Where did the FCC get the power to order radio stations to limit their broadcasting power? That's not in my copy of the Constitution.
FCC votes to investigate internet regulation even though it has no authority to do so.
SOCIALISM:
I put this here because I'm sure this guy was a union member.
"Assemblyman David P. Rible retired as a Wall Township police officer at age 31 with a bad back and a fat pension. He’s collected $570,000 in disability payments since a state board decided he was “totally and permanently disabled.”
Yet Rible competes in five-mile and five-kilometer runs along the Jersey Shore. He exercises at a gym, dancesas a celebrity and hauls trash to the curb at his Monmouth County home. He commutes to Trenton to represent the 11th District in the State Assembly, where he holds a leadership position as Republican Whip and seeks publicity as a tax-fighter."They're all corrupt.
Socialist housing projects collapse in New York, leaving taxpayers on the hook again.
Expect Obama to demand $500 billion to bail out Fannie and Freddie. That's over half as much as TARP, and well over how much of TARP was actually spent. But naturally the feds don't want to regulation Fannie and Freddie.
Letter to the editor: our forefathers didn't make their sacrifices for socialism. Damn straight.
TAX AND SPEND:
Cato develops a "moocher index" by state. Vermont runs away with it. Nevada is the lowest. How in the world did Harry Reid get elected in one of the most libertarians states in the union?
"Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey: Government has managed to sell us the idea, not that it is going to give us something for nothing .. but it is going to give us something and somebody else is going to pay for it." That doesn't go far enough. It should read "...somebody else is going to pay for it, and that won't negatively affect us." When government takes money from one of us by force, it makes all of us poorer because that money no longer works in the productive, private economy. It has been corrupted and now and forever more works in the non-productive, political economy.
Moody's downgrades Greek government debt to junk status. The collapse is underway.
Scottish minister warns:
"'Every man, woman and child' to be hit by 'brutal' spending cuts"This is presented as a bad thing. It's not. Everybody will benefit from this is the long run, including us. When a foreign government seizes money from its citizens, it takes that money out of the productive, private sector world economy and puts it in the corrupt, unproductive political economy, making everybody in the world poorer.
German Chancellor Merkel and the EU pushes for a global tax on banks. No thanks.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
Conference committee expands audit powers over the Federal Reserve in compromise between Ron Paul's bill and watered-down Senate version.
You might think it's a good thing that the government wants to regulate the Fed, but the regulation is about hiring minorities, not the Fed's destruction of the dollar and our economy.
EDUCATION:
Government school children taught to chant, "I am an Obama scholar." This is child abuse.
How teachers unions corrupted your child's education.
Ex-teacher famous for harsh criticism of government schools has new book detailing the subject.
"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy – these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."So true.
"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory."It's no wonder so many school kids enter the military. Government schools seem to be modeled on the military.
HEALTH CARE:
Remember when Obama lied that people won't have to change their health care plans? Now we know just how fantastic this lie was. 51 percent of companies will have to change their health care plans. 66 percent of small businesses will have to change their health care plans.
This is frightening for several reasons: lawmakers seek to prevent Americans outliving their savings. The easiest way to do that is to kill the elderly, and Obamacare started that process. The other way to do that is to seize retirement plans and provide a pittance in return. This is why productive Americans are leaving the country.
What's really wrong with our health care system? Government intervention.
"LASIK is an elective procedure that is not covered by standard insurance, and consumers must pay directly for the service — which means that they are much more likely to discriminate between providers both on cost and reported quality of the surgeon. With these incentives in place, the LASIK procedure has been reported to have fallen in cost by over 30 percent during the last decade.[6]
Even more importantly, the quality of the procedure has improved dramatically in that period as providers competed to deliver the most efficacious treatment."Every aspect of medicine would enjoy these same, rapid price reductions and quality increases if consumers were in charge of purchasing the services and government did not interfere with the choices. Another example:
"I wanted to have a small epidermoid cyst removed from my back. The first practice I visited was a dermatologist's office, which deals primarily with insured customers and can afford to charge exorbitant rates. I explained to the assistant on my first consulting visit that I didn't have health insurance — I choose not to — and asked how much the procedure would cost if I paid cash. She quoted me $700 for a riskless procedure that takes about 15 to 20 minutes to perform, and would not in this instance be performed by the dermatologist, but by the assistant herself.
...
On the recommendation of a friend, I decided to visit another medical practice, Country Doctor, which deals mostly with lower-income patients who do not have health insurance. Because its customers pay out of pocket, Country Doctor has a much stronger incentive to charge prices that its customers are willing to pay up front. When I had the procedure to remove the cyst done at Country Doctor, it was performed by an actual doctor, and it cost less than $50."Those exorbitant price differences are caused by government interference in the market.
"Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest."That's just one of many examples.
ENERGY:
Nice to see more and more people are realizing this:
"Ultimately, environment and climate change are of no consequence to this administration. Despite all the rhetoric they've done virtually nothing to deal with the oil disaster in the Gulf and they've let BP fumble. It suggests political opportunities of denigrating industry outweigh environmental concerns. They are simply vehicles to achieve political control."The same was true for health care, education and the stimulus boondoggles. All Obama cares about is power.
I have no problem with Obama taking advice from outside his administration. Politicians ideally should take the best advice from anywhere in the world, but that's never going to happen. They typically take the advice that most promotes their power, and Obama thinks how he's handling the spill best advances his power.
The amazing thing about the Gulf oil spill is how little impact it's had considering its size.
There's no doubt that many Republicans, their accomplice press and some tea partiers are being hypocritical about Obama's handling of the oil spill. Until the oil spill the mantra was less government, less government, less government, and that was a good thing. But the oil spill exposed these big-government, political opportunists for what they are as they demanded Obama to do more, not less, to deal with the spill.
Remember when I said that Obama made BP a deal it couldn't refuse even though we don't know what the deal was? Here's some more evidence.
"The other day, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked what will happen if the people running BP decline to go along with everything the administration demands of it. "The president," he replied with chilly menace, "has the legal authority to compel them to do so, and if they don't, he will."
As a matter of strict truth, Barack Obama may not have all the legal authority he would need. But punctilious adherence to the law is rarely the hallmark of American presidents."Obama illegally strong-armed just like a banana republic strong man. Between Bush and Obama, they've turned the US into a banana republic.
Republican apologizes for Obama's $20 billion shakedown.
"Barton's point, made at the start of a congressional hearing featuring Hayward's testimony, was that BP (BP.L) (BP.N) should pay for damage claims but should be allowed to follow the "due process and fairness" of the American legal system."I love it. This guy stood up for due process and showed that Obama is as lawless as the mafia. Embarrassed Republicans my butt. Republicans should be embarrassed they haven't stood up to Obama's lawlessness before now. Republican leaders made Barton withdraw his apology under threat of taking away his chairmanship. That's a powerful reminder than all Republicans care about it their personal power, not principles, just like Democrats. I wish Butler Co. voters would oust Boehner.
WAR ON DRUGS:
Sarah Palin's double-talk on the war on drugs. Judge Napolitano should have called her on that.
Stossel wants to end the war on drugs.
"Radley Balko of Reason magazine says more than a hundred police SWAT raids are conducted every day."This is a good reminder that, behind all the pretense of civilization, government is violence.
Cigarette taxes are so high, they've created a black market in cigarettes. Crime will rise because of it.
POLICE STATE:
Republicans concerned about DHS plans to put the its boot on the neck of all Americans ostensibly to reduce homegrown terrorism.
"As the U.S. government mulls ways to stem the rising threat of homegrown terrorism, some Republicans on Capitol Hill have privately raised concerns over new policies and tactics being considered. But counterterrorism officials say such resistance is undermining national security and can only be explained by a "misunderstanding" of the facts or political gamesmanship."I have a couple ideas. End the wars that are convincing American Muslims to become jihadists and end the oppression that is angering everybody else. That's probably too easy.
It is ironic that the feds' prosecution of Blagojavich has transformed him from a typical, despicable, corrupt government aristocrat into a sympathetic underdog. And I love how the prosecutor leaked wiretapped conversations of Blago to the press to sway the jury, but he wants a gag order on Blago. I like this part:
"One example they gave was that Blagojevich kept saying prosecutors were keeping him from talking about recorded calls when in fact that was a decision dictated by the judge -- a decision to which Blagojevich’s attorneys didn’t object."So let's see... Blago's lawyers try to include some tapes. Prosecutors object and the judge excludes the tapes. The paper then twists this to make it seem like Blago's lawyers didn't want the tapes in evidence or else they would have objected. No. The tried to get them in as evidence, so they obviously wanted them. This is a railroad. It's a warning to all that anybody who crosses Obama will be punished.
The British government claims 2.15 million crimes were committed against British children last year. They claim one in four children was a victim of a crime.
"However, the figures were immediately criticised for exaggerating the scale of the problem after it emerged that these “crimes” included incidents such as toys being broken by older siblings or the theft of dinner money."Power-hungry politicians always claim children are being victimized then use it as an excuse to expand their power.
WAR:
Libertarian makes the case that assassination is a legitimate tool of war similar to the one I've made in the past. When some terrorist overseas who has carried out attacks on the US before and wants to do so again or is in the process of carrying out an attack in the present and who can't be arrested by the local government, the US government has the responsibility to stop him from killing Americans and assassination will sometimes be the only option. I don't support Obama targeting that American cleric because I've seen no evidence he's carried out attacks on Americans, but assassination is a legitimate tool to stop attacks. I'm happy to see this on lewrockwell.com. It's a welcome and rare change from the total passavist point of view.
"While the legally trained mind may point to the "Rules Of War" as reason to not mark your enemy’s political class for assassination, recall that it is only natural that every country’s political class – who write the laws of international behavior among themselves – have taken the prohibition against attacking civilians (long a part of civilized man’s concept of the proper course in war) and pulled that protective blanket off the working masses and instead wrapped it about themselves. It is here that we see the world’s political classes have developed a class conscience; on this matter it is not the workers of the world who have united, but the politicians."Of course the politicians who wrote the rules of war outlawed the killing of politicians, but not the killing of us serfs. That prohibition is baloney.
"Who else but the politician orders armies raised, atomic bombs dropped, and builds forward operating bases with guard towers at hundred yard intervals? Why this ridiculous prohibition on targeting them, while all the while they’re ordering air armadas to firebomb entire cities of men, women, and children into ashes and dust? Why can’t they feel war’s consequences, too? Yet today, international law cleaves humanity into two classes – granting wartime protection to those who do not deserve it while removing it from the innocents who do."Absolutely. If the prohibition on killing politicians wasn't in place, we'd have a lot fewer wars.
"Think how the frequency of war might decrease if every politician knew that should his country become involved in one he’d flinch every time he started his car each morning. Every politician the world over most certainly has taken that into consideration, and here we find what likely is the primary reason for this Kafkaesque ban. The 1976 Congressional Church Committee (tasked with investigating rumors of wide-spread use of assassination by America’s politicians – which it found plenty of) stated in its conclusions "assassination should be rejected as a tool of American foreign policy" as it may "incite retaliatory attempts on the lives of U.S. officials." (Note the same worry does not exist in our Congressmen for the troops in the field who, if captured by insurgents, might very well find themselves water-boarded in retaliation for their political leaders’ policy of torture.)"Pretty good paragraph up until the end. I'm sure US prisoners in the war on terror would trade being beheaded for being waterboarded every day for the rest of their lives.
"In the event of war the most rational, moral, and effective means to bring it to a quick and successful end is to target for assassination, smart bomb, or drone attack every member of the enemy nation’s political class, to make them feel the harsh hand of war, and to leave the working masses out of it unless absolutely necessary."Absolutely.
As I suspected, this info about Afghan riches isn't new. It's being recycled and promoted in the press to drum up support for the Afghan war. These mineral riches are the reason Russia invaded and we're still fighting there.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:
Arizona considers law denying birth certificate to children of illegal aliens. The problem is the Constitution explicitly grants Congress power over citizenship:
"To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization..."Denying them a birth certificate only confuses things. It doesn't stop birthright citizenship. What it may do though is convince illegal aliens to go to other states to have their babies, so it might help reduce the number of illegal aliens in Arizona.
FOREIGN POLICY:
It sounds like Israel is making some improvements in the Gaza blockade, allowing construction materials and more food. Why were they blocking ketchup and mustard?
""We wish for a total lifting of the siege,'' says Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. "Are we talking about thousands of items? Most of Gazas supplies come from Israel and Israel should provide for them. This isn't against Hamas, its harming the civilian population of Gaza.''"Of course they do. They want Hamas to obtain weapons. If they really wanted the blockade to end, they could stop firing rockets into Israel every day.
Swiss parliament caves on bank secrecy and passes law forcing UBS to turn over the names of US clients to the IRS. This sucks.
POLITICS:
Independents want Ron Paul for president, and independents swing elections. Obama is ahead of all the typical Republicans.
This is scary. Over half of Americans don't think Democrats are too liberal.
Pelosi's pricey place.
Mark Steyn exposes Obama. Another expose - Alien in the White House. Politicans are not normal people, but Obama is more abnormal than any president I know of, probably any president in history.
MEDIA:
Jon Stewart is finally beginning to see who Obama really is. Please never vote again, Stewart. If you believed Obama, you are to blame.
MISC:
Walter Williams reminds us that people tend to be well satisfied with the goods and services supplied by the private sector and unsatisfied with the services supplied by government.
"If Wal-Mart, or any of the millions of producers who are in it for money and profits, were to deliver the same low-quality services, they would be out of business, but not public schools. Why? People who produce public education get their pay, pay raises and perks whether customers are satisfied or not. They are not motivated by profits and therefore under considerably less pressure to please customers. They use government to take customer money, in the form of taxes.
The U. S. Postal Service, state motor vehicle departments and other government agencies also have the taxing power of government to get money and therefore are less diligent about pleasing customers. You can bet the rent money that if Wal-Mart and other businesses had the power to take our money by force, they would be less interested and willing to please us.
The big difference between entities that serve us well and those who do not lies in what motivates them. Wal-Mart and millions of other businesses are profit-motivated whereas government schools, USPS and state motor vehicle departments are not."Funny how people who make a living by confiscating money from others at gunpoint aren't that interested in providing quality services and, with no more than a handful of exceptions, are corrupt. He's right that sometimes it's important to state the obvious.
It's not often we hear about 9-0 Supreme Court decision, but the justices unanimously agreed that government employers can view all text messages all government employees send on government supplied equipment. Makes sense to me.
In another unanimous decision, the Court rules that the state of Florida owns restored beaches, not the previous property owners.
"Under Florida law, property owners can own the land up to the waterline, but the submerged land belongs to the public. When beaches erode over time and the waterline moves, so does line between private and public land.
Under the Florida Beach and Shore Preservation Act of 1961, officials dump sand onto eroded areas, extending the beach. Property owners in Walton County contended that they should own the newly restored beaches, with public access remaining at the pre-restoration line.
But Florida law has treated the restored beaches as public property, since they would not exist without state action. The Florida Supreme Court upheld that view, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, voting 8-0. Justice Stevens, who himself owns a beachfront condominium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., recused himself."That's what those owners get for allowing the government to restore their beaches instead of doing it themselves. If you make a deal with the devil, you're going to get burned.
Scientists discover that our brains prefer when somebody agrees instead of disagrees. That's why people tend to surround themselves with sycophants.
On the cover-up of many, especially communist, holocausts.
"Nolte's thesis is that it was the Communists who introduced into modern Europe the awful fact and terrifying threat of the killing of civilians on a vast scale, implying the extermination of whole categories of persons. (One Old Bolshevik, Zinoviev, spoke openly as early as 1918 of the need to eliminate 10,000,000 of the people of Russia.) In the years and decades following the Russian Revolution, middle-class, upper-class, Catholic, and other Europeans were well aware of this fact, and for them especially the threat was a very real one. This helps to account for the violent hatred shown to their own domestic Communists in the various European countries by Catholics, conservatives, fascists, and even Social Democrats.
Nolte's thesis continues: those who became the Nazi elite were well-informed regarding events in Russia, via White Russian and Baltic German émigrés (who even exaggerated the extent of the first, Leninist atrocities). In their minds, as in those of right-wingers generally, the Bolshevik acts were transformed, irrationally, into Jewish acts, a transformation helped along by the existence of a high proportion of Jews among the early Bolshevik leaders. (Inclined to anti-Semitism from the start, the rightists ignored the fact that, as Nolte points out, the proportion among the Mensheviks was higher, and, of course, the great majority of the European Jews were never Communists.) A similar, ideologically mandated displacement, however, occurred among the Communists themselves: after the assassination of Uritsky and the attempted assassination of Lenin by Social Revolutionaries, for instance, hundreds of "bourgeois" hostages were executed.
The Communists never ceased proclaiming that all of their enemies were tools of a single conspiracy of the "world bourgeoisie."
The facts regarding the Ukrainian terror famine of the early 1930s and the Stalinist gulag were also known in broad outline in European right-wing circles. When all is said and done, Nolte concludes, "the Gulag came before Auschwitz." If it had not been for what happened in Soviet Russia, European fascism, especially Nazism and the Nazi massacre of the Jews,[8] would most probably not have been what they were."You can see why Jews and the violent left would aggressively attack this point of view.
"In the Federal Republic today, to mention any of these Allied — or even Soviet — crimes in the same breath with the Nazis is to invite the devastating charge of attempting an Aufrechnen — an offsetting, or balancing against. The implication is that one is somehow seeking to diminish the Nazis' undying guilt for the Holocaust by pointing to the guilt of other governments for other crimes. This seems to me to be a thoroughly warped perspective."Openness and honesty is the best policy, and we have to teach all the atrocities accurately in order to understand history.
"In fact, all great states in this century have been killer states, to a greater or lesser degree. Naturally, the "degree" matters — sometimes very much. But it makes no sense to isolate one mass atrocity, historically and morally, and then to concentrate on it to the virtual exclusion of all others. The result of such a perverted moralism can only be to elevate to the status of hero leaders who badly wanted hanging, and to bolster the sham rectitude of states that will be all the more prone to murder since history "proves" that they are the "good" states."Good conclusion.
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