When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous “I have a Dream” speech 47 years ago, he did it before a large and diverse audience full of both white and black faces, all united behind the cause of racial equality and equal opportunity for all Americans just because they were Americans, regardless of political, ethnic or social divisions. Today, while watching C-SPAN I saw the descendants of those who witnessed and even participated in King’s march on Washington gather in two largely segregated groups in an ironic segregation of the failure of King’s vision for our nation.

At the south end of the national mall, in the location where King spoke, there gathered a huge audience which was mostly white and middle and working class. They were enraged and driven to activism by the realization that the dream which Dr. King wanted white America to share with black America was now being taken away from both groups. At the call of a confused and clownlike fanatic with more media access than good sense, they came together to fumble for a shared expression of the powerlessness and frustration they feel when faced with a government running out of control and a nation wrecked on the shoals of greed and institutionalized corruption. There was far too much talk of God and Honor and other abstractions and too little talk about real solutions to the nation’s problems.

Not far away, at historic Dunbar High School, there were no good solutions to be found either. Before a small and unenthusiastic crowd which was uniformly dark skinned and had been bussed in by the SEIU, the AFT and the NEA, speaker after speaker repeated unionist slogans and socialist rhetoric with lukewarm response from the audience who had apparently been paid to show up but not to applaud. Unlike Dr. King’s spontaneous gathering of the people, this was a contrived event funded and manufactured by powerful special interest groups who have seized control of the government and promote an inhumane and exploitative ideology.

The contrast between the two rallies was striking.

Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event was enormous, far beyond anything I would have expected. Estimates of the crowd size place it well over 500,000 people, more than double the turnout for King’s original rally. In comparison Reverend Al Sharpton’s “Reclaim the Dream” event had a small and unenthusiastic turnout which may have barely topped 10,000, though comments from the podium suggested that the unions were still bussing in participants even as the original crowd was losing interest and wandering away during Sharpton’s speech.

The Beck event was largely apolitical. In fact, I found it troubling how heavily religious it was, with extensive references to Mormon symbolism and creepy religious figures spending time talking about moral values and vaguely threatening references to rechristianizing America. The most political speech came from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, but most of the speakers were pushing a religious message, including some black preachers who had marched with King and his neice Alveda King. The union-sponsored event was quite different. Everything was political and the preachers who appeared were among the most radical of the speakers. It was all about blaming Bush and asserting political dominance for unions and activist groups.

At the Lincoln Memorial Beck’s followers were dressed normally and mostly not carrying signs. They were hot but enthusiastic and engaged, though I can’t figure out how most of them could see or hear anything at all given the size of the crowd. Much of the crowd at Dunbar High School showed up in uniform, wearing SEIU provided t-shirts and obediently participating in displays of support, but seeming quite disengaged from the speakers, some of whom became quite frustrated at the lack of response from the crowd.

Frankly, the Beck rally bored the hell out of me. Aside from a creepy bit at the beginning with some blatant token Jews and Native Americans and a bizarre preacher who seemed to e some sort of dualistic or pantheistic heretic with a speech impediment, the only part which kept my attention was Palin’s speech. I wanted more politics and less moralizing. Too much flag-waving and religiosity and a lack of content left me uninterested.

The “Reclaim the Dream” rally kept me riveted because of the obvious anger, hate and frustration on display. It was like looking at the moment where a populist movement achieves victory and begins the transition to despotism and oppression. All they needed was Hugo Chavez on the stage, or maybe not since several of their speakers did a fair but unintentional impression of him.

The rhetoric of revolution sounds like the rhetoric of tyranny when it comes from those who already have power and who are the new establishment. When Marc Morial of the National Urban League talks about poverty it’s impossible to take him seriously when you know he makes $657,000 a year and has a 7 figure benefits package. It’s hard to stick it to “The Man” when times have changed and you are “The Man.”

Perhaps the most ominous moment was when a Gregory Floyd of Teamsters Local 237 in New York City said that “We stand in solidarity with this social movement. Labor and this social movement, this civil rights movement, are one and the same.” Words with terrifying implications from the spokesman of an organization which is notorious for denying workers their right of free choice and free association in the workplace.

Surprisingly, the strongest expressions of ugliness and hate from either event came from a hispanic speaker. Jamie Contreras of the SEIU called Beck’s rally a “shame” and announced that it represented “hatemongering and angry white people.”

Al Sharpton was not far behind, announcing that “they want to disgrace this day. And we’re not giving them this day. This is our day and we ain’t giving it away.” But it’s not and Dr. King would not agree. His message was for everyone and no one, regardless of skin color or political ideology can claim it exclusively for themselves.

47 years seems like a very short time for Dr. King’s dream to have soured and become so misunderstood. When the exploitative labor leaders and hatemongering activists stood up at Dunbar High School and declared that they wanted to “Reclaim the Dream” the sad truth was readily apparent that their goal was to take a dream which was meant for all people and deny it to some while perverting its intent to their own advantage.

If they really believed in Dr. King’s dream they would have been at the Lincoln Memorial with Glenn Beck, demanding an equal voice and speaking to an audience which their presence would have made truly representative of the dream which both groups professed so stridently and unconvincingly to believe in and which neither was really doing anything to advance.

I’ll be a guest on the Gary Nolan radio show tomorrow (saturday) morning with guest host Mike Ferguson. I’ll be on at 9:40am (central). We’ll be talking about the RLC and the Liberty Movement. If you don’t get the show where you are there’s a webcast of it. You can tune in and listen from the link to the right.

Dave

About a year ago they replaced the old airport in downtown Austin with a fancy mixed retail and residential development with a Best Buy and a Starbucks and eventually as it filled up it got a new barbeque restaurant called Mr. Bones, which opened about two months ago. I drive by it almost every day, but yesterday I thought I’d give it a try.

I was predisposed to view the barbeque favorably, because I assume that Mr. Bones is the revival of the business of the same name which was at the heart of a notorious lawsuit against the city of Austin about a decade ago for the ridiculous action of terminating a contract with a black restauranteur because he refused to register as a minority owned business in order to fulfill their racial quotas. Their original location in north Austin has also had some good reviews, so I had high hopes.

Mr. Bones is located in a nice modern strip mall and the interior decor fits that setting, looking more like an upscale coffee shop than a barbeque joint. The menu is extensive with just about every meat you can imagine plus about a dozen sides. Atypically for a barbeque restaurant it has table service and waiters and waitresses dressed in traditional black and white outfits.

Now, I should have known something was not quite right when, after seating me, the hostess sat down at a corner table to eat a box of Popeye’s fried chicken. With the large selection of meats and sides on the menu, having the employees sending out for food from a chain restaurant doesn’t look good, and letting them eat it where customers can see is a huge managerial blunder which suggests that there may be problems in other areas of the restaurant as well.

As I usually do when trying out a new barbeque place I wanted to order a little bit of everything. Although they did list meat by the pound on the menu, when I tried to order that way my waitress told me that meat by the pound had to be ordered in half-pound amounts of more. Not wanting to kill myself and my wallet with about 4 pounds of meat, I instead decided to order a four meat plate. I wanted to try the beef ribs which a friend has spoken highly of, but they wouldn’t let me have beef ribs as one of the meats and they wouldn’t let me order just one on the side. Frustrating, and not great customer service, but I made the best of it.

From the selection of 8 meats I picked the pork butt, brisket, pork ribs and mutton. I eliminated sausage after being told that they just sell Meyer’s sausage from Elgin. It’s good sausage, but I’ve had it before. I also passed on the pork short ribs, which aren’t a good test of barbeque skill and the turkey and chicken which aren’t my favorites. And, of course, I wasn’t allowed to have beef ribs. My plate came with two sides and bread. I picked green beans and sweet potatoes.

My plate came out quickly and the meat servings were substantial. In volume it was worth the $11 price for the largest meat selection available. Normally I don’t like to put barbeque sauce on my meats, so I set it aside and dug right in and started trying things.

I started off with the brisket, which was not impressive. It had no smoke ring, which is a surprising failing in properly cooked barbeque, plus it was surprisingly tough and dry. Most disappointingly it had a kind of kerosene-like chemical aftertaste which I think might be the product of some sort of liquid smoke style flavoring.

I moved o to the pork butt, which seemed like an easy winner. It’s hard to make bad pork butt, but as far as I could tell the meat was roasted rather than really barbequed and it had no flavor to speak of – certainly not the nice smoked flavor I was hoping for. It still wasn’t bad, but it was disappointing. On the upside it didn’t have the weird chemical aftertaste.

Next I moved on to the pork ribs, which turned out to also be dry and quite tough, and they had been basted in something which again had that chemical aftertaste, but beyond that it seemed not to have imparted any identifiable flavor to the ribs. This aroused my suspicions and I decided to try the barbeque sauce. It was not impressive and clearly contributed to the problems with the meats. Although it was the right color, the sauce was thin and had very little flavor except for a slight sweetness. You can buy better sauce in the supermarket. Since this sauce was clearly used for basting the meats, it explains the general lack of flavor, though not the weird aftertaste.

The one meat I had left turned out to be the best. Although it was basted with the same weak sauce, the mutton breast was pretty good. Admittedly it’s hard to make bad mutton, but the same cooking process which dried out the ribs and the brisket apparently made the mutton less greasy than it often is, so the end result was not bad. It still had a bit of that weird chemical taste, but by then I was used to it.

Overall the meats were just not good. Inferior sauce used to baste them rather than a stronger sauce or a nice dry rub, in combination with rushed cooking with a lack of real smoke and the application of some sort of chemical smoke substitute, produced a very unsatisfactory result. Ironically the best item I ate at Mr. Bones was the green beans, which were loaded with ham and quite flavorful. But it’s not good when the best thing at a barbeque joint is one of the sides.

Worst of all, that chemical smoke flavor stayed with me well into the next day. It was like it had coated the inside of my mouth and it just wouldn’t go away. It left me feeling vaguely nauseous through several subsequent meals.

I suppose that to be fair I ought to try Mr. Bones at its main location, but after this experience I was not encouraged to do it any time soon. I also suspect that because the strip mall location is ill suited to smoking meat they probably cook the meat at their north location and bring it in to this restaurant to serve, but I can’t be sure. Regardless of where they’re cooking it, they have a lot to learn about making barbeque up to the standards we’ve come to expect from the legendary barbeque which is easy to find all over the Austin area.

On Wednesday afternoon U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker struck down Proposition 8 and reopened the door to same sex marriage in California. The case will now be appealed to the 9th Circuit Court and likely go from there to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Proposition 8 was a controversial ballot initiative to ban gay marriage which passed last year after a high pressure media campaign which pitted hardcore religious conservatives and the Mormon church against civil libertarians and Hollywood activists. The result was to override a prior court ruling which had led to a brief period of legalization for gay marriage under which 18,000 couples were married. The status of those couples and of future gay marriages in California remains unresolved until judge Walker decides whether or not to put his ruling on hold pending appeal.

Walker’s ruling depends heavily on the Constitution and focuses on the issue of equal protection under the law, rejecting the idea that a majority vote can take rights away from minority groups. The ruling is a very positive step forward for liberty in California and a triumph for the rule of law over the rule of the mob.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that despite the fact that many conservative groups backed Proposition 8, in many ways this ruling is a direct product of a strong libertarian streak in the Republican party which is only getting stronger going into November’s election.

Ronald Reagan who once commented that he believed that the “heart of conservatism is libertarianism” essentially planted a liberty bomb decades ago when he appointed judge Walker to his first position on the bench. Walker was then and remains an avowed constitutional libertarian and one of only three openly gay federal court judges.

Reagan certainly knew who Walker was politically and personally when he made that appointment and it’s an indication of what direction he wanted the party to go in. No influence lasts longer than a court appointment, so in making appointments like Walker Reagan left an important libertarian legacy which outlived him.

Other Republicans also played leading up to this ruling. It was President George H. W. Bush who elevated Walker to his current position on the federal bench. One of the two lead attorneys suing to strike down Proposition 8 was Theodore Olson who was a Reagan appointee as Assistant Attorney General and was Solicitor General in the George W. Bush administration. And Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was involved in the decision not to have state attorneys argue on behalf of the proposition.

Despite the posturing of the religious right and the reverence in which Ronald Reagan is held throughout the party, Republicans may have to face up to the fact that it was Republican leaders both currently in office and going back decades whose practice of covertly embracing libertarianism has lead directly to Proposition 8 being struck down.

Those pro-liberty values are embodied in the Constitution and were the founding principles of the Republican party. They are also the key to revitalizing the party by taking it back to the Reagan era and beyond, when principle mattered more than political power and Republicanism stood for less government and more liberty.

As this court ruling has shown us, it’s time for Republicans to come out of the closet, embrace Reagan, embrace his legacy and embrace the most fundamental principle of liberty — that all men are created equal and should be treated equally under the law.

Under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed in 1998 the Obama administration has shut down 73,000 blogs this week which were hosted on the Blogetery.com WordPress based hosting service. Initially the target was a small group of sites which were incolved in illegal file sharing, but ultimately a request was issued to BurstNet, the Blogetery.com’s hosting provider, to shut down the entire network of 73,000 blogs, most of which were engaged in no illegal activity, including harmless sites like Science Experiments for Kids and political sites like Tea and Politics.

This is the first use of the DMCA on this scale and it has frightening implications for the future. Under the act no warrant or any kind of due process is required because the government makes its request directly of the ISP involved and can penalize it administratively if it fails to comply. There is no standard for proof of illegal activity and the target of the action has no protection under the act. Many on both the right and left are concerned that this could lay the groundwork for the shut down of political sites critical of the administration, either arbitrarily or as part of some future campaign finance or net neutrality legislation.

It would be virtually impossible to run a site hosting service with any large membership without having some users engaging in some sort of questionable activity and it is unrealistic to expect a hosting company to police thousands of individual users. Critics of this action believe that first amendment rights and due process should be respected and that the burden of proof should fall on the government to identify and punish only the actual wrongdoers rather than shutting down thousands of innocent sites to get a few malefactors.

It always fascinates me how politicians who are running for office find ways to warp and spin their records to appeal to every audience regardless of what their past positions and actions really were. Ambiguous votes on peculiar bills, supporting legislation they know will get voted down just to get it on their resume, authoring hopeless bills which die in committee to pander to a single-issue constituency, trading endorsements with other candidates which are full of qualifiers which can then be quoted out of context — all of these are fair game when it’s time to hoodwink the voters.

Here in the Austin area, Democrat Mark Strama (Texas House District 50) (see permanently sneering image to right) has been particularly adept at trading favors and distorting his record to try to strengthen his position in a district which is fairly evenly split between Democrat and Republican voters. To win and hold his seat he has had to make deals with Republicans and do everything he can to win Republican votes, but since he doesn’t actually vote much like a Republican that means misrepresenting the substance of his record on key issues. He’s clearly feeling the pressure from insurgent Republican Patrick McGuiness and the resulting mendacity is enlightening.

To win over Republican voters, Strama has made use of supportive quotes from Republican Representative Jim Keffer (Tecas House District 60) to look like a model of bipartisanship. In 2006 Keffer said that Strama “worked with Republicans to cut property taxes and keep our public schools open.” Yet further investigation demonstrates that Strama really didn’t do either of these things.

The truth is that Strama did not work on or support any major education initiatives and actually voted against property tax reductions twice in 2006. I can’t imagine how voting against property tax reductions can possibly be defined as working for them, except maybe by a definition broad enough to classify opposing legislation as an important collaborative role.

What Strama actually did do in 2006 was to support Keffer’s anti-business, job destroying and tax increasing franchise tax bill, one of the most negative pieces of legislation to come out of the Texas legislature this decade. This is a classic example of a corrupt bargain. Keffer needed votes from Strama and other Democrats to pass his tax increase, and as payback he provided Strama with a supportive quote to use in his next campaign to hoodwink fiscally conservative Republicans into voting for a tax and spend leftist.

So not only did Strama not cut property taxes as claimed (though the legislature did it without his support), he helped create a whole new strongly anti-busienss tax structure with the collaboration of big government Republicans. Yes, this was certainly bipartisan, but is being bipartisan a good thing when it sells out the best interests of the voters? Bad legislation doesn’t become good just because unprincipled legislators from both sides of the aisle support it.

Despite Strama’s attempts to draw Republican votes by presenting himself as a tax cutter, what we learn from the facts behind his claims is that he opposed tax cuts and supported tax increases, and what’s more that there are some Republicans like Jim Keffer who maybe ought to be looked at with a skeptical eye. Keffer not only authored the franchise tax, but also opposed the indian gaming bill which would have brought in substantial additional revenue for the state without imposing new taxes on the public. Someone with more authentic Republican principles ought to think about running against Keffer in the GOP primary in 2012.

For voters in Texas House District 50 the maxim “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” ought to apply. Strama may have fooled them through his tit-for-tat with Keffer and by misrepresenting his record in the past, but in this election Republicans and moderate but fiscally sensible Democrats ought to know better and vote for Republican challenger Patrick McGuinness instead.

California has drawn a lot of attention in the past because of its initiative and referendum system, which gets controversial issues on the ballot so that the voters of the state can make decisions their elected representatives are often afraid to take a position on. We’re going to see more fireworks this fall when Californians get to vote on Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010.

There are some rules and restrictions, but basically the proposed bill does exactly what the title says. It would legalize marijuana, regulate its sale, and tax it heavily to help out with California’s near-terminal deficit situation. It would make California the first state in the nation to move beyond just permitting some access to medical marijuana to full-scale and potentially profitable legalization. The other obvious consequences, like a decline in organized crime and moving billions from the underground economy to the public economy, would naturally follow.

Polls in California are tracking the issue closely and show a gathering momentum for legalization, though support is currently trailing opposition 48% to 50% in the latest Reuters poll. That’s within the margin of error and up substantially from where support was only a few weeks ago.

Because it’s not an electoral slam-dunk, politicians are not exactly lining up to endorse Proposition 19. In fact, once and (possibly) future Governor Jerry Brown has gone out of his way to distance himself from the issue, not only not endorsing it, but making some ridiculous statements in opposition to it which have earned him some hostile coverage from the left. It seems likely that in the upcoming meeting of the California Democratic Party they will follow his lead and decide as a party not to endorse legalization as well. They’ll lose voters to the Greens and the Libertarians and Meg Whitman will benefit as a result, and maybe having a businesswoman in charge will help out the financially troubled state.

Of course, this situation does create an opportunity for anyone smart enough to take advantage of it. The proposition is growing in popularity and just hanging out there with no formal backing outside of the legalization activist community. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the California Republican Party—which has occasionally made some very radical and unexpected decisions—were to take a serious look at the state’s dire financial need and the potential benefits of legalization and decide to endorse Proposition 19?

This scenario was laid out in a recent diary on DailyKos, which more than a few Republicans I talked to read and took seriously. Some were shocked and others were excited. The article is sarcastic and intended to make fun of various Republican concerns, but it accidentally reads rather like a believable account of real events. It’s fashionable among Republicans to butt heads with the federal government right now, and going against the drug war and declaring a sovereign right to regulate marijuana and profit from taxes on it would be a brilliant example of the kind of independence which a lot of Republican activists are pushing for.

Republicans are supposed to be fiscal conservatives and in favor of individual liberty, entrepreneurs, and businesses. A measure like this, which would raise billions in tax revenue and create a huge new business sector and lots of legitimate jobs, is exactly what California needs desperately, and no one is offering them a better solution. Rationally, Republicans ought to jump at the idea. All they need to do is put aside the archaic idea that marijuana is somehow more immoral than other sins we currently tolerate — a stance which looks pretty hypocritical at a political fundraiser while you’re chugging martinis.

As it stands right now the issue is up to the fickle voters and how much interest groups on both sides can influence the public (I wonder if the drug cartels have a PAC?). But if the Republican party stepped in with even a lukewarm endorsement it would shake California politics up and probably give them an unprecedented sweep in the general election. Voters from the left would cross over in droves and all the Republican party would have to do is make sure the also held on to their core constituents.

All they have to do to keep Republicans on board is make the argument on the grounds of states’ rights, individual liberty, and fiscal responsibility. I’ve made that argument with some of the most traditional Republicans I know and won over more than a few converts. If your mind is at all open it’s hard to reject the logic behind legalizing marijuana as an alternative to raising taxes. If it also means thumbing your noses at the feds then in the current environment it’s a real winner.

The California GOP doesn’t have to be this creative. They can stay in their safe little box and probably do respectably in the fall. It won’t be all that hard to beat Governor Moonbeam again. But in other states Republicans are anticipating extraordinary victories. A cautious strategy will leave California far behind other state Republican parties in the gains they rack up. Seizing the initiative and endorsing Proposition 19 would drive them to such a dominant victory over the Democrats that they would make history and leave every other state party green with envy.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and setting timidity aside. Why not be bold? Why not be defiant? Why not strike a blow for liberty?

It occurs to me that perhaps we sometimes look for unnecessarily complicated explanations in trying to understand the mental processes of those who are conspiracy obsessed, Several examples I’ve seen recently lead me to wonder if perhaps many common conspiranoid beliefs are the result of a simple misunderstanding or misreading of a text, or even an inability to parse an English sentence correctly. Or perhaps there is an inclination to read what one expects to see in a text rather than what is actually there – reading between the lines and ignoring the lines themselves.

I recently encountered a textbook example of this in the text accompanying a YouTube video titled “WARNING – Microchipping to Begin in 36 Months Under New Health Bill.” It’s a particularly excellent example because the author actually quotes the text of the Healthcare bill and then proceeds to interpret it in a way which obviously has zero connection to the actual words he’s quoting. Here’s the relevant part of the text:

“The new Health Care Bill, H.R. 3200, just passed by Congress has within it the requirement that all people thereunder shall be microchiped. The plans for this microchipping have been in the hopper going back to December of 2004.

Witness the actual FDA (Food and Drug Administration) document dated December 10, 2004 entitled Class II Special Guidance Document: Implantable Radiofrequency Transponder System for Patient Identification and Health Information. This ten page document may be read on the FDA website at…”

Now, if you go to the FDA website listed, what you find is a standard applicaton for FDA approval of a medical device. Nothing about mandatory implantation, just information about the chips which are a commercial product to help doctors track patient records electronically. Yes, the chips are implanted, which is why they need FDA approval, but there’s nothing there about any kind of government program or mandatory implantation. Just because the FDA is the government, that doesn’t mean that it’s endorsing or mandating this product. It’s just reviewing and ultimately approving its use exactly as it has countless other drugs and products.

The bizarre documentary misanalysis goes on from there:

“Witness the wording within H.R. 3200, Americas Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 found on Congresses House Ways and Means website…On page 1001 is Subtitle C National Medical Device Registry which states,

“The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the registry) to facilitate analysis of postmarket safety and outcomes data on each device that is or has been used in or on a patient.”

In other words, everyone microchipped pursuant to the new Health Care Bill must be registered with the Secretary. The Secretary is defined as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.”

There you have a quote from the document followed by a conclusion which cannot possibly logically result from an accurate reading of the text. The provision in the healthcare bill clearly refers to analysis and registration of the devices. It says nothing at all about registering people or making the devices mandatory. The author just leaps to that conclusion because of his paranoid inclinations.

I think it’s not a coincidence that he then goes on to quote extensively from the Book of Revelation and identifies the microchip as the famous Mark of the Beast. Clearly this very confused individual and what has happened here is that he heard about these microchips on a news report (the video shows that report) and immediately leapt to the irrational conclusion that they were a diabolical plot from a government working for the Antichrist. He then went looking for documentary evidence to support his belief, finding the FDA filing and the section in the healthcare bill which refer to the chips. And then he just assumes that these dosuments support his beliefs, even though they do nothing of the sort.

This is the exact inverse of a normal reasoning process. Normally you would start with evidence and draw conclusions based on the evidence. In this case the writer has started with his conclusions and then looked for evidence to support those conclusions. In the best case he might have found evidence which he could take out of context or shape to fit his conclusions. But in this case he just took evidence which really does nothing to support his conclusions and then points to it victoriously as if it says something which it does not.

This type of inverse reasoning seems characteristic of the thought processes of many conspiracy adherents. Their conspiranoia warps their perception of reality and they literally see and read things which are not there. They can look at video of planes and see guided missiles. They can read a government document and draw farfetched conclusions unrelated to its contents. They can ignore any amount of evidence if it doesn’t fit their predetermined conclusions. My first, charitable inclination is to assume that they just don’t know how to reason properly or can’t understand what they see or read, but given the almost hallucinatory disconnect from reality required to make these leaps of illogic, the less kind but perhaps more accurate conclusion is that this is evidence of some sort of actual mental disorder.

I’m not a psychologist, but I do have some understanding of the difference between reality and fantasy, and when fantasy supplants reality and you begin seeing things which aren’t there or even reading subtext which is not objectively present in a document, that’s a sign that something is very wrong. The fact that we’re dealing with a shared delusion or some sort of mass hysteria which effects a small but notable segment of the population doesn’t make it any less crazy, though it does make it a greater concern, raising the question of whether this particular mental disease is contagious and if so, how can it be contained?

I’ve recently been exposed to several examples of campaign finance laws in action here in Texas and it has become clear to me that these laws are inconsistent, arbitrary, and absurd. They seem to serve little purpose but to hide what the actual sources of money are and to create jobs for political middlemen and armies of lawyers and accountants. I guess creating all of those jobs is a good thing, but I’d rather see those kinds of jobs vacant and those particular hacks walking the streets looking for honest work.

The same problems exist with national campaign finance laws, which are just another level of complexity added onto state laws. Some progress was made with the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United vs. FEC case earlier this year, but there remain many inconsistent campaign finance laws on the federal level and even more on the state level.

In one recent example just covered in the news, the Texas Green Party got its candidates on the ballot using money from an out of state PAC which provided over $500,000 to finance a petition drive. This was theoretically a rule violation, but the party went to court and got a ruling that the cost of getting petitions signed was an administrative expense, which made the PAC contribution legal, because the campaign finance law allows PAC money to be spent for operating expenses, but not for actual campaign expenses. What’s more, the party is also distanced from the actual source of the money because they don’t have to report who the PAC got the money from.

Similarly, a Texas PAC got in trouble for using money from a single donor outside the spending rules. The couldn’t spend money for their candidate without violating spending limits for candidate ads, but could spend that money on attack ads against his opponent so long as they didn’t mention their candidate’s name. But they also had to jump through more nonsensical hoops. Although they got $250,000 from one individual, they had to scrape together another nine donations for a few dollars each to meet a requirement for a minimum of 10 contributors before their PAC could spend money. They got around this by taking a single additional $200 donation from another PAC run by a union which gets their money from multiple contributors. So that technically qualified them as a legitimate PAC — at least it would have if they had remembered they couldn’t run any ads until at least 60 days after they began operations. And again, no one knows where that union PAC really got any of their money from.

The whole system is enormously complex, with rules which make no sense at all. You can hide where money came from by having a PAC collect it and then give it to the candidate, or by having a PAC spend money directly on ads against your opponent while the campaign spends its money for its candidate. There are strict limits on what corporations and individuals can give the candidates, but they can give huge amounts to PACs and that gets around the restrictions. Or you can just have all your employees and relatives give the maximum amount until it adds up to millions.

All of this is ostensibly to try to make elections more fair, but all it really does is give an edge to those who know how to use the loopholes and game the system. The Supreme Court has already ruled that a campaign contribution is essentially free speech, so why not just scrap the entire burdensome mess and take that to its logical extreme and really make the system free and open?

Let people and businesses and groups and PACs and unions and anyone else spend all the money they want for any cause or candidate they like, directly or indirectly. You may complain that this means they can "buy" an election, but the truth is that one way or another they can already get around the restrictions, and with PACs in the game the federal restrictions actually limit small donors more than they limit big groups or corporations.

There should be just one restriction. All donations should be public. You have a right to free speech, but you don’t have a right to that speech being private if it’s in the form of money being spent in a public election. All candidates and all PACs and any other group financing campaigns or political activism should be require to publicly disclose all of their donors on their web site with contact information so that anyone can research them. If the money came from a PAC or a group, that organization should be required to provide its sources as well, so that no matter how many hands the money goes through, it’s all accessible for those willing to do the research.

This puts the responsibility on the voter, where it really should be, to do a minimal amount of work to figure out who is really behind the candidates or the groups they are being asked to support. What’s more, in an open system like this, opponents and public interest groups will go out and do the research for the voter, so if a candidate is taking money from a questionable source it will be used against him by the opposition, a possibility which will make candidates reluctant to get in bed with corrupt unions or greedy corporations. In fact, it will raise the value of citizen donors, because many candidates will find it advantageous to finance a campaign on smaller donations from individuals and small interest groups with good reputations and still maintain a positive public image. And with limits lifted those donations from individuals and smaller groups can be larger and more effective.

Past campaign finance reform efforts have clearly not worked, because they keep adding more special restrictions and exceptions to those restrictions, piling up layer on layer of arcane rules until none of it makes any sense and it doesn’t do the job it was intended to do. If anything it adds to the abuse and corruption. You can’t fix a failed concept by adding more of the same.

So strip it all away and start over. Let everyone spend what they want, but hold them accountable and let them do it in the light of day. The unfamiliar honesty might be good for the country.

A slightly different version of this article also appears at Blogcritics Magazine.

Paleocon and Southern Nationalist Thomas DiLorenzo has made a career of writing books with the objective of redefining the causes of the Civil War and rewriting the history of the Lincoln presidency. While he has been scoffed at by mainstream historians, he has gathered a following among deluded quasi-libertarians through his association with the Von Mises Institute and Lew Rockwell's peculiar brand of post-libertarian, anti-government extremism.

In honor of Independence Day a few years ago, DiLorenzo came up with an article which ably demonstrates the kind of distorted reasoning and poor research he has used to suck willing dupes through the looking glass into his bizarre alternate history of America. In this article DiLorenzo makes an argument that secession was always intended to be allowed under the Constitution on the basis of a few selected comments from Thomas Jefferson.

The foundational fallacy in his argument is the mere act of looking to Jefferson as an expert on the Constitution. Not only was Jefferson opposed to the Constitution, but he was not at the Constitutional Convention and was in France throughout the convention and for much of the ratification process. DiLorenzo realizes that Jefferson is highly regarded by libertarians and that he was critical of the Constitution in some areas, and just assumes that people will not notice that his appeal to authority is to an authority with little or no connection to the subject matter he is addressing.

The members of the paleocon choir to which DiLorenzo preaches make a very big show of exalting the Constitution and demanding that it be observed and adhered to in every possible particular. But I find it hard to believe that even they can buy into his argument that Jefferson had anything more than a tenuous connection to the Constitution or held it in the same regard which they do.

The actual author of the Constitution, as much as it had one, was Jefferson's friend James Madison, who was at the convention and probably understood the document it produced better than any of his contemporaries. But even Madison, who was the Constitution's greatest champion, did not have the kind of sacramental regard for it which modern paleocons have developed.

One of the peculiarities of the mindset of DiLorenzo and his followers is that they have become convinced that the Constitution, which was specifically written to turn a loose confederation of unorganized states into a permanent and binding union, somehow sanctions and justifies the Civil War and even modern secessionism. It is particularly ironic that they claim to regard the Constitution so highly and yet understand its content and purposes so poorly.

That DiLorenzo should choose to selectively ignore Madison's thoughts on the Constitution is convenient, self-serving and deceptive and characteristic of his approach to history where only those sources which agree with his politicized vision of the past are given an airing. It's a particularly shameful deception, because Madison wrote at length on secessionism and the Constitution in the early 1830s.

Madison outlived Jefferson and lasted long enough to see the first major crisis in the ongoing struggle which eventually led to the Civil War, the Nullification Crisis. As the Nullifiers began talking about secession and breaking up the union, people wrote to Madison and asked for his opinion on whether it was legitimate for states to leave the union or for a minority of states to dissolve the union and he was quite willing to share his expertise.

In a letter on this subject to Senator Daniel Webster in 1833, Madison wrote:

"It is fortunate when disputed theories can be decided by undisputed facts: and here the undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several States who were parties to it, and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity. they might, by the same authority and by the same process, have converted the Confederacy into a mere league or treaty, or continued it with enlarged or abridged powers, or have imbodied the people of their respective States into one people, nation or sovereignty; or as they did, by a mixed form, make them one people, nation or sovereignty for certain purposes, and not for others.

"The Constitution of the United States being established by a competent authority — by that of the sovereign people of the several States who were parties to it — it remains only to inquire what the Constitution is; and here it speaks for itself. It organizes the government into the usual legislative, executive and judiciary departments; invests it with specific powers, leaving others to the parties to the Constitution. It makes the government, like other governments, to operate directly on the people; places at its command the needful physical means of executing its powers; and finally proclaims its supremacy, and that of the laws made in pursuance of it, of the Constitutions and Laws of the States, the powers of the Government being exercised, as in other elective and responsible Governments, under the control of its constituents, the people and the legislatures of the States, and subject to the revolutionary rights of the people, in extreme cases.&quot

Here we see Madison arguing the supremacy of the Constitution and the fact that it was created as an alternative to various other forms of less centralized government and structured in such a way that the people would have a voice at multiple levels and would not need to secede from the union it had created.
In another letter to journalist and diplomat Nicholas Trist on the same subject in 1833, Madison wrote:

"The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater fight to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it. And certainly there is nothing in the Virginia resolutions of –98, adverse to this principle, which is that of common sense and common justice. The fallacy which draws a different conclusion from them lies in confounding a single party, with the parties to the Constitutional compact of the United States. The latter having made the compact may do what they will with it. The former as one only of the parties, owes fidelity to it, till released by consent, or absolved by an intolerable abuse of the power created."

Here Madison states unambiguously that states cannot leave the union without the consent of the other states once they have all agreed to what is essentially a contract. In the same way that the parties to a commercial contract cannot dissolve that agreement unilaterally the states cannot act individually or as groups to break up the union and negate the Constitution.

Madison goes on to actually cite Jefferson himself, taking note of one of Jeffersons opinions which DiLorenzo has chosen to ignore in his own writing on the subject.

"It is remarkable how closely the nullifiers who make the name of Mr. Jefferson the pedestal for their colossal heresy, shut their eyes and lips, whenever his authority is ever so clearly and emphatically against them. You have noticed what he says in his letters to Monroe & Carrington (Pages 43 & 203, vol. 2,1) with respect to the powers of the old Congress to coerce delinquent States, and his reasons for preferring for the purpose a naval to a military force; and moreover that it was not necessary to find a right to coerce in the Federal Articles, that being inherent in the nature of a compact. It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion; and I shall be glad to see the task commenced by one who understands the subject."

There's nothing equivocal about Madison's position or his exhortation to Trist to use his very sharp pen to disabuse the nullifiers of their dangerous and unconstitutional notions.  What Madison makes clear is that the Constitution created the union specifically to bind the states together and the union is the embodiment of the Constitution

To secede or to overthrow the union is to overthrow the Constitution, because it binds the states and the people together under a system of government which should protect the rights of minorities and individuals and should make secession unnecessary, except in the most extreme of circumstances where a true second revolution is called for.

Yet in 1833 or in 1865 or today when the issue has been raised again, no one has come forward with a cause of sufficient merit to justify the dissolution of the union and the shredding of the Constitution. It is certain that slavery is not such a cause, nor is dissatisfaction with the Federal Reserve or with Obamacare.  The claim from DiLorenzo and his neo-secessionist followers that secession is somehow constitutional or even a defense of the Constitution is utterly delusional and southerner and slave owner though he was, Mr. Madison certainly would not have approved.

This article previously appeared on Blogcritics Magazine in a somewhat different form.