Houston Area Liberty Campaign

Thanks to Barry K of HALC for passing this on to us…
====================================================

The board of Houston Property Rights Association has taken a position opposing the proposed drainage fee. HPRA says…VOTE NO!…

Two organizations have formed to oppose the hybrid fee/tax.Their websites are stuffed for reasons to block this new charge to be added to our water bills.First is the Taxpayers for Financial Accountability PAC: http://www.theproblemwithprop1.com/Second is No Rain Tax PAC: http://www.stopprop1.com/

Proposition 1 reads:

Relating to the Creation of a Dedicated Funding Source to Enhance, Improve and Renew Drainage Systems and Streets. Shall the City Charter of the City of Houston be amended to provide for the enhancement, improvement and ongoing renewal of Houston’s drainage and streets by creating a Dedicated Pay-As-You-Go Fund for Drainage and Streets?

 =====================================================
This message is intended for City of Houston Voters only.

The Renew Houston Crowd is winning!

The Citizens of Houston are being snookered!

Our Churches, our non profits and our seniors are losing!

We are way behind in the polls!  Please blitz this to every one on your list.  Please ask everyone to blitz it to everyone on their list.  Paul Bettencourt and I are waging this battle on a shoestring!  We need your help!  We have no money for TV ads!  Please ask every talk show host you know to invite me or Paul to talk about why Prop1 needs to be defeated!

Norman E. Adams

The Problem with Proposition 1 – by Paul Bettencourt

All Houstonians will see at nearly the end of their long Election Day Ballot, is one simple statement about establishing a dedicated Drainage Fund and a Fee associated with it called Proposition 1. What this hides for most City of Houston Voters is that Prop 1 is a massive new property tax that will charge even our Churches, Schools, and Charities, plus it does not provide any exemptions for our over 65 Senior Homeowners. As a former “Taxman”, let me urge you to vote against Prop 1 while explaining the real problems with Prop 1.

In all my years in public service to taxpayers, I have never seen a proposal that is a MINIMUM tax or fee before reading the Prop 1 petition you won’t see on the ballot. Prop 1 sets a minimum amount, $125 Million dollars of revenue collections to the city in 2012, and then mandates the City Council to set the drainage charges to collect it in FULL. Prop 1 supporters have talked about this fund being as much as $300 to $400 million dollars a year in size which is so large that it is 35% to 47% the size of all property tax collections in the City of Houston each year. It will collect 8 Billion dollars in 20 years.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: John Carney via CNBC

Libertarians frustrated by what they view as the lack of engagement by arch-Keynesian Paul Krugman with their arguments have come up with a clever ploy: they’re promising to donate $100,000 to the Fresh Food Program ofFoodBankNYC.org if Krugman will debate one of their stars.

The idea is meant to bribe and shame Krugman into debating Robert Murphy, an economist trained in the Austrian school of economics.

Basically, if Krugman refuses to debate Murphy, it will be tantamount to depriving the FoodBank of $100,000. What good liberal would want that on his conscience?

To make the debate even more enticing, the proponents have promised to have it moderated by Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s liberal policy-wonk blogger. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by STEPHEN GANDEL via Time.com

What is the most likely cause today of civil unrest? Immigration. Gay Marriage. Abortion. The Results of Election Day. The Mosque at Ground Zero. Nope.

Try the Federal Reserve. November 3rd is when the Federal Reserve’s next policy committee meeting ends, and if you thought this was just another boring money meeting you would be wrong. It could be the most important meeting in Fed history, maybe. The US central bank is expected to announce its next move to boost the faltering economic recovery. To say there has been considerable debate and anxiety among Fed watchers about what the central bank should do would be an understatement. Chairman Ben Bernanke has indicated in recent speeches that the central bank plans to try to drive down already low-interest rates by buying up long-term bonds. A number of people both inside the Fed and out believe this is the wrong move. But one website seems to believe that Ben’s plan might actually lead to armed conflict. Last week, the blog, Zerohedge wrote, paraphrasing a top economic forecaster David Rosenberg, that it believed the Fed’s plan is not only moronic, but “positions US society one step closer to civil war if not worse.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Laura Rozen, Politico

View Original Article at Politico.com

Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, will present findings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that argue that the majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause: military occupation.

Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprising some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks, dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times — the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 U.S. Marines.

“We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, … and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100 percent of the terrorist campaign,” Pape said in an interview last week on his findings. Read the rest of this entry »

One way to measure the surprising rightward political lurch of the past two years and rise of the Tea Party is to chart the relative position of Ron Paul, who has never flinched from his beliefs. He’s not alone anymore.

By JOSHUA GREEN

IMAGE CREDIT: SARAH WILSON

RON PAUL LED the annual Fourth of July parade through Friendswood, Texas, from the back of a gleaming pickup truck that inched along behind a replica of the Liberty Bell and just ahead of Lady Liberty herself, who was sitting in a Corvette and seemed to have wilted under the oppressive noonday sun. Or perhaps the oppressive policies of Barack Obama—it was hard to tell which. Along the parade route, the Stars and Stripes vied for prominence with STOP OBAMA signs.

Friendswood lies just south of Houston, in a district that voted 2-to-1 for John McCain, and for George W. Bush before him. But the distinctive flavor of the local conservatism is most vividly conveyed by Paul, the 75-year-old arch-libertarian congressman and sometime presidential candidate whose disdain for federal power is so severe that he once voted to deny Mother Teresa the Congressional Gold Medal because the Constitution does not expressly authorize such an expenditure. Paul thinks the government ought to be doing a whole lot less, and his constituents seem to agree. They’ve been returning him to Congress since the 1970s by growing margins.

Lately a lot of people, not just in Texas, are coming around to this view. “I’m so confident in my philosophy that I think I could run a pretty good race in San Francisco,” he told me in his Washington office recently. “What I’d talk about there wouldn’t be so much about deficit spending as about personal liberties, military engagement overseas, and the financial crisis. That used to help more in conservative districts. But everybody’s worried about it now.” Read the rest of this entry »

By John Tamny

The financial crisis of not long ago has not surprisingly generated a great deal of anguish within the electorate. Americans were and continue to be a skeptical lot when it comes to the competence of the various federal bureaucracies which dot the Washington, DC landscape. Despite their skepticism about the competence of regulators, they were still disappointed when those empowered to oversee our financial system were seemingly caught unware by a banking collapse.

Rightly or wrongly, the US Federal Reserve has become one of the biggest targets within the financial bureaucracy when it comes to public distrust, and as a result, its ongoing purpose is increasingly being questioned. Some in the political class seek greater congressional oversight of our central bank, while others, including Rep. Ron Paul, would like the Fed to be abolished altogether.

The Fed’s greatly reduced reputation naturally raises questions about why we have a central bank to begin with. Although the Fed presently engages in a wide array of activities, its adherents generally support its continued existence on three grounds: They expect it to manage inflation through manipulation of short-term interest rates; to issue a currency which facilitates exchange; and, most important, they see an essential role as “lender of last resort” to banks during periods of tight credit.

These Fed functions seem compelling at first glance, but given a careful rethink, it becomes apparent that much of what it does is either ineffective or superfluous, and could be handled much more skillfully outside this government-chartered monopoly. Contrary to the broadly held view that we need the Federal Reserve, logic says we’d be much better off absent a central bank that economist George Selgin terms “fundamentally destabilizing.” Read the rest of this entry »

[as posted on The Campaign for Liberty website on 10/06/10 4:03 PM, by Debbie McKee]

My letter to the editor published in the Greenville Herald Banner 10.03.10 with additional notes.

I attended the Texas Redistricting committee hearing last week in Richardson.  I testified, saying that although I’m a member or organizer for several different grassroots groups I was there to represent myself and I felt confident that I was speaking for millions of Texans. 

1.  I urged them to be fair, independent and non-partisan, do what is best for Texas.  40% of Texans consider themselves politically independent. 

2.  I urged them to get this worked out before the session starts and to not let this issue bog it down.  There are many vital issues to address and we don’t want valuable time wasted fighting over this.

3.  I urged them to put blindfolds on and do NOTHING to protect ANY seats.  Too many have been in office for far too long, and if their district gets redrawn, they can run for office like anyone else.  I urged them to be open and transparent about the entire process, no back room deals.

I neglected to mention one issue, frankly because I couldn’t imagine that it WAS an issue.  The longer I sat (I was there for over 4 hours) and listened to comments from committee members (half of whom were not present at any given time), and the testimonies, the more I realized that it WAS an issue.  Carving out districts for “communities of interest”.  There are some genuinely racist folks in ALL groups, but I truly believe the vast majority of Texans are color blind.  We look past skin color or last name and judge people based on their character. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Friend,

If you ever wondered whether the big government agenda is alive and well in Texas, you need look no further than this morning’s Austin American Statesman.  “Conservative, Republican” State Senator Steve Ogden is calling for a state-wide property tax.  And other “conservative Republicans” rather than decrying this socialist agenda, are quoted in the article either advocating the policy or saying we need to consider it as a possible option.

Consider it, like Hell, I say!  We better get in this fight and we better get all in NOW!

With Republicans like these, Texas doesn’t need to wait on President Obama and the Democrats to destroy us, our Republican leaders are doing it single handedly.

Want proof?  Look at the 2008 U.S. Economic Index, page 11 shows Texas is now ranked 31 having fallen from the 8th spot in 1999.  That’s under “conservative Republican” leadership!  Thanks to these sorts of policies, Texas now labors under nearly the largest state government (second only to New York) with the largest amount of state regulation (second only to Louisiana).  Read it for yourself, see page 34 of the study.

Read the rest of this entry »