The American Conservative Party

The Principles of the ACP is a statement of the principles from which our party positions shall be derived. Please feel free to comment on these Principles. We will be having an up/down vote on this in two weeks, starting on May 19. If it is not accepted, it will go back for further revisions.

Principles of the American Conservative Party

Foundation

From this Foundation, all principles flow.

The Creed of the ACP is a belief system of how we feel a just government and its citizens should interract. Please feel free to comment on this Creed. We will be having an up/down vote on this in two weeks, starting on May 19. If it is not accepted, it will go back for further revisions.

We Believe:

• the legitimacy of government exists only as long as it defends human liberty.
• in the equality of all American citizens under the law.
• the origin of human liberty predates government, and therefore liberty cannot be repealed by government.
• the existence of human liberty presupposes the right to defend it, and the basic right to live begets the rights of self-defence and free expression.

I added "identity" as a personal liberty being taken away by big government in favor of big corporations. I would like to add here something I wrote that may help understand why this is a big deal. The best part is that it is an understandable issue when reduced to more simple words. So here goes...

A trademark "in simpliciter."

1. Our Country was founded on the premise that the individual is sovereign - I will take responsibility for myself and my actions

2. Our Country was founded on the premise that government is the servant of the citizens - I will take responsibility to supervise and guide my servant by participating in the political process

3. Our Country was founded on the premise that citizens provide the government with the power and authority to accomplish those tasks it is authorized to - I will provide the means for the government to act, and withdraw the means when it attempts to overstep

4. As a citizen, I recognize the needs and rights of my fellow citizens - I will not attempt to impose my beliefs or ideals on them

The words DONT TREAD ON ME have a special significance in my heart. As a veteran and one who is not ashamed of being an American, the Gadsden flag with the coiled rattlesnake and the defiant "DONT TREAD ON ME" motto, to me, shouts out the historic American spirit of doing what we think is right regardless of what others believe and threaten. Some may see the motto as an arrogant statement. I don’t; I take my lead from "An American Guesser", who wrote to the Pennsylvania Journal in December 1775 concerning the rattlesnake symbol: "She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. ...

There was one line in particular used by John McCain that makes it nearly impossible for me to hold my nose and vote for him, though I do think he's the best chance at avoiding catastrophe.

When Mitt Romney was still in the race, he repeated the phrase 'for patriotism, not for profit', a direct slam at the success of Romney in the business world.

The line is an insult, was meant as one, and seems to have been taken as one by far more people than a middle class sales rep in the Upper Midwest:

Bush Business Donors Shunning McCain for Democratic Candidates -

Q: How do you double the value of a Trabant?
A: Fill up the tank!

Open thread!

Check this article out:

... Spreadshirt, founded in Leipzig, Germany, hosts 500,000 individual T-shirt shops. "These companies significantly lower the threshold for someone to bring anything to market," says Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. "There's an industrial-age bias that you need volume to support a factory; but with this, much-more-creative low-volume businesses become viable."

Border hawks must be scratching their heads, unable to figure out how could see McCain exhibiting any populism, false or otherwise.

Now, it must be due to the publications I read, but I usually see 'populist' used pejoratively. So it came in handy that that the Am-con-mag blogger provided his own positive definition, as an afterthought:

If McCain is a populist, I am a Sandanista. Aside from his silly gas-tax pander, which is also not really populist and is exactly the kind of phony economic populism you would expect from him, McCain has almost never taken a position that one could confuse for populism (i.e., supporting a wide distribution of wealth and power or having government actually serve the interests of citizens).

So, supporting free markets must be populist, right? Nothing diffuses power more efficiently than a spontaneous order.

There are several cool organizations out there that I will be adding to the Friends & Allies section on the lower left side of the page:

Open Congress, sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation, lists all bills in the Senate, has their text, has places to comment, and also will provide your local representatives based on your zip code. One bill in particular that looks rather scary is Obama's Global Poverty Act of 2007.

Open House, also sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation, does the same for the House.

...and much more than I thought.

"John McCain is going to be doing more of these themed tours of America, and one of them is going to be on energy and global climate change. It could get him into trouble with Republicans, of course, and with the base, who don't think there is much climate change going on, but it is something that he's very passionate about and he's going to be talking about it."

We'll see what comes about in this themed tour of his. I was willing to hold my nose at the ballot box and vote McCain come November, but more and more I'm going the way of a write-in. It appears it's going to be a damn-if-we-do, damn-if-we-don't election for us. SF

http://www.examiner.com/blogs-73-Yeas_and_Nays~y2008m5d9-McCain-planning...

Last night in the (sparsely attended) EC chat, an idea was floated by Typewriter_King for a national or state level oil trust fund for citizens.

Before going further, please to join me in a look at the map below:

Here is my idea:
In California, there is an initiative process that allows propositions to be put on the ballot without the approval of the legislature, via signatures on a petition.

Very good article worth a read. SF

Tidbit:

"...I also am beginning to think that we're reaching a tipping point in America, where the number of people who have a personal stake in continuing big government or who are simply ignorant enough to follow the leftist zeitgeist are too big to be overcome. I can only hope that a newfound conservative voice, ringing out like a cry in the wilderness, might be able to convert enough of them to stem the tide."

http://www.northstarwriters.com/dkk119.htm

Big HD video, man. I looked on Reason's Blip.tv channel for a lower quality version of the video, but they don't have it uploaded there. So all I've got is the giant that's unsuited for those without broadband. Sorry. Runs fifteen minutes.

Someone bought the bobbarrmoneybomb.com domain. You knew it would happen, right? I looked for symbolism over the page. Not sure why that picture of Barr has a green tint to it.

Good Lord, are Austin Powers references still considered hip? The top banner doesn't seem to mean anything. There's the hated Lincoln on the five dollar bill. Recall in a previous post how I stated they romanticize the Confederacy. The key, don't get it. I thought at first the watch was set to 4:20 to symbolize marijuana,
but no, the hands aren't apparently set for a time that carries any special meaning.

The Libertarian convention is on May 26th.

Video from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, running 35 minutes. This very much fits as a companion of Friedman's Free To Choose series. The Trabant naturally makes an appearance, to illustrate state planning. That East German car that came in every color, so long as that color was a depressing gray. The subtitles are almost impossibly small and blurry, so you may be unable to understand the German-speakers.

Lew Rockwell reviewed Ron Paul's The Revolution: A Manifesto on Amazon.com, even though- I suspect- he had a hand in the ghost-writing duties. I found this via Pat Buchanan's website. For some reason, I'd forgotten Pat had endorsed Paul.

By the way, if anyone's curious about the split in libertarianism between Reason, CATO, George Mason University and the University of Chicago's School of Economics versus Ron Paul, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, neoconfederates, and other southern paleoconservatives,here's a link to the Rockwell/Rothbard side of the story.

In all my time seeing various occasions where the speech has been passed around, I've never seen the full video. I may have seen the transcript, though rarely, and whenever a video clip was passed around, it was never longer than ten minutes. Well, Ronald Reagan spoke in front of a camera that day when he introduced the convention to Barry Goldwater, and he was at that microphone for a little over twenty-five minutes. He said basically everything we're saying today, and still today I believe every right-thinking individual would agree with the general premise. There would be some that would say "yes, but..." who would concede that this man was speaking the truth.

The Las Vegas odds-maker running for president on the Libertarian ticket made an appearance on Bob Grant's syndicated radio program, and made his case.

The Wide Awakes deemed it necessary to create a page against going the third party route.

On the page, they write:

The Wide Awakes comprehensively reject a Third Party / Splinter approach. The history of third parties or splinter groups in maintaining core Republican values has been a dire one...

This is a real jewel to find. I've never actually heard or seen F.A. Hayek speak before seeing this. The Nobel Prize-winning Austrian sat down in the seventies for thirty minutes with a friendly group of students and discussed price signals and monetary theory. It may startle some to learn he was a private money enthusiast, but it shouldn't be all that controversial, after one gives it some thought.

There's a certain kind of symmetry to this, the UK getting it's own version of the LP, while we're building a Conservative Party in the USA. There's a cross-pollination going across the Atlantic, perhaps. They quote a lot of Americans, and the address a dot org, rather than a dot UK. However, and I suppose this is only slighly
worrisome, they want to break our trans-Atlantic alliance. At least they want to break with the EU, as well.

This is their official website.

Exit question: Would Enoch Powell have joined this party?

Now I'm digging out the truly special videos. This is the one completely new installment for the 1990 update of Milton Friedman's 'Free to Choose' series for Idea Channel and PBS, and this particular Google Video happens to be one of the few with the working closed captioning button. Something else makes this video especially cherished, and that's the speaker that introduces this installment. The Gipper himself, only a couple of years out of office, offers a greeting at the start of this 'survival guide' for the free mind. This installment runs 47 minutes.

First off, My apologies for not being around much lately, My wife has been having health issues and I have been taking care of her.

I got to surf today and ran across this at The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler

Finally, as part of his commitment to talking with all Americans [Except for conservatives and other people who actually are Americans -- Emp. M.] during this presidential campaign, the McCain presidential campaign announced that John McCain will attend the La Raza Annual Convention in San Diego on July 14, 2008.

So much for McCain being against Illegal Immigration.

TAFischer