United Liberty

Remember that video that played during the Democratic National Convention that exhalted government, claiming that it “is the only thing we all belong to?” Well, President Barack Obama’s campaign is trying to back away from it:

An Obama aide emailed BuzzFeed disavowing involvement in the video: “The video in question was produced and paid for by the host committee of the city of Charlotte. It’s neither an OFA nor a DNC video, despite what the Romney campaign is claiming. It’s time for them to find a new target for their faux outrage.”

The executive director of the host committee also said that the video was unaffiliated with both the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Hasn’t the last four years proved to us that President Obama and his apologists in Congress will come up with a new government-run or funded solution for every perceived economic or social ill?

It may be true that the video is unaffiliated with the party, but does anyone really believe for a second that the video would have been played without approval from the Democratic National Committee and/or Obama’s campaign? And does anyone doubt that the video represents the feelings of most Democrats?

The folks at Revealing Politics went around Charlotte, where the Democratic National Convention was held, and asked convention-goers what they thought about being owned by the federal government:

News broke yesterday as excerpts of Bob Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics, were leaked to the press. Woodward, who has written a number of books about administrations, recounted the debt ceiling fight that took place last year and offered some behind-the-scenes information on negotiations between President Barack Obama and House Republicans.

What we’ve learned thus far isn’t all that flattering to the White House, painting the picture of a president that was excluded from the process at one point as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) tried to workout a deal:

Woodward portrays a president who remained a supreme believer in his own powers of persuasion, even as he faltered in efforts to coax congressional leaders in both parties toward compromise. Boehner told Woodward that at one point, when Boehner voiced concern about passing the deal they were working out, the president reached out and touched his forearm.

“John, I’ve got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people,” Boehner quotes the president as having told him.

But after the breakthrough agreement fell apart, Boehner’s “Plan B” would ultimately exclude the president from most of the key negotiations. The president was “voted off the island,” in Woodward’s phrase, even by members of his own party, as congressional leaders patched together an eleventh hour framework to avoid default.

Frustration over the lack of clear White House planning was voiced to Obama’s face at one point, with a Democratic congressional staffer taking the extraordinary step of confronting the president in the Oval Office.

With the 2012 presidential election expected to be close, a lot of attention is being focused on third party candidates. One candidate who has really received a lot of attention as a “spoiler” is Libertarian Party presidential candidate and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. Republicans appear to be so worried about Johnson that they have been accused of trying to deny him access to the ballot in some states. The perception is that voters who vote for Gary Johnson would normally instead vote for Mitt Romney and therefore split the anti-Obama vote. However, I’m not sure this is necessarily true. I’m inclined to think that a vote for a candidate is a vote for that candidate, not a vote for or against someone else.

Private property is at the heart of the free market, which Murray Rothbard described as the “field of exchange of title of ownership between individuals.”

Today, almost no one talks about private property in America any longer. This used to be the defining aspect of the American Ideal. That individuals were able to acquire, control and dispose of property as they saw fit without the coercive hand of government. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer American’s believe in that fundamental idea.

The “No Trespassing” sign that people put up in their yards is exactly what the idea of private property is all about. It is the fact that this land, your property, your person are private. That means they do not belong to the “collective,” they are not “communal property” to be used or dispersed by some benevolent despot, gang of “voters” or enlightened cadre of professors and politicians.

The motto “Don’t Tread on Me” is simply a “No Trespassing” sign. I would like to see “No Trespassing” signs become the hallmark of the Freedom Movement because if you can not own property, then you can not live free.

Private property is about self-ownership and, as Ludwig von Mises wrote, ”Control denotes ownership.” If you can dispose of something than you are its effective owner. In America today, how much “private property” do any of us truly own?

The government today uses three main ways to reduce your “control” over your property. That is through taxation – the outright seizure of your property; through inflation, which is the devaluation of your money (one half of every transaction you enter into); and through regulation, in which your control of your property and person are greatly reduced and in a lot of cases totally usurped by the state.

With Congress out of session, the party conventions going on and other issues coming to the forefront of the presidential race, the looming tax hikes seem to have fallen to the side, at least for now.

President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats have insisted that House Republicans go along with raising tax rates on the income earners making over $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000. House Republicans have balked at this over fears that raising taxes, particular during a time of slow job growth, would further hurt the economy. In response to this particular concern, Democrats and apologists of their policies often point to the economic boom during the late 1990s, which occured after then-President Bill Clinton’s tax hikes were passed.

Writing at the Heritage Foundation, Curtis Dubay dispels this myth of Clinton’s presidency, noting that the economy did not live up to its full potential after taxes were raised in the 1990s:

Clinton signed his tax hike into law in September 1993, the same year he took office. It included an increase of the top marginal tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent; repeal of the cap on the 2.9 percent Medicare tax, applying it to every dollar of income instead of capping it to levels of income like the Social Security tax; a 4.3 cent increase in the gas tax; an increase in the taxable portion of Social Security benefits; and a hike of the corporate income tax rate from 34 percent to 35 percent, among other tax increases.

Democrats took the extraordinary step of moving President Barack Obama’s speech at the party’s convention from the 74,000-seat Bank of America Stadium to a smaller arena over concerns of bad weather:

After days of bad weather, President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign and Democratic National Convention organizers have decided to change the venue of the president’s acceptance speech Thursday in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Instead of holding the final night at the Bank of America stadium as planned, the event will move indoors to the Time Warner Cable arena, where the first two days of the convention have taken place.

“We have been monitoring weather forecasts closely and several reports predict thunderstorms in the area, therefore we have decided to move Thursday’s proceedings to Time Warner Cable Arena to ensure the safety and security of our delegates and convention guests,” said DNCC CEO Steve Kerrigan.

Officials had already handed out 65,000 tickets for the event at the Bank of America stadium, but the Time Warner Cable Arena-home to NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats-can seat up to 21,000. As a result, thousands will be turned away.

I had an epiphany this week. Dyed-in-the-wool Liberals think I’m a bad person. I don’t mean they just disagree with me; they truly think I am evil. While I believe most liberals to be generally well-meaning, but misguided or uninformed, many think of me as a hateful person who revels in human suffering and who cares only for myself. They see my calls for budget cuts as proof that I don’t care about the poor, and am fine with old people starving and dying in the streets. They see any criticism of President Obama’s policies as proof of racism. They see my opposition to anti-global warming legislation and regulation as prima facie evidence that I don’t care for the environment.

This is nothing new, of course. It is stuff you hear all the time. But I guess I always assumed it was over-the-top, hyperbolic rhetoric meant to fire up their base. I am no stranger to hyperbole. My Facebook debates with my liberal friends are replete with it, my comments often marinated in sarcasm. It’s part of the fun of debating liberals; taking the truth and giving it a conservative, candy-coated shell. Yet at the end of the day, we all know that the core of our comments represent our true beliefs, but those beliefs are sprinkled with a heavy helping of trash-talking.

My epiphany came in the form of the unscripted comments of one David Chalian, unaware he was speaking near an open microphone. No run-of-the-mill Occupy protestor, Chalian was the Washington Bureau Chief for Yahoo! News, former political editor for PBS Newshour, and faculty member at Georgetown University. This is a seasoned political media member, which makes his comments all the more shocking.

Facing an increasingly tight race for re-election thanks to lagging job growth, President Barack Obama yesterday ostensibly said that it’s too soon to give him a fair grade, despite being in office for almost a full term:

President Obama’s assessment of his first term hasn’t changed since the last time he weighed in.

Asked to grade his first term in an interview with KKTV in Colorado, Obama said: “You know I would say incomplete…but what I would say is the steps that we have taken in saving the auto industry, in making sure that college is more affordable and investing in clean energy and science and technology and research, those are all the things that we are going to need to grow over the long term.”

The grade — typically given by teachers to students with unfinished work — is what Obama has given himself a number of other times.

While President Obama has given himself an “incomplete” on other occasions in the last couple of years, he wasn’t so shy about giving himself positive marks after less than a full year in the White House. In case you don’t remember, Obama gave himself a “solid B-plus” on the economy during an interview with Oprah Winfrey in December 2009, adding that if he got his health care law signed, “[W]e tip into A-minus.”

Last week, the Medical Marijuana Chamber of Commerce grabbed some headlines when it endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election. Most Americans probably aren’t paying attention to what an obviously pro-pot group does or says, but the endorsement was really a head-scratcher, even if they view Obama as an alternative to Romney.

But a new web ad featuring Kal Penn and John Cho, stars of the Harold and Kumar flicks, Obama shows that the is making a hard push for the pot smokers of America:

Most young voters may think it’s cool that President Obama is trying to relate to them by showing the two stars from this generation’s “Cheech and Chong.” But before pot smokers start getting head over heels for Obama, they may want to stop and look at some basic truths.