by Ron Paul The United Nations is holding a conference beginning this week in New York that ironically coincides with our national 4th of July holiday. It

Jonathan Turley writes about the death of privacy in America, "not with a fight, but a yawn." "For most of our history, one of the greatest protections for civil liberties has been the practical inability of the government to surveil a large number of citizens at one time. In the last couple of decades, those technological barriers have fallen away. "In the meantime, the Supreme Court has removed legal barriers to the government's acquisition of personal information by allowing it to obtain...

And there are a few. "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." Not that that isn't obvious. Thanks Charley Reese.

According to a writer to Lew Rockwell, this is the Sears tower, if you live in the Liberty City area of Miami: He writes: "Speaking as a former resident of Miami, to a kid in the Liberty City area, this is the Sears Tower -- not some building in Chicago. The tower is all that's left of the old Sears Building on Biscayne Blvd. in Liberty City. Since I've been out of Miami for more than a decade, I can't tell you what stage of construction it is in, but it is supposed to be part of a new...

The Post page 16 last Sunday: "Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups. But top Bush...

"I just saw the spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations on CNN saying that the Miami cult members just arrested are not Muslims. I'd say that is a fair statement. For one thing, they are vegetarians!"It seems pretty obvious that they are just a local African-American cult which mixed Judaism, Christianity and (a little bit of) Islam. It seems to be a of vague offshoot of the Moors group founded by Dwight York. I heard on CNN that one of them talked of being Moors. And Batiste,...

by Anthony Gregory: "World War II is seen by most as the most just war, the war against Hitler and fascism, the war for the future of humankind, the war of the Greatest Generation. It is the glory of war embodied. "Vietnam is perceived as the big failure, the clearest example of military overstretch, the quagmire against which all other misguided foreign adventures are to be measured. One is war at its most righteous; the other is war at its most foolish. "But the Korean War is simply...

I'm looking for a good reason to think that the Israeli state deserves American protection. Instead, all I can find is reasons to think that the Kadima Party is run by medieval barbarians: In regards to the murder by the Israeli government of three little children in Gaza, Prime Minister Olmert said last night: "I am deeply sorry for the residents of Gaza, but the lives, security and well-being of the residents of Sderot [the Israeli border town which has borne the brunt of Qassam attacks] is...

And they may have helped, according to the Independent. Congratulations Gemans, you're becoming the Nazis again! And that is good news, because we need another Good War around here.

To discuss the Fed's monitoring of your bank account. By the way, if you haven't read Attention Deficit Democracy yet, you need to concentrate. It's Bovard's masterpiece. Update: Bovard: 1; Liberty hating foreigner: 0. Update II: Jim will be on Fox News at 9:30 EDT

The Feds have announced that they have arrested some "terrorists" in Miami. But after so many complete farces posing as terrorism investigations, how am I supposed to believe one thing these guys say. Especially when they admit up front that they had an informant on the inside all along? Update: I saw the supposed ringleader friend on the Anderson Cooper rerun last night. He said that his buddy had been approached by people offering him all the supplies and that he had refused to accept...

William Perry calls for violence from the pages of Thursday's Washington Post: "Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not. The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of "preemption," which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma. It has applied the doctrine to Iraq, where the...

NBC: "A new, American-made PSA aimed at discouraging these deadly attacks is currently in production. The ad is slated to air as a 60-second spot on Iraqi television this summer. ... Onlookers were later asked to stand back as the pyrotechnic crew blew up a poor old Yugo coupe and stunt men and women, padded under their Arab garb, were thrust into the air with ropes and pulleys to simulate the impact of a bomb exploding. "We all watch it on the evening news," says 900 Frames partner Drew...

So Fox News is trumpeting claims by Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra that it is somehow a big deal that US troops have found 500 sarin and mustard gas shells in Iraq... that were buried in the 1980's. How sad for the Republicans that they have been reduced to this. The Post: "Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments...

Here. Signed by such War Party luminaries as William Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Newt Gingrich, David Horowitz, Michael Ledeen, Victor Davis Hansen, and Daniel Pipes. The libertarians at the Independent Institute and 500 PhDs they've rounded up have put the neocons to shame. Hat Tip: Boss Man (who wonders about the timing of the War Party's letter).