Thursday, April 22, 2010

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

More eminent domain abuse.

ECONOMY:

Economic indicators illustrate the deepening discrepancy between politically motivated statistics and the real economy. Specifically, the stuff that's measured in (inflated) dollars is up, but food stamp use is up too.

TAX AND SPEND:

Bill Gates calls for Washington state income tax. I guess he wants to make it perfectly clear that he's not that smart.

REGULATION:

Why is the government targeting Goldman-Sachs when it's the cause of our economic woes?
"Marc Faber, who runs Hong Kong-based fund manager Marc Faber, described the lawsuit against Goldman Sachs as a hunt for scapegoats amid economic problems faced by the US. 







“The target now is Goldman Sachs. You distract the masses with a villain,” he said at the Asian Public Real Estate Association Forum in Singapore. Goldman’s leading role on Wall Street, coupled with massive paychecks to staff and bumper profits, make it an obvious target, Faber said."
That's how government works.

Paulson executive reports he informed Goldman's investor, ACA management, that Paulson planned to bet against the CDOs in question. That hurts the SEC's case.
"In one part of Pellegrini's testimony, a government official asked him: "Did you tell (Schwartz) that you were interested in taking a short position in Abacus?"




"Yes, that was the purpose of the meeting," Pellegrini responded.
"How did you explain that to her?" the government official said.
"That we wanted to buy protection on traunches of a synthetic RMBS portfolio." Pellegrini said.

The SEC does not mention this exchange in its complaint against Goldman."
So the SEC is covering up testimony that refutes its case in order to scapegoat Goldman. Government is slime.

We have to be careful not to let government's distraction work. The important thing to remember here is Goldman supports more financial regulation of Wall Street since regulations make costs go up for everybody, Goldman's smaller competition will be hurt more than it. Regulations always make the biggest market player bigger and more powerful at the expense of it's competition and the American people.

Republican joins Democrats to support regulation of derivatives. This is a good reminder that Republicans have no small government principles. They don't support free markets. The only reason they are pretending to do so now is for political gain. It's all about power for all aristocrats.

Anger over European governments shutting down flights because of volcanic ash is growing. This wouldn't have happened if airlines had been free to make that decision on their own. In a free society, the whole transportation system would have adapted to the changing conditions to make sure people could travel as efficiently as possible. To those people who say that planes would have crashed if companies had been left to make their own decisions, I beg to differ. No airline wants its plane to crash. Pilots don't want their plane to crash. Plane manufacturers don't want their planes to crash. Enlightened self-interest would have insured safe travel.

EDUCATION:

Obama seizing control of student loans will make college more prohibitively expensive than government involvement has already made it for everybody but the super-rich. Graduates will be drowning in debt.

New Jersey governor accuses teachers unions of manipulating students in order to promote their political agenda. Good for him. Government schools are political brainwashing centers. If you want to find what we schools that educate children in the basics and to think for themselves, you have to look in the private sector.

New Jersey school teachers attack and threaten governor with profanity and bad grammar on his Facebook page for their students to read. This is the kind people government schools attract. Power corrupts and government school teachers have power. This is why we constantly hear about pervert teachers seducing kids. It's why our children are so poorly educated.

HEALTH CARE:

Democrats want to make Obamacare even more oppressive.

The number of sex change operations paid for by British taxpayer has tripled since the UK declared sex changes a "right". That means that a portion of the time British taxpayers work, they are slaves to people wanting sex change operations.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Boortz lists a number of alarmist quotes from Earth Day 1970. Needless to say, they're all a bunch of crap (and pretty funny) just like the global warming alarmism today.

WAR:

Afghanistan leading producer of hashish as well as opium.
"In addition to being the world’s leading producer of opium, Afghanistan has now become the largest producer of hashish, according to the first ever cannabis survey released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) earlier this month. Again, the US invasion is behind the new record."
Have you noticed how most of the really bad things in the world revolve around (bad) US policies? Have you noticed that pointing guns at people at home and abroad is just making things worse? Maybe we should make our government stop doing that.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Because we've made ourselves the world's policeman (dumber than an empire), our foreign policy is for sale to foreign bidders, and Israel does it best.
"We’re an empire now, and it’s perfectly rational for every state actor in the world who wants something from Uncle Sam to not only show up at the imperial court in Washington and seek the favor of the most powerful ruler in world history, but also to make an appeal to his subjects. Since Congress long ago ceded its war-making and oversight powers to the executive, an American president, once in office, can wreakconsiderable havoc in the conduct of our foreign affairs

Yet even Caesar operates under certain constraints: i.e. the vicissitudes of domestic politics, which require him to hand out favors to his supporters in order to remain in power beyond the next election. It is safe to say, with certain rare exceptions, that every political leader acts purely out of his own self-interest: that is, with an eye to either achieving political office or else retaining that office once elected. This is merely a restatement of a simple axiom: every ruling class acts to preserve its rule.

The American elite, however, is particularly ruthless, these days, in its pursuit of naked self-interest: the old British idea of politics as a "public service," a selfless act of noblesse oblige, went out with the first Bush administration, and had been near extinct long before then. Today, it is a veritable free-for-all, with various interest groups lunging at the loot, and battling over it on the public stage, so that American politics often looks like an episode of the Jerry Springer Show."
That's an insult to the Springer show.

POLITICS:

Dick Cheney endorses Marco Rubio. This is probably just SOP politics - endorsing the certain winner - but it shows how establishment Republicans continue to woo tea partiers. I fear Rubio will be just another big-government Republican once he's in office. Corruption investigation into Rubio and Florida Republicans with ties to both Crist and Rubio. More evidence for my concerns, but you never know what's really going on when the corrupt federal government investigates corrupt state government. If they've worked in government anywhere, they're corrupt, and thinking any professional politician is going to work for the people is foolish.

10 reasons why people vote Democrat are pretty funny. I remember a similar list when Republicans were in power, and it was pretty funny too. Because both parties use the government's gun to force their will on others, they're easy to lampoon.

Jonah Goldberg has noticed a delayed Bush backlash. About time, but better late than never. Let's hope this manifests in the ousting of Republican incumbents. This quote makes it sound like Goldberg might have read my last essay when he was in town.
"One of the more widespread anti-tea-party arguments goes like this: Republicans didn’t protest very much when Bush ran up deficits and expanded government, so when Obama does the same thing (albeit on a far grander scale), Republican complaints can’t be sincere.

This lazy sophistry opens the door to liberals’ preferred argument: racism. “No student of American history,” writes Paul Butler in the New York Times, “would be surprised to learn that when the United States elects its first non-white president, a strong anti-government movement rises up.”"
As I wrote in my last essay, because conservatives don't complain about Republican spending with nearly the passion they complain about Democrat spending, they make themselves easy targets for that slander.
"No doubt partisanship plays a role. But partisanship only explains so much given that the tea partiers are clearly sincere about limited government and often quite fond of Republican-bashing. So here’s an alternative explanation: Conservatives don’t want to be fooled again."
Fooled? Bush didn't fool anybody. He ran on No Child Left Behind. He ran on expanding Medicare. He ran as a big-government Republican. Anybody who didn't understand what Bush was all about fooled themselves, just like the people who claim they were fooled by Obama.


Obama loves him some socialists.

MEDIA:

I think the American people would love a good, conservative network. Whether this conservative network will be good or not is anybody's guess. Maybe it will show 24 24 hours a day. If it's successful, leftists will send the FCC to attack it.

LOCAL:

Only government would think it a good idea to make the same street a mix of two-way and one-way. Unbelievable. This is just an excuse to spend money Obama borrowed from China, and it's going to cause an increase in accidents downtown. People are going to die because of this.

MISC:

This story reminds me of the inaccuracies in science that we often overlook. This article claims that the Yellowstone super-volcano erupts on average every 730,000 years. This one says it erupts every 600,000 years. Both agree it last erupted 640,000 years ago, so that error is a big difference. Either the super-volcano is overdue to erupt by 40,000 years or it's not due to erupt for another 90,000 years. Either way, except for scientists, nobody should worry about it.

Nancy Pelosi called a press conference to show off $140,000 in new light fixtures in the House cafeteria. This is the kind of people government breeds.

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