Illegal Immigration

Democrat negotiator claims Republicans support rewarding illegal immigrants with citizenship. They don't want to call it amnesty because there are string attached, but it's still a reward for breaking the law. Rand Paul calls it probation. I call it breaking the law and being rewarded with a place at the front of the line. This is a huge mistake. If they do this, Democrats will get all the credit. It's not a bad mistake for the country because Americans and illegal aliens alike will be fleeing the country in the next couple years as our economy and society collapse into violence and chaos. I take the position that I love immigrants, but they have to obey the law. I believe that position is non-controversial. I think 80 percent or more of Americans would agree with it. Too bad Republicans don't take it.

Freedom of Speech

UK threatens to use libel laws to silence bloggers.

Federal Reserve

The Fed's counterfeiting operation is preventing a recovery.

Fed manipulation of the housing market.

"Calvo predicts, “The Fed balance sheet will likely be $5 trillion in toxic assets by the end of 2014.” Calvo thinks what is going on behind the scenes will one day come to light, and it won’t be pretty. Calvo thinks the mortgage rate forecast will eventually go up, but the Fed will suppress rates as long as it can. Calvo says, “It’s kind of like Enron. When it falls apart, then you realize what level of corruption and deceit was really taking place. . . . It’s a trillion times worse than Enron.”"

Legalized corruption.

Cyprus rejects bank bailout tax.

"The Cypriot Parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly repudiated a €10 billion international bailout package that would have set an extraordinary precedent by taxing ordinary depositors to pay part of the bill. "

This means banks will fail. The ECB will keep Cyprus banks liquid.

War

Syrian forces and rebels accuse each other of firing a chemical weapon, but only the rebels have an incentive to actually do so. They also have the track record of committing atrocities and blaming them on Syrian forces. If the Syrian military wanted to use chemical weapons, why would they fire one shell? Apparently the weapon killed 16 Syrian soldiers and was launched just days after a senior US congressman declared use of a chemical weapon would result in direct US involvement in the civil war. Claims that the Syrian army launched this weapon are laughable.

Pat Buchanan provides a more accurate assessment of the Iraq war disaster.

"What makes the question more than academic is that the tub-thumpers for war on Iraq a decade ago are now clamoring for war on Iran. Goal: Strip Iran of weapons of mass destruction all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran does not have and has no program to build."

There's that problem with government so-called experts again. No matter how many times they're wrong, they keep their jobs and the government continues to promote them as experts.

An honest appraisal of the role of oil in Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

"Wars rarely have one clear and singular purpose, and the Iraq War in particular was driven by different agendas prioritized by different factions. To say it was fought exclusively due to oil is an oversimplification. But the fact that oil is a major factor in every Western military action in the Middle East is so self-evident that it's astonishing that it's even considered debatable, let alone some fringe and edgy idea."

Agreed, but neither Buchanan nor Greenwald mention another powerful motivation for the war identified by a commenter:

"They have a lot of oil. No one is arguing otherwise. But to say it's the only reason, or even the main reason we invaded, is a little naive. Hell, I would argue that Saddam's desire to change Iraq's oil trading to a non-dollar currency factored in larger than the actual oil. Didn't Qaddafi threaten to do the same thing right before NATO rocked his world?"

Iran is doing the same thing too. That's the common denominator behind all these invasions. We didn't invade Venezuela. We didn't invade Sudan. That's because they didn't threaten to abandon the dollar.

News outlets tend to claim that 100,000 or more Iraqis died as a result of the US invasion. This source claims 1,455,590 deaths.

98 killed, 240 wounded in Iraq. Some anniversary.

Foreign Policy

Why America is the most hated country on earth.

"If you have lived abroad, as so very few Americans have, the explanation for the hatred is obvious: Meddling. Relentless, prideful, uncomprehending meddling, frequently military, often with horrendous death tolls. Americans, adroitly managed by a controlled press, historically illiterate, incurious, decreasingly educated, either have never heard of the American behavior that angers others, or believe it to have been inspired by virtuous motives. Nobody else thinks so. Add to unfamiliarity with the wider world the constantly inculcated assertion that America is the greatest, most wonderful nation ever to exist, a light to the world, a shining city on a hill, and you get a dangerously delusional state. Especially now. In the past, American economic and military supremacy were such that the US didn’t have to care what others thought. The times, they are a-changing."

"This is why they hate us – meddling, bombing, invading, droning, telling them how to run their countries. No, George, it is not because of our freedoms."

Not to mention the corruption.

Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Hypocrite former astronaut becomes poster child for gun control then is caught purchasing the same weapons he advocated banning. I think this is par for the course.

Tax and Spend

The sequester was a spending increase, not a decrease.

"The "sequester" is nothing more than $880 billion dollars in "on paper" reductions from projected spending in the next decade. As Forbes Magazine recently pointed out, the sequester deal put forth by Obama and accepted by the Republican majority in the House is actually a $110 Billion spending INCREASE!"

They lie.

Economy

Peter Schiff exposes the bad jobs report.

"The participation rate has now dropped to 63.5%, the lowest level since 1981 when the rate had plunged due to a terrible recession. It is important to realize that at that time women had not fully entered the labor force."

More evidence our economy is going backwards.

"More importantly, the number of people who are no longer even counted in the labor force rose by nearly 300,000 from January to February. This is greater than the number of jobs created. Analysts simply can’t look past the headlines to see these disturbing trends."

I think they can and they do. They just cover up the bad news.

How the government manipulates economic statistics to its own benefit.

Education

Quick summary of what government has done to schools.

"American education is in a sorry state of affairs, and there's enough blame for all participants to have their fair share. They include students who are hostile and alien to the education process, uninterested parents, teachers and administrators who either are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and politicians who've become handmaidens for teachers unions. There's another education issue that's neither flattering nor comfortable to confront and talk about. That's the low academic preparation of many teachers."

Why do we allow this?

"Schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, tend to represent the academic slums of most college campuses. They tend to be home to students who have the lowest academic achievement test scores when they enter college, such as SAT scores. They have the lowest scores when they graduate and choose to take postgraduate admissions tests – such as the GRE, the MCAT and the LSAT."

That was true when I was in college too. We used to call education the Mrs. degree because so many students were looking to get married, not teach.

Global Warming and Energy

Alarmists backing off claims because the data does not support those claims.

War on Drugs

Prohibition profiteers.

"No decent person has anything but contempt for Drug Kingpins – but it’s difficult to see how Prohibition Profiteers are any less contemptible. And they’re hardly the only people who have become wealthy by monetizing the misery generated in the prison-industrial complex. Public incarceration is the only consistently growing sector of our increasingly socialized economy."

This is why the war on drugs exists.

War

I can understand why intelligence agencies wouldn't believe this:

"Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction."

Why would anybody believe them? Obviously, few if any did.

Recording of Bradley Manning's statement in court.

Manning is just the latest target of Obama's war on whistleblowers.

"Indeed, despite promising unprecedented levels of transparency when he ascended to the presidency in 2009, Obama has invoked the WWI-era Espionage Act more times than all his predecessors combined as a means of silencing all internal dissent and criticism. Obama’s administration has also launched an all-out campaign to roust out, prosecute, and imprison government whistleblowers for exposing government corruption, incompetence, and greed."

Obama is a bad man.

Claim that the US is not just in Afghanistan for resources, but also so it can invade Pakistan and seize its nuclear weapons.

"The U.S. was loved by most Pakistanis before it invaded Afghanistan and slaughtered women and children in Pakistan. Now even Western polls there show almost total loathing of the U.S., which is obvious without any poll."

Thanks, government.

Local

Broken wire shuts down power to hundreds.

Former state representative goes to jail.

Federal Reserve

Cyprus bank customers resist having their savings stolen in the name of a bailout.

"Much of the day was given over to cross-border finger pointing and a public reluctance for anyone to take responsibility — some might say blame — for a decision that some analysts worry could cause a run on banks in Cyprus, and possibly in Italy and other troubled euro zone countries. Cyprus, whose banking system is on the verge of collapse, is now the fifth nation among the 17 members of the euro to seek financial assistance since the crisis broke out three years ago. "

They keep printing and stealing, but the problem keeps getting worse. That's because printing and stealing is the problem.

EU backs off and now wants to spare smaller savers.

""They are treating us like guinea pigs," said Takis Georgiou, 49. "The government has lost its credibility in the eyes of the people. We'd be better off leaving the euro and returning to the pound, we don't want to end up like Greece.""

They're right.

""Essentially parliament is called to legalize a decision to rob depositors blind, against every written and unwritten law," said Yiannakis Omirou, speaker of parliament and head of EDEK, the small Socialist party. "We refuse to subscribe to this." ($1 = 0.7654 euros)"

They're right too.

Prediction of an EU bank run.

"More importantly than the actual amount of money seized from the measure is the precedent set by the willingness of Europeans to retroactively tax deposits to protect bondholders. As of the writing of this column, there is still a chance that the Cypriot parliament may soften or reject this levy entirely. However, any reversal of this policy in the near term hardly makes a difference. By even considering the option of direct wealth taxation, Brussels has shattered the confidence of the European banking system."

You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The western banking system is based on confidence. Bank don't keep enough money on hand to deposits. In fact, they keep a tiny fraction - in the US, it's around 10 percent - of their deposits. That confidence has been shattered.

"Why would any depositor risk holding their money in a euro-denominated bank? Interest rates do not offer any real yield and with the high debt levels on sovereign balance sheets and undercapitalized banking systems, there is no reason to assume that any country's bank is safe from deposit confiscation. Individuals' risk of losing 6-10% of savings without notice far outweigh any convenience of a domestic bank account. In addition wealthy individuals can easily move enough money to US dollar, pound, or Swiss franc denominated bank accounts who do not have the same currency contagion risks."

The dollar will certainly make temporary gains because of this, but only temporary. Central banks are in a world-wide race to the bottom.
"On top of this, Brussels is looking to pass laws that force struggling countries to accept bailouts. If problems with Italy or Spain's banking system persist beyond a point acceptable to German creditors, similar bailout terms to Cyprus can be thrust onto these people without any recourse."

The percentage went up.

"The hit could now be as high as 15% on deposits of more than $646,000, an insider tells the Wall Street Journal, while smaller deposits could be subject to a 3% or 10% tax. The goal is $7.6 billion, in the first European bailout to be financed by depositers. Still, there's no guarantee the measure will pass. There's no majority party, Reuters notes, and three parties have already refused to support it. But Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades is calling on lawmakers to take action, saying that failure to back the levy could result in a "complete collapse of the banking sector." A lawmaker, however, offered a different take: "Essentially parliament is called to legalize a decision to rob depositors blind, against every written and unwritten law.""

This is getting worse, fast.

Misc

Microsoft might abandon Windows 8 on phones. Why does this company still exist? Government bans on competitive innovation in the form of patents.

Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Congress will pass some gun control law. I doubt it will be much, but it will be something. Obama understands politics well. He and his proxies stake out extreme positions, then berate Republicans until they give agree to some of what they want. That's why Republicans are losers. Libertarians can win because they can stake out positions promoting truly smaller government, then reduce government by compromise.

Gun control advocates lie. They want our guns. All of them.

This story claiming the NRA caved on some provisions is more evidence that gun controllers will win a victory. I predicted this the day after the shooting in Newtown.

Police State

In another outrageous sign of the collapse of western civilization, a helicopter rescued two inmates from a Canadian prison. Escapees captured.

Judge orders accused Aurora shooter to be interviewed while under truth serum. this is the nacro-government-police state gone wild. This guy was hooked on government drugs, prescribed by his friendly, neighborhood college shrink when he supposedly shot up the theater. Some bigwig decided to make this case the new precedent for drugging people to make them more compliant so they wouldn't expose the state and to make it easier for the state to erase them from society. It's sick. The state creates them. It prompts them to violence. They commit violence. Then the state uses violence to erase them. This is why the CIA plan to kill the extremists the US empowered and armed in Syria makes perfect sense from the perverted point of view of the government.

Big Pharma, dementia and crime.

Federal Reserve

Bank run in Cyprus. According to this article, some unknown government force has decreed that all depositors in Cyprus would lose at least 6.75 percent of their savings, and those holding more than $100,000 would lose 10 percent. That's the Russian oligarch tax. Get ready. That's soon going to be the rich American tax in the US. Then things will get worse. It's coming.

This report claims the EU forced the restrictions. And you thought the EU had taken care of everything.

Now it seems it was a brokered deal.

"President Nicos Anastasiades will on Monday attempt to persuade Cypriot lawmakers to back an EU bailout deal that slaps a levy on bank savings, amid fears of a run on accounts if he fails."

The EU fears contagion.

Cyprus bank run could spread to Europe.

Bigger story compares situation to Greece and other PIIGS. Britons decry theft. Spanish bank run. Greece bank run. This article uses the word seize and exposes the nature of government.

""Essentially parliament is called to legalize a decision to rob depositors blind, against every written and unwritten law," said Yiannakis Omirou, speaker of parliament and head of EDEK, the small Socialist party. "We refuse to subscribe to this.""

The mainstream is coming to understand what I'm talking about.

For a very long time I've been saying that central banks are manipulating gold prices. Here's evidence they're manipulating gold and silver prices.

Health Care

If this report about one of government's corporations selling aborted fetus cells to corporations to make better tasting food and drinks is true, then I'm more disgusted with government than usual, and that's hard to do.

In great news, people are rejecting doctors' advice more and more.

"The percentage of parents who say they won't have their teen daughters vaccinated against the human papillomavirus increases, even though physicians increasingly recommend the vaccinations."

Maybe because the science doesn't support the effectiveness of those vaccinations while it does expose their danger.

In one of the most telling stories of government's control of mental health for its own, nefarious purposes, psychiatrists are among the highest paid government employees.

Tax and Spend

Article claims that Guinness obtained its unique color and flavor by avoiding taxes.

Boehner and Obama are in a self-serving circle jerk on government spending and debt.  When the crash comes, and it's coming soon, I hope Boehner goes down along with Obama.

NASA uses Mars to search for pork. Here's a fantastic observation:

"To keep the search going, the media run stories once a month on “we’ve almost found it.” The basic story never changes; only the names of obscure scientists change. Because nothing is ever proven, NASA has to keep adding new names of “almost, but not quite yet” experts. I mean, it would look silly if the same old scientists kept saying “almost, but not yet.”"

This is incredibly insightful. If we allow NASA to keep stealing our money, our children and grandchildren will read the same headlines. Note to self: look for an old headline.