The Humble Libertarian original

This Sunday, I had the exciting privilege of talking with U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul when he came to speak at a fundraiser in Nashville, Tennessee. What struck me again as I observed Dr. Paul mingle with guests during the reception at Standard Restaurant , was how charismatic and charming Ron Paul's son is. While discussing grave matters like the skyrocketing national debt and the assault on our Bill of Rights, Rand let plenty of hilarious zingers and one-liners fly. He's not only passionate about fighting corruption and waste in Washington, he has a great sense of humor about it! I find myself wondering if this witty, down-to-earth Kentucky physician is the Reagan that Republicans are so desperate to find. Here are some video highlights from the event, including a campaign update from RandPaul2010 Treasurer Chris Hightower:

I recently wrote a landing page for visitors from KentuckyFight.com 's coalition page , and while I was writing it, I got so amped up about how much I love you all for your support and participation at the Humble Libertarian that I thought I'd share a link to the page in an update. Check it out here . We have already done a lot to make a difference for Liberty! With the one year anniversary of the Humble Libertarian just around the corner, writing this landing page was a delightful reminder of how far we've come- and without your help and readership, none of it would be possible. Thanks so much!

This is something I've seen other bloggers do and thought I'd try it out here at THL. "Open Thread" means you are free to comment and discuss on whatever you'd like. Want to start a discussion about something? Go for it! Make suggestions for upcoming posts here? Feel welcome to. What's on your mind right now as it relates to politics, news, culture, philosophy, (etc.)? Sound off!

U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy has reposed at the age of 77 after a long battle with brain cancer . It may be months before his seat is filled. As blogger Michelle Malkin requests of conservatives: please show some RESTRAINT at this moment. As tempting as it may be, show a little humanity and grace, and please allow the Kennedys and the nation some time to grieve. Perhaps take a moment to grieve yourself. If Ted Kennedy was not the kind of man you think he should have been, then his passing should be all the more cause for solemnity rather than barely-disguised glee and sarcastic jokes. As for any Democrats reading this and nodding vehemently at my admonition- please remember not to commit the same impropriety by politicizing Ted Kennedy's death and using it as a weapon to ram your health care reform through Congress. Can we all just make a truce and not politicize this (while criticizing the "other side" for politicizing it in their way)?

The news broke late Monday night that President Obama would be holding a press conference today and announce his nomination of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to another four-year term. The story broke on the same day that hundreds of grassroots activists sent letters to Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi demanding an audit of the monetary activities of the Federal Reserve Bank. The following is a list of ten videos of Fed Chairman Bernanke testifying (and getting grilled) to various members of Congress about the activities of the Fed. He visibly squirms at and evades some of the tough questions about the Fed's secretive policies, outrageous loans, and severe devaluation of the U.S. Dollar. One Congressman (Grayson - D) even laughs out loud at Bernanke's feeble answers. The very last video is a compilation of Bernanke's false predictions about the U.S. economy, which call into question the credibility of his recent statements that he expects an economic recovery by y...

By: Ryan Jaroncyk , T H L Contributor According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments , our nation's missile defense budget is being slashed by 16%. Of particular concern is the fact that our ground-based program is being cut by an even more substantial 35%. Todd Harrison, analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, stated: "no replacement or replenishment program could result in too few missiles to provide a basic level of protection, especially as these missiles are depleted over time from regular test launches." These steep cuts, particularly in the anti-ballistic missile program on U.S. soil, put the delicate balance between fiscal responsibility and national security concerns in the cross-hairs. Here are some potential solutions: 1. Increase funding for national missile defense, but cut back on overseas missile defense systems. Wealthy nations such as Japan and South Korea possess ample financial resources and technological ex...

Anti-Obama T-shirts from The Humble Libertarian: Click here to get yours. Matt Drudge set the conservative/libertarian blogosphere on fire over the weekend with his link to a Reuters article entitled: " Obama to raise 10-year deficit to $9 trillion ," after which I started seeing this graphic everywhere and was inspired to make a t-shirt. Reason Magazine's blog, Hit & Run , had it right in June when contributor, Nick Gillespie wrote that President Obama says he's concerned about the deficit, and is willing to "do anything" but cut spending to stop it. If "change" means everything that was bad about the Bush Administration only worse this time, then the Obama Administration has certainly delivered on its promise to bring "change" to Washington.

This moving video caught my eye over at one of my favorite libertarian blogs, Samizdata . Without the same linguistic and cultural vantage point of the audience, I am yet deeply moved by the quality of the artistry and the poignant depiction of the horrors of war and statism:

By: Ryan Jaroncyk , T H L Contributor Thus far, Peter Schiff's exploratory committee and Dr. Paul's official campaign have raised over $1.5 million. Pretty impressive numbers this early in the game. On the money bomb front, Peter Schiff raised over $350,000 in a single day on August 7th, and he hasn't even officially announced his candidacy. Yesterday, Rand Paul raised over $400,000 in his August 20th money bomb. Make no mistake, these guys are going to rake in the cash for their U.S. Senate campaigns. The question is, will all this money turn into actual votes? We've seen it before. Dr. Ron Paul raised a gargantuan $34 million for his failed presidential bid, setting two one-day Internet fundraising records, but he never won a single primary or caucus, and he averaged less than 10% of the vote. Could we be looking at a similar outcome for Peter Schiff and Rand Paul? Let's hope not. It would be very interesting to see the number and amount of local donations to...

Happy Birthday, Ron Paul! Congressman Ron Paul has been a true champion of Liberty, the Constitution, and Rule-of-Law on Capitol Hill, and today is his birthday. Happy Birthday, Congressman Paul! In ten terms as a U.S. Congressman, he has never voted to raise taxes, never voted for an unbalanced budget, never voted to raise congressional pay, never taken a government-paid junket, never voted to increase the power of the executive branch, not participated in the lucrative congressional pension program, and repeatedly been named the "Taxpayers' Best Friend" in Congress. Rand Paul's August 20th Money Bomb His son, Rand Paul, is running for U.S. Senate representing Kentucky in 2010. Because he shares his father's beliefs in limited government and individual liberty, grassroots patriots all across the country are donating en masse to his campaign website today. Be a part of history and join the August 20th Rand Paul money bomb by donating today ! Here's more info...

Here's a video I've been working on for the past couple days that demonstrates something rather startling about the U.S. Congress: ...fans of Congressman Ron Paul and his son, Rand Paul, who is making a bid for U.S. Senate representing Kentucky, will find this video particularly interesting!

Tough Love for Africans This Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended her 11-day tour of Africa by saying she has no regrets about her message of "tough love" for Africans: " The Obama administration has delivered ... a message of tough love. We are not sugarcoating the problems. We're not shying away from them." Clinton's words and tone echoed the message brought to the African continent just a month ago by U.S. President Barack Obama, who said in his speech to Ghana's Parliament: " We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans... And it won’t be easy. It will take time and effort. There will be suffering and setbacks." Corruption, Taxation, & Tyranny in Africa If only the Obama Administration had words of "tough love" for their home country back here in America! President Obama should be telling Americans: "We must start from the simple premise that America's future is up to Amer...

George Orwell's classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984), is a novel that needs no introduction. Its lucid vision of a dystopian future has ignited controversy, stirred the cultural landscape, and terrified Orwell's admirers as well as generations of freshman English classes since its first publication in 1949. The following is a list of three of the most startling aspects of Nineteen Eighty-Four , along with their real-world parallels in the Obama Administration: 1. Doublethink One of the most penetrating and astute criticisms of totalitarian government in 1984, is its use of "Doublethink" (sometimes referred to as "Doublespeak"), which is an active process of deliberate self-deception accomplished by ignoring the truth, believing lies, and entertaining contradictions in ones mind, or as Orwell described it in 1984: "to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of d...

By: Ryan Jaroncyk , T H L Contributor The 2010 liberty candidates are certainly talking a good game thus far: balanced budgets , less debt, a stronger dollar, lower taxes, increased transparency, greater state sovereignty, and a more efficient national defense. But, haven't we heard it all before? During the Bush administration , Republicans talked about fiscal responsibility , yet national debt doubled, the budget was never balanced, and the U.S. Dollar lost nearly 30% of its value. From 2006 to the present, Democrats have talked about change, yet the U.S. is still bogged down in Iraq & Afghanistan , national debt is skyrocketing, and unemployment is rising fast. So, why should we believe the 2010 liberty candidates will fare any better? The answer lies in personal credibility. Here are a few examples: Peter Schiff is a successful businessman . He knows what it takes to create jobs and balance a budget. He's also a prescient economist who courageously and ac...

By: Heidi Moseley , T H L Contributor Our Founding Fathers kept the language of the Constitution and America's first laws simple. They wrote in a straightforward way that allowed all who read the Constitution and subsequent laws to know exactly what their rights and freedoms were. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Johnson in 1823, wrote “Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense.” The American people actually lived by common sense back then, even some politicians. It's still possible to follow their example today, regardless of America's 21st century size and scope. The Federal Highway Act of 1956 was only two sheets of paper . The bill was strictly about building the interstate highway system that would traverse the entire United States. But since then something changed in how our elected officials saw legislation. Our legislative bills are now full of pet projects and campaign pay...

By: Ryan Jaroncyk , T H L Contributor David Kilcullen , senior military adviser to General Stanley McChrystal, has been highly critical of the war's management in Afghanistan. In a speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Kilcullen outlined a "best case scenario" of ten more years in Afghanistan: two more years of heavy fighting, three years of transition to Afghan forces, and five years of supervision. If this scenario plays out, the U.S. will have conducted wartime operations for eighteen years in Afghanistan. The British Army's new Chief of Staff, Sir David Richards contends that the conflict will drag out for as long as 40 years, saying: "I believe that the UK will be committed to Afghanistan in some manner – development, governance, security sector reform – for the next 30 to 40 years." This raises a number of troubling questions. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the U.S. is projected to run $1-$2 trillion budget deficits for the...

How exciting! Rand Paul's run for U.S. Senate representing Kentucky is a phenomenal opportunity for the liberty movement that rallied around his father's presidential bid in 2007-08, which Congressman Ron Paul rolled forward into a perpetual Campaign for Liberty that has made serious leaps and bounds towards an audit of (and eventual end to) the Federal Reserve Bank. One of the crucial elements of Ron Paul's success was the sheer size and determined tenacity of his grassroots support, which focused their efforts into two meteoric money bombs in November and December of 2007. It is in that spirit and for that purpose that the organizer of both those money bombs has put together RunRandRun.com to raise Rand Paul $1,000,000 in one day on August 20th. As a poor college junior, I donated to both of the original money bombs because I believed in Ron Paul's message of limited government, strict constitutionalism, and individual liberty- and in the flawless record he had of u...

Take a good look at these videos below and you will start to get a picture of how Americans really feel about President Obama's healthcare reform (whatever the Democrats may say ), particularly the Congressional Democrats' bill, H.R. 3200, with its "public option." Way to go, patriots! Seeing you crashing these town hall meetings is just one more argument for requiring our Congressmen to spend 75% of their time in their districts ! Keep up the energy, keep up the activism, and most importantly of all... roll all of this forward into electoral action in 2010 to unseat the tyrants in Congress! PS: While you're watching these videos, here are a couple questions for our nation's tyrants to consider- "Do the people in these videos look anything like Nazis to you, Madame Pelosi ?" and "Are the people who are talking in these videos the ones who made the mess, or is it the Washington politicians they're talking to, President Obama ?" Rep. D...

Peter Schiff, the economic adviser to Ron Paul during his presidential campaign, is making a potential bid for Christopher Dodd's U.S. Senate seat representing Connecticut, and his money bomb today has raised nearly $650,000 at 7:00 pm CDT. If you haven't already, swing by to drop a money bomb for Schiff's campaign. Together we can explode our country's corrupt banking system! The good thing is that Peter Schiff has promised to return all the money his exploratory committee raises to the individual donors if he ends up not running- so there's no risk in donating. Peter Schiff Was Right Video :

Piggy-backing off of yesterday's post , I would like to outline some differences between Reality and "the Big Rock Candy Mountains," a fictional paradise in an old hobo ballad: In the Big Rock Candy Mountains : "the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night." In Reality: wealth does not simply grow on bushes, but must be produced with hard work. As a corollary, handouts to some must come from the hard work of others ...and you can't sleep out every night because in reality it rains sometimes. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains: "the sun shines every day, on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees, where the lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings." In Reality: the weather is not always good, cigarettes are expensive (and taxed like crazy on top of that), and you have to make lemonade yourself from lemons that someone harvested from a tree, which was carefully tended to on a farm somewhere. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains: ...

Judge Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed (in a vote of 68 to 31) to replace Justice Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. We can now only hope that like her predecessor (a Bush appointee), she will swing slightly to the opposite side of the political spectrum from the President who appointed her... ah, the audacity of hope! Seriously though, that would be sweet, sweet poetic justice. Other than hoping for such an outcome, now that the vote is cast there is nothing more we can do but use this as a learning opportunity. Particularly, we need to understand the rhetoric that surrounded Sotomayor's appointment, see what is so critically wrong with it, and stand ready to expose its dangers so that we are prepared to win the ideological battle, if not the political one when it comes time for President Obama to appoint another Supreme Court Justice. Long before Sotomayor's appointment, the media was trumpeting the call for "someone with empathy" on the Supreme Court. After the...

With Barack Obama's birthday earlier this week, let's take a moment to revisit the claims of the "Birther" Movement afoot in the Republican Party today. It revolves around a conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama's birth certificate from Hawaii is a forgery and that he is not in fact a U.S. citizen, but a citizen of Kenya. To begin with, it's extremely irritating that the Palin wing of the Republican Party has become so enamored by this Birther movement after it gave the Ron Paul campaign so much abuse for being a hive of conspiracy theorists and 9-11 "Truthers." It's especially irritating when you note that Ron Paul himself adamantly and unequivocally denied any belief in such theories, calling them "preposterous" and "bizarre" (like here at 35:45 - this is near the end of a Glenn Beck interview. You should watch the whole thing whenever you get a chance). If you want the truth about 9-11 or Barack Obama'...

It's official: Kentucky Ophthalmologist Rand Paul, son of U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, has entered the Kentucky U.S. Senate race . He's now in it to win it. As the Associated Press reports : FRANKFORT, Ky. -- A Kentucky ophthalmologist who has been eyeing a U.S. Senate campaign says he will run for the seat now held by Jim Bunning. Republican Rand Paul of Bowling Green ended months of speculation Wednesday when he told The Associated Press in an interview that he is entering the race. Paul told the AP of his decision in advance of a series of planned media events, including an appearance on national television Wednesday evening. And I just received an announcement via e-mail from Rand Paul's exploratory election committee saying the following: Fellow Citizens, Rand Paul , Bowling Green Eye Surgeon and son of former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, today announces he is officially in the race for the US Senate representing Kentucky. Dr. Paul will now transition hi...

Yesterday the entire conservative blogosphere and Internet were abuzz with links to this page from WhiteHouse.gov, with the following alarming excerpt: There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov . Yikes! (...and yes that "yikes" is the G-rated version of what I'm really thinking.) Encouraging Americans to report on each other for committing thoughtcrimes is pretty freaking scary if you ask me, the kind of thing that the Soviet Union did, or Nazi Germany, or the totalitarian government in Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Honest "liberals...

By: Ryan Jaroncyk , T H L Contributor There's an epidemic in the U.S. military. Repeated deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq are leading to record suicide rates and an explosive rise in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Here are some sobering facts and figures: CNN reported that the military suicide rate for 2008 was the highest level among soldiers since the Pentagon began tracking it twenty eight years ago. A Pentagon study revealed that 10% of the returning soldiers met the military's criteria for PTSD. The New England Journal of Medicine studied four combat units and found that 17% of Iraq war veterans and 11% of Afghanistan war veterans suffered from PTSD. In addition, 25% of returning soldiers were drinking excessively. A study by the RAND Corporation revealed that 20% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan will suffer from PTSD or severe depression; sadly, only about 50% of these veterans will get the treatment they need. An older study by the Government Accountabil...