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Showing posts with the label gun control

THE CONSERVATARIAN MANIFESTO: LIBERTARIANS, CONSERVATIVES, and the FIGHT for the RIGHT'S FUTURE by Charles C. W. Cooke

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   Libertarians and Conservatives - Natural Allies, Natural Rivals Published in 2015 by Crown Forum Charles C. W. Cooke is a writer for National Review  and as such he has been in the center of a storm as the political Right works through a new generation of thought on a variety of issues. In some issues, the political Right is united, such as on the concept of Limited Government and keeping taxes as low as possible. Ron Paul Generally speaking, Libertarians bond more readily with the Right than the Left, which is why Ron Paul identified as a Libertarian for years yet caucused with the Republicans in the Congress and ran for president as a Republican. The dislike of the Nanny State on many issues pushes them together as temporary allies on many issues. But, on other issues such as the War on Drugs and Gay Marriage the Right is split and split deeply. Cooke is attempting to nudge the Republicans a little more to the Libertarian point of view on things so that these temporar

Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War by Joe Bageant

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Published in 2007 by Crown Publishers Just to get it out of the way, Joe Bageant (1946-2011) and I differ politically despite sharing similar roots. We both grew up in rural  America near a working class town. We both were educated in the local public schools and left to go to college and never really went back except to visit (although do I live in a working class neighborhood in the city). Admittedly, his town (Winchester, Virginia) is a little more poor and run down than mine but I may be remembering my home with rose-colored glasses and he may be intentionally focusing on the worst aspects of his. But, Bageant did return to Winchester. He returned to be a foreign correspondent of sorts. His aim is to explain white working-class America ("...that churchgoing, hunting and fishing Bud Light-drinking, provincial America...the people who cannot, and do not care to, locate Iraq or France on a map - assuming they even own an atlas." [p.2]) to the left-leaning, college-ed

No, They Can't: Why Government Fails - But Individuals Succeed (audiobook) by John Stossel

Libertarianism thought delivered painlessly by nice guy Stossel Published April 10, 2012 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Stossel Duration: 9 hours, 14 minutes The title of this audiobook , No, They Can't ,  is a play on the 2008 campaign slogan of then-candidate Obama, "Yes We Can!" Stossel, of course, is the TV consumer reporter turned anchor of ABC's 20/20 who now hosts a weekly show of Fox Business News and a series on one-hour specials on Fox News. He has won nineteen Emmy Awards. He begins his book with an explanation of why he left ABC after more than 20 years and how the culture of ABC made it very uncomfortable for him to explore stories in any way except the tried and true politically correct way. The premise of the this audiobook is that the entire thought process behind that campaign slogan is wrong  - the government cannot do a lot of the things that people want it to do, and even if everyone agreed it should give those th

The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties by David K. Shipler

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An Important Book - for Liberals and Conservatives Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning author David K. Shipler takes a long hard look at the rights we have sacrificed in the era of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, and lesser wars such as the War on Handgun Violence in The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties . I picked this book up figuring that my Conservative sensibilities might get ruffled a bit by a New York Times reporter but I might learn a thing or two along the way. I always tell people that the traditional left-right continuum used to describe someone's politics is so inaccurate as to be useless. Really, what is the difference between an aging hippie living on a hill somewhere raising some dope for personal use and telling the government to get out of his business and a Barry Goldwater-type conservative (like me) living by himself on a hill somewhere that tells the government to get its nose out of

The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country by Howard Fineman

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The Thirteen American Arguments offers a lot of potential but doesn't deliver Howard Fineman I heard Howard Fineman on the radio discussing The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country one day and scribbled the book title down in my little notepad as I was driving down the road. The idea behind this book is truly great - find 13 central arguments that have been passed down over time and look how different eras of Americans have addressed them. Fineman's 13 arguments are: 1. Who is a person? 2. Who is an American? 3. The role of faith 4. What can we know and say? 5. The limits of Individualism 6. Who judges the law? 7. Debt and the Dollar 8. Local v. National Authority 9. Presidential Power 10. The terms of trade 11. War and Diplomacy 12. The environment 13. A fair, "more perfect" union He adds to these by noting 5 groups that often have competing visions about what to do with each of these: the St

Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots by Rod Dreher

Neat idea but bad follow through I grabbed Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots on impulse as I was leaving the local purveyor of books. You see, I am a "Crunchy Con" of sorts, being an avid recycler. But, this book really failed to reach me. In fact, I felt like I was being preached at with certain topics being outright hammered into my skull due to their repetitive re-occurrence. Pluses: -The book addresses the fact that the conservative movement is not monolithic and their are a variety of reasons for people to espouse conservatism. -Embraces a belief in buying local - something I try to do when I go out to eat or shop whenever reasonably possible. -Points out how silly it is to apply big business agricultural regulations to family farms. Negatives: -What the heck is "crunchy"? Search the internet and you may get a reference to "Crunchy granola", which basically means being hippie-like. Or, you

The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms & Violence by Gary Kleck, John K. Lattimer and Don B. Kates

I liked this book a lot except... ...the last 1/3 of it got bogged down in too much technical detail and repeated information that had been previously stated. That is too bad because the first 2/3 was well-written and informative. The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence  really is an interesting book - one that should burst some bubbles of the anti-gun crowd. The writers painstakingly analyze the statistics and the motivations of some of America's biggest gun control lobbies, including the Centers for Disease Control (did you know that they use bogus data to label handguns as a public health threat? They quote FBI data that literally does not exist - they cite the document but it does not have the statistics that they use as a justification to lobby against guns. The document doesn't even report that type of statistic!) Don't let my comments about the last 1/3 of the book deter you from reading the rest of it - it really was worth the time and