Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Interesting intersection of stories. First, The New York Times reports that GM sees gains from Toyota's flogging. At the same time, the BBC reports that GM recalled 1.3 million cars over a power steering problem. Wanna take bets on whether or not Congress publicly flogs GM execs?

"GM blamed the fault on a supplier partially owned by Toyota."

How funny. GM execs are like the cat who swallowed the canary.

ECONOMY:

Obama is already preparing his argument for rising unemployment - the weather.

TAX AND SPEND:

Pressure in Europe to transform the EU economic coalition into a European central government to avoid financial crises like the PIGS crisis in the future. Crises are always used to expand government and expand power of a central government.

Ron Paul says the US will never pay of its debt. There's no such thing as good government. It's impossible that an institution based on violence against the citizens and funded by taking money from them by force can be anything but harmful. All government is bad, and bigger government is worse.

Ron Paul returns $100,000 of his budget.

"Like him or hate him, Dr. Ron Paul doesn’t just talk a big game about fiscal conservatism, he lives it. In 2008, his congressional office returned $58,000 to the Treasury. In 2009, his office returned $90,000. Now, according to an official press release, Dr. Ron Paul’s congressional office has just paid back $100,000.

At a time when Wall St is running wild, the national debt is $14 trillion, and the federal government is running $1.4 trillion deficits, Dr. Ron Paul’s congressional office is running a surplus and paying back the American people."

This is the kind of government conservative claim they want. I want to see them put their votes where their mouths are. Boortz even took note of this is his reading assignments, and Boortz never mentions Ron Paul except to slam his supporters. Maybe webwench snuck it in while he wasn't looking.

It's no surprise that a government monopoly service, in this case the Post Office, expects to see $238 billion in losses over the next 10 years. It's also no surprise that those losses are exacerbated by political concerns instead of market forces. That's the nature of government. That's the nature of monopolies. It's a double whammy.

For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans received more money from government than they paid in. That's not sustainable.

I just went back and looked at my essay America's Looming Debt Crisis I wrote two years ago, and it's astonishing how accurate I was. The only thing is, the crisis is starting sooner than I expected, and it's going to get worse than I expected because we didn't elect the only candidate in the race who had the prescription to the crisis - Ron Paul.

Good for Jim Bunning for holding up more unemployment benefits until they get paid for. Isn't funny how aristocrats suddenly become responsible when their party is in the minority and they're retiring?

$280.85 in food stamps buys $50 cash, two bottles of liquor, two porn DVDs and two Viagra in Detroit. Good think Congress just increased the food stamp budget. Have I mentioned how government interference in our lives degrades society? Yes I have.

REGULATION:

I don't believe this article. It claims that if the accelerator of a car was depressed, that a car's computer might ignore the brake.

"Without the system, a car’s computer might think a driver wants to keep accelerating, and ignore a driver’s efforts to depress the brake pedal and stop the car."

That's absurd. No engineer in his right mind would design a system like that. No system like that would pass design review. This is a leftist paper spouting propaganda for bigger government. That doesn't mean that brakes have to deactivate the accelerator, but there's no way that the accelerator deactivates brakes as this article claims.

States have no business banning credit checks of potential employees by employers. That information is available to the public, so businesses can check it if they want. If these bans are passed, they won't work. It'll create a black market in credit checks.

EDUCATION:

Government schools paying tuition of violent students to send them to private school. It would be more honest to ban private schools outright, but it's more convenient to use them as a dumping ground for their failures.

I'm all for firing staff and shutting down failing schools, but where does Obama get that power and why does that cost more money? That should save money, and Obama doesn't own the schools. Besides which, teachers unions won't stand for it. This idea seems doomed from the start. I wonder if this is another distraction, and nothing is supposed to come of it except more money dumped in the black hole of government schools.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Pat Buchanan weighs in on Al Gore and Co.'s great climate hoax.

Fossil fuels are less harmful to the environment than grown fuels mainly because people cut down forests to grow alternate fuels.

POLICE STATE:

Brooklyn prosecutors clear ACORN over giving advice on how to run an underage prostitution ring, then they went back to prosecuting little old ladies on trumped up charges of cheating at bridge. I don't know if what those ACORN goons did was a crime since the guy recording the video wasn't really trying to set up a prostitution ring. I hope it wasn't. I don't want prosecutors prosecuting people for advice based on a false premise because if that was allowed, prosecutors would sting and prosecute every person they didn't like. But if I had given that advice on tape, you can bet they would have prosecuted me because I have no political connections. You can bet they would have shut down the organization I worked for because it had no political connections. The politically connected are typically above the law, and the rest of us are typically below it. The rule of law is an illusion in America. Eliot Spitzer wasn't prosecuted, prosecutors conveniently couldn't find enough evidence, and he's considering returning to politics. The rare case of William Jefferson getting prosecuted is just to hold up the illusion.

POLITICS:

Boortz compiles a list of many instances of corruption by Charlie Rangel we know about. The list we don't know about is much longer.

MEDIA:

In another example of how the mainstream media is committing suicide by not reporting the news that matters, the Washington Post discusses 10 possible Republican presidential candidates, mentioning CPAC in the article, but does not mention Ron Paul. This is dereliction of duty. Nobody wants to read a paper that covers up the important stories or important aspects of stories, but the mainstream media does that about every story.

LOCAL:

It makes no sense to me that demand

"for pediatric subspecialty services has more than doubled in the past 12 years, with total clinic visits to specialists growing from 29,445 to 60,770."

Why?

"Medical advances have helped more children with complicated medical conditions survive and be treated outside of hospitals. That has driven up demand for pediatric specialists, said Lawrence McAndrews, president/CEO of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions."

I don't believe this. That many children didn't die 12 years ago who now live today to make this difference. And there aren't more kids in Dayton. Dayton's population is cratering and growing older. This has got to be the product of the medical community convincing more parents that there's something wrong with their children when in the past they would have been considered normal.

Montgomery County is the Ohio leader in prescription drug overdoses. That's not a category we want to lead in. We should be the leader in cutting taxes and government spending greatly reduce problems like this.

It's nice to see scientists talk about something I've been talking about for years - that society affects our genes just like our genes affect society. Muslims, Hindus, Africans and others are not like us, and the differences aren't just cultural. We don't understand each other not only because of our different experiences, but because of our different genetic biases. Their culture has driven their evolution along a different path than Judeo-Christian culture has driven most westerners. The same is true of every different culture. That's why the best way to interact with individuals of any other culture is through a system of voluntary exchange.