Libertarian Calendar for January 2018

January 1
Taos, New Mexico

Governor Gary Johnson's birthday

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January 7

Washington, D.C.

Rand Paul's birthday

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January 12

Rush Limbaugh's birthday

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January 24
Washington, D.C.

Burning Man
6:00 pm

Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue NW

Featuring Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform (@GroverNorquist); Mark Lutter, President, Institute for Innovative Governance, (@MarkLutter); Jeremy Tunnell, Cofounder, Thumbtack, (@jeremytunnell); Robert Mariani, Freelance journalist, (@robert_mariani); moderated by Kat Murti, Senior Digital Outreach Manager, Cato Institute (@KatMurti) 

For just one week every year, roughly 70,000 people from around the world come together in the Nevada desert to create Black Rock City, home to Burning Man, billed by its organizers as an “annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.”

Because cash exchanges and the barter system are largely banned in Black Rock City (Burning Man instead relies on something called the “gift economy”), Burning Man is often seen as an attack on conventional libertarian principles.

However, as a voluntary community driven by freedom of association, self-governance, nonviolent dispute mediation, and emergent order, Burning Man is in many ways a quintessential example of the libertopian ideal.

On Wednesday, January 24th, please join the Cato Institute for a robust conversation about what libertarians can learn from Burning Man — and how these lessons can be applied to policy and philosophy.

If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online and join the conversation on Twitter using #CatoDigital. Follow @CatoEventson Twitter to get future event updates and videos from the Cato Institute.

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January 25
Washington, D.C.

School Choice: The Non-Academic Imperative

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Special Event 

4:00PM to 4:30PM ESTADD TO CALENDAR

Online: http://www.facebook.com/CatoInstitute 

Featuring Neal McCluskey (@NealMcCluskey), Director, Center for Educational Freedom, Cato Institute; Corey DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey), Policy Analyst, Center for Educational Freedom, Cato Institute. 

Like the country’s overall education discussion, the national school choice debate is far too often reduced to “which schools get better test scores” and maybe even “who gets kids to graduation.” But there is so much more to education than blunt academic outcome measures, including shaping character, transmitting culture, and just plain advancing freedom.

In this special, National School Choice Week Facebook Live event, join the Cato Center for Educational Freedom crew to tackle these far deeper, arguably far more important goals and desires for education. We’ll be taking your questions via Facebook and Twitter, using #CatoCEF. Join the conversation! 

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January 30
Tuscaloosa, AL

Richard Rothstein – The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
125 ten Hoor Hall , University of Alabama

Cost: Free and open to the public

Categories: College of Arts & Sciences, Department of History, Lectures and Speakers

The History Department is hosting a talk Richard Rothstein, the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. 

This event is open to the public; light refreshments will be served.

Contact Info: David Beito, dbeito@ua.edu

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January 30

Tallinn, Estonia

Libertarian meetup

6:30 pm

Must puudel

2017 brings new talk radio

This was published yesterday at Breitbart.

If 2016 brought a shakeup in American politics, 2017 promises changes in talk radio, where some think American politics often begins.

Two new national talk radio shows launch this morning, one from the world of conservative talk radio, and one from the liberal world of National Public Radio.

Both also represent a "browning of America," as broadcasters of color - one Hispanic, one African American - move into prominence with new national radio shows.

The new conservative show, at 9 am Eastern, aims to join radio stars like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, is Washington, D.C. area broadcaster Chris Plante, whose "Chris Plante Show" has run on WMAL radio at 9 am for several years.

Plante, a former CNN reporter who covered the Defense Department, is from a family of broadcasters, including both brothers and his step-father, CBS reporter Bill Plante.

Plante lives across the street from National Cathedral with his "best gal," as she is frequently discussed on the show, Tricia Messerschmidt, a Washington, D.C. realtor.

Plante has two recurring themes for which he has two tag lines: political hypocrisy - "if they didn't have double standards, liberals would have no standards at all," and media bias - "Democrats, and the media...but then, I repeat myself."

Plante, who has described himself as being somewhat libertarian (though he has in most cases ridiculed Gary Johnson and local Libertarian Party candidates when mentioning them at all), a sometimes reluctant Republican voter, and an independent with a wait and see attitude on Donald Trump's policies, was a vociferous critic of Hillary Clinton and the DNC in the 2016 election cycle. For a year or two Plante has been appearing occasionally on FOX News paired with a liberal in point/counterpoint panels, or as the "one lucky guy" on "Outnumbered," FOX's newsy (almost) all woman noon answer to "The View."

WMAL radio's recent line up was a morning show, "Mornings on the Mall," featuring former FOX reporter Brian Wilson and former Breitbart editor Larry O'Connor (who is also launching a new local radio show), followed by Plante, Rush Limbaugh at noon (eastern time) , and Sean Hannity and then Michael Savage at 3 pm.

Hannity and Limbaugh are at the top of the talk radio firmament, each along with NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" having an audience of a little over 13 million people daily. For comparison, the most popular cable news shows, like "The O'Reilly Factor," reach 3 million people, and major morning broadcast shows like "Today" and "Good Morning America" reach an audience of fewer than 5 million.

Sean Hannity currently has a $100 million multi-year contract and Limbaugh's multi-year contract is for $400 million.

If Plante, whose maternal family and birth father are Hispanic, can duplicate their successes, he'd be one of the few non-white broadcasters breaking into Oprah territory by earning more than $10 million a year.

Sylvie Rivera, who runs a facebook fan page for WMAL (The Real Housewives of WMAL) thinks Plante will succeed nationally: "This is so exciting for Chris and for his longtime fans, who've seen him rise from an unknown evening radio talk show host in 2006, to national and international prominence. We look forward to sharing Chris' wit, dry humor, vast political & pop culture knowledge and absolute control of the facts with the rest of the Nation!"

One hour later, at National Public Radio, Joshua Johnson, launches a new show, at 10 am Eastern time, "1A," the show's name referring both to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights and to the front page of newspapers "1A" replaces the almost 37 old "Diane Rehm" show, which had an audience of 2.8 million.  

Rehm, a Palestinian American, began her career as a volunteer, also at a local DC radio station, WAMU. Rehm's show proclaimed itself dedicated to civil discussion and offering multiple points of view, especially on its Friday news round up segment where a panel of American and British, liberal and conservative, journalists discussed the events of the week in advance of the similar Sunday TV programs. But her career was marred by lapses into bias, as when in the 1980s she alone on her panel was unaware of the author Joan Peters, who had received death threats from Palestinian activists for publishing a book, "From Time Immemorial" (1984), whose thesis was that the economic activity of Jewish settlers had attracted Arab immigrant labor to Israel who were not an original Palestinian population. In 2016 Rehm was forced to apologize to Presidential candidate Bernie Saunders when she was fooled by a fake news story circulating on leftist websites into believing that he was a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen.

Johnson, who is replacing Rehm, co-created Truth Be Told, one of several NPR shows (like Snap Judgement) that are attempts to find an audience beyond the white upper middle class liberal one so often spoofed even by other "progressive" media programs like Saturday Night Live. Truth Be Told, produced at KQED in San Francisco, aimed to be conversational, low key, and previously uncovered reports on race in America, like the plight of African Americans facing employment discrimination in Silicon Valley, or of white students enrolled in black colleges. Though Johnson only created that show a few months ago (he'd previously been a reporter at an NPR affiliate in Miami, where he graduated from college in 2002, for a few years), NPR was impressed enough to hire him to replace one of their flagship national shows.

Chris Plante was off the air for the past week and mum on what his first order of business will be. For Johnson's maiden show he's inviting listeners to give him their New Year's Resolutions for the country:

What should America's #NewYearsResolution be? Your answer could end up on tomorrow's premiere of @1A! https://t.co/SkBgqiFcvY

— Joshua Johnson (@jejohnson322) January 2, 2017

In Trump She Trusts

This was published today at The Daily Caller.

I love Ann Coulter.

Lately I've been descending into the smoking, stalling, short-circuiting Hades of the D.C. Metro holding as a protective relic her latest In Tump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome (Sentinel, 2016).  (She'd excommunicate me - I'm interfaith, so I was also wearing a Johnson-Weld tee shirt.)  It's now 3rd on the best seller list.

It's actually the first Coulter book I've read, though I've read many of her columns and seen her media appearances.  I was once sort of accused of reading a pre-publication copy of one of her earlier books - my immediate next door neighbor, like Coulter a former Congressional staffer when both were freshly minted law school grads, is one of the half dozen people who reads her drafts and makes suggestions, and is duly thanked in the prefatory acknowledgements. That year's preview draft was lost and everyone was anxious to find it and slightly terrified it might have been mis-delivered to someone like me.  Who might post excerpts or discuss it in advance.

My neighbor, who like me is more libertarian than is Ms. Coulter, tells me he always tells her about half a dozen things  so outrageous she must remove them, and much as if she was following Coco Chanel's fashion advice, she looks in her mirror and removes just one accessory before she goes out to the publisher.

Reading Trump I feel about Ms. Coulter and my neighbor the way I did when I started listening to Rush Limbaugh.  Everyone had always told me Rush was a sexist-racist-homophobe-bigot.  I had a job where I drove around a lot with the radio on, and I preferred talk, any talk, Howard Stern, Scott Simon, Terri Gross, Rachel Maddow, to music.  When poor gay GOP Congressman Mark Foley had the bad judgement to send purple prose mash notes to Congressional pages (who are all over the age of consent in Washington, D.C.) I was listening to the minor comic Stephanie Miller on Air America radio.  Stephanie, a "liberal," was coming pretty close to making jokes about lynching the pedophile gays - jokes that are even more gruesome given what it going on in the Middle East in the aftermath of the policies of Ms. Miller's heroes, President Obama and Secretary Clinton.

So I wondered, if Air America was calling for lynching the gays (around the time Sidney Blumenthal was inventing birtherism), what would that neanderthal Rush Limbaugh be doing?  I switched him on.  He was discussing the machinations of Congress and the two establishment parties as they scheme to enrich themselves and hold onto power.  It was like a case study of public choice theory.  Albeit delivered with humor by someone who was an American male from an earlier generation.

It wasn't what I had been told I would be hearing.

And this is what Coulter's book on Trump is like.

The Donald Trump she presents is not the Trump we've been told about.  Lots of Ann's fun is trading on the hypocrisy and ignorance of her subjects, politicians, the media, and the consultant class.

She quotes them saying Trump won't succeed in the primaries, and then shows them eating their words a few weeks later.

They say Trump has no policies, and she digests his many policy proposals and papers that they refused to cover.  His central policy, taxing the remittances that foreigners, especially illegal immigrants, working in the U.S. send out of the country, and using the money to build a wall on the southern border and otherwise vet immigrants and beef up border security may be a good or a bad idea.  But it does seem to be a policy, and a straightforward one that attempts to make people benefiting from cross border work and trade pay for an externality they are imposing on others, that is the cost of making sure violent criminals or terrorists are not crossing the border with them.  How is that much different from Gary Johnson's temporary flirtation with a carbon fee that would "internalize" the cost of carbon?

They say Trump should have been disqualified for denigrating Senator John McCain, a war hero.  Coulter reproduces the entire quote and the context of Trump's statement, where he was retaliating against McCain for saying that Trump was crazy, and more importantly smearing 15,000 Arizonan Trump fans who had gone to a rally  - McCain's own constituents - as "crazies."

They say Trump was making fun of a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski of the Washington Post.  Coulter makes a compelling case that Trump didn't know Kovaleski was disabled, and was making fun of him for being wishy washy, as Kovaleski had written one of the original reports on American Muslims who chose to celebrate the 9/11 attack the day it happened, but then tried to claim he had not written such an article when the liberal media smeared Trump for allegedly inventing this calumny on Islam.

And on and on.  Coulter targets the political class, the consultant class, and the media spinners who make a good living in the wealthy counties around Washington, D.C., in Manhattan, and a few other enclaves, by delivering failed policies - or kneecapped, failed campaigns to change those policies - that always only benefit themselves.  And she presents Trump, as a heroic figure who alone is willing to be rude and politically incorrect in bashing these people, calling them out, and disregarding their increasingly hysterical attempts to take him down with their usual smears.

Coulter's romance of Trump is not so much akin to an Ayn Rand story about an industrial titan, the easy parallel the facile might make.  It's far more street.

A few years ago media critic Bernard Goldberg took Coulter to task for being a shock jock.  He was correct (much like Jamie Kirchick may be in this year's conservative Jew vs right-wing blond contretemps with the gay Coulter, Milo Yiannopolous).  (Full disclosure:  I'm a little jealous of Milo's becoming the gay Ann Coulter before I could, though I am not as willing to add to the other "big" blogs at Breitbart - Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Hollywood - by creating and editing Big Black Cock.)

Ann Coulter is a kind of shock jock, a Jacqueline the Ripper as Jane Austen.  And so it's apropos that her admission of Trump is more akin to Howard Stern associate Robin Quivers'  admiration for Muhammad Ali.  Coulter sees Donald Trump as the prize fighter for the Deplorables, the new negroes in the establishment's new version of Jim Crow America. And she thinks the election is going to be a knockout.