How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians’ stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers’? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.

The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad, and Mr. [Peter] Schweizer details the most lucrative methods: accepting sweetheart gifts of IPO stock from companies seeking to influence legislation, practicing insider trading with nonpublic government information, earmarking projects that benefit personal real estate holdings, and even subtly extorting campaign donations through the threat of legislation unfavorable to an industry. The list goes on and on, and it’s sickening.

Astonishingly, none of this is technically illegal, at least not for Congress. Members of Congress exempt themselves from the laws they apply to the rest of us. That includes laws that protect whistleblowers (nothing prevents members of Congress from retaliating against staffers who shine light on corruption) and Freedom of Information Act requests (it’s easier to get classified documents from the CIA than from a congressional office).

The corruption isn’t confined to one political party or just a few bad apples. It’s an endemic problem encompassing leadership on both sides of the aisle. It’s an entire system of public servants feathering their own nests.

—Sarah Palin, “How Congress Occupied Wall Street”

Hat tip: Roger Ebert

TechDirt says SOPA, if enacted, would create “The Great Firewall of America”.

Nate Anderson of Ars Technica says SOPA would kill the internet as we know it by replacing freedom and chaos with order and restrictions. He says that if SOPA were passed into law, the internet of the 1990′s wouldn’t “sound like something from a foreign country so much as something from a foreign planet“. He quotes the violent, aggressive, indecent, anti-social, anti-civilization RIAA: “‘An Internet of chaos may meet a utopian vision but surely undermines the societal values of safe and secure families and job and revenue-creating commerce,’ said the music group in 2010. It later called for ‘an Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos.’” He continues, “The trends have been present for years, but if SOPA passes, it will make them explicit: the chaotic, unfilterable, borderless Internet of the 1990s is truly dead, replaced by an Internet of order, filtered connections, and national borders.”

Larry Downs at CNet.com says SOPA “creates vague, sweeping new standards for secondary liability, drafted to ensure maximum litigation. It treats all U.S. consumers as guilty until proven innocent. If passed, the bill would give media companies unprecedented new powers to shape the structure and content of the Internet.” Downs’s column contains numerous other highlights:

“Rather than give up on the idea of legislating a fast-changing Internet, the House authors have instead built in as many alternative definitions, open-ended requirements, and undefined terms as they could.”
[...]
[SOPA includes] “new authority for the attorney general to cut off access and funding for “parasite” foreign Web sites. (SOPA requires the U.S. copyright czar to determine the extent to which these foreign infringers are actually harming U.S. interests….”
[...]
Search engines (a term broadly defined that includes any website with a “search” field), along with payment processors and advertising networks, can also be forced to cut ties with the parasites. Operators of innocent sites have limited ability to challenge the Justice Department’s decision before or after action is taken.

SOPA also includes its own version of another Senate bill, which would make it a felony to stream copyrighted works. The House version allows prosecution of anyone who “willfully” includes protected content without permission, including, for example, YouTube videos where copyrighted music is covered or even played in the background.

While supporters deny that such minimal infractions would meet the bill’s definition of “willfully,” the actual text suggests otherwise. Prosecutors need only demonstrate that the use had a total “retail value” of more than $1,000.
[...]
The House bill also makes significant changes to provisions in the Senate bill that afford new enforcement tools to private holders of copyrights and trademarks. This “market-based system,” as SOPA calls it, greatly extends existing provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, under which copyright holders can easily issue takedown notices for unlicensed use of protected content.

SOPA’s “market based” provisions are not limited to foreign Web sites. Indeed, they apply to any site or “portion of” a site that is “dedicated to theft of U.S. property”….

Unlike the DMCA, SOPA provides little penalty for wrongly targeting websites turn out not to be “dedicated to theft of U.S. property.”
[...]
SOPA may represent the most intrusive and dangerous effort yet to micromanage Internet infrastructure and services. A wide range of technology-oriented advocacy groups were quick to cry foul. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in its initial review of the bill, determined the legislation would cause irreparable harm. “This bill cannot be fixed,” the organization wrote on its Web site; “it must be killed.”

The Center for Democracy and Technology’s David Sohn, similarly, called out the bill’s broad and vague new standards for “facilitating” copyright and trademark infringement.

He argues that SOPA effectively introduces new monitoring requirements for all websites that allow user content, even comments posted to blogs.

Downs’s report contains so much more information that I’m not even done reading it yet.

The more you hear about Congress’s attempts to govern, restrain, regulate, cleanse, police, and secure the internet, the more obvious it becomes that what our professional criminal class really seeks is to choke our freedoms, destroy the internet’s openness, control our activities and exchanges (and even eventually our speech), and protect wealthy, well-connected, campaign-contributing copyright holders at the expense of the common people. To make this observation is not conspiratorial, it is not kooky; it is obvious. It’s as plain as day. Reading about the input that copyright holders had in writing the E-PARASITE and PROTECT IP acts and the immense support copyright holders are giving them underscores the now-obvious fact that any nominally “private” corporation or person that has an active, interested role in violating people’s rights, diminishing their well-being, or carrying out the State’s depredations belongs squarely in the professional criminal class alongside the politicians.

The fact that these conniving parasites even want such power is proof that they shouldn’t have it.

Starting at about the 5:30 mark, the owner made some comments that motivated me to blag about it. Regarding high-fructose corn syrup vs. cane sugar:

Everything prepared in this country has corn syrup in it, and it’s totally unnecessary. The largest single crop in the world is cane sugar. It’s larger than corn and wheat put together. It takes three times less sugar to sweeten with than it does corn syrup. I mean, take a look around at the diabeetus. You’ll never get an allergy from sugar. You’re going to get an allergy because there’s a spore in corn syrup that cannot be refined out, and people have allergies to corn products. So why would you use corn as a sweetener?

Once a year, Coca-Cola makes a kosher Coke, just before Passover. The kosher one will be cane sugar, it’ll have a yellow cap, it’ll have a U in the upper left-hand corner with a circle around it, and the label will still say “corn syrup”; it won’t be changed. Try the two side by side and then tell me. The one with the cane sugar just goes “Pop!” and it explodes and the flavor just “Wham!”, it’s delicious. And the one with the corn syrup is like [blows raspberry with tongue].

Regarding big businesses vs. small businesses:

Big business loves big government. They just take the marketplace up, eliminate all the little guys, they run them out of business, and then they jack the prices up and control the market. But you look at the candy section, it’s Nestle’s [sic] Hershey’s, and Mars, or you look at the soda pop market, it’s Coke and Pepsi. My thought had always been that what I wanted to do was do business with other businesses my size. To help them become unique businesses. And that’s exactly what’s happening. And what’s really interesting about it is that out of all the things that we sell wholesale, one business a mile away from the other…what they’re selling is totally different. One restaurant we sell to, they love the floral sodas, and another place, they can’t give them away, but they’re doing the Red Ribbons. And I’m going, “Isn’t this interesting, that everybody has found their own level and their own niche, and they’ve done it on their own.” The important thing is to set yourself apart and provide your customers with something that nobody else has.

Regarding the California Refund Value (bottle recycling) law:

Who do you think passed the RV laws? … It wasn’t written for the consumer, and it certainly wasn’t written to keep this country “green”. It was written so Coke and Pepsi wouldn’t have to wash a bottle, and they wouldn’t have to make recyclable bottles [I think he means "reusable", as in refillable?], and they could transfer the cost to the consumer.

I called the recycling center when I got started, and I said, “Listen, I want to put a recycling center in [my store]. They [the customers] bring them back to me, and I’ll give them the money, and I’ll sell them some more sodas.” “Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t do that because you have a recycling center two blocks away.” I said, “Yeah, they don’t give the full price, and I want to give the full price to the customer to get them back to sell them some more!” And he says, “Well, if you did anything like that, you’d be in restraint of trade. And you could probably get sued by the state.”

If we were really caring about the environment, we would have reuse, not recycling.

Wish I could go there. I don’t even generally like soft drinks, but I’d love to try some of those unique flavors, and I’d love to give this man business.

Speaking of large internet-related companies, Canadian ISPs admitted that their pricing structure (which they call “usage-based billing”) is designed to discourage/reduce internet use by its customers. Cory Doctorow writes, “In other words, they’ve set out to limit the growth of networked based business and new kinds of services, and to prevent Canadians experimentation that enables them to use the Internet to its fullest.” Michael Geist, whom he quotes, says that this pricing model, therefore, is more accurately called behavior-based billing. As a rule, private companies in a free market always strive to attract more customers in order to do more business and make more money, in contrast to government-created “companies” and government agencies, which always seem to be seeking to limit the amount of products or services they have to provide to customers (water, electricity, every office you have to go and wait in line). This indicates that Canadian ISPs are not truly private companies in anything resembling a free market.

Another company that is not close to being entirely “private” and operates in a market that isn’t close to being free is Time Warner. Time Warner supported a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would prevent city governments from introducing fiber-optic broadband infrastructure in their cities. Simple pro-business right-wing conflationists reflexively support a bill that would prevent city governments from doing anything (especially providing a product or service that can and/or should be provided by private companies) and reflexively support the interests of private businesses. They are not entirely wrong, because the ultimate solution is not to get city governments into the fiber-optic broadband business or any other utility. However, the solution that would help the residents of cities where broadband is scarce, expensive, or nonexistent is to remove the regulations that are keeping it that way rather than passing new laws that seem to be mainly aimed at propping up telecom giants. No, I don’t know what laws North Carolina or any other state might have passed restricting competition and expansion in the broadband industry, but, well, look at this bill. It’s a bill that the state legislature will pass that will have profound effects on the telecom industry. It is undoubtedly one bill out of thousands across the country that have set regulations and restrictions on telecommunications, always to the detriment of the average (or, especially, poor) citizen.

Higher education might be the next asset bubble. Well, it’s certainly overpriced, a situation that is entirely the result of government interventions (mainly guaranteed loans to everybody) whose purpose is to make college affordable to more people. All government action has unintended consequences.

This is a great TED talk by Indian scientist Sugata Mitra about how children can teach themselves (and motivate themselves) when given the opportunity (and the necessity) to do so.

Speaking of the problems with traditional, regimented, government education, Boston University Psychology professor Peter Gray writes about the seven sins of our forced-education system. He expands upon a previous post in which he called forced education “prison”. In this post, he also outlines seven reasons compulsory education is harmful to society and not just the children who are currently forced to go to school. Numbers 3 and 4 are “Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance” and “Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.” It’s a really good, brief read.

Sixty-three percent of people killed in the Iraq War have been civilians.

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

Glenn Greenwald is dismayed at the speed with which the Obama regime’s official reason for sending military aid to Libya changed.

Glenn Greenwald writes another masterful post on America’s two-tiered justice system: one standard of justice for legislators, high-level bureaucrats, and their big-business cronies, and another standard for everyone else. It is not possible to read Glenn Greenwald consistently and objectively and remain an Obama supporter, or possibly even a Democratic Party supporter.

In the heady days of the 1990s, it was widely assumed that the global Internet was, by its nature, an anarchic zone of untrammeled speech inherently immune from the control of governments quite apart from any formal legal constraints on censorship. But as political scientist Henry Farrell, among other scholars, has observed:

[A] small group of privileged private actors can become “points of control”—states can use them to exert control over a much broader group of other private actors. This is because the former private actors control chokepoints in the information infrastructure or in other key networks of resources. They can block or control flows of data or of other valuable resources among a wide variety of other private actors.

The freedom of the global Internet comes with an increased dependence on globalized intermediaries, over whom political actors in large and valuable markets will typically exert enormous leverage. A dissident publication running its own press may have an incentive to resist that political pressure—but a multinational credit card company or hosting provider, for whom the publisher is a relatively insignificant source of revenue—will often find its bottom line better served by compliance. As Farrell notes, we’ve already seen a similar strategy pursued against offshore gambling sites, whose payment processors were threatened with litigation by ambitious prosecutors.

It’s a sobering validation of Friedrich Hayek’s famous dictum that to be controlled in our economic pursuits—perhaps now more than ever—means to be controlled in everything. Whatever you think of Wikileaks, the idea that a controversial speaker can be so effectively attacked quite outside the bounds of any direct legal process, thanks to the enormous leverage our government exerts on global telecommunications and finance firms, ought to provoke immense concern for the future of free expression online.

Confessions of a Price Controller by Joseph Antos. He explains how Medicare’s price-control system keeps prices up, which is no different from any price controls.

The Resource-Based Relative Value System (RBRVS) is founded on the simple, but incorrect, view that higher payments are justified for services that require greater inputs—ignoring the consumer side of the market.
[...]
Prices must respond to both the supply and demand sides of the market to allocate resources to their best use. Medicare ignores the market, setting prices for physician services based on an academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union and implemented by the American Medical Association. Those prices do not reflect the value patients receive from their care, and they do not reflect shifts in the demand for particular kinds of services (such as primary care) as the population ages or as more people have health insurance.
[...]
The problem for a government price controller is that he can never know when the price structure is “right.” He can know when physicians are unhappy with their prices because they will complain, but that does not necessarily mean that those prices should be raised. He cannot know when prices are too high, because physicians benefiting from that mistaken generosity will not complain. The bias is always to raise prices, not lower them.

As good, simple, short as that column is, the last sentence struck me as some platitude that was insisted upon by an editor, which might be a good example of why the glorious world of blagging and self-publishing produces more unfiltered honesty and relevant commentary than writing for some corporate publication. Or maybe it’s just because it was published by the American Enterprise Institute. Either way, it was kind of funny and dumb: “Let’s hope a Republican Congress will have the guts to start pulling the needle out of our arms.”

UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First, originally published at cnbc.com. You can’t make this stuff up.

Federal Student Aid To For-Profit Schools Has Tripled In Recent Years, The Consumerist. This is because when the State subsidizes something by taking money from people who earned it and giving it to others, there is no incentive for the prices to go down. In fact, there is incentive for the prices to go up, so they have. In other words, the demand for college in general and the demand for expensive colleges in particular have increased because price is much less of an issue now that the Imperial Federal Government will give you loans to pay for everything. Because the demand is artificially inflated, so are the prices. It is simple.

Obama argues his assassination program is a “state secret” by Glenn Greenwald. I don’t know why everyone who calls himself a “liberal” doesn’t read Glenn Greenwald regularly. I haven’t ever seen a Glenn Greenwald blag post shared by my friends on Facebook. I doubt the implementation of a state assassination program was cited in that one article, shared by at least two of my friends on Facebook, listing all the things Obama has accomplished in his first two years in office with a Democratic Congress. I wonder why they aren’t too proud of that one. I wonder how many have even heard about it.

The Cost of the TARP: One More Time from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Money quote:

Thanks to their access to below market credit in their time of need, courtesy of the taxpayer bailouts, the Wall Street executives are still pocketing tens of millions a year and the banks are again making record profits. Had the market been allowed to work its magic, this wealth and income would have been available for the rest of society. The financial sector will continue to be a drain on the rest of the economy because the government saved it from the consequences of its own recklessness.

Federal and state governments offer a lot of subsidies and incentives for businesses, or so we’re told, but we never have more than one admin person working the front desk at any given time. We don’t have qualified staff ready to go looking for government programs to tap into. We know how to serve private customers, but not how to get money from the government. This puts us at a disadvantage compared to big companies that can afford to spread the cost of a full-time “getting money from the government” employee.

A government that consumes a larger percentage of the GDP is a government that makes lobbying more fruitful. In a lobbying war, however, the small will inevitably lose out to bigger enterprises.
[...]
You might think that we’d be doing well because the government has decided to put more money into education. The new funds, however, generally can only be used at degree-granting institutions. Once enrolled in a “bachelor’s of aviation” program, the spigots open up for the student’s tuition, housing, and food. This is great for established large colleges and universities because, even though they may charge 50% higher prices than our school, it works out to be cheaper for the student. Our prices are lower and our instructors are more experienced, which gives us a competitive advantage when dealing with privately-funded students. In a world where most of the new students are government-funded, however, we are inevitably out-competed by the big schools.

One commenter pointed out that you don’t have to be a big business with legions of administrators and lobbyists to get the government grant money; you can hire private businesses or independent contractors who know how to get the government money for you, and in this way, it’s one private business helping another private business get government money that was going to be spent anyway. That’s not a terrible argument for the practical debate about who suffers and benefits under corporate-State socialism, but as it does so often, Ludwig von Mises’s calculation argument comes into the forefront: how do we know the free market would have allocated the government grant money to the places it ends up? How do we know that was best? What did we miss out on because it was allocated thusly? When and how would those allocations of resources have been deemed inefficient and been modified or replaced altogether with some opportunity that someone anticipated or took a chance on, and then gained a competitive advantage and transformed the market in some important way? It is impossible to know or even guess.

Even if, as I doubt, small governments are or could become as capable of getting tax dollars as large businesses, and even if the endless government regulations that big businesses lobby for and small businesses have no resources to oppose or support could help some small businesses as much as some large businesses, there is absolutely no way to determine whether the ultimate allocation of tax money (and labor, capital, land) was the way it would have been without State interference. Because the State can’t calculate but markets can, it is clear that the free market’s allocation of that grant money would be more efficient for the whole society and in the long run than the government’s.

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive.
[...]
Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can’t sue a priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue.

If you can’t be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical safety; if you can’t be guaranteed anything except that you’ll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean?
[...]
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
[...]
There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.

How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it.
[...]
Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.
[...]
What is “proper” social order? What does “right” social growth look like? If you don’t know you’re like me, not like John Dewey who did, or the Rockefellers, his patrons, who did, too.

Somehow out of the industrial confusion which followed the Civil War, powerful men and dreamers became certain what kind of social order America needed, one very like the British system we had escaped a hundred years earlier. This realization didn’t arise as a product of public debate as it should have in a democracy, but as a distillation of private discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but that didn’t disturb them. They had a stupendous goal in mind. The end of unpredictable history; its transformation into dependable order.

From mid-century onwards certain utopian schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play, following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be reached in stages, was an orderly, scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.

During the post–Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.
[...]
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.

Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another.
[...]
[I]t isn’t difficult to find various conspirators boasting in public about what they pulled off. But if you take that tack you’ll miss the real horror of what I’m trying to describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway—without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I’m correct, we’re in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.

If you obsess about conspiracy, what you’ll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we’re in, it won’t be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys.

In the future, I would like to read more of John Taylor Gatto, perhaps by actually buying one of his books. Other than promoting a free market of schooling and more family involvement in children’s educations, I don’t recall him offering very many concrete solutions, but that’s probably because, as he said, there are as many ways to educate a child as there are fingerprints, and families, communities, private companies subject to profit and loss, and even (maybe especially) the children themselves should decide how they each should gain an education. I think the most important point about compelled schooling is that it absolves parents, and therefore children, of most of the responsibility that they would otherwise have in children’s education, and it is impossible to really gauge how much human value is lost by the absence of such a vested interest.

As David Z. predicted a year ago and I predicted a couple times in the past year, the bailout money taken/inflated from the American public and given to Chrysler and GM will not be repaid. “Oh, but it’s not a bailout; it’s a LOAN!” Eat crow, you accessories to robbery.

But, at least we only lost $30 billion in this venture instead of the possible maximum of $44 billion.

The $30 billion isn’t the end of it because this is the way Obamanomics works. It’s the same way Bushonomics and every other socialist, dirigiste economy works: the rich and well-connected benefit at the expense of the common people, who don’t get bailouts and are impoverished by inflation.

Hat tip: David Z. at …no third solution

When I say Teddy Kennedy was a terrible senator, obviously what makes him so harmful in my mind is what made him a great senator in the minds of so many Statists. He did support liberalization of immigration laws, he didn’t seem to be an outrageous drug warrior, he seemed to oppose the death penalty in principle, he seemed to oppose some military interventionism, and he voted against attacking Iraq and further funding the war at at least one point. So I will commend him for all of that right here.

The problem with Kennedy, as with a great many senators and congresshumans, is that so many of his stances were so entirely political, not principled. For instance, he supported the murderous military adventures of a president who wrote a (D) after his name but not one who wrote an (R) after his name. I have the impression that he supported just about anything the big-government Democrats did and opposed anything with a Republican stench to it; that he loved big government for the power and prestige it gave him, his family, and their cronies, and not, originally, because he really felt it could help the poor or protect the innocent. He probably convinced himself of the latter in time, but so do most people who live a life of power and privilege at the expense of the innocent taxpayers.

Some people who have no conception of civics and government refer to Ted Kennedy as a “civil servant.” What a load of obsequious crap. He was born into extreme wealth, he never had to work a real job in his life, he lived off of stolen funds his entire career, and his work consisted of taking from some to give to others while keeping a large portion of the loot for the professional criminal class. The taxpayers served him, many of them unwillingly.

Kennedy had the reputation for being a great advocate of civil liberties, but he fervently fought against and helped weaken our most important civil liberty after free speech: gun ownership and use. This was his proudest stance, his most noble crusade, the object of as much adulation by Statist cheerleaders as anything else he did. Additionally, his neo-liberal attitude that society should be dominated by racial statistics and race-awareness is clearly an attitude that has retarded our progress in racial harmony over the last few decades as much as any residual racism or bigotry has. He was a collectivist through and through, an ideology entirely incompatible with individual rights of any kind.

Some of my friends who are incapable of seeing past the (D) that appeared after Ted Kennedy’s name scorned cable news networks for their presumed fixation on Kennedy’s murder of Mary Jo Kopechne. “Let me guess: it was all Chappaquiddick, all the time,” one said disdainfully. Well, did he kill her, or didn’t he? Did he try to save his political career, or try to save her? Should he have spent the last 40 years in prison, or shouldn’t he?

Suggesting that news programs should not focus on Ted Kennedy’s heartless and remorseless murder of Mary Jo Kopechne would be like suggesting that they discuss O.J. Simpson’s life and times without giving much attention to his murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

After leaving someone to drown in your car and being solely responsible for her death, everything else you did in your life pales in comparison to that hideous act! O.J. Simpson’s irrelevant achievements on the football field (and tireless search for the real killers) don’t make up for his two murders in anyone’s mind. Mark David Chapman’s supposed religious conversion doesn’t make up for his murder of John Lennon in very many people’s minds. And Ted Kennedy’s dubious achievements as a “civil servant” don’t make up for his murder of Mary Jo Kopechne! Besides, he was a detriment to society in the Senate. It is indicative of our society’s backwardness that people regard his accomplishments in the Senate as a saving grace for his personal failings; they should be thought of as adding insult to injury!

I’ve largely grown out of the primitive attitude that revels in people’s deaths. Except in the more monstrous cases (like child molesters and people who talk at the theater), I will be content with my hatred of what the person did and everything he stood for without wishing for his death and celebrating it when it comes. I’ll just celebrate his absence from the Senate. I’m glad he is no longer a senator, that is all.