Tag Archives: #libertarian

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Tulsi goes to CPAC

While I like the concept of the Libertarian Party, supporting maximum freedom and individual rights, I will admit to not having much use for it. The primary function of a political party is to bring like-minded people together to win elections, to get their policies and principles into governing power; that’s the definition given to me by Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky, back in the horse-and-buggy days.

And that is where the Libertarian Party fails: whether people like its positions or not, the party fails in its most important function, getting people elected to office. On June 8, 2018, I went to the Libertarian Party’s website, to find their list of Libertarian Party candidates who were actually elected to public office. They claimed a total of 166 elected officials, with 52 of them holding partisan offices. Their highest, at the time, elected officials were three state representatives from New Hampshire, all of whom were elected as Republicans or Democrats, and none of whom were re-elected.

Representative Justin Amash (L-MI) switched to the Libertarian Party, due to his disagreements with President Trump, but he, too, was elected as a Republican. To date, there have been exactly zero candidates running as Libertarians who have been elected President, Senator, United States Representative, Governor, state Senator or state Representatives. For a party which has been around since 1971, that’s a pretty massive failure.

Former Representative Ron Paul, elected as a Republican, was the Libertarian Party candidate for President in 1988. Following that, he won the House seat again in 1996, and served in the House of Representatives until January of 2013. He twice ran for the Republican presidential nomination, in 2008 and 2012, failing both times.

His son, Rand Paul, was elected to represent Kentucky in the United States Senate in 2010, as a Republican, and re-elected in 2016; he is currently running for a third term, and is heavily favored. The Bluegrass State is home to two of the libertarian Republicans, with Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4), first elected in 2012. Dr Paul and Mr Massie used the TEA Party movement to help win election.

The electoral history has been simple: lower-case libertarians can win, if they run as Republicans, but running as upper-case Libertarians, the lose, and lose badly.

Now comes former Representative Tulsi Garrard Williams (D-HI 2). A Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination herself in 2020, but withdrew on March 19, and endorsed Joe Biden after doing poorly. The odious Hillary Clinton later floated rumors that Mrs Williams was going to run as a third-party candidate, to throw the 2020 election to President Trump. Mrs Williams is very much a liberal, but she’s also a libertarian, believing in people’s individual rights.

    Contrarian Dem Tulsi Gabbard To Headline CPAC

    by Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets Columnist | Monday, February 21, 2022 | 9:19 AM EST

    Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a 2020 presidential primary candidate who has been critical of President Joe Biden and liberal lawmakers, will be the headliner at the main CPAC dinner event this week, officials told Secrets Monday.

    Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman, will speak at the annual Ronald Reagan Dinner held by the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Glenn Beck is slated to be the keynote.

    Having a popular Democrat speak at the group’s main dinner, to be held Friday, is an “extraordinary event,” said a spokeswoman.

    Gabbard has recently roiled Democratic circles with her criticism of Biden’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine crisis and decision to only consider a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. She has also blasted Vice President Kamala Harris as a weak vice president.

    CPAC opens in Orlando Thursday and ends Sunday. Former President Donald Trump and virtually every conservative politician and pundit is expected to speak.

Again, Mrs Williams is no conservative, but her inclusion at CPAC tells us one thing: the GOP has completely co-opted libertarianism, and the future for the Libertarian Party is to stop being stupid, and become part of the Republican Party to which it naturally belongs.

Conservatives will never go along with everything for which the Libertarian Party stands, but there is much we can appreciate. And today’s Democratic Party, with its ‘progressive’ bent, is one which demands conformity over individuality, one which seeks to punish those who do not go along with its social demands and conformity policies. Mrs Williams may support universal health care, and even a guaranteed annual income, but she also supports our First Amendment rights, supports freedom of speech, and of the press, and or religion, of peaceable assembly, and due process of law. She has called out President Biden and his saber-rattling (sanctions-rattling?) against Russia, in a matter in which we cannot stop President Putin from taking. She has criticized his odious vaccine mandates. She was the best candidate the Democrats had, and while Republicans would have been upset that President Trump had lost, we wouldn’t be nearly as upset with Mrs Williams as President as we are with the dummkopf from Delaware and his ‘progressive’ filled administration.

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Why do the left always want to run other people’s lives?

Twitter did not suspend or delete the account of Richard Marx:

But for “Freckled Liberty,” a Jewish-American libertarian, it was off to 12 hours in Twitmo!

Mrs “Liberty” is a 26-year-old married woman who spends kind of a lot of time on Twitter. She wants to have children, and has expressed reservations about the long-term effects of the various COVID-19 vaccines, as possibly impacting her fertility. We do not know the long term effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, because they haven’t been available long enough.

Now, Mrs Liberty has been pretty strong in pushing her position, but she has never, to my knowledge, said that other people shouldn’t be allowed to take the vaccines if they wish; she has been, like the libertarian she is, saying that it is a matter of personal choice.

Of course, the left don’t really like that. A guy named Tom, whose Twitter address is, laughably enough, @FreedomSeeker83, condemned her by saying, “Knowingly carrying a chance you can infect other with a disease that may kill when it can be prevented or mitigated is an NAP violation,” and “You have a moral obligation to mitigate risk where one can.”

Freedom: he keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

I’ve said it before: I have taken the vaccine, and have reached the “fully vaccinated” stage. Taking the vaccine was my personal choice, as it should have been, as it should always be. Miss Liberty’s concerns are her own, and her choices are her own. That’s a big problem with the left: they believe that they should get to take decisions for everyone else, too.

Like Jonathan Edwards said in Sunshine, “And he can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine!”

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You did know that the #ClimateChange activists would be coming for your lifestyle, too, right?

Joanna Gaines’ kitchen set, with its $60,000 range.

My daughters — when they’re here — and my wife tend to watch cooking shows like The Kitchen, The Pioneer Woman, and Giada in Italy, though, admittedly, Giada in Italy is watched as much for the Italian scenery as anything else. Joanna Gaines has just started her own cooking show, Magnolia Table, and she has the ultimate, a La Cornue Chateau range, a hand-crafted gas appliance that starts at $60,300, not including shipping and delivery. It’s simply the most expensive version of what it seems that every cooking show has, and every cook wants: a gas stove.

Molly Yeh in her set kitchen; note the old style electric range.

The notable exception is Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, where the hostess uses, unexpectedly, not only an electric range, but an older style one, with the spiral heating elements.

While I don’t spend an inordinate time in front of the boob tube, I do like to watch the various house hunting shows like Living Alaska, Restoring Galveston, and Building of the Grid. And one frequently noted request of the prospective homeowners is a gas range. Gas is on instantly, and is much more easily adjustable.

But that’s not what the global warming climate change activists think you should have . . . or be allowed to have! From The Washington Post:

The battle over climate change is boiling over on the home front

Municipalities want new buildings to go all electric, spurning gas-fired stoves and heating systems. The gas industry disagrees

By Steven Mufson | February 23, 2021 | 7:00 AM EST

A new front has opened in the battle over climate change: The kitchen.

Cities and towns across the country are rewriting local building codes so that new homes and offices would be blocked from using natural gas, a fossil fuel that when burned emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. New laws would force builders to install heat pumps instead of gas furnaces and electric kitchen stoves instead of gas burners.

When we moved to our retirement fixer-upper in July of 2017, it was total electric. In January of 2018, a snow and ice storm hit, and knocked out the electricity. Since we’re out in the country, at pretty much the far end of Jackson Electric Cooperative’s service area, we’re among the last people to get power back, and it took 4½ days. My wife went to Lexington, and stayed at our daughter’s apartment, but I had to stay here, to care for the critters, and the plumbing.
It got down to 38º F in the house.

Gas fireplace in my computer room/den.

As I said, our house is an eastern Kentucky fixer-upper, and it certainly isn’t done yet, but we decided that we would have gas in the remodel, because Mrs Pico wanted a gas range. Thus we now have a new gas (propane) range, water heater and the fireplace installed. If we lose power again, we’ll still be able to keep the house warm, cook and take showers.

Without that fossil fuel, the place would become a not-very-much-fun place in the winter when the electricity goes out.

Local leaders say reducing the carbon and methane pollution associated with buildings, the source of 12.3 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, is the only way they can meet their 2050 zero-emission goals to curb climate change.

But the American Gas Association, a trade group, and its members are campaigning in statehouses across the country to prohibit the new local ordinances. Four states last year adopted such laws, and this year similar legislation has been introduced in 12 more.

“Logically the natural gas industry does not want to see its business end, so it’s doing what it can to keep natural gas in the utility grid mix,” said Marta Schantz, senior vice president of the Urban Land Institute’s Center for Building Performance. “But long term, if cities are serious about their climate goals, electric buildings are inevitable.”

What people want is what the climate control activists do not want people to have.

Of course, the timing of this article is interesting, considering the electricity outages due to the severe cold snap in the Lone Star State. The problems have been serious there, in part because of Texas’ large population, and because the state is simply not used to temperatures near 0º Fahrenheit. That the state has solidly Republican leadership has simply added to the impetus of the credentialed media to place blame.

But here in the Bluegrass State, we’ve had similar problems, just ones which haven’t gotten as much national media attention. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

KY couple without electricity after ice, snow storm apparently froze to death
By Bill Estep | February 22, 2021 | 5:04 PM EST

A couple found dead in Laurel County Sunday apparently froze to death, Sheriff John Root said in a news release.

Autopsies conducted Monday on James Duff, 62, and his wife Dinah Duff, 63, of Laurel County determined their apparent cause of death as hypothermia, according to the release.

A person who knew the couple found them Sunday about 10:30 a.m. and called police. Officers from the sheriff’s office responded.

James Duff was lying in the yard of his home on Pine Hill — Brock Road, about five miles east of London. Dinah Duff was inside the house, according to a news release.

The house had no electricity for some period before the couple was found because of damage to power lines from ice and snow that hit the area earlier in the week, said Deputy Gilbert Acciardo, spokesman for Root’s office.

Tens of thousands of people in Kentucky lost power recently after trees and limbs weighted by ice fell and knocked down lines.

Mr and Mrs Duff had apparently attempted to build a fire in their fireplace, but the home had no secondary heating source. The article does not tell us what the primary heat source for the house was, but it was apparently dependent upon electricity to run.

Our house in Jim Thorpe.

On Christmas Day of 2002, our first in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, the town received 14″ of heavy, wet snow in the beautiful white Christmas about which Bing Crosby so wonderfully sang. It also knocked out the power at 11:30 AM.

Our house in Jim Thorpe had steam radiators powered by a heating oil boiler, but the boiler required electricity to start and run. By the time the sparktricity came back on, at about 6:00 PM on the 26th, it was around 50º F inside.

Because the house did have a chimney for a wood stove installed by the previous owner, we later bought a wood stove, but never went through another prolonged power outage there again.

An anecdote? Perhaps, though, despite the protests of some, the plural of anecdote really is data! That episode pointed out to me that Mr and Mrs Duff could have had a primary heating source that wasn’t electric, but it still depended upon electricity to run.

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.

As it happens, we get our electricity from Jackson Energy as do many other people in eastern Kentucky, but we’ve been fortunate during the recent series of ice and snow storms: other than a couple of flickers, our electricity stayed on, and our house was nice and warm. My good blogging friend William Teach cross-posted some of his articles here, upon my request, because I didn’t know beforehand whether we would lose power. Being at the far western end of Jackson’s service area — just a couple miles up the road, power comes from Kentucky Utilities — when the power does go out here, it can stay out for days.

But, as noted above, because we have a secondary heat source of which the Patricians disapprove, if it had gone out, we wouldn’t have suffered Mr and Mrs Duff’s fate.

The socialist nature of the argument comes from the Post article originally cited:

“The average American likes choice and doesn’t want to be told what kind of fuel to use in their homes,” said Karen Harbert, chief executive of the American Gas Association. “Municipalities cannot take away that choice.”

“The natural gas industry frames it as a choice issue; we frame it as a choice issue,” said Johanna Neumann, a senior director at Environment America, an environmental group. “The industry frames it as a choice for people who want to use natural gas. We see it as a choice for a community to decide its energy future.”

One group want to leave your choices up to you; the other want to have the “community” dictate your “choice” to you. Of course, for the longest time the left have been pro-choice on exactly one thing.

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Tulsi Gabbard Williams is very much a leftist, but the left hate her anyway Why? It's because she believes in our constitutional rights!

JVW, one of the regular posters on Patterico’s Pontifications, and the one who was least infected with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, calls her his Little Aloha Sweetie, and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI 2nd) was the most sensible — not that that’s saying a whole lot — of the Cavalcade of Clowns running for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. She is a true left liberal. From her Wikipedia biography:

Tulsi Gabbard (/ˈtʌlsi ˈɡæbərd/; born April 12, 1981) is an American politician and United States Army Reserve officer who served as the U.S. Representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021. Elected in 2012, she was the first Hindu member of Congress and also the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress. In early February 2019 she announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election.[1][2]

In 2002, Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives at the age of 21.[3] Gabbard served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009 as an Army Military Police platoon leader.[4][5][6] She was a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 to 2016, when she resigned to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Gabbard supports a two-tier universal health care plan that she calls “Single Payer Plus”[7][8][9] and strengthening Roe v. Wade by codifying it into federal law. Her position has evolved on the issue and she now believes that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”, although it is not a choice she would personally make.[10][11] She co-sponsored the Family Act for paid family and medical leave and endorsed universal basic income.[12][13][14] She opposes military interventionism,[15][16] although she has called herself a “hawk” on terrorism.[17] Her decision to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and her skeptical approach to two claims that he had used chemical weapons[18][19] were controversial.[20]

On March 19, 2020, Gabbard dropped out of the 2020 presidential race and endorsed Joe Biden. She had already withdrawn from her U.S. House re-election race during her presidential campaign and was succeeded by Kai Kahele on January 3, 2021.[21]

Mrs Williams greatest claim to fame in that primary was how she eviscerated Senator Kamala Harris Emhoff (D-CA) in the debates. That helped to torpedo Mrs Emhoff’s campaign, but, sadly, the eventual nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, selected her to be his vice presidential running mate. Mrs Emhoff is now Vice President of the United States, while Mrs Williams is out of public office. 🙁

But if she’s a leftist, Mrs Williams is one other thing: she’s a libertarian (not Libertarian), in that she believes in really radical things like freedom of speech. and privacy rights. The 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disliked Mrs Williams enough that she ‘hinted’ that JVW’s Little Aloha Sweetie was actually a Russian stalking horse, and that the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would use her as a third party candidate to try to split the liberal vote and hand the election to President Donald Trump.

Of course, Mrs Clinton has always found someone else to blame for her loss:

Clinton also said she thought Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, was a Russian asset: “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset – I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”

Bitter much? https://i0.wp.com/www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif?w=612&ssl=1

From National Review:

Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Is ‘a Targeting of Almost Half of the Country’

By Brittany Bernstein | January 23, 2021 | 10:05 AM

Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii, on Friday expressed concern that a proposed measure to combat domestic terrorism could be used to undermine civil liberties.

Gabbard’s comments came during an appearance on Fox News Primetime when host Brian Kilmeade asked her if she was “surprised they’re pushing forward with this extra surveillance on would-be domestic terror.”

“It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said.

No, we don’t have to guess about how things like this end; the results have been seen around the world.

She continued: “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.”

She said her concern lies in how officials will define the characteristics they are searching for in potential threats.

“What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this?” Gabbard said.

As noted above, Mrs Williams supports abortion, but, how about that, she was concerned for the rights of those of us who are pro-life. We saw Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) try to impose her own religious test on then nominee to the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and now Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, because Mrs Barrett is pro-life, yet Mrs Williams, who is pro-abortion, could support the rights of, shockingly, Catholics!

I’m old enough to remember how the left were the ones who insisted that Freedom of Speech was absolute, and how The New York Times fought for Freedom of the Press. Today, it seems, that the left are all for restricting freedom for those with whom they disagree, using the January 6th kerfuffle — and yes, that’s what it was, a kerfuffle, blown wholly out of proportion by liberals — as an excuse, but, as we’ve noted before, the attempts to restrict freedom of speech were already happening.

The Washington Post, which has the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its masthead, has, on its website, several articles all bemoaning the Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

The hypocrisy is astounding! The Post certainly defended its freedom of the press, in its own piece of the Pentagon Papers case, but now the editors and the newspapers’ columnists seem to want darkness to fall on people and opinions they dislike. No wonder the left hate Tulsi Gabbard Williams.

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Big Brother is watching you, and the left think you need to be watched more closely

In George Orwell’s 1984, every home was fitted with a Telescreen.

The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. . . . .

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

After nine months now of increasingly draconian controls of our society and our economy in the huge governmental response to COVID-19, we are now being told that the one place into which government cannot reach, our homes, is the place in which our leaders need to exert the most control.

Where COVID-19 spreads most easily, according to experts

The most likely place to contract the virus is not at work or at school.

By Dr. Adjoa Smalls-Mantey | December 24, 2020 | 6:08 AM

COVID-19 is a highly transmissible disease, but evidence shows that small indoor gatherings and households are where the novel coronavirus is spreading the fastest.

For nearly a year, public health officials across the globe have grappled with how to reduce the spread of COVID-19. At times, travel has been restricted, schools and gyms have closed, and some cities, such as San Francisco, are under lockdown. But despite these restrictions, the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths continue to reach record highs.

“I think we want to be careful about blaming one particular environment and scapegoating one particular setting for generating transmission,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an ABC News contributor, epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.

However, there are some settings where COVID-19 is more easily spread. In New York, for example, contact tracing has shown that 70% of new cases come from small gatherings and households.

“Informal gatherings may have played even the biggest role,” Brownstein said, “because they are harder to police, they’re harder to enforce, and people are probably more lax when it comes to recommendations of mask wearing and social distancing.”

I will admit to some amusement at Dr. Adjoa Smalls-Mantey’s, the author’s, choice of language, that informal gatherings, meetings between friends and family, “are harder to police, (are) harder to enforce” restrictions. In the end, of course, policing things, enforcing rules, is precisely what Our Betters want to do.

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, Dr Richard Levine[1]Dr Levine is a mentally ill male who thinks he’s somehow a woman, calling himself ‘Rachel.’ The First Street Journal does not go along with such foolishness, and always refers to … Continue reading issued orders that individuals must wear masks and practice social distancing inside their own homes if guests are present. The credentialed media were also full of similar recommendations.

When people gather in small groups with friends and family, they are more likely to let their guard down, not wear their masks and stay together indoors for longer periods of time, which makes it easier to transmit the virus.

In a recent study at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, researchers found that for children and adolescents who tested positive for COVID-19, it was small social gatherings — not school — that was the most likely place they were exposed to the virus.

The children who tested positive in the study were more likely to have attended social gatherings outside of their homes, had playdates or had visitors at their home where mask wearing and social distancing precautions were not taken.

Gladys Kravitz

As we have noted previously, various officials know that they can’t just send the gendarmerie into your house, so they want your neighbors to peer into your windows and snitch on you. Of course, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) does seem to think that he can send the sheriff’s deputies to your home, so perhaps other of our government officials will try to make my statement that they can’t send the police to your homes a false one. A conspiracy theorist might suggest that Dr Smalls-Mantey’s article is just something to condition the public into thinking that such is regrettably necessary, so that the sheeple will simply accept it, at least if it only happens to their neighbors and not themselves.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued executive orders limiting gatherings in your home of more than eight people, from more than two separate households. I am happy to say that we didn’t obey the Governor’s restrictions any heed on either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Three households, no masks.

If only the government had those telescreens, they wouldn’t have to depend on those Gladys Kravitzes to peer into your windows![2]I had to put a descriptive link to Gladys Kravitz in the article, because my good friend Donald Douglas pointed out that you have to be older than dirt to get the reference.

If we allow authoritarianism to continue for this emergency, in what other emer-gencies will it be used?

Am I just being paranoid here? In 1984, sexual activity is regulated by the government, and Winston Smith’s and Julia’s sexual life is a form of rebellion. And in 2020, Dr Levine issued ‘guidance’ about your sex life, ‘suggesting’ that you must ‘limit’ your number of sex partners, and always ‘discuss’ COVID-19 with any new potential inamorata. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D-Washington, DC) did the same.[3]The left had always claimed that it was evil reich-wing conservatives who wanted to regulate sex, even referencing 1984, but it doesn’t seem to have been conservatives doing this now, does it?

People with actual governing authority have been telling us how we must live our lives, interfering in our jobs, our businesses and trying to impose their authority even in our homes, justifying it as an emergency, of course. But if they are allowed to get away with this for the COVID emergency, just what other ’emergencies’ can they use to justify restricting our rights? The September 11th attacks wound up justifying the PATRIOT Act, and, sadly, that was done by Republican congressmen and senators, and signed into law by a Republican president.

Benjamin Franklin put it best, saying, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” We have surrendered some of our essential liberty, and far too many of our people have agreed with this, because it’s just so necessary, or, as the law would put it, “a compelling government interest.”

This is where we must say, nay, scream, that government cannot do this, and the people will not allow it. More than just scream, we must protest, we must take political action, to unseat the would-be tyrants and petty dictators. If we do not do this, now, we insure that it will happen again, and again, as those who believe they should run our lives for us can always find something to justify it.
_________________________________
Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 Dr Levine is a mentally ill male who thinks he’s somehow a woman, calling himself ‘Rachel.’ The First Street Journal does not go along with such foolishness, and always refers to ‘transgender’ individuals by their birth names and sex.
↑2 I had to put a descriptive link to Gladys Kravitz in the article, because my good friend Donald Douglas pointed out that you have to be older than dirt to get the reference.
↑3 The left had always claimed that it was evil reich-wing conservatives who wanted to regulate sex, even referencing 1984, but it doesn’t seem to have been conservatives doing this now, does it?
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Not just no, but Hell no! Why is it that every time the left think they have a good idea, they want to make it mandatory?

I have to take this one with a grain of coarse kosher salt, because Seth Dillon says that he is CEO of The Babylon Bee, a very good satire site, but here’s the tweet:

Perhaps Mr Dillon’s eyesight is going, because rather than a grown man in his twenties, it was obviously Senators Edward Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CN) who accosted his son.

Senators Markey and Blumenthal announce national face mask mandate legislation

Bill would require states to implement mask mandates, promote “the most powerful public health tool” the nation has against the coronavirus

November 25, 2020

Washington (November 25, 2020) – Despite guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), millions of Americans are traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday, giving rise to concerns about continued spread of the coronavirus as the country already is suffering a terrible surge of cases and deaths. Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) today announced introduction of the Encouraging Masks for All Act, legislation that would encourage states to require the use of face masks in all public spaces and outside when one cannot maintain social distance. The legislation provides an additional $5 billion to the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund available to states who implement masking requirements. States can use this additional funding for efforts to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus. Additionally, the legislation authorizes $75 million for grants to states for promotion of universal mask wearing. The legislation also mandates mask use on federal property. Recent research suggests universal masking could prevent 130,000 deaths from COVID-19. Nonetheless, 15 states do not have mask mandates.

“Masks and face coverings are the essential public health tool to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic” said Senator Markey. “As President-elect Biden recognizes, we need to use every technique available to us to encourage mask use, from clear communication of the need for masks, to providing masks to those who need them, to leading by example, and even to mandating mask use nationwide. Our legislation would move us closer to goal of ensuring universal mask adoption during these dangerous winter months. It would also ensure that essential workers in transit, health care, and retail settings all over the country are protected with face masks. Mask up!”

“Wearing a mask should be considered a moral and health mandate—our primary defense against the coronavirus,” said Senator Blumenthal. “With cases skyrocketing as we head into the holidays, the Encouraging Masks for All Act would bring us closer to ensuring every American has a face mask and wears it. Even with a vaccine, mask wearing is an essential tool in conquering COVID-19, along with physical distancing and other common sense public health steps. This bill gives states the resources to encourage mask wearing in public and outdoors, to provide masks to those who need them, and to enforce mask mandates to protect public health.”

According to Newsweek, the two New England Fascists leftists bemoaned that a third of the states do not have any mask mandates.[1]Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming The two looney lefties names it the Encouraging Masks for All Act, but “encourage,” in this use, is defined as “to attempt to persuade.” Perhaps Senator Blumenthal, who once “encouraged” the people of Connecticut to vote for him by falsely claiming he was a Vietnam veteran, which he brushed of as “misplaced words” and having “misspoken”, meant that the bill was meant to “encourage” the states to mandate masks, or miss out on federal funds, but it certainly isn’t meant to “encourage” the public to wear them; it is an attempt to get the states to force people to wear masks.

Why is it that every time the left think they have a good idea, they want to make it mandatory? In the novel The Once and Future King, author T. H. White proposed a similarly worded rule as the rule of totalitarianism: “Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory.” The Pico Corollary of that is, “The Democrats support freedom of choice on exactly one thing.”

If Messrs Markey and Blumenthal recognize that the ‘authority’ to require people to wear masks — an authority I deny that any state has over free citizens — belongs to the states, why don’t they recognize that different states might legitimately choose differently? Oh, I’m sorry, that’s right: they don’t believe that the states could legitimately choose differently from how they see things, so they simply have to force those which don’t do what they see as the right thing.

This is why the Democrats cannot be trusted. They never want to ask people to do things, they want to order people to do things. If Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) had asked me to wear a face mask, and made his case for doing so, I would have happily complied. But when he ordered such, any free man would rebel, any free man would see not complying with the Governor as a proper act of independence and defiance.

Jonathan Edwards might have said it best:

Some man’s come he’s trying to run my life, don’t know what he’s asking
Working starts to make me wonder where fruits of what I do are going
When he says in love and war all is fair, he’s got cards he ain’t showing
How much does it cost? I’ll buy it!
The time is all we’ve lost–I’ll try it!
He can’t even run his own life,
I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine-

References

References
↑1 Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming
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Conservatives today vs conservatives during the Bush Administration.

On The Pirate’s Cove, the commenter currently styling himself Elwood P Dowd wrote:

We were responding to Kye who had typed: And I’d love to hear the names of conservatives who wanted war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Republicans, many, many Democommies but no conservatives.

The invasion of Iraq was a Republican project. If Republicans wish to argue that there are no conservatives extant, I have no opinion. Have at it. But it sounds like a “No True Scotsman” argument.

The two wars are not alike. Afghanistan was precipitated by an attack on American soil, led by a group hiding in Afghanistan. Going after and destroying al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was a war of necessity.

Iraq, on the other hand, was a war of choice. As I have said previously, it would have been completely avoided had the elder George Bush not ended the first Iraq war too soon. The younger George Bush wanted to finish that job, and poor intelligence gave him a reason.

But both wars had the same problem: what do you do with a country after you have defeated it in war? Americans of all political stripes learned the wrong lesson from World War II, that a Western-style democracy could be imposed on a defeated foe. Germany and Japan were so thoroughly destroyed, the fighting aged men killed or injured, and the boys soon to reach fighting age so shell shocked, that there was no resistance left, and despite neither nation having any significant democratic experience, the imposition of democracy was successful. In Germany, it was aided by democratic tradition in its neighbors, while in Japan, the orders to the people by the Emperor Hirohito, helped General Douglas MacArthur’s imposed democratic government.

In Iraq, our overwhelming force quickly defeated Saddam Hussein, but really killed relatively few of his soldiers. The fighting aged men, and the boys growing into fighting age over the sixteen years of our presence, were able to think they could resist Westernization successfully. In Afghanistan, we kicked the Taliban out of power, but that place is simply ungovernable by any outsiders, as first the British and then the Soviets learned, and really, by Afghanis themselves; it is not really a nation, but a region of tribes. Westerners deceive themselves into thinking that every ‘nation’ must actually be a nation.

The younger President Bush was, if not a neo-conservative himself, greatly influenced by the neo-cons, and by Natan Sharansky, who wrote in The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, that once people experience democracy, they will continue to want it for themselves. The argument sounds persuasive, but experience has taught us the bitter lesson; some cultures are not so ready for democracy that they will not willingly surrender to a strongman. The various Iraqi factions, all militarily defeated several times, kept coming back to life as new leaders sprung up and more boys grew into men. Then, when Da’ish arose, hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis simply fell into line, just as so many Iranians willingly turned themselves over to the terror of the mullahs.

This was a hard lessons, but conservatives have (mostly) learned it: one nation cannot simply impose its values on another, at least not as long as there are any tough men left alive. The neoconservatives, who were really only ‘conservative’ when it came to a strong military and the willingness to use military power, are almost gone now, just part of the ‘never Trumper’ movement.[1]Via Wikipedia: “In an opinion piece for Foreign Policy in September 2017, Max Boot outlines his political views as follows: “I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion … Continue reading

Today’s conservatives are not the conservatives of fifteen years ago. Not only have conservatives learned some lessons, but many older conservatives have moved into retirement, or gone to their eternal rewards, while newer ones became adults. Domestically, they still believe in the same things: a nation subject only to God, a social order founded on Judeo-Christian values and morality, and that the rights of the individual cannot be subjugated by the state. The libertarian outlook, which has always been part of conservatism, is becoming more pronounced. This is why I have said that, like the TEA Party, the future for libertarians, and the Libertarian Party, is to fold itself into the Republican Party.

One of the things that Libertarians, and note that I use upper-case Libertarian to refer to Libertarian Party members, and lower-case libertarian to refer to those with a basic libertarian philosophy but who don’t belong to the official, hapless, Libertarian Party, have long favored is a withdrawal of American forces and power to our own shores, something totally anathema to the neo-conservatives. While such is not generally part of the Republican Party, President Trump’s America First ideas have pushed that notion into more widespread acceptance among the Republican voters outside of Washington DC. The concept of defending our national interests abroad rather than at our own borders makes a lot of sense; what American wouldn’t rather see the destruction of war in some other land rather than our own?

But that forward defense has led us into wars less of defense than of protecting our sphere of influence, to invading Iraq to prevent Iraq from obtaining nuclear weapons. Israel used the same notion when it attacked the Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osirak in 1981, and somebody sponsored the surprise assault which killed Iran’s nuclear program’s top scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. I do not in any way disapprove of the killing of Dr Fakhrizadeh, not if it sets back Iran’s attempts to build nuclear weapons. That’s a lot smarter ‘forward defense’ than sending thousands upon thousands of soldiers into Iran to beat down the Iranian army. I suppose that statement would definitely put me at odds with the Libertarian Party.

The conservatives of 2004 would simply not win much support in the Republican Party of today, as former Governor Jeb Bush (R-FL) found out in the 2016 Republican primaries. Hillary Clinton’s campaign simply assumed that Mr Bush would win the nomination, and actively wanted, and helped, Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination. Mr Trump won because, among other things, he wanted to lead the GOP exactly where Republican voters wanted it to go. The Republican elite, and the Democrats, simply did not understand that then, and I’m not sure that they understand it now.

Is there anything more telling that the elder President Bush voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, while the younger President Bush voted for “none of the above” in 2016, and would not disclose his vote this year? Conservatives of 200 and 2004, who pushed the younger Mr Bush’s candidacy strongly enough to defeat Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for the nomination in 2000 are simply not the conservative mainstream of today. Given the tremendous support for President Trump within the GOP, 95% prior to the election and still 90% now, indicate how strongly conservatives of today have moved away from those twenty and sixteen years ago.

The soft heart of conservatism has been burned away; what remains is the cold logic, the logic which says that conservatives must stay the course, for the good of our country, and not wimp out because some people won’t like it or some people will get hurt. It is the logic of the free market and capitalism, which provides an opportunity for people to succeed greatly, but also allows people to fail, and fall, into the depth of despair, knowing that such is the best and most prosperous system for the vast majority of Americans.[2]I am in no way opposed to private charity, and my own charitable contributions are in the four figure range, but I believe that private charity should be, and stay, just that: private.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 Via Wikipedia: “In an opinion piece for Foreign Policy in September 2017, Max Boot outlines his political views as follows: “I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion rights, pro-immigration. I am fiscally conservative: I think we need to reduce the deficit and get entitlement spending under control. I am pro-environment: I think that climate change is a major threat that we need to address. I am pro-free trade: I think we should be concluding new trade treaties rather than pulling out of old ones. I am strong on defense: I think we need to beef up our military to cope with multiple enemies. And I am very much in favor of America acting as a world leader: I believe it is in our own self-interest to promote and defend freedom and free markets as we have been doing in one form or another since at least 1898.

In December 2017, also in Foreign Policy, Boot wrote that recent events—particularly since the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president—had caused him to rethink some of his previous views concerning the existence of white privilege and male privilege. “In the last few years, in particular, it has become impossible for me to deny the reality of discrimination, harassment, even violence that people of color and women continue to experience in modern-day America from a power structure that remains for the most part in the hands of straight, white males. People like me, in other words. Whether I realize it or not, I have benefited from my skin color and my gender — and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.”

Does that sound like a conservative to you?

↑2 I am in no way opposed to private charity, and my own charitable contributions are in the four figure range, but I believe that private charity should be, and stay, just that: private.