The last time we saw His Corpulance, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, he was embracing Barack Obama, whose FEMA minions were busy burying victims of the tropical storm Sandy under mountains of red tape. However, Christie is back again, this time renouncing Rand Paul for speaking out against the government’s latest spying caper. Declares the Corpulent One:

These esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have.

He goes on:

The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put…

Whatever one might say about 911, it did not occur because government officials had a lack of intelligence gathering and domestic spying. Unfortunately, Christie pulls out the classic non sequitur to endorse the government’s vast spying apparatus and most people will fall for it.

. . . and Miami cops will shoot you dead with a stun gun to the heart.  The ex-military thugs who now dominate most police forces do seem to have a bloodlust, don’t they?

Check out this story from an affiliate of Gannett News – a network that’s not exactly Russia Today but instead firmly in the WaPo’s camp of house organ to the Feds. Yet in reporting on the TSA’s Orwellian “VIPR teams,” the anchor asks whether the country is turning into a police-state. Yes! Actual term used! And rather than the usual puff piece on how VIPR protects us from the State’s ubiquitous boogeymen, the account continues disapprovingly – albeit mildly so.

Meanwhile, twice this week I’ve come across readers commenting on articles in which they scold each other for defending the major parties. Why try to blame NDAA or the TSA or DHS or any of the other catastrophic evisceration of our rights on either Dumb-as-a-Bush Rethuglicans or Obummer’s Demopukes, these folks ask. Why not realize it’s us against the rulers? I expect such wisdom from LRC’s audience, but out there among the sheeple? Whoo-hoo!!!!!

No, it’s not the belligerent American empire, the spying police state, never-ending military aggression in the Middle East, cops gone wild, unlimited government, public debt that can never be repaid, the impending bankruptcy of the welfare/warfare state, etc., etc.  It’s the outrage — outrage! — expressed by some in the “mainstream media” that the new “bachelor” (on the ABC television show by that name beginning in January), a Spanish soccer player, does not appear to be Hispanic enough.  According to a “panel of experts” on the subject, anyway, some of whom are upset that a “white Hispanic” was chosen.  (A friend of mine who was born and raised in Spain once asked me, “What is this ‘Hispanic’ word that you Americans use, anyway?”).

Search google on Russell Tice to find who he is and a number of his interviews. Allegations he made in 2006 about the wide scope of the spying have been confirmed by Snowden’s work. That is extremely important. In the best Soviet tradition, the Defense Department attempted to smear him as a paranoid psychotic. He has recently told of NSA spying on government officials. (Thanks to Alex Zoumaras for bringing up his name.)

Then you must be a very bad person.

UPDATE from Butler Shaffer:

Your blog reminded me of Mae West’s line: “when I’m good, I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.”

Suppose that I own a safe and it is empty. Someone breaks into it and finds nothing. They have trespassed at a minimum. Maybe more, maybe breaking and entering, maybe attempted burglary.

Suppose now that I invent a new soft drink and I keep the formula in this safe. No one can chemically analyze the soft drink and replicate the formula. Someone breaks into the safe and steals the formula. Is the crime worse? I say it is. The harm to me is greater. One cannot assume that the formula, as an idea, is not a scarce good or a free good. It is my private property. It can be copied without disturbing the original, but that is not relevant in this case because I’ve placed a boundary around it. We shouldn’t go off on a confusing tangent about it using a concept of intellectual property because of the copying factor.

A private e-mail, like a letter, could physically be intercepted, accessed and copied without taking anything physical away from the sender or owner. Are the contents then not property, and is copying them therefore not a theft? I say it is theft. The “good” that is an e-mail and a letter is not purely physical. The subjective utility of it depends on its personal, private and psychological content as a communication. The thief who accesses it has, in general, undermined this utility. He has harmed the sender.

I see this case as being the same as the thief who steals the soft drink formula. There is a trespass followed by a theft.

NOTE: A comment by Nick Badalamenti with a second from Robert Wenzel has induced me to alter this post although not in the direction they suggested. All remaining errors are solely mine.

Obama is known to be petulant. This is vividly on display in his snub of Putin and Russia. He refuses to meet with Putin in a G20 conference in St. Petersburg. Imagine the hullaballoo if Putin came to New York for such a conference, cancelled a meeting with Obama, and then proceeded to blame Obama, lecturing him on his failings to live up to Putin’s ideas and demands.

Obama had the insolence paternally to accuse Putin of reverting to Cold War ideas and thinking when Obama has ramped up missiles pointing at Russia.

American senators are a sorry lot of warmongers and blowhards. New York’s senator Chuck Schumer has said “President Putin is acting like a school-yard bully and doesn’t deserve the respect a bilateral summit would have accorded him.” And what has Schumer ever done to deserve respect? He supports NSA spying and opposes Snowden. He has inanely criticized Snowden for not staying in the U.S. and possibly going to jail for the rest of his life, or worse, being executed. He has gone off the deep end in accusing Russia of aiding and abetting Snowden. Obama has now followed Schumer. These men are thrashing around throwing temper tantrums.

Suppose I’m the government and Obama is a mere private citizen. I inform him that I’m using my power to collect and store all of his telephone calls and e-mails without warrant and without probable cause of wrongdoing. I may at my option examine them in the future, should there arise certain possibly changing and unknown markers of national security that I shall determine. Would Obama, I wonder, object to this? Or would he tell me “Fine. That’s not domestic spying. That’s also constitutional. Go right ahead.”?

A child knows better than Obama, in his statement denying domestic spying, that the U.S. government has demolished bounds of privacy and propriety that, when absent, must inhibit free communications and must give those who control the stolen information the upper hand over anyone and everyone.

This does not bother Obama (and it didn’t bother Bush) in the slightest, because they believe in benevolent government and themselves as benevolent government leaders, not the tyrants and usurpers that they are.

According to Grand Junction, Colorado’s daily paper:

Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman who sought the Republican nomination for president in 2012, will speak next month at Colorado Mesa University.

Paul is to speak about “Liberty Defined: The Future of Freedom” in the appearance on Sept. 24, according to BlueRepublican.org, which says the Colorado Blue Republican chapter is hosting the event.

Paul is a counselor to the Ludwig Van [sic] Mises Institute and the author of several books, including “Challenge to Liberty,” “The Case for Gold,” and “A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”

Whistleblower Bradley Manning is facing a possible 90 years in prison for telling the American taxpayer what all his toiling for the Feds actually pays for. Manning’s fate reminded me of this line from Season 2 of Hell on Wheels:

Absolutely hilarious!

h/t MoA

During his softball interview with Jay Leno last night Dear Leader had this to say about the odds of people dying from terrorism:

Terrorists depend on the idea that we’re going to be terrorized. And we’re going to live our lives. And the odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than in a car accident, unfortunately. But there are things that we can do to make sure that we’re keeping the pressure on these networks that would try to injure Americans. And the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about when I go to bed is making sure that I’m doing everything I can to keep Americans safe. (Sheeple applause)

So, was this just a non-sequitor from the teleprompter-less droner-in-chief, or did he inadvertently reveal something deeper about the mindset of a tyrant? Surely, it would be most unfortunate for the ever expanding empire if the booboisie could do the math and realize that you’re more likely to win the Powerball–perhaps twice over if you remove US-affiliated terror plots–than die at the hands of some jihadi or otherwise crazed malcontent.

Sidenote. I noticed that Drudge originally linked this quote to this NPR piece. It currently reads: “But he added: ‘We’re going to live our lives,’ and noted that for Americans, the odds of dying in a terrorist attack is lower than dying in a car accident.” Ah, you can always count on the State’s stenographers to set the record straight.

He paid $250 million for a dying newspaper worth $50 million.

Dan Eble raises an interesting point. My use of the word “seizure” he suggests may be incorrect. When the NSA copies your e-mails, is it seizing something or do the arguments against intellectual property apply so that they are seizing nothing?

I may not have the language just right, or it may be a gray area. They are gaining a copy of something that is your right to keep private, and in that sense they are gaining your property. The property is not in the physical or electronic matter, because otherwise a copy wouldn’t be the correct word. The property is in something else. Exactly what? Suppose an authority in the old days entered your home or a storage facility that you used and made a photo or a xerox of a private letter of yours. There’d be a trespass followed by a theft of some sort. Exactly what? It’s something attaching to your person as a belonging. It’s property, but what kind? It’s your private thoughts or those relating to you through business or someone else that you’ve transferred to a medium. I’d say that communications that are meant to be private are property. Property entails boundaries and exclusive use. Some communications are property and some are not. If hacking someone’s e-mail or accounts is trespassing and theft, then the government is engaged in gigantic hacking, only it does it right from the source through the companies like Verizon and ISPs.

The online law dictionary uses the phrase (under seizure) of “property or communications”.

August 7, 2013 (Clute, Texas) – Today, former-Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul announced the Ron Paul Channel (www.RonPaulChannel.com) would launch the week of August 12, 2013, and new details about the Channel. Known for refusing to play by the establishment’s rules, Dr. Paul will air all original programming several times a week.

Since announcing the Ron Paul Channel’s creation solely on Facebook and Twitter, more than 200,000 people have gone to www.RonPaulChannel.com to express interest in learning more about the channel and Dr. Paul’s programming.

The Ron Paul Channel will begin by providing fresh, engaging original programming each week, available to subscribers live or on-demand. Subscriptions will cost $9.95 per month and provide subscribers with direct access to Dr. Paul and a diverse array of guests.

“Americans are tired of the games and the lies of today’s media. They want the truth. I have been astonished by the flood of interest in the channel from tens of thousands of people in just a matter of hours,” said Paul. “Imagine this: no censors, no barricades, no statists. We will be able to engage viewers directly on subjects that matter most to them from finances to civil liberties to foreign policy.”

The Ron Paul Channel expands upon Paul’s vast grassroots and online support, capitalizing on the increasing demand for accessible, interesting and original programming. The Ron Paul Channel will stream online, allowing subscribers to watch it when they want, where they want and on the device they want: internet-connected televisions, computers, tablets, and smart phones.

The Ron Paul Channel will allow me to engage directly with viewers,” said Paul. “With the help of social media we can cut through the noise and get straight to the truth about subjects that matter most to you.”

Go to www.RonPaulChannel.com for more information and sign-up for updates and announcements.

Obama on the Jay Leno show said “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” He said “What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an e-mail address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat.” Obama is wrong and he knows he’s mis-leading the American people when he goes on national tv and makes such devious statements.

Obama is incorrect. The XKeyscore program of the NSA spies on everyone. “A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.” It’s not the only program of the government.

Data collection and observation comprise a step in spying. The NSA does this in secret. Storing the data is another step. This is searching and seizing personal items without constitutional warrant authority. Even if the content is ignored for some time, these procedures are still spying and still warrantless searches. They are powerful tools that can be turned against anyone at any time by the government, which is one reason this spying is wrong. If turned against someone for any number of other concocted crimes that are now on the books, a person’s life can rapidly be destroyed because vital property can be seized and recovery made exceedingly difficult and costly. It is a one-sided power that no government should have. This spying gives the government OPTIONS for future use and enhancement in oppressive directions. This is a strong reason for ending it.

Obama professed surprise when the CIA killed Awlaki’s son, an American citizen. There was no punishment of the persons responsible that has been made public and no statements by Obama that he would find them and hold them accountable. He didn’t do his duty.

Quite commonly one part of the government cannot or does not control another part when it should, or one part does control another part when it shouldn’t. The FBI stonewalls Congress, for example. These failures become all the more dangerous to ordinary Americans when an agency possesses key powers that effectively give it a monopoly that can be levered to gain control over other vital government powers and processes. This is precisely the case with the NSA’s spying. Obama doesn’t bring any of this up because it would diminish trust in his office and in government in general, but it is another danger and another reason why his disingenuous statements cannot be trusted.

I’ve written often on the scams of Big Cancer, and how the medical establishment’s scaremongering has the purpose of securing lifetime patients and profitability, especially within the cancer industry.

Here is a very revealing (breaking news) story of yet another fraudulent agent of the medical establishment who has put human beings at risk in terms of their health and life for the sake of massive profits. This Detroit area Doc was a local “hero”, as represented by the media, for his high-visibility involvement in cancer treatment and a major cancer center.

A reminder that each of his patients, like most of the general masses, trusted their doctor because he or she had a paper degree from a paper-degree institution. They trusted this representative of Big Cancer who intentionally misdiagnosed patients as having cancer so that he could pass them off for high-profit cancer tests and invasive chemo treatments. Yes – he lied to people about having cancer, causing them complete upheaval in their personal lives, while they went off to dangerous chemo treatments that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Lives are ruined, and no matter what his criminal penalty, he will never pay the full price of his destruction.

Dr. Farid Fata is being charged, by the FBI, with the administration of unnecessary chemotherapy to patients. He lied about diagnoses. He kept patients on chemo “too long,” according to reports. He prescribed chemo to dying patients who should have been in hospice. He was allowed to destroy lives because the current medical scam system with 3rd party payment allows criminals like him to seduce and lie to trusting patients who think the Hippocratic Oath has traction. These adherents of the medical establishment also believe that The System is humane and it only exists to care for their health matters and benefit them. They are clueless, and they act shocked(!) when news like this erupts.

By the way, overhead camera shots showed Dr. Fata’s home compound in Oakland County to be a giganta-McMansion on steroids. Shocking!

Personal health and self-defense products top the list for LRCers. Here are just a few:

LifeStraw Personal Water Filter;
Gerber Bear Grylls Scout Drop Point Knife;
Mace Pepper Spray Gun;
Mercola Bug-Off Spray;
Nutrex BioAstin Hawaiian Astaxanthin 12 mg.;
Essiac International – 500 mg, 60 veggie caps.

Best-Selling Books:

A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, by Thomas Fleming;
The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre, by Carleen Madigan;
Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, by Barr McClellan.

Thank you for supporting LRC with your purchases, which comes at no cost to you. Amazon has some strict rules for giving sales credit to LRC, which are here. Thanks for taking a moment to look them over.

Your fellow neocons have started another war — this time in Yemen! I’m sure you’ll all be on the next cargo plane over there.   To celebrate this joyous event I have purchased each of you a designer camouflage outfit.  Watch out for a Fed Ex package in the next day or two.  I didn’t include Marc Levin (“The Grate One”) since I’ve heard from a reliable source that he’s already “in country” digging fox holes.

Tom, thanks for directing us to USAToday’s smear of a fine patriot, Benedict Arnold. It’s about what I’d expect from a newspaper that absolutely worships the State.

Most of what we “know” about General Arnold turns out not to be true. He was actually a huge hero who defended liberty’s principles no matter who was abusing them: the British king and Ministry (equivalent to our modern bureaucratic regime) or people who called themselves Patriots but were, in fact, even more tyrannical than London’s government. I discovered the real story of Arnold and his “treason” while researching my second novel (due for publication this fall). I began writing the book determined to show Arnold for a traitor and a fool; within a few months, based on the facts, I had entirely changed my opinion.

Benedict Arnold defied American dictators, just as Heroic Ed has done. Those dictators naturally and vengefully vilified him at the time; textbooks and professors have repeated their slanders ever since as the truth (imagine the lies statist “historians” will one day write about Ed Snowden). I invite LRC’s readers to suspend judgment of a courageous anarcho-capitalist until my novel, M Genl B Arnold, debuts in another couple months.

(Arnold also makes a cameo appearance — and not a flattering one, since I didn’t yet understand his incredible devotion to freedom — in my first novel, Halestorm.)

Rouhani’s position is spelled out in greater detail in a news conference. He is asking the U.S. to stop making excessive demands about Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, which is being conducted within the confines of international agreements signed by the U.S. He specifically singles out U.S. warmongers. I do not expect the U.S. to respond favorably to Rouhani because the U.S. government operates by threats, intimidation and sanctions. These are a policy of “might makes right”, as opposed to a notion of justice or adherence to international agreements.

After this article are comments. A good many are bellicose and suspicious of Iran. Such comments can no longer be taken as the thoughts of independent-thinking persons because the CIA now makes comments on articles under the guise of being from the public. The CIA has corrupted public conversation.

Finally, after a week of hysterical warnings about “worldwide terror,” as though one of those James Bond bad guys finally got that nuke-the-planet-Earth machines working, we learn from yesterday’s news what all the warnings are about.  As reported on the ABC evening news, the U.S. Spying Empire claims to have overheard one of the old geezer al Qaeda guys say that it would be nice to kick the asses of some of the CIA guys in Yemen.

In other words, if the report is true, it has nothing to do with any ordinary American.  None of us is in any danger whatsoever.   The only ones in danger are state stooges and paid murderers who are sticking their noses where they don’t belong — in the politics of foreign countries in the Middle East. When the state is threatened with retaliation from its murderous ways, it wants us to believe that WE are somehow endangered by it.  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Quick research suggests that Bush authorized making war in Yemen around November of 2002. That was the time of the first drone strike. Obama intensified the war in 2011, following up on his earlier intensification in 2009. Even a CFR publication by Micah Zenko (Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies) is highly critical of drone warfare and recognizes that retaliation grows and anti-U.S. groups enlarge as the U.S. increases its violence.

Today’s headlines say that the recent “terror” warning applies specifically to Yemen. The U.S. has advised Americans to leave Yemen. The anticipated retaliation is not terror. It is action taken in response to earlier offenses and injuries, which in turn were ill-considered actions initiated by the U.S. as revenge against even earlier offenses (the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden) and so on going back decades.

Bush escalated the fighting, although the U.S. was unsure who bombed the Cole. According to Condoleezza Rice, Bush “made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al Qaeda one attack at a time. He told me he was ‘tired of swatting flies.’” Instead he decided to eliminate al Qaeda through war, the war on terror.

Dear Mr. Bezos:

Congratulations on your purchase of the Washington Post. I just splurged on some great new shoes and I can’t wait for them to arrive in the mail, so I can only imagine how you must feel after this kind of splurge! It was a gutsy move and many are wondering how you might be able to turn around the floundering flagship of the Washington (the other one) Beltway set.

I won’t presume to offer you advice, as you are an exceptional entrepreneur and I am one of your most loyal customers (Amazon Prime!). You have been described in various profiles and publications as having libertarian tendencies. This is music to my ears.

I have to confess that my organization runs a regular feature called “Neocon Watch” where we often take aim at some of your best-known writers like Jennifer Rubin and Fred Hiatt. As much as I would hate to lose this invaluable source of material, might I respectfully suggest you think about replacing this tired and predictable old guard of writers with some really interesting and thought-provoking writers who are probably more in line with your (and America’s) way of thinking?

I am thinking you could easily issue pink slips to Ms. Rubin, Mr. Hiatt, Charles Krauthammer, and a few others. They are dusty and boring and no one is interested much in what they have to say. Some great replacements would be terrific writers closer to your perspective like Lew Rockwell, Robert Wenzel, Tom Woods, Walter Block, Eric Margolis…well just about anyone whose writing you will see on this website, LewRockwell.com.

Good luck on your new newspaper and I wish you the best.

Sincerely,

Daniel McAdams
Director
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

Last week the US House voted 400-20 to dramatically increase sanctions on Iran, including measures to cripple Iran’s oil exports. Two days ago three-fourths of the US Senate sent a letter to President Obama demanding that the US “toughen sanctions and reinforce the credibility of our option to use military force” against Iran. Ominously, the Senate warned the president that the “time for diplomacy is nearing its end,” demanding a “convincing threat of the use of force that Iran will believe.”

What did the Iranians do to warrant such deafening and dramatic saber-rattling? Test a nuclear device? Open a military base in Mexico?

No. They voted for moderate Iranian politician, Hasan Rouhani, to be president. Rouhani ran on a platform of reaching out to the West and ending Iran’s largely US-imposed isolation from the international community.

(more…)

How interesting that, for the past several days, Matt Drudge has been mocking the latest “worldwide terror alert” with one of these pictures of 1960s-era public school children hiding under their desks as practice for “protecting” themselves from a nuclear holocaust, at the instruction of the state.  One wonders if Japanese public school children in Nagasaki and Hiroshima did the same in 1944-1945.

It’s fun to see the house organ of the state, and especially the Fed, the Pentagon and the CIA, go under the hammer, right after the Boston Globe. Too bad Jeff apparently intends to keep the DC Liar unchanged. So we can look forward to the next sale, a la Newsweek.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will buy The Washington Post for $250mm cash. Whether or not this is a good deal remains to be seen, since, according to The Guardian in 2012:

The Washington Post Company’s newspaper division has lost money in 13 of the last 15 quarters. Total loss over that period: $412m. The latest quarterly figures reveal a $23m loss and a 7% drop in revenue. Indeed, revenue has now slithered down in 20 of the last 22 quarterly returns. Last year’s annual figures show it at $314m, a third less than in 2006. Print advertising has shrivelled by 53% in that period. As for digital ad revenue, and supposed salvation, that’s down too – by 8% in the new returns. Amazingly, it too has slipped back over the past five years.

It’s doubtful things have improved for The WP since 2012.

Buying legacy newspapers that are losing money has become something of a hobby for rich guys in recent years. Sam Zell bought The Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times in 2007 and failed miserably in his attempt to turn the papers around.

And Friday, we learned The News York Times Company sold The Boston Globe to Red Sox owner John Henry for a measly $70 million. The NYT Co. bought the Globe back in 1993 for $1.1 billion. It doesn’t look like those values are adjusted for inflation, so we’re looking at a decline of price in 93 percent in nominal dollars. It would be worse if in real dollars. (93 percent? I had to double check my math on that.)

Thanks to Chris Rossini, who writes, “Milestone! LRC’s Google+ page has crossed 5,000 likes (+1′s).” Thanks also to Andrew Ward, who notes that LRC now has 26,121 followers on Twitter, and 43,675 on Facebook.