Do you feel safe yet? A Republican Woman explains the NeoCons.

As a Republican I have long worried about the erosion of freedom in America. It was a concern for freedom that propelled me into politics when I was eleven, having read Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. It was a desire to leave a more civil America for my five children that has kept me in politics all of my life.
Many things changed for all of us on September 11th. From the place of unity and trust that followed the tragedy of September 11th we have moved to a state of unprecedented hostility, division and fear.
Remember for a moment the outpouring of compassion from the world and the way we came together during those days when volunteers from every walk of life throughout the world worked to aid survivors in New York. That is the real America, the America that each of us loves and trusts; the America that speaks a vision beyond the partisanship of politics and inspired the world as a shining beacon of hope.
That trust had been used by the Bush administration to cancel the Bill of Rights and install a federal monarchy. The Bush White House has betrayed both America and the Republican Party. No real Republican can support George W. Bush.
The steady growth of government is drowning the hopes of women and men from all parties and all parts of our nation. Using the rhetoric of freedom the White House is calling up the reality of fascism. None of us is immune.
As a Republican woman I did not imagine that the Patriot Act would be used in a focused attempt to destroy my family. That is, however, what happened. Sometimes freedom becomes very personal. Our story will be your story if we cannot change the direction our nation has taken.
We are no longer safe from our own government.
In our case this administration allowed one of its political operatives disguised as a journalist access to private records legally protected by the courts. The Patriot Act makes this possible. National security was not an issue. The political operative in question was seeking to evade charges of domestic violence. The abuser’s name was John Fund. Here is how this administration uses its power.
Normally, adoption records are sealed unless ordered by the court. Getting access is impossible, even for those most closely involved. That is what the law says. But if you have the right connections with the NeoCons presently running our country into bankruptcy and corporate fascism you can get anything on anyone.
I have been a member of the National Federation of Republican Women since the early 1990s. My daughter is also a member – but I have learned some hard lessons in the past three years about those who are in charge of the Party that once was the shining hope of a generation inspired by Barry Goldwater and dedicated to individualism and civil liberties. I spent my entire adult life working for those ideals only to see the progress we had made redirected to line the pockets of those who gathered the power into their own grasping hands, laying the groundwork for an Imperial Federalism.
How did my daughter and I learn this had happened? The first inkling we had of just how far the Bush administration will go to protect its political operatives came from Eric Alterman’s article published in the Nation in June of ’03. In that article Alterman publishes information that we would ourselves be unable to access, information available only through the misuse of power.
My daughter, Morgan Pillsbury, was in a relationship with John Fund from October 1998 until she finally left him, preferring charges for domestic violence, in the spring of 2002. John Fund had been a NeoCon operative since he started working with Evans and Novak in the early 1980s after a brief stint with the Star. His potential thus revealed he was recruited. From there he moved on to the Wall Street Journal and worked there as a political operative for eighteen years. He has vacationed with Dick Cheney and remains in close contact with the White House.
The NeoCons do not care about issues of right and wrong. A study the ‘election strategies’ of Karl Rove reveal that slander, libel, and orchestrated events are standard operating procedure. Fund used his NeoCon connections to evade justice. This included eliciting cooperation from men like Eric Alterman. Alterman is no NeoCon, but he has the same kind of ego.
Alterman is only one in a series of journalists who cooperated with Fund and were rewarded for their cooperation with jobs from other NeoCon sources. Another journalist who recently killed a story was then immediately hired by the Wall Street Journal, a NeoCon institution.
Let’s examine how Alterman’s hit piece was assembled.
“In a signed affidavit, the woman in question--whose true age is 36, seven years older than was reported, and who was born Carolyn Anne Barteaux but carries a passport (a copy of which was provided to me by Fund) under the name Carolyn Anne Pillsbury and now goes by Morgan Francis Pillsbury--withdraws any accusations of physical abuse, accusations that resulted in Fund's arrest.”
The entire article is a montage of arrogance and unsubstantiated accusations not just according to me but according to the journalists who bothered to do research. Alterman’s article says more about his quality as a journalist than about my daughter.
Here, Alterman implies that the changes of name indicate a questionable history, raising questions of devious intent. But the facts actually say something very different. When my daughter was between five and six she was adopted by my new husband, something that happens every day. She became Carolyn Anne Kellett. When my daughter was twelve I allowed my parents to adopt her. She had been living with them and they wanted this very much. She became Carolyn Anne Pillsbury. She continued to visit me during the summers. When my daughter turned 18 she changed her given name to Morgan because she loved horses, and took Francis as a middle name to honor my father, Dr. Arthur Francis Pillsbury.
California allows name change by usage. But to get a passport you have to jump through hoops. So, while she used the name Morgan for everything else her passport remained Carolyn Anne. She has used ‘Morgan Francis’ unfailingly since she was 19.
But how did John Fund get copies of my daughter’s adoption records and passport? My daughter kept the passport elsewhere and never mentioned her previous name to Fund. Neither she nor I possess a copy of the original birth certificate and her baby book in which the name is written is in storage at my home in California. But Alterman says he was shown a copy of the passport and published the previous name.
The law on passports is similar to the law on adoption records. These records are not available. Accessing them is a felony. The only way Fund could have gotten it therefore is through his political NeoCon connections. In a deposition of Fund taken in New York on October 19th Fund admitted to having destroyed the documents that would prove how he acquired these records. More discovery is in motion.
The withdrawal of charges Alterman cites did not happen. Morgan was physically forced to sign a statement dictated by Fund. The man who had so often beaten her into unconsciousness told her he would do it again if she did not cooperate. He also threatened to harm me, her mother, I later learned. Such coerced statements are void for obvious reasons. Since I heard my daughter being abused and saw her injuries I was able to rebut this document myself and have done so under penalty of perjury. I was not the only one to hear her abused; there is another witness.
Fund and his attorneys have declined to depose me. His chief attorney, Fred Kessler is a partner at Wollmuth, Maher & Deutch, LLP in New York.
The Alterman article also mentions a “close friend of Fund’s” who supplied “documents now posted on the Internet—that demonstrate to almost any fair-minded person that Fund is probably the victim of a deeply disturbed person.”
The ‘close friend’ is my former husband, Craig Franklin, the only person to have access to a transcript from a now settled lawsuit. That transcript was never filed and so is not available through the court. The transcript is also misidentified. To use the document in this way is a felony and has now been reported to the court having jurisdiction in the matter.
The failure to do adequate research on this point opens both Alterman and the Nation to litigation and Morgan and I have filed against them in New York. We were urged to do this by fair minded journalists who were appalled at Alterman’s article and his arrogant disregard of the truth and fair journalistic practice.
The relationship between Fund and Franklin is also unusual.
In the spring of 2001 Morgan took stock of her life and made some changes. She recognized she had said things that were hurtful and untrue about friends and family and wrote letters to those she could have harmed thereby and apologized. Many of us have had similar experiences and changed our lives for the better. God calls us to such self examination and amendment. Doing so is not a sign of mental disorder but of growing maturity. I received one such apology from my daughter.
Why would Morgan’s step father, a man who raised her and my other children and named them as his children for all purposes in his will supply a document to a man he barely knows? He had his reasons, and as with all other stories examining it is revealing.
John Fund and Craig Franklin are not close friends but they are co-conspirators, cooperating to suppress the facts in two separate cases that they knew could cost them financially and professionally. Craig’s only other previous contact with Fund was to try to use me to pressure John to get an Oped on achieving world peace published in the Wall Street Journal in around 1994. In the Oped Craig urged that all world leaders be forced to exchange children with leaders from other countries. Craig said that John’s failure to find this idea appealing would make him responsible for the nuclear war that would doubtless ensue. To date that war has not started.
Craig’s great ideas also included a suicide hotline staffed by a computer that at the end of a lengthy menu suggested the depressed person become a libertarian activist. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
Common goals create cooperation between relative strangers. Discrediting me and my daughter with slander and libel was the goal they could best achieve through cooperation.
Craig supplied the documents because he was guilty of fraud related to our divorce and to cover the fact he is a sexual pervert who tried to live out his fantasies about young girls by exposing himself to my pubescent daughters and attempting to have sex with Morgan. I employed a private detective to provide documentation of his perversion and have that evidence. The law suit I was forced to settle because I ran out of money was over the fraud he had perpetrated and those records are available through the court in Santa Barbara.
A partnership of this kind is a criminal conspiracy and Craig is named as a defendant in the lawsuit now filed in New York.
Eric Alterman was one of a series of credulous and greed driven journalists and political hopefuls Fund and other NeoCons used in their campaign against us. The NeoCons use the same techniques politically.
The list of those who cooperated with Fund includes his former employer, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, his sometime sexual partner Gail Heriot, a law professor from the San Diego University of Law, and more than 30 others. That pleading is now under review by the court in New York because, we were told by the clerk of the court, many of the charges for which we provided documentation were felonies.
The strategies used by Fund and other NeoCon operatives such as Karl Rove are simple. Lie. Lie some more. Manufacture events. Lie again. Coerce silence. Bribe where necessary. When that fails violence is always an option. The NeoCons have been profoundly successful in converting the power of government into a means for private self enrichment using these techniques. They grabbed for power like the most ill-mannered brat in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
They have destroyed our trust along with lives and so much else.
Any tool misused can become a weapon. The economic tools for returning power to the individual, privatization, and those like it, have become the means to transfer control and wealth into the hands of the few. These tools were originated by what we call the Freedom Movement.
In 1971 after Nixon imposed Wage and Price Controls thousands of people spontaneously left the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party was founded. The intellectual and political insights, founded in an understanding of markets and individualism, gave birth to a series of think tanks that have created the policy now used by both the Republican and Democratic parties.
But those tools have been misapplied. Instead of reducing the size of government by returning the choices and control to the individual those market tools have been applied to permit government to reach deeper into our pockets.
Those in the Movement saw it happening and did nothing. Their failure to demand that these powerful tools be properly applied is perhaps the most massive moral failure since the 1799 failure to sunset slavery. They chose to protect their 401Ks and remained silent or have become apologists for the Bush administration.
In this way the NeoCons converted the rhetoric of freedom that brought a generation into politics, creating privatization, deregulation, and outsourcing, into the means for establishing a totalitarian state. It is a tragedy for freedom.
It is a fact that within any market for human action the bad currency and bad behavior drive out the good. In the American system of government that means that bad ethics, the short term strategy of winning at all and any cost, has driven out the long term strategy of creating cooperative governance and a society of consent that rewards those who do the right thing.
The Bush administration is the logic of a course set through greed. John is one small but very useful cog in the NeoCon wheel that seeks to run the world for its own profit. The course set by the NeoCons can only end in the death of American honor and freedom.
This tragedy for our family is a microcosm of the fate awaiting all Americans and therefore transcends the personal and serves as a model for the warfare presently being waged against Americans and the entire world from those we believed we could trust.
However, in every crisis is also opportunity. Freedom remains the goal and the vision. Change is possible. The issue for those who love freedom should not be which bad choice wins the presidency but how we retake control of our lives.
Freedom that word so debased and misused still bespeaks a harbor of opportunity, hope and peace. The vision of America is still the destination that draws humanity through the fateful courses of time. But America must change its course to remain that shining light.
We must reject fear and relearn the lessons of Washington, Jefferson, and those other men and women of courage and vision who saw opportunity in a simple equality and honor in a clear sighted reliance on the plain truth.
When the autonomy of the individual to choose is respected each of us learns the lessons God placed before us. We are drawn by necessity to confront our own souls and convert our human yearnings into communities of consent.
The civil sector, the organizations through which we work, churches, charities, and associations, clubs and lodges, have been doing their good work despite the interferences of government. Through parents who home school, local charities who meet the needs of those who yearn for jobs, meals, shelter, homes and hope, through community sighted businesses and volunteers we are building a better tomorrow.
On September 11th thousands of American volunteers voted with their own lives for a world of community. From blood banks to food banks to tutoring for literacy we, the American people, are creating the future, not any president.
On November 2nd there will be an election. A man unworthy of our trust will win and America will lose. But on November 3rd we can begin again to make the vision of America real. Remember that when you are listening to the election results.

As always Wendy McElroy has failed to do the due diligence you would expect of a first grader.
I first met Wendy over twenty five years ago at a Libertarian event in West Los Angeles. My daughter, Morgan, was a small girl then.
This is relevant because the case she is citing in this most inane of screeds is the one in which my daughter was battered into an inch of her life by John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. I was a witness. I heard two events of battery going on over the phone. Later, I saw her bruises and I watched as she vomited blood from internal injuries. I nursed her through those first horrible days. I sat with her on the phone all one long night after the almost successful break-in attempt at her apartment in New York. John has thugs who work for him. I helped move her into hiding so that John Fund and his NeoCon buddies could not find and kill her.
I am not the only such witness.
You might ask why Wendy did not know this. Perhaps because like Alterman she never asked. You see victims and those who love them are deemed to be unreliable witnesses in the eyes of women like Wendy who would prefer for reasons of their own financial wellbeing to continue to doubt without ever asking for proof. Wendy McElroy makes a living off the raped and brutalized bodies of women and children. She is an apologist and enabler for those who steal through violence, stealth, and deceit. Her comfort level means more to her than the freedom from violence for the innocent. She is a dishonest, aging intellectual pygmy with the morals of a William Bennett. With this ‘opinion piece’ she has proven her moral weight to anyone with even a modicum of brains and objectivity.
The last several years has taught me a lot about human nature. I am no longer as trusting as I once was. I have learned some ugly truths about human action and the greedy side of self justification and how the cults of philosophical posturing are used by those in power.
At one time I thought I was working for freedom. I thought that I shared a common understanding of freedom with those who surrounded me. I dealt with people on a handshake, always taking pride in being my word. Unlike so many of my former compatriots I never tried to make a living out that work. I worked for the future I wanted to leave for my children. That was more than enough.
To them it turned out that the rhetoric of freedom is just another tool to continue the ugliness of a different flavor of slavery. A culture that allows, tolerates and enables the kind of abuse we have suffered should be destroyed so that something better can take its place.
When John Fund lied to my daughter he took from her. When he coerced her into having an abortion he destroyed the child she wanted. When he battered her and stole thousands of dollars from her with the help of American Express, Citibank and Chase he committed felonies. He used his influence in continuous attempts to destroy both of us so that he would not be found out. But he was. The courts do not work well. They are often corrupt and it is difficult for those who have less to get the simple justice that our ancestors believed were their due.
Today the fight for freedom is not to be fought in the safe incestuous maunderings of the political parties but at the grass roots.
Only when all of the power is returned to the people will America be free. When that happens Wendy will have to find an honest job.
Unlike Wendy McElroy I do not expect to be believed in the absence of proof.
Ruthlesspeople.net for a partial recitation of events. More is coming. John Fund’s deposition took place October 19th. He lied, but as a NeoCon that is his divine right, isn’t it?

Are the institutions that regulate human action in American culture working as envisioned by our Founders?


These were not the questions I had in mind when I went to Elks on Tuesday, but that question became the central focus of our discussion.

My friend Robert Crouch, a professor of economics who teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, asked me what I had been doing with myself over the summer. A long conversation ensued that included the happy announcement that I had finished writing my second book of the year, titled GREED 2004: The NeoConning of America.

No discussion with an economist can begin without some defining of terms so amidst the discussions of football, Lodge politics, and the greetings and meetings of those assembling, we did a little of that.

Robert is not your normal academic. He likes playing poker and has in fact written a book on the subject. He is a former surfer, sidelined by his knees, who spends every summer scrolling through his memories in the first person while touring through the lush and lovely landscape of England, his native soil, in a sedan.

I like Robert. He is always jolly and very co mplimentary, filled with insights and interesting stories about his past. I would like him even if he were not a dedicated economist of the free market variety. But he is.

I asserted that there were serious problems with issues impinging on the 1st Amendment in that a relatively small cadre of powerful individuals in America today, namely the NeoCons, can make it impossible to publish for some people, in this case me. Robert asserted this was not true. Hence, this opinion piece that will take up three distinct issues melding them together to formulate a short study of why NeoConism worked and how they have impacted our essential institutions.

I begin at the beginning. How do the assumptions of the 2nd Amendment apply to the present understanding of secrecy, privacy and confidentiality, a right ‘discovered’ only in 1890?
That ‘right of privacy’ was derived from a corollary of the 4th Amendment in 1890. This ‘right’ was originally asserted as a protection from libelous coverage of the press in a case occurring in Boston that year. A family was suffering under the publishing of what we are assured were libelous assertions. While we can sympathize with the family in question they had at their disposal the means for protecting themselves, namely the existing laws on slander and libel. If the statements were untrue they could sue. Libel and slander remained specific to falsehoods. What was inadvertently created with this precedent was a right of privacy that was later used to protect falsehoods.

By creating this formulation of ‘privacy’ a tool was created that became a weapon wielded against freedom as envisioned by the Bill of Rights.

The ‘right of privacy,’ as the tool for deception it became, takes its present form when applied during the Twenties to the right of criminals to ‘privacy’ to continue their felonious careers. These related to the imposition of Prohibition on Americans, a limitation on freedom.
Clearly, this is not what the Founders had in mind. But neither could they have imagined the need that drove its application.

Each of the significant cases in which the principle is applied asserts the ‘right of privacy’ as a tool to protect freedom, not from other individuals, but from the government.
Along with ending the production, trade and consumption of alcohol statutes were being used by government to force sterilization of the genetically unfit, to prevent individuals from engaging in homosexual behavior, to keep people from killing themselves, and to limit their right to make reproductive choices for themselves. Instead of challenging the government’s use of statute to limit freedom civil libertarians retreated to this convenient but specious concept of privacy.
The government had ignored their most elemental right, namely freedom. The response of civil libertarians was to create a specious ‘right.’ The correct solution would have been to ensure that government not interfere in the personal or commercial lives of Americans by rescinding statutes.

To tie the issue of freedom to privacy is to use a hammer to file your nails. Why this happened is obvious. At that point in time civil libertarians were faced with the growing specter of the various forms of collectivism that were to blight the forward progress of the twentieth century, powered by the growing unrest caused, ironically, by having ignored the injustices flowing from the government’s original failure to make freedom available to all. The poor, women, blacks and minorities were inferior in constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Women were the muscle of the movement for social justice in the early years of the past century, moved by the failure of the Founders and subsequent generations to recognize their rights to self determination. Their cause was just. The tools they chose were unfortunately collectivist. Those who spoke the verities of individual rights had ignored their plight and the use of statute was adopted as a justifiable means for doing what freedom adherents had failed to do.

Failing to do the right thing has down stream consequences. Now, we should learn the lesson.

Therefore the present understanding of privacy should be rethought as follows. Confidentiality is a contractual relationship, mutually agreed to, such as exists between physician and patient, attorney and client. Within that covenant behavior and unpalatable truths are protected. The asserted ‘right to privacy,’ as a means of avoiding the truth regarding undeserved reputation does not exist. Facts are private when they are not known to others. No ‘right’ to privacy exists through the Bill of Rights. Privacy, as a means of evading the disclosure of unpalatable truths does not exist outside the contractual agreements limiting the actions of consenting parties.
We will now relate this line of argumentation to the 1st and 2nd Amendments.


The 2nd Amendment would appear to be about ‘the right to keep and bear arms.’ But in actual fact it has a broader application, that being the right to self defense, the expression of that being at the time it was written entirely bound up in the possession of weapons which were technologically adequate to the needs of the people to revolt against oppression in the year 1776.
This is incomplete. All tools for the protection of the individual should properly be included within our understanding of the 2nd Amendment. Truth is a tool, a weapon of appropriate defense in the hands of the innocent, and cannot and should not be limited by the use of ‘privacy.’ Further, its use should not be limited by the abuse of power by other individuals, the court system or by government.
We are not used to thinking of truth as a weapon, but it is.
The Founders thought they had taken care of the issue of free speech as a tool for self defense. The example of Zenger, the printer who ran afoul of the Royal Governor of New York in 1735, and so established the concept of the right of jurors to rule on the law as well as the facts, was clearly within the purview of their experience. This is the principle of jury nullification.

Zenger broke the law according to the statutes. He was found innocent because the law was unjust. His right to speak the truth was superior to all statutes. The truth was not to be abridged. Clearly, the Founders understood the potential for statutes to void the rights they protected within the Bill of Rights. Statute is always inferior to rights secured by the Bill of Rights and the natural rights of humankind.
This previous example refutes the creation of a ‘right of privacy’ from the 4th Amendment.
The truth was seen by the Founders as a weapon of social correction and self defense.

The NeoCon Cabal today continues the bad precedent created by civil libertarians who feared government, using the tool of ‘privacy’ and ‘executive privilege’ to protect deceit. Government has been lying to us for a good long time but the NeoCons have taken this to a new level. The use of lies is foundational to the philosophy of NeoConservativism as emoted by Irving Kristol and by Leo Strauss, the philosophical mentors to this administration.
First, make sure your ugly behavior does not become known. Then find the means to have your own deceits accepted as truth.

The NeoCons saw the potential to use the media for their own purposes. They had learned from watching others do the same on a smaller scale and brought with them the Trotskyite methods of their origin in the left.
The fourth estate, the media, with traditional newspapers, writers of subjects relating to politics and policy, and now radio and television, are no longer a reliable means for ascertaining the truth. Instead they have morphed into a form of entertainment at best and at their worst the public relations arm of political parties and the primary owners of political parties and corporations. Depending on who owns them they line up to produce and so be paid.
Corporations are the third part of the story.

The Founders lived in a world where wealth was held by individuals. The first such corporation was East India Company. Founded by Royal Charter in 1600 the first limited liability corporation, gradually assumed the form of a government, enabling and justifying the take over of India by the British Crown.
This early limited liability corporation was enormously profitable to its investors and the British Crown. But this wealth was not created but transferred from producers. Governmental heads of the various sultanates in India traded access to the markets and merchants residing therein in exchange for advantages accruing only to themselves. The East India Corporation was therefore a middle man, taking from the producers but supplying no value in exchange. In 1670, through five acts of Parliament, the East India Company was granted rights that made it, effectively, a nation in itself, exercising rights of dominion over millions of Indians who had no recourse or choice in the matter.

So the tendency for corporations to become quasi-governmental entities, reaching for and asserting rights reserved to governments and individuals is of long standing. Corporations are now invested with an artificial personhood that makes them potentially immortal. They are not vulnerable to the impact of strict liability or social ostracism as are individuals. While the majority of businesses engaging in commerce are owned by the individuals who run them there remains a class of corporation that has worked to enjoy the benefits of citizenship while evading the balancing accountability. That class of corporations ignores the issues of informed consent, benevolent outcome, and individual autonomy.

Discriminating between the uses of the form of incorporation is an essential element for ensuring humanity moves in positive directions. Incorporation is a tool of human devising; it is not natural. Corporations should not be protected under the Constitution.

In the world of the Founders, the corporation, as we understand it today, did not exist. Wealth brought power but the power of wealth was limited; individuals holding great wealth died. Their heirs usually dissipated the accumulation of wealth over a few generations. It was a small world and reputations were not subject to the spinning all too familiar to us today. The truth was not as much at risk because the tools of truth and the right to enforce those tools remained very much within the control of the people as a whole. It was a small world and reputation mattered.

The Founders did not imagine that entities like corporations as we know them today would ever exist and could not therefore defend against them.


It was only in the 1960s that corporations succeeded in assuming personhood. Since then the irresponsible and grasping subset of corporations have been working at supplanting government. They are succeeding. The dynamic thereby produced is both complex and simple. The means used to control and steal are many, the formula remains the same. Lie. Distract. Take. Do it again.

Having formulated a powerful set of tools, the ‘right to privacy,’ the means for broadcasting disinformation, and then the means for displacing the original vision of American government through a collation of corporate entities, the pieces were in place for turning the representative republic originally visioned by the founders into a federal empire.
Thomas Jefferson said that we should have another revolution every twenty years, that being the maximum time that a government could remain free of corruption.

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Americans should listen to the words of their founders and consider carefully what actions seem best.

Next Tuesday night I will hand this to my friend Robert before we line up for dinner at the Elks. Because it is true and Robert needs to know it.
Corporations have come to exercise rights superior to those of individuals. Each of these is a conversion of an existing institution of American life; paid for by the people, but used by those who are building the federal empire we now see taking shape. It could not have happened without generations who ignored the essential issues of freedom.

Using the military, Social Security, the department of Social Services, education, disasters, the court system and the wistful hopes of a Nation those in change continue to steal. For most of them it is the only job they have ever held. While this is going on the series of mistakes made by wishful civil libertarians, hoping that band-aids will fix the problems, continue to accumulate. It is time for real answers and we can only hope it is not too late.

---

Wedding of Matt Drudge and David Brock in San Francisco with Ann Coulter serving as the Best Man.



San Francisco is to be congratulated for affirming the right of gays to marry and doing so in defiance of all higher authority except their consciences.
Marriage is an ancient human relationship and will always remain the only familial connection that can be based entirely on choice. We do not get to choose our mother, father, sisters, brothers, cousins or children; in the sense that we know exactly who children are going to turn out to be after investing eighteen years in their raising. Children come with mountains of obligations beyond the diapers, and although they are certainly worth every moment of the time we invest it can even happen that they grow up and register in some Party that is antithetical to our own beliefs.
The featured simulation above symbolizes the freedom that will now be offered even to those who will probably reject this particular match for a variety of reasons. Matt Drudge will probably not be moving to San Francisco so he can offer David Brock marriage with a bouquet of yellow roses. David already spurned him. David would probably not be interested in a man who does not share his new political beliefs now any more than he was when he occupied a prominent position on the Right. Ann Coulter, while doubtless the best man of the three, will therefore miss out on the chance of standing up for the fantasy duo. But we can wonder who else might have been involved if such a wedding took place.
Weddings are always a wonderful human experience.
So while I hardly ever agree with anything that happens politically in San Francisco it was very nice today to open my paper and see that the city of the Golden Gate had allowed gays to put their head in the same noose provided for heterosexuals.
Now, having said that, and along with advising that the calligraphy on the wedding certificate be in Old English, I would like to add a cautionary note on the institution of Marriage as practiced by the government.
Before you pick you bride’s maids, groomsmen, and decide on what kind of wedding cake to serve at the reception think about that license you take out from the government. Read the contract the government issues. It is a Soviet kind of one size fits all document. This is in itself enough to sour you on the project. There are over 50 obligations intrinsic in the deal; the contract can be changed without notice and on the whim of the legislature, most of whom are attorneys. Would you sign a contract like that for a motor home? No way.
Think about that. Also, the judicial system is staffed by a cadre of former attorneys and judges who are immune from accountability. You can sue your contractor but not the judge. Which do you think can cost you more?
While getting government to recognize that you are married is necessary to securing benefits such as medical insurance, government marriage can cost you in ways you do not anticipate.
The better approach on the issue would actually be to let people determine who they name as their family members and write their own contracts, where necessary. A further objection, not often cited, to the current involvement of government in marriage is that some Americans view it as a sacred bond, affirmed by God, and therefore within the covenant of a religious institution; others as a civil contract, and therefore within the jurisdiction of the right of individuals for self determination. Many Suffragists married with a conscience contract in which their husband agreed to ignore the mandates of government.

The bottom line issue is that it is we ourselves who should be making these choices about our lives, not the government.
But tomorrow is Valentine’s Day – so congratulations to San Francisco and long live romance.

 

 

She hungered for raspberry gumballs. These ecstatically wonderful delights could only be had from the gumball machine at the local Safeway Market. She knew it was after curfew. This limitation was an annoyance that had been mandated by frisky high school students wandering through the night looking for very different excitements. This could not apply to her. She was law-abiding and careful of the proper rights of others.

Little Carolyn was always a law unto herself.

She got dressed. Her aunt would never know. She could almost taste the gumballs now.

The Safeway was just a few blocks away, a matter of a five-minute walk. She had often ventured into the night on some such small adventure, but this time it would be very different.

The place was pretty quiet except for a clutch of people around the checkout stand at the other end of the store. Little Carolyn, standing around 4’ 8," ignored them, eyes firmly on the source of coming delight.

The coins clinked into the slot and she turned the handle. The machine groaned, coughed, and fell silent. No raspberry gumballs appeared in the spillway. She tried again. Still no gumballs. She knew that appealing to the store manager would result in a smirk and dismissal. That had happened all too often. The gumball machine seemed to be sneering at her.

"Hey! You can’t shake that machine!" Little Carolyn looked back to see a friend of her grandfather’s glaring at her. She had to look way up as he was well over six feet.

"It stole my money and it is not going to let it get away with it – this time." She returned to her activity. Smack.

Little Carolyn felt herself seized bodily and hauled off.

"Apologize to the Manager, Carolyn. Your grandpa is going to be very upset when he finds out."

"No. This machine steals my money and the manager won’t give it back or fix the machine. He promised he would the last time. Grandpa would say I was right to insist on having the gumballs. He might not have wanted me to hit the machine but…."

"But we do not smack machines. They aren’t our property."

"So I guess it is alright to steal from kids?" She looked up into the face of the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan who had paused while bagging his own groceries in Goleta, California in 1981 to intercede, recognizing the grandchild of an old friend.

Little Carolyn would be hauled off by a grim faced President and his accompanying Secret Service cortege and deposited home into the horrified custody of her aunt. She remained unrepentant.

Authority misapplied that ignores the proper rights of individuals was the issue. It is too bad that with the best intentions in the free world President Reagan failed to see this small revolution as what it really was. Standing up for your rights includes the gumballs – even when authority wants you to shut up and just take it.

Maybe if it had been jelly beans he would have understood.

The White House – May 11, 2001
By Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

The tea was held upstairs, past open doors that held the portraits of First Ladies and mementos of previous administrations. The People’s House is large enough to hold all of the variations of which America is capable. Therefore it must be large, more on the inside than in any other dimension.
We scaled the broad and beautiful stairs while listening to the floating music of a military string quartet that played in the foyer across a gleam of marble flooring. The music drew us on.
Various of our number stopped to study the portraits of the presidents that hung on the walls and more than a few paused in front of the bust of Lincoln that gazes into a place far away at one side of the hallway.
The People’s House hushes voices and fills the heart with pride. We have known so many disappointments and failures. The light was gold and clear drifting down to touch the marble and gleaming carpets.
The event was everything any of us imagined it could be. We had dressed accordingly.
The tiny pastries epitomized all that is delicious. As rapidly as we could empty the trays they were replenished by the hovering servers. Our noble best did not suffice to empty even one before it was whisked from sight to make way for another.
The day was warm. So instead of sipping hot tea our thirsts were quenched by the most excellent iced tea, delicately flavored with just a touch of mango. Cautioned not to take souvenirs a few of our number did tuck a single paper napkin into a dainty purse.
We basked, remembering the hours of labor that each of us have invested in bringing this administration home.
Pictures were taken, smiles and words exchanged with the First Lady. She shared with us her hopes for a better tomorrow through her work for all children everywhere. Her hopes were made tangible and accessible through programs that enable each to work within their home and community. We listened, moved and delighted with her simple informality.
The contrast served to remind each of us that this administration is very different from the last.
The People’s House is large. It is not so much a home as a symbol and destination for thoughts and deeds. We snapped our own pictures; unofficial mementos to be savored over and over again through the months and years ahead.
Tea. Pastries. Music. A lavishing of thoughts and a reminder that the building is a symbol of things we cannot touch. Those things we can and did take with us.

The Omnipotent Cult of the Sperm - or where the irrationality of our laws on
'fatherhood' originated.

Aristotle was a smart guy. One day he squinted down into a handful of
his own semen and noticed an army of tiny little wigglers vainly trying to go
someplace. The guy must have had great eyesight, I can say that.
From this evidence the man derived the Theory of the Omni-potent Sperm,
which is still alive and well, living with us today.
Men, asserted Aristotle, are the source of all life. They ejaculate
their wondrous seed into the fertile, but dead soil of the Woman, and behold,
life. All else was irrelevant.
From this handy theory, the original for junk science, Western
Civilization derived the law that gave into the hands of men the full and unquestioned
custody of children, the product of their excessively valuable loins. It was a
question of property riveted to a proper respect for the miraculous process
of impregnation. Birth was just delegated work of little value. Women did it,
for gosh sakes, how much could it be worth? Sex was work a man could get
into.
This was, of course, long before the time of such useful cognitive tools
as economic theory and biophysics. But this is the source of the laws whose
imprint remains with us today.
When they were struggling for their rights women faced a legal reality
that denied they had any right to their children, thanks to Aristotle and his
handy handful of cum. So they punted. They compromised with another legal
fiction. Men and women each should have a 50% interest in their biological
children. As with most compromises, this has not worked either.
Even though economic theory existed no one thought to apply it. Even
though the biological realities were better understood, they were ignored. After
all, what does law have to do with reality?
The social tinkering of generations of We-Know-What's-Good-For-You
theoreticians had so deadened us to the verities of individual rights that we did
not even notice. And lawyers, as we all know, are so toxic they are likely to
turn into politicians.
But it is never too late to change.
The Cult of the Omni-potent Sperm is actually pretty funny when you
summon the images of that scene into the mind. Circle jerks getting off while their
economy (yes, they had one) continued to function on the wealth produced
almost exclusively by the disfranchised. Women and slaves were the working
population. Men who could vote did not work - unless jerking off and talking are
forms of labor. They did become politicians, and presumably, lawyers. Women
were slaves, but they didn't get the use of the title. Slaves, after all,
could buy their freedom in that day in age; women could not.
While ancient Greeks might not have understood the economic theory
whereby they asserted ownership of the source of wealth, they certainly understood
how to do it.
Their descendents are alive and well all over the world today.

Good News: Voter fraud can be handled easily and without voting machines.
Better News: We can also inject some backbone and ethics into the body politic
Best News: The truth really can set you free.


The model that our Founders had in mind when they were working out the forms for America’s elections were clear and simple.
Stand up and be counted. Literally.
Most of them came from towns that used the yearly meeting to settle issues. Some of those issues were strenuously debated. Voting was accomplished by raising hands and counting. The secret ballot was a concept beyond their experience. At the close of the Revolution in which so many of them had fought and died the idea that any individual would be unwilling to stand up for their vote when they had so recently risked life, fortune and honor for their freedom would have seemed alien.
So how does this relate to the issue of fair and just elections and Diebold voting machines?

It goes to the issues of our cultural insistence on confidentiality, the character required to exercise franchise, and the real value of reputation.
There is no right to privacy in the Constitution. No one back then imagined that the Constitution would be used to assert a right to deceive others. Nowhere is it written that there is some convenient privilege to pick up and leave behind obligations voluntarily assumed and fail to reveal those liabilities to our new circle of acquaintance No one imagined a world where a sexual predator would be released from prison and move next door to you and your child without your knowledge. .
Such an idea would have astonished the Founders. A person was their word, and a signed piece of paper could not change the moral bankruptcy of the individual who defaulted.
The Founders all came from small towns and a sprinkling of cities where it was sometimes impossible to be unaware of the reputation and history of most of the people living nearby, either first hand or at one remove. So reputation, your personal history, was the bottom line in the currency of trust.
A good reputation was an asset. A bad reputation was a liability.
When honorable people fell on hard times the community’s extended help was often modified by the reputation of the individual needing assistance.
Demeaned as small mindedness by a generation eager to issue itself unearned wealth in counterfeited reputation the very concept of reputation was replaced by the concept of ‘privacy’ and complicated further by dividing our lives into ‘personal’ and ‘business.’ It was an idea with all of the validity of allowing government to print money unsupported by an objective standard of value.
Bad ideas drive out good when they enable theft. When that happens we are allowing an inflationary standard for truth, assuming that reputation has no real meaning. But, of course it does. Most of us reveal who we are most clearly to those with whom we share the most intimate ties.
Men who abandon their wives and children, women who deceive their husbands, men batter and who drink the family income, each of these earns their reputation.
Those who insist the most loudly on privacy are generally those with the most to hide and the sappy assertion that individuals behave differently in their personal and professional lives may well be in for a shock when the cash box disappears.
The right to privacy has impeded our ability to know each other and therefore driven up our transaction costs in relationships. The insistence that we be able to vote anonymously, a whiny divorcement from responsibility, created the essential avenue for stealing elections, the crisis that now confronts us via the Diebold voting machines produced by Rapture Republicans and armed with software backdoors by the Neocons, Unlimited.
So the answer to the problem is to start standing up to be counted on Election Day.
It can be simple. Perhaps we could even vote from home, many of us. Your vote and the votes of your neighbors could be available on line. You can go look – and Americans will do just that. An increase in interesting conversations across the back fence could be counted as an advantage, not that many of us will really be surprised.
Changing how we vote may then also make us think who we are voting for – and that could be a change that is even more sorely needed today.

The puzzle for the intelligent reader is to pick out a thread of sanity in anything Ann Coulter writes. I have an advantage here because I raised five children and therefore recognize the ploys being dragged out from Ms. Coulter’s little box of tools. Yelling loudly when you have not a shred of justification is a strategy I have had to deal with many times. So is misdirection and fatuous assertions of authority. “Nicky’s Mom said we could” and “Dawn wanted us to roll the water balloons off the roof” make more sense when they are coming out of the mouths of individuals who have not yet begun preschool, however.
Ms. Coulter will use anything that will work. She has a lot at stake.
Ms. Coulter has managed to become a multimillionaire by accepting a job for which she is uniquely qualified. Those who employ her have a hard time finding candidates for this particular position because it demands an unusual intersection of personal skills and good looks combined with a sublime lack of rationality, ethical insight and good taste. At one time in the history of America public discourse followed rules of minimal civility. Maybe someday that will again be true.
The job Coulter fills is to provide a woman’s point of view; ‘commentary,’ attacking those who question any policy of the NeoCons. In case you are in doubt, the NeoCons are the esoteric, Straussian Illuminati-wanna-bes presently running our country right into the ground in hopes of solidifying a base of support and perpetuating their personal fortunes. Coulter’s astonishing and not even funny harangues are protected by the 1st Amendment and enabled by her cool good looks and ‘charming personality.’ They are intended to create the impression that women, at least some women, are on board while stifling objections from those who would normally have delighted in attacking her bizarre statements.
She is well aware that men, who comprise most of the world’s real commentators, are very reluctant to attack her as they doubtless would if she were less esthetically enhanced. Ever hopeful of getting lucky men dislike attacking attractive women. Biology, the unspoken driver of nearly all human action, trumps all. The NeoCons never miss a trick, a word that works rather well in this context.
In her most recent regurgitation of bizarre opinion Ms. Coulter asserts that Liberals love Saddam Hussein, likens them to insects, accuses them of being unable to think for themselves, compares Bill O’Reilly to Jesse Helms, and cites George S. Patton, Jr. as an authority. And in that case she is not wrong. I have a poster of him, one of my heroes on my office wall. But he would have despised Coulter; Patton was a true patriot.
From there she paints the happy picture of the citizens of Iraq recalling a governor within three years and accuses a fellow female columnist of having PMS because all Iraqis are not endlessly grateful for our kind attentions to their civil liberties. These things take time, Coulter says. Someday the Iraqis will be sending thank you notes.
According to Coulter all Liberals are evil and should be taken out and shot for treason. Not being a liberal I was originally amused.
No more.
It is a mistake to spend time trying to respond to what she says. It is time to pay attention to why she is employed, given a forum, and assured millions in compensatory perks.
Always follow the money. Most people involved in politics are there because of money, sex, or power. Money is infinitely fungible.
Ann Coulter is a tool. She is the most visible NeoCon female pundit and has provided an essential service to the interlinking collation of special interests that drive the present agenda to place a monarchial type of government in America; with them in perpetual charge, of course. The trappings of an imperial presidency are falling into place.
According to their faith, Straussians are ‘destined to rule.’ What they are doing now is simply acting out the logic of their personally constructed agenda. We can usefully refer to it as the NeoConning Manifesto.
It does not surprise me that they have tried to accomplish such an end. The power hungry will be always with us and Straussians are not very different than those who preceded them. What surprises me is that those who are really committed to individual freedom and the vision that is America have shown all of the intestinal fortitude of golf balls in opposing them.
The real Republicans cower in their golf clubs, looking for more balls or trying to find a way to profit from the coming tide. The Liberals just look clueless or try to find a way to profit from the coming tide. If they have balls they have yet to find them.
The present tense of this little melodrama became possible at the same time that Nixon, with an unadulterated stupidity only he could have summoned, instituted Wage and Price Controls. At the same time that Republican thinkers all over the country dropped out of that Party a subset of these disgruntled individuals formed a new political movement. The political vehicle was the Libertarian Party. The policy that originated in those now main-stream think tanks is now the current political rhetoric for both parties. With exceptions.
Into this Nixonian power vacuum was drawn those who are now at the core of the NeoCons; former liberals who brought with them the tactics that they had learned in hard scrabble socialism. Their commitment was to gaining and exercising power. These include the Kristols and their close friends.
Attractive nuisances always draw flies. The corrupting potentials of power are too well known to be restated here.
It was not a conspiracy except in the classical understanding of that term. Those who grasped for power over others, having common goals, have drawn together in a cooperative effort to subvert the checks and balances still remaining to us from the Founders.
So here we sit, on the edge of an American fascist state looking at more of the same old Dems, in desperate need of a hero to lead us back towards Liberty.
Mostly, when you wish for something it doesn’t happen, but this time it may well be different. The grasp of the Neocons on America is not yet complete, and if we find that certain someone Anne Coulter may be writing obituaries in Podunk, Idaho at this time next year.