Originally published on Ad Libertad:

The battle lines are forming in Washington DC. Barring any tricks which the embattled (racist, redneck, kooky, backward, radical, unelectable) libertarian wing of the Republican Party may still have up its sleeve, it seems to be another contest between Marxist-Leninist Socialists who will take everything we have in the name of social welfare, and National Socialists who will take everything we have in the name of national security. Much like in Alien vs. Predator, whoever wins, we lose.

I think we’ve crossed the Rubicon toward tyranny and fiscal ruin long ago, and the important thing now is to brace for calamity. A fiscally conservative friend of mine is appalled by my cynicism. He invokes America’s greatness and my veteran status in an attempt to bring me back to the noble cause of shutting up and blindly supporting the Republican Party. He recently encouraged me to watch Allen West’s speech at CPAC 2012. He wants, presumably, for me to give people like Allen West my time, money, attention and respect, because nothing is more important that defeating Obama (. . . says the Predator about the Alien).

In the speech, Allen West goes on at length about the virtues of the Constitution. He said, “[The founders] laid out in no uncertain terms the types of things government would have the right to do, and the types of things it wouldn’t.” I’d love to hear him reconcile this with his discussion of “a Chamberlin-Churchill moment,” and “kinetic solutions” to Iran’s nuclear research, and “the precipice of World War Three.” Does he know the Constitution requires presidents to seek congressional declarations of war? Or does he, like most politicians, only believes in the Constitution when it foils his political opponents.

He said, “The founders knew that if government were allowed to restrict the freedom of the people . . . freedom would not long survive,” yet he voted in favor of renewing Patriot Act provisions.

He decries reckless spending: “We’ve allowed the federal bureaucracy to balloon out of control,” yet he voted in raise the debt ceiling. When questioned by Young America’s Foundation’s Ron Meyer, he asked for the thing all politicians have always requested: unity and support. Presumably, Allen West’s rapid betrayal of the principles he invoked in his campaign would be remedied if only I gave him more money, time, attention and respect. . . .

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Reasons this is pathetic:

1- Aside from prisoners, soldiers are the people over whom the government has the most direct control. They can’t even prevent

2- A fat Army represents the bureaucratization of the military.

3- Gives Michelle Obama more opportunities to talk about obesity as a national security issue.

4- Weight loss injection do NOT need a government subsidy. Any company that develops this stands to make a fucking fortune.

Officials for the US Army are worried that its soldiers are getting to fat and to combat that issue they plan on injecting soldiers with fat.

While it might seem odd to think that fat injections can help soldiers lose weight there are actually two types of fat, the first is white adipose tissue which causes weight gain while the second is brown adipose tissue which actually helps lose weight.

A recent study has found that brown adipose tissue can burn up to 250 calories in a three hour period and even more special is the fact that it uses conventional fat cells to fuel it’s work, burning energy from those cells. The study also found that exercise can help create additional brown fat cells.

Researchers are now attempting to create the brown adipose cells in a laboratory at which point they will be injected into overweight soldiers.

If you aren’t in the Army and you want weight loss injections you might be in luck, a Boston-based company is already working on a commercial treatment.

In the Army’s researcher note in which they granted money to examine the use of brown adipose tissue they wrote:

“Obesity and its associated metabolic complications…are becoming increasingly prevalent in military personnel. Increasing [brown fat] by about 50 grams in obese patients could induce strong weight loss and improve metabolic status.”

If all goes as planned researchers will isolate brown adipose progenitor cells which they will then use to generate new adipose cellsin the lab. If all goes as planned soldiers will receive “transplantation therapy” to shed their extra pounds. (Read more)

Glenn Greenwald is one of the most honest reporters out there. He reminds me of Henry Hazlitt who worked for the NY Times and had always considered himself a progressive. When FDR’s fascist New Deal came about, he assumed all his colleagues would oppose it. He was wrong.

During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:

The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to close the brig at Guantanamo Bay and to change national security policies he criticized as inconsistent with U.S. law and values, has little to fear politically for failing to live up to all of those promises.

The survey shows that 70 percent of respondents approve of Obama’s decision to keep open the prison at Guantanamo Bay. . . . The poll shows that 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay open, even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed.

Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.

Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it:

Fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year. Support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists stays high, dropping only somewhat when respondents are asked specifically about targeting American citizens living overseas, as was the case with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American killed in September in a drone strike in northern Yemen.

The Post‘s Greg Sargent obtained the breakdown on these questions and wrote today:

The number of those who approve of the drone strikes drops nearly 20 percent when respondents are told that the targets are American citizens. But that 65 percent is still a very big number, given that these policies really should be controversial.

And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

It’s hard to imagine that Dems and liberals would approve of such policies in quite these numbers if they had been authored by George W. Bush.

Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.

There was a fantastic mises daily article about creeping taxes and tyranny in the Roman Empire. Available in audio too. http://mises.org/daily/3663

Here are some excerpts:

- The advice that the Emperor Septimius Severus gave to his two sons, Caracalla and Geta: “live in harmony; enrich the troops; ignore everyone else.”

- “nobody should have any money but I, so that I may bestow it upon the soldiers.”

- “. . . he doubled the inheritance taxes paid by Roman citizens. When this was not sufficient to meet his needs, he admitted almost every inhabitant of the empire to Roman citizenship. What had formerly been a privilege now became simply a means of expanding the tax base.”

- “One of the Christian fathers, Saint Gregory Nazianzus, commented that war is the mother of taxes. I think that’s a wonderful thing to keep in mind: war is the mother of taxes. And it’s also, of course, the mother of inflation.”

- “the class known as the decurions. This was your prosperous, small- and middle-landowning class who were the dominant elements of the cities of the Roman Empire. They were the class from whom the municipal counsels, magistrates, and officials were chosen. . . . they had donated, not merely their time, but also their wealth to the betterment of the urban environment. Building stadiums and bathhouses, and repairing the streets and providing for pure water were considered benefactions. It was a kind of philanthropic act and their reward was, of course, public recognition and esteem. . . .The central government could no longer collect its taxes effectively, so they made the decurion class collectively responsible for getting revenues and passing them on to the imperial government. The decurions, of course, had as much difficulty as anyone else in doing this, and the returns were, again, frequently inadequate. So the government solved that problem by simply passing a law that any taxes that decurions could not collect from others, they would have to pay out of their own pockets.”

- “merchants and artisans were now compelled to make deliveries of goods. So that if you had a factory for making garments, you now had to deliver so many garments to the government requisitions. If you had ships, you had to carry government goods in your ships. In other words, what we have here is a kind of nationalization of private enterprises, and this nationalization means that the people who use their money and their talent are now compelled to serve the state whether they like it or not. When people tried to get out of this they were then, by law, compelled to remain in the occupation that they were in. In other words, you couldn’t change your job or your business. This was not sufficient because, after all, death is a relief from taxes. So the occupations were now made hereditary. When you died, your son had to take up your profession. If your father was a shoemaker, you had to be a shoemaker. These laws started by being restricted to the defense-oriented industries but, of course, gradually it was realized that everything is defense-oriented.”

- “The Roman people, the mass of the population, had but one wish after being captured by the barbarians: to never again fall under the rule of the Roman bureaucracy.”

Most military acquisitions are malpractice. Some just cost us miserable taxpayers more than others.

Of all the stinking heaps of corruption in Washing DC, I don’t think any reeks worse that military acquisitions — that’s because there’s just a gigantic myth of noble military service to hide behind.

From Air Force magazine:

F-35 Concurrency was “Acquisition Malpractice”: In retrospect, hurrying the F-35 strike fighter into production was, to say the least, a big mistake, according to the Pentagon’s acquisition executive nominee. “Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done. But we did it,” said Frank Kendall, acting acquisition czar, during a Center for Security and International Studies-sponsored address in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Kendall said the department made “optimistic predictions” when it started production that it had good-enough design tools and simulations and modeling such that it wouldn’t have to worry about discovering problems with the aircraft in testing. That “was wrong and now we’re paying the price,” he said. The F-35 program “is probably an extreme example” of transitioning from development to production too early, said Kendall. On the bright side, all three F-35 variants “are making progress,” he noted. “We’re committed to that program. It is the future of tactical air for the Department of Defense.” Further, “we don’t, at this point, see anything that would preclude continuing production at a reasonable rate,” he said. (CSIS’ transcript of event) [emphasis added]

They put the most expensive plane *EVER* into production before a test flight???

See also: US: Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Ron Paul’s CNN Walkout interview conducted by reporter-wife of huge war profiteer

Well, well, it turns out hit job specialist Gloria Borger is married to Lance Morgan. Morgan is according to the web site of his employer, Powell Tate,”chief communications strategist at Powell Tate in Washington, D.C. He specializes in developing and executing communications strategies for public policy debates, crisis communications and media training.”

So who might be the clients of Powell Tate, where Borger’s husband is “chief communications strategist and crisis communications” adviser for?

Just about every part of the military industrial-complex that Ron Paul wants to shrink or shutdown.http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2011/12/hot-ron-paul-walks-out-during-cnn.html

See also,

Uncut video shows Paul did NOT ‘storm out’ of CNN interview

The uncut version of a CNN interview between Ron Paul and Gloria Borger surfaced online Sunday, leading many Paul supporters to claim that the footage shows the presidential hopeful didn’t “storm out” of the interview, as some media outlets reported based off the edited version that aired on CNN.

In the interview, Borger pushed the Texas Republican about newsletters from the ’80s and ’90s that bear his name and contained racist and homophobic content. In the originally aired video, Paul seemed to walk out on Borger after a terse rebuttal.

But the uncut version shows that Paul and Borger were standing up for the entire interview, and that Paul actually responded to questions about the newsletter for almost three minutes before walking off, and that the interview was likely over.

Paul was clearly irritated by the line of questioning, which he says he covered at length with CNN in another interview the day before, but early reports seemed to indicate that Paul fled the interview to avoid the issue.

The full interview lasted more than eight minutes, and covered issues not aired by CNN, such as negative campaign advertisements and the payroll tax cut.

A post on a website for Paul supporters described the interview controversy as a “creative editing hit job.”

Frum goes after Paul. Typical slander from a typical war mongering, chicken hawk, neo-con.

It’s sad and squalid that Ron Paul finished ahead of Jon Huntsman. Gov. Huntsman has the elements of a president; Ron Paul is not even a fanatic. He’s a bunco artist. May I repeat something I’ve said about him before? (The piece can be read here on CNN.com)

Ron Paul is something more (or less) than a racist crank. As Michael Brendan Dougherty aptly observed in the Atlantic last week:

(Read more)

Al “Skinny” Shartpton banging the race drum

See also:

Compilation of Black Ron Paul supporters

Al Gore encourages voters to dismiss Ron Paul as a ‘silly’ candidate

Analyzing the returns, Gore said, “He does not have a ceiling in fantasy land, but in the real world when people take a look at his actual positions, when Republicans take a look on at his actual positions, come on.”

Americans’ frustration with the economic and political situation in the country was, Gore said, the only reason Paul would even been considered by voters.

“That all is part of a general attitude that you know, let’s just play 52-card pick up,” he mused, “let’s just up end things and do something radically different. And I think he does culturally, psychologically tap into that.”

“At some point when people look seriously at what his positions are, I mean getting rid of the Federal Reserve,” Gore jeered. “Look, the wars are enormously unpopular, but bringing all the American troops home from no matter what the dangerous situations are? It’s so silly.”

Gore additionally claimed that Paul wasn’t being pummeled sufficiently for so-called “racist” passages in newsletters from the 1980s, which Paul claims he did not write.
(Read more & see video)

Marginalizing Ron Paul

It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

. . . .

It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Fed sits at the center of the rot and bears the major responsibility for tolerating the runaway mortgage-backed securities scam that is at the core of our economic crisis. After the meltdown it was the Fed that led ultra-secret machinations to bail out the banks while ignoring the plight of their exploited customers. (Read more)

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Calls Ron Paul A Fraud!

Ron Paul Booed by Insane Debate Audience for Endorsing the Golden Rule

CNN’s Dana Bash is Worried About Ron Paul

Jon Stewart Exposes Ron Paul Media Bias After New Hampshire Primary

National security advisers to the Republican presidential candidates have ties to defense, homeland security and energy companies that have received at least $40 billion in federal contracts since 2008.

Five of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s 41 national security and foreign policy advisers have links to companies that last year alone received at least $7.9 billion in federal contracts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Government analyst Christopher Flavelle. Of that, $7.3 billion came from the Department of Defense.

Romney and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who are leading in the polls, have advisers who sit on the board of directors of BAE Systems Inc., which has received at least $37 billion in U.S. government contracts since 2008, the most of any of the companies with ties to Republican national security advisers. (Read more)

Wow!

1) Starting tonight, Ron Paul will begin winning caucuses. This will be followed by either an assassination, or, in the long term, prosperity. Remember, they killed Bobby Kennedy after he began winning primaries. The chances of this are probably small. I do think there are powerful people and institution who would consider it.

If Ron Paul is assassinated, it’ll be followed by isolated instances of violence against federal institutions. These will be used to discredit anything libertarian. Government will declare new powers for itself, and the gigantic anti-terrorism apparatus will turn its full attention to Americans. An assassination would also be followed by large scale tax protests which would cripple the state. They will resort to printing money and slander tax protesters as domestic terrorists.

If, on the other hand, Ron Paul wins the primary, he will defeat Obama. Democrats will defect en masse to support him. The media mud slingers will realize their impotence. The markets will celebrate, perhaps with the exception of large commercial banks. They will threaten to blow-up the economy as revenge upon a public that elected Ron Paul. We will call their bluff.

2) At least one country will leave the Euro Zone. The EU will remain intact, but calls to end it will grow louder and more insistent. The turmoil in Europe will continue to create the illusion of economic stability in the U.S. and capital will flow away from the headlines, but once things have stabilized there, expect the much bigger and much more destructive problems of the U.S. to resume their unfolding. The prices of precious metals will resume their climb. Let’s hope Ron Paul is in power so the crisis isn’t used to lead us further down the road to serfdom.

3) SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a thinly veiled attempt to censor the internet will fail. However, it’s proponents will very quickly put another piece of legislation on the table. They will not stop until it is passed.

4) A massive troop reduction will occur in Afghanistan. It will be done for political reasons. The media will spend weeks praising Obama.

5) A galvanizing incident will be provoked or staged in Iran. There will be an outbreak of hostility, but the United States, despite the propaganda from neo-con politicians and the media will not fully commit to a war.

See also, predictions for:
2011
2010
2009
2008

As part of an ongoing investigation into military mortuary services, the Air Force admits it dumped the partial cremated remains of at least 274 servicemembers in Virginia landfills.

Craig Whitlock and Mary Pat Flaherty of The Washington Post report the dumping was hidden from families who had agreed to allow the military to dispose of their loved ones remains in “a dignified and respectful manner.”

The Air Force halted the practice three years ago, just prior to the 2009 ruling by President Obama to lift the ban on news coverage of fallen troops imposed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. Until then, the mortuary activities of the military were hidden from scrutiny.

The Air Force went on to tell The Post that it cannot say how many remains went to the dump and that to find out it would have to search the records of more than 6,300 servicemembers handled by the mortuary since 2001.
(Read more)

A few days ago, some Republican senators attempted to lay the groundwork for a shooting war with Russia. I wish I were exaggerating.

Last week, while most senators were focused on the important national issues of war funding and Americans’ constitutional liberties, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) seemed more concerned with the fate of a foreign country. Behind the scenes, Rubio moved to have a unanimous consent vote that would have hastened Georgia’s entry into NATO. The unanimous consent vote never happened because Senator Rand Paul single-handedly prevented it.

This is not a triviality. Make no mistake: Bringing Georgia into NATO could lead to a new military conflict for the United States, which is why any move that would facilitate Georgia’s entry into the alliance should be publicly debated. Rubio’s attempt to push this through by unanimous consent — that is to say, without any formal debate or vote — is highly suspect and calls into question the senator’s better judgment.

But what Sen. Rubio is advocating is nothing new. Examining the political context of McCain’s declaration of solidarity with Georgia in 2008 should give Americans pause about the Washington establishment’s foreign policy agenda. After the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, Pat Buchanan wrote:

Who is Randy Scheunemann? He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States. But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role. He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

[emphasis added]

Continued Buchanan:

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili. What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia. Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Buchanan’s description of Scheunemann and his activities is instructive because Georgia’s entry into NATO would commit the United States to fighting for Georgia. Buchanan explains what would have happened in 2008 if Georgia had been part of NATO at that time:

Had [Scheunemann succeeded], U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

. . . .

(Read more)

“The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.”