush said, on worldwide television, that America needed to invest in new, experimental clean-coal technology. Apparently not unless those investments benefit Bush's buddies, huh?

Well, that seems to have sped up my browser. Let's look through a few of the O-L-D news bookmarks from last year and see if there's anything I can dispose of, hm?

From May of last year: Jim MacDonald writes about how the FBI and CIA actually creates domestic terror cells. Specifically, he talks about how agents act as provaceteurs and encourage nitwits to become terrorists for the promise of money. As soon as the nitwits begin botching together a plan- usually with the help of those undercover FBI agents- the Feds bust them, then brag about how they're protecting us from those evil horrible Islamo-fascists. And this helps us remain secure... how?

As was mentioned by Hillary Clinton last night- so this is still current eight months after this was written- the Pentagon has drawn up no contingency plans for leaving Iraq. They have contingency plans to invade Canada, in the event that a communist beaver regime takes over in Ottawa, but they're not even considering getting out of a nation which, more and more, is expressing its wish to be shed of us.

Jack Markowitz writes that we already have socialized medicine on the state level: the wasteful bureaucratic morass that is Medicaid. Although a ton of people are technically eligible, the paperwork requirement to prove you qualify is enormous... and yet the states, in particular Texas, have funded and expanded the program until it constitutes between a quarter and a third of all state budgets. All, according to Markowitz, in order to get votes and Federal matching funds. There may be an argument in favor of national health care, but Medicaid certainly isn't it.

One of the bad laws that passed the Texas legislature last year: now, if fifteen or more students request a bible study class, your local school district must provide it. Don't know if Perry signed it, but I don't see him not signing it, to be honest. There's no guarantee that the "religious studies" classes won't be used for Christian prosletyzing... and considering my home state, every reason to expect they WILL be used that way.

And finally... some of the richest people in the new Internet economy got that way by cyber-squatting. Have you ever typed in a URL and got, instead of what you expected, a page full of spam ads? These are the guys responsible. The leader, Kevin Ham, makes no bones about his plans: he wants to be one of a handful of people to control the Internet. It's time to drop a heavy boot on cybersquatting and misleading URLs and reopen domain name registry to the common man.

That's plenty of trouble for now...

Immunity for Spying Telecoms: Not Just to Cover Bush's Ass

Tomorrow debate resumes on the new FISA bill to replace the Protect America Act, which expires Friday. The Protect America Act, if you didn't know, gave George W. Bush six months of authority to conduct warrantless wiretaps on American citizens for whatever reason he sees fit to give. George W. Bush has promised to veto any replacement bill which does not give immunity from lawsuit to any of the telecomm companies who have cooperated with the Bush Administration in the spy operation during the period when it was NOT authorized by the Protect America Act- when, in short, it was a blatant violation of the FISA laws and the Fourth Amendment.

The odds are very good that the Democrats will fragment, with enough crossing the aisle to give the President what he wants rather than be seen as "weak on terrorism."

It's been said time and again by the pundits that the lawsuits against AT&T, Verizon, and other telecomm corporations are pretty much the last chance to find the smoking gun to prove George W. Bush's criminal activity as President. As such, the Bush White House wants immunity for one purpose: to prevent their lord and master from being impeached while in office or prosecuted in criminal court once out of office.

But this new item out Friday opens up a new aspect of this scandal. It seems AT&T wants to spy on its users' Internet use for its own purposes- not for any national security advantage.

Consider: what happens if the immunity provisions are passed intact by the Senate, as they already have been in the House version of the bill? The immunity won't just be retroactive- it'll be total. Congress will make it impossible for anyone to sue to prevent their Internet provider or the telecomm corporation that owns any part of the network from violating their privacy. The telecomms will be able to monitor all Internet traffic for content- the first vital step on the road to regulating and censoring the Internet for content.

This is by no means new. Recently retired AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who once told stockholders he intended to re-create the old Ma Bell monopoly on all electronic communications, made clear his wishes to screen out content providers who didn't pay a toll for access to AT&T users. His replacement, Randall Stephenson, is even more determined to make his wires pay-for-play. Whitacre, as CEO of AT&T, was a major supporter of Bush and the Republican Party. The ultimate goal, of course, is to return the Internet to its pre-1995 state: domination by a handful of online companies with limited services, content strictly controlled by those services, and virtually no crossover from one service to another.

Heretofore their efforts have been stymied by Net Neutrality activists, the remnants of common-carrier laws (gutted by Bush and his Republican Congress), and certain of their Internet competition such as Google. The lawsuits pending over the illegal NSA spying program, if they end in defeat for the telcomms, could set the firm precedent that telecomms have no right to restrict content on their networks, any more than they have the right to eavesdrop on private telephone calls.

Such rulings wouldn't just cost the telcomms massive amounts of money in damages. They wouldn't just expose George W. Bush for the lying, power-mad dictator he is. They would knock the idea of an Internet censored by corporate extortion and intimidation in the head, kill it deader than the XFL.

So count on the telecomms to lean heavily on every candidate they've donated campaign funds to, and don't count on them to settle out of court if they lose their fight in the Senate. This isn't just about politics: this is about naked, boundless greed.

Ron Paul: Symptom, Not Disease?

A few posts ago I mentioned how I'm coming to dislike people who blog anonymously for the purposes of cheap, empty slams on public figures- even when I agree with some of the slams being made.

Well, I recently found another anti-Ron Paul blog, quite possibly the same person as the creator of Ron Paul Revealed. This blog, The Ron Paul Survivors' Report, is credited to one "Ron Lawl," who has a hobby of making "LOLRons" every bit as unfunny as the "editorial cartoons" on the Ron Paul Revealed site.

However, one of his more recent posts does resonate with eight years of anger and frustration left in me from my Libertarian Party experience: this proposed flyer to be used in response to a Paulian propaganda distributor.

The specific point of resonance is the second paragraph, which I'll rewrite a bit to target it at one of the main sources of Ron Paul support- Libertarian Party leadership and anarchist activists therein.

You know what your problem is? You don't listen. You want to know why your party doesn't catch on? Try asking people. Maybe instead of telling voters that tax is theft and how we should all go back to private schools for the rich only, you should have paid more attention to what *the electorate* cared about. It's funny how you advocate the free market, but your own marketing skills are terrible. You have an elitist attitude where everyone else is a mindless sheep and all you have to do is "get the word out." Well, here's a thought: maybe you're wrong. Maybe the voters have already heard of the Libertarian Party... and they just don't like you.

Bear in mind, for the first half or so of my association with the LP I was one of those elitists. Thinking of everyone who disagrees with you as "sheeple" or outright evil gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of superiority. I got over myself and started listening to the doubts I had about Libertarian policy because I got tired of hitting my head into the same brick wall over and over- the resistance the public, even those eager for an alternative to the Republicrats, have to anarchism.

I then began hitting my head against a different brick wall- the purists and anarchists in the LP who wanted to keep their warm fuzzy feeling. I brought up my own disagreements with the extremes of Libertarian thought, gave examples of intelligent objections given me by those I'd discussed Libertarianism with. I was ignored, and when I couldn't be ignored I was attacked as a closet Republican, statist, Communist, etc. I kept on fighting, even when I was burned out and dreaded the very mention of the word "Libertarian," because I believed there was a party worth saving from itself, with people like me in it who were being driven out or silenced by the anarchists.

Then came first the state and then national LP endorsements of Ron Paul for the Republican nomination for President... and I knew there wasn't anything worth fighting over in the Libertarian Party.

And the biggest reason why there's nothing worth fighting over in the Libertarian Party is that most of the old leadership, the long-time activists, and the loudest voices in the party have the same attitude that Ron Lawl attributes to Ron Paul activists. It is the attitude that the only reason people might disagree with LP positions is that the people are too stupid to understand them. Once people are "educated", they will have no choice but to acknowledge the intellectual (and moral) superiority of Libertarian thought, join the party, and work for eventual Libertarian victory.

With the Rondroids, you can just replace "Libertarian" with "Ron Paul."

It's a rotten attitude.

It's an attitude that will cost you friends and make you a pariah- as I discovered when I was trying to argue people into submission to Libertarianism.

It's the exact opposite attitude to that used by most successful political candidates.

It's the attitude Ron Lawl claims drives Ron Paul's supporters.

It's an attitude I know, for a fact, drives the core of the Libertarian Party.

And, to a great extent, they're the same people.

Romneycare/Hillarycare Advocates Suppress Dissent in California Capitol

Just before he left office, Mitt Romney drove through a universal healthcare plan for the state of Massachussetts. The foundation of the system was the individual mandate: in short, solve the problem of the uninsured by making it illegal to be uninsured. If you don't buy health insurance, you pay a fine to the government with your income tax... and the government isn't obliged to pay you a penny for your healthcare. Also, there are no caps on how high insurance premiums can go and little or no guarantee that the insurance corporations will actually pay claims on policies.

The results, according to the consumer advocate group(1) Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights:

Proponents of the Massachusetts mandatory purchase of private insurance sold it on a promise of comprehensive health insurance for about $200 a month.

• In fact, premiums for health plans for a 55-year-old through the Massachusetts state pool reach up to $531 per month for the most basic required coverage. . . . The same 55-year-old wishing to purchase more comprehensive coverage will pay up to $906 monthly.
  
  
• Massachusetts at least offers automatic exemptions based on income and premium costs. A Wall Street Journal editorial on January 7 noted that Massachusetts has already exempted almost 20% of uninsured adults who don't qualify for subsidies because the mandated insurance is too expensive. Many others who fail to qualify for exemptions are simply refusing to buy.
  
  . . .
  
  
• Massachusetts estimates that the cost of subsidized plans {paid for by the state government for those living on or below the poverty line} by the end of the first year, July 2008, will be $147 million, or 30%, over budget. (2) . . .
  
  
• There are a higher-than-expected number of enrollees in subsidized care. Massachusetts' budget projected 136,000 participants; 178,000 new enrollees are expected by July 2008. . . .
  
  
• Massachusetts' costs are projected to increase up to an additional 14% next year.
  
  
• Massachusetts' budget for that state's health care program was based on a low-ball number of the insured. The Massachusetts Department of Finance and Policy reported the number of uninsured Massachusetts residents to be 355,000 while the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation found that number to be 571,000. Other estimates put the number of uninsured between 500,000 and 650,000. . . .

Source for above: FTCR Letter to California State Senate. The letter also includes testimonials from two Massachusetts residents who are unable to buy insurance or get on the subsidy list (only about 3% of Massachusetts residents are eligible for hardship subsidies). One of those was Ron Norton, more about whom in a bit.

Why to California? Because Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor, and Fabian Nunez, Democratic Speaker of the California House of Representatives, support a law to give California a nearly identical system to Massachusetts.

Before we go into that, back to Massachusetts for a bit. The bureaucracy that runs the program is well aware that the system is failing. Their solution? Increase the fines on those who refuse to participate, according to the Boston Globe.

Hint: if you're trying to do something to help people, punishing people who can't or won't accept the help is counterproductive. Unfortunately this is the standard bureaucratic (and, often, the standard liberal) response: if a system doesn't work, the fault isn't in the system or in the idea behind it, but in the people it's meant to help. Don't change the system, don't rethink the idea, change the people.

Hint #2: I've just spent eight years in an organization (the Libertarian Party) whose primary strategy for elective success was to change the people into Libertarians. It's not a good strategy for any group, be it a third party or a government.

Now remember: this is the core of both Hillary Clinton's and John Edwards' proposals for universal health care. Note, on the stump, that they avoid like the plague answering anyone who asks what the punishment will be for those who won't participate. Note that they also avoid explaining how costs will be kept from soaring through the roof- as they did when automobile insurance became mandatory across the nation.

And it really doesn't say much good about the advocates for this insurance-corporation welfare scheme when they use their power to prevent opponents from having their say.

Don Norton was flown out to Sacramento to testify before the state legislature against their individual-mandate healthcare plan. In response, Speaker Nunez not only cancelled the hearing, but used California police to have Norton and the FTCR spokesperson removed from the Capitol. Furthermore, when Norton and the FTCR spoke to press on the Capitol grounds- outside, in the rain- Nunez announced his intent to prosecute them for the misdemeanor of speaking to the media in the Capitol rotunda. Never mind that they weren't in the rotunda when they spoke: never mind that insurance corporation lobbyists have been speaking in the rotunda all this time without any prosecution.

So, we have a proposed system which won't cover most of those who are currently uninsured, which won't guarantee that what coverage it does provide will actually pay off, that won't prevent insurance companies from price gouging, that won't do a thing to reduce the costs of healthcare, and that requires strong-arm tactics to suppress dissent...

... anyone want to explain to me why this is a good thing?

And remember: a vote for either Hillary or Edwards is a vote for this to go nationwide...

(1) I did a bit of checking on the organization. They appear to be on the up-and-up: the only negative reference I could find was an attack blog that accuses them of being a front for trial lawyers. Granted, trial lawyers make a bundle of money off of consumer advocacy suits (which, often, provide no actual relief to the consumers, fifty-cent coupons notwithstanding). The accusations were empty and scattershot enough for me to ignore the blog, and absent stronger information I'm going to treat the organization's statements as being made in good faith, but still from a position of advocacy, i. e. don't take it as the very last word.

(2) That means the original budget for Massachusetts alone, for the indigent alone, was originally projected at nearly $450 million, and it blew past that in the first year alone... that's to provide emergency-only "Mack truck" insurance for, as the article says, 178,000 people in a state of 6.4 million people. Scale that up to a nationwide system, as Clinton, Edwards, and Romney would have it, and that's over $25 BILLION going into the back pockets of insurance corporations to only cover two percent of Americans with the most bare-bones, last-resort, cover-nothing-but-the-worst coverage... with no actual requirement that the corporations pay off when the time comes. And all of that money comes out of YOUR taxes, folks...

I'm going off the idea of Internet anonymity.

Not enough free time today to do my examination of Mitt Romney.

However, while wandering links related to the New Republic article about Ron Paul's newsletters (which, for some reason, I can't download, dammit, and I don't want to address the article too much until I've read the actual newsletters), I found this site:

http://www.ronpaulexposed.com/

The index page is pretty good, for people opposed to Ron Paul's candidacy (like myself). The rest of it, though, is hater garbage: material slamming Ron Paul not because of his positions so much as because he is Ron Paul. The "Cartoons" page in particular is as vile as they come- all hate and absolutely zero humor.

My personal bet is that the website, founded in March 2007, is backed by one of the other campaigns, probably Giuliani or McCain. Unfortunately, when I did a WHOIS search of the domain, I got nothing. The domain is registered through GoDaddy, which offers privacy plans that, among other things, block WHOIS lookups.

A lot of people, myself included, have said at various times that the Internet draws its strength in no small part because people can say the unsayable anonymously, without fear of repercussions. Considering the results- Ron Paul followers on one hand spamming blogs and attacking anyone who dares challenge their idol's credentials, and cretins like this website's creator on the other hand- I'm beginning to see it more as a weakness. The ability to say anything may be liberating for democracy, but too much of the time it sounds like the liberty of Westboro Baptist Church and Fred Phelps to drown out the preacher at veterans' funerals to protest against gay tolerance.

And in politics, where reputation is damn near everything, such tactics do the most damage. As this letter from the Texas state chairman of the Libertarian Party shows, there are people who are leaving the Ron Paul fold because of the abusive and vandalistic habits of certain of his supporters. Anonymity is hurting, not helping, the Ron Paul Revolution...

... and annoying the hell out of the rest of us.

And a web site? Creating a web site, in legal terms, is like publishing a book, newspaper or magazine. The printer (web host) is not responsible for content, but the publisher (person who pays the printer/webhost) IS responsible. Domain registries should not EVER, in my opinion, be secret- not when there are acts of fraud, libel, slander and wrongful defamation on a daily basis on the World Wide Web.

The person behind Ron Paul Revealed obviously feels strongly about his dislike of Ron Paul. So do I- I do not like the man, how he's used the libertarian movement for his own purposes and discarded it afterwards, and who he associates with. Unlike the anonymous web creator, though, I try to base my posts against Ron Paul on persuading people on the merits that he's not the right man for the job- any job. Ron Paul Revealed, however, is nothing more than a slash job on Ron Paul- mean-spirited, anti-liberty, and above all cowardly.

I'm not at all certain whether voting should be secret: in these days when vote fraud is easier than ever before, I'm questioning the merits of the secret ballot. Political advocacy, though, should NOT be secret. A person willing to advocate for or against a candidate should stand on a soapbox... not speak from under a paper bag.

And if your message is too obnoxious for you to say without the protection of anonymity... maybe there's a REASON for that.

Think about it, assholes of cyberspace.

Ron Paul: the Record Against

It's important to remember that Ron Paul is NOT a Libertarian, despite his life membership (pay once, never pay again) and his 1988 Presidential run.

His stance on abortion is, of course, debatable- there are Libertarians on both sides of that issue. His stance on immigration is rather less so- despite a vocal minority, the right of people to travel and migrate freely is a Libertarian cornerstone from the founding of the party.

But there are a number of other things Ron Paul advocates that run counter to the spirit of liberty. I mentioned one such item in my last Ron Paul post, as part of a list of corn-flake positions he holds in his campaign platform: he wants to end birthright citizenship. That means being born here, according to Paul, will no longer be sufficient to make you a citizen. One can only wonder if that is meant to be retroactive.

In this post I'm going to avoid items which, although ludicrous and politically embarassing (gold standard, conspiracy theory, anti-UN), are not in direct opposition to Libertarian thought. (In some cases such things run along with Libertarian thought- and in such cases Libertarians need to think again.) I'm going to focus ONLY on those things Ron Paul has tried to get enacted which would reduce freedom, liberty and equality under the law for some or all citizens.

1. Ron Paul wants to eliminate the power of the Judiciary to strike down unconstitutional laws.

In his "Sanctity of Life Act", currently HR 2597, HR 776 in the previous Congress, Ron Paul proposes that Congress strip the federal courts of any power to rule on any issue related to abortion or to the proposition that life begins at conception. Furthermore, he would strip away all federal court precedents on those issues and prohibit the federal courts from overruling state courts. This is not a recent development: Ron Paul has tried to strip court power regarding abortion since 1976, when he first entered Congress.

(Incidentally, the above bill makes a lie about his claim that he favors giving the states power to decide the legality of abortion. Although the bill gives states "the authority to protect lives of unborn children residing in the jurisdiction of that State," it does NOT give states the option of keeping abortion legal- making it clear that, by Federal law, abortion is murder.)

Nor has Ron Paul restricted his efforts to blocking the courts on abortion. His "We the People Act", HR 300, would prohibit the courts from ruling on, and repeal all Federal precedents regarding, the Constitutionality of any law related to:

any claim involving the laws, regulations, or policies of any State or unit of local government relating to the free exercise or establishment of religion;

(B) any claim based upon the right of privacy, including any such claim related to any issue of sexual practices, orientation, or reproduction; or

(C) any claim based upon equal protection of the laws to the extent such claim is based upon the right to marry without regard to sex or sexual orientation...

That means Ron Paul wants the states to be able to mandate or establish religious practices; to ban sexual practices, including homosexuality, masturbation, adultery, or even out-of-wedlock sex; and to discriminate against homosexuals. Furthermore, he wants to strip religious and sexual minorities of their ability to seek redress for discrimination in the federal courts. What's more, he's tried to do this in the past three Congresses.

The fundamental point here is this: Ron Paul is trying to use Congress to bypass the courts, and the Constitution... and the rights of individuals. If Congress has the right and power to prohibit the federal courts from ruling laws on abortion, religion or sexuality unconstitutional, why should they not be able to remove that power for ANY AND ALL issues? What power would the courts retain to rein in unconstitutional acts of Congress, the President, or the States? NONE- and that's just the way Ron Paul wants it.

2. Ron Paul opposes religious freedom.

Remember the "We the People" act above? Before that, Ron Paul tried the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act", last submitted as HR 1547 in 2003. The foundation of this law is the premise that the First Amendment does not separate Church and State; it merely prohibits government from mandating any specific sect's ceremonies. In the abstract government may promote religion in general- and, based on the following quote, we can be assured Ron Paul believes only Christianity should be allowed in America:

Justice Joseph Story, considered the Father of American Jurisprudence, stated in his Commentaries on the Constitution: `The real object of the [First A]mendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohometanism [sp], or Judaism, or infidelity by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy [a denominational council] the exclusive patronage of the national government. (Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States [Boston; Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1833], p. 728, par. 1871.)

To this end, Ron Paul wants to prohibit federal courts from hearing any case concerning religious freedom issues- period. He wants to give both the state and federal government full power to exercise religious discrimination and to mandate religious practices... and strip away the power of the individual to seek redress in the courts.

Ron Paul, apparently, wants religious freedom for himself and his friends to push their religion on you- but don't want you to have freedom FROM religion, or freedom to pursue an unpopular religion.

3. Ron Paul opposes free speech.

Specifically, burning or otherwise desecrating the American flag, as per his proposal for an amendment to the Constitution, HJ 82 back in 1997. The only difference between his version and the more standard version is that Ron Paul would allow the states to declare it illegal, rather than making it illegal as part of the Constitution itself. To be blunt, this is a distinction without a difference, especially when you consider that the 14th Amendment guarantees ALL the rights of American citizenship to citizens of ALL the states; no state is allowed to infringe upon those rights.

4. Ron Paul is an imperialist.

Ron Paul may be opposed to the occupation of Iraq, and he may claim to call for the withdrawal of all troops back to American soil... but he claims that the Panama Canal is unalienable American soil. Never mind that the Canal was never more than leased from Panama, Ron Paul believes we should keep it... using force if necessary.

There are other issues- quite a few others- which make Ron Paul, to me, unqualified to serve as dogcatcher, much less a Congressman or a President. These specific issues, however, plus his flirtation with white supremacist groups and his attempts to use Libertarian venues to recruit Libertarians to the Republican Party, should be more than enough to turn away even the most anarchist, anti-tax, conspiracy-believing Libertarian from the Ron Paul rEVILution.

Ron Paul is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good representative for the Libertarian Party- however you wish to interpret that phrase.

(Thanks to Dave Neiwert for the research done on his blog, Orcinus.)