So, it has finally been decided that Al Franken won the election in the race for Minnesota’s US Senate seat. People everywhere are either celebrating or crying because the Democrats now have 60 Senators, which is a “fillibuster-proof majority”.

Is this really important? Does anyone see the Republicans having the backbone to launch a full scale fillibuster of any issue? Furthermore, we’ve already seen that there are plenty of Republicans willing to defect on various issues–that they likely already had a fillibuster proof majority.

So is this really an issue? Or just scare-mongering on behalf of Republicans, to get their base pumped up?

Is anyone surprised by this story? They shouldn’t be. The leader of the British Columbian Marijuana Party was arrested for distributing marijuana seeds.

Marc Emery, the “Prince of Pot” who sold millions of marijuana seeds and helped form the British Columbia Marijuana Party, is being prosecuted in Seattle, Washington for selling seeds to Americans.  He recently gave up a fight against extradition, and is attempting to make a deal with his prosecutors in order to lighten his sentence.  If the deal goes through, he will face a maximum of about eight years in prison, if he is convicted.

Surely this wasn’t a surprised to Mr. Emery. I’m not saying it’s right–but the United States sends special forces all the way to Afghanistan and Columbia to prosecute drug dealers, you don’t think they’d take a hop over the northern border?

Glenn Beck is one of TV’s most popular personalities these days, and the same goes for Radio. His radio show is the 4th most popular in the nation, and his TV show is currently ranked third behind Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. So when he recently claimed to be a “libertarian”, I naturally thought that libertarians would be jumping up and down at the thought of having a popular TV news personality claiming to be one of them in front of 2.3 million people. Not so, apparently. Tibor Machan, who is a well-known libertarian academic has penned an article entitled “You, Sir, Are No Libertarian”.

The other day I was awoken from my occasional complacency and shocked to be told that Glenn Beck, Fox TV’s most recent addition of conservative commentators, has been calling himself a libertarian.  Wow.  That’s all libertarianism needs, to have become the victim of this confusion or perhaps out and out distortion. 

Therefore let me spend a few paragraphs again on just what libertarianism is.  

The libertarian political philosophy is defined as one according to which the most fundamental principle of public affairs, admitting of no official compromise, is that the right to individual liberty of everyone in society is the most precious value to be upheld, protected and promoted by the law.  If you read the Declaration of Independence carefully, its basic theme is libertarianism, plain and simple.  Everyone has basic, unalienable rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (among other, less fundamental rights).

Read the rest here.

Nicolle Wallace was one of the top advisors to both George Bush and John McCain, and now she is suggesting different figureheads to lead the Republican Party out of the desert. Who tops her list? Actor Gary Sinise. Yes, that Gary Sinise.

“The natural strengths that an actor brings to politics would come in handy to anyone going up against Obama in 2012,” she wrote. “We will need an effective communicator who can stand toe to toe with Obama’s eloquence.”

Does anyone out there honestly think that Gary Sinise has the capacity for abstract thought? Forget eloquence, he ought to master ACTING first.

People often claim that Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires”, and they are absolutely right! Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, and Alexander the Great all fell to the sun-hardened warriors in the Afghanistan mountains. However,most people pay too much attention to the “graveyard” part, and not enough to the “empire” part. To say that we may meet the same fate as Alexander the Great admits that the “empire” part of that phrase must also apply to the United States. I am not going to comment on whether the United States is or is not an empire, with all the nastiness that word implies, but stop using the phrase if you don’t think the US is an empire.

A recent Chico, California city ordinance re-legalized public bowling. Which immediately begs the question–why on earth would a city council waste time making public bowling illegal? Good question. I don’t have the information on when the ordinance was passed–but bravo to the brave City Councilmembers for having the bravery to stand up to anti-bowling special interests and repeal the law. Really? Are there not more important issues to focus on?

So, thank you Chico, California City Councilmembers Mary Flynn, Scott Gruendl, Andy Holcombe, Larry Wahl, Jim Walker, Tom Nickell, and Ann Schwab. To thank each of these brave men and women personally, please email dpresson@chi.chico.ca.us and lcameron@ci.chico.ca.us, which will place a hardcopy of your email into the inbox of every councilmember.

P.S. – This is not Chico’s only historically stupid law. There is a city ordinance that says a $500 fine will be given to any person who detonates a nuclear weapon within city limits. 1.) Within city limits? Really. 2.) If they can get a nuclear weapon–don’t you think $500 is going to be easy to procure? 3.) Who is going to accept this $500 fine? 4.) Why $500? That seems absurdly low to me.

Chico, CA Mayor Ann Schwab

Newt Gingrich, the bastion of conservatism who once interested America in the Contract with America, is claiming that if the Republican Party doesn’t straighten out, a credible conservative third-party could emerge.

“If the Republicans can’t break out of being the right wing party of big government, then I think you would see a third party movement in 2012,” Gingrich said Tuesday. The speech, to a group of students at the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, was recorded by Springfield TV station KY3.

But continue reading the article–Gingrich goes on to say that although he despises Obama’s increase in the budget, the latest economic crisis began under Bush, who passed the bailout packages. It’s good to see someone with such a big name in the conservative movement not playing partisan politics. Gingrich’s message is that, essentially, the Republican Party ought to say “mea culpa” and return to small government principles.

-Nock the Blogger

With all of the recent news about bailouts, war expenditures, and stimulus packages–the word “trillion” has been thrown around a lot. To most of this, this is a number too larger to even comprehend, sort of like one million, one-hundred million, or a billion. It is important to understand the difference, though. PageTutor has a pictorial that demonstrates what a trillion dollars looks like–and I’d suggest everyone take a look.

For those who are too lazy to surf over to PageTutor, here is the last picture–of a trillion dollars stacked next to an average height man.

One trillion dollars

One of the most frightening things that happens to corrupt governments is when the police or armed forces begin oppressing the citizenry, just to scare them. That very thing happened in Louisiana recently, in Homer. The Homer police apparently stormed into Bernard Monroe’s house chasing Shawn Monroe. Moments later, Bernard Monroe, age 73, was dead of multiple gunshot wounds. The officers claim they acted in defense, the family claims it was cold-blooded murder. But the most shocking part was this:

“People here are afraid of the police,” said Terry Willis, vice president of the Homer branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “They harass black people, they stop people for no reason and rough them up without charging them with anything.”

That is how it should be, responded Homer Police Chief Russell Mills, who noted the high rates of gun and drug arrests in the neighborhood.

“If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names,” said Mills, who is white. “I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.

It doesn’t get any scarier than that. Take away the man’s badge immediately. It’s a bad sign when your policemen sound just as bad as your KKK members.

The future of police

-Nock the Blogger

A California lawmaker is making waves by suggesting that Google Maps and other public access satellite imaging products should blur the locations of “soft targets”, like churches, schools, hospitals, and government offices. Assemblyman Joel Anderson got the bright idea after reading about how Mumbai terrorists used online mapping imagery to plan terrorist attacks. There are so many problems with this bill, i’m actually going to number them.

1.) This is unconstitutional. American courts long ago decided that pictures taken in public places are untouchable by lawsuits or legislation.

2.) You don’t think the terrorists are going to pick up on this? When they are looking for a school or hospital, will they not notice the large blurry area on the map? They will simply assume that American schools and hospitals are like Bigfoot–permanently blurry in photographs.

3.) If this is, by some stroke of idiocy, passed and enacted–we ought to blur out all hospitals, schools, and government offices except for Assemblyman Joel Anderson’s Office. Naturally, we will keep him in a blurred-out bunker somewhere else, but it would serve as an interesting experiment.

4.) Terrorists have not attacked schools or hospitals in the U.S. They have only attacked major commercial buildings (World Trade Center) and massive government buildings (Pentagon)–so maybe we should blur all the big buildings!

5.) If this whole blurring out thing works, we should just blur out the entire United States. The terrorists would go to plan their attack on Google Earth™ and find that the United States was completely blurry. Heck, we could blur out the entire world! Google Earth™ would be rendered useless, but terrorism would be eliminated worldwide!

6.) This is just one of the many tools used by terrorists! They also use airplanes, cars, guns, boxcutters, boots, pants, arabic, and english–we ought to ban all of those terrorist-weapons too!

Google Earth

-Nock the Blogger