Extraordinary Power and Privacy Grab. That’s exactly what the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is.  FISA empowers the government to spy on U.S. citizens communications — their emails, phone calls, etc. As Libertarian Presidential Candidate, Bob Barr, notes in the video above, the only requirement some bureaucrat needs to tap into your communications — phone, email or otherwise — and record them for posterity is that the other party is located abroad. That person does not need to be a suspected terrorist, or a member of Al Queda, or even engaged in committing a crime! — nothing!   The other party just needs to be at a foreign location.  Moreover, private telecommunication companies were previously doing this illegally, and FISA will simply grandfather their prior crimes — clear violations of law — magically turning them illegal.

No doubt U.S. citizens have been willing to allow for lost liberty and privacy in this so called War Against Terror. What many don’t realize is that many of the losses of liberty they thought would be used against terrorists are, instead, used by the Big Government to fish around on completely unrelated situations.

This is just as advocates of liberty and freedom like the LP argued would happen with the Patriot Acts I and II. Instead of being used exclusively for terrorists wanting to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil — the whole reason we needed to suspend constitutional provisions of individual privacy and the requirement for a judge to approve the constitutionality / need of a wire tap and surveillance — communication data that is mined indiscriminately using government hired super computers is sifted through at the convenience of whomever is surfing for evidence of something. Such ill-gotten evidence is being used to charge defendants in crimes completely unrelated to terrorism, and is functionally no different than having authorities entering one’s home to see what can be found as evidence. Worse yet, with the added structure of FISA, the government covers-up its own evidence gathering methods, preventing the public from ever knowing it is being spied on.

In these advanced stages of global interventionist U.S. policy, where the U.S. administrations and many in Congress — and many of the voters — demand that whatever the U.S. wants all over the world, the U.S. should get — U.S. citizens are paying both with a badly inflated currency and dramatically decreasing freedoms. This author is reminded of George Carlin’s quirky observation:

“If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”

If that’s too pop-culture for you, we can just provide for you an original patriot from the era of the Declaration of Independence and an actual founding father, Samuel Johnson:

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Every Republican I’ve spoken to is mystified that John McCain has sewn up the Republican nomination. For his entire career, he has been more statist on both domestic and foreign policy than even the typical Republican. He has been considered a “liberal,” and not in a good sense. He doesn’t share any of the values that are said to make up the Republican consensus on economics or culture or religion. His personal baggage is heavy and a mile long. He had no dedicated constituency within the party.Of course I’m not talking to the run-of-the-mill Republican. There are vast hordes of these people who have never read a book and vote only by the most sordid political instinct known to man. McCain is their candidate. It comes down to one thing only: the simple-minded, unthinking impression that he is a war hero and, more than anyone else, has what it takes to smash the evil foreign peoples who want to kill us. In short, he appeals to the militaristic, nationalistic impulses of the base Republican base.

The real question is why that one issue would trump every other concern alive among Republicans. How is it that imperialist nationalism has come to trump every other issue?

Many libertarians were formerly affiliated with the republican and democrat parties. Generally speaking, they found certain elements of one party or the other (and sometimes both) that they identified. But the also found a large and ever increasing element of both parties they didn’t like: the obsession to use government as the ultimate enforcer of solutions to the problems of humanity — at least as Congress and the President defined problems — and a willigness to sacrifice individual liberty as a mean to those ends.

Above is a passage from Llew Rockwell titled Triumph of the Red State Fascists. If you’re a believer in Ron Paul or just at a loss to explain why republicans can justify ending liberty while claiming to be for it, well — just give the piece a read. It explains a lot.   It explains why many republicans have finally given up on the Republican Party — the establishment pays short shrift to liberty, and believes you have no place to go. It explains how the R’s now use the fear you have of the “other party’ to get you to sacrifice your character, morals and ethics at the alter of “not wasting your vote.”

Welcome to the Libertarian Party. Even if you are not ready to join, please consider the importance of the libertarian ideology and its importance is keeping both Republicans and Democrats grounded in some way to the idealogy that founded this country. An ideology that said the individual answers to god, and that government is his servant and limited only to protecting the individual’s right to say no thanks to others meddling, be they robbers, foreign invaders, or mobs at the voting booth seeking to confiscate both dollars and freedoms for their own cause regardless of your consent. Our ideology is so strong and true, many of us would gladly vote for a libertarian minded person even if he or she was an R or D. Such is the case with Ron Paul. Its truly about your freedom and liberty.

Libertarianism is the key to freedom and a wealthy economy. Please support it one way or the other.