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.

        

Has George Will (yes, that George Will) officially joined the expanding ranks of conservatives and tiny-l libertarian Republicans growing progressively skeptical about John McCain's dedication to the spirit and letter of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights?

Without using one archaic word, and his self-indulgent propensity for insouciant, inconsequential meandering held mostly in check, Will last week ridiculed McCain's shrill denunciation of the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 ruling that Gitmo prisoners are entitled to petition the United States government for habeas corpus hearings.

"One of the worst decisions in the history of the country!" McCain preposterously bellowed, then launched predictably into the standard warmed-over GOP boilerplate against "unaccountable judges" subverting the omnipotent imperial presidency and so forth.

Taken aback by the McCain's "extravagant condemnation" and off-kilter sense of historical proportion (or that of whatever "clever ignoramus" is calling the senile old trouser trumpet's campaign stump tunes), Will queries:

Will also pointed out for those who haven't been paying attention that McCain's latest anti-constitutional position isn't at all inconsistent with others he's staked out.

The job of reminding McCain that he still lives in an ostensibly constitutional republic, and that most here don't require a Hanoi Hilton get-away to appreciate freedom from tyranny, falls squarely on the shoulders of Bob Barr. Indeed, as Will offered in an April Newsweek column, a "condign punishment" for the Arizona Senator's authoritarian sins would be if Barr and the Libertarians, whose ballot-access efforts have been "handicapped by John McCain's handiwork," were to vanquish his will to unconstrained power in November.

        

Humberto Fontova:

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research:

Justin Raimondo:

        

Dr. Paul may be wrapping up his long-shot quest for the Republican Party presidential nomination (or not), but the Wall Street Journal's Rhodes Cook prognosticates a chronic pain in the gulliver nevertheless for McCainiacs as a result of the "feisty" Texas congressman's reawakening of libertarian sentiment among traditional conservatives.

Too bad the LP's VP slot is already taken. (Any chance WAR might "voluntarily" step aside?) 

In the meantime, Bombs Away!

        

Anthony Gregory levels some appropriate criticism at the Libertarian Party presidential candidate's odd and disappointing bit of pandering before the oafish Glenn Beck this week. 

Beck: "When Ron Paul was running I had several run-ins with these people called the 9-11 Truthers. They say we blew up the World Trade Center. You?"
Bob Barr: "I didn't pay any attention to that. None at all. I've heard the same thing. We heard it when we did some investigations of Waco, the same sort of stuff. We gotta move beyond that. I mean there are real problems facing us and the world that we can actually do something about without worrying about conspira[cies] of times past."
Beck: "Good."

One would assume that, if elected president, Bob Barr could in fact "actually do something about" getting to the bottom of the events that transpired at Waco (and in Washington, D.C.) on April 19, 1993, and in the months preceding. Furthermore, Barr might, unlike anybody else in the 2008 electoral mix, actually want to.

Back in the late 1990s, after it had become ominously clear that Janet Reno and her duplicitous Clinton administration cohorts had for years been lying about the origin of the flames they'd helped fan into a pyre of mass death, Barr wanted to reopen the investigation into the federal government's criminal incompetence, purposeful misdeeds and potential crimes against humanity during the Waco siege. As expected, Democrats couldn't have cared less whether or not their Führer's regime may have kindled a blaze that charred to dust a few dozen devout Christians and their children. But Barr couldn't get the Gingrich-led House GOP interested in further hearings, either. So eventually calls for unearthing the truth slowly faded in Washington and then flatlined entirely after the election of George W. Bush and the "catalyzing events" of Sept. 11, 2001, which ended the short-lived Clinton-era remission phase of the GOP's terminal affliction with malignant state-worship.

One wonders now how Barr remembers fellow congressman and former criminal prosecutor, Steven Schiff, R-N.M. A stark raving tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist? A "Waco Truther"? Schiff, who passed away in 1998, was, like his colleague Barr at the time, deeply disturbed by federal law enforcement agency actions at Waco.  Indeed, he proclaimed that "the deaths of dozens of men, women and children can be directly and indirectly attributable to the use of (CS) gas in the way it was injected (into the Branch Davidian church) by the FBI." 

"Unfortunately, we saw in the Waco tragedy one logical result of the blurring of lines between domestic law enforcement and military operations: an operation carried out pursuant to a strategy designed to demolish an 'enemy,' utilizing tactics designed to cut off avenues of escape, drive an enemy out, and run roughshod over the 'niceties' of caring for the rights of those involved," wrote Schiff in 1996. "I believe very firm steps must be taken to 'demilitarize' Federal domestic law enforcement, through substantive legislation and funding restrictions."

Waco was a catalyzing event in its own right in the minds of a lot of younger libertarians in America. And it remains so to this day.

"Waco still matters," Gregory wrote two months ago in commemorating the 15-year mark since the inferno. "Not just because it has become the paradigmatic symbol for federal police power gone out of control. Not just because it starkly demonstrates the American government’s militarism unleashed against its own people. Not just because it showcases the propensity of politicians and law enforcers to deceitfully cover and obscure their wrongful actions. No, Waco’s still important mostly because it shows exactly what happens when people resist the unjust incursions of their own government, including under democracy."

Bob Barr not only had a front row seat to the chilling ATF, FBI and White House administration treachery, he's also famously undergone libertarian transformations of his own. That he'd now come up tone deaf to the chords Waco struck with people half his age who've been passionate about their libertarian beliefs for far longer than he has is...well, unbecoming of a political candidate boasting so much "media savvy."