Posted by Adam de Angeli on 03/14/10

In a rare up-or-down vote on the war and occupation of Afghanistan, Congress voted overwhelmningly to continue the carnage of the occupation of Afghanistan.  Thousands of lives, thrown away to occupy a foreign nation that never did anything to harm America.  The rogues who attacked us were all killed, captured, or fled the country.

Of our 15 representatives, only Bart Stupak, representing the 1st (Upper Peninula and eastern lower peninsula down to Bay City), voted to bring the troops home.  But before you get too excited, keep in mind that Stupak still voted wrong on every vote we noted, including several war spending bills.

While most of Michigan's Democrat and Republican representatives have been consistent supporters of the warfare state, it was notable that John Conyers chose not to vote.  Perhaps no other Congressman has paid so much lip service to the anti-war movement and done so little. 

Both freshman democrats Mark Schauer and Gary Peters voted for the war, and just about every other big-government bill they could.  So much for "throwing the bums out."

Silver lining to a terrible vote: tremendous speeches by Dr. Paul, Alan Grayson, and John Duncan.

Posted by Adam de Angeli on 03/02/10
Last updated 03/02/10

Republican candidate for attorney general, Bill Schuette, and state senator Alan Cropsey (R-Dewitt), recently published the following opinion piece in the Detroit News on Feb 26:

The Detroit News is correct that Michigan needs to adopt sweeping reforms and enact cuts, rather than crippling tax hikes, to balance the state's budget. But the options endorsed by The News to deal with the cost of incarcerating prisoners in Michigan -- ending truth-in-sentencing, re-establishing good time for prisoners and releasing thousands of inmates early -- are every bit as wrong as raising taxes ("Shorter sentences: Restoring prisoner good-time credits and early paroles would help Michigan balance its budget," Feb. 22).

Instead of releasing thousands of prisoners early, Michigan taxpayers would be better served by lowering the cost of incarcerating prisoners. In Michigan, the cost per prisoner per year is $32,800, according to the Pew Center on the States. By contrast, Ohio incarcerates prisoners for $25,300, while Texas does it for $15,600. If Michigan spent the same as Texas, our budget could be reduced by $700 million.

Interesting argument, except that cuts in one aspect of the budget don't preclude cuts in another.  Regardless of whether cuts are made elsewhere, restoring good-time credits and parole will still save more money than incarcerating people.

The opinion continues:

There are several reforms Michigan could adopt to lower costs. For example, Saginaw County spends 50 percent less per prisoner per day to feed its population than the state. And reducing frivolous prisoner lawsuits by instituting mediation has saved millions in other jurisdictions.

Instituting mediation also reduces legitimate lawsuits.  There is no question among educated people that prison conditions are conducive to illegal abuse of inmates, denial of basic human rights, and extreme negligence.

Here's a true story from someone in America's prisons:

Inmate Al, a 77-year-old oseopathic doctor, was sentenced to jail for 1 year and 1 day for the following crime against humanity: one of his office assistants was not properly licensed. After several months here, Al could no longer see properly because he suffered from a severe condition of droopy eyelids, and needed surgery. Since there was no option for medical care, Al solved the problem by stealing a roll of scotch tape, and taping his eyelids open whenever he needed to walk. Unfortunately, Al's medical conditions worsened, and he no longer could walk, or control many of his bodily functions. Nothing was done. Al's condition deteriorated so much that he was finally rushed to the hospital. With only a few months left on his sentence (all of which could have been legally spent in home confinement) the judge ordered his release. Local "management" refused. Al's family was restricted from seeing him, and he finally needed to be transfered to another medical facility. He was refused an ambulance for the transfer. Al died in custody. Al was a decent guy, and certainly did not deserve a death sentence. I don't know how these people sleep at night.

So if Schuette wants to save the state money by denying convicts their right to trial, in part to give the state government a break on its budget crisis, I find that revolting.

Anyway, Schuette & Cropsey continue:

Sadly, Michigan is the most violent state in the Great Lakes region. Yet only two out of every 10 felons go to prison in Michigan; the national average is twice that.

And remember this: Michigan prisons are not filled with bookies and bad check writers. Only the worst felons end up in prison -- murderers, rapists, child molesters, drug lords and career criminals. Releasing them early makes no sense.

...except for the half that are there for non-violent drug offenses that the government has legitimate authority to criminalize.   And when they actually show real dedication to reforming, in the opinion of prison authorities who know better than a judge who threw them away years ago.  Releasing inmates on good behavior frees up a bed for violent criminals let go because of overcrowding.

Also, Schuette is bald-faced lying here.  Not "only the worst felons end up in prison"--so do innocent people, by the thousands.  I once spoke with someone acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon.  He told me flatly: "The only factor in the trial is who your lawyer is.  Nobody cares whether or not you were justified attacking someone invading your home.  All they care about is who your lawyer is and who he knows."

Schuette & Cropsey close with the usual tripe:

We fully support reforms to lower the cost of corrections. But releasing dangerous prisoners early is a terrible idea. Protecting Michigan families must remain the first obligation of government.

Then, you don't fully support reforms to lower the cost of corrections, do you?  Only "starve the helpless" reforms.  Only a bigot would refer to every prison inmate as "dangerous."  And paroling a convict is not letting them out "early."  It's letting them out when the prison judges them fit to return to society.  The only thing I can imagine worse than letting bureaucrats make a decision is having it written in stone as law.

Well, Schuette wrote that to appeal to his supporters.  Maybe it even worked.  Let him reach out to them, then, and leave me alone.

Posted by Adam de Angeli on 03/02/10
Last updated 03/02/10

Local C4L members organized a presentation by Jan BenDor of the Michigan Clean Elections Project and Tom Barrow, candidate for mayor of Detroit who believes the voting machines affected the outcome of his election:

Part 2 Tom Barrow

Part 3 Q & A

See also: Tom Barrow's Recount Hearing

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Posted by Adam de Angeli on 02/27/10

A recent Washington Post article beats the war drums for Iran with the following statement:

Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, spoke of Israel's eventual "demise and annihilation" and said the countries of the region could create a future "without Zionists and without colonialists."

But I'm not so sure about either count.  Four years ago, an article was published that thoroughly deconstructed Ahmadinejad's original statements, and noted that the accusations were questionable at best.

On his then-recent comment about "wiping Israel off the map," the expression was fabricated whole cloth; it did not appear in any direct translation of his words, which rather said that Zionism would be "erased from the pages of history."  In other words, he was not talking about physical annihilation, he was talking about political defeat, just as the Soviets were defeated politically rather than militarily.

On Holocaust denial, the authors noted that Ahmadinejad used carefully worded statements that either attacked the exploitation of the Holocaust by those who would foment war (see this video where Norman Finkelstein, son of Holocaust survivors, explains the assertion), or criticized Europe where most countries imprison people who make outrageous statements about the Holocaust (never mind free speech).  Even at Iran's "Holocaust denial conference," he never endorsed a single person there--the intent of the event, however miscalculated, was to cast Europe as the pot that calls the kettle black for criticizing censorship in Iran.

The full article is linked here.  Given the press's disposition to exaggerate and mis-characterize Ahmadinejad's statements then, it's hard to believe this situation is different.

And we have seen this all before.  Saddam Hussein was said to be the new Hitler.  He was said to be a madman.  He was said to be a threat to his neighbors.  We went in with a quarter million troops and destroyed the country, shattered the lives of tens of thousands of troops and by some estimates millions of Iraqi lives, only to discover there had been no threat in the first place.

We owe it to ourselves to really examine every angle of the Israel/Iran conflict in detail before we commit ourselves to another mistake in which millions of lives hang in the balance.

Posted by Adam de Angeli on 02/22/10
Last updated 02/23/10

They say ten thousand people attended this year's CPAC, the largest ever. I don't doubt it. The comparisons to Woodstock are reasonable. Amidst the scheduled events, it was an ocean of chaos.

To this connoisseur of irony, nothing I've seen before compared to some of the things I saw here. John Ashcroft, proponent of the Constitution-shredding Patriot Act, was presented with the "Defender of the Constitution" award. A member of YAF (Young Americans for Freedom, not to be confused with Young Americans for Liberty) boasted of his success in bringing David Horowitz to his campus as a victory for free speech: Horowitz heads an organization that lobbies universities to fire professors for having controversial views, regardless of academic rigor. And following Ron Paul's address to CPAC attendees, which focused on the madness of interventionism, I left the building to overhear a man boast of having obtained an autograph from the navigator of the Enola Gay—the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

There were many strange encounters in the sprawling hotel. I once looked up to see the man walking past me was disgraced South Carolina governor Mark Sanford (a pity—he had a good record). Dodging past a dense crowd of moving people, I realized I had just cut in front of Newt Gingrich. And when I took the rear elevator up to the lobby, the door opened just as Glenn Beck and an entourage of college-age supporters were posing for a photo right in front of me.

I didn't approach any of them. I had nothing to say.

As the scheduled events went, a pattern quickly emerged: C4L-sponsored events were incredible; other events, incredibly stale.

Case in point: CPAC held a "debate" called "Does The Need for Security Trump Liberty?" The event was prefaced with John Ashcroft being given the aforementioned "Champion of the Consitution" award, followed by a speech in which Ashcroft argued that "you don't need to trade liberty for security; you can have both"- not by putting liberty first, but that we'll have more liberty in the long run by strip-searching travelers and confiscating their pocket knives, than if we don't.

The panel on this "debate" was Jim Gilmore (Chairman of the National Council on Readiness & Preparedness and President of USA Secure, both related to "homeland security"), Viet Dinh (architect of the Patriot Act), Rep. Dan Lundgren (votes for homeland security funding and surveillance at all times), and Bob Barr, representing the other side. Of course it wasn't lost on the audience that Barr had abandoned the Republican Party to run as the Libertarian Party nominee for President in 2008, and that he stabbed Ron Paul in the back during the 2008 campaign, ditching a press conference with Dr. Paul to hold his own to condemn Dr. Paul. So the side of liberty was represented by someone everyone in the audience had one reason to despise or another.

I walked out in disgust minutes after the event began.

Contrast that with Campaign For Liberty's panel, "Why True Conservatives Oppose Interventionism," with Jacob Hornberger, Bruce Fein, Karen Kwiatkowski, and Philip Giraldi. It was not a debate, but it didn't pretend to be. Each speaker presented unique angles on the contradiction between liberty and the warfare state. Philip Giraldi set the tone by contrasting the utterly failed War on Terror and Department of Homeland Security with pre-existing, standard law enforcement practices known to be effective. Hornberger, speaking last, brilliantly broke the issue down into four major arguments, which he concisely struck out of the park: 1) that the astronomical cost of war feeds a bureaucracy that is not fundamentally different from any other bureaucracy; 2) that the War on Terror is actually creating more terrorism; 3) that the war undermines the Constitution and liberty; and 4) that opposing war is supporting individual liberty. It was the perfect wrap-up to the detailed presentations by Bruce Fein and Karen Kwiatkowski.

At all of C4L's events were many C4L members, but I was always fascinated by the interplay between them and the other attendees. There were a lot of heated questions at the end of the anti-war panel. I was reminded of Norman Finkelstein, who after a controversial two-hour speech opened the Q&A by saying, (paraphrasing from memory) "now you have shown me a great deal of respect for sitting through two hours of listening to me say things you don't agree with and might even despise, so it's only fair that I show you the respect by allowing you to ask anything you want."

I found the average CPAC attendee quite taken by all of our events. Of the few people who left our events sourly, they were invariably college-age, and had nothing to say of them but shallow statements of hate. This time, it was the elder generation there to listen with open minds.

Not that I fault the youth. Doubtless many of them were employees or interns for the various mainstream groups, emotionally committed to the mainstream.

Of the C4L events, my favorite was the Our American Dream panel with Gov. Gary Johnson, Tim Carney, and Mike Church.

I must admit that until the event I did not know who Mike Church was. I don't listen to talk radio very much. His speech floored me. Not because of its top-notch delivery with so many perfectly-timed jokes, but because he actually talked about something I've been waiting to hear somebody talk about: criticizing the Constitution and questioning the motives of the Founders. The Constitution is the greatest political document written by man, so says Andrew Napolitano. Church observed: what about the very thing it replaced, the Articles of Confederation, which worried Madison and the Founders for its lack of a powerful central government?

Church even took it a step further than I had been willing to go, by expressing fearlessness toward a Constitutional convention. I've written elsewhere that a "ConCon" would be a bad idea-"Given public opinion, we'd be more likely to get a Constitution less amicable to individual rights than the one we have now." But Church had a point: how much less amicable to individual rights could it possibly be? Individual rights are all but ignored by lawmakers today, with no punishment for them and little hope in the courts to stop them. Maybe Church is right.

Following Church was Tim Carney, a reporter for the Washington Examiner and protege of Robert Novak. I haven't read his new book, Obamanomics, but I did read The Big Ripoff of a couple years ago, and it was a gem. Readable yet scholarly, Carney tore open the myth that "protecting people from the big corporations" was the Democratic politicians' view of government, and exploded much hypocrisy from the Right on the matter as well. Come to think of it, I read his book around the time I was shedding my leftist economic beliefs. I joined the Ron Paul Revolution for the foreign policy, civil liberties, monetary policy, and globalism issues; it was from reading books like Carney's that the free market began really making sense.

Tim Carney's talk was great. He broke hearts describing all of the corporatist scams of the Bush regime, but ended on a positive note, that conservatives can capture popular support if they tackle this issue of corporate-government partnership head-on, with a rallying cry of "end corporate welfare" rather than Ayn Rand's "greed is good" angle. He closed with another potential rallying cry: "Let Goldman Sachs fail!" It was academically and tactically enlightening. I cannot wait to post the video to our website.

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson closed the event with a speech that I can only describe as comprehensive. Johnson is rumored to be preparing for a presidential run, and his credentials are impeccable. He was New Mexico's first two-term governor, and before being term-limited from a third, he vetoed more than 750 bills, more than all other governors put together. "People ask me sometimes what I think of the line-item veto. I've used it thousands of times, so yes, I support it." He recalled opposing the occupation of Iraq since before it began, and spoke out on the Fed, and many more issues in turn. He was eye-to-eye with Ron Paul on every issue he raised. I left the event with visions of the possibilities if we had not one, but two real candidates on the stages in the Presidential debates.

But before long I had to buckle down; I was on a panel at a CPAC event the following morning, and needed to make notes. I'd already heard every sentence in my head, but needed to set them down on paper and arrange them in the right sequence.

The panel was entitled "Using Technology to Mobilize Conservatives." The panel was me, Thomas Keeley of Freedomworks, and Jimmy LaSalvia of GOProud, a gay Republican organization. I met up with LaSalvia a half hour before the event; his group had been catapulted into the spotlight by an incident that had occurred just yesterday, and we wondered whether there might be an incident during our panel.

Here's what happened: just before Ron Paul's address, CPAC had hosted a panel called "Two-minute activist" where eighteen college students gave two-minute accounts of their effective activism. Most were members of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF); none were from Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), Campaign For Liberty's "sister" organization of college students. About halfway through, one student began by saying, (paraphrasing from memory) "I'd like to thank CPAC for permitting GOProud to be here; liberty includes freedom of expression and I'm glad to see that all conservative groups are welcome here." His statements was met with some scorn but mostly applause from the audience, and he proceeded with his speech.

Four students later, a YAF member of a California chapter began by saying (this is quoted from video) "I'd like condemn CPAC for bring GOPride [sic]to this event..." Booing erupted immediately. After a few half-witted remarks about natural rights and "the natural end of the reproductive act being reproduction," he retorted the wave of booing with "The lesbians of Smith College protest better than you do. Bring it." Boos got louder. Suddenly, he declared: "Yeah YAL is my enemy, Jeff Frazee, guess what, you just made an enemy out of me, buddy. (pointing) Yeah, you." He repeated it and stormed off the stage.

One can only wonder what the CPAC planners expected, putting a panel of college students from a rival organization right before the man every YAL and C4L member wanted to see. Were they trying to provoke an incident? Perish the thought.

Anyhow, this put LaSalvia in the spotlight; he was worried he might be ambushed with a pie in the face, or something.

As it turned out, everything went quite smoothly. We each gave seven-minute presentations, followed by Q&A. I discussed social networking versus social mobilization, the necessity of developing your own social mobilization platform where social networks are peripheral, and basic information for doing so.

Q&A went well; I noticed that many of the questions related to cutting-edge technology (eg "What do you think about the future of smartphone applications?") and my responses centered on the idea that while one should mind the cutting edge, most people are not there. With most people, you're lucky if they get your email within 48 hours. Yet people who develop so much time to these cutting-edge phone applications don't even keep an email list.

The event was not taped (it was a CPAC event, not a C4L event) but I plan to adapt my lecture as an article to be published on campaignforliberty.com.

Other than that, whew... the whole conference was a blast. Dr. Paul winning the straw poll was the perfect end to a perfect event. Regardless of the mass media's belittling of Dr. Paul's straw poll victory, CPAC is not just a conservative conference, it is a conservative leadership conference. Some people there were sworn enemies, but a lot of people learned a lot from us. And while there were a lot of Ron Paul supporters running around, we were not 31% of 10,000 people. Even 31% of the 24% is still 744 people-more than C4L brought, and it's doubtful each of us voted before polls closed at noon on the second day of the conference. This was no "orchestrated" victory-we turned some people out, as all organizations do, but we won because we weren't the only people there who supported Ron Paul. We are breaking through.

The media can belittle the victory all they want. Any observer can see the value of it. Huffington Post's article generated a whopping 8,100 comments. Why are readers of a leftist website so interested? Perhaps because Dr. Paul's views on foreign policy, civil liberties, and monetary policy are closer to their's than those of their Democratic leaders.

CPAC was chaotic, it was surreal, and it was the best ever. I can't wait for 2011. I predict Dr. Paul will fully double the runner-up next time, and it will be even more energizing than this year's.

Posted 02/22/10 Heather D Port Byron, IL

Sounds like an amazing event. Thank you for this detailed report.

Posted 02/22/10 Scott D Chicago, IL

Was great meeting you last weekend Adam! Best of Luck.