Saturday, December 26, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
Sarah Foxwell Found
The Heart of Delmarva Shows Up in the Search for Sarah Foxwell
Salisbury, MD: The true heart of the Eastern Shore of Maryland was displayed today at Arthur W. Perdue Stadium as thousands of people showed up to volunteer in the search for Sarah Foxwell. Organizers were overwhelmed with volunteers and it took a couple of hours to get things organized.The selfless service provided by local businesses such as Station 7 Restaurant, McDonalds, Panera Bread, Pepsi, and the people who worked to support the volunteers was absolutely incredible. The concern and compassion displayed by law enforcement, firefighters, and local leaders should be commended.
We do ask that everyone please keep the family in your thoughts and prayers.
Merry Christmas
"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it."
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Christmas Videos
So stay tuned for some holiday laughs.
-- Post From My iPhone
Reliving the Crash of '29
A half-century ago, America – and then the world – was rocked by a mighty stock-market crash that soon turned into the steepest and longest-lasting depression of all time.
It was not only the sharpness and depth of the depression that stunned the world and changed the face of modern history: it was the length, the chronic economic morass persisting throughout the 1930s, that caused intellectuals and the general public to despair of the market economy and the capitalist system.
Previous depressions, no matter how sharp, generally lasted no more than a year or two. But now, for over a decade, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness led millions to seek some new economic system that would cure the depression and avoid a repetition of it.
Political solutions and panaceas differed. For some it was Marxian socialism – for others, one or another form of fascism. In the United States the accepted solution was a Keynesian mixed-economy or welfare–warfare state. Harvard was the focus of Keynesian economics in the United States, and Seymour Harris, a prominent Keynesian teaching there, titled one of his many books Saving American Capitalism. That title encapsulated the spirit of the New Deal reformers of the '30s and '40s. By the massive use of state power and government spending, capitalism was going to be saved from the challenges of communism and fascism.
One common guiding assumption characterized the Keynesians, socialists, and fascists of the 1930s: that laissez-faire, free-market capitalism had been the touchstone of the US economy during the 1920s, and that this old-fashioned form of capitalism had manifestly failed us by generating, or at least allowing, the most catastrophic depression in history to strike at the United States and the entire Western world.
Well, weren't the 1920s, with their burgeoning optimism, their speculation, their enshrinement of big business in politics, their Republican dominance, their individualism, their hedonistic cultural decadence, weren't these years indeed the heyday of laissez-faire? Certainly the decade looked that way to most observers, and hence it was natural that the free market should take the blame for the consequences of unbridled capitalism in 1929 and after. Read the Rest
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Democrats Drag In Byrd to Make 60 Votes
As The Gunpowder Chronicle states - Emperor Palpatine enters the Senate. Ahhh yes, the Dark Lord of the Sith and card carrying member of the "The Invisible Empire" is dragged into the Senate Chamber near death. If he was on life support they still would have forced him to vote.
In Defense of Senate 'Obstructionism'
In a party-line vote at 1:17 a.m. yesterday, Senate Democrats cleared a key procedural obstacle to a federal takeover of health care. With Saturday's buyoff of Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., a pre-Christmas vote now looks likely.
But Obamacare's far from a done deal. There are large and contentious differences -- on abortion, taxes, the "public option" -- between the Senate bill and the one that passed by five votes in the House. The GOP Senate leadership intends to filibuster whatever emerges from conference as well.
Liberals are screaming bloody murder about Republican obstructionism. But thank God for obstructionism, and the Senate rules facilitating it -- because the longer this debate goes on, the less Americans like what the Dems are trying to sell them.
No wonder Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is desperate to force a vote before senators go home: As CBS's Nancy Cordes put it, he otherwise runs "the risk that any Democrats change their minds over the holidays or get swayed by all those tea party protests."
Because Senate rules empower a determined minority to shut business down, the Senate has always prized collegiality. The ongoing fight over Obamacare reveals what happens when senators "stop being polite and start getting real." Read More at CATO
Don’t Waste Your Vote: Vote Democratic!
by William Redpath
(originally published in the December 2009 issue of LP News)
I can’t know what each of you thought when you read the headline above, but probably the most charitable thought was “Poor Bill Redpath. He almost made it to the end of his second term as Chair before he cracked up.”
Please be assured that I don’t really mean it. But, until I get a law passed making it illegal to skip past the Chairman’s column when reading LP News, kindly forgive my grabbing your attention by stooping to headlines that would make the editors of the late Weekly World News proud.
But, there is a point to it.
We’ve all heard it many times. “I can’t (sign your petition/vote for you/all of the above), because you’ll take votes from Republicans and then The Really Bad People will win.”
In 2008, when I was the Libertarian candidate for US Senate in Virginia, we had to circulate separate petitions for the Libertarian presidential ticket and me. Many people gladly signed my petition (getting my charm tank topped off beforehand helped, I guess), but when it came to signing for the LP presidential ticket, “Nooooooooo! Barr will screw things up for John McCain!”
Let’s see how that philosophy has worked out for those people.
I just read the recently published Recarving Rushmore, written by Ivan Eland of the small-l libertarian Independent Institute, in which he ranks forty presidents (too early in Obama’s presidency/Cleveland served twice/Garfield and William Henry Harrison both served less than a year) on a “PP&L (Peace, Prosperity & Liberty) scale.”
What appeared to chafe Dr. Eland was the tendency of historians to judge presidents as “great,” or not so, based on the times in which they served, not the actual decisions made by them when they were President. Dr. Eland’s goal is to judge presidents on the extent to which their actual policy decisions contributed to Peace, Prosperity & Liberty for the United States.
As a libertarian, Dr. Eland does not play favorites. Thomas Jefferson is rated a woeful 26th by Eland, who calls TJ “A Hypocrite on Limited Government.” I have not asked Dr. Eland if he thinks we should save our rotten tomaters for whomever next sings that “Thomas Jefferson” song at an LP convention (non-old-timers may not remember this).
Surprisingly, in Dr. Eland’s judgment, the best president in American history was John Tyler (vetoed the revival of the national bank/ended the worst Indian war in US history/responded with restraint to Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island/ditto with a border dispute between Maine and New Brunswick/opposed big government in fact and not just rhetoric), while the second best was Grover Cleveland, a fat guy who liked slim government. The worst president (#40) in his view was Woodrow Wilson (got the US into World War I/post-war policies set the table for World War II/plenty more, but ain’t that enough?).
But, what really struck me, as I reviewed Dr. Eland’s presidential rankings, was how low recent Republican presidents were on his PP&L scale. I know some people will dispute this, but Eland ranks Ronald Reagan as #34 (landing him in Eland’s “Bad President” category), and he has sensible reasons. Eland claims that the Iran/Contra scandal was worse than Watergate, Reagan did not reduce big government, started “surreptitiously” raising taxes soon after his 1981 tax cuts were enacted, and helped keep Social Security limping along in 1983 (with tax increases, of course) when he could have worked to privatize it. Dr. Eland also thinks Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War was overblown, and that the Soviet Union failed largely on its own. Other low recent Republican president rankings (W. at #36, H. W. at #33 and Nixon at #30) are no surprise.
What is somewhat surprising is that Dr. Eland ranks Jimmy Carter as “The Best Modern President” at #8 (restrained foreign policy/evenhanded Middle East policy/deregulated industries/appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed, who then slayed inflation). Eland even ranked Bill Clinton as the 11th best president on his PP&L scale, so he thinks that over the last forty years, Democratic presidents have actually been more libertarian than Republican presidents.
According to Dr. Eland, to find a Republican president who ranks higher in his PP&L rankings than Jimmy Carter, one must go all the way back to Warren Harding. And, to write that pains me; the Marion Harding Presidents (what else would their nickname be?) were rivals with my Findlay Trojans in the Buckeye Conference when I was in high school.
What I took away from Dr. Eland’s enlightening book was that the frequently heard advice to libertarians and supporters of small government to not “waste their vote,” and to hold their nose and vote Republican, makes about as much sense as the headline at the beginning of this column. The people who have done that over the last several decades need to look around and observe what that admonition has wrought.
There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lumpectomy
The folly of a "right to health care"
Jacob SullumThis week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that his chamber’s health care bill “demands for the first time in American history that good health will not depend on great wealth.” Reid said the legislation “acknowledges, finally, that health care is a fundamental right—a human right—and not just a privilege for the most fortunate.”
Since more than four-fifths of Americans already have medical insurance, and even those without “great wealth” have been known to enjoy “good health,” Reid was laying it on a little thick. But his premise, which is shared by President Obama, explains the moral urgency felt by supporters of the health care overhaul that is making its way through Congress. It also reveals a radical assault on the traditional American understanding of rights.
The Framers believed the Constitution recognized pre-existing rights, protecting them from violation by the government. The common law likewise developed as a way of protecting people from wrongful interference by their neighbors. If people have rights simply by virtue of being human, those rights can be violated (by theft or murder, for example) even in the absence of government.
By contrast, notwithstanding Reid’s claim that government-subsidized health care is a fundamental human right, it does not make much sense to say that it exists in a country too poor to afford such subsidies or at a time before modern medicine, let alone in the state of nature. Did Paleolithic hunter-gatherers have a right to the “affordable, comprehensive and high-quality medical care” that the Congressional Progressive Caucus says is a right of “every person”? If so, who was violating that right? Read More REASON
2004 LP Presidential nominee Michael Badnarik hospitalized after heart attack
The Libertarian Party headquarters in Washington, DC has received various reports that Michael Badnarik, the 2004 nominee for President, has suffered a heart attack and has been hospitalized in Wisconsin.
William Redpath, Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC), commented, "While initial indications are that this is possibly a serious heart attack, we're hoping that Michael makes a full and speedy recovery."
Great American Quotes
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Great American Quotes
"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation."
Monday, December 21, 2009
What Is a Right?
In the continually harsh public discourse over the President’s proposals for federally-managed healthcare, the Big Government progressives in both the Democratic and the Republican parties have been trying to trick us. These folks, who really want the government to care for us from cradle to grave, have been promoting the idea that health care is a right. In promoting that false premise, they have succeeded in moving the debate from WHETHER the feds should micro-manage health care to HOW the feds should micro-manage health care. This is a false premise, and we should reject it. Health care is not a right; it is a good, like food, like shelter, and like clothing.
What is a right? A right is a gift from God that extends from our humanity. Thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas, to Thomas Jefferson, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pope John Paul II have all argued that our rights are a natural part of our humanity. We own our bodies, thus we own the gifts that emanate from our bodies. So, our right to life, our right to develop our personalities, our right to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, our right to worship or not worship, our right to travel, to defend ourselves, to use our own property as we see fit, our right to due process – fairness – from the government, and our right to be left alone, are all rights that stem from our humanity. These are natural rights that we are born with. The government doesn’t give them to us and the government doesn’t pay for them and the government can’t take them away, unless a jury finds that we have violated someone else’s rights. Read The Rest
A Tale of Two Libertarianisms
A new book of unpublished critiques by Murray Rothbard reveals a divide in the larger libertarian project
Brian Doherty | December 18, 2009If Murray Rothbard—Austrian school economist, anarchist political philosopher, early American popular historian, and inveterate libertarian organizational gadfly—had never lived, the modern libertarian movement would have nowhere near its current size and influence.
He inspired and educated generations of young libertarian intellectuals and activists, from Leonard Liggio to Roy Childs to Randy Barnett. He helped form and shape the mission of such libertarian institutions as the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. His unique combination of a Randian-Aristotelian natural rights ethic, Austrian economics, anarcho-capitalism (of which he was the ur-source, within the contemporary libertarian movement), fervent anti-interventionism, and a populist distrust of “power elites” both public and private injected modern libertarianism with the distinct flavor that separates it from other brands of small-government, free-market thought.
Let’s put it this way: When the likes of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman died, conservative flagship National Review could and did praise them pretty unreservedly. But when Rothbard died in 1995, his old pal William Buckley took pen in hand to piss on his grave. Rothbard, Buckley wrote, spent his life “huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement…but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco. Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.”
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Sam Adams on a Sunday Afternoon
"He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections."
Charters Hold Key to Saving State Big Education Dollars
by Andrew J. Coulson
This article appeared in the Detroit News on December 17, 2009.
Michigan is awash in concern over education funding. Recent budget cuts ranging from $165 to $465 per pupil — with another $127 per-pupil cut on hold — have been described as a "tsunami that threatens to push scores of districts into deficit this year." But if Michigan converted all its conventional public schools into charters (also known as public school academies), that tsunami would explode into a refreshing mist — complete with fiscal surplus rainbow.
Based on the latest (2006-07) figures, the average charter school in Michigan spends $2,000 less in state and local tax dollars per pupil than the average district school. So the savings from a district-to-charter student exodus would add up to $3.5 billion annually. To put that in perspective, it would erase Michigan's recent $2.8 billion state budget shortfall and still allow for a $700 million across-the-board tax cut.
And the benefits of migrating completely to charter schools would go beyond the financial. One of the key concerns voiced by parents in response to Gov. Jennifer Granholm's spending cuts is that they will lead to larger class sizes. But Michigan's charter schools not only spend 20 percent less than district schools, they also have 20 percent fewer pupils per teacher.
How is that possible? Charter schools typically employ far fewer nonteaching staff than conventional public schools, so they can hire more teachers and still operate at a lower per pupil cost.
Thus far, the governor and state Legislature seem unaware of the vast savings to be had from universal charter schooling. But they have shown their willingness to promote charters in response to a far smaller financial inducement. Read More @Cato
Maryland Unemployment Rises To 7.4%
We were told the Obama Stimulus plan was to create real jobs and lift us out of the depression we were quickly approaching. All we have seen is unemployment go, government spending going up, and businesses bracing for an expensive Healthcare package.
At some point the Piper must be paid. Baby Boomers are approaching retirement, Social Security is approaching failure, Unemployment is rising, we are fighting two expensive wars, and government leaders are looking for everyway possible to squeeze taxpayers last pennies out of their wallets. The near and distant future are not looking to pretty, and the Piper Must Be Paid (the inflation Piper that is.)