Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Evidence mounts that Toyotas do not have a sticking accelerator problem, but you can't prove a negative.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Somebody needs to cut the FCC off at the knees before it seizes control of the internet.  The FCC's broadband plan winners and losers. Every government interference in the marketplace creates winners and losers. Government interference takes wealth from losers by force and transfers it to winners. That's why government has no business interfering in the economy. Notice how it doesn't mention taxpayers as a loser?

TAX AND SPEND:

State and local governments cost us $2.2 trillion in 2008.

A salad costs more than Big Mac because of federal subsidies.

A quick reminder of how terrible government services are and how fast America is collapsing: two years ago the CBO predicted Social Security would go broke in 2019. Social Security went broke this year.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The head of the IMF blames our economic problems on too little inflation. Go tell it to Zimbabwe.

"As it turns out, the state of macro wasn't so good after all — a realization Blanchard feels the need to come to grips with in his latest paper, "Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy," published by the IMF this month. In it he admits the wrongful thinking he and his colleagues were responsible for before the crisis, stating that "the great moderation lulled macroeconomists and policymakers alike in the belief that we knew how to conduct macroeconomic policy. The crisis clearly forces us to question that assessment.""

So this so-called expert admits he and his fellow central planners were all wrong, but instead of realizing that central planners are doomed to fail, he thinks they should slightly modify their central plan, and they'll get it right this time. Hayek called this the fatal conceit of central planning. Conceit is right. These conceited, know-nothing experts who keep screwing up our lives with their central plans drive me nuts.

The idea that deflation is bad because it's generally associated with recessions is like saying medicine is bad because it's generally associated with illness. I think that's just the excuse central bankers use to transfer wealth from us to their banking cartel and government through inflation.

"What is clear, however, is that the behavior of inflation is much more complex than is assumed in our simple models and that we understand the relationship between activity and inflation quite poorly, especially at low rates of inflation. (emphasis added)"

This isn't by accident. Government has manipulated the CPI for the express purpose of hiding inflation. It manipulates every statistic it reports for political purposes. Surely this so-called expert knows this. Maybe he's talking about non-government statistics. It sounds like he might have been brainwashed into thinking price inflation is what matters, not monetary inflation.

EDUCATION:

All male charter schools sends 100 percent of attendees to college. Remember when we have all male and all female private schools and they succeeded? That was the norm before government seized control of schools. It's taken government 100 years to replicate that in one school. Government is a made-caused disaster.

Teachers unions unhappy Obama wants merit pay for teachers. That isn't what they paid for. He got one thing right.

HEALTH CARE:

I love it when politicians are inadvertently honest. In this case, Nancy Pelosi explains that passing health care oppression opens the door to finishing the transformation of America into a socialist country. This is one of those very rare occasions when I agree with Pelosi. The health care oppression debate is about power, not health care.

Text of a letter from a member of Congress to Boortz about health care oppression:

"It is official: the President and the Speaker have decided to ram a health care bill through the Congress this week. The first step for this newly introduced 2,300 page bill is for it to be rushed through the Budget Committee this afternoon. As you saw if you clicked on the link to the bill, the legislation is moving so fast that it hasn't even been assigned a bill number yet.

While you can read this new bill here, it won't be worth your time. Why? Because these 2,300 pages aren't even the 2,300 pages that the President and Speaker Pelosi want us to vote on. That's right: the pages that they want us to vote on haven't even been completed yet. The bill that the Budget Committee is working on is simply a placeholder because the Speaker is still working out new language. The plan, we're told, is that Budget Committee will finish its work today to move the process along and then tomorrow--likely deep into the night--the Rules Committee will take up the bill. The Rules Committee will completely erase the 2,300 pages approved by the Budget Committee and insert thousands of entirely new pages into the bill. Don't worry, though: the Speaker has promised us at least 1 hour to read those several thousand new pages before the Rules Committee votes. No, I'm not laughing either.

Obviously, this is not the way that any bill should be considered in Congress, butt his is definitely not the way to handle something as important as health care reform and something so enormous that it accounts for almost 20%of our entire economy.

If you need to learn more, I will be holding a telephone town hall meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, March 16, at 7PM. By calling 1-800-_________ a few minutes before 7PM and giving the operator the pass code _______ you can join in this discussion. I would certainly value your participation."

Pelosi thinks she can get away without voting for the Senate bill even though the law says she can't. The law means nothing to these freaks. Only power. It's easy to be outraged, but why? Anybody who is outraged by this doesn't understand the nature of government and the nature of the aristocrats we elect to rule us. This is who they are. This is what they do. Every one of them is like this. And as long as we keep voting for the same two failed parties, they will get worse.

Republicans would do this in a heartbeat for a bill they thought would buy them as many votes in the long term as Democrats expect to get from passing health care oppression. But Republicans are like Democrats-lite. They love the income tax, but they want the rate a hair lower. They love government spending, but they want it slightly lower. Since Republicans don't stand for anything but being slightly less terrible than Democrats, Democrats are the ones who always push lawlessness first. Then Republicans follow them.

On Pelosi's corruption:

"As Stanford law professor Michael McConnell pointed out in these pages yesterday, "The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form." If Congress can now decide that the House can vote for one bill and the Senate can vote for another, and the final result can be some arbitrary hybrid, then we have abandoned one of Madison's core checks and balances."

I'm surprised they're going through such hoops to make it look legitimate.

Pelosi still doesn't have the votes to pass this, and removing sweetheart deals may cost votes.

Using an unconstitutional procedure to pass an unconstitutional law. That's our government for you.

Exposing the myths behind Obama's attacks on health insurance companies.

This is a weird headline: Health care foes 11 votes shy of defeating bill. The headline would make you think Pelosi had 10 more votes than she needs. That's not true. Pelosi doesn't have the votes to it. Maybe this is a sign she's further away than 11. That would be good.

The press has done a terrible job crediting Mitt Romney for his role in passing Obamacare. If Romney hadn't championed Romneycare in Massachusetts, Obamacare would have been dead on arrival. Romney's a tyrant wannabe like Obama, and no discussion of Obamacare should ignore Romney's role.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Analysis shows that IPCC cherry-picked scientific studies to hide the growth in antarctic ice. The depth and breadth of this fraud should make it clear to everybody that government funding of science is the worst thing that ever happened to science.

POLICE STATE:

The biggest threat from online anonymity? Undercover cops. Criminals harm a few individuals. Government agents harm everybody.

How the government's monopoly on the use of force leads to violence in drug dealing and union strikes.

WAR:

Here we go again.

"One president and his staff of hand-picked neoconservatives decided to invade and occupy Iraq, without a declaration of war by Congress, and without congressional debate."

No debate? Are you kidding me? Was the writer in a coma for all of 2002? Did she forget that John Kerry voted for the war before he voted against it? Here's the Iraq War resolution which was passed after months of debate. I don't care how much you hate Bush, war in general or the Iraq War specifically, you don't get to lie about it. As cowardly as this resolution is, this is a declaration of war. According to the Constitution, it can't be anything else. She doesn't even mention it to make a case that it's not a declaration of war. She pretends it doesn't exist. That's dishonest. This essay claims to be about Avatar and The Hurt Locker, but that's a scam. It hardly mentions them. The author just uses them as a fresh excuse to vent her anger.

Here Ron Paul uses sloppy reasoning about the war in Afghanistan. First he says the war in Afghanistan is unconstitutional. He claims Bush sent the military into Afghanistan based on the 1973 war powers resolution. But right after that he acknowledges the initial war resolution, which means the war is constitutional and wasn't undertaken under the war powers resolution authority. The purpose of the war resolution may have been to drive al Qaeda from Afghanistan, but that's not what it said. It's incredibly, foolishly general.

"That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

Bold mine. Clearly the Taliban aided and harbored al Qaeda and still does, so the war in Afghanistan, while terrible policy, is constitutional. Congress should end it, but Ron Paul and everybody else should be honest about the constitutionality.


I looked up this 1973 war powers resolution, and I see where Ron Paul is coming from. According to that, Congress put a 90 day limit on the length of the war. That makes Ron Paul's statement consistent. Congress had required US forces to be withdrawn after 90 days, and neither Bush nor Obama complied. The same is true for the Iraq war resolution. A declaration of war with 90 day expiration date. Interesting. Presidents consistently consider the 1973 war powers resolution unconstitutional because it limits their war powers. But Congress has the power to declare war, and it has the power to revoke that declaration, so I don't see how this is unconstitutional. I don't see how this relates to the cabinet member issue. Anybody saying these wars are unconstitutional should point out that there's disagreement on that.

FOREIGN POLICY:

This is what we get for sticking our noses in the regional problems between Israel and the Arabs. That's why non-intervention is the best policy.

POLITICS:

The Government Accountability Office calls Obama's government spending website unreliable.

Senator says government is dysfunctional and government doesn't work anymore. That's the inevitable result of big government. The more power government seizes, the more it determines winners and loses, the more divided the country becomes. The more special interests pay to get their way. This is the nature of government.

ACORN is changing its name but not its stripes.

Obama administration is more secretive than the Bush administration. Remember when liberals were constantly attacking Bush for being secretive? Where are they now?

MEDIA:

This article tells us that a local roller coaster has problems, but it doesn't tell us what problems. What kind of reporting is that? This is why the newspaper business is dying so fast.

MISC:

Remembering constitutional government as defined by the Father of the Constitution - James Madison.

"With respect to the words, "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the details of power connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution … not contemplated by the creators."

The general welfare phrase can only apply to the specific, enumerated powers because by definition it cannot apply to anything else. The only powers government has are to limit freedom or transfer wealth from some individuals to others. Neither of those things is in the general welfare. The only application of the general welfare clause other than to specific enumerated powers would be for crimes against others such as murder, assault or theft, but those are the only things the federal government doesn't use that phrase as the basis of laws for.

Short, intense bursts of exercise are as good for you as long sessions of moderate exercise. Wow.

How entropy infects every system including the US government and Toyota, and I would add Google, which seems to have plateaued and will likely fall from there.