From Animals

The ad garnered more attention for asking why Obama supports different policies for his children than for others’ children, and the White House asking for the ads to be taken down, than it did for its actual content or purpose. I think the ad serves its purpose well. The fact is, Obama has no idea what food is served in the lunchrooms of American public schools because his daughters have never attended one, and neither did he. He went to the most exclusive private academy in Hawaii.

As for the mission of PCRM– I’m a vegetarian, so I agree with their mission of showing that vegetarian diets are in fact healthy (as confirmed by the American Diatetic Association in a recent statement) and expanding them. However, the concurrent goal of having the federal government step in to provide healthier school lunches is not one I can wholeheartedly endorse. I don’t think the federal government, and especially the USDA which works in tandem with agribusiness lobbyists to buy gruel for the nation’s schoolchildren, should be in the business of providing lunches at all.

However, we currently spend billions of the USDA’s budget on school lunches and other subsidized lunch programs that will not end anytime soon. IF we’re going to spend the money anyway, we might as well buy healthy food and not contribute to an obesity problem poor children are already more likely to have due to our other food policies. While vegetarian food, strictly speaking, is not necessarily healthier than meat-based meals 100% of the time (think cheese pizza vs. salmon), most of the time it is. Spending billions on meals for children and not including fruits and vegetables is pretty much a crime. This is true especially if we get some sort of public health care system in place (of course, we do already have that for those over 65), where we’ll be paying for treatment for heart attacks, statins, and strokes of grown-up schoolchildren with clogged arteries from years of mystery meat.

And there’s always the possibility, too, that Malia and Sasha might take notice: the last young girl to live in the White House, Chelsea Clinton, was a vegetarian. The Obama daughters attend the same school as Chelsea, Sidwell Friends, which has a Quaker affiliation; Quakers have historically been very friendly towards vegetarian diets due to their teachings of non-violence.

I attended the Lobby Day in Congress on Monday, and my state’s Republican senator was dismissed by my state director as something along the lines of “awful, absolutely terrible” on Humane Society issues, yet he was the sponsor of The Great Ape Protection Act in the last Congress and apparently has signed on to many of the Humane Society’s bills. His legislative assistant practically cried when she was told about the horrors of puppy mills.

The new Democratic Senator, by contrast, sent a representative who didn’t flinch an eye when told that horses are being exported for food, that puppies are being abused horribly by breeders, and that companies selling dog fur from China mislabel their products as faux fur. She seemed slightly concerned when told that many chimps have been held in cages for 50 years, without even being experimented on, just to get federal research dollars (the last is my own editorializing, however true it is– the Humane Society of course doesn’t say this). Yet her senator was praised just for being, well, a Democrat.

That’s the kind of attitude that turns a lot of groups– the NRA, the AKC, etc.– away from the Humane Society’s bills. When a Republican does everything but jump up and down and yell, “I love the Humane Society and all legislation it puts forth!”, yet a Democrat gets praised just for deigning to meet with the proles making the rounds on Lobby Day, it kind of shows you why some might oppose the Humane Society’s “agenda” (in quotes because some people seriously think this whole Humane Society thing is one huge conspiracy.) There is absolutely no reason from what I observed for the Humane Society to have such a pro-Democrat, anti-Republican view. Two of the four current Great Ape Protection Act sponsors are Republicans. John Ensign is a huge supporter, as are many Republicans in Congress.

Of course, opposing these bills doesn’t mean you aren’t supporting animal rights, either– more on that in a later post. Stay tuned.

So, that’s my open letter to Humane Society speakers, state directors, and citizen lobbyists. At least try to act non-partisan. Your bills are, and it would benefit your group.

Speaking of which, over the next week, I’ll be blogging about how libertarianism, not Democratic Party-ism, is the solution for helping animals, and how much more would actually get done if we just took a more libertarian approach to helping the animals.

Arlen Specter is the least likable type of politican– the one who switches positions based strictly on polling and whimsy (most of Congress does this in some form, but not as blatantly).

In addition to his long list of other embarrassing blunders (claiming the Military Commissions Act was one of the worst laws to ever be proposed before Congress and unconstitutional, then voting for it is one low point), we now have this: Specter proposing a law banning party changes by Senators after Jim Jeffords turned independent in 2001. As we all know, Specter switched parties on Tuesday after polls showed he had no hope of winning the Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary next year.

The AP writes:

” The thrifty measures Obama ordered for federal agencies are the equivalent of asking a family that spends $60,000 in a year to save $6.

Obama made his push for frugality the subject of his first Cabinet meeting, ensuring it would command the capital’s attention. It also set off outbursts of mental math and scribbled calculations as political friend and foe tried to figure out its impact.

The bottom line: Not much.

The president gave his Cabinet 90 days to find $100 million in savings to achieve over time.

For all the trumpeting, the effort raised questions about why Obama set the bar so low, considering that $100 million amounts to:

_Less than one-quarter of the budget increase that Congress awarded to itself.

_4 percent of the military aid the United States sends to Israel.

_Less than half the cost of one F-22 fighter plane.

_7 percent of the federal subsidy for the money-losing Amtrak passenger rail system.

_1/10,000th of the government’s operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.”

Of course, there are those who think that Obama’s doing all he can to restrain the budget.

Some libertarians may view Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant or a criminal (even a litmus test for whether or not someone is libertarian!), but I can’t agree. Maybe it’s because I’m from Illinois. At the same time, libertarians might get excited over the ideas of Darwin, and what that might mean for liberty.

I’ll probably save more Lincoln-related libertarian arguments for another day, but I’m shocked when I hear some people talking about Lincoln and drinking this “Lincoln was a tyrant” Kool-Aid. Let’s say that George W. Bush becomes governor of Texas again. The Texas government then decides that it wants to, say, attack Iran. The federal government says they can’t. Texas then announces that it is seceding from the United States effective immediately. Is Bush a hero for states’ rights or libertarian causes, or is he the tyrant?

I believe that the Southern states should have been able to secede if they had wanted to, but only if the matter was put to their citizens by referendum and won by a vast majority. That was not done in the South– and needless to say, they didn’t give the slaves a vote on the matter, either. Some might say that as elected representatives, the Southern legislatures had the right to do what they pleased in representing the people. Again, the slaves hadn’t gotten a vote on those representatives, had they? They seceded as soon as Lincoln became President, not for some liberty-related principle, but because they wanted to continue the system of slavery. That’s nothing for a libertarian to exalt, in any manner, but I see it done continually.

Sure, Lincoln expanded government powers to an unprecedented degree– but almost every President has done that, so why single out Lincoln (compared to, say, Teddy Roosevelt) when Lincoln was obviously well-meaning, freed the slaves, and was assassinated in office (so he certainly was punished for any mistakes he might have committed while in office)? Why disparage Lincoln while exalting those who would have kept slavery in existence, something that is the antithesis of libertarianism and freedom in general?

I don’t believe that the federal government has the right to interfere in state matters unless perhaps when rights under the Bill of Rights are being severely breached. Others may disagree. Who is going to enforce freedom of speech, or the press, or the other rights? Did the slaves have any of these rights? At that time, there wasn’t really a court system to deal with these matters, even for non-slaves. Do I think the DEA should be raiding terminally ill cancer patients, or anyone for that matter in no-knock drug raids? Of course not. Do I think that the federal government should be coming in when an essential freedom such as whether one is kept as a slave or allowed to be free is being breached? Perhaps. As one example of how far the federal government has come from defending these rights, take a look at Heller v. DC last year, when the federal government came down on the side of the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, which was clearly a violation of the Second Amendment.

Lincoln can’t be responsible for what people did after him; he, like all the presidents of the 1800s, would be astonished at the powers the federal government has now claimed for itself. There was no income tax in Lincoln’s day, few federal agencies, and of course, the president just went to the theatre with one security guard, imagine that.

Now, the problem with this is that it can be a slippery slope. Once the federal government got rid of slavery, then it wanted to get rid of other things. Now it wants to get rid of drugs (and even drugs in other countries!), interferes in neighborhood disputes (ex. a local group went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development when it thought the city should provide water services to its neighborhood), gets involved in every aspect of business and almost every aspect of personal life, and I could go on. It has exceeded things that are black and white such as, should people be owned by other people, and has greatly expanded its power beyond almost any comprehension.

I don’t think that Lincoln started that. He may have begun the framework, sure, but he had help– those expanded government powers could have been stopped by the Southerners who insisted on keeping slaves. I’ve even heard otherwise intelligent people refer to Lincoln as a murderer. Sure, maybe there could have been an alternative to the Civil War. Those most in charge of that were the leaders of the South, who seceded as soon as Lincoln came to office.

Anyway, let’s move on to the less controversial subject of Charles Darwin! (“The Great Disturber”??) First of all, local schools should be allowed to teach what they want. Involving entire states in what should be local education leads to problems like those seen in Kansas, Pennsylvania and Texas, where evolution is put on a level with, let’s say, time travel rather than with gravity. Teaching intelligent design in school, by the way, is the same as the governor of a state sending public school kids home with flyers about a kids’ health program (as Rod Blagojevich did in Illinois), teaching that taxes are good because they build roads (as I recently encountered when teaching a public-school approved curriculum to a student I tutor), etc. As Radley Balko once said,

“Intelligent design is to evolutionary biology what socialism is to free-market economics.”

Some Darwin quotes for Darwin Day.

Who, eight years ago, could have predicted that Al Gore’s right-hand sidekick Lieberman would be one of the biggest backers of the GOP ticket in 2008, with Powell not far behind espousing how great the Democratic nominee is? (Meanwhile, Joe Biden doesn’t know what he’s saying, as usual.)

It’s too bad that the Powell-Obama and Lieberman-McCain non-partisan lovefests have come about for the pettiest of reasons: Powell is upset that Bush made him look like a fool in front of the world at the UN. Lieberman is upset that Democrats didn’t support him in his primary race against Ned Lamont in Connecticut after he came out and supported the Iraq War so strongly. Does either really have America’s best interests at heart, or are each looking forward to their respective Cabinet appointments in Obama and McCain administrations?

(I long ago lost most of my respect for Colin Powell– who couldn’t have with his appearance before the United Nations? This is also the man keeping gays out of the military.)

If I were Obama, I would therefore be less proud about getting Powell’s endorsement and revel in the endorsement of London mayor Boris Johnson, who is a libertarian (on some issues, at least) and a former Tory member of Parliament. In other words, this is not necessarily an obvious person to stump for Obama. Johnson defeated “Red Ken” Livingstone for the office of mayor earlier this year, and that’s enough for me to love him forever. But he’s also one of those politicians I wish America had, one who can say what he really thinks and still get elected. What a concept.

Anyway, what Boris thinks now is that Obama should be elected for many of the same reasons I’ve mentioned in favor of Obama’s candidacy: the rest of the world will respect it, the Republicans haven’t earned it, McCain has offered little reason to think he can do better, and electing a black man would show the rest of the world that America is truly an accepting place. I agree these are good reasons, but none of them have to do with Obama directly. Johnson obviously respects McCain, but is mostly basing this on the current Republican administration in general. He doesn’t like Obama’s policies and says he hopes that his tax plan is blocked by Congress (I wouldn’t count on that). Melanie Phillips of The Spectator responds that Boris has succumbed to “Neocon Derangement Syndrome”:

How else to explain the fact that for paragraph after paragraph he exults that an Obama victory will be a triumph for black people because he is black – only to conclude that such a victory will demonstrate that being black is a total irrelevance?!

Johnson writes in his Obama endorsement:

It would be tough for any candidate to receive the Republican baton from Dubya, and McCain can be proud of doing as well as he is.

His chief problem is that he does not seem to offer any hope of repair to those American ideals.

Or, to put it another way, it is not clear how America under McCain would recover her standing in the eyes of the world.

Since Hillary gave up, Obama has lost his luster for me. He doesn’t bring any sort of change I or any self-respecting libertarian can really believe in. The Wall Street Journal lays out some of the reasons succinctly.

Now, of course we also come to the other side of the coin. History teaches us that George W. Bush talked a good game in 2000 (no nation-building, Americans aren’t the police officers of the world, smaller government is good, etc.) and if you went on substance rather than style and voted for the idiot, you were voting for someone who immediately jettisoned his campaign promises and increased the size of government more than any Democrat in at least 40 years. He doubled the size of some government agencies (including the Department of Education), introduced the largest entitlement program since the beginning of Medicare with the Medicare prescription drug “benefit,” and wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars using America to act as 911 for the world. Al Gore is a real small government guy compared to W.

So now, do we trust Obama- who seems like he can think through things and maybe listen to the other side, although he never actually votes that way– or McCain, whom some have called “the most reliable Democrat” in the Senate and someone who thinks we should spend 100 years in Iraq, someone who actually has reached out to the other side, even if a little bit too much.

McCain once said he didn’t know as much about economics as he should, something that is true about almost all Americans including myself; Obama doesn’t know that much about economics, either, but he doesn’t admit it, so on that respect I think McCain seems more forthright about his weaknesses and more willing to surround himself with advisers who do know what they’re talking about.

Is Obama going to “reach across the aisle” as he likes to say and give us libertarians anything to cheer about? Is McCain going to reach across the aisle too much and give us nothing?

This is why a libertarian– even in a swing state– might be better off keeping a clear conscience and voting for Bob Barr.

Joe the Plumber is the perfect messenger: he’s not a Wall Street banker or a lawyer or even a doctor. His name is actually Joe, and he provides an important, if un-glamourous, service: plumbing. No one becomes a plumber because they want to be a millionaire, although I’m sure plumbing, like garbage collecting, can help someone earn a good living because there’s less competition in people who want to take on the job.

Those who are criticizing Joe as a wealthy man who needs to hand over his dough to other Americans (as is the case with the New York Times’ Caucus comment section seem to think Joe is making his work visits in limos and relaxing, sipping champagne while he’s fixing people’s plumbing. The man says he wants to save for his son’s college education and works 10 to 12 hours a day to do so (and by the time his son gets to college, the price tag for tuition will be so over-inflated that he might in fact need that entire $250,000 a year to pay it).

Joe the Plumber (actually Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio) wants to buy a business, see– he doesn’t have the business now, he just wants to buy it and would be making “payments for years” on it– and he’s hoping the profits would be more than the $250,000 threshold for Obama’s tax cuts. If it is, his taxes will go up and a lot of that profit will be gone, when he’s just trying to fix people’s plumbing, make a living for his family, and save for his son’s college education. A tax increase means he won’t be able to hire other plumbers on– creating those jobs Obama is always talking about– and he won’t be able to buy a new truck– helping those American car companies Obama is always catering to in Detroit.

In other words, he might not be able to buy the business at all.

… I’m planning on purchasing this company – it’s not something I’m gonna purchase outright, it’s something I’m going to have to make payments on for years – but essentially I’m going to buy this company, and the profits generated by that could possibly put me in that tax bracket he’s talking about and that bothers me. It’s not like I would be rich; I would still just be a working plumber. I work hard for my money, and the fact that he thinks I make a little too much that he just wants to redistribute it to other people. Some of them might need it, but at the same time, it’s not their discretion to do it – it’s mine.

Joe says about himself:

you know, my big thing is the American Dream. I work hard. You know, I was poor; my mom raised me and my brother by herself for a very long time until my dad came along. So I know what it’s like to suffer. It’s not like I was born with a silver spoon… Eventually – I mean, just to sound a little silly here, but you need rich people. I mean, who are you going to work for?

You start giving people stuff, and then they start expecting it – and that scares me. A lot of people expect it now. They get upset when their check’s late, they get upset when they don’t get as many benefits as they used to, or when different government agencies are cut or spending is cut here and there for whatever reason – people get upset at that. And that’s because they’re used to getting it and they want more. I mean, everyone’s always gonna want more. People work the system left and right to get more out of welfare, to get more out of state assistance, federal assistance. And if government’s there for them, they’re gonna keep on trying to manipulate it to get more out of it. You got people that come along and say, “Hey, I wanna help you people,” I mean, they’re all ears! They’re like, “Hey, you can help me more, I don’t have to work as hard, I don’t have to do as much, and you’re gonna give me this? Man, that’s great, you’re a good guy.”

That is essentially what is wrong with our politics and the fundamental problem with a government such as the one we have– the tendency will always be towards bigger government, although that is not necessarily the best way to go for the long run.

So yeah, it goes down the socialist – His healthcare plan scares me. You know, I don’t like people going without healthcare, but it’s not my job to pay for everyone else’s healthcare. It’s hard enough paying for my own. I like the idea of deregulation as far as – nationally, you know, you only get insurance companies that can work in this state – if you deregulate that then you have more people competing and then the prices would go lower. It seems pretty simple to me. It probably isn’t that simple – but you flood the market with more products, usually they go down cheaper.

With just a few paragraphs, Joe has proven himself to be better at understanding basic economic facts than even a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Paul Krugman; he essentially expounded on many of the best and basic reasons why a free market economy, with rare exception, works better than a regulated, planned, socialist one: we need rich people because we all need to aspire to something. Ask anyone in this country if they want to be rich or not, and overwhelmingly they’ll say they do. Sure, some genuinely might not care, but if given the choice, we’d pretty much all prefer to be wealthy, and that’s what keeps us plumbing and garbage collecting and teaching and nursing and selling real estate. We all have the chance to be wealthy, if we work hard enough at something we’re good at. That’s why Joe the Plumber works 10 to 12 hours a day, and it’s why anyone would work 10 to 12 hours a day.

Regulation is usually ineffective and devastates competition, thereby decreasing choices for consumers and quality of services and products.

And what is Joe the Plumber’s idea of the American Dream?

Me personally, my American Dream was to have a house, a dog, a couple rifles, a bass boat. I believe in living life easy and simple. I don’t have grand designs. I don’t want much. I just wanna be able to take care of my family and do things with them outdoors and that’s about it, really. I don’t have a “grand scheme” thing. My American Dream is just more personal to me as far as working, making a good living and being able to provide for my family, college for my son. Things like that – simple things in life, that’s really what it comes down to for me. That’s my dream.

This guy deserves a New York Times column.

I disagree, and here is one direct way to lower healthcare costs.

Why don’t we make all those who lose malpractice lawsuits (or, better yet, all lawsuits) pay the court costs of the plaintiff? We often see people hold up European countries’ healthcare systems as models we should be aping, but what about their court systems, too? Europe doesn’t have any problems with wasteful or frivolous lawsuits because if the plaintiff loses, he or she pays all court costs of the defendant.

Therefore, if someone doesn’t have a rock solid case in which they definitely experienced malpractice, they won’t initiate a case in the first place, and this will save doctors and insurance companies– and the American consumer– millions of dollars.

Every time you go to the doctor and can’t believe the bill you get, it’s because you’re also contributing to that doctor’s insurance costs, which could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Of course, John Edwards and his trial-lawyer brethren will fight against it, but if we really wanted to make a difference and get healthcare for the “two Americas,” this would be an excellent way to do it.

Congressman David Price of North Carolina’s 4th District has:

• Voted for a $700 billion taxpayer-financed bailout of Wall Street billionaires. That’s reason enough right there to vote Mr. David Price out of office, but I will continue.
• Voted for the PATRIOT Act, oy vey! And just when you thought he couldn’t get any worse…
• Voted to raid the Social Security trust fund to spend money this country doesn’t have on various projects, including other members’ (and his own) incessant pork barrel requests.
• Votes for war funding.
• Thrown civil liberties to the wind when he voted for FISA, the bill that gave immunity to telecom companies that spied on their innocent customers for the government, unconstitutionally.

One of Lawson’s county coordinators is Rev. Ray McKinnon, a hardcore Democrat who met Dr. Lawson while campaigning for Hillary. No, BJ Lawson is not your typical Republican. While Price usually wins the district by 65%, polls have him at less than 50% with 10% undecided. Meanwhile, while Price hid from his constituents during the bailout fiasco, Lawson was bringing serious money in from Americans angry at the bailout, to the tune of over $170,000 in ONE DAY, which simply must be a record for North Carolina.

Because I am “Libertarian Girl,” some people assume some things about me. I am not a member of the Libertarian Party, and I go across partisan rhetoric to support issues, not groups. I receive solicitations in the mail from both Republicans and Democrats due to the wide range of causes I support and organizations that I’m a member of; I’ve gotten signed photos of McCain and Palin and letters begging support from Hillary.

I’m not a Libertarian, a Republican, or a Democrat, but I’ve voted for all three at times. As an election judge in this district the last primary cycle, I noticed that many voting Democratic took care to maintain their independent status, not wanting to be listed as a Democrat. This is a stance I can respect, voting for the person and the issues, not the party. According to an interview on Live Free Radio earlier this week, Lawson said an Orange County Democrat was hesitant to give her support, but came back the next day at Festifall and said, “After reading about you and your stance on the issues, I’d vote for you even if you were a member of the Communist Party.” Who could say the same about David Price, the disappearing act who won’t answer a simple question of: Does he read bills before he votes on them?

I hope there are many Democrats in the Fourth District who vote for who will really represent them and their interests in Congress, and that would be a vote for BJ Lawson.

I voted for David Price the last time he was up for re-election, but this time I will be glad to vote for a true man of the people, for a man who is not red or blue but American… BJ Lawson.

Therefore, I officially endorse BJ Lawson for the Fourth District congressional race, if you have not already figured this out. And it’s not because his kids are so darn cute, it’s because of the Constitutional principles that he is running on.