Will the Professional “Journalists” Now Defend Their Own Press Freedoms?

Glenn Greenwald has this post on whether the news media, in light of the recent Obama intrusions of the AP and Obama attempting to criminalize a Fox News reporter’s journalism work,  will do anything to defend Press freedoms and the First Amendment’s protection of the people’s right to question their government Rulers, their right to investigate what the Rulers are doing, and their right to report on what the government Rulers are doing.

And these rights which are inherent amongst the people belong to everyone, not just “professional” (if we can call them that) news journalists, but bloggers, pamphlet-distributors, and just average everyday people as well.

Greenwald cited HuffPo’s Michael Calderone who asked some White House reporters if they will respond to these threats against Freedom of the Press by the Obama Administration and AG Eric Holster. The general consensus from the “professional” news journalists is that they will do nothing. As Greenwald later noted, the news media by and large have become virtually a part of the U.S. government in their subservience and government propagandism.

Greenwald quoted Mark Grassy Knoller and Ann Compton:

Just marvel at their excuses for inaction. “It would be unprofessional,” CBS News’ Mark Knoller said. “We’re there to cover the president, his policies and statements, not stage a protest.” ABC News’ White House correspondent Ann Compton explained: “White House briefings are not advocacy sessions. We are there as reporters, to ask about presidential actions and policies not advocate, even for press freedom.”

News media personalities these days are really just that: personalities, self-absorbed in promoting their careers, not particularly concerned for getting at the truth. And add to that the more recent phenomenon of text-obsession zombies, social schmoozing and a love of the State.

I would say that Greenwald has consistently exposed various examples of news media sycophancy and subservience to government bureaucrats. In general, even the “liberal” media’s propagandizing for George W. Bush on behalf of the Iraq War was sickening.

But the news “journalists” own propaganda and suppression of facts and information of then-2008 candidate Barack Obama was exposed for what it was, especially by the “Journolists.” Remember them?

Many national news “journalists” themselves have been in and out of various government jobs, such as Diane Sawyer (a former Nixon flunky) and George Snuffleupagus, who worked for President Bill Clinton.

Here are some past articles by Greenwald on the Media-Government-Complex:

(I will add more to this when they become available, most likely at the top of the list.)

Michael Hayden, Bob Schieffer, and the Media’s Reverence of National Security Officials

Media, Drones, and Rank Propaganda

Correspondence and Collusion between the New York Times and the CIA

The NYT and Obama Officials Collaborate to Prosecute Awlaki After He’s Executed

The Nixonian Henchmen of Today: At the NYT

The NYT‘s Journalistic Obedience

Journalism in the Age of Obama Shows the Real Media Bias

On Scott Pelley’s 60 Minutes Profile of Leon Panetta (“13 uninterrupted minutes of drooling propaganda”)

Bob Schieffer, Ron Paul, and Journalistic “Objectivity”

The Military/Media Attacks on the Michael Hastings Article

The Worsening Journalistic Disgrace at Wired

How the Obama Administration Is Making the U.S. Media Its Mouthpiece

Adventures in Media Transparency

The Universality of War Propaganda

U.S. Media Takes the Lead on Iran

Zero Dark Thirty: CIA Hagiography, Pernicious Propaganda

Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross Belong in a Fear-Mongering Museum

New Study Documents Media’s Servitude to Government

Washington Post and Transparency: Total Strangers

The WP‘s Employment of a Fear-Mongering Smear Artist

The Fun-Filled Ocean Resort at Guantanamo Bay

Charles Krauthammer’s Propaganda

Erin Burnett: Worst of the Worst

Erin Burnett: Voice of the People

The Jeffrey Goldberg Media

Octavia Nasr’s Firing and What the Liberal Media Allow

Here is Edward R. Murrow on the right to dissent, the importance of due process and presumption of innocence, and that a free people should not be driven by fear:

It Can’t Happen Here

This is an important (albeit lengthy) video documentary by Larken Rose of our police state in Amerika and why it needs to be resisted.

(h/t Activist Post)

Getting It Wrong, Over and Over and Over Again

May 24, 2013

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

Scott Pelley recently confessed that he and others in the news media have been “getting the big stories wrong, over and over again.” He then goes on to blame the alternative media for that, and web news, bloggers and tweeters lacking “editors,” i.e. censors, and states that alternative news gatherers and distributors are not “real journalists.”

Pelley, who replaced “real journalist” Dan Rather via Cutesy Katie, is admitting to getting the big stories wrong, yet he is totally clueless as to why that is.

For example, Pelley cites his inaccurate reporting on the Sandy Hook story. And he referred to merely getting a few details wrong, such as stating that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at that school when she was not.

But Pelley, as with most of the reporters, anchors and editors of the mainstream news media, did not seem to explore whether the alleged shooter Adam Lanza may have been taking psychiatric drugs which may have contributed to his alleged violent behaviors.

However, Pelley did do a story on 60 Minutes in which he interviewed some people who knew the Lanzas who, as with some other close Lanza family associates, had said that Adam was “on medication” to treat his Asperger’s Syndrome. But Pelley did not follow up on the medication angle.

We just have not been hearing from mainstream news providers that most of the recent mass shootings have been by perpetrators on psychiatric drugs, especially SSRI antidepressants, including alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes. It has been asserted but not yet verified that the Sandy Hook shooter was also on psychiatric medication.

Have the media largely omitted any mention of the recent mass shooters’ use of psychiatric drugs because the media just want to help Premier Obama and Frau Feinstein implement their gun-grabbing fetishes? (Or is it because the news networks make a lot in ads from the Big Pharma drug dealers?)

It’s not just a matter of getting facts wrong, it’s a matter of obvious omission.

But this isn’t really about the mainstream news “journalists” getting things wrong, over and over again.

This is, once again, a matter of State-aggrandizing propagandists pushing a particular agenda. In this case, it’s the gun control agenda, along with the push for a police state.

Incidentally, was it on purpose that CBS Evening News hire an anchor who sounds like Richard Nixon? But I digress.

Because the facts do not support their cause, the gun-grabbers have been using emotional appeals, including exploiting the Sandy Hook tragedy, to disarm their victims while aiding and abetting the violent criminals out there who don’t obey the law including gun laws.

And Lawrence O’Donnell’s recent misinformation and dishonesty in defense of the police in Watertown illegally ordering people from their homes while police searched without warrants or probable cause was disgraceful. Talk about “getting it wrong, over and over and over again.”

It seems like we may be seeing more of that kind of criminal, thoroughly unconstitutional behavior committed by police, and maybe even military as well, mainly to satisfy the Rulers’ gun-control agenda, their need to disarm the civilian population so there will be no resistance against their further Soviet criminality.

Now, you “liberals” out there: Do you really believe that if the people amongst the civilian population were armed, openly or concealed, that more people would just go shooting wantonly and recklessly?

According to John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, the cities with more gun restrictions (e.g. Chicago) have very high violent gun-related crimes and deaths, and those with fewer restrictions have lower rates of gun-related violence.

Here is Scott Pelley’s interview of the gun-grabbing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just days after the Sandy Hook shooting. Once again, they emotionalize the gun issue by bringing up the families of the victims of gun-related violence, with Bloomberg asking Pelley, “Do you really want to call them up and say, ‘oh it’s hopeless, we’re just going to keep killing more and more people’?”

But they never discuss the valid points made by John Lott and others and the statistics which back up their assertions, including the many lives saved by someone who possessed a firearm and used it in self-defense.

Unfortunately, the “progressives” seem to want only police to be the ones with weapons, but not private civilians. In contrast, a much freer and safer society would have it the other way around.

So like good little sheeple, the “liberals” do not seem to be concerned with why police do not keep statistics on police-perpetrated gun-related deaths.

But why does the Left want a police state?

And I can see why the conservatives refer to the liberals as “criminal-coddlers,” in the Left’s constant defense of violent criminals. The Left’s gun-grabbing agenda is a part of their “criminal-coddling” in their intentionally disarming innocent people by government force and by law. When the Left’s adored State disarms innocent people, they are ipso facto arming the criminals.

But doesn’t this go with the larger picture of why the Left love confiscatory taxes, fascist regulations and welfare redistribution schemes and Big Government bureaucracies? They want the power (via the armed State) to steal from other people and tell them what to do, and they don’t want their victims to have the right or the means to defend themselves!

So just what is it about the State, its apparatchiks, and its propagandists in the media who help to push the agenda of the State’s criminals? In my view, there is some sort of power trip involved in aiding and abetting the State’s crimes against innocent human beings’ persons and property.

One grandiose example of the Left and the biased media’s “criminal-coddling” was their propagandist push for the George W. Bush Iraq War ten years ago.

Talk about “getting it wrong, over and over and over again.”

Is the Bloated “Defense” and “National Security” Budget Worth It?

Sorry for the reruns lately. But here are two posts from my blog from March 2011:

The Bloated Defense Budget Just One Big Example of The Need To Oust Socialized “Defense”

March 13, 2011

Independent Institute Research Fellow and defense expert Winslow T. Wheeler has this op-ed in The Hill, The Defense Budget: Ignorance Is Not Bliss, in which he notes the ability of the federal government’s protection monopoly to propagandize its need for more socialist redistribution of wealth from America’s actual workers and producers to the much-entrenched military contractors. With the Establishment’s “hyperventilated rhetoric,” Congress has approved of plenty of boondoggles for the contractors and for the over-paid bureaucrats of DOD. But one thing has changed, says Wheeler, and that is the overly-statist-influenced public’s dwindling “aggressive ignorance” about the bloated defense budget, despite efforts of the bureaucrats’ intensive campaign for more, more, more. But while more people are becoming better informed about the huge defense budget, the Pentagon does not seem to be subject to an audit.

Besides being a research fellow at the Independent Institute, Wheeler is Director of Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information (now part of the Project on Government Oversight*) in Washington. The climax of his years as a Congressional staffer was his 2002 article under the pseudonym “Spartacus,” titled, Mr. Smith Is Dead: No One Stands in the Way as Congress Lards Post-September 11 Defense Bills with Pork, after which he was asked by Republican staffers of the Senate Budget Committee to resign. No surprise there. At least 99% of members of Congress don’t like their self-centered hoggishness and gluttony for feeding at the public trough exposed. Shoot the messenger.

Wheeler wrote the book, Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security in 2004.

But as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted, and several times, with democracy the temporary rulers have no incentive to actually serve the needs of the taxpaying public, and tend toward short-sightedness when it comes to their use (or misuse) of public assets. The public trough is “everybody’s,” so let’s get as much of it while we can. And this applies to all three branches of government, “the House, the Senate, and the President,” as Sen. Chuckles Schumer would say.

Especially the President and his executive branch. The wars of the last 60 years have been the executive’s wars, and have not had formal Congressional approval. But as with the elder President Bush’s first Iraq War of the early 90?s, which really got the ball rolling as far as starting the U.S. government’s campaign of provoking the Muslims in foreign lands to be against the U.S. (as a bogyman replacement for the commies who went down in flames at that time), the younger Bush’s wars were in the name of “political capital” for his reelection bid. Saddam was the bogeyman for both Bushes, and now Gadaffy will be the one for Obama’s “political capital.”

In an interview with the Global Beat, a Boston University publication, Winslow Wheeler was asked if it really mattered that the Bush Administration “exaggerated” (i.e. “lied”) about Iraq’s alleged threat of weapons of mass destruction, and he replied that it does matter, but that Congress will not substantively investigate the matter. He also noted how unprofessional the Press has been throughout this post-9/11 “War on Terrorism”:

But the press in this country has been demonstrating in the last decade or so that it has forgotten how to be professional. The press is atrocious on defense and national security issues. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, I pretty much gave up on most American newspapers. There were some journalists who did good work, but I pretty much found the European press to be far more informative about Iraq than the American press. Case one is the Jessica Lynch story. The American press bought the DOD story hook-line-and-sinker. It took the BBC to research it, and the U.K. press to come out with the expose. The American press still hasn’t figured out what to do with it. It is pitiful. I am not optimistic that anybody in this country is going to get to the bottom of it and do some work that will change public opinion about it.

And on the Bush Administration’s case for Iraqi WMD:

If the president had wanted to make that case, he should have. But that is not the case that the president made. The case he made was that Saddam was a threat to us, and that the threat was weapons of mass destruction. That is the case he made. I am not particularly interested in a president who presents a disingenuous case for going to war. Even if you support president Bush, why should you believe him? It has all sorts of consequences. The people who wanted to go to war with Iraq are saying that it is not a big deal, and that (Saddam Hussein) was horrible to his own people, and that justifies the war. Well, that is not what they were telling us. We could see that he was a son-of-a-bitch, but that is not what they built the war on. They built the war on weapons of mass destruction.

GLOBAL BEAT: So the issue is credibility?

Winslow T. Wheeler: It is one of ethics. If you don’t have ethics, you have no credibility.

On the credibility of the nation’s unnecessarily and misguidedly centralized “national defense” monopoly, the Washington Post‘s series last year showed that the DOD has no credibility. (I’ve linked to it here before, but am always glad to do it again, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

What really has no credibility, and that I will continue to write about in this space, is the system we have, that of monopolized and centralized territorial protection. It doesn’t work. People just don’t realize that our so-called national defense in Washington is a socialist scheme. Economically, the means of production of defense are seized by the federal government, and it is “socialist” because it is a system of public-(or, more accurately, State-) ownership of the means of production in security. Socialism just doesn’t work in any endeavor of life – zilch. For efficient service in anything, there needs to be private ownership (and control) of the means of production, including the labor, and there needs to be competition in the free market of such services for genuine incentives to exist.

Socializing and monopolizing territorial protection and security has time and again motivated the monopolists to use the monopolized military apparatus as a means of provoking the inhabitants of foreign lands, thus constantly creating new reasons for the bureaucrats and parasites to feed off the productivity of the society’s workers.

Related articles for further reading:

The Production of Security, by Gustave de Molinari, contrasting the counter-productive communistic monopolization of security vs. the efficiency and peace that competitiveness  encourages in the free production of security.

Foreign Aggression by Linda and Morris Tannehill, (from their book, The Market for Liberty), describing the free market, private (i.e. honest, without socialist enslavement) alternatives in territorial protection.

Iraqi Sanctions and American Intentions, by James Bovard, on the 1991 example of how the monopolists in territorial security lose control of their judgment and engage in egregiously evil behavior, such as, in this instance, the U.S. military’s intentional destruction of civilian Iraqi water and sewage infrastructure for the purpose of “undermining civilian morale.” In my opinion, only utter idiots (and truly bad people) would engage in such treatments of other human beings, the idiots we find in a centralized bureaucracy such as DOD.

Entering the Soviet Era in America by Tom Engelhardt compares the current self-destruction of the American empire with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and discusses the “boundless military ambitions” of the Establishment led by GWB and his “Global War on Terror” and the “creeping giganticism” of the executive branch’s military and Pentagon expansion especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray Rothbard, on how America’s national banking cartel and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street is what really funds these useless, counter-productive wars overseas whose only real purpose is to line the pockets of not only those parasitic defense contractors, but the financial elites as well.

The Living Reality of Military Economic Fascism, by Robert Higgs, with more on that revolving door between “private” business and government.

The Private Production of Defense (pdf), by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe suggests that the privatized alternative to State-monopolized “defense” would include insurance and responds to skeptics of such an unconventional, unusual idea.

No More Military Socialism by Murray Rothbard, (from his book, Power and Market: Government and the Economy) Excerpt:

It is all the more curious, incidentally, that while laissez-faireists should by the logic of their position, be ardent believers in a single, unified world government, so that no one will live in a state of “anarchy” in relation to anyone else, they almost never are. And once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as being in a state of impermissible “anarchy,” why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighborhood? Each block? Each house? Each person? But, of course, if each person may secede from government, we have virtually arrived at the purely free society, where defense is supplied along with all other services by the free market and where the invasive State has ceased to exist.

* Updated in May, 2013 to reflect a 2012 merger.

___________________________________

The Fascist, Communist, Criminal Police State of America

March 24, 2011

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reports that the Nazi federal government in Washington that owns our lives plans to study new anti-”terrorism” technologies (frankly, I’m terrified of this damn Nazi out-of-control criminal organization in Washington and what they’re doing to our Liberty, or what’s left of it! It is THEY who are the terrorists!), to use the same kind of “back-scatter” radiation-cancer-causing scanners and cameras on pedestrians and motorists on public streets that DHS describes as “a walk through x-ray screening system that could be deployed at entrances to special events or other points of interest.”

The material obtained from DHS (Department of Hitlers and Stalins) by EPIC also includes references to the corporate contracts, the special interests whose cronies would benefit from such egregious invasions of our privacy, our Liberty and our security. Those corporations include, according to Forbes, “Siemens Corporations, Northeastern University, and Rapiscan Systems.” Hmmm. More profits for Rape-scan and Michael Chertoff. These criminals are sick, and yes, they are criminals in Washington, including the war-starters Bush and Cheney, and the elder Bush who started all this, as far as I’m concerned.

According to the Forbes blog,

One project allocated to Northeastern University and Siemens would mount backscatter x-ray scanners and video cameras on roving vans, along with other cameras on buildings and utility poles, to monitor groups of pedestrians, assess what they carried, and even track their eye movements. In another program, the researchers were asked to develop a system of long range x-ray scanning to determine what metal objects an individual might have on his or her body at distances up to thirty feet.

This totalitarian police state scheme is primarily because of Bush, who could never have been elected to anything had his daddy not been a previous president, and Cheney, who has spent his entire adult life feeding at the public trough starting with being Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant in the 1960s (after flunking out of Yale and having to extend college for two extra years in Wyoming because of his poor academic performance, and after his drunk driving arrests, and getting draft-deferments so that he could later be called the “draft-dodging chickenhawk warmonger” by his many fans). And I’m not kidding about “feeding at the public trough.” Cheney, with the exception of his five years as Halliburton CEO and his years with those neocon think tanks (if you call it “thinking”), Cheney literally has been employed by government, or benefited from government contracts (via Halliburton, etc.) most of his adult life.

Obviously, the obsessive Security State Nazis have never read the Declaration of Independence, and do not have any understanding of the concept of presumption of innocence, Due Process and the right to be left alone by the government unless and until agents of the State have actual specific reason to suspect a specific individual of having committed a specific crime of theft, trespass or physical aggression against another specific individual or group (victim). Otherwise, people have an inherent inalienable right to be LEFT ALONE. I am so sorry that retards don’t understand that.

That means that we all (Yes, ALL, even including Muslims and Arabs, Ms. Geller. I know, that Helen is way out there. Oh, well.) have a right to go about our business, walking along the sidewalks or driving our cars, without our belongings being searched, or our bodies and vehicles being scanned, and without being asked for “our papers,” or even being approached by any agent of the State or by any police or military agent. I am sorry that some people just don’t understand these things.

As I noted in my Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon, these conservatives and war supporters who have been supporting the past ten years’ police state, given to us by Bush and Cheney, and who supported the PATRIOT Act for purely emotional and fear-monger reasons and without actually reading through the bill, may soon regret their support for such idiotic and retarded anti-American, anti-freedom and anti-security policies, as such policies are surely to be used against them by all those lefty Cass Sunsteins who slither around in Washington looking for any excuse to pry, search, censor, oppress and who hunger for that police power they love so much. (“Liberals?” What a joke!)

Kevin Carson notes that it doesn’t even matter what the “law” is, as “law enforcement” (another joke) officials don’t really care what the actual laws are, and are really going to do what they please, what serves their need for more power over others, and  use “asset forfeiture” as an excuse to merely steal from their fellow citizens.

I think the “collective bargaining” fights in Wisconsin have been exposing exactly what America has become, this entitlement mentality in which “laborers” organize themselves to take what they want from the actual producers of society through the armed force of government. They have a right to your stuff, as do the National Security police state contractors who benefit from the police state contracts, as they are merely living off the same taxpayers and producers via the Pentagon and DHS’s own redistribution-of-wealth schemes.

And our Liberty is being burned to the ground by these criminals. And so is our security as well. We are literally less secure now, because we have these goddamn police intruders literally perpetrating crimes of aggression, theft, and trespass against presumably innocent people, with all these presumption-of-guilt schemes. It is the agents of the State who are the real criminals and the real terrorists. The criminal State. Don’t any of those people have a conscience?

Destructive Collectivist Central Planners

I did this post in January, 2012. Here it is again:

Trying to Make Sense of Santorum’s Irrational Lawless Authoritarianism

January 15, 2012

Here is a quote by Rick Santorum that has been referred to quite a lot on the Internet:

One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a Libertarianish right. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture

But the hypocrisy is extreme with Rick Santorum, who constantly speaks about the “War on Radical Islam” or on “jihadism,” even though he’s the one on the religious crusade. He is right there along with the other neocons who are warning us that the Islamists are trying to spread their religious repression and Sharia Law, and that “they want to kill us,” yet Santorum has been supporting these wars, U.S. government invasions and occupations over the past ten years that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, mainly in Iraq. And he is the one who wants to use the government and police to force his social and cultural views down other people’s throats.

As I have pointed out, the warmongers of the past 20 years — the neoconservatives — who started two wars against Iraq (1991, 2003), and one in Afghanistan as well as several unofficial wars, are not really “right-wingers,” because their ideal of “reshaping the Middle East in our image” is a socialist, central-planning ideal, and is therefore on the left. They are collectivists who either are hostile to or just do not understand the concepts of individual liberty, natural rights (to life, liberty and property, etc.), property rights, voluntary association and voluntary contracts, and especially, the rule of law.

In his strong anti-individualism, anti-natural rights feelings and his wanting to have a Big Leviathan Government empowered to make rules regarding how individuals must live in their private lives, Santorum therefore is not a “right-winger,” but a left-winger. That is because, as I noted in the above linked post, individualism, private property and voluntary exchange are on the right, while collectivism and all its forms such as statism, communism, socialism, etc. are on the left. Santorum is a collectivist because he strongly opposes the very ideas and principles of individualism upon which America was founded, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and many other writings of the Founders and American Revolutionaries.

And it’s not as though he is saying the things he’s been saying just to get votes (as opposed to Willard Romney, who has no strong views or principled stands on anything). Santorum really believes strongly in his collectivism, and his wanting to use the armed police powers of government to intrude into other people’ private lives as well as invade and occupy the territories of foreigners. I hope people are beginning to understand the relationship between anti-individual freedom central planners (Santorum’s culture war collectivism, “progressives’” anti-traditional values culture war central planning in schools, etc.) and the government-interventionist foreign policy central planners. Santorum is a dangerous collectivist and statist with the both domestic and foreign policy intrusions he craves.

Here is the hypocrisy of Santorum’s anti-”radical individualism,” which some conservatives tend to view as “self-centered” or accusing people of “self-worship.” They just can’t see how they themselves are very “self-oriented” and narcissistic in their policies of intrusion into the lives of others. The “libertarianish right,” in contrast, tends to view the individual as having rights to life and liberty, and the right to live one’s life however one pleases, as long as one does not interfere with the same rights of others to live as they want to live. That is not Santorum’s view at all. He wants to have his way of life, but he wants to use armed force of government to force others to live in his particular way, just as the so-called “Islamists” about which Santorum warns us. This is an extreme, aggressive form of self-centeredness, a total disregard for the lives and rights of other human beings. The collectivists are much more “selfish” in their agendas than individualists.

That is why the Santorum authoritarians and collectivists do not believe in the rule of law, in which The Law is there to protect the individual, one’s person and property from the aggression of others. In contrast, Santorum wants to use the armed apparatus of “law enforcement” to impose his way of life onto others, i.e. to commit acts of aggression against others’ persons and property, the opposite of protecting others from aggression.

And then there is the idea of authority. Santorum collectivists and statists are authoritarians. They do not believe in the right of an individual to have authority over one’s own life. The authoritarians believe in a paternalistic authoritarian government. (Another aspect of the Nanny State War on Drugs.) The Santorum collectivists seem to say they believe in God, but really, quite frankly, their god is government, the State. Or perhaps a merger of God and State. Now, I am an individualist who believes in individual freedom, but I don’t exactly “worship” myself as the conservatives tend to accuse individualists of doing. I merely have a sense of self-respect. I do believe in God or Superior Intelligent Being who created human life and everything else around here. In fact, as long as I’m going back to past posts, here is something I said about that back in 2009:

Recently, there have been criticisms by people in the news media of conservatives’ “listening tour,” with the pundits bringing up the old creation vs. evolution debate. They are constantly labeling those who believe in God or a creator as knuckle-dragging, flat-Earth-thinking Neanderthals. Most people who believe that we were created by a superior being or beings also believe that we were products of evolution from earlier life forms, and gradually over a period of centuries, millennia, etc. It’s just as each individual evolves from conception to birth to adulthood to death.

One may ask the critics of creationism how exactly humans formed, with the heart the way that works and the brain and how it functions, and so on. Is their answer that it all came about by total randomness, with particles and matter and chemicals coming together and developing the means of life on their own? What are the chances of our heart and entire circulatory system being the results of spontaneous events and randomness? Just look at how every part of us works, and how everything functions, and all working together. Look at the eyes and how complex the optic nerve is, communicating visual messages to the brain. It’s all coincidental?

All these biological facts of existence and their complexity really should be seen as evidence that we were created, because the odds of being the results of such randomness are so great, you’d have to believe in that randomness as a matter of faith.

Unlike the Santorium collectivists and authoritarians, while I believe that God (or Superior Intelligent Being) created human life, I don’t believe that God has any particular agenda for us to follow. We already have free will (which the Santorum authoritarians and collectivists don’t believe in, because they believe in State force and dictates), and I believe in that free will, and that things were not “God’s will,” and so on. Our culture has declined not because of “radical individualism,” as Santorum describes it, but because of the Santorum religious collectivists and central planners, and from the FDR New Dealers and Wilson “make-the-world-safe-for-democracy” expansionists to the Bush-Cheney-Obama “remaking-the-Middle-East” leftists.

Another recommended way of understanding all this is Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book, Democracy, the God That Failed. And in his article, Political Economy of Monarchy and Democracy, Hoppe notes the idea of time preferences, and the post-World War I period when private government ownerships (as in monarchies) were completely replaced by public government ownerships (as in democracies), which were characterized by present-orientedness and government exploitation. In modern governments, the temporary caretakers exploit whatever public government resources they can while they still can.

We can see how in the past century selfishness and immediate-gratification have been the traits of our declined culture. After 9/11, the Cheney-Bush central planners exploited to a maximum whatever fears Americans experienced after that day, as a means of implementing police state policies and starting wars that had already been planned well in advance. They rushed through policies to further strengthen and expand the power of the centralized Leviathan U.S. government, for these non-productive professional bureaucrats to gratify themselves with power-grabs and for their corporate sponsors to further enrich themselves at taxpayer expense as well.

So the present-orientedness, immediate-gratification exploitation of publicly-owned government isn’t just from the Obommunist Left welfare statists. It has also been, especially in these past 20 years, from the Cheney-Bush-Santorum warmongers and corporatist military-security-industrial complex who have been starting all these wars and provoking foreigners as a means of expanding the federal government as much as possible to shake down the workers and producers of America while these people still temporarily have their access into the public trough.

And now we have a police state that is expanding each day and becoming more and more oppressive. So, it is not we individualists (the ones who believe in non-aggression, individual liberty and private property) who are the cause of the cultural decline and loss of liberty. Right along with the Obama-Pelosi-Clinton-Kennedy leftists, the Santorum collectivist authoritarians and Cheney-Bush foreign aggressors and police-staters have all been the true moral relativists of our time.

Obama’s IRS Harassment of Tea Party Conservatives Similar to Union Intimidation Tactics

This news of the Tea Party and other conservative organizations being singled out and harassed by the Obama IRS reminds me of an article I did in June 2012 on Rand Paul’s unwise endorsement of Willard Romney last year for President. The article was more about the demise of the Tea Party generally than specifically Rand Paul’s Romney endorsement (and could’ve been better titled). Anyway, here is an interesting excerpt (with one link change):

I heard at least one talk show caller say that at some Tea Party events some people were seen taking photos or videos of the license plates of Tea Party attendees’ cars. Savage has repeated that reference several times.

For some reason this doesn’t surprise me. Some unions are known for using intimidation tactics to get what they want from management or to silence opponents. For example, during a 2009 health care town meeting, a black man who merely was trying to sell buttons and Don’t Tread On Me flags was beaten by three men wearing S.E.I.U. shirts and sent to the hospital (more).

…

Similarly, the National Labor Relations Board’s newer rules include the right of union bosses to collect from employers the names and address of all employees, against employees’ wishes. What other reason for unions to have that information, particularly of non-union employees, but to phone or visit their homes as a means of intimidating people into joining unions?

I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael Savage might be on to something, regarding those Tea Party events. Savage’s ukulele is proving to be quite helpful.

Another possible cause of Tea Party impotence could be the alleged intimidation and stonewalling by the IRS of Tea Party groups attempting to register as non-profits.

According to U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, a Tea Party group in his district

tried to register as a non-profit with the IRS. Despite repeated and numerous inquiries, the IRS stonewalled this group for a year and a half, at which time it demanded thousands of pages of documentation – and gave the group less than three weeks to produce it.

The IRS demanded the names of every participant at every meeting held over the last two years, transcripts of every speech given at those meetings, what positions they had taken on issues, the names of their volunteers and donors, and copies of communications they had with elected officials and on and on.

World Trade Center: Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Private Property Symbol of Socialism and Politics

The new One World Trade Center tower in New York was in the news this week, as the spire was placed atop the tower, making it a symbolic 1776 feet high. But why did it take well over 10 years for all this, and it’s still not completed? It is expected to be completed in about 18 months, and currently 55% of it is leased.

The reason why it has taken so long to complete is that 95% of it is owned by the New York Port Authority. i.e. government-owned. This news story reminded me of a post I did a few years ago, and I’ll repost it here, with some minor changes:

The Twin Towers and Their Evil Eminent Domain Roots

September 13, 2010

The rebuilding on the site of the former World Trade Center 9 years and counting after the September 11th terrorist attacks has been slow. It appears that two of the main elements that have been holding things up have been bureaucrats and battles between victims’ families and leftists/”anti-war zealots” etc. on what kind of memorials to have on “Ground Zero.”

Had those properties been privately owned, you can bet your sweet bippy the whole area would have been completely rebuilt long ago. But the problems with the rebuilding are because the government-run Port Authority owns the property, as is the case with every other government-run entity or function.

Gary North in 2003 brought up the actual history of the World Trade Center: “The Twin Towers began with acts of legalized theft.” Eminent Domain.

It all started with those great freedom-loving Americans, believers in the ideals of the Founding Fathers, the Rockefellers.

No, I’m just being sarcastic. The Rockefellers, in this case then-NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and his brother David Rockefeller. It is a sad case of eminent domain, 1960s government confiscation of private property, with politically connected parasites destroying the lives and businesses of small business owners and entrepreneurs, so that some bureaucrats can play with their new properties like little girls play with their little dollhouses. It was a central planner’s dream come true. As Gary North notes,

The Twin Towers project was a combination of four crucial factors: (1) David Rockefeller’s desire to raise property values in lower Manhattan; (2) Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s appointees, who controlled the Board of the Port Authority; (3) taxpayers’ credit, which was used to underwrite bonds to build the Twin Towers; (4) exemption from all New York City building codes and taxes….

The Twin Towers were conceived in the sin of eminent domain and leased in the iniquity of state ownership. They became symbols of state capitalism, towering emblems of technology and tax exemption.

And North quotes at length from a City Journal article with the details:

Virtually every important consideration in developing the World Trade Center had nothing to do with business and everything to do with politics. Costs, which the public would ultimately have to pay, mounted rapidly. To get New Jersey’s backing for the project, for example, the Port Authority agreed to take over the financially strapped Hudson tubes that brought many New Jersey rail commuters into Manhattan (today, it’s called the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, or PATH, train). The World Trade Center development thus extended the agency’s state-capitalist reach beyond real estate into mass transit. The final cost of the twin towers, as usually happens with publicly financed projects, swelled far beyond initial estimates. Supporters of the development had low-balled those estimates to win public support.

Since the World Trade Center originated as government’s idea of what lower Manhattan needed, rather than as what the market really called for, it’s no surprise that it misfired commercially….

Rather than attracting new firms to New York, as its planners thought it would, it drew tenants from other lower Manhattan offices, driving up vacancy rates throughout the area. With the towers still unfilled, New York State moved nearly all its Gotham offices into them, becoming the center’s biggest tenant. Similarly, the Port Authority moved many of its own offices there…

Such deal-making, with the public footing the bill, guarantees inefficiency, since there’s no free market in place that – by rewarding good work and disciplining bad – would pressure administrators to hire the right people for the right jobs and make sure they worked hard…

So, the Twin Towers really weren’t symbols of actual capitalism, actual free markets and private property, the principles upon which America was actually founded and that the Founding Fathers believed in. The World Trade Center towers were symbols of State capitalism, that is, State confiscation of property and wealth, in which it is the politicians, hacks and bureaucrats doing the wheeling and dealing, not only with the property that their bureaucracies stole from private citizens but not even paying the same taxes that their neighbors have to pay (which is already immoral enough).

All these arguments over memorials and rebuilding would not be happening if the property in question were not publicly, or, more accurately, State owned. We need some kind of Constitutional amendment or law — or something — that clearly states: “Separation of commerce and State!”

The Left’s Propagandizing for Their Domestic Police State and Foreign Warmongering

Daniel McAdams posted this video on the LRC Blog (via Daily Paul) of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell with an embarrassingly propagandistic defense of the police state in Watertown three weeks ago.

The video includes more than enough proof that not only is O’Donnell wrong about Ron Paul being a “liar,” but it is O’Donnell, in his frothing slobbering love for the State and its violence, who is the true “liar” here.

(I have already posted another video of an Infowars reporter interviewing siege-victim Watertown residents, some of whose doors to their homes were left wide open by the violent lawless nomads who invaded their homes after ordering the victim residents out.)

In Lawrence O’Donnell, we are given a further glimpse into how the Left loves police power, they want to have a government armed to the teeth which rules over a thoroughly disarmed civilian population. This is why Lawrence O’Donnell has no problem with the criminal Watertown martial law police state, and in fact will lie and propagandize to support it.

Here is Ron Paul in 2008 discussing the feds’ treasonous violations of posse comitatus and individual rights and usurping of local controls, predicting much of what we are already seeing in the Amerikan police state:

Lawrence O’Donnell’s bias toward the State is like a lot of people on the Left. (Remember those “Journolists“?)

I have written in the past how those who propagandize for the State’s expansion including in its police power are on the Left, and that includes the war propagandists and warmongers such as Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the neocons. The neocons are on the Left because they favor government expansion, especially overseas in their coveting of foreigners’ lands and natural resources.

In contrast, the people on the genuine “Right” are the individualists who believe in private property, voluntary contracts and voluntary association, as well as genuine civil liberties, due process, the presumption of innocence and the philosophy of “live and let live.”

However, those people who, in the old days, would speak of “civil liberties” had mainly been on the Left, but largely were opposed to private property rights and support State-confiscations of workers’ and producers’ earnings and wealth. Those are not true advocates of “civil liberties” and “live and let live.”

And SOME of the so-called “Tea Party” people are genuine individualists and private property-advocates. They believe in “small government.” They uncompromisingly oppose policies such as ObamaCare. This is why the Obama IRS was criminally harassing Tea Party groups.

But you see, the Republican Party, which has been ruled by Establishment Big Government expansionists and warmongers since the 1950s, had also been shunning of Tea Partiers and libertarians, as we saw in the Boehners and the McConnells ousting Tea Party Republicans from key committees. They and the neocons are just as communistic as the leftists.

And also among these Establishment warmongering leftist Republicans and Democrat elitists have been those cheering on the Iraq war and now war on Iran and Syria. These people (and the millions of American dupes who swallow their war propaganda) have been promoting the myth that what motivates Islamic terrorists is only their religious fanaticism and their hatred for “America’s freedom and values.” But the propagandists have been refusing to admit that what motivates the Muslims and terrorists against America is our government‘s actions overseas on their territories for decades and decades, slaughtering their people and destroying their countries, well before 9/11.

For example, Glenn Greenwald had this post in 2010 on Charles Krauthammer’s intentionally leaving out part of a quotation by a terror suspect in which the suspect stated clearly that, like most of the other terror suspects thus far, he is retaliating against the U.S. government’s violent and intrusive actions on Muslim lands overseas. But Krauthammer’s intentional omission was to further the “religious fanatic” element as the terrorists’ sole motivation, a propagandistic way for Krauthammer to incite anti-Muslim sentiment to help get the American people’s approval for more war.

This propaganda ties in with Lawrence O’Donnell’s propaganda in that both are defenders of State violence and the police state, the Left domestically and the neocons in foreign affairs. And we wouldn’t have terrorism against us if our stupid government bureaucrats weren’t provoking those foreigners, invading one country after another especially since the elder President George Bush invaded Iraq in 1991. We wouldn’t have had a Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent siege if it weren’t for our stupid government bureaucrats and their biased media State propagandists.

Can Our Lawless Police Bureaucrats Be Tamed?

May 6, 2013

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

This Infowars reporter interviewed several residents in Watertown, Massachusetts who suffered through the criminal police siege of their town, with illegal searches of their persons and their homes, and who were illegally and criminally forced out of their homes.

As I have already mentioned, in their ordering people from their homes while the homes are illegally searched, the police compromised the people’s “right to be secure,” as the Fourth Amendment describes it. For how “secure” are people while strangers go through their homes without those homeowners or residents being there to supervise those cops? Government bureaucrats are NOT trustworthy, and they prove themselves as such day after day. As I have mentioned before, all you have to do is read William Grigg’s articles, Radley Balko or Cop Block and even the Cato Institute to understand this.

As seen in the video posted above, an even further example of these addicted-to-overkill police compromising of the people’s right to be secure is that after police searched homes, they left doors open and unlocked. Absolutely disgusting.

And as far as searching private property goes, the police need to have a specific reason to suspect that there is something or someone of a criminal nature in or on a specific property, they need to have probable cause and a warrant signed by a judge. For a judge to sign the warrant, there needs to be probable cause. In Watertown, the police needed to show that the wanted suspect was likely to be hiding in a specific house to which the specific warrant (that they didn’t have) applied. If a judge signs a search warrant without being shown probable cause, that judge is illegally signing a warrant. Police who use illegally obtained warrants are criminals. You can’t just do wide, sweeping fishing expeditions of entire neighborhoods. (Maybe in Nazi Germany or North Korea perhaps, but not in America in which the government must follow and obey the rule of law.)

As we can see from the video, the people of this Watertown neighborhood were frightened and intimidated by out-of-control, over-zealous cops high on adrenaline. It would take a lot of guts to actually stand up to them, to not open the door, and to demand that these armed government bureaucrats state their specific reason to believe that a specific suspect is hiding in their specific home. And the people need to demand that police have a legally-obtained warrant. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone with some courage had done that.

Such demands by the people should also apply if police are searching for drugs, weapons or other items they believe to be “illegal.”

As Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote recently, the criminal British government bureaucrats of the time of the American Revolution wrote their own warrants and lacked suspicion and probable cause, and the criminal government bureaucrats of the post-9/11 hysteria are also illegally writing their own warrants. This is shameful, and thoroughly un-American.

And if these armed government bureaucrats actually broke into such a home in Watertown or elsewhere, would the owner or resident have a moral and legal right to defend oneself and one’s family? This, by the way, is one of the most important reasons why the Second Amendment was written into the Bill of Rights.

These points and criticisms are especially relevant now, given that the police all across America have been knowingly and criminally falsely arresting and detaining, falsely charging and prosecuting totally innocent individuals, including planting evidence and lying. (Here is the latest update on that.)

And we have cops who do those things in order to meet their arrest quotas. It’s absolutely sickening. See this and this by Radley Balko, William Grigg, and the Young Turks on the arrest quotas, and Roger Roots on the prosecution quotas, and more from William Anderson recently on the corruption of the prosecutors.

And there is the immoral and counter-productive drug war. Now that the precedent has been set in Watertown, and given how dishonest police and prosecutors are now, we will have warrantless, suspicionless, random sweeping searches of buildings and neighborhoods, without probable cause, based on baseless “tips” and the “If You See Something Say Something” campaign. And that will be mainly to do with the drug war, in which people consuming, buying or selling, or possessing drugs, are NOT committing any crime, and have a right to their freedom to do such things. I am sure this Nazi-like policy will also spread to other areas of life, in which just about everything, every little innocent and harmless act, has been made into a felony, or at least a misdemeanor. Just read Harvey Silverglate’s book Three Felonies a Day to understand that.

In my opinion, all this Nazi police-state crap is why we must abolish the government’s monopoly in community policing and security, and also give the government’s self-serving monopoly in ultimate judicial decision-making the heave-ho.

But as James Bovard, author of Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, wrote,

One of the best ways to reduce police brutality is to greatly reduce the number of laws that police have to enforce. “Order” is something different from keeping people subdued through sheer fear of violent government agents.

Three Years Since the Gaza Flotilla Attack, Israel Is Still a Police State

Here is another post from my archives, from June 9, 2010. It refers to the May, 2010 attack by the Israeli military on a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters headed to the Gaza Strip.

The Police State of Israel

June 9, 2010

The nearly unanimous backing of the Israeli military’s siege of the Gaza aid flotilla last week by America’s conservatives is continuing this week. As I wrote in this space a few days ago, many people have been persuaded by the Israeli government’s careful manipulating of events since the beginning of the siege, especially from the Israeli-produced video of the events that did not include the actual beginning of the actions (video of the commandos already shooting from their helicopter before landing on the ship). It seems to be more of an emotional tie to Israel, rather than a rational and objective view of both Israel and Gaza, that keeps so many people believing of the Israeli government’s propaganda, and conservative talk host and columnist Dennis Prager is no exception:

…Though Hamas runs a theocratic police state based on torture and terror, though it recognizes no freedom of speech and no freedom for any religious expression outside of radical Islam, though it seeks to annihilate the Jewish state, and though its state-controlled media depict Israelis and Jews as worthy of death, the world sees Israel, not Hamas, as the villain.

Let’s hope the world is right…

…Turning to American newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, in its editorial, posed some deep questions. Here are three:

“Were the boats ferrying novelists and Nobel Peace Prize winners and elderly Holocaust survivors, as news accounts have suggested, or seething Israel haters, as defenders of the raid would have us believe?”

Apparently, the Los Angeles Times believes that novelists, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and elderly Holocaust survivors cannot be “seething Israel-haters.”

A lot of the support for the Israeli government’s actions really was based on the edited video that the Israeli military produced and provided to the news media. Those who try to be objective in all this have asked: if this situation of commandos approaching the ship (albeit already shooting) and then being beaten by ship’s passengers and in turn commandos shooting at the beaters is such a clear-cut case (even though the commandos’ shooting preceded the beating), then why was it necessary for the commandos to confiscate all the passengers’ cameras, cell phones radios and laptops? Investigative journalist Philip Weiss had this update yesterday on that situation:

Today I tuned in on an Institute for Middle East Understanding presser that included Huwaida Arraf, longtime Palestinian-American activist, and filmmaker Iara Lee relating their experiences in Israeli custody following their arrests on the flotilla.

Both women said that their recording equipment had been seized by the Israelis: blackberries, laptops, hard-drives, cameras, phones. And held by them. “We demand that all our equipment get returned to us,” Iara Lee, who is described online as being Korean-Brazilian, said, and then she said that some of the passengers’ recordings were being used, heavily edited, on the Israeli hasbara youtube broadcasts aimed at painting the flotilla as jihadists.

Arraf, who has American and Israeli citizenship, told of being freed at the port and refusing to get into an Israeli truck until her computer and phone were returned to her. She sat down on the floor. Then she was beaten and dragged and forced on to the truck, and dumped outside the port. Later she was treated for her injuries, which she now dismisses, as others suffered more.

What is our government doing about this? When will the passengers get their equipment back? What shape will it be in? Look, here is the Committee to Protect Journalists denouncing Israel’s use of confiscated footage. And how can anyone trust the Israelis to conduct an investigation of this episode if they have already seized and misrepresented evidence so as to manipulate the court of international opinion?

Lee will be having a press briefing showing some uncensored footage of the flotilla tomorrow afternoon at the U.N. in New York.

I really don’t understand the Israel-First-Above-the-U.S. people, who will believe whatever the Israeli government tells them, just like those who will believe whatever the U.S. government tells them. And it seems that, no matter how many cases of Israeli spies against the United States that come up, that’s okay, because Israel is our “friend” in the Middle-East. There has been an ongoing case of a young Israeli named Anat Kamm who is on trial for espionage against her own country, because, during her time as a military clerk, she burned classified information to CD and made copies of material and gave them to a Haaretz newspaper reporter, Uri Blau, whose report of the military’s alleged wrongdoing was published by Haaretz. Ms. Kamm explained,

There were some aspects of the IDF’s operational procedures in the West Bank that I felt should be public knowledge…

…When I was burning the CDs I kept thinking that history tends to forgive people who expose war crimes…

Apparently, Kamm isn’t being accused of spying on behalf of another country, but she is being accused of compromising Israel’s security by releasing those documents. It seems, however, that she genuinely believed that some of the military’s actions were wrong, even criminal, and she believed that it was her duty to make that public. If we citizens here in the U.S. suspect that government or military officials are engaged in some kind of wrongdoing, wouldn’t the moral thing be to expose those corrupt or even dangerous public officials? I wonder what Dennis Prager thinks of this situation, given that he has spent much time on his radio show discussing issues of morality. British journalist Jonathan Cook puts it this way:

During her conscription, Kamm copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig. Gen. Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.

Blau’s crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law.

Really, Anat Kamm is on trial for embarrassing high officials, as well as exposing possible corruption, incompetence or high crimes. And similarly, the U.S. military is now charging a U.S. soldier for being a “whistleblower.”

Now, given that Israel has spied on the U.S. so many times now, there are times that the United States perhaps ought to exercise greater caution in the choosing of military advisors. For example, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi has raised doubts about a principle advisor to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, Dr. Lani Kass, who was born and raised in Israel and was a major officer of the Israeli air force and in more recent years has been working in the U.S. Department of Defense, apparently concentrating on cyber-warfare and issues related to possible war with Iran. Giraldi notes about Kass:

…She comes from a country that has a history of large scale and highly aggressive espionage directed against the United States and she appears to continue to have close ties to her birthplace.  Dr. Kass has become a naturalized American while apparently retaining her Israeli citizenship and her three children were reportedly born in Israel, not the United States.  The information she has access to would be extremely valuable to Israel and potentially damaging to US interests, particularly as she likely knows what the US Air Force response to a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran would be…

So we have in Israel a young lady (Anat Kamm) who thought it was her duty to expose possible incompetence at best and war crimes at worst but who is herself being charged with espionage and is being called a traitor by many among the Israeli population, who apparently love their government more than they love their country and prefer to not question the judgment of military officials, just as many people in America do not want to question the judgment of government officials (including those who knowingly gave false information to get the U.S. to war with Iraq). And we have a very influential U.S. military advisor whose loyalty might be more to Israel than to the United States.

At the same time, we can’t question the judgment of the Israeli military who could very well have disabled the flotilla ship and prevented it from continuing to get through the Gaza blockade but instead chose to begin shooting from the helicopter and attack the ship and murder several passengers, including one American who was shot in the head five times. And many people are satisfied with the Israeli military’s edited video while at the same time could not have seen any other videos from passengers given that all the passengers’ videos and cameras and cell phones were confiscated by the military.

That reminds me of how, here in the U.S., we are not allowed to videotape police officers making arrests (or allegedly harassing citizens or worse), but at the same time, our government can have surveillance cameras and keep us under careful watch, and worse than that given there are government officials who want to force us to carry biometric IDs. As Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com has noted, and several times, it’s a “bizarro world,” and this stuff with Israel, this Israel-First-Above-the-U.S. is probably the most bizarre I’ve seen yet.

The Israel-First-Above-the-U.S. crowd doesn’t want to deal with the fact that Israel is virtually a police state, just as is America, and more and more each day. The Soviet Union kept their people enslaved and they were made to be serfs of the State, kept in the tightly guarded prison and no one could escape—it is the same situation in which the Israeli government are keeping the Palestinians. And, just as the Soviet Union stifled dissent, so they do also in Israel.

As Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s own nephew, Jonathan Ben-Artzi, after having served 18 months in prison for being a military conscription conscientious objector, and now studying for a Ph.D. in the U.S., wrote,

…. Israel pumps drinking water from occupied territory (in violation of international law). Israelis use as much as four times more water than Palestinians, while Palestinians are not allowed to dig their own wells and must rely on Israeli supply.

Civil freedom is no better: In an effort to break the spirit of Palestinians, Israel conducts sporadic arrests and detentions with no judicial supervision…

…We must remove travel restrictions from West Bank Palestinians. How can we live in peace with a population where most children cannot visit their grandparents living in the neighboring village, without being stopped and harassed at military checkpoints for hours?…

…. If Americans truly are our friends, they should shake us up and take away the keys, because right now we are driving drunk, and without this wake-up call, we will soon find ourselves in the ditch of an undemocratic, doomed state.

It is inherent in totalitarian regimes to suppress speech, stifle dissent and the press, and throw in jail those who attempt to expose the incompetence, corruption and treason of the agents of the State and its hired guns the police and military. These are the reasons why Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and why the writers of the U.S. Constitution were forced (kicking and screaming) to include a Bill of Rights.

So What Else Is Happening in Massachusetts?

(Link to article at Strike the Root)

There are other things happening in Massachusetts, besides the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent illegal martial law in Watertown.

For example, we just had a statewide senatorial primary to nominate candidates for the June 25^th special election to replace John Heinz Kerry, now that Kerry is Secretary of State.

We really need someone to partner with Chief Fullabull Elizabeth Warren in Washington, don’t we?

The Democrat candidates in the primary were U.S. Reps. Steve Lynch and Ed Markey. Markey won the nomination with 57% of the vote.

Ed Malarkey is the far-left moonbat known for his love of “Cap-n-Trade,” regardless how carbon taxes or other energy- and environment-related intrusions make us all less free, less prosperous, less secure and are really just counter-productive. (Obviously, there are far sounder ways to protect the environment and our liberty at the same time, by the way.)

The losing Democrat candidate in the special election primary, Steve Lynch, is the one Massachusetts Democrat in Congress who voted against ObamaCare. Supposedly, some conservatives – yes, there are one or two here – stated that they took a Democrat ballot and voted for Lynch “because he voted against ObamaCare.”

However, what the conservative dupes don’t seem to understand is why Democrat Lynch voted against ObamaCare – because it didn’t have a “public option.” Lynch wants the government to participate in providing insurance as a competitor with private insurance companies. As many readers already know, when the government provides people with a “competitive” alternative, the private insurers will be run out of business. This “public option” plan is really the sneaky way for politicians to eventually get their “single payer” plan that they really want – complete government control over everybody’s health and medical matters, whether we like it or not. (That really worked in the Soviet Union, for sure.)

On the Republican side, former Navy SEAL, Obama campaign contributor and political hack wannabe Gabriel Gomez won that party’s nomination with 51% against former U.S. attorney Mike Sullivan and former Romney legal counsel Dan Winslow.

I am hearing in the news that political newcomer Gomez will be supported by the national GOP (The “Grand Old Progressives”), despite Gomez’s supporting and donating to Obama’s presidential campaigns, and Gomez’s support for gun control and same-sex marriage.

So, as with the Democrats, the senile old GOP really like their political power, and they will support anything (anything but principle, that is) as long as they stay in control.

And Gomez has said that he, like Scott Brown, will “reach across the aisle.” Ah yes. He’s a “Bipartisan Consensus” kind of guy. That Bipartisanship thing has really worked throughout history, hasn’t it?

Anyway, I’m sure you can see just how useful these primaries and elections really are, year after year, decade after decade.

And speaking of former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, did he run in the special election? Nope.

Apparently the longtime GOP hack has been visiting New Hampshire and is considering running for U.S. Senate against incumbent N.H. Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in 2014.

Now, this Scott Brown person is the guy who throughout his previous campaigns for U.S. Senate bragged about how he was the only candidate in the race who was born and raised in Massachusetts and has spent his whole life here, and was devoted to the people of Massachusetts. But apparently he has been bitten by the “political bug,” and is anguished over his loss of power he had in the U.S. Senate. (Yech!)

And after this special election, there is another election in 2014 for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, the regularly scheduled election at the conclusion of John Kerry’s six-year term. But will Scott Brown consider running in that election? Uh-uh. Could he possibly win such an election? Uh-uh. As stated above, he will have to switch to the Democrat Party to win something in this People’s Republic now.

But does it really matter who wins in this special election, or next year’s elections, in Massachusetts or any other state? Of course not! These politicians are all the same – they’re statists. They love political power, and, frankly, most of them have been going through life as professional politicians, government bureaucrats, or government-subsidized lawyers, lobbyists or corporatists, so to hell with them!

In other words, most of these pols have been living a life of political enrichment and empowerment, as opposed to the “economic means,” as the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer would call it. The difference is that some people use the political means of State power and authority to impose aggression against others to get what they want, while others use the economic means of peaceful, free productivity and exchange with the absence of aggression.

So, no, it doesn’t matter who replaces John Forbes Heinz Kerry in the U.S. Senate. We would be better off if that remained an empty seat. And the same goes for all the other seats as well.

In fact, we would all be better off if Congress would just adjourn and go home permanently, and take all those damn laws, special interest-favoring policies, tax-thefts, regulations and intrusions with them.

So, just what good have these politicians and bureaucrats actually done for America?

Exactly.

They should all be fired, and not replaced!

And the same goes for the states and locals as well!

Just imagine the freedom – and prosperity – we would have without them and their bureaucratic intrusions. People would be free to associate with their doctors and it would be kept private. People could start businesses in any field without having to ask for some parasite’s permission, and work without having their earnings stolen from them and their labor enslaved by non-productive racketeers, banksters and hooligans. Law and order would actually be restored by the people whose main means of security and protection would be theirs to choose, with no restrictions. No dependence on “law enforcement,” as “law enforcement” is no longer dependable.

And by the way, speaking of the police state in Watertown following the Boston Marathon bombings and police ordering residents to leave their own homes while police illegally search them: Whatever happened to “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects”?

But how secure are you in your person, house, papers and effects with police in your home while you are not there to supervise them? Because not only are government police not dependable, they are also extremely untrustworthy! If we got rid of the inherently corrupting “law enforcement” socialism that we have now, we would be much better off. But I digress.

Anyway, in recent Massachusetts electoral races, the most recent candidate promoting liberty was the young Joe Kennedy (not the current Joe Kennedy who replaced Barney Frank but the other one who is of no relation to “The Kennedys”).

The other young Joe Kennedy ran against Scott Brown and Martha Coakley in the 2010 senatorial special election to replace the late U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.

And prior to that “not-a-Kennedy” Joe Kennedy, we had Libertarian Carla Howell who ran for governor against Willard Romney and some also-rans in 2002. Carla is now the executive director of the national Libertarian Party. Who knows why, as the LP hasn’t really made much progress since it began 40 years ago, and they have been what some people would call “statist lite.” Sadly, the “Party of Principle” has not been as principled as one would like.

But people who want their freedom restored must realize that politics and government are not the answers to our problems. They are the causes of our problems. If people don’t understand that, then perhaps they should read the aforementioned Oppenheimer, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Murray Rothbard as well, to name just a few.

So, regarding the upcoming special election to replace John Kerry, it would be best for the people of Massachusetts to just sit this one out.

And every other election as well, as a vote for anyone is a vote for the evil State and against your life and your freedom.