Disgraceful

This is one of those stories that makes me spend the day wondering what the hell is wrong with this country. A new study from the Pew Center shows that 1 in 99 adult Americans is behind bars right now. Not has been been incarcerated at some point in their lives. In prison or jail today, as you read this.

 And of course, the stats are even worse for minorities:

One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.

One in fucking nine!

And they wonder why Michelle Obama isn’t prouder of her country.

The United States, the land of the free, imprisons more of its population than any other country on earth, both in percentage terms and absolute terms. Communist China, with over a billion people, only has 1.5 million prisoners. We have 2 million.

Germany imprisons 93 out of every 100,000 of its citizens. We imprison 750 out of every 100,000.

So is there something intriniscally criminal about the American people that requires locking them up in so much greater numbers than any other people on earth? Are other countries allowing dangerous fiends to run wild? Or maybe, just maybe, do we have too many stupid laws — especially our insane drug laws – and a FUBAR justice system?

Hunter Thomspon was right. We have become a nation of jailers.

Ron Paul Certified Election Results for NYC

The Board of Elections has finally posted certified results for the primary earlier this month. Some guy named McCain won the Republican race in a landslide, as expected, but we know you’re all dying to find out how Ron Paul did in your neighborhood. So without further ado:

• 4,705 votes (5.9%), 4th place citywide
• 1,363 votes (6.2%), 4th place Manhattan
• 415 votes (7.3%), 4th place Bronx
• 1,044 votes (6.3%), 3rd place Brooklyn
• 1,351 votes (6.2%), 4th place Queens
• 532 votes (4.0%), 5th place Staten Island

So Ron Paul had his highest percentage total in the Bronx and his best ranking in Brooklyn. He did the worst in both percentage terms and in ranking in the relatively Republican stronghold of Staten Island, finishing even behind Giuliani, who had already dropped out of the race.

And, zooming in to my home Assembly District 66 on the Lower East Side, Ron Paul got 19 votes for an impressive 12.1% and third place. I’d like to think at least some of that is due to my canvassing efforts among my neighbors. (And I don’t even know if they actually counted the affidavit ballots filed by my wife and me, since they couldn’t find us in the voter book.)

View the results for your own assembly district, congressional district and more here.

Liberal Fascism

What is fascism?

Surprisingly, there is no shared definitive answer despite numerous books written on the subject. The word is mostly parroted by those who have the least idea of its meaning, let alone its history. Its ironic to hear it chidingly used by leaders such as Hugo Chavez who embody it’s meaning perhaps more so than George W Bush, its current poster boy.

Even George Orwell stated that fascism has no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. Which is why Jonah Goldberg, the author of the best-seller LIBERAL FASCISM sums up his own definition after an exhaustive research.

“Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.” Goldberg goes on to conclude “I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism”.

Goldberg’s arguments are eye-opening and on point. The biggest misconception being fascism is a phenomenon of the right as most people argue and believe it to be the polar opposite of communism. With political pundits such as Bill Maher stating fascism is “when corporations become the government”, it’s interesting to note how its originator, Benito Mussolini, was not only a devout socialist, but declared socialism was “bred into my very bones.”

The difference between Mussolini’s exploitation of socialism as opposed to Lenin’s was he believed it to be an “Italian” struggle, not a class struggle. He was seeking to rebuild a modern day Roman Empire, and understood that class-consciousness wasn’t as powerful as the call of the nation to achieve this goal.

It’s impossible for anyone under the age of 70 to remember when Mussolini was revered in the US. Members of Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust such as Rexford Tugwell said of Italian Fascism “It’s the cleanest, neatest most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” Much less do people want to remember the internment camps under FDR where hundreds of thousands of Japanese, German and Italian Americans were forced to relocate during WW II under the guise of the “common good”.

And if one fast forwards to our current presidential primaries and listens to candidates alluding to FDR and their “progressive” versions of a new New Deal, it’s eerie to think how fascism may rear its ugly head. Though this time in the form of “smiley-face” fascism as the book’s cover alludes to. “If there is ever a fascist take over in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors” writes Goldberg. “but with lawyers and social workers saying ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

McCain Hoisted by His Own Petard

As Serf City columnist and blogger Bob Armstrong has noted, John McCain’s troubles with the FEC and campaign finance regulations are nothing short of delicious. I rarely get any joy from reading political news, but the irony in this story has me positively giddy.

McCain is squirming to get off the hook from the spending limitations imposed on his campaign when he applied for political welfare (i.e., matching funds). When his campaign was on life support last summer, the welfare seemed like a great idea, but now that donations are streaming in, his campaign is noticing the potentially lethal strings that were attached.

Technically, McCain hasn’t taken any of the matching funds yet, but he did use the promise of them as collateral on a $4 million loan. So it’s a bit late, as the FEC chairman noted, to claim he never benetfited from the welfare and now wants to opt out of the spending restrictions.

The public financing system places a spending limit of $54 million on each participating candidate for the duration of the primary season — which for the Republicans doesn’t end until their convention in September. So far the McCain campaign has already spent $49 million, which means they’ll be running on fumes for the next 6 months unless they get a reprieve. Meanwhile, neither Clinton nor Obama has applied for matching funds, so they can spend to their bleeding hearts’ content.

The best part is the FEC can’t even take a vote to let McCain off the hook, because with only 2 out 6 commissioner slots filled, they lack a quorum. Bush’s other FEC nominees are bottled up in Congress.

What makes this all so delicious, of course, is that McCain’s single greatest claim to fame (aside from being held prisoner by the people whose villages he was destroying from 10,000 feet) is championing anti-free-speech “campaign finance reform” laws.

“I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt,” McCain infamously told Don Imus in 2006. “If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.”

McCain is getting what he wanted (and deserves), so he should be happy. He gets “clean government” at the expense of the “quote First Amendment,” while Obama spends the next 6 months taking him to the cleaners.

Cool Aimee Allen Video

I know it’s getting rather late in the game for another Ron Paul music video, but this one is so cool I had to pass it along:

Great Moments in Fashion (Manhattan Libertarian Thong Edition)

 

We’re a bit late for fashion week, but the Manhattan Libertarian thong, the Manhattan Libertarian maternity shirt, the Manhattan Libertarian trucker hat, and much more similarly branded apparel and trinkets are now available at our Cafe Press shop.

Order now. Don’t make me post a picture of me modeling the thong.

How to Make Campuses Really Safe

With the string of recent shootings on college campuses, it’s not surprising that some of our best and brightest have figured out it sucks to defenseless.  There’s a grassroots effort underway across the country to allow college students to carry concealed weapons on campus. That effort has spread upstate to Cornell University.

Jacob Rieper at the NYSPRA blog points out that the ”gun control” crowd is obviously putting students at greater risk, not less:

The proponents of “gun-free zones” aren’t just doing nothing, they are creating target rich environments full of helpless victims. Notice how many of these mass shootings take place at gun shows, gun clubs, Camp Perry, etc.

Indeed. If those big bad gun shows are the problem, you’d think that someone would have gone on a shooting spree at one by now. For some strange reason, the killers always choose a setting where no one can shoot back.

It would be great to see some students at my alma mater NYU or other local universities take up the cause. Of course, there’s no chance of any of them getting a concealed carry permit from the NYPD, unless they’re celebrities, so I suppose it’s moot. Mayor Bloomberg would much rather see a classroom full of dead bodies than a student with a gun in her bag. The dead bodies make for better photo ops.

Naked Capitalism

By Ignacio Gutiérrez
February 18, 2008

Only in America can one earn a fortune for believing in themselves and their dream, be it standing in nothing but underwear briefs, cowboy boots and hat playing guitar in Times Square even through unforgiving weather for ten years and counting such as NYC’s own Naked Cowboy, Robert Burck.

“Everybody likes this story. It’s the American dream versus the sold-out America” says Burck. Hopefully he’ll win the $6 million dollar lawsuit filed against Mars Inc., the makers of M&M’s. They used his trademarked alter-ego in an ad displaying a blue M&M character in his indisputable likeness. Considering the amount of money, time and focus-group testing behind these multi-million dollar campaigns, it’s a wonder why no one from Mars Inc. or Chute Gerdeman, the advertising agency, bothered to contact Burck for permission to parody his character.

And it’s thanks to such short-sighted decisions made by top CEO’s and corporate management in boardrooms across the country that compel people to mistrust the very impetus behind the American dream – capitalism. Ask most people to define it, and you’ll hear some wildly disparate and inaccurate answers.

“It’s the art of making money”. “It’s every man for himself.” “It’s all about greed dude! Like, in that movie Wallstreet…”“It’s nothing but corporate corruption, and evil, and…and …global warming!!”

But its actual meaning is much less sinister. It’s simply an economic system that allows individuals the right to own property and create goods and services from that property in order to sell them for a profit within a free market. How it has become synonymous with consumerism, materialism, imperialism, fascism, corporate cronyism, and a multitude of other “isms” is one of the 20th and 21st centuries greatest misconceptions.

Considering our current economic woes, it’s imperative more people understand its infinite possibilities, as opposed to moralizing that it brings us these problems to begin with. The right to own, but most importantly, the right to create, has been the catalyst for the most effective , efficient and productive ways of solving society’s problems. Until people realize these crucial rights belong to them as much as any corporation, we’ll continue misguiding ourselves to experiment with other systems such as socialism, collectivism, communism and let alone totalitarianism, all proven to fail time and again for the simple reason they undermine the most important “ism” of all, individualism.

One has to admire the gumption of true individuals such as Burck who’ve taken destiny into their own hands, created their own jobs, and refused to depend on or demand government handouts that purport a supposed “common good”. He represents the cowboy in all of us, one whose nakedness is worth singing about.

He’s the NRA?

 

Okay, who’s the wise-guy who sent Mike Bloomberg a gift membership to the National Rifle Association?

Mayor Bloomberg, who is leading a national crusade against illegal guns, said Wednesday he’s a member of the National Rifle Association - well, sort of.

“They gave me a gift membership to the NRA. You can’t make this up. It arrived four weeks ago,” Bloomberg told a group of mayors and police gathered at a gun summit in Baltimore Wednesday.

“I’m just waiting for them to survey their membership,” said Bloomberg, who vowed to give his powerful rivals an earful on gun violence.

The NRA has publicly attacked Bloomberg for pushing the federal government to make more gun-tracing information available and for suing gun stores known for selling firearms used in city crimes.

The association’s magazine last April featured a cartoon of Bloomberg as a giant octopus on its cover with a headline that blared “Tentacles!”

The article said the big city mayor was extending “his reach, and his illegal anti-gun tactics, across America.”

The one-year membership was given anonymously, but a spokesman for the mayor said Bloomberg planned to keep it.

It was unclear if the gift was a gag.

I have to admit, I’m jealous that I didn’t think of this prank sooner. But I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’ll actually read his subscription to 1st Freedom.

Draft Bob Barr for President

I have started an online petition urging former Congressman Bob Barr to run for President on the Libertarian line, or at least to accept nomination if drafted at the Libertarian National Convention in May.

Bob Barr, in my opinion, represents our best hope for continuing the Ron Paul Revolution on a national level. There are several outstanding Ron Paul Republicans (and Libertarians) running for Congress and Senate, which is fantastic, but nothing captures the public’s or the media’s attention like a presidential campaign.

Unfortunately, Ron Paul has made it clear “there will be no 3rd party run,” and it’s equally clear that he will not receive the Republican Party’s nomination. As for the currently declared candidates for the Libertarian Party’s nomination for President, I respect and like several of them as nice people and good Libertarians, but I’d be lying if I said I could get excited about any of them as the nominee.

Bob Barr could generate that excitement. He appeals to both Libertarians (his current party) and Republicans (his former party). He’s huge on civil liberties and privacy, very strong on guns — heck, he’s even gotten good on ending the drug war, which is nothing short of miraculous. As a bonus, he helped lead the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Who wouldn’t pay good money to see Barr and Hillary share a debate stage?

In fact, there is already a lot of buzz on the Internet about the idea of a Bob Barr presidential campaign. The Revolutionaries are ready. Now all we need to do is convince Bob Barr.

Here is a video of Bob Barr introducing Ron Paul last week at CPAC. Ask yourself if he isn’t the logical choice — the only choice — to take the baton from Dr. Paul. Then go and sign the petition.

Update: It was just pointed out to me that I misspelled PRESIDENT at the top of the petition. %$#@!!! I blame Al Gore, since he invented the Internet. Seriously, I just sent an email to PetitionOnline.com tech support to see if it’s possible to fix it or remove it and start over.