Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Joe Lieberman says we shouldn't worry about giving the president the power to shut down the internet because the president would never do if it wasn't necessary and China already has that power. I guess he'll advocate giving the president power run over freedom protesters with tanks on the same grounds.

Supreme Court upholds law criminalizing even speech with organizations the government labels terrorist. I'm not talking about conspiring with terrorists to perform attacks, which should be criminal...

"The primary plaintiff in the case, retired U.S. administrative law judge Ralph Fertig, is a civil rights activist and college professor who said he sought to instruct the PKK in ways to advance its goals through the peaceful use of international law."

How could it be illegal to try and convince terrorists to pursue their goals peacefully? That's nuts.

"While some terrorist groups may conduct both peaceful and violent activities, Congress found that they may be "so tainted by their criminal conduct that any contribution to such an organization facilitates their conduct," [Chief Justice Roberts] wrote, joined by other conservatives and liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.

When considering national security and foreign-relations questions, courts should give great weight to such judgments by Congress and the executive branch, he wrote."

Where does the First Amendment say that it can be ignored if the Congress and the president says so? I must have missed that clause. Where does the Constitution say anywhere that it can be ignored if Congress and the president say so?

SOCIALISM:

Obama's Labor Sec. wants to dictate wages that he considers fair for everybody in America including illegal immigrants.

Socialism always ends this way.

"The two government-created creatures to spur home ownership have turned into the largest homeowners in the U.S. of A. according to the New York Times. The GSEs combined portfolios were close to 164,000 at the end of March, a quarter where the entities took ownership of a home every 90 seconds.

“Our business is the American dream of home ownership,” Fannie Mae declared in its mission statement, and in 2001 the company set a target of helping to create six million new homeowners by 2014. Now Fannie is spending $10 million a month just to mow its lawns.

The taxpayers have propped up the two GSEs to the tune of $146 billion, the stocks of the entities were just de-listed from the NYSE and are now selling for pennies, but back in the day a few on Capitol Hill were defending Fannie CEO Franklin Raines and his “outstanding leadership.” Raines told congress that mortgage loans were “riskless.”"

There's no such thing as good socialism. Government is socialism.

ECONOMY:

The world is switching to a gold economy despite the will of governments.

TAX AND SPEND:

Having compassion for the poor is a good thing. The policies we allow government to enact to supposedly help the poor are the problem. If you want help the poor, help a poor person find a job. Don't give them a handout.

Taxes have raised the price of a pack of cigarettes to $11 a pack in New York City. You know they have a black market in cigarettes that's becoming more violent and more powerful by the day.

Instead of making a do not pay list to stop government from writing checks to dead people, we should just take away government's power to hand out checks.

GLOBAL WARMING:

This weird article paints the picture (literally - look at the picture) that the sun is super-active when in fact, it's unusually quiet as solar cycle 24 has been for unusually long.

ENERGY:

It can't be good for Obama and Democrats when accomplice press member Reuters complains about needless bureaucracy holding up the Gulf spill cleanup. Needless bureaucracy is redundant.

Chemical dispersants and burning oil on the sea kill wildlife too, but not as much.

POLICE STATE:

Maryland cops arrest another citizen for recording the police.

"The city of Annapolis, Maryland recently received a Homeland Security grant for 20 new surveillance cameras in the downtown area. The city of Baltimore already has nearly 500. According to the watchdog site PhotoEnforced, the state of Maryland has at least 375 red light cameras and 80 speed cameras. Your government is watching you, Marylanders. But don't think for a second that it's going to tolerate you watching back.

On Saturday, Yvonne Nicole Shaw, 27, was arrested by sheriff's deputies in Lexington Park, Maryland. According to the Southern Maryland News, Shaw was cuffed and booked for recording deputies who had come to an apartment complex in response to a noise complaint. Sheriff's Cpl. Patrick Handy's report explained that Shaw was standing about 12 feet from him, and that Shaw "did admit to recording our encounter on her cell phone for the purpose of trying to show the police are harassing people.""

There you have it. Anybody recording cops to show they harass people is subject to arrest, prosecution and imprisonment. How's that "land of the free" stuff working out for you?

WAR:

There is no good way to fight the Afghan war. We won that war by ousting al Qaeda eight years ago, and there's no way to win anything else. The only smart thing to do is come home so Americans, our allies and the Afghans won't keep dying.

Because our wars in the Middle East create terrorists faster than we can overcome them and because we've made al Qaeda the heroes of 10s of millions of Muslims, maybe hundreds of millions, they probably will successfully launch a huge attack against the US soon. Then they'll do it again. And again. There used to be thousands of al Qaeda. Now there are tens of thousands. Soon there will be hundreds of thousands. If we don't stop killing Middle Eastern Muslims, there will be millions of al Qaeda soon. Al Qaeda will keep attacking the US until we quit waging war in the Middle East and start engaging Middle Eastern Muslims in a mutually beneficial system of voluntary exchange that will transform mainstream Muslims into allies who will turn on al Qaeda and stop them from attacking us.

The bald guy arrested for the Times Square fake bomb attempt even though the guy caught on surveillance cameras isn't bald pleads guilty and calls the attack "a war". Isn't that convenient? And isn't it really convenient that this terrorist who is so dead set on war against America built a bomb that was designed to make a lot of noise, smoke a lot, but not blow up?

"On May 1, street vendors spotted the smoking vehicle almost immediately and notified the New York Police Department, which cleared the area. After firefighters doused the flames, the search began for whoever had left the vehicle. It was quickly traced to Shahzad.

“In this case, the speed with which they broke the case because of the terrorist overtones was breathtaking,” says Randy Mastro, former deputy mayor under Rudolph Giuliani and now co-chair of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher’s Litigation & Crisis Management Group in New York. “They actually identified him faster than his arrest because they wanted to track him to figure out if he had any accomplices.”"

The speed with which government agents broke this case is super-convenient too.

"After his arrest, Shahzad waived his Miranda rights – the right to have an attorney present during questioning. Instead, he spent weeks talking to federal investigators before getting a lawyer."

Gosh. Isn't it lucky this guy is the perfect, incompetent, guilty terrorist who makes life so easy for government agents? Government agents couldn't have captured a more convenient terrorist if they had created one themselves. Obama is so great at defending America.

In today's reminder that central planning is doomed to fail in all things comes a report that the US is funding corrupt Afghan politicians, warlords and even the Taliban in order to supply US troops in Afghanistan.

"The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators.

The security arrangements, part of a $2.16 billion transport contract, violate laws on the use of private contractors, as well as Defense Department regulations, and "dramatically undermine" larger U.S. objectives of curtailing corruption and strengthening effective governance in Afghanistan, a report released late Monday said."

Get our troops out of there before anybody else gets killed in this doomed to fail war.

POLITICS:

President Obama took the most money from BP of any candidate in the last 20 years. He's handed out more of our money to big corporations than any president in history. Democrats take more money from corporations than Republicans. But Democrats are trying to paint Republicans as the patron of big business.

Obama is worse than Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter didn't nationalize our health care system and steal trillions from us.

This conservative vision of "excellent" central planning is as frightening as the liberal version. There's no such thing as good government. Government as we know it begins with taking money from people by force. Government begins with theft. It's inherently corrupt.

Sarah Palin is the most effective politician the Republicans have seen since Reagan. As conventional has her views are, she's carved out a niche as a maverick, and with the exception of Ron Paul, she's the only Republican who boldly challenges Obama and the Democrats. The rest constantly show they're just Democrats-lite.

Now that I've bought a Sony e-reader, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have slashed prices of the Kindle and Nook respectively. Sometimes I hate being such a trend setter.

Obama to boot Rahm Emanuel because Emanuel isn't enough of an ideological leftist and too prone to compromise. You think I'm joking?

"Differences in style between the cerebral Mr. Obama and the confrontational Mr. Emanuel are said to have played a role. In addition, Mr. Emanuel is reported to be frustrated at the inability of the White House to "knock heads together" to fashion political compromises.

Mr. Obama sent a signal by choosing the respected but hard-charging member of the Congressional leadership almost immediately after his 2008 victory to become his top aide. Mr. Emanuel had a reputation as a tough partisan but was also known to exhibit impatience with left-wing members of his party who have overly ambitious ideological agendas."

You can't make this stuff up.

Engineers know that Twitter is stupid except when it's the only way for Iranians who are being shot at and beaten to communicate to the outside world. Why doesn't everybody else? Twitter should be treated like an emergency channel, not an everyday communication tool.