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"Presidential candidate Ron Paul seeks the Colbert Bump. "
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=88505
"The late-breaking news today [June 13, 2007] is that the New York Assembly has passed a medical marijuana bill -- 92-52, according to an email from MPP. Richard Gottfried (D), who has been supporting the issue for years, was the sponsor."
http://stopthedrugwar.org/speakeasy_main/2007/jun/13/new_york_medical_marijuana_bill_
"In deciding that al-Marri can likewise be tried in a criminal court but cannot legally be kept in military detention, the 4th Circuit distinguished his case from those of Hamdi and Padilla, noting that he has not been accused of taking up arms with the Taliban. 'The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention,' the court ruled...."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/120703.html
"Sometimes, I am proud of my town. 'Berkeley High remains the only high school in the nation that has failed to comply with the military’s request for students’ data, a Department of Defense spokesman said'."
http://thestressblog.com/2007/06/14/go-berkeley/
"I've noted before how slimy I think NBC's To Catch a Predator series is. It's also of highly dubious journalism ethics. The show essentially cooperates with police and a vigilante justice group to create crimes, which it then gleefully broadcasts to the country"
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/027859.php#027859
"[R]ather than seeing themselves as representatives of local communities, even in conflicts of this sort, most (not all, but most) police are indecently eager to treat them as public works projects – sources of lucrative overtime and an excuse to swan about in paramilitary drag and play with all the bitchin' toys they've gotten from the Pentagon."
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/06/siege-in-new-hampshire-operation-this.html
"Why do the parents who make up the Parents Television Council think they have a right to raise everyone else's children? This group is the Gladys Kravitz of public advocacy. Like an all-seeing neighbor peering from behind the drapes, it pounces on every errant expletive loosed over the airwaves."
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/06/10/News/The_nanny_inside_your.shtml
"For the more than nine years that Ars Technica has been publishing online, we've been outspoken when it comes to the lack of balance between the threat of piracy (which is always overstated) and the 'solutions' to piracy (which are often draconian) that some copyright holders demand. Whether it's laws that would turn the possession of software into a crime, completely baked piracy reports, or yet another law meant to criminalize civil infractions.... For better or for worse, real property should not be confused with intellectual property, which is not subject to the same rules of scarcity."
"Lest anyone protest that the state’s true 'function' or 'duty' or 'end' is, as Locke, Madison, and countless others have argued, to protect individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property, the evidence of history clearly shows that, as a rule, real states do not behave accordingly. The idea that states actually function along such lines or that they strive to carry out such a duty or to achieve such an end resides in the realm of wishful thinking."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1982
"To participate in politics is to submit to conquest. The sinister genius of the political ruler consists in his ideological coup d'état by means of which sufficient numbers of people volunteer for servitude. Curiously, people are persuaded in numbers to abandon their inherited autonomy in favor of a promise of protection from the forces of nature without effort on their part. The promise is wholly without merit but the prospect is nonetheless enchanting, to say the least. So perhaps the politician is not so much the genius as the opportunist."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/lowi7.html
"This week, when I went to pick up my legal-for-now-if-you-jump-through-lots-of-hoops raw milk, I asked Hebron how business was. “Really good,” was his reply. 'Great, in fact! Lately, every time I make a delivery, the order gets bigger and bigger.' I was very happy for him. He seemed to have more to say. I hoped he was about to say that he was beginning to break even, but was happily wrong in my expectation. 'I’m thinking of writing the FDA a thank you letter. Since they seized my truck full of milk, I have people contacting me to buy milk shares from all over Michigan . Business is booming!' "
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/fontana/fontana18.html
"Can government spending contribute to macroeconomic stability and the higher productivity of labor? Many people say yes, because they believe that government spending can stimulate the aggregate demand and contribute to the accumulation of capital if it finances large public investment projects. In one of my previous articles I argued ... that government spending ... always and everywhere exacerbates the very economic problems it is called upon to solve."
http://www.mises.org/story/2597
"It was business as usual on the day after Arrowsic became the first community in Maine to endorse a resolution calling on President Bush and Congress to immediately stop all war funding and bring the troops home from Iraq."
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=114274&ac=PHnws
"The Edgewood Park Defense Patrol will be patrolling the 16-block area from Whalley to Edgewood and Winthrop to West Park. They believe that the police are not doing their part to keep the streets safe."
http://www.wtnh.com/global/story.asp?s=6642501
"Mike Tuggle directs us to this map of the United States, with state names replaced by the name of a country with a similar Gross Domestic Product. As Tuggle says, this puts the lie to the idea that 'No State could survive economically by itself'."
http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/06/can-states-be-viable-countries.html
"Worker cooperatives are businesses that are owned and democratically governed by their employees. Some 300 worker co-ops throughout the U.S. provide their employees with both jobs and ownership — allowing them to directly benefit from the financial success of the business."
http://www.aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/
artikkel?Dato=20070612&Kategori=NEWS&Lopenr=70612004
"Gitmo is actually the 'first circle' of Bush's hell, the best that it gets. Behind this public face lie the 'secret prisons' of the CIA and other agencies and entities in the hydra-headed, ever-expanding 'security organs' of the Regime. We know almost nothing of the horrors that have gone on there -- or in the many dungeons of the many tyrannical regimes to which Bush has 'renditioned' an unknown number of captives."
http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/
Articles/Seasons_in_Hell%3A_Voices_From_the_American_Gulag/
"The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn't have ordinarily done. The Miami gang's Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/portrait_of_the_1.html
"Considering what the government is doing to 'tax protester' Irwin Schiff, it makes sense the 'tax protesters' Ed and Elaine Brown have vowed to die before allowing hired guns working in the service of the psychopathocracy to take them in."
"When SWAT teams were introduced in the late 1960s, they were intended to be used only in hostage rescues and similar extraordinary circumstances, and those recruited for such duty were taught that the mission was a failure if innocent people were endangered. Today, SWAT teams are entirely useless in hostage situations, and are promiscuously used to carry out routine police duties. And SWAT operators who kill innocent people enjoy nearly bullet-proof immunity. We can anticipate that the use of police carjackings and similar deceptions will follow a similar trajectory."
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/06/punking-fourth-amendment.html
"They were idiots in terms of how the world worked, but they understood power in the Beltway better than Nixon, better than Clinton, better really than any White House clan since the Roosevelt years. That's why they'll keep getting top billing on talk shows and invites to all the best Washington parties, even if, as seems likely, they leave office 18 months from now with half the planet in flames."
http://www.alternet.org/story/53941/
"In essence, Ron Paul is everything our current system of government is not. If you're no fan of the current government, he is likely your saving grace should he gain the Republican nomination. That's a big 'if,' however, because the media and Paul's fellow Republicans are trying to marginalize him, despite him being the only traditional Republican running!"
http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/
articles/canon_fodder/01402_taking_ron_paul_seriously.html
"If the senator [Joe Lieberman], who seems to be one of those who loves war as long as he doesn't have to fight it, really believes that we can attack Iran without Iranian retaliation, then he's naive. If he knows better, he's a liar, and to lie the American people into a second war before the other lied-into war in Iraq is even over is despicable. He should be shunned by all decent people."
http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=11144
"Everything that we have seen unfold over the past six years – the outrageous abuses of authority, the lawlessness, the gulag, the torture, the instigation of a monstrous war of aggression – was seeded in the 'enabling act' that Congress granted to Bush four days after the attack. That legislation was, again, deliberately weasel-worded in such an ambiguous manner that Democrats could claim that it limited the president's response to the attacks while the Bushists – and some courts – have used it as, well, a blank check for tyranny. "
"That the National Rifle Association supports the current bill is just further evidence that the NRA, far from being a pro-liberty organization, is really just one of the more moderate members of the gun-control lobby. The best response to intrusive regulation is a healthy underground market. "
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2007/06/anti-gun-shenanigans.html
"Though we often assume that money is simply an invariable unit of measure, it too is subject to the same forces that a comic is. If the demand for dollars rises — say people want to hold more money in their wallets — the value of a dollar will rise as well. This rise means that a dollar will be able to acquire more goods than before, and that all things staying the same the prices for goods will fall. Conversely, if the supply of dollars increases — say the government has issued new currency — the value of the dollar will decline. More dollars will be spent, pushing goods prices up so that a dollar will be able to buy fewer goods than before."
http://www.mises.org/story/2611
"When people think of land preservation, many immediately assume that it is the responsibility of government. However, people like Douglas Tompkins, founder of the North Face and Espirit clothing lines, are challenging this notion."
http://www.abetterearth.org/blog/id.4045/news_detail.asp
"Americans love a square deal. The idea of the quid pro quo, the something for something, lies at the heart of our very sense of fairness. But there's one area in which something for nothing is much closer to the rule, and it's a transaction on which people's very lives turn: organ donation."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1633084,00.html
"The true history of Greenland makes one thing clear: there's no climate emergency, and therefore no need to legislate draconian regulations on energy use that will dramatically affect almost every aspect of our lives. Further, no one has demonstrated that we even have the ability to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the amount necessary to curtail a substantial portion of Greenland's future warming."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8285
"The general public has been led to believe that the business class favors the unhampered market and wants government only to stay out of the way of its accumulation of wealth. The truth, of course, is that those who populate the business world possess the same moral foibles as the rest of us, including the inclination to seek after wealth with the least possible exertion. That is exactly what the state makes possible: instead of earning a living by satisfying the needs of your fellow man, you can enrich yourself far less strenuously by employing the state machinery to loot him."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0702h.asp
"Rep. Lipinski said in a statement. 'While there is no doubt that parents are the first line of defense in protecting their kids, clearly they need more help.' With the parental controls built into every television set, set-top box, and DVR being sold these days, the need for such legislation seems questionable at best. Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite."
"People saw that everything that was politically feasible or indeed necessary, could be done to the economy without the sky crashing down on them. A democratic government always had the whip hand over business. The freedoms of property and contract could always be curtailed by appeal to the public interest."
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Jasaymorals.html
"In reality, the ruling elite who order everything from aerial bombings of civilians to commando raids on family homes are not you or your neighbors. The murderous chumps who follow the orders of the ruling elite are not you or the people next door. Remember this: You are not your rulers. The people who make the high-level decisions to murder foreigners, drop bombs, poison land, and shoot rockets into neighborhoods live in mansions in far-away Washington DC, aptly referred to as Rome-on-the-Potomac by some commentators. These people are not Joe Sixpack or Good Neighbor Sam; they are duplicitous politicians who have gained aggression-power through their role in the state. You are not the government, in any meaningful sense."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/bill/bill1.html
"To hold onto the support of the American people for this dictatorial power, the Bush administration has engaged in its own form of terrorism by exposing domestic 'plots' involving small rag-tag groups allegedly bent on, among other things, attacking Fort Dix and blowing up fuel tanks and pipelines near JFK International Airport."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0706c.asp
"If Americans understood the enormity of the deception behind the invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) and the pending attack on Iran, Bush and Cheney would be impeached and turned over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and AIPAC would be forced to register as a foreign agent. Just as Goebbels said, some lies are too big to be disbelieved. It is this disbelief that is so dangerous. The inability of Americans to see through the Big [Lie] to the secret agenda allows the neoconservatives to escape accountability and to continue with their plot."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06122007.html
"President Bush calls Islam a 'religion of peace,' and Homeland Security policies prevent airport security from profiling Arab-looking males. Instead, even celebrities and old ladies are randomly searched, along with everyone else, so that the government won't discriminate. At the same time, the U.S. starts wars against Muslim countries abroad and threatens more because 'Islamic Terror' is supposedly the great threat to Western Civilization. Neither the Politically Correct domestic policy nor the World Police foreign policy actually protects Americans from terrorism. But they enlarge The State's powers and budget, and the wars bring profit to numerous contractors."
http://partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2500
"[D]o what used to be expected of limited constitutional republics: file criminal charges and shoulder the burden of proving the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before a jury. Some find it tempting to relax the traditional protections of the accused in 'exceptional' cases. But it's worth reminding ourselves, on this the 792nd anniversary of Magna Carta, that preventing tyranny requires us to resist that temptation -- especially in such cases."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1372
"The Summer of Love and the phenomenon it represented was many things. ... It was a rejection of the culture of war and the gray flannel suit and it was a celebration of eros. It was escapism and it was a new way of involvement. It was apolitical in the sense of having a party line and it was political in the sense that it challenged much of what the capitalist world stood for at the time."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/
2007/06/luv-n-haight-a-different-look-at-the-us-summer-of-love/
"At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It since has endured decades of bad government, including the rudderless reactionary populist appeal of Peronism (which still dominates the county's politics today), the military junta in the 1970s and '80s, and consistently bad economic policy that culminated in the country's financial collapse in 2001."
http://reason.com/news/show/120586.html
"When you get right down to it, the surgeon general doesn't do very much. The office was originally established in the 19th Century to ensure medical care for the Navy. For years, surgeon generals labored in quiet obscurity, until C. Everett Koop dragged the old Navy-style uniforms out of mothballs and discovered television."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8282
"What we are seeing in the Middle East, highlighted by the ascension of Hamas in Gaza and a looming civil war among Palestinians, is the virtually complete unraveling of the American enterprise and the country's influence in the region. Wherever the hand of George W. Bush has meddled the result has been destabilization, chaos, confusion, blowback and backfiring, leading more and more of the players in the region to distrust and even hate America."
http://www.antiwar.com/bock/?articleid=11145
"Politicians don’t like to tell the American public what they don’t want to hear, but at least the administration could quietly begin to open the floodgates for Iraqi refugees. Many of these people helped the United States in Iraq and could be in grave danger once U.S. forces are reduced or withdrawn."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1983
"[E]vidently it is now a capital crime, worthy of instant death by special ops or air raid or drone-fired missile, for any Muslim of any nationality to visit or take part in an Islamic regime which the U.S. government dislikes -- even if, like Somalia's Islamic Councils government, that regime is not at war with the United States and strenuously denies any connection to al Qaeda."
"The question of the morality of the Iraq War is not a difficult one. It is, in fact, an open and shut case. The war was immoral from the very beginning. It is still immoral right now. And anything short of immediately withdrawing U.S. troops merely continues the immorality."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance112.html
"Edvard Grieg's goal was to create a national form of music which could give the Norwegian people an identity, and in this respect he was an inspiration to other composers. But the greatness of his works lies not just in this , but in the fact that he also succeeded in expressing thoughts and emotions which could be recognized everywhere...."
http://www.mnc.net/norway/GRIEG.HTM
"Although he is known primarily as a cultural anthropologist, he did significant work in archaeology, and he contributed to anthropology by making connections between archaeology and culture."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_L._Kroeber
"Jeannette Rankin … became the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress…. Only four days after taking office, Jeannette Rankin made history in yet another way: she voted against U.S. entry into World War I. She violated protocol by speaking during the roll call before casting her vote, announcing 'I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war'." [Though I don't normally include politicians in this section, for her peace efforts Ms. Rankin deserves to be named.]
http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_jeannette_rankin.htm
"Under the aegis of Nicholson and Arkoff, the company survived in a constricting industry by catering to the whims of the teenage trade. AIP's long (350-plus) roster of kitsch classics, running the gamut from horror to rock'n'roll, from juvenile delinquency to Italian musclemen, and from Edgar Allan Poe to Annette Funicello, have formed their own unique niche in film history."
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0035098/bio
"Are we so busy 'knowing' that our failures to feel or to pay any attention to our intuition keeps us from achieving all that we could? Does our focus on the material—both our physical selves and the tangible world around us— keep us from seeing the illusions it presents, and keep us from grokking our deeper, spiritual nature?"
http://endervidualism.com/salon/books/bach.htm
"Authorities today said they had arrested two young members of Al Qaeda who had been planning what they claimed was 'the worst terror plot we have ever encountered'."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/07/06/11/wallace.htm
"Technology that allows humans to create multiple backups, shift shapes, and resume life from a 'save point' (backup) rather than die allows for a lot of interesting speculation."
http://endervidualism.com/salon/books/stross.htm
"'Torture porn' movies are always luridly made, reveling to some degree in explicit carnage and gore. As such, there is a B-movie atmosphere to these movies, and what could be considered a lack of taste or class on the part of their directors and producers. Nevertheless, a discerning moviegoer with a strong stomach can see that there is often more going on than flowing blood and spilling guts."
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/nowicki_torture_porn.htm
"Jon charts our 'friends' and 'allies' list in Iraq after the military plans to arm Sunni insurgents. "
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?lnk=v&ml_video=88491
"According to the plan, which went into effect at midnight, the U.S. will bus illegal aliens across the border to work as 'guest congressmen' to draft the nation’s new immigration laws. The illegals will remain in the country long enough to write the new immigration laws, after which they will be permitted to run for election for permanent congressman status."
http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6750
"Chroniclers of this country's culture were doubtless shocked at the nearly unprecedented prospect of professional Party-and-Puke plaything Paris Hilton actually doing hard time in the LA lockup. It's a time-honored tradition in Celebrityland that the glitterati don't do jail."
http://www.freecannon.com/CultureShocker.htm
"The most anti-American product to come out of Asia since the introduction of Hello Michael Moore. "
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?lnk=v&ml_video=88618
“I believe liberty lies in the leftward direction and culminates at the farthest left in statelessness, or anarchism. Likewise, as you travel rightward along the line, you move toward bureaucracy and concentrated power and wealth. That direction terminates in, well, tyranny, despotism, and repression.”
http://endervidualism.com/salon/intvw/conger.htm
"One of the most horrendous aspects of the government is the degree to which it dilutes, undercuts and destroys moral responsibility within society. Old women who would never rob their grandchildren at gunpoint feel perfectly entitled to cash their Social Security check. Gentle mothers who would pale at the thought of spanking their children will march self righteously for "free" daycare. Corporations who would never imagine assaulting their customers assiduously lobby for legal benefits--or to escape regulations."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/molyneux/molyneux4.html
"What is being proposed is the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual's lifetime, rather than as the result of chance mutations. This was first suggested by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, before Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection swept the board. However, even Darwin did not reject the idea that Lamarckian inheritance had some part to play, and it did not disappear as a serious idea until 20th-century genetic experiments failed to find evidence for it."
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9333471
"In Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury urges the reader to wake up! start reading! look at what's going on around you! and if thousands of readers woke up and discovered the government is inefficient, top-heavy, tax-mad and happy that people have forgotten there's such a thing as war, well then, the novel hasn't been misinterpreted at all."
http://bwrmontag.blogspot.com/2007/06/bradbury-meant-what-he-said.html
"After two decades of standing in his own rhetorical realm in Congress, Ron Paul is finally gaining some attention. Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, is making an impact in his second bid for the U.S. presidency. The combination of a rabid Internet presence and appearances on nationally televised debates has raised Paul’s profile."
http://www.columbiatribune.com/2007/Jun/20070615News009.asp
Tommy Chong tells Stephen how he would like to punish Paris Hilton.
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?lnk=v&ml_video=88498
"The evidence is surprising but clear: Foreign-born Hispanics are far less likely to end up in prison than native-born whites. They also have low divorce rates. As for learning English, the truth is also more appealing than the myth. Many of the people who have immigrated here don't speak the language well, if at all. But that's a transient phenomenon with a time-tested treatment: reproduction. Surveys indicate that the majority of U.S.-born children of Latino immigrants mainly speak English, and by the third generation, 96 percent prefer English."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/120759.html
"In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, 'If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.' Mr. Gates worried that 'some large company will patent some obvious thing' and use the patent to 'take as much of our profits as they want.' Mr. Gates wrote his 1991 memo shortly after the courts began allowing patents on software in the 1980s. ... Today Microsoft holds more than 6,000 patents. It's not surprising that Microsoft — now an entrenched incumbent — has had a change of heart. But Mr. Gates was right in 1991: patents are bad for the software industry."
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