You are cordially invited to the March 6th meeting of the Republican Liberty Caucus of North East Florida to listen to the following candidates for the fourth congressional district.

• Black, Bob (REP)
• Klauder, James R. (REP)
• Koniz, Gary L. (DEM)
• Pueschel, Deborah Katz (REP)

The candidates will also take part in a panel discussion.

We will be serving snacks and drinks from 6:00 to 6:30 and then will open the meeting.

Each candidate will be allowed an opening statement of five minutes. Then, three questions from the moderator will follow. Each candidate will have two minutes to give an answer to each question, and then a one minute response to the answers given by the other candidates. After this we will take questions from the audience for individual candidates who will have one minute to answer until the end of the meeting.

Please feel free to suggest questions that you would like all the candidates to answer.
We look forward to seeing you there.

When:
Tuesday, March 6, 2012, 6:00 PM

Where:
Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott – Jacksonville
4888 Lenoir Avenue, Jacksonville, FL

In the Spring of ’04, I was struck by the idea that I had to have a piece of chocolate pudding pie. I decided to make it myself. The crust was made by hand, with flour, ice-water and butter. The filling was made with cocoa, sugar, cornstarch, vanilla, butter, and whole milk mixed together in a bowl and then microwaved it until it came to a slow boil.

After baking my pie shell in the oven and filling it with the warm pudding, I left it to set up in the refrigerator for several hours. For the topping, I used heavy whipping cream, vanilla, and sugar, with just a touch of rum to help flavor it. Let me tell you that it was everything you could ever want a chocolate pudding pie to be! I cut a generous slice and ate it with the whipped cream along with a hot cup of coffee. Not something that you would want to eat every day, at least if you valued your health, but offered as a punctuation of one’s life, a brief interlude of pleasure, it was truly perfect.

This pie cost me about six dollars and fifty cents to make. Most restaurants assume a thirty percent food cost so you would expect to pay two dollars and seventy cents for a slice of this pie if it was cut into eight pieces. The problem is you that cannot find it at that price anywhere. What you are offered instead is a poor imitation of the reality that is chocolate pudding pie. A chiffon filling with artificial flavor that is more air than anything else, and topping made of whipped oil instead of cream. All this for about three dollars and fifty cents and that doesn’t include the coffee. The sad thing about it is that most people don’t realize that they are being served a cheap imitation. They like the way it tastes.

A silly thing to be writing about, chocolate pudding pie. But I submit to you that so much of what we are being served up today by our suppliers, our corporations, our media and our government is so pervasively artificial that we should be seriously considering what it might take to replace them with the genuine article. To begin with we would have to stop swallowing the stuff they are feeding us. Even if we often like the way it tastes.

by Roderick T. Beaman

I never really cared that much whether homosexuals were permitted to serve in the military. I figured this was just as much their country as mine and they’d be just as tenacious, and perhaps more so, defending it as anyone else, especially when you consider that in some countries homosexuality is punishable by death.

Barry Goldwater wrote that he didn’t care either. All he wanted to know was that the guy next to him in the foxhole could shoot straight. Ken Hamblin, the Black Avenger, wrote something similar about affirmative action; that he never cared what color the pilot was when he flew, he just wanted to know ‘did he kick ass in flight school.’ I’ve always felt that way and never really understood the problem.

Some claimed that it would create a sense of unease if military people knew that homosexual members were looking at them in the shower which seemed reasonable until I realized that I’d already been in open showers at YMCAs and health clubs where it was highly likely there were homosexuals anyway. So what was the big deal?

A number of years ago, one of the Lucian Truscotts, the fourth I think, wrote an article that appeared in The Providence Journal about his experiences in the Korean War when the men in his battalion thought one was homosexual. Truscott wrote of the cruel taunts heaped upon him but also, finally when he was killed, how they all wept. That’s what it takes sometimes to awaken people to their intolerances, I’m afraid. We forget all too quickly that we are all Children of a Creator and that none of us is more worthy of His love than another. We’re all capable of some cruel things and some wonderful examples of decency. At any rate, I’m glad that’s all over.

But there is a far more vexing question which has not been posed by either the conservatives nor the liberals in this matter. That question is, why do we have such an extensive military in the first place?

Article I, Section 8 of The Constitution empowers the Congress ‘To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; (and) To provide and maintain a Navy. Article II, Section 2 states ‘ The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;…’

The wording of The Constitution with regard to the navy is much more permanent than that for the army. I think this is no accident. A mere look at the map is enough to tell why.

Even today, we’re isolated from many of our trading partners. At that time, we were contiguous only to Canada; Spanish and French colonies lay to the west and south with Mexico, a long overland distance away, all with indistinct borders. We were just a short sail from many Caribbean and other New World nations but an ocean away from Europe.

We had to become a maritime nation and we needed to have a navy to protect our shipping. In fact, a lot of what it did in those early years was just that, as evidenced by the Barbary Coast Wars and the Quasi-War with France. Our shipping was being harassed and it also contributed to our War of 1812 with Britain. Shipping was vital to our survival! It still is.

We have five basic military services; Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard but we really need just two. The Marines are actually part of the Navy anyway; the Coast Guard a naval service. Aircraft carriers could many of the needs of an air force. That would leave only domestic ground defense to be provided which, of course, is where the militia come in which could also fill the remainder of the needs of an air force, which was part of the Army to begin with.

It’s also obvious that Founders wanted us to rely extensively on our various militias for defense. That was part of the purpose of the Second Amendment. So we really have little need of a standing army but like everything else governmental, the military has become a huge bureaucracy whose main interest is self-preservation.

Most military spending is unnecessary. Harry Browne once estimated that the entire defense budget could be covered with just $100 billion; later he lowered it to $50 billion. A stripped down federal military, especially the Army, with reliance on militias, run by the states, necessitates only a skeleton federal crew with fifty states as laboratories for developing the most efficient & effective models.

Anyone who has spent any time on a military base knows about the budget jokes; how at the beginning of the budget year there’s meat loaf for dinner and at the end, roast beef and lobsters. That’s how all bureaucracies work. They have to spend their allotment for the year so their officers can trek to Capitol Hill to request an increase for the next year to mourn how ‘woefully inadequate’ the current allowance is for their current mission, which, of course, always has to be expanded.

Whether it’s health education, welfare, environmental, law enforcement or military services, a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat. You will never hear a department or military Chief of Staff ask for a budgetary decrease. That has to be a sure ticket to a funeral for any government career.

Cyril N. Parkinson formulated his famous, humorous law, partly from observations of the military while in the British Civil Service. He noted how the number of personnel in the foreign service increased as the empire dissolved. An essence of Parkinson’s Law is that any bureaucrat wants subordinates, to magnify his own position; he doesn’t want competitors and he certainly never wants to resign.

I don’t know what was going through so many of our minds during those years when, unbeknownst to us, the Soviet Union was collapsing from within. We got snookered by the military and the CIA that kept up the alarms about Soviet capabilities. For me, I began to see the light about the military sometime during the 1980s, the Reagan years.

Our children were going to school and my wife became friendly with another woman whose husband was a career military man. She told my wife, one day, that they were anticipating that the next hot spot would be the Mideast.

At that, I said, whoa! Aren’t we simply fighting to end the communist threat to us? Isn’t that why we’ve had this huge military presence all these years? The answer, I came to realize was, of course it’s not. We’ve had this military presence to ensure the military’s survival.

It was then I realized that the military is just like any other government bureaucracy. Its first order of business is its own preservation. Karl Marx predicted the withering away of the state once the workers’ paradise came to pass but, the neither the state nor its bureaucracies, ever withers; no earthly paradise is possible. And so, today we find ourselves in imbroglios around the world.

That’s why the military discerned future problems in the Mideast. It needed a secondary bogeyman if the first one faltered and falter it did with the collapse of the eastern Europe Soviet satellites and finally the Soviet Union itself in 1991. And the fun continues.

The groundwork for overseas intervention that began with William McKinley, accelerated with Woodrow Wilson making the world safe for democracy and Franklin D. Roosevelt maneuvering us into World War II and the CIA’s unconstitutional foreign policy interventions that Robert Taft warned about, all have come to fruition. The military-industrial complex has been saved.

If tomorrow, somehow, peace descended over the entire arc from Morocco to Bengla Desh, the military would scramble and discover a new enemy du jour. You can count on it. It’s the truth about the military.

And as far as freedom goes, one of the greatest dangers to a free society and the world, is from soldiers sitting around with little to do. But don’t ask and don’t tell about it.

This article originally published in The Freedom Beam, November 7th, 2011 Dr. Roderick T. Beaman is an osteopathic family physician practicing in Jacksonville, Florida. Born in New York City, he attended New York University as an undergraduate. He is a recipient of a 2003 Ron Paul Liberty in Media Award. He has written a novel that he has given up hope of ever getting published and so has made it available for the asking through TheFreedomBeam@comcast.net.

Regarding Ax Handle Saturday, I am not exactly sure why we should be celebrating a day when a bunch of black folk got beat up by a bunch of white folk with ax handles. I think it is unlikely to happen again given Republican efforts made to repeal Jim Crow gun laws preventing African Americans from arming themselves. Any such attempt made now by racists to assault their fellow citizens would be surely be met by a hail of gunfire, and that’s the way it should be.

I am told that approximately 360,000 Union soldiers died during the Civil War, of which approximately 40,000 were black. The rest were white. It seems silly to talk about what color they were now, as they are all dust. By their actions they preserved the Union, and they ended the open practice of slavery.

Racism is still going strong, based on the idea that the color of a person’s skin will automatically serve as an indicator of how they think and act politically. Of course there are some cultural arguments to be made. If you are a member of a group of people that looks alike and has the same history and traditions, and lives in the same area, it might be likely that you would hold the same opinions as your life-long friends and relatives. But that should not discount the fact that a person can grow as an individual and change their political opinions based on reason.

People love to mix racism with politics, not to end it, but to promote is and use it to fool the voter. Although it is personally appalling to me, I will condescend for a moment to draw attention to skin color. Former Councilwoman Glorious Johnson, Mr. Sam Newby, Vice Chairman of the Republican Party of Duval County, Clive Rickets, Chairman of the Libertarian Party of St John’s County, these among others are champions of Liberty and the American Way. Patriots do not view them as “African” Americans, but only as Americans who by the serendipity of nature happen to have dark skin. They are not leaders of “black” men, they propose to lead “all” men. Justice Clarence Thomas, defender of the Constitution and natural law, a man who would never apologize for his country; Dr. Alan Keyes, defender of Liberty and the life of the unborn, Herman Cain, Dr. Condi Rice, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jennifer Carroll, Eldridge Cleaver, all of them Republican political examples to be emulated. However, to say that one does or does not admire them because of their color their skin is as ludicrous as saying that I admire Lord Acton because he was fat.

What is most annoying is when racists accuse others of being racist. It is not racist to be rich and to want to keep your money. It is not racist to say that before we allow this country to degenerate into all-out, one-world socialism, we will go to war in the streets. It is not racist to say that we do not have as a country or as individuals the resources, or the responsibility, or even the desire to take care of all the needs of the poor. It may or may not be selfish, or mean spirited, but it is not racist. Racism is the big lie and should never be tolerated. The vocabulary of racism, even the word “race” should never be tolerated. We are all one race, one set of DNA. Differences in color, in height and weight, in age, are ridiculous subjects for political contemplation.

Differences in ideology however are not. Differences in ideology are fodder for war between countries, and for civil war. We fought the Civil War based on the question, “Will men be free or slaves?” NOT “Will black men be free or slaves?” It appears that we are soon to fight that battle again, not over the issues of color but over the issue of economics. Will men be free or slaves? Will they be able to keep the fruits of their labor? Will they be able to own property? Will they be able to keep what they have earned to enrich themselves and their families, or will it be taken from them and given to others who have not earned it in the interest of “fairness.”

We on the far right despise racism and do not tolerate it. We stand for liberty for all. We demand due process and equal access for all to the procedures and processes that describe our political system. Our system, a constitutional republic, administered by representatives elected by democratic process. A capitalistic economy ruled by market forces that anyone, anyone at all may benefit from and grow rich . A system where the rights of the individual are more important than the rights of the “state”, or the “masses.” A system that tens of thousands of Americans have died to establish and preserve, that we ourselves are prepared to fight and die for even today, and tomorrow. Let’s celebrate that instead the memory of some horrific act that means nothing today except for its value as a tool to alienate men and women of good will on the basis of color.

(Louis William Rose is a political philosopher and the Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Northeast Florida you can contact him at louisrose@yahoo.com)

I know that I am the odd man out when I say I could care less about the Jaguars. But given that, you must admit that professional football is a fantasy world where the players (Boselli and a few others noted exceptions) don’t care anything about the town where their team happens to be located. The Jaguars will play here, they will play in Detroit , they will play in Beijing if the money is right. And pro-football aficionados get all excited about it, like they were a college team from their Alma Mammy. This is also the problem with the Republican Party. Put on the uniform and we will cheer for you no matter who you are.

That has to stop. A republican is someone who believes in Liberty and a republican form of government. A republic is a form of government where the majority is constrained from doing things by a written constitution and where representatives (not leaders) are elected by the people, who retain all the power. People who do not ascribe to this philosophy are not Republicans and if they say they are they are lying to you. People who do not support this type of government are not Americans either, because their allegiance is not to the Republic as is constituted. They are the domestic enemies of our Republic referred to in the Constitution and need to be shunned and expelled (preferably bodily) from our party. This includes folks who do not act and vote as if they are Republicans.

Do not be confused if I tell you that the members of the Democratic Party also must support this type of government. We are all republicans because that is the type of government we have established, a republic. There are many issues that Republicans and Democrats can debate and disagree on, and many programs and policies that can be tried and judged on their merits. But the type of government we are going to have is not open to debate. That frankly is a non-negotiable issue for us, a life and death issue. The fact is that both our parties are filled with individuals who have over several decades attempted to transform our republic into a collectivist state. Now at last the call for Liberty is ascending and this will stop. Make no mistake, it’s still “Liberty or Death.”

A life of Liberty is not easy, but it is sweet. There is no Social Security with Liberty ; there is no health care with Liberty ; there are no government loans or bailouts with Liberty . It’s pull yourself up by your bootstraps boys, and oh yes, you get to keep your money if you can earn it. There are no seatbelt laws with Liberty, there are no cameras on every street corner with liberty, there is less crime with Liberty because everyone is heavily armed and the criminals are well…dead. Liberty means being the actual head of your household, and if you can’t hold it together, Liberty means looking to your family, and your neighbors, and your church, because the government is not in the business of being your mama. Liberty means being on your own to do what you want, and sometimes doing the wrong thing and having to pay for it. But in Liberty is also the motivation and the necessity to do great things and that is what makes it sweet.

The good ol’ boys and gals down at the Tea Party are not going to have the wool pulled over their eyes. They know what manure smells like. The GOP cannot go on supporting the socialist, big government buffoons like Peyton, Crist and McCain. Make no mistake, the list is much longer than that. When we say that we are a big tent, inclusive party, it means that we don’t care what religion, sex, or color you are as long as you are for people being left alone to live their lives. That goes for foreign policy too. We can no longer accept villains who want to tax every transaction, and regulate our every movement. The time has come for government to step off or be stepped on. The real republicans in this party are going make it happen, our ranks swelled by those who will not be lied to by power hungry elitists. Screw football. Let’s talk about the issues, let’s talk about what Liberty means and what lengths we are willing to go to for our children to enjoy its fruits.

Louis William Rose is a political philosopher, writer, and the parliamentarian of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Florida. You can contact him at louisrose@yahoo.com.