Free kibbles

STATES RIGHTS:

Nullifying Obamacare.

SOCIALISM:

The GM ads saying they've paid back their bailout loan in full with interest is misleading. The feds spend $49.5 billion on GM total, not just $6.7 billion on a loan. The company is still owned by the government, and it's asking for more money.

"But when Mr. Whitacre says GM has paid back the bailout money in full, he means not the entire $49.5 billion--the loan and the equity. In fact, he avoids all mention of that figure in his column. He means only the$6.7 billion loan amount.

But wait! Even that's not the full story given that GM, which has not yet broken even, much less turned a profit, can't pay even this puny amount from its own earnings.

So how is it paying it?

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as "working capital" in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money--government money--to pay back the government loan.

...

Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research, points out that the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5%) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government's tougher new CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the small bailout loan makes the new--and bigger--DOE loan much more feasible.

In short, GM is using government money to pay back government money to get more government money. And at a 2% lower interest rate at that. This is a nifty scheme to refinance GM's government debt--not pay it back!"

It's a scam. Socialism always a scam.

REGULATION:

How the minimum wage causes unemployment for the benefit of politicians and labor unions.

Republicans holding out for compromise on financial regulation. Republicans won't stand on principle - they want to share in the looting. Democrats will compromise, and we'll get a bad financial bill, but not one as bad as this one.

Massachusetts requires that personal information about a Massachusetts resident be encrypted on the web. That should be between customers and businesses.

Yet another theory on the political motive for the SEC sueing Goldman-Sachs - to push stories of SEC incompetence out of the news including agents making over $200,000 a year spending all day looking at porn.

HEALTH CARE:

In praise of Mexican health care.

Ron Paul introduces bill to repeal the Obamacare mandate.

GLOBAL WARMING:

The global warming scandal just keeps growing.

"[A] new study put [the claim that all the studies cited by the IPCC were peer reviewed] to the test. A team of 40 researchers from 12 countries, led by a Canadian analyst Donna Laframboise, checked out every one of the 18,531 scientific sources cited in the mammoth 2007 report. Astonishingly, they found that nearly a third of them – 5,587 – were not peer-reviewed at all, but came from newspaper articles, student theses, even propaganda leaflets and press releases put out by green activists and lobby groups."

The IPCC lied? The UN lied? The climate frauds lied? I'm shocked. The inquiry done by the climate frauds into the CRU climategate scandal was a whitewash? I'm stunned.

"Anyone who has followed the meticulous analysis of this curious story by Steve McIntyre on his Climate Audit website might well conclude that we are looking here at a complete travesty of proper scientific procedure, matched only by the bizarre methods used by Mann himself to construct his original hockey stick. Yet these are the men, Mann, Jones and Briffa, who acted as the “lead authors” of the key chapters of the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports."

This fraud just keeps growing and getting more exposure, but that won't stop Al Gore, President Obama, John Kerry and Lindsay Graham from trying to force tax and trade on us.


Or maybe I'm wrong. Lindsay Graham has removed support the legislation he helped write for purely political reasons - he doesn't like Democrats pushing a new immigration bill first. None of these people have any principles, so Graham could change his mind again tomorrow.


Russian scientists warns that the Arctic may be in a cold snap that started in 1998 and will last for years, and we've all been misled by cherry-picked temperature data.

WAR:

This sounds more like one way to prepare a well-regulated militia than corrupting kids to me. This should augment real training with real weapons like hunting and target shooting.

POLITICS:

This might belong under police state, but I'm putting it here for now. Tom Tancredo exposes the Southern Poverty Law Center for smearing limited government supporters as dangerous extremists.

The political establishment hates real populism - real grass roots movements - because they can't control them.

"A similar reaction is taking place, to a lesser extent, on the establishment (i.e. neoconservative) right. David Frum, the Bush speechwriter and co-author of the "axis of evil" catchphrase, has become the liberal establishment’s favorite interview subject because he now spends all his time attacking "right-wing extremism," most especially the explicitly libertarian elements of the tea party movement. He has set up his own movement, which might be called the "Scoop Jackson Republicans," and a Web site where one can go for regular denunciations of the tea partiers and pleas for Republicans to moderate their message – except when it comes to foreign policy, naturally enough. In that realm, it’s the same old Republican invade-the- world globaloney: Iraq was a "victory," Afghanistan is a necessity, and Israel must be defended and succored no matter the damage to demonstrable American interests."

I wish I knew where this fantasy that Republicans always like to invade other countries more than Democrats came from. That's only been the case since Bush the Elder. Reagan didn't invade anybody - he pulled troops out of Lebanon. Nixon didn't invade anybody - he just tried to win the war Johnson started. Eisenhower didn't invade anybody - he ended Truman's war in Korea. Hoover, Coolidge, Harding and Taft didn't invade anybody. If you want to look at invaders of the 20th century, Democrats dominate. Wilson, FDR, Truman, Johnson (or JFK, take your pick). Teddy Roosevelt and George Bush are the only Republicans to invade anybody in the 20th century.

"The genesis of the tea-partiers was the bank bailout, not the election of Barack Obama, and one would have thought that the takeover of the government by a few corporate giants might have provoked a hostile reaction on the left – but not in Obama’s America."

Why would anybody think that leftists would be hostile to socialism? That makes no sense. And fascism - socialism-lite - is a leftist ideology too. Leftists always support more government control of everything as long as leftists are in power.

"The message coming from our liberal elites, and their neoconservative allies, couldn’t be clearer: if you’re an "antigovernment" extremist – a phrase that, in their view, is a bit redundant, since any and all "antigovernment" ideology is inherently extremist and violent – you represent a physical threat to the social order."

But this is very true - the neocons and leftists are allies. That's why Bush governed like a Democrat and the country was so divided and angry. Both parties are dominated by big-government, imperialistic people. That's because anybody who supports using violence to force their will on their own people also supports using violence to force their will on the people of other countries and vice-versa. That's an issue of character. The only reason leftists didn't want to defeat the Soviet Union is the Soviet Union was run by kindred souls - communists - and they wanted communism to take over the world. They still want that.

POLITICS:

How the federal government trashed the Constitution and our duty to resist its power.

"[T]reason is defined by the U.S. Constitution in Article 3, Section 3, as follows: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in waging War against them, or adhering to their Enemies, and giving them Aid and Comfort . . ." As in all the founding documents, "United States" is in the plural, signifying that the free and independent states were united in delegating certain enumerated powers for their own mutual benefit. Thus, "waging War against them" means the states. Waging war against the free and independent states is what constitutes treason under the U.S. Constitution. That’s why Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of Treason.

...

The income tax effectively declares that all earned income is the property of the state, and that the state will inform us from time to time how much of our own income we may keep to live on by setting the income tax rates.

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The income tax and the Fed finally centralized all political power in Washington, as it became trivially easy for the central state to conscript millions of men for its wars, spend mind-boggling sums on things like a welfare state and the nationalization of education that have no constitutional authority whatsoever, and to easily bribe any state government that voices the least bit of dissent by threatening to withdraw federal grants to the state. More than half of the American population is bribed and manipulated in a similar manner today as recipients of myriad federal subsidies."

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FDR condemned the Constitution as the irrelevant scribblings of a lost generation, and advocated massive socialistic government intervention whereby the government would magically "guarantee" everyone a high-paying job, high food prices for farmers, a "decent home," all the medical care you could want, freedom from fear of old age, sickness, and accidents, and of course, state-funded education. This was the essence of FDR’s childish wish list of an "economic bill of rights. Of course, government cannot promise anyone anything without also confiscating the income of someone else to pay for it. Nor can it "guarantee" any of FDR’s pie-in-the-sky wish list unless the laws of economics are repealed, which of course they can never be.

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According to Andrew Napolitano, author of The Constitution in Exile, not a single federal law was ruled unconstitutional between 1937 and 1995.

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[T]here can be nothing more patriotic and "American" than opposing everything the central state proposes doing that would expand its scope and powers in any way.

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"TEA Party" activists claim that they are Taxed Enough Already. That’s not good enough. If they took their own rhetoric about constitutional government seriously, they would recognize that what is needed is at least a 90 percent reduction in federal taxes, not merely being satisfied with being taxed "enough already.""

Great essay, but I prefer zero taxes.


MISC:


The Russians come clean on massacre of Poles in WWII but not on others.


Super-long Gore Vidal essay on the meaning of Timothy McVeigh.


Liberals generally don't understand economics. That should be a fixable problem. Unfortunately, liberals control the education system and write most histories, misinforming the people about economics.

"As bad as things were in 1880 America, it was a golden era compared to the pre-industrial age. This point was made as long ago as 1954 in a book entitledCapitalism and the Historians, which was edited by libertarian Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek. As Austrian economist Murray Rothbard stated, “Hayek contributed to and edited a series of essays that showed conclusively that the Industrial Revolution in England, spurred by a roughly free-market economy, enormously improved rather than crippled the standard of living of the average consumer and worker in England. In this way, Hayek led the way in shattering one of the most widespread socialist myths about the Industrial Revolution.”"

Of course it was, and common sense tells us so. If the industrial revolution had made people poorer, they wouldn't have done it. They would have stayed in their previous economic circumstances.

"To explain why I consider 1880 to be a golden era, especially for the poor, let’s consider a modern-day example, one that a good liberal like John Sumner would consider to be a model society: the socialist paradise of North Korea. In that country, everyone is equal in terms of economic condition. The state owns everything, and everyone works for the state. There are no profits, speculators, or entrepreneurs. Greed and selfishness have been stamped out of society. Total government ownership and total government control. Everyone works for the benefit of the collective.

In other words, a liberal dream!

Oh, did I mention that there is also horrific poverty, famine, and starvation in North Korea? Let’s assume, just for the sake of argumentation, that each year some 10 percent of the North Korean population is dying from malnutrition or illness.

Now, suppose we asked Sumner to give us his recommendation for ending poverty in North Korea. What would he say? He would say: “Adopt a welfare state and a controlled economy! Create bureaucratic departments, modeled on the IRS and U.S. welfare agencies, whose job it is to confiscate wealth from the rich and give it to the poor!”

Do you see the problem though? Sumner would be doing what liberals always do: they assume that there is a pie of wealth to confiscate and redistribute. That’s their solution to ending poverty. But he would be missing the obvious point: They already have total socialism in North Korea, which is precisely why there is no pie for Sumner to confiscate and redistribute. Everyone has nothing."

Why can't liberals grasp the consequences of their policies when they have North Korea to look at? They had the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia to look at, yet they continue to advocate the same policies that led to the destruction of those countries. I will never understand that.

"Did I mention that 19th-century America was not only the most prosperous nation in history but also the most charitable nation in history? In a land with no income tax and no welfare state, it was voluntary contributions that built the churches, opera houses, museums, and so much more."

Naturally. People take care of each other unless government comes in and takes money from them by force and subsumes that role.


Amazing story of Japanese-Americans fighting in Europe while their families were imprisoned in concentration camps by FDR.