Closed Session House of Representatives???

(Rec’d Via E-Mail…) 

Not only did members discuss new surveillance provisions as was the publicly stated reason for the closed door session, they were also bluntly warned about:

Word has begun leaking from last nights special, closed-door session of the United States House of Representatives.

Not only did members discuss new surveillance provisions as was the publicly stated reason for the closed door session, they were also bluntly warned about:GO HERE

http://www.halturnershow.com/

The Essence of Liberty : Part 263 (1) Freedom of pornography

The Essence of Liberty : Part 263 (1)  Compiled by  Dr. Jimmy T. (Gunny) LaBaume  A Summary of Gutzman, Kevin R.C. The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Constitution  (The book is available from the Ludwig von Mises Institute at http://www.mises.org)  Chapter 11: The Court on Pornography, Crime, and Race  Freedom of pornography It is not self-evident that the print media is the same as the broadcast media or that the ratifiers intended to prevent state and local governments from banning indecent material. But, in Wilkinson v. Jones (1987) the court protected such “speech” on cable TV. Rather than leaving the regulation of pornography to the state and local governments, the Court has declared itself the sole judge of its legality and morality. It all started with Roth v. United States (1957) when the Court declared the test for obscenity to be “whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards”…considered the material obscene. Logically, these words can not mean what they say. If the issue is “community standards” then why should state and local statutes be reviewed by nine Washington, DC lawyers?

Gunny G: Nothing Like A Good Homebrewed Beer!

GUNNY G’s BEER HOMEBREWING!

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Back in California, I guess it was in the late eighties that I first took notice of the new microbrewery/brewpubs, but I paid little attention to them. Later I found that they had spread to the eastern states, not just koo-koo California. Most of them were combination restaurants and brew pubs or something similar. This was where I first discovered new and different kinds of beers, and how I soon became aware of and interested in homebrewing. I suspect, this has also been the case for many other present and future homebrewers. I never would have considered homebrewing the usual Budweisers and other nothing beers of America–well, Sam Adams maybe, and a few other notable beers that have come along since then.

AFTER INVADING ONE OF THE MOST PETROLEUM-RICH COUNTRIES ON EARTH, THE U.S. MILITARY IS RUNNING ON EMPTY!

The American Conservative
March 10, 2008 Issue

Oil for War

After invading one of the most petroleum-rich countries on earth, the U.S. military is running on empty.

by Robert Bryce

Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach. That may have been true for his 19th-century force. But the modern American military runs on jet fuel—and lots of it.

Three Volume Set Biographical Material About Marines by George Clark….

From:

George Clark

brasshat@surfglobal.net

Friends,

I have been busy developing what will be a three volume set of biographical material about Marines. The first, which is complete, is titled Legends of the Corps; the next will be Characters of the Corps, and the final, Heroes of the Corps.

Kennedy Rebukes General On MRAP Request….(USMC)

USA Today
March 18, 2008
Pg. 4

Kennedy Rebukes General On MRAP Request
By Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today

WASHINGTON — The commandant of the Marine Corps “misrepresented” the Corps’ February 2005 request for armored vehicles to Congress and is unwilling to fix the way the Marines handle urgent pleas for new equipment, Sen. Edward Kennedy says in a letter to the commandant.

Queenfish: A Cold War Tale

New York Times
March 18, 2008
Pg. F1

Queenfish: A Cold War Tale
By William J. Broad

Atop the globe, the icy surface of the Arctic Ocean has remained relatively peaceful. But its depths have boiled with intrigue, no more so than in the cold war.

A False Claim Of Valor And A Cry Of Free Speech

New York Times
March 18, 2008
Pg. 14

A False Claim Of Valor And A Cry Of Free Speech
By Adam Liptak

When Xavier Alvarez was asked to say a few words about himself at a meeting of a California water board last summer, he decided on these: “I’m a retired marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy. I’m still around.”

Only the last three words were true.

BUSH’S BIG BANK BAILOUT

BUSH’S BIG BANK BAILOUT

By Cliff Kincaid

March 18, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

Both the Wall Street Journal and conservative economist Lawrence A. Kudlow are defending the Bush Administration’s big-government-socialist bailout of Bear Stearns. The taxpayers are bailing out a big bank while millions of Americans may be losing their homes in the financial meltdown. Where are the conservatives protesting this?

Government-Made Crises

Government-Made Crises

by Jacob G. Hornberger
by Jacob G. Hornberger

DIGG THIS

A fascinating aspect of government intervention is how it induces people (1) to get embroiled in the crisis environment that the intervention produces, and (2) to feel a vested interest in coming up with a solution to the crisis.

Consider price controls, an intervention that governments traditionally turn to in response to their own debasement of the currency. As prices rise in response to monetary debasement, people begin screaming at businesses for raising their prices, not realizing that rising prices are in reality just a reflection of the falling value of the dollar due to government’s inflation of the money supply.

To Become An Educated Ron Paulian A Libertarian Syllabus

A Libertarian Syllabus by Daniel McCarthy by Daniel McCarthy DIGG THIS A friend of mine who is involved in youth politics asked me to put together a curriculum for Ron Paul libertarians, a four-year course of study that will take students from the basics of free-market economics and the Constitution into the deeper waters where theory, history, and policy meet. Here’s the tentative curriculum I’ve come up with:

Just As They Smeared Ron Paul

March 17, 2008

Smearing Obama Every antiwar candidate has to endure the same hate campaign

by Justin Raimondo

The smear machine is taking out after Barack Obama, and with a vengeance. Not that this is surprising, or even anything new: they’ve been conducting a low-level hate campaign ever since he attained front-runner status, and now they’re going into overdrive with a commentary by Ron Kessler in the Wall Street Journal that uses the same guilt-by-association technique that they used against Ron Paul.

Lied To About WW II….

Truncating the Antecedents How Americans Have Been Misled about World War II by Robert Higgs by Robert Higgs DIGG THIS Whereas historians obsessively trace every event’s causal lineage further and further into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the opposite extreme: they assume in effect that the world began immediately before the event they have in mind. I call this unfortunate tendency “truncating the antecedents.” Among the general public, it has given rise to mistaken interpretations of historical causation in cases too numerous to mention, and mistakes of this sort continue to occur frequently, in part because politicians and other conniving parties have an interest in propagating them. I was recently struck by this tendency while reading comments at a group blog associated with the History News Network. A commentator there had mentioned that the blame for World War II is not as cut and dried as Americans typically assume it to be, and hence some revisionism is long overdue. In response, another discussant, whose previous contributions to the blog show that he is an intelligent man, expressed bafflement: “Yes, obviously some revisionism regarding the ‘great allied leaders’ of WWII is called for. But an attempt to be revisionist about the justness of a war where U.S. territory is attacked by one opponent and war is declared on the U.S. by the other opponent is sort of like justifying the War on Iraq on the basis of mythical WMD.” Like Americans in general, this man takes the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the German declaration of war on December 11, 1941, as dispositive evidence that Japan and Germany started the war that ensued between these nations and the United States, and therefore he concludes that they should be held responsible for it. In a later post, he persists in this interpretation by saying: “Nation X attacks Nation Y. One or the other is right. Either Nation Y is a victim or the attack was a ‘justified pre-emptive attack.’ Yes, the response may be disproportionate, etc., but those really aren’t reasons to declare Nation Y ‘wrong.’ Or the two ‘equally wrong.’” This view represents a classic case of truncating the antecedents. Many people are misled by formalities. They assume, for example, that the United States went to war against Germany and Japan only after its declarations of war against these nations in December 1941. In truth, the United States had been at war for a long time before making these declarations. Its warmaking took a variety of forms. For example, the U.S. navy conducted “shoot [Germans] on sight” convoys, which might include British ships, in the North Atlantic along the greater part the shipping route from the United States to Great Britain, even though German U-boats had orders to refrain (and did refrain) from initiating attacks on American shipping. The United States and Great Britain entered into arrangements to pool intelligence, combine weapons development, test military equipment jointly, and undertake other forms of war-related cooperation. The U.S. military actively cooperated with the British military in combat operations against the Germans, for example, by alerting the British navy of aerial or marine sightings of German submarines, which the British then attacked. The U.S. government undertook in countless ways to provide military and other supplies and assistance to the British, the French, and the Soviets, who were fighting the Germans. The U.S. government provided military and other supplies and assistance, including warplanes and pilots, to the Chinese, who were at war with Japan. The U.S. military actively engaged in planning with the British, the British Commonwealth countries, and the Dutch East Indies for future combined combat operations against Japan. Most important, the U.S. government engaged in a series of increasingly stringent economic warfare measures that pushed the Japanese into a predicament that U.S. authorities well understood would probably provoke them to attack U.S. territories and forces in the Pacific region in a quest to secure essential raw materials that the Americans, British, and Dutch (government in exile) had embargoed. Consider these summary statements by George Victor, by no means a Roosevelt basher, in his recently published, well-documented book The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable(Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007). Roosevelt had already led the United States into war with Germany in the spring of 1941 – into a shooting war on a small scale. From then on, he gradually increased U.S. military participation. Japan’s attack on December 7 enabled him to increase it further and to obtain a war declaration. Pearl Harbor is more fully accounted for as the end of a long chain of events, with the U.S. contribution reflecting a strategy formulated after France fell. . . . In the eyes of Roosevelt and his advisers, the measures taken early in 1941 justified a German declaration of war on the United State – a declaration that did not come, to their disappointment. . . . Roosevelt told his ambassador to France, William Bullitt, that U.S. entry into war against Germany was certain but must wait for an “incident,” which he was “confident that the Germans would give us.” . . . Establishing a record in which the enemy fired the first shot was a theme that ran through Roosevelt’s tactics. . . . He seems [eventually] to have concluded – correctly as it turned out – that Japan would be easier to provoke into a major attack on the Unites States than Germany would be. (pp. 179–80, 184, 185, emphasis added) The claim that Japan attacked the United States without provocation was . . . typical rhetoric. It worked because the public did not know that the administration had expected Japan to respond with war to anti-Japanese measures it had taken in July 1941. . . . Expecting to lose a war with the United States – and lose it disastrously – Japan’s leaders had tried with growing desperation to negotiate. On this point, most historians have long agreed. Meanwhile, evidence has come out that Roosevelt and Hull persistently refused to negotiate. . . . Japan . . . offered compromises and concessions, which the United States countered with increasing demands. . . . It was after learning of Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States if the talks “break down” that Roosevelt decided to break them off. . . . According to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Roosevelt said he hoped for an “incident” in the Pacific to bring the United States into the European war. (pp. 15, 202, 240) These facts and numerous others that point in the same direction are for the most part anything but new; many of them have been available to the public since the 1940s. As early as 1953, anyone might have read a collection of heavily documented essays on various aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s that showed the various ways in which the U.S. government bore responsibility for the country’s eventual engagement in World War II – showed, in short, that the Roosevelt administration wanted to get the country into the war and worked craftily along various avenues to ensure that, sooner or later, it would get in, preferably in a way that would unite public opinion behind the war by making the United States appear to have been the victim of an aggressor’s unprovoked attack. (See Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes [Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1953].) As Secretary of War Henry Stimson testified after the war, “we needed the Japanese to commit the first overt act” (qtd. in Victor, Pearl Harbor Myth, p. 105). At present, however, sixty-seven or more years after these events, probably not one American in 1,000 – nay, not one in 10,000 – has an inkling of any of this history. So effective has been the pro-Roosevelt, pro-American, pro-World War II faction that in this country it has utterly dominated teaching and popular writing about U.S. engagement in the “Good War.” Only a few years ago, when an essay of mine was included in a collection being considered for publication by the University of Chicago Press, the press’s expert outside reader expressed shock that I had mentioned in passing Roosevelt’s pre-Pearl Harbor maneuvers to bring the country into the war, and he declared that crackpot statements of this sort would discredit the entire volume. (In deference to the editor and to discourage the volume’s rejection by the press, I removed the single obnoxious sentence, which was not central to my purposes in the essay in any event, and eventually the book was published, notwithstanding this “expert’s” negative appraisal of my own contributions to it.) Observations such the foregoing ones tend to elicit angry accusations of “Holocaust denial” and “moral equivalence,” among many others. For the record, then, let me avow that I do not deny the Holocaust, nor do I regard the Roosevelt administration as morally equivalent to Hitler’s regime. While I am making my innocence plain, let me also avow that I do not regard the Roosevelt administration as morally equivalent to Stalin’s regime. This latter comparison comes up surprisingly seldom, however, given that the two regimes were close allies in the war, and, most important, that the major outcome of the war was to leave Stalin and his puppet regimes astride the greater part of the European continent in an area that stretches from the Urals to Bohemia and from Estonia to Azerbaijan. In short, if anyone deserves to be recognized as the war’s “winner,” that person is Stalin. Somehow this fact has never seemed to me to fit comfortably into a characterization of this horrible conflict as the “Good War.” Perhaps I’m just unduly squeamish. The fate of the European Jews also requires mention, inasmuch as after the war many people professed to believe that saving the Jews was the war’s prime justification. Aside from the fact that none of the Allied leaders held that view – Roosevelt himself was a genteel anti-Semite of the sort typical in his time, place, and class – the undeniable truth is that the Jews were not saved: approximately 80 percent of them had perished by the end of the war. Little wonder, too, because U.S. and British war plans did not give high priority to saving them; as a rule, those plans completely disregarded the urgent need to rescue the surviving Jews. Few Americans have ever entertained the idea that their country ought not to have entered World War II. They persist in believing that they – the ordinary people of the country, as distinct from its political leaders and their foreign legionnaires – were genuinely threatened by the Japanese and the Germans and therefore that the war “had to be fought.” Even George Victor, from whose honest and useful book The Pearl Harbor Myth I quoted earlier, has brought himself to believe that Roosevelt had excellent motives for his persistent provocation of Germany and Japan. Thus, he writes: “As Germany began to prepare for conquest, genocide, and destruction of civilization, the leader of only one major nation saw what was coming and made plans to stop it. As a result of Roosevelt’s leadership, a planned sequence of events carried out in the Atlantic and more decisively in the Pacific brought the United States into one of the world’s greatest cataclysms. The American contribution helped turn the war’s tide and saved the world from a destructive tyranny unparalleled in modern history” (p. 16). Unparalleled? What about Stalin’s tyranny or Mao’s? Regardless of one’s answer to this question, however, another question remains – whether Nazi Germany, as evil as it certainly was, had the ability to defeat the United States, much less to “destroy civilization.” Americans love to speculate about German acquisition of atomic weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and other military capabilities the Nazis, in fact, never came close to acquiring. As things actually stood, Germany lacked the capability to invade and conquer even Great Britain. Conquering the United States, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, was realistically inconceivable. Whatever else one may take U.S. leaders’ motives for war to have been in the early 1940′s, national self-preservation could not have been among them, unless they were shockingly ill-advised as to the economic, logistical, and technological constraints on the German war machine. In reality, that machine had its hands more than full in dealing with the Soviets on the eastern front, not to mention the British and others who were pestering it on other fronts. Thirty-six years ago, Bruce M. Russett’s little book No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II(New York: Harper & Row, 1972) was published. Russett noted at the outset that “[p]articipation in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of theology” (p. 12). In this regard, nothing has changed since 1972. Yet Russett argued forcefully, with logic and evidence, that this orthodoxy rests on shaky grounds. He concluded that World War II “may well have been an unnecessary war that did little for us and that we need not have fought” (p. 20). Nor did he concede that although the war may have been imprudent on instrumental grounds, it was well justified on moral grounds: “it is precisely moral considerations that demand a reexamination of our World War II myths,” he insisted (p. 21). Although much has been added to the corpus of World War II scholarship since the publication of Russett’s book, this little volume remains unjustly neglected, and its argument deserves serious consideration even now. Of course, many other great events in American history might be examined as I have suggested U.S. participation in World War II ought to be examined – by taking the relevant antecedents fully into account. For historians, this advice should be unnecessary; if they know anything, they know that history did not begin yesterday. The American people at large, however, remain extremely vulnerable to misleading descriptions of the government’s actions, especially its plunges into foreign wars – accounts of which generally disregard many relevant antecedents, particularly those that cast blame on the United States for stirring up enmities abroad. Yet, any honest account of U.S. foreign policy reveals that this country’s government has engaged again and again in foreign interventions whose official justifications cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Many of these interventions amounted to little more than armed errand-running for privileged American business interests seeking to beat foreigners into line and, not coincidentally, to line their own pockets. This aspect of U.S. foreign policy famously led General Smedley Butler to declare that war is a racket. Time, some wit has said, is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Taking this idea to heart, we may remind ourselves and others that whenever the U.S. government launches a new war abroad, we would be well advised to look into what happened in that part of the world previously, perhaps over the course of several decades. We may well discover that the locals have legitimate grievances against our government or some of its corporate cronies. Or we may simply discover that the situation is more complicated than it has been made out to be. We know one thing for certain at the outset, however: we cannot rely on the government to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unvarnished truth is to our rulers as holy water is to vampires. March 18, 2008 Robert Higgs [send him mail] is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government. He is also the author of Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. Copyright © 2008 Robert Higgs Robert Higgs Archives Find this article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs77.html by Robert Higgs by Robert Higgs DIGG THIS Whereas historians obsessively trace every event’s causal lineage further and further into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the opposite extreme: they assume in effect that the world began immediately before the event they have in mind. I call this unfortunate tendency “truncating the antecedents.” Among the general public, it has given rise to mistaken interpretations of historical causation in cases too numerous to mention, and mistakes of this sort continue to occur frequently, in part because politicians and other conniving parties have an interest in propagating them.

Top New York Cop Thought Towers Were Bombed On 9/11

Top New York Cop Thought Towers Were Bombed On 9/11
Former debunker Dietl admits he shares 9/11 truth activist’s questions during confrontation

Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet Monday, March 17, 2008

reddit_url=’http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2008/031708_towers_bombed.htm’ reddit_title=’Top New York Cop Thought Towers Were Bombed On 9/11′

digg_title = ‘Top New York Cop Thought Towers Were Bombed On 9/11′; digg_bodytext = ‘Highly decorated former New York City detective Bo Dietl admits that his first instinct on 9/11 was that the twin towers were downed with explosives, as he conceded that he shared many questions about the official story with 9/11 truth activists he had formerly debunked on national television.’;

Highly decorated former New York City detective Bo Dietl admits that his first instinct on 9/11 was that the twin towers were downed with explosives, as he conceded that he shared many questions about the official story with 9/11 truth activists he had formerly debunked on national television.

Start your week with Ron Paul – only here!

This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows.
To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=59124

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

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NEW IN WND
WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Start your week with Ron Paul – only here!
Congressman joins commentary lineup with ‘Texas Straight Talk’ column

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Posted: March 16, 2008
7:08 pm Eastern

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Rep. Ron Paul

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, the presidential candidate who shocked the nation by garnering surprisingly loyal and enthusiastic support in the Republican race, joins WND’s commentary lineup today with a column available exclusively at WorldNetDaily each Monday morning.

Who is Barack Obama?

Who is Barack Obama?
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Who is Barack Obama? The truth is that neither Sen. Obama’s supporters nor opponents can answer that question. We know he is bright, eloquent and charismatic. But if he were elected president of the United States, he would be the least known man to be elected in modern American history, perhaps in all of American history.

Beyond Pearl Harbor

Beyond Pearl Harbor

How God caught up with the man who led Japan’s surprise attack.

Elesha Coffman

America’s latest blockbuster, Pearl Harbor, has already been blamed for dwelling on a shallow love triangle, ignoring the sacrifices of Japanese Americans, downplaying the Japanese empire’s aggression, and generally Disney-fying the “date which will live in infamy.” No surprises there; as director Michael Bay told Reuters, “It’s not a history lesson.” But it’s far too easy to shoot holes in Hollywood history. Instead, I’m going to fault the movie for missing a poignant and inspiring Christian story: the saga of Mitsuo Fuchida.

today’s toons….

today’s toons….

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1987435/posts