TAX AND SPEND:

Republican New Jersey Governor vetoes millionaires tax. Good for him. New Jersey's tax burden is the highest in the nation. How hard is it to make the case that taxes (actually the spending they fund) are the problem.

Graph of federal debt since 1900 by president and Congress.

I know how to save Cleveland and every other dying city in America: dramatically reduce the size and scope of government at the federal, state and local level.

REGULATION:

I'd like to thank Republicans for caving on the financial oppression bill so we could suffer this:

"Well according to CNSNews ... the Senate version of the bill would allow the government to collect data on any person operating in financial markets. If you so much as use an ATM, that includes you. CNSNews explains:

The bill, if it becomes law, will create the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection and empower it to "gather information and activities of persons operating in consumer financial markets," including the names and addresses of account holders, ATM and other transaction records, and the amount of money kept in each customer's account.

The new bureaucracy is then allowed to "use the data on branches and [individual and personal] deposit accounts ... for any purpose" and may keep all records on file for at least three years and these can be made publicly available upon request."

This is for our protection.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Marc Faber explains how central banks will destroy the world as we know it.

"If debt and money printing equaled prosperity then Zimbabwe would be the richest country."

"Mugabe is the economic mentor of Ben Bernanke."

"There is no means of avoiding a total collapse in the West; at the first train station in 2008, the financial system went bust but didn’t die, at the next station nations will go bust (though this could take 5-10 years or less), but first they will print money as this is the most politically tenable option, and ultimately the world will go to war"

We're all going to be Zimbabweans. Doesn't that sound fun?


HEALTH CARE:

When I read that government so vehemently goes after somebody, in this case a doctor, it leads me to believe the victim is on to something the government wants to keep covered up.

"A U.K. medical regulator revoked the license of the doctor who first suggested a link between vaccines and autism and spurred a long-running, heated debate over the safety of vaccines.

Ending a nearly three-year hearing, Britain's General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield guilty of "serious professional misconduct" in the way he carried out his research in the late 1990s. The council struck his name from the U.K.'s medical register.

The same body in January concluded that Dr. Wakefield's research was flawed, saying that he had presented his work in an "irresponsible and dishonest" way and shown "callous disregard" for the children in his study."

His study may or may not have been flawed, but he must have been onto something or government wouldn't have destroyed him like this.

"A 2004 statistical review of existing epidemiological studies by the Institute of Medicine, a respected nonprofit organization in the U.S., concluded that there was no causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism."

The way this is worded, there's obviously a correlation between MMR vaccine and autism. The government must not want that to be publicized. The government must think the benefits of the vaccine are worth the increased cases of autism, and that don't want that known, but the parents of autistic kids wouldn't accept that trade-off.

GLOBAL WARMING:

A great reminder that the eco-movement is nuts:

"Denmark evicting citizens to clear cut forests for wind turbines"

Hopefully this movement will be torn apart from the inside.

College undergrads are notoriously easy to misinform, but an elite bunch of them reject the global warming fraud.

"For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.

Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC."

Hopeful, but this is after Europe has already established a corrupt tax and trade exchange.

POLICE STATE:

Justice Dept. drops investigation into illegal activity at AIG before the crash. I don't think they're going to find much if any criminal activity associated with the crash. The problem was government, not the private sector. The government created the system that not only allowed but encouraged financial firms to make irresponsible bets with other people's money. This wouldn't happen in a free market where customers had plenty of competition to move their investments too and in which corporations which took more risk than they can handle went bankrupt.

Violent SWAT teams kill another innocent child. The government loves perpetrating violence on the people.

"First 48 is one of dozens of bread-and-circus reality cop shows across cable and network TV. Despite police assertions that SWAT raids are reserved for the most violent of criminal suspects who require precise, direct, and overwhelming force, there seem to be a large and growing number of police departments who have no problem bringing TV crews along for the ride. Or celebrities. In one infamous mistaken raid in Denver that claimed the life of immigrant and father-of-eight Ismael Mena, the police had invited Colorado Rockies second basemen Mike Lansing along for the raid. In a mistaken 2006 child porn raid in Virginia, police brought along NBA star Shaquille O'Neal."

And they like to show off their violence. We're to blame for that. Millions of Americans love watching shows of cops oppressing their fellow Americans. That's sick.

WAR:

The US should get out of Korea and allow the Korean to work out their own problems.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Article claims that Oklahoma's relatively strong economy is the result of strong illegal immigration laws. This only makes sense if the illegal immigrants were not working before they left. If a large number of non-working illegal immigrants left the state, then this would account for the difference, but if they had been working, getting rid of them would be a bad thing even if it made employment figures look better. The question is are the people of Oklahoma producing more or less wealth because of the laws, and that's not addressed by this article.

POLITICS:

This is pretty good description of how Americans see things, but it's not accurate.

"This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise -- limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose."

The reality is we've been eroding the principles of limited government, reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces for 100 years at least. During the Wilson, FDR, LBJ and George W. Bush years, we moved toward European-style statism faster than others, but we moved that way under every president and Congress during the last century. But Obama is accelerating that transition faster than Americans will take, and he's creating a backlash because of it. Hopefully he'll create enough of a backlash we actually reduce the size and scope of government for the first time since Teddy Roosevelt.

"It is not at all clear which side will prevail. The forces of big government are entrenched and enjoy the full arsenal of the administration's money and influence. Our leaders in Washington, aided by the unprecedented economic crisis of recent years and the panic it induced, have seized the moment to introduce breathtaking expansions of state power in huge swaths of the economy, from the health-care takeover to the financial regulatory bill that the Senate approved Thursday. If these forces continue to prevail, America will cease to be a free enterprise nation."

He gets it wrong here too. Either the forces of limited government will prevail over the entire US, or they US will split. There's no way all the states will bend to Obama's agenda. He's very much like Lincoln he so admires, forcing the nation to split, and probably looking forward to waging war on the states which secede.

The left is moving to identify small-government conservatives as libertarians then claim they are anti-government. This is a smart, divide and conquer strategy. Don't fall for it. Don't let your friends fall for it. I like Boortz's amendment, but...

"The congress shall pass no law making any act, or conspiracy to engage in an act, a crime unless that act would deprive another person of life, liberty or property either through force or through fraud."

The problem is a piece of paper can't protect us from the people we vote for. The Constitution as is doesn't authorize Congress to pass such laws. The aristocrats don't care. The only politician in Washington who respects the Constitution is Ron Paul. That means the people elected 536 out of 537 (including VP) aristocrats knowing full well the Constitution means nothing to them. Changing the Constitution won't help. Electing people who subordinate their ambition to it will. But the people will never do that.


Voters in Obama's home town of Honolulu send Republican to Congress for the first time in two decades.


Democrat infighting continues over whether or not Obama offered Sestak a job to not run against Specter.


Source say Ron Paul won't run for president in 2012. That's really bad news. America as we know it isn't likely to survive to 2016.

"The source said this likely means Ron Paul won't run in 2012 and Rand Paul will run in 2016. The prediction makes sense, with the huge caveat that we're dealing with the ever sifting sands of politics."

I hope this source is wrong.

"As for Ron Paul's candidacy, my source pointed out that according to every public and private indication, he doesn't want to run another presidential race. The congressman told Reason magazine that he remains "firmly undecided" about another go-round, with good reason. He is not a young man. He is seen by too many people as a dangerous radical. A sub-par performance in 2012 could damage the Paul brand and make it harder for his son to make a run at it.

The possibility that Ron Paul seems to be playing with, my source argued, goes like this: Put up a candidate for the next Republican primary who credibly carry the banner, and then hand off his new political machine to his son for a run in 2016. Former two-term New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson has been making the rounds at many Campaign for Liberty events, and could make a credible candidate, provided he doesn't begin every speech by talking about pot. That would give the younger Paul enough time to find his political sea legs and to put a broad coalition of people who are weary of war and sick of big government."

There's a good point here. Republicans didn't slime Paul too much in 2008 because he was not a threat, but they could certainly slime him in 2012, and some of it might stick. But we need a quality, freedom-loving Republican to be a force in debates for the Republican nomination in 2012, and that comment doesn't make me hopeful.

MISC:

Against burqua bans enforced at the point of the government's gun.

There's a huge lesson to be learned from this headline as it applies to everything:

"Government has authority to lead spill response, but may lack know-how"

If CNN rewrote it as "Government has authority but lacks know-how", it would be universally applicable to any situation.

Corporations including Google are not as concerned about your privacy as you hope they are.

"But the prevailing attitude among corporate executives in these cases seems to be summed up by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

If you look beyond the patent absurdity of Schmidt's statement for a minute, you'll find another old maxim hiding underneath: Blame the user. 

You want privacy? Don't use our search engine/photo software/email application/maps. That's our data now, thank you very much. 

Oh, you don't want your private chats exposed to the world? Sorry, you never told us that."

Let's see some competition that respects privacy.