Playing Politics with American Lives

Playing Politics with American Lives

by Mark Luedtke

Imagine if Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had closed down all allied prisoner of war camps during WWII. Imagine if they had either released all the prisoners into Britain or the US, returned them to their home countries, or put them into the civilian court system. The thought is laughable. It should go without saying, but in our crazy society, everything must be stated clearly - any of these options would increase the duration, casualties and cost of the war. Any would lead to greater erosion of rights at home. Any person who suggested such a thing during WWII would have been put in a straight jacket and a padded cell, and rightly so.

But that's exactly what President Obama promises to do in the War on Terror, with the full support of radical liberals. The first official act of President Obama was to order the prisoner of war camp in Guantanamo Bay shut down in one year. In the same week, Obama complained there were no complete files in the White House on detainees for his staff to investigate so they could determine what to do with the detainees. Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems to me that the responsible course of action would have been to investigate before making any decision.

Obviously Obama was just playing politics for his radical left base. He has no idea what to do with the detainees, and he's admitted as much. Now Attorney General Holder says Obama might release some detainees into the US. Obama is playing politics with American lives so he can force the most radical leftist agenda in history down our throats.

But Obama didn't make this mess – President Bush did. Like nearly everything else, Obama is making a bad situation created by George Bush worse.

Over the last seven years, only two detainees have been tried by military commission. That reflects the poor rules developed by President Bush and Congress. Many of the detainees at Guantanamo were not captured on a battlefield, but criminals arrested for terrorist crimes. By blurring the distinction between enemy combatants and criminals, Bush opened the door to powerful, legitimate criticisms over civil rights violations at Guantanamo. By using harsh interrogation techniques on criminal suspects, he destroyed the ability to try the criminals in a civilian court and opened the door to irresponsible accusations of torture.

This failure of leadership and disrespect of the rule of law by President Bush also opened the door to the Supreme Court sticking its nose in the process of detention at Guantanamo. Although the Court has no power to interfere in the waging of war, it was obvious that Bush was overreaching his war powers and holding criminals. In response, the court extended habeas corpus rights to every Guantanamo detainee because it can't tell an enemy combatant from a criminal without a hearing, further complicating the mess.

Sanctimonious European governments share in the responsibility too. European governments sat on the sidelines eating popcorn while publicly attacking the US at every opportunity. In many cases, they privately backed US actions, but they never helped to find alternative solutions.

And of course the radical liberals who are using the war on terror and any other crisis to expand the power of government have exploited this issue for political advantage instead of helping solve it.

Rectifying this legal nightmare won't be easy, and Obama's order to shut down Guantanamo without having an alternative solution just complicates the matter more. Some European governments like Switzerland and Spain are making noises about accepting detainees, but not dangerous detainees. That's a big help. Federal courts in New York and Virginia are considering hearing some Guantanamo cases.

But the handling of Guantanamo has significantly harmed the Constitution's separation of powers. The Judicial Branch has no power to force the Executive Branch to surrender enemy combatants into the court system. Yet George Bush did just that, undermining the Constitution.

What we need right now is a leader to boldly stand up for the Constitution and American interests. Obama should tell the Court it has no power to interfere in the detention of enemy combatants. When the Supreme Court disagrees, Obama can ask the famous question, “How many battalions does the Supreme Court have?” The co-equal Executive Branch must stand up for its Constitutional authority to wage war without Judicial intervention.

At the same time, Obama should clearly delineate enemy combatants from criminals held in Guantanamo. He should work with Congress to set new rules for military tribunals of enemy combatants based on the Nuremberg trials from WWII, not US civilian legal process, and he should try the enemy combatants.

Obama should either try the criminals in US court, turn them over to the appropriate country for trial, or release them. Finally Obama should identify victory conditions in the War on Terror, meet those conditions, then end the war.

But that's not about to happen. Dropping the use of the term enemy combatant didn't change a thing. Obama wants to extend the War on Terror just like he wants to extend the economic crisis so he can enact his radical agenda. Like Bush, Obama wants America involved in an Orwellian perpetual war that grants him war powers. Bush and Obama both believe that crises should be exploited by government to grab power, though they focus power on different agendas.

Obama hasn't milked the detainee issue for all its worth yet, so don't expect any solutions soon. But expect Americans to pay a price.

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Now we have some details of the SEALs rescue of the captain from pirates. The shots were simultaneous from 75'. By all accounts, this was impressive. Now we know the USS Bainbridge had rammed the lifeboat to keep it from drifting to shore. Excellent.

There was no command to fire at that given moment

The articles make it sound like they all fired with no signal between them. That would be outstanding.

Exxon claims US oil demand has peaked. I find that hard to believe. We're going through a temporary lull because of the economy, but I seriously doubt our demand as peaked long-term. The economy will recover despite the best efforts of Barack Obama to keep it down.

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails make money bypassing the music copyright.

How come only Washington D.C. is experiencing an uptick in housing prices? Pharaoh Obama's magic, of course.

Does the First Amendment forbid copyrights?

Mises scholar suggests Mothers Against Drunk Driving make some changes for the safety of all Americans. I strongly agree that the focus on drunk driving instead of dangerous driving has led to many more fatalities than we should tolerate. Whether a driver has been drinking or not is immaterial. All we should care about is if the driver is unsafe, and we should identify a coordination/judgment test that tests that.

What kind of freak would write the headline "Verdict blights Spector's legacy" after a man was convicted of murder? When did a man's musical legacy become more important than the life he took?

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The lifeboat holding the pirates and the US freighter captain is close to shore. This report says Navy Seals escorted the freighter to port, so that means more Seals are on the ships sitting idly by while the lifeboat drifts to shore. Apparently the reason we have the most powerful Navy in history is so it can sit around and talk to pirates. And resupply the pirates. Let's keep the pirates strong so they can continue to threaten the captain. What happened to depriving hostage takers of food and water and whatnot to force them to surrender faster? At least the French know how to deal with pirates. Kill them.

How come we don't hear anything about what Obama's doing during this hostage crisis? If Bush were in the White House, the news would be reporting on what he was doing about these pirates every day, but with Obama in the White House, we get nothing. This is the first time since Obama took office he hasn't been on the news making speeches once or twice a day. Obama is missing in action. Maybe Obama isn't doing anything about it, and is spending his time getting a dog.

The Navy SEALs finally rescued the freighter captain, killing the three remaining pirates after one had surrendered. Hell, yeah! Congratulations to the captain and his family. This is great news for every American.

But who does the FBI think it is considering charges for the remaining pirate? Do they think they're a global police force? This isn't some criminal. This wasn't a crime in America. It was piracy on the high seas, and the captain of the Navy vessel should hold a captain's mast and try this pirate. Somebody better slap the Justice Department and remind them that their jurisdiction ends at the US border. You can bet President Missing in Action Obama will be making a speech now and taking all the credit he can. Needless to say, now that it's all over with he jumped into the story with a statement trying to horn in on some of the glory. According to this article, Obama left a standing order to kill the pirates if the captain was in imminent danger. That order has undoubtedly been policy for hundreds of years. Obama is trying to take credit for something he wasn't even involved in. The only reason Obama would have had to be consulted was if he was holding the Navy back. They should have killed the pirates when the captain tried to escape.

Deaths could escalate violence. If the pirates don't want to die, maybe they should find another line of work. Now the pirates are vowing revenge. Don't you love how these terrorists capture and kill people then vow revenge when their victims fight back? US ships in that area should mount deck guns, arm their sailors and hire a well armed security team which includes a sniper.

Time Warner's attempts to limit bandwidth prompt congressman to consider price controls. So government gives Time Warner local monopolies on cable, and when that goes bad, they try to regulate the internet. It's an insidious game. The solution is to allow free competition, but don't expect government to do that any time soon.

Iran master entire nuclear fuel cycle and can now produce plutonium.

As Barack Obama drags us into greater debt than all previous presidents combined, China slows its financing of our debt.

Gen. Petraeus explains why we need to continue engaging in Afghanistan, but he doesn't explain why it takes more troops to keep al Qaeda from establishing a save haven there. He doesn't mention whether that could be done with fewer troops.

Apparently we have a treaty with Kenya to be the court for pirates off the coast of Somalia. Try the pirate there.

Somali militants fire mortars as US congressman.

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Thanks to our weak response to the pirates, Somali pirates have captured a second US ship. They have no fear of us because we've given them no reason to fear us. That's stupid. The headline on this article no longer calls the tugboat a US boat. Now it's an Italian boat. It's good to know the US is demanding the arrest of the pirates. We can never back off that demand. We should sink any pirate ship that tries to get close to the lifeboat.

Our response to this pirate attack just gets stupider and stupider. Now the lifeboat has drifted to within 20 miles of the Somali coast. The Navy fears it will land and the pirates will escape. As if they're powerless to stop it. What is this crap? Why don't they get between it and the shore? Why haven't the Seals sent these pirates to the bottom of the sea and brought the captain home? Plus, the FBI says the original container ship is a crime scene. A crime scene? As if piracy is now some run of the mill crime to be investigated by the FBI? That's a crock too. We kill and capture pirates, period. The military tries them and hangs them from the highest yard arm, and everybody goes about their business. There's no place for an FBI criminal investigation when dealing with pirates.

Mises's reality tour of Washington DC.

Mises scholar says Obama's patriotic bailout bonds are backed by the taxpayers and the Fed and therefore a repeat of the same mistakes, like Fannie and Freddie, that created this economic mess in the first place.

A person who says that the earth is experiencing global warming is divorced from the reality that the planet has been cooling since 1998, and is therefore insane. Obama's insane science director is considering radical methods to cool our planet. He wants to pollute our planet. Didn't we just clean up a bunch of pollution? Somebody should explain to this guy that the planet has been cooling for 10 years, and if he talks about global warming again, he should be fired and institutionalized. How about planting trees instead of building artificial ones?

A farmer's view of carbon credits.

Aerosols warm the arctic much more than greenhouse gases.

Boortz looks at what's happening with North Korea, Iran and the Somali pirates and determines that Obama is weak. Huh? What exactly did George Bush do to stop North Korea, Iran and the Somali pirates? Nothing. You can't lay this at Obama's feet. This is a failure of leadership by both parties, and it's been going on since Clinton took office.

Hillary Clinton has a good laugh about the predicament of the US captain held by pirates. This woman is slime.

It's always about force with Obama. His Education Sec. proposes sending kids to schools 6 days a week, 11 months a year. I guess government schools aren't destroying kids' futures thoroughly enough or fast enough with just 5 days a week, 9 months a year.

Hawaii residents fix road in 8 days that government claimed it would take 2 years and $4 million to fix, if government ever bothered to get around to it. Do you think they got tax rebates for their trouble?

Brit calls Obama President Pantywaist and a surrender monkey. Then he takes the gloves off.

President Barack Obama has recently completed the most successful foreign policy tour since Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. You name it, he blew it.

How funny. I didn't realize the new NATO troops are all non-combat troops. What a bunch of crap.

I'm glad to see the US put an end to secret prisons, but I don't want to see them shut down. I just don't want them to be secret. Bush spectacularly screwed up how we dealt with terrorists, and Obama is screwing it up more instead of getting it right. We should have the moral clarity to hold enemy combatants openly, but we can only do that if we have a reasonable process for separating criminal detainees from enemy combatants, which we are sorely lacking.

Continuing the government's tradition of absurd secrecy, the Treasury Dept. won't disclose which banks want to give TARP money back and whether or not they have been allowed.

Cleveland to use police helicopters to halt the scourge of skinny dipping.

What in the world is President Obama doing bowing to the Saudi king or any royalty? Reason wonders the same thing.

Government plans to regulate the internet by making it a "right".

The Barbary pirates remind us there's nothing new under the sun.

China is becoming the world's largest car market.

Plano schools consider not docking students' grade for cheating or being late. That'll help.

Plane struck by lightning.

The Washington DC voucher program Democrats just killed saved DC $8 million a year and gave kids a superior education. We can't have that now, can we?

Using facts and figures from around the world, Cato explodes the myth that the recession started in the US by US banks. The culprit?

There is no way the oil-importing economies could have kept humming along with oil prices of $100 a barrel, much less $145. Like nearly every other recession of the postwar period, this one was triggered by a literally unbearable increase in the price of oil.

But Cato doesn't mention that the Fed and other central banks caused that spike in energy prices by dropping interest rates to a ridiculous low level in response to fears of contraction.

Cato presents the competing pressures for more military manpower versus more weapons and predicts nation-building will fall by the wayside. Let's hope so.

Cato book tells the story of how entrepreneurs with very little money, are educating the world's poorest people. Maybe we should try turning teachers from unionized government bureaucrats into teacher-entrepreneurs in America.

Congress as car service company.

Reason advocates limiting the weight of eye-witness testimony because it's invariably flawed.

Charles Krauthammer doesn't like Obama celebrating the decline of America he's helping bring about. But that's exactly what Obama promised in the campaign, and that's exactly what he's delivering. He thinks it's his job to hurt Americans, make us poorer and to humble us because that's what social justice is all about.

Mona Charon calls the six congressional black caucus members who performed like trained dogs on behalf of Fidel Castro useful idiots. Indeed. Democrats love despots. Michelle Malkin calls it the worst propaganda tour since Walter Duranty. The one thing that is funny about this is these supposed freedom loving conservatives who complain about Castro throwing people in jail for political dissent turn right around and call for throwing Americans in jail for doing drugs. The double-standard is disgusting. You don't get to pick and chose when you're for freedom. Either you're for it all the time, or you're not.

Here's a good example of a conservative who would undoubtedly rail against Fidel Castro restricting speech one minute while defending FCC censorship the next.

Obama's Homeland Security Sec. will no longer call terrorists attacks terrorist attacks, but will instead call them man-caused disasters. Obama is a man-caused disaster.

Mark Steyn is not so funny this week talking about piracy and what our inability to deal with it tells us about how civilizion is self-destructing and how every foreign event is a distraction to Obama's plans to destroy America as we know it.

We're taxing ourselves into oblivion.

Game theory analysis shows Geithner's Public-Private Investment Program to purchase toxic assets is flawed. Shocker.

It's nice to see Investor's Daily giving Reagan credit for our 25 year boom, even though that's a little simplistic. Much of the boom was powered by inflationary monetary policy that we're paying for now. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been a more moderate, steady boom that was still continuing.

So the response to North Korea's missile launch is continuing the same old sanctions. I.e. nothing. That Obama is really healing our position in the world.

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Freighter captain recaptured by pirates after diving overboard in escape attempt. Why didn't Navy snipers or deck gunners kill the pirates when he did this? You know the captain expected some cover from the Navy for his escape attempt, and from this report it seems he didn't get it. Surely Navy Seals are on the scene by now. If not, why not? Why are we pussy-footing around with these terrorists instead of killing them? Now 2 more pirate vessels are in the sea nearby. I hope the Navy plans to sink them as soon as they free the captain. To hell with paying ransom for this captain. There's a reason the US supposedly doesn't negotiate with terrorists - if terrorists gain any advantage from capturing or killing Americans, they will do it more often. Kill the pirates.

So the pirates are demanding $2 million ransom. How about a watery grave instead? If you can't see from this quote all that's wrong with America and western civilization, I'll never be able to explain it to you...

"Knowing that the Americans will not destroy this German ship and its foreign crew, they hope they can meet their friends on the lifeboat," said the pirate, who has given reliable information in the past but asked not to be named.

The pirates know we're a bunch of wimps. We have Clinton, Bush, Obama and liberals to thank for that. I say bull****. After we kill the pirates holding the US freighter captain, we should storm the German mothership and send those pirates to a watery grave along with their fellow terrorists.

If we know so much about what these pirates are doing, why aren't we sinking their boats?

Study shows that students receiving school vouchers get a better education than students stuck in government schools. Democrats can't allow that, so they killed the program.

Obama sees glimmers of hope across the economy, but so far none of his stimulus boondoggle has been spent. Once that spending hits, taking more jobs from the productive private sector than it creates in the non-productive government sector, our economy will take another hit.

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Iranian President Ahmadinejad laughs at Obama's desire to talk while he unveils a new plant for producing nuclear fuel. Let's make the Iranians look more reasonable to our allies and more powerful to their enemies by rewarding them with talks. No wonder every Arab country is starting crash programs to build the bomb.

US is negotiating with pirates holding US freighter captain. I thought we didn't negotiate with terrorists. I guess you can talk as long as you don't give up anything. This sounds like an easy negotiation. Let our man go or starve. Pretty soon Navy Seals will be on the scene, at some point they'll be in the water and then it will be over.

I'm unimpressed with this supposed weakness in international law on piracy. People have known how to deal with pirates since our ancestors invented sailing. To say that we've erected an institution that keeps us from dealing with them now is absurd. Natural law tells us any ship can defend itself from any pirate and common sense tells us any nation can sink or capture pirates and try them if there's no local authority or the local authority doesn't police its own waters. Free people and sovereign nations do not have to defer to international aristocrats to protect themselves from pirates.

[The Law of the Sea], in article 105, does permit the seizure of a pirate ship, but article 110 lays down that, in order to establish that a ship is indeed a pirate vessel, the warship - and it may only be a warship - has to send a boat to the suspected ship first and ask for its papers.

What a bunch of baloney. We should put Reapers in the air and sink any pirate ship that threatens another ship off the coast of Somali and charge the ship we saved for the cost of the mission.

Mises scholar says the real estate market hasn't hit bottom yet because commercial property is just starting to collapse. He also says this real estate correction will be worse than the S&L crisis of the 80s.

I think much like the Bush administration was crippled by 9/11, so were the people. 9/11 was so horrendous that Americans couldn't see anything but the external threat of terrorism. We lost what little was left of the American principle of healthy distrust of government. Americans couldn't see that the titanic growth of our own government was a far more significant threat to our way of life than the terrorists could possibly be. But now that Obama has taken over and is attempting to amass more debt than all other presidents combined, the people are finally waking up to the greatest threat America has always faced - our own government. Unfortunately, it's almost too late. We are racing toward an economic crash that will make the Great Depression look like a weekend in Vegas. These tea parties are a tiny first step, but they're not going to be nearly powerful enough, soon enough to stave off this collapse. In order to stave off collapse, Americans must completely reject the aristocrats of the same 2 failed parties who have brought us to the brink of destruction and start electing the only people who honestly and unapologetically stand for freedom and smaller government - libertarians. If we don't, we won't be able to fight terrorism, deal with Iran, deter Russia, out-compete China, afford health care, get an education or fuel our car. No issue facing America is anywhere near as significant as dramatically reducing the size and scope of government.

I plan to go to the Cincinnati Tea Party on 4/15.

Educational essay that's actually an introduction to a book describes how in the modern world people have come to accept that the state is society and that individuals are nothing but replaceable cogs in the machinery of the state. Even in the US, where citizens tell themselves government is limited and subordinate to the individual, we are far closer to a Marxist society than the free country created by the Founding Fathers, and that's the common denominator and most significant factor in all our major problems today. This was written in 1959, and you can see how it's even more valid today.

The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between State and Society, conceptually or institutionally. The State is Society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment, depending on it for sustenance, health, education, communications, and all things coming under the head of "the pursuit of happiness."
...
In the operation of human affairs, despite the fact that lip service is rendered the concept of inherent personal rights, the tendency to call upon the State for the solution of all the problems of life shows how far we have abandoned the doctrine of rights, with its correlative of self-reliance, and have accepted the State as the reality of Society. It is this actual integration, rather than the theory, that marks off the twentieth century from its predecessors.

We've given away the house. We won't admit it to ourselves and as a result our government is on the verge of destroying our country. This paragraph describes how liberals and conservatives both feed this concept of the state controlling our lives:

One indication of how far the integration has gone is the disappearance of any discussion of the State qua State — a discussion that engaged the best minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inadequacies of a particular regime, or its personnel, are under constant attack, but there is no faultfinding with the institution itself. The State is all right, by common agreement, and it would work perfectly if the "right" people were at its helm.

Lesser evils voters and those who hold their nose and vote for the guy their party tells them to fit in here.

It does not occur to most critics of the New Deal that all its deficiencies are inherent in any State, under anybody's guidance, or that when the political establishment garners enough power a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power apparatus is indeed the enemy of Society, that the interests of these institutions are in opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it is brought up, it is dismissed as "old-fashioned," which it is; until the modern era, it was an axiom that the State bears constant watching, that pernicious proclivities are built into it.

Because we won't admit that government itself if the greatest danger to our way of life, we may well have elected that demagogue. Barack Obama thinks its OK for his friends to bomb the US and to be spokesmen for terrorists. He wants to draft Americans into a "civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military. Michelle Obama told us that Barack would force us to work. Even if Obama isn't that demagogue, and lets all hope he's not, the demagogue is coming if we don't start tearing down the government apparatus that threatens us, and he can come from either of the 2 big-government parties. And the people who voted for either of the 2 parties, whose presidential candidates and other than Reagan and a handful of congressional candidates, invariably think the state is more important than the individual, brought us to this point by building the government apparatus that threatens us.

Please, Lord, not another Bush

Not too long ago, Jeb Bush suddenly starting publishing essays, this one on education, calling for federal funded vouchers and school choice, but he still sounds like a central planner. 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..." It sounded to me at the time like he was seeding the ground for a presidential run.

Tonight Jeb Bush is doing his first interview since God knows when on Hannity. Naturally Hannity is going to launch the campaign of the next Bush for president. As sick as I am of seeing and listening to President Obama, my stomach turns worse at thinking about Hannity and Jeb Bush together.

On a personal level, I feel sorry for Jeb. It's not his fault that my stomach turns just thinking about him running for president. But on a political level, he's just another hypocritical Bush who will lie about supporting freedom and free markets while he attacks them with every policy just like a Democrat.

We are almost certainly going to elect a Republican president in four years after all the damage done by the Democrats. About the only thing that could prevent that is a powerful 3rd party run like Perot's that enabled Clinton to win twice.

But please, Lord, not another Bush.

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President Obama is considering radical climate engineering technologies to destroy the world - I mean to fight so-called global warming. The planet is cooling by itself and has been for 10 years. Somebody stop this madman before he kills us all.

Somali pirates hijack ship with 20 Americans on board. The government still hasn't taken my advice about putting predators in the air over that coast to sink any pirate ships. The American crew retook the ship from the pirates. One pirate is captured and others are in the water. Woohoo! That's what free Americans can do when government is not in their way. Some jerk on Foxnews said that the crews are not armed because they want to escalate the situation. That's insane. Armed crews should send these pirates to watery graves. This same jerk said companies shouldn't hire security - the military should take care of if. What a loser. The captain is being held by pirates in a lifeboat. Let's hope the Navy gets there before they reach shore. A US Navy cruiser has reached the scene of the standoff over the captain.

Google shoots back at the AP for its threat to news aggregators. If the aggregators drop AP, they'll have even less revenue.

Now the government is bailing out life insurance companies. More corporate welfare.

Excellent book review and summary of Meltdown which explains the current financial crisis from the Austrian perspective.

Does it strike anybody else odd that members of the congressional black caucus would visit a the main slave holders of a slave state?

Who said:

We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.

The great economic interventionist Herbert Hoover, who's interference in our economy turned a typical recession into a depression which Roosevelt subsequently turned into the Great Depression.

Vermont allows gay marriage. The word "allows" shows what's wrong with this entire debate. Who is government to allow or not allow adults to get married. The institution of marriage belongs to the people, not to government. If government didn't have the power to define marriage, the great majority of Americans would be free to promote the traditional definition of a man and a woman and gays would be free to say they were married. Everybody would be happy, and we could have a good natured, open debate about the institution of marriage that government's use of force prevents.

They showed the new Star Trek film at Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. I'm jealous.

The miracle of free markets is millions of little creativities and exchanges that happen every day, many of which create needs that never existed and over time become the necessities of life. What this essay really observes is that free markets have evolved with man and are as much a part of what it means to be human as any other. "In the final analysis, everything we conceive or perceive is radiant energy proceeding from Creation." Entertaining essay that finds the divine in the free exchange of goods, services and ideas - i.e. in the free market.

The danger is that millions of people, observing progress and human intervention proceeding simultaneously, are tempted to correlate the two and, thus, regard the foolish actions as the cause of the progress. They may fail to see that the progress is in spite of the obstruction. In such situations the destructive forces become so overpowering that whole civilizations decline and fall.

We're living that decline.

David Frum makes the case that in order to overcome the demographic changes in America that favor Democrats, Republicans must give up on Reaganism and become more like Democrats. Bull. Bush the Democrat already tried that, and all we got for it is a huge increase in government and the corresponding reduction in freedom and the most radical leftist president and Congress in history. Freedom never goes stale. It's just that we have yet to have a major candidate who articulated a message of freedom and had realistic policies to reduce government and grow freedom since Reagan.

56 percent of French blue collar workers think it's OK to kidnap your boss. This shows how socialism and big government undermine the rule of law and respect for the law.

AG Holder is suing states that don't register welfare recipients to vote. Federal money by itself is poisonous, but it always comes with even more poisonous strings.

The hurricane forcast is only for 6 storms this year. That means we'll have more.

The Chairman of Citigroup, recipient of $300 billion in taxpayer bailout funds, is tired of people demonizing bankers for the financial crisis. I'm tired of it too because it's just misinformation, but this guy should keep his mouth shut.

Jonah Goldberg says bailing out the UN Human Rights Council is Obama's worst bailout so far.

How funny is it that GM plans to develop this PUMA.

I'm was watching Glenn Beck, and he was talking about foreign intelligence agents here sowing discontent. That's a very real concern. I'm sure ACORN is packed with Russian and other agents. But then the colonel he has on says he looks at every Chinese restaurant as a sleeper cell. That's just nuts. He never claimed it was a joke, and it didn't come across as a joke, though everybody laughed. Pretty much every time I watch Beck, he undermines good points with paranoia or religion and turns me off. We need a rational, reasoned presentation of what's facing America, not paranoia and religious dogma.

What does Obama expect to get out of talks with Iran on its nuclear program? Iran gains from delays and the appearance of reasonableness, let alone any concessions Obama is likely give them, but we have nothing to gain. They know what we want, and they know they can anything from us short of a nuclear bomb if they stop enriching uranium. They don't care. They prefer the bomb because it's the only hope the regime has of staying in power after another 5 years or so.

John Stossel exposes Obama's pre-K scam.

In an essay designed to unite what he calls social and economic conservatives, Ken Blackwell is beginning to grasp that traditional family values are inexorably tied to economic freedom. He couches his essay in conservative terms instead of in an unapologetic and unconditional defense of freedom, but this is the best essay I've ever read from Blackwell, whose essays I haven't read in a while because so many were so bad for so long. Still, he uses the word conservative so many times, it's like he's trying to convince himself and others he's a conservative.

I had no idea that Thomas Sowell had been a liberal then a Marxist through his 20s. Wow. It's good to know that at least some liberals, John Stossel was another, still have open enough minds to grasp that freedom is always the right answer.

Legendary investor who predicted doom for America now says that because Obama has been worse than he expected, circumstances are even more dire than his last prediction and we're on the verge of the worst economic disaster in history. He says American families will owe $800,000 (there's a typo leaving out a zero in the essay) in public debt per family by 2019. The CBO graph of deficits is astounding. Every aristocrat in Washington and every elected office in the US and the world knows this is coming. But they refuse to fix it, and they're going to continue to refuse to fix it until the collapse comes. It's important to remember we did this to ourselves by giving our power away to the aristocrats of both parties, and we can turn it around by taking our power back. Now. We have to reject the 2 parties and start electing libertarians in 2010. To anybody who says they won't vote libertarian because of certain other policies, please explain how a bankrupt and destroyed America can push any policy at all? America will be the failed state soon, like Somalia or Zimbabwe, if we don't start electing people who put dramatically cutting the size and scope of government above all else, and the only people who will do that are libertarians.

Ralph Peters calls Obama's European tour amateur hour.

Obama means well. Just as Jimmy Carter, his policy godfather, meant well. But the road to embassy takeovers and strategic humiliation is paved with good intentions -- coupled with distressing naivete.

I'm not so sure he means well. Boosting Turkey's ongoing Islamic fundamentalist transformation is not in our interest.

Author who predicted the financial crisis says Bernanke is trying to re-bubble the bubble. That's exactly what everybody in government is trying to do, and it's doomed to fail.

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Newt Gingrich compares Obama's foreign policy to Carter's.

Cutting weapons programs in favor of military manpower is one thing. Cutting military spending while escalating the war in Afghanistan we can't win is another. That doesn't make sense. Cutting back on missile defense development is insane.

Democrats, including RINO Olympia Snow, have unveiled their plan to control the internet under the guise of national security, giving the commerce secretary unlimited access to any segment of the internet the president deems critical. This censorship that's bound to accompany this is another piece of the puzzle of how Obama plans to win re-election despite destroying our country.

Obama the windbag.

Poll shows that Obama starts as easily the most divisive and partisan president in modern history, just as those of us who did the work to get to know him before the election knew he would be. Anybody who voted for Obama expecting him to be a moderate should not have voted because they either didn't do the work to know him or were lying to themselves. I hope all those voters spend some time in serious self-reflection and figure out how they were so wrong before voting again.

Study shows the human and financial benefits of decriminalizing drugs in Great Britain.

It looks like my fear that Obama would so deepen and prolong this recession that it would accelerate the looming entitlement crisis and we would run into it before we escaped from the recession has come true. The Social Security pyramid scheme, recently expected to be in the black for 10 more years, is now expected to hit the red as soon as next year. Much of our government funding comes from taking the Social Security surplus to fund the vote buying schemes of the aristocrats. All that's in the so-called trust fund is IOUs. When that crisis hits, this recession is going to look like the roaring 20s.

CVS and Google team up for online medical management system that Obama will either nationalize or destroy so government can monopolize our health care.

Almost 1 in 5 4 year olds is obese. Note to parents. Stop overfeeding your kids and make them go outside and play.

Mises uses squirrel water consumption calculation to show that greenies are alarmists.

The private sector in Spain looses 2.2 jobs for every green job created by government subsidies.

Liberals complained about Bush politicizing the Just Dept. for years, but this corrupt prosecution of Alaska Sen. Stevens shows that any politicization of the Dept. by Bush obviously favored Democrats. How does a judge do a criminal investigation, and where does he get the power to do so? Do judges have power to conduct independent contempt of court investigations? That would make sense.

Cato explains the bipartisan socialist bill called the Serve America Act mistakes subservience to the government with service to other people.

Cato provides the figures proving that the rich are overtaxed.

Fidel Castro asks US Congressmen how he can help. Free your people!

Chinese firm and its manager busted for helping Iran get missile and nuclear weapon technology.

"This case will cut off a major source of supply to Iran and it shows how they are going ahead full steam to get a nuclear bomb."

Obama to make firm YouTube video in response.

Reason analyzes the fiscal irresponsibility of state governments like California begging for a bailout.

It turns out that in practice, cap and trade policies are just corporate welfare in which people pay high prices for energy which line the pockets of energy company stockholders.

Obama's health care plan is likely to put private health insurance companies out of business. That's what it's designed to do, sucking more people into the subsidized and therefore seemingly cheaper but actually more expensive government program until we end up with socialized medicine.

Obama's budget dooms us all to higher taxes.

Plow convoy escorts man to liver transplant. This is an incredible story of good government. Naturally, there were no politicians or bureaucrats involved.

15 minute sterilization for women. Every man in the world is sighing in relief.

The problem with these students who can't handle English only schools is in their home. Clearly some of the parents are not working with them to learn English.

Swedish police can't find children kidnapped by mother for 6 months. Father flies in from Australia, sits outside the mother's parents' house for a week and finds his kids.

Allied commanders made sure only white soldiers liberated Paris with Charles de Gualle. Wow.

$50,000 seems like an awfully low amount for rescue relief in Italy.

Conspiracy theorists will go wild with this study that claims to have found evidence for a high explosive in the World Trade Center debris.

Witnesses say man who died from supposedly natural causes at G-20 was actually killed by falling and hitting his head after a policeman hit him with a baton.

Model wakes up to find her boyfriend having sex with her friend on the airplane seat next to her. Alcohol was involved.

Cyber-spies cracked the US electrical grid.

I bet Al Gore got a good chuckle at the snow we had today.

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Obama's talk about abolishing all nuclear weapons is an irresponsible fantasy that does nothing but distract the public from real issues. That's probably why he brought it up. No nation is going to willingly give up the ultimate weapon of deterrence, including, or maybe especially, the US. I'm sure it makes liberals feel tingly all over to have him talk about it, but it's a lie. Reducing nuclear stockpiles and nuclear proliferation is a different story, and Obama should have stuck to that.

Speaking of which, if we want to stop nuclear proliferation, we have to punish countries for it. But I agree with the WSJ prediction that North Korea will benefit from its missile launch, not pay a price.

Like I said, all the onerous restrictions government attached ex post facto to bailout funds is making companies try to avoid those funds like the plague or give them back. This is a good thing. But President Obama doesn't want to give up his power over those companies, so it's trying to backtrack on all the restrictions. To circumvent the law, Obama is setting up a middleman entity that government gives money to, then that middleman entity gives it to companies, so it's not subject to law. How Bush-like. Government is force, and brute force is dumb. Anybody company which asked for a bailout deserves to live in a hell of their own making. That'll teach other companies not to repeat that mistake. The WSJ agrees that Obama doesn't want TARP money back, and is threatening banks that try to give it back, because he wants to use that leverage to control banks. He's a Marxist. What did you expect?

Every private industry is losing jobs, but government keeps growing. That's what happens when you have a Marxist president.

The WSJ doesn't think the US should join and thereby legitimize the UN Human Rights Council.

Obama pledges to go ahead with missile defense in the Czech Republic, much to the surprise of he Czechs. This is smart even if he only intends it as a bargaining piece, especially after the way the Russians and Iranians made Obama look like a fool for his overtures toward them.

Vermont is the country's most taxing state for individuals.

Why does Barack Obama care if Turkey becomes a member of the EU? Somebody remind him he's president of the US, not the world.

Maybe somebody should tell Obama that Antarctica is a huge continent, and few cruise ship tourists aren't going to affect its environment. This is just exercising power for the sake of exercising power.

Pentagon proposes weapons cuts to reorient military around small engagements instead of big, set-piece wars. It's about time.

Mises explodes Greenspan's excuse, saying that his monetary policy didn't create the housing crisis, China's savings did, with real data and real graphs and also shows that Greenspan's monetary policy in fact create the Chinese "savings glut" he blames.

Dick Morris call the outcome of the G-20 summit, global regulations for all, a repeal of the Declaration of Independence.

Great quotes from random thoughts by Thomas Sowell:

Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover's policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR's policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain's policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent.
...
Barack Obama's favorable reception during his tour in Europe may be the most enthusiastic international acclaim for a democratic government leader since Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938, proclaiming "peace in our time."
...
How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.
...
What does "economic justice" mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?
...
Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. Fascists believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of this government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it and then, when their interventions turn out badly, summon executives from the private sector before Congress and denounce them on nationwide television.

Nice closure with a reference to liberal fascism.

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Since the man-made global warming fraud is the new communism, Obama will take the lead implementing it, making his EU comrades happy. Of course the forecast is for snow tomorrow. Fortunately Senate Democrats, now that they're on the hook if Obama's cap and trade tax passes, are showing signs of blocking it. Do we really need an analysis to tell us this plan is anti-market and anti-consumer? No, but it can't hurt.

Geithner threatens to remove bank executives as a condition for any more government aid. That should keep them from asking.

Obama calls for nuke-free world. Then he clicked his heals three times and said "There's no place like home." What a bunch of baloney. This guys knows how to read the most meaningless speeches to excite his base loony base.

North Korean launch fails to put satellite in space, if that was its intended mission.

A bunch of neo-cons - Democrats who became Republicans to win the Cold War - blame the private sector for the economic downturn and support global financial regulatory operations. That's a move toward one world government. These guys who led the Republican party for the last 8 years are nearly as bad as Democrats and are the reasons why our government is now run by socialists.

If only government can build and maintain roads, why is government so bad at it? Why does it cost so much? Why did Chicago reject KFC's offer to pave for free the potholes government is unwilling or unable to fix?

Obama's auto restructuring teams says GM's plan won't work because GM is doing what Obama wants - focusing on expensive, "green" cars that Americans don't want. Obama's own White House staff is coming down against him.

Only an idiot would think a drivers test should be in anything other than English.

Who cares what this Federal judge says about trying Guantanamo detainees in Federal court? It's not the court's decision. Unfortunately, Bush and Obama are both bad leaders, and this issue is getting even worse, not better.

Just because Tom Daschle was busted for corruption isn't going to stop him from working with Obama on socialized medicine.

Republicans in Alaska are asking for a redo of the election since corrupt Federal prosecutors used a corrupt trial to corrupt the election of corrupt incumbent Sen. Stevens. I hope they don't hold their breath.

Obama picks census director who will fudge the numbers to help Democrats buy more votes.

Of course immigration agents should target employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. That's independent of how many legal immigrants we allow into the country.

Senate Democrat plans to investigate ACORN and Project Vote corruption as well as their ties to Obama. Good for him. ACORN is an organized crime entity, and should be investigated as such.

Michael Barone explains that despite Obama's anti-Bush rhetoric, his foreign policy is very much a continuation of Bush's foreign policy. So is his domestic policy.

Mark Steyn says the G-20's new regulations are an attempt to force the worst of government policies to the global level so people won't be able to escape by going to a freer country.

Let it be said that in recent years in America, the United Kingdom, and certain other countries the “financial sector” grew too big. In The Atlantic, Simon Johnson points out that, between 1973 and 1985, it was responsible for about 16 percent of U.S. corporate profits. By this decade, it was up to 41 percent. That’s higher than healthy, but it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near that high if government didn’t annex so much of your wealth — through everything from income tax to small-business regulation — that it’s become increasingly difficult to improve your lot by working hard, making stuff, and selling it.

Amen.

Newt Gingrich is right when he says that government has created our energy problems, but he's wrong when he claims that a new government energy policy is the solution. We need a free market in energy, not a new energy policy that will certainly become just as destructive and corrupt as the current one.

British city orders firefights to use poles to test smoke alarms because climbing a step ladder is too dangerous for them.

Security cameras catch policemen cutting wires before looting a store.

19 most unhealthy fast food products.

If this guy didn't want to abide by the homeowners restrictions, he shouldn't have signed the contract and bought the house.

Phoenix cops harassing citizens for taking pictures of public buildings.

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North Korea launches rocket. US and allies respond with harsh glares. That'll show 'em.

The US, population 300 million, commits 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. The rest of NATO, the EU population is 500 million, commits 5,000 additional troops. That 5,000 is considered a big deal. Why isn't it obvious to every thinking person that NATO is waste of US resources?

Obama's economic adviser Larry Summers received $5 million last year from a hedge fund and made $2.77 million more speaking to Wall Street firms. Wall Street loves Democrats, and Democrats love Wall Street, and Wall Street got its money's worth for all the tribute it paid to Democrats. The accomplice press just lies and lies about it.

Mises scholar's criticism of the FairTax is basically that it's a tax. It's a shame he can't get past that point and do an analysis of the FairTax versus the Flat Tax versus our current income tax. We can't teleport from where we are today to a system with no taxes. There has to be a path to get to a small government that has no taxes, and we need real proposals to get us there. This criticism doesn't help. The FairTax offers a far bigger lever for libertarians because any president who passed the FairTax would have tremendous political capital because of the tremendous boost to prosperity that would follow passing it to dramatically cut the size and scope of government.

This is an impressive story of an amazing bank owner who saw the entire financial collapse coming, stopped making or buying loans in 2004, sold off assets to get a lot of cash, and is now buying up bargains like crazy. Needless to say he was hassled by regulators for not following the bad behavior they wanted him to follow.

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Cato blasts Geithner's call for higher capitalization and further regulating risk of financial institutions and also shows that the too big to fail mantra is baloney - that's nothing but an excuse used by central planners to grab power. Cato says Geithner's power grab is intended to distract the people from the failures of government regulation. I think it's just the opportunism of a Marxist.

Cato breaks down the policies that turned a recession into the Great Depression and concludes that Obama is repeating many of the same mistakes. But Obama consider them mistakes. He's trying to put the country in a depression because of some misguided sense of social justice that makes him think hurting Americans will right perceived wrongs of the past.

Cato calls the economic basis for Obama's spending plans nonsense. It's good to see Cato starting to step up the rhetoric.

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A year and half after the government sparked a major financial crisis by forcing companies to adhere to the mark-to-market accounting rule, and after government took $9 trillion from taxpayers by force to fight the subsequent crisis, the government eases the mark-to-market accounting rule. Naturally, financial stocks rebound as a result since their balance sheets that were forced to be artificially low immediately improved.

Why do we outsource our foreign policy and sovereignty to the IMF or any other supra-national organization?

Jupiter's great red spot is shrinking over the last 10 years. It's probably global cooling on Jupiter just like on earth since 1998.

In another case of big government creates problems that must be solved by bigger government, bank regulators will make banks hold more capital. But they only reason they hold so little capital is all the moral hazard created by government in the first place. They have the Fed as a lender of last resort, and the FDIC insuring their deposits, and government squashes competition in banks, so the banks have no reason to take care of their money. Naturally, instead of removing the moral hazard, aristocrats make government even more powerful.

Another Bush administration relic of the war on terror falls. 3 suspects captured outside Afghanistan have been held at Bagram Air Force Base for 6 years. Today a judge ruled they have access to US courts. If these people weren't captured on a battlefield or weren't clearly tied to al Qaeda by a military tribunal or weren't planning to attack the US or US forces, and it seems likely they were not since they were outside Afghanistan, then why are we holding them at all? If they were caught committing crimes in another country, they should be in that country's justice system. Right after 9/11 and Congress invoked Bush's war powers, he should have immediately set up rules for the military to distinquish enemy combatants from criminals. If he had done that, we wouldn't have any of these problems now. We don't want judges second-guessing US troops, but at the same time we can't have criminals held as prisoners of war. It was the failure of the Bush administration that put us in this quandry, and Obama is not a leader who can fix it.

Democrats plan to increase energy taxes to fund their socialized medicine plans. But President Obama said nobody in bottom 95 percent of Americans would pay higher taxes? Surely he would never lie.

Radical leftists are excited that America may be poorer in the future. This is what they've wanted all their lives, and as long as Democrats are in power, just like Jimmy Carter, they're going to get it.

New Homeland Security Secretary delaying illegal immigration raids. Democrats love 'em some illegal immigrants, and hope to buy votes from them.

Anybody who thought Obama would do something other than radically expand the size of govenment was willfully ignorant and shouldn't have voted.

Kentucky Fried Chicken is offering to fix the country's potholes for free as long as they can stitch "Re-Freshed by KFC" on the patches. Chicago has rejected the offer because it prefers potholes to advertising. Any mayor who mayor who rejects this offer should immediately be recalled from office.

Obama blames North Dakota flood on global warming. They probably never had a flood up there before evil men starting having good quality of life.

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." This essay shows pretty conclusively that Ben Bernanke is trying to bring about the latter. Obama supports hyperinflation because the collapse of the currency could lead to the Marxist revolution he wants, so he's piling on with fantastic increases in government debt and empowerment of unions. I don't know whether Geithner and Bernanke are fatally conceited idiots or evil Marxists intending to destroy America like Obama. This essay also explains the findamental difference in the definintion of inflation used by the Austrians and the definition used by everybody else, and just understanding that difference leads to an understanding of how and why the Fed creates the regular 5-7 year boom-bust business cycle.

Sounds like Geithner is an evil Marxist too.

Obama's town hall meeting was filled with Obama plants. Shocker. If George Bush had done this, liberals would be outraged, but since it was Obama, it's cool.

This new UN plan ostensibly to fight global warming is really just a cover for the greatest transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations in history.

A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

This has been the real goal of Al Gore and the profits in his church of man-made global warming all along. Of course it's the highest priority of the UN. It's theft on the largest scale in history - an even bigger scam than the Social Security pyramid scheme. Unfortunately, Obama will lead this attempted theft.

The state of New York plans to raise taxes on people earning over $500,000 by 31 percent and 14.5 percent on people making over $250,000. The consequence of this is rich people will move out of New York, impoverishing New York and enriching surrounding, low tax states. How hard is it for liberals to recognize that big government and class warfare inevitably hurts the people? Apparently really hard.

2 jobs will be destroyed for every so-called green job Obama creates. Duh. Renewable energy is more expensive, which means forcing people to use it instead of cheaper energy makes people more poor. The inevitable result is a net loss of jobs. This is not rocket science, and you don't have to be Milton Friedman to understand it.

Government is force, and government schools are force, and therefore stupid. Government school bans all physical contact between students.

Apparently we can thank German Chancellor Angela Merkel for killing the Brown-Obama global new deal. Thank you. Brown's plan wasn't a bunch of tax cuts. What's that all about? If Brown wants to cut taxes, he can just do it. Brown's plan was for $2 trillion in new stimulus spending. Whatever they're calling tax cuts is a smoke screen.

Sea temperature rise from cleaner, less dusty air, not greenhouse gases.

Earth hour didn't cut energy usage in New York or California. Shocker. Our news seems to filled with the obvious and Democrat lies - nothing else.

Cato scholar calls NATO a hollow shell of an organization and a political honor society, points out that like all welfare, NATO enables European countries to take a free ride off of US security forces, and concludes by calling for pulling out. I concur.

Cato analyzes the consequences of Portugal's drug decriminalization (not legalization) program and concludes it's a great success. None of the bad things predicted by the prohibitionists came true, and many of the bad effects of the black market and criminalization were greatly reduced, just like any rational person would expect.

Cato and 100 scientists respectfully smack down Obama's claim that "the facts are clear" on man-made global warming in new newspaper ad with footnotes backup their claims.

China may not be the military boogeyman government officials make it out to be, but calling China's procative threats to a US Navy vessel "a recitation of the sort of ongoing force modernization that any major power would undertake as a matter of course" is nothing but apologizing for China's threatening behavior.

Remember my theory that the person who wins the presidency is the person who women think look best in their underwear? Check out this quote: 'Warner "launched an email inquiry," which revealed that "many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president."' My theory has held true at least since 1960. No wonder Ann Coulter says all our problems can be traced to women getting the vote.

Cato says a politicized one world currency would threaten our prosperity, freedom and sovereignty.

Mainstream support for school choice is growing.

The House passed Obama's budget today. $3.55 trillion. Are you kidding me? No debate? No discussion? No hearings? No news? The Republican alternative was just released yesterday and Pelosi didn't allow any debate on it? I expected a couple month of hearings and debate. Boy was I wrong. At least no Republican voted for it.

Boortz asks the obvious question about the Republicans' alternative budget:

OK ... this is all very special. But the obvious question is "Where the hell were these ideas when you were in charge?" Sorry .. but the Republicans still have not done nearly enough to atone for the mess they created when they controlled every branch of government. Many of the problems we're facing today ... including the problem of a U.S. government now controlled by anti-capitalists ... can be laid at the failures of the Republican party over the past eight years.

These ideas weren't politically expedient when they were in power. Anybody who believes Republicans really support smaller government is as loony as an Obama supporter.

Victor Davis Hanson dissects the beliefs of Obama administration officials and in so-doing paints a stunningly pathetic and profoundly naked picture of the leftist movement in America. In what could be a related story, it makes perfect sense that Barack Obama would fawn over the Queen. I can't understand or stand people who fall over themselves over royalty. But I don't think the gift of an I-Pod, a perfect symbol of the tremendous ingenuity and wealth of the citizens of America, is a bad gift for the ultimate anachronistic elitist in western civilization at all.

So it's bankruptcy for GM after all. After government officials gave it a bunch of taxpayer money, of course. Government should have let GM declare bankruptcy months ago. This process should be 2 months farther along and without taxpayer money having been wasted. And why can't GM go through bankruptcy like any other country? More to point, where does Obama get the power to interfere in GM's bankruptcy? You can bet Obama plans to "control" this bankruptcy and pack the board of directors to protect his union voters. If this really happens, there is a bright side: the American people will see that corporate bankruptcy doesn't destroy the business like the aristocrats and the accomplice press have been implying with this too big to fail nonsense. It just reorganizes the company into profitable organizations and sells off the rest of its assets to be used by profitable organizations. But what is this new, government financed auto company? Is Obama following Hitler's model with Volkswagen?

Even the House majority leader wonders where Obama got the authority to tell GM what to do. Pharaoh Obama gets his authority from his divinity.

Once again, Ann Coulter cuts right to the chase:

Apparently, it's OK for Obama to fire the head of General Motors, but Bush can't fire his own U.S. attorneys.

It is stunning that Democrats, the media and most of the people find nothing wrong with Obama effectively firing the CEO of GM, but the press and Democrats and the media complained about Bush firing political appointees, US Attorneys. Ann brings up the obvious: if handing government money out to organizations means the president can start firing people in that organization, there's a whole lot of firing that needs to be done. How come reporters never ask questions about stuff like this? I mean any reporters.

Israel may yet pull our fat out of the fire by bombing Iran's nuclear program. It's a shame it had to come to this. If liberals had let Bush rally our allies and credibly threaten to bomb their program, Iran most likely would have come to the negotiating table, and no bomb would ever have fallen. But with Obama the Appeaser in power, Israeli bombs are probably the only hope for stopping the Mullahs from getting the bomb.

People wait years for Social Security disability claims hearings. This is what liberals want to do to our health care system.

Obama the Transparent (not in the way he claimed) won't release info on the bailout program.

People are abandoning their boats. I don't feel bad for them.

Obama should be happy that the G-20 agreed to reduce the US role in the world marketplace. Actually, that wouldn't be a bad idea if they were reducing all governments' roles, but they're not. Other governments are increasing power and increasing regulations. And tripling the funding of the IMF? Why should my money be going to the IMF for its foreign policy instead of my elected officials using it for US foreign policy? This is all bad.

Our out of control criminal justice system is targeting sports figures for breaking sports rules. In a related story, government wants to put activists in jail for movies that make candidates look bad under the pretense of campaign finance reform.

Political bias is what's killing newspapers. Newspapers would be declining anyway, but if they didn't have that bias, people would not actively be searching for alternatives, and their decline would be slower.

Obama is spending more money on defense than Bush.

Jury finds in favor of parasite Ward Churchill.

Is anybody surprised that the aristocrats are lying about 90 percent of the guns confiscated from drug gangs in Mexico come from the US? I hope not.

This is is how liberals destroy the places they govern.

The state loses a family every 12 minutes, and the families who are leaving -- young, well-educated high-income earners -- are the people the state desperately needs to rebuild.

This is Atlas Shrugging. Ohio's following Michigan's path, and liberals want to make the entire nation as unlivable as Michigan.

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Republicans roll out alternative budget proposal that spends $4.8 trillion less over the next 10 years. That's a vast improvement. This gives Republicans the opportunity to take the initiative away from Democrats, which would be a wonderful thing. Too bad this apparent fiscal responsibility of Republicans isn't a matter of principle, but only political expediency since Democrats are in power.

The US to defer to the UN on Korea missile launch because the UN is committed to the best interests of the US. What a joke. Obama is too wimpy to have his own foreign policy, so he's outsourcing it to the UN. As long as this missile isn't aimed at the US, I think South Korea and Japan should handle it. I hope the Japanese shoot it down.

US commander in Afghanistan requests 10,000 more troops. That's on top of the 38,000 we already have there and the 21,000 Obama has already ordered to deploy. I have a lot of confidence in Gen. Petraeus, but I don't understand this mission. It appears we're trying to defeat the Taliban, but the Taliban is not our enemy, and we're not going to be able to defeat them as long as they have a huge, lawless safe haven in Pakistan.

Police officer who held NFL player at gunpoint to give him a ticket while the player's mother-in-law was dying in the hospital has resigned. Good riddance. But you can't help but wonder if this power-hungry creep would have been flushed out of the system if his victim had not been famous.

Federal prosecutor ask federal judge to set aside corruption conviction of Alaskan ex-Senator Stevens because the trial prosecutors withheld information relevant to Stevens's defense. Big-government corruption begets even more big-government corruption, and this case also cost Stevens the election. This is the new American way - corrupt prosecutors corrupting the justice system in a trial of a corrupt senator resulting in a corrupt election.

This April Fools joke about Microsoft requesting a bailout isn't nearly as funny as Microsoft actually receiving stimulus money is sad.

US helping UAE develop nuclear energy. I understand the risks, but what's the option? Trying to stop Arab countries from developing nuclear power is doomed to fail. Better to try to create a model of responsible nuclear power development.

Boortz claims Obama took 12 teleprompters with him to London and 1 friend to play basketball. You don' t think he can find somebody among the 500 courtiers he took with him who would play basketball?

Barney Frank's House subcommittee passes out bill that would empower the government to set the salary for every employee of every company that received bailout money. This is to crush those zombie companies, guaranteeing that the taxpayers' money is wasted, then Obama, Frank, Rich, Pelosi and Reid can all blame the private sector and nationalize the companies. This is all part of the radical Democrats plan for Marxist revolution in America.

If Obama was going to fire the head of GM, shouldn't he fire the head of the UAW union too? Of course not, even though I bet GM gave more money to Obama than McCain.

Mark Steyn describes how easily once-free people slip under the spell of government control.

Washington has created a black market in dishwashing liquid in the name of environmentalism.

Where did President Obama get the power to guarantee automobile warranties?

Obama is using this crisis to force his Utopian vision on the US auto industry. How do you think that's going to work out for us? Bow down before the somuch smarter than everybody else combined Obama.

I'm not surprised the New York Times spiked a story about the cozy and potentially illegal relationship between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign during the election.

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”’

That's how those radical leftists at the NYTimes roll.