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Maximum Freedom
Minimum  Government
Minimum Taxes

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. — Ayn Rand

If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute. --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. --Thomas Jefferson

Credit expansion is the governments' foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether, to finance lavish government spending, to expropriate the capitalists, to contrive everlasting booms, and to make everybody prosperous. — Ludwig von Mises, Human Action [1949]

“Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors – and miss.” — Robert Heinlein

7/31/2009: New study debunks global warming claims

Members of the U.S. Senate will do well to take the time to read "Influence of the Southern Oscillation on Tropospheric Temperature." Sounds like a real page-turner, no? It certainly should be for senators and anybody else who cares about whether Congress approves the Obama-Waxman-Markey anti-global warming energy bill ("cap-and-trade") that recently passed the House and is now before the Senate. The principal evidence underlying cap-and-trade is contained in the UN's annual Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which asserts that the Earth's atmosphere is warming due to man-made activities, chiefly the burning of carbon-based fuels like oil and coal; the consequences, not surprisingly are described as catastrophic. Cap-and-trade imposes a host of draconian measures masquerading as a "market-based approach" designed to phase out carbon fuels, which would be replaced by the alternatives encouraged by tax breaks and government subsidies. If the measure becomes law, it will double or triple monthly utility bills, make the price of gasoline skyrocket, and cost millions of jobs.

Quite simply, the "Influence" study demolishes the claims of the IPCC. Conducted by two scientists from Australia and one from New Zealand, the peer-reviewed paper assessed the influence of the Southern Oscillation Index, (which manifests north of the Equator as El Nino), on global temperature variation. At least 81 percent of the variance in global temperatures is explained by the Southern Oscillation Index, according to the study. The study findings were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. In view of these findings, the Senate should, at the very least, put cap-and-trade on hold, pending congressional hearings in September at which the Influence study authors and IPCC proponents can argue their cases. Then senators should be better able to make defensible decisions on whether it makes sense to impose radical new controls on the production and consumption of the energy that is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.

This is the sensible approach because, as Buzz Aldrin, the former NASA astronaut who famously walked on the Moon, recently told the London Telegraph: "I think the climate has been changing for billions of years. If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today." Put another way, it's time to make global warming decisions on the basis of credible evidence and logical analysis, rather than alarmism fueled by the media.

7/31/2009: Higher Taxes for All! (Except Ambulance Chasers.)

Higher Taxes for All! (Except Ambulance Chasers.) Democrats in Congress have finally found a tax cut they can get behind, Legal Newsline reports:

Federal legislation that would afford trial lawyers a special tax break faces an uncertain future, says one of the chief lobbyists for the nation’s trial lawyers.

The proposal would allow attorneys to deduct fees and expenses up-front for filing contingency-fee lawsuits. The proposal amounts to about a $1.6 billion tax break for plaintiffs’ attorneys, estimates indicate.

”Everyone wants to do it, but the problem is there is not a tax vehicle yet,” said Linda Lipsen, American Association for Justice (AAJ) Senior Vice President of Public Affairs. . . .

“You cannot have a stand alone bill to help lawyers … so we have to tuck it into something,” she said.

Under current tax law, expenses incurred by plaintiffs lawyers working on contingency are considered loans to the client. If the plaintiff wins the case, he pays his lawyer back out of the award. If he loses, the lawyer deducts the loss from his taxes in the year the case is resolved. Under the proposed change, the lawyer would get the deduction right away. Presumably if the client ultimately reimburses him, he would pay taxes then--which means this effectively amounts to an interest-free government loan for trial lawyers.

Legal Newswire notes that this tax break for ambulance chasers “has the support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.,” all of whom are eager to raise taxes of non-trial-lawyers.

In fairness, we should note that not only Democrats are behind this: The free-market Washington Legal Foundation reports that Senate co-sponsors include Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mike Crapo of Idaho and Mel Martinez of Florida, all lawyers. The chief sponsor is Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, another lawyer, who belongs to whichever party is convenient.

The WLF brief notes somewhat drolly that “those who practice plaintiffs’ lawyer work learn quickly that it is a business similar to other capital businesses. Capital is placed at risk and a judgment is made whether or not it will bring a profit.” Why would liberal Democrats, usually so eager to tax greedy capitalists, make an exception for this bunch? Probably because the work they do has the virtue of not actually producing anything.

7/30/2009: A Peek Inside the ObamaCare Bill

A Peek Inside the ObamaCare Bill

Chairman Obama wants to ram his gargantuan healthcare bill down our throats before anyone realizes what's in it. What doesn't he want us to see? Some examples, from a quick inventory by Family Security Matters:

Ÿ Page 22 of the HC Bill mandates the Government will audit books of all employers that self insure.

Ÿ Page 30 Sec 123 of HC bill — a Government committee (good luck with that!) will decide what treatments/benefits a person may receive.

Ÿ Page 29 lines 4-16 in the HC bill — YOUR HEALTHCARE WILL BE RATIONED!

Ÿ Page 42 of HC Bill — The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your HC Benefits for you.

Ÿ Page 50 Section 152 in HC bill — HC will be provided to ALL non US citizens, illegal or otherwise.

Ÿ Page 58 HC Bill — Government will have real-time access to individual's finances and a National ID Healthcard will be issued!

Ÿ Page 59 HC Bill lines 21-24 Government will have direct access to your bank accts for election funds transfer.

Ÿ Page 65 Sec 164 is a payoff subsidized plan for retirees and their families in Unions & community organizations (read: ACORN).

Ÿ Page 72 Lines 8-14 Government will create an HC Exchange to bring private HC plans under Government control.

Ÿ Page 91 Lines 4-7 HC Bill — Government mandates linguistic appropriate services. Example — Translation for illegal aliens.

Ÿ Page 95 HC Bill Lines 8-18 The Government will use groups, i.e. ACORN & Americorps, to sign up individuals for Government HC plan.

Ÿ Page 85 Line 7 HC Bill — Specifics of Benefit Levels for Plans. AARP members — your Health care WILL be rationed.

Ÿ Page 102 Lines 12-18 HC Bill — Medicaid Eligible Individuals will be automatically enrolled in Medicaid. No choice.

Ÿ Page 124 lines 24-25 HC No company can sue Government on price fixing. No "judicial review" against Government Monopoly.

Ÿ Page 127 Lines 1-16 HC Bill — Doctors/ AMA — The Government will tell YOU what you can earn.

Ÿ Page 145 Line 15-17 An Employer MUST auto enroll employees into public option plan. NO CHOICE.

Ÿ Page 126 Lines 22-25 Employers MUST pay for HC for part time employees AND their families.

Ÿ Page 170 Lines 1-3 HC Bill Any NONRESIDENT Alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay.)

Ÿ Page 195 HC Bill -officers & employees of HC Admin (the GOVERNMENT) will have access to ALL Americans' finances and personal records.

Ÿ Page 203 Line 14-15 HC — "The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax" Yes, it says that.

Ÿ Page 239 Line 14-24 HC Bill Government will reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors, low income, poor affected.

Ÿ Page 241 Line 6-8 HC Bill — Doctors — doesn't matter what specialty — will all be paid the same.

Ÿ Page 253 Line 10-18 Government sets value of Doctor's time, professional judgment, etc. Literally, value of humans.

Ÿ Page 265 Sec 1131 Government mandates & controls productivity for private HC industries.

Ÿ Page 317 L 13-20 OMG!! PROHIBITION on ownership/investment. Government tells Doctors what/how much they can own.

Ÿ Page 317-318 lines 21-25,1-3 PROHIBITION on expansion — Government will mandate hospitals cannot expand.

Ÿ Page 354 Sec 1177 — Government will RESTRICT enrollment of Special needs people!

Ÿ Page 425 Lines 4-12 Government mandates Advance Care Planning Consultations. Think Senior Citizens end of life prodding.

Ÿ Page 425 Lines 22-25, 426 Lines 1-3 Government provides approved list of end of life resources, guiding you in how to die.

Ÿ Page 427 Lines 15-24 Government mandates program for orders for end of life. The Government has a say in how your life ends.

Ÿ Page 429 Lines 10-12 "advanced care consultation" may include an ORDER for end of life plans. AN ORDER from the Government to end a life!

Ÿ Page 472 Lines 14-17 PAYMENT TO COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATION. 1 monthly payment to a community-based organization. (Like ACORN?)

There's plenty more. See for yourself; get the bill here:

What a travesty! Oh, wait, it gets a little worse, look at the last two paragraphs! If only the American people knew... Ah, but the Canadians do! Plus, they seem more interested than most Americans about what she spends.

First Lady requires more than twenty attendants
Recession, Depression...What, Michelle Obama Worry? Hardly!
by Dr. Paul L. Williams

“In my own life, in my own small way, I have tried to give back to this country that has given me so much,” she said. “See, that’s why I left a job at a big law firm for a career in public service." --Michelle Obama

No, Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she doesn’t perform any official duties. But this hasn’t deterred her from hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession. Just think Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing china for the White House during the Civil War. And Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out the salary for her personal secretary.

How things have changed! If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans facing certain destitution, earning less than subsistence wages stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart or serving up McDonald cheeseburgers, prepare to scream and then come to realize that the benefit package for these servants of Ms. Michelle are the same as members of the national security and defense departments and the bill for these assorted lackeys is paid by John Q. Public:

1. $172,2000 - Sher, Susan (Chief Of Staff)

2. $140,000 - Frye, Jocelyn C. (Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Policy And Projects For The First Lady)

3. $113,000 - Rogers, Desiree G. (Special Assistant to the President and White House Social Secretary)

4. $102,000 - Johnston, Camille Y. (Special Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the First Lady)

5. Not Public - Winter, Melissa E. (Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)

6. $90,000 - Medina, David S. (Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)

7. $84,000 - Lelyveld, Catherine M. (Director and Press Secretary to the First Lady)

8. $75,000 - Starkey, Frances M. (Director of Scheduling and Advance for the First Lady)

9. $70,000 - Sanders, Trooper (Deputy Director of Policy and Projects for the First Lady)

10. $65,000 - Burnough, Erinn J. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)

11. Not Public - Reinstein, Joseph B. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)

12. $62,000 - Goodman, Jennifer R. (Deputy Director of Scheduling and Events Coordinator For The First Lady)

13. $60,000 - Fitts, Alan O. (Deputy Director of Advance and Trip Director for the First Lady)

14. Not Public - Lewis, Dana M. (Special Assistant and Personal Aide to the First Lady)

15. $52,500 - Mustaphi, Semonti M. (Associate Director and Deputy Press Secretary To The First Lady)

16. $50,000 - Jarvis, Kristen E. (Special Assistant for Scheduling and Traveling Aide To The First Lady)

17. $45,000 - Lechtenberg, Tyler A. (Associate Director of Correspondence For The First Lady)

18. Not Public - Tubman, Samantha (Deputy Associate Director, Social Office)

19. $40,000 - Boswell, Joseph J. (Executive Assistant to the Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)

20. $36,000 - Armbruster, Sally M. (Staff Assistant to the Social Secretary)

21. Not Public - Bookey, Natalie (Staff Assistant)

22. Not Public - Jackson, Deilia A. (Deputy Associate Director of Correspondence for the First Lady)

There has never been anyone in the White House at any time that has created such an army of staffers whose sole duties are the facilitation of the First Lady's social life. One wonders why she needs so much help, at taxpayer expense, when even Hillary, only had three; Jackie Kennedy one; Laura Bush one; and prior to Mamie Eisenhower social help came from the President's own pocket.

Note: This does not include makeup artist Ingrid Grimes-Miles, 49, and "First Hairstylist" Johnny Wright, 31, both of whom travelled aboard Air Force One to Europe.

7/29/2009: Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care? by Theodore Dalrymple

If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion.

People sometimes argue in favor of a universal human right to health care by saying that health care is different from all other human goods or products. It is supposedly an important precondition of life itself. This is wrong: There are several other, much more important preconditions of human existence, such as food, shelter and clothing.

Everyone agrees that hunger is a bad thing (as is overeating), but few suppose there is a right to a healthy, balanced diet, or that if there was, the federal government would be the best at providing and distributing it to each and every American.

Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?

If, on the other hand, the right to health care did not exist in those benighted days, how did it come into existence, and how did we come to recognize it once it did?

When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”

When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.

Moreover, the right to grant is also the right to deny. And in times of economic stringency, when the first call on public expenditure is the payment of the salaries and pensions of health-care staff, we can rely with absolute confidence on the capacity of government sophists to find good reasons for doing bad things.

The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world.

Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world. Even Greeks living in Britain return home for medical treatment if they are physically able to do so.

The government-run health-care system—which in the U.K. is believed to be the necessary institutional corollary to an inalienable right to health care—has pauperized the entire population. This is not to say that in every last case the treatment is bad: A pauper may be well or badly treated, according to the inclination, temperament and abilities of those providing the treatment. But a pauper must accept what he is given.

Universality is closely allied as an ideal, ideologically, to that of equality. But equality is not desirable in itself. To provide everyone with the same bad quality of care would satisfy the demand for equality. (Not coincidentally, British survival rates for cancer and heart disease are much below those of other European countries, where patients need to make at least some payment for their care.)

In any case, the universality of government health care in pursuance of the abstract right to it in Britain has not ensured equality. After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.

There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month.

—Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician. He is a contributing editor to the City Journal.

7/28/2009: Six Simple Ways to Dramatically Cut Costs of Medical Care - at Zero Expense to Taxpayers" by Michael Cloud

Imagine that the federal and state governments imposed laws, regulations, restrictions, and mandates on medical care that drastically increased the cost - without improving medical care. What if it were possible to cut your medical care costs by 20% or 30% or even 50% now - while keeping current levels of quality and service - by repealing and removing these government-created burdens and barriers? If this were possible, would you want it? Would you want the U.S. Congress to repeal and remove these laws, regulations, restrictions, and mandates? Would you want your state legislature to do the same?

Yes? Well, these government-imposed burdens and barriers DO exist - and your federal and state legislators CAN repeal and remove them. Would you like to see a small sample?

1. Allow price advertising. Let pharmacies, doctors, hospitals, and laboratories to publish their prices for goods and services. Eliminate all laws, regulations, and government provisions that hinder or prevent medical providers from posting their prices. Charges for the same medical procedure can vary 30% to 300% within a 100-mile radius. But without price information, patients can't shop for the best value. In the 1970's, U.C.L.A. Economist Sam Peltzman compared the costs of eyeglasses in states that allowed price advertising and states that outlawed it. Results? Much lower prices in states that allowed price advertising.

2. Let all Americans buy prescription drugs outside the United States. Do NOT force them to travel abroad. Allow them to have the prescription drugs shipped to their homes. I've seen the 30% to 60% savings in prices of prescription drugs purchased in Mexico. International competition for prescription drugs will drive down domestic prescription prices.

3. Let all people buy medical insurance across state lines. In New Jersey, a single man would pay $4,000 for medical insurance. If he lived in Pennsylvania, he'd pay $1,500. If the New Jersey man could buy medical insurance from a Pennsylvania provider, he'd save $2,500 a year. Imagine this all across America. This would cut medical insurance costs for millions who already have needlessly overpriced premiums. AND, if the American Enterprise Institute study is correct, this would make medical insurance affordable for 12 million uninsured Americans.

4. Let doctors and patients negotiate discounts for paying cash. If a patient saves a doctor the time, trouble, delay and cost of dealing with insurance companies, Medicare, or Medicaid - let the doctor and patient share the savings.

5. Let patients, doctors, and hospitals enter into legally binding, limited-liability contracts. This would reduce the cost of medical treatment by reducing the cost of malpractice insurance. Just as Prenuptial Agreements limit marital risk, limited-liability contracts will limit medical risk.

6. End all government mandates that require businesses or individuals to buy medical insurance. End all government mandates that punish and tax those who do NOT buy medical insurance. [End all state "mandates" (requirements that an insurance policy or health plan cover or offer coverage for certain benefits, such as "mental health parity," substance abuse, acupuncture, pregnancy, etc., or certain patient populations, such as those who seek coverage only after they become chronically ill or need expensive treatment. For almost every health care product or service, there is someone who wants insurance to cover it so that those who sell the products and services get more business and those who use the products and services don’t have to pay out of pocket for them.] Make insurance companies earn our business with lower prices and better quality, rather than lobby government to compel us to buy medical insurance by force of law. (See Carla Howell's excellent essay below.)

This is just a sketch of small government proposals to UN-do the government-caused high prices of medical care...

"Why We Need More UNinsured Americans" by Carla Howell

This column was originally published April 13, 2006. The cost of insurance premiums have risen steadily since then.

Socialized medicine's true believers, who dominate the ranks of mainstream news reporters and politicians, try to bludgeon us into believing that the lack of medical insurance is a crisis, a disaster, and a never-ending emergency. Here's an example of how a news report typically casts the "uninsured":

"The number of uninsured or underinsured people in the United States is estimated to be about 46 million... they sit on the edge of catastrophe." (Journal Times, Wisconsin, February 27, 2006)

But "uninsured" Americans are usually nowhere near "catastrophe." They have plenty of access to urgent care when they need it. Moreover, they save themselves a boatload of money by steering clear of one of America's biggest money pits: health insurance. We don't need more insurance in America. We need much less.

The black hole of medical insurance

Americans who don't have health insurance are often neither poor nor do they lack access to medical care. They simply choose not to buy insurance because they believe it's a bad use of their money.

In Massachusetts, the Overpriced Health Care Capital of the World, young, healthy families can spend over $9,400 a year for the cheapest HMO policy they can find, and over $19,800 for a broader coverage plan. Families with middle-aged parents can spend over $30,000 - every year - to be insured. The older you are, the more unaffordable it gets.

What's worse, these exorbitant prices don't even guarantee that you'll be covered. A policy's fine print gives insurance companies the option to terminate your coverage if your care drags on too long. The insured who suffer from a serious disease or medical trauma have to turn to the same government welfare programs they would if they had no insurance at all. What's the point of buying an insurance policy that doesn't insure you in your times of greatest need?

UNinsured": Down & out? Or smart investors?

The "uninsured" are portrayed as poor, desolate souls on the brink of "catastrophe." But contrary to media propaganda, they have access to the health care they need. The wealthy don't need health insurance. Their money is better spent on investments that provide a return. They can easily cover the cost of treating a serious medical condition.

Many above-average wage earners don't need insurance either. They're better off investing their money in their retirement and withdrawing funds for health care only if there's a need.

Even people with no cash savings to fall back on - average and below-average income families - are often able to insure themselves. They may have an IRA or equity in a home or business they can borrow against in the event of an emergency. Although a serious illness could wipe out their assets, they at least have a chance of building wealth - and not depleting what assets they have by forking over huge sums for an overpriced medical insurance policy.

Individuals and families that invest the money they would otherwise spend on medical insurance can build a nest egg worth over $100,000 in just 5 years. In 10 years it could grow to over $250,000 - enough to cover a major health care catastrophe. Or buy a house. If they continue to enjoy good health, they can retire as millionaires.

Hazards of Medical Insurance

There are other good reasons to avoid medical insurance. Whenever an insurance company pays for health services, it drives up everyone's cost - yours included - and renders health care services clumsy, inefficient, and even dangerous.

Neither patients nor providers have incentive to keep costs down. This encourages doctors to prescribe procedures you don't need - raising costs for insurance companies. They respond in turn by raising the price of your premiums, raising the amount you must pay for co-pays and deductibles, and reducing the services they cover.

In addition, excess treatment can put your health at risk. Patients who undergo unnecessary tests, operations, and drug regimens sometimes end up with worse medical problems than they started with. At the same time, insurance rules forbid practitioners from giving you services you actually need. Again, your health suffers.

When you pay directly for services, you or someone you trust is in the driver's seat. You and your health care providers have direct incentive to give you high quality care at a reasonable price.

Medical insurance co-pays, deductibles, and coverage denials make medical bills confusing and hard to read. Billing errors are common - and difficult to correct. You're forced to either pay what your bill instructs you to pay or to try to avoid overpayment by submerging yourself in paperwork that can be as complicated and infuriating as filing taxes.

The best way to minimize billing hassles is to forgo medical insurance and pay your providers directly for medical services.

If insurance is such a bad investment, why do so many people have it?

Many Americans have insurance because Big Government mandates it, subsidizes it, and provides tax incentives for it.

Seniors are forced to sign up for Medicare or they forfeit their Social Security checks. Taxpayers are forced to fund high-priced health plans for government employees.

Employers are forced to provide their employees insurance. If employers were free to use the tax-free money they now spend on medical insurance to pay tax-free wages instead, many employees would far prefer the higher wages. It's a much better deal.

Others buy insurance, or seek a job that provides insurance, because of the horror stories they've heard about how expensive medical bills can be. A catastrophic care episode can cost tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars and leave a family in dire financial straights.

Big Government is directly responsible for these high costs. Thousands of state and federal laws, regulations, mandates, and subsidies drive up the cost of health care. What should be a minimal part of the family budget is a backbreaking expense. If we end Big Government Health Care, prices will drop dramatically. Far fewer people will need or want insurance.

Rather than end these disastrous Big Government Health Care Programs and allow prices to drop, Big Government Politicians seek to expand them. They keep the demand for insurance artificially high.

People also seek insurance because Big Government outlaws health care charity, leaving poor people with medical problems nowhere else to turn but to Big Government welfare programs.

Years ago, medical special interests convinced politicians to shut down free clinics for the poor, once common in the United States. Rather than allow them to reopen, socialized medicine advocates claim that the high cost of health care is the fault of people who refuse to buy insurance and who run to a hospital emergency room instead every time they have a problem. What they never admit is that Big Government Politicians cut off poor people from life-saving zero cost, tax-free alternatives.

Bemoaning the "uninsured" is a ruse. Big Government Politicians drive up the cost of health care. They drive affordable free-market alternatives out of business. Then they blame the taxpayer for not buying health insurance - made unaffordable by Big Government. It's a scam.

Get Big Government out of health care

We must reject calls for more insurance. Rather, we should celebrate every time Americans free themselves from unnecessary and oppressively overpriced government-mandated health insurance. What we need is to bring down the high cost of health care by removing Big Government health care prohibitions, mandates, regulations, and subsidies. We must vote against every politician who refuses to tear them down. Who deny us our health freedom.

We must vote out of office politicians who blackmail voters by threatening to cut needed subsidies - while leaving in place the legions of health care laws and regulations that drive up cost and reduce access to medical care.

We must replace them with candidates who will remove all Big Government laws and regulations that escalate medical care costs or that block free care FIRST and who will cut back subsidies that people depend on LAST - after free market alternatives, including free clinics, are in place.

When we separate health care from government, we'll dissolve the government-created, artificial demand for needless, high-priced medical insurance. Those who need insurance will be able to buy affordable policies that protect them in their times of greatest need. Those who can't afford care at all will have access to lovingly-donated free care services. We will enjoy higher quality, cost-conscious health care. We'll take $1 trillion every year from overpriced medical spending - and put it back in the pockets of working Americans.

Note: Since original publication of this column on April 13, 2006, it was learned that Tennessee is relatively lax about permitting the operation of free medical care clinics. However, free clinics appear to remain effectively prohibited throughout most of the United States. If you find a clinic that is neither sanctioned by government nor free of government subsidies, i.e., an unencumbered health care clinic charity, please let us know by contacting the Center For Small Government.

It is worth noting that while free clinics unaffiliated with government are largely prohibited, many individual medical professionals generously donate their services and/or give price breaks to those in need who lack financial means.

(c) 2009 Copyright Carla Howell and Michael Cloud

7/28/2009: Forget global warming, there's a space rock with our name on it
While we spend time, money and effort on battling climate change, a very real threat is being virtually ignored. by Jonah Goldberg

The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind's heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: It's just as hot as it was in 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.

But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers' brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.

But there's little we can do. The space flotsam smashes into the solar energy farm formerly known as Arizona. The space rock, 100 meters in diameter, hits at a velocity of 50,000 mph, with the force of thousands of nuclear warheads. Untold millions die. Dust and debris blot out the sun and chill the planet for years to come. Crops fail, billions starve. The heat of impact releases torrents of nitrous and nitric acid rain.

So horrendous is the calamity that some even dare wonder if the enormous investment in fending off climate change might not have been better spent.

Alas, there's no time to defrost Al Gore's frozen head to ask his opinion.

This vision of the end times came to me on hearing the news that something hit Jupiter in the breadbasket last week and nobody saw it coming.

It left a Jovian scar as "small" as the Pacific Ocean or as big as Earth. An amateur astronomer in Australia was the first to lay eyes on the "bruise," because none of the pros were looking that-a-way. One reason no one saw the rock is that it was probably pretty small, between 50 and a few hundred meters wide. That is to say, about the size of John Edwards' house.

Now, I know what you're saying: So what? It's not like we need an early warning system for Jupiter. What have the Jovians done for us? When God starts pelting rocks at Earth, then we can worry.

Well, he has been, on a regular basis. In March, a meteor called 2009 DD45 came within a few inches, astronomically speaking, of smashing into Earth (about 45,000 miles). Fortunately, we spotted that one ahead of time -- a mere three days ahead of time. That's just enough warning for Keith Olbermann to knock out several top-notch diatribes on why George W. Bush is to blame, but not enough time to, you know, keep New York City from being liquefied.

In 1908, a DD45-sized meteor blew up in the sky over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over an area of 800 square miles, or nearly twice the size of Los Angeles. If it had hit five hours earlier, St. Petersburg would be gone.

Scientists think there are millions of such "small" near-Earth meteors out there, and more than 1,000 that are a kilometer wide. Those are the ones that really leave a mark. Just ask the dinosaurs. And we're discovering more every day.

A few years ago, a book titled "The Black Swan" came out. No, it's not about swans that get singled out by the Cambridge Police Department for breaking into their own roosts, but about sudden, unpredictable events occurring far more often than we'd like to think. There are flocks of black swans out there.

In 2008, science writer Gregg Easterbrook surveyed preparedness for a "space-object strike" for the Atlantic magazine. He found that even though serious experts believe there's as much as a 1-in-10 chance of a significant Earth-strike within the next century, NASA doesn't much care.

Things are improving a bit, but it's still a cottage industry. A scientist quoted last month in Maclean's magazine noted that "there are more people working in a single McDonald's than there are trying to save civilization from an asteroid."

Meanwhile, the global warming industry -- and it is an industry now -- could fill football stadiums with eggheads, activists and bureaucrats.

It makes you wonder. For all the talk about how there's no time to argue about climate change, the truth is -- even if the threat is real -- this is a very slow-moving catastrophe. Moreover, while most adherents are no doubt sincere in their beliefs, their beliefs happen to align with an ideological and political mind-set that predates any theories of global warming: Unregulated economic growth is bad and must be controlled by experts; nature is our master, and we must be her servants. Hence, if true, climate change is a terribly convenient truth.

Meanwhile, a "deep impact" is a terribly inconvenient threat, and the only way to avoid it is to make peace with the idea that nature can be conquered.

Better to not even think about it.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com

7/27/2009: There’s Still [a little bit of] Hope for America

7/27/2009: from the Daily Reckoning

...This morning, California is in the news. Apparently, a deal has been worked out. The state will stay in business...and even pay off its IOUs. But it will mean cuts of 'services.' Here at The Daily Reckoning, whenever we modify the word 'services' with the word 'government' we feel we should warn readers that we don't really mean it. Most government services are a disservice...like a government-subsidized business they are a fraud on the economy, absorbing valuable resources in order to provide a 'service' that is worth less than the inputs that were required to provide it. The service is a disservice to the broader economy...

...Normally, small businesses lead the economy out of recession. But this is no normal recession. This is a depression. And small businesses are getting crushed. An AP report says small businesses are not bouncing back as hoped.

Part of the phenomenon can be explained merely by the severity of the downturn. If this were a recession it would be a bad one - worse than any since the Great Depression. Consumers have rediscovered thrift. Households are cutting back. They do this by eliminating things that aren't necessary. Small enterprises often provide things that people don't really need to have.

Another explanation involves the feds' response to the slump. Never before have they fought so hard to avoid a capitalist correction. But in their efforts to bailout Wall Street they not only ignore the side streets and back alleys where small businesses operate, they actually take away money from what might be called the small business economy in order to pay off their friends on Wall Street.

This is how you put the 'great' into a Great Depression - by depriving the small business sector of the capital and freedom it needs to innovate and grow...

From the Mogambo Guru: the Austrian school of economics...has been insistent all along that the whole Federal Reserve modus operandi of creating excess money and credit was...a big, stinking load of bankrupting inflationary stupidity.

...the loathsome Federal Reserve, lo these last several decades, ...created a constant deluge of money which, single-handedly, made all the weird Congressional insanities possible, all the economy-distorting government spending possible, all the crushing debts public and private possible, and our "We're freaking doomed!" future so pathetically predictable and indeed inevitable that, just as predictably and inevitably, gets me started on how this "predictable and inevitable' thing is the Exact Freaking Reason (EFR) why it is imperative that you buy gold, silver and oil! It's all so easy!

The Economist magazine, also predictably and inevitably, does not comment on this Gem Of Mogambo Economic Wisdom (GOMEW), which is to buy gold, silver and oil on the advice of the last 4,500 continuous years of the world's economic history, particularly as it pertains to fiat currencies and the trustworthiness of governments.

Instead, they admit that "There are three main critiques; that macro and financial economists helped cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it," which are all only true in the broadest sense, although because The Economist magazine is filled with these same kinds of neo-Keynesian guys, they are completely unaware that there are lots and lots and lots of economics people out here who did NOT cause the crisis and, in fact, the Austrian school of economics (see: Mises.org to learn the only true economic theory!) has been insistent all along that the whole Federal Reserve modus operandi of creating excess money and credit was...a big, stinking load of bankrupting inflationary stupidity.

And since you mentioned it, these same Austrian school of economics guys had it spotted with laser-like precision the Whole Freaking Time (WFT), too!

7/27/2009: Morality and Charlie Rangel’s Taxes
It’s much easier to raise taxes if you don’t pay them.

Ever notice that those who endorse high taxes and those who actually pay them aren’t the same people? Consider the curious case of Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel, who is leading the charge for a new 5.4-percentage point income tax surcharge and recently called it “the moral thing to do.” About his own tax liability he seems less, well, fervent.

Exhibit A concerns a rental property Mr. Rangel purchased in 1987 at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic. The rental income from that property ought to be substantial since it is a luxury beach-front villa and is more often than not rented out. But when the National Legal and Policy Center looked at Mr. Rangel’s House financial disclosure forms in August, it noted that his reported income looked suspiciously low. In 2004 and 2005, he reported no more than $5,000, and in 2006 and 2007 no income at all from the property.

The Congressman initially denied there was any unreported income. But reporters quickly showed that the villa is among the most desirable at Punta Cana and that it rents for $500 a night in the low season, and as much as $1,100 a night in peak season. Last year it was fully booked between December 15 and April 15.

Mr. Rangel soon admitted having failed to report rental income of $75,000 over the years. First he blamed his wife for the oversight because he said she was supposed to be managing the property. Then he blamed the language barrier. “Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they’d start speaking Spanish,” Mr. Rangel explained.

Mr. Rangel promised last fall to amend his tax returns, pay what is due and correct the information on his annual financial disclosure form. But the deadline for the 2008 filing was May 15 and as of last week he still had not filed. His press spokesman declined to answer questions about anything related to his ethics problems.

Besides not paying those pesky taxes, Mr. Rangel had other reasons for wanting to hide income. As the tenant of four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem, the Congressman needed to keep his annual reported income below $175,000, lest he be ineligible as a hardship case for rent control. (He also used one of the apartments as an office in violation of rent-control rules, but that’s another story.)

Mr. Rangel said last fall that “I never had any idea that I got any income’’ from the villa. Try using that one the next time the IRS comes after you. Equally interesting is his claim that he didn’t know that the developer of the Dominican Republic villa had converted his $52,000 mortgage to an interest-free loan in 1990. That would seem to violate House rules on gifts, which say Members may only accept loans on “terms that are generally available to the public.” Try getting an interest-free loan from your banker.

The National Legal and Policy Center also says it has confirmed that Mr. Rangel owned a home in Washington from 1971-2000 and during that time claimed a “homestead” exemption that allowed him to save on his District of Columbia property taxes. However, the homestead exemption only applies to a principal residence, and the Washington home could not have qualified as such since Mr. Rangel’s rent-stabilized apartments in New York have the same requirement.

The House Ethics Committee is investigating Mr. Rangel on no fewer than six separate issues, including his failure to report the no-interest loan on his Punta Cana villa and his use of rent-stabilized apartments. It is also investigating his fund raising for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York. New York labor attorney Theodore Kheel, one of the principal owners of the Punta Cana resort, is an important donor to the Rangel Center.

All of this has previously appeared in print in one place or another, and we salute the reporters who did the leg work. We thought we’d summarize it now for readers who are confronted with the prospect of much higher tax bills, and who might like to know how a leading Democrat defines “moral” behavior when the taxes hit close to his homes.

7/28/2009: Rasmussen: Obama Double-Digit Negatives

A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that President Barack Obama's rating in Rasmussen's Presidential Approval Index has hit negative double digits for the first time. The survey found that 29 percent of voters strongly approve of Obama's job performance, while 40 percent strongly disapprove. Rasmussen calculates its Presidential Approval Index by subtracting the "strongly disapprove" figure from the "strongly approve" figure. As a result, Obama's overall score is a minus-11. That's the first time his rating has reached negative double digits. Other results of the poll:

Ÿ 49 percent somewhat approve of Obama's performance.

Ÿ 50 percent disapprove of Obama's performance.

Ÿ 76 percent see Obama as liberal.

Ÿ 48 percent see Obama as very liberal.

Ÿ 54 percent primarily blame former President George W. Bush for America's economic woes.

Ÿ 25 percent say the U.S. economy has been aided by the economic stimulus package.

Ÿ 53 percent oppose the Democratic healthcare reform package.

Ÿ 37 percent say deficit reduction should be Obama's top priority.

Ÿ 20 percent say healthcare should be Obama's top priority.

The poll is based on answers from 1,500 likely voters. It has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

7/27/2009: from Barrons’ Up and Down the Street by Alan Abelson

“...why all the print and air time devoted to President Obama's pitch for his health-care proposal? All it demonstrated (again) is that Mr. Obama is big on rhetoric, not exactly generous with details and short on action. So what else is new?”

7/25/2009: Rhetoric V. Reality: Health Care by Orwell by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

President Obama's rhetoric Wednesday night summoned the memory of "1984," George Orwell's novel of a nightmarish future -- where the slogan of the rulers is "War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength."

The president assures us that he will cut health-care spending ... by adding $1 trillion to health-care spending.

He says that "health-care decisions will not be made by government" ... while he sets up a new Federal Health Board to tell doctors what treatments they can offer and to whom and under what circumstances.

Obama told the media, "I will free doctors to make good health care decisions" ... by telling the physicians what to do.

When the president says he guarantees the "same coverage" to people who like their current health-insurance policies, he means that their current HMOs, insurers and doctors will be the ones to implement the protocols and instructions the government hands down to them -- not that we'll have our current freedom of decision-making.

When he blandly assures us that we will "stop paying for things that don't make us healthier," he really means that his Federal Health Board will overrule your doctor and stop him from using his own best judgment in your treatment.

The president will "get the politics out of health care" by putting it under government control.

Obama says that he will not "add to the deficit" to fund health care. But the bill reported by Rep. Charlie Rangel's Ways and Means Committee leaves $550 billion unfunded.

The president says that he'll identify savings that will reduce the need for more taxes -- even though the Congressional Budget Office refuses to say that his "savings" will actually work and warns that the bill will really be added to the deficit.

He repeatedly tells us that he'll cut health-care spending. What he means is that he will cut doctors' incomes and will turn down patients -- particularly the elderly -- when they seek medical care that his bureaucrats disapprove of.

And he ignores that cutting incomes in the medical field will reduce the number of doctors and force further rationing of care.

The president opines that he will replace the most "expensive care" with the "best care" by empowering government officials who have never met you to substitute their judgment for that of your doctor, who has examined you thoroughly.

When Obama laments that "14,000 people lose their insurance every day," he is referring to the job losses that his own failed efforts to end the recession have permitted.

He warns that health care costs are gobbling up money that employers should use to raise wages and worker pay -- yet the plans he backs would require employers to pay 8 percent of their payroll as a tax or provide insurance to their workers.

The Obama plan highlights greater preventive care -- but, at the same time, cuts medical incomes and so will cut the number of doctors who might provide it.

The stimulus package, in the Gospel According to Barack, was "designed" to work over the next two years. But at the time, he demanded immediate passage to "jump-start the economy" -- something that clearly did not happen.

Medicare and Medicaid are "driving the deficit" even as he increased the amount of red ink by at least $800 billion in six months with little, if any, increase in the cost of either program.

He says he "expects" banks to repay their TARP money. In fact, they're lining up around the block to do so -- but the Treasury will only permit a handful of them to do so.

In summary, Obama's health program will promote "lower cost and more choice" by increasing spending by $1 trillion, telling patients what care they're permitted to have, and limiting their access to quality care.

Orwell's heirs should sue for violation of copyright.

7/24/2009: Joan Swirsky's analysis of Barack Obama's psychological profile is a masterpiece. Americans (and other "global citizens") are beginning to realize that Obama isn't what he appeared to be during a theatrically orchestrated campaign. Does inner rage - not hope - lie at the root of this man's motivations? You decide.

Obama's Revenge
Posted by: Joan Swirsky 02/15/2009

Once upon a time, a white teenager from Kansas got pregnant by her black Kenyan boyfriend, Barack Obama Sr., or was it her husband? Whatever. (I say whatever because we've never seen either marriage or divorce certificates). Some say the couple was in Kenya visiting relatives when the birth of their son, Barack Obama Jr., occurred. No matter.. (I say no matter because we've never seen an authentic birth certificate). By the time the baby was two years old his father abandoned him for his other wife and child in Kenya .

I wonder how toddler Barry felt when his father left him, and never reappeared until a single time when the boy was 10. Bewildered? Sad? Lonely? Angry? What do two-year-olds do with those feelings?

It didn't take long for Barry's mother to meet and marry an Indonesian native named Lolo Soetoro. They moved to Indonesia , where her child became Barry Soetoro, took on Indonesian citizenship, and was presumably schooled in public, Christian, and Muslim schools. (I say presumably because we've never seen those school records). But when Barry was 10 years old, his mother sent him back to the U.S. to be raised by her parents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, although she kept her baby daughter Maya Soetoro with her.

I wonder how the by-now fully-sentient young Barry felt when his mother sent him packing. Sad? Jealous of the baby who remained behind with mommy? Confused and dizzy by the disparate cultures - languages, customs, foods, sights, sounds, schooling - he had experienced? Resentful? What did Barry do with those feelings?

By the time he was 10, the boy had been abandoned three times - by his father, stepfather, and mother. And although he was raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii - where "people of color" were not his color - he found out soon enough that his mixed-race background rendered him, in effect, an outsider. Did that make him feel self-conscious, indignant, victimized? But he wasn't altogether an outsider. In Hawaii , young Barry met Frank Marshall Thomas, his first and perhaps most influential mentor. The infamous Marshall, a Communist activist (and self-confessed pedophile) taught Barry - was it Obama, Soetero, Dunham? - that white people were the devil incarnate and that blacks were the most "victimized" people on earth.

Yet the abandoned and rejected child was lucky. His white-devil grandparents gave him a comfortable life in Hawaii , and an education that apparently qualified him to attend several prestigious schools - Occidental College in CA, Columbia Univ. in NY City, and Harvard Law School in Cambridge , MA . (I say apparently qualified because we've never seen any of his college transcripts).

BARRY MORPHS INTO BARACK

After his undergraduate days at Columbia , Obama chose not to go to graduate school, but instead held various jobs in the Big Apple and then moved to Chicago to become a community organizer.. Although he had been exposed to American exceptionalism through his life in the United States and his privileged education, it is clear that his experiences in impoverished Kenya and totalitarian Indonesia, as well as his exposure to Marshall and the other radicals he had met during his years in New York - among them the unrepentant domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of Weather Underground infamy - made the deepest and most lasting impressions. Their messages of American imperialism and its white-devil culture clearly resonated in the thrice-abandoned boy. In his young-adult and adult years, free to choose his friends and pursuits, he opted exclusively for far-left socialists and Marxists, and activities aimed at relieving the suffering of people he perceived to be as victimized as apparently he felt he had been. He understood their feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and impotent rage, as well as the pain of fatherlessness. After all, his Harvard-educated father consciously chose to leave him. And his mother gave him away. Was that depressing to Barry? Infuriating?

When given the opportunity to join one of dozens of churches in Chicago, Barry - who had morphed into Barack - opted for the Trinity United Church of Christ, which was led by the fire-breathing Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose decades-long anti-American and anti-Semitic rants apparently resonated in Obama's rejected and abandoned heart and soul. (I say apparently resonated because in over 20 years of regular attendance, Obama said he heard nothing inflammatory or anti-American, and we've never seen the videotapes of any sermon, although each one was unfailingly recorded). "God damn America," Wright raged. "The chickens have come home to roost," he "preached" to his whooping and hollering congregation after 9/11. Obama heard nothing.

But it wasn't only Wright who Obama was attracted to in Chicago. He was also drawn to another hate-spewing radical, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, as well as to the raving Father Michael Phleger, the radical Islamist Khalid Rashidi, his friends and neighbors the Ayers, and to equally-close friends "Tony" and Rita Rezko - Tony being the notorious "fixer" and now-convicted-and-imprisoned felon for fraud, bribery, and money laundering. What did the seemingly mild-mannered Obama find so irresistible in these angry and/or crooked people and others like them? Was it the same thing that a shy man finds in his attraction to a flamboyant girlfriend - and alter-ego, a person who expresses what he really feels but is unable to give voice to? In these relationships and in community organizing - which offers inner-city mostly-black residents job training, tutoring, and methods to organize tenants'-rights groups and voter-registration drives, etc. - the twenty-something Obama apparently found his calling, and also a renewed and burning ambition.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

While his community-organizing job paid a paltry $12,000 or so per year, Obama somehow managed to pay his way through one of the priciest graduate schools in the world, Harvard Law School. (I say somehow managed because we have no record of his tuition payments). Even more amazing, he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review without ever producing a written paper - or at least a paper that the public has ever read.

There is a good deal of evidence that Obama's acceptance at Harvard Law - and his tuition - were facilitated by friends who had a vested interest in the community organizer. Among them was Percy Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president and ardent leftist, who was also Malcolm X's lawyer. In an interview last year, the octogenarian Sutton stated: "I was introduced to [Obama] by a friend. The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction took place about 20 years ago." Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principle adviser to one of the world's richest men" and suggested that al-Mansour was raising money for Obama. Knowing that Sutton had friends at Harvard, al-Mansour asked him if he would write a letter to Harvard recommending Obama, which Sutton did most agreeably. This took place about 1988 when 27-year-old Obama was applying Harvard Law.

Journalist Jack Cashill has credibly speculated that Obama's two memoirs were actually written by his pal Bill Ayers, who was and is a University of Illinois at Chicago English professor, having escaped life in prison on a technicality. Two years [after he was admitted to law school], Cashill writes, "while still a law student, Obama improbably received an advance to write a memoir that would be called `Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,' which was published in 1995." His second memoir, published in 2006, was "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream." (I suspect Cashill said "improbably received an advance" because, as stated earlier, Obama had not produced even one paper or distinguished himself in any way to have inspired a major publishing company to approach him).

All this begs the question: Who writes two memoirs about himself before the age of 45? My own speculation is that it could be no one but a narcissist. As most people know in this age of pop psychology, the psychiatric disorder of narcissism derives from the Greek myth in which Narcissus, a handsome young man, became obsessed with himself and fell in love with his own image as he gazed into a pool of water. A lot of people have some degree of narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, an unquenchable need for admiration, unhealthy self-absorption, dependence on the affirmation of others, and also a lack of empathy, which is hidden by both personal charm and the kind of earnest language that pretends to "feel your pain." Or he could be a malignant narcissist., which psychiatrist Dr. Otto Kernberg, a legendary leader in thought disorders, compares to a narcissist on steroids. This variety involves paranoid traits (think of Obama's thin-skinned, quasi-hysterical reactions to Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin), and ego-syntonic aggression, which means the person is perfectly in-sync with people who have the courage he lacks to lash out. But consider the source! Obama's father was a self-aggrandizing narcissist who thought nothing of throwing his son away to fulfill his own ambitions and his mother also threw him away for the same reason. Talk about DNA, which Obama perfectly exhibited when, during his campaign, he unflinchingly dispensed with both his white grandmother and his black "mentor" Rev. Wright for his personal ambition.

GROOMING THE PERFECT MARXIST CANDIDATE

This leads me to only one conclusion, which I wrote about in a former article: "Obama: The Trojan Horse." My theory is that President Obama's narcissistic charm, even temperament, skill with words (teleprompter included), hunger to please, radical agenda, and subterranean rage at the "unfair" American system have been brilliantly exploited by powerful leftist radicals and Marxists in the United States, who for decades have plotted America's path to socialism. He is their pawn, totally dispensable but handy while the "aura" lasts. These "handlers" saw in Obama the ideal blank slate on which to actualize their agenda, and they made sure the slate remained blank by concealing (or destroying) any evidence of his past, including his birth certificate, Selective Service record, visa(s), school transcripts, and other vital documents. All of which is costing his moneyed backers - including America-loathing billionaire George Soros - multimillions in lawyers' fees to fight the proliferating lawsuits that seek the truth about this stealth president. In fact, former ambassador Alan Keyes, one of the many plaintiffs seeking proof of Obama's American citizenship, has reported that Obama's lawyers have now filed a motion "to quash our effort to obtain the relevant documents...[which] confirms Obama's ruthless determination to destroy anyone who continues to seek the information the Constitution requires. Obama thus signals his intent to bring financial ruin on those who won't accept his cover-up of the circumstances of his birth is a tactical escalation. It confirms the common sense suspicion that he won't act forthrightly in this matter because he has something to hide."

It is clear that Obama and his fellow radicals are restive. In the less-than four weeks of his presidency, the new president has taken volumes from the Marxian handbook, which dictates that the stupid masses be blitzed with an overload of information, hollow press conferences, appointments, dismantling of formerly effective national-security programs, et al., in order to set the stage for a massive, Soviet-style takeover of our government, including a civilian national security force that Obama has said should be "just as powerful, strong and well-funded as the U.S. military." Echoes of Nazi Germany in 1938, anyone? According to writer Kyle-Anne Shrive, in Obama's ascendance: "We have yet to see a more perfect collision of Murphy's Law with the Peter Principle. In only three weeks' time, [he] has signaled to every terrorist on the planet that we are a sorry, groveling, ashamed nation ready to come to the diplomatic confessional. He is closing Gitmo within one year, has suspended trials there, and dismissed the charges against the U.S.S. Cole plotter. [He] has just put our money where his mouth is and is using $20.3 million to bring in Palestinian refugees from Gaza...[he] had the gall to pronounce the so-called economic stimulus bill absolutely free of `earmarks' and `make-do work'...but according to the Congressional Budget Office [this bill] will do worse to our overall economy than no government action whatsoever." And Obama has done all this with the predictable double-speak that characterizes malevolent intention, i.e., touting transparency while concealing everything, speaking of integrity while appointing crooks and incompetents riddled with conflicts-of-interest, supporting energy independence while killing off-shore and domestic oil-drilling and nuclear power, and feigning optimism while he speaks of impending "catastrophe" in! order to push through a pork-laden, trillion-dollar-plus Stimulus plan that rewards the corrupt voter-fraud organization Acorn with billions and unions with discriminatory union-only labor agreements, paves the way for socialized medicine, and threatens to take away the most cherished rights of We The People.

As blogger Eric Gurr has said: "We still talk about the health care crisis, the environmental crisis, the oil crisis, the banking crisis. Let me tell you my friends you are about to learn the meaning of the only crisis that matters, the survival crisis.."

You can be sure that the sad-lonely-angry two-year-old, the jealous-confused-resentful 10-year-old, the self-conscious- cheated-victimized adolescent, and the man who found solace in and identified with his hate-America mentors is now determined to redeem all of his demons. Unfortunately, he is acting out his rage on free-market capitalism, a free press, property and gun rights, a limited constitutional government, protection of the unborn, and everything else that is good and great about our country.

This is Obama's revenge!

Joan Swirsky (http://www.joanswirsky.com) is a New York-based author and journalist who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com.

7/24/2009 will be the 40th Anniversary of Ted Kennedy’s (may he rot in hell) negligent homicide of Mary Jo Kopechne (those Kennedy boys sure are dangerous to women; how stupid must the people in Massachusetts be?)

July 24, 1994 Chappaquiddick's Unanswered Questions by Jeff Jacoby

One final question -- the one Kennedy himself asked in 1974, when Richard Nixon was pardoned: "Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law, or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?"

7/21/2009: Interstate Concealed-Carry Bill Could Defy Filibuster

“A measure that would let gun owners carry weapons across state lines could threaten the filibuster-proof edge Democrats have in the U.S. Senate, observers note.” (UPI, Tuesday) Is federalism being sacrificed?

FEE Timely Classic: “Guns, Gun Laws, and Liberty” by Lawrence W. Reed

7/19/2009: What's Next, Mr. President -- Cardigans?
by Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president's approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to "accomplish too much," and 57 percent think the country is on the "wrong track."

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. "Give it to me!" the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to "solve problems" and not "gripe" about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il's health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America's best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party's left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP.

And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular. The auto bailout -- which, incidentally, is illegal, springing as it has from a fund specifically earmarked for financial institutions -- has been reviled from the get-go, with opposition consistently polling north of 60 percent. Majorities have said no to bank bailouts and to cap and trade if it would make electricity significantly more expensive.

According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, more than 80 percent are concerned that health-care reform will increase costs or diminish the quality of care. Even as two House committees passed a reform bill last week, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned that the proposal "significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs" and dramatically raises the cost "curve." This sort of voter and expert feedback can't be comforting to the president.

As writers who inveighed against last year's GOP candidate and called George W. Bush's presidency a "disaster," we're equal-opportunity critics. As taxpayers with children and hence some small, almost certainly unrecoverable stake in this country's future (not to mention that of General Motors, Chrysler and AIG), we write with skin in the game and the fear that our current leader will indeed start busting out the 1970s cardigans.

Of course, it's too early to write Obama off. Just a few years ago, Republicans and Democrats alike were puzzling over the "permanent" GOP majority. And less than two years ago, the smart set was buying advance tickets for Rudy vs. Hillary. Yet there's no question that Obama's massively ambitious domestic agenda is at a fork in the road: One route leads to Plains, Ga., and early retirement, the other to Hope, Ark., a second term and the revitalization of the American economy.

The key to understanding Obama's predicament is to realize that while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor's big-government policies and perpetual crisis-mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.

Beyond pushing the "emergency" $787 billion stimulus package (even while acknowledging that the vast majority of funds would be released in 2010 and beyond), Obama signed a $410 billion omnibus spending bill and a $106 billion supplemental spending bill to cover "emergency" expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, improbably, a "cash for clunkers" program). Despite pledges to achieve a "net spending cut" by targeting earmarks and wasteful spending, Obama rubber-stamped more than 9,000 earmarks and asked government agencies to trim a paltry $100 million in spending this year, 0.003 percent of the federal budget.

In the same way that Bush claimed to be cutting government even while increasing real spending by more than 70 percent, Obama seems to believe that saying one thing, while doing another, somehow makes it so. His first budget was titled "A New Era of Fiscal Responsibility," even as his own projections showed a decade's worth of historically high deficits. He vowed no new taxes on 95 percent of Americans, then jacked up cigarette taxes and indicated a willingness to consider new health-care taxes as part of his reform package. He said he didn't want to take over General Motors on the day that he took over General Motors.

Such is the extent of Obama's magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn't even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of "providing the American people more transparency in government."

What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn't get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

On this last point, Obama is a perfect extension of Bush's worst trait as president. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration pushed through the Patriot Act, a massive, transformative piece of legislation that plainly went unread even as Congress overwhelmingly voted aye. Bush whipped up an atmosphere of crisis every time he sensed a restive Congress or a dissatisfied electorate. And at the end of his tenure, he rammed through the TARP bailout at warp speed, arguing that the United States yet again faced catastrophe at the hands of an existential threat.

But contrary to the dreams of dystopians and paranoiacs everywhere, there simply is no outside threat to the American way of life. No country can challenge us militarily; no economic system stands to dislodge capitalism; no terrorist group can do anything more than land the occasional (if horrendous) blow. And as history has shown, the U.S. economy is resilient enough to overcome the worst-laid plans from the White House.

Bush learned the hard way that running government as a perpetual crisis machine leads to bad policy and public fatigue. Obama's insistence on taking advantage of a crisis to push through every item on the progressive checklist right now is threatening to complete that cycle within his first year.

What are his options? First, stop doing harm. Throwing money all over the economy (and especially to sectors that match up with Democratic interests) is the shortest path to what Margaret Thatcher described as the inherent flaw in socialism: Eventually you run out of other people's money.

No matter how many fantastical multipliers Obama ascribes to government spending, with each day comes refutation of the administration's promises on jobs and economic growth. Even his chief source on the topic, economic adviser Christina Romer, now grants that calculating jobs "created or saved" by Team Obama is simply impossible.

Which leads to the second point: Stop it with the magical realism already.

Save terms such as "fiscal responsibility" for policies that at least minimally resemble that notion. Don't pretend that a budget that doubles the national debt in five years and triples it in 10 is the work of politicians tackling "the difficult choices." Americans have a pretty good (if slow-to-activate) B.S. detector, and the more you mislead them now, the worse they'll punish you later. Toward that end, producing real transparency instead of broken promises is the first step toward building credibility.

That the administration is now spending millions of dollars to revamp its useless stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov is one more indication that, post-Bush, the White House still thinks of citizens as marks to be rolled.

Finally, it's time to connect the poster boy for hope to the original Man From Hope. After Bill Clinton bit off more domestic policy than even he could chew, leading to a Republican rout in the midterm elections of 1994, the 42nd president refocused his political intelligence on keeping his ambitions and, as a result, the size of government growth, limited. Though there is much to complain about in his record, the broad prosperity and mostly sound economic policy under his watch aren't included.

This shouldn't be a difficult task for Obama. As a political animal, he has always resembled Clinton more than Carter. This might help him avoid the Carteresque pileup he's driving into. Far more important, it just might help the rest of us.

Nick Gillespie is the editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv. Matt Welch is editor of Reason magazine. They will discuss this article online at 11 a.m. on Monday at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

7/14/2009: Obama's Shifty Economics by Dick Morris Published on TheHill.com

Now President Obama says in The Washington Post that he never envisioned that his stimulus package would afford quick relief to the American economy, but would do so only after it had run its two-year course. But when it was passed, Obama sang a different tune, urgently demanding its enactment to speed relief to a sagging economy. He claimed it would "create or save" 600,000 jobs. Now, even as the economy loses 450,000 jobs each month, he pretends that it is a matter of time until the stimulus kicks in.

He now justifies the stimulus package by saying it was adopted to prevent the "collapse" of the economy and the banking systems. But it was really the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), first passed under President Bush, that stopped the banks from going under. At the time of the enactment of the stimulus package, Obama never mentioned that he was counting on it to save the banks.

All these shifting justifications are designed to explain why the stimulus package has totally failed to accomplish anything. Not only has it done no good. It has done significant harm by ballooning the deficit, driving up interest rates, creating doubts about the U.S. currency and fanning inflationary fears.

But Obama has paid and will continue to pay dearly for betting on his stimulus package. Because of it, the Bush recession is becoming the Obama recession much faster than it would have had he adopted a more gradual approach to solving economic problems. By jumping in immediately, as he did, in order to increase government spending and pass eight years of Democratic dreams in one day, he made the public expect a solution.

At first, a sick patient looks forward to seeing the doctor. But when the medicine his physician gives him fails to make him better, he is likely to turn on his doctor. And then, gradually, when it dawns on him that the cure is making the disease last longer and get worse, he will really get mad at the physician. This is Obama's fate.

The stimulus package used up all the wiggle room he had to increase the budget deficit. He probably could have passed the healthcare program without a tax increase had he not already sent the deficit soaring with his massive spending (Hillary and Bill pretended that there was no need to raise taxes to pay for their 1993 reform package and few questioned their presumption). But now that the deficit has soared to 12 percent of the gross domestic product, everyone realizes that taxes must go up to pass healthcare "reform," making its adoption even less likely. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) has passed $550 billion of tax increases, but everyone knows that at least $1 trillion is required. And, in the current environment, Congress will not vote to add the balance to the deficit, even if Charlie wants to "charge it."

Finally, Obama has laid a trap for himself. Just as the economy is coming out of its recession -- in 2010 and 2011 -- and he begins to run for reelection, he is going to face massive inflation. The money supply has more than tripled since October of 2008 and is going up each week as the Fed buys Treasury bills and other securities to "monetize the debt" (i.e., give other people money so they can lend it back to the government and charge it interest for doing so). With each new infusion of cash, the problem of avoiding inflation becomes particularly severe. Obama could well lose the elections of 2012 because of the inflation his deficit has created.

Of course, we all know that the only way to put the inflation virus back in the test tube is to trigger a new recession, this time caused by massive increases in interest rates, as Fed Chairman Paul Volcker did in 1979. If the recession doesn't doom Obama to a single term, the inflation will. And if the inflation doesn't get him, the subsequent recession will.

The deeper he gets into his term, the more it is apparent that he threw it all away when he first took office and demanded over $1 trillion in stimulus and supplemental appropriation spending. He was doomed to lose the game right after he received the first kickoff.

7/15/2009: Health-Care Competition by John Stossel

The statist establishment would love a single-payer health-care system like Canada's if it were politically achievable. Barack Obama said that if we were starting from scratch, single payer is what he'd back. But, thankfully, Americans are still libertarian enough to cringe at turning the medical system entirely over to government.

So with single payer out of reach, the fans of government control have grabbed for second best: the "public option." This would be government-run health insurance that would "compete" with private insurance. (It wouldn't compete fairly because it could do something no private firm can do: milk the captive taxpayers.) But the public option is proving hard to get. Even some Democrats are nervous about it.

What's a statist to do?

Leading Democrats in the Senate say the answer might be nonprofit health cooperatives. Sen. Charles Schumer wants some method "to keep the companies honest," and if the "public competitor" can "do those things in a co-op form, I think we're open to it".

One sign that this may be the way things are heading is that the New York Times, the mouthpiece of the statist establishment, ran a front-page article last week that begins with glowing praise for a co-op where doctors have lots of time to spend with patients because of its "collaborative model of primary care." Among the media it's an article of faith that the "collaborative model" is more consumer friendly than a profit-seeking business.

The Times connects the dots in case anyone missed the point. "On Capitol Hill, those innovations have made Group Health a prototype for a political compromise that could unclog health care negotiations in the Senate and lead to a bipartisan deal. ... [T]he Senate Finance Committee seems poised to propose private-sector insurance cooperatives ... as its primary mechanism for stoking competition and slowing the growth of medical costs."

Give me a break. Since when is government needed to stoke competition? Competition is what happens when government lets people alone. I defy anyone to give me an example of lack of competition that doesn't have its roots in government intervention.

Since co-ops are nonprofit organizations owned by their members, the Times' story subtly implies that the profit motive is responsible for the absence of competition and higher medical costs. But that's ridiculous. In a free market without government barriers to entry, it's the quest for profit that produces competition and lower costs.

If health cooperatives were really more efficient and innovative, wouldn't they be copied all over the country? That's how the market works. When someone comes up with an innovative way of doing business, it is quickly imitated and improved on. But buried late in the Times story is the revealing fact that the co-op is "a rare survivor among the hundreds of rural health insurance cooperatives."

Hello? Don't the Times editors see the disconnect? If co-ops worked well, today there would be thousands of them. Why should taxpayers fund a method of delivering health care whose success is "rare"?

The newspaper story made another point that is a favorite of the policy elite: Preventive care will save tons of money. If that's true, there is nothing (but government) to keep people from implementing that principle. But is it true?

This seems to be one of those things we know that isn't so.

I take Lipitor. The drug may extend my life. But this doesn't lower my health-care costs. Years of pill-taking increases costs. If the pill works, I may live long enough to get an even more expensive disease. And maybe I, like millions of others, take Lipitor unnecessarily because we would never have had heart attacks. We then spend more, not less, on health care.

Health-care expert John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis (www.ncpa.org) says there are "literally hundreds of studies from over the past 40 years that show preventive medical services usually increase medical spending ... Contrary to popular belief, checkups for children and adults do not save the health care system money".

If the policy elite really wanted cost-cutting competition, they would deregulate medicine. No one has ever found a better way to stimulate competition than freedom.

7/15/2009: EPA Cover-Up by Walter E. Williams

Here's what I wrote in last year's column titled "Global Warming Rope-a-Dope" (12/24/2008): "Once laws are written, they are very difficult, if not impossible, to repeal. If a time would ever come when the permafrost returns to northern U.S., as far south as New Jersey as it once did, it's not inconceivable that Congress, caught in the grip of the global warming zealots, would keep all the laws on the books they wrote in the name of fighting global warming. Personally, I would not put it past them to write more." On June 28, 2009, the House of Representatives, by a narrow margin (219-212), passed the Waxman-Markey bill. The so-called "cap and trade" bill has been sold as a system for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the struggle against global warming. There's a full-court press on the U.S. Senate to pass its version of "cap and trade."

"Cap and trade" is first a massive indirect tax on the American people and hence another source of revenue for Congress. More importantly "cap and trade" is just about the most effective tool for controlling most economic activity short of openly declaring ourselves a communist nation and it's a radical environmentalist's dream come true.

So why the rush and the press on the Senate? Increasing evidence is emerging that far from there being global warming, the Earth has been cooling and has been doing so for 10 years. Prominent atmospheric scientists have recently sent a letter to Congress saying, "You are being deceived about global warming. ... The Earth has been cooling for ten years. ... The present cooling was not predicted by the alarmists' computer models." Last March, more than 700 international scientists went on record dissenting over manmade global warming claims. About 31,500 American scientists, including 9,029 with Ph.D.s, have signed a petition, that in part reads, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

The Obama administration's EPA sees the increasing evidence against global warming as a threat to their agenda and has taken desperate measures. About a week before the House vote on "cap and trade," the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released some EPA e-mails, demonstrating that an internal report by Alan Carlin, a 35-year career EPA analyst, criticizing EPA's position on global warming, had been squelched for political reasons. One of the e-mails is from Dr. Al McGartland, director of the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics reads, "The administrator and administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. ... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."

The Competitive Enterprise Institute summarizes Dr. Carlin's report saying, "(T)hat EPA, by adopting the United Nations' 2007 'Fourth Assessment' report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature. "New data also indicate that ocean cycles are probably the most important single factor in explaining temperature fluctuations, though solar cycles may play a role as well, and that reliable satellite data undercut the likelihood of endangerment from greenhouse gases."

Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, currently at Uppsala University in Sweden asks, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" Obviously, 10 years is not enough.

7/14/2009: Obama has turned an economic downturn into an economic disaster
Obama’s White House is Falling Down By Daniel Greenfield

In the sixth month of his presidency, Obama has turned an economic downturn into an economic disaster, taking over and trashing entire companies, and driving the nation deep into deficit spending expected to pass 10 trillion dollars.

Abroad, Obama seems to have no other mode except to continue on with his endless campaign, confusing speechmaking with diplomacy. It is natural enough that Obama, who built his entire campaign on high profile public speeches reported on by an adoring press, understands how to do nothing else but that.

Ego driven photo op appearances and clueless treatment of foreign dignitaries

While the press is still chewing over Obama’s Cairo speech, this celebrity style coverage ignores the fact that Obama’s endless world tour is not actually accomplishing anything. Instead, his combination of ego driven photo op appearances and clueless treatment of foreign dignitaries have alienated many of America’s traditional allies. Those who aren’t being quietly angry at Obama, like Brown, Merkel or Netanyahu, instead think of him as absurdly lightweight, as Sarkozy, King Abdullah or Putin do.

While his officials carry out their dirty economic deeds, Obama responds to any and every crisis as if it were a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musical, with a cry of, “Let’s put on a show.” Thus far Obama has put on “shows” across America, Europe and the Middle East. And what the adoring media coverage neglects to cover, is that Obama’s shows have solved absolutely nothing. They have served only as high profile entertainment.

Neither alienating America’s traditional allies, through a combination of arrogant bullying and ignorance, nor appeasing America’s enemies, has yielded any actual results. Nor does it seem likely to. Islamic terrorism is not going anywhere, neither are the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran. While Obama keeps smiling, the global situation keeps growing more grim.

At home, if Obama was elected as depression era entertainment, the charm of his smiles and his constant appearances on magazine covers appear to be wearing thin on the American public. Despite the shrill attacks on Rush Limbaugh or the Republican Enemy of the Weak-- the Democratic party of 2009, is polling a lot like the Republican party of 2008. The Democrats have suddenly become the incumbents, and the only accomplishment they can point to is lavish deficit spending, often on behalf of the very same corporations and causes they once postured against.

The European Union Parliament’s swing to the right cannot be credited to Obama, though doubtlessly some European voters seeing socialist economic crisis management on display in the world’s richest country decided they wanted none of it, but it is part of a general turning against federalism. And Obama’s entire program is dependent on heavily entrenching federalism at the expense of individual and state’s rights. Yet that is precisely his Achilles heel with independent voters who are polling against more taxes and expanded government. And no amount of speeches by Obama can wish away his 18 czars or the national debt he has foisted on generation after generation of the American people. That leaves Obama with a choice between socialism and the independent voter. And thus far he has chosen socialism.

Obama’s tactic of hijacking Bush Administration era policies on the economy and the War on Terror, and exploiting them as Trojan horses to promote his own agenda, have left him coping with a backlash from his own party, as well as general Republican opposition.

His Czars are meant to function as the bones in an executive infrastructure accountable to no one, but a lack of accountability isn’t just another word for tyranny, but for incompetence. A functional chain of command is accountable at multiple levels if it is to function effectively. Obama’s White House by contrast is in a state of over-organized chaos, the sort of organized disorganization that undisciplined egotistical leftists naturally create for themselves, complete with multiple overlapping levels of authority and no one in charge but the man at the top, who’s too busy doing other things to actually be in charge.

Dennis Blair as National Intelligence, who collaborated with the Muslim genocide of Christians in East Timor, trying to muscle out the CIA to create his own intelligence network, is typical of the kind of chaos being spawned by every chief in an expanding government bureaucracy working to make sure that all the Indians answer to him. Similarly the National Security Council wrestling with the State Department, highlighted by Samantha Power getting her own specially created NSC position to butt heads with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, illustrates the state of conflict and chaos in American foreign affairs. A state of chaos so pervasive that incompetence has now become commonplace, and no one can even be found to double check the spelling of a Russian word that is meant to be the theme of American’s diplomatic reconstruction with Russia, or to pick out a gift for the visiting British Prime Minister.

The death of Chrysler at the hands of Fiat and the UAW

Meanwhile on the economy, Obama exploited the ongoing bailouts, transforming them from bailouts into takeovers meant to shift the balance of power in what had been a democracy and socially engineer not only corporations, but the lives of ordinary Americans. But the public’s patience with corporate bailouts is at an end, most Americans were never happy with them to begin with, and want them to end. The death of Chrysler at the hands of Fiat and the UAW might look like a victory in the union ranks, but it doesn’t play too well outside Detroit. And tacking on CAFE standards that will kill the pickup truck and the SUV will badly erode Obama in the swing states, if exploited properly in 2010 and 2012.

Despite the constant media barrage, orchestrated out of the White House, the public is growing disenchanted with the performance of Obama and the Democrats. With unemployment booming and the economy dropping, the jobs aren’t there and the spending is out of control. Republicans today are polling better on ethics and the economy, than the Democrats are. That shows a trend which is likely to register in the mid-term elections in 2010, in the same way that the EU parliamentary elections served as a shock to the system.

In the opposition, Republicans are free to embrace the rhetoric of change, to champion reform and push libertarian ideas about the size and scope of government. In turn all Obama has is his celebrity fueled media spectacle world tour. A charade now serving as a parallel to the depression era entertainment that functioned as escapism in a dour time. But before long, it may be Obama that the American public will want to escape from.

A shallow, manipulative and egotistical amateur who is in over his head,

Obama has tried to play Lincoln, Reagan, JFK and FDR-- but in the end he can only play himself, a shallow, manipulative and egotistical amateur who is in over his head, and trying to drag the country down with him. Obama’s White House is falling down and while the flashbulbs are still glittering and the parties are going on in D.C. and around the world, Obama and the Democratic Congress may be headed for a recession of their own.

7/12/2009: The Audacity of Unawareness:

Barack Obama, through his spokesman, claimed today that he was unaware of the tax day tea parties. Granted, the mainstream media has done a good job in suppressing any sort of coverage ahead of time (and the little coverage they did provide was derisive at best)… but how out of touch is the Community Organizer in Chief, really? This much...

He was unaware that he was attending a church (for 20 years) with a racist pastor who hates America.

He was unaware that he was family friends with, and started his political career in the living room of, a domestic terrorist.

He was unaware that he had invested in two speculative companies backed by some of his top donors right after taking office in 2005.

He was unaware that his own aunt was living in the US illegally.

He was unaware that his own brother lives on pennies a day in a hut in Kenya .

He was unaware of the AIG bonuses that he and his administration approved and signed into a bill.

He was unaware that the man he nominated to be his Secretary of Commerce was under investigation in a bribery scandal.

He was unaware that the man he nominated to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services was a tax cheat.

He was unaware that the man he nominated to be his Secretary of the Treasury was a tax cheat.

He was unaware that the man he nominated to be the U.S. Trade Representative was a tax cheat.

He was unaware that the woman he nominated to be his Chief Performance Officer was a tax cheat.

He was unaware that the man he nominated to be #2 at the Environmental Protection Agency was under investigation for mismanaging $25 million in EPA grants.

He was unaware that to be president of the United States of America you must be a naturally born citizen of the country.

He has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep from showing proof that he is. Because he can't. Because he isn't.

He appears to be unaware that he is totally destroying America due to his being unaware of reality.

There are people in comas that are more aware of world affairs than this guy.

7/6/2009: The Cap That Doesn't Fit by Thomas G. Donlan

A cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions looks great on paper. Did politicians feed their copies to the dogs?

FEW CONCEPTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS COULD be more logical and efficient than a “cap-and-trade” system to reduce emissions of a noxious substance. All it requires is competent authorities to decide, on the basis of the best scientific evidence, how much of the substance should be allowed to escape into the world. Then the authorities print up certificates allowing that much emission, which they auction for cash. The emitters then can buy and sell the certificates in a free market.

Emitters with no easy alternative will bid vigorously for certificates as a matter of survival, but an emitter with an easy alternative also will bid, because he can sell certificates after reducing his own emissions.

The market for certificates also will attract speculators and hedgers; the rapid exchange of cash will stimulate invention; every emitter who can reduce emissions will profit; there will be less of the noxious substance; and the world will be a better place.

Those industries that are low emitters and those that can easily curb their emissions will be winners. Emitters with no choices will have to buy certificates and they will pass their new costs along to their customers, or go out of business. Their customers also will be worse off if they have to pay higher prices or curb their use of products that can't be made without the noxious emissions.

Thanks to the market for cap-and-trade certificates, the authorities and the citizenry will know they have done the best they can in the face of a serious challenge: Emissions will be lowered at the least possible cost, and everyone who benefits from emissions will pay for the reduction.

Theory and Practice

That's the story in some economics textbooks. In the real world, it is hard to find competent regulators, harder to understand the best scientific evidence and hardest of all to determine what emissions actually are noxious. The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference. But in practice, there is.

The House of Representatives passed a cap-and-trade bill last month to control carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It's considerably different from the textbook version of cap-and-trade. It is a remarkable case study in political science, focused on special-interest pleading and rent-seeking.

The bill, drafted under the supervision of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), is crammed with energy-wasting, money-wasting pet ideas. After promising to hand out 85% of the permits at no charge, the bill also provides loopholes and exemptions and escape clauses from the cap-and-trade system.

From coast to coast, the Waxman-Markey bill subsidizes, mandates and spends the taxpayers' money on the ideas and industries dear to them and to a couple of hundred other congressmen. Markey and Waxman imagine cap-and-trade as a tax on business that won't tax customers.

“Food Fight at the Carbon Trough”

Joining the congressmen in such absurdity are some major U.S. corporations. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership includes more than the usual environmental activists. Big energy producers and users are also members, including the former Big Three auto companies, ConocoPhillips, Alcoa, DuPont, and several big electric utilities.

Maybe they hope to have a voice in the shaping of the final legislation -- a form of political-risk management. Some, such as General Electric and Siemens, may hope to reap subsidies for their green investments.

European businesses went along with a pan-European cap-and-trade system that started in 2005. That system has provided little reduction in carbon dioxide, but it has taught a few lessons.

The European regulators created too many emission certificates and they exempted 55% of greenhouse-gas emissions. The market set the price of certificates at nearly zero, and emissions increased under the system designed to reduce them.

After 2007, the system was tightened. Now the European authorities claim credit for reduced emissions, although the worldwide recession and the high energy prices of 2008 may also have something to do with it. Imagine how Congress will follow the European example. Not all emitters will have to have certificates -- some will be more equal than others: small businesses, of course, especially small farmers, and individual car owners and homeowners and any other groups that vote in great numbers.

After that, industries and traders will be lining up and lobbying for the “free” certificates -- always with the argument that one industry is unfairly hurt, or that another industry is extremely important to the economy and deserves a break. Kenneth Green, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, predicts “a food fight at the carbon trough.”

It will be just like the food fight at the defense trough, the food fight at the stimulus trough, the food fight at the tax-break trough, the food fight at the housing trough, the food fight at the health-care trough, the food fight at the poverty trough, the food fight at the oil-and-gas trough and at all the other troughs Congress has created.

No-So-Hidden Tax

In the current political debate, cap-and-trade has been denounced as an energy tax in disguise. It is, but raising energy prices is a sensible thing -- probably the only sensible thing -- if you want to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions or increase energy efficiency.

Higher energy prices are an effective incentive to conserve. Tradable permits, moreover, can work better than a straightforward energy tax, because the system can allow for winners and losers. A tax forces every energy user to cut back; the cap-and-trade system can push for the least efficient energy users to cut back the most and allow the most profitable uses of energy to expand.

Cap-and-trade will slow down economic growth and put some Americans out of work. But a properly designed system should be less painful than an energy tax, and far less painful than a regulatory mandate for equal reductions by all emitters.

If carbon-dioxide emissions are a real environmental problem, cap-and-trade should be the right economic solution. But, first, Congress has to read the textbook.

Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan receives e-mail at tg.donlan@barrons.com.

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Other Information about Dale F. Ogden

Dale F. Ogden & Associates
Actuaries & Management Consultants
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Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 2006
www.dalefogden.org

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California State Senate, 2004

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 2002

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California State Assembly, 2000

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 1998