Credit where Credit is Due

Freedom lovers,

Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the raid on the concealed carry weapons (CCW) fund.

He did it to shore up his image as a conservative.

He did the right thing.

Thank you governor.

Everyone else should thank him too:

Phone number: (850) 488-4441 or (850) 488-7146
Fax number: (850) 487-0801

Send your email to the Governor at this address:

Charlie.Crist@MyFlorida.com

IN THE SUBJECT LINE PUT: THANK YOU for your VETO of the CW Trust Fund Sweep

Arlen Specter - Rino to Dino

Today Pennsylvania's "Republican" U. S. Senator Arlen Specter became Pennsylvania's "Democrat" U. S. Senator, and nothing changed.

The Senator claimed it was for philosophical reasons, and the Republicans were dismayed to their core, but why should they be? It was for philosophical reasons. The reason being, he has a better chance (in his mind) of maintaining his position in the Senate as part of the current ruling class.

All other talk is pure rubbish, because there is no significant philosophical difference between the GOP and the DNC. Oh the GOP claims it, but lets check the record:

* Massive government spending: Check
* Assaults on every liberty we have: Check

Oh sure, Bush thwarted federal spending on some fetal stem cell research, and the DNC wants to close Guantanamo Bay, but otherwise their are no differences.

Where then, I ask, does this leave the voters of Pennsylvania? Are they going to now find a "real" Republican to put up against Specter in 2010? And would it matter even if they did? A "real" Republican would just be another lip service RINO that would ride the crest until winds of politics blew a different direction.

This is all because the Republican and the Democrats are not rooted in any sort of principles. Their only concern is the acquisition of power, and once acquired, the maintenance of it. what they do with this power is use it for more of the same. They care nothing for the people the pretend to represent and serve.

Now, lest anyone point their finger at me and scream "Hypocrite!" let me explain that I know a thing or two about changing parties. I was a life long Republican, until November 5th, 2008. I have already well documented my reasons for leaving the Republican party, but unlike Specter I did not just jump to a party that better suited my re-election prospects. I moved to a party that walks its talk. Specter did not move to a philosophy that better suited his personal beliefs, he simply switched mascots

The people of Pennsylvania now have one more very visible reason to see the dysfunction that is in their elected officials. Many of them voted "for change", and now they have a golden opportunity to see that the only change they have received is more of the same under a different mascot.

One can only hope that the voters of Pennsylvania, now twice betrayed, once by President Obama being more of the same, and now by Specter being more of the same, will stand up and demand real change. Change that puts liberty first. Change that demands freemarket answers to economic problems. Change that removes government from our personal lives.

Pennsylvania, now is the time to demand the Libertarian party.

Obama, the Special Olympics and Perspective

I've seen the video. Obama said his bowling is something like watching a Special Olympics athlete.

Then the world went nuts about that comment.

We have the DOW in a tailspin, government spending at an all time high, the Federal Reserve going nuts, all threatening to drive inflation into the stratosphere, and we're worried about a something this stupid?

And to make it worse, the "offended" group hasn't cried fowl.

The only people "defending" the "offended" group are the hard left liberals with nothing better to do. They are the economic equivalent of those who moved deck chairs about on the Titanic. They can't imagine doing anything constructive.

Let the testing begin!

Well,

Now that the world believes Barak Obama is the President, the testing of his mettle has begun in earnest.

The North Koreans are going to test their longer range missile.
The Iranians are full speed ahead in their nuclear program.
The Russians laughed in his face at his (ridiculous) offer to pull back the missile defense system deployed in Eastern Europe.

AND NOW

The Chinese think they can harass our navy ships.

The worlds now holds its breath to see if Obama will be like his democratic predecessors, Clinton and Carter, both totally unprepared to deal with international bullies, or if he will man up like Reagan and Bush, and the man he pretends to be, Lincoln.

We should hold our breath too!

Should the Obama Administration show the characteristic Democratic weakness then we could be in for a very bad four years. Couple that with the economic disaster the Democrats are heaping upon us and it might be the saddest chapter in this great nations history yet.

And we're not off to a good start either.

The Obama administration has thus far managed to offend our most stalwart ally, the United Kingdom, and has shown its proclivity to appeasement by trying to buy off the Palestinians in the Gaza strip rather than letting Israel really clean house.

It makes me sad to think that the only thing that will keep this country "safe" is nuclear weapons. But once again our technology may be the only thing that can offset the otherwise fatal policies of liberal leaders. Let us hope the fools in Washington don't manage to disassemble them all before a leader that is willing to actually defend our interest is installed.

The Liberal Knife at our Throats

A few days ago I happened to be listening to Rush Limbaugh, and he made an offhand comment about an author named Saul Alinksy. I'd never heard of the man. I did a little research and found his book "Rules for Radicals" and thought, what the hell? I ordered it from Amazon.com. It arrived. I began reading.

The first chapter of the book holds this paragraph [emphasis his]:

I believe that man is about to learn that the most practical life is the most moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival. He is beginning to learn the he will either share part of his material wealth or lose all of it; that he will respect and learn to live with other political ideologies if he wants civilization to go on. This is the kind of argument that man's actual experience equips him to understand and accept. This is the low road to morality. There is no other.

His road to morality is nothing more than extortion. Those who own material wealth must give to those who do not, or else.

Indeed he is right that this the low road, for it leads through hell and can get no lower.

But, thankfully, he is wrong in his last sentence. There is another way. Indeed, he has deluded himself into a accepting something that cannot be. He asserts that the experience of men will lead them to this conclusion, but he ignores that the experience of men is essentially self-centric. People can not be expected to "share" (under threat of harm) forever. Eventually they will devise a mechanism for their deliverance.

The avoidance of the low road is to devise the deliverance beforehand. Lucky for us, we know the way. The road to freedom and prosperity for as many as possible begins by resisting the extortion and defiance of the threat.

The road to freedom and prosperity for as many as possible will be paved on the backs of those few who will organize the resistance and push those who would menace us into "sharing" back.

It is no wonder that the so called radicals of the 1970s failed so miserably! If this is the height of their intellectual achievement then they would have been much better off staying home. It is sheer sophistry to think we could extort morality out of men at large for those doing the extortion would be amoral.

This is ultimately why I am optimistic, not merely hopeful, but confidently optimistic that we are on the verge of a great awakening in the United States. The people know right from wrong. They know that "sharing" under duress is wrong, and they will not tolerate it for long. Even the benefactors of such ill gotten gains will be unhappy as their appetites will grow beyond the governments ability to feed. Then the real clash will happen, and those who have spent their lives learning how to produce, manufacture, serve and work will sweep aside those who can hardly be bothered to even learn to read.

Most Americans, young, old, rich, poor, northern or southern, want nothing more than to be left alone to live their lives in relative peace. The government will be unable to accommodate this, and true anger the likes of which has not been seen in decades, will emerge.

No manufactured crisis or government orchestrated market collapse will be strong enough to hold back the will of the people who still yearn to be free. They will easily identify the chains that hold them (I'll make sure of it) and they will cast them off, and with those chains they will bind the serpent that is Socialism and once again cast it into the abyss from which it crept.

These things are unavoidable. The socialists know it, which is why they try so hard to rush all their programs. They hope that by stampeding things into place they will either be proved right, which the laws of economics will not allow, or they will so entrench themselves that they cannot be removed, with the law of numbers will not allow.

The harder they push, the stronger the backlash will be.

How could anyone not be optimistic in times like these? The future of conservative thought is brighter than ever for it will be showing us the way out of the darkness that the socialists are bringing.

A Little Rebellion Now and Then - A Conservative's Perspective

There’s an old saying that seems to hold more truth in it the more time that passes. Don’t ask where it came from, probably a humorist of the caliber of Will Rogers or P.J. O’Rourke, but definitely not Jon Stewart, because it’s actually witty and a bit insightful. At any rate, it says that “Politicians, much like diapers, need to be changed often and for the same reasons.”

Looking around, it’s not that hard to see why somebody would say that. Once upon a time a person lived two different lives. The first would be life before politics, a life dedicated to whatever career or profession they had set their sights on. Often times they would be successful, rising above the others in the same field, other times they would be Harry Truman, but regardless they would have life experience under their belt, knowledge of something besides the Capital Beltway. They ‘d have wealth of successes and failures to claim as their own that would perhaps give them a wisdom and a degree of foresight that would help them in the tasks that were there in front of them.

Then they would have their political lives.

The truth is that the Founders, they perhaps never saw a profession rising out of politics. The Constitution, it would carefully crafted for that exact reason. Two years in Congress, six in the Senate, four in the Presidency, perhaps someone would return for another term or perhaps they would seek a higher office, but the entire framework would be devised that no one man might find himself elevated above others, spending their life in public office to the exclusion. Having seen and felt the effects of those who ruled believing they had a divine right to sit in the seat of the mighty, they wanted to spare the people from the inevitable corruption that it would seem to breed.

There, even by the first President precedent would be set for generations to come. Without a doubt George Washington could have found himself as the President of the Republic for the remainder of his years, and yet it would be a temptation that he would not yield to. Even as France began brief republican experience across the ocean, it had to be seen as truly remarkable, that which Washington did in that singular act of refusing to serve a third and possible a fourth term, fading off into the sunset. Lesser men would find the same too difficult to refuse.

In the over 150 years before the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution was passed, limiting a president to two terms in office, only one man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would break that tradition handed down since Washington.

Looking around, it’s obvious that the Founders, they were on to something there…

Let’s face it, we have, in recent years, come to see the rise of perhaps some of the most corrupt and immoral leaders to rise from the ranks of this Republic to assume the roles of leader, leaving many to wonder where the system has gone wrong.

In recent years we have watched as one Governor would resign amidst a sex scandal with high priced prostitutes, another arrested while trying to sell a Senate Seat and impeached for a host of other crimes, now standing trial in Illinois, yet another still finds himself under investigation for a host of pay to play scandals in his own state, a mayor sentenced to time in prison for obstruction of justice, two men elevated to Cabinet posts despite a history of tax evasion, only one who would withdraw his name, congressmen hiding FBI money in their freezers, another congressman now tied to a lobby firm raided by the FBI, this on top of his other questionable dealings, and a host of other scandals and dirty deals that have either gone unnoticed or forgotten about because they just cease to shock us anymore. The list, it just seems to go on and on and on with no signs of letting up any time in the near future. There are good and decent legislators in Washington and around the nation, those who view their service for the sacred trust that it is, and yet they are largely forgotten, as the host of others seem to take this perpetual perp walk to the podium to give their election or re-election speeches or to say, whoops I messed up or it really wasn’t me, I didn’t do anything wrong.

There we are left to wonder, are there any more Mr. Smith’s left in Washington?

Yet as frustrating as it may be, or as difficult as it may seem the responsibility is squarely placed on our shoulders as the electors. As much as the founders perhaps tried to protect the people from the abuses that we have now seemed to grow accustomed to amidst our current political climate with the rise of the career politicians, it won’t do it all of the time. There, these politicians, these so called leaders, they flourish and remain in positions of power and esteem because we allow them to remain there, despite having the instruments at our disposal to remove them from the place of honor that they now find themselves in.

There it must be the role of the enlightened citizen to hold their leader to account and to refuse to allow for them to degrade and sully the office that they hold, it is the role of the enlightened citizen to show the courage and the fortitude to struggle to remove them from their office when they have been so inclined to denigrate it for personal gain or wealth, seeking to do their business, with little regard for the people’s business.

There, perhaps it’s been now over 200 years since that revolution that would give birth to this Republic, yet, as children of it, it our role to be ever determined, ever vigilant to make that stand against abuses of power, as did our forbearers.

After all, a little rebellion, even if solely political in nature, is a healthy venture.

But then just a few thoughts I suppose…

Bailouts, Stimulus and Freedom

For the last weeks we have heard nothing but the specifics of one form of massive government spending or another. Be it a bailout or a stimulus package they both have two common elements that threaten your freedoms.

First, they will seriously erode the value of your dollar. Don't think that freedom and economics are not linked. Many people seem to believe there is no link, but then why was the revolutionary battle cry "No taxation without representation" so iconic? It shows the clear link, indeed, the inseparability of economic freedom and civil freedom.

Second, they both put the governments hands on massive amounts of what is rightly the private sector. We have already seen the governments sticky fingers on things. Do you think the government can make an economic argument for meddling in the compensation packages of the executives of the big banks? They don't even try. They make a social argument along the lines of "it's not proper". Who the hell is the government, specifically the President, to say what is proper compensation and what is not? And what criteria is he really using?

In both cases the problem is the concentration of power. In both cases power is being transferred from the private sector to the government. It's the age old equation of tyranny. More power in fewer hands.

Think I'm making this up? We have a historical precedence to study and consider. The public education system. The very moment a school begins to accept federal funds, for any program what so ever, the entire curriculum of the school falls under the heavy hand of the federal government.

An entire industry was corrupted by two things, free flowing federal dollars, and strings on those dollars. And what has been the result? Have American schools, which, by the way neither needed bailout nor stimulus at the time, advanced even farther ahead of the pack? Or have schools around the world made serious progress? You know the answer. The rest of the world is catching up, and government is directly to blame for slowing us down.

Another result has been the tyranny that is the National Education Association. The NEA has crushed all opposition to anything that might upset its applecart. Vouchers, crushed. School choice, crushed. Merit pay, crushed. In short, it has done everything it can to insolate itself against competition, which is the free market, which is freedom itself. The NEA is the government master of your childrens education, and by proxy, your children, and to a large extent you.

You still have the option to pay twice and send your child to a private school I suppose. Chalk one up for freedom, for the rich. The poor are stuck.

And the exact same thing is now happening to huge sectors of the American free enterprise system. The banks are now directly run by the government. They are effectively multiple branches of the same entity. The rules that apply in one will apply in all. This is the concentration of power at work.

Why is that dangerous?

Because there are no one-size fits all solutions to problems as diverse as economics on a global scale. Diversity has always been a safety net for the consumer. If one company fails, another is there or will be there shortly. Diversity and innovation come only from competition.

History proves I'm right too. We have far more companies doing innovation today than ever before. Those who point to the old saw of Wal-Mart putting mom and pop out of business never stop to ask what those displaced mom and pop are now doing. They had to innovate. They created new companies and new jobs. They didn't get hired on at minimum wage. Oh sure, a few proved to be unable to adapt, but the vast majority found new services to perform. And we are all better off for it. We have both now, Wal-Mart and the new stuff.

Capitalism does not concentrate power, it diversifies power.

Socialism concentrates power.

Concentrated power is tyranny.

Capitalism is freedom.

Your government is trying to buy you. Will you be bought?