Last Friday I had an opportunity to take part in Todd Andrew Barnett’s show Liberty Cap Talk Live on Blog Talk Radio. It started out as an interesting but not particularly remarkable show with Mary Ruwart as the primary guest and me joining in late. Then about two thirds of the way through we switched topics and things got out of control and perhaps more entertaining — certainly more provocative.

At that point Todd switched the topic to Iran and brought up as his starting point an article either by Eric Dondero or from his site Libertarian Republican which took issue with Ron Paul for opposing a congressional resolution in support of freedom for the Iranian people. Eric is always trying to stir the waters and has a well-known personal beef with Ron Paul, so the article isn’t surprising. My mistake was in trying to explain why a libertarian might support such a resolution or even support foreign intervention on behalf of liberty.

I wasn’t trying to advocate that position, merely explain the reasoning behind it and how it comes from a legitimate strain of classical liberalism and perhaps point out that it was a pretty trivial issue, but that was lost very quickly when Jim Davidson who was one of the other guests on the show, went completely berserk. It seems Davidson is a very emotional and passionate anarcho-socialist who sees all actions of government as treason and believes that anything government does in the name of the people is essentially a crime. That didn’t exactly leave a lot of common ground with my belief that a republican form of government is the greatest safeguard of individual liberty. Though I tried to pursue a reasonable course, in a matter of seconds he was ranting and screaming about murdering babies and genocide and other craziness which was hard to follow, taking the position that supporting a non-binding resolution in favor of liberty in a foreign country was the first step to and essentially equivalent to invading that country and murdering their people. Davidson seemed to have a specific obsession with republicans as the source of all evil, which put me in a difficult position as the Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus and someone who always looks to find common ground with other libertarians — something which was clearly not happening here. And, of course, he immediately jumped from square A to square Z and assumed that I was a warmonger and perhaps even a war ciminal, in response to which I kind of feebly pointed out my decades of opposition to war an involuntary servitude, but the rant went on.

Then the fates, technical glitches or perhaps the host intervened and the whole thing came to a crashing halt and went off air, which was probably just as well. In the aftermath, Todd Barnett apologized to everyone concerned and banned Davidson from future appearances on his show, which is understandable. I feel like I ought to apologize too for provoking Davidson, but I’m not sure that anything more than mentioning the word “republican” was needed to set him off.

I bring it all up here, and offer the recording below for reference, because I think that this is a classic example of the irrationality which lies at the heart of anarchism and much of the libertarian left. Jim Davidson may be an extreme example, but there are many who share the same beliefs and seem to be incapable of looking at issues in any way other than one of emotion, rage and unreason. I find them difficult to understand, because for me the belief in liberty is the natural outcome of reason and I think that liberty can really only be preserved and maintained in an atmosphere of rationality.

Their viewpoint seems to be one of blind and unconsidered faith rather than the product of any kind of rational process, and it makes me wonder how easily that irrationality could be turned to violence or twisted upon itself in service of a demagogue or a totalitarian movement. It is a characteristic of the irrational rage which motivates domestic terrorists — even though they may have very different core beliefs — and which motivated the anarchists who tried to incite riots at the political conventions in 2008. It’s a narcissistic attitude which causes a violent response to disagreement rather than a more rational desire to understand and dispute or disprove opposing viewpoints. Many of the greatest tyrannies in history had their beginnings in movements which espoused liberty and attracted followers who were blind and uncritial fanatics like Jim Davidson. Then they evolved and accepted the idea that the only way to implement their vision of liberty was the force it on others — which is not liberty at all.

I think that’s the essential fallacy in the beliefs of not only left-libertarians and anarcho-socialists, but also the problem with the religious right and nativists and conspiracy fanatics and followers of the John Birch society who have been attracted to the liberty movement and revere Ron Paul as some kind of messiah. All of these groups put certain other issues to which they have a great and irrational emotional attachment ahead of the basic principle of individual liberty. Someone may have convinced them that they are libertarians, but so long as they don’t believe in liberty first, they are something else in my book. This doesn’t mean that we should purge these people from the liberty movement, but they do need to be educated and taught to reason and moved away from fanaticism and towards a rational understanding that liberty has to come first and that maybe hatred of immigrants or republicans or jews doesn’t make much sense and is certainly less important than liberty.

Like an old joke turned ironically true, it seems that the government is now preparing to actually tax us for breathing. This comes in the form of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 sponsored by Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) which is likely to come to the floor of the Congress as early as this Friday. It is the legislative culmination of the ongoing ecomadness based on the idea that the carbon dioxide is a form of toxic pollution, despite the fact that it is produced in nature, is part of the atmospheric cycle on which all life is based, and is shown to stimulate plant growth and the replenishment of the atmosphere.

Of course, the truth is that carbon dioxide is not an environmental threat, but is merely being raised as a bogeyman to allow for the passage of laws like this new energy bill whose real purpose is social engineering and anti-capitalism. It’s the perfect bogeyman because it’s everywhere and can never actually be eliminated plus it’s produced by almost every human activity — we even breathe it out with every breath. This means that a “carbon tax” can be applied to almost anything and becomes an excuse for raising taxes on everyone through indirect methods where the taxes end up being passed on to consumers in the form of energy price increases. John Dingell (D-MI) who is the senior Democrat in the House admitted recently that “nobody in the country realizes cap and trade is a tax, and it’s a great big one.”

The heart of this energy bill is the idea of a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide and other more serious pollutants, specifically targeting fossil fuels and making it costlier to use them, thereby pushing energy businesses to move into more earth-friendly sources of power. This is combined with the idea of “cap and trade” which allows companies which produce high emissions to buy offsets from companies which produce low emissions, thereby subsidizing the low polluters at the cost of the high polluters.

This all sounds great in abstract, but the problem is that 85% of America’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels of one sort or another, so the initial aggregate cost of the program will be huge. The other problem is that cap and trade just doesn’t work. As has been demonstrated in those nations where it has been used, energy companies find it more practical to just pass on the additional cost to consumers so the net result of all of this is not a reduction in pollution, just a massive increase in prices for energy consumers — effectively a big additional personal tax on every man woman and child in the nation, something they can ill afford in hard economic times.

Analysis of the consumer cost which this program would create suggests that by 2035 the price of gasoline would increase 58 percent, natural gas would go up 55 percent, home heating oil would increase 56 percent, and the typical electric bill would go up a whopping 90 percent. These would be increases to the baseline price and in addition to added cost from inflation and any natural fluctuation in the price of oil. In addition there would be secondary costs as the higher prices impact transportation and manufacturing and create sudden artificial inflation in almost every area of the economy. The finall cost for consumers would be almost $3000 per year starting as soon as the bill is implemented, and within 25 years the cost per family will have increased to almost $5000.

There are also other secondary costs to the economy in taking such a huge amount of money (almost $400 to $600 billion per year) out of the economy. Companies will look to cut costs and that means cutting jobs and wages. Families will not be able to pay the added energy costs and that means an increase in household debt.

The impact on jobs is particularly troubling and has been explored in depth in a stufy (PDF) done in Spain when they implemented a similar program. The administration is promoting this bill as one which creates more “green” jobs. What they don’t mention is that every one of those green jobs created comes at a cost of the loss of 2.2 existing jobs and most of the new jobs are temporary jobs in construction and installation or jobs which cease to exist when the new technology proves to be inefficient and is abandonned. It is estimated that 90% of the jobs created are temporary, so the long-term ratio is more like 20 jobs lost for every job created. Added to the massive job loss already caused by the administration’s failing economic policies this might be a cost too great for the nation to bear.

Massive job loss and energy cost increases for consumers were the result when Spain implemented a carbon tax with cap and trade, and it is that system which President Obama is using as a model for his program. President Obama regularly cites Spain as an example to look to for energy policy, despite the fact that the economic and human impact there has been devastating, prolonging recession, increasing unemployment and taking money out of the pockets of every consumer. The upside is that it is one of the factors contributing to the crushing defeat of Spain’s socialist government in the latest election which brought in more pragmatic reformers.

Fearmongering about “catastrophic global warming” is being used by powerful lobbying groups like the Natural Resource Defense Council to drive support for this bill with no consideration of the damage which will be done to the economy and to consumers. And when you look at the bottom line, the projected outcome of all of this cost and suffering is estimated to be less than two-tenths of one degree in worldwide temperature change by the end of the century. Meanwhile the nation is enjoying what is reported to be one of the the coolest summers on record and a growing group of scientists led by Edward Teller are speaking out against climate change hysteria.

With a floor vote possible Friday, now is the time to contact your representative in congress and urge them to vote against HR2454. Remind them that you can’t afford to pay thousands in additional taxes to underwrite speculative technology and gratuitous expansion of the power of government. Tell them that carbon taxes and cap and trade have been a failure in Europe and that we can’t afford them here.

Drawing on the concept of the “Four Estates” of Republican France, it was once popular to call the press the “Fourth Estate,” a non-governmental entity whose independence made it one of the pillars which supported liberty, and an important check on the power of government. In a free press the people had a way to express their concerns about government and a relatively unbiased advocate for truth independent of the self-serving assertions of political parties and leaders. In America that great tradition of a free press which truly stood out as a Fourth Estate began with the publication of Publick Occurances in 1690 and lasted for over 300 years before dying with a whimper this Wednesday at the hands of ABC News.

On Wednesday the 24th of June ABC will give over most of its programming schedule to custom programming, much of it direct from the White House, dedicated to promoting and publicizing the Obama administration’s multi-trillion dollar healthcare plan. This programming will begin first thing in the morning with a Good Morning America interview with the president and continue throughout the day’s newscasts, culminating with a primetime special touting the benefits of government run healthcare. The network has been given unprecedented access to the White House, where it has even been encouraged to set up an office in the East Wing. ABC and the White House are collaborating on the content of the special, few opposing voices or alternative plans will be heard, and they are refusing any advertising from groups advocating patients rights or opposing socialized medicine.

Just a few years ago Democrats were crying foul and demanding investigations when the Department of Education sent out a few Video News Releases to promote the No Child Left Behind Program, yet now they are willing to do the same thing on a much larger scale when it is their program which is being promoted. At a time when Democrats are talking about reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine and demanding a balance to right wing talk radio, turning over an entire network to government propaganda seems particularly hypocritical.

The left has long derided the right for complaining about media bias, insisting that the corporate nature of the media automatically biases it to the right, but here we see a corporate media giant deliberately whoring itself to become the propaganda outlet for a left-wing administration, and there is no question where ABC’s loyalties lie. ABC News employees overwhelmingly supported Obama in the last election, donating 80 times as much to his campaign as they did to John McCain. In addition, a study by the Media Research Center shows ABC giving a disproportionate amount of coverage to the Obama healthcare plan compared to other health care options by a 3 to 1 margin.

The Obama administration has made state-corporatism a cornerstone of its economic plans, taking over businesses, forcing them into bankruptcy and handing out the spoils to their cronies and allies. But at least in the financial and auto industries there was some effort to resist, and many of those companies are still trying to buy back their freedom. What ABC is doing is many times worse, because they are volunteering willingly for a government takeover, offering themselves up as propagandists without considering the consequences. Perhaps they see a future where the state controls all media and they want to get in on the ground floor and have a favored status, but that just makes them like the slave who turns in the runaways hiding in the barn to the slave-catchers. He may get more scraps from the master’s table but he’s still a slave and he’s also a traitor.

Journalists used to believe that they had a responsibility to keep politicians honest and hold their feet to the fire. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t go to Nixon looking for ways they could help him promote his pet projects. When the press becomes nothing more than another arm of government, promoting the party line and dishing out propaganda, the people have lost one more essential safeguard of their liberty. ABC has decided to leave integrity and objectivity behind and become nothing more than shills for an ideology and a style of government which they believe in. Whether you support socialized medicine or not, this trend in the media should scare you. It’s the death of the independent press and the beginning of state-run media. I halfway expect to hear the strains of “Moscow Nights” over the credits on ABC as I did on every radio or television newscast when I lived in the Soviet Union, formally confirming that the media has gone from watchdog to lapdog.

Join me and many others in boycotting ABC, starting on Thursday and continuing through their summer line-up of very little but tawdry reality shows. You won’t be missing much and you might be striking a blow for freedom. Though it’s entirely possible that if we manage to dry up their advertising revenue they’ll just get bailed out and taken over completely by the government.

Last week I spent some time at the National Taxpayers Conference in Crystal City, just over the river from Washington DC, trying to figure what the hardcore fiscal conservatives of the National Taxpayers Union had on their agenda in this era of out-of-control spending and government war on free enterprise. To my chagrin I found the event to be a shadow of what I understand it was in previous years. It was underattended, with a weak schedule of speakers and an air of resignation which was almost palpable. I saw too many people talking about how to live with the excesses of the Obama era and too few discussing ways to fight back and preserve our most basic economic freedoms.

I’m sure that some of the low attendance can be blamed on the economy, but when is it more important for believers in responsible fiscal policy to organize than when times are darkest and the government is spending us into economic serfdom? The NTU’s publications talk about leading a “national tax revolt” but what I found at the conference was about 200 of the same old think-tank staffers and DC insiders talking at each other with only a handful of grassroots activists in attendance, looking bewildered and out of place.

There were some good speakers and interesting events on the program, most notably Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal and John Stossel from ABC News, but the tone for the event was really set by the fact that the opening speaker was Sen. John McCain, who may look like a fiscal conservative by DC standards, but really doesn’t have a lot of credibility based on his record of lukewarm efforts and marginal accomplishments. It was clearly a bad sign that the bio of McCain in the program had far more about his war experiences than it did about anything he had ever done to reduce taxes or government spending. Sadly the same was true for most of the other speakers. They had plenty of accomplishments to list, but few of those were in the area of shrinking government and saving taxpayers money.

The breakout sessions had more to offer than the major speakers did, especially if you were interested in running a local political group or organizing tax protests. Groups like the Sam Adams Alliance and the Leadership Institute had good ideas and valuable things to teach grassroots activists in sessions like “Building an Effecitve Grassroots Organization” and “Getting Beyond Bylaws and Boards,” but their knowledge would have been put to better use had more than a handful of actual grassroots activists been in attendance.

I actually found the most interesting activity of the conference to be walking around the small exhibitor area and seeing what some of the other groups sponsoring the conference were up to. One organization I encountered for the first time was the American Legislative Exchange Council, a very interesting group which promotes conservative legislative issues nationwide to state legislatures. They must be doing something right because they’ve earned the ire of the rabidly anti-capitalist NRDC which has a little hate site all about ALEC called ALECwatch. I also had a good talk with some of the people from Liberty Features Syndicate, who are working to promote liberty-oriented content in the media and seem to be off to a good start.

The other good thing about the conference was a chance to hear a presentation from John Stossel at the Friday night reception. Stossel is always entertaining and informative, and while I think this presentation was a bit underprepared and rushed compared to other times I’ve seen him, he still got very positive response from the crowd and communicated his pro-liberty, common sense message very effectively.

One of the things which caught my attention at the conference is that a lot of the participating groups seem to get their funding from the same fairly short list of sources. I love the fact that the Koch brothers throw money at pro-liberty groups like candy, but when they’re behind almost all of the participants the event becomes a bit like a Koch Foundation staff picnic. When you have paid activists from one group talking to paid activists from another group and they all get their money from the same sources, it’s all a little too inbred. It’s a closed circle and it’s going nowhere because they are all talking to the wrong people and the real grassroots activists just aren’t there.

The NTU puts on a nice conference and they certainly raise valid issues and concerns, but something’s missing. They act like there’s “movement” or a “tax revolt” but nothing is really going to happen except for lots of talking until they find a way to broaden their message and get real citizen activists involved. That clearly was not happening at this conference, so a lot of money and effort was being expended while very little was being accomplished — a frustrating situation to observe when you know how much the nation needs real change and real activism for liberty and fiscal responsibility.

I consider myself to be socially conservative in my personal beliefs. I’m not about to marry a man, encourage my daughter to have an abortion, picket a military recruiting office or smoke marijuana. But I am also a libertarian, so I do not believe in using the power of government to force my values on other people. I hope and believe that as a group the Republican Liberty Caucus shares this perspective and that our members understand that like the Republican party we are a “big tent” with room for anyone who agrees with our core principles of limited government, free markets and individual liberty.

The RLC is not just a bunch of Libertarians who got tired of the bickering in the Liberarian Party. Many of us are long-time Republicans who are inspired not by Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard or the modern gurus of the libertarian movement, but by the fundamentally conservative belief in liberty which descends from enlightenment conservatives like Edmund Burke and the founding fathers and was reinforced by the great leaders of the Republican party like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Reagan described his own philosophy of government as libertarian and he saw no conflict between his libertarian beliefs and his personal moral principles. Like many Republicans he understood that there are separate spheres for the political and the personal. The RLC operates in the political sphere and is not in the business of advocating for or against any moral belief held by any individual. While it is true that we do not believe that it is the role of the federal government to legislate morality, that also means that as a group we do not advocate or oppose any position on personal moral, religious or social issues. There are other groups both inside and outside the GOP which address those issues quite well without our help.

The RLC has many members whose personal values tend towards the socially conservative, but they still share a belief in the principles of limited government, free markets and individual liberty. We welcome them into our chapters because their beliefs do not conflict with ouir core principles. By the same measure we also welcome members whose personal beliefs tend to be more socially liberal. If we have differences on some social issues we can put those aside because it is more important to work together on the larger issues which we share in common.

Our nation is in peril and our most precious rights are threatened. Government is out of control and must be returned to the principles on which it was founded. Achieving this is the mission of the RLC and if it is your mission, then that should override all lesser issues and we ought to be able to find common ground and work together, because none of us will be able to live the way we want — whatever our personal social and moral beleifs — if we are no longer free.

It’s hard to find adjectives strong enough to describe the losses which left-leaning socialist and labor parties face in the current European elections. To call it a debacle might be understatement. The European left has crashed and burned and the region faces a complete political paradigm shift with some very unexpected results. Never has a dominant political ideology suffered such an overwhelming rebuke and rejection from the voters since the era of revolutions when autocracy was cast out in favor of representative government. The final results are due tonight, but early reports leave only the question of the degree by which the left will be devastated Europe-wide.

The first indicator came several days ago when news of the result of the EU parliamentary election in the Netherlands was leaked, revealing that radical libertarian Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party had catapulted from being a fringe party to the second largest party in the nation, gaining 4 seats in the EU parliament and likely breaking up the ruling coalition, forcing the Christian Democrats to look for new support to remain in power and making concessions to the Freedom Party and their anti-immigrant, anti-EU agenda.

Britain already set the pattern for electing representatives to the EU parliament who were hostile to the body in which they are serving. The Netherlands will now be sending 4 more troublemakers to join British libertarian firebrand Daniel Hannan, and similar results are expected in other European countries including Ireland, Britain and Spain. Countries which recently elected more conservative governments like Poland, France and Germany are expected to see less radical change, but will likely still experience growth in conservative and libertarian parties. The fuil results of the EU parliamentary election will be announced Sunday evening.

This EU parliamentary election is an indicator of things to come in the internal politics of European nations, as demonstrated by Saturday’s devastating defeat for Britain’s Labour Party in local council elections. Labour, which used to dominate local council governments, has lost 300 seats and no longer controls any local councils at all. Labour’s loss has been described as being “wiped off the electoral map” in Britain, and in the EU election they are expected to come in behind virtually every party of any note, including the radical UK Independent Party.

These results will lead to shakeups in the governments of many European nations in the next few months. In combination with financial scandal and the resignation of 6 of his ministers, this change in the balance of power will likely lead to the replacement of Gordon Brown as Britain’s prime minister. In other nations there may be similar changes in the political landscape with conservative leaders and policies taking the forefront. If the current trends do not change, the next internal elections in many nations will probably produce dramatic political realignments.

The surge to the right in Europe is being driven by dissatisfaction with the economy, anger over immigration, fear of terrorism, high unemployment, dismay at the poor quality of healthcare and increasing popular alienation from the remote and unresponsive bureaucracy of the European Union. Voters want more local control, more national autonomy, restrictions on immigration and governmental reform. Whether newly empowered conservatives and small-government, anti-EU parties will find solutions for these problems remains to be seen.

Ironically, as President Obama tours Europe and talks with the leaders of various nations, those leaders may no longer be in power the next time he visits. As he moves America farther left politically the rest of the world seems to see their answer in moving in the opposite direction.

Sometimes something which should be a non-news, non-story becomes a huge story solely because of the ridiculously over-the-top reaction which it generates, a phenomenon which seems to be magnified by the instant networked communication made possible by the internet.

Such is the case with a recent Playboy article by Guy Cimbalo which was basically a “hate fuck” list of conservative women with commentary on why he found them physically attractive despite finding their views intellectually abhorent. The article was clearly written as satire and has some intentionally offensive description of the women and acts he’d like to perform, but nothing one wouldn’t have expected to see in similar satirical articles in outlets like National Lampoon when I was in college.

Cimbalo’s remarkable achievement is that his weak attempt at biting sarcasm was rapidly transformed into something so toxic that not only was the article removed from the Playboy website, but other articles discussing it or even highly critical of it have been purged from the internet. One site which posted snapshots of the article seems to have been taken completely offline, and an AOL writer who covered it was fired by AOL.

The progress of events was that the Playboy website published Cimbalo’s article “So Wrong It’s Right” on the Monday. Almost immediately two normally antithetical groups — right wing moralists and left wing feminists — began twittering and blogging about it. Pretty soon the internet was ringing with complaints that it objectified women, that it advocated rape, that it was grossly sexist, that it was politically biased (duh), and so on. But the second generation of bitching about it really passed over into the surreal, as feminists complained that fellow feminist Anne Schroeder Mullins of Politico was a thought criminal just for reprinting the names from Cimbalo’s list with none of the commentary. And then the reaction went beyond ridiculous when AOL’s Politics Daily fired Tommy Christopher for writing an article highly critical of Cimbalo’s work, and possibly also for his role in blowing up the whole situation on Twitter. By Thursday, sites which quoted or even referred to the article were being shut down and articles were being taken offline, though for the time being the content of the article is still cached on Google.

Cimbalo has achieved a sort of trifecta of online journalism. He offended liberals and conservatives, he wrote something you could get slagged on for supporting or criticizing, and he managed to create a discussion so provocative it became toxic and started tumbling web pages like dominos. Even if he’s not particularly good at satire, Cimbalo proved that he was a master of creating controversy, though he certainly had a lot of help from self-righteous twitterheads and moralistic buffoons all over the net.

Ironically all of this attention — the heads exploding, the reputations trashed, the pink slips being handed out — came over an article which is juvenile and at best mildly funny, and no more offensive than myriad articles in Hustler or The Onion or National Lampoon which are given a pass because they are clearly satire. Whether it was well written satire or not, Cimbalo’s article was still obviously intended to be humorous, if perhaps only appealing to the not terribly intellectual audience that reads Playboy and whose idea of feminine beauty involves breast augmentation and airbrushing.

What Cimbalo may have proven is that the combination of satire, partisan politics and sexism in one article is just too much to handle for the humorless and self-important moralists who think people want to actually read their tweets about the sandwich they had for lunch and how offended they are to see a woman in a burkha on their bus. Cimbalo triggered a feeding frenzy and each new contribution to the online library of outrage built it to a higher level, until the outrage was the story and any sense of perspective or proportion regarding his original article was lost.

In fact, I suspect that many of those expressing the greatest outrage over this incident have only read reports on the article without reading the actual article itself, and if they did read it, by the time they got to it their ire was so aroused and their objectivity so tainted that they could no longer see it for the pointless piece of drivel which it is.

Coming from the perspective of a former fratboy and lover of satire who once got his fraternity on “double secret probation” for writing a party poster which offended feminists, if Cimbalo committed any real sin, it was that his satire did not go far enough. For something this offensive to work as satire it should have actually been more outrageous than it was, because clearly there are a lot of people whose sense of humor is so atrophied that they need the satirical equivalent of being hit in the head with a brick to realize that something is supposed to be funny and temporarily suspend their self-righteousness. Cimbalo’s piece seemed a little too earnest and a little too much like a personal fantasy to work as believable satire.

I was very interested to see the reaction of many Republicans to the over-the-top behavior of the extreme right in the wake of the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller earlier this week. On The Next Right they quickly removed an offensive article and comments had loudly condemned the author. On Little Green Footballs they posted a substantial article condemning commenters and posters on several other right-leaning blogs for their comments about Tiller. These reactions give a clear impression that more and more mainstream Republicans are fed up with the fanaticism of the religious right, sickened over their behavior over the Tiller issue and just about ready to give them the boot.

Is it possible that this incident is the straw which finally broke the camel’s back and has created an unhealable rift between rational conservatives and the extremists of the religious right? Even Republicans who are socially conservative seem to have had enough of the extremist rhetoric and support for violence coming from people like Fred Phelps and Randall Terry. They seem to have worken up to the fact that the fanaticism and terrorism they oppose in the Islamic world is not much different from the beliefs held by some they considered allies.

As Barry Goldwater pointed out many years ago, the one thing which Republicans ought to be extreme about is liberty and on all other issues they ought to be rational and pragmatic. Maybe that lesson which he spent decades trying to teach with his own actions, is finally sinking in.

The obsession with legislating morality and with opposition to abortion and gay rights is really not part of the core Republican agenda. These ideas and the fanaticism they inspire were brought into the party through its alliance in the post-Reagan era with religious conservatives. Historically, Republicans have had a laissez faire attitude, not just to the economy, but also on moral issues. Republicans used to be dispassionate, leaving moral decisions in the hands of individuals and keeping government out of the picture. It seems like the pendulum might be swinging back in that direction.

As Abraham Lincoln said many years ago, our nation and by extension the Republican Party, was “conceived in liberty” and that idea of individual liberty ought to be the basis of every policy and every decision which Republicans make. There is very little question that abortion is a sin, but shouldn’t that sin be a matter of personal responsibility to be resolved between the individual and his or her soul and church and god? Once you get government involved, a change in policy or administration could as easily mean forced abortion and sterilization as you have in China as it could mean protecting unborn fetuses. Putting such personal decisions in the hands of government can only work out badly when there is the potential to go to either extreme.

This change in attitude in the GOP seems real and very significant. It has been building for years, starting with uneasiness with many Bush administration policies and perhaps culminating with the Tiller incident. That doesn’t mean that I expect a wholesale casting out of the religious right, but it does seem as if the more reasonable elements of the religious wing of the party are finally realizing that they have to distance themselves from the exrtremists, and perhaps put broader priorities first if they want to continue to play a role in the party and if they want that party to be successful. Extremism has been like an anchor dragging the GOP down and if the party cannot cast itself free of that extremism and chart a better course for itself it will never be successful.

Fanaticism and extremism breed violence and terror and are the enemies of liberty. If we are determined to fight them in the War on Terror how can we be less vigilant in opposing them at home? If we are to have a Republican party which makes liberty its first priority, then it must reject extremism and intolerance in every form. We can still embrace conservative and moral values, but we must accept that these are personal values and that only evil and oppression can come from giving government the power to dictate morality and institutionalize the prejudices of religious fanatics.

On Monday morning Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammed drove his black SUV up to the front of a military recruiting center in Little Rock and opened fire with an SKS assault rifle, killing one recruiter and seriously injuring another before driving off. Like the conspirators in the recent planned attacks in New York and Florida and other terrorists plots like the Viginia Jihad Network case in 2003, Muhammed was an African-American convert to Islam with a history of attempting to contact terrorist groups in the middle east. Unlike the conspirators in other recent cases he is believed to have acted alone.

Muhammed, who legally changed his name just over a month ago from Carlos Bledsoe, was arraigned Tuesday on one count of first-degree murder and 15 counts of engaging in a terrorist act. He entered a plea of not guilty.

Like the terrorists in the other two recent cases, Muhammed was under investigation by the FBI, but in this case they were unable to intervene to prevent the attack. Covert intervention was made more difficult because Muhammed was acting alone rather than as part of a group. Muhammed drew the attention of the FBI when he traveled to Yemen and was arrested by local authorities for using a forged Somali passport. His possession of the forged documents suggests some contact with terrorist groups in the region. While in Yemen he may have been studying with radical Salafi scholar Yahya Hajoori who is part of a group which has trained other Americans involved in jihadist activity.

Like other recent domestic muslim terrorists, Muhammed specifically targeted the military because of anger over the deaths of muslims at the hands of the US military in the middle east. After the arraignment prosecutor Larry Jegley observed: “It’s my understanding that after his conversion to Islam he decided that he had a bone to pick with the military officers because of what he perceived to be mistreatment of Muslims around the world.” The arrest report states that at the time of his arrest he commented that “he would have killed more soldiers if they had been on the parking lot.”

Walid Phares of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies observed that “The real common denominator is the ideological commitment (present) in every single case I’ve seen over the past few months and over the past few years.” Noting that most converts to Islam are peaceful, but there is a clearly defined element with common background characteristics who are attracted to extremist ideology.

In an interview with FOX News terrorism expert Niall Livingstone said “Most of these guys…are misfits, they believe they’ve suffered injustice…they basically are striking back at society.” He went on to explain that this is why so many seem to come from criminal backgrounds or to have been converted to Islam in prison.

Although police stated that Muhammed is believed to have been acting alone, files discovered on his home computer suggest that he may have been in contact with other potential terrorists and had a plan to attack additional targets, including other military recruiting centers, schools and Jewish synagogues.

Although there have been very few successful terrorist attacks within the United States since the attack on the World Trade Center, the number of American converts traveling to Islamic nations for training is significant, and the number of plots which have been uncovered and the suggestion of networks tying them to international terror activity raises serious concerns.

The FBI has been very successful at uncovering plots and deporting suspects who are not United States citizens, but although that may disrupt some activity by these groups, many of the potential terrorists are US citizens like Muhammed, and when they act alone and give off few obvious signs of involvement with radical groups they are very hard to track.

This week you can probably expect a big push in the media for the cynically misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (Card Check), which I’ve written on before. One element of that push which will be getting coverage is an article by Seth Michaels on the AFL-CIO Now blog which heralds the fact that:

“A coalition of major investors who oversee more than $750 billion in assets is joining the fight for workers’ freedom to form unions by asking major corporations what they’re doing to protect and enhance the ability of workers to form unions.”

Wow, that sounds pretty serious. That’s a lot of investment money. It must mean that stockholders and important players on Wall Street are really concerned about making sure that unions can bully workers into joining by taking away their right to a secret ballot.

In fact, stockholders and major investment groups have not actually taken leave of their senses and decided it would be great to further burden businesses with rapacious union interference in our current harsh economy. What you actually have here is a classic example of how propagandists can use legtimate seeming sources to support their positions and create the impression of a popular movement or widespread support where it does not actually exist.

In the article there is a link to a press release from Domini Social Investments which further heralds this letter which has been sent to various Fortune 100 companies in support of EFCA by a group of “major institutional investors” controlling $757 billion in assets.

The effort here is to create an impression of widespread support in the financial community for Card Check. The core deception in this propaganda effort is that the letter is actually signed by a very limited group dominated by investors controlled by or closely associated with the unions promoting the legislation. The major signers on the letter are actually mostly international union pension funds or organizations representing union pension fund managers. Also signing the letter are a variety of specialty investment groups which invest in “socially responsible” businesses (unionized businesses), but they control only a small fraction of that $757 billion in assets and they are on the list mainly as a smokescreen for the union-controlled investment groups who hold the vast majority of the assets referred to.

In fact, the top signer on the list and the one with the largest assets is the AFL-CIO Employees Staff Retirement Fund, so the AFL-CIO is using their blog to promote this letter from “a coalition of major investors” without bothering to point out that they themselves are the major investors in question. Everything in the article is true as written, but the appearance that the unions have found major allies in the investment community for Card Check is entirely deceptive. The progressive angels of Wall Street who have joined them in their fight turn out just to be the unions themselves in a not very clever disguise.

What’s more, the letter itself is hardly the clarion cry for EFCA which the AFL-CIO would have you believe. The letter actually makes an effort to look like it originates with the UNPRI a United Nations labor practices workgroup. The letter also does not actually endorse EFCA in any way as the AFL-CIO website suggests, but actually just solicits companies for their input on various labor issues. The letter says clearly:

“Please note that, although individual investors represented in this letter may have taken a view on the legislation, the group as a whole has itself not formulated an official position.”

In reality the UNPRI and perhaps even many of the signers on the letter don’t actually support Card Check at all. The letter also describes what policy towards unions and workers rights ought to be:

“The freedom to form or join a union of one’s choice or not, and to bargain collectively for the terms of one’s employment, are fundamental human rights that we as global investors recognize and respect.”

Who could disagree with that statement? It’s broad enough that almost anyone would sign off on it, and would apply to the position of those who oppose the EFCA as well as those who support it. In fact, the main argument against Card Check is that it limits worker freedom to join unions by taking away the secret ballot which protects their free choice. So it could very well be that many of the signatories oppose the EFCA and it’s certainly true that the group as a whole has not take a position on it and the letter is not an endorsement of it.

The letter actually seems to originate with a company called Boston Common Asset Management which like many of those signing the letter is a strange amalgem of investment firm and advocacy group. They’re a worker owned collective which manages “socially responsible” investments, but seems to devote more of their time to lobbying for and promoting various left-wing causes. This business model raises all sorts of questions, like where they get the money to fund their advocacy work and how much of their customer base and revenue comes from union sources. Adding to my suspicions is that what appears to be the draft version of a similar letter to selected congressmen clearly originated on the AFL-CIO site, suggesting that these letters are being written by the union and passed on to these other groups for publication. Further research may turn up more evidence, but looking at the websites of these “social investing” groups I find it hard to believe that they could attract a great deal of money from legitimate private investors. My suspicious nature makes me wonder whether any of the groups signing the letter represent anyone other than domestic and international union interests.

What this example shows us is that when you have enough money and resources you can effectively generate your own news. Your shills issue a letter, you then hail that letter in your own publicity as a newsworthy event, you misrepresent it to make it seem more significant than it is, and then with any luck the compliant media picks up on it. With the letter released on Thursday, we’ll see if that happens this coming week.

Meanwhile, in contrast with the score of shills advocating Card Check in this letter, 3100 businesses have sent their own letter to Congress opposing the passage of EFCA.