Henry David Thoreau and 'Civil Disobedience' by Wendy McElroy
Emerson missed the point of Thoreau’s protest, which was not intended to reform society but was simply an act of conscience. If we do not distinguish right from wrong, Thoreau argued that we will eventually lose the capacity to make the distinction and become, instead, morally numb.


- posted by SARTRE @ 3:28 PM (0) comments

 
he Roberts Nomination: Supreme Court or Supreme Ruler? by Hugh McInnish
Whatever we might call the non-court we have today—junta (definition: a group of persons controlling a government esp. after a revolutionary seizure of power) comes to mind—it is hypocritical to pretend that it still deserves the hushed respect the Court once attracted.


- posted by SARTRE @ 7:58 AM (0) comments

 
It's Still Martial Law Even If No One's Declared It Yet by Becky Akers
The essentials of this incident were repeated a few days later, this time in the air and far from New York City. Once again, nervous Nellies alarmed by perfectly normal behavior ratted out their fellow serfs, as the police state so frequently urges us to do; once again, that state joyously jumped to respond.
- posted by SARTRE @ 7:25 AM (0) comments

 
Casting Aside Justice by William Norman Grigg
Many conservatives consider it something akin to sedition or treason to criticize the Bush administration for claiming that the president has unlimited power to deal as he sees fit with anyone he designates as an enemy in the "war on terror." This perspective rests on two completely unjustified assumptions. The first is that George W. Bush, being a better man than Bill Clinton (hardly the highest hurdle to surmount), can be entrusted with extraordinary powers. The second is that the powers in question would always be used against "them" — that is, the "worst of the worst" — rather than against "us."


- posted by SARTRE @ 8:52 AM (0) comments

 
The Police State Act: A Report by Rep. Ron Paul
The Patriot Act, like every political issue, boils down to a simple choice: Should we expand government power, or reduce it? This is the fundamental political question of our day, but it’s quickly forgotten by politicians who once promised to stand for smaller government. Most governments, including our own, tend to do what they can get away with rather than what the law allows them to do. All governments seek to increase their power over the people they govern, whether we want to recognize it or not. The Patriot Act is a vivid example of this. Constitutions and laws don’t keep government power in check; only a vigilant populace can do that.

- posted by SARTRE @ 6:53 AM (0) comments

 
American revolution, now! by John Stanton
The powerful of the country run a minimum security, open air labor camp called the Unites States of America in which the wardens are the Republicans and Democrats located in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the US government, along with their governments-in-waiting at think tanks around the country. The hideous and anticompetitive one-party system with two faces is an abomination, a monster disguised as an American politician, or maybe even a general or CEO, who claims to be the leader of the free world.
- posted by SARTRE @ 4:22 PM (0) comments

 
America'' Fascination with Logical Thought in a World Devoid of Logical Thought by Dr. Gerry Lower
Someone, for example, really ought to be thinking about abstract concepts like national honesty, integrity, fairness, justice, security and reputation in the eyes of the world. Some one really ought to be thinking about the people and their empowerment in a democracy originally based on nascent Christian human rights.
- posted by SARTRE @ 9:00 AM (0) comments

 
The Decline and Fall of Conservatism by Butler Shaffer
The Cold War defined conservatism for nearly half a century, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, conservatives were left without a raison d’être. Their very existence, as a political movement, ceased to be. They had accumulated weapons and powers – along with an army of defense contractors eager to keep the game going – but no "enemy." Conservatives – and, I should add, so-called "liberals" – were like a man with a leash, desperately in search of a dog. If centralized power was necessary to resist a foe that later disappeared, what could justify the retention of such power?


- posted by SARTRE @ 7:03 AM (0) comments

 
The Republican Congress Wastes Billions Overseas by Rep. Ron Paul
Now we have a Republican-controlled Congress and White House, and foreign spending soars. It was not that long ago when conservatives looked at such cavalier handling of US tax dollars with consternation. Now it seems that they are in a race with the Left to see who can spend more.


- posted by SARTRE @ 6:18 AM (0) comments

 
Antireligious Tests by George Neumayr
For many Democrats the only good Catholic is a bad one -- a Catholic ready to dissent from his religion for the sake of a spot in the secularized public square. Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer, and company are sure to question, in one veiled form or another, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts about his Catholicism. That is, they won't baldly ask him about his religion but they will probe his "personal" views, and the question implied will be: You promise to give our judges' liberal rewriting of the Constitution greater priority than your own religion, right?

- posted by SARTRE @ 8:21 AM (0) comments

 
Because the Government is evil and stupid by Jay P Hailey
If it's not explicitly stated here then it's not a Federal government power—it belongs to the states or to the people. The States can restrict these powers further if they deem necessary.


- posted by SARTRE @ 8:35 AM (0) comments

 
Meaning of the terms
Despite the prevalence and durability of these terms, there is little consensus on what it actually means to be Left or Right at the present time. There are various different opinions about what is actually being measured along this axis:


- posted by SARTRE @ 7:56 AM (0) comments

 
FBI Builds Huge File on Anti-War, Rights Groups by Eric Lichtblau
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.

- posted by SARTRE @ 8:19 AM (0) comments

 
Ten Commandments by Edgar J. Steele
The Supreme Court's recent ruling in McCreary County vs. ACLU now makes complete America's official breaking of all of the Ten Commandments. How appropriate that this final breakage concerns an actual display of those Commandments. Perhaps the ultimate irony, in fact.


- posted by SARTRE @ 11:48 AM (0) comments

 
Mostly Fertilizer by Charley Reese
What you have to realize is that the few terrorists who actually exist are supporting a large industry in the United States. President Bush bases his whole administration on it. There are hundreds of self-proclaimed experts on terrorism. The media are fascinated by it. The bureaucracy has exploded, and every law-enforcement agency and fire department in the country is latching on to the gravy train. Private industry is thriving selling gadgets and alleged expertise.

But it's all a racket. Do you think if the U.S. government were really concerned about terrorists that it would continue to allow more than 1 million illegal aliens to cross our borders every year?

- posted by SARTRE @ 6:15 AM (0) comments

 
Fascism Comes to America by Ralph Raico
And now Franklin Roosevelt, too, has come to represent a certain conception of America, one that is worlds apart from Jefferson's vision, and different from anything that even Lincoln could have imagined. Roosevelt stands for the national government as we know it today, a vast, unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus that recognizes no limits whatsoever to its power, either at home or abroad.
- posted by George @ 5:59 PM (0) comments

 
Pennsylvania's Anarchist Experiment: 1681–1690 by Murray N. Rothbard
Unable to collect revenue from the free and independent-minded Pennsylvanians, [William Penn] saw the colony slipping gracefully into outright anarchism—into a growing and flourishing land of no taxes and virtually no state.
- posted by George @ 8:51 PM (0) comments

 
They Lied to Me, Too by James Glaser
I never realized that Washington wasn’t trying to win the war, nor did I know the whole thing was started by a President lying to the American people about an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened.

It is hard to believe that our leaders in Washington could sit there and watch as thousands and thousands of Americans were getting killed and wounded every month.
- posted by George @ 11:53 AM (0) comments

 
Terrorism's indispensable allies by Joe Sobran
Terrorism isn't a threat; it's an unnerving nuisance. Most of the panic it causes is due to news media coverage, rather than to the material human harm it does. In our time it's easy to mistake a dreadful local incident for a general threat – or even an attack on civilization itself, as Blair, playing Churchill, calls the latest bombings.

We should never think about terrorism without considering the role played by media amplification. "You give me the pictures, and I'll give you the war," the publisher William Randolph Hearst is supposed to have said. That was even before the coming of radio. Today he might have said, "You give me the runaway bride, and I'll give you a worldwide sensation."

Terrorism, in order to have full effect, requires three elements: terrorists, politicians, and electronic media. We need to think of it in conjunction with its indispensable allies. What if they gave a bombing, and nobody covered it?

- posted by SARTRE @ 8:07 AM (0) comments

 
The Supreme Battle: The Cultural Capital of New York Versus The United States of America by Kent Bailey
The problem is solved! Simply reify the Constitution and make it a kind of legal golden calf of Marxist secularism, and then proceed to supplant Christian MORALITY and its Ten Commandments with an endless and cryptic set of LEGALISMS where the courts and not the Bible or tradition define truth and the American way. This substitution of the superego (moral consciousness) for unvarnished egoism (nothing is wrong unless so deemed by a court of law) has moved our entire culture several devastating regressive notches toward the id (our selfish animal nature) in a mere 40 years.

- posted by SARTRE @ 7:54 AM (0) comments

 
"A Bill of Rights or a Bill of Goods?" by Lisa�Fabrizio
This meant that whatever was not in the Constitution or amended into it, was in the power of the states to decide. And while this amending was done as required some seventeen times after the Bill Of Rights was ratified, today, changes have simply been declared by the courts, often resulting in the trampling the founders so feared.


- posted by SARTRE @ 6:56 AM (0) comments

 
War Made Easy - an excerpt by Norman Solomon
Aren't we at least dimly aware that – no matter how smooth and easy the news media and elected officials try to make it for us – in faraway places there are people not so different than us who are being destroyed by what journalists and politicians glibly depict as necessary war?
- posted by George @ 5:51 PM (0) comments

 
Interdependence Day by John N. Cooper
It is almost two hundred and thirty years since our Declaration of Independence was signed; in that time, much has changed. Rather than independent, we are in fact far more dependent on other peoples, other countries, other nations than our founders aspired to be two and a third centuries ago. Do we still yearn to be free of those dependences? Commercially we are deep into, or striving to be party to, ‘free trade’ agreements: Central America, North America, the Western Hemisphere, the world. We rely on military alliances to provide fodder for our foreign adventures. We support unpopular regimes to keep their peoples in their place. We depend on the rest of the world, and they depend, however shakily, on us. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that, far from being independent, we are interdependent, with all peoples, all countries, all nations -- albeit truly some more so than others.


- posted by SARTRE @ 7:35 AM (0) comments

 
Independence Day: Still a Call to Action by Bob Ellis
We would all do well to go back and read the Declaration of Independence, not just today, but over and over again in the days and months to come, to remind ourselves of where we have come from, so that we do not find ourselves irrevocably back in that same predicament again.


- posted by SARTRE @ 6:23 AM (0) comments