Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

This explains the real motivation behind TARP:

"For anyone who wondered if last winter's federal seizure of the financial services industry would have adverse economic consequences, an answer is now available. The credit market has been tilted to favor a single borrower with a huge appetite for money, Washington. Private borrowers, particularly small businesses, have been sent to the end of the queue.
The Federal Reserve, which supervises some 7,000 banks, has been telling bankers that they must cut risk. The most spectacular step in that effort was the Fed announcement last month that it will evaluate the salaries of bank officers on how carefully they manage risk.
By official definition, Treasury securities are risk-free, so how better to manage risk than to pad your bank's portfolio with Treasury securities, which is what bankers are doing. Under the new management from Washington, bankers who take a flyer on a venture that might some day become an Apple, Microsoft or Google will risk not only their depositors' money but a possible pay cut. Banking has been captured by the nanny state, which means that its potential for contributing to economic growth and job creation has been sharply curtailed, even as its potential contribution to government growth has been expanded."

I still think it was a coup. Here's what government thinks our real debt is:"A number more relevant to what the government is actually demanding from the capital markets is the Treasury's financing requirement. At a recent Chartered Financial Analyst Institute conference, Treasury official Karthik Ramanathan proudly described the prodigious fund-raising task he and his colleagues pulled off in the fiscal year, what one might call a borrowing feat unparalleled in human history: "In the course of 291 auctions in 251 business days, Treasury issued nearly $7 trillion in gross Treasury marketable securities to raise approximately $1.7 trillion to finance the government.""And you thought the recession was over.

More on the Goldman coup:

"The "Goldman Conspiracy" is the perfect B-school case study of Wall Street's secret contagious pathology, with insiders like Lloyd Blankfein, Henry Paulson and others pocketing billions more of the firm's profits than shareholders, evidence the new "mutant capitalism" has replaced Adam Smith's 1776 version which historically endowed the soul of American democracy as well as our capitalistic system."

Fierce competition in the marketplace puts the brakes on greed. Government feeds it.

ECONOMY:

This video showing growing unemployment by county is just depressing. Thanks, government.

Whenever a new, tallest skyscraper is built, a major recession follows. The idea behind this is building the world's tallest building is a bubble activity fed by loose monetary policy. Dubai is the latest prediction to come true. China in 2012 is next on the list.

The collapse of the Dubai sovereign fund may trigger the double dip depression we know is coming. The Great Depression had three dips. No matter how bad it is, it can always get worse.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama only spent 22 percent of his stimulus boondoggle before the end of fiscal 2009. He still has some $500 to buy more votes, and you know he's going to spend it well.

When on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, cutting taxes increases revenue just like the supply-siders predicted. But that's not a good reason for cutting taxes. The priority should always be to cut spending and cut taxes to compensate for the lower spending levels.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Peter Schiff explains that the stock market is still going down if you price it in gold. It only appears to be going up because the value of the dollar is falling faster than the value of the stock market. Gold is real money. The modern dollar is a government created fiction that the Fed is quickly destroying. Bottom line: buy gold.

EDUCATION:

Government has done so much damage to our education system and our economy, going to college is not a good investment for many.

HEALTH CARE:

Tax on cadillac health care plans will hit the middle class. You can just hear Obama laughing at all the idiots who believed he was going to cut taxes for the middle class.

20 good things about our health care system.

After correcting for accounting gimmicks and hidden costs, the actual cost of Obamacare to the American people? About $6.5 trillion over 10 years.

America leads the world in medical innovations, at least until Obama and Democrats get their way.

Why Republicans have failed to oppose the individual mandate for health care and how that failure has enabled the Democrats to reach the the finish line.

"A mandate will fundamentally alter the relationship between Americans and their government. Instead of the government being accountable to them, they will become accountable to their government. No less than the Congressional Budget Office—a non-partisan government agency—once admitted as much. "A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action," it noted. "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."

If the government can force Americans to buy coverage on the threat of fines or even imprisonment—an option that Nancy Pelosi has pointedly refused to rule out—every other government diktat becomes small potatoes by contrast. In fact, it becomes necessary. If uninsured Americans must buy coverage, why shouldn't other Americans be taxed to subsidize them? Why shouldn't the insurance industry be required to sell them coverage? Why shouldn't government set insurance prices to ensure affordability? Why shouldn't doctors and hospitals be asked to charge only "reasonable" rates—or offer only government-sanctioned treatments? Nothing about ObamaCare fundamentally changes so long as the individual mandate remains intact.

Therefore, instead of wonkishly droning about the public option, Republicans should counter Democrats' grand appeals for "universal coverage for all" with equally grand appeals for "medical freedom for all." They should stand together on the Capitol steps and issue the health care equivalent of Reagan's Berlin Wall ultimatum: "Mr. President: Tear up this mandate."

During the campaign, Obama himself successfully stopped poor Hillary dead in her tracks by reminding voters at every turn of her tyrannical plans to force them to purchase coverage. So why aren't Republicans doing the same to Obama?

The main reason is that they themselves are deeply conflicted about the mandate. On the one hand, every Republican on the Senate Finance Committee voted against it—except, of course, for Maine's Sen. Olympia Wavering-Heart Snowe. On the other hand, many Republicans, led by their intellectual lights at the conservative Heritage Foundation, among others, have long accepted—no, championed—the notion that unless people are forced to carry insurance, freeloaders who land in emergency rooms will cripple the health care system. Legislate personal responsibility, in other words. It was a Heritage plan for forced coverage that formed the blueprint for the Massachusetts universal care debacle that the then Republican Gov. Mitt Romney enacted."

Thanks, Heritage Foundation. This is just another reminder that conservatives, liberals-lite, are no friends of freedom.

Reason tells us women and their doctors, not bureaucrats, should decide when to get mammograms.

The US leads the world in health care innovation by a large margin.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Now New Zealand scientists are accused of manipulating data to support the global warming fraud. It's a world-wide conspiracy funded by poisonous government money that carries with it the political agenda to advance this fraud.

Summary of many of the emails made public by CRU (the world's most prominent global warming propaganda institute) hacker. These emails show systematic manipulation of data, burying data, obfuscating results, intimidation of skeptics. This reads more like the operation of a criminal organization than a scientific organization. Of course, these men profited from lies. That's fraud. They are criminals. The CRU is a criminal organization. Like Al Gore.

Why does Gore continue to get a pass from the media? Because he's one of them. Because they still make money off of him.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Because politicians are starving for something new to tax, the movement to legalize marijuana is gaining steam. Predicting the actions of politicians is easy.

SURVEILLANCE STATE:

DHS intercepts strategy guide for roleplaying game about taking over the planet with miniature monsters.

My doctor recently copied my drivers license to comply with the government too. But our aristocrats are smart. They don't send in an armed DHS guard to copy the license. They make secretaries do it so we'll comply because we know it's not their fault. But the effect is the same. It's just like Obama didn't send in tanks to seize GM, but the effect is the same. This must be stopped. Somebody must stand up and say know to the seizure of their property and privacy.

WAR:

Fort Hood shooter considers insanity defense. I would say all jihadists are insane, but that shouldn't protect them from the consequences of their killing sprees.

Three navy seals charged with assault because terrorist they captured ended up with bloody nose. You got to be kidding me. Waging war against our troops and intelligence personnel is going to produce predictable, bad consequences - they're going to start killing the terrorists instead of capturing them, and we're going to get a lot less info, making the wars longer and more bloody.

US plans to buy off Taliban soldiers. We should buy them off from the safety of America to deliver Osama bin Laden. And I don't mean just put a bounty on his head. I mean an in depth diplomatic effort to work with the Taliban to oust al Qaeda from the mountains of Pakistan and to turn on Osama bin Laden. The key to making that happen will be to stop dropping bombs on them and other Afghans and Pakistanis. If it doesn't work and al Qaeda regroups, we can always invade again, and the Taliban would know it. We're good at invading and destroying stuff. Much better than we are at nation-building. And invading is far cheaper in blood and treasure than nation-building.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Corruption in Pakistan forces president to hand over control of nuclear arsenal to prime minister. This guy is the often indicted well known crook and widower of Benazir Bhutto, the woman we tried to replace Musharraf with. Good thing we got rid of Musharraf with our meddling so we could have this more corrupt, anti-American government in power.

POLITICS:

Boortz breaks down Obama's lack of approval ratings.

Thomas Sowell explains,"No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems-- of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind."Once you realize that, politics becomes easy to understand. Barney Frank is a walking, talking beacon of corruption and his continued re-election is a national scandal and embarrassment. Frank, Chris Dodd, Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid seem to be the most corrupt in a sea of corruption. At least Reid's re-election bid is in trouble.

We pay politicians to lie to us, but I dispute that we do so unwittingly. Everybody knows the old joke about how you can tell when a politician is lying. His lips are moving. Everybody knows it's true, so there's nothing unwitting about it. We knowingly pay politicians to lie to us. We've just been stupidly conditioned over the last century to walk into the booth and pull the lever next to the R or D. When election time rolls around, the vast majority of voters check their brains at the door and follow their programming to our great detriment.

MEDIA:

Glenn Beck won the attention of the libertarian movement. It's good to see I'm not the only one who recognizes the similarities between Obama and Lenin. This essay shows how Obama is a Marxist, not a typical Keynesian aristocrat.

"Marxists want to destroy the existing economic system, creating a social catastrophe that they hope will allow them to foment a revolution and consolidate their political power. Keynesians are merely neo-mercantilists who use Keynesian ideology to pull the wool over the public’s eyes with regard to their policy of perpetual political plunder under the guise of a perpetual quest for prosperity."

I love the term Obammunism.

MISC:

Facts the government doesn't want you to know about executive compensation - it's much more closely tied to corporate performance than reported.