American Glob

There’s been some talk around the web that if Lisa Murkowski loses the Republican nomination for US Senate in Alaska that she might try to run as a Libertarian. Apparently, the Alaska Libertarian Party has said thanks but no thanks. Eric Dondero of Libertarian Republican broke the story today…

The Executive Committee of the Alaska Libertarian Party held an emergency meeting yesterday to discuss the contested primary results in the Republican Senate primary. All 5 board members met in an undisclosed location in northeast Anchorage to hammer out a decision as to how to move forward.

Friends of Lisa Murkowski approached the ALP early Wednesday morning immediately after the Tuesday primaries, feeling out if there was any possibility that the Senator could appear on the Libertarian line for the fall election, as a third party candidate. Other supporters of the Senator, including at least two longstanding members of the Libertarian Party, also called to lobby ALP Chair Scott Kohlhaas to keep an “open mind,” on the issue.

Kohlhaas was immediately innundated with Alaska and national media over the matter.

On Sunday morning, over coffee and donuts, the ExComm voted unanimously, 5 to 0 to deny the Senator the ballot line. There was no malice intended. ALP Chair Kohlhaas has repeatedly stated that she is a nice lady, and the ALP was flattered by the offer.

Robert Stacy McCain, who knows Dondero, offers some juicier details at his blog and makes a gutsier choice in his post title.

Murkowski’s opponent, Tea Party backed Republican Joe Miller, has a slight lead but absentee ballots have yet to be counted.

Allahpundit at Hot Air describes the inherent catch 22 in all this….

Irony of ironies, if Miller wins the primary then the one person in Alaska who can probably guarantee his victory in the general is … Lisa Murkowski, by endorsing him and asking her supporters to back him in a show of party unity. (She has major centrist appeal, drawing 38 percent of indies, 32 percent of Republicans, and even 27 percent of Democrats in a three-way race.) Think Murky will be willing to put all this behind her and help the GOP by declaring “It’s Miller time” in Alaska?

Read more on this at Memeorandum.

Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager for George W. Bush in 2004 and former chair of the RNC has come out as gay. You know what? Good for him…

Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”

Maybe he was listening to what Paul Ryan said about the future of the Republican party in April of 2009…

Ryan is promoting, not bending, conservative principles to expand the party.

“If you believe in freedom, liberty, self-determination, free enterprise, I don’t care if you’re a Muslim, Jewish, Agnostic, Christian, gay, straight, Latino, black, white, Irish, whatever. Join us.”

I’ve been saying since July of 2009 that the Republican Party was going more Libertarian and that it was a good thing. I stand by my prediction.

UPDATE: According to Allahpundit of Hot Air, this is old news. Who knew? Not me, apparently.

Read a lot more on this at Memeorandum.

Why? Because the billionaires in question are Libertarians who give money to conservative causes. Feast your eyes on their big exposé called “Covert Operations.”

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.”

The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

How does the New Yorker feel about far left billionaire George Soros who gives millions of dollars to far left causes? Just look at the headlines I dug up with a quick search…

The World According to Soros

Most of the instincts that Soros brings to his current incarnation–one in which he sometimes refers to himself as “a stateless statesman”–were developed in the course of his nearly 40-year career in the financial markets. He started Quantum in 1969. Today the fund and its diversified offshoots have assets of roughly $11 billion. Tells about the “open society” foundations he has established in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

The Wisdom of Soros

As a rule, I do not put much store by the statements of billionaires and central-bank chairmen. The former are accorded undue respect because of their wealth, the latter because of the positions they hold. In my experience, neither great riches nor high office are strongly correlated with economic wisdom and common sense. For today, however, I am making an exception: first for George Soros, the veteran speculator and philanthropist, and, in my next post, for Mervyn King, the head of the Bank of England.

The Money Man

Can George Soros’s millions insure the defeat of President Bush? Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

Gee. That almost seems like a double standard, doesn’t it? Funny that.

Read more on this at Memeorandum.

Reason TV has produced a video that profiles a new school voucher program in post-Katrina New Orleans that is enjoying tremendous success.

School vouchers and charter schools are a very libertarian approach to education that puts power and choice in the hands of parents instead of government bureaucrats. What a novel idea…

For the record, President Obama doesn’t support school voucher programs.

Author, professor, economist, and conservative libertarian Thomas Sowell appeared on the Sean Hannity show last night to discuss race in American politics and the Shirley Sherrod situation.

This man is a national treasure.

Starring….

John Stossel as Mister Fantastic
Virginia Postrel as Invisible Woman
Nick Gillespie as Human Torch
and Judge Andrew Napolitano as The Thing

I love them all.

That’s what BIG Hollywood is reporting.

Frankly, I think the young man sparring with Nobel Prize winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman in the video below is far too thin to be Michael Moore. Unless Mr. Moore didn’t discover Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell until after his 21st birthday.

What do you think? Is it him?

Heh. At the time of this posting, the top commenter on YouTube says:

“That is not Michael Moore. That’s the kid Michael Moore ate.”

This historic interview of Ayn Rand conducted by Tom Snyder is timely. I don’t know the exact date of the broadcast but Ayn Rand is clearly approaching her later years which means it probably took place in the 1970′s. Plus, there are numerous references to Jimmy Carter in PART II, so go figure.

WARNING: These videos are guaranteed to piss off conservatives, liberals, libertarians, objectivists, religious people, atheists, right wingers, left wingers, business owners, union leaders and guys from Wisconsin. Enjoy!

PART I

Parts 2 and 3 after the fold.

Read more »

Take a deep breath, Don.

The Michael Steele controversy has me siding with Republican Congressman Dr. Ron Paul.

President Obama campaigned on Afghanistan being the “real war.”

It’s his.

Congressman Paul agrees.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Now which one of us is the clock?

One difference of course is that I would not pull out now. But Obama did not “inherit” this war; he sought it out. Steele called him out on that.

I think I know how to solve this problem but I confess I didn’t invent the solution.

This guy did.

He was right.

Barry Goldwater, the conservative libertarian politician who died in 1998, apparently reassumed life shortly thereafter as a boy from southern California.

He is currently 11 years old, attending a public school and has wasted no time in documenting the liberal agenda of his teachers.

Allahpundit of Hot Air isn’t sure if this is real…

Three possibilities. One: This is all deadly serious and on the level, notwithstanding that rather significant final line. Two: This is a grand goof conceived by a budding comic genius, notwithstanding his subdued appearance on Fox this morning. Three: This is a grand goof conceived by his parents or some other adult, which would explain why his essay is so cheeky but his TV performance is so straightforward.

Mr. Goldwater’s current incarnation, 11 year old Sam Besserman, recently wrote an op-ed for American Thinker which can be seen HERE.