The Humble Libertarian original

Although the Republican controlled House of Representatives recently passed Audit the Fed, HR 459, Audit the Fed will never pass nor will the Fed ever be abolished legislatively. Republicans really do support the Federal Reserve because it funds their wars and empire. Furthermore, all the Republican YEA's to Audit the Fed were nothing more than an act of political expediency because Republicans in Congress absolutely do understand that Audit the Fed stands no chance of ever getting out of the Senate where it only has 30 co-sponsors and could never survive a presidential veto. The Federal Reserve is the mother's milk of empire, tyranny and statism. Big government and central banks exist for no purpose except to massive concentrate wealth and power. Moreover, it's absolutely true that the phrase "99% vs the 1%" is indeed a valid premise even if it was hatched by socialists on the left. What the progressive left fails to grasp is that it was liberal pr

Killer drones just keep getting smaller. The Army wants to know how prepared its defense-industry partners are to build what it calls a “Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System.” It’s for when the Army needs someone dead from up to six miles away in 30 minutes or less. Read the rest here Wired  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

I love stories like this: As a solo general surgeon in private practice, in 2004, with a gross business income before taxes of roughly $500K, I figured that the 39.6% Federal + 9.98% Iowa state top income tax rates + 6% [state] sales + Medicare which no longer peaked out, + property taxes, medical license fees, malpractice fees which were already at $100K for me and headed higher, and no scholarship help for the 4 out of 10 kids in college at the time, my marginal rate was somewhere north of 70%. Once I 'retired' from surgery and became a biology professor, making around $50K, my gross income was one tenth as much, but now one of my kids got a full-ride scholarship at [University], another got a half-ride scholarship, and another got a couple thousand that would not have been given under my earlier circumstances. By my 'going Galt', I figure that the .gov took at least a $200K hit (I remember previously paying $161K in fed. income taxes alone), whereas my dis

The Republican Party is running scared. Either that or they think the country is better served by restricting voter choice to only those candidates they want to appear on the ballot. Could this be the same party that is supposed to totally support the Constitution and personal freedoms? Read the rest here The Liberty Crier  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

The Afghan government on Wednesday banned YouTube from the country for the first time to prevent people from watching an anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims, which sparked a riot in Libya that killed the US ambassador and three other American diplomats. Read the rest here The Telegraph  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Watching Phil LeBlow providing Ford with a reacharound this morning reminded us of total farce that is both the forest and the trees of the US auto industry. We have discussed the FUBAR channel-stuffing and the subprime-lending SNAFU but now, as Reuters reports , we see the ugly truth about GM's little baby "the Volt is over-engineered and over-priced". Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds.  Furthermore, there are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce. And while the loss per vehicle will shrink as more are built and sold, GM is still years away from making money on the Volt, which will soon face new competitors from Ford, Honda and others. Read the rest here Zero Hedge  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

President Obama is tearing the shroud of secrecy off his once hush-hush death-by-drone program.  From his interview with Ben Swann, host of Fox 19’s Reality Check, to his sit-down with CNN’s chief White House correspondent Jessica Yellin, the kill-list compiler-in-chief is gradually exposing details of the principles he purportedly follows before targeting someone for assassination. The president may assume that there is little reason to try hiding something that is being publicized daily — except in the mainstream media. In fairness, the New York Times has done fine work chronicling the expansion of the use of drones, as well as their involvement in the killing of innocents overseas caught in the blast zone of missiles aimed at alleged militants. Read the rest here The Liberty Crier  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Former Reagan OMB Director David Stockman was 'allowed' on CNBC this morning - much to their chagrin now we suspect - and espoused his own brand of truthiness, starting with this epic tirade: "Ron Paul is the only one who is right about the Fed, and the Fed is the heart of the problem. They have destroyed the capital markets and the money markets; interest rates mean nothing; everything is trading off the Fed and Wall Street isn't even home - as it's now a bunch of computers trading word-clouds emitted by this central banker and that" In this environment, he goes on, everyone is being given the wrong signal - i.e. the Ryan/Romney campaign is abnout restoring vibrant capitalism; how can you do that when the financial markets are dead - the lifeblood of a capitalist system. And that is the problem today. Read the rest here Zero Hedge  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

“We Are the Future Rally” at the Sun Dome at the University of South Florida. ( Andrew Harnik/The Washington Time s By: Eric Sharp   The Sunday before the 2012 RNC, a unique political event took place. "We Are The Future Rally" with Ron Paul drew an overflow crowd of more than 10,000 young people. While the GOP Establishment was busy pushing Ron Paul's delegates to the margins with rule changes , the R3VOLUTION was making other plans. "We Are The Future" isn't just a name, it is a declaration. What we are looking at is a "libertarian long-march ", to borrow a Marxist term (it's pay back for stealing the word liberal). What this means is that the Ron Paul Revolutionaries are not going to quietly assimilate into the machine and become good cogs that do what they are told. They will " throw their bodies upon the gears ". They will keep pushing every way they can until a free society is achieved.  The method of each activist is

By: Eric Sharp Delegates and convention goers who were forced to wait for buses to be rerouted expressed surprise that the Occupy presence has been stronger at the DNC than at the Republican convention in Tampa last week. "I didn't see them at the Republican convention," said Wandra Ashley-Williams, vice president of the Maryland State Conference NAACP. "That's not good." Bad news for party elites. Perhaps Occupy knew that Ron Paul's people were already going to bring the fight to the RNC. Anyway what this means for the DNC is that they have a populous movement angry not just at Republicans but mostly at the Democrats for selling out. Compare what Reason.tv reported people were saying about Corporate contributions and the bailouts inside and outside of the Democratic National Convention. Convention goers saw no problem with the bailouts, while Occupy protestors compared the bailouts to theft. Eric Sharp , Regular Columnist, T H L Ar

From a Facebook post. Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Friday’s payroll jobs report says that 96,000 new jobs were created in August and that the unemployment rate (U.3) fell from 8.3% to 8.1%. As 96,000 new jobs are not enough to keep up with population growth, the decline in the U.3 unemployment rate was caused by 368,000 discouraged job seekers giving up on finding employment and dropping out of the work force as measured by U.3. ....  Let’s have a look at those 96,000 jobs. What kind of high-tech, high-income super jobs is “the world’s only superpower, the indispensable nation, the world’s greatest economy and capitalist heaven” creating? The answer is lowly paid third world jobs, which is why there is not and cannot be an economic recovery. All the good jobs have been moved offshore in order to maximize the incomes of the rich. Read the rest here Paul Craig Roberts  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

There’s been a lot of loose talk and leaked tales about what an attack on Iran might ultimately entail. Anthony Cordesman, one of Washington’s best-connected defense analysts, has put together a remarkably detailed inventory of what it would take to strike Iran (.pdf), cataloging everything from the number of bombers required to the types of bombs they ought to carry. He analyzes both Israeli and American strikes, both nuclear and not. He examines possible Iranian counterattacks, and ways to neutralize them. It leads Cordesman to a two-fold conclusion: “Israel does not have the capability to carry out preventive strikes that could do more than delay Iran’s efforts for a year or two.” Despite the increasingly sharp rhetoric coming out of Jerusalem, the idea of Israel launching a unilateral attack is almost as bad as allowing Tehran to continue its nuclear work unchallenged. It would invite wave after wave of Iranian counterattacks — by missile, terrorist, and boat — jeopardi

President Obama "heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede," Politico reports. Read the rest here Judy Morris Report  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Unquestionably, the Republican Party has embraced strong arm Nazi tactics to squash conservative leaning liberty activists who seek to restore America to constitutional rule that parallels the originalist vision of our founders. At first, it was the ruthless disenfranchisement of Ron Paul supporters and legally elected delegates by the RNC and state GOP machines that literally evicted liberty activists from the Republican Party because of our advocacy for limited government, fiscal solvency and the restoration of constitutionally mandated gold backed currency. But now that Romney has been anointed the Republican nominee, the focus of the Republican Party has shifted to disenfranchising 3rd parties by using the judicial system to remove its most formidable challenger - the Libertarian Party. Read the rest here Judy Morris Report  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

It's been said many times that the US is really nothing more than the resurrected British Empire that lost its power and prestige post WW II when the US fanatically embraced British style militarism and empire that catapulted America to the status of the world's sole superpower because of its superior military might. Never before in human history had a sole superpower dominated for so long and without challenge. The US-British alliance has frequently been dubbed the Anglo-sphere. Read the rest here Judy Morris Report  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Small Atlantic nation enjoys growth and employment gains after failing to rescue its banks. Mainland Europe remains stuck with stagnation, decline, and ruinous "rescue" packages. Taxpayers in Europe (and the United States) who have been terrorized since 2008 by government officials warning about economic armageddon, catastrophe, and pestilence should look to tiny Iceland for a taste of how little there is to fear when the experts can't save the people. Read the rest here Reason.com  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Naïve Americans are quick to applaud our military interventions in the false belief that we are doing good things, spreading Jeffersonian democracy and actually helping people who are suffering. But the truth is far different, very ugly and so horrifyingly repugnant that it should constitute an assault on our moral instincts.  Haiti and its suffering is a profound example of a nation destroyed and ruthlessly plundered for 200 years by Spanish, French and US corporate imperialists Read the rest here Judy Morris Report  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

A judge ruled that 10 rare gold coins worth $80 million belonged to the U.S. government, not a family that had sued the U.S. Treasury, saying it had illegally seized them. The 1933 Saint-Gaudens double eagle coin was originally valued at $20, but sold for as much as $7.5 million at a Sotheby's auction in 2002, according to Courthouse News. After President Theodore Roosevelt had the U.S. abandon the gold standard, most of the 445,500 double eagles that the Philadelphia Mint had struck were melted into gold bars. Read the rest here Yahoo! News  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Critics from across the political spectrum are outraged after the Obama administration announced that it was unconstitutionally sending 200 U.S. Marines to Guatemala under the guise of fighting the drug war. According to officials, the American troops were deployed as part of “Operation Martillo,” a multi-national squad of soldiers and law-enforcement personnel supposedly aimed at countering narcotics trafficking throughout Central America. The new President of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina — a widely respected tough-on-crime former military general who opposed communism — had said earlier this year that legalizing drugs would be a better approach. However, the Obama administration swiftly deployed high-level functionaries to coerce the leader into backing down. Apparently the mission was a success. In mid-July, the Guatemalan government signed what news reports and officials described as a “treaty” with the Obama administration — the U.S. Senate, however, never ratified any

Make no mistake - this bomb was designed for Iran. To achieve its goal of blasting through 60 feet of concrete with a bomb exploding at 200 feet underground, Boeing's Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) team just won a prestigious prize. Read the rest here   Business Insider Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

If the point of quantitative easing was to provide enough liquidity to keep the massive, earth-shatteringly large debt load serviceable, then quantitative easing succeeded — but the “success” of sustaining the crippling debt load is that it remains a huge burden weighing down on the economy like a tonne of bricks. This “success” has turned markets into junkies, increasingly dependent on central bank liquidity injections. After QE3 will come more and more and more easing until the market has either successfully managed to deleverage to a sustainable level (and Japan’s total debt level as a percentage of GDP remains higher than it was in 1991, even after 20 years of painful deleveraging — so there is no guarantee whatever that this will ever occur), or until central banks give up and let markets liquidate. Quantitative easing’s “success” has been a junkie recovery and a zombie market. As I see it, the West’s economic depression is being directly caused by an excessive total deb

Whenever 'the poor' and 'minorities' are invoked in the same headline, it's good to set your skepticism filter extra low or you will likely never get through the first paragraph of an article (umm, including this one) because the issue is rarely science or even policy, it is instead advocacy.(1) Oddly, when it comes to a really bad cap-and-trade idea, like for emissions, environmentalists claim it will help the poor and minorities. Read the rest here Science 2.0  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

Firearms expert, hickock45 demonstrates the Glock 19 on the range. This midsize 9mm is one of the most widely purchased handguns ever. It's simple to shoot with little recoil, and it's easy to break down for cleaning. And, it's very accurate. And talk about reliability.......watch him go through seven 15 round magazines in a couple of minutes. Read the rest here LewRockwell.com  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

A few of my favorite quotes. Terrorism is the price of empire. If you do not wish to pay the price, you must give up the empire. - Pat Buchanan Read the rest here Judy Morris Report Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website

The federal mandate to turn corn into motor fuel is bad for the environment and raises food prices. But both parties need corn-state votes too much to care. Corn ethanol is the Franken fuel of American politics. Neither party, neither candidate dares question the program that requires motorists to buy a corrosive, low-heat-content, hydrophilic fuel adulterant—even though that program is now consuming 37 percent of all American corn production and driving up food prices. Read the rest here The Daily Beast  Judy Morris , Blogger, T H L Articles | Website