Will the Next Simon Please Stand Up?
by sherry mann
If you haven’t heard, The Liberty Voice torch has been passed on to a great patriot, Jason Rink. Before I describe how that transpired, I wanted to reflect and tell you about the ride.
We published the first edition of The Liberty Voice on Veteran’s Day, 2007, and the effort was begun on little more than faith and I must admit, was fueled by the sheer anger I felt by the lies behind this “War on Terror”. I hated the thought that so many of our brave soldiers, one of whom is my dear cousin, were off “fighting for our freedoms,” risking life and limb, doing what they thought was noble, only to learn that their decision “to serve” was based upon nothing but lies. Even as many of these errors were being revealed and we learned that they were generated by “our” government as a pretext for war, people like us were called peace nuts and sometimes even worse — truthers. As if fighting for peace and truth was an insult!
We tried in vain to inform our local printing company — no, the Columbus Dispatch is not worthy of being called a newspaper — about their reporting “errors.” It quickly became apparent that they were not in the business of delivering truthful content, but rather approved propaganda. “News tips” were ignored and “This is a paid advertisement” headlined many of the most important news stories. Many other informative “ads” were flatly refused by many local and national printing companies across the country, and it seemed that the truth could not be purchased at any cost in America’s “post 9/11″ world. I finally concluded that A. J. Liebling was right and the “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.”
Hip-Pocket Politics: How To Become a Tack
by Gary North
hat tip: Lew Rockwell
“If you are in the hip pocket of any political party, prepare to be sat on.” ~ Gary North
Political victory in the United States is best defined as follows:
Getting your political agenda enacted into law, enforced by the Executive branch, and upheld by the courts.
A definition of political victory that ignores any of these criteria is part of a shell game: getting people elected for their careers’ sake, not your agenda.
To achieve this three-part victory, you must be part of a voting bloc that has the power to impose sanctions: positive and negative.
Establishment politicians understand this. They respect it. They have learned to exploit it. They tell their constituents: “You can win through me if you supply the votes to enable me to win (positive sanction) at the expense of my opponent (negative sanction).” This is the politics of the shell game, what I call the Punch and Judy show.
The correct definition of the power to impose political sanctions is this:
Sufficient votes to deliberately keep your party’s candidate from winning in November if he waffles, and sufficient votes to elect his replacement two years later.
There is a corollary:
The willingness to run a post-nomination independent candidate against an incumbent member of your party if he has waffled during his most recent term in office.
Any voting bloc that has this ability will not be in any party’s hip pocket.
Conclusion: a fundamental strategy for political success is to get the rival wing of your party into the party’s hip pocket.
In modern American history, we saw this strategy applied by the Eastern Republican Establishment’s refusal to support Goldwater in 1964. They ran Governor Scranton as a last-ditch effort to keep Goldwater from getting the nomination. When that failed, they literally walked out of the convention.
Johnson won in 1964. He did not run in 1968. Nixon defeated Humphrey, and the Republican Establishment took over the White House in 1969. They were willing to go down to defeat in 1964 in order to ruin the Goldwater wing of the party. They were wise to do this.
Quote of the week: Astronomical numbers
“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers”
Richard Feynman
Saving Souls–Losing Freedom
One would have to be a blind man to not see that America is fast losing the fundamental principles of liberty upon which our once-great country was established. And, without a doubt, the single biggest reason for this decline is the lack of concern and effort on the part of today’s Christians and pastors to resist it.
All over America, when one approaches our pastors and church leaders with the obvious decay and ruination of constitutional government and Declaration principles taking place in our land today, the response flippantly comes back: “God hasn’t called me to do that; I’m supposed to win souls and that’s it.” (Or words to that effect.) As if the call to Gospel preaching, evangelism, and missionary endeavor negates our responsibility as citizens of a free land.
Of course, this call to “win souls” doesn’t interfere with these preachers’ golf games; it doesn’t interfere with their family vacations; it doesn’t interfere with their active membership in whatever local civic organization they happen to belong to; it doesn’t interfere with their hiring of a lawyer if they are falsely accused or defrauded; it doesn’t interfere with their invitations to celebrity politicians for special church recognition on patriotic holidays; it doesn’t interfere with them going to the polls to vote; it only seems to interfere when they are personally asked to take a stand in the gap for our country’s liberties. Then, all of a sudden, they haven’t been “called,” or “God will take care of it,” or “Jesus is coming soon,” or “Religion and politics don’t mix,” ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent’
Hat tip: Times Online
by Tim Reid, Washington
(Andres Leighton/AP) Two detainees are escorted to interrogation by US military guards at Guantánamo Bay
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.
The WikiLeaks Video and Terrorist Blowback
By Jacob Hornberger
hat tip: Campaign for Liberty
I can’t improve on Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the WikiLeaks video depicting the slaughter of Iraqi citizens. See here and here and here.
However, there is one part of the WikiLeaks video that I wish to address — the reaction of the helicopter pilots upon learning that there were two children who were shot and injured during the melee. Their reaction, in fact, perfectly exemplifies the mindset that has long characterized U.S. officials, including those in the Pentagon.
When the pilots discovered that they had shot the two Iraqi kids, here was their exchange:
“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
“That’s right.”
No remorse, no anguish, no regret, no concern. Just callous indifference to the possibility that the lives of two innocent children might have just been snuffed out.
No legitimacy for fraudulent elections
From the editor: This is an e-mail from Democrats.com…the subject was “No legitimacy for fraudulent elections” and I thought…Finally! they are going to acknowledge our sham elections caused by electronic voting machines! Of course as you read you quickly learn that isn’t the topic, but maybe the US could send Darfur’s brutal regime “our” voting machines. That way, we could stop slaughtering the people trying to vote in Darfur and the Darfur regime can still get the “election” results they want! (That’s what “our” government has been doing since 2000 and obviously it works, and the people can have the great feeling of thinking their vote counts and no one gets hurt!) Just an idea!
Dear sherry,
Next week Sudan will hold an election that has already been discredited by violence against journalists, activists, and candidates opposed to the genocidal government of Omar al-Bashir.
Please join the Save Darfur Coalition in urging President Obama to lead the world in rejecting Sudan’s sham election.
Bob Fertik
THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING – STILL SEEKING THE TRUTH, FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
Event Location: The Oklahoma State Capitol Building
Second Floor, West Wing
State Supreme Court Corridor.
DATE: Thursday – April 15, 2010
TIME: 1:30 pm – CST.
SUBJECT: THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING – STILL SEEKING THE TRUTH; FIFTEEN YEARS LATER.
Oklahoma City, OK – Oklahoma City bombing victim’s family members and survivors along with investigative journalists, law enforcement officers, private investigators, documentary film producers and attorneys impacted by the Oklahoma City bombing; will hold a press conference to review the unanswered questions and latest revelations pertaining to this very important part of U.S. History.
Well documented information contradicting the patently false, official account of the Oklahoma City bombing of April, 19, 1995 as offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and the F.B.I. will be reviewed. Why should any one of us be asked to remember the deaths of the Oklahoma City bombing victims in a lie?
The Disintegration of Fractured Democracies
In America, the Fracturing results from the Economic System
by John Kozy
Global Research, April 1, 2010
Consider this paraphrased account of a famous nation’s demise:
The death of the nation was both violent and natural. The fatal agents were the organic disorders of the system. The government had proven incapable of solving problems: it failed to preserve domestic order or an effective defense; it discovered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power; and its love of liberty failed to interfere with its passion for empire and war. The class struggle had become bitter beyond control and had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting. The legislature degenerated into a mob, rejecting all restraint, voting itself every favor, and crushing initiative, industry, and thrift.
Education spread, but thinly; it stressed knowledge more than character and produced masses of half-educated people. The old problem of ethics and morals found no solution in religion, statesmanship, or philosophy. Religious superstition spread even while science reached its apogee. The growth of knowledge secularized morals, marriage, parentage, and law, and the pursuit of pleasure prevailed. Public games degenerated into professional contests; the people, who had once been athletic, now became spectators, content to witness rather than to do. Sexual morality was relaxed, and human life was portrayed as a round of triviality, seduction, and adultery. . . . The nation had destroyed itself; it died of its own tyrannous anarchy.
What nation do these paragraphs describe? It could be the United States of America, but it is not. These paragraphs come almost word for word from Will Durant’s The Life of Greece where he describes the demise of Athenian democracy.
Madison, in The Federalist, No. 10, writes,
The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to [factions]. . . . Complaints are everywhere heard . . . that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and . . . rights. . . .
The latent causes of faction are . . . sown in the nature of man. . . . A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well . . . ; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. . . . But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. . . .
It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. . . .
The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS. . . .
Tiberi to have an OPEN QUESTION PERIOD!
WOW!
Will he allow his constituents to record his answers also? Bring your video cameras and find out!
Tom Cady of the Westerville 912 Group has announced that Congressman Pat Tiberi will be addressing the public this coming week:
When: Thursday April 8th 6:30 pm
Where: Westerville South High School in the commons area. Parking available in the rear of the building.
Tiberi will speak and have an open question period. It’s open to
the public. Feel free to share this with your friends and neighbors!
If you have any questions please call at 614-395-2525.
