Be libertarian one time? Is that the same thing as "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"?
Author’s note: I wrote this brief dispatch about my run-in with libertarian pro-marijuana activist/former judge James P. Gray back in March of 2011. But the piece disappeared into the black void of my computer hard-drive, and I forgot all about it—until now. I’m glad the text turned up, because Judge Gray’s sleazy efforts to bring lefties and progressives into the Libertarian Party fold under the innocuous banner of pot legalization is much more relevant today than it was 2011. After all, Judge Gray is now the running mate of Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson is using the weed wedge issue to siphon off votes from Obama. —YL
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There have only been a handful of instances over the years when Megan McArdle felt compelled to issue a “full disclosure” about her journalism conflicts of interest. And every time, these “full disclosures” have been used as smokescreens to give readers the false impression that McArdle was being up-front about her conflicted relationships.
S.H.A.M.E. just published a brand new shill profile. Its latest subject: Megan McArdle, who was just hired on this September as Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s “special correspondent on economics, business and public policy.” In case you’re wondering, yes, that’s her in the image…
I did a simple check: I went to the websites of three of the biggest names in liberal activist politics: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU. Checking their websites, I was surprised to find that not one of those three organizations lists labor as a major topic or issue that it covers.
There is so much more to hate about Aubrey McClendon than this—the millions McClendon poured into Gary Bauer’s gay-bashing outfit “Americans United To Preserve Marriage” and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the role McClendon and his Whirlpool heiress wife played in stealing waterfront land from Benton Harbor, an African-American slum and the poorest city in Michigan, in order to expand an exclusive golf course country club for residents of St. Josephs, where McClendon owns several plots of land…
Limey libertarian conspiracy theorist James Delingpole befouls the land Down Under with a book claiming that climate change science is an Illuminati conspiracy by the Club of Rome to enslave mankind…And Australia’s top libertarian think-tank is James Delingpole’s biggest promoter…
John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” served on the Cato Editorial Board for Cato Supreme Court Review during the Bush presidency. At the same time, Yoo was writing the Bush administration’s legal justifications for waterboarding, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping and more.
In the early 2000’s, the co-chairman of the Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Privatization, José Piñera, played a key role advising and overseeing Slovakia’s mass pension privatization, which passed in 2003 under the free-market government of Mikulas Dzurinda. Today, Slovakia’s retirees are groaning under the austerity pain administered to them by the Cato Institute.
I travelled to Breitbart’s hood to carry out a private investigation into what happened that fateful night …and found a grisly, blood-splattered crime scene just a block away from his home.
The real meaning of the amagi cuneiform isn’t about abolishing “big government” or abolishing the Fed–nope, it’s about abolishing debts to free citizens from debt slavery. What the history-failures at Liberty Fund hilariously mistranslated was that the term “return to mother” is Sumerian-speak for “jubilee”–as in “debt forgiveness” or “freedom from debt.”
This summer I traveled to Quanah, the dusty North Texas railroad town that Harry Koch called home, to find out more about the life of the man who spawned the two most powerful oligarchs of our time…
Things heated up last Friday after Herman Cain finished his stand up routine at the Kochs’ Americans For Prosperity event in Washington D.C. and the crowd settled in for a late night Ronald Reagan tribute dinner. At least 500 protesters, including…
If the Kochs are so anti-interventionist, then why does a 2005 State Department cable show Charles Koch’s premier libertarian think-tank in the former Soviet Union, circle-jerking with one of the most notorious CIA/State Department front-groups for the American Empire?
There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs.
Slate’s David Weigel is one of the few libertarian media figures who at least has had the courtesy to disclose, on occasion, his past relationships with Koch-funded outfits (Institute for Humane Studies, Reason Magazine…). But half-disclosures can be deceiving. The…
Urgent update, folks! Andrew Breitbart’s Koch-monkey, Joel B. Pollak, just outdid himself as the top ace gumshoe reporter of the retarded-right. Yes folks, Joel. B. Pollak, peddler of the “Johnny Chen Conspiracy Theory” that changed the face of journalism as we know it, now has another shocking scoop about eXiled editor Mark Ames–and to get the scoop, he even used what hi-tech futuristic types call a “proxy.”
Khloe Kardashian, Donna D’Errico of Baywatch, former Miss USA Susie Castillo, Playboy nude-model Tammy Banovac, Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones: to most Americans, a list of names like that sounds like the punch-line to an elaborate pop culture comedy routine….
This anti-TSA protester coming straight outta Waco! On Saturday June 4, a dozen or so anti-TSA protesters marched on the Texas State Capitol, demanding that state legislators and Governor Rick Perry stand up to the federal government and pass a bill…
You have to give David Foster Wallace some credit – he was better at making his fans bash themselves than any other writer of the Pynchon school. His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a 1000-page novel full of intestinally-shaped sentences and fine-print notes on calculus, organic chemistry and VCR programming. Normally, when a book like that comes out, people realise its purpose right away: terrorising B.A. students into meek submission.
On the same day he posted his famous “don’t touch my junk” TSA video, Tyner destroyed evidence that would have exposed his deception, because he feared that if he didn’t, the public wouldn’t believe his “don’t touch my junk” story with the TSA.
Really? This is the year that the Republican right-wing, backed by corporate sponsors like the billionaire Koch brothers, have declared all-out war on public sector unions. It’s the culmination of a decades-long crusade against organized labor, which has only hit…
Mark Ames goes on the Amy Goodman Show on Democracy Now! to talk about the Koch brothers’ shocking election mailer to their workers, the subject of Ames’ latest cover story feature for The Nation magazine co-authored with labor journalist…
Mark Ames talks with Dylan Ratigan about his investigative article in The Nation magazine, co-authored with labor journalist Mike Elk, exposing the scary and bizarre propaganda and elections influencing that Koch Industries now forces on its employees. Watch the video…
This article was first published in The Nation. On the eve of the November midterm elections, Koch Industries sent an urgent letter to most of its 50,000 employees advising them on whom to vote for and warning them about…
