The GOP Delegate Battle is NOT Over

Ben Swan takes an extended look at the real battle for GOP delegates, not the fake story being promoted by the mainstram media talking heads. Note the beginning segment where in Washington state, King County Republican Party Chairwoman Lori Sotelo  tries to use totally false rules to try and keep a Ron Paul delegate from being elected permanent caucus chair.

Ron Paul on Firing Line

Ron Paul was a guest on William F. Buckley Jr.'s Firing Line in 1988. Ron Paul was the 1988 Libertarian Party's candidate for President.

Part 1 of 4:



Part 2 of 4:



Part 3 of 4:





Part 4 of 4:

Who Benefits From Economic Progress?

Praxgirl explains economic progress and who benefits from it.

CISPA Passes House, Supporter by Internet Providers

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was passed by the House yesterday. From Russia Today:

A controversial cyber security Act CISPA is now a step closer to becoming law, following US Congress approval. The process now heads to the Senate, although the White House had already threatened to veto the bill. Internet users slammed the proposal accusing it of breaching American's privacy. Critics point to the fact that the act could eclipse all existing laws protecting people's privacy. RT's Gayane Chichyakyan reports from Washington. And Declan McCullagh, correspondent from C-net news, says it's the most alarming part of the bill.

Expanding Killing Without a Trial

The CIA is seeking to expand its drone program. From the Washington Post:

The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.  

Securing permission to use these “signature strikes” would allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior, such as imagery showing militants gathering at known al-Qaeda compounds or unloading explosives. 

The practice has been a core element of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan for several years. CIA Director David H. Petraeus has requested permission to use the tactic against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, which has emerged as the most pressing terrorism threat to the United States, officials said.

Setting Up Failure

Prosperity can only be achieved through a true free market (which we don't have in the United States). Massive regulations stifle economic growth which hurts the poor and the middle class, while further enriching the wealthy and powerful.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Lionel comments on the CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) and it's far reaching invasion of all your privacy.

Ron Paul Wins Another State. First Minnesota and Now Iowa

Well at least one mainstream media person is paying attention. Rachel Maddow reports on Ron Paul being the real official winner of Iowa. Ron Paul has sewn up a minimum of half the delegates in both Iowa and Minnesota. He has in all likelihood also won Colorado. Of course most of the mainstream media talking heads will continue to report that Ron Paul hasn't won any states.

Who Can Take Your Money? The Government Can

From Tim Hawkins:

Hey everybody! Gather 'round! I'm here to give you anything you like! You want free college, money, mortages?! Whatever you like! You have come to the right place! Why? I'll tell you why!  

Who can take your money? With a twinkle in their eye? Take it all away and Give it to some other guy 

[Chorus]  

The Government The Government can! 

Who can tax the Sun rise? Who can tax the trees? Let you run a business and Collect up all the fees 

[Chorus] 

The Government can 'cause They mix it up with lies and Make it all taste good! 

The Government takes Everything we make To pay for all of their "sollutions" Healthcare, Climate Change, Pollution Throw away the Constitution 

Who can give a bailout? Tell us to behave? Make the Founding Fathers Roll over in their graves 

[Chorus] 

The Government takes Everything we make They're power hungry And malicious The economics are fictitious Soon we'll have to eat our dishes Mmm! Delicious! 

Who can be a failure? In so many ways? Instead of getting fired, HEY! We'll give ourselves a raise! 

[Chorus] 

The Government can 'cause They mix it up with lies and Make it all taste good! And your government can 'cause they mix it with lies and Makes it all taste good!  

And I feel so good Because the Government Says I should! Oh!...

Paul versus Paul (Ron and Krugman)

From Jeremy Hammond:

RON PAUL VS. PAUL KRUGMAN

AUSTRIAN VS. KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS IN THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Why do modern economies go through the "business cycle" of booms and busts? What caused the U.S. housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis? Who correctly predicted it and who should we listen to for wisdom moving forward?

Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman is an examination of the root cause of the crisis as seen through the eyes of two prominent commentators on the subject, each representing a different school of economic thought. Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul is today perhaps the most visible proponent of the Austrian school, whose luminaries include Ludwig von Mises and Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. Hayek. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is today perhaps the most well-known voice for the Keynesian school, whose adherents espouse the theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes.

A comparative analysis of these two schools of economic thought as applied to the financial crisis and as promulgated through the views of Ron Paul and Paul Krugman is instructive. Whose school offered more explanatory and predictive power? Whose diagnosis and prescriptions have been better suited to deal with the problem? Who should we listen to now?

Mainstream Media Bogus Delegate Counts

According to The Associated Press as of 6:18 this morning, the delegate breakdown for Minnesota is as follows:

• Rick Santorum        28
• Newt Gingrich          1
• Ron Paul                   9
• Mitt Romney            0
• Unallocated              2

Now for the true story:

As of Saturday April 21, 2012, all eight Congressional District Conventions have been held in Minnesota. At these conventions, 24 of Minnesota's 40 delegates to the National GOP convention are elected. The results are as follows:

• Rick Santorum          2
• Newt Gingrich          0
• Ron Paul                 20
• Mitt Romney             1
• Unknown                   1

 Thirteen delegates will be chosen at the State Convention May 18 -19, 2012. The remaining three delegates are pre-selected party leaders.

So the point is that what the mainstream media constantly reports as the delegate count bears very little resemblance to the truth. But aren't they suppose to report the news and not create their own story line?

Protecting Us from Used Records

The incompetant government of Washington, D.C. is about to regulated used records stores out of business. From Reason TV:

April 21, 2012 marks the fifth annual Record Store Day, a nation-wide project to promote struggling brick-and-mortar music shops. Across the country, independent stores offer exclusive, one-of-a-kind recordings as a way to bring customers through the door. 

"It is the busiest day of the year," says Matt Moffatt, co-owner of Washington, D.C.'s Smash Records, a shop that sells new and used CDs and vinyl LPs, along with clothing, posters, t-shirts, vintage clothing, and more.  

But now the powers that be in the nation's capital have decided that record stores must get second-hand dealer business licenses, which cost a lot of money and have onerous reporting requirements. Store owners such as Moffatt would have to report every new piece they put up for sale to the police, allow the cops to verify it's not stolen, and get information about all customers who buy used goods. Failure to comply would mean incurring massive fines of thousands of dollars a days.  

"Basically," says Moffatt, "they want us to get a pawn shop license."

Local business groups such as the Adams Morgan Partnership are pushing back but the future of stores such as Smash Records is far from clear. "It just seems so heavy-handed, it could easily destroy businesses like mine," says Moffatt.

We Looked the Other Way

Nineteen years ago the FBI set fire to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. They had to kill the children in order to save them. Anthony Gregory explores the significance of Waco in our ever growing police state.

We’re All Branch Davidians Now

by Anthony Gregory

Nineteen years ago, just outside Waco, Texas, the FBI demonstrated once again that the state at its core is a killing machine. Monarchy, democracy, or republic – any government as conventionally defined is a legal monopoly on violence. The state is always inclined toward oppression, division, conquest, and bloodshed, because these are its tools of trade.

Matters are no different here. The myth of a free America was always seen with bitter irony by those not blessed by such freedom. In the founding generation, as half a million labored in slavery, many who fought in the Revolution genuinely believed in liberty, but for the ruling elite who chided them on, liberty was hardly more than a slogan. This has always been true of our political leaders. The Father of the Country was a centralizing slaveowner. Old Hickory talked up freedom as he threatened war on South Carolina and forced the Cherokee to flee from their ancestral land on a barbarously murderous walk of shame. The Great Emancipator turned America into a military dictatorship and abolished the revolutionary right of secession. Wilson’s New Freedom was cover for a Prussianized war machine generating revenue for his profiteering buddies on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms failed to include the freedom not to be drafted or interned in a concentration camp. Ronald Reagan threw the word freedom around as he trained Latin American torturers and raped the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting drugs. The United States has never lived up to its rhetoric.

But the events from February 28 through April 19, 1993, still stand out in my mind as a watershed. It was the post-Cold War regime’s coming of age, signifying a major event in cultural history.

Everything about Operation Showtime was brazen, and it seemed like an overreach even by some of the government’s establishment defenders. Yet today Washington’s fixers must look back at these embarrassments as a hiccup at most, as growing pains on the way to establishing a militarized law-and-order apparatus of nearly unlimited power. That this stepping stone was reached on the eve of the Internet era, right before the old media began its decline in influence, was most convenient for the police state and its solidification.

The propaganda against the Branch Davidians was perfectly tuned to appeal to the masses, each adjustment in frequency coming just in time to keep the people listening. Religious fanatics with a meth lab, armed and dangerous, abusing their children – few wanted to stand up for these people during the siege. Even fewer wished to identify the Davidian response to the original raid for what it was: self-defense. The Davidians fired on the ATF so long as the ATF fired upon the Davidians, and when the ATF ran out of ammo, the Davidians held their fire. The government’s officials were the aggressors. What followed were fifty-one days of psychological warfare designed to isolate the Davidians – from water, from food, from the press, their lawyers and family – and break them down like any wartime enemy.

So preposterous was the standoff that eventually even the mainstream media began asking questions. A New York Times exposé on March 28 raised all sorts of troubling issues, which only multiplied in the days that followed. Federal agents said that supervisors had known they had lost the element of surprise, but decided to go ahead with the February 28 raid anyway. Agents were reportedly unhappy with their equipment and communication methods. The poor planning and lack of contingency options were exposed. No medical assistance had been prepared for the ATF's raid. Reports emerged that some of the ATF agents had injured or killed one another in friendly fire. There were hints that other agents might have even been captured and let go by the Davidians. The ATF intelligence chief stopped holding press conferences as the heat continued to mount.

On April 19, tired from the boredom and bad publicity of just standing around outside the "compound," the FBI drove a tank through the Davidians’ home, pumped it full of CS gas, launched incendiary devices at the building, and watched it go up in flames. As soon as the stakes became higher, as soon as questioning the feds meant implying they had committed mass murder, the media stopped barking defiantly and jumped back to the government’s lap.

The Democrats, home of America’s center-left, oversaw this exceedingly important event in the development of the police state. Unsurprisingly, every respectable liberal defended the government and believed Clinton’s people when they demonized the Davidians. The entire respectable right went along with the bloodletting, too. Why wouldn’t they? It was a raid planned by George H.W. Bush’s ATF, carried out by the Clintonistas, and ultimately rubberstamped by the Republicans in Congress, and so everyone could get behind it. Some libertarians wavered, including Randians and other proponents of violent national secularism, and much of the radical left went limp too.

The Oklahoma City incident two years later was spun by the media as an example of anti-government extremism somehow being a greater threat than the government itself. It became increasingly un-PC to bring up what had happened in Texas. The election of Dubya and 9/11 washed away the paranoid anti-statist instincts of much of the Clinton-hating right.

Waco, from the raid’s planning to the cover-up and show trials, taught the U.S. government what it could get away with – which is to say, practically anything. It can gas innocent children with internationally banned chemicals. It can hoist a federal flag atop a torched American home, claim victory, and see its public image improve. It can throw grenades at people trying to escape a building and claim they are being held hostage. In the name of protecting these "hostages" and children, it can watch as they burn and keep the firefighters away. And the massacre will be tolerated, even applauded.

Dozens of people of color died at the hands of the federal government, and the official Civil Rights movement hardly spoke up. Dozens of people were targeted for their religion, and it hardly bothered many of the very conservatives who allege a war on religion waged by DC. The largest federal-military killing of civilians on U.S. soil in a century has now become one more notch on the progressive left’s timeline of major events in anti-government extremism, as opposed to a principal example of government extremism where a tiny minority community was virtually exterminated.

Indeed, in 1993 the Davidians were only the most conspicuous and recent example in America’s long history of the demonized Other, the marginalized underclass in the official hierarchy of human worth. Slaves, Indians, Mexicans, Southerners, Catholics, Irish and German-Americans, Chinese immigrants, Japanese-Americans, Mormons, homosexuals, alleged Communists, rightwing extremists, and many others have played the role, often for their imagined association with the wartime enemy, but always for being out of step with the government’s accepted definition of legitimate humanity. Many look back at incidents of intolerance with disbelief that Americans could be so blind to oppression. Yet when the topic of Waco comes up, they will think only of those nutcases who, according to the government and media, attacked federal agents and then killed themselves.

In the nineteen years since Waco, we have seen the police state explode in every direction and now we are all ensnared. Some groups are always more threatened than others, but no one is truly safe. The prisons have swollen to the largest detention system since Stalin’s gulags. The police conduct three thousand SWAT raids a month. The war on terror has made a total mockery of what remained of the Fourth Amendment. Torture has lost its taboo. So has indefinite detention. The feds irradiate and molest airline passengers by the millions. People are jailed for taking medicine, buying Sudafed, sharing songs, and selling milk. The Kafkaesque regulatory state threatens people of all economic classes with crushing fines and a fate in a cage. The public schools, always authoritarian institutions, have become explicit adjuncts of the criminal justice system and military recruitment offices. Every major police department has tanks and battle rifles and drones are being used for surveillance and God knows what else. Each federal department has enough firepower to conquer a small third-world country. DHS alone has ordered enough ammo to shoot every American man, woman, and child. The president claims the right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet on his say-so alone. And he exercises that power.

Why do some of us continue to fixate on Waco? If for no other reason, because April 19, 1993 was a squandered opportunity if ever there was one. The people could have risen up and said, "Enough!" They could have demanded the military occupation retreat from their own neighborhoods – both the federal presence and its satellite jackboots in the city police. They could have demanded an end to the gun laws, drug war, and federal war on crime, each of which was instrumental in ending the lives of more than twenty children at Waco. They could have turned against the media whose elites stood and applauded the White House as it announced and defended its latest killing spree. They could have seen the federal government for the clear and present danger it obviously poses – the only government that had militarily mass murdered American civilians on American soil since the collateral damage at Pearl Harbor. They could have turned their backs on the killers in DC, refusing ever to believe in their lies again, saving the lives of uncountable Americans, Serbians, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, Palestinians, and so many others who would bear the wrath of an unhampered imperial executive in the nineteen years to come, sparing the priceless liberties we have seen shredded on the altar of state power.

Instead, they looked the other way, they yawned, even cheered. There might still be time to turn things around. But the tanks are closing in.

April 19, 2012

Anthony Gregory is research editor at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Does Any One Think George and Martha Washington Had a Marriage License?

Three videos from the Libertarian Party presidential debate in Texas. The best line was when Lee Wrights asked:

Does any one think George and Martha Washington had a marriage license?

The Libertarian Party of Texas Presidential Debate - Family Values



The Libertarian Party of Texas Presidential Debate - Gun Control





The Libertarian Party of Texas Presidential Debate - Ending the Fed

Just the Facts Please!

Lionel is just interested in discussing the facts in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case.

The Mainstream is Ignoring the rEVOLution

Jack Hunter comments on the significance of the Ron Paul Revolution. The mainstream media and political pundits are doing their best to ignore the Revolution, but they won't be able to forever.

Why Printing Money is a Bad Idea.

Ben Bernake is printing money virtually to bail out the bankers and the government. Why is this a bad thing for the common people? Because it leads to inflation which decreases the buying power of the common people. So our government is literally picking your pocket to bail out the special interests that own our "leaders."

Ben Bernanke Says We Are Printing Money and That We Are Not Printing Money

Ben Bernake,the liar in chief at the Federal Reserve, can't keep his story straight as Jon Stewart demonstrates with two clips from 60 Minutes.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

He Can't Run His Escalators, How Can He Run the World?

From Reason TV:

How is Washington, D.C. supposed to run the world when it can't even fix its own escalators?
Strap on some steel-toed safety shoes—you're gonna need them—as Reason.tv correspondent Kennedy investigates D.C.'s dismal and dangerous subway system.

Metro, the sprawling 106-mile rapid transit system that serves 3.4 million D.C.-area residents, is notorious for a lot of things, but nothing so much as the squeaky disrepair of its 588 escalators. On any given day, about one out of eight moving stairs are out of service. Yet Metro's escalator and elevator maintenance division has a $22.5 million operating budget and 214 staffers, which works out to about one employee for every four escalators and elevators systemwide.

The grim history of Metro escalators runs like an endlessly circulating chain of horror stories. In 2002, an escalator at Brookland Station set a record by breaking down 147 times over the course of one year. Poorly maintained escalators have led to broken arms, lost digits, massive pileups, and multiple deaths. In 1991, for example, a 25-year-old student from California lost the top of his right foot on an escalator because a drugged-up schizophrenic station manager at Dupont Station refused to walk 10 feet to hit the emergency shut-off switch, though he did give vague instructions to a noncompliant homeless man to do it for him. The same year, a 15-year-old Michigan girl saw her pinkie toe snipped by an escalator at Smithsonian Station.

When heading home from the 2010 "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear," some demonstrators boarded an escalator at L'Enfant Station that suddenly started running as fast as a roller coaster, landing four passengers in the hospital. In 1985, a three-year-old girl was strangled to death by an escalator at the Minnesota Avenue Station and four years later, a 40-year-old woman was killed when her clothing became entangled in an escalator at Rhode Island Avenue. The advent of side brushes and better automatic shut-off sensors have reduced accidents on Metro escalators, but more units today are routinely out of service.

Why are Metro's escalators so bad? The problem stems partly from a decision made 20 years ago. In 1992, Metro got rid of the private contractors that repaired and maintained the system and started hiring and training its own escalator mechanics. The rationale was that government employees would do a better job for less money.

Partway through a planned eight-month-long maintenance project that many riders assume will take far longer, the wisdom of that decision remains an open question. Reason.tv would have loved to talk with WMATA, the government agency that runs the Metro, but it ignored our requests for an interview.

Mike Bloomberg - Petty Dictator

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned private food donations to his city's homeless shelters, because the City can't control the fat and salt content. Bloomberg wins Nanny of the Month.

Two More People from Muslim Countries That Hate Us Because of Our Freedom

Here are singers Eldar Gasimov and Nigar Jamal (aka Ell & Nikki) from Azerbaijan, a country where about 95% of the people are Muslim:



Ell & Nikki won the Eurovision Song Contest 2011 with their entry "Running Scared". It was Azerbaijan's first ever win at the contest.

So many Americans suffer from a lack of understanding of the rest of the world, that they are easily swayed by those who seek to instill fear and hate of other people. The warmongers paint a false stereotype of the people and countries they wish to control.

When you cut through all the baloney that is spewed, people are the same the world over.

"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."

-- Thomas Jefferson (1801)

United States Supports Pro US Dictators

Jacob Hornberger,of the Future of Freedom Foundation, appearing on RT comments that the United States does not want "democracy", but rather pro US regimes. He points out US support for various pro US dictatorships.

Rick Santorum Supports Big Government

Rick Santorum is all for big government, run by people like him.

BOHICA

The Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 decision ruled that anyone arrested can be subjected to a strip search, no matter how minor the offense. From The San Francisco Chronicle:

Albert Florence was forced to undress and submit to strip searches following his arrest on a warrant for an unpaid fine, though the fine actually had been paid. Even if the warrant had been valid, failure to pay a fine is not a crime in New Jersey.

Florence's problems arose in March 2005, as he was heading to dinner at his mother-in-law's house with his pregnant wife and 4-year-old child. His wife, April, was driving when a state trooper stopped the family SUV on a New Jersey highway.

Florence identified himself as the vehicle's owner and the trooper, checking records, found an outstanding warrant for an unpaid fine. Florence, who is African-American, had been stopped several times before, and he carried a letter to the effect that the fine, for fleeing a traffic stop several years earlier, had been paid.

His protest was in vain, however, and the trooper handcuffed him and hauled him off to jail. At the time, the State Police were operating under a court order, spawned by allegations of past racial discrimination, that provided federal monitors to assess state police stops of minority drivers. But the propriety of the stop is not at issue, and Florence is not alleging racial discrimination.

Read more here.

General Services Administration: It's Only Money

The Federal Government's General Services Administration apparently has lots of extra money to spend. It spent $822,000 of taxpayer money for an lavish training conference at a swank Las Vegas resort hotel.

Race Baiting at NBC and MSNBC

Lionel disscusses the editing job NBC and MSNBC did to the George Zimmerman 911 tape. The tape was edited to stoke the flames of racial conflict and NBC and MSNBC lied about it. Don't ever trust that the mainstream media is giving you the truth.




This wasn't the first time MSNBC has tried to stir up contoversy on race by cleverly editing tape:

The Dog Whistle Isn't Working Anymore

Bonnie Kristian of Young Americans for Liberty interviews Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine. Welch states that things are getting better (more libertarian) in culture, commerce and in our private lives, while at the same time government is getting bigger and more controlling. Welch thinks that the government will eventually succumb to the growing libertarianism of the culture.


Full interview transcript here.

A Noninterventionist Foreign Policy is the Cornerstone of a Free Society

Great article by Anthony Gregory on how a libertarian must be anti-war. It gives a good overview of all the unintended consequences of our involvement in wars over the years. War breeds more war and loss of liberty.

Article here.

We Are Not Afraid To Lose

There more important things than elections. Voting for the usual suspects, results in the usual bad outcome.

Van Jones is an Ignorant Fool

Van Jones is either an ignorant fool or just a plain liar. Even the most superficial reading of libertarian philosophy will inform one that what Van Jones describes has nothing to do with libertarianism. Libertarianism is all about the rights of the minority, the individual, being protected from the tyrannical majority. Libertarians do not pigeonhole people into groups, rather we recognize the rights of all individuals to live their lives as they choose, as long as they respect the rights of others to do the same.

Beauty Contests Don't Count

Doug Wead once again tries to explain to the mainstream media (David Frost in this case) how the delegate selection process really works.

Political Savagery In Washington State

Ben Swann reports on the "Unity Slate" developed by Romney operatives in Washington state. This slate is designed to keep the "savage" Ron Paul supporters from winning any delegates. Savage Ron Paul supporters? Why a slate that locks out Ron Paul? Because he is not one the establishments good old boys.

So much for the mainstream medias constant reporting of an alleged deal between Paul and Romney.

87 Year Old Man Defends Himself

Another case of a gun being used for self defense. From KCAL in Los Angeles:

Burglars messed with the wrong senior when they decided to break into Jack Goodwin’s Baldwin Hills home.
The 87-year-old retired postal worker was in bed, listening to the Laker game Tuesday night when he heard a rear window in his house breaking. Goodwin got out of bed, picked up his gun, and walked down the hall. When he saw intruders at his window, he raised his gun and fired.
“When I saw them breaking the glass, I was, man. I got kinda — it was either me or them, then,” Goodwin said.

More here.

Who Cares About The Constitution?

Do any of our political leaders really care about defending the Constitution?