by Nathan Barton

Good morning!  We see a lot of politics games being played here at home this week.  Here are a few.

The folks over at Godfather Politics make a mighty interesting point: if the [putative] President of the United States, US Attorney General and now state Attorney Generals [according to Holder] do not have to enforce laws that they disagree with, does this set the precedent for American citizens to not obey laws they disagree with? All of these elected officials swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land, but if they don’t have to live up to their oath, then we as citizens should not be expected to live up to our supposed duty to obey the laws.”  I look at it this way: the powers-that-be have almost NEVER bothered to follow the laws that they enforce so harshly against others.  It doesn’t matter whether they call themselves conservatives or liberals:  they are hypocritical.  But to use THEM as an excuse is likely to make us just as hypocritical.  The best reason to disobey an unjust or immoral or ungodly law is because it IS unjust, immoral, or ungodly: we don’t need to pay attention to the likes of the “messiah” or his minion, Holder.

The writer over at Last Resistance DOES say it is probably the only time he will ever praise the legislature, but he does for the new “slowpoke” law they are passing.  I guess I can see his point, but the real problem is that government agencies set speed limits NOT based on science (although we try and tell ourselves that traffic speed studies are scientific) but based on politics, from the state legislature down to the same little old whinging woman that wants to go 65 in the left lane – unless there is a wet road or a touch of snow or… or…, and then she wants to go 45.

This bit of news from L. Neil Smith should not surprise anyone except that they are getting more bold, and the arrogance is at an all-time high.  This FEMA guy might have been one of Sherman’s foragers, the way he behaved.  And there are tens of thousands out there like him: not just in Connecticut.  People who are preparing for disasters need to remember that no matter how bad a disaster is, government will make it worse.  And worse again.

I may have missed it, but I don’t think this bit of news about Idaho stamping “void” on the First Amendment made it into many “Libertarian” news outlets.  It is a perfect example of “red-state tyranny” as the guys at Political Outcast labeled it.  Is this an example of farmers being almost as sacrosanct as soldiers: they can do no wrong?  Or is this just the normal Republican socialism/fascism mix that has been around since Fremont started the GOP?    Of course, as I’ve noted above, the powers-that-be don’t really care about whether they and their fair-haired children obey the law (even animal cruelty law: look at PETA and all the Humane League euthanasia out there), just whether the cannon-fodder and serfs do.

Information from a reasonably trusted but non-website source. A mother’s womb should be the safest place a child can ever be, yet in 2008 the abortion rate was 4,111 times higher than the overall national murder rate. There were 5.4 murders for every 100,000 people [already born or born that year] in America in 2008. In the same year, 22,200 out of every 100,000 pregnancies were ended by abortion.  Of course, they weren’t really comparing apples and oranges. Now, there were 305 million residents in the US that year (estimate), but only 4.2 million births and 825,000 induced abortions that year, which is “only” 0.27 abortions per 100,000 people, or just 1/20 the number of murders.  But that STILL amounts to 1 OUT OF 5 UNBORN CHILDREN KILLED INTENTIONALLY.  The “Children’s Defense Fund” claims that 2,947 “children” were killed by guns that year.  (The number may be lower, since most hoploclasts claim anyone under the age of 21 to be a “child”)  That is STILL 280 times less than unborn children aborted.  Sodom, Gomorrah, the worshippers of Ba’al and Moloch and Milcom, had NOTHING on the formerly united States.

Kentucky: proposed bill allows Rand Paul to run for Senate and for U.S. President according to Personal Liberty, who says to expect opposition from State Democrats.  They, of course, have a vested interest in that, figuring that they have a little more hope in a border state with no incumbent in the Senate race.  But the GOP types who introduced that show that they STILL believe in men on white horses and other myths, and think that they can counter the current cult of the “messiah” with a personality cult of their own.  Talk about racing to the bottom:  presumably if Rand wins both races, he can nominate his own successor or have a puppet governor do so.  Nero’s horse, anyone?  Why not just save ALL that money by having the winner of the 2016 prez race select replacements (or reappoint) all 33 or 34 senators up for a new term in 2016?

Mark Thornton over at Von Mises had an interesting bit of news and commentary about economic prosperity and medical cannabis in the various states, as shown in a recent poll.  While there is certainly some correlation, there is not necessarily a direct cause and effect.  “Libertarian” is not a good label to apply to ANY state, and economic freedom does have an impact on prosperity, but many of these states with MMJ have very little economic freedom.  We should be asking ourselves how much more prosperous states like North Dakota or California would be if they had more personal AND economic freedom.