Decker: America would be a lot better off if Washington adopted more libertarian positions, especially those that advocate cutting red tape, slashing taxes and getting Big Brother off our backs. In a very tangible way, however, many Americans have gotten hooked on federal largesse and aren’t willing to give up their government goodies. How can you make the message of smaller government resonate in this growing climate of dependency, and who is your main audience?

Johnson: I believe most observers would agree that, of all governors in modern history, I governed from a more libertarian foundation than any other. When I ran for governor and when I took office, many claimed the sky would fall. It didn’t, and I was re-elected and even today enjoy the highest approval ratings in my home state of all the governors in the presidential race. And New Mexico is a Democratic state. That tells me that people actually get it. They understand that government “largesse” is not largesse at all; rather, big government and the “benefits” it provides come at a price that is simply too great. They also understand that by limiting the federal government to that which it really needs to do, we will free the states to deliver essential services in innovative and efficient ways. And we will free the private economy to create real jobs and restore opportunity as an American trademark. Government would not disappear in a Johnson administration. It would live within its means and do what the Constitution says it should do. No more, and no less.

As I convey this message, I find that Americans of all ages, incomes and demographics respond. Young people, in particular, are embracing a libertarian approach to government. They want to be left alone to live their lives, chase their dreams and do so without government imposing values and burdens that limit their freedoms. I am convinced that there is a majority of voters in America today who are classical liberals — committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law,due process and individual liberty.

Never before has that majority been more poised to organize and exert itself in a political environment that has for too long been controlled by the two “major” parties.

Decker: Conventional wisdom is that a third-party challenger cannot be elected president of the United States. Certainly, a Libertarian candidacy siphons votes away from the GOP. Is that the point — to send a message of protest that Republicans need to be more principled, especially on fiscal issues?

Johnson: Conventional wisdom has never been a guiding principle in my life or career. Conventional wisdom held that a businessman who had never been in elected office could not run and win as a Libertarian-Republican in New Mexico. And conventional wisdom would argue against a former governor with a not-yet-healed broken leg making it to the summit of Mt. Everest. My candidacy is not about a message of protest. It is about defying conventional wisdom and giving voice to what I believe is a majority of Americans who today do not feel comfortable in either the Democratic or Republican Party.

Likewise, I do not accept the premise that my candidacy siphons more votes from Republicans than from Democrats.As I hold online town halls, travel the country and read the emails and messages coming into our campaign every day, it is obvious that we are connecting with at least as many Obama voters as McCain voters from 2008. A lot of people who thought they were voting for change in 2008 are today very disappointed that what they achieved was only a slightly different version of the same business-as-usual they wanted to reject. The desire for a truly new approach cuts across all parties and independents alike.

When parents explained to their offspring about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament, there always seemed to be an undertone of admiration in their voices, or at least there did in Northampton.

While that era’s children perhaps didn’t see Fawkes as a hero, they certainly didn’t see him as the villainous scapegoat he’d originally been intended as.

At the start of the 1980s when the ideas that would coalesce into V for Vendetta were springing up from a summer of anti-Thatcher riots across the UK coupled with a worrying surge from the far-right National Front, Guy Fawkes’ status as a potential revolutionary hero seemed to be oddly confirmed by circumstances surrounding the comic strip’s creation: it was the strip’s artist, David Lloyd, who had initially suggested using the Guy Fawkes mask as an emblem for our one-man-against-a-fascist-state lead character.

When this notion was enthusiastically received, he decided to buy one of the commonplace cardboard Guy Fawkes masks that were always readily available from mid-autumn, just to use as convenient reference.

To our great surprise, it turned out that this was the year (perhaps understandably after such an incendiary summer) when the Guy Fawkes mask was to be phased out in favour of green plastic Frankenstein monsters geared to the incoming celebration of an American Halloween.

It was also the year in which the term “Guy Fawkes Night” seemingly disappeared from common usage, to be replaced by the less provocative ‘bonfire night’.

At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn’t keep a good symbol down.

I love women. Women are great. I’ve married one, I’ve personally bred one and I’ve got lots who are my friends. And after years of close observation, here’s what I’ve concluded: chicks are definitely the superior species. They’re more intuitive, more versatile, more articulate, more competent. Plus, of course, they have breasts.

Given that all this is so, I really don’t understand why David Cameron feels he needs to impose quota systems on boardrooms. Not for the reasons he gives anyway. I could understand it if he said: “Look, I have no shame, no principles, no moral or ideological core in my blubbery, spineless, Heathite body. My Coalition government is run by Lib Dems, a marketing man and focus groups. And what they all tell me is: “Suck up to the female demographic.” So that’s why I’m saying this crap.”

But that’s not what Cameron has said in Stockholm. He’s actually trying to claim that he’s doing it for the good of British business.

Government figures suggested that Britain’s slow progress was costing the economy more than £40 billion in lost potential each year, roughly equal to the defence budget.

Yeah right. I’m sure there are also “government figures” which suggest that green technologies will create millions of new jobs; “government figures” which suggest wind farms are a vital part of Britain’s energy package; “government figures” which suggest that a 50 per cent upper band tax rate is really healthy business.

Doesn’t make it so, though does it?

Update: Megan Moore says that the tokenism on display in Cameron’s comments “represents the ultimate triumph of style over substance”:

The first and most obvious objection to boardroom quotas is that they don’t actually work. A 2010 study by Amy Dittmar and Kenneth Ahern of the Ross Business School, University of Michigan, found that in Norway, a 10 percent increase in female board members in a company — enforced through a quota introduced in 2003 — caused the value of the company to drop. After all, if quality is no longer the sole criterion for choosing board members, it is highly likely the quality of the board will suffer.

You’d just as easily make a case for boards being required to match the ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual profile of the country: “Oh, sorry, due to the quotas we can’t invite you to join the board unless you’re Irish or Sikh and are either handicapped or left-handed. Bonus points if you’re transgendered.” Rather than emphasizing the needs of the organization — hiring someone who brings skills, talents, or connections that the organization can benefit from — this kind of social engineering only values people for their plumbing or their skin colour, or their sexual lifestyle.

The European Union is currently straining every sinew in a campaign to stifle outbreaks of politics across Europe.

For the EU oligarchs, democracy sucks. What if the Greeks — voting in elections this April — decide to tear up an austerity programme painstakingly hammered out by their betters in the EU and the IMF? Imagine — and the memory of all those lost referendums still smarts among Eurocrats — if a country should decide it has had enough of the economic mismanagement and diktat that has characterised the Eurozone’s handling of the economic crisis.

A spectre is indeed haunting the corridors of Brussels offices and it is real: a well-founded fear that voters will reject the ‘fiscal compacts’, ‘debt brakes’ and ‘golden rules’ aimed at securing the EU’s reign in de facto perpetuity.

[. . .]

Pierre Moscovici, the Socialist campaign manager, has further horrified the EU by hinting that a new French president could hold a referendum — a taboo in contemporary European politics. ‘I am convinced that we will find allies for a renegotiation aimed at a policy change to pull us out of this austerity spiral and recession. We don’t like the idea of a popular vote because we are pro-Europeans and we don’t want a “No”, but nor can we allow tensions to spill over’, he said last week.

Here is an extended quote from his rant to show that I’m not taking this out of context one bit:

“Makes you wonder when was the last time a group of ideological warriors went north to train in the backwoods and plot to storm Parliament, blow up the CBC, seize the airwaves and spread terror across the land. Oh yeah, the Toronto 18 did that. Didn’t police arrest the lot of them and call them the gravest threat to our democracy?

“I think a weekend with Ezra and friends could be something just like that.

“The only thing that sets them apart from the Muslim extremists is that Sun Media will be charging you admission.”

Sorry, we’re not planning to storm Parliament. Maybe we’ll talk about writing some letters to our MPs. We’re not planning to blow up the CBC. We just want to privatize it. And we don’t believe in spreading terror across the land. In fact, we support our Canadian troops in the war against terror, and don’t want that little terrorist Omar Khadr let back in from Guantanamo Bay.

Miller ended by saying “the only thing” that makes us different from those terrorists is that we charge admission.

What a disgusting man.

Why did he liken me, my fellow Sun personalities and Sun readers to terrorists? For one reason only: We’re conservative, and we refuse to go along with him and the rest of the consensus media.

The fact that someone as vile as Miller has held senior posts at journalism schools and the largest newspaper in Canada is not surprising. Because both the Star and every j-school in the country believe in a uniform, official left-wing view.

They believe in every type of diversity — racial, sexual, ethnic — except for intellectual diversity.

I hear that you are unenthusiastic about the prospect of the Olympics this summer. In your eyes, what is the greatest folly of this whole affair?
Rather unenthusiastic is putting it waaaaay mildly: I think the Olympics suck dogshit through a straw. People believe they encourage da yoof to take up running, jumping and fainting in coils — but this is nonsense. They’re a boondoggle for politicians and financiers, a further corruption of an already corrupt self-appointed international coterie of Olympian cunts, an excuse for ‘elite’ athletes to fuck each other, snarf steroids and pick up sponsorship deals, and a senseless hitching of infrastructural investment — if there’s any reality to this anyway — to a useless loss-trailing expenditure on starchitectural bollix. The stadia themselves are a folly. The new Westfield is a temple to moribund consumerism — in ten years time they’ll all be cracked and spalled; a Hitlerian mass of post-pomo nonsense.

If the Olympics did not exist, would it be necessary to invent them?
They didn’t exist for thousands of years. The modern Olympics is a fatuous exercise in internationalism through limbering up and then running down to entropy. The modern Olympics have always been a political football — nothing more and nothing less — endlessly traduced and manipulated by the regimes that ‘host’ them. This one is no different, presenting a fine opportunity for the British security state apparatus and its private security firm hangers-on to deploy the mass-suppression and urban paranoiac technologies in the service of export earning. Some peace, some freedom.

[. . .]

‘Really, one may say that the whole Olympic process was a pasteurisation of the city… the microbes disappeared and from a hygienic point of view maybe that was positive, but really what happened is that the variety was destroyed in the process…’ Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said this about the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Do you believe that London is being pasteurised too?
No, I’m quite confident that London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It’s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.

H/T to Charles Stross for the link.

The major problem is that people do not see any alternative to the presently enacted European unification. The Europe-minded politicians even insist that, if the euro and the EU collapse, complete chaos will break out. The European continent will go back to the situation before World War II. The various nations will isolate themselves economically, and they will even start to fight each other. A war within the core of Europe, in particular between France and Germany, is taken to be a real possibility lurking in the background.

This view disregards the fact that the European unification process was made possible only because Germany and France stopped considering each other as enemies. They then saw themselves as the ‘motor’ of the European integration process, which started with the establishment of an economic union and then expanded to the political sphere. It is certainly wrong to think that the only thing that was needed to bring peace to Europe was a formal international treaty.

The claim that the downfall of the euro and the EU would produce chaos and war may be interpreted to be just a strategy necessary to get support for helping the highly indebted nations such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Italy with ever more financial support. However, conversations I have had with persons from various European countries suggest that many people really believe that Europe will disintegrate and that wars are looming if the EU dissolves. I hold this view to be seriously mistaken.

[. . .]

The individual countries in Europe will quickly form new treaties among themselves. Collaboration will be maintained in all those areas where it has worked well. Some countries will remain in a newly formed and smaller Eurozone, for which the appropriate treaties will be designed. A similar reconstitution will take place with respect to Schengen, which will then encompass different members. Only those countries that find it advantageous will join a new convention on the free movement of persons. In contrast, those nations that do not find such new treaties attractive, or that are not admitted to them by the other members, will not join.

The result will be a net of overlapping contracts between countries, which the various nations will join at will. These contracts will not be based on a vague notion of what ‘Europe’ may mean, but rather on functional efficiency. Crucially, the individual treaties will be stable because they will be in the interest of each member.

“Fifty thousand for what you didn’t plant, for what didn’t grow. That’s modern farming — reap what you don’t sow.”

That’s a line from a song about farm subsidies, “Farming The Government,” by the Nebraska Guitar Militia.

But these days it applies to more and more of the U.S. economy, as Charles Sykes points out in his new book, A Nation Of Moochers: America’s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing.

The problem, Sykes points out, is that you can’t run an economy like that. If you tried to hold a series of potluck dinners where a majority brought nothing to the table, but felt entitled to eat their fill, it would probably work out badly. Yet that’s essentially what we’re doing.

[. . .]

But the damage goes deeper. Sykes writes, “In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.

“We continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens. But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time.”

And, after a while, people who pay their bills on time start to feel like suckers. I think we’ve reached that point now:

• People who pay their mortgages — often at considerable personal sacrifice — see others who didn’t bother get special assistance.
• People who took jobs they didn’t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn’t getting extended unemployment benefits.
• People who took risks to build their businesses and succeeded see others, who failed, getting bailouts. It rankles at all levels.

And an important point of Sykes’ book is that moocher-culture isn’t limited to farmers or welfare queens. The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn’t between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.

She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.

She was in the midst of an 18-month affair with the most powerful man in the world, sharing not only John F. Kennedy’s bed but also some of his darkest and most intimate moments.

In her explosive new tell-all, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, sets the record straight in searingly candid detail. The book, out Wednesday was bought by The Post at a Manhattan bookstore.

Just imagine a world where you never had to worry about global warming, where the ice caps, the ‘drowning’ Maldives and the polar bears were all doing just fine.

Imagine a world where CO2 was our friend, fossil fuels were a miracle we should cherish, and economic growth made the planet cleaner, healthier, happier and with more open spaces.

Actually, there’s no need to imagine: it already exists. So why do so many people still believe otherwise?

[. . .]

The turning point towards some semblance of sanity in the great climate war came in November 2009 with the leak of the notorious Climategate emails from the University of East Anglia.

What these showed is that the so-called ‘consensus’ science behind Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) — ie the theory that man-made CO2 is causing our planet to heat up in a dangerous, unprecedented fashion — simply cannot be trusted.

The experts had, for years, been twisting the evidence, abusing the scientific process, breaching Freedom of Information requests (by illegally hiding or deleting emails and taxpayer-funded research) and silencing dissent in a way which removes all credibility from the scaremongering reports they write for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.