Sunday, April 24, 2011
Defense Budget “Cuts”
Defense Budget "Cuts"
Posted by Laurence Vance on April 23, 2011 09:00 PM
According to Defense News, President Obama wants to "cut" defense spending by $400 billion by 2023. There are two things wrong with this, and neither one has anything to do with actually cutting the bloated defense budget.
1. The only cut is in the rate of growth: "The goal will be to hold growth in the defense base budget below inflation, which would save $400 billion by 2023."
2. Politicians always talk in terms of other years after the next fiscal year because they want to make their numbers look bigger. It is ludicrous for Obama or anyone else to talk about anything that will happen in the year 2023 or any other year after the next fiscal year. 2023 is twelve years from now. What is actually being proposed is a "cut" in the defense budget of $33.33 billion a year, or less than 5 percent. A politician might as well say that he plans on cutting $10 trillion from the federal budget by 2095.
Naturally, the war-crazed Republicans in Congress are upset about any talk of cutting or limiting the rate of growth of the DOD. Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is worried about national security even though we spend as much or more than the rest of the world combined: "I have grave concerns about the White House announcing a $400 billion cut to national security spending while our troops are fighting in three different theaters." I guess ending these senseless wars never occurred to him. I suppose he has some defense contractors in his district and/or gets campaign contributions from them.
Liberty Defined
Liberty Defined
By Ron Paul
Published 04/15/11
The following is the Introduction to Liberty Defined, Ron Paul's newest book, to be released on April 19, 2011
America's history and political ethos are all about liberty. The Declaration of Independence declares that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights, but notice how both life and the pursuit of happiness also depend on liberty as a fundamental bedrock of our country. We use the word almost as a cliche. But do we know what it means? Can we recognize it when we see it? More importantly, can we recognize the opposite of liberty when it is sold to us as a form of freedom?
Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. This means, above all else, keeping government out of our lives. Only this path leads to the unleashing of human energies that build civilization, provide security, generate wealth, and protect the people from systematic rights violations. In this sense, only liberty can truly ward off tyranny, the great and eternal foe of mankind.
The definition of liberty I use is the same one that was accepted by Thomas Jefferson and his generation. It is the understanding derived from the great freedom tradition, for Jefferson himself took his understanding from John Locke (1632-1704). I use the term "liberal" without irony or contempt, for the liberal tradition in the true sense, dating from the late Middle Ages until the early part of the twentieth century,1 was devoted to freeing society from the shackles of the state. This is an agenda I embrace, and one that I believe all Americans should embrace.
To believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions.
Do our leaders in Washington believe in liberty? They sometimes say they do. I don't think they are telling the truth. The existence of the wealth- extracting leviathan state in Washington, DC, a cartoonishly massive machinery that no one can control and yet few ever seriously challenge, a monster that is a constant presence in every aspect of our lives, is proof enough that our leaders do not believe. Neither party is truly dedicated to the classical, fundamental ideals that gave rise to the American Revolution.
Of course, the costs of this leviathan are incalculably large. The twentieth century endured two world wars, a worldwide depression, and a forty- five- year "Cold War" with two superpowers facing off with tens of thousands of intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And yet the threat of government today, all over the world, may well present a greater danger than anything that occurred in the twentieth century. We are policed everywhere we go: work, shopping, home, and church. Nothing is private anymore: not property, not family, not even our houses of worship. We are encouraged to spy on each other and to stand passively as government agents scan us, harass us, and put us in our place day after day. If you object, you are put on a hit list. If you fight to reveal the truth, as WikiLeaks or other websites have done, you are targeted and can be crushed. Sometimes it seems like we are living in a dystopian novel like 1984 or Brave New World, complete with ever less economic freedom. Some will say that this is hyperbole; others will understand exactly what I'm talking about.
What is at stake is the American dream itself, which in turn is wrapped up with our standard of living. Too often, we underestimate what the phrase "standard of living" really means. In my mind, it deals directly with all issues that affect our material well-being, and therefore affects our outlook on life itself: whether we are hopeful or despairing, whether we expect progression or regression, whether we think our children will be better off or worse off than we are. All of these considerations go to the heart of the idea of happiness. The phrase "standard of living" comprises nearly all we expect out of life on this earth. It is, simply, how we are able to define our lives.
Our standards of living are made possible by the blessed institution of liberty. When liberty is under attack, everything we hold dear is under attack. Governments, by their very nature, notoriously compete with liberty, even when the stated purpose for establishing a particular government is to protect liberty.
Take the United States, for example. Our country was established with the greatest ideals and respect for individual freedom ever known. Yet look at where we are today: runaway spending and uncontrollable debt; a monstrous bureaucracy regulating our every move; total disregard for private property, free markets, sound money, and personal privacy; and a foreign policy of military expansionism. The restraints placed on our government in the Constitution by the Founders did not work. Powerful special interests rule, and there seems to be no way to fi ght against them. While the middle class is being destroyed, the poor suffer, the justly rich are being looted, and the unjustly rich are getting richer. The wealth of the country has fallen into the hands of a few at the expense of the many. Some say this is because of a lack of regulations on Wall Street, but that is not right. The root of this issue reaches far deeper than that.
The threat to liberty is not limited to the United States. Dollar hegemony has globalized the crisis. Nothing like this has ever happened before. All economies are interrelated and dependent on the dollar's maintaining its value while at the same time the endless expansion of the dollar money supply is expected to bail out everyone.
This dollar globalization is made more dangerous by nearly all governments acting irresponsibly by expanding their powers and living beyond their means. Worldwide debt is a problem that will continue to grow if we continue on this path. Yet all governments, and especially ours, do not hesitate to further expand their powers at the expense of liberty in a futile effort to force an outcome of their design on us. They simply expand and plummet further into debt.
Understanding how governments always compete with liberty and destroy progress, creativity, and prosperity is crucial to our effort to reverse the course on which we find ourselves. The contest between abusive government power and individual freedom is an age- old problem. The concept of liberty, recognized as a natural right, has required thousands of years to be understood by the masses in reaction to the tyranny imposed by those whose only desire is to rule over others and live off their enslavement.
This conflict was understood by the defenders of the Roman Republic, the Israelites of the Old Testament, the rebellious barons of 1215 who demanded the right of habeas corpus, and certainly by the Founders of this country, who imagined the possibility of a society without kings and despots and thereby established a framework that has inspired liberation movements ever since. It is understood by growing numbers of Americans who are crying out for answers and demanding an end to Washington's hegemony over the country and the world.
And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that that power is always abused. Every single time.
Over the centuries, progress has been made in understanding the concept of individual liberty and the need to constantly remain vigilant in order to limit government's abuse of its powers. Though steady progress has been made, periodic setbacks and stagnations have occurred. For the past one hundred years, the United States and most of the world have witnessed a setback for the cause of liberty. Despite all the advances in technology, despite a more refi ned understanding of the rights of minorities, despite all the economic advances, the individual has far less protection against the state than a century ago.
Since the beginning of the last century, many seeds of destruction have been planted that are now maturing into a systematic assault on our freedoms. With a horrendous financial and currency crisis both upon us and looming into the future as far as the eye can see, it has become quite apparent that the national debt is unsustainable, liberty is threatened, and the people's anger and fears are growing. Most importantly, it is now clear that government promises and panaceas are worthless. Government has once again failed and the demand for change is growing louder by the day. Just witness the dramatic back- and- forth swings of the parties in power.
The only thing that the promises of government did was to delude the people into a false sense of security. Complacency and mistrust generated a tremendous moral hazard, causing dangerous behavior by a large number of people. Self-reliance and individual responsibility were replaced by organized thugs who weaseled their way into achieving control over the process whereby the looted wealth of the country was distributed.
The choice we now face: further steps toward authoritarianism or a renewed effort in promoting the cause of liberty. There is no third option. This course must incorporate a modern and more sophisticated understanding of the magnificence of the market economy, especially the moral and practical urgency of monetary reform. The abysmal shortcomings of a government power that undermines the creative genius of free minds and private property must be fully understood.
This conflict between government and liberty, brought to a boiling point by the world's biggest bankruptcy in history, has generated the angry protests that have spontaneously broken out around the country -- and the world. The producers are rebelling and the recipients of largess are angry and restless.
The crisis demands an intellectual revolution. Fortunately, this revolution is under way, and if one earnestly looks for it, it can be found. Participation in it is open to everyone. Not only have our ideas of liberty developed over centuries, they are currently being eagerly debated, and a modern, advanced understanding of the concept is on the horizon. The Revolution is alive and well.
The idea of this book is not to provide a blueprint for the future or an all-encompassing defense of a libertarian program. What I offer here are thoughts on a series of controversial topics that tend to confuse people, and these are interpreted in light of my own experience and my thinking. I present not final answers but rather guideposts for thinking seriously about these topics. I certainly do not expect every reader to agree with my beliefs, but I do hope that I can inspire serious, fundamental, and independent- minded thinking and debate on them.
Above all, the theme is liberty. The goal is liberty. The results of liberty are all the things we love, none of which can be finally provided by government. We must have the opportunity to provide them for ourselves, as individuals, as families, as a society, and as a country. Off we go: A to Z.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1413
The unvarnished truth about Un-American TSA
The unvarnished truth about Un-American TSA
By: Gene Healy 04/18/11 8:05 PM
Examiner Columnist
We're either gonna look at you naked or feel you up -- your call." That's the choice the federal Transportation Security Administration offers any law-abiding citizen who wants to fly -- and the fact that we're willing to put up with it shows that there's something seriously wrong in America today.
Two items last week put the problem in stark relief.
First was the viral video of a 6-year-old's recent encounter with the agency in New Orleans. As ABC News described the clip, "It shows a TSA agent rubbing the young girl's inner thighs and running her fingers inside the top of the girl's bluejeans."
Then on Friday, CNN revealed a list of "behavioral indicators" TSA uses to scope out travelers who deserve extra manhandling. Among the agency's red flags are "arrogant" expressions of "contempt against airport passenger procedures."
Because, clearly, making a scene on the airport security line is sound strategy for anyone trying to sneak a bomb onto a plane.
There's been a lot of talk lately about "American Exceptionalism," and whether President Obama understands what makes America stand out among the family of nations.
I've always thought that what makes Americans exceptional is our ornery resistance to being bossed around.
But how long can that spirit survive the demands of modern "homeland security"? We're building a country where you're expected to stand by placidly while agents of the state run their rubber gloves under your innocent 6-year-old daughter's waistband.
Neoconservatives see America's uniqueness as an excuse to bomb any country that looks at us crosswise.But the original idea was somewhat less aggressive. With "every spot of the old world... overrun with oppression," America would be freedom's home -- an "asylum for mankind" -- as Thomas Paine put it in Common Sense.
In the 1992 film adaptation of "Last of the Mohicans," James Fenimore Cooper's novel about the Seven Years War, there's an exchange that illustrates American Exceptionalism at its best. An effete British officer berates the rough-hewn colonial "Hawkeye": "You call yourself a loyal subject to the Crown?"
"Don't call myself 'subject' to much at all," Hawkeye replies.
Alas, there were plenty of "loyal subjects" at the nation's airports last week. NBC observed a "mixed reaction" to TSA's kindergartner pat-down policy: "I see the pros and I see the cons," said one traveler at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The TSA has "information that's not available to the general public," a grandmother at Salt Lake City International Airport offered; "you never know what some folks might be trying," the father of another 6-year-old observed.
No, you never do -- but you're still allowed to ask whether the risks justify the indignities. In his 2008 book "The Science of Fear," Daniel Gardener noted that even if terrorists crashed a plane a week, "a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking -- a trivial risk compared with the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car."
If we'd sold our birthright for the proverbial "mess of pottage," at least we'd have something to eat.It's more contemptible by far to betray our heritage in the name of "security theater" -- pointless restrictions that don't make us safer.
The president had an odd laugh line in his last State of the Union address. Pushing his high-speed rail scheme, he quipped that it would let you travel "without the pat-down." (Spoken like a man who has his own plane.)
Does Obama properly understand "American Exceptionalism"? Beats me. But he seems to find our current predicament pretty amusing.
Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/04/unvarnished-truth-about-un-american-tsa
The Reality Of Airport Insecurity!
The Reality Of Airport Insecurity!
Airport Security: Observations from the security line!
Can political correctness get you killed? It may or it may not by itself, but judging from airport security that I recently encountered courtesy of the TSA, that government entity is not doing a whole lot to prevent an incident from occurring.
The question has long been asked as to whether racial profiling is a good methodology for targeting those believed to have an agenda of death and destruction against the United States and other western countries?
Examining the many of the acts of terrorism carried out in the United States and abroad, racial profiling, if allowed, would tend to target men of Middle Eastern appearance. Additionally it would focus on those with passports from specific Middle Eastern countries.
Unfortunately for national and travel security, profiling of this nature is neither condoned or allowed leading to gaping holes in passenger safety. In fact, judging by a recent international flight I was on, security personnel will tend to go to the other extreme of specifically not scrutinizing Middle Eastern men or women at all.
Kennedy Airport: Security Through Omission Rather Than Through Commission!
With a security line stretching a long way and moving very slowly, I was curious to see the thoroughness of the inspections causing the delays. Was it intense and probing as one would hope with a special eye focused on those fitting a certain description? Or, as suspected, was it cursory at best with the lines slowed by the fact that for hundreds of travelers only two security lines were open?
The cursory level of security I actually encountered did not come as any great surprise, but what I watched at the end of the line did. It was in many ways startling and a perfect example of why security is really nothing more than a charade of form over substance. Something put in place to make the general public feel that things are under control when in reality they are not.
Two Muslim women who were wearing traditional clothing that included covered faces with only their eyes revealed, made their way to the TSA agent checking identification. The agent looked at the pictures and then at the women, and then waved them through. Waved through although any actual identification was virtually impossible. Continuing to watch, they did not get any closer scrutiny as they passed through the detectors where passengers will often be pulled over for enhanced checking.
Why? I can’t answer that except to think that had security applied closer scrutiny to the women there was the potential to have them or others claim profiling and/or Islamophobia.
Therefore, an error made by omission was determined to be more tenable than an act of commission by the powers that be.
For everyone except the flying public that is!
http://politicsandfinance.blogspot.com/2011/04/reality-of-airport-insecurity.html
Freedom Is Always Illegal.
Airport Security: Observations from the security line!
Can political correctness get you killed? It may or it may not by itself, but judging from airport security that I recently encountered courtesy of the TSA, that government entity is not doing a whole lot to prevent an incident from occurring.
The question has long been asked as to whether racial profiling is a good methodology for targeting those believed to have an agenda of death and destruction against the United States and other western countries?
Examining the many of the acts of terrorism carried out in the United States and abroad, racial profiling, if allowed, would tend to target men of Middle Eastern appearance. Additionally it would focus on those with passports from specific Middle Eastern countries.
Unfortunately for national and travel security, profiling of this nature is neither condoned or allowed leading to gaping holes in passenger safety. In fact, judging by a recent international flight I was on, security personnel will tend to go to the other extreme of specifically not scrutinizing Middle Eastern men or women at all.
Kennedy Airport: Security Through Omission Rather Than Through Commission!
With a security line stretching a long way and moving very slowly, I was curious to see the thoroughness of the inspections causing the delays. Was it intense and probing as one would hope with a special eye focused on those fitting a certain description? Or, as suspected, was it cursory at best with the lines slowed by the fact that for hundreds of travelers only two security lines were open?
The cursory level of security I actually encountered did not come as any great surprise, but what I watched at the end of the line did. It was in many ways startling and a perfect example of why security is really nothing more than a charade of form over substance. Something put in place to make the general public feel that things are under control when in reality they are not.
Two Muslim women who were wearing traditional clothing that included covered faces with only their eyes revealed, made their way to the TSA agent checking identification. The agent looked at the pictures and then at the women, and then waved them through. Waved through although any actual identification was virtually impossible. Continuing to watch, they did not get any closer scrutiny as they passed through the detectors where passengers will often be pulled over for enhanced checking.
Why? I can’t answer that except to think that had security applied closer scrutiny to the women there was the potential to have them or others claim profiling and/or Islamophobia.
Therefore, an error made by omission was determined to be more tenable than an act of commission by the powers that be.
For everyone except the flying public that is!
http://politicsandfinance.blogspot.com/2011/04/reality-of-airport-insecurity.html
Freedom Is Always Illegal.
Re: The Worm Has Turned
I never heard of him but as far as I am concerned the more commies, leftists, socialists, islamists and other assorted traitors that die the better. As long as they don't send me the bill.
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On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com> wrote:
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Hmmm. Relentless Obama fascist spammer and blogger James Frye has cancer.Karma gets them somtimes
Saturday, April 23, 2011
The Worm Has Turned
I've been fighting cancer so I haven't written much so here goes.
Even with that going on, there is something going on that has made me happy and sad at once. Namely how things have turned since the elections of 2010.
I was told by my friends on the right how devastated I was going to be on election night because the "Marxists" would soon be out of power. I'd be just a quivering, weeping little pile they told me. Well, I'll be the first to admit that last November could have been better and we did have our asses handed to us when it came to the House. Always the optimist, I took what comfort I could over the fact that even with the losses in the Senate we managed to hang onto that and the President was still a Democrat so the nuttier ideas from the House GOPers would go nowhere. Some things were going to slip through though, given how the Democrats bend over backwards to avoid annoying the other side too much.
I was also bemoaning that so many of our side decided to stay home last November as well but I wasn't surprised that it happened either. The less ideological Democrats were being bombarded with a pretty steady diet of how either evil Obama was or how he had "betrayed" the progressive cause since he was actually in office. The atmosphere was pretty darn negative when it came to our President and by extension the message being sent out was why bother voting, you're just going to get screwed no matter who gets in.
The Republicans, as is their wont, read the elections wrong. Instead of seeing it as the beneficiaries of low voter turnout and a successful campaign from both the far right and left to demonize President Obama, they saw it as a resounding endorsement of their ideas. ALL of their ideas, even the ones they neglected to mention on the campaign trial. So they went for it, policy-wise first in Wisconsin by going after the hated unions then going after Medicare and Social Security.
Then something very interesting happened.
I don't know which one it was but somewhere along the line people hit the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Maybe it was the public unions being attacked or the push to privatize Medicare and Social Security but one of them did it without question. Then something happened that my friends a bit further left than I had promised and I doubted would ever happen - things had finally gotten so bad that the people woke up.
Suddenly state capitols were overcome with protesters. People were out on corners, waving signs at passing motorists. They even shut down phone exchanges with their actual phone calls to actual legislators, state and federal. People were actually doing more than signing online petitions, they were out of the house standing up to the right live and in person.
In normal times, that would be a signal to the party doing things that all these people didn't like to back off a bit. But the Republicans, tone deaf as always, had convinced themselves that they still held the majority position and decided to double down on it. How did they accomplish this? First they threatened to shut down the government if they didn't get their way entire but cooler heads prevailed that time. Those same heads lost it when their "genius" Representative Paul Ryan came out with his budget for 2012.
This was a wishlist of every thing the Republicans have wanted to do ever since the South went from solid Democratic to pretty-solid Republican. Make Medicare into a voucher-like system instead of the single payer system it is now, cut back Social Security, defund NPR, Planned Parenthood and even more like cutting food stamps and school lunches. Now, it would have been bad enough for them if this budget abomination had just stayed in the realm of "proposed" but they had to go that one more step and go ahead and pass it in the House.
Oops.
Big boo boo. Now there's actual votes to have to defend to the folks back home. No denying that or saying you really meant to do something else there.
The Republicans are now getting a taste of what they try so hard to avoid: reality. The new Tea Bag members of the House are holding town halls while they're off and instead of friendly crowds shouting down pesky liberals they're finding they are the ones being shouted at and not in a good way. Why, their "courageous" Rep. Ryan even got BOOED by a home district crowd.
Knowing the Republicans, they'll ignore even these clear signals and go even further with their policies.
Election night 2012 just might be a lot more fun than the one in 2010 was.Posted by James Frye at 1:41 PM
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