[COLUMN] The liberal attack on Palin
In this Aug., 29 file photo, Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is introduced by Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)
Liberal bloggers have to be the lowest form of life on the planet.
I am a classical liberal, so I disagree with liberals and conservatives alike, or at least what passes for liberalism and conservatism today. They are simply two sides of the same big government, anti-freedom coin. Being neither a conservative nor a liberal gives me a perspective on both that adherents of those two philosophies lack because of their natural biases.
It is important, if one wishes to be informed, to read a variety of arguments on the issues of the day. Refusing to read viewpoints that run contrary to your own personal beliefs is intellectual sloth as well as intellectual vanity. Reading opinion with which you agree merely confirms your own prejudices and comforts your own ignorance.
Besides, it is boring.
To that end, I read many liberal and conservative viewpoints as well as listen to and watch pundits and politicians from both camps. I can say, without a doubt, that the left is far more hateful and irresponsible than the right.
I am, frankly, downright disgusted by the pure, hate-filled vitriol I read on left-wing blogs, much of which can't be published in a family newspaper.
It sickens my heart.
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[COLUMN] Let 18-year-olds drink
Thanks to the Amethyst Initiative, a movement by 129 college presidents and chancellors who say America's experiment with the drinking age is not working, we are finally having a serious and open debate on the reality of our failed alcohol laws.
Unfortunately, I can't say the debate is an honest one. When it comes to alcohol debates in this country, the arguments, especially by those who would unjustly restrict human liberty in favor of stricter laws, are steeped in misleading statements, skewed statistics, and outright lies.
There really are several issues pertinent to the debate on the drinking age and, despite what lunatic groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving claim, none of them has anything to do with whether drinking is healthy, whether 20-year-olds are mature enough to drink responsibly, or any other silly nonsense. In fact, the issue is less about drinking and more about exercising immoral power over others.
MADD and other anti-freedom, and therefore anti-American, groups like to confuse the issue by throwing out all kinds of crazy statistics about drinking that, when actually looked at, are misleading to say the least.
That's because the real goal of groups like MADD is not responsible drinking, but outright prohibition. MADD's leaders will not rest until they deprive the rest of us of the liberty to drink a beer. MADD is nothing less than a modern-day temperance organization that spreads lies and misinformation in an effort to stifle any debate on the issue.
In reality, the main issues here are states' rights and personal liberty.
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[COLUMN] Morality, not law, guided judge
A free-speech ruling by a federal judge in Cleveland must have left a few First Amendment advocates speechless.
Last year, Ohio enacted a law that prohibits touching between customers and nude or seminude dancers. It also halts nude dancing in strip clubs after midnight and prohibits adult bookstores and theaters from remaining open between midnight and 6 a.m.
Business owners, rightfully outraged at this blatant restriction on their liberties, filed a lawsuit to overturn the law, correctly arguing that it is an unconstitutional violation of free speech.
In comes U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr.
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| Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. |
The business owners sought an order to block enforcement of the new law while the lawsuit worked its way through the federal judicial system. The request is a reasonable one considering the important constitutional question at stake.
The judge, however, seems to have let his personal morality guide his decision and refused to put the law on hold.
"The businesses may still operate for the remaining 18 hours a day," Oliver wrote. "Therefore, [the law] is merely a reasonable regulation on the time, place and manner in which plaintiffs may exercise their First Amendment rights."
Regardless of how you feel about sexually oriented businesses, the judge's decision should violate your sense of fairness.
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[COLUMN] The growing paramilitary police threat
In 2004, I was sitting in a bar in Ruzyně Airport in Prague, Czech Republic. Outside the bar was a police officer wearing military clothing and toting a military-style weapon that was most likely an automatic.
It used to be that such a militant display by police officers was limited to banana republics and the Soviet Bloc. Being from a country where the average police officer only carries a Glock sidearm and perhaps some sort of electronic control weapon, the sight was slightly jarring.
Unfortunately, the USA is headed in that direction.
Americans should be seriously concerned with the militarization of our municipal police forces and the rapid rise of paramilitary police raids.
The trend began in the 1960s with the first special weapons and tactics team and quickly escalated in the 1980s and 1990s with the dawn of the war on drugs. Today, even the smallest departments can boast of heavy firepower, including military-grade weaponry such as the Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun. Other equipment often includes battering rams, ballistic shields, "flash-bang" grenades, smoke grenades, grenade launchers, pepper spray and tear gas. They use armored personnel carries, helicopters, tanks, rappelling equipment, bayonets, and night-vision goggles.
The officers (soldiers?) are often wearing combat boots and black or camouflage military uniforms. They have Kevlar helmets, ninja-style balaclava masks and boot knives.
All dressed up and no place to go.
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[COLUMN] More regulation coming
Imagine, if you will, the U.S. government voted to regulate gelato (replace with your favorite unhealthy food or habit).
Would that not stoke your fire?
Yet, most Americans either did not care about, or even applauded, Wednesday's vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to permit the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products.
Additionally, the bill bans flavored cigarettes such as candy-, fruit- and spice-flavored cigarettes as well as clove cigarettes. However, menthol cigarettes, which make up about 28 percent of the $70 billion cigarette industry in America, mysteriously escaped the ban.
The implication is that black lives are not as important as white lives because 75 percent of black smokers choose menthol-flavored cigarettes. The Congressional Black Caucus was going to withdraw its support of the bill because menthol was not included in the ban. A last-minute compromise requires a scientific advisory committee to issue recommendations on menthol in cigarettes within one year.
The bill has many supporters in the Senate, which is likely to pass it this fall. The White House is opposed to the bill and has hinted that a veto is possible. It is not clear if there are enough supporters in the Senate to override a presidential veto. One estimate has the Senate three votes shy of being able to override a veto.
The bill, if approved, would greatly expand the power, and the size, of the FDA, which is already a behemoth that costs more lives than it saves.
There is no arguing that cigarettes are unhealthy and that people should not smoke. Or, as U.S. Rep. John Boehner, R-Hamilton, himself a smoker, said on the House floor after calling it a "boneheaded idea": "How much is enough? How much government do we need? There's not a smoker in America that doesn't understand that smoking isn't good for you."
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[COLUMN] Forget energy; debt is killing us
"The Decline and Fall of the American Empire."
I can imagine that book title adorning some future bookshelf.
Am I crazy?
I am certain that, if you told a citizen of Rome on Sept. 3, 476, that the empire was going to collapse, he or she would have laughed you right out of the Forum Magnum.
Of course, Odoacer deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus the next day and the rest is history. In reality, no specific event marked the end of the Roman Empire. The fall was most likely a gradual transformation stemming from loose fiscal policy, military adventurism, welfare, high debt and excessive defense spending.
That is the likely course for the end of the American Empire. We will not even know it happened until long after the fact.
Perhaps the best indicator that we are in decline is the national debt.
Thomas Jefferson, in many of his letters, warned against government debt. In several letters, he warned that an overbearing national debt would lead to the collapse of liberty and to what philosophers referred to as the bellum omnium in omnia, or, roughly, the war of all against all.
The national debt is a phenomenal $9.54 trillion. That comes to about 65 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product and $31,309.88 for every man, woman and child in the country.
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[COLUMN] Market will correct itself
Oil prices declined? How can that be? How can that happen without government intervention? Are you telling me the free market actually works? Demand went down, supply went up and prices dropped. Wow. Imagine that.
Liberals must really hate it when the market self-corrects. It really shows how economically ignorant liberals can be.
While economics can, in detail, be much more complicated than rocket science, its basic principals are simple and even a government-educated fifth-grader should be able to grasp the idea.
Still, for some reason, otherwise very intelligent and well-educated people just don't seem to comprehend it.
It is frightening, really, when people such as U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, a Harvard-educated attorney, a member of the U.S. Senate, and possibly the next president of the United States, says silly, incomprehensible things like, "We can't drill our way out of this."
Nonsense.
Increased supply means lower prices. Period.
What we can't do, and what Obama should have said, is regulate our way out of this. What the Congress needs to do is stop interfering with the market and let it correct itself. It needs to lift restrictions on off-shore oil drilling and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It needs to lift the onerous regulatory burden on companies wishing to build oil refineries and nuclear power plants.
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[COLUMN] Big Brother is watching you
I am disgusted. Why, pray tell, do we even have a Constitution if the people of this country are just going to roll over and allow the government to ignore it whenever it becomes inconvenient?
I am, of course, referring to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed by the Senate on Wednesday and signed into law by President Bush on Thursday.
Passage of this bill was a cowardly attack on everything this country has ever stood for.
A member of my family has fought in nearly every American war, from the Revolutionary War in 1775 to my own participation in the war in Iraq in 2003. We did not serve so the government could run roughshod over the Constitution.
This sickens me.
The new law amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and further loosens restrictions on the ability of the federal government to spy on American citizens without judicial oversight.
This was in response to Bush's illegal wiretapping program in which his administration spied on Americans from 2002 to 2007.
Perhaps the most disappointing part of the FISA Amendments Act was a blanket immunity granted to telecommunications companies for helping Bush break the law. The immunity effectively puts an end to 46 pending lawsuits against telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon. The companies went along with government requests to spy on Americans without a warrant, a clear and blatant violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment and a violation of several laws, including the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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[COLUMN] America has become an oligarchy
The American elections system is broken. Of course, you know that but I don't think you know how it is broken.
The problem is that our current two-party rule has created a system that is really no better than nations with one-party rule. In fact, in some ways, nations with one-party rule are somewhat better because at least there is a sort of honesty. You know going in who the winner is going to be and you know you have no choice.
Here in the United States, however, the people have been brainwashed by 150 years of government-run education into thinking that the two-party system works. If you have any doubts, keep in mind our educational system was modeled on the Prussian system, which was created to break the influence of religion over the people and to instill in students social obedience through indoctrination. Every person was taught from the youngest age that the king was just and his decisions always right.
I am not sure what Horace Mann found attractive about such an educational system, but it is past time we break the government's monopoly on education.
However, I digress.
The monopoly that is troubling me today is the monopoly on power by the two major parties. The two parties have created an elections system that keeps out third parties by passing restrictive ballot-access laws. Sure, there are third parties, but the hoops through which they have to jump just to get on the ballot can be downright ridiculous.
It also goes beyond ballot access.
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[COLUMN] Court ruling a victory for liberty
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday scored a victory for liberty when it correctly struck down a 32-year-old Washington, D.C., law banning handguns and ruling for the first time that the Second Amendment is a personal right and not a right of the states to maintain militias.
In other words, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means exactly what it says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
This seems obvious to me. After all, why would Congress and the states create a Bill of Rights for the people and include in it a right for the states to form militias?
That would make no sense.
The Bill of Rights was meant to recognize some of the rights of the people, not of the government. The amendment even specifically states "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Seems pretty specific. Additionally, the phrase "right of the people" is used several other times in the Bill of Rights and in the unamended Constitution.
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