Free kibbles

CEO of Whole Foods suggests 8 good ideas to reform health care.

The Fed left interest rates near zero. That hissing sound you hear is the inflation of another, bigger bubble. The dollar is not long for this world. The recession is like a leaky roof, and Bernanke is fixing it by papering the ceiling with dollar bills. It looks OK for a little while, but the damage is getting worse.

The recession appears to be over because inflation (real, monetary inflation, not it's late developing symptom, price inflation) makes GDP look better. It makes stock prices rise. Early in the inflation cycle, prices don't rise. Bernanke is re-inflating the same high-GDP, high stock market bubble by printing money. He might as well paper the ceiling with dollars to in an attempt to fix a leaky roof.

(Technically, because of the way recessions are defined, the recession is over. But that's only because the definition is based on government statistics that can be manipulated by inflation.)

If you look at the Great Depression, it was really a series of recessions with bounces in between. We're in the bounce phase right now. This article argues we've been in a recession since 2000, and it will last about years.

"[A]djusted for inflation, stocks never beat their January 2000 high. And outside of government, the economy has no more jobs than it did in 1999. We’ve had wars against terror, bubbles in practically every sector, trillion-dollar boondoggles, bailouts, bamboozles and Michael Jackson’s tragic cooling…but what is the only durable thing to come out of the last 10 years? Just Google and debt."

Sounds pretty accurate to me.

Hollywood police caught conspiring to frame a woman by their own cameras after one of the officers rear-ended the woman. The reporter says this calls into question all DUI stops by these cops. That's far too restrictive. This calls into question every arrest made by this police department. What's obvious from this tape is this type of frame is standard operating procedure. There's no attempt to keep it hidden. There's no fear of being caught. They conspire in front of their own evidence cameras.

Tom Coburn asks 10 questions that Democrats won't answer about health care, then answers them as best he can since he's cut out of the process by Democrats. I like this format.

White House website says Obamacare won't add a penny to the deficit. We know Obama read the CBO report showing otherwise, so this is just business as usual for the Liar-in-chief.

Obama's health care town hall full of plants. Remember what the press did to George Bush for doing that?

Only 32 percent of Americans support a single payer system. I hope they move to Cuba, Canada or Great Britain and see how it works out for them.

George Soros rides in with $5 million to hire astroturfers on behalf of health care oppression. Only $5 million?

Obama refused the Senate health care plan in favor of Michelle's health insurance plan from those evil insurance companies. And the Senate plan is much better than what Obama wants to force on us.

Boortz has just discovered Rahm Emanuel's brother and his role in this health care debacle as a proponent of denying care to the elderly and disabled. His basically advocates eugenics through socialized medicine. Boortz is late to the party. I posted about this before the election.

Important facts explain how government creates the problems with out current health insurance system that Obama is attacking.

Chuck Norris reports that one section of one of the house bills has government agents checking on households expecting children or with small children. Parenting will be a thing of the past.

John Stossel explains that while Obama and Democrats are demonizing health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, the biggest of those companies support Obamacare. That's because they'll get new customers and the new regulations will protect them from competition from smaller companies. The special interests are on Obama's side. The power of corporations always grows with the power of government. If you want to reduce the power of corporations, you have to reduce the power of government. If you want corporations to provide better services at better prices, you have to reduce the power of government.

I can't help but laugh every time I hear one of the aristocrats demand the people be polite to them. That's like a robber demanding his victim be polite when the victim catches the robber stuffing his bag with the victim's stuff. They've been robbing us blind for 100 years, and, with the exception of minor tax revolts in the 30s and the 70s, we've bent over and taken it. Americans are mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore.

(I bet they do take it more though. I bet Americans bend right over and re-elect the same Republicans who abused us for the last 8 years.)

Government in action:

"Despite a new oversight panel, a new special inspector general, the existing Government Accountability Office and eight other inspectors general, those charged with minding the store say they don't have all the weapons they need. Ten months into the Troubled Asset Relief Program, some members of Congress say that some oversight of bailout dollars has been so lacking that it's essentially worthless.
"TARP has become a program in which taxpayers are not being told what most of the TARP recipients are doing with their money, have still not been told how much their substantial investments are worth, and will not be told the full details of how their money is being invested," a special inspector general over the program reported last month. The "very credibility" of the program is at stake, it said."

What else would anybody expect?

The Heritage Foundation estimates that one quarter of the jobs lost in July were due to the minimum wage hike.

I'm not the only one who noticed Larry Kudlow's bizarre praise for cash for clunkers. Here's a little insight into the stimulus boondoggle:

"It's true that most of the $787 billion "stimulus" package hasn't been spent yet, but that's not due to government incompetence. No, the politicians quite deliberately designed the program so that its maximum seduction of the voters kicks in shortly before the 2010 midterm elections. There's no point in buying votes too early; people have short memories."

Our government is a scam.

I might as well get my climate stability theory out here. If our climate was sensitive to greenhouse gas changes, if it had positive feedback effects, climate would be wildly variable or Earth would have long ago become like Venus. I think when the planet heats up, increased evaporation forms more clouds, and the clouds reflect more sunlight than they trap heat. This limits how much the planet heats. When the planet cools, decreased evaporation forms fewer clouds, allowing more sunlight to heat the planet. This limits how cold the planet can become. There has to be a negative feedback cycle keeping climate fairly stable, and I think cloud formation reflecting sunlight is it. Obviously a couple times every million years, some major occurrence creates and ends ice ages.

I don't understand the complaints about presidents who campaign for issues while in office. In America, the people have the ultimate power. The president has no power of Congress. The only power he has over domestic policy is his power to generate consensus among the people in order to influence Congress. To do that, he has to go out and talk to the people. On the other hand, if the president's policies were good for the people, he wouldn't need to generate consensus in general. And he shouldn't have to go out and do this on a daily or even weekly basis. The reason Obama has to do it, and the reason Bush had to do it in the run-up to the Iraq war is those policies were bad for us and the people wouldn't support them without that effort.

Mark Steyn describes how Democrats plan to take over everything.

I don't trust Obama to overhaul Social Security. I think overhaul is code for expand.

American productivity has increased at its fastest pace in six years. Labor costs drop the most in eight years. Guess what was going on six to eight years ago? That was the post dot.com bubble - post 9/11 recession. That's what recessions do. They wipe out the bad investment, the marginal operations, and the country becomes more productive and efficient. The recession is not the problem. The recession is the healthy part of the business cycle. The unhealthy cycle is the boom cycle. Our economy is correcting itself despite the ongoing damage being done by government.

Obama can't stand dissent, that's why he's attacking free speech.