We found the above interview to be telling. The constitution was initially designed to protect individual freedoms — your innate (God Given, many argue) right to your body, the fruits your labor (e.g., you’re not a slave in any portion to man or state), and the rights to the fruits of past labor (in essence, you’re protected against after-the-fact slavery, protected from those who make noble arguments that stealing your property after you’ve earned it is nobler than simply stealing at the time you’re earning it as in true slavery, when functionally these acts are not different).

When it comes to regulating your life and all the goings on in this once great nation, the meddlers in support of big government have created a gigantic hole in the Constitution, carved carefully through an initially tiny hole in the commerce clause; one that has since been pushed so far open that violations to personal liberty are disregarded as if the constitution never existed, so long as the political enablers of such violations can somehow define said violation as covered by the commerce clause.

That said, in this video above the recent supreme court nominee, Kagan, seems to find no fault in driving the Titanic through this liberty stealing hole in the constitution: the government has the authority to tell you what you must eat.

Funny how neither major party will object to her nomination when push comes to shove. That’s because both generally love all the power that the commerce clause allows them to consolidate in Washington D.C. for their own purposes, largely to ply one voting base against another. It is a politician’s lifeblood, and both D’s and R’s would rather trade away your freedoms than stem the bleeding and shrink the power grab.

As for blame, you need only look in the mirror: They know that you — as a D or R voter — you can’t bear to give up the goodies you get at the expense of your fellow country man, funded by those other citizens’ wealth, production, liberty — funded at the expense of their basic, innate rights. Politicians know your lust to have the reigns of power in the hands of your team –for at least a little while, where government pushes your agenda when your candidate wins, is a reasonable trade-off you’ll gladly accept while watching your own liberties and rights erode when the other party is in power — or when they both collude together and screw the little guy, as the dirty truth tends to be when you really see what’s beneath well-sounding legislation that is purported to benefit you.

If you’re tired of this arrangement, it’s time to start voting like you mean business in protecting not just yourself from the giant, increasingly dangerous Big Government. It’s time to vote for liberty for one and all, and it all starts locally.

Vote libertarian!

The Libertarian Party is not a fan of many of the drug war laws in the United States, believing that they create too many criminals out of otherwise consenting adults.  Not that we condone the use of drugs (or the abuse for that matter — any more than we’d condone the misuse or abuse of alcohol).  It’s the fact that prohibitions create black markets for otherwise worthless substances.  Rather than taking  away the incentive to push all sorts of things on your friends, family (children at school), the profits created by the War on Drugs give every person willing to take a shortcut to wealth the perfect incentive to get people hooked on the junk.

And then there is the ugliest side of the War on Drugs: further erosion of basic liberties, and the mainstreaming of authoritarian behavior in the culture to the points where many citizens watching the video above will think the actions of the police above are perfectly justified, or at worst, are a tolerable casualty  — tolerable collateral damage for a good cause.

Above is video from a February raid in Missouri.  The Balko site captions:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

And advocates:

I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime. But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

Contrary to popular belief, ObamEnomics are not all that different from George Bush’s: Pandering to Big Banking still rules the roost, while legislation proposed does nothing to deal with the real problem — The Big Banks will still have their hands in the pockets of Big Government, while the extra tape added to the system will only hamstring smaller competitors unable to curry political favor with the anointed political class doling out billions of taxpayer money while the Federal Reserve prints out $ trillions of fresh dollars from thin air, which gain their purchasing power at the expense of the common man.

Problem with such efforts is what it implies: the government sees fit to know every little detail about you, tax scofflaw or not.

Perhaps if people actually felt the taxes they were paying were getting more of something they wanted, they’d more gladly pay.

Here’s a good interview with a defender of liberty — we don’t care what party — who explains the pros and cons of the Tea Party.

Read more about it here:

http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/localnews/localeln110309

Pittsburgh knows deficits. In the end, you can’t spend yourself to riches or indebt yourself to wealth. Neither the Republicans or Democrats seem to be capable of real change.

But it can change with Libertarian candidates, and it all starts locally. Vote Pittsburgh Libertarians!

Stay tuned for more details!

(Wondering how different Bob Barr is from the same, old Democrats and Republicans?  Consider Bob’s comments on business as usual causing the economic crisis.)

August 25, 2008 6:32 pm EST