Free kibbles

This headline drips with irony: Obama's transition team exonerates itself in Blagojevich affair. With Obama and his henchmen aggressively silencing all critics, this is what we have to look forward to for the next 4 years. Of course the "investigation" has a closed loop quality. It was closed loop predetermined to exonerate itself. Obama, Emanuel, and another Obama top aid were questioned by prosecutors about the case.

Terrorists continue rocket barrage into Israel. If the citizens of Gaza won't stop it, and if Israel can't stop the rockets with regular military action, Israel should line up a bunch of bulldozers and push Gaza into the sea. It's unconscionable the citizens of Gaza and the Israeli government allows this to continue. Government's primary reason for existence is to protect the people. By that measure, Israel has a failed government.

Cato weighs in on George Bush's Monty Pythonesque comment that he "abandoned free market principles to save the free market system," noting they warned Bush was no friend of free markets before he was elected.

Cato explodes the myth that deregulation caused the financial crisis. The federal government has 12, 113 regulators regulating the financial markets. That's hardly deregulation. But that oppressive amount of regulation failed to prevent the crisis, and no amount of regulation in the future will prevent the next crisis. The regulators are part of the problem, not the solution.

Retailers ask Obama to give them 3 periods of 10 days without sales tax. There is no federal sales tax. They're asking Obama to override state and local tax codes. These are the same state and local governments that are asking the feds for a bailout. We created this situation by voting for the same 2 parties over and over, and it won't end until we stop voting for them.

Cato describes why Obama's economic plan, like all Keynesian plans, will fail. I think every modern politician understands that Keynesian economics does not work. I bet even Paul Krugman understands it can never work. The theory is bogus. That's why it never has worked in practice and never will. Politicians just use it as an excuse to spend money the government doesn't have to buy votes from special interest groups and socially engineer the country in their own image like the gods they fancy themselves. From Wilson then Hoover and FDR to LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter to Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Obama, they all play god with our country to our detriment.

This Cato video on the failure of Keynesian economics explains that tax rebates are another form of Keynesian economics. At least tax rebates leave money in taxpayers' pockets instead of allowing politicians to redirect it, so it's not a double whammy. Like I always say, every dollar government spends is a tax. It must be paid for by the people either through direct taxes, taxes on subsequent debt or inflation.

Cato lists 10 reasons the government should not do another Keynesian economic stimulus. My favorite: Rising federal debt is fiscal child abuse.

Scientist claims to make radio waves travel faster than the speed of light.

This is cruelty to animals. These people need to get help and quit abusing their dogs to make themselves feel good.

Phenomenal photographs from 2008.

So you want to be an air traffic controller?

Government's monopoly on schools enables special interests to rewrite history in textbooks. If we had school competition, those schools teaching accurate history would rise to the top.
John Stossel calls Obama's desire to take advantage of the current economic crisis to transform America in his own vision an arrogant conceit. Isn't that redundant? He points out that even Keynes, on whose work FDR based his New Deal, openly criticized FDR for prioritizing reform ahead of recovery. It's like we have a great old video of a conductor driving another train into a wall, which everybody has seen, and we know exactly all the mistakes he made to do that, but the conductor of our train is doing everything exactly the same anyway.

Thomas Sowell has some random thoughts. My favorite: representatives should wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers with patches of special interest groups proportional in size to how much money they paid the representative.

Amateurs tinkering with genetic engineering in home made labs. How scary is that?

Plain clothes cops attack and beat 12 year old girl under the auspices of fighting prostitution.

The NYTimes continues to pay the price for being a liberal propaganda organ - Nov. ad revenue drops 20 percent.

"Scientists" warn Christmas lights promote global warming. Christmas lights are a wonderful target for liberals. They can attack capitalism and Christmas at the same time with this propaganda. Now we know the real truth according to liberals - global warming is Jesus's fault.

Quote of the year is Chris Matthews talking about Barack Obama sending tingles up his legs while claiming to be objective. You can't make this stuff up.

Bush hate fueled Springsteen's latest album. I diagnose him with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Home prices may stabilize because of refinancing. Or they may stabilize because the housing market correction is over. It'll be interesting to see a graph showing if housing prices have dropped to where they would otherwise have been without the Fed created housing bubble. Yesterday I posted an article with a graph showing that commodities had done so, so I wouldn't be surprised if houses have as well.

As more and more governments increase spending, the recession gets deeper. Duh. Maybe somebody ought to notice this and stop increasing government spending. China and Russia warn of bad 2009.

Russia announces massive rearmament plan including 70 new strategic nuclear missiles. Obama plans to counter by reducing the US nuclear arsenal, missile defense, and advanced weapon systems. He's so smart. Putin is salivating at the prospect of Obama in the White House.

Obama's infrastructure boondoggle just keeps getting worse. He doesn't want to spend fixing our roads and collapsing bridges. He wants to build expensive mass transit systems that Americans continually reject in order to "go green".

With $100 million, Caroline Kennedy is a shoe-in to buy Hillary's New York Senate seat.

Why did the German navy release these captured Somali pirates?

Interesting, predictable, irrational, human economic behavior patterns.