Category: Politics

So Obama Came to Town Yesterday

Obama came to the Twin Cities yesterday to speak to the American Legion national convention. What I always find ironic is the fact that when the president of the “free” world comes to town everything goes into full tyrannical lockdown. Much of downtown Minneapolis was locked down for the duration of the President’s visit in an attempt to reveal the true tyranny of the state through restriction of travel ensure the president’s safety.

The Red Star had another one of their live blogs of the event and boy did I find a doozy of a quote to pull out:

“Next weekend, we will mark the 10th anniversary of those awful attacks on our nation,” the president said. “In the days ahead, we will honor the lives we lost and the families who loved them, the first responders who rushed to save others, and we will honor all those who have served to keep us safe these ten difficult years, especially the men and women of our armed forces.

Emphasis mine. I wonder if these are the same first responders who didn’t get invited to the memorial service on September 11th?

Besides that his speech was a total non-event. As usual he made baseless promises of not cutting funding for Veteran Affairs, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (no mention of Libya of course), and ensuring the private sector hires veterans through some new proposed initiative that will blow up in his face just like all his other initiatives. Going by his track record we can now safely assume that he’s planning to slash the budget for Veteran Affairs, extend the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ensure veterans become a hazard to hire through government legislation.

It’s Scary That $30 Billion is a Drop in the Bucket

According to the commission on wartime contracting the United States government wasted some $30 billion in contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. What’s truly frightening is the fact that $30 billion is barely a statistically notable amount when you look at the overall deficit this country carries.

In all honesty through I’d say every dollor spent on the wars in those countries was wasted.

The Irony is Too Much

The New York times has an op-ed piece titled “Republicans Against Science.” What’s ironic is the fact that it’s written by Keynesian economics Paul Krugman. That’s a bit like a pot calling a kettle black. Keynesians like to tout their scientific approach to economics through the use of empirical and mathematical methods but being economics isn’t a natural science, and individual factors can’t be isolated, traditional scientific methods prove to be almost completely useless. Any scientist will point out the fact that you have to use the right tool for the job and the only effective tool for studying economics is praxeology.

Stimulus Money at Work

Even though the intelligent economists (better known as Austrian economists) have been warning governments against the false hopes of Keynesian economics since Keynes first published his works nothing has changed. Although it’s been demonstrated time and time again that “public works” projects serve no purpose other than transfer taxpayer money into the hands of politically well connect companies without any actual benefit to the people governments still implement them.

I know the government is adverse to hearing the arguments put forth by intelligent people but how many times do the government’s failures have to be pointed out until the people wake up and realize something has to change. Let’s look at the fairly recent stimulus plan and it’s effect on the “green” energy market:

According to a Feb. 17 letter signed by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican, to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Fremont, Calif.-based solar panel manufacturer should never have received a $535 million loan guarantee from the stimulus.*

The company became the first recipient of an Energy Department loan guarantee under the stimulus in March 2009, which was intended to “finance construction of the first phase of the company’s new manufacturing facility” for photovoltaic solar panels.

The Energy Department estimated in a March 20, 2009 press release that the loan guarantee would create 3,000 construction jobs and a further 1,000 jobs after the plant opened.

[…]

Instead, Solyndra announced on Nov. 3 it planned to postpone expanding the plant, which put the taxpayers on the hook to the tune of $390.5 million taxpayers**, or 73 percent of the total loan guarantee, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It also announced that it no longer planned to hire the 1,000 workers that Obama and Biden had touted in their speeches and that it planned to close one of its older factories and planned to lay-off 135 temporary or contract workers and 40 full-time employees.

A closer look at the company shows it has never turned a profit since it was founded in 2005, according to its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

This is the result typical of government intervention in any market, they prop up the companies who are politically well connected which gives them an unfair advantage over those who lack such connections. In a majority of cases the politically well connected companies are also those that are incompetent (birds of a feather flock together after all) and lack profits (because people view profit making corporations as “evil” and “greedy”). The companies that are actually competent and provide goods that consumers want are left to flounder and eventually be killed off by their competition who can afford to outspend them now that they have that half a billion dollars in stimulus money.

But the most heinous piece in this puzzle is the fact that money stolen from taxpayers is used to fund these stimulus plans without delivering any benefit to those taxpayers.

Salt Lake City Mayor Looks to Ban Idling Engines

The stupidity… it hurts. It seems the mayor of Salt Lake City, Ralph Becker, is pushing an ordinance that would make it a offense (punishable by a fine of course) to idle your engine for more than two minutes:

And it has persuaded Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker to fight back. He wants to outlaw vehicle idling (beyond two minutes) as a means to cleanse the air. His proposed “idle-free” ordinance, which carves out exemptions for defrosting, extreme temperatures, emergency vehicles and work trucks — while carrying a fine of up to $160 for a second offense — gets its first airing Tuesday before the City Council.

While the environmentalists are jacking off to how awesome this legislation is I’ll just laugh at the fact that this law can be easily bypassed by tapping my gas petal every one minute and fifty-nine seconds.

Obama’s Helpful Advice

I think everybody realizes by now that Obama is a complete prick (at least judging by his approval ratings). The guy is an arrogant ass but being a career politician that’s not at all surprising. During a town hall meeting in Atkinson, Illinois a local farmer asked the Obamessiah about upcoming rules and regulations that may be put into place to further fuck our farming communities over. Obama told the farmer to call the government and ask them. Guess what? A reporter did exactly that and found out that getting an answer from the government is kind of like finding teeth on a hen:

When this POLITICO reporter decided to take the president’s advice and call the USDA for an answer to the Atkinson town hall attendee’s question, I found myself in a bureaucratic equivalent of hot potato — getting bounced from the feds to Illinois state agriculture officials to the state farm bureau.

Here’s a rundown of what happened when I started by calling the USDA’s general hotline to inquire about information related to the effects of noise and dust pollution rules on Illinois farmers:

Wednesday, 2:40 p.m. ET: After calling the USDA’s main line, I am told to call the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Here, I am patched through to a man who is identified as being in charge of “support services.” I leave a message.

[…]

10:40 a.m.: A spokeswoman for the Illinois Natural Resources Conservation Service calls me, to whom I explain my multiple attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to retrieve the information I was looking for.

“What I can tell you is our particular agency does not deal with regulations,” she tells me. “We deal with volunteers who voluntarily want to do things. I think the reason you got that response from the Cambridge office is because in regard to noise and dust regulation, we don’t have anything to do with that.”

After playing a game of phone call hot potato that spanned across two days the reporter was unable to get an answer from the government. So is there anymore helpful advice that you can bestow upon the people Mr. President? Perhaps you have a little additional work to do before your promise of a transparent government comes to fruition.

Obama Can’t Take the Heat

I usually try to avoid criticizing politician’s character flaws as I prefer ripping apart their policies and political beliefs. Once in a while I’m willing to set aside this preference because the character flaw is either humorous or stupid enough that it’s worth noting; this is one of those times. It seem President Obama can’t take the heat as he was complaining about all the flak he’s received since getting seated in the Oval Office, even going so far as to say he’s received more criticism than Lincoln did:

“Democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this,” Obama responded. “When you listen to what the federalists said about the anti-federalists … those guys were tough. Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

People in Lincoln’s time only almost talked about Lincoln as bad as people of today talk about Obama? I guess that’s true… so long as you remove the fact that Lincoln was assassinated. Getting a bullet in the back of your head is probably one of the harshest forms of criticism that exists. Using this comparison makes Obama look like a whiny, sniveling, bitch (which he is).

Stop being a bitch Obama, you’re the president of an entire country. Thanks to your ability to issue executive orders you’re practically a dictator. Your life isn’t that bad and the criticisms you’ve been receiving are downright civil compared to the criticisms most members of Parliament in the United Kingdom receive from their fellow members. Suck it up and take it like everybody else does.

These New FDA Warning Label Requirements Make Me Want to Start Smoking

Rockwell’s Law (named after Lew Rockwell who created it) states, “Always believe the opposite of what state officials tell you, and the corollary, always do the opposite of what they advise you.” I subscribe to this which is why the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cigarette warning label requirements make me want to start smoking*. I’ve never had a desire to start smoking in my life, nor have I ever smoked a cigarette but when the government puts so much effort into making people think something is bad it instantly raises red flags in my book.

I’m guessing the cigarette companies forgot to pay their yearly extortion fee because they’re now having to resort to filing a lawsuit against the FDA to prevent themselves from having to put the new warning labels on cigarette cartons:

In their 41-page complaint, the five companies say the new labels would illegally force them to make consumers “depressed, discouraged and afraid” to buy their products.

“The government can require warnings which are straightforward and essentially uncontroversial, but they can’t require a cigarette pack to serve as a mini-billboard for the government’s anti-smoking campaign,” Floyd Abrams, a lawyer representing the cigarette makers, said in a statement.

How naive those cigarette companies are. The government can make you do anything because they have enough capacity for violence to force you obedience.

Let’s talk about the FDA’s new requirements for a second. Frankly I find the requirements absurd to the nth degree. As I said I don’t smoke and never have because I know it’s not good for you, in fact almost everybody knows it’s not good for you. You’re told throughout your entire public school career how dangerous smoking is (which is why so many kids start in all likelihood), you’re blasted with messages on television that tell you how bad smoking is, and there are billboard advertisements telling you how bad smoking is. If you haven’t figured out that smoking is bad by the time you’re old enough to legally buy cigarettes you should be smoking 10 packs a day to help Darwin get you out of the gene pool (note, I’m not saying people who smoke should be removed from the gene pool, just those who do it and don’t realize there are negative health side-effects involved).

By the time somebody walks into a store and makes a conscious decision to buy a pack of cigarettes they’re beyond the point where a simple warning label with a picture will dissuade them. This entire effort is a waste of taxpayer time and money as these laws need to be enforced (enforcement isn’t cheap) and now lawyers need to be paid by the FDA to fight this lawsuit. All this for what is effectively nothing more than the government not liking cigarette companies anymore.

* Before somebody tells me to not start smoking, I’m being somewhat facetious. Although I do have a desire to do the opposite of what the state tells me I don’t actually have a desire to start smoking.

Obama Came to Cannon Falls

So Obama came to the small Minnesota town of Cannon Falls a couple of days ago on his Tour of Economic Destruction. I would have reported on it earlier but there were far more important and interesting things to write about such as my distaste for new trends in the first person shooter genre of games. Either way he came, he saw, and he accomplished nothing (his tour is turning into his presidency already). The Red Star has a small piece on the President’s visit and one of the shittiest live blogs I’ve ever seen about anything (if anybody from the Red Star is reading this please hire some people at Engadget to consult you on doing proper live blogs in the future).

As this is the Red Star the article and live blog both tout the President as the man who will deliver us from evil and vanquish all that may harm us. In reality Obama is a moron who, like almost every other politician out there, doesn’t have a clue on how to actually fix the economy. Instead of discussing the economy (which is the supposed purpose of this tour) and how he’s going to “fix” it the President’s visit seems to be nothing more than the beginning of his taxpayer funded campaign for the next presidential race. One of my favorite quotes from the article was the following:

Responding to a question about the legal challenges to his health care reform bill, Obama noted that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney “instituted the exact same” individual mandate in Massachusetts.

“This used to be a Republican idea by the way, this whole idea of the individual mandate,” Obama said. “And suddenly it’s like they got amnesia. ‘Oh this is terrible. This is going to take away freedom for Americans all over the world, all over the country.'”

OK Obama I get it, you get your rocks off but forcing people to do your bidding. Because this masturbatory pleasure ends when people start calling you on your tyrannical activities you feel the need to justify why you did what you did so the serfs will shut up. But claiming that something was a Republican ideal isn’t a valid justification for anything. On top of that most Republicans wouldn’t consider Romney one of them in any real sense thus saying, “But Romney did it so that means the Republicans support it!” is stupid and meaningless. Further demonstrating his tyrannical tendencies Obama had this to say:

Noting that it was “not election season yet,” Obama said he had to mention a recent Republican presidential debate in which candidates said they would not take a deal that offered $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue increases.

“Think about that,” Obama said. “I mean, that’s just not common sense.”

Although I don’t agree with the Republican’s justification for not raising taxes (their justification being that the Democrats oppose it therefore they support it) when you look at taxation for what it really is the refusal to raise taxes is common sense. Raising taxes increase the amount of money the government steals for its citizens victims (might as well call us what we really are). Increasing taxes increases the criminal activity of theft and therefore should be avoided at any and all costs. On top of that taxes aren’t revenue, so stop claiming otherwise.

Jon Stewart Calls The Media Our on Ignoring Ron Paul

Although I don’t agree with many of Jon Stewart’s political beliefs I’ve always given him credit for being willing to rip on the Republicans and Democrats with equal vigor. Thus I wasn’t surprised when he called the media out on blatantly ignoring Ron Paul. Kudos to you Stewart for being one of the few people on television to actually bring this up.