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.