The recent amount of sycophantic soundbites praising Ted Kennedy as a hero, champion of the people, defender of the realm and the king of bravery is kind of sickening. I understand the man has brain cancer - a condition that strikes a chord of fear in many people. I understand that the condition is most likely inoperable and fatal. I understand that this is traumatic and heart wrenching for the man’s family. Life is tough.

Everyone is suddenly whipping out speeches extolling the man’s great virtuosity and pretending he is the greatest patriot since George Washington. This is a man who has been working for longer than I have been alive to take away choices and freedoms that I hold very dear. I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of idiotic and costly legislation that the man has sponsored.

His biography shows him to be one of the helmsman of the decline of intellectualism and free thinking in the United States. He is a staunch supporter of the idea that Uncle Sugar should care for us all from cradle to grave, dumbing us down and making us catatonic and ignorant along the way. He is an advocate of theft and mediocrity, preaching the mantra that high achievers should have a portion of their wealth taken by force and redistributed according to his visions. Ted Kennedy believes that government managed socialism will actually make the quality of life in this country better in the long term. And on that issue, we are fundamentally at odds. Government programs almost always make things worse.

I am not celebrating Ted Kennedy’s misfortune. Neither will I sit quietly while others laud him as our great national champion. Ted Kennedy is not a hero. He is not a saint. He is a man who may have done some good things for some people some of the time but it was always at the expense of the American taxpayer. The media and his fellow politicians are doing us all a disservice by pretending otherwise just because he is afflicted with a fatal condition.

A malignant brain tumor is a terrible thing. But Ted Kennedy is not my god and I will not pretend that the man has been championing the American people and steering this country on a course that I agree with. That’s simply not the case. For his political enemies to pretend otherwise is disingenuous and a disservice to all those of us who disagree strongly with Mr. Kennedy’s political views and the agenda he strongarms in Congress. I wish him and his family well as far as health goes, but I don’t want to hear all this utter nonsense every time I turn on the TV or the radio. Ted Kennedy is not my friend or a man I respect. If Ted Kennedy is the lion of Congress just because he developed a brain tumor then I am the Pope. Quit singing hosannas to the man. What the hell is wrong with your gray matter?

At best, I can say that I strongly disagreed with Ted Kennedy on almost every issue. Now that he is effectively retired, I wish him well in his battle against the tumor.

In case you don’t pay attention to these things, Bob Barr is running for President on the Libertarian ticket. Bob Barr’s campaign site looks a hell of a lot like Ron Paul’s campaign site. I wonder if he got a discount for using the same template. After all, the design company didn’t have to start from scratch.

Generally speaking, I tend to agree with most of Barr’s positions. He is against continuing growth of the federal government and that is the single most important issue because that one issue causes all my various problems with government. If we could limit the role of the federal government to a few key things like providing for a common defense and maybe regulating interstate commerce this nation would be a better place to live, and certainly a more interesting place to live.

Neither Ron Paul or Bob Barr has a chance of winning the election. Either of the two could upset the balance though, and skew the results in favor of the Democratic contender. When the time comes to decide, it is likely I will write in Ron Paul’s name and consequences be damned. But now, at least, I have a good backup. I may still cast my symbolic vote for Bob Barr depending what happens in the next few months.

Many in the ranks of American punditry are speculating that the spoilers in this election will ensure a Democratic President gets elected. If that happens, then I say more power to the successful candidate. Both parties are destroying the value of our currency. Both parties are trying to homogenize this nation, effectively removing the ingredient that once made us the greatest place on earth to live. Both parties continue to encroach on personal freedoms by pretending that doing so will somehow benefit us all collectively. Both parties throw money at a failing education system and continue pretending that the money will fix the problems instead of looking at the root causes (social value systems) that are responsible for the mediocrity of our public education system. Neither party is serious about fixing the energy crisis. Neither party is serious about making America a better nation.

If electing a Democrat speeds up the inevitable recycling that nations go through in history, then I’m all for it. Rome is going to burn sooner or later - the writing is already on the wall. Let’s get it over with so we can start rebuilding from the ashes. Maybe we’ll have a longer cycle of enlightenment and freedom the next time around. If Bob Barr can destroy the status quo then he’s doing a good thing.

Of the three current contenders for the job of Thief in Chief, Hillary Clinton appears to be the most talented money grubber.

WASHINGTON — Propelled by her husband’s post-White House earnings, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s average net worth soared from red ink to $30.7 million between 2000 and 2006, the fastest financial climb among members of Congress who arrived without assets, a watchdog group reported Tuesday.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, reported a $27.6 million surge in his and his wife’s average worth from 1995 to 2006. Their worth rose over that 11-year period from an inflation-adjusted average of $8.9 million to $36.4 million, the ninth-biggest rise in Congress, the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation reported.

The Sunlight Foundation posted on its Web site the first-ever comparison of the 535 House and Senate members’ latest available net worth with their earlier disclosure statements. The forms don’t require any explanation for shifts of fortune.

Many members of Congress have added significantly to their wealth while in office, such as Sen. Edward Kennedy’s jump from an average net worth of $7.1 million in 1995 to $102.8 million in 2006. But because lawmakers are allowed to list their assets in wide ranges and exclude homes that can be worth millions of dollars, the foundation acknowledged that the data may create misimpressions.

Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama’s average net worth rose from $328,442 in 2004, when he was elected to the Senate, to $799,006 in 2006. But counting Obama’s and his wife Michelle’s pricey Chicago home, he almost assuredly has joined the Senate’s “Millionaire’s Club.”

Next time you hear the shrill, harsh voice of your fearless pantsuit wearing potential leader, remember that she lines her pockets from the same pot of gold that her health care plan will be paid for from - yours.

The bottom line has a lot to do with why someone like Hillary Clinton wants to be in politics in the first place. Any person with a poorly developed moral compass who thinks it’s perfectly OK to redistribute wealth by force would be attracted to the shining lights of Washington, D.C. where strangers argue over how much money to steal from the rest of us and skim cents from each dollar that rolls in for their own silk-lined pockets.

HIllary’s base salary is $169,300 per year. She must be a very savvy investor to have turned that into $30 million plus.

I highly encourage you to carefully read this editorial entitled Clueless in America. Here is a sample:

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

Author Bob Herbert mentions that the United States has “one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world.” Gee, I wonder if that somehow correlates with the fact that we have the highest per capita number of prisoners in the industrialized world. Whether you’re planning on electing John McCain, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is irrelevant to solving the education crisis. None of those individuals are serious about changing our educational landscape. No major politician in the two parties is - educated Americans do not grow government so politicians do not have a real interest in educating Americans.

In all likelihood, what we’ll get from our next President is more empty promises that federal oversight can solve our national overabundance of American dumbasses. I envision proposals to rename No Child Left Behind to something a little more catchy while increasing funding for the program. In 30 years, those few Americans who can still read will look back fondly on the time when this nation had an 80% basic literacy rate. By then, we’ll be a third world nation looking for handouts from India or China.

I know exactly what it feels like to be a negro. At least I do when it comes to gun control.

In 1840, the North Carolina supreme court passed a statute decreeing: “That if any free negro, mulatto, or free person of colour, shall wear or carry about his or her person, or keep in his or her house, any shot gun, musket, rifle, pistol, sword, dagger or bowie-knife … he or she shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and may be indicted therefore.” This law did not apply to whites - only black or mixed-race people.

In the 1890s, Florida also passed race-specific gun control laws. In 1941, Justice Burford, a judge in the supreme court in Florida, overturned a conviction for carrying a handgun without a permit on the basis that the state’s original gun control statutes had a racial basis. “I know something of the history of this legislation”, he said. “The act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro labourers … and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.”

All gun laws passed in the United States since my birth in 1971 have been designed not for the purposes of solving a problem. Rather, they have been designed for the purposes of making people feel better about a problem. The problem is that sometimes, bad people get access to guns.

Guns are not moral. They are neither good or bad. They are tools in the hands of people who are either good or bad. Because our society has increasingly evolved into a reactionary, status oriented, instant gratification driven one, we frame the war against individualism poorly. We tell ourselves that only government should have guns because only government is responsible enough to use them wisely.

By arguing thusly, and by passing increasingly ridiculous numbers of laws aimed at keeping law abding individuals from owning the kinds of guns they want, in the quantities they want, with as much ammunition as they want to stockpile, we have created a new class of negro.

I am a member of that class. I want to follow the law, but I also want the right to defend myself and my existence and my property by any means I deem reasonable. As a new negro, I must contend not only with do-gooders who believe they know better than I what types, quantity and quality of weapons I should be allowed (must of these do-gooders, if given ultimate power, would not even permit me a rock for head bashing), but with the criminal class who, no matter how many stupid gun laws are passed, will always find access to the weapons they desire.

In the mean time, this nation of the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, has locked up more citizens than any other nation in the world, per capita. These citizens are held on a variety of charges, most of which are non-violent. And from the violent among them, they learn to become animals. They learn the way of the gun. They learn to take whatever they want. And they force me to conclude that I too need guns to defend myself from them because when they emerge from their cells they will have morphed into committing violent crimes, compounding the problems we all must face.

As a modern negro, the stigmatized gun owner, I must speak out. I am not a threat to anyone who does not threaten me. I just want to be left alone to pursue my life as best I see fit. I do not want any part of your irrational fearmongering ways. I do not want to interact with your children who will cringe from me because I believe in the right of self-defense. But I must. No negro is an island.

Having said that, please take the time to read Defending Freedom. If you are reading this, and you are an American, you are part of a society that takes its freedom largely for granted. You are part of a society that will lose more and more freedom with each new socialist or authoritarian politican elected. One day, you will wake up and find that you too have joined the ranks of the modern negros. And what will you do then?