Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Pretty good explanation of rights.

STATES RIGHTS:

Imperial Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius says states cannot nullify Obamacare.

ECONOMY:

Joe Biden predicts that the economy will be adding up to (what's that mean?) 500,000 jobs a month in the next few months. I wonder if Biden will bet everything he own against everything I own that he's wrong. He'll probably try to claim that losing jobs is "up to" 500,000 jobs.

Despite the oversupply of houses, developers are building new homes.

"By all indications the U.S. has more than the required number of houses in stock. According to data from the National Association of Realtors, at the end of March there were 3.6 million homes for sale. The average inventory of “for sale” homes is 2.7 million, so the excess supply is 900,000 units based on historical averages. NewObservations.net estimates the current supply to be 8.6 months worth, while the 10-year average has been 5.8 months.

Plus, anywhere from 11 million (First American’s estimate) to 25 million (Deutche Bank’s estimate) homeowners owe more on their homes than the homes are worth, keeping many homeowners where they are unless they decide to strategically default."

But...

"“Lot prices in Phoenix and Southern California’s Inland Empire have soared more than 60%. Sacramento, Orlando and Los Angeles are up between 30% and 40%.”

Builders have cash and tax-funds, so they’re spending the money the only way they know how–buying land. Builders are even picking up lots in hard-hit Las Vegas, where reportedly over 80% of homeowners are burdened with negative equity."

Cash printed by the Fed and tax funds provided by debt-funded stimulus boondoggles. Notice the locations? Las Vegas, southern California, Phoenix and Orlando were ground zero for the housing bust. Government is re-inflating the housing bubble. Are you ready for housing bust II?

TAX AND SPEND:

While the federal government is racing to increase the burden of government like Europe, the Europeans are reducing the burden government.

"The grand irony here is that the very continent we’re scrambling to emulate has been moving aggressively in the opposite direction on taxes and economic policy.

While the US keeps corporate taxes frozen near 40%, EU countries have slashed them down to an average of around 25%. Top marginal income tax rates, which in the US are 35%, are under 25% all across the former East Bloc.

As the share of government spending in health care has been steadily increasing in the US, it has been inching downward in Europe. While first Bush and then Obama pushed through massive new public entitlements, governments from Stockholm to Rome have been grappling with real private reform.

Though conservatives especially like to sneer at the democratic socialism of Old Europe, it is precisely those cheese-eaters in France and Vikings up north who have been leading the world in privatization these last two decades, selling off everything from airports to sewage companies."

This is why jobs are fleeing America for greener economic pastures. There didn't used to be any greener pastures. That's why we were so wealthy relative to the rest of the world. Now greener pastures are everywhere. That's why the US is in rapid decline.

Government's lust for our money once again overrules its puritanical nature as House considers legalizing and taxing online gambling. Funny how prohibition goes out the window when government wants more revenue.

As bad as Obamacare is on health care, it's also bad in other areas. In this case it will force businesses to send out hundreds of millions of 1099 forms they didn't have to send out previously.

"Basically, businesses will have to issue 1099s whenever they do more than $600 of business with another entity in a year. For the $14 trillion U.S. economy, that’s a hell of a lot of 1099s. When a business buys a $1,000 used car, it will have to gather information on the seller and mail 1099s to the seller and the IRS. When a small shop owner pays her rent, she will have to send a 1099 to the landlord and IRS. Recipients of the vast flood of these forms will have to match them with existing accounting records. There will be huge numbers of errors and mismatches, which will probably generate many costly battles with the IRS."

It'll impose significant costs on businesses and will require hiring more IRS workers away from the private sector. As always, smaller businesses will be forced out of business because of the increased cost while the biggest businesses will fair well and pick up marketshare from reduced competition leading to higher prices and lower quality products and services for consumers. It's all part of Obama's plan to collapse our economy and spark a Marxist revolution.

"I’m stunned that there wasn’t a broader debate before such a costly mandate was enacted. If it goes into effect, it will waste vast quantities of human effort in filling out forms, reworking computer systems, collecting and organizing data, and fighting the IRS. The struggling American economy can’t afford anymore suffocating tax regulations. This mandate is a giant deadweight loss. It should be repealed."

He must not have paid attention to the health care oppression debacle? The last thing Democrats wanted  was debate, and they had all the power. They hid what was in the bill on purpose. To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, they wanted to pass it so we could find out what's in it. And we are. I doubt it will be repealed as long as Obama is on office. He wants to collapse our economy and spark a Marxist revolution. Why would he repeal it?

It's one thing for talking heads to explain the peril of out-of-control spending on union government employees, but it's way more effective when SNL lampoons them.

The IMF is urging all government to impose higher taxes on banks. Our taxes fund these bureaucrats, and they turn around and lobby for more taxes on us. At least in this case, citizens of other countries are in the same boat. We're all the stupidest people in the world.

"Price fixing is illegal in the private sector, but unfortunately there are no rules against schemes by politicians to create oligopolies in order to prop up bad government policy. The latest example comes from the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund, who are conspiring with national governments to impose higher taxes and regulations on the banking sector. The pampered bureaucrats at the IMF (who get tax-free salaries while advocating higher taxes on the rest of us) say these policies are needed because of bailouts, yet such an approach would institutionalize moral hazard by exacerbating the government-created problem of “too big to fail.”

But what is particularly disturbing about the latest IMF scheme is that the international bureaucracy wants to coerce all nations into imposing high taxes and excessive regulation. The bureaucrats realize that if some nations are allowed to have free markets, jobs and investment would flow to those countries and expose the foolishness of the bad policy being advocated elsewhere by the IMF."

This is an attempt to promote world-wide socialism by removing tax competition between nations and creating a world-wide banking cartel. I guess the nation-wide banking cartel hasn't caused enough damage.

REGULATION:

Pushing for financial regulation, Obama said:

"A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it."

That's what government is. Talk about projection. A free market is a system voluntary exchange that we've never tried because government is always interfering with and corrupting the marketplace.

Article shows how the unholy alliance between government regulators, the government protected Wall Street firms and the government created oligopoly of ratings agencies worked together to destroy our financial system and profit from that collapse at our expense. This isn't about Stockholm Syndrome. It's about not biting the hand that feeds you.

"Instead, the e-mails paint a picture of employees struggling to keep up with the massive amount of derivatives the big Wall Street houses were whipping up before the whole housing market came crumbling down. "Tensions are high, just too much work, not enough people, pressure from the company, quite a lot of turnover. . .""

That wouldn't happen in a free market. Either the existing companies would adjust to meet demand or other companies would enter the market to compete. But because government only allows three ratings companies -Fitch, Moodys and Standards and Poors - to operate in its oligopoly, they provide sub-par services at an artificially inflated price - enabling government's favorite donors - Wall Street - to run wild. As wikipedia puts it:

"Ratings agencies, in particular Fitch, Moody's and Standard and Poors have been implicitly allowed by the government to fill a quasi-regulatory role..."

From the original article:

"And that's exactly how Wall Street and corporate America wanted it -- the dimmest guys in the room signing off on their crummy IOUs."

That's exactly how government, Wall Street and corporate America wanted it so they could all profit from our loss. It's ridiculous how this article ignores the elephant in the room that controls everything at the point of a gun - government.

Along with Obama, Chuck Schumer is up to his eyeballs in this Goldman corruption.

Like all government actions, because they're all politically motivated to buy votes through looting the people, this Goldman witch-hunt is calculated for its emotional appeal, not rational policy. Rational policy would be to abolish the SEC and empower free competition in our financial markets like the Constitution demands.

It would be really stupid of Democrats not to compromise to get a single Republican vote on financial oppression, but it looks like they won't. Obama will not compromise. He is not willing to share the looting with anybody. He must think he can out-demogogue Republicans on this and win some support with voters.

GLOBAL WARMING:

This Lindsay Graham thing is just ridiculous. He supports tax and trade. He supports amnesty. Withdrawing his support for tax and trade because the Democrats want to do amnesty first makes no sense. I'm hoping this is just his excuse for finally seeing the light. Or else he's a flake in addition to everything else.

POLICE STATE:

Police seize computers, laptops and cameras from man because he was filming his motorcycle ride which included being pulled over at gunpoint by a Maryland plain-clothes police officer.

The importance of recording police brutality and making sure that stays legal. In the case of cops beating a student for no reason in Massachusetts:

"After the iPhone video of McKenna's beating emerged, investigators subpoenaed 60 hours of surveillance video from the College Park campus police. The only video police couldn't manage to locate was the one from the camera aimed squarely at the area where McKenna was beaten. Funny how that works. Campus police claimed that a "technical error" with that particular camera caused it to record over the footage of the beating. As public pressure mounted, police later found what they claimed was a recording of the lost video. But two minutes of that video were missing. Coincidentally, those two minutes happened to depict key portions of McKenna's beating. The kicker? The head of the campus video surveillance system, Lt. Joanne Ardovini, is married to one of the cops named in McKenna's complaint. (Washington D.C.'s ABC News affiliate, WJLA, a station with a history of deferring to police spokesmen without bothering to verify the accuracy of their statements, quaintly referred to this as "a bizarre coincidence.")"

Funny how that works pretty much every time, but police officers are waging war on video-takers:

"At about the same time McKenna's case was making the rounds on the cable news networks, another Marylander was illegally raided, arrested, and jailed. This time for videotaping a cop. On April 13th, Maryland State Trooper Joseph David Ulher pulled over Anthony Graber for driving his motorcycle 80 mph in a 65 mph speed zone. Graber happens to have a video camera mounted to his helmet. As depicted in the video that Graber later posted to the Internet, Uhler, in street clothes, cuts Graber off and emerges from his car with his gun drawn. It takes Uhler several seconds to identify himself as a police officer. You can decide for yourself if Uhler's actions were justified (Graber was apparently popping wheelies, and, according to Uhler, was driving in excess of 100 mph). But what happened next ought to get Uhler and a number of other police officers fired.

According to an interview Graber gave to photography activist Carlos Miller days after posting the video of his encounter with Trooper Uhler to the web, six officers from the Maryland State Police raided Graber's parents' home at 6:45 in the morning on April 14. Graber and his family were held for 90 minutes while the cops rummaged through their belongings. Graber was then charged with felony eavesdropping and spent 26 hours in jail. As an "official" told WJLA of Graber, "He had been recording this trooper audibly without his consent." The report from WJLA added, "That kind of recording is against the law in Maryland."

In fact, under Maryland law what Graber did isn't actually a crime. For a recording to be illegal, one of the parties being recorded must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. A cop, acting as a cop, with his gun drawn, while standing alongside a public roadway, has no such expectation. On April 15th, Graber was released and the charges against him were dropped. As he told Miller, "The judge who released me looked at the paperwork and said she didn’t see where I violated the wiretapping law.""

He's lucky he got that judge. Most judges side with the cops as a matter of policy. Notice how the prosecutor aids this violence by bringing an obviously false charge fully expecting the judge will support it like judges almost always do.

"Graber was harassed, intimidated, illegally arrested, and jailed for an act that clearly wasn't illegal. According to Graber, the name of the judge who signed off on the raid of his parents' home doesn't appear on the warrant. As Graber told Miller, "They told me they don’t want you to know who the judge is because of privacy." If true, that statement is so absurd it's mind numbing. A judge issued an illegal warrant for police to invade the private residence and rummage through the private belongings of a man who broke no laws, and we aren't permitted to know the judge's name in order to protect the judge's privacy?"

Judges are in on this violence. The whole system from cops, to prosecutors to judges is geared to promote and protect the police state. They're all in it together.

"That judge needs to be held accountable, as do the cops who violated Graber's civil rights. In a just world all of them would be fired, and Graber and his parents would be compensated. It isn't enough that the charges against Graber were dropped. He was still punished for a crime he didn't commit, and his punishment serves as a deterrent for future would-be documentarians of government abuse. If the authorities are allowed to intimidate people who legally videotape public officials while those officials are on the job—and that would certainly include government agents illegally raiding, arresting, and jailing citizens—then the right to videotape public officials doesn't really exist."

They should all be prosecuted for abrogation of rights under color of law, but government doesn't police itself other than a few token cases to make it appear it does.

POLITICS:

This statistic scares me too:

"The latest Rasmussen poll shows that 29% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of Barack Obama's handling of the presidency."

29 percent of Americans either hate America or are irreparably ignorant.

Blagojavich documents show Obama's corruption. This is politics as usual.

Established Democrats facing tough competition. About time.

People are beginning to grasp the extent of Obama's corruption. What took them so long? Were they unaware he was a product of the most corrupt political machine in America? Did they miss his daily lies in the campaign? Did they fail to notice he's trying to destroy America and spark a Marxist revolution while presenting himself as a moderate? Did they miss the lawlessness of his actions as president? Did they ignore his love of using violence against the American people? I guess so.

Obama unabashedly calls for blacks, women and young people to vote for Democrats in 2010. He wants them to all gang up against white men. He doesn't even try to hide his desire to divide our country by playing to race and gender biases. He celebrates it. He also says that Wall Street banks want to put their allies back in power - meaning Republicans - but you can see from this chart from opensecrets.org that financial firms gave more money to Democrats in 2008 and are giving more in 2010 to Democrats. This video is pure Obama evil.

MEDIA:

Cartoonist launches "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day" in response to Comedy Central censoring South Park. I hope cartoonists flood papers and the internet with drawings of Mohammad so we can end this nonsense once and for all. Apparently the creator has backed out after he cartoon went viral. What's up with that? She started this thing to get people involved, and now she says she didn't want it go viral?

"When asked about her change of heart, Norris told The Ticket that she didn't intend for the cartoon "to go viral."

Then why did she send the cartoon to the media in the first place?  "Because I'm an idiot," Norris replied.

"This particular cartoon of a 'poster' seems to have struck a gigantic nerve, something I was totally unprepared for," she said.

She doesn't appear to be alone.  The creator of a Facebook page dedicated to the day has bowed out as well.  Jon Wellington told the Washington Post (before abandoning ship) that he created the page because he "loved [Norris's] creative approach to the whole thing -- whimsical and nonjudgmental." 

While he was still associated with his own event he said: "To me, this is all about freedom of expression and tolerance of other viewpoints, so I hope you'll help make this a sandbox that anyone can play in, if they want. I don't think it'd be right under the circumstances for me (or anyone) to censor inflammatory posts *ahem*, but let's be welcoming and inclusive, mmkay"

Apparently the posts weren't "welcoming" enough, as on Sunday morning he announced his departure from the cause. "I am aghast that so many people are posting deeply offensive pictures of the Prophet," he writes. "Y'all go ahead if that's your bag, but count me out."

Did he think people were going to post flattering images?"

So they're backing out because it spun out of control? I don't buy it. I think it's more likely they're scared.

MISC:

Oh my gosh, these Hitler parodies are hysterical. There's no better way to lampoon stupidity than to use Hitler. That's why they're so popular. I bet these parodies have done more to make it hard for another Hitler to rise to power than anything else in history.  When the next Hitler tries to rise to power, the people will just point and laugh. Bad language.

I publish my essays here in original form, and now I'm republishing updated versions of them on hubpages.com.

Obamacare and Liberal Fascism
Tea Partiers Fight Back
How Many Times Over Do We Need to Be Able to Destroy the World?

Tax cheat Lord Geithner tells CNN that he never held a real job. Neither has Barack Obama. Neither has most of Congress. Neither have most of the bureaucrats in Washington. Why would we be surprised that they want to expand government at the expense of us in the private sector?