By: Stephen Carter
An often repeated line by many liberals and even some conservatives, is that it is hypocritical for a libertarian to accept money from the government in any form. So is this true? Not hardly. Read more…
The percentage of Americans identifying as political independents increased in 2011, as is common in a non-election year, although the 40% who did so is the highest Gallup has measured, by one percentage point. More Americans continue to identify as Democrats than as Republicans, 31% to 27%.
This means independents let a small minority of the population choose the candidates they are to vote on in the general elections. Doing your duty as a voter is going to have to require more than just showing up at the polls come election day, it means going to the primaries and finding candidates beforehand. This and the support of third party and independent candidates are a must if we are to expect better outcomes.
By: Stephen Carter
Sometimes I need to work more than forty hours a week, sometimes I want to work more than forty hours a week, either way it’s to get ahead and be a little more financially stable. Often though, I’m unable to do so. Read more…
Germany’s promotion of renewable energy rightly gets singled out for its effectiveness, most often by me as an example of how to do things well versus the fits and starts method of promotion common in the US. Over at Wind-Works, Paul Gipe points out another interesting facet of the German renewable energy saga: 51% of all renewable energy in Germany is owned by individual citizens or farms, totaling $100 billion worth of private investment in clean energy. Read More
This Wednesday will mark the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo prison camp. In The New York Times, one of the camp’s former prisoners, Lakhdar Boumediene, has an incredibly powerful Op-Ed recounting the gross injustice of his due-process-free detention, which lasted seven years. It was clear from the start that the accusations against this Bosnian citizen — who at the time of the 9/11 attack was the Red Crescent Society’s director of humanitarian aid for Bosnian children — were false; indeed, a high court in Bosnia investigated and cleared him of American charges of Terrorism. But U.S. forces nonetheless abducted him, tied him up, shipped him to Guantanamo, and kept him there for seven years with no trial. Read More
How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a book about it, titled Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true. Read More
Over 26,000 Republicans participating in that party’s Iowa Caucus voted for Ron Paul.
According to data breaking down entrance polls conducted by Edison Research, Ron Paul won 43 percent of independents who voted in Tuesday’s caucus.
Conversely, however, he garnered only 14 percent of those describing themselves as “Republicans.” This seems a substantial obstacle to the Texas Congressman’s eventual nomination as he is running as a Republican. Read More
The most perplexing character in Congress, ideologically speaking, is Ron Paul. This is a guy who exists in the Republican Party as a staunch opponent of American empire and big finance. His ideas on the Federal Reserve have taken some hold recently, and he has taken powerful runs at the Presidency on the obscure topic of monetary policy. He doesn’t play by standard political rules, so while old newsletters bearing his name showcase obvious white supremacy, he is also the only prominent politician, let alone Presidential candidate, saying that the drug war has racist origins. You cannot honestly look at this figure without acknowledging both elements, as well as his opposition to war, the Federal government, and the Federal Reserve. And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview. Read More
By: Ron Paul
January 14, 2003
Two Democratic Congressman introduced legislation last week to revive the military draft, taking a race-baiting shot at the President and his war plans. Their idea is not new, however, as similar proposals were introduced by Republicans in the months following September 11th. Although the administration is not calling for a draft at this time, last week’s controversy shows while conscription has been buried for 30 years, the idea is not necessarily dead. Read more…
The benefits of his candidacy are widely ignored, as are the Democrats’ own evils. Read More
Excerpt from the article:
It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:
Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.
By: Gigi Bowman
My New Year’s resolution to my country. I will do everything I can to get Ron Paul elected and here is why: Read more…
By: Stephen Carter
Should it be illegal for a privately owned business to discriminate against people?
People discriminate every day. What instantly comes to mind with something like this is color of skin and gender. Discrimination can be any range of areas though, from looks, to speech, quality of clothes, pitch of voice, physical strength, etc. There are many things here that are discriminated against that people cannot control. Should we employ a bad singer over a good singer in order to avoid discrimination? Should we employ a weaker person over a very strong person to do a job that requires a lot of physical strength, just to avoid discrimination? How about the modeling business, isn’t that entire industry built on discrimination against ugly people? What of all female book clubs, doesn’t this discriminate against males? Scholarships that go to only black people? Businesses that will not hire people with visible tattoos or those who cannot pass a drug test but never show up to work inebriated? Read more…
IF you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.
The information I have just provided — about a constitutional doctrine called “jury nullification” — is absolutely true. But if federal prosecutors in New York get their way, telling the truth to potential jurors could result in a six-month prison sentence. Read More
Here’s the hurricane: In reality, no less than $29.616 trillion is the total emergency assistance provided by the Fed to foreign and domestic entities during the Global Financial Crisis. Let’s repeat that: $29 trillion. This astounding number is over twice U.S. gross domestic product, the nominal value of all goods and services produced for the year 2010. Read More
“* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.
* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.
* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven’t recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.” Read More
By: Stephen Carter
When I was in high school I always stood and always recited the Pledge of Allegiance because that was what I believed we were supposed to do. It was all I had ever known and I was just following what everyone else did. Some other students refused to participate though and they caught a lot of hell for it and I often felt that they didn’t deserve to be berated by teachers for refusing to participate since that was simply them exercising their freedom of choice.
When I got older though and I began to look at life and government differently, I realized a few things. Read more…
The REINS Act would require an up-or-down, standalone vote in Congress and the President’s signature on all new major rules before they can be enforced on the American people, job-creating small businesses, or State and local governments. Major rules are those that have an annual economic impact of $100 million or more. Read More
US Attorney General Eric Holder is in hot water again over Operation Fast and Furious, in which federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives lost track of hundreds of guns they had encouraged firearms dealers to sell to suspected traffickers. It’s the big sequel to BATFE’s Operation Wide Receiver in which multiple guns were sold to suspected cartel buyers under BATFE surveillance in 2006 and 2007.
But the plot thickens, and goes in a direction that probably shouldn’t be surprising: Documents obtained by CBS News strongly suggest that BATFE agents had intended to use Fast and Furious guns to support their demands for tighter administrative regulations on gun sales, particularly requiring dealers to report the sale of multiple rifles to the same person within a certain time period.
Where to even begin unraveling this one? Read More