Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Nothing good can come from a new US government cyber-strategy. They'll act like it's all about keeping the internet free, but in fact it will be about controlling it and stifling speech. The only way to keep it free is keep government away from it.

STATES RIGHTS:

I once proposed the idea that 1/3 of states could force the repeal of a federal law. I picked 1/3 because it takes 75 percent of the states to change the Constitution. Two-thirds couldn't do it. Somebody else has proposed 2/3 of the states could repeal a federal law. That would be better than nothing, but it would almost never happen even in the unlikely case the amendment passed.

TAX AND SPEND:

Mark Steyn is back in form with this attack on government spending.

"So under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day, the United States government spends $188 million it doesn't have, $130 million of which is "borrowed" from itself. There's nobody else out there."

"Sure, Congress can vote to raise the debt ceiling — just as you and your spouse can reach a bipartisan agreement on raising your own debt ceiling. Go on, try it: Hold a vote in your rec room, come up with a number and then let MasterCard know what you've decided on."

And it gets worse.

"In the real world, debt ceilings are determined by the lenders, not the borrowers. In March, Pimco (which manages the world's largest mutual fund) calculated that 70% of U.S. Treasury debt is being bought by the Federal Reserve."

That would be the end of most essays, but that's only the introduction. This is a full-throated attack on Romney and Romney care.

"It suggests that our institutions are incapable of course correction. It reminds us that Republicans are either easily suckered or too eager to be bipartisan figleafs in embarrassing kindergarten kabuki. It confirms that "technocracy" in politics is a synonym for "more" — more government, more spending, more laws, more bureaucrats, more regulations, more paperwork, more of what's killing this once great republic every hour of every day."

Buzzzz. Wrong answer. It reminds us that Republicans are sociopathic, or psychopathic, thieves and murders just like Democrats. Sorry. Thanks for playing.

High taxes chasing young people out of New York City. And Ohio especially Dayton. Want to take bets on whether government will voluntarily cut taxes to stop this problem?

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The establishment is scared of bitcoin. They're scared of money they can't control.

EDUCATION:

Teacher claims that education reform is as bad or worse than the holocaust. You can't make this stuff up. We're paying for this teacher to teach that insanity to our children. This is what happens when you allow the most successful criminal gang in history to take over the schools. What would have been normally reasonable people are corrupted into imbeciles.

HEALTH CARE:

Gingrich supports his own version of Obamacare and the individual mandate. Has this guy been on another planet for the last year and half? He must be looking for an excuse to lose.

Boortz reports:

"The Obama administration approved 204 new waivers to ObamaCare over the past month, bringing the total to 1,372."

Odds are you didn't get one because you don't have the political clout to escape this oppression.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

A former global warming true believer, a scientist who worked for the government, saw the models and promoted the fraud, has realized the whole thing is a scam.

"We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!"

We're seeing more and more of these converts all the time.

Only a fraud would say something like this:

"People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful."

If I write a model showing I'm rich, observations to the contrary need not apply. You can't make this stuff up.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Kentucky Supreme Court piles on Indiana Supreme Court in destroying the Fourth Amendment. Government's assault on the freedom that enabled Americans to create the greatest nation in history continues.

POLITICS:

Just a few weeks ago the head of the IMF, previously expected to run against Sarkozy to be president of France, said he was vulnerable to a honey-pot scheme. Wow.

I'm disappointed in Ron Paul's desire to "work with" the psychopathic arch-criminals in Congress and to prioritize cutting the empire before the welfare state as if the Constitution prioritizes one over the other. The president takes an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic, and that means like Jefferson he should nullify illegal wars and illegal domestic programs both immediately, Congress and the Courts be damned. Maybe this is a political decision, but if so, I think it's a mistake. I think the American people would overwhelming elect a president who would do his constitutional duty to nullify the unconstitutional wars, welfare state, and regulatory state without regard to Congress or the Courts. I think this position would win an unprecedented majority, and I wish Paul would adopt it. But this won't keep me from voting for Paul because every vote helps increase the audience for his ideas.

MEDIA:

For the first two years of his presidency, Obama enjoyed a massive majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The only reason any program he advocated failed was because his programs divided is own party. Yet the press never reported how divisive he was of his own party. But now that Republicans control the House and only the House, you read about the divisions in the Republican party every day. It's a crock.

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ECONOMY:

Six fundamental errors of modern macroeconomic thought. This is an excellent criticism of the economics underlying the failed policies of Obama and Bernanke.

POLICE STATE:

DHS using Customs to target people it doesn't like since Customs requires no warrants.

UAE hires former head of Blackwater to build a foreign legion to crack down on protesters. I guess UAE forces weren't keen on killing their neighbors.

WAR:

After killing bin Laden, president's approval rating shoots up to 60. Assassinating people is an easy way to gain approval from the American people, unfortunately.

Great description of the futility of waging a hot war on terror:

"It's the perfect self-perpetuating cycle:  (1) They hate us and want to attack us because we're over there; therefore, (2) we have to stay and proliferate ourselves because they hate us and want to attack us; (3) our staying and proliferating ourselves makes them hate us and want to attack us more; therefore, (4) we can never leave, because of how much they hate us and want to attack us.  The beauty of this War on Terror -- and, as the last two weeks have demonstrated, War is the bipartisan consensus for what we are and should be doing to address Terrorism -- is that it forever sustains its own ostensible cause."

Every innocent US troops kill, and they kill a bunch, creates more enemies.

POLITICS:

In another reminder that politicians aren't like us, that the worst of the worst rise to the top of government, the head of the IMF was arrested for sexual assault. He fled the room so fast after the housekeeper allegedly escaped from him, he forgot his cell phone, and he immediately boarded a flight for France. Police did not handcuff him because he's a member of the ruling class. It's possible this is a honey trap.

MEDIA:

Isn't it funny how every Republican has to deny being a racist, but no Democrat does?

LOCAL:

Police make excuse for the pursuit that caused the death of a Sheriff's deputy, calling pursuits a necessary evil. Baloney. Nobody's life was in danger over a burned out tail light. When police decide to initiate a violent confrontation through pursuit, they create tremendous potential for property damage, injury and death. In this case, that potential was fulfilled with the tragic, avoidable death of the deputy. It's never worth it to kill somebody to issue a ticket. It's nice to see the article present multiple viewpoints.

I told RTA to stop using stolen funds and privatize everything.

Free kibbles

STATES RIGHT:

Texas House passes bill to make TSA groping illegal. Let's see if it becomes law.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

As I suspected, housing is the factor making the CPI look better than it really is.

"Also of interest in the April numbers is that if you subtract housing, which makes up over 40% of the weight of the CPI, then prices increased 4.2 percent — twice Bernanke’s measure of stability."

This is a fraud. House payments in general don't change. And it makes no sense to include rent in the general CPI because many people don't rent. This is another example of how the government manipulates statistics to make itself look better.

"This touches upon what is one of the less recognized features of current inflation trends:  the regressive nature of these prices increases.  If you rent, then you’ve seen costs increase more than if you own.  If you mostly eat at home, then you’ve seen prices increase more than if you dine out a lot.  If you have a lot of leisure time, the you’ve gained by the decrease in reaction prices.  While I don’t think one’s position on inflation should be driven purely by distributional concerns, the fact that working middle-income households have been hit harder by recent inflation trends than higher-income households should cut against the claims that inflation is somehow good for the poor or working class."

I don't know why anybody would have had that idea in the first place.

HEALTH CARE:

Where I have heard this before?

"If “Mandate Mitt” once again clings to his untenable position that RomneyCare is good but ObamaCare is bad, he will reinforce the perception that he has no principles and will say anything to get elected."

That's exactly what I wrote a few days ago. That's exactly what he did.

"If Republicans pick Romney as their standard-bearer, they will be choosing someone who, as the Wall Street Journal editorializes, is either a leftist on health care, too clueless to realize the Left played him for a fool, or so unprincipled that he doesn’t care.  The Obama campaign would like nothing more.  The attack ads write themselves.  Romney would become a laughingstock — if he isn’t already — and would drag the ObamaCare-repeal effort down with him."

I don't think Romney has a chance.

Vermont to implement a single-payer health care system. Yikes.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

This article presents a phony debate: pay taxes on gas or by the mile. This isn't an either-or situation. They'll never abolish gas taxes. They just want to add a mileage tax.

Article claims Obama will allow more drilling for oil. I'm skeptical. I bet this was just talk and there will be no significant change in policy.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Ohio government pushing people onto heroin. As always, the government non-solution to the government-created problem is more force.

WAR:

On the sudden declaration that Pakistan should be the new target in the war on terror:

"Now that bin Laden is dead, and the vast intelligence cache scooped up by the raiders effectively dismantles al-Qaeda as an effective international fighting force, the US government is desperately scrambling to find a replacement – a new bogeyman who will scare the American people into going along with the War Party’s plans."

God forbid we actually have peace.

Now we get another story of bin Laden's execution.

"In the main building, no shots were fired even though the occupants had access to a stash of weapons.
The first glimpse of the most wanted man in the world came when Bin Laden emerged onto a third-floor landing dressed in a tan robe and white undershirt.
Navy SEALs fired at him, but missed, and then chased him into his bedroom.
The first commando through the door was met by Bin Laden's daughters, and he pulled them aside.
A second SEAL was then rushed by the terror group leader's wife, who either ran toward him or was pushed from behind, and he shoved her to one side before shooting Bin Laden in the chest.
A third SEAL entered and shot him in the head."

And apparently all this was captured on video. I wonder how long it will be before we get another new version.

Now the government fears the identities of Osama bin Laden's killers will be revealed, endangering them. It's practically a certainty their identities will be revealed. Journalists want to make them celebrities so they can make a lot of money. The administration was stupid for identifying the team.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

Milton Friedman explained that illegal Mexican immigrants were good because they couldn't receive welfare.

POLITICS:

Because Ron Paul supports freedom including freedom of association, he would not have voted for the Civil Rights Act.

The government always pretends it protects our privacy from companies. Ha.

"Current law doesn't require those Internet service providers to "retain any data for any particular length of time," although some already do, said Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ's Criminal Division. And many wireless companies — which must collect some data — also "do not retain records that would enable law enforcement to identify a suspect's smartphone based on the IP address collected by websites the suspect visited," he noted in prepared testimony.That's why Weinstein urged the Senate Judiciary's Privacy, Technology and the Law subcommittee on Tuesday to consider data-retention legislation as it weighs new privacy efforts in the digital age. The top DOJ official said such a congressional fix would boost the agency's ability to investigate privacy breaches, prosecute other digital crimes and ferret out abuses in the offline world."

With friends like that...

Huckabee says he's not running for president.

MISC:

Security bunkers.

Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

The government is finally admitting Social Security and Medicare are in worse shape than it previously admitted. But they're even in worse shape than that. Social Security went into the red last year, and there is no money in any trust fund. Congress raided that and left behind a bunch of IOUs. It's already being subsidized from the general fund.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bernanke keeps saying he wants inflation. This chart shows he's produced it. But I think the American people feel it much more acutely than this chart shows. I don't know what is in the CPI that is pulling the numbers down. I bet it's housing prices, like people buy houses every couple of weeks. Nope, but it does include rent which is probably falling as well.

We're reached the limits of the Fed's power to inflate the economy. Despite everything its done, the economy is heading into a double dip while suffering inflation.

The Fed's escape plan, the ability to raise rates, is no longer available.

"The Fed could announce a federal funds target of 3% but the tsunami of excess reserves now out there swamps any conceivable demand, so the Fed funds rate would be guaranteed to remain stuck at zero. The target would be meaningless."

Oops. So even if Bernanke wanted to raise rates, he couldn't.

"Now, it would be possible for the Fed to raise the federal-funds rate by way of paying the banks significantly higher rates on their reserves than the current 0.25 percent. But such an action would cause banks to cease lending to the public, which would create a recession. Therefore, the Fed cannot raise rates without causing a recession."

But the double-dip is happening anyway. And we have inflation to boot. Bernanke claims these rising prices are the result of economic growth, new production, but that's impossible.

"Therefore, by definition, if emerging markets are truly growing quickly, they are creating new goods and services at a very fast rate; they are producing more commodities and other goods. Their demand for purchasing commodities is being enabled (i.e., paid for) by those other recently produced goods that are given in exchange for commodities, and whose creation lowers both domestic and international prices. And if the United States (and other Western economies) were truly growing as well, it, too, would be producing more goods, causing prices to decline. All of this increased production would cause all goods — including commodities — to fall in price, not to rise."

Another Bernanke lie exposed.

"Consider just the savings effect of printing money. People have to save for their retirement because they have to have money to live on when they're no longer working. Their current savings will not support them in the future, so they must save more, especially because prices will be higher. Suppose that today it costs a 40-year-old $45,000 a year to live. With inflation of 3 percent per year, it will cost her over $94,000 a year to live when she retires at age 65. Thus, she must save heavily in order to have an amount of savings large enough to live off each year, and still have it grow for future years of retirement (say, into her 90s, given current life expectancies) at a rate faster than she is drawing down on it. A very high growth rate is needed, especially considering that she will be taxed on all her gains.But consider an alternative scenario in which no money was printed, and that the rate of production increased at 3 percent per year. In this case, upon retirement, the living that used to cost the woman $45,000 would now cost just over $21,000. And by age 95, it would cost less than $8,500 per year — in real terms, and with nothing taxed! In that case, not only would workers not have to race against the inflation clock before and during retirement, but whatever savings they had would buy more each year."

That simple example shows how damaging inflation is to people who don't die young.

HEALTH CARE:

EU bans sale of unlicensed herbal remedies that have been used for centuries.

POLICE STATE:

Indiana Supreme Court rules mundane citizens have no right to resist unlawful entry of their home by police. The justices explicitly white-wash the Fourth Amendment:

"“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” wrote Justice Steven David. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”"

Bend over and take it.

WAR:

After weeks of targeting Qaddafi with air strikes, the archbishop in Tripoli claims he has been wounded and fled Tripoli. This article and another I read are careful not to blame NATO for wounding him. It turns out there was no popular uprising against Qaddafi. The revolt was engineered by the French government. That's why we never saw pictures of mass protests.

How bin Laden used couriers to send and receive email.

Taliban kill 80 Pakistan training forces in revenge for assassination of Osama bin Laden.

"A different Taliban official, however, speaking anonymously to The Washington Post, disputed his organization’s statement. The official said the attack was intended to punish the Pakistani military for a recent offensive in the Mohmand region of Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt, where the Taliban, al-Qaeda and a potpourri of other militant organizations are based. Charsadda borders the the Mohmand region."

The idea that terrorists were choosing not to attack until bin Laden was killed is ludicrous.

MISC:

Libertarians like me often talk about how government picks winners and losers. Most of the people most of the time yawn about that. Who cares, right? It's academic. The people being killed and having their homes wiped out care. There's nothing academic about killing people. The idea that central planners have to make agonizing choices is a false choice in itself. This is a problem created by central planners. People will die because of it. Others will lose all their belongings and their livelihoods because of it. This illustrates the fatal flaw of central planning, not its benefits.

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TAX AND SPEND:

Illinois state government raises taxes then gives $100 million to Motorola Mobility to keep its headquarters in Illinois. This is what passes for economic development by government. This is a perfect example of how government loots the people to create and protect giant corporations and turn them into agents of the government. Government exists to loot the common man on behalf of the ruling class - it can't be any other way - and it performs this task with ruthless efficiency.

REGULATION:

FCC commissioner resigns to join Comcast-NBC. This is a reminder that corporations are just government agents. You can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

New York Mayor Bloomberg dictates the single make and model of future New York taxis.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Barney Frank wants to centralize control of the Federal Reserve by restricting the open market committee to Washington bureaucrats. This is the opposite of reform.

EDUCATION:

Here's a nice reminder that government is force. This also highlights my contention that the number one goal of government schools is to brainwash students to blindly obey authority.

HEALTH CARE:

Mitt Romney tries to hide the fact he was for Obamacare when it was called Romneycare by coming out and promising to repeal Obamacare.

"Mr. Romney has lately qualified his praise, saying in a speech in New Hampshire in March that "our experiment wasn't perfect—some things worked, some things didn't, and some things I'd change." He's mostly avoided specifics other than retreating to the cover of state experimentation, but we can fill in the details based on interviews with Romney staffers as well as others present at the creation."

Another central planner who likes to experiment with people's lives like they're lab rats. The Wall Street Journal doesn't fall for the charade and blasts Romney for Romneycare. Excellent. Romney's the Republican Obama, the say anything to get elected candidate.

Thanks to the FDA and its factory farms, staff super-bugs now exist in grocery store meat. Government won't stop until it kills us all or we abolish it.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Senate Republicans want to merge the Department of Energy and the EPA. That doesn't sound like small government to me. I want to abolish them.

WAR ON DRUGS:

SWAT team kills another innocent man in the name of the war on drugs.

WAR:

Comparing bin Laden to Obi-Wan Kenobi is absurd.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Iraqi government to ban smoking. Our government exports tyranny, not freedom. A vote is not freedom.

MISC:

The return of the bedbugs with a super-bug.

Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

The failure of FDR's socialist utopia Arthurdale.

TAX AND SPEND:

Ireland's tax on pension plans won't apply to public sector pensions. How convenient for the bureaucrats. I bet the Irish people revolt. Reminder that Clinton proposed stealing 15 percent of pension plans in 1993.

EDUCATION:

Thomas Sowell on the state of education in the US.

"Too many of the people coming out of even our most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters."

Sowell fails to point out that this is by design, but he hints at it:

"Many Third World countries have turned out so many people with diplomas, but without meaningful skills, that "the educated unemployed" became a cliche among people who study such countries. This has not only become a personal problem for those individuals who have been educated, or half-educated, without acquiring any ability to fulfill their rising expectations, it has become a major economic and political problem for these countries.Such people have proven to be ideal targets for demagogues promoting polarization and strife. We in the United States are still in the early stages of that process. But you need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus."

Government schools are brainwashing centers. Their primary purpose is to produce adults who won't challenge authority, who think there's nothing they can do to resist government's power. The second priority is to make them easily manipulatable by demagogues.

HEALTH CARE:

After the government bans hot water, forcing hot water heaters down to 130 degrees, and effective detergents, next they ban restaurants from using washable towels and aprons because they might not get clean in the laundry. Imagine that. And we wonder why business is so expensive and our health costs keep rising.

Thanks to government, the bedbug menace is growing.

Isn't it funny to watch government-lover Mitt Romney pretend he hates socialized medicine after he implemented in Massachusetts? You know, if you had done something really bad that hurt a lot of people, unless you were a selfish freak, you would beg for forgiveness. You are not Mitt Romney. That freak wants us believe that his version of Obamacare is different than the real thing.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

NASA scientist James Hansen helps kids sue the federal government to implement draconian anti-carbon policies. We pay that fraud's salary. Only government would allow a wacko like to keep his job.

Government utilities - they're all owned outright or so heavily regulated that they're effectively owned by the government - using smart meters to spy on households. Of course government is proposing a non-solution to this government-created problem.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Iraqi veteran killed by police in drug raid.

POLICE STATE:

Cops taser another man to death.

Looking to the past for lessons about today.

"Defying Hitler is a mesmerizing memoir written by the German journalist Sebastian Haffner (a pseudonym for Raimund Pretzel) shortly after he emigrated from Germany to England with his Jewish wife in 1938. In it, Haffner explores a question similar to one that has haunted me since 9/11. He examines how a highly cultured and civilized nation could slip so quickly into the barbaric totalitarianism of Nazi rule. My version of this question is, how could America, a nation with deep roots in individual freedom, so quickly slide into a police state?"

It starts with government control of schools. The corruption of other institutions plays a role, but the most important factor enabling government to make this transformation is the corruption of schools.

WAR:

Fifty-nine percent of Americans believe we should bring troops home from Afghanistan. Heck yeah.

Military adopting "green" ammo that it claims is higher performance. There's something missing from this article. I bet that the military couldn't get the funds to improve this ammo based solely on performance, so they had to sell it to Congress or some bureaucrats as "green" in order to get the money. On the other hand, maybe they're just lying about the performance.

""I can't say that it's more lethal than the M855. That depends on how the round hits a target," Woods said, emphasizing that accuracy is paramount. "But what I can say is that you'll see the same effects every time with this round. And we can confirm that it is superior to the [M80] 7.62 on soft targets.""

This is fishy. I have a better solution for the environment. Stop shooting at people. That'll save the environment and lives. Only government would care more about saving the environment than saving people's lives.

POLITICS:

Every Obama policy drags the country deeper into depression. That's going to make him easy to beat. He's making Carter look good by comparison. And it's too late for him to fix it. If he removed all the government interventions he could right now, the economy would suffer a correction that wouldn't end before the election. He already blew it.

MISC:

Insect repellent 1000 times more powerful than DEET.

Salon calls the market vicious. Apparently the writers miss the irony of supporting a system based on violence instead.

Does killing Osama bin Laden makes safer?

No introduction needed.

Does killing Osama bin Laden makes safer?

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Jeffrey Tucker explains that Haiti's crushing poverty is a result of the lack of capital because the government aggressively steals wealth.

"This is an interesting case of a peculiar way in which government is keeping prosperity at bay. It is not wrecking the country through an intense enforcement of taxation and regulation or nationalization. One gets the sense that most people never have any face time with a government official and never deal with paperwork or bureaucracy really. The state strikes only when there is something to loot. And loot it does: predictably and consistently. And that alone is enough to guarantee a permanent state of poverty.Now, to be sure, there are plenty of Americans who are firmly convinced that we would all be better off if we grew our own food, bought only locally, kept firms small, eschewed modern conveniences like home appliances, went back to using only natural products, expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished. This paradise has a name, and it is Haiti."

We're moving in that direction.

The gold standard is a way to regulate greed in government and Wall Street.

TAX AND SPEND:

Irish government taxing pension plans to raise money so it can spend it ostensibly to stimulate the economy. This is wrong on so many levels. Note that Ireland's government can't afford to borrow any money and the bailout restrictions are limiting the aristocrats. I bet they're discussing pulling out of the eurozone like Greece. Eventually every country in the western world plus Japan will likely do the same.

REGULATION:

Yet another study concludes the minimum wage harms blacks more than others.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Greenpeace loses charity status in New Zealand. Greenpeace has charity status? More corruption.

Even a government research bureau recognizes that raising taxes on oil companies would make gasoline more expensive. It's not rocket science.

Obama's pretense of investigating speculators and oil producers for price gouging is political theater.

POLICE STATE:

New York City to require all new cell phones have an app for receiving terror warnings. Leave my cell phone alone. It looks like everybody is going to get this.

WAR:

Bin Laden's youngest son may have escaped the SEAL raid.

On the ever-changing story of Osama bin Laden's reported assassination. This might be a seminal moment in journalism. I can't think of a time when all the evidence for such a major event was completely erased in plain sight. It's not like this cover-up is happening in the background. The president came right out and said he destroyed the most important evidence and he wasn't going to release any of the rest of the evidence. The press cannot verify any of the claims of the administration, yet it reported the story as fact.

POLITICS:

Fifty two percent of Republicans want a third party. The aristocrats don't care what the people. want.

The Republican establishment must be cringing at the results of this Zogby poll.

LOCAL:

The Feds sent a SWAT team on a food stamp raid that was expected to produce no arrests.

Sheriff's deputy killed in chase over burned out tail lights. Is burned out tail lights worth killing somebody over? Apparently it was for those sheriffs. Doesn't it make more sense to just run the guy's plate and give him a ticket at home than to risk people's lives? It's amazing how cops can turn a simple traffic stop into a lethal event.

MISC:

Robert Murphy shoots down a wacky new economic theory.

Free kibbles

STATES RIGHTS:

Here's more on the Maine town that declared food sovereignty from the federal government. As much as I love this, it's not going to end well. I see many armed and armored thugs in their future. More cities in Maine do the same. It would wonderful if this snowballed.

ECONOMY:

Despite trillions stolen from us by the Fed and the government, home values continue to fall. The American people are trying to fix the economy by correcting all the errors created by government, but government won't let us.

TAX AND SPEND:

Fannie Mae wants another $8.5 billion from taxpayers.

"Including the latest request, the firm has taken about $100 billion from the U.S. government since it was seized in 2008, though it has also paid about $12.4 billion to taxpayers in interest."

More like $12.4 billion in Fed funny-money.

"[Including Freddie Mac] the two firms together have asked for about $164 billion, though their net payments have been reduced to about $140 billion as a result of the interest payments, including the latest request"

So Congress steals $164 billion out of our right pocket, and the Fed steals more out of our left pocket and gives it to these firms, and they pay back $24 billion stolen from our left pocket that will never go back in our right pocket, and we're supposed to be grateful.

Boortz reports, "It has now been 768 days since the Democratic-controlled Senate last passed a budget …" Yet the government hasn't shut down.

REGULATION:

Cash for Clunkers has created a shortage of used cars. Shocker.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Democrats want to end tax breaks for Big Oil. If they succeed, that means gas prices will jump up further. It's important to watch the language they use: they call those tax breaks subsidies, but they're exactly the opposite of subsidies. Tax breaks allow an entity to keep its own money. Subsidies are money stolen from others then handed out an entity. I have a better idea. Let's give every American the same tax breaks and cut spending to match.

How government started a coal mine fire in 1962 that is still burning today.

POLICE STATE:

Absolutely bizarre picture of a mother holding an infant while two TSA thugs grope it. I feel sorry for the people who believe this makes us safer.

WAR:

Lots of people have argued that our mission in Afghanistan wasn't really about preventing terrorism. Lots of people have argued that Pakistan is the real terrorist safe haven. But attacking Pakistan is foolish. It just creates more potential and actual terrorists. They want to attack us because they're tired of our government attacking them for decades.

According to this article:

"Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations."

I'd be fine with those techniques if we were in a legally declared war and the terrorists didn't abide by the Geneva Convention, but we're not in a legally declared war. That makes all the difference.

Mark Steyn on the situation in Pakistan.

"On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting "when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later." The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf's I'm-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he'd been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if they didn't get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it."

So how'd that work out for us? Besides turning Pakistan into the focal point of jihad, I mean. Mark Steyn is not usually stupid, but celebrating Bush's threat as something a model to be followed despite all the evidence of the damage it did is stupid. As bin Laden's residence proved, Pakistan didn't suddenly become a terrorist haven after Obama took office. It was a result of Bush's aggression, not Obama's lack of it, as if he lacks it.

Pakistani government leaks name of CIA bureau chief in Pakistan. That's a serious threat.

POLITICS:

Juan Williams says Ron Paul is shaping Republican politics. He's right. It's about time.

Free kibbles

STATES RIGHTS:

Texas House committee passes bill to ban porn-scanners in Texas.

HEALTH CARE:

The benefits of going paleo for pregnant mothers and newborn babies.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

It looks like solar cycle 24, which just started getting going, has reached maximum. So not only is cycle 24 the weakest sunspot cycle in a century, it's also going to be about half the length of a normal cycle.

POLICE STATE:

This is an important point: the government knows that terrorists come here because our government is over there. They aristocrats do it on purpose. They want a police state so they can control us.

"We go there, and they come here. That’s the root excuse for a U.S. police state. That cause is going unaddressed by the U.S. government. Its ambitions are just the opposite, which means it doesn’t care about a peaceful and carefree America."

Politicians are not like us. We like to get along in a system voluntary exchange. They like to use violence to force their will on others.

Documents leaked by WikiLeaks purport that al Qaeda would respond with nuclear retaliation if bin Laden was killed or captured. This is ridiculous on many levels. First, we have assume that al Qaeda has the ability to attack us with a dirty bomb, and is choosing not to. Why wait? Second, what else would you expect al Qaeda operatives who want to protect bin Laden to say? This is baloney. Don't get me wrong. If the US continues it's policy of invading Muslim countries and killing Muslims, eventually some Muslim will retaliate with a dirty bomb. Unless our government ends its aggression against Muslims, it's inevitable. But al Qaeda didn't have such a weapon primed and ready to go just waiting until bin Laden was killed or captured. Still, the best thing we can do to protect ourselves is to end our government's aggression against people all over the world.

MISC:

My experience in the horse show business backs up this statement:

"Ninety-five percent of the people in this business lose money, and the other 5% are lying."

The only reason to get into the horse business is for love of the animals, not profit.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Every time I go out, I hear people complaining about working so much overtime, yet unemployment is still high. This tells me that it's cheaper for an employer to pay time and a half for 20 or 30 hours than it is to hire a new employee. That's a measure of how expensive government has made it to hire somebody.

Peter Schiff reports we've entered the next phase of the gold boom: institutional investment. Beat the rush.

TAX AND SPEND:

More discussion of whether or not Greece will secede from the Eurozone over its debt problems. The disintegration of the Eurozone is happening fast.

This is a provocative headline:

"What would Jesus cut?"

I'm not aware of Jesus ever supporting the theft and violence inherent in government.

John Williams is the keeper of Shadowstats.com which tracks statistics the way the US government used to track them before it changed them to make itself look better as well as alternative ways. He makes a crucial point about rating US government debt.

"There's good reason for fear about the debt, but it would be a tremendous shock if either S&P or Moody's Investor Service actually downgraded the U.S. sovereign-debt rating. The AAA rating on U.S. Treasuries is the benchmark for AAA, the highest rating, meaning the lowest risk of default. With U.S. Treasuries denominated in U.S. dollars and the benchmark AAA security, how can you downgrade your benchmark security? That's a very awkward situation for rating agencies. As long as the U.S. dollar retains its reserve currency status and is able to issue debt in U.S. dollars, you'll continue to see a triple-A rating for U.S. Treasuries. Having the U.S. Treasuries denominated in U.S. dollars means the government always can print the money it needs to pay off the securities, which means no default."

In other words, just as we measure the cost of goods in dollars, the credit agencies measure the credit ratings of investments in terms of Treasuries. So they have no way of valuing Treasuries below AAA. It's uncharted territory. Explaining further:

"Let's say the U.S. wants to sell debt to Japan, but Japan doesn't like the way the U.S. is running fiscal operations. It can say, "We don't trust the U.S. dollar. We'll lend you money, but we'll lend it in yen." Then, the U.S. has a real problem because it no longer has the ability to print the currency needed to pay off the debt. And if you're looking at U.S. debt denominated in yen, most likely you would have a very different and much lower rating."

Since a Treasury is defined in dollars and the Fed prints dollars, the US is always guaranteed to pay off its debts by simply printing money. This implies foreign governments and central banks may stop buying the debt in dollars and demand it be valued in their own currency. This would force some fiscal constraint of the US government. He predicts the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency and hyperinflation in the US by 2014.

"Shy of any short-term gyrations, the U.S. is really in the worst condition of any major economy and any major country in the world and, therefore, in a weaker currency circumstance."

That comment should be sobering to anybody. He reports we're falling into the double-dip recession. Every day the economic collapse doesn't come means it will be worse when it does.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Ten super-secret signs of US inflation.

HEALTH CARE:

Every now and then you see a headline that just shines because of its honesty.

"Doctors are creating too many patients"

This is one of them. They get away with that because they're protected from competition by the government. Malpractice risks also play a role. This is similar to how police create crime.

Baby's brain cancer reportedly cured by medical marijuana. Cured? I'm skeptical, but I'm not surprised that the marijuana worked better for him than the anti-nausea cocktail provided by doctors. I'm happy for this family. I hope he continues cancer-free.

POLICE STATE:

Fourteen ways you are tracked.

WAR:

Government to release captured home videos of Osama bin Laden. This would support, but not prove, they got the right guy.

Motivation for the changing US stories of Osama bin Laden's assassination:

"The first U.S. edited version of "The Killing Of Osama" made it look like one Seal found Osama and his wife in their third floor bedroom, the surprised and unarmed Osama used her as a shield so the Seal shot her first and then him. It did not seem to occur to them that this made the Seal both a coward – or a terrified incompetent – and a war criminal. By the second day they had edited this scene to have the wife rushing at the Seal, presumably scaring him witless, so he shot her and then shot the unarmed old Osama who was either sitting around or standing around doing nothing but, presumably, looking dumb. This still left the Seal a coward and war criminal, so on the third day they started editing it to have Osama sitting next to a pistolo and an AK-47 which he apparently was too witless, too scared, or too incompetent to use to defend his wife and himself. This still left the Seal a coward and a war criminal, so they started whispering the Seal thought Osama was wearing a suicide vest, in spite of that being a bit bulky and uncomfortable under his nighty."

This is why government will significantly edit any pictures and video before releasing them. But they will be released.

Now we read that US detective work may not have led to Osama bin Laden after all. It turns out that his second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri might have turned him in to get him out of the way so he could take over the organization.

"Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri, who has been touted widely as the man who will succeed Bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, turned his back on his terrorist leader following a prolonged power struggle, according to a Saudi newspaper.
The plot to get rid of Bin Laden began when Zawahiri’s faction persuaded bin Laden to leave the protection of the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border."
"The courier who led U.S. forces to Bin Laden was a Pakistani national working for Zawahiri, according to the source.
The man is said to have known he was being followed by American troops and to have intentionally led them to their target."

That would explain why al Qaeda confirmed bin Laden's death: to solidify Zawahiri's control.


Poor little Osama bin Laden, confined to his compound with his three wives unable to kill more Americans. Don't you feel sorry for him? But what's that about a computer? I thought he didn't have internet access.


FOREIGN POLICY:


Despite the best efforts of government, US power is collapsing around the world. Better sooner than later. Better we make those decisions ourselves than to have them forced on us as is happening now. Because of decades of US aggression in the Middle East, we're going to have to endure a more militant Islamicism in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.

POLITICS:

Ron Paul may the South Carolina Tea Party favorite, but South Carolina's Republican establishment vote overwhelmingly for Rick Santorum followed by establishment Mitt Romney. This highlights the continuing rift between the dangerous Republican establishment and the tea party.

MEDIA:

I just had a depressing and late revelation: being right doesn't matter in the media. Media people succeed by telling the masses what they want to hear. That's how they gain audience. That's why pundits can be wrong time and time again, they can be wrong every time, and not only keep their jobs, they get promoted to the top. I should have realized this decades ago.

MISC:

I don't know what to make of this. Google and others claim "do not track" would hurt economy. It would certainly harm the businesses that profit from selling tracking information, but I have no idea how big a market that is. I also have no idea how many people would use it. What I know for sure is, this is a government non-solution to a problem created by government. Robust competition would resolve this issue, but patents prevent robust competition.

In praise of cheapeners. Suppose the airplane was still as expensive and rudimentary as when the Wright brothers invented it. Who would care? This article praises all the people who take inventions and and cheapen and improve them to make them worthwhile.

Prediction that current, growing flood on the Mississippi will be the worst ever. Wow. You can count on the global warming frauds to claim credit, or blame. However that works.

Chocolate and red wine are good for the brain and better when consumed together.

Tuscaloosa tornado relieve from the private sector in spite of the looting we suffer under the government.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Unemployment jumps back up to nine percent. The establishment wants us to think this is good news.

TAX AND SPEND:

The success of Chile's privatized social security system. Government has no business stealing people's money. Period. I think businesses, banks and employees should set up a system that encourages savings, like private sector 401Ks.

REGULATION:

Government bans ingredients that make our clothes clean, dragging civilization backwards and nearly wiping out the commercial laundry business.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Fed employees drink their own Kool-aid.

POLICE STATE:

It's awful convenient for the CIA to say al Qaeda will go after soft targets to help the TSA overcome resistance to groping people there too.

Boortz asks is this cop went too far. What a stupid question. He assaulted a 15 year old girl and knocked her to the ground.

You know these miniature drones will be tracking people all over the US.

WAR:

Group files FOIA request for pictures of Osama bin Laden's corpse.

US drone attack misses Yemeni cleric who is also a US citizen.

POLITICS:

It looks like Ron Paul owns the South Carolina tea party.

Chaotic voting result in Canada.

Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

CEOs rate Texas as the best state to do business in and California the worst. It's no coincidence that state income tax rates are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Jobless claims are up again.

TAX AND SPEND:

Exposing phony alarmism surrounding the debt ceiling debate and proposing the government sell off assets to pay off the debt.

Obama White House floats trial balloon for mileage tax to be recorded by a government device in every car and paid along with each gas purchase.

"Among other things, CBO suggested that a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven; payment could take place electronically at filling stations."

Get out of my car and out of my life.

The number of Americans receiving food stamps has reached one out of seven. Yay for government fighting poverty.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The title of this article by John Stossel explaining general inflation is priceless: Gasoline and Onions.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

The EU plans to pay fishermen to catch plastic. Who needs food?

Desperate global warming frauds, unable to steal as much of our money as they want through legislation, are filing suit in many states and D.C. using children and young adults as plaintiffs in an attempt get the courts to declare the atmosphere a public trust.

WAR:

Obama is throwing the SEALs under the bus on the execution of bin Laden.

"Mr Panetta also told the network that the US Navy Seals made the final decision to kill bin Laden rather than the president.He said: "The authority here was to kill bin Laden. And obviously, under the rules of engagement, if he had in fact thrown up his hands, surrendered and didn't appear to be representing any kind of threat, then they were to capture him. But they had full authority to kill him.
"To be frank, I don't think he had a lot of time to say anything. It was a firefight going up that compound. And by the time they got to the third floor and found bin Laden, I think it - this was all split-second action on the part of the Seals.""

What a load of crap. This is a new low even for Obama. We've already heard it was a kill mission from the start. Obama tried to pretend it wasn't, and it didn't work. So now he's throwing the SEALs under the bus. He knows they won't say a word. That's a new low. This is going to come back to haunt him, big time.

"There was also growing doubt about the US claims that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies involved in the raid.Lieutenant General Asad Durrani, former head of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, said it was "inconceivable" that his government was unaware of the US raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.
He claimed his country was forced to deny any knowledge of the raid to avoid a domestic backlash. The ISI's official line has been that bin Laden's compound had "slipped off our radar" after it raided the building in 2003 while hunting for another senior al-Qaeda operative.The agency claims it was unaware that bin Laden was hiding there.
Lieutenant General Durrani, however, said that the denial was a "political" maneuver by the intelligence services to avoid claims that they were working too closely with the US."

This makes sense too. It's hard to imagine the Pakistanis were unaware of US helicopters flying all the way from Afghanistan to within 30 miles of Islamabad. The more lies about this come out, the worse it's going to be. I'm telling you, the government can't help but screw up a train wreck.

""The army chief was in his office, the cordons had been thrown around that particular place. The Pakistani helicopters were also in the air so that indicates that it was involved."[There are] political implications back home. If you say that you are involved there is a large, vocal faction of Pakistani society that will get very upset because we are carrying out repeatedly these operations with the Americans.""

How stupid do they have to be think nobody would notice that? Only government can be consistently that stupid.

The Guardian summaries a number of bin Laden conspiracy theories, but the best part of the article is the explanation of why they're proliferating.

"The decision not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden's corpse and the way the White House has changed its account of how he died has prompted an avalanche of conspiracy theories about his death."

All these theories are the product of White House lies. Assuming they got the right guy, all they had to do was tell the truth and show him captured and alive or show his body to independent observers. It would have been easy, but instead they chose to lie, dispose of the body with no independent verification and then implement an obvious cover-up.

"Bin Laden is alive and being held in a secret location while the US interrogates him about al-Qaida's nuclear arsenal. "Is it possible that Osama bin Laden has been ghosted out of his compound, and we're seeing a show at this point?" asked the rightwing commentator Glenn Beck."

We can only hope this is true. I just don't think our government is that smart. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised. I hate to lampoon bin Laden's reported death, but changing stories of the government has made it all but impossible.

"The White House has also had to abandon the story that President Obama and his national security team watched tensely as events unfolded in real time (despite the White House having released photos of the team watching tensely), with the operation conveyed into the White House by cameras on the SEALs helmets. If Obama was watching the event as it happened, he would have noticed, one would hope, that there was no firefight and, thus, would not have told the public that bin Laden was killed in a firefight. Another reason the story had to be abandoned is that if the event was captured on video, every news service in the world would be asking for the video, but if the event was orchestrated theater, there would be no video."

What I read earlier, I hoped I linked it, but maybe not, is that the video didn't work for 20 minutes or so. Those pictures from the Obama situation room were staged. Duh. Or maybe they weren't. Maybe that's part of the cover-up. This is a public relations disaster overshadowed by a public opinion victory for Obama. But I think eventually, and not too long in the future, the public relations aspect will collapse under the scrutiny of skeptics.

"No explanation has been provided for why an unarmed bin Laden, in the absence of a firefight, was murdered by the SEALs with a shot to the head. For those who believe the government’s story that "we got bin Laden," the operation can only appear as the most botched operation in history. What kind of incompetence does it require to senselessly and needlessly kill the most valuable intelligence asset on the planet?"

That sounds familiar. Where have I heard it before? Maybe in the last four or five posts I've made?

"As one reader put it in an email to me: "What is really alarming is the increasingly arrogant sloppiness of these lies, as though the government has become so profoundly confident of their ability to deceive people that they make virtually no effort to even appear credible.""

Where have I heard of a cover-up in plain sight before? Where I have heard the word 'arrogance' used often in relation to the administration response used recently? Maybe in the last four or five posts I've made?

Frankly, I'm more interested in the OBL cover-up in plain sight than the crashed helicopter cover-up.

Here's the text of the FBI's most wanted statement on bin Laden:

"Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world."

Notice anything conspicuously missing?

Speculation that the primary reason behind the US and western attack on Libya was Qaddafi's plan to introduce a gold dinar as the unified African currency to compete internationally with the fiat currencies of the west.

"Gaddafi did not give up. In the months leading up to the military intervention, he called on African and Muslim nations to join together to create this new currency that would rival the dollar and euro. They would sell oil and other resources around the world only for gold dinars."

That would do it. Bush invaded Iraq after Saddam started selling oil in euros instead of dollars. No wonder France and Germany didn't want to invade then.

With all the news about OBL's assassination, here's what you didn't read in the news last week.

"Sequels are rarely as good as the original, but last week’s Great Escape from Kandahar Prison II was almost as exciting as the 2008 original in which 800 Taliban prisoners were busted out of Afghanistan’s Sorpoza Prison.This time around, 541 prisoners, including 106 Taliban commanders, tunneled their way out of the notorious maximum security prison."

Yeah. Hundreds of Taliban escaped a US-Afghan maximum security prison. Maximum non-security maybe.

"No less an authority than Afghan president Hamid Karzai recently called the ten-year US-led war, “ineffective, apart from causing civilian casualties.” Ouch!"

Ouch. That's what happens when a foreign power takes sides in a gang war half way around the world.

"Petraeus’ new role confirms CIA is fast becoming militarized as an active combat arm of the US government. CIA is slated to deploy more paramilitary units, mercenary forces and drones in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Bigger ouch.

"Veteran intelligence professionals lament CIA’s “going cowboy.” They say the agency’s primary goal is providing the White House with facts and balanced analysis, not indulging in gunplay. Getting involved in fighting overseas will inevitably corrupt CIA, they warn, and bias its judgment. We have already seen this happen in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Not to mention Vietnam and Afghanistan the first time. But this has to be a metastasizing cancer.

POLITICS:

The Weekly Standard says Ron Paul is too honest to win the presidency. I agree. But that won't stop me from supporting him.

According to a CNN poll, voters think Ron Paul is the best candidate to beat Obama.

"Who does best against Obama? Paul. The congressman from Texas, who also ran as a libertarian candidate for president in 1988 and who is well liked by many in the tea party movement, trails the president by only seven points (52 to 45 percent) in a hypothetical general election showdown. Huckabee trails by eight points, with Romney down 11 points to Obama."

Voters are right. Only Ron Paul can win the anti-war votes. Obama can't. Only Ron Paul can win the civil liberties votes. Obama can't. And Ron Paul will win the right.

The double-standard between Obama assassinating bin Laden and running a victory lap around Ground Zero compared to if Bush had done the same thing is breath-taking.

President Transparency - uhm, I mean Pharaoh Obama - is holding meetings in a local coffee shop to keep them off White House logs. Shame on me, but I would hate holding meetings in the world's most guilded cage. The world's greatest symbol of modern oppression. The world's most grotesque reminder of slavery. But apparently Obama relishes in White House oppression. He isn't running from the greatest symbol of oppression in the modern world. He's playing politics.

MISC:

Xe, formerly Blackwater, hires John Ashcroft as ethics director. If somebody told you that in a bar, you'd think it was a joke.