Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

17 Senate Republicans, all of whom claim to support smaller government, voted for Obama's omnibus spending bill. Anybody who claims to support small government then votes Republican is a hypocrite too.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Climategate, the Medieval Warm Period, the hockey stick and Yamal.

Sunspots on the rise. This is good news. Finally.

French Constitutional Council declares French tax and trade law unconstitutional.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Judge sentences man to eight years in prison for graffiti and marijuana possession, but state law reduces sentence to two years.

WAR:

No war on Yemen, please. We don't need to make 20 million more enemies.

Government cannot provide security for us. Why would anybody think the same government that gave us the New Deal, cash for clunkers, the Department of Education, Medicare, and every other failed government program can protect us from terrorists? Our security organization is a socialist institution and is doomed to failure just like any other socialist institution. It doesn't matter which party is in charge. Socialism is doomed to fail regardless of who the head socialist is. The solution is to turn airport and airplane security over to airports and airlines. Several private sector organizations should administer competing, public terrorist watch lists. And the American people should be encouraged to heed the wisdom beginning the second amendment - that the security of a free state depends on a well trained militia of all the people.

The inevitable, predictable consequence of applying these full body scanners to all airline passengers will be to attract dangerous perverts into the airport security field. When it turns out that these perverts aren't checking for bombs but are instead using the the machines to get their jollies and some of them are caught stalking or raping women, our aristocrats will act surprised, and it will be called an unintended consequence. It will also debase and distract the most well-intentioned security personnel. I notice nobody claims this technology would have caught the recent attempted bomber, only that it might. Shortly before the underwear attack, African Union peacekeepers arrested a Somali man who tried to carry a similar weapon onto a plan in Mogadishu. Somalia has better security than we do.

Interesting comparison between how the Catholic Church circled the wagons and protected child molesting priests and attacked church-goers to how government will circle the wagons, protect the many people involved in this failure and add more onerous burdens on the public.

In an analysis of the different layers of airplane security, Cato reminds us that the security layers of jet, its crew and the passengers didn't fail. Only government failed.

MISC:

Regular, suburban Americans preparing for catastrophe.

"But about a year ago, Bedford's homemaking skills went into overdrive. She began stockpiling canned food, and converted a spare bedroom into a giant storage facility. The trunk of each of her family's cars got its own 72-hour emergency kit—giant Tupperware containers full of iodine, beef jerky, emergency blankets, and even a blood-clotting agent designed for the battle-wounded. Bedford started thinking about an escape plan in case her family needed to leave in a hurry, and she and her husband set aside packed suitcases and cash. Then, for the first time in her life, Bedford went to a gun range and shot a .22 handgun. Now she regularly takes her two young children, 7 and 10, to target practice. "Over the last two years, I started feeling more and more unsettled about everything I was seeing, and I started thinking, 'What if we were in the same boat?'" says Bedford, 49."

I like all these plans, but I especially like teaching the kids to shoot while they're young. Every parent should care that much for their kids.

Dave Berry's summary of 2009.

"It was also a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result Washington, rejecting ``business as usual,'' finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars at it."

OMG, this is funny. 2009 is the year that should remind once and for all that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. And quickly. It's a year that proves that government doing nothing is typically far, far superior to government doing anything.