Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Murphy smacks down Krugman again.

TAX AND SPEND:

Boortz claims Obama's empty threat to withhold Social Security checks if Republicans don't cave to his demands has scared enough seniors that Republicans are feeling the heat.

Republican Senator vows to hold up every appropriations bill until Democrats propose a budget.

"Adopting a federal budget is not optional. The Congressional Budget Act requires the federal government to operate under a duly enacted budget, and sets out an annual timetable for the Congressional budget process. The Democrats have simply been ignoring the law because they think it is in their political interest to do so. They don’t want voters to see, in black and white, their plan to raise taxes while simultaneously expanding the national debt, with no end in sight.Currently, the Democrats are bringing to the Senate floor a series of appropriations bills for FY 2012, which begins in October. This is plainly illegal under the Congressional Budget Act, Section 303(c)(1) of which provides:
(c) APPLICATION TO APPROPRIATION MEASURES IN THE SENATE.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—Until the concurrent resolution on the budget for a fiscal year has been agreed to and an allocation has been made to the Committee on Appropriations of the Senate under section 302(a) for that year, it shall not be in order in the Senate to consider any appropriation bill or joint resolution, amendment or motion thereto, or conference report thereon for that year or any subsequent year.
The Democrats intend to circumvent Section 303(c)(1) by asking for the Senate’s unanimous consent to waive that provision. Today, Senator Sessions said that he will call a point of order under 303(c)(1) with respect to any appropriations bill brought forward by the Democrats, until such time as they agree to adopt a budget. This will force Harry Reid to hold a vote, and the bill can proceed only if a majority of Senators are willing to go on record by voting to waive the legal requirement of a budget."

This idea sounds great in theory right up until Democrats put through some appropriation bill for some extremely sympathetic group like war veterans or disabled children or something like that, then the people let their emotions run amok and turn on those holding up the process.

I'm telling you, the fix is in on this debt ceiling baloney.

"A plan by the Senate's two top leaders to allow President Obama to raise the debt limit without congressional approval is emerging as the most likely strategy to avoid a looming federal default.
The plan being drafted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada would lock in roughly $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years — a figure considerably smaller than Republican leaders or President Obama had been seeking."

This is a complete joke. Congress can't allow Obama to do this. He'll either raise the debt ceiling on his own or he won't. If he does it, Congress can't stop him without legislation that can't pass or impeaching him which can't pass either. He may pay lip service to spending cuts, but as soon as he lifts the debt ceiling and forces Congress to vote to lower it, any cuts he agreed to will be out the window. This is the 14th amendment thing I've been talking about all along, and McConnell is trying to get Democrats on record supporting cuts before Obama does it, but I think this has been a fait accompli for a week or more.

"Under the emerging proposal, Obama would be able to order increases in the debt ceiling on his own, without congressional approval."

This is a non-sequitur. If the 14th amendment gives Obama to raise the debt ceiling on his own, any agreement by Reid and McConnell is unnecessary. If the 14th amendment doesn't give Obama that power, Reid and McConnell can't give it to him. And note that there will be no Congressional vote to give it to him. It will literally be outside the law, i.e. illegal. They know there will be no consequences. Propagandists say defaulting on our debt would make us a banana republic. I think this level of lawlessness makes us a banana republic.

REGULATION:

Big companies are using IP to chase independent entrepreneurs out of the software market. That's exactly what IP was designed to do. It works great.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The Fed issues a gag order against internal critics. Apparently there is dissension in the ranks.

Analysis of Bernanke's QE programs by non-Austrian economists estimates...

"Our estimates show that these negative effects, resulting from the Fed’s two rounds of quantitative easing (QE1 and QE2), are sizable and may help account for the lackluster character of the current recovery. The negative effects estimated here should therefore be taken into account when evaluating the net potential benefits of any monetary stimulus."
"Using our mid-point estimate of $14.35 trillion of interest-sensitive assets, a 4.93 percentage point reduction in interest rates annually cost the economy $371 billion in spending, 3.5 million jobs, and 2.53 percent of GDP. This is a sizable effect, given that during this time GDP grew by only 2.33 percent and the economy added only 870,000 jobs."

Ouch. Interest on savings is valuable, that creation of wealth adds to our economy, and Bernanke stole that from all of us.

EDUCATION:

You can't blame our economic woes on young people, but Greenspan is correct that because the federal government took over control of government schools in earnest with the creation of the Department of Education in 1979, they've received the worst education of any generation in American history, and therefore they're not as competitive and neither is our country.

HEALTH CARE:

It turns out most of the scooters you see fat people ride around in were paid for by Medicare fraud. I'm not surprised.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Mexican government discovers large marijuana plantation. Agents will destroy most of it, sell some of it, keep some it for themselves, the price of marijuana will go up a little, and the Mexican drug gangs will get richer, better armed and more deadly.

POLICE STATE:

It's rare that judges declare a mistrial because of all too common prosecutorial misconduct, but the judge in the Roger Clemens case did just that. It pays to be so famous the press covers your trial. I bet the prosecutors are livid. They get away with this stuff every day, and for a judge to suddenly call them on it must tick them off.

POLITICS:

This ad shows Ron Paul is serious about winning.

MEDIA:

The revelations of wiretaps by a News Corp newspaper in Britain gave the US government an excuse to unleash its dogs on Foxnews. They'll find stuff, the same stuff every news organization does, and they'll use it to attack Foxnews. It's going to be a witch hunt with all the usual leaks of real and false information to slime Foxnews as much as possible.

"Facing an angry backlash by lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, Murdoch told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that corporate executives would create an independent, internal committee to "investigate every charge of improper conduct.""

It can't be both independent and internal. He should have hired an outside investigator.

""It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism," King wrote."

What hypocrisy. Government agents compromise the integrity of anybody they choose in order to advance their personal agendas.

MISC:

I enjoy reading the Onion. It's nice to know that other people recognize some of the idiocy in the world that never gets publicized. For example, this article lampoons the pervasive corruption and stupidity government funded science we see every day but nobody in the press will talk about:

"New Study Shows People With Panic Disorders Respond Poorly To Being Locked In Underwater Elevators"

Awesome. Here's a perfect, real example:

"Loss of predators in the food chain can alter the ecosystem"

I wonder how much money government stole from us to figure that out.

"The review was conducted by two dozen scientists in six countries. It was funded by the National Science Foundation in the USA, Canada's Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and others."

Who would have guessed?

""I think this might be the most important paper Science has published in a long time," says Paul Dayton, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego."

I think it might be the biggest waste of money. Here's another one:

"The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write."

The world might end because people didn't bother to memorize useless trivia that they knew they could look up later. Oh the humanity. Money stolen from us funneled to political activists posing as scientists who then turn around and publish pseudo-scientific papers to promote the political interests of the thieves who fund them.

In the private sector, businesses profit in proportion to the service he provides to others. Therefore people in the private sector adopt principles promoting honesty and hard work. But government thrive in proportion to how much power it exerts over others. Therefore people in the government sector adopt principles promoting coercion and control. It's also not surprising that the people who make the law think of themselves as the above the law, and therefore not subject to it. Of course the people who are attracted to this profession are people predisposed to forcing others to bend to their will.

Praise for the entrepreneur.