The Libertarian Enterprise
by Jim Davidson
09/14/09
There’s a mistaken idea about history that is persisting. The pursuit of this mistaken idea is ruining many things and destroying many millions of lives. This idea has to be put to rest. The idea is that the Roman empire was a pinnacle of culture. It wasn’t. The Romans did not create new technologies, new forms of art, new ideas. They burned libraries, raped Europe, north Africa, and parts of Asia, slaughtered poets and philosophers, stole entire museums of art, enslaved masses, brutalised souls, debased their currency, and paved parts of three continents. The Roman empire’s fall did not herald a new dark age, it heralded the end of a dark age. Yet for many centuries, the idealisation of Rome and the pursuit of a new empire by Russian, French, British, and now American elitists has been part of the pretext for war and slaughter...
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle536-20090913-12.html
Homeland Security goes insane
Dallas Libertarian Examiner
by Garry Reed
09/16/09
We now know what the whole point of creating the Department of Homeland Security was all about. It’s about creating the biggest baddest bogus boondoggle in the history of American boondoggleism. A CNN article reports that the people who spend their entire adult lives eating, drinking, breathing, and generally suckling at the great national teat of taxation have broken ground on ‘the biggest federal building project in the Washington area since the Pentagon 68 years ago.’ Once completed, the DHS Big Top will take ‘more than 15,000 employees now scattered in 35 offices in the region’ (where their diffusion makes them relatively safe from physical attack) and pack them into a single ‘176-acre campus’ (where, as the old joke goes, one hand grenade can git ‘em all.)...
http://tinyurl.com/oncgfl
War without end
AntiWar.Com
by Philip Giraldi
09/17/09
An assessment by France’s highly regarded Paris Institute of Political Studies last week suggested that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda has likely been reduced to a core group of eight to ten terrorists who are on the run more often than not. The report from Paris should be regarded as good news, enabling Washington to close the book on the ‘global war on terror’ saga that has damaged the United States more than it has any adversary. Unfortunately, things do not quite work that way and Washington is in fact expanding its anti-terrorism Crusade with a military incursion into Somalia even as it continues to be bogged down in a war that it is losing in Afghanistan. The Afghan war is being fought precisely to eliminate bin Laden even though General Stanley McChrystal indicated last week that there is currently no al-Qaeda presence in the country...
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/09/16/war-without-end-2/
Lobbyists still run Washington
Salon
by Andy Kroll
09/17/09
The new White House stood confident in those early months that it could take on ‘K Street’ — a street in the capital notorious for the density of its lobbying firms as well as Washington shorthand for their growing ranks. Tallied up today, however, the administration’s seven-month scorecard tells a different story. Just as sweeping as the administration’s packed domestic agenda has been the sheer force with which the lobbying industry and its clients have fought back, blocking, maligning or undermining its progress. In a Washington version of Newton’s third law, the president’s actions and those of his allies in Congress have elicited an equal and opposite reaction from opponents — inside the Beltway and beyond it. Spending eye-popping sums of money, deploying armies of lobbyists, dispatching grass-roots foot soldiers as agents of disruption, the special interests have fought fiercely to derail the White House reform agenda. It’s now apparent that Obama and his advisors, including Rahm Emanuel, underestimated their strength...
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/17/kroll/
Why is Obama still using Blackwater?
The Nation
by Jeremy Scahill
09/16/09
Two years ago on September 16, 2007, on a steamy hot Baghdad day with temperatures reaching 100 degrees, a heavily armed Blackwater convoy entered a congested intersection at Nisour Square in the Mansour district of the Iraqi capital. The once-upscale section of Baghdad was still lined with boutiques, cafes and art galleries dating back to better days. The ominous caravan consisted of four large armored vehicles with machine guns mounted on top. As the Blackwater convoy was entering the square that day, a young Iraqi medical student named Ahmed Hathem Al-Rubaie was driving his mother, Mahasin, in the family’s white sedan. As fate would have it, they found themselves stuck near Nisour Square. The family were devout Muslims and were fasting in observance of the holy month of Ramadan...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/scahill3
The crisis of confidence
Strike the Root
by Michael Kleen
09/16/09
There is a crisis of confidence in America’s political leadership, from the smallest municipality all the way to Washington DC. At bottom, this crisis means that trust between elected representatives and their constituency has almost completely broken down...
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/kleen/kleen3.html
Obama and the protectionist war against the poor
Foundation for Economic Education
by William Anderson
09/16/09
After President Barack Obama unilaterally slapped a 35 percent tariff on Chinese-made tires imported to the United States, I checked the Usual Sites to see if there were any objections to this latest government assault against lower-income Americans. I flyspecked the New York Times, and while there were editorials and columns condemning Serena Williams’s outburst at the U.S. Open and a call for lawmakers to criminalize ‘texting’ while driving, the was silent about the tariff...
http://tinyurl.com/lyuhwa
The continuing push for globalism
Campaign For Liberty
by Chuck Baldwin
09/16/09
When George W. Bush was President, he greatly advanced the prospect of integrating the United States with a North American Union (NAU). With no thanks to most Christian conservatives or the mainstream news media, hundreds of thousands of patriotic Americans rallied against this proposal and–at least temporarily–seriously stymied Bush’s draconian dream. But if you thought President Barack Obama would be content to let the NAU die a natural death, think again...
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=220
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bush+legacy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Rahm+Emanuel
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=empire
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=elitist
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Homeland+Security
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=war+without+end
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=global+war+on+terror
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=globalism
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Somalia
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=al-Qaeda
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=McChrystal
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=North+American+Union
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Blackwater
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=lobbyists
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=protectionist
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Jim+Davidson
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Garry+Reed
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Philip+Giraldi
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Andy+Kroll
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Jeremy+Scahill
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Michael+Kleen
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=William+Anderson
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Chuck+Baldwin
