The Humble Libertarian original

By: Carl Wicklander Fighting between the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Free Syrian Army raged in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, the largest city in the country, with rebels taking land near the airport. Professor Robert Rabil of Florida Atlantic University noted how the Turkish arming of the rebels is leading to, among other things, the withering of the territorial integrity of Syria. Former Syrian prime minister Riyad Farid Hijab, who defected one week ago, was reported in the New York Times saying, "Based on my experience and position, the regime is falling apart morally, materially, economically . . . Its military is rusting and it only controls 30 percent of Syria's territory," and that other leaders were themselves waiting to defect. Read the rest of this article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander A year in which the economy stagnated was also the year of Sandra Fluke, contraceptive mandates, gay marriage, and the Chicken Wars. And ironically enough, it may not be the economy, Stupid, that decides the election. It may just be whose base of supporters are more energized by their particular issues. Like Bush in 2004, Obama in 2012 doesn't have a range of popular accomplishments on which to run, so he is counting on rallying his base and hoping enough undecided voters are more afraid of the other side than theirs.  Read the rest of this article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander Politico's Tuesday morning headline read, "GOP pros fret over Ryan," depicting anonymous GOP operatives expressing concern over Paul Ryan. In a move that apparently wasn't meant to be sarcastic, Politico also carried a companion piece entitled, "[Bill] Kristol: 'GOP pros' often wrong." There's the pot calling the kettle black, but this is more like the captain of the Titanic lambasting the designer of the I-35W Bridge. Read the rest of this entry at The ICON blog at The Independent Voter Network  Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander If Ryan couldn't stand up to his president when he had a viable vote to cast, what is he going to do if President Romney wants to enact an agenda very similar to the one that made Ryan "miserable" under George W. Bush? Read the rest of the article at The Independent Voter Network  Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander One of the more contentious political episodes of the past week has been an ad run by a pro-Obama PAC making the claim that as CEO of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney killed a man's wife. Of course, the ad doesn't quite say that. Regardless, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul added to the obtuseness of the campaign by saying, "Well, if people had lived in Massachusetts they would have had health care." If Mitt Romney was running for the good of his country and to change the status quo this would be a golden opportunity to change the narrative from Romney as a heartless corporate moneybags to Obama as a hypocrite.  Read the rest of the article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander  Via Jim Antle at The American Spectator , the Washington Post 's Ezra Klein takes up the question of Paul Ryan as VP. Not that he is actively trying to help the Republican Party, but Klein repeats a sentiment many seem to share - that Ryan can influence a Romney White House from his perch in the House. There isn't much reason to believe this because Ryan has already been a member of the House of Representatives during a Republican administration and he wasn't a conservative check on anything. Rather, he voted for every major piece of spending legislation including the Medicare expansion he is now accused of trying to gut! Read the rest of this entry at The ICON blog at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander  In a primary race where the three main contestants were trying to "out-conservative" each other, Representative Todd Akin prevailed over businessman John Brunner and former state treasurer Sarah Steelman. Akin voted against No Child Left Behind and TARP. He has a convoluted record on the Medicare expansion, voting for it the first time and against the version that was eventually signed into law. So Akin actually has a domestic fiscal record that is more responsible than Paul Ryan, who voted for all the Bush administration's domestic demands. Akin did, however, support all the military spending of the Bush administration: voting for Iraq, no exit date, and regularly voting for sanctions on Iran. He was against President Obama's actions in Libya, but did release a statement saying Libya was not "in the best interests of our nation" and that "we are not the world's police force." Read the rest of this entry at Th...

By: Carl Wicklander  According to various reports, Rand Paul is going to speak at this month's Republican National Convention. The news somewhat answers a question bandied in the media: what role will Ron or Rand Paul play at the convention? It is likely that this is just the pay-off for Rand Paul's June endorsement of Romney. Although a prime-time speaking slot at a major party convention isn't what it used to be, like Illinois senator Barack Obama in 2004, this may be the younger Paul's introduction to a national audience. Read the rest of this entry at The ICON blog at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander  A trending topic on Twitter this weekend has been a plea for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to select either Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin or Senator Marco Rubio from Florida as his running mate with the corresponding hashtags "#giveusryan" and "#giveusrubio." Voters won't be able to get excited for Paul Ryan for the same reason they aren't able to get excited for Mitt Romney. They like the idea of a budget guru taking care of the economy just as the like the idea of a financial consultant taking care of the economy. But this isn't about why Paul Ryan is a bad choice for vice president. It's about how many conservative voters act like the Republican Party works for them when it's the other way around.  Read the rest at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander  "A Reuters story this week reported that President Obama has 'signed a covert directive authorizing U.S. support for Syrian rebels battling Bashar al-Assad's forces.' Reuters also reports that Obama held a telephone conversation with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan about speeding up political transition in Syria. "Although White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is insisting that it is only humanitarian and communication equipment, or 'non-lethal' aid, the original Reuters report states that the secret order 'broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.' With such criteria, Obama probably did not authorize just the use of telephones."  Read the rest of the article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander Over at The American Conservative , Scott Galupo offers a thoughtful contribution to a conversation they're having about a recent Francis Fukuyama Financial Times column where the End of History author expressed concern about the rise of anti-statism in the GOP: "The question Fukuyama, and the rest of us, should be asking is not whether the GOP is too anti-statist, but, rather, whether the Tea Party is truly anti-statist. I've written about this obsessively over the last two years. In summary, my opinion is this: The Tea Party was a fraudulent ideological freakout. Its adherents saw the electoral disasters of 2006 and 2008 and refused to believe that they bore any responsibility for them. And so they contrived a feeble narrative in which government, by spending too much and by forcing mortgage lenders to act like idiots, caused the financial crash. Long-term exposure to the Tea Party has shown it to be a rebranded version of the religious r...

By: Carl Wicklander  Reading through the transcript of former Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with ABC News one thing is clear: he is not sorry about anything. There are plenty of statements worth discussing. Judging from the media reaction, Cheney only seems to have commented that the selection of Sarah Palin in 2008 was a "mistake." This is hardly breaking news nor particularly controversial. There has been a little push-back but the general silence from movement conservatives seems to acknowledge that the Palin candidacy was a fiasco. But what I found more interesting was Cheney's criticism of President Obama as commander-in-chief (excerpt left unedited from transcript): "I believe that - as we go forward, there's no question in my mind but what - Mitt Romney would be much better as a commander in chief than - is Barack Obama. "I think Obama's made some big mistakes. I look, for example, at the Middle East situation today. ...

By: Carl Wicklander "Among the more closely watched U.S. Senate races this year will be in Missouri. First-term incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill narrowly won her first term in 2006 and faces no intraparty challenger in 2012. In Washington McCaskill has supported two of the more controversial bills of the Obama administration: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, respectively known as the 'stimulus' and 'ObamaCare.' "Businessman John Brunner, former CEO of Vi-Jon personal care products whose most well-known product is Germ-X hand sanitizer, is perhaps the most intriguing candidate because he has never before sought office. In a [Republican primary] where the establishment vote is split between two old hands Brunner has been able to capitalize as the outsider." Read the rest of my article at  The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L...

By: Carl Wicklander "It's unclear what anyone expects to see in Romney's tax returns or Obama's birth certificate or college records. These issues themselves aren't in themselves insignificant, but they are a distraction. They are a distraction from a real national conversation that could be had on secrecy and transparency. "Obama was elected in part due to his opposition to the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy and declaring that his own administration would have 'an unprecedented level of openness.' But since Obama has not lived up to his promise, this would seem like an ideal way for Romney to attack Obama: Take Obama's words from 2007-08 and use them against him. But this isn't likely." Read the rest of my article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander Catching up on some editorials I came across an interesting one in the Telegraph by Timothy Stanley entitled Obama is Batman and Romney is The Thing. But what America really needs is Darth Vader . Admittedly Stanley's comparisons of 2012's presidential candidates with fictional superheroes interested me less than this line: "It was a popular theory [in 2008] that the rebooted Batman franchise was an endorsement of Bush's war on terror, and a writer for the American Spectator naively predicted that his fellow countrymen would pick Batman over Spider-man [Obama] in the November vote. They did not." Reading this line I thought to myself, "Self, what are the chances that the American Spectator writer he links to is Jeffrey Lord ?" For people in our circle Lord's name is something of a cuss word. Most of us, including myself, had probably never heard of him until he wrote a long, ignorant article in August of last year ent...

By: Carl Wicklander "According to a Drudge poll, nearly 63% of Republicans were satisfied with the prospect of a Rice candidacy. Internet polls are notoriously inaccurate and this one makes Rice the equivalent of a football team's back-up quarterback: the most popular person until he actually gets onto the field and fans realize why he was on the sidelines in the first place."  Read the rest of my article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander The appeal of governors to the presidency is easy to see. Like the president, a governor is an executive and a man in charge. Plus, coming from state government a governor can claim to be an outsider. It is both as a business executive and a state executive that Mitt Romney is making his case for the presidency against an incumbent who came into office through the legislature and has at times appeared muddled in his decision-making.  Read the rest of my article at The Independent Voter Network   Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander With a stagnant 8.2% unemployment rate and only 80,000 jobs created, the June jobs report, like its past few inceptions, delivered disappointing news for President Obama. If numbers like these persist it looks like this is going to be the economy that will be on the ballot on November 6. Yet, one man's misfortune is another man's fortune. For Mitt Romney, the bad jobs report is another stroke against a struggling incumbent. While the Republicans are still trying to make sense of Romney's latest triangulation on health care, they are stuck with him and so is the rest of the country if they determine ObamaCare and fiscal stimuli were not enough to resuscitate a tanking economy.  Read the rest of my article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander Two weeks after Senator Rand Paul endorsed Mitt Romney much of the wider Paul movement is still at odds over its meaning. How could Paul say such a thing when Romney compiled a foreign policy team filled with neoconservatives and Bush retreads? Instead of taking an overtly antiwar stance, Rand Paul has always talked about foreign policy more in terms of constitutionality and less in terms of blowback. By making an appeal to constitutionality he is speaking a language acceptable to the Republicans he is trying to reach.  Read the rest of my article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

By: Carl Wicklander "Rubio seems hopelessly confused - apparently equating America's secular political system with religious faith. Yet when he really gets down to it, Rubio isn't really advocating good examples. To get what Rubio is proposing means imposing those examples on others with force." Read the rest of my article at The Independent Voter Network Carl Wicklander , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website