Wire Report

William F. Shughart II – Senior Fellow, The Independent Institute

William F. Shughart II is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute and the Frederick A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Mississippi. A former economist at the Federal Trade Commission, Professor Shughart received his Ph.D. in economics from Texas A & M University, and he has taught at George Mason University, Clemson University, and the University of Arizona. Professor Shughart is Editor in Chief of Public Choice, past President of the Public Choice Society, President-elect of the Southern Economic Association, Associate Editor of the Southern Economic Journal, and Book Review Editor for Managerial and Decision Economics. His books include Taxing Choice: The Predatory Politics of Fiscal Discrimination; The Elgar Companion to Public Choice: The Organization of Industry; Antitrust Policy and Interest-Group Politics, Modern Managerial Economics (with W. Chappell and R. Cottle); Policy Challenges and Political Responses: Public Choice Perspectives on the Post-9/11 World (with R. Tollison); The Political Economy of the New Deal (with J. Couch); The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust (ed. with F. McChesney); and The Economics of Budget Deficits (with C. Rowley and R. Tollison). A contributor to numerous other books, Professor Shughart is the author of more than 100 articles for scholarly journals and his popular articles have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Oklahoman, San Francisco Chronicle, Investor’s Business Daily, San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Examiner, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Washington Times, Detroit Free Press, Clarion-Ledger, Vision Hispana, National Post, Providence Journal, and many other publications.

Put a New Tax in Your Pipe and Smoke It.

(Wire/Ind.Inst.) – I am a college professor. My job description therefore requires that, among other things, I wear a tweed sport coat with leather elbow patches, grow a beard, spend two days a week in the classroom, and smoke a pipe.

H.R. 4439 Tobacco Tax Parity Act of 2010 (PDF 156KB)

That last essential trait is now under attack. A bill before Congress proposes to increase the federal excise tax on pipe tobacco, making it equal to the recently enacted tax on loose cigarette tobacco purchased by smokers who “roll their own.” If passed, the bill would tax pipe tobacco at nearly $25 per pound, an increase of 775 percent over the current level.

Tobacco smoking is bad for one’s health. To my knowledge, however, no scientific studies have been conducted showing that pipe smokers (or cigar smokers, for that matter) have shorter lives than nonsmokers. There certainly is no evidence that nonsmokers who are exposed to environmental pipe or cigar smoke are harmed by it. Indeed, every person who smells the ambient odor of my pipe says that they are reminded of their fathers or grandfathers.

So, why are pipe smokers selectively being targeted by Washington? The answer is political opportunism. The federal government has been on a spending binge since George W. Bush occupied the White House. Over the past nine years, America’s taxpayers have been burdened with unprecedented expansions in the federal budget to finance new educational mandates (“No Child Left Behind”), new healthcare initiatives (Medicare Part D, to pay for granny’s meds), two wars on terrorism (Iraq and Afghanistan), failed economic “stimulus” plans and the bailouts of irresponsible financial institutions.

With annual budget deficits now running at $1.4 trillion, Washington is desperate for revenue enhancements (i.e., new sources of tax revenue). Rather than increasing taxes on a broad basis, which predictably would elicit broad-based opposition from already overburdened taxpayers, it is politically expedient to single out minorities who cannot bring effective power to bear in the legislative marketplace. And so we have seen proposals to tax those who have sacrificed wages in return for generous, “Cadillac” health-insurance plans, to tax the consumers of junk food and carbonated soft drinks, and to tax transactions in common stocks.

It is naïve to think that our elected representatives are attentive to the public’s interests. What presidents and the members of Congress do in practice is to transfer wealth to the special interests that are critical to their re-election prospects. It is therefore not surprising that they finance those wealth transfers by taxing groups that are not important to them electorally.

And so the tax burden falls most heavily on anyone, anywhere who is politically impotent, especially if they can be portrayed as the consumers of products that, on the flimsiest of scientific evidence, harm themselves or impose costs on others.

That mindset unleashes the nanny state to run amok. Pipe and cigar smokers are no threat to the public’s health. Even if smoking a pipe or a cigar harms the consumers of those products, that harm is borne privately and thus is not an issue of public policy concern.

But it unfortunately is if tax policy is predatory, with the aim at raising revenue from any group that cannot marshal effective political opposition to it. Perhaps it is time to add pipe tobacco, junk food and soft drinks to the agendas of the tea parties now being organized to oppose a government that is everywhere more intrusive.

Copyright 2010 The Independent Institute

Wire Report

Jacob G. Hornberger – Founder & President, The Future of Freedom Foundation

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, publisher of The Freeman.In 1989, Mr. Hornberger founded The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a regular writer for The Foundation’s publication, Freedom Daily. Fluent in Spanish and conversant in Italian, he has delivered speeches and engaged in debates and discussions about free-market principles with groups all over the United States, as well as Canada, England, Europe, and Latin America, including Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina. He has also advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows. Most recently, he has regularly appeared as a commentator on Fox News’ legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Internet-based show Freedom Watch. His editorials have appeared in the Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, La Prensa San Diego, El Nuevo Miami Herald, and many others, both in the United States and in Latin America. He is a co-editor or contributor to the eight books that have been published by the Foundation.

(WIRE/FFF) – What happens when the military is used in a police capacity? You get a “war on terrorism,” one in which people think that the laws of war now apply to the situation. But in actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. What you actually get is a criminal-justice problem that inevitably goes horribly awry, causing the problem to escalate into a deadly and destructive horror story.

Consider the war on drugs. Most everyone concedes that drug dealing and drug possession are federal criminal offenses. Drug offenses are listed as crimes in the U.S. Code. People who are caught violating them are arrested, indicted by a federal grand jury, and prosecuted in U.S. District Court. The Bill of Rights requires the government to accord drug defendants all the rights and guarantees of the Bill of Rights, including trial by jury and due process of law. Incompetent, irrelevant, and illegally acquired evidence is excluded from the trial. The defendant is presumed innocent and must be found not guilty unless the government provides sufficient evidence to convince the jury that the defendant is guilty. Cruel and unusual punishments are prohibited. The defendant has the right to remain completely silent, before, during, and after the proceeding.

Now, consider the following scenario. In a concerted effort, a couple thousand members of powerful Latin American drug cartels cross the Mexican border into the United States. Employing automatic weapons, bombs, and grenades, they begin killing DEA agents, federal judges, and local cops and blowing up federal buildings in retaliation for U.S. military actions against drug cartels in Colombia and DEA actions in Mexico. The drug gangsters slip back into the populace, only to engage in more assaults in the following weeks.

The local cops take on the drug gangs, but they are clearly outgunned. The state governors ask the president to send the U.S. military to help them out. The president persuades Congress to suspend the posse comitatus law, and he reassigns U.S. military forces fighting the drug war in Colombia to the U.S. southern border.

Question: Does the military’s participation in the drug war automatically change the drug war into a real war, like World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War?

Answer: No. The matter continues to remain one of criminal-justice. The gangsters are violating laws against murder, mayhem, drug dealing, illegal entry, and no doubt dozens of other criminal laws on the books. But the fact that the military is being employed to assist the police doesn’t mean that the matter is now governed by the laws of war. The gangsters do not become enemy combatants. They remain criminal suspects.

The military is simply being used in a police capacity, albeit one employing much more force than the cops employ. But in principle the situation remains the same: when the military is used in a police capacity, it is still subject to all the rules and processes that govern the police. When the military takes one of the drug suspects into custody, the suspect is entitled to all the rights and guarantees that drug suspects are entitled to when the police take them into custody.

Why don’t we use the military to enforce the drug war and other federal crimes here in the United States? Why is there a policy against it? After all, the U.S. military is used to wage the drug war in Colombia, and the Mexican government employs its military to fight the drug war in Mexico. Why don’t we do the same thing here?

The reason is that the mindset of a law-enforcement officer is completely different from that of a soldier.

The mindset of policeman is: apprehend the suspect and bring him to justice, which means a trial to determine whether he’s guilty, and, in the process, do your best to ensure that innocent bystanders are not hurt.

The mindset of soldier is: kill the enemy and win the war. The killing of innocent bystanders is acceptable as collateral damage, especially if the action results in the killing of the enemy and protection of U.S. troops.

That brings us to the subject of terrorism. Like drug dealing, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. No one can deny that. It has long been listed in the U.S. Code as a crime. That’s why terrorists are indicted in U.S. District Court and accorded all the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights, just like drug defendants. It’s why such famous terrorists as Ramzi Yousef, Zacharias Moussaoui, Jose Padilla, and Timothy McVeigh, to name only a few, were indicted, tried, and convicted in federal court.

In fact, the Yousef case provides a good example for analysis. He’s the man who committed the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, an attack which, in principle, was no different from the subsequent attack on the same building 8 years later, on September 11.

After attacking the WTC, Yousef, a foreign citizen, escaped from the United States. In 1995, Pakistani law enforcement agents learned that he was holed up in Pakistan, arrested him, and extradited him to the United States, where he stood trial for terrorism in U.S. District Court and convicted. He is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in a federal penitentiary.

Was Yousef’s attack on the WTC an act of war? No. It was a federal criminal offense. When he was taken into custody, he wasn’t taken to a prisoner of war camp. He was instead turned over to U.S. law-enforcement agents.

Let’s suppose that Yousef had been located in an area of Pakistan in which he was protected by 3,000 compatriots who had conspired with him to commit the terrorist attack. Would the large size of co-conspirators convert the attack into an act of war? Again, the answer is no. It doesn’t make any difference whether a criminal act has 2 co-conspirators or a thousand. It still remains a criminal act, albeit one involving a larger conspiracy.

Suppose that Yousef and his gang were armed with automatic weapons and that the Pakistani police and military were unable to take him into custody. Let’s say that the Pakistani government invites the U.S. government to send in its military forces to take Yousef into custody. The U.S. military enters the country, attacks Yousef and his cohorts, and takes him into custody.

Has the matter now been converted into a war, like World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War, simply because the U.S. military is involved and doing the apprehending?

Again, the answer is no. The issue of war does not turn on whether a nation’s military branch is used to subdue and apprehend a suspected criminal. Once the military took Yousef into custody, it would be required to do what the police did — turn him over to the authorities for trial. By subduing and apprehending Yousef, the military has simply functioned in a police capacity, albeit one with overwhelming force.

Consider Al Capone and his gang during Prohibition. They used machine guns against local cops and federal agent Elliot Ness and his “untouchables.” Did that constitute war? Of course not. But what if it had been necessary to bring the military into the situation to overcome Capone’s massive firepower? Again, the military would simply have been operating in a police capacity and, thus, subject to the rules that govern the police.

The problem though, as I mentioned earlier, is that the military, because it has a different mindset than the police, will inevitably treat the matter differently than the police. For example, the police will stake out a building for days where they suspect that a criminal suspect is holed up. That’s not what the military would do. If they are reasonably certain that the suspect is in the building, they would simply drop a bomb on it. And if it turned out that the suspect was killed in the blast, the military would consider the operation to be a success, even if a several innocent bystanders were killed in the process.

All this brings us to Osama bin Laden and the military invasion of Afghanistan.

The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 was, in principle, no different from the attack on that same building in 1993. Again, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. As the suspected planner of the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden was in no different position from people who conspired with Ramzi Yousef to commit the 1993 attacks.

After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush demanded that the Afghan government turn over bin Laden to U.S. officials, just as Pakistan had turned over Ramzi Yousef to U.S. officials. If the Afghan government had complied with Bush’s request, then U.S. law dictated that bin Laden be treated the same way as Yousef and, for that matter, 9/11 conspirator Moussaoui, were treated — that is, indicted in U.S. District Court and prosecuted for conspiring to commit a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

However, the Afghan government refused to unconditionally comply with Bush’s demand. For one thing, there was no extradition agreement between the United States and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the Afghan government expressed a willingness to deliver bin Laden to an independent third party for trial if the U.S. government provided evidence establishing bin Laden’s complicity in the attacks, the type of evidence that would have been required in an extradition hearing.

Bush refused those conditions and emphasized that his demand for bin Laden was unconditional. The Afghan government refused. At that point, the United States attacked Afghanistan. Thus, that involved the U.S. military in two separate actions: a war against the Afghan government for refusing to comply with Bush’s extradition demand and a police action to apprehend Osama bin Laden.

The action against the Afghan government constituted war, like World Wars I and II. It was a conflict between two nation states. Clearly it was an illegal war, given that it was waged without the congressional declaration of war required by the Constitution but it was a genuine war nonetheless.

Not so, however, with respect to the military action intended to apprehend bin Laden. Like our examples regarding Ramzi Yousef, Al Capone, and the Latin American drug gangs, that action remained a police action, one in which the military was being used in a foreign country to employ its overwhelming force to bring a suspected criminal to justice.

The problem arose when the U.S. government made no attempt to distinguish between legitimate prisoners of war and suspected terrorist criminals. Instead, it intentionally conflated the two and then defaulted into making all them — Afghan soldiers and al-Qaeda members alike as “illegal enemy combatants.”

At the same time, of course, was the massive war-on-terrorism propaganda that the Bush administration issued after the 9/11 attacks. In the fear-laden environment of post 9/11, federal officials embarked on a big hype campaign in which they convinced people that this particular criminal offense was either a criminal offense (which is precisely why they indicted and prosecuted 9/11 co-conspirator Moussasoui in federal court) or an act of war, at the option of U.S. officials. At the same time, by conflating the prisoners of war taken captive in the war against Afghanistan with suspected members of al-Qaeda taken captive, U.S. officials succeeded in confusing the separate issues of war and criminal justice in people’s minds.

Thus, we have the horribly muddled situation today, one in which some people are saying that some suspected terrorists should be treated as criminal defendants, while others are saying they should be treated as illegal warriors, while others are saying that the government should continue to have the option of treating them either way. Perhaps the most bizarre suggestion came from those who said that the Detroit bomb suspect should have been turned over to the military for torture and then returned to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution in federal court.

We now also have a warped dual-track judicial system with respect to suspected terrorists. One track involves criminal prosecution in the federal judicial system established by the Constitution, where people are presumed innocent and the Bill of Rights applies. The other track involves criminal prosecution in an alternative, competing military tribunal system established by the Pentagon, one in which people are presumed guilty of terrorism, subjected to torture and abuse, and tried in kangaroo proceedings where the Bill of Rights does not apply. The government has the arbitrary, ad hoc power to decide which track people are going to be subjected to.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the horrific consequences of the Bush administration’s decision to employ the military to apprehend bin Laden, unlike the case with Ramzi Yousef several years before.

In Yousef’s case, no bombs were dropped on Pakistan. U.S. officials waited patiently for two years before he finally turned up and was taken captive, with no loss of life to innocent bystanders.

Contrast that with the horrific mess in Afghanistan. In the midst of all the anger and hatred that people all over the world now have for the United States, it’s easy to forget the outpouring of sympathy and friendship that came from all over the world after 9/11, including from the Muslim community. If U.S. officials had simply waited out the situation, as they had with Yousef, bin Laden would have been isolated. That is, he could never have travelled freely and there were countless people all over the world sympathetic to the United States who would have been willing to turn him, especially for a sizable reward. His recruiting efforts would have been limited to people who were angry with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East (e.g., unconditional support of Israel, the sanctions against Iraq, etc.)

Instead, the Bush administration sent in the military — the people with the mindset of “kill the enemy even if it kills innocent bystanders,” which produced massive death and destruction in Afghanistan, which in turn converted all that sympathy and friendship for the United States into widespread anger, hatred, and rage, which in turn greatly fueled bin Laden’s recruiting efforts. And, oh, by the way, even after 8 long years of death and destruction in Afghanistan, they still haven’t apprehended bin Laden.

Finally, I should also point out that the terrorism-is-war crowd has never answered a critically important question: How is the war on terrorism expected to end? That is, how do we know when all the terrorists in the world have been killed? Or, better yet, how do the terrorists surrender? Does the president of the TAW (the Terrorist Association of the World) sit down on a U.S. ship and sign the surrender papers, just like Japanese military officials did at the conclusion of World War II? Yes, that is ridiculous, but it goes to show what the terrorism-is-war paradigm has led us to — perpetual military conflict, along with perpetual death and destruction, along with ever-increasing military expenditures, along with ever-growing infringements on civil liberties.

It’s time to bring the military home and end its role as domestic and international cop.

© 2001-2010 The Future of Freedom Foundation. All rights reserved.

Allison Bricker

“Not Evil Just Wrong” looks to debunk the myths promoted by environmental extremists.

UPDATE: Live Chat & Screening Stream – http://smargus.com/2071

A new documentary by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney entitled, “Not Evil Just Wrong” looks to debunk the various pseudo-scientific notions presented by global-warming profiteers, such as former Vice-President Al Gore. A man who looks to foster fear of environmental catastrophe amongst people, spinning emotionally charged fables of dying polar bears in a manner all too similar to former President George W. Bush’s smoking-gun/ mushroom-cloud analogy prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

The directors look to combat what they view as the environmental movement’s most powerful weapon, disinformation. Consequently, “Not Evil Just Wrong” charges headlong into debunking the claim of “scientific consensus” as well as the infamous “hockey stick graph” that attributed a supposedly unique increase in temperature during the 20th Century to the industrialization of human society. The film further tasks itself with disproving several of the environmental movement’s core talking points, from the hottest years on record myth, to the preposterous notion that Co2, i.e. oxygen to all plant life, is poison.

According to the group’s media contact Travis Swindle, the documentary will reach global saturation as a result of the thousands of planned DVD/theatrical premieres as well as the free internet streams set to commence on Sunday, October 18 at 8:00 p.m. EST. Both the documentary’s website, NotEvilJustWrong.com and several affiliates such as Andrew Breitbart’s collaborative blog project, BigHollywood.com, will host the free streams in order to provide a smooth viewing experience.

With traditional media networks continuing to hemorrhage viewers, the potential for a successful premiere of a feature-length documentary at least in part over the internet, may provide a glimpse to the thus far elusive new-media business model.

Wire Report

Jack Hunter

“The Southern Avenger” Jack Hunter has been in radio for over a decade, is currently a personality for 1250 AM WTMA talk radio in Charleston, South Carolina, writes a weekly column for the Charleston City Paper, is a contributing editor for Taki’s Magazine and Young American Revolution and works as a freelance writer who has been featured in numerous publications including The American Conservative, The American Spectator and Lewrockwell.com.

(WIRE/LPN) – It’s hard to imagine a Republican more useless than South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Whether spearheading legislation that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens¹, stumping for the $787 billion taxpayer theft² known as “TARP,” being the lone GOP committee vote to confirm liberal Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor³, or his recent joining with John Kerry to promote cap-and-trade⁴—without shame and without fail—conservatives have never had a friend in Graham.

And yet in 2008, Graham was reelected in the deep Red State of South Carolina over a Democratic candidate, Bob Conley, who staunchly opposed amnesty, TARP and was well to the right of Lindsey in almost every respect. Many dubbed Conley a “Ron Paul Democrat,” given his support for the Texas Congressman during the Republican presidential primary and in that senatorial election the conservative “D” lost to the liberal “R” thanks purely to party affiliation. Rest assured, Lindsey Graham would like to keep things this way.

And Ron Paul would not. Comparing the 2008 Paul campaign with every other Republican who ran for president that year is a study in contrasts. Paul remained a Republican out of political necessity, sometimes seemingly regrettably, despite his continuing disappointment with his party’s lack of serious commitment to limited government principles. Every other GOP candidate, from talk radio favorite Mitt Romney to eventual nominee John McCain, would mouth occasional limited government rhetoric despite their lack of a voting record to match, seeming most interested in their ascendancy in the Republican Party and the power it affords.

When confronted by a crowd of tea partiers, town hall protesters and other angry grassroots conservatives at a meeting in Greenville this week, Graham reacted to criticism leveled against him by attacking one man: “We’re not going to be the Ron Paul party … I love this party … I’m not going to let it be hijacked by Ron Paul … Ron Paul’s run for president like 39 times. He keeps losing.”

Graham is right. The limited government philosophy that Paul believes once was, and could be again, the guiding principle of the Republican Party, keeps losing. Despite the Founding Fathers best intentions, the Constitution that has remained the only guideline for every vote Paul has cast during his decades-long career in Congress, has been badly damaged by politicians from both parties. To “hijack” the Republican Party, Paul would have to inspire a genuine revolution, not only in the way our government conducts its business but in what Americans think about how much business their government should be conducting. For Paul, the battle has never been about “Republican” vs. “Democrat” but limited government vs. unlimited government and there’s never been any question about which side Paul stands on.

On the other side, you’ll find Graham. As the quintessential GOP establishment man, the big government Republicanism that defined the Bush era had no greater champion than Graham. Conservatives who now trash Lindsey for siding with the Democrats have short memories, as it was Bush who first promoted amnesty, who “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system” with TARP, and grew our government and debt to record heights. At every turn, Graham was Bush’s boy. Now says Graham, “I’m going to grow this party,” which is comical considering his last attempt at Republican resurrection resulted in the sound defeat of his political life-partner, John McCain, who voters rightly saw as a continuation of the unpopular Bush. Today, Graham’s GOP remains wedded to recycling Bush-era, big government policy, always stamped with an elephant insignia and always designed to fool rank-and-file conservatives into voting against their better interests.

But now, too many are tired of being played for fools. The angry crowd that confronted Graham at a town hall meeting in Greenville this week were but the most vocal representatives of an ever-growing group of Americans who are fed up with both the excesses of Bush and the even worse excesses of Obama. For the first time in a long time, many Americans are looking back to the Founding Fathers, holding up their Constitution and seriously reexamining the role of government in their lives. This is fertile ground for an admitted “revolutionary” like Ron Paul. This is dangerous ground for protectors of the status quo like Lindsey Graham. “We’re not going to be the Ron Paul party” Graham will continue to say defiantly, but can no longer say definitely.

And neither can Paul. While any future Republican Party worth having must indeed, finally be “hijacked” by the principles of limited, constitutional government, big government Republicans like Graham would like nothing more than a safe return to the good old Bush days when constituents would just keep their mouths shut, wallets open and their votes-a-comin’.

If this happens—and there’s a good chance it might—conservatives, constitutionalists and patriots of all stripes interested in genuine political revolution must finally go to whichever party, old or new, that best suits their interests. And Lindsey Graham and his retread Republican Party—can go to hell.

Source(s): ¹The Hill “Democrats stymie Republican efforts to pass immigration reform measures” published 10/11/2009 by: Walter Alarkon • ²WSPA News Channel 7 “Sen. Graham Responds To Bailout Vote” published 09/29/2008 • ³CBS News “GOP Sen. Graham to Vote Yes on Sotomayor” 07/22/2009 by: Stephanie Condon • Politico “Sen. Lindsey Graham working with Sen. John Kerry on climate bill” published 10/10/2009 by: Lisa Lerer

The Smoking Argus

Monsanto is the world leader in genetically modified crops (GMO’s)¹, as well as one of the most controversial companies in industrial history. Since its foundation in 1901 as a chemical company founded in St. Louis, MO, Monsanto² has been party to multiple lawsuits due to the toxicity of its products. Today it has reinvented itself as a “life sciences” “agricultural” claiming to produce products to help remake agriculture into a sustainable development model with less impact on the environment. The documentary cites numerous unpublished documents and the testimonies of victims, scientists and politicians. “The World According to Monsanto” pieces together the origins of an industrial empire, built upon lies, collusion with the American government via its bureaucracies, pressure and attempted corruption. If you enjoy this documentary, please consider purchasing the DVD online to support the documentarian and to help spread the message.

Source(s): ¹Reference.com • ²Monsanto.com

Allison Bricker

Dear Readers:

This week past, some readers of “The Smoking Argus Daily” took offense and expressed outrage at two of our recent articles. The articles in question, “President Obama’s Secret Goon Squad Still Torturing Prisoners in Gitmo” and “Jekyll Island Project Media Blackout; Bob Schulz Refuses Press Coverage” stirred up controversy over our criteria for publishing and some questioned “our” loyalty to the liberty movement.

Our criterion for publishing content is based on our determination as to the reliability and overall credibility of the original source. Thus, in reference to the President Obama article we stand behind the reputations of award winning journalists Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill.

This is why when we launched SmArgus one of our main goals was to combat the tabloid stereotype of online blogs by offering sources and hyperlinks back to the original sources. Nevertheless, we nor any other journalist is not above reproach, and as such, if a previously stated claim within a post is found to be wholly unreliable, inaccurate, or needs further clarification, we shall, issue a statement of retraction or clarity.

Additionally, if you came to SmArgus with the misconception that this blog would shirk from its responsibility to report critically on one particular viewpoint solely because a contributor or contributors possess a certain ideology, then we suggest you look elsewhere. The internet is replete with blogs who shill endlessly for their point of view, operating under the assumption that their philosophy or leaders are akin to gospel. The Smoking Argus Daily” is not one of them. There are no sacred cows.

“Therefore, we at The Smoking Argus, will not pander or seek the approval of any particular ideology, character trait, politician, political party, religious persuasion, ethnicity, etcetera, etcetera. We welcome everyone irrelevant of their label, both as contributors and those who add to the conversation via the post comment forms.”

‘About’
The Smoking Argus Daily

In closing, the style in which my reporting and editorial is based upon, is in part an homage to the old Chicago style muckrake journalists who contrary to today, refused to let the subject of an interview slither their way out of answering a question. Like it or not we and all the other bloggers, YouTubers, etc, are the new-media, and we have a duty to provide answers and opinion to our readers. You may not like the answers or opinion you read, and are free to voice your opposition in the comment section below each and every post. However, sometimes getting to the bottom of a story can be messy business.

Respectfully,

Allison Bricker
Editor & Publisher

Allison Bricker

As someone who did not vote for President Obama, (my vote went to Thomas Jefferson as a write-in) never did my imagination fathom that he would move so quickly in continuing the unConstitutional “Bushian” expansion of the Executive Branch. Case in point, President Obama gave a speech this past Thursday filled with enough doublespeak as it relates to the rule of law and torture to make Mr. O’Brien proud.

Thus proving yet again, holding a degree in Constitutional Law does not necessarily equate to a love or respect for the Constitution. Unfortunately, it seems at least in this case, only to serve as a road map to its circumvention. However, the fact that Ms. Maddow of “The Rachel Maddow Show” rakes him over the coals for such intellectual dishonesty provides further substantiation that the false left/right paradigm’s facade continues to crumble as more and more Americans are awakening. It is becoming plain that regardless of party label/mascot,  a politician’s sole motivation is the retention and expansion of power unto themselves via the bloated state apparatus.

Long Live the Republic, as the answer to 1984 is still 1776.

Jeff Lewis

On Wednesday of this past week, the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, defiantly said:

“Colin Powell should close the loop and become a Democrat!”¹
Rush Limbaugh
May 6th, 2009

A few days earlier, an ad hoc group of prominent Republicans, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Eric Cantor (R-VA) among them, began a “listening tour”, ostensibly to rekindle a fire in the vanquished Republican faithful. Within 24 hours, Chairman Rush, was on the radio, in full throat, denouncing this half-hearted effort as meaningless and said what Republican leadership should be doing was having a “teaching tour”.

Such a suggestion begs the question, “What should Republicans be teaching folks?” One would be hard pressed to think they should conduct seminars on how to repackage the plethora of outworn, ineffective, and counterproductive mantras of their recent voting experiences. Since the 2004 election, Republican Senators have dwindled from 55 to 40. None other than current Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) summarized on Thursday that unless things improve soon, they [Senate Republicans] would be down to 36 after the 2010 midterm elections. The tread worn issues of anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-government, anti-diplomacy in foreign policy, anti-Obama on virtually everything he stands for, have lead the national body politic to the news contained in the April 24th, 2009 Washington Post/ABC opinion survey shows only 21% of voters consider themselves Republicans². Duh!

The Republican Party does not need a teaching program; they need a “Twelve Step Program!” They need a collective soul searching that asks the question, “Where did we run so afoul of the voting populace?” For a 12-step program to be effective, it requires an honest self-appraisal, and therein is the problem. They do not admit to having any inherent message problem, but one of a lack of focus, a loss of basic direction, and cosmetic imaging problems. Republicans are not out of touch with most Americans, they are out of touch with themselves. To borrow from contemporary vernacular, “There is only so much lipstick…”

Assuming that such an approach would be an extremely tough sell with the limited capacity of hard core Republicans to admit any shortcomings, their salvation could happen in one of two ways, in my judgment. One, they need an equivalent of a modern day “Moses” to appear with new tablets of stone; or two wait for President Obama to implode, which would allow votes by default because of the restrictive nature of two party entrenchment, inherent in our political machinery. Both of these possibilities will take more time than the next year permits, barring any unforeseen monumental calamity or lightening bolt. Voters’ attention spans have an effective range of about ninety days, which coincides with corporate America’s attention span, as well.

Moses had forty years in the dessert to deliver his people to their promised land. The Republican Party does not have that much time. Is this the opening for America’s next third Party?

Source(s): ¹Excellence in Broadcasting Network, “The Rush Limbaugh Show” – Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 • ²Washington Post/ABC News Poll, Conducted April 21-24,200 +/-3%

Joseph Marohl

I appreciate the improvement in tone of the Obama administration over its immediate predecessor, for example, Obama’s statement in Turkey that America, though enriched by its Christian population, is “not a Christian nation”; even the President’s espousal of his personal faith has, so far, avoided the arrogant display of ignorance and bullying bluster of Bush.

Obama has lifted bans on stem-cell research and the abortion bans linked under Bush to international aid. On Friday, Obama condemned homophobia in particular no less than intolerance in general in a speech at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum—an inclusiveness that is poignant in light of the surge in gay bashing in the past decade and the growth of hate groups in America since his election.

All these examples speak of a bright new spirit in the leadership and values of our nation.

But President Obama has everything to gain or lose over the issue of whether to investigate those in power who promoted or condoned the use of torture of terror suspects.  So far, he appears to be failing a crucial test of integrity.

Fox TV has repeatedly criticized the President’s release of formerly classified memos showing the government’s deliberate attempt to whitewash torture techniques and to approve specific techniques, namely waterboarding, that have been used as torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition and condemned by American military courts trying foreign war criminals for the past 65 years. Fox TV pundits say that the President’s act is politics, a threat to security, an aid to the nation’s enemies.

The White House has defended its action on the basis that the information had already appeared in the media—in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Besides, precautions were taken to blacken out names, supposedly to protect the innocent or the legally covert. And, unlike the Valerie Plame “outing” in 2003, the White House appears to have little to gain politically from the release of this information.

The burning question is—What does the President intend to do with this information?

In his original statement to the press, Obama exempted CIA operatives who participated in torture but did so with an understanding that they were acting within certain legal bounds. In World War II and other cases, soldiers were prosecuted only for exceeding the bounds of laws existing at the time—“following orders” was a legitimate defense that many Nazis who did not just follow orders tried illegitimately to use to save their necks at Nuremberg.

Obama can reasonably justify not prosecuting low-level personnel—unlike the 2004 attempt to quiet the Abu Ghraib scandal, where investigations and prosecutions did not rise higher than low-ranking GIs.

Then last Sunday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel announced that the Bush policymakers, namely John Yoo and Jay Bybee, whose support of torture is documented in the released memos, would likewise be exempt from further investigation and prosecution. But then later White House aides intimated that the President did “not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.”

Troublingly, in public addresses, Obama has echoed Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s dribble that we should not waste time, money, and energy to “look back” to offenses in the past. (As one commenter to Noonan’s original statement put it: “Great news for hit-and-run drivers.”)

Obama told an enthusiastic crowd of CIA employees, “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.” But the government’s detailing of specific torture techniques and fostering an air of institutional and public acceptance of what it euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” can hardly be called a simple mistake.

On Tuesday, an internal memo by Dennis Blair, Obama’s national intelligence director, was publicized, stating, “High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” Blair seems to support at least the underpinning assumption that the Yoo-Bybee interrogation policy was effective.  Obama, in turn, has left the matter in the hands of Attorney General Eric Holder, who is less shy of the word “torture” and has called for the release of even more memos detailing the U.S. government’s support and defense of torture.

To my mind, torture is a bigger issue than the economy. The cost of investigating and prosecuting those of both political parties who were actively or tacitly behind the senseless, brutal, and unjustified beatings of detainees fraudulently in the name of the American way of life and at the expense of justice-loving American citizens is worth more than ten General Motors and fifty Bank of Americas.

And if we taxpayers could fork out $6.2 million to investigate a blowjob in the Oval Office, we owe at least as much to our sense of ourselves as a just, moral, tolerant, and humane people.

Government funds are at least as justly spent in supporting the rule of law as in supporting military actions abroad and sustaining economic growth.

One of the reasons we elect a President every four years is to permit the opportunity to investigate and legally address the flaws—both simple mistakes and flagrant illegalities—of the previous administration. If he or she does not do so, why bother with term limits or even elections?

Our nation’s much-praised propensity for “smooth transitions” distinctly implies that we transition to something new and different from its precedent—not continuation of the same, and not erasure of recent memories of injustice and lawlessness.

If Obama does not address the wrongs of the previous administration, he betrays the fundamental reason for his (or any new President’s) election: change.

If he does not push the investigation and prosecution of injustices committed in the name of America, he does nothing to build the nation’s reputation for democracy and rule of law.

If he does not look into charges of wrongdoing in the Bush administration, even if he  and (less likely) his political party could remain blameless of those wrongs, he furthers the erosion of American values and liberties and, in this case, leaves torture as a tool for future leaders with a bent towards tyranny and a cruel streak.

Joseph Marohl

Texans like Rick Perry, Chuck Norris, and Ron Paul are talking to the media about secession possibilities—and folks apparently take the bluster seriously. How serious are they? Joaquin Phoenix serious? Stephen Colbert serious? Or Jefferson Davis serious?

Norris already has his sights on the presidency of Texas, having played a Texas Ranger for eight years on TV.

Paul seems even to be under the impression that the United States of America “seceded” from Great Britain. Is Texas a colony, and nobody told me? Weren’t Texans allowed to vote in 2008? Weren’t their votes counted? Didn’t their 34 electoral votes go to McCain?

In 2000 and 2004 several high-profile lefties and serious liberals threatened to move out of the country if Bush won the Presidency. I’m not sure what happened. Did they? I don’t recall any follow-up in the press, though I’m aware that Johnny Depp lived in France for a good part of the last decade, for whatever reasons beyond the obvious one: Vanessa Paradis.

And how many anti-Bush expatriates gave up their U.S. citizenship, or even threatened to do so? Any?

But I don’t recall any state, however left-leaning, threatening to secede from the union during the eight years of Bush’s Presidency. Correct me if I’m wrong.

So why is it that liberals—supposedly the collectivists in the pack—get pissed off and threaten to move away on their lonesome; but conservatives—supposedly the rugged individualists—insist on everybody else in their state having to vamoose with them? (It follows, though, in a way, since a good many conservatives believe that if they personally do not want to have an abortion, nobody should be allowed to have an abortion.)

And didn’t 44 percent of Texas voters vote for Obama? What would happen to them? Would they, like the Loyalists of 1776, be tarred and feathered? Would they, like 20 percent of the Loyalists in 1783 —including thousands of black Loyalists—at least those who were freed from slavery by the British and not recaptured by their Patriot masters, move to Canada, the Bahamas, and elsewhere?  (Iowa?)

And, besides, during the Revolutionary War, Patriots outnumbered Loyalists 4 to 1, whereas in Texas the ratio is somewhat closer to even. It might be difficult to tar and feather 44 percent of the population, even if they are Democrats.

I’m inclined to think the secession talk is bullplop, and I’m a bit shocked that anyone would invest any emotion—outrage or hell-yeah—in it. Coming from the mouths of Republicans, it sounds like a threat to take all their toys up and go home. Texas doesn’t want to play anymore.

So far, my favorite response has been actor Steven Weber’s: “Hey, Gov. Perry: don’t let Democracy hit you on the ass on your way out!”

Nate Silver projects that, without Texas, Democrats could have a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate. Good news for hardshell partisans, perhaps, but I prefer a divided government for, ideally, the invaluable dialogue on important issues, not at all for the real-world impasse of political games-playing.

All of this bluster has some serious repercussions, to be sure. They are hard to see, though, for all the comic relief bubbling up from Republican leadership—as denuded now, post Bush, as the Wizard after Toto pulled back the curtain.

Except perhaps for Christian theocracy, some form of libertarianism looks like the only viable move for the G.O.P. right now. And if all libertarian-minded Republicans from the 49 other states flocked to an independent Federal Republic of Texas, we could end up with two one-party governments lobbing missiles (or, more likely, only IOUs) over the Red River.