Monthly Archives: July 2012

07.31.12
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Socially “neutral,” not “liberal”

Tim Nerenz explains the difference among libertarians in the headline:

Libertarians are often described as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but many of us prefer the term “neutral”, especially when liberals are prone to go fascist over things like someone expressing a personal opinion they don’t’ like. Our attitude about social legislation is the same as most other legislation – we don’t like legislation.

This is often wrongly construed, especially by conservatives, as an endorsement of vice, but the libertarian objection to criminalizing choice is not about sin, it is about crime.  Specifically, it is the rejection of the notion that government can invent a crime when there is no victim.

Who is the victim when I possess a firearm, or if I carry one without a government permission slip?   That is a victimless crime – and we oppose laws that restrict our right to keep and bear arms.

Who is the victim if you offer me work at $7.00 per hour and I accept your offer of my own free will?   That is a victimless crime – and we object to minimum wage and all other laws that restrict our right to work.

Who is the victim when a farmer sells milk directly to a consumer?  That is a victimless crime – and we stand against laws that prevent choice in the market.

We have come down to prosecuting lemonade stands and roll your own shops, banning chicken sandwiches, hounding hair braiders, fining the uninsured, and programming aerial drones to seek out insurgents holding large cups of pop.  Ok, that last one was exaggerated, but you get the point.

The list of victimless crimes can go on for pages without ever having to get into the juicy stuff, but it is when we confront the lurid that liberty’s mettle is sorely tested.  Freedom to choose demands the courage to let some people choose badly some of the time.

If prostitution is the price to pay to have free markets, we are better off to tolerate the whores.  If pornography is the price we have to pay to insure that we can always buy “Atlas Shrugged”, then the presence of smut merchants is oddly comforting.  The risk of addiction is preferable to government choosing our intoxicants for us.

Tolerance of vice is necessary because the alternative is intolerable – when government can concoct victims at will, or assign victimhood unto itself, then it can justify any action it takes.  It has, it does, and it will.

As is often observed, everything Adolf Hitler did was lawful; the millions he killed were criminals according to laws he enacted to “protect the German people”.   The only reason a maniac like Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t ban everything he doesn’t like and force you to buy everything he does like is because he can’t.  Any reasonable person should like to keep it that way. …

The growing power of the Tea Party rests upon its focus on economic liberty, fiscal responsibility, and allegiance to our Constitution.  Those priorities unite conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists, free-thinkers, independents, Republicans and many Democrats who believe in individual rights and individual responsibility – and yes, there are many of them.

It is an unbeatable electoral coalition that can only be defeated if it is divided – and social issues are the liberals’ only hope of dividing us.  That’s why they keep fabricating one phony civil liberty “crisis” after another as the election approaches – abortion, contraception, gay marriage, illegal immigration, chicken sandwiches.

There are as many different beliefs about virtue and vice as there are Americans to hold them; that is the diversity that makes us a great nation, not some arbitrary herd assignment based on skin color, genital configuration, or ancestry.  God decided to gift us with moral free agency, not the Libertarian Party; His is the higher law we are commanded to follow and His is the judgment we must accept when it comes to sin and salvation.  Secular government should stay in its lane.

07.31.12
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The stakes Nov. 6

Tabitha Hale:

I don’t love Barack Obama. He’s far more destructive than I ever imagined an American president could be. The moment Bill Clinton started looking good because I believed he didn’t actually hate the country he was supposed to be running, I knew there was a serious problem. This movement, the Occupy vs. Tea Party message, the class warfare rhetoric… this is more than a simple political pendulum swing. This is a crossroads. This is when we decide which direction we’re going to choose, which America my children will grow up in.

I need it to be the one I was blessed to grow up in. The one that allowed my grandfather to run a sportman’s store in a small town for 35 years. The one that allowed my parents to be self-employed and do the things that they loved for a living. The one that gave me the opportunity to be the first in my family to graduate from college, to pursue multiple careers in fields that I love, and to carve out a niche that landed me what I believe to be the coolest job ever. …

It took me months to come around to voting for Mitt Romney. I still don’t know if I can work for him, or even tell you to do the same. I don’t know what’s going to happen in November. I do know that Barack Obama is giving us a pretty clear picture of how we can destroy our country, and with it our freedom. I know that we are the only ones that can stop it. That’s enough to keep me in the fight.

07.31.12
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Presty the DJ for July 31

Today in 1964, a Rolling Stones concert in Ireland was stopped due to a riot, 12 minutes after the concert began.

Today in 1966, Alabamans burned Beatles products in protest of John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” The irony was that several years earlier, Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church dinner.

Other than my mother (who was a singer, but never recorded any records, unlike my father’s band, which released a couple of them), birthdays today include Kent Lavoie, better known as Lobo:

Bob Welch, who before his solo career was in Fleetwood Mac before they became big:

Karl Greene of Herman’s Hermits:

Hugh McDowell played cello for Electric Light Orchestra:

REM drummer Bill Berry:

07.30.12
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I, Madison, Center of the Universe

The Capital Times of the People’s Republic of Madison reports:

Mayor Paul Soglin says state leaders should be looking toward the city as an example of how to build a 21st century economy rather than blaming it for Wisconsin’s current problems.

Sporting a two-tone bowling shirt a la Charlie Sheen, the Mayor on Wednesday launched into a blistering attack on the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Scott Walker for crafting a tax system Soglin claims penalizes Madison for its success. …

Soglin said Dane County has only 8.5 percent of the state’s population yet delivers nearly 12 percent of the income and sales tax revenue collected in Wisconsin.

But because of the state’s complicated shared revenue formula, Soglin says Madison gets less back in state aid and ends up sending money off to wealthy Milwaukee suburbs. …

Soglin blamed both his predecessor, Dave Cieslewicz, and the state for failing to make investments in infrastructure that could have helped ease the impact of the recession – although he didn’t specifically mention the $810 million Madison-to-Milwaukee passenger rail project that Walker scuttled. …

“I’m a big believer in stimulating the economy,” Soglin said, ticking off a list of government-driven infrastructure improvements throughout history: the Erie Canal; the western U.S. dams, the rural electrification program and the interstate highway system.

(I’m a big believer, Paul, that politicians are like baby diapers. They need to be changed. Often.)

Mayor-for-Life Soglin is whining because the city is about $10 million short of revenue to fund everything Soglin wants to fund, “and no way to close it other than with spending cuts.”

Meanwhile, Madison’s schools are starting to suck, and crime is on the increase, but nary a word about either from Soglin. Instead, His Petulance blames his predecessor and those who fail to give him enough  money to waste and/or worship at the altar of Mad City. (Metaphorically speaking, since Madison is officially atheist.)

Madison these days best fits Ann Richards’ claim about George H.W. Bush — Madison was born on third base and officially thinks it hit a triple. You would have to be at the very nadir of competence if you did not have a growing economy in a city that is the state capital and has the flagship state university campus.

I love this comment about Soglin’s screed:

Paul, what do you know about stimulating the private sector? You have tried the private sector a couple times; failed because you have to produce results in the private sector. You end up crawling back to the voters of Madison to put you back on the government teat. The only reason Madison is successful is because of the state. If the state did not have all of its offices in Madison you would be a ghost town. With all of the regulations put on businesses, by people who have never worked outside of government much less run a business, you have managed to run off most business that do not cater to the state. Just say thank you and move along to supporting some city ordinance wishing Hugo Chavez a speedy recovery.

This one too:

Best cut of the entire story:
“We are not allowed to share in the bounty we have created,” he says.

Pardon me, but when you progressive geniuses want to spread MY wealth around, everything is butterflies and rainbows. When it’s your own wealth…not so much?

Hypocrisy much?

And …

Soglin’s statement is profoundly moronic and does not reflect the ground realities. Must be the bad weed!

Soglin single handedly droves businesses out of town and continues to do so. He is unqualified to be a mayor in 2012. His allegiances are to people who continue to blame and vilify businesses and corporations. He is in bed with them.

This guy is not even player in economic development game. Don’t confuse blowing tax payer money with business development.

Perhaps Soglin’s foil, Walker, can alleviate Madison’s revenue problems by moving as much of state government as possible out of Madison. Fewer people, fewer government services to have to provide.

I am reminded yet again how happy I am to not live in Madison. I wouldn’t drive through or around Madison if I could avoid the left-wing suckhole in the middle of Dane County.

07.29.12
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Presty the DJ for July 29

A short but deep list of birthdays today begins with Neal Doughty of REO Speedwagon:

Geddy Lee of Rush (whose last song here should be the theme song of my old high school):

John Sykes of Thin Lizzy:

And from today’s Ironic Death File: Today in 1974, Mama Cass Elliott died, not from drug use or alcoholism, but from choking on a ham sandwich:

07.28.12
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Presty the DJ for July 28

We begin with our National Anthem, which officially became our National Anthem today in 1931:

Birthdays begin with George Cummings of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show:

Clem Cattini was the drummer for the Tornados:

Richard Wright played keyboards for Pink Floyd:

Steven Peregrine Took of T-Rex:

Steve Duncan of the Desert Rose Band:

07.27.12
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Let the games begin

Today is the official start of the Olympics, because today is when NBC carries the Olympics opening ceremonies, even though events began Wednesday.

One could say the official start of the Olympics is the first official blasting of “Bugler’s Dream,” the name of which you may not know, but the music of which you do:

This, however, is the official Olympic theme song:

The best thing about the Olympics may be that, for sports fans, TV-watching improves tremendously. The Olympics are now all over the cable or satellite dial, with CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, the NBC Sports Network and Telemundo all carrying events. And, for those of us without a working TV in our houses, it’s all available online.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that NBC’s Olympics coverage is not really geared for sports fans; in fact, event coverage degenerates into soap opera, a trend that began with ABC-TV’s “Up Close and Personal” vignettes during their coverage.

(Speaking of up close and personal: my wife was a translator — Spanish and, unexpectedly, Portugese — for Olympic volleyball in the old Omni for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. One night, I was idly watching late-night coverage back in Wisconsin when it was suddenly interrupted for news of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. That caught my immediate attention because the Omni wasn’t far from the bombing site, and I wasn’t sure if she might not have been in that area at the time. She wasn’t, I found out after one after-midnight phone call to the house where she was staying.)

It would be nice if the Olympic movement was only about athletic achievement. For that matter, it would be nice if the Olympic movement was motivated only by athletic achievement. It would also be nice if the Olympics was a place where international disagreements could be set aside for a couple of weeks. None are the case, of course; in fact, anyone who says the Olympics should be free from politics doesn’t know much about the Olympics, of which USA Today’s Richard Benedetto said, “Sports and politics are running mates.”

The Olympic movement has been the poster child for political intrigue for almost its entire existence, dating back to the days when Baron Pierre de Coubertin resurrected the Olympic movement in the 1890s. Coubertin believed that professional athletes soiled sports, so, when Jim Thorpe was discovered to have played “professional” baseball ($2 a game), he was stripped of his medals even though his losing his medals was against Olympic rules. Adolf Hitler viewed the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a chance to show off the superiority of his master race. Several Arab countries boycotted the 1956 Melbourne Olympics to protest Israel, and 20 years later many African countries boycotted over South Africa. The 1968 Mexico City Olympics was marred by the Mexican government’s massacre of more than 200 protestors.

Four years ago, the Weekly Standard‘s Dean Barnett wrote that “Unwholesome Olympics politics are more the rule than the exception,” including the 1936 Olympics and boycotts by the U.S. in 1980 and then of the U.S. by Soviet bloc countries four years later. In a completely different category would be the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists in the 1972 Munich Olympics, an obscenity basically blown off by International Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage, a truly loathsome figure in sports history. (As for now, same thing.)

Beyond boycotts, each of the winter and summer Olympics between 1948 and 1988 was an athletic attempt for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to show off its superiority against the other. This was a rather stacked race given that the U.S.S.R.’s “amateurs” were not amateurs at all. Some viewers see NBC’s coverage of the Olympics as excessively pro-American to the point of being jingoistic. And we haven’t even discussed various medical scandals tied to the effort of outdoing the competition.

Commercialism has been a recent complaint, and yet the three U.S. Olympics held in the past 25 years — Los Angeles in 1984, Atlanta in 1996, and Salt Lake City in 2002 (run by some guy named Romney) — all were profitable. (I was in Salt Lake City three years before the Olympics, and one business group that benefitted from the Olympics before the Olympics were road builders.) The Athens Olympics in 2004, the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, and the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 ran deficits. We’ll never know how much money the 2008 Olympics in China lost, since China lacks, you know, freedom.

This has all made me a bit cynical of the Olympic movement, a feeling expressed by Mary Riddell of London’s Telegraph:

What voters want from these Olympics is a chance to forget about politics. In bleak times, when people lose faith in their leaders and their gods, they seek saviours from other spheres. The rise of comic book superheroes, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, coincided with the collapse of the American dream after the Great Depression. It is not an accident, in an age when many of the super-rich have been exposed as charlatans and politicians can offer no escape from crisis, that Spiderman and Batman are back, over-riding political incompetence and corporate greed, to rescue the world from the forces of evil. …

Great events, lauded as founts of bravery and revival, are always invested with more significance they can bear. So keep it simple. In an age warped by unfairness and inequality, ordinary Britons must be willing and able to reclaim the Games. The biggest jamboree of the recession was devised as the people’s Olympics. It will live or die on that criterion.

Still, the Olympics can generate stunning achievement, including gold medals by athletes you’ve never heard of, such as American Billy Mills in the 1964 10,000-meter run, or Nadia Comaneci in 1976 gymnastics, or Cathy Freeman in the 2000 400-meter run. And, of course, there was that hockey team in 1980. (1960, too.) The Olympic Games is worthwhile watching, as long as you don’t watch too closely.