Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

This explains the real motivation behind TARP:

"For anyone who wondered if last winter's federal seizure of the financial services industry would have adverse economic consequences, an answer is now available. The credit market has been tilted to favor a single borrower with a huge appetite for money, Washington. Private borrowers, particularly small businesses, have been sent to the end of the queue.
The Federal Reserve, which supervises some 7,000 banks, has been telling bankers that they must cut risk. The most spectacular step in that effort was the Fed announcement last month that it will evaluate the salaries of bank officers on how carefully they manage risk.
By official definition, Treasury securities are risk-free, so how better to manage risk than to pad your bank's portfolio with Treasury securities, which is what bankers are doing. Under the new management from Washington, bankers who take a flyer on a venture that might some day become an Apple, Microsoft or Google will risk not only their depositors' money but a possible pay cut. Banking has been captured by the nanny state, which means that its potential for contributing to economic growth and job creation has been sharply curtailed, even as its potential contribution to government growth has been expanded."

I still think it was a coup. Here's what government thinks our real debt is:"A number more relevant to what the government is actually demanding from the capital markets is the Treasury's financing requirement. At a recent Chartered Financial Analyst Institute conference, Treasury official Karthik Ramanathan proudly described the prodigious fund-raising task he and his colleagues pulled off in the fiscal year, what one might call a borrowing feat unparalleled in human history: "In the course of 291 auctions in 251 business days, Treasury issued nearly $7 trillion in gross Treasury marketable securities to raise approximately $1.7 trillion to finance the government.""And you thought the recession was over.

ECONOMY:

This video showing growing unemployment by county is just depressing. Thanks, government.

Whenever a new, tallest skyscraper is built, a major recession follows. The idea behind this is building the world's tallest building is a bubble activity fed by loose monetary policy. Dubai is the latest prediction to come true. China in 2012 is next on the list.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama only spent 22 percent of his stimulus boondoggle before the end of fiscal 2009. He still has some $500 to buy more votes, and you know he's going to spend it well.

When on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, cutting taxes increases revenue just like the supply-siders predicted. But that's not a good reason for cutting taxes. The priority should always be to cut spending and cut taxes to compensate for the lower spending levels.

HEALTH CARE:

Tax on cadillac health care plans will hit the middle class. You can just hear Obama laughing at all the idiots who believed he was going to cut taxes for the middle class.

20 good things about our health care system.

After correcting for accounting gimmicks and hidden costs, the actual cost of Obamacare to the American people? About $6.5 trillion over 10 years.

America leads the world in medical innovations, at least until Obama and Democrats get their way.

Why Republicans have failed to oppose the individual mandate for health care and how that failure has enabled the Democrats to reach the the finish line.

"A mandate will fundamentally alter the relationship between Americans and their government. Instead of the government being accountable to them, they will become accountable to their government. No less than the Congressional Budget Office—a non-partisan government agency—once admitted as much. "A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action," it noted. "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."

If the government can force Americans to buy coverage on the threat of fines or even imprisonment—an option that Nancy Pelosi has pointedly refused to rule out—every other government diktat becomes small potatoes by contrast. In fact, it becomes necessary. If uninsured Americans must buy coverage, why shouldn't other Americans be taxed to subsidize them? Why shouldn't the insurance industry be required to sell them coverage? Why shouldn't government set insurance prices to ensure affordability? Why shouldn't doctors and hospitals be asked to charge only "reasonable" rates—or offer only government-sanctioned treatments? Nothing about ObamaCare fundamentally changes so long as the individual mandate remains intact.

Therefore, instead of wonkishly droning about the public option, Republicans should counter Democrats' grand appeals for "universal coverage for all" with equally grand appeals for "medical freedom for all." They should stand together on the Capitol steps and issue the health care equivalent of Reagan's Berlin Wall ultimatum: "Mr. President: Tear up this mandate."

During the campaign, Obama himself successfully stopped poor Hillary dead in her tracks by reminding voters at every turn of her tyrannical plans to force them to purchase coverage. So why aren't Republicans doing the same to Obama?

The main reason is that they themselves are deeply conflicted about the mandate. On the one hand, every Republican on the Senate Finance Committee voted against it—except, of course, for Maine's Sen. Olympia Wavering-Heart Snowe. On the other hand, many Republicans, led by their intellectual lights at the conservative Heritage Foundation, among others, have long accepted—no, championed—the notion that unless people are forced to carry insurance, freeloaders who land in emergency rooms will cripple the health care system. Legislate personal responsibility, in other words. It was a Heritage plan for forced coverage that formed the blueprint for the Massachusetts universal care debacle that the then Republican Gov. Mitt Romney enacted."

Thanks, Heritage Foundation. This is just another reminder that conservatives, liberals-lite, are no friends of freedom.

Reason tells us women and their doctors, not bureaucrats, should decide when to get mammograms.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Because politicians are starving for something new to tax, the movement to legalize marijuana is gaining steam. Predicting the actions of politicians is easy.

SURVEILLANCE STATE:

DHS intercepts strategy guide for roleplaying game about taking over the planet with miniature monsters.

WAR:

Fort Hood shooter considers insanity defense. I would say all jihadists are insane, but that shouldn't protect them from the consequences of their killing sprees.

Three navy seals charged with assault because terrorist they captured ended up with bloody nose. You got to be kidding me. Waging war against our troops and intelligence personnel is going to produce predictable, bad consequences - they're going to start killing the terrorists instead of capturing them, and we're going to get a lot less info, making the wars longer and more bloody.

POLITICS:

Boortz breaks down Obama's lack of approval ratings.

Thomas Sowell explains,"No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems-- of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind."Once you realize that, politics becomes easy to understand. Barney Frank is a walking, talking beacon of corruption and his continued re-election is a national scandal and embarrassment. Frank, Chris Dodd, Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid seem to be the most corrupt in a sea of corruption. At least Reid's re-election bid is in trouble.

We pay politicians to lie to us, but I dispute that we do so unwittingly. Everybody knows the old joke about how you can tell when a politician is lying. His lips are moving. Everybody knows it's true, so there's nothing unwitting about it. We knowingly pay politicians to lie to us. We've just been stupidly conditioned over the last century to walk into the booth and pull the lever next to the R or D. When election time rolls around, the vast majority of voters check their brains at the door and follow their programming to our great detriment.

MISC:

Facts the government doesn't want you to know about executive compensation - it's much more closely tied to corporate performance than reported.

Free kibbles

WAR:

New taxes on the middle class to fund the war in Afghanistan. Obama loves making and breaking promises.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iran refuses to stop enriching uranium. Duh. Who would have predicted that? Pretty much every person in the world except Obama and liberals. The Iranian government has spent 20 years developing the bomb. They aren't going to stop now that they're so close. Now they're just playing Obama and Democrats for fools to gain time and finish the process. And Obama is playing right along. It's too late for sanctions. Iran getting the bomb is a fait accompli unless we organize a group of allies who will credibly threaten to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. But with Obama leading the free world, that's almost certainly not going to happen. Maybe Cameron will win in Britain, then he, Sarkozy and Merkel can drag Obama into making that threat.

ENERGY:

The NRC licensing nuclear power plants to operate beyond their lifetimes and limits. This is how government regulatory regimes lead to systematic and widespread failures and endanger the population. In a free market, with liability solely on the shoulders of the plant operators, this would be a problem of isolated cases at worse and possibly not a problem at all. But by issuing the licenses, the central planners greatly reduce the risk of liability from operators, enabling systematic and widespread unsafe operation. And of course when a failure occurs, it's blamed on too little regulation.

MISC:

Great quote from Ludwig von Mises:

"The dogma that the State or the Government is the embodiment of all that is good and beneficial and that the individuals are wretched underlings, exclusively intent upon inflicting harm upon one another and badly in need of a guardian, is almost unchallenged. It is taboo to question it in the slightest way. He who proclaims the godliness of the State and the infallibility of its priests, the bureaucrats, is considered as an impartial student of the social sciences. All those raising objections are branded as biased and narrow-minded. The supporters of the new religion of statolatry are no less fanatical and intolerant than were the Mohammedan conquerors of Africa and Spain. (Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos)"

Another example of how government usurps the role of religion in our lives. Communism as the religion of power:

"Communism is the religion of power. To be sure, it has a rationale and even an ethic; but so had pharaohism, caesarism, the Inquisition, and all the machines of coercion ever invented by man. It is necessary for those who compel subservience to clear their road with a moral code of some kind. In such a religion the self-restraints of "bourgeois morality" have no place, while heretical indeed is the doctrine of nonmaterialistic, superpersonal ideals. Being the only true religion it cannot permit competition from any other "opium." Power is god enough."

And the close-nit relationship between communism and fascism:

"Communism did not come, as Marx predicted, as the inevitable replacement of a collapsed capitalism. It came because of improvements in the techniques of grabbing power: the machine gun, the radio, the airplane, and, above all, the art of fiscal robbery. Lenin preached the glory of toughness; Stalin purged. Mussolini bettered Stalin's fanfare with castor oil. Hitler added the racial gadget of repression. The "public good" was invoked by all three."

Roosevelt the kindred spirit:

"It remained for the Great Man in America to improve on their techniques by destroying the meaning of words, by so confusing language that instead of being a means of communicating ideas it became an instrument for compelling subservience.

Meanwhile, he dug up and polished the old Roman device of "bread and circuses." Here was an apostle of power whom the least bloodthirsty socialist could accept. No bludgeon in his equipment, but the skillful use of seductive phrases, so dear to the "intellectual," gained for him the selfsame means of compelling conformity which his crude European models sought: control of the economy. And with that control he built a hierarchy — a church. He anointed the frustrated soapboxers and collegiate wordmongers with the scented oil of bureaucracy. He gave them jobs. He invested them with power. That began in 1933."

Religion has always been a tool for power hungry people, but the religion of the state, the idea that elected officials and bureaucrats are good, worthy people who must be obeyed by us untrustworthy lowlifes, has killed orders of magnitudes more humans than any other religion in history.

I believe this statement to be truth and the fundamental reason why, when people discuss politics, they so often fail to find common ground:

"There are those inclined to liberty — freedom of the individual to live his life or her life in any peaceful way. And there are those who are inclined to mastery — permitting others to live their lives only as another sees fit."

Professional politicians universally fall into the latter category. Here's a wonderful observation concisely presented:

"In a small setting, we view the use of force as a means to help others to be the antithesis of charity. However, in a political arena, we find ourselves condoning, even promoting, the use of physical force as the proper means to extract aid. And when such force is used, we paradoxically refer to it as an act of charity and compassion."

I still prefer my line - there's nothing compassionate about welfare.

"The democratic State simply provides an attractive means for some to acquire the resources produced by others at little or no cost to themselves, while preventing any real recourse for those from whom those resources are taken."

That's democracy in a nutshell. Democracy is inconsistent with freedom and the rule of law.

"Those who earn wealth by producing goods and services that others choose to purchase have freed multitudes from the miseries that nature would have otherwise bestowed.… Because the earning of wealth in free markets is dependent upon those who perceive value in the earner's goods and services, the greater the wealth earned by one necessitates the greater the perceived wealth (well-being) gained by another."

That's right. Bill Gates's wealth shows that he's created more wealth for others than anybody else in America. More on Gates:

"When free markets create wealth, regardless of how wealthy one individual becomes, someone else … is also better off.… Those of wealth have not taken anything from society, but, in fact, have given to society an amount of wealth that far exceeds the amount they have earned."

"Those wishing to close the gap between the rich and the poor (by restricting individual liberty and transferring wealth) will … only reduce real earnings for everyone, and in the process, harm the poorest the most."

Another truth.

"Liberty is an end unto itself, with prosperity as its positive externality."

Another.

Free kibbles

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Inflation as the cruelest tax of all.

"The zero-interest-rate policy of the Fed is sold to the public as a benign economic rescue in the public interest. The stark reality is that this policy is a disguised tax implemented by the Fed. It takes income from savers and hands it as a subsidy to borrowers. It also facilitates and funds the fiscal deficit policies of central government. Such a well disguised tax is a boon for governments. The cruelest tax of all is this 100 percent tax on interest income, disguised and rationalized as "good" policy."

Nice intro.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Tehran not cooperating with IAEA on investigation into whether or not Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Duh.

LOCAL:

The city of Dayton to take $100,000 from taxpayers by force and spend it trying to make Dayton a hub for aerospace. In other words, Dayton's central planners are going to use force to do $200,000 of damage to our economy, making us all poorer, to buy votes while pretending it will help our economy. The folly of central planning will never end until we end it. If you want to make Dayton an aerospace hub, quit taking money from us by force for central planning and abolish the income tax.

MISC:

Apdesignco.com and therefore lostpolitics still has an account problem.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The US economy can't absorb any more damage from government.

"It’s been over fifty years since I first heard Leonard Read make the comment, "The market is analogous to a sponge. The market can absorb a lot of government mess until, like a saturated sponge, it becomes a mess too!" Looking back, it’s been almost fifty years since Leonard (he was my best man at our wedding) told me marriage and the market share this similar trait, so keep your sponge dry. While our marriage has done so, sadly the same cannot be said about the free market economy over these past fifty years."

GLOBAL WARMING:

Obama to attend Copenhagen summit and pledge CO2 cuts. This is bad news. The only reason Obama would show up would be because he's ordering the EPA to enforce cuts without legislation.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The real unemployment rate is 17.5 percent. I think it's higher. This number is still provided by government

Unemployment taxes make it hard for companies to hire. Duh. Paying people not to work is stupid. If people want to purchase unemployment insurance, they can.

TAX AND SPEND:

This is the kind of irresponsibility that the welfare state breeds, literally: woman with 13 kids and living on welfare won't stop having kids until she has twins because she always wanted twins. It's all about her. The children be damned.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Wall Street rallies forces to maintain secrecy of the Fed against Ron Paul's audit the Fed bill.

"Congressman Ron Paul dared to introduce a bill, H.R. 1207, that would require an audit of the FED by a government agency. The House of Representatives agrees with him. He got over 300 co-signers of the bill. Barney Frank at first tried to bottle it up in committee. Then he tried to substitute a watered-down version. The committee voted for Paul's version last week. This was a palace revolt against Frank. This does not happen often in any committee.

This is the first bill in Paul's long career that has had widespread support. This indicates that the Federal Reserve, for the first time since 1914, has serious opposition in Congress. This in an historic event. The FED can no longer presume that Congress will treat it with kid gloves.

The Wall Street establishment understands the threat."

Check out the argument the Wall Street guy makes about keeping Fed operations secret:

"The flaw in the thinking about an "open Fed" is that most elected officials and average citizens are too stupid to understand the Fed. They don't have an IQ problem, but they do suffer, in most case, from a lack of education about complex fiscal policy, macroeconomics, and game theories of John Forbes Nash who was himself schizophrenic. In other words, the Federal Reserve management and staff perform a function that most people cannot possibly understand in any detail. Citigroup may need $100 billion for a week. That does not mean it is going out of business, or, if it is, the Fed knows enough to call the Treasury Secretary immediately."

Can you say elitism? Can you say contempt? Can you say baloney? A company that needs an emergency $100 billion loan and can't get it in the marketplace is, by definition, in serious trouble and should suffer the consequences of its business decisions and be replaced by better businesses.

HEALTH CARE:

Boortz compares what politicians the CBO told us certain programs would cost to what they actually cost, and no, I don't buy the numbers on the health care oppression bills. Incomplete list of the accounting gimmicks used to make the Senate bill seem less expensive than it really is. Why do we allow our aristocrats to get away with this constantly?

This is a summary of the entire Obama agenda, not just health care oppression. These numbers on the Senate health care oppression bill are scary.

Senate bill attacks health savings accounts.

Advocating civil disobedience against the health care purchase mandate. It worked in Massachusetts.

Health care competition with the government option.

Cato reports that after 157 days and many votes, nobody, including Congress, has seen a complete cost estimate of Obamacare.

GLOBAL WARMING:

72 percent of Americans still think we're experiencing global warming, down from 80 percent last year. Nice job, press. The planet has been cooling since 1998, but you've managed to misinform 72 percent of Americans about that fact. Self-government can only work when the people are well informed. The founding fathers thought a free press would make sure that happened. What they never foresaw was that the press would become dominated by people with similar political agendas and that the press would develop such a symbiotic relationship with government. When the government becomes the single most important force in our lives, the press wants to have a good relationship with the government so they can get scoops. That's yet another reason to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government.

Lord Monckton calls the climate frauds criminals. How long have I been saying that? Al Gore is profiting from a lie. That's fraud. He and all his political cronies and phony scientists who have profited from this fraud should be investigated for fraud, tried and convicted.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Police arrest man for not making tweet they ordered.

WAR:

It's been 86 days that Obama has fiddled around since Gen. McChrystal asked for more troops while Afghanistan burned. Higher taxes to fund more troops. If they weren't so destructive, these aristocrats would be comical.

The German government is sending a team of lawyers to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad to insure that no evidence it supplied will be used to seek the death penalty. How would that even work? I'm not aware of different juries to determine guilt and punishment.

Dennis Kucinich says everybody should have the same constitutional rights including Osama bin Laden. If this dumbass had his way during WWII, we'd still have Nazis and Japanese soldiers clogging US courts. There would have been no crimes tried since WWII. Why can't some people understand the war is different from crime?

Bill Clinton forced military personal to be unarmed victims on their own bases.

This is the question every American must ask:

"If the federal government--including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, etc., with billions of dollars worth of technology; tens of thousands of snoops, spooks, and intelligence gatherers; and myriad Patriot Act-type laws--could not protect US soldiers on one of the most tightly secured and heavily guarded military installations in America, how can anyone in the country possibly not break out in cacophonous laughter when politicians tell us we need to surrender more liberties so that they might pass more laws to protect us crummy little peons?"

They can't protect us. We depend on ourselves and our neighbors for security just like the second amendment explains.

Our military is the military of empire instead of a military of defense. Obvious our military must have the capability to take the fight to any enemy who attacks us, but our military is serious overkill. 11 carrier fleets is ridiculous. The 50 percent of world spending is very misleading though. We have a higher standard of living in the US, so we have to pay our troops and the defense contractors more than other countries pay them. But we still spend far more than we have to for defense.

One way to fix the problem would be to reduce all intellectual property (IP) rights to two years period. That would spark a technological revolution as competition exploded in industry and the arts. Prices of military and all other equipment would drop enormously if we did this. Two years is an arbitrary number I picked reflecting the modern produce cycle. I understand the argument for abolishing the artificial, government protected monopoly called IP rights completely, but I don't think it's politically possible and I'm not sure it's the smartest idea yet. I'm still studying the subject. I can think of cases were art, not technology, would be stifled without a short period of IP protection.

But there's no way the American people will accept cuts in the military. The American people need to be shown that they will be safer without having American troops stationed all over the world. Once they see that, then they'll accept cuts in the military. I think a libertarian candidate running as a Republican can promise to hold military spending flat for four years except for the savings from bringing all American troops home, while dramatically cutting other spending and win.

How can an essay claiming to prove that Guantanamo is unconstitutional never mention the war except to quote Karl Rove and call our aristocrats war criminals. Our aristocrats are lots of bad things, but I haven't seen any evidence of a war crime by them. This essay is just a bunch of anger like you see from the rabid anti-war left. How come these people refuse to acknowledge we're that al Qaeda declared war on us, and we're fighting that war. If you don't like the war, argue we should end it. Stop pretending it's not a legal war declared by Congress. It is. Text of Congress War on Terror resolution. Quit pretending we don't have the authority to capture and hold prisoners in that war like we have every other war we ever fought. We do.

POLITICS:

Mark Steyn on Obama the Superbower.

"The other day, for example, he told Fox News that “if we keep on adding to the debt . . . people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

That’s a great line — but not from a guy who plans to “keep on adding to the debt” as a conscious strategy. This is the president who made “trillion” the new default unit of federal budgeting, and whose irresponsibility is prompting key players around the world to consider seriously whether it’s time to ditch the dollar’s role as global reserve currency. But Obama’s much vaunted “bipartisanship,” to which so many “moderate” conservatives were partial a year ago, seems to have dwindled down to an impressive ability to take one side of an issue in his rhetoric and another in his actions."

Steyn falls for the old bipartisan gimmick. Bipartisan should be a four letter word. When the two parties become bipartisan, that just means they're going to quit fighting each other so they can more effectively loot us. That's like the Bloods and the Crips calling a truce so they can better loot their neighborhoods. With apologies to the Bloods and the Crips for using them in a comparison with the biggest looters of all: Republicans and Democrats.

Now that the EU has seized power over all of Europe thanks to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty (I still want to know why Vaclav Klaus signed it), the EU is pushing a new Europe-wide tax.

""The financing of the welfare state, irrespective of the social reform we implement, will require new resources," he said. "The possibility of financial levies at European level needs to be seriously reviewed.""

That didn't take long. At least he's half-honest about the reason - financing the welfare state. He could have been more honest and said it was about buying votes. Anybody who didn't see that coming is an idiot. Europeans are not going to like living under an American-style, all-powerful central government.

Barbie in a burqa.

Walmart and Amazon in major price war.

Lostpolitics board gives account suspended error. So does H4P's business page that we ride on apdesignco.com. I guess he is using a host service and they suspended his account.

Thanksgiving is the time to be thankful for the economic freedom without which we would have nothing and to remember the Pilgrims almost died trying communism and subsequently flourished when they embraced economic freedom.

How long ago did I recommend using predator drones to fight Somali pirates? Since then though, I've decided the government should do nothing. We should not subsidize companies which ship along Somalia. Instead, ships that choose to use that route should be prepared to defend themselves and suffer the consequences of their own decisions if captured. Maybe Obama will keep following me to better and better ideas.

Top 20 funniest signs.

Political Correctness and Central Planning Beget Catastrophic Con

Political Correctness and Central Planning Beget Catastrophic Consequences
by Mark Luedtke

When a normal person makes a simple mistake in his or her life, the consequences of that mistake are limited to the individual who made it and the people close to him. Since we're all human, we all make mistakes and suffer the consequences. But when we transfer power over our lives to central planners, and those central planners make the same human mistakes, the consequences are catastrophic. The only way a central planner could be effective is if he was both omniscient and angelic. Humans are neither. Only God could be an effective central planner, and central planners know it. That's why our politicians, especially the president, usurp the role of God and religion by pretending to be all-powerful solvers of all problems. Much like 9/11, the Fort Hood massacre illustrates how the simple, inevitable human mistakes of central planners produce destructive results for others.
Political correctness doesn't seem like a big deal. Everybody understands that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but some prefer not to acknowledge that the world's terrorists are overwhelmingly Muslim and commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam. Some ignore Muslims who look to radical imams who preach jihad for guidance. That's their prerogative. Their political correctness will probably never be a problem or the consequences will be limited to them and those around them. But when political correctness infects central planners - our politicians and high level security bureaucrats - the result is catastrophic institutional failure like we saw at Fort Hood.
According to early reports, the Fort Hood shooter (whose name I won't mention because sensationalism in the press frequently inspires copycats) was an outspoken advocate of jihad against American troops. He attended a mosque in Washington run by a radical imam who had counseled three of the 9/11 hijackers. He emailed that imam in Yemen seeking guidance. The shooter claimed the Koran took precedence over the Constitution. According to the London Telegraph, instead of delivering a medical lecture to fellow Army psychiatrists, the shooter once delivered an hour long rant on the Koran and told the attendees that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire and that non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats. He tried to contact al Qaeda through multiple jihadist websites. He had business cards printed up saying "Soldier of Allah". All of this was known by our military and intelligence services.
And those are just the early reports. We'll find out more. According to NPR, "a key official on a review committee [at Walter Reed] reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who happened to be a Muslim." Our central planners strip search granny at the airport. They mine data on millions of Americans. But they refuse to investigate radical American Muslim Army officers who try to contact al Qaeda. The shooter did everything but carry a neon sign over his head flashing "Death to America".
But our central planners will never learn the lesson. Prosecutors have charged the shooter with murder but not treason. As a murderer, he's just like any other American who goes postal. He was unhappy with work so he killed his coworkers. Ideology is a non-factor. For prosecutors to charge him with treason, the central planners would have to admit they'd allowed an enemy guerrilla fighter they were aware of to strike behind our lines. Central planners never admit their failure. They always claim the failure of their programs was because they had too little power, not too much.
Political correctness played another role in this massacre. The day of the shooting, Fort Hood commanding General Cone euphemistically reported that soldiers at Fort Hood weren't armed on base because it was their home. Like it was their choice. What he really meant was the Army ordered soldiers to go unarmed on base. When a person volunteers for the military, he surrenders his freedom including the right to keep and bear arms if so ordered, but in what world does it make sense to disarm the people we trust to fight our wars and turn them into victims on their own bases? If those troops had been allowed to carry firearms, the shooter might never have attacked, or soldiers returning fire would have stopped him immediately.
Mark Steyn expressed the opinion of many Americans when he claimed that political correctness was the fatal flaw of the war on terror. He was wrong. An enemy guerrilla fighter shooting up a military base every decade or so would be tragic, but it won't cause us to lose this war. The fatal flaw in the war on terror is our policies. While speaking out one side of his mouth, Tweedledee Bush claimed we weren't fighting a war of civilizations with Islam. Out of the other side of his mouth he claimed he wanted to transform the Middle East into an Americanized society with American-like institutions using tanks and bombs. I wonder if that was an inside joke or if Bush didn't realize those are the same thing. Muslims realized it. Tweedledum Obama escalated the conflict against Muslims and is on the verge of escalating it again. On the one hand, our central planners claim they aren't waging war on Muslims. On the other hand, they're setting fire to half the Middle East.
We ousted al Qaeda from Afghanistan nearly eight years ago, but we're still killing Afghans. Al Qaeda was never in Iraq, but we invaded anyway, and al Qaeda followed us. After years of futility, we finally defeated them, but our troops are still in Iraq. Our wars destabilized Pakistan, and now we're bombing Pakistanis. The Fort Hood shooter wasn't a jihadist when he joined the Army. Our policies invited the Fort Hood shooter and continue to invite Muslims in America and millions of Muslims in the Middle East who never cared about America to become enemies. We're making enemies faster than we can overcome them. To be successful, we must end these counterproductive wars and focus on stopping terrorists who are trying to attack America.

References:

Now we find out that the Fort Hood shooter had attended a radical mosque in Virginia, he had tried to contract al Qaeda,
and intelligence agents knew it. Yet this man was still in the Army
counseling US soldiers. This guy is the poster child for who shouldn't
be in the military, yet nothing was done. This highlights again how
inept our government is. I hope they charge this guy with treason as
well as murder, but government is so stupid, I wouldn't bet on it. The imam who advised the shooter also advised three of the 9/11 terrorists.

Mark Steyn tries to point out a fatal flaw in our terrorism strategy
- turning a blind eye to radical Muslims in our midst, which is a real
problem - but he fails to identify the real fatal flaw: waging war
against entire countries, against people who are not terrorists, and
doing so for years moving into decades at a time, radicalizing Muslims
overseas and at home who would not otherwise be radical and turning
them into enemies.

Here's the quote from the London Telegraph

Fort Hood shooter to be charged with premeditated murder. That's fine as far as it goes, but what about treason?

Fort Hood shooter had business cards printed saying "Solder of Allah", and common term among jihadists, and he accessed multiple jihadi websites under different screen names.

Reason on how foolishly banning guns at Ford Hood enabled the shooter to kill and wound so many people.

Cato on Fort Hood and political correctness. Good point about this being an act of guerrilla warfare, not a terrorist attack.

"It was stated simply in an NPR report
yesterday: “A key official on a [Walter Reed] review committee
reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who
happened to be a Muslim.” If this isn’t ”political correctness,”
nothing is."

Free kibbles

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Kennedy tried to put the Federal Reserve out of business. This explains why the LewRockwell crowd is so interested in the Kennedy assassination. I never read any of those articles because I'm not interested.

GLOBAL WARMING:

The liberal press is really pushing the phony global warming stories before the Copenhagen conference, but they won't touch the story about the hacked emails. They're pretending they respect privacy and secrecy. That's too funny.

LOCAL:

It took seven years for government to complete the I-75/I-70 interchange north of Dayton. That's unbelievably slow, but they had a big celebration today when they removed the barrels. A project manager in the private sector would have been fired for taking over a year.

The ten commandments do not include "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote".

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Government artificially inflates our GDP numbers by including work done by foreign workers.

"An article in this week's New York Times by veteran writer Louis Uchitelle confirmed a fact that I have been alleging for years. Uchitelle pointed out that foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of U.S. GDP and productivity. The connection goes a long way to explain why we keep losing jobs even as GDP is apparently expanding.
As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers."

Yet more fraud from our government.

"Don't expect the brain trust at the President's job summit to fret much about these details. That public relations stunt will likely ignore the root cause of the economic imbalances and instead stress the need for government spending on training and education, i.e. more public debt. The unemployed do not need government theatrics, they need actual jobs. But as long as the government props up failed companies, soaks up all available investment capital, discourages savings, punishes employers, and chases capital out of the country, jobs will continue to be lost."

But that's exactly what government will do.

TAX AND SPEND:

Unemployment benefits stimulate unemployment.

FREE SPEECH:

It's not reasonable to compare government censorship of information to media's failure to report information. Once is a produce of the use of force. The other is voluntary.

Robert Murphy looks to God for his rationalization for being libertarian. I think he fails to make his point that this is the only way to avoid contradiction.

HEALTH CARE:

Cato says that the House health care oppression bill would cost $3 trillion over 10 years of operation.

Senate gets 60 votes to begin health care oppression bill debate.

Senate bill would cost $1.8 trillion over 10 years of operation. You know even that number is too small. It's obnoxious that they've pulled this trick multiple times on health care, and they keep getting away with it.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Fear of a deep temperature drop. We also have to fear that the climate alarmists will eventually jump on this bandwagon and try to use as a reason to implement global communism. The assault on freedom never ends.

"Observations of the Sun show that as for the increase in temperature, carbon dioxide is "not guilty" and as for what lies ahead in the upcoming decades, it is not catastrophic warming, but a global, and very prolonged, temperature drop. [...] Over the past decade, global temperature on the Earth has not increased; global warming has ceased, and already there are signs of the future deep temperature drop. [...] It follows that warming had a natural origin, the contribution of CO2 to it was insignificant, anthropogenic increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide does not serve as an explanation for it, and in the foreseeable future CO2 will not be able to cause catastrophic warming."

Agreed.

Now Obama wants to centrally plan cities to fight global warming. I'm so impressed with this guy. He's so smart that he can run every aspect of our lives and make them better.

Thomas Sowell on how Obama is dismantling America as we know it. Part 1.

"Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government-- people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list."

Part 2.

"As for the benefit of the doubt, no one-- especially not the President of the United States-- is entitled to that, when his actions can jeopardize the rights of 300 million Americans domestically and the security of the nation in an international jungle, where nuclear weapons may soon be in the hands of people with suicidal fanaticism. Will it take a mushroom cloud over an American city to make that clear? Was 9/11 not enough?"

All government officials, because we give then extraordinary power, should never receive the benefit of the doubt. They must be held to the highest standards.

The Russian government as organized crime. That's redundant. All governments are organized crime. The only question is to what extent, and it sounds like the Russians are pretty obvious about it. Any organization that claims it can take money and property from people by force for its own operation is immoral and the result can only be corruption and violence. It doesn't matter if the organization calls itself government, mafia, yakuza or anything else.