http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.

Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.

The department started sending letters of notification Saturday to the activists, inviting them to review their files before they are purged from the databases, Sheridan said.

“The names don’t belong in there,” he told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. “It’s as simple as that.”

The surveillance took place over 14 months in 2005 and 2006, under the administration of former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R). The former state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday. Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists “fringe people.”

Both Hutchins and Sheridan said the activists’ names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.

“I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government,” he said. Hutchins said he did not notify Ehrlich about the surveillance. Ehrlich spokesman Henry Fawell said the governor had no comment.

I’m pretty sure one of the precise reasons for the First Amendment is to disrupt the government. Besides… how is it that these people are in any way a threat? They are activists AGAINST violence. At what point will a software limitation cause all liberty activists to end up on watch lists? Or am I being too optimistic that we aren’t already?

http://news.yahoo.com/…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that a $150 billion economic stimulus plan is needed now because of the faltering economy and she may call the House into session after the election to pass it.

“We may have to go back into session before the next Congress,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi said a stimulus package would create jobs by investing in public works, increasing food stamps benefits and extending unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless. She said lawmakers need to “hunker down” and look closely at the federal budget for possible savings, and reconsider whether the U.S. can afford to fight “a war without end” in Iraq.

“We have some very harsh decisions to make and some of them can’t wait until January,” said Pelosi, D-Calif.

“What we can’t wait for is a stimulus package,” Pelosi added. “We may have to go back into session before the next Congress.”

Invest? No… the government doesn’t invest. It steals or borrows and spends. Public works aren’t jobs but make work projects. Food stamps and unemployment insurance increase unemployment and will help prolong the recession.

Someone needs to tie Pelosi down, A Clockwork Orange style, and make her read America’s Great Depression, The Case Against the Fed and Economics in One Lesson.

The Wanna-Be Vice Dictators
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 08:12 PM

They both want more regulation, more totalitarian “oversight,” more national socialism. So far, the only debate is centered around a lie perpetuated by both sides: That the Republicans are for smaller government.

McCain Is a Socialist, Too!
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 08:15 PM

Palin argues that McCain is anything but laissez-faire. After all, he’s for campaign finance censorship and tobacco nanny statism.

She’s Getting Away With It
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 08:19 PM

The key for McCain is to somehow run against the status quo, to run against his own party’s recent legacy. Palin says that we shouldn’t trust national health care, unless we have been happy with the way the feds have been handling things lately. Of course, she is right. Those who hate the Bush legacy — meaning, total statism — should logically oppose socialism too. But the McCain/Palin administration would be more of the same, more Bushism, more socialism. This severe ideological confusion helps both parties, and creates the illusion that there is a difference between the two.

Biden is getting away with it too, blaming the Republicans for shrinking the state. I can’t stand either one.

The Elephant in the Room
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 08:23 PM

They both support the fascist bailout. They both support a trillion-dollar foreign policy and a multi-trillion dollar corporate/entitlement state. They are debating over millions when the state they wish to run spends trillions. Even assuming the greatness of mass democracy, this is a grave injustice. They should be debating big, real issues. Not this trivia.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign continues to campaign on the fact that for a few days they nominally stopped campaiging.

The GOP’s Embrace of Autarky
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 08:30 PM

When, by the way, did the Republicans and almost all conservatives come to champion the frightening and economically ludicrous concept of “energy independence”? What they mean, of course, is autarky and socialism: All energy produced within America, and every single form of energy — solar, coal, oil, nuclear, wind, etc. — subsidized massively by the federal government. Even the Alaska drilling issue isn’t conceived of with anything approaching market reasoning. “We,” as in the federal government, should drill.

(Although the Republicans are more skeptical of the global warming zeitgist, they seem willing to champion big government programs such as carbon emissions limits to address climate change. Hey, environmentalists, with all the Republican leaders and corporate state adopting this line, you know it’s wrong.)

Biden Just Admitted It
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 08:39 PM

Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan is the same as Bush’s. Biden does say, however, that the Dems will end the war, eventually. Palin doesn’t even make this much of a promise. On foreign policy, the Dems still seem slightly better than the Repubs.

On the other hand, “Pakistan already has nuclear weapons,” Biden points out, and so, I guess, we should be at war with them.

A Relief
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 08:54 PM

Well, at least both say Israel must be protected at all costs, that nothing is more important, and that Iran is the greatest threat ever. Indeed, they both accuse the other of being insufficiently determined to keep the Persians in line.

They also agreed on gay marriage, just as Bush and Kerry did: More equality under the law but no marriage for homosexuals. Same exact position. Different emphasis.

http://campaignforliberty.com

Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression. Our country has long been admired by the rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a light shining in the darkness of tyranny.

But many Americans today are frustrated. The political choices they are offered give them no real choice at all. For all their talk of “change,” neither major political party as presently constituted challenges the status quo in any serious way. Neither treats the Constitution with anything but contempt. Neither offers any kind of change in monetary policy. Neither wants to make the reductions in government that our crushing debt burden demands. Neither talks about bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the world. Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible proposals are even on the table.

This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political life for many years. Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.

That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them into the American political conversation.

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document. Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers. Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy. Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda. Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns. And the central bank’s ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred. For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.

We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress. We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.

We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational organizations in which the American people possess no elected representatives. Such compromises of our country’s independence run counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought on behalf of self-government and local control. Most of these organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually alleviated, for example? The peoples of the world can interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.

We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has cherished from time immemorial.

Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.

Our country is ailing. That is the bad news. The good news is that the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our Founders taught us. Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.

Will you join us?

I’m not one for spending much effort attempting to change the system from the top down. It’s mostly a waste of time. The Campaign for Liberty seems to me to be both top down and down up. You need to spend a little effort on those at the top but mostly at the bottom. Coordination and access to information are the most important aspects besides the drive to change things. It appears to me that Paul’s Campaign for Liberty is or will provide that. Even if it’s just to get the updates I recommend joining. The Ron Paul campaign for president helped spark this new movement for peace, prosperity and freedom and I think it’s an opportune time to get on board. The potential is there for real change. Even if only used as an educational tool.

http://www.breitbart.com/…

The US Senate Saturday approved 25 billion dollars in loan guarantees for the financially strapped US auto industry, intended to spark a wave of automotive innovation.

The loan guarantees were included in a continuing resolution that included funding for the US government and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President George W. Bush has indicated that he intends to sign the bill.

“We’re very pleased Congress has chosen to act at this critical time,” said Greg Martin, director of communications for General Motors Corp’s Washington office.

GM had been subject of much speculation that it could be forced into bankruptcy.

The bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives on Wednesday, are the first loan guarantees for US carmakers since Congress approved a similar 675 million dollar measure for Chrysler Corp. in 1980.

Chrysler Chairman Robert Nardelli, however, said this week the loan guarantees should not be considered a rescue package for struggling carmakers. “This is not a bailout,” he said.

Under provisions of the new legislation, not only US carmakers are eligible for the guarantees but also suppliers and foreign automakers with plants in the United States that are more than 20 years old — Nissan and Honda’s US operations qualify.

Not a bailout?

Bailout in economics and finance is a term used to describe a situation where a bankrupt or nearly bankrupt entity, such as a corporation or a bank, is given a fresh injection of liquidity, in order to meet its short term obligations. Often bailouts are by governments, or by consortia of investors who demand control over the entity as the price for injecting funds.

Obviously Mr. Robert Nardelli and I have different definitions of ‘bailout.’

How about we let them burn just like the banks? The unions want to complain about it? Let’em! They have brought this on themselves by using the guns of government to minipulate and regulate the auto industry out of competitiveness. Though luck.

• Handed out about 100 half page fliers with one side information about Rothbard’s The Case Against the Fed and the other Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. Photos of the book cover, description and links to online versions and audio books. People snatched them up real quick. One woman was a freegan. She told me she doesn’t buy books to save trees, has a computer or at least access to one, no digital audio player, but yet still took everyone’s fliers… including mine.
• Almost every person their was anti-capitalist. Everything I heard told me they were in fact anti-corporatist. As you see in the footage they, like many on the left, incorrectly label what currently exists in the Western world as capitalist.
• I spoke with an employee of Revolution Books who was a Marxist. He believed in the end goal of stateless communism but said a state was needed to get there. Seems a bit contradictory to me. He didn’t like when I asked if he was a statist as he reminded me that communism doesn’t have a state. I tried to explain to him that it was incorrect to call what the USA economy is as capitalist and that if he was non-violent he would find allies in the anarcho-capitalist camp. He wasn’t familiar with Rothbard or ALL which I found unfortunate but he was receptive to learning about them. I’ll be sending him some links.
• I ran into Chris Maloney. He’s written some articles on Mises.org and LewRockwell.com.
• Explained to a young 20 something y/o woman who had shown up to find out more about what was going on. I explained to her how the Federal Reserve works, how it causes the boom bust cycle and what’s generally going on now.
• They had an open mic and I was real close to taking advantage of it and explaining what capitalism really is and some better reasons to oppose the bailout and the Federal Reserve instead of just complaining about which people gets the stolen goods. I decided that was likely a bad idea.
• Someone gave me an article entitled “No to the Bailout of the Capitalist Speculators! Down with the Dictatorship of Finance Capital!” by The Internationalist. Last I check it wasn’t available on their site. It’s interesting because it has some things I wouldn’t have expected to read such as noting that since 1971 the US dollar is no longer backed by gold. They call out the Socialist Equality party for not being hardcore enough effectively and the Green and Working Families as being “capitalist” parties. The article speaks of the Austrian (not the school but the country) economist Joseph Schumpeter. “Free-market ideologues like to quote the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter on the ‘creative destruction‘ unleashed by capitalism on outmoded economic structures. But today, as the wages and living standards of the working people are being steadily eroded, as social programs are drastically slashed, there is nothing creative a bout the destruction unleashed by the wold-be masters of the universe.” The authors really need to recheck what Schumpeter was speaking about, get an understanding as to why the standard of living is being eroded, and acknowledge the fact that what they complain about is in no way, shape or form a free market. Actually… the author and those protesting need to realize that these banks are more regulated than just about any other time period in history and this situation still developed. Regulation is not the answer, removing government control over the money supply is.
• There were lots of Obama buttons around. It was rather entertaining to see hardcore socialist 1 argue with hardcore socialist 2 over how the Democrats and Obama are the enemies of their cause. I, walking around with my Ron Paul, “Taxation is Theft”, “I do not consent to be searched”, etc. pins, found that many people knew of Paul and had generally good things to say in the few words exchanged.
• I was yelled at at one point for moving due to several people with cameras who were filming the back of my bookbag which has a Ron Paul civil flag patch and a “Ron Paul 2008″, Paul and V mask, and 4th Amendment pins. I usually have a gadsden flag like “Don’t tread on me” patch and more pins but I took some off for the Service Nation Summit and have yet to put them back.
• Not directly related but a coworker is leaving my firm Friday and so we went out to lunch. During which I got to pretty much fully explain the full Austrian School of economics’s position on what’s going on. Needless to say several of my coworkers who I don’t typically talk with were fascinated. They didn’t seem to trust a transition to a commodities based system… giving me “what about the guy who chooses the wrong commodity? do you really want people bothered with deciding on a common currency?” type arguments. They also has hangups on acknowledging or accepting the inherent harm central banks cause and underestimated the influence artificially cheap debt has.

Update: CNN’s coverage of the event, some photos

So why did I choose the wrong rally? From LewRockwell.com/blog:

Writes Jim Sheehan: “I just walked by the New York Stock Exchange. Hundreds of demonstrators have gathered to protest the government’s bailout of Wall Street. Several were holding placards that read ‘Stop the bailout! Read The Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek. Read mises.org.’ They were also handing out copies of Ron Paul’s 2002 speech introducing his bill to eliminate subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Keep up the good work!”

I’m not sure where this was advertised but the NYC Campaign for Liberty Meetup.com event listed the Bowling Green but I didn’t notice anyone familiar when I showed up at 4PM. Oh well. Hopefully some of those who I handed info to will actually read one of the suggested books. If it’s one thing many of those lefties need is an overview of economic theory.