Conservative Libertarian Outpost

The Democrats and their Doomed Ideology
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Posted on 2/12/2007
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Those of us who loathe Republicans, especially Republican presidents, have some hope against hope that the Democrats will nominate a candidate who can save us from the certain doom of eternal Republican rule. Sadly, it seems that Bill Clinton, as much as we hated him at the time, was the last of a kind: a fairly normal and plausibly electable Democrat. In retrospect, he seems like the model of the moderate social democrat.

Hey, he signed off on welfare reform, a capital gain tax cut, and decentralized speed limit control. Also, he at least had the acumen to pull out of wars gone wrong (are there any other kind?). He cut government payrolls and reduced the deficit dramatically. Would that Republican presidents would show such restraint!

(One reason that Democrats make better presidents: they actually believe in government, dummies that they are. And so they tend to want to make it work better and more efficiently on behalf of their voters, who are tightly connected to the public sector. The Republicans, in contrast, don’t believe in government and so they are happy to steal everything in sight, wreck the budget, detonate the bombs, etc.)

Now, one might argue that a bad Democrat is better than any Republican, and I’m open to that idea. For one thing, a Democratic president inspires Republicans to be better than they would otherwise be. They suddenly remember, for example, that government is the problem and not the solution, that government spends and taxes and regulates too much, and they even cultivate skepticism about foreign intervention.

But just look at the crew the Dems have assembled for this year! What a mess of hucksters, victim-group politicos, and anti-capitalistic wackos. Maybe they would be tamed in office, but they sure are a scary crew otherwise. It can be depressing, to be sure, but let us remember that the root of the problem is not the individuals in question but the ideology that underlies the raison d’être of the modern Democratic Party, at least at the national level.

That ideology is socialism. I know what you are thinking: these guys aren’t socialists, for it’s been years since any prominent Democrat openly advocated the nationalization of all industry. So triumphant have free markets been that they don’t even believe in this stuff anyway.

That’s true enough but it sidesteps the reality that there is no economic activity that these people don’t favor regulating to the nth degree. They talk of privacy and civil rights, but when it comes to commerce, they recognize no right of privacy and no individual rights. All property is up for grabs to control and meld in the name of national well-being.

That’s the practice, but what about the underlying theory? Here too, socialism of the old sort is gone. But the socialist theory of society still burns brightly. Their model is that in the state of nature, meaning in a state of freedom, all is conflict and cruelty. Pathology and ugliness are everywhere. The government is necessary to step in at every level of society to resolve these otherwise intractable conflicts and manage our way into the new epoch of human well-being.

The old conflict view of society posited a perpetual clash between workers and management. That idea survives to some truncated extent in the Democrats’ love of labor unions. But since unions constitute a tiny and dwindling sector within the labor market, and only thrive in the public sector, this idea takes a back seat to many other and crazier ideas.

You will recognize them. They believe that a deep and intractable rift separates the sexes such that one is always dominating the other, and so legislation and regulation is always needed to even the score and make up for past wrongs. The same is true of the races, and natives and immigrants, and the abled and disabled. None of these people can possibly work out their differences on their own. They need deep institutional change — even social revolution ushered in by elites — in order to bring about dramatic, Hegelian-style advances.

So it with man’s general relationship with the environment. They posit an abiding conflict between the two, such that if one ascends, the other must descend. That is why all moves toward human prosperity are ultimately regretted as an attack on precious natural resources that should be left undisturbed. This is a Marxist idea: life under freedom is a prize fight in which everyone is throwing punches. All appearances of contentment are illusory. The job of the state is to decide winners and losers, while our job is to obey the authority and come to a consciousness that the expropriators must be expropriated.

Only this conflict model explains why these people can’t imagine, for example, that business and consumers can have a cooperative relationship rather than an antagonistic one. So it is in every area of life. Even the most long-lasting institutions, such as the family, are seen as fundamentally pathological and exploitative. The same is true in international relations: they don’t like Republican wars that much, but offer no model of internationalism that can replace the view that it is always and everywhere war by someone against someone, and so the only way to stop war is to wage one.

Such is the view of today’s Left. They have never come to terms with the great insight of the old liberal revolution, which is that society is self managing over the long term. People can work out their problems. Human relationships are characterized most often as cooperative rather than antagonistic. People, not bureaucrats, know what is best for their own; and pursuing their self interest is compatible with, and even enhances, social well-being.

Society isn’t broken.
Such propositions are entirely rejected by most of the Democratic hopefuls. It’s true too that Republicans have their own objections to the old liberal view, but we’ll save these for another day. For now, suffice to say that party elites among the Democrats regard regular Americans as the problem and not the solution, so it is no surprise that they continue to have problems finding candidates for whom people are willing to vote. Think of it: They suppose all these awful things about the structure of the society in which we live and act, and then they ask us–the incompetent, pathological, unenlightened masses–to vote for them.

The heck of it is that the policies they promote end up bringing about conflict where none existed, and thus makes society reflect the very reality that they posit as their underlying theory. Their cure is the very disease that they sought to eradicate.

Let us remember that the core problem, in the end, is ideological and not personal. Uproot the underlying anti-liberal assumptions of the Democrats, make them Jeffersonian once again, and you would have a viable party. Until then, they will be hopelessly stuck in the mire at the national level, as depressing as that is to admit.

——————————————————————————–

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty. Send him mail. Comment on the blog.

Democrats equal anti-freedom in my book. From elitist attitude to taking your guns with the express goal of controlling you, I have little use for them in their present incarnation.
Patrick Sperry

18 Goals For The Coming Years Under The Socialist Democrats

(1) Placate the terrorist regime in Iran while retreating from Iraq

(18) Create staggering new anti-business environmental regulations based on demands from radical environmental groups

http://www.850KOA.com

Posner’s Catastrophes, and Ours
By J.H. Huebert
Posted on 2/5/2007
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[This review of Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) originally appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2006.]

Richard Posner is widely described as a libertarian,[1] but as many of this journal’s readers likely know, this is not true.[2] And the latest of his many books, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, may be his most statist work yet, for it wants nothing more than to scare you into accepting bigger, ever-more-powerful government. It is part of a stream of recent work from University of Chicago court intellectuals advocating bigger government and explicitly attacking those who warn against trading liberty for security.[3]

The book looks at several interesting-but-unlikely catastrophic scenarios in which millions of humans could be killed. And its proposal for avoiding each one is more power for the state. All the while, however, Posner overlooks the critical fact that the state poses the greatest danger of all to human life — and is responsible for many of the catastrophic risks he analyzes.

Catastrophe!

In his first chapter, Judge Posner describes a number of scenarios under which a catastrophe could kill many, most, or all of us. This is the best part of the book, because some of these disasters are so outrageously unlikely and unfathomable, and Posner so clearly enjoys describing them in graphic detail. Indeed, not since The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has an author appeared to have so much fun wiping out humanity. Four catastrophes in particular get extensive attention: asteroid collisions, scientific accidents, global warming, and bioterrorism.

The first disaster discussed is an asteroid collision, described as follows:

You wouldn’t see the asteroid, even though it was several miles in diameter, because it would be hurtling toward you at 15 to 25 miles a second…. When the asteroid struck, it would penetrate deep into the ground and explode, creating an enormous crater and ejecting burning rocks and dense clouds of soot into the atmosphere that would raise surface temperatures by as much as 100 degrees Fahrenheit and shut down photosynthesis for years…. A quarter of the earth’s human population might be dead within 24 hours of the strike, and the rest soon after. (Posner 2004a, 3)

Judge Posner then provides a helpful chart showing different asteroid sizes, how often an asteroid of each size hits the Earth, and how much damage each size would cause. It turns out that an asteroid such as the one described in the quote above only comes along every 10 million years or so, but there are plenty of lesser asteroids that could make life unpleasant for you or someone you know much sooner.

Of course, almost everyone already knows about the danger posed by asteroid collisions from movies about them. Almost no one, however, has ever heard of the next group of disasters Posner describes — those caused by “scientific accidents.” Judge Posner is especially interested in the risk posed by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. He reports that this particle accelerator could “produce a shower of quarks” that would reassemble themselves into something called a “strangelet,” which could in turn “transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across.” This scenario is, scientists assure us, “exceedingly unlikely,” but everyone agrees that its probability of occurring is, though perhaps infinitesimal, nonetheless greater than zero. And some scientists even believe particle accelerators could precipitate a “phase transition” that could destroy “all the atoms in the entire universe.” A newer model, RHIC II, will be up and running soon, and may pose an even greater risk.

Global warming receives a lengthy treatment, because Posner believes it is occurring and relatively likely to lead to catastrophe. In this discussion, shortly before prescribing unprecedented worldwide government intervention, he writes, “I am not a scientist and have no authority to make judgments on disputed scientific questions.” But on he goes.

“Not since The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has an author appeared to have so much fun wiping out humanity.”
Bioterrorism is another of his primary concerns, and he runs through the usual doomsday scenarios everyone heard about in the days following September 11, 2001, but which, of course, have yet to materialize.

While those four topics receive the most attention, especially in the public-policy discussion, I also should note that Judge Posner believes we should be seriously concerned about “omnivorous nanomachines” that would consume every living thing on Earth, covering its surface with “gray goo.” He also is disturbed by the prospect of “superintelligent robots,” that might “kill us, put us in zoos, or enslave us, using mind-control technologies to extinguish any possibility of revolt, as in the movie The Matrix.”[4]

The Greatest Catastrophe — The State.

For each of the four main catastrophes described above, Judge Posner offers a statist solution. To defend against asteroids, we must give NASA more taxpayer money. To avoid scientific accidents — or rather, to determine whether it is worth exposing the world to the risk of such an accident — we must have a federal agency perform a cost-benefit analysis of each project. To avert a global-warming disaster, we must establish an “international EPA,” impose a heavy tax on emissions, and subsidize cleaner technology. To fight bioterrorism — and terrorism generally — we must trade liberty for security.

Posner arrives at these solutions through the usual Chicago/neoclassical “cost-benefit analysis,” which of course involves attaching dollar values to things whose value certainly cannot be so quantified. For example — in perhaps the greatest unintentional reductio ad absurdum of Chicago law-and-economics analysis to date — he estimates “the cost of extinction of the human race” at $600 trillion.

More importantly, Posner ignores that the state created many of these problems in the first place. The answer is not more statism, with all of the infringements upon liberty and potential for further abuse of power that it entails. The answer is repealing state intervention to eliminate or reduce the risk.

Consider RHIC, the particle accelerator that could reduce the Earth to a tiny ball. It is owned by the United States Department of Energy. And Posner admits that private parties would have little incentive to build such a thing, because such “basic research” seeking to uncover the mysteries of the universe has no readily apparent commercial value or practical application.[5] No government money, no risk that the Earth suddenly turns into a tiny ball — it’s that simple.

Posner, however, dismisses privatization as “politically unrealistic.” That seems questionable — are scientists really such a powerful interest group? Certainly, eliminating federal funding will remain politically unrealistic as long as everyone continues to say it is. And surely RHIC’s abolition would become more realistic if the foremost judge of the United States Court of Appeals were to call for it forcefully. But he does not do that. Instead, he uses his clout to recommend establishing a team of bureaucrats to perform cost-benefit analysis. Never mind, of course, the impossibility of such analysis outside the market, and never mind that the analysis will surely be corrupted by politics.

What about terrorism? Posner admits we have no idea how likely a catastrophic terrorist attack is, but given that it is possible, he is ready to seriously curtail civil liberties. “The set of rights we call ‘civil liberties’ is,” he writes, “the point of balance between security and liberty, with neither entitled to priority” (Posner 2004a, 228). He suggests that comprehensive, 1984-style surveillance is something we just might have to “learn to live with.” He points out that the law already suppresses a lot of speech — so what, he asks, is so bad about suppressing some more?

He also suggests “extreme police measures” should not be off the table. What might those include? There’s torture, of course, but also “collective punishment” — for example, punishing terrorists’ families. Though we may find the idea of collective punishment initially shocking, Posner says it really should not bother us, because, after all, “[t]he economic sanctions that we imposed on Iraq … were a form of collective punishment and caused many innocent people to die, as did our bombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II” (Posner 2004a, 235).

“This thinking leads in only one direction: the total state, to protect us from ever-more-dangerous hypothetical evildoers and technologies.”
This thinking leads in only one direction: the total state, to protect us from ever-more-dangerous hypothetical evildoers and technologies. And Posner ignores entirely the fact that few, if any terrorists, would be anxious to unleash a plague upon the United States but for its foreign intervention. Instead, he envisions “mad scientists” of science fiction,[6] and fanatics who wish destruction for its own sake — the same “madmen” Bush and other power-mongering presidents have long wanted us to fear.

What about global warming? Whether it is occurring at all, and whether it poses a serious disaster threat, are seriously disputed questions. In any event, much of the pollution blamed for it is the state’s fault. Government, after all, stands in the way of clean nuclear power.[7] Posner recognizes that nuclear power would help, but again cites political infeasibility as an insurmountable obstacle. True, superstitious ignorance makes nuclear power politically problematic. But are voters — and politically powerful automobile, energy, and oil producers — likely to respond any more favorably to Posner’s recommended taxes? Given two politically difficult options, why endorse the one that gives the state more power — power that would be difficult to ever take back?

Automobile emissions pose a more complex problem for libertarians.[8] Still, before we attack the automobile and disrupt the entire economy, would it not be wise to just wait until more scientific evidence comes in on global warming?[9] Given the evil and destruction the state has wrought in the past century, shouldn’t those who urge major intervention from a highly centralized government at least bear a heavy burden of proof? Apparently not in Judge Posner’s court.

As for asteroid collisions, this job is simply too important to entrust to government as Posner recommends. Government cannot protect us from ordinary criminals or terrorist attacks, nor can it even timely warn tsunami victims. So why should we assume it capable of deflecting asteroids if only we give it enough money? And government meddling would forestall potentially effective private solutions, as government grants would direct research toward the type of collision-prevention techniques that the state thinks best. Scientists would stop focusing on how best to prevent asteroid collisions, and start focusing on how to carry out the government’s specific ideas about collision prevention. When the asteroid came, if the government solution wasn’t ready or didn’t work — which seems likely, given NASA’s record of failure — humanity would be out of luck. And if the asteroid never came, then the United States government would just have that many more weapons of mass destruction on hand to use for something else.

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True, it may be hard to think about how private resources would come together to prevent an asteroid collision. But given humans’ shared desire to avoid obliteration by an asteroid, is it so hard to imagine that they would, one way or another, especially once concerned scientists begin making the public and private foundations aware of the problem? Isn’t it much more difficult to imagine government undertaking the project without making a bad situation worse, as usual? Apparently, Richard Posner’s imagination does not work that way.

Some Interesting Questions

Despite its deplorable advocacy for ever-increasing federal and world government, the book does pose some interesting questions for libertarians. What if, say, Bill Gates wanted to privately build and operate a particle accelerator like RHIC? Should no one ever be allowed to subject the Earth to, say, a 1 in 100 billion chance of obliteration, regardless of the potential benefits?[10] And what if scientists convincingly argued that a global warming catastrophe is, in fact, imminent unless we all stop driving cars?

Those are fun points to ponder, but we are not faced with those sci-fi scenarios. In the real world, we are faced instead with an ever-more-intrusive federal government, armed with countless weapons of mass destruction. And Judge Posner, rather than recognize this and the threat it poses to life and liberty, instead mongers fear and urges us to cede more power to government over highly speculative possibilities, all the while dismissing civil libertarians as “ignorant.”

Governments killed at least 170 million of their own people in the twentieth century, and countless more through war.[11] That was a catastrophe for humanity. It will be again if we follow the path Richard Posner has laid out for us.

——————————————————————————–

J.H. Huebert is an attorney and an adjunct faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Send him mail. Visit his website. Comment on the blog.

This review of Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) originally appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2006.

Bibliography

Beckmann, Petr. 1976. The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear. Boulder, Colo.: Golem Press.

Block, Walter. 1996. O.J.’s defense: A reductio ad absurdum of the economics of Ronald Coase and Richard Posner. European Journal of Law and Economics 3: 265–286.

Gordon, David. 2003. “Do future generations have rights?” Rev. of A poverty of reason: Sustainable development and economic growth, by Wilfred Beckerman. The Mises Review 9 (3).

Kurtz, Steven. 2001. Sex, economics, and other legal matters: An interview with Richard A. Posner. Reason, April.

Posner, Eric A. and John Yoo. 2003. Panic and the Patriot Act. The Wall Street Journal, December 9.

Posner, Richard A. 2004a. Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Posner, Richard A. 2004b. “The Changing of the Guard.”

Rothbard, Murray N. 1982. Law, property rights, and air pollution. Cato Journal 2: 55–99.

Rothbard, Murray N. 2003. War, peace, and the state. In The Myth of National Defense, ed. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, 65–80. Auburn, Ala: The Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Rummel, R. J. 1994. Death By Government. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

Vermeule, Adrian. 2005. “Libertarian Panics.” Rutgers Law Journal, Symposium Issue 2005.

Notes

[1] He has even called himself one (Kurtz 2001).

[2] See, e.g., Block 1996.

[3] See, e.g., Vermeule 2005, Posner and Yoo 2003. Vermeule and Yoo were or had recently been at the University of Chicago when this review was first written, but have since moved on to Harvard Law School and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively.

[4] The Matrix, incidentally, gets considerable attention here, and has become Judge Posner’s favorite movie, replacing Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag (Posner 2004b).

[5] Such research can lead to practical applications — it led to the invention of PET scans, for example. But that does not mean the research is economically justified, even from Posner’s approach.

[6] Posner references science fiction throughout the book — citations include Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Matrix, Oryx and Crake, Outbreak, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. He blames sci-fi for making people think catastrophes are “the stuff of science fiction,” yet it fuels his own imagination.

[7] On the environmental superiority of nuclear power, see, e.g., Beckmann 1976.

[8] Even Murray Rothbard could only suggest that private road owners could be held liable for auto emissions in a libertarian society (1982, 90–91). We, of course, do not live in a libertarian society. Whether the status quo, under which no one is liable for auto emissions, represents a second-best world is debatable.

[9] See Gordon 2003.

[10] Probably not — there would be no way to confine the harm from a such a disaster to consenting individuals. And consider Rothbard’s (2003) arguments against the very existence of nuclear weapons.

[11] See Rummel 1994.

Military strategy « Conservative Libertarian Outpost

What You Won’t Find in the Clinton Museum and Library

This is a LONG piece, and it does start off with a slight bit of Bush bashing, but it rapidly stops as the author goes into great detail regarding the business dealings of the Clinton’s… Please, if you’re going to look at it, read it ALL, it is very enlightening, and I honestly think Hillary believes these matters are long forgotten… Well, they’re NOT…

What You Won’t Find in the Clinton Museum and Library
by: Sam Smith

BILL CLINTON AND GEORGE BUSH are the two most corrupt individuals to have occupied the White House in modern times. While Bush has clearly proved more venal and deadly and far more destructive of the American republic, it is a fair reading of history to say that Clinton was the warm up band for George Bush, towit:CLINTON, WITH NO LITTLE HELP from the Democratic Leadership Council, discredited and destroyed long standing principles of social democracy that had guided the party since the New Deal. Instead he offered the public GOP Lite. As Harry Truman pointed out, given a choice between a real Republican and someone who talks like one, the public will favor the real one.

CLINTON NEUTERED PROGRESSIVE organizations ranging from Americans for Democratic Action to women’s and black groups. Early in his administration they swore a loyalty that not only blinded them to his faults and corruption but left their brains devoid of ideas and arguments with which to take on the conservatives.

CLINTON DRASTICALLY LOWERED the standards of national politics with the help of a Washington establishment that rushed to his assistance as each scandal developed. The result was the Arkanization of the capital under which the only standard became whether you could get away with it. This opened the door wider for the even more venal neo-cons and their candidate, George Bush.

CLINTON WAS NOWHERE NEAR as good a politician as the Washington media and political establishment has claimed and the myth has proved to be a destructive fantasy for the party. Bill Clinton got 43.9% of the vote in 1992, while Michael Dukakis – purportedly the worst of all candidate – got 45%. True Clinton was up against Ross Perot who got 19% as well as Bush, but Clinton might well have lost were it not for Perot, in which case he would have joined Michael Dukakis in the hall of shame. Clinton won a majority in only two state-like entities: Arkansas and DC. In only 12 other states was he able to get ever 45%. Dukakis, meanwhile, got over 50% in 11 states and got over 45% in 12 others.

THE DAMAGE DONE TO THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY by Bill Clinton was the worst experienced under any incumbent president since Grover Cleveland. Here are some of the stats:

– GOP seats gained in House after Clinton became president: 48– GOP seats gained in Senate after Clinton became president: 8

– GOP governorships gained after Clinton became president: 11

– GOP state legislative seats gained since Clinton became president: 1,254 as of 1998
– State legislatures taken over by GOP after Clinton became president: 9

– Democrat officeholders who became Republicans since Clinton became president: 439 as of 1998

– Republican officeholders who became Democrats: 3

CLINTON’S SCANDALS, going far beyond Monica Lewinski, were a major liability for Al Gore in 2000, far more so than Ralph Nader. According to the 2000 exits polls:

– 60% of voters disapproved of Clinton as a person– 59% – including some who approved of him – disliked him

– 68% said he would go down in the history books for his scandals rather than for his leadership

– 44% thought the Clinton scandals were important or somewhat important. In contrast, only 28% thought Bush’s drunk driving arrest was important or somewhat important.

– 15% of those who had voted for Clinton in 1996 voted for Bush in 2000.

Much More Here:
What You Won’t Find in the Clinton Museum and Library by Sam Smith

Can we STAND another Clinton administration

Stolen from http://texasfred.net/?p=936

Clinton will never get my vote simple as all that. Why?

• Clinton is a sexist.
• Clinton hates Our Military.
• Clinton hates the Constitution on many fronts, and it only takes one to lose my vote.

Military Science « Conservative Libertarian Outpost

Five minutes and six responses! Okay, I will start a thread!

“Conservatism, like pornography may be difficult to define, after all is said and done. But you will know it when you see it. It revolves around integrity as I see it. Honesty, honor, and addressing the issue of liberty based upon those ideals.
Neither RINO’s nor DINO’s meet the test. Just how many so-called Conservatives hold the same position on the War on Drugs as say William F. Buckley Jr. does? Or on immigration in step with Tom Tancredo? It’s a lot like gun rights, and the difference between the NRA and GOA.

Compromise may be acceptable in some circumstances, but never with Liberty or Freedom IMO. It is, and has been my opinion for quite some time that a new political party needs to be formed. The that new party needs to get to work, and shove the big government laws right back down the throats of those that passed oppression and foulness.

It will hurt the Republicans / Democrats? SO WHAT? ”

trackbacked from http://texasfred.net/?p=877

“Conservatism or political conservatism can refer to any of several historically related political philosophies or political ideologies. There are also a number of Conservative political parties in various countries. All of these are primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) identified with the political right.”

Source: http://www.politicsdefined.com/content/conservativism.htm

The above website has a very detailed discussion concerning conservatism. While I do not intend for my blog entry to be such a work of scholarly distinction I would like to address some salient points.

Todays Conservatism has much to do with tradition, and traditional thinking in these United States. The love of country, belief in individual liberty, defense of Freedom as defined within the “Founding Documents,” and the ability to worship, or not to worship God as seen fit by an individual. Those things are the frameworks of modern American “tradition.”

The “Founders” were heavily influenced by the writings of John S. Mills who is often referenced as the father of modern Libertarianism. (I am using the term Libertarianism here as regards philosophy, not in the manner of the existing political party.) The beliefs in personal integrity, responsibility, and accountability are fundamental within the modern concept called conservatism.

In that note, I submit that both the Republican and Democrat political party’s have failed to serve the American people in securing the inalienable rights that The United States was founded upon. I also submit that when our government commits acts as an oppressor, such as prosecuting sworn agents for doing their sworn duty that we, as citizens need to take a very hard look at those that lead us.

From http://www.tomdelay.com/home/2006/12/21/tampa-san-francisco-bay-hurricane-warning.html

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« Quote of the Week | Main | The Trashy Tale of Sandy ‘Burglar’ »

Tampa-San Francisco Bay Hurricane Warning

It seems that the Pelosi Democrats are nothing, if not, consistent when it comes to overplaying their hand and attempting to satisfy their ultra-liberal base. That is why it is worth warning my former Republican House colleagues and others who care about our electoral system that trouble may be afoot if the Democrats stay true to form.

You see, when the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives on January 4^th, the new leadership will be forced to confront their leftwing base on a touchy political issue even before they set out to raise taxes, crush small business, and weaken our international standing. It is not well known, but the final approval of officially being granted a seat in the House rests not with the voters, but within the body itself. The entire House must vote to ‘seat’ each individual member on its first day of business regardless of the electoral outcome. Normally, the seating of the members is a pro forma ritual, but disputes can and have arisen in our recent history.

The controversy that could erupt next month involves the representation of the 13^th District of Florida, the seat Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL) vacated to run unsuccessfully for the Senate. The voters, albeit by a small 369 vote margin, chose Republican businessman Vern Buchanan to replace her. However, in typical sore loser form, the Democrat nominee, wealthy former bank president Christine Jennings, is activating the left-wing base, including the DNC’s ultra-liberal Chairman Howard Dean, to pressure the incoming leadership and the state courts to call for a new election. Dean is going so far as to tell the likely next Speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), that she should deny seating Buchanan, despite the fact that Buchanan has been officially certified the winner by the state’s chief election officer, the same status as the other 434 members-elect, including herself.

Jennings , for her part, is filing an official election challenge with the House Administration Committee, and she and leftwing advocacy groups such as People for the American Way and the ACLU have already launched a lawsuit in Florida, asking Leon County (Tallahassee) Circuit Judge William Gary to negate the November 7^th results and order a new election. The suit was filed in Tallahasse, hundreds of miles from the 13^th district, in hopes of getting a more liberal judge and jury pool instead of Sarasota County where the election actually occurred and the voting machines in question are located. The crux of the complaint is Jennings’ contention that 18,832 people who went to the polls did not vote in the congressional race, a number that the defeated candidate claims is too high and out of balance. Without a paper trail from the electronic machines to prove otherwise, she believes that many cast ballots were simply not recorded. With such a small margin between the two candidates, any such malfunction could certainly have altered the outcome of the voting.

At 237,831 voters, the Sarasota and Bradenton-based seat was the second highest turnout district among the state’s 25 congressional seats, even without the 18,000+ under votes. Adding in the additional votes would actually make the 13^th’ s turnout abnormally high in relation to the rest of Florida (53.3% of registered voters versus 46.8% statewide). Furthermore, to get a better picture of the entire ‘under vote’ issue, one must look at the ballots cast statewide. To illustrate, 116,120 people who came to the polls did not vote in the Governor’s race, thus lending credence to the argument that all elections have voters who choose to skip particular contests. Though having over 18,000 voters not participate in the congressional race does seem high, it is not out of the question that the large number simply did not want to vote in the contest because both the September Republican primary and the Buchanan-Jennings contests were hard fought, very close, and highly contentious. Many Republicans, for example, with a negative impression of Buchanan, could simply have chosen not to vote rather than cast a ballot for him or the Democrat.

If Pelosi and the Democrats refuse to abide by the election results, however, their behavior would not be without precedent. I remember when I first came to Congress in January of 1985; the Democrats pulled a similar stunt, refusing to seat Republican Richard McIntyre, who had been certified by the Indiana Secretary of State as the winner after a closely contested election in Indiana’s 8^th District. Instead, the House Democrats concocted an elaborate scheme to seat his Democrat opponent by appointing a special ‘House task force’ to conduct an election recount.  No one was shocked when the recommendation came back that the Democrat should be seated.

One of the things I learned during my political career was how to count votes. In this election, Vern Buchanan got more votes than his opponent did and he and his 434 colleagues have duly authorized Certificates of Election to prove it. If the Pelosi Democrats refuse to seat Vern Buchanan it will reveal a heavy-handed, partisanship far worse than any of the imagined transgressions by the Republican Majority that I had the honor to lead. This vote just might show us the true nature of the greedy, power-hungry, unrelenting adversaries we face.

It would seem that lessons have been learned from the Chicago political machine. Forget about your rights people, because you flushed them down the commode when you voted Democrat.

Cross posted from  http://texasfred.net/?p=836

This is my first attempt at a trachback, so please bear with me.Patrick Sperry Says:
December 27th, 2006 at 2:04 am “Denver Base to Haley Paramedic seven.” The radio crackled;
“Haley Base to Denver General. Paramedic Seven is occupied can we assist you with another unit?”
“Negative Haley base, have them code up as soon as possible.”
“Copy that.” Larry the lizard replied with a snide tone in his voice.

Mike Rice, my EMT looked at me and said “I wonder what that’s all about?” I just shook my head, knowing that we would get stuck with all manner of lousy calls now that dispatch was irritated. We dropped off our patient, a little old lady in no acute distress, gave report to the nurse and headed out to the ambulance. Just for grins, I phoned D.G. dispatch by land-line, after all keeping my dispatcher out of the loop was fun. Not to mention it is every E.M.T.’s God given right to hate dispatchers.

What I heard was startling to say the least. He asked who my partner on the ambulance was that day, and I told him, adding that he was a recently dry docked Navy SEAL. It took all of about fifteen seconds for a response, I heard another voice in the background say “go!” I took the information and told Mike that we were about to go on an adventure. He kind of grinned, and said “Let’s do it Bro!”

Larry was waiting intently so he could send us on another taxi run, when I coded up on the radio….

Haley Base, Paramedic Seven is seven and ten D.G. O.L.F.A. to Vail Valley Medical Center. “Copy that Paramedic Seven, patient name, condition, and insurance information. ” I responded that he would need to contact Denver Dispatch for the information.” ( Later I was told that he called them and they told him that he did not have a need to know! LMAO!)

I had a special type of security clearance that allowed me to provide emergency care to diplomats and such. Even so, I didn’t actually know just who I was going into the mountains to bring back to Denver for treatment.

We pulled into V.V.M.C. and I knew that whoever it was, they were high risk. Secret Service people guided us to our parking spot. Yes, they are easily identified.

We got the pram out and went into the E.R. Again, we were guided by the not so secret Secret Service to a room. Walking in I saw a former President of the United States. It appeared that Gerald Ford had what is called a syncope incident while playing golf in Vail.

He was cheerful, and did not think that he needed all this attention at all. But, protocol is protocol. The transport was uneventful, and we spent most of the time in small talk. Pointing out this or that landmark, an Elk, and a Bighorn near Georgetown. I knew that we had a before and aft escort, but that is the only time that I ever had a Gunship overhead escorting the ambulance.

Gerald Ford was a nice man in that short time that I was around him. Full of interesting things that he shared. I may not have always agreed with his politics. But I must say that he was indeed one of the most special patients that I ever had in my care.

Rest in peace Sir.