I knew it!

Constitutional Convention?

SC Lieutenant Governor calls for Constitutional Convention to revoke Healthscare
Really long shot, but wouldn't it be amazing...

http://news.sc/2010/03/26/sc-lt-governor-andre-bauer-calls-for-convention-to-overturn-obama-healthcare/

Healthscare Can Be Defunded Over Veto

Think the Healthscare cannot be undone in face of Obama veto?
A mere majority can defund it.

Would Repubs actually do this if they take Congress? Probably not, IMHO. Power corrupts- when was the last time an entitlement was undone?  Welfare reform you might say? Truth is, the 'reform' part has since been undone. They would meddle about with it instead.

Amazon Filler Item Finder

Great idea
-------------------------------------

How To Ensure You Always Get Free Shipping On Amazon

Amazon’s offer of free shipping is a blessing and a burden. They’ll send your items at no extra cost, yes, but your basket of goods has to reach a certain price before you qualify.

And there’s nothing more annoying than being $1.29 short and buying a $15 DVD out of frustration to round out your order.
Moments like that one call for Amazon Filler Item Finder, an innovative tool that helps you find every item Amazon sells, listed by price.
The site is an exercise in simplicity.  Just enter the amount you’re short and you’ll see a list of products that match the price, starting from cheapest to more expensive.



http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=ea7544b086a8473bd90e4c1e3&id=805eec14cc&e=b93037bf0c

War on Fat is Making Us Sick!

Health Czars caught bare baked- one more reason we need to keep them out of our health (and diet) decisions.

Ultimately, saturated fat—named because it contains no double bonds, so all of its carbon atoms are saturated with hydrogen atoms—may be neutral for the heart. Meanwhile, some mono-unsaturated fats (which have one double-bond and are found in many nuts) and some poly-unsaturated fats (which have multiple double bonds and are found in fatty fish) could be good for the heart.

http://www.slate.com/id/2248754

Naked Nincompoops

"Without real, genuine, malevolent evil to fight against, we'd all be mindless nincompoops."

I don't know where I got this quote that I memorized years ago, or why I've always liked it, because it's not really accurate.

Most of us, unless we're with military, anti-terrorist or criminal justice forces, haven't had to fight real evil, at least directly — though our decisions as voters can make it easier or tougher for them. Most of us can keep mentally sharp by simply fighting those mindless nincompoops.

The tricky part is being able to tell the mindless nincompoops from the mindful manipulators. As a general guide, the latter are liberal politicians, and the former are the people who believe them when they say, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

Take the health care debate. One manipulator said that the government must take over health care because an uninsured woman is wearing her dead sister's dentures.

Nincompoops said, "That's awful!"

A thoughtful person might ask: "If we can use a dead person's heart, liver or cornea, why not her dentures?"

Manipulators always have scapegoats — someone to blame for their own failures or the things that normally go wrong in the course of an imperfect life.

Nincompoops mindlessly repeat the mantra, "The insurance companies and Big Pharma are killing people."

Those of us who have insurance companies paying for surgery, cancer treatments, and chronic disease-controlling drugs created by the drug companies, are somewhat grateful for our increased life expectancy.

A manipulator says that adding a new giant entitlement program, which not only expands health insurance and prescription drug coverage, but also adds long-term care to the almost bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid systems, will cut the deficit by a trillion dollars.

A nincompoop will buy that fanciful notion, along with the assurance that new taxes on investment income and payroll won't damage the already hurting economy.

A thoughtful person is worried about further expanding the national debt, and horrified by the addition of 16,500 new IRS employees to oversee the mandatory insurance program.

Manipulators also say that with more government involvement, our health insurance premiums will go down.

Surely no one believes that!

But when it doesn't happen, the liberal politicians will say it's because we don't have a single-payer system and will make their move for complete government takeover of our health insurance. And once they have that, they will own us. If we resist higher taxes on anything for any reason, or don't support raising the national debt ceiling again, we'll be told the only place to cut is our health care.

Nincompoops will believe that and beg for higher taxes and more debt.

One thing that nincompoops and thoughtful people may have in common is an inability to understand the real motives of many manipulators. Most of us just want to live our lives, finding happiness within ourselves, our relationships, our productive work and enjoyable pastimes. We don't easily comprehend that some people find their happiness in power and control.

We may recognize the problem of bullying in our schools, but fail to see it in our government.

Some liberals are simply deluded, believing that they do good by forcing others to pay for their good intentions.

We can all understand this and even excuse it, while resisting it by citing the law of unintended consequences. We can agree with many good ideas, while facing the reality that we can't afford their implementation until we first get a grip on our existing debt.

But other liberals have another agenda. It's often hard for good people to recognize low-level evil, the beginner evil that gets its little kicks from making us do what it wants.

When it's grown big enough to control us completely, nincompoops might finally recognize it; the rest of us work throughout our lives on prevention and containment.

Nincompoops make fun of patriots who protest Big Government, with signs expressing support for the U.S. Constitution and longstanding American values. The mindless aren't mindful of history; or they somehow believe that history's uglier lessons won't have to be learned here.

Our Founding Fathers knew better, and did their best to protect us from what some of them feared might be an inevitable decline in the freedoms they gave us.

In any case, my first concern upon the passage of ObamaCare last weekend was that the tea-party activists might get discouraged. But all across the Internet they are already sharing plans for the next battle with already battle-hardened activists.

I watched President Obama sign the health reform bill Tuesday. His supporters were cheering; and were those women doing a little chorus-line dance?

Some puzzled citizens have asked me why the president and Congress are congratulating themselves for doing what many Americans don't want.

I suspect the manipulators believe that most Americans — both those who oppose them, and those who blindly follow — are a bunch of nincompoops, and will allow these politicians all the power that they crave. I think they are wrong, at least about us opponents.

---

The comments made and opinions expressed in her columns are those of Barbara Anderson
and do not necessarily reflect those of Citizens for Limited Taxation.

---

-- More of Barbara's Columns --

Man Creates $747 Space Camera

Putting NASA to shame:

Putting NASA and its billion dollar budgets to shame, a British space enthusiast took amazing photos and video from space with just a few hundred dollars, a home camera and a balloon.

Robert Harrison spent a mere $747 dollars to take his photos and video from 22 miles above Earth's surface.
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-balloon-home-photos-space,0,5393976.story

Healthscare Bill Creates New Army

 SEC. 203. COMMISSIONED CORPS AND READY RESERVE CORPS.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—There shall be in the Service a commissioned Regular Corps and a Ready Reserve Corps for service in time of national emergency.

(2) REQUIREMENT.—All commissioned officers shall be citizens of the United States and shall be appointed without regard to the civil-service laws and compensated without regard to the Classification Act of 1923, as amended.

(3) APPOINTMENT.—Commissioned officers of the Ready Reserve Corps shall be appointed by the President and commissioned officers of the Regular Corps shall be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.

(4) ACTIVE DUTY.—Commissioned officers of the Ready Reserve Corps shall at all times be subject to call to active duty by the Surgeon General, including active duty for the purpose of training.

(5) WARRANT OFFICERS.—Warrant officers may be appointed to the Service for the purpose of providing support to the health and delivery systems maintained by the Service and any warrant officer appointed to the Service shall be considered for purposes of this Act and title 37, United States Code, to be a commissioned officer within the Commissioned Corps of the Service.

(b) ASSIMILATING RESERVE CORP OFFICERS INTO THE REGULAR CORPS.—Effective on the date of enactment of the Affordable Health Choices Act, all individuals classified as officers in the Reserve Corps under this section (as such section existed on the day before the date of enactment of such Act) and serving on active duty shall be deemed to be commissioned officers of the Regular Corps.

(c) PURPOSE AND USE OF READY RESERVE.—

(1) PURPOSE.—The purpose of the Ready Reserve Corps is to fulfill the need to have additional Commissioned Corps personnel available on short notice (similar to the uniformed service’s reserve program) to assist regular Commissioned Corps personnel to meet both routine public health and emergency response missions.

(2) USES.—The Ready Reserve Corps shall—

(A) participate in routine training to meet the general and specific needs of the Commissioned Corps;

(B) be available and ready for involuntary calls to active duty during national emergencies and public health crises, similar to the uniformed service reserve personnel;

(C) be available for backfilling critical positions left vacant during deployment of active duty Commissioned Corps members, as well as for deployment to respond to public health emergencies, both foreign and domestic; and

(D) be available for service assignment in isolated, hardship, and medically underserved communities (as defined in section 399SS) to improve access to health services.

(d) FUNDING.—For the purpose of carrying out the duties and responsibilities of the Commissioned Corps under this section, there are authorized to be appropriated such sums as may be necessary to the Office of the Surgeon General for each of fiscal years 2010 through 2014. Funds appropriated under this subsection shall be used for recruitment and training of Commissioned Corps Officers.

http://www.thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showpost.php?p=958482&postcount=2

Waiting for healthcare

Hopenchange 1775 Style

They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

— Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

Corporate bonds yielding LESS than Treasuries

The market is betting that many corporations are more credit worthy than the Feds:

Two-year notes sold by the billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Procter & Gamble Co., Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s Cos. debt also traded at lower yields in recent weeks, a situation former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. chief fixed-income strategist Jack Malvey calls an “exceedingly rare” event in the history of the bond market.
The $2.59 trillion of Treasury Department sales since the start of 2009 have created a glut as the budget deficit swelled to a post-World War II-record 10 percent of the economy and raised concerns whether the U.S. deserves its AAA credit rating. The increased borrowing may also undermine the first-quarter rally in Treasuries as the economy improves.

“It’s a slap upside the head of the government,” said Mitchell Stapley, the chief fixed-income officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Fifth Third Asset Management, which oversees $22 billion. “It could be the moment where hopefully you realize that risk is beginning to creep into your credit profile and the costs associated with that can be pretty scary.”

http://seekingalpha.com/article/194790-all-roads-lead-through-healthcare

Healthscare is back!

Just watched the votes count up in the House. Sick to my stomach. Clearly bad for my health.

Oh, now Obama's on;  "A government of the people and by the people still works for the people"  say what? Bare naked, I tell you. "This is what change looks like". I'll take the status quo, thanks. Now he's bashing insurance companies again- how many times are you planning to spend their paltry 6% profit margin?

Let's just hope it hits some sort of technical snag in the Senate, because we are screwed.

Update:  Don Boudreaux states it well:

Watching tonight on television the charlatans who infest Pennsylvania Avenue gaudily pronounce their saintly motives and their deity-like powers to “guarantee world-class health care for every American” (as one creep put it to a NewsChannel 8 reporter here in DC) makes me want to vomit.
These people look like serious adults; the timber of their voices make them sound like serious adults; and their titles are ones that are assumed to be reserved for serious adults.  But, in fact, these people – from Obama to Pelosi to Hoyer to Reid – are nothing of the sort.

If they really believe even a quarter of the things they say, they’re imbeciles.  If they aren’t imbeciles, they’re scoundrels.  No third alternative is conceivable.

http://cafehayek.com/2010/03/venting-2.html

Outsourcing Space Travel

Looks like a promising trend- the space shuttle was cool, but poorly conceived from a cost-benefit standpoint.
The fact that we can pay to Russians a mere $15million per seat to hitch a ride to the space station shows how far out of whack the costs of operating the space shuttle were.
---------------------------------------------------

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Space Exploration Technologies successfully test fired its Falcon 9 rocket this weekend, clearing a milestone toward the inaugural flight of a privately developed spaceship to fly cargo, and possibly astronauts, into orbit, the company said.
Saturday's 3.5-second 'static' firing of the Falcon's nine kerosene and liquid oxygen-burning motors took place on a refurbished oceanside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It followed an earlier firing test aborted last week due to an improperly configured valve....
...
SpaceX, owned and operated by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, already holds NASA contracts worth nearly $1.9 billion to develop and fly Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules for space station cargo resupply missions.
Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp has NASA contracts of similar value for its Taurus II-Cygnus system, which is scheduled to debut next year.
SpaceX says it needs about three years to develop a launch escape system for Dragon and other upgrades to have Falcon 9 ready for passenger service....



http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100314/sc_nm/us_space_business

Is China Bankrupt?

Interesting- not what you normally hear... should we really be surprised if China cooks their books? I mean, what are you going to do, file a request under the Freedom of Information Act?
---------------------------------

Is China actually bankrupt?

The nation has erected a complex system for magically making its debts disappear, but a look up China's sleeve shows that its IOUs may equal its GDP.

By Jim Jubak
Is China broke?
All governments lie about their finances. At worst, as in Greece and the United States, the lies are bold and transparent. Everybody knows the emperor has no clothes, but no one wants to say so. At best, as in Canada and China, the lies are more subtle -- more like a magician's misdirection than a viking raider's ax. Look at these great numbers, the lie goes, but don't look at those up my sleeve.

There's a good argument to be made that if you look at all the numbers, instead of just the ones the budget magicians want you to see, China is indeed broke.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/is-china-actually-bankrupt.aspx

Bebo-Tax Code Encourages Destruction of Assets

AOL is likely to abandon Bebo, for which it overpaid, rather than sell it, due to tax incentives.
Just one more government structure that favors destruction of assets over preservation, production and prosperity.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newly independent Aol is still struggling with the fate of Bebo, the social network they acquired for $850 million in 2008.
No one argues that Aol underpaid  [sic. overpaid] for Bebo. And the social network has fallen from 22 million monthly unique visitors when it was acquired to just 14.6 million today (Comscore worldwide). But even so, Bebo clearly has some value on the open market.
Despite that value, Aol’s best financial option for Bebo will likely be to abandon it rather than sell it, say corporate tax experts we’ve spoken with.
Here’s why – complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the asset. With Aol’s effective tax rate of around 45%, that’s $380 million and change in their pocket in taxes that they’d be able to avoid.
A sale of Bebo would almost certainly be less attractive. If someone were to pay them $100 million for the service, which is optimistic, Aol could still offset the remaining $750 million as a tax loss. But it could only apply against long term capital gains, and Aol doesn’t have any to offset against. They’d have to carry that loss forward and hope for future gains to offset it against.
One corporate tax attorney we spoke with wouldn’t discuss Aol specifically, but did confirm the logic of the approach. Bryan Smith, a partner at Perkins Coie, says “Without getting into any specific facts or companies, it will often be more attractive for a U.S. corporation to simply shut down a subsidiary and claim a deduction for the worthlessness of the stock against ordinary income instead of selling the stock at a distressed price and taking a capital loss, which may only offset capital gains.”
If Aol were to abandon Bebo they couldn’t pull any of the assets of the company back into Aol, say the experts we’ve spoken with. Otherwise it becomes a non-taxable liquidation. If Aol had debt or preferred stock on the books with Bebo, though, they could pull out assets to offset that liability.



http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/10/aol-bebo-tax-abaondon/

Dept of Education buying shotguns

 Hmmm. Militarization everywhere.

Added: Mar 08, 2010 10:39 am

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14" - PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT - XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID - 14" LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.


https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=cb68cf9f3fa2fe18a83d1c3dee0039b2&tab=core&_cview=0

Water Usage During US/Canada Hockey Final

This is geeky cool:

http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushed_at_once_Edmonton_water_gold_medal_hockey_game/

Commercial Jetpack!

Want.   $86k

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/martin-jetpack-priced-at-86-000-mere-mortals-will-soon-be-able/

Are Stocks Expensive?

http://seekingalpha.com/article/192868-are-stocks-expensive?source=email

Senate warns staffers to avoid Drudgereport

SENATE WARNS EMPLOYEES TO AVOID THE DRUDGE REPORT
Tue Mar 09 2010 08:53:37 ET

Just as the healthcare drama in the capitol reaches a grand finale, congressional officials are warning employees to avoid the DRUDGE REPORT!

The Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works issued an urgent email late Monday claiming the DRUDGE REPORT is 'responsible for the many viruses popping up throughout the Senate.'

The committee ordered hill staff: 'Try to avoid' the DRUDGE REPORT 'for now'.

On Monday DRUDGE served over 29 million pages with NOT ONE email complaint received about 'pop ups', or the site serving 'viruses'.

The site was seen 149,967 times since March 1st from users at senate.gov and 244,347 times at house.gov. [10,825 visits from the White House, eop.gov]

The Systems Administrator may want to continue taking her antibiotic until the prescription runs out.

Developing... 


http://www.drudgereport.com/flashsd.htm

MI Six Year Old Suspended for bringing weapon to school

Fear not for your safety- the offending fingers have been impounded.

Ionia kindergartner suspended for making gun with hand

By Brian McVicar The Grand Rapids Press

March 04, 2010, 10:39PM

IONIA -- To the little boy's mother, it was just a 6-year-old boy playing around.
But when Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter.
They suspended Mason until Friday, saying the behavior made other students uncomfortable, said Erin Jammer, Mason's mother.
School officials allege Mason had displayed this kind of behavior for several months, despite numerous warnings.
"I do think it's too harsh for a six-year-old," said Jammer, who was previously warned that if Mason continued the practice he would be suspended. "He's six and he just likes to play."
Jammer says her son isn't violent, and there are other, more effective ways of teaching him not to make a gun with his hand.
"Maybe what you could do is take his recess away," suggested Jammer, adding her son doesn't have toy guns at home.
"He's only six and he doesn't understand any of this."

Our top export? Fraud!

In real dollars (such as they are), our top export may be fraud!
Note the equivalence to counterfeiting, and the quote from an actual counterfeiter.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a rational explanation why the public still grants a great deal of validity to the opinions of people I like to call the “men who cried wolf” – Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geitner, Gordon Brown, Alan Greenspan, et al.
The explanation is that the fastest growing export of the Western banking industry is fraud. This is not to say that the eastern banking industry is not guilty of this same fraud. Off the top of my head and from what I have see in my travels through Asia, I can think of at least three real estate markets in the Pacific Rim region that are bubbles waiting to burst – New Zealand, Thailand, and Hong Kong. If you study the Central Banking monetary policies in these countries in recent years, their present real estate bubbles are undoubtedly the architectural accomplishment of their respective Central Banks as well. However, the roots of this global monetary crisis lie with the most influential Central Banks in the world that include the ECB, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve....

This from a convicted counterfeiter:

 "These ‘experts’ will tell you that the present difficulties are simply the result of abuses and excesses in a system that is basically sound. All that is required is for some faults to be corrected. Do not believe them. The reality is that the problem is systemic and a little tinkering here or there will achieve nothing in the long term. What is needed is a root-and-branch re‑evaluation of that most curious of cultural inventions, money: how it is created, how it circulates, and how it can best be used to serve the interests of the community.”....

This is a powerful statement that should lead the majority of the world’s citizens to engage in some serious introspection. There is more truth in that statement than any statement I’ve heard in the last decade issued by any global banker, politician, or the latest Nobel-prize winning economist with whom the media is enamored. If you take the time to understand how money is created, how it circulates, and how it can best be used to serve the interests of the community, I guarantee you will immediately question the integrity of every derivative of our monetary system from carbon credits and taxes to mortgages to credit cards. If a convicted felon understands more about how our monetary system operates than 99% of all Congressman and even Nobel laureates in economics, let alone the common citizen, then we need to not only question why this is, but we also need to ask the following question:

“Who controls [aka manufactures] the flow of information so expertly that we now have a grotesque imbalance between the understanding of reality and the acceptance of fantasy?”

http://seekingalpha.com/article/192440-fraud-the-western-banking-industry-s-fastest-growing-export?source=email

Let's all go to work for the Feds

This USA Today article shows salary descrepancies between Fed and private sector jobs. Casually mentioned, but not expounded upon when presenting the stats:

"These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis."

 Whoa  now- that makes all of the data that follows completely misleading. This means the lowest paying Fed job, Janitor, pays $70k equivalent (benefits exceed pay), and unless you are an Optometrist, you a probably better off on the Fed gravy train.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm

Paul for President

Good stuff here. The only man in Congress who consistently speaks truth to power presents a roadmap back to a Constitutional Republic.

My Plan for a Freedom President
How I would put the Constitution back in the Oval Office

If Congress failed to produce a budget that was balanced and moved the country in a pro-liberty direction, a constitutionalist president should veto the bill. Of course, vetoing the budget risks a government shutdown. But a serious constitutionalist cannot be deterred by cries of “it’s irresponsible to shut down the government!” Instead, he should simply say, “I offered a reasonable compromise, which was to gradually reduce spending, and Congress rejected it, instead choosing the extreme path of continuing to jeopardize America’s freedom and prosperity by refusing to tame the welfare-warfare state. I am the moderate; those who believe that America can afford this bloated government are the extremists.”
Unconstitutional government spending, after all, is doubly an evil: it not only means picking the taxpayer’s pocket, it also means subverting the system of limited and divided government that the Founders created.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul647.html

F-15s in Bavaria

This is just a great picture:

Bunning's Last Stand

A little late to get religion, but hey, the mist is lifting
---------------------------------
I have been serving the citizens of Kentucky for nearly 24 years in Washington. During that time I have been a member of both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. I have taken thousands of votes in relation to spending the taxpayers' money. I will be the first one to admit that I have cast some bad votes during my tenure, and I wish I could have some of them back. For too long, both Republicans and Democrats have treated the taxpayers' money as a slush fund that does not ever end. At some point, the madness has to stop.

Over a month ago, Democrats passed and President Obama signed into law the "Pay-Go" legislation. It calls on Congress to pay for bills by not adding to our debt. It sounds like a common sense tool that would rein in government spending. Unfortunately, Pay-Go is a paper tiger. It has no teeth. I did not vote for the Democrats' Pay-Go legislation because I knew it was just a political dog-and-pony show to get some good press after some political setbacks. Since the Pay-Go rule was enacted, the national debt has gone up $244,992,297,448.11 (as of Wednesday, that is).

I have 40 grandchildren, and I want them to grow up in a country where they have all of the same opportunities I had as a child. I fear that they will not have those opportunities if Washington continues on its course of spending without paying for it. We are at over $12 trillion in debt. I know many Americans sit around their kitchen table and make the tough decisions. It is time for the politicians in Washington to do the same.
Jim Bunning is a Republican senator from Kentucky.



http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/column-why-i-took-a-stand-.html

Woman leaves 2000 living descendants

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html?hp

Climategate:Criminal Penalties Next?

Senator Inhofe calls for criminal investigation and Senate hearings.  They should be using the RICO laws for this one!
--------------------------------------
The staff report describes four major issues revealed by the Climategate Files and the subsequent revelations:

1. The emails suggest some climate scientists were cooperating to obstruct the release of damaging information and counter-evidence.
2. They suggest scientists were manipulating the data to reach predetermined conclusions.
3. They show some climate scientists colluding to pressure journal editors not to publish work questioning the “consensus.”
4. They show that scientists involved in the report were assuming the role of climate activists attempting to influence public opinion while claiming scientific objectivity.

The report notes a number of potential legal issues raised by their Climategate investigation:

1. It suggests scientific misconduct that may violate the Shelby Amendment — requiring open access to the results of government-funded research — and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) policies on scientific misconduct (which were announced December 12, 2000).
2. It notes the potential for violations of the Federal False Statements and False Claims Acts, which may have both civil and criminal penalties.
3. The report also notes the possibility of there having been an obstruction of Congress in Congressional Proceeds, which may constitute an obstruction of justice.

If proven, these charges could subject the scientists involved to debarment from federally funded research, and even to criminal penalties.


http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-and-the-law-senator-inhofe-to-ask-for-congressional-criminal-investigation-pajamas-mediapjtv-exclusive/2/

Poll: Only 21% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed

Peering through the mist at last?
------------------------------
The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.
However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2010/only_21_say_u_s_government_has_consent_of_the_governed

Naked Emperor Raises Rate

...and stocks and commodities go up?  Confirms inflation fears.
-------------------------------------------------------

So I’ll ask the question again — why on earth would Ben & Co. raise rates? The answer should be obvious if you’ve been listening to me and my brethren for the last several years: Bernanke is terrified of inflation. He knows that U.S. debt is losing its cachet. He knows how much money has been printed. He knows the American consumer is an empty gun. He knows what’s coming, and he figures if he starts raising rates now, he can postpone the inevitable catastrophe. And maybe he can. If he raises rates to 10,000 basis-points (that’s 100%, by the way, and even that wouldn’t be enough).
You think that’s crazy? Ben doesn’t. After Friday, he’s more terrified than ever. Sure the dollar went up a little, but so did gold, oil, and stocks, and that’s not supposed to happen when the Fed raises rates. No, when rates go higher, it’s supposed to mean slower growth ahead, and less opportunity for investment. The only real exception to this rule is the anticipation of inflationary price increases — in which case markets don’t appear to care about slower growth, because investors are more focused on the likelihood of weakening currencies. In this case, markets anticipate higher prices and move up in spite of higher rates.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/189741-inflation-why-markets-ignored-the-fed-rate-hike?source=article_sb_picks

Ignore Expiration Dates on Food

They have no meaning except in relative terms.  Even the mandated ones are arbitrary, and differ from state to state.  Also remember that advancing perishability BENEFITS the producer (who sets the date, in most cases).
----------------------------------------------
The fact is that expiration dates mean very little. Food starts to deteriorate from the moment it's harvested, butchered, or processed, but the rate at which it spoils depends less on time than on the conditions under which it's stored. Moisture and warmth are especially detrimental. A package of ground meat, say, will stay fresher longer if placed near the coldest part of a refrigerator (below 40 degrees Fahrenheit), than next to the heat-emitting light bulb. Besides, as University of Minnesota food scientist Ted Labuza explained to me, expiration dates address quality—optimum freshness—rather than safety and are extremely conservative. To account for all manner of consumer, manufacturers imagine how the laziest people with the most undesirable kitchens might store and handle their food, then test their products based on these criteria.

http://www.slate.com/id/2244249/

Naked Crony Capitalism

Shameless spendulus;  Picking the "green" winners and losers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCZBKxP4TY

Best Reason to Live in AZ

 This is awesome.  I can't stand the money-leeching Mass RMV.
----------------------------
Well, maybe the second best reason… the first best is that it was 75F today.  But the second best reason is that my son got his driver’s license today, and it expires in the year 2059.  I kid you not — get your license at 16 and there are no more renewals until you are 65 years old.  Have fun at the DMV.

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/02/single-best-reason-to-live-in-arizona.html

Obama=Bush+++

Birds of a feather:  Same policies tripled down
--------------------
At first glance former President Bush and President Obama seem like opposites when it comes to economic policy making.  Talk of Bush as a free-marketeer and deregulator abounds as Obama’s reputation as a big spender and intervener grow stronger by the day.  A closer look shows their economic policies have more in common than meets the eye.

5. They love to spend. Bush passed a $3 trillion budget for 2009.  Obama posted a $3.5 trillion budget in 2010.  Bush doubled the debt to almost $6 trillion and Obama’s plans would leave us with an IOU of an additional $8.5 trillion by 2020.

4. They shop at the same stores. Contrary to popular belief, defense and homeland security spending only made up about 40 percent of Bush’s new spending.  He increased spending across most non-defense categories – like education, Medicare, Medicaid, income security and regional development – by four to six times the rate of inflation.  In Obama’s first half year in office, as he demanded a departure from the “investment deficit” years under Bush, these budgets rose another 70 percent or 40 times the rate of inflation.

3. They dabble with stimulants. In 2001 and 2008, Bush spent billions on rebates to stimulate consumer spending.  In 2009, Obama upped the ante with his $862 billion stimulus package.

2. They give sweetheart deals to failing corporations. Obama carried out Bush’s unpopular $700 billion bailout for failing corporations.  Together, the presidents have bailed out over 600 businesses since Spring 2008.

1. They enjoy regulating in their free time. Once again contrary to popular belief, President Bush was the biggest regulator since Richard Nixon.  Under his leadership in 2007, the number of pages of regulation added to the Federal Register reached an all-time high of 78,090  – a 21 percent increase from Bush’s first year.  And spending on regulatory activities rose to $42 billion in 2009 – a 62 percent increase.  Since taking office, Obama has proposed a large and sweeping increase in regulation that many worry could lead to another financial crisis in the future.

Despite rhetoric that suggests the contrary, President Obama’s economic policies are strikingly more of the same failed policies that Bush tried before him.  This is unfortunate because, as Paul Krugman claims, the last decade has seen declining private-sector employment and declining median household income.

http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/2010/02/16/the-odd-couple-5-unfortunate-similarities-between-bush-and-obama/

Insolvency? Making Greece look good

 

http://seekingalpha.com/article/188776-outstanding-external-debt-numbers-greece-doesn-t-look-so-bad?source=email

Measure the Speed of Light with Valentine Chocolate

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/02/leftover-valentines-chocolate-use-it-to-measure-the-speed-of-light/

Climategate-Moving to Capitulation

• Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
• There has been no global warming since 1995
• Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

TSA; Disabled 4-Year-Old Forced to Remove Leg Braces

I feel so much safer;
------------------------------------------
Did you hear about the Camden cop whose disabled son wasn't allowed to pass through airport security unless he took off his leg braces?
Unfortunately, it's no joke. This happened to Bob Thomas, a 53-year-old officer in Camden's emergency crime suppression team, who was flying to Orlando in March with his wife, Leona, and their son, Ryan.
Ryan was taking his first flight, to Walt Disney World, for his fourth birthday.
The boy is developmentally delayed, one of the effects of being born 16 weeks prematurely. His ankles are malformed and his legs have low muscle tone. In March he was just starting to walk.
Mid-morning on March 19, his parents wheeled his stroller to the TSA security point, a couple of hours before their Southwest Airlines flight was to depart.
The boy's father broke down the stroller and put it on the conveyor belt as Leona Thomas walked Ryan through the metal detector.
The alarm went off.
The screener told them to take off the boy's braces.
The Thomases were dumbfounded. "I told them he can't walk without them on his own," Bob Thomas said.
"He said, 'He'll need to take them off.' "
Ryan's mother offered to walk him through the detector after they removed the braces, which are custom-made of metal and hardened plastic.
No, the screener replied. The boy had to walk on his own.



http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_region/20100215_Daniel_Rubin__Another_case_of_TSA_overkill.html

Mortgage Bankers Association Underwater on their Mortgage

On Friday, CoStar Group Inc., a provider of commercial real estate data, announced that it had agreed to buy the MBA’s 10-story headquarters building in Washington, D.C., for $41.3 million. The price is well below the $79 million the trade group says it paid for the glass-walled building in 2007, while it was still under construction. The price also falls short of  the $75 million of financing that the MBA received from a group of banks led by PNC Financial Services Group Inc. for the purchase.

When the MBA announced the purchase of the building in early 2007, the trade group’s president at the time, Jonathan Kempner, said: “We have come to the inescapable conclusion that owning our own building was the smartest long-term investment for the association.”  In October 2009, however, the MBA informed its members that it had put the building up for sale. At that time, the MBA said that continued ownership of the building, which was financed with $75 million of variable-rate debt, would be “economically imprudent.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2010/02/06/mortgage-bankers-mum-on-how-they-fixed-their-own-mortgage-woes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fdevelopments%2Ffeed+(WSJ.com%3A+Developments+Blog)&mod=WSJ_Real+Estate_BLOGSDEVELOPMENTSFEED

Nearly Failed Treasury Auction?

Hmmm.  Interesting.
---------------------------------------------------

I realize this sounds complicated, so simply think of it this way:
1) Direct Buyers: folks who buy straight from the Treasury, typically comprising a minor stake in US debt purchases
2) Indirect Buyers: folks who buy LARGE chunks of US debt, typically Foreign Governments
3) Primary Dealers: banks that HAVE to buy US debt to ensure an auction doesn’t fail. You don’t want to see a lot of Primary Dealer purchases as this means that those who can CHOOSE to buy US debt DON’T want to.
On Wednesday, February 10, 2010, the US Treasury issued $16 billion in 30-year Treasuries. Here are the buyer data points:

Buyer	Purchase Amount (%)
Primary Dealers	47%
Direct Buyers	24% (A RECORD)
Indirect Buyers	28%

First of all, we see Direct Buyers hit a RECORD percentage of purchases. This is extremely bizarre and somewhat disconcerting given that we have no way of knowing who these buyers are. For all we know, they could be the Federal Reserve itself or other US Government entities buying “off the radar.”
Indeed, on that note, we know that the US Federal Reserve accounted for 11% of the total purchases. Folks, you’re not dealing with a healthy debt auction when the Fed accounts for 10% of purchases.
However, far, FAR more worrisome is the pathetic Indirect Buyer takedown: 28%. Historically this number has been more around 40% (Tyler at ZeroHedge notes that the average Indirect purchase of the last four long-term Treasury auctions was 39.9%). To see such a MASSIVE drop off in Indirect Buyers (40% down to 28%) is a MAJOR warning sign that Foreign Governments are no longer willing to buy long-term US debt.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/188380-the-u-s-land-of-the-free-and-home-of-a-nearly-failed-treasury-auction-of-its-own?source=article_sb_popular

New aerial 911 photos released

Just released.  Interesting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1249885/New-World-Trade-Center-9-11-aerial-images-ABC-News.html

ClimateGate Gets Even Worse

The unraveling continues.  At what point do these guys and their complicit IPCC lackeys have zero credibility.

Strange case of moving weather posts and a scientist under siege

It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?
But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.
It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.

The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.

Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.

The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then.
The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanisation influence … is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.
But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.

But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be "unduly burdensome", they concluded that he was covering up the error.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.

He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.

Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication". He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/dispute-weather-fraud

Rx for Decongestants; Police State Gone Wild

The Pyrrhic 'war on drugs' has no bounds. Because prescriptions have done so much to stop prescription narcotics trafficing, the police state is going after my pseudophed. Imagine having to visit your doctor to get a decongestant- aren't we supposed to be trying to contain healthcare costs? How much human suffering must we all endure to appease them?

State and local efforts to thwart methamphetamine production by further limiting consumer access to a popular decongestant are pitting law enforcement against pharmacists and patients.

New ordinances in some Missouri communities and legislation pending in several states would require consumers to get a prescription to buy cold and allergy pills containing pseudoephedrine, such as Sudafed and Claritin-D. The medicines still are being purchased at pharmacies to make methamphetamine, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), despite an earlier nationwide effort to track sales.

The goal is to eliminate meth labs — often in homes or hotel rooms — that use a mixture of toxic chemicals that can explode or catch fire, putting bystanders at risk and requiring costly cleanups.

"I don't think I've ever been involved in my entire career in law enforcement in something that's more important than this," said Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics Director Marshall Fisher, who supports a bill the Mississippi House passed last week. Mississippi seized 590 meth labs in 2009, he said, up from about 300 the previous year.

About 15 million Americans use pseudoephedrine products. Requiring prescriptions will delay access to the quick-acting medication and drive up costs to consumers through more doctor visits and co-pays, said Ron Fitzwater of the Missouri Pharmacy Association, which opposes prescription laws.

The Consumer Healthcare Products Association, which represents makers of over-the-counter medication, also is against the restrictions. It wants to pay for states to install electronic tracking systems to detect and stop excessive purchases.

Oregon is the only state that requires prescriptions. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wants to mandate prescriptions nationwide. He notes Oregon had just 10 meth lab seizures in 2009.

Nationwide, cold and allergy sufferers already must show ID and sign pharmacy logs to buy restricted quantities of medications with pseudoephedrine. Those rules increasingly are being thwarted by illegal drugmakers who send people to multiple pharmacies to make small purchases. "It's a huge problem," said Gary Boggs of the DEA.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-01-decongestant_N.htm

Boom & Bust Rap

Starring Keynes and Hayek;  Too funny!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk&feature=player_embedded

Here are the lyrics:

[Keynes Sings:]

John Maynard Keynes, wrote the book on modern macro The man you need when the economy's off track, [whoa] Depression, recession now your question's in session Have a seat and I'll school you in one simple lesson

BOOM, 1929 the big crash We didn't bounce back--economy's in the trash Persistent unemployment, the result of sticky wages Waiting for recovery? Seriously? That's outrageous!

I had a real plan any fool can understand The advice, real simple--boost aggregate demand! C, I, G, all together gets to Y Make sure the total's growing, watch the economy fly

We've been going back and forth for a century [Keynes] I want to steer markets, [Hayek] I want them set free There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it [Hayek] Blame low interest rates. [Keynes] No... it's the animal spirits

Hayek sings:

I'll begin in broad strokes, just like my friend Keynes His theory conceals the mechanics of change, That simple equation, too much aggregation Ignores human action and motivation

And yet it continues as a justification For bailouts and payoffs by pols with machinations You provide them with cover to sell us a free lunch Then all that we're left with is debt, and a bunch

If you're living high on that cheap credit hog Don't look for cure from the hair of the dog Real savings come first if you want to invest The market coordinates time with interest

Your focus on spending is pushing on thread In the long run, my friend, it's your theory that's dead So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective Prepared to get schooled in my Austrian perspective

Quote of the Day

I admire the remarkable honesty

Quote of the Day

“People will never know what’s in that bill until we pass it.”

–Obama Advisor David Axelrod, discussing health care over the weekend.

IPCC; Himalayan Glacier Melt Data "Plucked from thin air"

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0dgQzCY8Y

MoveYour Money

Bank "too big to fail"?  We can collectively fix that by making them smaller. Just because the government propped them up, this does not mean we cannot make a dent in their retail business model. Why on earth does anyone bank with the majors anyways? I think a sense of security and credibility used to be part of it, but that was clearly a false assessment.  Now they are nothing but fee factories!  Put your money in a bank that did not get bailed out!
Choose George Bailey over Mr. Potter.  Better service, higher interest, lower fees- what's not to like?

Check out the movement here:
http://moveyourmoney.info/

Kling on Causes of Depth of Recession

Some of these causes are better than others; The "innovation slump" is a huge factor, because government kept partying like it was 1999, and the private sector could not continue to feed the beast without the illusory housing boom, which (unlike the internet boom) did not do anything to improve productivity.  Productivity is the only route to real and lasting wealth, and a higher standard of living, as it has been for millennia. Lately, the government has been doing everything it can think of to kill the golden goose.
----------------------
If I had a convincing explanation for the depth of this recession, I would shout it from the rooftops. Instead, let me toss out a few ideas, in no particular order of importance or plausibility.

1. The huge transfer of wealth to failed banks sucked a lot of energy out of the economy. In other words, the bank bailouts that are credited with keeping things from getting worse are in fact what made things worse.

2. The bloated housing and financial sectors created broader distortions in the economy. If the value of New York City's exports of financial services falls, then that has all sorts of effects. The city's nontraded goods and services sector is adversely affected. Its imports from other parts of the U.S. and the rest of the world fall. And so on. All sorts of trading patterns need to change, and that requires considerable recalculation.
3. Part of the adjustment process in the economy involves physical relocation. The nature of the collapse in the housing market means that relocation costs go up, which reduces the economy's capacity to adjust.
4. Since 2000, the economy has been in an innovation slump. The human genome project yielded less immediate benefits than expected. Progress in computer and communications technology has become evolutionary, not revolutionary. Nanotechnology is far too immature to create major new business opportunities.
Only when an innovation reaches the point where its economic impact can be felt, as happened with personal computers and the Internet in the 1990's, will lots of new businesses be created. Remember that in 1987 Robert Solow quipped that "we see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics." That soon changed. Today, one could argue that we see genome decoding and nanotech research everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

The recent innovation slump was disguised by the housing boom. That is, if you take away the housing boom, you would have seen a steady increase in unemployment, due to the lack of new business formation. Instead, the housing boom caused unemployment to fall, and the crash caused unemployment to shoot up.

5. We ran into a "limits-to-growth" problem with energy. Tightness in the oil market means that we have to convert to less oil-intensive patterns of consumption growth and productions. Just as in the 1970's, this creates big adjustment problems.
Of course, it is possible to have several of these problems at once.




http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/01/why_such_a_deep.html

Noonan on the Brown phenomenon

 Of Nuts and Creeps


Speaking broadly: In the 2006 and 2008 elections, and at some point during the past decade, the ancestral war between Democrats and the Republicans began to take on a new look. If you were a normal human sitting at home having a beer and watching national politics peripherally, as normal people do until they focus on an election, chances are pretty good you came to see the two major parties not as the Dems versus the Reps, or the blue versus the red, but as the Nuts versus the Creeps. The Nuts were for high spending and taxing and the expansion of government no matter what. The Creeps were hypocrites who talked one thing and did another, who went along on the spending spree while lecturing on fiscal solvency.
In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort. In 2009 and 2010, they looked at his general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations—health care, cap and trade—and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, "Uh-oh, he's a Nut!"
...
In a telephone conversation Wednesday night, Mr. Brown spoke of what's ahead. The conversation turned to the movie "The Candidate," to the moment Robert Redford wins the election and takes a top strategist aside to ask: "What do we do now?"
Mr. Brown laughed: "I know what I want to do: Go down there and be a good person, a good and competent senator. I have huge shoes to fill, the legacy is just overwhelming. I'm a consensus builder. . . . I can disagree in the daytime and have a coffee or beer later on. Everyone's welcome to their opinion."
He said he thought the president "inherited a lot of problems," that "he's doing a great job with North Korea, a nice job with Afghanistan." A centerpiece of Mr. Brown's campaign was opposition to the president's health-care plan, but he stressed that he opposes high spending wherever it comes from. "I've criticized President Bush for his failure to use his veto pen. There's plenty of blame to go around. The question is how solve problems. It's not bailouts. What made America great? Free markets, free enterprise, manufacturing, job creation. That's how we're gonna do it, not by enlarging government."
The next morning he took the 7 a.m. shuttle from Boston to Washington for his first trip to the Capitol. On the plane, after they took off, the pilot came on and said, "Senator Brown is on board, on his way to Washington." The plane erupted in applause.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703699204575017503811443526.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Supremes Gut McCain-Feingold

What the hell took them so long?  Disturbed by the 5-4 vote, I mean come on now.

Justice Kennedy's opinion says it all:

“When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought.  This is unlawful ... The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

http://bigjournalism.com/fross/2010/01/21/supreme-court-drop-kicks-mccainfeingold-scores-victory-for-1st-amendment/

Chavez; US Caused Haiti Earthquake

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has once again accused the United States of playing God. But this time it's Haiti's disastrous earthquake that he thinks the U.S. was behind. Spanish newspaper ABC quotes Chavez as saying that the U.S. navy launched a weapon capable of inducing a powerful earthquake off the shore of Haiti. He adds that this time it was only a drill and the final target is ... destroying and taking over Iran.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/01/21/chavez_us_weapon_test_caused_haiti_earthquake.html

Bernanke Going Down?

Not sure it would make much difference- the chairman is little more than a figurehead for the secret society that is the Fed. Would imply a crack in the facade though.

Senate Dems Not Sure They Can Get Enough Votes to Reconfirm Bernanke

Amidst the voter anger at Wall Street and Washington, D.C., ABC News has learned that the Senate Democratic leadership isn't sure there are enough votes to re-confirm Ben Bernanke for another term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Bernanke's term expires on Jan. 31.
"The American people are disgusted with the greed and recklessness of Wall Street," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said in an interview with The Associated Press last month. "People are asking, 'Why didn't the Fed intervene at the appropriate time to stop the casino-type activities of large financial companies?'"

Sanders, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Sen. David Vitter, R-La., have all put holds on Bernanke's nomination, requiring 60 votes to proceed to a vote.

Voter anger is of heightened concern to members of Congress given the surprise victory of Sen.-elect Scott Brown, R-Mass., who rode a tide of voter discontent and economic anxiety to an upset victory in a special election earlier this week.



http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/01/senate-dems-not-sure-they-can-get-enough-votes-to-reconfirm-bernanke.html

Don't Blame Me...

I couldn't find a 1972 bumper sticker, so this will have to do.

Haiti; Man Made Disaster

Sad but true- the place was structurally unsound before the ground shook, which is what turned a tragedy into a full-blown disaster.
---------------------------------------------
Though the earthquake was a powerful one, its impact was multiplied many, many times by the weakness of civil society and the absence of rule of law in Haiti. As Roger Noriega has written, "You can literally see [the] dysfunction from space": Satellite photos of Hispaniola, the island split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, show green forests on the Dominican side and bare, deforested hills on the Haitian side. Mudslides and collapsing houses were routine in Haiti, even before this disaster. Laws designed to prevent erosion, and building codes designed to prevent criminally shoddy construction, were ignored. The rickety slums of Port-au-Prince were constructed in ravines and on steep, unstable hills. When they collapsed, they collapsed completely.
So weak were Haiti's public institutions, literally and figuratively, that nothing is left of them, either. Parliament, churches, hospitals, and government offices no longer exist.* The archbishop is dead. The head of the U.N. mission is dead. There is a real possibility that violent gangs will emerge to take their place, to control food supplies, to loot what remains to be looted. There is a real possibility, within the coming days, of epidemics, mass starvation, and civil war.

http://slate.com/id/2241861/

I'm with SEIU?

These union thugs are so intimidating

http://www.thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showthread.php?t=90013

Look out for your 401k

The greedy pols are eying your pile of money to pay off their obscene debts.

How’s that 401(k) working out for you?  Well, if the Obama administration has its way, you won’t have to worry about that any more.
Apparently, you’re too stupid and lazy to be trusted with your own retirement planning. So, what you need is for the government to “urge” you to convert your 401(k) plan to a government annuity.

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

TaxProf has a roundup of some useful links concerning this, but here’s the key takeaway:
There literally isn’t enough money in the world to float the T-notes the Treasury must issue in order to prop up our unsustainable spending path.  There are, however, about $3.6 trillion in funds just sitting in 401(k) accounts.  If the government can urge–or force–you to convert your 401(k) into T-note funded annuities, the Treasury can continue to issue those notes to float the government’s deficit.  Essentially, you’ll be converting your retirement funds into an IOU from the government…just like your social security account has already done.

http://www.qando.net/?p=6596