Comedian/conspiratorialist/actor Richard Belzer asks what's so "happy" about the "new year", when one considers our growing Police State. Here's proof the U.S. has lost its privacy rights. The Mises Institute laments people's continuing addiction to socialism.

It's sickening that the only hope Humanity has, to get the Liberty Train back on track, is to rely on a political election for U.S. President. Our Presidency, the Congress, the Courts, States, all Governments worldwide, and Big Business all have lost their moral compass and respect for Natural Rights. Great news though - A Danish bank has predicted a Ron Paul presidential victory in November. And here's an analysis showing RP victory in Iowa and New Hampshire. Paul's certainly raised enough money to win.

Speaking of Paul's campaign, his gold standard rhetoric continues to confuse, so here's Mises' rebuttal to David Frum's critique.

And the Welfare-Warfare State prepares full battle against Ron Paul, who threatens everything the Monsters have built over the past Century. And for Fox News' unwarranted exclusion of Ron Paul from the critical January 6 Debate, we can boycott investors in Murdoch's Big Media company.

Professor DiLorenzo, author of the amazing expose on President Lincoln, reminds us that if Ron Paul wins, he'd be the first Jeffersonian president since Grover Cleveland, the last president to veto congressional powermongering if their bills were not authorized by the Constitution.

Cleveland was president 120 years ago. Thus, for over a century, we've been subjecting ourselves to unconstitutional non-Jeffersonianism. No one should be surprised, then, by the Welfare-Warfare State now plaguing us.

Ron Paul is closer than Cleveland to Jefferson, since only Paul makes free banking a key issue. Until this past Century of statism, Banking was an important issue, as DiLorenzo describes here, in this great debate between Jefferson and Hamilton:

When Ron Paul proposes abolishing the Federal Reserve Board and returning to the gold standard, he is taking Jefferson's position in his great debate with Hamilton over the propriety of a government-run bank. As explained in my forthcoming book, Hamilton's Curse, Hamilton wanted a big, expansive and intrusive central government that would centrally plan the economy and pursue "imperial glory" in foreign affairs. He wanted America to imitate the British empire. In order to achieve this, he knew that a government-run bank would be necessary. Jefferson, on the other hand, believed that the sole purpose of government was to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, and that such a bank would be a danger to liberty.

It was a Jeffersonian Democrat, President Andrew Jackson, who would de-fund Hamilton's Bank of the United States some forty years later, after it had fueled decades of political corruption and economic instability. Hamiltonian central banking was subsequently revived by one of his political heirs - Lincoln - and then cemented into place by the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

DiLorenzo goes on in the above essay to remind us that, while Hamilton loved "debt" since it bound the rich to the government, which would have to tax the middle class to pay the rich the interest on the debt, Jefferson opposed debt for anything other than a defensive war - and he said debt had to be paid off in 19 years (to avoid saddling the next generation with the present generation's profligacy). And in 2008, our debt is $9 trillion, with no plan to protect future generations from this liability! Shame on us.

Finally, Paul's call for the abolition of the income tax could be signaled by his quoting this Jeffersonian passage in Paul's inauguration:

How inspirational and revolutionary would it be to hear President Ron Paul quote Jefferson's first inaugural address at his first inaugural: "[A] wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government . . ." (emphasis added).

Independence Institute's Wendy McElroy says Voltaire's "Letters on England" said England's religious pluralism was a precursor to freedom, and that this toleration applies to modern times when thinking, for example, about the value of immigration and differing values in general. I was drawn to this Voltaire essay because I'm reading a classic historical novel by Neal Stephenson, from his Baroque Cycle.

The more libertarian writings one seeks, the more one discovers that so many of the great writers and thinkers in history were libertarian, or "clasically liberal."

15,000 people harassed when they fly are trying to remove their names from the Terror Watch List - which has almost 800,000 names - managed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Every month 2,000 people beg for removal, but TSA no longer promises an answer within 30 days. Congresswoman Yvette, New York Democrat, will introduce legislation to streamline this process. TSA refuses to move faster until next year, when a requirement for citizens to report birthdates apparently will ease the clearing of suspected names as compared to the names of more obvious terrorists.

At least list removal is a possibility. For pain doctors stripped by DEA of their certificates to prescribe controlled medicine - like Oxycontin - not ONE doctor ever has had their prescribing rights returned!

Back to airport security, a better solution would be to privatize airports, so they and private airlines can best decide the level of needed security, with the threat of lawsuits forcing them to do a good job. And a healthy respect for individuals' 2nd Amendment Right to defend oneself with guns would raise the cost for criminals, including terrorists. Gun-haters should support this Amendment, because its honoring makes it easier not to have a gun - because the criminal doesn't know that you don't have a gun. In a fascist society where gun rights are denied, the criminal knows you are unarmed and thus the cost of crime is lower. For evidence of this fact, just look at my city of Washington, DC - gun rights are denied, so crime is high - the criminal knows we're defenseless, after all.

As for the TSA, America has done reasonably well for two centuries without such a monstrosity, so it's abolition won't be missed. And as for the 9/11 terrorism that caused the new Police State, here's yet more allegations of the lack of all the facts: apparently, plenty of whistleblowers are ready to go public. And if that weren't serious enough, seven CIA veterans have called the 9/11 Commission Report a "coverup".

Recently, the GAO showed testers sneaking bomb parts past TSA, suggesting terrorists could construct a bomb in-flight.

Ron Paul's newsletters in the 1980s and 90s used hyperbolic language to energize libertarians to oppose the State. Unfortunately, some of that language was insensitive to various minority groups. In this CNN YouTube with Wolf Blitzer, Ron Paul apologizes for those words, saying he never wrote them (a staffer did), while turning the interview into a coup, showing he's the best friend of minorities. Further, because he's the most vociferous opponent of the War in Iraq and the Drug War - which disproportionately affect African Americans - Ron Paul indeed would be the best President for minorities. (His stable monetary reforms also would help those of modest income the most; and getting rid of regulatory barriers to entry would enable more home-based and small business development in inner cities). Even a local chapter of the NAACP calls the Paul racist charges "ridiculous".

Actually, a commenter at the Economist's blog doubted how racist the comments were, saying similar "rants" had issued from famous African American economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. Thus, could what we have here be merely a silly political correctness fight, exagerrated by the Thought Police of the Mainstream Media and Big Government elites - all of whom would do anything to avoid a Constitutional presidency as offered by Dr. Paul? Another allegedly offended minority group - gays - garnered this response.

By the way, some have suggested one of the alleged "racist" ghostwriters from the period in question could be a scholar who runs the eminent Mises Institute at Auburn University. Yet, according to the same Economist commenter above, this same scholar has fired staffers for racist offenses. If these controversial comments can't be discussed in the open, how can we solve these problems without discussion?

Ron Paul worships the civil disobediance of Ghandi and Martin Luther King - in fact, his next "money bomb" is set for MLK Day (Jan 21). Paul exercised poor oversight over his newsletter language, but in his speeches he comes across as a very non-racist idealist. Let's hope minorities can forgive a few instances of inflammatory language, and focus on larger policy changes that would remove the violence (Drug War) from their lives, replace government interference with small business creation, and stabilize the dollar so less money goes further.

Update: Kudos to Dr. Paul for using the anger from the huge attack on him, to show more energy in last night's South Carolina Debate. It was his best performance yet. Even in the debate the moderators used slimy tactics to undermine his credibility, particularly in this sad behavior by Brit Hume.

Latest Update: Anti-War's Justin Ramaindo, author of a great biography of the late philosopher Murray Rothbard, just gave an essay on what Ron Paul was thinking in these Newsletters; warning, this essay contains "inside baseball" attacks on the critics of the newsletters.  So while the context is helpful, it's unfortunate to witness libertarians attacking each other.

Yesterday on behalf of two clients - Natural Solutions Foundation and Free World Media - I attended a National Press Club event, in which the American Civil Liberties Union issued a Report castigating the Government's Pandemic Policy for preferring a Law Enforcement/Anti-Terrorism approach to infected citizens, rather than a Public Health System approach. Kudos to Barry Steinhardt, Director of ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, for saying the notion that we must "trade liberty for security" is both false and dangerous:

"History makes clear that a heavy-handed, coercive approach to pandemics that treats the sick as potential enemies is not only an unnecessary violation of civil liberties but is also ineffective from a public health standpoint and will leave more Americans stranded, sick and untreated."

Reuters covered this event here. An avian influenza call "H5N1" has killed birds around the world and has killed a few hundred humans, but if it spreads like a contagion in the U.S., President Bush has proposed military quarantines of whole sections of the population.

The ACLU experts said they were especially disturbed by an October executive order from President Bush that directed HHS to establish a task force to plan for potential catastrophes like a terrorist attack, pandemic influenza or a natural disaster that would ensure full use of Department of Defense resources.

ACLU claims coercion never protects the public health, and trading "liberty for security" is a dangerous slippery slope that justifies perpetual Rights violations. Here's the official Government policy on avian flu.

Government is focusing on rare lawbrakers like Andrew Speaker, who violated a quarantine order while on vacation in Europe, to fly back to the US for treatment. A more sober Public Health response would be for the Government to pay for a victim's flight back home, where the patient would self-quarantine, with subsidies to pay him or her for lost wages. (I'm a little queasy about putting a gun to someone's head to require them to stay in their house, or to steal peoples' money in taxation to replace the quarantined person's non-work).

When a Maryland law professor, Michael Greenberger, added that vaccines and anti-virals could be developed within 6 months of an outbreak - and thus technology, not law enforcement - could help stem the pandemic's spreading, Monica Shoch-Spana, a Pittsburgh Medical professor, said a subsequent problem would be resistance by citizens to experimental vaccines or any other "public health intervention". I say if the public doesn't like what the Public Health system is offering, why fight that? One thing's for sure, with 45% of last year's service job growth coming in health care or social services, the Public Health system won't give up its demand for subsidies anytime soon!

In response to a question I posed to Barry about whether ACLU would give up protection of Liberties in a worst-case pandemic scenario, he thankfully said "no," saying laws exist already to deal with lawbreakers, and for most situations the Public Health System is prepared to do its job. In another question from me about whether he would protect citizens from forced drugging of vaccines, he agreed they should be voluntary. Thank God for that -in an earlier post below, I discussed witnessing Maryland's forced vaccination of school kids, under threat of jail. If a vaccine is worthwhile, its suppliers should have little difficulty convincing consumers of its merits, on a voluntary basis - but if they are so safe, why did such producers get the Government to exempt FDA-approved vaccines from liability?

And despite ACLU assurances, can they really protect"our liberties" from Big Brother's "security"? Precedent suggests not. After the September, 2001 terrorism, we suffered the Patriot Act and the Military Tribunals Act, Total Information Awareness, No-Fly lists, as well as "signing statements". The 2006 Defense Authorization Act expanded the 1807 Insurrection Act to allow the President to declare Martial Law and send in the Military not only for insurrections, but also any "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition," with both "incident" or "condition" not defined nor limited. Further, Haliburton has built a constellation of concentration camps (like our very own Gulag Archipelago) across the U.S. - are these camps for infected patients, or civil libertarians and nonviolent dissidents (once Congress passes the "Homegrown Terrorism" bill)?

Are we being set up? As scholar James Bovard warns, if Bush can use false pretenses to wage war overseas, can't he use false pretenses to declare a domestic emergency?

As the German National Socialists said, a fearful nation loves a savior. And Bush has set up everything for Rule by the Executive. People fear Islamic terrorists, the Recession will encourage the people to clamor for aid, and a pandemic of contagious sick people will fill the concentration camps - if there's room once they're filled by the Homegrown dissidents.

Despite the insensitivity of some of Dr. Paul's staffers more than a decade ago (see my blog below), I hope my blog today encourages most people to realize we have to elect Candidate Paul or suffer what's being slammed down our throats by Republican Bush and the Democrat Congress.

Donate today to the Campaign of Dr. Paul, to whom Nevadans gave the second most votes in Saturday's Caucus, since only he supports the civil disobedience exemplified by the late Martin Luther King. By the way, if MLK caused lunch counters to lose profit today from his nationwide sit-in protest, he could face fines and jail under the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, since such counters sell the animal-related good called meat. And to think some Sheep bought the Government's argument that AETA was just a "targeted" law meant to protect businesses that dealt with animal-using laboratories or animal farms.

In other news today:

I say let the law expire that allows the Government to spy on citizens without warrants. Congress was supposed to have brought oversight to heinous spying with the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; let's keep the controls. If people are scared of terrorists, stop interfering overseas. Meanwhile, if you adhere to MLK's admonition to civilly disobey, you get spied on, with no constitutional protections.

The strange actions surrounding the September, 2001 Terrorism remain. Today, new body parts were discovered at "ground zero," but the question exists whether DNA testing will be done, or will such parts be disposed of as previous parts - into Staten Island's landfill, and then into the potholes of New York's streets.

Yesterday former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson endorsed Dr. Ron Paul for President. Johnson is a fierce opponent of the Drug War, and only Paul agrees with that position. A well-known financial expert, Donald Luskin, also offered his endorsement.

In other news, the ACLU is leading the charge against Senate Majority Leader Reid's effort to extend and revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This proposed version of FISA would force all citizens to suffer spying on their persons, homes and effects with no court order or other constitutional protection.  Aren't the gross violations of our Natural Rights by Government enough to get a Majority behind Dr. Paul?

Update: When Ron Paul Radio asked me to broadcast LIVE from the Blimp when it was flying over Baltimore, the event was covered by a team from Public Television's Newshour. They just released a video of the event, starring, at the end, yours truly. Here's my original blog entry when I got to fly in the blimp. I wonder if PBS' sudden interest in Paul stems from his second place showing in Nevada's primary, and victory in Louisiana's caucus?