By Matt Hawes
Recently, Tim Carney was interviewed by ReasonTV about his new book Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses.
We’re excited to have Tim joining us for a book signing and speech at CPAC 2010. Click here for more information.
By Phil Giraldi
I was shocked by yesterday’s House Intelligence Committee comments by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and am astonished that his statement is not the featured front page item in every news medium today. Blair said that US citizens abroad might be killed by CIA or the Defense Department if they are “taking action that threatens Americans.” He added that in so doing the government would “follow a set of defined policy and legal procedures that are very carefully observed” and described the policy as designed to “protect most of the country.”
Well, I guess it’s just tough luck if you’re not one of the “most” while a “defined policy” being overseen by a Washington bureaucrat whose mission is to kill terrorists might reassure some. One recalls, however, that Washington officials approved waterboarding, secret prisons, and extraordinary rendition. I must admit to having a problem with extrajudicial killing unless someone is absolutely caught in flagrante in a murderous act because, as a former intelligence officer, I know full well how bad intelligence can be. Would we be killing someone without any due process just because someone else bearing a grudge manages to plant some false info, as has occurred all too often in Afghanistan? If it is true that something like 19 civilians die in drone strikes for every bad guy we manage to get, there is something seriously wrong with the intelligence and about the system in general.
And who makes the judgment of what constitutes something that “threatens Americans”? Blair went on to explain that being targeted might be based on being “involved in a group that is trying to attack us.” Involved? What does that mean? That would seem to be a First Amendment issue to me. If I send $5 to an apparent charity that turns out to be a part of Hezbollah can I expect a black helicopter overhead in minutes? The Blair comment is particularly scary in that it is a complete denial of the rights guaranteed to US citizens, including the right to a fair trial. It is also an admission that the White House sees such targeted killings as perfectly acceptable. I would add that no one on the Intelligence Committee protested much either. When a government is selectively targeting and killing its own citizens isn’t it a sign that something is very, very wrong? -Phil Giraldi, American Conservative Defense Alliance
By Gary Howard
From the Washington Post and other outlets, we learn some news on a peculiar partnership.
The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.
Not one word of that sentence makes me feel at ease.
Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack.
Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.
If you’ve been pondering whether to seriously reduce your web presence, this looks like your opportunity to distance yourself from all Google-related internet products (if that’s possible).
With the Patriot Act coming up for reauthorization, people should make it clear that we do not care to have further government intrusions into out private cyber lives. And Google should remember what their slogan is: Don’t Be Evil.
By Matt Hawes
Rally for the Republic speaker and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson will be joining C4L at CPAC 2010 for a Friday night (Feb. 19) event titled “Our American Dream.” Governor Johnson has been making quite a few appearances on the east coast recently, and we’re excited to have him at CPAC, where he’ll talk about his principles of good government and his experience with putting principle before power.
Also joining us on Friday night will be Tim Carney, reporter and author of Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses. Carney’s book exposes the corporatism championed by both parties, and it features a foreword by Congressman Paul. Tim will also stop by our booth at 3 pm on Friday for an Obamanomics book signing.
In addition to these two great speakers for the Friday night event, Sirius radio host and the man behind The Spirit of ’76, Mike Church, will be joining us as the emcee! Listen to Ron Paul’s recent interview on The Mike Church Show here.
A private briefing with Governor Johnson will start at 6:15 on that Friday.
Here’s our promotional information for the event:
Gary Johnson served as the Governor of New Mexico from January 1995 to December 2002, serving two terms in a state dominated two to one by Democrats.
Under Governor Johnson’s administration, New Mexico experienced the longest period without a tax increase in the state’s history. The rate of growth in the state government was cut in half.
Half of the state’s prisons were privatized. State Medicaid was shifted to managed care, and the state was left with approximately one thousand fewer employees (with no firings) and a budget surplus. He also vetoed more than 750 bills.
Gary Johnson’s speech will take place in the Thurgood Marshall Ballroom South/West on Friday, February 19 at 8:30 p.m.. A question and answer time will follow Gov. Johnson’s presentation.
Discounted tickets and lodging are still available, but they are going fast. Don’t miss out on what are sure to be incredible events with Congressman Paul, Judge Napolitano, Tom Woods, Thomas DiLorenzo, Gary Johnson, Tim Carney, Mike Church, Bruce Fein, Phil Giraldi, and more! Get more information on our CPAC activities here and purchase discounted tickets here.
By Matt Hawes
More and more Americans are realizing that “hope and change” really means “status and quo.”
Via Rasmussen:
Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes….
Just 11% of all voters now think the government spends taxpayers’ money wisely and well. Seventy-eight percent (78%) do not believe that to be true….
Last February, President Obama pledged a tough, unprecedented oversight effort” to make sure the public’s money was not wasted in any of the administration’s multi-billion dollar reform and economic plans. At that time, 46% of Americans were at least somewhat confident that their money would be wisely and carefully spent, while 50% lacked that confidence….
By Matt Hawes
1.) On a national level, contact Congress today and urge your representative to vote against H.J. Res 45, which contains a $1.9 trillion raise of the federal debt limit!
Update: The House voted 217-212 to adopt the rule (but the way this was written, it was really a vote to increase the debt limit), and it voted 233-187 on the final legislation including PAYGO provisions.
2.) If you live in Virginia, please contact the House Militia, Police, and Public Safety Subcommittee #1 here and ask them to support the Virginia Firearms Freedom Act when it comes before their subcommittee today at 5 pm. For more information on the legislation, click here.
By Matt Hawes
An article in Politico today reminds us that the health care fight is far from over, as politicians are still wrangling for special deals. The piece highlights how legislators only view deals as “politics as usual” when it’s some other representative cutting out his share.
“It is very clear from the process that took place in the final days of the bill that Americans are disturbed about the process,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). “I believe it would be important for us to take out the egregious items.”
Does that mean he might forfeit the money for Massachusetts?
Not at all. Kerry argued the funding was completely legitimate because Massachusetts has already used significant state resources to extend benefits beyond what the current federal Medicaid rules require….
By Matt Hawes
As President Obama continues to try to sell the country on the necessity of government intervention, this Mises Institute video from April 2009 looks at what happened when a president made the rare choice to restrain government action in an economic crisis.
By Anthony Gregory
From the administration that told us the “war on drugs” was an anachronistic construct, we now see that war being escalated, with all the emphasis on enforcement we get from the law-and-order rightwing. Of course, this should be no surprise. Obama is a progressive Democrat, and just as Wilson gave us the Harrison Narcotics Act, FDR banned marijuana, LBJ extended drug prohibition to ever more substances and Clinton began the federal raids on medicial cannibas clinics despite the Tenth Amendment, Mr. Hope and Change is following in his predecessors’ footsteps.
By John Tate
We are barely over a month into the New Year, and our elected officials already need an injection of more money to continue their out of control spending addiction.
Contact Congress and urge your representative to vote against H.J. Res. 45, which would increase our debt limit by $1.9 trillion.
We need to act immediately, as a vote on H.J. Res 45 is expected tomorrow.
House leaders are attempting to persuade members to vote for the bill by sticking in a so-called “PAYGO” provision. PAYGO is designed to make it easier for them to raise taxes faster while making it more difficult to cut spending on welfare and warfare.
Make sure Congress hears from you immediately! Tell your representative to support real change and to stand up for true fiscal responsibility by refusing to increase the debt limit any further and rejecting H.J. Res. 45.
By Matt Holdridge
This via Young Americans for Liberty
To continue to help raise awareness and to bring Tom Woods to Indiana University, a press release has gone out on behalf of IU’s YAL chapter.
Below is the text of the release; please share it with any bloggers or members of the media who might bring attention to this situation.
PRESS RELEASE: INDIANA UNIVERSITY REFUSES EQUAL FUNDING FOR FREE MARKET SPEAKER
ARLINGTON, VA — The Economics Department and Indiana Memorial Union Board Lectures Committee of Indiana University-Bloomington refused to host Mises Institute senior scholar and economist Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. on campus, citing the blatantly false excuse that Woods, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia and a New York Times bestselling author, lacked “sufficient academic credibility.”
The Young Americans for Liberty chapter whose request to host Woods was denied is fighting back against this gross academic bias and power play with the assistance of CampusReform.org, a website for conservative and libertarian student activists, and the national Young Americans for Liberty organization.
Sam Spaiser, president of the IU Young Americans for Liberty group, has taken swift action to bring Woods to IU with or without the school’s assistance. “It is clear that the Lectures Board rejected Woods based on philosophical differences, not his lack of credibility,” he said. “This is a ridiculous decision based on false pretenses and amounts to nothing more than ideological injustice.”
Woods agreed in a statement given to CampusReform.org. “If my academic credentials are in question, anyone can judge for themselves at TomWoods.com. But from their point of view I’m surely uncredentialed: unlike other speakers they might consider, I haven’t wrecked any economies.”
IU previously spent $35,000 to bring to campus John Edwards, a disgraced liberal politician best known for long denying an extramarital affair and illegitimate daughter, but refused Woods a speaking opportunity despite his more reasonable speaker’s fee of $4,000.
The story was first reported by The Indiana Standard, an independent conservative student newspaper, and published online at CampusReform.org.
The IU Memorial Union Board Lectures Committee chairwoman declined to comment, and said she did not know the committee’s budget or its full list of past speakers.
Young Americans for Liberty seeks to recruit, train, educate, and mobilize students on the ideals of liberty and the Constitution. Visit www.yaliberty.org for more information. Email Sam Spaiser at [email protected] to donate to bring Woods to IU.
###
If you would like to see Tom Woods live yourself, he will be speaking at C4L’s CPAC event on February 18 in Washington, DC.
We hope that you can make it to CPAC and help spread the word of IU YAL’s battle to bring free-market thinking to their classmates.
By Jesse Benton
A must read here. The author does not come at this problem exactly from our point of view (he’s probably a monetarist), but has some astounding information.
Geithner’s last job, as the President of the New York Fed highlights that question. The NY Fed’s most important jobs, arguably, are safety and soundness supervision and capital market supervision. Success in carrying out those responsibilities should be the basic litmus test for the measuring how well the NY Fed is serving the public trust. In these roles it is supposed to examine, regulate and oversee the Federal Reserve regulated bank holding companies in the NY Fed’s region, the largest bank holding companies in the country, many of which were AIG’s counterparties.
I expect documents to come to light that will show that Geithner and Summers did the WTO negotiations on behalf of the industry and viewed the completion as a ‘deliverable’ to their financial constituents. How can Obama say, while Summers and Geithner are his team, “if the banks want a fight, I am ready to fight them”?
Read the rest here.
By Matt Hawes
On the heels of VA C4L’s great legislative victory for health freedom in the Virginia Senate on Monday, we have a chance to win another crucial victory with HB 69.
HB 69, the Virginia Firearms Freedoms Act (which, like legislation in Montana and other states, says that federal regulations or other laws do not apply to firearms, firearm accessories, or ammunition manufactured commercially or privately in Virginia and remaining within the borders of Virginia), will be heard by the House Militia, Police, and Public Safety Subcommittee #1 on Thursday, February 4 at 5 pm.
Please click here to urge subcommittee members to support HB 69.
VA Co-State Coordinator Donna Holt has been paying for a lot of the fight on her own dime, so if you live in Virginia and are able (or are out of state and sympathetic to this cause), click here to contribute to VA C4L. Your contribution of any amount will go a long way toward making fliers and mailings in support of HB 69 and helping to continue organized efforts to win its passage.
By Matt Hawes
Last week, National Journal caught up to Dr. Paul for a brief interview.
NJ: What stirred the activists’ fervor now?
Paul: I think it’s the failure of government. People are recognizing that government…. made promises, and yet now people are recognizing that they can’t fulfill their promises. They know about the debt, they know about the entitlements that can’t be paid. They know about the problems that we have around the world, they know about the corruption dealing with Goldman Sachs and others….
By Matt Hawes
Via The New York Times:
By President Obama‘s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 – years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms – they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water….
As Dr. Paul said in his “State of the Republic” speech, “We have lived, as a nation, far beyond our means and the message is, for the foreseeable future, that we will be forced to live beneath our means as this debt is paid.”
There is still time to prevent this kind of future from coming to pass, but it will require our elected officials to once and for all abandon their seemingly insatiable desire to run our lives – and real change like that has never been popular in the halls of Congress.
By sjaye
Much discussion regarding Barak Obama’s estimated $3.8 Trillion 2011 budget is focused on which agencies are going to see budget increases, and which agencies will be cut. For example, this budget scraps NASA’s amitions to return to the moon, reduces (albeit slightly) EPA funding, but increases funding for education as a part of a No Child Left Behind revamp [Source]. However, missing from much of the mianstream media and political pundit discussion of this budget is just how large the budget is!
In 2011, deficits are expected to soar to near $1.6 Trillion. This estimate even includes optimistic estimates of economic growth, including a 40% decrease in expenditures for the Labor department, based on this assumption from the above link .. “The Labor Department would see a major drop in spending for its unemployment insurance programs. That’s because the administration forecasts an economic rebound and expects fewer people to claim unemployment benefits.”
As atrocious as the 40% increase in spending for the Treasury department is (which amounts to about $190 billion), what all Americans should stop and think about is the full number in the budget – $3.8 Trillion. If you divide this number by the current US population estimate, 308.6 Million, you get $12,313. RIght now, President Obama is proposing that our Federal Government spend $12,313 per person. My question to you, everyday Americans is; Do you feel like you need over $12,000 worth of Government services? While politicians will talk about nibbling around the edges of this mamoth budget (witness Obama’s joke of a spending freeze that only applies to 20% of the budget), I would very much like to hear someone justify why $12,000, or even $8-10 thousand worth of Government is necessary in our lives!
By Jesse Benton
Update: Reuters has pulled the story referenced below. We’ll keep an eye out for any further updates.
A central plank to Obama’s camapign was a pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. Here’s a video on how that is going. (Thanks to my friend Adam Radman at ATR)
Now, Reuters and Drudge are reporting on the back-door, sneaky way the Administration is planning to cut the deficit – not by cutting spending, or trimming back our overseas empire. No, it’s to squeeze more money out of your pocket.
In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year — effectively a tax hike by stealth.
Read the rest here.
By Gary Howard
This is an interesting piece in Time Magazine online on the Vermont secession movement:
The Secessionist Campaign for the Republic of Vermont
The President on Wednesday may have reassured Americans that the state of the Union is “strong,” but, just the week before, a group of Vermont secessionists declared their intention to seek political power in a quest to get their state to quit the Union altogether. On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. “For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign,” said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.
A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as “left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding philosophy.” The group not only advocates the peaceful secession of Vermont but has minted its own silver “token” – valued at $25 – and, as part of a publishing venture with another secessionist group, runs a monthly newspaper called Vermont Commons, with a circulation of 10,000. According to a 2007 poll, they have support from at least 13% of state voters. The campaign slogan, Naylor told me, is “Imagine Free Vermont.” In his fondest imaginings, Naylor said, Vermonters would not be “forced to participate in killing women and children in the Middle East.” Read more…
These days folks seem to be talking about secession for all the right reasons. Let’s hope the principles behind this movement catch on, and it grows into something serious and worthwhile.
By Matt Hawes
As President Obama calls for further government intervention and control, another speech on the state of our country reminds us that the crisis will only get worse if we do not abandon the establishment’s failed way of thinking and pursue liberty.
Click here for the full speech.