Political Class Dismissed

They have realized that their little 2.5 square mile community, relatively poor and mostly Hispanic has been parasitized by a gang of thieves calling itself a government. The Bell political class fed itself well, surviving as long as it did behind a curtain of secrecy with deaf ears to the inquiries of concerned and suspicious residents. Only time will tell what other secrets the investigation of the City of Bell government will expose.
Bell is a microcosm of what goes on in other cities and towns, county and state governments and of course the federal government where the tax feeding scams of a much larger plutocracy are far more complex to the point of being almost incomprehensible to the average person on the street. The people of Bell have held their own Tea Parties of sorts and I’m sure they will succeed in ridding themselves of all the vermin that infest city hall. They are poorer for their experience, but I hope wiser.
For the larger Tea Party movement, I wonder. I see too many being lured by big government party hacks, offering them nothing other than a lesser of two evils.

I recently got to speak with former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson at the Free State Project’s Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, New Hampshire. I blogged reflections on the festival elsewhere, but wanted to focus here on consideration of a possible Johnson run in 2012. Here’s a relevant excerpt from the other post:

There’s a good bit of speculation around Gary Johnson as the possible “Ron Paul of 2012.” A libertarian-leaning Republican, Johnson vetoed 750 bills as governor (not counting line-item vetoes), never raised taxes, favors withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and advocates the legalization of marijuana.
…
I also spoke with a reporter from The New Republic, who asked me mostly about Johnson’s fanbase in the and chances in New Hampshire should he decide to run in 2012. If Johnson were to run, I think he would enjoy near-unanimous support among Free Staters who engage the political process, just as Paul did. Now, Paul has been around a lot longer, and it’s difficult to imagine that Johnson would enjoy quite the sheer enthusiasm and cult following that Paul did – but with Ron Paul’s blessing and full-throated support, he should be able to do just as well in raising money. If, as I suspect, he also does better among mainstream Republicans, he could do pretty well in terms of vote share. He has two terms of executive experience, unlike Paul and many other potential candidates for the nomination, and the party should be in a relatively libertarian mood by then. Tea Party types are politically homeless right now; while they tend to support either Sarah Palin or Ron Paul, there’s also a consensus among conservatives that neither of these would be an effective candidate in the general election.

So in short - what are the chances that Tea Partiers line up behind Johnson if he runs? They’re short of alternatives!

This is for those of you who live to marginalize the Tea Party movement with racial allegations and other baloney.

Amy Kremer, director of the Tea Party Express, one of the many organizations that try to steer the Tea Party movement, appeared on The View, recently. She stayed on point, talking sense, on the whole:

• The movement is all about fiscal issues, limited government, responsibility, and free markets. No social issues, she said.
• “We have no leader, the leaders are all across the country.” Sarah Palin is not the Tea Party’s leader.
• The Tea Party is non-partisan, crossing “all party lines,” with independents, Democrats, Republicans and libertarians participating.
• Tea Party folk are most angry at the GOP because “there’s no denying that the spending started under Bush.”

HT Paul Jacob, Common Sense

Utah Senator Bob Bennett lost his bid for re-election at the at the GOP nominating convention in Salt Lake City.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

“The “tea party” movement has carved a major notch in its political pistol grip.
At the GOP nominating convention in Salt Lake City Saturday, Sen. Bob Bennett (R) of Utah came in a distant third behind two other Republican candidates vying for the Senate seat Mr. Bennett has held for three terms.”

Bob Bennett, a Republican Party establishment candidate has been a target of constitutional conservatives and libertarians in the Tea Party movement as “No Friend of the Constitution”.
Endorsements for Bennett by the NRA and Mitt Romney had no effect in staving off his defeat.

Court rooms are unwieldy devices. They often let truths emerge that are inconvenient. This seems to have been the case in the trial this month (April 2010) of Najibullah Zazi, who admitted to dumping his likely ineffectual bomb-making materials (made from beauty salon products) after he changed his mind about bombing the NYC subway system. He then flew home to Denver.

Zazi is a citizen of Afghanistan, but a legal permanent resident of the United States, who is accused of planning to commit suicide with a bomb in a crowded train. His arrest was famously broadcast with video footage of him buying hydrogen peroxide in a Denver beauty supply store. He has plead guilting to planning the crime. What is at issue is the fact that he chose not to commit the crime.

So, what does this mean to jurisprudence in America? It means that the government is now arresting people, not for something they actually did, or even for things they were actively planning to do, but for things that they formerly considered doing, but decided not to. This is alarming enough in itself, but more frightening still is the likelihood that this is only a tiny step away from arresting people for things they might do — given their ethnicities, cultures, religion, personal histories, and personality traits.

While this scenario may sounds like a bad mashup of 1984 and Minority Report, it is, unfortunately, fast becoming the reality of the present-day justice system in post 9/11 America. Only this month (April, 2010), it was reported that the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has begun using software from a private company, IBM, to do predictive modeling of whom is most likely to commit a crime. Citizens of Florida, be very afraid.* Citizens of Missouri should likewise be worried. Even though it was withdrawn following controversy, the Missouri Fusion Center MIAC report classified entire categories of Americans as potential terrorists. Actually, citizens of the whole country should be alarmed. A report from the Department of Homeland Security also identified whole classes of citizens, as disparate as returning veterans, Ron Paul supporters, and born-again Christians, as potential terrorists. Phillip K. Dick’s nightmares are fast becoming our daily realities.

For decades now, scientists have been failing in efforts to use computers to model the behavior of the economy and the weather — both of which are far less complex than the human mind. Using such modeling tools, both the SEC and Federal Reserve put our economy exactly where it is today — mostly broke, and broken. When the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) models get it wrong, the consequences can be even worse. The list of disasters resulting from bad weather predictions is simply too long to enumerate. In either case though, a person — you — can’t end up in jail as the result of a missing variable or a computer bug.

All this technology aside, there is an even more basic, and far larger problem with the concept of pre-emptive prosecution: it undermines civil society. Where is the motive, under such a system, for people to reconsider the consequences of their actions if they can be held equally accountable for committing or not committing the crime? By the same standard being pursued in trying Mr. Zazi, a good percentage of all people are guilty of some crime or another — whether that be having thought of jaywalking or of having considered eliminating their mother-in-law. Predictive prosecution is’t a recipe for a safer society, it is a recipe for turning half the country into a detention camp and the other half into mindless, soulless, unquestioning automatons of the state whose highest common denominator matches the lowest common denominator of the committee of unelected bureaucrats who dictated the parameters of a computer program.

We should not forget that Mr. Zazi was previous investigated and cleared as a threat by the F.B.I. It was only after the Obama administration felt the need to demonstrate a political victory in the war on terror that the case was reevaluated and a plea agreement was extorted out of Mr. Zazi by the Justice Department’s threat of charging his relatives with miscellaneous charges of dubious credibility. As a result, he has plead guilty to charges of having aiding al-Qaeda. Of course, the truth of any matter can never be known with any degree of certainty in plea arrangement situations, which are notoriously abused by overzealous prosecutors.

President Obama where is the change? Under your guidance, America is now not only putting people on trial for “thought crimes,” it is now  extending that abuse of justice to putting them on trial for “past thought” crimes — and that puts us on the slippery slope to far worse: pre-emptive prosecution. Is an Obama Doctrine of Predictive Prosecution, to match the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War, really the legacy you want to leave America? Is it not crystal clear to you that African-Americans and other minorities will most certainly be disproportionately victimized by such a system?

This is not quite the change we were expecting.

From Associated Press:

ALBANY, NY - Opponents of the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement say they plan to infiltrate and dismantle the political group by trying to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic, and moronic.

Jason Levin, creator of CrashTheTeaParty.org, says the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country who are trying to recruit members to infiltrate Tea Party events for April 15 — tax filing day.

READ ON

Tea Party address March 27, 2010 Bufalo, NY

It was a sunny afternoon with a gentle breeze blowing the fresh air of freedom over the Tea Party at the Inner Harbor in Buffalo, New York.   Carl Paladino was a featured speaker who was cheered-on to run for Governor of  The State of New York.  Carl let the people know that he is fed up with the self-serving stewardship of Albany, and the people enthusiastically agreed.

Several hundred people were present to support a return to a sane, fiscally responsible government.  Click here for more information and resources for restoring individual freedom.

Keith Olbermann like most liberals live in a bubble of their own imagination.

AL GORES A LIAR!

By Ed Crane

Which brings us to the war in Afghanistan. The neocons are predictably enthused about the prospect of a prolonged U.S. occupation there. A dozen or so of them recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to up the ante. Astonishingly, the president who was elected as the antiwar left’s protest candidate appears poised to take the neocons’ advice and commit tens of thousands more troops to a conflict in which immediate U.S. interests are unclear at best.

Meanwhile, Obama’s domestic agenda is in shambles. Americans are outraged at the prospect of trillion-dollar deficits, auto bailouts and the subsidies to irresponsible bankers. And they don’t want socialized medicine.

The “tea parties” and town hall meetings are essentially libertarian. There is no conservative policy agenda — only a demand that the government stop trying to run our lives.

Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional noninterventionist roots and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus. The Republicans have a chance at this moment to reclaim the mantle of the party of nonintervention — in your healthcare, in your wallet and in the affairs of other nations. Click here for more…

Raw Story:

MSNBC morning show host Joe Scarborough went on the attack against right-wing “hatred” Tuesday and declared he would be putting together a “conservative honor roll” to reward GOP politicians who denounce the rhetoric of commentators like Fox News’ Glenn Beck.

Not that Beck is truly sincere with his post-Dubya attitude change but the right-wing neoconservative warmongers who are foaming at the mouth and cheering on Obama to kill more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Iran are actually claiming people who question authority figures are dangerous? Give me a break!

A deluge of irate letters regarding Senator Dick Durbin’s (IL) refusal to have any meaningful interaction with his constituents over healthcare reform have been appearing in Illinois newspapers. In one small Central Illinois city (Decatur), the count of such letters is already into the dozens. Extrapolating from that, the count of similar letters from angry Illinois constituents must easily be in the hundreds statewide. (And, of course, these are only the most literate, well-reasoned letters that editors have chosen to print. How many others went unprinted?)

One has to wonder, with that level of motivated dissatisfaction, how is it that Senator Durbin is repeatedly reelected? That he appears to be, despite this elitist attitude toward average Illinoisans, is inexplicable. Take this together with last year’s Congressional passage of the Wall Street Bailout bill, which the public overwhelmingly opposed, and serious questions begin to form. Just who is it that is reporting to whom in our “democracy”? Who is it that is really in control of this country? It doesn’t appear to be the people. To ad to this logic puzzle, it is fast becoming apparent that Congress and Administration are setting the stage to (again) ignore public opinion and to pass a health care reform bill, in one fashion or another, under one name or another.

The healthcare debate, however, is covering up this much more serious issue:

It is increasingly irrational, indeed outright ostrich-like, to not recognize that the American political system is just as “rigged” as it is in the countries where we have spent trillions of taxpayer dollars to impose democracy. Instead of the U.S. sending “election observers” (and armies) to questionable democracies overseas, perhaps we should be asking for some election observers to monitor our elections here at home. It is illogical to believe that a senator who routinely ignores his constituents, and who elicits such statewide public outrage, is actually being fairly reelected term after term.

From THE NEW AMERICAN:

Obama’s Wars Trigger New Activists

The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency has highlighted the foreign policy double standard that the activists on the left end of the political spectrum have exhibited, or should one say not exhibited, towards the President’s war-centric foreign policy.

Obama is following the McCain plan for Iraq, doubling the U.S. forces in Afghanistan in addition to sharply increasing the number of private contractors operating in that region and bombing Pakistan on a regular basis. Yet, all of these actions, which in prior years would have been decried by those who consider themselves liberals/progressives, have seemingly fallen off the radar of the left-wing grassroots activists. Click here for more…

“Never had people who should be on my side doing this, so its kind of funny” - Dale Volker

MORE PHOTOS HERE

No limited government populist movement will be effective until the majority of the people involved reject the levinhannitylimbaughboortz right-wing talk radio consensus on endless occupations and nation building (you know, the same thing Obama is doing right now).

Here’s Jack Hunter highlighting the confused message of pro-war/anti-tax talker Levin.

Like the first Tea Party events, the 4th of July protesters primary criticism was government spending, and yet they were circulating flyers written by a man who thought spending three trillion dollars on Iraq was not only a good idea, but would be enthusiastic about doing it again in Iran or elsewhere. I wondered what the protesters holding “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and screaming “liberty” at the tea party think the Founding Fathers would have thought of Levin’s support for preemptive war, torture, and government surveillance. According to “the great one,” the Founders would have been enthusiastically for each. Levin’s warnings about the dangers of “utopianism” in foreign policy are almost laughable, when you consider his closest radio comrade Sean Hannity, still praises Bush for “liberating” Iraqis.