Liberty For All

by Dennis D. Hayes

Please…before you send our sons and daughters to die for causes and becauses…you should know something.

It cannot be about hatred. It cannot be about lies, apprehension, greed, or deceit.  It matters not the envy, the craftiness, the treachery, or the despair. Of no consequence or purpose are cruelty, superstition, guilt, or revenge. Useless is anger, arrogance, and contempt. Let go of embarrassment, indifference, laziness, and doubt.

But cling to love.

Hold fast that one precious moment that first opened your heart to joy, affection, respect, and wonder. Have the courage and resolve, the hope and the pleasure, the nobleness and the dignity to choose…peace.  Look into the eyes of a child to find trust and reverence. Then gather this knowledge and give it not only to yourself, but also to all for whom you care.

How you ask?  Place yourself in either of the roles of the following poem. Know that what you are about to feel is not only what you can give, but what you must endeavor to never take away. Pay attention…for you are about to have….

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by Brian Schwartz

President Obama is either misinformed or lying about health care. He said the “free market has not worked perfectly.” There’s a market, but it’s not free. It’s infested with harmful political meddling. One example is government’s favoring employer-provided insurance, a poison to affordable medical care and insurance.

But unions and Congressional Democrats want to intensify the dose with a “pay or play” employer mandate. This would penalize employers for not buying medical insurance for their employees. This is not “reform;” it just entrenches flawed policies. It would violate rights, lower wages, and threaten jobs of minority single moms

Government’s favoring employer-sponsored insurance is the problem, not the solution. When your employer buys your insurance, it’s a non-taxable corporate expense. Employers save by “paying” you with insurance instead of higher wages.

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by Sandy Froman

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, has a narrow view of the Second Amendment that contradicts the Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. A heated debate has started in the U.S. Senate over her opposition to the right to keep and bear arms. This issue, which has decided the fate of presidential elections, could also decide her nomination. Gun owners, and especially the members of the National Rifle Association, must aggressively oppose Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

On June 24, senators began speaking on the floor of the Senate expressing grave concerns over Judge Sotomayor’s Second Amendment record. Senator Jeff Sessions R-AL, the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pointed out that although her record on the issue is “fairly scant,” she has twice stated that the Second Amendment is not a fundamental right. Senator Sessions also noted that in Second Amendment and other constitutional cases, Sotomayor’s analysis of important constitutional issues has been lacking suggesting “a troubling tendency to avoid or casually dismiss difficult Constitutional issues of exceptional importance.” Sotomayor’s view on the Second Amendment clearly reflects an extreme anti-gun philosophy, and some Democrat senators from pro-gun states are justifiably nervous.

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by Kevin Tuma

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by Peter Orvetti

On Friday evening, the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), a well-intentioned but misbegotten Frankenstein monster of a bill intended to combat climate change.  Republicans Mary Bono Mack, Mike Castle, Mark Kirk, Frank LoBiondo, John McHugh, Dave Reichert, and Chris Smith joined 211 Democrats to put the bill over the top 219-212.  Showing the profiles in courage typical to elected politicians, about three dozen Democrats hung back during the roll call until passage was certain, waiting until they could safely vote no without riling their party’s leaders.

As its sponsors struggled to make it palatable to representatives from energy-producing states, the bill swelled from 942 pages to just over 1,200, leaving undecided members little time to digest the new material.  This brings to mind Rep. John Conyers’ admission to Michael Moore that members of Congress “don’t really read most of the bills” they vote for, because it would “slow down the legislative process.”

Two weeks after his election as president, Barack Obama said, “Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change.  The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.”  Shortly thereafter, more than 100 scientists signed a newspaper advertisement responding, “With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.”  The scientists, from places as varied and esteemed as Los Alamos National Laboratory, the American Physical Society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, said the “case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.”

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by Jessica Pacholski

Many people clamor for “social justice,” they want a turn of the tide against the evils that have haunted humanity through the ages. This is a term I have never understood, mostly because it’s an impossibility. Justice is only applicable to individuals, since it can only be just to punish someone for their own actions. Social justice is a dragnet, in reality it punishes everyone for being part of society, whether they have committed a crime or not. How can a person be held responsible for crimes committed before they were born? They can’t, and what’s more there is no way to repay people for certain wrongs committed against their ancestors, such as slavery. How do you ever make that right?

There are no reparations for such heinous acts because those who were responsible and those who were injured are dead now and any hope for justice died with them. Punishing innocent people for the crimes of their grandfathers seems to me to be the opposite of justice, it seems more like a blood vendetta. When I hear people rant about societies ills I sometimes have to wonder if they think about what that truly means. Like most idealism, what sounds noble on the surface is really about control over others, the reality of the philosophy is hidden by the rhetoric even to those who preach it.

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by Larken Rose

On a couple of occasions, while driving back and forth to Michigan, I made myself listen to NPR (which I think stands for “New Pravda Radio”). One of the topics discussed by the collectivist brigade was “extremism” in America, and how sometimes extremists, “right” and “left,” resort to violence to push their agenda.

What was most noteworthy about the show was what they did not say, and probably have never even considered. While talking about how, out of frustration and desperation, sometimes disenfranchised people resort to violence, they failed to mention that “government,” by its very nature, ALWAYS resorts to violence. Everything “government” does is backed by a threat of brute force. Every “law” is a command–not a friendly suggestion, not a helpful tip, but a command backed by the threat of violence. But statists never seem to grasp that obvious truth.

When has any statist, after seeing a video of a SWAT team invading someone’s home, referred to it as government “resorting to violence”? In fact, when do they even call it “violence” at all? Never. You see, in their eyes, “legal” violence committed by “authority” is automatically legitimate, and therefore doesn’t count as violence at all. When the IRS fascists resorted to violence on May 6, 2003, sending a dozen armed thugs to my home, to force their way into my house so they could steal all of my “Theft By Deception” videos, that didn’t count as violence–not in the eyes of statists, anyway. And when the local, state and federal thugs do armed invasions of many people’s homes, pointing machine guns at everyone, because they think there might be a non-government-approved plant growing on the premises, that doesn’t count as “violence” either. In fact, when they shoot and kill someone in the process, even that doesn’t win the label “violent” (though it might qualify as an “unfortunate mistake”).

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by Danny Brooks

As most Libertarians can agree, the best way to win the so-called “War on Drugs” is to end it once and for all.  Not partially, but completely. As long as there are any drugs that are illegal in The United States, there will be people willing to risk prison in order to profit from them just as there will be people willing to risk prison in order to use and possess them.  It’s a classic no-win situation. 

You would think that someone would’ve paid attention to that old adage that “those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them” and drawn a correlation between the current drug war and alcohol prohibition from the 1920’s and 1930’s.  But, for a non-Libertarian politician to use a little common sense on this multi-billion dollar a year fiasco that has landed millions of non-violent high school and college kids in prison with sentences that are not at all proportional to their “crimes” of doing the very things that President George W. Bush and recent Democratic challenger Al Gore (not to mention practically every Kennedy who has ever held public office) admitted to doing when they were younger, would be political suicide.  So, they continue to offer up the same tired rhetoric about being tough on drugs, tough on crime, blah, blah, blah (unless, of course, it affects them or a member of their family, in which case the “drug offenders” become “drug victims” and what they normally classify as a crime becomes a disease.)

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by Garry Reed, The Loose Cannon Libertarian

All cranked up over global warming?  Why?  It’s happened before and humans just like you survived it, so why not this time around?  It’s nothing new.  The last recorded temperature uptick was known as the Medieval Warm Period, a time of unusually balmy weather, which lasted (depending on who’s doing the figgerin’) from around 800 to 1300 AD.  The warm period was presumably preceded by a cold period, else how did anyone know it was a warm period?  It was, in fact, followed by a cold period, known today as the Little Ice Age, which ran on Broadway and all over the Northern Hemisphere from (again, approximations) 1250 to 1850 AD.

People are obsessing about today’s global warming because anti-libertarian political opportunists and cultural Marxists and enviro-religionists and government-paid researchers who stand to gain political and/or social power and prestige and tons of taxbucks are demanding that we obsess about it.

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by R. Lee Wrights

Doctors told Steve Kubby that he had only six months to live. That was more than thirty years ago! What has Mr. Kubby done with the extra time physicians told him he didn’t have?  Well, besides becoming an icon in the medical marijuana movement and running for the LP presidential nomination in 2008, he is taking libertarians, and the liberty movement, out of the trenches. He is taking our message from the front lines of Main Street to the bottom line of Wall Street. His new company, Cannabis Science Inc. (NASD OTCBB: CBIS), brings an opportunity to the libertarian community which has rarely, if ever, been offered before.

Make no mistake, Steve Kubby is no fool. He knows that starting a new company is a risky venture, but when you live day-to-day with life-threatening adrenal cancer and the authorities breathing down your neck because the medicine you use is not sanctioned by the government, just getting up in the morning is less than certain. When asked recently about the risk of starting a new company in tough economic times Kubby, who has had success in other entrepreneurial endeavors, said:

“There are always those who scoff at new ideas and ventures. Such doubters will tell you, and anyone else who will listen, that Cannabis Science, Inc., our new cannabinoid pharmaceutical company, is too risky and our stock too volatile. Yes, our venture is a risk and investors could lose everything, but where is there a ’safe’ investment these days?”

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