David L - Without creating a new system, you could go a long way towards the private prosecution of wars of liberation without the bad side effects by having the Congress issue letters of marque and reprisal. We actually have the legal foundations to do it. It's currently an impractical measure because: 1. People *don't* consider stopping americans from fighting injustice to be an anti-liberty activity improper for government 2. The US Government is unwilling to give up its world policeman role and would be aghast at the idea of private prosecution of these conflicts without their involvement. They would also be terrified that the private groups would botch it and buy up politicians and force the government forces to go in and bail them out.

I do not think that it is obvious that the left is against corporate welfare in fact. Efforts to strip out various real-life corporate welfare provisions often draw more support from members of Congress on the right than on the left.

Let me give you a thought experiment. It has to do with the breakdown of the great westphalian compromise that we so clearly saw on 9/11 and that neither the conventional Democrat or Republican elite have found a sustainable answer to. If a US citizen is shocked to the core at the bloody handed behavior of an authoritarian state, should the US government suppress their private initiation of actions to defend people from unjustified aggression by these states? I have found most non-interventionist libertarians to shy away from this question, implicitly accepting the westphalian compromise of suppressing our own people in a bloody bargain that keeps outraged people from coming over here and attacking us without state sanction. That's a stable solution that lasted since about the end of the 30 Years War to the end of the Cold War. It had been breaking down for some time with theories of "humanitarian intervention" and extensions of international law that laid waste to the foundations of the pact but 9/11 really put the icing on the cake so to speak. If I wish to raise a company of men to go over and fight for the liberty of Libya, US law stops me. Should it in a libertarian state? If it doesn't, we end up with the US being just as interventionist as before, perhaps more so. The difference being that our humanitarian interventions would be privately led and funded and our own government would not stand in our way, merely shielding its own citizens inside the territory of the US and stopping only unprovoked aggressive actions unjustified by foreign repression. In a contest between our free non-state actors versus their repressed non-state actors, I would bet on ours and I would bet on authoritarianism itself having a distinctly short shelf life on this planet. Repression upsets too many people with disposable income and revolution is not that expensive to fund anymore.

I think that Noonan made some egregiously stupid errors but I don't think this is one of them. Instead, it's doing the hard work of framing the resurgence on the right so it's harder to caricature. Somebody needs to do that in order to protect our flanks from media attacks. We could do a lot worse than Chris Christie as a model for the GOP going forward. And Ronald Reagan? He sacrificed his reduce government platform in favor of winning the cold war and reducing taxes, the other 2/3rds of his platform. That's something you've got to do sometimes but there's nothing wrong with calling small government tea party activism "finishing Reagan's work".

Absurd? Not at all. This is warfare and sane muslims are the targets. The US has special issues due to the 1st amendments and the necessary religious truce we impose in this country but that does not mean that we do not see nor that we are unsympathetic. We just wish that we knew how to help other than popping a hellfire missile on these lunatics when they act on their absurd rulings of apostasy and aggress against US citizens. A little help in instructing how non-muslims could help would be of assistance. You are not alone.

In this dystopia, how elevated is the value of the opinion of a leader who simply doesn't play the game, doesn't take the freebies? Don't say such people don't exist just because you might not have met one. I have.

Mr. Zumbo's case is one I was not familiar with. I would completely be against machine gun owning hunters. That's absurd. Looking into it, machine gun toting was not at question. Calling an AR-15 a machine gun is a PC abuse of language. It simply, mechanically does not do what a machine gun does. I'm not a hunter but if the engineering does not match the language, I know that there's a fast one being pulled. You are concerned that muslim-bashers are "setting the tone". They can only do that in a vacuum. If muslims persistently step forward and reach out to coordinate against the PC police in a way that is respectful of true muslim interests so that you're treated just like every other religion, it is you that will be setting the tone. I strongly urge you to follow the investigation into what happened where it leads and ask yourself, did Maj. Hasan give off signals a reasonable person should have reported and should have lead to Maj. Hasan's becoming former Maj. Hasan prior to the shootings? If the signals were given, people who noticed them needed to have a safe way to report such a thing without endangering their career. Did they have such a way? As a patriotic gesture, could the muslim community provide such a way? I think that if you look in depth, you will find the truth. Write it up. Allay fears of unpatriotic muslims by being patriotic against your false cousins who, coincidentally, also want to slit your throat too. A muslim who will peacefully advocate, be willing to let others peacefully advocate for their own faiths, that sort of muslim will thrive in America and will find acceptance over time. Religious bigotry *is* getting better. It's been years since I heard Catholicism called "the whore of Babylon". I see no reason why anti-muslim prejudice (as opposed to rational anger against the Maj Hasans of the world) shouldn't die down similarly.