Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

A reminder that Thanksgiving today is as much a product of capitalism as the first Thanksgiving was. Jamestown and Plymouth were almost destroyed by communism before private property and free markets were allowed, enabling the colonies to thrive.

TAX AND SPEND:

The claim that government owns all wealth and generously allows us to keep some of what we earn used to be considered a crank idea, but now it's becoming the new normal. All politicians think this no matter what they say, and Americans better figure that out.

"The notion that the absence of taxation constitutes government spending is setting the stage for the total perversion of genuine tax reform. It is being used in an effort to impose as much as a trillion dollars a year in new taxes disguised as a trillion dollars a year of reduced government spending."

Specifically regarding Obama's deficit commission:

"Erskine B. Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, the chairmen of President Obama's deficit reduction commission, have taken a hard look at these tax expenditures — and they don't like what they see. In their draft proposal, released earlier this month, they proposed doing away with tax expenditures, which together cost the Treasury over $1 trillion a year."

Have I mentioned that government has turned everything upside-down? And in case you think just Democrats think this way.

"This is the sum and substance of the concept of tax reform held not only by the Obama administration but also by cowardly Republicans and conservatives. Simpson was a Republican United States Senator from Wyoming for eighteen years. Mankiw, the author of the Times' article, was chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors from 2003 to 2005."

Republicans are just as bad.

"In sum, the danger exists that Left and Right are about to unite to accomplish a colossal political fraud in the form of enormous tax increases sold to an unsuspecting public as reductions in government spending. The American people need to stand up and refuse to accept any form of the absurdity that in not taxing them, the government is spending their money and that the path to lower spending and taxes is raising their taxes. The basis of tax reform must be reduced government spending, not higher taxes."

I knew that Bowles-Simpson plan had to be a fraud. I'm happy to see it exposed.

HEALTH CARE:

USA Today gets it right: eating meat and avoiding bread and potatoes keeps you slim. Decades ago, everybody knew that, but then the FDA created the disastrous food pyramid with fats and meats at the top and grains at the bottom, backed that pyramid up with subsidies and regulations, and sparked our obesity and diabetes epidemic. Government makes us sick as well as poor and depressed. Freedom makes us healthy, wealthy and happy.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Study links cosmic rays to cloud formation as expected. This is one mechanism linking solar activity to climate changes on earth.

WAR ON DRUGS:

FDA bans synthetic marijuana. Owatonna, Minnesota, Huntington, West Virgnina, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Minnesota state government, Michigan state government and more were considering bans. Claim the ban is temporary.

POLICE STATE:

According to a TSA bureaucrat, children under 12 are still subject to a pat-down, though it will be a little different pat-down than for 13 and up. Pistole liked again.

TSA harasses and detains woman over breast milk, causes her to miss her flight and takes her personal information and keeps it. This seems to me to be a clear case of abrogation of rights under color of law. This supervisor and possibly the other two agents should be prosecuted.

TSA's false trade-off: we do not have to subject to their nude-scanners or gropes to be more safe. The private sector, airlines and airports, can provide significantly better security with much better privacy protection at a lower price.

The feds are installing 300 spy cameras in Houston.

Tourists don't want to come to the US anymore. Imagine that.

Police discover record cache of liquid explosives in San Diego, but that record is only eight or nine pounds. Still, you can't help but wonder if this guy is yet another American that was pushed to the end of his rope by our policy of wiping out Muslims in the middle east.

"In addition to bomb-making charges, Jakubec, 54, is charged with two bank robberies. Now being held in lieu of $5 million bail, he was on probation for a 2009 burglary conviction when he was arrested last week.

Authorities are investigating Jakubec's intentions. He is a Serbian national who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and he lived in the house with his wife.

Authorities also found Wednesday more blasting caps, adding to others discovered in the past week, but they were not removed from the house, officials said."

"Outside court this week, Jakubec's wife, Marina Ivanova, was distraught.

"He's crazy," she told camera crews. "I think he lost his mind. He lost his mind or something. ... I know that he was collecting, obsessively collecting stuff."

Bomb technicians must work slowly inside the house because the slightest friction -- such as opening a drawer -- could ignite the explosives, Prendergast said.

Jakubec appears to be a hoarder, and the clutter of paper and boxes in the house makes the hunt for explosives more difficult, the assistant sheriff said. Bomb crews were wearing less gear so they can move about the house without brushing up against anything and accidentally triggering the explosives, he said."

You can't tell much from those descriptions.

POLITICS:

Tom Delay convicted of doing what every politician does. They should all be imprisoned. Armed robbery should be illegal for everybody. But this post documents the many ways in which Delay's political prosecution and trial were corrupt. It's twisted to have corrupt prosecutors prosecuting a corrupt aristocrat in a corrupt court, but that's what America has come to. Another explanation of why this trial was so corrupt and the implications.