Saturday, February 6, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
Big Government's Cronies
The real reason politicians like complicated tax and regulatory schemes
Vice President Joe Biden appeared at the opening of one of its plants. CEO Kevin Surace thanked him for his "unwavering support." "Without you and the recovery ("stimulus") act, this would not have been possible," Surace said.
Biden returned the compliment: "You are not just churning out windows; you are making some of the most energy-efficient windows in the world. I would argue the most energy-efficient windows in the world."
Gee, other window-makers say their windows are just as energy efficient, but the vice president didn't visit them.
Biden laid it on pretty thick for Serious Materials: "This is a story of how a new economy predicated on innovation and efficiency is not only helping us today but inspiring a better tomorrow."
Serious doesn't just have the vice president in his corner. It's got President Obama himself.
Company board member Paul Holland had the rare of honor of introducing Obama at a "green energy" event. Obama then said: "Serious Materials just reopened ... a manufacturing plant outside of Pittsburgh. These workers will now have a new mission: producing some of the most energy-efficient windows in the world." READ MORE REASON
Tea Partiers Shouldn't Date the GOP
by John Samples
In recent months, the most influential political party in the country may not be the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but the Tea Party. This murky, largely leaderless grassroots movement has been the driving force behind the derailment of President Barack Obama's dearest agenda items, notably health care reform and climate change legislation.
What are the goals of this movement? In part, that is the wrong question. The Tea Party effort rejects the notion that a politician or a pundit should define their movement. Rather, citizens themselves will tell us what the movement means.
As their name suggests, these citizens want to revive the ideas at the heart of the American Revolution: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. One chapter in Texas adopted these principles: limited government; fiscal responsibility; personal responsibility and the rule of law.
Tea Party groups are conducting online polling and deliberations to determine the priorities of the movement. This process will create a "Contract from America" to serve as a template for reforms to come. The most popular ideas now include a flat tax, congressional term limits and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.
Those ideals and policies sound like what the Republican Party once espoused but have not practiced for at least a decade.
Not surprisingly, establishment conservatives have recently tried to make hay of the Tea Party movement's apparent lack of a recognizable face or national headquarters. Grover Norquist, the Rasputin behind countless conservative organizing activities, has offered tips to Tea Party organizers. Old (and perhaps new again) Republican apparatchiks like Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich have proclaimed their oneness with the Tea Party faithful and essentially offered their services as the movement's leaders. No doubt many Republican leaders would like to direct the energy of the Tea Party against the Obama administration and to receive the votes of these idealists come November.
We pray thee, Tea Partiers: Do not go there. READ MORE @ CATO
Are All Jobs Created (or Saved) Equal?
NASA shouldn't be a jobs program
And in Washington, D.C., an attack of the nerves generally manifests itself in howls of outrage at committee hearings. So on Tuesday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) dove right in, with a thinly veiled threat: "When the president says that he's going to cancel Constellation, I can tell you that to muster the votes and to overcome that, it's going to be very, very difficult." While Nelson—and nearly everyone else quoted below—talked about the importance of the grand vision of space exploration, when they got down to brass tacks their concerns were about constituent jobs. About 7,000 space jobs in Florida are at stake in the revision of the NASA budget.
In the traditional howl-of-outrage committee meeting of the House Armed Forces Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Rob Bishop, (R-Utah) said "thousands of people in Utah…are losing good-paying, high-tech jobs. Many of the employees at [rocket manufacturer] ATK have been with the Minuteman program for 35 years or more and have unique experience and capability that will now be lost to our country." READ MORE REASON
Words to Live By.......
"The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients."
Edmund Burke (1899)
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Truth
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
Words to Live By.......
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session."
Mark Twain (1866)
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Truth
"If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves. "
Thomas Sowell (1992)
Surveillance Can't Make Us Secure
by Julian Sanchez
In a major speech on Internet freedom last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged American tech companies to "take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments' demands for censorship and surveillance." Her call to action followed a series of dazzlingly sophisticated cyberattacks against online giant Google and more than thirty other major technology companies, believed to originate in the People's Republic of China. Few observers have found the Chinese government's staunch denials of involvement persuasive — but the attacks should also spur our own government to review the ways our burgeoning surveillance state has made us more vulnerable.
The Google hackers appear to have been interested in, among other things, gathering information about Chinese dissidents and human rights activists — and they evidently succeeded in obtaining account information and e-mail subject lines for a number of Gmail users. While Google is understandably reluctant to go into detail about the mechanics of the breach, a source at the company told ComputerWorld "they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with [US] search warrants by providing data on Google users." In other words, a portal set up to help the American government catch criminals may have proved just as handy at helping the Chinese government find dissidents.
In a way, the hackers' strategy makes perfect sense. Communications networks are generally designed to restrict outside access to their users' private information. But the goal of government surveillance is to create a breach-by-design, a deliberate backdoor into otherwise carefully secured systems. The appeal to an intruder is obvious: Why waste time with retail hacking of many individual targets when you can break into the network itself and spy wholesale? READ MORE
In a major speech on Internet freedom last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged American tech companies to "take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments' demands for censorship and surveillance." Her call to action followed a series of dazzlingly sophisticated cyberattacks against online giant Google and more than thirty other major technology companies, believed to originate in the People's Republic of China. Few observers have found the Chinese government's staunch denials of involvement persuasive — but the attacks should also spur our own government to review the ways our burgeoning surveillance state has made us more vulnerable.
The Google hackers appear to have been interested in, among other things, gathering information about Chinese dissidents and human rights activists — and they evidently succeeded in obtaining account information and e-mail subject lines for a number of Gmail users. While Google is understandably reluctant to go into detail about the mechanics of the breach, a source at the company told ComputerWorld "they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with [US] search warrants by providing data on Google users." In other words, a portal set up to help the American government catch criminals may have proved just as handy at helping the Chinese government find dissidents.
In a way, the hackers' strategy makes perfect sense. Communications networks are generally designed to restrict outside access to their users' private information. But the goal of government surveillance is to create a breach-by-design, a deliberate backdoor into otherwise carefully secured systems. The appeal to an intruder is obvious: Why waste time with retail hacking of many individual targets when you can break into the network itself and spy wholesale? READ MORE
Words to Live By.......
"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation."
Thomas B. Reed (1886)
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Truth
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
Winston Churchill (1903)
Fiscal Fraud—or Frugality?
Runaway spending is a bipartisan problem
For the past year, Republicans have been criticizing Barack Obama for out of control spending. So they must be pleased that they have forced him, in his State of the Union address, to concede the point by proposing a freeze on outlays of the kind Republicans generally don’t like.
Well, not exactly. After the administration floated a plan to cap non-defense, non-security discretionary spending for the next three years, the opposition party erupted in jeers.
The complaints were many: It affected only one-eighth of the budget, it came on top of big increases, and the savings would be trivial next to the deficits that are in the pipeline.
The loudest catcall came from a spokesman for House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio: “Given Washington Democrats’ unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest.”
All the criticisms, as it happens, are true. Obama’s claim of stern fiscal discipline—“we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years”—collapsed into comical irrelevance as soon as he listed all the programs that won’t be included: national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which happen to be the Four Horsemen of the Fiscal Apocalypse.
There’s more: Unspent stimulus funds amounting to $165 billion. Other “mandatory” programs like unemployment and food stamps. Interest on the debt, which will triple in the next three years. Obama is going on a hunger strike, except during mealtimes.
Words to Live By.......
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin
Mark Twain's Radical Liberalism
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
Part of the difficulty of understanding Mark Twain's political outlook is due to terminology and the tendency of politics to corrupt the meaning of everything. As often as you see him called a liberal, he is called a conservative, and sometimes both in the same breath. Critics puzzle about how one person could be champion of workers, owners, and the capitalist rich, while holding views that are antigovernment on domestic matters, antislavery, and antiwar. They often conclude that his politics are incoherent.
Part of the reason for the confusion has to do with the changed meaning of liberalism as an ideology and the incapacity of modern critics to understand its 19th-century implications.
Twain was born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, when the meaning of liberalism was less ambiguous. To be liberal was to favor free enterprise and property rights, oppose slavery, reject old-world caste systems, loathe war, be generally disposed toward free trade and cosmopolitanism, favor the social advance of women, favor technological progress – and to possess a grave skepticism toward government management of anything.
The tradition of thought extends from Enlightenment thinkers like Jefferson through 20th-century Misesians and Hayekians. This outlook on the world might be nearly extinguished from politics today (two flavors of statism), but it was the one embraced by Clemens.
By the time Clemens died in 1910, liberalism was on the verge of transformation. The Gilded Age of capitalist accumulation had come and gone, and inspired envy and ideological fanaticism all around. Liberalism's progressive outlook led to sympathy for socialism and government management, and, later, to the war economy as a means of imposing economic regimentation in the absence of democratic consensus. A half century later, liberalism would have moved full swing toward the very opposite of its 19th-century meaning, while those who opposed government management and favored free enterprise were called conservatives.
It is for this reason that Twain's political views are so frequently misunderstood, as the vast literature on his life and work easily demonstrates. Biographers and critics have had difficulty figuring out how the same person could champion the interests of Newport capitalist class while founding the Anti-Imperialist League. He loved America's attachment to property and commerce but emerged as the country's most severe critic of the warfare state (he said that the United States should make a special flag for the Philippines: "white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.")
Monday, February 1, 2010
Look Who’s on Al Gore’s Side
David Kramer
BIN LADEN BLASTS US FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday. In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt. He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for “drastic solutions” to global warming, and “not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change.”
Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic. The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants. [Appeal to who? Other terrorist organizations, such as the United Nations and the United States Government, already believe in "man-made" global warming.]
Many people actually believe that Bin Laden is dead. Also, many people—including myself and the FBI—believe that Bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11. But if the above is true (highly unlikely), it’s nice to know the sort of folks that Al Gore’s pseudo-science attracts.
Pull the Plug on This Program
No matter what happens in a State of the Union address, the opposition's official response is going to feel pathetic.
Jesse Walker | January 29, 2010
The State of the Union address is traditionally followed by a response from the opposition. Wednesday night's Republican reply was anything but traditional, though: It was filmed before a live audience, which clapped and laughed at the expected intervals with all the robotic reliability of the crowd at a taping of Two and a Half Men. As Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell delivered his party's statement, he was flanked by figures representing a calculatedly diverse assortment of races and sexes; they nodded and made thoughtful faces every time McDonnell made a point, even one as banal as "We were encouraged to hear President Obama speak this evening about the need to create jobs." It felt like a weird, ersatz State of the Union, the sort of thing a couple of consultants might throw together with just enough of a budget to hire some extras and buy an applause sign.
Still, you can't blame the GOP for trying something new. If there's one constant in the recent history of the State of the Union address, it's this: No matter how lethargic, long-winded, dishonest, or dimwitted the president's speech may be, the reply will feel like a pathetic rejoinder put together in someone's rec room. A politician—possibly a party leader but often a "rising star," i.e., someone most viewers won't have heard of—stares at a camera in an apparently empty office, reciting a set of talking points. In the State of the Union speech itself, an immensely powerful man sets an agenda. In the response, no matter what the speaker says, the takeaway message for anyone still bothering to watch is that he isn't setting the agenda. In Great Britain, the opposition gets to confront the prime minister on television every week. In the United States, the opposition gets to borrow the camera after the president has left the room.
READ MORE REASON
Say it Ain’t So
by Becky Akers
Prepare for a shock: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lied.
That’s the bureaucracy pestering passengers in airports while the Underwear Bomber waltzes past checkpoints onto his plane and sets himself afire. No matter: the TSA turned that flaming failure into an excuse to clamor more loudly for "whole-body imagers," i.e., cameras that virtually strip-search us.
Though the TSA pretends these pornographic contraptions are its answer to explosive briefs, it’s actually been lusting after them for years – even as passengers vehemently objected to exposing themselves to government agents, especially ones armed with cameras. And so the TSA’s propagandists swore its imagers could neither store nor transmit pictures. Screeners may leer at your birthday suit for the "short 12 or 15 seconds" they scan you, but "the minute that the passenger walks in through the [imager] and is cleared, meaning they’re given a green light, that image is gone forever."
Ahem: not according to documents recently pried from the agency’s claws. The specs the TSA supplied to the machines’ manufacturers call for the capacity to both send and store images.
I know, I know: you’re terribly disillusioned. You thought the TSA’s selfless patriots protected you, not their own voyeurism. After all, they’re in that noblest of professions, public service; they’re from the government, and they’re here to help, not hoodwink. Sure, screeners and the agency’s assorted other miscreants become a bit coarse and cantankerous at times, even cruel, but only when we inmates disagree that they’re God.
Meanwhile, some serfs are foolish enough to question the TSA’s wisdom, skill, even its intentions. Among the heretics is EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. It refused to accept Our Rulers’ word that their perverted gadgets "have zero storage capability," as the TSA’s website insists in at least three places and as its innumerable spokesfolks have assured the travelling public. Rather, EPIC’s skeptics actually prosecuted "a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit" to "[obtain] the technical specifications and vendor contracts" for the gizmos. READ MORE
Words to Live By.......
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. "
James Bovard (1994)
Crisis of the Government Party
by Patrick J. Buchanan
President Obama is in a dilemma from which there appears to be no easy or early escape.
Democrats are the Party of Government. They feed it, and it feeds them. The larger government grows, the more agencies that are created, the more bureaucrats who are hired, the more people who become beneficiaries, the more deeply entrenched in power the Party of Government becomes.
President Obama is in a dilemma from which there appears to be no easy or early escape.
Democrats are the Party of Government. They feed it, and it feeds them. The larger government grows, the more agencies that are created, the more bureaucrats who are hired, the more people who become beneficiaries, the more deeply entrenched in power the Party of Government becomes.
At the local, state and federal level, there are 19 million to 20 million government employees. And if one takes only Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and earned income tax credits, we are talking of scores of millions who depend on government checks for the necessities of their daily life.
These vast armies of voters – these tens of millions of government employees and scores of millions of government beneficiaries – are the big battalions of the Party of Government. They provide implacable resistance to any party that pledges to cut or curtail government. For they are fighting for their livelihood. And here is where Obama's dilemma arises.The progressives thought that with the takeover of both houses of Congress by veto-proof Democratic majorities, and the election of the most progressive of the candidates in the Democratic primaries save Dennis Kucinich, a new Progressive Era was at hand.
Another New Deal, another Great Society. And early passage of a stimulus package of $787 billion, nearly 6 percent of the entire economy packed into a single bill, seemed to confirm that happy days were here again.
But, at the same time, the federal takeover of AIG, General Motors and Chrysler and the bailouts of Fannie, Freddie and the Wall Street banks were igniting a Perot-style prairie fire that manifested itself in Tea Party rallies in the spring and town-hall protests in August.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi denounced these folks as "evil-mongers" engaged in the "un-American" activity of shouting down Democrats – though, when college radicals do it to conservatives, it is called "heckling" and the conservatives are instructed that they "just do not understand the First Amendment."
READ a little or however much you can stand of Buchanan.... Every now and then he makes a point.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sam Adams on a Sunday Afternoon
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks."
Samuel Adams
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