Old Antiwar Speeches

Thomas Woods, over at the LRC Blog has put out a call for great antiwar speeches in American history, so here's a good one I remember reading in the New American. In an article called "Minding Our Own Business," Steve Bonta quotes a speech given in 1898 by Representative Richard P. Bland, a Democrat from Missouri, during the congressional fight over the annexation of Hawaii. Bland said that those promoting the American empire, "boldly assert on this floor that Hawaii is necessary to us in our...

I’ain’t No Gore Lover…

but whoever wrote this speech for him didn't do a half bad job. "[T]he President has ... declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person. The President claims that he can...

Libertarians and the Left

Long, Singleton, Featherstone, Shaffer, and Kinsella on the relationship between lefties and liberatarians. The way I see it, liberals are no more friendly to liberty in sum than the red state fascist types. The only reason most leftists are so anti these days is not because of real principle, but because their perceived opposites are in power. The question is not which brand of socialism is the right one, but whether or not the rights of the individual are paramount. Don't get me wrong, there...

They Hate Us Because We’re Free

Pat Buchanan's new piece in the American Conservative goes over some recent survey results from the Arab world. It turns out that I was absolutely right ; ) when I laughingly condemed Bush's scare tactic of bringing up a gigantic Islamo-Fascist Caliphate to rule the world from Spain to Indonesia and beyond as the likely result of an American exit from Iraq. "While only 6 percent agreed with al-Qaeda

Chaostan as Injun Country, Too Late for a Ghostdance? or “Ready to Help” or No Land Wars in Asia, Stupid

Back in August I had an interesting talk with Richard Maybury, an economist of the Austrian school and editor of the financial newsletter Early Warning Report. He is the author of a big idea, actually a model with which to help predict long term trends in global politics and finance. It's called Chaostan, and basically it means that enlighenment ideas of liberty and property never made it past Marx in Germany in their natural spread eastward, that the former Soviet Union is ready to break into...

Bush Joins O’Reilly in Claiming Treason by Dissenters

As you know, the so-called social contract which created the national government provides them the power to prosecute for treason, as it was in the Old World, but at least they made the standards pretty specific. From Article 3 Section 3: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on...

Stupid Hippy Burns KOOP Radio to the Ground

"KOOP 91.7 FM is off the air after a fire Friday morning damaged the building the station is housed at in downtown Austin. Fire investigators say someone fell asleep in the building while smoking a cigarette. The building housed a recording studio and the public access radio station. The fire destroyed most of the second floor of the building on Fifth and San Jacinto streets, causing an estimated $600,000 in damages." More

Excerpt About the NSA Program from Risen’s Book

Here "The small handful of experts on national security law within the government who know about the NSA program say they believe it has made a mockery of the public debate over the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act of 2001 has been widely criticized for giving the government too much power to engage in secret searches and to spy on suspects, and even some Republicans chafed at the idea of giving the government still more surveillance powers under an extended and expanded version. The Patriot Act...

Who’s in charge here?

David Ignatius at the Washington Post profiles Cheney's other Cheney, the pro-torture David Addington. He is one of these who takes the phrase "The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States" to mean that James Madison and the boys meant to create a military dictatorship when they wrote the constitution. Maybe he's right. via Laura Rozen.