End the War on Freedom

Today is my parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary. Unfortunately, my father didn't live to see it. But I look forward to talking to my mother.

I went to a memorial service last night for a thirty-something single guy who was killed by a tree (he felled trees as part of his living). Quite an eclectic crowd. I didn't know him well, but he struck me as very real. The comment I thought before the service, but said out loud only to my wife was, "Sometimes you want to try God for murder and hang the blighter. This is one of those times."

# Charley Reese at LewRockwell.com - This Cliché Is A Lie - America does not have the "best-trained, best-equipped Army" in the world. [lew]

We have a military that is overstretched and underequipped because it has more missions than resources. We have a military that is suffering from a leadership crisis. We have a military with way too many women in it. We have a military that still suffers from logistics problems.

Don't take my word for it. Go to www.sftt.org. This is a site set up by Col. David Hackworth -- a fellow King Features columnist -- that, among other things, invites comments from officers and men actually on the battlefield. We have soldiers who didn't get the vests they needed. We have unarmored Humvees that have cost Americans dearly. And, to hear the enlisted men and young officers tell it, we have about the worst military leadership at the top since Abraham Lincoln struggled to find a general who knew how to fight. Unbelievably, many soldiers in Iraq have had to purchase equipment on the open market because it was better than the Army stuff or because the Army stuff wasn't available.

...

I highly recommend Col. Hackworth's Web site. You will get more truth from there in one five-minute visit than in listening to Donald Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for 10 hours.

# Brad Edmonds at LewRockwell.com - One Drop of Government Is All It Takes - government doesn't work and isn't necessary. There are no exceptions. [lew]

When we oppose government involvement -- say, in the shoe industry -- we note that government involvement always raises prices, limits choices and availability of products, and results in social injustice and economic inefficiency. This doesn't apply only to government involvement in specific goods such as food products (we pay between four and twenty times the world market price for sugar, for example). With regard to national defense, law enforcement, justice, and roads, government always will produce economic inefficiency, social injustice, lower quality, and unintended consequences. If government is the wrong answer to anything, this owes to the nature of government, not to the nature of the task at hand. Hence, if forcible government is the wrong answer to X because of the nature of government, government is the wrong answer to Y as well.

# Ron Lewis in the House of Representatives - H.R. 3920, the "Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act of 2004" proclaims that:

The Congress may, if two thirds of each House agree, reverse a judgment of the United States Supreme Court--

(1) if that judgment is handed down after the date of the enactment of this Act; and

(2) to the extent that judgment concerns the constitutionality of an Act of Congress.

Seems blatantly unconstitutional to me, but when has that stopped this organized criminal gang recently?

# Felicity Lawrence at The Guardian - Things get worse with Coke: Bottled tap water withdrawn after cancer scare - Coca-Cola recently introduced their Dasani bottled water in the UK, but it was pulled from the shelves country-wide after dangerous levels of bromate were discovered. [grabbe]

The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.

So now the full scale of Coke's PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it "pure" and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for "taste profile"; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide - which is not a problem - into bromate - which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre).

Coca-Cola doesn't lie about their product, though they don't say, and probably didn't know, that the UK version contained a carcinogen. From the dasani.com website:

To create DASANI, Coca-Cola bottlers start with the local water supply, which is then filtered for purity using a state-of-the-art process called reverse osmosis. The purified water is then enhanced with a special blend of minerals for a pure, fresh taste.

# Angel Shamaya at KeepAndBearArms.com - A Gun Rights Reply to the Bush-Cheney 2004 Fundraising Letter - why Mr. Shamaya will not be voting for Mr. Bush in 2004. [kaba]

The only thing that could possibly sway me from opposing Bush's re-election would be an amazing public about-face by Mr. Bush that includes strong, vocal and active support for the right of the individual people to keep and bear arms, through action and not mere words, coupled with an authentic and moving public apology for supporting a rifle and magazine ban. But I won't hold my breath. George W. Bush seems to be more politician than patriot -- a man to whom principles mean very little. When it comes to the Oath he swore, Mr. Bush now seems like just another lying Democrat with an "R" next to his name -- Republican In Name Only. In fact, if Democrat Sen. Zell Miller were running against Mr. Bush, we'd be putting our backs into electing Mr. Miller -- because he, as a Democrat, is more supportive of the Second Amendment than our "conservative" President!

So spare yourself the expense of additional fundraising letters trying to garner support from me. I'm convinced by a man's actions -- not his flaccid, transparent, meaningless, inauthentic, written-by-somebody-else words. Many of our President's actions leave me thinking him a disgraceful socialist traitor unfit to hold any elected office in a free America.

# Jim Lesczynski at The Village Choice - A Modest Marriage Proposal - scroll down to the "Rant of the week". Mr. Lesczunski proposes that we separate marriage and state. Good idea.

Add comment Edit post Add post