More really thin books
Posted in Tuma's Toons by R Lee Wrights on May 31st, 2009 Archive for May, 2009
Posted in Tuma's Toons by R Lee Wrights on May 31st, 2009 
Obama’s court nomination validates America’s rush to buy firearms
Posted in Liberty Rant by R Lee Wrights on May 30th, 2009 by CCRKBA staff
President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court validates the concerns of millions of American citizens who have been rushing to gun shops for the past seven months, fearing their Second Amendment rights are in jeopardy, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
Judge Sotomayor was part of a Second Circuit Court panel that ruled in January that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states, in Maloney v. Cuomo. That is in direct conflict with a Ninth Circuit opinion earlier this spring in Nordyke v. King that the Second Amendment is incorporated to the states, and therefore does place limits on states’ ability to regulate the individual right to keep and bear arms.
“Starting literally last Nov. 4 and every day since,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “concerned Americans, many who had never before owned a firearm, have been crowding into gun shops. Their concerns that the Obama administration may somehow try to destroy Second Amendment rights have certainly been affirmed with the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
“Sure, Congress has turned a cold shoulder to renewal of the ban on semiautomatic sporting rifles,” he continued, “and the president did sign the guns-in-parks bill, but only because he had to in order to save his credit card legislation.
End the war on drugs
Posted in LFA Flashback by R Lee Wrights on May 29th, 2009 by Danny Brooks
As most Libertarians 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, there will be people willing to risk prison in order to profit from them as well as use them. It’s a classic no-win situation. You would think that someone would’ve paid attention to that old adage about being doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past if we don’t learn from them and draw a correlation between the current Drug War and alcohol prohibition. But, for a non-Libertarian politician to apply a little common sense to this multi-billion dollar a year fiasco would be political suicide.
In what has become a War on People and on the Bill of Rights, millions of nonviolent high school and college kids have had their lives shattered by prison sentences that are not at all proportional to their “crimes”. Ironically, many of these “criminals” were caught doing the very things that politicians have been accused of, and even admitted, doing. In the 2000 presidential campaign, both Bush and Gore decreed that the punishment for doing what many believe they themselves did, should be a minimum of 10 years in prison. As the former LP Presidential candidate Harry Browne wanted to ask both Bush and Gore, “Would your lives had been better had you spent 10 years in a federal prison for your youthful indiscretions?”
The private sector
Posted in Student Union by R Lee Wrights on May 28th, 2009 by Sean Gangol
About a year ago Congress investigated the accusations of steroid abuse among Major League Baseball players. Whether steroid use is rampant in professional baseball is irrelevant to me. Since I have never been much of a baseball fan, I could hardly care less if Roger Clemens or Mark McGwire ever used steroids. What concerns me the most about the congressional hearings on steroids abuse is that no one seemed to question what authority the government had in conducting the hearings.
It seems like the MLB could have easily solved this problem by proposing mandatory steroid testing of all the players. The problem could have easily been solved without government intervention. Those who defend the government’s meddling say that athletes are role models and shouldn’t be taking steroids. As true as that may be, what business does the government have with issues that should only concern the private sector?
Another response that I get from the clueless defenders of government intervention is the notion that baseball is an American symbol and the steroids scandal tarnishes it. Once again that may be true. That still doesn’t change the fact that the MLB is a privately owned organization made up of privately owned teams. Publicly badgering the players into confessing their use of steroids is unnecessary and a waste of tax dollars. The congressional hearings are direct testaments to how much time government officials have on their hands. Instead of wasting time and tax dollars on self-serving hearings on steroids, congress could have done more productive things like repealing The Patriot Act or getting our troops out of Iraq, like the Democrats promised us when they regained control of congress. Apparently that was just too much to ask for.
I’m from Missouri, snow me!
Posted in Serious Levity by R Lee Wrights on May 27th, 2009 by Kevin Joseph Tull
In Missouri, “The Show Me State,” we have a clique that goes “I’m from Missouri, show me.” It simply means that we expect accountability. Talk is cheap, the proof is in the pudding, don’t just say it do it, where’s the beef(?) and Show Me.
Our state logo means what most people expect from anyone. This is why there are a lot of different cliques in America that mean exactly the same thing as our state logo. “Show Me” is what people say when they expect personal responsibility, but when it comes to the government the people rarely hold their elected officials feet to the fire.
Strange, the people who we give the greatest amount of power over our lives, have the least amount of accountability. We Libertarians know that if individual people act in the same manner as government then they are imprisoned by the very government they emulate. The vast majority of people seem to think this is OK.
If I were to point a gun at someone and shoot them dead in a case of mistaken identity I would serve time, and deservedly so. If a police officer shoots someone under the same circumstances they get suspended pending an investigation and then after the investigation that always seems to clear the officer of any wrongdoing they are back out on the streets packing a gun and protecting us with the same incompetence that they had in the first place. Show Me, where is the accountability? I’m not trying to imply that officers aren’t doing their best to protect the public, but I am stating that the same citizens that they are sworn to protect are held to a higher standard and harder punishment for the same crimes.
Being a criminal
Posted in Liberty's Friend by R Lee Wrights on May 26th, 2009 by Larken Rose
As in just about every other culture on the planet, Americans are raised to respect “authority.” They are taught that obedience is a virtue, and that the measure of whether you’re a good person is whether you’re a “law-abiding taxpayer” who “plays by the rules.” Likewise, we’re taught that the bad guys are all “criminals” who “have a problem with authority.”
People with brains have a problem with authority. And while being at odds with “authority” and “the law” does not automatically make someone a good person, it also doesn’t automatically make someone bad, either. Whether someone respects and honors the individual rights of other people is what matters. The trouble is, so many people, including those in the pro-freedom “movement,” still have a desire to receive the approval of authority.
Try asking yourself, or the people you know, “Are you willing to be a criminal?” Most will vehemently say no. But why? These days, when politician scribbles are called “laws,” what does it mean to be a “criminal” anyway? All it means is that someone disobeyed any one of the myriad of arbitrary politician commands and demands. Why should anyone feel bad about that? (The truth is, by that definition we’re all criminals, since the sheer volume of “laws” makes it impossible to even know all of them, and impossible to obey them all.)
Mississippi spurning
Posted in Jefferson D.C. by R Lee Wrights on May 25th, 2009 by Peter Orvetti
Jones County, Mississippi, is sometimes called the “Free State of Jones,” a nickname that dates back to a period of near-anarchy in the sparsely populated area in the 1840s. With few people, there were few laws, and no law enforcement personnel. A quarter-century later, the Free State of Jones was a hotbed of anti-Confederate activity.
These days, Jones County is not a hotbed of anything. It is best known, if known at all, for being the birthplace of singer Lance Bass and independent film star Parker Posey. Still, given its past as a place so radical that its residents rebelled against rebellion and once lived without laws, it would seem like it would be a hospitable place for three peaceful travelers “searching for freedom in America.”
That’s the motto of Motorhome Diaries, a cross-country journey by Pete Eyre, Adam Mueller, and Jason Talley intended to “connect with those who reject government violence in favor of a voluntary society.” All three are veterans of the self-governance movement; Eyre and Talley are former heads of the Competitive Enterprise Institute-affiliated Bureaucrash Activist Network. These are credible, informed activists.
LNC Judicial Committee Meeting Report, 5/22/09
Posted in LNC Reports by R Lee Wrights on May 24th, 2009 by Sean Haugh
The Judicial Committee (JC) of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) met Friday evening, May 22, to hear opinions in the appeal by R. Lee Wrights regarding his removal and subsequent reappointment as an at-large member of the board.
Representing Mr. Wrights were Dr. Mary Ruwart and Mike Seebeck. Alicia Mattson was the sole speaker on behalf of Chair Bill Redpath and Secretary Bob Sullentrup, the respondents.
There were initial problems with first conference call number given. The meeting convened at 9.12pm Eastern time after a new number was provided.
Mr. Seebeck began by stating the position of Mr. Wrights. He pointed out that the Bylaws only list four possibilities for removal of a member: death, resignation, missing LNC meetings, or 2/3rds vote of the LNC for cause. Only the first three instances specify a remedy, while no remedy is specified in the bylaw which declares that one must be a sustaining member to be eligible to hold the seat.
Victory at last
Posted in Doing Something by R Lee Wrights on May 23rd, 2009 by GOA staff
“Gun Owners of America was the most consistent and loudest voice on Capitol Hill in support of the effort to repeal the National Park Service gun ban.”
- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)
Good news! National Park Service Gun Ban Repealed!
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill today that included an amendment to repeal the gun ban on National Park Service (NPS) land and wildlife refuges.
The amendment, sponsored by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and attached to a credit card industry reform bill, passed the House overwhelmingly by a vote of 279-147.
For decades, law-abiding citizens have been prohibited from exercising their Second Amendment rights on NPS land and wildlife refuges, even if the state in which the land is located allows carrying firearms.
With some limited exceptions for hunting, the only way to legally possess a firearm anywhere in a national park is by having it unloaded and inaccessible, such as locked up in an automobile trunk. A Bush administration regulation partially reversed the ban, but that action was singlehandedly negated recently by an activist judge in Washington, D.C. The Department of Interior decided not to appeal that ruling.
A natural moral order: Why regulation is unnecessary
Posted in LFA Flashback by R Lee Wrights on May 22nd, 2009 by Jason A. Junge, author of Why Freedom
Most moral discussions and arguments today, from personal discussions to political propositions, seem to end in an impasse wrought from the magnetic chasm of moral relativism. Even solid, traditional principles fall prey to assertions of ethnocentrism or superannuation in a supposedly globalized and rapidly evolving population.
Family values, an often cited basis of morality in American society, for example, will depend on how one defines a family, what constitutes a “good” family, and other abstractions that can quickly be deconstructed to a vanishing point. A family unit in one culture is immutable, while in others it changes with the departing or marriage of children. A good family in one culture is closely knit and interactive, while in others it is born of respectful independence. And of course, these definitions change over time as cultures evolve. Perhaps you live in a middle class Latin American family where the culture impels you morally as a child to take care of your parents when they age, or perhaps you live in one of the socialist European countries where the moral expectation is for the state to take care of the elderly, or perhaps you lived during the times of cavemen when the elderly were left behind once their burden was too difficult to bear. Of course, none of these cultural expectations are any more moral than the others. If a European family moved to Latin America you would still not be able to argue the family’s morals as either right or wrong even given their cultural setting. Culture, being an amorphous and mutable concept, cannot be the foundation for morality. Otherwise we’d be stuck arguing that the Spanish Inquisition was a moral endeavor given the culture of the time and place.
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