Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Sadly, it seems the story about the Prius accelerator was mostly true; the driver really was too ignorant to try the emergency brake or put the car in neutral. Or else he's lying about the accelerator being stuck along with everything else.

ECONOMY:

Government has made it difficult and expensive to hire full time employees, so employers are switching to part-time and temporary employees. The aristocrats have figured that out, so now they want to punish employers for hiring part-time and temp employees too.

Houses in Detroit are selling for a dollar.

TAX AND SPEND:

London to become the tax capital of the world. Anybody want to bet on how that will work out for them? Britain fathered western civilization, and now it's leading western civilization to suicide.

After both parties in the Senate just extended unemployment benefits, you have to wonder: Are unemployment benefits no longer temporary?

"About 11.4 million out-of-work people now collect unemployment compensation, at a cost of $10 billion a month."

This is a self-perpetuating problem. As long as both parties pay people not to work, they won't work.

REGULATION:

A few examples of the freedoms we've surrendered to government:
"Western society has become so thoroughly politicized that it is difficult to imagine any area of human activity that can be said to be beyond the reach of the state. People’s diets, weight levels, child-raising practices, treatment of pets, how he can express anger, whether one can make alterations to his/her home – including replacing a lawn with rocks or plants: these are but a handful of private decisions intruded upon by the state."

EDUCATION:

Why would Obama attach a bill that seizes control of loans for students from the private sector to the health care reconciliation bill? One reason could be he intends to have Biden overrule the parliamentarian so the game is rigged. But that still has to bother moderate Democrats, possibly costing him some votes. But then again, Obama is the king of overreach. Let's hope this blows up in his face. Democrats are resisting this idea.

Apparently the Dept. of Education is buying shotguns. Did I mention that everything government does, it forces on us at the point of a gun? Even government schools. Our government has become so illegitimate, the Dept. of Education needs a police force.

HEALTH CARE:

Republican hypocrisy on health care.

"On the issue of health care, it even seems of late as though congressional Republicans have en masse embraced a real free market for medical care. But have these Republicans suddenly become libertarians, or are they partisan hypocrites without any real allegiance to the Constitution or the principles of liberty and limited government?

For proof that the answer is the latter we can turn to two of the biggest expansions of taxpayer-funded health insurance since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s: SCHIP and the Medicare prescription drug benefit."

Republicans don't support smaller government. They want to force government down our throats as much as Democrats. They only oppose Obamacare because it boosts Democrat interests and not Republican interests. That's why we're lucky Democrats refused to compromise, or we'd be losing freedom to both Democrat and Republican interests. But I'm not going to bash Republicans when they're resisting government expansion. I bash them when they're trying to grow government.

This is a great van.

Big business running multi-million dollar ad campaign against Obamacare. But I'm not going to bash big business when they're resisting government expansion. I bash them when they're trying to grow government.

"Health insurance companies also began running their own ads, aimed at countering Democrats' argument that insurers are largely to blame for spiraling costs. The new campaign's cost—said to be in the millions—reflects how much the health-care debate has turned for some businesses. Insurers were running ads last summer supporting a bipartisan bill."

Insurance companies read the writing on the wall when Obama shackled them to it and called out the firing squad.

Boortz comes up with list of new accusations Obama will make against insurance companies including eat puppies. Pretty funny.

This quote from Nancy Pelosi is truly moronic.

"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

Her voters must be so dumb that they fall for this crap. Obama, Pelosi and Reid would be hysterically funny if they weren't so dangerous.

Compilation of polls show how unpopular Obamacare is.

Senator Hatch threatens to shut down the Senate if Obama uses Biden to quash Republican input on health care oppression. Now that's the kind of talk I like to hear.

Obama's $868 billion lie about health care costs. Reason lists a number of them.

"Here’s how predictable the president’s slippery relationship with the truth has become: Hours before the State of the Union address,Washington Examiner reporter Timothy P. Carney posted a “pre-emptive fact check” that, among other things, prebutted any presidential claim to have “stopped the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying.” As it happened, that night Barack Obama made an even bolder (read: less truthful) claim: that “we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”"

Why do we bother keeping track of Obama's lies? It would far easier to count the number of times he tells the truth.

"The difference between these two most recent Democratic presidents, substantial to begin with (especially in the crucial area of economic policy), may come into sharper relief in 2010. Clinton’s reptilian relationship with the truth, suffused as it always has been with a catch-me-if-you-can sense of personal preservation, actually turned out to have some uses for the nation when he changed course after the 1994 Republican revolution and began co-opting some of the limited-government policies proposed by his opponents. It’s easier for a chameleon to change his spots.

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

And yet it smacks of something worse still. When a politician cannot fathom opposition to his policies except as the manifestation of wicked manipulation by bad guys, remediable only by more thorough “explanations” from the good guys, it indicates an unseemly paternalism. And if he cannot take the hint that Bush-Obama bailout-and-spend economics are deeply and increasingly unpopular, that indicates something immovable about his core economic ideology. With those two factors as backdrop, it’s hard to say which would be worse: if the president didn’t really believe what he said, or if he did."

Excellent analysis.

Walter Williams explains that if health was a right, that would require a form of slavery. The obvious conclusion is that health care is not a right.

"True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another. In other words, my rights to speech or travel impose no obligations on another except those of noninterference."

No right can require the labor or property of others. That's why forced jury duty is immoral. It's a form of slavery too. I like the idea of calling them wishes.

The problem this guy describes isn't too much democracy. It's too big a government. But it's funny that a Democrat supporter would complain of too much democracy. How do people so ignorant of politics get jobs as political commentators? His mistaken analysis shows the authoritarian bias of modern liberals.

18 House Democrats on the bubble over Obamacare vote.

"The bottom line is that Democrats probably have only about 205 votes to pass health care reform. With four empty House seats, they will need 216 to guarantee passage."

Man, I hope these numbers hold.

President Obama singing the Day Obamacare Died (sung to the tune of American Pie). Let's hope.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Climate change policies in California cost jobs. Everywhere else too.

WAR:

Our ongoing war against Arab Muslims prompted another American to turn on her country. Dropping bombs of foreign Muslims is not only turning foreign Muslims into enemies of America, it's turning American Muslims into enemies of America. That's just stupid.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Court rules that Zimbabwe President Mugabe's seizure of farms is racist.

POLITICS:

Obama waging dishonest war against the Supreme Court is just stupid. If you want to take on the Supreme Court, do it honestly. Our entire unconstitutional government was blessed by the Supreme Court. Take on the court over that. Not over some lie.

Why would Obama attach a bill that seizes control of loans for students from the private sector to the health care reconciliation bill? One reason could be he intends to have Biden overrule the parliamentarian so the game is rigged. But that still has to bother moderate Democrats, possibly costing him some votes. But then again, Obama is the king of overreach. Let's hope this blows up in his face.

MEDIA:

Who would have known that lowering the price on a black Barbie doll would cause such a fuss? Walmart is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. Just to put this charade in perspective:

"One could argue—were he irredeemably statist and weak-minded—that Walmart, by pricing black Barbies at a lower price point than white Barbies, is actually discriminating against people who want to buy a white Barbie!

Walmart—keeping the black man and the white man down, with the same action."

How funny.

Lew Rockwell makes an interesting point. Gerry Studds took a 17 year old male staffer to France and had homosexual sex with him. He was censured by the House, but the media didn't destroy him and he continued his career. But the media is destroying Eric Massa, ostensibly for far less serious offenses, if the accusations are even true. Or maybe, as Rockwell suspects, they're destroying him for exposing our corrupt political system for what it is. Good insight:

"How many congresscritters could be forced out of office on this or that accusation, with a custom-ordered media frenzy to follow, all the Operation Mockingbird-style media drones hitting the same themes?

Probably a lot of them, which is how the corrupt establishment likes it. If one won’t vote the way they want, he’s gone in a heartbeat. Which doesn’t excuse Massa’s behavior — it only shows how selective and strategic the manufactured media outrage is."

Most congressman do this groping crap. We've heard about it for decades. It's disgusting. It illustrates that our elected representatives are the lowest slime in the country. But nobody else gets railroaded out of Washington for it. The real issue is the one they don't want to talk about - Massa's a Democrat who doesn't support Obamacare.

These lawsuits against Toyota claiming loss of resale value are scary. Imagine if every time somebody or some company did something that lowered the value of an already owned product, they could sue. For example, imagine if horse and buggy owners sued Henry Ford for loss of resale value on their horses and buggies. Imagine if the railroad tycoons sued the Wright brothers for loss of value on the trains. This would stop human development in its tracks, and its exactly the kind of thing statist judges would do.

Ron Paul recommends Judge Napolitano's new book Lies the Government Told You.

Apple uses patents to stifle competition. That's what IP is for, and that's dumb. Why do we want to stifle competition? Do you think Apple would have refused to develop the iPhone because it was afraid somebody would copy it?