Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Free kibbles

Freddie Mac executive commits suicide.

Two senior Tamil Tiger rebels surrender. Congratulations to Sri Lanke for finally breaking the back of this rebellion.

Israeli military absolves itself for any crimes in Gaza invasion. Maybe we should allow everybody to be their own judge and juror.

Obama only released part of the CIA interrogation memos. He refused to release the memos showing how successful the interrogation techniques were and how many American lives were saved by application of the techniques. I wonder what Obama's agenda could be.

How do you prosecute people for writing policy memos?

Banks want out of TARP, but Pharaoh Obama and Lord Geithner won't let them.

TARP is inherently open to fraud and abuse, and 20 cases of fraud are being investigated. All government money is inherently open to fraud and abuse. That's why we need a dramatically reduced government.

Earmarks are exploding thanks to Obama. When Obama talked about earmark reform, he really meant using more of them to promote his agenda.

I'm happy to hear the political class strongly disliked the tea parties. That means they think their jobs might be affected, and that's the only way we can get them to work in slightly for our good instead of theirs.

I sure hope the Supreme Court allows people falsely convicted or even just unjustly prosecuted due to prosecutorial misconduct to sue the pants off of prosecutors.

Global recession to deepen in 2009. That's because government keeps dragging our economies down further. If government had left well enough alone we would be well on the way to recovery by now. If government had reduced its size and scope, we would be even farther along.

Despite, or more likely because of, the political bias of the American Bar Association, President Obama will make them the preeminent reviewer of judges.

This attack on the tea parties is an impressive illustration of how out of touch radical leftists are with society.

How did I manage to miss Earth Day? The planet looks much more green today.

Video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded. The dramatic music and everything is stupid and kind of funny, especially compared to the Steve Harrigan video which was sparse, but the technique appears indistinguishable. This technique is fabulous. With absolutely no harm, pain, danger or anything resembling torture, we get information. The subject is broken down by exploiting the body's natural fear of drowning. It's like magic. It's unconscionable that Obama would outlaw such an effective, harmless technique as this for collecting intelligence from terrorists. The die hard test of whether or not its torture is that people volunteer for it. Do you think Hitchens or Harrigan would volunteer to let me use pliers or a car battery on him? Of course not. Those things are torture. Waterboarding is not. The video shows Hitchens being waterboarded only once. Steve Harrigan allowed himself to be waterboarded 3 times in a row with slightly different techniques. Obviously, this is not torture. And no, I don't want to be waterboarded any more than I want to New York City, but neither is torture.

Obviously waterboarding would be a war crime between signatories of the Geneva Convention, but it's not torture.

On another note, long-term sleep deprivation is harmful to the mind. Keeping somebody awake for a week should be considered torture, imo. I've yet to hear of any other approved technique I would consider torture. And I don't appreciate being called a Bush partisan because of that opinion.

And severe suffering is not torture. Imprisoning people causes severe suffering, yet we do it to convicted criminals all the time. That legal definition is absurdly vague. It's hard to judge the temperature extremes without details, but if they don't cause overheating, frostbite or hypothermia, then they're not harming the subject so they're not torture.

Barney Frank blames George Bush for the subprime mortgage crisis. The same Barney Frank who killed Bush's attempts to reform Fannie and Freddie. The same Barney Frank who supported Clinton's major changes to CRA and Fannie and Freddie that set off the subprime mortgage crisis. He's trying to blame Bush. He contradicts himself too. Frank takes political slime to a new level.

Obama signs national service bill, taking him one step closer to eliminating private charity and creating his own force of brownshirts.

Hugo Chavez is happy that Barack Obama is bringing socialism to the US, and an Iowa Republican compares Obama's policies to Chavez's.

The aristocrats vote buying scheme has reached new highs with the top 10 recipients of bailout money spending $9.5 million on lobbying in just 3 months. This is the system laid bare. Companies pay tribute to the aristocrats, and if they pay enough, the aristocrats give them our money. If they don't pay enough, they don't get our money. If they pay way too little or complain, they get destroyed. Our system has turned completely feudal. Pay tribute to our masters in Washington or they'll burn your business to the ground.

Obama and black farmers.

Obama's Labor Department overturns regulation that would root out corruption in union finances because it was overly burdensome, but pushes for more regulation of businesses despite how burdensome and worthless Sarbanes-Oxley is.

I hope the founder of the Minutemen kicks McCain's ass in the Arizona senate primary.

New York pays welfare recipients for good behavior. You've got to be kidding me. The program was modeled after programs in Mexico, Turkey and Brazil. That's what the US should be emulating. What are liberals thinking? (Rhetorical question)

I don't want to imagine what's going to happen because government painted zig-zag lines on the roads.

How the Fed feeds the culture of dependency.

Obama could get America to 100 percent employment by making us all push wheels or row freighters to generate clean energy, but of course, that would set civilization back 2000 years. No thanks.

Obama is keeping a new intellectual property treaty secret. It can't be ratified by the Senate in secret, but both parties will likely support it, so it won't be up for debate long.

Cato criticizes the IMF and the G-20's decision to empower the failed institution to fight the global recession.

Cato does not support the Law of the Sea Treaty and neither do I.

The Tea Parties were about out of control government spending, all of which, and the interest, will have to be paid back with taxes.

Congress intends to regulate your garden out of existance. Just like everything else.

Update on the case of Charlie Lynch, convicted for selling medical marijuana out of a shop that was certified completely legal by California. This is a travesty.

Reason explains that the problems in Mexico stem from prohibition and the black market it creates, not guns.

No comments:

Post a Comment