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Liberty and Power

  • Jan 27, 2004

    ON SHARPTON, SILVER SCREENS, AND SILBER

    by Liberty and Power

    I've already talked about"Al Sharpton, Comedian." Now, as we await the results of the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the New York Daily News publishes a piece on The Tao of Rev. Al. His political ideology might make you cringe, but at least the guy retains a sense of humor.

    Meanwhile, as the voting ends in New Hampshire, and the voting begins for the <

  • Jan 27, 2004

    IF YOU REELECT BUSH, YOU DESERVE WHATEVER THE HELL YOU GET

    by Liberty and Power

    Many others have made this point, but it's worth making any number of times: the central problem in combatting genuine terrorist threats to us does not lie in the fact that the government does not have enough power. No, the real problem lies in the fact that the government was, and appears to continue to be, remarkably incompetent and inept in using the power it already has -- and the power it had long before 9/11.

    Here are two stories from today alone that demonstrate th

  • Jan 27, 2004

    Nanny State Update

    by Liberty and Power

    Looks like efforts to ban public smoking in Washington state have stalled, at least temporarily. Similar statewide bans are under consideration in Maryland, Rhode Island and Georgia.

    Meanwhile, in D.C., the fascists nannies have decided to circumvent the D.C. City Council and go right to the voters, apparently feeling they have a better chance of squelching personal freedom through direct democracy

  • Jan 26, 2004

    ZERO GRAVITY

    by Liberty and Power

    One of my friends sent me an e-mail, which contained some quotations. He did not provide any sources so unfortunately I cannot provide a link. However, the one below was so good I feel the need to pass it on anyways. If I had Mark Shields’ e-mail address I would certainly forward it to him.

    ”When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 million develop

  • Jan 26, 2004

    NEW ARTICLE BY BOB HIGGS

    by Liberty and Power

    Here is a great new article on the real cost of America's"security" by Bob Higgs, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. He says that the actual U.S. budget for security is almost double the already whopping $400 billion that's usually cited.

    "The Defense Budget Is Bigger than You Think"

    When President Bush signed the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2004 on November 24, 2003, the event received considerable attention in the news media. At $401.3 billion, the publi

  • Jan 26, 2004

    WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION ARE OVERATED AS A THREAT TO AMERICA

    by Liberty and Power

    David Kay, the president’s hand-picked weapons of mass destruction snoop in Iraq, has resigned and criticized U.S. intelligence for not realizing that such Iraqi weapons programs were in disarray. He now thinks that the stocks of chemical and biological weapons were destroyed in the 1990s—out of fear that they would be discovered by U.N. weapons inspectors—and that new production was not initiated. He also believes that Iraq’s nuclear program had been restarted but was only at a very primit

  • Jan 26, 2004

    DIRTY HARRY IS A LIBERTARIAN

    by Liberty and Power

    The guy in the White House may not be a libertarian, but Clint Eastwood is. In USA Weekend, Ol' Dirty Harry tells us:"I don't see myself as conservative, but I'm not ultra-leftist. ... I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live."

    And also unlike the guy in the White House, Clint adopts a laissez-faire view on

  • Jan 25, 2004

    MARK SHIELDS

    by Liberty and Power

    In his post just below Radley Balko quotes pundit Mark Shield as saying,"It's an insult to Americans when a politician stands up and says that Americans know better how to spend their own money than the government does. I'm tired of it."

    Have we considered the possibility that maybe the government really does know how to spend Mark Shields money better than Mark Shields does? I have been watching Shields on TV, off and on, for years and I have never heard him say anything remotely intellig

  • Jan 25, 2004

    Funny. I Don't Feel Insulted.

    by Liberty and Power

    Friday night on Newshour With Jim Lehrer, Washington Post columnist Mark Shields declared, crankily,"It's an insult to Americans when a politician stands up and says that Americans know better how to spend their own money than the government does. I'm tired of it."

    I think it might be applesauce time for Mark Shields.

    Now, it is an insult when President Bush says such things, as he did in the SOTU. Because he doesn't mean them.

    But Shields was spea

  • Jan 25, 2004

    Sometimes It Really Is All About Oil

    by Liberty and Power

    Leslie Stahl reports on 60 Minutes tonight that as CEO of Halliburton in the mid to late 1990s, now Vice President Cheney oversaw the construction of a Cayman Islands-based subsidiary that was created for the sole purpose helping Iran extract and process oil -- an effort to get around U.S. State Department rules forbidding U.S. companies from doing business with countries that sponsor terrorism.

    To th

  • Jan 22, 2004

    Hello Again

    by Liberty and Power

    Thanks to David for inviting me in for permanent residence here at L&P. I'm honored to be in such esteemed company.

    Your Cliff's Notes bio of Radley Balko: I was recently hired as a policy analyst for the Cato Institute (read my first paper for them here). My issues include the range of"nanny state" issues, which would include alcohol and tobacco control, drug prohibition, obesity, and to a lesser extent, issues like gambling,

  • Jan 22, 2004

    NIXON IS TO CAMBODIA AS BUSH IS TO...

    by Liberty and Power

    Lebanon. Noah Schactman at Defensetech sends along a report from Jane's Intelligence Digest about the next front:

    US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld is considering plans to expand the global war on terrorism with multi-pronged attacks against suspected militant bases in countries such as Lebanon and Somalia...

    Sending US troops into lawless Somalia would not be new, nor is it likely to cause serious diplomatic waves.

  • Jan 22, 2004

    Nonfiction Titans

    by Liberty and Power

    Interesting dichotomy in the lists of Modern Library's editors' picks and readers' picks for best nonfiction titles. The reader list is chock full of libertarian titles, which makes me think there may have been some sort of email campaign to skew the results. I'd love to believe that scads of people are rediscovering Paterson and Hazlitt, and reading the likes of Rummel and Friedman, but the evidence just isn't borne