Read this.

Howard Husock.

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities

...written in AD 2000. 8 years ago.

Understand this: you have only two choices.

You can have an imaginary economy based on the day-dreams of ambitious bureaucrats and politicians. Or you can have a real economy based on what people really trade and why they do so. You don't get both, and one doesn't work.

Imaginary economies work as well as imaginary parachutes.

So, yeah...I don't want no steenking bail-out. The capital everybody is worried about is still all out there. This is just a fight about who gets to keep it, and--if it's the government keepin' it--how much they get to pretend it's worth.

h/t Billy

Close but no cigar...

Taxes could get sky-high with aerial technology (The Press of Atlantic City/Richard Degener)

A new high-tech aerial photography system that can spot an illegal porch from 5,000 feet is being marketed to tax assessors as a way to grow revenue...

"We're not supposed to be spying on people. When it gets to the point where we're doing aerial spying on people's lives, I've had enough," [State Senator, Jeff] Van Drew said.

Well, yeah, Jeff...I guess that's true. I mean, it is true--but what makes aerial spying the point where the line between right and wrong gets crossed?

Anyways, you've had enough, so please quit and take a few more meddlers with you. Mmmm'kay thnx.

You got it wrong, Nancy.

Pelosi: We must insulate Main St from Wall St.

Nope. Actually, we must insulate Wall Street and Main Street from Pennsylvania Avenue.

In other words, separate the economy from the government just like we separate the church and the government--and for exactly the same reasons.

For decades...

...Canadians have been commenting that the CBC has a strong statist-leftist (essentially Liberal/NDP) bias, and the statist-leftists have been denying it.

Yeah, well now the publisher of CBC news just plain admits it.

Except he titled the admission "We erred in our judgment."

The truth is they finally got caught with no room to weasel about it.

And it's not really a compliment if Mr Cruikshank is just realizing the bias exists.

Quote:

"Your third party vote is not wasted. It serves to enslave your mind just as well as a major party vote does."--Brad Spangler.

Link to article containing quote.

Great news about Hemingway's cats.

Now all someone has to do is give me one decent reason it was any of the gummints business anyways.

Tax dollars at work.

Do you get it...yet?

You poor bastards have been voting for the lesser of two evils for so long that evil is all that’s left now.

Billy at The Agitator.

A Democrat I respect...

My head is still shaking!

ex-DEMOCRAT Mike Gravel (former Democrat US senator) speaking on radio regarding Sarah Palin.

QandO for the file. It's a great listen.

I'm still laughing at the show's hosts.

Addendum: I was thinking about this post and doing some follow-up surfing and, in all fairness, the guy is now a Libertarian, so I read. I guess that's no surprise for me since a) I come to my corner of the LRQ with my political growth starting from the left, as well, and b) the guy was making sense.

Investors Daily article...

...Stealth Socialism ...well worth the read.

H/T New Paltz Journal by way of Billy.

The same madness has deeply affected Canada as well.

Social justice means massive State interventionism.

It just sounds prettier. That's why they use it.

Dion Liberals would ban assault rifles in Canada...

OK...I'm a reasonable man, willing to entertain an opposing argument.

If assault rifles are such a bad, bad thing for anyone to have, how about we start with "police & government first"?

Then maybe we'll talk.

Palin

I have my disgareements with Ms Palin.

But I freakin' LUV watching Obama supporters in panic mode.

By the way, didn't Mr Obama make some kind of big speech a couple of days ago? Not much mention of it on the news ;-)

This article is almost too stoopid for words...

If Everyone's Talking, Who Will Listen? (Washington Post)

The article starts off talking about how there's just so much freaking information out there...

But the implications for our democracy are troubling. To achieve their goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of millions of citizens. Despite conventional thinking that the Internet helps spread information, such reach is actually impossible online...

The opportunity to educate [read: propagandize--ed.] millions of citizens, so essential to significant movements of the past, has dwindled. In the early New Deal era, the Roman Catholic "radio priest" Father Charles Coughlin promoted ideas for economic reform to a weekly audience estimated at 40 million, which helped pressure President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enact Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and other programs...

Plain english translation: "If there isn't any rationing of the media, of information, people might/will stop acting like sheeple. It'll be harder for us folks who know better than most people to manipulate them.

The madness doesn't stop:

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself...

Yeah, let's not take away people's computers. Folks might not stand for that.

perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans)...

Make the price so high they just stop using 'em.

It's possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers, Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain, could reduce the supply of information. If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it? A reduced supply of information technology might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper-individualistic outlets we have now.

Plain english translation: tax stuff until people can only go to the few places the zombie who wrote this drivel likes for their information ration.

But why be surprised? Take a look at what this pompus airhead thinks is good news, and why:

This solution may sound radical and unlikely, but as an environmental analyst, I've spent long hours studying energy consumption. Two years ago, I wrote an article speculating that the real problem behind America's loss of manufacturing jobs was low energy costs that made shipping so cheap that employers had overwhelming incentive to send jobs overseas. My argument that higher energy prices could reverse 50 years of outsourcing was met with skepticism. Yet that's exactly what has begun to happen this year as the high cost of oil has brought some manufacturing jobs back to such cities as Bowling Green, Ky., and Danville, Va.

That's a "socially concious" way of saying that "high energy prices" is good news and "low energy prices" is bad.

Tell that to your wallet. Watch your wallet belly-laugh.

Dusty Horwitt is a lawyer who works for a nonprofit environmental group in Washington.

Really? There's a shocker.

What a fukkin dolt. As my brother says: "Gawd save me from people with a plan."

All of which ties in nicely with this.

Good on ya , Conrad

Lord Black on Strip Searches and fellow inmates (National Post).

Best wishes.

Mr. Biden

Mr. Biden might be the purest proof recently of the idea that political ambition is about obtaining power, not about principles.

Now the Vice-Presidential candidate with Mr. Obama, Mr Biden had this to say a short while ago:

On Mr. McCain: "I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off."

On Mr. Obama: "Is he ready? Right now I don’t believe he is, the presidency is not something that lends itself to on the job training."

Obviously, he just wants the job. He'll work for anybody.

People are going to find out what "suspended" means...

...because Der Rodham didn't quit her campaign. She suspended it.

Billy might be wrong and, if so, I'm wrong too.

There is nothing I trust about that woman. Except her ambition.

Rules are not a substitute for thought...

Over at Billy Beck's Two-Four:

'Til tomorrow, ponder this item, ladies and gentlemen, linked at Say Uncle.

I have no idea what Billy will have to say about it, but I'm going to concentrate on this, from an online commenter named "Steve":

I witness crimes and call 911 on a weekly basis and there is nothing I can do but watch the crime take place and relay the information to 911. If I had known that I was able to intervene I could have stopped a violent sexual assault in front of the YMCA on Tuesday evening. So what's the law? Are we intervening on our own now or what? [emphasis mine]

Note that Steve is not asking whether or not he "should" intervene; he's asking something different. Steve wants to know if he is "able" to intervene on his own and asks, looking for an answer: "what's the law?".

That's pathetic. What is this "we" garbage? I'm able to decide that sort of thing for myself.

Finally...

BRITISH COPY EDITOR NARROWLY AVOIDS CLICHÉ!!!

A bus doesn't plunge: "One dead and 44 hurt in bus fall" (BBC).

Will wonders never cease?

Pro-censorship mental gymnastics...

Lea Anderson writes in The Calgary Herald:

Demanding the elimination of human rights laws to allow a journalist to be offensive or contemptible to a fellow Albertan is not the longstanding western tradition I know.

Actually, Lea, (other than the quickly overturned Alberta Press Act) allowing a journalist to be offensive or contemptible to anyone, Albertans included, is *exactly* the longstanding western tradition I know.

But let me ask you, Lea: what mental contortions could lead you to actually propose censorship while stating:

Milke demands we gut our human rights laws, the very week George Bush requested China allow more basic rights and freedoms, and the week Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died. He was famous for chronicling the abuses and terror of the Russian gulags, one of the biggest human rights catastrophies ever.

??? I just don't get that. Solzhenitsyn was punished because he was a journalist who offended someone.

Perhaps you aren't familiar, Lea...China and The Soviet Union aren't exactly known for...uh...freedom of expression. In fact, and to be specific, Soviet bureaucrats found Solzhenitsyn very offensive; that's why they put him in the Gulag.

I understand you might find this complicated, Lea, but it might help you to read the next bit and pay special attention to the bolded, underlined parts.

From Wikipedia:

During World War II, he [Solzhenitsyn] served as the commander of an acoustic recognizance unit in the Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and twice decorated. In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, he was arrested for writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a friend, N. D. Utkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called "the whiskered one," "Khozyain" ("the master") and "Balabos", (Odessa Yiddish for "the master"). He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organisation" under paragraph 11.[12] Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet security police (NKGB) to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time. [emphasis mine]

In other words, Lea, I think your position on this subject is kinda contemptible; the sheer lack of logic you display is offensive to me, especially every time I think of you voting.

I admit though, I was especially entertained by this word salad of yours:

Milke's attempt to defend free speech abuses by eliminating human rights is an assault on our dignity.

You toss those terms together ("free speech", "abuses", "rights", "assault", "dignity") with such careless, delicious abandon; it reads almost like you understand them.

Oh, of course I trust the government...

...and the folks who work for 'em.

Words fail me. This just just horrible.

...and par for the course these days.

He's (she's ???) got a point.

I think we need to change the name of our country to Kafkada... (batb at SDA)

I don't know batb at all, but still that's straight up dead on the money.