The Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. Of course it does. The right to keep and bear arms is a natural right, and the Second Amendment is unique in that it offers one of many reasons why the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed - the security of a free state. That explanation enjoins the states in the right to keep and bear arms. None of the other bill of rights amendments enjoins the states. But that isn't the argument they used. Why the Supremes went out of their way to say this decision doesn't strike down all gun control laws is beyond me. What part of "shall not be infringed" don't they understand? But centralizing power always has its downside. The power a central authority has, no matter how well intentioned it is given, is always twisted back and used against the people.
STATES RIGHTS:
Tom Woods released his new book on the history and future of nullification today.
ECONOMY:
Peter Schiff claims the US is in a depression.
TAX AND SPEND:
Owner of shop gives product to Vice President Biden and his entourage for free but jokes that he wants lower taxes. Biden insults him and calls him a smartass. I really can't stand these corrupt, elitist aristocrats.
From the Telegraph:
"At last, we are having the right argument for our time. Virtually everybody who is in touch with political reality now accepts that the old contest – socialism vs capitalism – is over. We all believe, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, in free-market economics."
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"If we learnt anything from the terrible ideological crimes of the 20th century, it was that over-powerful states were dangerous: that even if they did not commit murder or enslave their own populations, their good intentions ended up producing perverse effects simply through the gross, insensitive interventions of central bureaucracy which could take no account of individual needs. Can anyone still believe that the largely catastrophic consequences of Big State solutions to poverty, to housing shortages, to unemployment, to educational disadvantage, have been pure coincidence?"
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"...when the state creates a mass, collectivist solution to a problem, it ends up treating people as categories (“the poor”, “the deprived”, “the homeless”) rather than as individuals who are ultimately going to have to determine their own fate."
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"It is the basic premise of Big State thinking that has produced the monstrous edifice that we know as the benefits trap: the idea that “the poor” are a fixed and immutable section of society who must be “protected”. Sadly, what “protecting the poor” generally amounts to in practice is “protecting poverty” – which is to say, preserving it. Welfare dependency creates huge disincentives to entering employment because few jobs at entry level can offer a competitive package of payments and support equivalent to the benefits system."
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"The tragic inevitability of government intervention is that when you create a permanent agency to deal with a problem it has an inherent tendency to make the problem itself permanent. This is not only for self-serving reasons – to justify its own continued existence – but because it prefers to deal in fixed entities such as poverty, deprivation, or educational inequality, rather than to view the infinite range of human possibilities and personal circumstances as a dynamic, ever-changing spectrum in which individual vagaries matter more than any total result."Draft Janet Daley for president in 2012 (if she was born here). Despite all the damage done by the British government, they are having this public debate while we are not. This is one thing we need to take from Europe.
Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that the federal debt is the greatest threat to US national security. I've been saying for nearly a decade that the war on terror was incidental compared to our debt problem because you can't fight wars if you have no money. It's nice to see some people are finally catching on.
Krugman predicts disaster if governments cut spending like every government but the US federal government plans to do. If governments do cut their budgets, economies will experience painful healing process, so Krugman will be able to claim he was right during that time. When economies rebound, he’ll be able to claim they would have rebounded without the cuts. Krugman is in a no-lose position. He can always blame every economic problem on not spending enough.
14 reasons the US government will never balance its budget. A couple of select choices:
"Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama's 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf."That's $2.17 trillion spent on vote buying.
"Over 40 million Americans are now on food stamps and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is projecting that more than 43 million Americans will be on food stamps by the end of 2011."That's an impressive measure of how effective the government has been at creating poverty and subsequent dependence.
"Interest on the U.S. national debt now makes up 7% of the budget and it is climbing rapidly. This is an expense that must be paid or else U.S. government finances collapse."That sounds more like a reason government will balance the budget.
"The vast majority of the American people have become soft and don't know how to take care of themselves any longer. We now have millions upon millions of people who are totally dependent on the U.S. government for survival. As the government takes care of more and more people the red ink will increasingly get worse."Baloney. The government and the mainstream media want to us to believe that's true, but it's not. The tea party movement is just the start. The only question is will the great libertarian mainstream of America get involved in politics enough to stop the collapse before government destroys our country.
"According to an official U.S. government report, rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. That is before one penny is spent on anything else. As the U.S. government graph below reveals, the financial picture only gets more bleak in the years beyond that.... "Now do you see why these wars are worse than worthless?
REGULATION:
The financial oppression bill further entrenches and empowers the corrupt Wall Street financial firms. The senate may still stop this new financial oppression bill.
Unions get exemption in new campaign finance law.
How government regulators, little Napoleons, kill business.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
Central banks around the world are buying gold.
EDUCATION:
Here's a perfect of example of how government takes little problems and turns them into big problems. Some parents got into an argument at a children's kindergarten graduation. Really. Kindergarten graduation. As dumb as kindergarten graduation is, and as dumb as parents getting into an argument at kindergarten graduation is, you what happened next. School lockdown. Government makes sure that everybody suffers.
HEALTH CARE:
FDA denies procedure to eight year old burn victim. This kind of rationing is going to explode under Obamacare.
GLOBAL WARMING:
Carbon sequestration schemes have similar problems to nuclear waste sequestration schemes, but the frauds who hate nuclear power advocate carbon sequestration in a blatant double-standard.
Frauds publish a paper claiming AGW skeptics aren't as expert as believers in AGW. Right. Like we have to be experts to recognize the well publicized lies by the frauds.
ENERGY:
Our economy is addicted to oil kind of like our bodies are addicted to oxygen.
"The use of the term ‘addiction’ is no accident. It is an attempt to psychologise and pathologise what is in fact the attempt to satisfy perfectly rational human desires using the tools and resources available to us. The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a significant problem which will take a lot of human energy - and a plenty of fossil-fuel energy - to sort out. Both the companies involved and the US government must take responsibility for doing that. But the most dangerous pollution of all is the hypocrisy of the relatively wealthy, who damn the very things that enable them to live so comfortably and who would happily condemn the rest of us to a life of shivering immobility."Oil is another great equalizer. Without it, the rich and powerful could still freely travel the world, but the rest of us would be much more limited.
How moronic is this?
"Now that President Barack Obama has settled on Gen. David Petraeus to lead the war in Afghanistan, maybe he can focus his attention on putting the right general in charge of the other war that's going badly for the administration.
You know, the one in the Gulf ... of Mexico."We're the stupidest people on the planet. We're paying the salaries of people like this guy and everybody in government who want to declare wars on domestic problems instead of freeing people to solve them.
Is anybody surprised that Obama's panel on new regulations on drilling is packed with Marxist-cum-environmentalists and others who hate offshore drilling? I hope BP is happy with the consequences of all that money they gave to Obama and Democrats. They're some of Obama's useful idiots.
Turtle deaths not caused by oil or dispersants but shrimp nets. Now the Marxist will demonize shrimpers.
BP and other oil companies based their oil spill response efforts on grossly inaccurate government projections because the government forced them to.
How BP, the darling of the Democrats, manipulated the political economy to its profit and our loss.
"As BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig was sinking on April 22, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was on the phone with allies in his push for climate legislation, telling them he would soon roll out the Senate climate bill with the support of the utility industry and three oil companies — including BP, according to the Washington Post."
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"But the Kerry-BP alliance for an energy bill that included a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases pokes a hole in a favorite claim of President Obama and his allies in the media — that BP’s lobbyists have fought fiercely to be left alone. Lobbying records show that BP is no free-market crusader, but instead a close friend of big government whenever it serves the company’s bottom line.
While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels."
If course it has. All big corporations do it. They get a far greater return on investment in the political economy than in the private economy.
"Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG: Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.
As Democrats fight to advance climate change policies, they are resorting to the misleading tactics they used in their health care and finance efforts: posing as the scourges of the special interests and tarring “reform” opponents as the stooges of big business."
That's exactly what they do. As if we had anything approaching a free market in the US.
"BP has more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans. It employs the Podesta Group, co-founded by John Podesta, Obama’s transition director and confidant. Other BP troops on K Street include Michael Berman, a former top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale; Steven Champlin, former executive director of the House Democratic Caucus; and Matthew LaRocco, who worked in Bill Clinton’s Interior Department and whose father was a Democratic congressman. Former Republican staffers, such as Reagan alumnus Ken Duberstein, also lobby for BP, but there’s no truth to Democratic portrayals of the oil company as
an arm of the GOP."
Imagine that.
"Two patterns have emerged during Obama’s presidency: 1) Big business increasingly seeks profits through more government, and 2) Obama nonetheless paints opponents of his intervention as industry shills. BP is just the latest example of this tawdry sleight of hand."
This may be the only skill Obama has.
POLICE STATE:
I really don't get conservative schizophrenia regarding cops. In one breath they'll blast them as unionized tax feeders. In the next breath they'll tell you how noble they are and defend them for grossly abusing their powers.
How a corrupt police department killed a city.
"...the Maywood, California Police Department, is being liquidated. In fact, the entire municipal government of Maywood, a Los Angeles suburb of roughly 40,000 people, is being dissolved on account of bankruptcy. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will provide law enforcement coverage to Maywood, and a rump city council will coordinate delivery of services provided by neighboring Bell.
In Maywood, as elsewhere, the economic crash has choked off the tax revenue on which the municipal government subsists. The town is currently facing a $450,000 deficit. But what finally broke the city, reports the Los Angeles Times, was the decision by the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority to terminate "general liability and workers' compensation coverage because the city posed too high a risk."
More specifically, the city was un-insurable because of "a large number of claims filed against the police." This is because the department (which also afflicted a neighboring town called Cudahy) had become the police equivalent of The Island of Misfit Toys – a sanctuary city for criminals in state-issued costumes."Once again I'm saddened that this doesn't surprise me. I'm more surprised this isn't happening all over the country. I bet it will be soon.
This old legal precedent requiring people to resist government overreach is unfortunately long gone.
Americans are quickly reaching a breaking point, just like Obama wants them to. What he fails to understand is that when the Americans break, they'll break the opposite way of what he wants.
Pat Tillman's family releases a movie about the US cover-up of his cause of death by friendly fire.
McChrystal to retire from military. Good.
Malou Innocent advocates getting back to basics on Afghanistan, reminding us that al Qaeda is not an existential threat, Afghanistan is not critical to our security and that its mineral wealth is not vital to the US.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:
Reason argues we should keep birthright citizenship. I don't believe that birthright citizenship is filling America with illegal aliens, but nobody should be rewarded for sneaking across the US border then using the political economy to pay for giving birth in a US hospital at taxpayer expense. Birthright citizenship makes sense for people who come here legally to become Americans, not for people who are trying to steal it.
I'm all for hearings on the abuse of lethal force by all government agents including border agents.
Obama appoints sanctuary city supporter to head ICE. He's poking his finger in the eye of the American people and laughing.
Obama punishes Arizona citizens by having federal agencies boycott the state.
FOREIGN POLICY:
The tension between South Korea resolved the tension with North Korea in spite of the US trying to stoke it. Get our troops out of there and let South Korea take care of itself.
Japan can take care of itself too.
POLITICS:
Ex-KKK member, senator for 51 years and one of the strongest advocates for the government take-over of our lives, and pork barrel spending champion Robert Byrd died last night. Hopefully West Virginians will replace him with a small government advocate given Democrats want to destroy the coal mining industry.
Blagojevich talked about appointing Oprah to senate seat.
The Telegraph is quickly becoming my favorite paper. In this story, it exposes how aristocrats - foreign diplomats in Great Britain - are all corrupt.
"Foreign diplomats based in the capital owe more than £37 million in unpaid congestion charges, parking fines and non-domestic rates, new figures show."
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"In addition, dozens have been able to get away with crimes including sexual assault, threats to kill and actual bodily harm by claiming diplomatic immunity.
The United States was responsible for the highest level of unpaid fines, owing nearly £4 million for congestion charges dating back to 2003, followed by the Russians with more than £3 million and Japan on £2.77 million.
In total, embassies and high commissions based in London failed to pay £36 million.
In addition, diplomats were responsible for nearly 5,000 parking and traffic violations last year, owing a total of £534,000."Aristocrats love using the government's gun to force new laws on us because they're above the law. You know this is way worse in New York because of the United Nations.
Mark Steyn cuts through the bull to tell it like it is, or wars, for BP, Obama, Democrats and leftists.
"The executives of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam."
How's that working out for us? All leftist policies are based on violence, and therefore they're all corrupt. This is why BP was able to break so many rules and regulations and not worry about the consequences. Now Obama and Democrats are demonizing BP to cover up their complicity.
"White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stonepiece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?"Of course it's all about Obama. I bet Obama is the most narcissistic president ever. That our troops are dying because of restrictive rules of engagement being applied in a war we cannot win doesn't faze him. That McChrystal has lost control of his command doesn't faze him. But the perceived personal slight is a firing offense. Obama makes your typical corrupt, lying, egotistical, elitist, cut-throat politician look good by comparison.
"Only the other day, Sen. George Lemieux of Florida attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, over-manned, and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “super-skimmers”: Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Senator Lemieux found the president unengaged and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” reported the senator."Of course not. He's too busy obsessing over the gray in his hair.
"“It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. . . . The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.
“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”
Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses."That's because Obama is on the side of the tyrants, not the oppressed. We knew that before the election 2008 election. He's fine with China and Russia oppressing their people. He sympathizes with the mullahs when they order demonstrating Iranians to be shot in the street, not the victims. Obama is a Marxist. He thinks of himself as the American Vladimir Lenin, but better. What part of that don't people understand?
"Moveon.org have quietly disappeared their celebrated “General Betray Us” ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the “anti-war” movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don’t care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c’est la même chose."There's nothing anti-war about the left. Get over it.
Victor Davis Hansen on the lawlessness of the Obama administration.
"All this is eerie; it has a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another, and which often appealed to foreign nations for support."Yikes.
48 percent of Americans see government as a threat to individual rights. The other 52 percent are fools.
Republicans promote a positive agenda.
Ron Paul supporters have taken over the Idaho Republican Party. One down, 49 to go.
Europe is changing direction, albeit slowly, but Obama is putting the pedal to the metal taking America toward collapse.
MEDIA:
Significantly more Americans trust Google, Microsoft and Apple than trust the media, as well they should. The media profits by misinforming Americans. If those companies did the same, they would go broke.
In praise of Judge Napolitano.
MISC:
Researcher concludes that thinking you are good or evil, especially evil, increases physical capabilities. This is going to be controversial.
Criticism of Justice Stevens on his way out the door. More criticism of Stevens and the mainstream media misrepresentation of his record.
This author beats me to writing about the other Supreme Court decision today. It's being presented as a victory over Christians, but it's no such thing.
"In this one, the Christian Legal Society (CLS) at Hastings law school (a state school in San Francisco) challenged a school rule that prohibits student groups from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation."
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"Predictably, observers in certain libertarian circles are decrying this as a violation of freedom of association. But that’s the wrong way to look at it."
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"After all, how can a libertarian think the CLS is entitled to a state subsidy? Why should taxpayers who abhor discrimination against homosexuals — as we might reasonably imagine that most of Hastings’ taxpaying neighbors do — be forced to subsidize, even slightly, a student group that engages in such discrimination?
(Here, the funds apparently came out of a mandatory student fee, not directly from taxpayers, but at best this changes the question to why other students should be made to subsidize the CLS.)
Also, if it violates the CLS’s freedom of association to make them accept homosexuals, why doesn’t it violate the rest of the law school’s freedom of association to make them accept the CLS?
I’m sure the CLS is right that being forced to accept all comers could undermine its mission. But what really undermines its mission is getting in bed with a state institution. It shouldn’t be shocked by what’s happened because almost all government money comes with government control. (School voucher advocates, take note.)
For the libertarian, there is no good solution to the issue in this case except to keep as much property as possible private and then let its legitimate owners decide what rules to have."Exactly. This group is free to exclude homosexuals. They're just not free to exclude them and to accept stolen money from the government. The school has freedom of association rights just like the Christian group.
Hayden Panettiere opens a bottle of champaign - or something.
US arrests 10 Russian agents.
Sirhan Sirhan still proclaims his innocence.
Seven myths about grilling steak.
Questioning the validity of compensation for the victims of disasters. Of course people harmed by others deserve compensation, but the level of compensation should be appropriate.
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