The choices people make while they're high not only affect them, but the people around them. Do you think this guy regrets what he's done? Is it a reality check for him? Can you imagine how the friend that called feels? Do you think his call made a difference?

This ad is a little too scare tactic-esque if you ask me. If his friends can't take care of themselves, that's on them and getting upset at someone for not ruining their own good time in order to babysit their friends is silly. He doesn't need Tim as a friend and shouldn't feel bad about losing him.

[H]is post/essay basically says “Look, ‘new’ Democrats and libertarians have a lot in common, except that you need government instead of the market to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.”

We are ready to accept precise forms of help. I don't want money, and I don't want hand-outs. I want trade agreements with European firms who will come to Senegal and work with African firms. Anything else is a waste of time.

For decades, conservatives stood against big-government intrusions into American education. They defended local control of schooling, championed parental choice, and pushed to abolish the federal Department of Education. But then, tragedy struck: Republicans took power in Washington, and conservatives suddenly learned to love big government. Indeed, some are now so enamored of it that they are proposing what was once unthinkable: having the federal government set curricular standards for every public school in America.

With friends like these, libertarians don't need enemies. Let's hope NRO's education prediction is as illusory as their polls that are "rising everywhere."

..allow the indefinite detention of some illegal immigrants ..

[It] also would expedite the removal of immigrant criminals, denying them some court access, and would broaden the definitions of gang violence to facilitate detention and deportation.

Top Ten Reasons Libertarians should to vote Democrat

1. You can still hate Hugo Chavez.

2. You can be smug about Abramoff (but not that smug).

3. You can complement Ahmadinejad on his style.

4. You can still hate John Kerry.

5. You get to use wacky words like "RepubliKKKans."

6. You don't have to subscribe to The New Republic anymore (just read Slate!)

7. The girls! (They don't call us the Mommy party for nothing.)

8. You won't be the first.

9. You can still hate the Daily Kos.

10. You might not feel so bad about sneaking into the AFF for free beer. (Think of it as welfare.)

…countered that the real infringement upon voting rights would be allowing fraudulent votes by the dead or illegal "to cancel out legitimate votes."

In 2002 I attempted to vote, unsure whether my registration was still valid, in Colorado. I was asked for my name and some personal information, much like the credit card company does on the phone, and allowed to vote via provisional ballot. Now, how exactly does one vote if is illegal? Well, if you're illegal and you're working you already have false documentation of citizenship (probably a social security card), so in 2008 and 2010 you won't have the slightest bit of trouble, a driver’s license is only as far away as the DMV.
When I lived in Germany, they had a tax on all TV's and Radios and the government was allowed to arbitrarily enter your house and search to make sure you were claiming the right number of each in your possession. I remember shaking my head at this and being proud that Americans were fighting to keep from having a national ID card. No more.
As this misguided bill fails to prevent voter fraud, the federal government will be inclined to further regulate what kind of ids are allowed and eventually issue a proof of citizenship. The solution is merely to support the states in efforts to keep more accurate voter rolls, a result that would benefit everyone, but instead this congress has decided to further impinge personal liberty by requiring identification for the most basic right a citizen has.

After the presentation, people asked questions. Some of them were even embarassed by what they clearly thought were dumb questions, questions my boss dispatched as a matter of course. But for me they were extremely enlightening. As I said, I spend my days interacting with a computer, convincing it to do my bidding, what I don't do was try to use the product.

On my way to the Census Bureau I read an old copy of Reason I had procured courtesy of AFF and stumbled upon this quote:

At the rate that technology is advancing ...people will be implanting chips in our children to advertise directly into their brains and tell them what kind of products to buy.

If I was capable of any sort of cheery utterance at that time of morning I might have laughed out loud. How delightfully absurd! Then I looked down at the author of this load of bollocks- Hillary Clinton. Now, I like Hillary, I think she's plucky and ballsy. Enough for me to forgive nonsense about video games and flag burning, but I do understand that for a true blue libertarian these are unforgivable heresies, especially on the left and I'm not going to argue her case. Besides if you're libertarian in New York, you're pretty well doomed anyway. But I do think it important to remember something: Hillary is not an idiot. Her quote above is, however, idiotic.

Hillary is a politician, she must watch what she says 24 hours a day and this means we'll catch her sometimes. Still there's more to her blunder than this. Hillary spends most days convincing other legislators and being convinced by them, doing this even the smartest person will come up with some absolutely moronic ideas and be convinced of their veracity; group think gets us all at times. What on earth does this have to do with voting Democrat as a libertarian?

My meeting this morning put me back in touch with the people I'm really working for, it jarred me into recognizing their perspective, and what they need from me. If you're a politician, that jarring is quite difficult because, unlike me, a politician has real power and is therefore much more easily lulled into complacency. And much harder to jar. The other side of the isle has had some stunning successes in the last ten years, and all of those have been hard earned, but they have developed a swagger, some have admittedly been better than others but, in general, they've forgotten who they're working for (at least from a libertarian perspective) and they've started working for themselves. Earmarks, Deficits, the largest expansion of Medicare since it's inception, and division and ineptitude on the issues that they actually get right like privatizing Social Security and tax reform. One can't help but look at the last six years and wonder; exactly what has such a striking majority gotten for the everyday libertarian?

In this period we've gone backward not forward. So much so that Democrats are trying to seize upon some libertarian economic ideas. Is this just naked opportunism? Will they act on these promises once they get into office? The better question is, does it matter?

On one count, I can't help but sympathize with his consternation, Kerry, especially since the election, has come across like the loony lefty that he was portrayed during the campaign. Weak willed, mealy mouthed, and opportunistic in the worst way he's exhibited just about every negative quality associated with the word liberal. I still proudly call myself a liberal and I do my best to do so unironically (at times, yes, it's difficult). I was the only person on the campaign who was pro-war, I was easily the most adamant free trader and probably the only one who advocated shrinking the current government, as opposed to undoing everything Bush did and doubling it's size. But I wasn't blind to these differences during the campaign and, although some may claim I've made a deal with the devil by voting Democrat, I find the alternative infinitely less palatable.

On the campaign one phone conversation I had sticks out in my mind, I was on the phone with an ideological brother; after talking to this older gentleman for some time, I found that his ideological fault lines mirrored my own. He was libertarian. I was delighted to have him on the phone talking, and we both enjoyed the conversation (or so I'd like to think). At one point he said one thing he liked about Bush was that he cut taxes. I asked him if in the last three years his taxes had gone down. He said no.

Now I realize that that was somewhat opportunistic because, yes, Bush did cut taxes, but there's an issue at the heart of this that is still at the center of why I believe libertarians should vote Democrat this fall - accountability. No politician, even the most well meaning ever does everything they promise but if you elect a politician, and they must convince you that they have made a good faith effort to fulfill their promises. Bush told the middle class he cut their taxes and that, he did not do.

Libertarians who continue to vote Republican slavishly, and I claim voting in this election is voting slavishly, face a very real threat of disenfranchisement. The starkest example of the counter productivity of this behavior is the black vote. As voters black people tend to fall to the right on cultural issues, yet the Democratic Party is clearly far left on cultural issues, why doesn't such a large constituency have more sway? Because the black community has not held them accountable by abandoning Democratic candidates (at least not yet). Mostly because of an instinctive reaction against Republicanism. The same is true of libertarians; having grown accustomed to voting red, they are loath to change tack. They shoyuldn't be, this is a recipe for marginalization. If libertarians don't flex their muscle they'll lose it, which would be a shame for American politics.

In the last election the economist endorsed John Kerry for the presidency in an article entitled "The Incompetent Versus the Incoherent" and that's the crux of the choice that libertarians face this election; bet on a known loser or someone who you're not sure about. Doesn't seem like a call anyone would like to make, but that doesn't make it a tough call. I'm sure the specifics will get fleshed out ad nauseam in the coming months, I look forward to a healthy debate. Oh, and for the record, I'm pro dams.

Having resigned myself to these caveats and made the reader aware of them, here it go.

I download illegally, and I think it's wrong. I realize that's a contradiction but it's a pretty common one. People often do it often; otherwise we wouldn't have the word "rationalize" in our lexicon. Nonetheless, I have decided to spew my two-point rationalization (you can tell I really do think it's wrong because I not only rationalize it by I have a two point rationalization, had I gone so far as to construct a three point rationalization, then, well, I guess I wouldn't think it was wrong anymore)

Point 1:Selection

The basis for my experience is iTunes and, although this may not be typical, I am going to assume it is.

To begin let me point out an obvious fact: I am a suburban white boy. Suburban white boys grow up amongst a dizzy array of uniformity and mediocrity. As do most suburban boys, but suburban white boys have it worse because well, everybody's white. Not everybody but a plurality of Americans and also (I think) a majority, if a slim one.

Right about seventh grade, we all noticed how cool a band T-Shirt was. It meant that you had been to that record store in the seedy part of the nearby city or better you had actually been to a concert. And not everybody had them, at least to start with. So we all started getting them. Then we took this distinguishing characteristic (which, quickly ceased to distinguish anyone) to the next level: obscurity. The more bizarre outlandish, foreign and esoteric your T-Shirt the better. You only needed two or three other schoolmates to know of the band ; if some didn't you would immediately school them with a scornful "You've never heard of them!!??" and then proceed to tell all you knew about the band, which usually took two or three sentences. Then after schooling enough people you would need to find another such band. My musical tastes have been driven by this odd feedback loop and as such, I now must go to the seedy part of town to buy anything I listen to and even then I scorn their selection as "pop".

iTunes only has those pop anthems, those suburban guilty pleasures that you liked only because they were so mainstream that no one liked them. But that type of music is not what you buy, your friends and your friend's friends already have it. It has made copyright law anachronistic by it's sheer ubiquity. So after not too short a time you go looking for those treasures of esoterica, your personal suburban holy grail. And it is nowhere to be found. When you type in the band name it gives you a Google-esque "Did you mean U2?" and you scoff. Legal Internet downloads are the wannabe hip kid who wore only big name band T-Shirts. I scorned him then as I do now. Illegal downloads have the swap meet factor going for them, maybe one out of 10,000 users likes artist A but as long as you have 10,000 users then you'll find something of his and he will find something of yours and you've accomplished you goal. Every time iTunes gets a new CD it has to store it itself and, no doubt, go through some rigmarole with the record company.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is I can't find what I want on iTunes. Literally I think I have bought something like two CD's from them in the nine months I used legal downloading. Which Leads into point 2.
Point 2:Ease of Use
I used to have Comcast high speed internet. It is rarely high speed and even occasionally not Internet. When I was about to move into my new place I had some friends over and, as is my suburban white boy way, I found a band that they didn't know that I was fond of (In all seriousness, east coast people really don't know anything about west coast music). So I found the album in question and clicked on it in iTunes. The song loaded for an unusually long time, then informed me that, as my internet was offline it could not verify that I actually owned this album that I had paid for. I was angry. I had done things right, I had legitimately purchased this album online and here I was being punished for it. This can never happen when you download illegally. Once you have, it's yours. There's no online verification, no limit to the number of CD's you can burn you may have acquired it illegally, but it's yours now. Legally download music and you still don't own it in the same way.

Shortly thereafter, my hard drive crashed. This happens. My computer was rather old. But I had had all my music on my iPod, luckily. But after getting a new hard drive and installing iTunes, when I plugged in my iPod, iTunes wanted to erase all the music on it. I refused, of course. After that I went to the Apple store, Macs being a total mystery to me, and the clerk told me what was clearly company policy: "The iPod is not a backup device." He seemed nice and so I explained to him that this was all music I legitimately owned and thus I wouldn't be stealing it if I got it off my iPod. He was cool and told me "off the record" that you could easily buy illegal "iPod rip" programs off the internet for $10. I bristled at the thought of re-paying for music I legally owned. And resented the fact that I was forced to do it illegally. That was really the last straw.

I still use iTunes but, due to the one drawback of illegal downloading; viruses, I will be reformatting soon and I won't put it back on.

This begs the question "Didn't you say you had an iPod?" And "if you won't be using it can I have it?" Sadly I will continue to use my iPod so there will no raffle between my whopping seven blog readers to give away my iPod. I still use it and I got all my songs off of it without buying an iPod rip program. Turns out that it functions as a removable hard drive if you plug it into a windows machine that doesn't have iTunes. So as it turns out I can use it as a backup device.

Girl1 : I really love your group of friends, I mean they're so diverse. Not to get racial or anything.

Girl2: Yeah, where is rachael anyway? I think I'll go get her.