It’s great weather to be out and about so why not come join other Marin County freedom lovers for a casual gathering to discuss all things Libertarian! Check out the Meet-Up group for more information! Or email info@marinlp.com to get added to the list!
September 9, 2014
Joe Salama Interview On Measure R / Marin Health District
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September 6, 2014
August 20, 2014
Excellent Interview with Paul Craig Roberts on coming Financial Collapse
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http://www.henrygeorgeschool.org/Smart_Talk_TV.html
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.
August 19, 2014
You will not believe why “Homeland Security” just raided the property of 40 American families
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By Eric Peters at Eric Peters Autos:
Apparently, old cars now threaten the “homeland” (every time I hear that word used I feel as though I’ve been inserted into a black and white movie from the ’30s about Nazi Germany and trench coat-wearing Gestapo agents… then realize it’s our living color reality here, today).
Anyhow, this couple in Statesville, N.C. got Hut! Hut! Hutted! by a gaggle of heimatsicherheitsdeinst (that’s “Homeland Security,” in the native tongue) agents on account of their possession of an old Land Rover Defender whose papieren were not in ordnung.
Bill and Jennifer Brinkley – along with about 40 others, maybe more – were SWAT-swarmed by the Hut! Hut! Hutters! – who stormed the property of these evildoers in order to protect the Homeland from dangerously “noncompliant” older vehicles.
“ICE (oy vey) Homeland Security Investigations special agents served court-ordered seizure warrants on approximately 40 Land Rovers in various locations around the country,” announced Vincent Picard of tough-guy acronymed ICE HSI. “The seizures were made pursuant to an ongoing criminal investigation involving the unlawful importation of vehicles from Great Britain… ”
And here’s the punchline, folks – the thing to focus on: “The Land Rovers, which do not meet federal safety or emissions standards, cannot be lawfully operated in the United States.”
Italics added.
Like VW – which was forced to stop selling the original Beetle in the land of the “free” back in the late 1970s – Land Rover had to stop selling the Defender 90 in the United States because it lacked the required cocoon of air bags, did not comply with rollover and other “safety” requirements.
The last year it was “legal” to sell a new one in the heimat was 1997.
Now, it’s well-known that new cars must comply with all the orders of the riegierung. But what’s alarming here is the Hut! Hut! Hutting! of old cars.
The Brinkleys, for example, assumed they were ok because their Land Rover was more than 25 years old – and thus, ought to have been exempt – as an antique vehicle – from all the federal folderol. Ditto Danny Harrington of Albany, NY – who was also the object of a thug scrum over his possession of a 1983 model Land Rover 110.
1983 was 31 years ago.
That year, most new cars still came from the factory with carburetors – and none were required to have any air bags at all. Relative to now, both “safety” and “emissions” mandates were minimal. In any event, the deal to date has been that a given vehicle is only required to comply with the “safety” and “emissions” ukase in force at the time of its manufacture.
Not subsequent to its manufacture.
And that no matter when it was made, after a defined number of years elapse from the time of manufacture – 21-25 is the norm – a vehicle may be registered as an antique and at that point is exempted from both “safety” and “emissions” inspections.
This grandfathering clause is part of what makes it feasible (that is, affordable) to keep decades’ old vehicles. No more worries about having to spend wads of cash to fix stuff that the owner doesn’t regard as worth fixing. For example, one could elect not to replace a faulty ABS pump (if the car had one) and just drive with normal (non-anti-lock) brakes. Or pull the fuse for the air bags, eliminating any threat that the 20-plus-year-old components might fail while you’re driving 65 MPH.
And it would be legal to do so.
What’s scary about this “ICE Homeland” Hut! Hut! Hutting! is that the vehicles seized were not new.
Indeed, they appear to be very old – as in the case of both the Brinkleys’ and Danny Harrington’s Land Rovers. Harrington told a Jalopnik reporter that the M16-toting, body armor-clad Hut! Hut! Hutters! claimed his vehicle’s paperwork had been diddled with to make it appear older than it actually was. But Harrington insists his vehicle is “clearly a 1983″ model, as evidenced by not just its condition – in Harrington’s own words, the truck was a “mess” in need of a major makeover – but also by its Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) as well as its ’80s-era equipment and trim.
Regardless, it’s disturbing that the Hut! Hut! Hutters! were involved in this at all. When did sweating whether an old car has air bags and a catalytic converter become a matter of “homeland security”? Weren’t we assured that only evildoing terrorists were the object of this exercise?
Mission creep, anyone?
And there’s the bigger worry – if you own an older car. It is that the regierung will announce that all vehicles must be “compliant” with current “safety” and “emissions” laws. No more exemptions. No more grandfathering. No matter how old the car happens to be.
It is not hard to imagine this happening.
Indeed, it is surprising it hasn’t already happened.
Any vehicle made prior to say 1990 or so – before the air bag mandate, when only a handful of cars had ABS or even four-wheel-disc brakes – is arguably (by Clover standards; see here for more) egregiously “unsafe”… as measured against current standards.
If it’s a federal case – literally – to buy/possess an older vehicle sans all the modern “safety” stuff… then every old car (and owner thereof) is potentially a future target of a SWATfest by the Hut! Hut! Hutters.
Which, I suspect, is precisely what’s going to happen. The seizure at gunpoint of the Brinkleys’ (and Harrington’s) Land Rovers was the proverbial toe in the water. A test run. Let’s see how it feels – and see what happens. If people accept this, they’ll accept more of this.
Jawohl?
Keep in mind: The old car hobby is not what it used to be; it’s smaller – and it’s older (herewith my piece on that). And worst of all, the culture has shifted. Cry “safety” – and let slip the dogs of ICE Homeland.
Older vehicles without air bags, without computers (and most definitely without data recorders) are in the process of being anathematized. It is probably only a matter of time before they’re decreed “noncompliant” – and ushered to the crusher via the Hut! Hut! Hutters.
July 7, 2014
Attendees: Nick Sturtevant, Pete Riopel, J.R. and guest, Paul Kelley
Discussion summary: What are good ideas to generate local interest in the LP and momentum?
1. Determine local issues and national issues to develop MLP appropriate response and promulgate within the county via website, meetups, attendance at local city meetings, local media (publicity)
2. Look into contacting other groups, such as Ron Paul meetups, even Repub/Demo, disaffected mainstreamers looking for 3rd party alternative
3. Local issues: plan bay area, agenda 21, smart rail, transportation and development issues, what else? (research local city websites)
4. Communication to local registered LP’ers: solicit participation – who’s going after Huffman next election? Need a candidate. Officer elections; Nick as chair for a while; PK as secretary, Pete as treasurer and investment advisor; develop mailing list from website (where email available) and maybe do a cheap postcard mailing (for non-email contact info): notify of new county officer elections; also what are the issues you want pushed in Marin County by MLP?
5. More on publicity: make connections with local reporters- twitter. Develop working relationships that augment MLP dissemination of LP position.
6. Develop recommended positions on local ballot measures, write great text, and submit to registrar of voters for inclusion in voter pamplets
Action Items
Owner Item Due and Status
Practice debating LP positions on hot button issues TBD
Meeting schedule: first Wednesday of each month
Next meeting: August 6th , 2014
Location: TBA
July 2, 2014
Rutherford Institute Files First Amendment Lawsuit Challenging Discriminatory Election Laws that Favor Major Party Candidates over Independent, Minor Ones
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On The Front Lines
July 02, 2014
RICHMOND, Va. — Alleging that Virginia’s signature and ballot placement election laws favor major party candidates for political office, while discriminating against minor party and independent candidates, The Rutherford Institute has filed a First Amendment lawsuit in federal district court against the State Board of Elections (SBE). Institute attorneys have asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to strike down Virginia’s law requiring Democrat and Republican candidates to be given the first and higher spots on ballots, thereby giving them an unfair advantage over other candidates, as well as requiring minor party and independent candidates to obtain numerous signatures in order to be listed on election ballots while exempting Democrat and Republican candidates. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Virginia, several Libertarian Party candidates and an independent (non-party) candidate for public office in the November 2014 general election.
“There was a time in our nation’s history when a person’s vote counted for something more than merely the illusion of participation and when the people’s referendum at the ballot boxes brought about a change in the way government did business. That is no longer the case, thanks in large part to a corrupt political establishment that favors an elitist, two-party system whose primary aim is to maintain the status quo,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of the award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. “While voting is the very least that we are called to do as citizens, Americans are entitled under the Constitution to elect individuals to office capable of and willing to represent us, rather than being forced to choose from a limited field of individuals with the money and political backing to get on the ballot. Ensuring a level playing field for all candidates for public office will hopefully help transform our present government by oligarchy—one that is of the rich, by the rich and for the rich—to a government that is truly of the people, by the people and for the people.”
The Rutherford Institute’s lawsuit alleges that Virginia’s signature and ballot placement laws violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution by favoring the election chances of Democrat and Republican candidates at the expense of Libertarian Party and independent candidates. Under Virginia’s election laws, a candidate for public office is allowed to be listed on the official ballot printed by the SBE only if the candidate obtains numerous signatures of qualified voters (in the case of a candidate for U.S. Senate, 10,000 signatures). That requirement is waived, however, if the candidate is the nominee of a “party.” Since only the Democratic and Republican Parties have obtained enough votes in previous elections to qualify as a “party,” only those parties’ nominees are exempt from obtaining signatures in order to be placed on the ballot. Additionally, even if a minor party or independent candidate qualifies for placement on the ballot, they are automatically relegated to a position below that of the Democrat or Republican nominee. Virginia law provides that the names of candidates of “parties” for an office are listed at the top of the ballot, while candidates of any other political parties are listed below “party” candidates. Independent candidates are always listed at the bottom of the ballot. In filing suit against the SBE, Rutherford Institute attorneys point to numerous cases and studies showing that candidates listed lower on ballots are placed at a material disadvantage, which harms their chances for election.
Affiliate attorney David P. Morgan of Cravens & Noll, P.C. is assisting The Rutherford Institute in representing the Plaintiffs in the case.
Press Contact
Nisha Whitehead
(434) 978-3888 ext. 604
(434) 466-6168 (cell)
nisha@rutherford.org
June 28, 2014
California Assembly Panel Votes Unanimously to Turn off Resources to the NSA
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June 17, 2014
House Of Lies: The Inevitable Downfall of Iraq,
a Vietnam Redux! A Repeated Case Study of America’s Obsessional Need to Delude its People and the World!
This is the story of a fallen US military and corrupt US/Vietnamese/Iraq civilian governments, wrapped in self-delusion; harnessed by incompetence; and leading us to the inevitable outcome of massive carnage and historical shame.
As a teenager in Toulouse, France, the first and last memory I had of French Indochina was that Dien Bien Phu had been overrun by the Viet Cong. A few years later, I was to hear those same words of defeat regarding the vicious War in Algeria where France had brutally colonized an Arab country for well over one hundred years. Clearly, the country of France and all of its adjunct philosophies expiated its colonial imperialism to spell ‘defeat’, ‘anachronism’ and ‘futility’.
Imagine my reaction when I had heard that a 37 year old French Military Officer named David Galula had written two books entitled: Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958 and another ironically called, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory And Practice written in 1964. David was part of a school of French Military officers associated with “GUERRE REVOLUTIONNAIRE”. Rather than accept the fact that the French Army was born, bred and brainwashed to be nothing more than an instrument of defeat, these arrogant Organisation de L’Armee Secrete, or OAS [they tried to assassinate Charles De Gaule], blamed the French Government for being ineffectual.
This COIN [counterinsurgency] theory of ‘winning the hearts and minds of the restless natives’ became popular with General William Westmoreland [father of our Vietnam Defeat] and my former boss, Henry no war is a bad war Kissinger. In addition, this hearts/minds theory permeated the CIA tentacle in the personages of William Colby, General Edward Landsdale [“The Quiet American”] and his stool pigeon, Dan Ellsberg [Pentagon Papers; yesterday’s Snowden]. Thus this nonsensical theory which had never worked in the past two hundred years was used to justify the death of 58,195 American soldiers in VietNam and hundreds of thousands wounded veterans.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Le Durc Tho, once said to me when I was DAS for East Asia in the late 1980’s that “America was lazy”. He was being polite. We were more than ‘lazy’ we were purposefully creating lies and theories of war that had no correspondence to any reality in any country, then Viet Nam now Iraq and Afghanistan. My first and last words to my students at the War College at Ft McNair, Washington , DC. about the impending assault in Iraq ‘that it was a major mistake for which we were neither prepared nor understood.’ However, being right was never a commodity highly valued by our civilians in government or our military. In turn, my students [Colonels, Majors, CIA, State Dept. et. al. ] retorted as one might have expected, “this will be a short war. Wait till you see the ‘Shock And Awe’…” You know how that story ends (or doesn’t).
It always amazes me how resistant we, Americans are to understanding duplicity and deceit practiced by our own civilian/military leaders against us, the innocent American citizens. Is this why we never teach contemporary history in our schools? Better to keep the next generation dumb?
All the students in my class at Ft McNair had understood the following premises:
[1] Iraq was a deceptive construct created in the 1920’s by Gertrude Bell [British MI-6; “Queen of the Desert”] in order to artificially unite three disparate entities – the Kurds in the north; the minority Sunnis in Baghdad; and the majority Shi’ites in Basra [where the Brits were pumping oil].
[2] 9/11 was a Bush /Cheney/Rumsfeld ‘stand down’ a la Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Hadley, Condi; Elliot Abrams; David Addington etc.
[3] Paul ‘Jerry’ Bremer was a faux scholar/warrior who wrote a completely nonsensical article in the Mad Magazine or CFR’S “FOREIGN AFFAIRS” Journal—how ‘we, Americans, would accrue oil, money and wealth after our ‘successful invasion of Iraq’.
Sidebar: Bremer, an abject reject from the Office of Counter-Terrorism at the State Dept and a DEVOTED MEMBER of OPUS DEI, made certain along with his legal toddy, Walter Slocombe [a high paid DC Legal Pimp] to completely dissolved the SUNNI MILITARY —allowing 20,000 Sunnis to form the nidus of a major ‘terrorist phenomena’ that would eventually overrun the country and overthrow the Shi’ite led Govt imposed by the ignorant US officials.
I warned my students that Generals like Tommy Frank, George Casey, Abizaid were going to lead them into defeat and mayhem. The force structure of 75,000 US soldiers was at best inadequate, at worst criminal. I also added that Wolfowitz and his Deputy Zalmay Khalizad [Afghan CIA asset] and Doug Feith were completely useless and incapable of creating a post-Saddam Hussein civilian government. Zalmay was awarded Ambassadorship to Afghanistan and became the ‘token Muslim’ in the Bush Jr administration. Wolfowitz was rewarded for his egregious incompetency with the Presidency of the World Bank, he lost that too.
That’s a thumbnail sketch of the history of counter-insurgency and American leaders willingness to fall into this Peter’s Principal of Incompetency or Murphy’s law, then have the nerve to write a stupid book about it. Take Robert Gates book, Duty (or I call it Doody), written by a guy who knows nothing about war but a lot about kowtowing to his civilian bosses and how to lie about it. After I read the book, I realized how little our CIA and DCI knows about real world issues and how these insulated, corrupt purveyors of self deception promote their idiotic analyses.
What did we really get from the Iraq and Afghanistan war?? Did we get some “war heroes”? Let’s take General David ‘all in’ Petraeus who created the “counter insurgency strategy” in his army manual FM3-24. Through an ersatz intellectual slight of hand, Petraeus applies the failed COIN to the non-existent war on terror. Amazing isn’t it? This so called intellectual bullshit goes far in the army, especially when they don’t listen to or read their own studies at RAND (created by the brilliant Curtis LeMay and my old alma mater). RAND studied 648 terrorist groups that were active from 1968 to 2006 and concluded that “policing” not military action was effective 40% of the time in deterring such activities. What use does Petraeus have for real research and facts when he can manipulate the public perception of the Iraq/Afghanistan war to promote a “surge”?? A surge in his groin is more like it when he gets honey-trapped by his CIA biographer, Paula Broadwell.
What about the self-made General Stanley McChrystal? I had met this gentleman at one of my last meetings at the CFR. He introduced himself as ‘having just run five miles from Brooklyn to Manhattan’. I was unimpressed. He deliberately lied about the cover-up of the famous Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire. This pompous ass forgot that I had also known about his history of detainee abuse and torture at various prisons in Iraq.
I could go on about these self-created publicity hounds that call themselves generals. These guys are surrounded by cooks, body guards, PR people and travel on private jets while allowing hundreds of our men/women to die or be wounded in meaningless conflicts around the world and throughout our history. The civilian hawks are evil yes, but what gives with these military leaders that promote themselves as idols??? The story of Korea, VietNam, Iraq and Afghanistan are wrapped in a painful package of lies contrived by civilian elites and executed by their consorts, the military leadership.
The veterans that know better from their own experience need to raise up collectively and say NO to going back into Iraq. Citizens must educate themselves so they “Don’t Get Fooled Again!”. I thoroughly devoured The Operators by Michael Hastings. I read that his next target was John O. Brennan, perhaps that’s why he is RIP. An informed citizen will not be fooled nor allow their children to be sacrificed to the greedy, misguided thing we now know as government.
Steve Pieczenik
June 12, 2014
A lot of new Libertarian activity and activism is coming to Marin County in the next few weeks! Are you signed up on the Marin Libertarian Party’s Meetup group? If not, please make sure to register here: http://www.meetup.com/marinlp/ Also, please take a moment to update us with your most current contact information so that we can invite you to some fun meetings and events. Would you like to volunteer? Have some great ideas for Libertarian activism in Marin County? Please share your thoughts with us at the email below!
info@marinlp.com
Marin Libertarian Party 