Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

This baloney about Republicans demanding budget cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling shows Republicans aren't serious about cutting spending. If they were serious, they would just refuse to raise the ceiling so cuts or default would be the only option. Republicans just want to make token cuts to pretend they support smaller government.

POLICE STATE:

This article is subtitled, "The authoritarian left comes out of the closet." I didn't realize it had ever been in the closet.

LOCAL:

There should never be a public meeting to discuss business expansion. If a business wants to expand, it should be able to do it without being hassled by the government.

MISC:

Walter Williams shows how silly and dangerous to freedom it is to have government decide what's fair.

Prediction of the rapid downhill slide of the US again in 2011.

"The year 2011 will bring Americans a larger and more intrusive police state, more unemployment and home foreclosures, no economic recovery, more disregard by the US government of US law, international law, the Constitution, and truth, more suspicion and distrust from allies, more hostility from the rest of the world, and new heights of media sycophancy."

Sound pretty much like every year of the last decade, which each one building on the worst of the previous.

"2011 is shaping up as the terminal year for American democracy. The Republican Party has degenerated into a party of Brownshirts, and voter frustrations with the worsening economic crisis and military occupations gone awry are likely to bring Republicans to power in 2012. With them would come their doctrines of executive primacy over Congress, the judiciary, law, and the Constitution and America’s rightful hegemony over the world."

Blaming everything on Republicans? I think the original prediction is correct, but this guy's leap to blaming Republicans and ignoring Democrats makes him not credible. This article takes on the progressives. At least it doesn't pretend to be anything more than that. Other than the fact that each claims to hate the other, I don't think there's a nickel's worth of difference between a progressive and a neocon.

Microsoft patents facial recognition software for dating. IBM tries to patent patents.

Chile suffers another major earthquake. A 7.1. Wow. At least it sounds like there's no major damage.