Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Well, well, well. It seems that while the official numbers for November show unemployment falling from 10.2 percent to 10 percent, the country lost jobs. Something's rotten in Denmark. Funny I didn't read that second part in any of the stories about unemployment the other day. Mises scholars suggests that decreasing unemployment now is a sign of re-inflating the bubble that must soon pop, much like happened in the Great Depression.

Major bank failures continue.

Obama's jobs summit distracted the American people from the health care debate for a few days. The charlatan draws the riveted eyes of the press and the people pretending to pull jobs out of his hat, then presto-chango, Congress passes health care, no jobs appear and the people look around wondering what just happened. We need to get over this self-defeating fixation with Congress's virtually powerless distraction tool and focus our attention and efforts on the real power over the domestic agenda in Washington - Congress.

FASCISM:

In the American fascism note of the day, US senators are debating setting the pay of insurance executives as if the constitution grants them that power. If we don't kill this bill, it's the end of the world as we know it. Our congresscrooks have abandoned the last shreds of pretense of having limits on their powers. Defeating some aristocrats who voted for seizing this power after the fact won't matter. Congress will have successfully declared itself tyrant of America and emperor of the world and made the president its strong-man, and it will never acknowledge a limit on its power again.

You don't see Republican aristocrats standing up for the constitution. You don't see them fighting against the fascist mandate. They're just playing the political angle because all they care about is their own power, just like Democrat aristocrats. If Republicans think they're smelling like roses right now, they're sadly mistaken. If you think the next time Republicans gain power they'll undo the damage done by Democrats, please don't vote. We have enough fools blindly pulling levers for Rs and Ds already. Republicans are just going to pile on as soon as they get back in power. King Henry VIII had better morals and recognized more limits on his power than our congresscrooks from either party.

To all those people who complain about the power of the presidency, once again I say you've fallen in Congress's trap. While the people and the press fixate on the flashy showman who's only power is the power of hot air, veto or rubber-stamp, and following Congress's laws, Congress is destroying our lives. The president isn't seizing control over our life and death decisions. Congress is. The president didn't create the Fed, income tax, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Agriculture, Dept. of Energy, the FCC, the FTC, welfare or anything else. Congress did. Congress is our biggest problem. Under single party rule, the president is Congress's tool and enforcer. When the president is a different party than Congress, he's a minor obstacle but still Congress's enforcer. That's why Gingrich's agenda was much more successful than Clinton's. Reporters and pundits have so misinformed the American people about the power structure in Washington that people thought President Obama really had the power to make the legislative process more transparent.

This is what we get for repeatedly voting for the two organized crime parties. Both break the law (read constitution) as a matter of policy, but we elect them anyway then act surprised when they don't follow the constitution. Neither care about the people and our rights. All they care about is seizing more power through the use of force for themselves at our expense. If that isn't organized crime, I don't know what is.

The constitution is an inanimate object. A piece of paper. It cannot vote against unconstitutional legislation. It cannot veto unconstitutional bills. It cannot overturn unconstitutional laws in court. It can't appoint judges who respect it. It cannot impeach aristocrats who ignore it. It cannot refuse to vote for aristocrats who ignore it. People must do those things. Enforcing the constitution is our responsibility and it begins by voting for people who respect it, but we keep voting for Republicans and Democrats instead. We're our own worst enemy.

TAX AND SPEND:

Government should not take money from people by force and give it to artists, scientists or anybody else. The constitution may make it legal, but it's still immoral and damaging to our quality of life. I know many will say that arts improve the quality of our lives, and to the extent that people will pay for them voluntarily, that's true. If we extracted government from our economy including the arts and sciences, the arts and sciences would thrive like they've never thrived before. Because of the damage government interference in our economy does, costing us twice what government spends, even the recipients of government's ill-gotten gains, like the arts and sciences, suffer.

House votes to make death tax permanent. Double taxation is no obstacle to Democrats, and why should it be? They have no limits on their power to confiscate the wealth of others until the wealth runs out.

The government employee union tax eats up a huge amount of state budgets. Unionized government workers destroying California. This is doubly perverse. Government grants unions the power of coercion - the power to force people to join the union against their will - then it turns around and uses that power to negotiate absurd compensation packets with government. As always, government is the culprit because it has all the power, even when it gives that power to unions so unions can use it against government. But in the final analysis that power comes from the people, and the people are ultimately to blame.

"Government employees use various scams to boost their already generous benefits, which include fully paid health care and cost-of-living adjustments. The Sacramento Bee coined the term “chief’s disease,” for example, to refer to the 82 percent (in 2002) of chief’s-level employees at the California Highway Patrol who discovered a disabling injury about one year before retiring. That provides an extra year off work, with pay, and shields 50 percent of their final retirement pay from taxes. Most of these disabilities stem from back pain, knee pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and the like—not from taking bullets from bad guys. The disability numbers soared after CHP disbanded its fraud unit."

I can't help but laugh, and I feel bad about laughing about this stuff because it's so destructive, but it's comical. Our government at every level is a joke, the joke's on us, yet we continue voting for the same two parties who made it into a joke on us, expecting them to fix it. We continue to have some sort of sick reverence for government. It's hysterical. Voters who vote Republican or Democrat are in denial. There is no such thing as good government. Government is power. Power corrupts. Therefore government is corrupt. The level of corruption is proportional to the power and inverse to the accountability of government. Small, accountable government is bad. Big, opaque government is worse. Government at all levels in the US is titanic and fears no accountability which leads to the horrific government we suffer under. Republicans and Democrats are going to destroy America unless we take away their power ASAP.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Requiem for the dollar.

"Ben S. Bernanke doesn't know how lucky he is. Tongue-lashings from Bernie Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont, are one thing. The hangman's noose is another. Section 19 of this country's founding monetary legislation, the Coinage Act of 1792, prescribed the death penalty for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money. Was the massive printing of dollar bills to lift Wall Street (and the rest of us, too) off the rocks last year a kind of fraud? If the U.S. Senate so determines, it may send Mr. Bernanke back home to Princeton. But not even Ron Paul, the Texas Republican sponsor of a bill to subject the Fed to periodic congressional audits, is calling for the Federal Reserve chairman's head."

Yeah, but the American people might. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Bernanke has to go into hiding after the destruction caused by his policies becomes clear. I'll say good riddance.

"There's no business value in financial safety when the government bails out the unsafe."

Moral hazard in a nutshell.

"The Fed would iron out the business cycle, promote full employment, pour oil on the waters of any and every major financial crisis and assure stable prices. In particular, under the intellectual leadership of Mr. Bernanke, the Fed would tolerate no sagging of the price level. It would insist on a decent minimum of inflation. It staked out this position in the face of the economic opening of China and India and the spread of digital technology. To the common-sense observation that these hundreds of millions of willing new hands, and gadgets, might bring down prices at Wal-Mart, the Fed turned a deaf ear. It would save us from "deflation" by generating a sweet taste of inflation (not too much, just enough). And it would perform these feats of macroeconomic management by pushing a single interest rate up or down.

It was implausible enough in the telling and has turned out no better in the doing. Nor is there any mystery why. The Fed's M.O. is price control. It fixes the basic money market interest rate, known as the federal funds rate. To arrive at the proper rate, the monetary mandarins conduct their research, prepare their forecast—and take a wild guess, just like the rest of us."

I really like this essay.

Senator who voted against confirming Bernanke four years ago wonders if some of his "purchases" are illegal.

"As recently as a letter you sent me two weeks ago, you still refuse to admit Fed actions played any role in inflating the housing bubble despite overwhelming evidence and the consensus of economists to the contrary. And in your efforts to keep filling the punch bowl, you cranked up the printing press to buy mortgage securities, Treasury securities, commercial paper, and other assets from Wall Street. Those purchases, by the way, led to some nice profits for the Wall Street banks and dealers who sold them to you, and the G.S.E. purchases seem to be illegal since the Federal Reserve Act only allows the purchase of securities backed by the government."

Where's the investigation into that?

HEALTH CARE:

62 percent of Americans oppose a single payer health care system. Liberals would claim that's a straw man since nobody is proposing a single payer system. Liberals would be wrong. The ultimate goal of the leftists in charge of Congress and the White House is a single payer system. The ultimate goal of the bills currently in Congress is to move America to a single payer system. The American people seemed to be aware of this in August, but Republicans have dropped the ball, and I don't think Americans fear this as much any more.

In an essay deriding the pretense of knowledge of our aristocrats, Walter Williams reminds us how close we are to returning to slavery.

"There is absolutely no moral case, much less constitutional case, for Congress forcibly using one American to serve the purposes of another American, a practice that differs only in degree from slavery, which we all should find morally offensive."

We're sliding down the slope on the return to slavery at an ever accelerating pace.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Sustainability pushers are alarmists too. Energy is a scarce resource, and the best system for allocating scare resources is a system of voluntary exchange. Sure, conserve energy and save money. That's prudent. But don't fear we're going to run out of energy. If the supply of oil gets short, the price will rise until another form of energy becomes cheaper, and as people move to it, it will will become cheaper still. All this will be handled elegantly and efficiently by the marketplace.

"Take, as an example, the transition in the market for interior illumination: tallow candles were replaced by whale-oil lamps, which were replaced by kerosene lamps, which were replaced by incandescent bulbs powered by electricity. There was no social or political pressure needed to accomplish this evolution; there was no "peak whale oil" movement, no kerosene conservationists, no sustainability crusade of yore. All it took was a functional price system, combined with the ever-present entrepreneurial drive for profits under a competitive, free-market order."

Just like that.

Obama changes plans so he can meet other world leaders in Copenhagen to sign a significant deal that would include the US government sending a bunch of our tax dollars to developing countries. Maybe somebody should tell Obama he's supposed to put US interests first. Look for an important health care vote to take place while Obama's in Copenhagen while media distracts the American people. That's how Congress uses its flashy front man tool to distract us while it destroys America.

Denmark rife with CO2 fraud.

"Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries."

Naturally. Using force to impose your will on others always leads to corruption. It can never be any other way. How much you want to bet Al Gore is profiting from this fraud? How sweet would it be to see him rolled up in the investigation?

Rather than face the press and answer questions about his fraud, Al Gore chickens out of attending Copenhagen conference.

"Mr. Gore had to deal with some hard questions at a book signing this past week, and had the readers escorted away rather than discuss Climategate."

But is the CRU fraud the only fraud or is he involved in the fraud in Denmark too? Isn't it funny the climate conference is being held in the capital of the country with all that CO2 fraud? You can't make this stuff up. Earliest snow on record in Houston too. The founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves from eternally witnessing how badly we've screwed up what they fought and died for.

"Last week, Penn State's Michael Mann was placed under investigation after being implicated for his 'trick' in changing old data to make current temperatures look warmer. Unfortunately the old original data was erased, a serious blow to the scientific process. CEI intends to sue NASA Goddard for Climate Change fraud based on 'Freedom of Information'. On Tuesday, The University of East Anglia's Phil Jones was forced to step down as director of the world renown Climate Research Unit due to an investigation of his involvement in the fraud."

I hadn't heard that CRU's director was forced to step down. Fantastic. This scandal isn't going away anytime soon.

The one world government wanabees at the UN haven't given up their hope to use the global warming fraud to achieve their agenda yet. It's their last best hope to take over the world, until the next one comes along.

NASA climate fraud, whose salary we're paying for, compares global warming to slavery and Nazism. With their hopes possibly to be dashed for decades, the alarmists are off the scale. His solution? Worldwide communism, an authoritarian state worse than the Nazis which would enslave the entire world population by controlling every human activity down to breathing. Project much?

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

How the FBI uses paid informants to radicalize then arrest Americans.

WAR:

Pakistani Muslim terrorists kill 37 Muslims in mosque. Apparently mosques are not sacred. You remember the old saying, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."? The terrorists are showing the world what they want us to do to them. We should never hesitate to kill terrorists hiding in mosques. I can't understand a culture where terrorist attacks would erode support for a war against terrorists. Terrorist attacks should increase support for such a war. Yet the terrorists are betting their lives on that strategy and we saw it work in Spain.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iranian government trying to crack down on anti-government Iranians world-wide.

POLITICS:

Sen. Max Baucus, well known for ramming his Baucus health care oppression bill through his senate committee, recommended his girlfriend to be a US prosecutor. It's good to be the king.

Barry Goldwater was a classic liberal except for his interventionist approach to foreign policy. That's a big except.

"[Modern l]iberals believe in concentrated power — in the hands of liberals, the supposedly educated and genteel elite. They believe in concentrating that power as heavily and effectively as possible. They believe in great size of enterprise, whether corporate or political, and have a great and profound disdain for the homely and the local. They think nationally but they also think globally and now even intergalactically. Actually, because they believe in far more authoritarian rule than a lot of conservatives, it probably would be best to say that [modern] liberals lie next to but actually to the right of many conservatives."[1]
...
"Goldwater," Hess recalled in his autobiography, written thirty years after the Arizona senator's tragic presidential campaign, "had very little support from big business.""

Big businesses require big government to protect them from competition to survive, otherwise big corporations would constantly be falling to hungry entrepreneurs. That's why big corporations are always pushing for more regulation of markets to squash the little guys so they can provide lower quality goods and services at higher prices and make more profit. Government is their daddy and their god, feeding them and keeping them alive like pet dinosaurs when natural forces would have killed them. This is why big business heavily favors Democrats in general, contrary to what the media tell us.

Obama's radicalism might be fueling Democrat retirements from Congress.

Leftist complains Obama isn't leftist enough. I guess if Obama isn't teaming up with Ayers and throwing Molotov cocktails at the Pentagon, he's not leftist enough. It goes to show how the leftist movement is driven by hate. These guys aren't rational enough to allow Obama to destroy the US as fast as political reality allows. They want to burn it to the ground now. I find it distasteful to find myself on the same position as leftists on the wars, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

MEDIA:

Chris Mathews apologizes for calling West Point the enemy camp.

MISC:

Great random thoughts from Thomas Sowell:

"Since this is an era when many people are concerned about "fairness" and "social justice," what is your "fair share" of what someone else has worked for?
...
Many colleges claim that they develop "leaders." All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else's freedom."

Just great.

"People who are urging us to do things to win the approval of other countries seem to put an excessive value on other country's approval, as distinguished from their respect that we can lose by such bowing to "world opinion." Do the world champion New York Yankees try to curry favor with teams that are also-rans?"

Unfortunately, that analogy is stupid. It's not our job to beat other countries. Thomas Sowell is human.

Also unfortunately, Thomas Sowell tends to be a strong advocate of continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I think he could be persuaded otherwise so I sent him this email:

"We're losing the war in America. Every other conflict pales to insignificance. Our fixation with winning wars overseas is distracting us from recognizing our government is on the verge of conquering us. We defeated al Qaeda in Afghanistan nearly eight years ago. We defeated al Qaeda in Iraq a year ago. It's time to end those wars so we can galvanize conservatives to stop our government from completely conquering us.

It's been a slow process. I often say government began conquering us in earnest in 1913 with the creation of the Fed, the income tax and popular election of senators. Congress has been conquering us in earnest pretty much every year since then with rubber stamps from Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Bush and Obama enabling the worst periods. But because our aristocrats continue to distract us with overseas fiascos, the American people aren't even aware the only war that matters is the one we're on the verge of losing in America.

I'm with you on stopping Iran from developing the bomb. A nuclear bomb going off in America would give government all the incentive it needs to turn America into a slave state. It would be the final nail in the coffin of freedom. But we have to put an end to the distracting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that gain us nothing but are costing us our country."

I hope it moves him. He would be a powerful ally for focusing conservatives on the battle for freedom.