I just downloaded a sample general election ballot, which can be obtained here. Check out the list for the Senate race:

For United States Senator:
- Democratic: Larry LaRocco
- Libertarian: Kent A. Marmon
- Independent: Pro-Life (A person, formerly known as Marvin Richardson)
- Independent: Rex Rammell
- Republican: Jim Risch
- Write-in ______________________

Uh… what?

Sure enough - Idaho is the home of an organic strawberry farmer who legally changed his name to Pro-Life.

He says he will run for the highest state office on the ballot every two years for the rest of his life, advocating murder charges for doctors who perform abortions and for women who obtain the procedure.

“I think it’s just and I think it’s proper to have Pro-Life on the ballot,” he told the Idaho Press-Tribune of Nampa. “If I save one baby’s life, it’s worth it.”

I… uh… wow. Honestly? I got nothin’.

Idaho Congressmen are 1 for 1 on this one.

My Representative, Bill Sali (who represents north and west Idaho), voted no. The other Idaho Representative, Mike Simpson (who represents southeast Idaho) voted yes.

Thank you, Representative Sali. Keep it up, please.

Representative Simpson, you are a frickin’ idiot. Either your constituents are frickin’ idiots as well, or you just did something really stupid considering there’s an election a little over a month away. Good luck with that.

We have a 16″ Bushmaster M4gery with an A2 style upper. The rear sight BZO is 34 clicks right. (Yeah, not good!)

The leading theory from folks with more know-how than us is an over-torqued barrel. Apparently there was a run of Bushy uppers with this problem.

We don’t have a vice at the moment, so barrel removal is going to require either some jimmy-rigging or a trip to the gunsmith. Before we start tearing things apart, we’d like to be relatively sure we’re barking up the right tree. Any other ideas what it might be?

(Evilegg, if you can ask Dutch, that’d be grand.)

I’m on hold with CapitalOne. I’m calling to close a savings account, as recent economic events have prompted me to decide I’d rather have my money in a local bank (or, y’know, under the mattress).

When I pushed the button to be transferred to a representative, I got an automated message: “Thank you for your patience. We’re currently experiencing high call volume…”

Yeah, I BET!

Ron Paul is mad. You should be, too. I’m posting this in its entirety - apologies for length, but it’s worth reading.

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”

Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,
Ron Paul

Remember when I posted this entry the other day?

I wound up doing a little digging into Australian firearms laws. I found the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia and learned that, while Aussies by no means have a legally-recognized right to keep and bear arms, gun ownership is possible. It looks like the “application” process is about as fun as trying to get a gun permit in D.C. if your name is Dick Heller, but… it’s possible.

So, I sent a message to the woman who had posted about being unable to own guns in Australia. Her original post seemed receptive to firearms - after all, she’d said she couldn’t have them, not that she wouldn’t. I offered a link to the SSAA and told her that, while I’m American and not well versed in what the legal process there is, I’d be happy to share general firearms knowledge or answer any questions I can.

I didn’t hear anything back for a week.

This morning, I logged into my email and saw a reply from her. It read, in part:

My response is very delayed but I just wanted to say thankyou so much for sending me that link.. so it turns out we can legally own a firearm. We’ve always been told that it’s not legal unless you require a firearm for work (but I now suspect that they do this to keep firearms in the hands of few).

I will probably have a few questions to ask in the coming weeks once we get the application form all sorted out… so thankyou for the offer because I will be taking you up on it!

Consider my day made.

Spam the first: I was just cleaning out my Askimet spam catcher, and I had a (presumably) spam comment written in Hebrew. Neat.

Spam the second: This is actually what I intended to post about in the first place. With the economy sucking, a kid on the way, those pesky bills expecting to get paid every month, and Mike eyeballing law school in a year, I’m more interested than ever in being a cheap bastard. Err, I mean living frugally.

We’re presently cracking down on our eating habits, and that’s where you come in. I want y’all to spam me with tips, tricks, recipes, shopping lists, whatever that deal with eating cheap without eating crap.

Here are a few parameters to keep in mind:
1) We live in north Idaho, so local fresh foods can be somewhat limited, especially in winter.
2) We avoid high fructose corn syrup.
3) We prefer whole grain foods.
4) We do not have any food allergies.
5) We eat organic food when we can. The areas we’re most adamant about this are dairy, eggs and meat, to avoid growth hormones and antibiotics.
6) We will be hunting again this year and, Artemis willing, intend to have venison make up a good chunk of our meat supply.
7) We have an electric stove/oven, a crock pot, a cast iron dutch oven, a blender, a bread maker, a dehydrator, and a nice KitchenAid mixer. We do not have a microwave.
8) I do the lion’s share of the cooking, and I work 10-6 most days. I prefer to get something started before I leave, or otherwise avoid spending two hours cooking when I get home.
9) We don’t like eating things with ingredients we can’t pronounce. The closer it is to something that you’d find in nature, the more comfortable we are with it.
10) We’re interested in getting in gear with food storage/disaster preparation, so ingredients and recipes that work well into a rotation of staples and canned goods get bonus points.

Alright, flying monkies, do your thing! And hey… if you give me some good ideas, we’ll have you over for dinner next time you’re in town. :)

I was just checking out a forum that is populated primarily by crunchy parents, mostly women. Depending on which sub-forum you’re in, they range from raving Obama liberals to preparedness homesteaders. Anyway, I was perusing the financial forum (which seems to lean toward the conservative prepared types), and came across a thread about buying gold. The author was asking whether it’s better to save money by buying in 1-ounce increments, or spend extra to get 1/10 ounce coins that would be more spendable in times of need.

Someone replied:

“In an economic depression, you are better off having goods to trade (food, clothing, gas/oil, etc), and weapons to protect your cache of goods. If people are starving, it won’t matter how much gold you have on hand - people can’t eat gold.”

Then the original author replied, and here’s part of what she said:

“thanks for the heads-up guys!! good point about stockpiling other goods! we’re not allowed to bear arms in australia… “

As the title says: Count your blessings… and keep your powder dry.

I’ve been musing about the topic of sex education, since it’s come up so frequently in the wake of the Bristol Palin pregnancy story. The Palins failed as parents, many say, because their presumed abstinence-only approach didn’t prevent their daughter’s pregnancy. This is evidence abstinence-only is an unacceptable policy. Poor Bristol Palin is pregnant because her parents didn’t give her access to birth control.

So, here are a few thoughts:

1) Sarah Palin has backed abstinence-only education in public schools. In other words, she hasn’t felt it’s the place of the taxpayer to fund, nor the public school teacher to teach, explicit sex education. You may agree or disagree with that, and as I’ve said before, it’s a valid topic to debate. But does anybody have any evidence the Palins believe in or practice abstinence-only education at home? Is it not possible that Sarah Palin doesn’t believe explicit sex education belongs in public schools because she believes, rather, it is the job of parents to have those conversations with their children?

2) Here are some stats on birth control failure rates with (older) teens. According to that site, 56.2% of female teens are choosing abstinence, and guess what - it has a 0% pregnancy rate. I’d argue it isn’t fair to consider teens not choosing abstinence be the “failure” rate of abstinence-only education, either, since most use another form of birth control to avoid pregnancy. Compare that to the “failure” rate of pills or condoms, which is the rate of accidental pregnancies. See what I mean?

Only 8.1% of teens don’t use anything at all - and yes, that is a very bad plan and almost always (96% of the time) results in pregnancy within two years. But how about the 16.7% using oral contraceptives - which have a one-year failure rate of 8.6%, and a two-year failure rate of 14%? Do those teens who become pregnant while on oral contraceptives constitute enough evidence to scrap the idea of ever giving teens the pill? Do we point to that and say oh, look, there’s a case where that didn’t work… so nanny nanny boo boo, you’re wrong, I’m right?

3) Here’s the one that is really sticking my craw. Bristol Palin is pregnant because she had sex with somebody and whatever form of birth control they chose (or neglected to choose) didn’t work out. Aren’t we forgetting about that somebody? I haven’t heard anybody asking what kind of sex education Levi (the baby’s father) received, either at school or at home. How do we know his mom didn’t hand him a big box of Trojans when he turned 15 and tell him to go have fun? How do we know his dad didn’t sit down with charts and graphs and medical information and explain in graphic detail how everything works, what various birth control options are, etc.? Where is his responsibility in this? Yet again we have society sticking the scarlet letter on a pregnant teen, and completely failing to recognize the shared responsibility of the father.

Furthermore, Bristol and Levi had access to confidential birth control services and even abortion services a mere 45 minutes from Wasilla. You honestly expect me to believe two 17-year-olds haven’t so much as heard about birth control because they’re so sheltered by their evil abstinence-preaching parents? You want me to believe they don’t have friends who have paid a visit to that Planned Parenthood? You really want me to accept that neither one of them knows about Google!?

For the umpteenth time: There is definitely a valid debate to be had about appropriate levels of taxpayer-funded sex education in public schools. But wow - the assumptions and accusations being leveled without any actual information about what went on within two family circles are really something else.

*composes self*

Via Kit: LOOK!

Special Events :: Community Event
Justice Antonin Scalia: “Constitutional Interpretation”
2:00 PM University of Montana

Description:

The Judge William B. Jones and Judge Edaward A. Tamm Judicial Lecture presented by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

Free and open to the public.

You better bet yer ass we’re going!

SCALIA!!!