Vox Popoli

AFP: The unspoken issues of the 2004 presidential elections are the antiquated and useless policies of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Most Americans believe both major political parties are pandering for future Hispanic votes while avoiding the politically sensitive issues of immigration. If homeland security and the threat of foreign terrorists are such a major concern, why can’t we control immigration on the Mexican-U.S. border?

Badnarik: “Let’s be realistic: The U.S. has more than 95,000 miles of border and coastline, and the current immigration regime encourages people to slip through without the formalities. With millions of immigrants dodging our Border Patrol every year, it’s time to say ‘enough – this isn’t working.’

“My goal is to encourage legitimate immigration – people coming to the United States to live free and work hard – while defending the nation against enemies who come here to harm it and parasites who come here to live on government largesse.

“I advocate open immigration for individuals who are willing to enter at a Customs and Immigration station and submit to a quick background check to ensure that they aren’t criminals or terrorists. And except for extreme cases such as Cuban and Haitian boat refugees who don’t have much control over where they land, I advocate treating people who cross the borders elsewhere as what they are: invaders.

“A more open immigration regime, coupled with the elimination of welfare incentives, would greatly reduce the resources needed to provide real border security. And the proper agency for that security is the armed forces – once we’ve brought them home from Japan, Korea, Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan …”

Interesting. The Libertarian Party presidential candidate is for harsher border control than either the Republican or the Democratic candidate, neither of whom dare to mention the issue, still less do anything about it. Badnarik’s position is certainly not what most people imagine when they hear that libertarians support open borders.

In case you’re interested, I’ll be on with Northern Alliance crew again on the Patriot 1280 at 2 PM Central this Saturday. The good news is that if you’re so inclined, you can listen now to the audio stream at:

http://mainstreamnetwork.com/listen/?station=taxpayersleague. We may throw down on Newt as per the previous post, but we’ll probably spend a good bit of time talking about the gender gap and why it exists in politics as well.

If you enjoy it, don’t hesitate to send the Fraters gang a thank-you note.

From the Fraters Libertas:

At one point the issue of circumscribed civil liberties came up and Gingrich’s response was that it had to be a balancing act. He rhetorically posed the question, if there were reliable information that a terrorist nuclear strike on Washington DC was scheduled for inauguration day next January, would he favor the temporary retraction of all civil liberties in the country. Given the threat to the survival of the US government and the loss of over a million people, his answer was “unquestionably, yes”.

Since Gingrich believes the war on method will last until 2070, this definition of “temporary” is apparently a Clintonesque one meaning “longer than you will likely live.” In other words, once gone, they’re gone forever. I would rather lose a city or three than sacrifice “all civil liberties” and live in a military dictatorship – I thought the whole point of being Americans was that we were willing to make sacrifices for freedom, not of it. Isn’t sacrificing the nation’s freedom in order to save the nation tantamount to burning the village in order to save it? What are we hoping to save? A nation of frightened serfs slavishly grateful to their feudal protectors? Bah – what are sheep if not for slaughter?

As for saving the government, this country would be much better off if Congress and the White House both disappeared in a big bang. The scene in Independence Day, you may recall, was greeted with cheers across the country. We’d be faced with governing ourselves for a change – oh, the horror! And where is the limit drawn? We now know that a million lives justifies throwing out the Constitution in Gingrich’s opinion, (we’ll skip over the fact that this begs the question of whether it would do any good at all), where, precisely, does he draw the line. Do we throw out our supposedly unalienable rights and call in Marius to save us if 100,000 are at risk? 1,000? Ten? What if one little girl in New York City has a tummy ache, should we declare martial law then?

The rampant idiocy of this is the notion that embracing serfdom will protect us from anything. It won’t. I absolutely guarantee that, and I assure you that if we go down this path, the most that Gingrich and his poisonous ilk will ever be able to say is to make a baseless assertion that whatever ends up happening could have been worse. Even now, the central goverment is ENSURING that the situation is more dangerous than it need be – you don’t think NWA would ban Arabs in a heartbeat and advertise that fact if the Feds would let them? – and even if Gingrich is correct about the threats he cites, the centralized autocracy he advocates will cripple the economy and stifle individual initiative as it always does, making any future war harder to win, not easier. History is littered with centralized military dictatorships that have lost wars, whereas decentralized free nations are usually victorious. And no government, once having expanded its reach, can be expected to voluntarily give up the new powers it has claimed for itself.

We already knew the Democratic leadership is treasonous, but with their recent words and actions, the Republican leadership seems hell-bent on proving that they, too, are traitors to the republic.

Perhaps this is the apocalypse of which Dark Window is the harbinger. I’ve been tracking the decline of the market during what appears to be beginning of Primary Wave 3, and interestingly enough, as of the close yesterday, the percentage of the S&P 500 decline over the percentage of trading days/640 (the length of Primary Wave 1) came to a perfect 1. Seriously, the decline from 1163.89 in the 110 trading days since March 5, 2004 was 17.19 percent at yesterday’s close of 1063.23. 110/640 also equals 17.19 percent.

I’d say that’s about as close to being on schedule as you can get. Coincidence? As Big Chilly says, there are no coincidences.

A Vox nemesis expresses a desire:

If we keep saying such nice things about each other, people are going to start talking. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already being compared to Carville and Matalin. Uh…you can be Carville.

Look, Pete, if you want to slip on Victoria’s Secret because it makes you feel pretty, no one’s stopping you, least of all me. I fully support your right to wear women’s clothing and call yourself Mary. I’m a libertarian, after all.

Oh, don’t be embarrassed, here, take this Cuddle certificate and you’ll be feeling more secure about your new identity in no time. Sure, I think the sheer pink chiffon would go over great with the Cuddlers. Just remember Rule Number 7!

From Instapundit:

The Kerry campaign responded, initially, that Mr Kerry had always said he was “near” Cambodia. Then a campaign aide said Mr Kerry had been in the Mekong Delta “between” Vietnam and next-door Cambodia – a geographical zone not found on maps, which show the Mekong river running from Cambodia to Vietnam.

Michael Meehan, a Kerry campaign adviser, told ABC Television: “The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol . . . in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was ambushed, they fired back, he was fired upon from both sides, from the Cambodian side of the border and the Vietnam side during that day in 1968.”

This is like saying that because the Mississippi River runs south from Minnesota, you can say that you’re in Mississippi when you cross the river to go to a Vikings game at the Hump. I know Kerry voters, excepting the corrupt elite hoping to ride the gravy train, are generally low-IQ, but this defense doesn’t even rise to the level of pathetic.

We were a little busy playing Doctor Kervorkian on the market, among other things. Got to make hay while the sun is shining, don’t you know. Can’t BELIEVE we forgot to nail CSCO yesterday. Bloody bloody bloody bloody heck! Oh well, can’t win them all.

I love the smell of a 200 percent short in the morning. And the Vorpal Blade went snicker-snack….

One of the most difficult myths to shake in dealing with people is the idea that people are rational. No matter how many times we see people behaving in a manner that is obviously contrary to their self-interest, we find it difficult to imagine that anyone would knowingly do so. And yet, they do, again and again.

I’m working on a project right now, and I decided that from the start, I wouldn’t worry about whether it made sense to anyone. I tried to do the same thing six years ago and was tremendously frustrated when people simply would not see or accept the obvious. Now that I’ve learned to expect irrational behavior, I’ve taken precisely the identical product but have designed an approach to appeal to the customer’s instincts instead of his reason.

Needless to say, the level of interest is now off the charts. I was badly misled by my father, I think, who was always telling me that I needed to be less contemptous of people. In day-to-day relations, I now accept that is true, but it is precisely the opposite in business. In business, no matter how low your opinion of the average individual, you will usually be surprised by the blind greed, incompetence, inability to project the future and total incapacity for logical thinking with which you must deal.

Think about it for a second. If people were rational creatures, how many would purchase Microsoft Office, considering the alternative? And yet Microsoft Office XP Pro ranks #390 on Amazon. It retails for $499, but you can find copies of it for about $140. Its functional equivalent, OpenOffice, which is 95 percent equivalent to Office – in the sense that only 5 percent of Office users need features that are not in OpenOffice – is infinitely cheaper. Seriously, it’s free, you only have to go to openoffice.org and download it. If you install Linux, you don’t even have to do that.

And yet every single person that I’ve ever spoken with about this specific issue, who did not need any of those Office-specific features, has gone out and bought MS Office anyhow. This isn’t reason, this is herd mentality. So, the trick to convincing an individual of something is to make sure that the solution you are offering him lies in the direction that his herd mentality is already driving him. This isn’t a new concept, but it’s harder to force yourself to think this way than you’d imagine. I’m constantly wrestling with the urge to make a rational case, but in truth, logic often only gets in the way. People will almost always do what they want in the end.

Once you learn to put forth your ideas and proposals in a manner which deals with people as they are instead of how you think they should be, you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to deal with them.

President Bush said on Tuesday that abolishing the U.S. income tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax was an idea worth considering. “It’s an interesting idea,” Bush told an “Ask President Bush” campaign forum here. “You know, I’m not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it’s the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously.”

Yes, he sounds completely committed to tax reform, doesn’t he? Isn’t “interesting” the sort of thing you say when you think something is outrageously stupid, but don’t want to say so in public? I suspect the five or six people who are still very excited about the possibility of George Bush making the abolition of the income tax the priority of his super-secret second-term agenda are going to be sadly disappointed.

Dark Window sets aside the mushrooms long enough to hit it out of the park with a much-needed smackdown of the latest neoconservative insanity:

Here is the proposed Lucom Plan to End Terrorism (subject to modification):

That “subject to modification” means he’ll change it a little and write another column about it next month. Here are a couple of his latest ideas:

1. All terrorists are declared criminals, subject to arrest on sight for the act of being terrorists. Due process, of course, must be observed.

Hmmmm…Something sounds fishy here…The “act” of “being.” Well, anyway, as long as it’s “on sight” I think we’ll be okay. Too bad Annie Jacobson didn’t have the Lucom Plan on her Terroristic Flight of Doom.

3. A $250,000 reward is payable by the State Department for information leading to the arrest and conviction of individual terrorists, in accordance with its reward program, to assist in preventing acts of national and international terrorism and other related criminal acts. A $1 billion reward is posted for the capture of Osama bin Laden.

That really big reward is the hallmark of the Lucom plan. It has graced every iteration I’ve read so far.

4. Any nation willfully and deliberately violating this United Nations resolution will be fined $5 billion for each violation. The U.N. or U.S. armed forces will enter the non-cooperating country to eliminate the terrorists and any terrorist training camps. Nuclear weapons can be used if considered necessary to save the lives of U.N. or U.S. troops, as President Truman used nuclear weapons in Japan. (This point expressly subject to modification.)

You know, on the off chance that people might actually object to having their country nuked.

This is so profoundly stupid that it practically strikes one dumb with awe at the sight of its towering idiocy. How is a terrorist defined, the same way that the FBI defined the 19 9/11 hijackers, seven of whom are still living after supposedly having crashed a 757 into the WTC? Isn’t there already a plethora of fines being offered for various undesirables? Note the now-obligatory neoconservative Republican kowtowing to the UN, as Wilson advocates nuclear attack in defense of UN resolutions. And on what basis is the UN fining these nations? Who collects and receives the fines… the same entity that hands them out? Hmmm, I wonder how that will work out.

I recently wrote that if you scare a woman enough, she’ll embrace death camps. Scare a crazy man and he’ll embrace indiscriminate nuclear attacks. When I read this sort of lunacy, I begin to understand the global elitist’s burden.