Free kibbles

The ACLU claims the Pentagon is using the FBI to spy on Americans using national security letters. The Pentagon is not allowed to spy on Americans at all, and it's using the FBI to skirt those laws, and the FBI is using national security letters to bypass warrants. I don't generally care for the ACLU, but it sounds like they uncovered an impressive abuse of government power.

State governments are mining public data to build databases on citizens. That's the problem with public data - it's public. Government is learning the power of the information age, and as always, government is using it's power against citizens. This is a fundamental truth of government that both liberals and conservatives seem to have forgotten - government is always opposed to the people. What's good for government is bad for the people. That's why we must keep government as small and powerless as possible.

2003 Justice Dept. memo gave the US military the power for harsh interrogations of terrorists, but not torture. The left is trying to pretend this memo supports torture. I prefer having the military more limited, while allowing the CIA more harsh techniques for high value detainees. Article claims Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other administration officials sanctioned torture at Guantanamo. The article does not define nor describe the torture, it just uses the word as an attack on the Bush administration. Harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding and stress positions are not torture and are not prohibited by the Geneva Convention for non-uniformed enemy combatants like terrorists. I get tired of having to repeat this, but liberals have yet to quit repeating the "Big Lie" that waterboarding is torture. Next year they're going to declare that failing to serve lobster bisque as an appetizer before a detainee's steak and baked potato dinner is torture.

Police are considering charges against a 12 year old boy for killing his mother's attacker.

Military recruiters demand the same access to college students as every other recruiter. That makes sense to me.

Chertoff waives environmental laws so DHS can finish building border fence.

Secret Service agent demands man delete picture of President Bush from his digital camera because it also showed security checkpoints.

Bush wants NATO to support missile defense. That should go without saying. If that's controversial, that's another sign that NATO is cracking.

China has provided the IAEA with intelligence on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Wow. Even China is beginning to realize the threat a nuclear armed Iran poses to the entire world. Iran is not a normal proxy. It's leaders are nuts, and maybe China is starting to realize how much damage Iran could cause it too. Or maybe Saudi Arabia pressured China - pure speculation on my part.

After presiding over the fastest growing economy in the EU, thanks to dramatic tax cuts, and the Irish peace accords, Ireland's Prime Minister is stepping down amid corruption charges. That's too bad. During his time as Prime Minister, nobody in the world's lives improved more than the Irish.

Zimbabwe opposition says it won a majority with all votes counted, but the government has not released official results yet.

The world's opinion of the US, still low, has risen slightly.

Reason takes on school officials and judges who think it's OK to strip search 13 year old girls to find if they're hiding ibuprofen.

I don't even want to think about human-animal hybrids, but we don't have the luxury of ignoring this issue.

The same liberals who are attacking President Bush on a daily basis because of warrantless wiretaps, are now up in arms because government didn't act on a phone call from overseas into America that may have been related to 9/11 before 9/11. They don't want the government to listen in on any conversation to or from America, but they expect the government to know and act on what's being said by terrorists in those conversations. As always, they want it both ways, and they're doing everything they can to make us helpless while blaming Bush for not doing enough.

Judge blocks effort to force Hillary Clinton to testify about the hundreds of raw FBI files she and Bill managed to get a hold of when they were in office. Why? Why block the Clintons from having to answer for their corruption? The press should be all over this.

Hillary's lies and corruption go back to her youth when she hid documents then produced a fraudulent brief in an attempt to deny Richard Nixon right to counsel during an impeachment hearing. She was subsequently fired from her position. This is a pretty powerful charge by a fellow Democrat. I wonder if the mainstream media will dig into this story.

Once again Democrats seem surprised at Bill Clinton's angry tirades. Democrats need to ask themselves how come they never knew how the Clintons behaved over the last 16 years. We've known about both Bill's and Hillary's outrageous tempers, pathological lying, thuggery, and innate corruption the whole time. Do these people turn off their brains until something happens to them personally? That's narcissistic in itself.

Reason says John McCain is more of an interventionist than George Bush. Lovely.

Astronomers discover young, Jupiter-like, proto-planet. They'll get a lot of information watching it develop over time.

A beautiful picture of a liberal mind at work. Another scary insight into the liberal mind - the reason Americans don't support socialism is because whites are racists. Even scarier, since liberals have paraded their very real racial biases - the racial biases they erroneously project on the rest of us - destructively through the primary, they will make the general campaign about a linkage between socialism and race, no matter which Democrat wins the nomination.

Earth Day had no significant reduction in power.

Low income drivers get a break on NYCity's planned congestion tax for driving into the city. Who are low income drivers? How will government identify and verify their incomes? How much will that cost?

Since big government is creating the problem of suddenly obsoleting analog TVs big government will take money from taxpayers by force to give to seniors to buy a converter box.

Interesting article explains why Michigan's economy is in the crapper (high taxes and government spending) and how Democrats hate the democratic process and will use state employed union thugs to intimidate recall petitioners.

Bob Barr points out that even with all the new powers of the Fed, the voters have no say over it. This argument doesn't make any sense. The same is true of judges, but would Barr call for electing Supreme Court justices? We don't elect the people running the IRS or the military either. We elect the people who appoint those people. The problem isn't that we don't elect the Fed board members, it's that government has too much power.

Cato describes the economic mess in Argentina.

Austin Bay explains the Iraqi government's strategy for suffocating Sadr without making him a martyr. I think Maliki handled the Basra clash beautifully. It was crafted to advance the political agenda of the government in 2 ways, and it succeeded in both. It showed the Sunnis, who are still wary of the Shia led government, that the government will take on and defeat Shiite militias. It also weakened Sadr politically and weakened his militia by attrition. At the end of the battle, Maliki was standing the heart of Basra, rightly announcing the success of his government to all of Iraq and Iran.

Mother Jones asked a bunch of national security experts to provide questions they would like Congress to ask Gen. Petraeus in his upcoming testimony. These are nearly without exception fabulous questions. These are the kind of questions Democrats, and Republicans, should have been asking since 2003. Instead Democrats abandoned the field of ideas and have been grandstanding and proclaiming the war lost. Republicans didn't ask any questions either. And as Mother Jones points out, we can't expect Congress to ask any challenging questions again this time either. They'll just play for the cameras and try to score political points instead of trying to extract crucial information to inform the public debate on how best to deal with Iraq. Our representatives are worthless.

Robert Reich is correct that government created the conditions for the credit crisis, but he doesn't grasp the obvious solution - get the government of the financial markets. Instead he calls for more government in the form of regulation. We are addicted to government and it's killing us.

Dick Morris speculates that Gore is waiting until after all the primaries are finished to broker a deal to seat Florida and Michigan if they agree to support the leading candidate at that time, who will be Obama.

Jonah Goldberg points out how safe it is to criticize Christianity compared to criticizing Islam.