Category: Liberty
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The ACLU Gets One Right
The American Civil Liberties Union is a “civil liberties” group – defending the liberties that the political class east of the Hudson and West of the Sierra Madre value, first and foremost. Don’t get me wrong – in the great scheme of things, someone has to defend the First Amendment rights of Nazis to march in Skokie,…
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Straw
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Naturally, I favor the dissent in the Abramski straw-buyer gun case. This section caught my eye: That Abramski’s reading does not render the Act’s requirements “meaningless” is further evidenced by the fact that, for decades, even ATF itself did not read the statute to criminalize conduct like Abramski’s. After Congress…
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Outsourced
Georgia town privatizes just about everything that’s not elected; the experiment has been a raving success. Sandy Springs, Georgia has, for the past nine years, privatized just about every facet of government: To grasp how unusual this is, consider what Sandy Springs does not have. It does not have a fleet of vehicles for road…
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The S Word – Redux
Why keep political divisions, just for the sake of tradition? Here’s a video about the proposed “State of Jefferson” – the move by rural Northern California to secede from the rest of the state: This, and the secession movement in Colorado – and the fallout either or both could bring – could be the best…
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Doakes Sunday: Too Much Of A Good Thing
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: The guy who owns 20% of Heathrow Airport in London is worried about freedom – Londoners have too much of it. Hard to argue with the Middle Eastern foreigner who owns your biggest transportation center. Great photo, though. Joe Doakes I guess not every immigrant comes for the…
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A Libertarian Is A Conservative Who’s Been Audited
Minnesota’s property forfeiture laws – which allowed law enforcement to confiscate property they believed was involved in crimes even before anyone was convicted – started out under the Carlson Administration – during America’s last major round of drug hysteria, in the early-mid ’90s, when the national murder rate spiked over the crack trade and Minnesota…
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Memorial Day
As I discussed on the show on Saturday, there are really two sides to Memorial Day, to me. The first part is the obvious part; remembering those who’ve died to keep this country free. There are many of them; well over a million men and women have died in the service of this country, in…
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Aberration
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Horror! Free speech might actually mean conservatives can get their message out to voters. We can’t have THAT. Except for unions, of course. There are times I don’t think Orwell went far enough.
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Our Corrupt Overlords
If the definition of corruption isn’t “abusing government power to achieve a political end that would never happen on its own“, then I’m not sure there is a meaningful definition.
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Of Convenience, Part II
First things first. I’ve got nothing against Hannah Nicollet. If you go by what little she’s said in public about her political beliefs – she supported Ron Paul in 2012 – I probably agree with her 90-odd percent of the time. Indeed, now that she’s been endorsed to run for Governor, my biggest dream is…
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Success Breeds Success
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: A buddy writes, regarding citizen journalist Andrew Henderson’s acquittal: So one year and thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees later, he is acquitted of all charges. But where is the apology, the admission of wrong doing by the cops? Or the assessment of defense costs and fees? Here is…
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The Founding Fathers Were Worried
The founding fathers were worried, more than just about anything, about the threat a standing military would provide a free people. Their worries were answered for the first 140 years of our nation’s history with a national military that was the absolute bare minimum needed to secure an isolated nation’s peacetime borders – the US…
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Why I’m No Longer A Libertarian
My old friend Gary Miller is giving a speech to a Young Republican group tomorrow. Or maybe a College Republican group. And it might have already happened, for all I know. But the particulars aren’t as important as the theme of his talk; “Why I’m No Longer a Republican”. Gary was of course the proprietor…
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For Those Of You…
…who’ve wondered “whatever happened to Landen Beard…” Well, we don’t have any indication whatsoever that he was the BATF agent who flashed a gun at someone in rush-hour traffic yesterday, shutting down traffic in I94 while cops chased him down… …and then released him. Because the law apparently allows “undercover” plainclothes cops to threaten people…
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The No-Brainer
A majority of Minnesotans support Sunday liquor sales. And every year, as another generation of Minnesotans runs out of beer for a Sunday cookout for the first time, that support rises. And yet the Minnesota Senate killed an amendment to an omnibus booze bill that would have legalized Sunday liquor sales for the first time.…
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The S Word, Part V: Realigned
In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the idea that the word “no”, in hands of a free consumer, is the most powerful idea in the world With a simple “no”, free people have brought monopolies that defied government’s gnarliest efforts to their knees. With a series of simple “nos”, free people with…
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Freedom Of Choice
I don’t oppose unions. Unlike the vast majority of Democrats, I’ve actually belonged to a union. Unions can be – can be – a vital part of a free labor market. But they usually aren’t. And when people encounter a product or service that’s of no worth to them in the free market, they can say no –…
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Kill National Popular Vote With Greasy Fire
Word is starting to leak out; a number of GOP politicians are flirting with supporting the idea of the National Popular Vote. Let me be blunt: This idea must be stomped, and stomped some more, until the convulsions stop. This is an utterly wretched idea, favored by liberal plutocrats with deep pockets to give the…
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“…Nothing To Fear”
Republicans. At our best, we are the party of individual rights, liberty, and limited government. At our best, we are the party that actually believes in the original intent of the United States Constitution – including all ten amendments of the US Constitution. At our best. But the GOP isn’t always at “its best” – or, perhaps…
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The S Word, Part IV: Creative Destuction
Throughout this series, I’ve referred to Kevin Williamson’s year-old classic, The End Is Near And It’s Going To Be Awesome. In it, Williamson – perhaps the best political-philosophy writer doing business today – notes that politics is the worst possible means to allocate resources among a population, in large part because politics, alone among life’s institutions,…
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The S Word, Part III: Baggage Full Of Red Herrings
So as we discussed in the first two installments, there are plenty of reasons Americans aren’t enamoured with each other these days. There really are two Americas – one that believes that the road to all good things leads through government, and one that pays at least lip service to the idea that we’ve a…
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The S Word, Part II: Our Fathers’ House
Years ago, a bunch of people I’ll call The Original Bloggers wrote: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of…
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The S Word, Part I: We’re Just Not That Into Each Other Anymore
It’s said that America is the most polarized it’s been in history. It’s not true, of course; the stretch from the 1890s into the Depression features some very stark social battle lines. The 1828 election was kinda contentious. And you might recall we fought a Civil War once upon a time. Ken Burns even did…
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Huckperbole
The goverment is too powerful. Individual freedom has been eroding for decades, and is frankly in a terrible state today. And I do very sincerely believe we must watch out for slippery slopes – which most assuredly exist – when guarding the freedoms we have (and, ideally, bringing them back to where they belong). And…