Weekend Wound Up: Open thread

Pope-a-potamus again, -A-?

I hope you've bought stock in Dramamine.

For the record, Dr. Barry Poulson doesn't explain squat. His answer to "why" we need to do anything is nothing more than "because that's what we anti-tax zealots want."* A

You got that right! In fact his sister operation in Iowa even ban a presidental candiate who is more a anti-tax zealot than them! Sorry about the whole story. But the Pope anti-free speech bunch can't even stand their own lies.....

The Iowa Crime of '07

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

As I wrote on Wednesday, the misnamed Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Christian Alliance (ICA) have chosen to exclude Ron Paul from their candidates’ forum on June 30.

There is more to report.

I’ve received emails from people telling me that the folks at the ICA insist that they had nothing to do with excluding Dr. Paul, and that the blame rests with Ed Failor of Iowans for Tax Relief. (Ed’s not too popular with a lot of people these days, apparently.)

Now I have no doubt that there may be some decent people at the ICA, and that they may really believe what they are saying. But that organization cannot possibly be believed when it innocently claims it has nothing against Ron Paul.

The ICA has a page on its site that lists all the announced candidates for president. Here is the link.

Until yesterday, when I pointed it out on the LRC blog and embarrassed them a bit, there was no Ron Paul.

Now look at the list again. Ever heard of Hugh Cort? John Cox? Mark Klein? The people at the ICA evidently have, since there they are on the list. But they apparently hadn't heard of Ron Paul until just yesterday.

Actually, though, they did know who Ron Paul was. They even used to have him on their list, as this Google cache shows. But then he disappeared.

They also used to have a link to Paul’s YouTube site, along with those of the other candidates, at the bottom of the page, but that’s also been suppressed. So if they thought they could claim that deleting the link to Ron Paul’s campaign site was some kind of innocent mistake, that isn’t going to work.

Heck, they even include a list of "potential" candidates. That list includes Al Sharpton.

So Al Sharpton merits inclusion, but Ron Paul does not. There is the faith of the apostles, according to the Iowa Christian Alliance.

Now let’s return to my other favorite Iowa organization, the Iowans (Allegedly) for Tax Relief. Its executive vice president, Ed Failor, wasn’t happy about my LRC article on Wednesday. Not happy at all.

In fact, he called me on Wednesday and insisted that I correct something I’d said – that by replacing Jim Gilmore with Duncan Hunter at the last minute (a fact I discovered by comparing press releases from earlier this month), Iowans for Tax Relief implicitly revealed that the reason they were excluding Ron Paul – that the event had supposedly been organized months ago and was now cast in stone – was bogus, and a lie.

Here is the earth-shattering change Failor wanted me to make. Hunter, he said, had been one of the original invitees – man, these guys are just great at picking out the credible candidates, aren’t they? – but failed to respond by the deadline. So when Gilmore dropped out, they went back to Hunter, who accepted.

But if they really wanted "credible" candidates, why would they do such a thing? By now even the zombie population can see that Ron Paul is far more credible than Hunter by any measure. The comparison is almost laughable. And since Hunter had his chance to participate but elected not to respond, why not give Paul a chance, since his initial exclusion – on the ludicrous grounds that he was not a "credible" candidate – has subsequently been shown to be a gross misjudgment? Paul seems particularly "credible" given that he came in second behind Fred Thompson in a straw poll that Iowans for Tax Relief itself co-sponsored!

Meanwhile, with Failor’s technicality off his chest, he had absolutely nothing to say about 99 percent of what I wrote: he never denied his support for the execrable George Pataki (what non-hack ever supported Pataki for anything, much less for president?), his support for Pataki’s spending increases, or his donations to the McCain campaign, for which Failor is a senior advisor.

The humorless Failor appeared on Jan Mickelson’s radio program later that day in order to justify his organization’s exclusion of Dr. Paul; Ron Paul campaign manager Kent Snyder also appeared. You can listen to it here.

My favorite part is Failor’s claim that other non-credible candidates weren’t invited, either, so Ron Paul hasn’t been treated unfairly. And which candidates would those be? Why, Hugh Cort, John Cox, and Mark Klein, of course!

You cannot make this stuff up.

The "Rudy McRomney" moniker is meant to suggest that the establishment’s favorite Republican candidates are indistinguishable from each other, and that they collectively represent the same inoffensive commitment to nothing that characterizes the entire political mainstream. As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, electing one of these men means absolutely nothing will change. Of that you can be certain.

And that’s just the way Ed Failor, Rudy McRomney supporter, evidently likes it. No Ron Paul revolution for him. Who needs a revolution when you can vote for John McCain and get a slightly more maniacal status quo?

This is the man who sits in judgment of Ron Paul?

And no, Ed, I don’t buy your phony explanation. Neither does anyone with an IQ over 75.

To conclude, here is some information readers may find useful:

Iowa Christian Alliance
515-225-1515 (hasn’t been answering)
515-225-1826 (fax)
Steve Scheffler, President, slscheffler@iowachristian.com, 515-971-7363
Morris Hurd, Treasurer, mhurd@iowatelecom.net
Gopal Krishna, Finance Chairman, gopkrishna@yahoo.com, 515-975-8771
Jessica Anderson, Director of Church/Community Development, jessica@iowachristian.com

Edward Failor
Executive Vice President
Iowans for Tax Relief
563-288-3600 or 877-913-3600
Fax: 563-264-2413
efailorjr@taxrelief.org

Katie Koberg
Public Relations Director
Iowans for Tax Relief
515-875-4936
kkoberg@taxrelief.org

June 22, 2007

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [view his website; send him mail] is senior fellow in American history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His books include How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (get a free chapter here), The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards), and the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

My husband threw me for a loop yesterday morning. Everything is running along smoothly with the sale of house/rental of temp housing/arranging moving truck, etc and my dear panicking hubby decides he wants to start looking at existing homes to buy........just to cover our bases.

So, on top of packing and preparing for home inspection, etc, I'm being dragged (dramatic effect) from floor plan to floor plan that doesn't suit our wants. (....they all suit our needs) I don't know that he wants to scrap the two years of planning our "final resting place" :) on our beautiful deciduously wooded 2.85 acres, but he sure has put our entire family into a bit of a panic with his need to "cover all the bases". It's a good thing I love him.

Robin Hayes lied. Nobody died, but thousands of folks lost their jobs.

That you should all see.

If Reid were Rove

If Reid were Rove, we’d see constant examples of Bush making a fool of himself on national security issues, and we would have seen them in 2004, when they counted. We’d see Bush promising to get bin Laden “dead or alive”, then we’d see clips of bin Laden mocking Bush, six years later. We’d see Bush in 2002 saying “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him… I truly am not that concerned about him.” Then we’d see Bush this year at the Coast Guard graduation ceremony talking about all the bad things bin Laden has been cooking up. You know, about how he was only two or three weeks away from blowing up some passenger airplanes bound for America in what Bush described as “the most ambitious known al Qaeda threat to the homeland since 9/11″. About how bin Laden is, according to Bush in this same speech, sending his best generals to Iraq to kill the American troops Bush put in harm’s way there.
(...)
If Reid were Rove, we’d see images of Bush with a guitar in hand as New Orleans drowned, morphing into visions of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. We’d watch jumpy repeat cuts of Bush saying “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” over and over again, like some sort of video scratch track.

Written by David Michael Green, a political science professor at Hofstra, this isn't complimentary to either political party. It expresses the frustration I, and I daresay many of us, have felt as the Bush years steamroll us.

...reportage.

i was contacted by the parents who want to stop all this, and we apparently have a summer project.

stay tuned for a primer on the school lunch program in the next few days, with more posts to follow.

there's more we can't discuss today; but i can tell you this is begining to look like two parallel stories-and both of them are "tales of outrage" indeed.

summer school-oh, boy!