Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

It's good to see some mainstream talking head waking up to the danger of democracy.

TAX AND SPEND:

The bailout of Greece shows the universal mentality of politicians. They won't cut spending. It's too unpopular with their welfare state voters. The same is true of the US, but nobody can bail us out. When we collapse, it's for real, and it will take down western civilization.

Naturally Democrats want to rush Son of Stimulus through the Senate with no debate. How often will we fall for that scam?

Republicans urge Obama to use authority to force Congress to vote on spending cuts. Maybe Republicans should have done that when they were in power.

While attacking the stimulus on the one hand, Republicans are trying to funnel the cash to their districts with the other. There's no contradiction here. The stimulus was always about buying votes, not creating jobs. Republicans want to use it to buy votes too.

EDUCATION:

Obama's budget has huge increase in government school indoctrination spending. If we allow government to poison our schools with more and more government money, soon every child will fail.

HEALTH CARE:

Democrats blame Rahm Emanuel for the failure of Obamacare. Last I checked, he wasn't in Congress, so how could he be to blame? These aristocrats are worse than elementary school kids.

White House demands insurance company justify price increases.

"The Obama administration and state insurance officials pressured Anthem Blue Cross on Monday to justify its decision to raise rates by as much as 39 percent for thousands of outraged and frustrated California customers.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asked Anthem to explain its “extraordinary” premium increases for its individual policyholders.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Insurance demanded that Anthem delay its rate increases until May 1 to give the state time to investigate. Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said last week that he plans to hire an outside actuarial firm to make sure Anthem is spending at least 70 cents of each premium dollar on benefits."

In a sane world, this company should just give Obama the finger, but Pharaoh Obama would probably seize the company if it did that. All during the 2008 campaign I talked about the Obama thugocracy, and now we're reaping the whirlwind of it.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Global warming blamed for snow storms. While that's obviously silly because the planet is cooling, not warming, global warming could produce worse snow storms. More energy being in the air could lead to more snow.

POLICE STATE:

I'm changing my criminal justice category to police state.

Southern California police are training garbage men to spy on their fellow Americans because we don't have enough oppression in our lives. Hey, CA police. The worst crooks are in Sacramento, not southern California.

UK police beat man for burping.

WAR:

British airport security at Heathrow prints out naked scans of celebrity and passes them around. The commentary surrounding this report is right on.

"The Big Lie that the airport body scanners would show an image that could not be reproduced has been exposed. From Heathrow Airport across the Pond, we get this:

Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.

What we have to understand here is that the authorities knew all along what was going to happen, but they lied in order to get the public to fall into this trap. Of course, since the British government requires all flyers to go through this humiliating strip search, there is little doubt that this will happen again and again. (Hat tip to Drudge Report)"

Of course they knew it would happen. The same people who claimed pictures couldn't be circulated are probably collecting their favorite pictures and having a good time at our expense. They're playing us for fools, and we're proving them right.

Did you ever wonder how Bush filled Guantanamo and why so many detainees had to be released?

"The [Bush] regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for "terrorists." Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.

The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed "terrorists" prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat."

The Afghans used Guantanamo as a way to disappear their own enemies and people they didn't like, not necessarily enemies of America. This is a horrendous story of how a US citizen was caught up in that charade.

"On February 4, [US citizen] Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

...

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen."

I've never heard this story before.

"Anyone can be next. Indeed, on February 3 Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government’s judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat."

You don't find this info in the mainstream media.

FOREIGN POLICY:

I have no problem with sanctions against Iran's Republican Guard and human rights abusers. Why would we just now be applying those?

POLITICS:

During the Bush years, Democrats told us it was patriotic to attack the president. Now that Obama's in power, criticism of the president helps al Qaeda. Of course Republicans have flip-flopped on this just as much.

Michael Steele accuses his critics of bigotry.

Michelle Malkin rips George Bush. She could have done better. She didn't even mention government spending except for a couple policies.

All government acts are political. What if every aristocrats was limited to one term in one office for life? Nobody could ever run for reelection. Obviously they would still have to win one election and therefore promise the people something. There's no such thing as good government, but I still think the key to reducing the damage of government to the least amount possible is to make sure every elected official has to go back and earn a living in the private sector after they get out of office. There should be no pension plans for elected officials, and probably not for any government employee.

"Professor Ludwig von Mises, in his scholarly but readable little books,Bureaucracy and Planned Chaos, shows perhaps better than any other modern author why government interference with the free market leads to crisis, totalitarianism, and war. Every interventionist measure results in conditions which are even less satisfactory than those which preceded it, as shortages follow price control and black markets follow rationing. Yet, those who favor such intervention usually blame the evil results of their measures on the selfishness, stupidity, or perverseness of individuals. Then they urge more coercion to deal with the new problems."

Truth.

"The "mixed economy" advocated by the Keynesian economists, therefore, is highly unstable. It moves from crisis to crisis, from one emergency to another, while the currency depreciates, producers are demoralized, demagogy increases, government becomes more despotic, and international friction mounts. This spiral towards totalitarianism and war persists as long as faith in coercion and government planning prevails over a preference for voluntarism and free enterprise. Says Mises:

Our age has to face great economic troubles. But this is not a crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of interventionism, of policies designed to improve capitalism…

"

There are no good interventions in the market. They're all harmful. This essay clearly and concisely explains why government can only be oppressive and why central planning is always doomed to fail.

The Coming Insurrection apparently documents Obama and his leftist partners' vision for Marxist revolution in America. They're well on their way to collapsing our society under the weight of government, and Obama is dramatically accelerating that process. The violent left of Obama, Ayers, Wright, ACORN, etc. is ready to rise again. I think they're terribly misjudging the situation. I think when they rise the great libertarian mainstream of America will slap them down hard.

I'm not so sure Palin was advocating Obama declare war on Iran. From her phraseology, she might have been making the observation that, if circumstances led Obama to declare war on Iran before 2012, Americans would rally around him like they always rally around wartime presidents at first. Actually, that's probably Obama's ace in the hole to get re-elected. Or she might have been advocating he declare war on Iran.

Michelle Obama says childhood obesity is a threat to national security because obese people can't become soldiers.

"“A recent study put the health care cost of obesity-related diseases at $147 billion a year,” Mrs. Obama said. “This epidemic also impacts the nation’s security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.”"

You can't make this stuff up. This comment is exactly right - her position makes sense in the way a cattle farmer wants his livestock to be perfect for the slaughter.

LOCAL:

It's looks like Dayton is jumping on the red light ticket tax bandwagon.

"The City Commission also approved a one-year extension of a contract with California-based, Redflex Traffic Control Systems to continue operating red-light enforcement cameras at 10 intersections.

According to the contract, the city receives $30 per citation issued. Redflex, responsible for monitoring the system, gets $55 per ticket. The contract overall is worth about $204,000 to Redflex and will generate estimated revenue of $97,500 over the life of the contract."

This has nothing to do with safety. It's just about making the people more poor. As if Ohioans are suffering enough from titanic government.

"Dayton began installing the red-light cameras in March of 2003. The last camera was installed in June of 2005. Traffic accidents at camera-enforced intersections have declined by 44 percent since the cameras were installed, compared to a 26 percent drop citywide, according to Dayton Traffic Engineering statistics."

If this is to be believed, then why ticket? They're already making us safer. But this is misleading. People don't know where these cameras are. They're not driving different because of the cameras. Those intersections are safer probably because they're major intersections and as Dayton continues to turn into a ghost town, fewer and fewer people are driving through those intersections because they're finding less traveled alternate routes to avoid them.

MISC:

Overuse of antibiotics at factory farms created superbugs. They're in our food. Our food is more unsafe today than it ever was in the past.

Many of the most important events in American history happened because we had no central plan.