Category: Uncategorized

Larry Elder has a run-in with the pasty-faced wonder:

When Garofalo agreed to a sit-down, she clearly knew nothing about me. When I defended the administration on the War on Terror, a frustrated Garofalo started to get up and leave, muttering, “This show sucks.” After I called her a coward, however, she sat back down and finished the segment.

After our interview, Garofalo began broadcasting her radio show on “Air America.” Several of my callers – I was still on the air at the time – said that Garofalo called me a “house Negro” and a “fascist.” Then something interesting happened. Garofalo’s people asked me to appear on her show. Would I agree?

I promptly said yes, after which I was informed that, no, they really had no time for an interview. What? After all, they asked me to appear, and when I promptly accepted, Garofalo’s people suddenly decided they could not fit me into their schedule! Here’s my speculation: Garofalo assumed that I feared appearing on her show. She extended an invitation in hopes that I would refuse. She then would go on the air, call me a coward and accuse me of fear in the face of hostility. Well, I called her bluff, and somebody backed down.

And yes, Garofalo is still a short fat idiot, as I wrote back in March 2003. I’m even more dubious about the war on method than she is, but the dim bulb wouldn’t know what a fascist was if one bit her on her oversized and appropriately named gluteus maximus. Now, there are without a doubt some fascist strains in the present Bush administration, but they are the same strains that were present in the Clinton administration and would be present in a theoretical Kerry administration as well. Fascism is simply another movement for expanding the power of the central state, something that Garofalo herself advocates on a regular basis.

She’s not equipped for educated debate, though, so it’s probably best that she run away as fast as those stumpy little legs will carry her.

Ramesh Ponnuru writes in NRO’s Corner

This is the third time in a row that the national Republican party has intervened in the primary for the third district in the House on the losing side. It managed to be against Adam Taff when he won the primary (in 2002), and with him when he lost it (as he appears to have lost yesterday). Every time I asked a party operative about the support this year for Taff over conservative Kris Kobach, I was told that Taff was going to win the primary going away. I figure that Kobach will now get party support; the incumbent Democrat, Dennis Moore, is one of the GOP’s top targets. But winning the race is going to be difficult, and the NRCC, by supporting a primary campaign that harshly attacked Kobach and depleted his funds, has made it harder. I’m not against national-party intervention in principle. Given this awful track record, maybe next time around the D.C. party should let Kansans choose their own candidate without the benefit of its expertise.

As is often the case, the national Republican leadership opposed the more conservative candidate in the party primary. Who needs them, when it’s clear that the NRCC sees its job as preventing the Republican Party from moving to the right? I note that Alan Keyes, despite his credentials, only appears to have become acceptable as a candidate for the Senate in Illinois since the candidates preferred by the state party leadership have dropped out. Keyes looks like a sacrificial lamb at the moment, but he’s a bright man and perhaps he can turn it around.

He’s one Republican candidate for whom I would vote, along with Ron Paul.

The White Buffalo bellows:

Do you have any stats on how private vs public schooled perform?

The only thing that I’ve ever seen is a comprehensive study based on the standardized achievement tests. It was mostly billed as a homeschool report, since it was the first study to look at a large number of homeschoolers but it also had the results of the public school kids as well as the privately school students taking the IOWA as well. Unfortunately, the private school data appears to have been left out of this particular citation.

However, I remember reading this study, which I first saw mentioned in the Washington Post a few years back, and I recall clearly that the conclusion was that the homeschooled kids were reaching in nine years the level that private school kids reached in eleven and public school kids reached in twelve. If one were to consider the tests to be reasonable approximations of academic achievement, (and they are almost certainly more credible than the inflated grades now being handed out at most schools and colleges around the country), then private school would appear to add approximately a year’s worth of schooling over public school.

There must be other studies out there, but that’s the only one that springs immediately to mind.

Almost 1.1 million students were homeschooled in 2003, according to the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The NCES says the number of students taught at home in 1999 was 850,000.

7.4 percent annual growth in homeschooling? That’s great news. If there’s one thing that makes me feel any sense of optimism about the nation’s future, it is that statistic.

BG writes of the Oshkosh gun seizures:

My friend BW doubted the story and tells me he called the assistant editor. This is what emailed me.

“This is the story reported on the news of the shooting and gun confiscating. It appears two search warrants were issued and the rest consented to the searches. The guns were returned to the citizens after ballistic test were performed to compare to the bullet when found. This I got from the city assistant editor of the Northwestern newpaper, yes I called and talked to her. The story was on the front page, but not the lead story. According to the police department, news channel and newspaper, the wisconsin gun owners assc. used this incident to boost membership and contributions. Looking at their play on words I would tend to agree. ”

Why wouldn’t the WGO use the incident to boost membership? The actions of the police department were outrageous and make very clear why the WGO is needed. The only play on words being performed here is by BW, who confuses a consent to a SEARCH with a consent to a SEIZURE. This is why the Constitution bans illegal searches AND seizures; if the two were identical, only illegal searches would need be banned. The two actions are completely different. When a policeman asks to search your car and you consent, you are not granting him permission to take your girlfriend’s purse or to remove the spare tire from the trunk.

The newspaper itself wrote: He [Police captain Jay Puestohl] acknowledged consent to search does “not necessarily” mean officers have consent to remove property. Puestohl also said nothing illegal was done by removing the firearms and that investigators needed to examine them. He declined to say on what grounds officers had the right to remove the firearms, though.

Puestohl’s wrong, of course, and it would have been more accurate for him to say “not” instead of “not necessarily”. It’s good that the police apparently had the good sense to eventually return the gun owners’ property – which is not reported in the original article, by the way – but just as a bank robber is still prosecuted even if he returns the money he stole, the policemen responsible should be prosecuted for theft.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert says he’s committed to abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, but he does not expect President Bush to make it a campaign issue…. In an interview with the Associated Press, Hastert said he had talked in general terms with President Bush about his proposals.

“I think he’s on board on the litigation issue and the regulation issue,” he said. As for the tax proposals, however, Hastert said, “I think that’s a piece they don’t want to bite off in the campaign. They have other things they want to talk about.”

Clearly, this is a major priority for the President. It must be part of that super-secret second-term plan. Why talk about something that would be massively popular with the American people in an election campaign? Either Bush does not support the idea or he’s even more strategically incompetent than I’d imagined.

David Hackworth writes on WND:

For example, the CPA paid 74,000 guards even though the actual number of guards couldn’t be validated. On one site alone, 8,206 guards were on the payroll, but only 603 warm bodies could be counted. Elsewhere, more than $17 million was allocated to guards and the Iraqi army without one piece of backup paper. Pals in Iraq say this has been standard drill since the birth of “a very dysfunctional” CPA.

The report cites, “An improper $120 million disbursement was made in May 2004 because of miscommunication between CPA-OMB and Comptroller’s office.” In other words, $120 million went south, but was blithely rationalized as some clerks getting their wires crossed!

Well, what’s a missing $8.8 billion dollars anyhow…. This episode brought to you by the Coalition of the Willing and the taxpayers of the United States of America.

WA asks me to respond to David Kupelian’s article on the November election:

Christians, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, constitutionalists, patriotic independents and other traditionalists: When you look at George W. Bush today and are dissatisfied – dissatisfied that he raised the federal budget sky-high, that he granted de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, that he doesn’t always follow the Constitution, that he invaded Iraq, that he hasn’t done enough to fight abortion and gay rights, that whatever …

What conclusion do you draw?

One conclusion is that Bush is a globalist, money-grubbing elitist Bonesman conspirator, or at best a clueless, sold-out puppet.

Another interpretation at the opposite end is that Bush is a general at war – a general who knows more than you do, who sees the lay of the land, who comprehends the odds, who knows what troops he’s got, and determines which battles he can and must win and which ones he has to concede, at least temporarily – even if it looks bad to his supporters.

As there is a plethora of information in support of the former which is also backed by the history of the ruling parties two factions, while there is absolutely nothing but blind trust supporting the latter assertion, I don’t see how any thinking being can possible conclude the latter. Every argument for President Bush’s re-election posits that he is a good and decent man, primarily because he claims to be a Christian. Well, so do the Archbishop of Canterbury and the gay Episcopalian priests, and I don’t hear any conservatives asserting that they are therefore genuinely good leaders worthy of support.

I pay very little attention to words and a lot of attention to actions. The irony of the pro-Bush conservative’s position is that he is forced to argue that the president does not have the political capital to enact policies that have far more popular support than the war on Iraq upon which he spent it all. If nothing else, this makes him at best a lousy political general in whom to place one’s trust. But I don’t think that’s the case, as I’m quite confident that he’s nothing more or less than a globalist tool, functionally identical to Jean-Francois and almost every other politician in the ruling party.

One aspect of Europe that I found markedly superior to the USA when living there was the far more astute attitude of the populace towards the politicians. They know the politicians are all corrupt, whereas in the United States we insist on excusing them on the basis of “stupidity”. When individuals and institutions succeed repeatedly at achieving what they set themselves, for good or for ill, stupidity is unlikely to be involved.

Kerry would betray the unborn, betray our youth, betray both the haves and the have-nots, betray us all. With inspiring rhetoric and fanfare, he would unravel what remains of our national sovereignty, leading us down the road to servitude, poverty and insecurity in a thousand smothering ways – all the while piously thinking he was ushering in a new era of peace.

And this is different from George Bush in precisely what way? If you want to vote for a winner, go ahead, vote for whoever is ahead in the polls on November third. But don’t try to pretend to me or anyone else that principle is involved. If your strongest argument after four years of governance is “don’t think, just close your eyes and trust”, you don’t have a leg to stand on.

Several of you have asked what I would do, if faced with a situation like the one in Oshkosh. I think it’s important to first understand that everything, literally everything, takes longer than those who see what is coming expects, and so it is a huge mistake to overreact directly to a simple probe and confuse it with the real thing.

It is wise, however, to use it as a warning and begin to prepare for the less desirable eventualities. My personal preference, as modeled by some of my intellectual heroes like Ludwig von Mises, is to simply leave. Anywhere is preferable to a society in the process of radical transformation – see South Africa and Russia for details. At no point in history has a society ever successfully resisted the suicidal urge to drown itself in chaos, and while there is one factor operating in America’s behalf – never before has a population been so well armed – it’s not difficult to envision an event that would lead the public to clamor for its own disarmament. If it is not too bizarre to apply a principle of socionomics here, I would not be surprised to see just such an event sometime before July 2006.

Of course, it’s not possible for many people to leave, nor are many who could leave inclined to do so. To those who stay, the principle of misdirection in all things is key. As it relates to the current subject, if they want guns, make sure you have some openly purchased guns for them to seize. Let them have them, behave in an appropriately servile manner, and take any action you deem appropriate later.

What most people don’t understand is that the police and government are terrified of the public. They know they are massively outnumbered. That is why they behave so arrogantly, like teenagers working themselves up to spray paint a street sign. And they are right to be afraid – in Peru, the police were afraid to even leave their homes as the initiation rite for the Shining Path was to shoot dead a uniformed policeman on the front steps of his house. It is not mass riots and demonstrations that they fear, for those can never be so large that they cannot be controlled one way or another.

What they fear is the quiet, invisible violence of places like Northern Ireland, where the entire British Army was finally forced to agree to a truce that was a de facto victory for the IRA. This is why the Bush administration is secretly trying to negotiate a deal with the Ba’ath and Sunni leaders, as they know that the foreign jihadists can be defeated with Iraqi help, but that the indigenous resistance will never be overcome now that the hearts-and-minds campaign has clearly failed. Government, however totalitarian, always depends on the consent of the governed, regardless of whether that consent is given freely or fearfully.

Perhaps these concerns are unfounded. I admit to the possibility that they are. However, I’ve never found it helpful to assume the innocence of government actors in any situation. Their interests seldom align with mine, and when they not only fail to answer my questions honestly but seek to evade them, well, I consider that sort of thing to be a red flag. It never hurts to be prepared.

And the gun seizure tests begin:

Police evacuated citizens from their homes within a quarantined area near Smith Elementary School Saturday night (July 17, 2004) to conduct a broad gun sweep of the neighborhood following the shooting of Oshkosh police officer Nate Gallagher. Residents reported returning home from area shelters — where they were herded by police — to find their guns gone. Others watched in awe as police took their firearms after giving police consent to search. Some were told by police their firearms would be subjected to ballistics tests, and would be returned.

“However, the bullet that hit officer Gallagher was not found,” said Corey Graff, executive director of Wisconsin Gun Owners Inc. “So how can police conduct ballistics tests if there’s no bullet with which to match the results? It defies logic.” Graff said the biggest issue is what he calls the department’s “Guilty-until-proven-innocent” posture towards citizens….

Warrants for searches were issued for at least two homes, (perhaps more) but homeowners in the area reported having all their firearms taken by police. Some witnesses said the whole neighborhood was evacuated by force and citizens were being told – not asked, but told – to hand over their guns. Some weren’t even asked.

What I’m wondering is if this little incident was ordered by the Oshkosh police, or if it was ordered by others interested in learning just how willing Americans are to submit to having their weapons seized.