Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

It's a buyer's market, so haggle.

TAX AND SPEND:

The $787 billion in stimulus money is paying for fewer than $600,000 jobs. That's $1.3 million per job. I wish I could get that kind of work. Assuming $50,000 per average private sector job, Obama's stimulus bill killed 26 productive jobs for every unproductive job it saved or created. So Obama wants $100 billion more so he can kill 2 million more private sector jobs to create 70,000 more unproductive jobs. He's doing it to us on purpose.

Taxes on pollution are the new sin taxes.

Lots of us are getting sick and tired of big-spending Republicans attacking Democrats for spending and acting like they're something other than big-spending Republicans. I couldn't stand hypocritical Democrats who attacked Bush for spending too much either. All we have in Washington are self-serving hypocrites. Nice chart of annual spending increases for presidents back to Eisenhower. And it's good to see Republican organ National Review go after hypocritical Republicans on this too.

Charts of the growth of federal "aid" to state and local governments.

HEALTH CARE:

Obama admits that the CBO estimates on his health care bill are artificially low.

WAR:

The TSA lied about its full body scanners which TSA requires to be able to send and receive images. Lying is what government does best. Even better than blowing stuff up.

How aristocrats exaggerate the threat from terrorists to keep the people scared enough to give them more and more power.

"A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants."

Did I call this or what? Think pregnancy implant for a much bigger bomb. Terrorists really are going to do this, but giving government more power is the sure way to disaster. The solution is to embrace freedom and trade freely with mainstream Arab Muslims so they'll stop becoming terrorists and instead turn on the hard-core terrorists they don't want running their lives either.

CIA agent who said waterboarding quickly makes terrorists crack has changed his story. I don't care how quickly it works. It works. The terrorists gave interrogators information that saved American lives, and they're no worse for wear and neither are the cool-kid reporters who had themselves waterboarded to prove their reporter bona fides. None of those reporters has offered to allow an interrogator to beat, electrocute, burn, use pliers, or use other actual torture technique on them. Waterboarding is not torture. If the terrorists want Geneva Convention protections, they can put on uniforms and start following those conventions. If they were subjected to actual torture, the torturers should be prosecuted.

POLITICS:

Political change starts locally.

Text of Obama's State of the Union speech.

Obama received campaign donations from Gaza.

I wonder if the Republican 2012 candidate will have the nerve to use these slogans. What's the scariest thing you will ever hear? I'm Barack Obama, and I'm here to help. How can you tell when Barack Obama is lying? His lips are moving. Barack Obama isn't the solution to our problems, Obama is our problem. I doubt it.

The Republican power-brokers who created the lost decade forming new political group to fleece the Tea Partiers.

"Republican leaders expected to be affiliated with the group include former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Bush adviser Karl Rove, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, and Republican donor Fred Malek.

A House leadership aide told Washington Wire today that Rob Collins, a political operative and senior aide to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, is leaving Capitol Hill to be the executive director of the 501(c)4."

I'd love if the Tea Party folks would just say no, but you know these power-hungry fruitcakes are going to suck big bucks out of the anti-government movement and funnel it to leviathan-government Republicans, mostly themselves, just like they always do.

This is important insight into Obama from author of Obamanomics.

"NB: It's very hard to reconcile what the president has done with his rhetoric during the campaign, and even his rhetoric now, he was stumping for Coakley, and he's talking about how 'we don't need another big business senator in Washington'. The way you describe it, Obamanomics is a necessary consequence of Obama's agenda, not necessarily how he would have set out to accomplish that agenda.

CARNEY: Well, let me put it this way. What I'm not saying, and I write this explicitly in the book, what I'm not saying is that Obama is bought and paid for by special interests. You could look at all the money he got from Wall Street and the drug makers and look at how the drug makers benefit from health care reform and Obama likes all the bailouts and say, okay he was bought and paid for, but that's reading into his heart and mind and that’s just not something you can do from available evidence is know what his actual intentions are.

I’d say there are two reasons why Obama ends up teaming up with the likes of Goldman Sachs and Pfizer. The first is tactical necessity. He needs allies in his efforts to make these broad changes, whether it’s Wall Street, health care, the environment, etcetera.

The second is the economic laws that I was discussing earlier. Big government will inevitably benefit big business. A caveat there: a giant communist steamroller will crush big business. A single payer plan will crush big business. But the big government of the sort Obama is willing to do, a left of center big government, that will inevitably help big business. So you can even imagine Obama believed he was going to run the special interests out of town, and then he starts erecting his, you know, his health care reform, his cap and trade, and all of a sudden the big businesses come flocking going 'we love it! tweak this, tweak that, and we'll make profit.' And he might have been a bit surprised, but I don't think so considering that he raised more money form Wall Street than any candidate ever, he raised more money from the drug industry, from the health insurance industry, and even from the oil industry, than any candidate ever. I don't think he was surprised by the big business embrace of his agenda."

A lot of people are missing this. Obama's leftist supporters think he's sold out to big business. Even many libertarians and conservatives think that. It isn't true. Obama recognizes the political reality that he needs big business on board in order to dramatically increase the burden of government to collapse our economy and spark a Marxist revolution as quickly as possible. If Obama tried to outright seize those businesses today, he'd never succeed, he would be outed as a Marxist, and his presidency would be over. He has to create the bigger crisis, the next dip in the recession he's worked so hard to create, and he has to successfully blame the "free market" in order for the people to allow him to seize those companies. He has to do this in steps, and he's well on his way. Big businesses are Obama's useful idiots, supporting his agenda for short term gain without seeing the ultimate conclusion which runs over them like a steamroller."My broader point is, Obama is GE's whole story; they are the for-profit arm of the Obama administration. Obama says embryonic stem cells, GE starts an embryonic stem cell line. Obama says high-speed rail and freight trains, GE goes ahead and hires Linda Daschle to be their lobbyist in that. Obama says health care reform, GE launches a line of health care imaging, MRI-type things. Obama says global warming, GE is all over that creating greenhouse gas offsets already, something that only gets a real value once cap and trade passes. And GE spends more on lobbying than any company in America. When you put that all together, you see the success of Barack Obama is the success of General Electric, so that's where the conflict of interest is just utterly glaring."This is a great interview. I'm going to buy this book.

Both AP and Cato find Obama failed to present the facts in his State of the Union speech.

The Democrat meltdown continues as SEIU president calls Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman terrorists for not supporting union card check.

It looks like the Nashville Tea Party Convention is collapsing because of fears it's a scam.

George Will summarizes Obama's position based on his State of the Union.

"Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington shouldconscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc."

Good one.

MEDIA:

Chris Mathews said he forgot Obama was black during the State of the Union. Democrats can never be colorblind. It's like they're genetically programmed for bigotry and they feel guilty about it so they overcompensate by becoming harmfully patronizing.

MISC:

The Constitution, replacing the Articles of Confederation, was the first big power grab by the political elites.

"Compared to the overtaxed, overregulated society that is America today, the America of the 19th century was one of astounding liberty and prosperity. However, even America after 1787 had much more government than America in its first decade. We are taught that this was a grave problem and that the Constitution was necessary to avoid imminent destruction from any number of horrors, including invasion by a foreign power, civil war, or economic upheaval as a result of protectionism by the states. We accept these assertions as facts because of the reverence we hold for the founders of our country. However, how different was the atmosphere surrounding the Constitutional Convention from that surrounding the Patriot Act, the TARP bailout, or the current efforts to expand government power in the name of environmentalism? Despite the pure heresy of the idea, there was really no difference at all.

...

Like the Patriot Act, the TARP bill, and the coming Climate Treaty, The U.S Constitution was conceived and drafted in an atmosphere of panic that was created by proponents of big government for the express purpose of using fear to win support for a massive expansion of government power. Also like TARP or the Patriot Act, it was debated in secret by a convention of delegates that were told that unspeakable horrors awaited America if they did not pass it immediately. Like most expansions of government power, its proponents did not get everything that they hoped for, but they got a lot more power than they had. Most importantly, the next debate over the size and scope of government started from there. The seeds of America’s multi-trillion dollar welfare-warfare state really lie in this seminal expansion of government power."

Government always uses crises, real or fabricated, to grab power.

Jeff Tucker teases us about Robert Murphy's new introduction to economics for high school students called Lessons for the Young Economist. This should be a great intro for everybody.

Next generation is skeptical of big-government and big-business. That's great news. I hope it isn't too late.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Peter Schiff compares Obama to Hoover. I thought Bush was Hoover and Obama was Roosevelt.

"The President spoke optimistically about the future, but in reality there is little evidence to support such an upbeat outlook. He began his speech by assuring us that the worst of the storm had passed. General Custer may have said something similar when the first wave of Indian attacks ebbed at Little Big Horn."

Good one.

"Rather than tightening the reins on the reckless monetary policy that undermined our savings, diminished our industrial output, inflated asset bubbles, and led to reckless speculation on Wall Street and excess consumption on Main Street, we are loosing them further. Rather than repealing regulations that distort markets and create moral hazards, we are adding new ones that do more of the same. Rather than cutting government spending to reduce the burden it places on our economy, we are increasing both the amount of the spending and the size of the burden. Rather than making government smaller so that the private sector can grow, we are making government bigger and forcing the private sector to shrink. Rather than paying off our debts we are taking on even more. Rather than encouraging people to save we are enticing them to spend. Rather than creating jobs, we are merely creating unemployment benefits."

I love when Schiff strings together these comparisons.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

A system of voluntary exchange provides the only effective regulation mechanism ever created.

"But don't markets need regulating? Of course. Markets in which the government hasn't turned criminal regulate themselves without violating anyone's rights. If a bank insists on practicing fractional-reserve lending, for example, and finds itself unable to meet depositor demands, it files for bankruptcy, not a bailout. The free bank is thereby discouraged from creating multiple claims to the same dollar. It cannot ask for a loan from its friendly central banker because it doesn't have one."

Businesses that cheat their customers or suppliers go bankrupt. If officers commit fraud, they are prosecuted. Government regulation suffers from the same fatal conceit as all central planning -the idea that a handful of men are smarter and more capable of performing an unimaginably complex and rapidly evolving task better than all the people combined. We need to unleash the regulating power of 300 million Americans instead of suffering under the impossible to succeed regulation by a handful of bureaucrats.

"The hidden tax of bank inflation is perfectly suited to their ends. It gives the impression that government is an endless source of largess, while shifting the blame for crises and everyday higher prices onto governments' favorite whipping boys, speculators and business people. By depreciating the currency, bank inflation quietly takes wealth from our pockets and gives it to those in on the racket.

The very existence of a fiat-paper money like federal reserve notes precludes the possibility of a free market. "In no period of human history has paper money spontaneously emerged on a free market," Jörg Guido Hülsmann writes in The Ethics of Money Production.

Whenever governments issue the stuff, they of necessity impose a "legal obligation for each citizen to accept it as legal tender." At one point, paper money certificates were "backed" by a certain weight of gold or silver. But with widespread indifference to monetary issues, it proved easy for governments to blame crises on the commodity backing rather than the inflation of the notes. Governments outlawed the use of gold and silver as money so they could inflate with minimal restraint."

We're repeating the mistakes of history, and unless we fix the problem, we'll suffer the same consequences.

The mainstream media is figuring out that our banking and finance industries are a big, secretive cartel.

GLOBAL WARMING:

State governments to implement cap and trade and carbon markets. State governments are still governments and therefore oppressive, but the difference is they have to compete with each other. Citizens will leave these states for states without carbon markets just like people are fleeing California and New York like the sinking they ships they are.

WAR:

The shard-dressed man who helped the underwear bomber avoid the passport check in Amsterdam for his flight to Detroit was a US intelligence agent. Nothing else makes sense given all the evidence. The US didn't revoke the terrorists' visa at the request of counter-terrorism agents because they wanted him in the US. I agree that Kurt Haskell is a hero. You have to read this cover-up attempt to believe it. He refused to cave to pressure from the FBI to change his story, and now he's been vindicated. Every American owes this man a debt of gratitude for exposing the dark and convoluted machinations that our government employs that endanger us. At least there's no evidence the agent knew the guy had a bomb in his pants. This illustrates Security comes from powerful individuals, not doomed-to-fail central planners.

I have mixed feelings about these so-called mind scanners. They're a heck of lot less intrusive than body scanners, and that's a good thing. But are they effective? I'm sure they're advertised to work wonderfully, but that doesn't mean anything. How many false positives and negatives do they get in the real world? Would they highlight all the Muslims who are angry at the US but never intend to raise arms against us? How can it tell the difference? I would hope these would only be used to identify people for additional screening. I'd have no problem with private companies employing them, that way passengers could chose to fly elsewhere if they didn't like them, but anything the government uses against the people it abuses for its own purposes.

Obama to move 9/11 trials out of New York. On what grounds? This isn't a matter of politics. It's a matter of law. If Obama is going to try the terrorists in civilian court, he must do it in the jurisdiction of the crimes. This is another example of Obama's lawlessness. He thinks his power is unlimited except by political factors. The problem isn't where he holds the trial. The problem is he's trying war criminals as civilians in a court system that was intentionally designed not to have that happen. If we pervert our civilian courts into courts for war criminals, those same perversions will used against every US citizen dragged into court. We'll all end up being tried as war criminals. And every person in the world who wages war in the US will end up in our courts. This has got to be part of Obama's plan to collapse the US.

What is it with soldiers and rape? Until we figure out how to solve the rape problem with combat troops, lifting don't ask, don't tell would be irresponsible. Nobody can know what injecting homosexual tension and homophobia into the most stressful situation in human experience will be. I bet it would be explosive. We have an all volunteer military. It's not like gays are being forced to live with that policy against their will.

POLITICS:

House Republicans meet with Obama on TV, feeding the illusion that Obama is a bipartisan president. Republicans should have kept the cameras, but not the reporters, out. The TV works in Obama's favor. The record works in Republicans' favor. Nobody can force others to work with them. If Obama wanted to work with Republicans, he could easily do so by moving their direction. Fortunately for all of us, that hasn't happened. Bipartisanship, i.e. both parties working together to grow their power at our expense, is the most dangerous threat we face. The best we can hope for is for Republicans to remain solidly united against every Democrat policy.

This meeting show Republicans are still clueless about why their fortunes have turned so dramatically. Because they're power-hungry, lying aristocrats just like Democrats, their DNA pushes them to pass laws and compromise so they can buy more votes. They're programmed that way like reptiles so they can't grasp that doing nothing, that being obstructionist, that being the party of no more expansion of government and dramatically differentiating themselves from freedom-hating Democrats is the best thing for them politically and for the people.

Pat Buchanan figured out what I've been saying for a year, the Democrat coalition, because it's inherently contradictory, is tearing itself apart, and Obama can't do anything about it.

"Obama's dilemma, evident in his State of the Union, is that the progressives, who were indispensable to his victories over Hillary, now feel betrayed, especially with apparent abandonment of health insurance reform, while conservative Democrats and independents, who were indispensable in giving Obama his November victory, are angry and alienated and disposed to vote Republican to stop what they see as America's plunge into socialism.

The non-negotiable demands of these two essential elements of Obama's coalition are in irreconcilable conflict."

This is why central planning always fails. This is why our parties ping-pong in power. Central planners cannot please all the people all the time, and over time, they make so many mad they kick the party in power out of power. Freedom is the system that maximized happiness of the people.

MISC:

I've never understood this desire to contact aliens. I think it's related to religion. Any aliens who could come here are at the top of their food chain just like us but way more advanced than we are. There's no reason to think they would look at us and our planet as anything other than raw material for their own advancement.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

The Census Bureau is starting a new yearly survey called the American Community Survey with 24 pages of questions despite having no constitutional authority for it.

"The questions are both ludicrous and insulting. The survey asks, for instance, how many bathrooms you have in your house, how many miles you drive to work, how many days you were sick last year, and whether you have trouble getting up stairs. It goes on and on, mixing inane questions with highly detailed inquiries about your financial affairs. One can only imagine the countless malevolent ways our federal bureaucrats could use this information. At the very least the survey will be used to dole out pork, which is reason enough to oppose it.

Keep in mind the survey is not voluntary, nor is the Census Bureau asking politely. Americans are legally obligated to answer, and can be fined up to $1,000 per question if they refuse!

I introduced an amendment last week that would have eliminated funds for this intrusive survey in a spending bill, explaining on the House floor that perhaps the American people don’t appreciate being threatened by Big Brother. The amendment was met by either indifference or hostility, as most members of Congress either don’t care about or actively support government snooping into the private affairs of citizens."

We have nobody but ourselves to blame for this stuff. Hopefully Americans will exercise civil disobedience and reject this illegal invasion of privacy at gunpoint.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

It took me a little bit of reading to figure it out exactly why Democrats and the mainstream media are so upset over the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision. I should have just immediately read John Stossel.

"The media outrage is almost funny. Under McCain-Feingold, media corporations were exempt from the prohibition—which suits the Washington Post and New York Times just fine. But people with common sense already knew what Justice Kennedy found it necessary to say: "This differential treatment (between media and nonmedia corporations) cannot be squared with the First Amendment.""

This ruling takes away the liberal media's monopoly power over painting the portraits of candidates. Before this ruling, Democrats were assured that in the last 60 days before an election, their media shills would paint them in the best possible light while painting their Republican competitors in the worst possible light and competing voices were silenced. Not any more. I strongly doubt Barack Obama could have won an election without this censorship.

"There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them."

Nice finish.

ECONOMY:

Lew Rockwell explains how we can return to virtually zero unemployment overnight. Think about it: is your life so perfect that you have no needs or wants to be fulfilled? Until we reach a situation in which every individual has everything he or she can possibly want, i.e. never, we need more work done. Includes non-exhaustive list of government interventions in our economy that make it prohibitively expensive for employers to hire workers.

"Read any account of economic history from the late Middle Ages through the 19th century and try to find any evidence of the existence of unemployment. You won't find it. Why is that? Because long-term unemployment is a fixture of the modern world created by the interventionist state. "We" try to cure it and "we" ended up doing the opposite."

There's nothing compassionate about welfare.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's spending freeze proposal is not for real. Graph shows why. Imagine if you became CEO of a company that was gravely in debt, hemorrhaging money and on the verge of bankruptcy. Imagine if you then borrowed 10 percent of your yearly revenue "to invest" in your company and instead you blew it all in one weekend in Las Vegas in a historic orgy of irresponsible, self-gratifying spending for you and your cronies. Imagine if the next day you proposed to your board to freeze spending for 13 percent of your company while borrowing more money to expand spending for the other 87 percent of your company. Do you think the board would applaud you for fiscal responsibility? Do you think you'd keep your job? Do you think your company would survive if you did?

GLOBAL WARMING:

Osama bin Laden teams up with Al Gore to blame the US for global warming. Have you noticed that our world more closely resembles a twisted Hollywood farce instead of the world we grew up in? Bin Laden was probably with Gore in Copenhagen and the UN security forces missed him.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Vancouver police go to wrong man's house and beat him despite him not resisting. I wonder who they intended to beat.

WAR:

How Pavlovian Americans have been brainwashed into thinking government can provide security better than the private sector.

"First of all, the contention is that the private sector is either too greedy, to immoral or too inept to sufficiently provide airline security so the government is going to do it. Where does the government get the people to do the airline security? From the private sector; moving right along.

The private sector is full of firms specializing in security with people who are experts in the field and who compete against one another for work. The government hires people who have absolutely no experience in security of any kind and gives them basic training on how to recognize objects in an x-ray machine, how to do a full-body pat-down or how to do their explosive powders tests on a laptop. And they compete against no one. Once you’re in you are in for life as long as you don’t quit or kill someone.

If a private sector security firm fails in providing adequate security to a client, the firm is penalized which can lead to financial losses, legal action and possibly the failure of the firm. If the TSA fails to provide adequate security it leads to increased funding at taxpayer’s expense and employment of yet more unqualified security personnel in order to address the now identified security hole; has anyone other than me opened that bottle of Jack yet?

A private security firm represents their own interests as well as the interests of their client. They must add value of some sort to the airlines they work for or else the airline will lose money in the form of fewer passengers, law suits and the like and the security firm would risk losing their contract with the airline. The TSA represents no one’s interests. They will never suffer any sort of financial or fiscal penalties based on their performance since their revenues are forcibly taken from Americans rather than earned. Unlike the private security firm, the TSA has absolutely no incentive to care about what kind of job they do. In fact the more security loop-holes that are identified the more money they are appropriated and the larger they grow. Precisely the opposite sort of incentive any rational person would want in an organization solely responsible for their safety. Just think about that for a second: the worse they do their job, the more money they get. "

What's happened is we've allowed government lovers to convince Americans that the profit motive makes people do a worse job than a collectivist motive. That's completely backwards. The profit motive is why the private sector is better at everything than government.

POLITICS:

This essay on political language has a great quote from Orwell, who knew a little bit about the subject."Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."This has only gotten worse with time.

"The giggling must have commenced even in the congressional hearing room when Mr. Geithner began his public catechisms about how the conferral of hundreds of billions of dollars on AIG was undertaken for the benefit of American taxpayers. Nor was his self-contradiction more evident than when he first declared that trust in the financial system required disclosure and transparency, but later warned that it would be a grave mistake to make public the machinations of the Federal Reserve Board. Such actions (i.e., exposure to the American people about how the Fed actually operates) would destroy this agency’s "independence." There was even some suggestion that the cause of "national security" had been invoked early on when the AIG bailout was being considered! Such are the consequences whenever hot air is disguised as cool reasoning."

I always feel much better about being mugged when the mugger takes the time to explain it's for my own good and the good of society. And of course transparency is required of thee but not for me.

Executive summary of Obama's state of the union (I didn't know it was SOTU now) speech:

"This crazy @&%!@ is going to get us all killed. He is going to take his Titanic of dubious policies and ram the iceberg of reality at full speed.

...

As best as I could tell from the speech, Obama thinks Kennedy is still the senator from Massachusetts.

...

Heard this speech before. Obama is Captain Ahab. He's nailed up the gold coins and wants us to chase the great white whale. My name's not Ishmael and I am not signing up for any watery grave. If the padded-cell junkie wants to start a revolution, he can count me out."

Oh my gosh, this essay is funniest essay anybody will read about that speech. Apparently the speech played better as a drinking game than anything else.

Cato documents striking similarities between Obama's SOTU speech and Bush's SOTU speeches. We're in the third term of the Bush/Obama administration, and Obama is like George Bush's bigger, meaner brother.

MISC:

I hope this report that Obama will privatize manned space missions is true. He should privatize the rest of the government.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Bizzaro World continues in Great Britain as man is prosecuted for blowing his nose while driving. For all those people who think it's OK for the government to make us wear seat belts, ban us from using cell phones and tell us how much we can drink before we drive, you're wrong. These aren't individual policies. They're part of a process of the death spiral of totalitarianism. This article illustrates the inevitable next step. We're watching Britain spiral into the black hole of totalitarianism, and we're caught in the same death spiral, just a little further out. Maybe I should start a separate category for Great Britain.

Obama proposes mandating businesses offer direct deposit to IRAs. Mandate, mandate, mandate. Obviously this is an additional expense for businesses and would kill more jobs. There's more to this than meets the eye. Government views IRAs as a pool of untaxed money to loot, so the more people they can force into them now, the more money they can loot from them later.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

John Stossel asks why progressives are so willing to throw freedom of speech under the bus. Because they are progressives. Progressives have never supported freedom of speech. They want to control all speech so it conforms to the progressive agenda, and they always have.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Ron Paul introduces legislation to repeal legal tender laws and remove taxes from gold and silver so Americans can use competing currencies to protect themselves from the Fed's destruction of the dollar.

You can't help but wonder is Bernanke clueless, locked inexorably in Keynesian dogma, or is he lying?

"As chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors in October 2005, Bernanke told Congress that he wasn’t concerned about a housing bubble. A year and a half later, in March 2007, he testified as Federal Reserve Chairman that problems in the subprime market were "contained." But never mind the chairman’s inability to see the bubble as he helped froth it up. After the fact, there is something especially chilling in the chairman’s blank look of incomprehension about his role in the debacle. For when the deluge hit exactly as Congressman Ron Paul and others employing Austrian-school analysis had forewarned, the brazenness of Bernanke’s wide-eyed denial of Fed complicity in the real estate bubble was simply breathtaking.

After all, considering the scale of destruction on his watch, wouldn’t anyone with healthy human consciousness at a bare minimum seek out the views of those who had warned of the calamity? Doesn’t the magnitude of the losses cry out for examination without prejudice? Not by our role model. Bernanke has to exonerate the Fed, because acknowledging the role of interest rate manipulation in the housing bubble is also an indictment of current Fed policy and an advance admission of authorship for the dollar meltdown to come."

It's hard to know just how deeply some people are brainwashed, especially academics who have spent their entire lives being brainwashed and brainwashing others. It's hard to know how far they're willing to go to cover up that their entire careers have been based on lies too. I can't tell. Greenspan looked absolutely clueless in front of Congress when he blamed the non-existent free market after the economy melted down, but I still believe he knew it was coming and retired in an attempt to avoid the blame.

Ben Bernanke was reconfirmed today 70-30, but was politically wounded in the process. He no longer enjoys the air of authority of previous Fed chairmen.

WAR:

The FBI is finally looking for the nice dressed Indian man who helped the underwear bomber circumvent the passport check before he got on the plane. Finally. We've surrendered our ability to secure ourselves and our country to these incompetent central planners. (I know, incompetent central planner is redundant.)

Bush and Obama have authorized US forces to kill Americans overseas if they are engaged in terrorism against the US.

"After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military,authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added."

The Constitution unequivocally declares waging war against the US to be treason and treason to be a civilian crime. This directive is unconstitutional.

POLITICS:

Lew Rockwell compares the agenda Obama laid out last night in his state of the union address to Mussolini's.

"The Leader ascends to the fasces-festooned podium in the awful US Capitol. He calls for more pork-barrel projects, protectionism, war, taxes, spying, nationalism, state jobs, student debt, business debt, housing debt, bureaucratic medicine, environmentalism, redistributionism, and general Mussolinism. Oh, and he publicly embraced Tim Geithner."

Glad I missed it.

Obama attacks Supreme Court for upholding the Constitution regarding free speech of people organized into corporations and lies about the legality of foreign companies being able to influence our elections. The Supreme Court specifically excluded foreign individuals and corporations from its ruling.

"On Wednesday night, during his State of the Union address, the president attacked this decision by arguing that the ruling permits foreign nationals and foreign corporations to spend money on American campaigns. When he said this, Justice Samuel Alito, who was seated just 15 feet from the president, gently whispered: “That’s not true.” Justice Alito was right. The Supreme Court opinion, which is 183 pages in length, specifically excludes foreign nationals and foreign-owned corporations from its ruling. So the president, the former professor of law at the one of the country’s best law schools, either did not read the opinion, or was misrepresenting it."

This is another of the many examples of Obama's lawlessness. It's all about protecting the power of Democrats and their labor union partners. I still think Democrats are all wrong about this. I think corporations, who hate and fear competition, always support greater government intervention in our economy, will overwhelmingly support Democrats. But when corporations come into conflict with unions, that won't happen. Looks like I'm wrong. The law had previously forbid labor unions from advertising too. Then how did labor unions spend over $68.3 million to elect Obama and Democrats in 2008? I know what the deal is. Before this ruling, only media outlets could advocate for candidates. The mainstream media was the most powerful voice in getting candidates elected. The Court put an end to that. And while historically corporations have supported Democrats over Republicans, after the radical leftist attacks on corporations since Obama took over, that may change.

MISC:

This bizarre post shows such a horrible misunderstanding of pro-life, pro-military conservatives, it's hard to come up with words. Why is it so hard for these so-called libertarians (I find this post to be unlibertarian - libertarians are supposed to use reason in their arguments, not slander tens of millions of good people) to understand that conservatives like the military because they protect us from threats. That's what conservatives think the military is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our military personnel aren't murderers, and acting as if they are is irresponsible and destructive. They are doing the best they can to hunt down killers and kill them before they kill others with as few non-combatant casualties as possible. It's our policies that are the problem, not the troops carrying them out, and not the people who are misinformed about the consequences of these policies. These irrational, irresponsible attacks on our military and the people who support our military doom the libertarian movement to remain a fringe movement with very little political influence. We have to debate policies on their merits, attack specific individuals or small groups (like Republicans and Democrats) for their specific actions and policies, and stop attacking good people who support the wars because we have yet to convince them there's a better way.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Bizzaro World continues to take over Great Britain. Here's the headline:

"Employer told not to post advert for 'reliable' workers because it discriminates against 'unreliable' applicants"

A little more detail:

"When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn't ask for 'reliable' and 'hard-working' applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people."

We're on the same path in America.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The Fed is already unwinding its monetary base and reducing the money supply in the process. This will undoubtedly trigger another recession.

WAR:

These slanderous attacks on people who support killing terrorists before they kill us are baseless, ugly, irrational and counterproductive to the cause of freedom. I bet this guy would kill his attackers before he allowed them to kill his family. The problem is a difference in policy, not that ordinary Americans who support the wars are evil or hypocrites. They think terrorists in the Middle East are plotting to kill them right now, and they're right. They think we should kill or capture those terrorists before they kill us, and they're right. No honest, sane person would disagree with that. The only question is what is the best policy to keep them from killing us. Dropping bombs on them (or non-terrorists in the case of common mistakes), their families, their friends and the people in the neighborhood who happened to be nearby is not the answer. Waging war across the Middle East is not the answer. Having a system of voluntary exchange with and befriending the mainstream Middle Eastern Muslims who are the natural enemies of the terrorists is the best policy. This is a debate on policy we need to win, but we'll never win it with irrational libertarians calling Americans who just want themselves and their families to survive the terrorists but are misguided on policy baby-killers. Libertarians are supposed to be rational, but there's nothing rational about this irresponsible, dishonest slander.

Our military expansion around the world continues as if George Bush never left office. I don't care if China is infuriated about the sale of Patriot missiles to Taiwan. If Taiwan wants to defend itself from China, we should support that, as long as we don't have troops there manning them. We should always support deterring aggression. The Puerto Rico comparison is dumb too. But putting US anti-missiles on Russia's border makes no sense. Europe has a significantly bigger economy than Russia or any country in the Middle East, and it can take care of itself. I thought Obama nixed that idea last year.

"If earlier plans to deploy ground-based midcourse missiles to Poland evoked, however implausibly, an alleged Iranian missile threat, the Patriots can only be meant for Russia."

That's what I thought. I wouldn't mind if Russia or China sold Patriots to Cuba (a much better comparison) since they're defensive only missiles, but I wouldn't like Russian or Chinese troops stationed there. But I fear these missiles and radar are prime targets for Russia to seize to obtain their technology. They can only heighten tensions between Russia, Eastern Europe and the US, and they'll never stop a committed attack from Russia.

MISC:

Humorous, insightful article on the social harm caused by smoking bans. Any smoker will get a real kick out of this story. It's irresponsible of government to make anybody so miserable.

The digital revolution is making Earth invisible to aliens. Instead of indiscriminately broadcasting in all directions, we beam information point to point except for satellites that broadcast down on the Earth. All those Seti people are not happy.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

As we've become less free, we're losing the ability to imagine what it means to be free.

"If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.

On the face of it, many people today do not necessarily reject these premises. No longer is the idea of a state-planned society seen as frightening. What scares people more today is the prospect of a society without a plan, which is to say a society of freedom.But here is the key difference between authority in everyday life — such as that exercised by a parent or a teacher or a pastor or a boss — and the power of the state: the state's edicts are always and everywhere enforced at the point of a gun."

Government does not keep us safe, and we need to quit pretending it does before it destroys our country.

Robert Murphy makes an interesting argument about anarchy in response to the situation in Haiti.

"When Rothbardians say that they favor anarchy, what we mean is that for any given society, with all else held equal, a government monopoly on legal rulings and police enforcement will make the society worse off. (I am here focusing on the pragmatic claims rather than ethical considerations.)

...

When dealing with Somalia, therefore, the relevant question isn't, "Would you rather live in the United States or Great Britain, with a stable government, or live in Somalia, with competing warlords?""

I think the relevant question is where in the world has anarchy ever produced as thriving a society as the top civilizations of the world? Another relevant question is where in the world has a thriving anarchist society survived predation by government dominated societies? There are no examples. I've heard the Celts mentioned as an example, but I don't get that because they were governed by warlords. The anarchist's paradise is as much a fantasy as the worker's paradise. There are always jerks in society who initiate violence against others, and those people must be dealt with with more violence. The people dealing out that "legitimate" violence to stop the initiators of violence are the government. A because power corrupts, government is always corrupt. The only question we need to answer is how to make government the least bad it can be while still serving the function of overcoming those who initiate violence on others.

You must have economic freedom in order to have political freedom. We have neither.

Judge orders woman to stay in hospital because she might miscarriage otherwise. I'm not surprised that the US is generating into a totalitarian state, I've been writing that we were on this path for 20 years, but even I'm surprised at how quickly it's happening. Within the last two years, I said we only had about 20 years to turn it around. I doubt we have 10 now. We may not have five. Our government has abandoned all pretense of having limited powers and the rule of law.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Two states have passed and 21 states have introduced legislation protecting the right to keep and bear arms for citizens inside those states from federal interference.

ECONOMY:

Our government is following the same policies that Japan followed which led to zero GDP growth for 17 years.

TAX AND SPEND:

After exploding the budget faster than any president in history, Obama to propose spending freeze on 1/6th of the budget in order to appear fiscally responsible. That means spending will continue to skyrocket in 5/6ths of the budget. This is a cheap political ploy to appease the Tea Party movement, but it will anger his base, and I bet nothing will come of it. He's just looking for good press. He should have made real spending cuts the day he took office, not phony ones a year after he made George Bush look like a spendthrift.

There may be a more evil motive behind this proposed spending freeze. Obama certainly knows we're heading for another stock market crash and a second dip in the recession. When it comes, he can blame it on this spending freeze and make the case that the only thing propping up the economy is crazy government spending.

How runaway government spending kills jobs and economic growth.

Telling headline: Deficit picture slightly less bleak. That's trying to put the brightest face on a terrible situation and failing horribly.

GLOBAL WARMING:

NASA and NOAA busted for selectively using temperature data that is biased towards higher temperatures and ignoring temperature stations that show otherwise.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Minnesota Supreme Court upholds DUI conviction of man whose car wouldn't start. They must have a different definition of driving than the rest of us.

The self-defense basis for DUI laws is wrong.

"Laws prohibiting drunk driving have absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate right to self-defense, and are actually on par with John attacking the roofer before the roofer has even threatened him. In order to see why this is the case, it is important to recognize that the supposed "crime" drunk drivers commit is only being intoxicated behind the wheel of a car. If the intoxicated driver should get into a deadly accident (that is his fault, due to negligence), he will be charged with a different and more serious crime, like manslaughter or even homicide. If the intoxicated driver should drive in a manner that threatens the lives of other motorists, he will be charged with something like reckless endangerment. The charge of "drunk driving," therefore, is always a separate charge that only addresses the fact that a man has an arbitrary amount of alcohol in his veins at the time he was driving. This is precisely analogous to prohibiting roofers from ever holding hatchets, simply because they coulduse those hatchets in order to maim or kill other people."

Unsafe driving should be punished. The cause of the unsafe driving is immaterial.

Another story of cops who "feared for their lives" killing a citizen. In this case it was three cops shooting a 62 year old man with a baseball bat after they had already tasered him. Never call the cops during a family dispute that hasn't turned violent. If you live through it, it will ruin your life.

POLITICS:

After getting advice from Bill Clinton, Obama to play the "feel your pain" card.

MEDIA:

Important Obama stories the mainstream media covered up in 2009. They did far worse in 2008 when they failed to point out that Obama is a member of the bomb-throwing Marxist wing of the liberal movement.

MISC:

Early reading can cause myopia and more serious eye problems.

Discovery of 7,000 year old man with amputated arm shows that our ancient ancestors performed complex surgery.

Avatar surpasses Titanic as top grossing film.

Does power corrupt all or merely attract the corruptible? Study suggests it only corrupts those who feel they deserve power, and there's a lot to be said for that point of view. But the answer is both, but it doesn't corrupt everybody at the same rate (it corrupts those who feel they deserve it much faster). Even the most seemingly incorruptible person will be corrupted in subtle ways through use of the language of power and identifying with those in power, separate from the rest of us, and over time that corruption will grow and leak out into actions.

30 percent of female military veterans report they were raped in the military. Wow. We knew there'd be serious problems with women in the military, but I wouldn't have expected it to be that bad.

Free kibbles

FREE SPEECH:

Hugo Chavez isn't as smart as Barack Obama. If he was, he'd just say he shut down this TV station for national security reasons. Then instead of resisting on free speech grounds, the people would just shut up and nod their heads or support the decision like they do in the US.

ECONOMY:

White House advisor says Obama turned the economy around. I guess she means made it worse, which was his goal.

Peter Schiff slams Obama over his new Wall Street regulation proposal.

"Once again, President Obama completely missed the mark on the causes of and solutions to the financial crisis. In his speech this morning, the President outlined a major initiative to increase regulation of banks. He claims the financial crisis was caused by reckless speculation by greedy bankers in search of quick profits. What he fails to acknowledge is that this behavior was the direct result of the cheap credit supplied by the Federal Reserve and the moral hazard supplied by government regulations and subsidies.

In his efforts to prevent the next financial crisis, the President is focused on the symptoms rather than the disease. Therefore, his attempt to prevent future financial crises is doomed to failure, as the misguided policies that led to the last crisis are preserved while even more damaging policies are added. Current Fed policy is more reckless than before; continued subsidies to the mortgage market and the bailouts for banks are creating even bigger moral hazards; and, as a result, the economy is even more leveraged and more vulnerable to rising interest rates than ever.

The only way to prevent another financial crisis would be to reverse the fiscal and monetary policies that lead to the last crisis, and which now threaten to bring on an ever larger one. However, this Administration seems to lack the brains or the guts to do it."

Neither. They're doing exactly what they want in order to collapse the US economy. Obama's economic team is telling him that his policies are bad for the economy. Obama sees the rapidly growing secessionist movement out there. He's crashing our economy and trying to start a revolution while empowering his socialist and communist buddies in hopes they'll win the revolution. He told us he wants a presidency like Lincoln. Only evil or insane men would want to have a presidency like Lincoln. He wants to spark a revolution, turn the military on the American people, crush the revolution like Lincoln did and implement a Marxist government in America. Whenever you wonder about Obama's policies, just ask yourself, what would Lenin do?

EDUCATION:

How Obama's "Race to the Top" central planning education initiative is as damaging as Bush's "No Child Left Behind".

"When the federal government decides it’s too risky to usurp the powers reserved to the states respectively, or to the people with outright force or fraud, it often employs a softer approach involving bribery. It should surprise no one that the Department of Education (DOE), under President Obama, is at it again."

Central planning is always doomed to fail.

POLITICS:

Knowing full well that the people don't want him to, Obama vows to continue to collapse America. He knew all along the people would reject his agenda. Nobody wants America to collapse around their ears (but apparently Americans are too dumb to stop voting for the aristocrats who are collapsing it around our ears). That's why he tried to ram it all through Congress ultra-fast before the people turned on him. Fortunately, Republicans managed to slow the process as the people woke up to what Obama was forcing on us.

Obama looks to Bill Clinton for answers. Thank goodness. I was afraid he'd look to Chairman Mao.

LOCAL:

John Kasich plans to abolish Ohio's income tax. Naturally Democrats hate this idea. They prefer Ohio to die a lingering painful death like California. The problem with phasing it out over 10 years is the benefits won't been seen right away but the costs will. That will make it pretty much impossible to sustain the policy over 10 years. We'd be better off abolishing it all at once so the economy could start growing again in a year. Then voters would have pictures of economic growth to offset pictures of closed down services. Kasich knows this, so I'm skeptical he really intends to carry out this policy. More likely it's a political ploy. It's easy to say you want to abolish income taxes 10 years after you take office in order to get elected while setting up the circumstances to insure it can never happen. I don't trust the news, the Republicans or the Democrats.

MISC:

The outrageous sex lives of teens. Government domination of our lives corrodes and corrupts society in far reaching ways.

We've restarted the lostpolitics discussion group here with more diverse categories.