Little Johnny lifted his neighbor’s motorized tricycle. Pushed it home while no one was looking. He was caught before he could get any joy out of it. When confronted about the theft by his father, the boy declared that it didn’t work anyway. “You see”, dad says, “that’s why you shouldn’t steal!”

The wisdom encompassed in this fatherly advice is currently on display in the debate over torture. Many critics of torture are pointing to its “efficacy problem”. It doesn’t work. Presumably, then, if it did work its use might possibly be justified, or at least something worth arguing.

Then what are we against? Torture itself, or torture in that it demonstrates a lack of efficacy? I’ll leave it to the legal scholars but my guess is that, in all the domestic and international laws and conventions against torture, the prohibition is based on the act itself without regard to its consequences. Continue reading →

Rightly, the students of Austrian Economics have laid the blame for the current economic crisis squarely on the doorstep of the Keynesian policies of governments and central banks. However, in this case, there are other culprits involved, most notably the former titans of financial services. FULL ARTICLE

My mind turns to thoughts of possible retribution when I see the sick policies of the last administration dragging on. Differences mingle between the two parties as the distinctions betwixt the two once held sway, now fade into the quest for power, greed and pay offs, bail outs and ravenous spending. FULL ARTICLE

The Bush/Obama bailouts require serious investigation.  Were these bailouts necessary, or were they a scam, like “weapons of mass destruction,” used to advance a private agenda behind a wall of fear?  Recently I heard Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a member of a congressional bailout oversight panel, say on NPR that the US has far too many banks.  Out of the financial crisis, she said, should come consolidation with the financial sector consisting of a few mega-banks.  Was the whole point of the bailout to supply taxpayer money for a program of financial concentration?  FULL ARTICLE

Here’s how well they have us trained: The powers that be are no longer gonna call the illegally detained terrorism suspects (sic) by the name of “enemy combatants.”

Like the pre-programmed robots we’ve all become, we’ll celebrate this as a welcome and much-needed change from the reviled Bush-Cheney administration. A step in the right direction, we might even say. Continue reading →

What I want to see is the Republican Party shunned into the dustbin of history. And why shouldn’t they be? The have taken a very public stand that anything not Republican, i. e. anything Obama is bad. This is the height of stupidity. And it is troubling for the future of the United States.

The GOP says they are against the Stimulus plan because it has too much pork in it. Remember those Stimulus plans approved by the Republicans when Bush was still in? Up around $2 Trillion and nobody knows where it went? And Paulsen, who was appointed by Bush, says he ain’t telling.

It would appear that the Republicans are hoping the public forgets the Bush record over the last eight years. But I’m going to remind you of it right now. Continue reading →

To avoid being hounded by hucksters as you walk a carnival midway, simply declare to them, “I’m with it!” This is the signal that you are not to be “marked”, that you understand completely the game and approve of it, that you are, to your own glorification and indemnification, one of them.

This is a valuable heuristic for interpreting the increased chatter we’re picking up – not by NSA and not concerning the evil intentions of “others” against “us” – but the steady drone about possible investigations, commissions, and prosecutions concerning certain elements of, and individuals in, the defunct Bush/Cheney administration by the nascent Obama/Biden administration. Continue reading →

For anyone seeking to get away with murder, there seems to be a foolproof method: be appointed president of the United States. The lucky person in this office, along with the vice president, cabinet members and advisors, all, it seems, are above the law. FULL ARTICLE

There are those who call the financial leaders who got us into this Bailout mess “Idiots”. I disagree with that. I don’t think they were idiots at all. The “idiots” who built that house of cards didn’t care if the house collapsed, they knew it would. They planned to profit from the collapse just as they planned to profit from the building. Can anyone deny that they have profited both ways? I call it fraud. By the way, fraud is a criminal activity, no matter who does it, even if our Government that does it.

But see, I know who are those that help “Idiots” defraud us. It is those Party loyalists who put Party first. These are also bad guys. See they’ll vote for their crook “because he’s their crook”. They think that when he stops robbing them, and them includes us, it’s because he has found compassion. The real truth is that the “Party” will quit stealing when there is nothing of value left to steal. Continue reading →

I was watching a House session yesterday and of all things they were discussing a Bailout fiasco. It was about a Bailout that took place before the “Big Bailout” and probably everyone has already forgotten it.

The time was around April or May and the amount was $300 Billion and it was put in place to help 400,000 people with their mortgages. In July of 08, I sent a letter to my Newspaper entitled “The Mother of All Rip-Offs”

Here it is in its entirety: Continue reading →