FYI from BATR

Author Says Constitution At Risk From Territorial Unions

An Iconoclast Interview With Texas Author Robert Gaylon Ross

The rapidly-metastasizing Southern Poverty Law Center attack on immigration reformers and other dissenters from contemporary political correctness is finally inspiring me to get around to writing a full response to the SPLC’s naming VDARE.COM a “Hate Group” in early 2004.

The American historian Norman Finkelstein, whose book "The Holocaust Industry" provoked a fierce debate in Germany four years ago, is creating new furor. There are protests in the USA against the publication of his new book "Beyond Chutzpah. On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History". Finkelstein plans to bring the book out in August through the University of California Press. The attorney and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, has, however, expressed his vigorous reservations against Finkelstein's book in a number of letters to the publishers as well as to CA Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's legal department. "This would be a scandal equal to Holocaust denial" Dershowitz told the Tagesspiegel.

He lost, pulling only 30 percent of the vote. I interviewed Crews last week, concentrating on the mechanics of the run, rather than on the issues Crews had raised. (Crews raised them anyway. He's a preacher. It's what he does.)

Please join our nationwide movement to STOP Congress from approving the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

Although the immediate threat posed by CAFTA is job losses, the most important reason to oppose CAFTA is that it would be a steppingstone to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Congressional approval of the FTAA would spell the end of U.S. Independence and our American way of life.

If you can only read one book on the immigration issue, read Mexifornia (Encounter Books, 2003), which author Victor Davis Hanson accurately describes as "part melancholy remembrance of a world gone by, part detached analysis by a historian who knows well the treacherous sirens of romance and nostalgia, and part advocacy by a teacher who always wanted his students to be second to none."

“Each month, the ill-treatment reaching the level of torture as defined in international law is inflicted in dozens of cases, and possibly more. In
other words -- torture in Israel has once more become routine.”[3] And after Professor Dershowitz claims PCATI conceded torture had ended, PCATI was still reporting that “Instances of torture, abuse, prisoners held incommunicado and excessive violence against [Palestinian] detainees
continue to grow in both numbers and severity”, while “interrogators and perpetrators of torture, their commanders and superiors enjoy impunity.”

One of the side benefits of presidential elections every four years is that it allows for fairly close readings of where America's culture as a whole currently stands. That's one reason so many books on the topic are released shortly after each presidential election's conclusion. One of the newest is Brian C. Anderson's "South Park Conservatives," the title of which will be familiar to Tech Central Station readers. The name is based in part on a piece that Stephen Stanton wrote for TCS back in 2002 called "South Park Republicans."

This is a 1 hour+ audio clip featuring Alex Jones' comments on peak oil and then the analysis of Dr. Nick Begich.

Bob Carr paints Gore Vidal as a committed isolationist who believes that projecting American power will always make a situation worse. The vehicle for Vidal's latest assault on the Bush administration is a tract devoted to examining the lives and motives of America's founding fathers. His treatise appears to be that today's America and its foreign policy would be unrecognisable to them and betrays many of their ideals.

Editor in Chief of The North Carolina Conservative

Sen. John Sununu (R.-N.H.) will soon introduce Social Security reform legislation that would make the Social Security system permanently solvent, while guaranteeing no cuts in Social Security benefits and allowing workers to create large personal retirement accounts.

The more time you spend with Austrian economists or libertarian intellectuals, the more you realize that Murray Rothbard's influence has been underestimated. No, his name is not a household word (yet) but his influence is felt in another way: those who read him experience what amounts to the intellectual challenge of their lives. Whether that means adopting his paradigmatic approach to political economy, elaborating on a feature of his system, or attempting a refutation, once read, Rothbard seems inescapable.

Iran-bashing; the most popular beer-parlor game these days.

Mere words cannot fully describe the character of Jerome R. Corsi, the author of the new book, ATOMIC IRAN, published by Cumberland House Publishing, Nashville Tennessee. The reader might plug Mr. Corsi’s name in any internet search engine and watch what surfaces. http://www.mediamatters.org/items/200408060010

Because of the war, fewer dollars are available for real national security and defense of this country. Military spending is up, but the way the money is spent distracts from true national defense and further undermines our credibility around the world.

Manuela Paraipan of the Munich-based World Security Network interviewed Hussein Naboulsi, political officer and director of foreign media relations of the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon. The following is the transcript of that interview.

Gore Vidal On War For Oil, Politics-Free Elections, And The Late, Great US Constitution

For the past 40 years or so of Gore Vidal's prolific 59-year literary career, his great project has been the telling of the American story from the country's inception to the present day, unencumbered by the court historian's task of making America's leaders look like good guys at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal's series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC in 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and through his ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across the years. Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own annual State of the Union message, in magazines and on the talk circuit. His words were always well-chosen, provocative, and contentious: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved," he told an interviewer in 1972, "if people would simply do as I advise."

This swinish and murdering coward [Che Guevara], this child-killer, was the toast of the Oscars.

. . . there is nothing particularly fair about ‘fair trade’. In effect, British retailers and consumers are being browbeaten into subsidising a certain small group of Third World producers at the expense of other poor and equally deserving producers.

At today's White House news briefing, WND asked presidential press secretary Scott McClellan about the seeming inaction on the Sandy Berger case, and the president's views on the border-area Minutemen and Rep. Tom Tancredo.

He was always aware of the inescapable scarcity in this life: that every benefit has a cost, that every advance imposes a price, that there are no free lunches. If you want progress, you will sacrifice tradition. If you want the division of labor that a city offers, you will lose the community that small town life offers. There was not a trace of utopianism in his writings. This is why he is so devastating when he writes about utopian thinkers, of whom there have been many in the West. He hated Plato but acknowledged his greatness. He had the same opinion of Rousseau, who he regarded as the greatest single influence for evil in Western social thought – far more important than Marx.