My Perfect Christmas

Posted on 2014-12-22 by MamaLiberty

By Susan Callaway (AKA MamaLiberty)

My "Charlie Brown" Christmas tree in Wyoming - 2014

1950 was a hard year. My father died and my mother was left with two small children. She was a “housewife” and had no particular marketable skills. She also didn’t have any family who could help her much. She was a recovering alcoholic and suffered from severe depression. Not a pretty picture.

This, of course, was long before the social workers, welfare, food stamps, WIC, or any of the alphabet soup government offices and “programs.” All she had was her faith in God and her children, the few friends who stood with her, and the understanding that it was her responsibility to raise her children and get on with life the best she could.

So, the winter of 1950 found us all staying with a friend’s family in a small Southern California desert town. Not the rich and beautiful part, but the dirt road, snowed in, wood stove outback of the Morongo Valley. There was no telephone or reliable transportation. Continue reading →

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New York Ambush: What next? (Was Libertarian Commentary on the News, #14-52A)

Posted on 2014-12-22 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

I guess that the “big news” this weekend was the assassination of two NYPD cops in their vehicle in Brooklyn: killings immediately claimed as retaliation for the brutal behavior of NYPD, as most recently in the news following the failure of a grand jury to indict cops for the death of Erik Garner.

We have this news also: Police departments on alert after cop killings: “Big-city police departments and union leaders around the country are warning the rank and file to wear bulletproof vests and avoid making inflammatory posts on social media in the days after a man ambushed two officers and shot them to death inside their patrol car.” Continue reading →

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Libertarian Commentary on the News: #14-51F: Schools and Cops Destroy Society

Posted on 2014-12-20 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Just a few days to Christmas, and so, Merry Christmas to all! All I want for Christmas is to get rid of corrupt “public” schools and corrupt cops.  Here are a few reasons:

A blind 7-year-old child, accused of waving his cane around on a school bus, was punished by having his cane taken away, replaced by one of those styrofoam “pool noodles” for two weeks.  I know how important canes ARE to blind people (my great-grandmother had one) and how EVIL this action is.  This is clearly child abuse and a complete overreaction to a simple incident.

Officials at a Virginia school turned an allegedly misbehaving 4-year-old preschooler over to law enforcement, where he was put in handcuffs and shackles and ordered to talk to jail inmates, Thanks to Margaret for this one:  the child may be scarred for life, not just “scared straight,” as seems to have been the object.  Criminals in schools deserve this and worse. Continue reading →

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Libertarian Commentary on the News: #14-51E: Stupid government tricks damage the economy

Posted on 2014-12-19 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

IRS Commissioner threatens temporary IRS shutdown. And this is a bad thing, how? As Personal Liberty.com noted, “It’s hard to tell whether IRS commissioner John Koskinen has a realistic grasp of the way the agency he leads is perceived by more than half the Congress, as well as an unknowable number of American citizens. But he apparently believes casting the agency’s financial troubles in a pitiful light makes for a sympathy-generating tactic.”  Funny.  And here I thought that the IRS worked on the commission system, and since they collected a record amount of taxes in FY 2014, how can they be in the red?  Ah, I know.  It is because they are GOVERNMENT. Continue reading →

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Libertarian Commentary on the News: #14-51D: Money, money, money

Posted on 2014-12-18 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Good morning!

In my commentary on Texas, I discuss a plan whereby cops would be allowed to have stopped motorists pay their fines by credit card directly to the cop, to avoid going to court (or even jail).  Sadly, in many states, cops skip the credit card and go straight for the cash, the contents of the car, and even the car itself.  This “civil forfeiture” is a practice that was theoretically outlawed by the US Constitution, but has grown to be an even greater menace than ever before in English-speaking countries (unlike French- or Spanish- or German-speaking countries).

It is about the money, of course.  The US DOJ has agreements with local police agencies to let the agencies get wealthy off forfeiture for the property “committing” federal crimes. Continue reading →

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Now Hear This

Posted on 2014-12-18 by MamaLiberty

By MamaLiberty

I’m seriously hearing impaired. Though I hear a lot of actual sound, inner ear damage from early childhood restricts how much of it I actually understand because I don’t distinguish one sound from another very well. That is most troubling when listening to human speech, because the different sounds are usually quite subtle. I’ve had to read lips and watch body language all my life.

Now I am starting to experience other hearing loss from simple aging as well. So you can believe that I am very, VERY careful to maintain good hearing protection when I shoot. I’ve made the big mistake of firing a gun, or being nearby when one is fired without protection, and it has not happened often if I could do anything about it. Continue reading →

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Texas: Recent News Reveals Why Texas Is the Poster Child for Failed Democracy

Posted on 2014-12-18 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

I have a bit of a long-term relationship with Texas.  I had ancestors who lived in Texas two and a half centuries before it was named, others who came when it was still a Mexican state, others who came when it was a republic, and some who came after it was admitted to the American Union.  They all came to Texas (and stayed) because it was a land of great opportunity and freedom.  And like other Texians and Texicans and Texans, they fought for that freedom when it was threatened, whether the threat came from Madrid or Ciudad Mexico or the District of Columbia, or Austin.  Sometimes they lost, but usually they won, at least for a time. Continue reading →

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Libertarian Commentary on the News: #14-51C: Economy slipping?

Posted on 2014-12-17 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Good afternoon! Let us look at the economy briefly, with a couple of stories.

Convenience Store Decisions, a professional webzine I receive, notes that demand for gasoline in the US nosedived after Thanksgiving, despite the continued drop in gasoline and diesel prices in much of the country. This is extremely rare: usually demand picks up when prices drop.  But what it DOES indicate is that there are still millions and millions of us who don’t have the money to travel and are having to adjust our lives – even our daily live – to that fact: the economy is rotted and rotten, and the Crash of 2009 is STILL with us, despite all the lies spread by government agencies and politicians and bankers. Continue reading →

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Libertarian Commentary on the News: #14-51B: Terrorism 2001-2014 at home and abroad

Posted on 2014-12-17 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton

Good morning, I think… We’ve got a lot going on, and not much of it is good.  But we could be in Australia… or Pakistan… Sidney was the subject of one of the two commentaries I’ve written and why this one is both short and later than usual.

On top of the Senate Terrorism Report and the Sidney Siege and the latest round of protests and of course, the never-ended beat of killings in the Ummah (the Muslim world) (including the one at Peshwar I discuss below), we have these words of wisdom from Dick Cheney: Terrorist Threat Today ‘As Bad As It Was on 9-11’ (spoken before the Sidney and Peshwar attacks, by the way). Continue reading →

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Lessons Learned from Sydney

Posted on 2014-12-16 by TPOL Nathan

By Nathan Barton and Mama Liberty

To start off with, Australia has disarmed itself. Not a single one of the dozen or so hostages in the cafe were armed with so much as a pocket knife.

The Sydney hostage situation has ended with the death of the alleged hostage taker, a man “well known” to Sidney police, whose “motives are not known” but who had hostages raise the black flag of the Caliphate and other Islamist movements, and who was involved with the suspicious death of his wife some time ago, as well as various threats to families of dead Aussie soldiers.  But the siege ALSO ended with the death of two hostages, during or before an assault with fully automatic weapons – no word on who killed the hostages.

Keep in mind, NO ONE except this man is responsible for his actions.  He could have been a Vietnamese immigrant, or a Scots or Irish immigrant.  But he was an Iranian “refugee” and he had made it clear by his other actions that he was an Islamist. He and no one else made him act upon his beliefs. Continue reading →

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