I wish I had paid more attention to politics in High School. I didn’t come to libertarianism until I was in my early twenties. A mock debate in a Michigan high school played out a bit like what the real debates could have been. Along with McCain and Obama, the mock debate included a student representing the views of Libertarian candidate Bob Barr. The student had never heard of Barr nor the Libertarian Party prior to planning for the debate.
Matt Tanyi, who played Barr, said it was important that students heard a different set of views.
“All you ever hear about is Democrats and Republicans. This opened my eyes to the need for an opposing view point,” said Tanyi, who’d never heard of Barr before the mock debate.
As Barr, Matt criticized government spending habits and talks of going to war with Iran.
“The government is money hungry. It’s going to spend as much money as it can get out of you,” Tanyi said. “Just because a country may have weapons of mass destruction is no reason to go to war. America is not the world’s police.”
The debate was put on by the school’s advance placement U.S. government and politics class.
Teacher Andy Nester said the debate helps students better understand the candidates.
“They learn the passion behind how these different groups believe the government should operate,” Nester said. “And when the students hear these things coming from their peers, it’s believable to them.”
The teacher, Andy Nester, deserves praise for including at least one of the third party candidates in the mock debate. That is more than can be said of the debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which strictly limits the participation of third party candidates with thoroughly un-American and unfair requirements.
There was a rather short (as expected) report on NBC Nightly News this evening on Barr and his campaign. Watch it below.
This was a much more “respectful” report (but half as long) than the one from NBC last year during Ron Paul’s campaign where he was painted as a “fringe” candidate. See that one again below for comparison.
The Libertarian candidate for President in 2000 was Harry Browne. That year he released a campaign book with the title, “The Great Libertarian Offer“. The positive libertarian sentiment in that book was both educational and inspiring to me and many other liberty seeking individuals. There has been quite a bit of talk in the past year about the demise of the Republican party to the delight of loyal and liberal Democrats everywhere. This demise represents a great opportunity for libertarian ideas to either reinforce the Libertarian Party itself or modify the Republican Party’s neo-conservatism into libertarian conservatism.
I say opportunity because the outlook for liberty at this point in our country’s history is quite bleak. The popular political culture pendulum is swinging far to the left with Barack Obama’s pending victory. Following 9/11 Neo-conservative Right ideals were in vogue. The question remains what happens when the rebound occurs from the current move to the left? This is where libertarians can capitalize if the cards are played properly.
Bob Barr did what I believe to be the best interview of the campaign thus far for Franklin Pierce University on October 21st. The interview was extremely substantive and revealed a few insights I’ve always been curious about such as Barr’s true position on opening up another investigation of 9/11 and how he ended up being tricked into doing that interview for the Borat movie.
The interview is typically amateurish as it is for the campus television station, but it is well worth your time. This is the interview that should be on NBC Nightly News or some other main stream media outlet. It’s probably too long for the soundbite culture those outlets live in though.
The interview is in three parts. Watch them below.
Ron Paul appeared on CNN’s American Morning with John Roberts this morning. They discussed Alan Greenspan’s recent testimony and the state of the Republican “brand” as well as Paul being a potential spoiler in Montana where he is receiving 4% of the vote as reported yesterday.
“The Republican Party is really in a mess.”
“It took 20 years” (to rebuild the Republican majority in Congress from 1974)
“It’s not the regulation that caused the problems.”
“The person who’s name they pick [vote for] is the one doing the spoiling. I think it is the flawed policy of both candidates.”
In May 2007 during the first primary Republican Presidential debate many were introduced to Ron Paul for the first time. One of the first answers he gave during that debate explained in a mere few sentences his philosophy regarding the role of government. It doesn’t really matter what the question was (it was a question about phasing out the IRS). It was his answer that was the springboard for understanding the more finer points of the quintessential Ron Paul.
“You can only do that [phase out the IRS] if you change our ideas about what the role of government ought to be. If you think that government has to take care of us from cradle to grave and if you think our government should police the world and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a foreign policy that we cannot manage you can’t get rid of the IRS”. (see the video starting at the 1:45 mark)
There it is. It’s quite fundamental. If you truly want limited government the government can’t act as if there are no limits. This is an actual recipe for change in contrast to all of the new programs that Barack Obama and John McCain keep promoting from the campaign trail. Unfortunately, it seems the majority of Americans have answered the “role of government” question with “gimme more please!”
Ron Paul is vindicated yet again on his foreign policy of non-intervention. Walk by any terrorist training camp and you just might see a bunch of McCain-Palin yard signs proudly posted. Recently a message of endorsement for McCain was discovered on a known Jihadist online message board. From Wired magazine:
The supposed McCain endorsement appeared Monday on a private Islamic extremist forum, al-Hesbah. The author — a longtime contributor going by the name Muhammad Haafid — suggests that al-Qaida should launch a terror attack against the United States before the election, so that Americans would vote for McCain. Haafid argued that McCain would continue the policies of President Bush and keep the country embroiled in costly overseas wars, aggravating America’s financial crisis.
“Al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming election,” wrote Haafid, adding that McCain would follow the “failing march of his predecessor.”
The McCain campaign convened a conference call Wednesday to address the extremist’s endorsement, and attack The Washington Post, which ran a story about the comments.
Of course the McCain campaign and the CIA are denouncing the story and vilifying the Washington Post for running it, saying the story is inaccurate, but given Ron Paul’s words of warning during his primary campaign why is it so difficult to believe this threat and the endorsement along with it to be real?
An independent analyst suggests that the words ring true.
But Adam Raisman, a senior analyst at the SITE Intelligence Group in Bethesda, Maryland, which monitors terrorism websites and uncovered the statement, said the Post story had been entirely faithful to the substance of Haafid’s statement.
“I don’t believe the words were twisted — this is what the jihadist said, and he’s been writing since 2003 with more than 600 posts,” Raisman said. “And there have been other posts in this regard as well — there have been many individuals saying this since early 2008.”
He added that postings on extremist websites are important because the forums serve as social communities and grassroots think tanks, generating ideas for “jihadist enthusiasts.”
“I’m not going to extrapolate that what one member writes is going to translate into an attack, but some of the members of the forum are active in the field,” Raisman said.
It seems that Ron Paul’s words during the debates in 2007 are confirmed yet again. You remember them: “They attack us because we are over there!”. The other candidates and the audience laughed at Paul at the time. People don’t seem to be laughing at him any more.
Ron Paul in a short interview with The Politico sums up our state of the union with a few choice words that do not disappoint freedom seekers. Below are some of his words from the interview.
“We are all going to be a lot less free.”
“We’re going to see inflation on a large scale.”
“I worry more about the loss of liberty and the socializing of our country.”
“We have the Nancy Pelosis of the world being best friends with Henry Paulson and George W. Bush. They’re not capable of managing the system.”
“This is what always bankrupts empires. It did it to the Soviets. Osama bin Laden knew it, and he sucked us in.”
It seems to be Bob Barr day today thanks in part to his several media appearances. Bob Barr went into the liberal mass of confusion known as Air America today when he was interviewed by Thom Hartmann. The majority of the interview was quite contentious as you might expect. In the end they run out of time in the middle (or end) of a discussion on the “general welfare” clause in the Constitution. Hartmann seems to think that it allows for policies such as nationalized health care while Barr tells Hartmann that he is misinterpreting it. The audio lasts about 15 minutes. Listen below.
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A neutral Bob Barr report/article comes from The New Yorker magazine. It is a very interesting read and has some new bits of information regarding the so called “snub” by Barr of Ron Paul.
The article is also quite long as it traces Barr’s history, checkered and otherwise.
In the nineteen-nineties, Barr, then a Republican congressman from Georgia, led the charge to impeach President Bill Clinton and argued on the House floor that “the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society.” The Christian Coalition gave his voting record a perfect rating, and he became so well known for his dour, ultra-conservative image that he told the voters in his district, “You don’t send me to Washington to smile.” But in the past few years, Barr says, he has profoundly changed. He now devotes himself to the advance of personal liberty and no longer cares to play the role of law-and-order conservative and culture warrior. After all, America is a free country, or at least this is why Barr says he is running for President: to abolish as many laws as society can bear to lose, to cut away the sinews of federal power, to “get the government out of it.”
Liberty Maven
“. The positive libertarian sentiment in that book was both educational and inspiring to me and many other liberty seeking individuals. There has been quite a bit of talk in the past year about 
