Northern Illinois Campaign for Liberty

Read the report here.

By Joseph Margulies

Days after the thwarted Christmas bombing, the Rasmussen Group took a poll. They asked whether the failed bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, should be tried in civilian or military court. Seventy-one percent said military.

They also asked whether he should be waterboarded to extract information about his connection to terrorism. In a sign of the times, 58 percent of respondents said yes, even though he had already confessed.

By themselves, the numbers are alarming but not surprising. Other recent polls have consistently shown substantial support for torture and considerable skepticism about the use of civilian courts to prosecute terror suspects. And this despite the empirical proof: after eight years, there is no evidence that information secured by torture could not have been secured by lawful means, and despite the hysteria, we have successfully prosecuted terrorists in civilian courts for many years with no complications.

Click here to read the complete article

By Jeffrey Tucker

Part of the difficulty of understanding Mark Twain’s political outlook is due to terminology and the tendency of politics to corrupt the meaning of everything. As often as you see him called a liberal, he is called a conservative, and sometimes both in the same breath. Critics puzzle about how one person could be champion of workers, owners, and the capitalist rich, while holding views that are antigovernment on domestic matters, antislavery, and antiwar. They often conclude that his politics are incoherent.

Click here to the read the complete article.

By Jo Comerford

$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind — just for a minute or so.

After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, rankedby the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.

Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60.  That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.

By the way, add up the yearly salary of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.

Read the complete article here.

By Don Cooper

There was once a small village in the heart of country “US”called village A. Village A was the source of a river that flowed to another small village, village B. Both village A and village B had all the fresh water supply that they needed.

There was another village though, village C, that didn’t live near a river so they got the government to reroute the river running between village A and village B to run through village C as well. Even though the project was drastically over budget and schedule it was eventually completed and the government was hailed as good and righteous. Unfortunately, the government didn’t know that village C sat right on top of a fault line. One day the fault moved and opened up a large hole in the earth right underneath the river cutting off the water supply to both village C and village B.

Click here to read the complete article

By Anthony Gregory

December 15 is neglected by most Americans for its historical significance as the anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Even worse, American politicians neglect the actual Bill of Rights on a day-to-day basis.

Whether or not the Bill of Rights can ever be an effective means of limiting the government is open to debate. However, the Bill of Rights does offer a fairly good outline of a free society, and it shows how far our country has strayed.

In an America with a full respect for the Bill of Rights, there would be no Federal Communications Commission regulating the airwaves and forbidding certain speech, no Federal Election Commission limiting how much Americans can donate to political candidates or what they can say in independent political ads, no Food and Drug Administration harassment of pharmaceutical and wine producers regarding their commercial speech, no federal laws that have anything to do with religion whatsoever, and no federally established “free-speech zones.”

Click here to read the complete article.

By Tom Mullen

Like the Patriot Act, the TARP bill, and the coming Climate Treaty, The U.S Constitution was conceived and drafted in an atmosphere of panic that was created by proponents of big government for the express purpose of using fear to win support for a massive expansion of government. Also like TARP or the Patriot Act, it was debated in secret by a convention of delegates that were told that unspeakable horrors awaited America if they did not pass it immediately. Like most expansions of government power, its proponents did not get everything that they hoped for, but they got a lot more power than they had. Most importantly, the next debate over the size and scope of government started from there. The seeds of America’s multi-trillion dollar welfare-warfare state really lie in this seminal expansion of government power.

Click here to read the complete article.

From Campaign for Liberty, by Deb Wells

Four more House Reps co-sponsored HR1207 on December 1:

Rep Reyes, Silvestre [TX-16]
Rep Rodriguez, Ciro D. [TX-23]
Rep Kilpatrick, Carolyn C. [MI-13]
Rep Boren, Dan [OK-2]

The state of Oklahoma is now a premier member of what we call the “HR 1207 100 Club”, where all House Reps have co-sponsored Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill.

Other HR 1207 100 Club member states:  Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississipi, Montana, Nevada, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Now, the real test will be whether these 317 co-sponsors will support HR1207 as a stand-alone bill rather than as added language to the woefully inaccurately named “”Financial Stability Improvement Act” (wherein the Fed would be given even more power and thus give us even greater instability).

Every HR 1207 co-sponsor needs a phone call from you to remind them that HR1207 has everything required to stand very well on its own, thank you very much.

Find the full list of co-sponsors here.  Then, click here to find your U.S. House Representative’s phone number.

If you see that your House Rep hasn’t co-sponsored yet, you might want to ask them why….

After all, isn’t transparency exactly what we were promised last fall?

by Jake Towne

This talk was originally delivered to a Campaign of Liberty chapter on December 3, 2009.  Video will be available shortly.

Today President Obama will tour Allentown, Pennsylvania, in my home congressional district as part of a “Main Street Tour” to show his concern for economic plight of the masses. Many of the people I have spoken with while campaigning innately realize that government is at fault — or at least complain a lot about how the government should “fix” the economy. Unfortunately, many do not have enough of a grasp of economics to understand exactly how the government is ruining their lives and their childrens’ lives. Speaking for myself, about 2 years ago I would have been included in this category. This is no surprise as most of the press and educational system has been hijacked by the disciples of Lord Keynes (the Keynesians) and the socialist Karl Marx for the past century.

Click here to read the rest.