A vote for McCain is a wasted vote

Food for thought to a Republican

"A vote for John McCain is a wasted vote" says Bob Barr. There's no practical excuse for not voting your conscience now. A vote for Barr is a protest vote against the unlimited spending, the bailout, and the warrantless wiretaps, which now seem inevitable, unless Obama is a closet classical liberal, hah! At best one can only hope he's a moderate. A vote for Barr is a way to make your vote count by giving it meaning.

• Libertarian Barr says McCain can't win presidency
  by Shannon McCaffrey

Here are the facts.

inTrade.com shows Obama today with an 87% chance of winning and McCain at a mere 13%.

The electoral college is predicted to be 364 to 174. If you place the states in order, either Colorado or Pennsylvania, each at the electoral 50% mark, would put McCain over the top, each showing an 85% chance of an Obama victory. There are 6 other states leaning Obama that would also have to switch over, FL (63%), NC (64%), OH (65%), MO (70%), NV (73%), VA (81%).

Barack Obama, copyright, and the surveillance society

Food for thought to a Democrat

Is Obama's support for warrantless wiretapping related to his wife's professional background as an "intellectual-property" lawyer? I learned about her work in Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. Are she and her former colleagues egging him on?

Don't laugh. Some wonder if the dramatic erosion of our civil liberties is connected to this decade's efforts to enforce copyright in an acceleratingly draconian fashion. Richard Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party makes this argument (not about Michelle Obama in particular), that unscrupulous copyright lobbyists want surveillance.

Bob Barr tells his story on Bloomberg

Bob Barr tells his story. What happened to the Republican Party after the Republican Revolution of 1994? Barr argues in this interview on Bloomberg that it died 4 years later in a meeting with Newt Gingrich right before the 1998 election. However, in his book The Meaning of Is (2004) I learned that things changed much earlier than that. It happened with Newt's cave (p. 223) on the Clinton 1995 budget, where Barr reports that Gingrich meant to discipline Republicans who did not do a 180 with him, with Gingrich that is.

Barr continues, explaining that he stayed in the Republican Party after 1998 because he saw hope yet for reform from within the party. This hope disappeared for him when (1) he heard Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez say that habeas corpus was no longer important and (2) President Bush repeatedly say that he would spy on American citizens within this country without court orders because he was commander-in-chief, even though there's a law that says he can't.

I must say that personally these were exactly the two things I saw in the Bush administration that deeply alarmed me. I remember turning to a friend of mine, while watching Kafka's play Amerika at the Jeune Lune Theatre and saying that Bush needed to be impeached if he didn't back off. That was early 2006. Since then I have changed my mind. Now I support impeaching Cheney instead, after learning more, particularly from Frontline. I continue to be deeply alarmed, and the Democrats are no succor.








Responding to the dull argument in the third video, I say it's not campaign finance that's at the root of the two-party state, it's the form of election. We Americans can address the problem without curtailing political speech, by moving to a form of election that's truly general.