As a comparatively early blogger (starting back in 2005), I found the technology for blogging to be a godsend.  Did I hope to make millions off of my content?  Nope.  Was I looking to rip off others’ content and fack up ad revenue on the backs of people doing the real work?  Absolutely not.

What I wanted to do was get my opinion published, once and for all, so that minority voices in a forest of PC / pro-government (both left and right) group-think could be heard.  Normally I’d have to throw horribly condensed / distilled opinions to the two local dailies with hopes that their editorial boards might pick up my thoughts.  Even if my content were quality, 1)  I’d never see a dime from my labors and 2) I’d be confined to one letter to the editor per month.  As for my opinions about what the Big Boys at the WSJ, the Wash Post, the NYT, etc. were saying… Well, forget it.   You’re as likely to get an LTE published there as you are to win the lottery.

Enter the blog where you and I can not only challenge the often faulty opinions published at the aforementioned institutions, you can critique FoxNews, CNN, CNBC, etc, and whosoever dares to put forth their opinion into the ethernet.

And let me tell you this; there are some very smart, well educated folks like myself out there publishing for free, with more coming online every day to share their own clarifications on reality.

So it is in this context of free content that officially sanctioned journalists at the FT.com site, like Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, are both flailing with their fists in near tantrum while they struggle to get their arms around how the blogosphere works.

The same can be said for Time Inc’s Anne Moore, who according to AE-J above asked, “Who started this rumour that information had to be free and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out?”

AE-J responds with his own borrowed conclusion:

According to Mr (Rob) Grimshaw (Managing Director of FT.com), the answer is that a “free evangelist movement [convinced] everybody that the internet was somehow different and any attempt to impose a business model was an imposition on people’s human rights”. Changing that perception will mean nothing less than challenging the culture of the internet as we currently understand it.

Well, yes and no… And a BIG NO, at that.  No doubt a bunch of freeloaders have long viewed the net as a license to steal copyrighted material.  AE-J’s article mixes these two concepts — outright theft, and free content, as one.

Let’s keep the slate clean on each issue. I have very little sympathy for those who think it is their right to outright pirate copyrighted content.  Granted, I may in the same breath think the music and movie industries need to rethink their model, but their property is their property.  Little communist-thinking punks, who believe everyone’s property is theirs for the taking, well…  How ironic that a movie and music — and even News industry that has largely fostered the notion that private property rights are obsolete to the whims of big government problem solvers is raided by the very mentality it fostered?  The very concept of Barrack Obama would be impossible without the outright pro-state indoctrination received through these media, from both traditional left and right.  Or, for that matter, that anyone would tolerate the bailout of this industry or that, including the flailing newspaper industry, with taxpayer or Fed inflated money.

And that’s perhaps the real driver here.  There are the politicians like John Kerry (among far too many others) who think it is the job of government to subsidize the major Newspapers given their model is collapsing under its own outmoded, unionized weight. Throw out all the crocodile tears for how essential these institutions are to freedom,and you’ll see these crocodile politicians know fully well to which degree these newspapers help keep the masses swayed to vote them back into office. Should it come as any surprise that Mr. Kerry would like me to have to put down the keyboard and get to work so I can pay more taxes to keep in business those with whom I vehemently disagree, like “Lefty” (Paul) Krugman at the NYT? His opinions are dangerous and worth dramatically less than what many puppies being house trained leave on his columns each day across America.

Of course, the knee-jerk progressive would be quick to suggest I’m for shutting up the free speech of Lefty Krugman. But that’s the last thing I’m for. The Krazy Krugster should stand on his own on an even playing field. He and his “democracy above freedom and liberty” publishers most certainly should not be subsidized by folks like me.

I’m reminded of comments made by the hated Matt Drudge well over a decade ago, on June 2, 1998, when he was invited into the vipers den of the National Press Club to speak.   In his introduction remarks, Press Club President, Doug Harbrecht, set the stage of the Q&A that was to come:

I must confess, my first reaction to having our speaker today at the National Press Club was the same as a lot of other members – was the same as what a lot of other members of the Club have had: Why do we want to give a forum to that guy?…  So why is Matt Drudge here? He’s on the cutting edge of a revolution in our business and everyone in our business knows it. And like it or not, he’s a newsmaker.

And so Drudge took the stage, lacking the journalist’s credentials of those he addressed, to lay bare the revolution taking place right under their noses, and that it would continue never mind their self-righteous protestations and the heat Drudge himself was taking for actually breaking news the major outlets deemed unworthy, ala the Lewinsky scandal.  Recall, Drudge broke the the story of how NewsWeek spiked the story (meaning, it intended to bury it so it’d never see the light of day), not the story itself.  Drudge’s comments are a great read even if you hate the guy. Note how the questions he receives from the “real media” can ‘t conceive what he’s telling them — that they are the proverbial horse and buggy in a new world of motorcars.  In his presentation before the Q&A he documents how news papers complained about radio, how radio sought political  favors to ward off TV, and how TV fought to ward off cable, etc.   And in response to one attendee questioning Drudge’s credentials, as if degree alone qualifies one to question our reality, Drudge’s response hits the nail right on the head: The freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one.

And it is that concept that motivates me out of a 9 month writing slumber.  I’m starting to worry about how the powers that be feel about losing control of a monopoly that took them nearly 100 years to complete.  It is a trifecta between government, banking, and the media.  And at the moment, banking has been exposed as an outright fraud, where money printed out of thin air for the benefit of Wall Street created the largest credit bubble in history, causing everyone to get drunk on easy money, the banking insiders themselves, to the point of collapsing the very system they rely on.

At the moment, the bankers are being bailed out at the expense of the legitimate finance industry, as well as the nation as a whole — all with the support of Congress and the high-finance elite at the Treasury and the Fed, groups filled with former Wall Streeters themselves.  The media has sat aside complacently endorsing this system of fraud, and the priveledges of power have flowed to the media — the wealth, the connections to inside stories, etc.

But now it stands to topple. Websites like Vigilant Investor, or Mish’s Econoblog, or Peter Schiff’s Europacific give away free information that contains the financial truth that sites like FT.com and WSJ.com would never print even if they wanted, dare they actually bite the hand that feeds them.   Yet the masses are slowly waking up to the fact that the system is bleeding them dry for its own benefit, and those same people are reaching out for the truth deliveredy by those who don’t have gatekeepers or careers to lose for publishing to thruth, let alone a socialist belief systme that clouds their reporting from the start.

Go Freedom!  Go Liberty!

Video great up until its conclusion.  Goes to show you how corrupted the system is.  And these BASTARDS have the sheer chutzpah to blame the free market for this mess?!!!

As for the conclusion of the video, that’s a joke, too. McCain is as big a BIG GOVT proponent as you’ll find in Congress. Worse, he sees every possible conflict as Hitler and the Sudetenland, never once considering how the bull-headed stupidity of WWI is perhaps the best foreign intervention lesson any country needs. Yet McCain wants to be the next Woodrow Wilson, but we’re economically bankrupt. In the face of economic collapse, McCain still actually believes interventionism into every nook and cranny of the world — into the affairs of other nations — is good for spreading democracy (not freedom and liberty)… Never mind that it costs $trillions to do. He’ll be worse than Bush, making the world safe for hypocrisy. (BTW, we’re not a democracy, but a liberty based republic… Our founding fathers hated democracy because it crushes liberty — look it up!)

This video tells you all you need to know about politics.   The democrats are presently crying foul and trying to blame the republicans for being asleep at the switch for the past eight years thus causing the crisis.  Now, it is our opinion that, yes, the republicans mostly were –with an exception here or there; the most we could expect from them was some mild regulatory changes that would have only forced this crisis onto us earlier and a bit smaller.  That’s the case with this video and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Here we have evidence of just what a bunch of liars the democrats are as their socialist love affair with Freddie and Fannie is exposed.   Many analysts warned that these two GSE giants had financial statements rife with criminal accounting that would blow up eventually, yet nobody seemed to care — especially those most socialist in Congress, although you can say the same for major bond investors who counted on a government bailout to protect their investments for decades.  What do financial statements matter when you’ve got an implied guarantee at the taxpayers’ expense?

As well, these two GSEs contribute large amounts of money to both parties, neither of whom, in the end, really pushed any legislation to get these entities under control. Moreover, in the vid you have Republican Christopher Shays making it clear he does not read the bills he signs when he comments that he thought the exceptionally clumsy legislation contained in the Sarbanes Oxley Act included some kind of oversight for the GSEs.

Indeed, both parties are unfit to rule.  After all, if these people know so much about how to manage an economy, as they insist on doing through regulation year in and year out, and it good times or bad, then how the hell did they allow the economy to get into such trouble?

Moreover, informed minds understand damn well that it is decades of usnound, short-sighted legislation imposed on the free market going back to to the Federal Reserve Act in 1911 that enabled this crisis to develop and then crash.   The economic illiterates among the voters have indeed voted into office their intellectual counterparts, and they’re now driving the economic train over the cliff, proving H.L. Menckens observation from nearly 70 years ago that democracy is the theory that the electorate deserves to get what it wants…. and good and hard!

Madam Speaker, I have, for the past 35 years, expressed my grave concern for the future of America . The course we have taken over the past century has threatened our liberties, security and prosperity. In spite of these long-held concerns, I have days–growing more frequent all the time–when I’m convinced the time is now upon us that some Big Events are about to occur. These fast-approaching events will not go unnoticed. They will affect all of us. They will not be limited to just some areas of our country. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed.

Though the world has long suffered from the senselessness of wars that should have been avoided, my greatest fear is that the course on which we find ourselves will bring even greater conflict and economic suffering to the innocent people of the world–unless we quickly change our ways.

America , with her traditions of free markets and property rights, led the way toward great wealth and progress throughout the world as well as at home. Since we have lost our confidence in the principles of liberty, self reliance, hard work and frugality, and instead took on empire building, financed through inflation and debt, all this has changed. This is indeed frightening and an historic event.

The problem we face is not new in history. Authoritarianism has been around a long time. For centuries, inflation and debt have been used by tyrants to hold power, promote aggression, and provide “bread and circuses” for the people. The notion that a country can afford “guns and butter” with no significant penalty existed even before the 1960s when it became a popular slogan. It was then, though, we were told the Vietnam War and the massive expansion of the welfare state were not problems. The seventies proved that assumption wrong.

Today things are different from even ancient times or the 1970s. There is something to the argument that we are now a global economy. The world has more people and is more integrated due to modern technology, communications, and travel. If modern technology had been used to promote the ideas of liberty, free markets, sound money and trade, it would have ushered in a new golden age–a globalism we could accept.

Instead, the wealth and freedom we now enjoy are shrinking and rest upon a fragile philosophic infrastructure. It is not unlike the levies and bridges in our own country that our system of war and welfare has caused us to ignore.

I’m fearful that my concerns have been legitimate and may even be worse than I first thought. They are now at our doorstep. Time is short for making a course correction before this grand experiment in liberty goes into deep hibernation.

There are reasons to believe this coming crisis is different and bigger than the world has ever experienced. Instead of using globalism in a positive fashion, it’s been used to globalize all of the mistakes of the politicians, bureaucrats and central bankers.

Being an unchallenged sole superpower was never accepted by us with a sense of humility and respect. Our arrogance and aggressiveness have been used to promote a world empire backed by the most powerful army of history. This type of globalist intervention creates problems for all citizens of the world and fails to contribute to the well-being of the world’s populations. Just think how our personal liberties have been trashed here at home in the last decade.

The financial crisis, still in its early stages, is apparent to everyone: gasoline prices over $4 a gallon; skyrocketing education and medical-care costs; the collapse of the housing bubble; the bursting of the NASDAQ bubble; stock markets plunging; unemployment rising; massive underemployment; excessive government debt; and unmanageable personal debt. Little doubt exists as to whether we’ll get stagflation. The question that will soon be asked is: When will the stagflation become an inflationary depression?

There are various reasons that the world economy has been globalized and the problems we face are worldwide. We cannot understand what we’re facing without understanding fiat money and the long-developing dollar bubble.

There were several stages. From the inception of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to 1933, the Central Bank established itself as the official dollar manager. By 1933, Americans could no longer own gold, thus removing restraint on the Federal Reserve to inflate for war and welfare.

By 1945, further restraints were removed by creating the Bretton-Woods Monetary System making the dollar the reserve currency of the world. This system lasted up until 1971. During the period between 1945 and 1971, some restraints on the Fed remained in place. Foreigners, but not Americans, could convert dollars to gold at $35 an ounce. Due to the excessive dollars being created, that system came to an end in 1971.

It’s the post Bretton-Woods system that was responsible for globalizing inflation and markets and for generating a gigantic worldwide dollar bubble. That bubble is now bursting, and we’re seeing what it’s like to suffer the consequences of the many previous economic errors.

Ironically in these past 35 years, we have benefited from this very flawed system. Because the world accepted dollars as if they were gold, we only had to counterfeit more dollars, spend them overseas (indirectly encouraging our jobs to go overseas as well) and enjoy unearned prosperity. Those who took our dollars and gave us goods and services were only too anxious to loan those dollars back to us. This allowed us to export our inflation and delay the consequences we now are starting to see.

But it was never destined to last, and now we have to pay the piper. Our huge foreign debt must be paid or liquidated. Our entitlements are coming due just as the world has become more reluctant to hold dollars. The consequence of that decision is price inflation in this country–and that’s what we are witnessing today. Already price inflation overseas is even higher than here at home as a consequence of foreign central banks’ willingness to monetize our debt.

Printing dollars over long periods of time may not immediately push prices up–yet in time it always does. Now we’re seeing catch-up for past inflating of the monetary supply. As bad as it is today with $4 a gallon gasoline, this is just the beginning. It’s a gross distraction to hound away at “drill, drill, drill” as a solution to the dollar crisis and high gasoline prices. Its okay to let the market increase supplies and drill, but that issue is a gross distraction from the sins of deficits and Federal Reserve monetary shenanigans.

This bubble is different and bigger for another reason. The central banks of the world secretly collude to centrally plan the world economy. I’m convinced that agreements among central banks to “monetize” U.S. debt these past 15 years have existed, although secretly and out of the reach of any oversight of anyone–especially the U.S. Congress that doesn’t care, or just flat doesn’t understand. As this “gift” to us comes to an end, our problems worsen. The central banks and the various governments are very powerful, but eventually the markets overwhelm when the people who get stuck holding the bag (of bad dollars) catch on and spend the dollars into the economy with emotional zeal, thus igniting inflationary fever.

This time–since there are so many dollars and so many countries involved–the Fed has been able to “paper” over every approaching crisis for the past 15 years, especially with Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, which has allowed the bubble to become history’s greatest.

The mistakes made with excessive credit at artificially low rates are huge, and the market is demanding a correction. This involves excessive debt, misdirected investments, over-investments, and all the other problems caused by the government when spending the money they should never have had. Foreign militarism, welfare handouts and $80 trillion entitlement promises are all coming to an end. We don’t have the money or the wealth-creating capacity to catch up and care for all the needs that now exist because we rejected the market economy, sound money, self reliance and the principles of liberty.

Since the correction of all this misallocation of resources is necessary and must come, one can look for some good that may come as this “Big Event” unfolds.

There are two choices that people can make. The one choice that is unavailable to us is to limp along with the status quo and prop up the system with more debt, inflation and lies. That won’t happen.

One of the two choices, and the one chosen so often by government in the past is that of rejecting the principles of liberty and resorting to even bigger and more authoritarian government. Some argue that giving dictatorial powers to the President, just as we have allowed him to run the American empire, is what we should do. That’s the great danger, and in this post-911 atmosphere, too many Americans are seeking safety over freedom. We have already lost too many of our personal liberties already. Real fear of economic collapse could prompt central planners to act to such a degree that the New Deal of the 30’s might look like Jefferson ’s Declaration of Independence.

The more the government is allowed to do in taking over and running the economy, the deeper the depression gets and the longer it lasts. That was the story of the 30s and the early 40s, and the same mistakes are likely to be made again if we do not wake up.

But the good news is that it need not be so bad if we do the right thing. I saw “Something Big” happening in the past 18 months on the campaign trail. I was encouraged that we are capable of waking up and doing the right thing. I have literally met thousands of high school and college kids who are quite willing to accept the challenge and responsibility of a free society and reject the cradle-to-grave welfare that is promised them by so many do-good politicians.

If more hear the message of liberty, more will join in this effort. The failure of our foreign policy, welfare system, and monetary policies and virtually all government solutions are so readily apparent, it doesn’t take that much convincing. But the positive message of how freedom works and why it’s possible is what is urgently needed.

One of the best parts of accepting self reliance in a free society is that true personal satisfaction with one’s own life can be achieved. This doesn’t happen when the government assumes the role of guardian, parent or provider, because it eliminates a sense of pride. But the real problem is the government can’t provide the safety and economic security that it claims. The so called good that government claims it can deliver is always achieved at the expense of someone else’s freedom. It’s a failed system and the young people know it.

Restoring a free society doesn’t eliminate the need to get our house in order and to pay for the extravagant spending. But the pain would not be long-lasting if we did the right things, and best of all the empire would have to end for financial reasons. Our wars would stop, the attack on civil liberties would cease, and prosperity would return. The choices are clear: it shouldn’t be difficult, but the big event now unfolding gives us a great opportunity to reverse the tide and resume the truly great American Revolution started in 1776. Opportunity knocks in spite of the urgency and the dangers we face.

Let’s make “Something Big Is Happening” be the discovery that freedom works and is popular and the big economic and political event we’re witnessing is a blessing in disguise.

Ron Paul, TX

On top of explaining the how’s and why’s, Paul asks the valid question: why don’t we ask those who predicted this was coming with near exact prescience to provide us the solution?

Who predicted this?  Those with an understanding of the Austrian School of Economics.

Note Bernanke’s wiggly answer on fighting inflation  — defining inflation as prices rising vs. the printing of money.  Absent is any acknowledgment that stock and bond prices are massive beneficiaries of inflation.

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”

Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day – and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects – the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Anyway — here’s the news from SFGate:

Activists and civil rights organizations had criticized police for a series of pre-emptive raids on Friday and Saturday on the homes of suspected demonstration organizers and at the meeting place for the “RNC Welcoming Committee,” an umbrella organization of dozens of activist groups and individuals from around the country. It has been planning convention demonstrations for over a year.

Police seized several laptop computers, digital cameras, schedules and 7,000 “welcoming guides” organizers planned to distribute to people coming to the Twin Cities for demonstrations. They also seized several gallons of urine and various tools activists use to link themselves together during protests.

How wonderful,  Now, I’m no fan of what these folks were probably planning with their urine, but on the other hand I find far more egregious the idea that the Police can simply decide to preemptively strike homes of protest organizers and seize laptops, cameras, and literature.  THIS IS NOT BEIJING, PEOPLE!  Where do they get off on violating the constitution for the convenience of stamping out the work of protesters?!??

And then there’s this exchange:

Asked whether law enforcement used undercover infiltrators to obtain information on the suspected demonstrators, [St. Paul Police Dept spokesperson Tom] Walsh said “that’s an irresponsible question” and declined to answer.

Are you kidding me? How about a bloody straight answer vs. that one couched in flaccid moral high ground nonsense.  Were you infiltrating or not?  Or is this, too, covered under some expansion of the Patriot Act?!? Where the people cannot know the tools the police state is using on them — for national security, of course!

Welcome to America 2008, where most will simply yawn at this kind of news. And you progressives, don’t wash your hands with criticism of the GOP without looking into the mirror. It was your man Clinton who started segregating protesters away from spots that were too close and inconvenient to where he might be visiting — all under the guise of security.   Your acceptance of pushing the Monica Lewinsky protesters to the other side of town in authorized protest areas paved the way for this so go take a hard look in the mirror.

What a sad point we’ve reached.  If there is no reflexive reaction to what is transpriing, I fear we’ve crossed the Rubicon.  The last one out, please turn off the light of liberty.

These videos are simply frightening. I’m no philosophical fan of Amy Goodman or her Democracy Now! show at least as far as it tends to promote Progressive socialism — the myth that is collective democracy.  I’ve long thought the show deserved a rebuttal show called Liberty Now! — where we stop dawdling with the idea that the highest politics and government can reach is to fight like Hyenas over who gets to be share the spoils of the Kill — the Kill being those who are victimized by countless legislative victories for this special interest lobby or that.

Philosophy aside, though, I think Amy Goodman and Democracy Now are as privileged as any CNN or Fox News reporter to cover the events as they transpire at the Republican Convention, never mind how politically inconvenient they may be for the Bush Administration, the GOP, the the McCain camp.   These videos are simply frightening enough, but what’s all the more frightening is the complete lack of coverage by the mainstream media on these arrests, and moreover, the collective yawn by most Americans, mixed in with a heavy dose among the GOP Neoconned Faithful that these arrests were warranted given who was arrested — the idea that security and lockstep support of pro world interventionism policy in the USA is more important that the 1st Amendment.

Of course, none of this is to support the self-proclaimed Anarchists (a misuse of the word since their actions are generally motivated by radical collectivist angst) who went on their own rampage when they splintered off from the peaceful demonstrations that dominated Monday afternoon. Nonetheless, the media should still be allowed to cover those more radical demonstrations unobstructed. What is it the police have to hide by arresting journalist witnesses?!?

Moreover, sad times these are when our own police forces act as they did with Goodman, under order from up on high no more concerned about the constitution they swear to uphold; that’s abdication of duty which is in some ways far worse than the automatons in Beijing that make their arrests perfectly in line with what one expects from totalitarian ideology.

Below is a Video where Goodman explains what happened upon her release. I may not agree with her political philosophy, but I will defend with my life her right to say it or else our country long ago crossed the Rubicon to oblivion!

This stuff is better than the actual elections.

Here’s Barr’s response to this effort. Vote Libertarian!

August 25, 2008 6:32 pm EST

Atlanta, GA – Bob Barr’s presidential campaign has recently learned of an action by the McCain campaign and the Pennsylvania Republican Party to have Barr removed from the state’s ballot, this despite McCain’s promise in the 2000 election that he would, “never consider, ever consider, allowing a supporter of [his] to challenge [his opponent]’s right to be on the ballot in all 50 states.”

In 2000, McCain told reporters, ”Let’s not have the kind of Stalinist politics that the state of New York, the Republican Party, has been practicing.”

“This move by the McCain campaign completely contradicts everything John McCain stood for in 2000 when his competitors were trying to keep him off the ballot,” says Barr. “McCain has become a part of the same corrupted machine he spoke vehemently against only eight years ago.”

“This is America, where people have a right to run for office and a right to compete for the chance to lead the people of this nation,” Barr continues. “I look forward to the chance to compete fairly against Senator McCain for votes in Pennsylvania and every other state.”

In a recent email to supporters, Barr’s campaign manager, Russell Verney, stated that McCain’s attempt to block Barr from the ballot is one “you might expect of a dictator in North Korea, Libya, China, or Iran.” Verney, who also was the campaign manager for Ross Perot, called the plot “a blatantly hypocritical move.”

“This move is certainly one of the more brazen attempts to lock me out of the political process,” explains Barr. “But it is simply just one more example of how the political establishment desperately clings to their own power instead of empowering the people. The political establishment serves only themselves and not the people of this nation. It is time candidates for the most powerful position in the world compete based on ideas and not dirty politics.”

“I challenge Senator McCain to forcefully and publicly instruct his agents to drop the lawsuit,” says Barr.

Bob Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, where he served as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, as Vice-Chairman of the Government Reform Committee, and as a member of the Committee on Financial Services. Prior to his congressional career, Barr was appointed by President Reagan to serve as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and also served as an official with the CIA. Since leaving Congress, Barr has been practicing law and has teamed up with groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the American Conservative Union to actively advocate every American citizens’ right to privacy and other civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Along with this, Bob is committed to helping elect leaders who will strive for smaller government, lower taxes and abundant individual freedom.