Obviously it makes me feel kind of old, even though I’m only 24. And it makes a lot of my other accomplishments feel a lot less important in comparison.

But what I want to focus on (unsurprisingly?) is how it related to my thoughts on politics, specifically how I prioritize issues.

If you look at my blog history you probably can see an evolution in my thought and what issues I focused on most.

For example I used to focus a lot on somewhat abstract philosophic issues and things like tax policy and have since shifted to immigration, along with the drug war and land use policy.

Thinking about Liam’s birthday has helped clarify in my mind why I’ve come to care about the issues I do.

While my concern in politics was, and remains to be, the defense and promotion of individual liberty, there’s a lot of room for varied priorities under that umbrella. What has come to concern me the most is what I think of as “experienced liberty and tyranny.”

What do I mean by this? Let’s go back to the evolution in thought over the course of this blog.

Taxes matter, I certainly won’t dispute that. However, given the current political realities, changes in our tax code will have minimal impact on the lived experiences of almost everyone.

On the other hand, things like our current immigration policy or the War on Drugs have a massive impact on people’s lives, one that is far more visceral and destructive than the tax code.

Marginal tax rate brackets creep up a few percentage points? That’s a negative change and one I’d just as soon Liam could avoid. But the War on Drugs? Statistically speaking it’s a pretty good bet he might end up trying marijuana some day and that choice could land him in jail, unalterably changing his life for the worse.

Given that kind of disparity, I think it is far more important to focus on working to change those areas where government is actively destroying people’s lives, or at least significantly harming or limiting their well-being.

As a young man still in college or just out of it, it’s easy and fun to spend time worrying about abstract questions of philosophy (actually it still is and I do think it’s important to engage in the exercise).

As a Republican, particularly one who holds office within the Party, it’s easy to go along and be vocal about the mainstream issues like taxes and spending.

But it’s not enough to do what’s easy and being a father has made that clearer than ever to me.

I want to work to make a world I can feel better about Liam and others his age growing up in. And that means focusing on the issues that are doing the most to limit individual liberty and harm people’s well-being, things like restrictive immigration policy, the War on Drugs, prohibitions on same-sex marriage, pointless military adventurism, and occupational licensing that helps incumbent businesses & stifles competition.

These aren’t sexy or high status issues and I don’t begrudge anyone their priorities. But I hope others will come to see things the way I have come to; positive changes in these fields can yield immediate and significant improvement in the lives of many and make the world a noticeably better place for those who will follow after us.

I wanted to write about Shaffer’s response, because something he says in it is completely false.

Louis was responsible for the Rule 11 waiver in 2010.  But this is only one example of a demonstrated pattern of behavior.  He has consistently used his position to sway the results in contested primary elections, by giving unfair advantages to one Republican candidate over another.  This year he served as state campaign chair to the Romney campaign, dismissing the other candidates

While I don’t challenge the note about Louis’s involvement with the Rule 11 waiver (although I do think it an exaggeration to imply he was solely responsible, which the sentence does as written, and don’t think it was ever a real problem), I do take significant issue with the claim that Louis attempted to sway the results of primary races, particularly during the most recent primary when he served as a co-chair to the Romney campaign in Maryland.

This past year I served as the Maryland State Director of Gov. Gary Johnson’s presidential campaign, until he stepped out of the Republican race and decided to seek the Libertarian nomination instead.

As you may or may not know, Gov. Johnson was driven to do this in large part because the media effectively locked him out of the race, not including him in their polls (in fact dropping him after he outpolled candidates like Gov. Huntsman and Sen. Santorum) and then denying him a place in the debates because he wasn’t on their polls.

Gov. Johnson fought hard against this and as part of that fight sought to get the RNC to step in and protest the media’s efforts to manipulate the Republican primary.

I spoke with all of our RNC representatives as part of that effort, and while I got positive responses from all three, I was particularly impressed by what Louis told me.

First, Louis was the first to respond to me.

Second, he told me that he agreed it wasn’t right that Gov. Johnson was being excluded from the debates and that even though he was working in support of Gov. Romney he would speak with RNC Chairman Priebus in support of the RNC doing what it could to stop the media exclusion of Gov. Johnson.

Third, he said this even as he conceded that even though he disagreed with Gov. Johnson on some policy issues he did respect his executive experience and acknowledged he had more of it than his own candidate.

These are not the actions of someone looking to sway the primary in favor of his candidate. Louis didn’t need to do anything to aid Gov. Johnson in his efforts to make it onto the debate stage – but he did.

And that’s really what has me convinced that Louis is the right man for the job. His actions when I spoke with him about Gov. Johnson were the actions of a man of integrity, one who is concerned about what is best for the Party, not for any individual candidate.

We saw it with Van Jones who strangely claimed:

“…they [libertarians] hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, ya know ya’ll.”

And then, as reported by Radley Balko, there’s the case of the Cato Institute getting blasted by a liberal blog for having the temerity of wanting to support and take on a project documenting police misconduct.

Meanwhile Sen. Orrin Hatch is “doggone offended” by efforts of libertarians to prevent or at least hinder his re-election and is ready to “punch them in the mouth” for dumping on him. Interestingly enough, the Libertarian Party doesn’t appear to be fielding an opponent against Hatch.

And I’ve even had my own bit, with a recent op-ed I wrote at the Chestertown Spy encouraging civil liberties voters to not let Democrats take their votes for granted. It’s gotten fairly notable pushback, much of it along the lines of “I largely agree with what you’re saying, but since you’re a Republican Central Committee member I can’t consider it credible.”

What is it that is driving this kind of anti-libertarian vitriol? It’s not like there’s a ton of us out there winning elections and changing government to reflect our policy ideas.

But apparently we must be seen as a threat after all. And that’s something to take heart in, since it suggests more people are beginning to recognize the importance of individual liberty and are prepared to act on it.

While I didn’t find much worthy of response in her three articles on the subject, one thing did jump out at me:

He claims that those who want to slow immigration and close the borders are “environmentalists” who don’t want more people here.  I guess he has never heard about the hard Left Sierra Club’s OPEN BORDER views.

Hate to tell you this Ann, but it might be a good idea to actually look into the groups you routinely cite from before casting aspersions. From a quick search of her blog I found the following:

• 41 posts making use of NumbersUSA material, which openly states in its About section that it is motivated by “beliefs in environmental sustainability, economic justice, the rule of law, and individual liberty, and opposition to federal immigration policies that threaten these values by forcing massive U.S. population growth.”  NumbersUSA also complains about loss of open space due to population growth putting it squarely in line with the smart growth planners behind PlanMaryland that Corcoran is so rightly incensed about.
• 25 posts drawing from material by the Center for Immigration Studies, which has a whole section of its website devoted to enviromentalist, pro-zero-population-growth arguments for its anti-immigrant agenda.
• And at least 5 posts pertaining to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, another anti-immigration organization that proudly works to spread enviromentalist arguments in support of its agenda (due to their acronym being FAIR, it is a bit harder to tell which posts of hers are about the group and which just use the word “fair”).

And to just make the picture a bit clearer, all three groups are part of the network of anti-immigration organizations founded by John Tanton, a proponent of radical Malthusianism, population growth alarmism, and zero-population growth.

Also potentially interesting to Ann, besides his involvement with anti-immigrant organizations, he’s also been actively involved with a couple of groups she holds less than kind opinions of:

• The Sierra Club
• Planned Parenthood

Now personally I tend to try and avoid condemning an organization just because someone tied to it is tied to things I dislike. But in this case I do hope that this rather revealing information leads Ann to rethinking her openness to studies put out by anti-immigration groups and even moreso her commitment to the anti-immigration agenda.

From The Daily Caller:

Internet pornography could conceivably become a thing of the past if Rick Santorum is elected president.

The unapologetic social conservative, currently in second place behind Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, has promised to crack down on the distribution of pornography if elected.

Santorum says in a statement posted to his website, “The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.”

If elected, he promises to “vigorously” enforce laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.”

What does this have to do with rape? Evidence suggests it might be quite a bit.

Todd Kendall, of the Clemson University Economics Department, wrote an excellent paper in 2006 on the relationship between internet pornography and rape.

After reviewing the data on rape and internet access, his findings all point to the same conclusion – internet pornography acts as a net substitute for rape and that as internet access increases, rape rates decrease.

• When the data was divided between states with quicker internet adoption rates vs slower internet adoption rates, the data showed that a 10% increase in internet access (and therefore access to internet pornography) correlated with a reduction in the rape rate by 11.7%.
• Taking the same data and breaking it into three groups based on the ratio of 15-24 year old males-to-females, the most at risk of rape age group, it is seen that in those states with the highest ratio of males-to-females, which would be the states where the substitution effect would be strongest, a 10% increase in internet access correlated with a 15% lower incidence of rape while the other groups experienced statistically insignificant effects, further reinforcing the hypothesis.
• Finally, after performing a sophisticated regression controlling for numerous factors that could also be influencing the reduction in rape incidence, the finding was that a 10% increase in home internet access correlates with a 7.3% decline in rape, which would mean 6,800 fewer rapes in 2003. Factor in non-reported rapes and Kendall estimates the number of avoided rapes could be higher by a factor of 2-3.

Now obviously this is only proof of correlation, not causation, but it still should make anyone have some serious alarm that a serious presidential candidate is calling for an end to internet pornography when there is strong reason to believe it may lead to more people being raped.

Factor in Santorum’s opposition to contraceptives, his (near?)total opposition to abortion though and one truly has to begin to wonder at what he does and doesn’t care about.

Or you could just listen to him saying that he thinks pregnancy is the silver lining to rape.

While I don’t disagree with many of the people there that removing the deduction, or even curtailing it for the people most likely to use it, will likely have a deleterious effect on the housing market, that wasn’t why I was there.

In fact, and this probably won’t make me popular with my colleagues in the industry, but as a matter of general policy, I support getting rid of the MID entirely. It distorts the housing market, encourages people to take on as much debt as possible, and by acting as an effective tax on renting has a potentially regressive impact.

Read the rest of the article at The Queen Anne’s Spy.

At the state level we’ve already seen a successful drive to put the MD DREAM Act on the ballot and there are already plans to put the same-sex marriage bill there too, while people in Baltimore County are working to put a recently passed transgender civil rights bill up to a vote as well.

Meanwhile, at the local level activists in Queen Anne’s County have successfully put the big box retail zoning amendment on the ballot and have met the first threshold necessary to do the same with the APFO revision.

All of this is certainly impressive, particularly the ways groups have leveraged modern technology to do what used to be impossible even with paid signature gatherers. But the question remains, is it good?

Get the answer in full at The Chestertown Spy.

If Paul wants to continue his campaign, he has the right to do so as a third-party candidate. Ron Paul is NOT a Republican and certainly is not a Conservative. The sooner Republicans figure out that the Ron Paul of 2012 is no different from the Paul of 1988; the sooner Republicans can get to the business of deciding our nominee without distractions from fake Republican candidates dressed up in elephant clothing.

This line of attack might have a bit more traction if there was some substance to back it up…

Read the rest of the article at The Talbot Spy.

In particular, I find myself drawn to the (quickly withdrawn) words of Catherine O’Malley, our governor’s wife, on the bill’s failure last year:

“We didn’t expect things that happened to the House of Delegates to occur, but sadly they did, and there were some cowards that prevented it from passing.”

Contrary to many on the Right, I’m going to come out and say it – even if she’s claimed she regrets her remarks, I think she’s right. The same-sex marriage bill was killed by cowardice.

Read the rest of the article at The Chestertown Spy.

Former Maryland Republican Party chairwoman Audrey Scott also attended, agreeing with other supporters that infrastructure is the key to economic growth and jobs. Scott also accentuated the need to safeguard transportation money, which too often has been tapped by governors from several administrations to plug other budget holes.

This has been interpreted by Michael Swartz, Richard Cross, and others as Audrey supporting an increase in the gas tax, and as such, a strong mark against her in her campaign for the MDGOP National Committeewoman spot.

If it’s true, then I’d have to agree that it’s pretty damning. But on the other hand, I know Audrey and I’ve seen the way she operated as MDGOP Chairman and it certainly didn’t seem in keeping with her, so I reached out to her for more clarification. This is what she had to say:

I wasn’t there to support a hike in the gas tax. I was there for one reason and one reason only – to speak out against Gov. O’Malley’s repeated raiding of the Transportation Trust Fund and to insist upon stronger protections for it so he and other tax and spend liberals can’t continue to do so.

When I agreed to attend the event, I was never told that calling for a gas tax increase would be any part of it and to be frank, I thought it was shameful to see others subverting what the rally should have been about – putting an end to wasteful spending and fiscal irresponsibility. Marylanders can’t afford a gas tax increase and I find it abhorrent that anyone could even consider imposing one.

Infrastructure is important to Maryland’s economic well-being, but the answer to fixing it isn’t raising taxes, it’s restraining spending and ensuring that the Transportation Trust Fund can’t be raided to fund O’Malley’s pet projects.

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It’s the right policy stance and it’s much more in keeping with all the things Chairman Scott has said and done in the past.

Plus, this is the Washington Post we’re talking about, an openly liberal paper that imports huge left-wingers like Obamacare cheerleader Ezra Klein – of course they’d take any opportunity to make it look like Republicans are getting behind a gas tax increase, even if the facts don’t back it up.

I don’t know if the others writing about the article bothered to talk to Audrey or not, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves if they didn’t. The GOP has enough problems of our own without parroting left-wing hit pieces from rags like WaPo.