Free kibbles

North Korea declares truce halting Korean War invalid. Apparently we're at war with North Korea again, and they have nuclear weapons. North Korea launches another missile to thumb its nose at the UN. Don't you love how all that talking and treating North Korea with kid gloves has worked out so well? Talking with insane people like Kim Jung Il and the Iranian Mullahs is insane.

I do not understand Cato's advice to wait out the fall of an insane North Korean regime with a nuclear weapon and long range missile capability. Does this guy think the NK regime will just quietly collapse? This regime will not go away, and it's willing to use nuclear blackmail to stay alive. Does he want to wait until Los Angeles is vaporized? NK hasn't mastered the technology to obliterate LA yet, but he advocates we sit, wait and talk while they master it. Would Cato advocate that families sit, wait and exercise diplomacy with the Manson family too? Cato is advocating classic victimization strategy, and its guaranteed to blow up in our faces - literally. It's patently absurd to claim that NK's ongoing development of nuclear and missile technology is no threat to anybody (though the author contradicts that statement later in the essay, he continues to say it's not a threat to the US). We should destroy every aspect of NK's nuclear program so they can't threaten us with a nuclear bomb, which is obviously their intent. South Korea has 20 times the GDP of North Korea or more by now. It can take care of itself. This article seems to have been written by an apologist for both North Korea and China. You would think a libertarian think tank would strongly advocate for freeing the people of North Korea and China from oppressive regimes, but this author does just the opposite, advocating the status quo while both regimes get more dangerous.

Taliban kills dozens in Lahore, Pakistan. Fortunately Pakistan is fighting them now.

Iraq government cracks down on corruption. We should do that here, but no....

A Republican put a Hispanic on the Supreme Court 70 years ago, so Obama's choice is not the first Hispanic on the Court. The Supreme Court has reversed Sotomayor 3 out of 5 times. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The Supreme Court is wrong as often as it's right, at best. Cato says Sotomayor was picked because of her parents, not on merit. Doesn't that smack of hereditary titles? Reason says Sotomayor is wrong on gun rights and racial issues. Jonah Goldberg advises Republicans to go after Sotomayor on her oath and how it contradicts Obama's empathy claim and her claim that the nationality of her parents affects her decisions. George Will agrees. It's obvious that Republicans should do that. They should press that issue hard. Thomas Sowell puts it in perspective:

If you were going to have open heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is or by the best surgeon you could find-- even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer.

Or would you prefer a surgeon who was empathetic to people of certain nationalities (her own) instead of the most skilled? Those she empathized with would still be at a disadvantage, and it would be doubly bad for those of different ethnic background.

The Financial Times summarizes our frightening debt picture and tells Obama to quit blaming others and solve the problem instead of making it astronomically worse.

FBI wiretap shows Obama replacement Burris offered to buy Obama's Senate seat with a donation to Blagojevich. Corrupt Democrats are always given hugs and kisses by the press. Only corrupt Republicans have to pay a price in the press.

One third of Maryland's millionaires are gone, but this info doesn't tell us if they moved out of the state, are hiding their money or are just not making over a $1 million because the economy is in recession.

It's absurd that the Supreme Court is considering removing this 75 year old memorial to WWI vets.

Obama renigs on promise to display bills for 5 days before he signs them into law. How trivial is this?

How does somebody get standing to sue a family and force them to get a medical treatment neither the parents nor child want?

Pretty good analysis of world view differences between liberals and conservatives. From the libertarian perspective, both the rational and irrational view of men is accurate, but it doesn't matter. Voluntary action is always superior, regardless of the rationality of the individuals involved, than coercion.

What a bunch of crap. Wired magazine is spouting some baloney about digital socialism rendering old debates about free markets and socialism obsolete. One assumption in this article is that free markets work for individuals at the expense of society, and that's a demonstrably false assumption. Another assumption is that cooperation on the web is not free markets. Voluntary interactions by definition are free markets. The free exchange of information and cooperation through open source on the web is a free market activity, the antithesis of communism and socialism which is when people are forced to give up their property to the community.

The FCC plans to use broadcast localism to limit free speech. Does anybody notice the irony in thinking faceless bureaucrats in Washington better understand the needs of local communities than the people in the local communities? Democrats intend to make this far more oppressive than the Fairness Doctrine ever was.

Cato is distraught at the growing power of the vice-president.

China is not a threat to us right now, but if we don't change something, it will be. That's why we should take a strong moral stand for freedom for the Chinese people. Why will nobody do that?

Government is the exact wrong entity to create a smart electric grid. Free people should do it, but government regulation keeps it from happening.

I'm happy to see Reason join me in a clear call for the GOP to adopt liberty as its theme. Freedom through severely limited government on every issue is the way back to greatness for American and the way back to power for Republicans.

So what should the Grand Old Party do to resurrect itself enough to mount some semblance of resistance to the advancing Democratic juggernaut? The answer is that it needs intellectual coherence around a powerful idea, and that idea should be liberty. This is a principle that is both strong enough to intellectually moor the party in the way that those who want a "purer" GOP desire—and grand enough to appeal to a broad swath of the population, as those who advocate a more Big Tent approach recommend.

This would be the exact opposite of what Bush did. He, remarkably enough, managed to combine every anti-individual liberty idea from the right with every pro-big government policy from the left. From the right, Bush acquired: a super-hawkish foreign policy; contempt for civil liberties; and religiously informed positions on gay marriage, abortion and end-of-life issues. And from the left he got: high-spending ways, including the massive drug entitlement for seniors; expansive ideas about the federal government's role in education policy; and the chutzpah, just before leaving, to engineer a massive government bailout of banks and auto companies.

So true. Excellent essay.

Reason explains that liberals are mistaken to want to go back to the political-economic environment of the 50s. Those policies restricted our economy and made us not much better than the Soviets. Only by freeing our economy did we defeat the Soviets, and only way we'll outcompete the Chinese is by freeing our economy further.

Clings to the language of war? Maybe that's because we're at war. Al Qaeda declared war on us, and is waging war against us. After 9/11, Congress declared war on al Qaeda, and we're waging war with them. Shame on politicians for using the language of war during a war. If you want to advocate ending the war, do it. Lobby for Congress to revoke the president's war powers regarding al Qaeda. But don't pretend we aren't at war when we're in the middle of a declared war. As for the Taliban, we have no authority to fight a war against the Taliban or in Afghanistan other than to fight al Qaeda. We should reduce our forces there to the limit necessary to combat al Qaeda. The Iraq War is also a real war declared, however cowardly, by Congress. If you don't like it, lobby for Congress to end it. Granted, the Bush and Obama administrations have both screwed up handling enemy combatants and criminal terrorists who are not enemy combatants, but that doesn't change the fact we're still fighting two legal wars - one against al Qaeda where ever they may be and one in Iraq.

Ralph Peters advocates summary execution for captured terrorists. That's what George Washington did.

Random thoughts from Thomas Sowell:

One of the most important talents for success in politics is the ability to make utter nonsense sound not only plausible but inspiring. Barack Obama has that talent. We will be lucky if we escape the catastrophes into which other countries have been led by leaders with that same charismatic talent.

How surprising is it that Barack Obama, who spent decades hanging out with people who spewed out their hatred of America, did not say anything in the presence of foreign rulers like Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega, when they spewed out their hatred of America?

Walter Williams recommends Thomas Sowell's book on the housing crisis.

John Stossel takes fire for explaining that laws intended to protect pregnant women in the work place have exactly the opposite effect - making employers fear all women as potential lawsuit filers. Shame on Stossel for advocating a radical idea - voluntary exchange. If women want to have children and work less because of it, they can negotiate a lower salary. Jobs belong to employers, not employees and not the government.

Some libertarians are just figuring out that Obama is even worse than Bush. It took just over four months. Even though I found that obvious before the election, that's not too bad. Liberals will probably never admit it.

I'm sure University of Chicago would welcome a Woman in Power group, but they're not tolerant of Men in Power.

Digital transition is 2 weeks from Friday. Unless the government changes the government mandated event again.

The economists who failed to predict the recession predict it will end around the end of the year. Why should I listen to them?

Obama has one thing in common with the majority of Americans - he opposes gay marriage. I wonder why liberals didn't excoriate him like they did Miss California.

Female teacher at Our Lady of Charity school offers too much charity to 15 year old boy student.

10 Mexican mayors and other officials arrested for corruption.

At least 83 of Michoacan's 113 municipalities are mixed up at some level with narcos, a Mexican intelligence source told The Times this month.

Wow.

Sensing this is the best chance they'll ever have to do serious harm to every man, woman and child on the globe, global warming frauds step up the alarmism.

Girl to graduate with perfect school attendance for 13 years. I'm not sure this is something to celebrate. Surely she was sick sometime in 13 years, and her fellow students would have been better off if she had stayed home. Besides, think how incredibly indoctrinated in government she is. She should definitely go on senior skip day.