Inside the Executive washroom
Posted in Tuma's Toons by R Lee Wrights on June 30th, 2009 Archive for June, 2009
Posted in Tuma's Toons by R Lee Wrights on June 30th, 2009 
ACES gone wild
Posted in Jefferson D.C. by R Lee Wrights on June 29th, 2009 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.”
The myth of social justice
Posted in Liberty Rant by R Lee Wrights on June 28th, 2009 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.
Resorting to violence
Posted in Liberty's Friend by R Lee Wrights on June 27th, 2009 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”).
A silent victim of the drug war
Posted in LFA Flashback by R Lee Wrights on June 26th, 2009 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.)
Ten reasons to love global warming
Posted in Loose Cannon by R Lee Wrights on June 25th, 2009 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.
Taking the libertarian movement from Main Street to Wall Street
Posted in Carolinus by R Lee Wrights on June 24th, 2009 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?”
The ability to determine one’s own destiny
Posted in Serious Levity by R Lee Wrights on June 24th, 2009 by Kevin Joseph Tull
The ability to determine one’s own destiny, for good or bad, for better or worse, is as much the definition of freedom as any. I know that this definition may seem flawed by the fact that some may choose to do badly to others. I am not so naive to believe that there is no line of demarcation between this freedom and another person’s freedom. In fact, unlike most of my peers (not my more libertarian minded peers, but most friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers), I believe there is only one line that a person cannot cross without destroying freedom. That line is the border between violating the natural rights of another human being and doing everything in your power to influence another human without violating their natural rights.
This area may sound gray, but it is the determining line of what we already know naturally. In fact a peer of mine who doesn’t agree with me on where that line is has helped me to define it more clearly by commenting on my question of “Why isn’t ignorance of the law an excuse?” After all, there are more volumes of law than the most brilliant attorney could hope to learn in several lifetimes. My peer said that ignorance of the law could be an excuse because no one can hope nor is expected to know all written currently active law. My peer stated that there are several cases, tried in our courts, that have invalidated prosecution against defendants because there was no reasonable way they could have been expected to know the law and therefore that sufficed as reason enough to prevent the state from prosecution of those defendants.
Kennedy bill could send your gun info into a massive federal database
Posted in Doing Something by R Lee Wrights on June 23rd, 2009 by GOA staff
At long last, Teddy Kennedy has partially revealed the health care system he wants to foist on the whole country — and it isn’t pretty.
It won’t be pretty for your pocket book… OR FOR YOUR GUN RIGHTS!
But first, let us explain what TeddyCare is all about.
At the center of the plan is what’s called a “universal mandate.” What this means is that you — and virtually everyone in the country — will have to buy as much health insurance as the government demands, and that insurance plan will actually have to be approved by the government.
He’s just not that into you
Posted in Jefferson D.C. by R Lee Wrights on June 22nd, 2009 by Peter Orvetti
President Barack Obama is proving himself to be a clever political tactician. This should come as no surprise: He is, after all, the mixed-race son of divorced parents who managed to become the fourth-youngest president at time of inauguration. This rise required a great deal of skill. Since taking office, he has shown his savvy in many ways, not least of them his mostly successful efforts to undercut the Republican Party through appointments.
Obama brought Sen. Arlen Specter into the Democratic fold, and nearly brought Sen. Judd Gregg into his Cabinet, which could have cleared the way for a future Democratic Senate pickup. He tapped Rep. John McHugh of New York for Army secretary, setting up a special election that could add another Democrat to the House. Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, was voluntarily retiring after a career as a respected House Republican, but could have been considering a later run for higher office. In the most clever move of all, Obama brought in Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman — who Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe saw as a formidable possible White House challenger in 2012 — as U.S. ambassador to China.
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