Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

This group of billionaires is pessimistic:

"For 25 years, legendary Wall Street strategist Byron Wien, now with The Blackstone Group, has held summer meetings with high net worth individuals to get their outlook on the global economy and investing. This year’s group, totaling fifty individuals and including more than 10 billionaires, was decidedly pessimistic on the U.S. economy, investment opportunities and the Obama administration.

“They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite real,” said Wien, in a commentary to Blackstone clients. “The Obama administration was viewed as hostile to business and that discouraged both hiring and investment. Companies and entrepreneurs were reluctant to add workers because they didn’t know what their healthcare costs or taxes were going to be.”"

I think that's optimistic. We're accelerating into deeper depression, not slow growth.

Obama is achieving his goal of dragging more Americans into poverty.

Cuba gets it right.

"Cuba to eliminate 500,000 state jobs, spur private sector"

It's sad that Cuba's communists understand economics better than American economists who claim to support free markets.

TAX AND SPEND:

 I don't understand this big deal over Boehner's comments either. Of course if the only option he had was to vote to extend some of the Bush tax cuts, he would. That's the only sensible choice. But in the mean time he's going to push to extend them all. Good for him. Unfortunately he has no interest in pushing spending cuts. I think Obama is trying that Alinsky technique he used so well two years ago: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." He's picked Boehner as his target.

Democrats lying about the impact raising taxes on the "rich" will have small businesses. What else is new?

"The administration professes deep concern about the $700 billion revenue loss from extending the tax cuts at the top, but apparently views the revenue loss of nearly $2 trillion from extending the tax cuts for the middle class as too inconsequential to mention. Nor has the administration's concern about the deficit driven it to reduce federal spending."

That's a pretty good quote. Of course, they won't gain anywhere near that revenue after they raise taxes because our economy will slow down further. They'll probably lose revenue.

Obama's bogus tax cut for small businesses is actually a net tax hike.

"This bill isn't even a net business tax cut, because the temporary small business cuts are offset by permanent corporate tax increases. Mr. Obama is promising $12 billion of tax cuts with his left hand while proposing to collect about $300 billion in tax increases from this bill and others with his right."

That's huge tax hike he doesn't talk about.

Top Republicans claims Republicans may have to shut down the government because they will cut spending and Obama will veto. Don't I wish. We saw this play out with Gingrich and Clinton, and Gingrich ended up ousted, Clinton was the big winner, and Republicans went back to spending like Democrats. As much as I would love to see the government shut down, it didn't happen then, it won't happen if Republicans take over Congress and ultimately government will return to loot us more than ever. There's no such thing as good government.

REGULATION:

You'll never guess what's behind the bed bug epidemic sweeping America:

"The New York Times Science article headline says that the scary resurgence of the bed bug is baffling to scientists, but the bafflement evaporates by page 2 of the story: “Many pesticides don’t work, and some that do are banned.”"

OK. You probably did. Government is the enemy of civilization. Government drags us backwards.

HEALTH CARE:

Democrats running away from Obamacare. Duh. They knew when they voted the people hated it. That claim that people would like it once it passed was always a smoke screen. They just wanted to oppress more Americans because the radical leftists felt it would buy them more votes in the long run. Like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid before it, Obamacare will permanently shift American politics toward more government.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

I don't believe for a second that Obama has dropped his push for green jobs. A strategic pause, maybe. Dropped? No way.

POLICE STATE:

Homeland security testing iris scanners. How long until they require all of us to get tested before we can walk down the street?

WAR:

I wonder if the incidence of rape by US military personnel overseas is any different than the rate by civilians domestically.

POLITICS:

This is, unfortunately, good advice from Lew Rockwell.

"In the Roman empire, it was treason to insult or make fun of the emperor, to “injure his majesty.” This is true in all unfree countries, to protect the state and its head, and as the American empire becomes ever more authoritarian, here too. Not that this is anything new in the US context. John Adams’s Sedition Act of 1798, under which Americans were fined and jailed, was of this ancient and evil tradition, as was the Apostle Woodrow’s Sedition Act of 1918, which was never repealed. Recently, an English teenager sent an insulting email to Obama, and the praetorian guards, FBI division, have banned the kid for life from ever visiting the Homeland, by mere edict. There is a lesson here: Never send a message to any part of the imperial regime. It will only be added to your NSA dossier, and has no chance of doing any good. Withdraw your consent. At the very least, don’t participate in the civic hoax."

Anything you say will be used against you.

Politics is the art of seizing power from the people through deception. I still like my ladder analogy.  As if the idea was ripped from my blog, Robert Murphy shows how politicians use euphemisms to mislead the people into supporting their looting.

MEDIA:

How media campaigns dovetail with big-government agendas and get us to fall for phony science.

MISC:

In another excellent example of the self-serving malfeasance of government, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of old people in Japan reportedly alive are in fact dead. Government statistics are all lies to make the government look better.

Some people are going to perform a Klingon opera. They'll probably make money off it too.

The US government does a terrible job of securing sensitive information like social security numbers. Of course it does. Who would have expected otherwise?