Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

Jobs

• Stop job-killing tax hikes — Grade: A. (It’s a start, but better to abolish taxes.)
• Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income — Grade: A. (Ditto.)
• Require congressional approval for any new federal regulation that would add to the deficit — Grade: C.  (How about no new regulations period? Better yet, repeal all existing ones.)
• Repeal small business mandates in the new health care law. — Grade: A.

Cutting Spending

• Repeal and replace health care reform law — Grade: Unknown, probably B or lower. (Replace with what?)
• Roll back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels before TARP and stimulus (will save $100 billion in first year alone) — Grade: B.  (Should roll back more.)
• Establish strict budget caps to limit federal spending going forward — Grade: B, maybe C.  (How strict? Will these caps be lifted periodically like the national debt ceiling?)
• Cancel all future TARP payments and reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — Grade: Unknown, no higher than a B. (Reform Fannie and Freddie how? Better to abolish them.)

Reforming Congress

• Will require that every bill have a citation of constitutional authority — Grade: C. (Won’t stop Constitutional-but-still-bad bills, and the Constitution is a “living” document anyway.)
• Give members at least 3 days to read bills before a vote — Grade: C.  (Little impact; they still won’t read them.)

Defense

• Provide resources to troops — Grade: F. (Get troops out of foreign countries. Cut the military and intelligence budgets.)
• Fund missile defense — Grade: F. (Worthless boondoggle.)
• Enforce sanctions in Iran — Grade: F.  (Act of war.)

Overall: F. The military provisions outweigh the good things. How about ending the War on Drugs, rolling back the surveillance and police state, and ending aggression against immigrants? In any case, put not your faith in campaign promises.

I think I’m being generous. What do you think? How would you grade the Republicans’ Pledge to America?

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Maybe it’s because we have the best ‘bread and circuses‘ money can buy and plenty of fiat money with which to buy it. Or maybe it’s because the court intellectuals all sing variations on the same discordant statist song. Or maybe it’s because we all learn the same myths and dogmas and untruths in state indoctrination camps called public schools, if we learn anything at all. Or maybe it’s because most of us lack the moral courage to inconvenience ourselves by standing up for what is right. I think it is some combination of these and other causes. In any event, most Americans seem to be a-okay with the evils of statism — at least so long as their man is in power.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

The Obama Administration gets away with “fulfilling” Obama’s promise to end US combat operations in Iraq by removing the last (officially-labeled) combat brigade from the country, yet 50,000 troops will remain until (supposedly) 2011. These 50,000 troops make up 7 “Advise and Assist” Brigades, which are brigade combat teams like the one that just left but with special training, and 2 combat aviation brigades. “The troops are officially there to assist and advise the Iraqi government, but will carry weapons to defend themselves and will join Iraqi troops on missions if requested.”

After 2011, the “military” presence in Iraq is supposed to be “limited to several dozen to several hundred officers in an embassy office who would help the Iraqis purchase and field new American military equipment,” but military officers are saying that “5,000 to 10,000 troops might [still] be needed.”

Meanwhile, “the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000.” Can we really still call security personnel ‘civilians’ or ‘private security’ anymore when they’re working for the state in foreign lands, particularly in a combat zone? They’re mercenaries, troops that are conveniently not part of the official US military. The NYT reporter couldn’t help calling them “a small army of contractors.”

The US is building military bases, fortified compounds, outposts, and the largest “embassy” in the world in Iraq. Iraqi politicians still haven’t been able to come to an agreement and form a government after the last elections, making Iraq vulnerable to a coup if the Iraqi military leadership get too frustrated by the ineffectual, in-fighting politicians. The US empire will not be completely out of there anytime soon.

But hey, “we” won…right?

~*~

Update: Less than a week after the official end of combat operations in Iraq, US troops were involved in a combat operation in Iraq.Go figure. 12 people died and dozens were wounded in an assault by heavily-armed militants against an Iraqi military headquarters,in the center of Baghdad no less.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Here’s a practical example taking place before us. Some technologically and strategically-incompetent pundits are clamoring for the United States federal government to use its cyber capabilities to take out WikiLeaks before the organization puts online the remaining 15,000 documents of the leaked Afghan war logs.

Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com explains how a previous attempt to take down wikileaks.org has already failed in the past and how future attempts to take out WikiLeaks will fail as well.

In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page [go to the Wired.com article or view it on Google Maps — GAP]. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Scott Blasken got this shot from his office window Tuesday morning after Greenpeace unfurled a banner from the Calgary Tower.

Hey, I’m all in favor of separating oil and state. But that means no strategic oil reserves; no taxes, including carbon taxes; no cap-and-trade; no regulations; no moratoriums or bans on offshore or other drilling; no special protections of any kind, including caps on liability for actual damages to private property caused by oil companies;¹ no eminent domain (ab)use; and no mercantilistic and imperialistic wars to make the world safe for domestic consumption of foreign oil. But somehow I don’t expect all of this is what the Greenpeace activists confusedly mean by “separate oil and state.” Alas and alack.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

1. I’m not talking about limited liability for shareholders here. I’m referring to caps like the $75 million liability cap that has received so much attention in the wake of the BP oil spill, enacted in 1990 as part of the Oil Pollution Act following the Exxon Valdez spill. ↩

I love Noah Shachtman’s analysis of the propagandistic publicity poster by Northrop Grumman, the maker of the Army’s latest war toy:

God smiles when the Army spends a half-billion dollars on spy blimps the size of a football field. I believe that’s the message Northrop Grumman is trying to convey in this illustration. . .

The first airship is supposed to be inflated around 10 months from now. Eight months later, the Army hopes to have the first LEMV flying over Afghanistan. On that day, the clouds will part, the sun will shine, and the cherubs will sing as the unblinking eye begins looking for Taliban.

God bless America indeed.

The Unblinking Eyes of Sauron are intended for use over foreign soil. But with the increasing militarization of US borders and police, I wonder how long until they or their successors are deployed over our own heads? looking for brown-skinned interlopers, pot growers, and terrorists under every rock.

I’m reminded of a couple of pieces by heavy metal bands, though these work just as well for spy satellites. The first is a creepy intro, “An Eye Is Upon You,” by Powerman 5000 for their album Tonight the Stars Revolt! And the second is “Electric Eye” by one of my favorite bands, Judas Priest (their compilation album Metal Works is a good place to start).

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.