The power of III

Summum ius summa iniuria--More law, less justice
--Cicero.

15 April 2011

More nullification? Ab-so-freakin-lutely.

Toys in the Attic Strikes Again

by Michael Boldin


Rachel Maddow doesn’t like me. I get that.


Without trying, though, I guess I’ve been getting under her skin. She obviously doesn’t like the fact that the Tenth Amendment Center’s efforts to promote nullification have been gaining some serious traction around the country. Just this week, Rach did a full 14 minute segment on the subject. And her presentation, as you might guess, wasn’t a cheer leading session either.


The segment, titled “Confederates in the Attic” was about how efforts today, primarily championed by the Tenth Amendment Center, to decentralize power and reject unconstitutional federal “laws,” are somehow directly-related to slave owners in the pre-civil war south.


No. That’s not a joke.


She says “a conservative group called the Tenth Amendment Center has been pushing a lot of the anti-health reform stuff…in the context of nullification. And they’re pushing for other kinds of nullification too.”


Ok, other than the absurdity of using the term “conservative” to define an anti-drug war, antiwar, anti-patriot act organization started in 2006 in opposition to GW Bush, she’s right on the money here.

The Center has been pushing anti-health reform stuff? Yup. We drafted the model bill, the Federal Health Care Nullification Act. Versions of our legislation – to either fully nullify or refuse compliance with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), have been introduced in 11 states so far, and it’s making headway in a few too.


We’re pushing for other kinds of nullification too? Ab-so-freakin-lutely.

----------------------

More from the Tenth Amendment Center director.

Perfect explanation of why to own gold

Gary North, on Lew Rockwell:

I have stressed holding coins, especially tenth-ounce American gold eagles.


I am writing this for those readers who did what I recommended, have quadrupled their money (on paper and in digits), but who may be getting cold feet.


There are good reasons for buying gold. But you should have an exit strategy in mind. You need to consider this.


We are told by the mainstream financial media, which never told investors to buy gold over the last decade, that gold is in the final phase of a bubble market. But how can any market be a bubble market when the mainstream financial media are not running report after report on the bubble, telling readers and viewers about how much money people are making.



What mainstream financial outlet warned investors loud and clear, issue after issue, in 1999 that the dot.com market was a bubble? I told my subscribers in February and March of 2000 that it was, and that they should get out. But I published a newsletter. I was not mainstream.

Read more here. 


----------------------------


Gary North is a great writer, very accessible, clear explanations on many economic topics.  Read his archives at Lew Rockwell.  This is an awesome review of how intelligent people, with an understanding of the principles of the Austrian school of economics, can read the economy well enough to predict and avoid disasters.

Hey, no comments on silver -- you know I know already, and have bought...:-)



Quote of the Day 4/15

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Silver: Messing with your mind...


Ok, I know there are some old fogies out there that either were kids or grownups when these were still circulating, or at least can remember occasionally finding one in change as late as the 70's or 80's.

Here's what blows my mind:  one of these quarters, which contains 6.25 grams of silver, is worth $7.63, as of tonight's spot price ($42.21/oz).

$1.00 of face value silver coins is worth $30.52.  


Tell that to your older relatives and see if they can wrap their brain around that...

14 April 2011

RAND Paul shows well in presidential poll

Sure, Rand lags behind some of the "mainstream" candidates, but 38 % is not bad for a wingnut.  

Educational inroads being made into the minds of the sheeple???  Hope springs eternal.

---------------------

Public Policy Polling:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 13, 2011

Obama leads potential 2012 foes nationally

Raleigh, N.C. – President Obama has held his ground or slightly increased his share of
the vote against his prospective Republican opponents since PPP last took a measure of
the American electorate in March. His closest challenger for the national popular vote is
Mike Huckabee, who lags 43-48, the same deficit as last month. Close behind is Mitt
Romney, down 41-47 (42-47). Obama beat John McCain by seven points in 2008.
Unlikely candidates Chris Christie (39-48) and Rand Paul (38-48) trail Obama as well, as
do Newt Gingrich (38-52, versus 39-50 in March) and Sarah Palin (36-54 versus 38-53).
No candidate has lost the nationwide vote by 18 points since Walter Mondale won only
his own state and D.C. against Ronald Reagan in 1984.

via Lew Rockwell's new political blog

13 April 2011

Tom Woods shows that there is no difference between statist left and right

...On the subject of nullification, using MSNBC leftist pundit Rachel Maddow as an example.

Remember: National socialist = socialist = nationalist = neocon = statist. There is no difference between mainstream Republicans and Democrats. They are dark and light of the same color, flip sides of the same coin.

This is the main reason why I don't vote where I live, and donate money to Ron and Rand Paul, Mises Institute, and LewRockwell.com.

------------------------------- 

 "In a discussion whose every syllable one could have predicted in advance, left-nationalist Rachel Maddow covers nullification, and you’ll never guess: it’s an idea only “racists” and “neo-Confederates” (there’s that agitprop term again) would support!

Of course, her viewers are too delicate to have their worldviews confused by any mention of northern nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, or the fact that South Carolina, as it seceded on December 20, 1860, listed northern nullification among its grievances. I thought this was supposed to be a “neo-Confederate” idea! We certainly can’t mention that Ohio’s legislature declared in 1820 that a majority of Americans accepted the principle of state nullification. And so on and so forth. I am beginning to suspect Rachel has not read my book on this subject."


Here is the rest of his blogpost on LewRockwell.com

During bailouts, Federal Reserve betrayed you (American public): It's worse than you imagined

This is a particularly egregious example of legal plunder of the taxpaying public, which I assume means you and me both:

Rolling Stone reports insane distributions of Fed bailout money:

The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income. (emphasis added)

Rare War Between the States photos at Library of Congress

The photos can be seen at the exhibit The Last Full Measure, April 12, 2011 through August 13, 2011, in the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building.

Captain William W. Cosby of H Company, 2nd Virginia Light Artillery Regiment


Quantitative easing reaches the American public


via Alex Jones' Prison Planet.

12 April 2011

150, butternut and gray

Southern Independence movement should broaden its scope

But I say: Good luck finding centrists, leftists, and non-whites to embrace the modern Southern cause...

At any rate, good article with good points raised.

Via Rebellion Blog, article by Jared Taylor, at VDare.com

Some excerpts:

"Americans are famously ignorant of history, and the past is always receding—but for not a few Southerners, The War and its consequences are never far below the surface. William Faulkner famously said: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” This rings true only for Southerners (except perhaps for a few Mayflower-descended Boston Brahmins).

Indeed, some Southerners still dream of an independent nation-state of their own. Since 1994, an organization called the League of the South has tried to prepare for independence, though its leaders—thoughtful and honorable men—concede that that time has not yet come.

Will it ever come? There are enormous obstacles. The South is filling up with Yankees and Mexicans for whom the idea of a Southern nation is meaningless. Blacks are moving back from the North, and for them, a Southern nation is worse than meaningless: it is anathema. Southern nationalists imagine a benign and romantic revival of the Confederacy, with battle flags, chivalry, and conservative Christianity; but for many Americans, there can be no benign revival. They cannot separate the Confederacy from slavery. And any goal with even the slightest, second-hand, undeserved, taint of slavery is at a deep disadvantage." 



He goes on to say that any national movement that has a hope of success has to embrace different races, creeds, religions, etc.,. united in their love for the South.

"But today, how many Southerners feel as she did about the South unless they also are deeply conservative? The cause of the South must be at the political center, not the fringe.

Let me be clear: I am not blaming today’s Southern nationalists for their political opinions, many of which I share. I am pointing out only that the broadly-based Southern patriotism of which my mother was a part is gone. There are not many Southern nationalists today who would march for gay rights or would expand the welfare state."


While I agree the movement needs to be broad, I would say that the political center, north and south, is at a low point.  Centrists are hard to define, and hard to find.  Liberals are too brainwashed about Southern history to see beyond the latest Huffington Post, let alone embrace the idea of an independent South.

I like this line.  Speaking of his mother, a political liberal who loved the South and her Confederate Heritage, the author writes:
She didn’t know what to make of the monuments to the Union dead [visiting New England] that are in virtually every town square until she came up with a good, Southern way to think about of them: as monuments to Confederate marksmanship.

Annoying "...the enemy very seriously"

 Love it.  I will never be able to look at another Union memorial without thinking of it as a monument to Confederate marksmanship!

Pelham's Horse Artillery:  bigger guns, same Southern marksmanship

Be it sooner or later, Deo Vindice!

Tea Party stirrings in Europe, starting in Finland

No sooner had Portugal succumbed to a bail-out than European Union officials were gearing up for “The Battle for Spain” – ensuring the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy is not consumed by the contagion that last week claimed its neighbour.
But those concerned about the EU’s ability to fight that battle should turn to the other end of the continent, where Finland could this weekend elect the eurozone’s first truly Eurosceptic prime minister.

Perussuomalaiset

“If the Portuguese thing comes before the Finnish elections, that will mean quite a fierce discussion and protest,” said Mr Soini. True Finns were last week only narrowly behind the centre-right National Coalition party, according to most polls, and that was before Lisbon appealed for a rescue. “People just don’t get it, don’t want it.”



It is a sentiment that appears to be spreading. Popular anger at bail-outs, austerity and general economic uncertainty has already toppled leaders on the eurozone’s periphery: first in Ireland, then Portugal and arguably Spain, where José Luis Zapatero has said he will not seek a third term as prime minister.

Article in Financial Times, via Drudge

Quote of the Day 4/12

Our rural ancestors, with little blest,
Patient of labour when the end was rest,
Indulged the day that housed their annual grain,
With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain.

~Alexander Pope

09 April 2011

Like gold and silver as an alternative to federal reserve paper? You are a domestic terrorist.

Like Bernard von Nothaus.  Like Peter Schiff.  Like me.

Another follow-up to the "Outrage" post:






Speaking of federal reserve notes, I have seen a few five dollar bills with the words "Deo Vindice" written across Lincoln's forehead in pen. 

Can anyone conceive of someone doing like that? Its illegal to deface the currency, you know...

08 April 2011

Texas star Debra Medina: "States are duty-bound to interpose"

The ties between England and what would become the United States of America were severed, as Tench Coxe, delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress, put it, in large part due to the perversion and mal-administration of the British government.[i] Two hundred years later, Americans are manifesting similar levels of frustration with government and inflammatory terms like secession are being used by politicians ever anxious to grab the media spotlight and secure their re-election.  But what have they done exactly to correct the “perversion and mal-administration” of the government?



Our founders, astute students of history, well understood as St. Augustine had described, Libido Dominandi, the lust to dominate. They knew that if permitted, the federal government would transgress the limits of the constitution, and, as Thomas Jefferson remarked, “[annihilate] the state governments and erect upon their ruins a general consolidated government.”[ii]

Debra Medina is a featured speaker at Nullify Now events, and her article can be found on the Tenth Amendment Center Blog.

DiLorenzo teaches Paul Krugman about the War Between the States'

When James M. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 the first thing he said at his George Mason University press conference was that the award "does not make me an instant expert in everything." Buchanan was well aware – and amused – at how previous recipients of the award had made fools of themselves by viewing the award as a license to pontificate about anything and everything, whether they knew anything about the subject or not.

No such modesty and sense of reality occupies the mind of a more recent Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman. As a New York Times columnist he has always done what all New York Times columnists do – pretend that he does in fact know everything about everything. A case in point is his March 29 New York Times blog entitled "Road to Appomattox Blogging." After mentioning how the Times has a special "Disunion" blog to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, Krugman gives a hilarious, elementary-schoolish rendition of his "take" on the "Civil War."


Krugman said he has always been infatuated by the "symbolism" of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, with "Lee the patrician in his dress uniform," compared to General Grant, who was "still muddy and disheveled from hard riding." Krugman is apparently unaware that in 1860, on the eve of the war, Robert E. Lee was in his thirty-second year as an officer in the United States Army, performing mostly as a military engineer. He was hardly a "patrician" or member of a ruling class. Grant, by contrast, was the overseer of an 850-acre slave plantation owned by his wealthy father-in-law. The plantation, located near St. Louis, was known as "White Haven" (which sounds like it could have been named by the KKK) and is today a national park. (On the "White Haven" Web site the National Park Service euphemistically calls Grant the "manager" of the slave plantation rather than the more historically-accurate word "overseer"). 

Article on Lew Rockwell website.

07 April 2011

Jack Hunter condemns the Stereotyping of the Old South in the Charleston City Paper

"My entire adult life I have defended the Old South and the Southern cause in America's bloodiest war, not because I support slavery or racism, but despite it. The positive parallels between what the Confederacy was fighting for in 1861 and what the American colonists fought for in 1776 are many and obvious: republican democracy, political and economic freedom, independence, defense of one's homeland. But these causes are never obvious to critics who can only see the other parallel, that both the Old South and the 13 colonies were dependent upon, and protective of, the institution of slavery. 
 
In the United States today, the very concepts of states' rights, nullification, secession, and other examples of Jeffersonian democracy are routinely dismissed as racist doublespeak. When a number of states recently declared that they might attempt to nullify Obamacare, their critics emphasized the fact that there seemed to be a high degree of hostility toward America's first black president. Of course, this was coupled with the establishment's tried-and-true narrative that allowing states' rights is what the Old South was all about."

The Judge says "Shut it Down"

and (I paraphrase the Judge and Astronaut Alan Shepard):  "G-d's speed, Glenn Beck..."



Regarding the government shutdown:  It's really gonna suck for everyone on the dole.  Painful now or more painful later, your choice on budget austerity.  You want your kids to starve or do you want to tighten your belt and take the hit for them?

Regarding Glenn Beck:

Respect him for the millions he reached and taught.

Pity him for worshiping Lincoln, and not wholly embracing Austrian economics.  Perhaps he'll see the light yet, if he is intellectually honest as the Judge says.

As for me, I will always be pissed at him for humiliating Debra Medina when he had a chance to elevate a constitutional conservative, just when she had been surging against Kay Baily and Rick Perry.  Made me feel he was in bed with big government when he espoused constitutional conservatism.  My enthusiasm for him never recovered, but I still think a great deal of him (if that makes any sense).  Now I listen to him as a skeptic instead of as a believer.

What does this flag mean to you? "Freedom"

The Stars and Bars and the Third National fly in Palestine, TX.  


 Listen to the 10 year old redhead answer the reporter's question: "What does this flag mean to you?".....

06 April 2011

Two good posts on the economy from Gonzalo Lira

First, from Friday April 1st:


 The causes of the mess we're in
 
Right now, we’re in that weird in-between time of financial crises: The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 is behind us, while the next global crisis is not here yet—but it’s on its way.
“But I just wanted a pony!”
We can feel how it’s on its way. Most everyone plugged into the macro-economic zeitgeist can tell you that bad juju is most definitely in the post—just that nobody yet knows (or is sure) what shape the next crisis will take.

Lots of people have been pointing to the various signs of the coming crisis: A U.S. Federal government deficit that’s over 12% of GDP, to be repeated in fiscal years 2012, ’13, ’14 and possibly ’15, if not surpassed; abnormal rises in commodity prices; European disintegration; a Federal Reserve that is printing money like there’s no tomorrow; the largest bond fund in the world—PIMCO—exiting
Treasuries (that’s like Baskin & Robbins exiting chocolate); a complete inability of the political leadership class to do anything about the fiscal mess of the United States, at the Federal, State and local levels.
 
Continued here. 
 
------------------------------

and he debunks an argument against hyperinflation in this post, from April 5th:
 
In fact, the money [for hyperinflation] is coming right now from the Federal Reserve to the wider economy, by way of the Federal government’s spending.

As I have shown elsewhere—and this isn’t controversial or anything anyone seriously debates—the Fed is monetizing roughly 50% of the Federal government’s FY 2011 deficit by way of QE-lite and QE-2. That’s roughly $100 billion a month that the Fed provides, $75 billion of which it is printing out of thin air.

The Federal government needs this money printing—as I’ve said repeatedly, Washington is a junkie, and the Fed is its friendly neighborhood dealer. Washington can’t afford to go off the horse—the Federal government would go broke if it did. Broke as in bankrupt—broke as in full government shut-down. Broke as in no more money to pay for entitlements, the military, or regular government services.

Broke as in broke.

Think it through: If the Fed suddenly cut off it’s $100 billion monthly purchases of Treasuries, where would the Federal government get its funding? From China? They’re selling Treasuries and getting into commodities. From Japan? They’ve got Fukushima to deal with. From Europe? They’ve got Portugal on deck, Spain and Italy warming up.

Read the whole article here.

Barocky Road Ice Cream

I got this in one of those emails you get sent by a friend with a million cc's.  Thought it was worth sharing...




In honor of the 44th President of the United States , Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream has introduced a new flavor: "Barocky Road".

Barocky Road is a blend of half vanilla, half chocolate, and surrounded by nuts and flakes. The nuts and flakes are all very bitter and hard to swallow.

The cost is $100.00 per scoop.

When purchased, it will be presented to you in a large beautiful cone but after you pay for it,  the ice cream is taken away and given to the person in line behind you at no charge.

You are left with an empty wallet and no change, holding an empty cone with no hope of getting any ice cream.

Are you stimulated?

05 April 2011

Obama skewered and roasted

Love him or hate him, you never want Jon Stewart's wit turned against you on the air...


This is great, via David Kramer's post on LewRockwell.com.

Embracing the wingnut

First, a digression:

Many regular readers of this blog know me by now;  I am the kind of guy that judges a person by their character, and I try to make an effort to get beyond the superficial when I meet someone new.  Why do I go out of my way to say this?  Because some strays to this blog may think:  Uh-oh, confederate lover, must be a slavery longing racist closet KKK kinda guy.  

Uh, not really.  If you only knew me...

When I teach my kids about bad words (I mean unacceptable language, swearing, etc.), whether it is in response to something we saw on TV, or what another kid said in school, I don't shy away from actually saying the word.  I say the word out loud (usually making the kid cringe, and say "ooooh, dad, you said a bad word") when I teach about what they mean and why we don't use them.

I don't believe in shying away from reality when I try to teach my kids about anything.  They get the bad words, the descriptions of bad things in history, gore and all, so that they understand what they are up against.  For some reason, some people, like my wife, think that if you don't talk about a subject in front of a child, they won't be tainted by it, or they will have a much happier childhood, or something like that.  Nice sentiment, but my job as a father is to prepare my kids for taking care of themselves, not to keep them anesthetized.  That means allowing them to hear about reality from me before it hits them in the face.

A second digression:

I loathe politically correct speech.  I am a product of my culture, which was conservative and anglophilic.  I grew up in the seventies, and went to college in the eighties.  When I hear someone pushing PC language, or making a point of correcting someone else, it sets off my inner resistance to external force.

I make silly references to politically correct speech when I talk to other people, calling the cover to the sewer a "person-hole cover" instead of man-hole cover, and I will call anything that has the word "black" in it "African-American" (like calling a blackout an african-american-out).  The PC crowd at my college was a bunch of spitting self righteous liberal bullies, kind of like someone who looks like a hippie but acts like a brownshirt or member of the Komsomol, so I resent it to this day.  But I am no racist.

So with those digressions to start, I wanted to talk about the term, "wingnut". 

I resent a label being applied to myself and people who think like me by an outsider.

You've heard Olbermann, Schultz, Bill Maher, and Rachel Maddow all refer to right wingers, especially Constitutional conservatives like Ron and Rand Paul as well as tea party folks "wingnuts". Basically, anyone they disagree with is bound to be labeled a wingnut eventually.

A wingnut, according to our intellectual betters on the Left, is an epithet for a person who espouses radical right wing political views.

Well,

The British called the colonials Yankee Doodle dandies, and the colonials embraced the term, and called themselves Yankees with a sense of pride.

Eventually we called the Brits "Limeys" and they called us "Yanks" during the Second World War, which were basically terms of affection (I guess it depended on the person's tone when they said it).

Haters of black people called blacks "niggers" in the past, but blacks decided to turn the tables and started calling each other "nigger" and condemned anyone who wasn't black for using the word, so they made the word everyone now calls the "N" word their own.

Haters of homosexuals called them "fags," "faggots", "queers", gays, etc, and now, you guessed it,  now that's what they call themselves, and they say it with pride.

I am proud to think of my ancestors as "secesh", even though it started out as a derogatory term. I know they had the right idea.

When Obama was elected, my heart embraced the idea of secession, and I felt that I mentally seceded from the current Statist goverment.  Not because we have the first black man in the white house (Please don't think it dear, dear Jeanene Garofalo;  it would cut me deep if you thought ill of me).   I seceded mentally because we have yet another national socialist Statist in the white house.  I couldn't care less if he is a black community organizer from the slums of Chicago or a another lilly white Yale Skull and Bones member who gets invited to the Bilderberg Group meeting every year.

So I say with pride:  I am a wingnut.  A Ron Paulian, tenther, threeper, gun-toting, religious, small government, free market, sound currency supporting, Confederate flag waving,  States' Rights believing, unconstitutional federal law nullifying, secesh, Austrian economic school fellow traveller, dyed-in-the-wool wingnut.

Why not call ourselves "wingnuts"?  I like wingnuts. 

Lefty loosey, righty tighty (or, Lefty looney, Righty righty, as the case may be) 

Quote of the Day 4/5

There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because the law makes them so.
--Frederic Bastiat




-------------------

I never wanted to sit on a jury until I started to absorb this idea.  Even more so when I learned that many convictions are based on the way the State "instructs" a jury, and the jurors don't realize the power in their hands.

04 April 2011

Update on "Outrage" post -- Feds trying to confiscate precious metals

Followup to this post:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Federal prosecutors on Monday tried to take a hoard of silver "Liberty Dollars" worth about $7 million that authorities say was invented by an Indiana man to compete with U.S. currency.

Bernard von NotHaus, 67, was convicted last month in federal court in Statesville on conspiracy and counterfeiting charges for making and selling the currency, which he promoted as inflation-proof competition for the U.S. dollar.

His Charlotte-based lawyer, Aaron Michel, is appealing that verdict. He wrote in a motion filed Thursday that von NotHaus did nothing wrong because he didn't try to pass the Liberty Dollars off as U.S. dollars.

...The case involves more than five tons of Liberty Dollars and precious metals seized from a warehouse, which the government wants to take by forfeiture,...

That's partly why von NotHaus' group has been followed for years by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks political extremism. Long before the government began its investigation into von NotHaus, the group was raising concerns about the popularity of Liberty Dollars among fringe groups on the far right.

"He's playing on a core idea of the radical right, that evil bankers in the Federal Reserve are ripping you off by controlling the money supply," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the group. "He very much exists in the world of the anti-government patriot movement, whatever he may say. That's who his customers are."

Link to full article

------------------------------

By the way, by SPLC standards, I am officially a member of the radical right anti-government patriot movement.  

And getting prouder of it by the minute. 

Bonnie Blue Rebel, byproduct of the U.S. government

Quote of the Day 4/4

"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. 


Moderation in temper is always a virtue; 


but moderation in principle is always a vice." 


--Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man, Part 2, 1792

03 April 2011

Re-branding Libya

Daily Show's John Oliver interviews the former Libyan ambassador to the US:


Love the flag.

American interventionism explained by the Daily Show

John Oliver explains to Jon Stewart about America's "Freedom Packages":


You have to watch all the way to the end, to read the small print...


-----------------


I know he's liberal, and most of the time I don't watch, but he will sometimes turn his lens on the left and make fun of the progressives with as much passion as he makes fun of neo-cons. 


I decided I liked him in the first season of his show when he made fun of a Democrat in front of what was obviously an audience made up of Democrats, prompting an "ooooohhhh" of condemnation from his audience.  


Stewart looked up at the audience with a smile and said:


"Not so funny when it's your guy, huh?"

Quote of the Day 4/3

But no people can ever be free, whose government is founded upon the usurpation of their sovereign rights; for by the act of usurpation, the sovereignty is transferred from the people, in whom alone it can legitimately reside, to those who by that act have manifested a determination to oppress them.


St. George Tucker, Virginia, 1752-1827