Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Here we go again. Obama to call for another $50 stimulus boondoggle to tear up more roads. This is like his fifth one.

Exposing Cantor and Ryan as the hypocrites on spending they are.

The Australian government won't allow Paul Hogan, Crocodile Dundee, to leave the country and go home despite never having charged him with tax evasion.

As I suspected, Cameron's supposed budget cuts in Great Britain aren't real. The budget increased by four percent.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Graphical illustration of the Fed's ratchet effect on our economy.

"Say what you will about Bernanke, he's one crafty fellow. (As Bob Wenzel warns, "Don't play poker against Bernanke.") Whether through luck or design, he has managed to hand over hundreds of billions of dollars to some of the most powerful people on the planet, and he has maneuvered the Fed into a position to hold $2 trillion in Treasury debt, all without spooking the markets into expecting massive price inflation.

This last point is important: If Bernanke ever announced, "I just talked with Tim Geithner, and he tells me the Fed needs to loan the government $1 trillion to pay for healthcare reform," then US interest rates would spike. Investors around the world would scream, "The Fed's monetizing the debt!!"

Yet somehow, Bernanke has managed to implement this exact policy, without anyone blinking an eye. In fact, the usual suspects — on both the left and the right — are upset at the Fed's timidity."

It can't get out without allowing the economy to crash and recover, and Bernanke won't allow that.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Walter Block enumerates the ways in which government created the conditions that led to the Gulf oil spill and crippled efforts to clean it up.

"What suggestion emanates from market fundamentalists such as me? Why, to privatize the entire Gulf of Mexico, of course. Why? Because with private ownership, external costs would be internalized. Any owner of the Gulf would have been much more careful than the MMS, because he would have lost, wait for it, profits! Had the Mississippi river been in private hands, the corporate owner would have gone broke, and this property turned over to more capable hands in the advent of the Katrina tragedy. Instead, those responsible for killing some 1500 of our neighbors, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, are still in existence. This is in sharp contrast to BP, which of course, is (partially) responsible for this disaster. But, happily, based on free enterprise principles, that firm will suffer losses and even risk bankruptcy, unlike these statist institutions.

Ideally, users of the Gulf, its homesteaders, would become its owners. As a second best policy all those living within say, five miles of its coast, plus intensive users of its waters, would become stockholders in a new Gulf of Mexico Corporation. Take that, pinkos. If we learn anything from the study of economics, it is that private property rights systems, while far from perfect, function markedly better than their alternative, nonownership or government ownership."

Damn straight.

Italy's mafia is cashing in on wind-farm grants.

WAR ON DRUGS:

The presidents of Mexico and Columbia want a debate on legalizing drugs. This is positive.

POLICE STATE:

NBC advocating embedded microchips for all Americans as if this is a good idea.

Off-duty cop chases woman home, runs over her husband in the drive-way, shoots shotgun into their house, but is not prosecuted because he's a cop.

Cato advocates defense vouchers for criminal defendants to replace public defenders. Somebody needs to remind Cato that all government money is poison. As unpopular as criminal defendants are, the marketplace would still provide better defense services to the poor at a lower cost than any government service.

WAR:

NATO fires colonel for writing op-ed illustrating the inane bureaucracy at the top of the war effort in Afghanistan.

"Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports that Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year-old Army reservist, has been dismissed from his post in headquarters with NATO's  International Security Assistance  Force less than 48 hours after he published an op-ed, via UPI, complaining that the "war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information." Sellin clearly anticipated that his tirade, which NATO says he didn't clear for publication in advance, would serve as a resignation letter. It opened with, "Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment. I see no reason to change that now. Consider the following therapeutic." He went on to excoriate the meaningless, self-serving, metastasizing military bureaucracy that holds sway in Afghanistan and justifies its existence via PowerPoint slide: "Little of substance is really done here, but that is a task we do well.""

The whole op-ed is worth reading.

Commanders trying to get NATO to 2,000 more troops. 140,000 isn't enough, but 142,000 will win the war.

ACLU challenges Obama's claim to be able to kill anybody in the world any time he wants so long as he declares them to be a member of al Qaeda.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iran continues to enrich uranium, and the IAEA has concerns about a weapons program, but it still has no evidence of weapons-grade enrichment.

POLITICS:

Conservatives still cling to the tenets of communism.

"Politics is like the surface of an ocean. From time to time, there are great storms and great waves. Ships go down. But beneath the waves are growing numbers of sharks [bureaucrats - LIW], gliding silently far below the turmoil on the surface. They consume anything they can. Marx thought the proletariat would win. Instead, the bourgeoisie did – on a scale that seems irreversible."

Gary North gets a little poetic.

"Men of similar outlook run the large foundations, the universities, the K–12 schools, thousands of Federal agencies, and the fading mainstream media. Only one thing can remove them from power: budget cuts. This is the lesson of the past century. No reform sticks that is not in the interest of senior bureaucrats. No funds are cut, so no reform changes anything significant."

You can't train a rampaging dinosaur. You have to kill it.

"When a bureaucracy fails spectacularly and in full public view, the political appointee who officially runs it is replaced. Then the agency asks Congress for more money, so that a similar mistake does not take place. Congress forks over the money.

FEMA is still operating. Brownie is long gone. Such is the iron law of bureaucracy."

Obama family's ties to the CIA.

"According to a published report in the September Rock Creek Free Press of Washington, D.C., investigative reporter Wayne Madsen says Obama’s mother Ann Dunham worked “on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation.” The East-West Center had long been affiliated with CIA activities in the Asia-Pacific region, Madsen says.

What’s more, Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., arrived in Hawaii from Kenya as part of a CIA program to identify and train Africans who would be useful to the Agency in its Cold War operations against the Soviets, Madsen says. Obama Sr. divorced Ms. Dunham in 1964.

Ms. Dunham married Lolo Soetoro the following year, a man Madsen says assisted in the violent CIA coup against Indonesian President Sukarno that claimed a million lives. Obama’s mother taught English for USAID, “which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia,” Madsen reports. That USAID was a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos was admitted by its administrator Dr. John Hannah on Metromedia News. Madsen says the organization was also a cover for the CIA in Indonesia.

Ms. Dunham worked in Indonesia at a time when Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities(MUCIA) – a group that included the University of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Minnesota and Indiana – was accused of being a front for CIA activities in Indonesia and elsewhere. Ms. Dunham traveled to Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, India and Thailand “working on micro-financing projects” for the CIA, Madsen reports.

And Ms. Dunham’s mother, Madelyn Dunham – who raised Obama while his mother was on assignment in Indonesia – acted as vice president of the Bank of Hawaii in Honolulu, which Madsen says was used by various CIA front entities. She handled escrow accounts used to make CIA payments “to U.S.-supported Asian dictators” including Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu, and President Suharto in Indonesia, Madsen says."

That seems pretty amazing. On the other hand, the CIA has so many front companies, we might all have worked for them at one time or another.

"“President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother,” Madsen says. “There are volumes of written material on the CIA backgrounds of George H.W. Bush and CIA-related activities by his father and children, including former President George W. Bush. Barack Obama, on the other hand, cleverly masked his own CIA connections as well as those of his mother, father, step-father, and grandmother,” Madsen points out."

This is interesting.

MISC:

Wikileaks organizer calls for spokesman Assange to resign over Swedish rape allegations. I doubt it's coincidence that the person making this call is an aristocrat and subject to political pressure since Sweden dropped the charges.