Liberty Student's Workshop

Project One: June 12 Update

liberty student — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:48:00 GMT

Previously, I announced that the first web project would be a blog and article aggregator, in the style of theweblist.net or popurls.com.

The name has been selected, it will be Liberty Appeal and residing at libertyappeal.com (registered but not hosted yet).

Currently on the demo (no sneak peeks!) I'm pulling a lot of libertarian/conservative/political feeds. So what I need from the Mises community, are the following types of blog and online magazine suggestions...

Sites about agorism, anarchism, activism, libertarianism, minarchism, old right conservatism, classic liberalism, etc. Right now, the feed list is quite biased towards paleoconservatism and political activism, based upon my own personal reading habits.

Feeds I am already pulling (and subject to significant change based on feedback)

Ron Paul Stuff
Lew Rockwell
Mises blog and articles
3rd Party Watch
Taki's Mag
FSK's Guide to Reality
Liberty Maven Blog
American Conservative
HNN Liberty & Power Blog
Mises YouTube, Ron Paul YouTube
Ron Paul Flickr
Downsize DC
Antiwar.com

So please post your suggestions in the comments. You can post as many as you like and feel free to post your own blogs with the following in mind.

Vlogs, Podcasts etc are fine
The site/blog must support RSS (XML) feeds (the orange chiclet icon)
The sites/blogs must be updated consistently, at least twice a week.

Let's go!

Project One: Blog and Article Aggregator

liberty student — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:44:00 GMT

So, our first project will be deploying a PHP coded RSS aggregator. This will be a static, self updating, fully automated newshub.

Right now, I am looking for names for it.

I'm stuck deciding on

Liberty Appeal
Liberty Observer
Liberty Current

What do you think? Drop me a line in the comments.

Who is Vern McKinley Virgina District 10 Republican?

liberty student — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:19:00 GMT

Vern McKinley is known as the "first Ron Paul Republican". But he's also known for his policy work through Cato Institute. Work that has found it's way to Mises.org, and Ron Paul's written testimony.

Here are some samples,

Freddie Mac: A Mercantilist Enterprise
http://www.mises.org/story/1765
[4]McKinley, Vern. "The Mounting Case for Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," Cato Policy Analysis (293) December 29, 1997, pg. 2.

A Glorious Sunset
On assault weapons and laws that fade away
http://reason.com/news/show/33670.html
Of course, sunsetting won't always kill the laws or agencies it's aimed at. Even with widespread criticism from congressmen and the General Accounting Office, as Vern McKinley detailed in the pages of Regulation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission managed to continually survive four-year sunsetting deadlines (with staffing falling right before deadlines, to show the CFTC's lean-meanness, and rising immediately thereafter).

WRITTEN TESTIMONY OF RON PAUL ON H.R. 1121
THE FINANCIAL FREEDOM ACT OF 1997
BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 1998
http://financialservices.house.gov/banking/31198pau.htm
"The [Community Reinvestment Act] utilizes fairly vague terms such as ‘convenience and needs’ and ‘meet the credit needs of the local community,’ and then explicitly delegates to the individual agencies the power to define these terms, while using the threat of denying applications to assure compliance with the agency-created definition," according to Vern McKinley, who worked at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board and the Resolution Trust Corporation, in Regulation magazine (1994 Number 4). He states clearly, "The CRA should be repealed. Altering the underlying regulation merely leaves the way open for future administrations to utilize the statute as a government credit allocation scheme."

Tomorrow is a grassroots Money Bomb for Vern @ http://www.maydaymckinley.com. Help support Vern in his quest to knock off pro-state, pro-war, pro-welfare Frank Wolf, the big spending, business as usual incumbent and send Ron Paul another ally in the House of Representatives.