Audio from Ron Paul’s speech today at Cato is available here.

Funny, astute satire from The Onion:

US To Trade Gold Reserves For Cash Through Cash4Gold.com

Given that Sotomayor was nominated by Barack Obama, I never had high hopes that she’d be good on federalism, guns, economic regulation, labor issues, property rights or the rest of the issues that I agree with the Court “conservatives” on. I did, however, hope that she’d be at least good on the things that “liberals” are supposed to be good on: civil liberties, torture, and police abuse.

This article doesn’t give me much hope that she’ll be at least good on those issues.  

As the article explains, in Jocks v. Tavernier Sotomayor convinced two skeptical judges to join her in throwing out a verdict where a jury found that Jocks had been wrongfully arrested by an off duty cop. The crux of the issue is that Sotomayor convinced her fellow judges to overrule the jury and believe the story of the off-duty cop, after the jury had effectively rejected his story by ruling for the plaintiff.

It seems Sotomayor’s “empathy” doesn’t include the victim of police abuse, who managed to convince a jury of his peers that that he was wrongfully arrested.

The Virginia DMV has banned smiles while taking photos for your driver’s license.

Honestly, so what?

As someone who has wasted hours of my life dealing with the bureaucrats at the Virginia DMV I don’t know how anyone could smile after such an experience. Naturally, the facial recognition technology is scary, but I really don’t see how someone could smile after such an experience  where you’re treated like cattle just for the “privilege” of being able to transport yourself.

Over at StogieGuys.com, I wrote the following column about how nanny-staters chip away at our rights.

It’s the perfect example getting the camels nose under the tent. In other words, they set the precedent for taking away our rights, then, before you know it, they expand a seeming narrow violation of our freedom and use it to take away an entire area of our liberties.

Here’s the entire article:

Make no mistake, the well-funded, well-connected professional activists who oppose tobacco are far from sensible people looking to place so-called “reasonable restrictions” on tobacco. The truth is, almost all are deceitful opportunists who won’t stop until tobacco is taxed or regulated out of existence (or at least pushed completely into an underground black market).

These anti-tobacco zealots are too smart to ever admit their ultimate goal in public, even though occasionally they let their secret slip. Instead, they twist science to deceptively present themselves as reflective, thoughtful advocates who just happen to continuously find “problems” in need of “solutions,” which always amount to more tobacco taxes, more regulations, and more expansive smoking bans.

Recently, these incremental steps towards tobacco prohibition have often been presented as closing loopholes, leveling the playing field, or combating problems seemingly unrelated to smoking. It seems the anti-tobacco crowd has taken to heart the lesson of the boiling frog, which goes something like this: If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump out. But if you place the frog into a pot of lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, it will boil to death.

I suspect they realize that if they are forthright about their ultimate goal of prohibition, they know they would lose credibility and could even unleash a backlash, as those whose freedom of choice they seek to limit would rally to defend their right to enjoy tobacco. However, if the steps towards total prohibition are small enough, like the frog, we won’t act until it is too late.

Three examples show how the tobacco banners present more regulation, taxation, and smoking bans as merely fixes to “loopholes” or “problems” in existing laws:

Congress Takes on Mail-Order Tobacco Sales

This week, Congress is debating a ban on mail-order cigarette sales. It seems that many states are losing revenue as consumers seek to avoid punitive cigarette taxes. Instead of buying a pack of cigarettes for $10 in New York City, they are ordering them through the mail for less than half the price.

Never mind that it’s the excessively high taxes that are forcing people to look for less expensive ways to get tobacco. The anti-smokers say the solution isn’t to re-examine the taxes that created this pseudo-black market, but to create more restrictions and make the postal service, and companies like Fed-Ex, police the contents of every package shipped over state lines. At least so far, the regulation only affects cigarettes, but that’s just another “loophole” waiting to be closed.

Anti-Smokers Say Nebraska Smoking Ban ‘Unfair’

Meanwhile, in Nebraska, after a battle to ban smoking in all restaurants and bars, a deal was eventually struck that would ban smoking everywhere except cigar bars where cigars and pipes would be allowed, but not cigarettes. But the anti-tobacco zealots at the American Cancer Society thought even that most limited exemption was a problem, and they even found novel way to suggest that it was unconstitutional.

According to their tortured reasoning, the ban was an unfair benefit to cigar bars. It seems after banning smoking in all these restaurants and bars, they suddenly claimed to be concerned with the competitive disadvantage that the ban’s victims were put in. Naturally, the “solution” they were seeking—which fortunately wasrejected by the Nebraska Attorney General—was to extend the ban to include cigar bars.

San Francisco Pushes Butt Tax

As reported by the New York Times yesterday, San Francisco’s mayor is pushing a tax increase on cigarettes. (No word yet on any effect on cigars.) His reasoning? Smokers, who have been forced out of bars by city and state smoking bans, were creating litter by leaving their cigarettes in the street.

Citing the cost of cleaning up the cigarette butts, Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to increase the cigarette tax. Obviously, the idea of allowing smoking back into bars where staff can clean up butts and provide smokers with ashtrays isn’t being considered. Instead, the “solution” is to raise taxes further.

In all three situations, the “problems” were created when freedoms were limited by policies advocated by the anti-tobacco crowd. Yet somehow the solutions are always more anti-free choice policies.

It has become quite clear that we smokers are becoming the frog, standing idly by as our freedom to smoke is stolen from us one degree at a time. My fear is if we don’t start fighting back soon, it will be too late and our freedoms will have evaporated completely.

Robert Murphy debunks the myth that Hoover plunged the U.S. into the Great Depression by refusing to intervene in the economy. As he explains, Hoover had the exact same response as Bush/Obama:

Let’s first set the record straight on Herbert Hoover’s fiscal policies. Contrary to what you have heard and read over the last year, Hoover behaved as a textbook Keynesian after the stock-market crash. He immediately cut income tax rates by one percentage point (applicable to the 1929 tax year) and began ratcheting up federal spending, increasing it 42 percent from fiscal year (FY) 1930 to FY 1932.

But to truly appreciate Hoover’s Keynesian bona fides, we must realize that this enormous jump in spending occurred amidst a collapse in tax receipts, due both to the decline in economic activity as well as the price deflation of the early 1930s. This combination led to unprecedented peacetime deficits under the Hoover administration — something FDR railed against during the 1932 campaign!

How big were Hoover’s deficits? Well, his predecessor Calvin Coolidge had run a budget surplusevery single year of his own presidency, and he held the federal budget roughly constant despite the roaring prosperity (and surging tax receipts) of the 1920s. In contrast to Coolidge — who was a true small-government president — Herbert Hoover managed to turn his initial $700 million surplus into a $2.6 billion deficit by 1932.

It’s true, that doesn’t sound like a big number today; Henry Paulson handed out more to bankers by breakfast. But keep in mind that Hoover’s $2.6 billion deficit occurred because he spent $4.6 billion while only taking in $2 billion in tax receipts. Thus, as a percentage of the overall budget, the 1932 deficit was astounding — it would translate into a $3.3 trillion deficit in 2007 (instead of the actual deficit of $162 billion that year).

Read the entire thing here.

Ron Paul’s latest Straight Talk Express column:

The recent episode with the Somali pirates has brought to the forefront many questions about maritime security. What is the best way to deal with a gang of criminals, not acting on behalf of any country, when they attack private vessels? Under whose jurisdiction are these types of criminals to be prosecuted? Most importantly, how do we deter such attacks in the future?

Already the administration is saber-rattling with typical big government so-called solutions, like “diplomatically” threatening the weak Somalian government, or any government of any country where pirates are thought to live, with military action if they fail to control the situation. There are calls to increase the size of the navy until it is nearly omnipresent on the seas. I was pleased to see they got one thing partially right in stating that the government should work with shippers and the insurance industry to address gaps in their self-defense, if by “work with” they mean “get out of the way”. But I fear this will be soon be brushed aside in favor of the more elaborate, interventionist and expensive measures. Self-defense is the most obvious, most effective and least expensive solution, but that has never stopped the government from spending money they don’t have to make problems worse.

The situation is not unlike the situation with the non-state thugs that perpetrated the attacks on 9/11. We were not attacked by any country, and yet our response was to start wars with countries out of a need for misguided retaliation. This destroyed most of the goodwill our nation had in the world, and helped terrorists recruit and grow even more powerful. The worst thing we could possibly do is react to this incident with the same misguided fervor, producing equally damaging results.

First and foremost, the people and entities closest to the situation need to be empowered to defend themselves. In the case of private shipping companies, the owners and operators need to be allowed to carry weapons to deter and defend from attacks. But because many governments, including ours, have anti-gun laws in place in ports and territorial waters, ironically to discourage piracy, it is nearly impossible to legally carry weapons at sea for peaceful and defensive purposes. This sets up the predictable situation that only criminals and military vessels remain armed, making legitimate shipping operations ridiculously easy prey. I strongly believe that standing behind the basic human right to self-defense is the best deterrent to both terrorism and piracy, which is why I also argued for allowing pilots to be armed after 9/11. What governments call a gun-free zone is in reality a target rich environment to a criminal.

The second line of defense would be for Congress to act within the Constitution and issue letters of marque and reprisal, deputizing private organizations to act within the law to disable and capture those engaged in piracy. This approach to keeping ships safe at sea would minimize the effect on international relations by keeping our Navy out of it, as well as keeping costs to a minimum.

These criminal gangs should not have free reign to rob, terrorize and murder as they please in the world. But we need to be thoughtful and strategic in our reaction to incidents like these, and not knee-jerk our way into bigger, more encroaching government and military solutions.