Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Five reasons why Barney Frank's 1,300 page Wall Street regulation bill is bad for America. Of course it is. By definition, it will restrict opportunities for entrepreneurs, protect Wall Street firms from competition and at the same time restrict them from opportunities for profit. To fund it, government will take money from the people by force. Nothing good can come of it.

TAX AND SPEND:

Remember that $787 billion stimulus boondoggle with all that money for infrastructure? Apparently it wasn't nearly enough. We need more infrastructure spending. Like our streets haven't been torn up enough causing more accidents already. Another day. Another government program. Another attempt to distract us from what Congress is doing to our health care.

56 percent of Americans oppose Obama's stimulus boondoggle II. I hope the other 44 percent don't vote.

Tax cheats Lord Geithner and Charlie Rangel want to overhaul the tax code so they can pay less without getting caught and we can pay more.

Cash for Caulkers is a welfare for homeowners who make politically correct improvements. Every homeowner should make is house more energy efficient to save money, but government interference in that decision can only lead to problems. People will jump all over this seemingly free money. At least it doesn't destroy wealth like cash for clunkers.

GUN CONTROL:

Missouri attempts to join Montana and Tennessee which have nullified the federal government's claim to power to regulate intrastate gun ownership.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Judge Napolitano discusses with Tom Woods, author of Meltdown, how the Fed creates money by adding a zero or two to the bank accounts of favored organizations. Imagine if your bank could legally put a couple zeros on your account. If you have 1,000 in the bank, suddenly you'd have 100,000 without doing anything. Sweet. But imagine if every bank in the country put two zeros behind every account balance of every depositor in the nation. Every American would think they were rich. The would run out and buy stuff. But the only thing that would change is the prices of everything would add two zeros behind their previous price. Stock values would go up by 100x. Prices would go by by 100x. Nothing would change, yet our GDP numbers would go up by 100x. So what? But if only a few people got the extra zeros, those people would profit tremendously and the rest of us would pay higher prices for the same goods before the money trickled down to us. That's inflation. A tax. A transfer of wealth. We pay.

Ron Paul is no longer alone in fighting the Fed, but because of his principles, he'll probably vote against the oppressive, omnibus bill that contains his amendment to audit the Fed.

"Despite his unusual success in advancing the proposal, however, Paul is unlikely to cast a rare "yes" vote for it. That's because it is part of the bill proposing broad new financial regulation, something Paul simply cannot approve.

"That's my tradition," he said. "I won't vote for a bill that's a disaster because 1 or 2 or 5 percent of it is an improvement.""

Ron Paul provides a stark contrast between a representative committed to the principle of limited government and the rest of our aristocrats.

HEALTH CARE:

The WSJ provides an archive of essays on health care oppression.

Democrats trying to lower the age of Medicare recipients. Apparently they didn't get the memo that Medicare is bankrupting the country already. Don't you love when government claims something will be temporary?

The idea that states will opt out of government run health care is ridiculous. Taxpayers in every state will be subsidizing government run health care and they'll want some of their money back. I want to see states nullify the law and protect their citizens from the new taxes.

Harry Reid thinks he has 60 votes and a vote could come next week.

"But if Mr. Reid has his way, he could begin the process of shutting off debate late this week. That would set the stage for another test on the Senate floor early next week that will demonstrate whether he has 60 votes for the bill. Final passage could come late next week."

I told you to expect a big health care vote while Obama is in Copenhagen. This is by design. Obama's the distracter-in-chief. Congress is destroying America.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Apparently a plan to yank worldwide global warming administration from the UN and give it to the world bank, which is controlled by rich nations, threw a big monkey wrench in the Copenhagen one world government conference.

The WSJ provides an archive of essays on climate change.

Charles Krauthammer just discovered that environmentalism is a cover for socialism. Better late than never, I guess.

Just like the CRU, NASA and Jim Hansen refuse to release climate data so scientists can verify their work. So does NOAA. So do all the frauds.

Obama's EPA ruling gives him leverage to negotiate more damage to America in Copenhagen.

How the left has been hijacked by the global warming fraud, focusing all its energy on that instead of working on real problems the left usually resists to our detriment.

"Meanwhile, the police state has made unbelievable advances in the last ten years. We all live today in fear of the state's "security" apparatus. Airports have become living chapters in a dystopian novel. The local police treat us like potential terrorists. Crossing the US border is becoming reminiscent of East Germany. You can't go anywhere without your papers.

And where has the left been while the whole world is being Nazified? Worrying about my barbecue grill out back."

I think Rockwell's assumption is wrong. Leftists are every bit as much lovers of police states as radical right-wingers. They just want leftists to run the police state, not right-wingers. The global warming fraud provided the best opportunity for their twisted ambition to enforce a police state run by leftists all over the world.

Rockwell's assumption about the left being antiwar is also wrong. The left is no more antiwar than the right. The left is anti-right-wing war, not antiwar in general. The don't want to fight wars to stop communists and terrorists because they sympathize with them. The left wanted to send troops into Bosnia. They want to send troops into the Sudan. Leftist leaders like Bill Ayers are extremely violent. You see the violence at every leftist demonstration. There's no such thing as violent people who are antiwar.

One of the lessons from climate gate is that government aristocrats have taken control of the scientific process with government money with the predictable result that scientists have been corrupted into political tools for the aristocrats.

If Copenhagen falls flat, look for the aristocrats to scapegoat Jones and Mann, their scientific careers are already over, then jump on the next bandwagon in support of one world government - global cooling causing famine - which it will.

Record setting cold and snow in the US (the Gore effect - how funny) as the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) kicks off in Copenhagen. It is funny how many times cold and snow have covered the US during these huge global warming propaganda conferences.

"In all, over the three day span from Friday through Sunday, 370 new record low temperatures were set or tied across the United States according to the National Climatic Data Center. Similarly 333 new record low maximums were set or tied over the same period."

List of global warming events coinciding with record cold and snow included.

China and US have a public spat in Copenhagen.

WAR:

Pakistan arrests five Americans apparently looking to join jihad movement. There's five more enemies our policies have created.

POLITICS:

Only 26 percent of Americans think Obama deserved his Nobel Peace Prize. I hope none of them vote.

MISC:

Reporter seems surprised that fast food chains have higher standards for food than the government school monopoly providing lunches to kids.

"McDonald's, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

And the limits Jack in the Box and other big retailers set for certain bacteria in their burgers are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called "spent hens" because they're past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don't pass muster with Colonel Sanders— KFC won't buy them — and they don't pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on "quality considerations." "

This reporter obviously understands neither government nor monopolies.

12 foods for a healthy immune system. Why must the eggs be raw?

Texas football coach Mack Brown gets $5 million a year. He deserves it. He probably brings in $100 million a year, and the university isn't guaranteed anybody else can do that. Just ask Notre Dame.

I don't think it's new news that FDR wanted to invite attack on the US to draw us into WWII, but I hadn't heard that US forces wanted to engage the Japanese fleet at sea before they reached Pearl Harbor but were stopped from doing so by the Pentagon. Frankly, it defies credibility. If our military knew where the Japanese fleet was, nothing, not the president, not the Pentagon, could have stopped Pearl Harbor forces from counter attacking. I didn't know Napolitano had a daily video on Foxnews website. I have a new show to watch.

I didn't know that skull and bones, the Yale secret society in which Bush and Kerry were both members, had been linked to the one world government movement. I'm not endorsing this conspiracy theory, but I wouldn't be surprised either. Conspiracies do exist. Like the great global warming fraud.

Five top publishers unite to take on kindle. This should force prices down and soon.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Great quote from Ludwig von Mises:

""The propensity of our contemporaries to demand authoritarian prohibition as soon as something does not please them, and their readiness to submit to such prohibitions even when what is prohibited is quite agreeable to them shows how deeply ingrained the spirit of servility still remains within them. . . . A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.""

Americans are far too eager to apply government force to others and far to tolerant when government force is used against them.

It's nice to read somebody else make the argument that drunk drivers should not be singled out. All bad drivers should face equal penalties. By making that, we can make our roads safer and put and end to the draconian punishments of people who drink and drive. I still think a video game type test measuring both reflexes and judgment is the best way to objectively measure whether a person who made a mistake in traffic is too dangerous to drive. I disagree with this guy that a cop should let a person dangerously weaving down a road in traffic alone until he crashes.

ECONOMY:

Our credit problems are just beginning.

"Moody's Investors Service cut its ratings on a raft of Dubai government-controlled companies, citing a lack of government support over the emirate's debt obligations. Fitch Ratings downgraded its credit rating on Greece to triple-B-minus from single-A-minus, highlighting "concerns over the medium-term outlook for public finances given the weak credibility of fiscal institutions and the policy framework in Greece."

Adding to the worries, Moody's said the U.S. and Great Britain may test the boundaries of their triple-A sovereign ratings due to deteriorating public finances, although Moody's said it doesn't see an immediate threat to the ratings of any of the 17 nations for which it has a triple-A rating."

Our government has turned us into a beggar nation.

This graph shows that commercial loans are still falling and the rate of decrease hasn't slowed a bit even though government claims we're out of the recession.

Consumer loans have crowded out business loans for 35 years, helping create our consumption driven economy.

TAX AND SPEND:

Instead of using remaining TARP funds for deficit reduction, Obama intends to use it it buy more votes under the guise of stimulating the economy a second time. Apparently the first stimulus didn't do enough damage. I think Obama is finding the most powerful and advanced economy in the world is harder to collapse than he thought.

This number is probably optimistic, but it claims that each job created by Obama's first stimulus boondoogle cost Americans $246,436. Assuming an average job pays $50,000, that means Obama's stimulus boondoggle destroyed about five jobs for every job created.

Nancy Pelosi calls for global tax on financial transactions because companies would move overseas to avoid a US only tax.

"The tax idea, the brainchild of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, would mean that all major financial centers – Asia, the EU, U.S., and U.K. – would all have to pass a similar transaction tax to avoid disadvantaging one country’s stock exchange. This would ensure that no matter where a person wanted to buy stock, they would have to pay the new tax."

This is another step in an ongoing movement by our aristocrats to stop Americans from voting with their feet by leaving the country and taking their money with them. The aristocrats of both parties are turning America into a slave state, and we keep re-electing them to do it. And it's not just America. Western civilization is committing suicide.

Thanks to the government trashing our economy, Social Security will go in the red next year. The tricks government uses to hide this is are pretty amazing.

Funny stimulus boondoggle cartoon.

HEALTH CARE:

Harry Reid compares Republicans to the Democrats who supported slavery, but he doesn't mention that it was Democrats who supported slavery.

Both the Republicans and Democrats want to keep the third party payer system that drives up our health care prices and reduces quality of services.

Comparison of House and Senate bills.

Senate bill includes trigger for public option controlled by government. That's quite the charade. I hope Lieberman and Snowe don't fall for it.

GLOBAL WARMING:

The EPA's declaration that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant threatens to harm business in America. Everything government does harms business in America, and we wonder why jobs are flowing overseas.

"An "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions -- even if Congress doesn't pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected."

Pharoah Obama doesn't need to wait for that pesky legislation process to work to harm us. Thanks to previous Congresses, he can do it all by himself.

"An EPA endangerment finding "could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery," he said, noting that the group supports federal legislation."

Choking off growth is Obama's goal, but with supposed friends like the US Chamber of Commerce supporting tax and trade legislation, who needs enemies? According to the second article:

"This reckless "endangerment finding" is a political ultimatum: The many Democrats wary of levelling huge new costs on their constituents must surrender, or else the EPA's carbon police will inflict even worse consequences.

The gambit is also meant to coerce businesses, on the theory that they'll beg for cap and trade once the command-and-control regulatory pain grows too acute—not to mention the extra bribes in the form of valuable carbon permits that Democrats, since you ask, are happy to dispense. Ms. Jackson appealed to "the science" and waved off any political implications, yet the formal finding was not coincidentally announced at the start of the U.N.'s Copenhagen climate conference (see above)."

It sounds like it worked on the Chamber of Commerce.

Copenhagen stories focus on taking wealth from the people of wealthy nations by force and giving to the governments of poor nations.

I can tell you how much I hope the last sentence of this opening paragraph is true:

"For months, the U.N. climate change summit that began yesterday in Copenhagen has been billed as the world's last best hope to match the scientific consensus on global warming with a policy consensus. But now it turns out there is little of either, and Copenhagen looks like it will go down as one of the more remarkable cases of political hubris in recent memory."

But every time we underestimate the ability of the political crooks around the world to use government force to steal from us, we pay for it.

15,000 year graph of temperature reconstructed from Greenland ice core shows that the current temperature of the earth is well below average for the last 10,000 years. Article also shows that alternating warming and cooling trends since 1490 last on average 27 years, just as we've seen during the last century. This time frame coincides with the duration of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

"Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO₂ in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming—it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years."

Don't tell the global warming frauds.

Here's what the global warming frauds in Copenhagen were hoping for:

"A November 20 report from a U.N. working group outlines what many nations would like to see in a final treaty. Wealthier nations including the United States will make "mandatory contributions" to a "multilateral climate change fund" paid for by the requirement that "developed country parties shall restructure their taxation regime." The report warns: "Delay by developed country parties in implementing their commitments to reduce emissions will increase their climate debt to the developing country parties.""

It's all about stealing from people who created wealth in western countries and giving it to the governments of countries that keep their people from creating wealth. It looks like Mann has corrupted the climate department at Penn State. Since he produce the original fraudulent hockey stick graph, and he's one of the inner circle with the CRU guys and Jim Hansen, I'm not surprised. The IPCC is packed with frauds.

"No less than 59 percent of Americans believe that scientists have faked climate change research and only 22 percent view the U.N. as a reliable source of global warming information, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll."

Physicists are calling this the greatest scientific fraud in their careers.

It looks like Al Gore has flip-flopped again and will speak in Copenhagen. As will Obama. And the Vatican. Everybody is pulling out all the stops to create this one world government of wealth distribution. That's because global warming is too big to fail.

Climategate is the tip of the iceberg.

"U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has urged members of Congress to consider the joint opinion of nearly 32,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who believe humans likely have little or nothing to do with any "global warming." "

I hadn't heard that before.

WAR:

Great analysis of the situation in Afghanistan. I think Obama will bring the troops home before 2012 in hopes of winning a second term.

POLITICS:

Hypothetical Tea Party party more popular than Republicans. But then again, Republicans probably rank below the swine flu in popularity. They deserve it.

LOCAL:

Caterpillar bringing 600 jobs to Clayton because of tax breaks and free land. So why not give everybody the same tax break? What is the city of Clayton doing barring the people from developing this 163 acres of land before now? As always, reducing the burden of government leads to job and wealth creation. This isn't rocket science.

MEDIA:

John Stossel's new show starts Thursday at 8pm on Fox Business Channel.

MISC:

Another great quote:

"If it's true that millions of adult American citizens are incapable of caring for and supporting and educating their own children, incapable of providing their own housing and their own medical care, incapable of paying the full costs of their bus and train and plane fares or the costs of highways and parking spaces for their own cars, incapable of meeting the expenses for light and heat and water and recreational facilities, incapable of operating their own farms or businesses without price support or tariff protection or "urban renewal" or other subsidy, incapable of looking after their own interests in job negotiations without a special grant of monopoly power from government, incapable of providing for themselves in periods of temporary unemployment or in their years of retirement — if it is true that so many American citizens are improvident and irresponsible, incapable of earning their own living and unable to survive except as wards of society — is there any reason why they should be permitted a vote or have any part whatsoever in governing society?

Isn't that the logical next step in the regression from citizenship to serfdom? Or, as one of the "liberal" professors has revealed, "Ours is not a government by the people, but government by government.""

We're near the end of that natural progression.

Boortz lists a number of bizarre beliefs people hold.

Boortz wonders why people are so much more fired up about his comments on Tim Tebow's religious script on his face than health care oppression, the global warming fraud and other minor issues impacting our lives. I wonder too.

Wireless electricity is on the way.

John Stossel on the folly of government interference in the mortgage market.

Feminists hoping Tiger Woods's wife beat him with a golf club. You have to love the peaceful leftists.

Free kibbles

HEALTH CARE:

Harry Reid and his tyrant wannabe Democrats are working toward a consensus as to how to force socialized medicine down the throats of the people. The people are more interested in who will make the NFL playoffs. Five years from now, we'll read the interviews of the tyrant wannabes and the dumbasses more interested in football than their futures who made this happen and they'll all pretend to be shocked that government imposed a new dark age of socialized medicine on us all. I would say check back to this post so I could say I told you so, but government will have wiped out this blog well beforehand.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Despite the irrefutable evidence that the anthropogenic global warming movement is a fraud, Obama has EPA declare human breath, plant food, an essential ingredient for life, CO2, a public threat in an announcement orchestrated to coincide with the Copenhagen summit of climate frauds. Nice performance. Like all successful charlatans, Obama is a masterful showman. I'm sure Mao and Lenin are proud to have Obama continuing their work. Obama has declared that breathing is hazardous to our health, and he will take steps to save us from our breath. I'm sure Obama plans to take breath from the rich and distribute it to the poor and from conservatives to distribute it to liberals. The fraudulent politicians in Copenhagen are pleased.

WAR:

Why stop at zombie pigs when you can hibernate soldiers? I know on the surface this sounds stupid, but where does it end? Our aristocrats use war to advance their own agendas constantly. Suppose we never lost a soldier because of this technique? Obviously never losing a soldier to war would be fabulous, but how would we galvanize the people to stop our aristocrats from killing others? Suppose robots replaced humans in war? How would we stop Obamas and Bushes from killing everybody on the planet? No sane person wants Americans to die, but we don't want other people in other counties to die either. You can't say the same for Bush, Obama, Cheney, or any other aristocrat who uses foreign wars to distract Americans from the cause of freedom.

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

They myth of Sweden as a successful socialist country.

"Indeed, with just a few exceptions, nearly all large Swedish companies were started during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was not only a period of strong growth, but also the time when the foundation for later economic growth was laid.

Another factor which continued Swedish prosperity was the fact that Sweden was able to stay out of both World Wars, and indeed all other wars as well. Sweden is in fact the country with the longest consecutive period of peace, having fought no war since 1809, when Sweden was invaded by Russia, losing Finland to the invader.

Sweden has thus enjoyed 5 more years of peace than Switzerland, which participated in the Napoleonic wars in 1814. As a result of its free market policies, the resourcefulness of its people, and its successful avoidance of war, Sweden had the highest per-capita income growth in the world between 1870 and 1950, by which time Sweden had become one of the world's richest countries, behind only the United States and Switzerland, and Denmark (who have since also fallen behind because of high taxes)."

Momentum is a key factor on economies. We're wealthy today not because of our policies today, but because of the economic freedom our ancestors enjoyed but we do not and the savings they built up but we do not, powering the accumulation of capital that makes the goods we consume today. But because of our lack of economic freedom and lack of savings, we're consuming capital, ensuring a poorer future.

"Even in the early 1950s, Sweden was still one of the freest economies in the world, and government spending relative to GDP was in fact below the American level."

That's an inconvenient fact for the socialists.

ECONOMY:

China is bursting at the seams with entrepreneurs. Because of the burden of government in the US, the US is not. I think the indexes of economic freedom are inaccurate.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Judge Napolitano illustrates how the Fed creates fiat money and the illusion of wealth out of thin air.

EDUCATION:

Government schools are bad for your kids. You don't say.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Sweet summary of many related stories showing the global warming fraud is falling apart before our eyes.

"The piece was inspired by another bravura performance by Professor Ian Plimer, the Aussie geologist who argues that climate change has been going on quite naturally, oblivious of human activity, for the last 4,567 million years."

Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah. I say it all the time, but I prefer, "Climate has been changing for four billion years, and it will continue changing for four billion more." Feel free to use my line. I'm glad to hear at least two scientists are attempting to get the CRU team charged with criminal fraud.

"Their case, quite simply, is that the scientists implicated in Climategate have gained funding and career advancement by twisting data, hiding evidence, and shutting out dissenters by corrupting the peer-review process."

How long have I been saying Al Gore and the other leaders of this movement should be investigated for fraud? Glad to see I'm no longer the only one publicly calling for it. But just because this fraud is unraveling is no reason to quit pressing our congresscrooks. I remember many people proclaiming Obamacare was dead in August and very few of us were saying otherwise.

Excerpts and full summary of climategate from Lord Monckton.

"The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better.
In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss a treaty to inflict an unelected and tyrannical global government on us, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all once-free world markets and to tax and regulate the world’s wealthier nations for its own enrichment: in short, to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to an instant end worldwide, at the stroke of a pen, on the pretext of addressing what is now known to be the non-problem of manmade “global warming”."

That's quite the teaser intro. I didn't realize the hacker had first sent this data to the mainstream media (outlet or outlets not named), and they refused to report on it. How pathetic.

"He had revealed what many had long suspected:

- A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research."

Just as we thought.

"Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent."

Interesting point. That data was paid for by taxpayers. Since scientists never destroy their data, ownership has never been an issue. This could spill out of the scientific community into a general property rights issue. I kind of doubt it because I imagine a grant is just a grant. These scientists didn't work for the government per se, though they were funded by it. But this is more fuel for my prediction that eventually the politicians who were eyeballs deep in this fraud will call for a government takeover of science. This summary is a great read.

Long description of "Mike's nature trick" and the decline (in post 1960 proxy data) it was intended to hide. The primary goal of this fraud was to hide the Medieval warm period, a time from 900 to 1,300 AD when temperatures were warmer than they are today and then make it appear temperatures started rising dramatically after 1960. Article calls this the greatest scientific fraud in history. I'd like to see a comparison to other scientific frauds. There's no doubt there's more at stake than in any other scientific fraud in history.

"As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s UN climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever."

This is the biggest story since the economic collapse or maybe even 9/11, yet the mainstream media continues to ignore it while proclaiming it's more important than the internet and the internet just piggybacks off it.

"After all, the stakes are enormous – perhaps trillions of dollars and unquestionably every American’s personal liberties."

The bias of the mainstream media is making it irrelevant and putting it out of business. Here's why so much is at stake in this fraud:

"And while reconstructions — as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called — can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past.

Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be."

The entire anthropogenic global warming fraud is based on the fraudulent reports from CRU. This is a super explanation and history of how and why this fraud progressed.

Important reminder that we were well aware of rampant fraud in the global warming fraud crowd before this hacker dumped his data. This data provides new info into how the fraud was managed including corruption of the peer review process and the extent it reached. But the computer code is the smoking gun.

"But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it."

That's the effect of poisoned government money on everything it touches.

This article calls Climategate the biggest scientific scandal in a generation. I want to see a list.

"What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
...
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen [of NASA - LIW], whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
...
Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.
...
The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
...
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work."

Nice summary of the importance of the scandal.

Calling Climategate the death blow to climate science is premature, but calling the CRU a criminal cabal sounds right.

"[Director] Jones gave a foretaste of his behavior in 2005. Warwick Hughes asked for the data and method he used for his claim of a 0.6°C temperature rise since the end of the nineteenth century. Jones responded, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” He has stonewalled ever since."

That is not the response of a man of science. It's the response of a politician. Stonewalling is inconsistent with science. Manipulating the peer review process is inconsistent with science. Manipulating, hiding and destroying data is inconsistent with science. It's politics. I hope these guys get prosecuted. At the very least, I hope they never find work doing science again. Anybody who would hire them opens themselves up to concerns of fraud.

"These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion."

More on how significant this is.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

Arguing for jury nullification is barking up the wrong tree. Juries have no incentive to acquit. Individual jurors don't fear that they'll be wrongly arrested, tried and convicted. Nobody does until it happens to them. Especially white jurors. So for a juror who doesn't have that fear, it's in his best interest to convict. If he convicts an innocent man, he loses nothing from his point of view. If he acquits a guilty man, he might be the next victim of crime. As long as people are more afraid of criminals than government, jurors have no incentive to acquit. Our problem is the people lionize government, not that they aren't informed of their power as jurors.

WAR:

Now this is a powerful argument that the war in Afghanistan is illegal based on the war on terror authorization resolution. I want to congratulate this author on taking this issue on head on. Most antiwar activists pretend this authorization doesn't exist. Unfortunately, the authorization is vague enough that you can't conclude the Afghan war is illegal since the authorization includes the text,

"That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

The Taliban harbored al Qaeda, so as likely as it is that Congress did not intend this war resolution to enable long-term nation building in Afghanistan, the sloppily worded text of the resolution did enable an open ended war against the Taliban. Also, Congress has the power to end the war in Afghanistan any time it wants. If Congress thought the war was illegal, it could end it today. Congress controls the purse. Obviously Congress doesn't want to end the war. Bush needed a different authorization for Iraq because Saddam Hussein didn't harbor or aid al Qaeda. I agree with this guy's sentiment, but his argument is flawed. We should end the war in Afghanistan because it's the right thing to do even though it is a legal war. It's funny how people of all ideologies including libertarians try to interpret laws and the Constitution to mean what they wish they meant instead of what they say.

Judge Napolitano makes a bizarrely different argument - he claims that the authorization for the use of military force is not a declaration of war. Unfortunately, he never provides a basis for this distinction. He never explains why he thinks this authorization is not a formal declaration of war. The constitution sets no restrictions on the form of a declaration of war, so on what does Napolitano base his claim?

Here's my email to Napolitano on the subject:

"I think your reasoning on military tribunals in the war on terror is wrong because the authorization for use of military force is a declaration of war.

Here's my reasoning:

The constitution speaks for itself. Any laws including so-called constitutional laws (court decisions) that contradict the constitution are null and void. The constitution grants the power to declare war to Congress. It grants no power to Congress to authorize military force other than declaring war. The constitution puts no requirements of form on a declaration of war, so when Congress authorizes the use of the military against an enemy, it is declaring war.

Based on what you wrote about Ex Parte Quirin, a meaningless decision since the co-equal judicial branch has no power over the executive or legislative branches or war, it seems to agree with me. Since the tools of war cannot be employed without a formal declaration of war, it follows that the authorization for use of military force is a formal declaration of war."

To put it another way, according to the Constitution, an authorization for the use of military force by Congress can't be anything but a declaration of war. To put it another other way, the only power to authorization the use of military force the Constitution grants to Congress is a declaration of war, ipso facto, an authorization for the use of military force by Congress is a declaration of war.

It sounds like those WWII tribunals are the perfect model we should use for all the terrorists, but because Napolitano is wrong about the declaration of war, his conclusions regarding the tribunals are wrong. If Napolitano was right, if this was not a war declared by Congress, then tribunals should be the least of his concerns. If he was right, everybody in the Bush administration who authorized or carried out imprisonment without trials and harsh interrogation techniques would indisputably be criminals. Anybody in the Obama administration continuing those policies or pushing military tribunals would indisputably be criminals too. Maybe this is what the anti-war left is so rabid about.

I don't know when I got in the habit of not capitalizing Constitution. I need to fix that.

I agree with Napolitano about the Cole bombers. Congress had not declared war at the time of the Cole bombing. Actually, I wonder about the jurisdiction in the Cole case. Should those guys be tried in Yemen? Is a warship considered US territory like an embassy or overseas military base? If it is, then they should be tried in federal court. Is a US airplane or truck considered US territory? Where is the line drawn? China sure didn't consider that US spy plane US territory.

"Think about it: If the president could declare war on any person or entity or group simply by calling his pursuit of them a "war," there would be no limit to the government's ability to use the tools of war to achieve its ends. We have a "war" on drugs; can drug dealers be tried before military tribunals? We have a "war" on the Mafia; can mobsters be sent to Gitmo and tried there? The Obama administration has arguably declared "war" on Fox News. Are Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and I and my other colleagues in danger of losing our constitutional rights to a government hostile to our opinions?"

This is a really weak straw man argument. He conveniently ignores the authorization of military force. Neither Congress nor the president can legally declare war on Americans. Treason is a civilian crime. That's not to say that our aristocrats won't wage war on us anyway since they recognize no limits on their power. But this brings up an often overlooked point - without a formal declaration of war (or authorization of military force by any other name), the military cannot legally be employed against drug cartels. We have no legal justification for using the military in the drug war in South America. I wonder where the Coast Guard fits into this. Is it federal law enforcement or military?

"[The Coast Guard] is unique among the military branches in that it has a maritime law enforcement mission (with jurisdiction both domestically and in international waters) and a federal regulatory agency mission as part of its mission set."

That sounds contradictory. I'll have to check my Constitution to see how that's constitutional. Seven uniformed services? I can't find any conclusive links, but a number of articles I've looked at claim that warships are considered the sovereign territory of their home country. That straw man argument settles it for me: even Napolitano isn't immune from allowing wishful thinking to infect his reading of the Constitution.

MISC:

Apdesignco.com and lostpolitics.com are still down. Maybe the government shut down H4P.

Man who discovered HIV reports that a strong immune system can overcome it and recommends nutrition, hygiene and clean water to fight it in Africa. Huh? It's obvious that we've been misinformed about AIDS and HIV. AIDS may turn out to be the second biggest scientific scandal of our generation and for the same reason - it's funded by government money poisoned with the political agenda of aristocrats.

I love this headline from the Onion: Christ turns down 3 year, multi-million dollar deal to coach Notre Dame.

""I love Notre Dame and respect their football legacy, but no matter what you've accomplished before coaching there, once you're a Golden Domer, the expectations, frankly, are unrealistic," said Christ, whose family has been involved with the university since its founding. "I've had people turn on Me before, and it really put Me through hell."

Oh man, that's funny.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Well, well, well. It seems that while the official numbers for November show unemployment falling from 10.2 percent to 10 percent, the country lost jobs. Something's rotten in Denmark. Funny I didn't read that second part in any of the stories about unemployment the other day. Mises scholars suggests that decreasing unemployment now is a sign of re-inflating the bubble that must soon pop, much like happened in the Great Depression.

Major bank failures continue.

Obama's jobs summit distracted the American people from the health care debate for a few days. The charlatan draws the riveted eyes of the press and the people pretending to pull jobs out of his hat, then presto-chango, Congress passes health care, no jobs appear and the people look around wondering what just happened. We need to get over this self-defeating fixation with Congress's virtually powerless distraction tool and focus our attention and efforts on the real power over the domestic agenda in Washington - Congress.

FASCISM:

In the American fascism note of the day, US senators are debating setting the pay of insurance executives as if the constitution grants them that power. If we don't kill this bill, it's the end of the world as we know it. Our congresscrooks have abandoned the last shreds of pretense of having limits on their powers. Defeating some aristocrats who voted for seizing this power after the fact won't matter. Congress will have successfully declared itself tyrant of America and emperor of the world and made the president its strong-man, and it will never acknowledge a limit on its power again.

You don't see Republican aristocrats standing up for the constitution. You don't see them fighting against the fascist mandate. They're just playing the political angle because all they care about is their own power, just like Democrat aristocrats. If Republicans think they're smelling like roses right now, they're sadly mistaken. If you think the next time Republicans gain power they'll undo the damage done by Democrats, please don't vote. We have enough fools blindly pulling levers for Rs and Ds already. Republicans are just going to pile on as soon as they get back in power. King Henry VIII had better morals and recognized more limits on his power than our congresscrooks from either party.

To all those people who complain about the power of the presidency, once again I say you've fallen in Congress's trap. While the people and the press fixate on the flashy showman who's only power is the power of hot air, veto or rubber-stamp, and following Congress's laws, Congress is destroying our lives. The president isn't seizing control over our life and death decisions. Congress is. The president didn't create the Fed, income tax, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Agriculture, Dept. of Energy, the FCC, the FTC, welfare or anything else. Congress did. Congress is our biggest problem. Under single party rule, the president is Congress's tool and enforcer. When the president is a different party than Congress, he's a minor obstacle but still Congress's enforcer. That's why Gingrich's agenda was much more successful than Clinton's. Reporters and pundits have so misinformed the American people about the power structure in Washington that people thought President Obama really had the power to make the legislative process more transparent.

This is what we get for repeatedly voting for the two organized crime parties. Both break the law (read constitution) as a matter of policy, but we elect them anyway then act surprised when they don't follow the constitution. Neither care about the people and our rights. All they care about is seizing more power through the use of force for themselves at our expense. If that isn't organized crime, I don't know what is.

The constitution is an inanimate object. A piece of paper. It cannot vote against unconstitutional legislation. It cannot veto unconstitutional bills. It cannot overturn unconstitutional laws in court. It can't appoint judges who respect it. It cannot impeach aristocrats who ignore it. It cannot refuse to vote for aristocrats who ignore it. People must do those things. Enforcing the constitution is our responsibility and it begins by voting for people who respect it, but we keep voting for Republicans and Democrats instead. We're our own worst enemy.

TAX AND SPEND:

Government should not take money from people by force and give it to artists, scientists or anybody else. The constitution may make it legal, but it's still immoral and damaging to our quality of life. I know many will say that arts improve the quality of our lives, and to the extent that people will pay for them voluntarily, that's true. If we extracted government from our economy including the arts and sciences, the arts and sciences would thrive like they've never thrived before. Because of the damage government interference in our economy does, costing us twice what government spends, even the recipients of government's ill-gotten gains, like the arts and sciences, suffer.

House votes to make death tax permanent. Double taxation is no obstacle to Democrats, and why should it be? They have no limits on their power to confiscate the wealth of others until the wealth runs out.

The government employee union tax eats up a huge amount of state budgets. Unionized government workers destroying California. This is doubly perverse. Government grants unions the power of coercion - the power to force people to join the union against their will - then it turns around and uses that power to negotiate absurd compensation packets with government. As always, government is the culprit because it has all the power, even when it gives that power to unions so unions can use it against government. But in the final analysis that power comes from the people, and the people are ultimately to blame.

"Government employees use various scams to boost their already generous benefits, which include fully paid health care and cost-of-living adjustments. The Sacramento Bee coined the term “chief’s disease,” for example, to refer to the 82 percent (in 2002) of chief’s-level employees at the California Highway Patrol who discovered a disabling injury about one year before retiring. That provides an extra year off work, with pay, and shields 50 percent of their final retirement pay from taxes. Most of these disabilities stem from back pain, knee pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and the like—not from taking bullets from bad guys. The disability numbers soared after CHP disbanded its fraud unit."

I can't help but laugh, and I feel bad about laughing about this stuff because it's so destructive, but it's comical. Our government at every level is a joke, the joke's on us, yet we continue voting for the same two parties who made it into a joke on us, expecting them to fix it. We continue to have some sort of sick reverence for government. It's hysterical. Voters who vote Republican or Democrat are in denial. There is no such thing as good government. Government is power. Power corrupts. Therefore government is corrupt. The level of corruption is proportional to the power and inverse to the accountability of government. Small, accountable government is bad. Big, opaque government is worse. Government at all levels in the US is titanic and fears no accountability which leads to the horrific government we suffer under. Republicans and Democrats are going to destroy America unless we take away their power ASAP.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Requiem for the dollar.

"Ben S. Bernanke doesn't know how lucky he is. Tongue-lashings from Bernie Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont, are one thing. The hangman's noose is another. Section 19 of this country's founding monetary legislation, the Coinage Act of 1792, prescribed the death penalty for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money. Was the massive printing of dollar bills to lift Wall Street (and the rest of us, too) off the rocks last year a kind of fraud? If the U.S. Senate so determines, it may send Mr. Bernanke back home to Princeton. But not even Ron Paul, the Texas Republican sponsor of a bill to subject the Fed to periodic congressional audits, is calling for the Federal Reserve chairman's head."

Yeah, but the American people might. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Bernanke has to go into hiding after the destruction caused by his policies becomes clear. I'll say good riddance.

"There's no business value in financial safety when the government bails out the unsafe."

Moral hazard in a nutshell.

"The Fed would iron out the business cycle, promote full employment, pour oil on the waters of any and every major financial crisis and assure stable prices. In particular, under the intellectual leadership of Mr. Bernanke, the Fed would tolerate no sagging of the price level. It would insist on a decent minimum of inflation. It staked out this position in the face of the economic opening of China and India and the spread of digital technology. To the common-sense observation that these hundreds of millions of willing new hands, and gadgets, might bring down prices at Wal-Mart, the Fed turned a deaf ear. It would save us from "deflation" by generating a sweet taste of inflation (not too much, just enough). And it would perform these feats of macroeconomic management by pushing a single interest rate up or down.

It was implausible enough in the telling and has turned out no better in the doing. Nor is there any mystery why. The Fed's M.O. is price control. It fixes the basic money market interest rate, known as the federal funds rate. To arrive at the proper rate, the monetary mandarins conduct their research, prepare their forecast—and take a wild guess, just like the rest of us."

I really like this essay.

Senator who voted against confirming Bernanke four years ago wonders if some of his "purchases" are illegal.

"As recently as a letter you sent me two weeks ago, you still refuse to admit Fed actions played any role in inflating the housing bubble despite overwhelming evidence and the consensus of economists to the contrary. And in your efforts to keep filling the punch bowl, you cranked up the printing press to buy mortgage securities, Treasury securities, commercial paper, and other assets from Wall Street. Those purchases, by the way, led to some nice profits for the Wall Street banks and dealers who sold them to you, and the G.S.E. purchases seem to be illegal since the Federal Reserve Act only allows the purchase of securities backed by the government."

Where's the investigation into that?

HEALTH CARE:

62 percent of Americans oppose a single payer health care system. Liberals would claim that's a straw man since nobody is proposing a single payer system. Liberals would be wrong. The ultimate goal of the leftists in charge of Congress and the White House is a single payer system. The ultimate goal of the bills currently in Congress is to move America to a single payer system. The American people seemed to be aware of this in August, but Republicans have dropped the ball, and I don't think Americans fear this as much any more.

In an essay deriding the pretense of knowledge of our aristocrats, Walter Williams reminds us how close we are to returning to slavery.

"There is absolutely no moral case, much less constitutional case, for Congress forcibly using one American to serve the purposes of another American, a practice that differs only in degree from slavery, which we all should find morally offensive."

We're sliding down the slope on the return to slavery at an ever accelerating pace.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Sustainability pushers are alarmists too. Energy is a scarce resource, and the best system for allocating scare resources is a system of voluntary exchange. Sure, conserve energy and save money. That's prudent. But don't fear we're going to run out of energy. If the supply of oil gets short, the price will rise until another form of energy becomes cheaper, and as people move to it, it will will become cheaper still. All this will be handled elegantly and efficiently by the marketplace.

"Take, as an example, the transition in the market for interior illumination: tallow candles were replaced by whale-oil lamps, which were replaced by kerosene lamps, which were replaced by incandescent bulbs powered by electricity. There was no social or political pressure needed to accomplish this evolution; there was no "peak whale oil" movement, no kerosene conservationists, no sustainability crusade of yore. All it took was a functional price system, combined with the ever-present entrepreneurial drive for profits under a competitive, free-market order."

Just like that.

Obama changes plans so he can meet other world leaders in Copenhagen to sign a significant deal that would include the US government sending a bunch of our tax dollars to developing countries. Maybe somebody should tell Obama he's supposed to put US interests first. Look for an important health care vote to take place while Obama's in Copenhagen while media distracts the American people. That's how Congress uses its flashy front man tool to distract us while it destroys America.

Denmark rife with CO2 fraud.

"Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries."

Naturally. Using force to impose your will on others always leads to corruption. It can never be any other way. How much you want to bet Al Gore is profiting from this fraud? How sweet would it be to see him rolled up in the investigation?

Rather than face the press and answer questions about his fraud, Al Gore chickens out of attending Copenhagen conference.

"Mr. Gore had to deal with some hard questions at a book signing this past week, and had the readers escorted away rather than discuss Climategate."

But is the CRU fraud the only fraud or is he involved in the fraud in Denmark too? Isn't it funny the climate conference is being held in the capital of the country with all that CO2 fraud? You can't make this stuff up. Earliest snow on record in Houston too. The founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves from eternally witnessing how badly we've screwed up what they fought and died for.

"Last week, Penn State's Michael Mann was placed under investigation after being implicated for his 'trick' in changing old data to make current temperatures look warmer. Unfortunately the old original data was erased, a serious blow to the scientific process. CEI intends to sue NASA Goddard for Climate Change fraud based on 'Freedom of Information'. On Tuesday, The University of East Anglia's Phil Jones was forced to step down as director of the world renown Climate Research Unit due to an investigation of his involvement in the fraud."

I hadn't heard that CRU's director was forced to step down. Fantastic. This scandal isn't going away anytime soon.

The one world government wanabees at the UN haven't given up their hope to use the global warming fraud to achieve their agenda yet. It's their last best hope to take over the world, until the next one comes along.

NASA climate fraud, whose salary we're paying for, compares global warming to slavery and Nazism. With their hopes possibly to be dashed for decades, the alarmists are off the scale. His solution? Worldwide communism, an authoritarian state worse than the Nazis which would enslave the entire world population by controlling every human activity down to breathing. Project much?

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

How the FBI uses paid informants to radicalize then arrest Americans.

WAR:

Pakistani Muslim terrorists kill 37 Muslims in mosque. Apparently mosques are not sacred. You remember the old saying, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."? The terrorists are showing the world what they want us to do to them. We should never hesitate to kill terrorists hiding in mosques. I can't understand a culture where terrorist attacks would erode support for a war against terrorists. Terrorist attacks should increase support for such a war. Yet the terrorists are betting their lives on that strategy and we saw it work in Spain.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iranian government trying to crack down on anti-government Iranians world-wide.

POLITICS:

Sen. Max Baucus, well known for ramming his Baucus health care oppression bill through his senate committee, recommended his girlfriend to be a US prosecutor. It's good to be the king.

Barry Goldwater was a classic liberal except for his interventionist approach to foreign policy. That's a big except.

"[Modern l]iberals believe in concentrated power — in the hands of liberals, the supposedly educated and genteel elite. They believe in concentrating that power as heavily and effectively as possible. They believe in great size of enterprise, whether corporate or political, and have a great and profound disdain for the homely and the local. They think nationally but they also think globally and now even intergalactically. Actually, because they believe in far more authoritarian rule than a lot of conservatives, it probably would be best to say that [modern] liberals lie next to but actually to the right of many conservatives."[1]
...
"Goldwater," Hess recalled in his autobiography, written thirty years after the Arizona senator's tragic presidential campaign, "had very little support from big business.""

Big businesses require big government to protect them from competition to survive, otherwise big corporations would constantly be falling to hungry entrepreneurs. That's why big corporations are always pushing for more regulation of markets to squash the little guys so they can provide lower quality goods and services at higher prices and make more profit. Government is their daddy and their god, feeding them and keeping them alive like pet dinosaurs when natural forces would have killed them. This is why big business heavily favors Democrats in general, contrary to what the media tell us.

Obama's radicalism might be fueling Democrat retirements from Congress.

Leftist complains Obama isn't leftist enough. I guess if Obama isn't teaming up with Ayers and throwing Molotov cocktails at the Pentagon, he's not leftist enough. It goes to show how the leftist movement is driven by hate. These guys aren't rational enough to allow Obama to destroy the US as fast as political reality allows. They want to burn it to the ground now. I find it distasteful to find myself on the same position as leftists on the wars, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

MEDIA:

Chris Mathews apologizes for calling West Point the enemy camp.

MISC:

Great random thoughts from Thomas Sowell:

"Since this is an era when many people are concerned about "fairness" and "social justice," what is your "fair share" of what someone else has worked for?
...
Many colleges claim that they develop "leaders." All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. There are already too many people like that, and they are a menace to everyone else's freedom."

Just great.

"People who are urging us to do things to win the approval of other countries seem to put an excessive value on other country's approval, as distinguished from their respect that we can lose by such bowing to "world opinion." Do the world champion New York Yankees try to curry favor with teams that are also-rans?"

Unfortunately, that analogy is stupid. It's not our job to beat other countries. Thomas Sowell is human.

Also unfortunately, Thomas Sowell tends to be a strong advocate of continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I think he could be persuaded otherwise so I sent him this email:

"We're losing the war in America. Every other conflict pales to insignificance. Our fixation with winning wars overseas is distracting us from recognizing our government is on the verge of conquering us. We defeated al Qaeda in Afghanistan nearly eight years ago. We defeated al Qaeda in Iraq a year ago. It's time to end those wars so we can galvanize conservatives to stop our government from completely conquering us.

It's been a slow process. I often say government began conquering us in earnest in 1913 with the creation of the Fed, the income tax and popular election of senators. Congress has been conquering us in earnest pretty much every year since then with rubber stamps from Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Bush and Obama enabling the worst periods. But because our aristocrats continue to distract us with overseas fiascos, the American people aren't even aware the only war that matters is the one we're on the verge of losing in America.

I'm with you on stopping Iran from developing the bomb. A nuclear bomb going off in America would give government all the incentive it needs to turn America into a slave state. It would be the final nail in the coffin of freedom. But we have to put an end to the distracting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that gain us nothing but are costing us our country."

I hope it moves him. He would be a powerful ally for focusing conservatives on the battle for freedom.

Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

1912 book predicted the world was moving toward the reestablishment of slavery. Of course at that time communism, a policy of enslaving entire nations, was on the rise, so you can see why this makes sense. But we need to recognize, despite the collapse of communist countries, western civilization is still on that same path today, and we're very close to being there.

"The Servile State is not the market economy. It is also not simply socialism. Instead, it is a creation of the State to benefit a class, which is considered free, and for which class the system is perpetuated by force of law. Essentially, it is a State marked by artificial, government-created monopolies. Hayek provides the rise of Nazism as an example of what Belloc warns against. The direction that the United States is heading may well provide another case.

The first area that comes to mind is the healthcare debate. Certain drafts of the bill contain a provision mandating healthcare coverage of a level acceptable to the government. If a person does not purchase such coverage, he is threatened with a fine and possibly jail time for refusal to comply.[5] Here we have positive law compelling a person to work (to pay for his coverage) for the benefit of others; in this case, the benefit is being sold as a way to eliminate free riders and ensure fairness."

Not only that, leftists claim health care is a right. Inherent in that claim is that doctors can be forced to provide health care against their will. That's a form of slavery. It's hard for us to remember that slavery has been the norm for human society for 10s of thousands of years and was only abolished in the last 150. It's hard for us to imagine that we could go backward. But socialism, fascism, communism, the welfare state, and every other government dominated social structure are steps backward toward slavery.

How freedom, i.e. capitalism, lifted the masses out of poverty and government has dragged many back.

ECONOMY:

Unemployment rebounded from 10.2 percent to 10 percent in November. Do you think temp hiring for Christmas season had any impact? Of course not. All credit belongs to Obama and Democrats who are using this as an excuse to buy more votes and do more damage to the economy. Let's have a party.

GUN CONTROL:

How the 14th amendment and the Slaughterhouse precedent impact upcoming McDonald case challenging Chicago's handgun ban.

EDUCATION:

Cato reports that Vermont could save $80 million per year by voucherizing it's education system. What this report fails to take into account is that vouchers are just another form of welfare. Cato should understand that all government money is poisoned. Vouchers are no magic bullet. They work well now because the amount of money spent on this is so little that the amount of poison attached to them is small. If government starts pouring big-time money into vouchers, they will become as poisonous as any other big-time welfare program like government schools.

HEALTH CARE:

Tax increases in the senate health care oppression bill.

UK cancer death rate is 38 percent higher than in the US.

GLOBAL WARMING:

The global cooling alarmism is ramping up. According to this article, catastrophic global cooling happened once in the last 12,000 years, so everybody better panic. Between the Marxists and the dying mainstream media, these self-aggrandizing frauds will say anything. At least global cooling is a real problem that we must adapt to, unlike global warming, which would have made the world a richer, more prosperous place. But look for the same true believers to follow the same proven frauds like Al Gore down this next boondoggle. I wouldn't be surprised to see Gore put out a new propaganda flick about global cooling in the next few years and have it win another oscar and nobody in power note the contradiction.

WAR:

The US commits 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. 25 other NATO members combined commit 7,000 more. NATO is a joke, and a the joke's on us. This welfare program is making the world less safe and making us more poor.

POLITICS:

Republicans introduce the "Geithner Penalty Waiver Act" to insure that all tax cheats get the same privileged treatment as Lord Geithner. I love it.

MEDIA:

The Tigers Woods non-story illustrates one of several reasons why the mainstream media is dying.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

I love this headline: Administration Targets Jobs Puzzle. What puzzle? Government is crushing the life out of our economy. There's no puzzle. It looks like Obama just sent out invitations to union heads and other Obama donors, not job creators. Shocker.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama to spend remaining TARP funds buying votes under the guise of job creation. Somebody tell me how extending unemployment benefits helps people get employed?

HEALTH CARE:

Senate votes to force health insurers to raise prices on other services to pay for mammograms and other preventive screenings. If insurers refuse, government will will invade their offices with armed men, wrestle their officers to the ground, handcuff them, drag them off to little cells and lock them away. All because insurers have the audacity to think that if somebody wants a mammogram or mammogram insurance coverage, they should pay for it like everything else. We've created a monster. We live under the pervasive threat of extreme violence from government 24/7/365 if we don't conform to every order that government makes. And all these orders go against our nature, or they wouldn't exist. Government has created so many of these orders, no individual in America knows them all. That's why we have by far the highest incarceration rate of any so-called civilized nation on earth.

I'm all for Republicans using every parliamentary option available to them to stop this health care fiasco, but I don't think using these tactics "without cause" will help. That's the lazy party's way out and will backfire politically. I'm sure this health care oppression offer the opportunity to employ every single parliamentary maneuver available with cause. Find cause and use it. I'm going to inform Sen. Voinovich of my opinion. It's worked so well so far.

Democrats have played the system masterfully. They learned in August that the American people violently oppose this bill, so they backed off and took it slow so the people's anger would diminish and allow them to pass it. They've overcome every hurdle by quietly using our money to buy the votes necessary to pass each hurdle, and the American people have not risen up like they did in August to stop it. We're nearing our last chance. Our best chance to stop this bill is right now on the Senate floor. Right now is when we need that town hall and tea party anger to flood the Senate. Democrats are counting on the American people becoming complacent, and so far that has worked in their favor. We must not be complacent now. When is the last time you wrote your senator? If it isn't tonight, why not? Do you think you're helping by not contacting him or her? Our political process may be horribly corrupt and our power small, but if we don't exercise it, our power is nothing. If the people at large rise up, even in our corrupt system, our power is irresistible in Washington. We've seen it over and over again. Get your friends and neighbors to call and write. Run ads. Do whatever you can to kill this bill.

Plan B for the public option. If we don't get on the ball, Democrats are going to get everything they want in this health care monstrosity. Nice to know my senator Sherrod Brown is insisting on the public option. That puts him right there with Blagojevich nominee Burris. The time to get out the pitchforks and torches is before this thing gets passed. Afterward, it will be too late. We need a major, and I mean millions of people, anti-health care oppression march on Washington ASAP.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Naturally leftists like Sen. Boxer who have made a career out of this global warming fraud are calling for the prosecution of the hacker who exposed the frauds instead of the prosecution of the frauds. Note to Sen. Boxer: the global warming fraud is the biggest fraud in history. Al Gore makes Bernie Madoff look like a kid stealing lunch money. That's the real crime.

WAR:

This is an ignorant, politically motivated comment from George Will:

"Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan."

Really? It seems to me that even Obama, if he thought the job in Afghanistan was to get out of Afghanistan, would come up with a better plan than sending 30,000 more American troops into Afghanistan for the next 18 months. For example, he could recall the troops immediately, which is what he should do. Instead, Obama is going to get hundreds if not thousands of more Americans and 10s of thousands of Afghans killed for nothing. Al Qaeda is already gone from Afghanistan. We can't make them any more gone. Once we're gone, nothing we have done will stop them from coming back. That will up to the Afghan people. Afghanistan is not Iraq. Trying to create a self-governing state there is futile. The future of Afghanistan is in the hands of the Afghans, not the Americans. All we can do is delay them from controlling their own destiny by killing many of them and them killing many Americans. Will should be embarrassed.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iran releases British sailors who weren't in Britain's navy. That's good to learn. I guess it will be a few more weeks before Iran catches sailors from the British navy. But if you were a civilian British sailor, would you be sailing along the Iranian coast? I can see why Iran checked them out.

MEDIA:

OMG, this is a chilling quote:

""News is a public good," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said. "We should be willing to take action if necessary to preserve the news that is vital to democracy." "

The old "public good" excuse again.

LOCAL:

I have no problem with temporarily housing federal prisoners in the Montgomery County jail while they're being tried here in federal court. I don't like the idea of this as a money maker for the county - nothing good can happen when administrators look to imprisoning people as a source of income. I also have a problem with the federal government having a tremendous criminal code. Criminal justice is supposed to be the purview of the states.

MISC:

This is funny.

I've basically ignored this Tiger Woods story, only catching snippets on TV before I turned the channel. Top athlete has multiple affairs is the second oldest dog bites man story in history and not worth a second of anybody's time. But the following headline caught my attention because it told me something about Tiger than I wouldn't have expected - he's STOOPID! Tiger Woods Sex Text Messages... Sorry Tiger. If you sext the girls you're having affairs with, you surrender any hope for privacy. Quit apologizing you two-faced bastard. You're not sorry you had the affairs. You're only sorry you got caught, just like the rest of them.

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

GM CEO resigns.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The creator of bubbles wants power to fight creation of bubbles. Easily done. Stop creating money out of thin air.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Australian Senate rejects global warming legislation for a second time under global warming fraud supporting president. Let's hope our Senate does as well.

Global warming propaganda masquerading as science, like the global cooling propaganda masquerading as science before it, threatens to make people stop paying attention to scientists. This is a pervasive phenomena. The more government funds science, the more phony science rises to the top, and eventually the people will just stop listening. In fact, I think that's happened to a large extent. People only listen when the media propaganda machine really ratchets up the alarmism like they did for the global warming fraud.

LOCAL:

Government has had I-75 between Dayton and Cincinnati dangerously under construction since the dawn of time. The result? Left lane closed because of high water. How pathetic.

Xenia man found not guilty of rape charges. That's practically unheard of in today's outrageously prosecutor-biased justice system. Not guilty after only three hours. That's amazing. This girl must have been a the worst liar in the world.

"Magnuson’s attorney, Jay Adams, said prosecutors had no evidence except for the girl’s accusations. “Anyone can make an allegation against anyone,” Adams said. “It’s a scary prospect.”"

That's right. Women can and do use the state to attack men and almost always succeed in convicting him. That's the justice system we made. Prosecutors are elected and promoted on convictions, not justice, and they know that having a woman accuse a man of rape, no matter how bogus the charges, is almost always an easy conviction. The Duke non-rape case is illustrated just how common this is. Fortunately those students were high profile and had money so they managed to avoid being railroaded. Most don't.

MISC:

How freedom and a system of voluntary, cooperative exchange leads to a moral and virtuous society.

"For each of us social cooperation is of course not the ultimate end but a means … But it is a means so central, so universal, so indispensable to the realization of practically all our other ends, that there is little harm in regarding it as an end in itself, and even in treating it as if it were the goal of ethics. In fact, precisely because none of us knows exactly what would give most satisfaction or happiness to others, the best test of our actions or rules of action is the extent to which they promote a social cooperation that best enables each of us to pursue his own ends. Without social cooperation modern man could not achieve the barest fraction of the ends and satisfactions that he has achieved with it. The very subsistence of the immense majority of us depends upon it."

But when government limits the power of voluntary exchange with bans, regulations and mandates, and when government takes money from people by force and gives it to others, it undermines the morality and virtue that freedom re-enforces.

One of many good points: in a society based on voluntary exchange, even the most selfish, greedy, narcissistic and self-serving individuals must win the voluntary cooperation of others to satisfy their desires. The system provides a check on their worst impulses. In a system dominated by the use of force - government - like in America, these worst of all people become the most powerful people in the land - professional politicians - and use force against others to expand their power and satisfy their desires. The system empowers and rewards their worst impulses. This is why you always see moral breakdown in cultures dominated by centralized power. Rome is just the most well known example. The Greeks, Chinese, French, English, Roman Catholic Church, and more all experienced the same inevitable moral decay from all-powerful government. We see it in America today.

Note to Glenn Beck: the breakdown of morals in America isn't the cause of our problems - it's the inevitable symptom of our root problem - big government. You can't just convince Americans to be more moral to fix our problems. That's like trying to heal plague by putting band-aids on the sores. You have to fix the root problem - big government - then morality will follow naturally. Freedom produces a moral society, not vice-versa. Remember the Pilgrims' attempt at communism?

How government has corrupted our way of looking at our world.

"It may be that wary beasts of the forest come around to accepting the hunter's trap as a necessary concomitant of foraging for food. At any rate, the presumably rational human animal has become so inured to political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a living without them; in all his economic calculations his first consideration is, what is the law in the matter? Or, more likely, how can I make use of the law to improve my lot in life? This may be described as a conditioned reflex. It hardly occurs to us that we might do better operating under our own steam, within the limits put upon us by nature, and without political restraints, controls, or subventions. It never enters our minds that these interventionary measures are placed in our path, like the trap, for purposes diametrically opposed to our search for a better living. We automatically accept them as necessary to that purpose."

We don't even know what freedom looks like any more. Because freedom is so alien to us, we can't imagine what it would be like. For 100 years we've been brainwashed into thinking that government provides order because freedom is chaotic. The exact opposite is true.

"Since the beginning of political institutions, there have been attempts to fix wages, control prices, and create capital, all resulting in failure. Such undertakings must fail because the only competence of politics is in compelling men to do what they do not want to do or to refrain from doing what they are inclined to do, and the laws of economics do not come within that scope. They are impervious to coercion. Wages and prices and capital accumulations have laws of their own, laws which are beyond the purview of the policeman.
The assumption that economics is subservient to politics stems from a logical fallacy. Since the State (the machinery of politics) can and does control human behavior, and since men are always engaged in the making of a living, in which the laws of economics operate, it seems to follow that in controlling men the State can also bend these laws to its will. The reasoning is erroneous because it overlooks consequences."

I like this excerpt. We often forget that the laws of economics are laws of nature. Just as government can't change the law of gravity, it can't change the law of supply of demand either. Using force to manipulate supply and demand is guaranteed to create a harmful reaction just as legislating that people who walk off cliffs need not fear gravity would. Fortunately, the people understand the folly of the latter but not the former.

"In 1913 came the amendment that completely unshackled the American State, for with the revenues derived from unlimited income taxation it could henceforth make unlimited forays into the economy of the people. The Sixteenth Amendment not only violated the right of the individual to the product of his efforts, the essential ingredient of freedom, but it also gave the American State the means to become the nation's biggest consumer, employer, banker, manufacturer, and owner of capital. There is now no phase of economic life in which the State is not a factor, there is no enterprise or occupation free of its intervention."

Thanks Democrats and Republicans.

"The metamorphosis of the American State from an apparently harmless establishment to an interventionary machine as powerful as that of Rome at its height took place within a century and a half; the historians estimate that the gestation of the greatest State of antiquity covered four centuries; we travel faster these days. When the grandeur of Rome was at its grandest, the principal preoccupation of the State was the confiscation of the wealth produced by its citizens and subjects; the confiscation was legally formalized, as it is today, and even though it was not sugar-coated with moralisms or ideologically rationalized, some features of modern welfarism were put into practice. Rome had its make-work programs, its gratuities to the unemployed, and its subsidies to industry. These things are necessary to make confiscation palatable and possible.
To the Romans of the times, this order of things probably seemed as normal and proper as it does today. The living are condemned to live in the present, under the prevailing conditions, and their preoccupation with those conditions makes any assessment of the historic trend both difficult and academic. The Romans hardly knew or cared about the "decline" in which they were living and certainly did not worry about the "fall" to which their world was riding. It is only from the vantage point of history, when it is possible to sift the evidence and find a cause-and-effect relationship, that a meaningful estimate of what was happening can be made."

Lust for power trumps learning from history.

The three myths about trash."Holding all of America's garbage for the next one hundred years would require a space only 255 feet high or deep and 10 miles on a side. Landfills welcome the business. Forty percent of what we recycle ends up there anyway. We are not running out of landfill space.
...
Overall, curbside recycling's costs run between 35 percent and 55 percent more than other recycling methods, because it uses huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Recycling itself uses three times more resources than does depositing waste in landfills.
...

Recycling is a long-practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed, voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. So yes, people do recycle even when they are not forced to do so.

However, forcing people to recycle makes society worse off. Mandated recycling exists mainly because there is plenty of money to be made by labeling products as "green" or "recycled" to get municipal and federal grants.

"

Free kibbles

WAR:

Obama to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and declaring we'll leave in 18 months, if conditions permit. What kind of meaningless crap is that? He's obviously trying to buy time with his leftist base to get him through next year's midterm elections. I'm sure they'll see through it though, and at the same time that statement alienates our allies and conservatives. Obama is trying to please everybody and by doing so he's angering everybody. Expect our allies to begin pulling out soon and leave Americans to bleed alone thanks to that stupid comment. It's hard to see how Obama could have gotten this any more wrong.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iran captures five British sailors to use as propaganda tools again. Whoever runs the British Navy should be fired. How many times must this happen before they figure out how to protect their sailors? It's obvious the British Navy doesn't consider this a threat. I sure hope the Mullahs don't execute them.