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“The United States has made its first response to a lawsuit filed in federal district court in Missoula to test the Montana Firearms Freedom Act (MFFA), passed by the 2009 Legislature and signed into law by Governor Schweitzer. The MFFA declares that any firearms, ammunition or firearms accessories made and retained in Montana are not subject to federal regulation under the power given to Congress in the U.S. Constitution to regulate commerce ‘among the several states.’” (02/08/10) http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=3800 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. isn’t in danger of losing its Aaa debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010. ‘Absolutely not,’ Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast yesterday whether a downgrade is a concern. ‘That will never happen to this country.’ … Moody’s Investors Service Inc. last week said the U.S. government’s bond rating will come under pressure in the future unless additional measures are taken to reduce budget deficits projected for the next decade.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yg7qwxn | | Report Bad Link |
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“For months, the leaders of Tancitaro had held firm against the drug lords battling for control of this central Mexican town. Then one morning, after months of threats and violence from the traffickers, they finally surrendered. Before dawn, gunmen kidnapped the elderly fathers of the town administrator and the secretary of the City Council. Within hours, both officials resigned along with the mayor, the entire seven-member City Council, two department heads, the police chief and all 60 police officers. Tancitaro had fallen to the enemy. Across Mexico, the continuing ability of traffickers to topple governments like Tancitaro’s, intimidate police and keep drug shipments flowing is raising doubts about the Mexican government’s 3-year-old, U.S.-backed war on the drug cartels.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/ybb59pb | | Report Bad Link |
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“A bomb left on a minibus killed one person and wounded three in Diwaniya province’s Daghara district. In Mosul, gunmen killed a female candidate who was visiting from Baghdad, where she works as a veterinarian …. In Baghdad, a sticky bomb killed a man and wounded another in Adhamiya.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/y8hqrqx | | Report Bad Link |
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“Militants bombed a hospital filled with the casualties of an earlier attack in Karachi today, killing more than 20, injuring at least 80 and setting Pakistan’s largest city and economic hub on edge. The first attack targeted a bus filled with mostly with women and children on their way to a religious festival. A second bomb exploded just outside the emergency room of Jinnah Hospital where the wounded were being treated and where their families had gathered to check on their status.” (02/05/10) http://tinyurl.com/yfozfu2 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Minivans piled high with mattresses and clothing lined up at checkpoints Sunday as hundreds of civilians fled a Taliban-controlled area ahead of a planned NATO offensive in southern Afghanistan. The militants, meanwhile, dug in for a fight, reinforcing their positions with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons, according to witnesses.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yjopgvl | | Report Bad Link |
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“Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Scott Lee Cohen, a Chicago pawnbroker whose surprise primary win last week was followed by scandalous revelations about his troubled past with a prostitute ex-girlfriend, said Sunday night he would quit as nominee. … In a steady torrent following the Tuesday primary, leading Democrats called for Cohen to step aside as new details were revealed about his relationships with his now-ex-wife while using anabolic steroids and his ex-girlfriend, convicted as a prostitute, whom he met at a massage therapy spa. Other revelations showed that as he pumped millions into his campaign, his ex-wife filed a mid-December lawsuit seeking $54,000 in back-due child support.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/ylbrzxr | | Report Bad Link |
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“The members of the Cape Christian Fellowship felt their donations of baby food, diapers, toys and cribs would be welcomed in this impoverished port city. They were, but for a price, said Brett Furlong, executive pastor of the fellowship in Cape Coral, Fla. Haiti customs agents told those bringing in the donated goods that if they didn’t pay $120 that the aid would be held indefinitely, he said.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/ygbsa7x | | Report Bad Link |
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“In the first major step to revive his health care agenda after his party’s loss of a filibuster-proof Senate majority, President Obama on Sunday invited Republican and Democratic leaders to discuss possible compromises in a televised gathering later this month. Obama’s move came amid widespread complaints that efforts so far by him and his Democratic allies in Congress have been too partisan and secretive.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yhfuvwb | | Report Bad Link |
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“Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday he is looking at instituting conscription to build an army big enough to provide security without international help. Karzai told a conference of the world’s top defense officials in Munich that he wants to build and train an army and police force of 300,000 by 2012 that will be able to provide security for Afghanistan by 2015 without international help.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yksqvjc | | Report Bad Link |
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“As the first cases in a massive battle over illnesses linked to 9/11 near trial, an Associated Press investigation has found that several of the initial 30 suits contain inconsistent or exaggerated claims about how the workers got sick or how much time they spent at ground zero. One demolition worker who said he developed health problems after toiling for six months in the toxic ruins of the World Trade Center has actually been severely ill since the 1990s.” (02/07/10) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35284446/ns/health-cancer/ | | Report Bad Link |
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“Employing a broad-based lobbying effort, the soft drink industry has smothered a plan to tax sugared beverages — a plan advocates said would have reduced obesity and helped finance healthcare reform. Only months ago, public health advocates thought the tax would be a natural for congressional Democrats looking for revenue to fund expanded health insurance coverage.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yzvn7j6 | | Report Bad Link |
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“The alleged neglect and death of a terminally ill Chinese immigrant detained in a Rhode Island jail two years ago triggered scathing reports and investigations, a wide-ranging federal lawsuit and hand-wringing over who was responsible. A judge will hear arguments this week on whether the federal government bears culpability in the August 2008 death of Hiu Lui ‘Jason’ Ng, 34, who was accused of overstaying a tourist visa and detained at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls for the last month of his life.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/ylhtx6v | | Report Bad Link |
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“In the past six weeks, Americans have witnessed two jarringly different-but completely accurate-views of al-Qaida’s terrorist network. One image was that of terrorist leaders being hunted down and killed by satellite-guided, pilotless aircraft. The other was of an agile foe slipping past U.S. defenses and increasingly intent on striking inside this country.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/ygyytpw | | Report Bad Link |
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“Costa Rica’s first female candidate held a two-to-one lead in the country’s presidential election, as the second-place candidate, Otton Solis of the Citizen’s Action Party, conceded defeat. If the PLN — the Spanish acronym for the ruling National Liberation Party party — wins, Laura Chinchilla would become the nation’s first female president.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yk9wsa5 | | Report Bad Link |
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“President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered Iran’s atomic chief on Sunday to enrich the country’s uranium to 20 percent. The move is seen as a fresh challenge to Western powers trying to rein in Tehran’s galloping nuclear drive. Ahmadinejad did not set a deadline for the increase. But his announcement is likely to shake up his skeptics in the West, amid efforts to get Iran to accept a draft deal, backed by the United Nations, to send its low-enriched uranium abroad to be enriched for use at a medical research reactor in Tehran.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/ykztuat | | Report Bad Link |
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“A senior Chinese envoy was in North Korea on Monday on a mission to persuade the reclusive state to rejoin nuclear disarmament talks, reports said, while officials from the two Koreas met in the North to discuss restarting joint tour programs. Wang Jiarui, a top Communist Party official, will likely meet Monday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to discuss the stalled six-party nuclear talks, the South Korean cable network YTN reported, without citing its source.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/ylymaed | | Report Bad Link |
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“To borrow a phrase from counter-terrorist parlance, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s alleged plot to bring down a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day was a ‘game changer.’ As a reluctance to introduce body scanners at airports eases, two countries deploying them nationwide this month include Britain, reportedly a key setting for the Nigerian student’s radicalization, and the Netherlands, where Mr. Abdulmutallab passed through undetected before boarding a flight to the United States.” (02/06/10) http://tinyurl.com/yalv3fo | | Report Bad Link |
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“Former congressman Tom Tancredo took heat Friday for remarks at the national Tea Party convention that critics viewed as calling for a return to Jim Crow laws. But Tancredo said he wasn’t targeting a specific group when he suggested in Nashville there should be a ‘civics-literacy’ test before someone could vote. ‘People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,’ Tancredo said in his opening-day speech Thursday. ‘His name is Barack Hussein Obama.’” (02/07/10) http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_14345675 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Voters elected Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu mayor of New Orleans Saturday, marking the first time the city will have a white mayor in three decades. Mr. Landrieu won in a landslide in a vote that was scheduled as a primary and that many had worried would be overshadowed by revelry and football fever as the New Orleans Saints prepared for their first Super Bowl appearance on Sunday in Miami, and as Mardi Gras parades were under way. He won more than 65% of votes with 96% of precincts reporting, despite the fact he was just one of 11 candidates in the race.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yj6krww | | Report Bad Link |
Commentary
News | Audio and Video | Events and Movement News
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“It hasn’t exactly been a banner month for our favorite terrorist organization, the Transportation Security Agency. The name is three lies in one, much like the military MRE, in that it doesn’t transport anything, secures even less, and the Keystone Kops run a better agency. And given recent news reports and official reaction to them, it’s a good thing that most TSA employees don’t carry guns, or there would be even more self-inflicted pedal injuries than there are now.” (02/07/10) http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle556-20100207-03.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“What is the benefit to Wall Street in killing things or bringing the share price of companies to near worthless? Tails they win; heads you lose. Wall Street can and does make enormous profits on bets that share prices will decline (shorting), that companies will disappear (credit default swaps), that the economy will crater (interest rate swaps). And there’s a slogan on Wall Street: the trend is your friend. When it’s clear the bull is lying in the center of the ring (think Lehman’s death and the Merrill Lynch shotgun wedding on September 15, 2008), Wall Street moves its bets to the downside.” (02/08/10) http://counterpunch.org/martens03082010.html | | Report Bad Link |
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Legalizing drugs: It might end the war in Afghanistan and reduce prison overcrowding
Fr33 Agents by Ziggy Encaoua “Towards the end of last year, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama were uttering the idea of having a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, but I believe it to be a ploy rather for real. The reason I believe it to be a ploy is that the situation of perpetual war, with the Taliban not being able to defeat NATO outright and NATO not being able to defeating the Taliban outright, is the way the Military Industrial Complex wants it. It’s good for profit. It occurred to me long ago that if the Establishment wanted to truly defeat the Taliban and end the war in Afghanistan, they’d legalize opium.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/y94wals | | Report Bad Link |
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The illegality of cars and the re-birth of freedom
Albuquerque Libertarian Examiner by Kent McManigal “I’ll let you in on a secret you may not be aware of: cars are illegal in America. Don’t believe me? Then just try driving around Albuquerque, or any other populated area, in a car and see what happens when you are found to be in possession of that car. Not a ‘licensed and registered car,’ but just a car. Even if you pay the State all the demanded fees, simply being in possession of a car is an excuse to be stopped and searched by enforcers at any time without any warning. Anything as heavily regulated as a car can not honestly be considered ‘legal’ anymore.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/y8fmgya | | Report Bad Link |
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“Whatever the merits of this particular grievance, it is rather amusing to hear complaints about the abuse of power from dairy farmers, who were pioneers in interest-group politics. They have been adept in using the power of government, as Adam Smith put it, to launch ‘conspiracies against the public’ and ‘contrivances to raise prices.’ And their efforts have had far-reaching constitutional implications.” (02/08/10) http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/123084.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“Leaving aside the highly dubious proposition that one’s personal religious beliefs should be directly translated into public policy — including laws governing citizens who do not share those beliefs — the notion that the Bible supports government redistribution of wealth should be firmly challenged. The fundamental question for those who consider the Bible authoritative is not whether it advocates charity or helping the poor. Obama, Wallis, and other statist Christians are not arguing for charity. They are arguing for government appropriation of property. The issue isn’t charity, but property rights. If the Bible rejects the notion of a right to property, then these people may have a basis for their perspective. But if the Bible supports a right to own property, safe from government redistribution to others, then their policy proposals are unbiblical.” (01/10) http://libertyunbound.com/article.php?id=469 | | Report Bad Link |
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“You mean we once did? I must have missed it when I blinked.” (02/08/10) http://c4ss.org/content/1845 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Nineteen states still maintain Prohibition era laws in which the state retains the sole right to distribute wine and spirits. As Prohibition died a justified death about 77 years ago, many state leaders justify the archaic state control laws with the rationale that without tight government control of booze underage drinking, driving while intoxicated, and domestic abuse cases would skyrocket. Well, on the surface that doesn’t seem to be the case in those 31 states where a private system of distribution exists.” (02/08/10) http://www.nolanchart.com/article7351.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“Given the libertarian tenet that everyone has the right to do as they choose as long as they don’t initiate or threaten force or fraud against anyone else, how can a person be both a Libertarian and a judge? Wouldn’t libertarian judges have to recuse themselves from every victimless crime case on the books? The Libertarian Party of Texas lists six judges running for election in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area: three for County judgeships, two for Court of Criminal Appeals, and one for Supreme Court justice.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/ykjfg9p | | Report Bad Link |
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Bottom up resistance to the GOP’s attempted top down takeover of the tea party movement
Poli-Tea by d.eris “Is it possible that the GOP’s public hijacking of the tea party movement could turn out to be a grave strategic error? Is it possible that the attempted coup will solidify resistance to the co-optation of the movement by the representatives of the establishment parties and their political apparatus? One thing is certain: if tea party activists do not fight to maintain their political independence, they will soon find themselves deprived of it.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/yj8evvy | | Report Bad Link |
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“This week I debated the Socialist Party of Great Britain on Capitalism or Socialism? I have a soft spot for the SPGB because they share many of my ideals — reducing coercion, class, privileege and inequality, peaceful co-operation and mutual respect. They thoroughly reject the bureaucracy, the concentration of power and the barbarity of countries that call themselves socialist but in fact practice state socialism or worse. And they are genuinely willing to debate. So we had an engaging exchange. But I came away with three disappointments.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/yhj3pau | | Report Bad Link |
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“For most of last year, Republicans spent their time attacking Democratic plans for reform, rather than describing their own. But now they’ve put a plan on the table. Showcasing that plan — and comparing it to what the Democrats have proposed — might help clarify a few things. The Republican health care plan is part of the ‘Roadmap for America’s Future.’ Its chief architect is Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee and a rising star in the party. Republicans boast that the Roadmap is serious plan to get the federal budget under control, which turns out to be a fairly large exaggeration.” (02/08/10) http://www.tnr.com/article/health-care/fairness-doctrine | | Report Bad Link |
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“I’m a professional economist, which means I can’t just be happy when people try to help others. Instead, I feel compelled to analyze whether their altruistic actions are efficient or if they seem to be a waste of resources. In a recent flash of insight, I came up with a way to make charitable impulses more productive, but I had to abandon the idea once I realized the government wouldn’t approve.” (02/08/10) http://mises.org/daily/4038 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Despite the juiced-up GDP numbers of the last two quarters, there is no illusion that the depression is over and the boom has resumed. While GDP is reported as being positive, the employment numbers remain weak. The headline jobless number has one in ten people out of work. Include those who have become discouraged and dropped out of the labor force, and the number is one in five.” (02/08/10) http://mises.org/daily/4099 | | Report Bad Link |
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“A cigarette tax increase is not a reliable way of raising revenue, and the brunt of the burden will fall disproportionately on lower-income individuals (’Taxes key in competing health legislation,’ Feb. 3). Tobacco taxes are an unsustainable and risky way to fund health care, because they rely on a very narrow tax base and encourage smuggling and other untaxed purchases. This unreliable tax revenue stream will dry up, but of course Medicaid costs will keep rising.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/yk5v745 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Last week, the House approved another increase in the national debt ceiling. This means the government can borrow $1.9 trillion more to stay afloat and avoid default. It has been little more than a year since the last debt limit increase, and graphs showing the debt limit over time show a steep, almost vertical trend. It is not likely to be very long before this new ceiling is met and the government is back on the brink between default and borrowing us further into oblivion.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/yz67tdv | | Report Bad Link |
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“What is to be done about the idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House, deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of former Vice President Dick Cheney: that Guantánamo was teeming with hardcore terrorists, who couldn’t wait to ‘return to the battlefield.’” (02/08/10) http://www.fff.org/comment/com1002d.asp | | Report Bad Link |
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“Some Americans have declared 2010 the ‘best year to die.’ Due to the temporary expiration of the estate tax or death tax, all individuals that pass away this year are guaranteed that their loved ones will receive their inheritance in full. Those that pass away are not forced to leave their mourning family with the burden of paying exorbitant taxes on their belongings. Yet, in Obama’s 2011 proposed fiscal budget he plans on reinstating the 45-percent death tax with a $3.5 million exemption.” (02/05/10) http://tinyurl.com/yjqcafm | | Report Bad Link |
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“What the federal bureaucracy calls ‘the largest peacetime mobilization effort in U.S. history’ is now underway. It’s the 2000 census — and if you’re an American citizen, it’s got a few questions for you. As many as 53, in fact. America’s founders felt it was important enough to know how many people lived in the country that they wrote a requirement for a census every ten years into the third paragraph of Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution.” (written 05/00; posted 02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/l4zu8q | | Report Bad Link |
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“Around the country, twenty two states are currently considering a bill known as the ‘Firearms Freedom Act.’ This bill declares that guns, accessories, and ammunition made within a state, sold within that state and kept in that state are not subject to federal laws or regulations under the ‘Interstate Commerce Clause’ of the Constitution. Montana and Tennessee passed a Firearms Freedom Act into law in 2009, and a number of states are moving that direction in the 2010 legislative session.” (02/08/10) http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=591 | | Report Bad Link |
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“I see the current state of affairs as an intensification, perhaps even a culmination, of four interrelated 25-year political trends: a growing distrust of conservative and liberal ideologies, a growing movement away from the two parties and toward political independence, increases in the racial-minority (which usually means Democratic-voting) share of the population, and a growing inability of the Republican party to bridge the gap between its populist and elite wings. Together, these trends raise the specter of a serious independent, populist presidential candidacy for the first time in a century. And if the GOP doesn’t adapt to the shifting political terrain, there is even a remote possibility that the identity of America’s two dominant parties will change for the first time since the 1850s, which saw the death of the Whigs and birth of the Republicans.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/ye8yxmr | | Report Bad Link |
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“Amy is an unwitting porn star. She is among the most-downloaded in the reviled genre of child smut. Photos of her sexual abuse at the age of 8 and 9 by her uncle have proliferated to the point that every day, sometimes several times a day, someone is caught with the more than decade-old images. Every time this happens, she’s notified by police and reminded that uncountable strangers have gotten off on the trauma she suffered — and, once again, she feels victimized. Her uncle is in jail, but what of these vicarious abusers? She’s hoping to make them pay, too. The 20-year-old is seeking restitution — to the tune of $3.4 million — from those caught in possession of these images.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/yl6lvg9 | | Report Bad Link |
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“First it was the medical marijuana crowd in California who offered their state’s politicians an enticing arrangement: Legalize our pot and tax it. It will help close the state’s multibillion-dollar deficit. The ‘Manhattan Madam’ not only likes the idea but she wants to expand on it. Kristin Davis is the alleged madam who supplied Ashley Dupre and other high dollar call girls to former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for his personal amusement before the scandal broke in 2008 and drove him out of office. Now Davis wants to run for governor herself on the Libertarian Party ticket.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/yzzawec | | Report Bad Link |
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“At the Memphis party on Saturday, someone in the audience asked her about the prospects for what he called the ‘two words that scare liberals — President Palin.’ Let’s be clear on why those words should terrify anyone with a thinking brain. Palin is someone who has clearly never seriously thought through any issue of national importance on her own. She’s excellent at reciting a raucous speech, but she can’t improvise a coherent sentence, which usually reflects an inability to form a coherent idea. … She is deluded enough to believe (or at least to say Sunday morning on Fox News) that her brief, aborted stint as Alaska’s governor gave her more executive experience than President Obama has even now. She believes that the country should elect leaders, including presumably herself, who seek solutions in ‘divine intervention.’” (02/08/10) http://www.slate.com/id/2244062/ | | Report Bad Link |
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“Courtesy of the Obama administration, we’re experiencing more and more Nixonian moments. Take medical reform. The health insurers started out in Obama’s camp. But a shuffling of policies and a few insurance companies began making obvious points about how this or that feature would raise costs, not decrease them. And the Obama administration struck back.” (02/08/10) http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/003984.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“Counterinsurgency, or COIN, has been in vogue at the Pentagon since the success of the Iraq surge, and its dominance was cemented when President Obama chose General Stanley McChrystal, former head of special operations forces and a recent convert to counterinsurgency, as his commander in Afghanistan. Shortly afterward, Obama promulgated his new strategy ‘to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.’ The primary tool would be COIN. Counterinsurgency theorists obsessively study ’small wars,’ such as the British war in Malaya, the French war in Algeria, and the wars in Vietnam. The emphasis is on using the least amount of violence against the enemy, familiarity with the local culture, and painstakingly removing popular support for the insurgents.” (01/10) http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/obama-afghanistan-stoner-cops | | Report Bad Link |
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“Freddie Peacock of Rochester, New York, was convicted of rape in 1976. Last week he became the 250th person to be exonerated by DNA testing since 1989. According to a new report by the Innocence Project, those 250 prisoners served 3,160 years between them; 17 spent time on death row. Remarkably, 67 percent of them were convicted after 2000 — a decade after the onset of modern DNA testing. The glaring question here is, How many more are there?” (02/08/10) http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/08/how-many-more-are-innocent | | Report Bad Link |
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“Three decades ago, angst over the looming insolvency of Social Security reached fever pitch. President Ronald Reagan responded by grasping the third rail of American politics long enough to add decades to the entitlement’s solvency by increasing the taxes employers and employees paid and by incrementally extending the age of retirement from 65 to 67. In the years since, the sprawling Medicare/Medicaid system has replaced Social Security as the emblem of impoverished entitlements. Despite duly repeated warnings that the program is unsustainable — or perhaps as a result of those constant cries of ‘wolf!’ — we have become numb to the peril. The entitlement train that has been a mere smudge on the horizon for years is now approaching the cliff of insolvency at high speed.” (for publication 03/01/10) http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/mar/01/00008/ | | Report Bad Link |
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“Every census is worse than the last. The 1990 census asked for the year of your birth, but the 2000 census wants to know the day and the month, not to mention the race and relation of every person in the house, along with the number of toilets and much more. And what is this information used for? Mostly for social and economic central planning — an activity the government shouldn’t be engaged in at all. This isn’t a biased rendering of the objectives of the census. The Census Bureau itself says, ‘Information collected in Census 2000 will provide local area data needed for communities to receive federal program funds and for private sector and community planning.’ You only have to ask yourself what any 18th- or 19th-century liberal would have thought of the idea of ‘private-sector’ and community planning undertaken by the central state.” (02/08/10) http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/census.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“The Orange Revolution’s ignominious degeneration and ultimate rejection by the Ukrainian people is yet another example of a media-driven narrative, one created by ideology and a selective perception of the facts, crashing on the rocks of reality. Just like the ‘liberation’ of Iraq was supposed to be a ‘cakewalk’ culminating in the spread of democracy throughout the region, the so-called color revolutions of the post-Soviet era, in some cases directly supported and funded by the US government, were held up as sterling examples of the same liberatory impulse supposedly generated by the Bushian foreign policy of perpetual war. The ‘global democratic revolution,’ as Bush dubbed it in a speech before the National Endowment for Democracy, was on the march. Except it wasn’t. In every single case, first and foremost being Ukraine, these ‘revolutions’ marched the affected countries off a cliff.” (02/08/10) http://tinyurl.com/yznjnd8 | | Report Bad Link |
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“If you’re forced to keep a secret from your employer, you’re vulnerable to extortion. And if you’re vulnerable to extortion, your employer is vulnerable to you.” (02/05/10) http://tinyurl.com/y8q3xhz | | Report Bad Link |
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“Let me state clearly for the record: today’s tea party movement as manifested in Tennessee is a travesty that has completely moved away from what originated during the presidential campaign of 2008. What started as a grassroots effort in the Ron Paul campaign to support basic, fundamental values of freedom and small government has turned into an anti-libertarian, pro-neo-conservative revival meeting. The emerging leader in this effort is Sarah Palin.” (02/07/10) http://www.nolanchart.com/article7348.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“President Barack Obama Tuesday (Feb. 2, 2010) introduced his budget for next fiscal year. To put it into perspective, consider this: The estimated budget deficit — just the deficit — almost matches the entire federal budget when George W. Bush became president in 2001. A strong case could be made that Bush and Obama represent the most fiscally irresponsible back-to-back presidencies in national history.” (02/05/10) http://tinyurl.com/ylxj83l | | Report Bad Link |
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Cartoon. (02/07/10) http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/05/friday-funnies | | Report Bad Link |
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“This week the President again showed how thin-skinned he is about criticism in the media. Maybe he’s so sensitive to criticism because he’s gotten so little of it.” (02/06/10) http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/02/06/spiro-t-obama/ | | Report Bad Link |
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http://tinyurl.com/yb5ljd3 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Atop Palinland’s Mount Rushmore are Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. Palinland’s Bill of Rights has been edited and redacted, reordered and revised with red ink: in Palinland, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments that ensure due process and the rights of the accused are merely suggestive measures to be administered based on the emotional whim of a carefully-harnessed fear and a fervently-stoked anger. And in Palinland, the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of power for the individual states is paramount, a necessary protection for a people whose government is supposedly hell-bent on destroying them.” (02/07/10) http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/527600/welcome_to_palinland | | Report Bad Link |
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“In advance of yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama was under pressure to use the opportunity to condemn the anti-homosexuality bill pending in the Ugandan Parliament. The legislation, which would criminalize homosexuality and require the death penalty or life imprisonment for certain ‘offenses,’ has been described by human-rights activists as tantamount to instigating a genocide against sexual minorities, who are already persecuted in the African nation. Obama, speaking just before the first anniversary of the launch of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, once again fell into the religion-in-public-life trap: Faith is intended for good, and we must present it as such — regardless of its exploitation for ends that are less than pure, and regardless of one’s stated commitment to secular government.” (02/05/10) http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=in_bad_faith | | Report Bad Link |
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China is aiming at America’s soft underbelly: The Internet
Christian Science Monitor by Nathan Gardels “No one knows more about China’s cyberwar capacities than Mike McConnell, who was director of National Intelligence, the authority over all US intelligence agencies, from February 2007 to January 2009, and director of the NSA from 1992 to 1996. After attacks last spring on the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange, I sat down with him to discuss China, the chief suspect then also, and to get the lay of the cyberwar battlefield.” (02/05/10) http://tinyurl.com/yj7olt4 | | Report Bad Link |
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“The fatal flaw in the climate models seems to come from one repeated assumption. The assumption is that positive feedbacks from greenhouse effects can exceed negative feedbacks. While this situation might actually exist over a given time period (and reflect temperature increases during that time period as a result) the average over the long term must net to zero. If it doesn’t, then everything we have learned about physics over the last 1000 years is wrong, and perpetual motion is possible. If a climatologist and a physicist were to discuss the matter, the conversation might be as follows …” (02/07/10) http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle556-20100207-02.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“The president said, according to the White House’s prepared transcript: ‘We should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system — to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.’ I agree with that. I suspect Jim Gilchrist of the border-watching Minuteman Project could happily agree with that. The only people who don’t agree with those words are Barack Obama and his liberal cohorts in Congress.” [editor’s note: And libertarians - TLK] (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/y8nq6ct | | Report Bad Link |
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“In terms of organized politics the explosion of radical energy in the 1960s culminated in the peace candidacy of George McGovern, nominated by the Democrats in Miami in 1972. The response of the labor unions financing the party, and of the party bosses, was simply to abandon McGovern and ensure the victory of Nixon. Since that day the party has remained immune to radical challenge. Jimmy Carter, the southern Democrat installed in the White House in 1977, embraced neoliberalism, and easily beat off a challenge by the left’s supposed champion, the late Ted Kennedy. The antiwar movement which cheered America’s defeat in Vietnam mostly sat on its hands as Carter and his National Security aide Zbigniev Brzezinski ramped up military spending and led America into ‘the new cold war,’ fought in Afghanistan and Central America.” (02/05/10) http://counterpunch.org/cockburn02052010.html | | Report Bad Link |
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“In last week’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared that he would freeze government spending for three years, excepting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and ’spending related to our national security.’ This week, we can see what that blanket exemption for the Pentagon will cost us. The base budget (which excludes war costs) weighs in at a whopping $548.9 billion, the largest since the end of World War II. Military spending advocates might note that this represents just a 3.4 percent increase over last year, but inflation-adjusted spending on national defense has ballooned by 60 percent over the past 10 years.” (02/04/10) http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11199 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Tobacco smoking is bad for one’s health. To my knowledge, however, no scientific studies have been conducted showing that pipe smokers (or cigar smokers, for that matter) have shorter lives than nonsmokers. There certainly is no evidence that nonsmokers who are exposed to environmental pipe or cigar smoke are harmed by it. Indeed, every person who smells the ambient odor of my pipe says that they are reminded of their fathers or grandfathers. So, why are pipe smokers selectively being targeted by Washington? The answer is political opportunism.” (02/05/10) http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2725 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Who can quarrel about the word ‘retarded’ in this context? It is obnoxious and unnecessary. We should do our best to avoid it. After all, our goal as Americans must be to offend the guilty (some congressional Democrats) without dragging the innocent (the mentally disabled) into the fray. But what was even more disturbing than finding out that political hacks use demeaning references in private assemblies? It was watching those who usually complain about political correctness dig deep for some of their own artificial outrage and begin playacting the victim.” (02/05/10) http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/05/are-we-that-thinned-skinned | | Report Bad Link |
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“Late last Friday, we learned that Obama’s Department of Justice plans to go easy on John Yoo and Jay Bybee — the two assistant attorney generals under Bush who penned the infamous torture memos. For those who have been working long and hard in the accountability movement to make sure no one — not even presidents or their top advisors — is above the law, this was a serious setback.” (02/06/10) http://tinyurl.com/y9tqfdc | | Report Bad Link |
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“For months, much of the right-wing blogosphere has been fuming about Executive Order 12425, which Obama amended in mid-December. The one-paragraph document grants Interpol, the international law enforcement agency based in France, special privileges within the United States — mainly immunity from the Freedom of Information Act and from lawsuits over activity considered part of its official duties. It’s no secret police conspiracy. But thanks to Glenn Beck, the National Review, Newt Gingrich, and others, this obscure directive has fueled a firestorm of right-wing paranoia. Conservative activists warn that Obama intends to use Interpol as a ’secret police’ with the power to knock down doors and arrest law-abiding American citizens. No matter that Interpol agents don’t even carry guns and have no right to arrest people, or that its American office boasts all of five people. And the hysteria over the executive order is not confined to the Tea Party movement. It has also reached the highest levels of politics — that is, the US Congress.” (02/05/10) http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/obama-secret-police | | Report Bad Link |
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“For many years, the word ‘retarded’ was used by both the medical and teaching professions to describe persons whose cognitive functions were slow, who were slow to learn, who were slow to catch on. Now the Special Olympics — and Sarah Palin — want to eliminate the word ‘retarded’ from common usage because it offends their egalitarian premise that we shouldn’t take notice that some people are less cognitively functional than others.” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yllyo5w | | Report Bad Link |
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“At first blush the idea of Credico being palatable to the Libertarians sounds to be at odds with his November YouTube announcement explaining why he’s running against the Democrat Schumer. ‘Because Chuck Schumer has abandoned, if he was ever even there in the progressive agenda of the Democratic Party, he supported both wars, the Patriot Act, he has supported the death penalty.’ But if Schumer isn’t ‘progressive’ enough for Credico, is Credico ‘Libertarian’ enough for the LPNY?” (02/07/10) http://tinyurl.com/yaec53s | | Report Bad Link |
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“President Obama’s economic policy has run smack into reality. No one believes that he can keep spending even to the massive levels he projects, or eventually lower the deficit, or persuade congress to switch from profligacy to prudence, or … well, you get the idea. Worse still, even if you believe all of these things and more, the deficits projected by the president are simply unsustainable, and would drive the combination of federal, state and local government debt to well over 100 percent in 2020 — a level that most observers believe will stifle economic growth.” (02/06/10) http://tinyurl.com/yds4fby | | Report Bad Link |
Audio and Video
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Jay Lehr, Science Director at the Heartland Institute, joins host Paul Molloy. 10-11am Eastern on WTAN 1340 AM, Tampa Bay, FL, KLRG 880 AM, Little Rock, AR or live on the web. [live radio or stream] (02/08/10) http://thefreedomworks.com/ | | Report Bad Link |
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“Obama’s Aunt Facing Deportation :: Byzantine Immigration Bureaucracy :: Definition of Government :: Society and Laws :: Welfare Problem :: FTL vs. KBCT’s Program Director on Immigration :: Streamlining Government? :: Murderers and Drug Cartels :: Military on the Borders :: Arpaio’s Inhumanity :: Cracking Down on Business Owners and Landlords :: Is the law what is right? :: Is the military necessary? :: Slavery.” [MP3] (02/06/10) http://media.libsyn.com/media/ftl/FTL2010-02-06.mp3 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Fed’s share of health spending climbs,” featuring Michael F. Cannon. [MP3] (02/05/10) http://tinyurl.com/cato020510 | | Report Bad Link |
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“Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Inter Press Service, discusses the Obama administration’s inability to negotiate an Afghan peace deal, differing opinions on whether the troop surge will ultimately help or hurt U.S. diplomatic leverage with the Taliban, the possibility a constitutional rewrite will bring back Sharia law and snuff out Afghanistan’s fledgling ‘democracy,’ the high likelihood of renewed civil war even with a U.S.-brokered peace deal and the slightly improved Afghan justice system that allows defense lawyers but rejects acquittals.” [Flash audio or MP3] (02/03/10) http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/02/03/gareth-porter-74/ | | Report Bad Link |
Movement News & Events
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Check our sidebar calendar for this week’s freedom movement events. Don’t see your event? Drop us a line at info@rationalreview.com … or see: www.rationalreview.com/add-your-event-to-our-calendar … for instructions on adding your events directly! http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/4042/ | | Report Bad Link |
