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Another suicide bomb in Baghdad kills 33 more. The terrorists are feasting on President Obama's policies.

Iran test fires new air-to-surface missile intended to attack ships.

In traditional aristocrat fashion, Fed Chief Bernanke wants to exploit the recession for a big power grab for the Fed. His misnamed mea culpa is just a big lie to confuse the people about who created this crisis. The Fed created this problem. Nobody else. I bet this guy has one of those evil genius laughs.

And Bernanke's declaration that big banks will not be allowed to fail gives them carte blanche to take all the risky, self-serving actions they want and stick their fingers in our eye while doing it because they know full well the Fed will cover up anything that backfires on them. This is naked fascim. Every government intervention in the market of any kind always promotes bad behavior, perverts the market so some can make more money at others' expense and destabilizes the economy.

You can't patent business models.

Obama's cradle to career education plan includes merit pay for "the best" teachers. That sounds like bonuses for top teachers, not merit pay. The majority of teachers would not get merit pay. Obama is once again trying to redefine words to make his plans sound more mainstream. Notice he doesn't advocate firing or lower pay for poor teachers. Obama's plan specifically panders to the lowest common denominator, as if this is a good thing. If you want more money, do poorly in school. Democrats will support the cradle to career part but not this tiny nod toward merit pay. Government schools will continue to produce a mediocre force of working class drones to vote Democrat.

Minnesota government panders to Muslims. Can you imagine if they changed laws specifically to cater to Christians? This is clearly a breach of the First Amendment, and it should be stopped immediately. Compare to this to the bill in Connecticut that was just withdrawn that would have allowed the government to restructure Catholic churches. Wow.

How come conservatives never cared about economic freedom and libertarian values while Republicans were in power? In 2000, the US was ranked 3rd in economic freedom with a rating of 8.5 when Bush was elected. In 2008, the US was ranked 8th in economic freedom with a rating of 8.04 after 8 years of Bush and Republicans. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that conservatives suddenly care about economic freedom. Better late than never. But how about having some principles, like the principle of freedom, that you stick to no matter who's in power? Remember George Bush and Hank Paulson started this whole stimulus, bailout mess.

With conservatives newfound appreciation of economic freedom expressed by their sudden appreciation of Ayn Rand, it's time to hammer home the FairTax. Republican and Democrat aristocrats exploit crises for their personal gain. We can exploit this newfound anger at big government for the cause of freedom.

How do we reconcile this report that the government is making further plans to prop up Citi with the stock surge of 379 points because Citi claims this is its best quarter since 2007?

This Hummer tax is obviously driven by wealth envy, but I have no problem with vehicle registration fees being weighted by vehicle weight. Heavy cars are harder on roads, so it makes sense to charge their owners more to cover road maintenance.

Cincinnati is America's 4th manliest city. Dayton is 15th. Ohio seems to be pretty manly. You couldn't tell by the way we vote.

Mises scholar's analogy shows how Obama is like Bush on steroids:

Imagine Bush as a drunken sailor in port for the first time in a year. He goes into a casino in Atlantic City, sits down at a thousand-dollar-a-hand blackjack table, and promptly loses a million dollars. Obama comes in as Bush's replacement, and the casino seats him in Bush's old chair. While bemoaning the situation, Obama tells us we must end this failed policy by moving up to the ten-thousand-a-hand table and doubling down. Of course, this makes no sense whatsoever, and the sane person would quickly back away. But sanity appears not to be present anywhere in Washington these days.

Frustrated Texan writes open letter to IRS saying he'll pay his federal taxes as soon as he gets his stimulus check, but not to worry - then he goes on an lists some 30 other taxes he's already paid. Our government is crushing us.

Madoff to plead guilty. Good riddance.

You would think it was impossible to research anything, not just stem cells, without federal money. Bush didn't tie anybody's hands. George Soros could have funded all the embryonic stem cell research liberals could stand if he had wanted. Liberals could have all donated 20 bucks out of their own pockets to fund embryonic stem cell research. Bush was a fool to take money from people by force to fund research against their will for the lines he did fund.

The government doesn't recognize the recession. Government is booming! Of course, all those non-productive jobs are paid for by the productive sector of the economy - the private sector.

Obama is doing an equally poor job of overseeing bailout funds as did Bush. That's because big government is ineffective. You can't centrally plan and oversee everything. This is one of the many fatal flaws of big government.

The world lost about $50 trillion in wealth in 2008. Obviously the major culprit is the Fed, but pretty much all western central banks pushed inflationary monetary policy.

Thomas Sowell wants to know why Americans who pay their mortgage or rent because they can't afford to buy should subsidize Americans who bought more house than they could afford. Because Obama said so, that's why.

The WSJ explains that carbon cap and trade is really a tax. The costs are inevitably paid for by consumers.

Hit hardest would be the "95% of working families" Mr. Obama keeps mentioning, usually omitting that his no-new-taxes pledge comes with the caveat "unless you use energy." Putting a price on carbon is regressive by definition because poor and middle-income households spend more of their paychecks on things like gas to drive to work, groceries or home heating.
...

Cap and trade, in other words, is a scheme to redistribute income and wealth -- but in a very curious way. It takes from the working class and gives to the affluent; takes from Miami, Ohio, and gives to Miami, Florida; and takes from an industrial America that is already struggling and gives to rich Silicon Valley and Wall Street "green tech" investors who know how to leverage the political class.

Obama will diversify the WSJ ownership if it keeps telling the truth like this.

They say that as goes California, so goes the nation. California's suicide presages the ongoing suicide of America. Suicide by government.

Boortz likes this defense of capitalism, and it's fine as far as it goes, but the author clearly does not understand capitalism or the US economy.

It didn’t seem possible six months ago that capitalism in the United States could be in danger.

We haven't had true capitalism in the US in 100 years because of constant, insidious, progressive attacks. If you look at Marx's 10 planks for communism in the Communist Manifesto, you'll notice that most of them have been achieved in the US either fully or significantly. From the Fed, the income tax and government schools to attacks on private property, inheritance and government domination of our health care sector (which Marx would have listed if he had thought of it) our economy is closer to communism than capitalism. Taking stakes in banks just takes us one step closer. I'm happy Charon pulled her head out of the sand, but people who are just waking up to how badly capitalism is under attack in America have long been part of the problem.

Wikipedia keeps scrubbing Obama's page of information about the controversy over where he was born and other controversial issues like Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers.

Obama's step-grandmother in Kenya to fight the testse fly, but I'm sure Obama won't reach into his own pocket to help her. But Obama will probably take money from taxpayers by force and send it to her.

New Yorkers upset over bowling tax.

Protectionism hasn't gripped the world as much as rhetoric.

Cato illuminates the delusions Mexico's leaders are entertaining because of the growing drug violence.

Washington Times correspondent Sara Carter reports that a high-level source in the Pentagon concludes that the two leading drug-trafficking organizations, the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels, now field more than one hundred thousand armed foot soldiers. That figure does not take into account the enforcers at the disposal of the smaller cartels. Adding their personnel to the mix would likely bring the total to one hundred forty to one hundred fifty thousand. In short, the forces the drug gangs can deploy are now nearly as numerous as Mexico's one hundred eighty-eight thousand man army.

Yikes!

Inflation is baaaaack.

Suddenly Republicans like the judicial filibuster. What a shocker. These last 2 essays from Cato show signs of life. Maybe Cato is getting a little energized itself.

Day 1 notes from the International Conference on Climate Change. Day 2 notes from the International Conference on Climate Change. This is a conference of real scientists discussing real science.

This essay on the current (lack of) direction of the conservative movement is sometimes on the mark, sometimes well off the mark. For example, Republicans did lose because they governed too much like Democrats (what Limbaugh would say wasn't conservative enough). But the anti-intellectuals who so loudly supported Bush seem to be gaining power, not losing it, and no direction other than anti-liberal has emerged.

Apparently Obama's bizarre diplomatic behavior toward Britain was intentional because Obama rejects a special relationship between the US and Britain. I bet Brown is pissed.

Pat Buchanan thinks Obama is repeating the mistakes of LBJ.

Chuck Norris doesn't sound all that tongue in cheek when he talks about Texas seceding from the union.

E-Verify is a big government non-solution to illegal immigration that would be terribly administrated, abused, corrupted and used against US citizens just like every other big government program. The solution to illegal immigration is to end the war on drugs and to demand employers check 2 forms of ID, one of which must be a birth certificate, green card, or visa before hiring anybody. If bartenders can check ID, employers can check ID.

US officials say Iran has enough lowly enriched uranium to make a bomb, but it hasn't enriched any of that into weapon's grade material, contrary to claims by Israeli officials.

United States and Israel are interpreting the same facts, but arriving at different conclusions.

That's not very comforting.

The more we learn about Obama's deficit, the worse it gets. These guys imply his budget is a con job and they show why.

Evaluating earmarks on their merits. That's fine, and on their merits, 90 percent of earmarks today are used by incumbents to buy votes and retain power or by party leaders to grease the wheels so that representatives will vote for bad legislation. The buying votes part is corrupt, and earmarks should be used by the Justice Dept. as a starting point to follow the money in corruption investigations. Legitimate earmarks won't be corrupt.

Idiots like Paul Krugman tell us we need to keep spending more money and that the reason Japan didn't succeed at spending itself out of inflation induced bubble in the 90s is it didn't spend enough money. Take a look Japan's debt on this graph and decide for yourself if Japan didn't spend enough and if we want to spend more to appease the Keynesian idiots of the world.

The military runs into the age old conundrum about body armor limiting mobility.

Humorous story reminds of the fatal flaw of homosexuality.

Australia to provide sex education to 7 year olds. Something tells me this is going to backfire.

Fomenting Anger and Division

Fomenting Anger and Division

by Mark Luedtke

Many Americans were angered when Attorney General Eric Holder called America a nation of cowards for not confronting the race issue. It's easy for Holder to throw stones since any white American who tries to confront racial issues is instantly attacked as a racist by liberal attack dogs. He knows his liberal allies prevent an honest discussion about race in America for reasons I explain below. I haven't seen Holder out with Bill Cosby confronting racial issues either.

In the wake of the election of the country's first black president, many thought Holder's comments came out of left field. That's naive. If you understand the Democrat party and President Obama, you understand that Democrats and Obama need racial agitation to hold onto power and promote their agenda. Democrats try to foist white guilt on all white Americans, dividing the country to gain power for themselves, but guilt over racism falls squarely on the shoulders of Democrats, not all Americans.

When debating the Declaration of Independence, it was the soon-to-be Democrats of the south who forced the Continental Congress to remove the text decrying slavery. Democrats seceded from the Union, sparking the Civil War because they wouldn't give up slavery. Democrats founded the KKK, and the senior member of today's Senate, Democrat Robert Byrd is a former KKK member. Republicans more strongly supported the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.

Democrat policies continue to oppress blacks to this day. Aristocrats have used minimum wage and gun control laws to oppress the poor and minorities for centuries. Modern minimum wage laws keep black teens from taking entry level jobs, starting careers and moving up the economic ladder. Big city government schools fail to educate nearly half of black children. Illegal immigrants take up to 7 million entry level jobs that therefore aren't available to young blacks. Welfare and the entitlement mentality propagated by Democrats keeps blacks trapped in poverty at a significantly higher rate than whites.

As a result, black teens are 15 times more likely to join a gang than white teens. And gun control laws keep blacks from being able to effectively defend themselves from the crime created by oppressive policies. If blacks ever stopped to think about the devastation wreaked upon their lives, their neighborhoods and their culture by Democrat policies, Democrats would disappear as a political force. In order to keep that from happening, Democrats need blacks to feel angry and victimized.

And so does Barack Obama. Obama is a student of Marxist radical agitator Saul Alinsky. When Obama worked as a political agitator for ACORN affiliates in Chicago, he learned and taught the racially divisive methods of Alinsky.

During this time, Obama worked with a number of radical black churches in Chicago, but in order to launch the political career he coveted, he had to find exactly the right church for a launching pad. His search led him to radical Rev. Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ. And as we now know, Obama latched on to Wright's clerical robe tails and rode them to power in Chicago, Illinois, and ultimately the presidency.

Rev. Wright taught a particularly virulent form of Black Liberation Theology (BLT) (remember his sermon claiming whites invented AIDS to kill black people?), a political movement that compares blacks to the Israelites and Jesus, mixes it with Marxism, and preaches the salvation of black Americans from their white American oppressors. BLT weaves the beliefs of Malcolm X with Marxist inspired South American liberation theology. Because of his political ambitions, Barack Obama necessarily became a leader in the BLT movement too.

Stanley Kurtz quoted BLT founder James Cone and in so doing predicted Obama's radical leftist policies and Holder's agitation, “A scarcely concealed, Marxist inspired indictment of American capitalism pervades contemporary 'black liberation theology'...The black intellectual's goal, says Cone, is to 'aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.' Such destruction requires both black anger and white guilt.”

Holders comment was design to inflame black anger and white guilt, and Obama's war on capitalism and prosperity will destroy America as we know it and transform it into a declining, second rate country like those of Europe, impoverishing Americans and retarding economic growth around the world – exactly as Obama and Democrats intend. All in the name of misguided social justice.

But Democrats have a problem. As frighteningly successful as Obama has been since taking office, the great, slumbering mainstream of America is waking to resist. Democrats need their coalition strong, and they need to distract the country from the consequences of their policies, but having a black man in the presidency undermines two decades of Democrat exaggerations about racism in America. A black person can become anything in America, the same as anybody else, and that's long been the case. The only reason Colin Powell wasn't elected the first black president in 1996 is because he chose not to run. He had a personal limitation. Like anybody else, blacks have to overcome personal limitations and the obstacles before them, but those things can be overcome.

Democrats no longer have a case for systematic white victimization of blacks, and once blacks move past victimization en mass, the Democrat coalition will fall apart. Obama's success undermines the coalition that put him in power and his BLT creed. To stay in power, Democrats must continue fomenting black anger and white guilt, and AG Holder's comments are just the opening salvo. Expect Democrats' racial agitation to intensify.

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China continues to escalate it's new Cold War on Terror against the US by harassing US Navy surveillance ship. We've put ourselves in a position where our relationship with China can only go downhill. The richer we make the Chinese government, the more powerful they become and the more aggressive they become toward us.

Zimbabwe opposition leader says car crash was an accident. If he said otherwise, Mugabe would have him killed immediately.

The Dow is down 78 more, barely above 6,500.

Newt Gingrich confuses the president with the country. I want the country to succeed. That means I want the president to fail.

Somebody should put Paul Krugman out of our misery. He's mad at Obama for not borrowing and spending enough. Maybe the NYTimes will fire him. Ha!

I just blasted Google for its lack of quality as exhibited when I post an essay from Google Docs to this blog. I compared their sloppiness to Microsoft's. It'll be interesting to see if they respond.

2006 poll shows most Democrats wanted Bush to fail. But that's OK. It's only when an American wants a socialist like Obama to fail it becomes an issue.

Depressions inspire men to dress stylishly while good times lead men to dress casually. Dressing down is a sign of wealth. I must have used to be really wealthy.

When government bails out AIG, it's really bailing out a number of failing companies that AIG insures through credit default swaps. If we stop bailing out AIG, a number of other zombie firms will stop wasting precious resources that would be better utilized by other firms to aid in the recovery.

I've been wondering where rich people and their money will move to in the next 4 years. Boortz suggests New Zealand. It sounds like they're going in the right direction, but they have a long way to go. I still advocate creating a free market zone in Belize. I think just one rich American could negotiate a deal for a free market zone in Belize.

Somebody should make this person the poster child for modern liberalism:

"From the headline, 'Trillions in Fed Spending: Obama's first budget quadruples the deficit.' President Obama is giving us the change we can believe in, just like he promised. How do all the retirees feel about their life savings being worth half now? If you hadn't been so greedy all these years and had paid more in taxes we wouldn't be in this mess. I hope that before long, the president with the help of the Democratic Congress will get all of your retirement money and give it to the poor, and then you will know what it feels like. I hope and pray that we will soon have free medical care that President Obama promised. The rich have always had the insurance and money to go to the doctor, and soon you rich people will know what it's like to have to wait in line to get treatment with the rest of us. No more going to the front of the line just because you have money. During the campaign every time Obama pressed the economy his number went up and McCain's went down. The American people have spoken, we won the election from Bush. He caused all the problems and now you Bush supporters just whine about your problems, well get over it. It's a new America, and we are the Man now."

You can't help but pity these people who want to cause so much harm like Obama. This is modern liberalism laid bare.

Guy crashing the homeless soup kitchen line takes a picture of Michelle Obama with his camera cell phone. Our welfare dollars bought that cellphone. I'm a big champion of private charity over welfare, but private charity can become welfare too. In the age of the internet, everybody can do the research to identify charities which put people back to work instead of just give them handouts.

Obama as Manchurian Candidate waging war on American prosperity. This kind of stuff is coming out after Obama has been in office less than 2 months. This guy has earned the tremendous antipathy of the mainstream of America already. I can't imagine how bad it's going to be. Apparently speculators are betting on whether or not tax cheat Treasury Sec. Geithner will last the year. I have no idea where this guy draws the conclusion that Obama wants what's best for America. It's seems obvious to me, Obama intends to harm America. This whole essay strikes me as a way for the writer to say what he really thinks about Obama without taking responsibility for it.

I don't believe Obama wants the best quality health care at the best price, which should be every Americans' goal. Obama knows damn good and well that his program will fail. It's designed to undermine private insurance and suck everybody into government supplied insurance, and he intends to follow up his failure with socialized medicine. Obama also knows damn good and well that socialized medicine is the worst possible system for health care. Obama knows about Britain's NHS. He knows about Canada's collapsing system. He knows the only reason any socialized medicine system in the world survives is because they are all backup up by the private sector system in the US that is only 60 percent infected by government so far. I believe Obama is using the health care issue and his mastery of Orwellian double-speak to gain power for himself and Democrats knowing full well it will harm Americans. Obama does not have our best interests at heart.

Obama to change US trade policy to emphasize social issues. This is guaranteed to restrict trade and harm the US and world economy. Obama is like the anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to crap. Just like George Bush, Obama thinks the US is the master of the world. Baloney. America should lead by example and embrace freedom on every issue, including trade. The world will follow our lead a safer and more productive future.

"I believe in trade and will work to expand it, but I also know that not all Americans are winning from it and that our trading partners are not always playing by the rules," Ron Kirk, Obama's nominee as U.S. trade representative, said in confirmation testimony tonight before the Senate Finance Committee.

Obama is making his entire staff masters of double-speak. That's change toward 1984 we can believe in.

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US to cut Iraqi forces by 12,000 in the next 6 months. Apparently those troops were going to be replaced, so Obama's race to pull troops out is going to create a greater risk of loss of stability in Iraq. Suicide bomber killed 28 outside police recruiting center in Baghdad. Obama can still lose this war.

British PM Gordon Brown wants to outlaw tax havens. I guess he thinks he's king of the world, so he can tell other countries what to do. I like how they call it "hiding money". If don't put your money where the government wants you to, instead putting it where government can't touch it, you're not being smart - you're hiding money that aristocrats think belongs to them. Hey Mr. Brown, I'll tell you what would serve our prosperity: dramatically reduce the size and scope of your oppressive government instead of whining about tax havens.

Any Republican that supports a Democrat Truth Commission witch hunt should be immediately drummed from the party. In order for Republicans to be successful and for the country to survive, they have to repudiate their government uber alles philosophy from the Bush years, but there's no way any Republican should partner in this witch hunt. But you watch Arlen Specter sign up.

This FDIC thing is a red herring being used to keep the American people gripped by fear. Government will borrow more money from China to cover it.

The green movement is battling itself, blocking green projects in court. That's because the green movement has very little to do with environmentalism. It's mostly an anti-capitalist, anti-progress, anti-development, anti-human movement masquerading as an environmental movement.

Michelle Malkin reports some of our stimulus money is going to beautify bike paths. I feel more prosperous already.

Missouri proposes constitutional amendment requiring presidential candidates to prove they meet the constitutional requirements for the office, namely they must produce an official copy of a birth certificate before they can be placed on the state ballot. The amendment specifically excludes the bogus, non-official certificate of live birth that Obama tried to con us into believing is a birth certificate. This should be the law in every state, and it should have been that way for centuries. Naturally liberals don't want candidates to prove they meet the Constitution's requirements. They must know something about Obama we don't, or else they're planning to run frauds in the future.

I don't see any reason to believe a word this recently released Guantanamo detainee says, he still sounds like a terrorist wannabe who'll say anything to help his terrorist cause to me, but the circumstances of his capture are significant. According to the article, this guy was arrested for suspicion of attending an al Qaeda training camp and conspiring to build a dirty bomb. If the article is accurate, those are civilian crimes, not acts of war. He should have been charged and tried in a civilian court. If he'd been caught delivering a bomb, that would be different. But people like this should never be in Guantanamo in the first place. Guantanamo should exclusively house enemy combatants - i.e. people captured in the act of waging war against the US or our allies. And yes, I would say Osama bin Laden's driver qualifies as an enemy combatant just like Hitler's driver was an enemy combatant.

Some Guantanamo detainees may soon end up in Federal Court.

Switzerland considers helping resettle Guantanamo detainees. Hillary Clinton impressed by European leaders hot air on the subject. That and a $1.25 will get you a cup of coffee.

Google Earth accidentally leaks details of secret nuclear base in UK. Oops. I really don't understand the problem. Surely both the Russians and the Chinese have this info. Who were they trying to keep it from? Terrorists maybe? I bet all the bad guys have it. It seems to me they were just trying to keep it from the public.

Israeli ex-President indicted for rape. The rule of law is stronger in Israel than here, where Bill Clinton managed to escape multiple indictments on rape. It's sad to think I would prefer to have Bill Clinton in office than Barack Obama.

As if Reason is reading my blog, a new article says that Barack Obama will make people will miss Bill Clinton.

Why would Cisco and NASA partner to create a global skin to track climate change if, as Al Gore has told us for a decade, the debate is over? This is the kind of science we need to to do to understand our climate, and since I don't trust NASA one iota, it still employees one of the world's leading global warming frauds, I have more confidence in Cisco. I'm just afraid Cisco won't question NASA's all too frequenct bogus science.

I've been wondering how Obama plans to make the case for a second term after destroying our economy. Mises scholar highlights a liberal writer who is developing the argument liberals will use to convince Americans that America can't have a growing economy anymore - mother nature caused the recession because of overconsumption, and mother nature won't let us do that again. Obama will play to liberals' guilt and religous belief that god (mother nature) is punishing us for our sins. It's like Jimmy Carter all over again, but with green drapes and more dangerous.

Once the public is convinced that we have to live with high unemployment and economic insecurity, Obama and his people can govern forever. There is no way that the policies that Obama and Congress are trotting out can result in anything but double-digit unemployment and near-zero economic growth. I repeat, there is no way for those policies to have any different effects.

Furthermore, by having the press serve as cheerleaders, and by preying on the minds of voters by telling them that we are in a "new era of social, economic, and environmental responsibility," the game is over. I believe we need to frame our arguments in that vein.

Nice job seeing this coming at us. But Obama will still have to control communication on the radio and internet to succeed.

Verizon is planning to share users' personal data, and is making hard for users to stop it.

Cato offers several Constitutional suggestions for D.C. to get voting rights, and my favorite alternative - no federal taxes. What do the aristocrats care about the Constitution?

Obama is trying to redefine the term tax increases to mean savings. Nope. They're just tax increases. Obama's picture is in the dictionary next to double-speak.

I didn't know the international war on drugs was 100 years old. Look how successful it's been. I guess we have another 100 years to look forward to. Aristocrats love perpetual war, and apparently so do the people. Orwell explained it to us, but we don't care. We plan to give up all our rights to government in return for perpetual wars and crises, and we're convinced we'll be better off for it.

Zombies are appearing everywhere again.

Reason says it's OK to want politicians to fail. Of course it is. Almost everything they do is bad for us.

Obama wants to reach out to Taliban moderates. That's an oxymoron. You can't repeat the success of the surge - reaching out to Sunnis in Iraq - in Afghanistan. Then again, Obama thinks he can sit down and convince the Mullah's to change their ways too. This guy's hubris just continues to damage America.

First liberals claimed that the British socialized medicine system was the best in the world and we should emulate it. Then it turned out Britain's socialized medicine system is actually about the worst in the developed world. Then they claimed Canada's socialized medicine system is fabulous and we should emulate that. Then it turned out Canada's system is just about as bad as Britain's. Now liberals claim Sweden's socialized medicine system is the wonderful and we should emulate that. Walter Williams describes some of the big and growing problems with Sweden's socialized medicine system too. And there are the health care cops at the door in Sweden just like I said would have to happen under socialized medicine. It's only going to get worse in Sweden, which still depends on the US for medical innovation. Who will perform that role when government controls our health care business? Strike three. Liberals and socialized medicine are out.

Global warming bait and switch.

Wall Street and big corporations are lobbying for cap and trade policies. Wall Street because those policies artifically create a new commodity that will traded on Wall Street. All money spent on thes caps is a hidden tax - created by government and collected by corporations. Other corporations because cap and trade policies will make it too expensive for entrepreneurs to start companies and compete with the big corporations. As always, big government boosts the power of corporations at the expense of the people. So even though it's obvious the planet is cooling, most Americans have figured out that global warming is a scam, and the people want an end to this nonsense, corporations and government aristocrats are teaming up to stick it to us again. If Obama gets his cap and trade policy passed, it's going to appear as if he literally created wealth out of thin air - for a while. It can only end badly. Guess who'll get blamed.

Michael Barone on the animal instincts which drive our economy.

George Will discusses America's corn problem.

Obama comes out and repeats that crises are to be used as an opportunity. He's making the most of this one.

Sales of Atlas Shrugged are soaring.

So far Barack Obama has named only 70 of 1,200 appointments so far. He must be having troubling finding enough tax cheats.

California Supreme Court Justice latches on to my idea to take the definition of marriage away from government and instead have government acknowledge only civil unions for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. I hope this becomes the law and sweeps the nation.

This paragraph in a devastating expose of Obama's budget paints an even scarier picture of Obama's budget than I've read elsewhere.

Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.

Yikes.

Not too long ago, I posted the following in my blog: Zimbabwe opposition leader is sworn in as PM in power sharing deal. Crazy.

That wasn't my initial entry. The first time I wrote it, instead of writing crazy, I wrote that Mugabe would have the opposition leader killed shortly. But I had second thoughts about my cynicism, and frankly I didn't want to be right, so I changed it.

But I shouldn't have. Opposition leader injured and wife killed in car crash.

What a surprise. Nancy Pelosi supports Obama's initiative and the Senate bill to have the FCC implement Obama's vision of diversity in ownership of radio stations. Forget the Fairness Doctrine. That's small potatoes. Obama and his henchmen are going directly for the owners. Who would have predicted that?

Aristocrats are more interested in gift exchanges than freedom or the people. Something tells me the American people, like me, don't care.

The Chinese government leads the way on reducing capital gains taxes. Seriously. The US is officially more socialist than China. Read this comment and wonder at how badly liberals in both the Democrat and Republican parties have harmed out country:

One is the simple argument of Chinese lawmakers: taxing investment less leads to more investment, which makes workers more productive and raises wages.

That's the wisdom of John Locke and one of the founding principles of America. The Chinese are surpassing us because they've embraced economic freedom and we are destroying it. How hard is that to figure out?

Kay Bailey Hutchinson fought to remove earmarks from the $410 omnibus spending bill, except for her own $150 million in earmarks. Her excuse? Her earmarks are good earmarks. Only the other people's earmarks are bad earmarks.

Apparently Obama thinks that science has no integrity unless its funded by government.

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Obama claims the stimulus bill he signed three weeks ago saved 25 police jobs in Columbus. I don't believe him. There's no way the federal money made it to Columbus that fast. There's no way Columbus put those men through months of training only to kick them out right before the finish. That money went to cover jobs that were already being paid for.

Obama to restore federal funding of stem cell research. I guess he couldn't find any more divisive issue than taking money from Americans by force and using it for a purpose half of Americans find outrageously immoral, but I'm sure he's trying. Everything government does, by definition, somebody doesn't like and somebody else does. Therefore government is inherently divisive, and the bigger the government, the more divisive. But this issue is about as divisive as it gets.

NASA launches telescope for hunting earth-like extra-solar planets.

A Republican and a Democrat have partnered to destroy the last impediment to the Federal government effectively nationalizing the financial industry by taking over the accounting rules for the industry so government can change them based on political whim and the desires of special interests (as the government does with its own budget) instead of using the centuries long standard of best accounting principles. Naturally both parties agree on this power grab and destruction of freedom. We're going the wrong way. The right thing to do is to make the government adopt best accounting principles, not to allow government's corruption of accounting to infect the private sector.

Mises scholar flips the voting in private argument on its head, but his argument is a fallacy from the point of view of freedom. He's suggesting that coercion would stop Americans from voting to take money from their neighbors. While that's probably true, it's still coercion, and coercion is the antithesis of freedom.

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Government interference in the economy has driven the unemployment rate up to 8.1 percent. Like FDR, the aristocrats will never admit they're wrong and they're damaging our economy. This is going to continue for 4 years until we vote Obama out of office, and it might continue afterward because conservatives and Republicans show no signs of repudiating their failures of the Bush big-government years.

Thawing relations with Russia is a smart thing. Allowing Russia to play us like a fiddle is not. The US should be the originator of US foreign policy, not Russia. We should be acting, not reacting. We should invite Russia to the table and get concession from them in response to our decision to pull out of NATO and to draw down in Afghanistan. We should get concessions from China in response to our decision to pull out of South Korea and to draw down forces in Japan. We should be setting the agenda, not Russia.

Gordon Brown should keep his mouth shut about the definition of marriage in the US. Like we need some pompous, incompetent British aristocrat who's calling for a world-wide attack on freedom named a world-wide New Deal lecturing the US about freedom. Our problem is we're becoming too much like Britain, not vice-versa, and one of the many ways we should differentiate ourselves is by taking the power to define marriage away from government.

Illinois legislators declare Pluto a planet. Even if everything in Illinois was perfect, this would be stupid. I wonder where in the Illinois constitution it gives the legislature the power to define what is and isn't a planet.

So Obama has a mortgage rescue plan and the House just passed a cramdown bill. Obama can't just be detailing a program that's already passed the House. These must be 2 plans, probably designed to sound innocuous separately but wreak the maximum amount of havoc on our economy once combined.

It looks like Republicans have enough votes to put off the $410 omnibus spending bill laden with 9,000 earmarks, so the Senate delays the vote. I guess Harry Reid will add some more pork to buy the votes he needs. This is one reason pork is much more destructive than the small amount of money it actually spends.

At least one bank is trying to give the poisoned federal bailout money back, but the Feds won't take it. This is the first of many. Look for this to become a big issue.

Cato could learn a lifetime of lessons from reading a few Mises articles. The head of the Mises Institute minces no words, and we're all better off for his honesty and bluntness:

It's raining, pouring, economic fallacies by the hour, followed by a flood of horrible policy that is driving us ever further into economic depression. The regime in charge has really gone nuts, revealing itself as both deeply ignorant and horribly evil. We find ourselves facing the horror of what has always been the Achilles heel of the left wing: its abysmal ignorance of economic science. The ideological tendency has gone from Keynesianism to outright socialism in a matter of a few weeks. And the trajectory seems to be accelerated mainly by the logic of the interventionist cycle: bad policy leads to bad results that are addressed through bad policy, and so on, straight down the fast track to serfdom. Obama's attachment to "transparency" — the buzzword of the day — allows all intelligent people to observe the sickening sight in real time, and to the cheers of the kept class of intellectual phonies like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman.
...

Thus all our favorite conservatives are starting to make sense. The American Spectator is alarmed. Rush Limbaugh sounds like LRC. The American Conservative has temporarily dropped its love of protectionism to warn of dollar inflation. The love of war has gone AWOL at National Review. The Heritage Foundation is warning that government spending and taxation are driving us to ruin. Pat Buchanan is defending the free market!

Where were these people during the last eight years of Bush's misrule? Asleep or seeking preferment or something. It's not as if Obama caused this crisis; he is only making it worse. In any case, the Right has begun to turn to the side of truth and justice, precisely as they did during Clinton's rule, and this is all to the good, in general.

But just in case we are observing yet another expedient shift [we are - LIW], it might be a good idea to understand precisely why socialism is a bad idea. The Obama administration doesn't seem to get it. And there is plenty to get. Socialism crushes human rights, builds the state, impinges on the liberty of conscience, and breeds social, cultural, and economic degeneration.

...

Ludwig von Mises in 1920, however, added something special and new to the critique of socialism. He said that socialism in all its forms cannot accommodate any economic development beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. And the reason has to do with the socialist attack on the ownership and exchange of capital goods. Without ownership, there is no exchange, and so prices do not emerge. Here is his 1920 essay, which says it all.
Without market prices for capital goods, accounting is not possible. You don't know if you are making money or losing money, saving resources or wasting them, doing the right thing or not doing the right thing. Think of all the decisions that have to be made on the production end that require you to know whether you are wasting resources or not. With steel, do you make more buildings or trains? Or do you make cutlery or computers? Or cars or cables?
You can't just rely on assessing consumer demand. The demand for stuff is infinite. What matters are choices in light of foregone alternatives. These can't be discerned with polls or intuition. What matters here is the weighting of all alternative uses of resources. They can only be worked out in real time, in light of the choices of consumers and the profitable production decisions of producers.
None of this is possible if you don't have real market prices providing the real stuff that makes cost accounting possible. Collectivize property and you abolish the market for capital goods. No prices emerge. Every choice you make is arbitrary. There is no more rationality remaining. You just end up groping around in the dark.

Wake up America and read the essays!

This summary explains the mass delusion that grips our world:

Click at your own risk. This is the NYT article explaining how ridiculous economists are for failing to embrace socialism in light of the current and perfectly obvious failure of the free market. So you can take a market and beat it, tax it, regulate it, subsidize it, flood it with fake money, punish its performers and reward its losers, hobble its capital sector, strangle consumers, nationalize stuff at will, and erect every barrier to trade and cooperation, and STILL call it a market. When the scheme fails, it's the free market that failed, so clearly we need the totalitarian state to sweep into action.

Author contrasts the invisible hand of the free market that brings order and prosperity from individual decision of self-interested people in a free market to the the reverse invisible-hand that creates chaos and poverty when powerful aristocrats apply political decisions to our economy.

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Here's more on how raising taxes changes people's behavior for the worse:

President Barack Obama's tax proposal -- which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more -- has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay in an attempt to avoid paying higher taxes on every dollar they earn over the quarter million dollar mark.

Obama is making people less productive. That means Americans will have less wealth, a lower standard of living, and our country will be weaker. That's the goal of the Obama administration in order to satisfy his desire for Marxist social justice.

Spreadsheet breaks down senate earmarks in the $410 billion spending bill. I don't even know what this spending bill is for. I bet its the spending Democrats were supposed to pass last year but refused to so they could push it to this year because Bush wouldn't grow government fast enough for them. Specter has his hands in 265 earmarks, 134 personal, the highest number of any senator for both categories, Cochran has his hand in $470 million worth , the most money of any senator, and Byrd spent the most money on individual earmarks at $122 million.

The stock market is down another 150 so far today. Make that 263. It finished down 281. Yesterday must have been profit taking for short sellers. Obama says buy stocks now. Right. Apparently Obama's figured out he's killing the stock market, so he's begging for taxpayers to bail him out. With energy prices due to rise significantly, our health care system under attack by government and banks in danger of being nationalized, I don't think so. It doesn't make sense to buy stocks when the president and both houses of Congress are waging war on prosperity.

Capital investors have no confidence in Obama. I disagree. I think they're confident Obama is driven by Marxist goals, he intends to harm the country, and he's been dangerously successful at harming it so far.

We may be in for a double-dip recession. It's interesting to see a liberal news agency finally mention this, even though they have it backwards. It's not government pulling out that's the problem - it's government getting in that's the problem. These guys are making the argument that government should never pull back to where it was a year ago. I've written about the secondary and tertiary damage caused by government's attempts to fix the recession, and they will likely be far worse than the original recession. Just like Hoover's and FDR's New Deal turned a recession in to the Great Depression.

Supreme Court hearing case with huge consequences for independent political speech.

GM may go bankrupt. Shouldn't we have just let it go bankrupt before dumping billions of taxdollars into a black hole?

NATO and Russia resume contacts. NATO is hoping for support in Afghanistan. Russia has played NATO and the US like a fiddle. Russia lost nothing despite its aggression in Georgia, and its agitation over missile defense and its pressure on the countries surrounding Afghanistan made the US look like fools.

But the greater lesson is the US is irresponsibly overextended. We're not going to war over Georgia, anywhere in the Balkans or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and we shouldn't pretend we will. We haven't got the clout in southeast Asia to support a decade of nation building. These were foolish policies to begin with, and we have to accept the limits on US power. NATO is an irresponsible welfare organization that increases tensions between Europe and Russia. Our military welfare to South Korea is irresponsible and it increases tensions between North and South Korea. Protecting Europe and South Korea from communists made sense 50 or 60 years ago. Not today. Our attempt to build a nation in Afghanistan is doomed to failure and never made sense.

North Korea lunatics threaten civil aircraft. We should get our troops out of South Korea and just keep a couple of submarines in the area for deterrence. South Korea has 40 times the GDP of North Korea. It can deal with its insane brother without welfare from us.

Muslim Americans tend to look more like other Americans than Muslims elsewhere. The melting pot is working. We still need more help from mainstream American Muslims in isolating the radical Muslims in America.

Pat Buchanan analyzes Obama's dangerous agenda.

Thomas Sowell explains the power of rhetoric using Hitler, Churchill, Reagan, and Obama as examples. I'm sure Sowell will get brutally attacked for this, but at least nobody will call him a racist.

Madoff is fighting to keep his $7 million Manhattan penthouse and $62 million in assets because they are in his wife's name. So Madoff thinks because he hid all that money he stole from investors in his wife's name, he should get to keep it. At least he's consistent. Kind of like the supporters of social security.

CEO of Freddie Mac resigning after 6 months. He probably already bilked taxpayers out of $300 million like Obama advisor Raines when he ran one of those GSAs.

It's possible Republicans could lose more seats in Congress. Republicans are doing nothing to win the favor of the people. They're the same big government, corrupt Republicans they were during the Bush administration. They're counting on Obama to fail so badly that Americans forget how badly they failed first. Republicans are trailing Democrats in the race to destroy America, but not by much, and it's unlikely that no matter how bad Democrats are in the next 2 years, they'll destroy the Democrat brand to the level Republicans have destroyed theirs.

Eric Holder unconditionally rules out waterboarding of terror suspects. I hope he volunteers to be a victim instead of other Americans in the next attack that could have been prevented by waterboarding.

Democrats cutting off vouchersthat enable D.C. children to attend the same private school as Obama's children and Biden's grandchildren. So instead of the government paying $7,500 for vouchers to ensure these children get a quality education, the government will spend $26,000 (that's how much D.C. spend per child) to force them to attend a failing government school. That's how our government rolls. Imagine what's going to happen to us when this same government has a monopoly on our health care.

Philip Morris is going to get the cigarette regulation legislation it bought and paid for. More power to the corporations!

President Obama's escalates his war on charity, started by removing the tax breaks on charitable contributions for rich people, by advocating forcing charities to spend money according to political whims. Giving federal money to private charities gives the government power to determine how the charities spend their money. This is how the federal government has extended it's corrosive and coercive power into all aspects of our lives.

Senator Specter to support union card check. Why do the Republicans allow this guy to claim he's a Republican? Voters expected to kick him out. About 28 years too late.

Good for the people who wonder if Obama is a native born American for not letting this drop. If Obama is native born, he has it in his power to make this go away - produce the documents. Since he won't, we know he's hiding something significant. We just don't know what. I think this article is inaccurate because Obama never released a certified copy of his birth certificate. He posted a non-certified copy on the web so it couldn't be verified.

In typical government fashion, the workers at the new Capitol Visitors Center are using their power to make it harder for Americans wanting to tour the Capitol.

Democrats in Michigan and Detroit have done so much damage to their state and city that the median home price in Detroit is $7,500. This is what Obama and Democrats are trying to do to the entire country.

It doesn't get any more clear than this. Study of personal and economic freedom of US states shows that the more Democrat a state is, the less economic and personal freedom in that state. You might notice that basket case states are all dominated by Democrats. The proof is clearly visible - Democrat policies destroy freedom and prosperity faster than Republican policies, and the most prosperous states are the most libertarian. As if we didn't already know that. Pretty graphs and charts. Michigan sticks out like sore thumb, though. As poor as it is, and as dominated by Democrats as it is, for some reason it ranks high in both economic and personal freedom. It's the only obvious outlier I noticed, and I wonder if that data point is wrong.

Mises scholar uses the failure and hypocrisy over management of tickets to Obama's inauguration as an object lesson in the failure of government versus free markets to manage scare resources.

Firefox continues its domination in browser technology.

Mises scholar points out the costs of the patent system. 17 years seems crazy to me. That might have made sense a century ago, when product development times were significantly longer and economic development was significantly slower, but it seems long even for then. But Mises still hasn't convinced me to get rid of IP altogether. In the modern world patents and copyrights shouldn't last more than 2 years, imo. That's more than enough time to make a huge profit off an idea, but it would dramatically reduce the costs of the IP monopoly and dramatically increase innovation.

Daniel Henniger from the WSJ suggests a bold, new, alien strategy for Republicans - champion private enterprise, freedom and free markets instead of big government. What a novel idea. We haven't had a president do that since the '80s. It worked pretty well back then, but we can do it even better. He suggests that Republicans read Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, the dirty little secret of Republican aristocrats is they dislike the private sector almost as much as Democrats aristocrats.

This is what happens when politicians take over the economy - human weaknesses like revenge dominate the economy:

Bear had been the only big firm that refused to help out Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that came close to the brink in 1998. Some wondered if this was the reason Hank Paulson, then treasury secretary and a former boss of Goldman Sachs, insisted on Bear being sold for a mere $2 per share (though this was later quintupled after shareholders revolted). There were certainly many on Wall Street, including a fair few at the firm itself, who felt Bear had it coming.

Obviously regular people have the same human weaknesses, but in a free market, no one person has the power to harm so many by giving in to those weaknesses, and there are repercussions for giving in to those weaknesses, deterring them. Paulson didn't face any repercussions for his decision on Bear Stearns or any other decisions.

Obama's tax cheat Treasury Sec. lectures us that Obama's budget is changing the tax code out of fairness. Our tax code is unfair - it's unfair that some people have to pay higher tax rates than others, but that isn't what Geithner is talking about. He's talking about making the successful Americans pay even more taxes to subsidize the least successful Americans. He actually pulls out the term "just", signaling that Obama is driven by the Marxist philosophy of social justice, not fairness or what's good for the country. If Obama was interested in fairness and what's good for the country, he would support the FairTax.

Remember when Democrats were up in arms because McCain wanted to tax employer provided health insurance and provide a tax deduction to cover the cost for those who carried insurance? It was a great idea for still being mired in big government, but Democrats and Republicans both attacked him on the bogus charge of raising taxes, and McCain was inept at explaining his policy. Now one of Obama's congressional henchmen has proposed taxing employer provided health insurance, but with no deduction to offset the costs, to pay for government provided health insurance. These aristocrats are a farce. The American people have to stop voting for them. Note this liberal article neglects to mention McCain's plan had a tax deduction to cover the costs as it tries to convince people this Democrats' idea is the same as McCain's.

The government won't release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because it would take them a 100 years to pay off their debt to taxpayers. Thanks for making them so corrupt, Democrats. Thanks for taking taxpayer money and dumping it into these black holes, Republicans and Democrats. This is a warning to banks that have sold shares to the government, willing or not. We should starting selling off the profitable pieces of Fannie and Freddie today, put those government sponsored monstrosities out of our misery, cut our losses, vow never to repeat the asinine mistake of allowing government to interfere in our economy again, and never look back.

$700 billion isn't enough to stabilize the banks. Geithner wants more. I have a better idea. Let the bad banks fail. The rest will pick up the pieces, and the economy will be stronger for it. If raising taxes is a bad idea in a recession because it hurts the economy, why isn't raising taxes always a bad idea? Trick question.

It's ironic that tax cheat Geithner is making rules to keep overseas companies from avoiding federal taxes.

Note to Harry Reid: It's not just Republicans who want Obama to fail. I want America to succeed, so I want Obama to fail.

Irresponsible government pension plans, fraudulently accounted (what else would you expect from government - government is the only entity that can commit accounting fraud and get away with it, and every level of government does it every day), may demand the next $1 trillion bailout. In the private sector, frauds get prosecuted. In government, they get rewarded with more power. Anybody who surrenders responsibility for their own retirement to somebody else deserves what they (don't) get. Just say no to another bailout.

House passes mortgage cramdown bill.

Good article compares Obama's tax hikes to Hoover's. Fortunately Obama's aren't quite as high as Hoover's (made worse by FDR), but they're plenty bad enough.

Obama lied; the economy died. Funny but accurate.

Jim Cramer says, "This is the greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president." No doubt.

Check these Obama votive candles of the Messiah. Obama supporters are a healthy, rational bunch.

Potential aids for Obama cabinet members withdrawing their names like crazy. I bet they've either been busted for cheating on their taxes or they don't want to be associated with the most destructive presidency since the Great Depression. Or both.

Cato uses the TVA as an example of how big government infrastructure projects can be a drain on taxpayers and consumers for decades.

Cato agrees with me that the US needs a humbler foreign policy and that Republicans show no signs of recognizing their mistakes of the past.

Michael Tanner of Cato explains why universal health care is not the best option. What an absurd understatement. If it's not the worst option, I don't know what's worse. It sounds like Tanner is suggesting a different fertilizer for your lawn. This essay is drier than Jack Webb from Dragnet. This essay minces words and like the guy is afraid to offend anybody - "may not be exactly" and "does not necessarily mean". It's hard to tell if this essay advocates implementing a system like France or a free market health care system. Where are the analogies? Where are the historic parallels? Self-censorship and the lack of context and passion in many Cato's essays weakens them in the political debate. I wish Cato allowed comments after its articles.

The mainstream media attacks Democrats for attempting to end school vouchers in D.C. Interesting after what I posted above that the Cato writer points out how passionate the example editorial writer is. Cato should learn that lesson.

Cato study proves that free market education outperforms government education. This is so obvious that I doubt anybody but zealots of the church of government uber alles (like George Bush and Barack Obama) thinks otherwise, so this study won't change any minds. It's still valuable to have the scholarly work to reference though.

Cato celebrates 3 powerful women libertarians.

Obama opens the door to compromise on health care. He played this same game on the stimulus bill, and we see how well that worked out for us.

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Despite the federal bailout (the federal government borrowing money from China and giving it to the states, which taxpayers have to pay for including interest), many state budgets are still busted.

Stock are up 151 so far today. Maybe Obama will crawl under a rock and keep his mouth shut so our economy can recover.

Geithner releases details of mortgage rescue plan that will obviously include a big new bureaucracy. More power to government. Less power for citizens.

World court indicts Sudan President Bashir for war crimes.

Despite the carnage Obama is wreaking on our country, he still has a 60 percent approval rating. That's not unusual for a president 6 weeks in, but his disapproval rating is high at 26 percent. This just shows that Obama has successfully scared the American people or convinced them to tune out politics.

Obama names yet another corrupt appointee who traded taxpayers money for campaign contributions. Obama is in love with corruption. All tyrants love corruption. This guy is clearly a tyrant wannabe.

Obama's tax hikes target the most productive people in America. Even congressional Democrats are resistant to Obama's tax hikes on the rich. They must not have figured out how to cheat on their taxes yet. No wonder Obama didn't pick them for his cabinet.

This Financial Times writer reports Obama is a liberal. Did he just figure this out? It took this long for this guy to recognize Obama is a liberal? Was he hibernating during the election? Has he realized yet that Obama's the most radical leftist president in history or is he still hibernating? This writer and anybody who claimed Obama was a moderate should be fired because of extreme ignorance. We should never reward that kind of failure with a salary.

20 states have introduced sovereignty bills to remind the federal government of the 10th amendment. Only 20? And why did it take so long?

Brown and Obama sitting in a tree, taking more money from you and me. We know what their grand bargain means for us.

Micky Kaus explains how the card check bill is even worse than we thought.

Fema employees in New Orleans accused of slowing down aid so they can keep their jobs longer.

This comes in the wake of allegations of cronyism, nepotism, sexual harrassment and other alleged misconduct in the New Orleans FEMA office.

That's SOP for big government, and that's what liberals want to turn our health care system into.

When buying gas, pay cash.

Article explains how Rahm Emanuel exploits tax schemes to avoid paying any property taxes on his home and writes off tens of thousands of dollars in regular old expenses to deduct from his income taxes. While I'm sure this is all perfectly legal, what a racket! Regular people can't do this. No wonder Democrat aristocrats love high taxes for the rest of us - they either cheat on their taxes or develop sneaky schemes like this to keep from paying them. Democrats like to claim high taxes don't change people's behavior, but it sure changes Democrats' behavior - for the worst.

Mises economist teaches fabulous, obvious, but generally overlooked lesson about socialism.

Tom Woods describes how if Obama succeeds, the US will decline at least to the lowly standards of France and may end up as a banana republic (with all the corruption and totalitarianism in Washington, we're well on our way) in a powerful essay that points out mistakes of both parties and from which I could quote every paragraph.

Wow. This is a satisfying, accurate and witty attack on Obama and his stimulus boondoggle in the style of Mark Steyn. This is like Robin Hood's arrow so well shot it splits the previous arrow in the target. Savor it.

Merril Lynch executives subpoenaed over apparent looting in the final months of the company.

Florida county considers declaring itself a disaster area because of the housing crisis so it can get access to emergency funds. If those officials succeed, I hope they choke on the money. Maybe they should have just discouraged the house flipping craze in their county.

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Obama offers to stop missile defense in eastern Europe if Russia helps deal with Iran. This sounds like a fine deal on the face of it, but Russia doesn't want Iran to get a bomb any more than we do. It would be as likely to go off in Chechnya as anywhere. It'll be interesting to see how this develops. If it stops Iran from building a bomb, I'm all for it. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt Iran will give up its enriched uranium, so forever now, Iran will be able to build the bomb in a short time.

It looks the Fed and the Treasury have created a trillion dollar bank called TALF to directly compete with private banks. If banks aren't making these loans, why should taxpayers?

This headline is a bit misleading: Stocks climb after Monday's loss. They're only up 50 after a 300 point loss, so they're not even close to making up the difference. The Dow is still under 7,000. 5 minutes later, the Dow is only up 26. Make that 21. The Obama administration must be tanking the market with TALF.

Whoa! This is a violent video of cops assaulting a female prisoner. As bad as the beating is, the worse part is these cops know they're on video, and they know their police department is going to cover this up for them. They obviously have no fear that their assault will get them in trouble. Let's hope they're wrong. These are the same kind people liberals want to be in charge of our health care.

Because Democrats don't have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, Obama plans to use a parliamentary trick to pass his socialist utopia agenda bypassing the filibuster. I'm sure the liberals who were upset at Bush's budget tricks will love Obama's budget tricks. If Republicans had tried this, liberals would have screamed to high heaven, but you can bet they'll have a double-standard on this for Democrats. Hopefully a Republican Senator will use a secret hold if Democrats try this, assuming it doesn't bypass the secret hold too. Senator Kyl has used the secret hold before.

Big government is driving highly educated immigrants back to their native countries. This will continue for at least 4 more years.

Using an effective SUV metaphor, Mises scholar explains how the Fed distorts and harms our economy, how inflation harms the poor most and why the Fed's policies aren't pulling us and can't pull us out of this financial crisis.

Obama isn't just trying to bankrupt the domestic coal industry, he's trying to bankrupt oil and natural gas too. Because we have those things, Obama must destroy them and make us poorer.

President Anti-Earmark Obama is set to sign yet another $410 billion spending bill with 9,000 earmarks in it including 16 earmarks from Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. This shyster makes Bill Clinton look pretty darn good.

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Obama has driven the Dow down another 194 points so far today, below 7,000. 5 minutes later, it's down 210. It closed down 299 below 6,800. Liberals should be happy. They got exactly what they voted for. Funny how declaring war on capitalism and prosperity will do that. It's a shame mainstream Americans didn't do the work to know who Obama was before the election.

The Obama administration is an absolute joke. Not only do they intend to destroy America as we know it, they've been doing so for years by not paying their taxes. Yet another Obama nominee, Ron Kirk, is a tax cheat.

You want change you can believe in? Try not paying your taxes. See how that works out for you.

Obama couldn't give a damn. He's pissing on our country and laughing at us while he's doing it. Could Barack Obama make any more powerful statement about his disdain for America and the rule of law than continuing to name tax cheats to cabinet level officials? With this lunatic and his allies in Congress in charge, we should be grateful he didn't name Charles Manson as Attorney General. His Democrat allies would surely have supported him.

Doctors aren't exactly scientists (and Al Gore's allies aren't exactly scientists either), but that's no excuse for giving the government power to interfere between doctors and patients.

Obama's budget makes libertarians fear for their country. Tell me about it. I didn't have to wait and see Obama's budget to fear. I repeat from an earlier post: Anybody who thought Mr. Government uber alles Obama had a libertarian bent is a super-fool. With friends like that, libertarians don't need enemies.

For 5 years, my pundits email group has included Hannity and Colmes. I email everybody when I blast. For the first time today, Colmes email bounced. Looks like Foxnews is dumping Alan Colmes completely. Foxnews is pretty fair and balanced on just the news, but when they dumped Alan Colmes and went to Hannity only, their heavily right leaning commentary became pretty much exclusively right leaning. It looks like they finally gave Colmes the shot in the head.

That mooing sound you hear is AIG strolling up to the federal feed trough for another $30 billion. Citi and AIG are in a bidding war to see which can make taxpayers squeal first.

Obama administration releases legal position papers from the Justice Dept. Bush had previously kept secret. I'm happy to have legal reasoning out in the open, assuming these don't discuss policies and techniques to fight terrorists, and therefore aid and abet terrorists, but I bet Obama is keeping plenty more secret. Obama leaks what he thinks will work to his political advantage and hides everything else, like the master liar/politician he is. Of course, Obama doesn't care about fighting terrorism, so maybe this is all of them. Although holding a different vision of future America from the terrorists, like the terrorists, Obama is dedicated to destroying America as we know it. Instead of Sharia law, Obama holds a Marxist vision for future America.

It's quite the understatement to state tough questions dog Obama's health care ambitions.

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Sec. Gates downplays the significance of Iran having enough fissile material to further enrich into weapons grade material to make a bomb. Of course we still have time, but we've been squandering our time for years, and we're continuing to squander it. I have no confidence that we will stop squandering it.

Why when Americans are suffering the worst recession since 1982 is Obama sending $300 million to Gaza so Hamas can use it to launch more rockets at Israel? That's exactly what it will be used for. Sending money to Gaza and expecting it won't end up in Hamas's hands is silly.

President Anti-Lobbyist Transparency Obama is negotiating his oppressive health care plan with lobbyists behind closed doors. This is the non-change we expected.

File sharing site has blueprints for presidential helicopter. Yikes!

Interesting take on wealth envy and the smashing of old Hollywood.

Solar panels reach $1 per watt without Obama's stimulus program. How can that be? You can bet as use of solar power expands because of natural market forces, Obama will take credit. It's important we make sure everybody understands this transition is because of the market, not Obama.

"President Obama is attempting not merely to expand the role of the federal government but to put it in such a dominant position that its power can never be rolled back." That's a little melodramatic, government can always be rolled back if the people have the will to do so, but it gets the point across and works as a call to arms. "The only impetus for growth in this budget comes from the government spending more money that it is taking out of the job-producing private economy. With $1 trillion of new entitlements, $1.4 trillion in new taxes, and $5 trillion in new debt, America's entrepreneurs aren't getting any help soon from Washington." Ya think?

How come nobody has sponsored a constitutional amendment amending the First Amendment and adding "freedom of communication" to the list? This seems like something Ron Paul should do. Obviously none of the aristocrats really want that, but if this would come to a vote, it would hard for any aristocrat to not support it and go on record as being against freedom of communication. That amendment would make all these attacks on free speech go away and would lead to getting rid of the FCC. The Libertarian Party supports it.

For a guy who thinks nothing of taxing the entire coal industry out of business and telling CEOs how much money they can make, we shouldn't be surprised that Obama's backdoor Fairness Doctrine involves changing the ownership of media companies and their on air personalities to reflect his vision of diversity.

Too bad auto makers can't just ignore taxes like Geithner who's overseeing their bailout.

Reason breaks down Obama's budget.

Indeed, if the president is right about this relatively robust growth in 2010, how can he justify spending the bulk of his stimulus funds after the economy would have already recovered? After all, by his own count, 75 percent of stimulus funds won't be released until 2010. Maybe this sort of contradiction is to be expected from a man who signed the biggest spending bill in history one week and then organized a fiscal responsibility summit the next.

Ouch.

Walter Williams turns AG Holder's comment about a nation of cowards on its ear.

Charles Krauthammer summarized Obama's 3 focus areas - health care, education and green energy. He explains how Obama's health care program is designed to fail and transform into full socialized medicine, how he want cradle to cubicle brainwashing in government schools for all children except his and the children of his fellow aristocrats, and how he plans to use carbon cap and trade policies to ruin our energy structure so it can be replaced with a more expensive one he chooses.

Jeb Bush is suddenly putting out essays, this one on education, calling for federal funded vouchers and school choice, but he still sounds like a central planner. He must be seeding the ground for a 2012 presidential run. You can always recognize a power grab when you see a sentence that starts like this, "While states should remain responsible for managing their own public school system, it is in the national interest..." God help us.

EPA to regulate farm dust blowing in the country.

the threshold for unsafe levels of dust in the air must remain consistent nationally

You can't make this stuff up.

Taxpayers hand over another $30 billion to AIG. We're so generous.

US to provide military aid to Mexico for drug war. Great. The War on Drugs in which we fund both sides is in a never-ending and never-endable state of escalation. In a few months, we'll read that the Mexican drug cartels are using US military weapons and recruiting soldiers from the US military. And the escalations will continue because we can't win a war against ourselves. Stop the madness and end the War on Drugs.