Tennessee Cottonmouth

OK, it's official: The Times They Are a-Changin'

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:53:23 GMT

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:

While not explicitly supporting the legalization of marijuana, we have to agree with Frank that the decision on whether to legalize is within the jurisdiction of the states.

We are not convinced that the "slippery slope" argument declaring marijuana a "gateway drug" leading to harder drugs doesn't have at least some merit.

That said, doctors prescribe hard drugs every day to their patients, from the addictive oxycontin to morphine.

We trust doctors to make those decisions in the best interest of their patients based upon their own study, best trade practices and years of experience.

We don't think the federal government should be prosecuting people who are taking oxycontin under the care of a doctor, nor should those taking marijuana under the care of a doctor if their state has declared such prescriptions legal.

Ultimately the issue is one of states’ rights.

We fall on the side of the states, while leaving the discussion of legalization of marijuana for another day.

The Music City (Falling) Star

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:44:35 GMT

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:

In many ways, the Tennessee line is similar to the proposed Howell-to-Ann Arbor line, down to the length, estimated costs, number of stops and projected ridership.

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.

Bob Barr a Dixietarian?

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:44:19 GMT

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:

The term "conservative values" means so many different things to so many different people. To me, what has utterly failed in the traditional conservative movement is any understanding of or respect for true individual liberty and our constitutional system of government, which was designed expressly to provide protection for individual liberty.

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:

Family values are part and parcel of the same notion of individual liberty. Where you have a Federal government, or in the cases of many of our state governments, state governments that want to tell individual citizens or the Federal government to override the decisions of the citizens.

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.

Go ahead and quit your day jobs, Revenuers

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:39:07 GMT

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:

Ever since NewsChannel 5 Investigates first aired the "Tax Tunes" videos, it's caused quite the stir among state employees. Some said it's just a harmless training exercise.

On the other hand, what really makes the videos interesting was to hear how Tennessee's tax collectors sing and joke about taxpayers.
The faces of Tennessee's faceless tax collectors - auditors who sang gleeful songs like "Tax Fever" about auditing. One group chimed:

"It's my audit,
And I'll tax if I want to.
Tax if I want to.
Tax if I want to."

Some of the videos from a week-long revenue department training session may be silly, perhaps even a bit embarrassing, but according to revenue commissioner Reagan Farr, the videos were basically harmless.

"As long as all those things have the net goal of team building, breaking down bridges or communicating an important message, I have no problem with that," Farr told NewsChannel 5's chief investigative reporter Phil Williams.

At the same time, some tax watchdogs said listen to the lyrics - "Taxpayer, watch out! Watch out for me!" - and you'll hear a definite, anti-taxpayer message.

"I'll be there
To come and audit you.
I'll be there.
No matter what you do."

"We the taxpayers are paying these Department of Revenue staffers to sing songs about how they are out to get us," said Drew Johnson of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

"Oh, oh, we're toiling on the chain gang.
And we're frightening taxpayers while we're working
On the chain gang."

Williams told the commissioner, "This is your auditors singing about frightening taxpayers."

"Well, they are the ones on the chain gang," Farr responded. "I mean, I don't know, generally its better not to be part of the chain."

"Some taxpayers only believe in fairy tales.
They don't have a clue to what we tax."

"It's just very anti-taxpayer. We see that song after song," Johnson said.

One song celebrated a ruling against a taxpayer.

"Commissioner Page called down in rage,
Looking for a penalty waiver.
We said it's done, and we had fun
Denying the claim."

"Do your people have fun denying claims?" Williams asked Farr.

"You know, I don't know," the commissioner answered. "What's important to me is did they follow all of our rules and procedures in denying it or not."

In another video, auditors worry about not digging up any dirt in an audit.

"We all remember being blue,
Another audit no tax due.
We were sure that we were screwed.
The day the bills went through."

"So are auditors screwed if they don't find anything on the taxpayers?" Williams questioned the commissioner.

"No," Farr insisted. "We audit for compliance. I have no problem, as long as we do our work, if that audit results in a refund."

Then, there's video that shows revenue staffers dancing at what appears to be a funeral.

"We apparently have a dead taxpayer and a grieving widow and these people dancing around to a 50 Cent song," Johnson observed.

"Go. Go. Go, money.
It's your tax day.
We're gonna party.
Like it your tax day."

"Is this what the department of revenue thinks of us, the taxpayers?" Johnson asked. "We die and maybe they should audit our family and see if they can get more money?"

"I think most of this was done in fairly good fun," Farr said.

"Some taxpayers won't be too happy to hear these sorts of jokes being made at their expense," Williams said.

"I'm sure they won't," Farr replied.

Birthday Wishes for the DEA: Hope it's your last

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:38:53 GMT

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."

Barr's barrier

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:23:10 GMT

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.

Music City Star surpasses Fourth of July ridership goals!

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:08:09 GMT

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"!

More from the libertarian-conservative 'Anybody But McCain' front

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:21:18 GMT

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.

McCain&Obama: Worse&Worser

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:19:12 GMT

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.

Belated applause for Will Power

Tennessee Cottonmouth — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:05:24 GMT

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:

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?

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.

McCain, co-author of the McCain-Feingold law that abridges the right of free political speech, has referred disparagingly to, as he puts it, "quote 'First Amendment rights.' " Now he dismissively speaks of "so-called, quote 'habeas corpus suits.' " He who wants to reassure constitutionalist conservatives that he understands the importance of limited government should be reminded why the habeas right has long been known as "the great writ of liberty."

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.