Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

The Department of Justice forces newspapers to sign contract at point of gun. This is amazing. It would be easy to blame Obama for this, but this situation began on his little brother Bush.

ECONOMY:

Feds find very little fraud in Wall Street investigation. That's because, contrary to what Obama wants us to believe, Wall Street didn't create the financial crisis. The Fed coupled with Fannie and Freddie and the CRA created the financial crisis and because heavy interference of government in the mortgage industry, that's where all the fraud occurred.

Foreigners buying our debt is not good news. Foreigners buying more US debt means we're going deeper into debt and the crash we'll suffer because of it will be deeper and longer.

According to the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal, the US dropped to eighth on the index of economic freedom behind Canada with a greater drop than any other country. How hard is it to see that as we lose economic freedom our economy and quality of life gets worse? We're going the wrong way.

TAX AND SPEND:

Boortz makes a good point about Obama.

"Going into his next year, the White House says that Obama's top goal will be to create jobs. Shouldn't this have been his top priority all along? Obama and his advisors truly believed that spending $787 billion was going to turn the tide for our economy. They believed that it would create/save three million jobs. They believed that the unemployment rate would top out at 8%. Instead what did we get? Record unemployment rates and record budget deficits."

Isn't this just an admission that Obama was either negligent by not focusing on jobs his first year or that his policies failed? Either way, it's an Obama failure. Don't expect the press to point that out. Even if he blames Bush, which you know he will, and says the problem is worse than his supposedly crack economic team realized, then why would we trust that incompetent economic team to fix the problem?

Social Security was designed as a giant Ponzi scheme, and it's about to collapse on top of us.

"Social Security was a sure thing in its infancy. Just think of Ida May Fuller (1874–1975), a nonexempt legal secretary from Ludlow, Vermont. Ms. Fuller exemplifies the advantages of getting in early and getting out early. She paid a whopping $24.75 to participate in Social Security. Her first monthly Social Security check was issued January 31, 1940, for $22.54. Within three months, Ms. Fuller's investment was in the black. Over the ensuing 35 years, she would collect $22,888.92 in Social Security payments.

Of course, only a small percentage of mankind was lucky enough to have been born in 1874. Everyone reading this polemic resides far down the pyramid — exactly where you don't want to be in a Ponzi scheme, especially in one where participants keep voting themselves greater remuneration. Social Security benefits totaled $35 million in 1940, soared to $961 million by 1950, rose again to $11.2 billion by 1960, trebled to $31.9 billion by 1970, quadrupled to $120.5 billion by 1980, doubled to $247.8 billion by 1990, and nearly trebled again to $650 billion by 2009."

That's the lure of Ponzi schemes. The politicians at the time understood this, and they bought the votes of the people with impossible to sustain returns. We're left holding the bag.

"If a Ponzi scheme is in the offing, I prefer the Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff variety. At least their schemes don't drag unwilling participants into the fray. So I refuse to blame Messrs. Madoff, Petters, and Stanford for duping the dopes; they were simply satisfying market demand.

I also refuse to blame Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or Barack Obama; they are simply satisfying voter demand, just like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson before them.

That leaves the voting majority, whom I do blame. Victims of micro-level Ponzi schemes are only greedy; they don't infringe upon others' freedom. The same can't be said of those who demand that we all participate in these macro-level Ponzi schemes."

We have the government we created and deserve.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Senate unlikely to debate cap and trade this year. I hope that's true, but I wouldn't put it past Democrats to try and sneak this in under the radar somehow.

Now it's nitrogen.

WAR:

The rise of new warlords in Afghanistan.

Article suggests that the reported simultaneous suicide of three Guantanamo detainees in 2006 was actually a cover-up for torturing them to death. I appreciate this guy going out of his way to point out this doesn't prove they were tortured to death.

How Soviet spies maneuvered FDR and the Japanese into war.

"These four [Soviet spies] spearheaded the ultimately successful attempt to frustrate Grew's and Craigie's negotiating efforts. They were top White House aide and Canadian-born economist Lauchlin Currie, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White (who essentially was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s puppetmaster), New Deal tax-and-spend fanatic Harry Hopkins and the notorious State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss had tapped Johns Hopkins University Asia specialist and "adviser" to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang-Kai-shek, Owen Lattimore, as FDR's "China expert" – one whom Mao Tse-tung's sidekick Chou En-lai warmly regarded as "quite sympathetic to the Chinese Communists."

All of these men, White and Currie especially, actively pressured FDR into waging a war with Japan. They eloquently masked their staunch Soviet sympathies behind facile appeals to the territorial integrity of China under Chiang (a weak, greedy and corrupt leader who was uneasily allied with Mao and would later be overwhelmed by him) and in the interests of a "united front against fascism." FDR thus flatly disregarded the advice of Grew and Craigie and refused any meeting with Konoye.

Meanwhile, German Communist Richard Sorge's high-level Soviet spy ring in Tokyo, which had substantial influence on ranking Japanese military officers and numerous cabinet officials as well as close contacts with several German diplomats, helped steer Japanese strategy toward its existing Navy-based "Strike South" approach – conquest of the fruitful Pacific possessions of the West and away from the Army-based "Strike North" approach which targeted Siberia and Soviet Central Asia."

FDR was a tool in more ways than one.

POLITICS:

The radical leftists are in full meltdown mode over losing the Senate election in Massachusetts.

"Now that the Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate Slobbering Barney [Frank] thinks it's time to change the Senate rules and end the filibuster.

...

[Olberman] called Brown a "irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea bagging, supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees." That's what passes for responsible commentary by Democrat Obama supporters."

I can't believe ABC still lets this wacko do their football show. At least ESPN was smart enough to recognize their mistake and drop Rush Limbaugh right away. But Olberman's tremendously worse than Limbaugh. You don't ever hear Limbaugh say stuff like that. If he did, the left would go bananas.

The Wall Street Journal calls it the Boston Tea Party. Very appropriate. Our government is far more oppressive than King George ever was. Think about that for a minute. Our Founding Fathers fought and died to separate from a government significantly smaller and less powerful than our central government, but we not only bend over and take it, we continue to-reelect the same people bending us over and giving it to us 94 percent of the time. When it comes to politics, we're the dumbest people on the planet. If you don't believe me, consider this"

"Massachusetts passed a prototype of the Obama plan in 2006, and residents have since watched as their insurance premiums have risen to the highest in the nation, budget costs have soared, and bureaucrats are planning far more draconian regulation of medical practice. Mr. Brown accurately said the national sequel would be too expensive and reduce the quality of care, and that it would be a "raw deal" forcing Massachusetts taxpayers to subsidize all other states."

Mitt Romney, the architect of Romneycare in Massachusetts which was the model for Obamacare that conservatives claim to hate, is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. How stupid is that? Anybody who hates Obamacare has to disqualify Mitt Romney, but not conservatives. Nobody on the right will even talk about Romneycare and Romney's same health care mandate included in Obamacare.

Senate Democrat admits plan to use nuclear option to thwart the will of the people. Democrats think so little of the American people, they're willing to drop the legislative equivalent of a nuclear bomb on them. What this tells us is Democrats think they'll gain so much power by sucking most Americans into a government provided health care is worth the cost of nuking us. I think they're wrong. They may not have a Capitol building to work in if they do this. I think this will lead to revolts and Obama will get to be Lincolnesque by using the military to kill Americans resisting tyrannical government. I would be surprised if enough Democrats would be willing to go this route to make it happen.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans should be surprised by this election. They should have realized that Americans punished Republicans for big, oppressive government in 2006 and 2008. But Democrats tried to claim a mandate for dramatically bigger, more oppressive government and force it down our throats. Democrats knew this was going to be damaging and unpopular, that's why they raced to get everything done in the first year before Obama's honeymoon wore off, but they did it anyway. They voters have been 100 percent consistent. The people are sending a clear message - we want smaller government - but that isn't how aristocrats gain power so both parties refuse to see it.

Pat Buchanan absolutely nails it in this essay. Massachusetts tells us Republicans better embrace Ron Paul. Every Republican better stand up and take notice.

"In the near term, what is happening in Massachusetts is good news for the GOP.

What it says is that, no matter the weakness of the party label or brand, independents will vote Republican if that is the only alternative to the party in power.

The GOP can thus run this fall as the only effective force left in Washington that can block the Democrats' drive for power. The GOP problem arises when the presidential season begins in spring 2011.

For what Republican ran last time for cutting back George Bush's big government? Who ran against expansion of NATO into Ukraine and Georgia? Who opposed war in Iraq? Who stood up and said no to No Child Left Behind or Medicare coverage of prescription drugs?

Who in the Republican Party today is calling for a Barry Goldwater-like rollback of federal power and federal programs? Except Ron Paul."

Ron Paul is the only Republican who stands for what conservatives tell us they stand for. But will they finally vote for him? This is a must read.

MISC:

Power is naturally corrupting the EU.

Stephan Kinsella proposes meaningful IP reform. He's a powerful advocate for abolishing IP altogether, but that's unlikely to happen, so I'm happy to see him weigh in with more realistic proposal.

How government intervention in Japan Airlines led to its demise and bankruptcy after costing taxpayers billions. We're following the same model here.

Haiti needs real economic reform not more government intervention.

Murray Rothbard on Lincoln and the uncivil war.

"“The central grievance of the American rebels was the taxing power: the systematic plunder of their property by the British government . . . One of the central grievances of the South, too, was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners whose major income came from exporting cotton abroad.”

...

“[T]he southern United States was the only place in the 19th century where slavery was abolished by fire and by ‘terrible swift sword.’ In every other part of the New World, slavery was peacefully bought out by agreement with slaveholders.”

...

“In his First Inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region.”

...

“Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar.”

...

“The Northern war was the very opposite of honorable . . . . the North insisted on creating a conscript army . . . and broke the 19th century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians . . .”"

That's the model Barack Obama wants for his presidency.

British man imprisoned for using a cricket bat to knock the knife from the hand of one of three home invaders.