Political Class Dismissed

Andrew Cuomo thought he could duck into the Wyoming County Fair without us finding out about it.

Wrong!

We heard and Andrew was greeted by Carl’s Duck.

Very funny.

I suspect Andrew will cut and run and head East. He knows the tea party will be there if he shows up in Erie County again.

They are still getting the rubber off Pearl St. from his last quick exit.

Another colossal waste of tax money.

Story.

Another great opportunity for jury nullification.

Like Blago.

Wouldn’t it be great if the jury just got up at the end of summations and said, “Not Guilty, have a nice day.”?

News & Commentary from the Artvoice Editorial staff

August 19, 2010
A “Taste of Freedom” at Potts Banquet Hall
Filed under: Events,Music — Tags: 103.3 edge, guitar contest, potts banquet hall, Steve Balesteri, taste of freedom — Artvoice Staff @ 4:26 pm

Steve Balesteri and friends David Nolf, Ashlee Amoia and Chris Norman (winner of The EDGE 103/Creed guitar contest!) will be on hand Saturday beginning at 2:00 pm at Potts Banquet Hall 694 S. Ogden (near Dingens) just off the 190 at the S. Ogden exit. There will be other live bands beginning at noon along with ethnic foods, a beer tent with other drinks, the amazing chair massage, ice cream, and much more. The Taste of Freedom is an all day event from noon to 8 PM on Saturday, 8/21/10.

Read more: http://blogs.artvoice.com/avdaily/2010/08/19/a-%e2%80%9ctaste-of-freedom%e2%80%9d-at-potts-banquet-hall/#ixzz0×6NzGi7F

The Tea Party Coalition (WNY) is holding its major fundraiser of the year on Saturday, The Taste of Freedom.

In addition to having a rip-roaring good time for just ten bucks admission, I want to briefly explain why you should support this fundraiser.

First, the folks involved in the Coalition, including Allen Coniglio, Paulette Peterson, Tony Matuszak and me, were not only involved in the very beginnings of the tea party movement in WNY, but were also involved in many cases in the very beginnings of the WNY Tax Revolt of 2004-2005.

Second, there is an ongoing effort to co-opt the tea party movement to be a mere tool of the GOP. The Coalition insists on being independent of any political machine including the Republican machine. We stand on principle and have a passion for real policy changes. The tea party movement cannot be the mere plaything of the Republican Party or we will fail in our prime mission: to create, in the face of the GOP’s forty year failure to do so, a successful movement in favor of limited government and free markets. To the Coalition, the GOP is simply one of many political tools to be used to achieve limited government and individual liberty. We reject and will aggressively fight any effort to make the tea party movement a tool to return big government machine Republicans to power.

Third, the Coalition fills an important need in WNY. We always needed an effective political arm of the tax revolt/tea party movement to go along with the policy arm, Free New York. The Coalition has already donated $1000 to Dave DiPietro, the Tea Party/Republican candidate for Dale Volker’s seat. Dave will be the main beneficiary of the Taste of Freedom fundraiser as well.

If we can help Dave be the first tea party state legislator, the Coalition will have established itself as the effective political arm of the movement that we needed but lacked.

These are some of the reasons why you should support the Coalition and the Taste of Freedom, besides hearing great live music and having a great time with great people.

For more info about the Taste, go here.

It is critical that you support this event. I will explain this in a post later on tonight. It took a trip to the Liberty Bell to crystallize my thoughts on the present state of the tea party movement.

Tea Party Coalition of WNY

Allen Coniglio, Chair
ilkitty@roadrunner.com
teapartycoalitionwny.com
(716) 435-8918

Buffalo, NY. August 18, 2010. The Tea Party Coalition (WNY) is hosting the Taste of Freedom, a day-long freedom fest on Saturday, August 21st from noon to 8pm at Potts Banquet Hall, 694 South Odgen, Buffalo, NY.

There will be eight hours of live music, great ethnic food, activities for kids, book signings, and an opportunity for tea partiers to meet candidates for public office.

Performers will include: Steve Balesteri, Ashley Amoia, Dave Nolf, and Chris Norman.

Speakers will include Dave DiPietro, the Tea Party candidate for the key 59th state senate district, Janice Volk, tea party candidate for Congress in the 29th District, Mike Kuzma, Democratic candidate for the state senate against Stachowwski, and Jim Ostrowski, author of the tea party movement strategy manual, Direct Citizen Action.

We will give away as door prizes gift certificates to great Buffalo restaurants including Russell’s, Salvatores, Mother’s, Pearl St., Shannon’s Pub, Grapevine, and more.

Admission is ten dollars. Kids under 18 are free if accompanied by an adult.

The Coalition has a limited number of tables available for vendors, candidates and community groups for $50.

Billionaire limousine liberal Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg, whose many zealotries include anti-gun and anti-tobacco showed his truly violent nature when he said he told Gov. David Paterson, “’Get yourself a cowboy hat and a shotgun. If there’s ever a great video, it’s you standing in the middle of the New York State Thurway saying, you know, ‘Read my lips — the law of the land is this, and we’re going to enforce the law.’ Bloomberg obviously found one good purpose for guns in his mind, put the guns in the hands of the state to force the American Indian tribes in New York State to act as tobacco tax collectors for what they know is a dysfunctional and corrupt foreign government in which their sovereign territories are surrounded.
Bloomberg’s radical liberal agenda is transparent though; he’s less interested in tax collection than he is in using oppressive taxation to tax tobacco out of existence for his Utopian state. Bloomberg’s whole stratagem for forcing the little people to not eat, drink or smoke anything he does not like is to ban it, if you can’t outright ban it then use the power of taxation to destroy it. Bloomberg like many other authoritarian liberals of his kind is insensitive to the poverty and suffering that would be caused by his social engineering schemes, instead remains fixated on the imagined benefits outweighing the collateral damage.

The mayor, who has supported higher cigarette tax levels to encourage people to stop smoking, brushed aside Seneca claims that the collection efforts will cost jobs in the region. “Yea, the cigarettes are killing our people,’” Bloomberg said in response to the job argument.

What a creep!

News Sources:
Buffalo News
NY Daily News

Carl Paladino recently sent out an email blasting opponents of the Bass Pro project. While I support Carl for governor, I take strong exception to his support for a project that involved tens of millions of dollars of illegal cash grants to corporations.

The Boston Tea Party in 1773 was in essence a protest against mercantilism, a regime in which the government granted monopoly power to favored corporations.

The Tea Party movement of 2009 was also in large measure a protest against corporatism and corporate welfare.

Carl Paladino has based his campaign on the support of the tea party movement yet he openly and brazenly supports corporate welfare programs, not as a private developer but now as a candidate for governor.

I am not going to re-argue the case against corporate welfare here. That’s not the point. I have done that many times elsewhere. It’s a no-brainer that corporate welfare is a great evil that corrupts the political process and has a negative impact on the economy. The point here is to point out the contradiction between Carl’s views on Bass Pro and his active pursuit of tea party votes and support.

Carl has to make a choice here. He can’t have it both ways.

One more thing Carl. Larry Quinn is a member of the political class whose fingerprints are all over many failed projects in Buffalo in the last thirty years. Guys like Quinn are not the solution to our problems. They are the problem!

I will be hosting Buffalo Uncensored again today at 11am to noon.

WECK 1230 AM Buffalo.

Listen live here.

Guests will include Free NY’s Paulette Peterson.

Feel free to call in. 716.783.WECK

Update: Here’s the Buffalo News story.

For the last three days, I tried a case in NY State Supreme Court to keep the odious Louise Slaughter’s opponent, Eddie Egriu, on the Democratic primary ballot. Though I generally kicked the crap out of the high-priced law firm representing the Kentucky carpetbagger (Nixon Peabody from Rochester), in the end, we lost. To understand why, read this essay.

But I don’t want to bore you with the arcane legal details. Suffice it to say that the Election Law is designed to screw challengers and it does so magnificently.

But get this. Louise had seven government employees working on her case and appearing at trial. A young male staffer was sitting at the counsel table for three days and six Erie County Board of Elections workers testified that they did investigative work (without a license) for Louise.

This is one of the classic advantages the political class has–they can shift sinecures from fake jobs to political work and use generous leave and vacation policies so they are technically not “working” while doing political work. But who is paying the freight anyway? The taxpayer.

So, what Louise did was take your money and spend it to make sure you didn’t get a choice in the upcoming election.

And for that, I nominate Louise Slaughter the political class scoundrel of the month.

OK, government programs are designed to “beat the market.” That’s what so-called “progressivism” is, the notion that the government can out-perform the market, the sum total of all voluntary choices by the 6.8 billion people on the planet. (Fat chance!)

So now we have a myriad of government programs designed to do such and such but people are still people. They will seek their own goals in their own ways. My theory is that “waste, fraud and abuse” is simply the result of the failure of government bureaucracy to stamp out market forces.

For example, people on unemployment are supposed to be busy working for a job. Most game the system for the six-month paid vacation. That’s waste, fraud and abuse. There is no way to eliminate it unless you change human nature, or simply create a free market.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Janice Volk for Congress
www.janiceforcongress.com
media@janiceforcongress.com
(607) 661-8886

Volk Will Seek the Tea Party Line for Congress

Cuba, New York. August 8, 2010. Janice Volk announced today that she will circulate petitions for a “Tea Party” line for Congress in the 29th district. “I want to give the voters a choice,” Volk said, “the same choice that Tom Reed took away from them by challenging my Republican petitions.” Reed, the endorsed Republican candidate admitted Saturday that his supporters had knocked Volk off the Republican primary ballot using technicalities such as voters listing their village instead of town on the petition.

“All across the country, the Republican machine has been at war with the tea party movement or trying to co-opt it,” Volk said. “It’s time to draw a line in the sand and say, enough! I will do my best to collect the necessary signatures (3500) to put a Tea Party line on the ballot in November and I dare Mr. Reed to try to knock the Tea Party off the ballot.

When asked about why his supporters filed a challenge to Volk’s petitions, Reed said, “The rules are the rules.” Volk’s reply: “That’s probably what King George said when he heard about the Boston Tea Party. Two can play that game. ‘The rules’ say I can run as the Tea Party candidate and I intend to do so.”

Tea Party Coalition of WNY

Allen Coniglio, Chair
ilkitty@roadrunner.com
teapartycoalitionwny.com
(716) 435-8918

Buffalo, NY. August 6, 2010. The Tea Party Coalition (WNY) is hosting the Taste of Freedom, a day-long freedom fest on Saturday, August 21st from noon to 8pm at Potts Banquet Hall, 694 South Odgen, Buffalo, NY.

There will be eight hours of live music, great ethnic food, activities for kids, book signings, and an opportunity for tea partiers to meet candidates for public office.

Performers will include: Steve Balesteri, Ashley Amoia, Dave Nolf, and Chris Norman.

Admission is ten dollars. Kids under 18 are free if accompanied by an adult.

The Coalition has a limited number of tables available for vendors, candidates and community groups for $50.

Get the backstory here.

I will handling the duties for the radio show Buffalo Uncensored tomorrow (Thursday) at 11am to noon.

Dave DiPietro will be off the air due to his campaign for state senate.

WECK 1230 AM Buffalo.

Listen live here.

I have no guest tomorrow so feel free to call in. 716.783.WECK

Topics may include:

Bass Pro
The Pork Lawsuit
The upcoming primaries
Political machines.

I hope to continue Dave’s (and Carl Paladino’s before him) approach of uninhibited bashing of the political class.

I hope to have an open door policy for any serious candidate for office this year.

Who the hell is Larry Quinn to issue ultimatums to the Buffalo Council to sell land to his state-controlled authority?

Buffalo will never progress until we run people like Quinn out of town on a rail.

This guy has his fingerprints on numerous major failures in Buffalo: The Theater District, the Hyatt, The Arena and Bass Pro.

Now, this arrogant prick says he’s losing patience with the Council.

Screw you Larry!

This 26,000-word essay was published in Political Class Dismissed in 2004. It is published today on the web for the first time. I should have put it online years ago.

Why now? It makes a good companion to this piece on “America’s Ruling Class.” Also, its discussion of political machines is timely since some members of the tea party movement don’t seem to understand why we cannot play ball with the GOP machine.

Enjoy, and pass it along.

What’s Wrong With Buffalo: A Rothbardian Analysis

by James Ostrowski

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

~ H.L. Mencken

The wheels of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

~ old English proverb

Note: This essay was prepared in connection with a lecture the author gave at the 20th Anniversary of the Ludwig von Mises Institute [1] in October, 2002. It was published in Political Class Dismissed: Essays Against Politics (2004). The views expressed are the opinions of the author and are based on the facts stated within.

Introduction

When economist Murray Rothbard died in 1995, William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote a mean-spirited “obituary,” the upshot of which was that Rothbard died “huffing and puffing” with “as many disciples as David Koresh.” Buckley’s gift of prophecy is no better than Mr. Koresh’s was. Eight years later, while Buckley yet lives, Buckleyism is fading; while Rothbard is gone, Rothbardianism thrives. Rothbard has prevailed over Buckley in the war for the future as there are thousands of young and bright Rothbardians and Buckley’s influence is waning. Rothbard’s success can be seen today in three websites devoted to his ideas: Mises.org, LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com. All three are among the most popular political websites in the world, and growing fast. These websites and the Mises Institute’s other publications have been gracious enough to publish over seventy of my articles.

I want to thank Lew Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker for their heroic efforts in preserving and expanding Misesian and Rothbardian thought, and for allowing me to participate in this celebration. Mises’s fellow Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek said that in politics, the worst rise to the top. Conversely, the best have risen to the top in anti-politics. I have had the fortune, and sometimes misfortune, of working for, in or with most of the major libertarian institutions, publications and organizations and I can assure you that the Mises Institute is the best of the lot. They are unwilling to abandon or modify their beliefs for monetary, political, or personal advantage. Can a higher compliment be paid to a think tank?

Lew Rockwell suggested the original title for this essay – “Rothbardian Lawyer Confronts the State” – and as I pondered that title, I realized that he wanted a personal statement from me, a statement about how Rothbard’s philosophy has influenced me in my life and career. Taking that concept even further, I came to see that the corpus of Rothbardian thought went a long way toward explaining and making sense of many of my own experiences in law and politics, both before and after becoming a libertarian. Finally, and in a broader historical context, I realized that the general outline of the sad recent history of my hometown can only be explained from a Rothbardian framework. After all, I had discovered that framework in my search for an explanation of that sad history.

Having what some psychologists would call a “scientist-type” personality, I suppose I always thought I came by libertarian views through pure cogitation; through the use of “geometric logic,” in Captain Queeg’s [2] famous term. Looking back on it now, though, I can see there was always an emotional component, a personal factor. Yes, the logic was there, but what prepared me to see and accept it while others passed?

More

Almost all of the commentary and reporting of Bass Pro pulling out of Buffalo misses the point.

I wish I had time to present the complete picture here but I don’t, so let me summarize.

This is a huge defeat for the political class and the plutocrats.

Frankly, I can’t recall another defeat they have suffered EVER.

This is a gigantic failure for Brian Higgins but the media is allowing him to get away with it as is his sleepy opponent for Congress.

The Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation is a cash-machine and money-laundering operation for the political class and plutocrats.

This is the central point and if you don’t understand this, you understand nothing about Bass Pro.

This isn’t about land use planning but the nature of the regime that runs and rules and ruins Buffalo, the Corporate State.

The favored form of government of the Corporate State is the public authority, since it gives them public power with zero accountability and little disclosure.

Example, no outsider knows how the board of ECHDC was appointed. I have no doubt the media never even asked!

I asked, BTW, and got no response from the Governor.

Cash machine you say? Yes, public dollars go in and public dollars go out to private interests often connected to the board or power brokers but we know little about the whos and hows and whys and again, the media, often employed by the very same power brokers, never asks. Then, money flows back to the politicians from the special interests that got ECHDC cash in the form of campaign contributions.

That’s why Higgins has $800,000 more than his sleepy opponent.

Thus, ECHDC is Brian Higgins’ cash machine!!!!

Capiche?

Brian made a colossal policy error in backing the creation of ECHDC, then conning us into thinking it would be locally-controlled. Again, no one in the media caught the fib–I did.

Public authorities are a horrendous form of government as I explained here. A public authority ruined the waterfront in the first place–NFTA!

But Brian helped put our waterfront at the mercy of a corporation in Manhattan.

BRIAN HIGGINS IS A CATASTROPHE FOR BUFFALO! WAKE UP PEOPLE!

As for why it takes so long to get anything done about here, I explained that here. I’m tired of explaining this over and over again to the city that never learns anything.

Book Review: Direct Citizen Action: How We Can Win the Second American Revolution Without Firing a Shot
Posted by: sccriley1123 on: July 31, 2010

I recently purchased and read the book Direct Citizen Action by James Ostrowski. This book lays out many of the foundational principles of what has happened to our country and details things that we, as regular American citizens, can do to fight the monster that has been created – in Ostrowski’s words, “…win the second American Revolution without firing a shot.” Ostrowski does this clearly and concisely, purposefully keeping his statements as brief as he can in order to keep the length of the book short. In this way he has maximized any activist’s potential use of the book by keeping the cost of the book low; he has also held the potential reader’s interest by keeping to the point.

More

Apparently, there’s no video of this magnificent performance. What a tragedy.

You have to imagine the multiple standing o’s at the end.

I love Sinatra, but Judy ate his lunch that night. The two best singers of the century.