The failure of the Ron Paul movement to affect any change, gain any electoral leverage — or for that matter achieve even a modicum of visibility during the Republican Party's quadrennial Nuremberg pageant — has been made all the more depressing because Bob Barr and the Texas Republican couldn't work out a deal to join forces on the Libertarian ticket.

It’s a disappointing testament to the political vision and skills of both men that they didn’t recognize their historic opportunity once it became clear Paul's fortunes in the GOP were souring so badly, and Barr couldn't deliver on the early hype without the maverick congressman at his side.

Instead, the Libertarians are stuck with a presidential candidate desperately lacking energy, inspiration, enthusiasm, and, most importantly, support (to say nothing of his running mate, an embarrassing buffoon even by Libertarian Party standards, who’s at this point taken to virtually cheering for McCain-Palin). Paul’s decision today to scatter his remaining support to the Third Party crosscurrent breezes ensures the r3VOLution not only won’t be televised, it’ll dissipate gently into obscurity, a minor election footnote forgotten soon by all but those who loved or hated the standard bearer.

It is yet another sad moment for the Orphan Child.

        

A sign the end is near...for federal marijuana prohibition?

Writes a contributer to State Policy Network's health care blog:

Those famously straight-laced Okies may not have smoked marijuana in Muskogee back in 1969 (although perhaps ol' Merle just didn't sniff around enough). But even the editors of the local paper there certainly understand in 2008 that it's high time the squares in the federal government quit having a ball busting docs, raiding dispensaries, persecuting sick people and extinguishing the democratic will of citizens in states where cannabis prohibition is being relaxed.

An editorial in — that's right — the Muskogee Phoenix endorses congressional calls for a cessation of federal hostilities against marijuana users and growers in states where the miracle herb has been legalized.

The lyrics to the paper's kindly tune go like this:

        

In addition to news that it wiped out a car yesterday, Nashville's Snafu Choo Choo hit another rough patch of media coverage recently.

A Michigan newspaper last weekend questioned if a proposed rail line in the Detroit area has reasonable chances for "success," given that it bears disturbing front-end resemblances to the Middle Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority's "sputtering" two-year-old commuter train.

The Livingston Daily Press & Argus reported Sunday that the Music City Star's original performance goals have been derailed by market disinterest, customer dissatisfaction, managerial incompetence, cost overruns and taxpayer-funding shortages:

Yet reality has been a rough ride for the Music City Star. Actual ridership started at only 550, far below projected numbers of more than 1,400. Daily ridership is still hovering in the 800s and has forced the system to embark on an expensive and unbudgeted campaign to attract new riders.

The lower-than-projected ridership is the main reason why the Tennessee line has a $2 million annual funding gap.

Is this a cautionary tale for the so-called WALLY — Washtenaw-Livingston — line, which is projecting a similar 1,300 riders?

Both services also used the Virginia-based R.L. Banks & Associates for their studies, which will be presented separately to both county government boards in Michigan later this week.

RTA Executive Director Diane Thorne then got to offload an ignorance plea and a couple of the lame excuses she and her fellow public transportation planners no doubt spend much of their time engineering and polishing these days in order to try and sidetrack charges of gross ineptitude and policy fraud.

"I think this was the first commuter rail line in the state of Tennessee, so it's a totally new concept," breezed Thorne to the paper's reporter. "So maybe they didn't take that into account when projecting ridership numbers."

Those original ridership numbers weren't particularly ambitious, by the way. Roughly 700 there-and-back riders served a day, total? That's about how many people whoosh by on a typical Nashville freeway on a typical weekday afternoon in the time it takes an overbooked special holiday train to blast indifferently past a platform full of ill-starred Independence Day revelers waiting in vain to catch a rail ride downtown to watch the fireworks display. (Wait a second, kids — I think I hear another one coming!)

Transit schemers most certainly didn't anticipate a gas crisis was lurking just up the track back when they went about setting modest rider projections either. Chances are they were secretly glee-stricken in anticipation of all the ranting and raving and honking and tooting they were going to get to perform once those projections were easily surpassed and it became readily apparent what a steaming goddamn success they had on their hands. What's truly mind-boggling now is that even the highest fuel prices since the 1970s still can't convince working stiffs (particularly those in the private sector) to ride the lethargic locomotive in numbers consistent with the original low-ball guesstimates.

The bottom line is that the Music City Star is just the first "spoke" in a spinning wheel of waste and scattershot centrifugal government spending that's going to continue unbraked until voters demand that the railroad romantics are forcibly put off the public gravy train once and for all.

        

The Libertarian Party presidential candidate is doing a better job lately of finding his libertarian voice.

Bob Barr is melding his ideological conversion with the old traditionalist cultural outlook, and has become, in essence, a Dixietarian: A Southern social conservative who believes in strong separation of not just church and state, but prejudice and police power. That makes him a decidedly different sort of "conservative" than what currently infests the GOP. (For that matter, it makes him a truer "liberal" than the whole mushy mishmash of impeachment-foiling Pelosicrats and fawning Obamapawns). Barr explains:

We now have a government which calls itself conservative, yet believes it's okay to spy on American citizens within their own country without a court order. We now have an administration which calls itself conservative and supports conservative values that believes it's okay to detain a citizen or non-citizen in this country and never give them access to courts to determine under habeas corpus if they are being held properly.

So if in fact respect for individual liberty, respect for the Constitution are conservative values, we certainly don't have that in Washington nowadays.

Even the haters gotta give it up for him here:

For example, if the citizens of a particular state wish to legalize medicinal marijuana, or to change the definition of marriage in their state, why should the Federal government have any right (or), if in fact if it respects individual liberty and individual conservative values, have any power have any power to come in and override the position of the people of the state? Yet that's what we have in Washington. That's not conservatism. That's big government.

The value that is most important to me, is that which is most important, for example, to the great 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand, and that is the value of individual privacy. As Ayn Rand said, the value of privacy, the notion of a person being freed from the interference of other people, is the essence of civilization.

And where you have a government that can come in and can invade your privacy, as Ayn Rand also said, you take away a person's freedom when you do that. That's the most important and fundamental of all values.

It's simply an understanding and a recognition that the notion of privacy in virtually everything you see and do government-involved-in nowadays — whether it's surveillance cameras, whether it is wiretapping, whether it is trying to dictate to individuals or the states how one must behave, whether it's the government believing it can have access to our most personal financial and medical records without ever telling about it, or without showing a probable cause, it is under assault everywhere, and if we don't get a handle on it pretty soon, we'll lose the opportunity forever to do so.

        

Remember back at the start of 2007 when Tennessee Department of Revenue Commissioner Reagan Farr questioned whether Drew Johnson's free-market watchdog advocacy group was a "legitimate organization"?

For close to a year and a half (as recently as three weeks ago), evangelical global-warming liturgists, doomsaying climate-change diviners and crusading Church of Al Gore congregationalists have approvingly plastered the Tennessee tax tsar's bungling misapprehension of legality and reality all over the leftard blogosphere (although not so much the editorial upbraiding his dereliction of public servant's duty later elicited).

Well, now it's Johnson and the Tennessee Center for Policy Research's turn to question if Farr's the one who's fer farkin' real.

A two-part Nashville NewsChannel 5 expose' (here and here) this week showed videos that depict cacophonous ensembles of melodiously challenged (by Music City, USA standards, at least) Tennessee revenue department office mopes and union dopes dancing and prancing about while belting out show-stoppingly insipid and tasteless little lyrical tributes exalting the glories of audits, forced-tribute and legal plunder.

Given lengthy mug-time and ample opportunity to explain his merry band of state-sanctioned pocket-pickers' on-the-clock hijinks, Farr claims it's all very legitimate, you understand — an indispensable part of "all-day intensive training sessions with relevant and substantive agendas" at the department's all-expenses-paid "Team Week" (or "Fuck Fest," as it is purportedly called by participants) at the luxurious Opryland Hotel.

Farr wasn't in charge of the tax-happy revenue-bureaucrat revue when it performed the tin-tuned spoofs and burlesque taxpayer lampoons, but he nevertheless finds value in their musical efforts.

"They are not skits just around parodies or fun. They are skits with the purpose of  delivering a message," he maintains. They "could have had a very valid business purpose...You know, there's all types of team building that our training office does."

Judge for yourself if such "team building" is, as one department memo solemnly insists, "critical for auditors and special investigations agents to adequately perform their job duties." From the Channel 5 story:

        

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review associate editor Bill Steigerwald recently issued a spot-on anniversary vilification of one of the most vile and abusive bureaucracies the United States federal government has ever birthed. (Note to the Bureau of Indian Affairs: Don't worry, you're still right up there, too.) 

Spawned appropriately enough during the Nixon administration, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — which earlier this month entered its 35th year of confiscating freedom, justice, health, property, happiness, commerce and culture — has "become a typically bloated, self-preserving federal bureaucracy whose power, budget and continuing existence bear no relation to its performance," Steigerwald writes.

He generously gifts the agency (and readers) with what will most certainly go down as one of 2008's best lines about the war on drugs: "If the DEA were a heroin addict, it would have overdosed on its own incompetence by age 6."

Steigerwald also notes that today's DEA budget and burgeoning paramilitary goon squad are mainlining greater than six times the dosage of American tax dollars a year than in 1974, and "(y)et today illegal drugs are as plentiful and cheap as ever." Intellectual honesty nevertheless demands Steigerwald acknowledge that "(i)f you consider locking up mostly pot smokers and other perpetrators of victimless crimes a valid measure of success in the war on drugs" — which the dopey prohibitionist Kool-Aid quaffers certainly do — then "the DEA and its fellow state and local drug warriors deserve high praise."

High praise, indeed. So don't be too hard on the DEA, Steigerwald ultimately avers. They were, after all — like so many of their predecessor oppressors in the annals of police-state ruthlessness — juss followin' orders. True blame for the all the high crimes and misdemeanors against liberty, compassion and decency committed by the DEA rests with "35 years (of) Congress and seven presidents (who) haven't had the brains or the political courage to decriminalize marijuana or at least work to humanize America's drug policy."  

        

For Bob Barr, it all comes down now to getting into the debates. (And, from the GOP perspective, keeping his accursed cracker ass out at all costs). If the one-time Clinton impeachment House manager successfully barges onstage for a nationally-televised forensic fracas with McBama, his polling could double by the time the network credits start rolling that night.

If, on the other hand, the 'pukelickens once again win their time-honored pastime of stifling voices of freedom from the right, Barr's national numbers may plateau and languish in the high single digits. Although historic by Libertarian Party presidential campaign standards, such a finish would constitute a disappointing letdown given the promise and possibilities a high-profile candidacy like Barr's offers.

This is a tough test for Barr. Russell Verney, Ross Perot's campaign manager back in the day — and now Barr's chief organizer — knows the debate gig is rigged against challengers to the bipartisan leviathan status quo. "The criteria are absolutely, unequivocally unfair, and the debate commission is a complete fraud," Varney told Campaigns & Elections' Politics magazine.

Nevertheless, Barr's acumen, savvy, balls and gravitas are on trial here. It was his proclaimed ability to get bottom-line results and capture national attention that got the former Georgia federal prosecutor nominated over more philosophically principled LP lightweights, one-notes, no-names and nut jobs at the party convention back in May.

Minimally, Barr needs to put up a big enough stink to force the subject of his inclusion in (or exclusion from) the debates to the forefront of campaign season political awareness. Should he ultimately prove unsuccessful in gaining entry, Barr at the very least needs to collar an arresting verdict in the court of public opinion to the effect that the Commission on Presidential Debates is corrupt, pathetic and rotten to its heart.

        

Unfortunately, Middle Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority planners, who'd been feverishly promoting their Independence Day special, sold more tickets than they had available seating. No worries, though. With the holiday over and regularly scheduled runs to Bankruptville resuming right on time, there'll now be plenty of room aboard the government-employee movement service (Seventy-five percent of the Boo-Boo Doodoo Snafu Choo Choo's meager ridership is state workers who ride gratis, or at least get taxpayers to foot the freight for them, according to the Tennessean).

All Aboard the "Fireworks Express"!

        

Although they irresponsibly didn't see fit to even mention Bob Barr's name — even as the Libertarian Party presidential nominee has lately been making the rounds on the Sunday morning yap sessions — the San Francisco Chronicle marshals a pretty respectable posse of libertarians and conservatives popping off fusillades of condemnation in the general direction of the Republican Party's most recent unfit offering for commander in chief.

        

Need more evidence that voting for the supposedly lesser of big-government evils still gets you a bigger evil government in the end? The National Taxpayers Union says that if elected president John McCain and Barack Obama would jack up federal spending by $68.5 billion and $343.6 billion, respectively.