Category Archives: The State

No Furlough For Fondlers

Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

Aren’t you relieved that the TSA child fondling professionals will not be furloughed, now that our overlords in DC have come together to screw us all royally? (Link) As a mother—as a human being with a heart—it is particularly hard seeing children, like the little girl below, subjected to the cruelty of strangers. Watching footage of this kid between whose miniature trousers a TSA goon is reaching—I can’t help but wonder: Where in all this is the effing FLOTUS? If Michelle Obama has experienced a gut reaction to the ordeal inflicted by her husband’s administration (begun under his predecessor) on travelers and their tots—she is not letting on. The First Lady, as you know, is in touch with her gut—and the gut of every kid in the country. The FLOTUS of the fat-based initiatives “cares” enough to decide what America’s bloated babes will ingest, but not enough to weigh-in when their bodies are being invaded by state workers.

By the way, WHERE ARE THE MEN in all this?

Obamanomics: Me, My Minions & YOUR Money

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, Political Economy, Reason, Taxation, The State

“Obama: U.S. economy cannot afford [a government] shutdown.” Unless the government continues “making key investments in things like education, infrastructure [and] innovation,” we won’t “win the future.” [Transcripts]

This dyed-in-the-wool statist needs the aid of Lego or some sort of pop-up children’s model to figure out that dolling out unemployment benefits, state aid, and government jobs programs, all necessitate the seizure of private wealth through taxing, borrowing, and printing paper.

That cannot create wealth! The fact that some individuals will get wealthy or be “helped” leaves out the unseen; the overall poverty and misery he, his minions and their schemes create.

There is no big secret about “creating” jobs. Government can’t do it. Unless it sucks more capital and credit out of the private economy, it has only the capacity to consume wealth, not create it.

Here’s a simple, crude model for Obama the statist. Play with it with the First Girls. Recommend it to your Fabian friends, Mr. president:

Put 10 blocks in box A. Take 5 blocks out of box A and place them in box B. The owner of box A is 5 blocks poorer, the owner of box B is 5 blocks richer. Total number of blocks: still 10. Total blocks added (or wealth created): 0.

Come on BO, you can do it.

The best BO can do is take a hike; go on a 4-year vacation; walk the plank; just GET OUT OF THE WAY!

UPDATE III: Libya: My First Liberal War (Bravo Bernie)

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Drug War, Foreign Policy, Just War, Middle East, The State, War, War on Drugs

Obama’s war against Libya is my first liberal war as a resident of the USA; I was living in Canada during the Kosovo campaign (here). Americans may be used to waging war on the world, but this brand of Exceptionalism (here) is a shock to the sane person’s system. Most countries—I’ve lived in a few—do not go to war with the regularity the US does. As it was once noted, here, “a brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly one fights because it can.”

To tell you the truth, the overall zeal to attack Iraq (see “Tuned-Out, Turned-On, And Hot For War”) in 2003, was on a par with the enthusiasm currently being expressed for defending the amorphous entity we call “rebels” (whose Egyptian compatriots are now performing hymen inspections on women (here). Back then, with the exception of some, not all, libertarians and lefties, the justifications advanced by the retread liberals known as neoconservatives were wholly embraced. By popular demand, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times (This means you, Judith Chalabi Miller, now at FoxNews) adopted a similar faux patriotism devoid of skepticism and serenely accepting of every silly White House claim.

As to the casus belli, nothing has changed. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn), McMussolini, Newt Gingrich, FoxNews, Juan Williams, and others, all solemnly intone about the massacres that where in process when Obama began strafing Libya. Let us presume that it is the US’s role to stop injustice wherever it occurs and vet the world’s leaders; where’s the evidence of these killing fields? At least when President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999, also without the formality of the comatose Congress’s approval, there were those disturbing images. Now we hear nothing but assertions and the childish terms: “the dictator” is killing “his people” repeated ad nauseam à la the slobbering over Egypt.

I suspect that the average Libyan has fewer encounters with representatives of the state than the average black man living in New York. (“According to a report in The Times last year, there were a record 580,000 stop-and-frisks in the city in 2009. Most of those stopped (55 percent) were black.” I know, harmless fun when done in a “good” country like ours.)

The American Managerial State is so much more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are these tin-pot dictators, whom we have built-up into mega-monsters in our infantile, Disneyfied minds. In Libya, some baksheesh is likely to make a bureaucrat disappear. Given the US’s record-breaking incarceration rates, the average American is more likely to be jailed, harassed or have a threatening encounter with the state’s emissaries than your average Egyptian under Mubarak (who chased the Brotherhood, mainly).

Tell me, who killed Carol Anne Gotbaum? (or Baron “Scooter” Pikes?) Gotbaum met her demise not in a Pakistani or Saudi airport, but in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor. There are lots more like her. Let’s worry about our own tyrants.

Naturally, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Joe Lieberman, the Fox and MSNBC phalanx—all approve of Obama’s paternalistic war in Libya. The rigor mortis Right, in particular, has protested the operation not on points of principle, but on timing, strategy, mission statement and the degree of control exerted by Über America: Obama entered the fray too late, he’s relinquishing the National Greatness agenda by sharing the cockpit with the Europeans, only when the US leads the world in a military operation can any good come of it, blah, blah, blah.

UPDATE I (March 28): STRONGMAN BIDEN. I’m sure it’s a mere coincidence—a statistical anomaly, when it comes to the interface between Americans and their leaders—but in the “good country” (USA), those doing the Vice President’s bidding can lock up a reporter in a closet for hours “after he was invited to cover a Florida political fundraiser because they did not want him talking with the guests.” Onward to fix Libya!

UPDATE II: Democrat Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) adds another point to the limited litany of complaints against BHO’s war: The Great Communicator didn’t convey his (magnificent) message effectively. Repackage the message and all will be well again.

And I was worried for a moment.

No mention of America’s sink hole of a debt.

UPDATE III: BRAVO BERNIE SANDERS. The Democratic senator from Vermont, a man of the far left with whom I seldom agree, puts up an opposition to BHO’s Libya adventure, on the Dylan Ratigan Show: “We have lost thousands of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq [for naught], and trillions of dollars.”

And here’s Bernie’s pivotal point, put in precise language:

“I would hope that the president will tell us [in his address later today] that, if our friends in Europe (France ad Italy), and the UK, feel very strongly about this issue, that they will do what they want to do. But I am not enthusiastic about the US getting into yet another conflict given the other two wars and $ 14 trillion in national debt.” More or less.

Sanders went on to spoil this common sense with his usual eco-energy silliness.

Not A Dime for NPR From This Little Piggy

Constitution, Ilana On Radio & TV, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Regulation, Taxation, The State

The following is from my new, WND.COM column, “Not a Dime From NPR From This Little Piggy”:

“A classmate of mine, an Israeli Arab, taught me a phrase I will paraphrase here, as it was indelicate in the original: There is nothing wrong with carving a little something for yourself out of the hind end of a pig. Translated: If you hold the person you’re scheming on robbing in contempt — by all means, rob him blind. (My friend was the recipient of a scholarship courtesy of the Israeli taxpayer whom he despised — you can see where our disagreement lay.)

For today’s purposes, the justified robber is the Public Broadcaster in all its offshoots — NPR (National Public Radio), PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), and, in my case, ‘KCTS 9 Connects,’ of Washington State. The hind end belongs to the American taxpayer. The propagandists hate their meal ticket, but feed off its flesh all the same.

To his credit, the recently fired Ron Schiller, President of the NPR Foundation and Senior VP for Development at NPR, has agreed with fiscal conservatives on the need to eliminate federal funding for his organization, which gets $90 million annually off the backs of some “seriously racist, racist” taxpayers.” (Schiller’s words.) Scrap that: doing away with taxpayer subsidies for public broadcasting was a point of agreement between this NPR functionary and a few fictitious Muslim philanthropists.

Members of the so-called Muslim Education Action Center Trust had lured Schiller to lunch. Amir Malik and Ibrahim Kasaam were really associates of gonzo journalist James O’Keefe, who played the pimp in the ACORN undercover operation. The luncheon was a trap. The bait: breaking bread with two blokes who boasted about their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. … Boy, does O’Keefe know how to whet appetites at NPR!” ….

The complete column is “Not a Dime From NPR From This Little Piggy,” now on WND.COM.

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