Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

"... silver is for survival, gold is to preserve wealth."

Foreclosures were up sharply in Q1.

TAX AND SPEND:

Federal government seizes $2 million from taxpayers at gunpoint and uses it to study promoting condom use among intravenous drug users in Kazakhstan.

Obama's Chicago machine has turned Illinois into America's worst credit risk, surpassing California, just like Obama is doing to the US government.

The International Monetary Fund concludes that government spending is a poor stimulus. Wow. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Somebody is going to get fired for being honest and accurate.

Steny Hoyer admits Democrats plan to raise taxes. No kidding.

Another piece of evidence that we've stupidly turned the world upside down: US government defends and wants to expand government debt while European governments want to cut it. We have nobody to blame but ourselves for creating this Bizzaro World.

REGULATION:

How government forced BP to drill in dangerously deep waters.

EDUCATION:

The final report on Washington D.C.'s school voucher program that Obama is killing is in:

"Even a tiny, restricted program that’s only been around for six years increases graduation rates, has a positive impact on at least some groups of students, harms no groups of students, and does this for less than a third of what the DC Public Schools spend.

DCPS spends around $28,000 per student. The last report pegged the average voucher at just$6,620. The maximum voucher cost is just $7,500."

No wonder Democrats hate it. But all government money is poisoned. The amount of poison is proportional to the amount of money involved. Right now vouchers are very little money, but if they became commonplace, they would be as poisoned as any other government program. What this program shows is that private charities could make a huge difference in the quality of education for the very poor if government wasn't seizing all our money for expensive, crappy government schools.

HEALTH CARE:

Obama starts arbitrarily regulating health care with a so-called patients bill of rights.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Arctic sea ice extent has fallen below 2007 levels. Look for a bunch of news articles to paint this as the end of the world.

ENERGY:

Judge who struck down Obama's ban in drilling in the Gulf owns oil company shares. That's a conflict of interest, and he should have recused himself. Even though he made the right decision, it's now appears tainted. Reason comments on the shakedown:

"Although Barton was widely mocked for appearing to defend a huge corporation that is responsible for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, he had a point. Obama's grandstanding money grab exemplifies the lawless unilateralism that he condemned as a candidate yet embraced as a president.

Since the $75 million statutory cap on damages for oil spills does not apply in cases involving regulatory violations, "gross negligence," or "willful misconduct," BP's potential tort liability is enormous. But so are its assets, and there was no danger that it would run out of money before compensating everyone with a valid claim.

Obama could have let the legal process run its course, or he could have asked Congress to create a compensation fund in the interest of hastening payments. Instead he unilaterally extracted $20 billion from BP, on top of whatever damages the company will have to pay as a result of lawsuits, and appointed a lawyer to dole it out as he sees fit.

BP, facing an administration that will decide whether to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling and whether to pursue a criminal case that could bankrupt the company, felt compelled to cooperate. "Mr. Obama had no legal basis for the demand," The New York Times noted, "but concluded he did not need one."  

That's precisely the attitude for which Obama rightly castigated his predecessor, who believed that obeying the law was optional, especially if it stood in the way of measures aimed at fighting terrorism. "The law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers," Obama declared in 2007, condemning "unchecked presidential power"  and promising that in his administration there would be "no more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.""

What a magnificent liar. Obama had every intention of being the most lawless president in history, but his remarkably lying skills enabled him to win the election anyway, and now we're all paying the price. Now we find out one of the reasons BP agreed to the deal was Obama's appointee would make people who wanted a piece of the $20 billion agree not to sue BP for more liability in the future. So this stinks for them too.

Obama blocks another effort to clean up the oil spill. Obama doesn't want the spill cleaned up. He wants people out of work. He wants damage to spread. He wants to bankrupt BP and loot the taxpayers to clean up the mess. He wants to collapse the US economy under the burden of government and spark a Marxist revolution, and this oil spill gives him an opportunity to advance that cause.


Oil and natural gas are not fossil fuels. The chemicals and pressures in the earth constantly replenish them.


Eco-theater is a good term.

"A wildlife biologist visiting my town is “saving birds” in the oil spill, as he did after the Exxon Valdez leak. When the media is around, he and his colleagues are seen carefully cleaning birds, though this is virtually always futile. When the media are absent, they simply twist the poor animals necks, since they are dying. The whole business costs about $5,000 per bird."

Fraud is at the heart of all politics.

Web designer and budding entrepreneur building nuclear fusion plant in nearby warehouse in Brooklyn.

POLICE STATE:

Why must one comply with the police?

"Marilyn Levias, a 19-year-old Seattle girl involved in a jaywalking incident during which a police officer assaulted another 17-year-old girl, displayed "a dangerous refusal to observe a cardinal rule that civilians simply must comply with instructions from police officers," insistsSeattle City Attorney Pete Holmes."

When did we get this backwards? Government in general and police in particular are not our bosses. They are our servants. They exist to protect our rights, but we've allowed them to become far and way the major violators of our rights. The burden must always be on the police officer to show he was protecting somebody's rights, and if he wasn't, if he was instead oppressing a citizen, he should be punished. This idea that we give police the "benefit of the doubt" which really means we let them get away with literal murder, is absurd. The citizen should always get the benefit of the doubt against the powerful government agent with the license to kill.

"For this, Miss Levias faces a gross misdemeanor charge of "Obstructing a Police Officer." During the confrontation, Levias's 17-year-old friend, Angel L. Rosenthal, intervened on her behalf and was punched in the face by officer Ian P. Walsh. As is typically the case when a Mundane's face obstructs the trajectory of a police officer's fist, the victim is the one facing criminal charges."

God forbid you use your face to obstruct the police officer's fist. Why was this guy writing a jaywalking ticket anyway? People jaywalk without getting tickets all the time. I bet he needed to fill a quota.

"City Attorney Holmes offered the mildest possible limp-wristed swipe at the Seattle Police Department by saying that the incident illustrates the need "for de-escalation training for officers." Holmes also cited an observation by Judge Michael Spearman, auditor for the police department's Office of Professional Responsibility, that "The use of force in a [jaywalking] situation as a best practice is questionable.""

You think? This is another stark reminder that all government action is violence or the threat of violence, and that cops, no matter how well intentioned, are uniformed tax collectors much like mafia henchmen that extort protection money from shopkeepers. "Pay up, or it's going to go hard for you and your family." No doubt.

"Accordingly, the use of overwhelming force is entirely appropriate: "Officers are trained to enforce the law and not to 'de-escalate' (walk away) simply because a violator objects to being stopped. That would simply lead to lawlessness.""

The "I was just following my training" defense was quashed at Nuremberg, but now it's rearing its ugly head in America. It doesn't matter what you've been ordered. It doesn't matter what you've been trained to do. You personally are responsible for the consequences of your actions, and this officer assaulted a citizen, initiated the violence, and should be prosecuted.

"As I've noted elsewhere, the idea that "civilians" are to render instant, unqualified obedience to any armed individual in a government-issued costume is the chief characteristic of the martial law mind-set."

It's the police state mindset, and we have it.

"It was the assumption of police impunity, not the requirement to "de-escalate," that led to Walsh's lawless assault on 17-year-old Angel Rosenthal – unless we are to assume, as do O'Neill and his ilk, that the individual police officer is the law."

That's what I keep harping on. The reason we see all this police abuse and corruption is there's no accountability. Until we start holding cops like this accountable for their crimes and reject this bogus defense that the officer was just following his training, our police departments will continue to be criminal organizations.

"Jesse and Aline are both employed by Chattanooga's Erlanger Medical Center. Aline, who lost her leg to cancer a few years ago, is undergoing chemotherapy, and the possible side effects of her treatment include stroke. Last Wednesday, when Aline's face began to droop and her speech became slurred, Jesse called the Medical Center and informed them of her condition. En route, Jesse treated stop lights as if they were stop signs – pausing at each and then proceeding through them before they turned green.

Daves, who was lurking near one stop light, hit his siren and followed Jesse and Aline to the hospital. When they arrived, Jesse grabbed Aline and, carrying her in his arms, tried to get her into the emergency room. His path was suddenly obstructed by Daves, who ignored the obvious fact that Jesse was dealing with a life-and-death emergency.

For Daves, the really important thing was not to render aid, but rather securing compliance from a Mundane – even if this meant prolonging the encounter while his stroke-afflicted wife suffered permanent brain damage. Aline's symptoms were visible and unmistakable – yet Daves was fixated entirely on enforcing the "cardinal rule" of contemporary law enforcement: Make the Mundane Submit."

This is another one of those passages that just blazes with painful truth. In another incident,

"Martin was speeding in his cruiser in a frantic rush to get nowhere in particular, and had his feelings hurt when the ambulance – which was actually providing a useful service by ferrying Stella Davis to the hospital – didn’t pull over for him. He then compounded his useless rage by imagining that the driver flipped him off.

The ambulance driver, intent on getting the elderly patient the care she needed, hadn’t noticed that the trooper had been behind him with lights flashing. When Trooper Martin zoomed by, he made radio contact and snarled that the driver "should consider checking [his] rear view mirrors."

A little while later, Martin cut off a car driven by a family member of the patient and signaled for the ambulance to pull over. Seeing a woman sitting next to the Trooper, and thinking she might need medical care, White – who was supervising the driver – complied – only to find himself under assault and the subject of a spurious arrest on the way to the hospital.

...

Episodes like this are hardly uncommon. Indeed, it's reasonable to believe that treatment of this kind – if not necessarily this severity – is becoming the rule, rather than the exception, during encounters between police and citizens."

I agree. Every abuse of power we have tolerated from police over the decades has led to greater and greater abuses until today dangerous abuse of power is the norm for all police departments. The only way to fix that is to start prosecuting these criminals in government uniforms and replace prosecutors who won't do that duty. If we prosecute the worst of the worst for couple of years, and I don't mean just the few isolated incidents that get prosecuted every year, police departments will change dramatically for the better.

The G-20 should stop meeting if it's going to change every city they visit into a police state.

By prosecuting a non-crime, federal prosecutors have harmed a family, their former employees, their former business partners and everybody who participated in that market. Real crimes have victims. Any law that criminalizes behavior that doesn't have a victim is an abuse of government power.

WAR:

Obama replaces McChrystal with Petraeus. More.

"But the comments' impact has been magnified by a series of public setbacks for the war effort that has produced a widely held perception in Washington that the war isn't going well: continuing violence in Marjah; the firing by Afghan President Hamid Karzai of two highly regarded Afghan security officials; and a delay in operations in Kandahar."

Damn straight it isn't going too well.

Interesting take on McChrystal:

"McChrystal has fired his media aide. McChrystal is so busy destroying Afghanistan and Pakistan to save them that he almost certainly does not have time to read and discovert that Rolling Stone publishes the truth. He has dealt with CBS, NYT, and all the rest without having his truthful words show up in public. They all protect Obama and the Conspiracy of Incompetence and Corruption in the White House. McChrystal’s aide apparently also does not read Rolling Stone. Fatal error."

That makes more sense than any theory I've come up with.

"IF Obama had any knowledge of the final years of the Vietnam U.S. Catastrophe, he would see McChrystal as Westmoreland on Steroids. He is actually pursuing the Ink Spot, Mass Murder, AID to win hearts and minds, totally corrupt Puppet Regime, and all the rest the U.S. pursued so avidly to produce a catastrophe for everyone in Vietnam."

But this is a poor comparison. Westmoreland was hunting for the big, set-piece battle and resisting calls to implement a strategy of pacification and counter-insurgency. McChrystal is trying to implement pacification and counter-insurgency, and instead of mass murder, his rules of engagement harm Americans to save Afghan civilians. The problem is Americans at war in Afghanistan don't want to die because of restrictive rules of engagement, so it can't work like McChrystal wants it to. It's doomed to fail. He's right about the corrupt puppet regime though.

POLITICS:

The double standard of Bush being blamed for local failures during Katrina and Obama getting free pass on federal failures during Gulf oil spill.

What Obama doesn't understand is the American people can't stand him.

"Barack Obama and his administration are quickly developing a reputation for something that is not sitting well with the American public: Generally defying common sense, statistical evidence or even the rule of law, the Obama administration will ultimately do whatever it wants and justify those actions by whatever means necessary."

Exactly, but Obama's messianic complex leads him to think he's still wildly popular. He surrounds himself with sycophants. He selects who he speaks with. And I have no doubt he thinks he'll be able to keep Democrats in power in November and win a second term in 2012. Reality has no power to dent his narcissism. He's a loon. A dangerous loon.

LOCAL:

After losing nearly 40 percent of its population over the last 40 years, Dayton officials are happy we lost a smaller percentage of population than other rust belt cities. This article wants us to believe that's good news. Yay. Dayton is dying slightly more slowly than other cities. Only government and its accomplice press would consider this good news.

The disconnect between some theories and history.

Magnitude 5.5 earthquake on the Ontario-Quebec border shakes central Ohio. I didn't feel it here. Others felt it in Dayton, but I was probably driving then.

Intel drops support for the dinosaur PCI bus while government continues to bail out dinosaur companies and expand dinosaur bureaucracies.

MISC:

According to The Cult of the Presidency, page 130, President Carter created FEMA by executive fiat, so it's doubly unconstitutional.

The amount of work to be done is infinite.

"There is as much work to be done as there are unfulfilled desires. Since human desires are, for all practical purposes, limitless, the amount of work to be done is also limitless. Therefore, no matter how much work the eager young man completes, he cannot possibly exhaust or even make an appreciable dent in the amount of work to be done."

Therefore, in a natural economy, the only people unemployed would be unemployed by choice. Unemployment would effectively be non-existent. Government interference in the economy creates unemployment.