Last Wednesday, I braved the falling snow and rain on Central Ave. to make the Kokesh for Congress rally that took place in the atrium of the Student Union Building. I parked at Bryn Mawr and Columbia NE (several blocks to the east of the facility where the rally actually took place) because the parking situation at UNM makes the CNM setup look like a work of genius, and I didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle. I spent about 30 minutes looking for a spot before settling on a two-hour curb at around 11:15 AM.

Upon arriving (30 minutes early — I overestimated the time it would take to walk from where I parked to the SUB by about 20 minutes), I met some libertarian-leaning Republicans, in particular Rhead Story and Bob Cornelius, and we talked for a bit. I found out that the GOPNM’s current State Chairman, a Harvey Yates, has allegedly used his position as a party officer to funnel a pile of cash (about Ø1200) to one candidate in a race while not offering an equal pile of cash to the other candidate seeking the same office. This is apparently a felony under New Mexico state law. Ha ha ha.

At around 11:50 AM, the Kokesh campaign volunteers started arriving, followed by Adam himself at 12:00 PM on the dot. Adam was introduced by Ruben Pacheco of UNM’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty. Also present were representatives from Students Against Empire.

Ruben Pacheco introducing Adam Kokesh
Photo by myself

It’s important to note that the assembled listeners roughly doubled in number from the time he started his speech to the time he finished up and left the podium.

Photo by myself

Photo by Andrew Sharp
Adam Kokesh at the UNM SUB

• John Newby^[1]
• Mike Morasco (sp?), who rode his bicycle across the continental United States TWICE to spread the Ron Paul message

After the rally was over, I hustled out of the SUB and headed back to my car, and arrived with five minutes to spare on the parking spot. Still, I checked my tires for a parking-enforcement “boot” — the meter-readers aren’t the brightest, but do have the tendency to be rather capricious. When I got home, the snowstorm was in full bloom.

1. John came to our Liberty Forum last night (Thursday, 4 Feb 2010) at Fiesta’s and talked for a while with myself, Ron Bjornstad and Bill Koehler about the campaign, the GOP, the LP, New Mexico, Adam, etc., etc. As John was leaving, he asked us, “What can we do for you?” (I’m used to hearing “What can you do for me?”) My response? “Let Adam be Adam.”
2. The campaign’s official blog posting — Adam Speaks to Students at UNM

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As opposed to Buchanan-style “let’s build walls around the country” isolationism, which is just as stupid as Bushevik / McCaindroid neo-conservative “let’s bomb them them into being our friends” schtick, which The Barack made hay of during the 2008 campaign, then started doing on his own after being inaugurated in 2009.

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Lunch includes the sandwich of your choice (roast beef, turkey or ham and cheese) kosher pickle spears, bagged potato chips, freshly baked cookies, condiments, canned beverage (soda or juice).

An interesting fact about this movie is that Ivan Cooper is played by James Nesbitt, who himself is a Protestant from the area covered in the movie. What does that say about the lamestream snoozemedia’s portrayal of The Troubles as a sectarian fight between Catholics and Protestants? I guess the hairspray heads are too lazy to look up the Irish Rebellion of 1798?

For more information —

Call Chuck McLaughlin 505-235-5906 or 505-255-1848
Check guildcinema.com or irishfreedomcommittee.net.

All proceeds collected will go directly to the families of Irish POWs currently held in English and Irish Free State prisons

About the 30 January 1972 event / About this movie

It does get tiring after a while, but they unwittingly DO have a point.

What George W. and the GOP have done in between 21 January 2001 and 2 January 2007 is EXACTLY what the Austrian corporal turned Reichschancellor did between 1929 and 1945 — he took a pile of “left-wing” socialist economic policies and painted over them with flag-waving nationalism and racial and religious bigotry.

Well, the “Main Street” wing of the GOP, embodied by their 2008 Presidential candidate, John McCain^[1] DID help George W. create the first round of corporate-welfare bailouts just before that election. There’s your “left-wing” economics, along with Medicare Part D, the resurrection of farm subsidies^[2], among other things.

What about the flag-waving and bigotry, you might ask?

Well, what about the comments from self-styled “conservatives” about how “the Muslims will come here and force their ways upon us” ? Is that really true of all Muslims? Probably not for more than a very few.

Then, to compound the cover-up of the GOP’s “left-wing” economics, there’s the ongoing demonization of Mexican immigrants — “they’re stealing our jobs!” and such.

1. I can’t remember all of the times I’ve referred to McCain as “McClown” or “the Manchurian Senator” over at New Mexico Liberty
2. Phased out by Waco Willie of all people with the  Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, while George W. signed the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, where Republicans opposed subsidy caps.

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Here Obama says that health care insurance should be mandatory, like vehicular insurance, because those who pay for it subsidize those who don’t.

What he neglects to mention is that the only mandatory part of vehicular insurance is the liability portion — the part that covers the aftermath of you hitting someone else or their property. The rest — medical, vehicular damage, etc. — is OPTIONAL because the authorities who require the insurance don’t care if you harm yourself, just others.

At last, that’s the theory.

But if Obama has his way, we’ll be treated to that stupid gecko hawking us our medical care, too.

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Re: We Interrupt this Peaceful Christmas Day With a Terrorism Attempt

If this and the shoe-bomber guy is the best al-Qaeda can do, I don’t see them as any sort of true threat to anyone besides themselves. After “9-11″ and the two European train bombs, they pretty much shot their collective wad, and the world outside of neocon circles and Washington DC knows it.

Seriously, if this is the best they can do, they won’t last long if it comes down to anything resembling a protracted fight. Remember the Beltway shooters of 2002?

This is where the Busheviks remind us that it took months to root out al-Qaeda from the Iraq Occupation. That’s because al-Qaeda had plenty of Arab locals to hide amongst, and plenty who were somewhat sympathetic due to the presence of American troops in their neighborhoods. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal certainly didn’t help the American cause there.

They didn’t have that advantage on American soil, yet they still managed to pull off “9-11,” due to routine disarmament of airline passengers by the FAA.

Will Obama’s perpetual ass-kissing on the diplomatic circuit “weaken” America’s readiness to deal with these bums? Maybe — they might feel emboldened by the lack of Bushevik threats. Still, The Barack hasn’t pulled many troops out of Iraq (as promised in the 2008 campaign), and He wants to send another 70,000 troops to play DEA in the Afghanistan Occupation, and maybe invade Pakistan in the process. Some “dove.”

Remember that most of America’s large-scale overseas military deployments in the 20th Century — World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam — were initiated by Democrats: Wilson got us into WWI, FDR wanted us in WWII so, so bad to distract the populace from “fix” the Depression, Truman presided over Korea, and Vietnam can be laid onto the legacies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Seems that if the GOP had the good sense to nominate more candidates like Ron Paul, like Adam Kokesh, well then, we wouldn’t have these al-Qaeda clowns coming over here to do anything except spend their money. They wouldn’t have a legitimate complaint, as they wouldn’t see American troops patrolling Arab neighborhoods back home, American foreign-aid cash wouldn’t be filling the numbered Swiss bank accounts of Arab tyrants such as Hosni Mubarak.

Don’t forget that Americans would be freer to exercise their Second Amendment rights to self-defense, and thus would be better equipped to cut short any attempts at hijacking or suicide-bombing. Remember that Fort Hood is a “gun-free zone,” with the only people allowed (per federal regulations maintained under George W.) to carry loaded weapons outside of the live-fire ranges are the post MPs, CID and law-enforcement types. That sort of policy gave MAJ Hasan a free hand on 5 November 2009.

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Joe Kennedy recently announced his support of HR 4248, the Free Competition in Currency Act, a bill endorsed by the BTP National Committee as part of the “Honest Money” Resolution. At-Large Rep. Darryl W. Perry said, “Joe Kennedy is the only candidate (in this election) that supports a Competitive Currency (establishing an effective monetary policy to maintain strong currency at home and a competitive currency abroad for balancing trade,) and an Audit/End of the Federal Reserve System.”

BTP Chairman Douglass Gaking added, “He supports Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed and Free Competition of Currency acts and takes a strict libertarian position on just about everything.”

In accepting the endorsement, Kennedy commented, “I am very excited to receive the endorsement of the Boston Tea Party. Before I was a politician I was a TEA Party Activist and like millions of others I see the looming problems with our government. Our great nation is rapidly racing toward bankruptcy. Taxation is growing without restraint and the freedoms and ideals we grew up with are vanishing. All the while our politicians have stopped caring and stopped listening to the wants and needs of the population. As a country we deserve lower taxes and a smaller, more responsible and less intrusive government. As TEA Party Activists we insist on more freedom, State’s rights and a government that listens to the people it represents not one that takes our money and turns a deaf ear to the population it supports. These are the needs of our nation and the foundation of the Boston Tea Party and my candidacy. I am running on Tea Party Principals and I will represent them fully in the Senate. My gratitude (goes out) to the Boston Tea Party for the honor of their endorsement.”

The Boston Tea Party was founded in 2006 with a one sentence platform, “The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.” In October 2008, the party’s National Convention adopted the four point program of the Campaign for Liberty. Their program calls for an end to overseas occupation, a restoration of privacy and other liberties, no increase in the national debt, and a thorough review of the Federal Reserve.

One soft Oklahoma afternoon, sitting on a bunk in the half-light of an old wooden barracks, he told me his story.

In Charley’s little town in Belgium, there lived an old man, a gunsmith. The old man was friendly with the kids and welcomed them to his shop. He had once been an armorer to the king of Belgium, according to Charley. He told us of the wonderful guns the old man had crafted, using only hand tools. There were double shotguns and fine rifles with beautiful hardwood stocks and gorgeous engraving and inlay work. Charley liked the old man and enjoyed looking at the guns. He often did chores around the shop.

One day the gunsmith sent for Charley. Arriving at the shop, Charley found the old man carefully oiling and wrapping guns in oilcloth and paper. Charley asked what he was doing. The old smith gestured to a piece of paper on the workbench and said that an order had come to him to register all of his guns. He was to list every gun with a description on a piece of paper and then to send the paper to the government. The old man had no intention of complying with the registration law and had summoned Charley to help him bury the guns at a railroad crossing. Charley asked why he didn’t simply comply with the order and keep the guns. The old man, with tears in his eyes, replied to the boy, “If I register them, they will be taken away.”

A year or two later, the blitzkrieg rolled across the Low Countries. One day not long after, the war arrived in Charley’s town. A squad of German SS troops banged on the door of a house that Charley knew well. The family had twin sons about Charley’s age. The twins were his best friends. The officer displayed a paper describing a Luger pistol, a relic of the Great War, and ordered the father to produce it. That old gun had been lost, stolen, or misplaced sometime after it had been registered, the father explained. He did not know where it was.

The officer told the father that he had exactly fifteen minutes to produce the weapon. The family turned their home upside down. No pistol. They returned to the SS officer empty-handed.

The officer gave an order and soldiers herded the family outside while other troops called the entire town out into the square. There on the town square the SS machine-gunned the entire family-father, mother, Charley’s two friends, their older brother and a baby sister.

I will never forget the moment. We were sitting on the bunk on a Saturday afternoon and Charley was crying, huge tears rolling down his cheeks, making silver dollar size splotches on the dusty barracks floor. That was my conversion from a casual gun owner to one who was determined to prevent such a thing from ever happening in America.

Later that summer, when I had returned home I went to the president of the West Texas Sportsman’s Club in Abilene and told him I wanted to be on the legislative committee. He replied that we didn’t have a legislative committee, but that I was now the chairman.

I, who had never given a thought to gun laws, have been eyeball deep in the “gun control” fight ever since.

As the newly-minted Legislative Committee Chairman of the West Texas Sportsman’s club, I set myself to some research. I had never before read the Second Amendment, but now noticed that The American Rifleman published it in its masthead. I was delighted to learn that the Constitution prohibited laws like Belgium’s. There was no battle to fight, I thought. We were covered. I have since learned that the words about a militia and the right of the people to keep and bear, while important, mean as much to a determined enemy as the Maginot line did to Hitler.

Rather than depend on the Second Amendment to protect our gun rights, I’ve learned that we must protect the Second Amendment and the precious rights it recognizes.

Permission to reprint or post this article in its entirety is hereby granted provided this credit is included. Text is available at FirearmsCoalition.org. To receive The Firearms Coalition’s bi-monthly newsletter, The Knox Hard Corps Report, write to PO Box 3313, Manassas, VA 20108.

© Copyright 2009 Neal Knox Associates

This recent Friday night, I was watching one of the shows from the Stargate franchise and this commercial spot was included as a sponsor —

Now, I’ve seen these sort of things before in print advertisements and in spam I’ve received in email. What sparked my attention this time was that in this case, the gadget was billed as a “therapeutic device,” and thus is covered by Medicare.

This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Viagra is covered. Maybe Bob “Brady Bill” Dole had something to do with that in his post-Senatorial time as PR spokeslug for Pfizer, pitching Viagra in between lobbying gigs.

And it gets even funnier — the Pos-T-Vac site sets you back Ø550 for the BOSS 2000-3 unit.

Hey guys, if this sort of therapy is what you need to get it up, do your fellow taxpayers a favor and go with one of the “non-therapeutic” pumps that are advertised in porn outlets that run somewhere around Ø20-50 apiece. Sure, you’ll have to shell out that Ø20-50 from your own pocket at the local adult bookstore.

And if that’s not an option, there’s always the Shop Vac therapy —

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