~ Thomas Jefferson, 1774

For at least 40 years, modern proponents minarchy and anarchy have argued that we can eliminate many, if not all government functions and replace them with self-governance. Some do this by appealing to the imagination of their audiences. Robert Heinlein was particularly good at this. Some have chronicled current and past attacks on liberty to which government inevitably turns.

A wide variety of proposals have been offered as a means to fashion freer societies including the creation of new political parties. Some have even acted upon this advice. The Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Peace and Freedom, Reform and many other parties have been formed over the last 40 years. Government responded exactly like one should expect. It crafted laws making it nearly impossible for the new parties to effectively compete.

Some have argued over the very morality of voting. Some suggest that voting a certain way will promote liberty. However, very few writers in the modern era have suggested that we may have all of the tools we require to drastically reduce the size and scope of government without ever casting a vote.

Whether or not you are philosophically inclined toward libertarianism or anarchy, it’s hard not to agree that voting for politicians has been an unmitigated disaster if you measure success by limitations placed on government as a result. I speak from a particularly American perspective, but I think this statement could apply anywhere. If it is the U.S. federal government or a particular state, the size and scope of government continues to increase. Other than the possibility of catastrophic failure, the horizon does not indicate a change in this trend. The U.S. Debt is now at 94% of its GDP.

We have witnessed in recent months the growth in anti-government sentiment that even the mainstream media can’t ignore but that our elected officials ignore with apparent impunity.

Voting is the least effective way to affect change. Legislatures react slowly to objections against tyranny that they haven’t created and even slower to that which they have. In Texas for instance, the legislature meets only once every other year. When a bad law is passed, Texans have to wait two years for a repeal, “reform” or nullification assuming that elections netted lawmakers inclined to provide relief. I’m not sure this has ever happened in Texas’ history.

In the meantime, several hundred citizens may have been prosecuted and punished while her citizens wait for another election cycle. The examples are almost too numerous to list where voters have attempted to change policy only to find that the politicians are not so inclined once in office. 1994, a year that seemed to hold so much promise, proved to be another bait and switch. It produced a republican majority in the House of Representatives arriving by way of anti-government sentiment prevalent at the time. But the results were a major disappointment. Despite promises to balance the budget and reduce spending, government continued to grow at an alarming rate.

Apologies for the negative waves, but the discussion surrounding voting is itself a red herring. The framers of our government never intended voting to be as important as its modern-day proponents and antagonists suggest.

It is fashionable to say that the Constitution created a government replete with “checks and balances” but it is probably better to characterize them as safety valves. For instance, impeachment. Ben Franklin described impeachment as a way to prevent assassinations. Pressure, release. Each body of government was to have its own distinct duties but in case tyranny were to flourish, safety valves were added to reduce the necessity of violence as remedy.

The 6th amendment to the constitution was one such safety valve. It states simply:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

The word jury, at the time this amendment was drafted, had a far different meaning than it is accorded today. The first instructions given a jury by a Supreme Court of the United States were delivered by then Justice John Jay (yes, a jury trial in the Supreme Court):

“It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision…you have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." ~ State of Georgia vs. Brailsford (3 Dall 1).

In reading dictionaries of that era, you will find that John Jay was not inventing something out of thin air. A Jury was defined as a body of men who were expected to judge both the law and the facts in criminal cases. In fact, by the time that Jay gave these instructions, the jury’s role as judge of law and fact had already seen it’s five hundredth birthday come and go.

Rather than leave the citizens naked against legislatures intent on “reducing us to slavery," the jury provides an immediate and legal means to strike down unjust laws and repudiate prosecutors and judges who have used just laws to persecute their constituents. This was deliberate and intentional.

“I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” ~ Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Paine, 1789.

This speaks directly to just whom is empowered to interpret the constitution. The jury is not only a wonderful backstop to belligerent legislatures and prosecutors, but also against judges who presume to interpret the constitutions in a way contrary to common sense and reason. Clearly, Jefferson at least, never intended that the interpretation of our constitutions be limited to judicial review. Reading the intent any other way is to employ circular reasoning; the authority to judge the legitimacy of government actions is the sole authority of government itself.

Statists assert that only the Supreme Court and its district subordinates decide what is and isn’t constitutional. If you thought voting was slow to change government’s direction, how about waiting up to 12 years as your case travels up the district and circuit court food-chain before it is heard by the SCOTUS? And maybe then only to be told that the government is allowed to deny your rights by way of some invented “compelling interest."

No. That was never the intended outcome.

If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant’s natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.” ~ Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone

Consider that the right to have your case placed in front of a jury is, ipso facto, the right to sit on juries. Today we tend to dread the summons for jury duty. It takes time. Some cases have been known to take months. In fact, you will see quite a few libertarian types brag that the way to get out of jury duty is to simply declare that you know your rights. It’s true. Judges and prosecutors wither from juries aware of their rights. And they will do anything, including lying to your face, to prevent you from exercising your prerogative.

From the inception of the United States until 1895, courts as a routine informed the juries that they had a right and duty to judge the law as well as the facts. In 1895, that changed dramatically. In Sparf and Hansen v. United States, the Supreme Court addressed jury nullification directly for the first and only time. The court acknowledged that the jury had the right to judge the law, but it also ruled that judges didn’t have to inform them of this right. And the judges and prosecutors rejoiced.

You see, up until that time, a great number of tyrannical designs had been neutered by juries. Slavery, prohibition, sedition laws, death penalties…. all of these and more have been abolished in the jury box. Where the ballot box created such messes, the jury box cleaned them up. The ammo box could afford to gather dust a little longer.

There are scholars lately focused on legislative tools, nullification and interposition. However, these not only rely upon the ballot box, but have also historically been the follow-on to jury nullification rather than a pre-cursor. The legislative nullification of fugitive slave laws came after juries nullified them, rather than before. In essence, the legislatures were merely formalizing what had already been accomplished by jurors rather than leading the charge to erase tyranny.

The same can be said of prohibition, nullified even after judges stopped informing juries of their right to judge law. The final legislative repeal of the 21st amendment was a mere formality. The government found it virtually impossible to convict and thus it went about saving face while throwing in the towel. Can you imagine any similar outcome as a result of voting? If so you have a vivid imagination because such has never happened in our relatively brief history.

“For more than six hundred years — that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 — there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such law.” ~ Lysander Spooner, The Right of Juries

To really understand the principle of individual sovereignty, one only has to examine the history (pdf) of jury nullification. Every principle of self-government is embodied in the act of individuals using common sense and reason to repudiate those who would seek to control them under color of law. Both civil disobedience and its inextricable mate, jury nullification, are all the individual needs to restore the rightful role of government to protect, rather than destroy an individual’s liberty.

Those who complain that we have no tools but for voting or revolution are dead wrong and it’s time to nullify this erroneous thinking. Rather than take to the streets waving cardboard, seekers of liberty should direct themselves post-haste to their nearest court house and volunteer to sit on a jury.

And make no mistake, if the judges and prosecutors are willing to blatantly lie in order to keep you off of a jury, it is not only moral for you to lie your way onto that jury, but your duty should it be required. Because they will lie and when the court reviews the judge’s instructions that a juror may not judge the law, they will not hesitate to find in the judge’s favor.

Do not fret that you live in a community of people who enjoy servitude. It only takes one juror to hang a verdict. If we allow the one effective tool of liberation to be atrophied and marginalized by statists and naysayers, there will be only one option left, and it won’t be a voting booth.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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I picked up my local paper this Sunday only to find a half-dozen “background” articles on the polygamists who have recently been shown what Texas-style hospitality looks like. I was treated to various articles on the history of the group’s leaders and their persecution by state officials in Arizona, Colorado and now finally, Texas. Of course, it wasn’t called persecution. The raid was said to be an act of kindness for young women who are forced to marry against their will. These evil, evil, men, women and children are refusing to bow down to the state and conform to societal norms so they must be punished, apparently.

The raid, executed by machine gun-toting, tank-driving county Sheriffs ripped 416 children away from their mothers so that the State child “protective” services could question them and discover whether or not they were being abused. There are some beginning to question whether the state’s action was itself abuse, but these are like cries in the wilderness.

The entire ordeal was justified by authorities who acted upon a second-hand report of a desperate 16-year-old girl claiming to have been abused by a man who wasn’t even in the state of Texas and hasn’t been for over a year.

“The April 3 raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch was prompted by a call made to a family violence shelter, purportedly by a 16-year-old girl who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. That girl has never been identified.” [emphasis added].

It gets worse. The girl may have actually been 33-year-old Rozita Swinton, who has a history of hysterical calls into authorities which have mobilized them to action in more than one state. You would think that these shocking facts would cause a great deal of embarrassment for Texas law enforcement officials, but it doesn’t seem to have fazed them in the slightest. The judge at the initial arraignment has ordered every child to undergo DNA tests while also separating them from their mothers.

But of course, none of these officials has the decency to be embarrassed. They are counting on the fact that what the FLDS does is unpopular. It doesn’t matter that their warrant was totally unjustified as long as they can count on the media to carry their smears about those they’ve targeted. This is very similar to what happened with Vernon Howell [aka David Koresh] and his church near Waco, TX. We can breathe a little easier since Janet Reno wasn’t anywhere near a place of authority during the raid.

What makes this situation hardest to bear is that the FLDS has a lot to answer for politically. While it may seem that they’re fairly innocent — they just want to practice their religion in peace — they are victimizing us Texans. While I don’t have any problem with people who want to practice polygamy — it’s practiced in many other countries with no apparent ill side-effects — I do have a problem with the way the group makes it possible to sustain this practice financially.

The FLDS church has skirted the polygamy laws — not that the laws are legitimate — by avoiding the marriage license. Fine. The state may not recognize unlicensed marriage, but they also have no legitimate legal authority to turn a religious institution into a “legal” institution. However, the FLDS goes a step further by having the “unwed” mothers apply for state welfare. They don’t just want to live their lifestyle in peace, they want to have the people of the State of Texas pay so that they can afford to maintain so many wives and children.

So my fellow Texans and I get to pay into the system so that Warren Jeffs and his followers can afford to live the kind of life they have designed. In real life, only a very rich man could afford to support 70 or 80 children and multiple wives. The FLDS isn’t really an independent body at all. It cannot survive without the support of the citizens of Texas generous “donations." For this reason, the FLDS should be denied any state help. In fact, rather than a bunch of thugs raiding them, the easiest solution to the “problem” the various states have had with the FLDS would have been eliminated by simply disallowing the welfare payments. The polygamy would either stop immediately because it is not financially feasible or the FLDS would quickly change its tactics.

For instance, in order to ensure that there are enough young women available, younger men born into the groups are routinely expelled. The reason for this is obvious. There aren’t enough women available to provide multiple wives for all of the men, and the other alternative for those men who couldn’t marry, is that they be kept in the group as workers to maintain the lifestyle of the few who get all of the wives.

The young men would leave anyway as there wouldn’t be any benefit in the relationship to themselves. The older men, unable to support their wives, would have to create some income and fast. You have to admit their solution to the age-old problem of supporting multiple wives is novel if not anti-Christian in nature.

The entire situation is a loser for all of us in Texas and the other states where the FLDS operates. Not only are we supporting a lifestyle with which some of us may fundamentally disagree, the press’ reluctance to deal with the legal sham that has occurred is weakening our constitutional system. The general public is being led to believe that forced medical treatment and invasive DNA testing — itself a violation of the 5th amendment right to avoid self-incrimination — is legitimate to protect children even if the original premise for the raid is completely illegitimate.

When you step back and examine what is going on in this case, you can see that we are being conditioned into believing that the rights enumerated in our constitutions are not inviolate as is stated, but totally irrelevant if the state merely acts as if it has authority.

The FLDS case is not just an isolated instance. If the state of Texas can prevail in this terrible attack on liberty against a group that hasn’t much sympathy in the press or public at large, then any “weird” group or family can be targeted with impunity. Unfortunately the state will also bilk the federal taxpayer since the Federal government pays state CPS agencies for every child taken from parents (for whatever reason). Additions to the original Mondale act of 1974, which acted as the blueprint for all state Child Protective agencies, have essentially put a bounty on the heads of all of our children and made doctors, teachers and other health professionals immune from prosecution even if the allegations they make which lead to the taking of children are totally erroneous.

And finally, Texas’ taxpayers get to foot the bill for the hundreds of lawyers who will descend on the courtroom at their expense to “advocate” for the children — as it is called in CPS administrative court parlance. I don’t know if anyone has bothered to tally up what this may cost the taxpayers but it could easily reach 8 figures by the time everything is said and done. And not one of those state-paid lawyers will be arguing that the State’s action is constitutionally unjust. Quite the contrary. They’ll be counseling their “clients” to cooperate and make it easy on everyone.

The once-revered freedom to raise your children to your own standards rather than somebody else’s is going extinct right before our eyes. This situation is a travesty on so many levels it would take a book to cover them in detail. The first, fourth and fifth amendments to the federal constitution are being blatantly ignored as well as the constitution of the once-great State of Texas. If this action is allowed to stand without opposition, where on earth will we go to enjoy freedom as it was envisioned by the authors of our constitutions? The United States was once a beacon to people all around the world because of its dedication to the principles of freedom. If we cannot avert our country’s current heading, it will be no country for free men.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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I recently had an incredible dream. It involved mostly characters I know, but also some I didn’t know. With some dreams, if I even remember them, I rarely know what they “mean” but this one was crystal clear and was a perfect illustration of why empires fall and why its former subjects suffer.

In my dream I was visiting my father, a veteran who served just prior to Viet Nam. The first scene took place during an air show. Because my father’s house (in this dream) had a vantage point to the airfield, we weren’t at the air show but were watching it through a huge picture window. A big, green C-130, retrofitted with newer turbo props had taken off and flown right over the house. It passed so closely that I could see the pilot’s facial expressions as the plane buzzed low over the house. He was followed by a small single-engine Cessna. His pass over us preceded a diving turn into the valley below as preparation for a pass over the airfield behind us.

My father tapped my shoulder and handed me a cable and a pair of binoculars. His hand motions reminded me of a flight attendant’s as he indicated I was to plug the cable into the binoculars. The cable connected into a laptop sitting on a high table. As I looked through the binoculars, the image was being projected onto the laptop’s screen and presumably could have been recorded. I thought it was fairly nifty and went back to peering through the glasses. As the cargo-plane approached on its way back to the airfield, it filled my vision and I was overwhelmed with dread. In a flash, I threw down the glasses and ran toward the door while yelling for everyone to "get out!" I was certain the plane was going to hit the house. My fears were only half-realized. The airplane didn’t crash into the house but instead onto the runway of the airfield. As I ran out the door, I saw that it had passed over the airfield and was turned back toward me. I made it outside just in time to see it explode in a ball of fire. The Cessna pilot appeared to panic. The little single-engine plane abruptly nose-dived into the tarmac as if in exasperation for there was no other course of action.

As I looked on in horror, I could hear my sister and a cousin who has been dead now for almost ten years, sobbing in the background. We turned on the news but the women were not going to have any of that. To have such a tragedy re-told by such blankly-countenanced people after having personally witnessed it would be too immoral to bear. They never said a word really. Their cries only intensified when the television set came on and thus it was immediately turned off.

We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, so we did what any dysfunctional family might do after such an event: we went to the mall. Not just any mall. This was some huge monstrosity that looked more like an amusement park than the traditional, nondescript mall of my youth. As is also typical in such places, the family got separated. Alone and lost, I was soon elated to discover that John McCain was going to have a political rally somewhere in the mall. Maybe I could ask him a question… The ticket masters in my dream were the envy of my waking life. I was able to walk right up to the front of the stage. About 40 people were milling around just as they announced John McCain’s arrival. The dream was so vivid; I could make out the vertebrae through his beige windbreaker as he walked up the short row of stairs to the stage. He moved like he was made of steel rather than flesh. There wasn’t an ounce of spryness in the man and he carried a smirk that could coat your pancakes.

I immediately raised my hand and gave a shout. “Mr. McCain, I have a question, sir. I know you won’t like what I’m about to ask…”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re with that Jason fella from last week,” he replied.

“No," (I was expecting him accuse me of being a Ron Paul supporter) "it’s not that… A while back you mentioned that we might be in Iraq for 100 years. You said that if our boys weren’t getting killed, we shouldn’t mind that we had troops there for even 10,000 years. Well, I was wondering, why shouldn’t we mind? Even if we weren’t losing any soldiers and the Iraqis were delivering flowers to our troops on a daily basis, aren’t we going to be paying the costs of that war and occupation for the years in question? How are we going to afford it?”

As I asked my question, McCain was slowly backing away wearing that fake smile until he was just a person milling at the back of the stage — more like the set of a play. There were building faades around the edges such as you’d see at a Disneyland ride or a themed restaurant. There were other people back-stage and suddenly, John McCain wasn’t addressing the crowd anymore but trying to blend in with the staff. Some slick campaign representative in his 50s, swinging a golf-club as he spoke, stepped up and tried to answer the question and take control of the event. I saw I wasn’t going to get a straight answer and walked away.

I reached for my cell-phone. As I dialed my father’s number, I saw him in the distance standing to put in his ear-bud. Instead of talking, I waved and hung up the phone. My sister found us a bit later at the mall caf with the plastic chairs, though in this case it appeared to be a bit higher class than what you’d find in an average mall. There were big umbrellas protruding from the tables. Anyway, because my father is somewhat of a George Bush fan, and I like my family reunions to be as uncomfortable as possible, I excitedly told him how he had missed the chance to see John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee and terminal Strangelove.

As I relayed what had happened and just as I was getting to McCain’s disappearance, a man I’d never met leaned in to speak at my father’s ear. He was tall, young-looking, had long, blond hair and was wearing a faded blue jump suit. His mustache was thin, of the kind that looks as though it’s been combed over the lip but once arrived at its destination, the individual hairs have lost interest in any solidarity with the others. He talked and chuckled, making sure I would overhear that in a “hundred years” he and my father would be drawing military pensions.

I was incredulous. I looked like I was trying to catch bugs with my open mouth. Finally, through shock and outrage, I was able to blurt out a rejoinder; “In a hundred years, you’ll be dead. That has to be the worst reason I have ever heard to support a war: so you can draw a check!”

I didn’t get to elaborate. The man’s head sank toward his chest as if he was deliberating on a problem. He then stood up and made motions as if he were going to strike a blow. Thinking I could never be flabbergasted twice in such short succession, my mouth dropped open again. I finally managed to say, “Come on, man. You can’t be serious. That’s your idea of fighting words?”

The man blinked, hesitated for a moment and then backed away. He was clearly expecting a different response. I was scared for a moment. When a big man steps up to you like that, the adrenaline flows, but it was so ridiculous, I could only take it half seriously. Of course, it was just a dream. But then, my father, after a short conference, decided he might be more successful. He stepped forward and put up his fists.

I woke up though I was still formulating things to shout at these two men that would let both know how utterly immoral and bizarre their behavior and reasoning. Once I realized that it was a dream, I was a bit disappointed. I was just getting started.

Later, I reflected on the dream’s meaning. It illustrated to me what is most wrong about empires in general and our political situation in the U.S. specifically. The military aircraft represented the empire and the little Cessna the citizenry. The Empire’s crash will be felt by many of us. Those who see a crisis coming and are prepared for it may make it through relatively unscathed. Those who continue to put any stock in the Old Media’s talking heads are in for a shock. The smirking pilot and the smirking politician need no explanation really. Our “leadership” believes that they will not be affected by their decisions and they don’t really care how their poor decisions affect anyone else.

In spite of the fact that we hear a large majority is against foreign meddling, election results tend to indicate that a good number of our citizens have no problem with the Empire’s wars as long as there is some perceived financial benefit. Critics like to put blame on our leaders and characterize certain among them as aberrations. But these leaders are not unlike the society they came from at all. They act in the way that they act because we as individuals generally share their values. We are not sufficiently outraged it would appear to rise up and demand that a different moral compass be applied.

It isn’t as if we’re any different than subjects of the Romans, the Huns, the Mongols or the English. All empires have been filled with domesticated citizens who learned — the hard way — that sitting back idly was just as dangerous as standing up to protest their government’s behavior. The difference was simply when and how the crises unfolded.

My father — he isn’t a violent man but is an authority figure to me — and the other veteran in the dream were representative of those who are willing to use intimidation and fear rather than reason. When you show them that you aren’t scared, they back away. Perhaps they wrongly assume that people like me, who oppose wars of aggression on moral grounds, are in reality opposed to war because we are cowards or perhaps they think that intimidation is the only way to make people “understand” their point of view. Frankly, I believe it is a sign of fear and a lack of confidence in one’s moral and intellectual position to resort to violence or threats in order to make a point.

Where personal intimidation techniques represent the virtual microcosm, the macro of the same behavior is represented in our foreign policies. The one difference is that the unafraid opponent is not given any quarter. I fear that Iran, a beautiful country, will be ruined by people who could never imagine that their actions are wrong or immoral. They are in the throes of executing a plan and behave exactly as would John Dewey’s Pragmatists in these situations. Their idea of a “greater good” — knowingly or unwittingly false — renders morality an irrelevant artifact.

As I reflected on this, I became very thankful for the people who have embraced the moral view and refused to use intimidation or fear — men and women dedicated to peace and freedom who lead by example. I still maintain a great deal of hope for the Ron Paul Revolution. This nation has to turn from ways that have failed us all. We will either be forced into this, or make a conscious and deliberate decision to do so. More than likely the criminal policies of the economic central planners in Washington and New York will be the cause for our epiphany. Whatever happens, I’m convinced that there is a very motivated and dedicated minority that still values freedom. If we have to face catastrophe in order to rise once again as a peaceful and prosperous nation, then I am happy to remain in the company of dreamers who propelled Ron Paul’s candidacy these past months.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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My fellow patriots,

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Have you ever had the wind knocked out of you? I don’t know that everyone has experienced it but I bet a lot of you have if you were ever athletically active. Nothing in your respiratory system seems to work, you can’t even convulse properly and after what seems an age your body’s unconscious mechanics take over. Ironically, it may be that your inability to breathe had more to do with your conscious effort to control your breathing than your spasming diaphragm.

Many things along life’s path are like that. Too much thinking and even the simplest things become harder. Many spiritual leaders have tried to teach us how to make our so-called rational minds just be quiet for some period of time to get closer to that which brought us life. It isn’t easy. If it were easy, people wouldn’t spend much of their lives perfecting the practice of meditation and prayer in an attempt to drive out that constantly chattering inner voice. In my head the chatter is often doubt disguised as reason. It’s that cosmopolitan intellectual in this uneducated brain that says, “You know, you’re going to make a fool of yourself by being optimistic. You’ll never have any real credibility by being unrealistic about things. The powers that be aren’t going to allow you to have what you want. They have a plan and they have more resources than you. You are deluding yourself.”

Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. While our federal Leviathan has seemed to suck up more resources than we can ever provide it, those who run it are not resourceful. They don’t even come close to what a group of motivated individuals possessing ingenuity can achieve. Can anyone look at what has been accomplished this year and fail to marvel? You all should be so proud of what has been accomplished. Sometimes I’ve wondered how it could get any better and then “something better” happens. As optimistic as I have been, the reality has exceeded my optimism.

How the rest of this primary season fleshes out remains to be seen. One thing I have noticed time and time again is the symbiotic relationship between Dr. Paul and his supporters. When he’s down, the revolution lifts him up. And when we’re down, he sticks out his hand. I’m convinced that Dr. Paul’s invitation to CPAC this year was due to your accomplishments. At every event, supporters of Dr. Paul have shown an incredible solidarity and enthusiasm that has been the envy of every other candidate.

Dr. Paul’s recent speech to CPAC attendees (after having been snubbed for the past 10 conventions) was one of the best he’s delivered this year. It rivals the speech he made at the Iowa Straw Poll. As I watched it, I came to the realization that I am truly blessed to be alive at this time in our history and to witness quite possibly the bravest man alive. In spite of the superlative, I don’t think I am exaggerating.

CPAC would normally be a fairly hostile environment to Dr. Paul in recent years, but you know that he has no problem walking right into the lion’s den and preaching truth to power. He never backs down and he never gives in. That speech in Iowa was a great example of this but so was his performance at the Values Voters debate and its follow-up convention and straw poll.

And boy did he ever speak truth to power at CPAC. Let’s face it, the credibility of the conservative movement has taken quite a beating since 1994. People who have supported a blatant disregard for constitutional and conservative principles in the name of pragmatic politics can’t be too proud about where conservatism stands at the moment. Look at what they’ve had to defend. Laying aside the wars, we have torture, blatant disregard for enumerated rights and proscriptions found in our Constitution and a looming financial catastrophe brought on by total failure in monetary policy and fiscal responsibility. Most of this occurred while the Republicans occupied majorities in both houses of Congress and the White House.

This speech came after the loss on Super Tuesday and the announcement by Mitt Romney that he was bowing out of the race. Frankly, I think that Romney’s “suspension” of the campaign may be a clever ploy. McCain is not well-liked and if he fails to galvanize the conservatives in the upcoming primaries and caucuses, Romney might think he can, without spending another dime, walk into the national convention as a potential savior.

There are still 20 states left to decide. The CPAC speech and the gnawing reality amongst conservatives that a McCain nomination ensures a Hillary Presidency (not that the media and Clinton backers would want to orchestrate something like that) could be a large factor in what happens from here on out. Conservatives have just one real conservative to support. What is disheartening about the “vote for a winner” mentality is that it is clearly what has put us in the mess we are in today and it is the single largest hurdle we as Ron Paul supporters have to face.

Who really thought that Bob Dole was the conservative nominee who could cut Bill Clinton’s presidency to one term? Nobody, that’s who. But instead of backing any of the real conservatives, people picked the person who was more likely to get the GOP nomination. They didn’t even look past the primaries to the general election. It was very short-sighted and demonstrated an utter lack of wisdom if not a contempt for true conservative principles. There is nothing pragmatic about picking a non-conservative “winner” who has no chance to sway a majority of voters in the general election. Expect Dr. Paul to point this out when he speaks at the GOP Convention.

Yes. I believe he will be speaking at the GOP national convention. That is because I believe in you as much as I believe in Dr. Paul. We are Ron Paul. I also believe that it’s possible to obtain the nomination at a brokered convention even though the conventional wisdom promotes the opposite view.

I try to stay up on the rules but I am not clear on what happens to Romney’s so-called delegates. Let’s remember that even now, no delegates have been chosen to attend the GOP’s national convention. If I’m not mistaken, the only delegates chosen so far are those elected at West Virginia’s state convention on Super Tuesday. And three of those, by a brokered deal, have been committed to Dr. Paul.

Dr. Paul’s latest communiqu to us has put this election into our hands. He’s pairing back the staff and getting them out of your way. What happens from here on out is completely up to you. I believe that you’ll rise to the occasion. While a large majority of the Republican apparatus has treated Ron Paul as if he had a contagious disease, he has bravely defended the constitution and his oath. Now the hardest part of our battle comes and it is up to us to prove we can match Dr. Paul’s courage and work ethic.

But let’s go ahead and imagine that the goal of getting Ron Paul the nomination fails. Staying in this fight to the “end” is crucial. The upcoming county and state conventions do far more than just select delegates. It is at these smaller conventions where the platforms are drafted and party leaders are chosen. A select few will become the future leaders of the Republican party and will guide it for the next decade and beyond. What better ranks to chose from than the Ron Paul Revolution? Where will the GOP’s money be spent? Will that money be directed towards the same country club republicans who have been driving the party since the Nixon era, or will it be directed to support those candidates who would work to restore our liberties?

The answer is obvious and thus our responsibility is clear. We must do everything in our power to eke out a Ron Paul nomination. By doing so, we will be securing our future and the future of our children even if we fail at that one task. What fun it will be to utterly stun the Old Media which thinks that it can black us out. Hold fast my friends. We are in for the drive of our lives. We must talk to everyone, in person, about Dr. Paul and the message of freedom he has championed. How we reach people is up to us. I have faith in you and your ability to devise even more astounding ways to promote the message of freedom. You have been doing this for a year now and look what it has wrought; Faith, hope and love.

Yours in freedom,
Rick Fisk

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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As long as I have been a libertarian, the Libertarian party has been running candidates in the national elections resulting in 1—2% poll results on election days. As the years passed, it has become difficult to spin these results in a positive light. But now comes a libertarian who knows how to get elected and has already achieved the equivalent of the Holy Grail for many libertarians: getting elected and speaking truth to power in a national forum. Why then has Ron Paul found his most vocal opponents from within the very ranks of the libertarians?

If you are a bit disheartened by the media blackout and smears by beltway “libertarians” and Republican these past weeks, lighten up. The smears have been dispatched handily and the “think-tanks” and their publications are being seen for what they are: libertine tabloids whose writers have abandoned all propriety and credibility in a desperate attempt to maintain the status quo. None has been more discredited than the New Republic. Thanks to Justin Raimondo, the New Republic may have learned an old lesson about sending a boy to do a man’s job. Rudy Giuliani has learned the same lesson. After taking on Ron Paul in one of the early debates, he landed in the dustbin of the 2007/8 campaign season along with Fred Thompson, Alan Keyes, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson, and Sam Brownback.

It is becoming abundantly clear that many of the so-called libertarian pundits promoted libertarian ideas (so-called) so long as there wasn’t a chance that they’d actually be enacted. They were arguing for the sake of argument. Now that it looks like there is a real possibility that some of these radical ideas are being embraced by a motivated and active group of individuals, they’re doing everything they can to stop them, including advocacy of the President’s perpetual power to spy on U.S. citizens. Imagine that! You could shake your head and feel bad about it but it’s truly a cause for joy. Everywhere you look, statists are tipping their hands out of desperation thanks to Ron Paul. It just sort of unfolds and the corrupting influence of Washington D.C comes into focus. There are very few friends of liberty who have spent any time in Washington. But it isn’t just Washington. The centers of power in the states are also being exposed as belligerent to the people.

In Louisiana, the establishment there still refuses to acknowledge that Ron Paul has probably won the caucuses there. This after doing everything it could to disqualify the slate of Ron Paul delegates arriving at the contest. The second place finish in Nevada was ignored by the Old Media while being hailed as a turning point for Romney but if you look a little deeper, you will find that the grass roots there knew the rules and beat the “front-runners” at the real political game, not the one presented to us by the Old Media.

In some states, like West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia, Dr. Paul’s supporters have been very busy to the open dismay of the GOP establishment. The Ron Paul revolution has already this year proven detractors utterly and totally wrong. So, why not the rest of the year? The Old Media insisted that New Hampshire and Iowa would decide the nominee; however, they are but two states and neither are particularly representative of the nation at large, nor are they loaded with delegates. In fact, the Iowa caucuses didn’t commit any delegates for the national convention. The real delegates won’t be determined until June. A lot can happen between now and June.

Personally, I can find no reason not to remain very optimistic about Ron Paul’s chances. If they were as slim as the Old Media keeps pretending, there would be no need to produce smears or institute black-outs. They continue to torpedo their own credibility. Some cynics still believe the pundits when they claim that Dr. Paul just doesn’t have a shot in the same sentences which expresses amazement at the campaign’s achievements. If you remember, the mantra after that famous exchange last May between Rudy Giuliani and Dr. Paul was that Dr. Paul couldn’t get 2% of the vote if he paid people to vote for him. At that time, polling reflected the fact that he had little name recognition beyond those who have followed his career these past 30 years, yet he’s now polling as high as 12% in some states.

But the bar for "failure" keeps being raised. Now that is just hilarious. What most people measure as success, the Old Media says is failure. The same people who claim that what we witness in their contrived debates is serious barely reaches the level of petty squabbling.

The establishment is sweating profusely. Ron Paul is their worst nightmare. This becomes more evident each day as one observes the tactics they use and the poor effect of these tactics as evidenced by the growing talent pool signing on with the campaign. Dr. Paul has hired a new national media director, a new national political director, has built a formidable economic team and has been gathering more high-profile endorsements.

None of this would have been possible without the grassroots and this won’t change. Don’t expect the Old Media ever to play along, though. It won’t happen. There will be no magic moment where the Old Media starts treating Ron Paul like a serious person and we can breathe a sigh of relief, have a cup of coffee and sink back into the couch. Sorry, but the Old Media is never going to give you the slightest help in this endeavor unless you buy the ads. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ron Paul elected only to have the Old Media, if they can hold out financially until the inauguration, ignore the election, refuse to show up to the inauguration or even refuse to cover subsequent press conferences out of protest. We’ve just got to quit putting any credence in what Old Media members do and say. They’ve been wrong, they will continue to be wrong, and their influence wanes.

But this was never about taking a pill and having everything magically work out in our favor. Even after Dr. Paul is sworn in, there is a mountain of largess to erode and almost an entire Congress to kick out on its ear. The people we are seeking to depose have a lot of power and influence so our rows are tough to hoe. But our task is not impossible, and every setback so far has been turned into a positive lesson. By the way, did you know that in Maryland the supporters there have 6 Ron Paul candidates running for Congress?

I personally believe that the reason some have expressed a lack of confidence in the past few weeks is because they realize the importance of this election and what is at stake. Anything other than total victory has attracted cynicism. Of course, this is exactly what the Old Media has been practicing; resorting to the same is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are one of those people, hold fast. That cliché about the blackness before dawn is also a truism. The level of effort that is being exerted to minimize Dr. Paul’s chances is itself evidence of just how viable he is as a candidate. George Washington lost a battle or two but then learned, regrouped and led his troops to victory over the most powerful nation in the world at that time.

We are involved in a historic battle that has raged for as long as there have been civilizations and governments. It is now up to us to crank up the volume, reach deep down into our pocketbooks and step out onto the curbs of our neighborhoods — the very places these allegedly powerful elite will never set foot — and take our country back. The Ron Paul nightmare is coming to a town near you and soon. Don’t forget to have fun. This is our country and we’re taking it back, precinct by precinct.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Open Letters

Reality for you, Old Media representatives and executives, is self-fulfilling. That is, the reality broadcast through the airwaves and printed on dead wood has for so long influenced the way that the general public perceives reality, it has become inconceivable that a time would come when your pictures and words would no longer drive public opinion.

I am writing this to you as a final warning. That time has already arrived. Whether or not Dr. Paul threw his hat in the ring, it was inevitable. With the advent of the Internet, people from all over the world, able to tell their own stories and reflect their own perceptions to willing eyes and ears, have provided an awakening and shake at the very foundations of what you currently perceive to be reality.

When your advertising agencies began collecting demographic information and targeting consumers as collective groups who thought as one, that was the beginning of the end for you. When our own government started aiding and abetting this collectivism through expanded census — defying the very nature and intent of a census — the demise of media influence was propelled further. Your agencies and marketing professionals kept refining the data, methods and messages you directed toward these groups until we, who were once just open-mouthed consumers, have finally slipped through your fingers.

I was there when it began as were many of my colleagues — when the “Internet” was a few land-line-connected mainframes via 300-baud modems and the government’s idea of electronic mail was less timely than the U.S. Postal service. Its development began slowly. In 1986, we were still using UUCP to send each other messages over the Internet and USENET to broadcast our opinions to anyone who could subscribe. In 1991, the web browser and HTTP arrived. Your reporting of this occurred only in those papers and television programs directed toward that demographic of college-educated geeks whom you thought cared about such things. You certainly didn’t cover it as the earth-shattering, reality-altering event that it was.

Tim Berners-Lee’s contribution to the Internet (and those who have refined HTTP) was as important as Gutenberg’s creation of the practical printing press. But you really didn’t see it coming. Had the general population conformed to the reality you were broadcasting and printing at the time, we’d probably never have moved from zero to 100 billion worth of e-commerce per year in the U.S. by the time 16 years had passed.

Now, once again, we are at a time when you are witnessing history but are not aware of its significance. I’m talking about the Ron Paul Revolution.

Consider this: In 1991, the general population in the U.S. was not favorable to gun control. About 42% of the population favored a ban on handguns. But propaganda that you produced and published promoted the idea that the second amendment was an anachronism in this modern age and actually a danger to society. By 1993 53% favored gun control. Your coverage and commentary of high-profile shooting crimes and dubious opinion polls helped to solidify the view that gun control was a national desire and thus the Brady Bill finally made it through Congress. This was similar to what happened leading up to the Gun Control Act of 1934. Old Media characterization of Chicago’s mob wars helped to give Congress the public support to pass, in direct violation of the constitution, the first national gun-control law. In 1993, most of the gun-crimes were committed by the hands of criminals profiting from drug prohibition but the sensational “postal” incidents were what carried the news day.

Finally, on April 19, 1993, 84 men, women and children were burned to death at the hands of Federal Police, ostensibly to enforce provisions of the 1934 law and its revisions of 1968. Most of you in the Old Media still do not realize what a galvanizing event this was. On its ten-year anniversary, you were still publishing already-rebutted stories in an attempt to justify the Federal Government’s actions.

In 2007, when the Virginia Tech gunman killed so many, your polls showed that a majority of the respondents were in complete opposition to any gun control measures as a response to that tragic event. What happened? The Internet happened. Between 1994 and 2007, pro-second amendment writers, both professional and amateur, made their case for the constitution and the wisdom of the founding fathers. For many, re-doubled efforts were fueled by Waco. And Ron Paul stood alone in Congress during many of those years defying the status quo and defending the constitution.

The same sort of thing occurred in 1776. The Boston Massacre, a galvanizing, violent event, occurred six years before Thomas Paine’s Common Sense propelled a small band of freedom-seekers into a formidable movement which finally freed itself from the chains of the British Empire. You can look back on the years leading up to the colonist’s war with the British and see some amazing similarities to what is occurring today.

When the Old Media was new, before the collectivist targeting of people as “consumers” and when ordinary colonists were printing their own newspapers, a Revolution had begun. The colonists were the subjects of a tyrannical empire which continued to erode their liberties and fortunes in order to prosecute unnecessary and belligerent wars; enriching Rulers who had little or no concern for their subject’s interests.

Men, women and children from varied political and religious backgrounds grew tired of the tyrants who wished to rule them and banded together to promote liberty and independence. They produced an amazing variety of artifacts to promote these ideas and to turn public opinion to their way of thinking. Silver flatware engraved with pro-Liberty images, paintings, drawings, poems, songs, tea sets, signs, pamphlets, letters, quilts and flags. The ingenuity, optimism and apparently inexhaustible enthusiasm made the revolution’s success possible.

And so, while you keep scratching the surface and proclaiming that we are just a bunch of kooks and geeks who spend all of our time on the Internet, we, the modern revolutionaries, are also engaging in the same sorts of activities as did our predecessors. We’ve written poems, songs, and pamphlets. We’ve produced videos, radio shows and newspaper ads. We’ve launched a blimp, painted signs on barns, houses and cars. We’ve raised 10 million dollars in two one-day fund raising events. We’ve put our candidate in the top-tier of fund raising. We’ve voted him the top contender in almost every Internet poll, in more than half of the straw-polls held around the country and have mobilized over 80,000 volunteers (and growing) for the cause of liberty.

We’ve organized rallies in every state, many of which have been attended by thousands of real-life individuals who crave freedom and still you keep pretending that we’re going to fizzle out or simply go away, embarrassed by defeat, when in fact we’re enjoying a healthy and steady rate of growth.

While you’ve rejected change and cling to your old ways, we’ve embraced change. When you tried to tell us about the “new economy” we recognized it for what it was: The old Federal Reserve—driven boom-and-bust centrally-planned economy. We’re not buying what you have to sell and in some cases, we’re even shorting your stock and profiting from your demise.

We’re young, old, Republican, Libertarian, Democrat, Anarchist, Green, Constitutionalist, Christian, Muslim, Jews, Atheist, Pagan, homeschooling, no-TV-watching, TV-watching, raw milk-drinking, pasteurized milk-drinking, farmer’s market-shopping, alternative building, single, divorced, 2.5 kid-having, 3-car-having, bicycle-riding, fitness-fanatic, farmer, no-car-having, sedentary, public school—attending, Gay, Straight, Black, Yellow, Red, Brown, White, Man, Woman, child. We’re the demographic group to whom you have never marketed. We believe that we’re smart enough to manage our own affairs and don’t need government hand-outs.

We’re tired of being told about a Social Security trust fund that never existed, a government that is here to help us and an income tax that really, really does make us liable to pay — cross our hearts and hope to die (just don’t read the law please). We’re tired of being treated like children. We treat our own children much better than the bureaucrats, whom you constantly claim have our best interests at heart, treat us.

We’re tired of being told that we should live our lives in fear of people six thousand miles away; who hate us because we’re free, when we aren’t actually free. We’re tired of being told that every encroachment upon our freedoms is justified because the world is “different now.” Different from what? Does our dictator wear a different brand of suit than the one whose country was bombed into oblivion on his orders?

Whether you are yourselves frightened, or you just want us to be frightened, we’re giving up fear.

We. Are. No. Longer. Afraid.

If there is just one message beyond what you find at the surface, take that with you. We’re past fear, we’ve gone beyond cynicism and our apathy has been cured.

Perhaps you could understand if you would only allow yourself one moment to take Dr. Paul’s utterances seriously. However, if you won’t move beyond the surface and won’t take even a moment to imagine what it would be like to live in a truly free society, then you will see your fortunes reversed.

As much as we’d love you to join us, we understand that you may want to cling to the status quo. We apologize for the inconvenience but the status quo just will not do. Allowing a continuance of the status quo will render us all penniless and at the mercy of the same people who are now managing us into bankruptcy.

Yours in Freedom,

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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In the blogosphere recently, there have been a few articles dedicated to Ron Paul’s belief or rather, suspension of belief regarding the theory of evolution [sic]. Some are up in arms about Dr. Paul’s refusal to accept the theory of evolution as fact. Personally, I think that this controversy is overblown and many of those who are making a mountain out of this are misrepresenting what he said.

The controversy arose when Dr. Paul answered a question from an attendee at a campaign event, who wanted to know how Dr. Paul felt about evolution in the context of questions asked during a Presidential debate. A number of bloggers, even those sympathetic to Dr. Paul’s candidacy, are a bit flummoxed because he stated that he didn’t “accept the theory of evolution.” Those are his words but when you view the clip and listen to the entire answer, it’s clear that this is not what he meant.

Here’s what was actually said:

Questioner: All of the candidates were asked if the theory of evolution could be true…and similar things but I didn’t see [garbled] … would it be true or false?

Dr. Paul: Well, first I thought it was a very inappropriate question, you know, for the Presidency to be decided on a scientific matter and umm I uh… I think it’s a theory, the theory of evolution and I don’t accept it, you know, as a theory. I think the Creator that I know, you know, created us and created the universe and the precise time and manner — I just don’t think we’re at a point where anybody has absolute truth on either side.

Dr. Paul (a scientist) has never been one to back down from a question. His response here is perfectly reasonable and I think if he had to clarify or change anything it would be the phrase “I don’t accept it as theory." Based on his closing statement I think he meant to say, “I don’t accept it as fact.” Be that as it may, the most important part of this exchange is Dr. Paul’s insistence that the question is irrelevant in a Presidential forum. Science has no place in politics. Politics is the exercise of power.

“Government is force! Like fire, a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” ~ George Washington

Government is to science as rape is to making love. Over the last two hundred years, the injection of science in politics has been an unmitigated disaster just as the injection of religion has been over the last two thousand years. The theory of evolution is a response to religious dogma which suggested that the universe is static and unchanging. Both are probably inaccurate representations of the universe if taken at face value. Furthermore, the theory of evolution is not monolithic though some of its subscribers would have you believe this is the case.

But more importantly, both religion and science are corrupted when wielded by the hands of government officials who are generally not scientists or good representatives of their religions. Just as there should be a separation of religious beliefs from the use of government authority and power, so should science. I personally believe that the theory of evolution is probably in a class of religions so I don’t mean to be redundant here. Laying that aside, while science itself is not supposed to be akin to religion, it should nonetheless be removed from government policy as it has no place in dictating how anyone should live their life. People have the right to believe and live in whatever manner they wish (as long as they are not harming others) regardless of any scientific proclamations to the contrary. People who believe in a flat earth may be scientifically wrong, but it isn’t the government’s place to force them to teach their children that the earth is round just as it isn’t the government’s place to force people to teach only creationism in schools.

Whether or not a Presidential candidate believes a particular scientific theory, the U.S. constitution gives no authority for government to defer to science on any subject (not even weights and measures — that was reserved to Congress!) and there are no jurisdictional issues that require scientists to stand up as a collective and inject opinion. In the context of governmental authority, science and religion are essentially irrelevant other than as a guide for a particular person’s moral and intellectual character. Since evolution theory is more of a belief system than scientific fact, its place in Presidential politics is highly suspect. But maybe part of the problem is that we have elevated politics to science itself.

The term political science — there are accredited schools which will give you a degree in this field of study — seems inappropriate. Polling and global governance, hot topics in the field, are only scientific by association. If there was such a thing as political “science” somebody would be working on the scientific proof of rights. Our various constitutions here in the U.S. indicate that all political power is inherent in the individual and that each individual possesses rights for which the government is given the responsibility to protect. These are decidedly unscientific ideas. Political science is an oxymoron in the same sense that the sport of Boxing is “the sweet science." Boxing is two people standing in a ring and beating the crap out of one another within the rules of the sport. Government is 535 people authorizing federal police to beat the crap out of you if you don’t obey their rules. Hmmmm … maybe this really is science. Anyway….

Where is the scientific evidence that rights exist? Even Ayn Rand’s attempt at proving the existence of rights fails miserably since it relies upon a contradiction which she claimed would invalidate any theory. Rand suggested that objective reality couldn’t be a construct of the mind, by definition. Yet, rights were, according to her theories, a construct of the mind. Therefore, they cannot be “real” or objective.

Attempting to define truths within a scientific framework and then using that as a basis for government authority could be very dangerous indeed. Failure to prove that rights exist by scientific methods could render our entire system of governance in this country (or the foundations upon which it was built) completely moot. If rights don’t exist in the eyes of science, and science is a valid basis for determining proper governance, then our government is unscientific and needs to be changed to something which is properly scientific.

Dr. Paul believes that our rights are given to us by a Creator, just as our forefathers believed. Most of our Nation’s founding fathers were also creationists. If that disqualifies a person from becoming President, then maybe we should compare the accomplishments and beliefs of Creationists vs. Evolutionists who were Presidents in the past and keep score. And let’s not stop there, let’s go ahead and broaden that to political office holders everywhere.

Science can’t prove that God exists either. Perhaps we should discard the first amendment to the constitution. After all, if God doesn’t exist according to scientific consensus, religion has no place in anyone’s life. It would be for everyone’s own good if we were to force them to conform to scientific thought in this regard. We should ask Chinese citizens how they feel about this since their government doesn’t protect their right to practice religion or speak freely; arguably a position the government has defended by scientific means.

This scientific approach could also be used to justify the elimination of those pesky people who object to medical treatments based on religious beliefs. How dare they reject certain scientific theories regarding vaccine efficacy! They haven’t got the right and the scientific evidence we allow into the political debate states that vaccines are never dangerous and always eradicate diseases.

Look, I don’t reject science. I engage in a bit of hyperbole here to make a point about the relevance of science when applying the use of force. Science may be a valid means to describe the force and effect of the bullet that entered the political dissenter’s brain, but it is a lousy tool for justifying when said force should be applied.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto, twice-former Prime Minister of Pakistan, had a celebrated homecoming tragically cut short. An assassin approached Bhutto’s vehicle, while she was waving to crowds through its sunroof and mortally wounded her by gunfire. Almost immediately, the assassin’s own life, and the lives of 20 more ended when a bomb detonated. The hope for a democratically-elected government in Pakistan may also have been mortally wounded in the aftermath of this day’s violence.

A “tense” George Bush responded to reporters repudiating the event, deriding the “murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy.” No doubt, the President didn’t even consider the irony of his words.

The government of Pakistan has for quite some time been mired in turmoil. Bhutto herself, though very popular in Pakistan, had been removed from office twice for accusations of corruption. Her return was preceded by a grant of amnesty, allowing her to campaign for her old job in upcoming elections; elections that General Pervez Musharraf would rather not occur. Musharraf only stepped down as head of the army in October of this year, having usurped executive power on October 12, 1999 in a military coup which ousted then-President Nawaz Sharif.

Unless you speak Urdu or Punjabi, sources in English regarding Pakistan have to be viewed with some skepticism. However, according to the Cooperative Research Project, the U.S. had been pressuring Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan back in 1998. Pakistan’s ISI — an agency like the US CIA — achieved a great deal of wealth cooperating with the Taliban, supplying arms and aiding heroin-smuggling efforts. In fact, shortly after the coup, Musharraf replaced the head of the ISI, Brig Imtiaz, for skimming profits and depositing them in a Deutsche Bank account.

While there was outward talk that the coup was planned because Sharif was too friendly to the US, this was probably just propaganda. Musharraf may have been publicly reluctant to withdraw military support to the Taliban, but he did just as the U.S. asked and thus received the benefits of U.S. military and economic aid, in spite of the fact he had overthrown the duly elected government. Given the C.I.A.’s history, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if Musharraf was chosen by U.S. intelligence officials as somebody who would cooperate and appease the Pakistani population when an invasion of Afghanistan occurred sometime later.

Which would mean, of course, that an invasion of Afghanistan had been in the works for a significant period prior to October 12, 1999 when Musharraf took power.

While many have said the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were about oil or terrorism, natural gas may have been the prime motivator for the invasion of Afghanistan. In 1998, the attacks by Osama bin Laden on U.S. embassy locations in Africa had the unpleasant effect — to UNOCAL corporate officers — of diplomatically isolating Afghanistan, which had finally agreed to allow the energy giant to route a natural gas pipeline through their territory on its way to the Caspian Sea; an idea first proposed in 1995. This diplomatic isolation was so unpleasant that the Northern Alliance had already begun capturing Northern Afghan cities by March of 2001 with the alleged blessing and cooperation of the U.S., India, Russia and Iran. Keep in mind that this military activity in Afghanistan was occurring 6 months prior to the attacks of September 11.

Whether or not UNOCAL will ever benefit from the new regime in Afghanistan (it claims publicly to have abandoned the pipeline project), the corporate interests that clamor for war are not hard to spot. Before Enron imploded, it was regularly meeting with the Bush administration about energy policy; Afghanistan being a hot topic of conversation. In Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie outline the Bush administration’s involvement in pipeline negotiations and proclaim that just a month before the Trade Center Attacks, the Taliban were offered "a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs" to close the deal.

The situation in Afghanistan paints a stark picture of how corporate interests become "national interests." Some deals, according to those who subscribe to managed-trade theories, are not possible without the use of force. The bigger the potential profits, the more force is required, up to and including, all-out war.

Back to Pakistan. While Musharraf was a handy tool in the “real politik” arsenal (Ron Paul calls him a U.S. puppet) he was also a liability. When your country is claiming its aggressive wars are waged to spread democracy, a guy like Musharraf is an unpleasant reminder of the truth. So, the U.S. apparently prodded Musharraf to deal with Bhutto. Musharraf’s decision earlier this year to give up his military commission was arguably to improve his image both at home and abroad. The decision to hold elections and allow Bhutto to compete was another step in that direction.

But, people who gain power by illegitimate means are not likely to suddenly get religion and give it up. Musharraf has held power illegitimately for over 8 years. He was willing to kill to gain that power. Yet we are supposed to believe — as nearly every pundit asserts and newsreaders assume — that Bhutto’s assassination was the work of Al Qaeda or some other crackpot extremist group, even though there are several reasonable suspects, including Musharraf. Whether a false flag, or truly carried out by terrorists seeking to destabilize elections in Pakistan, it may just work.

Whatever motivated the killer, the result may be that Musharraf continues to wield illegitimate power. He may even reclaim his military commission in order to “restore order." At this point, there are many, including apparently, George Bush, who will give Musharraf every benefit of the doubt even as his government seeks to punish political dissenters under the guise of rooting out terrorism. The current situation in Pakistan begs more than a few questions.

How can anyone in their right mind defend the mercantilist foreign policy our country has practiced these past 140 years? If we are to accept intervention which results in the deaths of political office seekers and innumerable private citizens within our allies’ borders, are we not inviting the same policies to be put in place here? Ron Paul was right (and Giuliani dreadfully wrong) regarding blowback, which is the inevitable consequence of such policies. If it doesn’t result in bad policy at home, it most certainly antagonizes those abroad who suffer under these policies. U.S. "aid" to nations such as Pakistan can only prolong the agony for the citizens subject to these puppet dictators.

If a leader can support the actions of a Musharraf, what would lead anyone to believe he had the moral restraint to prevent himself from taking that plunge?

This isn’t to say that a Musharraf couldn’t be approached. But to give him money ($10 Billion in the past 8 years) from your own citizen’s pockets? How wicked. Worse, to stand up and claim that such action is necessary to promote “democracy.” The rise of neoconservatives has resulted in more naked aggression and ever more shrill pronouncements about how non-intervention makes America less safe in spite of the fact that any honest look at the results of these policies would lead one to conclude otherwise.

The truth is, the tangled webs of foreign intervention put us at risk both in terms of real national security and domestic security. With the large majority of our defense forces abroad, we are at risk of being unable to defend against a military attack. Ron Paul suggests that bringing our troops home from all foreign nations can save us 1 trillion dollars and improve our defensive capabilities. How can that approach be any worse than what is being promoted today?

If our leaders are willing to support the suspension of elections and military coups amongst our so-called allies, is it then only a matter of time before they engage in the same activities here at home?

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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As a father of three children, who my wife and I homeschool, I am deeply disappointed with the recent endorsement for President of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, by an organization which has helped a lot of us over the years. The Home School Legal Defense Association has come out in favor of a candidate who has touted his Christian beliefs and support of homeschoolers, but whose record belies that support.

Like me, you probably view any government involvement in your children’s education with a jaundiced eye. We’ve seen the literacy and graduation rates plummet year after year in our nation’s public schools while special interest groups constantly pass blame for this onto parents, taxpayers and a lack of enough centralized control.

HSDLA has for over two decades been a great help to homeschoolers and has advocated against those who have stood in opposition to our goals. Their staff members advised my family when local Child Protective Services personnel wanted to investigate a mother who we’d taken in. Their advice was invaluable and saved us from a potentially perilous situation. But the advice they are providing with regard to the Presidential election is a poor example of scholarly research and appears to run counter to the ideals they’ve promoted for so many years.

As a homeschooling parent, I hold that the state has no authority to dictate what my children should learn or the methods by which my wife and I teach them. In short, the state does not own my children. Mike Huckabee, whom the HSLDA has endorsed, does not feel this way in spite of statements he has uttered supporting that view. As Governor of Arkansas, Huckabee showed a poor understanding of this fundamental truth and advocated that parents be forced to submit their curriculum choices to the state for approval while claiming that the law in question was an increase in freedoms for homeschooling parents. HSLDA has typically advocated that families shouldn’t be required to get permission from the state to homeschool their children.

Huckabee’s record is at odds with their general principles. He has played politics with the issue and tried to please both unions and homeschoolers in his state. In order to keep homeschoolers’ objections at bay, he appointed leading homeschooling advocates to the state board of education. Like Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee is a very slick politician. Maybe we need less slickness and more uncompromising principle on the matter of schooling.

If Mike Huckabee is such a strong advocate for homeschoolers as some suggest, how could the organization which said the following (pdf) about homeschooling have justified their endorsement of his candidacy?

The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to ensure adequate academic progress. Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians. Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state department of education should be used.

The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools. The Association further believes that local public school systems should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting from a home school setting. (1988, 2006) pp. 45 B-75

That is taken directly from the NEA’s charter. The NEA is one of the largest anti-homeschooling organizations in the U.S., yet its New Hampshire organization has endorsed Mike Huckabee. Does something seem wrong with this picture? Before you imagine that this was somewhat random, Huckabee in fact actively sought the endorsement.

Just how is it that Huckabee can be perceived as a homeschooling advocate? The actual record isn’t as pretty as the flowery words he uses to describe it.

• During his term as Governor, Huckabee signed into law increases in mandatory vaccination schedules and expanding coverage from public schools to private daycares.
• During the Univision debate, held in Florida, Huckabee reiterated his strong support of the federal Department of Education, an agency which has no legitimate authority dictating curriculum to the states, much less existing.
• He has advocated that federal funds be distributed to pay for arts and music studies in state schools as a “reform” to the No Child Left Behind act, a position — a big hit with the teachers unions.
• In 1999, Mike Huckabee signed into law a bill which added major restrictions on homeschooling parents and which was opposed by the HSLDA.

There are also other areas where Huckabee shows poor judgment, specifically, US foreign and monetary policy. Over the past 60 years, the United States government has not only encroached on our personal lives, but also the lives of citizens in other countries. Our military has been used to intimidate and bully other nations. Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations he has called for continued U.S. intervention abroad because it is in our “national interests” to do so.

Unfortunately, these national interests do not include you and me. Because of this belligerent meddling, there are fewer countries where we can safely take our families to visit. When I first imagined the prospect of homeschooling my own children, I was excited to think that I could travel around the world with my children, giving them a rich experience which would enhance their knowledge and increase their imaginations.

This is becoming less and less likely for my family. Central and South America have been destabilized by a foreign policy which has installed brutal dictators, only to see them finally ousted by violent revolutions; resulting in leaders as bad or worse than the U.S. installed puppet regimes. The Middle East, with its fantastic sights and holy places, is now an unwelcome region for anyone carrying a US passport. It was not always this way. Europe is financially out of reach for a middle class family due to our federal government’s horrendous monetary policies.

The main reason I write this letter is because there is a candidate on the Republican ticket who has been a champion of policies which would enhance the lives of any homeschooling family as well as those families who chose to send their children to public schools. That Candidate is Ron Paul. Ron Paul, unlike Mike Huckabee, will probably never receive an endorsement from the NEA. That is because Ron Paul has never pandered in his entire political career.

As a Congressman, Ron Paul has been a consistent champion of educational choice.

• Introduced the Family Education Freedom Act which would provide parents a $3000 tax credit to spend on private tuition or homeschooling curriculum.
• Opposed The No Child Left Behind Act.
• Has encouraged homeschooling in speeches and statements during his 10 terms in Congress.
• Sponsored legislation which would abolish the federal Department of Education.

In addition, Ron Paul bases his positions upon basic founding principles of this country. His consistent and dogged defense of those principles has continued in spite of the ridicule heaped upon him by detractors who fundamentally disagree with those principles. That consistency has produced a groundswell of support unsurpassed in history. So powerful are the ideas that he’s promoted over the course of his career that enthusiasm for their possibilities has spread beyond our borders to other countries.

I can’t tell you how to vote, nor would I engage in such presumption. But for all the reasons I’ve laid out here and more too numerous to include in this letter, I believe that Ron Paul has a far superior record compared to anyone who might claim they support homeschooling. Won’t you please investigate for yourself why so many in this country have shed their apathy and cynicism to support him?

Sincerely,
Rick Fisk

P.S.: If you can afford it and do chose to travel abroad with your family, I suspect that you could find yourself in status as a minor celebrity were you to tour your destination wearing an item of clothing with Ron Paul’s name on it. Ron Paul’s positions on foreign policy and military interventionism have inspired thousands upon thousands outside our borders. An excellent homeschool project would be the production of a YouTube video documenting foreign public reactions to Ron Paul’s stated positions on U.S. Foreign Policy.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has three children and resides in Austin, TX.

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The first vaccine mandated by governments was the small pox vaccine. Today, you’ll hear any number of medical professionals refer to the vaccine as proof of Western military medicine’s superiority over any other discipline. The World Health Organization proclaims proudly to anyone who will listen that the vaccine has eradicated smallpox (yet for a disease "indistinguishable from smallpox," apply the same vaccine used to protect against smallpox).

So prevalent is the favorable view of vaccines, that people who question this "truism" are ridiculed. But, when the vaccine had been about 100 years old (it is now over 200 years old), it had its detractors. One of them was a scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Wallace was an interesting man. His list of accomplishments is stunning. Sometimes referred to in England as the "Grand Old Man of Science," he continued to produce papers into his 90s. A reluctant socialist, he felt that science and government didn’t mix and had no problem arguing against government involvement in science.

Wallace focused on biology and zoology in his early career and turned to social issues later in life. One such social issue was vaccination. He noted in 1906 that doctors were not the best judges of a vaccine’s efficacy though they were continuously consulted on vaccination policy by government officials.

In the first place they are interested parties, both pecuniarily and in a much greater degree on account of professional training and prestige. Only three years after vaccination was first introduced, on the recommendation of the heads of the profession, and their expressed conviction that it would give lifelong protection against a terrible disease, Parliament voted Jenner [the scientist who created the smallpox vaccine derived from cowpox] 10,000 in 1802, and 20,000 more in 1807, besides endowing vaccination with 3,000 a year in 1808. From that time doctors as a body were committed to its support; it has been taught for nearly a century as an almost infallible remedy in all our medical schools; and has been for the most part accepted by the public and the legislature as if it were a well-established scientific principle, instead of being as the historian of epidemic diseases — Dr. Creighton — well terms it, a grotesque superstition.

This quote is from a summary of his original arguments against mandatory use of the smallpox vaccine in 1889: Vaccination: Proved Useless & Dangerous. (Wallace wasn’t one for mincing words.) The 1889 work was an epidemiological study which showed that smallpox rates in London and the rest of England were not reduced at all by the mandatory use of the vaccine. In fact, other illnesses increased during the time that the smallpox vaccination was forced on the population suggesting that the effect on immunity was negative rather than positive as vaccination proponents kept asserting.

The 1889 study was instrumental in influencing public opinion and ultimately forcing the repeal of laws making smallpox vaccination mandatory in England. Other European nations followed suit. The U.S. government’s medical and scientific organizations and the World Health Organization have disregarded Wallace’s findings, as well as a long list of subsequent papers and corroborations, and have proclaimed that the smallpox vaccine was a smashing success.

This has occurred, in spite of the fact that there have been no counter-examples to disprove the contrary view. There have been many examples since which tend to support Wallace’s conclusions however.

For instance, one of the most stunning antidotes to the idea that smallpox was eradicated due to mandatory vaccination is the Japanese example. The practice of "revaccination" was prevalent there (and in the British Navy) until their vaccination rate exceeded 100%! In spite of this, Japan faced huge smallpox epidemics. All told, the Japanese lost 48,000 people to smallpox, most of them vaccinated at least once. When the government stopped the mandatory vaccinations, the epidemics were finally arrested. Were the smallpox vaccination truly effective as a prophylactic, such an example could not exist. Unfortunately, there are dozens just like it all over the world.

In 1904, the U.S. Army decided to forcibly vaccinate the Philippine population ostensibly to improve health conditions but more likely intended to protect military personnel. They touted its success when in the following two years smallpox appeared to be under control. However, from 1917 to 1919, in a population of 11 million that had a reported 100% vaccination rate, smallpox epidemics claimed over 70,000 lives out of 163,000 reported infections.

By contrast, Australia, from 1900 to 1915, which never instituted a mandatory vaccine program, reported 3 deaths due to smallpox over the entire period.

A doctor who treated smallpox victims in San Antonio near the turn of the century wrote of his experiences. Charles Campbell became so trusted by his patients and coworkers that they agreed to allow him to expose them to smallpox to help him prove his own theories about how smallpox was transmitted, treated and how its effects could be minimized.

Only one of his patients received the pock marks so customarily associated with the disease and that patient’s pock marks were "done intentionally." Dr. Campbell’s belief, based on his observations and experience, was that smallpox was spread by bed bugs, a pest most of us haven’t had to experience in our lifetimes but is making a comeback. That the bed bug could be a vector makes logical sense given what we know about the spread of smallpox to Native American populations via blanket distributions. Viruses do not live for long periods of time absent a host; unlike bacteria which can lay dormant for decades while retaining viability. Bed bugs, like fleas, offer a convenient host for a virus and can live for weeks without food in unwashed bedding. Campbell’s work has been mostly ignored by the establishment medical community and the press.

Why haven’t Campbell’s experiences, treatment results and the general knowledge of the smallpox vaccine’s danger been more prevalent instead of the current view that vaccines are a modern miracle?

This puzzling contradiction doesn’t just apply to the smallpox vaccine. We’re told that polio’s low current rate of infection is due to the vaccine. However, a closer look tends to discredit that idea as well. Those who track world health statistics do not consider vaccination as having reduced disease rates by any more than 3% world-wide during the 19th and 20th centuries. The reduction in infectious disease has been attributed to sanitary improvements or natural immunity and natural disease cycles, not vaccination. Furthermore, since 1970, there have been no cases of polio in the U.S. which are not attributed to the vaccine itself.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence against the benefits of vaccination, our own government health officials continue to recommend a growing battery of vaccinations, starting with infants at birth. The CDC’s recommended vaccination schedule(pdf) is staggering compared to what it was just 20 years ago. If you strictly followed the CDC’s recommendations, your child would have twenty-five vaccine injections by the time they reached four years of age. What justifies such a number?

To be fair, the growing list of vaccinations is suggestive rather than mandatory. That being said, there are government officials who use these suggestions to augment the list of "mandatory" vaccinations that children must have before attending public school. Think about that for a second. How are state school boards qualified to mandate vaccination schedules?

Doubts over the efficacy of vaccines appear to be increasing as information has been made available. Until the internet, many of the contrary studies were not available to the general public. We are only recently discovering that what we’re told by our own government agencies and the drug companies they appear to represent, are not exactly representative of the facts.

The list of additives and basic ingredients found in many vaccines would be otherwise advised against by ethical medical professionals, but we are told repeatedly by our own FDA that there is no evidence to suggest that injecting mercury (thimerosal) and other additives directly into the bloodstream is harmful. Meanwhile, the EPA will send in armed police to shut down somebody’s private business as an immanent threat to the population if some bureaucrat happened to detect mercury on or about the premises.

Why the disparity? Quite frankly, it is because the corporations who create the vaccines have gained control over our regulatory agencies and legislative bodies. The FDA’s regulations have been continuously augmented internally and by Congress to protect pharmaceutical companies from litigations. The Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System has been put in place to protect the public, but is really a way to protect the drug companies from lawsuits.

Apathy and lack of confidence in ourselves has led to an irrational reliance upon government experts employed by the, FDA, CDC and WHO to inform us about the causes of disease and to control how our government responds to health crises. That is a lot of power concentrated in one place.

What has resulted from this unholy marriage of corporate interests and the government is not public health but political medicine. Both figuratively and literally, political medicine is poison that seeks to destroy common sense, customer choice and too often, lives. When it isn’t denying medication that has been proven useful to cancer patients, it is attempting to mandate medicine and ban food supplements.

If one didn’t know any better, one might conclude that the FDA and related health agencies of the federal government, want you to get sick.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Statists and warmongering neoconservatives (apologies for the redundancy) have been working overtime in an attempt to derail the Ron Paul Freedom Train. Since most of them have only involved themselves in war from behind a keyboard, the chicken-hawk generals (my new choice of names for the D.C. baseball club) aren’t proving themselves well-versed in political strategery.

While there have been some attacks originating from the left, let’s face it, most of the attacks against Ron Paul have been from those claiming to be “conservatives." Entire volumes could be written about the socialist bent of those belonging to the Trotskyite neoconservative movement who proclaim themselves the sole heirs to Ronald Reagan’s legacy, but it is safe to say that Ron Paul’s detractors are not standing up for political ideology as much as they are defending their own livelihoods. They feel threatened; as well they should, because their entire house of cards is falling down before their eyes.

These same people who have maintained an appearance of credibility in spite of their fabulously wrong predictions on war, political races and public opinion are now attacking Ron Paul and his supporters for openly, and very credibly, shaking the foundations of their beloved status quo. Neoconservatism is in its dying throes and its media representatives are finally starting to see the oncoming train at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

Unable to provide their dwindling members with any real “dirt” on a man who has doggedly defended the Constitution these past 30 years, Ron Paul’s detractors have issued an inordinate number of words deriding his supporters. The effect has been humorous at best. Resolve is being hardened rather than weakened. Ironically, between the leftist progressives and the neoconservatives, the neoconservatives attacking Ron Paul are less honest. At least the progressive critics are attacking Ron Paul’s actual views.

The neoconservative weapons of choice have been guilt-by-association and ad hominem. The first attacks of this nature were issued from obscure blogs and rarely-read Internet publications but have been found floating to the top of the neoconservative cesspool. Even in shark-infested waters, excrement floats; though neoconservatives would try to convince you that it is cream you’re witnessing. (Here, you eat it then, Norm.)

From neoconservatives in print, on the Internet and hosts of nationally syndicated television programs, we learned that Ron Paul and his followers were terrorists, conspiracy theorists, loony, kooky, isolationist, anachronistic and my favorite "Paultards." This smacks of projection. I think these people owe our troops a few hundred thousand bouquets of flowers. These same pundits who claim that Ron Paul’s followers consist of neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists, are the same people who see Nazi’s under every bed and a floral arrangement in the hands of every citizen liberated by Raytheon’s bunker busters.

Neoconservatives bring a new level of irony to the phrase “look who’s talking.” Hubris has always been one of neoconservatism’s most striking features. As if in a cynical contest played with each other, they seem to escalate each blatantly wrong prediction or exclamation with one exponentially more hysterical and wrong than the last. Ed Wood couldn’t add any more camp to this bunch.

They have deluded themselves into believing that nobody notices the level of their kookiness. And why wouldn’t this be the case? When you can respond to critics with “talk to the hand” as you slide into the back seat of a limousine, what else are you going to believe? "Ratings and advertising revenue are high, therefore I am revered." But like political polls, Nielson ratings indicating a million viewers or readers in a nation of over 300 million can be very misleading.

As an example of the kookiness that is the neoconservative punditry, look at what they are all saying (talking points anyone?) about the current state of our economy. An 8% increase in “Black Friday” pre-Christmas sales over last year’s number, which doesn’t even rise above the level of inflation this year, is held up as proof that the “driveby media” has the economic forecast all wrong. The stock market has dropped over 1200 points since it’s last record high, many areas of the country have seen an evaporation in real-estate equity of over 50%, oil nears a hundred bucks a barrel but the economy is great. If anyone tells you otherwise they’re part of a media conspiracy to help democrats win in 2008.

One might think that these people have short memories (“it’s the economy stupid“) but more likely they are just repeating themes and hoping something, anything, will resonate and give their shrinking base a reason to come out to the polls to select the next neoconservative champion on the Republican ticket. The real kooks are standing up with one finger pointed at the Ron Paul Revolution and four others pointed back at their tin-foil hats.

Perhaps the next time any of us are fortunate enough to meet one of these people in public, we can just shout: “Look! Behind you! Hitler! Run for your life!”

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Shortly after having written about the general tendency to warehouse our children and later our elderly, I got an email from my wife. I thought I would share it as the practice of keeping your kids out of warehouses is generally left up to the women; since we men go off somewhere to do work and only deal with the kids part-time. My wife is absolutely heroic. There are many stay-at-home, home-schooling mothers like her. This one is for them and the dads who annoy them.

A day in the life of a stay-at-home, home-schooling, working, mother of three kids under the age of ten….

My day started at roughly 2 AM as I rolled over to nurse the rooting baby in my bed. After about an hour-and-a-half of sucking and chewing on my increasingly dry boobs, I lie there praying for him to just please, please, please let me sleep just a little. I tell myself to ignore my dry mouth and sore boobs. Just block that out. Just ten minutes more and you can sleep…

But alas…no rest for the wicked. At 4 AM I get up with the fussing baby and quickly leave the room where I am sleeping with my other two kids, ages 4 and 9, to prevent waking all of them up, and go pee while holding a 22-pound 11-month old. I tip-toe, ever-so-quietly into the other room where his father is sleeping. Since there are only four rooms in the house, including the bathroom, this makes being up at 4 AM with a fussing, teething baby a dicey piece of work.

Dad awakes and agrees to take the boy (he fears for his only begotten son’s life after looking into mom’s eyes). He tells me to go to sleep as I laugh sardonically and a bit psychotically. Nevertheless, I fall asleep sitting up on the floor. After hitting the floor I crawl back into bed. Did I mention this was also on the floor? It makes it all so convenient. I sleep until roughly 5 AM. Baby is again crying so I get up. He nurses my flaming sore breasts and falls asleep. I lay him down and close my eyes, but before the horrific dream of being sucked to death by rats with pink straws really gets underway, I am again awakened by a very upset and stinking baby. Diaper change! Baby sleeps a little more, I think. I can’t quite remember at this point. At about seven I get up with the darling boy, and feed him some scrambled eggs, milk and toast, most of which he throws on the floor to be eaten by the dog. Then "we" take a shower. At least he’s not screaming. I forgo shaving … it’s been only about six months after all. At this point it seems kind of silly.

8:30: Dad wakes up. Bleary eyed, he stumbles over to make coffee and comment on what an exhausting night he had.

8:45: I start breakfast for the other two kids, now awake. Cold cereal and yogurt all around. It’s that sort of morning. I pour a cup of coffee for myself (however, I do not drink the cup of coffee) and eat the cereal that gets too soggy and stirred up. They beg for Halloween candy and I say "sure," while baby hangs on me screaming.

9:15: I negotiate a path from the living room still destroyed from the sleep-over two days ago and go into the "office" which is really a large room for my husband to store his guitars in. However, I have now started working from home, so I have his laptop set up in the corner between the mixing board and the amps. (Don’t ask me why my three kids sleep on the floor in my room while my husband uses the only other bedroom in the house as his play room)

9:30: Fetch baby out of bathroom, wash off toilet water, change clothes, administer all-natural antibiotic drops.

9:45: Return to office, nine-year-old enters to say her new earrings make her ears swollen. In fact, they do look infected. I stop to make hot salt water to clean her ears. She takes a shower.

10:00: Four-year-old needs butt wiped and new panties. Look at long list of tasks and phone calls that need to be returned, stack of files next to laptop.

10:10: Time to start "school." Get out material for nine-year-old to work on report about Polynesia. Set four-year-old to copying letters on wipe-away work book. Start picking up toys, dishes, clothes and food from floor.

10:30: Sneak back into office. Drink cup of cold coffee.

10:33: "Mom… what type of canoes did the Tahitians sail in? And how do you spell Polynesia?"

10:40: Four-year-old brings work book to show progress, review letters and start over. Find a hot-pink crayon because the letter E can only be written with a hot-pink crayon.

10:42: Return calls to CPA, Credit bureau and business partner. Threaten death for interruption. Four-year-old colors, nine-year-old colors page for report, baby eats crayons.

11:00: Baby hungry again… feed baby … feed self. After making two fried eggs and toast, four-year-old announces she is hungry again too and wants fried eggs. Since those are the last eggs in the house, I eat a piece of dry bread and cheese, then sop up leftover cold yolk before washing dish.

11:30: Change poopy-diaper…Baby naps.

11:31: Back in office. Nine-year-old swears that none of her books list what the Tahitians brought on their migrations. I give permission to use other laptop for research, after reminding her Hannah Montana is not Hawaiian. Four-year-old gives up on school and decides to pull apart a beaded necklace and leave the seed beads scattered all over the floor. She then takes apart all of the "learning puzzles" so her dolly can do school too. Meanwhile I attempt online research and place an order for some online material to bring me up to speed on the profession I haven’t participated in for six years, swearing to myself that I will read all of this sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. every night until I am caught up.

Noon: Start downloading files into Quicken to prepare for tax time. Files do not come over as expected. Accounts don’t balance. Curse all technology and every technologist who ever lived. Start over… click ACCEPT ALL>

12:45: Baby wakes up… nurse while continuing to look for missing $234.45 and answer questions about long canoes, pit roasted dog meat and kinship systems. Ply four-year-old with every pen on my desk and old files as scratch paper. Look for paper bank statements to reconcile account. Realize that four-year-old has been quietly and industriously writing A’s and E’s all over last year’s accounts. Call bank. Order copies of paper statements.

1:00: Give up…

1:01: Make lunch

1:02: I place baby in high chair while standing barefoot on 100 scattered size 8 seed beads and mashed banana. Give baby some cold noodles to eat/play with until lunch can be prepared. Baby did not order cold noodles. Commence screaming. Now, I haven’t mentioned the previous screaming that is more or less the soundtrack of my life, but this screaming was just the exact pitch required to make me reconsider my life choices for the 374,273rd time. I cannot put baby down on the floor because he will eat the seed beads (they are tastier than cold noodles). I know this because I have spotted them occasionally next to the corn (maybe those were the pony beads I lost hmmm) Baby now takes his arm and in one fell swoop lands all of his noodles on the floor to join the banana, beads, milk, and egg mess.

Mommy gets "that look" on her face and the other children begin to appear very busy. I push screaming baby still strapped into high chair into the bathroom and close the door. My transformation is now complete. In true Indian-orphanage fashion I begin to bark orders: ‘I want all of these toys off the floor or I swear every last one of them will be in the trash! Pick up those shoes! If I find one more towel on the floor you will be drying with baby diapers!! GET THIS!!! TAKE THAT!! THROW THAT AWAY!! MOVE !!!!!"

Amidst the screaming (mine and his) and the four-year-old’s rapid movements, the nine-year-old-announces that it’s "very hard to concentrate on Pele and the formation of Kona with all this noise". I announce I am now channeling Pele and she had better move her butt and pick up her crap because I am getting the VACUUM. They all know what that means…

I send the four-year-old into the bathroom with the baby, armed with two very nice and developmentally appropriate toys with orders to "entertain the boy." To her credit, she puts on quite the dog and pony show and he condescends to take it down a notch.

I vacuum like I am on fire…like lava is crawling up my backside… I pick beads out of my heel and keep laying waste to the village.

Finally…

Peace rains down amid folded futons and floors waiting empty, patiently to be filled once again with the detritus of life. The lives of five people are ready to spill over and upon all 600 sq ft of living space. How do the Japanese manage?

The children peek out from behind doors.. Pele has left the building.

1:53: We eat…PB&J, even the boy. And only one crust falls to the floor. I pretend I don’t care.

2:15: School continues. I plug the four-year-old into a "learning program" on one computer while I sit at the other, googling Hawaiian history. We find the answers to our questions and I leave her to write them down. I clean up the now-happy boy and notice that one cusped has managed to poke through the gum. This is brought to my attention as he stands holding onto my chair and looks up mouth all agape and smiling. Why, there it is!! There is the source of all this unhappiness. Then he bends down and lays his sweet little head in my lap and bites my inner thigh as hard as he can.

Do not fear, Dear Reader, he lives.

I reprimand… he cries. HE cries!

2:30: We are done with Polynesia, for today. Now, on to math, the dreaded subject. However, since we have an instructional video to accompany the curriculum, my chief role is to nag her to completion. I decide to multi-task and do a bit more work on the laptop while periodically goading her to “Hurry up or we’ll be at this all day.”

3:00: The nine-year-old takes a break to ride her bike and get the mail. The four-year-old is happily destroying brain cells in the name of education and sanity for mom. The boy is eating frozen blueberries and looking oh so rakish and adorable.

I take this quiet moment to do the dishes, put in a load of laundry, fold and put away a load of laundry, clean up the chaos in the bathroom (those dogs and ponies sure are messy), clean-up and finish vacuuming the office.

3:29: Screaming baby alarm. I notice poop coming out the sides of his diaper and mixing with the smashed blueberries. I also remember that I am out of wipes. I pull baby out of high chair while carefully holding away from body. In the bathroom I wipe the worst of it down with toilet paper, all the while keeping those cute, chubby hands out of it and out of the toilet where I am throwing the nasty mess. Then I place the baby in the tub and hose off. Note to self … clean tub before bathing kids tonight.

3:47: I call the nine-year-old back in. Back to school!!! She powers through parts of speech, paragraph editing, human anatomy and spelling. I sort the mail. Done? YEA!!!! She can be released from servitude, but first, put away the dishes, please. And tell your sister her computer time is up. “Can I…?” … “NO!”

4:30: Time to start dinner. "Would you like to hear our specials tonight, madam?

"We have spaghetti: spaghetti with butter and spaghetti with sauce." But wait, this isn’t just any spaghetti, this is organic fresh from the farmers market Spaghetti with pastured pork Italian sausage.. Oh crap, I forgot to take that out of the freezer. I’ll just throw it in hot water while I make the sauce (yes Dear Reader, I did say MAKE the sauce). I dig through the fridge for vegetables that might taste good in marinara…zucchini, bell peppers, onions, roasted garlic, fresh basil. I chop, I dice, I sauté. Every movement calculated for efficiency. I am Zen. I am ambidextrous. I am about trip over the baby and all of the bakewear pulled out onto the floor. But he is not now currently screaming so I dance around and make happy faces at him. I reach into the fridge and pull out the arugula. "Ugh, already bad, how about the cucumbers? Uh oh." I hear my husband’s voice in my head “What a waste of money and good food. You know, we should really stay on top of this.” Yes, yes so true we should…

5:30: Sauce is bubbling, pasta is on the stove. I finish the dishes. More voices: “Do I always have to do ALL the dishes? Even the lunch dishes?”

5:45: Round up children, prepare plates, undress boy (it is spaghetti after all) and place in secured high chair.

6:00: Husband walks through door, “Wow, great I’m starving. So, you look tired, hard day?” To my credit I neither break down hysterically weeping nor run screaming into the street, but simply nod my head.

6:15: I’ve now missed my window for eating (new diet and all that, have to have last morsel of food in mouth before 18:00 hours), so I eat a spoonful of peanut butter and the half of Italian sausage that was too spicy for the baby.

6:45: Baby has eaten and thrown around all the food that’s going to keep him entertained. Time for a bath. Ooops …see 3:29…

6:47: Clean tub…ah what the hell, might as well clean the sink and toilet too.

7:10: Bathe the baby, wait, bathe all three kids while dad cleans up the bedroom. I’m in bedroom denial. I just close the door during the day and pretend it’s the garage.

7:15: I go to Office Depot. Yes, I know your thinking, “Well, that’s a treat!”

Indeed. The truth is I would rather have my pinky nail pulled out than take all three kids into any Big Box store. I must have manila folders and various other sundry items by tomorrow or I will be forced to continue to look for the missing $234. Instead I can look for the missing tax receipts.

8:00: Walk in to girls in their nighties and a diapered boy crawling around made beds rolled out ready for sleep. Dad puts the boy to sleep while I unpack my bags from Office Depot. It’s Christmas in November. There are new pencil boxes, construction paper and even sticky notes! I label some file folders and stack them neatly next to the box of miscellaneous papers. There are mechanical pencils and their very own CD organizer. They immediately organize. It’s just all so fabulous. And who can sleep when it’s this exciting!

8:30: I lie down and "pet" the four year old. Two rounds of "Tula Tula" and she’s out for the count.

8:45 I get up. My nine year old has run me a bath (ahhhh). I finish the kitchen. I get into my very nice smelling herbal bath. I relax. This is a little challenging as the-nine-year old has decided this would be a great time to have a little mother daughter chat about boys and girls and Hannah Montana and why baby’s penis doesn’t look like daddy’s and why some girls wear bras when they are only ten and when I think she might wear a bra etc etc. Until… oh what is that? Did I hear a boy waking up? Of course I did…

9:15: nursing… nine-year-old lays down in her spot, still chatting.

9:18: “No more talking it’s time for sleep.”

“But I just…”

“Shush.”

“Okay but…”

“Shush!”

“Humph!”

9:30: I get up. OMG… it’s almost over. I have a short adult conversation, mostly about how great Ron Paul is and how absolutely for sure he is going to win the primary, how Hilary sucks, how much money he raised in one day, how CNN is now all over it. How absolutely GREAT he is… um, did I mention how GREAT it is that he made over 4 million dollars in ONE day. You know maybe you should write an article about how great Ron Paul is …oh you did… well…GREAT!!

Maybe I’ll write an article too. No, not about Ron Paul. I know there isn’t much else worth writing about… still….

10:07: I write about things that aren’t really all that important and I’m sure CNN won’t be covering me…still… It seems sort of satisfying somehow…

10:29: nursing

10:40: write…eat three crackers and a glass of milk.

11:00: bad dream… pet pet…

11:17: write…

Midnight: Lay down on the floor, nurse… doze…nurse…doze…

The sun rises….

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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When the dust cleared, there were over seven million dollars collected and deposited into the Ron Paul campaign coffers, just 5 days into the second month of the quarter. While there was a push sometime past midday, November 5, 2007, to beat Mitt Romney’s one-day fund-raising drive of 3.1 million dollars, there was a huge difference in the result and the methods used. Romney received pledges. Ron Paul received real money — or, as real as they allow us plebes to possess nowadays.

The number reported by the Associated Press was “more than 4.2 million” raised in a single day. Ron Paul Graphs puts it at 4.014 million if you don’t count the offline donations of 326,000 added to the mix just after midnight. Counting those offline donations, the number was 4.3 million. This was an event completely scripted outside campaign officialdom and embraced by his grassroots supporters. It was the largest single-day haul on-line in the history of politics. For those who are discounting the value and strength of Dr. Paul’s grassroots support, this should kill their arguments dead. They may have a chance to salvage their careers. They can start by admitting that only real people with real money can buy an internet connection or a cell-phone.

Press outlets didn’t really know how to handle this historic event. The first old-media outlet to report it found their numbers had already gone stale by hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time they could post their copy. During a late surge, the rate of donations had reached 220,000 dollars per hour.

Folks, neoconservatism is officially dead. Guy Fawkes may have the last laugh after all.

Even at Free Republic, home to the most cartoonish versions of “conservatives” ever assembled on the web, posters who had previously dropped out of sight, came back to revel in the carnage that was the Fifth of November. The thread there starts out with the usual detractors. However, if you can gird your loins past the first couple of pages, it gets real interesting.

Money didn’t talk on what has become known as Guy Fawkes Day. I hate that cliché. Money can’t talk. People voted with their pocket books. The market moved. The most brilliant part of this was not necessarily the choice of days or the efforts by supporters to spread the word but the choice to show in real-time what was happening. Only 17,500 people pledged on the November 5th website. There were double that many who actually participated. The lesson of economics is being taught in real time by the one candidate who speaks that language fluently.

Hear that sound? It’s fear. The screws are being tightened against the limbs of the status quo. Who needs gunpowder when you have the Internet, the Constitution and forty thousand credit cards?

The New York Times, USA Today and CNN jumped on the news bandwagon late in the afternoon with fairly positive stories of the day’s events and the Washington Post reported too but couldn’t do it with a straight face. Come on, how could you report on an event like this without mentioning that some obscure, wrestling porn-star-wannabee posted to a blog in support of Ron Paul? Why, it would be a ‘Dog Bites Man!’ story otherwise.

Reading some of these old-media produced stories can be frustrating. The old media had a chance to tell the story correctly, but generally couldn’t bring themselves to do it. The caption in the NY Times story below Dr. Paul’s scowling picture stated: “Representative Ron Paul’s use of Guy Fawkes Day to encourage donations to his presidential campaign netted millions.”

Ugh. Ron Paul had nothing to do with the event. According to the best old-media article of the day, written by ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf, Trevor Lyman operated the November 5th site collecting pledges but didn’t actually come up with the idea himself. He simply acted on a post he read in one of the Ron Paul meet-up forums. That was October 18th, a mere 3 weeks prior to the historic event.

Here’s another great lesson to be learned from the Austrian school. If you allow a market to self-organize and operate freely, the results can be staggering.

That’s true in more ways than one. The 4.3 million dollar pick-me-up is obviously an end unto itself, but the resulting value of the media’s discussion of what it means, could be worth 5 times that amount. For better or worse, the next week and perhaps even Sunday’s political shows will see the old media covering what has happened and discussing what it means to the future of politics. There’s no getting around that. George “That’s not going to happen” Snuffleufflelgus might learn to talk through his teeth. Those of you with televisions can fill me in Monday.

For fans like myself, watching events unfold was by far the most exciting experience of this campaign thus far but I dare say it will only be a milestone among many. Thomas Woods gets the award for most humorous observation, and the Lew Rockwell team of bloggers gets the “thank God they’re around for people without television” award. I coded up an SMS text messaging router today with the donation counter on one screen and the Lew Rockwell blog just behind it. I can’t imagine that I was alone. New Media articles were too numerous to read and started showing up just prior to the clock’s race toward midnight.

The truly exciting result of this day will be the number of fence-sitters and “leaners” who jump on the bandwagon. Politics is generally a wait and see affair. Rasmussen has reported that a full 60% of the Iowa Straw Poll voters said they could envision changing their minds before the Iowa Caucuses:

However, the race in Iowa is very fluid. For each of the top four candidates, between 57% and 61% of their supporters say they might change their mind before the caucus is held.

That didn’t get reported much, if at all. Ron Paul’s two biggest hurdles now are name recognition and skepticism. The skepticism is normal. A significant number of people have been waiting to see if Ron Paul really has a chance. Well….I think we’ve seen that myth blown apart today by a money bomb. The name recognition will commence to increase but don’t expect that the old media will be reporting any poll number jumps. It may just be that the Paul campaign mirrors Kerry’s who polled at 4% nationally before winning New Hampshire and Iowa.

Bombs away…..

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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I don’t own a television. On debate nights I just head out to the local meetup event. Tonight though, there was no meetup event. What was I going to do? Well I remembered that at the company where I used to be employed full-time but now perform part-time consulting, the break room is equipped with a dish and a TV. Why? I have no idea. People who write software don’t have much time to sit down and watch TV. They generally don’t even go out to lunch. A lot of eating happens at their desks.

I’m glad I made the trip. So many times I have watched this campaign achieve utterly historic and cosmic coincidences. This was one of those times. For one, Tom Cruise was a guest. His new movie, Lions for Lambs revolves around the Iraq war. What a setup! For another, the Sex Pistols were the musical guest. The Sex Pistols were very controversial in their day. I bought “Never Mind the Bullocks” the year it was released. “Bodies," one of the best songs off that album is decidedly anti-abortion and in a very offensive way.

Dr. Paul was great. He was affable, witty and was treated well by both Leno and his audience. Later, when the Sex Pistols had finished their song, he rushed up to meet and shake Johnny Rotten’s hand. Politics? Dunno. But the original Sex Pistols was one of my favorite bands ever. Not because they were so “good." They were mediocre musicians at best. Most of the songs that they recorded were actually performed by session musicians in the studio. Live it didn’t matter. It’s only three chords. The songs though, that’s another story entirely. So is the influence that they had on music. They weren’t the first punk band, but they certainly were the most influential.

At a time when the radio had been totally overtaken by disco (even The Rolling Stones included a disco song on the “Some Girls” album — “Miss You”) and great rock bands were being ignored, here came the Sex Pistols with an incredibly raucous, disrespectful, authority-hating attitude to single-handedly save Rock and Roll. Their first album was released in 1977 and it took a while to really catch on in the US though it was a smash in the UK. By 1979, the effect of that album culminated at the old Comiskey Park in Chicago. Steve Dahl, a Chicago D.J., had tapped into public sentiment more than he imagined.

Expecting 5000 to show up for a promotion which would culminate in disco records brought to the stadium in exchange for tickets destroyed, more than 50,000 people showed up and the event itself became something just shy of an uncontrollable riot.

Dahl had tapped into something that even he did not understand at the time. Record sales for disco artists fell off sharply the next year.

The parallels between that event and Ron Paul’s candidacy are eerie. Ron Paul has ignited something similar within the American people. Like the corrupt record execs who offered the public very little in the way of choices, our American government and old media has offered the public the political equivalent of disco. Lots of different people are saying similar sounding things and promising to run our lives in only slightly different ways. Like the event in Comiskey Park, the reaction cannot be controlled and is vastly underestimated — though in this case the participants are not drunken baseball fans. Paulenteers have channeled their passion into a grass roots campaign that is rocking the world.

The connection between the Sex Pistols and the Dahl event is probably not documented anywhere. But if you read anything about the Sex Pistol’s influence in the music industry, it cannot be overstated. They saved Rock and Roll. Music fans just ate it up. In the UK, their first Album went number one to the horror of the music establishment and the government. "God Save the Queen," was utterly shocking and turned British society on its ear. The stakes are higher now. Ron Paul could literally save this country and maybe even the world (from U.S.).

Oh…and tonight? The song? Only the most appropriate for the occasion: “Anarchy in the U.K.”

The old phrase “disco sucks” now has a completely different meaning for me.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Old media personnel are puzzling over FEMA’s fake press conference this week which was alleged to be just a result of poor judgment by well-intentioned bureaucrats. When you read press reports about this however, you get the feeling that reporters weren’t so upset that they could probe beyond the talking points issued by Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino.

FEMA called a press conference last Tuesday, giving reporters only 15 minutes notice. Its purpose was to communicate FEMA’s efficiency in responding to the crisis in San Diego. Naturally, no reporters showed up due to these time constraints. However, FEMA did think enough in advance to provide a conference number so reporters could listen in. Yes, that’s correct. Listen. Only. This must have been a government-designed conference-calling application because reporters were unable to ask questions.

Stung by Katrina’s press nightmare, FEMA was attempting to give the public timely communications. They even went so far as to put FEMA employees in the press conference location to ask questions about the crisis. Clearly, they were doing their best to give the public the facts. It was all just a big misunderstanding and an error in judgment.

"FEMA has issued an apology, saying that they had an error in judgment when they were attempting to get out a lot of information to reporters, who were asking for answers to a variety of questions in regard to the wildfires in California," Perino said. "It’s not something I would have condoned. And they — I’m sure — will not do it again."

Now, any rational person would draw the conclusion that everything about the FEMA press conference was completely intentional and the claim it was "an error in judgment" is a gross understatement if it is even applicable. Some unknown reporter(s) who called in to the conference call that day complained of its mute nature and now it’s a big story. I imagine that there will be quite a few old media commentators who will trot out an indignant phrase or two, but let’s face it, any self-righteous indignation by the majority of our old media representatives is purely hypocritical.

A typical press conference with just about any old media outlet, national or local, proves that the last few generations of reporters have been given nothing more than a homogeneous indoctrination rather than an education in the art of journalism and reporting. Not very many stand out and they all seem to ask the same dumb questions, finally just printing or broadcasting, without any serious critical thinking applied, the subject’s statements. When the final report is delivered, the unfiltered, unquestioned statements are fed to the public. That is, if the person making the statement is somebody who holds any position of authority.

When it is some poor schmuck who’s run afoul of the authorities it is a completely different story. Of course, whatever the authorities say is repeated without question, but the citizen is usually maligned and there is no attempt to help a brother out by asking pertinent questions. Reporters generally won’t be awarded a Pulitzer for writing about you until you’re on death row, accused of a crime you haven’t committed. In that case, the same person who managed to sleep-walk through journalism classes and his or her journalism career, starts asking relevant questions. Maybe if questions were asked before or during the trial, you wouldn’t be on death row, held as an “enemy combatant” or accused of being a bad-parent justifying the state’s action against you.

FEMA’s little charade was no different than what occurs every single day when members of the old media show up to cover the world’s important stories. The only difference is where the “reporter’s” paycheck is drawn.

How is this different than what you see on any given day in the old media?

“Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?” one staffer asked.

“I’m very happy with FEMA’s response so far,” Johnson replied.

And so it went for more than 10 minutes, without any journalists.

Oh, the horror. Just like virtually every press conference one can witness in the modern era appears to be void of any journalists, so was this fake version of a press conference. Of course, at the same time that ABC news is reporting on FEMA’s fake press conference, they run a puff-piece on Chertoff, now in charge of FEMA as the head of Homeland Security. Trust them, the government learned its lesson after Katrina and is working hard to give us all confidence that FEMA can properly do its job.

When the old media’s “journalists” start asking Chertoff where he finds his authority in the constitution to manage disaster efforts and how he can in good conscience execute such authority when it doesn’t exist, I’ll be convinced of their concern and professionalism. Until then, I’ll remind myself that the best thing I ever did was to sell my television and cancel my cable subscription. I can tell you this: a year after I stopped watching television, my entire way of thinking changed. That was 12 years ago. I don’t miss it even a little bit.

I am convinced that most everyone would be affected as I have been and that television psychosis is the main problem with media personnel. They watch each other on television. It’s a very incestuous situation where a surreal version of the world is presented by its most narcissistic. The fact that there are so few in the old media who can be distinguished from FEMA plants is very sad. Obviously ad revenue and profits do not depend on journalistic integrity.

This isn’t to say that profit is bad; profit should drive media decisions. However, the old media is subsidized heavily and does not suffer from competition as much as we are led to believe. Licensed and protected by the government, the old media has faced no real competition and no serious consequences for bad actions. It also has no incentive to strike at the system. What competition exists amongst old media players is purely an illusion. However, as protection of old media has been increased, so it has it moved further towards extinction.

The internet has slowly but surely become the only decent alternative to old media. With the old media, you have to tune in at a specific time or purchase the current publication to see a regurgitated news story, but the internet offers that same regurgitated story on-demand. Look at how CDR has rocked the old media (which, by the way, fought this technological advancement tooth and nail). The Internet is Tivo on steroids.

It’s time we all just turned it off. The excuse that you won’t be informed is laughable. The trend toward entertainment on TV is to package popular shows on DVD. So, if you’re addicted to a particular show, don’t worry, you can still get your fix.

The real reason to stop watching television and spending any time with the old media, is that it needs to die. It serves no purpose other than to perpetuate lies. I would argue that even the "entertainment" they offer is nothing but propaganda. The number of dramas which portray LEOs and Judges as saviors of the people are laughable in the face of reality. Just like the FEMA press conference, it’s not real. It’s the great American fake-out and it’s time for us to stop giving it any legitimacy.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Fox News outsmarted itself last Sunday. In its attempt to act as foil to the Ron Paul Revolution, a movement that is re-asserting the original ideals of the Republican Party, it slipped and showed its hand. Out of desperation, the Murdock-owned old media outlet exposed its penchant for manipulation.

About a month ago, in New Hampshire, Frank Luntz breathlessly informed Fox viewers that republican voters in New Hampshire were strongly opposed to the U.N. Of course, he didn’t also ask the voters in the focus group he had assembled if they had heard of Ron Paul or knew that part of his platform espouses a U.S. withdrawal from the U.N.

That’s Luntz’s stock in trade (F-bomb alert!): asking “the right questions” to get right answers. His expertise in manipulating poll respondents was used to great effect in 1994, when the Republicans wrote themselves into the history books. Devotees of Trotsky and John Dewey were given the keys to the House and Senate because they gave palatable answers to questions about fiscal responsibility, corruption and gun control; which was arguably the foremost issue in that election cycle due to the passage of the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban just prior to that election.

Luntz trotted out his dog and pony show with the promise that after the debate we’d all know who was going to win the primary. The responses and Luntz’s commentary were sold as impromptu. Watch the video, and you’ll see that the camera breaks to Luntz just prior to the debate’s start and Luntz responds as if he has just started discovering their feelings about the GOP candidates. The problem is, Luntz and his camera crew shot over 70 minutes of video to get just about 4 minutes of air time. While the segments aired might have been live, the preparation and Luntz’s manipulative and combative attitude directed the group in exactly the direction he wanted.

Though despicable, the effort was pretty slick. But you can’t control everything and the cat escaped the bag. The prominent Paul detractor in Luntz’s focus group, who was fooled into thinking that he was actually driving the show due to the quality of his own brilliant observations, gives us the scoop over at Free Republic, where he is a member. You know, the same Free Republic which gained its reputation by “freeping” polls, the very thing many of its membership complains about when Ron Paul supporters do it? Regrettably for Frank Luntz, this fellow doesn’t know when to shut up.

“Luntz was angry early on before camera’s went live when he polled the group to make sure everyone there was undecided. A 21 yr old guy raised his hand and said he was supporting Ron Paul. Luntz absolutely lost it on this kid and said “Why in the hell did you not put that on your questionnaire that was e-mailed to you? Why does it not shock me that a Ron Paul supporter would pull this kind of crap?”

….

“When he compared a moderate conservative to a major serious conservative he wanted a show of hands…then he added “When I say major serious conservative I mean you can hear the German Nazi marching bands and get excited” [sic]

With friends like Frank Luntz, who needs enemies? The poor, misguided chap in question believes he represents the Republican base. He took offense at Luntz’s question. His main concern (in all caps) is finding a candidate to represent the GOP who can combat the image of GOP politician as warmongering Nazi. Gee….who might help him out in this regard, a bunch of warmongering Nazis, or the one candidate running who truly isn’t either of those things?

The audience at the debate was uncharacteristically critical of Ron Paul’s views. We learned later that Ron Paul supporters were not the sort to be invited. This audience actually booed when Ron Paul spoke the inconvenient truth regarding a landslide-majority of Americans who want us out of Iraq. The studio audience was booing reality! The viewing audience was not so controlled. They gave Ron Paul the debate win with 34% of the text-message vote, double-digits higher then his next closest competitor. Fox doesn’t report the raw numbers as this would tend to discredit Sean Hannity’s insistence that the post-debate poll was being gamed.

And just what level of respect does Fox News show its viewers when its pundits reject their opinions out of hand? Why, the same level of respect it shows by manipulating people, namely, none at all.

What should this episode tell us? One, Fox News is doing its utmost to keep the warmongering Nazi image alive. While people believe that Fox News is merely a propaganda arm of the GOP, I don’t believe this at all. Murdock likes Clinton. She is neocon enough and at this point the GOP has over-played its hand. Its image is now a detriment. The writing on the wall is that Hillary wins in 2008, according to Frank Luntz anyway, so Fox News is hedging its bet by actively seeking to undermine her opposition and make sure that the one candidate who can beat her is not there when it would matter.

The second thing we can take away from this event is that Fox News is scared to death of Ron Paul. Not because he can beat the other Republicans but because he can beat Hillary. This fear isn’t limited to the neoconservatives over at Fox News. Elsewhere, neoconservative pundits are finally beginning to realize that Ron Paul is not the quixotic dark-horse of their alternate reality. If they’re not publicly noting that he’s formidable, the plagiarists amongst them are banning discussion about him. Yet they cannot change reality: the support is real, the money is real and as Dr. Paul pointed out after the debate, on issues, if not name recognition, he owns the election going all the way into November.

If you look at who Fox is trying to manipulate its viewers into supporting, you’re looking at the most ridiculous and least likely to beat the Democrat nominee. Of these four so-called front-runners, none are fiscally responsible enough to win the primary election much less the general election. And, none of them know the magic trick that is Hillary: Being pro-war while saying she isn’t.

One wonders what Fox News is going to try at the next debate.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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My dog escaped the yard last week. He’s a Corgi and he doesn’t like to be cooped up, alone. If there’s a dog in the neighborhood, he has to meet it.

A kind woman down the block discovered him and held on to him for a couple of hours. She’d contacted the cell-phone number on the tag. It was my wife’s phone who was, at the time, out of cell range on a camping trip. The kind lady finally took my dog down to the animal shelter here in town.

I discovered the details the next morning and headed down to the animal shelter. This was the first time that my Corgi had managed to get put in doggie jail. I didn’t expect an ordeal. I’ve had dogs go missing before. Some sort of fine would be assessed and I’d be on my way.

It was not to be. The animal shelter believes that our biggest problem here in Austin is animal sex. Animals are going to have it and you don’t want them to have any kids. They’re irresponsible parents. So, to entice you to have your dog neutered or spayed, they set an exorbitant bail. In this case it was $160.00. "Unless, Mr. Fisk, you decide that you’ll get your dog neutered, then the price is $50.00."

My wife and I talked it over and decided that we’d go ahead and save the hundred bucks. Our own vet would charge more than double that price.

The paper I was asked to sign, included a waiver of any rights to hold the vet performing the surgery liable should something go awry. "Why is this necessary," I asked. The bureaucrat behind the desk explained that this was just standard procedure and that they wouldn’t release the dog otherwise. I swallowed hard and signed. I’ve agreed to liability waivers before, but this felt like extortion. That’s what all government interaction feels like to me lately.

At the courthouse you will find the same sort of extortion occurring. The authorities are like car salesmen. They first knock you in the head with a very scary sounding fine or legal charge and then offer you something cheaper if you’ll cooperate. "Just sign here and see the clerk on your way out. That wasn’t so bad now was it?" Never mind that last part. I was reminded of my dentist. The bureaucrat doesn’t care what you think.

A supplementary document I was required to initial explained that the veterinary facility, where my dog would have his surgery, was strict about time. My appointment was on the following Monday and the flyer explained that I would be charged a significant amount of money for every minute that passed, should I arrive late. The shelter would drop him off at the vet and I would have to arrive at 5:00 PM sharp.

On Monday, I got a call from the vet. I mentioned the fee and they said not to worry since there was a thirty-minute grace period. "We don’t start charging until five-thirty."

Well that was a relief. After work, I headed to the shelter. I gave myself plenty of time and followed the map they provided. This wasn’t the first mistake I’d made. The whole ordeal was a series of ill-chosen actions on my part. Trusting bureaucrats to provide a decent map was the least of these. The map actually put me two miles north of my destination during rush hour. I did finally discover its location and I arrived at 5:29 PM, just barely in time to sign in.

Being in a hurry, I walked straight to the counter without paying much attention to my surroundings. The first thing I observed, after breathing a sigh of relief, was that I hadn’t come to a private business as I had imagined. It was a non-profit organization which contracted with the city. The furniture was period yard-sale. Every seat was occupied by "customers" who had either come to take advantage of the low price (this outfit advertises subsidized prices for spaying and neutering around town) or had been suckered like I had.

The walls were covered with propaganda peddling a variety of medications. In every case, the ads warned how your pet could die if you didn’t purchase it right now. It all seemed familiar. My son tries this same tactic. He’s about 10 months old and makes it clear to everyone within view that if he doesn’t get what he wants immediately, he could die. He can’t talk, but the ear-splitting scream coupled with distinct body language conveys the point perfectly. The wall u2018O drugs and fear was almost as annoying as one of my son’s tantrums.

I hadn’t noticed it when I came in but some joker had super-glued a quarter to one of the few still-intact linoleum tiles. As I waited, I made bets with myself as to whether or not the next person who arrived would try to pick it up. At least this place was providing some entertainment.

In case you’re wondering, I discovered the joke for myself during a walk around the room reading the various drug advertisements and promotional material posted on the walls.

Speaking of walls, there were at least five distinct colors on the walls, apparently due to a financial decision on the part of the painting contractor to buy unclaimed or defective paint mixes without regard to how much area it will cover before having to open a new gallon of paint. Not the same color as the last gallon? No problem! Just pour it in the hopper and go!

Ninety minutes after I arrived, after having read every frightening heart-worm brochure, and having played with a cutaway model of a worm-infested heart, my name was called.

"Mr. Fisk? Can you come with me please? I need to show you something. Did you know that your dog had one testicle that wasn’t descended all the way?"

"Well, yeah, sure. I knew that, but it wasn’t considered a big deal by our vet."

By this time, we had turned a corner and there was our little u2018Finnian.’ He sported a compression bandage from the bottom of his rib cage to his hips and finally wrapping down around his legs. He looked like he’d been hit by a truck just minutes before. This was not the feisty little pet my daughters adored. He was grotesque and obviously fighting for his life.

My stomach began to turn and then my own testicles leapt upward into my body as my mind imagined for the briefest moment what I had allowed them to do. Instinctively, I was clenching my thighs together. My jaw clenched also as it was explained that his un-descended testicle provided them quite the challenge. After the surgery was completed, they noticed bruising which aroused concerns of excess bleeding and clotting.

"He’ll be okay; he’s just a little bit sensitive to the medication we gave him. That’s why he’s so lethargic right now."

Their biggest concern was getting him on his feet. I squelched the urge to beat the tattooed young woman who kept handing me the leash, pleading with me to just make him get up and shake off the drugs. Who in their right mind could look at the poor fellow and imagine he was in a condition to get up and walk?

"Are you people serious? I’m no veterinarian, so I won’t argue why he’s not feeling good, but I’m not going to ask him to get up and walk around. It’s quite obvious he doesn’t want to do that."

"Oh, he’ll be fine. We’ll just give him some more time."

"It’s already been an hour and a half since I arrived, how much more time do you think he needs? Look at him!"

I won’t detail the conversation I had with the surgeon (who left my poor dog in this condition hours earlier) and we’ll skip a description of the sanitary conditions of their operating rooms.

Suffice it to say, this was nothing more than a factory. No care could be provided in such a facility. It was clear that its operators were only interested in cranking out sterilizations. I had somehow slipped into a dimensional warp and had arrived in a socialist third-world nightmare. This was socialized "medicine" in all its glory. I expect that the condition of this country’s hospitals will devolve to the same level within a decade should national single-payer healthcare be enacted in this country.

The bureaucrats had an arrangement with a local vet in cases like mine and so we loaded up my poor dog and I drove across town to leave him in their care overnight. They would watch him and release him to me the next morning.

When I arrived I felt as if I’d just entered a different country. This country was one where a (relatively) free market and competition drive the decisions of business owners. The facility was spotless, the waiting room comfortable and the staff concerned with poor Finnian’s comfort.

He’s finally recovering. He never got used to the plastic head guard and thankfully, he no longer requires it. It proved to be more a device of torture than protection. Because he likes to explore every smell, walking him around the block was an excruciating affair. Every three feet or so, he’d dip his head down to get a closer sniff and would be jolted to a halt as the cone of torture would catch on the grass or sidewalk. I don’t think he’s the smartest dog I’ve ever owned because he insisted on repeating the experience often.

Then again, his owner hasn’t proven to be that intelligent either. I won’t be making that mistake again. There’ll be no more government-managed health care for my family. I wouldn’t wish that on my dog and certainly not my own family. You could die.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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You walk past it every day as you start your commute. When you come home, there it is. Depending upon your diligence, maybe you address the issue once a month. I’m talking about that patch of grass that has grown out of the seam in your concrete driveway. If you let it go for too long it threatens to grow out over the entire slab! Why, the nerve!

So, as time and motivation allows, you get out your weed whacker or hoe and you trim it down. Afterward, you break out the leaf blower, hose or broom if you have the energy, and tidy up the massacre’s aftermath; finally leaning on your broom to admire your handiwork.

In a month, that grass has done it again! It tricked you. It escaped your notice by lying low, but then a seed head burst forth in defiance as if to say, "You can’t win, I refuse to go down without a fight! FREEEEEEDOOOMM!"

Incensed, you realize what you have to do. You have to kill it, utterly and completely.

What you may or may not know is that you are doomed to a cycle of killing and frustration because that grass wants to live. The driveway, put there to obliterate all plant life and keep your world "tidy," was constructed with seams, a wonderful place for trapping grass seeds and soil. The seam was put there to allow for expansion, preventing cracks. The seeds can’t help it. Man’s designs have unintended consequences, "blowback" if you will pardon a lately overused term.

But you are the government. Your job, as dictated by the city’s central planners is to keep your lawn tidy and within the dictates of the bureaucrats. Your only tool, be it exercised through the hoe, weed whacker or chemical weapon of grass destruction (WGD), is force.

Contrary to what some claim, trickle-down economics is a fact. Your bureaucratic work trickles down to you from the city council. You must kill the grass because if you don’t you’ll be forced to repeat this routine every month. Worse, if you defy the dictates, somebody might dispatch a policeman. You could be killed yourself. All over a tuft of grass which recognizes its inherent right to live, even though it is absent opposable thumbs or a brain with which to ponder its rights

This is a very real example of the self-evident truths that many seem to have forgotten. Central planning is itself a make-work program for those whom the planners seek to enslave. They do this by making laws.

Section 2315

Part II

…

(d) Homeowners must keep lawns watered and premises tidy.

…

What should be obvious is that the central planners believe they own you. Your home is allegedly your property, but if you don’t keep it tidy and kill that defiant tuft of grass, they can deal with you whichever way the law dictates. Your resistance can end in death. After all, if you resist, you are a defective person. The government must employ the force required which causes you to comply. Its agents will continue to escalate up until the event of your death if necessary.

This is just one way the planners generate work for you. The number of laws on the books continues to increase with each passing legislative session and each of these requires you to expend some effort in order to comply. This is before we factor in taxes, which further increase your bureaucratic workload. Don’t worry too much about this. You can rest assured that these bureaucrats and planners have special knowledge that you do not.

If it weren’t for them, chaos and anarchy would ensue. Before you know it, the grass will have won. Sure, there might be a lot less chemicals and a lack of noise generated by the neighbor — who spends 20 minutes burning up his leaf blower’s motor and raising the decibel level to ear-shattering levels — defiantly refusing to bend over and pick up the cigarette butt caught in the crack of the sidewalk closest to your bedroom window at 6:30 AM on Saturday. However, there are other considerations. The aesthetic of our fine city is at stake here. That has to be more important than your rights. You don’t have the right to ruin the property values of your neighbor.

Isn’t that the argument for most of these aesthetic laws? Where is the proof that property values are diminished? Well, there is no proof. Aesthetic (all?) laws are based on two things: fear and ownership. Because they own both you and your property, they can make any law they wish. They sell it to the public by spreading fear about lowered property values. But drive into the "bad" part of town and then think about who benefits from low property values. Why aren’t aesthetic laws enforced there?

Why wouldn’t self-interest be a good enough reason to make a property aesthetically pleasing to potential buyers? Well, it would, but the central planners do not want to acknowledge this self-evident truth. According to the claptrap they peddle, humans tend to make decisions harmful to themselves and their neighbors. That is why we need central planners: to rescue humans from their own folly.

You know what else this means? It means that central planners cannot be human. Otherwise they would be flawed just like us. Because they are free of flaws, they are qualified to redistribute our wealth and manage our affairs; forcing us to do their bidding. How does the public recognize an inhuman(e) person qualified to run their lives? Why, they look on the ballot at election time. Just pick one.

So, please, get out there and kill that grass. Just give me some time to sleep OK? Otherwise I’ll have to call the police and report you as a disturber of the peace.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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While it represents less volume than responses stating agreement with my view of Ron Paul’s electoral chances, a portion of the emails I have been receiving represent a belief that I am overstating the case. I get a few telling me that there aren’t enough facts to support the case. I’m deluding myself and others or am simply nave.

I was surprised that there are still some cynics represented amongst Ron Paul’s supporters. I imagine them pacing back and forth, wondering if Dr Paul has a realistic shot at winning the GOP nomination. "Does this Fisk guy really believe what he’s saying? Where’s the polling data? Where’s the real evidence? When is it okay for me to take the plunge? When will it be the right time so I don’t look like an idiot optimist acting out of irrational exuberance?"

I see it as obvious, though I was a cynic prior to Ron Paul’s Presidential bid. I prefer optimism. It’s easier on the circulatory system. On the other hand, there is evidence and it’s fair to ask.

Polling data is what seems to concern the doubters. Low polling numbers would appear to be an indictment. Last quarter in New Hampshire, Ron Paul was polling at 2% in those polls which included him.

This quarter, a recent poll in New Hampshire shows Ron Paul with 6%, 22% of those being black voters. That represents 66% increase over last quarter’s poll numbers. Where his competitors are just jockeying for position, Ron Paul is gaining significantly. By the way, in 2000, only 10% of Black voters gave Bush the nod.

I’ve previously written about the way these polls are conducted and their usefulness in predicting outcomes (they can’t by definition). However, there is historical data that also tends to support the idea that early polls are not reliable predictors.

In 2003, prior to the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries, Al Sharpton was beating John Kerry in the polls 5% to 4%. Kerry went on to win both primaries and shortly thereafter was polling nationally at 53%. That’s either a very large bump or a very inaccurate result prior to the primary. There are currently a significantly high number of undecided voters (hovering between 17% and 21%) amongst the Republicans. In a field this large where only Dr. Paul has a platform that represents a real difference in policy, the "upset" factor leans heavily in Ron Paul’s favor. Many of these undecideds are waiting to see how the race progresses before making a commitment.

Let’s look at the other areas which should give us rational, objective reasons to question what the old media is attempting to sell the public.

Fundraising is another indicator of real support. Ron Paul raised 5 million last quarter which isn’t as much as Thompson, Romney or Giuliani. But it represents a 114% increase over second quarter fundraising. It will also be used far more efficiently than other campaigns which have yet to acquire significant grass roots support for the money they’ve raised and spent so far. This is a very important issue. Romney has been running millions of dollars worth of television ads and does not have much to show for it. And more and more, old media members continue to hop on Ron Paul’s bandwagon.

The bad news for Paul’s competitors doesn’t stop there. James Dobson who has inherited the Christian Coalition (now "Values Voters") is threatening to pull his support from the entire GOP field. Ron Paul doesn’t necessarily need this segment of the Republican base to win the nomination but if we read Dobson’s message correctly, he would get that support if he were the nominee. The "front-runners" have no chance of carrying the Party without them and it doesn’t appear that any are pro-life enough for Dobson.

Romney’s campaign stops in New Hampshire are drawing no more than 100 supporters and I’m being generous (many of those are old media representatives). At one stop, he managed to commit the dumbest campaign move so far: turn his back on a wheel-chair-bound Muscular Dystrophy sufferer, who asked if Romney would have him arrested for using medical marijuana, while the cameras rolled.

John McCain was caught on tape at an event where a whopping one supporter(s) showed up to see what he had to say.

Fred Thompson hasn’t been on the trail very long, but has already been freeped by Ron Paul supporters at a stop in Iowa and had to literally request applause at a recent event attended by less than 50; perhaps they came merely out of curiosity given their apparent lack of enthusiasm for Thompson’s positions.

Unless Tancredo, Brownback, Keyes, Hunter and Huckabee are saving up campaign event videos, there seems to be no significant interest in their candidacies except by the small number of people contacted via landline for opinions.

In short, the other candidates have been as exciting to potential voters as watching paint dry.

None of the GOP candidates have had much luck beating Ron Paul in straw polls either. It’s hard to say how this might predict the outcome of primary elections. However, 14 of 30 first place finishes with 10 of 30 resulting in top 3 finishes is indisputable evidence that his chances are far more real than the old media is willing to admit. Many of the first place finishes were overwhelming landslides. If those represent party growth, we see another reason why Ron Paul has a very good chance to make history.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul has rarely drawn a crowd of less than 800 people for the past three months. On Saturday in Nashville, an event organized before his fundraising success had been announced, Dr. Paul drew a crowd of 1,440 at War Memorial auditorium. That was the crowd inside. Almost 100 people were turned away at the door because the venue was filled to capacity.

The prior week, in New Hampshire, at least 800 arrived to help the Paul Family canvas New Hampshire neighborhoods. These were not paid campaign staffers. Everyone there paid their own way, came from several surrounding states and worked all day to knock on some 12,000 doors in support of Ron Paul.

After last night’s debates, Ron Paul held a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I caught a little bit of this from the live feed. In my estimation, there were almost 2000 people there. The growth in just the past few days has been staggering. The campaign has reported a daily sign up of 20,000 new supporters. If that pace remains steady, the number of new supporters will reach 600,000 before November 1st. (Hello? McFly! Does this seem like a long shot to you?)

From New Hampshire to Washington, thousands upon thousands have gathered at Ron Paul appearances. If this were happening for any of the alleged front-runners, it would generate an inordinate amount of press coverage. It isn’t happening. The rest of the field consists of paper tigers. Giuliani is said to "wow" crowds of 200.

New media types, even ones who are not necessarily Ron Paul supporters are openly saying that a Ron Paul upset in New Hampshire and Iowa is a very real possibility. Here’s what David Kopel had to say:

"This weekend, I attended and spoke at the Second Amendment Foundation’s annual Gun Rights Policy Conference, which was held at a convention center in northern Kentucky, a few miles away from Cincinnati. What I saw and heard there changed my mind about the viability of Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy; Paul is going to far outperform the expectations laid out for him."

As a supporter, I could be accused of being overly optimistic merely because I want him to win. I predicted he would win back in June before there was evidence of the statistical sort. Not because I am particularly smart, psychic or able to time-travel. It was (and is) the fervor of his supporters and the amazing coalition he has united to the message of freedom which made it obvious to me that this campaign is historic.

Please, fence-sitters out there: this revolution will roll with or without you. Do something that you haven’t done in a while and just get involved. Show up at an event, make a donation, believe. Oh, yeah, don’t expect me to revert to cynicism any time soon.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 45-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Ron Paul can win. Dr. Paul’s latest accomplishments have created a great deal of buzz amongst the old media talking heads (let’s stop calling them “mainstream” OK?) Most of those who have been predicting that Ron Paul is a long shot or is merely a curiosity are now forced to re-assess their remarks; those who are honest anyway. The rest continue to repeat the same derisive comments because they haven’t yet figured out how they’re going to derail the Revolution.

Ron Paul’s supporters, my favorite name for them so far is "Paulunteers," have decided that he’s going to be their next President.

There are several reasons why Ron Paul’s campaign is historic and none of them have to do with Ron Paul’s "genius" in utilizing the Internet. The old media would like us to believe that Ron Paul’s campaign is just a repeat of the Howard Dean campaign. However, there is only one parallel, grass roots support, but all comparisons end there. What most of the derisive pundits overlook is the campaign’s message. The fact that they do not truly understand what Dr. Paul is advocating, speaks volumes about entrenched old media personnel.

Like government bureaucrats who spend most of their lives witnessing tragedy, their view of the world is distorted. Members of the old media have spent at least 40 years attempting to amplify the worst in our society, pretending it is the norm. It isn’t surprising that this advocacy would turn practitioners into believers. The old media is used to politics as strictly an advertising campaign. Typically, the public is manipulated by psychological propaganda issued by campaigners. To the media and many scientific observers, this manipulative process always works. From the time that the first soap advertisements were produced, people have studied and improved upon propaganda techniques. However, humans are unpredictable. Most studies assume that because a particular experiment showed humans to be easily manipulated, they will always be subject to manipulation and thus merely focus on the effectiveness of different techniques.

The possibility that humans could change their behaviors and beliefs is not seriously considered. Take a look at polling for example. In spite of the knowledge that technology and its use has been changing, every major polling organization still clings to old methods. They have not adapted to new technologies whereas the population is doing so. The old adage — “if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes truth” — is assumed to be true forever. What if it isn’t? What if Goebbels was wrong? Or, what if what Goebbels said was true but there is a more powerful antithesis?

To one who knows the truth, the repetition of lies cannot shake his belief in those truths.

Alan Stang wrote of Ron Paul recently:

Then, suddenly, without warning, there was an Incredible Hulk transformation. Godzilla was onstage, biting off heads, tearing off limbs and chewing on the bones. Who was he? Where had he come from? Who let him in? The reptilian media scumbags couldn’t very well drag him off the dais. The cameras were live. They had to sit there and listen while Dr. Ron assured them that his first official act as President would be to dismantle IRS.

And across the country, from the west bank of the Hudson to the California line, a roar erupted, as millions of astounded Americans who pay the taxes, fight the wars and go to work (unless their jobs have been deported), realized that Dr. Ron was saying in plain English what they believe in private. Most of the other candidates spoke boilerplate. They saw they were not alone and not crazy. "Imagine! A candidate for President who thinks like me."

The self-evident nature of certain truths is a problem for the old media and central planners. When the founders stated that some truths were self-evident, they were acknowledging that truth didn’t require a certain level of education or rational thinking to be understood. We know them in our bones and they do not necessarily require articulation. I personally believe that these truths are so obvious that social planners have for over a century, done everything they can to prevent them from being considered. A great number of "isms" have been introduced into our lexicon and taught in public schools and universities; most of which seek to rationalize and advocate central planning.

But because they are stuck in the same cycle, they don’t recognize what is actually happening. Why is Ron Paul so successful in spite of the fact that his campaign hasn’t employed “time tested” methods?

• Message/Delivery
  This is number one on the list though what follows may not necessarily be in order. Ron Paul’s message isn’t original, but it is powerful and highlights the self-evident truths that drive every human action and interaction. Most importantly, this message is not antagonistic. To central planners it is offensive, but to everyday people, it is purely positive. Ron Paul’s strength is in the way he delivers the message — not as a charismatic speaker but as a Patriot whose actions are hard to fault. He’s the opposite of a cult leader because he does not demand anyone follow him. Quite the opposite is true. His statements have been in deference to his supporters. They are the ones leading the Revolution and he is merely the public representative of this movement.

• Home Schooling
  For the past 25 years, a significant number of parents have rejected government schools. Not only can we count a large number of the children (some 1 million per year) as better educated, their parents count amongst those who, in spite of a public education, have rejected central planning. While it is hard to gather statistics in this regard the number could be up to 30 million who have completed their studies or are in the process of doing so.

• Government Intervention — “blowback”
  Over the past 40 years the government at all levels has become increasingly belligerent towards us. The increasing level of central planning is producing the unintended consequence of a population seeking ways to circumvent central planning. This is a feature of any market system as it is fundamentally part of all nature (not just humans) to seek freedom.

• Distillation of the Message
  The Internet is a key here but only as a tool. The use of YouTube and various social networking sites have compressed Ron Paul’s public appearances and allowed people to see what he has to say without the old media’s vapid commentary. The “permanence” of availability is also important. Prior to the internet, one had to tune in or wait for a re-run to air. Now, we have an on-demand source of information and no one to dole it out in acceptable doses.

• Action
  This applies to both Ron Paul and his supporters. Actions speak far louder than words. As with Ron Paul’s life-long devotion to spreading the message of freedom, his supporters, encouraged by Dr. Paul’s sincerity, proven by his actions, are taking action themselves. This action is far more powerful than the old media’s methods of simply broadcasting platitudes and slogans.

• The Remnant
  Counted amongst the remnant must be Lew Rockwell and the Von Mises Institute, Ludwig Von Mises, Ron Paul, Harry Browne, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Murray Rothbard, Alan Stang, a gaggle of Patriot Movement writers and protesters and to some degree Ayn Rand and her Objectivist followers — all who have provided a source of enlightenment and an antidote to central planning themes. We also must include the relatively small group (as compared to all of organized Christianity) who actually follow Jesus’ teachings and of course Jesus himself whom I list last but certainly not least. Their reach was, and is, far greater than imagined.

• Convergence/Timing
  The blowback listed above has created a myriad of political insurgencies. Every Federal agency has organized detractors now. From the BATF, to the Department of Education, there are advocacy groups which oppose the policies of these agencies. Though these groups will not always agree with one another, we are at a very unique point in our history where members of these groups are coming together while laying aside any differences they may have. Ron Paul’s candidacy has facilitated this.

To use an old cliché, the stars are aligning perfectly for Ron Paul and against his opponents. The results have been nothing less than spectacular. This isn’t to say that a Ron Paul victory is a foregone conclusion. Quite the contrary, we have no idea what the establishment is going to do next. However, we do know, like the Federal Reserve which has one weapon in its arsenal, inflation; the government also has only one weapon, force. Its fraudulent use of force is the cause for Paulunteer’s sense of urgency. More of the same will only speed up the process.

However, it’s not just wishful thinking as detractors keep saying. There is a very real possibility that we can lead Ron Paul right into the White House over the objections of his detractors.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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The media, neoconservatives and some Democrats just don’t understand why Ron Paul’s supporters are so excited, dedicated and diverse. At the most recent PBS debate in Baltimore, the camera panned to catch the first African-American female fighter pilot in U.S. history applauding enthusiastically when Dr. Paul suggested we should bring the troops home from Iraq and every other country they currently occupy. Neoconservative bloggers are aghast at Ron Paul’s increasing success as are the neoconservative gatekeepers. This is a truly satisfying result since it was the neoconservative hijacking of the Republican Party which has helped to further decimate our once-great Republic.

In one comment, written as a response to a post at the quintessential neoconservative and freedom-hating blog, Red State, a reader unsupportive of Paul points out the obvious for most neoconservatives, that Ron Paul’s ability to raise a million dollars in seven days is “[expletive deleted] scary.”

The neoconservative movement is now officially in its dying throes and yet neoconservatives do not take notice. A good example of this can be witnessed in Newt Gingrich’s threat to join the crowded field of GOP Presidential candidates. (Eye of) Newt has been touting his ability to bring together a goodly number of intellectuals who will help solve America’s problems. What is at the forefront of those problems? Why, it is the threat of Islamic law being instituted in the United States if we were to pull out of Iraq. Seriously, that is what he’s saying.

The neoconservatives are banking on a strategy that has worked for them since 1994 (and all governments since the dawn of civilization). If they just pull the kids ’round the campfire and tell them a scary enough story, the kids will flock to their skirts and demand protection. If the story isn’t scary enough, then it has to be modified until it becomes sufficiently scary. But at some point, the story becomes so far-fetched that even the true believers have to scratch their heads.

With Ron Paul’s entry into the field of Presidential contenders, that tactic is no longer going to work. Ron Paul’s early support was made up of those who were either never fooled by this claptrap or have come to understand that they were being manipulated. It only becomes more apparent to them with every utterance by neoconservatives that the scare stories have no basis in reality. Rather than offer something truly different, the neoconservatives are simply upping the ante and labeling it “different.” They have discounted Ron Paul’s support by claiming that it is much smaller than it appears. This is just another side of the same reality-denying tactic that is killing their movement. Because they cannot acknowledge reality, their influence will completely wither away, sooner rather than later.

Ron Paul’s grass roots support is growing daily. Each time he is given a national forum in which to speak, a new flood of supporters joins the cause and his coffers grow (as opposed to Mitt Romney who’s coiffeur’s coffers grow). In the spaces between these national appearances, the growing body of supporters reaches out to their neighbors and spreads the word.

The neoconservatives on the other hand, believe that they are the keepers of all intellectual truth and that they have enemies both domestic and foreign. The domestic enemies are “liberals” or those whom they label so. The list of “liberals” keeps growing however and their blindness to reality prevents them from realizing that a list of enemies, increased by spite and action and drawn from a static pool of voters, is causing the number of “allies” to dwindle.

If you are thinking that I’m giving away some secret that will tip off neoconservatives and cause them to mend their ways long enough to torpedo Ron Paul’s candidacy, don’t worry. As Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (ret.) told the San Diego Tribune recently, "this administration is immune to good advice."

The neoconservatives are immune to good advice. Their arrogance and hubris knows no bounds. Even if they were to read this, they would discount it as irrelevant nonsense from a wacko Paul supporter. Since it is only they who have the answers to America’s problems, there are no qualified observers who can offer worthwhile advice. Their inability to give criticism any serious consideration is the source of their failures in every policy. Iraq is a great example of this but there are others that can be pointed out such as FEMA’s reaction to hurricane Katrina.

We are at the “fight” stage in Gandhi’s oft-quoted statement. The neocons are beginning to fight, but they are using the very tactics that do nothing to diminish support for Ron Paul and everything to decrease their own ranks. They think that non-neoconservative voices emanate from brainless liberals, but this isn’t why their ranks dwindle. They are incapable of honest self-assessment — the very thing of which they accuse their enemies — thus, neoconservative influence continues to wane. Their knack for projecting their own problems onto others is similar to their knack for projecting U.S. military power all over the globe. It is not “terrorists” who would convert the U.S. to a nation ruled by draconian dictates but the neoconservatives themselves.

Ron Paul’s support grows because he is the anti-neoconservative candidate. Where neoconservatives deride those who don’t buy their solutions, Ron Paul always assumes the best of both detractors and the merely ignorant. When Bill Maher asked him “Why are Americans so stupid?” he responded, “We’re Americans,” to point out that all Americans aren’t stupid and his task is to inform and enlighten rather than make enemies. What a concept. The most obvious truism for a politician is that he should be expanding his influence rather than alienating voters. This is lost on neoconservatives.

Ron Paul refuses to convert disagreements into personal arguments which create animosity. His tactic is to merely present his side of the argument while acknowledging that this is part of his core belief system and not an indication that those who disagree are stupid or evil. This has trickled down to his supporters who, for the most part, avoid political arguments and instead implore the uninitiated to simply discover for themselves what Ron Paul is saying. This tactic has worked brilliantly. Ron Paul’s message is genuinely compelling and his defense of these views has been consistent and dogged over the past 30 years; no matter what obstacles are thrown before him. That is the basis for his supporter’s enthusiasm. He truly means what he is saying. Unlike his counterparts, he does not have to waste any words explaining why his votes do not match his rhetoric. His supporters do not have to suffer the nagging feeling that something different would occur if they were to elect him. He has always voted in a manner that matches his speech.

The neocons have no candidate in the race remotely showing the same level of integrity though they appear to be certain that nobody will notice this. They prove by their actions that any talk of truth, honesty or values is just empty, pandering, rhetoric. The number of Paul supporters is increasing because, contrary to neoconservative belief, Americans are not stupid. They just haven’t had a decent alternative in 30 years. Well….now they do.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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It is striking when watching the media-anointed choices for President, how much emphasis is put on their ability and desire to run things. Speaking to a crowd of 200 in San Diego, Rudy Giuliani said, “The leading Democratic candidates have never run a city, they’ve never run a state, I don’t think they’ve ever run a business of any size.” Rudy is running to run. I doubt that he’ll get very tired in spite of this. He has a real passion for running people’s lives. Just ask New York fire fighters.

There’s a lot of running in politics. The candidates run for office (hurry!) and there’s a running theme in the media: “Who is most qualified to run your life?” (Vote here!)

Doesn’t it seem strange that a guy who made millions with his post-911 security company, would want to temporarily leave his company to be President? I mean really, if you had a successful business, why take a job that pays about 10% of what you could make in the private sector? For most politicians, I think it’s the running. When you run people’s lives, there are just never enough lives to run. When you’ve run the lives of seven million, stepping down to a cadre of three figures is a real let down.

Hillary got a taste while she was the First Lady. She was no Lady, but you know what I mean. She can’t wait to get back there. Bill can’t wait to hire some interns. But isn’t that what our powerful people do well? They tell the gardener to “freshen up that spot over there,” the maid to “clean more in the crevices,” and the driver to “hurry up." Apparently that sort of thing is impressive to a good number of people.

I don’t mean to bash the rich. I’ve known some rich people who were among the most down to earth, caring and generous people I’ve ever met. But these politicians, they’re not like that. If there’s any “generosity” involved, it’s with other people’s money. In the real world, this is not referred to as generous. It is called thieving, fraud or extortion — preceded by choice four-letter words in most circumstances.

Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama are all proposing “universal” health care plans. Hillary’s plan, as breathlessly reported by sycophant-cum-journalist (or is it the other way around) Joe Klein, is “astute” in that it demands every citizen buy health insurance, while giving employers tax credits if they provide health insurance for employees. Like mandatory automobile insurance, you’d be required to buy mandatory health insurance. It’s for the safety of others you know. What if you didn’t think you needed insurance and then got into an accident? You couldn’t possibly just pay the bill, says Klein.

But an estimated one-third of the 47 million who don’t have health insurance are people who can afford it, mostly healthy young people who don’t think they need it. They do, of course; the rest of us subsidize their care when they show up at the emergency room after a skateboarding accident.

See, even the media is enamored with people who want to run your life. Statements like the one Klein makes here are total fabrications to justify tyranny, but people read it and believe it. You would think that Democrats would blush at such an overtly fascist plan; the real winners in Hillary’s plan are health insurance providers and employers who will no longer have to offer health insurance as an incentive. You lose. The other mandate in Hillary’s plan is that insurance companies have to cover everyone. If you think health care costs are expensive now, just wait until something like this is legislated.

Newt Gingrich wants to run your life. But he needs you to pledge. If he gets 30 million by November 13, the anniversary of the day in 1979 when Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy, then he might deign to run to run your life.

“You can’t bring all your good ideas if you don’t have the resources to communicate,” Gingrich told reporters Thursday at a breakfast in Washington.

I apologize for the colloquialism, but the only response to this blatant huckster that I can manage is: What a putz. Newt Gingrich is the Dark Lord himself, who has the audacity to claim (again) that we need a change in Washington. Here’s the rat who ushered in the neoconservative era, lecturing the rest of the GOP about how it should distance itself from Bush. Trust him. He would never steer you wrong. When he says that the Republicans should change their ways, he really means it this time. Why, every plank in the “Contract with America” was enacted wasn’t it? Oh….not even one?

Speaking of Hucksters, Mike Huckabee, a man who has never seen a day of military service, wants to send more soldiers to die in Iraq to obtain “peace with honor.” He wants you to pay for it because, as he said in New Hampshire, we all need to pay for the mistakes of a few power-crazed neoconservatives who have hijacked this country’s foreign policy. If we didn’t all share in the costs, we might have to place the blame squarely on those who actually ordered the aggressive invasion of Iraq. Isn’t this ironic? Ron Paul can explain the concept of blowback and it is characterized as “blaming America.” Which is more appropriately characterized as blaming America; Ron Paul’s statements on the dangers of faulty policy, or the forcing of Americans to finance and die in wars which they do not approve? Actually, blaming isn’t the appropriate word. Another colloquialism is required here: “screwing America” — as in, I’d rather vote for a guy who blames America than a guy who advocates screwing America.

Pause. If this were a movie, the soundtrack would have, up to this point, been some sort of industrial buzzing noise so annoying that it drives you to smash your head against your keyboard.

Queue the elevator music. Calming and nondescript. Now that we have mentioned Ron Paul, there is something to be highlighted. Ron Paul doesn’t want to run your life. He neither believes he is qualified to do so, nor does he believe that the constitution gives him the authority to do so. He’s right. But more important is how he’s run his own life and how he’s actually voted while in office. His record is quite plainly superior to any of his so-called competitors.

For instance, when Newt Gingrich was explaining to his seriously ill wife, that he needed to find his bliss and screw his secretary (you’re next), Ron Paul was past his 30th year of marriage having already put his kids through college without the aid of the federal government student loan program. When Hillary Clinton was telling the media that Bill Clinton was a “hard man to keep under the porch," Carol Paul was putting together a family cookbook which Dr. Paul credits for pushing his candidacy in the 14th district over the top. And this year, with very little money and armed only with ideas, Ron Paul kicked off one of the most stunning political campaigns we will witness in our lifetimes.

Contrary to the Benny Hinn of Republican Politics, Newt Gingrich, you bring “all your good ideas” first. Then the money comes. Ron Paul’s candidacy will prove historic. Newt Gingrich’s will prove a flop and about as spendthrift as John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s campaigns have been. This is because neither Newt nor the rest of the Ron Paul challengers understand the power and attraction of freedom. Perhaps they do, but they certainly wouldn’t want to go around promising any of that. How could they run your life if you were free?

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Watching the final two hours of the Values Voters debate was a pretty excruciating experience. When I joined the debate in progress, I had to sit through about forty-five minutes of yes or no questions which were as leading as questions posed by Fox News questioners during the September 5, 2007, New Hampshire debate. So leading were some of the questions that positing a “no” couldn’t have been understood without an explanation, but that was the format. So, as has been reported, when Ron Paul affirmed a no vote to some of these questions, there were gasps from some delegates. Perhaps they were just shocked that a politician would refuse to pander to them in spite of the hyperbole and hysteria pregnant in the questions.

Some questioners were in fact as hostile towards the no-shows as Fox News questioners were to Ron Paul. In some respects, this was satisfying since the no-shows are rarely asked hard questions in the main stream media’s “debates.” However, it displayed a level of cowardice and dare I say, dishonor. Attacking others when they are unable to defend themselves seems par for the course lately. It is a bit troubling that this tactic is an accepted practice with a group that claims it represents Christianity’s political conscience.

At least they’re consistent on this one. America can attack countries unable to defend against her bombs, and should be encouraged to do so, according to values voters and their warmongering favorites. George Bush and any number of his neoconservative sycophants can exclaim “you are either with us or against us," which is exactly opposite of what Jesus said, and values voters eat it up.

Viewers got to see the new addition to the warmongering lineup, Alan Keyes. Alan Keyes doesn’t speak. He screams. He preaches. He is irrelevant. Even values voters find him shrill though his ability to string together sentences is quite impressive as meaningless as the content may be. Oh, sometimes it means something. Alan Keyes’ message for as long as I’ve seen him speak has been “the federal government should enact the entire book of Leviticus.” I guess it never occurred to him that this would bring back slavery. Ironic. His closing statement was embarrassing even to the values voters in attendance. Keyes’ message was essentially: “Ron Paul is wrong. Ron Paul says we are endowed rights from our Creator, but the rights enumerated in the Constitution are only valid if those exercising them do so the right way. So, please go to my website and donate money.”

Keyes will not be making any impact on the Republican primary race other than to siphon off less than 1% of the Christian Jihadists from Huckabee, Hunter or Tancredo. He is all bark and no bite, rhetorically speaking. His bark is like that of a Corgi that thinks he can take on the German Shepherd.

A good deal of the questions were posed by socialist pastors and clergy whose organizations would follow Bush to hell if he commanded them to do so. The obvious bastardization of Romans 13 was on full display. In fact, a visit to the Values Voters website, the political arm of the American Family Association which has essentially replaced the Christian Coalition, directs pastors(pdf) to obey Title 26, 501(c)3 instructions on what they can or can’t say to their congregations. The words “Congress shall make no law….” are to be ignored. That the government is even defining what is and isn’t a church is absurd but this does not even cross the minds of Church “leaders” who affiliate themselves with the AFA.

The first amendment goes much further than merely prohibiting the government from establishing a State religion, it even forbids the government from defining what is and isn’t a church. "Establishment" is not a verb. It is a noun. Thus, “Congress shall make no law … respecting an establishment of religion” means that congress can’t regulate religion in any way, shape or form, including what constitutes a religious establishment. But don’t tell that to values voters and their “leaders.” Refusing to register under 501(c)3, would mean they couldn’t “render unto Caesar” that which is God’s. That seems to be the sole purpose of this coalition of “Christians” apart from the small number who could understand the counter arguments Dr. Paul presented.

The debate was both disappointing and exhilarating. To see so many stand up and presume to speak for God himself, that was disappointing though in my experience a regular occurrence. I am convinced that most religious leaders today would be very happy if their parishioners disobeyed the New Testament’s admonition to question everything. That the bible ever was translated to English is a curse on such leaders in spite of their claims to the contrary. What was clear is that these values voters and their organization want large, powerful and mean federal bureaucracies to punish evildoers both domestically and abroad. Evildoers in this case are not those who reject Christ, but those who reject federal power over every aspect their lives.

Values voters were mostly perplexed by Ron Paul. He admonished them to be wary of the government. Their own leaders are telling them to trust the government; to spy on them, to torture them, to regulate their houses of worship because this is God’s will. When Jesus was tempted on the mount and Satan offered him all of the Kingdoms of the world, did Jesus tell Satan that he was fraudulently offering him political power that Satan didn’t possess? After all, aren’t all governments ordained by God? No. Jesus didn’t even argue that these Kingdoms were not under Satan’s command. He replied that he was bound to obey one God only and let the implication that Satan controlled the governments of the world stand. Values voters apparently also worship one God: the State.

When Jesus said “I came for the Jews," I personally believe he meant that. When the Jews begged God for a King, a government, God told them that they had better be careful for what they prayed. The King would tax them and impose upon them laws and restrictions on the freedoms they enjoyed. They were, prior to their formal government, a loose tribal society, anarchists essentially who governed themselves. Jesus’ message was that a real Kingdom existed outside the realm of government and that they could chose to be under its submission rather than that of the flawed rule of man. That was the salvation he offered. In the two thousand years since, this message has been utterly ignored and the opposite is now being preached in the pulpits of the world as if it were Christ’s message. The doctrine, that the Kingdom of God has not yet come to pass and that it will eventually be installed by military force in what is now Israel, is completely counter to everything Jesus taught. If there is anything that one could consider anti-Christian, that is it.

Ron Paul is not Jesus but his message is closer to what Jesus said than anyone who shared the stage with him that evening. Government should be as small as possible in order that it be the least intrusive on our lives. People are capable of following moral laws without government interference. In fact, they are more likely to be moral without government’s corruptive influence. But this is something that values voters do not appear capable of understanding.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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My wife and children are away for three weeks on a home-schooling adventure. That makes it very hard for me to sleep or remain well. When I’m away or when they’re away, I don’t sleep. Maybe it’s lucky, maybe unlucky, but I caught some sort of nasty flu bug and was laid up for two days where I could do nothing but sleep. I think I’d rather find some alternate way of sleeping next time we’re away from each other. When I was finally able to get up, wash the stink off and move about, I rented a few movies; the kind that I can’t watch with the kids. You know, "guy movies."

Only one of these was remarkable: Blood Diamond.

Leonardo DiCaprio has talent far beyond the hype that surrounds him. His performance was so believable, as was his co-star Djimon Hounsou, that I felt like I was a fly on the bullet-riddled wall in the ironically named, Freetown, Sierra Leone where the film is based. As far as plot goes, it’s not that original. The Maltese Falcon, Treasure Island, Romancing the Stone, if you’ve seen one buried treasure movie, you’ve seen ‘em all. The subplots are where the real action is in this picture.

Vandy is a victim who just won’t lie down and be a "kafir." What he is most, is a loving Father. As the film opens, we see Vandy and his family waking before dawn to send his only son, Dia off to his first day of school. Dia finally "hops to" when his father threatens a beating. In third world countries, it’s perfectly okay to threaten children with a beating because they just don’t know better. In civilized countries we don’t ever do that. Solomon Vandy is just a poor fisherman who dreams that his son will go to medical school. [I have to say this is truly one of the dumbest plot devices of this film — I'll explain later.] As Dia arrives home from school that same day, repeating his teacher’s promise of Sierra Leone’s future Utopia, Dystopia arrives in the form of R.U.F. rebels who proceed to either chop off the hands of males they capture or take them intact as slave soldiers and mine workers.

Solomon leads his family to escape, but doesn’t fare as well himself. After being captured, he is spared the use of his limbs so he can be used as a slave at the R.U.F-controlled diamond mines. His captors, excepting a few commanders, are just boys. They have been programmed via the use of drugs and propaganda to be killing machines. These aren’t your typical younglings. There’s something terrifying about twelve-year-old boys wielding AK-47 sub-machine guns.

In spite of the dire consequences (immediate execution) for withholding diamonds, Solomon finds a 100 caret pink, clear diamond, and buries it. He’s found out by one of the R.U.F. commanders while the mine is being stormed by government forces. Both slaves and captors are sent to jail. The government isn’t picky.

DiCaprio’s character, Danny Archer, a mercenary busted for trying to smuggle diamonds into Liberia, is in the same jail. The relationship between Archer and Vandy starts here. When Archer overhears the injured rebel leader demanding access to the stone Vandy has hidden, he recognizes his chance to finally be rid of his own slave-masters and plots to befriend Vandy and smuggle the diamond out of the country. His interest in Vandy is purely selfish.

Meanwhile, we are given a look at Archer’s world. He’s a mercenary whose recent arrest has upset his boss. The loss of the diamonds has put him on shaky ground (Han Solo anyone?). His boss works for a very powerful family in Europe modeled after the DeBeers family. When Archer meets a reporter, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), the two fill us in on the evil diamond trade which takes advantage of the turmoil to drive up profits.

Eventually, Vandy and Archer meet and Archer promises he will help restore Vandy’s family, splitting the profits with him if he’ll take him to the diamond. Vandy is not easily convinced. Archer finally uses irrefutable logic. "I’m white, you’re not. You’ll need a white man to negotiate the red-tape of government." Vandy finally succumbs but not before the R.U.F. has entered Freetown to clash with government forces. Vandy and Archer are literally caught in the middle. Their escape is one of the most harrowing I’ve ever seen on film and DiCaprio convinces us he could have been a soldier.

The rest of the movie follows the duo’s adventures. Archer is singularly focused on the diamond while Vandy’s focus is on restoring his family. This leads to some very dangerous situations and conflicts between them. Bowen agrees to help them when Archer promises to give her all of his contacts’ information and to go on record so that she can break the story about the evil diamond cartel back in Europe.

The R.U.F. rebels make bail and coincidentally Vandy’s nemesis has captured Dia, hooked him on heroin, brainwashed him and turned him into an indiscriminate murderer. The chance that Vandy’s family will ever be whole again appears unlikely. It becomes obvious that at some point, Vandy may have to face that his son is a lost cause. Like any loving father, he never accepts this for a moment even when doing so might save his own life.

As with many of these sorts of stories, Archer’s character seems to be seeking redemption. At the same time, the filmmakers project a message sounding very similar to the one proffered by neoconservatives who have hijacked this country’s foreign policy and who are constantly bringing up the various Sierra Leones of the world that need the U.S. to rush in and save them.

That message is: We need characters like Danny Archer in real life. They aren’t moral but they can be useful to us to kill the bad guys. Vandy, though extremely brave and principled, never once fires a weapon in this film. He is a "regular Joe" and regular Joes just aren’t cut out for war. But if they play their cards right, the Danny Archers of the world will save them. Just don’t bother the Danny Archers of the world with morality. They are such good defenders of the little people because they have adopted moral relativism, not in spite of it.

The filmmakers have another message: Corporations are evil. The way that this is delivered is ironic. Scenes of UN and government refugee camps turn out to be more totalitarian than the regular countryside where the R.U.F. terrorizes the population with apparent impunity. But, the turmoil is exacerbated because the evil corporation buys diamonds and arms both the rebels and the government. Apparently the government has also disarmed its citizenry so they are defenseless against the rebels.

What the film fails to note is that the remedy proposed, a moratorium on diamond purchases from war-torn countries, actually helps to drive up the price on the diamonds that come from countries like Sierra Leone and further increase the profits of the diamond cartels. One has to wonder if the European diamond cartel isn’t rubbing their collective hands in glee. "Oh no, don’t throw me in the briar patch!"

There is also a joke told in the movie. It is as out of place as would be a spaceship. In a remote village that has just been sacked by R.U.F. rebels, an old man talks with Vandy in his native tongue. He claims that things are just hunky dory, all things considered and then adds: "It’s a good thing they haven’t discovered oil here, then where would we be?" I would have appreciated it if this implausible conversation had never taken place. The filmmakers go out of their way to show us how R.U.F. rebels have terrorized every village in the country only to tell us now it could be worse, it could be about oil. Remember Young Frankenstein? "…could be worse, could be raining…." How apropos since the director’s cognitive ability appears descended from "Abby Normal."

Archer finally gains the redemption he seeks and sadly, Vandy’s family is restored, but not to their peaceful fishing village in Sierra Leone. Instead, Vandy, who improbably negotiates directly with the head of the diamond cartel’s representative, relocates his family to the most surveiled and unfree city in the world: London. We are given plenty of images of the marvels of "modern" society and its vast superiority to the meager existence Vandy and his family eked out back in Sierra Leone. Wealth is to always be measured in terms of monetary and material possessions apparently. A simple life, with enough food and a loving community is simply not good enough. You have to have a cell phone, big box shopping centers, big hospitals and big brother to prevent the R.U.F’s of the world from wreaking havoc.

Vandy’s exemplary character was formed with the help of strong family traditions and history. Tribal traditions stick with him and he presumably has passed this on to his son. So it is truly ridiculous and frankly not believable that he would seek to strip his son of these valuable traditions by sending him to medical school. It is also not believable that he would place more value on a society he has never seen, than the one passed down to him by his own father. By sending his son to school, he undermines his own tribe. A man who looks down upon his own traditions and work is not noble, he is covetous and unappreciative. Such people do not show a good work ethic and do not value basic principles. Vandy’s actions and solid character are at odds with his dreams. That is why this particular plot device is misguided and out of place in an otherwise great story.

In spite of these silly plot devices and conflicting messages I found the movie to be superbly done. It was fun to watch even though its politics are a bit heavy-handed and misguided. I would recommend it for the performances alone.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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In spite of a Republican Party apparatus in Texas which prevented new Republicans from voting and Rick Perry’s videotaped declaration that there were no Texans in the race, Ron Paul received 16.7% of the Texas Straw Poll vote on September 1st and proved that he is the legitimate front-runner for the Republican Party nomination by every measure.

On the Friday evening before the vote, a fundraiser was held in somebody’s home. Ron Paul’s campaign raised more money there than the Republican Party collected at its war-mongering event the next day.

Note to the Texas GOP: had you opened the poll to the newly energized Ron Paul supporters who weren’t previously delegates, you might have tripled the funds you raised. Ron Paul’s supporters owned the streets anyway, as it was in Iowa and is everywhere else with no exceptions.

In Maryland over the past 11 days, Republicans there participated in a GOP Straw Poll and picked Ron Paul over the alleged top tier candidates.

Then came the Republican "debates" in New Hampshire. Fox News shamelessly held Ron Paul at bay for 29 full minutes before allowing him to answer his first question. He hit it out of the park. Ron Paul didn’t miss any opportunities. The best lines of the night came from Ron Paul.

When asked about previous statements he’s made advocating the abolishment of major federal agencies, including the FBI and CIA which are tasked to save us from terrorists, Dr. Paul delivered one of the best closing statements to a question ever made in these debates: "It is perfectly legitimate to know what’s going on and gather intelligence around the world, but you have to have somebody intelligent interpreting that information."

The strategy for this debate was keeping challengers from falling into the Ron Paul lair. None of the candidates are qualified to do this because their answers are scripted, and quite frankly there isn’t a man among them capable of thinking on their feet. So, Brit Hume and his underlings were set to the task of posing the most leading, baiting questions possible to help them out. I watched with about 30 Austin Ron Paul supporters and the subtleties of sound were not available to us. It wasn’t until later, watching a YouTube video of the debate that I noticed how blatantly Fox and the lower tier candidates were working together. During some of the questions, the utterly classless, sophomoric giggling by Romney and Giuliani, suggested that they knew the questions beforehand. They timed their chuckles and guffaws at just the right moments. They were coached.

Each and every time one of these traps was set, it went off in the questioner’s face like an IED. I half expected to see burn marks and smoke. Some may get incensed at what they were doing but frankly, I hope they keep doing it. If they really thought his positions were funny, they’d let the audience laugh. But the audience wasn’t laughing. It was cheering, wildly.

There were a few boos from the audience. Mind you, they were not universal. The boos erupted from neoconservatives in the audience who react like vampires to crosses when adherence to constitutional principle is mentioned. Ron Paul reminded the audience that as President, he would remember that the President doesn’t have the power to make war. Only Congress has that power. Unfortunately for the back of the pack, the shrieks and cries of the undead were drowned out by cheers.

One of the better overall moments, and there were so many in such a short span, came when Paul and Mike Huckabee were allowed to directly respond to one another. Not only was Dr. Paul able to destroy the argument for staying in Iraq ("…what do we have to pay to save face? That’s all we’re doing is saving face, it’s time we came home!), but he also was able to position himself as someone genuinely concerned with the future of the Republican Party. Huckabee actually conceded that the Republican Party should continue its suicide pact with the neoconservative gatekeepers.

PAUL: "The American people didn’t go in. A few people advising this Administration, a small number of people called the neoconservatives hijacked our foreign policy. They’re responsible, not the American people. They’re not responsible, we shouldn’t punish them"

HUCKABEE: "Congressman, we are one nation. We can’t be divided. We have to be one nation under God. That means if we make a mistake we make it as a single country, the United States of America, not the divided States of America."

PAUL: "No. When we make a mistake…when we make a mistake, it is the obligation of the people through their representatives to correct the mistake, not to continue the mistake."

HUCKABEE: "And that’s what we do on the floor of the Senate."

PAUL: "No! We’ve dug a hole for ourselves and we’ve dug a hole for our Party. We’re losing elections and we’re going down next year if we don’t change it and it has all to do with foreign policy and we have to wake up to this fact."

HUCKABEE: "Even if we lose elections we should not lose our honor and that is more important than the Republican Party."

There is more to that exchange than meets the eyes and ears. Ron Paul is telling Huckabee that the American people are taking their responsibility seriously, which is why Republicans are being summarily thrown out of office: so that mistakes can be corrected. But, like a rutting bucks chasing does, the Republicans are so horny for war that they do not recognize truth or wisdom when it is offered them. Ask any hunter how many rutting buck deer he’s killed when the buck was so fixated on that doe that he didn’t see or smell the hunter.

All in all, Ron Paul was nothing short of Paul Revere in his eloquence, his fire and the content of his speech.

Dr. Paul also displayed his fastidious nature during this latest performance. The initial confrontation with Rudy Giuliani back in May caused him consternation and doubt as he has freely admitted. (Imagine that! He’s human!) You wouldn’t have known it by his refusal to back down that evening, but his doubts were seeded by the audience’s predictable response to Giuliani’s smarmy interjection.

Ron has learned from that experience and plays to his strengths. He never once backed down. He held fast in the face of ridicule and malice. His challengers will underestimate the affect this is having on Republican Party members who are undecided. He is, day by day, inch by inch, weakening the neoconservative hold on the Republican Party. By now, they have but one finger left and you can guess which one it is.

The tactics used this week against Ron Paul are further evidence that his candidacy leads the pack. There is no other explanation for the (unsuccessful) attempts to marginalize and ridicule. They’re fighting him but their kung fu is weak.

With each appearance and debate performance, Ron Paul gets better and his supporters grow more and more confident beside him. The idea that this campaign is merely an attempt to spread the message of liberty to a wider audience should by now be a laughable claim.

Ron Paul is in this to win. He’s a T. Rex hunting down and eating the competition for lunch. Bring napkins. This week Ron Paul has shown us that he has no serious competitors.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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The worst rhetorical device used when discussing immigration and border control is the ad hominem, "illegal alien." It is used daily but its absurdity is rarely challenged other than to suggest it is a politically incorrect term.

There is no such thing as a person whose very nature makes him illegal. Nobody is born into a state of illegality.

The U.S. Constitution enumerates the rights we all possess as individuals. It doesn’t grant them nor does it claim to be exhaustive or authoritative on the subject. It is quite specific as to who possess rights: people; persons. In other words, anyone who can fog a mirror has rights.

Geographical location is thus not a barrier to the endowment of one’s rights. We possess rights by virtue of being alive. Merely being alive can never be construed, either morally or logically, to be an illegal act.

An alien is generally defined as a person who is a citizen of another country or state. If you travel from Texas to Arizona, you are an alien there until you have complied with Arizona law on the matter of legal residency. That only means you are entitled to certain privileges such as less-expensive college tuition, a driver’s license issued by the state, etc. It does not mean that you are illegally in the state until such time as you become "legal." A state doesn’t have any legitimate power to deny your rights, but it can deny you certain privileges if you are an alien.

Traveling, without interference by some government official, is a fundamental human right. When I was a kid, you could travel between Mexico and the U.S. and between Canada and the U.S., without any identification. Nobody demanded you produce ID. A trip down to Ensenada or Tijuana was a regular occurrence for my family during the late 60s. Crossing the border was no big deal and that was at the height of the Viet Nam war. But today, we are told that this is no longer possible. The government cannot obey the constitution because that would lead to anarchy. See, if you obey the Supreme Law of the Land, that is anarchy. (Orwell would be so proud).

A border is not a property boundary; it is a demarcation of legal jurisdiction. A person, who crosses a border, has not committed a common law crime. If he hasn’t trespassed, there isn’t a moral or just legal reason to demand he show papers or submit to a search. By making this demand, the government is insuring that those who want to retain their privacy do so by trespassing.

The U.S. Constitution grants no authority to harass people crossing the border unless those crossing are obviously intent on committing harm. The only authority given to congress relating to immigration was to determine what constituted citizenship. Since it is allegedly supposed to protect our rights, it has no legal authority to demand identification or to detain us merely because we cross a border. We celebrate Ellis Island, but we shouldn’t. It was a detainment camp that violated the rights of everyone who entered even if they gladly accepted it. Many people died there unnecessarily.

Now before you get upset with me, I am not asserting that we don’t have an immigration problem. We do, but, the current system is so corrupt, some are considering further ruining the rights of Americans in order to solve the problems created by it. Unfortunately, most of the remedies proposed will either make things worse, or only treat the symptoms.

The issue of illegal immigration is a political minefield. There are many causes and therefore no one solution can resolve them. As Dr. Paul has said on multiple occasions, the first problem that has to be addressed is birthright citizenship. You can’t do that without replacing or amending the 14th amendment with something that repudiates Supreme Court decisions holding that rights are conferred by birthright citizenship.

The 14th amendment is an abomination as was the legal opinion of the Supreme Court that incented its creation. It isn’t terrible because it presumes to tell states that their citizens have rights. It doesn’t do that at all. It is terrible because it legitimizes the milestone Supreme Court decision, Scott v. Sanford. Justice Taney in that decision "discovered" a legal loophole. You see, in spite of the plain words of the constitution, Taney argued that "people" and "persons" really meant "citizen." Since there was no legal decree making people citizens by birth, Dred Scott, who was born in the U.S., had no rights. What Taney meant to say, was that Dred Scot, a black man, was not human.

In a better world, Congress would have impeached all of the Justices who supported that decision. Instead, they proposed an amendment legitimizing the decision though intending to remedy the injustice wrought by the decision. The Dred Scot decision has never been overturned. If you don’t believe me, read US v Verrdugo-Urquidez decided in 1990. The court claimed that "people" is a "term of art" meant to describe citizens. In other words, rights are conferred by citizenship.

To work and to travel internationally, you must prove to authorities that you are a citizen. This renders you guilty until you can prove your innocence. Due to other abominable laws and decisions, you are also forced to pay to educate, feed and care for citizens who are such by consequence rather than allegiance.

Healthcare is the most oft-cited expense leading to bad immigration policy. The charity hospitals, country doctors and house calls of the past are but a memory as are reasonable costs for healthcare. It wasn’t always so expensive. My father made ninety cents an hour in 1962. He had no health insurance and didn’t need it. When I was born, he was able to pay for the entire hospital bill, which included a 3-day stay and a battery of drugs and test, in cash.

By 1990, when I was 28, if you didn’t have insurance, you couldn’t pay for a hospital birth in cash unless you were very well-to-do. Multiply the cost of just one hospital birth today by the tens of thousands per year who come here just to do that, and you have the initial cost of birthright citizenship given to those who have no means.

States have recently sought ways to curtail the cost of illegal immigration. California passed a proposition some years back that was struck down by the Supreme Court. Essentially the court said that privileges can’t be denied anyone, including non-citizens. Too bad the court isn’t as generous with rights.

A law passed in Oklahoma, sponsored by State Senator Randy Terrill, "terminates public assistance benefits to illegals; it empowers state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws; and it punishes employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens."

Oklahoma is no longer “O.K.” for illegal aliens, Terrill observes. “When you put everything together in context,” he contends, “the bottom line is illegal aliens will not come here if there are no jobs waiting for them, they will not stay here if there is no government subsidy, and they certainly won’t stay here if they know that if they ever encounter our state and local law enforcement officers, they will be physically detained until they’re deported. And that’s exactly what House Bill 1804 does.”

Now, this may seem like a great idea. It’s certainly working to rid Oklahoma of inherently illegal people. A mass exodus of the work force in Oklahoma is currently taking place in advance of the law taking affect November 1, 2007. Parts of this law deal with the problem, and parts simply trample on the rights of all people working and living in Oklahoma, not just those considered illegal.

The Oklahoma law legitimizes the idea that it is moral and just to compel a person to show his papers in order to earn a living. It also interferes with business owners and presumes to tell them who they may hire. Lastly, the law gives federal police powers to local authorities. A side effect of this law will be the ruination of Oklahoma’s economy.

The wages for unskilled labor will rise, but so will prices. In order to attract workers, assuming that there are enough people to fill those roles, businesses will have to raise wages and then prices to cover the margin.

But that’s not the worst thing that will happen. The worst is that the legislature of Oklahoma will view the reduction in health and welfare costs to the State as a surplus that they can spend elsewhere. It will not only ruin the economy, but will also expand government.

Dr. Paul hasn’t just offered a solution which seeks to treat a symptom. He has repeatedly pointed out that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy poses a hidden tax on citizens as well as non-citizens; particularly those in the middle and lower income brackets. By devaluing the currency through inflation, immigrants who come here to work can’t afford healthcare and education because the costs are so high. Then again, neither can a large number of us "legal" people.

Healthcare has enjoyed an attack from both monetary policy and government regulations, making anything more than a cold or flu a potentially bankrupting event.

Ron Paul’s proposed solutions to the immigration problem make the most sense. He isn’t suggesting we further encroach on the rights of individual citizens. Immigration is one of the reasons given by some politicians for the necessity of a national ID card but Dr. Paul argues convincingly that it is not needed.

He also hasn’t suggested that we immediately start deporting people. His call to end birthright citizenship and welfare incentives, along with a monetary policy which restores confidence and value to the currency, attacks the root cause of systemic abuse rather than the symptoms. However, this will have to be preceded by a fundamental shift in the view that our rights are granted by virtue of citizenship rather than birth.

If we don’t adopt Ron Paul’s suggestions, and instead adopt the solutions proposed by his challengers, being illegal will be the only option available to us to preserve our own rights and liberties.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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From the time I started paying attention to the Republican race for the Presidency, something has been bothering me. Out of the eleven candidates that made up the original field, there was only one who openly stood against the neocon agenda. The rest made every attempt to prove how loyal they were to the Bush Doctrine — misnamed, since the "Bush Doctrine" is truly the PNAC doctrine.

The majority of Republican Presidential candidates have been issuing extraordinarily clumsy rhetoric; part bravado, part insanity with equal parts fear-mongering and logical absurdity. To a man, Republican candidates not named Ron Paul, promised to continue and expand wars while proclaiming a u2018pro-life’ stance. Their platforms showed utter disregard for 70% of the American public who wanted an end to the Iraq war. Why aren’t these men afraid of committing political suicide? Do they know something we do not?

What do they know?

The same caveat applies, perhaps more so, to the Democrats. In 2006, Democrat promises to end the Iraq war, led voters to give them a majority in the House. Yet, when the opportunity arose to make good on their promises, the newly elected Democratic leadership folded. It was eerily similar to the budget showdown between neocons and the Clinton White House in 1995.

While watching a Democratic debate on YouTube, I found myself imagining that the theme from the Twilight Zone would begin playing and everyone would have a good laugh. Sadly, that never happened. A majority of Democrat candidates were saying that we should continue our military adventurism. This led me to wonder how they could sleep at night.

It wasn’t until Daniel McAdams wrote the following that I finally understood what was so bothersome:

Although other bloggers have been cited elsewhere on the Barbour, Griffith PR firm move to replace Maliki with Allawi, they have all missed the point: This is NOT a Democrat plot to undermine Republican policy in Iraq, dude: This is “The Party” shifting tactics toward open conflict with Syria and Iran. Anything else is diversionary propaganda, especially when it comes from an ensconced neocon at Hudson Institute.

Case in point: Barbour, Griffith is a Republican firm. No doubt about it. Look at the staff. But its highly paid push to replace Maliki who is veering wildly off the reservation has been picked up without skipping a beat by Democrat neocon Hillary Clinton, who has enthusiastically endorsed the replacement of Maliki. Quoth Hillary: “I share Senator Levin’s hope that the Iraqi parliament will replace Prime Minister Maliki with a less divisive and more unifying figure when it returns in a few weeks.”

What they "know," is that we, the voters, are inconsequential.

Hillary’s statement is almost sublime in its calculating shrewdness; yet it is sinister in what it represents. The statement is directed toward the neocon elite who run the system and its controlled media, not those who will be casting votes. You are but an afterthought in her mind. She is essentially saying to the neocon elite, "I understand the Plan. I’m with you."

The PNAC plan calls for war against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. The neocons will accept nothing less than that. That’s why Barack Obama doesn’t have a chance to win the Democratic nomination. He may be too warmongering for our tastes, but the neocons who write the plans don’t just want any old war, especially not one that seeks to put focus on the terrorists who attacked on 9/11. Barack’s stated target is terrorists in Pakistan. That’s not in the plan. The Plan is everything. You either play along or get dumped. Hillary makes it clear that she understands this. She’s talking to them.

The neocons have almost complete ideological and physical control of the media through both ownership interests and by virtue of the fact that they control the government which issues the media’s licenses to broadcast. However, the neocon star is falling in terms of ideology. The days of growing the movement are long gone. So, this is a desperate time for them even if they do not yet recognize it.

These neocons are like, scratch that, they are literally and figuratively, petulant children. Three spoiled children of prominent political families, Kristol, Podhoretz and Bush, along with their good buddies from the fraternity houses of Ivy League schools, have been given the keys to dad’s car and they’re out drinking, partying and wrecking the neighborhood, just like their fathers before them.

They will not relinquish the keys without throwing a world-class temper tantrum. The Presidential candidates in "both" parties, save three, do not currently see the electorate as a barrier to power as evidenced by their rhetoric. The only barrier they view as important to gaining power is approval from the neocon gatekeepers. This is why their campaigns make no attempts to appease the anti-war contingent of the electorate.

This sycophantic exercise also has another purpose. It seeks to undermine public confidence. For many, the subtext goes un-noticed. In the case of Hillary’s statement a large portion of her listeners will thoughtfully nod their heads in agreement. "Why yes, that Maliki fellow must be evil." For those who do notice its implications, the intent is that we fall to cynicism and inaction. If they are that arrogant, then we must be powerless against them because they know something we don’t.

That is a trap. We are not powerless. Furthermore, we know something they do not. In spite of their best plans to control ideological thought and its dissemination, they have failed utterly. The message of freedom is spreading by means and methods which they did not foresee and cannot possibly control. It is that powerful.

If they manage to stifle the internet, we will simply find other ways to promote the ideas of liberty. There wasn’t an Internet in 1776. "Common Sense," the ideological spark of the first revolution, was barely 46 pages in length. Yet it set the Colonists on a path to independence.

This market cannot be controlled. If all we do is ask everyone we meet whether or not they’ve heard the name Ron Paul, it won’t be but a few months before everyone has. The people who think they can control the outcome of this next election are the same who claimed they could control the situation in Iraq. They are the same who have been trying, without success, to prevent natural consequences in the financial markets from occurring.

As Ron Paul says, restoring our once-great republic should be fun. If Ron Paul the man and the message he espouses has affected you the way it has me, then there is no reason why we can’t prevail. The message sells itself. That’s what they don’t know and will never understand.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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One of the more preposterous lies peddled by the Bush Administration during the run up to the Iraq war, was the one about "yellow cake." Iraq, it was claimed, had attempted to obtain yellow cake from Niger.

The documents used as evidence for the claim were poor forgeries. When the Bush Administration continued to represent them as genuine articles, Joe Wilson stepped into the spotlight and exclaimed that the evidence in question was a pack of lies.

Then all hell broke loose. At the time, Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife, was a covert CIA officer stationed in Iran. Her assignment was to gather intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program. When her name was leaked and her cover blown, the press concentrated on how this affected plans to invade Iraq, how poor Valerie Plame was exposed and whether or not this really constituted a crime (was she technically a covert officer?)

Very little was said about how this affected U.S. intelligence efforts in Iran. Nothing was said about why the "evidence" was obviously preposterous even without the knowledge that the Niger documents were forgeries.

The first thought I had upon discovering that Joseph Wilson was married to Valerie Plame, was that Wilson showed an incredible recklessness. He certainly knew that she worked for the CIA. How could his actions not have jeopardized her career, even if no one were to leak her name? The public may not have made the connection, but foreign governments were certain to do so. Furthermore, Wilson’s whistle-blowing efforts were totally fruitless. President Bush still ordered an invasion of Iraq even when everyone knew full well that Iraq didn’t purchase yellow cake from Niger.

There were other reasons given to justify the attack on Iraq. There were the shocking aluminum tubes and the claim that Iraq could assemble WMD within 45 minutes. The government scare tactic finally proffered to justify the war?: "We just don’t know what they have!" — courtesy of Tony Blair and British Intelligence.

So why should it have been so obvious that the yellow cake claim was a lie? Al Qaim.

Al Qaim is a city near the western border of Iraq and Syria roughly 200 miles WNW of Baghdad. Since 2005, the U.S. military has had a base there — "Camp Al Qaim." There have been several, major war operations conducted from there.

The facility Iraq used to process yellow cake into uranium while it still had nuclear capabilities during the late 1980′s, was located in Al Qaim. Roughly 50 miles to the southeast of Al Qaim, was a phosphate mine (a by-product of which was yellow cake) in Akashat. Lord Butler’s report to the House of Commons entitled: Review of Intelligence On Weapons of Mass Destruction (.pdf), claims that the facilities at both Al Qaim and Akashat were damaged during the first gulf war. For this reason, the report says, Saddam Hussein would have to go outside Iraq to obtain the yellow cake needed to reinstate a nuclear program.

491. Natural uranium is the necessary starting point for all nuclear developments (whether for weapons or civil power). In the late 1970s, Iraq obtained large quantities of uranium ore from Niger, Portugal and Brazil. By the mid-1980s, however, Iraq had become self-sufficient in uranium ore, which was a by-product of indigenous phosphate mines at Akashat and purifying plants at Al Qaim and Al Jazira which extracted and purified the uranium ore for subsequent use in nuclear enrichment processes.

492. In the course of the first Gulf war, the facilities involved in this indigenous route were severely damaged. Subsequently, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervised the dismantlement of all the facilities that Iraq had built to process, enrich and fabricate uranium, and removed all potentially fissile material. Some unprocessed uranium ore was left in country, but under IAEA safeguards and subject to regular inspections. Iraq would therefore have had to seek imports of uranium or uranium ore if it wished to restart its nuclear programme covertly. [sic]

The report goes on to say that Iraq contacted Niger in 1999. Therefore, British Intelligence assumed, due to the circumstances, the purpose of the trip was to purchase yellow cake.

What the report fails to revisit, even briefly, is Al Qaim. The uranium purification plant located there (built by Switzerland) was dismantled under supervision of the IAEA. So where was this yellow cake from Niger going to be processed? There isn’t even a whiff of speculation as to this crucial detail in Lord Butler’s report. There is absolutely no credible reason to seek the importation of yellow cake absent a facility to purify it into weapons-grade uranium. Such a facility wasn’t even alleged to exist elsewhere in Iraq by either the CIA or British Intelligence.

It is also preposterous to assert that it would have been necessary to import yellow cake. In 1987, the amount of phosphate rock reserves estimated to exist in the Akashat area was 5.5 billion tons — "enough to meet local needs for centuries."

Lord Butler’s report was a classic case of CYA. It was released to cover for the Bush Administration’s use of bogus intelligence while presenting a plausible reason why both the US and British intelligence agencies could ignore flaws in their data and still come to a conclusion that Iraq may have been trying to restart its WMD programs.

You may have heard that there is a "liberal media" seeking to discredit Bush. Strange then that this liberal media never once asked where Saddam would have processed raw uranium had he been able to procure it. This is especially troubling since Iraq had opened Al Qaim to reporters on September 2, 2002.

Reporters were flown by helicopter to a site at al Qaim, accompanied by Hussam Mohammed Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, the office used for liaison with UN inspectors. The reporters were shown a uranium extraction plant destroyed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

When it could have raised the truly relevant questions, the liberal media wasn’t interested. Lord Butler’s hand-wavy report kept the public occupied on irrelevant details and then the media, having asserted that there was nothing left to discover, turned its attention to poor, poor Valerie Plame.

The Bush Administration, by outing Valerie Plame, has, intentionally or not, created the ultimate "we just don’t know" scenario regarding Iran’s nuclear designs.

Valerie Plame is just a side show. She may not be playing a scripted part. Rather, she may have already brought back information supporting Iran’s claims that its nuclear program is peaceful. Based on the Bush Administration’s history, it is plausible that the motive for outing Plame was not retaliation, but the elimination of a potential source of contrary intelligence. Without credible evidence that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful, it must therefore be sinister, or so the logic goes. However, that scenario would also require Plame remain quiet about exculpatory intelligence she may have gathered while in Iran. If she were truly a whistle blower, this would be a perfect opportunity to blow that whistle.

She has instead decided to sue Bush Administration officials for the original offense it committed against her. It hasn’t so far proven successful, but it certainly has given the media and the public a convenient distraction between that and Scooter Libby’s prosecution. Four years of searching in Iraq for anything even remotely resembling a weapons program has produced exactly the same result and credibility as has O.J. Simpson’s search for the "real killers."

This isn’t to say that the outing of CIA assets is an acceptable tactic or that it is to be dismissed as unimportant, quite the contrary. It would appear as if the intent is to undermine intelligence-gathering efforts so that the data can remain micromanaged by the White House rather than by the experts who are tasked with gathering and analyzing it.

In spite of the Administration’s record, mainstream media "reporters" still repeat, without question, its claims that Iran seeks to expand its nuclear capabilities to include weapons production. To think that anyone would accept such claims without a great deal of solid evidence is to shudder. (For mainstream media reporters to think is to shudder.) Even if the Bush Administration presented photographs of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself producing nuclear weapons, one would be wise to remain skeptical.

The seemingly irreversible march towards war with Iran continues while a majority of Democrat and Republican Presidential candidates virtually chant "Nuke ‘em All!," and a "liberal media" focuses on the irrelevant. As this unfolds, let us remember Al Qaim.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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I have a friend who claims: “Irony is the most powerful force in the Universe.” He says that this theory helps him to solve problems. “Looking for the most ironic cause of failure can sometimes be a better place to start than the most obvious,” he says.

Historians may analyze how the paleoconservative wing of the Republican Party was amputated from the larger body. I believe it happened in 1995 when Bill Clinton stared down Newt Gingrich and the freshmen Republicans over the budget. Gingrich blinked. Nave freshmen were ready to ride it out but it was not to be. Instead of actually shrinking the budget, Rush Limbaugh shrieked in 1995, the Republicans were only growing it at a lower rate than Democrats. The Democrats were lying and not playing fair! Republicans are not the party of smaller government. They are the party of smaller bigger government. Thus was the death of the fiscally responsible Republican Party. It wasn’t that it died. Those who noticed the fallacy of this good-cop, bad-cop routine decided they’d had enough and walked away, disgusted with the whole mess.

William Kristol, son of the archetypical neocon, Irving Kristol, took a hard-line stance against government spending in 1994. The Weekly Standard, financed by Rupert Murdoch and run by Kristol and John Podhoretz was formed shortly after the 1994 Republican victory in Congress to churn out intellectual propaganda (pseudo) supporting Gingrich and the new Republicans. A large majority endorsed the ideas Kristol and Newt Gingrich advocated, driving the Republicans to their first majority in Congress in forty years. The Republican majority was going to finally implement a reduction in government largesse promised 14 years earlier but denied by democrats. Or so it was believed.

From a strategy standpoint, what the Republicans managed to accomplish was more than impressive. The Christian Coalition and other grass roots organizations were rallied around a uniting, small government battle cry. The perfect bogeyman was in the White House. Conspiracy and other fear-inducing stories were used to scare the Republican membership into supporting people who would never show up in their churches and if they did, would shock congregations with their debauchery.

When it came time to stand up for principle, the GOP leadership folded. That point in history marks the rise of the neoconservative star and the beginning of the neoconservative fall.

Jesus admonished his followers to find truth in the actions of those who claimed to speak it. “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” He meant, if a person’s character was true, his life would reflect it.

Based on that principle, we can see quite clearly that the fiscally conservative talk of Kristol and Gingrich was a means to an end. It certainly wasn’t a matter of principle as their actions betrayed. Perhaps Kristol believed that less entitlement spending would allow the U.S. to spend more money supporting Israel and meddling in the Middle East. Gingrich doesn’t talk much about fiscally responsible government anymore. It is clear that neither has any qualms about spending scads of taxpayer dollars. For them, the important thing is where this money is directed. The more the better if it is directed toward their pet concerns.

The downfall of the neocons will come sooner, rather than later, because war is expensive. It was in vogue to bash Bill Clinton’s foreign policy before the 2000 election. George W. Bush and Karl Rove kept the Christian political movement involved by promising a humble foreign policy and truckloads of money in the form of “faith-based initiatives.” After Bush was elected and the welfare “reform” bill passed, IRS-regulated “churches” put on seminars on how to properly word applications to receive government funding. Oink.

Like the economic fortunes of bankers and sub-prime lenders on Wall Street, so it is with neoconservative political fortunes. Both are in decline due to a culture of denial by leaders who cover up lies with more lies. The monetary meltdown we are witnessing is because the inevitable has been postponed while those at the helm do and advocate exactly the things that will hasten the meltdown while increasing its effects. They act like obsessive-compulsive gamblers who have gone "all in" but cannot acknowledge they are playing a losing hand. As Lew Rockwell points out in “Reality Vs. The State” the government “is running on empty promises that have nothing to do with the real world.”

The neocons kept making and breaking promises to the Christian wing of the Republican Party thinking that they could continue to do so unpunished and that the activists would continue to show. To some extent they had every reason to think Christian activist support would continue unabated. They played them for fools in 1994 and still the Christians came out to support them in 1996, though less so in 1998. In 2000, they finally offered bribes allowing them to completely abandon talk of smaller government.

Support is drying up. The bubble popped in GOP grass roots support by politically active Christians. If you examine who has shown up to GOP debates and events where a good number of the candidates are represented, it has been a disappointment for the establishment candidates. It would seem that a crisis of conscience is occurring amongst those who have been typically responsible for electing Republicans.

The armchair warrior is not the kind of person who makes phone calls as a campaign volunteer (or volunteers for military service). He’s the guy who stays home during the battle and pulls the lever on Election Day. So far, and it is early yet, the activists we traditionally expect to see, are staying home. The polls show a decidedly undecided bent amongst likely Republican voters. The paleoconservative amputees? They loom large and untapped as do disaffected Democrat and Independent voters.

In a recent column, Michael Medved displays a beautiful example of this tendency to deny reality.

Two other also-rans in the Iowa Straw Poll, Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul, will no doubt continue their campaigns regardless of their non-existent chances of future success. Both men seek to publicize issues about which they’re passionate: a hard line on immigration for Mr. Tancredo, and an isolationist foreign policy for Mr. Paul. Their continued campaigning can actually provide a public service: demonstrating that their angry, alienated (and alienating) fringe perspectives draw scant support within the Republican Party

Medved parts with reality by claiming that Ron Paul’s message alienates voters. The reason he includes Tancredo is due to Tancredo’s opinion that all twenty million illegal aliens should be immediately deported. He asserts that it is this particular viewpoint, not his advocacy of bombing cities considered holy by the world’s 2 billion Muslims, is what would alienate the Republican base.

Tancredo is essentially a neocon but his views on immigration part ways with the rest of his colleagues as do Paul’s; though Paul does not advocate that we round up illegal aliens. He recognizes that the government is not capable of handling such a monumental task without a great deal of missteps. There are better ways to deal with illegal immigration concerns than resort to totalitarian techniques.

The point here is that Medved is simply making assertions. He’s denying reality about who is alienating whom. When the immigration “reform” bill was floated to the American people earlier this year, the American people rejected proposals of amnesty and fast-track citizenship for those here illegally. The resistance to the idea was so swift and so forceful that not only was the idea dropped almost as quickly as it was promoted, but neoconservatives in Congress and in media outlets were openly suggesting that right-wing conservative media be targeted for sanctions. How dare they speak against us!

Open opposition drives neoconservatives to rage. The rational politician would acknowledge significant public opposition as a warning. This never seems to faze the neoconservatives. Kristol, Podhoretz, Cheney and other neoconservative icons continue to push for increased military actions in the Middle East in spite of the fact that now 70% of the electorate are against the current wars. The response to contrary opinions is to inject increasingly strident and shrill arguments into the debate.

In reality, those who truly alienate voters are the neoconservatives. McCarthy comes to mind. Whether or not McCarthy was right, he was finally discredited publicly because of his tactics. Being right won’t save you if your rhetoric alienates the public. Unfortunately for neoconservatives, they are wrong in both theory and practice.

The neoconservatives just don’t want to face reality. Their tactics and views alienate the electorate. Prior to the neoconservative rise in politics, there was a general decline in voter participation. This has been occurring for decades. However, more than one commentator has noted that this has now infected the Republican Party as evidenced by the 2006 elections. Both of this year’s Iowa and Illinois Straw Polls reported low turnout as compared to 1999. Rather than re-think strategy, the response has been to ratchet up the rhetorical machine and argue for the very same policies which have decimated the GOP and divided its members. As they do this, they become less and less attractive to GOP party members.

Neoconservatives have shown by their actions that they are simply wed to power, not ideas or principle. Fortunately for the opposition, they prove to be their own worst enemies. Many of us would prefer that they had fizzled out long before they had caused so much damage to our liberties and fortunes, but their demise will be all the sweeter to watch when it unfolds. The end of the neoconservative movement will be ironic to the observer; though it is doubtful that neoconservatives will recognize the irony. My friend may be proven correct, at least in this instance. Maybe irony really is the most powerful force in the universe.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.

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Let’s face it: Ron Paul doesn’t have a lot of new ideas. His foreign policy harkens back to the very first President, George Washington. George Washington, who gave up a dictatorship, given to him by the continental Congress to prosecute the revolutionary war, was crazy. Washington was the original “decider” and gave up all of that power so that a bunch of politicians could meet and draft the Constitution. That same tired old document to which Ron Paul keeps referring in speech after speech. Now, if Washington would have just kept his dictatorship, he could have written the Constitution himself.

Think of all the good Washington could have done with the power he so cavalierly abandoned. He could have taken over Canada. Instead he advised us to avoid making promises to defend other nations in order that the U.S. would remain peaceful and the federal government would remain small. That idea actually was original at the time. I mean, if you think George Washington was crazy, you should have seen his contemporaries in Europe. They made alliances all the time. They made wars all the time too. Probably because the Royal leaders in Europe were all related. You think you have mother-in-law problems. George Washington was wise to figure this out 211 years ago. But that was 211 years ago. Not original in 2007.

Presidents really didn’t start to realize how important it was to have a grand vision and original ideas until Lincoln. Lincoln was not a handsome man and I think he may have been a little jealous of Washington’s dictatorship and his good looks. Whether it was the affects of syphilis or the fact that he was a lawyer, he definitely thought outside the box. He could have done what Dr. Paul does by studying the constitution and the words of those who drafted it. However, he didn’t want to seem unoriginal. It didn’t matter to him that the founders believed secession was a valid, non-violent response to tyranny. It didn’t matter to him that 600,000 Americans had to die in order for his ideas to come to fruition. Lincoln’s originality is unsurpassed. No President since has managed responsibility for so many deaths. In fact, his record may never be surpassed if you stick to Americans killed in war. All of the other forty-two Presidents before and after him haven’t managed to combine for his record. This must be a bitter pill for them.

Wilson was another visionary though he also fell short of Lincoln. Wilson made the world “safe for democracy.” He was one of the first President’s to go to war to make an idea safe. He also made U.S. monetary policy safe for the Federal Reserve by signing the Federal Reserve Act. He made America safe from freedom by signing the income tax. His pice de rsistance was the Treaty of Versailles. Very original idea in foreign affairs. The treaty was so punitive it put things in motion for WWII. The Germans apparently got a bit upset when the French marched into Germany and confiscated goods directly from German factories as a means to collect reparations. Later, in WWII, France was attacked and occupied by Germany. The French Politicians claimed it was because Germans hated them for their wine but Ron Paul calls this sort of thing “blowback." I think he got that word from the CIA and didn’t make it up. Our current President makes up lots of words because he’s smart and original.

By Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we start getting into the unoriginal category. FDR promised he wouldn’t get the U.S. in war but did a lot of things to get the U.S. in a war. He did this covertly. FDR did have some truly original ideas. One was that an economic depression can be reversed by increasing taxes and redistributing that money to people who don’t have jobs. Shifting production from the private sector to government was extremely original. Internment camps not so much. The American Indians probably could tell you this was an old idea.

You need to be careful when choosing who you’ll support. Original ideas are important. Tom Tancredo has some intriguing and original ideas lately as does Barack Obama. Tancredo thinks we should bomb Mecca in a virtual “neener neener neener” — letting the terrorists know who’s really the boss of the world. Now that’s original. At least as far as President’s go. When I was in 5th grade, a boy playing kickball said something like that but he was talking about whose dad could beat up whose and I don’t think Tancredo is the right age to have been there to overhear it. I’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Obama says we should just march into Pakistan and get Osama bin Laden whether Musharraf likes it or not. Again, I don’t remember Obama being at my elementary school. He probably went to a private school where those kinds of conversations didn’t occur. I had to go to public school and they happened all the time, let me tell you.

Bush is pretty original too. I mean, if you accept that he actually has ideas and isn’t remotely controlled through a chip implanted in his brain by Dick Cheney’s physicians, then you have to credit him with some very original ideas. Where Wilson made the world safe for an idea, Bush put a different perspective on it and made war on an idea. Where FDR promised against war and covertly involved the US in a war, Bush promised not to involve us in nation building but then blatantly reversed that stance shortly before his second-term campaign. Not only was it original, it was ballsy. The most original idea Bush has professed is the one about pre-emptive war. It’s hard to say if it’s his idea but I’m certain he’s jealous of Washington because he calls himself the decider. He’s vying for a Lincoln-esque legacy by using up the last of the original ideas.

Ron Paul may sound different then the current crop of Republican candidates, and the current President, but really he’s not very original. In fact, he sounds like Bob Taft who most of us wouldn’t know about but for Ron Paul’s incessant referrals to historical figures.

Ron Paul would turn back the clock on many original ideas put forth by past Presidents. Wilson’s income tax? Gone. The Iraq war and pre-emptive war, the two Bush additions to original Presidential thought gone as well. The department of Education? Homeland Security? Welfare? All Gone. No original idea would be spared from the boring veto pen of a Paul presidency.

Rick Fisk [send him mail] is a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur. He is married, has 3 children and resides in Austin, TX.