Marge,
Good advice about spreading the word to non-libertarians. I sent an email about the "National Defense Authorization Act" to a number of acquaintances along with an article about Ron Paul calling it "literally legalizing martial law" in a recent interview (see below).
In response to Marcy's comment about the people taking to the streets, many of those *opposing* the Occupy protesters are "clamoring for government largess" by demanding that local governments suppress the protests by force -- which of course costs money that they are not donating themselves.
So far, according to the Examiner ( http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/12/cost-occupy-sf-camp-nearing-1m ) SF city government has spent nearly $1 million on anti-Occupy efforts, including clean up and repair spending that they needed to authorize in order to prop up their overblown claims of damage put forward as rationalizations to justify the money being spent on police presence and raids. (If you think some dead grass is normally this high a city priority, you may not have spent a lot of time at Dolores Park in recent years.)
Thus it appears that Occupy *opponents* are contributing more to the cost of government than are Occupy supporters. Some will find this ironic, but significant parts of the Occupy message are pro-freedom, as I have previously documented here, while significant parts of the anti-Occupy message are anti-freedom, as should be readily apparent.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Ron Paul: Obama pushing ‘martial law,’ Holder should be ‘fired’
By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
196
Speaking to conspiracy talk show host Alex Jones on Tuesday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) said he believes that Attorney General Eric Holder should be “immediately fired,” and that President Barack Obama is pushing for the legalization of “martial law” in the U.S.
In his comments about Holder, Paul, who’s in a close second place among Iowa Republican primary voters, suggested that his role in the “fast and furious” gun-running scandal should be enough to leverage him from office.
“He should be immediately fired and then there should be an investigation to find out if charges should be made,” he said. “That’s obviously over the top. All these kind of sting operations and false-flag, this is criminal. They do it constantly. I think they were doing that when there was this so-called attempt to kill the Saudi, or, the Iranian ambassador. That kind of stuff. They should be investigated.”
He went on to say that although House Republicans are investigating Holder, he wasn’t sure if the attorney general would ever face charges. “But I think he deserves to have charges up against him,” Paul added.
Holder, who put a stop to the sting operations that saw U.S. agents selling guns to straw buyers, then attempting to track them as they made their way into Mexico, has said he will not resign over the scandal. About 2,000 guns went missing in the investigation. Though several hundred have been recovered, many of them were found at gruesome cartel crime scenes.
The Republican frontrunner also took issue with the inclusion of an “indefinite detention” provision in a defense budget authorization bill that recently made its way through Congress. The provision cements into law the power claimed by the Bush administration and reaffirmed by the Obama administration, letting authorities detain American citizens under military custody, without formal charges against them or access to legal representation.
As a candidate, then-Senator Obama said repeatedly that should not happen in the U.S., but as president he pushed Congress to approve that very power, and created by executive order a system of once-yearly reviews for detainees in military custody. He’s threatened to veto the bill,which is currently being renegotiated, but only because it imposes too many checks on the administration’s power to detain prisoners.
“You know our government has been involved with the CIA, in overthrowing governments for a long, long time, and of course last spring, I guess it was in February, the administration admitted they could assassinate American citizens,” Paul told Jones. “Now they’re putting it into law. This, to me, is an extremely wrong way to go. This is a giant step. This should be the biggest news going right now, literally legalizing martial law.
“In our debates, it didn’t come up at all. This is the one thing that Rand got stopped: the arrogance of them, trying to push through under voice vote, if you go through a trial and are found innocent, the government wants to put you in prison for life anyway. Fortunately for that, they wanted to do it under voice vote and he finally got a vote on that, and that was canceled out.
“That is arrogance of the administration and neglect of the Congress in using their authority and responsibility, as well as the people’s. That’s why it’s up to us now to wake the people up, because they don’t probably realize the significance of it. This is big. This is big.”