Katrina Revisited: Walmart Wins! Part 2

Lew Rockwell and Walter Block on Hurricane Katrina, it's aftermath, and getting people to realize that central planning (whether it's for the economy or for disaster relief) sucks balls:

Watching the Capitol Hill hearings on what went wrong after Hurricane Katrina provided a glimpse of what it must have been like in the Politburo in the 1950s. The Soviet bureaucrats would gather with the party officials and factory and farm managers to figure out why grain production was down or why shop shelves were empty or why the bread lines were ever longer and the quality ever worse.

They gathered under the conviction that they had a workable system that was being rendered unworkable because of the incompetence, shirking, or wrecking of certain key players in the chain of command. No one was permitted to say that the command system itself was the problem. Instead, they had to place blame on someone, as if all problems could be reduced to issues of obedience. It was always a scramble. Whoever was finally said to be at fault faced certain ruin.

Let's be clear, we are much closer to a socialist society than we are to a free state. Every aspect of our lives can be monitored, scrutinized, criminalized, or taxed by our government. But when the opportunity came for our government to make good on the marshmellowy promise of safety and protection during the hurricane, let's face it, the government swung and missed.

I don't fault Bush for the governments weak, inefficient, and incompetent response because Katrina could have happened on Clinton's watch and I'm pretty confident we would have gotten the same bureaucratic abortion that W presided over.

What we should be questioning is the fundamental assumption that our strong central government should be handling disaster relief (among many other things) at all. That's one question that no one in the MSM is asking.

I like the way Rockwell and Block end their paper:

It took decades for the rot to give way underneath the Soviet apparatus of central planning. But eventually the implausibility of the entire project was no longer possible to deny. It gave way under an intellectual reaction against the whole of socialism. We are seeing something like that take place today, as government fails in Iraq and New Orleans, and in every place around the country and the world where it causes problems and creates no solutions. The age of confident central planning is behind us. Right now, the state is just trying to keep its head above water. If freedom is to have a future, the time will come when it will sink to an ignoble end, and we will wonder how we ever believed in this myth called government crisis management.

Read the whole position paper here.

The Revolution Lives

In Missouri from St.Louis Post Dispatch:

The first hints were the phone calls.

Never before had St. Charles County Republican Party Chairman Jon Bennett received so many queries about where this year's party caucus was to be held. And Bennett didn't recognize most of the callers.

On Saturday, Bennett learned why. Dozens of avid supporters of Ron Paul, a Texas congressman who is running a renegade quest for the presidential nomination, staged a political guerrilla attack. At that caucus at St. Peters City Hall — as well as others across the state — party regulars like Bennett were overwhelmed.

Party crashers! How rude.

The LA Times has additional coverage of what happened in Missouri:

Usually attended only by party apparatchiks, the caucuses help set the official party platform and deal with internal rules issues. The kind of stuff most folks ignore. Not the Paulistas, who swarmed meetings in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield and some rural counties and, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it, "snagged roughly a third of the 2,137 state Republican delegates."

This reminds me of that scene in Old School where the character played by Jeremy Piven finds out that Luke Wilson and crew were able to get their fraternity set up. "They're really good at paperwork!"

Of course, this really didn't go over too well with some of the Republican blogosphere. Take for example Dee over at Chatterbox Chronicles.

Now, I've always maintained that the way that most of the Pajamas Media Right react to Ron Paul is not really any different than what you would find with the Daily Kos crowd about George W. Bush. Mostly rantings and name calling, but never really anything that challenges the basic questions that he asks and that makes them squirm.

Anyway, one question that will be asked is now that the GOP is the party of big government and we are now paying for the sins of our largesse, why should anyone vote for the party hack McCain if it's just more of the same thing we've had for 8 years? Look at where all this spending has gotten us. Up until yesterday, the silence from the PJM right on the collapse of the dollar and government bailouts for financial institutions had been deafening. My opinion is because this disaster can be laid squarely at the feet of GWB and 6 years of GOP rule and to all the neocon enablers who cheered every step of the way. Well, people are waking up, and all of the "Old Right" are pissed. Because you ruined it all for me, my kids, and my grandkids.

God Bless Ron Paul for standing up there and speaking the truth.

Why Shouldn't Bush tell Israel What's What?

Over at the Hill Chronicles Layla writes this:

Bush has vowed to return to Israel in May to check if the government there is listening and heeding his threats, warnings, and implementing his plans - plans for a nation that he is not the leader of. Bush told the Kenesset to heed to the plan and stick by Olmert and help him to achieve the two state solution.

Who in the hell does Bush think he is? No one died and named him god. The one and only G-d, which is the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were bequeath the land by G-d and told to never divide this land or woe to the man that does.

If you read the comments, then you will see that I take issue with the premise of Layla's reasoning:

Don’t you think that since we give them aid we should have a say in what Israel and the other Middle East countries do?

That’s what our foreign policy is, we give aid to those governments and in exchange for that aid we get a say in how those governments conduct themselves. Period. Right?

She responded:

Maximus Israel is very capable of taking care of itself. Their economy is not based on oil, but based on technology and medicine. Per captia Israel is the fourth richest nation in the world.

Talk to me!

I wrote back:

I don’t disagree with you, I guess my point is, if we send taxpayer dollars to Israel, we should get a say in what and how they run things over there.

Why shouldn't Bush go over there expecting Israel to bend to our wishes? It's my tax dollars that are going over there, I should be able to go over there and declare a national holiday there if I want to.

The fact of the matter is, we give 3 times the amount of aid to Israel's Arab neighbors than we do to Israel herself (and it's not like we don't expect the Arab states to do our bidding). If we stopped all foreign aid then Israel still comes out ahead. I'm so friggin brilliant.

The CIA Destroyed Interrogation Tapes

I haven't been following the story of the CIA destroying videotapes of interrogations involving waterboarding. But, on its face, it reads like one of those stories where the cover up will be worse than the waterboarding. From Ed Morrissey:

Those who are inclined to shrug this off should rethink their positions. The action of the CIA not only shows disrespect to Congress, the only real check on potential abuse, it may have provided the basis for overturning an important conviction in the war on terror. In a nation based on the rule of law, we cannot allow government officials in positions of power to make up their own rules as they go along. We certainly cannot abide them disseminating false information as Hayden apparently has.

This has my attention now, though we probably won't get the full story before a new administration is in office. We should be fully aware of what is being done in our name. The Bush administration has always said that they don't torture. But with video evidence being destroyed the credibility of those claims certainly should be called into question.

Warrantless Searches

Over at Conservative Belle's blog, there is a post that talks about how telecom companies should have immunity for helping the NSA eavesdrop on conversations without warrants.

I understand that we should be concerned about terrorism here in this country. But if the argument I have heard from Republicans of the Bush/Romney/Giuliani school for why we were attacked on 9/11 was because of our freedoms. Aren't we appeasing our enemies by making our country less free?

Aren't we doing exactly what the terrorists want us to do? Terrorists can't invade or occupy us. They can't bomb us back into the stone age. But they have scared us into changing the very things that make our country great.

Hannity begs James Dobson not to go 3rd party route

I'm not really a big fan of Sean Hannity, but he did give James Dobson (who I'm not a big fan of) a lot of time to make his case for not endorsing Rudy Giuliani (who I'm also not a real big fan of). So why am I posting about this? Because this is where the GOP is right now, fractured and IMHO a sinking ship. The social conservatives are just the latest to make noises on bailing out on them.



Conservative Belle made this point recently:

If the conservative Christians are as powerful as they believe, then why can't they put their full weight behind a second-tier candidate who is pro-life (Brownback, Huckabee, Paul, Tancredo, Hunter, Keyes) and bring them to the front of the tier? If they are so influential in the political arena, they should be able to promote this candidate enough to soar them to the top.

The lack of top tier candidates at the recent "Values Voters" debates would seem to indicate that they are the constituency that can be ignored. The last candidate the social conservatives had an effect on was probably Ronald Reagan. Bush wasn't their number one pick in '88, neither was Dole in '96, and I believe GW Bush was nominated by social conservatives with huge reservations. To his credit, GW did come through with his Supreme Court nominations but only after massive blowback from the Harriet Miers nomination.