Who voted for War on Iran?

BILL TITLE: To hold the current regime in Iran accountable for its threatening behavior and to support a transition to democracy in Iran

For War:
Maine (Allen, Michaud), Vermont (Sanders), Massachusetts (Neal, Meehan, Frank, Tierney, Markey, Lynch, Capuano, Delahunt), New Hampshire (Bradley, Bass), Rhode Island (Kennedy, Langelin)

Against:
For New England:
Massachusetts: McGovern, Olver

For President:
Paul, Duncan

Secede: Maine islanders want to go their own way

4/21 Boston.com

...Dismayed by steeply increasing property taxes that threaten to push lower-income families off the island and frustrated by their lack of a voice in city affairs, Peaks Island voters will decide on June 13 if the island should secede from Portland and become a self-governing town. They are not alone in their push for independence.

Seaboard pork plant to close for immigration rally

Factory farm in Oklahoma supports cheap labor...check out that kill ratio and I suppose Americans wouldn't want to do that job either.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Seaboard Corp. said it will close its Guymon, Oklahoma, pork plant on Monday to allow workers to attend rallies planned for that day in support of immigration reform, the company said.

The plant has a daily hog slaughter capacity of about 16,000 head, the company said.
On Tuesday, Cargill Inc. said its five beef plants and two hog plants will be closed on Monday for the rallies.

LRC: No More Government Roads

What if I could propose a solution that would clean up our air, reduce our dependency on foreign oil, save energy, reduce urban sprawl, lower taxes, and alleviate traffic congestion, all in one fell swoop?

No, this isn't a fantasy. It's actually quite simple: get the government out of the business of building roads and highways.

-David Woods

Entire Article

LRC: Patriots Day

-Jim O'Keefe

...After nearly forty years removal from my home state, it has been quite some time since I’d thought of Patriots Day, truth be told. It’s not an official holiday of any kind here. The daily routine of life and business tunes out many of the old pleasures and memories.

Then I found myself today, the 19th of April, 2006, at the Hawaii County Police Department, filling out the firearms permit application, to renew my long gun permit. In effect, to ask for permission to be able to purchase firearms – only long guns, and only after a two-week wait for the permit to return, and only during the twelve-month period for which the permit is valid. Pistol permits are even more restricted, limited to one specific firearm for only a ten-day period subsequent to a two-week wait.

Full Story.

SVR: Poll

POLL SHOWS VERMONT INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT
LEADS THE NATION

How Many Secessionists Are There?

The 2006 Vermonter Poll recently conducted by the Center for Rural Studies of the University of Vermont indicates that the percentage of eligible Vermont voters who favor secession from the United States of America could very well be the highest in the nation.

Secession is nothing new to Vermonters. On January 15, 1815, less than twenty-five years after Vermont became the fourteenth state, it joined other New England states in signing the report of the Hartford Convention in opposition to the proposal of the Secretary of War to implement a military draft for continuing the badly mismanaged War of 1812 with England. This report was nothing less than a declaration of the right to secede.

They really don't like Real ID

Concord NH
They really don't like Real ID
Protest of national identification card draws mock Nazis, Constitutionalists

Congress passed the Real ID Act last year, and New Hampshire and Kentucky were offered $3 million grants to test the program. All states must comply by 2008.
But the New Hampshire House voted last month to refuse to do so, calling the program "contrary and repugnant" to the Constitution. Now it's up to the Senate to decide whether to take the federal grant money and overhaul the state's licensing system or not.

The Pulitzer Farce

...The central project of the Pulitzer Prize committee is always to perform that function, only this year the need was more pressing than usual. 2005 was a bad year for the New York Times, dominated by steady disclosure of its important role in manufacturing and then disseminating lies designed to plunge the nation into war in Iraq. ....cont...


-Alexander Cockburn

Oh, to be in England

TD is the best of the Brits...

What is Poverty?
Theodore Dalrymple (Spring 1999)

do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today, no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV.
What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today, no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were—poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth—even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.

cont.

Brimelow Trip back to 1965

Peter Brimelow writes [04-13-06]: This is what Senator Edward Kennedy said when he was piloting the 1965 Immigration Act.

“First our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same…Second, the ethnic mix of the country will not be upset…Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia”

To the North: PM wants to see more missions like Afghanistan

Harper's other major goals include a new child care entitelment...at some point the (Real?) Left is going to have to acknowledge that these sorts of "conservatives" are fellow travelers.

PM wants to see more missions like Afghanistan

ALLISON DUNFIELD

Globe and Mail Update

Prime Minister Stephen Harper continued to show strong support for the Canadian military Thursday, attending a military graduation ceremony in Alberta and saying that he believes that Canada can make a difference globally by taking a "more visible role" in international missions.

continued...

LRC: Did Romney Win a Victory for Free Markets?

Did Romney Win a Victory for Free Markets?
by Michael S. Rozeffby Michael S. Rozeff

The Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), reliably Republican in its opinions, embraces Romneycare as "a victory for market-based reform." The recent Massachusetts legislation that mandates health care insurance for everyone in the state is "a big step forward." They fancy "that the plan relies on consumers in a market, undeveloped as it is, rather than seeking to replace private insurance and dictate private care through government fiat."

As I showed in my previous article on this subject, IBD’s assessment is wildly inaccurate. What the IBD applauds is a thorough government entanglement with health care businesses that leaves intact a few empty shells that suggest a "market." A reasonably accurate term for this procedure is fascism. There is no market reform in this because there is no market left standing. When the IBD says that "Mittcare" is "a far cry from Hillarycare," it is saying that fascism is preferable to the communism it sees in Hillarycare, namely, health care owned and operated by state enterprises.

IBD is so certain that health-care fascism is a good thing that it advocates it as a "rough model for market-based, consumer-driven reform of health care nationwide." While some of this is a knee-jerk "us versus them" (Republican vs. Democrat) attitude and some part of it is the IBD’s liking for fascism per se, a good part of it is driven by plain old errors of economic thought. IBD really does erroneously believe that the market needs reforming and that Republicans (and government bureaucrats) are just the engineers to oil and tune up the market machine.

Continued...

Nation of Immigrants and Emigrants I

Chronicles
Hard Right!
April 13, 2006
Dr Thomas Fleming

I consider myself lucky to have been in Mexico during both rounds of the Mexican demonstrations that have been staged to protest any enforcement of US immigration law. I was in Mexico gathering impressions: I thought it might be nice to know what lies in store for all of us. My extended observations on immigration, I shall save for the Chronicles issue and the book we are putting out. But since I have been away so long, not only from the office but away from my computer (I didn’t fancy hauling my laptop with it’s “STEAL THIS” sign around Mexico on a bus), I really should sketch out a few preliminary observations on this issue. continue reading

LRC: Why We Need More 'Uninsured' Americans

Carla Howell

Socialized medicine’s true believers – who dominate the ranks of mainstream news reporters and politicians – try to bludgeon us into believing that the lack of medical insurance is a crisis, a disaster, and a never-ending emergency.

Here’s an example of how a news report typically casts the "uninsured":

"The number of uninsured or underinsured people in the United States is estimated to be about 46 million... they sit on the edge of catastrophe." (Journal Times, Wisconsin, February 27, 2006)

But "uninsured" Americans are usually nowhere near "catastrophe." They have plenty of access to urgent care when they need it.

Moreover, they save themselves a boatload of money by steering clear of one of America’s biggest money pits: health insurance.

We don’t need more insurance in America. We need much less.

LRC: Universal Health Mess in Massachusetts

Universal Health Mess in Massachusetts

by Michael S. Rozeff

Insanity in health-care legislation

As if to prove that its state’s democracy is just as authoritarian as New York’s or Minnesota’s, the Massachusetts legislature has passed a health care bill that establishes a democratic dictatorship over health care. Democrats, Republicans, and the Republican governor, Mitt Romney, alike support the bill. Bi-partisanship signals that the legislation achieves a new bear market low in the replacement of free markets for health care with health care by government fiat.

Governor Romney will sign the bill (or most of it). He pushed for it. He contributed to it. He called it "exactly what we’d hoped for." What he hoped for is a vile and morally reprehensible piece of legislation. As a rule, is legislation ever anything else?

House Act No. 4850 begins with a preamble that an "emergency law" is "necessary for the immediate preservation of the public health and convenience." This is a lie. The same sentence says that the "purpose" is not an emergency but to "expand access to health care...increase the affordability of health care products, and enhance accountability of our state’s health system..." This is a second lie. Funneling health care through new state bureaucracies will diminish access, raise costs, and make health care less responsive and accountable to its customers...

LRC: Freedom Rings for Wrong Reasons

Blaine Amendments to save us from a complete federal take over of education?

Freedom Rings for Wrong Reasons

...Elsewhere, Establishment libertarians condemn Blaine Amendments, because they're allegedly the product of bigotry (that most heinous of all possible crimes, which we all know is worse than statism) against Catholics. And that is, to an extent, true. The man who inspired them, James Blaine (1830–1893), fought for a similar amendment to the United States constitution. The proposed federal amendment failed, but most of the states subsequently passed "Blaine Amendments" of their own. And in some cases, the Amendments were supported by anti-Catholic evangelical Protestants.

Well, so what? If Catholic schools were, in fact, trying to get their hands on government money, well, then – though I have little but admiration for the Catholic Church – thank God for Blaine Amendments.

Music, Americana

Mary use to have a restaurant, the Dixie Kitchen, in Boston.

“…My church and my country could use a little mercy now
As they sink into a poisoned pit
That's going to take forever to climb out
They carry the weight of the faithful
Who follow them downI love my church and country, and they could use some mercy now
Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They'll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now…”

Mary Gauthier's "Mercy Now" scored #12 on Harp's 50 Greatest Albums of 2005! "Nashville-based Gauthier combines a twangy world-of-hurt voice with vivid songwriting worthy of Lucinda Williams' 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road'. Gurf Morlix's sinewy, seductively slow bluesy arrangements should make Tony Joe White smile."

The Federal Schools:Girl, 5, Forced To Apologize For Hugging Classmate

Girl, 5, Forced To Apologize For Hugging Classmate
Parents Looking For New School For Girl

MAYNARD, Mass. -- A family in Maynard is outraged after their 5-year-old daughter was forced to write a letter denouncing hugging after a classmate embraced her.

You do not know and will never know who the Remnant are, or where they are, or how many of them there are, or what they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist; second, that they will find you.

Albert J Nock

Website: ForgottenBoston

ForgottenBoston

Carver Street, Edgar Allan Poe's birthplace

From Providence: Anti-war protesters interrupt Hillary Clinton's speech at university

Anti-war protesters interrupt Hillary Clinton's speech at university
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) - Anti-war protesters interrupted U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech at Brown University by heckling the New York Democrat for four solid minutes before police escorted them out of the auditorium...

LRC: Banned Near Boston

Banned Near Boston
More chicanery from the underworld of family law.
by Stephen Baskerville

...On March 24, Kevin Thompson received an order prohibiting distribution of his book, Exposing the Corruption in the Massachusetts Family Courts. The court also impounded the records of Thompson’s custody case, reinforcing the secrecy in which family courts like to operate.

The standard justification for secret courts is the one Judge Manzi now extends to censorship: "privacy interests of the parties' minor child." Thompson’s son has already been forcibly separated from his father, and his life is now under the total control of state officials. What "privacy" does this child have left? Thompson understands that the true reason for the secrecy and censorship is not to protect privacy but to invade it with impunity: "The only interests that are protected are the interests of the racketeers and hypocrites who invade ‘family privacy’ by removing loving fathers from the lives of their children against their will and without just cause to fill their pockets."...

To the North: Ottawa stops funding One Tonne Challenge

Ottawa stops funding One Tonne Challenge
By MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
ENVIRONMENT REPORTER; With a report from Bill Curry in Ottawa
Saturday, April 1, 2006, Page A7
The new Conservative government in Ottawa has abruptly stopped funding groups across the country that have been promoting the One Tonne Challenge, the quirky program to persuade Canadians to do their bit to help the environment by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.