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.